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As communicating with customers across the world grows ever more challenging due to multiple channels, tools and networking providers, companies are looking for a way to simplify it all. Sinch, a company that makes communications APIs, announced a new tool this morning called the Conversation API designed to make it easier to interact with customers across the planet using multiple messaging products.

Sinch chief product officer Vikram Khandpur says that business is being conducted in different messaging channels such as SMS, WhatsApp or Viber depending on location, and businesses have to be able to communicate with their customers wherever they happen to be from a technology and geographic standpoint. What’s more, this need has become even more pronounced during a pandemic when online communication has become paramount.

Khandpur says that up until now, Sinch has concentrated on optimizing the SMS experience for actions like customer acquisition, customer engagement, delivery notifications and customer support. Now the company wants to take that next step into richer omni-channel messaging.

The idea is to provide a set of tools to help marketing teams communicate across these multiple channels by walking them through the processes required by each player. “By writing to our API, what we can provide is that we can get our customers on all these platforms if they are not already on these platforms,” he said.

He uses WhatsApp as an example because it has a very defined process for brands to work with it. “On WhatsApp, there is this concept of creating these pre-approved templates, and they need to be reviewed, curated and finally approved by the WhatsApp team. We help them with that process, and then do the same with other channels and platforms, so we take that complexity away from the brand,” Khandpur explained.

He adds, “By giving us that message once, we take care of all of [the different tools] behind the scenes transcoding when needed. So if you give us a very rich message with images and videos, WhatsApp may want to render it in a certain way, but then Viber renders that in a different way, and we take care of that.

Examples of transcoding across messaging channels. Image Credits: Sinch

Marketers can use the Conversation API to define parameters like using WhatsApp first in India, but if the targeted customer doesn’t open WhatsApp, then fall back to SMS.

The company has made four acquisitions in the last year including ACL Mobile in India and SAP’s Interconnect Messaging business to enhance its presence across the world.

Sinch, which competes with Twilio in the communications API space, may be one of the most successful companies you never heard of, generating over $500 million in revenue last year while processing over 110 billion messages.

The company launched in Sweden in 2008 and has never taken a dime of venture capital, yet has been profitable since early days. In fact, it’s publicly traded on the NASDAQ Exchange in Stockholm and will be reporting earnings next week.

Celebrity investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Rebel Wilson, Ruby Rose, Darren Criss, Baron Davis, Tove Lo, and Casey Neistat have come together to back the Los Angeles-based thc-infused drink company, Cann, the company said.

It’s the latest in a string of deals that show the strength of the market for alternative intoxicants — at least in California.

News of the funding follows yesterday’s announcement that the Los Angeles-based, national liquor delivery service Saucey would be merging with a marijuana dispensary and delivery service, Emjay under the mantle of Pacific Coast Holdings.

For its part, Cann has become the fastest growing THC beverage on the market with over 2 million cans of the stuff sold (I’ve had it. It’s good.).

For the company’s backers — and its founders — the pitch that Cann is a better alternative to alcohol simply resonates.

“Cann sits at the intersection of two powerful trends we’ve been monitoring at goop for some time: the
‘sober curious’ and ‘cannabis curious’ movements,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, the multi-hyphenate actress-entrepreneur-musician (she sings!) who founded the lifestyle and wellness brand, goop. “There’s no reason why alcohol should be so much easier to purchase than Cann, and I’m confident the founders will lead the charge in finding ways to integrate it into the same purchasing channels and drinking environments.”

Cann’s not the only company looking to carve out a slice of the liquor market with an alternative intoxicant. There’s also Kin Euphorics, which also pitches itself as an alcohol alternative. Then there’s a slew of CBD and THC infused drinks that have managed to attract venture backing. They include K-Zen Beverages, which has raised $5 million from the investment firm DCM to roll out its line of intoxicants and California Dreamin’ is a Y Combinator-backed intoxicant containing a whopping 10 milligrams of THC. Sweet Reason raised money from Lerer Hippeau for its CBD-sparkling drink and Recess, Daytrip, Infuzed, and Dram all have offerings as well.

Cann’s cans come with 2 milligrams of THC and 4 milligrams of CBD, which, after a few cans of Cann is enough for a light buzz.

Actress Ruby Rose cited the company’s commitment to diversity, with a staff that’s comprised equally of men and women and where people of color make up 33% of the total headcount.

For its next act, Cann is looking to grow its geographic footprint. The company expanded into Nevada in the past year and is eyeing four more states within the next six months, according to a statement.

Over the course of the last few years, Microsoft started adding the concept of ‘data types’ to Excel, that is, the ability to pull in geography and real-time stock data from the cloud, for example. Thanks to its partnership with Wolfram, Excel now features over 100 of these data types that can flow into a spreadsheet. But you won’t be limited to only these pre-built data types for long. Soon, Excel will also let you bring in your own data types.

That means you can have a ‘customer’ data type, for example, that can bring in rich customer data from a third-party service into Excel. The conduit fort his is either Power BI, which now allows Excel to pull in any data you previously published there, or Microsoft’s Power Query feature in Excel that lets you connect to a wide variety of data sources, including common databases like SQL Server, MySQL and PostreSQL, as well as third-party services like Teradata and Facebook.

“Up to this point, the Excel grid has been flat… it’s two dimensional,” Microsoft’ head of product for Excel, Brian Jones, writes in today’s announcement. “You can lay out numbers, text, and formulas across the flexible grid, and people have built amazing things with those capabilities. Not all data is flat though and forcing data into that 2D structure has its limits. With Data Types we’ve added a 3rd dimension to what you can build with Excel. Any cell can now contain a rich set of structured data… in just a single cell.”

The promise here is that this will make Excel more flexible and I’m sure a lot of enterprises will adapt these capabilities. These companies aren’t likely to move to Airtable or similar Excel-like tools anytime soon but have data analysis needs that are only increasing now that every company gathers more data than it knows what to do with. This is also a feature that none of Excel’s competitors currently offer, including Google Sheets.

On the heels of Germany announcing another lockdown to try to contain the rapid rise in Covid-19 cases in the country, one of the hottest startups in its capital city is announcing the closing of a large convertible note to help it keep moving forward.

GetYourGuide, which in brighter times runs a thriving and viral business of arranging and running a series of walks and other exploration experiences for people touring different parts of the world — viral because it’s been taken up by a critical mass people who love to share pictures of their experiences on social media — has now closed funding, in the form of a convertible note, of €114 million ($133 million).

The funding is being led by Searchlight Capital, with SoftBank Vision Fund, KKR, Battery Ventures, Highland Europe, Spark Capital, Lakestar, Heartcore Capital, NGP Capital, and the founding team all also investing.

The company tells me that the convertible note will convert into equity when it next raises a round, with the investors getting a stake in the company at that point based on its valuation in that round. That round is not anticipated to be for another 12-18 months, which could be why some might think of a convertible note as a loan (and strictly speaking they are called ).

For some context, the company was last valued at over $1 billion after it raised a Series E of $484 million in 2019.

The funding comes not just at a tumultuous time for Germany amidst the global health pandemic, but the world in general, and also the tourism and travel industry in particular, which has been hit especially hard by the shut down of many flights and the ability to travel places, the closures of many facilities, as well as a general reluctance from consumers to congregate with lots of people who are not already in their “bubble.”

Johannes Reck, the co-founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, described the situation back in March as a “nuclear winter” to us.

However, at least this summer, things slightly started to recover, with GetYourGuide seeing a bounce back in its home country with ticket sales up 60% in Germany over the warmer months, with people also looking at making far-far-foward bookings in general, too.

All that said, GetYourGuide tells me that it’s now seen ticket sales of 45 million in aggregate on its platform, which is only up 5 million on its figures from January this year — a major slowdown in growth that speaks to the struggles companies like it are facing, and very likely far from the projections it had originally made for its expansion.

The plan is still to keep on keeping on, though, with an IPO remaining in its sights for the longer term.

Reck said today that the fundraising is one of the easier rounds it’s closed in its life as a startup — a mark of how investors, who are still flush with lots of money to invest, will continue to use some of it to help shore up the most promising but most hard-hit of its portfolio companies through the current crisis.

“After the pandemic, people will travel again, and experiencing the sights and culture of the world’s iconic destinations will be what they crave the most,” said Reck in a separate statement. “As the global tourism industry prepares to rebuild, GetYourGuide’s mission to give the whole world access to incredible experiences matters more than ever. This new financing is a vote of confidence in GetYourGuide’s readiness to lead the recovery of global tourism.”

It’s also enough of a promise that new backers are also coming in, it seems. Eric Zinterhofer at Searchlight Capital is a first-time backer of the company with this funding. “We have a natural affinity with the talented, entrepreneurial team at GetYourGuide, given Searchlight’s own enterprising culture and our success in partnering with founder-led businesses,” he said. “While 2020 has undoubtedly been a challenging year for the travel sector, we believe GetYourGuide has the right strategy, capabilities and investor support in place to rebound strongly once the pandemic is under control. We are excited to begin our work together.”

ByteDance on Thursday unveiled its first consumer hardware product, a smart light lamp with a display, that it says is part of its education technology portfolio as the Chinese internet giant continues to expand to categories beyond social video.

The Dali smart lamp features a display, camera, and a built-in digital assistant. The Dali smart lamp (in Chinese), which starts at $119, is aimed at school-going children who can use the device to finish their homework, ByteDance said (in Chinese) at a press conference. The camera will enable parents to tutor their kids and check in remotely via a mobile app.

The smart lamp could prove successful in China where, like many other markets, a large number of parents struggle to find a balance between their work and personal lives, and engage better with their kids.

ByteDance said the smart lamp is part of the company’s push into its education category, which it is now calling Dali Education (Dali is Chinese for big force). The Chinese giant, which owns viral short-video app TikTok, forayed into the education category several years ago.

The company today runs a range of education services including GoGoKid, which teaches kids English classes, and Qingbei, which replicates classroom experience. All of these products, including Guagua Long and Open Language, are now part of Dali Education umbrella.

Last year, ByteDance’s TikTok also expanded its education offerings in India, which until New Delhi banned the app in the country in late June this year was its biggest market outside of China.

The company said more than 10,000 employees are already working on its education arm. No word on whether ByteDance plans to launch the Dali smart lamp outside of China.

Rita Liao contributed to this report.

Austin and El Segundo-based Slingshot Aerospace was born out of a realization that while there is a massive amount of information collected by observation technology aboard satellites, airplanes, drones and beyond, the analytics and turnaround of said info into something actionable often took a long time – sometimes crucial insights that would’ve been valuable in the moment for Air Force pilots, for instance, would be processed and returned long after they were actually in the air and on a mission. Slingshot was founded three years ago to help turn Earth and space-based observation data into something useful when it’s needed, and now the startup has raised an $8 million Series A to grow its team and expand its focus to new industries beyond the aerospace and defense customers it currently serves.

I spoke to Slingshot Aerospace co-founders David Godwin and Melanie Stricklan about their new funding, which brings the company’s total raised overall to $17.1 million. The startup is also already generating plenty of revenue, with early contracts from customers including NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and most recently, the U.S. Space Force for its forthcoming Slingshot Orbital Laboratory simulated training environment.

Godwin, Slingshot’s CEO, explained that initially, the startup has been focused primarily on aerospace and defense customers, which explains the all-star early customer list of companies and public agencies in that field. That has come in part from the experience of Stricklan, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, and their third co-founder, Thomas Ashman, who both spent many years prior to founding the company in the Air Force.

“In the past, the past two tothree years, we haven’t really had a lack of aerospace and government business,” Godwin explained. “It’s definitely taken a lot of our attention. But over this past year, we’ve started exploring other verticals, what we want to do in those verticals, and identifying opportunities. And honestly, we’ve seen, we’ve seen a lot of opportunity there. One of the tricks is just picking which which direction we’re going to lean the hardest into and focus on – so we’re working on that plan right now.”

There should be no shortage of demand for what Slingshot is trying to accomplish. As mentioned above, the startup is unlocking actionable insight from data that until now, has been essentially unusable without time-consuming round-trips to data centers and plenty of off-site processing. Advancements in technology have meant that you could potentially do more with this data in a timely fashion, but systems haven’t necessarily caught up to the technical leading edge.

“I spent 21 years in the Air Force and I flew on a surveillance aircraft that had a synthetic aperture radar on it,” Stricklan explained. “What that meant is it could see through rain,  could see through clouds and it could see at night, unlike a lot of Earth observation optical data, and it could see very far and wide and so that data set was extremely rich, and it had so much potential at the same time. That aircraft that I flew on called, JSTARS, was a battle management platform. So it was also bringing in different feeds of information from different platforms, whether they be satellites, or intelligence feeds from the ground or other aircraft like AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System], etc. One thing that really was challenging was getting real time information down to the warfighter, or even making real-time decisions on board the aircraft from a battle management perspective.”

Essentially, Stricklan said that the only real-time insight they could gather during her time on JSTARS was moving target indicators, to show literally that there were targets in motion on the ground. Other, much more valuable information would be revealed by the analysis of the combined info, but that could take hours, days, weeks or even months to arrive. Slingshot leverages Godwin’s more than two decades of experience with data analytics to provide what he calls “the right data, at the right time, all in one place” in order to enable “faster, better informed decision-making.”

That’s obviously of value and interest to entities like the U.S. Space Force, which is trying to map out how to secure an entirely new warfighting domain, but it’s also valuable to private companies and commercial operators. One area of potentially significant growth for Slingshot is in on-orbit commercial satellite operations, where the increased pace of launch from private companies operating satellite constellations means situational awareness is more important than ever.

Slingshot Aerospace is growing the team, having already expanded to nearly 30 people, with plans to hire more engineers in particular as part of the use of these funds. The Series A was led by ATX Venture Partners, as well as Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Seed fund, Techstars, and Okapi Venture Capital. Angels including the co-founders of Apple-acquired Semetric also participated.