Category: UNCATEGORIZED

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online.

“My goal has always been make an impact on the 2020 election,” Sehremelis told me — a tall order, particularly when the big social networks are struggling to solve these same problems. And as if that wasn’t enough, Meheris is hoping to revitalize student and local newspapers at the same time.

To do that, he’s launched Overlooked, an app currently being piloted with newspapers at the University of Southern California, Dartmouth, West Virginia University and elsewhere.

“We didn’t want to build a news aggregator, and we didn’t want to build a social network,” Sehremelis said. “We wanted to combine them.”

So Overlooked is an app where users — initially college students — can post and share articles. And that’s basically all they can do. They won’t be able to post any comments or content of their own, which Sehremelis said already “eliminates the possibility of a deepfake” video or image that’s been edited to mislead.

Of course, misinformation doesn’t just come from individual posts, but also from articles posted by publishers across the web. Those kinds of articles might still be shared on Overlooked, but Sehremelis argued that by eliminating user-generated content, the startup “drastically reduces the amounts of data that we have to vet.”

“Instead of posts, videos, memes, all of the above, there’s only news articles,” he continued. “One day in the future, our content moderators will be able to actually vet all the content on our system.”

But without those social posts and memes, what’s going to bring readers to the app? For one Sehremelis said Overlooked is the “fastest way and the easiest way to share a news article with your friend.” This is also where the partnerships with student newspapers come in.

Sehremelis is a recent USC alum, and he participated in the school’s Blackstone LaunchPad powered by Techstars. He recalled visiting the offices of the USC newspaper, the Daily Trojan, and seeing printed newspapers stacked to the ceiling — which seemed like a wasted expense that’s disconnected from the way students actually get their news. This, in turn, led him “down the rabbit hole of the newspaper industry as a whole,” where he learned about broader circulation and revenue challenges.

“The newspaper, it needs a superhero,” Sehremelis said.

And in fact, Overlooked has created a superhero mascot of sorts called Article Man, who represents the profile that newspapers can create on Overlooked, allowing them to communicate and share content directly with readers. They also get a share of the revenue from any Overlooked advertising that targets the newspaper’s readers.

Sehremelis argued that this approach addresses the issues that arise from an individual newspaper app (which can have a hard time getting downloads) or a profile on social media (where a newspaper gives up control and rarely monetizes in a significant way). He suggested these issues are only going to be more acute this fall, with many colleges sticking to remote learning or bringing students back to campus in a reduced capacity.

“Students aren’t going to be on campus to pick up the newspaper,” he said. “Many students weren’t picking up newspapers, anyway. Many of these student newspapers instead are on social media — it’s just that social media wasn’t compensating them.”

In addition, he’s hoping to get Overlooked in classrooms (virtual or otherwise), with professors inviting their classes to join the app and discuss the news.

Yalochat, a five-year-old, Mexico City-based conversational commerce platform that enables customers like Coca Cola and Walmart to upsell, collect payments, and provide better service to their own customers over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat in China, has closed on $15 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group.

Sierra Ventures, which led a $10 million Series A financing for the company in early 2019, also participated.

The round isn’t so surprising if Yalochat’s numbers are to be believed. It says that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, its platform has seen a tenfold increase in volume, and a 650% increase of message volume as more large enterprises  — especially outside of the U.S. — use messaging apps to manage some of their sales operations and much of their customer service.

Yalochat is chasing a fast-growing market, too. According to the 10-year-old, India-based market research company MarketsandMarkets, the conversational AI software market should see $4.8 billion in revenue this year and more than triple that amount by 2025.

Certainly, having conglomerates on board is speeding along the company’s growth.

“With Coca Cola, we started in Brazil and we helped them run their commerce when it comes to talking with small mom-and-pop shops,” says Yalochat founder and CEO Javier Mata, a Columbia University grad who studied engineering and founded three other companies beginning in 2013 before launching Yalochat.

“They had such success running their ordering process that they then took us to Mexico and Colombia, and we’re talking with [them about entering into the] Philippines and India.” Says Mata, “You try to get fast success in one market, then the conglomerate takes you into other areas of business so they can optimize their workflows around sales and customer service in other countries.”

Mata makes the process sound awfully easy, particularly considering that dozens of startups are also focused on conversational commerce and also raising funding right now.

Still, he argues that if you build your product the right way, it becomes a no-brainer for customers.

In pitching companies like Walmart, for example, he says Yalochat would “start with something super simple but high value that they could launch in a week.  We’d say, ‘That process for sales that it has taken you years [to organize], we can get it out for you by Friday.’ Then we’d just do it.

“It was low stakes for them to try us out, and as soon as they saw our conversion rates, we were introduced to other [units] with the corporation.” Says Mata, “I think why a lot of other companies haven’t been successful is that [their tech] is not simple or doesn’t really work. We made ours scalable, easy to launch, and capable of running smoothly without passing that complexity to end users.”

B Capital is plainly buying what Yalochat is selling. Firm cofounder Eduardo Saverin — who famously cofounded Facebook —  calls Mata and his team “phenomenally strong” and suggests there’s little to stop their trajectory right now. “Yalo is an example of a Latin American business that is already today in Asia. And if you’re building  a conversational commerce enablement for large enterprises that redefines the way they touch customers — [meaning] messaging applications, the most engaging medium in the world today —  should that really be confined to Latin America or Asia? Absolutely not.”

Saverin compares the startup to B Capital itself, which has offices in L.A., San Francisco, New York, and Singapore.

The firm has already made bets in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, since getting off the ground in 2015. Now, with Yalo, it has its first investment that’s principally headquartered in Latin America, as well.

“For us,” says Saverin, who grew up in Brazil, “we didn’t start investing everywhere on day one. But that’s the mission.”

Airbnb has been implementing measures to help limit hosting of unauthorized parties at listings booked through its platform, and today it implemented the strictest of all: A global ban on all parties and events. This includes an occupancy cap of 16 guests max at even the largest of the listings available on its platform, and the ban is “in effect indefinitely until further notice” according to the company.

The company notes that “unauthorized parties” have always been against its rules, even though it previously allowed hosts on its platform to selectively authorize small parties depending on their own assessment of whether they would be okay with that given the size of their house, and the comfort level of the surrounding neighborhood.

In its posted explanation of the rule change, Airbnb cites the global COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing as a contributing factor to updated rules around group gatherings, including removing specific flags encouraging use of listings as party venues from its search tools. Simultaneously, they also added a policy that requires both hosts and guests to follow local health agency guidelines around COVID-19 prevention measures, which the company says amounted to what was “effectively […] a form-fitting, patchwork ban on parties and events.”

Airbnb says that while that seemed to be sufficient at the time to encourage responsible and safe behavior, changing regional guidelines have meant that they’ve seen an increase in some individuals on their platform to turn listings into defect bars and clubs – hence the introduction of this new global ban, which is designed “in the best interest of public health.”

In terms of specifics, the guideline explicitly profits parties on all future bookings, and adds the 16 occupant cap. Airbnb is working on creating some kind of exception process for boutique hotels and other similar properties that make use of its platform for bookings. Meanwhile, Airbnb is working on process for informing guests of the party rules and that they open themselves up to potentially legal action if found to be in violation of the restriction.

Airbnb does not mention recent killings at rentals arranged through its platform, including one in Toronto in February in which three people were killed, and the California shooting last Halloween in which five people died. That incident in October 2019 prompted the ‘party house’ ban that Airbnb then implemented, while the incident from February prompted calls for further action.

Budget-strapped students, this post is for you. We have a limited number of discount passes to Disrupt 2020 for $125 a pop. Buy your student pass now, before one of two things happen. One, we run out of tickets. Two, the price on any remaining passes increases on September 13. Insert sad face emoji here.

Your pass may come at a discount, but there’s nothing discounted about your Disrupt 2020 experience. You’ll have total access to five full days of programming across all the Disrupt stages. You’ll hear from some of the most influential people in technology, investing and business — we’re talking movers, shakers and makers like CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha and Zoom founder Eric Yuan. Check the agenda and plan your schedule now.

If you’re a budding founder, be sure to attend one of our Pitch Deck Teardown sessions. In these sessions, a new addition to the Disrupt lineup, top venture capitalists will critique an early-stage startup’s pitch deck and provide tips to improve it. Want to be considered for the teardown treatment? Submit your pitch deck here.

Mosey on over to the Extra Crunch Stage where seasoned veterans hold forth on subjects that every early-stage startup founder needs to learn. Topics like how to craft a pitch deck or how to raise money in an economic downturn. Join the interactive Q&As and glean real-world tips from experts in marketing, business development and investing.

Explore Digital Startup Alley and discover hundreds of exciting new startups. Use CrunchMatch, our free AI-powered networking platform to find and connect with likeminded attendees around the world — discover employment opportunities, schedule 1:1 virtual meetings to meet founders, pitch investors or highlight your expertise. The platform is live right now, which gives you weeks to master your networking mojo.

Don’t miss Startup Battlefield — our always-epic pitch competition — as an international cohort of extraordinary startups competes virtually for glory, massive media attention, investor affection and, of course, $100,000 in equity-free cash.

Disrupt 2020 takes place September 14 -18. Students, buy your 60% off pass to the full Disrupt experience before they’re gone. No one wants a sad emoji face.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Vertical farming technology provider iFarm has bagged a $4 million seed round, led by Gagarin Capital, an earlier investor in the startup. Other investors in the round include Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, IMI.VC and several business angels.

The Finnish startup is focused on providing software that enables others to carry out vertical farming — targeting sales at food processing companies and FMCG giants, as well as farmers, university research centers and even large corporates with their own catering needs, as a result of operating large physical office footprints.

Its software as a service platform automates crop care for plants such as salad greens, cherry tomatoes and berries grown in vertical stacks. The system involves a range of technologies to monitor and automate crop care, applying computer vision and machine learning and drawing on data on “thousands” of plants collected from a distributed network of farms, per iFarm .

At this stage it’s providing technology to around 50 projects in Europe and the Middle — covering a total of 11,000square-meters of farm. Its platform is currently able to automate care for around 120 varieties of plants, with the goal of getting to 500 by 2025 (it says ten new crop varieties are being added each month).

“iFarm started three years ago, with three founders. The goal is to build technology… for growing tasty and healthy food that we already eat,” says co-founder and CBDO Max Chizhov, who notes the business has grown to 15 employees along the way.

“We started from a greenhouse. First year just looking for technologies — which kind of technologies to use. After one year of experiments we have some pilots and now we are focused on indoor farming, vertical farming.”

Vertical farming is an urban farming technique that involves stacking plants in dense layers in a highly controlled indoor environment, using LED lighting to replace sunlight to power all-year-round agriculture.

iFarm notes that the fully automated approach also means there’s no need for pesticides to grow a range of edible greens, herbs, fruits, flowers and vegetables. There are some natural limits on what can be grown within such systems — taller plants and trees obviously can’t be squeezed into stacks. Deep root vegetables also aren’t suitable, although iFarm touts baby carrots among its product portfolio.

“We focus on profitable products,” says Chizhov. “Small crops, very fast growing crops, and easy to irrigate and easy to grow in many layers. Many layers is the advantage of indoor farms.”

While there are now hundreds of vertical farming startups whose business model is fixed on selling the edible produce they grow, such as to supply supermarkets and other food retailers, iFarm is purely focused on developing technologies to support automated indoor agriculture.

o it might, for instance, be eyeing the likes of Infarm, Bowery and Plenty as potential customers for its vertical farming optimization technologies.

It says its systems can be applied to vertical farms of 20 to 20,000 square meters, supporting scalability.

“Our main advantage is we know how to grow and you don’t need any special technologies to know how to grow. All of our algorithms, all of the data, is based in our software,” says Chizhov, emphasizing the software is hardware agnostic — meaning customers don’t need to use iFarm’s kit for their vertical farms but just can apply its algorithms to their own set-ups.

iFarm has designed various bits of vertical farm hardware it can supply, or co-develop with customers, per Chizhov, such as fertilizer units and LED lighting. But the software as a service platform isn’t locked to any specific piece of kit.

“The main thing is the software that combines optimization systems like humidity, temperature, CO2 etc; and some business separations — like why, how, when we start growing, which clients,” he says, adding: “It’s like a CRM plus an ERP system that controls all the parameters.

“In this system we use computer vision systems. We use AI for increasing taste [of the edible produce], increasing yield parameters of our growing crops. We also use drones which fly in our farms and observe all of our greens and all of our plants. We optimize all of the processes in the farm using software and some [pieces of hardware] that use the software.”

Chizhov says the seed funding will be used to gradually expand the business into new regions — with a launch into the US market on the cards in two years’ time — but the main priority now is to spend on further software development.

“The main goal is [adding] new type of crops,” he notes. “Research, development, new products.”

On the competitive front, iFarm is not the only technology provider seeking to sell to the burgeoning vertical farming sector. Chizhov says there are around ten to 15 similar agtech startups. But he contends its tech and approach has the edge over the likes of UK-based Intelligent Growth Solutions, Belgium’s Urban Crop Solutions, Switzerland’s Growcer, US ‘container farms’ provider Freight Farms, or China’s Alesca Life, to name-check a handful of other players in the space.

“There are some companies in this market that also provide solutions but with less optimization, with less software value and with less product mix/product line,” he argues. “The main difference is the type of crops; it’s software that we provide for our clients — because you don’t need to know how to grow; you don’t need to be a specialist in your company you just push a button. And we provide excellent services for our clients. Design, installation, operation, help to sell the final product etc.”

Chizhov also notes iFarm has filed patents to protect some of its technologies.

Mikhail Taver, GP of Gagarin Capital, who is the lead investor in iFarm’s seed round, says the startup stood out on account of having a competitive advantage in the sector. Although he also notes that the fund’s agtech strategy is focused on indoor farming rather than mainstream outdoors — which again makes iFarm a good fit.

“We do see a large potential in the sector with the [world’s] rising population. We see the increasing demand for food — it’s only going to continue. We see global warming and general sustainability issues. And iFarm seems to be able to solve most of those,” Taver told TechCrunch.

“I don’t really see much competitors able to grow things other than greens,” he added, elaborating on the competitive edge claim. “You don’t normally get proper tomatoes or edible flowers and things like that grown in vertical farms. They mainly concentrate on a couple of salads at most.

“Plus most of our competitors they focus on competing with actual farmers, whereas we’re trying to augment them. We don’t try to force them off the market — we’re trying to help them get bigger. Which is a totally different approach and it should be working better. At least that’s what I believe.”

So far, 2020 has been mostly a garbage year, but it has also been consistently interesting in terms of the amount of change that it has brought.

Venture capital? Changed. Public markets? Very changed. How to go public? How about a SPAC? E-commerce? Going through a once-in-a-generation step-change. E-commerce venture investment? Down. Fintech investing? More nine-figure rounds than ever. Fintech losses? New records.

The list goes on. But amidst the signals and noise, there has been a notable theme struck by some public companies in their earnings reports, and private companies’ investors in interviews: the digital transformation is accelerating.

This concept is something that TechCrunch has covered at length this year, including this column, where we’ve chatted with folks from Twilio and Qualtrics to collect their in-market observations.

But if companies of all stripes are racing to modernize operations with more software and more cloud, why aren’t we seeing more revenue acceleration amongst public SaaS companies?

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

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That’s a question Redpoint’s Jamin Ball asked the other day on Twitter, posting a chart showing that most SaaS and cloud companies posted revenue deceleration in Q2 2020 compared to Q1 2020. Less revenue growth during a longer period of supposedly COVID-led digital acceleration? Odd, given what you’ll hear talking to any booster of public or private cloud companies.

Indeed, the narrative in mid-Q2 was that things were looking better than expected amongst startups, at least, and by late Q2 that many were actually catching a COVID tailwind. But if their public brethren are any indication, things could be slower among private companies than anticipated.

Lightning and a massive heatwave have contributed to raging wildfires in Northern California. By last count, some 11,000 lighting strikes caused hundreds of blazes n a 72 hour period — 26 of which have been classified as major fires, according to officials. The fires have grown to around 124,000 acres, threatening some 25,000 structures in the process.

Google this week has unveiled a tool it’s been working on for some time, aimed at delivering easily accessible information to the impacted areas. Through Search and Maps, the company has started offering up information relevant to the specific region.

At the heart of it  is a digital polygon — a red border that encircles a rough approximation of the active blaze. The object is drawn using data gathered from NOAA’s GOES (Geostationary Satellite Server) system. There’s a full Medium post from the team detailing how that information is gathered and processed if you’re interested in reading it. It’s interesting and pretty technical.

All you need to know as a consumer is that the information will be presented to you through Google Search. A floating notification will also pop up when you search for a location at or near the affected region in Maps. In addition to the name and location of the fire, Google will also offer up an SOS alert offering up relevant news articles and resources from local emergency services.

The information follows a pilot program in 2019 that found the company working with first responders like e California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) and Boulder, Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management in order to collect the most relevant information for an emergency scenario.

Target announced today its grocery pickup service is available nationwide, First introduced earlier this summer in the Midwest, Target said it would soon roll out grocery pickup services across the U.S., reaching 1,500 stores in a matter of months. Today, Target says it has reached that goal, which equates to nearly 85% of its locations.

Though the retailer had already offered grocery delivery through Shipt and both online Order Pickup and a same-day curbside service called Drive Up, it hadn’t yet offered the ability to pick up groceries due to issues with storing cold foods. But store remodels and more recent expansions to the pickup area inside some Target stores addressed the problem.

To move forward with its plans, the retailer had to work around issues related to the coronavirus outbreak that had delayed Target’s plans to fully remodel hundreds of stores. In stores that hadn’t yet been remodeled, a small construction project allowed the order pickup area to accommodate temperature-controlled storage.

The new grocery pickup service doesn’t offer all of Target’s fresh and frozen items at launch. Instead, Target has made available the most popular 750 fresh and frozen items on top of thousands of non-perishables that were already available to order. These newly added items include produce, dairy, bakery, meat and frozen products. The company said it imposed the limitation based on how it saw customers were using grocery pickup services to shop for essentials between larger trips to the store. It’s unclear, however, if that will remain true in the coronavirus era, when shoppers are now visiting stores less frequently, but stocking up in greater quantities when they do.

In both Target and Walmart’s earnings, announced this week, the retailers reported basket size increases related to this trend. Target, for example, reported customer basket size grew 18.8% in Q2 as people shopped for more items on their Target runs.

If this trend continues beyond the pandemic, retailers may need consider making online order pickup equivalent to shopping inside the store, in terms of product selection.

In addition to fresh and frozen groceries, Target shoppers can also pick from the over 250,000 general merchandise items available for pickup across categories like home, apparel, essentials, and more within their same grocery order. Shoppers don’t have to create separate “carts” in the Target app, nor does the Target website or app separate grocery shopping from other online shopping the way Walmart.com and its app do.

However, the option to build a “Drive Up” order is only available within the mobile app, as before. From the web, you can only create a order you pick up inside the store or choose delivery.

Target is ahead of schedule with its grocery pickup expansions. Originally, the retailer said it would reach 1,500 stores by the U.S. holiday season. The company didn’t offer a timeframe for when it expects to offer grocery pickup at every store.

Online grocery helped fuel both Target and Walmart’s quarterly sales, both retailers reported this week. In Target’s case, same-day services accounted for a majority of its digital growth, with growth of 273% across all services. Curbside pickup grew 734% while Shipt grocery delivery grew 350% during the quarter.

 

When space launch startup Firefly’s first planned orbital flight takes off in November, it’ll carry an experimental payload developed by engineers from Purdue University: A drag sail that’s designed to haul a rocket back to Earth once it’s fulfilled its mission and deployed its cargo. Safely deorbiting a spent launch vehicle would mean one less large piece of flotsam circling the globe in an increasingly high-traffic orbital area.

Most launch vehicles do safely de-orbit on their own – eventually. But that can take up to a hundred years for rocket stages. Increasingly, spacecraft like satellites are also building in propulsion systems to actively de-orbit at end-of-life, but any time you put an active propellant system on a craft designed to operate in space, that means you need to make space for both the propulsion system and propellant, both of which take up space which means added cost for launch, and less room on the satellite for instrumentation and other mission-critical payloads.

As Purdue points out, propellant-based active propulsion systems also require that a spacecraft is operational in order for them to work. A drag parachute, conversely, is effectively a passive measure that can be triggered via fail-safe to de-orbit even a disabled spacecraft.

A drag sail works by creating drag, reducing the orbital velocity of a launch vehicle or spacecraft much more quickly than would occur without any assistance. Objects orbiting Earth in space are only able to maintain those orbits because they’re moving at very high speeds, which in turn means they can counter the effect of Earth’s gravity, which is continually pulling them back down towards the surface, even beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

The experimental drag sail, called Spinnaker3, spans 194 square feet when unfurled, and is a prototype that is designed to eventually form the basis of a while line of drag sail products to be commercialized by Vestigo Airspace, a startup company founded by Purdue adjust associate professor David Spencer. Eventually, small sats and launch craft equipped with drag sails like these could help ensure that despite increased launch activity in Earth’s orbit, the existing traffic problem isn’t exacerbated anywhere near as much as it would otherwise.

DoorDash is announcing that customers can now order groceries through the DoorDash app from partners including Smart & Final, Meijer and Fresh Thyme. Additional stores like Hy-vee and Gristedes/D’Agnostino are supposed to be added in the next few weeks.

Through these partnerships, DoorDash says it has a delivery footprint covering 75 million Americans in markets like the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit and Indianapolis.

DoorDash began delivering from a wide range of convenience stores earlier this year. Fuad Hannon, the company’s head of new verticals, also noted that a number of grocery stores are already part of the DoorDash Drive program, a white-label service where DoorDash handles last-mile delivery.

So Hannon said introducing grocery delivery into the DoorDash app itself is a “natural extension” of those efforts. And in contrast to many other grocery services, the company promises to deliver within an hour of your order.

“There’s no scheduling, no delivery slots, no day-long waits,” he said.

To achieve this, Hannon said DoorDash has created “deep partnerships and commercial relationships” with the grocery stores, coordinating on things like inventory management. “Embedded shoppers” hired from a staffing agency handle the shopping in each store, and the groceries are then delivered by DoorDash’s Dashers.

Hannon said these deliveries will be handled by “the same pool of Dashers” as restaurant delivery. Individual Dashers will decide for themselves when and if they want to take on groceries as well, but he argued that this provides a new opportunity for them, particularly between mealtimes when there’s not much demand for restaurant delivery.

Asked whether there’s any tension with grocery stores in the Drive program who may prefer bringing in customers through their own websites and apps, Hannon argued that customers in the DoorDash app represent “largely different users,” and he said the company is “philosophically agnostic” about whether customers are making purchases through the grocery store’s website/app or through DoorDash.

“DoorDash provides another convenient way for customers to get the value, selection and quality that Smart & Final offers, especially at a time when some are looking to limit trips outside their homes,” said Navin Cotton, Smart & Final’s director of digital commerce, in a statement. “DoorDash’s on-demand grocery service is a nice addition to our online shopping options and with delivery in under an hour, we know Smart & Final customers are going to appreciate it.”

Grocery prices are set by the merchant and should be the same as what you’d find in-store, Hannon said, though perhaps without buy-one-get-one-free offers and others in-store deals. These deliveries are also included in the company’s DashPass subscription, which offers free delivery and reduced service fees.

DoorDash is also offering prepared meals from a longer list of grocery partners, including Wegmans, Hy-Vee, Gelson’s, Kowalski’s, Big Y World Class Markets, Food City, Village Supermarkets, Save Mart, Lucky, Lucky California and Coborn’s.