Author: azeeadmin

Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on top of the Salesforce platform that looked to be heading toward an IPO in recent years has taken a different tack, instead being acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo today.

The company did not reveal the purchase price, but said it could be ready to share more details about the arrangement after the deal closes, probably next month. “What we can say is that Apttus views this development positively and believes Thoma Bravo can instill greater operational excellence, strengthen our market leadership and allow us to continue providing indispensable value to our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

They are describing this not as a full on acquisition, but as ‘taking a majority stake’. However you describe it, it probably wasn’t the ending the company envisioned after taking $404 million in investment since launching in 2006, one of the earliest startups to build a business on top of the Salesforce platform.

If the company believed that Salesforce would eventually buy it, that never happened. In fact, that dream probably went out the window when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a similar company also built on Salesforce, at the end of 2015 for $360 million.

In spite of this, in an interview in 2016, CEO Kirk Krappe still was confident that an exit was coming, either by IPO or a possibly a Salesforce acquisition.

“We will be IPOing this year. That may be a function to figure what Salesforce wants to do and they may think about that [after purchasing SteelBrick at the end of last year]. There’s no reason they can’t buy us too. For me, I have to run the business, and we’re growing 100 percent year on year. If Salesforce came to the table, that would be great if the numbers work. If not, we have an amazingly strong business,” he said at the time.

That never came to pass of course, and the company tried to separate itself from Salesforce in April of 2016 when it released a version of Apttus that would work on Microsoft Dynamics. Krappe saw this as a way to show investors he wasn’t completely married to the Salesforce platform.

While Salesforce provided a system of record around the customer information and all that involved, once the salesperson actually closed in on a sale, that’s when software like Apttus came into play, allowing the company to generate a detailed proposal, a contract once the deal was agreed upon and finally collecting and recording the money from the sale.

Apttus took its last funding rounds in Sept 2017 for $55 million and later a debt financing round for another $75 million in February this year, according to data on Crunchbase.

Thoma Bravo has bought a number of enterprise software products over the years including Qlik, Sailpoint, Dynatrace, Solar Winds and others. Apttus should fit in well with that family of companies.

It was May 2016 when Thomas Plantenga got the call.

He was living in New York and working on projects with Fabrice Grinda — the co-founder of classified juggernaut OLX, and the founder of FJ Labs. Plantenga had worked with Grinda on expanding OLX and was ready for the next challenge — which came in the form of the used clothing marketplace, Vinted.

The invitation came from Insight Venture Partners and it was an offer to help work with one of their portfolio companies — a former high flyer that had fallen on hard times.

“They sold me on the story,” said Plantenga on a call from Vilnius, Lithuania, where he moved to take the reins at the used clothing startup.

“The business was completely burning down and I was hanging out with them,” said Plantenga. “In those five weeks I connected with both the co-founders and wrote a very aggressive plan of how to completely change things and really change the direction… I said fuck it. If you’re going to be betting everything and everyone on this… let’s stick around.” 

Plantenga proposed severe austerity measures for the used clothing exchange. The company shuttered its offices in San Francisco, London, Munich and Paris, and slashed headcount from 240 to 150 and automated the processes of content moderation.

There was a strategic shift in product development, as well. The company focused on trust and safety between buyers and sellers and concentrated on two core markets: Germany and France. And, as Milda Mitkute, the company’s co-founder, told Forbes in an article earlier this year, the company shifted from a mandatory sales fee to a free product with additional paid services (like promotional marketing on the platform for sellers). Between January and December 2017, Vinted processed $360 million in sales.

The turnaround not only saved the company but had investors come knocking at the door. Last week, Sprints Capital led the EUR50 million financing that also included Burda Media and Insight Venture Partners (along with Grinda’s FJ Labs).

“Insight and Accel had the investment written-off to zero and did not expect it to come back,” said Plantenga. What came next was the biggest investment round ever for a Lithuanian startup.

“We started this whole turnaround with something like $14 million in bank account and we closed the round when we had $10 million of cash,” Plantenga said. Before the weekend the company saw $2 million in sales ina . single day. “It was close to zero a little more than two years ago,” said Plantenga.

As a sign of the faith the company has in management, Plantenga said that even though the ownership stake of the founders and executive team has fallen below 50 percent, they still maintain control over the company and the board.

Used clothes may not sound like much of a business, but in Europe, Vinted thinks that roughly $500 billion worth of clothing changes hands across the continent every year.

With so much money on the table, it’s little wonder that Vinted has attracted competition. Companies like Depop, which raised $20 million in January to pursue its own expansion plans for global domination of the used clothing market, are putting their own spin on the marketplace for used clothes.

And the two companies have very different approaches to their market.

“Depop is very smart in branding and positioning themselves as a cool brand that sells cool clothing,” said Plantenga. “And we’re just selling everybody’s clothes. We don’t care whether it’s cool. We just want people to sell their clothes.”

But both companies are on the edge of what Plantenga sees as a massive shift in consumer behavior.

“If we see the super trends of people wanting not to waste and being careful of how they pressure the environment, and all these super trends are becoming a thing,” said Plantenga. “We are hooking in on those super trends. I came from the classified space where you build a horizontal and you monetize cars and real estate, and fashion was a thing that was kind of nice to have. I stuck around because of my own belief that this is something really big.”

The Pansar Augmented is a Swedish smart watch that looks like a standard three-handed wristwatch. However, with the tap of a button, you can view multiple data points including weather, notifications, and even sales data from your CRM.

Pansar is a Swedish watch company that uses Swiss movements and hand assembled components to add a dash of luxury to your standard workhorse watch.

The watch is fully funded on Kickstarter. It costs $645 for early birds.

The watch mostly displays the time but when the data system is activated the hands move to show any data you’d like.

The world is full of interesting data: be it the quest for information on the perfect wave, keeping track on your stock value, or the number of followers you’ve acquired since yesterday. Pansar Augmented collects the data that matters to you and streams it conveniently to the hands of your watch. This is made possible because of the unique dual directional Swiss movement combined with the Pansar Augmented app.

The watch comes in three models: the Ocean Edition that shows “relevant data on weather, wind, and swell amongst others,” the Accelerator Edition that shows website visits or Instagram views, and the Quantifier Edition for the “analytical mind” that wants to track sales numbers.

It’s definitely a clever twist on the traditional smart watch vision and, thanks to some nice styling, these could be some nice pieces for folks who don’t want the distractions of a normal Apple Watch or Android Wear device.

The Pansar Augmented is a Swedish smart watch that looks like a standard three-handed wristwatch. However, with the tap of a button, you can view multiple data points including weather, notifications, and even sales data from your CRM.

Pansar is a Swedish watch company that uses Swiss movements and hand assembled components to add a dash of luxury to your standard workhorse watch.

The watch is fully funded on Kickstarter. It costs $645 for early birds.

The watch mostly displays the time but when the data system is activated the hands move to show any data you’d like.

The world is full of interesting data: be it the quest for information on the perfect wave, keeping track on your stock value, or the number of followers you’ve acquired since yesterday. Pansar Augmented collects the data that matters to you and streams it conveniently to the hands of your watch. This is made possible because of the unique dual directional Swiss movement combined with the Pansar Augmented app.

The watch comes in three models: the Ocean Edition that shows “relevant data on weather, wind, and swell amongst others,” the Accelerator Edition that shows website visits or Instagram views, and the Quantifier Edition for the “analytical mind” that wants to track sales numbers.

It’s definitely a clever twist on the traditional smart watch vision and, thanks to some nice styling, these could be some nice pieces for folks who don’t want the distractions of a normal Apple Watch or Android Wear device.

Tribe Capital, the venture capital firm launched by Arjun Sethi, Jonathan Hsu and Ted Maidenber, a trio of former Social Capital partners, is reportedly raising $200 million for its first flagship venture capital fund. 

This story is developing. We’ve reached out to the firm for comment.

Tribe was said to be focusing on cryptocurrency and blockchain startups, recently leading the $22.7 million round for crypto trading platform SFOX. Though the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that capital from the fund will be deployed across multiple industries.

The news is a kick in the gut for former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya‘s venture capital firm Social Capital, which has been bleeding partners as of late—so much so that the firm has removed the page on its website that listed its team.

Last week, we highlighted two notable exits in Ashley Mayer, a partner and VP of marketing since 2015, and Mike Ghaffary, a partner since August 2017, who said he was leaving to focus on his angel investing career.

Since then, Axios is reporting Social Capital associate Tejinder Gill has been hired by Collaborative Fund as a principal and that Alex Chee, who headed up product development, is leaving too—whereabouts unknown. It’s quite possible he’s joining Tribe. The firm, after all, is made up of three former Social Capital investors, and the only other person to list Tribe Capital as their employer on LinkedIn is Georgia Kinne, who’s in charge of operations at the firm and was previously an executive assistant at Social Capital.

Other high-level Social Capital employees to head out the door this year include growth equity chief Tony Bates and vice chairman Marc Mezvinsky.

A new technology by MIT researchers can sense depression by analyzing the written and spoken responses by a patient. The system, pioneered by MIT’s CSAIL group, uses “a neural-network model that can be unleashed on raw text and audio data from interviews to discover speech patterns indicative of depression.”

“Given a new subject, it can accurately predict if the individual is depressed, without needing any other information about the questions and answers,” the researchers write.

The most important part of the system is that it is context-free. This means that it doesn’t require specific questions or types of responses. It simply uses day-to-day interactions as the source data.

“We call it ‘context-free,’ because you’re not putting any constraints into the types of questions you’re looking for and the type of responses to those questions,” said researcher Tuka Alhanai.

“Every patient will talk differently, and if the model sees changes maybe it will be a flag to the doctors,” said study co-author James Glass. “This is a step forward in seeing if we can do something assistive to help clinicians.”

From the release:

The researchers trained and tested their model on a dataset of 142 interactions from the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus that contains audio, text, and video interviews of patients with mental-health issues and virtual agents controlled by humans. Each subject is rated in terms of depression on a scale between 0 to 27, using the Personal Health Questionnaire. Scores above a cutoff between moderate (10 to 14) and moderately severe (15 to 19) are considered depressed, while all others below that threshold are considered not depressed. Out of all the subjects in the dataset, 28 (20 percent) are labeled as depressed.

In experiments, the model was evaluated using metrics of precision and recall. Precision measures which of the depressed subjects identified by the model were diagnosed as depressed. Recall measures the accuracy of the model in detecting all subjects who were diagnosed as depressed in the entire dataset. In precision, the model scored 71 percent and, on recall, scored 83 percent. The averaged combined score for those metrics, considering any errors, was 77 percent. In the majority of tests, the researchers’ model outperformed nearly all other models.

Obviously detection is only part of the process but this robo-therapist could help real therapists find and isolate issues automatically versus the long process of analysis. It’s a fascinating step forward in mental health.

HTC is cozying up to its main competitor in the VR space, Facebook-owned Oculus as it looks to find a business model that will wrestle it out of the VR market doldrums.

Today, the Taiwanese hardware company announced that its Viveport VR subscription service has opened up shop on a non-HTC headset, namely Facebook’s Oculus Rift. The product allows gamers to download a few titles per month from its store on a rolling basis.

HTC has had a rough time finding where it can compete as a VR hardware company in a competitive landscape that is pulling in little to no hardware margins. Its answer has been to focus on enterprise customers with a high-end, overpriced headset and point consumers to a content subscription model that gives headset owners access to a library of titles and gives it the cut of developers’ VR titles that has been going to its headset-partner Valve.

In theory this isn’t an awful idea considering that a lot of the VR owners right now operate firmly within the early adopter arena and would theoretically be very open to a model like this. The problem is that a lot of the people with Vive headsets purchased it because they liked the deep integration with Valve’s SteamVR, both its superb tracking system and its familiar Steam store. Most of the Vive owners I talk with think of Viveport as little more than buggy bloatware.

Because the software isn’t a huge asset to the Vive platform or at least one that could move systems, there’s no reason for HTC not to open it to other headsets and try to court some interests from VR users looking to power through some of the quite good indie titles that are on the store. A Viveport subscription costs $8.99 per month.

One of the big problems with buying VR content has been that some smaller studios are charging a lot for their early titles because it’s incredibly daunting to make money as an indie VR developer, this does lead to a lot of consumers being a bit dissatisfied with what they get though. This was one of Viveport’s big selling points, “try before you buy!” This doesn’t hold on the Oculus store as much after the company announced a pretty relaxed return policy last year.

Without headset-level integration, it’s not all that clear how the company plans on gaining a footing on the Oculus platform. Of the 1400 titles in the Viveport library, about 200 of them have been tested to work well with the Rift, HTC says.

Mercedes-Benz unveiled Tuesday the EQC, an all-electric crossover that kicks off the German automaker’s plans to invest more than $12 billion to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand.

The automaker plans to invest another $1.2 billion in global battery production, Daimler AG Chairman and Mercedes-Benz CEO Dieter Zetsche said.

The Mercedes EQC, which is expected to go on sale in the U.S. in 2020, joins a list of luxury all-electric vehicles introduced in recent months that aim to capture market back from Tesla.

Porsche has plans to produce the all-electric Taycan at the end of 2019. Audi is unveiling its all-electric e-tron quattro SUV next week. Sales of the Jaguar I-Pace are expected to begin in the U.S. this fall. 

Mercedes-Benz EQC 400 interior.

The Mercedes EQC has a new drive system with compact dual electric drivetrains at each axle, which together generates 402 horsepower and 562 pound-feet of torque. The EQC can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds. The vehicle’s 80 kilowatt-hour battery has an estimated range of around 200 miles, Mercedes-Benz said. The battery has standard DC fast-charging that can reach an 80% charge in 40 minutes.

The EQC will come standard with 19-inch wheels, LED headlamps with adaptive high-beam assist, a sliding sunroof, heated, power and memory front seats as well as its new MBUX infotainment system, which will include three year of free map updates. The system has a 10.25-inch instrument cluster and a 10.25-inch media display.

Mercedes-Benz didn’t release a price for the EQC.

CRISPR, the gene-editing system that could one day change the course of humanity still has a long way to go before we seriously alter anything but it’s not too far-fetched to say it could happen. What’s real and what’s not and just how close are we to radically changing our food supply, medicine and life as we know it as human beings? We’re going to get into all that with Trevor Martin, the co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences and Rachel Haurwitz, the co-founder of Caribou bioscience this week at Disrupt SF 2018.

Trevor Martin is building what he refers to as the biological search engine for CRISPR through his company Mammoth Biosciences. That means using a guide RNA to direct a CRISPR protein to search for any specific DNA or RNA sequence and it could be used to shape the future of bio research. Martin holds a PhD in Biology from Stanford University and received his undergraduate education in biology from Princeton.

Rachel Haurwitz earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the CEO and president of gene editing company Caribou Biosciences, which she co-founded with CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna. Haurwitz also owns several patents covering multiple CRISPR-based technologies.

We’ll be chatting with both of these fascinating people on stage this Thursday at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco about CRISPR and the future of gene editing.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

It’s been ten years since Google first launched Chrome. At the time, Google’s browser was a revelation. Firefox had gotten slow, Internet Explorer was Internet Explorer and none of the smaller challengers, maybe with the exception of Opera, every got any significant traction. But here was Google, with a fast browser that was built for the modern web.

Now, ten years later, Google is the incumbent and Chrome is getting challenged both from a technical perspective, thanks to a resurgent Firefox, and by a wave of anti-Google sentiment. But Google isn’t letting that get in the way of celebrating Chrome’s anniversary. To mark the day, the company today officially launched its new look for Chrome and previewed what it has in stock for the future of its browser. And it’s not just a new look. Chrome’s Omnibox and other parts of the browser are getting updates, too.

If you’ve followed along, then the new look doesn’t come as a surprise. As usual, Google started testing this update in its various pre-release channels. If you haven’t, though, you will still instantly recognize Chrome as Chrome.

The new Chrome user interface, which is going live on all the platforms the browser supports, follows Google’s Material Design 2 guidelines. That means it’s looking a bit sleeker and modern now, with more rounded corners and subtle animations. You’ll also see new icons and a new color palette.

On the feature side, Chrome now offers an updated password manager that can automatically generate (and save) strong passwords for you, as well as improved autofill for those pesky forms that ask for you shipping addresses and credit card info.

What’s maybe more interesting that, though, is an update to the Omnibox (where you type in your URLs and search queries). The Omnibox can now search the tabs you have currently open and in the near future, it’ll return results from your Google Drive files, too.

Also new are the ability to change the background of your new tab page and create and manage shortcuts on it.

Looking ahead, Google VP of product management Rahul Roy-Chowdhury notes that the team is looking at how to best bring more AI-driven features to Chrome.

“With a smarter Chrome, you will be able to do more than just look at a webpage,” he writes. “Imagine searching on Chrome for a singer you just heard, and having Chrome show you not just their bio, but also their upcoming concert near you and where to purchase tickets. With AI, Chrome will also better understand what you’re trying to get done, and help you do so faster.”

That, of course, is exactly what Microsoft is also trying to do with its Edge browser and its integration with Cortana. I’m not a regular Edge user, but I’ve generally been surprised about the usefulness of that integration, which automatically brings up related information about restaurants, for example. It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s version of this feature will look like.

Roy-Chowdhury also notes that the team is working on building more augmented-reality features into the browser. So far, those features have always sounded better on paper than in practice and mostly felt like a gimmick. Google thinks it’s on to something, though, so we’ll just have to see what that’ll look like when it goes live.