Category: UNCATEGORIZED

A lagging trend of the past few months has been witnessing startups that COVID seemed poised to kill end up scaling back some of those deep cuts and taking off again. Not all spaces have been quite so lucky, in particular, lately we’ve seen a host of location-based virtual reality startups shut their doors.

Virtual reality arcades weren’t exactly crushing it pre-pandemic, the small industry was already a bit of a Hail Mary for the virtual reality market which has failed to push consumers to adopt headsets on their own and saw arcades as a way to warm up the general public to VR’s role in entertainment. Lackluster consumer interest and the throughput difficulties associated with quickly moving users through experiences were among their biggest challenges facing VR arcades.

This week following a report from Protocol, Apple confirmed its acquisition of Spaces, a virtual reality arcade startup which had been forced to close its in-person arcades amid COVID and had attempted a pivot to creating virtual environments for video chat software. An Apple acquisition is hardly a mark of failure, but it is unlikely that the company has any interest in reviving the startup’s arcade business.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US subsidiary of Sandbox VR had filed for bankruptcy. Sandbox VR raised quite a bit of money on the promise that they could revamp several industries at once. The idea was that mall operators on the decline would give great deals to some of these startups to set up physical storefronts as a loss leader to bring in a younger generation of consumers, while they could capitalize on mixed reality social media video to bring a level of viral growth to their VR offerings.

In July, UploadVR discovered documents that suggested Disney had terminated the lease of virtual reality startup The Void’s Downtown Disney location following months of COVID-related closures.

It was impossible to forecast the current pandemic when many of these investments were being made, but virtual reality arcades had already shown they were far from a sure bet. In late 2018, IMAX shut the doors of the last of its seven virtual reality arcades after investing tens of millions into its VR efforts.

With the future of in-person entertainment unclear, the question is whether virtual reality arcades have any chance of a rebound. As massive movie theater chains struggle to see how the pandemic will affect their industries in the long-term, it isn’t surprising that many of these startups have failed to see a light at the end of the tunnel and have shut down operations or been sold off.

The fact is many of these startups were pushing up against current realities on multiple fronts and were attempting to seriously shift the landscape of 21st century digital entertainment, attempts that seemed daunting from the start. I suspect investors will be reluctant to back new efforts in this space and that the time horizon of COVID-19 will force current entrants towards pivots that look dramatically different from pre-COVID era business models. One caveat is that the VR arcade market certainly looks differently in the United States compared to markets in countries like China and Japan where virtual reality arcades seem to fit a bit more snugly into popular gaming culture. If VR arcades survive or are reborn, it will be due to some pretty massive adoption shifts.

Virtual reality, as an industry, is in a tough spot. In the United States, it’s essentially only Facebook keeping the space alive in a meaningful way and while the company seems to be barreling ahead in its efforts to build a mainstream future for the technology, the ecosystem that sprang up around Facebook’s Oculus has receded meaningfully leaving the company in a lonely position.

FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that offers derivatives, options and other sophisticated products, is acquiring a popular portfolio tracking app, Blockfolio.

FTX is spending $150 million for the acquisition. But take that price with a grain of salt as it’s a combination of cash, cryptocurrency and stock. Cryptocurrency (and stock) in particular might not be perfectly liquid.

While an exchange buying a portfolio tracking app seems to be a right fit, they don’t necessarily have the same audience right now. FTX is better positioned for professional traders as it lets you trade on futures markets and it even offers ERC-20 tokens that track the volatility of bitcoin.

Blockfolio is a consumer app and it has been downloaded over 6 million times on iOS and Android. The startup had previously raised $17 million from Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Dan Matuszewski, DCM Ventures, Hashkey Digital Asset Group and others.

As the name suggests, Blockfolio lets you add your portfolio of cryptocurrencies and track their value over time. The app also lets you view market moves by searching for a token in the app. You can also automate portfolio tracking by connecting the app with your exchange accounts.

With today’s move, FTX wants to launch a simpler trading experience for retail customers. The teams behind FTX and Blockfolio are already working together on a Blockfolio-branded trading product.

And if FTX takes advantage of Blockfolio’s user base, it’s certainly going to be a big advantage when it comes to liquidity.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We’re back out of sequence, because literally every company you can name (well, almost) dropped an S-1 yesterday so we had to sit down and parse them out a bit. That so many filings dropped during the same two days when we had Y Combinator’s two-day Demo Day at the same time meant that we were all a bit punchdrunk, but we rallied.

Natasha and Danny and Chris and myself all piled back onto the mics to dig through all the numbers. Here’s a rundown of the companies we went through:

• Palantir, which filed its formal S-1 during our recording session. Danny covered most of the news last Friday, but the public doc is now live, so happy sleuthing.
• Unity’s huge IPO that shows how big gaming is. Natasha connected it to the broader Apple-Epic dustup, and we all reviled in its growth results.
• Snowflake had Danny so excited he was conjuring scripted segues, and we were all impressed at its historical growth. Sure, it lost a lot of money last year, but, hey, Snowflake has dialed that back as well.
• And then there was Asana, a company I’ve covered quite a lot over the years. Our general take is that the company’s growth has been good, if it is losing more money than we anticipated. Still, Asana could set a neat new precedent of raising debt ahead of a direct listing. This is one to watch.
• And then we spent a little time on JFrog and Sumo Logic (more here), because we are nothing if not completionists.

Got all of that? It was a lot of facts to get through, but we did our best and we hope this helps. More tomorrow as we talk Y Combinator with a special guest host. Chat tomorrow!

Axon, the company formerly known as Taser and which provides the majority of police body cameras, has a few new tech tools for cops that could cut down on paperwork and improve response times. But at a time when the fundamental means and mission of police is being questioned, is this what’s really needed? Even the company’s CEO has reservations.

The new products Axon is delivering will no doubt be useful for police and emergency personnel across the country. The first is the ability to automatically transcribe voices on body camera footage (using machine learning, naturally). As someone who has to deal with a lot of spoken content, I’m easy to convince about the utility of such a tool.

One of the things body cams do is produce a record of officers’ interactions that need to be sorted and referred to in an organized way, but doing so is largely an affair of scrubbing manually through the video to note that such and such an exchange happened at this or that time, over and over. By providing a rough transcript right away, important events can be found and listed quickly, saving time and effort.

Rough is the word, though: Smith was clear that this is meant to be a transcription aid, not to produce court-ready documents. But the company “tried to design products that have value given today’s accuracy.”

I was concerned that this service, like others I’ve seen, may have higher error rates for people whose speech patterns differ from those of the training set’s. If you don’t have people with Puerto Rican or southern accents in the training data, or people using local slang or dialects, they get worse treatment by the algorithm. Smith noted that they license their speech recognition algorithm and tested on real-world data before choosing it, but didn’t have much to say on maintaining a diverse dataset to nip bias in the bud. Even if they didn’t write the algorithm, that’s important for both ethical and practical reasons, so hopefully the company will look into it.

The other new item from Axon is a system aimed at integrating the disparate tools used in 911 dispatch and police crime centers.

“There’s a radio system, a call system for routing, the dispatch software, the dispatcher is usually typing notes furiously into like a command line interface in the software, they’re communicating with officers in the field over a push to talk radio and it’s not a dedicated channel. I’ve been impressed that these people do their job with such a thin pipe,” said Smith. “These systems aren’t integrated — they might be in totally different buildings. It feels like a lot of human glue, and it’s expensive and complicated. We see all that coming together.”

Its “Axon Respond” software helps put all that at a dispatcher’s fingertips, along with relevant data like whether an officer in the area is available, what their expertise is, and so on. Certainly anything that can make a 911 call go more smoothly and get the right resources to the right location would be welcome.

You can share their vision in the following concept video — the tools are in development but not quite ready to be filmed, it seems.

 

It’s not just about getting more cops faster, either, though that is an option.

“We have a customer looking at using our livestreaming not for tactical purposes but to get a live mental health professional on, to give an assessment of the person,” Smith noted. “We could potentially have a very different outcome when you have a trained professional versus a guy with a gun and a stick.”

More tools, more abuse?

That all sounds very nice, except the country is presently in the throes of a major crisis having to do with police abusing their authority and the tools they have available to them — guns, sticks, and body cameras.

A major criticism of body cameras is that while they are ostensibly to provide accountability, in fact police departments use them and the footage they capture very sparingly, withholding it if the cops look bad and publicizing it if it advances their preferred narrative. I’ve seen it happen myself so this is no longer a theoretical for me, and I asked Smith what he thought of it. He didn’t deny that this occurred, but disagreed that the tech is a net negative.

“Tech isn’t a panacea,” he said. “It’s not going to solve these problems for us. But how are you going to solve some of these problems without body cameras? People say body cameras didn’t prevent George Floyd’s death, and that’s true. But I think the George Floyd incident will lead to more lasting change because body cameras were there. If they weren’t, I don’t know that we’d be seeing the energy from police leaders around the country that we are. You’re seeing law enforcement leaders around the country saying, ‘That was wrong. They killed George Floyd.’ You never see that. Police just don’t come out and criticize their peers. But in this case there was enough evidence.”

Certainly the body camera footage has made the behavior of the officers who killed Floyd more clear. But the obvious counter to this is that, had bystanders not filmed the encounter in the first place, there’s a good chance that the body camera footage would never have been seen publicly at all. Even with half the country calling for it, the video practically had to be pried from the department’s hands.

The idea, however, that Axon is preparing for the law enforcement roles of the future by selling the tools for them today. But if, as I invited Smith to imagine, many major police departments do face defunding or significant cuts and restructuring, as seems likely over the next decade, where does that leave Axon?

“We aspire to be adaptable compared with the others in this space,” Smith said. “The way the government buys technology hasn’t rewarded companies that are agile but ones who know how to manage a complex procurements system. We’ve deliberately avoided that because we feel it’s a great way to rebuild the exact same problems we have today.”

“I’ve said, why don’t we do this with a clean sheet of paper and take the risk? And if it’s better our customers will find the way to buy it,” he continued. “When we started doing cloud software in 2009, our customers told us it was illegal for them to use it, so the next couple years were a series of ‘hell no’s. But now for 90 percent of agencies, it’s way safer. So we build stuff for the world that’s emerging. These catalysts do present challenges, but also opportunities.”

Axon, the company formerly known as Taser and which provides the majority of police body cameras, has a few new tech tools for cops that could cut down on paperwork and improve response times. But at a time when the fundamental means and mission of police is being questioned, is this what’s really needed? Even the company’s CEO has reservations.

The new products Axon is delivering will no doubt be useful for police and emergency personnel across the country. The first is the ability to automatically transcribe voices on body camera footage (using machine learning, naturally). As someone who has to deal with a lot of spoken content, I’m easy to convince about the utility of such a tool.

One of the things body cams do is produce a record of officers’ interactions that need to be sorted and referred to in an organized way, but doing so is largely an affair of scrubbing manually through the video to note that such and such an exchange happened at this or that time, over and over. By providing a rough transcript right away, important events can be found and listed quickly, saving time and effort.

Rough is the word, though: Smith was clear that this is meant to be a transcription aid, not to produce court-ready documents. But the company “tried to design products that have value given today’s accuracy.”

I was concerned that this service, like others I’ve seen, may have higher error rates for people whose speech patterns differ from those of the training set’s. If you don’t have people with Puerto Rican or southern accents in the training data, or people using local slang or dialects, they get worse treatment by the algorithm. Smith noted that they license their speech recognition algorithm and tested on real-world data before choosing it, but didn’t have much to say on maintaining a diverse dataset to nip bias in the bud. Even if they didn’t write the algorithm, that’s important for both ethical and practical reasons, so hopefully the company will look into it.

The other new item from Axon is a system aimed at integrating the disparate tools used in 911 dispatch and police crime centers.

“There’s a radio system, a call system for routing, the dispatch software, the dispatcher is usually typing notes furiously into like a command line interface in the software, they’re communicating with officers in the field over a push to talk radio and it’s not a dedicated channel. I’ve been impressed that these people do their job with such a thin pipe,” said Smith. “These systems aren’t integrated — they might be in totally different buildings. It feels like a lot of human glue, and it’s expensive and complicated. We see all that coming together.”

Its “Axon Respond” software helps put all that at a dispatcher’s fingertips, along with relevant data like whether an officer in the area is available, what their expertise is, and so on. Certainly anything that can make a 911 call go more smoothly and get the right resources to the right location would be welcome.

You can share their vision in the following concept video — the tools are in development but not quite ready to be filmed, it seems.

 

It’s not just about getting more cops faster, either, though that is an option.

“We have a customer looking at using our livestreaming not for tactical purposes but to get a live mental health professional on, to give an assessment of the person,” Smith noted. “We could potentially have a very different outcome when you have a trained professional versus a guy with a gun and a stick.”

More tools, more abuse?

That all sounds very nice, except the country is presently in the throes of a major crisis having to do with police abusing their authority and the tools they have available to them — guns, sticks, and body cameras.

A major criticism of body cameras is that while they are ostensibly to provide accountability, in fact police departments use them and the footage they capture very sparingly, withholding it if the cops look bad and publicizing it if it advances their preferred narrative. I’ve seen it happen myself so this is no longer a theoretical for me, and I asked Smith what he thought of it. He didn’t deny that this occurred, but disagreed that the tech is a net negative.

“Tech isn’t a panacea,” he said. “It’s not going to solve these problems for us. But how are you going to solve some of these problems without body cameras? People say body cameras didn’t prevent George Floyd’s death, and that’s true. But I think the George Floyd incident will lead to more lasting change because body cameras were there. If they weren’t, I don’t know that we’d be seeing the energy from police leaders around the country that we are. You’re seeing law enforcement leaders around the country saying, ‘That was wrong. They killed George Floyd.’ You never see that. Police just don’t come out and criticize their peers. But in this case there was enough evidence.”

Certainly the body camera footage has made the behavior of the officers who killed Floyd more clear. But the obvious counter to this is that, had bystanders not filmed the encounter in the first place, there’s a good chance that the body camera footage would never have been seen publicly at all. Even with half the country calling for it, the video practically had to be pried from the department’s hands.

The idea, however, that Axon is preparing for the law enforcement roles of the future by selling the tools for them today. But if, as I invited Smith to imagine, many major police departments do face defunding or significant cuts and restructuring, as seems likely over the next decade, where does that leave Axon?

“We aspire to be adaptable compared with the others in this space,” Smith said. “The way the government buys technology hasn’t rewarded companies that are agile but ones who know how to manage a complex procurements system. We’ve deliberately avoided that because we feel it’s a great way to rebuild the exact same problems we have today.”

“I’ve said, why don’t we do this with a clean sheet of paper and take the risk? And if it’s better our customers will find the way to buy it,” he continued. “When we started doing cloud software in 2009, our customers told us it was illegal for them to use it, so the next couple years were a series of ‘hell no’s. But now for 90 percent of agencies, it’s way safer. So we build stuff for the world that’s emerging. These catalysts do present challenges, but also opportunities.”

Last month’s ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ripping up the EU-US Privacy Shield and sewing doubt over alternative mechanisms, has put a cat among the pigeons of international data transfers.

For Facebook the impact could fall like a cleaving sword as its business is front and center following the so-called Schrems II judgement.

Eponymous privacy campaigner Max Schrems’ underlying complaint targeted the tech giant’s use of a data transfer tool known as Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). Thousands of businesses make use of SCCs to carry out EU to US transfers of personal data, sometimes in addition to the now defunct Privacy Shield framework. An earlier ruling by the CJEU — following another Schrems complaint which also drew on the 2013 Snowden disclosures of US government mass surveillance programs — struck down the prior transatlantic ‘Safe Harbor’ arrangement.

SCCs were an existing alternative for businesses to plug the gap then until Privacy Shield came into effect. But the CJEU ruling of no US adequacy with EU privacy standards casts doubt on their continued use for these transfers. Facebook was using SCCs in the Safe Harbor era. Now, in the wake of the CJEU decision, it’s said it’s moving its Privacy Shield transfers to SCCs. So the tech giant has no visible ‘plan B’ if it’s ordered to suspend these data flows too.

In Schrems’ views the only way Facebook will be able to comply with the CJEU ruling is if it splits its infrastructure into two. And while other types of companies — such as cloud storage providers — may already separate data by regions owing to factors like latency or even cost, Facebook’s business simply doesn’t operate like that. It’s designed to draws data to its center.

“Facebook is probably the most [susceptible] to all of this,” says Schrems, discussing the ramifications of the CJEU ruling in an interview with TechCrunch. “For Facebook it’s really, really complicated as a company to comply with any of this.”

“There are parts that are necessary data transfers, and [Facebook] can continue to do that. So basically the message that I sent to an American friend, stuff like that. But that’s only a small percentage,” he continues. “So I think technically the approach they’d have to do is basically split Facebook in two. And then kind of reconnect the necessary data transfers. So you’ve basically federated. A bit like Diaspora was always designed to be; a federated social network where you basically have different parts and what’s necessary is communicated and what’s not necessary is not communicated.”

“They’re not going to do that without heaven and hell moving onto them,” he adds. “I guess — especially for Facebook — that the problem is we kind of have a case where the consequences are so extreme the pushback is obviously as extreme as possible… They know that without fundamentally restructuring the whole system they will never be able to comply with any of this — so they don’t.”

Schrems points to what happened historically with SWIFT financial data exchanges as a comparable scenario — where the fix was to move backups from the US to Switzerland “so only the data that is international and US is actually stored in the US and all the other transfer data is kept in Belgium and Switzerland”. “So you separate your backups and your situations and so on,” he says, adding: “It’s a lot of engineering.”

At this point most of the big tech companies have data centers in Europe. While newer social video sharing app TikTok recently announced plans to establish one Ireland for EU users’ data. But Schrems reckons there’s no easy way for Facebook to unpick all its EU data flows.

We asked Facebook for details on its legal basis for continuing to use SCCs but the company did not engage with questions on the topic. Nor did it respond when we asked for clarity on any ‘plan B’ if it’s ordered to stop using SCCs.

Beyond a massive engineering headache for the company, Schrems doesn’t see huge legal significance in a federated version of Facebook’s service that holds EU users’ data in Europe. But he argues such a split would send an important message about the rule of law.

“The law doesn’t differentiate if the data is processed in Europe or in the US on having to be compliant with it… So I don’t really think we can probably gain much from it. To me it’s more of a general question of companies having to respect the law or just getting away with it, over and over again, without really complying. I don’t think [it would be a gain] for direct compliance — it’s probably more of a big message that you don’t get away with it that would be important to send,” he says.

Can SCCs still be used for US transfers?

In the clash between EU privacy rights and US surveillance law, Europe’s highest court has made it clear it isn’t budging. At the same time, lawyers all over the region are busy grappling with the apparent contradiction of the CJEU finding US surveillance practices fatal to Privacy Shield yet not putting an indelible blocker on SCCs for data transfers over the pond. This other long-standing transfer mechanism — sometimes also referred to as ‘model clauses’ — could have been struck down too but wasn’t. So the court left the door ajar.

Law firms have seized on that to shape strategies for businesses to proceed using SCCs for US data transfers in a way that minimizes their risk — via performing detailed risk assessments and/or applying ‘special measures’, where possible. Given the rich seam of paid advice opportunities opening up it’s not hard to find European lawyers who believe SCCs can be made to work for some data controllers who want to continue (or start) bulk processing EU users’ data in the US.

This advice boils down to handling all of the associated bureaucracy around performing risk assessments over a particular data transfer and whether/how it falls under US surveillance law; for some it may also mean investigating technical and operational solutions, such as whether data could be encrypted in transit and the keys held by a EU entity that’s not subject to US law; and perhaps seeing whether policies can be applied and contractual language beefed up so that a US receiving entity which gets a law enforcement request for data is obliged to take steps to make sure there’s a real legal compulsion underpinning it.

In a public discussion on the topic hosted by the International Association of Privacy Professionals last month, Hogan Lovells partner, Eduardo Ustaran — one of the more bullish voices touting the ongoing value of SCCs for US transfers — made the case for building policy protections into contracts to require a level of push back and interrogation of US government agency requests for data.

“When the court talked about additional safeguards and making up for the lack of protection in the regime of the recipients… they’re talking about precisely that: Having that legal process in place — a contractual obligation — to question that request. And you will probably find that if that is in place only a very, very, very small minority of cases will lead to something that is a true conflict where the prohibition of data really needs to be given,” he argued.

“Even in that case, one needs to question whether that is actually within the parameters of what European law provides. Or outside those parameters. Because, again, what the court didn’t say was that all access to data is unlawful; it’s the one that’s not necessary, it’s disproportionate. So that’s what you need to get at. And that’s what we’re saying. I think there is definitely room for manoeuvre in that contractual document for the parties to that document to agree to what level of scrutiny they’re going to undertake when one of them receives a request.”

In the same discussion, Fieldfisher privacy, security and information partner, Renzo Marchini, suggested some data controllers may be able to determine they do not have any risk of European standards not being met for their particular data transfer.

“For some vanilla transfers there might simply be no risks,” he posited. “They might be outside of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and so on. And you only get to additional safeguards, additional measures if you conclude that you need to do something more — and the court has allowed you to do something more.”

“They haven’t said what that’s got to be,” he added. “I hope the EDPB [European Data Protection Board] will give some certainty here and tell us what those things are.”

The lack of judicial redress linked to US surveillance law is a stickier problem, though. One Marchini accepted can’t be fixed with any amount of contractual spit and polish — and which, for businesses subject to FISA, will carry through as what he couched as “residual risk”.

“That simply goes to the risk assessment that’s carried out beforehand,” he said when pressed on that point. “So if you’re at risk and you can’t fix it technically, operationally, then you’re left with the residual risk that you haven’t fulfilled essential equivalence. There’s no way of avoiding that, I think. You’re not going to fix that gap in US law which the court found either… There’s a lack of judicial redress under FISA 702; you can’t fix it, but you might be able to conclude you’re not at risk under FISA 702.”

In Facebook’s case, there’s no plausible dispute the company falls under US surveillance laws — which means its wiggle room in the face of Schrems II is minimal. And so suddenly the company throwing all its eggs into the SCCs’ basket in the hopes that Europe’s regulators will ignore the CJEU’s instruction to step in looks high risk.

“One of the holdings of the Court of Justice was there is simply no legal redress whatsoever as a foreigner,” notes Schrems, adding: “I’ve had calls with people from industry and they said we know that we actually don’t have a legal basis but we just hope they’re going to be reasonable and not enforce it. Which is basically saying you’re working illegally and you hope the law doesn’t apply to you.”

“We’re now asking different companies and most of them say we don’t really know the legal basis — we’re waiting for guidance,” he adds. “The reality is the vast majority of them is simply now working illegally. Google and Microsoft and even Facebook put out ‘oh we’re still using SCCs because we read the judgement differently’.”

In another example, the IAB Europe suggests in an Q&A on the CJEU ruling that worried advertisers “seek guidance from your lead supervisory authority” — and then immediately suggests DPAs “may give leniency towards data transfers that took place under the Privacy Shield due to the sudden nature of this change in the law”. Although, on SCCs, the ad industry body is more circumspect, writing that compliance is now determined on a case-by-case basis and “will depend on the companies sending and receiving the personal data, the regulator in the target country, and the types of personal data”.

“To be honest I’m not super enthusiastic about data transfers because we have so many other privacy problems there probably are bigger issues. But the reason why I’m really getting more and more excited about this case is it just shows the vast ignorance on any of these decisions,” adds Schrems. “If the Supreme Court of the EU says for the second time you can’t do that and they’re just saying ‘oh I guess the law doesn’t apply to us or is not going to be enforced anyways’.

“With the data transfers you kind of understand why it’s complicated and you can’t change it overnight. Even in the Facebook complaint I filed in 2015 — back then I said you know they should at least have an order where, within a certain time period, they should have to stop the data transfers than say you’ve got to stop it overnight because that’s not going to happen. But they could, theoretically, order them to stop the data transfers within a year, for example. Which would give them enough time to actually comply with it.”

What happens next?

Individual EU regulators have generally been keeping their cards close to their chest since the CJEU ruling. And it remains to be seen what action Facebook’s lead supervisor, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), will take as its next steps vis-a-vis Schrems’ seven-year-old complaint. All eyes are on Dublin.

More than two years since the application of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the regulator is no stranger to complaints that it needs to pick up the pace and get on with the job of enforcing major cross-border complaints against tech giants like Facebook. Though its counter argument to such criticism is that building robust cases that will stand up to legal challenge takes time.

In the meanwhile, guidance on the CJEU ruling put out by the EDPB emphasizes that international data transfers via SCC must be assessed on a case by case basis; and, if a data controller intends to keep using SCCs, it must inform the relevant EU supervisory authority — inviting scrutiny of these flows.

Combine that with the CJEU telling EU data protection agencies they have a duty to intervene and stop data transfers to places where they suspect people’s information is at risk and it’s hard to see how regulators can keep sitting on their hands in obvious cases involving FISA-subject entities.

One thing looks clear: The era of ‘tickbox’ data transfers to any international jurisdiction that lacks an EU data adequacy agreement is toast.

Taking that further, any third country that lacks a comprehensive data protection framework akin to GDPR probably isn’t going to be able to sustain ‘seamless’ access to the European market for long, if at all — which means, yes, the US; but also China, India, and so on (a post-Brexit UK also looks dicey on the adequacy front given its penchant for surveillance overreach; though some of that has already been dialled back via the courts).

And even though there are now noises on both sides of the Atlantic about cooking up a ‘Privacy Shield 2‘, barring enlightened reform of US surveillance law — or the impossible flip-side of Europe tearing up its charter of fundamental rights — any such respawned instrument would soon follow its predecessors into legal history.

As we said last month, all this sums to a lot more work for lawyers. And right on cue law firms are talking up contractual risk reduction strategies to sell concerned data controllers a way forward.

Cash-strapped regulators are also going to find more work piled on their plates now they have unequivocal instruction not to look the other way at lawbreaking data transfer ‘business as usual’.

Pressure is being applied to regulators by EU lawmakers too who want to see more joint working to ensure harmonious application of major rulings across the bloc’s patchwork of data authorities. Businesses need clarity, is the common refrain. And the role of the EDPB — whose current duties include issuing guidance and promoting pan-EU cooperation and consistency of regulatory application — looks set to become increasingly pivotal as more of these cross-border cases and pinch-points flare up.

The EDPB will need to take on more of a leadership, decision-making role vs its customary talking shop, per Schrems. “They will have to become a proper legal entity that does proper legal decisions because they will be tested in court,” he argues. “So far they got away with more political statements and so on. In both directions. There’s some things that they put out that are just going way too far, which the GDPR does not provide for. And there are other things where they’re miles away from the basics of what the GDPR says. [Their output] will have to become more like a proper legal analysis — that says this is what you have to do now.”

Unsurprisingly, for a privacy activist who’s been petitioning regulators to uphold his fundamental rights for so many years — and now with two adequacy-crushing CJEU rulings that bear his name — Schrems expresses plenty of frustration at the DPAs’ performance to date.

After so much time and legal energy it’s amazing to think his original complaint against Facebook’s use of SCCs is still unresolved. And that’s just one of many he’s filed, having spun up noyb: A not-for-profit European digital rights group dedicated to strategic litigation to defend privacy.

“The other problem is that that the authorities locally then also have to enforce [EDPB guidance] because there’s still a lot of talk,” he says. “We have decisions that, I can’t name them publicly — but we have ‘in between’ decision from the Irish DPC where they literally say yeah that’s what the EDPB says but we have a different view and we’re just going to decide the opposite way. And they’re not technically bound by these guidelines but if structurally they’re not upheld in Member States then, yeah, nothing’s going to happen.”

noyb also has pending cases that have been sitting with DPAs for as much as 1.5 years without a key authority providing feedback — because “they simply don’t talk to each other”.

“I mean just in daily practice. We have cases that are pending — like the forced consent stuff — where the Germans said they now called them every month in Ireland and there’s simply no answer,” he adds. “And so it’s not working on such a childish, basic level.

“So the problem that we’re having is this whole cooperation system is just so fundamentally not working. It could work if everybody tries to pull in the same direction. But right now they are rather all pulling in different directions.”

What does Schrems believe will happen with his Facebook SCCs complaint now the CJEU has finally weighed in?

“I have no clue to be honest. We’re now planning to do more and more turning up the heat a bit,” he says, nodding to the 101 complaints just filed by noyb against the use of SCCs for Facebook Connect and Google Analytics data transfers. “Fundamentally it’s a question of whether the data protection authorities take themselves seriously or if they continue to be like ‘FAQs’ that are just like ‘blah, blah, we don’t really tell you anything’. And which of the DPAs are going to start to take some enforcement measures.”

“People complain about the US a lot and US companies not being compliant with EU law… But the reality is we’re simply not enforcing these laws. And it’s a fundamental European problem that we don’t do that,” he adds. “I’m usually joking in Austria; one Google penalty would buy us up to four high speed rail tunnels through the Alps!”

There has been one Google penalty since the GDPR began being applied in May 2018 — levied by France’s CNIL in early 2019. But Schrems argues the €50M fine was woefully low, pointing out Austria slapped a larger penalty on its postal service (€80M) for trying to calculate people’s political interests based on their location and age in order to run a direct mailing service. And it’s clear Google’s behavioral ad-targeting personal-data-sink goes a lot deeper than a spreadsheet to sell direct mailing.

“If you never really enforce the law, if you never really put out a penalty, if the maximum penalty even from the CNIL was €50M — which was nothing — then there’s no reason to wonder why [tech giants] don’t comply,” adds Schrems.

The Irish DPC has also sought to package product launch delays as annual-report-worthy enforcement wins. But Schrems argues such stuff “fundamentally underestimates their power”. He also notes that noyb has instigated legal action against the DPC “for being inactive”, as he puts it.

“They’re oftentimes more happy to write a press release than to actually take the law and take the options that they have on the law and go for it,” Schrems adds, discussing the problem of EU DPAs generally not feeling willing or able to enforce. “That’s the reason why we’ve tried to push them with these complaints, the 101 complaints. Basically they can’t say that they haven’t a case on their table anymore.”

He likens the impact on Europeans’ fundamental rights of so much regulatory inaction as akin to having the right to vote but without access to a polling station most of the time.

“That’s a bit of how we do privacy,” he suggests. “And that’s a part of what we’re trying to do at noyb; just dig into that and just see, you know, there is a law, you breached it, now you pay for it. Because unless we actually push for that structurally, and bit by bit, we’re just going to be in this endless debate about privacy for the next 30, 40 years.

“I’m always telling myself it’s a bit normal because when we had the first time that we talked about workers’ rights — it still is a 100+ years ongoing debate about actually getting paid what your collective, bargaining agreement says. It’s not like any of these problems are done tomorrow or done forever but here the gap between reality and law is just so huge — and even huge companies just fundamentally do not comply — and that’s a bit exceptional. Because in other areas they at least pretend to comply. Or somehow comply if they’re a larger company with some reputation.”

Of course even massive financial penalties can amount to a parking ticket for tech giants. Witness Facebook’s smiles-all-round $5BN FTC settlement. Or Google’s $5BN antitrust fine for a still dominant Android OS. But Schrems’ point is you have to actually have functioning institutions issuing penalties to stand any chance of tackling such massive rights asymmetries. And, well, a law that’s not enforced is like a footpath no one walks; soon enough there’s weeds growing over it and pretty quickly you couldn’t even walk it if you tried.

“We’re not going to police the world by having a DPA behind each bush and ogling each click that everybody does. But if they, in general, have an enforcement pressure that companies have the feeling that ok if I don’t comply, bit by bit, I’m going to get caught for something… It’s a bit like with traffic,” says Schrems. “You know I’m not a fan of having a speeding camera around every corner but if once in a while you get a speeding ticket you kind of realize that going 160 on an autobahn is not a good idea and it generally keeps people to drive at 140 if 130 is legal. It keeps it somehow at a format that is somehow acceptable — and that’s totally missing in the privacy world.”

For now, the enforcement gap is being challenged by not-for-profits like noyb. It’s also increasingly viewed as an opportunity by class action style litigation funders — hoping to profit off of population-scale damages even if regulators won’t.

Schrems says noyb has managed to attract a crowdfunded annual budget of around €600k-€700k at this point — “all donated money for doing the job that regulators are actually paid to do” — although he’s recently been running ads on social media to try to get it to full target funding. “Technically noyb shouldn’t exist,” he jokes.

Clearly, though, Schrems has tapped into an appetite among Europeans for someone to champion their rights.

After years of regulatory inaction that has allowed data-mining giants to exploit people’s privacy without any meaningful consequences — sewing up the attention economic in the process — there’s a vacancy for privacy heroes to tackle the sorts of abuses Schrems and his team are worried about. Problems regulators have failed historically to act on, and which Europeans are still waiting for action on. (A two-year Commission review of GDPR in June acknowledged a lack of uniformly vigorous enforcement.)

“Right now we’re looking into a lot of the data brokers on the advertisement stuff,” says Schrems, when asked about his biggest privacy concern. “What’s kind of interesting in some countries — not all — the credit ranking agencies and what they do and why they think they can have data on every European and their financial situation without ever having consent or anything. So there’s tonnes of stuff that we’re looking on right now. I’m luckily not involved in all of it at the same time anymore.”

Epic Games wins a victory against Apple, Fitbit announces a new smartwatch and Microsoft Word adds a transcription feature. This is your Daily Crunch for August 25, 2020.

The big story: Judge says Apple can’t block Unreal Engine

U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers weighed in on the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple with a mixed verdict. She denied Epic’s motion to restore the popular game Fortnite to Apple’s App Store, but also ordered Apple not to block Epic’s developer accounts or to restrict developers on Apple platforms from accessing Epic’s Unreal Engine tools.

“Apple has chosen to act severely, and by doing so, has impacted non-parties, and a third-party developer ecosystem,” Rogers said.

A full hearing on the dispute is scheduled for September 28.

The tech giants

Fitbit launches a $330 Apple Watch competitor — The Sense is designed to be a premium alternative to the Versa line, described by the company as its most advanced health smartwatch.

Facebook is bringing a Shop section to its app, while Instagram expands Live Shopping — Facebook Shop doesn’t sound too different from the similarly named Instagram Shop, where users can browse products from their favorite brands and businesses.

Microsoft brings transcriptions to Word — This new feature lets you transcribe conversations, both live and pre-recorded, and then edit those transcripts right inside of Word.

Startups, funding and venture capital

YC’s most anticipated startup raised $16M from a16z before Demo Day — Trove sells a suite of internal compensation tools to other startups.

Self-charging, thousand-year battery startup NDB aces key tests and lands first beta customers — NDB has created a new, proprietary nano diamond treatment that allows for more efficient extraction of electric charge from the diamond used in the creation of the battery.

Instacart workers are demanding disaster relief amid CA wildfires — Gig Workers Collective, a gig worker-activist group led by Instacart shoppers, is asking Instacart to provide disaster relief to workers impacted by natural disasters.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to establish a startup and draw up your first contract — We invited James Alonso from Magnolia Law and Adam Zagaris from Moonshot Legal to join us at TechCrunch Early Stage to give us a 360 overview of the legal side of running a startup.

Unity, JFrog, Asana, Snowflake and Sumo Logic file for IPOs in rapid-fire fashion — Alex Wilhelm does a big roundup of new IPO filings.

As DevOps takes off, site reliability engineers are flying high — The emergence of site reliability engineers is not a new trend, but one closely coupled with the theme of DevOps over the last decade.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Netflix’s ‘Emily’s Wonder Lab’ is smart, interactive science TV for kids — TV science host (and former TechCrunch contributor) Emily Calandrelli told us that “Wonder Lab” is the realization of a concept that she’s been pitching for years.

Porsche experiments with subscription pricing, expands to Los Angeles — Porsche now has three tiers under its newly rebranded Porsche Drive vehicle subscription program.

Meet the Disrupt 2020 ‘TC10’ — The TC10 is a group of entrepreneurs, investors, etc. who have been a staple of our Disrupt conference over the past decade. And they’re all coming back!

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

And we’re back! Today was part two of Y Combinator’s absolutely massive Demo Day(s) event for its Summer 2020 class.

As we outlined yesterday, this is the first YC accelerator class to take place entirely online, from the day zero interviews all the way on through to their eventual demo day debut. We talked with YC President Geoff Ralston about what it was like to take the program fully remote (and whether or not it’ll be staying remote for the long run) in an ExtraCrunch interview here.

Nearly 100 companies presented yesterday, and almost 100 more took the stage today. Each company got 60 seconds to pitch an audience of investors, media, and fellow founders and tell the world — in many cases, for the very first time — what they were building.

Here are our notes on each of the companies that presented today:

CapWay: A mobile bank for the “financially underserved”. CapWay brings modern banking services to those in regions where only local (and potentially out-of-date) credit unions exist. The company makes money on the processing fee during debit card transactions. Set to launch in 3 weeks. 

Supabase: An open source alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase helps developers by providing a Postgres database with a self-documenting API based around the data inside. 12 weeks post launch, the team says it’s already hosting over 1500 databases. 

BaseDash: The people who know how to edit a database aren’t always the same people who need to do it. BaseDash lets non-engineers safely manage data as simply as they’d edit a spreadsheet, replacing custom internal tools. 

Afriex: If you remember the early days of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the idea that they would be huge for remittances was a regular talking point. Somehow that never took off quite as expected. At least not yet, if Afriex has its way. The startup uses USD-pegged stablecoins to help users to send money to other countries, and its model is catching on: Afriex is currently processing $500,000 per month, which is up 5x in the last three months. If Afriex can take on TransferWise and other services that have scale today, it would do well by itself and make cryptos look good at the same time.

Backlot: Meet the collaborative design tool for film and video industries that’s billing itself as the Figma for filmmakers. The company boasts that filmmakers can render their entire film in 3D, enabling productions to mitigate a lot of the risk and expenses associated with film production. Blockbusters typically hire teams of humans to do by hand what Backlot offers with its software. The company estimates that it’s an $11 billion market. Backlot charges $130 per user per month.

LSK Technologies: LSK is looking to tap computer vision to build disease testing hardware (a “lab in a box,” as they put it) small/fast enough to keep in a doctor’s office or workplace. The company says it’s currently running Zika Virus field trials in Latin America, and is looking at how they can bring their computer vision approach in to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. They also say they’ve seen over $100,000 in pre-orders to date.

inFeedo: inFeedo’s “Amber” is an AI bot that chats with employees and aims to predict who is unhappy or about to leave. The team says it’s already working with 46 enterprise companies, and is cash flow positive with an ARR of $1.6M.

Opvia: Nobody is less satisfied with the data tools available to scientists than the scientists themselves, but they’re not often able to do anything about it. These two, however, decided to make “Airtable for scientists,” replacing the menagerie of tools old and new, from spreadsheets to MatLab, that researchers use to hold and corral data.

Porter: Remote development environments for microservices. Lets developers set up “templates” of the dev environments they use, and roll out new remote instances with a click. Currently used by companies like PostHog and Motion.

Plum Mail: It’s not an email and chat competitor, it’s an email and chat replacement. The startup sells a platform that focuses on communication features and scheduling tools. On its website, it says it has 36 “other era-defining features that blow e-mail and chat out of the water.” The startup launched 6 days ago and has 550 people on its waitlist. 

Cradle: SMBs in India often resort to cash or checks because the overhead from online payment systems cuts into their profits. Fortunately new regulations make certain types of B2B payments free there, and Cradle is building a platform on top of these. With no interchange fees and all the usual benefits of instant online payment, this could help supercharge SMBs in this growing market.

Clover: Creatives are still largely stuck living in Google Docs and Word, two pieces of technology that are designed around the history of physical paper and printers and general Office Space sadness. Clover wants to shake the text doc world for creatives on an “infinite canvas.” The company’s product isn’t launched yet, so there are no growth numbers to share, but the startup does claim 5,400 folks on its waitlist. Our question is how you get creatives to pay for stuff, as most creatives that we know are out of work. Regardless, down with today’s terrible text apps! Let’s see if Clover can shake its market up.

Datafold: automates quality assurance of analytical data. Anytime a developer makes a change, Datafold analyzes and verifies the output across your databases. Developers spend hours checking data manually, but incidents happen because there’s not a good way to handle all of the changes that go into modern software programming. 

Depict.ai: Joining the host of products aiming to help SMBs compete with Amazon in the ecommerce sphere, Depict.ai is building a product recommendation engine to help bring “Amazon-quality” product recommendation for any e-commerce store. Customers include office bigbox chain Staples.

DigitalBrain: Pitched as “Superhuman for customer support agents”, DigitalBrain says it can help CS reps get through tickets twice as fast. Currently in 10 paid pilots after launching 6 weeks ago.

Daybreak Health: Online counseling for teenagers. The startup uses a mobile app to connect teens to teen-specialized therapists. It also communicates with parents to figure out a plan for online counseling. Founded by Stanford alums, Daybreak Health is bringing in $6,000 in monthly revenue and claims it is more affordable than private practice. Read more in our story here. 

Phonic: Surveys are useful for a million reasons, but the text-based online surveys we’re all familiar with haven’t changed much in 20 years, leaving them open to manipulation and fraud. Phonic avoids this by using audio and video responses rather than text or buttons, and the company says this triples response quality and helps eliminate fraud and joke responses. The media are automatically ingested and summarized using machine learning, so no, you don’t have to watch/listen to them all. 

Dapi: Dapi is a fintech API play that is aimed at facilitating payments between consumer bank accounts and companies. That Dapi has managed to make its service work in seven countries with deep bank support is impressive. And Dapi has found demand for its service, with $400,000 in ARR and growth of more than 50% per month as of its presentation. Of course, that growth rate will sharply decline in time, but everyone knows that fintech APIs can have big exits. Expect to hear more from Dapi.

Reploy: By rolling out staging environments with each code deploy, Reploy lets developers share features with their teams and get immediate feedback. Reploy has $1500 in monthly revenue after launching roughly 3 weeks ago.

Index: Index wants companies to use its no-code dashboard builder to help visualize their KPIs and track performance. The tool boasts integration with a variety of data providers so that users aren’t forced to manually enter data into another tool. The startup hopes that building embeddable dashboards will help their solution catch fire and that startups will turn to their tool when they want to track progress on goals. 

Ramani: Helps distributors in Africa manage their inventory, allowing sales people to catalog and track sales. Currently running 5 pilots, they’ve seen $80k worth of sales logged to date.

Spenmo: Framing itself as Bill.com for SMBs in Southeast Asia, Spenmo helps companies manage their payments. The founding team hails from Grab, Xendit, and Uangteman. After launching 5 months ago, it has 150 companies as customers and processed $500,000 in transactions in July. 

Piepacker: We can play games together, and we can video chat, but it’s not actually that easy to play games together and video chat. Piepacker combines video with a collection of licensed popular retro-style games that friends can play together easily. It’s simpler than putting together a Discord group but more interactive than just streaming. So far the platform has seen long sessions and engagement. 

Farel: Another Shopify for X startup, Farel stood out from the pack by having an idea that we’d never thought of: Shopify for regional airlines. The Farel team says that regional airlines — those with fewer than 30 airplanes — make up 30% of the $600 billion air travel market; Farel wants to offer better software for those airlines, charging $1 per traveller per segment. That sounds super cheap? So far the startup is lining up early customers and partners, so it’s a bit too early to say if Farel will, ahem, take flight.

PhotoRoom: This promising startup already has over $1 million in annual recurring revenue, thanks to its service that removes backgrounds from product photos. It’s grown 50 percent since its launch in February and the simple service belies some pretty interesting technical wizardry with machine learning tools to effortlessly retouch marketing images. 

Liyfe: Liyfe is building a telemedicine platform for breast cancer patients to communicate with oncologists and cancer professionals from home. The founders hope that more communication between experts and cancer patients can lead to more thoughtful approaches and outcomes.

Openbase: Reviews and insights to help developers choose the right open-source packages. Founder Lior Grossman previously founded Wikiwand and the open-source project Darkness. According to Grossman, Openbase is already seeing 250,000 developers per month.

Quell: Quell is eyeing what they see as a $18 billion market opportunity in the immersive fitness gaming market. The startup uses resistance bands to help players get fit while fighting their way through a virtual fitness world. It coins itself as a “Peloton meets gaming”, and charges a monthly fee to keep content fresh. 

Hypotenuse: E-commerce sites need a lot of copy: product descriptions, ads, blog posts and more. This is generally done by copywriters, but the quality (especially if hired from by-the-word content farms) can be hit and miss. Hypotenuse generates high quality copy automatically for a variety of purposes and they claim switching to their system boosts engagement by double digits. The founder has a strong AI background so you can at least count on the science.

Reflect: Testing your website or web service is time-consuming and hard to get right. And if Reflect is correct, the existing tooling in the market to help make web testing better is too complicated for most folks to use. Reflect is a bet that a no-code (buzzword!) tool to automate web testing (desktop and mobile, per its website) will be a hit. The company claims $9,600 in MRR, growing at 30% month-over-month. 

Byte: Byte is building on-demand food delivery from virtual kitchens in Pakistan. Using virtual kitchens, Byte can slash the cost of food prep, the company says. Byte is already growing 40 percent week over week. The company makes $1 per order, and says it has a total addressable market in Pakistan of $20 billion to make food delivery cheaper.

Parrot Software: Parrot is building Toast for Latin America, creating a suite of back office tools for restaurants. The software handles all of the expected tasks, including customer payments, ordering, seating and data visualization. 

BlaBla EdTech: An app that aims to help the user learn English using short, TikTok-style videos. Founder Angelo Huang says the company has 8,000 weekly active users six weeks after launch.

StratumAI: Artificial intelligence software and technology that helps mining companies figure out where to mine. Stratum charges $2 million per year, per mine and it helps those customers unlock an average of $10 million in profit during the same time period. 

Intelline: Diesel generators may sound like 20th century tech, but they’re used everywhere, both by industry and individuals. Intelline has designed a diesel generator that they claim has 40 percent better fuel efficiency, which translates to enormous savings at scale; Mining operations, they note, could save millions per year with better diesel generators. 

Ilk: Using a thesis of the “childcare pod”, Ilk is coming to the rescue of worried parents who need to find better/safer childcare solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the company’s founder. With a childcare pod, two to five families team up to pool resources and pay for a caregiver to care for their kids.  The company’s service matches parents with caregivers. The very very early stage company has already set up two successful pods in San Francisco and officially launches next week. 

Isibit: A platform for managing/overseeing business travel, focusing on companies in Latin America. Allows travel managers to configure travel policies/limits, and offers employees rewards for making affordable travel choices. The team says they’ve seen over $10,000 in bookings a month after launch.

QuestDB: Born years earlier as a side hustle being built on nights and weekends, QuestDB is building an open source time series database focused on speed. If the startup pulls it off, it can help companies detect fraud plus plan and predict customer activity at a faster speed than other competitors. The company is currently being tested at a fintech unicorn, and several companies are using it as part of their production processes. Read more on our coverage here. 

WareIQ: Companies in India are trying to wean themselves off Amazon’s infrastructure, but can’t match the company’s fast shipping. WareIQ is a software platform that links India’s huge network of fulfilment centers and last mile couriers to enable next-day delivery for budding e-commerce sites that would normally only be able to offer 5-15 day shipping.

Kernal Bio: MRNA therapies to cure COVID and Cancer are  a pretty compelling business proposition. Kernal Bio says it has developed therapies which rely on using messenger RNA to instruct cells in the body on how to make their own defenses to diseases. The team has an incredible background with co-founders that include a former researcher from Merck who’s developed therapies already. A former founder of Santigen and a phD scientist from MIT.  The company has already won three awards from Amgen and NASA.

Kosmos: Kosmos is building a control center for a company’s microservices, helping developers monitor and debug a web of services inside a unified interface. The company is integrating all of these tools so developers can see updates and track changes without being forced to search in multiple locations.

Matter: Pitched as “Superhuman for reading”, Matter says it is building an “opinionated reading app” to help users find better content online. Currently in private beta on iOS. 

Ladder: Building a labor marketplace to help construction companies hire skilled workers for permanent positions. Essentially, Ladder works as an HR team that construction companies can turn to for hiring and retention needs. It has 1,340 workers on the platform and booked $12,200 in revenue in the first month of launch. 

Letter: Letter is a bank specifically for rich people, made by a newly rich person who didn’t like existing banks. Aimed at “high net worth individuals” with $1-10M in assets, Letter includes features specifically for the wealthy, replacing the pedestrian tools and designs of ordinary banks and credit unions. The team says they earn up to 2% per transaction.

Maytana: Pitching itself as the financial payment center for multinational startups, Maytana makes it easier for multinational businesses to move money using open banking APIs. The company has three customers and is charging a 0.01% fee for money transfers. There’s $10 trillion being transferred around the world and Maytana thinks it can capture a big chunk of that spending. 

Safepay: Safepay wants to build a Stripe for Pakistan, crafting a digital payments API in the country where the founders say there are no other major players in this space. 

Jumpstart: Helps international founders setup businesses in the US, aiding with things like incorporation and establishing bank accounts. Charging $129-$329 per year, the team says they have 1,280 companies on the service today. 

Mozper: A debit card and app for kids and parents in Latin America. The startup is seeking to tailor to the smartphone-carrying youth, sticking with them until adulthood and becoming their de-facto bank option along the way. Mozper’s core product is a debit card, which it charges a fee for, and an app. The startup has already raised $1.5 million from investors and friends. Read more with our previous coverage here. 

Parade: Parade lets online brands generate tailored marketing content automatically. You fill out a survey about preferred styles and other info, and it generates assets, including social media posts and a style guide for other content — all with no human in the loop. It’s a big industry dominated by expensive human designers, and Parade feels there’s plenty of room for an automated solution like theirs for businesses that can’t afford or don’t want to deal with the human element.

Nestybox: creating software to enable containers to replace linux virtual machines. Instead of deploying a few heavy VMs on a server, Nestybox lets you deploy a number of containers for the same functionality. There are 30 million deployments which represents a $6 billion opportunity for Nestybox. Containers have already revolutionized programming, now Nestybox is looking to extend that revolution to compute infrastructure. 

Here: Here is building “personal, shareable, flexible” in-browser video chat rooms. Unlike most other video chat startups, the company’s founder says they’ve built their own video stack. Seeing their website, it definitely has its own unique look, bringing in some 90s website design paradigms with modern video chat.

Roboflow: Helps developers build computer vision models without having to know much about machine learning. Co-founders previously built AR-heavy Sudoku solver Magic Sudoku, spinning the tools and learnings they put together there into Roboflow.  The team says there are currently over 1,000 developers using Roboflow each week.

Vena Vitals: Sells a wearable sticker that allows consumers to monitor their blood pressure continuously. It’s a replacement for needles, at a fraction of the cost and clinical accuracy. The company is starting out the clinical route, but wants to become the standard for blood monitoring and managing for consumers and hospitals over time. 

SafeBase: B2B SaaS companies, of which there are approximately five million in this batch alone, need to be able to show that they meet security standards in a clear, verified way or they risk losing customers. SafeBase aims to be a one-stop status page that provides “instant credibility” by showing compliance with security standards.

 

Rume: Rume wants to make the social video experience better by allowing groups to have multiple conversations in one space. The company says it enables attendees to fluidly move between groups just like they would at a party. So far, the average Rume session is 50 minutes long and the company has integrated games into the Rume. What sets Rume apart, the company says, is that it owns the entire video stack, thanks to the expertise of the co-founders as former developers at Google and Dropbox. 

Oico: Oico is a B2B marketplace for construction materials in Brazil. The company is aiming to build the “missing infrastructure” to help large contractors acquire materials, pointing them to materials providers and facilitating deals. The company takes a 10% slice of transactions, and they’ve reached $87k GMV after four months on the market.

Osmind: Millions of Americans suffer with mental disorders that traditional psychiatric and psychological treatments don’t address. While experimental treatments have been developed, they’re not being delivered or tracked effectively, thanks to the barriers that exist in practice management, reimbursement, data collection and distribution to pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Osmind wants to use its practice management and monitoring software to help mental health professionals deliver care to this population that’s most in need… and provides anonymized insights for pharma/insurance companies to ensure that these treatments are effective. Find our previous coverage of Osmind here.

Todos Comemos: A ready-to-cook meal kit delivery service for Latin America. The company sources food from production facilities that serve restaurants and hotels and is able to turn over meal kits  at a cheaper price, with a 30% margin after delivery costs are accounted for. 

Orchata: Grocery stores and other food suppliers in Latin America rely on outdated methods like paper/pen for things like ordering and delivery, if they offer it at all. Orchata wants to be the Shopify for online grocery ordering in the region, enabling these small businesses to list items and receive orders online, accept payments, optimize delivery routes, and so on. The company says 1.7M people can be served at their current pricing, which suggests it’s a bit expensive for most, but really, that’s true of Instacart and others as well.

Speedscale: Another programming dev tool to make life easier, Speedscale simulates APIs using actual traffic. Founded by former leaders of engineering and developer solutions at companies like NewRelic, Speedscale solves the problems of code oversight that even companies built with state of the art cloud services have to face. Development updates are often impossible to test due to too many dependencies, but Speedscale says it validates each component with real traffic. The company already has Digibee as a customer and hopes to roll up each of the 11 million developers programming with APIS, which would represent a $6.5 billion market opportunity. 

Stacker: Stacker is another startup aiming to upscale the spreadsheet with no-code functionality, allowing the company’s users to turn spreadsheets into internal apps and customer portals. The software pushes customers to let data drive designs and turn manual processes into automated ones. The company has more than 250 customers including Google and Amazon.

Epihub: Another Shopify for X! This time it’s “Shopify for anyone teaching online”. Epihub is a platform meant to help online instructors schedule/run classes and charge students. 3 weeks after launch they have 50 paid instructors on the platform, with an MRR of $1k.

Notabene: Helps businesses perform crypto transactions in a regulatory compliant way. The startup wants to be the “trusted layer on top of blockchain” for sharing information. The market is looking to cash in on the new global regulations on crypto that is driving adoption but, at the same time, confusion. In 3 weeks, it landed 10 signed customers. 

Bits: Bits helps people build their credit score by providing them with a digital credit card that they pay off every month. Sure, you could do it yourself, but why not have a service that helps you out? In nine months the company has attracted 10,000 paying customers and collected $1.9M in revenue, and some customers have seen their credit scores jump by hundreds, so clearly there’s something to it. The founder hopes that this straightforward beginning will be the basis for a new, more full-service billion-dollar fintech company.

Oco Meals: Delivering prepared meals made by local catering companies has already nabbed Oco Meals 25,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Unlike most delivery businesses, Oco Meals delivers pre-ordered food in bulk once a week. The company boasts that it’s able to give customers better pricing at half the cost and still make $25 per order. 

Response: Response is another YC startup that’s focused on the response to COVID-19. The startup is building a network for PPE in the United States allowing suppliers to bid on customer requests. The startup hopes that they can further scale this infrastructure beyond PPE in the future and eventually become Alibaba for the United States.

RingMD: Helps governments quickly roll out telemedicine in their countries. Currently working with customers in Chile, the Philippines, and India while charging $3 per user per year, founder Justin Fulcher pins their ARR at $632,000. 

CarbonChain: A way for companies to automate the arduous process of tracking their carbon emissions. The company, which is profitable, has landed 5 paying customers with $280,000 in annual recurring revenue. CarbonChain’s success hinges on more than just the benevolence of business leaders. It’s betting on government regulation as a catalyst for companies to care (and transform) their carbon emissions. Read our coverage here. 

Panadata: Background checks are an ordinary part of doing business everywhere in the world, but the data is fragmented across multiple government databases and other document hoards. Companies have emerged to sift through the mess in the U.S. and E.U., but Latin America provides a unique challenge and Panadata hopes to tackle it. Its automated check system is already in action and in use by banks, law firms… even the local governments in charge of the data it uses.

Venostent: Venostent, the company that’s developing a novel material for stents and vascular reconstruction and stenting surgeries, has already won prestigious prizes from HHS and the NIH and will be beginning a clinical trial this year. The company has a $5 billion market opportunity ahead of it in just its initial market alone and it has 92% gross margins. Read more about our coverage on this company here.

NeXtera Workforce: NeXtera is building a software platform to help factories integrate robotics into their processes in days instead of months. The AI platform is focused on deployment, monitoring and tech support to help optimize rollouts. Early customers of theirs include Dunkin Donuts and Tesla. The founders are MIT alumni with backgrounds in AI and cybersecurity.

Finch: An API to help developers tap into payroll systems (like ADP, Gusto, Rippling, etc)  “with three lines of code”, enabling them to do things like verify income, set things up for direct deposits, pull paystubs, and confirm employment.

Scrimba: An online, personalized coding school coming out of Oslo, Norway. Scrimba teaches students coding through interactive videos that are pre-recorded. Students are able to actively code throughout the videos, and so far Scrimba has worked with students from over 100 companies. 

Tangobuilder: Taking an architect’s designs from concept to construction-ready blueprints is an expensive, complex job done by structural engineers and other experts. Tangobuilder automates the process, saving time and money — for example, they claim one hospital project was 2 months faster and $1.5M cheaper because it used their platform. You can read our coverage of Tangobuilder here.

Frontline: How about a startup that gives developers — no matter their security experience — NPCI compliance? That’s Frontline. The company already has $22,000 in monthly recurring revenue and is growing 42% monthly. Already 20 Fortune 500 companies are using the company’s service. Typically the process to deploy a secure virtual machine takes 100 hours to complete. Frontline’s service is an obvious and affordable choice to get that chore off of developer’s plates. The company estimates that its service represents a $4 billion market.  

Synth: Synth is building a platform for creating compliant, realistic fake data for application development, cloning existing databases while synthesizing the specifics. The startup believes its approach will help promote better data privacy and compliance with regulations while still maintaining accuracy.

Sutra: Looking to help the countless fitness instructors put out of work by COVID gym closures, Sutra charges $25 per month with a 3% transaction fee to help instructors host live fitness classes and sell videos/monthly memberships. Their platform can be integrated into your existing website, or they can provide a landing page.

Trident Bioscience: Sells software that helps biotech companies design proteins with recent breakthroughs in mind. The company has predictive models that help customers decide which kinds of proteins should be made. The founder, Tyler Shimko, has a PhD in genetics from Stanford. Trident is currently working with 2 biotech companies. 

TyltGo: Brick and mortar stores and small online retailers want to provide same-day delivery, but would prefer not to own a bunch of trucks. TyltGo provides same day delivery service on demand, batching orders from multiple retailers to optimize routes, lower costs, and reduce the need for warehouse space.

Tappity: The company bills itself as the interactive Netflix for kids. It already has 5,000 subscribers and $55,000 in monthly revenue. It’s picking up 20,000 free downloads per month and has no marketing spend — something that’s a valid selling point given the high costs of consumer customer acquisition. Customers pay $8 for the service and with 25 million kids in its target market that’s a $2.5 billion market opportunity. It’s already the number one science app for kids on the app store and the company plans to add classes for programming, history math and art. The goal, the company says, is to build a veritable Library of Alexandria of interactive lessons that kids are curious about. 

Ukama: Ukama is building technologies to allow any enterprise to create their own LTE-based cellular network. The founder says that this approach can reduce network bills, increase security and provide more accessibility to on-campus users. The CEO previously founded another cellular network startup that was acquired by Facebook. 

Biocogniv: Builds AI-powered software to help hospitals diagnosis patients, analyzing their EHR (electronic health records) in real time. Currently focusing on predicting COVID outcome, they will soon expand to screening for signs of sepsis and pulmonary embolisms.

Drip: Rather than a restaurant running on a collection of disconnected pieces, Drip provides what it claims is “the only piece of software a restaurant needs to run its entire business.” That means POS, employee scheduling, payroll and more. With lots of restaurants modernizing their methods during the pandemic, Drip has grown from doing $10k/month in business in June $600K in August.

Henry: Bringing the income sharing model to Latin America to help potential students pay for their education, Henry is a company that thinks it’s in the right region at the right time. It already has more than 500 students and it’s serving an incredible need given the flood of demand coming from tech companies in the region. The college and university system is broken, Henry argues, and it’s got the education opportunity for new developers. “That’s why we created Henry. To unlock potential and bring high quality education with an income share model.” 

Batch: Batch is building a Time Machine for corporate data. The startup’s tools allow customers to observe and replay data inside messaging systems to help them quickly diagnose outages and data disasters and revert changes.

Cohere: Superhuman onboards users with a live, one-on-one training session with a live guide; Cohere wants to open up that same concept to any other application with just a few lines of code.

Verifiable: With healthcare increasingly moving online, it’s more important than ever to keep things up to date and verified. Verifiable is building an API to automate license verification for healthcare providers, integrating with state and federal sources. After launching this month, the company says it’s projecting an ARR of $210k.

Virtually: An all-in-one solution for anyone looking to build an online school, providing tools for admissions/student management, video conferencing, payment processing, and a forum to keep in touch with students. Virtually says it’s currently working with over 25 programs just 3 months after launch, and will charge $10 per student per month. The startup is selling a white-label solution that organizes the mess of tools that teachers or schools currently have to piecemeal together. 

Fieldguide: Fieldguide is building a software suite for accounting firms, helping them rethink how they conduct audits, generally allowing for greater collaboration inside firms. The platform blends secure data requests, controls testing and automated reporting. The company launched in July and has $150K in signed commitments.

Acho: A point-and-click, no-code interface for processing and publishing data, Acho helps users dig into their data without having to write complicated SQL. With 300 users onboarded in the month after launch, the team says they’ve processed over 100 TB of data already.

SuperTokens: Maintaining a user’s session at a frequently visited site removes the need to log in again, but also presents security vulnerabilities — in fact session attacks are one of the sneakiest new attack vectors out there, and big companies aren’t immune. SuperTokens helps securely manage sessions while providing state of the art defenses against the latest attacks and enabling easier compliance with security standards. Their libraries are already seeing lots of use by industry majors and a paid version is gaining traction.

Finmark: Doing for financial management what Carta did for equity and fundraising, Finmark is financial planning software for startups to manage runway and cash. Trying to manage your business off an excel sheet is painful, but for startups proper oversight this can mean the difference between thriving and dying. 300 companies have signed up for its financial management service, the company says. 

Gather: Helps people ops team coordinate things like onboarding/offboarding/temporary leave through automated Slack workflows. Co-founder Alex Hilleary says they’ve found 10 paying customers after opening the gates just two months ago, and have onboarded one unnamed 700-person company. Find our previous coverage of Gather here.

Yottasavings: The upstart American challenger bank, Yottasavings has accumulated over $30 million in deposits since its launch in July. The company was inspired by premium bonds; the idea is that it encourages savers to deposit money into their accounts by giving them the ability to win prizes. In the UK, the government-run savings program has attracted $100 billion in savings from one third of the population. The team notes that the overall concept was illegal in the US until 2015 and it requires a fundamentally different approach to building a banking product. The company boasts that it could be the next big challenger bank in the US, by borrowing this UK model and with the amount of savings it has collected, seems to be on its way. 

New York-based startup Muze is rethinking mobile messaging. While today’s messaging apps have expanded over the years to include support for sharing photos and videos, voice messages, reactions and more, Muze has fully redesigned the traditional messaging experience as a blank canvas, allowing for more creative interactions. The company’s new mobile app on iOS allows users to add text, pin their photos and GIFs, zoom in and out on content and even draw on the messaging canvas itself using different pen sizes and colors, among other things.

The end result looks nothing like your standard messaging conversation, where back-and-forth chat bubbles are interspersed with the occasional photo, video or link. Instead, a chat in Muze looks like some sort of collaborative art project — a collage of ideas, a meme board or perhaps a sketchpad, depending on how you use the app.

Despite offering a jumble of new features, Muze itself is simple to get started with and fairly easy to use, as well.

After signing up for an account on Muze and optionally syncing your contacts, you’re first presented with what otherwise appears to be a fairly typical messaging interface. There’s a text box to type in and buttons that let you quickly access your iPhone Camera or your phone’s photo gallery to add media to your chat.

To the right, you’ll notice a pen icon, as well — the first visual hint that Muze may be doing things differently.

But as you dig into the features, you realize Muze offers more ways to interact. For instance, when you tap the photo gallery icon, you’ll discover Muze doesn’t only offer access to your own media — you can also search for photos, add GIFs from Giphy or grab one of dozens of custom stickers. These include stickers that let you frame the text, react to messages and decorate the screen, as well as a set of emoji mashups — like a pleading faced-emoji, surrounded by hearts, making the “But I’m Shy” symbol with its fingers (it’s a TikTok thing). The TikTok-favored Eye Mouth Eye emoji set is also plastered across a yellow smiley with open arms and tiny feet.

When you tap into the text box to begin typing, you’re presented with more of Muze’s expanded features. From here, you can tap buttons to change the font, text color or the alignment, or turn on the highlight color (the “bubble” color).

When you’re ready to enter the text, you can drag and drop the chat bubble anywhere on the screen, or make it larger or smaller. You can stick it over the top an image and so on.

The pen, meanwhile, lets you draw on anything on the screen — not just the blank canvas itself, but also on top of text, images, stickers or whatever else you’ve used to decorate your chat.

There’s only a slight learning curve to the app. For example, when you tap on the pen icon from the main chat screen, you may want to be able to draw underneath the current chat in a blank area of the canvas. But if you try to scroll down, you end up drawing on the screen, much to your surprise. To actually draw beneath the existing chat, you have to instead tap into the text box first, then tap a different pen icon that appears in the gray iOS toolbar. Of course, kids who can manage complex TikTok edits won’t struggle with these sorts of quirks.

The app has a few other modern features, as well, like the ability to change the app icon from one of several it includes, for example. It also gives you the ability to theme the app not just with light or dark colors, as is now common, but also in shades like millennial pink, mint green, dark teal, forest green, purple and light blue.

Combined, its feature set delivers an app that has a lot of youth appeal — which makes sense, as Muze itself was designed by younger people who are used to communicating online with memes, GIFs and other creative content. Currently, Muze’s co-founders include Douglas Witte, Willem Simons and Grant Davis. Fenner Stevens is Muze’s CEO.

Though new to the market, Muze has already attracted the interest of investors. According to Crunchbase and SEC filings from 2019-2020, Muze has raised around $7 million in outside capital, including both equity and debt. On its AngelList profile, Muze’s backers include Sequoia Capital, Tribe Capital, Maveron, True Ventures, Grand Central Tech, Village Global and Hiten Shah. We understand a handful of other smaller funds and angels have also backed Muze.

The team at Muze declined to be interviewed about their plans for the business going forward, but confirmed the funding. The app is live on the App Store as a free download.

Figma for filmmakers, TikTok for English learners and a cryptocurrency twist that actually makes sense?

After 197 pitches, Y Combinator’s Demo Day for its Summer 2020 cohort has concluded. While the fanfare, run-ins and fortune cookies were missing in this virtual session, it was still exciting to see and hear founders from 26 countries pitch their passions. Of course, some opted for a more quiet route, raising millions before the two-day pitch session even kicked off.

Members of the Summer 2020 class drew attention from nearly 2,400 investors across the world. For those who didn’t tune in, no worries: here’s our write-up of the companies that presented yesterday.

Participating startups spanned a number of sectors: we saw companies in the future of work, sustainability, no-code, consumer, edtech and delivery solutions. Several entrepreneurs aimed big at e-mail, small at socks and straight at Shopify’s recent success.

While TechCrunch reporters aren’t in the business of cutting checks or predicting success, read on to learn about the 12 startups that stuck out to us for a variety of reasons (apart from their Zoom backgrounds).

CarbonChain

Jonathan Shieber

CarbonChain may be the company that times the carbon market correctly. Now that the European Union and other regions are taking a serious look at penalizing businesses that fail to reduce carbon emissions, a service that provides accurate accounting for a company’s carbon footprint will be increasingly valuable.

And if the company can add marketplace and offsetting services on the back of its assessments, then its proposition becomes even more valuable. But what really makes CarbonChain stand out is the rigor with which it approaches its measurements.

The company uses independent software tools to make a digital twin of the carbon-emitting assets in a company’s business and claims that it can determine the emissions footprint of operations down to a cup of coffee (it also has models for the carbon footprint of heavy industrial equipment in the world’s most polluting industries).

For the world to address its carbon emissions, companies must understand their contribution to the problem. CarbonChain could be an invaluable tool in that effort.