Author: azeeadmin

This has felt like an inevitability at least since Amazon teamed with South Carolina-based Element Electronics to bring the world a 43-inch Amazon Fire TV Edition back in 2017. The company has also teamed with several third-party TV makers to build its popular voice assistant into sets, but today Amazon is taking things to the next level with the arrival of two new smart TVs, the Fire TV Omni Series and 4-Series.

The company is calling these the “first-ever Amazon-built smart TVs,” implying that they were purpose built, ground up, rather than slapping its voice technology into a set built and branded by another company.

The Fire TV Omni Series is the headliner — and more premium of the pair. Though, the price is still pretty low, as far as these things go, with a starting point of $410. That’s $40 cheaper than the aforementioned Amazon-branded Element system.

“Smart TVs have been around for decades, but we don’t think they’re really smart,” Amazon VP Daniel Rausch tells TechCrunch. “They’re not really that capable compared to what customers would love to get from them. More often than not, TVs present a passive experience. It can be complex and difficult to interact with. There are many heterogeneous devices and content experiences in our living rooms. And I think coordinating across all that is probably only grown in complexity for customers. We believe that with voice and ambient computing, TVs really have the potential to do so much more and to be so much smarter for customers.”

The company is entering a crowded space, with stiff competition from the likes of Samsung and LG (even if the seemingly decades-long rumors of an Apple Television have thus far proven fruitless). Naturally, the company is looking to distinguish itself with Alexa integration. The Omni set features far-field technology to use voice for a range of activities, from TV watching, to music and gaming.

The system features new integration with the recently rolled out Alexa conversations, offering a more natural way to ask the assistant things like “Alexa, what should I watch,” (that specific command won’t be out until later this year in a beta form), “Alexa, Play Something from Netflix,” (ditto, but for the fall) and the same feature for TikTok. The wildly popular social network launched on Fire TV in the U.K., Germany and France and is coming soon to North America. Now you can watch short videos on up to a 75-inch screen, if you’re so inclined.

The Omni is available in 43-, 50-, 55-, 65- and 75-inch models, all with 4K resolution. There’s on-board support for HDR10, HLG and Dolby Digital Plus, while the larger two models sport Dolby Vision support. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of differences between the Omni and the cheaper 4-Series. The latter starts at $370 and comes in 43-, 50- and 55-inch sizes, again all in 4K. The biggest difference between the two lines appears to be that the 4-Series has near-field Alexa capabilities built into its remote, while the Omni has far-field directly built into the set.

The new TVs arrive next month.

The TVs are joined by the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. The $55 streaming stick offers a number of the above voice features, coupled with a quad-core 1.8GHz processer and 2GB of RAM, promising better performance. The stick supports WiFi 6 and, naturally, Amazon’s gaming service, Luna.

Probably the most surprising bit in all of this is the appearance of Pioneer’s name. Years after dropping its beloved plasma line due to low margins, the company is returning to the TV space with a new 4K set bundled with an Alexa remote. The 43-inch version is scheduled to arrive through Amazon and Best Buy in September, while a 50-inch version is set to arrive two months later.

Toshiba’s upcoming set, meanwhile, has far-field tech built in. That will come in 55-, 65- and 75-inch models and is set for a spring 2022 debut.

AV8 Ventures unveiled its AV8 Ventures II fund with $180 million from Allianz Group, an insurance and asset management giant, aimed at supporting entrepreneurs developing artificial intelligence-driven technologies in the areas of health, mobility, enterprise and deep tech.

Since the Palo Alto venture firm’s launch in 2018, it has invested in 20 seed-stage companies, with another four in the pipeline. Its first fund was also $180 million and backed by Allianz, George Ugras, managing director at AV8, told TechCrunch. The new fund will also invest in seed stage and some Series A and will aim to go into 25 companies.

“The idea is to operate as a financial VC with the support of the world’ largest insurance company and asset manager behind us,” Ugras said.

Some of the technologies the firm is excited about include how chronic diseases are managed. Ugras believes the lack of access to swaths of data and alignment of interest around the table are prohibiting many of the right solutions from bubbling up. In enterprise, AV8 is looking at management around cyberattacks, predicting vulnerabilities and the impact they have on enterprises, so that companies can be proactive in securing their vulnerabilities versus reactive.

Meanwhile, the driver for the second fund was to ensure continuity in deal activity. AV8 “is seeing so many deals right now,” and the competition to get into a VC deal makes it difficult to project how fast a fund will be able to deploy the capital. Even if a firm gets excited and issues terms sheets, there is always uncertainty, he added.

With venture capital being abundant these days, Ugras noted that the velocity is the fastest he has seen in 22 years. The competitiveness in the market is such that if a startup has a decent team, there is no issue raising capital. However, on the investor side, they have to do things better than ever.

“In terms of the key diligence, you need domain expertise to be very clear on how you can add value and key execution milestones going forward,” he added. “Healthcare and insurance more so than others because the business models are complicated. If you have the startups educating you on the front end, it is going to be difficult for the fund.”

 

Airplanes and drones today, regardless of size or fuel type, all face the same limitation: eventually they have to land.

Skydweller Aero, the U.S.-Spanish aerospace startup, wants to break free from that constraint by developing an autonomous solar-powered aircraft it says will eventually be capable of perpetual flight.

Their pitch, which helped the company raise $32 million in a Series A, has led to an additional $8 million in oversubscribed funding led by Leonardo S.p.A, Marlinspike Capital and Advection Growth Capital. The company has also entered into a partnership with Palantir Technologies to use its Foundry analytics platform to process information at-scale and onboard the aircraft designed for telecommunications, government operations and emergency services.

“[Palantir is] the best at creating value from your data, whether it’s putting data into their system to create operational insights for how we may fly our aircraft, putting data in to understand the sensing systems that are coming off of our aircraft and what those might provide, or to understand what’s coming through the networks in the aircraft,” Skydweller co-founder John Parkes told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

And Skydweller will be generating a lot of data. The company is focused on three data-rich markets: telecommunications, geospatial intelligence and government surveillance. Skydweller plans to use the Foundry platform to help its customers, which includes the government, better understand whatever areas are being monitored.

The Foundry platform will also come in handy for route and mission planning, as Skydweller intends to leverage weather and atmospheric information to ensure the aircraft can efficiently use the sun’s rays to stay in the air.

“What it’s all about is creating a persistent aerial layer or pseudo satellite,” Parkes said. “We’re focused on building a perpetual flight aircraft. The goal is to create a plane that will fly for forever, so long as the sun rises.”

Weather and atmospheric data is especially important as it will determine, in part, the altitude at which the aircraft flies. While the plane will be able to fly at high altitudes, “the harder problem and the more useful problem,” according to Parkes, is to capture enough energy and use weather planning to stay at lower altitude. Lower altitudes give better internet quality, geospatial data, and provide more power for payload, he said.

Skydweller’s tech was born out of the Swiss solar aircraft project dubbed Solar Impulse, which was helmed by Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. The project operated for 14 years and invested $190 million into the solar-powered aircraft, before the foundation behind it sold the intellectual property to Skydweller in 2019. The Solar Impulse was configured to be piloted, however, so much of the work since then has been to unman the platform and turn it into an ultra-long endurance aircraft, Parkes said.

The aircraft is all-electric, outfitted with 2,200 square-foot solar panel wings, 600 kilograms of batteries and a hydrogen fuel cell back-up power system. The solar panels aren’t only used to maintain flight; they will also power systems for customers, like a geospatial camera system or payload from a telecom company.

The company’s using standard commercial aviation parts but most of them haven’t been tested beyond a certain number of hours of use – certainly far less than the number of hours Skydweller plans to keep the aircraft in the air. Plus, like other planes built from emerging technologies, there isn’t a full certification framework already established for the vehicle

“You’re into that uncharted territory to break some of those hour paradigms,” he said.

Skydweller launched its flight test campaign in 2020, and has focused on installing and testing the autonomous systems tech since. He added that “in a very short horizon” the company will be test flying the autonomous aircraft, including take-off, full flight and landing, with future milestones focused on completing long-endurance flights. Customers will be able to start licensing the aircraft within a year to eighteen months, Parkes estimated.

Revitalized by the pandemic, entrepreneurs are on the hunt to refresh some of education’s most traditional tenets, from flashcards to tutors to after-school programs. And those aren’t just bets: They’re unicorn-valued businesses looking to capitalize on consumers’ newfound digital adoption.

The edtech sector’s boom is rivaled by that of the creator economy, which promises to help creators monetize and democratize their passions, all while maintaining their identity. The creator economy has grown over the past year due to an increased appetite for digital content from at-home eyeballs and a wave of new creators eager to meet demand.

Edtech and the creator economy certainly differ in the problems they try to solve: Finding a VR solution to make online STEM classes more realistic is a different nut to crack than streamlining all of a creator’s different monetization strategies into one platform. Still, the two sectors have found common ground in the past year — as encapsulated by the rise of cohort-based class platforms.

At large, cohort-based platforms help experts launch classes for their communities, no previous teaching experience required. Students move through the class together — ergo “cohort” — with the expert on-demand as a sounding board. It’s a bet on education, but it also allows an individual to showcase their passion by pushing all their chips to the center of the table rather than working for an institution. While the idea of experts teaching a group of people isn’t exactly new, it’s being refreshed by a wave of new startups.

It’s not a simple overlap, entrepreneurs and investors say. Some fear that turning creators into educators could bring in a rush of unqualified teachers with no understanding of true pedagogy, while others think that the true democratization of education requires a disruption of who is traditionally given the right to educate.

Anyone’s a teacher!

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and traditional institutions are built around the belief that students want to learn from accredited teachers, while many cohort-based platforms are forming around a more controversial, yet compelling, ethos: Anyone can be a teacher. The idea of empowering people to monetize their talents is a page directly out of the creator economy rulebook.

In other words, instead of convincing a college professor to teach in their spare time, what if you convinced the star product manager at a tech startup to launch a class sharing their tips and trade secrets? It’s not a theory; it’s a venture-backed business. Mighty Networks raised a $50 million Series B to help its creators launch classes. Last month, Nas Academy raised $11 million to help creators launch their own MasterClass-type series. Then there’s Maven, an early-stage edtech company that raised millions before it even had a name — and led the charge on popularizing cohort-based classes as a branding move to begin with.

These companies sit at the intersection of edtech — and its evolving views on how education should look — and the creator economy, with its empowering premise of “individuals as a business.”

Mark Tan has taken part in a dozen fellowships and received years of coaching through his years in tech. For Tan, who moved from the Philippines to the United States, the allure of virtual classes has always been the network of students also participating in the program. That virtual networking led him to stints at Amazon and Twitch, and, most recently, he spent the last three years working as a director of product at Wyze.

The realization that “you don’t need to be an expert teacher, just an expert” is what eventually gave Tan the confidence to launch a course of his own on Maven. It will begin in a few weeks and is about community-driven product development.

“I’ve been in fellowships with people who are really well known, and sometimes it’s hard to connect with them because they’ve been in my shoes five or 10 years ago,” he said. “I think there’s an overreliance on the expert being the teacher.

“Over time, what I realized is that there’s way more stuff to learn from other people, so I spent more time connecting to [my peers] rather than spending time listening to the lecture.”

His four-week class was originally priced at $799 but now costs $599 and requires a commitment of five to 10 hours per week. Programming will range from live weekly workshops and open Q&As to guest speakers and peer-to-peer networking.

In many ways, Tan is the quintessential example that cohort-based platform founders look for when trying to bring creators onto their service. He has experience at big, well-known companies, has spent years experiencing the product he is now selling and has a passion for education after seeing the benefit of peer-to-peer learning firsthand.

“The best teachers are the ones who haven’t been teachers before,” said Ana Fabrega, who spent years as a primary school teacher before joining Synthesis, an online enrichment school inspired by Elon Musk’s Ad Astra model. “I think that the instinct of a teacher is to jump in and try to control, over-engineer and plan everything so kids don’t struggle … but I think the approach that works the best is [by doing] the opposite.”

Synthesis focuses more on creating good facilitators that can sense engagement and create intimacy with students than educators who focus on a specific curriculum to hit certain metrics, Fabrega explained.

“We really want to make sure that the kids are the ones in charge and doing all the heavy lifting, not the teachers,” she said.

Scalapay, a buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) technology provider that has made significant headway with retailers and consumers in Europe and in categories like fashion, has closed a round of funding that it will be using to fuel its expansion ambitions. The startup has raised $155 million at a $700 million valuation.

Tiger Global is leading this round, with new backers Baleen Capital and Woodson Capital also participating, alongside Fasanara Capital and Ithaca Investments, which had backed Scalapay in its previous $48 million round earlier this year. (Scalapay has now raised $203 million in total.)

This is a sizable round of funding given Scalapay’s age: the company is only two years old and this is a Series A. Ramping up in this way underscores just how hot the BNPL market is right now, and also how the startup has been faring within that.

The company’s service is based around being tightly integrated with online retailers’ check-out process and offering users an interest-free, three-installment way to pay for anything they purchase. It now works with 3,000 merchants in Europe — specifically Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Belgium, Netherlands and Austria — and it has yet to move into huge markets like the U.S. and U.K.

“When we launched, we saw between 5% and 10% of all transactions for our customers go through Scalapay,” CEO Simone Mancini, who co-founded the company with Johnny Mitrevski, said in an interview. “Now we are at 15%-20% and its growing. In luxury fashion we’re accounting for 30%-50% of all transactions, and in some cases more than half. We want to be the thing that makes purchasing pleasurable again.”

Pleasurable, and more likely to happen: while shopping cart abandonment continues to be an issue for all online retailers, Scalapay claims that its existence has increased conversions by 11%, and gives consumers the confidence to spend more, typically 48% more per shopper.

The growth of buy-now, pay-later services has been one of big hallmarks of the pandemic-era e-commerce market. Although the option to pay for items in installments had been around for years before Covid-19 — indeed, layaway and other delayed payment services were big even before e-commerce was a thing — usage of BNPL saw a new boost of attention on the back of way more people using online channels to shop, and — given the uncertainties of the economy — way more of them needing some financial help ultimately to make purchases.

That was complemented too by a new and more sophisticated approach: the leading BNPL providers are bringing together a much more ambitious big-data play, leveraging wider risk analysis and a much more creative and complete picture of a person and his/her finances in order to better understand what to expect out of any transaction. The algorithms and how they direct the course of transactions have become as important as the accessibility of the services themselves.

All of this has led to a huge rush of big BNPL companies getting even bigger. Klarna, which has long been seen as the most valuable startup in Europe (in terms of paper valuation) raised money at a valuation of nearly $46 billion in June. Affirm went public at the start of the year and is currently valued at aorund $23 billion. PayPal re-upped its own ambitions in the market with an Asian kicker just this week: it acquired Paidy in Japan for nearly $3 billion. And of course Square has waded into the space in a big way with its $29 billion acquisition of Afterpay in June.

And that’s before you consider the many smaller BNPL companies that have raised and are raising money. They include Zilch, which is now valued at over $500 million; and Resolve, a spinout from Affirm, which has raised $60 million.

In that context, Scalapay’s $700 million valuation seems modest — maybe even a little like a bargain? You may not be surprised that this latest fundraising happened on the heels of the startup actually getting approached to be acquired, not by one but by two different companies, which were interested in the technology, but also the fact that Scalapay had made significant headway into specific markets — geographically, in Europe; and also in terms of product categories, specifically fashion — where they are keen to grow.

Mancini declined to say which companies except to note they were among the biggest of the lot. (Just my inference, but maybe the acquisition pace of some of the bigger players gives a clue as to whom it might have been?) In any case, Scalapay said no, but the chatter got other things moving, and that is how Tiger Global came into the picture.

Big investor pockets could prove to be a key part of how any of these companies fare going forward: relationship building and expanding your own pool of talent will be key for growing, both areas where having the right contacts and the right resources to meet new demands will come in handy.

“Scalapay has quickly become an important player in European payments and the BNPL sector,” said Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We are impressed by their product development pipeline and strong focus on merchant success. We are excited to support Scalapay in the next phase of its growth.”

Interestingly the company said it plans to stay very focused on improving the process of BNPL rather than diversify into other areas like fintech (areas where Affirm and Klarna are doing a lot); or the wider area of payments (an obvious move for Afterpay and Square).

“While the likes of Klarna and Afterpay have launched deposit accounts and moved further into the banking space, Scalapay’s exciting roadmap is laser focused on helping merchants with new customer experiences that increase conversion. They’re leveraging BNPL in an entirely new way,” added Francesco Filia, CEO of Fasanara Capital.

 

A serial entrepreneur Hiroshi Takatoh recognized the need for convenient and nutritious food for critically ill consumers after losing his late wife to cancer.

Takatoh founded Teatis, a plant-based sugar blocking superfood powder for diabetic consumers, in 2017 in stealth mode and went fully operational in April 2021 by teaming up with a group of doctors and registered nutritionists.

Teatis announced today it has raised $700,000 seed funding to advance its growth in the US market.  The seed money brings Teatis’ total funding to over $1million.

The seed round was led by Genesia Ventures, Ryo Ishizuka, a former CEO and co-founder of Japanese e-commerce company Mercari and Takuya Noguchi, CEO and founder of Japan’s skincare brand BULK HOMME. Seven other angel investors also participated in the seed funding.

Teatis will use the seed money for production and marketing in the US, where 122 million diabetics and pre-diabetics continue to work for prevention and treatment against diabetes, CEO and co-founder of Teatis Hiroshi Takatoh told TechCrunch. The company is now focusing on the US market where its production is located while its next funding, a Series A, is set for next year, Takatoh added.

“Most of our consumers, about 88%, are diabetics, and our recipe is built to help diabetics manage their blood sugar. A staggering number of Americans suffer from diabetes, and there is significant demand for diabetic-friendly foods that are nutritious, convenient and functional,” Takatoh said.

Teatis develops a supplement for all consumers interested in low-sugar foods, as well as pre-diabetics, Takatoh said. Teatis’ plant-based powders does not contain chemicals or sweeteners but include a special Japanese ingredient such as brown seaweed extract (Arame) that is proven to suppress the absorption of sugar from the intestinal tract and reduce blood sugar levels. The low-sugar powder can be made into teas, lattes or added to smoothies.

The US meal placement market size for diabetes is estimated at $5 billion while the US consumer packaged foods market for diabetes is approximately $300 billion, Takatoh said.

“We combine food science and technology to solve problems for diabetics through food products and telehealth,” Takatoh said.

With its plan on building out a comprehensive one-stop shop for diabetic health, Teatis will launch a Registered Dietitian platform, Teatis RD on Demand, this month, to offer a full-service such as food products, telehealth, and recipes, for those battling diabetes.

Teatis RD on Demand will provide private, 1-on-1 sessions with registered dietitians. It will start at $29 per 30 minutes, which is a reduced cost, versus traditional offline appointments that cost $150 per 30 minutes, and Teledoc, which costs $90 per 30 minutes, according to Takatoh.

“Many existing players in space are old companies that don’t have digital competency and data-driven production methods. Mr. Takatoh is a proven serial entrepreneur with the qualities and boldness to take over the market…I’m excited to see how Teatis’ great ideas and products will help many people who are suffering from diabetes and other chronic diseases in the future,” Genesia Ventures Manager Shunsuke Sagara said.

Chef-prepared, small-batch meal delivery startup CookUnity is undergoing a major expansion after closing a $47 million Series B round.

Insight Partners led the round and was joined by Endeavor Capital and current investors IDCV, Fuel Ventures and Gaingels. The latest funding comes eight months after New York-based CookUnity closed a $15.5 million Series A round led by Fuel Venture Capital. The company has now raised a total of $70 million since its inception in 2018.

Mateo Marietti, founder and CEO of CookUnity, had the idea for the subscription-based company five years ago. Marietti, who is from Argentina, was working in food tech and saw that modern delivery services were only able to offer limited food options and pricing, and was a trade-off between convenience and variety.

He went looking for a similar experience to apps like Spotify, where the music selection was limitless, and created CookUnity to connect creators of food with the people who would be eating it.

CookUnity combines the ready-to-eat meal category with a chef-focused business model that provides restaurant-quality meals at home. The rotating menu features hundreds of dishes, starting at $10.49 per meal, with an option of a subscription plan for four, six, eight, 12 or 16 meals per week. Meals heat up in minutes and also include both fast-cooking instructions, like in a microwave, or how the chef might prepare it at home, like with an additional squeeze of lemon or other toppings.

Chefs are also given tools and resources to create a digital-first business, and Marietti told TechCrunch that top-selling chefs bring in upwards of $1 million a year.

“We are building the infrastructure, working with farmers, providing the ingredients and the tech layer for both the consumer app and the chef app,” he added. “We don’t employ any talent or cook the food, but we give chefs the tools to start recruiting cooks, gather information on new recipes, organize their team and expand into new markets while also seeing their sales for the day or week.”

The company’s platform is already working with notable chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Marc Forgione and Esther Choi, and the Series B funding will enable it to add more chefs, including local rising stars and established restaurateurs, enabling them to sell beyond the typical on-demand food delivery zone, Marietti said.

Starting with the flagship kitchen in Brooklyn, CookUnity initially expanded to San Francisco, Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston and Washington, D.C. Following the Series A, the company opened kitchens in Los Angeles, Austin and Chicago. The new funding will now enable the company to accelerate its nationwide expansion with new kitchens in Atlanta and Miami by the end of the year. When all of the new kitchens are online, Marietti estimates that CookUnity will be able to serve 88% of the U.S. population.

In the last 12 months, CookUnity saw over 550% growth and to date has over 50 chefs on its roster, with plans to increase to 150 across all of its kitchens by mid-2022.

As part of the investment, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, is joining the CookUnity board of directors. Insight’s model is to track companies for a long time before investing; in CookUnity’s case, Liu-Doyle was watching them for more than two years. She said the timing was right for Insight to invest.

In addition to product-market fit, strong chef retention and liking the company’s focus on the food market, which is a “massive total addressable market,” she said, CookUnity was on its way to building a big business with subscription-based revenue as it took on the complexities of the back-end business for chefs.

The value proposition is unique for both of the stakeholders — on the chef side there is a creator economy tailwind, which is taking the friction out of scaling a business while also enabling chefs to build a business with a larger footprint than they just selling food around their restaurants. On the consumer side, Liu-Doyle said CookUnity is providing affordable and convenient food without having to compromise on taste and quality.

“Very few companies can offer that: it is democratization on both fronts,” she added. “In order to execute on the vision, you need a specific team, which Mateo has, and show incremental improvement to the experience. It doesn’t just happen overnight. You have to be patient and deliberate in the way you improve the experience.”

Work insights platform Fin raised $20 million in Series A funding and brought in Evan Cummack, a former Twilio executive, as its new chief executive officer.

The San Francisco-based company captures employee workflow data from across applications and turns it into productivity insights to improve the way enterprise teams work and remain engaged.

Fin was founded in 2015 by Andrew Kortina, co-founder of Venmo, and Facebook’s former VP of product and Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin. Initially, the company was doing voice assistant technology — think Alexa but powered by humans and machine learning — and then workplace analytics software. You can read more about Fin’s origins at the link below.

In 2020, the company pivoted again to the company it is today. The new round was led by Coatue, with participation from First Round Capital, Accel and Kleiner Perkins. The original team was talented, but small, so the new funding will build out sales, marketing and engineering teams, Cummack said.

“At that point, the right thing was to raise money, so at the end of last year, the company raised a $20 million Series A, and it was also decided to find a leadership team that knows how to build an enterprise,” Cummack told TechCrunch. “The company had completely pivoted and removed ‘Analytics’ from our name because it was not encompassing what we do.”

Fin’s software measures productivity and provides insights on ways managers can optimize processes, coach their employees and see how teams are actually using technology to get their work done. At the same time, employees are able to manage their workflow and highlight areas where there may be bottlenecks. All combined, it leads to better operations and customer experiences, Cummack said.

Fin’s view is that as more automation occurs, the company is looking at a “renaissance of human work.” There will be more jobs and more types of jobs, but people will be able to do them more effectively and the work will be more fulfilling, he added.

Particularly with the use of technology, he notes that in the era before cloud computing, there was a small number of software vendors. Now with the average tech company using over 130 SaaS apps, it allows for a lot of entrepreneurs and adoption of best-in-breed apps so that a viable company can start with a handful of people and leverage those apps to gain big customers.

“It’s different for enterprise customers, though, to understand that investment and what they are spending their money on as they use tools to get their jobs done,” Cummack added. “There is massive pressure to improve the customer experience and move quickly. Now with many people working from home, Fin enables you to look at all 130 apps as if they are one and how they are being used.”

As a result, Fin’s customers are seeing metrics like 16% increase in team utilization and engagement, a 25% decrease in support ticket handle time and a 71% increase in policy compliance. Meanwhile, the company itself is doubling and tripling its customers and revenue each year.

Now with leadership and people in place, Cummack said the company is positioned to scale, though it already had a huge head start in terms of a meaningful business.

Arielle Zuckerberg, partner at Coatue, said via email that she was part of a previous firm that invested in Fin’s seed round to build a virtual assistant. She was also a customer of Fin Assistant until it was discontinued.

When she heard the company was pivoting to enterprise, she “was excited because I thought it was a natural outgrowth of the previous business, had a lot of potential and I was already familiar with management and thought highly of them.”

She believed the “brains” of the company always revolved around understanding and measuring what assistants were doing to complete a task as a way to create opportunities for improvement or automation. The pivot to agent-facing tools made sense to Zuckerberg, but it wasn’t until the global pandemic that it clicked.

“Service teams were forced to go remote overnight, and companies had little to no visibility into what people were doing working from home,” she added. “In this remote environment, we thought that Fin’s product was incredibly well-suited to address the challenges of managing a growing remote support team, and that over time, their unique data set of how people use various apps and tools to complete tasks can help business leaders improve the future of work for their team members. We believe that contact center agents going remote was inevitable even before COVID, but COVID was a huge accelerant and created a compelling ‘why now’ moment for Fin’s solution.”

Going forward, Coatue sees Fin as “a process mining company that is focused on service teams.” By initially focusing on customer support and contact center use case — a business large enough to support a scaled, standalone business — rather than joining competitors in going after Fortune 500 companies where implementation cycles are long and there is slow time-to-value, Zuckerberg said Fin is better able to “address the unique challenges of managing a growing remote support team with a near-immediate time-to-value.”

 

A Canadian startup called Nuula that is aiming to build a superapp to provide a range of financial services to small and medium businesses has closed $120 million of funding, money that it will use to fuel the launch of its app and first product, a line of credit for its users.

The money is coming in the form of $20 million in equity from Edison Partners, and a $100 million credit facility from funds managed by the Credit Group of Ares Management Corporation.

The Nuula app has been in a limited beta since June of this year. The plan is to open it up to general availability soon, while also gradually bringing in more services, some built directly by Nuula itself and but many others following an embedded finance strategy: business banking, for example, will be a service provided by a third party and integrated closely into the Nuula app to be launched early in 2022; and alongside that, the startup will also be making liberal use of APIs to bring in other white-label services such as B2B and customer-focused payment services, starting first in the U.S. and then expanding to Canada and the U.K. before further countries across Europe.

Current products include cash flow forecasting, personal and business credit score monitoring, and customer sentiment tracking; and monitoring of other critical metrics including financial, payments and eCommerce data are all on the roadmap.

“We’re building tools to work in a complementary fashion in the app,” CEO Mark Ruddock said in an interview. “Today, businesses can project if they are likely to run out of money, and monitor their credit scores. We keep an eye on customers and what they are saying in real time. We think it’s necessary to surface for SMBs the metrics that they might have needed to get from multiple apps, all in one place.”

Nuula was originally a side-project at BFS, a company that focused on small business lending, where the company started to look at the idea of how to better leverage data to build out a wider set of services addressing the same segment of the market. BFS grew to be a substantial business in its own right (and it had raised its own money to that end, to the tune of $184 million from Edison and Honeywell).  Over time, it became apparent to management that the data aspect, and this concept of a super app, would be key to how to grow the business, and so it pivoted and rebranded earlier this year, launching the beta of the app after that.

Nuula’s ambitions fall within a bigger trend in the market. Small and medium enterprises have shaped up to be a huge business opportunity in the world of fintech in the last several years. Long ignored in favor of building solutions either for the giant consumer market, or the lucrative large enterprise sector, SMBs have proven that they want and are willing to invest in better and newer technology to run their businesses, and that’s leading to a rush of startups and bigger tech companies bringing services to the market to cater to that.

Super apps are also a big area of interest in the world of fintech, although up to now a lot of what we’ve heard about in that area has been aimed at consumers — just the kind of innovation rut that Nuula is trying to get moving.

“Despite the growth in services addressing the SMB sector, overall it still lacks innovation compared to consumer or enterprise services,” Ruddock said. “We thought there was some opportunity to bring new thinking to the space. We see this as the app that SMBs will want to use everyday, because we’ll provide useful tools, insights and capital to power their businesses.”

Nuula’s priority to build the data services that connect all of this together is very much in keeping with how a lot of neobanks are also developing services and investing in what they see as their unique selling point. The theory goes like this: banking services are, at the end of the day, the same everywhere you go, and therefore commoditized, and so the more unique value-added for companies will come from innovating with more interesting algorithms and other data-based insights and analytics to give more power to their users to make the best use of what they have at their disposal.

It will not be alone in addressing that market. Others building fintech for SMBs include Selina, ANNA, Amex’s Kabbage (an early mover in using big data to help loan money to SMBs and build other financial services for them), Novo, Atom Bank, Xepelin, and Liberis, biggies like Stripe, Square and PayPal, and many others.

The credit product that Nuula has built so far is a taster of how it hopes to be a useful tool for SMBs, not just another place to get money or manage it. It’s not a direct loaning service, but rather something that is closely linked to monitoring a customers’ incomings and outgoings and only prompts a credit line (which directly links into the users’ account, wherever it is) when it appears that it might be needed.

“Innovations in financial technology have largely democratized who can become the next big player in small business finance,” added Gary Golding, General Partner, Edison Partners. “By combining critical financial performance tools and insights into a single interface, Nuula represents a new class of financial services technology for small business, and we are excited by the potential of the firm.”

“We are excited to be working with Nuula as they build a unique financial services resource for small businesses and entrepreneurs,” said Jeffrey Kramer, Partner and Head of ABS in the Alternative Credit strategy of the Ares Credit Group, in a statement. “The evolution of financial technology continues to open opportunities for innovation and the emergence of new industry participants. We look forward to seeing Nuula’s experienced team of technologists, data scientists and financial service veterans bring a new generation of small business financial services solutions to market.”

Juno, a proptech startup which aims to build more sustainable and affordable apartment buildings, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round.

Comcast Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Real Estate Technology (RET) Ventures co-led the financing, which brings the company’s total raised to $32 million since its 2019 inception. JLL Spark, Vertex Ventures, Anim, K50, Foundamental and Green D Alumni Ventures also participated in the Series A investment.

Juno co-founder and CEO Jonathan Scherr said the San Francisco-based startup plans to build all electric properties by assembling “the first OEM ecosystem for ground-up development.” (For the unacquainted, OEM stands for “original equipment manufacturer.”)

“We’re…treating housing development like product development, a process we call ‘productization,’ ” he told TechCrunch. “By creating buildings that are worthy of being repeated, tools and systems can be created to enable continuous improvement and increase efficiency. If buildings are considered or designed in a one-off context, then the learnings from one project to the next will fail to exist.”

Note that Juno’s productization could be considered similar to the more commonly used term prefabrication in some aspects. While prefab construction company Katerra crashed and burned, a number of other companies in the space continue to raise money and grow, including Abodu and Mighty Buildings, which is also backed by Khosla but is more focused accessory dwelling units and single-family homes. There is also North Carolina-based Prescient, which is also  constructing multifamily housing and hotels through prefabrication.

Juno’s theory is that via “productization,” it can create the tools, systems and processes that can lead to things like reduced design timelines, increased precision in estimation and scheduling and a “significantly accelerated” construction process. All this, Scherr said, can result in more affordable housing options for people all over the United States. Also, Juno claims that its design process, for example, is 60% faster than in traditional real estate development.

Like other players in the space, Juno of course touts an approach that it says is far more sustainable than traditional construction methods.

“Today, construction refuse is literally 2x that of all municipal refuse combined in the U.S.,” Scherr told TechCrunch. “The Juno system creates efficiency in the design, supply chain, and construction of buildings that reduce waste and energy usage.” Features include low-carbon, all timber construction, more exposed wood (which Juno says is anti-microbial) and entirely gasless buildings, for example.

Thanks to its focus on all-electric buildings in cities that have established roadmaps to clean energy generation, the Juno residential system is trending toward a net zero target for embodied carbon in its multifamily residential units, Scherr said.

Scherr founded Juno with BJ Siegel, who was a designer of the original Apple Store, and Chester Chipperfield, who currently serves as an advisor to the company. Chipperfield previously served as global creative director at Tesla, head of special projects at Apple and head of digital at Burberry. Scherr has worked as a venture investor and advisor to a number of companies.

“As the concept architect for Apple’s retail program going back as far as 1999, BJ [Siegel] had thought about how to create an identity for the built environment that deserved to be repeated,” Scherr said. “By doing so, he and his colleagues at Apple began to think about Apple retail more like Apple’s products: grounded in a decentralized supply chain.”

Juno was created with a similar model in mind: with the goal of designing “better” housing that could be replicated so that the company is able “to build out a supply chain and lay the groundwork for learning systems in ways that have never been possible before,” said Scherr, whose father was a real estate developer.

Juno is starting out by building what it describes as the first national network of mass timber apartment buildings at scale with all-electric buildings in cities across the United States. And it’s partnering with Swinerton and Ennead Architects to put its model into practice. The startup has also broken ground on its first project — an apartment building in East Austin — and currently has more than 400 units in development. The East Austin building is slated to open in 2022. Juno also has sites planned for Seattle and Denver.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to continue to build out its product, break ground on its first cohort of projects and engage with more developers.

Juno’s investors are naturally bullish on what the company is doing, and plans to do.

Evan Moore, partner at Khosla Ventures, said he does not generally invest in real estate development companies or builders or architects.

“But when a strong team is working on a dramatically different product in an important industry, I’ll get behind it,” he wrote via email.

Historically, Moore added, apartment development has been a finance-driven industry, rather than product-driven, despite the fact that apartments are consumer products and derive their value from their use. 

“So there’s a tremendous opportunity to design buildings with the customer experience at the forefront,” he said. “What if Apple built apartment buildings? To me, that means working backwards from the experience you want to create, designing the components, supply chain and systems to support it, and working within cost as a constraint. That’s an ambitious idea, and an experiment worth undertaking.”

Sheena Jindal, principal at Comcast Ventures, notes that America’s housing stock is increasingly aged and in short supply — making it more difficult for people to buy houses. Her firm, she said, believes that everyone deserves access to an affordable home.

“When we first met the Juno team, we were struck by their first principles approach to building,” she wrote via email. “Juno fundamentally understood what was broken in multifamily housing production and tackled it head on by focusing earlier in the value chain with its design and OEM sourcing strategy. Juno partners with existing players in the value chain, rather than displacing them.”