Author: azeeadmin

When Anada Lakra and Ilya Usorov first moved to the United States, they struggled to find their voices. They both knew and understood English, but when it came time to speak up, their accents became a hurdle. Usorov, for example, watched his Russian-born parents struggle to advocate for themselves, which limited work opportunities. While Lakra, who just started college at Yale University, was constantly asked to repeat herself.

“Will I be able to express myself clearly enough? Will I be understood? Will I be as impactful?” Lakra remembers questioning herself. “My accent pronunciation made me feel like I really wasn’t my full self — and I lost a little of my personality.”

It’s an issue experienced, to varying degrees, by many of the roughly 65 million nonnative English speakers in the United States. Viewing accent as a hurdle in jobs, confidence and relationship-building, the duo teamed up as co-founders to build a solution.

Now, Lakra and Usorov are launching BoldVoice, an accent coaching app that helps users refine their pronunciation of the English language. The New York-based startup, currently going through Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch, raised a pre-seed round of about $605,000 from the accelerator and XFund.

Hollywood, meet edtech

BoldVoice has a very specific user in mind: nonnative English speakers who learned the language on paper but now need help speaking and interacting with people.

The startup uses short-form videos, taught by Hollywood accent coaches who traditionally help actors, to deliver content. The curriculum is built around three Ps: posture, to help with the physical feel of using an English R versus a Spanish R; phonology, the vowels and consonants; and porosity, which is the musicality of an accent. So far, there are two Hollywood accent and dialect coaches on the platform: Ron Carlos and Eliza Simpson.

“We’re really thinking about this in the same way that an actor will learn an accent for a new role,” where they have to pick it up very quickly, Lakra said. “We want to bring the same discipline and process to everyone at home, so we have Hollywood accent coaches who are trained voice speech and dialect coaches” as well as advisers who have degrees in linguistics.

Beyond its short-form videos, the company plans to integrate artificial intelligence into its product. When a user practices a speech, BoldVoice records the speech sample, feeds it into an algorithm and, over time, will be able to recommend more tailored exercises to their weak areas. It is using open-source software currently but is developing its own AI algorithm for the future. Real-time feedback would be a feat.

Image Credits: BoldVoice product screen

The sign-in process is pretty simple. Users are asked to set goals around accent confidence, explain English proficiency and identify native language, as well as the situation in which they want to improve, which can range from in the workplace to social settings. Users are also asked to commit pronunciation practice for 10 minutes a day, with the option to say no.

Image Credits: BoldVoice/TechCrunch screenshot

They are then given a lesson plan, which is only accessible through a subscription. The company charges $10 a month or $70 a year, which is meant to be more accessible than private accent coach tutoring, which can hit $200 per hour. There is currently no free experience for BoldVoice beyond a one-week free trial.

After launching a little over a month ago, BoldVoice has attracted 1,000 users, most of whom come from India, China, or are Spanish speakers. The company is focusing on creating “hyper-personalized” content around these core users, and will have its work cut out for it: There are 121 languages spoken by more than 10,000 people in India, with the Indian constitution officially recognizing 22 languages.

The owl is watching

BoldVoice is looking to dig into the crowded market of language learning startups at a key time for the edtech subsector. Language learning unicorn Duolingo is set to go public this week, which could cast a golden halo on other consumer edtech businesses. The company has already raised its expected price range ahead of its public offering, a confident move. Other companies such as Busuu and Babbel have also made progress in carving out spheres of language learning.

But Lakra doesn’t think any existing language learning apps have won over the accent market yet. She explained how learning a language is about memorization of vocabulary and grammar, while learning an accent is about working out your mouth through tongue exercises. The latter, which BoldVoice focuses on, doesn’t yet seem to be a priority for other businesses.

She’s not wrong. Duolingo excels at reading and writing literacy, but it has not yet shared any known efficacy studies about its pronunciation efforts. The company tried launching a chatbot in its early days to help users practice conversations. The highly requested feature flopped, though, as 80% of users didn’t use it — a reaction that CEO Luis von Ahn thinks underscores how difficult it is to get consumers to practice speaking.

Duolingo is now building investment in a team around speech recognition technology, as well as eyeing M&A opportunities. BoldVoice, which similarly uses bite-sized content and streaks, could bring its product of confidence to Duolingo’s mission of motivation.

Beyond the complementary yet competitive landscape, BoldVoice’s challenge ahead may just be that it is playing in a sensitive area. Someone’s voice is an integral part of their identity. BoldVoice will need to balance helping people, while also not erasing what makes them them.

Lakra thinks that they can strike the balance. Her perception of the user is constantly evolving.

“Users are already telling us that it would be awesome to get more tips around public speaking or how to interject in a meeting or how to give feedback politely,” she said. The requests are all about how to culturally and linguistically use English in a professional English-speaking environment, and BoldVoice is working with coaches to create content beyond pronunciation and into cadence, projection and intonation.

“We definitely want to move and make this a tool that helps people not just say the word the right way, but just feel confident in everything they say.”

Image Credits: BoldVoice. Co-founders Ilya Usorov and Anada Lakra.

From day one, Pillar VC has offered to buy common stock in startups.

Instead of the standard 10-page venture capital term sheet riddled with terms and conditions, our team believed that a far simpler structure where we owned the same security as the founders would align interests, increase trust, and hopefully, enhance the performance of our investments.

Five years since launching Pillar, as we finish investing our second fund and begin deploying our third, we thought it was a good time to reflect on whether buying common stock instead of preferred stock has offered the benefits that we had hoped for.

Preferred stock can misalign incentives between parties

There are many terms and conditions in a preferred term sheet that can misalign investors and founders — for brevity, I’ll highlight just two below. (For more, see the term-sheet grader).

Preference: Preferred stock has a “preference” that gives the investor the right to choose whether they want to get their money back or take their percentage of the total proceeds. In downside scenarios, having an investor take their money back may mean that they are taking a far higher percentage of the proceeds than the founders “thought” they sold.

For example, if an investor buys 25% of a company for $2 million in preferred stock, their break point on this decision will be $8 million, which happens to be the post-money valuation of the round. If the company is sold for less than $8 million, the investor would rather take their $2 million back. If the company is sold for more than that, the investor would choose to take 25% of the total.

The founder thinks that they sold 25% of their company, but that percentage is actually determined by what the company is sold for. Yes, if the company is sold for $8 million or more, they sold 25%, but if the company is sold for, say $4 million, the investors will choose to take their $2 million back, which is 50% of the proceeds. Worse still, if the company is sold for just $2 million, investors will take all of it.

Anti-dilution: This clause means that if an investor buys shares for $10 and the startup raises money in the future at a price point that is lower than $10, the investor’s share price will be recalculated retroactively to a lower price. How is this done? By issuing the investors more shares, which dilutes the rest of the ownership pie, especially the founders and employees. The company is not performing well and the investors are made whole at the expense of the founders. Aligned? Hardly.

Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses joins the data panel at TC Sessions: SaaS. See you there!

As the clock ticks down on TechCrunch’s upcoming SaaS-focused event, we’re excited to announce that Monte Carlo co-founder and CEO Barr Moses will join us. Specifically, the startup exec will be joining our data-focused panel.

What does Monte Carlo do? The startup works in the realm of data observability, making sure that companies’ data ingestion work is bringing in actual information, and not bunk.

When I covered Monte Carlo’s Series B earlier this year, Moses was kind enough to walk me through her company’s market. Which makes her a perfect fit for our data-focused panel.

We’re past the era in which saying “big data” could get you onto a stage. Today’s data gurus are now building lakehouses and going public for their work with hybrid structured-and-unstructured database tech. Meanwhile, Monte Carlo wants to make sure that companies around the world are alerted when some of their incoming data pipelines go off the rails. That way when the corporate world does run data analysis on their collected information, it isn’t skewed by zeroes and other effluent.

It’s a big enough problem, and a hot enough market, that Monte Carlo raised its Series A in September of 2020, and its Series B mere months later in February of 2021. That’s a rapid-fire pace of capital accumulation; investors are betting that Moses and her team are onto something pretty big. Notably, TechCrunch also published an article the other month that included an interview with her cofounder, Yotam Hadass.

Moses will join other tech folks at the event, including Javier Soltero, Google’s head of Workspace. Who else is coming? Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, UiPath’s Daniel Dines, Puppet’s Abby Kearns, and investors Casey Aylward and Sarah Guo, among others. It’s going to be nerdy and kickass.

Register today with a $75 early-bird ticket and save $100 before tickets go up. TC Sessions: SaaS takes place on October 27 and will feature chats with the leading minds in SaaS, networking and startup demos.

The Exchange is on a trip around the world, poking our heads into various startup markets to better understand how different geographies are faring during a historic boom in venture capital activity. Globally, the venture capital world is afire, pushing record sums into upstart technology companies. But the capital is not flowing evenly.

For example, the explosion in capital raised by U.S. startups this year is contrasted by a modestly cooling Chinese venture capital scene. But apart from China, most key startup countries and regions are seeing strong investor interest. The continent of Africa is no exception.

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Early data indicates that Africa is set to trounce historical records in terms of venture capital raised in the year and that the first half of 2021 saw roughly twice the funds raised by African startups as was recorded in the first half of 2020. Startups across Africa have never had more access to capital than they do right now.

But big numbers can be distorting. A few outsized rounds can make an overall investment picture appear rosier than it may actually be for startups on the ground. And to fully understand a startup market’s capital access, we’ll want to better understand the stages where capital is flowing quickly and the points of startup life where it’s more of a trickle.

To that end, The Exchange collated a number of data sources concerning Africa’s Q2 2021 and H1 2021 venture capital performance and collected notes on the results from Dario Giuliani of Briter Bridges, a business data provider focused on Africa, and Julio Dibwe Mupemba of Toumaï Capital to expand our understanding of the continent.

Let’s figure out which startup stages have the easiest and hardest capital access, whether Africa remains underfunded, understand changing diversity in founder funding, and just what’s up with impressive fintech venture totals in recent quarters.

A 2021 comeback

After a somewhat difficult 2020, venture capital flowing into African startups is back on the rise, with reports indicating that investments raised in the first half of 2021 totaled more than $1 billion, albeit with small variations – data discrepancies are a recurring issue when it comes to VC data. There are structural reasons for slightly divergent numbers that have not completely disappeared, but our different sources still concur on the general trend and ballpark results.

For instance, the Africa-focused Substack newsletter The Big Deal reported a $1.14 billion H1 2021 total for deals above $1 million, and $1.19 billion when including deals in the $100,000 to $1 million range. Those numbers coincide with Briter Bridges’ own count of $1.2 billion in disclosed funding between January and June 2021, and with a $1.03 billion estimate from the Global Private Capital Association (GPCA). These figures are also in line with 2021 predictions from tech accelerator AfricArena, which in a report earlier this year estimated that “investment into [African] tech startups will be between $2.25 and $2.8 billion, making it the best year in the history of tech investment on the continent.”

Haven’t you heard that Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app? Today, Instagram announced that users can now upload 60-second videos on Reels, the platform’s TikTok competitor.

This update also adds functionality for a captions sticker on Reels, which transcribes audio to text. Instagram previously teased this sticker for Reels when they added it to Stories, making the platform more accessible for Deaf or hard of hearing users, as well as people who want to use the app without sound. Right now, the caption sticker is only available in a handful of English-speaking countries, but Instagram says they plan to expand to additional countries and languages soon. TikTok already has a similar feature.

Previously, Instagram only supported Reels of up to 30 seconds, while TikTok recently made it possible for users to create videos up to three minutes long. Still, the ability to post 60-second reels is especially useful for creators who want to re-post their existing content from TikTok or other competitor apps to grow their following across multiple platforms. More creators are making a living on social media than ever, but with so many platforms available to them (even Pinterest is investing in short-form video), it’s smart to cross-post content. So, this feature benefits Instagram creators who also have a following on TikTok, but it makes sense for the platform itself as well — the more eyes on Reels, the better. Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t promote content with a TikTok watermark, but savvy users have figured out how to recycle their videos without it.

Currently, YouTube Shorts and Snapchat’s Spotlight also support videos of up to 60 seconds. In May, YouTube Shorts launched a $100 million creator fund to distribute among top Shorts creators over the course of 2021 and 2022; Snapchat distributed $1 million per day to viral Spotlight creators between its launch at the end of November through the end of 2020. Facebook and Instagram have also committed to investing in digital creators.

To access this feature, navigate to create a new Reel, then press the down button on the left side of the screen to reveal the menu. Tap “length” to toggle among options to create a 15-second, 30-second, or 60-second Reel. Not all creators have access to 60-second Reels just yet, but it should roll out to all users soon.

Shopify has made it possible for eligible sellers to sell NFTs (non-fungible tokens) via its platform, which opens up a whole new world for e-commerce merchants.

On Monday, the NBA’s Chicago Bulls launched its first-ever NFTs –– including digital artwork of NBA championship rings –– by launching an online store on Shopify. Instead of having to go to an NFT marketplace, Bulls fans can now purchase the digital art directly with the team’s online store using a credit or debit card. In its first day of making them available, the NBA team sold out of the NFTs within just 90 seconds, according to Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s VP of merchant services.

“You could buy NFTs on credit cards before, but honestly the NFT buying experience outside Shopify isn’t awesome for anyone right now,” he told TechCrunch “That’s why we decided to do this work. Merchants and buyers shouldn’t have to take a course in crypto to buy things they care about.”

It’s also about giving consumers more options to buy NFTs – especially those who are not well-versed in cryptocurrency.

By making it possible for merchants to sell NFTs directly through their Shopify storefronts, the company says it’s creating access for merchants who want to sell NFTs. They will eventually be able to choose which blockchain they’d like to sell on based on their products and customer base since Shopify supports multiple blockchains, Nejatian said.

“By contrast, if merchants want to sell on an NFT marketplace, they need to choose based on the blockchain supported by that marketplace,” he added.

The Chicago Bulls selected the Flow blockchain for their NFTs, for example. But overall, Shopify merchants can today choose from Flow and Ethereum, but soon “will have more choice with other blockchains on Shopify,” according to Nejatian.

The move was also driven by demand from merchants asking for the ability to sell NFTs and the desire to give creators and artists another forum to grow professionally.

“Many creators are already seeing the value of selling NFTs to their fans, but we’re removing some of the friction for themselves and their buyers, allowing them to better monetize their work and their connection to their audience,” he added. “We’re opening up a world where their fans feel meaningful connection to their brands, and where NFTs just increasingly become part of how we buy and sell online.”

Following last fall’s debut of Google TV, the new user interface for Chromecast devices, Google is today giving its Google TV companion app for Android a makeover. The updated version of the mobile app for Google TV includes an updated user interface, expanded set recommendations, and more TV and movies to watch.

The app in earlier days was known as “Google Play Movies & TV” (whew!) but rebranded to just “Google TV” alongside the changes that rolled out to Chromecast in September. Here, users can browse over 700,000 movie and TV episodes from across top streaming apps, find new things to watch, and rent or purchase movies and shows, including new releases.

Now, Google is updating the app’s look-and-feel with new 16:9 widescreen movie and show posters which it says will give the app a more “cinematic” look.

Image Credits: Google

In addition, it’s adding the Rotten Tomatoes scores directly under each poster to help users make decisions about what they want to watch next. You can also visit a movie or TV show’s details page and mark it as “watched” in order to improve the app’s recommendations. This will allow Google TV to make further recommendations based on your watch history, and could be helpful if you’re not a regular app user to start tailoring its suggestions to your interests. However, the feature won’t help you keep up with your progress in a show, as the Reelgood or TV Time apps allow for, as you can’t mark individual episodes as watched, only entire series.

The recommendations are another feature that’s been improved with the latest release to be more aligned with what you’d see with the TV experience. In addition to featuring more rows of personalized suggestions to browse through, the app’s recommendation system will now be based on what you’ve watched in the past, your interests from your Google account, and trending and popular content in your region. Trending recommendations are sourced from what’s popular or trending across Google products, what’s being mentioned across the web, as well as hand-picked selections from human editors. For instance, you could see recommendations that suggest “summer blockbusters,” or other timely suggestions.

Users will also now see new movie and how recommendations as new content is released from services they subscribe to.

Image Credits: Google

The app has also expanded its content lineup by adding new providers like Discovery+, Viki, Cartoon Network, PBS Kids, and Boomerang, as well as on-demand content from live TV services, including of course, YouTube TV, as well as Philo and fuboTV. These providers were previously unavailable for search and discovery inside the mobile app, following the platform update in the fall.

Google said during its I/O Developer conference in May that the Android TV OS had reached an install base of 80 million monthly active devices, but it didn’t break down how many consumers streamed on through the Roku and Fire TV rival, Google TV for Chromecast, which is powered by Android TV OS under-the-hood. Instead, Google combined that figure with the numerous Android TV OS-powered devices on the market that include those offered by other streaming device brand partners and TV service providers — meaning the number included operator-tier and set-top boxes, too, which is a different type of market.

The company said the new features are available now on the Google TV Android app in the U.S. but couldn’t offer a timeline for other platforms or an international expansion.

It’s hard to keep up with the Olympics any year, let alone when they’re taking place in a time zone that’s 13 hours ahead of you, if you’re on the East Coast. Yesterday, Apple News announced a collaboration with NBCUniversal (the U.S. broadcast rights holder for the Olympics) to develop exclusive daily recaps and audio briefings, event schedules, and medal counts to help sports fans keep tabs on the games.

NBC Sports is the go-to app for streaming any Olympic event, but it’s a bit buggy. To their credit, streaming so many different feeds at once is hard to pull off, the app can be tricky to navigate. Even though the app has an impressive catalog of every event, there’s no easy way to catch up with all the triumphs and defeats that took place while we were asleep across the world. So, this collaboration with Apple News fills a necessary void in NBC’s existing offerings.

Image Credits: Apple News (Screenshots by TechCrunch)

One of the most useful features is the News app’s user-friendly schedule of every single Olympic event by sport, which can set calendar reminders for the events you can’t miss (… but, you might also need to set your alarm for certain events, like the Women’s Gymnastics All-Around Final, which starts at 6:50 AM on Thursday — don’t worry, for these highly anticipated events, there’ll be primetime coverage, too). NBC Sports sends push notification reminders for sports that you choose, but a pre-set calendar event might be more useful for planning your evening (or early morning) Olympics viewing.

Of course, this partnership allows Apple to promote Apple Podcasts, which has more competition than ever as Spotify continues to grow, and Facebook adds support for podcasts. NBC is pushing its Olympics podcasts like The Podium and On Her Turf pretty hard — The Podium often appears as a banner ad during live coverage on the web. Even though these shows aren’t exclusive to Apple, the partnership with NBC can only help drive traffic to their podcast platform.

Three digits, so little time.

Numbers can take on profound cultural significance, but few numbers have quite the resonance as 911, the emergency number for the United States. Few want to dial it, but when they must, it works — every single time. One industry trade association estimates that 240 million 911 phone calls are made every year, ranging from the quotidian loud dog to the exceptional terrorist attack.

While it may be a singular number, 911 calls are directed to roughly 5,700 public safety answering points (PSAPs) across the country, all with independent operations, variegated equipment, disparate software, multifarious organizational structures, and vast inequalities of staffing and resources.

“Every 911 center is very different and they are as diverse and unique as the communities that they serve,” Karin Marquez, who we will meet later, put it. You have massive urban centers with dozens of staffers and the best equipment, and “you have agencies in rural America that have one person working 24/7 and they’re there to answer three calls a day.”

These organizations face a tough challenge: Transitioning their systems to incorporate information from billions of new consumer devices into the heart of 911 response. Location from mobile GPS, medical information from health profiles, video footage from cameras — all of this could be useful when police, firefighters and paramedics arrive on a scene. But how do you connect hundreds of tech companies to a myriad of 911 technology providers?

Over the last eight years, RapidSOS has become the go-to solution for addressing this problem. With more than $190 million raised, including an $85 million round this past February, RapidSOS now covers nearly 5,000 PSAPs and processes more than 150 million emergencies every year, and it’s technology is almost certainly integrated into the smartphone you’re carrying and many of the devices you have lying around (the company counts about 350 million connected devices with its software).

Yet, like many emergencies, the company’s story is one of reverses, misdirections and urgency as its founders worked to find a model to jump-start 911 response. RapidSOS may well be the only startup to pivot from a consumer app to a govtech/enterprise hybrid, and it has the most extensive directory of partnerships and integration relationships of any startup I have ever seen. Now, as it expands to Mexico, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, this startup with its roots in a rural farm in Indiana, is redefining emergency response globally for the 21st Century.

The lead writer of this EC-1 is Danny Crichton. In addition to being the EC-1 series editor, managing editor at TechCrunch, and regularly talking about himself in the third person, Danny has been writing about disaster tech and first covered RapidSOS back in 2015 prior to its public launch. The lead editor for this story was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, and illustrations were drawn by Nigel Sussman.

RapidSOS had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Crichton has no financial ties to RapidSOS, and his ethics disclosure statement is available here.

The RapidSOS EC-1 comprises four articles numbering 12,400 words and a reading time of 50 minutes. Here are the topics we’ll be dialing into:

• Part 1: Origin story “Smoking pizza ovens and pilfered dollar bills, or the early story of RapidSOS” (2,700 words/11 minutes) — explores the early years of RapidSOS and the company’s pivot from consumer app to govtech and integrated services for technology and device companies.
• Part 2: Product and business “RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design” (3,700 words/15 minutes) —analyzes how RapidSOS made its pivot and why its current business model has performed so well.
• Part 3: Partnerships “How RapidSOS used creative tactics to build partnerships and a BD engine at scale” (4,000 words/16 minutes) —investigates how RapidSOS has built up so many dozens of corporate and individual partnerships in its quest to transform 911.
• Part 4: Next-generation 911 “After a decade, Congress might finally bring 911 into the internet age” (2,000 words/8 minutes) —looks at the future of 911 after a decade of stagnation and limited funding from Capitol Hill as well as the future prospects of RapidSOS.

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

The irony of 911 is that it’s a number that everyone knows (at least in the United States), and yet, no one really thinks about it. Few of us will dial 911 more than a handful of times in our lives, and even when we do, we will meet the police officers and paramedics who respond, never the 911 call taker who handled the dispatch. These systems and the people behind them garner meager attention, whether from Congress, state legislatures, the public or anyone else outside the emergency response community.

Except, that is, for Michael Martin.

He, along with Nick Horelik and Matt Bozik very early on, became fascinated by the complexity and lack of innovation in the sector. “Uber had just come out. I could press a button and get a car. Why can’t I just press a button and get an ambulance? And then it sparks this curiosity,” Martin said. He sought knowledge, but for such a critical system, information was sparse. “The Wikipedia article on George Clooney is way longer than the one on 911,” he noted.

So began a nearly decade-long journey with RapidSOS that would see Martin and his team first attempt to build a consumer-safety app called Haven before pivoting exclusively to helping dozens of tech companies, including Apple and Google and device companies like SiriusXM, connect to a myriad of 911 software vendors. Along the way, they experienced the full vagaries of startup life, frenetically pivoting from product to product as they tried to get consumers to even care about emergencies.

It wasn’t easy, and it took years before the company finally hit its stride. But RapidSOS’s story is one of a mission, a community, a team and a dream that every emergency should have the best chance to be resolved as positively as possible.

Indiana: The callroads of America

Martin grew up outside the rural town of Rockport, Indiana, population about 2,500 today. His mother was the local doctor, and he and his brother habituated to the openness and ennui of rural farming life. “We grew up on 35 acres of land; we had an enormous garden and a little hobby orchard and stuff like that,” he said. “We had ‘Drive-Your-Tractor-To-School Day.'”