Author: azeeadmin

When WeWork appeared, other entrepreneurs looked at the model and thought that if you could apple co-working to property, then why not apply co-living. Thus, in the US, Common appeared, as did Hmlet in Asia. Imn the EU, Habyt launched, but has already gobbled-up its competitors Quarters, Goliving, and Erasmo’s Room.

It’s now closed a series B round of €20M / $24M, and merged with another competitor, Homefully, founded by Sebastian Wuerz in 2016. The round was backed by HV Capital (formerly Holtzbrink Ventures), Vorwerk Ventures, P101 and Picus Capital.

Founded in 2017 by Luca Bovone, Habyt will now have over 5,000 units across 15 cities and 6 countries. The merged companies will offer fully furnished and serviced living units, coupled with a tech-enabled user-experience and a focus on community, aimed at young professionals between 20 and 35 years old who move jobs and cities fairly frequently.

Luca Bovone, Founder and CEO of Habyt, said: “We have been on an incredible journey in the past year and a half. In spite of less than perfect market conditions we have been able to grow a lot via a very successful M&A strategy that brought us into the position of leaders of our sector in Europe and that still has a lot of potential. This 20M series B round really opens our doors to keep building Habyt both via organic growth and via more M&As. We are now looking at strategic targets in Europe, specifically in France and Italy, and also in other continents, especially in Asia.”

Sebastian Wuerz, Founder of homefully, said: “The coliving market is going through a consolidation phase and Habyt has really seized this opportunity quickly and effectively and is on the best track to become the leader of the sector at a global scale. Joining forces is a crucial step in this direction and I am very excited for the team to be part of this journey.”

Felix Kluehr, Partner at HV said: “We are happy to see that Habyt has emerged as the leading player in the European co-living market and HV is excited to support the team in their ambitious plan to build the leading European coliving company”.

Over an interview, Bovone told me: “It’s like a member’s club. We have a subscription model, where people pay a monthly fee, which is your rent, and then you can, of course, apply for a room somewhere else and know that we have a fairly decent scale across Europe and eventually, also in southern Europe. You are able to move from one place to the other. Our motto is live anywhere.”

He said that the pandemic had meant that people were ditching co-working spaces and “They would prefer to spend 50 to 100 euro more per month on getting better housing where they can work comfortably from home.”

“We are already seeing within our customer base, they want to stay six months in Berlin, three months in Madrid, then move back to Berlin and so on. The traditional housing market just doesn’t allow that to happen. You have contracts with utilities and so on, which you can never break and it’s just an outdated product offering, and we’re trying to tackle that.”

There have been plenty of pop-ups over the years, but tomorrow Google’s first store opens in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood. The brick and mortar model finds the company joining peers like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and even Amazon, all of whom have a retail presence in Manhattan, including several just around the corner from Google’s new digs.

The new space, which opens tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. local time, fills 5,000 square feet of selling space in Google’s big, pricey West Side real estate investment. The retail location was previously occupied by a Post Office and Starbucks, which vacated the premises once their leases expired under their new corporate landlord.

The store’s layout is designed to be experiential, highlighting the company’s growing hardware portfolio along with select third-party partners. Essentially it’s a way for the company to get Pixel phones, Home offerings, Stadia, WearOS and the newest addition to the hardware portfolio, Fitbit devices, in front of tourists and locals.

“We really used the pop-ups over the last several years to get a better sense of what are customer expectations for what we can uniquely deliver at Google,” VP Jason Rosenthal said during a press preview week. We’ve taken learnings from our 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 pop-ups and really fed that learning into what we’re opening[…] in Chelsea.”

Due to pandemic restrictions, the preview was virtual. And while it’s open to the public this week, the company will be maintaining the standard safety precautions, as the city deals with (knock on wood) the tail end of the pandemic.

And while COVID-19 almost certainly slowed the planned opening, Google promises that things will be in full force starting tomorrow. This follows several weeks of piloting, wherein the store’s 50 or so staffers were put through their paces, while the company put the finishing touches on the experience. Prior to this, Google built a full-size store mockup in a hangar space in Mountain View to test out ideas.

In addition to product screens and dioramas lining the 17-foot windows, the company filled the store with “sandboxes” — effectively scenarios like a living room, not dissimilar to what you might find in a large furniture store — albeit better lit. There’s also a gaming area for playing Stadia and a soundproof spot for testing out various Home/Nest products.

Like Apple’s Store, customers can bring in for repair broken devices like Pixels. The company says it’s growing the number of devices that can be repaired on-site, while certain issues, like a broken screen, should be able to be fixed same day.

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It seems likely that the store is a pilot in and of itself, with further plans to open additional locations in the U.S. and, perhaps, international markets where the company sells hardware. For now, however, Google won’t discuss the subject beyond tomorrow’s opening in Chelsea.

As the insurance industry adjusts to life in the 21st century (heh), an AI startup that has built computer vision tools to enable remote damage appraisals is announcing a significant round of growth funding.

Tractable, which works with automotive insurance companies to let users take and submit photos of damaged cars that are then “read” to make appraisals, has raised $60 million, a series D that values Tractable at $1 billion, the company said.

Tractable says it works with more than 20 of the top 100 auto insurers in the world, and it has seen sales grow 600% in the last 24 months, which CEO Alex Dalyac told me translates as “well into 8 figures of annual revenue.” He also told me that “we would have grown even faster if it weren’t for Covid.” People staying at home meant far less people on the roads, and less accidents.

Its business today is based mostly around car accident recovery — where users can take pictures using ordinary smartphone cameras, uploading pictures via a mobile web site (not typically an app).

But Tractable’s plan is to use some of the funding to expand deeper into areas adjacent to that: natural disaster recovery (specifically for appraising property damage), and used car appraisals. It will also use the investment to continue building out its technology, specifically to help build out better, AI-based techniques of processing and parsing pictures that are taken on smartphones — by their nature small in size.

Insight Partners and Georgian co-led the round and it brings the total raised by the company to $115 million.

Dalyac, a deep learning researcher by training who co-founded the company with Razvan Ranca and Adrien Cohen, said that the “opportunity” (if you could call an accident that) Tractable has identified and built to fix is that it’s generally time-consuming and stressful to deal with an insurance company when you are also coping with a problem with your car.

And while a new generation of “insuretech” startups have emerged in recent years that are bringing more modern processes into the equation, typically the incumbent major insurance companies — the ones that Tractable targets — have lacked the technology to improve that process.

It’s not unlike the tension between fintech-fuelled neobanks and the incumbent banks, which are now scrambling to invest in more technology to catch up with the times.

“Getting into an accident can be anything from a hassle to trauma,” Dalyac said. “It can be devastating, and then the process for recovery is pretty damn slow. You’re dealing with so many touch points with your insurance, so many people that need to come and check things out again. It’s hard to keep track and know when things will truly be back to normal. Our belief is that that whole process can be 10 times faster, thanks to the breakthroughs in image classification.”

That process currently also extends not just to taking pictures for claims, but also to help figure out when a car is beyond repair, in which case which parts can be recycled and reused elsewhere, also using Tractable’s computer vision technology. Dalyac noted that this was a popular enough service in the last year that the company helped recycle as many cars “as Tesla sold in 2019.”

Customers that have integrated with Tractable to date include Geico in the U.S., as well as a large swathe of insurers in Japan, specifically Tokio Marine Nichido, Mitsui Sumitomo, Aioi Nissay Dowa and Sompo. Covéa, the largest auto insurer in France, is also a customer, as is Admiral Seguros, the Spanish entity of UK’s Admiral Group, as well as Ageas, a top UK insurer.

Japan is the company’s biggest market today Dalyac said — the reason being that it has an ageing population, but one that is also very strong on mobile usage: combining those two, “automation is more than a value add; it’s a must have,” Dalyac said. He also added that he thinks the U.S. will overtake Japan as Tractable’s biggest market soon.

The new directions into property and other car applications will also open the door to a wider set of use cases beyond working with insurance providers over time. It will also bring Tractable potentially into new competitive environments. There are other companies that have also identified this opportunity.

For example, Hover, which has built a way to create 3d imagery of homes using ordinary smartphone cameras, is also eyeing ways of selling its tech (originally developed to help make estimates on home repairs) to insurance companies.

For now, however, it sounds like the opportunity is a big enough one that the race is more to meet demand than it is to beat competitors to do so.

“Tractable’s accelerating growth at scale is a testament to the power and differentiation of their applied machine learning system, which continues to improve as more businesses adopt it,” said Lonne Jaffe, MD at Insight Partners and Tractable Board member, in a statement. “We’re excited to double down on our partnership with Tractable as they work to help the world recover faster from accidents and disasters that affect hundreds of millions of lives.”

Emily Walsh, Partner at Georgian Partners added: “Tractable’s industry-leading computer vision capabilities are continuing to fuel incredible customer ROI and growth for the firm. We’re excited to continue to partner with Tractable as they apply their artificial intelligence capabilities to new, multi-billion dollar market opportunities in the used vehicle and natural disaster recovery industries.”

Amazon admits it has a fake review problem, but does its best to spread the blame around in a new post detailing the issue. After numerous reports for years that the online retail giant is overrun with knock-off products and faked or farmed reviews, the company aims to look as if it is finally putting its foot down, but no new efforts or rules are discussed — rather, it is others that need to step up their work to keep Amazon safe.

Amazon reviews have become notoriously unreliable as indicators of quality as the store has given itself over willingly to counterfeits, AliExpress resellers, and promotion of the company’s internal brands (developed with the benefit of seller data). Multiple reports have found organized efforts to spam the store with meaningless 5-star reviews in exchange for free products or cash. I have myself received such offers, or sellers promising payment for raising a star rating.

After the requisite preliminary palaver about being “obsessed with delighting customers” and all that, Amazon explains that it, like all big tech giants, uses automated systems to vet reviews before they go up. The company has always been cagey about the actual numbers, but in this post it drops a whopper: “In 2020, we stopped more than 200 million suspected fake reviews before they were ever seen by a customer.”

200 million is a lot no matter how you look at it, but it’s really a lot when you consider that Amazon told CNBC that same year that it “analyze[s] over 10 million review submissions weekly,” which adds up to somewhere north of 520 million submissions yearly. These two Amazon-provided numbers suggest that a third of all reviews submitted, at a minimum, are rejected as fake.

Hard numbers on Amazon’s total reviews are hard to come by. Speaking to Buzzfeed, Amazon listing analysis site ReviewMeta’s Tommy Noonan estimated that in 2020 Amazon hosted around 250 million reviews (of which, incidentally, he calculated about 9 percent were “unnatural”). But if over 500 million were submitted in 2020 and about 200 million of those were fake, that indicates a far larger total. I’ve asked Amazon for more precise information on this, and will update the post if I hear back, but the company is not communicative about these numbers in general.

Groups organizing on social media numbering in the tens of thousands have been repeatedly pointed out as major contributors to the fake review ecosystem. Amazon writes that in the first quarter of 2020, it reported 300 such groups to the platforms hosting them, and the same period in 2021 it reported over 1,000. Takedown times have increased, but it’s hard to take this increase as anything other than a thriving business model — certainly not something in the process of being stamped out.

“It is imperative for social media companies to invest adequately in proactive controls to detect and enforce fake reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them,” Amazon declares. Indeed social media companies are being pressed from multiple directions to take more responsibility for what users do on their platforms, but they make the same noises Amazon does: “we’re doing what we can,” (and, it is left unsaid, clearly it’s not enough).

“We need coordinated assistance from consumer protection regulators around the world,” Amazon writes. But the company lobbied forcefully and successfully against the INFORM act, which would have helped identify sellers with bad intent and add transparency to online marketplaces (strangely, Amazon has taken some of the actions it objects to independently). And that line is suspiciously absent when it is Amazon that consumers need to be protected against.

“It is also critical that we hold bad actors—and the service providers that provide them with fake reviews—accountable for their activity,” the post continues. But while lawsuits and partnerships with law enforcement are part of that, once again the call to “work together” rings hollow when Amazon itself is where the activity occurs and the company is in complete control of that ecosystem. Though it has banned some major players from the store, innumerable others flout the rules with impunity.

Nowhere in the post does Amazon detail any new steps it will take to deter these bad actors or crack down on the pervasive gaming of the system for which it sets the rules. It will “continue to enhance” its detection tools, “streamline processes” for partnerships, and “work hard” at keeping scammers accountable. In other words, it will keep doing exactly what it has been doing this whole time — which is what put it in this position in the first place.

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Thanks to a twist of fate, two large cups of coffee and help from editor Annie Saunders, the Extra Crunch team is taking over today’s edition of Daily Crunch.

Don’t worry, we’ll hand it back as soon as Henry Pickavet returns or Alex Wilhelm is back from vacation, whichever occurs first.

Since I’ve been handed the mic: We’re trying to identify the most effective growth marketers who are helping startups build their businesses. With that in mind, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed growth leader Susan Su, currently head of portfolio strategy at Sound Ventures, about the need for founders to develop a growth-centered mentality as the economy reopens.

“They don’t need to memorize all the right buttons to push in an ads dashboard, but they need to be familiar and comfortable with the core work of gap-finding,” says Su.

“Founders will fail if they adopt a mentality that someone else can or should do it for them. The founder’s job is to supply ambition and opinions, and then magnetize high-quality talent to come and pull the levers and bring their creative vision to life.”

If you’ve worked with a growth expert you recommend, please get in touch and let us know.

Thanks for reading!

Walter Thompson

Senior Editor, TechCrunch

@yourprotagonist

The TechCrunch Top 3

Apple doesn’t rank with top personal health brands like Procter & Gamble, Peloton or Fitbit, but perhaps it doesn’t need to. Cupertino’s health-related products and services are broad enough to touch each of these companies — and many others — in some way.

In an interview with Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch, Darrell Etherington tracked the evolution of the company’s user-guided approach to developing hardware, software and data management policies around personal health.

“It actually started from Apple Watch, where we were capturing heart rate data for calorimetry activity, and [Activity] ring closure, and we needed a place to put the heart rate data,” says Lynch. “So we created the Health app as a place to store the data.”

Sarah Perez reported on today’s launch of Spotify Greenroom, a live audio app based on the code of Locker Room. In March, Spotify purchased Betty Labs, which developed Locker Room.

Best known for music streaming, Spotify has been branching out into a more robust media company in recent years. Greenroom will allow users to host and join audio chat rooms, “and optionally turn those conversations into podcasts,” says Sarah.

There’s a reason why advertising units are called “impressions.” CPG companies are eager to literally place their messages in our faces.

So it should come as no surprise that Facebook today announced its plans to start testing ads on its Oculus platform in a limited rollout. A company blog post indicates that “for now, this is a test with a few apps.”

Startups and VC

Software testing platform BrowserStack announced today that it has raised $200 million in a Series B round. The round, which values the company at $4 billion, was led by BOND, with Insight Partners and Accel participating.

PandaDoc competitor Templafy has raised a Series D worth $60 million. Since launch, the business document creation platform based in Denmark has raised $125 million, including a $25 million Series C 14 months ago.

After securing a $100 million Series E round led by Accel partners, last-mile delivery platform Bringg is now valued at $1 billion, the company confirms. CEO Guy Bloch told TechCrunch the funds will be used to continue fueling growth, expanding operations and acquiring new customers. “Companies need our urgent help to do a job,” says Bloch.

Edtech investors are flocking to SaaS guidance counselors

The prevailing post-pandemic edtech narrative, which predicted higher ed would be DOA as soon as everyone got their vaccine and took off for a gap year, might not be quite true.

Natasha Mascarenhas explores a new crop of edtech SaaS startups that function like guidance counselors, helping students with everything from study-abroad opportunities to swiping right on a captivating college (really!).

“Startups that help students navigate institutional bureaucracy so they can get more value out of their educational experience may become a growing focus for investors as consumer demand for virtual personalized learning increases,” she writes.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Facebook rolls out new tools for Group admins: Facebook launched a new set of tools aimed at helping Facebook Group administrators get a better handle on their online communities and, potentially, help keep conversations from going off the rails. (May the odds be ever in your favor!) Among the more interesting new tools is a machine-learning-powered feature that alerts admins to potentially unhealthy conversations taking place in their group. Another lets the admin slow the pace of a heated conversation by limiting how often group members can post. As the adage goes, if you can’t say anything nice, say it slower.

Google updates online safety curriculum for kids: Perhaps we can teach the next generation to just be nice on the internet instead of using machine learning to prevent them from rapidly disseminating vaccine disinformation? Google updated and expanded its digital safety and citizenship curriculum, Be Internet Awesome, which has lessons for parents and educators about online gaming, cyberbullying and online empathy. Fingers crossed!

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving arm, raises $2.5B: In its second outside funding round, Waymo raised $2.5 billion to grow Waymo Driver, its autonomous driving platform, and its team. At the moment, Waymo One, a commercial ride-hailing service, operates in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and Waymo announced plans earlier this month to enter a “test run” of its trucking and cargo transportation service with J.B. Hunt.

E3 2021 kicked off with news about E3 2022. Kind of a funny way to start a show, as Mayor Eric Garcetti told the crowd, “we look forward to seeing you in-person, here in the City of Angels, in 2022.” Also a bit funny when the mayor’s video game show announcement has less confetti and Minions than his state-reopening speech, but that’s something for another post.

It’s understandable, of course, that E3’s organizers led with that news. The 2021 show was, like so many other things over the past year-and-a-half, a historic anomaly. After opting to skip the 2020 show altogether (understandably), it went ahead with the first — and for the time being, last — all virtual event.

The virtual event always seems like a good idea, in theory. In practice, results vary wildly depending on a number of factors, not the least of which is content. Many shows have an uphill battle when it comes to moving all online. CES, I think, was a struggle, due in part to the size of the show, but also the content. As ubiquitous as consumer electronics are, I don’t see wide swaths of the internet champing at the bit to watch a presentation from anyone but, say, Apple and maybe Samsung.

E3 doesn’t have that problem. The show already had a leg up, having moved away from industry-only to something more hybrid years ago. Unlike other shows I attend regularly, people in downtown LA actually get a bit of a buzz when E3 comes to town. Everyone’s a gamer and most are excited about some piece of upcoming news. Uber and Lyft drivers love to tell you about it that week.

It follows that the show’s online presence is immense. The days leading up to the event, E3-related content was trending all over the place — people watch trailers, argue about the trailers, stream about the trailers and argue about other people’s streams about the trailers on their own streams. It’s a recipe for success around a virtual event — especially coming after a year when, even before the latest Xbox and PlayStation were released, the industry was already setting records amid the pandemic.

Of the big three, Microsoft won, hands down. Sorry, Sony, you can’t win if you don’t play. Nintendo was solid, but not spectacular. But more on that in a moment.

I talked a fair bit about the Xbox press conference in the last one of these. But the long and short of it is Microsoft won on two flanks: sheer volume and Game Pass titles. That last bit feels about as close to a silver bullet as we’re going to see in this generation of consoles. Likely Sony is going to have its own virtual event in the near future — but it’s going to be a tough act to follow.

In all, Microsoft showed off 30 games (and a fridge), a whopping 27 of which will be available on Game Pass, if there were any doubt as to how all-in the company is on its subscription service. And, of course, there’s the fact that this was billed as a Microsoft/Bethesda event, which shows you how important that massive acquisition is to the future of Xbox.

As for Nintendo, let’s be honest. Anything that didn’t include the long-rumored Switch Pro was going to be a disappointment. The original Switch is four years old and due for a big upgrade, beyond the Switch Lite and a refresh with added battery. It’s time for that HD screen — the thing would sell like hotcakes next holiday.

Thing is, the Switch had a spectacular 2020. Even with an initial supply chain shortage (something all three current consoles are guilty of), it did gangbusters during the pandemic, due in no small part to the arrival of a long-awaited new Animal Crossing game. A low-pressure, social title between fuzzy animals was precisely what the world needed last year, and Nintendo was happy to deliver.

There’s also a good chance that Nintendo is dealing with continued supply chain issues around the new components. So while it seems likely the Pro is on the way (see: the new Guardians of the Galaxy game), we’ll likely have to wait until next year.

We’ll also have to wait until next year for Breath of the Wild 2, but at least the sequel to the much-loved Zelda game had the decency to show up this year. And, of course, we’ve got a bunch of great-looking titles coming for the system. Some highlights.

Some old-school 2D side-scrolling hotness for Metroid Dread.

Hey, neat, a Game and Watch with some classic Zelda titles.

Talk about long-awaited, Shin Megami Tensai V has been teased since 2017.

Mario Party Superstars is coming October 29, with 100 mini-games.

Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania arrives October 5, doing what Super Monkey Ball does best.

In addition to all of the Square-Enix and Ubisoft stuff we discussed last time, Capcom gave us updates to Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin and Resident Evil Village.

That about does it. See you next year in LA. But maybe leave the Minion costumes at home (sorry Mr. Mayor).

Lincoln also shared information on the interior of its new EV, attempting to make it a minimalistic and expansive space with a panoramic roof vista to create a more airy feel, one that befits a “sanctuary” as the automaker is referring to its vehicle. Perhaps most notable is the upcoming EVs will have a digital platform built off the Android operating system, which will allow the company to offer third-party apps and services and update the software remotely.

The vehicle will also be equipped with an advanced driver-assist features, including hands-free driving on certain highways.

Automakers’ interest in robotics is not a new phenomenon, of course: Robots and automation have long played a role in manufacturing and are both clearly central to their push into AVs. But recently, many companies are going even deeper into the field, with plans to be involved in the wide spectrum of categories that robotics touch.

At TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, we spoke to a trio of experts at three major automakers. Max Bajracharya of Toyota Research Institute, Mario Santillo of Ford and Ernestine Fu of Hyundai Motor Group joined us to discuss their companies’ unique approaches to robotics.

Why are automakers so interested in robotics?

Let’s get the simple question out of the way first, shall we? Moving beyond existing investments in manufacturing and autonomous vehicles, why do so many carmakers seem so bullish about companies like Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics?

Bajracharya: I think all automakers are recognizing that there won’t be the automotive business in the future as it is today. A lot of automakers, Toyota included, are looking for what’s next. Automakers are very well positioned to leverage what they already know about robotics and manufacturing to take on the robotics market. (Timestamp: 1:01)

• Toyota is building a tiny utopian prototype city filled with people, robots and AI
• Toyota AI Ventures launches $100M fund to invest in robotics and autonomous tech

The role of concept vehicles

Concept cars are nothing new in the industry, but even still, Hyundai’s recently announced Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV) was pretty wild, with large, extending legs that help it walk off-road.

Harry Stebbings, the well-known podcaster behind ‘20 minute VC’, announced today that he raised a duo of funds for 20VC, the venture capital fund he launched off of his show’s success. The pair of funds – one for early-stage and one for growth stage – total to $140 million in assets under management, plucked from LPs including MIT, Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek and RIT Capital partners.

The total is a 15X increase from Stebbings’ inaugural $8.3 million fund, launched less than a year ago.

Stebbings said that his early-stage fund, 20VC Early, will invest checks between $250,000 to $750,000, while his growth-stage fund, 20VC Explorer, will invest in Series B onwards, with checks between $1 million to $5 million.

The 20VC portfolio already includes a few reported unicorns, including audio app Clubhouse and virtual event organizer Hopin. But, maybe more notable, is what his assumed success – as a 24 year-old who has won a spot in competitive deals and raised a massive venture capital fund – means for the way that tech is evolving.

First, media experience, and the ability to spout useful content in a noisy world, is being increasingly valued as an asset in the modernizing world of VC. This week, Andreessen Horowitz launched Future, a full-fledged media operation that will cover trends in startups and tech.Stebbings’ podcast, which has over 200,000 subscribers and 80 million downloads to date, has cultivated an audience by interviewing tech’s elite, from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and to A16z’s Angela Strange. Those connections getting leveraged into dollars is a proof point of this growing idea, and sometimes meme, that Twitter followers can help anyone start a rolling fund.

Which brings me to my second point, which is that Stebbings raising such a massive tranche of capital could quiet some of the worry around emerging fund managers being unable to, well, 15X their initial micro-funds. In other words: you might be able to get a few of your buddies to venture to throw some checks in, but how do you get a full endowment to sign on board? Based on recent conversations I’ve had with emerging fund managers, it’s hard to get institutions, the ones with real check-writing power, on board for new funds because they only have so much capital allocated toward venture. It’s even harder for diverse, underrepresented founders. Whether or not Stebbings is a one-off is unclear, but we do at least know that venture backers are viewing his rolodex as a key competitive advantage, and asset in the wild world of investing.

 

At the end of the day, media is venture and venture is media. Stebbings sits at the intersection of that trend, and with $140 million more, it will be interesting to see what he does next, and if returns come for the ride.

Vianai Systems, an AI startup founded by former chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys, said on Wednesday it has raised $140 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

The two-year-old startup said a number of industry luminaries also participated in the new round, which brings its total to-date raise to at least $190 million. The startup raised $50 million in its Seed financing round, but there’s no word on the size of its Series A round.

Details about what exactly the Palo Alto-headquartered startup does is unclear. In a press statement, Dr. Vishal Sikka said the startup is building a “better AI platform, one that puts human judgment at the center of systems that bring vast AI capabilities to amplify human potential.” Sikka, 54, resigned from the top role at Infosys in 2017 after months of acrimony between the board and a cohort of founders.

“Vianai helps its customers amplify the transformation potential within their organizations using a variety of advanced AI and ML tools with a distinct approach in how it thoughtfully brings together humans with technology. This human-centered approach differentiates Vianai from other platform and product companies and enables its customers to fulfill AI’s true promise,” the startup said.

The startup claims it has already amassed many of the world’s largest and most respected businesses including insurance giant Munich Re as its customers.

Its investors include Jim Davidson (co-founder of Silver Lake), Henry Kravis and George Roberts (co-founders of KKR), and Jerry Yang (founding partner of AME and co-founder of Yahoo). Dr. Fei-Fei Li (co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI), has joined Vianai Systems’ advisory board.

“With the AI revolution underway, we believe Vianai’s human-centered AI platform and products provide global enterprises with operational and customer intelligence to make better business decisions,” said Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “We are pleased to partner with Dr. Sikka and the Vianai team to support their ambition to fulfill AI’s promise to drive fundamental digital transformations.”