Author: azeeadmin

MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency that has received technical guidance from Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of private messaging app Signal, has raised $11.35 million in fresh venture funding across two rounds from Future Ventures and General Catalyst.

The round, shared with us by a source familiar with the company, seems to suggest the cryptocurrency is one step closer to its possible use on the Signal platform, where it does not appear to be available currently.

We were unable to reach Marlinspike today. MobileCoin founder Joshua Goldbard, who lists himself as “Janitor” of MobileCoin on LinkedIn, declined to answer questions this afternoon after being reached on Signal. Investors pointed us back to the company when asked about how MobileCoin compares to other crypto-related outfits.

It was back in 2017 that Wired first profiled MobileCoin, describing it as on a mission to overcome many of the early, and in some cases, lingering, challenges with cryptocurrencies, including that they’re too complicated for most people and merchants to use, they aren’t adequately scalable, and transaction times take too long.

Dapper Labs, for example, the company behind the ventures CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, developed its own blockchain and “Flow” token last year owing to scalability issues it encountered with Ethereum, as well as its interest in developing a platform that was more “consumer oriented.”

At the time, Wired added that while it “may feel like the last thing the world needs is yet another cryptocurrency” — there are now more than 4,000 of them in digital circulation currently —  Marlinspike’s track record with Signal “makes this a project worth watching.”

Based on its website, MobileCoin’s ambition appears to be focused around privacy-protecting payments made through “near instantaneous transactions” made over one’s phone, even while the risks involved in storing cryptocurrency on a phone include potentially losing that value if the phone is left unlocked or the radio on the phone is hacked or if, say, iOS itself is hacked. (It happens, despite the robust permissions system that iOS uses to grant apps access to particular services and information.)

According to the site, one feature of MobileCoin is that it allows users to “securely recover” their wallet if they lose their phone, though without trusting a provider with private keys — which MobileCoin says isn’t necessary — it isn’t immediately clear how. (More on this soon, presumably.)

If MobileCoin becomes a de facto way to transact over Signal — Goldbard and Marlinspike told Wired they envisioned it first as an integration in chat apps like Signal or WhatsApp — its reach could potentially be massive.

Though Signal doesn’t disclose how many users are on the platform, an estimated 40 million people now use its encrypted messaging app, which saw a surge in downloads earlier this year, in the waning days of the Trump presidency. According to Sensor Tower, which provides mobile app analytics, Signal was downloaded 17.8 million times during the week of January 5, compared to the 50,000 downloads per day it typically sees.

Still, if heavy use over Signal is how MobileCoin aims to gain value, the currency — which became available to purchase on the exchange FTX after launching on the platform in early December — would seemingly have an upward battle.

While Marlinspike’s early involvement is a definite plus, cryptocurrencies and messaging apps haven’t historically mixed well together, owing to regulators. Kik Messenger, the mobile messaging app founded by a group of University of Waterloo students in 2009, created a digital currency called Kin for its users to spend inside the platform that ultimately led to a years-long battle with the Securities & Exchange Commission that nearly decimated the company, though it’s currently mounting a comeback.

(In fairness to MobileCoin, which has turned to venture capitalists, Kik tried raising money from Kin through an initial coin offering or ICO, a relatively untested and unregulated type of funding mechanism at the time.)

Telegram, a much bigger messaging app than Signal in terms of users (it had an estimated 400 million users as of last April), similarly abandoned plans to offer its own decentralized cryptocurrency to anyone with a smartphone after years of battling with the SEC. Like Kik, part of Telegram’s drama dated to early sales of its tokens through ICOs.

Even Facebook, despite scaling back more ambitious plans around a new cryptocurrency and resolving instead to launch a single digital coin backed by the dollar, hasn’t launched anything yet, though it’s expected soon.

The $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund has a new chief executive and it’s Andrew Steer, the former head of the World Resources Institute — an organization that Bezos described as “working to alleviate poverty while protecting the natural world.”

As the head of the fund, Steer will be responsible for spending that money down by the end of 2030, according to a tweet from none other than Steer himself.

“The Earth Fund will invest in scientists, NGOs, activists, and the private sector to help drive new technologies, investments, policy change and behavior. We will emphasize social justice, as climate change disproportionately hurts poor and marginalized communities,” Steer wrote.

With a $100 million award from the first rounds of grants the Bezos Fund issued in November, the World Resources Institute was one of the largest recipients of Bezos’ largesse. Other big recipients from the first block of grants included the Environmental defense Fund, The Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy and The World Wildlife Fund.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to join the Bezos Earth Fund as its CEO, where I will focus on driving systemic change to address the climate and nature crises, with a focus on people. Too many of the most creative initiatives suffer for a lack of finance, risk management or the right partnerships. This is where the Earth Fund will be helpful,” Steer said in a statement issued by the WRI.

While at the WRI, Steer oversaw its international expansion from an advocacy organization centered primarily in Washington to a global organization with offices in Indonesia, the UK and Colombia along with hubs in Ethiopia and the Netherlands. Steer also expanded the offices in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Mexico.

His tenure also involved creating coalitions and initiatives that changed the understanding around the economics of climate change, including the launch of a $10 million annual initiative to support the implementation of climate plans by 100 countries, according to a statement from the WRI.

“The $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund has the potential to be a transformative force for good at this decisive point in history. Andrew’s global reputation, deep technical knowledge and experience, and commitment to social justice make him a perfect leader for the fund,” said Christiana Figueres, co-founder of Global Optimism and former Executive Security of the UNFCCC.

In light of Women’s History Month, we’re taking a look at the status of gender diversity in investment portfolios because women remain underrepresented in the field of entrepreneurship. Let’s delve into the numbers — and why your deal flow may not be diverse enough.

Women entrepreneurs and fundraising

There is an unmet need of $260 billion to $320 billion for women-owned company funding, according to a 2013 study conducted by the International Finance Corporation. A survey of women from 350 tech startups reinforced this: 72% of women respondents said that they faced difficulty attaining financial capital when they were starting their businesses and nearly 80% of them had to rely on personal funding. Furthermore, women founders receive less than 3% of all VC dollars.

The stark contrast between the ease of fundraising for men compared to women is apparent. Data show that men were four times as likely as women to access equity financing from angel investors or VCs (14.4% against 3.6%). The ease with which men tap into multiple sources for capital explains why they start companies with almost twice the capital of women founders on average.

So, why is fundraising harder for women-led startups?

Women’s struggle to attain capital can perhaps be explained by looking into the diversity in fund management firms. Fund managers’ lack of diversity ultimately contributes to the resulting funding inequality when it comes to their portfolios. Data from Women in VC show that only 5.6% of U.S. VC firms are women-led and only 4.9% of VC partners in the U.S. are women.

“Empowering women and people of color to drive the investment strategy of venture firms is the fastest and most effective course correction” for the lack of gender-diverse portfolios, the Women in VC report said. “Venture investors have extraordinary power to impact broader society norms. They decide what founders get funded, what businesses stand a chance at success, and what products get brought to market. These things, in turn, exert a determining influence on our culture.”

Investors must address the diversity issue within their ranks first; they must be aware of the existing unconscious bias and take extra actions toward improving their efforts in actively trying to source and invest in women-led startups.

Why is diverse deal flow important?

Diversifying an investment portfolio to include more women-led ventures means trusting in the leadership of women, which research has shown to be worth believing in. A 2012 study of company performance showed that more than 150 listed German firms excelled when they had at least 30% women representation on their executive boards.

Even more interesting, another study argues that women make better board directors than men. The findings revealed that women are more effective at accounting for multiple competing interests, solving problems creatively and building consensus. By comparison, male directors often made decisions based on rules, regulations and tradition.

Undeniably, companies managed by effective women leaders are set to provide a lucrative return on investment. Roy Adler, a Fulbright scholar and professor of marketing at Pepperdine University, conducted a 19-year study that found a correlation between companies with the best record of promoting women to senior positions and higher profitability — between 18% to 69% higher than the median Fortune 500 companies in their respective industries.

While the numbers prove that the financial returns can be promising, the bigger impact and importance of investing in gender diversity is the overall economic growth and prosperity that follows. Increasing opportunities for women entrepreneurs sets off a domino effect that local and global markets can benefit from.

McKinsey estimated that if total gender equality was achieved, the global gross domestic product (GDP) could be increased by up to $28 trillion globally by 2025. In fact, by not investing in women, the downsides prove to be quite massive. A study by the United Nations showed that the Asia-Pacific region, including China and the United States, loses at least $42 billion annually in GDP by not fully engaging women’s participation in their economy.

Seedstars, the Swiss investment holding group that focuses on investing in tech high-growth companies from emerging markets, provides a more in-depth view of the benefits of developing women entrepreneurship, specifically in developing countries.

The numbers make it evident that gender diversity is underutilized but highly valuable. In Melanne Verveer and Kim K. Azzarelli’s book “Fast Forward,” experts weigh in on the topic of gender inclusivity.

“The biggest destroyer of wealth creation is patriarchy,” Pax World Funds CEO Joseph Keefe said. “It’s not just up to women to ‘lean in’. Shareholders seeking better returns would do well to lean on companies to appoint and promote more women.”

“Women remain hugely underrepresented at positions of power in every single sector across this country,” Barnard College president Debora Spar noted. “We have fallen into what I call the 16% ghetto, which is that if you look at any sector, be it aerospace engineering, Hollywood films, higher education, or Fortune 500 leading positions, women max out at roughly 16%. That is a crime, and it is a waste of incredible talent.”

Moving gender inclusivity forward

Taking active measures to ensure that we are fully including women is necessary to make an impact. Since 2018, Seedstars has been actively working on gender equity within its core activities, highlighted in the group’s theory of change, such as sourcing of ventures, capacity-building programs and investment activities.

To date, Seedstars has supported more than 600 women-led enterprises and invested in 14 businesses co-founded by women. Additionally, Seedstars is working on gender equity when it comes to mentors, jury members and training delivery experts. Recent numbers show that about 30% of all Seedstars program participants are women, a number that Seedstars is proud to have increased over the past years (2018 numbers were more around 20%, depending on the region) and is committed to increasing that figure in the coming years.

Through the combined efforts of our own initiatives and those from investors who do their part in promoting gender diversity, the world is bound to reap the benefits of investing in what is proving to be one of the most powerful demographic groups the world is yet to fully embrace.

Recognizing the issue is the first step to solving any problem. The increase in awareness and action is sure to bring forth important development that makes the future brighter for women entrepreneurs everywhere.

Mercado Libre, one of the largest e-commerce and financial services company from Latin America by market cap, has selected the startup and Y Combinator alumni Pachama as its strategic partner in developing projects to restore ecosystems in Latin America.

The selection of Pachama is part of a program initiated by Mercado Libre, Latin America’s answer to Amazon, which is called Regenera America. The $8 million that Mercado Libre is investing will be in two reforestation projects: the “Mantiqueira Conservation Project”, organized under the auspices of The Nature Conservancy and the “Corridors of Live Project”, designed and implemented by the Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas.

Both projects will focus on the reforestation of over three thosuand hectares, through natural regeneration and planting over 1 million trees, restoring biodiversity corridors and protecting hydrological basins in the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil, the two companies said in a statement.

Pachama will provide satellite and machine learning technologies to verify and monitor the carbon sequestration produced by the sweeping reforestation efforts in a deal which leapfrogs Mercado Libre ahead of Microsoft as the young startup’s largest customer.

Software tools provided by Pachama will also increase the efficiency and transparency of the actual reforestation efforts on the ground, the companies said in a joint statement.

The deal between the two companies, and Mercado Libre’s big buy was announced earlier today at a press conference in Argentina and the agreement marks the first time Mercado Libre has tapped money from a recently issued $400 million Sustainability Bond that was designed to finance projects of what the e-commerce giant called “triple impact” in the Latin American region. The bond was issued by JP Morgan and BNP Paribas.

“We’re taking our first steps. We have always tried to do things the hard way and go to the core of problems. We have had a very interesting debate internally about when is the right time to start buying carbon offsets and carbon credits but we also realize that the … getting up and running of projects that generate carbon credits in Latin America was potentially even more of a challenging situation and more of a longterm solution,” said Mercado Libre chief financial officer Pedro Arnt.

“This is a building block of a longer term strategy thinking through not just what we can do for the next two or three years,” Arnt said. 

The Regenera America project has four pieces, Arnt said: measuring and reporting emissions internally for the company; buying clean energy for the company’s operations; providing electric vehicles for its own fleet and assisting its last mile and logistics partners in electrifying their own transportation; and the development of reforestation efforts across Latin America.

“This is setting up an example for more traditional industries across Latin America,” said Diego Saez-Gil, the co-founder and chief executive of Pachama. MercadoLibre is the largest company by market cap in Latin America and serves as a standard bearer for the forward thinking businesses in the region, he said. “Latin America is one of the biggest holders of biodiversity and carbon stocks in the world, and should be playing a more active role in climate mitigation.”

It’s a big step for Pachama as well. The deal marks the first time the young company has involved itself in project origination and provide a new revenue stream to compliment its existing lines of business.

“We are incredibly excited to start helping new reforestation projects get off the ground that have the capabilities to plant millions of trees and remove millions tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. If we are to solve climate change we need more projects like these to start as soon as possible,” said Saez-Gil in a statement. “We are confident that technologies such as AI and satellite imagery are key to scaling these efforts with high integrity, efficiency and transparency. Partnering with world-class organizations such as Mercado Libre, The Nature Conservancy and IPE for our first projects represents an incredible opportunity for us.” 

Introduced in late-2019, the Move was a very Sonos approach to the Bluetooth speaker. It was an attempt to bring the company’s long-standing premium approach to a more portable form factor. Accordingly, the press photos feature a lot of shots of the product on porches and around pools.

Today’s arrival of the Roam, however, takes an even bigger step to full portability, with a smaller, lighter, more ruggedized and waterproof design that puts it more in line with popular offerings from companies like JBL. It’s also priced at a much more palatable $169, more than half the Move’s starting price.

Image Credits: Sonos

Of course, you can still get plenty of cheaper (and quite good) portable Bluetooth speakers. JBL’s Flip 5, for instance, retails for about $40 less. But what you’re paying for, in part, is the Sonos ecosystem. As such, I suspect the clearest play from the outset here is Sonos’ base. And thankfully, for the company, there are no doubt a lot of Sonos users who have been waiting for a long time for a compatible speaker they can toss in their suitcase — or, rather, will be able to toss into their suitcases when they use suitcases again.

In addition to the standard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections, the system utilizes Sonos’ new Sound Swap feature, which switches the music to the next closest speaker when the play/pause button is held down. The speaker works with more than 100 streaming services, per the company’s count, including, of course Sonos Radio. It also can be controlled with Alexa and Google Assistant or via AirPlay 2.

Image Credits: Sonos

I got all of this information by way of a virtual briefing, as is how business is done these days, so I can’t speak specifically to the sound. That said, I’d imagine it’s a step down from the very good and quite expensive Move. But again, this is a speaker you’re buying specifically with flexibility in mind. On that note, the speaker gets about 10 hours of playback on a charge and can go 10 days when not in use.

The speaker arrives on April 20th.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will be providing NASA with a valuable scientific tool ahead of the U.S. space agency’s goal of returning to the Moon: The ability to run experiments in simulated lunar gravity much closer to home, in suborbital space.

NASA revealed that Blue Origin will be modifying its reusable New Shepard sub-orbital launch vehicle to add Moon gravity approximation via rotation of the spacecraft’s capsule. That’ll effectively turn it into one big centrifuge, which will mean that objects inside will experience a gravitational force very close to that found on the lunar surface.

It’s not like there aren’t already ways to simulate lunar gravity, but the way that New Shepard will implement its system will provide two benefits that none of these existing methods can match: Longer duration, offering over two minutes of continuous artificial Moon gravity exposure, and larger payload capacity, which will unlock experimental capabilities that are currently impossible just due to space restrictions.

Blue Origin anticipates that this new capability for New Shepard will be ready to roll by 2022 – important timing because the whole idea is to help support NASA’s Artemis program, which is its mission series that will see a return to human Moon exploration, including establishment of a more permanent crewed research presence both in lunar orbit and on the surface.

Gravity on the surface of the Moon is about one-sixth as powerful as that here on Earth. NASA also points out that it will require experimentation not only in preparation for lunar missions, but also to support eventually crewed launches to Mars, which has gravity that’s just over one-third as strong as it is here.

Blue Origin is also working with NASA on human landers for its lunar missions, through a space industry team-up that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.

The creator of the Nyan Cat, Chris Torres, has organized an informal collection of meme originators – the creators or original popularizers of meme images — into a two-week-long auction of their works. Under the hashtag #memeconomy the creators of memes like Bad Luck Brian, Coughing Cat, Kitty Cat Dance, Scumbag Steve, Twerky Pepe and some others are finally finding a way to monetize the creation of genuine cultural phenomenons that have been used freely for decades.

They’re mostly being hosted on booming new crypto art and collectibles platform Foundation, which launched in February and has already hosted $6M in sales of over 1,000 NFTs. I have a lot to say about NFTs and can’t say them all here, but I found this project fascinating and wanted to note it. The fact is that memes are Internet art (sorry). They are unique creations that took elements of participatory and performance art and injected them into the veins of the internet. In many ways, they have millions of creators, as the original editions may have planted the seed but every use and permutation gave them additional strands of DNA, crafting their cultural importance upload by upload. They have let us express ourselves — our desire, disgust, joy and lust — when words just wouldn’t suffice.

These “originals” are made original by the act of them being minted on the blockchain by the original artists. I know, it’s a distinction that may seem slim when the same images can be had anywhere at any time, but that’s the beauty of the re-organization that is happening within all of DeFi and crypto at the moment. We are stripping out layers of commerce and communication that benefited only platforms and participants that took part in the origination and sale of art from the perspective of frameworks like the DMCA and DRM. Those relationships are being rethought. The recapture of value for works that have already been broadly distributed has been historically relegated to ‘licensing them for t-shirts’. And extremely rarely elevated to the level of fine art sale.

Now that we’re all living on the Internet, Internet art is just art. And so are memes.

That’s why it’s fascinating to see some of the people who have created things that have let so m​any of us express ourselves get paid.

One famous case of this, of course, is the Pepe and its creator Matt Furie. Though Furie’s attempts to redeem Pepe have focused on attempting to reclaim him from a legacy of racist and hateful memes, Pepe and his friends are a cool cast of characters and it would be heartening to see Furie reclaim them by minting them himself.

I spoke a bit to Torres about the project and why he got interested in it.

TC: Why did you decide to organize this informal schedule of meme NFTs?

Torres: The idea has always kind of been in the back of my mind since discovering the NFT universe. The idea of NFTs were always so attractive to me, a place where you can create your own original art and gain proper attribution for your work. Memes have always had a rough time on the Internet, because their creators are usually taken advantage of, and I have personally seen artists have their works stolen and monetized to the tune of millions of dollars without even proper credit. So the idea has always been down deep in my subconscious but this week things have really amped up enough to finally give me the power I need to make it happen!

TC: How did you get in contact with the creators?

Actually, they all contacted me! It’s unbelievable knowing I’m in direct contact with some fantastic iconic internet legends from the past. Some of these have existed solely as enigmas on the Internet, it’s great connecting with them. Things started with casual conversations with Bad Luck Brian, but then Trollface messaged me, then Me Gusta, then Kitty Cat Dance, then things just kept amping up.

TC: How has it felt to have your creation formally rewarded after spending so long in the cultural meme-ory?

It’s still very surreal, to be honest. The NFT community is full of very talented people with so many thoughts and ideas on how to build a better future for the crypto space. I’ve actually used this power for good this week by starting up #Memeconomy with all these talented meme creators and will be trying my hardest to get these guys the recognition they deserve.

TC: What excites you about NFTs and art?

The number one thing that’s kept me excited for NFTs is just knowing that it’s a perfect way to empower artists to take ownership of their own works. I’ve been hanging out in the Clubhouse chats, reading everything I can on Twitter, and just have been losing sleep being so enthralled by it all. Every day I wake up and there’s a new meta of NFTs out there. It’s cool to see all this artistic knowledge evolving in real time. I absolutely live off that energy, and it’s inspired me to be more creative than ever.

The world of NFTs is complex and fascinating and deserves a deeper look that looks at the economic, ecological and technical aspects. We’ve already hosted and written about various projects in the space. Stay tuned for more.

The introduction of GPT-3 in 2020 was a tipping point for artificial intelligence. In 2021, this technology will power the launch of a thousand new startups and applications. GPT-3 and similar models have brought the power of AI into the hands of those looking to experiment — and the results have been extraordinary.

Trained on trillions of words, GPT-3 is a 175-billion parameter transformer model — the third of such models released by OpenAI. GPT-3 is remarkable in its ability to generate human-like text and responses — in some respects, it’s eerie. When prompted by a user with text, GPT-3 can return coherent and topical emails, tweets, trivia and much more.

Suddenly, authoring emails, customer interactions, social media exchanges and even news stories can be automated — at least in part. While large companies are pondering the pitfalls and risks of generating text (remember Microsoft’s disastrous Tay bot?), startups have already begun sweeping in with novel applications — and they will continue to lead the charge in transformer-based innovation.

OpenAI researchers first released the paper introducing GPT-3 in May 2020, and what started out as some nifty use cases on Twitter has quickly become a hotbed of startup activity. Companies have been formed on top of GPT-3, using the model to generate emails and marketing copy, to create an interactive nutrition tracker or chatbot, and more. Let OthersideAI take a first pass at writing your emails, or try out Broca or Snazzy for your ad copy and campaign content, for instance.

Other young companies are harnessing the API to accelerate their existing efforts, augmenting their technical teams’ capabilities with the power of 175 billion parameters and quickly bringing otherwise difficult products to market with much greater speed and data than previously possible. With some clever prompt engineering (a combination of an instruction to the model with a sample output to help guide the model), these companies leverage the underlying GPT-3 system to improve or extend an existing application’s capabilities.

Sure, a text expander can be a useful tool for shorthand notation — but powered by GPT-3, that shorthand can be transformed into a product that generates contextually aware emails in your own style of writing.

As early-stage technology investors, we are inspired to see AI broadly, and natural language processing specifically, become more accessible via the next generation of large-scale transformer models like GPT-3. We expect they will unlock new use cases and capabilities we have yet to even contemplate.

This morning Techstars Music is announcing 11 new companies that have joined its ranks, along with a partnership with Atlanta media house Quality Control.

While it’s easy to mentally bunch everything Techstars does together under the singular “Techstars” name, it’s actually made up of 40+ interconnected accelerator programs each with its own focus and portfolio. The majority of these are focused on a specific region — programs like Techstars Boulder, Boston, or LA. Others focus on a specific vertical or industry — like Sports, Space, or, in this case, Music.

So what all does that “Music” focus cover? It’s not just music creation tools, or apps for artists. As Techstars Music Managing Director Bob Moczydlowsky put it in a Q&A last year, “we don’t invest in music companies — we invest in companies solving problems for music. “.

Their past portfolio includes Endel, which generates “personalized soundscapes” meant to help you focus or fall asleep faster, and Blink Identity, a company looking to replace the paper/digital concert ticket with facial recognition machines.

The companies in the 2021 class, in alphabetical order:

555 Comic: A company that develops “virtual characters” and uses them to tell stories through social media (like the tweet above). Imagine one artist having multiple “personas”, with each genre they dabble in represented by a different character, each with an evolving backstory. (Fun trivia: the number five said aloud in Japanese sounds like “Go”; the Japanese company’s name is a play on “Go Go Go!”)

BlackOakTV: A subscription, on-demand video service focusing on content made by black creators. Currently costs $4.99 a month with apps available on most major platforms.

Creative Futures Collective: A networking/mentoring program aiming to “unearth the next generation of creative industry leaders from disenfranchised backgrounds” and connect them with jobs and paid internships.

Fave: A social platform meant to help connect an artist’s “superfans” with each other and allow them to compete to earn rewards from the artist.

HappsNow: a fully white-labeled ticketing platform meant to give artists/venues more control of the experience.

Holotch: Capture volumetric 3D video with off-the-shelf technology and stream it live. Imagine an artist capturing a performance live, and being able to watch them perform in your living room through augmented reality “holograms”.

Music Tech Works: A super simplified catalog and workflow for figuring out who owns the rights to a song and acquiring a license to use it.

Rares: A platform for investing in shares of particularly notable sneakers — think gameworn shoes, one-offs, or those that were never mass produced.

Remetrik: A software platform that aims to bring all of the (often labyrinthian) accounting involved with music royalties into one place in a simple and transparent way.

Volta Audio: A platform for artists to build immersive, evolving VR environments to perform in

Westcott Multimedia: An automated advertising platform that looks for events related to a music catalog (like, say, an artist’s birthday, or a song being played in the background of a viral video) and builds marketing campaigns around them.

Along with this latest class, Techstars Music is also announcing that it’s partnering with Quality Control, the media house behind Quality Control Music — best known as the label behind Migos, Lil Yachty, and Lil Baby. Quality Control joins Techstars Music as a “member” company (sort of like their equivalent to an LP, offering investment, helping with sourcing and vetting companies and mentoring them once they’re in); existing members include Amazon Music, AVEX, Bill Silva Entertainment, Concord, Peloton, Entertainment One, Right Hand Music Group, Royalty Exchange, Sony, and Warner Music Group.

Moczydlowsky tells me that Techstars Music alumni companies have raised over $105m since the first class in 2017, and that the group above has already raised over $3M ahead of its Demo Day in May.

Epic Games is quickly becoming a more dominant force in gaming infrastructure M&A after a string of recent purchases made to bulk up their Unreal Engine developer suite. Today, the company announced that they’ve brought on the team from photogrammetry studio Capturing Reality to help the company improve how it handles 3D scans of environments and objects.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Photogrammetry involves stitching together multiple photos or laser scans to create 3D models of objects that can subsequently be exported as singular files. As the computer vision techniques have evolved to minimize manual fine-tuning and adjustments, designers have been beginning to lean more heavily on photogrammetry to import real world environments into their games. 

Using photogrammetry can help studio developers create photorealistic assets in a fraction of the time it would take to create a similar 3D asset from scratch. It can be used to quickly create 3D assets of everything from an item of clothing, to a car, to a mountain. Anything that exists in 3D space can be captured and as game consoles and GPUs grow more capable in terms of output, the level of detail that can be rendered increases as does the need to utilize more detailed 3D assets.

The Bratislava-based studio will continue operating independently even as its capabilities are integrated into Unreal. Epic announced some reductions to the pricing rates for Capturing Reality’s services, dropping the price of a perpetual license fee from €15,000 to $3,750 USD. In FAQs on the studio’s site, the company notes that they will continue to support non-gaming use clients moving forward.

In 2019, Epic Games acquired Quixel which hosted a library of photogrammetry “mega scans” that developers could access.