Author: azeeadmin

Livongo Health, a consumer digital health company is focused on the treatment of chronic diseases, is integrating its service with Abbott Labs’ continuous glucose monitoring system.

Livongo is about empowering people with chronic conditions live better and healthier lives, CEO Glen Tullman said on stage at Disrupt SF.  Livongo started with a connected blood glucose monitor that captures data and sends it to the cloud, where it can be processed and analyzed. From here, Livongo delivers real-time insights to customers as well as their physician and even family members.

Livongo started with a product to manage diabetes. And has since added two other devices and services, one focused on diabetes prevention and another on managing hypertension. The company has raised more than $240 million since its founding in 2014.

The deal with Abbott Labs marks a new kind of expansion for Livongo. The collaboration lets Livongo offer Abbott’s glucose monitoring system (known as the FreeStyle Libre Pro System) to its members with diabetes. Instead of having prick their finger continuously, customers can now put a patch on, which delivers readings whenever they want. Members then receive a visual snapshot of their glucose data to give them a clearer view on their glucose levels as well as patterns. Members will also be able to share that data with their personal physicians.

“Our business is not only about hardware,” Jennifer Schneider, Livongo’s chief medical officer said on stage Wednesday when asked if the relationship with Abbott cannibalizes its existing monitor business. “It’s an end-to-end solution to allow and empower people with chronic conditions to live better lives, and that includes a piece of hardware, it includes really the data, the analytics around personalizing the data we get back to affect behavior change, and then services arms as well.”

“So from a philosophy standpoint any device where we easily collect data, that’s great.”

Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.

Origami Labs’ device is the Orii, a smart ring that works with an app on your phone, allowing you to physically touch your finger to your ear to either speak to or listen to your voice assistant.

This involves the use of bone conduction technology, which allows you to hear sounds through the vibration of bones in your face, bypassing the outer and middle ears to stimulate the inner ear directly.

That means you can use Orii to do things like listen to your text messages, send a WhatsApp message to a friend, take a phone call, get information like the time or weather, use reminders, or anything else that Siri or Google Assistant could do.

The ring alerts you with a vibration, then you listen (or speak to its microphone) by raising your finger to your ear.

The company presented its device on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 today, after winning a “wildcard” spot that allowed it to enter the Startup Battlefield competition.

The Hong Kong-based startup was founded by Marcus Leung-Shea and Kevin Wong in 2015.

Wong’s father is visually impaired, which makes using a smartphone more difficult.

“That’s where we got started – just to create a device that helps visually impaired people,” Marcus explains. “But through building the product and launching a Kickstarter, it became clear that this screen-free way of interacting with technology is something that actually a lot of people are looking for. It taps into this sense that we’re spending too much time looking at our devices,” he says.

With other Bluetooth devices, like AirPods, there’s a limit to how long they can be worn comfortably.

Plus, there’s the aesthetics to consider – not everyone wants to be seen wearing their AirPods all the time, out of a sense of style. AirPods and other Bluetooth devices in the ear are also often used as a signal others that you don’t want to be bothered.

Meanwhile, using the assistant through the speaker on the phone isn’t very private.

The startup ran crowdfunding campaigns last year to raise its initial seed round. On Kickstarter, the Orii had 4,000 backers – enough to prove there’s at least some consumer interest in this kind of product, the founders believe.

The first version of the Orii is shipping to its early backers who paid $99 to $150 for the device. It’s a bit large, in comparison to even costume rings, but that’s a solvable problem at scale. A second version of the device, shipping in Q2 2019, will be about 25 percent to 30 percent smaller, Marcus says. This one will come in different colors and enable new features. The company is also working on Alexa integration.

Orii has generated some interest from businesses and consumers. Specifically, luxury hotels and retailers want to test the product as a team communication system because they don’t want their staff looking at screens, which could come across as rude.

Mobile operators in Hong Kong, where the 14-person team is based, are also interested in selling Orii as a bundle with their phones. But all these discussions are in the early stages, Marcus notes.

Origami Labs is backed by its crowdfunding and seed investment from the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Seed Fund.

Groq has raised $52.3 million of a $60 million round, per an SEC filing. Social Capital co-founder and former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, who’s listed on the filing, has participated in the funding.

Presumably, Palihapitiya’s investment came from Social Capital; the firm, which has been experiencing a boatload of personnel changes as of late, led Groq’s $10 million investment in April 2017.

Groq is developing a tensor processing unit — which is an integrated circuit developed for machine learning specifically. There’s not much other info out there; the company doesn’t have much of a website or any promotional materials available for public viewing.

In addition to Palihapitiya, two other names are listed on the most recent filing. That’s the company’s CTO Jonathan Ross, who spent about five years as a hardware engineer at Google and co-founded the search giant’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is responsible for its custom ML chip.

The other name is Douglas Wightman, a former software engineer at Google. His LinkedIn profile says he’s Groq’s CEO.

Palihapitiya has spoken publicly about the project before, telling CNBC last year that he was “really excited about Groq.”

“It’s too early to talk specifics, but we think what they’re building could become a fundamental building block for the next generation of computing,” he said.

The company has reportedly poached several people from Google’s TPU team.

Vitamins are proving to be a lucrative industry in the United States. Just last year vitamin sales pulled in roughly $37 billion for the U.S. economy. That’s up from $28 billion in 2010. To cash in on this growing market, several startups have popped up in the last few years — including Nutrigene, a startup combining the vitamin business with another lucrative avenue of revenue in consumer DNA analysis.

Nutrigene believes your genes may hold the secret to what you might be missing in your diet. The company will send you tailor-made liquid vitamin supplements based on a lifestyle quiz and your DNA. You get your analysis by filling out an assessment on the startup’s website, choosing a recommended package such as “essentials,” “improve performance” or “optimize gut health.” After that you can also choose to upload your DNA profile from 23andMe, then Nutrigene will send you liquid supplements built just for you.

Founder Min FitzGerald launched the startup out of Singularity and later accepted a Google fellowship for the idea. Nutrigene then went on to Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class. FitzGerald’s co-founder and CTO Van Duesterberg comes from a biotech and epigenetics background and holds a PhD from Stanford.

PhDs and impressive resumes aside, the vitamin and genetics industries are not without controversy. For every study showing that those who eat a balanced diet don’t benefit from supplements, there are just as many highlighting the benefits of taking your vitamins. Also, coupling vitamin therapy with your DNA seems at a glance dubious. However, Dawn Barry, former VP at Illumina and now president of Luna DNA, a biotech company powered by the blockchain, says it could have some scientific underpinnings. But, she cautioned, nutrigenetics is still an early science.

Amir Trabelsi, founder of genetic analysis platform Genoox, agrees. We interviewed both Trabelsi and Barry previously when Nutrigene first came on our radar. Trabelsi pointed out these types of companies don’t need to provide any proof.

“That doesn’t mean it’s completely wrong,” he told TechCrunch. “But we don’t know enough to say this person should use Vitamin A, for example… There needs to be more trials and observation.”

Nutrigene acknowledges the best supplementation for performance goes beyond just a genetic profile. Our lifestyles, where we live, what we do and what we put in our bodies (or don’t) all can contribute to a deficiency. For better nutritional accuracy, Nutrigene will send you a blood test kit in the mail to test for things like Vitamin D deficiency (a common deficiency in Silicon Valley, according to my doctor). You also can choose to go to a blood testing center to find out what sort of nutritional supplements you’ll need for optimal performance.

One other twist — Nutrigene’s vitamins come in liquid form for what FitzGerald says is the optimum delivery method.

I tried out the program for myself earlier this year, though not for more than a few days as I was pregnant at the time and wanted to stick with the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking. Nothing I saw on the packaging from Nutrigene was dangerous for pregnant women, just run-of-the-mill stuff like vitamin B12, which my genetic analysis said I was prone to be deficient in. But I had already been taking some pretty good prenatal vitamins from New Chapter and a DHA supplement from Nordic Naturals for a year leading up to getting pregnant. I had a very healthy, nearly 9.5 pound baby boy in March. My own doctor, who tested my nutritional levels at the beginning of my pregnancy through a blood sample, did not tell me I had any deficiencies.

That’s not to say it wouldn’t be great for someone else looking for optimal nutrition and wanting a boost through supplementation. It’s also a great industry to get into if you know how to market your products. Though crowded, there’s plenty of room to grow and billions of dollars in the vitamin industry for those who can make their products stand out. DNA analysis and liquid supplementation might just be the thing.

FitzGerald tells TechCrunch that Nutrigene has already shipped 8,500 personalized dosages to customers since launching earlier this year.

For those interested in trying out Nutrigene, you can do so by ordering on the website. Package pricing varies and depends on nutritional needs, but starts at around $85 per month.

Earlier today, we took the stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event with top VCs Megan Quinn of Spark Capital, Sarah Tavel of Benchmark Capital, and Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures to explore some of the trends rippling through the startup investing ecosystem. Think megafunds, SoftBank’s $93 billion Vision Fund — even whether Silicon Valley is losing some of its gravitational pull, as suggested in a recent Economist piece that’s been making the rounds.

On the last front, and a little to our surprise, the VCs seemed to agree that a shift is afoot, if we aren’t already past a tipping point. Lee said she hadn’t read the story, but that for her part, “Probably, for all of us, around boardrooms, [we’re] talking about that hiring challenges in the Bay Area. And when companies get to a certain size, it often comes up that they’re thinking about moving or opening up a second office because it’s too expensive to live here . . . we’re definitely starting to see that more.”

Quinn agreed, saying that when Spark makes a growth-stage investment in the Bay Area these days, “We often [tell the founders to] go to sf.com, draw a three-hour circle around San Francisco where [the city has] direct flights, [then] find a city that has a university and open up a second office as quickly as possible.”

Even Tavel, whose firm has long been known for its laser-like focus on (and success in) Silicon Valley, admitted that she used to “believe very strongly” that to build a multi-billion company, founders had to set up shop in the Bay Area. Yet in the last couple of years, she continued, “I’ve stopped giving that [advice to founders] because it is just amazing how competitive it is for talent here and how expensive it’s become, especially when you’re competing against, you know, the big incumbents like Facebook and everybody else that have these gushing cash wells, and they’re in their businesses.”

You can check out more of the conversation below.

Most of us won’t ever have to present to the U.S. Congress, and that’s probably for the best. It might be more advisable to hit the gym if you want to give your heart a good work out, as opposed to having to answer politicians who ask why your company is enabling foreign entities to influence domestic elections.

Forethought, a 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant, has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.

The startup takes a bit of an unusual approach to search. Instead of a keyword-driven experience we are used to with Google, Forethought uses an information retrieval model driven by artificial intelligence underpinnings that they then embed directly into the workflow, company co-founder and CEO Deon Nicholas told TechCrunch. They have dubbed their answer engine ‘Agatha.’

Much like any search product, it begins by indexing relevant content. Nicholas says they built the search engine to be able to index millions of documents at scale very quickly. It then uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to read the documents as a human would.

“We don’t work on keywords. You can ask questions without keywords and using synonyms to help understand what you actually mean, we can actually pull out the correct answer [from the content] and deliver it to you,” he said.

One of first use cases where they are seeing traction in is customer support. “Our AI, Agatha for Support, integrates into a company’s help desk software, either Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and then we [read] tickets and suggest answers and relevant knowledge base articles to help close tickets more efficiently,” Nicholas explained. He claims their approach has increased agent efficiency by 20-30 percent.

The plan is to eventually expand beyond the initial customer service use case into other areas of the enterprise and follow a similar path of indexing documents and embedding the solution into the tools that people are using to do their jobs.

When they reach Beta or general release, they will operate as a cloud service where customers sign up, enter their Zendesk or Salesforce credentials (or whatever other products happen to be supported at that point) and the product begins indexing the content.

The founding team, all in their mid-20s, have had a passion for artificial intelligence since high school. In fact, Nicholas built an AI program to read his notes and quiz him on history while still in high school. Later at the University of Waterloo he published a paper on machine learning and had internships at Palantir, Facebook and Dropbox. His first job out of school was at Pure Storage. All these positions had a common thread of working with data and AI.

The company launched last year and they debuted Agatha in private Beta 4 months ago. They currently have six companies participating, the first of which has been converted to a paying customer.

They have closed a pre-seed round of funding too, and although they weren’t prepared to share the amount, the investment was led by K9 Ventures. While Village Global, Original Capital and other unnamed investors also participated.

The odds are stacked against Google if the reports are true and the company is trying to bring its services back to China, according to the former head of Google China.

News reports last month uncovered details of internal plans to introduce a search product and a news app in China, moves that would mark a re-entry to the consumer market which Google left in 2010. The plans, which follow a noticeable increase in activity in China from Google, were widely criticized by activists and also raised concern internally from Google employees.

Kaifu Lee left the search giant nine years following a four-year stint, and today he’s best-known as one of the world’s leading thinkers on AI and the founding partner of Chinese VC Sinovation Ventures. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco this week, he shared his belief that China’s tech ecosystem is rapidly catching the U.S. on AI — that also spills over into more general tech, and the kind of competitors that Google would face were it to return to China.

“I think re-entry is always difficult,” Lee said. But “the bigger issue really is can an American multinational succeed in China now that China has bifurcated into this parallel universe.”

Lee helmed Google’s China business in its battle against domestic search firm Baidu . He said that Google’s market share jumped from nine percent to 24 percent during his tenure, while total revenue was “approaching” $1 billion, but now the outlook in China is less rosy in 2018.

While he admitted that Google “should have a higher chance than any other company” at succeeding in China, he isn’t optimistic that it — or indeed any U.S. firm — can.

“People [in China] aren’t looking for a new search engine or an app store, new companies are emerging addressing previously unknown customer needs [and] innovations are coming out,” Lee explained.

“The new graduates generally prefer to work for Chinese companies and then, lastly, the heads of multinationals are really just professional managers. If they were to compete against local entrepreneurs who are gladiators in this colosseum, I don’t think the American companies will have a high chance of succeeding in this environment,” he added.

Google isn’t the only U.S. firm looking at China, of course.

Facebook briefly received approval for a China-based subsidiary — it was later withdrawn following media reports — while it has tested local products in the past and engaged in dialogue with regulators. Uber was more successful, but it famously spent more than $1 billion per year to compete in China before being sold to local rival Didi. The only companies that could be credited with not failing in China are LinkedIn, Evernote and Airbnb, and, in each case, the actual impact is debatable. Certainly, each has strong/stronger local rivals that remain active.

“I think any American company would have a hard time in China now, Apple being the single exception,” Lee said.” And I think that’s because [Apple is] mostly a hardware product and the product has become a fashion symbol… so that’s different.”

In the case of Google, the challenge is far different. Even local social media companies struggle to adhere to adequately police online content according to the whim of authorities. New media firm Toutiao, for example, had numerous apps temporarily suspended from local app stores, while it massively strengthened its content checking teams and made a public apology. Tencent, Alibaba and others also employ in-house teams to police the content and users on their platforms.

That’s a huge challenge without even thinking about finding the right product-market fit or engaging an audience.

The fertility market is projected to be worth more than $30 billion by 2025, and today on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage, a new device called the Kegg, a Bluetooth-connected silicone kegel ball that monitors mucus to help determine a woman’s fertility by being inserted for no more than two minutes every day, is launching a device it hopes will make some waves in it — literally and figuratively.

The device, when shipped in the near future, will sell for less than $200.

For the uninitiated, a kegel ball is an object that a woman places in her vaginal passage. Designed to be held in place by a woman’s kegel muscles (also known as the pelvic floor), holding a kegel ball in place helps to exercise those muscles and strengthen them — which can be useful to help recover after you’ve given birth, to keep yourself from involuntarily peeing as you age and (yes) to make sex more enjoyable. (It’s not a completely glamorous list, but one that I’d argue is pretty useful for many women.)

Kegg’s product takes that one step further and creates another use case by using it to measure mucus viscosity, with the daily, two-minute measurements producing a cycle that looks something like this:

In doing so, it is also exploring another aspect of fertility that’s not typically a part of many consumer-focused assistants: the viscosity of the mucus in a woman’s vaginal passage.

We have seen a wave of startups (and more traditional female health businesses) emerge in the last several years that are focused on tracking metrics like pulse and body temperature or your ovulation cycle to determine your fertility window. (There is even a kegel ball-based device on the market that measures your temperature, alongside other connected kegel balls.)

Mucus is another important determinant of what is going on. As an egg gets released from a woman’s ovary, the consistency of the mucus changes. Not only does the viscosity give you an indication of where the egg is in its travels out of the ovary, but the more viscose it gets, the more viable it is for holding sperm to survive for longer before they connect with the egg. (Typically sperm do not survive for that long, and so the thicker the mucus, the bigger window you have for that sperm getting to the egg to fertilize it.)

The Kegg comes with two gold bands on it that emit electric pulses that are used to measure the thickness of the mucus.

Using analyzer chips on a custom-designed PCB inside the Kegg, the device monitors the response from the mucus surrounding the Kegg’s sensors. It then “reads” the electro-chemical properties in the mucus to detect which electrolytes are present in the mucus. And this in turn is sent to the cloud for further processing through Kegg’s algorithm, ultimately determining the consistency of the mucus. 

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Kristina Cahojova, the CEO and founder of Lady Technologies (the startup behind the Kegg), says her team chose to focus on mucus because it’s too difficult, if not impossible, to use the other metrics to determine fertility if a woman has an irregular cycle, there are already a lot of products out there that are already measuring those metrics for those who are regular and there weren’t any products like the Kegg on the market already today.

“The tech has been around for 50 years,” she said, in reference to the ability to measure the viscosity of the mucus and tie that to a specific woman’s fertility. And yet, there have been very few products created based on it up to now.

Indeed, the most well-known consumer-focused product on the market today that measures a woman’s mucus is the OvuCue, which retails for more than $200 and is a larger and more complex probe. “I think you have to be a woman to invent something like this,” Cahojova said of the Kegg.

Right now, the Kegg is only using its measurements to help define the window for when you might be most fertile, but of course there are potentially many other areas of women’s health that could be informed by way of the diagnostics it is picking up, provided the startup finds the funding and manages to make it through the regulatory hoops to do so.

The bigger picture that we should all find encouraging is that the rise of connected devices, big data analytics and ever-more medical research is coming together to give us a much better idea of what is going on with our bodies, and what we can do differently to help influence the outcomes. Cahojova also sees the benefit of that competition.

“It’s very nice that users have a lot of options,” she said. “For me none of the existing options happened to work because I am very irregular. We are trying to address how to reduce fertility stress for other irregular women.”

23andMe is testing a $749 “premium” service for deeper health insights, according to several customers who saw a test page for the new product and posted about it on Reddit.

First spotted by CNBC, the company served up a test web page to several customers telling them about a service that would allow them to look at their “whole genome data.” However, when they clicked on the link provided, nothing happened. A few Redditors even posited the notification may have been a mistake as the link led nowhere.

But, according to the company, there’s no error here. 23andMe later confirmed to TechCrunch it sent out a test page to some customers to “gauge interest” in such a product. However, there’s “nothing planned” at this time for such a service, according to a 23andMe spokesperson.

The consumer DNA company charges $299 for its highest package right now, and includes a breakdown of both health and ancestry using all 23 of your chromosomes (hence the name). The cost to sequence your whole genome is currently just under $1,000 so it’s not clear if 23andMe would lower the price to sequence all of a customer’s DNA or if they would offer a comprehensive analysis of a good chunk of your genome.

One other possibility is that the company was exploring diving back into next-generation sequencing, which it abandoned in 2016. Next-generation sequencing was regarded as too complex at the time and the company wanted to focus on a technique that would expedite research efforts as it was cozying up to the drug research market.

However, 23andMe tells TechCrunch that’s not the case, and that it has no plans to get back into next-generation sequencing, instead sticking to genotyping, which offers much richer data on specific traits consumers may be interested in, such as if they’re prone to get fatter than average or if they’re a carrier for Alzheimer’s disease.

We don’t know if 23andMe will produce this particular product, but we do know the company is thinking up other streams of revenue in the future and, according to the company, working on something more comprehensive than genotyping. We’ll be sure to let you know if and when they can tell us more about what they’re spinning up.