Author: azeeadmin

A new study from Mount Sinai researchers published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research found that wearable hardware, and specifically the Apple Watch, can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before current PCR-based nasal swab tests.

The investigation dubbed the ‘Warrior Watch Study,‘ used a dedicated Apple Watch and iPhone app and included participants from Mount Sinai staff. It required participants to use the app for health data monitoring and collection, and also asked that they fill out a day survey to provide direct feedback about their potential COVID-19 symptoms, and other factor including stress.

During the course of the study, the research team enlisted “several hundred health care workers” to participate, and collected data over several months, between April and September. The primary biometric signal that the study’s authors were watching was heart rate variability (HRV), which is a key indicator of strain on a person’s nervous system. This information was combined with information around reported symptoms associated with COVID-19, including fever, aches, dry cough, gastrointestinal issues, loss of taste and smell, among others.

The Warrior Watch Study was not only able to predict infections up to a week before tests provided confirmed diagnoses, but also revealed that participants’ HRV patterns normalized fairly quickly after their diagnosis, returning to normal roughly one to two weeks following their positive tests.

As to what the study could lead to in terms of actual interventions, the study’s authors note that it can help anticipate outcomes and isolate individuals from others who are at risk. Most importantly, it provides a means for doing so remotely, allowing caregivers to anticipate or detect a COVID-19 case without even doing a physical exam or a administering a nasal swab test, which can help take precautionary measures in high-risk situations when cases are suspected, possibly preventing any spread before someone is highly contagious.

The study is ongoing, and will expand to examine what else wearables like the Apple Watch and their onboard sensors can tell us about other impacts of COVID-19 on the health of care workers, including what factors like sleep and physical activity can have in association with the disease.

“Seed rounds are up!” “Seed rounds are higher valued than ever!” “There were 10% less VCs investing in seed rounds last year!” !!!!!!!!1

We’ve all seen these stories, and we’re fine connoisseurs of them here at TechCrunch, for sure. Trend data about VC investing are always enticing to startup founders and investors, since they affect so much of the strategy and planning of building a company. If seed rounds are becoming more elusive, maybe skip on that last hire, extend the runway, and try to gain some revenues. If Series A is the new bottleneck, well, invest more in product and growth so you don’t slam into the capital wall. If money is raining down from the sky, double the team, double growth marketing spend, and go blitzscale.

It’s key market intelligence, and important. Which is why it is so frustrating that the aggregate data on VC rounds is so, goddamn bad.

Here’s a friendly reminder: there are no comprehensive datasets on VC rounds, at least in the United States) And the data quality has only gotten worse over time, particularly at the seed stage.

It’s a theme I have been harping on for years now. SEC Form D filings, which form the backbone of most trend data of VC investment rounds, have been disappearing for years now.

As I described in my analysis from way back in 2018, the biggest reason is also one that isn’t very visible: a transformation in the culture among lawyers from a culture of “always file” to a culture of avoiding filings if at all possible.

That cultural change has been driven by founders and investors who want to keep their startups stealthy and their competitors in the dark about where their finances are. Plus, founders can avoid the spectacle of salespeople beating down their door when they find out the startup has cash in the coffers.

When I talked to lawyers about how to delay filing a Form D, all gave the standard perfunctory response about the necessity of filing — until we went off-the-record. Then, lawyers opened up about how much they skirt around SEC securities regulations. As one lawyer essentially put it, there’s what the law says is required, and then what the SEC ever bothers to enforce. No one in Silicon Valley has ever been charged with a crime related to skipping out on a Form D filing, or even paid a fine that anyone seems to have any memory of.

One lawyer at the time described to me a prototypical conversation he has with founders. He doesn’t tell them not to file their Form Ds. Instead, he says that almost none of their peer founders will file securities paperwork, and thus, if they do follow the law, they would be at a competitive disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of founders follow the directed course.

While it might seem like the law is the law, what’s far more important than what is written in the law or SEC regulations is how the law is interpreted, which is really about the sociology of attorneys. Years ago, I was talking to a securities attorney about company valuations. He was describing to me how East Coast-based securities lawyers at the time would blanche at some of the valuation tricks that West Coast / Silicon Valley lawyers would use with startups. You can follow the law closely, and you can follow the law loosely — and neither group is altogether breaking the law.

A change in legal culture driven by founders is one aspect of the dilemma facing VC investment trend surveyors. Another, particularly at the seed stage, is the complexity of rounds today.

As my colleague Alex Wilhelm wrote this morning in The Exchange newsletter, alternative investment models are having a large effect on aggregate VC data. Rolling rounds, convertible notes, SaaS securitization products, crowdfunding, and other mechanisms have massively transformed the seed-stage investing world from the ol’ write-a-check-and-buy-equity approach. While some of these forms of investment trigger filings requirements, many of these models are so new that lawyers have been willing to skip filings given the paucity of case law associated with the regulations.

Finally, you can generally avoid a Form D by filing in the relevant state jurisdictions of the company and its investors. As much as securities law may seem federal (we talk about the SEC a heck of a lot more than the California Department of Financial Protection & Innovation), the reality is that much of securities law is still practiced at the state level. What that means is that startups can use state filings in lieu of federal filings, and those are essentially invisible since literally no one besides me and a few other journalists in the world read state securities filings.

Take for instance a cool company I covered a little while back called Hebbia, which is reinventing search on the desktop. They raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round led by Floodgate with a lot of other great investors. Now, go to the SEC search page and look for the Form D. Nothing. But if you go to the California DFPI, you will find three filings submitted on September 21, 2020 for a $1.2 million total round. There’s your filing.

Even late-stage companies can mostly go without any Form D filings. Take DoorDash, for instance, which just had a monster IPO last year. If you search through the SEC database for “DoorDash Inc,” you will find nary a Form D filing for any of the company’s 11 venture rounds that Crunchbase identifies. The first filings with the SEC are for its originally confidential Draft Registration Statement to go IPO in early 2020. Now, if you head over to California’s database again, you will find filings going back to 2016, which I presume is the five-year limit for the site’s search function.

Using state filings is not wrong, illegal, or unethical — it’s just the standard way to do business today. But few industry datasets go beyond federal Form D filings to take into account every state’s database for securities filings. There are 50 states, and many of them (looking at you Florida) are all but impenetrable to researchers and investigators.

So if the legal culture around filings has changed, more rounds are using alternative investment models, and startups aren’t filing federally, what are analysts supposed to do?

Well, they try to compensate for this sparsity by augmenting the dataset they have with publicly reported information from sites like TechCrunch, Twitter conversations, self-reported data from startups, surveys of lawyers and accountants and more to attempt to statistically estimate how many rounds were actually conducted given the limited information they have on hand. For example, if lawyers report a 15% uptick in rounds, we can guesstimate roughly how many rounds took place in a given year.

At least, that’s the idea. Unfortunately, there really is no way to measure the inaccuracy of this approach, since there is no administrative dataset to compare our estimations to.

What percentage of rounds go undisclosed? It’s impossible to count something we can’t count, but my guess covering the industry is something on the order of 50-60% of seed rounds, a third of Series A/B rounds, and a declining percentage the later a company goes (at a certain point, Form Ds solve a lot of problems for companies when it comes to securities paperwork and mitigating legal risk).

Even the government doesn’t have data better than us. Take a story from last week in the Wall Street Journal about how the Department of Justice is investigating startups that took money from Chinese investors. The DoJ isn’t taking advantage of some secret database to identify all the investors that are hidden from the general public. They don’t know themselves! From the article:

Startup investments are exempt from many of the disclosures required from public companies. Last year, Cfius launched a new confidential tip line to help surface deals. In some cases, companies have alerted Cfius to a rival’s connections with foreign investors, said startup executives and lawyers.

(That last bit is just so juicy – a good reminder that we have a Secure Drop if you want to similarly slam a rival).

Ultimately, VC investment trend data is interesting and key market intelligence, and it might be — at a very high level — directionally right. There are just huge constraints on the ability of market researchers and data companies to comprehensively analyze the market in an accurate way. Everyone tries their best, but the reality is that if startups don’t have to disclose their investor data, there’s literally no other source for the information.

The last few months have put technology and its role in society, especially in the United States, in the spotlight.

We need a serious conversation on the equitable and ethical use of tech, what can be done to combat the spread of misinformation and more. As we work to solve these problems, however, I hope this dialogue doesn’t overshadow one silver lining of the past year: The rise of the developer activists who are using tech for good.

They stepped up like never before to tackle numerous global issues, demonstrating they not only love solving incredibly hard problems, but can do it well and at scale.

The responsibility lies with all of us to empower this community to unleash their entrepreneurial growth mindset and ensure more people have the opportunity to create a sustainable future for all. I’m calling on my colleagues, our industry, our governments and more to join me in supporting a new wave of developer-led activism and renew efforts to collectively close the skills gap that exists today.

From the COVID-19 pandemic, to climate change, to racial injustice, developers are playing a crucial role in creating new technologies to help people navigate today’s volatile world. Many of these developers are working on social problems on their own time, using open-source software that they can share globally. This work is helping to save lives and going forward, will help millions more.

The international research community acted early to share data and genetic sequences with one another in open-source projects that helped advance our early understanding of coronavirus and how to mobilize efforts to stop it. The ability for researchers to track genetic codes around the world in near real-time is crucial to our response.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was able to digitize its contract signature process in just 10 days during this critical time. A team of four developers hailing from Taiwan, Brazil, Mongolia and India helped farmers navigate climate change by using weather data to make more informed crop management decisions.

From the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s through the recent rallies supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, people have used passion and protests to shape the conversations that lead to a better future. Now, this rich history of people-powered action has an important new set of tools: The data, software and tech know-how that’s needed to mount a coordinated global and local response to our greatest challenges.

Today’s software developers are akin to civil engineers in the 1940s and 1950s who designed bridges and roads, creating an infrastructure that paved the path for enormous widespread progress.

The open-source code community already collaborates and shares, producing innovations that belong to everyone, focusing on progress over perfection. If a hurricane is about to create havoc in your community, don’t just fill sandbags, hit your keyboard and use open-source technologies to not only help your community, but to scale solutions to help others. DroneAID, for example, is an open-source tool that uses visual recognition to detect and count SOS icons on the ground from drones flying overhead, and then automatically plots emergency needs on a map for first responders.

A recent GitHub study shows that open-source project creation is up 25% since April of last year. Developers are signing on to contribute to open-source communities and virtual hackathons during their downtime, using their skills to create a more sustainable world.

In 2018, I helped found Call for Code with IBM, David Clark Cause and United Nations Human Rights to empower the global developer community, and a big part of our mission was to create the infrastructure needed to shepherd big ideas into real-world deployments. For our part, IBM provides the 24-million-person developer community access to the same technology being used by our enterprise clients, including our open hybrid cloud platform, AI, blockchain and quantum computing.

One winner, Prometeo, with a team including a firefighter, nurse and developers, created a system that uses artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things to safeguard firefighters as they battle blazes and has been tested in multiple regions in Spain. We’ve seen developers help teachers share virtual information for homeschooling; measure the carbon footprint impact of consumer purchases; update small businesses with COVID-19 policies; help farmers navigate climate change; and improve the way businesses manage lines amid the pandemic.

This past year, Devpost partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) and challenged developers to create COVID-19 mitigation solutions in categories including health, vulnerable populations and education. The Ford Foundation and Mozilla led a fellowship program to connect technologists, activists, journalists and scientists, and strengthen organizations working at the convergence of technology and social justice. The U.S. Digital Response (USDR) connected pro-bono technologists to work with government and organizations responding to crisis.

The most complex global and societal issues can be broken down into smaller solvable tech challenges. But to solve our most complex problems, we need the brains of every country, every class, every gender. The skills-gap crisis is a global phenomenon, making it critical that we equip the next generation of problem solvers with the training and resources they need to turn great ideas into impactful solutions.

This year, we can expect to see a newly energized community of developers working across the boundaries of companies, states and countries to take on some of the world’s biggest problems.

But they can’t do it alone. These developer activists need our support, encouragement and help pinpointing the most crucial problems to address, and they need the tools to bring solutions to every corner of the world.

The true power of technology lies with those who want to change the world for good. To ensure anyone who wants to create change has the tools, resources and skillsets to do so, we must renew our focus on closing the skills gap and addressing deep inequalities in our society.

Our future depends on getting this right.

I have a confession to make: my company fell short of its DEI goal in 2020.

Heading into the year, our goal was to build a workforce that’s 44% women and 14% Underrepresented People (URP). We made some strides, but currently those figures are 43% and 13%, respectively.

Here’s why these goals are important to me: I immigrated to America at 17 with my mother and brother from Nicaragua. I was promised a land where anything is possible with some know-how and hard work. Yet, growing up, I can’t recall ever seeing a business leader, an elected official, or even a school principal who looked like me. There was never a Black Marc Benioff or a Latino Steve Jobs in the press to make that kind of accomplishment feel possible.

Things have changed at the very highest levels, beginning with the election of President Obama in 2008, which can’t be understated for its impact on people of color. Now, as a new administration takes power, President Biden is doing something well overdue in building a cabinet that “represents the diversity of our nation.”

His team is highlighted by influential voices from the Black and Latinx communities, including Ambassador to the United Nations nominee Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Department of Homeland Security Secretary nominee Alejandro Mayorkas.

I thought back to how a 17-year-old me would have felt seeing a former refugee steering the future of our country and how differently my worldview might have developed. I became more motivated to double down on our commitment. After all, if the public sector is able to make this commitment, then surely it should be possible for businesses to do the same.

Every business should have a DEI game plan in 2021. Here’s ours:

Skip the board and tap employees for ideas

While the board room is becoming a more diverse place, ultimately, this isn’t where progress is made. Rather, progress is made when employees feel empowered to combine their skills with their passions.

This is exactly what happened in our company this year.

Watching the outsized impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on Black-owned businesses, several employees came to us with an idea: they wanted to find a way to use our products to help Black-owned businesses outlast the shutdowns. They started by working with William Murrell, owner of BlackBoston.com to understand his needs–and how we could help him connect with website visitors. By working with William’s network, we became more aware of the barriers that deter Black-owned businesses from adopting technology and created a repeatable process to bridge the gap.

These decisions, and the resulting initiative weren’t made in a boardroom–where so much time is spent determining the path to profitability–but rather among employees that wanted to improve their community and saw a way how.

To make these efforts more commonplace, we’ve hired a diversity-focused recruiter to make sure our teams better reflect our communities. We’ve also created processes like Balanced Hiring, to help underrepresented groups get to the interview stage and reduce bias in the hiring decision. On the other side of the coin, we also aim to learn from our leavers–so we understand areas for improvement and can help them thrive beyond our company.

Don’t let remote work hinder expression and belonging

Right now, people are not working normal hours; they are juggling childcare, remote work and more; for leaders, understanding and relating to that trauma is an essential. To date, we announced that we moved our fiscal year-end to January. This way, our sales and go-to-market teams could spend the holidays recharging with family, rather than scrambling to hit year-end goals.

Moreover, we are empowering and expanding the role of our employee-led Employee Resource Groups (ERG) to create safe spaces for expression among peers. Belonging is essential in any business, and as founders who have often found themselves a token in a boardroom, we know the value in having an outlet for employees to express themselves and encourage the sharing of learnings from individual successes, and mishaps.

These steps alone will not directly improve diversity, but they will go a long way toward building trust.

Don’t stop at race or gender: embrace diverse perspectives

The final consideration we are making is acknowledging that diversity is not solely inclusive of outward appearance. Rather, diversity of thought and background are critical factors to how teams collaborate to reach a unified goal.

After all, building a culture where differences aren’t acknowledged only seeks to push minorities further to the outskirts of organizational structure. Part of our focus on DEI will encourage diversity of thought as much as it does ethnic diversity–and hold ourselves accountable to employees that will speak up when it matters.

2020 was a year of trauma, and one where every person was alike in sharing the same fears and anxieties. Thankfully, we have a light at the end of the tunnel with two promising vaccines, and an incoming administration that knows the value in encouraging equal representation across gender and ethnic borders.

Regardless of these positive developments, our focus toward empowering diverse communities must remain steadfast. After all, the systemic issue of low representation of URPs in tech will not be ended because of these efforts alone, but through sustained attention toward addressing the issue and learning each day. We might have missed our mark in 2020, but now we will take the President’s lead and build equity within our offices in 2021, wherever they might be.

I encourage all business owners to make this same commitment.

Just over a year ago in our coverage of the 2019 venture capital market,  we noted that “United States-demarcated angel and seed deals dipped in 2019.” Our reporting concerning the Q1 2020 venture capital market had a similar tone, noting that “domestic seed rounds, in slow decline since peaks in 2017, have sharply fallen since Q3 2019.”

The same theme continued in the second quarter. Widening our lens to global seed data, own we wrote that “global seed and angel deals […] were down from 4,256 rounds in Q2 2019 worth $3.7 billion to 1,791 rounds worth just $2.3 billion in Q2 2020.”

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Of course, the second quarter of 2020 was the middle of the storm when it came to the temporary decline in venture capital confidence. So, what about Q3? One source noted, as we wrote at the time, that the “percentage of U.S. VC deals that were for rounds of $5 million or less was the lowest since at least 2010.” Another data source showed a slight rebound in domestic seed rounds, but it was a rare positive data point.

Then came Q4 2020 data and a full-year look at the market. We wrote that in “the U.S., seed deal count was high in 2020, around 5,227,” per that day’s data source.

Weird, right?

The Exchange leans on PitchBook, CB Insights, the NVCA, Silicon Valley Bank and Crunchbase along with other more focused data sources for its raw inputs. I’m not citing individual sources in the above (you can find them at the links) to avoid appearing to be cross with any particular entity; that’s not my goal.

Instead, I’m curious how we can have so many different seed data signals in the same year. This is a question I’ve had for some time, as whenever I’d report that seed deal volume in any particular part of the world was looking light — Europe, for example — investors would tell me, in polite tones or with sheer incredulity, that the seed data in question did not match their lived realities.

Investors were seeing a hot seed market, while data often showed a flat-to-down seed market. So, what’s going on?

SAFEs could be to blame

Thanks to angel investor and Twitter bon vivant Trace Cohen, I think we have a good idea of what’s to blame for discrepant data and reality when it comes to seed and earlier dealmaking. Per Cohen, could SAFEs be to blame?

SAFEs, or Simple Agreements for Future Equity, are a method of raising capital that is quick and cheap. Y Combinator invented them back in 2013, and they’ve become rather popular amongst seed deals over time.

During a small gathering of journalists in China, Ren Zhengfei made his first public remarks since Joe Biden was inaugurated at the 46th President of the United States. The Huawei CEO struck a hopeful tone for those gathered around the table, in comments reported by CNBC among others.

“I would welcome such phone calls and the message is around joint development and shared success,” the executive said, noting a readiness to speak with the new administration in translated remarks. “The U.S. wants to have economic growth and China wants to have economic growth as well.”

Huawei’s future in the U.S. has been a major question mark hanging over the new administration. Under Trump, a number of high profile Chinese companies were added to the Commerce Department’s so-called “entity list” to various effects. Huawei has been among the hardest hit by the moves.

In addition to blocking sales in the world’s third-largest smartphone market, the company has been unable to work with key U.S. companies, including Google. That, in turn, has blocked access to key technologies, including the Android ecosystem and left Huawei scrambling. The company’s support among consumers has increased within China, but the move has been a big blow to the smartphone maker’s bottom line.

The incoming Biden administration has mostly been quiet on the matter. Though, facing mounting criticism from Republican lawmaker, Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo has since added that, “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”

While there haven’t been many positive signs for Huawei thus far, the company’s Chief understandably would prefer to make nice with the new administration.

“If Huawei’s production capacity can be expanded, that would mean more opportunities for U.S. companies to supply too,” Ren said in the translated comments. “I believe that’s going to be mutually beneficially. I believe that (the) new administration would bear in mind such business interests as they are about to decide their new policy.”

Eniac Ventures, a seed firm with a focus on New York startups, is announcing its fifth fund totaling $125 million.

Eniac’s four general partners — Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young — have been making seed investments together for more than a decade, and they’ve known each other for even longer, having first met at the University of Pennsylvania. Singh described the firm as “one of the OGs” in seed investing, while Mehta said, “Consistency has been our superpower.”

The size of Eniac’s funds has grown dramatically over the past decade, from its $1.6 million first fund in 2010 to its $100 million fourth fund in 2017. However, Mehta said the team approached the latest fund with $125 million as both a goal and a “hard cap.”

The larger funds allow Eniac to make more investments, and to lead rounds as the definition of a seed deal has expanded. (The firm says it can invest anywhere from $350,000 to $3 million in a single round.) At the same time, GP Hadley Harris emphasized that Eniac will remain focused on seed deals rather than Series As, and that it wants to remain “really collaborative, so that we never need to take more than half the round.”

Eniac’s general partners usually only two or three investments each per year, which Harris said is “quite a bit less than average seed fund.”

“We always want to be the investor of record in the companies that we invest in, leading or co-leading these rounds,” he continued. “And we want to have the bandwidth to be partners with them in the early stages of their journey. We think the only way to do that is concentration.”

Eniac’s portfolio now includes more than 120 companies, with 50-plus exits. Recent successes include mobile messaging company Attentive (which raised a $230 million Series D last fall), podcasting startup Anchor (acquired by Spotify) and online retailer Boxed (which recently partnered with one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar companies, Aeon).

While Eniac initially billed itself as a mobile-focused firm, it now invests across software-as-a-service, developer platforms, consumer and deeptech. Harris said they’re not pointing to any specific industries or trends that they’re focused on because, “We want to be balanced between thesis-driven and opportunistic … The theses that we tend to focus on tend to be on a per-partner basis and change pretty quickly.”

The firm is headquartered in New York, with an office in San Francisco. Hadley said New York-based startups remain a priority, while at the same time, “We also believe that great founders can be anywhere and we’re more and more interested in distributed teams.”

Singh added that despite the hype around other emerging startup hubs, “A lot of the founders we partner with in New York are staying in New York. They have not left.”

They might hire team members elsewhere, he said, but there’s a high bar for remote employees. And if a startup wants to be fully distributed, “You have to be fully remote and distributed first. You can’t go distributed later; you have to very intentionally build the organization in that way from the start.”

As for the team’s longevity, I noted that it also has a potential downside from a diversity perspective, especially since all four of the founding GPs are men. However, the firm has recently promoted two other team members — Vice President of Finance and Operations Anna Nitschke and Investor Kristin McDonald — who Singh noted “votes on deals with us” and “feels as if she has an equal say in how the firm is run.” And the firm plans to hire six new team members this year.

If you want to hear more from the firm’s partners, I’ll be interviewing them on Superpeer (another recent Eniac investment) tomorrow, February 10, at 2:30pm Eastern.

Nextmv, a platform that optimizes and tests decision models for logistics companies, announced the close of an $8 million Series A round earlier today.

FirstMark, an existing investor, doubled down on nextmv and led the Series A. Other investors include Github CTO Jason Warner, Seamless founder Jason Finger, Stripe COO Claire Johnson, Ankit Agarwal from Greenhawk Capital, as well as other institutional investors such as 2048, Dynamo, and Atypical.

Image Credits: nextmv

Founded by Carolyn Mooney and Ryan O’Neil, nextmv simplifies the process of optimizing and testing logistics-focused decision models. Consider a company like GrubHub, where the duo worked previously. GrubHub has to weigh a wide variety of priorities each time an order comes through on the platform, from speed of delivery to mileage on the drivers’ cars to overall efficiency.

It takes an immense amount of resources, and personnel talent, to optimize the algorithm running those platforms based on the company’s key performance indicators, or KPIs. And if those KPIs change, or tweaks to the algorithm need to be made, it takes even more resources to test those modifications.

And you would need a simulated environment to test the changes, something that nextmv has provided since its launch.

On the heels of this latest round, nextmv is working to simplify its product. The company has launched nextmv Cloud to allow developers, not just operations researchers, to use its software. nextmv Cloud has quick start models in the routing and delivery space to allow developers to automate decision-making, with plans to launch into new verticals in the coming months.

Before nextmv, it could take an entire team of operations researchers to optimize decision-making models and simulate test environments. When nextmv launched, a team still needed to have at least one operations researcher to use the product. Now, developers can hop on the platform and get started.

“There are hundreds of thousands of operations researchers, like my cofounder, out there that are trying to solve these problems in a research capacity or in very specialized groups within companies,” said Mooney. “But there are millions of developers out there. Why can’t this be a superpower that every developer has in their pocket. It’s the same way that Twilio made it so that every every engineer could be a messaging engineer.”

Image Credits: nextmv

A good chunk of the funding is going toward building out that Cloud platform to productize and distribute the nextmv technology and increase accessibility, but the company is also using funding to ramp up a content arm to help users explore the software.

Eventually, nextmv wants to build out a community arm of the platform, letting developers show each other how they’re automating decisions, not unlike Figma Community.

Shopify announced this morning it’s partnered with Facebook to expand its payment option, Shop Pay, to all Shopify merchants selling across both Facebook and Instagram. This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform, and represents a significant expansion for the e-commerce platform’s payments technology.

The company tells TechCrunch Shop Pay will first become available to all Shopify merchants using checkout on Instagram in the U.S., and will then be rolled out to Facebook in the weeks that follow.

Prior to this launch, Facebook’s platform has been one of Shopify’s most popular sales and marketing channels for merchants, Shopify says. At the beginning of the pandemic last year (March through April 2020), marketing on Facebook and Instagram via Shopify’s channel integration saw 36% growth in monthly active users, and that trend continues to rise.

Today, Shop Pay’s payment option is used by a number of top direct-to-consumer and newer brands, including Allbirds, Kith, Beyond Yoga, Kylie Cosmetics, Jonathan Adler, Loeffler Randall, Blueland and others. Over 40 million buyers now regularly use Shop Pay at these merchants and others on Shopify’s platform to complete their purchases.

Image Credits: Shopify

Through the course of 2020, Shop Pay helped buyers complete 137 million orders. And by the end of the year, Shop Pay had facilitated nearly $20 billion in cumulative GMV since its launch in 2017. Through its carbon offsetting feature, this also represented 75,000 tons of carbon emissions.

In addition to the carbon offsets, Shopify claims Shop Pay on its own platform is 70% faster with a conversion rate that’s 1.72x higher than a typical checkout. It also includes order tracking and management, which, to date, have tracked over 430 million orders across over 450 million miles.

Once available on Instagram, consumers will be able to find tagged products from Shopify merchants in the app, then add them to their in-app cart. At checkout, they can then select Shop Pay as their preferred payment option from among credit card, debit card, and PayPal. The consumer will receive a confirmation code to their phone, then enter the code to complete the order without leaving Instagram. A similar experience will be available on Facebook.

These orders can also be tracked via Shopify’s Shop app, the same as those processed on Shopify itself.

Image Credits: Shopify

“People are embracing social platforms not only for connection, but for commerce,” said Carl Rivera, General Manager of Shop, in a statement. “Making Shop Pay available outside of Shopify for the first time means even more shoppers can use the fastest and best checkout on the Internet. And there’s more to come; we’ll continue to work with Facebook to bring a number of Shopify services and products to these platforms to make social selling so much better.”

This is not the first third-party payment option integrated into Facebook’s shopping platforms, as PayPal is also accepted. But it is a notable addition, given how heavily Facebook has pushed its own “shops” platform, which encourages merchants to sell and transact within its own apps — an even more critical source of revenue now that Apple’s privacy changes will impact Facebook’s ads business to the tune of billions of dollars. But likely, working with a third-party like Shopify is allowing the company to spin up a new revenue stream.

Shopify, however, declined to discuss its financial arrangement with Facebook.

Shopify isn’t limiting itself to Facebook in an effort to expand its e-commerce business. Last fall, it also partnered with TikTok on social commerce, allowing merchants to publish their marketing ads directly to the video platform.

Shopify announced this morning it’s partnered with Facebook to expand its payment option, Shop Pay, to all Shopify merchants selling across both Facebook and Instagram. This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform, and represents a significant expansion for the e-commerce platform’s payments technology.

The company tells TechCrunch Shop Pay will first become available to all Shopify merchants using checkout on Instagram in the U.S., and will then be rolled out to Facebook in the weeks that follow.

Prior to this launch, Facebook’s platform has been one of Shopify’s most popular sales and marketing channels for merchants, Shopify says. At the beginning of the pandemic last year (March through April 2020), marketing on Facebook and Instagram via Shopify’s channel integration saw 36% growth in monthly active users, and that trend continues to rise.

Today, Shop Pay’s payment option is used by a number of top direct-to-consumer and newer brands, including Allbirds, Kith, Beyond Yoga, Kylie Cosmetics, Jonathan Adler, Loeffler Randall, Blueland and others. Over 40 million buyers now regularly use Shop Pay at these merchants and others on Shopify’s platform to complete their purchases.

Image Credits: Shopify

Through the course of 2020, Shop Pay helped buyers complete 137 million orders. And by the end of the year, Shop Pay had facilitated nearly $20 billion in cumulative GMV since its launch in 2017. Through its carbon offsetting feature, this also represented 75,000 tons of carbon emissions.

In addition to the carbon offsets, Shopify claims Shop Pay on its own platform is 70% faster with a conversion rate that’s 1.72x higher than a typical checkout. It also includes order tracking and management, which, to date, have tracked over 430 million orders across over 450 million miles.

Once available on Instagram, consumers will be able to find tagged products from Shopify merchants in the app, then add them to their in-app cart. At checkout, they can then select Shop Pay as their preferred payment option from among credit card, debit card, and PayPal. The consumer will receive a confirmation code to their phone, then enter the code to complete the order without leaving Instagram. A similar experience will be available on Facebook.

These orders can also be tracked via Shopify’s Shop app, the same as those processed on Shopify itself.

Image Credits: Shopify

“People are embracing social platforms not only for connection, but for commerce,” said Carl Rivera, General Manager of Shop, in a statement. “Making Shop Pay available outside of Shopify for the first time means even more shoppers can use the fastest and best checkout on the Internet. And there’s more to come; we’ll continue to work with Facebook to bring a number of Shopify services and products to these platforms to make social selling so much better.”

This is not the first third-party payment option integrated into Facebook’s shopping platforms, as PayPal is also accepted. But it is a notable addition, given how heavily Facebook has pushed its own “shops” platform, which encourages merchants to sell and transact within its own apps — an even more critical source of revenue now that Apple’s privacy changes will impact Facebook’s ads business to the tune of billions of dollars. But likely, working with a third-party like Shopify is allowing the company to spin up a new revenue stream.

Shopify, however, declined to discuss its financial arrangement with Facebook.

Shopify isn’t limiting itself to Facebook in an effort to expand its e-commerce business. Last fall, it also partnered with TikTok on social commerce, allowing merchants to publish their marketing ads directly to the video platform.