Author: azeeadmin

Coursera, an online education platform that has seen its business grow amid the coronavirus pandemic, is planning to file paperwork tomorrow for its initial public offering, sources familiar with the matter say. The company has been talking to underwriters since last year, but tomorrow could mark its first legal step in the process to IPO.

The Mountain View-based business, founded in 2012, was last valued at $2.4 billion in the private markets, during a Series F fundraising event in July 2020. Bloomberg pegs Coursera’s latest valuation at $5 billion.

The latest financing event brought its cash balance to $300 million, right around the money that Chegg had before it went public. Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda did confirm then that the company is eyeing an eventual IPO.

Coursera has had a busy pandemic. Similar to Udemy, another massive open online course provider planning to go public, Coursera added an enterprise arm to its business. It launched Coursera for Campus to help colleges bring on online courses (credit optional) with built-in exams; more than 3,700 schools across the world are using the software. It is unclear how much money this operation has brought in, but we know that Udemy for Business is nearing $200 million in annual recurring revenue. In February, the company announced that it has received B Corp. certification, which means that it hits high standards for social and environmental performance. It also converted to a public benefit corporation.

GSV, a venture capital firm that exclusively backs edtech companies, had its largest position of its first fund in Coursera. GSV announced a $180 million Fund II yesterday. 

It makes sense that edtech companies want to go public while the markets remain hot and remote education continues to be a central way that instruction is delivered. Other companies from the sector that have gone public in recent weeks include Nerdy and Skillshare, two companies that used a SPAC to make their public debuts. Once – and if – Coursera does go public, it will join these newbies as well as the long-time edtech public companies including 2U, Chegg, and K12 Inc, and Zovio Solutions.

Coursera declined to comment.

When I first wrote about Whatnot in February of last year, they were just getting started. Aiming to be the GOAT of collectible toys, they were focusing first on being the go-to trusted spot for buying and selling authenticated Funko Pop figurines.

A few months later, as they expanded into categories like pins and Pokémon cards, the company started to build out a live shopping platform — think of something along the lines of a TV shopping network, but swap out the studios and camera crews for folks at home with iPhones selling to an audience of fellow collectors. The concept had already proven popular in China, and was starting to gain traction amongst buyers of collectibles in the US… but a good chunk of those US live streams were happening on Instagram Live, which isn’t really built for things like bidding or handling payments after a sale occurs. Whatnot saw a gap in the market, and wanted to fill it.

It seems that move is working out well for the team. At the end of 2020, Whatnot raised a $4M seed round; just a few months later, building on the momentum of its live shopping platform and looking to expand into many more categories of collectibles, it has raised another $20M.

The company tells me that this Series A round was led by Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz, and backed by YC, Wonder Ventures, Operator Partners, Scribble Ventures, Steve Aoki, and Chris Zarou.

Whatnot continues to offer a more traditional, non-livestreamed selling platform — but co-founder Grant Lafontaine tells me about “95%” of the team’s focus is on the livestream side of things.

“People really come to us for the live, but then they’re like ‘Eh, I don’t want to sell across 10 different platforms’ so we give them the tools to be a one-stop shop,” he says.

As I wrote back in December, one increasingly popular type of livestream on Whatnot is the “card break”, wherein:

Users pool their money to buy an entire box of trading card packs — often boxes that are no longer being produced and can cost thousands of dollars to obtain. Each user gets a number, each number tied to a pack (or packs) within the box. Each pack is opened on the livestream, its contents sent to the (hopefully?) lucky owner tied to that pack’s number.

So why raise more money? Lafontaine tells me it’s to help them expand into more categories, fast. The company currently focuses primarily on Pokémon cards, Funko Pops, FigPins, and sports cards, but they mention things like comic books, video games, and vintage hardware as natural fits. Diving into a new category means building up a community for it, convincing trusted sellers to hop on their platform and marketing to the right buyers to make it worthwhile. In time, Lafontaine tells me, the team expects to cover 100+ categories.

A lot of our communication these days with each other is digital, and today one of the companies enabling that — with APIs to build chat experiences into apps — is announcing a round of funding on the back of some very strong growth.

Stream, which lets developers build chat and activity streams into apps and other services by way of a few lines of code, has raised $38 million, funding that it will be using to continue building out its existing business as well as to work on new features.

Stream started out with APIs for activity feeds, and then it expanded to chat, which today can be integrated into apps built on a variety of platforms. Currently, its customers integrate third-party chatbots and use Dolby for video and audio within Stream, but over time, these are all areas where Stream itself would like to do more.

“End-to-end cryption, chatbots: we want to take as many components as we can,” said Thierry Schellenbach, the CEO who co-founded the startup with the startup’s CTO Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam in 2015 (the startup still has a substantial team in Amsterdam headed by Barbugli, but its headquarters is now in Boulder, Colorado, where Schellenbach eventually moved).

Image Credits: Stream (opens in a new window)

The company already has amassed a list of notable customers, including Ikea-owned TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University, as well as a number of others that it’s not disclosing across healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Together, the apps Stream powers cover more than 1 billion users.

This Series B round is being led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, with previous backers GGV Capital and 01 Advisors (the fund co-founded by Twitter’s former CEO and COO, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain) also participating.

Alongside them, a mix of previous and new individual and smaller investors also participated: Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Amsterdam-based Knight Capital; Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin; and Selcuk Atli, co-founder and CEO of social gaming app Bunch (itself having raised a notable round of $20 million led by General Catalyst not long ago).

That list is a notable indicator of what kinds of startups are also quietly working with Stream.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but Schellenbach hints that it is “6x its chat revenues.”

Indeed, the Series B speaks of a moment of opportunity: it is coming only about six months after the startup raised a Series A of $15 million, and in fact Stream wasn’t looking to raise right now.

“We were not planning to raise funding until later this year but then Aydin reached out to us and made it hard to say no,” Schellenbach said.

“More than anything else, they are building on the platforms in the tech that matters,” Senkut added in an interview, noting that its users were attesting to a strong return on investment. “It’s rare to see a product so critical to customers and scaling well. It’s just uncapped capability… and we want to be a part of the story.”

That moment of opportunity is not one that Stream is pursuing on its own.

Some of the more significant of the many players in the world of API-based communications services like messaging, activity streams — those consolidated updates you get in apps that tell you when people have responded to a post of yours or new content has landed that is relevant to you, or that you have a message, and so on — and chat include SendBird, Agora, PubNub, Twilio and Sinch, all of which have variously raised substantial funding, found a lot of traction with customers, or are positioning themselves as consolidators.

That may speak of competition, but it also points to the vast market there for the tapping.

Indeed, one of the reasons companies like Stream are doing so well right now is because of what they have built and the market demand for it.

Communications services like Stream’s might be best compared to what companies like Adyen (another major tech force out of Amsterdam), Stripe, Rapyd, Mambu and others are doing in the world of fintech.

As with something like payments, the mechanics of building, for example, chat functionality can be complex, usually requiring the knitting together of an array of services and platforms that do not naturally speak to each other.

At the same time, something like an activity feed or a messaging feature is central to how a lot of apps work, even if they are not the core feature of the product itself. One good example of how that works are food ordering and delivery apps: they are not by their nature “chat apps” but they need to have a chat option in them for when you do need to communicate with a driver or a restaurant.

Putting those forces together, it’s pretty logical that we’d see the emergence of a range of tech companies that both have done the hard work of building the mechanics of, say, a chat service, and making that accessible by way of an API to those who want to use it, with APIs being one of the more central and standard building blocks in apps today; and a surge of developers keen to get their hands on those APIs to build that functionality into their apps.

What Stream is working on is not to be confused with the customer-service focused services that companies like Zendesk or Intercom are building when they talk about chat for apps. Those can be specialized features in themselves that link in with CRM systems and customer services teams and other products for marketing analytics and so on. Instead, Stream’s focus are services for consumers to talk to other consumers.

What is a trend worth watching is whether easy-to-integrate services like Stream’s might signal the proliferation of more social apps over time.

There is already at least one key customer — which I am now allowed to name — that is a steadily growing, still young social app, which has built the core of its service on Stream’s API.

With just a handful of companies — led by Facebook, but also including ByteDance/TikTok, Tencent, Twitter, Snap, Google (via YouTube) and some others depending on the region — holding an outsized grip on social interactions, easier, platform-agnostic access to core communications tools like chat could potentially help more of these, with different takes on “social” business models, find their way into the world.

“Stream’s technology addresses a common problem in product development by offering an easy-to-integrate and scalable messaging solution,” said Dick Costolo of 01 Advisors, and the former Twitter CEO, in a statement. “Beyond that, their team and clear vision set them apart, and we ardently back their mission.”

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming around the corner fast, April 1 & 2nd. And you still have a chance to pitch your startup on the famous TC stage to an amazing line up of judges. On April 2nd, TechCrunch will feature ten top startups across the globe at the Early Stage Pitch Off. Companies will garner the attention of press and investors worldwide. Founders – apply here by March 9th.

The pitch-off will consist of a 5 minute presentation followed by a Q&A with our expert panel of judges. The top three companies will move to a final round, this time with a more in-depth Q&A. The winner will get a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to Extra Crunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

We know you’re excited to know who you’ll be pitching to. So without further ado, here are a few of the judges for the Early Stage Pitch-Off:

Lucy Deland – Inspired Capital

Lucy is a Partner at Inspired Capital. Prior to Inspired Capital, Lucy was on the founding team at Paperless Post, where she spent a decade as COO. In her role, Lucy built and led finance, customer insights & operations, strategic planning, and marketing—driving the company’s growth to a network of 100M hosts and guests. Lucy also led the company to raise $50M in venture financing and grew a team of 100+ in downtown Manhattan.

Bucky Moore – Kleiner Perkins

Bucky Moore is a partner at Kleiner Perkins focusing on developer facing software and infrastructure investments. As an early investor, Bucky serves on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies including Netlify, Materialize, CodeSandbox, Opstrace and Stackbit.

Marlon Nichols – MaC Venture Capital

Marlon Nichols is the founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital (formerly Cross Culture Ventures), which finds entrepreneurs who are building the future for the rest of America. He’s a former Kauffman Fellow and Investment Director at Intel Capital, with an extensive background in technology, private equity, media and entertainment.

Eghosa Omoigui – EchoVC Partners

Eghosa Omoigui is the founder and Managing General Partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed & early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. Before this, Eghosa was Director, Consumer Internet & Semantic Technologies, with Intel Capital. Representative investments include Lifebank, Migo, Frontier Car Group, SystemOne, Gro Intelligence and KBox.

Neal Sales-Griffin – TechStars

Neal Sáles-Griffin is the Managing Director of Techstars Chicago and a Venture Partner for MATH. Neal is an entrepreneur, investor, and teacher. In 2011, he co-founded the first beginner-focused, in person coding bootcamp. He is active in non-profit and civic engagement across Chicago and in 2018 he ran for mayor.

Sarah Smith – Bain Capital

Sarah Smith is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures where she primarily invests in early- to mid-stage companies across a range of sectors including consumer, SaaS, and marketplaces. Sarah has been deeply involved in high-growth startups as an executive, investor, and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures, and Stanford.

Leah Solivan – Fuel Capital
Leah Solivan is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, marketplaces, and retail. She’s passionate about supporting teams who are taking on world-changing ideas.

Stephanie Zahn – Sequoia Capital

Stephanie Zhan is a partner on the early stage investing team at Sequoia Capital. She grew up in Hong Kong and Beijing and studied Computer Science at Stanford. At Sequoia, she loves partnering with founders pushing the boundaries of creating meaningful experiences in consumer, enterprise, and frontier technology. She has led Sequoia’s investmentsin Rec Room (digital third place), Brud (modern-day Marvel through computer-generated characters that become social media celebrities), Ethos (a modern life insurance company), Graphcore (microprocessors for machine intelligence), Linear (issues tracking tool), Evervault (dev tools for data privacy) and Middesk (background checks for businesses) among others.

Early Stage Day 1 will be filled with must-see panels from the judges above and more:

• How to Build Your Early Team for Future Growth (Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures)
• 10 Things NOT to Do When Starting a Company (Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital)
• Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A (Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins)
• How to Get An Investor’s Attention (Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital)

And that’s not all. If you snag your ticket to TC Early Stage, you get free access to Extra Crunch!  An Extra Crunch membership includes:

• Weekly investor surveys
• Fundraising, growth, monetization and workforce advice from startup experts
• Market analysis
• Late-stage deep dives
• Access to weekly Extra Crunch Live events
• EC Perks Program (save big $$$ on services and products you already use)
• The TechCrunch List

Hepster, an insurtech platform from Germany, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding led by Element Ventures. Also participating was Seventure Partners, MBMV, and GPS Ventures, as well as previous investors. The funds will be used to broaden the Hepster insurance ecosystem and scale up its network, with an emphasis on automation.

The German insurance market is famously slow at adopting new practices, and Hepster is part of a new wave of insurtech startups in the country taking advantage of this. It allows businesses to build insurance policies from scratch, matched specifically to the needs of their individual service or industry. E-commerce players, for instance, can then embed these insurance products into the e-commerce journey.

Its products are therefore better suited to the new sector of, for example, shared e-bike schemes and peer-to-peer rental platforms, which are rarely covered by traditional brokers in Germany. However, it also caters to traditional, established industries as well.

It now has more than 700 partners, including European bike retailers and rental companies Greenstorm Mobility and Baron Mobility, as well as Berlin-based cargo bike provider Citkar and Munich e-bike startup SUSHI.

Christian Range, Hepster co-founder and CEO, said in a statement: “Hepster is now a key player within the European insurance market. Our state-of-the-art technology with our API-driven ecosystem, as well as our highly service-oriented approach, sets us apart.” 

In interview, he told me: “Germany is the toughest market with the most regulations, the most laws. We have a saying in Germany if you can make it in Germany, you can make it everywhere. Also, it’s a big market in terms of selling insurance products because Germans really like insurance in every regard. So there is huge market potential in Germany I think.”

Michael McFadgen, partner at Element Ventures, said: “As new industries and business models emerge, companies need much more flexible insurance propositions than what is currently being offered by traditional brokers. Hepster is the breakout company in the space, and their focus on embedded insurance will pay dividends in years to come.”

Google today announced that its Chrome browser is moving to a faster release cycle by shipping a new milestone every four weeks instead of the current six-week cycle (with a bi-weekly security patch). That’s one way to hasten the singularity, I guess, but it’s worth noting that Mozilla also moved to a four-week cycle for Firefox last year.

“As we have improved our testing and release processes for Chrome, and deployed bi-weekly security updates to improve our patch gap, it became clear that we could shorten our release cycle and deliver new features more quickly,” the Chrome team explains in today’s announcement.

Google, however, also acknowledges that not everybody wants to move this quickly — especially in the enterprise. For those users, Google is adding a new Extended Stable option with updates that come every eight weeks. This feature will be available to enterprise admins and Chromium embedders. They will still get security updates on a bi-weekly schedule, but Google notes that “those updates won’t contain new features or all security fixes that the 4 week option will receive.”

The new four-week cycle will start with Chrome 94 in Q3 2021, and at this faster rate, we’ll see Chrome 100 launch into the stable channel by March 29, 2022. I expect there will be cake.

I have been thinking about creators.

I am one: I put out an e-book on Gumroad about cold emailing. That is actually the low point of creativity in my whole life, considering I think I have it in me to be a scriptwriter, a stand-up artist or at least a mediocre YouTuber. I created a piece of art about spamming. What a fall!

There are successful creators, unlike me. But what makes them succeed, and how should brands work with them? Let’s get the definitions in place first.

Creators create and hence have an influence over their fans. Influencers exist. That’s the working definition we’ll go with.

Brands work with influencers all the time. It doesn’t take a special skill to have a rotund posterior on which a wine glass can be balanced. Most of us don’t try such things. Yet some do, post it on Instagram and build multibillion-dollar fashion brands.

It’s art if an influencer does it. You and I have no business here, but brands embrace such influencers. Influencers monetize eyeballs directly (through brand partnerships) or through platform ad revenue.

Creators are morally superior — they earnestly create good, mediocre or bad content/art/internet moments through their good, bad or mediocre skills. That builds a niche fan following. 

They monetize through ads, brand partnerships or subscriptions 

Where brands go astray is when they expect creators to obtain products for their brands in the way that influencers do. Influencers influence. Creators endear themselves to their audience. Creators evolve and their audience base evolves along with them.

I have a framework for how brands can think about creator relationships and how to set goals for such relationships. 

Let’s call it FFS (Fan Follower Strength ) Framework.

Fans of a creator manifest their liking for the creator in one of these ways:

• Appreciate
• Advocate
• Adulate

Depending on the scale of the audience base and their fan following strength, creators’ alternative revenue streams could be anywhere between that of a guy who does the opening act at an obscure club’s stand-up night to that of a cult founder.

Image Credits: Ashwin Ramasamy

How much influence a creator has depends on the distribution of fans they have in these stages.

The more adulation they get, the more they are ready to carry a brand or monetize on their own. While the number of fans decides the scale of an outcome (exposure, sales, etc.), at any scale a creator can monetize if they have more fans in the advocate or adulate stages.

A brand has to choose its creators both on the scale and the goals they have for the relationship.

A creator with millions of merely appreciative followers could be good for brand exposure but not immediate sales, whereas a niche creator who receives great adulation from their audience could not just move products but move their audience to visit your store to buy a product they promote.

Such creators — if they are able to maintain a high proportion of advocates and adulatory followers as they hit scale — could launch their own brands.

The relationship becomes troublesome when brands simply look at influencer marketing metrics (engagement, clicks, etc.) and ignore the FFS metrics (intensity of fan following as measured from comments, organic shares and engagement for those shares; the shelf life of the content measured by the longevity of comment interaction; fanfic creations around the creator’s content or about the creator, etc.)

Without the understanding of FFS metrics, brands end up partnering with creators at a life stage that could be incompatible with brand goals. A creator with a huge following does not automatically translate to sales if their fan following strength is skewed more toward appreciation than advocacy or adulation.

Earlier this year, TikTok was spotted testing a new Q&A feature that would allow creators to more directly respond to their audience’s questions using either text or video. Today, the company has announced the feature is now available to all users globally. With the release of TikTok Q&A, as the feature is officially called, creators will be able to designate their comments as Q&A questions, respond to questions with either text comments or video replies, and add a Q&A profile link to their bios, among other things. The feature also works with live videos.

TikTok Q&A grew out of a way that creators were already using the video platform to interact with viewers. Often, after posting a video, viewers would have follow-up questions about the content. Creators would then either respond to those questions in the comments section or, if the response was more involved, they might post a second video instead.

The Q&A feature essentially formalizes this process by making it easier for creators — particularly those with a lot of fans — to identify and answer the most interesting questions.

Image Credits: TikTok

To use Q&A, viewers will first designate their comment as a Q&A question using a new commenting option. To do so, they’ll tap the Q&A icon to the right side of the text entry field in comments. This will also label their comment with the icon and text that says “Asked by” followed by the username of the person asking the question. This makes it easier for creators to see when scanning through a long list of comments on their video.

The feature will also feed the question into the creator’s new Q&A page where all questions and answers are aggregated. Users can browse this page to see all the earlier questions and answers that have already been posted or add a new question of their own.

Creators will respond to a Q&A question with either text or video replies, just as they did before — so there isn’t much new to learn here, in terms of process.

They can also add Q&A comments as stickers in their responses where the new video will link back to the original, where the question was first asked, similar to how they’re using comment stickers today.

The feature will also be available in TikTok LIVE, making it easier for creators to see the incoming questions in the stream’s chat from a separate panel.

Image Credits: TikTok

As a part of this launch, a Q&A profile link can be added to creators’ Profile bios, which directs users to the Q&A page where everything is organized.

During tests, the feature was only made available to creators with public accounts that had more than 10,000 followers and who opted in. Today, TikTok says its available to all users with Creator Accounts.

To enable the feature on your own profile, you’ll go to the privacy page under Settings, then select “Creator,” tap “Q&A” and then “Turn on Q&A.” (If users don’t already have a Creator account, they can enable it for themselves under settings.)

The feature is rolling out to users worldwide in the latest version of the TikTok app now, the company says.

@tiktokYou can now ask and answer any questions on LIVE with the new Q&A feature. Check it out now!

♬ original sound – TikTok

A year ago, Microsoft announced that its Edge browser would get vertical tabs and here we are: Microsoft today announced that vertical tabs in Edge are now generally available.

In addition, the Edge team also announced a few under-the-hood changes that will allow the browser to startup significantly faster (up to 41% faster according to Microsoft’s preliminary tests, to be precise). Since Microsoft can’t speed up your hard drive or significantly shrink Edge, though, the way the team achieves this is by loading the browser in the background when you sign in and then it’ll continue running when you close all browser windows. If that’s not to your liking, you can always turn this feature off, too.

While vertical tabs are available for you to play with now, though, the startup improvements will roll out over the course of this month.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Vertical tabs, of course, are nothing new. Other browsers have long supported them, either as a built-in feature or through extensions. But it’s nice to see them finally becoming a reality in Edge, too.

“Most websites follow a conventional grid that leaves plenty of whitespace on either end of the page,” Microsoft’s Michele McDanel writes in today’s announcement. “As we began working with our users, we realized that this vertical real estate could be a better location for tabs, rather than the traditional horizontal list of tabs at the top. While vertical tabs may not be an entirely new concept, we saw an opportunity to improve the browser experience and tested several prototypes with our users.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

In its research, Microsoft discovered that users who like vertical tabs also like to switch between them and standard horizontal tabs, so it added an always-visible toggle to do so. And since users sometimes want to reclaim all of their screen estate, the team added the ability to collapse the sidebar, too.

For those of you who use Bing, Microsoft is also adding a few nifty new features to its search engine. There’s a new recipe view for when you’re once again out of ideas for what to make for dinner, improved visual search results, and the company has spruced up some of its rich sidebar snippets with a more infographic-like feel. But let’s face it: you’re not using Bing. If perchance you do, you can find more details about the udpates here.

Healthcare is one of the most complex industries out there, creating frustration on the consumer side but also the opportunity for huge improvements from, in a way, rather simple methods. Halo Diagnostics (or Dx for short) has raised a $19M series A to improve diagnosis of several serious illnesses by crossing the streams from multiple tests and making the improved process easily available to providers. They’ve also taken the unusual step of taking out an eight-figure line of credit to buy outright the medical facilities they’ll need to do it.

As anyone who’s had to deal with major health concerns can attest, the care you get differs widely from one provider to another depending on many factors, not least of which are what your insurance covers and what methods are already in use by the provider.

For men going in to get a prostate cancer screening, for instance, the common bloodwork and rectal exam haven’t changed in years, and really aren’t that great at predicting problems, leading to uncertainty and unnecessary procedures like biopsies.

Of course, if you’re lucky, your provider might offer multiparametric MRIs, which are much better at finding problems —and if you combine that MRI with a urine test that checks for genetic markers, the detection accuracy rises to practically foolproof levels.

But these tests are more expensive, take special facilities and personnel, and may otherwise not fit into the provider’s existing infrastructure. Halo aims to provide that infrastructure by revamping the medical data stream to allow for this kind of multi-factor diagnosis.

“Basically doctors and imaging centers aren’t offering latest level of care. If you’re lucky you might get it, but in community medicine you’re not going to,” said Brian Axe, co-founder and chief product officer at Halo Dx. “As perverse as it sounds, what the healthcare industry needs is financial alignment, not just outcomes. The challenge is the integrated diagnostic solution — how do you get these orders, go to market and talk with primary care providers?”

An added obstacle is that multi-modal testing isn’t really the kind of thing medical imaging or testing providers just decide to get into. An imaging center isn’t going to hear that a urine test improves reliability and think “well let’s buy the building next door and start doing that too!” It’s costly and complex to build out testing facilities, and getting the expertise to run them and combine the results is another hurdle.

So Halo Dx is parachuting in with tens of millions of dollars and purchasing the imaging and testing centers themselves (four so far), taking over their operations and combining them with other tests.

Assuming that much liability as a young company may seem like folly, but it helps that these imaging centers are strong businesses already — not derelict, half-paid-off MRI machines being operated at a loss.

“The imaging orders are coming in already; the centers are profitable. They’re coming on board because they see how technology is coming to disrupt them, and they want to help,” said Axe.

Prostate and breast cancers are the first target, but more and better data produce similarly improved diagnosis and treatment planning for more conditions, potentially (these are still being proven out) Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases.

With one company running multiple intake, imaging, and testing facilities and integrating the results, it’s much more likely that providers will sign up. And Halo Dx is trying to bring some of the enterprise-grade software expertise to bear on the historically neglected field of medical data storage and communication.

Axe deferred to the company’s chief medical officer, Dr John Feller, on the perils of that aspect of the field.

“Dr Feller describes this so well: ‘I have this state of the art MRI machine that can see inside your body, but because of the fragmented solutions that are out there, from intake to the storage centers, I feel like I’m living with pre-dot-com era tech and it’s crippling,’ ” Axe recalled. “If you want to look at records or recommend additional tests, software vendors don’t talk to each other or integrate. You have three providers that need to talk to each other and there’s a dozen systems between them.”

Axe compared the company’s approach here to One Medical’s — increasing efficiency and using that to make the relationship with the consumer lighter and easier, leading to more interactions.

In some ways it seems like a risky move, taking on nearly a hundred million in obligations and jumping into a hugely complex and highly regulated space. But the team is accomplished, the backers are notable, the potential for growth is there, and the success of the likes of One Medical have likely emboldened all involved.

Zola Global Investors led the round, and a who’s-who in medical and tech participated: Anne Wojcicki, Fred Moll, Stephen Pomeranz, Bob Reed, Robert Ciardi, Jim Pallotta, and believe it or not Ronnie Lott of 49ers fame.

These and others involved make for a strong statement of confidence in both the model and the specific approach Halo Dx is taking to expanding and advancing care. Here’s hoping, however, that you won’t have to make use of their services.