Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Hunter Walk thinks your TAM slide is stupid.

That’s one viewpoint that the seed-stage investor shared with TechCrunch that made us laugh during our recent conversation. Walk joined us for an Extra Crunch Live chat late last week that was a mix of advice and insight about what the seed-stage Homebrew partner looks for in founders and companies to invest in.

In the case of founders, “attitude matters as much as aptitude sometimes,” Walk said, adding that “grit” and “resilience” are things he favors in entrepreneurs. Why do those qualities matter? Walk cited the Mike Tyson quip about everyone having a plan until they get punched in the face, saying that “building an early-stage startup, you get punched in the face almost daily.”

Form one line, folks considering building a new company.

We also dug into fintech, where Walk and his Homebrew partner Satya Patel have made a number of investments that have turned out well, including Plaid, Finix, Chime and so on. According to Walk, his firm has made investments into the startup category across funds because it felt that two things were going to happen. First, that “a lot of data that had been siloed and unavailable was going to become available,” citing Plaid as an example of the trend.

Second, that the top-down model of building tooling that made chiefs happier than front-line workers was going to flip in the financial world. New software was going to look quite different and focus on the individuals’ needs. Chime, the American neobank, was his example of this trend bearing out in the market.

We’ve excerpted a number of key moments and have embedded the session’s full audio and video below. Enjoy, and if you aren’t an Extra Crunch member, you can get an inexpensive trial here.

All in all it was a lively chat and a good time. We ran a bit short on time but did squeeze in a good number of audience questions, so a big thanks to everyone who turned out live for the show and took part.

Over 14.4 million adults over the age of 18 in the United States exhibited some kind of alcohol use disorder and only about 7.9 percent of those people received treatment. Alcohol-related deaths kill roughly 88,000 people in the U.S. — making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the country. And alcohol-related illnesses cost the U.S. $249 billion.

For Monument founder Mike Russell, those numbers aren’t just statistics, but a window into his own life. The co-founder of Monument, a tele-health service that provides access to prescription medication and therapies to combat alcohol use disorders started the business after seeking treatment himself.

As Russell laid out in a Medium post announcing his company’s launch earlier this year, Monument was formed from the realization that Russell had about the availability of alternative treatment options which weren’t receiving the same attention as the rehab clinics and referrals to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that represent the most common treatment options in the U.S.

Russell, a former nightlife promoter, used to be a professional drinker (the club promotion business demanded it) and even after he left the nightlife world to become an entrepreneur, he remained a binge drinker. That behavior carried through his first failed startup, VenueTap, to his second, more successful foray into the world of tech business creation with MyClean, an on-demand cleaning marketplace.

By the time his third, and most successful startup, Paintzen was acquired Russell said he recognized two things — the first was that his drinking was, in fact, a problem, and the second was that there were alternatives to AA and rehab that he could explore.

Those twin realizations led him to launch Monument, with $7.5 million in seed financing from the same group of investors that had backed him in Paintzen. Those investors, including Collaborative Fund, Lehrer Hippeau Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, Datapoint Capital, Corigin Ventures, and NextView Capital all bought into a thesis that’s captured the attention (and capital) of venture capitalists on both coasts — that treatments for drug and alcohol dependence are investable businesses. 

And while private equity investors are also financing networks of rehabilitation facilities as part of their push into healthcare — venture investors believe that the remote delivery of healthcare services can provide meaningful results without the same expenses that operating a network of locations can incur. It’s not the place, so much as the treatments that are available and the people offering them.

Unlike Tempest, another New York-based startup with venture backing focused on curbing alcohol abuse, Monument is working to connect people with therapists, using the platform as a gateway. Tempest’s approach is built around giving a host of tools as part of a subscription service to get people to stop drinking.

Funding for Monument closed in December 2019 and by January, Russell had penned his blog post and the company began creating its community of users looking for information about ways to overcome their disorders and connecting would-be patients with therapists and physicians who could prescribe medication to treat their conditions or offer cognitive behavioral therapy to try and do the same.

There are four facets of the Monument business.

There’s the free-to-access community of people looking for information and support around their decision to stop drinking and there’s also free group therapy sessions available for community members feeling increased urges to use substances because of added pressure from quarantine restrictions. This is similar to the kinds of therapy sessions that companies like Ro, Hims and others are bringing to market in the time of COVID-19. For community members who want to take the next step with their treatment, Monument there’s the one-time fee to see a doctor who can prescribe medication to suppress the need or desire to drink; and finally, Monument offers two tiers of therapy services for those who want either bi-weekly or weekly sessions.

“We connect members to physicians that understand the medication options or they could opt not to take medication,” said Russell. “[Members are] connected to a licensed therapist that focus specifically on co-morbidities.”

The medication only plan costs $19. A bi-weekly consultation with a therapist and an initial consultation for a prescription costs $149 per month and a medication management plus a weekly therapy sessions costs $249 per month.

So far, Monument has around 700 people on its network and expects to see more members come on board for the free community membership as it launches in California today.

“The treatement plans were available through New York, New Jersey, and Florida for our beta,” says Russell. “For launch it will be those three states plus California and Connecticut.”

While telemedicine providers are able to operate in all fifty states without licenses — thanks to changes in regulations made as a result of the pressures that have been put on the healthcare system from the COVID-19 outbreak — mental health providers still need to be licensed in the states where they operate. “We’re still required to build a supply of physicians, clinicians and therapists that are licensed in each state,” said Russell.

To get the new company off the ground, Russell turned to his co-founder at MyClean and Paintzen, Justin Geller and added Amit Klein, a data scientist as the company’s co-founder and chief product officer.

“The crux of this is data,” says Russell, of the importance of Klein’s role in the company. “As members go into treatment — we’re understanding health outcomes… Someone goes into a plan. Their diagnosis. We understand age, gender, drinking patterns, and then we can see if the treatment that they’re on is working or not.”

And Russell stresses that the company won’t use anonymized data or sell of its insights to third parties.

“It’s a binary outcome,” Russell said of the company’s decision to monitor the process. “We can track success… over time as we treat we build a data set and eventually it becomes personalized.”

The timing for Monument couldn’t be more critical, says Russell, given the increased stressors that the social response to COVID-19 is putting on people’s mental health.

“People are in the fights of their lives with their struggles with alcohol,” right now, Russell said. 

In an episode of Extra Crunch Live last week, Roelof Botha expressed excitement not only about the shift to teleconference platforms like Zoom, but the apps and bots that may spring up on top of the Zoom ecosystem.

Interestingly, Zoom just announced the results of its Marketplace App competition, with Docket taking first place.

Docket was founded in January of 2019 with a mission to bring common sense to meetings. The company claims that more than 70 percent of meetings, both in-person and remote, happen without an agenda circulated before the meeting begins.

Docket starts from the premise that every meeting should have a prioritized, circulated agenda and then kicks it up a notch. The platform allows you to build and share that agenda, as well as take notes on meeting minutes and decisions made to share those after the fact. Docket also has a Task Manager feature, so users can share action items after the meeting to the folks that need to get things done.

Of course, Docket manages the notes, to-do lists and agendas from each respective meeting in an archive so you can go back and review the important information you need, as well as evaluate the productivity of individual meetings.

Docket integrates with Evernote, Slack and Zoom (of course). With the Docket Bot for Zoom, much of the platform’s functionality actually lives within Zoom. The agenda and recap notes appear directly in the Zoom chat, and meeting guests can take collaborative notes about the meeting without ever leaving their Zoom chat window.

Docket also retrieves the Zoom transcription and recording and attaches it directly to the respective Docket meeting as an artifact, letting you go back and search for the exact wording around a decision or meeting topic.

Zoom’s Marketplace App competition was announced at Zoomtopia in October of 2019. The winner, in this case Docket, was selected by Zoom as well as a variety of Zoom’s investors, including Emergence, Horizons Ventures, Maven Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

Docket will receive up to $2 million in funding from these venture capital orgs, as well as an advisory session with Zoom’s top product leaders. The prize also includes priority development support from Zoom, a DTEN D7 55” all-in-one interactive whiteboard with a 3-year Zoom Rooms license, and 10 Zoom Pro licenses for three years.

Finalists from the competition include Ambition, Bloom, Discuss.io, Friday, iScribeHealth, Pledgeling, Session, Social27, and Tiled. All the finalists received a Logitech Pro Personal Video Collaboration Kit via a Logitech sponsorship of the competition.

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.

Hi and welcome back to The Station, I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. If you’re interested in all the future and present ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B, you’re in the right place.

As I mentioned in the last edition, “how” our society opens back up is as important as “when” it does. A line from The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, who wrote about a recent experience traveling via airplane, illustrated what I’ve been thinking about for weeks now.

The glittering allure of “normalcy” that waits on the other end of these stay-at-home orders is a mirage.

His words land with a gloom-laden thud. But I take more neutral view than perhaps Coppins was aiming for. Returning to “normal” isn’t always a good thing. That’s particularly true when you consider the inequity within our cities and transportation infrastructure. COVID-19 could be a positive catalyst for change.

We’re getting change whether we’re ready or not. What do you want that change to look like?

Please share your ideas. Reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts on my above question or offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Shall we get down to it? Vamos.

Micromobbin’

Uber and Lime made headlines this week with a deal that deepens ties between the two companies. Lime raised $170 million in a funding round led by Uber, along with other existing investors Alphabet, Bain Capital Ventures and GV.

As part of the deal, Lime has acquired Jump, the electric bike and scooter division that Uber bought back in 2018 for around $200 million. While Jump will no longer be part of Uber, the plan is to add more integrations between Uber and Jump down the line.

The deal values Lime on paper at $510 million after the round. For those keeping track, that’s a 79% drop from its previous valuation.

“Lime has the operational expertise and undivided focus needed to build a scaled, sustainable micromobility business,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We’re glad that our customers will continue to have access to bikes and scooters in both our apps because we believe micromobility is a critical part of the urban landscape, now more than ever.”

Lime also got a new CEO. After Lime co-founder Toby Sun stepped down last year, Brad Bao took over. Now, Bao is moving into the chairman position and Wayne Ting, formerly global head of operations and strategy, is the new CEO.

Meanwhile, Spin, the electric scooter startup acquired by Ford in 2019 for nearly $100 million, has restarted operations in four U.S. markets as COVID-19-related closures begin to ease. The company has resumed operations in Orlando, Nashville, Columbus, Ohio and St. Louis. The ramp up of operations will depend on the city, the company said.

— Megan Rose Dickey & Kirsten Korosec

Deal of the week

COVID-19 might have slowed the deal pipeline, but it hasn’t dried up altogether.

Intel confirmed, after some early reports from TechCrunch and a few other outlets, that is acquiring Israeli startup Moovit. The deal values Moovit at $900 million, although Intel says that the growth of its existing stake in the startup effectively means that Intel is paying $840 million in this transaction.

Moovit applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some 800 million people globally.

The plan is for Moovit to become part of Intel’s Israeli automotive hub, which is anchored by Mobileye, the autonomous driving company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017. Specifically, Moovit’s tech will be used to expand and enhance Mobileye’s “mobility as a service” (MaaS) offering, Intel said.

Other deals that got our attention:

Autotech Ventures announced that it raised more than $150 million in its second fund with capital commitments from both financial and corporate investors, including Volvo Group Venture Capital AB, Lear, Bridgestone and Stoneridge, as well as other vehicle manufacturers, parts suppliers, repair shop chains, leasing corporations, dealership groups and trucking firms. The new fund brings the firm to more than $270 million under management to date.

San Francisco-based computer vision startup Invisible AI raised $3.6 million in seed funding. The deal was led by 8VC and included iRobot Ventures, K9 Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure startup spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs and co-founded by Google vets Jonathan Winer and Brian Barlow, raised $400 million in Series A funding from Alphabet and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Covariant, a startup dedicated to building autonomy for industrial robotics, raised a $40 million Series B, led by Index Ventures.

Sleuth, an early stage startup focused on continuous delivery, raised a $3 million seed round.

From readers

I continue to hear from readers, a group that includes transit officials, startup founders, investors and AV developers and engineers. This week, I thought I’d share this note from Innoviz, the Israeli-based lidar company.

Co-founder and CEO Omer Keilaf sent this postcard — as well as a picture — from Israel explaining what life has been like and how his company is operating.

On stay-at-home orders:

“Restrictions are starting to lift in Israel. As employees start going back to the office, we’ve changed our shared office environment to maintain the 2-meter distance and continue to implement safety measures to minimize chances of contagion. We’ve created red and blue teams in the company to isolate critical production activities from the rest of the company: the red team for critical activities and blue team for all of the rest.”

On troubleshooting: 

“When restrictions in Israel were 30 % of employees allowed in the office, and then 15% of employees allowed in offices, we adjusted our project management activities and found that written reports kept communication and coherency in place.”

On how to hands on development has changed:

“LiDAR sensor development is very complex and requires a lot of hands-on activities. We spent a great deal of effort up front to adapt the remote control of our lab setups and allow continuity for testing and production, and other more critical activities of our products. Luckily, Innoviz’s advanced perception software, which turns our LiDAR sensor’s raw point cloud data into perception outputs, was not impacted by the current COVID-19 situation because software development doesn’t require hands-on activities like hardware development does.” 

On work-life balance:

“We launched virtual kids’ activities for parents and sent activity packages to employees all around the globe to help them entertain their kids.”

All the other stuff

A lot happened this past week: far too much to cover, but I’ll try.

Uber and Lyft reported earnings — hoowee! 

First Lyft: A glimpse at Lyft’s stock price Wednesday, which soared as much as 16.77% after first-quarter earnings were reported, suggested all was well in the ride-hailing company’s world.

In this COVID 19-era, “well” is a relative term. Lyft’s net losses did dramatically improve from the year-ago quarter (a loss of $398 million versus $1.1 billion in Q1 2019). However, Lyft was clear in its earnings call: COVID-19 had a profound impact on its customers and its business and the future was uncertain. I dig into Lyft’s survival plan.

Now Uber: Uber reported Thursday a net loss of $2.94 billion in the first quarter. Uber’s adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came to a loss of $612 million. The ride-hailing company generated $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from $3.1 billion on a year-over-year basis. Its Uber Eats division grew like hell in the first quarter, but that doesn’t mean it’s profitable.

Uber also pushed its target to achieve a measure of profitability to a quarter in 2021, reversing a decision made just three months ago to move up the goal to the end of this year.

Uber will miss its target to reach an adjusted EBITDA quarterly profit in the fourth period of 2020, CFO Nelson Chai said during the company’s earnings call Thursday. The new target is a quarter in 2021.

Layoffs and cuts continue

Careem, the Dubai-based ride-hailing and delivery company that was acquired by Uber last year, cut its workforce by 31% and suspended its mass transportation business due to affects from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Uber Eats said it was shuttering its on-demand food offering in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and Ukraine. It’s also transferring its Uber Eats business operations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Careem, its wholly owned ride-hailing subsidiary that’s mostly focused on the Middle East.

Getting back to work

Waymo announced it will resume driving operations on May 11 in Arizona. The company said the decision was made after discussions with “our teams, partners and local and state authorities,” before restoring them in other cities, including San Francisco, Detroit and Los Angeles.

Lyft and Uber announced plans to require drivers and riders to wear masks. Uber could turn to its driver selfie technology, officially known as Real-Time ID Check, to make sure drivers are adhering to the rule. Real-Time ID Check is a security feature that uses Microsoft Cognitive Services and prompts drivers to periodically to share a selfie before being allowed to accept fares

Tesla drama

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Saturday morning the company will file a lawsuit against Alameda County and threatened to move its headquarters and future programs to Texas or Nevada immediately, escalating a fight between the company and health officials over whether its factory in Fremont can reopen.

Hours later …. Tesla filed a lawsuit against Alameda County seeking injunctive relief. Later that evening, the company posted a blog that explains how it plans to reopen.

Tesla had planned to bring back about 30% of its factory workers Friday as part of its reopening plan, defying Alameda County’s stay-at-home order.

Some long reads …

Capgemini Research Institute released a report that looked at the key transportation trends that emerged from COVID-19. Here are a couple of findings: close to half (46%) of the consumers want to minimize visiting dealerships to compare deals and mainly use online channels for information search and purchase; and another finding found consumers are veering towards individual mobility over public transport and shared mobility services.

Wired wrote about Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Ford and Volkswagen. It’s a long one and provides some insights into the company and its founders. (on a side note and for full disclosure, I co-host Autonocast, a future of transportation podcast, with Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer. Roy works at Argo AI)

Speaking of the Autonocast, last week we talked to Boris Sofman, the former co-founder and CEO of Anki Robotics who now heads up engineering for Waymo’s autonomous trucking efforts. It’s worth a listen.

Shiprocket, a New Delhi-based logistics aggregator that works with direct-to-consumer sellers including several social media influencers, has raised $13 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its platform overseas.

Silicon Valley-based investment firm Tribe Capital led Shiprocket’s Series C financing round. Innoven Capital and existing investor Bertelsmann India Investments also participated in the round, which brings the three year-old startup’s to-date funding to $26 million.

Shiprocket works with more than a dozen courier companies in India and negotiates terms such as the fee and shipment tracking with them on behalf of its sellers, Saahil Goel, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, told TechCrunch in an interview last year.

The startup today works with more than 35,000 sellers in India and processes about 2 million shipments each month. It also helps sellers with tackling items that get lost during the shipment and enabling cash on delivery, the most popular payment option among customers in India. Gillettte, beauty product chain Mamaearth, beer franchise The Beer Cafe, coaching institute Aakaash Institute, and craft beer maker Bira are among some brands that use Shiprocket’s service.

Shiprocket has also become one of the top selling partners for social media influencers in India who have to take care of the items they sell to their fans themselves. In recent years, a wave of social commerce startups such as Meesho, backed by Prosus Ventures and Facebook, and Simsim have emerged in India as they attempt to reshape how people think about buying online.

“One of the reasons why the United States and emerging economies have thrived over the last 50 years has been a healthy dynamic of small to medium entrepreneurial businesses alongside consolidation and scaling corporations,” said Arjun Sethi, co-founder of Tribe Capital, in a statement.

“We invested in Shiprocket because they empower the small to medium businesses that truly represent the heart and soul of any emerging economy. Today, the SME segment lacks capital finance and credit, infrastructure, technology, and marketing strategies. Shiprocket has enabled these businesses to grow at a time of emerging competition enabled by mobile internet and corporations,” he added.

Shiprocket says it will use the fresh capital to expand its data science and engineering teams and focus on new initiatives including its international expansions. The startup already ships shipment overseas, it claims it delivers in more than 26,000 zip codes in India and 220 additional countries and markets.

The startup said it was profitable in the financial year that ended on March 31, 2019 and has an annualized revenue run rate between $25 million to $30 million. It did not comment on the impact coronavirus pandemic has had on its business.

Primer, a U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has quietly raised £3.8 million in funding.

Leading its £3.2 million seed round is Balderton Capital — which mostly does Series A — with participation from Taavet Hinrikus, who co-founded and previously led TransferWise.

And despite being founded as recently as January and not yet launched, Primer had already raised £600,000 in pre-seed investment from Seedcamp, Speedinvest and Kima, in addition to a number of unnamed angels.

Founded by ex-PayPal employees – via PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree — Primer is busy building out a payments API to (hopefully) rule them all, with the explicit aim of bringing greater transparency to a merchant’s payment stack.

The thinking is that larger merchants, especially those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payments methods, which brings with it significant technical overhead, a poor user experience, and lack of transparency.

Primer wants to carry out a lot of that heavy-lifting on behalf of merchants, essentially building a payments platform that is payment method agnostic. By doing so, it aims to reduce friction when adopting new payment methods as they come to market, and provide better insights into things like how well each checkout option is performing, and how much it is really costing.

“Payments is super complex,” says Primer co-founder Paul Anthony, who was previously Head of Solutions for EMEA at PayPal-owned Braintree. “Merchants have become increasingly sophisticated over the past few years in what they need from their overall payments solution, which requires them to leverage a variety of payment service providers (PSPs), local banking relationships, proprietary payment methods (think Klarna, GoCardless, Affirm, and WeChat) and other third party payments services in order to expand to new markets and offer the payments experiences their customers demand”.

Despite this complexity, Anthony says that merchants continuously try to optimise for cost and authorisation (i.e. acceptance rates), and reduce fraud and improve the user experience. At the same time, they have to adapt to macro changes in the payments landscape, such as PSD2 and 3DS 2.0.

As a result, it becomes increasingly complex for merchants to scale payments as they grapple with an ever growing number of “interdependent” technical integrations across payments services.

“This can directly impact the user experience at checkout, and, critically, reduces visibility of data across increasingly complex payments ecosystems,” he says. “Fundamentally, this is an infrastructure challenge”.

The pitch to merchants is that Primer will build the infrastructure for them, delivered through a unified API and data and analytics tools to help “supercharge” their global payments strategies.

An example, Anthony cites a ticketing merchant that is currently working with Stripe, Braintree, Adyen and PayPal across Europe in order to optimise for cost and authorisation rates, and to offer local payment methods in key markets. The merchant has also directly integrated with a local banking partner to process SEPA payments.

“In order to be absolved of exposure to sensitive payment information, and to offer a reasonable checkout process, they are using the payments integrations of each PSP,” he explains.

This, of course, causes a number of problems, such as multiple checkout pages and processes, and payment information that can only be stored against an individual PSP, meaning recurring transactions are restricted to the PSP the customer originally checked out with.

Adds Anthony: “In addition to multiple payments integrations, the merchant also needs to maintain multiple integrations to their fraud provider and create an abstraction layer to manage this sensibly. Their reporting and data comes from multiple sources, making it very difficult for their operations teams to manage basic functions, such as reconciliation. They have no well defined technical strategy in the event of PSP downtimes [both Braintree and Adyen have suffered downtime recently]”.

Primer claims to solve this by providing merchants with a single payments integration that manages the front-end checkout process and backend consolidation of payments services, including not just PSPs but also fraud providers and other third-party services in future.

“Primer centrally stores payment information, making recurring cross-processor transactions seamless,” says Anthony. “Our reporting and analytics enables merchants to see all transactions in one place, and we’re working closely with merchant finance teams in order to meet their requirements and stop them needing to log in to multiple PSP dashboards, which they literally do every day!”.

Vochi, a startup operating out of Belarus that’s created a “computer vision”-based video editing and effects app for mobile phones, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Ukraine-based Genesis Investments (backer of BetterMe and Jiji). It follows pre-seed funding in April 2019 from Bulba Ventures, where Vochi founder and CEO Ilya Lesun previously worked as a product analyst.

Recognising that video content is booming, especially on short video platforms like TikTok, Lesun sort to build a mobile video app that would help creators stand out, while making creative video editing simple.

With the help of a computer vision-based video segmentation algorithm, the app lets you apply effects on single objects in your videos, opening up a lot of opportunities to make something unique. You can mix different styles and play with different scenarios, all in real-time, which helps visualize how the finished video will look, before downloading a high quality copy to begin sharing.

“As mobile content production and consumption increase, there’s also an increasing demand for content creation tools,” Lesun tells TechCrunch. “This is where we can bring value to content makers — be it professionals and amateurs — by delivering a video editing platform with as many tools and effects as possible. We see it as a content editing studio in a user’s pocket”.

To that end, its the use of computer vision and its ability to apply effects, stickers, and filters to any objects in a video, that Lesun says differentiates the Vochi app from competitors. “The app uses object segmentation algorithms that allow users to edit single objects in the video,” the founder explains. “[This lets users] to apply high-quality effects on single objects in 1080p videos in real-time”.

Typical users are cited as a “content creators”: people that share a lot of content on social media and “don’t like to keep their videos stored in the phone gallery”.

Adds Vochi: “It can be an influencer or blogger, who really wants the content to stand out and be really engaging for the audience. It can also be a creative person, who likes to create fun videos and share those with friends. And, of course, it’s basically every smartphone user”.

Hummingbird Bioscience, a startup focused on developing new treatments for cancer and other diseases, announced today it has added $6 million to its previously announced Series B, bringing the round’s total to $25 million.

The extension was led by SK Holdings, and included participation from returning investors including Heritas Capital and SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that supports small- to medium-sized businesses.

This brings Hummingbird Bioscience’s total raised so far to $65 million. The company says it extended its Series B because the round was oversubscribed. The new funding will be used to take treatments Hummingbird Bioscience is developing to clinical trials more quickly, and expand research and development for its early stage pipeline.

Heritas Capital Management executive director and CEO Chik Wai Chiew said in a press statement that “Heritas Capital is pleased to continue our backing of the Hummingbird team since leading its Series A extended round. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a slow-down in investing, we are mindful that backing innovative biotech companies, especially players such as Hummingbird, to develop cures for addressing patients’ needs remains our priority.”

The company published data earlier this year on two antibodies, both oncology treatments, and expects to make regulatory submissions to start Phase 1 studies in the second half of this year.

Hummingbird Bioscience has offices in Singapore, Houston and South San Francisco and strategic collaborations with Cancer Research United Kingdom and Amgen. It was previously awarded a product development grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

Spotify has secured another deal in India to fill much of the remaining void in its catalog in the country.

The Swedish music streaming service said on Monday it has partnered with Indian music label Saregama to bring more than 100,000 retro and new age songs in over 2 dozen languages to users in one of the largest entertainment markets in Asia.

Spotify already has a deal in place with a distributor to offer Saragama’s music to users outside of India, a Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch. But the company had a legal battle with Saregama in India that resulted in Spotify to remove all of Saregama’s content from its platform for users in the country.

Vikram Mehra, Managing Director of Saregama India, said Monday’s announcement is allowing the music label to bring its entire catalog — “the largest library of films and non-film songs in over 25 languages” ranging from old classics to new age music — to users in India.

Saregama, one of the oldest music labels in the world, is the best place to find tracks from several India music legends including Lata Mangeshkar, R.D. Burman, Mohammed Rafi, Talat Mahmood, Manna Dey, Kalyanji-Anandji, and Hemant Kumar.

The company has found its music library so valuable that it has been selling portable speakers bundled with thousands of these tracks. It has sold more than 2 million such devices, called Carvaan, that retail between $25 to $80 in three years.

Monday’s announcement comes weeks after Spotify inked a similar partnership with Indian music label Shemaroo to bring an additional 25,000 songs on the world’s largest music platform. Also last month, Spotify resolved its legal dispute with Warner Music Group.

Expanding its catalog would help Spotify better compete with rivals in India, all of which already offer these titles on their platforms. And there are several of them.

Most music streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, and recent entrant Resso have aggressively priced their premium subscriptions in India, charging less than $2 a month.

According to industry estimates, more than 200 million Indians stream music online. Times Internet -owned Gaana leads the market with over 150 million monthly active users. But very few are willing to pay yet — which explains why Spotify launched a free ad-supported service in India that offers users in the country access to the full catalog.

Bloomberg reported in December that YouTube Music / Premium, had amassed over 800,000 subscribers in India, more than Spotify in the country. According to research firm Statista, music streaming services in India will clock about $244 million in revenue this year, compared to the much mature U.S. market, where they are estimated to generate $4.5 billion this year.

JobHopin, a Vietnam-based startup building an automated job-recruitment platform for Southeast Asia, announced today that it has closed a $2.45 million Series A. This brings JobHopin’s total raised so far to more than $3 million, from investors including SEMA Translink, KK Fund, Mynavi Corporation, Edulab Capital Partners, NKC Asia and Canaan Capital.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Kevin Tung Nguyen, JobHopin’s matching platform, called Bunny, uses machine learning to pair candidates with jobs. The company says there are about 60 million knowledge economy workers in Southeast Asia, and about 108 million job placements a year, but many positions take more than a month to fill on average, because many companies still do pre-screening work manually.

Bunny standardizes the language used in job descriptions and resumes for better data analysis, which is then used for to find promising candidates for open positions.

JobHopin also has a database of more than 1.4 million job candidates derived from online databases and 2,000 enterprise clients in Vietnam, and provides real-time market data analysis of salaries, talent supply (or the number of people qualified to fill certain roles) and hiring demand. Those features can be integrated into services like online education platforms, testing services and third-party job portals.

In a press statement, EduLab Capital Partners Liam Pisano said, “We are excited to now be part of the JobHopin story and lend our support. This is a company that is connecting the growing Vietnamese economy to a talented workforce, while finding ways to help the jobseeker improve their profile and bridge the skills gap.”