Year: 2021

Jumpcut founder Kartik Hosanagar is a professor at the Wharton School, but about ten years ago, he spent his summer in an unlikely way: he wrote a screenplay. Set in India, his script garnered some interest from producers, but no one took the plunge to fund a film by a first-time Indian director.

Now, films featuring diverse casts are gaining traction – this year, Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color, and only the second woman ever, to win the Academy Award for Best Director. At the previous ceremony, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Still, according to a recent report from McKinsey & Company, Hollywood leaves $10 billion on the table each year due to the industry’s lack of diversity.

“How do you make a bet on underrepresented voices or underrepresented stories?” asked Hosanagar. “While there’s awareness, there’s no action, because nobody knows how to do it. So that’s what got me into Jumpcut. It’s this rare company where 20 years of my work on data science and entrepreneurship meets with who I am outside of my work.”

At Wharton, Hosanagar is the Faculty Lead for the AI for Business program. He was a founder of Yodle, which was acquired by web.com for $340 million in 2016. But for this next venture, he wanted to tackle Hollywood’s homogeneity hands-on by using his experience with data science to de-risk media projects from underrepresented creators.

“The vision is to create a more inclusive era of global content creation,” he said to TechCrunch.

Hosanagar started working on Jumpcut in 2019, but today, the Atomic-backed company launches out of stealth as the first data science-driven studio working to elevate underrepresented voices in film. Already the studio has 12 TV and film projects in the works with partners like 36-time Academy Award nominee Lawrence Bender (“Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting”), Emmy Award-winning producer Shelby Stone (“Bessie,” “The Chi”), and showrunner Scott Rosenbaum (“Chuck,” “The Shield”).

Jumpcut models itself after Y-Combinator in its approach, pairing emerging talent with buyers and producers. First, Jumpcut uses an algorithm to scan hundreds of thousands of videos from platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Wattpad to find promising talent. The algorithm narrows down the extensive field to locate creators who are consistently finding new audiences and increasing their engagement. Then, the Jumpcut team – including advisors and veterans from Netflix, Buzzfeed, CBS, Sony, and WarnerMedia – identifies who to connect with.

In one example of the algorithm’s success, Hosanagar pointed to Anna Hopkins, an actress who has appeared on shows like “The Expanse” and “Shadowhunters.” Though Hopkins has found some success in front of the camera, she also wants to write.

“We discovered some of her short films, and the algorithm identified it because people had strong emotional reactions in the comments, like, ‘heartwarming but in a positive way,’ or ‘give me a tissue,'” Hosanagar explained. Since Hopkins isn’t publicly known as a writer, she assumed that Jumpcut found her through a television network she had pitched a script to, but that wasn’t the case. “We said, ‘no, our algorithms found you.'”

Once a creator is identified by Jumpcut, they can A/B test their ideas with audiences of over 100,000 potential viewers, which helps the company prove to funders through data science that these ideas can sell.

“The idea there is that we don’t wait for creators to get discovered by the traditional Hollywood agencies, because that requires the creators to have access to the top agents, and that again brings you back to the old boys club,” Hosanagar said. “We’re automating a lot of that process and discovering these people who are creating great stories that are resonating with audiences, not waiting for some Hollywood agency to discover them.”

Once the creators have an idea that tests well with a wide audience, they’re invited to Jumpcut Collective, an incubator program that helps artists develop an idea from a concept to a pitch in 6 weeks. Then, Jumpcut helps match projects with producing partners and buyers.

So far, Jumpcut has hosted three incubator programs. Out of the twelve Jumpcut projects currently underway, Hosanagar says that nine or ten of them came out of the incubator. One project, for example, is now being developed in partnership with Disney’s Asia Pacific Division.

Jumpcut isn’t disclosing the amount raised in this round of seed funding, but confirms that Atomic is the only investor in their seed round.

Hosanagar is joined on the project by Dilip Rajan, his former student and a former product manager at BuzzFeed, and Winnie Kemp, a former SVP of Originals at Super Deluxe and CBS. There, she developed and executive produced “Chambers,” the first show with a Native American lead, and “This Close,” the first show with deaf creators and cast. Most of their funding will go toward payroll, which includes engineers, data scientists, and product managers on the product side of the company, as well as development executives on the creative side, who run the incubator.

The global economy’s transition to widespread electrification has increased the demand for longer-lasting and faster-charging batteries across industries including transportation, consumer electronics, medical devices and residential energy storage. While the benefits of this transition are well understood, the reality is that battery innovation hasn’t kept pace with society’s ambitions.

With reports forecasting a 40% chance that the world’s temperature will rise over the next five years beyond the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius laid out in the Paris climate agreement, it is clear that there’s little time to waste when it comes to creating next-generation batteries, which can easily take another 10 years to fully commercialize.

To meet the increasing pressures to electrify, a completely novel approach to building batteries is the only way to scale rechargeable batteries quickly enough to curb greenhouse-gas emissions globally and avoid the worst-case scenario for the climate crisis.

The challenges to battery innovation

Over the last few decades, battery experts, automakers, Tier 1 suppliers, investors and others looking to electrify have spent billions of dollars globally on creating next-generation batteries by focusing predominantly on battery chemistry. Yet the industry is still grappling with two major fundamental technical challenges that are stunting the proliferation of batteries:

1. Energy/power tradeoff: All batteries manufactured today face an energy-to-power tradeoff. Batteries can store more energy or they can charge/discharge more quickly. In terms of electric vehicles, this means no single battery can provide both long range and fast charging.
2. Anode-cathode mismatch: Today’s most promising battery technologies maximize the energy density of anodes, the negative electrode of the pair of electrodes that make up every lithium-ion battery cell. However, anodes already have greater energy density than their positive counterpart, the cathode. Cathode energy density needs to eventually match that of the anode in order to get the most energy storage capacity out of a certain battery size. Without breakthroughs in increasing cathode energy density, many of today’s most exciting battery technologies will not be able to deliver on their full potential. As it currently stands, the most commonly used lithium-ion battery cannot meet the needs of the wide-ranging applications of an all-electric future. Many companies have tried to address these demands through new battery chemistries to optimize the high-power-to-energy-density ratio to varying degrees of success, but very few are close to achieving the performance metrics required for mass scale and commercialization.

Are solid-state batteries the holy grail?

Battery researchers have championed the solid-state battery as the holy grail of battery technology due to its ability to achieve high energy density and increased safety. However, until recently, the technology has fallen short in practice.

Solid-state batteries have significantly higher energy density and are potentially safer because they do not use flammable liquid electrolytes. However, the technology is still nascent and has a long way to go to achieve commercialization. The manufacturing process for solid-state batteries has to be improved to lower costs, especially for an automotive industry that aims to achieve aggressive cost reductions as low as $50/kWh in the coming years.

The other substantial challenge to implementing solid-state technology is the limitation of total energy density that can be stored in the cathodes per unit of volume. The obvious solution to this dilemma would be to have batteries with thicker cathodes. However, a thicker cathode would reduce the mechanical and thermal stability of the battery. That instability leads to delamination (a mode of failure where a material fractures into layers), cracks and separation — all of which cause premature battery failure. In addition, thicker cathodes limit diffusion and decrease power. The result is that there is a practical limit to the thickness of cathodes, which restricts the power of anodes.

New takes on materials with silicon

In most cases, companies that are developing silicon-based batteries are mixing up to 30% silicon with graphite to boost energy density. The batteries made by Sila Nanotechnologies are an illustrative example of using a silicon mix to increase energy density. Another approach is to use 100% pure silicon anodes, which are limited by very thin electrodes and high production costs, to generate even higher energy density, like Amprius’ approach.

While silicon provides considerably greater energy density, there is a significant drawback that has limited its adoption until now: The material undergoes volume expansion and shrinkage while charging and discharging, limiting battery life and performance. This leads to degradation issues that manufacturers need to solve before commercial adoption. Despite those challenges, some silicon-based batteries are already being deployed commercially, including in the automotive sector, where Tesla leads in silicon adoption for EVs.

The imperative for electrification requires a new focus on battery design

Advances to battery architecture and cell design show significant promise for unlocking improvements with existing and emerging battery chemistries.

Probably the most notable from a mainstream perspective is Tesla’s “biscuit tin” battery cell that the company unveiled at its 2020 Battery Day. It’s still using lithium-ion chemistry, but the company removed the tabs in the cell that act as the positive and negative connection points between the anode and cathode and the battery casing, and instead use a shingled design within the cell. This change in design helps reduce manufacturing costs while boosting driving range and removes many of the thermal barriers that a cell can encounter when fast-charging with DC electricity.

Transitioning away from a traditional 2D electrode structure to a 3D structure is another approach that is gaining traction in the industry. The 3D structure yields high energy and high power performance in both the anode and cathode for every battery chemistry.

Although still in the R&D and testing phases, 3D electrodes have achieved two times higher accessible capacity, 50% less charging time and 150% longer lifetime for high-performance products at market-competitive prices. Therefore, in order to advance battery capabilities to unlock the full potential of energy storage for a range of applications, it is critical to develop solutions that emphasize altering the physical structure of batteries.

Winning the battery race

It’s not just performance improvements that will win the battery race, but perfecting production and cost reduction as well. To capture a considerable share of the ballooning battery market that is projected to reach $279.7 billion by 2027, countries around the world must find ways to achieve low-cost battery manufacturing at scale. Prioritizing “drop-in” solutions and innovative production methods that can be incorporated with existing assembly lines and materials will be key.

The Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan highlights the importance of domestic battery production to the country’s goal of being a leader in electrification while meeting ambitious carbon reduction targets. Commitments like these will play a key role in establishing who can maintain a critical competitive edge in the battery space and take the largest share of the $162 billion global EV market.

Ultimately, the winning technologies in the race toward total electrification will be the ones that have the most significant impact on performance, lowered costs and compatibility with existing manufacturing infrastructure. By taking a holistic approach and focusing more on innovating cell design while also fine-tuning leading chemistries, we can achieve the next steps in battery performance and rapid commercialization that the world desperately needs.

If the pandemic achieved anything good, it was putting health front and center in the minds of the general public, elected officials, investors and innovators. Cityblock has been working on solutions for bringing together the healthcare industry and communities since long before now, but it raised a total of $372 million spanning December through March, so it’s definitely seeing the impact of the visibility of its mission in light of a worldwide healthcare crisis.

On June 30 at noon PT/3PM ET, Cityblock co-founder and CEO Iyah Romm will join us for an episode of Extra Crunch Live, along with Cityblock investor and Maverick Ventures managing partner Ambar Bhattacharyya. We’ll talk about the process of fundraising for this critical area in urgent need of innovation, and what it’s like trying to manage that process when the business you’re in is experiencing one of its busiest and most fraught times ever. Register here for free.

Romm and Bhattacharyya will also be providing live feedback to participants in our weekly Extra Crunch Live pitch-off, which you can apply to join live during the event.

But we’ve talked about Cityblock a bit, let’s take a step back and look at our guests.

Iyah Romm co-founded Cityblock in 2017 and has been its chief executive ever since. Before that, he was entrepreneur in residence at Sidewalk Labs, from which Cityblock spun out. He has a long history in public health and private care, including as chief transformation officer at Commonwealth Care Alliance, and a stint at the Health Policy Commission and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Bhattacharyya has spent more than a decade in VC, including at Bessemer and Bain, as well as in his current role at Maverick Ventures. His track record includes investments in companies that have had a total of 11 exists via IPO and acquisition, including four public market unicorns. His specific focus has been on early and growth-stage healthcare companies, so it’s a space he knows very well.

Maverick participated in Cityblock’s Series A, as well as its Series B and both the C and C extension rounds from this past year.

The episode goes down at noon PT/3PM ET on June 30 and is free to all who want to check it out live. On-demand access to the content is reserved for Extra Crunch members only. Register to come hang out with us here.

Listen up, all you budget-conscious early-stage founders. That sound you hear is the countdown clock for serious savings to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising on July 8-9. You have just two days left to score early-bird savings and keep $100 in your wallet. Want loads of opportunity for less money? Beat the deadline and register here before Friday, June 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

We’ve packed this two-day virtual event with more than a dozen (and counting) presentations by leading startup experts holding forth on a range of topics every startup founder needs to master — or at least understand enough to outsource wisely. We’re talking essentials like product-market fit, paid marketing strategies and, every founder’s favorite topic, fundraising.

But this isn’t a one-way situation. Nope, these are highly interactive sessions, and you’ll have plenty of time to get answers to your most pressing questions. Check the event agenda and start planning your schedule.

Here’s just a taste of the topics on tap.

How to Line Up Your Growth with Your Goals: Unlike giant brands, startups need to use their marketing spend wisely and efficiently. Sound Ventures’ Susan Su is a growth marketing expert and will share how to define growth based on your startup’s goals, and how to take a framework-based approach to growth, rather than relying on old playbooks that aren’t relevant.

How to Navigate the Ever-Changing World of Early-Stage VC: With over 25 personal investments, AngelList Venture CEO Avlok Kohli knows a thing or two about early-stage fundraising. At Early Stage, Kohli will explain the landscape of the early-stage fundraising market and how to take advantage of the changes in the VC world over the past year.

Nail the Narrative: Storytelling is a critical skill for startups. Coatue Management partner Caryn Marooney, formerly head of comms for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, will share how to frame the narrative for a startup depending on the audience and ensure that when you’re talking about your company, people are not only listening, but they want to learn more.

Pro Tip: Your pass includes access to video-on-demand. With VOD flexibility, you can watch sessions you missed and/or review sessions you attended to absorb the details on a cellular level.

Still on the fence? Here’s what Ashley Barrington, founder of MarketPearl, told us about her experience at Early Stage 2020:

I recommend going to Early Stage. The virtual aspect helps in terms of scheduling, it offers community-building through networking, and it gives early-stage founders a framework for navigating the startup ecosystem. This is the stage where founders need more support, especially if they haven’t done this before.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising takes place on July 8-9, but the clock is ticking. If you want to save $100, buy your pass before Friday, June 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Find loads of opportunity for less money. It’s the TechCrunch way!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

New regulations are making it easier to invest in alternative assets via crowdfunding, and the recent explosion of crypto and NFTs means that investors are more diversified than ever. 

Keeping up with such a variety of investments may prove difficult to those who want to handle managing their investment portfolios on their own. Money Minx, a new San Diego-based startup co-founded by husband and wife team Hussein and Jessica Yahfoufi, wants to help with that.

Put simply, Money Minx aims to build a “Personal Finance OS” for every household. The platform is designed to help people track all of their investments — yes, including crypto and NFTs — in one place, in whatever currency. The company claims that its AI can also go a step further, and help people spot opportunities in their portfolio as well as catch potential risks.

“We built Money Minx to help people cover all their bases, better understand their personal balance sheet and grow their net worth,” Hussein said. “No financial advisor needed.”

Money Minx also aims to provide people with easy-to-use tools to create dashboards and reports. In its “soft launch” phase, the startup has been growing rapidly — from $15 million in assets tracked at the end of March to $107 million by mid-May. Its user base is growing by 40% month over month.

As many founders do, Hussein says he and Jessica developed the platform to meet a need of their own.

“We built this because we needed it as ‘do it yourself investors,’ said Hussein, who previously started crowdfunding site appsplit and works as a CTO at a San Diego-based fintech company. “I didn’t want to hire a financial advisor and spend 1% of my portfolio every year for them to tell me what to do. So I started to do it on my own on a spreadsheet and then started building this tool last year.”

Hussein talked to other investors and realized that many were also managing their own finances and had also moved into investing outside the stock market.

Image Credits: Money Minx co-founders Jessica and Hussein Yahfoufi / Money Minx

“Everyday investors are preferring to invest more in crowdfunding sites and alternative assets than the traditional stock market,” he said. 

This shift has created a gap in the market for an easy way to track investments across multiple platforms, the Yahfoufis believe. 

Money Minx operates as a SaaS business and charges a monthly subscription fee across three different plans ranging from $10 to $30 a month. Looking ahead, Hussein is considering building out a white-glove service.

Although Money Minx has been approached by interested VCs, Hussein says the company prefers to stay bootstrapped — for now.

Indeed, VCs are pouring money into the space. Just last week, personal finance startup Truebill announced it had raised a $45 million Series D funding round led by Accel.

If you’ve ever bought a subscription inside an iOS app and later decided you wanted to cancel, upgrade or downgrade, or ask for a refund, you may have had trouble figuring out how to go about making that request or change. Some people today still believe that they can stop their subscription charges simply by deleting an app from their iPhone. Others may dig around unsuccessfully inside their iPhone’s Settings or on the App Store to try to find out how to ask for a refund. With the updates Apple announced in StoreKit 2 during its Worldwide Developers Conference this week, things may start to get a little easier for app customers.

StoreKit is Apple’s developer framework for managing in-app purchases — an area that’s become more complex in recent years, as apps have transitioned from offering one-time purchases to ongoing subscriptions with different tiers, lengths, and feature sets.

Image Credits: Apple

Currently, users who want to manage or cancel subscriptions can do so from the App Store or their iPhone Settings. But some don’t realize the path to this section from Settings starts by tapping on your Apple ID (your name and profile photo at the top of the screen). They may also get frustrated if they’re not familiar with how to navigate their Settings or the App Store.

Meanwhile, there are a variety of ways users can request refunds on their in-app subscriptions. They can dig in their inbox for their receipt from Apple, then click the “Report a Problem” link it includes to request a refund when something went wrong. This could be useful in scenarios where you’ve bought a subscription by mistake (or your kid has!), or where the promised features didn’t work as intended.

Apple also provides a dedicated website where users can directly request refunds for apps or content. (When you Google for something like “request a refund apple” or similar queries, a page that explains the process typically comes up at the top of the search results.)

Still, many users aren’t technically savvy. For them, the easiest way to manage subscriptions or ask for refunds would be to do so from within the app itself. For this reason, many conscientious app developers tend to include links to point customers to Apple’s pages for subscription management or refunds inside their apps.

But StoreKit 2 is introducing new tools that will allow developers to implement these sort of features more easily.

One new tool is a Manage subscriptions API, which lets an app developer display the manage subscriptions page for their customer directly inside their app — without redirecting the customer to the App Store. Optionally, developers can choose to display a “Save Offer” screen to present the customer with a discount of some kind to keep them from cancelling, or it could display an exit survey so you can ask the customer why they decided to end their subscription.

When implemented, the customer will be able to view a screen inside the app that looks just like the one they’d visit in the App Store to cancel or change a subscription. After cancelling, they’ll be shown a confirmation screen with the cancellation details and the service expiration date.

If the customer wants to request a refund, a new Refund request API will allow the customer to begin their refund request directly in the app itself — again, without being redirected to the App Store or other website. On the screen that displays, the customer can select which item they want refund and check the reason why they’re making the request. Apple handles the refund process and will send either an approval or refund declined notification back to the developer’s server.

However, some developers argue that the changes don’t go far enough. They want to be in charge of managing customer subscriptions and handling refunds themselves, through programmatic means. Plus, Apple can take up to 48 hours for the customer to receive an update on their refund request, which can be confusing.

“They’ve made the process a bit smoother, but developers still can’t initiate refunds or cancellations themselves,” notes RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, whose company provides tools to app developers to manage their in-app purchases. “It’s a step in the right direction, but could actually lead to more confusion between developers and consumers about who is responsible for issuing refunds.”

In other words, because the forms are now going to be more accessible from inside the app, the customer may believe the developer is handling the refund process when, really, Apple continues to do so.

Some developers pointed out that there are other scenarios this process doesn’t address. For example, if the customer has already uninstalled the app or no longer has the device in question, they’ll still need to be directed to other means of asking for refunds, just as before.

For consumers, though, subscription management tools like this mean more developers may begin to put buttons to manage subscriptions and ask for refunds directly inside their app, which is a better experience. In time, as customers learn they can more easily use the app and manage subscriptions, app developers may see better customer retention, higher engagement, and better App Store reviews, notes Apple.

The StoreKit 2 changes weren’t limited to APIs for managing subscriptions and refunds.

Developers will also gain access to a new Invoice Lookup API that allows them to look up the in-app purchases for the customer, validate their invoice and identify any problems with the purchase — for example, if there were any refunds already provided by the App Store.

A new Refunded Purchases API will allow developers to look up all the refunds for the customer.

And a new Renewal Extension API will allow developers to extend the renewal data for paid, active subscriptions in the case of an outage — like when dealing with customer support issues when a streaming service went down, for example. This API lets developers extend the subscription up to twice per calendar year, each up to 90 days in the future.

Another change will help customers when they reinstall apps or download them on new devices. Before, users would have to manually “restore purchases” to sync the status of the completed transactions back to that newly downloaded or reinstalled app. Now, that information will be automatically fetched by StoreKit 2 so the apps are immediately up-to-date with whatever it is the user paid for.

While, overall, the changes make for a significant update to the StoreKit framework, Apple’s hesitancy to allow developers more control over their own subscription-based customers speaks, in part, to how much it wants to control in-app purchases. This is perhaps because it got burned in the past when it tried allowing developers to manage their own refunds.

As The Verge noted last month while the Epic Games-Apple antitrust trial was underway, Apple had once provided Hulu will access to a subscription API, then discovered Hulu had been offering a way to automatically cancel subscriptions made through the App Store when customers wanted to upgrade to higher-priced subscription plans. Apple realized it needed to take action to protect against this misuse of the API, and Hulu later lost access. It has not since made that API more broadly available.

On the flip side, having Apple, not the developers, in charge of subscription management and refunds means Apple takes on the responsibilities around preventing fraud — including fraud perpetrated by both customers and developers alike. Customers may also prefer that there’s one single place to go for managing their subscription billing: Apple. They may not want to have to deal with each developer individually, as their experience would end up being inconsistent.

These changes matter because subscription revenue contributes to a sizable amount of Apple’s lucrative App Store business. Ahead of WWDC 21, Apple reported the sale of digital goods and services on the App Store grew to $86 billion in 2020, up 40% over the the year prior. Earlier this year, Apple said it paid out more than $200 billion to developers since the App Store launched in 2008.

As I’m typing this, I’ve just finished my second panel for our big TC Sessions: Mobility event. The write-ups will be ready in time for next week’s roundup, but a couple of things worth thinking about in the meantime.

The first is partnerships with big companies like Walmart. I get the sense that Walmart really loves to play the field when it comes to partnering with small tech startups. And honestly, why not, right?

There’s a lot of upside and relatively little downside. At the end of the day, a company like Walmart is looking for a competitive advantage against Amazon, the galactic emperor of competitive advantages. Amazon, of course, has invested a ton in robotics, including acquisitions and first-party development.

Image Credits: Veanne Cao/TechCrunch

For startups, there’s tremendous up and downside here. It’s hard not to see a company like Bossa Nova as a kind of cautionary tale on that front. The promising inventory scanning startup took a massive hit when Walmart backed out of a deal the company had invested large resources into. It left Bossa Nova shaken, to say the least.

There’s no easy math on this one. When a company like Walmart knocks on your door with a big contract, you want to jump in with both feet. But how do you avoid putting all of your eggs in that one basket. When it comes to emerging tech, companies like Walmart like to play the field.

Another subject I’ve been thinking a lot about of late is whether universities are doing enough to foster innovation in their own backyard. There are plenty of good and bad examples of this, but as someone who writes about robots, I keep coming back to Carnegie Mellon. Other big robotics schools like MIT and Stanford haven’t had to concern themselves with talent drain, in large part due to location.

Image Credits: Carnegie Mellon University

So, how does a school like CMU both help budding entrepreneurs transition from laboratory to startup and keep that talent in its own backyard? The good news is I’ll be able to take that question directly to the source. I’ll be interviewing CMU President Farnam Jahanian at TC’s upcoming virtual Pittsburgh event on June 29. Here’s a quote from Jahanian to whet your appetite:

Carnegie Mellon’s decades-long leadership in research and education in AI and robotics has catalyzed an innovation ecosystem in the Pittsburgh region where entrepreneurship, creativity and placemaking intersect. These emerging technologies are changing the way we farm, enabling millions to learn a new language, leading the race to develop self-driving vehicles, and even going to the moon. We are committed to empowering citizens across Pittsburgh to take part in the economic benefits of these innovations as they continue to transform our world.

Image Credits: Gideon Brothers

As we head into summer, the investments in the category aren’t coming quite as fast and furiously as they were earlier in the year. But I have it on good authority that we’ll be seeing some more robotics funding announcements in the not too distant future. Of course, for all of the reasons I’ve alluded to before, the warehouse space continues to be hot. And this week a Croatian firm named Gideon Brothers announced a $31 million raise. From a recent piece by Mike, here’s CEO Matija Kopić:

The pandemic has greatly accelerated the adoption of smart automation, and we are ready to meet the unprecedented market demand. The best way to do it is by marrying our proprietary solutions with the largest, most demanding customers out there. Our strategic partners have real challenges that our robots are already solving, and, with us, they’re seizing the incredible opportunity right now to effect robotic-powered change to some of the world’s most innovative organizations.

Kopić and team should clearly all consider changing their last name to Gideon and doing a whole Ramones thing. Of course, they’re the ones who just raised $31 million, so maybe they’re doing something right.

A mobile security startup has found seven security flaws in Samsung’s pre-installed mobile apps, which it says if abused could have allowed attackers broad access to a victim’s personal data.

Oversecured said the vulnerabilities were found in several apps and components bundled with Samsung phones and tablets. Oversecured founder Sergey Toshin told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities were verified on a Samsung Galaxy S10+ but that all Samsung devices could be potentially affected because the baked-in apps are responsible for system functionality.

Toshin said the vulnerabilities could have allowed a malicious app on the same device to steal a victim’s photos, videos, contacts, call records and messages, and change settings “without any user consent or notice” by hijacking the permissions from Samsung’s stock apps.

One of the flaws could have allowed the theft of data by exploiting a vulnerability in Samsung’s Secure Folder app, which has a “large set” of rights across the device. In a proof-of-concept, Toshin showed the bug could be used to steal contacts data. Another bug in Samsung’s Knox security software could have been abused to install other malicious apps, while a bug in Samsung Dex could have been used to scrape data from user notifications from apps, email inboxes, and messages.

Oversecured published technical details of the vulnerabilities in a blog post, and said it reported the bugs to Samsung, which fixed the flaws.

Samsung confirmed the flaws affected “selected” Galaxy devices but would not provide a list of specific devices. “There have been no known reported issues globally and users should be assured that their sensitive information was not at risk,” but provided no evidence for this claim. “We addressed the potential vulnerability by developing and issuing security patches via software update in April and May, 2021 as soon as we identified this issue.”

The startup, which launched earlier this year after self-funding $1 million in bug bounty payouts, uses automation to search for vulnerabilities in Android code. Toshin has found similar security flaws in TikTok, and Android’s Google Play app.

When companies are considering buying a particular software service, they typically want to test it in their own environments, a process that can be surprisingly challenging. TestBox, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a fully working package with pre-populated data to give the team a way to test and collaborate on the product before making a buying decision.

Today the company announced it was making the product widely available and a $2.7 million seed round from SignalFire and Firstminute Capital along with several other investors and industry angels.

Company co-founder Sam Senior says he and his co-founder Peter Holland recognized that it was challenging for companies buying software to test it in a realistic way. “So TestBox is the very first time that companies are going to be able to test drive multiple pieces of enterprise software with an insanely easy-to-use live environment that’s uniquely configured to them with guided walk-throughs to make it really easy for them to get up to speed,” Senior explained.

He says that up until now, even with free versions or free testing periods, it was hard to test and collaborate in that kind of environment with key stakeholders in the company. TestBox comes pre-populated with data generated by GPT-3 OpenAI to test how the software behaves and lets participants grade different features on a simple star rating system and provide comments as needed. All the feedback is recorded in a “notebook,” giving the company a central place to gather all the data.

What’s more, it puts the company buying the software more in control of the process instead of being driven by the vendor, which is typically the case. “Actually, now [the customer gets to] be the one who defines the experience, making them lead the process, while making it collaborative, and giving them more confidence [in their decision],” he said.

For now, the company plans to concentrate on customer support software and is working with Zendesk, Hubspot and Freshdesk, but has plans to expand and add additional partners over time. It has been talking with Salesforce about adding Service Cloud and hopes to have them in some form on the platform later this year. It also plans to expand into other verticals over time like CRM, Martech and IT help desks.

Senior is a former Bain consultant who worked with companies buying enterprise software, and saw the issues first-hand that they faced when it came to testing software before buying. He quit his job last summer, and began by talking to 70 customers, vendors and experts to get a real sense of what they were looking for in a solution.

He then teamed up with Holland and built the first version of the software before raising their seed money last October. The company began hiring in February and has 8 employees to this point, but he wants to keep it pretty lean through the early stage of the company’s development.

Even at this early stage, the company is already taking a diverse approach to hiring. “Already when we have been working with recruiting firms, we’ve been saying that they need to split the pipeline as much as they can, and that’s been something we have spent a long, long time on. […] We spent actually six months with an open role on the front end because we are looking to build more diversity in our team as quickly as possible,” he said.

He reports that the company has a fairly equitable gender and ethnic split to this point, and holds monthly events to raise awareness internally about different groups, letting employees lead the way when it makes sense.

At least for now, he’s planning on running the company in a distributed manner, but acknowledges that as it gets bigger, he may have to look at having a centralized office as a home base, at least.

InfoSum, a startup which takes a federated approach to third party data enrichment, has launched a new product (called InfoSum Bridge) that it says significantly expands the customer identity linking capabilities of its platform.

“InfoSum Bridge incorporates multiple identity providers across every identity type — both online and offline, in any technical framework — including deterministic, probabilistic, and cohort-level matches,” it writes in a press release.

It’s also disclosing some early adopters of the product — naming data-for-ads and data-aggregator giants Merkle, MMA and Experian as dipping in.

Idea being they can continue to enrich (first party) data by being able to make linkages, via InfoSum’s layer, with other ‘trusted partners’ who may have gleaned more tidbits of info on those self-same users.

InfoSum says it has 50 enterprise customers using InfoSum Bridge at this point. The three companies it’s named in the release all play in the digital marketing space.

The 2016-founded startup (then called CognitiveLogic) sells customers a promise of ‘privacy-safe’ data enrichment run via a technical architecture that allows queries to be run — and insights gleaned — across multiple databases yet maintains each pot as a separate silo. This means the raw data isn’t being passed around between interested entities. 

Why is that important? Third party data collection is drying up, after one (thousand) too many privacy scandals in recent years — combing with the legal risk attached to background trading of people’s data as a result of data protection regimes like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

That puts the spotlight squarely on first party data. However businesses whose models have been dependent on access to big data about people — i.e. being able to make scores of connections by joining up information on people from different databases/sources (aka profiling) — are unlikely to be content with relying purely on what they’ve been able to learn by themselves.

This is where InfoSum comes in, billing itself as a “neutral data collaboration platform”.

Companies that may have been accustomed to getting their hands on lashings of personal data in years past, as a result of rampant, industry-wide third party data collection (via technologies like tracking cookies) combined with (ehem) lax data governance — are having to cast around for alternatives. And that appears to be stoking InfoSum’s growth.

And on the marketing front, remember, third party cookies are in the process of going away as Google tightens that screw…

“We are growing faster than Slack (at equivalent stage e.g. Series A->B) because we are the one solution that is replacing the old way of doing things,” founder Nick Halstead tells TechCrunch. “Experian, Liveramp, Axciom, TransUnion, they all offer solutions to take your data. InfoSum is offering the equivalent of the ‘Cisco router for customer data’ — we don’t own the data we are just selling boxes to make it all connect.”

“The announcement today — ‘InfoSum Bridge’ — is the next generation of building the ultimate network to ‘Bridge the industry chasm’ it has right now of 100’s of competing ID’s, technical solutions and identity types, bringing a infrastructure approach,” he adds.

We took a deep dive into InfoSum’s first product back in 2018 — when it was just offering early adopters a glimpse of the “art of the possible”, as it put it then.

Three+ years on it’s touting a significantly expansion of its pipeline, having baked in support for multiple ID vendors/types, as well as adding probabilistic capabilities (to do matching on users where there is no ID).

Per a spokesman: “InfoSum Bridge is an extension of our existing and previous infrastructure. It enables a significant expansion of both our customer identity linking, and the limits of what is possible for data collaboration in a secure and privacy-focused manner. This is a combination of new product enhancements and announcement of partnerships. We’ve built capabilities to support across all ID vendors and types but also probabilistic and support for those publishers with unauthenticated audiences.”

InfoSum bills its platform as “the future of identity connectivity”. Although, as Halstead notes, there is now growing competition for that concept, as the adtech industry scrambles to build out alternative tracking systems and ID services ahead of Google crushing their cookies for good.

But it’s essentially making a play to be the trusted, independent layer that can link them all.

Exactly what this technical wizardry means for Internet users’ privacy is difficult to say. If, for example, it continues to enable manipulative microtargeting that’s hardly going to sum to progress.

InfoSum has previously told us its approach is designed to avoid individuals being linked and identified via the matching — with, for exmaple, limits placed on the bin sizes. Although its platform is also configurable (which puts privacy levers in its customers hands). Plus there could be edge cases where overlapped datasets result in a 100% match for an individual. So a lot is unclear.

The security story looks cleaner, though.

If the data is properly managed by InfoSum (and it touts “comprehensive independent audits”, as well as pointing to the decentralized architecture as an advantage) that’s a big improvement on — at least — one alternative scenario of whole databases being passed around between businesses which may be (to put it politely) disinterested in securing people’s data themselves.

InfoSum’s PR includes the three canned quotes (below) from the trio of marketing industry users it’s disclosing today.

All of whom sound very happy indeed that they’ve found a way to keep their “data-driven” marketing alive while simultaneously getting to claim it’s “privacy-safe”…

John Lee, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Merkle: “The conversation around identity is continuing to be top of mind for marketers across the industry, and as the landscape rapidly changes, it’s essential that brands have avenues to work together using first-party identity and data in a privacy-safe way. The InfoSum Bridge solution provides our clients and partners a way to collaborate using their first-party data, resolved to Merkury IDs and data, with even greater freedom and confidence than with traditional clean room or safe haven approaches.”

Lou Paskalis, Chairman, MMA Global Media and Data Board: “As marketers struggle to better leverage their first-party data in the transition from the cookie era to the consent era, I would have expected more innovative solutions to emerge.  One bright spot is InfoSum, which offers a proprietary technology to connect data, yet never share that data. This is the most customer-friendly and compliant technology that I’ve seen that enables marketers to fully realize the true potential of their first party data. What InfoSum has devised is an elegant way to respect consumers’ privacy choices while enabling marketers to realize the full benefit of their first party data.”

Colin Grieves, Managing Director Experian: “At Experian we are committed to a culture of customer-centric data innovation, helping develop more meaningful and seamless connections between brands and their audiences. InfoSum Bridge gives us a scalable environment for secure, data connectivity and collaboration. Bridge is at the core of the Experian Match offering, which allows brands and publishers alike the ability to understand and engage the right consumers in the digital arena at scale, whilst safeguarding consumer data and privacy.”

Thing is, clever technical architecture that enables big data fuelled modelling and profiling of people to continue, via pattern matching to identify ‘lookalike’ customers who can (for example) be bucketed and targeted with ads, doesn’t actually sum to privacy as most people would understand it… But, for sure, impressive tech architecture guys.

The same issue attaches to FloCs, Google’s proposed replacement for tracking cookies — which also relies on federation (and which the EFF has branded a “terrible idea”, warning that such an approach actually risks amplifying predatory targeting).

The tenacity with which the marketing industry seeks to cling to microtargeting does at least underline why rights-focused regulatory oversight of adtech is going to be essential if we’re to stamp out systematic societal horrors like ads that scale bias by discriminating against protected groups, or the anti-democratic manipulation of voters that’s enabled by opaque targeting and hyper-targeted messaging, circumventing the necessary public scrutiny.

Tl;dr: Privacy is not just important for the individual. It’s a collective good. And keeping that collective commons safe from those who would seek to exploit it — for a quick buck or worse — is going to require a whole other type of oversight architecture.