Year: 2021

Orbiit, a startup that automates the interactions within an online community, has raised a $2.7 million round led by Bread and Butter Ventures with participation from new investors High Alpha Capital, LAUNCHub Ventures and Company Ventures. Existing investors Founders Fund, which led Orbiit’s $1M pre-seed round, Acceleprise and other angels also participated. The capital will be used to build out the Orbiit product and engineering team.

Orbiit says its platform handles the communications, matching, scheduling, feedback collection, and analytics for people connecting with each other in an online community. The idea is that the communities therefore learn and network better, engage more, and share more knowledge.

CEO and Co-Founder Bilyana Freye said: “Tailored 1:1 connections allow members to discuss difficult topics, be vulnerable and share learnings with one another. Those 1:1 connections are the hardest to execute, but when you start investing in them, with the help of Orbiit, you see engagement feeding into all other initiatives and a vibrant, active community that truly delivers on the promise to its members.”

Bread and Butter Ventures Managing Partner Mary Grove added: “This age-old question of how to leverage technology at scale to drive meaningful connections across communities both internal to an organization and across the globe is a problem we’ve been actively seeking a solution to for a decade. Orbiit brings the perfect blend of tech-enabled software with human curation to create strong connections and provide insights back to community managers.”

The platform is being used by startup communities at True Ventures, GGV, and Lerer Hippeau; private networking groups such as Dreamers & Doers; and customer communities, like the CFO community run by fintech leader Spendesk.

Founders Fund Principal Delian Asparouhov said: “We see Orbiit as a key platform for peer learning within companies and communities, unlocking untapped knowledge through curated matchmaking.”

LAUNCHub Ventures participated in the round, following the recent first close of its new $70 million fund.

CorrActions, a noninvasive neuroscience startup that uses sensor data to evaluate a user’s cognitive state due to drowsiness, alcohol, fatigue and other issues, today announced that it has raised a $2.7 million seed round. Early-stage fund VentureIsrael, seed fund Operator Partners and the Israeli Innovation Authority are backing the company, which is based out of OurCrowd’s Labs/02 incubator.

The idea here is to use touch sensors wherever humans may interact with machines, be that in a fighter jet’s cockpit, a car or anywhere else where knowing a user’s cognitive state could prevent potentially catastrophic errors. CorrActions promises that its proprietary algorithms can identify the user’s cognitive state and detect errors 150 milliseconds before they occur by “decoding unconscious brain signals through body motion monitoring.” For the most part, the system is use-case agnostic since it’s basically a generic platform that is independent of where it is implemented.

“Using sensors that already exist in nearly every electronic device like smartwatches, smartphones and even steering wheels and joysticks, CorrActions is the first in the world to be able to read a person’s cognitive state at any given moment by analyzing micro changes in their muscular activity,” explained Eldad Hochman, the company’s co-founder and CSO. “It is enough for the person to come in contact with an electronic device for two minutes and we can accurately quantify cognitive state and even predict a rapid deterioration, which may lead to failure or accidents. We can see this coming seconds before it occurs. This means that we can quantify the level of fatigue, intoxication, exhaustion or lack of concentration at any given moment.”

A lot of modern cars already feature sensors that can monitor your alertness, of course, and so it’s maybe no surprise that CorrActions is already working on proofs of concept with a few players in the automotive industry. In addition, it is also working on projects with the defense industry to show that its systems can assess a pilot’s performance, for example. But Hochman also believes that the company’s algorithms may be able to alert athletes or the elderly when they may be at risk of injury and falls.

The company says it will use the new funding to further develop its algorithms and support its current deployment partners, especially in the automotive industry.

“We are developing, and already seeing significant results for a technology which has the potential to save companies man-hours and money by preventing basic operational errors,” said CorrActions co-founder and CEO Zvi Ginosar. “Moreover, the application of our platform can be used to save lives, and prevent thousands of accidents and errors. In the next months we hope to be able to report more ground-breaking results and proof of concept trials, and this funding will greatly help us reach this goal.”

Augmented reality and non-fungible tokens, need I say more? Yes? Oh, well NFTs have certainly had their moment in 2021 but the question of what they do or what can be done with them has certainly been getting voiced more frequently as the speculative gold rush begins to cool off and people start to think more about how digital goods can evolve in the future.

Anima, a small creative crypto startup built by the founders of photo/video app Ultravisual, which Flipboard acquired back in 2014, is looking to use AR to shift how NFT art and collectibles can be viewed and shared. Their latest venture is an effort to help artists bring their digital creations to a bigger digital stage and help find what the future of NFTs looks like in augmented reality.

The startup has put together a small $500k pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Lyle Owerko and Andrew Unger.

“As NFTs move away from being a more speculative market where it’s all about returns on your purchases, I think that’s healthy and it’s good for us specifically because we want to make things that are more approachable,” co-founder Alex Herrity says.

Their broader vision is finding ways for digital objects to interact with the real world, something that’s been a pretty top-of-mind concern for the AR world over the last few years, though augmented reality development has cooled more recently as creators have sunk into a wait-and-see attitude towards new releases from Apple and Facebook. Both the AR and NFT spaces are incredibly early, something Anima’s co-founders were quick to admit, but they think both spaces have matured enough that the gimmicks are out in the open.

“There’s a context shift that happens when you see AR as a vehicle to have a tactile relationship with something that you collected or that you see is a lifestyle accessory versus the common thing now where it’s a little bit more of an experiential gimmick,” co-founder Neil Voss tells TechCrunch.

The team has worked with a couple artists already as they’ve made early experiments in bringing digital art objects into AR  and they’re launching a marketplace late next month based on ConsenSys’s Palm platform where they hope to showcase more of their future partnerships.

Tokyo-based ispace has been selected to deliver rovers from Canada and Japan to the lunar surface after they launch aboard SpaceX rockets. The company will use its recently revealed Hakuto-R lander for both missions, currently scheduled for 2022 and 2023.

The Canadian Space Agency selected three private Canadian companies, each with separate scientific missions, to ride the lander. Mission Control Space Services, Canadensys and NGC are the first companies to receive awards under the CSA’s Capability Demonstration program, part of the agency’s Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program. LEAP, unveiled by the Canadian government in February 2020, earmarks $150 million over five years to support in-space demonstrations and science missions from Canadian private industry.

As part of the mission, the ispace lander will deliver the United Arab Emirates’ The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC)’s 22 pound rover, “Rashid.” The rover will be equipped with an artificial intelligence flight computer from space robotics company Mission Control Space Services. Mission Control’s AI will use deep-learning algorithms to recognize lunar geology as the Rashid rover traverses the surface.

ispace will carry cameras “to capture key events during the mission” for Canadensys. The Japanese company will also collect lunar imagery data for demonstration of NGC’s autonomous navigation system.

“We are honored that all three of the companies awarded by CSA have each entrusted ispace’s services to carry out their operations on the lunar surface,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a statement. “We see this as a show of the trust that ispace has developed with CSA over the past years, as well as a recognition of ispace’s positive position in the North American market.”

ispace will also be transporting a transformable lunar robot payload to the moon for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in addition to conducting operations and providing lunar data. The data collected on this mission, Mission 2, will be used to aid the design of a future crewed pressurized rover.

JAXA’s lunar robot will be only around 80mm in diameter before it transforms to its surface form, and will weigh only around 250 grams. That mission is scheduled to take place in 2023. ispace did not disclosed the financial terms of the deals.

Image Credits: JAXA (opens in a new window)

“While the robot travels on the lunar surface, images on behavior of the regolith, and images of lunar surface taken by the robot and the camera on the lunar lander will be sent to the mission control center via the lunar lander,” JAXA said in a news release. “The acquired data will be used for evaluation of the localization algorithm and the impact of the regolith on driving performance of the crewed pressurized rover.”

ispace unveiled their Hakuto-R lander design in July 2020. The Hakuto project was born out of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, in which teams competed to be the first to send a lunar rover to the moon, have it travel 500 meters and send back to Earth photos and video. None of the five finalists, including Hakuto, were able to complete a launch, and the competition subsequently ended in 2018 without a winner.

The MBRSC and JAXA rovers will have different deployment mechanisms from the landers, though Hakamada did not provide further details during a media briefing Wednesday.

The landers are being assembled in Germany and the assembly phase has just started, Hakamada said. “So we’re very confident we will meet this schedule,” he added.

Using water on the lunar surface is one of ispace’s long-term objectives. The company hopes to have more capability in the future to sustain resource utilization activites, Hakamada said.

This is only one of several lunar missions launching on SpaceX rockets. NASA announced in April that the space startup was selected to send humans to the lunar surface as part of its Artemis project, at a total award value of $2.89 billion. SpaceX will also be taking payloads from Firefly Aerosapce to take up its lunar lander in 2023.

All eyes have recently been on Basecamp, which lost about a third of its workforce at the end of last month after banning “societal and political discussions” at work. Late last year, Coinbase was embroiled in a similar controversy after its CEO declared that political activism at work is a distraction, leading to a smaller but still significant employee exodus.

Before that, controversies erupted at Google, Facebook and other prominent tech firms, leading to virtual employee walkouts and work stoppages. We continue to see headlines that highlight tech company employee revolts over management edicts or perceived policy failures.

These company meltdowns reflect a societal change, and those in the startup community ought to take notice. The strife may be attributable to changing generational expectations in some cases, or an excess of “tech bro” culture in others, but the reality is that things have changed.

A generation ago, it was standard policy to keep politics out of work. Today, it’s virtually impossible to separate the political from the personal, and employees are encouraged to bring their whole selves to work, which includes their backgrounds and belief systems.

Political and societal topics impact the everyday lives of employees and the world is more connected than ever. Startup leaders shouldn’t declare a political void — especially if they’re striving for a diverse and inclusive workforce. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t discuss these issues — systemic racism and workplace discrimination are allowed to go unchecked.

I’m the CEO and founder of a growing tech company, and also served as an HR executive at several Fortune 500 companies, which means I’ve seen all sides of the issues at play here.

That gives me some insight on the cultural problems gripping many tech businesses — and some thoughts on solutions. While companies have every right to create rules and policies on employee conduct and internal use of technology, leaders get better results when they approach these issues intentionally and transparently. As we’ve seen with Basecamp and others, banning political activities and discussions outright can result in unintended consequences.

How to change policies without all the drama

It’s impossible to know exactly what caused some of the recent tech company exoduses unless you were there. But most of us have experienced toxic workplace cultures, and having studied the issue extensively as an HR professional and then as a founder, my educated guess is that the recent employee actions that attracted negative media attention are symptoms of a situation that has been simmering for a long time.

If you’re a startup leader who wants to avoid similar controversies, how can you create or change policies without all the drama? Here are some tips to consider:

• Look in the mirror and analyze culture. People who found successful companies build a culture whether they consciously set out to do that or not. One explanation for cultural growing pains at startups is that many companies unconsciously create a monoculture populated by employees of similar backgrounds, skill sets, attitudes and life experiences. As the company grows, you bring in people with different backgrounds and perspectives to join the group and strengthen the business. But it’s important to remember that company culture and policies need to evolve and mature as the organization grows as well, or conflict will inevitably arise. Leaders can avoid that by being thoughtful about every aspect of the policies they create and adjusting the culture to support all employees, not just those who started on day one.
• Get help as your company scales. CEOs set the tone, and for an early-stage startup, policies tend to be less formal and arise directly from company values. But as the organization matures, you may need to codify practices, such as how you handle time off, parental leave and pay structures. Just as you’d turn to the board for financial advice, it’s best to turn to HR and employee relations experts for workplace guidance. Get counsel from HR on how to avoid unintended consequences and communicate changes appropriately. Depending on what kind of policies you’re putting in place, it might also be a good idea to get input from employees.

• Use employee feedback to understand impact. It’s important to understand what’s going on in your organization before you make policy changes and take other actions that shape the company culture. Collecting employee feedback through surveys and open discussions will allow you to gain visibility into employee priorities and concerns and proceed with greater transparency and decisiveness. Consulting employees before making changes, and even after a policy change, will help you build trust and see if adjustments are needed.Some decisions must be made without staff input; workplaces are not democratic. If possible, try to understand where employees stand so you can better anticipate the impact. One caveat is to not take silence as approval. Just because employees stay after a controversial policy change doesn’t mean they are necessarily OK with it. Many startups put employees in golden handcuffs with benefits or stock options so attractive they “put up with it” for the future payoff. Anonymous surveys will help you understand the sentiment.

• Don’t capitalize on employee policies for press: It’s not unusual for tech company leaders to publicly issue policy changes to create controversy. Just recently, Coinbase announced a new compensation policy that eliminates negotiations, a decision that is attracting scrutiny. Generally speaking, this practice isn’t necessarily a bad thing; some leaders have used their platforms to change calcified industry standards for the better. But leaders owe it to their teams to be judicious about publicly announcing new policies that affect staff. Employees shouldn’t be used as a pawn to garner press coverage.Employees want changes and programs that are driven by authenticity and what is right for the company, not changes spurred by the news of the week. With Basecamp, the company created an employee-run DEI committee when it was the “thing to do,” but the CEO disbanded it as soon as it became uncomfortable. This type of performative employee support is a surefire way to deteriorate employee confidence and morale. Be thoughtful about decisions and be prepared to stick through it even if challenges arise.

Addressing systemic problems requires a systemic approach

“Don’t discuss politics at work” used to be a standard expectation. But employee expectations have shifted, and leaders have to recognize and respond to that. There is more value to be gleaned from encouraging employees to fully be themselves at work, which helps create an inclusive environment, but it’s also important to know you can’t drop these commitments the minute they become inconvenient.

While startup founders play a leading role, it is also on employees and everyone within the startup community to call out bias or inappropriate behaviors in the workforce and at the leadership level. The reality is that most employees at startups are highly skilled in a job market that values technical talent, putting them in a privileged position to take a risk, speak up or just leave when an organization’s culture is toxic or discriminatory. Their voice and actions will speak volumes for millions of workers who don’t have the ability to walk out the door and risk losing their livelihood – and their next paycheck.

The good news is that several Basecamp employees tried to make a change by suggesting a group focused on diversity. When that effort was shut down, they used their feet to send a message. To drive change, those in positions of privilege and power mustn’t stay silent as bystanders — they have to take a stand for others who aren’t in the position to do so themselves. If all of us harness our privilege to support others who are more vulnerable, we will inevitably create more equitable, welcoming workplaces for everyone.

The turmoil some tech companies are experiencing really comes down to culture and ego. We need to recognize that the old-school “no politics” rule led to situations where systemic racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry festered unchecked. We have an obligation to do better.

Company leaders who acknowledge the direct impact politics can have on employees, engage in open discussions with staff, and approach policy changes in a way that reflects the organization’s core values can thrive, even in a divisive political climate.

There’s been a lot of talk about racial equality in the year since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, but achieving it is far easier said than done given the current state of affairs. Consider: according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, historically Black colleges and universities have $15,000 on average in endowment per student, while comparable non-HBCUs have $410,000 on average in endowment per student.

That matters, a lot. While higher learning institutions are almost universally focused on diversifying their student base, HBCUs are largely responsible for the nation’s Black middle class, and the larger the endowment, the stronger the school and its ability to support its educators, researchers, and in the case of public HBCUs, its public service mission. Venture capitalist Jamison Hill says that his own father, who attended North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, has long maintained that “if it weren’t for that experience, there’s no way he could have gone on to get a high-paying job, where he met my mother, who laid the foundation for the success of our family.”

Hill, who most recently spent more than six years with Bain Capital Ventures, is now doing something to protect that legacy, along with a kind of dream team that features Laura Weidman Powers, who has cofounded or led numerous impact-focused startups and nonprofits, including Code2040; and Luci Fonseca, who helped establish the Institute for Black Economic Mobility at McKinsey & Co. and has focused on impact investing at Salesforce Ventures, among her other roles.

All three have joined the four-year-old venture firm Base10 Ventures to invest a new, $250 million growth-stage fund — the firm’s first later-stage vehicle — and fully half the profits from that fund will be directed to HBCUs to create student scholarships and support university endowments.

It’s a brilliant play on the part of Base10, a Bay Area outfit that closed its second early-stage fund last year with $250 million in capital commitments. Called the Advancement Initiative, the fund has already managed to work checks into eight high-fliers — Attentive, Nubank, Brex, Plaid, Aurora Solar, Wealthsimple, CircleCI, and KeepTruckin.

In each case, the fund participated in heavily oversubscribed rounds, but given its mission, the companies’ founding teams made room for its capital, as did other investors. (As an added sweetener, Base10 has promised to create scholarships in the name of each of these portfolio companies to fund the education of HBCU STEM students. Think: The Plaid Scholarship, The Brex Scholarship, and so forth.)

It’s a very fresh take on how to close the racial inequality gap in the U.S., one that could conceivably prove even more effective than other initiatives, including that of LPs who are increasingly pushing VCs to diversify their investing ranks.

The fund could be particularly impactful if it inspires copycat efforts. HBCUs confer nearly half of all STEM degrees for African-American students, says Base10, yet all 107 HBCU endowments combined are equal to just 7% of Stanford’s roughly $30 billion endowment.

So how will it work? For now, says Hill, the idea is to operate the fund as any growth-stage fund, meaning the overarching criteria is to back companies with the potential to produce outsize returns, no matter the skin color of their founders. Ultimately, however — “our hope is that this is not one and done,” says Hill — the idea is to drive change even further by layering in requirements about who can receive a check from the outfit.

As for the fund’s returns, some will flow directly back to particular HBCUs because they are limited partners in the Advancement Initiative fund, including the private university Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. Indeed, while the fund’s LPs also include earlier Base10 backers, along with organizations that serve minority communities and impact- and mission-oriented foundations, the Advancement Initiative was particularly focused on “removing any barriers to HBCUs investing,” says Weidman Powers, adding that it invited them to invest with “no fees, no minimums, no real closing date.”

The rest of the returns being set aside from HBCUs will be poured into a donor-advised fund that’s focused on increasing financial inclusion for the many institutions that don’t currently have endowments large enough to support a private market strategy.

Certainly, industry watchers can expect to see Advanced Initiative pop up in more buzzy companies, into which it aims to invest between $10 million and $20 million.

“We’ve found that a lot of companies are very willing to have a conversation with us,” says Fonseca. “The toughest part is just getting in front of the CEO,” she adds. “Once we get in front of that person and we tell that story, we tell them the vision, they’re immediately sold.”

We’ve been urging you to apply to Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 for weeks now, and you have just over 12 hours left before the application window slams shut on May 27 at 11:59 pm (PT). Don’t procrastinate — the experience alone, whether you win the $100,000 prize or not, can improve the trajectory of your business.

Case in point: Mollie Breen started out as a mathematician at the National Security Agency before co-founding an IoT/OT security startup called Perygee. She and her team competed in Startup Battlefield last year at Disrupt 2020. Although they didn’t reach the finals, Breen has plenty to say about the experience. Here’s what she shared with us in a quick Q&A.

TC: Why did you apply to Startup Battlefield?                                             

Breen: I admired the leadership and growth of other companies that, at one point, were Startup Battlefield contestants. I noticed they had similar traction to us when they applied, and their products resembled ours in their ability to disrupt the respective industry.

TC: What was the training process like?

Breen: It was incredibly valuable both in the short term and long term. Every team gets a weekly session with the Battlefield editor. Together you rehearse and go over every iteration of the pitch line-by-line and slide-by-slide. After each session, I walked away with constructive feedback on everything — the content, the speaking style and even the font color on a particular slide.

This was a unique opportunity, and we put in extra hours to be ahead of schedule, sent drafts for review in the off hours and even doubled down on additional practice with Q&As. As a result, we couldn’t have been more prepared for pitch day. And the training has stayed with Perygee well past the sessions and the competition.

TC: What did it feel like to pitch at Disrupt?

Breen: Pitching at Disrupt was, in some ways, like other pitches except that you have an international audience. Since, at that point, we had practiced our pitch dozens of times, the real unknown during the competition was the Q&A with the VC judges.

There was additional pressure to answer succinctly and convincingly within a time constraint that you wouldn’t have during a normal one-on-one pitch. But with the prep help from the TechCrunch team, I felt ready to speak in front of such a large audience. I encourage anyone who might be nervous about the big stage to go for it and trust you’ll have more than enough preparation when you get there.

TC: What was the post-pitch impact? Did you meet investors, press or other key partners?

Breen: It helped accelerate our progress. Following Battlefield, we closed an oversubscribed fundraising round. We acquired additional beta users, including our first beta user who messaged us after reading about Perygee on TechCrunch. We also gained numerous press opportunities to share our story.

It’s almost a year since Startup Battlefield, and I’m still impressed by how many people start the conversation saying they watched the pitch while reading our company’s background. It’s a reminder that the opportunities created by being a TechCrunch Battlefield company continue.

TC: Do you have any great news to share since your pitch?

Breen: At TechCrunch Battlefield we were a small team doing MVP testing and just about to start raising. Since the pitch, we have scaled on all fronts. We grew the founding team and the engineering team, and we deployed the product to enterprise networks. Some of those deployments include contacts who reached out because of TechCrunch — and we raised our seed round!

TC: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Breen: I’m grateful for the camaraderie and relationships we developed with the other teams. What you didn’t see on stage during the pitches was all of us cheering one another on from the group chat or social media feed. Even now, we continue to support one another through navigating business questions or promoting product launches. If it weren’t for Startup Battlefield, I would never have met this awesome group of startups.

You have just 24 hours left to channel your inner Mollie Breen. Apply to Startup Battlefield before the deadline expires on May 27 at 11:59 pm (PT). Get moving!

Managing the technical side of open-source projects is often hard enough, but throw in the inevitable conflicts between contributors, who are often very passionate about their contributions, and things get even harder. One way to establish ground rules for open-source communities is the Contributor Covenant, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke back in 2014. Like so many projects in the open-source world, the Contributor Covenant was also a passion project for Ehmke. Over the years, its first two iterations have been adopted by organizations like the CNCF, Creative Commons, Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Linux project, in addition to hundreds of other projects.

Now, as work is starting on version 3.0, the Organization for Ethical Source (OES), of which Ehmke is a co-founder and executive director, will take over the stewardship of the project.

“Contributor Covenant was the first document of its kind as code of conduct for open-source projects — and it was incredibly controversial and actually remains pretty controversial to this day,” Ehmke told me. “But I come from the Ruby community, and the Ruby community really embraced the concept and also really embraced the document itself. And then it spread from there to lots of other open-source projects and other open-source communities.”

The core of the document is a pledge to “make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation,” and for contributors to act in ways that contribute to a diverse, open and welcoming community.

As Ehmke told me, one part that evolved over the course of the last few years is the addition of enforcement guidelines that are meant to help community leaders determine the consequences when members violate the code of conduct.

“One of the things that I try to do in this work is when people criticize the work, even if they’re not arguing in good faith, I try to see if there’s something in there that could be used as constructive feedback, something actionable,” Ehmke said. “A lot of the criticism for years for Contributor Covenant was people saying, ‘Oh, I’ll say one wrong thing and be permanently banned from our project, which is really grim and really unreasonable.’ What I took from that is that people are afraid of what consequences project leaders might impose on them for an infraction. Put that way, that’s kind of a reasonable concern.”

Ehmke described bringing the Covenant to the OES as an “exit to community,” similar to how companies will often bring their mature open-source projects under the umbrella of a foundation. She noted that the OES includes a lot of members with expertise in community management and project governance, which they will be able to bring to the project in a more formal way. “I’m still going to be involved with the evolution of Contributor Covenant, but it’s going to be developed under the working group model that the organization for ethical source has established,” she explained.

For version 3.0, Ehmke hopes to turn the Covenant into what she described as more of a “toolkit” that will allow different communities to tailor it a bit more to their own goals and values (though still within the core ethical principles outlined by the OES).

“Microsoft’s adoption of Contributor Covenant represents our commitment to building healthy, diverse and inclusive communities, as well as our intention to contribute and build together with others in the ecosystem,” said Emma Irwin, a program manager in Microsoft’s Open Source Program Office. “I am honored to bring this intention and my expertise to the OES’s Contributor Covenant 3.0 working group.”

If you drive past potholes and faded lane dividers on your morning commute to work, chances are you’ll continue to see such road blemishes until someone alerts the local department of transportation to the problem by filing a complaint. Utah-based startup Blyncsy wants to help governments be a bit more preemptive than that.

The movement and data intelligence company is launching an AI-powered technology, called Payver, that will use crowd-sourced video data to give transport agencies up-to-date information on which roads require maintenance and improvements. Blyncsy is offering this service to governments at a reduced cost and with no long-term commitment.

Utah’s DOT will be the first to pilot the program beginning June 1, deploying Payver in the Salt Lake County region, which covers more than 350 road miles. Blyncsy will be announcing other pilots in different states over the next few weeks. 

Governments are typically a bit slower to adopt new technologies, and while the U.S. DOT has spent more than $250 million in public and private funds for smart city and advanced transportation options, much of the progress tends to revolve around making public transit in cities greener and more efficient. Blyncsy founder and CEO Mark Pittman argues inefficient road maintenance is not only unsafe, but it also causes higher carbon emissions. 

“The inspiration for Payver came in 2017 when the UDOT executive director set a goal that it would be the first department in the country to have real-time situational awareness on our roadways, and we’ve been working on solving that problem for them,” Pittman told TechCrunch. “They want to know what’s happening and when it’s happening automatically so the public doesn’t have to be involved. So if there’s roadside debris or stop signs missing or paint lines that need to be fixed, how does the department know without the public having to call and complain or without an accident occurring?”

Blyncsy’s Payver technology works by collecting any kind of HD images and videos from a variety of sources, such as Nexar dash cameras, and analyzing the data sets with machine vision to deliver output to customers. The insights are available to transit agencies in a dashboard format, but Payver also integrates into the maintenance management software that determines a rank order of repair jobs.  

For the UDOT pilot, Payver will initially focus on monitoring paint lines, which is the basic requirement to support an autonomous environment, but may expand into potholes, construction barrels, knocked over signs and whatever else can go wrong from daily wear. UDOT has a budget of about $90,000 for this pilot, according to Rob Miles, UDOT’s director of traffic and safety.

“Right now, we do a lidar scan of our roadways every two years, so we’re always out there collecting data of some sort, but it’s not at a high enough fidelity that we can manage our striping off of it,” Miles told TechCrunch. “We’re still really managing striping off of public complaints. We’re hoping with a different data collection system that we can move from that complaint-based system to something that has less opinion and more measurable data behind it.”

Pittman said optimizing active mobility forms by helping predict repairs needed for pedestrian crossings or safe locations for bike lanes will be a priority for Payver as the technology advances, which is important for maintaining equity and inclusion in mobility. Payver can also help bridge the racial and socioeconomic gap in road conditions, says Pittman, helping DOTs deliver equitable services to the entire public.

“Pete Buttigieg recently talked about how transportation as it is has helped support systemic racism at times and pigeonhole communities because of the way we build roads often with lower income populations being closer to freeways,” he said. 

“The same thing is also true when you think about roadway maintenance. Lower-income populations are much less likely to complain and higher-income populations are a lot more likely to complain, but the impact of a pothole in a low-income population means a broken axle, which can determine the viability of that family surviving. That’s not true in a high-income environment.”

Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totalling $11 million.

The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.

Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.

“We’re big believers that the world, especially consumer brands, really need strong predictive personalization. But when you think about consumer big brands or the retailers that you buy from, most of them aren’t data scientists, nor do they really know how to activate [machine learning] at scale,” Keng told TechCrunch.

She says that she wanted to make this type of technology more accessible by hiding the complexity behind the algorithms powering the platform. “Instead of telling you how powerful the algorithms are, we show you [what that means for the] consumer experience, and in the end what that means for both the consumer and you as a marketer individually,” she said.

That involves the kind of customizations you might expect around website messaging, emails, texts or whatever channel a marketer might be using to communicate with the buyer. “So the AI decides you should be shown these products, this offer, this specific promotion at this time, [whether it’s] the web, email or SMS. So you’re not getting the same content across different channels, and we do all that automatically for you, and that’s [driven by the algorithms],” she said.

Breinify launched in 2016 and participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco that year. She said it was early days for the company, but it helped them focus their approach. “I think it gave us a huge stage presence. It gave us a chance to test out the idea just to see where the market was in regards to needing a solution like this. We definitely learned a lot. I think it showed us that people were interested in personalization,” she said. And although the company didn’t win the competition, it ended up walking away with a funding deal.

Today the startup is growing fast and has 24 employees, up from 10 last year. Keng, who is an Asian woman, places a high premium on diversity.

“We partner with about four different kinds of diversity groups right now to source candidates, but at the end of the day, I think if you are someone that’s eager to learn, and you might not have all the skills yet, and you’re [part of an under-represented] group we encourage everyone to apply as much as possible. We put a lot of work into trying to create a really well rounded group,” she said.