When Amazon debuted AWS DeepRacer in 2018, it was meant as a fun way to help developers learn machine learning. While it has evolved since and incorporated DeepRacer competitions, today the company announced it was adding a new wrinkle. It’s open sourcing the software the company created to run these miniature cars.
At its core, the DeepRacer car is a mini computer running Ubuntu Linux and Amazon’s Robot Operating System (ROS). The company believes that by opening up the device software to developers, it will encourage more creative uses of the car by enabling them to change the car’s default behavior.
“With the open sourcing of the AWS DeepRacer device code you can quickly and easily change the default behavior of your currently track-obsessed race car. Want to block other cars from overtaking it by deploying countermeasures? Want to deploy your own custom algorithm to make the car go faster from point A to B? You just need to dream it and code it,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the open .
After introducing the cars in 2018, the company has developed in person DeepRacer leagues, and more recently virtual races. In fact, the company reorganized the leagues last month to encourage new people to get involved with the technology. Adding an open source component could increase interest further as developers get a chance to make this their own, and really add new layers of usage to the cars that haven’t been possible up until now.
The idea behind all of this to teach developers the basics of machine learning, as AWS’ Marcia Villalba wrote in a blog post last month:
“AWS DeepRacer is an autonomous 1/18th scale race car designed to test [reinforcement learning] models by racing virtually in the AWS DeepRacer console or physically on a track at AWS and customer events. AWS DeepRacer is for developers of all skill levels, even if you don’t have any ML experience. When learning RL using AWS DeepRacer, you can take part in the AWS DeepRacer League where you get experience with machine learning in a fun and competitive environment.”
If you want to get involved customizing your car’s software, the project documentation is available on GitHub and on the AWS DeepRacer Open Source page, where you can get started with six sample projects.
Ford Motor Company will open a $185 million R&D battery lab to develop and manufacture battery cells and batteries, a first step toward the automaker possibly making battery cells in-house. The facility comes as yet another signal to consumers and other automakers that the auto giant is no longer hedging its bets on the transition to battery electric vehicles.
Company executives declined to provide a timeline on when Ford might scale its battery manufacturing, but it is clear that the company intends this facility to lay the groundwork for such a future.
The Ford Ion Park will be based in southeast Michigan and will be home to more than 150 employees across battery technology development, research and manufacturing. The facility will likely be around 200,000 square feet and will open at the end of 2022. The facility will be supported by Ford’s batteries benchmarking test laboratories in nearby Allen Park, Michigan, which is already testing battery cell construction and chemistries. Also nearby are Ford’s product development center in Dearborn and Ford’s battery cell assembly and e-motor plant in Rossville.
The new facility will be led by Anand Sankaran, who is currently Ford’s director of electrified systems engineering. He described it as a “learning lab” to create both “lab-scale and pilot-scale assembly of cells,” including next-gen lithium-ion and solid-state batteries.
Ford is thinking about the transition to BEVs in phases, Hau Thai Tang, Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer, explained. In this first phase, when BEVs are being largely purchased by early adopters, Ford’s working with external supplier partners. The company is now preparing for phase two, when Ford will bring more products to market and BEVs will take more of the market share. “So in preparation for that next transition into the second phase, we want to give Ford the flexibility and the optionality to eventually vertically integrate,” Tang said.
“Our plan to lead the electric revolution will certainly be dependent on the progress that we make on battery energy density, as well as cost,” Tang told reporters Tuesday.
“The formation of the Ford Ion Park team is a key enabler for Ford to vertically integrate and manufacture batteries in the future,” Tang said. “This will help us better control our supply and deliver high-volume battery cells with greater range, lower cost and higher quality.”
This would be a huge boost for domestic manufacturing of battery cells, which is dominated by companies based in Asia, such as Panasonic (Tesla’s main supplier), South Korea-based LG Chem and SK Innovation, Ford’s current battery cell supplier. Executives said the global pandemic and the semiconductor shortage have highlighted the importance of having a localized and domestically controlled supply chain.
“We know in terms of batteries, it’s a very capital-intensive business to be in,” Tang said. “The best tier one suppliers in the world spend a large amount of their revenue on R&D spending, and then the capital expenditure required to build and stand up battery plants is quite high. So as we think about this, the scale and volume that we would need to have dedicated sites for Ford is a big consideration, and we’ve talked about how bullish we see this transition happening. We’re at a point where now, there’s sufficient scale for us to entertain having greater levels of vertical integration at some point.”
Toucan, a startup that helps users learn a new language while they browse the web, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4.5 million in seed funding.
As I wrote last fall, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup has built a Chrome extension that scans the text of whatever website you’re reading and translates select words into whichever language you’re trying to learn. That means you’re expanding your vocabulary without having to make time to study or otherwise change your behavior.
Toucan currently supports seven languages — Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Co-founder and CEO Taylor Nieman said the company now has around 60,000 monthly active users, all acquired organically.
“On the surface, Toucan can look like a toy, but there’s massive engineering tech on the backend,” Nieman added.
For one thing, although the startup has a team of human translators, it also relies on machine learning and natural language processing to understand the context of each word and make sure it’s being translated properly. Nieman also said that the company also takes an intelligent, personalized approach to the translations that appear over time, allowing them to become more complex in order to keep challenging users.
Image Credits: Toucan
Toucan is free, but users can subscribe to Toucan Premium, which starts at $4.99 per month and offers a higher density of translated words. Premium subscribers can also opt in or out of advertising — apparently the ability to “own” a word (a.k.a. have your sponsorship message appear anytime that word is translated) is popular enough that some paying users don’t want to lose it.
Toucan has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The new round was led by LightShed Ventures, with participation from new investors Next Play Ventures, Concrete Rose Capital, GingerBread Capital, Form Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hampton VC, Spacecadet Ventures, GTMfund, Baron Davis Enterprises and Human Ventures, as well as existing investors GSV Ventures, Amplifyher Ventures and Vitalize.
“Screen time is escalating globally with younger generations living their lives always connected,” said LightShed Ventures General Partner Richard Greenfield in a statement. “Toucan seamlessly integrates language learning into the websites (and soon apps) you are already using via a simple browser extension transforming screen time into learning time.”
Nieman said Toucan will use the new funding to expand the team from 12 to 16. It’s also planning to internationalize — so not just translating English to Spanish, but Spanish to English, and so on — and is launching a new Safari extension (it will support more browsers in the future). The ultimately vision is for Toucan to be “layered wherever you are.”
“We want to be this augmented layer of learning on the web, on mobile browsing, the most popular social apps and even in the physical world,” she said, predicting that in the future, you might be “wearing a crazy cool contact lens that can translate a sign on the subway and provide you with those same micro-moments of learning.”
Mobile social networking app for women, Peanut, is today becoming the latest tech company to integrate audio into its product following the success of Clubhouse. Peanut, which began with a focus on motherhood, has expanded over the years to support women through all life stages, including pregnancy, marriage and even menopause. It sees its voice chat feature, which it’s calling “Pods,” as a way women on its app can make better connections in a more supportive, safer environment than other platforms may provide.
The pandemic, of course, likely drove some of the interest in audio-based social networking, as people who had been stuck at home found it helped to fill the gap that in-person networking and social events once did. However, voice chat social networking leader Clubhouse has since seen its model turned into what’s now just a feature for companies like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Discord, and others to adopt.
Like many of the Clubhouse clones to date, Peanut’s Pods offer the basics, including a muted audience of listeners who virtually “raise their hand” to speak, emoji reactions, and hosts who can moderate the conversations and invite people to speak, among other things. The company, for now, is doing its own in-house moderation on the audio pods, to ensure the conversations don’t violate the company’s terms. In time, it plans to scale to include other moderators. (The company pays over two dozen moderators to help it manage the rest of its app, but this team has not yet been trained on audio, Peanut notes.)
Though there are similarities with Clubhouse in its design, what Peanut believes will differentiate its audio experience from the rest of the pack is where these conversations are taking place — on a network designed for women built with safety and trust in mind. It’s also a network where chasing clout is not the reason people participate.
Traditional social networks are often based on how many likes you have, how many followers you have, or if you’re verified with a blue check, explains Peanut founder CEO Michelle Kennedy.
“It’s kind of all based around status and popularity,” she says. “What we’ve only ever seen on Peanut is this ‘economy of care,’ where women are really supportive of one another. It’s really never been about, ‘I’ve got X number of followers.’ We don’t even have that concept. It’s always been about: ‘I need support; I have this question; I’m lonely or looking for a friend;’ or whatever it might be,” Kennedy adds.
In Peanut Pods, the company says it will continue to enforce the safety standards that make women feel comfortable social networking. This focus in particular could attract some of the women, and particularly women of color, who have been targeted with harassment on other voice-based networking platforms.
“The one thing I would say is we’re a community, and we have standards,” notes Kennedy. “When you have standards and you let everyone know what those standards are, it’s very clear. You’re allowed an opinion but what you’re not allowed to do are listed here…Here are the things we expect of you as a user and we’ll reward you if you do it and if you don’t, we’re going to ask you to leave,” she says.
Freedom of speech is not what Peanut’s about, she adds.
“We have standards and we ask you to adhere to them,” says Kennedy.
In time, Peanut envisions using the audio feature to help connect women with people who have specific expertise, like lactation consultants for new moms or fertility doctors, for example. But these will not be positioned as lectures where listeners are held hostage as a speaker drones on and on. In fact, Peanut’s design does away with the “stage” concept from Clubhouse to give everyone equal status — whether they’re speaking or not.
In the app, users will be able to find interesting chats based on what topics they’re already following — and, importantly, they can avoid being shown other topics by muting them.
The Pods feature is rolling out to Peanut’s app starting today, where it will reach the company’s now 2 million-plus users. It will be free to use, like all of Peanut, though the company plans to eventually launch a freemium model with some paid products further down the road.
Over the course of the last few years, Mailchimp morphed from a basic newsletter platform to a fully-fledged marketing company. And while the service already offered integrations with a number of e-commerce sites, it is now launching its own online stores for small and medium businesses, as well as a new appointment booking service.
These new services will be part of MailChimp’s new ‘Websites & Commerce’ plans, which starts with a free tier that offers most of the basic functionality. Users on the free plan will pay a 2% transaction fee. For $10/month, Mailchimp will remove its own branding and users will get access to email and chat support and only pay a 1.5% transaction fee, while those who opt for the ‘Plus’ plan at $29/month will only pay a 0.5% transaction fee per order.
All plans will let users build sites with unlimited pages and without bandwidth restrictions, and include SEO tools and integration with Google Analytics. As for the stores, users will be able to build their product catalogs and manage their orders, taxes and shipping configurations. All of this, as well as the appointments functionality, is obviously deeply integrated with the rest of the Mailchimp stack.
Image Credits: Mailchimp
These new plans are currently in beta and the new e-commerce features will become available to all Mailchimp customers in the U.S. and UK by May 18, while the appointments booking feature will go live for all users on April 27.
This addition of built-in commerce features marks a major step in Mailchimp’s evolution. But it also makes sense. The company says about 40% of its customers over fourteen million customers are in the commerce space already and many of them have been asking for more native commerce features. Almost 30% of its users are also using its existing commerce features and integrations and the company saw its revenue for e-commerce customers grow 61% from 2019 to 2020.
Since Mailchimp already offers websites, domains and other adjacent services, adding these new features feels like a natural next step, whether that’s selling directly from a Mailchimp store or taking appointment bookings for a service business.
The company stresses that while it is entering a new space, it is not walking away from its existing products and customers. “Rest assured, we’re not abandoning our smart marketing solutions,” Mailchimp CEO and co-founder Ben Chestnut writes in today’s announcement. “In fact, our goal is still to have the best email marketing in the world. We know our customers and partners demand consistency and continuity as much as they demand new features and functionality, so we’re refining and nurturing existing tools, too. We continue to work on making the process of designing emails as easy as possible, and in a few months we’re adding new beautiful email templates.”
Adam Riggs is an experienced executive and investor in e-commerce, finance, and media companies. Adam was the first President and CFO of Shutterstock from 2005 to 2010. Prior to Frameable, Adam was a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the U.S. Treasury Department and a subject matter expert at the U.S. State Department on a variety of open data and knowledge management challenges.
Like all business operators and investors, I value recurring revenue. From my time as president & CFO of Shutterstock and in many other positions over the last 15 years, I have seen just how powerful a pitch-perfect subscription model can be for scaling quickly and responsibly.
However, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has perhaps become a bit too interchangeable with subscription models. Every software company now looks to sell by subscription ASAP, but the model itself might not fit all industries or, more importantly, align with customer needs, especially early on.
New categories make for skeptical customers
In established categories, customers have preconceived ideas as to what a software product should look like and how it should work and be sold. In most cases, this aligns with subscriptions. Customers are just used to it.
However, newer categories of software that address fresh problems-to-solve bring more skeptical, or at least, less experienced customers. They usually want to try a variety of solutions before they settle on the one that works for them. This means they will naturally value flexible terms more than the companies in established categories might.
Requiring commitment via subscriptions or larger agreements up front, in this environment, might actually hurt you rather than help you solidify your value proposition. Moreover, it certainly does not align with the customer’s need to identify the best solution for them by trying several.
A great example of this is the virtual events category. The COVID-19 pandemic instantly created a massive need for better virtual event software. Initially, people tried to use standard video call software for this purpose, but quickly came to the conclusion that they needed more customized solutions, since, as we all now know (and event planners knew all along), events are not meetings!
What happened? Lots of new virtual event companies and products sprang up, and with no established favorite and no clear understanding of the category, customers wanted to try out a variety of solutions. A similar series of events unfolds regularly in many other categories.
What will China’s answer to Estée Lauder look like in the digital age?
According to Ushopal, it will provide a seamless online and offline shopping experience, where China’s savvy beauty shoppers get to discover niche, tasteful brands and learn their stories.
Ushopal was founded in 2017 by J&J veteran Lu Guo as an “omni-channel” partner for luxury beauty brands at a time when online and offline consumption were increasingly merging in China. Unlike traditional import distributors, which simply puts goods on the shelves, Ushopal offers a holistic solution that helps brands develop their digital and brick-and-mortar retail channels as well as marketing content through its network of 2,500 influencers.
Ushopal felt that patnerships weren’t enough, so in 2019, it took a step further by adding a strategic investment arm to seek deeper operational influence on brands. Check sizes range from $10 million to $100 million, and for the larger rounds, Ushopal says it can leverage its own investors such as Cathay Capital, a private equity firm focused on global companies.
For instance, Cathay Capital bought a minority stake in the Paris-based, high-end fragrance brand Juliette Has A Gun. As its investor and partner, Ushopal helped the brand, which was founded by the grandson of the legendary couturier Nina Ricci, grow its gross merchandise value in China from zero to over 70 million yuan within a year.
To boost its capital pool, Ushopal raised $100 million in March that lifted its total fundings to $200 million. Aside from Cathay Capital, its past investors also include FountainVest Partners, a Chinese private equity firm that recently acquired the Canadian premium outdoor clothing label Arc’teryx, and Chinaccelerator, SOSV’s China-based accelerator focused on cross-border businesses.
Chinese consumers are hooked to e-commerce today, but there is still much of the shopping experience that Alibaba’s marketplace and WeChat mini-stores can’t offer. As such, Ushopal opened its first multi-brand store in an upscale mall in Shanghai last year, carrying brands that are normally found in Neiman Marcus in the U.S. and Le Bon Marché in Paris. The goal is to showcase treasures from around the world, an idea that is captured by the chain’s name — Bonnie&Clyde — the names of a Depression-era crime couple who is often depicted as chic and rebellious in popular culture.
Customers don’t pay at B&C’s brick-and-mortar store; instead, they order through its app and can have the order delivered to their doorsteps within four hours if they live in Shanghai. The delivery time is much shorter than China’s standard e-commerce import practice, which normally takes three to seven days for goods to arrive from their overseas distribution centers.
B&C, on the other hand, stockpiles in its own warehouse in a free trade zone in Shanghai, which allows for much quicker delivery. And since it holds exclusive and selective distribution rights to the brands it works with, it has a good grasp over how much inventory to keep.
A promotional short video made by Ushopal for Juliette Has A Gun in China
At China’s beauty stores targeting the mass market, shoppers are often seen moving from one busily stocked shelf to another while their eyes are fixated on their phones, browsing product reviews on content commerce apps like Xiaohongshu. B&C wants full attention from its customers by limiting its in-store product number and statinoing a team of beauty advisors. The demographics it targets are also quite different.
“When they are traveling in the U.S., they are going to Barneys, Saxs Fifth Avenue and whey they are in the U.K., they are going to Harrods,” Lau, vice president of brands at Ushopal, told TechCrunch in an interview. “They are familiar with the experience, and they are not here to line up.”
Last year, B&C generated over $200 million in gross merchandise value through the products it bought from a dozen of brands and subsequently sold in China. The average ticket size of its sales was over 5,000 yuan ($770), with shoppers often spending over 10,000 yuan per order, according to Lau. Many of the customers were what he called “second-generation rich,” roughly China’s equivalent to trust fund kids, as well as “trophy wives.”
Ushopal doesn’t limit its portfolio to overseas products. It doesn’t distinguish the origin of a brand, said Lau, whether it’s Chinese, Japanese or European. Though the company mainly works with Western brands at the moment, Lau said Chinese brands are becoming more sophisticated and often understand the local market better.
“For us, it’s just about creating great brands. It’s like Estée Lauder, which has brands from all over the world. We are a China-based company but a global luxury business.”
Greenlight, the fintech company that pitches parents on kid-friendly bank accounts, has raised $260 million in a Series D funding round that nearly doubles its valuation to $2.3 billion.
The funding comes just months after the Atlanta-based startup landed $215 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. With the latest round, Greenlight has now raised over $550 million.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led its Series D, which also included participation from return backers TTV Capital, Canapi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, BOND, Fin VC, Goodwater Capital, as well as new investors Wellington Management, Owl Ventures and LionTree Partners.
Since it launched its debit cards for kids in 2017, the company has managed to set up accounts for more than 3 million parents and children, who have saved more than $120 million through the app. That’s up from 2 million parents and kids having saved $50 million at the time of its September 2020 raise.
Overall, Greenlight says it has “more than tripled” YoY revenue, more than doubled the number of parents and kids on its platform and doubled the size of its team within the past year.
“Greenlight has quickly emerged as a leader in the family finance category,” said Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George, who will join Greenlight’s board of directors, in a written statement. “Greenlight was built to help parents raise financially-smart kids, and with its breakthrough combination of easy-to-use money management tools and educational resources, the company is well-positioned to become one of the most loved and trusted brands for families around the world.”
The company pitches itself as more than just a debit card, with apps that give parents the ability to deposit money in accounts and pay for allowance, manage chores and set flexible controls on how much kids can spend. In January, Greenlight introduced its educational investing platform for kids — Greenlight Max. Through that platform, kids can research stocks with analysis from Morningstar and actually make real investments in companies like Apple, Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon as long as their parents approve.
As TechCrunch previously reported, it’s a potentially massive business that can lock in a whole generation to a financial services platform, which is likely one reason why a whole slew of companies have launched with a similar thesis. There’s Kard, Step, Till Financial and Current pitching similar businesses in the U.S. and Mozper recently launched from Y Combinator to bring the model to Latin America. (Step and Current also announced big rounds today, while Till Financial announced its seed round last week).
“Our vision at Greenlight is to create a world where every child grows up to be financially healthy and happy,” said Tim Sheehan, co-founder and CEO of Greenlight. “Today’s financing will enable us to bring even more value to families as we continue to introduce new innovative products that shine a light on the world of money.”
Greenlight says it will use the new capital to accelerate product development to add more financial services to its platform as well as to invest further in strategic distribution partnerships and geographic expansion. It also plans to hire another 300 employees over the next two years, with an emphasis on engineers.
Vena, a Canadian company focused on the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software space, has raised $242 million in Series C funding from Vista Equity Partners.
As part of the financing, Vista Equity is taking a minority stake in the company. The round follows $25 million in financing from CIBC Innovation Banking last September, and brings Vena’s total raised since its 2011 inception to over $363 million.
Vena declined to provide any financial metrics or the valuation at which the new capital was raised, saying only that its “consistent growth and…strong customer retention and satisfaction metrics created real demand” as it considered raising its C round.
The company was originally founded as a B2B provider of planning, budgeting and forecasting software. Over time, it’s evolved into what it describes as a “fully cloud-native, corporate performance management platform” that aims to empower finance, operations and business leaders to “Plan to Grow” their businesses. Its customers hail from a variety of industries, including banking, SaaS, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance and higher education. Among its over 900 customers are the Kansas City Chiefs, Coca-Cola Consolidated, World Vision International and ELF Cosmetics.
Vena CEO Hunter Madeley told TechCrunch the latest raise is “mostly an acceleration story for Vena, rather than charting new paths.”
The company plans to use its new funds to build out and enable its go-to-market efforts as well as invest in its product development roadmap. It’s not really looking to enter new markets, considering it’s seeing what it describes as “tremendous demand” in the markets it currently serves directly and through its partner network.
“While we support customers across the globe, we’ll stay focused on growing our North American, U.K. and European business in the near term,” Madeley said.
Vena says it leverages the “flexibility and familiarity” of an Excel interface within its “secure” Complete Planning platform. That platform, it adds, brings people, processes and systems into a single source solution to help organizations automate and streamline finance-led processes, accelerate complex business processes and “connect the dots between departments and plan with the power of unified data.”
Early backers JMI Equity and Centana Growth Partners will remain active, partnering with Vista “to help support Vena’s continued momentum,” the company said. As part of the raise, Vista Equity Managing Director Kim Eaton and Marc Teillon, senior managing director and co-head of Vista’s Foundation Fund, will join the company’s board.
“The pandemic has emphasized the need for agile financial planning processes as companies respond to quickly-changing market conditions, and Vena is uniquely positioned to help businesses address the challenges required to scale their processes through this pandemic and beyond,” said Eaton in a written statement.
Vena currently has more than 450 employees across the U.S., Canada and the U.K., up from 393 last year at this time.
SF-HQ’d Instreamatic lets brands that advertise through streaming music apps and podcasts (for instance) have interactive voice-based dialogues with consumers. So instead of an audio ad playing in a one-way experience (as all adverts currently do), the listener can talk to, and interact, with the ad.
For example, when an Instreamatic advert says “Hello! Need help sleeping?” the microphone on the device it’s playing on opens, and the listener can respond however they like. If they say “Yes” then the brand’s voice (perhaps it’s a mattress brand) will respond with “Then we will sing you a lullaby”. If the user doesn’t respond then the ad experience is over and the content resumes playing. There are also more complex versions of this scenario. The key is that Instreamatic knows what happened and can tailor future ads to match the listener’s past engagement. Here’s an example.
The company says its technology can understand the ‘intent and tone’ of consumers’ natural responses to take the next action.
The upshot is that this AI-fueled voice ad could be coming to an audio stream near you soon. And with audio exploding following the pandemic, the platform is likely to benefit.
CEO Stas Tushinskiy, CEO, Instreamatic said in a statement: “Consumers don’t like being fed annoyingly repetitive ads. Brands are under ever-increasing pressure to make those moments meaningful while supporting strong ROI demands. On the publisher side, audio and video platforms need a better way to prove their audiences and ad inventory deliver their promise to brands. Our voice AI infrastructure, deployed by brands such as IKEA, Infiniti, and HP and across platforms like Pandora and Gaana, is empirically demonstrating that conversational marketing benefits brands, consumers, and publishers alike.”
Instreamatic says its voice ads can reach an average of 12% engagement, with some campaigns reaching 19%. These figures are quite unusual for the online advertising industry – the average CTR of mobile advertising is 0.6%.
The company says that a recent campaign by Infiniti saw 5.5% of listeners who declined the offer in the first conversation ask to receive more information about the vehicle after the second (and more personalized) chat.
Instreamatic also says it can achieve what it calls ‘continuous dialogues’ with consumers, not dissimilar to an Alexa or Siri device.
Because of the platforms complexity, Instreamatic also says it can build up a profile of the user based on an individual consumer’s previous interactions with a brand, allowing it to customize future campaigns.
So far brands that have used the platform include Pandora, Salem Media, Gaana (the Indian streaming music service), as well as a recent deal with Universal Electronics to expand voice ads into the smart-TV industry. It is also working with Triton Digital, one of the larger audio ad networks.
“Consumer demand for audio and video content, and the ubiquity of smart devices delivering that content on-demand, continues to accelerate,” said Nick MacShane, the founding partner at Progress Ventures, the venture capital arm of Progress Partners, a full-service merchant bank. “What hasn’t caught up is how brands and publishers can effectively engage those audiences in the same medium and analytically prove the ROI of their audio and video platform ad spend.”
A competitor to Instreamatic is AdsWizz, which, instead of voice, allows users to shake their phones when they are interested in an ad. But its interactions are obviously, therefore, more limited.
According to Juniper Research, the voice-based ad market will grow to $19 billion in the U.S. by 2022, growing the market share from the $17 billion audio ad market and the $57 billion programmatic ad market. Voice assistant usage is booming. Some estimates put it at over at 3 billion right, and half of all searches are expected to be done via voice. Some 55% of teens use voice search daily.
As well as Tushinskiy, the Instreamatic team also includes cofounder Simon Dunlop (former CEO/Founder of Bookmate, a subscription-based reading and audiobook platform, and Zvuk; Victor Frumkin (co-founder at Zvuk, a mobile music streaming app in Eastern Europe and Bookmate); Ilya Lityuga, CTO, one of the original team members at RuTube; and Andy Whatley, U.S. radio industry veteran.
