Author: azeeadmin

Social calendar app IRL has been busy building a messaging-based social network, or what founder and CEO Abraham Shafi calls a “WeChat of the West.” Following its pandemic-fueled growth and further push into the social networking space with group chat and other features, IRL is today announcing a sizable $170 million Series C growth round, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. The fundraise also mints IRL as a new unicorn with a $1.17 billion valuation.

Besides SoftBank, new investor Dragoneer also participated in the oversubscribed round, alongside returning investors Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund and Floodgate. To date, IRL has raised over $200 million.

The startup began its life as a tool for discovering real-world events — an industry that went to zero almost overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That could have been the end for IRL, but the startup quickly pivoted to prioritize discovery of online events instead. Under COVID lockdowns, users could turn to the app to find things like livestreamed concerts, esports events, Zoom parties and more.

IRL focused on pulling in popular online events from places like Live Nation, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and others.

As a result, IRL became more accessible because its audience was no longer limited only to those who had time and money to travel to real-world events.

That focus also helped the app to attract a crowd of younger users who are of the generation that doesn’t use Facebook.

“They essentially use Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok,” explains Shafi. “But there is no groups and events product for that generation,” he points out.

Earlier this year, the company doubled down on its social networking features with the launch of a new site that added things like user profiles, support for group chats, the ability to join group events, personalized recommendations and more. As users could now network with friends across both web and mobile, IRL began to feel more like a social network, not just an event-discovery engine.

Today, IRL has 20 million users and 12 million who use the app monthly, which are not startling numbers in comparison to major social networks and their billions of users. But the numbers are representative of a steady approach that helped IRL grow 400% over the past 15 months, despite COVID’s impact to real-world events.

But as of recently, things are starting to change. In-person events are starting to return. California, the home state for San Francisco-based IRL, is today re-opening, for example. That opens up IRL to once again focus on connecting people not just online, but also “in real life,” as its name implies.

That could mean helping people better connect around events with not just their own friend group, as is often the case today, but helping them discover new groups in their local area or on campus. The company is even planning to use a portion of its fundraise to help fuel the new events economy by allocating a certain amount of money per city that will go toward helping people put on real-world events. The exact details are still being worked out, Shafi says, but says the idea is that IRL wants to help “bring culture back in cities that are opening up again.”

IRL also plans to expand its international footprint by finding ways to bring in non-U.S. users to its platform — possibly beginning with the events focused on watching the Olympics. (If the Games are not again delayed or canceled due to a COVID surge.)

Shafi says IRL hadn’t been planning to fundraise, but they decided to take the meetings when they were approached.

“The philosophy is not to raise when you have to, but to raise when it makes sense. And we were scaling like crazy to the point where our servers were melting. It made sense to take those discussions very seriously when they came to us,” he says.

The addition of SoftBank and Dragoneer brings some expertise in scaling large social networks to the IRL team. SoftBank’s other notable social networking investment is with TikTok owner’s Bytedance, while Dragoneer has backed Snap. IRL has already has a close relationship with TikTok as it’s worked with the video app to pull in interesting events for discovery. It more recently integrated with TikTok’s new “Login Kit,” too, allowing TikTok users to authenticate with IRL using their TikTok credentials.

Now, IRL plans to add an even deeper TikTok integration — something that caught SoftBank’s attention.

Shafi is cagey on the details, but says more will be announced in the “coming weeks.”

“But what I can say is that we’ve seen a ton of growth of TikTok users linking to IRL group chats and IRL events through their TikTok profiles as a way to communicate and go deeper in relationships,” he says. “If you think about it, right now Instagram has really great messaging…whereas TikTok is still developing that,” he hints.

Beyond its value to growing social networks for the younger, Facebook-less generation, IRL is thinking about how to build a profitable business without ad revenue. On this front, it sees potential in helping people connect through paid events — although these wouldn’t have to be influencer-driven as on other platforms. In fact, when IRL recently piloted paid group chats, users were willing to pay for access to things like a calc homework help group, for example.

IRL also sees demand for tools that help groups and clubs collect membership dues and other fees, as well as for events that are too small for Ticketmaster or Eventbrite.

“Whether we succeed or fail will be based on our ability to execute on our opportunity,” says Shafi, adding that most social networks today are focused on media more so than helping users make connections. “What we’re building isn’t the media part of social, it’s the real human interaction part of social, because that hasn’t been paid attention to as much.”

“We’re building a messaging social network,” he continues, comparing it to the biggest messaging social network in the world, WeChat. “The big vision that we’re going for is building the WeChat of the West — a messaging super social network. And it starts with people organizing groups and doing things together,” he says.

With the additional funding, IRL will invest in product growth, international expansion and its Creator and Culture Fund, and will grow its now 25-person remotely distributed team to 100 by year-end.

“People are increasingly seeking more in-person social connections and are looking to share meaningful experiences together. As an innovative event-based social network, IRL sits at the intersection of group and event discovery, social calendaring, and group messaging, enabling people to do more together,” added Serena Dayal, director at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement about its investment. “We are excited to partner with Abraham and the IRL team to support their ambition of helping everyone deepen their connections to friends and family.”

Chaos and crisis are sisters, and none more so than when you dial for emergency help. A call to 911 in the United States and urgent numbers globally spins off a number of additional calls to emergency response teams, ambulances, hospitals and other actors who need to coordinate action to save your life. Theoretically, everyone should be working off the same data, but also theoretically, I should be able to eat ice cream without getting fat.

Israel-based Carbyne’s software platform coordinates these calls so that critical details — say, location or medical allergies — don’t get lost from the 911 call taker to the paramedic in the field.

Now, it’s taking a second scoop on its capital cone in the form of a $20 million new round, following a $25 million Series B that my colleague Ingrid Lunden reported on in January. The new funding was led by Global Medical Response, one of the world’s largest emergency medical providers who operates fleets of vehicles, trucks, helicopters and planes to get patients to hospital facilities expeditiously. GMR was founded in 2018 from a rollup of emergency services led by private equity giant KKR.

This new round was in the form of a convertible note that will convert into Carbyne’s next fundraise according to CEO and co-founder Amir Elichai. Also joining the round was Hanaco VC, Intercap VC, Elsted Capital and others. Elichai said that the round took about three weeks to fundraise and close, and was held to $20 million given the company’s earlier funding this year, which at the time we reported was “over $100 million” in valuation.

Carbyne and GMR have been partners since late 2020, and their ties are deepening. GMR COO Edward Van Horne will join Carbyne’s board of directors.

In addition to offering more advanced location services for emergency callers, Carbyne’s technology allows for callers to activate a video channel, giving emergency response personnel more live information about what’s happening. That’s critical in GMR’s business, where first responders need the most up-to-date information to increase their effectiveness.

“The ability to get smarter information, and to increase situational awareness to each case whatever it is, will give emergency medical services the ability to better triage and to make faster and smarter responses to events that occur within their jurisdiction,” Elichai explained. “So basically the entire ecosystem is becoming much more reliable and efficient, thanks to the Carbyne ecosystem that we’re putting together with GMR.”

My colleague wrote a great deep dive into the company in January, so read that for some background on the company’s founding and product and how it weathered the pandemic. A few more updates though in the past few months bear mentioning.

Elichai said that the company has doubled the recurring revenues of its business since the beginning of 2021, although wouldn’t provide those ever elusive absolute figures. The company has also expanded its employee base by 30% over the same period. Among the success stories is New Orleans, which is moving its emergency centers to Carbyne, as well as centers in Texas, Georgia and Florida. Elichai said that much of this transition was prompted by additional federal investment in 911 infrastructure appropriated in recent COVID-19 stimulus bills.

The company’s CTO and co-founder, Alex Dizengof, will move from Israel to the United States to start an R&D center.

Last week, the company announced a new “Ultra Emergency Network” that it is building with Israel Aerospace Industries that will allow phones to communicate emergency location information in post-disaster scenarios where commercial mobile services degrade or disappear entirely.

The company’s newest investment is in line with growing interest from venture capitalists in the disaster space, with more data, investments in communications infrastructure, and more dollars flowing into the space than ever before.

A long running privacy fight between Belgium’s data protection authority and Facebook — over the latter’s use of online trackers like pixels and social plug-ins to snoop on web users — has culminated in a ruling by Europe’s top court today that could have wider significance on how cross-border cases against tech giants are enforced in the region.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed that, in certain circumstances, national DPAs can pursue action even when they are not the lead data supervisor under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)’s one-stop-shop mechanism (OSS) — opening up the possibility of litigation by watchdogs in Member States which aren’t the lead regulator for a particular company but where the local agency believes there is an urgent need to act.

The OSS was included in the GDPR with the idea of simplifying enforcement for businesses operating in more than one EU market — which would only need to deal directly with one ‘lead’ data protection authority. However the mechanism has been criticized for contributing to a bottleneck effect whereby multiple GDPR complaints are stacking up on the desks of a couple of DPAs (most notably Ireland and Luxembourg) — EU Member States which attract large numbers of multinationals (typically for tax reasons, such as Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate).

Enforcement of the EU’s flagship data protection regime against tech giant has thus been hampered by a perception of ‘forum shopping’ — whereby a handful of EU DPAs have a disproportionately large number of major, cross-border cases to deal with vs the (inevitably limited) resources provided for them by their national governments. The resulting bottleneck looks convenient for those companies that face delayed GDPR enforcement.

Some EU DPAs are also considered more active in enforcement of the bloc’s privacy rules than others — and it’s fair to say that Ireland is not among them. (Albeit, it defends the pace of its investigations and enforcement record by saying that it must do due diligence to ensure decisions stand up to any legal challenges.)

Indeed, Ireland has been criticized for (among other things) the length of time it’s taken to investigate GDPR complaints; for procedural issues (how it’s gone about investigating or indeed not investigating complaints); and for its enforcement record against tech giants — which to date is limited to just one $550k penalty issued against Twitter issued at the end of last year.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) had originally wanted to give Twitter an even lower fine but other EU DPAs disputed its draft decision — forcing it to increase the penalty slightly.

As it stands, scores of cases remain open on the DPC’s desk, including major complaints against Facebook and Google — which are now over three years old.

This has led to calls for the Commission to step in and take action over Ireland’s perceived inaction. Although, for now, the EU’s executive has limited its intervention to a few words urging Ireland to, essentially, hurry up and get on with the job.

Today’s CJEU ruling may alleviate a little of the blockage around GDPR enforcement — in some narrow situations — by enabling national DPAs to take up the baton to litigate over users’ rights when a lead agency isn’t acting on complaints.

However the ruling does not look set to completely unblock the OSS mechanism, per Luca Tosoni, a research fellow at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law at the University of Oslo who has been following the case closely — and whose work was cited by the CJEU’s advocate general in an earlier opinion on the case.

“The Court has essentially confirmed the views that the Advocate General had expressed in his opinion: Under the GDPR’ one-stop-shop system, those data protection authorities that are not the ‘lead authority’ may start enforcement actions against big tech companies only in very limited circumstances, including in case of urgency,” he told TechCrunch.

“However, unfortunately, the Court’s ruling does not elaborate on the criteria to be followed to assess the urgency of an enforcement action. In particular, the Court has not expressly seconded the advocate general’s view that a failure to act promptly from the part of the lead authority may justify the adoption of interim urgent measures by other data protection authorities. Thus, this important point remains partially unclear, and further litigation might be necessary to clarify this issue.

“Therefore, today’s ruling is unlikely to completely settle the ‘Irish issue’.”

Article 56 of the GDPR allows for non-lead DPAs to pursue action at a national level in the case of complaints that relate to an issue that substantially affects only users under their jurisdiction, and where they believe there is a need to act urgently (as a lead authority has not). So it does seem fairly narrow.

One recent example of a non-lead DPA intervention is the Italian DPA’s emergency action against TikTok — related to child safety on the platform after the death of a local girl who had been reported to have participated in a challenge on the platform.

“An authority’s wish to adopt a ‘go-it-alone’ approach… with regard to the (judicial) enforcement of the GDPR, without cooperating with the other authorities, cannot be reconciled with either the letter or the spirit of that regulation,” runs one paragraph of today’s judgement, underlining the court’s view that the GDPR requires careful and balanced joint-working between DPAs.

The ruling does go into some detailed discussion of the “dangers” of under-enforcement of the GDPR — as the concern was raised with the CJEU — but the court takes the view that it’s too soon to say whether such a concern affects the regulation or not.

“If, however, [under-enforcement were to] be evidenced by facts and robust arguments – then I do not believe that the Court would turn a blind eye to any gap which might thereby emerge in the protection of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Charter and their effective enforcement by the competent regulators,” the CJEU goes on. “Whether that would then still be an issue for a Charter-conform interpretation of provisions of secondary law, or an issue of validity of the relevant provisions, or even sections of a secondary law instrument, is a question for another case.”

The ruling, while narrow, may at least unblock the Belgian DPA’s long-running litigation against Facebook’s tracking of non-users via cookies and social plug-ins which was the route for the referral of questions over the scope of the OSS to the CJEU.

Although the court also notes that it will be for a Belgian court to determine whether the DPA’s intervention meets the GDPR’s bar for starting such proceedings or not.

Contacted for comment on the CJEU judgement, Facebook welcomed the ruling.

“We are pleased that the CJEU has upheld the value and principles of the one-stop-shop mechanism, and highlighted its importance in ensuring the efficient and consistent application of GDPR across the EU,” said Jack Gilbert, associate general counsel at Facebook in a statement.

On the heels of making an acquisition in December of home management startup Setter, Thumbtack — one of the pioneers in the home services gig economy — has raised a big round to double down on the model. The company has raised a fresh $275 million, money that the company plans to use to built out a home management and maintenance business alongside its network of home services professionals. Co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta confirmed that the round values Thumbtack at $3.2 billion.

For some context, this is nearly double the valuation Thumbtack had when it last raised money, a $150 million round led by Sequoia in 2019. It also comes on the heels of a strong 2020, where its revenue grew more than 50%. Thumbtack’s gross revenue (what’s paid in service fees, not Thumbtack’s cut) is now on track, it says, to cross $2 billion this year.

This latest funding is being led by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), with participation also from Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM) as well as G Squared. Previous backers Ballie Gifford, CapitalG, Founders Circle Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global Management also invested.

The funding and shifting focus of the company underscore some of the changes we have seen among consumers in the last year.

In large part, because of Covid-19, most of us have been staying home — which has often included also moving to new homes to accommodate spending so much more time in them — and, as Thumbtack sees it, that has led many more people to paying more attention to how to make those homes better places, and to keep them in better shape overall, and why it sees a big opportunity — alongside being a marketplace to find pro’s for one- off jobs you might need done around the house — in providing a “home management” platform to cater to that new attention.

“It’s pretty wild that people’s homes their biggest assets, the most complicated thing you’re responsible for, but it doesn’t come with a manual,” Zappacosta said in an interview. “When you think about your car, you need to do regular service. Otherwise, you may have to pay a big emergency bill [to fix something]. That same concept applies to the home. But there’s never been an easy way to know what you should do, how much to pay for it, and then easily get it done. So that’s what we’re doing.” The services include emergency repairs of electrics in the home, plus preventative maintenance that you may need to do to on your property, he said.

The move into home management is an interesting turn for another reason, too: it’s a sign of how Thumbtack is playing into a bigger change in how many consumers engage with services overall, and that is by way of subscriptions. That is to say, while many of us will still go out and shop for items, or go to a cinema, we are all also subscribing to at least one video-on-demand service, many of us may well also have Prime accounts to get Amazon’s various perks, and so on. If we are subscribing everywhere else, why not throw home maintenance into the mix?

Thumbtack, now over ten years old, is thought by many as one of the earliest movers in the gig economy space to focus on home services. That has not come without challenges, however. As we reported back in 2019, the last round was a tough one for the company and looked like it might come in at a flat valuation. That was on the heels of many others in the space — competitors of Thumbtack’s that included not just other startups but also heavy hitters like Amazon and Google — also fizzling out in their own efforts in home services.

And Covid-19 proved to be a huge challenge for Thumbtack, too, which laid off 250 people in March last year.

Yeah, look, it was a roller coaster of a year,” Zappacosta said. “In the early phases of COVID, there was so much fear that many just shut it all down. People said, ‘I’m not going to have anybody in my home.’ And so those months were really scary — March, April — because it was unclear how long that was going to last. And so we made adjustments to ensure that we sort of would stand the test of time.”

However that changed later in the year, he continued. “Once people began getting more comfortable with masking up, and all the precautions, you know, demand did start to come back. And so by June, July, we saw ot get back to normal levels. And then you know, what happened is the big investments that we’ve been making in the platform in the last few years to make the hiring experience, much more e-commerce, like really began to pay more and more dividends.”

He said that 2020 was Thumbtack’s third year of accelerating growth, “which is sort of surprising given that Covid was in the middle of that. And so the momentum that we’re carrying out, is we’ve never been in a stronger position.”

The company now is focusing on where it might best use technology to get the upper hand with its platform, which competes not just with other home services provider marketplaces, but also a growing number of upstart and incumbent “home management” providers like Super, which raised $50 million last month. One interesting idea that Zappacosta described to me, which may well be part of a later phase of development, involved providing a way for customers to “tour” their homes so that Thumbtack could get a better idea of the space and what needs attention to better personalize its home management to the home and user in question.

That will keep the company working also in the U.S. he said. Globally the home services and repair market is estimated to be worth some $500 billion annually, and amazingly the U.S. represents a massive 40% of that value.

 

French startup Klaxoon is announcing a product update for its whiteboard collaboration platform as well as a new hardware product. With Hybridity, the company is going to sell ready-to-use conference rooms that optimize hybrid meetings between people currently in the office and people on the go.

Let’s start with the software update. Last year, the company unveiled Board, a visual interface that lets you work together during a video call. It lets you share ideas and collaborate using a whiteboard interface. You can create sticky notes, add text, insert images, move things around and start a video call from there.

Other people on the calls are represented through tiny thumbnails so that you can remain focused on the digital whiteboard. You can also connect Board with your existing video-conferencing tool.

This week, the company is updating Board and renaming it to Board Hybrid. “It’s the new version of Board that isn’t only designed for remote work, but also for hybrid work,” founder and CEO Matthieu Beucher said in a press conference.

Board Hybrid users can now add any type of file to their whiteboard. This way, they don’t have to upload files to a shared drive, create a link and paste the link in the whiteboard. Users can preview PowerPoint presentations, Word files, spreadsheets and more directly from Klaxoon’s interface.

There are some new drawing tools including some new connectors. For instance, you can create mindmaps from there. You can now also share your screen from Klaxoon’s own video-conferencing solution.

The new product is something quite different — it’s a meeting room called Hybridity. It looks like a hexagon-shaped space capsule. There’s no window and it feels like a black box from the outside.

Inside, you’ll find three seats, three screens, three cameras and three Klaxoon Box devices. “Everyone can see everyone perfectly well and everybody can immerse themselves in content,” Beucher said.

If you’ve joined a hybrid meeting from your home, you’re well aware of the issues involved with that setup. Part of the team is sitting in the same room. They look like tiny action figures and you can’t figure out who’s talking.

With this setup, Klaxoon hopes it’ll be easier to run meetings with people in the office and people at home. A Klaxoon Hybridity conference room requires 5 square meters. You can put it down in a corner and move it to another location a couple of years later. It’s not secured in the ground.

Pre-orders will start this week. The company expects to sell Hybridity with a subscription model with prices starting at €2,000 per month. It’s going to be interesting to see whether Klaxoon has found a new revenue stream of it it’s just a fun experiment. But it could replace those tiny phone booths in your office.

G2 Venture Partners, a firm that spun out of Kleiner and Perkins Caufield & Byers, has raised $500 million to support entrepreneurs that aim to make existing industries more efficient, environmentally friendly and socially responsible.  

With Fund II, G2 is most bullish about technologies in transportation, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture and energy, with an increasing focus on sustainability, according to a spokesperson for the firm.

“The launch of our second fund expands our ability to work with companies that are moving the needle to redefine and revolutionize their respective industries,” said G2VP founding partner David Mount in a statement. “We will continue to partner with technology companies that are pushing the future of industry forward, driving economic growth with reduced resource intensity.” 

Investors in the new fund include Shell Ventures, Mitsui & Co., Daimler AG, ABB Switzerland Ltd. and The McKnight Foundation, a G2 spokesperson told TechCrunch. John Doerr, famed investor and VC at Kleiner, also personally invested in the fund. Doerr invested in G2VP’s initial $350 million fund back in 2018, and he’s known for delivering an emotional TED Talk in which he argued for increased investments in clean energy.

The firm has already led rounds in AVEVA-acquired industrial data management platform OSIsoft, Oracle-acquired utility customer engagement platform Opower and solar energy company Enphase. Kleiner led Enphase’s past fundraising rounds back in 2010, and in 2017, Doerr stepped back in to help the financially struggling company with another $10 million alongside T.J. Rodgers. G2 would not provide names of portfolio companies for this newest fund yet, but a spokesperson did say Fund II will be investing in a new set of companies. Any follow-on investments in companies from Fund I will be made out of that fund.

The firm invested in 15 late-stage companies in Fund I and expects to invest in a similar number of companies in Fund II. G2VC typically invests $10 million to $50 million in each company. Past portfolio companies include lidar manufacturer Luminar, EV tech company Proterra, computer vision solutions provider Scandit, autonomous robot company Seegrid and agricultural supply chain platform ProducePay, among others. 

“This team has consistently shown vision and taken action that is ahead of the curve on many aspects of the digital industrial transition the world is in the midst of,” said Robert Linck, chief investment officer of Shell Ventures, a limited partner in G2’s first and second funds, in a statement. “The brain trust at this firm will be a significant asset to the new generation of technology leaders and path breakers that is emerging today.”

Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures has its eyes on a niche market targeting software developers. In April, the venture capital fund led a $10 million angel round in Jingling, a Chinese startup developing Linux-based tablets and laptops, TechCrunch learned. Other investors in the round included private equity firm Trustbridge Partners.

Jingling was founded only in June 2020 but has quickly assembled a team of 80 employees hailing from the likes of Aliyun OS, Alibaba’s Linux distribution, Thunder Software, a Chinese operating system solution provider, and active participants in China’s open source community.

The majority of the startup’s staff are working on its Linux-based operating system called JingOS in Beijing, with the rest developing hardware in Shenzhen, where its supply chain is located.

“Operating systems are a highly worthwhile field for investment,” Peter Fang, a partner at Sinovation Ventures, told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen the best product iteration for work and entertainment through the combination of iPad Pro and Magical Keyboard, but no tablet maker has delivered a superior user experience for the Android system so far, so we decided to back JingOS.”

“The investment is also in line with Sinovation’s recognition and prediction in ARM powering more mobile and desktop devices in the future,” the investor added.

Jingling’s first device, the JingPad A1 tablet based on the ARM architecture, has already shipped over 500 units in a pre-sale and is ramping up interest through a crowdfunding campaign. Jingling currently uses processors from Tsinghua Unigroup but is looking into Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets for future production, according to Liu.

On the software end, JingOS, which is open sourced on GitHub, has accumulated over 50,000 installs from users around the world, most of whom are in the United States and Europe.

But how many people want a Linux tablet or laptop? Liu Chengcheng, who launched Jingling with Zhu Rui, said the demand is big enough from the developer community to sustain the startup’s early-phase growth. Liu is known for founding China’s leading startup news site 36Kr and Zhu is an operating system expert and a veteran of Motorola and Lenovo.

Targeting the Linux community is step one for Jingling, for “it’s difficult to gain a foothold by starting out in the [general] consumer market,” said Liu.

“The Linux market is too small for tech giants but too hard for small startups to tackle… Aside from Jingling, Huawei is the only other company in China building a mobile operating system, but HarmonyOS focuses more on IoTs.”

Linux laptops have been around for years, but Jingling wanted to offer something different by offering both desktop and mobile experiences on one device. That’s why Jingling made JingOS compatible with both Linux desktop software like WPS Office and Terminal as well as the usual Android apps on smartphones. The JingPad A1 tablet comes with a detachable keyboard that immediately turns itself into a laptop, a setup similar to Apple’s Magic Keyboard for iPad.

“It’s a gift to programmers, who can use it to code in the Linux system but also use Android mobile apps on the run,” said Liu.

Jingling aspires to widen its user base and seize the Chromebook market about two from now, Liu said. The success of Chromebooks, which comprised 10.8% of the PC market in 2020 and increasingly ate into Microsoft’s dominance, is indicative of the slowing demand for Windows personal computers, the founder observed.

The JingPad A1 is sold at a starting price of $549, compared to Chrome’s wide price range roughly between $200 and $550 depending on the specs and hardware providers.

Self-expression for many consumers today comes in the form of social media and apps. But if you’re a larger business, even if you can’t ignore platforms like Facebook, a website still remains central part of your digital equation. Today, Duda — which has built a platform for larger businesses, and typically the agencies they employ, to build those websites — is announcing a round of growth funding of $50 million to expand its business.

This is a Series D, and it’s being led by Claridge IL with past investors Susquehanna Growth Equity and Vintage Investment Partners also participating. Itai Sadan, Duda’s CEO who co-founded the company with Amir Glatt, would not disclose the valuation, except to say that it has tripled since its last round. (It didn’t disclose then, either.) It has now raised $100 million and Sadan believes that the longer-term step will be an IPO in two or three years.

This latest round in the meantime is Duda’s biggest funding round to date, and it comes on the back of a predictably big year — one in which online presence for many became their only presence.

Duda has now crossed 1 million published websites from a community of 17,000 developers building on its platform. As a point of comparison, when we covered the company’s previous round — $25 million in September 2019 — Duda had crossed 560,000 websites and a community of 6,000 web professionals.

For some further context, these numbers may pale in comparison to WordPress overall, which today says it powers some 41% of the whole of the web (including, disclosure, TechCrunch.com itself) with tens of millions of websites created on its platform.

But Duda is not aiming to directly compete with all of WordPress, or SquareSpace, or Wix, or the wider field of web-building platforms: it describes itself as a “professional web site builder” and it specifically creates tools to handle not just large amounts of content, larger audiences, and larger processes (such as mass e-commerce transactions), but also a larger number of people who might need to engage with the site while it’s being constructed, and after it is built.

Having said that, in the area where it’s more directly competing — WordPress and others also provide tools to website building professionals and agencies — Sadan notes that some 60% of its customers are migrating from WordPress, according to the agencies that Duda has surveyed.

“The issues include security and, you know, plugins breaking,” he said. “The analogy I like to use is that it’s like Android versus iPhone,” he added, which to him means  “you get everything from one vendor: we do the hosting, provide a website builder, the templates, the widgets. And and you have a support team that you can actually call and talk to if you have any problems. That’s the guarantee that we give to our customers.” If the customer in question is an agency running tens or hundreds, or even thousands of sites, that is the kind of customer Duda handles.

The company’s more recent turn, he said, has been into SaaS: that is, websites that provide tools on their platforms that others in turn can use, whether those are travel planning tools, or e-commerce platforms, and so on. SaaS was an area Duda entered into back in 2019 and it now accounts for about half of its business, Sadan said.

Within, that, unsurprisingly, e-commerce has been one of the standout areas, growing 65% and now accounting for about 20% of all of Duda’s business. “Part of this raise is to double down on that,” he said.

“We look forward to partnering with Duda and its existing shareholders in further cementing Duda’s leadership in its space, as well as fulfilling its vision of making web design easy and scalable for web professionals serving clients across all industries,” said Oded Tal, Claridge IL’s founding managing partner, said in a statement. “The company has built an incredible product that is highly regarded by web professionals and operates in a truly massive, high growth market.”

Tests are king in many school systems and other educational environments: they are seen as an efficient way to assess what knowledge students have retained, and how well they do on a level playing field where everyone has the same exam to take.

Some, however, believe that system is flawed, and today a startup that’s built a platform to provide another way of assessing and teaching is announcing a big round of funding on the heels of strong growth for its approach.

Formative — a platform for K-12 teachers to provision assignments from other digital sources and learning platforms, assess how students handle them, help them based on those results, and then use progressive assignments to build a bigger picture and how that student is acquiring knowledge — has picked up $70 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding the reach of its platform.

The funding is being led by Summit Partners previous investors Fika Ventures, Mac Ventures and Rethink Education also participating, among others. Formative is not disclosing its valuation but this is being described as a minority investment.

More significantly, it’s a major step up for the startup, which was founded in Santa Monica, CA, back in 2011 and had raised less than $7 million before now.

The funding however matches how well the startup has been doing. On the back of a major surge of interest in digital learning tools — spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent closure of physical schools, and a huge shift to remote learning — Formative says that its platform is already in the majority of U.S. school districts (specifically 92% of all U.S. school districts have at least one teacher signed up); that more than four million students have engaged with “Formatives” (as the assignments are casually called); and that it is delivering annual recurring revenue growth of around 700%.

And in keeping with that momentum, Formative has a lot of ambitious plans for the funding. They include building more analytical tools for teachers and administrators as well as parents and students; taking Formative to more international markets (it’s currently most active in English-speaking countries); and more generally (and perhaps most importantly) building technology that’s helping the system rethink what a quality education might look like, what form that should take.

“One of our big goals in the future is to really help be a gateway to evaluate the rigor and effectiveness of different curriculum streams,” said Craig Jones, the CEO who co-founded Formative with Kevin McFarland (the COO), in an interview. “We’re using all the data that we’ve collected, the billions of student responses to facilitate a bigger picture, insights on student learning, to the necessary stakeholders. That can spin off into a lot of different things that we can help our schools and teachers and parents use that data to ultimately drive additional learning.”

Jones and McFarland came up with the idea for Formative the startup while working on education PhDs at UCLA, where they were looking at how different pedagogic approaches might prove to work better than traditional methods for learning. Formative the startup takes its name from the idea of formative evaluation, where teachers provide regular, sustained assessment to check on students and modify how they are teaching to help them learn. In many ways it sits in opposition to an over-reliance on summative assessment, or the idea of wrapping up learning, and evaluating, based on a final test, although in practice even a shift to more formative can still help a student better prepare for those final summative assessments.

While the idea behind formative assessments has been around for a while, the breakthrough that Jones and McFarland had was to realize that the concept could be truly scaled and expanded if it was digitized, since that would enable efficient assignment delivery, and much more data collation, visualization, communication and analytics.

That concept, of course, took on a whole new profile in the last year and a half: schools and teachers that had already invested in the idea of using more digital tools, and possibly even Formative itself, ramped up their engagement; and they were joined by a new wave of educators scrambling to fill the big gap created by schools closing to slow down the spread of Covid-19, who might have previously had a very tenuous engagement with online learning. That had a big impact on a lot of the edtech sector, with online learning companies like Kahoot also seeing a big rise in use (and taking a bigger initiative into learning management by acquiring tools like Clever), as well as a plethora of other providers.

Formative too seized the moment and set up something it called the Covid-19 Assistance Program, providing free access to its platform — which is normally priced in different tiers, starting at free for a basic service, then increasing to $12 and $17 or ‘contact us’ based on numbers of teachers using the platform that allows for more integrations, more analytics and so on. Some 5,000 teachers and schools signed up for the free service, Jones said, and McFarland noted that as schools reopened, it’s continued through in what has definitely been an evolving engagement with technology for many in the classroom. (And not all are so quick to shift: my kids’ secondary school in London still strictly forbids people using “screens” at school and in classrooms.)

“There’s been a really big shift in the U.S., where there are more devices in classrooms now than there are students,” said McFarland, who said that many are taking a hybrid approach of saying, effectively, ‘If we want to utilize this, we can utilize it but not necessarily rely on it every single day.’

“That’s where you’ll see a lot of flexibility,” he continued. “They’re using a device, not a toy. We try to work a lot in that flexible hybrid environment.”

The approach it has taken is to make its system work in as seamless a way as possible for teachers, by not only integrating with all the learning materials that are “native” to digital platforms, but also making digitized versions of the most popular publications, and those that they are using as part of their curriculum, also something the teachers can call up and assign through Formative. In that regard, it’s not a learning content company, but more of a channel for making the content that is there, more accessible and more useful. It also links up with other tools like learning management systems when they are used to create a more efficient process overall.

That’s a model that has resonated with both educators and investors.

“Formative helps to accelerate learning for students, save time for teachers and quantify results for school and district administrators,” said Tom Jennings, an MD at Summit Partners, in a statement. “We believe Formative has a rare combination of rapid, capital-efficient growth, innovative products, delighted customers and a humble, mission-driven team. We admire how Craig, Kevin and the team have built the business and expect our partnership to help Formative accelerate product enhancements and the continued global expansion of the business.” Jennings is joining Formative’s board with this round.

Twitter is looking at adding new features that could help users who are facing abusive situations on its platform as a result of unwanted attention pile-ons, such as when a tweet goes viral for a reason they didn’t expect and a full firehose of counter tweets get blasted their way.

Racist abuse also remains a major problem on Twitter’s platform.

The social media giant says it’s toying with providing users with more controls over the @mention feature to help people “control unwanted attention” as privacy engineer, Dominic Camozzi, puts it.

The issue is that Twitter’s notification system will alert a user when they’ve been directly tagged in a tweet — drawing their attention to the contents. That’s great if the tweet is nice or interesting. But if the contents is abusive it’s a shortcut to scale hateful cyberbullying.

Twitter is badged these latest anti-abuse ideas as “early concepts” — and encouraging users to submit feedback as it considers what changes it might make.

Potential features it’s considering include letting users ‘unmention’ themselves — i.e. remove their name from another’s tweet so they’re no longer tagged in it (and any ongoing chatter around it won’t keep appearing in their mentions feed).

It’s also considering making an unmention action more powerful in instances where an account that a user doesn’t follow mentions them — by providing a special notification to “highlight potential unwanted situations”.

If the user then goes ahead and unmentions themselves Twitter envisages removing the ability of the tweet-composer to tag them again in future — which looks like it could be a strong tool against strangers who abuse @mentions. 

Twitter is also considering adding settings that would let users restrict certain accounts from mentioning them entirely. Which sounds like it would have come in pretty handy when president Trump was on the platform (assuming the setting could be deployed against public figures).

Twitter also says it’s looking at adding a switch that can be flipped to prevent anyone on the platform from @-ing you — for a period of one day; three days; or seven days. So basically a ‘total peace and quiet’ mode.

It says it wants to make changes in this area that can work together to help users by stopping “the situation from escalating further” — such as by providing users with notifications when they’re getting lots of mentions, combined with the ability to easily review the tweets in question and change their settings to shield themselves (e.g. by blocking all mentions for a day or longer).

The known problem of online troll armies coordinating targeted attacks against Twitter users means it can take disproportionate effort for the object of a hate pile-on to shield themselves from the abuse of so many strangers.

Individually blocking abusive accounts or muting specific tweets does not scale in instances when there may be hundreds — or even thousands — of accounts and tweets involved in the targeted abuse.

For now, it remains to be seen whether or not Twitter will move forward and implement the exact features it’s showing off via Camozzi’s thread.

A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed the concepts are “a design mock” and “still in the early stages of design and research”. But she added: “We’re excited about community feedback even at this early stage.”

The company will need to consider whether the proposed features might introduce wider complications on the service. (Such as, for example, what would happen to automatically scheduled tweets that include the Twitter handle of someone who subsequently flips the ‘block all mentions’ setting; does that prevent the tweet from going out entirely or just have it tweet out but without the person’s handle, potentially lacking core context?)

Nonetheless, those are small details and it’s very welcome that Twitter is looking at ways to expand the utility of the tools users can use to protect themselves from abuse — i.e. beyond the existing, still fairly blunt, anti-abuse features (like block, mute and report tweet).

Co-ordinated trolling attacks have, for years, been an unwanted ‘feature’ of Twitter’s platform and the company has frequently been criticized for not doing enough to prevent harassment and abuse.

The simple fact that Twitter is still looking for ways to provide users with better tools to prevent hate pile-ons — here in mid 2021 — is a tacit acknowledgment of its wider failure to clear abusers off its platform. Despite repeated calls for it to act.

A Google search for “* leaves Twitter after abuse” returns numerous examples of high profile Twitter users quitting the platform after feeling unable to deal with waves of abuse — several from this year alone (including a number of footballers targeted with racist tweets).

Other examples date back as long ago as 2013, underlining how Twitter has repeatedly failed to get a handle on its abuse problem, leaving users to suffer at the hands of trolls for well over a decade (or, well, just quit the service entirely).

One recent high profile exit was the model Chrissy Teigen — who had been a long time Twitter user, spending ten years on the platform — but who pulled the plug on her account in March, writing in her final tweets that she was “deeply bruised” and that the platform “no longer serves me positively as it serves me negatively”.

A number of soccer players in the UK have also been campaigning against racism on social media this year — organizing a boycott of services to amp up pressure on companies like Twitter to deal with racist abusers.

While public figures who use social media may be more likely to face higher levels of abusive online trolling than other types of users, it’s a problem that isn’t limited to users with a public profile. Racist abuse, for example, remains a general problem on Twitter. And the examples of celebrity users quitting over abuse that are visible via Google are certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

It goes without saying that it’s terrible for Twitter’s business if highly engaged users feel forced to abandon the service in despair.

The company knows it has a problem. As far back as 2018 it said it was looking for ways to improve “conversational health” on its platform — as well as, more recently, expanding its policies and enforcement around hateful and abusive tweets.

It has also added some strategic friction to try to nudge users to be more thoughtful and take some of the heat out of outrage cycles — such as encouraging users to read an article before directly retweeting it.

Perhaps most notably it has banned some high profile abusers of its service — including, at long last, president troll Trump himself earlier this year.

A number of other notorious trolls have also been booted over the years, although typically only after Twitter had allowed them to carry on coordinating abuse of others via its service, failing to promptly and vigorously enforce its policies against hateful conduct — letting the trolls get away with seeing how far they could push their luck — until the last.

By failing to get a proper handle on abusive use of its platform for so long, Twitter has created a toxic legacy out of its own mismanagement — one that continues to land it unwanted attention from high profile users who might otherwise be key ambassadors for its service.