Author: azeeadmin

If you follow millennials on Twitter (and god help you), then you know that Anne Helen Petersen’s piece this past weekend “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” struck a deep chord for many.

It’s longform and detailed, but Petersen’s primary thesis is that my generation has been dumped into one of the worst moments for economic and social mobility in recent memory (global financial crisis, etc.), which has led us to massively over-optimize our lives to try to extract any value we can. Baby boomers could work at a big company for thirty years at 40-50 hours a week with stable and increasing pay (with pensions!), while millennials have to simultaneously hold down four gigs and make their Instagrams and LinkedIns look great lest they fail to land their next gig, all while operating under the pressure of horrific levels of student loans.

Nod or shake your head, but I also think Petersen is getting at a much tougher challenge for society, one that I think will be one of the richest areas for investment in the coming years for founders and venture capitalists.

That thesis is around wellness and resilience, but not just of the health/physical variety. It also encompasses the reliability of our products, the level of income we receive each week, whether a storm might knock out our power, and how we read the news. Modern life is complicated and also chaotic, jumping from crisis to crisis we can barely understand. The question then becomes whether there are solutions that can absorb some of that complexity and chaos to simplify and satisfy our lives.

This week, rivers of glistening ink flowed over Lambda School, a Y Combinator alum that is using income share agreements to fund tuition at its schools. ISAs as a financial model are reasonably simple: if you go to a school, you agree to repay that school a fixed percentage of your income over a set period of time (let’s say purely for ease 10% of income for 10 years). Lambda School argues that this provides incentive alignment, because the school wants its graduates to be as successful as possible, while the Twitterati snarks that the startup has invented “taxes.”

First, fuck the snarkers who don’t spend any time learning about new, innovative models for offering services.

That aside, Lambda School is really offering a pathway to a more resilient life. If the economy collapses, student debt today still has to be paid on a fixed schedule, regardless of employment opportunities. Yet Lambda’s take ebbs and flows with the changes in the macroeconomy, offering to absorb the complexity and chaos around us. Want to take a year away from a high-paying job to work at a non-profit? You can, and Lambda adjusts without you even having to make a phone call.

This resilience tech isn’t limited to just education — it touches pretty much every facet of innovation. Just take a look at some startups I have profiled in the past year. Gremlin is using “chaos engineering” to reduce downtime and increase software reliability for web applications. Even is building out a savings model so that anyone can plan for financial independence. Wild Type is manufacturing salmon that can provide more sustainability to our environment and absorb climate change shocks.

There has been an enormous academic debate for more than two decades about the meaning of GDP, and whether there are alternative models worth exploring like Gross National Happiness. There are deep intricacies in that debate, but I would offer you this conclusion: we can wait for top-down permission to make a more resilient society, or we can create bottoms-up solutions that take some of the complexity and chaos out of modern life today. In a world of constant change and disruption, it’s the startups that increase stability that will reap rewards this decade.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new — provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

What’s next & obsessions

After a bit of a hiatus from the holidays and avoiding CES, I am back. Arman and I are still exploring our obsessions from last year, including 5G deployments, China tech geopolitics, next-gen semiconductors, and GPS.

But the new direction we are going to spend some cycles on is this resiliency theme described above. How do we innovate for climate change? How do we handle the increasing complexity of modern life, whether it is educational/informational, financial, or health? What does water security mean, and how is the world going to adapt and innovate to ensure ten billion people have access to safe drinking water?

I love hearing from readers, so if you have thoughts, opinions, articles or books, share them with me: danny@techcrunch.com.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

• The Planet Remade – Oliver Morton takes an imaginative look at geoengineering and its potential to solve climate change. Recommended to me by futurist writer (and reader) Eliot Peper.I read the first two chapters last night, and I enjoyed Morton’s framework around innovation and climate change. He poses two key questions: 1) should we take serious action on climate change, and 2) do you believe that taking action is very hard? He posits that if you are in the “yes/yes” camp, then today’s solutions offer nothing that will slow let alone reverse the effects of climate change. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to start exploring alternatives — i.e. geoengineering. I found the framework and his explanations lucid and compelling, and I’m looking forward to sharing more notes in the coming days/weeks.

• The melting pot of JavaScript – I found this essay by well-known JavaScript engineer Dan Abramov quite compelling. He argues that the messiness of JS is a feature and not a bug, representing the flourishing of human creativity rather than a militarized top-down “BDFL” model that you see in other languages. That leads to complexity and “fatigue,” but also to much more rapid innovation. He has some suggestions on how to ameliorate that complexity’s worst effects, including improving default configurations to reduce cognitive load on engineers. Sounds like resiliency if you ask me.

• On a more personal front, I wrote a long list of my personal favorite reads and writes of 2018.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

• The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton and Networks of New York by Ingrid Burrington.

Mastermind Jordan Peele is a very busy man these days, working on new projects including the movie Us, an upcoming Twilight Zone reboot, a Netflix stop-motion animated movie called Wendell and Wild, as well as two Amazon shows. But the Academy Award winner is also making time for YouTube.

The first trailer for Weird City, a sci-fi anthology series with an absolutely amazing cast, dropped today.

The series was created by Peele and Key and Peele writer Charlie Sanders, and follows the lives of various characters in the future city of Weird, where the middle class has disappeared and left only the rich (living ‘above the line’) and the poor (‘below the line’).

The Weird City cast includes Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ed O’Neill, Awkwafina, Laverne Cox, Steven Yuen, Dylan O’Brien and Gillian Jacobs.

The show drops February 13 on YouTube Premium.

The London fintech industry is pretty close-knit, fall of strong personalities, and at times fiercely competitive. Within this context it is quite common for employees — and sometimes even founders — to swap sides. The latest such move sees André Mohamed, previously CTO and a co-founder of Freetrade, join rival Revolut as its new Head of Wealth & Trading Product.

Freetrade launched its ‘zero-fee’ trading app in October last year, four months after Revolut announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in a bid to compete with Silicon Valley’s Robinhood. That feature has yet to see the light of day, although I’m told it is still on track to launch this quarter. That makes the hiring of Mohamed from Freetrade all the more noteworthy. He joined Revolut in November.

The circumstances that saw Mohamed depart Freetrade remain unclear. According to my sources his contract was terminated last year and the two parties settled, with Freetrade accepting no liability. Companies House records show that the former CTO resigned as a Director of Freetrade on 7th September 2018. According to one person familiar with Mohamed’s side of the story, the former CTO had a difference in philosophy to that of Freetrade co-founder and CEO Adam Dodds. Founder disputes are not uncommon, after all (and I should know!).

Freetrade declined to comment on the specific reasons for Mohamed’s departure, but did provide TechCrunch with the following statement:

“In the first half of last year, it became clear to us we were not shipping the Freetrade product fast enough. We decided to bring in new technical leadership. Ian Fuller joined us as our new VP Engineering in July. Coming from Snap, and Amazon before that, he arrived with deep experience in shipping and scaling mobile products to millions of users. Under his leadership, we’ve finally launched our app and have been working on a new investment platform, which we are excited about rolling out in the coming months”.

Meanwhile, Mohamed’s background suggests he is a good fit for Revolut’s soon-to-launch trading product, and not just based on inside experience as a co-founder of Freetrade (it’s curious that Mohamed doesn’t appear to have signed a non-compete clause). He has a Computer Science degree from UCL, coupled with 20 years industry experience where he has worked at a number of leading fintech startups, SMEs, tier 1 investment banks and capital markets technology consultancies. He is also a former colleague of Revolut co-founder and CTO Vlad Yatsenko, from their time at Lab49.

“It’s a company that you don’t come across very often, so I jumped at the opportunity,” says Mohamed in a statement. “Revolut has a huge customer base and global ambitions, at a completely different scale to any company I’ve worked at before. It’s extremely exciting to be part of a fast-growing scale-up that is growing rapidly and getting worldwide recognition. The products we are building are truly disruptive, and we can’t wait for the trading products to join the roster of other fantastic money-saving financial products on offer at Revolut”.

As Head of Wealth & Trading Product, Mohamed’s will be focused on delivering Revolut’s commission-free trading platform as well as a complementary robo-advisor offering.

If you have tips regarding London’s fintech scene, get in touch confidentially by emailing me at steveohear@techcrunch.com

If you thought the on-demand laundry space had run out of startup steam here’s a bit of a conditioner: Madrid-based startup, Mr Jeff, has bagged a $12M Series A, led by All Iron Ventures.

The 2016-founded firm currently offers home laundry and dry cleaning services, including on-demand and monthly subscription options, in seven countries, with a focus on LatAm. Last August it acquired Brazilian laundry franchise, Lava é Leva, to move into another market in the region.

The franchise model sets the approach apart from some other on-demand laundry startups that already folded. That and a focus on markets with lower rates of washing machine ownership. Ergo, they’re disrupting trips to the laundromat.

The company closed 2018 with more than 1,000 franchises operating, and more than 150 direct employees plus 2,400+ indirect employees working to turn the customer’s in-app tap into clean and ironed clothes returned to them within 48 hours.

Flush with new funding, Mr Jeff says it’s aiming to have franchises operating in 30 countries by the end of 2019, looking east to Asia. It also plans to consolidate its LatAm position by expanding its operations in Panama, Costa Rica and Uruguay.

Prior to the Series A, it had raised around $3.5M in seed funding, including from European entrepreneurs such as Albert Armengol (CEO of Doctoralia), Jeroen Merchiers (Managing Director of Airbnb Europe, Middle East and Africa), and Kim Jung ( CEO NX Corp).

It adds that a majority of its earlier investors have opted to continue to support the company by participating in the Series A.

Ola, India’s local rival to Uber, has seen its valuation jump to nearly $6 billion as it prepares to take in a large round of financing.

The ride-hailing firm, which was founded in 2010, has raised around $3.3 billion from investors to date, and it topped that up a little this week. Ola pulled in 520 crore (around $75 million) from existing investor Steadview Capital, according to filings provided to TechCrunch by business signals platform paper.vc. The paperwork indicates that Ola’s business is now valued at $5.7 billion.

Ola declined to comment.

That figure is on par with Ola’s valuation when it raised in 2015, and a boost on recent numbers, which went as low $3.5 billion but reached $4.3 billion last year. Ola was said to be on track to reach a $7 billion valuation in 2017 but it appears that landmark wasn’t hit.

While $75 million isn’t a huge investment for Ola, it is a clear milestone that kicks off a larger round, a source within the company told TechCrunch. Fundraising is typically not as cut and dry as it may appear in the media with different tranches of rounds typically coming in and closing at different times. Oftentimes, existing investors are among the first to put in and that appears to be the case here.

There are certainly other clues to follow.

Another filing — also provided by paper.vc — shows that India’s Competition Commission approved a request for a Temasek-affiliated investment vehicle’s proposed acquisition of seven percent of Ola. In addition, SoftBank offered a term sheet for a prospective $1 billion investment last month, according to our source.

Put that all together and the result is likely to be a sizeable round for Ola — which has seen its cousin in Southeast Asia, Grab, massively increase its funding ambitions since it acquired Uber’s local business. Grab has currently raised around $3 billion of a planned $5 billion Series H round, as we reported recently.

The climate in India has certainly moved towards huge financing deals. Outside of ride-hailing, other Indian startups pulled in gigantic rounds in recent months. Those include Swiggy — a company that companies with Ola’s FoodPanda delivery business — which raised $1 billion from the likes of Naspers and Tencent in December, and OYO which grabbed $1 billion from SoftBank and others in September.

Last year was the year Ola stretched its reach into international markets with launches in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. In India, its service reaches more than 100 cities and towns while, outside of ride-hailing, it operates payments, food delivery, bicycles and it recently invested in electric scooters.

OneLogin is not a young startup by any means. The identity access management company was founded in 2009 and has watched while companies like Ping Identity, Duo Security and Okta had tidy exits. But as CEOs are fond of pointing out, the total addressable market is large and where investors see a chance, they take it. Today, the company announced a $100 million investment.

The latest round was led by new investors Greenspring Associates and Silver Lake Waterman, the late-stage investing arm of Silver Lake. Existing investors CRV and Scale Venture Partners also contributed to the round. Today’s investment brings the total raised since inception to over $170 million, according to the company.

It is referring to this as a “growth round,” but indicated that actually means Series D plus “flexible capital.” Whatever you call it, it would appear to give OneLogin some runway to grow large enough to find a way to exit.

CEO Brad Brooks says his company is well-positioned to compete with the likes of Okta and Microsoft in this market by offering a multi-faceted authentication solution that works both on-prem and in the cloud. He swept aside question of revenue, valuation or IPO plans, only indicating that the company was growing and they had big expansion plans.

That would include building on its success in Europe, while expanding to Asia and creating more specific solutions in the US such as focusing on FedRamp federal government compliance. The company currently has more than 260 employees, and with the new money Brooks wants to put the pedal to the metal.

He plans to double that number in the next 18 months, as he fuels that expansion plan, bringing in new engineers along with sales, marketing and support. He wouldn’t rule out acquisitions to expand the company’s capabilities, but said his preference is building in-house over buying. He believes that building provides an internal goal of innovation and offers the kind of challenges that attract engineering talent.

Brooks came on board in 2017, replacing co-founder Thomas Pedersen, who moved into the role of Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer. Its most recent round prior to today was a $22.5 million Series C last June.

Should you let AI help you pick your roommates? Barcelona-based urban room rental startup Badi thinks so, and it’s just closed a $30M Series B funding round less than a year after a $10M Series A — suggesting algorithm-aided matchmaking is resonating with its target Millennial(ish) ‘Generation Rent’ demographic, as they hunt for their next flatmate.

The 2015 founded startup has now raised circa $45M in total, while its platform has passed 12M rental requests. Badi also tells us it passed one million registered users last November, up from around 700,000 in February 2018.

It currently offers a service in key cities in four European markets: Spain, France, Italy and the U.K.

The business was set up to respond to the rising trend of urban living (and indeed tourism) that’s been driving rents and squeezing more people into shared houses to try to make city living affordable.

Badi CEO and founder Carlos Pierre points to estimates that by 2050 the total population living in cities will increase from 54% to 66%. “There will likely be a shortage of homes for people looking to live in cities and as a result, this will lead to an increase in smaller living units or rooms. This is where Badi comes in,” he suggests in a statement.

On the AI front, Badi applies machine learning technology to help with the flatmate matching process — learning from users of its platform, as they match and agree to become flatmates, and then feeding ‘compatibility insights’ back in to keep improving its recommendations.

The Series B is led by U.S.-based consumer tech VC firm Goodwater Capital, making its first investment in a Spanish startup. Also investing Target Global and existing VCs Spark Capital and Mangrove Capital.

Badi says the funding will be put towards consolidating its services in Barcelona, Madrid, London, Paris and Rome, and also to open new offices in London.

It says it’s spying a big opportunity there (despite Brexit) on account of the UK capital being one of the most most expensive for renters in the region.

Two other cities it operates in, Barcelona and Madrid, are similarly in demand with renters (and tourists), with Badi noting the rental market in Spain has grown by 130% in the last 10 years and represents 23% of the entire real estate industry.

While Paris and Rome are also major tourist destinations, and short term tourist rentals have been widely linked to increased rents for locals.

Badi’s business is positioned to benefit from the tourist-inflated rent trend as it stands, though cities like Barcelona are also looking at what they can do, policy wise, to curb rising rents and ensure there is affordable and adequate living space for local families, such as via social housing quotas on developers and even buying vacant buildings themselves to convert to housing stock.

But despite increased political attention on the problem of a lack of affordable housing in cities in desirable urban hotspots it’s highly unlikely that housing pressures are going to let up any time soon.

Badi says the Series B will also be used to expand the size of its team, up to 100%, and also to develop additional extra services intended to make life easier for landlords and tenants.

“In the first quarter of 2019, we will work on improving our product to offer possibilities for professionals and private owners to make their experience on Badi far more efficient. Secondly we are redesigning and launching a new booking system around April 2019 to enhance the booking experience to make it more streamlined and user-centric,” it tells us.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder of Goodwater Capita, added: “We are extremely excited to partner with Badi in their mission to solve the looming urban housing crisis — there simply aren’t enough homes in cities and housing has become too expensive. Badi provides a unique end-to-end rental platform that builds trust and convenience directly into the customer experience, which has enabled them to unlock thousands of new rooms in cities around the world.”

The funding streak for educational startups in Asia continues into 2019 after Emeritus, a U.S-Indian company that partners with universities to offer digital courses, landed a $40 million Series C round led by Sequoia India.

The deal includes participation from existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments, and it takes Emeritus — founded in 2010 as offline management program company Eruditus — to around $50 million from investors to date. It also follows notable rounds in December for India-based education companies Byju’s ($540 million) and Toppr ($35 million).

Emeritus is the online branch of Eruditus. It was founded in 2014 as a response to the growth in digital learning. Specifically, it took the core elements of the Eruditus — which include helping educational institutions design new curriculums — and applied it to the online space to develop certificate courses and online degrees.

The company has offices in Boston — where it works to develop curriculum content — as well as Dubai, Mexico, Mumbai and Singapore. In total, it has some 350 employees while its partners include MIT, Columbia, Tuck at Dartmouth, Wharton, UC Berkeley and London Business School.

Today, Emeritus accounts for most of the business’s growth potential and it is really the focus of this investment, co-founder and director Ashwin Damera told TechCrunch in an interview.

“We’re helping working professionals who can’t otherwise come to these schools to access high-quality educational content online,” Damera said. “It’s very different from a MOOC [such as Coursera or Udemy], we are a SPOC — small, private, online course.”

For one thing, all Emeritus courses are run in collaboration with universities, they tend to attract older students — since they are masters level — and their completion rates are around 90 percent, according to Damera. Students on a course, he said, are broken down into sections of around 100 and then smaller working groups of around six, much like traditional offline courses.

Emeritus said it will enroll 30,000 students from 80 countries during this current financial year. That’s a figure that Damera wants to grow ten-fold over the next five years.

The company’s strategy to reach that lofty goal revolves around widening its reach to new audiences. A key part of that focus is to expand its existing English and Spanish content libraries, and develop content in Portuguese and Mandarin for the first time. Interestingly, in the case of China, Emeritus is open to a potential acquisition or a joint venture to get a local business up and running.

Right now, Damera said that just 70 percent of students are based overseas. In addition to accommodating additional international languages, he said that global push will mean the company will develop its tech stack to enable a greater more mobile-based content for students.

But, beyond those perhaps obvious areas, Emeritus is examining the potential to offer newer products and courses at more affordable prices. In particular, Damera believes there is a “huge opportunity” to apply itself to bachelor degree education although he plans to expand its master degrees first.

Google will be cheered by the view of an influential advisor to Europe’s top court vis-a-vis the territorial scope of the so-called ‘Right to be Forgotten’.

Since a 2014 Court of Justice decision, search engines operating in Europe have been required to accept and review requests from private citizens to delist outdated or irrelevant search results associated with their name, balancing decisions against any public right to know.

Google has been carrying out these delistings on regional European subdomains, rather than globally. But in 2016 the French data protection agency, CNIL, fined it for failing to delist results globally — arguing that regional delistings were not strong enough to comply with the law.

Google filed an appeal against the CNIL’s order for global delisting and a French court later decided to refer questions vis-a-vis the scope of the rtbf to the Court of Justice of the EU.

The CJEU heard the case last fall, with Google arguing that global delistings would damage free speech, and enable authoritarian regimes to get stuff they don’t like scrubbed off the Internet.

On the flip side those who advocate for global delistings argue without them there’s a trivial workaround to the rtbf.

Although the intent of the rtbf ruling was never to remove information from the Internet but rather to allow old and erroneous data to sediment (rather than be artificially kept in public view by algorithms). And given most web users don’t look past the first page (or even the first few) search results regional delistings seems a fair enough balance — at least as things stand.

That balanced view is also now the published opinion of an influential advisor to Europe’s top court.

Advocate general Maciej Szpunar’s opinion, released today — ahead of the court making its own judgement on the matter — proposes that the regional rtbf should be limited in scope to local sub-domains, rather than being applied globally as the French data protection agency has been pushing for for several years.

In a press release summarizing the AG’s opinion, the court writes that Szpunar believes “a distinction must be made depending on the location from which the search is performed” and that “[h]e is therefore not in favour of giving the provisions of EU law such a broad interpretation that they would have effects beyond the borders of the 28 Member States”.

“[I]f worldwide de-referencing were permitted, the EU authorities would not be able to define and determine a right to receive information, let alone balance it against the other fundamental rights to data protection and to privacy,” it continues.

“This is all the more so since such a public interest in accessing information will necessarily vary from one third State to another depending on its geographic location. There would be a risk, if worldwide de-referencing were possible, that persons in third States would be prevented from accessing information and, in turn, that third States would prevent persons in the EU Member States from accessing information.”

That said, the AG is not ruling out the possibility that “in certain situations” a search engine operator may need to delist something “at the worldwide level”.

Rather, the court emphasizes, “he takes the view that the situation at issue in the present case does not justify this”.

So his current advice to the court is summarized as follows:

… the search engine operator is not required, when acceding to a request for de-referencing, to carry out that de-referencing on all the domain names of its search engine in such a way that the links in question no longer appear, irrespective of the location from which the search on the basis of the requesting party’s name is performed.

At the same time the AG emphasizes that — for valid requests — search engines must “take every measure available to it to ensure full and effective de-referencing within the EU, including by use of the ‘geo-blocking’ technique, in respect of an IP address deemed to be located in one of the Member States, irrespective of the domain name used by the internet user who performs the search”.

While the AG’s opinion is not binding on the CJEU the court tends to take a similar view so it’s a good indicator of where the final judgement will land, likely in three to six months’ time.

We reached out to Google for comment and a spokesperson emailed us the following statement, attributed to Peter Fleischer, its senior privacy counsel:

Public access to information, and the right to privacy, are important to people all around the world, as demonstrated by the number of global human rights, media and other organisations that have made their views known in this case. We’ve worked hard to ensure that the right to be forgotten is effective for Europeans, including using geolocation to ensure 99% effectiveness.

The search giant, which remains massively dominant in the European market, publishes a report detailing the proportion of requests it accepts and declines here, which shows both a steady growth in requests and that Google continues to grant only a minority of delisting requests.

Since the original 2014 rtbf decision, the EU has doubled down on the right — extending the principle by baking it into an updated data protection framework, the GDPR, which came into force in May last year and gives EU citizens rights to ask data controllers to rectify or delete their personal information.

Released in 2014, the year before Snapchat put face filters on the road to ubiquity, Perfect Corp’s YouCam Makeup app gave many smartphone users their first taste of augmented selfies. At the beginning, it let users experiment with different makeup looks and portrait-editing tools. Since then, YouCam Makeup has expanded beyond selfies into e-commerce and retail with tools for over 200 beauty brands and retailers, including L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Cosmopolitan, and Target (the big-box retailer’s online Virtual Try-on tool uses Perfect Corp.’s technology).

At CES this week, Perfect Corp announced a new roster of products under the brand name Beauty 3.0, including AI-based augmented reality tools that recommend foundation, makeup, and hair with a solid rate of accuracy and realism (I tested several of the new apps last month at Perfect Corp’s Taipei headquarters), even for finishes like glitter and metallics. It also recently signed a partnership with Ulta to bring its try-on technology to the retailer’s beauty stores and hair salons.

Launched in 2014 by CEO Alice Chang and owned by CyberLink, a digital media software developer, Perfect Corp says its apps have now been downloaded 700 million times and claims a total of 60 million monthly active users (in China, it also has a mini-program for WeChat). The company says its tools help retailers increase basket sizes and conversions, reduce the number of products returned, and give brands aggregated data about how consumers interact with makeup colors, like what shades they are most likely to try-on and how they combine different products.

Perfect Corp recently began working on 3D models, so users can see how a virtual makeup or hairstyle will look on them from different angles as they move their heads (for example, hair color, even ombré styles, look realistic even if you flip your hair). Four years on the market and a global user base have enabled YouCam to train its algorithms for a wide range of face shapes and skintones—an important advantage as consumers demand and expect more diversity from beauty brands.

Chang says one thing that sets Perfect Corp’s makeup try-on app is its ability to adjust different colors so users have a more accurate idea of how it will appear on their skin, instead of simply applying the same color to everyone (Chang describes that as “sticker effect”). Most of the company’s technology is developed in-house by Perfect Corp and CyberLink. YouCam Makeup app grew out of CyberLink’s video technology, including 3D high-definition video, face recognition, and augmented reality, created for desktop software called Media Show. Limited to PCs, Media Show did not become successful, but as smartphones (and selfies) began to gain traction and run on increasingly powerful processors, Chang decided to use its tech in YouCam Makeup.

“We are not a beauty company,” she says “But we know how to use technology to help beauty consumers solve their pain points.”