Author: azeeadmin

Much like smartphone manufacturers, drone companies have been adding to devices plenty of features over the past several years while making only modest improvements to battery life. But while your phone may boast “all-day” usage, a lot of the top drones only register flight times between 20-35 minutes.

Impossible Aerospace is looking to change up that equation, at least when it comes to commercial drones, with a dense design that is basically all battery. The company shared launch details of its US-1 drone today, and announced that it had closed a $9.4 million Series A from Bessemer Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures and Airbus Ventures.

Its first product is a drone that can most notably stay airborne for about 120 minutes in optimal flying conditions, with a 75km (over 46 miles) straight-line range. It can carry 2.9 pounds of payload, but that drops the total flight time to 78 minutes.

For commercial customers, the added flight time can dramatically free up use cases, changing the mindset of operation from mission-based to much more exploratory.

The company’s website has an almost comical X-ray diagram of the US-1’s battery makeup showcasing a design that just looks like a big “X” of battery cells. Around 70 percent of the 15-pound drone’s weight is lithium-ion batteries, the company tells me.

This is a design built for old-school drone pilots; in order to achieve their lengthy flight time they had to ditch some additional components, the most controversial choice probably being the lack of any onboard obstacle-avoidance sensors. “Every aircraft design is a compromise,” Impossible Aerospace CEO Spencer Gore told TechCrunch in an interview. “There’s nothing that’s harder than to figure out what features you will include for some users that hurts the performance for everybody else that’s not going to use them.”

Gore said there were certain features the startup knew it wanted to drill down with its first drone and that the company had an “exciting product roadmap” of designs that made some different choices.

The US-1 starts at $7,500 and will ship in Q4 of this year.

Everyone could use an executive coach — even executive coaches.

Such is the thinking of Christine Tao and Lori Mazan, co-founders of Sounding Board, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based marketplace focused on leadership coaching that has so far raised $1 million in seed funding led by Bloomberg Beta, with participation from Precursor Ventures and numerous angel investors.

Some of these investors are people Tao met while an SVP at the mobile advertising startup TapJoy. TapJoy is also where Tao met Mazan, who has been helping companies develop their talent for more than 20 years. “Lori started out coaching our CEO,  then coached me when I got promoted into the executive management team,” says Tao.

In fact, Mazan is continuing to coach some of the roughly 30 executive coaches who work with Sounding Board as contractors, and she isn’t alone, says Tao, noting that many of the startup’s senior coaches work with more junior coaches. (Sounding Board’s eight full-time employees also receive coaching.) “We definitely walk the walk,” says Mazan.

They also talk the talk, as we discovered in chatting with Tao and Mazan earlier today about the importance of coaching — and why more employers would be silly not to take advantage of it to help a range of people within their organizations.

TC: There are so many coaching startups. How do you distinguish Sounding Board from everything else out there?

CT: We combine best-in-class coaches with a tech platform that’s scalable and affordable and outcome-oriented. It’s also a lot more cost-effective compared with other coaching platforms.

TC: How much more affordable?

CT: A weekend of traditional executive coaching in the Bay Area costs between $25,000 and $30,000. We’re about a tenth of that price, and instead of sending someone to a workshop for a couple of days, you pay the same for six months of training with us.

LM: We’re modeled after traditional coaching engagements, including at Chevron, Genetech and a lot of other big oil and manufacturing and biotech companies where I’ve worked over the years. What we’ve done is take what worked at the top of the house and just bring it down to lower managers and senior leaders.

TC: You work with both big and small companies — from the Japanese giant Rakuten to venture-backed Quantcast. Which is the easier sale?

CT: Hah. Both venture-backed companies and bigger enterprises go through huge periods of growth and they elevate folks into leadership roles in which they don’t have experience. High-growth startups innately feel the pain of having talented folks in roles for which they have no skills. On the other hand, public companies often are easier, given that they have a budget and they’re used to investing in training and developing employees.

TC: Do you tend to coach one person at a time or do you do your coaching in batches?

CT: We typically teach a cohort over a six-month period, where the employees are meeting with a coach who has been chosen based on their particular needs and learning styles and [with whom they interact] via video or phone and who they engage any time through Slack or email. When a company on-boards with us, we collect a lot of data around key leadership values and goals, including from managers — they let us know what goals they have in mind for a person’s leadership development. And that person [who will be coached] provides us insights into their personal goals as well.

TC: For people who haven’t had coaching, it all sounds awfully squishy. What are some concrete ways in which the coaching will change based on the individual?

LM: We have 12 developmental areas, and each is personalized for an individual. One of the most popular has to do with managing up and across an organization, meaning we work with people wanting to have influence with their manager and their peers and maybe even their manager’s peers across the organization.

Every approach will be different, including based on whether the person is working in a very high-pressure, fast-paced environment or a more slow-paced and amiable one. It’s also very different if you’re in engineering versus sales, for example. Let’s say you’re in sales and you want to influence your boss. You might need to paint a bigger picture and give examples around how your vision will improve the quota you need to make. On the engineering side, it’s likely that you’ll have to be very detailed.

CT: When Lori coached me, we worked on language I used when talking with one of my CEOs, down to incredibly minute details around the order in which I presented ideas. It made a huge difference. Whereas the feedback was that this person felt like I would dump my problems on him, by instead providing recommendations up front to him and offering many fewer details, he thought I was being more “solutions oriented.” The reality was that I was mostly sharing the same things.

What better way to reach millennial voters ahead of a 2020 presidential run than through Instagram?

Joe Biden, in partnership with ATTN:, will host a 10-episode series streaming on IGTV beginning September 12. In reality, he has yet to confirm a presidential run; the partnership, rather, is meant to help combat digital misinformation in an era of “fake news.” 

The show, called “Here’s the Deal,” will air weekly until the midterm elections on November 6. Each episode will hit on big issues, including gun safety, education, infrastructure and healthcare.

“Folks, with less than 100 days until the most consequential election of our lifetimes, we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball,” Biden says in the announcement, adding that the show will not have “complicated, policy-wonk language or acronyms. Just facts — at least as I see them.”

Biden had just come off of an Instagram hiatus when digital media startup ATTN: announced the news. On Saturday, former President Barack Obama posted this nice tribute, welcoming Biden back to Instagram. 

In a bid to compete with YouTube, Instagram launched IGTV at the end of June. The new feature lets users upload vertical videos of up to one hour in length.

Zendesk has mostly confined itself to customer service scenarios, but it seems that’s not enough anymore. If you want to truly know the customer behind the interaction, you need a customer system of record to go with the customer service component. To fill that need, Zendesk announced it was acquiring Base, a startup that has raised over $50 million.

The companies did not share the purchase price, but Zendesk did report that the acquisition should not have a significant impact on revenue.

While Base might not be as well known as Salesforce, Microsoft or Oracle in the CRM game, it has created a sophisticated salesforce automation platform complete with its own artificial intelligence underpinnings. CEO Uzi Shmilovici claimed his company’s AI could compete with its more well heeled competitors when it was released in 2016 to provide salespeople with meaningful prescriptive advice on how to be more successful.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane certainly sees the value of adding a company like Base to his platform. “We want to do for sales what Zendesk has already done for customer service: give salespeople tools built around them and the customers they serve,” he said in a statement.

If the core of customer data includes customer service, CRM and marketing, Base gives Zendesk one more of those missing components, says Brent Leary, owner at CRM Essentials, a firm that keeps close watch on this market.

“Zendesk has a great position in customer service, but now to strengthen their position with midmarket/enterprise customers looking for integrated platforms, Base adds a strong mobile salesforce automation piece to their puzzle,” Leary told TechCrunch.

As he points out we have seen Hubspot make a similar move with Hubspot Apps, while SugarCRM, which was recently sold to Accel-KKR, could be shopping too, with its new owner’s deeper pockets. “This is almost like a CRM enterprise software Hunger Games going on,” he joked. But he indicates that we should be expecting more consolidation here as these companies try to acquire missing pieces of their platforms to offer more complete solutions.

Matt Price, who previously had the title of senior vice president for product portfolio at Zendesk will lead the Base team moving forward.

Base was founded in 2009 and boasts over 5000 customers. It’s worth pointing out that Base was already available for sale in the company app marketplace, so there was some overlap here, but the company intends to try to move existing customers to Base, of course.

Zendesk has indicated that it will continue to support all Base customers. In addition, Base’s 125 employees have been invited to join Zendesk, so there will be no blood letting here.

Mercedes-Benz shared on Monday its vision for how people and packages will someday move in dense urban environments. It’s called Vision Urbanetic — an all-electric autonomous concept vehicle that can change from a toaster-looking cargo van to a dung beetle-esque (or it is bike helmet) people mover.

The Vision Urbanetic joins a growing list of fugly autonomous vehicle concepts to debut in the past two years. But that’s not really the point here.

Moving past the hot takes on its looks, the Urbanetic shows where Mercedes and other automakers are headed. This is a concept, not plans for a production vehicle, after all.

Mercedes’s vision of a powertrain platform that can house several different vehicle bodies is not unique. Automakers are increasingly moving toward a universal powertrain platform for some of its production vehicles to improve manufacturing efficiencies and reduce costs.

The difference here is that the vehicle bodies could be changed on the fly by a team of workers back at a mobility hub, as depicted in the video below.

The system is based on an autonomous driving platform onto which the respective bodies (people mover or cargo) are fixed. The underlying platform incorporates all the driving functions, which means the autonomous chassis could make its way to its next job location without a body attached, the company said.

The people-mover body type has space for up to 12 passengers, while the cargo module has a storage volume of 353 cubic feet, can be divided into two levels and transport up to 10 pallets.

The idea presents new logistics and infrastructure challenges that any company with plans to deploy a commercial autonomous vehicle ride-hailing fleet will also face. If this vision were ever to become reality, Mercedes would need hubs located near urban centers, where the Urbanetic vehicles would be housed, maintained and charged. This is also where the body type would be swapped out, depending on needs at that time.

Mercedes seems to have thought through some of this. The vehicle bodies could be swapped out automatically or manually, and take a few minutes, Mercedes said. It also outlined a dynamic communications system that would be able to capture and process data in real time to determine what kinds of vehicles are needed, and where. For instance, it could identify a crowd of people gathered in a certain area or capture local information that a concert would soon be over and then deploy more ride-hailing vehicles to that location.

Mercedes said the vehicles could be used in restricted areas such as a factory site or an airport.

Snapdragon’s been talking up its new wearable chip architecture since Google I/O back in May. The component giant finally took the wraps off the product at an event earlier today in San Francisco.

As one imagines from the I/O partnership, Wear 3100 has Google’s smartwatch operating system firmly in its sites. And not a moment too soon, really. In spite of a handful of updates, Wear OS has felt pretty stagnant for some time. Not even the rebrand from Android Wear could help shake loose the cobwebs.

The new architecture replaces the 2100. Qualcomm’s chips are currently shipping in more than 100 different Wear OS watches by 25 different brands, according to the company. Honestly, I’m mostly surprised to hear that Wear OS devices have hit the triple digits. After all, category leaders like Apple, Fitbit and Samsung have all opted to invest in their own software ecosystem, rather than embracing Google.

Interestingly, the first three partners for the new chip are luxury watch makers, rather than tech companies like LG or Huawei. Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc have all signed up to use the tech, perhaps marking the perceived way forward for the operating system. A Pixel Watch launching at Google’s fall event also seems like a very likely possibility, given the timing of the news.

Extended battery life is the main thing here — that, after all, has long been the bane of smartwatch makers. The new chip also brings new modes, include a “Traditional Watch Mode” to cut down on battery use and a “Rich Interactive Mode” for a more robust experience.

The new chip starts shipping for mass production today.

What happens when you add AI to food? Surprisingly, you don’t get a hungry robot. Instead you get something like PixFood. PixFood lets you take pictures of food, identify available ingredients, and, at this stage, find out recipes you can make from your larder.

It is privately funded.

“There are tons of recipe apps out there, but all they give you is, well, recipes,” said Tonnesson. “On the other hand, PixFood has the ability to help users get the right recipe for them at that particular moment. There are apps that cover some of the mentioned, but it’s still an exhausting process – since you have to fill in a 50-question quiz so it can understand what you like.”

They launched in August and currently have 3,000 monthly active users from 10,000 downloads. They’re working on perfecting the system for their first users.

“PixFood is AI-driven food app with advanced photo recognition. The user experience is quite simple: it all starts with users taking a photo of any ingredient they would like to cook with, in the kitchen or in the supermarket,” said Tonnesson. “Why did we do it like this? Because it’s personalized. After you take a photo, the app instantly sends you tailored recipe suggestions! At first, they are more or le

ss the same for everyone, but as you continue using it, it starts to learn what you precisely like, by connecting patterns and taking into consideration different behaviors.”

In my rudimentary tests the AI worked acceptably well and did not encourage me to eat a monkey. While the app begs the obvious question – why not just type in “corn?” – it’s an interesting use of vision technology that is definitely a step in the right direction.

Tonnesson expects the AI to start connecting you with other players in the food space, allowing you to order corn (but not a monkey) from a number of providers.

“Users should also expect partnerships with restaurants, grocery, meal-kit, and other food delivery services will be part of the future experiences,” he said.

While many lament the death of local news, a small army of tech startups have been developing a new set of tools to figure out how to save it. In one of the latest developments, Hoodline — which has built a platform to ingest and analyse hundreds of terabytes of data to find and then write local news stories — has raised $10 million in a Series A round to help take its effort nationwide.

“We want to cover the news deserts that no one else is covering,” said Hoodline’s founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian. “It’s filling a gap. It’s filling a need.”

The San Francisco startup had once been called Ripple News (in reference to the news that “ripples out” from one event) but then took the name of a hyperlocal news blog network that it acquired in 2016 after another Ripple began to make waves.

It is currently generating stories in 20 cities, with ABC, MSN, Yahoo, Hearst and CBS among the publishers that are partnering with it to use its content.

This latest Series A round was led by Neoteny, a seed and early stage investment firm out of Boston whose founder and lead partner, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, is also joining Hoodline’s board.

Sound Ventures, Dentsu Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also participated, among other investors who asked not to be named.

Hoodline had been a part of Disney’s accelerator in 2017, so it too has backed the company, as has Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce behemoth that acquired Hovaghimian’s previous startup, the crowdsourced online video subtitling startup Viki.

Hoodline is not disclosing its valuation, but from what we understand, it’s around $75 million and a bump up from its previous valuation.

Hoodline’s platform today has two parts: a local data wire producing local news stories; and a recommendation module that is somewhat similar to the likes of Outbrain and Taboola. Rather than recirculating stories from a wider network of clickable sites, however, it suggests stories from Hoodline’s inventory of stories, alongside a publication’s own inventory to keep people engaged on a site for longer.

The first of these inks partnerships with media platforms to supply content but currently is provided free to them; the second runs ads alongside the recommended articles.

One of the big issues with local news and its decline is that, as more traditional publishers have moved to the internet to cut the costs of producing printed newspapers, they’ve found that the revenues and margins that they generated from the older activities have not translated to the newer medium and the issues that even exist for large, world-famous publications are only compounded for smaller ones: they have a hard time getting the economies of scale needed to make the ad-based model work, and then when they club together they have to contend with the fact that their readership has moved on to other forms of infotainment.

But as it turns out, there is still an appetite for local information.

“There are so many good stories that go uncovered,” Hovaghimian said. “Plus, forty percent of all searches have local intent.” Facebook’s new interest in local news and Google’s own experiments with local journalism aren’t simple good-will attempts at fostering more community; they reflect interests that these companies have observed among their user bases.

So now, while tech has arguably “killed” the local news business in that way, it’s also been trying to save it be — namely in the form of providing more intelligent ways to run its business, from the advertising technology and/or paywalls to fund it, through to disrupting and improving the means of producing it.

Hoodline is part of the guard of companies that have been looking at how the rise of new kinds of computing technology, such as AI and big data analytics, can be used to help with the latter of these.

“Hoodline is bringing pioneering technology to the world of hyper-local news and content, while layering in editorial expertise and perspective.  This uniquely allows them to craft dynamic stories across a wide range of verticals and outlets,” said Ito in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Hoodline and Razmig as they continue to deliver consumers content that they want, but was previously not available to them.”

Hoodline is not the only one exploring how to tap into big data to build stories; there are many. Among them, in the UK, the Press Association is working with a startup called Urbs to develop AI systems that can help surface interesting stories for (human) journalists to write. In the US, Automated Insights has been developing “robot” reporters to cover local sports and quarterly earnings beats. Other efforts like LiveStories is also tackling a trove of publicly available information — in its case civic data — to visualise and shape narratives from it, products that potentially also make their way into the news.

Hovaghimian said that Hoodline’s system ingests around 250 terabytes of data from a pretty diverse range of sources, spanning from hyperlocal listings services like Yelp and Foursquare through to things like feeds of local high school football sports results, and organises it and passes it through its algorithms to surface interesting items that can be used in stories. Editors, meanwhile, write templates that can be used for different types of stories, such as local food events, job trends in a particular city, or sports results from a local team. One person at the company described the templates as “advanced Madlibs.”

And for now, it’s as basic as this, too. Hoodline has bylined content written by journalists, but the content that is bylined to Hoodline is created by the company’s big data platform, and those articles, it has to be said, are more anodyne than earth-shattering. But Hovaghimian says this is almost intentional, it’s to clear the way for more serious work.

“We are filling a gap and covering news that is not being covered, even if it’s just to test what audiences want to read,” he said. “This frees up resources for more journalistic pursuits.”

Whether or not publications dedicate resources to more journalistic pursuits to complement the Hoodline work, of course, is another matter.

Meanwhile, Hoodline also has journalists to work on original content and to build these templates. The company currently has a ratio of around two engineers to one editor, Hovaghimian said, but believes that as it scales it will be bringing in fewer editors and more engineers: “At this point it’s about growth now that we have figured out what our bottlenecks are,” he said.

As for what comes next, Hovaghimian said that the ambition is to bring this to more than just the US eventually, and to work with different kinds of partners beyond news organizations. Facebook and Google’s own interests in this area haven’t gone unnoticed and the company has thought about how it could partner with them, too.

You can’t really blame Epic for captilizing on Fortnite’s massive and largely unexpected success. And really, you’ve got to strike while the iron’s still hot on this one. The gaming company announced a partnership with toy giant Hasbro this week that while give the world a Fortnite-branded Monopoly game and Nerf Blasters.

Monopoly: Fortnite Edition launches October 1 — just in time to be a little too early for the holiday season. That one is arriving in both the U.S. and U.K. this fall, with more markets coming in 2019. It promises to “bring a a battle building twist to the iconic Fast Dealing Property Trading game,” because nothing says real estate mogul like a survival game.

The Nerf partnership is a bit more of a natural from a licensed content perspective. No specifics to speak of at the moment, but given that there are, you know, guns in Fornite, you can really just use your imagination. Hasbro says they’ll “emulate the amazing onscreen battles Fortnite is known for,” which could imply a laser tag element here.

Those are due out some time next year.

Snapchat is hedging its bets as its social network shrinks. Today Snap Inc revealed the first class of its startup accelerator called Yellow that offers $150,000 in funding and creativity-centric business education in exchange for what a source says is a seven to ten percent equity stake — in line with other accelerators like Y Combinator. The nine companies will take up a three-month residency in one of Snap’s buildings in Venice, Los Angeles.

The accelerator class ranges from augmented reality and journalism studios to lifystyle brands around weddings and fashion to aesthetic-focused marketplaces like ConBody that pairs you with a muscular ex-convict for workouts.

Yellow calls itself “A launchpad for creative minds and entrepreneurs who are looking to build the next generation of great media companies.” Yellow could become a content provider and potential acquisition feeder for the company. ANRK and Space Oddity Films could boost Snapchat’s AR gaming effort, Hashtag Our Stories could fill Snap Map with citizen news broadcasts, Toonstar could bring animation to Discover, and SelfieCircus could power marketing pop-ups like the Snapbots that sold the company’s Spectacles.

But at the same time, it’s hard not to see Yellow as a potential escape route for Snap’s business if Instagram’s competition does end up stealing all its users. Snapchat lost three million last quarter, contributed to a massive share price downslide. Following today’s departure of COO Imran Khan, it’s trading at $9.66, just a few cents above its all-time low.

If a few of Yellow’s investments blow up and Snap makes capital available for follow-on rounds, the returns could supplement its ad revenue. But none of this first batch of startups looks poised to be gamechangers the way Snap’s acquisitions of Bitmoji and Looksery’s early AR filters were.

Yellow’s Inaugural Class

Here’s a look at the first nine companies in Snapchat Yellow, courtesy of write-ups provided by Snap.

ANRK (London, UK) – a new realities studio, exploring immersive storytelling through AR, VR, games and beyond.

• We are passionate about human-centered narratives, and use playful interaction and new technologies to create powerful experiences that connect the digital and physical.

ConBody (New York, NY) – a prison-style fitness bootcamp that hires formerly incarcerated individuals to teach fitness classes.

• ConBody is facilitating an opportunity-filled lifestyle by empowering our community to realize success lies within. We hire formerly incarcerated individuals to build personal discipline through a unique blend of cardiovascular training and bodyweight exercises that take advantage of the resistance properties of everyday objects. We apply military techniques to space constraints intimately familiar to city-dwellers and individuals who reside in small, constrained spaces. In addition, we’re changing the views of formerly incarcerated individuals to be changed by allowing professionals to interact with formerly incarcerated individuals, which allows to give professionals a different perspective on them.

Hashtag Our Stories (Durban, South Africa) – an international mobile journalism (MOJO) network, publishing vertical video stories on social media. Created by citizens, curated by journalists.

• Since September 2017, we’ve empowered 200 citizen storytellers in over 40 countries to produce videos with their phones. We focus on constructive, solutions-based stories and provide more diverse news coverage. Because more cameras and more perspectives means more truth.

IDK (Los Angeles, CA) – the ID for Korean music. We are a digital media company expanding in-depth on the music of Korea and K-Pop as a globally recognized genre; showcasing the Identity of the artists that shape the culture. We provide insightful and rich coverage and content for the global Korean Pop audience.

• We are creating a Global Brand and Destination for an English-Speaking Korean Pop Audience. Our mission is to create rich and stylized content about the Korean Music Genre; less gossip, more news & features. We want to provide a legitimate outlet for Korean Pop Culture; to create emotive, aspirational stories that are visually chic to a young, hyper-aware, and digitally engaged audience.

• As the company begins we will focus on publishing the best in engaging social video content. We will translate this content across platforms, ultimately building brands, shows, and stories that feed the insatiable audience appetite for Korean Pop. From there we will build towards live events, merchandise, and much more.

Love Stories TV (New York, NY) – a video platform for wedding planning and inspiration, bringing engaged couples and event professionals together in a uniquely visual community. Think of us like ‘Houzz’ for weddings: We connect brides and grooms with the ideas, inspiration, products, and services they need for their weddings in a uniquely visual community.

• On lovestoriestv.com filmmakers and newlyweds from all over the world share their professionally produced videos along with the data and details about the wedding. Brides and grooms watch the videos to find ideas, inspiration, products, and services for their wedding. We also have an active community of pre-engaged-brides under the age of 24 who watch the videos on our site, social, and Amazon Prime channel for entertainment. We partner with brands and wedding pros to help them reach brides and grooms on our site and channels via the real wedding films that feature them and original content.

Premme (Los Angeles, CA) – a fashion-first, body-positive lifestyle brand for the plus-size It-Girl.

• Today, 67% of women in America wear plus-sizes – yet plus-size fashion only accounts for 17% of the women’s apparel market. When it comes to media representation, plus-sizes are similarly lacking in positive, aspirational visibility. Premme empowers women who have been historically marginalized through fashion-forward, statement making clothing and visionary, contemporary editorial content and imagery. By creating a relatable, yet aspirational, brand that centers plus-size women, we aim to flip the script on what it means to look and be stylish, while leading the conversation and movement towards truly diverse and inclusive fashion.

SelfieCircus (Los Angeles, CA) – a new kind of circus.

• SelfieCircus creates popup experiences designed to be documented and shared on social media. The company is building a platform to connect artists, brands, and consumers. The first SelfieCircus will open in Los Angeles in late 2018.

Space Oddity Films (Los Angeles, CA) – a content studio exploring tech and culture that creates innovative content for every platform – mobile, digital, AR/VR, video games, feature film and television.

• We tell stories about the convergence of humanity and technology. Our original viral tech horror thriller shorts are the foundation of our brand. Our goal is to make the future now.

Toonstar (Los Angeles, CA) – a digital animation network that creates and distributes daily pop culture cartoons for an “always on” world. Powered by proprietary animation tech, we produce daily, snackable, interactive animated content at unprecedented speed and cost.

• We have a large and highly engaged audience of teens and young adults generating millions of views per week because our content is sticky, shareable, relatable and engineered specifically for social.  We’re a team of studio alumni and media tech innovators who have produced hit digital animated series, built groundbreaking interactive media technologies and launched mega entertainment franchises. Now we’re on a mission to build a nextgen animation network that delivers greater reach + engagement at a fraction of the operating cost.