Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Trove, a startup that sells a suite of internal compensation tools to other startups, has quietly graduated from this summer’s Y Combinator batch with millions in venture capital and a whopping valuation.

A16z and Trove did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal likely closed weeks after the company joined the famed accelerator cohort, which went virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic. The startup deferred presenting on Demo Day, Y Combinator’s biannual showcase of all startups within the batch, probably because it raised.

The business, less than a year old, is raising a $16 million round with a $75 million post-money valuation, according to individuals familiar with the deal. Andreessen Horowitz is leading the round. WorkLife Ventures confirmed that it also participated in the competitive round.

Simply put, Trove helps employers compensate their employees. In startups, stock options are a thorny but big part of compensation packages. Trove is a platform that helps managers visualize earnings amid different valuation scenarios, and then communicate those numbers to employees.

The startup is also breaking into the market during a time where startup employees are indefinitely working from home. Compensation gets trickier as perks disappear. What do you pay your San Francisco employee who now lives in Denver and acquires far less costs of living? If the perks disappear, does that turn into cash for an employee? Companies need new benchmarks, and a suite of startups is popping up to help bring clarity.

The company is founded by Matthew Schulman, a former software engineer at Facebook and graduate of University of Pennsylvania Engineering and Wharton school. The company raised a $850,000 pre-seed round in March.

Since Trove did not present on Demo Day, we don’t have a clear understanding of the company’s growth. Trove is one of many startups in the space that are trying to make it easier to understand how to pay employees through cash and equity within a startup. Just last week, Welcome raised $1.4 million with the goal of providing a clear picture of how total compensation works to job candidates. It describes itself as a “first offer management and closing platform.”

Across startupland, the size of seed rounds has been growing. In 2018, the average seed round was $5.6 million. Yet Y Combinator serves as sort of an anecdote for how big the rounds could actually get. Over time, the incubator graduates startups with competitively priced rounds on high valuations.

It hasn’t always been this way. For a sense of how things changed, consider that Trove raised at a $75 million post-money valuation, while Airbnb, which was once a Y combinator company, raised its first check at around a $2.5 million valuation in 2009.

So while high valuations are somewhat expected of Y Combinator graduates, Trove’s raise comes with a pandemic-sized footnote. Startups are closing big rounds even in a remote investment world, showing that the fundraising scene for seed stage startups definitely isn’t as bleak as we thought it would be in early March.

According to California filings, Trove is selling 8 million shares as of August 20th. Given that due diligence takes 30 days, it’s reasonable to believe that the startup was only part of Y Combinator’s cohort for a few weeks before it raised a Series A round.

It’s clear that A16z isn’t shy about placing big valuations on months old companies.

Last summer, the firm landed a lead investor spot with Tandem, another breakout star from the Y Combinator cohort. This year, A16z beat out other investors to lead a financing in Clubhouse, a buzzy app loved by VC and Silicon Valley elite, at a $100 million valuation.

Other investors in Trove include the Graduate Fund, Backend Capital, and Village Global, according to Trove’s website.

Trove, a startup that sells a suite of internal compensation tools to other startups, has quietly graduated from this summer’s Y Combinator batch with millions in venture capital and a whopping valuation.

A16z and Trove did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal likely closed weeks after the company joined the famed accelerator cohort, which went virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic. The startup deferred presenting on Demo Day, Y Combinator’s biannual showcase of all startups within the batch, probably because it raised.

The business, less than a year old, is raising a $16 million round with a $75 million post-money valuation, according to individuals familiar with the deal. Andreessen Horowitz is leading the round. WorkLife Ventures confirmed that it also participated in the competitive round.

Simply put, Trove helps employers compensate their employees. In startups, stock options are a thorny but big part of compensation packages. Trove is a platform that helps managers visualize earnings amid different valuation scenarios, and then communicate those numbers to employees.

The startup is also breaking into the market during a time where startup employees are indefinitely working from home. Compensation gets trickier as perks disappear. What do you pay your San Francisco employee who now lives in Denver and acquires far less costs of living? If the perks disappear, does that turn into cash for an employee? Companies need new benchmarks, and a suite of startups is popping up to help bring clarity.

The company is founded by Matthew Schulman, a former software engineer at Facebook and graduate of University of Pennsylvania Engineering and Wharton school. The company raised a $850,000 pre-seed round in March.

Since Trove did not present on Demo Day, we don’t have a clear understanding of the company’s growth. Trove is one of many startups in the space that are trying to make it easier to understand how to pay employees through cash and equity within a startup. Just last week, Welcome raised $1.4 million with the goal of providing a clear picture of how total compensation works to job candidates. It describes itself as a “first offer management and closing platform.”

Across startupland, the size of seed rounds has been growing. In 2018, the average seed round was $5.6 million. Yet Y Combinator serves as sort of an anecdote for how big the rounds could actually get. Over time, the incubator graduates startups with competitively priced rounds on high valuations.

It hasn’t always been this way. For a sense of how things changed, consider that Trove raised at a $75 million post-money valuation, while Airbnb, which was once a Y combinator company, raised its first check at around a $2.5 million valuation in 2009.

So while high valuations are somewhat expected of Y Combinator graduates, Trove’s raise comes with a pandemic-sized footnote. Startups are closing big rounds even in a remote investment world, showing that the fundraising scene for seed stage startups definitely isn’t as bleak as we thought it would be in early March.

According to California filings, Trove is selling 8 million shares as of August 20th. Given that due diligence takes 30 days, it’s reasonable to believe that the startup was only part of Y Combinator’s cohort for a few weeks before it raised a Series A round.

It’s clear that A16z isn’t shy about placing big valuations on months old companies.

Last summer, the firm landed a lead investor spot with Tandem, another breakout star from the Y Combinator cohort. This year, A16z beat out other investors to lead a financing in Clubhouse, a buzzy app loved by VC and Silicon Valley elite, at a $100 million valuation.

Other investors in Trove include the Graduate Fund, Backend Capital, and Village Global, according to Trove’s website.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left no industry untouched, but the healthcare industry is arguably the one that stands to be transformed the most by the ongoing pandemic. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, get the perspectives of two founders who’ve created entirely new healthcare modals with their respective startups on how their companies have adapted to a world transformed by a global health crisis.

Eren Bali, co-founder CEO of Carbon Health, and Othman Laraki, founder and CEO of Color, will join us on our virtual stage during Disrupt, which runs September 14-18 this year. Bali’s Carbon Health is a startup focused on creating a new standard for primary and urgent care, using modern clinics equipped with smart technology, as well as remote healthcare devices to enable a high standard of distanced clinical practice. Laraki’s Color, meanwhile, has adapted its population genomics platform and added COVID-19 testing as a core capability, with an eye to establishing and sharing best practices for high-volume diagnostics.

We’ll talk about how healthcare has changed since the advent of the pandemic, and what it means for people looking to ensure that their primary care continues to be offered at a high level – without other problems falling through the cracks. We’ll also discuss Color’s experience working with the city of San Francisco to roll out its in-person testing capabilities, including providing crucial testing resources for primary care workers. We’ll also look ahead to what kind of challenges we’re still likely to face before the pandemic is over, and how it will change how we approach community and individual care for decades to come.

Both Carbon Health and Color are at the frontlines of COVID-19 testing during an unparalleled national and global emergency, and their insight will be invaluable for getting a sense of what’s going right and what’s going wrong with testing in the U.S., and where we go from here. You won’t want to miss the perspectives that these two can offer.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 through September 18 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your front row seat to see Bali and Laraki live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.

Facebook is announcing a number of new e-commerce features both within the main Facebook app and on Instagram.

The pandemic has forced many businesses to shift online, and Facebook made a big announcement in May around the ability of merchants to create Facebook Shops that are viewable on both Facebook and Instagram. More recently, Instagram launched a redesigned Shop section, where users can browse products from their favorite brands and creators.

Now the company is bringing a similar experience to the main Facebook app. The company said that in the United States, it’s started testing a new section called Facebook Shop — like Instagram Shop, it’s basically a shopping destination where you can find products from a variety of different businesses. (This is distinct from Facebook Marketplace, which is designed for peer-to-peer sales.)

Director of Product Management George Lee told me the goal is to create something that’s “unique to the Facebook app and the Facebook community.”

Image Credits: Facebook

“That’s not to say that there aren’t learnings across the board,” he said. “[Instagram Shop and Facebook Shop] probably look like slightly different on day one, and the goal is not to have them be cookie cutters of the same experience.”

In addition, the company is announcing new tools for businesses running Facebook Shops, including new design layouts, the ability to see a real-time preview of collections, the ability to automatically create Shops if you’re a new seller and new data in Commerce Manager. Shops will also feature a new messaging option for customers to send sellers a message through Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram Direct.

On the Instagram side, the company said all sellers in the United States will be able to use the Instagram checkout feature “in the coming weeks,” managed either through Facebook’s Commerce Manager or through partners platforms BigCommerce and Shopify (with more integrations planned). Instagram will waive its selling fee for checkout through the rest of the year.

The company has also been testing a live shopping experience, where businesses can show off products in a live video, while consumers can browse the highlighted products and make purchases. Instagram Live Shopping should now be available to all sellers using Instagram Live Shopping in the United States.

Image Credits: Facebook

“We’ve seen live shopping take off in other parts of the world,” said Instagram’s vice president of product Vishal Shah. “The pandemic has really changed behavior from a consumer perspective, so we’re moving as fast as we can to bring out these tools to help [businesses respond].”

Microsoft today announced that Immersive Reader, its service for developers who want to add text-to-speech and reading comprehension tools to their applications, is now generally available.

Immersive Reader, which is part of the Azure Cognitive Services suite of AI products, developers get access to a text-to-speech engine, but just as importantly, the service offers tools that help readers improve their reading comprehension, be that through displaying pictures over commonly used words or separating out syllables and parts of speech of a given sentence.

It also offers a distraction-free reading view, similar to what you will find in modern browsers. Indeed, if you use Microsoft’s Edge browser, Immersive Reader is already included there as part of the distraction-free article view, together with its other accessibility features. Microsoft also bundled its translation service with Immersive Reader.

Image Credits: Microsoft

With today’s launch, Microsoft is adding support for fifteen of its neural text-to-speech voices to the service, as well as five new languages (Odia, Kurdish (Northern), Kurdish (Central), Pashto and Dari) from its translation service. In total, Immersive Reader now supports 70 languages.

As Microsoft also announced today, the company has partnered with Code.org and SAFARI Montage to bring Immersive Reader to their learning solutions.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Microsoft to bring Immersive Reader to the Code.org community,” said Hadi Partovi, Founder and CEO of Code.org. “The inclusive capabilities of Immersive Reader to improve reading fluency and comprehension in learners of varied backgrounds, abilities, and learning styles directly aligns with our mission to ensure every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science.”

Microsoft says it saw a 560% increase in use of Immersive Reader from February to May, likely because a lot of people were starting to look for new online education tools as the COVID-19 pandemic started. Today, more than 23 million people use it every month and Microsoft expects that number to go up once again in the fall, as the new school year starts.

Perhaps some day in the not-so-distant future, we’ll all be wearing smart glasses. Stranger things have happened. And hey, most people were fairly skeptical in the early days of smartwatches. And while I’m not saying that it will definitely take Apple launching its own pair to accelerate mainstream acceptance à la the Apple Watch, I would be short sighted to rule out the possibility.

The category is a strange holding pattern, as Vue announces the launch of its $179 Lite glasses. The original Google Glass are far enough in the rearview to make references feel outdated, but the arrival of a truly revolutionary model still feels a long ways off. Intel abandoned its Vaunt project and North killed its second-generation Focals before getting scooped up by Google. Bose’s own project appears in jeopardy after it shuttered its AR division this June.

When I first had some hands-on time with Vue’s original glasses back in October 2016 (a very different time to be sure), I was intrigued. The company was, notably, plagued by delays — certainly not an anomaly in the world of crowdfunding. “We apologize for the delays and wish we could be more timely. We don’t enjoy being late, but it can happen when developing a new product,” the company wrote in a recent post.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

At the very least, it’s worth noting that the first project is almost always the most difficult for hardware startups, for obvious reasons. I can also tell you now that I’ve had a pair of the Vue Lite for about a week now, which I’ve been using off and on. So on that front, at least, they’re a real thing. They’re also simpler than their predecessors, which could help on that front.

It’s worth tempering your exceptions a bit, in terms of what to expect from a pair of smart glasses. The main features are music playback, through a pair of low-power speakers that fire directly at the air. Those replace the Vue Pro’s more advanced bone-conduction system. They are, be warned, pretty quiet, but the design does go a ways toward keeping you in tune with your environment, as they don’t cover the ear.

Each side features a simple touch control, used to control music playback, pick up phone calls and trigger voice assistant. Like the speaker, the microphone’s…not the best, but it gets the job done. I definitely wouldn’t use the Vue Lite as my primary music device, and probably not for too many important calls, either. But it’s nice enough when you’re on the move.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The company’s swapped out the cool charging glasses case for simple conduction pads on either arm — each with their own battery that needs to be charged independently. You should be able to get around three-and-a-half hours of playback on a charge — an hour less than the Pros. They also drop some key features, including fitness tracking and Find My Glasses.

As for their look, they’re a bit boxy for my taste (though there are three styles available), though reasonably lightweight. You also can get them to ship with your prescription.

Microsoft today launched Transcribe in Word, its new transcription service for Microsoft 365 subscribers, into general availability. It’s now available in the online version of Word, with other platforms launching later. In addition, Word is also getting new dictation features, which now allow you to use your voice to format and edit your text, for example.

As the name implies, this new feature lets you transcribe conversations, both live and pre-recorded, and then edit those transcripts right inside of Word. With this, the company goes head-to-head with startups like Otter and Google’s Recorder app, though they all have their own pros and cons.

Image Credits: Microsoft

To get started with Transcribe in Word, you simply head for the dictate button in the menu bar and click on ‘transcribe.’ From there, you can record a conversation as it happens — by recording it directly through a speakerphone and your laptop’s microphone, for example — or by recording it in some other way and then uploading that file. The service accepts .mp3, .wav, .m4a and .mp4 files.

As Microsoft Principal Group PM Manager for Natural User Interface & Incubation, Dan Parish, noted in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, when you record a call live, the transcription actually runs in the background while you conduct your interview, for example. The team purposely decided not to show you the live transcript, though, because its user research showed that it was distracting. I admit that I like to see the live transcript in Otter and Recorder, but maybe I’m alone in that.

Like with other services, Transcribe in Word lets you click on individual paragraphs in the transcript and then listen to that at a variety of speeds. Since the automated transcript will inevitably have errors in it, that’s a must-have feature. Sadly, though, Transcribe doesn’t let you click on individual words.

One major limitation of the service right now is that if you like to record offline and then upload your files, you’ll be limited to 300 minutes, without the ability to extend this for an extra fee, for example. I know I often transcribe far more than 5 hours of interviews in any given month, so that limit seems low, especially given that Otter provides me with 6,000 minutes on its cheapest paid plan. The max length for a transcript on Otter is 4 hours while Microsoft’s only limit for is a 200MB file upload limit, with no limits on live recordings.

Another issue I noticed here is that if you mistakenly exit the tab with Word in it, the transcription process will stop and there doesn’t seem to be a way to restart it.

It also takes quite a while for the uploaded files to be transcribed. It takes roughly as long as the conversations I’ve tried to transcribe), but the results are very good — and often better than those of competing services. Transcribe for Word also does a nice job separating out the different speakers in a conversation. For privacy reasons, you must assign your own names to those — even when you regularly record the same people.

It’d be nice to get the same feature in something like OneNote, for example, and my guess is Microsoft may expand this to its note-taking app over time. To me, that’s the more natural place for it.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new dictation features in Word now let you give commands like “bold the last sentence,” for example, and say “percentage sign” or “ampersand” if you need to add those symbols to a text (or “smiley face,” if those are the kinds of texts you write in Word).

Even if you don’t often need to transcribe text, this new feature shows how Microsoft is now using its subscription service to launch new premium features to convert free users to paying ones. I’d be surprised if tools like the Microsoft Editor (which offers more features for paying users), this transcription service, as well as some of the new AI features in the likes of Excel and PowerPoint, didn’t help to convert some users into paying ones, especially now that the company has combined Office 365 and Microsoft 365 for consumers into a single bundle. After all, just a subscription to something like Grammarly and Otter would be significantly more expensive than a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Palantir, the secretive data analytics startup founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, would challenge a government order seeking the company’s encryption keys, according to a leaked document.

TechCrunch has obtained a leaked copy of Palantir’s S-1, filed with U.S. regulators to take the company public. We’ve covered some ground already, including looking at Palantir’s financials, its customers, and some of the company’s self-identified risk factors.

But despite close relationships with law enforcement and government customers — including the U.S. government — Palantir indicated where it would draw the line if it was served a legal demand for its data.

From the leaked S-1 filing:

From time to time, government entities may seek our assistance with obtaining information about our customers or could request that we modify our platforms in a manner to permit access or monitoring. In light of our confidentiality and privacy commitments, we may legally challenge law enforcement or other government requests to provide information, to obtain encryption keys, or to modify or weaken encryption.

The S-1 touches on a particularly thorny issue in the U.S., given repeated efforts by the Trump administration to undermine and weaken encryption at the request of law enforcement, who say that encryption used by U.S. tech and internet giants makes it harder to investigate crimes.

But despite the close ties between Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and the administration, Palantir’s position on encryption aligns closer with that of other Silicon Valley tech companies, which say strong encryption protects their users and customers from hackers and data theft.

In June, the government doubled down on its anti-encryption position with the introduction of two bills which, if passed, would force tech giants to build encryption backdoors into their systems.

Tech companies — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter — strongly opposed the bills, arguing that backdoors “would leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries.” (Verizon Media, which owns TechCrunch, is also a member of the coalition.)

Orders demanding a company’s encryption keys are rare but not unheard of.

In 2013 the government ordered Lavabit, an encrypted email provider, to turn over the site’s encryption keys. It was later confirmed, though long suspected, that the government wanted access to the Lavabit account belonging to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

More recently, the FBI launched legal action in 2016 to compel Apple to build a custom backdoor that would have allowed federal agents access to an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people and injured 22 others. The FBI dropped the case after hiring hackers to break into the shooter’s iPhone, without Apple’s help.

Palantir did not say in the S-1 if it had received a legal order to date. But the S-1 filing said that the company risks “adverse political, business, and reputational consequences” regardless of whether or not the company challenged a legal order in court.

A Palantir spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Facebook News, the social network’s dedicated news section launched to U.S. audiences in June, is soon expanding to international markets. The company announced today it plans to accelerate its plans to bring the product to non-U.S. markets, including the U.K., Germany, France, India, and Brazil, within the timeframe of six months to a year.

As in the U.S., Facebook says it’s committed to paying news publishers in the new markets for the content made available in the Facebook News product. However, it notes that the experience may not be exactly the same as it is in the U.S., in other ways.

“Consumer habits and news inventory vary by country, so we’ll work closely with news partners in each country to tailor the experience and test ways to deliver a valuable experience for people while also honoring publishers’ business models,” explained Campbell Brown, Facebook VP of Global News Partnerships, in an announcement detailing Facebook’s plans.

As the product expands in these international markets and beyond, the company will face various new laws and regulations that require tech firms like Facebook to pay for news. In Australia, which was not listed as one of the new destinations, Facebook and Google will both have to pay for news content under a recently launched system. Similar laws are being enacted in the E.U, as well. France, for example, was the first of the European Union Member States to push Google to pay for reuse of news snippets in Search and Google News, as part of a law that requires tech companies pay publishers.

Facebook News’ planned launch in that country seems to indicate the company has managed to successfully negotiate with regulators.

The product itself is still too new to pass judgement on at this time. But Facebook has had a rocky history with news distribution on its platform before its launch of Facebook News. Years ago, it had offered a short list of trending stories across the network. But when it fired the editors who curated that section, Facebook’s algorithms began posting fake news to the list. Facebook finally removed the feature in June 2018.

The company has also tried to serve publishers over the years with mixed results. It once pitched the concept of “Instant Articles” that loaded quickly in Facebook, but restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on, leading many to abandon the feature. It also once pushed the “shift to video,” but had inflated its video metrics. When Facebook pulled back on paying publishers, some news businesses were wiped out. Also in 2018, Facebook announced it would deprioritize the distribution of news posts in its News Feed in favor of personal updates from friends and family, shrinking referrals to news outlets.

In more recent years, Facebook’s role in the spread of fake news, propaganda, disinformation, and other un-fact checked content has been brought to light. Unfortunately, any changes Facebook makes at this point may be too late to address the underlying issues. For example, by the time it decided to ban some QAnon groups and accounts earlier this month, the conspiracy movement had become a part of the mainstream consciousness. Last May, the FBI had even flagged conspiracy theory-driven extremists, including those who believe in QAnon, were now a domestic terrorism threat.

Facebook News is the company’s latest response to the growing misinformation problem.

The section, programmed by journalists, requires that publishers qualify for inclusion by having a significantly large audience and abide by integrity standards. It claims to look for negative signals like if the content gets flagged by fact-checkers or if it includes clickbait, engagement bait or use of scraped content. But elsewhere on the social network, Facebook was at the same time relaxing its rules around misinformation for several high-profile conservative pages.

At launch, Facebook News had over 200 general news publishers and thousands of local and regional publications.

Today, the company says its plans are to also grow Facebook News in the U.S., in addition to bringing the product to new markets. It will focus more specifically on growing engagement with Facebook News in the U.S.

Facebook also claims that over 95% of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed.

After far too few startups appeared ready to take advantage of warm public market conditions and ecstatic IPO receptions, a deluge of private companies filed to go public yesterday.

There was Sumo Logic in the morning and JFrog a bit later on. Unity filed in there as well. Snowflake also dropped, along with Asana later in the day. If you were dog-tired just reading Twitter, we understand. This morning, we’re going to catch you up on the key facts from each offering.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But we’re not going to discuss every recent IPO filing. We’re not including X-Peng, a Chinese electric vehicle company that feels a bit afield from the largely-SaaS cohort that just went public (more on it here, if you’d like). Or AmWell, which does health stuff. And we’re going to leave Corsair, a gaming hardware company that’s going public, alone as well.

We have to focus, so we’re niching down to the most traditional venture capital and startup fare on offer. It’s not like we’ll lack for things to say. What follows is a digest of basic facts and IPO details just for you.

Five IPOs and Alex’s funeral

For each company, we’ll discuss what they do, how much they have raised, their initial IPO raise expectations and their financial performance. We’ll wrap with valuation notes as we can.

In alphabetical order, then:

Asana

• Asana provides a team-focused task-management service. In competition with startups like Monday.com, Asana has raised $213.5 million, according to PitchBook data, along with around $210 million in debt most recently. The company is pursuing a direct listing, so it does not have a traditional IPO raise target. You can read its filing here.