Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a couple of weeks ago.

The two companies match up quite well from a tech standpoint. While Gong searches unstructured data like emails and phone call transcripts and finds nuggets of data, Vaya looks at structured data, which is essentially the output of the Gong search process. What’s more, it handles large amounts of data at scale.

“Vayo helps find customer interactions at a large scale to identify trends like customers likely to churn or usage is going up, or your deals are starting to slow down — and they do this for structured data at scale,” Bendov told TechCrunch.

He said this ability to identify trends was really what attracted him to the company, even though it was still at an early stage of development. “It’s a perfect fit for Gong. We take unstructured data —  emails, audio calls video calls — and extract insights. Customers, especially with a large organization, don’t want to see individual interactions but high order insights […] and they’ve developed [a solution] to identify trends on large data volumes for customer interactions,” he said.

Vayo was founded in 2018 and raised $1.7 million in seed capital, according to Crunchbase. Joining forces with Gong gives them an opportunity to develop the technology inside a company that’s growing quickly and is extremely well capitalized having raised over $300 million in the last 18 months.

Avshi Vital, CEO at Vayo, who has joined Gong with his 4-fellow employees, gave a familiar argument for selling the company. “With Gong we found the perfect partner to realize this mission faster and maximize the impact of the technology we built given the scale of their customer base and growth potential,” he said.

The plan is to fold the Vayo tech into the Gong platform, a process that will take 3-6 months, according to Bendov.

Bambuser is a name that you may not have heard in a while, but the Stockholm-headquartered company is announcing today that it’s raised $45 million in new funding this year, with $34.5 million of that amount raised during the pandemic.

Bambuser’s history goes back more than a decade (the first TechCrunch coverage appeared in 2008). CEO Maryam Ghahremani told me that the founders’ idea — using smartphones to stream live video journalism — made them “very, very much ahead of their time.”

However, being ahead of your time isn’t always a good thing, and Ghahremani that the company has also struggled with having “too little capital” (although it publicly listed on Nasdaq First North in 2017) and also with turning its technology into a great product and a scalable business model.

So Ghahremani was brought on to change all that two years ago. She told me she soon saw an opportunity in the growth of live video shopping, particularly in China, with potential clients starting to ask whether Bambuser had any products for this. It didn’t at the time, but it quickly shifted focus and launched its first live video shopping products last fall.

“We didn’t plan for the pandemic to hit the world,” Gharemani said. “We started this because we believe that this is going to be the future of retail.”

At the same time, she suggested that the pandemic — and the resulting shutdowns and struggles of brick-and-mortar retail — have accelerated the transition, giving Bambuser’s business a big boost. The company’s offering has been used by brands including H&M, Motivi, Moda Operandi, Frame, LUISAVIAROMA and Showfields, and it says that in Q2, net sales were up 669% year-over-year.

While e-commerce and social media platforms are expanding their support in this area, Gharemani said brands are turning to Bambuser because they want to offer this live shopping experience while still owning the brand experience, the customer data and the transaction itself.

She also emphasized that Bambuser is focused on being a business-to-business product, rather than a consumer shopping platform.

“We are trying to create not another Instagram or Facebook or marketplace, because we believe other [companies] are already doing that,” she said. “We’re not even interested in going into that battle. What we’re trying to do, what we need to do is help the larger brands.”

Participants in the new funding include Consensus Asset Management, Handelsbanken, Harmony Partners, Lancelot Asset Management, Tenth Avenue Holdings and TIN Fonder.

Among other things, Gharemani said she’d hoped to create a physical presence in the United States earlier this year, but those plans were delayed by the pandemic. Still, she’s now planning to open a New York office this quarter. And in the meantime, the U.S. has already become the company’s largest market.

 

PicnicHealth, the startup that’s looking to give patients a way to manage their care in one place and pharmaceutical companies access to patient records for real world data, has just raised $25 million in financing to grow its business.

Founded in 2016 by a former international development worker and Crohn’s Disease patient, Noga Leviner, PicnicHealth’s initial pitch was around giving patients the ability to manage and coordinate their own care. It’s something that Leviner, a person with a chronic condition, knows can be complicated.

“Being a patient in the healthcare system in the US sucks,” said Leviner. “You think someone is going to be in charge and then, as it turns out, nobody’s in charge and it’s up to you to keep everybody in the loop.”

The pitch from PicnicHealth is that patients can use the service to collect and manage their medical records and then share their medical history to contribute to research. The data, the company says, is de-identified and then made available to external researchers.

The service is free for patients who are involved in clinical studies, and anyone who isn’t participating in the study pays a fee for the records management service, according to Leviner.

So far, there are tens of thousands of patients using the PicnicHealth platform.

For Felicis Ventures managing director Sundeep Peechu, a new director on the PicnicHealth board following his firm’s lead investment into the company, the opportunity Leviner’s company presents is in putting the patient first when it comes to data management.

“It is probably the first patient data company that has patient consent,” Peechu said. “This is a unique healthcare data company, which is going to the patients and asking for their consent and using that data in an advantageous way.”

Other companies in the data management space for healthcare have focused on making sure that healthcare providers are all looped in to provide coordinated care, but they don’t bring those tools into patient’s hands, according to the company.

Those are businesses like TrueVault and Aptible, who focus on delivering secure information to medical personnel rather than to the patient.

The access that pharmaceutical companies get when they work with PicnicHealth means that they’re able to use deep data sets to create longitudinal studies of patients over time. That allows those companies to look for commonalities between patient cases that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

For patients, it means the difference between a potential early diagnosis that may enable physicians to initiate treatment before a disease manifests itself, Peechu said.

To date, PicnicHealth has raised nearly $40 million from investors including YCombinator, Amplify Partners and Felicis Ventures with participation from notable investors in a seed round that included: Social+Captial, Great Oaks, Slow Ventures, YC partner Paul Buchheit, Scott Marlette, Sam Lessin, Joe Greenstein, Rashmi Sinha, Jameson Hsu, Kenny Van Zant, Rishi Kacker, Ramji Srinivasan, Eric Evans and Stanford’s StartX Fund.

Hazel Health was founded five years ago to provide telemedicine services to children in public schools. Launched by a former Apple software engineer and serial entrepreneur, Nick Woods, and named after one of Woods’ children, Hazel Health has grown to work with school districts responsible for 1.5 million children, and has raised $33.5 million to expand its footprint even further across the United States.

The company’s services are even more sorely needed as children are forced into distance learning classrooms by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Denied the network of services that in-person schooling provides for basic healthcare and nutrition, remote services like Hazel Health become, in some cases the only window into children’s health that some communities have.

When the first lockdown orders came through, the company began working with school districts to develop remote telemedicine services distributed via applications to continue serving the children it provided basic telemedicine services for.

So far, ninety percent of eligible families have enrolled in the company’s telemedicine program and 70 percent have engaged with the company’s services. These numbers are even more significant when viewed through the lens of the nearly forty percent of the company’s users who indicate they don’t have a primary care physician.

“We built this incredibly powerful model that partnered with schools and brought access to healthcare to families,” said Hazel chief executive, Josh Golomb. “At the schools we had an iPad on a stand. You hit a button and in a few minutes you would be talking to a doctor.”

After the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S., the company’s Hazel at Home service continues to provide care to kids.

“As soon as covid happened there was a lot of recognition by districts that we have to have a solution around student health and wellness,” said Golomb. “Pre-COVID we went from 300,000 in our network of districts to now, when we just passed 1.5 million. [The] rate of engagement went down but our overall expansion has increased dramatically.”

With those kinds of numbers it was no wonder that Owl Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures came in to back the company. Additional financing came from Uprising, the UCSF Foundation Investment Company and Centene Corp.

And the demand just keeps increasing, according to Golomb.

“Our pipeline has exploded,” he said. “A lot of the states have made expansion for telehealth and increasing access a priority. We were going to have eight or nine states that we were going to prioritize.. That’s priority number one… another big chunk is really making sure that we can invest in expanding the product to support that volume of states and finding ways to support our families and district partners.”

Oliver Zahn began his professional career studying the stars. The founder of Climax Foods, a startup that’s using data science to replace animal proteins with plant-based substitutes, spent years at the University of California at Berkeley with his eyes fixed firmly toward the heavens before taking up with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods as the company’s leading data scientist.

That experience focused Zahn on more terrestrial concerns and undoubtedly led the founder down the path to launching Climax Foods.

Now with $7.5 million in financing from investors including At One Ventures, founded by the GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi, along with Manta Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Valor Siren Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital and Global Founders Capital, Zahn is ready to take on the future of food.

The pitch to investors is similar to the one that Josh Tetrick made at Just Food (the company formerly known as Hampton Creek). It’s elegant in its simplicity — scan the natural world for proteins that have the same or better characteristics than those that are currently made by animals and make products with them.

By looking at what makes animal products so delicious, the company will find their plant-based analogs and start producing.

As with most things that depend on data science, the taxonomy is the key. So Climax Foods is building machine learning algorithms that will process and cross-reference molecular structures to find the best fit. It’s starting with cheese.

While, the replacing the humble wheel of cheese may not seem like a worthy adversary for an astrophysicist, companies have already raised hundreds of millions to defeat the big dairy industry.

“We are at a pivotal time where industrialization enabled explosive population growth and consumption of animal products. Today, more than 90% of all mammalian animals and more than 70% of all birds on the planet exist for the sole purpose of metabolizing plants and being turned into food,” said Zahn in a statement. “This industry is complex and wasteful, creating as much climate change as all modes of transportation combined, and using more than a third of the earth’s water and usable land. By speeding up food science innovation, Climax Foods is able to convert plants into equally craveable foods without the environmental impact.”

Joining Zahn on this quest to conquer the cheese industrial complex and its milk-made monstrousness are a few seasoned industry veterans including co-founder, Caroline Love, the company’s chief operating officer and former sales and operations executive from JUST foods, and Pavel Aronov, a Stanford-educated chemist who previously worked at the chemicals giant thermo-Fisher.

“Climax Foods is tackling the same opportunity to change the market and the food system, but they are doing it with an entirely novel technological approach. They are using data science to produce a new category of foods that will not merely compete with, but out-compete, animal products in terms of taste, nutritional density, and price,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, one of the largest investors in the plant protein space and Chief Investment Officer of S2G Ventures. “The machine intelligence approach Climax Foods is pioneering is critical for harnessing the vast number of ways raw ingredients and natural processes can be used to create the ultimate digital recipes.”

Krishnan would know. He’s an investor in Beyond Meat, the most successful public offering of a plant-based protein replacement company.

A new Los Angeles startup is betting that enough consumers are interested in paying between $69 and $149 per year to receive lessons in life and sports from celebrity athletes like Maria Sharapova and Shaun White to make a billion-dollar business.

That’s the gamble that Maveron, Global Founders Capital, and 8VC are taking on The Skills, which launches today.

Founded by E. Omer Atesman, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose last company Clean Energy Experts was acquired by SunRun for an undisclosed amount, The Skills aims to bring coaching lessons from life and sports to subscribers in a MasterClass style format.

With a roster that includes Sharapova, White, the volleyball star, Kerri Walsh Jennings; All-Pro football player Larry Fitzgerald; and Michael Phelps, the former competitive swimmer who won 28 medals in his Olympic Games competition; The Skills has managed to ink athletes that were among the or at the top of the competitive field in their respective sports.

The idea that consumers are willing to pay for aphorisms, homilies, and expert advice from the best practitioners of a particular craft propelled MasterClass to an $800 million valuation earlier this year, so The Skills’ pitch is not without precedent.

“There is so much research into the value of sports participation at an individual level. Sports is linked to improved mental health, enhanced social skills, better physical health and success in other aspects of life,” said Omer Atesman, founder and chief executive officer of The Skills, in a statement. “We launched The Skills because millions of people around the world want to learn from superstar athletes, but access is often limited to rare, offline opportunities. We want to share our athletes and their knowledge and skills they’ve learned from life experiences both on and off the field.”

The company’s course catalog contains over 20 sessions ranging in length from roughly two to five minutes and combines observations on life skills with lessons on technique. The more universal (or generic) advice covered by the sessions will include building confidence, leadership, mental preparation and self care, according to a statement from the company.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven a significant catalyst for robotics investments, as companies look to invest in automation. Utah-based Sarcos Robotics bucks the trend a bit, however, as the purveyor of a technology designed to augment an existing human workforce, rather than replacing a significant chunk through automation.

Today the robotic exoskeleton creator announced a $40 million Series C raise, led by Rotor Capital, with a number of existing investors plunking down additional funding. The oversubscribed round joins $56.1 million already raised by the company, which was spun out of the massive defense contractor Raytheon back in 2015.

Founded in the early 1980s, Sacros has also been a significant recipient of DARPA grants over the years. Back in January at CES, Delta announced that it would be partnering with Sarcos to outfit its ground crew with exoskeletons designed to help them lift up to 200 pounds without fatigue.

Sarcos says this round will go toward bringing its Guardian XO into full commercial production. The battery-powered system is scheduled for release at some point next year. The company has already opened the suit up to pre-orders. Sarcos is one of a number of companies producing exoskeletons for industrial use, a list that also includes Rewalk, Ekso, SuitX and automotive makers like Honda.

As noted in the release, ABI research is projecting the market for these devices to exceed $11.5 billion over the next decade.

VoIP provider Dialpad, the company behind the popular video conferencing service UberConference, today announced that it has acquired Highfive, a well-funded video conferencing startup that focuses on providing businesses with conference room solutions. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price, but Highfive raised $77.4 million from the likes of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Dimension Data ahead of today’s acquisition.

Led by its CEO Craig Walker, who previously sold GrandCentral to Google and then built Google Voice, Dialpad is clearly aiming to double down on video. While UberConference does have built-in video conferencing features already, the service is mostly known for its calling features. In addition to its conference call solutions and VoiP platform for business users, Dialpad also offers a contact center solution.

“When we did UberConference eight years ago, we were like, ‘look, 80% of, of conferences are just people on the phone. So let’s make phone, audio conferencing better,” Walker said. “And then, obviously, over time time that started changing and then COVID totally accelerated it. So with that accelerating, we realized we really want to double down on video — and not with a mindset of ‘hey, video as a standalone thing is going to be a big investment,’ but video, as part of business communications, has to be excellent and has to be part of a Unified-Communications-as-a Service (UCaaS) system.”

Highfive, which was incidentally also launched by a group of ex-Google engineers, always focused exclusively on video. Both companies, Walker noted, were also born in the cloud, but served somewhat different customers until now.

“What’s truly exciting about this combination is the joint heritage — both companies are truly born in the cloud, running on hyperscale, global infrastructures,” Highfive CEO Joe Manuele told me. “Dialpad‘s conferencing, UCaaS and CCaaS offerings were only ever built on public cloud infrastructures, as was Highfive’s. While video is an important part of Diaplpad’s current portfolio, we bring the ability to connect rooms, interop with other video services with our Meeting Connector technology and legacy device support with our Room Connector. Beyond the product fit, the shared industry vision that you can meet all of your communications needs over a hyperscale public cloud environment is what I’m personally most excited about.”

Manuele noted that the company’s board had considered other options, including a new round of fundraising, but in the end, the company decided that video conferencing services now essentially have become part of the larger UCaaS stack.

“While we have developed a scalable, born in the cloud video solution set, it was becoming harder to compete with competitors who were offering inferior ‘free’ video services as part of a UCaaS stack,” he said. “Even the industry leader Zoom had to move to IP Telephony and we see that trend to be irrefutable.”

That’s a thesis Dialpad’s Walker obviously agrees with. “Whether I’m on a phone call, whether it’s my business phone system, or I need to do a video call, or I need to do a conference call, or if I need to go screenshare — if I need to do any of these things, it should all just kind of be one [tool],” he said.

One area Highfive really exceeded in was making its service work seamlessly. It did that by tightly integrating its hardware and software stack, but also by reimagining some of the overall user experience around its room systems.

Walker admitted that nobody is really using room systems right now, but he believes that as people go back to their offices over time, video and remote meetings will potentially become even more important as most companies will adopt some kind of hybrid model for their employees.

He believes this acquisition will also give Dialpad a strong position in the overall market and that this allows Dialpad to offer a complete solution to its customers.

Highfive’s brand may ultimately go away, but customers who have already bought into the company’s systems won’t see any interruptions in their service.

Facebook has offered a little detail on extra steps it’s taking to improve its ability to detect and remove hate speech and election disinformation ahead of Myanmar’s election. A general election is scheduled to take place in the country on November 8, 2020.

The announcement comes close to two years after the company admitted a catastrophic failure to prevent its platform from being weaponized to foment division and incite violence against the country’s Rohingya minority.

Facebook says now that it has expanded its misinformation policy with the aim of combating voter suppression and will now remove information “that could lead to voter suppression or damage the integrity of the electoral process” — giving the example of a post that falsely claims a candidate is a Bengali, not a Myanmar citizen, and thus ineligible to stand.

“Working with local partners, between now and November 22, we will remove verifiable misinformation and unverifiable rumors that are assessed as having the potential to suppress the vote or damage the integrity of the electoral process,” it writes.

Facebook says it’s working with three fact-checking organizations in the country — namely: BOOM, AFP Fact Check and Fact Crescendo — after introducing a fact-checking program there in March.

In March 2018 the United Nations warned that Facebook’s platform was being abused to spread hate speech and whip up ethnic violence in Myanmar. By November of that year the tech giant was forced to admit it had not stopped its platform from being repurposed as a tool to drive genocide, after a damning independent investigation slammed its impact on human rights.

On hate speech, which Facebook admits could suppress the vote in addition to leading to what it describes as “imminent, offline harm” (aka violence), the tech giant claims to have invested “significantly” in “proactive detection technologies” that it says help it “catch violating content more quickly”, albeit without quantifying the size of its investment nor providing further details. It only notes that it “also” uses AI to “proactively identify hate speech in 45 languages, including Burmese”.

Facebook’s blog post offers a metric to imply progress — with the company stating that in Q2 2020 it took action against 280,000 pieces of content in Myanmar for violations of its Community Standards prohibiting hate speech, of which 97.8% were detected proactively by its systems before the content was reported to it.

“This is up significantly from Q1 2020, when we took action against 51,000 pieces of content for hate speech violations, detecting 83% proactively,” it adds.

However without greater visibility into the content Facebook’s platform is amplifying, including country-specific factors such as whether hate speech posting is increasing in Myanmar as the election gets closer, it’s not possible to understand what volume of hate speech is passing under the radar of Facebook’s detection systems and reaching local eyeballs.

In a more clearly detailed development, Facebook notes that since August, electoral, issue and political ads in Myanmar have had to display a ‘paid for by’ disclosure label. Such ads are also stored in a searchable Ad Library for seven years — in an expansion of the self-styled ‘political ads transparency measures’ Facebook launched more than two years ago in the US and other western markets.

Facebook also says it’s working with two local partners to verify the official national Facebook Pages of political parties in Myanmar. “So far, more than 40 political parties have been given a verified badge,” it writes. “This provides a blue tick on the Facebook Page of a party and makes it easier for users to differentiate a real, official political party page from unofficial pages, which is important during an election campaign period.”

Another recent change it flags is an ‘image context reshare’ product, which launched in June — which Facebook says alerts a user when they attempt to share a image that’s more than a year old and could be “potentially harmful or misleading” (such as an image that “may come close to violating Facebook’s guidelines on violent content”).

“Out-of-context images are often used to deceive, confuse and cause harm. With this product, users will be shown a message when they attempt to share specific types of images, including photos that are over a year old and that may come close to violating Facebook’s guidelines on violent content. We warn people that the image they are about to share could be harmful or misleading will be triggered using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and human review,” it writes without offering any specific examples.

Another change it notes is the application of a limit on message forwarding to five recipients which Facebook introduced in Sri Lanka back in June 2019.

“These limits are a proven method of slowing the spread of viral misinformation that has the potential to cause real world harm. This safety feature is available in Myanmar and, over the course of the next few weeks, we will be making it available to Messenger users worldwide,” it writes.

On coordinated election interference, the tech giant has nothing of substance to share — beyond its customary claim that it’s “constantly working to find and stop coordinated campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate across our apps”, including groups seeking to do so ahead of a major election.

“Since 2018, we’ve identified and disrupted six networks engaging in Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in Myanmar. These networks of accounts, Pages and Groups were masking their identities to mislead people about who they were and what they were doing by manipulating public discourse and misleading people about the origins of content,” it adds.

In summing up the changes, Facebook says it’s “built a team that is dedicated to Myanmar”, which it notes includes people “who spend significant time on the ground working with civil society partners who are advocating on a range of human and digital rights issues across Myanmar’s diverse, multi-ethnic society” — though clearly this team is not operating out of Myanmar.

It further claims engagement with key regional stakeholders will ensure Facebook’s business is “responsive to local needs” — something the company demonstrably failed on back in 2018.

“We remain committed to advancing the social and economic benefits of Facebook in Myanmar. Although we know that this work will continue beyond November, we acknowledge that Myanmar’s 2020 general election will be an important marker along the journey,” Facebook adds.

There’s no mention in its blog post of accusations that Facebook is actively obstructing an investigation into genocide in Myanmar.

Earlier this month, Time reported that Facebook is using US law to try to block a request for information related to Myanmar military officials’ use of its platforms by the West African nation, The Gambia.

“Facebook said the request is ‘extraordinarily broad’, as well as ‘unduly intrusive or burdensome’. Calling on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to reject the application, the social media giant says The Gambia fails to ‘identify accounts with sufficient specificity’,” Time reported.

“The Gambia was actually quite specific, going so far as to name 17 officials, two military units and dozens of pages and accounts,” it added.

“Facebook also takes issue with the fact that The Gambia is seeking information dating back to 2012, evidently failing to recognize two similar waves of atrocities against Rohingya that year, and that genocidal intent isn’t spontaneous, but builds over time.”

In another recent development, Facebook has been accused of bending its hate speech policies to ignore inflammatory posts made against Rohingya Muslim immigrants by Hindu nationalist individuals and groups.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying its hate speech rules to T. Raja Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, along with at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence — citing sourcing from current and former Facebook employees.

Edtech just keeps on booming.

Today, Owl Ventures, a San Francisco-based education technology fund whose portfolio includes Byju’s, Labster, Masterclass and Quizlet, announced that it has closed a pair of investment vehicles totaling $585 million.

Owl Ventures IV is a $415 million investment vehicle which will be used to invest in edtech startups Series A and beyond. The firm also formed its first ever opportunity fund at $170 million to work as a growth-stage bank for existing portfolio companies. With over $1.2 billion in assets under management, Owl Ventures claims that it is the largest venture capital fund in the world focused solely on edtech.

The new funds allow Owl Ventures to cut larger checks. Traditionally, the firm cut checks that were between $5 million to $35 million. Now, it can write investments up to $50 million in companies. The opportunity fund will exist to back existing investments throughout their lifetime.

“Edtech as a sector is really exploding and emerging,” said Ian Chiu, the managing partner at Owl Ventures. “It’s not that COVID is the reason for that. It’s more that COVID has accelerated that.”

Acceleration in mind, Owl Ventures has benefitted from focusing on the then-quite sector since 2014. This year, it saw exponential growth in a number of its portfolio companies. One of its investments, Byju’s, became the most valuable edtech startup in the world. Another one of Owl’s investments, White Hat Jr., got acquired by Byju’s about 18 months after launching. The intra-portfolio activity shows growth, and opportunity for exits.

Chiu is optimistic about the exit environment over the next five years.

“As these companies start to eclipse or get over $100 million in terms of revenue, many of them are going to be in prime position to go public,” he said. “There’s a handful of companies in our portfolio who fall into that bucket.”

Owl Ventures will continue to make international investments in education technology businesses across a number of categories, from recruiting to re-skilling.

Chiu also showed interest in the emerging cohort of startups that focus on education as a direct-to-consumer play.

In addition to the new funds, Owl announced that it has hired a number of new team members from all around the world: former Sequoia India investor Kriti Bansal, former TCV analyst John Azubuike, and former investor at George Soros’ Family Office Jenny Wang. The firm’s summer intern, Emily Bennettt, will join the team once she graduates from Harvard Business School.

Now with over $1.2 billion in assets under management, Owl Ventures says that it is the largest venture capital fund in the world focused solely on edtech.