Author: azeeadmin

TuSimple, the self-driving truck company that is backed by a diverse consortium of strategic investors, including Volkswagen AG’s heavy-truck business The Traton Group, Navistar, Goodyear, and freight company U.S. Xpress, filed Tuesday for an initial public offering.

TuSimple is taking the traditional path to going public, a departure from the recent trend — particularly among electric and autonomous vehicle startups — to merge with a blank check company.

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, according to the regulatory filing. TuSimple intends to list its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “TSP.” Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.

According to the company’s S-1, which was filed Tuesday, TuSimple has primarily financed its operations through the sale of redeemable convertible preferred stock and loans from stockholders. The company’s principal sources of liquidity were $310.8 million of cash and cash equivalents, exclusive of restricted cash of $1.5 million.  Cash and cash equivalents consist primarily of cash on deposit with banks as well as certificates of deposit.

TuSimple, which was founded in 2015,  was one of the first autonomous trucking startups to emerge in what has become a small, yet bustling industry that now includes Aurora, Embark, Kodiak and Waymo. While TuSimple’s founding team and its earliest backers Sina and Composite Capital are from China, a chunk of its operations are in the United States, including its global headquarters in San Diego. TuSimple also operates an engineering center and truck depot in Tucson and more recently set up a facility in Texas to support its autonomous trips —always with a human safety operator behind the wheel. TuSimple also has operations in Beijing and Shanghai.

This story is developing and will be updated. 

Digital advertising company Kargo is launching a new product and new business unit called Fabrik.

Founder and CEO Harry Kargman explained that Fabrik is a content management system designed for publishers’ modern needs and integrated with Kargo’s advertising technology.

Kargman suggested that he sees this as part of Kargo’s broader mission of “saving publishing.” That might seem like a tall order for an ad business, but he said the company has tried to do that “by driving extraordinary ad experiences and monetization.” And yet, he’s come to realize, “That’s not enough.”

In particular, Kargman came to realize that many websites have “too much weight” and load far too slowly (to illustrate his point, he loaded the TechCrunch homepage, and it was indeed slower than I would like). This drives readers away and also has a detrimental effect on Google search rankings.

So the goal with Fabrik is to create a “lightning fast” web experience, which you can see for yourself on the OK Magazine website. Fabrik says that one of the key steps to achieving this speed is by eliminating the need for third-party trackers and plugins — in fact, Kargman described plugins as “the death of the internet” and told me he often asks publishers, “Do you want to make money, or do you want to have a lot of plugins?”

“We built it for Google’s best practices and the core Web Vitals,” added COO Michael Shaughnessy. “We’re very strategic about how we load items that would really slow us down.”

This launch comes as many publishers are exploring business models beyond advertising, such as subscriptions and memberships. Shaughnessy suggested that Fabrik is complementary to those efforts, because it’s “simplifying the foundation,” thus freeing teams to focus on new commercial initiatives.

As for the advertising side, Kargman said, “We think we’ve built our adtech directly into Fabrik in a way that there’s absolutely no reason not to use Kargo — but certainly, it doesn’t require you to exclusively use Kargo. We expect publishers to monetize their own sites, to cut branded entertainment deals, to do all the good things that they do.”

And as previously mentioned, the plan is for Fabrik to be a separate business unit under the Kargo’s corporate umbrella, with its own customers and its own CEO — Kargman said he’s talking to a potential hire, but it’s “not quite ready yet to announce.”

Clubhouse, the social audio app that first took Silicon Valley by storm and is now gaining much wider appeal, is an interesting user experience case study.

Hockey-stick growth — 8 million global downloads as of last month, despite still being in a prelaunch, invite-only mode, according to App Annie — is something most startups would kill for. However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.

In our latest UX teardown, Built for Mars founder and UX expert Peter Ramsey and TechCrunch reporter Steve O’Hear discuss some of Clubhouse’s UX challenges as it continues to onboard new users at pace while striving to create enough stickiness to keep them active.

Homepage curation

Peter Ramsey: Content feeds are notoriously difficult to get right. Which posts should you see? How should you order them? How do you filter out the noise?

On Clubhouse, once you’ve scrolled past all the available rooms in your feed, you’re prompted to follow more people to see more rooms. In other words, Clubhouse is inadvertently describing how it decides what content you see, i.e., your homepage is a curated list of rooms based on people you follow.

Except there’s a problem: I don’t follow half the people who already appear in my feed.

Steve O’Hear: I get it. This could be confusing, but why does it actually matter? Won’t people just continue to use the homepage regardless?

Peter: In the short term, yes. People will use the homepage in the same way they’d use Instagram’s search page (which is to just browse occasionally). But in the long term, this content needs to be consistently relevant or people will lose interest.

Steve: But Twitter has a search page that shows random content that I don’t control…

Peter: Yeah, but they also have a home feed that you do control. It’s fine to also have the more random “slot machine style” content feed — but you need the base layer.

The truth about aha moments

Peter: In the early days of Twitter, the team noticed something in their data: When people follow at least 30 others, they’re far more likely to stick around. This is often described as an “aha moment” — the moment that the utility of a product really clicks for the user.

This story has become startup folklore, and I’ve worked with many companies who take this message too literally, forgetting the nuance of what they really found: It’s not enough to just follow 30 random people — you need to follow 30 people who you genuinely care about.

Clubhouse has clearly adopted a similar methodology, by pre-selecting 50 people for you to follow while signing up.

Have you noticed that some people have accumulated millions of followers really quickly? It’s because the same people are almost always recommended—I tried creating accounts with polar opposite interests, and the same people were pre-selected almost every time.

And at no point does it explain that following those 50 people will directly impact the content that is available to you, or that if your homepage gets uninteresting, you’ll need to unfollow these people individually.

But they should, and it could look more like this:

Steve: Why do you think Clubhouse does this? Laziness?

Peter: I think in the early days of Clubhouse they just wanted to maximize connections, and by always recommending the same people (Clubhouse’s founders and investors), they could somewhat control the content that is shown to new users.

April showers bring May flowers, but in the case of Extra Crunch Live, those showers will come in the form of actionable insights and advice from some of the top minds in tech.

We have an incredible line up of folks joining us on the show, which breaks down how successful founders got their early funding and what VCs are looking for in a startup. Historically, Extra Crunch Live has been for Extra Crunch members only, but we’ve decided to make the live events free for everyone.

Thus far, we’ve talked to Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst on how to build a process for fundraising, Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig and Accel’s Steve Loughlin about how to price your products, and Justworks gave us a look at their surprisingly simple Series B pitch deck. Extra Crunch members can catch all of the past episodes here.

But let’s not live in the past. We’ve got a fantastic slate of speakers ahead, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

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Dan Levine (Accel) + Alexandr Wang (Scale AI)

April 7, 12pm PT/3pm ET

Alexandr Wang has raised nearly $300 million for Scale AI, the data platform for machine learning. Dan Levine, an entrepreneur-turned-investor, led the company’s Series A financing back in 2017. Hear from this duo about what it takes to raise funding successfully and use that capital efficiently.

Register here. 

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Brendan Wallace (Fifth Wall) + Assaf Wand (Hippo)

April 21, 12pm PT/3pm ET

Proptech is one of the hottest segments in tech right now. Hear from Fifth Wall partner Brendan Wallace and Hippo cofounder Assaf Wand about how to raise funding in the prop/insurtech spaces and what it takes to be successful in this burgeoning market.

Register here. 

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Eurie Kim (Forerunner) + Harpreet Rai (Oura)

April 28, 12pm PT/3pm ET

Forerunner is one of the most successful VC firms in the country, and even though ‘hardware is hard’, they’ve made a big bet on Harpreet Rai and Oura. Hear from partner Eurie Kim and Rai about why they chose each other for the Series B financing and what it takes to be successful in the consumer hardware/health tech space.

Register here. 

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And don’t forget! On Wednesday, we’ll be talking to Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra and early investor Navin Chaddha (Mayfield) about how the company went from Series A to the public markets. And, as per usual, the duo will give live feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like to submit your pitch deck to be featured on a future episode, hit up the link here.

 

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Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

Twitter today is announcing what the company calls a “strategic acquihire” of the API integration platform Reshuffle. The startup’s commercial technology, which allows developers to build workflows and connect systems using any API, will be wound down as a result of Twitter’s deal. However, Reshuffle’s entire team of seven, including co-founders Amir Shevat and Avner Braverman, will be joining Twitter where they’ll work to accelerate the work being done to modernize Twitter’s new, unified API.

The new Twitter API 2.0 was first introduced last year, having been rebuilt from the ground up for the first time since 2012. It now includes features missing from the older version, like conversation threading, poll results, pinned tweets, spam filtering, and more powerful stream filtering and search query language. It’s also been designed in a way that will allow Twitter to release new functionality faster as the company itself rolls out more features. For example, the API has added new support for newer features like “hide replies” and tweet annotations. And as Twitter’s pace of development has recently been sped up, the company now has even more significant product launches on the horizon, including the public release of Twitter Spaces (audio rooms) and soon, Super Follow (a subscription service for creators and their fans).

In addition, Twitter’s API team is working to develop products that meet the various needs of different types of developers, including consumer-facing app developers, business and enterprise developers, and academic researchers. In January, Twitter’s API opened up to researchers, and Twitter promised more functionality would soon be on the way.

Reshuffle’s team will be immediately tasked with helping Twitter accelerate its API efforts and building tools for developers.

Reshuffle’s CEO Avner Braverman, who has nearly two decades of experience in both engineering and technical consumer-facing roles across startups and larger companies like IBM, will join Twitter’s Developer Platform team. Meanwhile, Reshuffle’s CPO Amir Shevat, whose previous roles included VP of Platform for Twitch, Head of Developer Relations at Slack, and Senior Developer Relations Manager at Google, will join Twitter as a senior member of the Developer Platform team.

“We’re doubling down on our investment and ambitions by bringing the Reshuffle team on board,” noted a Twitter blog post announcing the deal, co-authored by Twitter Revenue Product Lead Bruce Falck and Twitter Developer Platform Lead Sonya Penn. “Their experience building developer platforms will accelerate and enhance our work by building the tools that will make it easier and quicker for developers to find value on our platform,” it read.

Reshuffle’s existing product will wind down operations over the coming weeks, following the acquihire. However, the team will continue to maintain its open source project for the developer community, Twitter notes.

 

Twitter has been on an acquisition and acquihire spree in recent months, having bought newsletter platform Revue, which is already integrated into Twitter’s website; as well as teams from social podcasting app Breaker, screen sharing social app Squad, creative design agency Ueno; and last year, stories template maker Chroma Labs.

Twitter says it will continue to look for more acquihire opportunities in the future as a means of scaling its own teams and accelerating their work.

The company declined to share deal terms for the Reshuffle acquihire.

According to Pitchbook, Reshuffle was backed by $6.35 million in funding from investors including Cardumen Capital, Cerca Partners, Maverick Ventures, Meron Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Engineering Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Pitchbook says the business was valued at $11.85 million.

Since the dawn of the internet, knowing (or, perhaps more accurately, not knowing) who is on the other side of the screen has been one of the biggest mysteries and thrills. In the early days of social media and online forums, anonymous usernames were the norm and meant you could pretend to be whoever you wanted to be.

As exciting and liberating as this freedom was, the problems quickly became apparent — predators of all kinds have used this cloak of anonymity to prey upon unsuspecting victims, harass anyone they dislike or disagree with, and spread misinformation without consequence.

For years, the conversation around moderation has been focused on two key pillars. First, what rules to write: What content is deemed acceptable or forbidden, how do we define these terms, and who makes the final call on the gray areas? And second, how to enforce them: How can we leverage both humans and AI to find and flag inappropriate or even illegal content?

While these continue to be important elements to any moderation strategy, this approach only flags bad actors after an offense. There is another equally critical tool in our arsenal that isn’t getting the attention it deserves: verification.

Most people think of verification as the “blue checkmark” — a badge of honor bestowed upon the elite and celebrities among us. However, verification is becoming an increasingly important tool in moderation efforts to combat nefarious issues like harassment and hate speech.

That blue checkmark is more than just a signal showing who’s important — it also confirms that a person is who they say they are, which is an incredibly powerful means to hold people accountable for their actions.

One of the biggest challenges that social media platforms face today is the explosion of fake accounts, with the Brad Pitt impersonator on Clubhouse being one of the more recent examples. Bots and sock puppets spread lies and misinformation like wildfire, and they propagate more quickly than moderators can ban them.

This is why Instagram began implementing new verification measures last year to combat this exact issue. By verifying users’ real identities, Instagram said it “will be able to better understand when accounts are attempting to mislead their followers, hold them accountable, and keep our community safe.”

The urgency to implement verification is also bigger than just stopping the spread of questionable content. It can also help companies ensure they’re staying on the right side of the law.

Following an exposé revealing illegal content was being uploaded to Pornhub’s site, the company banned posts from nonverified users and deleted all content uploaded from unverified sources (more than 80% of the videos hosted on its platform). It has since implemented new measures to verify its users to prevent this kind of issue from infiltrating its systems again in the future.

Companies of all kinds should be looking at this case as a cautionary tale — if there had been verification from the beginning, the systems would have been in a much better place to identify bad actors and keep them out.

However, it’s important to remember that verification is not a single tactic, but rather a collection of solutions that must be used dynamically in concert to be effective. Bad actors are savvy and continually updating their methods to circumvent systems. Using a single-point solution to verify users — such as through a photo ID — might sound sufficient on its face, but it’s relatively easy for a motivated fraudster to overcome.

At Persona, we’ve detected increasingly sophisticated fraud attempts ranging from using celebrity photos and data to create accounts to intricate photoshopping of IDs and even using deepfakes to mimic a live selfie.

That’s why it’s critical for verification systems to take multiple signals into account when verifying users, including actively collected customer information (like a photo ID), passive signals (their IP address or browser fingerprint), and third-party data sources (like phone and email risk lists). By combining multiple data points, a valid but stolen ID won’t pass through the gates because signals like location or behavioral patterns will raise a red flag that this user’s identity is likely fraudulent or at the very least warrants further investigation.

This kind of holistic verification system will enable social and user-generated-content platforms to not only deter and flag bad actors but also prevent them from repeatedly entering your platform under new usernames and emails, a common tactic of trolls and account abusers who have previously been banned.

Beyond individual account abusers, a multisignal approach can help manage an arguably bigger problem for social media platforms: coordinated disinformation campaigns. Any issue involving groups of bad actors is like battling the multiheaded Hydra — you cut off one head only to have two more grow back in its place.

Yet killing the beast is possible when you have a comprehensive verification system that can help surface groups of bad actors based on shared properties (e.g., location). While these groups will continue to look for new ways in, multifaceted verification that is tailored for the end user can help keep them from running rampant.

Historically, identity verification systems like Jumio or Trulioo were designed for specific industries, like financial services. But we’re starting to see the rise in demand for industry-agnostic solutions like Persona to keep up with these new and emerging use cases for verification. Nearly every industry that operates online can benefit from verification, even ones like social media, where there isn’t necessarily a financial transaction to protect.

It’s not a question of if verification will become a part of the solution for challenges like moderation, but rather a question of when. The technology and tools exist today, and it’s up to social media platforms to decide that it’s time to make this a priority.

Social media executives will be answering to Congress directly for their role in January’s deadly attacks on the U.S. Capitol this week. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

The hearing, held by the House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, will focus on social media’s role in spreading disinformation, extremism and misinformation. The Energy and Commerce Committee previously held a parallel hearing reckoning with traditional media’s role in promoting those same social ills.

Earlier this month, Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr., joined by more than 20 other Democrats, sent a letter to Zuckerberg pressing the Facebook CEO for answers about why tactical gear ads showed up next to posts promoting the Capitol riot. “Targeting ads in this way is dangerous and has the potential to encourage acts of violence,” the letter’s authors wrote. In late January, Facebook said that it would pause ads showing weapon accessories and related equipment.

While the subcommittee has signaled its interest in Facebook’s ad practices, organic content on the site has historically presented a much bigger problem. In the uncertain period following the election last year, the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement swelled to massive proportions on social media, particularly in Facebook groups. The company took incremental measures at the time, but that same movement, born of political misinformation, is what propelled the Capitol rioters to disrupt vote counting and enact deadly violence on January 6.

The hearing is likely to go deep on extremists organizing through Facebook groups too. Chairs from both subcommittees that will question the tech CEOs this week previously questioned Facebook about reports that the company was well aware that its algorithmic group recommendations were funneling users toward extremism. In spite of warnings from experts, Facebook continued to allow armed anti-government militias to openly organize on the platform until late 2020. And in spite of bans, some continued to do so.

The Justice Department is reportedly considering charging members of the Oath Keepers, one prominent armed U.S. militia group involved in the Capitol attack, with sedition.

Facebook plays a huge role in distributing extremist content and ferrying it to the mainstream, but it isn’t alone. Misinformation that undermines the integrity of the U.S. election results is generally just as easy to find on YouTube and Twitter, though those social networks aren’t designed to connect and mobilize people in the same way that Facebook groups do.

Facebook began to course-correct its own rules around extremism, slowly through 2020 and then quickly this January when the company removed former President Trump from the platform. Facebook’s external policy oversight board continues to review that decision and could reverse it in the coming weeks.

Over the course of the last year, Twitter made an effort to demystify some of its own policy decisions, transparently communicating changes and introducing ideas it was considering. Under Dorsey’s guidance the company treated its platform rules like a living document — one it’s begun to tinker around with in an effort to shape user behavior for the better.

If Twitter’s recent policy decision making is akin to thinking out loud, YouTube took the opposite approach. The company wasn’t as proactive in shoring up its defenses ahead of the 2020 elections and rarely responded in real-time to events. YouTube waited a full month after Biden’s victory to articulate rules that would rid the platform of disinformation declaring that the election was stolen from Trump.

Hopefully the joint hearing can dig a bit more into why that was, but we’re not counting on it. The subcommittees’ decision to bring Google CEO Sundar Pichai to testify is a bit strange considering that YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki — who has yet to be called to Congress for one of these high profile tech hearings — would make the better witness. Pichai is ultimately accountable for what YouTube does too, but in past hearings he’s proven a very polished witness who’s deft at neutralizing big picture criticism with technical detail.

Ultimately Wojcicki would have more insight into YouTube’s misinformation and extremism policies and the reason the platform has dragged its feet on matters of hate and misinformation, enforcing its own policies unevenly when it chooses to do so at all.

In what looks like both an endorsement of its Premier Access streaming strategy and a tacit acknowledgement that theatrical moviegoing won’t be returning to normal anytime soon, Disney just announced that its movies “Black Widow” and “Cruella” will be coming to Disney+ at the same time that they’re released in theaters.

That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9. (The movies will later become available to all Disney+ subscribers at no extra charge.)

Disney first tested out this strategy with the release of the live action “Mulan” last fall, followed by the animated “Raya and the Last Dragon” earlier this month. The studio has released other movies, like Pixar’s “Soul,” directly to Disney+ without an extra fee, and it says it will do the same for Pixar’s “Luca” on June 18.

Other big Disney releases have been pushed back repeatedly — “Black Widow,” for example, was originally supposed to be released on May 1 of last year, and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has reportedly resisted sending it straight to Disney+. (This will be the first Marvel Studios film released since the beginning of the pandemic.)

However, Disney executives may only be willing to wait for so long. And because Marvel’s movies and new Disney+ shows are often interconnected, delaying one release can also require pushing back several others at the same time.

As vaccinations continue and COVID-19 case numbers decline from their peaks, movie theaters are reopening in major markets like Los Angeles and New York — but at reduced capacity, with box office numbers still far below what they were pre-pandemic.

In the face of this uncertainty (as well as a general shift to streaming), other Hollywood studios have adopted a variety of hybrid strategies for their 2021 theatrical slates. All Warner Bros. movies will be released simultaneously on HBO Max this year, while Paramount will be bringing its films to Paramount+ in an accelerated fashion, 30 to 45 days after the theatrical release.

As exciting as the entire Perseverance mission to Mars is, one of the events most looked forward to by us Earthlings must be the first flight of Ingenuity. After conducting numerous checks and double-checks, the Perseverance team has set April 8 as the date on which they hope to attempt the first controlled powered flight on another planet.

If all goes well, then in about two weeks Ingenuity will make its first hovering flight about 10 feet above the Martian soil. But the meantime will be chock full of preparation.

In the first place the team had to identify an “airfield,” a ten-meter-square space of flat ground close at hand to Perseverance’s landing zone. Having done so, the rover will soon make its way to the exact center and confirm its location.

Then the helicopter itself must be detached from the belly of the rover, to which it is apparently locked, bolted, and cabled. These are meant to keep it secure during the chaotic landing process, and are irreversible — so the team has to be 100 percent sure this is the spot and the conditions are right. The process should take about five days.

Once Ingenuity has been detached from Perseverance and rotated to flight-ready position, it will hang just five inches above the surface and use its few remaining connections with the rover to charge its batteries. Perseverance will then set it down and quickly drive away.

“Every step we have taken since this journey began six years ago has been uncharted territory in the history of aircraft,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer of the project at JPL, in a NASA news release. “And while getting deployed to the surface will be a big challenge, surviving that first night on Mars alone, without the rover protecting it and keeping it powered, will be an even bigger one. Once we cut the cord with Perseverance and drop those final five inches to the surface, we want to have our big friend drive away as quickly as possible so we can get the Sun’s rays on our solar panel and begin recharging our batteries.”

Once the helicopter detaches, it has 30 Martian days, or sols, in which it is sure to have enough power to work — beyond that they can’t be sure.

The next couple days will involve tests of Ingenuity’s systems and a test spin-up of its rotors to 2,537 RPM. The atmosphere of Mars is only a tiny fraction of that on Earth, making flight considerably more difficult in many ways. But that’s what makes it so fun to try!

If all the tests and checks are green, then on April 8 at the earliest Ingenuity will attempt to lift off, going up to 3 meters and staying for 30 seconds. The team should know if the flight was a success within a couple hours — and maybe even get some black and white imagery from the Ingenuity’s on-board cameras. Color imagery will come a few days later.

The team will evaluate what to do next based on this first flight, and the next weeks may bring more — and farther — forays around the airfield. We’ll know more after the data comes back.

A touching inclusion on Ingenuity’s chassis is a tiny scrap of the material from the Wright brothers’ first aircraft, the Flyer. So the machine that flew first on Earth will be present in a small way at the first on another planet.

Y Combinator’s latest batch — W21 — features 350 startups from 41 nations. 50% of the firms, the highest percentage to date, in the new batch are based outside of the United States.

India is the second largest demographic represented in the new batch. The world’s second largest internet market has delivered 43 startups in the new batch, another record figure in the history of the storied venture firm. (For comparison, the W20 batch had 25 Indian startups, up from 14 in S20, 12 each in S19 and W19 and one each in W16, S15, and W15.)

“YC going remote has helped make YC more attractive to companies at different stages and far away geographies. For companies in India, founders no longer have to spend three months away from their customers or teams. Covid has also taught us that building a program that is remote and more software based makes YC more accessible to founders around the globe,” the firm said in a statement to TechCrunch.

“When it comes to choosing founders in India, we accept them based on the same criteria we judge companies from anywhere else. Founders must be able to communicate their local context to investors. That is an important skill.”

Here’s a list of startups, in no particular order, from India that have made it to YC W21, with some context — wherever possible — on what they are attempting to build.

QuestBook, from CreatorOS, is an app for professionals to teach in bite-sized courses using chat and a mobile-first experience. We wrote about CreatorOS last year.

Leap Club is attempting to build a Good Eggs for India. Leap Club users can order fresh and organic groceries sourced from local farms through the startup’s website or through WhatsApp. The startup says it delivers the item to customers within 12 hours of harvesting. Leap Club is already garnering over $14,000 in monthly revenue.

CashBook is building a cash account app for small businesses in India. There are over 60 million small businesses in the country, nearly all of which currently rely on traditional ways — pen and paper — for bookkeeping. The startup launched its app just six months ago and has already amassed 200,000 monthly active users. In the month of February, CashBook logged cash transactions of $511 million.

GimBooks is attempting to solve a similar problem as CashBook, though from a different angle. The startup says it offers industry-based invoicing and bookkeeping with integrated banking and payments. Its app has been downloaded over 1.4 million times, amassed over 11,000 paying customers and clocked revenues of over $450,000.

BusinessOnBot is banking on the popularity of WhatsApp in India, where the Facebook-owned app has amassed over 450 million monthly active users. BusinessOnBot says it is building Shopify on WhatsApp for direct-to-consumer brands and small and medium sized businesses, helping them acquire users and automate sales.

ZOKO is helping businesses do sales, marketing, and customer support on WhatsApp.

Prescribe is a Shopify for hospitals. Its platform is aimed at helping doctor’s offices run their business online. Users can book appointments, chat with the doctor, pay and refer friends on WhatsApp.

Chatwoot is an open source customer engagement suite alternative to Intercom and Zendesk. Over 1,000 companies are already using Chatwoot and it’s clocking $32,000 in ARR from six customers.

Weekday is helping companies hire engineers who are crowdsourced by their network of scouts. The startup says it has found a way to solve the biggest problem with referrals — that it doesn’t scale.

Fountain9 helps food brands and retailers reduce food wastage. According to some estimates, over $260 billion worth of food is wasted every year due to mismanaged inventory.

Dyte is attempting to build a Stripe for live video calls. The startup says a firm can integrate its branded, configurable and programmable video calling service within 10 minutes using the Dyte SDK.

YourQuote has built a writing platform, with over 100 million posts. It has over 250,000 daily active users. The startup clocked revenues of $200,000 last year and is profitable.

Fifthtry is building a Github for product documentation. The tool blocks code changes until documentation has been approved. It has piloted its tool with three companies, all of which have over 100 developers. The startup plans to launch its tool publicly next month.

Voosh is building a OYO for restaurants and dark kitchens in India, helping them improve their economics using tech.

Kodo is building a Brex for India, helping Indian startups and small businesses secure corporate credit cards. (Banks and other credit card companies are still not addressing this opportunity. The problem Brex solved in the U.S. is even acute in India, Deepti Sanghi, co-founder and chief executive of Kodo, said in the presentation.

Krab provides instant loans for trucking companies in India. India’s logistics market, despite being valued at $160 billion, remains one of the most inefficient sectors that continues to drag the economy. In recent years, a handful of startups have started to explore ways to work with trucking companies.

Bueno Fiance says it wants to help the next billion users in India get access to financial services. It says it wants to solve for short term cash needs of customers by using digital credit card over UPI. It was to build a Chime for India, and has amassed 70,000 customers.

Betterhalf is building a Match.com for 100 million Indians. It says it is generating $75,000 in monthly revenues, a figure that is growing 30% every month.

Pensil is helping teachers who use YouTube monetize their courses. “YouTube is the largest education platform in India — but it’s not built for teachers,” said Surender Singh, co-founder of Pensil, at the presentation on Tuesday. The startup has built tools to allow teachers to create content, facilitate discussions, and collect payments.

AcadPal operates an eponymous app for India’s 10 million teachers to share homework with a tap. The startup is attempting to target a $1.4 billion market, which consists of over 400,000 private schools.

Pragmatic Leaders is attempting to build a platform to provide cost-effective alternative to an MBA. It is already clocking a monthly revenue of $112,000 and is cash-flow positive.

Splitsub is addressing a problem that tens of millions of users in India face — subscription fatigue. It says it has built a Pinduoduo for online subscriptions in India, allowing group buying and sharing of online subscriptions for services such as Netflix and Spotify.

Zingbus has built a platform for bus travel between Indian cities. (Several startups in India are helping users get cabs, three-wheelers autos, and two-wheelers bikes. Buses have remained largely untapped.)

Tilt is building a docked bike-sharing platform for Indian campuses. The startup, which has generated about $20,000 in revenues this month so far, says it has been profitable for the past 18 months.

FanPlay is a platform for social media influencers, helping them monetize by playing mobile games with their fans and followers.

(Also read: Why Y Combinator Went 8,725 Miles Away From Mountain View To Find The Next Big Startup)

In India only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and some analysts say that digital firms could prove crucial in bringing these services to the masses. According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017.

An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

Three startups in the current batch are planning to disrupt this market, which is largely commanded by state and bank-backed insurers.

GroMo is an app for independent agents to sell insurance in India. Most insurance policies in India are sold by agents. The startup says it is already generating monthly revenues of over $200,000.

Bimaplan is attempting to replace the agents with an app and reach users by a referral network. The app launched last month and has already sold 700 policies this month.

BimaPe helps users better understand their policies, and make informed decisions about whether those policies are right for them. The startup, leveraging New Delhi’s new regulations, is using a government issued ID card to fetch insurance policies.

Codingal is an online, after school program K-12 students in India to learn computer science. There are roughly 270 million K-12 students in the country.

Unschool provides professional education for college students in India. The founders say, “As former leaders in youth-run organisations with 3,000 members and edtech startups in India, we saw how colleges are not preparing students for the real world.”

Flux Auto builds self-driving kits for trucks.

SigNoz is an open-source alternative to DataDog, a $30 billion company, helping developers find and solve issues in their software deployed on cloud. The startup says recent laws such as GDPR and CPRA have helped drive adoption of SigNoz.

Pibit.ai are APIs to turn unstructured documents into structured data.

Invoid creates identity workflows in India. It’s tapping into a huge market opportunity: About 11 billion know-your-customers authentication is conduced by firms in India each year.

Redcliffe Lifesciences performs genetic testing and IVF treatments across India. Its revenue in March has topped $600,000.

Veera Health is an online clinic that treats Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a lifelong condition that affects 10-20% women in India. The startup says it launched 12 weeks ago, and 85% members have reported feeling “in control” of their PCOS after 1 month.

Snazzy is SmileDirectClub for India. The startup says it sells clear aligners that are 70% cheaper than those sold by dentists.

BeWell Digital is building the operating system for India’s 1.5 million hospitals, labs, clinics and pharmacies by starting with insurance regulatory compliance.

Triomics is operating a SaaS platform for end-to-end automation of clinical trials.