Category: UNCATEGORIZED

After the bell yesterday, Apple-device management company Jamf announced its final IPO pricing. We’ve been tracking the Jamf IPO for some time, as it is yet another example of a technology company worth $1 billion or more going public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in March, we’d have guessed that today’s IPO market would be devoid of any public offerings, let alone a litany of successful flotations. But, 2020 is unpredictable; instead of seeing an IPO drought, there have been a modest deluge of debuts.

And yesterday Jamf continued the trend of recent IPO pricing strongly, at times selling more shares in the bargain.

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Jamf’s IPO underscores that public market investors are hungry for new technology offerings and keen on growth but are willing to accept what startups would consider middling expansion — and sufficiently greedy to pay up both before and after a company begins to trade.

This is the IPO market that unicorns were waiting for.

Happily, more companies — and let’s be so bold as to say unicorns — could approach the public markets in short order. The Exchange spoke with Wouter Witvoet, CEO of startup equity service provider Secfi, yesterday to get his view on today’s IPO market and coming offerings. Sitting as he does between growing startups and their vested employees, Secfi has a fascinating lens into the maturity of the firms we discuss when we talk about future IPOs.

On the subject of companies going public today with strong pricing runs, Witvoet said that “what you’re seeing is that IPOs have dried up for a very long time, and people want to deploy cash.” More cash means more dollars chasing IPOs, which helps explain the current pricing cycles we’ve seen. Witvoet cited Palantir as a company that is “making use of the opportunity that there is somewhat of an IPO window now to go public,” going on to say that he had expected Snowflake to stay private longer, but that it instead opted to start its own IPO process, perhaps due to attractive market conditions.

Workplace instant messaging platform Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the European Union accusing the tech giant of unfairly bundling its rival Teams product with its cloud-based productivity suite.

A spokeswoman for the Commission’s competition division confirmed receipt of a complaint, telling us via email: “We confirm that we received a complaint by Slack against Microsoft. We will assess it under our standard procedures.”

We’ve also reached out to Microsoft and Slack for comment.

Per the FT, which has a statement from Slack, the company is accusing Microsoft of illegally abusing its market power by tying its competing product, Teams, to its dominant enterprise suite, Microsoft 365.

“Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers,” Slack said in the statement.

In further comments to the newspaper, Slack executives said they’re asking EU regulators to move quickly to “to ensure Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its power from one market to another by bundling or tying products”.

Slack told the newspaper it wants the Windows maker to be forced to sell Teams separately to Microsoft 365 at a separate price, rather than bundling it with the existing suite and absorbing the cost.

The complaint is not a surprise given Microsoft and Slack have been at odds for years, ever since the Redmond-based software giant announced its Teams product back in 2016. At the time Slack took out a newspaper advertisement sardonically mocking Microsoft and welcoming the competition. In the ensuing years, Microsoft’s Teams product has also grown from also-ran to legitimate competitor.

Teams most recently announced that it had reached 75 million daily active users (DAU) in April of this year, a gain of 70% from a March number of 44 million DAUs. Like many remote-work friendly products and services, Slack and Teams have seen usage gains in the wake of COVID-19 and its economic disruptions. (Both services are also rolling out new features, combating for media attention, user mindshare, and new customer accounts).

Slack’s last shared DAU number that TechCrunch could find came from March, when Slack’s CEO reported 12.5 million daily actives.

Microsoft’s competing Teams product has managed to transition from dismissed upstart, to rival, to perhaps leading competitor in the space of a few years — but with the advantage of being bundled with a dominant office suite product. Slack’s business is still growing nicely, but with the power of Microsoft’s enterprise sales channel stapled to its growing Microsoft 365 product suite, it’s not surprising to see Slack seek regulatory relief against the larger company.

Whether you agree with Slack’s antitrust take, the move is likely good business. Slack’s shares dropped after its most recent earnings report after its growth and future guidance failed to meet investor expectations (in fairness, Slack did grow 50% on a year-over-year basis, even if Wall Street was unimpressed). If Microsoft’s Teams product is eating into its famed business expansion, Slack could see its share price suffer further. So, heading off Microsoft in a region famed for active government intervention into business appears savvy.

EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager is famed for her relative alacrity in grappling with complex digital cases. Though her record when judged by outcomes remains contested.

Also noteworthy: EU lawmakers are consulting on whether to give regional antitrust regulators greater powers to intervene in digital markets when they suspect a market might be being tipped unfairly in favor of one player.

For long time tech watchers, Microsoft being accused of unfairly bundling in the EU will of course bring back plenty of memories. Although, most recently, the tech giant has been making hay out of Apple being put under formal antitrust probe in the region — with president Brad Smith claiming in a Politico video interview last month that Cupertino’s app store walls are “higher” and “more formidable” than anything it threw up in years past.

Reminder: All the way back in 2004 EU antitrust regulators slapped Microsoft with the (then) biggest ever fine — around a half billion euros — for abusing a near monopoly position with its desktop OS, Windows, to try to crush competitors in the digital media player and low end server market. So, er…

Cooks Venture has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox, with participation from Larry Schwartz and John Roulac.

At its most basic level, Cooks Venture provides a proprietary breed of chicken to grocery stores for consumption. The company also lists Fresh Direct and direct online sales to its distribution channels. But it’s far more complex than that.

For one, Cooks Venture spent years researching the genetic lines of chickens to develop its own breed of heirloom chickens. Why? Cooks Venture chickens grow more slowly, can live in a wider range of climates, get sick less frequently, and most importantly, can thrive on a much more diverse diet than your average chicken.

These features breed (see what I did there?) their own benefits. For one, this new proprietary breed (called Heritage breed) can be sold to emerging nations that perhaps can’t afford to build state-of-the-art temperature-controlled facilities or don’t have access to tons of corn (but do have access to yucca or quinoa) for feed. Cooks Venture also color sexes its chickens, making it easier for a farm without advanced infrastructure to quickly tell the difference between male and female chickens, which have different uses.

Secondly, feed for livestock is a huge source of demand on the agricultural industry, but much of that demand is for a small number of grains, like corn.

With Cooks Venture Heritage chickens, which can eat a wide variety of foods, farmers can practice regenerative agriculture and run a biodiverse farm with a reliable place to sell those yields.

As part of the fundraising deal, Cooks Venture has also partnered with FoodID.

The platform tests for the presence of antibiotics and other adulterants in near real time, providing a solution to the problem of label fraud.

Cooks Venture founder and CEO Matt Wadiak (cofounder of Blue Apron) explained that the USDA runs what is called a follicle test, “and one of the issues [they’ve] determined with this kind of testing is that the thresholds for those tests will never lead to a positive test.”

He said the same animal (that wouldn’t test positive in the USDA’s test) would be found to test positive for various proteins and antibiotics when submitted to FoodID’s mass spectrometer test. Moreover, your basic mass spectrometer test takes a few weeks to offer results, which by then means that the flock has already been slaughtered and is in the midst of being processed and sent off to stores. The FoodID test can be done in near real time.

Wadiak says that food fraud is one of the biggest challenges to Cooks Venture, which goes above and beyond to provide healthy chickens to customers. If other products can simply fake it, it’s all the more difficult for Cooks Venture to stand out at the point of sale.

Cooks Venture says that, through this partnership, it’s the first company in America to test for synthetic inputs and the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified non-GMO feed to its birds.

The company has significantly expanded since its $12 million fundraise in September 2019, serving broad swaths of California, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Seattle, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Northeast.

The Cooks Venture team is made up of about 240 people, 42 percent of whom are female and 52 percent of whom are people of color. The leadership team, made up of 11 people, includes six women and two people of color.

Apple recently announced that they would be transition their Mac line from Intel processors to their own, ARM-based Apple Silicon. That process is meant to begin with hardware to be announced later this year, and last two years according to Apple’s stated expectations, and while new Intel-powered Macs will be released and sold leading up to that time, it does mean that the writing is on the wall for Intel-based Apple hardware. Existing Macs with Intel chips will still be useful long after the transition is complete, however, and software porting means they might even support more of your existing favorite applications for the foreseeable future, which is why adding an external GPU (eGPU) likely makes more sense now than ever.

Apple added support for eGPUs a few years ago, made possible by the addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports on Macs. These have very high throughput, making it possible for a GPU in an internal enclosure to offer almost a much graphics processing capability as one connected internally. But while Apple has directly sold a few eGPUs, and natively supports AMD graphics cards without any special driver gymnastics required, it’s still mostly a niche category. But for anybody looking to extend the life of their existing Mac for a few more years to wait and see how the Apple Silicon transition shakes out, updates from Apple and key software partners make an eGPU a great choice.

Here are a couple of Thunderbolt 3 eGPU enclosure options out there for those considering this upgrade path, and the relative merits of each. Keep in mind that for each of these, the pricing is for the enclosure alone – you’ll have to add your own eGPU to make it work, but the good news is that you can continually upgrade and replace these graphics cards to give your Mac even more of a boost as graphics tech improves.

Razer Core X Chroma ($399)

The Razer Core X Chroma is Razer’s top of the line GPU enclosure, and it supports full-sized PCIe graphics cards up to three slots wide, up to a maximum of 500 watts. The integrated power supply provides 700w of power, which enables 100w output for charging any connected laptop, and on the back of the eGPU you’ll find four extra high-speed USB ports, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port for networking. The Chroma version also comes with tunable LED lighting for additional user customization options. Razer provided me with a Core X Chrome, an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for the purposes of testing across both Mac and PC systems.

This isn’t the smallest enclosure out there, but that’s in part because it supports 3-slot cards, which is over and above a lot of the competition. It’s also relatively short and long, making it a great option to tuck away under a desk, or potentially even held in an under-desk mount (with enough clearance for the fan exhaust to work properly). It’s quiet in operation, and only really makes any audible noise when the GPU held within is actually working for compatible software.

Most of my testing focused on using the Razer Core X Chroma with a Mac, and for that use you’ll need to stick with AMD’s GPUs, since Apple doesn’t natively support Nvidia graphics cards in macOS. The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is a beast, however, and delivers plenty of horsepower for improving activities like photo and video editing, as well as giving you additional display output options and just generally providing additional resources for the system to take advantage of.

Thanks to Adobe’s work on adding eGPU support to its Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere products, you can get a lot of improvement in overall rendering and output in all those applications, particularly if you’re on a Mac that only has an integrated GPU. Likewise with Apple’s own applications, including Final Cut Pro X.

In my experience, using the eGPU greatly improved the export function of both Adobe and Apple’s pro video editing software, cutting export times by at least half. And working in Lightroom was in general much faster and more responsive, with significantly reduced rendering times for thumbnails and previews, which ordinarily take quite a while on my 2018 Mac mini.

Apple also uses eGPUs to accelerate the performance of any apps that use Metal, OpenGL and OpenCL, which is why you may notice a subtle general improvement in system performance when you plug one in. It’s hard to quantify this effect, but overall system performance felt less sluggish and more responsive, especially when running a large number of apps simultaneously.

The Razer Core X Chrome’s extra expansion slots, quiet operation and max power delivery all make it the top choice if you’re looking for an enclosure to handle everything you need, and it can provide big bumps both to Macs and Windows PCs alike – and both interchangeably, if you happen to use both platforms.

Akitio Node Titan ($329)

If you’re looking to spend a little less money, and get an enclosure that’s a bit more barebones but that still offers excellent performance, check out the Akitio Node Titan. Enclosure maker Akitio was acquired by OWC, a popular Mac peripheral maker and seller that has provided third-party RAM, docks, drives and more for decades. The Node Titan is their high-end eGPU enclosure.

The case for the Node Titan is a bit smaller than that of the Razer Core X, and is finished in a space gray-like color that will match Apple’s Mac notebooks more closely. The trade-off for the smaller size is that it only supports 2-slot graphics cards, but it also features an integrated pop-out handle that makes it much more convenient, combined with its lighter, more compact design, for taking with you place to place.

Akitio’s Node Titan packs in a 650w power supply, which is good for high-consumption graphics cards, but it also means that another compromise for this case vs. the Core X Chrome is that the Titan supplies only 85w output to any connected laptops. That’s under the 96W required for full-speed charging on the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro, though it’s still enough to keep your notebook powered up and provide full-speed charging to the rest of Apple’s Mac notebook lineup.

The Node Titan also provides only one port on the enclosure itself – a Thunderbolt output for connecting to your computer. Graphics cards you use with it will offer their own display connections, however, for attaching external displays.

In terms of performance, the Akitio Node Titan offers the same potential gains with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT for your Mac (and both AMD and Nvidia cards for PCs) when connected, since the GPU specs are what matter most when working with an enclosure. It operates a little more noisily, especially in terms of making a quiet, but still detectable constant hum even when the GPU is not being taxed.

The Node Titan is still an excellent choice, however, and potentially a better one for those looking for more portability and a bit more affordability at the expense of max notebook power output and a host of handy port expansions.

Bottom line

Back when more Macs had the option for user-expandable RAM, that was a great way to squeeze a little more life out of external machines and make a slowing machine feel much faster. Now, only a few Macs in Apple’s lineup make it easy or even possible to upgrade your memory. Adding an eGPU can have a similar effect, especially if you spend a lot of time in creative editing apps, including Adobe’s suite, Apple’s Pro apps, or various other third-party apps including DaVinci Resolve.

The total price of an eGPU setup, including card, can approach or even match the price of a new Mac, but even less expensive cards offer significant benefit, and you can always swap that out later depending on your needs. It is important to note that the future of eGPU support on Apple Silicon Macs isn’t certain, even though Apple has said they’ll support Thunderbolt. Still, an eGPU can stave off the need for an upgrade for years, making it easier to wait and watch to see what the process transition really means for Mac users.

Gaming phones are a weird one. They make sense on paper to some degree. As we well know, everyone’s a gamer these days, and much or most of that gaming happens on mobile devices. So why aren’t devoting gaming phones a more popular phenomenon? It’s not for lack of trying.

Lenovo’s the latest company to toss its hat in that highly-specific ring. That’s the sort of thing you can do when you’re the size of Lenovo and can experiment with such things. Gaming phones are a kind of go big or go home proposition, and the company’s doing mostly the former with the Legion Phone Duel, a mobile addition to the company’s Legion line of gaming PCs.

For starters, the handset was briefly alluded to in Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon 865 Plus announcement — and is now is one of a very small club of phones sporting the chip. From where I sit, however, the most interesting thing about the category is the way it affords manufacturers an opportunity to experiment with ideas in a way that you don’t often see on flagships. And, indeed, there’s definitely some interesting stuff happening here.

For one thing, it’s got two batteries — something you don’t really see outside of foldables. Of course, those sport them for the very pragmatic reason that phone batteries don’t fold. Here, however, the batteries are separated to prevent overheating, leading the company the split the extremely health 5,000mAh capacity in two. You’re going to need that sort of battery for a gaming-centric 5G handset.

Also worth pointing out is the horizontal pop-up selfie camera — the most notable feature from early leaks. The idea here, of course, is that serious mobile gaming happens in the landscape configuration. As such, the design makes sense for video capture to stream to services like Twitch and YouTube. It’s a highly specific case use, of course, but this is highly specific phone. And, of course, your results of taking selfie video on the mobile device you’re using to game may vary.

Speaking of unique feature positions, there are also two separate USB-C charging ports — one in standard position on the bottom, and the other on the side. Again, the idea here is to make it as easy as possible to remain in landscape mode. If you’ve ever attempted to charge your phone and play a game at the same time, you know how much of a pain that can be.

Along with the aforementioned Snapdragon chip, you’ll also find up to 16GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage. The display is 6.65 inches at 2340×1080, with a 144Hz refresh rate. The phone does not appear to be coming to the U.S. for now, but will be available this month in China (where it will be called the Legion Phone Pro), followed by the Asia Pacific region, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Latin America.

Pricing is TBD.

Misfits Market, the ecommerce platform that sells ‘ugly’ produce (among other things), has today announced the close of an $85 million Series B financing round. The funding was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Third Kind Venture Capital, and Sound Ventures.

Misfits Market started out as a subscription box that allowed folks to buy ugly or misshapen product on the cheap each week. This product would have been thrown out at the farm, before ever heading to a distributor or grocery store, because it usually goes to waste sitting on a grocery store shelf.

There’s nothing actually wrong with this produce, except for the fact that shoppers wouldn’t normally choose it from a pile of fruit or vegetables that look more pleasing.

Since raising its Series A, Misfits Market has been working to expand its selection, which now includes chocolate, snacks, chips, coffee, herbs, grains, lentils, sauces and spices. Users can add these products to their usual weekly produce box on an a la carte basis, and they’re priced 20-25 percent below retail. These products are available to ‘add to box’ once a week (on Thursdays).

At its core, Misfits Market looks at any structural inefficiencies in the food supply chain and capitalizes on them, getting the product at a discount and passing those savings on to the end customer. These inefficiencies may include issues with sell-by date — some products must be on store shelves nine months before their sell by date — or an ineffectual mistake (like the olive oil company that works with Misfits Market and has a bad habit of attaching its labels on the cans upside down).

Where timing is concerned, Misifts Market doesn’t have to play by the same rules as a distributor or grocery store as it sends products directly to consumers, benefitting from a much faster logistical operation.

Alongside the funding announcement, Misfits Market is also announcing a new warehouse in Delanco, NJ that will allow the startup to double its capacity across the East Coast, the South and into the Midwest. This expands Misfits Market’s delivery footprint to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the company has plans to launch in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan soon.

Obviously, the food industry doesn’t want to be inefficient to the point of massive food waste. We’ve seen startups like Crisp look to solve these problems on the data science side. I asked Misfits Market founder and CEO Abhi Ramesh if improvements to supply chain efficiency and the continued growth of Misfits might create challenges ahead.

“Despite these technological advancements that are happening, the amount of product taht goes to waste in absolute and relative terms is increasing every years,” said Ramesh. “When you look at food waste over the past five years and compare that to the amount of food that went to waste in the prior five years, it’s increased. It’s one of those super long term risks, but at least what we’re seeing, and what the data is showing directionally around food waste, is that it’s growing in magnitude, which means there will always be opportunities for us, or a version of us, to go in there and eliminate waste and provide affordability for customers.”

A study by Boston Consulting Group expects food waste to increase in the next 10 years to 2.1 billion tons, worth $1.5 trillion, which represents a one-third increase in the next decade.

On the heels of the funding, Misfits will continue to build out the team, which has been growing rapidly in the midst of the pandemic. The company has hired 400 people since March, compared to 150 in the three-month period prior. The total team is 750 people, with an even split (51% male, 49% female) on gender. The executive team is 30 percent women and 20 percent racially diverse.

Misfits Market has raised a total of $101.5 million.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

My employer sponsored me and my family for green cards. We’re expecting to get a green card interview scheduled soon. What should we expect and how should we prepare for our interview?

— Nervous in Newark

Dear Nervous,

Thanks for reaching out. Great to hear that you’re in the final stretch of the green card process! Fortunately USCIS is starting up in-person interviews again now that they have COVID-precautions in place. For more info, check out what to expect and how to prepare for a green card interview.

Before 2017, USCIS waived interviews for most employment-based green card candidates. But an executive order directing federal agencies to implement screening and vetting processes prompted USCIS to institute a green card interview for all candidates, including dependents.

USCIS offices just reopened to the public on June 4, after being closed for nearly two months due to COVID-19, so scheduling — or rescheduling — a green card interview may require a bit of a wait. Be aware that USCIS tries to schedule families together for their interview at the same time and location; however, this is not guaranteed. USCIS may waive the interview requirement for children 14 years old and younger.

Always inform your immigration attorney of any changes to your employment prior to or immediately after the interview, such as:

When big platforms have carved out large swaths of the delivery market, the best thing for an upstart company to do is to specialize.

For Chowbus, that meant building a food-delivery business that finds restaurants whose cuisines specialize in regional cuisines from Northern and Southern China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

It’s a strategy that has now netted the company $33 million in financing led by the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Altos Ventures and New York’s Left Lane Capital. Hyde Park Angels, Fika Ventures, FJ Labs and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the round.

Founded four years ago in Chicago by Suyu Zhang and Linxin Wen, the company said that its goal was to connect people with authentic Asian food that’s not easy to find on delivery apps. Over the past year, the company touted significant growth in its business, a traction that can be reflected in its decision to bring on the former chief operating officer of Jump Bikes, Kenny Tsai, as its chief operating officer, and Jieying Zheng, a former Groupon product leader as its head of product.

“When we say we’re true partners to the restaurants we work with, we mean it. By eliminating hidden fees, helping them showcase their best dishes, and other efforts we make on their behalf, we really go the extra mile to help our restaurant partners succeed,” said Wen, Chowbus’ chief executive, in a statement. “We only succeed if they do.”

And seemingly, Chowbus is succeeding. The company raised $4 million in its first round of institutional funding just last year and its rise has been precipitous since then.

The Chicago-based company said it would use its new funding to expand to more cities across the US and add new products like a “dine-in” feature allowing diners to order and pay for their meals on their phone for a contactless experience at restaurants in cities that have flattened the curve of COVID-19 infections and are now reopening. 

Chowbus pitches its lack of hidden fees and footprint across 20 cities in North America including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, and many other cities across North America. In Los Angeles, the company offers menus in Mandarin and Cantonese and allows its users to bundle dishes from multiple restaurants in a single delivery.

Other companies are experimenting with specialization as a way to differentiate from the major delivery services that are on the market. Black and Mobile, which launched in Philadelphia but is in the process of expanding across the country, is a delivery service focused on Black-owned restaurants and food stores.

Founded by David Cabello, Black and Mobile was started in 2017 by the 22 year-old college dropout. The company launched its first operations outside of Atlanta earlier this month and is available on iOS.

“The market is experiencing a permanent shift from offline to online ordering, a trend that Chowbus is actively driving,” said Harley Miller, Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital . “Focusing on this large and loyal constituency with a vertical-approach to supporting Asian restaurants and food purveyors has allowed Chowbus to differentiate itself on both sides of the marketplace. The capital efficiency with which they have operated, relative to the scale achieved, is extraordinarily impressive, and not something we often see.”

As the pandemic has shut down in-person meetings, and pushed us online, products like Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have become part of our daily lives. Into the fray jumps huddl.ai, a 3.5 year old startup from a serial entrepreneur who wants to bring a dose of artificial intelligence to meeting technology.

Company co-founder and CEO Krishna Yarlagadda says while these companies have introduced the video meeting concept, his startup has a vision of taking it further. “As we move forward. I think the next [era] is going to be about intelligence,” Yarlagadda told TechCrunch.

That involves using AI tools to transcribe the meeting, pull out the salient points and help users understand what happened without pouring over notes to find the key information in a long session. “Primarily there’s a purpose for every meeting, or essentially we’re meeting for outcomes and that’s where Hudl comes in,” he said.

Yarlagadda said that current solutions simply give you a link to a cloud room and everyone involved clicks and enters. Huddl wants to bring some more structure to that whole process. “We’ve developed a very user centric architecture and also added a layer called meeting memory, which essentially captures the core aspects of the meeting, the agenda, action items and moments and then added search,” he explained.

They call the key meeting elements moments, and they involve capturing three key aspects of the meeting: the agenda and collaborative notes participants take during the meeting, screen captures the user takes using a built-in tool, and finally audio, which captures a recording of the meeting. Users can search across these elements to find the parts of the meeting that are most relevant to them.

Image Credits: huddl.ai

Further, it integrates with other enterprise applications like Slack or Salesforce to move items discussed during these meetings to applicable tools when it makes sense. “Essentially what we’re trying to do is create a five minute version of your 60 minute meeting that is stored in your memory and that becomes part of your search. Post meeting this content has a life, and through API’s and integrations, we can [share it with the right programs],” he said.

For instance, if it’s an action item in a sales meeting, it would go to Salesforce, and if it is a software bug in an engineering meeting, it could be shared with Jira.

The company was started in 2017, and has raised $8.7 million in seed money to date. It has 50 employees, with 10 in the US and the others in India, and has plans to hire 15-20 additional people this year between the US and India offices.

Samsung has been portioning out morsels of news in recent weeks in an attempt to prime the pump ahead of its big Unpacked event. On Monday, the company announced plans to unveiled five new “power devices” (including the new Galaxy Note) at the event. As of this morning, however, it seems the Galaxy Z Flip 5G won’t be among the mystery devices, as the company has officially made the device official today.

The device is set to arrive August 7, priced at $1,450. Not cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, but still only $170 more than the asking price of the original Galaxy Z Flip (and roughly $500 cheaper than the original Galaxy Fold. The Flip was, of course, much more positively received than the Fold, which seemed to run into one problem after another. In fact, the consensus around the device is that Samsung could have saved itself a considerable headache if it had made the Flip its first foldable.

Notably, the new version of the device is the first Samsung product announced to support Qualcomm’s newer chip after the Snapdragon 865 Plus 5G chip. There are also two new colors: Mystic Gray and Mystic Bronze. Most of the other bits and bops mentioned in the press release seem to line up with the original Flip, which launched 10 million-billion years ago, in February 2020.

[gallery ids="2019866,2019870,2019869,2019868,2019867"]

The device is one of two foldables expected from the company, the other being the Galaxy Fold 2, which is expected to carry a similarly lofty price tag as its predecessor.