Author: azeeadmin

Sign language is used by millions of people around the world, but unlike Spanish, Mandarin or even Latin, there’s no automatic translation available for those who can’t use it. SLAIT claims the first such tool available for general use, which can translate around 200 words and simple sentences to start — using nothing but an ordinary computer and webcam.

People with hearing impairments, or other conditions that make vocal speech difficult, number in the hundreds of millions, rely on the same common tech tools as the hearing population. But while emails and text chat are useful and of course very common now, they aren’t a replacement for face-to-face communication, and unfortunately there’s no easy way for signing to be turned into written or spoken words, so this remains a significant barrier.

We’ve seen attempts at automatic sign language (usually American/ASL) translation for years and years: in 2012 Microsoft awarded its Imagine Cup to a student team that tracked hand movements with gloves; in 2018 I wrote about SignAll, which has been working on a sign language translation booth using multiple cameras to give 3D positioning; and in 2019 I noted that a new hand-tracking algorithm called MediaPipe, from Google’s AI labs, could lead to advances in sign detection. Turns out that’s more or less exactly what happened.

SLAIT is a startup built out of research done at the Aachen University of Applied Sciences in Germany, where co-founder Antonio Domènech built a small ASL recognition engine using MediaPipe and custom neural networks. Having proved the basic notion, Domènech was joined by co-founders Evgeny Fomin and William Vicars to start the company; they then moved on to building a system that could recognize first 100, and now 200 individual ASL gestures and some simple sentences. The translation occurs offline, and in near real time on any relatively recent phone or computer.

They plan to make it available for educational and development work, expanding their dataset so they can improve the model before attempting any more significant consumer applications.

Of course, the development of the current model was not at all simple, though it was achieved in remarkably little time by a small team. MediaPipe offered an effective, open-source method for tracking hand and finger positions, sure, but the crucial component for any strong machine learning model is data, in this case video data (since it would be interpreting video) of ASL in use — and there simply isn’t a lot of that available.

As they recently explained in a presentation for the DeafIT conference, the first team evaluated using an older Microsoft database, but found that a newer Australian academic database had more and better quality data, allowing for the creation of a model that is 92 percent accurate at identifying any of 200 signs in real time. They have augmented this with sign language videos from social media (with permission, of course) and government speeches that have sign language interpreters — but they still need more.

A GIF showing one of the prototypes in action — the consumer product won’t have a wireframe, obviously.Image Credits: Slait.ai

Their intention is to make the platform available to the deaf and ASL learner communities, who hopefully won’t mind their use of the system being turned to its improvement.

And naturally it could prove an invaluable tool in its present state, since the company’s translation model, even as a work in progress, is still potentially transformative for many people. With the amount of video calls going on these days and likely for the rest of eternity, accessibility is being left behind — only some platforms offer automatic captioning, transcription, summaries, and certainly none recognize sign language. But with SLAIT’s tool people could sign normally and participate in a video call naturally rather than using the neglected chat function.

“In the short term, we’ve proven that 200 word models are accessible and our results are getting better every day,” said SLAIT’s Evgeny Fomin. “In the medium term, we plan to release a consumer facing app to track sign language. However, there is a lot of work to do to reach a comprehensive library of all sign language gestures. We are committed to making this future state a reality. Our mission is to radically improve accessibility for the Deaf and hard of hearing communities.”

From left, Evgeny Fomin, Dominic Domènech, and Bill Vicars.Image Credits: Slait.ai

He cautioned that it will not be totally complete — just as translation and transcription in or to any language is only an approximation, the point is to provide practical results for millions of people, and a few hundred words goes a long way toward doing so. As data pours in, new words can be added to the vocabulary, and new multi-gesture phrases as well, and performance for the core set will improve.

Right now the company is seeking initial funding to get its prototype out and grow the team beyond the founding crew. Fomin said they have received some interest but want to make sure they connect with an investor who really understands the plan and vision.

When the engine itself has been built up to be more reliable by the addition of more data and the refining of the machine learning models, the team will look into further development and integration of the app with other products and services. For now the product is more of a proof of concept, but what a proof it is — with a bit more work SLAIT will have leapfrogged the industry and provided something that deaf and hearing people both have been wanting for decades.

Disasters are, unfortunately, a growth business, and the frontlines that were once distant have moved much closer to home. Wildfires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes — let alone a pandemic — has forced much of the United States and increasingly large swaths of the world to confront a new reality: few places are existentially secure.

How we respond to crises can radically adjust the ledger of mortality for the people slammed by these catastrophes. Good information, fast response, and strong execution can mean the difference between life and death. Yet, frontline workers often can’t get the tools and training they need, particularly new innovations that may not wind their way easily through the government supply chain. Perhaps most importantly, they often need post-traumatic care far after a disaster his dissipated.

Risk & Return is a unique venture fund and philanthropic hybrid that has set its mission to seek and finance the next-generation of technologies to help first responders not only on the frontlines, but even after as they confront the strains both physical and mental from missions they undertake.

The family of organizations sees a spectrum from emergency workers in the United States to U.S. military veterans, all of whom share similar challenges and need solutions today — solutions that can often be hard to finance for traditional VCs who aren’t aware of the unique needs of this community.

The group was founded by Robert Nelsen, who made his name as a co-founder and managing director of biotech VC leader ARCH Venture Partners, which last year announced a $1.5 billion pair of funds. He’s joined by board chairman Bob Kerrey, the former co-chair of the 9/11 Commission as well as former governor and senator of Nebraska, and managing director Jeff Eggers, a Navy SEAL who served as senior director of Afghanistan and Pakistan on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

Nelsen had been thinking through the idea when he met Kerrey, who recalled the conversation happening during a fundraising event for Navy SEALs. “There has been a lot of suffering for those who have been on the frontlines,” Kerrey said. “Bob had this idea, and I thought it was a really smart idea, to try to take a different approach to philanthropic efforts.” They linked up with Eggers and the trio brought Risk & Return to fruition.

The venture fund is $25 million, with about 35% of it already deployed. The fund has had a big emphasis on mental health for first responders, with 75% of the companies funded broadly in that category.

The fund’s first investment was into Alto Neuroscience, which is developing precision medicine tools to treat post-traumatic stress. The fund has also invested in behavioral management startup NeuroFlow; alternative well-being assessment tool Qntfy; Spear Human Performance, which is a brand-new spinout focused on connecting commercial and health data sources to optimize human performance; and Xtremity, which is designing better connection sockets for prosthetics. The fund has invested in another six startups including Perimeter, which I profiled a few weeks ago.

This isn’t your typical venture portfolio, and that’s exactly what Risk & Return wants to focus on. Eggers said that “We love that type of technology since it has that dual purpose: going to serve the first responder on the ground, but the community is also going to benefit.”

While many of the startups the firm has invested in obviously have a focus on first responders, the technologies they develop don’t have to be limited to just that market. Kerrey noted that “Every veteran is a civilian, [and] these aren’t businesses targeting the military market.” Given the last year, “it’s hard to find a human being in this pandemic that hasn’t suffered at least some PTSD,” referencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Sales to governments can be incredibly challenging, and the ultimate market for the kinds of specialized mental health services that frontline workers need may not be as commercially viable as one would hope.

While the government does research and innovation in this category, Kerrey sees a huge opportunity for the private sector to get more involved. “One thing that you could do in the private sector that is difficult in the public sector is look for alternative therapies for PTSD,” he said, noting that areas like psychedelics have intrigued the private sector even while the government would mostly not touch the category today. Risk & Return has not made an investment in that space at this time though.

Half of the returns from the fund will stream into Risk & Return’s philanthropic arm, which writes grants to charities along the same thesis of aiding frontline workers both on the job and after it. The organizations hope that by approaching the complicated response space with a multi-pronged approach, they can match potential needs with different sources of capital that are most appropriate.

We’ve increasingly seen this hybrid for-profit/non-profit venture model in other areas. Norrsken is a Swedish foundation and venture fund that is investing in areas like mental health, climate change, and other categories from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. MIT Solve is another program that is working on hybrid approaches to startup innovation, such as in pandemics and health security. While disasters are always looming, it’s great to see more innovation in financing this critical category of technology.

such as in pandemics and health security

iOS 14.5 — the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — is launching today, and with it comes a much-discussed new privacy feature called App Tracking Transparency.

The feature was first announced nearly a year ago, although the company delayed the launch to give developers more time to prepare. Since then, support for the feature has already gone live in iOS and some apps have already adopted it (for example, I’ve seen tracking requests from Duolingo and Venmo), but now Apple says it will actually start enforcing the new rules.

That means iPhone owners will start seeing many more privacy prompts as they continue using their regular apps, each one asking for permission to “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.” Every app that requests tracking permission will also show up in a Tracking menu within your broader iOS Privacy settings, allowing you to toggle tracking on and off any time — for individual apps, or for all of them.

What does turning tracking on or off actually do? If you say no to tracking, the app will no longer be able to use Apple’s IDFA identifier to share data about your activity with data brokers and other third parties for ad-targeting purposes. It also means the app can no longer use other identifiers (like hashed email addresses) to track you, although it may be more challenging for Apple to actually enforce that part of the policy.

Image Credits: Apple

There’s been intense debate around App Tracking Transparency in the lead up to its launch. The pro-ATT side is pretty easy to explain: There’s a tremendous amount of personal information and activity that’s being collected about consumers without their consent (as Apple outlined in a report called A Day in the Life of Your Data), and this gives us a simple way to control that sharing.

However, Facebook has argued that by dealing a serious blow to ad targeting, Apple is also hurting small businesses that depend on targeting to affordable, effective ad campaigns.

The social network even took out ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post declaring that it’s “standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” (The Electronic Frontier Foundation dismissed the campaign as “a laughable attempt from Facebook to distract you from its poor track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues as it tries to derail pro-privacy changes from Apple that are bad for Facebook’s business.”)

Others have suggested that these changes could do “existential” damage to some developers and advertisers, while also benefiting Apple’s bottom line.

The full impact will depend, in part, on how many people choose to opt out of tracking. It’s hard to imagine many normal iPhone owners saying yes when these prompts start to appear — especially since developers are not allowed to restrict any features based on who opts into or out of tracking. However mobile attribution company AppsFlyer says that early data suggests that opt-in rates could be as high as 39%.

At its big event last week, Apple tipped off the forthcoming arrival of the latest point update to iOS. Today 14.5 goes live for all users, and it’s shaping up to be one of the bigger updates to the mobile operating system in a bit.

The most long-awaited update from a purely user standpoint is probably the ability to unlock the phone using an Apple Watch. It’s another useful addition for the company’s wearable, but more importantly, it comes after a year of frustrated mask wearers hoping for a work around for face unlock.

Image Credits: Apple

When wearing a mask, the handset will default to the Watch (once watchOS 7.4 is installed), sending a notification to the wearable, along with a haptic buzz.

A big new arrival on the security side, as well, with the addition of app tracking transparency. Anthony wrote about the feature in a post earlier this month, noting,

Apple will actually start enforcing its new rules, meaning that iPhone users will probably start seeing a lot more requests. Those requests will appear at various points during the usage of an app, but they’ll all carry a standardized message asking whether the app can “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites,” followed by a customized explanation from the developer.

So, get ready for a lot of pop-up notifications – but for a good cause.

Image Credits: Apple

Also arriving:

• A ton of new emojis. We’ve got kissing couples, fiery hearts and additional gender inclusivity.
• Updates to Siri, including an additional voice (there is no default voice now) and the ability to dial an emergency number.
• AirTag support!
• Apple Podcasts app redesign
• Fitness+ can now be streamed to devices with AirPlay 2 enabled
• Reminders can be date, priority and title
• Updates to voice control accessibility

Apple has spent years reinforcing macOS with new security features to make it tougher for malware to break in. But a newly discovered vulnerability broke through most of macOS’ newer security protections with a double-click of a malicious app, a feat not meant to be allowed under Apple’s watch.

Worse, evidence shows a notorious family of Mac malware has already been exploiting this vulnerability for months before it was subsequently patched by Apple this week.

Over the years, Macs have adapted to catch the most common types of malware by putting technical obstacles in their way. macOS flags potentially malicious apps masquerading as documents that have been downloaded from the internet. And if macOS hasn’t reviewed the app — a process Apple calls notarization — or if it doesn’t recognize its developer, the app won’t be allowed to run without user intervention.

But security researcher Cedric Owens said the bug he found in mid-March bypasses those checks and allows a malicious app to run.

Owens told TechCrunch that the bug allowed him to build a potentially malicious app to look like a harmless document, which when opened bypasses macOS’ built-in defenses when opened.

“All the user would need to do is double click — and no macOS prompts or warnings are generated,” he told TechCrunch. Owens built a proof-of-concept app disguised as a harmless document that exploits the bug to launch the Calculator app, a way of demonstrating that the bug works without dropping malware. But a malicious attacker could exploit this vulnerability to remotely access a user’s sensitive data simply by tricking a victim into opening a spoofed document, he explained.

The proof-of-concept app disguised as a harmless document running on an unpatched macOS machine. (Image: supplied)

Fearing the potential for attackers to abuse this vulnerability, Owens reported the bug to Apple.

Apple told TechCrunch it fixed the bug in macOS 11.3. Apple also patched earlier macOS versions to prevent abuse, and pushed out updated rules to XProtect, macOS’ in-built anti-malware engine, to block malware from exploiting the vulnerability.

Owens asked Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle to investigate how — and why — the bug works. In a technical blog post today, Wardle explained that the vulnerability triggers due to a logic bug in macOS’ underlying code. The bug meant that macOS was misclassifying certain app bundles and skipping security checks, allowing Owens’ proof-of-concept app to run unimpeded.

In simple terms, macOS apps aren’t a single file but a bundle of different files that the app needs to work, including a property list file that tells the application where the files it depends on are located. But Owens found that taking out this property file and building the bundle with a particular structure could trick macOS into opening the bundle — and running the code inside — without triggering any warnings.

Wardle described the bug as rendering macOS’ security features as “wholly moot.” He confirmed that Apple’s security updates have fixed the bug. “The update will now result in the correct classification of applications as bundles and ensure that untrusted, unnotarized applications will (yet again) be blocked, and thus the user protected,” he told TechCrunch.

With knowledge of how the bug works, Wardle asked Mac security company Jamf to see if there was any evidence that the bug had been exploited prior to Owens’ discovery. Jamf detections lead Jaron Bradley confirmed that a sample of the Shlayer malware family exploiting the bug was captured in early January, several months prior to Owens’ discovery. Jamf also published a technical blog post about the malware.

“The malware we uncovered using this technique is an updated version of Shlayer, a family of malware that was first discovered in 2018. Shlayer is known to be one of the most abundant pieces of malware on macOS so we’ve developed a variety of detections for its many variants, and we closely track its evolution,” Bradley told TechCrunch. “One of our detections alerted us to this new variant, and upon closer inspection we discovered its use of this bypass to allow it to be installed without an end user prompt. Further analysis leads us to believe that the developers of the malware discovered the zero-day and adjusted their malware to use it, in early 2021.”

Shlayer is an adware that intercepts encrypted web traffic — including HTTPS-enabled sites — and injects its own ads, making fraudulent ad money for the operators.

“It’s often installed by tricking users into downloading fake application installers or updaters,” said Bradley. “The version of Shlayer that uses this technique does so to evade built-in malware scanning, and to launch without additional ‘Are you sure’ prompts to the user,” he said.

“The most interesting thing about this variant is that the author has taken an old version of it and modified it slightly in order to bypass security features on macOS,” said Bradley.

Wardle has also published a Python script that will help users detect any past exploitation.

It’s not the first time Shlayer has evaded macOS’ defenses. Last year, Wardle working with security researcher Peter Dantini found a sample of Shlayer that had been accidentally notarized by Apple, a process where developers submit their apps to Apple for security checks so the apps can run on millions of Macs unhindered.

Last week, when we reported that Snap paid $124 million for Fit Analytics, we also noted that, according to the SEC filing that disclosed the value of the acquisition, Snap made another deal in the same quarter for a smaller amount, $7.6 million. We’ve now learned was that the acquisition was: Snap has confirmed to us that it has acquired Pixel8earth, a company developing 3D mapping technology, specifically based on crowdsourced data.

Pixel8earth is based out of Boulder, Colorado, and four employees from the startup are joining Snap to work on map product development. Specifically, they will be building out tools that will work with Snap’s location-based augmented reality experiences along the lines of the Local Lenses that Snapchat introduced last June at its annual Partner Summit developer event.

As we’ve reported previously, we’ve heard that this year’s Partner Summit is likely to see some launches related to Snap’s wider e-commerce strategy, and we now understand that it will also feature some news on the AR mapping front, too.

It’s not clear if Snap (or Snapchat) will keep Pixel8earth going, or if it will roll selected technology and further development into products like Snap Map, but given the price of the deal, it’s most likely more of a talent acquisition.

For the record, Pixel8earth — co-founded by Sean Gorman and Pramukta Kumar, two repeat founders and mapping PhDs — had built a platform where it encouraged people (dubbed “ambassadors”) to join the platform and use their 360 cameras and other cameras to record and contribute information to the startup’s global mapping database. (In that regard, the tech was not unlike what Mapillary, which got acquired by Facebook, had developed.)

Snap has largely been building its mapping experiences around the idea of using maps to increase and improve engagement with its users. One of the bigger deals it’s made on that front was its acquisition in 2017 of Paris-based startup Zenly, an app that let you opt in to be able to be discovered by your friends on a map. Other mapping acquisitions have included StreetCred, announced in January of this year. StreetCred’s service was shut down after the deal, but it was also based around the idea of crowdsourcing points-of-interest and other mapping data, paying contributors in crypto tokens and putting the information “on the blockchain.”

Snap’s mapping efforts already have some decent traction and differentiation as a more “personalised” map — in contrast with, for example, the very much used Google Maps experience, which is about universal accuracy and being as thorough as possible, not exactly personalised (unless you are logged in and have locations saved, but even so, not with strong social features in mind).

At its investor day in February Snap noted that Snap Map was used by more than 250 million Snapchatters monthly. “On other platforms, everyone sees the same Map. But on Snapchat we are building the world’s most personal Map,” Jacob Andreou, VP product, said there. “Your Snap Map reflects your world; it features the people, places, and activities you care about, and no two are the same. The Map is built to see where your friends are and what they’re up to quickly and easily. This kind of sharing is at it’s best with close friends, a perfect fit for the best friends network that is unique to Snapchat. The version of the map in our app today is one that has been relentlessly improved in conversation with our community over the last two years leveraging this data-informed approach.”

While some of that usage and growth will have inevitably been curtailed in the last year, given the pandemic-enforced lockdowns and reduction in travel, Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO and co-founder, also said last week in its earnings that this might be turning a corner.

“We are optimistic about the engagement trends we are seeing as the world is beginning to open up,” he said. “As things began to open up in the United States in late February, we saw inflection points in key behaviors like Story posting and engagement with the Map.”

And while engagement is definitely something Snap has developed, it seems monetization might well be on the cards, too.

“Local, digital advertising is an established market – it has a playbook, and we’re confident that this will be an important part of our business in the future,” said Peter Sellis, senior director of product, at its recent investor day. “But we want to do it right.”

The company has slowly been testing out some more commercial features like Promote Local Place to give smaller businesses, and specifically retailers, a boost, which was the first time Snap had put businesses on the Snap Map.

“We’re going to spend a lot of time expanding these products to work for the largest multi-location enterprises in 2021,” he continued, “but they were honestly reactive to the pandemic, and we feel that we have yet to truly build on the potential of the Map.”

It seems that Pixel8earth could be a sign of how Snap and its flagship app Snapchat plan to do that.

Weav, which is building a universal API for commerce platforms, is emerging from stealth today with $4.3 million in funding from a bevy of investors, and a partnership with Brex.

Founded last year by engineers Ambika Acharya, Avikam Agur and Nadav Lidor after participating in the W20 YC batch, Weav joins the wave of fintech infrastructure companies that aim to give fintechs and financial institutions a boost. Specifically, Weav’s embedded technology is designed to give these organizations access to “real time, user-permissioned” commerce data that they can use to create new financial products for small businesses.  

Its products allow its customers to connect to multiple platforms with a single API that was developed specifically for the commerce platforms that businesses use to sell products and accept payments. Weav operates under the premise that allowing companies to build and embed new financial products creates new opportunities for e-commerce merchants, creators and other entrepreneurs. 

Left to right: Co-founders Ambika Acharya, Nadav Lidor and Avikam Agur; Image courtesy of Weav

In a short amount of time, Weav has seen impressive traction. Recently, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the Weav API. It supports platform integrations such as Stripe, Square, Shopify and PayPal. (More on that later.) Since its API went live in January, “thousands” of businesses have used new products and services built on Weav’s infrastructure, according to Lidor. Its API call volume is growing 300% month over month, he said.

And, the startup has attracted the attention of a number of big-name investors, including institutions and the founders of prominent fintech companies. Foundation Capital led its $4.3 million seed round, which also included participation from Y Combinator, Abstract Ventures, Box Group, LocalGlobe, Operator Partners, Commerce Ventures and SV Angel. 

A slew of founders and executives also put money in the round, including Brex founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi; Ramp founder Karim Atiyeh; Digits founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang; Hatch founder Thomson Nguyen; GoCardless founder Matt Robinson and COO Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas; Vouch founder Sam Hodges; Plaid’s Charley Ma as well as executives from fintechs such as Square, Modern Treasury and Pagaya.

Foundation Capital’s Angus Davis said his firm has been investing in fintech infrastructure for over a decade. And personally, before he became a VC, Davis was the founder and CEO of Upserve, a commerce software company. There, he says, he witnessed firsthand “the value of transactional data to enable new types of lending products.”

Foundation has a thesis around the type of embedded fintech that Weav has developed, according to Davis. And it sees a large market opportunity for a new class of financial applications to come to market built atop Weav’s platform.

“We were excited by Weav’s vision of a universal API for commerce platforms,” Davis wrote via email. “Much like Plaid and Envestnet brought universal APIs to banking for consumers, Weav enables a new class of B2B fintech applications for businesses.”

How it works

Weav says that by using its API, companies can prompt their business customers to “securely” connect their accounts with selling platforms, online marketplaces, subscription management systems and payment gateways. Once authenticated, Weav aggregates and standardizes sales, inventory and other account data across platforms and develops insights to power new products across a range of use cases, including lending and underwriting; financial planning and analysis; real-time financial services and business management tools.

For the last few years, there’s been a rise of API companies, as well as openness in the financial system that’s largely been focused on consumers, Lidor points out.

“For example, Plaid brings up very rich data about consumers, but when you think about businesses, oftentimes that data is still locked up in all kinds of systems,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re here to provide some of the building blocks and the access to data from everything that has to do with sales and revenue. And, we’re really excited about powering products that are meant to make the lives of small businesses and e-commerce, sellers and creators much easier and be able to get them access to financial products.”

In the case of Brex, Weav’s API allows the startup to essentially offer instant access to funds that otherwise would take a few days or a few weeks for businesses to access.

“Small businesses need access as quickly as possible to their revenue so that they can fund their operations,” Lidor said.

Brex co-CEO Henrique Dubugras said that Weav’s API gives the company the ability to offer real-time funding to more customers selling on more platforms, which saved the company “thousands of engineering hours” and accelerated its rollout timeline by months.

Clearly, the company liked what it saw, considering that its founders personally invested in Weav. Is Weav building the “Plaid for commerce”? Guess only time will tell.

The Honest Company, a heavily venture-backed consumer goods company, announced an IPO price range this morning, telling investors that it expects to sell shares in its debut at $14 to $17 apiece. The former startup is selling 6,451,613 shares in its debut, while existing shareholders are letting 19,355,387 shares go.

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Honest’s IPO is not very large. The company’s own offered shares are worth $109.7 million at the top end of its range. Furthermore, because the company’s final private raise was worth $200 million back in 2018, it’s a comparatively modest sum.

Today, we’re digging into the Honest Company’s IPO pricing: We’ll calculate its IPO valuation range across a few different share counts, bring to bear its final private valuations and compare the entire dataset to its preliminary Q1 2021 numbers.

We care because IVP and Fidelity, Lightspeed and General Catalyst, ICONIQ and M13, Dragonner and others put capital into the Jessica Alba-founded company worth just over $500 million while private, according to Crunchbase. That’s an enormous bet.

Per its filings, Alba remains the company’s chief creative officer and chairs its board.

We owe it to our general understanding of the venture market to better understand what Honest is worth and why. Is this a company going public while markets are hot so it can try to limp across the finish line? Or is Honest something honestly more exciting? Let’s find out.

Honest Company’s IPO worth

Using a simple share count of 90,518,137 outstanding after its IPO, Honest is worth $1.27 billion to $1.54 billion at $14 to $17 per share. On a fully diluted basis, Renaissance Capital calculates that the former startup is worth $1.6 billion at its midpoint value, a figure that we estimate rises to around $1.75 billion at the top end of its anticipated price range.

Are those strong numbers? There are two ways to measure: against the company’s final private price, or we can use its recent financial performance as a yardstick.

Mere weeks after rival corporate spend startup Ramp announced that it raised a two-part round worth $115 million at a $1.6 billion valuation, this morning Brex disclosed a $425 million Series D led by Tiger Global.

The new capital marks Brex’s largest fundraise to date, and was compiled at a valuation that is more than double its most recent private valuation. According to Crunchbase data, Brex’s mid-2020 Series C valued the company at just over $3.0 billion, including the investment’s $150 million in issued equity.

The dueling rounds raised by Brex and Ramp underscore how active their product category is proving to be. Far from its roots in merely offering perk-laden corporate cards to growing companies, Brex and its myriad rivals — including Utah unicorn Divvy, Airbase, and others — are building software suites around their core plastic efforts to help companies manage all elements of their spending.

A growing rift is showing in how, compared to some rivals, the categories’ largest players, including Brex, Divvy and Ramp, forgo charging for their software, content to eat off other revenue sources including interchange. Airbase, in contrast, charges for its software.

Don’t expect the software arms race between corporate spend startups’ unicorns to lead to more corporate spend startups deriving software revenues in addition to their current income sources; each is growing their spend rapidly enough to warrant more time with their foot on the customer growth pedal over working to juice more per-customer revenue in the short-term.

Ramp, for example, disclosed that it is nearly on a $1 billion spend-managed run rate. Brex, worth a multiple of the younger startup, is presumably above that mark.

TechCrunch reached out to Brex, curious about its 2020 and Q1 2021 growth results. The company provided a statement to TechCrunch, claiming that it is “onboarding thousands of new tech and non-tech customers every month.” Brex also said that it grew its “total customer” figure by 80% in the first quarter, “with total monthly customer additions increasing by 5x.”

That’s precisely the sort of growth that makes late-stage investors excited. TechCrunch is speaking with Brex CEO shortly; more after that call.

As businesses continue to look for better ways to work more efficiently, a pioneer in the space of low-code tools to help automate how apps work together is announcing a round of funding on the back of impressive early traction.

Berlin-based n8n — which provides a framework for both technical and non-technical people to synchronize and integrate data and workflows — has raised a $12 million in a Series A round of funding.

The startup plans to use the money to continue expanding its team, which now numbers 60 people, and to expand its platform and the services it provides to users.

Currently, n8n can help link up and integrate data and functions between more than 200 established applications, as well as any custom apps or services that you might be using in your specific organization. And since launching in October 2019, the startup has picked up an impressive 16,000 users — including both developers and “citizen developers” (those whose jobs might be described as non-technical but they are not afraid to be more hands-on in trying to build in ways to work better).

Now it wants to make the service easier for more of the latter group to get stuck in with using it.

“We are still seen as a technical product and less of one for citizen developers,” founder and CEO Jan Oberhauser said in an interview. “Our plan is to make n8n simpler to use, so that it’s much easier to adopt. We want to give everyone technical superpowers, whether it’s the marketing team or the IT department.” That means for example building not just chatbots but more intelligent ones, or creating new ways of visualizing data in Slack or something else altogether. And n8n’s platform can also be used to build automation within products for example to monitor performance and flag when something might need maintenance.

The round is being led by Felicis Ventures, with Sequoia Capital, firstminute Capital and Harpoon Ventures also participating. Sequoia and firstminute co-led n8n’s seed round about a year ago, which also included participation from Eventbrite’s Kevin Hartz, Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen, and unnamed early employees of Google and Zendesk, among others. The startup has now raised around $14 million and is not disclosing valuation.

There are a number of low-code and no-code startups on the market today and many of them have been seeing a surge of in interest in the last year. It’s a trend I suspect was brought about in no small part by the arrival of Covid-19.

The pandemic not only led to more people working remotely and relying on apps and other cloud-based services to get what they needed to do done, but in many cases it led organizations to refocus on how they were working, and what could be improved. In some cases, it also has meant a severe tightening of belts, and so companies are needing to do more with less human power, another factor leading to more proactive efforts to use software to get more out of… software.

That’s meant more strain on IT teams, and that too has led to more people within departments themselves getting proactive in improving their own workflows.

Other startups in the space include Bryter (which raised a $66 million Series B earlier this month) and Genesis (which raised $45 million in March), along with Zapier, Airtable, Rows, Gyana, Ushur, Creatio, EasySend and CapivateIQ, some of which are coming to the market with a variety of solutions targeting a set of generic tools, while others are building solutions for more narrow use cases.

In the case of n8n, the company might be considered a “pioneer” in the space not just because of its focus on the growing area of low-code tools, but because of how it views the world of software.

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The basic approach n8n is taking is around the idea of “fair code.” This is somewhat similar to open-source, and is analogous to a freemium-style model for the concept. The code is available in a public repository and the idea is that this will never disappear (one issue many enterprises face on the bleeding edge of tech: companies and their services sometimes shut down). However, n8n itself limits how much it can be used for free, before users start to pay to use it so that n8n can monetize its work, which it does in the form of consulting and integration services. (In the case of n8n, that limit looks to be up to a limit of $30,000 in support services revenues.)

Oberhauser was an early proponent of the concept of n8n and he runs a site dedicated to spreading the word. (You can also read about the different approaches to fair code, and some of what led to the creation of the concept, here.)

While basic and limited access to the code will remain free, and even as a company like n8n aims to make it easier and easier for non-developers to build integrations, there will be areas that need attention to make those services accessible to the people within an organization. For starters, there is the issue of setting up the basic integration connectors, especially in cases where the software a company is using is proprietary or customized.

There is also another issue that is likely to become more prominent as low-code and no-code tools continue to grow in popularity, and that is security. While IT departments may not have oversight of every single integration, but neither will the security teams, which means that new data vulnerabilities might well become more commonplace, too. For all of these reasons, n8n is betting that there will still be some integration and consulting involved in implementation.

“Almost every company needs help connecting outside and internal systems, to make it easier for people to get started,” Oberhauser said.

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, who led the round, said that what attracted him to n8n was the extensibility of the platform — that it could be applied not just for app integration and workflow automation in those apps but a much wider set of use cases — and the very early traction of 16,000 users that it’s picked up with very little fanfare, a sign that the service has some stickiness and usefulness to it.

And the fact that it lets developers — “citizen” or otherwise — play with so many options is also a key part of it.

“We feel that data is the new oil, and one of the special things here is not just low or no-code per se, but how n8n is making it seamless and easy to connect tens or even hundreds of apps.” Senkut said that it reminded him a little of Felicis’ early investment in Plaid. “Essentially, the more data and APIs you have the more valuable the company can be. I think to measure the potential of a company, look at the APIs. If you can connect disparate things together, that is key.”