Author: azeeadmin

The startup investing market is crowded, expensive and rapid-fire today as venture capitalists work to preempt one another, hoping to deploy funds into hot companies before their competitors. The AI startup market may be even hotter than the average technology niche.

This should not surprise.

In the wake of the Microsoft-Nuance deal, The Exchange reported that it would be reasonable to anticipate an even more active and competitive market for AI-powered startups. Our thesis was that after Redmond dropped nearly $20 billion for the AI company, investors would have a fresh incentive to invest in upstarts with an AI focus or strong AI component; exits, especially large transactions, have a way of spurring investor interest in related companies.

That expectation is coming true. Investors The Exchange reached out to in recent days reported a fierce market for AI startups.

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But don’t presume that investors are simply falling over one another to fund companies betting on a future that may or may not arrive. Per a Signal AI survey of 1,000 C-level executives, nearly 92% thought that companies should lean on AI to improve their decision-making processes. And 79% of respondents said that companies are already doing so.

The gap between the two numbers implies that there is space in the market for more corporations to learn to lean on AI-powered software solutions, while the first metric belies a huge total addressable market for startups constructing software built on a foundation of artificial intelligence.

Now deep in the second quarter, we’re diving back into the AI startup market this morning, leaning on notes from Blumberg Capital’s David Blumberg, Glasswing Ventures’ Rudina Seseri, Atomico’s Ben Blume, and Jocelyn Goldfein of Zetta Venture Partners. We’ll start by looking at recent venture capital data regarding AI startups and dig into what VCs are seeing in both the U.S. and European markets before chatting about applied AI vs. “core” AI — and in which context VCs might still care about the latter.

Hot, expensive, crowded

The exit market for AI startups is more than just the big Microsoft-Nuance deal. CB Insights reports that four of the largest five American tech companies have bought a dozen or more AI-focused startups to date, with Apple leading the pack with 29 such transactions.

As Apple hosts their annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Instagram and Facebook chose this moment to pilot their first-ever Creator Week. This three-day event is geared toward aspiring and emerging digital creators, complete with 9:45 AM virtual DJ sets and panels on “Algorithm Mythbusting” and raising “zillions for a nonprofit you care about.”

During the first day of the event, Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement introducing new ways for creators to make money. In the coming months, Instagram will start testing a native affiliate tool, which allows creators to recommend products available on checkout, share them with followers, and earn commissions for sales their posts drive. When creators make these posts, the text “eligible for commission” will appear beneath their username in the same way that sponsored content labels appear.

Available immediately, creators will be able to link their shops to their personal profiles, not just business ones. By the end of the year, eligible creators in the U.S. will be able to partner with one of Instagram’s merchandise partners (Bravado/UMG, Fanjoy, Represent, and Spring) to drop exclusive product launches on the app.

During live Instagram videos, viewers can tip creators by sending them a Badge, which costs between $0.99 and $4.99. Facebook Gaming has a similar feature called Stars, in which one Star is valued at $0.01. Starting this week, creators can earn bonuses for accomplishing certain challenges, like going live with another account. In a promotional image, for example, Facebook offers a bonus of $150 for creators who earn 5000 Stars, the equivalent of $50.

“To help more creators make a living on our platforms, we’re going to keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges, and our upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2023,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “And when we do introduce a revenue share, it will be less than the 30% that Apple and others take.”

These updates mark the latest push by Instagram toward affiliate marketing and in-app shopping, like its redesigned Instagram Shop and Shopping in Reels, which debuted within the last year.

“Our goal is to be the best platform for creators like you to make a living. And if you have an idea that you want to share with the world, you should be able to create it and get it out there easily and simply – across Facebook and Instagram – and then earn money for your work,” Zuckerberg added during Creator Week.

Creators may be drawn to experiment with these affiliate and shop features, since for now, they won’t lose a cut of their profits to Instagram. But platforms like TikTok and YouTube offer monetization strategies that extend beyond ecommerce.

Last July, TikTok announced its $200M TikTok Creator Fund, which allows popular posters to earn money from their videos. It’s unclear exactly how TikTok determines how much money to dole out, but it depends on the number of views, engaged views, and other factors. In August 2020, the YouTuber-turned-TikToker Hank Green estimated that he would bring home about $700 from 20,000,000 TikTok views in one month, averaging to about 3.5 cents per 1000 views.

Meanwhile, YouTube announced a $100M fund last month for top creators on YouTube Shorts, its TikTok competitor. The platform pointed out that over the last three years, it has paid $30 billion to content creators. Snapchat has been paying $1 million per day to creators on their own TikTok competitor, Spotlight.

For users who don’t have millions of followers, these creator funds might not pay the rent. Still, it offers an income stream based on views, outside of ecommerce or viewer tips. For now, Instagram can’t say the same.

Twilio Segment announced a tool, which is available starting today, to help marketers create fine-grained customer journeys. Up until now the company has enabled marketers to build buyer personas and broader audiences, but this enables users to have much greater control of their interactions with a customer.

Company co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt says that marketers have been craving the ability to build more customized customer journeys and this tool gives them that. “It’s basically taking the power that existed in personas and audiences and actually putting it fully in marketers’ hands to build their dream journeys across every channel with the best data,” he said.

This enables marketers to stitch together a whole sequence of audiences. “Say when someone comes to the top of the funnel, they want to do X, then if they want to branch it and use X or Y, then do two different things, and you can keep branching and personalizing via this whole journey to cover the whole lifecycle.”

He says this capability has existed in some tools, but the Twilio Segment offering enables it to be used in more than 300 tools in the Segment ecosystem. “This is the first time that we’re going to be able to really do that and orchestrate this way, not just for a limited subset of channels, but across all of the channels,” he said.

Marketers can build branching by dragging and dropping journey components to send people on different paths depending on things like if they are a regular customer or a first-time customer or just about anything you can think of. Reinhardt says that flexibility is a key attribute of the new feature.

While it’s competing with some major players like Adobe and Salesforce in this space, Reinhardt believes this capability really gives Twilio a leg up over the competitors. “I think if you look at more of the legacy journey builders, [their products] are not built on real time data, meaning that they’re actually missing basically all of the interesting behavioral data that marketers actually build on,” he said.

Segment was acquired by Twilio last year for $3.2 billion, and part of the reason for that was to increase its customer engagement capabilities. Segment gives Twilio a customer data platform to build on top of its other communications tooling, and today’s announcement expands on that capability.

Swedish battery developer and manufacturer Northvolt AB has raised $2.75 billion in capital as it prepares to ramp up to an annual production capacity of 150 GWh in Europe by 2030.

The funding round – Northvolt’s largest thus far – was co-led by existing investors Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen, and new investors including the Swedish pension funds AP1-4, and OMERS, one of Canada’s largest pension plans. AMF, ATP, Baillie Gifford, Baron Capital Group, Bridford Investments Limited, Compagnia di San Paolo through Fondaco Growth, Cristina Stenbeck, Daniel Ek, IMAS Foundation, EIT InnoEnergy, Norrsken VC, PCS Holding, Scania and Stena Metall Finans also participated in the raise.

Volkswagen’s investment came to €500 million ($620 million), the OEM said Wednesday, maintaining its 20% stake in the battery manufacturer.

CNBC reported that Northvolt’s valuation now stands at $11.75 billion. The company declined to comment on the specific valuation figure to TechCrunch.

Northvolt has already scored major deals with automakers like Volkswagen and BMW. In July 2020, the company inked a $2.3 billion contract with BMW for batteries; more recently in March, Volkswagen put in a $14 billion order over a ten-year period. The two deals bring Northvolt’s total contracts to $27 billion. Other notable customers include Swedish heavy duty truck manufacturer Scania and energy storage company Fluence.

This brings Northvolt’s total raised to more than $6.5 billion since the company was founded in 2016. The manufacturer’s first gigafactory in Skellefteå, Sweden, will be expanded from 40 GWh to 60 GWh, in part due to increased demand from the Volkswagon order, the company said in a statement. That facility will commence production later in 2021.

Northvolt’s overarching plan is to ramp up to at least 150 GWh of annual battery production across Europe by 2030. To meet this massive target, the company is considering at least two additional gigafactories, including one in Germany.

Northvolt is one of Europe’s largest battery manufacturers. Company shareholder EIT InnoEnergy said in a statement Wednesday that the funding is key to Europe achieving its Green Deal objectives, which includes creating a European battery value chain.

The Swedish company aims to distinguish itself from other battery manufacturers by producing batteries using renewable energy for the manufacturing process. Northvolt says its batteries have an 80% lower carbon footprint than those made with coal power. It also recycles batteries in-house and reuses the raw materials in its production process.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday revoking actions targeting TikTok and WeChat signed by former President Donald Trump, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

President Biden signed a new order instead requiring the Commerce Department to review apps with ties to “jurisdiction of foreign adversaries” that may pose national security risks.

The U.S. Department of Commerce, Tencent and ByteDance could not be immediately reached for comment.

This is a developing story.

Branch Insurance, a startup offering bundled home and auto insurance, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Anthemis Group.

Acrew, Cherry Creek Holdings and existing backers Greycroft, HSCM Bermuda, American Family Ventures, SignalFire, SCOR P&C Ventures, Foundation Capital and Tower IV also participated in the round. With this latest financing, Columbus, Ohio-based Branch has raised $82.5 million in total funding since its 2017 inception.

With so many players in the insurtech space, it can get tough distinguishing the various offerings. Branch claims that it is unique in that it is able to provide customers with “an instant insurance offer” for bundled home and auto insurance “within seconds” using just a few pieces of information.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Lekas began his career at Allstate, where he went on to hold roles in underwriting, technology and product management. He then went on to build Esurance’s first online home insurance business.

But in the back of his mind, Lekas yearned to figure out a way to make insurance more accessible for more people. And so he teamed up with Joe Emison, and Branch was born.

“The industry is structurally flawed and it harms consumers. Complicated policies, rising costs and marketing warfare all contribute to a vicious cycle that results in overpriced insurance,” said Lekas. “We are a full-stack insurance company transforming the way people think about their home and car insurance.”

Branch, he claims, is the only insurance company that he is aware of that can bind insurance through an API, and the only one that can bundle auto and home insurance in a single transaction.

Another way Branch is unique, according to Lekas, is that it can be embedded into the buying experience. In other words, the company has partnered with companies such as Rocket Mortgage and ADT to integrate insurance at the point of sale in their products. For example, if a person is closing on a home, they have the option of purchasing Branch insurance at the same time.

“Every home or car policy starts with another transaction,” Lekas said. “Insurance is a product that exists only because of the other transaction. It’s never before been possible to embed in that primary purchase before.”

This distribution model means that Branch shells out less to acquire customers and thus, it claims, is able to offer premiums for a lower price than competitors.

“In just two clicks, a consumer can have home and car insurance or just home and we’ll cancel the old insurance on their closing date, and transmit all the data to their existing mortgage,” Lekas said.

Branch also offers its insurance direct-to-consumer and through agencies.

The company plans to use its new capital in part to accelerate its rollout across the U.S. so that it can sign more such partnerships where it can embed its offering. Currently, Branch has more than 30 partnerships of varying sizes, and is “adding more every week” as it launches in more states.

“It’s really hard to move quickly,” Lekas said. “The system is built to make you move slowly. Every state regulator has to approve individually and independently with their own rules.”

Lekas predicts Branch will be available in more than 80% of the U.S. before the year’s out.

Branch has seen increased momentum since its $24 million Series A in July 2020.

Specifically, the startup says it has achieved a 435% growth in its partner channel, 660% growth in active policies and a 734% increase in active premium less than one year after its last raise.

Anthemis Group Partner Ruth Foxe Blader notes that Branch marks her firm’s first investment from its new growth fund.

Blader says she has invested in insurance innovation over the past decade, and is particularly attracted to insurtech businesses that represent three things: significant technology and data science innovation; significant product innovation and significant cultural innovation.

“Branch easily ticks those boxes,” Blader told TechCrunch. “Branch’s products are both embedded and bundled, making them less expensive and more convenient to purchase, and less likely to leave customers with critical protection gaps.”

The startup, she added, effectively combines data science and technology to create “unique, automatic product bundles.”

With what it describes as a “built-for-savings” structure, Branch said it has created connected home discounts as well as programs that reward members for making referrals and practicing safe driving behaviors, for example.

Branch also has formed a nonprofit, SafetyNest, to help those who are un- or underinsured.

Two years ago, Lillian Cartright teamed up with some fellow Harvard Business School students to launch a new spiked seltzer brand called Astrid. Despite all the tools that make launching a D2C brand easier than it’s ever been, the team ran into complications when it came to securing raw materials.

This piece of the supply chain is still stuck in the past, according to Cartright, who explained that most of it is still based around trade shows, powered by referrals and personal connections and plenty of phone calls.

That’s when the idea for ShelfLife was born. The company, cofounded by Cartright and John Cline, is aiming to build a directory and marketplace of raw material suppliers based on what brands actually, specifically need, allowing them to secure quotes quickly.

The current system is set up to benefit the large incumbent CPG brands, but the industry is shifting. Craft beverages, in particular, are growing in popularity and the pandemic encouraged consumers to buy more bottled, box, and canned goods online.

In fact, Cartright says that 50 food and beverage brands are launched every single day. But the small, new brands don’t have an easy way to procure materials. For Cartright and Astrid, it was so complicated that it led her and her team to abandon the project.

“I instead took that experience kind of ran with it,” said Cartright. “There are thousands of other people that want to launch brands in the food and beverage space. There are no resources when it comes to supply chain. There’s something there, and this entire space is going to end up digitizing in the very near term.”

In beta, ShelfLife charges a small fee for use of the software, and is manually procuring supplier quotes on behalf of brands. The funding will, in part, go towards automating that process as much as possible to scale on both the brand and supplier side.

One of the challenges of that is that not all suppliers love the idea of being compared to one another, all on one page. Cartright argues that the shifting landscape of the industry means that lead generation around new brands is growing in importance, and a trend that suppliers should get ahead of.

Eventually, Cartright wants to shift the ShelfLife business model to a commission structure that would come out of the budget suppliers usually reserve for field sales reps. The company also wants to build products around financing for the brands, as many suppliers require upfront payment, which can be taxing on a small brand.

The funding round was co-led by Switch Ventures and Kindred Ventures, with participation from NextView Ventures, Ben Zises (SuperAngel.vc), Ilia Papas (former CTO of Blue Apron), and Elena Donio (former President of SAP Concur) among others.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive, Alex, Natasha, and Chris dug into the world of hormonal health, a sub-sector within the massive (and booming) world of digital health.

The show was inspired by Natasha’s latest Extra Crunch piece: “Hormonal Health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?”. To round out the show, we asked one of the featured founders, Dr. Elizabeth Ruzzo, to hop on the mic and help us understand if hormonal health is at its infancy, or at an inflection point, in tech.

The tl;dr before we hop into the show is that hormones — while constantly evolving and changing — are center node for a ton of health conditions that disproportionately impact women. These can include mental health issues, infertility, diabetes, and more. If you’re someone interested in the world of digital health and always read about the Ro’s and Hinge Health’s of the ecosystem, this episode will teach you what else there is that deserves equal – if not more – attention.

Here’s what we got into:

• We started with landscaping! We defined the term “hormonal health” and got a sense of market size, as to show the opportunity there is to innovate here right now.
• Ruzzo walked us through the opportunity in pro-active medicine, as well as how investors reacted to her pitch when she was first raising her seed round.
• We ping-ponged around different reasons as to why hormonal health is an underserved category, starting with stigma and ending with stigma.
• This post from a set of venture capital investors discussing the market opportunity that women’s health may have for founders and VCs alike.
• Then we got into Modern Fertility’s acquisition by Ro, and why Ruzzo and many in the digital health community were surprised at the outcome. That said, it’s still one of the rare exits, and as far as unicorns go, there are virtually no companies valued at over $1 billion that focus explicitly on women’s hormonal health.
• Shifting gears, the trio turned to startups working on PCOS, one of the most common hormonal conditions out there that impacts one in ten women. Former Ro director Rachel Blank announced today that she is starting a company in this world, Allara.
• To round out the conversation we touched on the recent Veera venture capital round, and closed with a short discussion concerning the the term “femtech” and why it’s not so good.

Don’t forget to take the Equity survey, and we’ll chat you on Friday morning!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

The European Union has been digging into the competition implications of AI-powered voice assistants and other Internet of Things (IoT) connected technologies for almost a year. Today it’s put out a first report discussing potential concerns that EU lawmakers say will help inform their wider digital policymaking in the coming years.

A major piece of EU legislation introduced at the back of last year is already set to apply ex ante regulations to so-called ‘gatekeeper’ platforms operating in the region, with a list of business practice ‘dos and don’ts’ for powerful, intermediating platforms being baked into the forthcoming pan-EU Digital Services Act.

But if course applications of technology don’t stand still. The bloc’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, has also had her eye on voice assistant AI technologies for a while — raising concerns about the challenges being posed for user choice as far back as 2019, when she said her department was “trying to figure out how access to data will change the marketplace”.

The Commission took a concrete step last July when it announced a sectoral inquiry to examine IoT competition concerns in detail.

It’s now published a preliminary report, based on polling more than 200 companies operating in consumer IoT product and services markets (in Europe, Asia and the US) — and is soliciting further feedback on the findings (until September 1) ahead of a final report due in the first half of next year.

Among the main areas of potential competition concern it found are: Exclusivity and tying practices in relation to voice assistants and practices that limit the possibility to use different voice assistants on the same smart device; the intermediating role of voice assistants and mobile OSes between users and the wider device and services market — with the concern being this allows the owners of the platform voice AI to control user relationships, potentially impacting the discoverability and visibility of rival IoT services.

Another concern is around (unequal) access to data. Survey participants suggested that platform and voice assistant operators gain extensive access to user data — including capturing information on user interactions with third-party smart devices and consumer IoT services as a result of the intermediating voice AI.

“The respondents to the sector inquiry consider that this access to and accumulation of large amounts of data would not only give voice assistant providers advantages in relation to the improvement and market position of their general-purpose voice assistants, but also allow them to leverage more easily into adjacent markets,” the Commission writes in a press release.

A similar concern underlies an ongoing EU antitrust investigation into Amazon’s use of third party merchants’ data which it obtains via its ecommerce marketplace (and which the Commission believes could be illegally distorting competition in online retail markets).

Lack of interoperability in the consumer IoT sector is another concern flagged in the report. “In particular, a few providers of voice assistants and operating systems are said to unilaterally control interoperability and integration processes and to be capable of limiting functionalities of third-party smart devices and consumer IoT services, compared to their own,” it says.

There’s nothing very surprising in the above list. But it’s noteworthy that the Commission is trying to get a handle on competitive risks — and start mulling potential remedies — at a point when the adoption of voice assistant AIs is still at a relatively early stage in the region.

In its press release, the Commission notes that usage of voice assistant tech is growing worldwide and expected to double between 2020 and 2024 (from 4.2BN voice AIs to 8.4BN) — although only 11% of EU citizens surveyed last year had already used a voice assistant, per cited Eurostat data.

EU lawmakers have certainly learned lessons from the recent failure of competition policy to keep up with digital developments and rein in a first wave of tech giants. And those giants of course continue to dominate the market for voice AIs now (Amazon with Alexa, Google with its eponymous Assistant and Apple’s Siri). So the risks for competition are crystal clear — and the Commission will be keen to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Still, quite how policymakers could look to tackle competitive lock-in around voice AIs — whose USP tends to be their lazy-web, push-button and branded convenience for users — remains to be seen.

One option, enforcing interoperability, could increase complexity in a way that’s negative for usability — and may raise other concerns, such as around the privacy of user data.

Although giving users themselves more say and control over how the consumer tech they own works can certainly be a good idea, at least provided the platform’s presentation of choices isn’t itself manipulative and exploitative.

There are certainly plenty of pitfalls where IoT and competition is concerned — but also potential opportunities for startups and smaller players if proactive regulatory action can ensure that dominant platforms don’t get to set all the defaults once again.

Commenting in a statement, Vestager said: “When we launched this sector inquiry, we were concerned that there might be a risk of gatekeepers emerging in this sector. We were worried that they could use their power to harm competition, to the detriment of developing businesses and consumers. From the first results published today, it appears that many in the sector share our concerns. And fair competition is needed to make the most of the great potential of the Internet of Things for consumers in their daily lives. This analysis will feed into our future enforcement and regulatory action, so we look forward to receiving further feedback from all interested stakeholders in the coming months.”

The full sectoral report can be found here.

 

Commit, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup that has a unique approach to matching up engineers looking for a new job to early-stage startups that want to hire them, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed round. Accomplice led the round, with participation from Kensington Capital Partners, Inovia and Garage Capital. 

The company, which focuses on working with remote-first startups, launched in 2019, with co-founders Greg Gunn (CEO) and Beier Cai (CTO), who met as early employees at Hootsuite, bootstrapping the company while they worked out the details of how they wanted Commit to work.

“I was an EIR [at Inovia Capital] and I just saw all these amazing founders that were coming in with world-changing ideas. They raised money, but their biggest challenge was getting an engineer to join them,” Gunn explained.

In his experience, founders typically look for senior full-stack tech leads to join their company, but it’s exactly those senior engineers that are often already in very comfortable roles at larger companies and taking a bet on an early-stage startup — or even a succession of early-stage startups — is often not the most pragmatic choice for them.

After talking to dozens of engineers, the founders found that many didn’t want to lose the support network they had built inside their current company, both from fellow engineers but also the kind of institutional support you get through formal and informal mentorship and personal development opportunities that most large tech companies offer. In addition, as Gunn noted, “hiring at early-stage startups sucks.” Senior engineers don’t want to have to go through a bunch of technical interviews anymore that test their whiteboarding skills but say very little about their actual capabilities as an engineer.

So the team decided to figure out ways to remove these barriers. Like a VC firm, it vets the startups and startup founders it works with, so the engineers that come to Commit know that these are serious companies with at least some prospect of raising funding and allowing their engineers to shape their trajectory and grow into what is potentially an early leadership role.

Meanwhile, it vets the engineers by giving them a technical interview so they can get started without having to do another one for every interview with the companies that partner with Commit. As Gunn noted, so far, the average engineer Commit has worked with only met 1.6 vetted founders before they started a pilot project together.

To mitigate some of the fiscal risks of leaving a large tech company, Commit actually pays the engineers it works with a salary until they find a job. Currently, around 90% of the engineers that start pilot projects with their prospective employees end up in full-time employment.

In addition to matching up founders and engineers, it also offers its community members access to an active remote-first community of fellow engineers for peer support and career advice, as well as coaching and other transition services.

In the backend, Commit uses a lot of data to match founders and engineers, but Gunn noted that while the team is very selective and has a tight profile for the people it partners with, it is committed to building a diverse pool of founders and engineers. “The thing we’re combating is the fact that these opportunities have been unevenly distributed,” he said. “Even within the Valley […] you have to be from a socio-economic class to even have access to those opportunities. For us, our whole business model is live where you want to live, but then get access to whatever opportunities you have.” Later this year, Commit plans to launch a project that specifically focuses on hiring diversity.

Commit’s startup partners currently include Patch, Plastiq, Dapper Labs, Relay, Certn, Procurify, Scope Security, Praisidio, Planworth, Georgian Partners and Lo3 Energy. The team started out slowly, working with fewer than 100 engineers so far, but hopes to expand its community to 10,000 engineers within the next 12 months. Starting today, engineers who want to join the program can now get on Commit’s waitlist.