Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Images of elephants roaming the African plains are imprinted on all of our minds and something easily recognized as a symbol of Africa. But the future of elephants today is uncertain. An elephant is currently being killed by poachers every 15 minutes, and humans, who love watching them so much, have declared war on their species. Most people are not poachers, ivory collectors or intentionally harming wildlife, but silence or indifference to the battle at hand is as deadly.

You can choose to read this article, feel bad for a moment and then move on to your next email and start your day.

Or, perhaps you will pause and think: Our opportunities to help save wildlife, especially elephants, are right in front of us and grow every day. And some of these opportunities are rooted in machine learning (ML) and the magical outcome we fondly call AI.

Image Credits: Jes Lefcourt (opens in a new window)

Open-source developers are giving elephants a neural edge

Six months ago, amid a COVID-infused world, Hackster.io, a large open-source community owned by Avnet, and Smart Parks, a Dutch-based organization focused on wildlife conservation, reached out to tech industry leaders, including Microsoft, u-blox and Taoglas, Nordic Semiconductors, Western Digital and Edge Impulse with an idea to fund the R&D, manufacturing and shipping of 10 of the most advanced elephant tracking collars ever built.

These modern tracking collars are designed to deploy advanced machine-learning (ML) algorithms with the most extended battery life ever delivered for similar devices and a networking range more expansive than ever seen before. To make this vision even more audacious, they called to fully open-source and freely share the outcome of this effort via OpenCollar.io, a conservation organization championing open-source tracking collar hardware and software for environmental and wildlife monitoring projects.

The tracker, ElephantEdge, would be built by specialist engineering firm Irnas, with the Hackster community coming together to make fully deployable ML models by Edge Impulse and telemetry dashboards by Avnet that will run the newly built hardware. Such an ambitious project was never attempted before, and many doubted that such a collaborative and innovative project could be pulled off.

Creating the world’s best elephant-tracking device

Only they pulled it off. Brilliantly. The new ElephantEdge tracker is considered the most advanced of its kind, with eight years of battery life and hundreds of miles worth of LoRaWAN networking repeaters range, running TinyML models that will provide park rangers with a better understanding of elephant acoustics, motion, location, environmental anomalies and more. The tracker can communicate with an array of sensors, connected by LoRaWAN technology to park rangers’ phones and laptops.

This gives rangers a more accurate image and location to track than earlier systems that captured and reported on pictures of all wildlife, which ran down the trackers’ battery life. The advanced ML software that runs on these trackers is built explicitly for elephants and developed by the Hackster.io community in a public design challenge.

“Elephants are the gardeners of the ecosystems as their roaming in itself creates space for other species to thrive. Our ElephantEdge project brings in people from all over the world to create the best technology vital for the survival of these gentle giants. Every day they are threatened by habitat destruction and poaching. This innovation and partnerships allow us to gain more insight into their behavior so we can improve protection,” said Smart Parks co-founder Tim van Dam.

Image Credits: Jes Lefcourt (opens in a new window)

Open-source, community-powered, conservation-AI at work

With hardware built by Irnas and Smart Parks, the community was busy building the algorithms to make it sing. Software developer and data scientist Swapnil Verma and Mausam Jain in the U.K. and Japan created Elephant AI. Using Edge Impulse, the team developed two ML models that will tap the tracker’s onboard sensors and provide critical information for park rangers.

The first community-led project, called Human Presence Detection, will alert park rangers of poaching risk using audio sampling to detect human presence in areas where humans are not supposed to be. This algorithm uses audio sensors to record sound and sight while sending it over the LoRaWAN network directly to a ranger’s phone to create an immediate alert.

The second model they named “Elephant Activity Monitoring.” It detects general elephant activity, taking time-series input from the tracker’s accelerometer to spot and make sense of running, sleeping and grazing to provide conservation specialists with the critical information they need to protect the elephants.

Another brilliant community development came from the other side of the world. Sara Olsson, a Swedish software engineer who has a passion for the national world, created a TinyML and IoT monitoring dashboard to help park rangers with conservation efforts.

With little resources and support, Sara built a full telemetry dashboard combined with ML algorithms to monitor camera traps and watering holes, while reducing network traffic by processing data on the collar and considerably saving battery life. To validate her hypothesis, she used 1,155 data models and 311 tests!

Sara Olsson’s TinyML and IoT monitoring dashboard. Image Credits: Sara Olsson

She completed her work in the Edge Impulse studio, creating the models and testing them with camera traps streams from Africam using an OpenMV camera from her home’s comfort.

Image Credits: Sara Olsson (opens in a new window)

Technology for good works, but human behavior must change

Project ElephantEdge is an example of how commercial and public interest can converge and result in a collaborative sustainability effort to advance wildlife conservation efforts. The new collar can generate critical data and equip park rangers with better data to make urgent life-saving decisions about protecting their territories. By the end of 2021, at least ten elephants will be sporting the new collars in selected parks across Africa, in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund and Vulcan’s EarthRanger, unleashing a new wave of conservation, learning and defending.

Naturally, this is great, the technology works, and it’s helping elephants like never before. But in reality, the root cause of the problem runs much more profound. Humans must change their relationship to the natural world for proper elephant habitat and population revival to occur.

“The threat to elephants is greater than it’s ever been,” said Richard Leakey, a leading palaeoanthropologist and conservationist scholar. The main argument for allowing trophy or ivory hunting is that it raises money for conservation and local communities. However, a recent report revealed that only 3% of Africa’s hunting revenue trickles down to communities in hunting areas. Animals don’t need to die to make money for the communities you live around.

With great technology, collaboration and a commitment to address the underlying cultural conditions and the ivory trade that leads to most elephant deaths, there’s a real chance to save these singular creatures.

The only thing more rare than a unicorn is an exited unicorn.

At TechCrunch, we cover a lot of startup financings, but we rarely get the opportunity to cover exits. This week was an exception though, as it was exitpalooza as Affirm, Roblox, Airbnb, and Wish all filed to go public. With DoorDash’s IPO filing last week, this is upwards of $100 billion in potential float heading to the public markets as we make our way to the end of a tumultuous 2020.

All those exits raise a simple question – who made the money? Which VCs got in early on some of the biggest startups of the decade? Who is going to be buying a new yacht for the family for the holidays (or, like, a fancy yurt for when Burning Man restarts)? The good news is that the wealth is being spread around at least a couple of VC firms, although there are definitely a handful of partners who are looking at a very, very nice check in the mail compared to others.

So let’s dive in.

Index Ventures, a London- and San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm that primarily invests in Europe and the U.S., recently announced its latest partner. Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, currently COO of London-based fintech GoCardless and previously the chief product officer of Skyscanner, will join Index in January.

Gonzalez-Cadenas is a seasoned entrepreneur and operator, but has also become a prolific angel investor in the U.K. and Europe over the last three years, making more than 50 angel investments in total. Well-regarded by founders and co-investors, his transition to a full-time role in venture capital feels like quite a natural one.

Earlier this week, TechCrunch caught up with Gonzalez-Cadenas over Zoom to learn more about his new role at Index and how he intends to source deals and support founders. Index’s latest hire also shared his insights on Europe’s venture market, describing this era as the “best moment in entrepreneurship in Europe.”

TechCrunch: Let me start by asking, why do you want to become a VC? You’re obviously a well-established entrepreneur and operator, are you sure venture capital is the career for you?

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas: I’ve been an angel investor for the last three years and this is something that has basically grown for me quite organically. I started doing just a handful and seeing if this is something I like and over time it has grown quite a lot and so has the number of entrepreneurs I’m partnered with. And this is something I’ve been increasingly more excited to do. So it has grown organically and something that emotionally has been getting closer and closer as time has passed.

And the things I like more specifically are: One, I’m quite a curious person, and for me, investing gives you the possibility of learning a lot about different sectors, about different entrepreneurs, different ways of building businesses, and that is something that I enjoy a lot.

The second bit is that I care a lot about helping entrepreneurs, especially the next generation of entrepreneurs, build great businesses in Europe. I’ve been very lucky, in the past, to learn from great people, like Gareth [Williams, Skyscanner co-founder] and Hiroki [Takeuchi. CEO at GoCardless], in my journey. I feel a duty of helping the next generation of entrepreneurs and sharing all the things that I’ve learnt. I care a lot about setting up founders as much as possible for success and sharing all those experiences I’ve learned [from].

These are the key two motivations that have led me to decide that it would be a great time now to move to the investing side.

How have you managed your deal flow while having a full-time job and where is that deal flow coming from?

It is typically coming in three buckets. A part of it is coming from my entrepreneur and operator network. So there are entrepreneurs and operators I know that are referring other entrepreneurs to me. Another bucket is other investors that I typically co-invest with. Another bucket is venture capitalists. I basically tend to invest quite a lot with VCs and in some cases they are referring deals to me.

In terms of managing it alongside GoCardless, it takes quite a lot of effort. It requires a lot of dedication and time invested during evenings and weekends.

The good thing is that my network typically tends to send me quite highly curated deals so essentially the deal flow I have luckily tends to be quite high quality, which makes things a bit more manageable. But don’t get me wrong, it still takes quite a lot of effort even if the deal flow is relatively high quality.

Presumably you haven’t been able to be all that hands-on as an angel investor, so how are you going to make that transition and what is it that you think you bring with the operational side to venture?

The way I think about this is, the entrepreneurs I typically invest in and their companies tend to be quite capable in their day-to-day perspective. Where they tend to find more value in interactions with me is what I call the “moments of truth.” Those key decisions, those key points in the journey where essentially it can influence the trajectory of the business in a fundamental way. It could be things like, I am fundraising and I don’t know how to position the business. Or I’m thinking about my strategy for the next 18 months and I will basically welcome an experienced person giving me a qualified opinion.

Or I have a big people problem and I don’t know how to solve that problem and I need that third person who has been in my shoes before. Or it could be that I’m thinking about how to organize my team as I move from startup to scale-up and I need help from someone who has scaled teams before. Or could be that I’m hiring three executives and I don’t know what a great CMO looks like. It’s those high-impact, high-leverage questions that the entrepreneurs tend to find helpful engaging with me, as opposed to very detailed day-to-day things that most of the entrepreneurs I work with tend to be quite capable of doing. And so far that model is working. The other thing is that the model is quite scalable because you are engaging 2-3 times per year but those times are high quality and highly impactful for the entrepreneur.

I typically also tend to have pretty regular and frequent communication with entrepreneurs on Slack. It’s more like quick questions that can be solved, and I tend to get quite a lot of that. So I think it’s that bimodel approach of high-frequency questions that we can solve by asynchronous means or high-impact moments a few times per year where, essentially, we need to sit down and we need to think together deeply about the problem.

And I tend to do nothing in the middle, where essentially, it’s stuff that is not so impactful but takes a huge amount of time for everyone, that doesn’t tend to be the most effective way of helping entrepreneurs. Obviously, I’m guided by what entrepreneurs want from perspective, so I’m always training the models in response to what they need.

Onit, a workflow software company based in Houston with a legal component, announced this week that it has acquired 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield alum McCarthyFinch.  Onit intends to use the startup’s AI skills to beef up its legal workflow software offerings.

The companies did not share the purchase price.

After evaluating a number of companies in the space, Onit focused on McCarthyFinch, which gives it an artificial intelligence component the company’s legal workflow software had been lacking. “We evaluated about a dozen companies in the AI space and dug in deep on six of them. McCarthyFinch stood out from the pack. They had the strongest technology and the strongest team,” Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit told TechCrunch.

The company intends to inject that AI into its existing Aptitude workflow platform.”Part of what really got me excited about McCarthyFinch was the very first conversation I had with their CEO, Nick Whitehouse. They considered themselves an AI platform, which complemented our approach and our workflow automation platform, Aptitude,” Elfman said.

McCarthyFinch CEO and co-founder Whitehouse says the startup was considering whether to raise more money or look at being acquired earlier this year when Onit made its interest known. At first, he wasn’t really interested in being acquired and was hoping to go the partner route, but over time that changed.

“I was very much on the partner track, and was probably quite dismissive to begin with because I was quite focused on that partner strategy. But as we talked, all egos aside, it just made sense [to move to acquisition talks],” Whitehouse said.

The talks heated up in May and the deal officially closed last week. With Onit, headquartered in Houston and McCarthyFinch in New Zealand, the negotiations and meetings all happened on Zoom. The two companies’ principals have never met in person. The plan is for McCarthyFinch to stay in place, even after the pandemic ends. Whitehouse expects to make a trip to Houston whenever it is safe to do so.

Whitehouse says his experience with Battlefield has had a huge influence on him. “Just the insights that we got through Battlefield, the coaching that we got, those things have stuck with me and they’ll stick with me for the rest of my life,” he said.

The company had 45 customers and 17 employees at the time of the acquisition. It raised $5 million US dollars along the way. Now it becomes part of Onit as the journey continues.

Bringing the buy-now pay-later model that transformed companies like Klarna and Affirm into billion dollar businesses to small businesses across the U.S. has netted the payment and lending company Credit Key another $33.85 million in funding.

The Los Angeles-based company raised its latest cash from Greycroft, Bonfire Ventures, Loeb.nyc and other, undisclosed, investors, the company said.

“B2B e-commerce continues to expand at an incredible pace, but a great majority of merchants still lack the payment tools that their customers are asking for,” said John Tomich, co-founder and chief executive of Credit Key, in a statement. “As we equip more and more merchants with our point-of-sale financing option, we continue to see data that points to larger orders, fewer abandoned carts and improved customer acquisition.”

For businesses, the company offers an alternative payment solution that quickly provides financing for purchases at the point-of-sale.

Credit Key assumes the credit risk and loan servicing, and buyers can have a transparent payment plan with competitive interest rates, the company said.

The company is tackling a huge market. There are more than $9 trillion in business-to-business payments processed in the US each year, and while (only) $1.3 trillion of those payments happen online, the percentage of e-commerce transactions is growing rapidly.

Credit Key said that it expects the e-commerce market to reach $1.8 trillion by 2022.

“As small and medium sized businesses increase online purchasing, they’re eager to find alternatives to the limits of both traditional trade credit and the common credit card,” Tomich said. “We anticipate continued momentum and we’re excited to assist small businesses as they work through the recovery and position themselves for the future.”

AllRight is a platform for English language learning, aimed at children four years or older, which combines lessons with real teachers and homework with ‘AI-powered’ tutors. It’s now raised a $5 million Series A round led by Genesis Investments, with participation from TMT Investments, TerraVC, and existing investors Flashpoint and Misha Lyalin.

The Ukraine-based startup will now enter new markets and strengthen its positions in Poland, Russia, Spain, and Latin America. AllRight’s competitors include Open English, LingoKids (raised $22M), MyBuddy, Preply ($15M) and NovaKid ($2.3M).

There are approximately 1.5 billion English language learners globally and the number of children among them reached 500 million in 2020. The global English language learning market is projected to reach $55 billion by 2025, growing at 7% annually, according to reports.

So the company targets markets with low online education penetration rates, such as emerging markets. Since its launch in 2017 AllRight has launched Spanish – English, Polish – English, and Russian – English language pairs and garnered 9,000 students, who take 50,000 lessons per month.

The learning process is powered by a real-time collaboration platform for teachers and students, doing live lessons online with lessons ‘quality controlled by AI’ and an ‘AI-powered tutor’ with a voice-only interface with speech recognition and synthesis. This allows children to practice spoken English with AI. The app has obviously benefited from the fact that many lessons in schools are now conducted virtually due to the global pandemic.

AllRight was founded by Oleg Oksyuk, and the team is comprised of people drawn from 51Talks, SkyEng, Cisco, and Yandex. He said: “Our pilot language pair launch three years ago showed that learning a language with gamification in early childhood produces excellent results. That is why in March 2019 we directed our efforts to further delivery of an affordable edutainment program and launched Spanish-English and Polish-English language pairs.”

Vitaly Laptenok, General Partner of Genesis Investments said: “This is the biggest deal of Genesis Investments by date…The platform currently demonstrates 3x year-over-year growth and the team supports these dynamics by entering new markets and scaling there.”

This morning Wish, a well-known mobile ecommerce startup, filed to go public. It joins Affirm, Airbnb, and Roblox in filing this week as many well-known and valuable private companies look to debut before the year ends and the holidays start.

Wish’s S-1 (which is filed under its corporate name ContextLogic) is of particular interest given that COVID-19 and the global pandemic have changed consumer behavior around the world in 2020. As going to stores became more risky over time, many shoppers turned to buying more goods from the Internet, bolstering ecommerce players like Shopify, BigCommerce, as well as companies that facilitate online payments, like Square and PayPal.

How has the pandemic impacted Wish? It appears to have accelerated its growth.

Looking back in time, Wish saw its revenue growth slow in 2019, before expanding much more quickly in 2020. From 2017 to 2018, for example, when Wish saw revenues of $1.10 billion and $1.73 billion respectively, it grew 57%. But from 2018 to 2019, its revenue only grew to $1.90 billion, up a far-smaller 10%.

More recently, the situation has improved for the digital retailer, with Wish managing to grow more quickly in the first three months of 2020. In the first nine months of 2019, Wish racked up revenues of $1.33 billion. In the same period of 2020 the company’s top line grew to $1.75 billion, up 32% from the year-ago result.

That’s far better than the 10% growth pace that Wish showed in 2019. Wish’s growth acceleration helps explain why it is going public now: it has a growth story to tell investors.

But the company’s accelerated growth has come at a cost, namely rising losses. During the first three quarters of 2019, Wish posted net losses of just $5 million, before some preferred stock costs pushed its total deficit to $12 million. In the same period of 2020 Wish lost a far steeper $176 million.

Wish’s falling gross margins have not helped. In 2018, Wish had gross margins of 84%. That number fell to 77% in 2019, and then to just 65% in the first three quarters of 2020.

But the ecommerce player did have some more positive details to show, as this table details:

Improving free cash flow in 2020 compared to 2019? Check. Monthly active user growth rising nicely? Yes. Active buyers up compared to the year-ago period? Yep. Looking at the company’s adjusted profitability is not encouraging, but a 6% adjusted EBITDA margin won’t send investors packing for the hills if they buy Wish’s growth story.

COVID-19 was not simply a boost to Wish, its S-1 makes clear. The pandemic shut some supply hubs, slowed supply chains, and lengthened delivery times. But the company also said that it “benefited from greater mobile usage and less competition from physical retail as a result of shelter-in-place mandates” and “benefited from increased user spending due to U.S. government stimulus programs.” Noting that stimulus is fading, Wish warns investors in the document that it “cannot assure you that increased levels of mobile commerce will continue when COVID-19 has subsided or otherwise, or that the U.S. government will offer additional stimulus programs.”

Wish is wealthy, with around $1.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. It also has no long-term debts that could cause concern.

Finally, who is going to win in the deal? Most notably Peter Szulczewski, Wish’s founder and CEO. He controls 65.5% of the Company’s Class B shares and around 58% of its total voting power, pre-IPO. Major investors include DST Global, Formation8, Founder Fund, GGV Capital, and Republic Technologies.

Quite a lot of venture hopes and returns are riding on this IPO, then. More soon.

Broadband communication satellite company OneWeb has emerged from its Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection status, the company announced today. It’s now also officially owned by a consortium consisting of the UK government and India’s Bharti Global, and Neil Masterson is now installed as CEO, replacing outgoing chief executive Adrian Steckel, who will remain as a Board advisor.

OneWeb seems eager to get back to actively launching the satellites that will make up its 650-strong constellation – it has set December 17 as the target date for its next launch. The company has 74 satellite already on orbit across three prior launches, which occurred prior to its bankruptcy filing in March.

OneWeb’s acquisition by the combined UK government/Bharti Global tie-up was revealed in July, providing a path for the financially beleaguered company to get back to active status with $1 billion in equity funding. The UK-based company will continue to operate primarily from the UK via this new deal, and it’s being positioned as a key cornerstone in positioning the UK as a space sector leader and innovator.

The company also announced that its joint-venture manufacturing facility with Airbus has resumed operation in Florida, and will continue to produce new spacecraft for future launches. The plan is to launch additional satellites throughout next year and 2022, and then begin offering commercial service in select areas late in 2021, with a global service expansion intended for 2022.

U.S.-based startup Neatsy AI is using the iPhone’s depth-sensing FaceID selfie camera as a foot scanner to capture 3D models for predicting a comfortable sneaker fit.

Its app, currently soft launched for iOS but due to launch officially next month, asks the user a few basic questions about sneaker fit preference before walking through a set of steps to capture a 3D scan of their feet using the iPhone’s front-facing camera. The scan is used to offer personalized fit predictions for a selection of sneakers offered for sale in-app — displaying an individualized fit score (out of five) in green text next to each sneaker model.

Shopping for shoes online can lead to high return rates once buyers actually get to slip on their chosen pair, since shoe sizing isn’t standardized across different brands. That’s the problem Neatsy wants its AI to tackle by incorporating another more individual fit signal into the process.

The startup, which was founded in March 2019, has raised $400K in pre-seed funding from angel investors to get its iOS app to market. The app is currently available in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Canada and Russia. 

Neatsy analyzes app users’ foot scans using a machine learning model it’s devised to predict a comfy fit across a range of major sneaker brands — currently including Puma, Nike, Jordan Air and Adidas — based on scanning the insoles of sneakers, per CEO and founder Artem Semyanov.

He says they’re also factoring in the material shoes are made of and will be honing the algorithm on an ongoing basis based on fit feedback from users. (The startup says it’s secured a US patent for its 3D scanning tech for shoe recommendations.)

The team tested the algorithm’s efficiency via some commercial pilots this summer — and say they were able to demonstrate a 2.7x reduction in sneaker return rates based on size, and a 1.9x decrease in returns overall, for a focus group with 140 respondents.

Handling returns is clearly a major cost for online retailers — Neatsy estimates that sneaker returns specifically rack up $30BN annually for ecommerce outlets, factoring in logistics costs and other factors like damaged boxes and missing sneakers.

“All in all, shoe ecommerce returns vary among products and shops between 30% and 50%. The most common reasons for this category are fit & size mismatch,” says Semyanov, who headed up the machine learning team at Prism Labs prior to founding Neatsy.

“According to Zappos, customers who purchase its most expensive footwear ultimately return ~50% of everything they buy. 70% online shoppers make returns each year. Statista estimates return deliveries will cost businesses $550 billion by 2020,” he tells us responding to questions via email.

“A 2019 survey from UPS found that, for 73% of shoppers, the overall returns experience impacts how likely they are to purchase from a given retailer again, and 68% say the experience impacts their overall perceptions of the retailer. That’s the drama here!

“Retailers are forced to accept steep costs of returns because otherwise, customers won’t buy. Vs us who want to treat the main reasons of returns rather than treating the symptoms.”

While ecommerce giants like Amazon address this issue by focusing on logistics to reducing friction in the delivery process, speeding up deliveries and returns so customers spend less time waiting to get the right stuff, scores of startups have been trying to tackle size and fit with a variety of digital (and/or less high tech) tools over the past five+ years — from 3D body models to ‘smart’ sizing suits or even brand- and garment-specific sizing tape (Nudea‘s fit tape for bras) — though no one has managed to come up with a single solution that works for everything and everyone. And a number of these startups have deadpooled or been acquired by ecommerce platforms without a whole lot to show for it.

While Neatsy is attempting to tackle what plenty of other founders have tried to do on the fit front, it is at least targeting a specific niche (sneakers) — a relatively narrow focus that may help it hone a useful tool.

It’s also able to lean on mainstream availability of the iPhone’s sensing hardware to get a leg up. (Whereas a custom shoe design startup that’s been around for longer, Solely Original, has offered custom fit by charging a premium to send out an individual fit kit.)

But even zeroing in on sneaker comfort, Neatsy’s foot scanning process does require the user to correctly navigate quite a number of steps (see the full flow in the below video). Plus you need to have a pair of single-block colored socks handy (stripy sock lovers are in trouble). So it’s not a two second process, though the scan only has to be done once.

At the time of writing we hadn’t been able to test Neatsy’s scanning process for ourselves as it requires an iPhones with a FaceID depth-sensing camera. On this writer’s 2nd-gen iPhone SE, the app allowed me to swipe through each step of the scan instruction flow but then hung at what should have been the commencement of scanning — displaying a green outline template of a left foot against a black screen.

This is a bug the team said they’ll be fixing so the scanner gets turned off entirely for iPhone models that don’t have the necessary hardware. (Its App Store listing states its compatible with iPhone SE (2nd generation), though doesn’t specify the foot scan feature isn’t.) 

While the current version of Neatsy’s app is a direct to consumer ecommerce play, targeting select sneaker models at app savvy Gen Z/Millennials, it’s clearly intended as a shopfront for retailers to check out the technology.

When as ask about this Semyanov confirms its longer term ambition is for its custom fit model to become a standard piece of the ecommerce puzzle.

“Neatsy app is our fastest way to show the world our vision of what the future online shop should be,” he tells TechCrunch. “It attracts users to shops and we get revenue share when users buy sneakers via us. The app serves as a new low-return sales channel for a retailer and as a way to see the economic effect on returns by themselves.

“Speaking long term we think that our future is B2B and all ecommerce shops would eventually have a fitting tech, we bet it will be ours. It will be the same as having a credit card payment integration in your online shop.”

Reddit has appointed Paula Price, who has served on the board of six public companies, including Accenture and Deutsche Bank, to its board of directors. Price’s appointment makes her one of two Black directors on the company’s board.

“Paula’s vast experience as a world-class financial leader and strategic advisor will be a tremendous asset to us in the years ahead,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a statement. “Best of all, she embodies the two qualities most important to us for this Board seat: expertise leading companies through periods of transformative growth and real passion for Reddit’s mission.”

Before Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian stepped down from the board and urged the company to appoint a Black director to take his place, Reddit had zero Black board members. Reddit took Ohanian’s advice and appointed Y Combinator Michael Seibel to the board.

We’ve seen an increase in Black board members across the board at tech companies in the last couple of years. Most recently, Pinterest announced its first Black board member in August, followed by the addition of a second one in October.

Here’s a look at Black board member representation at major tech companies.