Author: azeeadmin

Can an app improve your romantic relationships? The founders behind Paired, a “relationship care” app for couples, believe it can. And since launching in October, with $1M to kick things off, they’ve convinced 5,000+ coupled-up others to try their custom blend of partner quizzes, “relationship satisfaction” tracking, and audio tips from experts — to try to feel closer to their S.O.

Paired is now gunning for serious growth: It’s announcing $3.6M in seed funding today, led by Eka Ventures with participation from existing investors including Taavet Hinrikus (Wise, formerly TransferWise), Harold Primat (investor and former professional racing driver), and the co-founders of Runtastic.

As part of the seed funding, Camilla Dolan of Eka Ventures will join the board alongside the app’s co-founders Kevin Shanahan and Diego López (who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise).

Paired says its goal for the new funding is to grow its user-base from 5,000+ to 100k over the next 18 months.

All sorts of audio-led wellness ‘self-care’ apps have been bubbling up in recent years — offering individuals app-wrapped help with stuff like meditation and mindfulness; targeted motivation to combat anxiety and stress; or dishing up sex tips and sexual self awareness.

Paired fits within that broader trend, albeit with a more explicit nudge to extend the self-care phenomenon to a unit of two romantically connected people.

As it looks for growth, the UK-based startup says it will continue to target the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, which are its main markets at this point. “We expect the growth to continue to come from here over the next 12 months,” says Shanahan.

“We’re building out our product team — hiring engineers, a product manager, a data scientist — to begin offering more varied and personalised relationship conversations for our users,” he goes on.

“Personalisation is a particular focus as every relationship is different and the app will begin to understand what your interests are, what stage you’re in, what would be most useful for you to discuss, etc. We’re also growing our content, working with new experts to cover more relationship topics and marketing the app via influencers, partnerships, and other channels.”

Who are Paired’s early adopters? Currently, the average user is a straight, early 30s Millennial who’s been in their current relationship for two-three years, according to Shanahan. (He says around 5% of users are LGBTQ+.)

But he also claims Paired has a wide mix of users, adding: “We have couples who have been together for 6 months and those who have been together for 10+ years, so it’s a wide spectrum.”

He says the split of women and men using the app is “fairly even” but avoids specifying exactly how usage splits on gender lines.

The app can be used by only one half of a couple — for solo relationship support/self-care, if preferred — but users have the option to pair with their partner to swap answers to relationship questions in order to encourage discussion. And that’s where Paired can offer the most personalized experience to users, by opening up a dedicated ‘relationship’ discussion channel between the couple. (Paired does not obviously cater to open/polyamorous couples — but presumably could be used as a discussion tool for the primary partners.)

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The idea isn’t to replace couples therapy, per Shanahan. Rather Paired wants to create a whole new intermediating layer — based on the notion that communication problems in a relationship can be tackled earlier (and more easily) if you stick a piece of software between you which nudges both halves of the relationship to notice and address potential disconnect.

“If couples therapy is a dentist for your relationship, then we would be a toothbrush,” is how Shanahan puts it when asked if the idea is to replace couples therapy.

“Like a toothbrush is not a substitute for the dentist, we aren’t trying to replace couples therapy. Our goal is to promote healthy relationship behaviours between couples and believe our audience will eventually grow to become the majority of couples,” he suggests.

He points to a study Paired commissioned from the Open University and University of Brighton — which he says showed that couples who used the app over the course of three months saw on average a 36% increase in their “relationship satisfaction”. (Albeit quantifying such a subjective measure as a percentile increase may not appeal to every romantic person’s tastes.)

Shanahan says Paired wants to offer ongoing support, too — rather than (the opposite scenario) of its users arriving at such a point of mutual understanding they could feel they don’t never need to take another partner quiz to understand what their life partner is thinking/feeling.

Its philosophy is, no matter how thoughtful you get vis-a-vis your S.O., there’s always more to learn and thus you always need to keep working on ‘relationship care’. It is of course a very convenient philosophy for a subscription app.

“You probably wouldn’t say success when you’re fit is to stop going to the gym,” says Shanahan. “Or when your teeth are healthy to stop brushing your teeth. Similarly we want Paired to be a tool to help keep your relationship in a good place, so success for us is keeping your relationship satisfaction high over time.”

So what have the founders learned about their own relationships from using Paired?

Shanahan confirms that he and his partner have been using the app “a ton (and not just for testing)”, adding: “I’ve personally learnt that there is always more to discover about your partner and it’s a fun journey. Also that discussing issues when they are small is useful so they don’t become big later down the line.”

Diego López, Paired’s other co-founder and CTO, tells us that the daily questions posed by the app have “helped my partner and I fight lockdown monotony”. “There’s been many occasions where we give the same answer to a question. It’s a great feeling to know that we understand each other and a reminder of the things we have in common,” he adds.

Commenting on Paired’s seed round in a statement, Camilla Dolan from Eka Ventures, said: “Despite relationship health being such an important and truly global part of our lives there is not currently an accessible and affordable way of supporting it — Paired has set out to change that.

“We love Kevin & Diego’s vision to bring happiness and health to relationships and be the global category leader for relationship management. What really got us excited though was the Paired user stories and the level of change that Paired is already having on their early users.”

In another supporting statement, existing investor Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, added: “Kevin and the Paired team have a vision for improving the relationships of hundreds of millions of couples. Building and strengthening relationships is something we all need help with from time to time, but lots of people feel unsure of where to turn for help. The rapid uptake from paid subscribers since their October launch makes me confident that it can become the global, digital platform for relationships.”

Paired’s app (available on iOS and Google Play) is free to download — but a monthly or yearly subscription is required to access the full range of content and support.

French startup Agicap has raised a new $100 million funding round led by Greenoaks. With today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of more than $500 million (€415 million). Agicap is building a service that lets you track your cash flow in real time, build reports and get forecasts.

In addition to Greenoaks, existing investors BlackFin Capital Partners and Partech are also participating in the round. It represents a big jump from last year’s $18 million Series A round from last year.

The basic premise of Agicap is quite simple. Many small companies rely on Microsoft Excel to figure out their cash position every week or every month. Instead of exporting .csv files from your bank accounts, you can connect your bank accounts to Agicap for real-time monitoring. Similarly, Agicap has developed integrations with accounting software and invoicing tools.

When you want to see how you’re doing when it comes to cash, you can connect to your Agicap account just like you’d connect to a web analytics service. Agicap tries to break down how much you’re spending by category and branch. After that, you can run projections and make decisions based on forecasts.

Designed specifically for small and medium companies, Agicap has managed to convince 3,500 companies to use its service. They pay a monthly subscription fee. Clients include Cityscoot, Meero, Merci Handy, Ornikar and Blend Burger.

Agicap is currently live in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. France still generates 50% of the company’s revenue but other markets are growing rapidly.

“This Series B comes at a key moment in our development,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Beyet said in a statement. “It demonstrates our will to make Agicap the European leader in our market and will allow us to further accelerate our international presence, launching in 10 new countries in the coming months.”

Following today’s funding round, the company has some ambitious expansion plans. The company’s team has already grown from 30 employees to 200 employees over the last 12 months. Now, it plans to build a team of 1,000 employees within the next couple of years.

Ford is increasing its investment in its electric vehicle future to $30 billion by 2025, up from a previous spend of $22 billion by 2023. The company announced the fresh cashflow into its EV and battery development strategy, dubbed Ford+, during an investor day on Tuesday. 

The company said it expects 40% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030. Ford sold 6,614 Mustang Mach-Es in the U.S. in Q1, and since it unveiled its F-150 Lightning last week, the company says it has already amassed 70,000 customer reservations. 

The Ford+ plan reveals the new path automakers will have to take if they want to keep up with an EV future. Historically, China, Japan and Korea have owned much of the world’s battery manufacturing, but as major OEMs begin building electric cars, the demand is far outstripping supply, forcing car manufacturers to invest their own resources into development. General Motors is building a battery factory with LG in Ohio, and BMW joined Ford to invest in solid state battery startup Solid Power.

This investment “underscores our belief that production-feasible solid state batteries are within reach in this decade,” said Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer, during the investor day. “Solid Power’s sulphide-based solid electrolyte and silicon-based anode chemistry delivers impressive battery improvements in performance, including increased range, lower cost, more vehicle interior space and better value and greater safety for our customers.”

The solid state battery manufacturing process doesn’t differ too much from the existing lithium ion battery process, so Ford will be able to reuse about 70% of its manufacturing lines and capital investment, according to Thai-Tang. 

At Ford’s Ion Park facility, a battery R&D center Ford is building in Michigan, the automaker has brought together a team of 150 experts to research and create a game plan for the next generation of lithium ion chemistries and Ford’s new energy-dense battery technology, the Ion Boost +.

“Our ultimate goal is to deliver a holistic ecosystem including services that should allow us to achieve higher profitability over time with BEVs than we do today with ICE vehicles,” said Thai-Tang.

The Ion Boost +’s unique cell pouch format is not only ideal for powering Ford’s larger vehicles, but it could also help the company reduce battery costs 40% by mid-decade, the company says. 

“The cell chemistry, coupled with Ford’s proprietary battery control algorithm featuring high accuracy sensing technology, delivers higher efficiency and range for customers,” said Thai-Tang.

For commercial vehicles, Ford is working on a battery cell made with lithium ion phosphate chemistry, which it’s calling the Ion Boost Pro, which it says is cheaper and better for duty cycles that require less range.

Eight months after Lucid Motors showed off the final version of its all-electric Air sedan, the company has finally revealed the in-cabin tech — from the curved 34-inch display and second touchscreen to the underlying software, integrated apps and Amazon Alexa voice assistant —that drivers and passengers will use once the automaker begins deliveries of the vehicle in the second half of the year.

The aim of the company’s branded Lucid User Experience, or Lucid UX, is to include all the tech that customers might want in a vehicle priced between $80,000 and $169,000 without adding clutter and confusion.

“We really tried to follow a strong principle of ease-of-use and a short learning curve, for it to have quick responses and an overall feeling of elegance,” Derek Jenkins, Lucid’s head of design said in a recent interview. “I kind of wanted to move away from it being overly technical or sci-fi looking or spreadsheet-like and really move towards something that was more fitting with the brand and our design ethos.”

The interior isn’t as stark as a Tesla Model 3 or Tesla Model Y, nor as jam-packed as some of the German luxury vehicles. Jenkins and his team have tried to hit the Goldilocks’s equivalent the perfect bowl of tech porridge.

“At the beginning of the project I always used to tell the team, ‘Listen I want my mom to be able to get in this car and figure it out the first time,'” Jenkins said. “She should be able to know instinctively probably the light switch and the door locks are on the left side because that’s where they always are and not have to dig through that stuff. Or that the climate controls are probably on the lower screen because that’s where it often is and traditionally has been. I just felt like it should have intuitiveness and a degree of simplicity, while still having impressive features and having a system that can grow.”

The hardware

The curved 34-inch 5k display called the glass cockpit floats slightly above the dashboard and is the most visible hardware in the vehicle, although not the only component worth mentioning. It is actually three separate displays housed under a single plate of glass, a technique that Mercedes-Benz has used in its 56-inch hyperscreen. On the far left, is a touchscreen where Lucid has placed the most important, or core, vehicle controls such as window defrosters, lighting and wiper settings.

The middle screen, is the instrument cluster, which is where the driver will see the speed and remaining battery range displayed.  The right side of instrument cluster is a widget that can display a variety of information, depending on the user, including navigation or what music is playing. The instrument cluster is also where the driver will see whether the advanced driver assistance system is activated.

To the right of the steering wheel, is another touch display that Lucid is calling the home screen. It’s here where navigation, media and communications will be located.

Moving down and to the center console area is another curved screen that Lucid has dubbed the “pilot panel,” which displays climate controls, seat functions, including a massage feature, along with all the other vehicle settings. The driver or passenger can swipe menus from the home screen down to pilot panel to display in-depth controls for music or navigation. And if the driver doesn’t want that additional touchscreen, the pilot panel can be retracted, opening access to a storage space behind it.

It’s worth noting that analog switches are still within the vehicle in three areas: the doors, the steering wheel and a slice of space between the pilot panel and the upper home screen. Alongside the doors, the driver or passengers will find the window switches and interior door latches. Right above the center console display are four physical buttons that lets the driver or passenger control climate temperature and fan speed.

On the steering wheel is a touch bar and two toggles. These buttons can be used to launch the Alexa voice assistant and turn on and off the advanced driver assistance functions as well as adjust the following distance in cruise control and volume.

“We did a lot of research through this discussion of analog interaction such as physical buttons and digital interaction on a touchscreen,” Jenkins said. “What we found was there was some key functionality that people still wanted to have physical interaction with.”

The vehicle is also loaded with 32 sensors, including a single lidar that is located just below the nose blade on the exterior of the vehicle. Below that is a lower air intake and then a forward-facing radar. Other radar sensors are located on the exterior corners. There are exterior cameras as well in the nose and header area behind the rearview mirror.

Inside the vehicle, and tucked right below the instrument cluster is a camera that faces the driver. This camera is part of the driver-monitoring system, which is meant to ensure the operator is paying attention when the advanced driver assistance system is engaged.

Two other hardware items worth noting is the 21-speaker surround sound system from Dolby Atmos and a small vintage detail with the air vents. Lucid wanted the Air to have physical air vents that a person could touch and move unlike the Tesla Model 3, which requires the user to move the direction of the air flow through the digital touchscreen. But Lucid didn’t want the bulk of a vent in the chicklet style design, which has an additional side tab to turn on or off the air flow.

The solution is a slimmed down air vent with a single round dial right in the middle. That dial can be grabbed and move to shift air flow. It can also be turned to shut off the air to a particular vent.

“It was a breakthrough for us,” Jenkins said laughing, “which isn’t a breakthrough because that was super common in the 60s and 70s in cars.”

The software

Behind all of the physical touchscreens and sensors is the software that delivers functions and services.

Lucid started with the open source Android Automotive operating system and built out the apps and other features from there. Android Automotive OS is modeled after Google’s Android open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux. Google has offered an open-source version of this OS to automakers for sometime. In recent years, automakers have worked with Google to natively build in an Android OS that is embedded with all the Google apps and services such as Google Assistant, Google Maps and the Google Play Store. Lucid did not take the Google services platform route.

From here, Lucid worked with various third-party apps and integrated them into the infotainment system, a list that currently includes iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Dolby Atmos, Tidal and Spotify.

Lucid has also decided to make Alexa the default and primary integrated voice control system. Lucid Air will also come with Android Auto and Apple Carplay — apps that run on the user’s phone and wirelessly communicates with the vehicle’s infotainment system. This means the driver, or passenger, can access Google Assistant and Siri through these apps, they just won’t be able to control the vehicle functions like climate.

The vehicle will also have integrated mobile and Wi-Fi connectivity, which will allow Lucid to update the software of the vehicle wirelessly. The over-the-air update capability lets the company add new apps and services.

The future

Jenkins said they’re already looking at bringing more content to the infotainment system, including gaming and video streaming, which would only be accessible when the vehicle is parked.

The Lucid design team is also examining other more hardware-based additions to future model years of the Air, including rear entertainment displays.

“You probably won’t see that from us until sometime in 2023,” Jenkins noted. “We think that’s an important thing to bring to the car especially because the rear seat is such a nice place to be.”

 

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, May 26. Yes, we’re going to get to the huge Amazon-MGM deal, but we have to chat about a startup first. Have you heard of Poparazzi? If you have kids you might have — it’s the latest social phenom. And it just ran its way up to the top of the App Store. (Too bad it’s not Puparazzi!)

Yes, I feel old as well. Take a look if you want to know what the kids are up to. Now, the rest of the news. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Amazon snaps up MGM: The biggest news out today is the giant Amazon-MGM deal worth more than $8 billion. Its studio purchase helps cement Amazon in the mix of tech companies with huge investments in the online video space. Observers believe the e-commerce giant plans to use MGM to bolster its Prime service, making consumers less likely to churn thanks to the inclusion of more services. Which rings hollow to us: Who is going to give up Prime, but be swayed by movies? The connection to shipping speed feels tenuous.
• The global fintech boom: This morning, Clara announced a new round, mere months after it raised its preceding round of capital. The Mexican startup works in the corporate spend market, a startup niche that recently saw a $2.5 billion exit in the United States, and more capital for both Ramp and Brex. Our read here is that many nascent fintech formulas that work in the U.S. are going to have wide remit globally.
• IPOs are back: The recent Flywire IPO pricing (strong) and first-day trading (even stronger) are indicative that the temporarily slowed public-offering market is back. So, Robinhood, let’s go?

Startups and VC

Here are five of the tastiest venture capital rounds that TechCrunch covered, showing off an array of niches and round sizes:

• UK’s Paysend raises $125M for mobile B2B payments: You are excused for wondering if every fintech round these days involves both companies and payments. I feel the same way. But what matters in the case of Paysend is that its model to provide SMB online payment services is happening from a post-Brexit U.K. Not even a tectonic decoupling can stop U.K. fintech, it seems.
• Yalo raises $50M for conversational commerce: Here’s a tech startup round that typifies the year. Did it raise less than a year ago? Yes. Did the company have funding find it, as opposed to the other way around? Yes. And did COVID accelerate its business? Yes. Yalo is a wager that the way we buy online is changing, a technology story if we’ve ever heard of one. And it’s one that venture capitalists are lining up to bet on.
• Skiff raises $3.7M for encrypted Google Docs: That’s the pitch, per our own Zack Whittaker. Essentially, Skiff mimics the familiar features of Google Docs, but with end-to-end encryption. As a fan of privacy, I dig the project.
• Treet raises $2.8M to help brands resell their own stuff: The online resale market is huge. ThreadUp is public now, as is Poshmark. But Treet is betting that there is still room in the market for more tech, namely its plan to get brands involved in their own resale market. It isn’t the richest startup around, but given the sheer number of brands out there, it has a pretty huge TAM to grow into.

Finally, African fintech OPay is in the process of raising a huge new round. The investment could help push the continent’s 2021 venture capital totals to new heights, based on data TechCrunch reported earlier in the week.

7 questions to ask before relocating your startup to Florida

Cities like Miami, Pittsburgh and Austin have been drawing talent and wealth from Silicon Valley for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend.

In recent months, many investors and entrepreneurs have noisily departed for Miami, citing the region’s favorable business climate and quality of life. It’s always good to consider one’s options, but before booking a moving van for the Sunshine State — or any emerging tech hub, for that matter — here are some basic questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves.

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

Big Tech Inc.

We’re not going to touch on the Amazon-MGM deal more here in the Big Tech section, leaving us room for all sorts of other news:

• Facebook is looking into allowing users of both the Big Blue App and Instagram to hide social like counts. Which is great for your mental health, we suspect, if awful for those of us with overdeveloped competitive urges.
• Visa is rebounding from its pre-nuptial breakup with fintech unicorn Plaid by building a vetted list of fintech startups that its friends and other customers may want to leverage. In a sense, it’s a way for startups to get a stamp of approval from Visa, and possibly more clients in the process. What’s in it for Visa? More digital payments. That’s good for a company that does lots of payments work, we reckon.
• GM and Lockheed are working on the next American lunar vehicle. It is very, very American to have the progenitors of the consumer Hummer and various weapons of death build our next extraplanetary go-kart. And it’s good that we may go back to the moon? It’s more than time.

To round out the Big Tech section today, OpenAI is out in the market with a $100 million fund to invest in startups. And Microsoft is partnering with the company and putting funds into the capital pool. It feels like ages ago that Microsoft told me that it wasn’t getting into the VC game because the returns would not prove material to its asset base. That wasn’t the point and the company seems to have figured that out.

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI’s Sam Altman of Y Combinator fame said that the fund “plan[s] to make big early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably not more than 10.” Something to watch out for.

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TC Eventful

TechCrunch’s virtual transportation event, TC Sessions: Mobility, is just two weeks away. Join us to discover crucial trends shaping this rapidly expanding sector and find out how technology including artificial intelligence and cloud-based services will define what’s possible. The fun starts on June 9, so grab your ticket before this Friday with code DAILYCRUNCH and save 50% on your ticket at TechCrunch.com/mobility.

Would you pay for an upgraded Twitter? That’s a question Twitter will soon answer when it rolls out a new subscription service that will present users with an expanded feature set available only to paid subscribers. This is a different offering than Twitter’s previously announced Super Follow subscription plans, which will allow users to subscribe to individual creators’ for access to exclusive content. Instead, the new subscription service will target Twitter’s power users who tweet frequently enough or otherwise engage with the product to the point that they’d be willing to pay to do even more.

Twitter has already broadly hinted at its forthcoming subscription plans, having told Bloomberg in February that it would “research and experiment” with ways to diversify its revenue beyond advertising in 2021 and beyond. Twitter ads are 85% of revenue, but Twitter often faces slowing or flat user growth. That has led the company to consider new ways to extract more money from existing users. It told Bloomberg this plan “may include subscriptions” and other approaches that gave businesses and users access to “unique features.”

It also reiterated its interest in subscription products during its Twitter Analyst Day later that same month, when it said it would “experiment with subscriptions.” And its Twitter Investor Relations account tweeted in March that it would “test subscription products in public.”

But so far, the only subscription product Twitter has fully detailed is Super Follow, also announced during its Analyst Day event. It had not specifically spelled out what its other subscription tests would look like, nor provided any sense as to when they would arrive beyond tests that would begin rolling out “over the course of this year.”

What we know of Twitter’s efforts on this particular front doesn’t come from official sources.

Instead, it comes from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who earlier this month scooped not only Twitter’s premium subscription offering itself but also its name and pricing. She found the forthcoming subscription plan, currently dubbed “Twitter Blue,” would cost $2.99 per month and would include access to new features like bookmark collections and the Undo Tweets feature that Twitter had previously confirmed to CNET were being tested.

However, when tech news site The Verge asked Twitter to comment on Twitter Blue, the company declined.

This week at J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology, Media, and Communications conference, Twitter spelled things out a bit more clearly.

Instead of vaguely hinting at forthcoming “experiments” or tests that gave users “people and businesses of all sizes access to unique features,” as it said before (gotta love that corporate speak!), Twitter CFO Ned Segal told investors its new “premium service” would be aimed at people who use Twitter’s service — “and they pay us for it.”

Segal noted this premium offering was one of the two types of subscriptions that Twitter had in the works, the other being Super Follows.

The premium service also sounded less of an “experiment,” than when Twitter had discussed its plans before. In earlier statements, it had seemed as if Twitter was embarking on some kind of research project to see if there was even any demand for a Twitter premium subscription at all. The wording the company used in the past didn’t make it clear how seriously this effort was.

Segal said the company would offer more info about Twitter’s premium service in the coming months. It would test the service to learn more but then, it would “ultimately roll it out to people around the world,” he said.

That’s no “experiment” — that’s a roadmap.

Twitter won’t replace the core, free product it offers, in case you were concerned. He cleared that up, too. It will provide premium features “on top of [Twitter’s] continuous improvement mindset around the free version of the service that everybody will continue to have access to.”

Twitter shouldn’t have to tweak the new offering too much, as it’s already done a lot of pre-launch research on what features users are most interested in, including via user base surveys back in 2020. Not surprisingly, the Undo Tweet option — as close as we’ll ever get to an “edit” button, was among those features users wanted most.

While Twitter didn’t really say anything we didn’t know already, thanks to assumptions, leaks and vague confirmations in the past, it’s nice to see it spelled out in a more straightforward manner as a forthcoming product meant for users worldwide.

“We want to make sure that we have a durable business for our benefit, but also for the benefit of people who use the service,” Segal said.

The question now remains whether Twitter’s users will actually subscribe.

Drug discovery is a large and growing field, in which are to be found both ambitious startups and billion-dollar big pharma incumbents. Engine Biosciences is one of the former, a Singaporean outfit with with an expert founding crew and a different approach to the business of finding new therapeutics, and it just raised $43 million to keep growing.

Digital drug discovery in general means large-scale analysis of biological data like genes, gene expression, protein structures, binding sites, things like that. Where it has hit a wall in the past is not on the digital side, where any number of likely molecules or processes can be generated, but on the next step, when those notions need to be tested in vitro. So a new crop of biotech companies have worked to integrate these aspects.

Engine does so with a pair of tools it has dubbed NetMAPPR and CombiGEM. NetMAPPR is a huge sort of search engine for genes and gene interactions, taking especial note of “errors” that could provide a foothold for a molecule or treatment. CombiGEM is like a mass genetic testing process that can look into thousands of gene combinations and edits on diseased cells simultaneously, providing quick experimental confirmation of the targets and effects proposed by the digital side. The company is focused on anti-cancer drugs but is looking into other fields as they become viable.

The focus on gene interactions sets their approach apart, said co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Lu.

“Gene interactions are relevant to all diseases, and in cancers, where we focus, a proven approach for effective precision medicines,” he explained. “For example, there are four approved drugs targeting the PARP enzyme in the context of mutation in the BRCA gene that is changing cancer treatment for millions of people. The fundamental principle of this precision medicine is based on understanding the gene interaction between BRCA and PARP.”

The company raised a $10M seed in 2018, and has been doing its thing ever since — but it needs more money if it’s going to bring some of these things to market.

“We already have chemical compounds directed towards the novel biology we have uncovered,” said Lu. “These are effectively prototype drugs, which are showing anti-cancer effects in diseased cells. We need to refine and optimize these prototypes to a suitable candidate to enter the clinic for testing in humans.”

Right now they’re working with other companies to do the next step up from automated testing, which is to say animal testing, to clear the way for human trials.

The CombiGEM experiments — hundreds of thousands of them — produce a large amount of data as well, and they’re sharing and collaborating on that front with several medical centers throughout Asia. “We have built what we believe to be the largest data compendium related to gene interactions in the context of cancer disease relevance,” said Lu, adding that this is crucial to the success of the machine learning algorithms they employ to predict biological processes.

The $43M round was led by Polaris Partners, with participation by newcomers Invus and a long list of existing investors. The money will go towards the requisite testing and paperwork involved in bringing a new drug to market based on promising leads.

“We have small molecule compounds for our lead cancer programs with data from in vitro (in cancer cells) experiments. We are refining the chemistry and expanding studies this year,” said Lu. “Next year, we anticipate having our first drug candidate enter the late preclinical phase of development and regulatory work for an IND (investigational new drug) filing with the FDA, and starting the clinical trials in 2023.”

It’s a long road to human trials, let alone widespread use, but that’s the risk any drug discovery startup takes. The carrot dangling in front of them is not just the possibility of a product that could generate billions in income, but perhaps save the lives of countless cancer patients awaiting novel therapies.

Tesla has installed its 200,000th Powerwall, the company’s home battery storage product, the company said in a tweet on Wednesday. Tesla’s CFO Zachary Kirkhorn told investors during a first-quarter earnings call in April that Tesla is continuing to work through a “multi-quarter backlog on Powerwall,” suggesting that the volume of installations will continue to soar in coming months.

During that earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will no longer sell its Solar Roof panel product without a Powerwall. He said widespread installation of solar panels plus home battery packs (Tesla built, of course) would turn every home into a distributed power plant.

“…Every solar Powerwall installation that the house or apartment or whatever the case may be, will be its own utility,” he said. “And so even if all the lights go out in the neighborhood, you will still have power. So that gives people energy security. And we can also, in working with the utilities, use the Powerwalls to stabilize the overall grid.”

He noted the unprecedented winter storm in Texas in February, which, combined with record-breaking demand for electricity, left millions without power in freezing temperatures. He suggested that under that scenario, utilities could work with customers who have Powerwalls to release stored electricity back on the grid to meet that demand.

“So if the grid needs more power, we can actually then with the consent, obviously, of the homeowner and the partnership with the utility, we can then actually release power on to the grid to take care of peak power demand,” he said.

Tesla hit the 100,000 milestone for Powerwall installations in April 2020, five years after it debuted the first-generation Powerwall. That means that sales numbers that took the company five years to achieve were doubled in a single year.

In just a few short years, Vise has gone from launching on the Disrupt Battlefield stage to unicorn. Co-founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra met Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire at an afterparty at the event, and Maguire ended up leading a seed and Series A round while Sequoia led the Series B. Last week, Vise raised its Series C of $65 million and was officially valued at $1 billion post-money.

We sat down with Vasavada and Maguire to talk about the early fundraising process for Vise, specifically the seed round, and get a look at the startup’s first pitch deck. We discussed what Vasavada has learned about delivering a good fundraising pitch, and what stood out about the pitch and the product for Maguire.

Simplicity is key

Vasavada says he’s made dozens of pitch decks since starting Vise and that this early deck was not his best because it was trying to do too much.

“A good pitch deck is short and simple, and covers the key points in less than 12 words a slide,” said Vasavada, adding that many founders think they need to show investors every part of their business.

“The deck has to show that you’re solving an important problem, that you’ve got the path to an important solution, that there is a big market opportunity, and that your team is positioned to execute,” he said. “Those are the only four things that matter. Everything else can be discussed in the Q&A.”

The goal of a pitch meeting is not to get the “yes” instantly, and satisfy every curiosity, but rather to give the investor something to think about and a reason to want another conversation.

Vasavada explained to the audience that this early seed deck certainly went into too much detail and was too text-heavy. (You can check out the full deck below.)

Why will this product be successful right now?

Beyond the problem, solution, market and team, there is an additional X factor that makes a difference in pitching for fundraising.

Timing can make or break a startup. Incredible ideas, ones that have gone on to be some of the biggest businesses in the world, have fizzled out and died for being too early.

If Instagram’s photo tagging feature was spun out into its own app, you’d have the viral sensation Poparazzi, now the No. 1 app on the App Store. The new social networking app, from the same folks behind TTYL and others, lets you create a social profile that only your friends can post photos to — in other words, making your friends your own ‘paparazzi.’ To its credit, the new app has perfectly executed on a series of choices designed to fuel day one growth — from its pre-launch TikTok hype cycle to drive App Store pre-orders to its post-launch social buzz, including favorable tweets by its backers. But the app has also traded user privacy in some cases to amplify network effects in its bid for the Top Charts, which is a risky move in terms of its long-term staying power.

The company positions Poparazzi as a sort of anti-Instagram, rebelling against today’s social feeds filled with edited photos, too many selfies, and “seemingly effortless perfection.” People’s real lives are made up of many unperfect moments that are worthy of being captured and shared, too, a company blog post explains.

This manifesto hits the right notes at the right time. User demand for less performative social media has been steadily growing for years — particularly as younger, Gen Z users wake up to the manipulations by tech giants. We’ve already seen a number of startups try to siphon users away from Instagram using similar rallying cries, including Minutiae, Vero, Dayflash, Oggl, and more recently, the once-buzzy Dispo and the under-the-radar Herd.

Even Facebook has woken up to consumer demand on this front, with its plan to roll out new features that allow Facebook and Instagram users to remove the Like counts from their posts and their feeds.

Poparazzi hasn’t necessarily innovated in terms of its core idea — after all, tagging users in photos has existed for years. In fact, it was one of the first viral effects introduced by Facebook in its earlier days.

Instead, Poparazzi hit the top of the charts by carefully executing on growth strategies that ensured a rocket ship-style launch.

@poparazziappcomment it! ##greenscreen ##poparazziapp ##positivity ##foryoupage♬ Milkshake – BBY Kodie

The company began gathering pre-launch buzz by driving demand via TikTok — a platform that’s already helped mint App Store hits like the mobile game High Heels. TikTok’s powers are still often underestimated, even though its potential for to send apps up the Top Charts have successfully boosted downloads for a number of mobile businesses, including TikTok sister app CapCut and e-commerce app Shein, for example.

And Poparazzi didn’t just build demand on TikTok — it actually captured it by pointing users to its App Store pre-orders page via the link in its bio. By the time launch day rolled around, it had a gaggle of Gen Z users ready and willing to give Poparazzi a try.

The app launches with a clever onboarding screen that uses haptics to buzz and vibrate your phone while the intro video plays. This is unusual enough that users will talk and post about how cool it was — another potential means of generating organic growth through word-of-mouth.

After getting you riled up with excitement, Poparazzi eases you into its bigger data grab.

First, it signs up and authenticates users through a phone number. Despite Apple’s App Store policy, which requires it, there is no privacy-focused option to use “Sign In with Apple,” which allows users to protect their identity. That would have limited Poparazzi’s growth potential versus its phone number and address book access approach.

It then presents you with a screen where it asks for permission to access to your Camera (an obvious necessity), Contacts (wait, all of them?), and permission to send you Notifications. This is where things start to get more dicey. The app, like Clubhouse once did, demands a full address book upload. This is unnecessary in terms of an app’s usability, as there are plenty of other ways to add friends on social media — like by scanning each other’s QR code, typing in a username directly, or performing a search.

But gaining access someone’s full Contacts database lets Poparazzi skip having to build out features for the privacy-minded. It can simply match your stored phone numbers with those it has on file from user signups and create an instant friend graph.

As you complete each permission, Poparazzi rewards you with green checkmarks. In fact, even if you deny the permission being asked, the green check appears. This may confuse users as to whether whether they’ve accidently given the app access.

While you can “deny” the Address Book upload — a request met with a tsk tsk of a pop-up message — Poparazzi literally only works with friends, it warns you — you can’t avoid being found by other Poparazzi users who have your phone number stored in their phone.

When users sign up, the app matches their address book to the phone number it has on file and then — boom! — new users are instantly following the existing users. And if any other friends have signed up before you, they’ll be following you as soon as you log in the first time.

In other words, there’s no manual curation of a “friend graph” here. The expectation is that your address book is your friend graph, and Poparazzi is just duplicating it.

Of course, this isn’t always an accurate presentation of reality.

Many younger people, and particularly women, have the phone numbers of abusers, stalkers and exes stored in their phone’s Contacts. By doing so, they can leverage the phone’s built-in tools to block the unwanted calls and texts from that person. But because Poparazzi automatically matches people by phone number, abusers could gain immediate access to the user profiles of the people they’re trying to harass or hurt.

Sure, this is an edge case. But it’s a non-trivial one.

It’s a well-documented problem, too — and one that had plagued Clubhouse, which similarly required full address book uploads during its early growth phase. It’s a terrible strategy to become the norm, and one that does not appear to have created a lasting near-term lock-in for Clubhouse. It’s also not a new tactic. Mobile social network Path tried address book uploads nearly a decade ago and almost everyone at the time agreed this was not a good idea.

As carefully designed as Poparazzi is — (it’s even a blue icon — a color that denotes trustworthiness!) — it’s likely the company intentionally chose the trade off. It’s forgoing some aspects of user privacy and safety in favor of the network effects that come from having an instant friend graph.

The rest of the app then pushes you to grow that friend graph further and engage with other users. Your profile will remain bare unless you can convince someone to upload photos of you. A SnapKit integration lets you beg for photo tags over on Snapchat. And if you can’t get enough of your friends to tag you in photos, then you may find yourself drawn to the setting “Allow Pops from Everyone,” instead of just “People You Approve.”

There’s no world in which letting “everyone” upload photos to a social media profile doesn’t invite abuse at some point, but Poparazzi is clearly hedging its bets here. It likely knows it won’t have to deal with the fallout of these choices until further down the road — after it’s filled out its network with millions of disgruntled Instagram users, that is.

Dozens of other growth hacks are spread throughout the app, too, from multiple pushes to invite friends scattered throughout the app to a very Snapchatt-y “Top Poparazzi” section that will incentivize best friends to keep up their posting streaks.

It’s a clever bag of tricks. And though the app does not offer comments or followers counts, it isn’t being much of an “anti-Instagram” when it comes to chasing clout. The posts — which can turn into looping GIFs if you snap a few in a row — may be more “authentic” and unedited than those on Instagram; but Poparazzi uses react to posts with a range of emojis and how many reactions a post receives is shown publicly.

For beta testers featured on the explore page, reactions can be in the hundreds or thousands — effectively establishing a bar for Pop influence.

Finally, users you follow have permission to post photos, but if you unfollow them — a sure sign that you no longer want them to be in your poparazzi squad — they can still post to your profile. As it turns out, your squad is managed under a separate setting under “Allow Pops From.” That could lead to trouble. At the very least, it would be nice to see the app asking users if they also want to remove the unfollowed account’s permission to post to your profile at the time of the unfollow.

Overall, the app can be fun — especially if you’re in the young, carefree demographic it caters to. Its friend-centric and ironically anti-glam stance is promising as well. But additional privacy controls and the ability to join the service in a way that offers far more granular control of your friend graph in order to boost anti-abuse protections would be welcome additions. 

TechCrunch tried to reach Poparazzi’s team to gain their perspective on the app’s design and growth strategy, but did not hear back. (We understand they’re heads down for the time being.) We understand, per SignalFire’s Josh Constine and our own confirmation, that Floodgate has invested in the startup, as has former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos’ Dream Machine and Weekend Fund.