Author: azeeadmin

Over the past three years the Los Angeles-based startup Maple Media has amassed a portfolio of roughly thirty companies and one hundred apps in its quest to become the IAC of app store businesses. And now, even with the economy continuing to collapse, the company is on the prowl for new acquisitions and expects to spend tens of millions of dollars on new deals.

“We look at three pillars of our types of apps… casual games, mobile games, and personal tools,” said Maple Media chief executive, Michael Ritter. 

The company recently acquired PlayerFM, a podcast discovery service, for an undisclosed amount to expand its footprint in the podcast space. Other apps in the company’s portfolio include Pic Stitch, the photo collage editor and the calendar app, WeCal. 

The PlayerFM deal stands out as an example of what the company looks for in an acquisition target, said Ritter. “It’s an app that’s been in the market for eight years — and it’s feature complete, which is what you would expect in the podcast category.”

What Maple Media provides, said Ritter, is an ability to use its marketing muscle and internal development shop to update products more regularly, add new features, and make sure that those features are marketed effectively to potential new users.

“We actually push a lot of product… we’re working on five to six different apps at a time pushing updates weekly to our apps… we work on very short two-week sprints and doing a lot of different development,” said Ritter.

Typically production cycles are driven by the rhythms of Google Play and Apple’s app stores. If an app store reaches out to feature one of the company’s portfolio of apps then that app gets an upgrade. As new features come online or stores switch out APIs those thirty apps will all get the attention they need to remain up to speed, says Ritter.

One of the benefits of having such a broad stable is that the company can update a single codebase in its library and push that update to several different apps. “We have one codebase that we manage things from,” Ritter said.

Maple Media raised its original capital from Shamrock Capital, the investment firm managing money for the Disney family.

“We see ourselves as a media company,” said Ritter. “Our strategy is to build as large a user base over mobile and distribute advertising across that platform.”

Going forward, Maple Media could spend as much as $50 million this year alone, according to Ritter. The key for the company is to make acquisitions in areas that have lasting resonance with a certain audience, whether that’s a broadly useful service like a calendar, or a digital document scanner — or a game like Sudoku or Mah Jongg.

“What we’re looking for,” says Ritter, “are classic and evergreen games and apps.”

Spotify is expanding the capabilities of its parental controls on its Spotify Kids app, aimed at children ages 3 and up on a parent’s Spotify Premium Family plan. Before, parents could only select whether the child was directed to the experience for younger or older children. Now, they’ll be able to specifically block content from their child’s account when accessing the chid’s listening history.

These features had been hinted at when Spotify Kids made its U.S. debut in March. At the time, Spotify said it heard from parents testing the app in other markets how they wanted to have even more control over the app’s included content. Though the company didn’t detail its plans then, it did say new features would involve allowing parents making more specific choices over what their child could stream.

Both new features are now included in the PIN-protected “Grown Ups” section, previously called the “Parental Settings.” Once there, a parent can select which child’s account they want to to update or view.

The Listening History option will allow them to view every track the child has streamed on the Spotify Kids app over the past 3 months. From here, a parent can also opt to select a track and block it by tapping the “block” icon next to the track in question.

These blocked tracks are then removed from the child’s account and can’t be streamed. However, parents can unblock the track further down the road if they choose, by accessing either the Listening History section or the Blocked Tracks section and tapping the red icon next to each track.

Spotify says these new features are the first step in many planned updates for its Kids application, which today includes over 8,000 kid-appropriate songs, stories, audiobooks and sounds which are curated into 125+ playlists. Though app is aimed at kids young and old, many children will age out of it around their tweens, despite its support for an “older kids” experience. That’s because kids have established some favorite artists and musical preferences by then, and the more limited catalog on Spotify Kids doesn’t deliver. Plus, the downside of hand-curation means newly emerging hits — like, say, those blowing up on TikTok — may not make an appearance on Spotify Kids until later.

While it makes sense that Spotify would focus more immediately on parental controls catering to parents of the younger children, in time being able to go the other direction — perhaps a whitelisting option or the import of pre-approved playlists — would be appreciated by parents of older kids.

The Spotify Kids app is now live across 14 global markets, including as of today, Japan and Germany.

Sevetri Wilson founded her first company, a public relations firm catering to non-profit organizations, as soon as she graduated from Louisiana State University back in 2009.

Eleven years later, and with a fresh $8 million round of funding in the bank, Wilson has taken the experience she amassed working in the nonprofit world and turned it into her new business, Resilia. From offices in New Orleans and New York, Wilson’s company offers a suite of services for nonprofits to better manage and report their finances and for grant-making and philanthropic organizations to find the groups that are working in the areas they want to support.

“We are serving a two-sided market,” Wilson said. “We are providing software solutions from non-profits.. Helping them come online… whether you’re a charter school or healthcare clinic and from there we have helped non-profits with their compliance and fundraising and built that into a subscription platform.”

There are approximately 1.56 million nonprofits in the U.S., according to a 2019 report from the Urban Institute. And those organizations contributed roughly $985.4 billion to the U.S. economy in 2015, according to the last available data. That’s roughly 5.4% of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Of those non-profits, public charities accounted for three-quarters of revenue and expenses representing $1.98 trillion and just under-two thirds of the total assets of the nonprofit sector, which amount to a whopping $3.67 trillion.

Those are huge numbers and represent a massive opportunity for companies that can find better, lower-cost ways to service these organizations and help make the entire industry run more efficiently.

“For large funders, their job is to deploy capital,” Wilson said. “They have to monitor them and pull reports and track data and do evaluations.. If you are Oxfam America we are essentially covering their southern territories and the organizations they’re funding around workforce development.”

Now, in the wake of the economic collapse that’s accompanied the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., nonprofits are taking an even more central position in the U.S. economy.

With a market representing hundreds of billions of dollars its no wonder that the Louisiana-based investment firm Callais Capital chose to back the company. Notably, Resilia also managed to bring in Mucker Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that’s coming off one of the best years in its history.

Mucker, which raked in marquee returns last year off of its seed investment in Honey, the browser extension coupon service which PayPal acquired for $4 billion, is steadily expanding from its Los Angeles home and building up a presence in the Southeast.

“Entrepreneurs outside of LA look more like LA entrepreneurs than they do like Bay Area entrepreneurs” said William Hsu. “Working with them… we saw that skillset of working with LA could be replicated somewhere else.”

That somewhere else was Nashville, where Mucker has a presence through Monique Villa, the firm’s investor and scout for deals across the Southeast.

“We charged her with looking at every deal in the Southeast,” said Hsu. In the year-and-a-half that Villa has been investing, Mucker has made three public investments: Go Check Kids, Blueprint Title, and now, Resilia.

“One of the things that is interesting to us is how the rest of the US looks at New York and San Francisco as an elitist enclave,” said Hsu. “The populist part doesn’t connect or look up to the ethos of SF or NY.. We want to be an accessible and populist VC brand.”

It’s hard to get more populist than investing in a company founded by an African American woman who went to a land-grant university in Baton Rouge, La.

There’s already real revenue coming in for Wilson’s startup. Large donor customers pay $199 per-seat per-month for access to the company’s list of well-run nonprofits, and nonprofits pay $99.99 per month for access to the management tools, grant writing support and other features that they may need.

“We’re in such a good position because our product was created to capture innovation and mitigate grants and connect to capital in organizations to have a better understand of where that’s money is going and wether or not it’s being wasted,” Wilson said. 

It’s been a few years since August introduced any new hardware, but its August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, which it debuted at CES this year, is now available. This is the new flagship in the August lineup, replacing the August Smart Lock Pro as the latest and greatest feature-packed connected lock from the company, and it brings an improved design along with built-in Wi-Fi. August’s existing locks are the market leaders in easy conversion kits for existing thumbturn deadbolts, and the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock improves upon that reputation in every way.

Design

The August Wi-Fi Smart Lock has a great design pedigree already, since the company was originally co-founded by Yves Béhar. Béhar spearheaded the design of this generation as well, and the result is a look that is recognizably August, but with upgraded looks and tactile improvements, too. The satin nickel finish on my review hardware looked great and premium (it also comes in black) and the textured outer edge feels great when turning the lock to manually lock/unlock. There’s a slightly raised ‘pointer’ to provide a quick visual indicator of whether the door is locked or unlocked now as well.

The biggest design change vs. the August Smart Lock Pro, however, is that it’s quite a bit smaller. August says it’s 45% smaller by volume, in fact, and 20% slimmer front to back, and the size savings definitely show. The rather large dimensions of the Smart Lock Pro meant that it wasn’t even able to be installed on some doors, so there’s a practical, functional benefit to the change, but it also just looks a lot nicer and is less likely to stick out among the rest of your home decor.

The smaller design was made possible despite inclusion of Wi-Fi built-in in part due to the switch to CR2 batteries, which are a lot less common than the AAs used by the Smart Lock Pro, but which you should still be able to find pretty easily at a drugstore or via Amazon.

Size aside, the design still provides a great, easy to use manual turn for physically unlocking and locking your door. The install process is also still very easy, even if you’re not particularly handy. August even provides paint-safe tape in the box for securing the other side of your lock while you remove the thumb plate, and its app gives you easy instructions for matching the right included size adapter depending on your deadbolt manufacturer. Replacing my own thumb turn took about five minutes start to finish.

Features

The whole point of August’s technology is that it provides you with a way to lock and unlock your door with your phone. With the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, that’s a lot less complicated than it has been in the past because it has Wi-Fi built-in. Previous August locks relied exclusively on Bluetooth, and required that you also purchase and own a separate Connect dongle, which plugs into a standard wall socket, to connect to the lock itself via Bluetooth and act as a bridge to your Wi-Fi network.

Doing away with the need for a Connect means you connect the Wi-Fi Smart Lock to your network during setup, and then it’s reachable anywhere using the August smartphone app. You can easily tap to lock and unlock the door so long as you have an active data connection, and you can do a lot more besides, including granting others access.

August allows you to provision virtual keys to friends via email (they’ll be asked to register for an account if they don’t have one). This is a popular feature for Airbnb hosts, since you can also revoke permission once you no longer want someone to have access. It’s also great for letting in neighbors to feed your pets (once travel is an option again, of course) and for giving family an easy way to check in. Plus, you can share it with other members of your households and make them owners for top-level access and controls as well.

You can also set the August Wi-Fi Smart Lock to automatically lock once you close the door, either immediately or after a set time that you can customize. This works using DoorSense, which is facilitated by a magnetic sensor that August includes in the box and that you install in your door frame upon setup.

Auto-unlock for me has worked most of the time, though I have had a few occasions where upon returning, I get a ‘Welcome home’ notification from the August app, but the door doesn’t actually unlock and I have to do so by opening the app and pressing the button. In general, however, it works well, and is a great benefit when you return home with your arms full of groceries, for instance.

Performance

The August Wi-Fi Smart Lock brings an updated design and integrated wifi, but it doesn’t change much in terms of the core functionality of August’s previous locks, and it also seems to be at least a match for prior generations when it comes to reliability. Using the app, I was consistently able to both lock and unlock the door, both within and outside of the home.

August also offers integration with voice assistants, including Alexa, Google Home and HomeKit. These I found a bit more unreliable, with at least one actual failed unlock attempt via HomeKit, but overall they also performed mostly well, with a bit more lag than doing things via the August app directly. You’re also able to unlock via voice command, though the app wisely forces you to register an authorization code to protect against manipulation, like someone trying to yell at Alexa through your door to unlock the unit.

August also offers the option to receive push notification about lock and unlock events, and stores a whole history of the lock’s usage, including door open and closed status, manual/automatic/remote locking and unlocking events, and more. It’s a great way to maintain peace of mind about who’s accessing your home, when and how.

Bottom line

August has a long history of building connected locks, and its reputation has earned it both accolades and a 2017 acquisition by leading international lock maker Assa Abloy, which operates a number of brands including Yale. This is the first lock that it has launched since that acquisition, and it’s a promising indicator that the deal hasn’t dulled their edge when it comes to August-branded product development. This is a great smart lock, with fast and easy installation and ergonomic, visually pleasing design and broad compatibility. Its auto-lock and unlock features really change the way you go about everything from running errands to walking the dog – it’s surprising how much a little convenience can make even the most mundane tasks more pleasant.

The August Wi-Fi Smart Lock is available for $249.99 via August.com and Best Buy, and will expand availability to additional retailers beginning May 17.

Rising healthcare costs, an aging population, stifling regulations and the complexity of present-day technological offerings make the trillion-dollar healthcare industry ripe for disruption.

Not only are we finding new and innovative ways to get medical help, this global pandemic has led to explosive growth in telemedicine, digital devices and health-tracking apps — much of which needs a digital overhaul for doctors’ offices, insurance and the cumbersome HIPAA compliance.

While an infrastructure focus might not seem exciting, it is necessary to fix a broken, profit-driven system of paperwork and delays while the sick and suffering are saddled with mountains of debt.

Our current climate is the perfect illustration of just how critical new and innovative investments in the space truly are. It’s also a lucrative opportunity. According to Deloitte, healthcare infrastructure is expected to continue growing above pace into 2023.

But finding those disruptive technologies is the tricky part. In a recent survey, we asked VCs to evaluate the digital health sector; for today, we reached out to active investors to find out what they are seeing within the healthcare infrastructure landscape, what they are most interested in right now and where they think the industry is headed.

In this survey, we hear from:

• Carl Byers, F-Prime Capital
• Arvind Gupta, SOSV
• Matt Brennan, General Catalyst
• Bilal Zuberi, Lux Capital
• Sundeep Peechu, Felicis Ventures
• Bryan Roberts, Venrock

Carl Byers, F-Prime Capital

Data and automation are the most interesting themes to me right now. We are only beginning to see the efficiencies and new capabilities opened up by getting the data organized and applying modern techniques. I’m more excited about the practical impact of robotic process automation (RPA) than I am enamored with AI, though both are exciting. I’d point to Notable Health in San Mateo as a company that has a great use of both technologies. I think we are about to embark on a new era of open data in healthcare where we finally solve the longstanding quest for interoperability with privacy mediated by patients. This will require a new developer ecosystem to come about built on new protocols rather than tired, legacy models. The key is for there to be demand pull from new services like virtual primary care (e.g. Firefly) or at-home solutions (like Ro or LetsGetChecked), instead of just a regulatory push (though that also will be important).

I’m spending time on RPA and open data, which is the key to improving healthcare B2B/infrastructure (see above). I think all markets have been overheated from a valuation standpoint, but if you find the right company, the opportunity is vast. If healthcare today is roughly 2x too expensive, getting data flowing is key to eliminating most of that waste. RPA can attack the administrative bloat while data exchange will allow doctors and patients to finally shop for the best value without the worry that something will be lost clinically in the translation.

When the world is in an unprecedented state, it’s fair — and appropriate — to challenge the status quo.

Today at 11 a.m. PST, Jordan Crook and Natasha Mascarenhas are hosting a Extra Crunch Live chat with Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures. This is our latest chat in our series of discussions with investors like Mark Cuban, Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, Charles Hudson and Mitch and Freada Kapor.

Green has invested in a number of high-profile D2C companies like Glossier and Birchbox and had several large exits, like Dollar Shave Club selling to Unilever for $1 billion in 2016. We’ll talk about what attracted her to those companies in the first place and how that process may have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Beyond that, we’ll cover advice she’s giving to portfolio startups, what is keeping her up at night, and of course, what is keeping her hopeful.

During the call, audience members are encouraged to ask questions. We’ll get to as many as we can, but you can only participate if you’re an Extra Crunch member, so please subscribe here.

Extra Crunch subscribers can find the Zoom Link below and are encouraged to ask some questions live on the call.

There will also be a live YouTube broadcast of the discussion below for anyone who wants to let it play in the background or watch without participating in the Q&A.

Here’s the information you’ll need to join:

Carnegie Mellon University is one step closer to operating its robotic rover on the surface of the Moon: The school’s diminutive bot has passed a crucial NASA design review, performed by the agency in collaboration with Astrobotic, whose Peregrine lunar lander will be providing the ride for the robot down to the surface of the Moon on a mission set for 2021.

The positive result from the design review did include a few design tweaks that the team will now implement as it moves from prototype to flight-ready rover, a process that’s designed to take place this summer. That version will stress tested for conditions during the launch and flight to Moon, to ensure its own safety, and the safety of other payloads on board the Peregrine lander, which is taking a number of experiments to the lunar surface on behalf of NASA.

CMU’s rover, dubbed Iris, weighs roughly four pounds, and it’s about the size of a large toaster. It’ll get the distinction of becoming the first U.S. robotic rover to explore the surface of the Moon, however, should it make its flight target. Eventually, it could also pave the way for a line of “CubeRovers,” or tiny, relatively inexpensive rovers that could contribute to a range of scientific investigations and endeavors, both public and private, without breaking the bank.

Iris has four wheels, but also two video cameras, which represent the main sensor loadout for the little robot. Camera miniaturization means that it’s a lot easier to collect quality image and video data from even small robot exploratory platforms, which is great news for companies like Astrobotic that hope to kickstart a whole new market of private deep space exploration using lightweight, affordable lander platforms like Peregrine.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high.

Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite the later-stages of fintech-focused startups seeing healthy amounts of liquidity, aggregate venture capital activity in the historically well-funded sector was light in the first quarter of 2020.

According to a new Q1 2020 report covering venture data from CB Insights, VC dollars invested in the sector fell to levels not seen since 2017, while venture deal volume in fintech fell to 2016 levels. There are any number of reasons for this pullback that you can fill in, including COVID-19 and its resulting economic impacts. But what’s even more interesting is where the money and deals did and did not go inside of the various fintech categories.

Indeed, fintech has become so complicated as a startup grouping, it’s nearly as diffuse as discussing “SaaS” companies as a cohort. Of course, fintech is a product focus while SaaS is a business model (there are fintechs that sell SaaS, to be clear), but the general point holds.

Let’s dig into the top-line data to better understand the fintech funding landscape in Q1 (TechCrunch recently spoke to VCs on their expectations for the sector today and in the future). After the high-level stuff, we’ll dig into a few notes concerning sub-sectors of particular interest, including wealth management and insurtech.

Fintech’s Q1 venture scorecard

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high.

Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite the later-stages of fintech-focused startups seeing healthy amounts of liquidity, aggregate venture capital activity in the historically well-funded sector was light in the first quarter of 2020.

According to a new Q1 2020 report covering venture data from CB Insights, VC dollars invested in the sector fell to levels not seen since 2017, while venture deal volume in fintech fell to 2016 levels. There are any number of reasons for this pullback that you can fill in, including COVID-19 and its resulting economic impacts. But what’s even more interesting is where the money and deals did and did not go inside of the various fintech categories.

Indeed, fintech has become so complicated as a startup grouping, it’s nearly as diffuse as discussing “SaaS” companies as a cohort. Of course, fintech is a product focus while SaaS is a business model (there are fintechs that sell SaaS, to be clear), but the general point holds.

Let’s dig into the top-line data to better understand the fintech funding landscape in Q1 (TechCrunch recently spoke to VCs on their expectations for the sector today and in the future). After the high-level stuff, we’ll dig into a few notes concerning sub-sectors of particular interest, including wealth management and insurtech.

Fintech’s Q1 venture scorecard

As the healthcare industry moves to value-based care, physician practices and health networks need to shift the things they bill for. Now it’s about maxing out patient “care” rather than the number of procedures physicians can perform.

In this move to a more high-touch, rapid communication world where doctors need to take (and document) every step to ensure that their patients stay on their medication, come in for their routine check-ups and receive follow ups on their initial visits, a service like Stellar Health which provides a checklist for practitioners looks really attractive to investors.

Indeed, the company is announcing a $10 million investment led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from previous investors Primary Venture Partners.

The two-year-old company did not say in a statement when the round closed, but it has been expanding significantly without the infusion of additional capital. It already is selling services in networks across 11 states. The new money will take the company’s operations to more states around the country and double the size of its team, according to a statement. By the end of 2020, Stellar Health expects to have customers managing care for at least 100,000 patients through its platform, according to a statement. 

“Stellar Health has the potential to transform healthcare by increasing the number of providers who successfully adopt value-based care models,” said Sri Chandrasekar, Partner at Point72 Ventures. “They have developed a sophisticated and intuitive platform to drive VBC in the U.S. and we are excited to help them build on that momentum.”