Author: azeeadmin

The Green New Deal has landed.

Proposed by the rising star of the Democratic Party, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senator Edward Markey, a longtime advocate for decarbonization in both the House and the Senate, the sweeping proposal is a grand vision for what a progressive push to rebuild American institutions for the 21st century looks like. But it’s a plan that’s long on promise and short on details.

And it’s unlikely to gain much traction in Washington.

The proposal is notable for the support it has received in the Democratic party, particularly in the Party’s progressive wing, and could be a massive boost to a number of startup technology companies that are looking for government support as they look to commercialize their technologies.

Recognizing the centrality of climate change to the disasters that have pounded the U.S. in the past five years, and the role the bill declares “the United States must take a leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation.”

That economic transformation touches on many areas where startup technology companies are already working to develop solutions — meaning the Green New Deal could likely result in huge gains for companies developing technologies for everything from transportation, finance, new agriculture, energy generation and efficiency, food production and even housing and construction.

In part, it’s a sign of the breadth and depth of innovation in America and the ambitions of venture investors who now believe that private industry can disrupt everything. What will be interesting is watching how these ambitions align with the policy and priorities of a movement that would like to see government take back some of the ground it has lost to private industry.

As the bill states:

“… it is the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal— (A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition 4 for all communities and workers; (B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic 6 security for all people of the United States; (C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century; (D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come — (i) clean air and water; (ii) climate and community resiliency; (iii) healthy food; (iv) access to nature; and (v) a sustainable environment; and (E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”)”

To achieve these lofty goals, the bill’s authors, and the party seem to be hitching their wagon to a load of policy initiatives that are only possible through technological innovation.

Improving climate resiliency, infrastructure upgrades, water purification and desalination; zero-emission energy sources; clean manufacturing; sustainable farming; vehicle electrification; high-speed rail development; waste cleanup and removal are all dependent on technology being commercialized by startups.

At the same time, the the bill would require greater federal oversight to ensure that the work these startups are doing includes and accounts for communities that have been marginalized or left behind by the progress these technologies enables.

It’s a fine line that the Democrats are offering and little bottom-line details on how all of this would get funded.

Right now, the policy is a line in the sand — and one that could shape policymaking in the next two years — but only if Democratic House leadership comes on board.

With many representatives coming from swing districts where decarbonization policies and the labor and social justice goals that are attached to them, the Green New Deal may have a hard time event getting through the house. And with a Republican Senate — the bill seems dead on arrival.

But what isn’t up for debate — at least among scientists — is the scale of the problem and the immediate threat that climate change poses.

There’s already been nearly $500 billion in damages that scientists directly attribute to climatological changes that humans have wrought on the planet. The risks for future catastrophes that will cost billions of dollars more and risks untold numbers of lives are only increasing.

If the bill only serves as a conversation starter — and moves policy along toward modest goals like a price on carbon to encourage the acceleration of carbon neutral or carbon-reducing technologies that would be a win.. for the country, and for the investors whose technologies are likely to be called upon to provide solutions.

Green New Deal Resolution by on Scribd

Airbnb made it easier for travelers to find a place to crash. Now it wants to make it easier for them to get around.

The $31 billion home-sharing giant has hired Fred Reid as its first-ever global head of transportation. Reid served as the founding chief executive officer of Virgin America from 2004 to 2007 after a three-year stint as the president of Delta Airlines. Most recently, Reid was president of the Cora Aircraft Program, a division of Kitty Hawk focused on the development of an autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The hire suggests Airbnb has broad ambitions to further disrupt the travel and hospitality industry and given the 500 million guest arrivals to Airbnb listings the company says it will have recorded by the first quarter of 2019, integrating transportation services to better serve customers is a no-brainer.

Just over two months out, and our third TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event is shaping up to be another good one. We’ve already announced Anca Dragan, Alexei Efros, Hany Farid, Melonee Wise, Peter Barrett and Rana el Kaliouby. We’ve got some great demos planned for the event, as well — you can still get in on that by filling out our survey here.

Meantime, we’ve got a pair of new names to announce for the April 18th event, both representing major players in the drone category. Arnaud Thiercelin and Laura Major will both be returning to our stage after taking part in a successful drone panel at the last Disrupt.

As the Head of U.S. R&D at DJI, Arnaud Thiercelin helps lead developer technologies and enterprise solutions for the world’s largest drone manufacturer. Prior to joining DJI, Thiercelin lead iOS development at finance company Enova International and cofounded computer software company, Flying Pig.

Laura Major is the CTO of Aria Insights, a newly launched startup dedicated to using AI to analyze drone data collection. Aria represents a new focus for tethered drone company Cyphy Works, where Major also served as CTO. Prior to this, she worked as division leader at not-for-profit research and development defense and space company, Draper. 

Early Bird tickets are on sale now for $249. That’s $100 savings before prices go up. Book your tickets here. Students can save 90% on tickets when you book here.

Illumio has raised $65 million in its latest round of funding led by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the security startup has confirmed.

The news comes just weeks after the company was expected to announce a $50 million Series E round, but was delayed after a late addition pushed the figure up.

The datacenter monitoring and cloud security company focuses on network segmentation. By isolating critical applications and datacenters from the rest of the network, Illumio makes data leaks and breaches far more difficult to spread. That containment stops hackers from pivoting and navigating through a network in an “Equifax-style” attack.

In just six years, the company has exploded in growth, running through several rounds of funding accumulating over $330 million to date, amassing huge clients like BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, Oracle NetSuite, and Salesforce. And, the funding lands just a few months after the company obtained FIPS 140-2 certification, allowing it to run on federal government networks of low classification, opening the company up to another burgeoning market.

“With this latest round of funding, we’re investing more in all part of the business to meet market demand and continue to enable our customers to prevent the spread of breaches in their global infrastructures,” said Andrew Rubin, Illumio’s chief executive.

Specifically, the company said the $65 million will go across its entire business to grow into Europe, the Middle East and Africa — where its headcount has increased by more than fourfold; as well as Asia, and the U.S. where its headquarters is.

Illumio neither said now nor previously what its valuation is. At its last Series D round of $125 million in mid-2017, the company was said to be worth upwards of $1 billion. For its part, Illumio self-stylizes as a startup unicorn but wouldn’t comment further when pressed.

Along with its funding news, Illumio added that it’s hired Anup Singh as chief financial officer to focus on the company’s continued growth, and it’s also appointed Jonathan Reiber, a former Pentagon chief strategy officer for cyber policy as Illumio’s new head of cybersecurity strategy. And, angel investor John Hinshaw was appointed to the company’s board.

After five rounds of funding, Illumio is on a list of anticipated IPOs for later this year. When asked on its plans, the company didn’t comment.

Tony Haile, who previously led analytics company Chartbeat, is trying to rethink the business model for news at his new startup Scroll. Now he’s adding aggregation and curation to the mix with the acquisition of Nuzzel.

Scroll is still an invite-only product, but Haile explained the idea succinctly: “We deliver this amazing, clean, ad-free experience, and we do it for a low monthly price.”

In other words, after you subscribe and download Scroll, anytime you load up one of its partner sites (including USA Today, BuzzFeed and Vox), you should get an ad-free experience, which should work regardless of whether you’re accessing the site directly from your desktop or mobile browser, or from social media. In exchange, the publishers share the subscription revenue.

Nuzzel, meanwhile, was founded by Jonathan Abrams (who previously founded Friendster), and its core product allows you to see the stories that are most-shared by the people you follow on social media.

Haile said that by acquiring Nuzzel, Scroll can also start experimenting with different models for news curation — which is particularly important because if “we have just two algorithms determining who gets traffic and who doesn’t, then that’s not a healthy web ecosystem.”

“It’s really hard to [build] a scalable business as an amazing curation service,” he added. With Nuzzel, he hopes to “start finding ways in which we can build in that value and drive a new model for our user experience services.”

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 01: Tony Haile speaks onstage at the Buyer Beware! panel during AWXI on October 1, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXI)

That doesn’t mean existing Nuzzel users shouldn’t expect any dramatic changes to either the app or the newsletters — Haile said they will continue to operate as separate products, and his team is taking the approach of “first do not harm.”

However, Scroll does plan to remove any advertising from the newsletters, and the engineering team behind the Nuzzel Media Intelligence productwill be spinning that out as a separate company.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Nuzzel had raised $5.1 million from investors including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Scroll, meanwhile, has raised a total of $10 million.

Haile said there won’t be anyone from the Nuzzel team joining Scroll in a full-time capacity, though some of them may remain involved as contractors. Abrams, meanwhile, told me via email that he and Nuzzel COO Kent Lindstrom are starting a new, yet-to-be-announced company.

“I think current Nuzzel users should see this as great news, since Scroll wants to make sure that Nuzzel’s services continue to operate,” Abrams said. “As you know, a lot of other news app and news aggregation startups were unfortunately shutdown between 2015 and 2018, so like I said, this is good news for Nuzzel users.”

WeWork is diving more aggressively into software sales.

Just six months after spending $100 million in cash on Teem, a Salt Lake City-based office management startup, the company has acquired Euclid, a data platform that tracks the identity and behavior of people in the physical world.

WeWork isn’t saying what it’s paying for the nine-year-old, Bay Area-based company, which raised $43.6 million over the years and whose brand will be put to rest. But the deal is clearly an effort to move WeWork further away from merely selling memberships to its coworking spaces – –  a risky business model in a sour economy — and instead also become a software-as-a-service provider.

So how will WeWork put Euclid’s technology to work, along with its 24 employees? According to WeWork’s chief product officer, Shiva Rajaraman, the platform and its team will become integrated into what WeWork is calling, “workplace insights,” a software analytics package that WeWork plans to sell to companies that aren’t renting WeWork space but want to WeWork-ify their own offices.

The idea is to bundle Teem’s technology, which lets customers know when a conference room is being booked (and how often it is booked), with Euclid’s technology, which can let that same customer know how many people showed up to the meeting.

“We’re moving toward a Google analytics for space and making sure rooms are used the right way,” says Rajaraman, who uses event planning as one example. “A lot of companies do happy hours on Thursdays, but they might learn that more people show up to an afternoon tea time or other type of session that changes participation. Companies can run tests in their own space.”

While it’s easy to understand why WeWork wants to sell booking software combined with WiFi-based analytics to monitor the movement of people inside a building, the question begged is whether employees will feel comfortable  —  or they’ll feel surveilled.

Asked if individuals can be identified through the technology that WeWork is buying in Euclid, Rajaraman does not say no, stressing instead that the focus is on clustered information. “We’re committed to respecting the privacy of our members and these employees,” he tells us. “We’re looking at the aggregate level to understand how space is being used. We’re less interested in the individual. If I throw a large party, I’m interested in knowing why 40 people showed up versus 100; it’s not as interesting to see who individually showed up.”

As if to underscore his point, Rajaraman says that WeWork itself if testing out the technology before it begins selling it. “Internally, we’d like to understand how enterprises will use it, and if we look at our larger campuses, we have teams right now in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco that are all growing fast and have their own concerns about space. if we can solve our own problems, we can help others figure out theirs.”

Industry observers have long wondered whether WeWork an overvalued real estate company or else a misunderstood full-stack business. Investors don’t seem so certain, either. To wit, SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund had reportedly discussed a potential $16 billion additional investment in WeWork late last year after buying up an earlier stake in the company.  But the Vision Fund’s anchor investors, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co,. were said to push back as both are already heavily invested in real estate.

In the end, SoftBank agreed to invest another $2 billion in WeWork at a post-money valuation of $47 billion. It has invested $10 billion in the company altogether.

The funding may have given WeWork more runway. Still, its biggest challenge may ultimately be convincing public market investors that it’s a data-driven company whose growing spate of offerings make it a smart bet over time, despite its already lofty valuation.

In addition to Teem and to Euclid —  which we’d guess didn’t cost an arm and a leg (it raised its last round three years ago) —  WeWork has made 10 other acquisitions in recent years. One of these was Flatiron School, a coding education platform that it picked up in 2017. Another is MeetUp, a site for organizing group trips and events for which WeWork paid a reported $200 million in 2017.

Its bets are spread out by design, and the company looks to continue moving in that direction. Indeed, just last month, WeWork rebranded as The We Company, with cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann explaining in a prepared statement that The We Co. is now a holding company for WeWork, its co-working arm; WeLive, which is a co-living offshoot that rents furnished apartments on a monthly basis; and WeGrow, which is its own elementary school in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. (Its focus is on “conscious entrepreneurship.”)

WeWork remains the big money-maker for the company. According to a spokesperson, WeWork now has more than 400,000 members at 425 locations in 100 cities across 27 countries. And enterprises like Facebook and Microsoft now make up 30 percent of WeWork’s membership base.

Yet the fastest-growing part of WeWork’s business, it says, are those customers outside of WeWork spaces that want some of its mojo and are willing to pay for it. If things go as planned, this newest acquisition will make that offering even more compelling.

Christopher Gavigan, sitting in a crisp white shirt inside a small TechCrunch conference room, radiates energy, even in a late-day interview just hours before he’s scheduled to fly home from San Francisco to L.A.

We’re meeting to talk about Prima, a new startup that Gavigan began developing seven months ago with two cofounders. One of them is a former beauty and marketing executive, Jessica Assaf, who was until recently running a company called Cannabis Feminist to sell marijuana wellness products at her L.A. home. The other is Laurel Angelica Myers, who’d spent six years working alongside Gavigan at his last startup, The Honest Company, the now eight-year-old brand that sells nontoxic personal care and household products at Target, Whole Foods, Nordstrom and many other places.

Gavigan is still Honest’s “chief purpose officer” and its most effective evangelist, one quickly gathers. But he’s gotten excited in recent months about a new opportunity that many others are beginning to chase, too: the market for products made with cannabinoids of CBD, a compound that can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants and which has taken off since industrial hemp cultivation was made legal in the United States last year.

Prima, based in Southern California, is creating a spate of products around hemp cannabinoids that Gavigan manages to make sound magical. He talks of taking the “best organically grown hemp out of Oregon” and using a “very gentle, slow extraction process” to get it into an oil and distillate form that it will then use to create consumer products, starting with “emerging beauty and pain management” for the skin and a “luxurious facial oil,” noting that a “lot of these cannabinoids do a great job with moisture retention and irritation and redness reduction.”

Prima also plans to introduce ingestible products, including a soft gel and mix-in powdered blends that can be used to pour into coffee or tea or water. One will be focused on immunity, another on sleep, another on energy.

None of these products is available for sale today, it’s worth noting. Prima isn’t even sure yet of its packaging, though it sounds like a thicker card stock will be involved.

Still, Gavigan paints a sufficiently compelling picture that the company – – which plans to sell directly to consumers via a content-rich site designed to educate while it persuades —  has already raised roughly $3.3 million in seed funding. Lerer Hippeau led the round, with participation from Greycroft and other (undisclosed) private and institutional investors.

It’s easy to understand why they are already buying in. Broadly speaking, Prima has a good story as a science-driven plant wellness company that’s championing the strong therapeutic potential of hemp CBD, even if the jury is still out on whether that potential is real or imagined. Given that there is no go-to brand quite yet, it’s timing actually looks impeccable on this front.

Prima is also registered as a public benefit corporation, which means in addition to its corporate goal of maximizing profit for shareholders, its charter commits the company to spending some of its profits or resources (or both) in support of a specific public benefit. In Prima’s case, that will be invested in cannabis-related research initiatives. Consumers might like this, too.

Yet Gavigan himself may be the company’s best weapon. Having spent much of his career selling natural and “green” products, he understands toxic and questionable ingredients. He also says he loves “very nascent, stigmatized markets” and is well aware of the standards that users expect of them, particularly when the end product is more costly. The Honest Company has fought numerous battles over the years, owing to its marketing, getting sued over its sunscreen (which it later reformulated), its baby formula (the company fought back and a court ruled in its favor), and its laundry detergent and dish soap (it settled a class action lawsuit that claimed it misled buyers about their ingredients) .

He also knows how to talk to consumers looking to make better choices on behalf of themselves.

The bigger challenge right now for Prima, along with other CBD brands, might simply be convincing regulators that their products are, at a minimum, safe to use. Right now, that’s no small feat.

In New York City, health departments are stopping restaurants from serving CBD-laced foods to their customers. The L.A. County Department of Health similarly said it would ding restaurants for using CBD in their food and drink offerings. As a new story in The Atlantic notes, while CBD can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants, the FDA has said it will treat CBD the same no matter which plant it comes from, which is to say, it considers both illegal as additives in consumer food products.

Gavigan knows well of this uphill battle, though is he also convinced of the promise of CBD, spending 20 minutes with this reporter, outlining the research he has pored over and that suggests promise in numerous areas, including in treating epilepsy. (Last year, the FDA approved an oral CBD drug called Epidiolex for the treatment of seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy.)

He points to researchers at Mount Sinai and UCLA and UC Irvine among other places who are currently studying cannabinoids for pain, inflammation, stress, anxiety, and insomnia.

Without standards, it could be difficult for any brand to move forward in a meaningful way. In fact, a California-based attorney with whom The Atlantic spoke, tells the outlet that the current lack of standardization is what’s making regulatory agencies so nervous about CBD. “If you go buy a CBD beverage and it’s not specially packaged—it just looks like another coffee or whatever—someone might take a sip who doesn’t intend to,” he says.

Still, creams and oils are still on the table while they figure it out. And with the CBD market expected to grow to $22 billion by 2022 — outpacing marijuana — it’s looking smart for Prima and other brands that are barreling forward, hoping theirs is the name that will stick.

Pictured above, left to right: Laurel Myers, Christopher Gavigan, and Jessica Assaf

Substack started out by providing individual writers and publishers with a set of tools enabling them to charge a subscription fee for their newsletters. Now it’s giving them the ability to do the same thing with podcasts.

In fact, Morgan Creek Digital Assets founder Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is already using the platform to introduce a daily podcast to complement his existing, crypto-focused Off the Chain newsletter.

“We’ve always thought the magic of what Substack is doing is the fact that we’re disintermediating the people creating stuff and the people who are consuming it — you are the brand they’re paying for,” Substack CEO Chris Best told me. “That whole model works incredibly well for newsletters, and to us, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be a great model for podcast content.”

Substack’s podcasting capabilities will allow publishers to either offer a podcast-specific subscription — or, like Pompliano, to include it as part of a broader package with their newsletter subscription. The podcast itself will be distributed through an audio player that can be embedded in both newsletters and on the web.

A web-based audio player might seem like a clunky way to listen to podcasts, but Substack’s player (which you can try out here) works pretty smoothly and includes features like the ability to jump backward and forward 30 seconds, and to play podcasts at various speeds.

Best added that he’s also open to the idea of creating a private, subscriber-only feed that can be accessed by podcast apps.

“We’re going to put it out there and see what people want,” he said. But he argued that the “existing feed-based podcast system” is “not living up to its potential” when it comes to enabling podcasters to make money from subscriptions.

We spoke shortly after Spotify announced that it was acquiring podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor, which Best said illustrates the importance of a tool like Substack, because it’s focused on “empowering individuals”: “We let people get paid directly by people, rather than aggregated into a wider system.”

I also brought up the patronage model for supporting content creators enabled by Patreon (which is currently how I support one of my favorite podcasts).

“We definitely think the world is big enough for both of those things,” Best replied. While he expressed admiration for the Patreon model, he argued, “There’s also room for another kind of thing, where you say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this professionally, it’s my job, I do a good job with it and you should pay for it.'”

And Best doesn’t intend to stop with newsletters and podcasts. There are plans to support other media formats, although the exact timing will depend on Substack’s customers.

“We are hyper-focused on serving the authors that we’re working with,” he said. “The timing tends to depend on when we find people that want to do it. Why we did the podcast thing now [comes from] Pomp wanting to do it now.”

The tech industry has been called on to share data with public sector researchers so the mental health and psychosocial impacts of their service on vulnerable users can be better understood, and also to contribute to funding the necessary independent research over the next ten years.

The UK’s chief medical officers have made the call in a document setting out advice and guidance for the government about children’s and young people’s screen use. They have also called for the industry to agree a code of conduct around the issue.

Concerns have been growing in the UK about the mental health impacts of digital technologies on minors and vulnerable young people.

Last year the government committed to legislate on social media and safety. It’s due to publish a white paper setting out the detail of its plans before the end of the winter, and there have been calls for platforms to be regulated as publishers by placing a legal duty of care on them to protect non-adult users from harm. Though it’s not yet clear whether the government intends to go that far.

“The technology industry must share data they hold in an anonymised form with recognised and registered public sector researchers for ethically agreed research, in order to improve our scientific evidence base and understanding,” the chief medical officers write now.

After reviewing the existing evidence the CMOs say they were unable to establish a clear link between screen-based activities and mental health problems.

“Scientific research is currently insufficiently conclusive to support UK CMO evidence-based guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use or online activities (such as social media use),” they note, hence calling for platforms to support further academic research into public health issues.

Last week the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee made a similar call for high quality anonymized data to be provided to further public interest research into the impacts of social media technologies.

We asked Facebook-owned Instagram whether it will agree to provide data to public sector mental health and wellbeing researchers earlier this week. But at the time of writing we’re still waiting for a response. We’ve also reached out to Facebook for a reaction to the CMOs’ recommendations.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson said:

We want the time young people spend online to be meaningful and, above all, safe. We welcome this valuable piece of work and agree wholeheartedly with the Chief Medical Officers on the need for industry to work closely together with government and wider society to ensure young people are given the right guidance to help them make the most of the internet while staying safe.

Instagram’s boss, Adam Mosseri, is meeting with the UK health secretary today to discuss concerns about underage users being exposed to disturbing content on the social media platform.

The meeting follows public outrage over the suicide of a schoolgirl whose family said she had been exposed to Instagram accounts that shared self-harm imagery, including some accounts they said actively encouraged suicide. Ahead of the meeting Instagram announced some policy tweaks — saying it would no longer recommend self-harm content to users, and would start to screen sensitive imagery, requiring users click to view it.

In the guidance document the CMOs write that they support the government’s move to legislate “to set clear expectations of the technology industry”. They also urge the technology industry to establish a voluntary code of conduct to address how they safeguard children and young people using their platforms, in consultation with civil society and independent experts.

Areas that the CMOs flag for possible inclusion in such a code include “clear terms of use that children can understand”, as well as active enforcement of their own T&Cs — and “effective age verification” (they suggest working with the government on that).

They also suggest platforms include commitments to “remove addictive capabilities” from the UX design of their services, criticism so-called “persuasive” design.

They also suggest platforms commit to ensure “appropriate age specific adverts only”.

The code should ensure that “no normalisation of harmful behaviour (such as bullying and selfharming) occurs”, they suggest, as well as incorporate ongoing work on safety issues such as bullying and grooming, in their view.

In advice to parents and carers also included in the document, the CMOs encourage the setting of usage boundaries around devices — saying children should not be allowed to take devices into their bedrooms at bedtime to prevent disruption to sleep.

Parents also encourage screen-free meal time to allow families to “enjoy face-to-face conversation”.

The CMOs also suggest parents and guardians talk to children about device use to encourage sensible social sharing — also pointing out adults should never assume children are happy for their photo to be shared. “When in doubt, don’t upload,” they add.

By now, most of us should be familiar with the concept of the tailored news feed. Right now my Facebook feed (yes, I’m still there, alas) has been messed up because I’ve clicked on too many posts about Brexit, but I digress. My point is that content has long since fallen to the tyranny of tailoring and personalization, and content marketing (that stuff that marketers like pass-off as editorial) is a big business. Making that content so enthralling as to be practically addictive is the aim of this industry, but right now all those poor copywriters have to do a lot of manual heavy lifting, such is their burden.
This is the problem DataSine is trying to address by tailoring content to the reader’s personality. It does this by applying machine learning to behavioral data they hold about that person, whether it be customer profiles or whatever.
The idea is that marketers then make more informed decisions about what content they push out, and thus more time being creative, rather than spending time on writing, tweaking and A/B testing.
DataSine has now raised $5.2 million in a Series A round led by UK-based VC Pentech Ventures and Propel Venture Partners. Other investors include C.Entrepreneurs/Cathay Innovation, Twin Ventures and Sistema_VC. Customers include BNP Paribas and the Tinkoff bank. DataSine claims it has helped achieve uplifts of up to 80% in engagement and 71% in sales.
DataSine’s content personalization platform is called Pomegranate. The company says it provides an AI-powered content editing platform to guide marketers in tailoring a range of content elements, including words and images. The idea is that it will personalize everything from emails and landing pages to call center scripts Pomegranate will launch in March, and it integrates with CRMs like HubSpot and email platforms like MailChimp .
Founder and CEO Igor Volzhanin says he launched DataSine after moving to London to do a PhD in Psychology because he believed “that personality can help companies understand their customers as a whole… and move beyond the traditional focus of click optimization.”
According to Boston Consulting Group, personalization is worth an extra $800 billion in business to the 15% of companies that manage to get it right.
Marc Moens, a partner at Pentech, commented that “DataSine is particularly well-positioned to bring psychology and AI to address contemporary marketing challenges. The idea that digital communications can be tailored for an individual in the age of Big Data is very appealing and addresses the needs of the market.”
The company’s competitors include Meniga, The Signal Open Data Platform, Adapti, Textio, Crobox VisualDNA and Hello Soda). But Volzhanin says their approach differs from most of these in using a single customer profile, collaborative AI and a psychological approach. “We bring together AI and psychology to provide our recommendations. We do a lot of proprietary, cutting edge research to understand what kind of content different people like and use AI to power Pomegranate to provide these recommendations to marketers,” he told me.