Year: 2021

As AI gets stronger, the possibilities of what we can do with it grow exponentially (for better or worse). Synthesia, an AI video generation platform, is looking to make video content creation as simple and efficient as possible, and FirstMark is taking a bet on it.

The company has just announced the close of a $12.5 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from angels Christian Bach (CEO, Netlify) and Michael Buckley (VP Communications, Twilio), as well as existing investors LDV Capital, MMC Ventures, Seedcamp, Mark Cuban, Taavet Hinrikus, Martin Varsavsky, and TinyVC.

Though Synthesia’s technology could be applied to dozens of use cases, the startup is focused initially on educational content for organizations and enterprises. Think training videos and company- or department-wide video updates.

Here’s how it works:

Users can choose from a library of existing actors (who get paid per video they appear in) or upload their own video to create their own avatar. To use their own voice and avatar, Synthesia walks them through instructions on what type of video and audio they should send in.

Users can then type in a script, add other components like text, images, shapes, etc. and ultimately generate the video without any video creation or editing skills whatsoever. It’s also super easy to update or edit the video without having to do any traditional video editing.

The startup is well aware of how this platform could be used nefariously, and has built in multiple layers of security and authentication to ensure that users are aware of how their avatar is being used in videos, with the ability to check the script or the video before it’s generated or published.

Not only can this platform be used for the dozen or so training and educational videos that a company deploys each year, but it can be used in new and creative ways. The general principle is that video content is more compelling and engaging than text or other content. So imagine, say, that the weekly emails that come from your manager or CEO with updates on the business came in the form of video. With Synthesia, it’s super easy and low-cost to create that video quickly.

Synthesia has an entry-level plan, which is $30/month/seat, and offers 10 minutes of video per month. The startup also has an enterprise level plan that starts at $500/month and comes with many more minutes and extra feature functionality. 

The company plans on using the funding to fuel customer growth and product development.

Beyond the enterprise video platform, Synthesia is also working on an API that would allow organizations to hook the Synthesia tech into their own systems and distribute that video. Cofounder and CEO Victor Riparbelli showed an example where users could choose a stock and plug in a phone number that would automatically create a video with a daily stock price update and distribute that video to the specified phone number.

The enterprise product, called STUDIO, launched into public beta in the summer of 2020 and has since amassed more than 1000 companies as users.

Pragma is building what it calls a “backend as a service,” providing ready-made infrastructure to developers of online, live service games. And it’s announcing today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by David Thacker at Greylock, with participation from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Oculus founder Nate Mitchell and Cloudera founder Amr Awadallah, along with previous investors Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital. Amy Chang, who sold her business intelligence startup Accompany to Cisco, is joining Pragma’s board of directors.

Co-founder and CEO Eden Chen told me that where Unity and Unreal have built popular frontend game engines, he and his co-founder Chris Cobb (former engineering lead at Riot Games) are hoping Pragma will fill the void for a “de facto backend game engine.”

And while “many companies tried to do this” over the past decade, Chen suggested that this is the right time to launch the platform, thanks to the continued rise of live service games (like League of Legends) that have to be treated as “living, breathing products,” as well as improved tooling around infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services.

Pragma is launching a starter kit today designed to allow developers to quickly set up and test game loops. Meanwhile, the broader platform is currently in private beta testing with studios including One More Game (started by started by Pat Wyatt, one of Blizzard’s first employees) and Mitchell’s Mountain Top Studios.

Chen said the platform’s features fall into three broad categories — player accounts/social, game loops (including lobbies and matchmaking) and player/game data. Pragma isn’t building all of this from scratch; in some cases, it’s “acting as the integrator” for other platforms like Discord. Chen also noted that while the team plans to build a fully managed solution in the future, the current version is on-premise: “We’re building an instance of Pragma on the studio’s own infrastructure, [so they can] so they can take our code base and customize it to their own preferences.”

Pragma is initially targeting game studios with about 10 to 50 team members. Eventually, Chen hopes the platform could serve larger studios while also supporting “the democratization of these tools, so that a one- to five-person team can really leverage [them] to launch a networked, online game.”

He added, “The vision for us long term is that we really want to be innovating on the social side, creating social features that improve the game and build stronger connections.”

Last week, Scale AI announced a massive $325 million Series E. Led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital and Tiger Global, the raise gives the San Francisco data labeling startup a $7 billion valuation.

Alexandr Wang founded the company back in 2016, while still at MIT. A veteran of Quora and Addepar, Wang built the startup to curate information for AI applications. The company is now a break-even business, with a wide range of top-notch clients, including General Motors, NVIDIA, Nuro and Zoox.

Backed by a ton of venture capital, the company plans a large-scale increase in its headcount, as it builds out new products and expands into additional markets. “One thing that we saw, especially in the course of the past year, was that AI is going to be used for so many different things,” Wang told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “It’s like we’re just sort of really at the beginning of this and we want to be prepared for that as it happens.”

The executive will join us on stage at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9 to discuss how the company has made a major impact on the industry in its short four years of existence, the role AI is playing in the world of transportation and what the future looks like for Scale AI.

In addition to Wang, TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 will feature an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, fireside chats and breakouts all focused on the current and future state of mobility — like EVs, micromobility and smart cities for starters — and the investment trends that influence them all.

Investors like Clara Brenner (Urban Innovation Fund), Quin Garcia (Autotech Ventures) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — all of whom will grace our virtual stage. They’ll have plenty of insight and advice to share, including the challenges that startup founders will face as they break into the transportation arena.

You’ll hear from CEOs like Starship Technologies’ Ahti Heinla. The company’s been busy testing delivery robots in real-world markets. Don’t miss his discussion touching on challenges ranging from technology to red tape and what it might take to make last-mile robotic delivery a mainstream reality.

Grab your early bird pass today and save $100 on tickets before prices go up in less than a month.

Amazon announced this morning it’s opening Amazon Salon, the retailer’s first hair salon and a place where Amazon aims to test new technologies with the general public. The salon will occupy over 1,500 sq. ft on Brushfield Street in London’s Spitalfields, where Amazon says it will initially be trialing the use of augmented reality (AR) and “point-and-learn” technology — the latter being a system that allow customers to point to products on a display shelf in order to learn more through videos and other content that then appears on a display screen.

To then order the products, the customers will scan the QR code on the shelf, which takes them to the Amazon.co.uk shopping page for the item where they can add it to their cart and check out.

The salon’s AR technology, meanwhile, will be used to allow customers to experiment by virtually trying on different hair colors before making a commitment to a new shade.

Amazon has already entered the convenience store market, grocery business and other physical retail, where it’s innovating with new technologies like cashierless checkout, smart grocery carts, and biometric systems. But it’s not clear that Amazon actually has ambitions to be in the salon business itself. Instead, it seems the salon will largely serve as a testing ground for new technologies that Amazon will likely want to sell to other retail clients in the future, or perhaps implement in its own stores. And in the case of AR, Amazon may want to gather data on customers’ experiences it can use on its own shopping site, too.

Hinting that its goals are not about the salon business itself, Amazon today describes the salon as an “experiential venue where we showcase new products and technology,” and notes that it has no other plans to open more salons at this time.

The company has also recruited an existing salon owner, Elena Lavagni of Neville Hair & Beauty Salon, to help with this project, instead of hiring a new staff to run it long-term. Lavagni and her team have previously provided hairdressing services for other events, like Paris Fashion Week and the Cannes Film Festival.

Amazon has not detailed what sort of data it will collect from customers who use the salon, but it’s clearly there to learn about how new retail technologies would work in a real-world environment. But the fact that Amazon is capturing customer images for its hair color virtual try-on should raise questions about what it plans to do with the data it collects from the new salon. Will it only be used to learn about the specific technology being tested, or will it be put to other uses, too?

As many recall, Amazon has a complicated history with its use of technologies like facial recognition and biometrics, having sold biometric facial recognition services to law enforcement in the U.S., while its facial recognition technology was the subject of a data privacy lawsuit. And its Ring camera company continues to work in partnership with police. Customers should be told if they’re participating in an Amazon research project, not just having fun with new tech products.

Like other Amazon physical stores, the salon will first be open to Amazon employees only before offering bookings to the wider public in the weeks to come.

Today, Apple is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live.

Rumor has it that Apple plans to unveil a brand new iPad Pro. In particular, Apple’s tablet could get a big display update as the company could switch to mini-LED displays. You can expect some better specifications as well.

But that’s not all, we expect to see a refreshed iPad mini. Apple could also be ready to release AirTags after many months of rumors and leaks. As always, the only way to find out is by watching the event.

You can watch the live stream directly on this page, as Apple is streaming its conference on YouTube.

If you have an Apple TV, you don’t need to download a new app. You can open the Apple TV app and find the Apple Events section. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old ones.

And if you don’t have an Apple TV and don’t want to use YouTube, the company also lets you live stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed now works in all major browsers — Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

Cape Privacy, the early stage startup that wants to make it easier for companies to share sensitive data in a secure and encrypted way, announced a $20 million Series A today.

Evolution Equity Partners led the round with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management, Ridgeline Partners and Downing Lane. Existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Version One Ventures, Haystack, Radical Ventures and a slew of individual investors also participated. The company has now raised approximately $25 million including a $5 million seed investment we covered last June..

Cape Privacy CEO Ché Wijesinghe says that the product has evolved quite a bit since we last spoke. “We have really focused our efforts on encrypted learning, which is really the core technology, which was fundamental to allowing the multi-party compute capabilities between two organizations or two departments to work and build machine learning models on encrypted data,” Wijesinghe told me.

Wijesinghe says that a key business case involves a retail company owned by a private equity firm sharing data with a large financial services company, which is using the data to feed its machine learning models. In this case, sharing customer data, it’s essential to do it in a secure way and that is what Cape Privacy claims is its primary value prop.

He said that while the data sharing piece is the main focus of the company, it has data governance and compliance components to be sure that entities sharing data are doing so in a way that complies with internal and external rules and regulations related to the type of data.

While the company is concentrating on financial services for now because Wijesinghe has been working with these companies for years, he sees uses cases far beyond a single vertical including pharmaceuticals, government, healthcare telco and manufacturing.

“Every single industry needs this and so we look at the value of what Cape’s encrypted learning can provide as really being something that can be as transformative and be as impactful as what SSL was for the adoption of the web browser,” he said.

Richard Seewald, founding and managing partner at lead investor Evolution Equity Partners likes that ability to expand the product’s markets. “The application in Financial Services is only the beginning. Cape has big plans in life sciences and government where machine learning will help make incredible advances in clinical trials and counter-terrorism for example. We anticipate wide adoption of Cape’s technology across many use cases and industries,” he said.

The company has recently expanded to 20 people and Wijesinghe, who is half Asian, takes DEI seriously. “We’ve been very, very deliberate about our DEI efforts, and I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in is that we do foster a culture of acceptance, that it’s not just about diversity in terms of color, race, gender, but we just hired our first non binary employee,” he said,

Part of making people feel comfortable and included involves training so that fellow employees have a deeper understanding of the cultural differences. The company certainly has diversity across geographies with employees in 10 different time zones.

The company is obviously remote with a spread like that, but once the pandemic is over, Wijesinghe sees bringing people together on occasion with New York City as the hub for the company where people from all over the world can fly in and get together.

Many large enterprises now rely on hundreds of third-party SaaS applications to do business, but their security organizations can barely keep pace. Right now, the state of the art for SaaS enterprise security are cloud access security brokers (CASBs) that act as intermediaries between users and the actual service. But they don’t provide the kind of visibility that enterprises want since employees will often route around their IT departments. Tel Aviv-based Grip Security aims to make this a lot easier by providing enterprises with full visibility into their SaaS portfolios through enforceable endpoint-centric access controls and new data governance capabilities that work across devices and locations.

Grip Security today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed round led by cybersecurity-focused YL Ventures, with participation from CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz and a group of other angel investors with deep roots in the cybersecurity industry. These include the likes of former Akamai CSO Andy Ellis, former Zscaler CISO Michael Sutton, former Bank of America Chief Security Scientist Sounil Yu and Amazon Whole Foods CISO Sameer Sait.

“The founding team at Grip Security brings deep technical acumen to disrupt the SaaS security market,” said Ofer Schreiber, partner at YL Ventures. “Grip will not only upend antiquated SaaS security solutions, but they’ll also help enterprises implement much needed automated and granular security for SaaS, the fastest growing segment in information technology.”

Before starting Grip Security, co-founder and CEO Lior Yaari actually spent some time as the CTO of YL Ventures (though he says he still had to go through the firm’s standard vetting procedure to get funding). In that role, he talked to a lot of CISOs, and, again and again, they talked to him about the problems with current SaaS security solutions. Like his co-founders, Idan Fast (CTO) and Alon Shenkler (VP R&D), Yaari also has a deep cybersecurity background. But it was during his time YL Ventures that the idea for Grip Security was born.

“Within YL Ventures, we were always looking for the next interesting sub-market and we knew from our conversation with CISOs  […] that people know SaaS is a problem and they did not like the existing solutions — many of them being CASBs,” Yaari told me. “From this view of an investment team that not only talks with customers but also sees some technical teams that try to solve this problem and then go back and look for other solutions because they didn’t find a good fit within the market, I eventually wanted to do it myself. Last July, I actually told [YL Ventures partner Ofer Schreiber] that if no one solved this until October, I will. That was a joke back then — and then, three or four months later, it became reality. It’s hard to look at hard and interesting problems without trying to solve them.”

Most of the popular CASBs today were founded around 2013 and 2014 and then later acquired by other major players like Microsoft, Cisco and Proofpoint. But Yaari argues that the problems with protecting SaaS today is fundamentally different from those 10 years ago. These solutions, he argues, worked for protecting a dozen applications or so.

The promise of Grip Security is that after a quick installation, enterprises get full visibility into which applications their employees actually use. Yaari wasn’t quite ready to give away the secret sauce of how Grip does this, though. But he noted that this is a non-intrusive solution. “We do not install anything on user devices or corporate networks, but we follow the footprints left by SaaS applications and use this data to identify with extreme accuracy what applications were used.” He noted that Grip Security’s solution travels with the users, no matter which device they use.

Grip Security currently has about 15 employees and plans to use the new funding to build out its platform with additional capabilities, especially around providing access governance and data governance to applications. The plan is to grow to 20 to 25 employees within the next year.

After five years of providing non-dilutive financing for founders, Clearbanc is tired of being only a bank. So, it’s rebranding, and has just raised $100 million Series C at a $2 billion valuation off of its broader ambitions. The new valuation is five times larger than it was when Clearbanc closed a Series B in 2019.

Clearbanc has renamed itself Clearco, a move that is more in line with the company’s long-term vision of providing data-driven solutions for founders, say co-founders Michele Romanow and Andrew D’Souza.

“We’re moving from just being a capital provider and [having] sort of a transactional relationship with our customers to really using data, our network, guidance, [and] capital to be a long-term partner,” D’Souza said. In other words, Clearco wants founders to think of the company as more than a check-writing machine.

Today’s news a step away from what Clearco framed itself around just two years ago: the 20-minute term-sheet. The product, perhaps its most well-known in tech, allowed e-commerce companies to raise non-dilutive marketing growth capital between $10,000 to $10 million based on its revenue and ad spend. The founders then flexed rapid investment based on data – and to date, Clearco has put over $2 billion in over 4,600 companies.

“We can provide you the capital, really efficiently but then we can also help you figure out what to do with that capital to grow your business, and increase the value, and that was a big part of the motivation around the rebrand,” D’Souza said.

Clearco has been on a tear of new product launches in the past year. In April 2020, Clearco launched ClearRunway to help SaaS founders secure non-dilutive capital repaid through revenue-share agreements. A few months later, in July, it launched a way for founders to figure out how to value their companies based on benchmarking data and internal metrics. In October, Clearco launched a tool that would purchase a company’s inventory upfront directly from suppliers, and is then paid back as products sell. And in February, the company announced that it had created Clearangel, a product similar to its 20-minute term sheet, but focused on founders who bring in less revenue.

The growth hasn’t come without challenges. In April 2020, the same month it launched ClearRunway, Clearco laid off 8% of its workforce, or 17 people. The company said it would be writing more conservative checks, more frequently. At that time, it invested $1 billion across 2,200 companies. By now, it has invested $2 billion across 4,500 companies, a mix between startups and online businesses.

The company, still unprofitable, declined to close ARR, but instead pointed to another proxy: With all of its capital products, Clearco makes 6% in fees when it is repaid. Last year, Clearco invested $1 billion. This means that Clearco brought in around $60 million in sales last year.

“We were very naive when we started the business around the complexity around how fast you could lose a lot of money if you don’t get things right,” he said. Romanow added that in the beginning, Clearco had “very, very high loss rates” and it has gotten better with more data over time. The company is doubling down on different channels to get and shape and convey that data thus feels like a logical next step.

Since inception in 2015, Clearco’s biggest challenge was scaling the capital market side of its business and making sure it consistently had funds available. With the new product suite, Clearco’s new biggest challenge will be providing valuable services, consistently, to companies and balancing that mentorship with rapid investments.

Many of Clearco’s newest products are still in their infancy, but the potential success of the startup could nearly be tied to the general growth of startups looking for alternatives to venture capital when financing their startups. Similar to how AngelList’s growth is neatly tied to the growth of emerging fund managers, Clearco’s growth is cleanly related to the growth of founders who see financing as beyond a seed check from Y Combinator.

“I don’t believe anyone becomes a founder because they’re like, ‘I can’t wait to fundraise right now and can’t wait to like figure out which software to use’,” Romanow said. “They just want to build products and market incredible products [and] we’re just trying to make it easier.”

Its latest round was led by Oak HC/FT, which closed a $1.2 billion fund in February. In other words, a traditional venture capital firm backed a company that is betting that the future of raising financing for a startup is beyond venture capital. And, while meta, it’s a signal worth pointing out.

Community banks and credit unions aim to be the heart of the, well, communities, they serve. But without the big budgets of larger institutions, keeping up technology-wise can be a challenge. And not only are they competing with legacy players, there is also a slew of digital banks that have emerged in recent years, as well.

Enter Mantl, a startup that has developed technology to make it easier for people to open accounts digitally at community banks and credit unions so that those institutions can increase deposits and ultimately, profits. Founded in 2016, New York-based Mantl has been described by some as “the Shopify of account opening.” 

Community banks and credit unions make up a big percentage of all banking institutions, which means Mantl’s market opportunity is pretty darn large. The fintech’s revenue increased by 213% in 2020 as financial institutions clamored to meet increased demand for digital offerings from consumers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

And today, the company is announcing it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, to help it grow even more. The financing brings Mantl’s total funding raised since inception to $60.7 million and included participation from D1 Capital Partners, BoxGroup and existing backers Point72 Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures and OldSlip Group. The company raised $19 million last July after growing deposit volume by 705% in April of that year.

The startup declined to reveal hard revenue figures.

Mantl originally set out to build its own challenger bank, but in doing so realized there are 10,000 banks and credit unions in the U.S., and that 96% of them outsourced their technology to third-party legacy vendors such as Fiserv and Jack Henry, many of which have technology that is in some cases “decades old,” according to Nathaniel Harley, co-founder and CEO at Mantl.

Such outdated technology has kept many financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions from competing online, and also limits the digital banking options available to consumers, the company said.

So the company pivoted, based on the premise that most community banks and credit unions are critical to maintaining competition and equity in the United States’ financial system. 

“At a high level, Mantl is an enterprise software company that is really focused on helping traditional financial institutions modernize and grow,” Harley told TechCrunch. “Our mission at the end of the day is to really expand the access to financial services by taking on the legacy infrastructure, which has really hindered access to digital banking.”

The company claims that its white-labeled account opening software allows banks and customers “to open an account from anywhere at any time, on any device in less than three minutes.” 

Through its flagship account opening software, Mantl claims to have helped community institutions — many of which are competing online for the first time — establish efficient and profitable digital operations. Among the community banks it works with are Cross River Bank, Quontic and Midwest BankCentre. 

“Banks are naturally very risk averse, and we need to build in order to fully take on that full infrastructure that they’re working in,” Harley said. “Account opening is low risk, but it’s also extremely high value considering that less than 50% of banks actually have online account opening today.”

Mantl integrates directly into the legacy infrastructure, also known as a core banking system, in order to enhance that system and help institutions launch digital products quickly. 

The company says its software also automates application decisioning for over 90% of cases while also reducing fraud by more than 60%. This results in deposit growth that’s “typically 4x faster than other solutions on the market and up to 10x more cost-effective than building a new branch,” the company said. 

Combined, the institutions it works with have onboarded hundreds of thousands of new customers and raised billions of dollars in core deposits, the company claims. 

“We’re challenging the legacy infrastructure that is holding community institutions back,” Harley said,” and we see account opening as just the beginning.”

The startup plans to use its new capital to do some hiring and expand its product offerings, including software that it says would be able to improve and digitize the onboarding experience for not just financial institutions but businesses of all sizes, from sole proprietors to complex commercial enterprises.

CapitalG partner Jesse Wedler shares Mantl’s belief that banks form the backbone of this nation’s economy, both on a local and national level. 

“While digitization has long been a priority for banks, it has become an urgent imperative as branches close and digital disruptors grow,” he said.

As CapitalG reviewed the landscape of companies helping banks with digital transformation, Mantl stood out, Wedler said, due to its “user experience, resulting deposit growth and time-to-value for banks of all sizes.”

But what has his firm most excited, he added, is the team’s vision for “transforming adjacent core banking applications.”

Since its founding in 2013, CapitalG has invested in a number of fintechs, including MX, Stripe, Robinhood, Credit Karma, Albert, Aye Finance and LendingClub. 

Pulumi was one of the first of what is now a growing number of infrastructure-as-code startups and today, at its developer conference, the company is launching version 3.0 of its cloud engineering platform. With 70 new features and about 1,000 improvements since version 2.0, this is Pulumi’s biggest release yet.

The new release includes features that range from support for Google Cloud as an infrastructure provider (now in preview) to a new Automation API that turns Pulumi into a library that can then be called from other applications. It basically allows developers to write tools that, for example, can then provision and configure their own infrastructure for each customer of a SaaS application, for example.

The company is also launching Pulumi Packages and Components for creating opinionated infrastructure building blocks that developers can then call up from their preferred languages.

Also new is support for Pulumi’s CI/CD Assistant across all the company’s paid plans. This feature makes it easier to deploy cloud infrastructure and applications through more than a dozen popular CI/CD platforms, including the likes of AWS Code Service, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build, Jenkins, Travis CI and Spinnaker. Until now, you needed to be on a Team Pro or Enterprise plan to use this, but it’s now available to all paying users.

In addition, the company is expanding some of its enterprise features with, for example, SAML SSO, SCIm synchronization and new role types.

“When we started out on Pulumi, we knew we wanted to enable developers and infrastructure teams to
collaborate more closely to build more innovative software,” said Joe Duffy, Pulumi co-founder and
CEO. “What we didn’t know yet is that we’d end up calling this ‘Cloud Engineering,’ that our customers
would call it that too, and that they would go on this journey with us. We are now centering our entire
platform around this core idea which is now accelerating as the modern cloud continues to disrupt
entire business models. Pulumi 3.0 is an exciting milestone in realizing this vision of the future —
democratizing access to the cloud and helping teams build better software together — with much more
to come.”