Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Facebook announced this morning it’s bringing a number of new features and services to its family of Portal devices, including support for Netflix and Zoom. The company will also introduce easier ways to launch Netflix and other video streaming apps via one-touch buttons on its new remote, in addition to expanding its selection of its stories offered through its Story Time feature, adding new ways to use AR effects, and introducing Spanish-language voice control, among other things.

Portal TV, the media device that works with your TV at home, today offers access to a range of streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video, Showtime, and Sling TV. But, until now, one of the most important streaming services — Netflix — had been missing. Facebook says Netflix will now be introduced to Portal TV in all countries where Portal is sold.

It will also introduce a new remote that will include one-touch buttons for launching streaming apps, like Prime Video, Netflix, and its own Facebook Watch. This will ship with new Portal TV devices starting today and will be sold in stores in the coming weeks.

The news of Portal TV’s Netflix integration follows shortly after Amazon’s September announcement that it would support the popular streaming service on its own Amazon Echo Show smart displays, three years after the Echo Show line’s original debut. Google, too, recently added Netflix to its smart display lineup, with support arriving on its Nest Hub and Hub Max earlier this year.

The timing of these updates hint that negotiations with Netflix over smart display integrations had been taking place industry-wide, as Netflix worked to make to make its service available across the various platforms.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook will also bring Zoom to its Portal devices for video-calling. Back in August, the communications service had announced its plans to support smart displays, including Echo Show and Google Nest Hub Max, as well as Portal from Facebook.

With Portal support, Zoom users will be able to host a video call with up to 25 people on the screen, while leveraging the device’s high-fidelity sound and its AI-powered Smart Camera for hands-free calling. The support will be adding to Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+ in all regions where the device is sold.

Image Credits: Facebook

As previously announced at Facebook Connect, the company is also expanding its collection of interactive stories in its Story Time library with more diverse content. New stories include Thank You, Omu!, A Kids Book About Belonging, and Grandma’s Purse. Plus, AR features are being added to  Dr. Seuss stories, including Hop on Pop, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, The Foot Book, and There’s a Wocket in my Pocket! These will roll out sometime this fall.

Portal’s AR features are getting an update, too. Users will be able to control AR effects in Photo Booth using their voice and the “Hey Portal” command to send themed cards and take photos and video with AR effects to send to friends and family.

“Hey Portal” will also now work in U.S. Spanish, in addition to English, with more languages expected to come in the future. On-screen text on Portal can be displayed in French, Spanish, Italian, and English, however.

A new company called Scribe Therapeutics founded by two former members of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna’s UC Berkely genetics lab (alongside Doudna herself) launched on Tuesday, debuting a platform designed specifically to help develop and engineer new thereapeutics based on CRISPR for addressing specific diseases, with permanent treatments in patients.

Doudna is part of the leadership team behind Scribe, but it’s primarily led by CEO and co-founder Benjamin Oakes, along with VP of Platform Brett T. Staahl. Oakes and Staahl shared time at Doudna’s lab, with Oakes as a student while Staahl was a postdoc. Staahl’s interest was specifically in how gene editing, and CRISPR in particular, could be used to help treat Huntington’s disease – while Oakes, who originally set out to be a practicing medical doctor, realized early on he actually wanted to do more with solving the underlying causes of disease, and changed tack to pursue genome editing.

“I set out on this journey to understand how we could, and how we could best actually solve those underlying problems of disease,” Oakes explained in an interview. That led to him pursuing research in Zinc-Finger Nuclease (ZFN)-based genome editing – a precursor technique to CRISPR that was far less specific and much more work-intensive and time consuming. Doudna’s groundbreaking paper on CRISPR was published in 2012, and Oakes immediately saw the potential, so he joined her lab at Berkeley.

Meanwhile, Staahl was looking at treatment for disorders that specifically lead to neural degeneration – something that had not previously been part of Doudna’s lab’s research prior to him joining.

“He spent several years in the lab, developing strategies for neurons, and really trying to bring that technology to a point where it could be deployed as a real treatment for neurodegenerative disease, with Huntington’s as a model,” Doudna told me. “So Ben and Brett met up, they came from very different backgrounds, they had really different scientific training originally, but they hit it off. And they saw a really exciting opportunity to use the kind of technology development that Ben had been doing, and that he was very keen on continuing, and to focus it on this challenge of neurodegeneration.”

The result is Scribe Therapeutics, which has already raised $20 million in a Series A funding round (plus some small amount of earlier seed financing contributed by the founders) led by Andreessen Horowitz . Scribe has been at work on their solution since 2018, but remained mostly quiet about their progress until Oakes felt confident that what they’re presenting is a real, viable technology that can be used to produce therapeutics now. Representative of that progress, the company is also announcing a new collaboration with large drugmaker Biogen, Inc. to collaborate on CRISPR-based medecines for treating neurological diseases, and specifically Amyotriophic Lateral Sclerosis.

That deal is valued at $15 million in upfront commitments, with as much as $400 million or more in milestone payouts to follow, as well as royalties attached to any shipping therapeutics that result. Oakes says it’s a testament to the maturity of their platform that they were able to secure this partnership. But Scribe will also be pursuing development of its own therapeutics in-house, while partnering where it makes sense – a strategy Oakes says is in service of addressing the greatest number of possible disease treatments the startup can manage. And while it’s already generating revenue, and Oakes says he’s in no rush to secure additional funding, he does believe that ultimately they will seek out additional investment in order to help ensure they can treat as many potential conditions as possible, as quickly and safely as possible.

As for the fundamental science behind Scribe, their advantage lies in the work they’ve done to adapt a molecule called CRISPR-CasX, which is a bit smaller than Cas9 and not derived from pathogen molecules, both of which make it better-suited to therapeutics. Scribe has spent the past year-and-a-half turning CasX into the basis of a platform that works better than any CRISPR protein that exists for delivery via adeno-associated virus (the current state-of-the-art in gene therapy delivery), as well as engineering it for greater specificity.

“We built Scribe specifically to do that, to build an engineering core focused exclusively on making the most advanced the very best therapeutic genome editing molecules that we could,” Oakes said.

One of the broader trends of the pandemic has been the unbundling of Zoom with startups pulling out a feature or two and designing entire products centered around a specific vision of remote work. One of the more tempting product ideas has been the development of the omnipresent always-on video workspace where managers can always see their directs onscreen and team members are only a shout away from getting someone else’s attention. While it’s seemed like an exciting product for the founders building those startups amid the remote work boom, it also sounded awful for the workers using the software.

Remotion CEO Alexander Embiricos was never crazy about the idea of an always-on camera either, but he did like the idea of making it easier to build face-to-face time over video chat into a team’s culture. The startup he co-founded has been building an always-there dashboard that pins your co-workers profile pictures to a workspace taskbar on your Mac desktop.

Mouse over a team member’s profile pic bubble, click the video chat icon, send a quick chat request and get to talking over video. It’s far from a revolutionary workflow, but Remotion is aiming to build a platform that makes video calls feel like less of an event and more like a lightweight way to quickly get to the bottom of something without back-and-forth emails or Slacks .

Remotion CEO Alexander Embiricos and CTO Charley Ho

“Right now, when we look at teams we say, okay, we have ways to schedule meetings, and it works. We have ways to message each other, and it works,” Embiricos tells TechCrunch. “There’s no problems there that we want to fix, what we fundamentally want to change is when we use video and how we use video, making it so that you can use video informally.”

Remotion is launching their product in beta today and announcing that they’ve raised $13 million in funding, including a Series A led by Greylock and a seed round led by First Round. The startup is debuting its product on the heels of a historic pandemic that many believe could fundamentally shift companies away from strict office cultures towards embracing more hybrid and fully remote workforces.

“I think that the pandemic has permanently changed the way people work,” Greylock’s Sarah Guo, who led the Series A deal, tells TechCrunch. “I think people are disengaged in big video meetings — they just go in and multitask, and Slack is great, it’s instant and asynchronous, but… I just don’t see most companies doing distributed work in a text-first way.”

You won’t see an endless cascade of team member bubbles on Remotion, users designate favorites that sit on their desktop, and the app is largely designed around helping small teams collaborate anyway. Fittingly, Embiricos, who is based in Brooklyn, has been building Remotion with a small remote team, alongside co-founder Charley Ho, who is based in Chicago.

One of Remotion’s biggest risks is pushing users to give it a permanent home on their desktop. Users can opt to let the hub of profile bubbles hover over their other windows or recede behind them but the app is designed to leave your co-workers and their availability statuses just a glance away at most times. All of that screen real estate can be a big sacrifice to workers that might be already be dealing with more cramped workspaces than they’re used to in the office.

Credit: Remotion

The app aims to give users controls to designate when they’re heads-down, need to talk or just open for some idle chitchat. Users can set standard or custom availability statuses, quickly update profiled pictures with a Photobooth-esque feature, or let a Google Calendar integration automatically do the work in signaling what they’re busy with.

There’s a familiar danger for new workplace collaboration tools where something that was meant to help users cut back on another form of communication like emailing or Slacking ends up just adding to the noise, jamming notifications into your feed and giving you another inbox to check obsessively. Embiricos hopes that the ambient nature of just being pinned to the desktop can prevent this from becoming a problem.

“Showing up to Slack in the morning — it’s a wall of text and like eight channels you have to check,” Embiricos says. “What we’re trying to create is like, you wake up and show up in the product, but there’s nothing to check, you didn’t miss anything. It’s just the product is just there. And when someone comes online or doesn’t come online there are no notifications. If you want to know, you can glance over your team and find out.”

Remotion is live in beta for Mac with a waitlist for Windows and Linux users.

No matter the industry, the coronavirus pandemic has absolutely rocked the way that we work. Work from home is the new norm. But many are anxious to get back into the office and startups are looking to help with that transition in the safest way possible.

One such startup is Envoy, a company that launched back in 2013 with a guest sign-in platform for offices. Today, Envoy is launching a new suite of products, called Envoy Protect, meant to help workers get back into the office safely.

The platform has been in beta for several months and thus far has more than 5,000 organizations signed up.

Protect was built specifically to give workers access to the office and peace of mind in doing so, with features that include health questionnaires, capacity management tools, integrations with access control providers to ensure only healthy, approved individuals can enter the office, touchless sign-in with QR code, contact tracing, and integrated temperature screening, to name a few. Administrators can also customize registration by location based on local health and safety requirements, customize registration instructions and get analytics on the office traffic flow.

(Image: Envoy)

Envoy is also launching Desks, which allows businesses to properly socially distance workers who are in the office and ensure they’re using a clean and safe workspace when they come in. Desks will launch as a closed beta as the company continues to test.

Envoy Visitors, the company’s original product, is included with Envoy Protect at no additional cost to businesses.

There is a ton of movement in the future of work space. Just recently, Eden introduced a similar product to help offices re-open safely.

Envoy has a great position in the space with nearly $60 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and Initialized Capital, among others.

Founder and CEO Larry Gadea says that last quarter was the best quarter (in terms of revenue) for Envoy, despite the shifts caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The company has approximately 150 employees, of which 41 percent are female and 20 percent are underrepresented minorities.

Gadea says that one of the biggest challenges for Envoy right now is spreading the word about Protect. Envoy Visitors, which enables guests to get into the office, was an inherently viral product. People visited an Envoy-enabled office and realized they wanted that same system for their own office.

“The biggest challenge will be making it clear to people that there is a lot going on in our workplace and that our products can help a lot,” said Gadea. “People are thinking so much about their home and once people go back to their workplaces, they have to remember it’s a much better place for people to be thinking straight and working together. Our challenge is making sure people do that safely and don’t rush that.”

Last night, Root filed to go public, adding a second name to the insurtech IPO rolls in 2020.

Lemonade was first out the gate this summer, taking its rental and home insurance business public at an attractive valuation, compared to its revenues and margins as we traditionally understand them. Wall Street was enticed by its growth and burgeoning consumer brand, according to one insurtech executive TechCrunch spoke to earlier this week.

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Root, in contrast, is focused on the automotive market, a lucrative space with a host of incumbent players and startup rivals like MetroMile and Clearcover. Reuters was first to report that Root was looking to file, after which we dug into the company’s reportedly-targeted $6 billion IPO valuation.

We found that a $6 billion price tag, knowing what we did then, seemed reasonable. This morning we’ll fact-check our work.

Let’s get into the IPO filing and find out what we can. We want to know how quickly Root is growing, how much its economics have improved over time and how healthy the company is going into its public offering.

Inside Root’s IPO filing

Root has two lines of business in 2020: auto insurance and rental insurance. Akin to how fintech startups will offer you a debit card, and later offer, say, equities trading, insurance startups also want to cross-sell their existing customer base.

Historically, however, Root has been automotive-insurance focused, and its recent addition of rental insurance has yet to constitute a material portion of its in-market premiums. Still, here are the insurance-specific numbers that you should know, before we get into the regular financial results:

• Root’s active automotive policies grew from 111,736 in 2018 to 281,310 in 2019. That’s just under 152% growth on a year-over-year basis.
• And, Root’s active automotive policies grew from 220,536 on June 30, 2019, to 334,327 on June 30, 2020. That’s just under 52% growth on a year-over-year basis.

As Root has scaled, its economics have improved as well. Here’s a raft of key numbers of how Root’s overall business has gotten better over time:

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which invested $750 million in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms in June this year, has returned to invest just as much capital in Mukesh Ambani’s other venture.

Reliance Retail, India’s largest retail chain, said on Tuesday that it is selling a 1.2% stake in the business to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for about $752 million. Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is the seventh investor to secure a stake in Reliance Retail — at a pre-money valuation of $58.5 billion — in the past one month.

Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm), has raised about $5.14 billion by selling about 8.5% stake in its business to Silver Lake, Singapore’s GIC, General Atlantic and others. Mukesh Ambani, who controls Reliance Industries, said in July that he was looking to sell stakes in Reliance Retail to investors. Earlier this year, Jio Platforms raised about $20 billion from more than a dozen high-profile investors including Facebook and Google.

Founded in 2006, Reliance Retail serves more than 3.5 million customers each week (as of early this year) through its nearly 12,000 physical stores in more than 6,500 cities and towns in the country. Reliance Retail operates supermarkets, electronics chain, fashion outlets and a cash-and-carry wholesaler. In recent months, the firm has rushed to widen its dominance in the retail market. It bought several parts of Future Group, India’s second largest retail chain, for $3.4 billion in late August.

Late last year, it also entered the e-commerce space with JioMart. JioMart, a joint venture between Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, has presence in over 200 Indian cities and towns, and maintains a partnership with Facebook for WhatsApp integration. Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms earlier this year, has said it will explore various ways to work with Reliance to digitize the nation’s 60 million mom and pop stores as well as other small and medium-sized businesses.

“Reliance Retail has rapidly established itself as one of the leading retail businesses in India and, by leveraging both its physical and digital supply chains, is strongly positioned for further growth. This investment is consistent with our strategy of investing in market leading businesses in Asia linked to the region’s consumption-driven growth and rapid technological advancement,” said Hamad Shahwan Aldhaheri, Executive Director of the Private Equities Department at ADIA, in a statement.

Physical retail commands about 97% of all retail sales in India, according to estimates from several research firms.

One thing that annoys sales people is entering data into a CRM like Salesforce because it’s time spent not selling. Part of the problem is Salesforce is a database and as such is not necessarily designed for speed. Scratchpad wants to simplify that process by creating a workspace on top of the CRM to accelerate the administrative side of the job.

Today, the company announced a $3.6 million seed round led by Accel with participation from Shrug Capital and Sound Ventures, the firm run by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, as well as several individual investors. The round, which closed at the end of last year, hadn’t been previously announced.

Last year, company co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi had just stepped down from his previous company PersistIQ, a sales enablement startup that came out of Y Combinator in 2014. He and his co-founder Cyrus Karbassiyoon began researching a new company, and the idea for Scratchpad came to them when they simply sat down and watched how salespeople were working. They noted that they were using a hodgepodge of tools like taking notes in Evernote or Google Docs, tracking their pipeline in Excel or Google Sheets and tracking tasks with paper lists or sticky notes.

They recognized that these tools were disconnected from Salesforce and required hours of manual work copying and pasting this data. That’s when they saw there was an opportunity here to build a tool to track all of this information in one place and connect it to Salesforce to automate a lot of this grunt work.

“It eventually evolved into this idea that we’re calling “The Workspace” because everyone has Salesforce, but they are working with all of these other tools that then they just have to literally spend hours — and we saw some reps block off four hour chunks on their calendar — just to copy and paste from their documents, spreadsheets or notes into Salesforce for their pipeline reviews. And that’s how the idea for Scratchpad came to be,” Salehi told TechCrunch.

Today, a salesperson can install Scratchpad as a Chrome plug-in, connect to Salesforce with their log-in credentials and create a two-way connection between the tools. Scratchpad pulls all of their pipeline data into the WorkSpace. They can cycle through the various fields to enter information quickly, enter notes and track tasks (which can be pulled from email and calendar) all in one place.

What’s more, because all of this information is linked to Salesforce, anything you enter in Scratchpad updates the corresponding fields and sections in Salesforce automatically. And any new opportunities that start in Salesforce update in Scratchpad.

The company has been operating for about a year and has 1000s of users, although many are currently using the free tier. It has 7 employees with plans to hire more over the next year. As he builds his second company, Salehi says he and his co-founder are building on a foundation of diversity and inclusion.

“By nature, we are very diverse in many different perspectives that you can look at including gender, age, location and backgrounds,” he said. He adds that building a diverse and inclusive workforce is important to the company.

“And so even in our hiring process, we incorporated certain elements just to make sure that we’re not introducing bias in any sort of way, or at least recognizing that the natural bias and thoughts we might have. We look at things like doing blind looks at resumes and it’s something that we take very, very seriously,” he said.

While the company is built on top of Salesforce today, he says it could expand to include other databases or sources of information where the product could also work. For now though, he sees an opportunity to build another company in the sales arena to help reduce the amount of work associated with updating the CRM database.

Chargebee, which helps businesses set up and manage their billing, subscription, revenue operations and compliance, said on Tuesday it has raised $55 million in a new financing round as it looks to accelerate its expansion in global markets.

The new financing round, a Series F, for the San Francisco-headquartered firm was led by Insight Partners with existing investors Steadview Capital and Tiger Global participating in it. The nine-year-old startup, which kickstarted its journey in India, has raised $105 million to date.

For businesses, setting up and managing subscription service is a complex process. How do you manage the billing when your customers are on a free trial or want to change their subscription plan, for instance? This is where Chargebee comes into the picture.

Chargebee allows individuals, small businesses, and enterprises to automate subscriptions, billing, invoicing, payments and revenue recognition processes. It supports dozens of popular payment gateways including Stripe, Braintree, WorldPay, and PayPal and its global tax management coverage also helps businesses to expand to new markets. MakeSpace, an on-demand storage company, used Chargebee’s services to scale from four markets to 31 in one year, for instance.

The startup offers its services through a range of pricing schemes, including those that vary based on usage and it is able to renew billing cycles based on sign-up dates or other specific dates. It can also selectively route payments and currencies adherent to predefined rules. On the backend, Chargebee customers get a visual organizational chart of their customers and can easily define payment and invoicing responsibilities.

The startup told TechCrunch that businesses across the globe are moving to adopt a subscription model, which has made its platform more crucial than ever. Over 2,500 businesses including Freshworks, Calendly, Linux Academy, Fujitsu, Okta, and Envoy are clients of Chargebee.

Additionally, several businesses and individuals have signed up to the platform in recent months as they navigate the global pandemic. Some of these customers include individuals like teachers and small coffee chains.

Pret-a-manger, a coffee and sandwich super chain, went live with Chargebee after its physical stores were hit by the coronavirus outbreak. It sold 165,000 coffee subscriptions on the launch day.

AJ Malhotra, Vice President at Insight Partners, said there’s a global movement underway where businesses from cars to coffee pods are launching and scaling with a subscription-first model.

“We believe that a steady SaaS-i-fication of the market is already underway, with traditional businesses replicating the best practices of SaaS pricing and business models even outside the realm of software. Subscription businesses today have to be ready at all times to identify and leverage market opportunities rapidly,” said Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, in a statement.

What’s more, the startup provides its subscription invoicing service to customers at no charge until they reach $50,000 in revenue. Chargebee says it processes over $3 billion in revenue each year.

Chargebee, which also has offices in Chennai, Amsterdam, Salt Lake City, and Sydney and customers in over 160 countries, plans to use the fresh capital to further grow its footprints in international markets, an executive told TechCrunch.

Thirdverse, the virtual reality game developer behind “Swords of Gargantua,” has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by JAFCO, with participation from Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures, Incubate Fund and KDDI.

Based in Tokyo, Thirdverse was started four years ago as Yomuneco, but relaunched as Thirdverse in June to align with its corporate mission of creating a “Third Place inside the Metaverse,” where “each person has choices in his or her own hands and can live whatever life he or she wants to.” The company is currently focused on multiplayer virtual reality games, but its ultimate goal is to combine virtual reality with blockchain technology to create “VR worlds” where people can create online communities.

The concept has taken on a new relevancy, as COVID-19 related stay-at-home orders prompted organizations to bring gatherings, including conferences, concerts and even their offices, online.

Users have also spent more time playing online games during the pandemic, with titles that have a social element, like “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” proving especially popular.

Thirdverse is currently preparing to release other virtual reality games, including “Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds,” a multi-player shooter game that will be available later this year for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive VR and Valve Index headsets.

In a statement, Sisu Ventures and Presence Capital founding partner Paul Bragiel said, “In the rapidly growing VR gaming landscape, Thirdverse stands out as having strong leadership, deep relationships and a big vision to become the category leader in this market.”

SpaceX has launched yet another flight of 60 of its Starlink broadband internet satellites. The launch took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:29 AM EDT (4:29 AM PDT) this morning, after having been delayed three times earlier due to scrubs – twice because of weather, and one because of an unusual sensor reading. This is the 12 Starlink mission to date, and it means that over 700 of the SpaceX satellites have now been launched.

The mission included reuse of a Falcon 9 booster stage that had previously flown on two separate missions, including the Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch that carried SpaceX’s first human crew – NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. SpaceX successfully recovered the booster with a controlled landing on its ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ drone ship at sea for this mission, too. A recovery of the fairing halves using different recovery ships was also attempted – with one half caught by a ship as planned, while the second missed and fell into the Ocean, but SpaceX will also attempt to fish that part out.

SpaceX is currently in private beta testing of Starlink, optimizing for latency and connection. The company says that it has achieved downlink speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, with very low latency as well. It intends to broaden the beta to the public beginning later this year.

The deployment of these Starlink satellites is set for a little while from now, at which point we’ll confirm a good orbital insertion and update this post.