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Fintech startup Revolut has rolled out a handful of additional features over the past few days. The financial app lets you track all your subscriptions that you pay with your Revolut account or your card. In the U.S., Revolut is adding a savings bonus based on your purchasing habits. Finally, business customers can now order metal cards.

Let’s start with subscription tracking. For customers in Europe, Revolut is trying to make it easier to stay on top of your various subscriptions. Direct debit or card transactions are automatically marked as recurring. You can also manually mark transactions as subscriptions in case they aren’t automatically marked.

After that, you can see all your recurring payments from the app and check how much you’re spending with each merchant. If you spot a subscription that you completely forgot, you can block it — future payments will be declined.

And if you don’t have a lot of money on your account, you receive a notification warning you that a subscription payment is coming up. Subscriptions can be accessed from the Payments tab under Scheduled.

If you have multiple bank accounts, some users might switch their payment information to their Revolut card just to keep all their subscriptions in Revolut. It could boost usage.

4.5% bonus on savings accounts in the U.S.

In some markets, Revolut offers savings vaults. As the name suggests, those sub-accounts let you put some money aside and earn interest. You can round up card transactions and save spare change in a vault, you can set up weekly or monthly transactions or you can transfer money manually whenever you want.

In the U.S., customers earn 0.25% annualized percentage yield (APY) with their savings vaults. If you pay for a premium subscription, you get 0.5% APY with a Revolut Premium or Revolut Metal plan.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, you get a generous bonus on top of your normal interest rate. Revolut calculates how much you spent with your Revolut debit card the previous month. That amount is eligible for a 4.5% APY bonus.

For instance, if you spent $400 with your card last month and you have $500 in your savings vault, you’ll receive the 4.5% bonus on $400. You’ll also earn 0.25% to 0.5% on the entire savings vault.

If your savings vault balance is lower than how much you spent with your card last month, your entire vault is eligible for the bonus. Interests are calculated daily using an annualized rate and paid out the first business day of the following month.

Once again, the new feature should boost engagement in the U.S. for both card transactions and savings vaults. Revolut has 13 million customers in total, including 150,000 in the U.S.

Metal cards for business customers

People care about metal cards. That’s why many fintech startups now offer expensive monthly plans with metal cards — N26, Bunq, Curve and Revolut.

But Revolut Business customers have been limited to plastic cards (or virtual cards). If you use Revolut Business for your company, you can now order metal cards depending on your plan.

Revolut Business customers with a free account or a freelancer account can’t order metal cards. Customers on the Grow, Scale or Enterprise plans receive one, two or five metal cards respectively.

And if you want to order more metal cards, it costs £49 per card. You can choose a card among five different colors — black, gold, rose gold, space grey and silver.

Other than a new look, metal cards don’t differ from standard cards. It’s a small perk that you get with a paid plan. Revolut has managed to attract 500,000 customers for its Revolut Business product.

Since the robotic dental surgery assistant Yomi first came on the market in 2019 more than 2,700 patients have stared up at its plastic sheathed metal arms, and now the company behind it, Neocis, has raised $72 million to bring it into more dentists’ offices.

The money came from new investors DFJ Growth and Vivo Capital, with existing investors Mithril Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners, Section 32, and the godfather of robotic surgery Fred Moll all participating in the new funding round.

The new cash haul means that Neocis has raised over $120 million since its launch in 2009.

Robots are proliferating in operating rooms around the country, with more than 6 million robotic-assisted surgeries taking place across multiple specialities. They’ve been scanning, excising, and drilling into brains, hearts, and bones for years, but it’s only been in the past few years that robots have acquired the dexterity necessary to start rooting around in people’s mouths.

In fact, the Yomi is the only robot that’s been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for dental implant surgery.

It’s currently being used by two dental schools — Boston University’s and the school at West Virginia University — to train a cohort of willing dental students.

The Neocis robot is a navigational tool used in planning and completing dental implant surgery. Traditional techniques to dental implantation cuts away a flap of tissue to expose the jaw bone. Using the Yomi robot, doctors don’t need to be quite so invasive with their surgery and can implant teeth more quickly and with less risk of complications from extensive surgeries, the company said.

Not everyone is convinced that robotics are the way forward for surgeries just yet. Writing in the UK-based medical journal The BMJ, three surgeons from Houston, Mike Liang, Naila Dhanani, and Oscar Olavarria lay out the risks and rewards of using medical robots.

The use of robotic surgery is controversial. Many surgeons who advocate for the robot have strong feelings based on their anecdotal experience and perceived relative advantages, while others may have been influenced by industry marketing. Critics, on the other side, argue that users overstate the advantages of this technology and are unwilling to accept the limitations. Much of the published research supporting the use of the robot is derived from observational studies performed by authors receiving funding from the robotic industry. Financial relationships between industry and authors are associated with an enormously increased likelihood of publishing reports favorable to industry. [1,2] When evaluating the true benefit of any new technology on patient outcomes, such bias must be considered

While some innovations and technology have improved medical care and how it is practised, others have been proven ineffective or even harmful. In addition to our recent study, most randomized trials have demonstrated that current robotic platforms provide no measurable benefit in clinical or patient centered outcomes, but do increase cost and operative duration. [3] It is only through high-quality research that the value of new emerging technologies and treatment strategies can be rigorously assessed. Although most individuals in healthcare share the same belief, to our surprise, some do not. [4] It seems obvious that a new surgical device considered an “innovation” requires thorough evaluation through studies of the highest quality. [5]

“As early pioneers of robotic orthopedic surgery technology, we are excited to bring robotics to the world of dental surgery,” said Alon Mozes, Neocis co-founder and chief executive. “This latest round of funding will allow us to expand the reach of our robotic-assisted surgical system and fuel further development of Yomi’s technology platform to deliver increased value to every dental office in the country.”

Back in March, startup studio Betaworks announced that was partnering with James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems to create a new program called Betalab, which would fund and mentor early-stage startups that would try to “Fix the Internet.”

In the initial announcement, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, “While migrating our social lives to the internet allowed us to share our lives and interact with people we never could have before, we are also fragmenting our experiences and relationships as data-driven businesses and governments are tracking almost every inch of our existence.” He also noted that online technologies are being “weaponized to target, fragment, tribalize and disenfranchise citizens, to overwhelm us and our society with disinformation.”

Now Betaworks is unveiling the first four startups selected. Danika Laszuk, general manager of the Betalab program, said that this will be the firm’s first virtual startup program — and for that reason, they deliberately kept it smaller than a standard Betaworks Camp cohort.

“This is the first itme we’ve done this, so I want to see everyone’s face on one Zoom screen,” Laszuk told me.

At the same time, Betalab has kept its applications open and plans to welcome a new cohort of startups in the new year.

There’s an obvious sense of worry in the Betalab mission — a hard-to-dispute belief that the internet has eroded privacy and spread misinformation — but Laszuk argued that the team is looking to tackle these problems with “the optimism of technologists” and the belief there are “a lot of people with great ideas and the wherewithal to build them and fix things in the world.”

How can a startup hope to solve these big problems? Laszuk said that p the Betalab approach focuses, in part, on properly aligning incentives: “We are biased towards the product being the thing that technologist are building. We’re not excited about businesses collecting data to figure out what to do with it later.”

In addition, it sounds like she’s interested in a more pragmatic view towards the big internet platforms.

“We’re looking to invest in a generation of companies that acknowledges Google’s not going anywhere, Facebook’s not going anywhere,” Laszuk said. “People get tons of benefits out of those products. I don’t think we stand in the camp where if we could, we’d snap our fingers and destroy them all tomorrow.”

The goal, she continued, is to support “the internet as it exists today and get all the benefit of the internet” while also providing “a way to safeguard our privacy, to try to incentivize civil discourse as opposed to clickbait and incendiary behavior.”

With all of that said, here are the startups:

• • Savepoint is a mobile games company that uses game mechanics improve players’ lives. (Laszuk acknowledged that the is a bit vague description, and she promised more details once the startup leaves stealth.)
  • International Persuasion Machines is a cybersecurity company building tools to assess and, when necessary, combat algorithmic manipulation and other forms of platform abuse.
  • Synthetaic is a data company trying to eliminate edge cases by “growing” high quality data for machine learning.
  • Nth Party allows customers to exchange encrypted data sets without decrypting them, with the goal of enabling collaboration and personalization without sacrificing privacy.

  WeWork backs New York tech clubhouse Betaworks Studios

   

The Kroger Co., one of the biggest grocery chains in the Midwest is dipping its toe into on-demand delivery and the ghost kitchen craze through a partnership with an Indianapolis-based startup, ClusterTruck.

Supermarkets would seem to be logical places to site the kinds of ghost kitchens that have caught investor’s eye over the past few years and it wouldn’t be the first time that business models from startup companies bubbled up into large national brands, who are better positioned to capitalize on the trends.

Think about the various meal prep kits that launched and raised millions of dollars before being taken over or copied by big retail groceries. Meal prep kits are everywhere in the grocery store these days and supermarkets have had hot food counters dating back decades at least.

Through the partnership with ClusterTruck, Kroger is expanding on a pilot conducted last year, where the grocer set aside 1,000 square feet at participating stores in Carmel and Indianapolis, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio for ClusterTruck staff to cook meals for delivery and in-store pickup.

“Kroger remains focused on providing our customers with fresh food and experiences enabled by industry-leading insights and transformative technology,” said Dan De La  Rosa, Kroger’s group vice president of fresh merchandising, in a statement. “The new on-premise  kitchen, in partnership with ClusterTruck, is an innovation that streamlines ordering,  preparation and delivery, supporting Kroger as we meet the sustained customer demand for quick, fresh restaurant-quality meals, especially as we navigate an unprecedented health crisis that has affected every aspect of our lives, including  mealtime.” 

The idea, according to Kroger, is to continue to capitalize on the shift to digital deliveries and sales. In the second quarter of the year, the company said it saw over 100% growth in its digital sales.

Ghost kitchens (or cloud kitchens) caught investors’ attention when Uber co-founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick raised over a hundred million dollars to make the idea his next big bet after Uber. Interest and investment into the model, which sees companies offer food prep and storage spaces for would-be food truck and delivery entrepreneurs, soared. Kalanick’s CloudKitchens have gone on to raise several hundreds of millions of dollars and spawned competitors like the Pasadena, Calif.-based company Kitchen United.

Not everyone is convinced that the dark kitchen or cloud kitchen trend is all that it’s made out to be. My colleagues at TechCrunch have taken the idea to task for its reliance on some WeWork -ian assumptions around margins.

But if anything could make the model go, it’s the combination of existing infrastructure and digital efficiencies. That’s likely what Kroger is hoping to leverage.

It’s an interesting experiment at least and one worth tracking.

The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so they relatively new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim, in partnership with The Third Floor, a Hollywood VFX firm that worked on blockbusters including Gravity, The Martian and The Mandalorian. The goal is to generate a simulator that can replicate real-world physics, and provide interactive training capabilities for the Space Force.

In total, the partners have received $2 million towards development of the sim, including a $1 million contract from the Space Force itself, as well as $1 million in funding from ATX Venture Partners. The end result will be called the “Slingshot Orbital Laboratory,” and will be used to provide Space Force members with a better understanding of how objects and spacecraft operate and behave in the unique theater of outer space.

“Space operators need to understand complicated concepts like astrodynamics, the effects of various items in orbit, and how spacecrafts maneuver among other objects in space—all of which demand more adaptive, interactive, and tailorable educational tools than what we are currently using,” said Col. Max Lantz, Commandant, National Security Space Institute, United States Air Force in a press release. “Building an immersive environment to drive better comprehension of these foundational theories will be vital to support the Space Force.”

Slingshot Aerospace, which is a provider of data analytics, tools and computer vision related to both aerospace and terrestrial intelligence, will be handling all the informatics components of the system, while The Third Floor will take care of the immersive visuals. The Laboratory will aim to be a tool that’s simple to use, with the goal of creating a final product that’s accessible to service members with any level of education and technical understanding.

Anyone else getting Ender’s Game Battle Room vibes from this announcement?

IBM, a company that originally made its name out of its leadership in building a myriad of enterprise hardware (quite literally: its name is an abbreviation for International Business Machines), is taking one more step away from that legacy and deeper into the world of cloud services. The company today announced that it plans to spin off its managed infrastructure services unit, a $19 billion business, to help it focus more squarely on newer opportunities in hybrid cloud applications and artificial intelligence.

Infrastrucuture services includes a range of services based around legacy infrastructure and digital transformation related to it. It includes things like testing and assembly, but also  product engineering and lab services, among other things. A spokesperson confirmed to me that the deal will not include the company’s servers business, only infrastructure services.

IBM said it expects to complete the process — a tax-free spinoff for shareholders — by the end of 2021. It has not yet given a name to “NewCo” but it said that out of the gate the spun off company will have 90,000 employees, 4,600 big enterprise clients in 115 countries, a backlog of $60 billion in business, “and more than twice the scale of its nearest competitor” in the area of infrastructure services. Others that compete against it include the likes of BMC and Microsoft.

At the same time that IBM announced the news, it also gave some updated guidance for Q3, which it plans to report officially later this month. It said it expects revenues of $17.6 billion, with GAAP diluted earnings per share from continuing operations of $1.89, and operating (non-GAAP) earnings per share of $2.58. As a point of comparison, in Q3 2019 it reported higher revenues of $18 billion. Last quarter it had revenues of $18.1 billion. Tellingly, the divisions that contained infrastructure services saw declines last quarter.

The market seems to like the news: IBM shares are trading up almost 5% ahead of the market opening.

The move is a significant shift for the company and underscores a bigger sea change in how enterprise IT has evolved and looks to continue changing in the future.

IBM is betting that legacy infrastructure and the servicing of it, while continuing to net revenues, will not grow as it has in the past, and as companies continue with their modernization (or “digital transformation,” as consultants like to refer to it today), they will turn increasingly to outsourced infrastructure and using cloud services, both to run their businesses and to build the services that interface with consumers.

IBM, often referred to as “Big Blue”, is using the announcement as the start of an effort to streamline its business to spur growth (maybe we’ll have to rename it “Medium Blue.”).

“IBM is laser-focused on the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, in a statement. “Client buying needs for application and infrastructure services are diverging, while adoption of our hybrid cloud platform is accelerating. Now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best. IBM will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. NewCo will have greater agility to design, run and modernize the infrastructure of the world’s most important organizations. Both companies will be on an improved growth trajectory with greater ability to partner and capture new opportunities –creating value for clients and shareholders.”

Its purchase of Red Hat in 2019 is perhaps its most notable investment in recent times in IBM’s own transformation.

“We have positioned IBM for the new era of hybrid cloud,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Executive Chairman in a statement. “Our multi-year transformation created the foundation for the open hybrid cloud platform, which we then accelerated with the acquisition of Red Hat. At the same time, our managed infrastructure services business has established itself as the industry leader, with unrivaled expertise in complex and mission-critical infrastructure work. As two independent companies, IBM and NewCo will capitalize on their respective strengths. IBM will accelerate clients’digital transformation journeys, and NewCo will accelerate clients’infrastructure modernization efforts. This focus will result in greater value, increased innovation, and faster execution for our clients.”

More to come.

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Spark Capital.

The new investment gives 2011-founded MessageBird a whopping $3 billion valuation, and includes participation from Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and New View Capital. Existing investors Accel, Atomico, and Y Combinator also followed on.

Notably, MessageBird spent its first six years largely bootstrapped, claiming to have been profitable from day one. Aside from going through YC’s accelerator programme, the company’s first institutional investment came in late 2017 when it raised $60 million in Series A funding from U.S-based Accel and Europe’s Atomico. TechCrunch understands that off the back of accelerated growth, a $40 million Series B was quietly closed in February 2019 from existing investors but never announced.

Originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in a API — MessageBird has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omni-channel.

“People think of live chat as a ‘live’ channel, but [there’s] no ability to jump to other channels,” Vis told me in June when the company launched its omni-channel chat widget and Intercom competitor. “People still have to wait with a browser window open for a response during peak times. With the launch of the first-ever omni-channel widget, customers can now opt to have a business get back to them on WhatsApp, Messenger or the messaging platform of their choice. This means no more customers waiting in line, online, and agents don’t get flooded with tickets and can better manage customer relationships and response times”.

In a call earlier this week, Vis told me that the Series C was raised remotely during lockdown, and comes at a time where enterprises are increasingly looking for “messaging-first” customer communication tools across channels. In part, he puts this down to the coronavirus trend of companies wanting to move their sales and customer service fully remote and online, but concedes that with enterprise sales cycles typically quite long, in many instances this expedited digitisation was already underway.

To that end, MessageBird says the funding will be used to triple the size of its global team and further expand into its core markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Vis doesn’t rule out M&A activity, either, including both acqui-hires and companies with products or technology that can add value to MessageBird’s omni-channel offering.

One area the company is bolstering, for example, is the automation capabilities of its “Flow Builder” software, which aims to let customer service agents automate a portion of customer queries via AI-powered chatbots and FAQ bots. The bigger vision is that Flow Builder evolves to become an RPA (robotic process automation) platform for external business messaging.

Vis also says that MessageBird is now officially a “work from anywhere” company, even though he was initially slightly skeptical towards remote working. Now a full convert, he says in many instances at MessageBird the option to work remotely has already resulted in increased productivity and a better work-life balance. As the company continues to expand (and with an eye on a future IPO), he also says that being remote-first should help with recruitment, citing talent as any fast-growing company’s biggest challenge.

Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute. 

Falcon co-founded the company with Luis Capelo, who was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier. Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to take PyTorch Lightning, which launched about a year ago, and turn that into the core of Grid’s service. The main idea behind Lightning is to decouple the data science from the engineering.

The time argues that a few years ago, when data scientists tried to get started with deep learning, they didn’t always have the right expertise and it was hard for them to get everything right.

“Now the industry has an unhealthy aversion to deep learning because of this,” Falcon noted. “Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor [have] the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.”

As Falcon noted, Grid is meant to help data scientists and other ML professionals “scale to match the workloads required for enterprise use cases.” Lightning itself can get them partially there, but Grid is meant to provide all of the services its users need to scale up their models to solve real-world problems.

What exactly that looks like isn’t quite clear yet, though. “Imagine you can find any GitHub repository out there. You get a local copy on your laptop and without making any code changes you spin up 400 GPUs on AWS — all from your laptop using either a web app or command-line-interface. That’s the Lightning “magic” applied to training and building models at scale,” Falcon said. “It is what we are already known for and has proven to be such a successful paradigm shift that all the other frameworks like Keras or TensorFlow, and companies have taken notice and have started to modify what they do to try to match what we do.”

The service is now in private beta.

With this new funding, Grid, which currently has 25 employees, plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Falcon tells me that he aims to build a diverse team, not in the least because he himself is an immigrant, born in Venezuela, and a U.S. military veteran.

“I have first-hand knowledge of the extent that unethical AI can have,” he said. “As a result, we have approached hiring our current 25 employees across many backgrounds and experiences. We might be the first AI company that is not all the same Silicon Valley prototype tech-bro.”

“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago,” Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon told me. “So intrigued in fact I remember rushing into a closet in Helsinki while at a conference to have the privacy needed to hear exactly what Will and Luis had built. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.”

The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner circle diagnosed with COVID-19. This debate will be held as a “town meeting,” as planned, the CPD said via a statement today, with each candidate piped in form a sarape location, and C-SPAN moderator Steve Scully also located separately in the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.

This is a historic first for the Presidential debate, though also something that’s not entirely unexpected given the coronavirus pandemic, and the recent diagnoses of Trump and his staff. Biden has since been tested and received negative results, indicating that he didn’t contract COVID-19 from the socially distanced first debate, but the added measures and precautions make sense in the wake of the President’s apparent super-spreader event. Last night’s VP debate took place in person (Pence has tested negative for the virus at last check), but did include 12 feet of separation between the VP and Democrat Kamala Harris, as well as the use of plastic dividers.

No word yet on what specific technology will be used in this virtual debate, or what venues each of the candidates will be using for their respective video feeds. We’ll update this post when and if we learn more.

The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner circle diagnosed with COVID-19. This debate will be held as a “town meeting,” as planned, the CPD said via a statement today, with each candidate piped in form a sarape location, and C-SPAN moderator Steve Scully also located separately in the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.

This is a historic first for the Presidential debate, though also something that’s not entirely unexpected given the coronavirus pandemic, and the recent diagnoses of Trump and his staff. Biden has since been tested and received negative results, indicating that he didn’t contract COVID-19 from the socially distanced first debate, but the added measures and precautions make sense in the wake of the President’s apparent super-spreader event. Last night’s VP debate took place in person (Pence has tested negative for the virus at last check), but did include 12 feet of separation between the VP and Democrat Kamala Harris, as well as the use of plastic dividers.

No word yet on what specific technology will be used in this virtual debate, or what venues each of the candidates will be using for their respective video feeds. We’ll update this post when and if we learn more.