A district court denied Epic Games’ motion to temporarily restore Fortnite game to the iOS App Store, but also ordered Apple to not block the gaming giant’s ability to provide and distribute Unreal Engine on the iPhone-maker’s ecosystem in a mixed-ruling Monday evening.
More to follow…
Supermetrics, the data management and analysis tool for marketers, has raised €40 million in new funding.
Leading the round is Highland Europe, with participation from IVP, while the injection of capital will be used by the profitable Finland-based company for further expansion, including bringing data warehousing to the marketing sector.
Founded in in 2013 by Mikael Thuneberg, Supermetrics is a SaaS that helps marketers compile data in a “ready-to-use format” that is compatible with their data crunching and reporting tool(s) of choice. The idea is to provide a unified view of various disparate marketing data so that marketing teams and other stakeholders can see what is and isn’t performing — and more easily course correct or double down.
Supermetrics is also designed to be used by non-engineers, and without the need to add another codebase to a company’s IT stack.
“The problem is the growing amount of data that marketing teams have to work with and the fact that data is increasingly scattered across a growing number of platforms, channels and tools,” Thuneberg tells me. “It is hard to get a comprehensive view of the overall marketing performance, managing all that data becomes hard work. Many marketers still rely on manual processes like copy-pasting to collect their data together and to update reports. It is time-consuming, error-prone and boring”.
To remedy this, Supermetrics automates data transfers from more than 70 marketing data sources to tools like Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Excel, data warehouses and various business intelligence tools.
“We build tools that take away that pain with automated data transfers and help marketers extract valuable insights from unified data,” says Thuneberg. “Using Supermetrics is very simple and you can get started with just a few clicks, not needing a lengthy setup process. We believe everyone should be able to get their hands on relevant data and use it to do their jobs better”.
In addition, about a year ago, Supermetrics expanded to data warehouses by launching its “Supermetrics for BigQuery” product. “Many of our customers are struggling with the volume of data they need to manage, and setting up a data warehouse can really help them solve many issues. We wanted to make that better available and more accessible to all marketing teams. Although setting up a marketing data warehouse with Supermetrics requires a little more technical know-how, we have stayed true to our philosophy and made it as simple and effortless as possible”.
Meanwhile, Supermetrics is disclosing that the company now has over 14,000 clients, from Fortune 500 companies to marketing agencies. It claims to be “highly profitable” and says it has consistently achieved profit margins of over 30%. Customers include Nestle, Warner Brothers, L’Oreal, Hubspot, and iProspect.
Thuneberg cites Supermetrics’ main competitors as Funnel.io, Adverity, Fivetran and Stitch (part of Talend). “There are also lots of smaller companies addressing the same general problem of marketing data fragmentation,” he adds.
After restricting access to a popular group with posts critical of Thailand’s monarchy, Facebook is planning legal action against the Thai government, which the social media giant says forced it to restrict content deemed to be illegal.
On Monday, Reuters reported access to Royalist Marketplace had been blocked within Thailand. Users there who try to visit the group, which has over a million members, now see a message that says access to it has “been restricted within Thailand pursuant to a legal request from the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.”
In a media statement emailed to TechCrunch, a Facebook spokesperson said, “After careful review, Facebook has determined that we are compelled to restrict access to content which the Thai government has deemed to be illegal. Requests like this are severe, contravene international human rights law, and have a chilling effect on people’s ability to express themselves. We work to protect and defend the rights of all internet users and are preparing to legally challenge this request.”
The spokesperson added, “excessive government actions like this also undermine our ability to reliably invest in Thailand, including maintaining an office, safeguarding our employees, and directly supporting businesses that rely on Facebook.”
The group was started in April by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a dissident living in self-exile in Japan, where he is an associate professor of political science at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Pavin told Reuters that Royalist Marketplace “is part of the democratization process, it is a space for freedom of expression. By doing this, Facebook is cooperating with the authoritarian regime to obstruct democracy and cultivating authoritarianism in Thailand.”
The geo-restriction of Royalist Marketplace comes as thousands of pro-democracy protestors in Bangkok demand reform of the monarchy, including abolition of a strict lese-majeste law that mandates prison sentences of up to 15 years for people who defame members of the monarchy.
Pavin has been openly critical of Thailand’s monarchy. In a piece published on the Council of Foreign Relation’s website earlier this month, Pavin wrote that “for several decades now, the supposedly constitutional monarchy of Thailand has often proven to extend its powers beyond constitutional norms and rules,” intervening in politics as the current king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, established closer ties with the military.
In a 2014 New York Times opinion piece, Pavin described having a warrant issued for his arrest by the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. He was also attacked by a intruder in his Kyoto apparent, which Pavin believes “was a warning for my continuing to hold, and express, my positions.”
The restriction of Thai users’ access to Royalist Marketplace took place three weeks after Thailand’s Minister of Digital Economy and Society, Puttipong Punnakanta, threatened to take action against Facebook because he said it did not comply quickly enough with the government’s requests to restrict content.
In 2016, Thailand enacted the Computer-Related Crime Act, which the Human Rights Watch warned “gives overly broad powers to the government to restrict free speech, enforce surveillance and censorship, and retaliate against activists.”
Facebook is also under scrutiny in India, its biggest market by number of users, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Ankhi Das, the company’s top public policy executive in India, had opposed applying the platform’s hate-speech rules to a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party.
For iRobot, much of the last several years has been devoted to making its line of home-cleaning robots smarter. There hasn’t been much in the way of new hardware in a while, as the company focuses on things like connectivity, smart home integration and smarter cleaning. This latest update touches on all three, but primarily focuses on the latter.
Intelligence has long been a bit of a sticking point for the Roomba skeptics. The robotic vacuums have traditionally relied on patterns and physical barriers to offer the best clean. This week’s addition of the Genius Home Intelligence feature, on the other hand, brings a number features aimed at optimizing the cleaning efficiency of existing robots.
The feature is accessible through an update of the company’s Home app and will work with all of iRobot’s connected devices, including the Roomba i7 and i9 vacuums, along with the Braava Jet M6 mop. There’s a laundry list of different updates here, including personalized cleaning schedules developed around the user’s habits and/or preferences. The robots can also specifically target areas where messes tend to accrue, including tables and kitchen counters, setting it in motion with a voice command like, “Roomba, clean around the couch.”
Schedules can be set, including prompts like After Dinner and Bedtime, and the robots can be set to start cleaning when you leave the house and return to their charging bases when you get back. Other options include seasonal cleaning protocols and the ability to set “keep out zones” for the robots.
The news comes during what’s been a bit of a rough year for the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company. Back in April, the company announced it would not be releasing its Terra lawn mowing robot in 2020, as it cut around 5% of its global headcount amid a “repriortization.” The company laid the blame at the feet of COVID-19, as industrial automation companies have seen an increase in interest amid the pandemic.
The Genius feature begins rolling out this week.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a way for a fully wireless system to monitor not only movement and vital signs contact-free, but also to track activities – in a more privacy-preserving way without using video. The system has the potential to be used at long-term care and assisted living facilities to provide a higher standard of support, while also ensuring that the privacy of the residents of those facilities is respected.
The system, which is dubbed “RF-Diary” by the research team that created it, can identify whether a person is sleeping, reading, cooking, watching TV or more, by combining a map of a person’s living space with the types of activities that happen in different activities. The research team behind it trained the system on wireless signals generated by people performing known activities in these spaces, and was subsequently able to categorize activities from new people, in entirely new locations using the knowledge it gained through training.
Not only does the system preserve privacy more effectively than video-based monitoring, but researchers found that RF-Diary was actually more accurate, too. That means that it could accurately identify activity captions for individuals even when they were in dark settings, or blocked by other objects that would’ve thwarted visual checks. Overall, researchers found that their system was able to identify activities accurately over 90 percent of the time, across a range of 30 household activities.
This technology could not only help with communal care facilities, but also with aging-in-place, since the researchers note that families looking to support older relatives who are living alone could also use it as a way to keep up-to-date on their loved ones.
Since it can also monitor vital signs and general movement, the system created by this MIT CSAIL team could be a comprehensive solution that will not only help with resource-strained care facilities, but also with assisted care and remote monitoring in the COVID-19 era, when distance is often a prerequisite for safe and responsible best practice. Now the team hopes to get the system ready for real-world use, as a step towards commercializing it for general sale.
Palantir’s mysterious work and its founding origins with Trump ally and anti-press crusader Peter Thiel have inspired a number of controversies in recent years, none as divisive as its ongoing business with ICE. But with a direct listing around the corner, the famously secretive company is in for a lot more scrutiny.
In Palantir’s forthcoming S-1 filing, obtained by TechCrunch, the soon-to-be-public company addresses concerns about managing its brand reputation as some of its contracts attract unwanted attention. Palantir makes the fairly combative claim in the risks portion of the unpublished financial filing that its business could be harmed by “coverage that presents, or relies on, inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or otherwise damaging information” about the company:
“As our business has grown and as interest in Palantir and the technology industry overall has increased, we have attracted, and may continue to attract, significant attention from news and social media outlets, including unfavorable coverage and coverage that is not directly attributable to statements authorized by our leadership, that incorrectly reports on statements made by our leadership or employees and the nature of our work, perpetuates unfounded speculation about company involvements, or that is otherwise misleading.”
The filing also states that the company has its hands tied in responding to these hypothetical misleading reports due to the “sensitive nature” of its contracts and confidentiality requirements.
Incomplete reporting is inevitable for a company that’s largely shrouded the nature of its business from the public eye. Historically, any information that trickles out about Palantir’s work with U.S. defense and law enforcement agencies comes from FOIAs, like one that recently produced a user manual for Palantir Gotham, the company’s signature software platform developed for defense and intelligence agencies.
Palantir acknowledges that activists and the press have taken a special interest in the company due to its work with “organizations whose products or activities are or are perceived to be harmful.” The S-1 of course doesn’t name Palantir’s work with ICE specifically, but that contract has attracted a swarm of scrutiny, both from outsider observers and employees within the company. The filing notes that unspecified relationships have resulted in public criticism and “unfavorable coverage” of the company.
Last year, The Washington Post reported that Palantir employees were reckoning with the company’s work for the aggressive U.S. immigration agency, “[debating] the ICE contracts in town hall meetings, office hallways, Slack channels and email threads.”
While other tech companies have yielded to critics of defense and law enforcement work, Palantir instead has grown its most controversial contracts over time. The company’s S-1 discusses that decision making process:
“Activists have also engaged in public protests at our properties. Activist criticism of our relationships with customers could potentially engender dissatisfaction among potential and existing customers, investors, and employees with how we address political and social concerns in our business activities.
Conversely, being perceived as yielding to activism targeted at certain customers could damage our relationships with certain customers, including governments and government agencies with which we do business, whose views may or may not be aligned with those of political and social activists.”
In 2018, as the tech industry grappled with the ethical implications of lucrative federal defense work, more than 200 employees wrote a letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp expressing their concerns over its ICE contracts. Palantir has two current contracts with ICE, one for the agency’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) internal database and another for software known as FALCON. Combined, those contracts are worth as much as $92 million.
Palantir makes a sizable chunk of its revenue by selling U.S. agencies software that weaves together data streams to monitor individuals, but the company draws a thick line at helping China do the same.
“We do not work with the Chinese communist party and have chosen not to host our platforms in China, which may limit our growth prospects,” the S-1 states, calling work with China “inconsistent” with the company’s aims and culture.
“We do not consider any sales opportunities with the Chinese communist party, do not host our platforms in China, and impose limitations on access to our platforms in China in order to protect our intellectual property, to promote respect for and defend privacy and civil liberties protections, and to promote data security.”
Palantir’s anti-China stance isn’t necessarily surprising given Thiel’s penchant for ominous warnings about Chinese tech dominance — a position that also happens to bolster his relationship with a White House that’s since kicked off an unusual crusade against Chinese social media giant TikTok. Still, it’s strange, noteworthy and a sign of the times to see a refusal to do business with China articulated explicitly in a tech company’s S-1.
Asana, the project management software developer, dropped its filing for a direct listing on one of the busiest days of a surprisingly busy late summer.
The task management toolkit provider started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early FB employee Justin Rosenstein, isn’t as well known or as well financed as today’s other big public offerings — the game engine developer, Unity, and the $14 billion valued enterprise cloud storage provider Snowflake — but its modest $1.5 billion valuation may in some way make it a better bellwether for investor appetite in new tech offerings.
That’s because Asana is losing money … and losing money big. Its losses are expanding even as its growth increases. The company lost $118.6 million in fiscal 2020 even as it expanded its revenue to $142.6 million for the same period. In 2019 it saw revenues of $76.8 million and a net loss of $50.9 million.
If the idea is that you have to spend money to make money, then Asana is doing exactly as it should, because the company has been growing. Revenue increased $19.7 million, or 71 percent, during the three months ending April 30, 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The company attributed that growth to a shift in its sales strategy toward higher-priced subscription plans and revenue from existing customers.
Cost of revenues for the company grew by 51 percent as gross margins slightly rose over the same period, according to the company.
One bright spot for Asana is the potential converts it still has yet to win over as paying customers. Asana boasts 3.2 million free accounts and has managed to make its bones off of only over 75,000 paying customers. Given the rapid transition to remote work for many knowledge workers, project management tools only become more important.
The path to the public markets has been a long one for Asana, which first appeared on the scene in 2008. The company’s last capital infusion came in 2018 with $125 million raised across two quick investment rounds led by Generation Investment Management, the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore.
While Gore’s firm may have ponied up a lot of cash, the biggest winner in Asana’s public listing is likely to be Facebook co-founder Moskovitz. He owns a huge percentage of the company — roughly 35 percent. That’s a whole lot more than Rosenstein’s 16.2 percent haul.
Asana had telegraphed its intentions to access public markets via a direct listing earlier this year — even before the pandemic had made the market more receptive to collaboration software tools like the ones it offers.
The path to deploying commercial aircraft that can handle all aspects of flight without a pilot is long, winding, expensive and riddled with regulatory and technical hurdles. Marc Piette, the founder of autonomous aviation startup Xwing, aims to make that path to pilotless flight shorter and more cost effective.
Instead of building autonomous helicopters and planes from the ground up, Xwing is focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of existing aircraft. Now, the company is sharing details of its go-to-market strategy several months after raising $10 million in new funding and following successful autonomous test flights in a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan. Xwing said it has completed since July more than 70 hours of engine time for ground and flight tests, and more than 40 hours of automated flight time.
The Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, a utility aircraft that has historically been used for cargo, flight training and humanitarian missions, will be the initial centerpiece of its plan to operate commercial cargo flights. The plan is to have a regional focus and operate within a 500-mile range with flight paths over unpopulated areas.
Xwing will operate the fleet. However, Piette said the company is also open to partnerships and licensing the technology to other operators.
Xwing’s so-called Autoflight System is designed to be aircraft agnostic. And it still is, Piette said in a recent phone interview. The Cessna 208B Grand Caravan is just the beginning.
“It’s still in production, it’s a safe aircraft and it’s a good platform for us to convert to an unmanned aircraft here,” Piette said.
Piette believes that retrofitting existing aircraft with its Autoflight System will speed up deployment, while maintaining safety and keeping costs in check. The Autoflight System is integrated with onboard flight control systems that allow the plane to navigate, take off and land autonomously. The system is designed to be supervised by remote operators who work with air traffic controllers, according to Xwing.
Before commercial operations can start, Xwing will need regulatory approval.
Xwing has the necessary Part 135 Air Carrier certificate required to launch its commercial business, which was obtained when it acquired a company running commuter operations. Xwing is now updating the certificate for cargo operations and 208B Cessna Caravans. Xwing still needs the FAA to provide flight certification for unmanned Cessna 208B Grand Caravan aircraft with cargo capacity of over 4,000 pounds. Xwing has been working with the FAA and has also been involved for more than a year with NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS in the NAS) program, an initiative meant to mature the key remaining technologies that are needed to integrate unmanned aircraft in U.S. airspace.
“I’m not going to minimize the challenge here because this is quite novel for the regulator and it’s also complex in nature from a safety perspective,” Piette said. “I’d love to be able to start these commercial cargo operations unmanned in the U.S, in the very early 2022 timeframe. We’ll have to see if we can make that happen.”
Today was part one of Y Combinator’s two-parter Summer 2020 Demo Day, where nearly 100 companies debuted their efforts to the world for the first time.
The Summer 2020 batch of companies was the first fully remote YC cohort, with the ongoing pandemic leading the accelerator to take its program entirely virtual. But it was actually YC’s second virtual demo day; as the severity of the pandemic became more clear back in March, YC moved the Demo Day portion of its Winter 2020 class to virtual at the last minute. Doing so meant dropping key aspects of Demo Day… including, most notably… the demos. Instead of live pitches, each company in the W20 class pitched via a single slide and a brief text description of the company.
YC clearly had a bit more time to prepare this time around, with a Demo Day experience more in line with that of the in-person events. In an incredibly rapid-fire series of live pitches, each company got just 60 seconds to pitch to an audience of investors, media, and fellow founders; it was enough to present the surface of who they are and what they do, but often left the deeper details of how/why for follow-up conversations.
Here are our notes on each of the companies that presented today:
Image Credits: Seam
Seam: An API for homes and buildings, with a hardware hub meant to help developers build apps that can do things like unlock doors, summon elevators, etc. from different device vendors. Currently in 5 pilots.
Evergreen: A digital solution for employees to request purchases and track approvals. The B2B business is built for companies with non-centralized purchases and the need to manage a slurry of different tools.
Farmako Healthcare: A million doctors in India still use paper medical records. Farmako aims to help shift them to electronic ones so they can write prescriptions and see patients online easily and keep records centrally.
Polyops: SaaS business that provides analytics on e-commerce operations including visibility into returns, shipping and customer acquisition expenses. The startup wants to make e-commerce more efficient. Polyps claims 15 brands are already onboard with a combined $35 million in GMV. As commerce of all sorts changes, Polyps is trying to make the world a bit easier to grok, which seems like a smart direction to proceed.
Adyn: This startup is building a test to help women in the US determine which method of birth control is the best fit for their bodies in order to minimize side effects. The company says more than 49M US women struggle with birth control side effects. Once users submit their tests, the company gives them recommendations and can connect them with specialists to discuss options.
Image Credits: Akiflow
Akiflow: A command line-style tool for building quick shortcut commands across things like email, Google Drive, Slack, or Asana. Available on Windows/Mac. Currently has 2000 users waitlisted.
Inspectify: A software company that helps real estate agents coordinate inspections for home-sellers. The startup wants to grow into a managed marketplace that serves as a broker for all home services, from repairs to insurance.
Bikayi: Shopify isn’t a good match for consumers in the Indian market because of consumer habits that differ from those of the US (for instance, many purchases are made through WhatsApp rather than the web.) The founders started Bikayi after seeing family businesses using pen and paper to handle incoming orders online. They charge merchants $100 per year.
Atomic: A software company that provides a fintech API allowing other platforms to integrate investment accounts into their product, easily. Many modern fintech services allow you to hold cash, like Venmo and Apple Pay. That money could be, instead, invested. Atomic has found some initial traction, with a few companies signed up that give it around $300M in AUM, providing the startup with $1.5M in ARR. After every fintech added checking accounts, perhaps investments accounts are the next step.
Blue Onion Labs: This financial services startup is helping companies make sense of financial transaction data that lives across multiple systems. Their suite of API integrations are aiming to solve a big pain point for accounting teams, serving as a “single source of truth” for understanding the full scope of incoming transactions.
Fancy: Delivery of convenience store items, with delivery promised in under 30 minutes. Currently focused on the UK. Instead of picking up items from existing stores, Fancy operates its own “dark stores” to keep margins higher.
BukuWarung: A micro-accounting app for merchants in Indonesia. It enables mom and pop stores to bring payments and credit to their businesses. The service currently has 350,000 monthly active merchants.
CoreCare: Shuffling data between the hundreds of insurance companies, healthcare providers, and government entities can lead to errors that cost billions per year and can delay treatment. CoreCare synchronizes patient data between them, preventing errors and saving everyone money.
HotPlate: HotPlate is a service that helps unemployed chefs cook food at home, sell it, and deliver it. In its first 8 weeks the startup has secured 10 chefs which are generating around $1,500 in GMV. HotPlate takes a 15% cut of that total. The startups argument is that COVID has changed the world so much that, now, we’ll all want home-cooked meals instead of, we presume, restaurant-prepared food. We’ll see. And given the small GMV generated by each onboarded chef, how the economics will work out over time will prove interesting. Perhaps order size will grow.
ChatPay: ChatPay is building a Substack for WhatsApp, building out a platform that allows people to create exclusive WhatsApp chat channels while allowing admins to monetize the platform via member management.
Electry: A tool for hiring mechanics and electricians, pitched as “LinkedIn for skilled blue-collar workers”. The team says it’s currently seeing $75k monthly revenue, and is profitable.
Image Credits: Clew
Clew: We live on so many different cloud-based platforms, from Google Docs to Figma to Github and Dropbox. Clew wants to be the company that helps you streamline all your different cloud-based applications into a single-stream platform that works as a filing system. So far, Clew has lined up 85 paying customers and charges a $50 annual subscription fee.
Arist: Employee training materials like safety and anti-racism courses are usually videos or slideshows. Arist conducts this same training via interactive text messaging, which they say is faster, more natural for today’s users, and leads to higher completion rates. They already have several big ticket clients and say they will soon be profitable.
Decentro: Continuing the X for India trend that is taking shape in this batch, Decentro wants to build Plaid for India. The company provides an API for banking integrations, like Plaid. That Plaid sold for billions of dollars earlier this year is still on the mind of every sentient VC, so the comparison could prove enticing. Decentro is still small, with around $1 million in gross transaction volume (GTV), and around $7,000 in MRR. Still, with just four customers and 45 more in the pipeline, it’s on a good path.
Image Credits: Drapr
Drapr: Drapr is building software to help online shoppers see what their clothing looks like. The company’s online try-on widget helps shoppers get a better idea of how a shirt or other clothing item fits on a customizable 3D mannequin that users can adjust to fit their body type, height and weight.
GitDuck: A video chat tool built specifically for developers. It hooks directly into a developer’s IDE to allow for real-time code sharing, allowing devs to code together remotely. Charges $20 per developer seat.
Hannah Life Technologies: Hannah Life Technologies wants to help couples struggling to get pregnant conceive at home without ever visiting a clinic. The startup sells a small device that can be used during sex which they say can triple the chance of conception. They expect the product to launch with FDA clearance next year.
Hellosaurus: With YouTube making monetization of kids’ content more difficult, there are lots of creators looking to take the next step. Hellosaurus has signed a bunch of them to create an interactive video platform for children, who can play with episodes instead of just watching. It’s a crowded market but with HQ Trivia’s former head of product and some solid creators they may be able to slice off a piece of that $3B market.
Jika: Jika wants to help the average Shopify seller do price testing. The startup said during its pitch that the major online retailers have teams of folks working on pricing. Many smaller Shopify sellers do not change their pricing at all. As we’ve seen from Shopify’s recent quarter, the potential market for Jika’s service is pretty big and growing quickly. Still, Jika is a small thing today, with less than $1,000 MRR today. From small seeds, big trees. Let’s see how quickly Jika can grow its footprint in the Shopify seller market.
Minimall: Minimall bills itself as Pinduoduo for Europe and is another commerce startup aiming to provide consumers access to cheaper goods by cutting out retail middlemen. The company kicked off its efforts by building face masks, moving $450k worth of inventory in 3 months.
Hellometer: Uses off-the-shelf cameras to help fast food restaurant owners analyze how quickly customers are being served. Currently in testing in two locations, with letters of intent to test in 300 more.
MedPiper Technologies: By working with medical schools and government, MedPiper has aggregated the largest database of verified doctors and nurses in India. It charges hospitals a monthly subscription to recruit these medical professionals for open vacancies, faster.
Artifact: Everyone has people and events they’d like to preserve forever. Artifact aids in the creation of a “personal podcast” in which a professional interviewer speaks with someone like your grandparents to get their stories on the record so your grandkids can listen to it without hearing your dog bark in the background.
Charityvest: When rich folks give money away, they often use a donor advised fund, or what Charityvest calls a “a 401K or HSA, but for supporting charities.” The startup’s service allows companies to offer donor advised funds to folks in the middle classes, as an employee benefit. The company has rang up $65,000 in ARR ($5,400 in MRR) thus far. Many big companies match employee donations to some degree. Perhaps this is the obvious next step in that particular progression.
Eatable: Building order-ahead functionality into restaurant workflows, allowing them to sidestep pen-and-paper order taking over the phone and streamline operations.
Heron Data: A B2B company meant to help fintech services categorize/label bank transaction data using methods they promise are more accurate and cheaper than existing solutions.
VoloPay: The startup wants to be Brex for South East Asia. VoloPay seeks to bring approvals, bill payments, expenses, and accounting automation all under one roof and with one platform. It streamlines payments through a corporate credit card, and in 3 months users have spent $90,000.
LendTable: Matching company contributions to your 401K is a great way to save money, but folks living paycheck to paycheck can’t afford to lose that income. LendTable provides cash advance loans to cover the cost of financial employee benefits and takes payments in the form of a single profit-share payment down the line. With 30 million employees not taking advantage of this investment opportunity it could be a big market.
Zuddl: Zuddl is a startup that aims to bring conferences online for big companies. It charges $5 per attendees, and per its pitch has already managed to host a conference with a few thousand attendees. A bit like competitors Hopin and others, Zuddle wants to re-create some familiar in-person scenarios like booths, and lobbies for chatting. Zuddl stands out for racking up $54,000 in revenue in about a month, which, annualized, makes it one of the larger startups demoing.
Image Credits: OpenUnit
OpenUnit: OpenUnit is building management software to help self-storage facilities keep an eye on payments and customer accounts. The back office software suite is designed for self-storage facilities of all sizes and is aiming to help provide a highly specified backend that takes care of all the needs these customers have. Here’s our previous coverage.
Ready: Building tools meant to help local ISPs compete with the big nationwide chains, and allow them to cross sell services (like TV or VoIP) from vetted providers to their customers as bundles. Currently working with 5 ISPs with an MRR of $20.5k.
Hubble: Instead of manually tracking data quality, what if software could automatically do that for you? Hubble monitors a company’s data warehouse for errors and missing information, letting in-house engineers focus their time on other tasks. The company launched 3 weeks ago and has three customers. It plans to charge $10,000 per team per year.
OrangeHealth: There are hundreds of thousands of individual doctors with small clinics in India that aren’t set up for online consultations and other telemedicine services. OrangeHealth aims to set them up with the ability to provide online services and billing, as well as delivery and other infrastructure. Customers can keep their local doctor but get quick turnaround online treatments at no extra cost.
DraftWise: Legal work is slow, tedious, and expensive. So, perhaps software can help. That’s what DraftWise wants to do, saying that its service can cut the time needed for a credit agreement from 30 hours to 10. The startup has yet to monetize, but it has nearly a half-dozen letters of intent with some law firms, each it expects to drive seven-figure revenue in time. Indeed, the firm expects to charge big law firms over half a million dollars every year for its service. DraftWise is founded by a lawyer and a few ex-Palantir folks, which sounds fine, provided that they can keep their costs in check. (Hey-o, a Palantir IPO joke!)
Sakneen: Sakneen is another startup aiming to take a model that’s been successful stateside and see how the model fairs internationally. The company is aiming to create Zillow for Egypt and has already built out a database that accounts for 80% of the country’s new housing supply.
SockSoho: A direct-to-consumer clothing company that says it wants to be the “UNIQLO of India”, currently focusing specifically on men’s dress socks. With the majority of their orders taking place over WhatsApp, founder Simarpreet Singh says the company is seeing an MRR of $150K with margins of 70%.
HumanLoop: Building software to annotate, train, and deploy natural language processing atop thorny data sets. The startup is bringing specialized AI to lawyers, doctors, and accountants to process their data, which otherwise would need to be out-sourced to pricey domain experts.
BanditML: The team behind everyone’s favorite algorithm, surge pricing on Uber, is back to bring those ML chops to other companies. This time they’re optimizing when and how to send promotions to customers, and helped send out nearly a million dollars in promos just this month.
Image Credits: Statiq
Statiq: The company allows individuals and buildings to provide EV-charging points, all accessible via a single unified app. So far it appears to be working, with Statiq seeing 500 weekly charging sessions, or about 70 per day. Its weekly pace is growing by about 10% weekly it says, which is pretty good. Its margins are unclear, but the firm did claim $12,000 in net revenue in the last week. So, a little over $2 per charge, if we can divide accurately. Statiq wrapped by saying that Indian government policies are going to push more EV charging points into the market. Perfect, say, for a startup looking to bring folks to them. We covered Statiq here.
Rally: During the pandemic, Zoom has turned out to be a necessary tool for web users trying to stay in touch with friends. Zoom was built for enterprise; Rally is aiming to create a video chat platform built for social gatherings. The app has shifted the idea of a breakout room, aiming to replicate the experience of sparking up side conversations by allowing you to faintly overhear some of the conversation happening “nearby”.
Jemi: A platform meant to help content creators sell experiences (they mention video calls/shoutouts) and merch to their fans. Currently taking a 15% cut of transactions, the team says they’re currently seeing a GMV of ~$17,000 and growing 30% week-over-week.
In Stock: As the coronavirus pandemic keeps local retail stores shuttered, In Stock wants to bring delivery services that don’t just compete, but beat, Amazon Prime. The startup helps retail stores offer same-day delivery, at a cheaper price than Amazon Prime. After launching 6 weeks ago in Santa Cruz, In Stock has positive unit economics. In Stock is currently doing 10 orders per day, and per founder Ian McHenry, it is not scared of Amazon.
KeyDB: A NoSQL database that the team says is “up to 5x faster” than Redis. The company notes that it’s currently seeing over 40,000 downloads per month, and named HP Enterprise as an early customer.
Kingdom Supercultures: Microbes, invented thousands of years, power beer, cheese, kombucha, and wine. But what if they were built in 2020? Kingdom Supercultures has engineered new microbes with the goal of helping national food brands create foods that have never existed before. The startup is licensing its technology to brands focused on healthy and sustainable food development.
OpenBiome: “We’re like a blood bank, but for poop.” It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that! Fecal transplants help cure certain infections by restoring the balance of bacteria in the body; OpenBiome is the largest provider of transplants in the world, having treated 55,000 patients and saved perhaps thousands of lives. They’re a sustainable nonprofit with $15M in revenue and are hoping to expand to new treatments.
MilkRun: MilkRun is a service that connects folks in a city to local food products, like dairy and produce. It scaled to $425,000 in GMV per month in Portland before setting its sights on Seattle. In the more northern rainy city, MilkRun racked up $62,000 MRR in its first six weeks. Echoing the famous Amazon threat that “your margin is my opportunity,” MilkRun said that most money spent on food today goes to packaging and distribution, and that “that inefficiency is [its] opportunity.”
Thndr: Thndr is aiming to build a Robinhood for the Middle East, helping users invest in stock, bonds and funds commission-free via the company’s free app. Robinhood has taken the US exchanges by storm, but the trend hasn’t hit investors in the Middle East; Thndr is aiming to replicate their success with investors there.
Mesh: A “social network for remote companies”, allowing employees to share what they’re working on, see each other’s progress, and share feedback. It’s currently free for teams with fewer than 10 employees, with plans starting at $5 per employee per month after that. Working with 8 enterprise pilots.
KiteKRAFT: KiteKRAFT builds flying wind turbines, with the goal of creating a more viable wind power system for businesses. The startup claims that its wind turbine uses 10 times less material at half the cost of traditional options, and has already flown a 7-foot wide prototype. KiteKRAFT’s first use case is micro-grids, small energy networks that are normally powered by diesel generators and/or solar energy.
kSense: Companies need to collect lots of data in-house but often need to work with a third party to do so. That’s not always practical, as these CTOs found out in their own companies – so they built this tool to perform data collection internally using an open source core.
Blissway: Paying tolls sucks and stopping to pay tolls sucks even more, so Blissway wants to take the process of paying tolls in the United States and make it better. In its view, the current setup of toll-paying is 90% hardware, and 10% software. It wants to flip that with a solution they say can be deployed on “any highway around the world in months”, with the company handling everything from the tolling hardware to customer billing.
Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals: Gilgamesh is a medtech company aiming to use psychedelic-related drugs to treat a variety of ailments including ADHD and mood disorders, opioid disorders and depression.
inSoma Bio: A biomaterials company focusing on a gel that helps plastic surgeons “rebuild fat” in surgeries such as breast reconstruction. The company says that their gel can double fat volume, potentially replacing the need for implants.
Future Fields: Cellular agriculture, the science that powers lab-grown meat and other meat alternatives, often struggles to get into consumer homes due to a high cost of production. Future Fields sells cell-growth media products that are more cost effective and scalable than the status quo set forward by commercialized agriculture.
Flat: Flat is flipping homes in Latin America: Buy low, fix it up, sell high. It’s a proven model but in LatAm it’s twice as profitable, founders claim. In addition to being the “Opendoor for Mexico,” Flat has the backing of that company’s founders and a $25M debt line secured to scale up.
Layer: A developer tool that creates staging environments quickly so that developers can immediately see/compare/share the impact of code changes. The startup notes that its service allows developers at smaller companies to have access to a similar workflow as the major tech companies of the world. Per the startup, 18 customers have used its service 6,000 times in the last 30 days.
Lume Health: Lume Health is building a Glassdoor for hospitals, aiming to help nurses make the right choice when searching for jobs. The company integrated the predictable aspects of a jobs board, while also building out a platform of verified reviews from nurses that can speak to what an office or hospital was really like from the inside.
MarketForce 360: Salesforce for retail distribution in Africa. The startup brings more clarity to retail transactions in real-time, a mobile solution to pen and paper tracking. Along with a SaaS fee, MarketForce 360 charges a transaction fee on all orders processed over the platform. It has 40 paying fast-moving consumer good companies to date.
Manycore: Companies produce lots of code that runs on cloud computing resources… but if that code isn’t efficient, it racks up costs correspondingly. Manycore takes final code — first Java, and soon Python and JS, and optimizes it for cloud deployment.
Aquarium Learning: A few ex-Cruise folks have built Aquarium Learning to help customer machine learning teams make their models better by improving their datasets. How that happens was not noted, but the firm did claim that after a few months in the market that it has reached $8,000 in monthly revenue, which is nearly a six-figure run rate. Anyway, ML is only becoming more important which means that there are only more datasets in use that probably suck. Someone is going to build a big company here. Perhaps it’s Aquarium Learning.
Strive School: Strive School is building a Lambda School for Europe, leveraging income-share agreements to train software engineers who don’t pay for the education until they get a job in the industry. Once a graduate lands a role, the ISA terms charge the person 10% of salary for four years with a maximum total of €18,000. Read our coverage here.
Image Credits: Kuleana
Kuleana: Aiming to be the “Impossible Foods of seafood”, they’re making a plant-based raw tuna replacement. Currently has $400k in letters-of-intent.
Once: A Shopify storefront optimized for mobile. The startup is trying to funnel e-commerce traffic into mobile purchases, which is not currently as seamless as the desktop experience. By using Instagram stories, Once has created 12 mobile storefronts. The flagship customer has increased conversation rate by 70 percent.
Justo: In Latin America as in the rest of the world, restaurants are working with delivery services to serve quarantining customers. But the apps often take large cuts and hold customer data hostage. Justo aims to provide custom-built e-commerce websites for restaurant brands and provide order and delivery for a maximum 15 percent take — plus the owners get to keep the precious data accrued from the service.
Glimpse: Glimpse helps consumer brands place products in Airbnbs that are part of the Glimpse network. Glimpse gets paid by the brands, and the brands themselves get to put their goods in front, or in the hands of consumers in the market today. If folks who rent Airbnbs are your jam, then Glimpse might be a good alternative to retail. How inventory is managed and so forth wasn’t mentioned, but if Airbnb is on the way back up, perhaps it’s a good moment for Glimpse to unify the house-sharing and consumer D2C boom into a single experience.
Revel Technologies: Aiming to make a “better caffeine” called Paraxanthine. Founder Jeffrey Dietrich (a BioEngeering PhD) says that double-blind tests have shown Revel’s caffeine alternative increases alertness without the jitters/anxiety.
Omni: Helps sales and support teams get up-to-date and accurate answers for their customers. While a rep is on a call, Omni searches across tools to answer customer questions and confirm if information is accurate and up to date. Think of it as a smarter way to answer burning questions, without having to mine through old Slack conversations for the latest updated information. After launching two months ago, Omni has landed $80,000 in pilot programs from Dave, Notion, and Parsable.
Mailwarm: The founders of Mailwarm in their previous companies used email as their main line of communication with customers, but found that even “legit” marketing emails were relegated to the spam folder 20 percent of the time. Mailwarm is the tool they developed to prevent this from happening, and they’re seeing big organic growth and $50K in MRR after just a few months online.
Papercups: On the heels of news that Intercom has hired a CFO and is going to go public in a few years, Papercups wants to sneak up behind the company and pull its sweater over its head while nicking its wallet. In short, Papercups is building an “open-core” piece of software that may be able to challenge the chat portion of the Intercom product set. Sans revenue, the startup flexed 1,500 GitHub stars. Towards the end of its pitch, Papercups said that it intends to charge $50,000 to $250,000 for an enterprise-version of its product in time. We know that Intercom works, so let’s see what Papercups can do in its shadow.
Atmos: Atmos is building a managed marketplace for homebuilding, connecting users that want to build a house with builders who can help them do just that and the financing to make it happen. Since launching in Q2, the company has brought in more than $500k in booked revenue.
Image Credits: StartPlaying
StartPlaying.Games: A marketplace for hiring hosts for social tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons. DMs for Hire! Meant to help new players learn to play, or help existing players find experienced hosts. Hosts set their own price. Currently seeing a GMV of over $10k per month.
Together Video Chat: For kids, Facetime and Zoom might not be the most engaging way to communicate. Together Video Chat wants to bring an interactive element to video chatting between families and kids, like reading a book or playing games over the screen. The startup is making $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Reach.live: Lifestyle creators looking to monetize live content like yoga or cooking classes often have to resort to multiple platforms. Reach.live aims to put all of them together: storefront, scheduling, payments, subscriptions, donations, and even the video hosting.
Toolbox: An application and labor marketplace that connects general contractors on construction sites with qualified laborers. The service is currently live in New York City and drove $88,000 in GMV in July, a figure that it expects to rise to $102,000 in GMV in August. Toolbox can help some workers find full-time jobs, or plug in shorter work to fill demand gaps. And, Toolbox thinks that it can snag 25% of the total spend. That’s a big take.
Fig: Fig is building an app store for the terminal that allows developers to access lightweight graphical interfaces for common integrations without leaving terminal. These integrations can be further dialed in by the startup’s Teams product that allows engineerings teams to quickly access internal tools and share workflows.
Perch: Pitching itself as “Credit Karma for the underbanked”, Perch helps users build their credit score by turning recurring payments (like rent) into credit payments. The team says they currently have 22,000 users on the waitlist.
SiPhox: A circuit board for optical chips. The startup wants to replace refrigerator-sized diagnostic machines with a tiny chip. It’s first product is a $1 COVID test on a disposable cartridge.
Vectrix: As companies grow, they constantly accrue cloud services and other tools, and with them the possibility of security problems among and between them. Normally the company’s own security engineers would develop their own methods of scanning and monitoring for security issues, but Vectrix provides a marketplace for these processes so they can be set up faster and easier.
Recurrency: This startup is building an “automated” ERP, or enterprise resource planning service, for wholesalers. So far it appears to be working, with Recurrency growing from $0 to $17,000 in MRR during its time at Y Combinator. Per its quick talk, the company has found hundreds of thousands of potential customers.
Known Medicine: Known Medicine is looking to take the experimentation of how tumors respond to cancer drugs out of the patient’s body and into the lab. The startup breaks down tumor samples into micro tumors, which they treat separately inside specialized micro-environments with different methods and see what works best.
Queue: Real-time collaboration and feedback software for video producers and editors. Allows groups to drop feedback and timestamped comments into the video timeline, or draw notes/concepts directly on the video.
Conta Simples: A digital bank account for startups based in Brazil. The startup helps other online businesses get corporate cards fast and without big fees. Last month, the startup made $50,000 in revenue. The founding team hails from various payments and fintech businesses in Brazil.
Vitable Health: Workers earning living wages often don’t have healthcare options from their employer, and Vitable aims to change that with a plan that costs a tenth of others but still offers primary and urgent care coverage. It relies on nurse practitioners performing telehealth and in home visits, and has catastrophic coverage for emergencies — and costs $50 per month. They’re profitable and small but growing in the Philadelphia area.
ZipSchool: Every parent is worried about their kid’s education this year and the amount of time that those same children are spending on screens. ZipSchool — one of the hotter companies that demoed today, we’re told — is homeschool for kids, on screens, via Zoom. So, it’s screen time, but useful. Its site notes topics that kids might find engaging like art, space, and extreme weather. It’s 2020 and a pandemic and a recession and parents have had to park kidlets with tablets on couches. Why not make that time a bit more constructive?
Minimum: Minimum is another app building a toolset that automatically tracks and offsets a person’s carbon emissions. Minimum is looking to partner with companies directly to help employees stay mindful. It’s a familiar model that pairs a calculator with payments to offset a person’s carbon footprint with Minimum taking 20% off the top.
Image Credits: Sidekick
Sidekick: Standalone, “always-on” video chat hardware meant to help remote teams keep in touch. Charges $50 per user per month. We covered Sidekick here.
Ribbon: Ribbon gives creators and businesses a way to sell tickets for online virtual events, ranging from master classes to fitness workouts. Ribbon has sold $47,000 in tickets sold last week alone, with a 2.8% take rate.
Sameplan: According to Sameplan’s founders, sales reps are basically project managers, but lack the tools PMs usually use to do the job. Sameplan aims to help sales teams share and synchronize data between deals and projects in an organized way, replacing endless email threads and spreadsheets. Heap, Okta and Front have bit for the alpha.
Workbase: A data visualization and analytics tool for account/growth teams, meant to “help B2B companies reduce churn and grow customer spending”. They currently have 3 contracts after launching in May 2020.
Nototo: Nototo is building a visual map interface for note-taking, bringing a very unique interface to a productivity vertical known for its innovative app designs. The app basically encourages users to organize their maps geographically rather than sticking them in nested bullet points and folders.
Plunzo: Helps SMBs in Latin America bring all of their bank accounts into a single UI. The company’s founders say that after launching in early august, they’re already working with over 3,000 retail accounts.
Tella: Tella is building a way to collaboratively edit video from a browser-based application. The startup, which was founded in May, wants to compete with Quicktime and Loom with an easier-to-use edit platform. It helps you piece together video clips from screen and camera recordings, currently sporting 100 weekly users.
Mozart Data: Everything is SaaS now, which means companies may have their data spread over half a dozen tools from Salesforce, Stripe, and so on. Mozart Data collects, organizes, and manages all that data in one place, with no data engineering skills required, in about an hour. The team previously built data tools for companies like Yammer, Clover, Opendoor and others and hope to bring that expertise to growing enterprises looking to scale fast.
It’s been quite a day in the tech world with a bushel of S-1s being filed to go public. Not to be left out the ever acquisitive Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire The Crypsis Group, an incident response, risk management and digital forensics consulting firm for a crisp $265 million.
Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO at Palo Alto Networks sees a company that builds on the foundation of services the cybersecurity giant already provides, giving customers a set of services to lean on when a breach happens.
“By joining forces, we will be able to help customers not only predict and prevent cyberattacks but also mitigate the impact of any breach they may face,” he said. While the kinds of tools that Palo Alto provides are designed to prevent attacks, the fact is no set of tools is fool proof, and it’s always going to be a cat and mouse game between companies like Palo Alto and the attackers trying to breach their defenses.
Crypsis can help figure out how a breach happened and ways to close up the cracks in the foundation to prevent access through that particular weak point in the future. “We have dedicated ourselves to creating a more secure world through the fight against cybercrime. Together with Palo Alto Networks, we will be able to help businesses and governments better respond to threat actors on a global scale,” Bret Padres, CEO of The Crypsis Group said in a statement.
When the deal closes, and The Crypsis Group is in the fold, Palo Alto will gain more than 150 highly trained consultants, who have been handling approximately 1300 incidents a year. This gives Palo Alto some serious consulting fire power to deal with those times when attackers get through their defenses.
The Crypsis Group has up until now been part of a larger security consultancy called ZP Group. The deal is expected to close in the fiscal first quarter of 2021, which just started when Q42020 closed today. Per usual, the acquisition will be subject to regulatory scrutiny as Palo Alto is a public company.