Category: UNCATEGORIZED

MindAffect, a team which presented in today’s TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, wants to explore whats possible when we can control the devices around us with our minds — and to let others explore the possibilities, too.

MindAffect was selected as a wildcard entry into the Startup Battlefield from the companies exhibiting at the show.

One early area of research for the team has been helping those who are unable to move anything but their eyes (due to neurological disorders such as ALS or stroke) communicate by typing.

Through this research, the team has designed a brain-computer interface which uses existing electroencephalogram (or EEG) hardware and unique flashing patterns to allow a user to control a device using only their eyes and the signals generated by their brain. Now they want to let others build with this interface (whether it’s for medical use cases like they’ve explored so far, or things like gaming/entertainment) with plans to launch a development kit next month at CES.

Here’s MindAffect’s system wired up to control an AppleTV:

While there are existing solutions for tracking eye movements to control computers, this approach sort of flips the concept upside down.

Whereas eye tracking solutions mostly use cameras and infrared reflections bounced off the eye to determine where a user is looking, MindAffect’s approach analyzes signals from the brain to determine what a user is looking at.

To accomplish this, MindAffect flashes each button on an interface (such as every key on an onscreen keyboard) at a different frequency. As the user shifts their gaze from button to button, the company says, the unique frequency the user sees causes their brain’s visual cortex to generate similarly unique signals. A non-invasive EEG headset detects and amplifies these signals, and MindAffect’s algorithms work backwards to match the signal to the desired action or input. MindAffect says its current algorithms require little to no training to function accurately.

With those differences in mind, what are the advantages of this approach over camera-based eye tracking? In a chat with me backstage shortly before his pitch, MindAffect CEO Ivo de la Rive Box was quick to note that they’re still trying to figure that out. He mentions, as an example, environments where lighting conditions might interfere with eye trackers.

MindAffect is on the hunt for use cases where this tech could prove particularly advantageous – something that opening up a dev kit to others could help with.

Founded in September of 2017, the company has raised $1M to date.

Acquia announced it has acquired customer data platform (CDP) startup AgilOne today. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.

CDPs are all the rage among customer experience vendors, as they provide a way to pull data from a variety of channels to build a more complete picture of the customer. The goal here is to deliver meaningful content to the customer based on what you know about them. Having a platform like this to draw upon makes it more likely that you will hit the target more accurately.

Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert says he has been watching this space for the last year, and wanted to add this piece to the Acquia tool chest. “Adding a CDP like AgilOne to our existing platform will help our customers unify their data across various tools in their technology stack to drive better, more personal customer experiences,” he said.

In particular, he says he liked AgilOne because it used an intelligence layer while building the customer record. “What sets AgilOne apart from other CDPs are its machine learning capabilities, which intelligently segment customers and predict customer behaviors (such as when a customer is likely to purchase something). This allows for the creation and optimization of next-best action models to optimize offers and messages to customers on a 1:1 basis.”

Like most startup founders, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun sees this as an opportunity to grow his company, probably faster than he could have on his own. “Since AgilOne’s inception, our vision has been to give marketers the direct power to understand who their customers are and engage with them in a genuine way in order to boost profitability and create the omnichannel experiences that customers crave. Through this acquisition, Acquia will enable us to continue to deliver, and build upon, this vision,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at the Real Story Group, has been watching the marketing automation space for some time, as well as the burgeoning CDP market. He sees this move as good for Acquia, but wonders how it will fit with other pieces in the Acquia stack. “This in theory allows them to support the unification of customer data across their suite,” Byrne told TechCrunch.

But he cautions that the company could struggle incorporating AgilOne into its platform. “The Marketing Automation platform they purchased targets mostly B2B. AgilOne is dialed in on B2C use cases and a fairly narrow set of vertical segments. It will take a lot of work to make it into a CDP that could adequately serve Acquia’s diverse customer base,” he said.

Acquia was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1 billion in September, and it tends to encourage its companies to be more acquisitive than they might have been on their own. “Vista has been supportive of our M&A strategy and believes strongly in AgilOne as a part of Acquia’s vision to redefine the customer experience stack,” Buytaert said.

AgilOne raised over $41 million, according to PitchBook data. Investors included Tenaya Capital, Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Fund. It had a post valuation of just over $115 million and was pegged as likely acquisition target by Pitchbook.

AgilOne customers will be happy to hear that Acquia plans to continue to sell it as a stand-alone product in addition to making it part of the Acquia Open Marketing Cloud.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between. Today we’re starting off with a venture capital Q&A, a quick look at Slack’s share price stability and some thoughts on direct listings and their possible future frequency.

Bu before we do, I wanted to ask for help. As we look at startups and IPOs and the impact that public companies have on young tech companies, I want to make sure that I’m touching on the right topics.

So, email me with thoughts and complaints. During December I’m going to riff and then settle a bit on format and topics as 2020 starts.

With that, let’s begin.

Piva’s $250M energy fund

Petronas (Petroliam Nasional Berhad) is a Malaysian state energy company best for sponsoring Lewis Hamilton’s Formula One team, but the oil giant is drilling deeper into the startup world. The company announced a $350 million corporate venture fund in October, creatively named “Petronas Corporate Venture Capital.”

Now, Petronas is back at it, putting up the capital for a new $250 million fund announced today called Piva. The fund will operate independently from the main corporation, even as the energy giant exists as its sole limited partner (LP).

I was curious about the dollar amount and the goals of the new fund so I got in touch. Here’s a condensed and edited set of questions and answers to help better describe what all that oil money may buy:

TechCrunch: Why is Piva’s first fund $250 million, and not, say, larger? 

Piva: This is the ideal size for our first fund; not too small which would allow us to make too few deals, not too large that would force us to only focus on growth-stage deals. It provides us with the right amount of capital needed to back 15-20 companies we’re expecting to invest, given the size of the team that we have in mind. We expect to invest $5-$10 million per company initially, and $20-30 million overtime, in companies creating breakthrough technologies, services and solutions in the industrial and energy sectors.

Is Piva’s goal to help fund strategic partners for Petronas, or strategic acquisitions?

We have the freedom and independence to invest in any company that meets our investment criteria though we’re always looking for ways to introduce our portfolio to Petronas and its global partners. Therefore, we are not required to invest for strategic reasons and certainly can’t control who ultimately becomes the acquirer of our portfolio companies.

Having said that, we are looking to leverage our partner Petronas to help create value for our portfolio companies, and similarly looking to leverage our portfolio companies to create strategic value to Petronas. We view that as a win-win-win. And like any VC fund, the goal of the fund in to make strong financial returns for investors.

The rest of the interview, including notes on Piva’s views on battery tech, continues at the end of this post.

Slack’s new stability

Slack’s direct listening was a key moment in the startup world in 2019. By eschewing a traditional IPO, Slack helped stamp direct listings as the cooler way to go public. In the wake of its debut, Asana and Airbnb are also considering direct listings, for example.

But while Slack’s direct listing went well, its share price has since suffered. After receiving a reference price of $26 and reaching an all-time high of $42, Slack is worth a little over $21 today.

But notably, the slide that the company’s shares took through summer into fall has arrested. And, after its recent earnings report, Slack managed to stay in its $20 to $23 per share range, more or less. So, we now know what Slack is actually worth: about $11.7 billion.

That’s far more than its final private round’s post-money valuation, mind, which put a $7.1 billion price tag on the corporate chat company.

For Slack, finding its value must be a relief. Especially as its new trading band values it north of $10 billion. Call it an inverse Dropbox.

The question now becomes if Slack’s market repricing is considered a positive (the company found price stability sans traditional banker support) or negative (it’s worth less than its reference price and suffered a public fall in value) for direct listings overall.

Direct listings

Sticking on the direct listing point I wonder if they are going to see as much of a place in the 2020 IPO market as many expect. Summarizing market sentiment (based on what I’ve read, and investors and founders that I’ve spoken with), there’s optimism that the stock market will see more direct listings in the future than the past, as they are — putatively — better mechanisms for pricing companies when they go public while reducing value capture by banks.

Arcona Music took to the stage at Disrupt Berlin today to showcase its adaptive music service. The local startup utilizes machine learning to create musical beds capable of adapting to different contexts in real-time. The user simply needs to input a handful of parameters, and the service will adjust accordingly.

“Give it a style, an emotion and a musical theme, and you can say, ‘play this,’ and the engine will take that blueprint and realize it,” service cofounder Ryan Groves explained, in a conversation with TechCrunch. “If, at any point, the emotion or style changes, it will adapt to that and create this essentially infinite stream of music. You can play a particular song blueprint for as long as is necessary in any dynamic environment.”

The service is still in its infancy, at the moment. Its two founders are its only two full-time employees, along with a part-time developer. Groves and co-founder Amélie Anglade bootstrapped the scrappy startup, which has yet to seek funding.

 

Groves is a composer and musical theorist who formerly worked at popular AI-based music composition service, Ditty. Anglade is a music information retrieval specialist who worked at SoundCloud.

Rhythm gaming is the first clear application for the service. The popular gaming genre is built around a changing soundtrack and could potentially benefit from music that requires minimal pre-programing. Moving forward, the potential for such a service is far broader.

“In the very long term,” Groves said, “we should see this being almost your own personal orchestra, leveraging augmented reality, GPS and all that stuff, and just responding to your environment as you’re listening.

In June, PayPal announced its Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready would be departing the company at the end of this year. Now we know where he’s ending up: Google. Ready will join Google in January as the company’s new commerce chief, reporting directly to Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP, Ads, Commerce and Payments.

Ready’s role at Google will not involve payments, which means he won’t be directly involved with PayPal’s competitor, Google Pay. Instead, as Google’s new president of Commerce, Ready will focus on leading Google’s vision, strategy and delivery of its commerce products. However, the role will see Ready working in close partnership with both the advertising and payments operations.

Google’s prior head of ads, commerce and payments, Sridhar Ramaswamy, left the company in 2018 after more than 15 years, which is when Raghavan stepped in. But Ready’s role is a new one, as it will focus on commerce specifically.

“Bill’s exceptional track record building great experiences for consumers and deeply strategic partnerships makes him a powerful addition to our team. I couldn’t be more excited for the future of commerce at Google,” said Raghavan, in a statement.

Added Ready, “I’ve long admired how Google has enabled access to the digital economy for everyone. Google has been making world-class commerce capabilities universally accessible to partners of all sizes, and I look forward to furthering that mission,” he said.

Ready joined PayPal in 2013 when it acquired his startup, the payments gateway Braintree, for $800 million (he became CEO of Braintree and Venmo). Today, Braintree powers payments for businesses like Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Jet.com, while Venmo sees more than $25 billion in transaction volume on a quarterly basis.

Once at PayPal, Ready moved up the ranks to become EVP and COO in 2016. In this role, he was responsible for product, technology and engineering at PayPal, as well as the end-to-end customer experiences for PayPal’s consumer, merchant, Braintree, Venmo, Paydiant and Xoom businesses. He was also co-chair of PayPal’s Operating Group, which focuses on delivering on revenue and profit goals for the company.

At PayPal, Ready was behind a number of the company’s biggest moves, including the introduction of its most-rapidly adopted product ever, PayPal One Touch, as well as Pay with Venmo, the redesign of the PayPal mobile app, PayPal Commerce and the expansion of Braintree’s global reach.

PayPal announced Ready’s plans for departure this summer, saying he was planning to engage in other entrepreneurial interests outside the company.

Heading up commerce at Google will be a big task for Ready, given commerce’s close proximity to parent company Alphabet’s main source of revenue, which is advertising. In Q3 2019, Google’s ad revenue was $33.92 billion out of total revenue of $40.5 billion.

Today, many consumers visit Google first to shop for products, which allows it to charge top dollar for its ads. But over the years, Amazon has been steadily chipping away at Google’s lead as more consumers go directly to its site to hunt for products.

To address this challenge, Google has begun to transform its Shopping business.

At Google Marketing Live this year, Google unveiled a new look and feel for its shopping properties, which included rebranding its Google Express app as the new Google Shopping app. The goal with the changes is to better serve the way consumers now shop online. Today, people often start “shopping” by doing things like browsing Pinterest for inspiration or seeing what influencers are posting on Instagram, for example. Instagram capitalized on this trend with the launch of Instagram Shopping in March, which allows users to checkout right in its app.

PayPal is also now moving in this direction. The company recently made its largest-ever acquisition with a $4 billion deal for shopping and awards platform Honey. With Honey’s integrations, PayPal will be able to target shoppers with personalized promotions and offers earlier on in their shopping journey, then direct them to PayPal’s checkout as the final step.

Google’s commerce plans are similar in that regard.

It envisions a universal cart and new ways to shop across its platform of services, including Search, Shopping, Images and even YouTube and Gmail. This will allow Google to also capture shoppers’ attention as they engage with Google properties — like browsing images for product ideas or watching YouTube videos, for example.

As a part of the Google Shopping revamp, the dedicated Shopping homepage was updated to allow consumers to filter products by brands they love and features they want, as well as read product reviews and videos. Shoppers could add items to a universal cart where purchases were backed by a Google guarantee, as well as receive customer service and make easy returns, as before with Google Express.

Google’s travel business also falls under commerce, and similarly received new attention this year with updates designed to simplify the experience of trip planning on google.com/travel, and more features around tracking flight price drops and predictions. 

On the advertising side, Google’s highly visual Showcase Shopping ads were expanded outside of Google Shopping. And Shopping Actions — customers’ ability to shop directly from Google surfaces, like Google Assistant — are making their way to new services, like YouTube.

Google is also ramping up its ability to serve smaller and local businesses with features aimed at driving in-store pickup traffic to brick-and-mortar stores.

Critical to making Google’s new Shopping platform successful is being able to forge retail partnerships — as, unlike Amazon, Google itself is not really in the business of selling directly to consumers, outside of its own hardware devices.

Ready’s experience will prove valuable here, too. At PayPal, he was able to build strategic partnerships with a number of unlikely players — including Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Walmart, Samsung and even Google.

What Ready’s strategy and vision will more precisely entail for Google will have to wait until after he’s on board, however.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Bill to Google as we continue our work to create more helpful commerce experiences and build a thriving ecosystem for partners of all sizes,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Image Credits: Getty Images — Bloomberg/Contributor; Ready: Google

Intel today introduced the latest addition to its RealSense line. The L515 is roughly the size of a softball, targeted specifically for warehouse logistics — a hugely important and increasingly automated aspect of global trade.

Other potential applications for the new camera include retail, healthcare, 3D scanning and robotics. The little hockey puck is capable of scanning a scene and creating a point cloud with millions of depth points a second, per Intel — a fairly impressive spec, given its size.

Per Intel,

the L515 is in a class of its own, providing consistently high accuracy over the supported range of 0.25m – 9m. It also provides over 23 million accurate depth pixels per second, with a depth resolution of 1024 x 768 at 30 frames per second. The Intel RealSense lidar camera L515 has an internal vision processor, motion blur artifact reduction and short photon-to-depth latency. The lightweight L515 consumes less than 3.5 watts of power, enabling easy mounting on handheld devices with the flexibility of long battery life. Always ready to use, the L515 retains its depth accuracy throughout its lifespan without the need for calibration.

The new RealSense finds the company expending its operations to the massively profitable world of logistics, following similar cameras designed for drones, robotics and a slew of consumer hardware applications, including AR and VR.

Childcare is one of the biggest expenses for American parents and it’s not just families who are taking a hit. Childcare issues cost the United States’ economy an estimated $4.4 billion in lost productivity each year and also impacts employee retention rates. Kinside wants to help with a platform that not only enables families to get the most out of their family care benefits, but also find the right providers for their kids. The startup announced the public launch of its platform today, along with $3 million in a new funding round led by Initialized Capital.

This brings Kinside’s total raised since it was founded 18 months ago to $4 million. Its other investors include Precursor Ventures, Kairos, Jane VC and Escondido Ventures.

Founded by Shadiah Sigala, Brittney Barrett and Abe Han, Kinside began its private beta with 10 clients while participating in Y Combinator last summer. Over the past year, it has signed up over a thousand employers, underscoring the demand for childcare benefits.

“Getting meetings with employers has not been the hard part,” Sigala, Kinside’s CEO, tells TechCrunch. “Any subject line that says ‘do you want childcare for your employees?’ immediately gets a response. We a hit a nerve there and when we talked with them, we found that the biggest pain they expressed was that their employees were having a hard time finding childcare.”

The U.S. is the only industrialized country without a national law that guarantees paid parental leave. Companies like Microsoft, Netflix and Deloitte offer strong family benefits in order to recruit and retain talent, but offering similar packages remains a challenge, especially for small- to medium-sized businesses. As a result, many employees, especially women, leave their jobs to care for their children, even if they had planned to continue working.

“The worst case for bigger, more mature companies is a delayed return to work, which has a real impact on the bottom line because of lost productivity, but the deeper pain is when we lose the women,” Sigala says. “It’s documented that 43% of women in the professional sector will leave the workforce within one to two years of having a baby.”

Other startups focused on early childhood care that have recently raised funding include Winnie, for finding providers, Wonderschool, which helps people start in-home daycares and preschools and London-based childcare platform Koru Kids.

Before Kinside, Sigala co-founded Honeybook, a business management platform for small businesses and freelancers. When she got pregnant, Sigala began developing the company’s family benefit policies and became familiar with the hurdles small companies face.

While in Y Combinator, Kinside focused on streamlining the process of using dependent care flexible spending accounts (FSA), or pre-tax benefits for caregiving costs, after its founders saw that the complicated claims process meant only a fraction of eligible parents get full use of the program. Kinside still helps parents with their accounts by partnering with FSA administrators. Now their app also includes a network of pre-screened early childcare providers ranging from home-based daycares to large preschools across the country.

The startup pre-negotiates reserved spots and discounted rates for its users and gives them access to a “concierge” made up of childcare professionals to answer questions. Parents can search for providers based on location, cost and childcare philosophy. Sigala says the startup’s team found that many childcare providers have a 20% to 30% vacancy rate, which Kinside addresses by helping them manage openings and find families who are willing to commit to a spot. In addition to its app, Kinside also plans to integrate into human resources systems.

Initialized was co-founded by Alexis Ohanian, also a founder of Reddit, and a vocal advocate of paid parental leave. One of the areas the firm focuses on is “family tech” and its portfolio also includes startups like the Mom Project, a job search platform for mothers returning to work.

In an email, Initialized partner Alda Leu Dennis said the firm invested in Kinside because “we have this fundamental problem of gender inequality which can be partially attributed to imbalances in the workplace and at home. We have a gender wage gap and domestic responsibilities, still, largely falling on the mother. By solving a problem that men and women have—access to affordable and high-quality childcare—we can improve this situation.”

Dennis added, “the business model innovation that Kinside brings to the table is to involve employers in the process of bringing peace of mind and stability to their employees’ home lives and in turn making their employees more productive.”

Sigala says Kinside sees itself as part of the benefits equity movement, including paid parental leave and, eventually universal childcare, for all working parents. The platform’s users are split equally between men and women, highlighting that the need for caregiving benefits cross gender lines and impact an entire household.

“It’s a complex issue. Our infrastructure and society is still designed for single breadwinner households and yet the economy means that for most households, being able to pay the bills depends on having two parents working,” she adds. “I see this as a movement. It’s the right time.”

One of the largest civil liberties groups in the U.S. is suing two Homeland Security agencies for failing to turn over documents it requested as part of a public records request about a controversial cell phone surveillance technology.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Customs & Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in federal court on Wednesday after the organization claimed the agencies “failed to produce records” relating to cell site simulators — or “stingrays.”

Stingrays impersonate cell towers to trick cell phones into connecting to them, allowing its operator to collect unique identifiers from the device and determine their location. The devices are used for surveillance, but also ensnare all other devices in their range. It’s believed newer, more advanced devices can intercept all the phone calls and text messages in range.

A government oversight report in 2016 said both CBP and ICE collectively spent $13 million on buying dozens of stingrays, which the agencies used to “locate people for arrest and prosecution,” the ACLU said.

But little else is known about stingray technology because the cell phone snooping technology is sold exclusively to police departments and federal agencies under strict non-disclosure agreements with the device manufacturer.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 to learn more about the technology and how it’s used, but both agencies failed to turn over any documents, it said.

The civil liberties organization said there is evidence to suggest that records exist, but has “exhausted all administrative remedies” to obtain the documents. Now it wants the courts to compel the agencies to turn over the records, “not only to shine a light on the government’s use of powerful surveillance technology in the immigration context, but also to assess whether its use of this technology complies with constitutional and legal requirements and is subject to appropriate oversight and control,” the filing said.

The group wants the agencies’ training materials and guidance documents, and records to show where and when stingrays were deployed across the United States.

CBP spokesperson Nathan Peeters said the agency does not comment on pending litigation as a matter of policy. A spokesperson for ICE did not comment.

BMW today announced that it is finally bringing Android Auto to its vehicles, starting in July 2020. With that, it will join Apple’s CarPlay in the company’s vehicles.

The first live demo of Android Auto in a BMW will happen at CES 2020 next month and after that, it will become available as an update to drivers in 20 countries with cars that feature the BMW OS 7.0. BMW will support Android Auto over a wireless connection, though, which somewhat limits its comparability.

Only two years ago, the company said that it wasn’t interested in supporting Android Auto. At the time, Dieter May, who was then the senior VP for Digital Services and Business Model, explicitly told me that the company wanted to focus on its first-party apps in order to retain full control over the in-car interface and that he wasn’t interested in seeing Android Auto in BMWs. May has since left the company, though it’s also worth noting that Android Auto itself has become significantly more polished over the course of the last two years.

“The Google Assistant on Android Auto makes it easy to get directions, keep in touch and stay productive. Many of our customers have pointed out the importance to them of having Android Auto inside a BMW for using a number of familiar Android smartphone features safely without being distracted from the road, in addition to BMW’s own functions and services,” said Peter Henrich, Senior Vice President Product Management BMW, in today’s announcement.

With this, BMW will also finally offer support for the Google Assistant after early bets on Alexa, Cortana and the BMW Assistant (which itself is built on top of Microsoft’s AI stack). The company has long said it wants to offer support for all popular digital assistants. For the Google Assistant, the only way to make that work, at least for the time being, Android Auto.

In BMWs, Android Auto will see integrations into the car’s digital cockpit, in addition to BMW’s Info Display and the heads-up display (for directions). That’s a pretty deep integration, which goes beyond what most car manufacturers feature today.

“We are excited to work with BMW to bring wireless Android Auto to their customers worldwide next year,” said Patrick Brady, vice president of engineering at Google. “The seamless connection from Android smartphones to BMW vehicles allows customers to hit the road faster while maintaining access to all of their favorite apps and services in a safer experience.”