Author: azeeadmin

Massachusetts-based smart home company Savant Systems this morning announced a deal to require GE Lighting. The division has existed as part of General Electric since 1911, with its origins reaching back even further to Thomas Edison’s work in the space.

Today’s GE Lighting portfolio still largely revolves around bulbs, with some push into more modern corners of the category, including LEDs. It’s also the home to C by GE, a series of smart home products, including bulbs, plugs, switches and color strips that are intended to compete directly with lines like the Philips Hue.

That latter part of the portfolio, at least, makes sense for Savant, a much younger company formed in 2005. Savant will also retain the clout of the GE name, with a longterm licensing agreement attached to the deal. That’s a key part of the agreement, given how much more instantly recognizable the older brand is. The company says the division will retain its Cleveland headquarters, with its 700 employees now falling under the Savant banner.

As for GE, the sell off is a part of a broader shift in focus away from consumer products.  “Today’s transaction is another important step in the transformation of GE into a more focused industrial company,” GE CEO H. Lawrence Culp, Jr. said in a release tied to the news. “Our GE Lighting colleagues will join a fast-growing leader in home automation that shares their passion for bringing the future to light.”

Financial details have not been disclosed.

Extra Crunch Live is on fire, and the hits keep rolling! Next week, we’ll sit down with Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan. You can catch the chat live on Tuesday, June 2 at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT.

Alexis Ohanian is the founder and former CEO of Reddit, and his investment portfolio includes Flexport, Ro and Papa. Garry Tan has invested in Instacart and Coinbase, to name a couple, and also has a background in entrepreneurship, having founded Posterous and Posthaven. Previously, Tan was a partner at Y Combinator for four years.

For those of you who aren’t caught up, Extra Crunch Live is a virtual speaker series that connects Extra Crunch members with the brightest minds in tech and VC where the audience has a chance to ask direct questions.

We’ll talk to Ohanian and Tan about how they’re advising their portfolio companies through the pandemic. Which startups should hunker and conserve cash, and which ones should sprint and advance? Is there a middle ground, and if so, what does it look like?

We’ll also discuss their outlook on economic recovery and opportunities that allow entrepreneurs to capitalize on the speed at which the world is changing. Which sectors are piquing their interest? Is Initialized going to invest aggressively in this ecosystem or be more risk-averse than usual? What’s it like doing deals over Zoom or Google Meet?

Extra Crunch members are encouraged to drop their questions in the Q&A chat for Ohanian and Tan. We’ll get to as many of them as possible, so please click here to join.

You can find the full details for our discussion below the break.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be chatting with GGV’s Hans Tung, Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz, Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra and Plaid’s Zach Perret. You can check out the full schedule here. Members also have access to the complete backlog of Extra Crunch Live episodes, which include chats with Kirsten Green, Roelof Botha, Mark Cuban and Aileen Lee.

See you there!

Toro’s founders started at Uber helping monitor the data quality in the company’s vast data catalogs, and they wanted to put that experience to work for a more general audience. Today, the company announced a $4 million seed round.

The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Point72 Ventures with help from a number of individual investors.

Company co-founder and CEO Kyle Kirwin says the startup wanted to bring the kind of automated monitoring we have in applications performance monitoring products to data. Instead of getting an alert when the application is performing poorly, you would get an alert that there is an issue with the data.

“We’re building a monitoring platform that helps data teams find problems in their data content before that gets into dashboards and machine learning models and other places where problems in the data could cause a lot of damage,” Kirwin told TechCrunch.

When it comes to data, there are specific kinds of issues a product like Toro would be looking at. It might be a figure that falls outside of a specific dollar range that could be indicative of fraud, or it could be simply a mistake in how the data was labeled that is different from previous ways that could break a model.

The founders learned the lessons they use to build Toro while working on the data team at Uber. They had helped build tools there to find these kinds of problems, but in a way that was highly specific to Uber. When they started Toro, they needed to build a more general purpose tool.

The product works by understanding what it’s looking at in terms of data, and what the normal thresholds are for a particular type of data. Anything that falls outside of the threshold for a particular data point would trigger an alert, and the data team would need to go to work to fix the problem.

Casey Aylward, vice president at Costanoa Ventures likes the pedigree of this team and the problem it’s trying to solve. “Despite its importance, data quality has remained a challenge for many enterprise companies,” he said in a statement. He added, “[The co-founders] deep experience building several of Uber’s internal data tools makes them uniquely qualified to build the best solution.”

The company has been at this for just over a year and have been keeping it lean with 4 employees including the two co-founders, but they do have plans to add a couple of data scientists in the coming year as they continue to build out the product.

Once again, Trump has doubled down. Following the addition of a fact-checking warning label added to his tweet about mail-in ballots, Trump took to the platform yet again to denounce it. In what may be his strongest words to date against a service that has largely given him free rein to this point, the President suggested that social media services would have to be regulated or shut down. Republicans have long held that social media sites harbor an anti-conservative bias. 

“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” he tweeted. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016.”

That last bit appears to be a reference to the role platforms like Twitter and Facebook played in the 2016 election. Trump then went on to reassert earlier claims about mail-in ballots, accusing a push for easy access to voting amid a pandemic of being a “free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft.”

It was precisely those claims that earned him a Twitter fact-checking label in the first place. As of this writing, however, no such label has been added to the new tweet sent a little after 7AM ET this morning. It’s been a busy couple of days for Trump on his favored social media platform, following the long holiday weekend. Last night he accused the service of “stifling free speech,” in spite of Twitter’s long-standing reluctance to either delete tweets or ban Trump over perceived TOS violations.

This morning the President took to Twitter to once again tie a cable news morning host to an old conspiracy theory about his late-wife host and declare “Obamagate” worse than Watergate.

HBO Max, the HBO -plus-other-stuff streaming service from WarnerMedia, is finally here.

At $14.99 per month, the service — initially available to subscribers in the United States — is more expensive than competing offerings like Netflix and Disney+. But from another angle, it’s still a pretty sweet deal, since you’re getting HBO, plus a whole bunch of extra content, for the exact same price as an HBO subscription. (WarnerMedia couldn’t go lower than $15 per month without undercutting HBO pricing and violating its agreements with cable providers.)

So if it’s the same price as HBO and includes most of the same content, why launch a new service at all? As executives at WarnerMedia and its corporate parent AT&T have made clear, they’re hoping compete with players like Netflix. That means building a broader audience than HBO — though they’re also trying to leverage HBO’s reputation for prestige TV and its early success with streaming — and expanding globally. It will also probably involve introducing cheaper, ad-supported plans in the future.

The big question is whether WarnerMedia has successfully translated these corporate imperatives into a compelling offering for consumers. There’s certainly a rich library of content — WarnerMedia says HBO Max is launching with 10,000 hours of movies and TV, including existing shows like “Friends,” “The Big Bang Theory,” the new version of “Doctor Who,” “Rick and Morty,” “The Boondocks,” “The Bachelor,” “Sesame Street,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Batwoman,” “Nancy Drew,” “Katy Keene,” “Doom Patrol,” “The O.C.,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.”

The lineup includes newer movies like “Crazy Rich Asians,” “A Star is Born,” “Aquaman” and “Joker,” as well as classics like “Casablanca,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Matrix,” “The Goonies,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Citizen Kane,” and “Gremlins.” HBO Max will also offer titles from the Criterion Collection and the full library of Studio Ghibli films.

And if you’re a superhero fan, it’s got every DC film from the last decade, including “Wonder Woman,” “Justice League” (plus director Zack Snyder’s cut of the film, scheduled for release next year) and every Batman and Superman movie from the last 40 years.

When it comes to original content, things get a little bit sparser, particularly when you distinguish between HBO originals and HBO Max originals (though regular subscribers may not care about the difference). On the Max side, originals available at launch include a kids reality TV series called “Craftopia,” a new set of “Looney Tunes” cartoons, “The Not Too Late Show With Elmo,” another reality show called “Legendary,” a romantic comedy anthology series starring Anna Kendrick called “Love Life” and a music industry documentary called “On the Record.”

There’s more original programming scheduled for later this year, including a “Friends” reunion special (they’re waiting on a time when it’s safe to shoot in-person), new seasons of “Doom Patrol” and “Search Party,” and “Raised by Wolves,” a new science fiction series executive produced and directed by Ridley Scott.

Of course,this launch is happening as the COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for many streaming services. Viewership and subscriptions are up (at least for services designed to be watched in the living room)— no surprise, with movie theaters closed, people stuck at home and professional sports on hold — to the point that many streamers have had to reduce their quality in some regions.

At the same time, the pandemic has largely shut down film and TV production around the world, with no clear date for when it can resume. That means the release date for many HBO Max originals — not just the “Friends” reunion but also new “Adventure Time” specials, reboots of “Gossip Girl” and “Grease,” a “Dune” series spinning off from the big-screen adaptation due out later this year, a new “Green Lantern” series and more — remain uncertain.

So how do you get the app? Subscribers to HBO’s standalone streaming service HBO Now should be able to update their app to HBO Max today. The app is currently available for a range of devices including Android phones and tablets, Android TV, Apple TV, Chromebooks, Chromecasts, iPhones, iPads, PlayStation 4, Samsung TV and Xbox One — but not yet for Roku of Fire TV.

WarnerMedia says the service should also be available to HBO subscribers through partners like AT&T, Cox, DirecTV, Hulu, Optimum, Spectrum, Verizon Fios and YouTube TV at no additional cost — there’s a whole section on the HBO Max website about how to sign up.

And if you aren’t already a subscriber, you can sign up for a free seven-day rial on the HBO Max website.

Companies spend inordinate amounts of time and money building data warehouses and moving data from enterprise applications. But once they get the data in, how do they get specific information like product data back out and distribute it to business operations, who can use it to better understand customers? That’s where Census comes in. It builds a layer on top of the data warehouse that makes it easy for the data team to distribute product data it where it’s needed.

The company announced a $4.3 million seed today, although it closed last year while they were still building the product. That round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with help from SV Angel and a number of angel investors.

Census CEO Boris Jabes says the company was founded to solve this problem of data distribution from a cloud data warehouse. He says for starters they are concentrating on product data.

“The product is designed to sync data directly from cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift […] and the main reason we did that was people really needed to get access to this kind of product data and all this data that’s locked in all their systems and take advantage of it,” Jabes explained.

He says that the first step is to make the product data sitting in the data warehouse actionable for the organization. They are working with data teams at early customers to remove the complexity of getting that data out of the warehouse and putting it to work in a more automated fashion.

They do this by creating a unified schema that sits on top of the data in the warehouse and makes it easier to distribute it to the teams that need it inside the organization. It essentially acts as a middleware layer on top of the warehouse that you can take advantage of without having to write code to decide where data might be most useful.

David Ulevitch, who led the investment at a16z says that removing this manual part of the process is highly valuable. “For years, organizations have had to do the frustrating task of manually syncing data between dozens of apps. This friction is especially painful now that data has become critical to every team in a business, from product to sales. Census sets a new standard for how product-led SaaS companies can operationalize data,” he said in a statement.

Jabes understands these are difficult times for every business, and especially an early stage startup, but he says they are focusing on an aspect of the business that potential customers need.

“We’ve seen companies actually spending time trying to tackle some of these data problems […] so I’m still optimistic,” he says.

Kentik, the company once known as CloudHelix, today announced that it has raised a $23.5 million growth funding round led by Vistara Capital Partners, with existing investors August Capital, Third Point Ventures, DCVC, and Tahoma Ventures also participating. With this round, Kentik has now raised a total of $61.7 million.

The company’s platform allows enterprises to monitor their networks, no matter whether that’s over the Internet, inside their own data centers or in public clouds.

“The world has become even more internet-centric, and we are seeing growth in traffic levels, product engagement, and revenue across both our enterprise and service provider customers,” said Avi Freedman, the co-founder and CEO of Kentik when I asked him why he was raising a round now. “We’ve seen an increased pace of adoption of the kind of hybrid and internet-centric architectures that Kentik is built for and thought it was a great time to increase investment, especially in product, as well as go-to-market and partner expansion to support market demand.”

Freedman says the company has been growing 100% compounded year-over-year since it launched in 2015 and now has customers in 25 countries. These include leading enterprises, SaaS companies, content providers, gaming companies, content providers, and cloud and communication service providers, he tells me. Current customers include the likes of IBM, Zoom, Dropbox, eBay, Cisco and GoDaddy.

The company says it will use the new funding to invest in its product and for go-to-market investments.

One notable fact about this new round is that it is a combination of equity and growth debt. Why growth debt? “Growth debt is an attractive option for startups with the right scale and strong unit economics, especially with the changes to capital markets in response to current economic conditions,” said Freedman. “Another element that makes long-term debt attractive is that unlike equity financing, long-term debt limits dilution for everyone, but especially benefits our employees who hold common stock.” That, it’s worth noting, is also something that lead investor Vistara Capital has made one of the core tenants of its investment philosophy. “Since Kentik is now at a scale where we have enough data on the business fundamentals to be able to make growth investments using debt while still being able to repay it over time, it made sense to us and our investors,” noted Freedman.

Newly released documents show U.S. immigration authorities have used a secretive cell phone snooping technology hundreds of times across the U.S. in the past three years.

The documents, obtained through a public records lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and seen by TechCrunch, show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed cell site simulators — known as stingrays — at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, which led to dozens of arrests and apprehensions. Previously obtained figures showed ICE used stingrays over 1,885 times over a four year period between 2013 and 2017.

The documents say that stingrays were not deployed for civil immigration investigations, like removals or deportations.

Although the numbers offer a rare insight into how often ICE uses this secretive and controversial technology, the documents don’t say how many Americans also had their phones inadvertently ensnared by these surveillance devices.

“We are all harmed by government practices that violate the Constitution and undermine civil liberties,” said Alexia Ramirez, a fellow with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “ICE’s use of cell site simulators affects all people, regardless of their immigration status.”

“When cell site simulators search for an individual, they necessarily also sweep in sensitive, private information about innocent bystanders,” said Ramirez. “This is part of the reason courts have said there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns with this technology.”

Stingrays impersonate cell towers and capture the calls, messages, location and in some cases data of every cell phone in their range. Developed by Harris Corp., stingrays are sold exclusively to law enforcement. But their purchase and use are covered under strict non-disclosure agreements that prevent police from discussing how the technology works. These agreements are notoriously prohibitive; prosecutors have dropped court cases rather than disclose details about the stingrays.

The newly released documents are heavily redacted documents and offer little more about what we know of how stingrays work. One document did, however, reveal for the first time the existence of Harris’ most recent stingray, Crossbow. An email from 2012 refers to Crossbow as the “latest, most technologically up-to-date version of a Stingray system.”

But the civil liberties group said its public records lawsuit is not over. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not yet turned over any documents sought by the ACLU, despite spending $2.5 million on buying at least 33 stingrays, according to a 2016 congressional oversight report.

“We are deeply skeptical of CBP’s assertion that they do not possess records about cell site simulators,” said Ramirez. “Given public information, the agency’s claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

CBP has until June 12 to respond to the ACLU’s latest motion.

When reached, a spokesperson for CBP was unable to comment by our deadline. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Google is rolling out a series of updates aimed at helping local businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to serve their customers across Google Maps and Search. Since the outbreak, Google has made it possible for businesses to communicate to customers things like their revised operating hours or temporary closures, among other things. Now, it’s adding and expanding a set of features that will allow businesses to support themselves, including those focused on gift card sales, fundraising or by marketing their virtual services. Restaurants will also be able to point to their preferred delivery partners, so customers can choose to order through the third-party the business recommends.

That latter item addresses what’s been a particularly sore point for restaurant owners amid the pandemic. Already, restaurants found food delivery apps’ large commission fees difficult to swallow. Now, these apps are profiting from the industry’s collapse as the pandemic rages on.

 

While Google’s update won’t allow restaurants to avoid these commissions, businesses will at least soon be able to communicate which delivery app they’d prefer customers to use — and it will likely be the one offering the lowest fee.

Google also says it has expanded the set of delivery partners it works with across the U.S., Germany, India, Australia and Canada. This makes it possible for Google Maps users to order delivery from more than 25,000 new restaurants and has already pushed users’ food order requests to over half a million per week.

In addition, Google is expanding a recently launched product that will allow businesses to sell gift cards to support themselves during government shutdowns and slower customer traffic after re-opening. Google says businesses were already promoting their gift card links on their profiles, in many cases.

Customers will be able to donate to favorite businesses directly from Google Search in more markets. To make this possible, Google partnered with PayPal and GoFundMe for businesses that opt in to use this feature.

Google began by allowing merchants in six countries to add support links for donations and gift cards, including the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Now 18 more countries will gain the feature, including Italy, Spain, Japan and others.

Merchants will be able to promote a link that directs users to purchase their gift cards either on their own business website or through supported partners like Square, Toast, Vagaro and Clover. This feature will roll out first with merchants in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand before expanding to 18 more countries over the summer.

Another change aims to address the broader way the pandemic is impacting in-person businesses. Instead of shutting down entirely, many have chosen to pivot and go virtual. Restaurants have turned themselves into virtual kitchens, for example. Yoga studios have begun streaming classes online.

In the next few weeks, merchants who are verified through Google My Business will be able to alert their customers that they’re operating in a new capacity by adding to their profiles attributes like “online classes,” “online appointments” and “online estimates.” These will display in both Search and Maps, Google says.

Related to this, Google is expanding its Reserve with Google appointment-setting program to help merchants offer easy online appointment bookings that customers can book directly from a Business Profile, then add to their own Google Calendar. Today, Google’s program integrates with more than 100 partners for online bookings. It’s now adding Booksy, Regis, WellnessLiving and Zooty.Google’s ability to connect customers with local businesses has a sizable impact, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which has resulted in a surge of new traffic across Google Maps and Search alike. 

For example, Google said it has seen a 260% increase in worldwide search interest in terms like “takeout near me” since February, before reaching an all-time high in April. Global search interest for the phrase “how to help small businesses” reached an all-time high in March 2020, up 700+% from what Google saw in February. And over a million businesses have shared COVID-19 posts on their profiles since March, resulting in millions of clicks to merchants’ websites every week.

Unfortunately, despite the rapid pace of the updates on Google’s part they still may have arrived too late for some businesses. Google saw more temporary and permanent business closures in March and April 2020 than it saw during all of 2019. Economists are now projecting that more than 100,000 small businesses in the U.S. have closed permanently since the pandemic escalated in March.

“The pace of change is really pretty staggering” said Jen Fitzpatrick, SVP, Google Maps.

It’s hard to quantify how much Google could have helped here had it moved even faster, but it’s worth noting that other sizable social networks, including Facebook, Yelp, Instagram and Nextdoor, have already rolled out new features focused on helping businesses sell their gift cards and/or link to fundraising efforts.

Google’s updates, meanwhile, are rolling out in the days, weeks and months ahead, depending on the feature in question and the merchant’s geographic location. By then, the businesses that have survived government lockdowns are those that likely found alternative ways to reach customers and fundraise without Google’s help.

Google knows how critical its tools are, at least.

“There’s a new survey that was recently conducted by the Connected Commerce Council, and what they heard was that nearly 1 in 3 small businesses say that without digital tools they would have had to close all or part of their business,” Fitzpatrick noted. “So digital is suddenly even more at the forefront in terms of how small businesses are looking to operate and help them survive.”

Student loans are both a trillion-dollar debt category and also one of the most popular mini-verticals out there in fintech startup investing right now. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies in the space, and they all mostly do one of two things: either they help students think through their student loan options before choosing one (acting as a financial advisor to avoid mistakes) or they help students after they finish school figure out how to optimize their repayments or acquire loan forgiveness.

And so when I heard the pitch for LeverEdge, I was intrigued, because it really doesn’t fit either bucket.

Rather than approaching each user individually and trying to optimize their own financial decision independently, LeverEdge proposes helping students band together as a group and negotiate reduced student loan rates by essentially acting as a collective bargaining unit with banks.

For founders Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal, the idea came as they were entering Harvard Business School.

The two connected with some other HBS students through online new admit groups on Facebook and came up with the idea of trying to work together to lower their interest rates. The annual cost of attendance at HBS is $111,102 right now (annually!), so multiplied by two for the two-year MBA and you are looking at potentially massive cost savings if you can lower your interest rate.

There was just one problem: banks loved the idea, but no one knew how to actually negotiate interest rates at individual branches. As Agarwal explained, “So after work we would try to leave at a reasonable time to get to the bank branch before it closes and then pitch the branch manager on this. They were super excited, but then they’d be like, well, I don’t know what to do with this, I can’t change interest rates for you.”

So Abkarians started sending cold emails to bank CEOs with the same proposition, and also got a positive response, but was told that he would need much more volume to make a negotiated deal worthwhile for banks. At the time, the two only had 50 to 70 people working together, but they spread the option around more heavily with their classmates and students at other business schools and eventually got to 700 students with $26 million in loan volume over the next 10 days.

With that scale, the two were able to negotiate a competitive rate with a bank that saved each student an average of $15,000 in fees over the full life of their loans according to their calculations.

They did all this entirely virtually too. Abkarians and Agarwal eventually met for the first time in person at Harvard in the fall, still with a whirl of excitement over what had transpired over the summer. They started asking for feedback from their users about the process, and Agarwal said:

The number one negative feedback we got was you closed the deal on July 26, [but] I couldn’t use it because my tuition due date was before that day. And then every other piece of feedback — even for this haphazardly run group — was incredibly amazing. And that really convinced us [… that] we owe it to our members and really the future generation of classes to make this a thing.

LeverEdge is taking that one-off experience and systemizing it for more students in more contexts. The startup, which was officially founded in May 2018, targets the private student loan market outside of federal programs typical for most undergrads. That loan market typically has higher (and sometimes dramatically higher) interest rates than traditional federal student loans, and lenders also has the flexibility to negotiate interest rates unlike with federal loans.

Today, LeverEdge has more than 15,000 students on its platform and has financed $100 million in student loans according to the startup. It also raised a $2.5 million seed round led by NFX along with Global Founders Capital and founders from fintech companies Earnest and SoFi.

The company spends most of the year aggregating students for the next school year, and then “we spend around two months in this auction process between different lenders,” Abkarians said. The company currently has nine employees, and “our staff is focused on partnership building,” he said.

As for business model, LeverEdge takes a pre-set referral fee from lenders upfront for each tranche of loans that they negotiate between students and the lender. That fee is “non-negotiable” according to Agarwal, and all lenders participating in the auction agree to pay it if they have the winning bid. The company varies the fee based on the loans that are grouped together (Agarwal said that, for example, refinance loans have a lower referral fee than other student loans). He believes this approach ensures that LeverEdge always has the right incentives to get the best prices for students.

Importantly, no student is obligated to take the final loan as negotiated by LeverEdge. But, if the company is doing its job, then the offered loan should be competitive with any alternative loan on the market. “We still encourage people to compare it against other things and if they find anything that is better than what we’ve found to please just let us know. No one has yet,“ said Abkarians.

The big question now is what will happen this coming school year given COVID-19. On one hand, students may avoid campuses knowing that schools are moving heavily toward virtual classes due to social distancing policies. On the other hand, economic recessions and greater concerns around costs may lead more students to seek out cheaper student financing options: exactly the customers that LeverEdge wants to find.

Overall, it’s an interesting play on the student loan space and one of the more interesting fintech startups I have seen in some time.