Author: azeeadmin

The tectonic shifts to American culture and society due to the pandemic are far from over. One of the more glaring ones is that the U.S. labor market is going absolutely haywire.

Millions are unemployed, yet companies — from retail to customer service to airlines — can’t find enough workers. This perplexing paradox behind Uber price surges and waiting on an endless hold because your flight was canceled isn’t just inconvenient — it’s a loud and clear message from the post-pandemic American workforce. Many are underpaid, undervalued and underwhelmed in their current jobs, and are willing to change careers or walk away from certain types of work for good.

It’s worth noting that low-wage workers aren’t the only ones putting their foot down; white-collar quits are also at an all-time high. Extended unemployment benefits implemented during the pandemic may be keeping some workers on the sidelines, but employee burnout and job dissatisfaction are also primary culprits.

We have a wage problem and an employee satisfaction problem, and Congress has a long summer ahead of it to attempt to find a solution. But what are companies supposed to do in the meantime?

At this particular moment, businesses need a stopgap solution either until September, when COVID-19 relief and unemployment benefits are earmarked to expire, or something longer term and more durable that not only keeps the engine running but propels the ship forward. Adopting AI can be the key to both.

Declaring that we’re on the precipice of an AI awakening is probably nowhere near the most shocking thing you’ve read this year. But just a few short years ago, it would have frightened a vast number of people, as advances in automation and AI began to transform from a distant idea into a very personal reality. People were (and some holdouts remain) genuinely worried about losing their job, their lifeline, with visions of robots and virtual agents taking over.

But does this “AI takes jobs” storyline hold up in the cultural and economic moment we’re in?

Is AI really taking jobs if no one actually likes those jobs?

If this “labor shortage” unveils any silver lining, it’s our real-world version of the Sorting Hat. When you take money out of the equation on the question of employment, it’s opening our eyes to what work people find desirable and, more evidently, what’s not. Specifically, the manufacturing, retail and service industries are taking the hardest labor hits, underscoring that tasks associated with those jobs — repetitive duties, unrewarding customer service tasks and physical labor — are driving more and more potential workers away.

Adopting AI in manufacturing accelerated during the pandemic to deal with volatility in the supply chain, but now it must move from “pilot purgatory” to widespread implementation. The best use cases for AI in this industry are ones that help with supply chain optimization, including quality inspection, general supply chain management and risk/inventory management.

Most critically, AI can predict when equipment might fail or break, reducing costs and downtime to almost zero. Industry leaders believe that AI is not only beneficial for business continuity but that it can augment the work and efficiency of existing employees rather than displace them. AI can assist employees by providing real-time guidance and training, flagging safety hazards, and freeing them up to do less repetitive, low-skilled work by taking on such tasks itself, such as detecting potential assembly line defects.

In the manufacturing industry, this current labor shortage is not a new phenomenon. The industry has been facing a perception problem in the U.S. for a long time, mainly because young workers think manufacturers are “low tech” and low paying. AI can make existing jobs more attractive and directly lead to a better bottom line while also creating new roles for companies that attract subject-matter talent and expertise.

In the retail and service industries, arduous customer service tasks and low pay are leading many employees to walk out the door. Those that are still sticking it out have their hands tied because of their benefits, even though they are unhappy with the work. Conversational AI, which is AI that can interact with people in a human-like manner by leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, can relieve employees of many of the more monotonous customer experience interactions so they can take on roles focused on elevating retail and service brands with more cerebral, thoughtful human input.

Many retail and service companies adopted scripted chatbots during the pandemic to help with the large online volumes only to realize that chatbots operate on a fixed decision tree — meaning if you ask something out of context, the whole customer service process breaks down. Advanced conversational AI technologies are modeled on the human brain. They even learn as they go, getting more skilled over time, presenting a solution that saves retail and service employees from the mundane while boosting customer satisfaction and revenue.

Hesitancy and misconceptions about AI in the workplace have long been a barrier to widespread adoption — but companies experiencing labor shortages should consider where it can make their employees’ lives better and easier, which can only be a benefit for bottom-line growth. And it might just be the big break that AI needs.

Did you see the viral videos of yesterday’s flooding in New York City subways?

In one, riders waded through brown, waist-deep water; another video showed a cascade rushing down a flight of stairs to a subway platform where passengers waited for a train.

Infrastructure doesn’t attract much attention until it fails. Domain name services (DNS), the system that directs readers to techcrunch.com when they say or speak it into their web browser, are much the same way.

For the latest entry in a series of longform articles that explore the inner workings of notable startups, we looked at NS1, an internet infrastructure company best known for its software-defined DNS.

Since its founding in 2013, NS1 has raised more than $100 million to build an engineering team and robust product portfolio that’s expanded to include DDI, which helps companies manage internal networks.

If you’re curious about how NS1 transformed “a slumbering and dreary yet reliable aspect of the internet” into “a strategic moat and an enterprise win” in just eight years, read on.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Part 1: Origin story: how three engineers decided to rebuild the internet’s core addressing system.

Part 2: Product development and roadmap: experimentation, open-source efforts and expanding beyond DNS.

Part 3: Competitive landscape: a look at the broader internet infrastructure market.

Part 4: Customer development: how their top competitor’s stumble became “the gift that kept on giving.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch — have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Startups have never had it so good

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim didn’t mince words in today’s Exchange.

“The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire.”

That’s their hot take after analyzing the Q2 data released so far about how much money VCs deployed across the globe between April and the end of June.

Leaning on data from CB Insights, Crunchbase News and FactSet, Alex and Anna walk through the data from the U.S. and a few other regions — and promise deeper regional dives next week.

What I learned the hard way from naming 30+ startups

Image Credits: Juj Winn (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

If you’re starting a company, choosing a name can feel like a fraught choice. But actually, as long as you follow some basic guidelines, it shouldn’t lead to paralysis.

“The truth is that business names fall on a bell curve — you have a small number of outliers that actively contribute to your success and a small number of outliers that actively impair your ability to succeed,” Drew Beechler, who’s named more than 30 software startups, writes in a guest column. “The vast majority, though, fall somewhere in the middle in their impact on your business.”

Nextdoor’s SPAC investor deck paints a picture of sizable scale and sticky users

Image Credits: jhorrocks / Getty Images

The SPAC parade continued apace this week as Nextdoor announced it would go public via a blank-check company, with the community social network making its pitch based on scale, claiming users in one in three U.S. households.

Alex Wilhelm unpacks Nextdoor’s “clear-eyed look into [its] financial performance in both historical terms and in terms of what it might accomplish in the future,” noting that “our usual mockery of SPAC charts mostly doesn’t apply.”

Pakistan’s growing tech ecosystem is finally taking off

Image Credits: shan.shihan (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

So far this year, startups in Pakistan are on track to raise more than in the previous five years combined, according to Mikal Khoso, an early-stage investor at Wavemaker Partners.

“Even more excitingly, a large portion of this capital is coming from international investors from across Asia, the Middle East and even famed investors from Silicon Valley,” he notes in a guest post for Extra Crunch.

He’s identified three factors that are fueling investor interest: rapidly expanding mobile connectivity, an improved security situation, and critical legal and regulatory changes that are making the country more startup- and VC-friendly.

Drawing a map of Pakistan’s tech ecosystem, Khoso identifies local companies trying to grab a slice of grocery delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing and other sectors before examining the challenges still in place.

“The segments in Pakistan that are likely to attract the best entrepreneurs and most investor capital in the years to come will be fintech, e-commerce and edtech,” says Khoso.

Investors find European unicorns reluctant to join SPAC boom

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

The nonstop news of startups partnering up with SPACs in the United States had Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim wondering if the blank-check boom expanded to other countries.

“Unicorns are hardly unique to the U.S. startup ecosystem,” they write. “Are we seeing similar SPAC interest in Europe?”

Anna and Alex talked to investors to see why — or why not — European startups would take the SPAC path to become a public company.

For successful AI projects, celebrate your graveyard and be prepared to fail fast

Image Credits: Wachiwit (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

When you’ve invested a lot of time and energy in a project, it can be difficult to decide to shelve it — or worse, kill it.

But for AI projects, teams should be prepared to fail fast, Sandeep Uttamchandani, the chief data officer of Unravel Data, writes in a guest column.

“In order to fail fast, AI initiatives should be managed as a conversion funnel analogous to marketing and sales funnels,” he writes. “Projects start at the top of the five-stage funnel and can drop off at any stage, either to be temporarily put on ice or permanently suspended and added to the AI graveyard.”

Uttamchandani walks through the five stages of the funnel and offers suggestions for when to start digging a hole for your project in the graveyard.

Circle is a good example of why SPACs can be useful

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Yes, we’re all a bit over-SPAC-ed at this point. It’s just been a nonstop torrent of startups linking up with blank-check companies.

But Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin, is just “the sort of business that is correct for a SPAC-led debut,” Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.

“It could not go public in a traditional manner in its current state of maturity,” he writes.

“But a SPAC can get it a huge slug of cash at a price that it has locked in, allowing it to complete its growth into corporate adulthood while public. A gamble, sure, but one that will be very fun to watch.”

Can advertising scale in VR?

Image Credits: da-kuk (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

It’s not hard to imagine how advertising could be valuable in VR: billboards on streetscapes, magazine covers on newsstands, cereal boxes in virtual kitchens.

But Facebook’s stab at experimental VR ads didn’t last very long; after an onslaught of negative feedback from players, the test was quickly scuttled.

That said, VR advertising has a ton of untapped potential — but it’s going to take a minute to reach profitable scale.

Achieving digital transformation through RPA and process mining

Image Credits: Jackie Niam (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

“Robots are not coming to replace us,” Alp Uguray is quick to note in a guest column about robotic process automation. “They are coming to take over the repetitive, mundane and monotonous tasks that we’ve never been fond of.”

That’s the good news. But RPA is still in the early stages, despite rapid growth through IPOs, acquisitions and funding rounds.

“Adoption of RPA and process mining in your organization will define the operational excellence of your firm,” he writes. “If you are behind in this race, just think of how your enterprise can continue to compete with fully digital peers. Your organization won’t want to be in the back of this race.”

Demand Curve: 10 lies you’ve been told about marketing

Image Credits: Abscent84 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In a guest column, Nick Costelloe, the head of content for Demand Curve, notes that the content you stumble across in a Google search might not be “intentionally misleading,” it might not lead you in the right direction.

Here, he debunks 10 common myths about marketing — and offers suggestions for what to do instead.

5 fundraising imperatives for robotics startups

Image Credits: Paper Boat Creative (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

This guest post from three contributors from Next47, MassRobotics and Lux Capital looks at best practices for robotics startups looking to raise cash.

“There has never been a better time to pursue funding for robotics startups, but you are more likely to succeed if you build a fundraising strategy that is marked by the same sophistication and informed understanding you already bring to many other aspects of your new business,” the writers say.

Here, they lay out five strategies to ensure robotics startups get the funding they need.

Doing more with less: This is what marketers get asked for when they join an early-stage startup. British consultant Lucy Heskins knows firsthand how overwhelming that can be, which is why her services can both replace and complement early in-house marketing staff. Either way, it often involves educating the founders about the job to be done.

“Too many people fail to realize that marketing is the process of understanding your customers, building appropriate channels to reach them and ultimately meeting their needs (profitability),” she wrote on her site, Oh, blimey.

TechCrunch is asking founders who have worked with growth marketers to share a recommendation in this survey. We’ll use your answers to find more experts to interview.

Having earned “scars and stripes” at various startups, Heskins recently joined “tech for good” company Big Lemon as a part-time head of growth, but still offers her services to other teams as a SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant. If you are a marketer yourself or thinking of hiring one, read on: She shared some compelling insights with TechCrunch.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How do you collaborate with the startups you work with as a consultant?

Typically I will work with startups in two ways. The first will be project-based. So for example, when they want to explore a potential new customer market or introduce a freemium strategy.

The other way is as a mentor or extension to their marketer. Often I will work with marketers who’ve never worked in a startup and they can bounce ideas or strategies off me. It helps speed up their learning and time to deliver results.

How do your roles as an employee and as a consultant nourish each other?

I’ve experienced the very real pains/challenges/opportunities a startup presents, especially as an early-stage employee. I’ve come in, helped change business models, explored things like freemium and repositioned brands. It’s tough. So as a consultant, I can pass on my learnings (and mistakes). And I get to work with some great startups who are open to trying new things. Plus, having worked in four startups now, I get the pressure they’re facing and can adjust my approach accordingly. There’s a lot of plates spinning, and I get that.

What do early-stage startups typically misunderstand and need to know about startup marketers like you?

In my experience, there are a few mistakes startups often make.

The first is hiring a marketer too soon. I’ve come into startups, thinking I was coming in to set up their in-house function. However, very quickly you realize that they’ve jumped the gun and think they’ve got product-market fit when they are nowhere near it. This can cause conflict because the startup’s expecting one thing (say, revenue) but the marketer is missing a few basics to be effective (value proposition, an idea of how “painful” the problem is that they are solving, lack of involvement in areas like pricing).

The next mistake is not trusting their marketer. All too often I hear of marketers who’ve gone into a startup only to learn that their ideas are put on the back burner because the founder(s) — and this is typically first-time founders — don’t quite understand marketing and will push them to deliver short-term results (leads).

Lastly and probably the biggest mistake is applying what worked at a previous business. When joining a startup, you’re starting from scratch — new customers, new markets, go-to-market strategy. There’s a bias for wanting to use what worked previously, but people forget … your customers and markets are totally different. You can’t just replicate.

What should be the main focus of a startup’s first in-house marketer?

Of course, it depends really on the stage of the startup; however, whatever stage you’re at, it needs to be customer research/development. I’d be very wary of a marketer who doesn’t suggest this as one of their first activities.

You need to unlock why customers buy or subscribe to the startup’s product. This will determine your traction channels, your proposition, your pricing model — everything.

Why should startups consider hiring a freelancer or agency to help with their marketing instead of doing everything in-house?

I think it’s a great idea to outsource until the startup understands (1) if there’s an actual problem that needs solving and (2) whether there’s a market big enough to actually turn it into a business.

Whilst you’re in this period, you can’t afford to learn new skills — even though it may seem attractive/”cheap” to do it in-house, it really isn’t. It can actually set you back. Outsource the specifics and focus on what you do best. Once you’ve got a better idea of validation, then you can start to see which skills to bring in-house.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?

Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

Why have you decided to focus on SaaS startups? What makes them different when it comes to marketing?

I love working in SaaS, especially B2B SaaS. What makes it different, for me, is that the role becomes part marketing, part product, part commercial. You get to look at the entire customer experience, and because many SaaS products are trial/subscription-based, your focus needs to be on retention. You’re only as good as your last month, so it forces you to work and think harder.

Plus, B2B SaaS is actually very, very cool now. Just because you work in B2B marketing doesn’t mean you need to be boring!

What are some key takeaways from your Early-Stage Startup Marketing Playbook?

I created the playbook because I sat in a board meeting and, when an investor was asking about the go-to-market strategy, I realized that there wasn’t a clear toolkit for helping early-stage startups to map out the market, nor think about the steps leading up to launching a product.

There are many takeaways, but I think the main one and the most valuable is providing clarity as to what specific steps go into a go-to-market strategy and how it all works together.

I talk you through how to speak to the customers who’ll actually buy from you — not those who tell you they love your product but run a mile when it’s time to pay — and how to determine which market channel is best to reach them.

What is customer-led growth? And how can it help startups adapt post-COVID?

Customer-led growth is a strategy that combines product, marketing and sales. It views your product through the lens of a customer with the aim of working out how value is delivered to them “whenever, wherever and however they need it.” It’s something I learned and studied from the co-founders of Forget the Funnel.

The idea is that you look at the entire customer journey, from the struggle stage right through to when they’re a customer, and you break each section down to where there’s an opportunity for growth. It’s really helpful for startups — especially post-COVID because chances are, your customers’ needs have changed.

How your customers derive value from your product changes all the time. This framework gives you a starting point.

How is content marketing best used?

I often say to startups, stop creating content for the sake of it. A lot of content that’s created doesn’t allow for where your customer may be in the buying process. It doesn’t consider what’s motivating them to solve their problem.

As a result, the results you get are skewed. Things take much longer than they should. Customers get confused about what it is your business actually is/does. Everyone starts to lose respect for marketing.

Again, you need to take it back to the customer and their journey and identify what content they need to overcome that particular problem that’s getting in the way of signing up/using your product.

Why is alignment with sales important, and what does it involve?

I’ve worked in startups that have been sales-led (so, complex products, long lead time) and it’s important to understand what sales needs to uncover to help move a customer to the next stage. Likewise, marketing can help sales to really dig into the proposition and understand what channels are best to convert leads.

I think when you work in a startup as a marketer, you have to roll up your sleeves and get involved in sales. It’ll help improve the content, strategy and revenue in the end.

So if you are working with a salesperson whose ultimate aim is to secure a call with a prospect, you can’t just go in and expect a prospect to say yes, immediately. There are a series of steps you and the salesperson need to go through in order to nurture and open up this relationship. It’s all about proving a set of hypotheses about your customer. Do they really hang out on LinkedIn? Are they bombarded with companies offering the same? Which proposition is working enough to get someone to agree to a call? Is that calendar link putting off prospects altogether?

I truly believe people do love to help, but it’s about working out what’s in it for them and how your product will make their life just that little bit easier.

From the outside looking in, the construction industry appears ripe for tech innovation. The industry represents 6.3% of the U.S. GDP. There are close to 1 million general contractors (GCs) in the country, and anywhere between 3 million and 5 million workers on job sites every day.

Meanwhile, there’s a common (if somewhat justified) belief that construction firms are slow to adopt technology and are behind the digital curve.

But not every construction company is a technology laggard. While GCs are historically slower to adopt new technologies, this doesn’t necessarily make them behind the times. About 60% of construction companies have R&D departments for new technology, and the largest construction firms have substantial R&D budgets. Yet 35.9% of employees are hesitant to try new technology, according to JB Knowledge.

One way to interpret this is that there is a strong interest and need to take advantage of newer construction-centric technologies, but only if they’re easy to use, easy to deploy or access while on a job site, and improve productivity almost immediately.

These factors have made construction tech appealing to investors, who have poured at least $3 billion into the sector. Is construction tech the “it” place right now? Is it ripe for disruption, the way VC investors find attractive? If that’s true, what went wrong at Katerra? Is Procore justified in losing $1 for every $4 in revenue? And why does so little investment go into improving productivity at the job site where GC money is made — or lost — compared to back-office operations?

My experience to date says that construction is different from other sectors because of the significant variation among projects that originates in the way projects are financed, how risks are managed and the factors that drive variation among projects. Construction’s differences are not easily mitigated via data processing, as compared to fintech, for example, where all money is data-amenable to software processing. Addressing project variations will be key to succeeding in construction tech beyond the back office. Here are the critical factors to consider.

Project financing makes capital investment more difficult. While the Commerce Department reported that construction spending in the U.S. reached a record high of $1.459 trillion in November 2020, this doesn’t mean there are unlimited opportunities for construction tech. The reality is that GCs make few capital investments because they must fund investments in technology out of operating cash flow.

Construction projects are typically funded incrementally in phases as the project demonstrates progress. Delays or accidents can have a huge effect on cash flow. Overhead and G&A cost burdens are hated. Asking a GC to license technology as a capital purchase doesn’t always make sense.

GC ownership and business structure also make large capital investment more difficult. Most GC firms were founded by tradespeople and either started as, or remain, family-owned firms. Borrowing what’s considered the “family’s money” is a much more risk-averse decision compared to the way larger corporations evaluate productivity investments and put assets at risk.

We’re entering a phase in the COVID-19 pandemic where transmission is going to go through the roof because of the Delta variant. But as vaccinations ramp up around the world, the main cost to society now will not be the health services being overwhelmed, but mass disruption to businesses as staff are forced to self isolate by track and trace systems. Thus, biosecurity in the workplace (or any other setting for that matter) is going to matter a lot.

The paragraph you just read above is in fact a paraphrase of the recent open letter sent by a number of eminent UK scientists to the government about the next phase of the pandemic.

So if it’s the case that workplace biosecurity is going to have to be much more efficient, then faster, better forms of testing are going to be needed. Now, a UK startup thinks it may have cracked the problem.

Bio-security company Vatic has come up with its ‘KnowNow’ test for CoVID-19 which it claims is more accurate than lateral flow tests, is faster, easier (only a swab from your mouth is needed), allows test data sharing, and even produces a ‘Passport’ QR code to enable someone to access services or workplaces.

Vatic has now raised $6.37 million to deliver its at-home tests, starting with the one tailored to COVID-19.

The seed funding round was led by London-based VCs LocalGlobe and Hoxton Ventures.

Founded in 2019, Vatic has built a saliva-based test that is about generating data in the home. The company says the test takes fewer than 15 minutes and can identify people who are actually infectious at that moment, rather than get a false positive because the body has fought off the infection. Existing antigen tests can have a false positive rate of 1 in 200.

Vatic test

The company says its test identifies infectious viruses by mimicking the surface of a human cell, effectively redesigning how lateral flow tests are built and “enhancing their accuracy”.

Its KnowNow saliva-only rapid antigen test for COVID-19 is in fact now being used in the UK after receiving CE mark approval. It pairs its saliva test with an app that makes it possible to share at-home test results with health or other platforms instantly. The saliva self-swabbing technique is obviously much easier to do and less uncomfortable than current Lateral Flow Tests that require swabbing the back of the throat and nasal passages. Vatic is also now doing clinical trials in the US to secure Emergency Use Authorisation from the FDA.

Alex Sheppard, co-founder and CEO of Vatic, explained: “One reason for the recent decline in the uptake of rapid Covid-19 tests is the sampling technique – it’s currently very uncomfortable and difficult for people to use. We need to take the pain out of mass testing if we’re to return to normal to minimize the disruption caused by future COVID-19 outbreaks, whether in offices, schools, or hospitality venues. That’s why we’ve built supportive biosecurity technology that sits  alongside the test, allowing users to generate their own unique QR codes to facilitate safe venue entry.”

How does it work? Vatic says its technology searches for the ‘spike’ on the virus as a measure of infectivity, but also says it is immune to potential mutations of the virus, making it able to test for COVID-19 no matter the variant.

Sheppard said the Vatic test is only the first iteration. It can also detect other infectious viruses by mimicking the surface of a human cell.

“We selected the part of the Coronavirus that uses its spike to enter human cells, almost like a hypodermic needle,” Sheppard told me. “That’s the bit that essentially interacts on our test, and so, effectively, we’re mimicking a human cell on our test, which is completely unique. It’s got a completely different engine to a normal Lateral Flow Test, because the chemistry that’s powering it is totally different.”

The other aspect of the Vatic test is that it employs an app linked to the saliva swap test. Once the test is done it produces an encrypted QR code.

“It’s not altogether dissimilar to what we see on the NHS tests,” Sheppard said, “but it’s a completely trust-based system, so you don’t have to compromise your health data. You’re not writing your home address into a government website. Of course, it does synchronize with the government requirements of reporting a notifiable disease, but it’s designed to ensure that you know you’re not giving away too much health data. It’s secure.”

Sheppard and his co-founder Mona Omir met at Oxford University, at the accelerator program Entrepreneur First in September 2019 and have gone on to raised money from both London investors and grant support from the Oxford Foundry / University of Oxford and Innovate UK.

Julia Hawkins, partner at LocalGlobe, commented: “Vatic’s technology is the future of testing. It’s fantastic to hear how many top UK organizations are taking the initiative and putting employee testing at the forefront of their business recovery plan. This new round of investment will be key in ensuring the successful roll-out of KnowNow tests across the UK and internationally and getting economies moving again with minimal interruptions.”

Rob Kniaz, partner at Hoxton Ventures, added: “A saliva-only swab is a true breakthrough in the world of uncomfortable and tricky rapid testing and the speed that the Vatic team have got it to market is very impressive. Excitingly for the business, this test is just the start of their journey – the opportunities to innovate in the at-home testing market are endless.”

The Artemis Fund is a Houston-based firm built by three women with the goal of encouraging more women-led startups. The company launched in 2019 and has raised a $15 million initial fund, which closed earlier this year.

Diana Murakhovskaya, who launched the firm with Stephanie Campbell and Leslie Goldman, says that the three women met over a mutual interest in investing in startups, one that didn’t just write a check and walk away, but that was really involved in helping these companies grow and thrive.

“We launched the fund in 2019, and we were looking to raise a micro VC to invest in about 15 companies, and keep a concentrated portfolio where we can really help these companies,” she said. The LPs in the fund are split 50/50 between men and women with an equal capital share among them, she said.

The women recognized that female founders faced an up-hill battle when it came to getting funding. In fact, in 2019 Crunchbase research found that just 13% percent of VC money went to startups with at least one female founder with all female founding teams accounting for just 3% of that.

At the same time, as the women came together in the Houston investing scene, they couldn’t help but notice that it was mostly dominated by older white men. Murakhovskaya, whose background is engineering, connected with Campbell, who has an MBA and they wanted to know why more women weren’t getting involved.

“I said, ‘Where are all the women?’ […] And so we started doing these dinners to bring together women and asking them why they’re not investing, what they’re doing and, and these were all corporate women [who had the money to invest].”

What they found was that either women had never been invited to invest, or like them they were looking to do it, but found angel investing less than satisfying. About this time, they met Goldman, who was a lawyer, and was on the board at the Houston Angel Network. “She’s an active angel in about 50 companies and 11 funds and similarly had this thesis of shifting all of her investing to female founders at the time,” Murakhovskaya said.

The three women with distinctly different professional backgrounds decided to come together and the idea for The Artemis Fund began to take shape. “We thought it was the perfect [mix] — kind of what happens when an engineer, an MBA and a lawyer get together. So, we find that our backgrounds are unique, and that helps a lot of our portfolio companies in a lot of different ways,” she said.

That meant they wanted to be involved with the founders and help them grow the businesses. “And so that was one thing we wanted to make sure that differentiates us from the other female-focused VCs. We would invest nationally, we would lead or co-lead most of our rounds and really help the companies along the capital stack. And that meant running a much more concentrated portfolio.”

The fund focuses on startups with female founders, who are in large potential markets, but ones that conventional male-dominated VCs might not see the potential in. Among the portfolio companies is UNest, a company that helps families take advantage of tax-exempt college savings accounts to save money for their kids’ college education and Upgrade, a maker of custom wigs and extensions. These businesses checked each of these boxes of being run by a woman in a large market that had been mostly ignored by the traditional investment community.

Murakhovskaya says so far the firm has invested in 11 companies with plans to invest 4-5 more and then raise the next fund. She says while it’s about helping nurture and build these companies, it’s also about finding companies that continue to grow into their Series A, B and beyond, while delivering a good return for the company’s partners.

“This is not a charity or philanthropy. We really believe that women and diverse teams in particular will outperform, on top of bringing together a different set of companies and products and services that are just not being met for the consumers that they’re trying to serve.”

The Biden administration just introduced a sweeping, ambitious plan to forcibly inject competition into some consolidated sectors of the American economy — the tech sector prominent among them — through executive action.

“Today President Biden is taking decisive action to reduce the trend of corporate consolidation, increase competition, and deliver concrete benefits to America’s consumers, workers, farmers, and small businesses,” a new White House fact sheet on the forthcoming order states.

The order, which Biden will sign Friday, initiates a comprehensive “whole-of-government” approach that loops in more then twelve different agencies at the federal level to regulate monopolies, protect consumers and curtail bad behavior from some of the world’s biggest corporations.

In the fact sheet, the White House lays out its plans to take matters to regulate big business into its own hands at the federal level. As far as tech is concerned, that comes largely through emboldening the FTC and the Justice Department — two federal agencies with antitrust enforcement powers.

Most notably for big tech, which is already bracing for regulatory existential threats, the White House explicitly asserts here that those agencies have legal cover to “challenge prior bad mergers that past Administrations did not previously challenge” — i.e. unwinding acquisitions that built a handful of tech companies into the behemoths they are today. The order calls on antitrust agencies to enforce antitrust laws “vigorously.”

Federal scrutiny will prioritize “dominant internet platforms, with particular attention to the acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by ‘free’ products, and the effect on user privacy.” Facebook, Google and Amazon are particularly on notice here, though Apple isn’t likely to escape federal attention either.

“Over the past ten years, the largest tech platforms have acquired hundreds of companies—including alleged ‘killer acquisitions’ meant to shut down a potential competitive threat,” the White House wrote in the fact sheet. “Too often, federal agencies have not blocked, conditioned, or, in some cases, meaningfully examined these acquisitions.”

The biggest tech companies have regularly defended their longstanding strategy of buying up the competition by arguing that because those acquisitions went through without friction at the time, they shouldn’t be viewed as illegal in hindsight. In no uncertain terms, the new executive order makes it clear that the Biden administration isn’t having any of it.

The White House also specifically singles out internet service providers for scrutiny, ordering the FCC to prioritize consumer choice and institute broadband “nutrition labels” that clearly state speed caps and hidden feeds. The FCC began working on the labels in the Obama administration but the work was scrapped after Trump took office.

The order also directly calls on the FCC to restore net neutrality rules, which were stripped in 2017 to the widespread horror of open internet advocates and most of the tech industry outside of the service providers that stood to benefit.

The White House will also tell the FTC to create new privacy rules meant to guard consumers against surveillance and the “accumulation of extraordinarily amounts of sensitive personal information,” which free services like Facebook, YouTube and others have leveraged to build their vast empires. The White House also taps the FTC to create rules that protect smaller businesses from being pre-empted by large platforms, which in many cases abuse their market dominance with a different sort of data-based surveillance to out-compete up-and-coming competitors.

Finally, the executive order encourages the FTC to put right to repair rules in place that would free consumers from constraints that discourage DIY and third-party repairs. A new White House Competition Council under the Director of the National Economic Council will coordinate the federal execution of the proposals laid out in the new order.

The antitrust effort from the executive branch mirrors parallel actions in the FTC and Congress. In the FTC, Biden has installed a fearsome antitrust crusader in Lina Khan, a young legal scholar and fierce Amazon critic who proposes a philosophical overhaul to the way the federal government defines monopolies. Khan now leads the FTC as its chair.

In Congress, a bipartisan flurry of bills intended to rein in the tech industry are slowly wending their way toward becoming law, though plenty of hurdles remain. Last month, the House Judiciary Committee debated the six bills, which were crafted separately to help them survive opposing lobbying pushes from the tech industry. These legislative efforts could modernize antitrust laws, which have failed to keep pace with the modern realities of giant, internet-based businesses.

Citing the acceleration of corporate consolidation in recent decades, the White House argues that a handful of large corporations dominates across industries, including healthcare, agriculture and tech and consumers, workers and smaller competitors pay the price for their outsized success. The administration will focus antitrust enforcement on those corners of the market as well as evaluating the labor market and worker protections on the whole.

“Inadequate competition holds back economic growth and innovation… Economists find that as competition declines, productivity growth slows, business investment and innovation decline, and income, wealth, and racial inequality widen,” the White House wrote.

It’s not easy following a larger-than-life founder and CEO of an iconic company, but that’s what former AWS CEO Andy Jassy faces this week as he takes over for Jeff Bezos, who moves into the executive chairman role. Jassy must deal with myriad challenges as he becomes the head honcho at the No. 2 company on the Fortune 500.

How he handles these challenges will define his tenure at the helm of the online retail giant. We asked several analysts to identify the top problems he will have to address in his new role.

Ensure a smooth transition

Handling that transition smoothly and showing investors and the rest of the world that it’s business as usual at Amazon is going to be a big priority for Jassy, said Robin Ody, an analyst at Canalys. He said it’s not unlike what Satya Nadella faced when he took over as CEO at Microsoft in 2014.

“The biggest task is that you’re following Jeff Bezos, so his overarching issue is going to be stability and continuity. … The eyes of the world are on that succession. So managing that I think is the overall issue and would be for anyone in the same position,” Ody said.

Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali said Jassy’s biggest job is just to keep the revenue train rolling. “I think the biggest to-do is to just continue that momentum that the company has had for the last several years. He has to make sure that they don’t lose that. If he does that, I mean, he will win,” she said.

Maintain company growth

As an online retailer, the company has thrived during COVID, generating $386 billion in revenue in 2020, up more than $100 billion over the prior year. As Jassy takes over and things return to something closer to normal, will he be able to keep the revenue pedal to the metal?

WhatsApp is working on a setting that will let users more easily bypass its iffy image compression and send photos and videos in the highest available fidelity. The “best quality” option will likely join “auto” and “data saver” choices in a future version of the app.

It appears users will eventually have the choice of whether to compress photos and videos to perhaps save on their data allowance, send them in the best available quality or let WhatsApp automatically select the optimal level of compression for files.

The settings are present in an update WhatsApp submitted to the Google Play Beta Program, as spotted by WABetaInfo. The options will probably arrive in the public Android build of the app, though it’s not clear when — they’re currently in development. It’s likely the additional image quality options will come to iOS as well, since WhatsApp generally maintains the same features across both platforms.

This could come as welcome news for those who don’t use the stock messaging apps on iOS or Android and often share photos and videos of their loved ones (Apple Messages retains the original image quality most of the time). Meanwhile, multi-device support is also on the way to WhatsApp.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. 

French startup Didomi has raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Elephant and Breega. The company manages consent flows for web publishers and app developers. Didomi is already doing well in Europe with billions of consent interactions per month — it plans to expand to the U.S. with today’s funding round.

“Jawad, Raphaël and I have co-founded Didomi to make privacy easier for everyone and an obvious choice for companies. This fundraising is a major milestone on our journey to deliver on this mission,” co-founder and CEO Romain Gauthier said in a statement.

“We look forward to helping brands and publishers make customer journeys more transparent and trustworthy through a delightful consent and preferences management experience,” he added.

In recent years, many regulators have implemented new privacy-focused frameworks. You might think about GDPR in Europe for instance.

And if you live in a country that is affected by those changes, you are now well aware that you’ll get a consent popup or banner whenever you visit a new website or open an app for the first time.

I wouldn’t say that these popups are “delightful” as the best consent popup is the one that doesn’t exist because the site you’re visiting doesn’t collect and share personal data. But that’s not always possible and there are different reasons why you may need to collect data — including on this current site techcrunch dot com.

In that case, a product like Didomi can be really helpful. Taking those consent flows seriously is extremely important as you don’t want to mess up the implementation and get fined. Didomi is a developer-focused consent platform that works across many different devices. You can configure your consent flow for a desktop website, a mobile website, a mobile app or a connected TV.

Having a unified solution also means that you don’t have to ask for permission over and over again. Didomi can store and synchronize preferences across devices. Everything is auditable in case regulators want to see how you’re collecting consent.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to make its product even more developer friendly with open APIs and open-source SDKs. It doesn’t mean that Didomi is for everyone as the company focuses on premium clients in particular. Clients include Rakuten, Orange, Giphy and Weight Watchers International.

The company will also hire more people with local marketing and sales teams for different markets. Didomi plans to open offices in Germany, Spain and the U.S.

At the same time, the landscape is quickly evolving. Web browsers are gradually blocking third-party trackers and Apple now even asks you if an app can track you at the operating system level. It’s going to be interesting to see how Didomi evolves with user expectations.