Author: azeeadmin

Click Materials, a Vancouver-based developer of “smart glass” has inked a major partnership with one fo the largest manufacturers of windows for the home, Cardinal Glass, as it looks to challenge the billion dollar-backed View Inc.

Founded in 2016 by a University of British Columbia professor, Curtis Berlinguette, Click Materials has raised only a few hundred thousand dollars in seed funding. But the technology that Berlinguette’s company is developing could provide a lower-cost more flexible option to traditional photochromatic deposition — which can be applied to plastic as well as glass.

Smart glass gets its name from the coatings that are applied to transparent surfaces (typically glass) that allow users to customize the tint of the surface between clear and dark states. The result is more control over heat and light levels in an environment. It turns out that exposure to sunlight has implications for mental health and can enable dramatic cost savings in heating and cooling for any built environment.

Click Materials claims that its windows can reduce heating and cooling costs by up to fifty percent and that it can achieve those reductions while slashing manufacturing costs by as much as sixty percent.

Through the partnership with Cardinal Glass, Click will be building out a pilot plant that could give the upstart company manufacturing capacity to reach nearly $25 million in annual revenue, according to founder and chief executive, Curtis Berlinguette.

A typical plant of that size could cost at least $10 million, according to industry experts, but Click’s process — leveraging automation and existing manufacturing lines — means that a pilot can be built for a fraction of that cost, according to industry insiders.

“The first pilot plant is to prove out the product and get it refined,” says Berlinguette. And the company has other potential partnerships lined up to take its smart window products into commercial real estate and even auto manufacturing, Berlinguette said.  

The company has scaled from one employee as recently as a year ago to a staff of ten now with plans to add another 15 employees by the end of the year.

Image courgesy of Click Materials

While smart glass may seem like an odd investment thesis, the technology has received attention from a diverse array of investors. SoftBank’s Vision Fund is a major investor in the market through View Inc., which has raised roughly $1.8 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase. Another big player in the world of smart glass technologies is the multi-billion dollar French industrial conglomerate Saint-Gobain, which bought Sage Electrochromics back in 2012.

“Both of those companies have cleared a path for us because they’ve educated the market,” said Berlinguette. “The way they make their products — even with economies of scale you won’t be able to bring the cost of making those windows down to a level that’s accessible for the residential market. Those products are two to three times too expensive for the residential sector.”

Cardinal, a longtime leader in residential glass manufacturing and construction, was impressed with the new process that Click had developed, according to a statement from the company.

“Click Material’s proprietary deposition method enables uniform, optically-pure coatings that can be sprayed at ambient conditions and has the potential to disrupt the electrochromic window industry in the residential market and beyond,” said Keith Burrows, Technology Scouting & IP Manager at Cardinal Glass.

The potential to revolutionize design using smart glass extend far beyond the residential market, according to Berlinguette. Indeed, one of the areas where the company’s technology could have a significant impact is in the design of electric vehicles.

Heating and cooling can significantly reduce the range of electric vehicles, and the use of smart glass can, conceivably, increase efficiency significantly, Berlinguette said.

“As consumer appetite to bring smart technologies into the home grows, Click is delivering innovative advancements to window technology that will truly transform the way we experience our connected homes in the future,” said Berlinguette, in a statement. “The opportunities here are immense; heating, cooling and lighting account for 35% of home energy consumption, half of which can be lost through windows. Studies have also shown that greater control over lighting can dramatically improve energy, mood and personal well-being. Our partnership with Cardinal Glass is a massive leap towards bringing the future of windows into the present, with just one Click.”

SirionLabs, a startup that provides vendor management software to enterprises, has raised $44 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand and handle surge in demand from clients.

Tiger Global and Avatar Growth Capital led the Seattle-headquartered startup’s Series C round. The eight-year-old startup, which was founded in India, has raised $66 million to date. The new round values the startup at about $250 million.

Enterprises broadly handle two kinds of contracts, one when they are buying things from a supplier for which they use a procurement contract, and the other when they are selling things to customers, when a sales contract comes into play.

A significant number of companies today handle these contracts manually with different teams within an organization often dealing with the same entity, which leads to discrepancies in their promises. Teams work in silos and often don’t know the terms others in the organization have already agreed upon.

That’s where SirionLabs comes into the picture. “We use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to connect the dots between contracts and what happens after the contract has been signed,” explained Ajay Agrawal, cofounder, chairman and chief executive of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“For us, it’s not just creating a contract, but also realizing the promises that have been made in those contracts,” he said. SirionLabs also audits the invoice of suppliers, which has enabled its customers to save a significant amount of money.

SirionLabs today hosts contracts in over 40 languages for more than 200 of the world’s largest companies including Credit Suisse, Vodafone, EY, Unilever, Abbvie, BP, and Fujitsu.

Agrawal said the startup has seen a 4X growth in the number of customers it has signed up in the last 18 months. Part of the new capital would go into handling their demand. He said the coronavirus crises has resulted in many companies becoming more cautious about what they promise in their contracts.

The startup, which just opened a technology center in Seattle, also plans to open an AI laboratory in the Washington state to fuel technology innovation and grow sales.

It has also hired several industry veterans including the appointment of Amol Joshi as chief revenue officer, Anu Engineer as chief technology officer, Mahesh Unnikrishnan as chief product officer, and Vijay Khera, who will serve as chief customer officer.

Vishal Bakshi, founder and managing partner at Avatar Growth Capital, said he expects SirionLabs to “capture massive network effects as the platform continues to scale.”

The Minneapolis-based outdoor furniture brand Yardbird, which makes its wares in part from recycled plastic harvested from beaches and ocean-bound waterways, has raised $4.4 million in financing.

Even heading into the teeth of a pandemic, American consumers won’t be denied their sustainably manufactured patio furniture.

Yardbird, which closed the round in March, makes its furniture from recycled plastic that the company says is repurposed ocean plastic sourced from beaches, waterways and ocean-bound susceptible locations. The company said it incorporated over 75,000 pounds of this material into its furniture in 2020 alone — meaning roughly half of every piece of resin-based wicker furniture that the company makes contains that recycled material.

It’s not only the feedstock that makes the company green. The company said it offsets its entire carbon footprint — from commuting, product transportation, and warehouse, showroom and office electricity and heating — with a service called CarbonFund.

Since the coroanvirus outbreak hit in late March, the company has worked to change several aspects of its business, according to company co-founder Jay Dillon.

The digital nature of the business means that the company didn’t have much in the way of a physical footprint to shut down, but its emphasis on building a direct to consumer brand has meant increased investment in the company’s website.

“Our supply chain runs through China and in mid-February when the outbreak hit them the hardest, I was very concerned about supply concerns and was up all night talking with factories. At the time, we wanted to get as much product in-hand as possible to manage inventory, but now we are scaling that back because there are so many unknowns in the U.S. even though China is back on the grid,” wrote Dillon in an email.

The company moved to contactless delivery of its furniture in late March and has seen steady online sales for its outdoor furniture as consumers invest in sprucing up the only outdoor spaces they can access in some fases.

“We still believe in our model, and so do our investors—we have secured bank lines of credit to help us weather this storm but as of right now, we don’t know how long the storm will last,” Dillon wrote.

There is immense opacity in the venture capital industry, and that has made comparing venture funds notoriously difficult.

Traditional benchmarks calculated by groups like Cambridge Associates bucket VC funds into “vintage years” and place funds into quartiles based on metrics like IRR (rate of return adjusted for time) and DPI (or the amount of capital returned to limited partners against dollars paid into a fund). Everyone strives to be in the first quartile (the top 25%), and many fund CFOs have a bevy of tricks to squeeze a few more points out of their metrics to get their funds above that key cutoff line.

Comparing performance gets even more challenging though as you get more granular with the data. Let’s say a fund invested into a startup at the seed, did a follow on in the series A, and did pro rata investments in the series B and C rounds. When the company exits, the acquirer pays for the investment with three tranches of cash over 18 months. How do you calculate IRR? How do you make that comparable with other funds and their underlying portfolio investments?

AngelList hopes that its latest project can start to solve these challenges, and in the process, bring more transparency to performance within the VC asset class.

The company’s data science team built out a “fund performance percentile calculator” for its fund managers to compare their performance against other funds using detailed data from AngelList’s own syndicates and funds plus performance data from other sources. Going beyond quartiles, the calculator provides a specific percentile score of each fund’s performance.

Underlying this calculator is a redefined notion of the investment window for VC funds which AngelList calls “effective duration.” This gets at the problem I noted earlier where a VC fund might invest multiple times into one startup or spreads its investments over multiple years — how do you benchmark when those investments really take place? Aggregating all investments made over several years into a single “vintage year” or all exit returns for an investment into a single “exit date” seems like a blunt instrument, and so the calculator weights performance based on capital invested and returned over time, providing a more direct comparison between funds regardless of the velocity of their investments.

Photo via AngelList

Abe Othman, the head of data science at AngelList and the leader of this project, explained that using “effective duration” removes a lot of the ambiguity and gamesmanship around VC benchmarking.

He gives the example of how VC funds often keep large sums of their committed capital in reserve as a way to invest in future rounds of their portfolio companies. That process has the secondary benefit of inching up IRRs, since the capital deployed by the fund is committed later in the fund’s life cycle.

“One of the interesting things about my job is having the data to discover the mathematical groundings of a lot of venture folk wisdom, and I think kind of one of the things that came through in the study here,” Othman said.

Building the actual percentiles required a large dataset of venture performance, and few organizations have that level of detail available outside AngelList and groups like Cambridge Associates. Othman said “we used more than 400 funds to make this calculator,” which is why it can be so precise in terms of percentile score for fund performance.

One interesting note Othman made about what the percentiles show is that even scores that might seem very low, say the 40th percentile, can actually still have good underlying IRR metrics.

Photo via AngelList

AngelList is using the data internally as part of its own fund-of-funds to direct money to top performing managers. “This is not about sort of releasing data that we have on how big name venture funds are performing and how our venture funds do better,” Othman said. “It’s more about allowing the emerging managers that we host on our platform to identify themselves as being top performers, share their data, and hopefully help them raise more money in the future.”

Outside AngelList, Othman and his team hope that the new calculator and updated metrics will eventually help to make the venture industry more transparent and ultimately better able to communicate the asset class’ returns.

Berlin -based recruitment startup, Zenjob, which operates a digital platform connecting students with highly flexible temp jobs in sectors such as retail, logistics and hospitality, has closed a €27 million ($30M) Series C led by Forestay Capital. Also participating in the funding round: Redalpine, Acton Capital, Axa Venture Partners and Atlantic Labs.

Prior to this round Zenjob, a 500 startups growth hacking program alum, had raised just under $25M, according to Crunchbase.

The 2015 founded startup says it plans to use the money to further expand in Germany, where it currently offers a service in 14 cities — letting employers book student workers by the hour, with as little as 24 hours’ advance notice. Flush with Series C cash it’s now aiming to be nationwide by the end of the year.

It is also planning its first international expansion — spying opportunity amid the coronavirus crisis as it suggests social distancing requirements are generating demand for additional staff in certain sectors. (Which is something we’ve also heard from other recruitment startups in recent months.)

“The coronavirus crisis requires social distancing, which has created increased demand for staffing in, especially, logistics and retail,” said Fritz Trott, co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “Our service means that we can assist in the almost effortless digital hiring of hundreds of new students every day to fill these gaps.”

The new financing will also go on tech development to push for greater efficiency gains for users.

Zenjob says it wants to be able to use algorithms to further help predict staff demand in future, for example.

As well as job matching, the platform handles billing to cut down admin requirements for employers wanting temps to plug seasonal and/or short term vacancies.

Zenjob says its app reaches more than 15,000 students daily at this stage. It hasn’t provided data on how many employers are signed up to use the service.

Commenting on the Series C in a statement, Forestay Capital’s managing partner, Frederic Wohlwend, said: “We are delighted to have invested in Zenjob and are very much looking forward to working with Fritz and his highly talented team. Zenjob is a company that has deployed disruptive technology to shake-up the temporary employment market and which, prior to this coronavirus crisis, had already proven itself to have an exciting future. Now, during this pandemic, its flexible digital recruiting service has, in our eyes, further been confirmed as a model for keeping the working world moving.”

Scratchpay, the Pasadena, Calif.-based provider of petcare financing plans, is now offering lending services for dental, optical and chiropractic care for humans in a broad expansion of its services.

The expansion into human health and wellness was always on the company’s roadmap, according to chief executive John Keatley, but those plans accelerated as the company saw the cresting wave of the COVID-19 pandemic head for the United States.

The company now boasts 7,000 petcare practices and 1,000 human health and wellness practitioners on the company’s financing network.

“We provide short term financing through simple payment plans. We have a product called Take 5 which is a totally free buy-now-pay-later product at the vet or at the dentist,” said Keatley. 

Scratchpay makes its money off of the no-interest Take 5 payment plan by charging a fee to the practices that offer the service. For dentists, vets, optometrists and other service providers the payment plan provides a way to up sell patients on additional services. The company also offers more traditional lending products with interest rates in the high teens, on average, according to Keatley.

For years, the only provider in the patient lending market for pets and people was a company called Care Credit, which offered a high interest credit card, Keatley said.

By contrast, Scratchpay offers a more straightforward approach. Each transaction requires a single approval for a specific dollar amount, instead of the credit line that Care Credit offers, he said.

So far, the company has made around 100,000 loans through its service. Keatley wouldn’t disclose the default rate for the business.

“When we first launched Scratchpay, our goal was to get more pet parents the care they needed using fair, affordable, and transparent payment plans,” said Caleb Morse, co-founder and chief operating officer of Scratchpay, in a statement. “Today, we’re expanding our vision to include other verticals where many patients have historically been underserved in terms of their financing options. We want to help create a world where everyone has access to the health services needed to live healthy, happy lives. The incredible speed of adoption we’re seeing in dental, optometry, and many other sectors in healthcare gives us confidence that we are on a path to make that vision a reality.”

London-based femtech hardware startup Astinno has picked up an Innovate UK grant worth £360k ($450k) to fund further testing of a wearable it’s developing for women experiencing a perimenopause symptom known as hot flushes.

The sensor-packed device, which it’s calling Grace, is being designed to detect the onset of a hot flush and apply cooling to a woman’s wrist to combat the reaction — in a process it likens to running your wrists under a cold tap.

The aim is for algorithmically triggered cooling to be done in a timely enough manner to prevent hot flushes from running their usual unpleasant and uncomfortable course. While the bracelet wearable itself is being designed to look like a chunky piece of statement jewellery.

The femtech category in general has attracted an influx of funding in recent years, as venture capitalists slowly catch up to the opportunities available in products and services catering to women’s health issues.

But it’s fair to say menopause remains a still under-addresed segment within the category. Although there are now signs that more attention is being paid to issues that affect many hundreds of millions of middle aged (and some younger) women around the world.

The team working on Grace has built several prototypes to date, per founder Peter Astbury. He says some limited user tested has also been done. But they’ve yet to robustly prove efficacy of the core tech — hence taking grant funding for more advanced testing. At this stage of development there’s also no timeline for when a product might be brought to market.

Astinno and Morgan IAT, its commercial partner on the project, have been awarded the Innovate UK money via a publicly funded UK SMART grants scheme (the pair are getting match funding via the scheme, with the public body putting up 70% and Astinno and Morgan IAT funding the other 30% of their respective costs).

Loughborough University — Astbury’s alma mater — is also involved as a research party, and is being funded for 100% of its grant costs.

“Several prototypes have been created so far, mainly by myself having received electronics and design training as part of my degree at Loughborough University,” says Astbury. “Shortly after leaving university I also briefly worked with an electronics company who helped to refine some of the components within the Grace product.

“Morgan IAT has the crucial technical role of developing a number of prototypes in conjunction with Astinno. This includes both hardware and software development, building many more advanced prototypes that are being tested, refined and then tested again.

“We’re working with three researchers from Loughborough University which brings together industry leading expertise in menopause psychology and physiology. Based at the National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine, the researchers are using their fantastic lab facilities to test Grace, meaning that everything we’re doing is being validated by professional research. Once this step is complete, we’ll have more of an idea regarding product release time-frames.”

Astbury founded the startup last summer — but had begun work on the concept for Grace several years before, during his final year at Loughborough, back in 2016.

“As a member of Loughborough’s business incubator, ‘The Studio’, I was awarded an enterprise grant which helped to fund the business. I have also been putting my User Experience design skills and expertise to good use, contracting for start-ups and larger healthcare companies on a part-time basis to ‘bootstrap’ development,” he adds.

The idea for the wearable came after Astbury conducted user research by talking to women about their menopausal symptoms and hearing about their coping strategies for hot flushes and the night sweats that can be induced.

“A woman was telling me about her symptoms and how she coped with them until now. She would wake up ten to fifteen times each night due to her night sweats. Each time, she would go to the bathroom and run her wrists under cold water which helped the flush to subside. Looking into this method in more depth, it became clear that cooling an area of skin can indeed be extremely effective and there are lots of women that use this technique,” he explains.

“During a hot flush, your brain mistakenly thinks that you are becoming too warm and causes your body to lose heat. This results in sweating, a reddening of the skin and shortness of breath. The skin, however, acts like your body’s thermometer, passing information to your brain. By applying cooling to the skin at the right time, we’re harnessing the body’s natural temperature regulation system. The brain receives signals that you are cool and, in turn, the body reacts in a way that is directly opposite to a hot flush.”

“The real key to Grace is accurately and reliably pre-empting hot flushes (the automated nature of the bracelet) so that cooling can be applied at the earliest stage possible,” he adds. “We’re doing that using a specific line-up of sensor technology and algorithms all working together but I’m afraid the details of that can’t be disclosed publicly yet.”

Astbury says he was keen to get grant funding at this stage of product development to avoid dilution of the business, given VCs would require their chunk of equity.

“One of the best things about Innovate UK for a science-based start-up like Astinno is that it doesn’t contribute to the dilution of your business,” he notes. “By the end of a successful grant project, a company becomes a much more attractive investment from the perspective of both investors and the start-up. I have had discussions with multiple angels/VC’s and will maintain those relationships, however a grant was the best option for us at this stage.”

London-based femtech hardware startup Astinno has picked up an Innovate UK grant worth £360k ($450k) to fund further testing of a wearable it’s developing for women experiencing a perimenopause symptom known as hot flushes.

The sensor-packed device, which it’s calling Grace, is being designed to detect the onset of a hot flush and apply cooling to a woman’s wrist to combat the reaction — in a process it likens to running your wrists under a cold tap.

The aim is for algorithmically triggered cooling to be done in a timely enough manner to prevent hot flushes from running their usual unpleasant and uncomfortable course. While the bracelet wearable itself is being designed to look like a chunky piece of statement jewellery.

The femtech category in general has attracted an influx of funding in recent years, as venture capitalists slowly catch up to the opportunities available in products and services catering to women’s health issues.

But it’s fair to say menopause remains a still under-addresed segment within the category. Although there are now signs that more attention is being paid to issues that affect many hundreds of millions of middle aged (and some younger) women around the world.

The team working on Grace has built several prototypes to date, per founder Peter Astbury. He says some limited user tested has also been done. But they’ve yet to robustly prove efficacy of the core tech — hence taking grant funding for more advanced testing. At this stage of development there’s also no timeline for when a product might be brought to market.

Astinno and Morgan IAT, its commercial partner on the project, have been awarded the Innovate UK money via a publicly funded UK SMART grants scheme (the pair are getting match funding via the scheme, with the public body putting up 70% and Astinno and Morgan IAT funding the other 30% of their respective costs).

Loughborough University — Astbury’s alma mater — is also involved as a research party, and is being funded for 100% of its grant costs.

“Several prototypes have been created so far, mainly by myself having received electronics and design training as part of my degree at Loughborough University,” says Astbury. “Shortly after leaving university I also briefly worked with an electronics company who helped to refine some of the components within the Grace product.

“Morgan IAT has the crucial technical role of developing a number of prototypes in conjunction with Astinno. This includes both hardware and software development, building many more advanced prototypes that are being tested, refined and then tested again.

“We’re working with three researchers from Loughborough University which brings together industry leading expertise in menopause psychology and physiology. Based at the National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine, the researchers are using their fantastic lab facilities to test Grace, meaning that everything we’re doing is being validated by professional research. Once this step is complete, we’ll have more of an idea regarding product release time-frames.”

Astbury founded the startup last summer — but had begun work on the concept for Grace several years before, during his final year at Loughborough, back in 2016.

“As a member of Loughborough’s business incubator, ‘The Studio’, I was awarded an enterprise grant which helped to fund the business. I have also been putting my User Experience design skills and expertise to good use, contracting for start-ups and larger healthcare companies on a part-time basis to ‘bootstrap’ development,” he adds.

The idea for the wearable came after Astbury conducted user research by talking to women about their menopausal symptoms and hearing about their coping strategies for hot flushes and the night sweats that can be induced.

“A woman was telling me about her symptoms and how she coped with them until now. She would wake up ten to fifteen times each night due to her night sweats. Each time, she would go to the bathroom and run her wrists under cold water which helped the flush to subside. Looking into this method in more depth, it became clear that cooling an area of skin can indeed be extremely effective and there are lots of women that use this technique,” he explains.

“During a hot flush, your brain mistakenly thinks that you are becoming too warm and causes your body to lose heat. This results in sweating, a reddening of the skin and shortness of breath. The skin, however, acts like your body’s thermometer, passing information to your brain. By applying cooling to the skin at the right time, we’re harnessing the body’s natural temperature regulation system. The brain receives signals that you are cool and, in turn, the body reacts in a way that is directly opposite to a hot flush.”

“The real key to Grace is accurately and reliably pre-empting hot flushes (the automated nature of the bracelet) so that cooling can be applied at the earliest stage possible,” he adds. “We’re doing that using a specific line-up of sensor technology and algorithms all working together but I’m afraid the details of that can’t be disclosed publicly yet.”

Astbury says he was keen to get grant funding at this stage of product development to avoid dilution of the business, given VCs would require their chunk of equity.

“One of the best things about Innovate UK for a science-based start-up like Astinno is that it doesn’t contribute to the dilution of your business,” he notes. “By the end of a successful grant project, a company becomes a much more attractive investment from the perspective of both investors and the start-up. I have had discussions with multiple angels/VC’s and will maintain those relationships, however a grant was the best option for us at this stage.”

Children and teenagers in China are hyper-connected and using the internet in ways that were unimaginable and inaccessible to earlier generations.

As many as 175 million people under the age of 18, or 93.1% of the country’s underage population, were internet users in 2019, according to a joint report released by the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center and the Chinese Communist Youth League.

The digital divide was quickly closing. Internet penetration among urban minors was 93.9%, just 3.6% more than their rural counterparts, compared to a 5.4% gap in 2018. Almost all of them accessed the internet through smartphones. The US, by comparison, recorded 95% smartphone access among teens in 2018.

Though up to 81.9% of Chinese schools restricted the use of cellphones, 74% of the underage population reported having their own internet devices. 89.6% went online for educational purposes — the COVID-19 pandemic that has kept millions of students at home would certainly fuel more persistent adaptation of online education. 61% used the internet for gaming and 46.2% for streaming short videos on apps like Douyin (TikTok China) and Kuaishou.

Contrary to widespread concerns, only 17.3% of the underage users reported they had developed “psychological dependence” on the internet, although the numbers should be taken with caution as they came from respondents’ subjective judgments.

While many parents are growing wary of internet safety among children, 75.3% of the Chinese underage users said they had “some understanding” of rights protection or ways to report inappropriate behavior with regard to internet use.