Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The success stories of failed gaming startups that went onto strip elements of their infrastructure and pivot into wider markets like Slack has led plenty of game developers to “platformize” their tech to varying degrees of success.

Teeoh is looking to create an avatar-based events platform centered around startup culture. The startup is launching its product into private beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin’s Startup Battlefield.

Co-founders Don Stein and Jon Hibbins leverage connections with startup ecosystems to create a platform structured around entrepreneurial content. They’ve tested meetups with organizations like Startup Grind alongside events like AMAs with venture capitalists like Tim Draper.

Hibbins previously founded Psytec, a game development studio that built VR titles like the Windlands series. Stein spent the past several years in Silicon Valley investing in AR/VR companies and sourcing deals for larger venture firms.

Teeoh won’t be available in VR, instead focusing on mobile and desktop platforms, hoping to pitch an alternative to teleconferencing software like Zoom that is more bespoke for meetups where participants can single out and chat with individual users in a virtual environment.

The U.K. team is admittedly entering a difficult space.

Few areas have seemed to earn more entrepreneurial attention and less traction to date than avatar startups. Most of these startups have been VR-based which hasn’t exactly widened their addressable user base, but Teeoh is hoping that its focus on more accessible platforms can minimize the friction of users adopting a more cartoonish approach to interacting online.

Few areas of health tech appear as untapped as the technology around how we sleep. Far too many people spend much of their waking hours obsessed with how to maximize their hours in bed.

Nyxo is building an app-based sleep-coaching program to help users track and improve their quality of sleep in a four-week program.

Consumer health tech apps have always had a bit of an uphill battle when it comes to bringing complete experiences to customers. Data collection is a pain and you’re left building products for the lowest common denominator. Nyxo is trying to make it easier on themselves by taking input from most sleep trackers out there, or you can simply use the startup’s app to gather information about your sleep quality.

Most sleep-tracking apps out there will give you some tips about when to stop drinking coffee, but the quality of sleep coaching generally ends there. Nyxo’s founding team is looking to leverage university research from the University of Helsinki to deliver more specific insights about their sleep rhythm and why their sleep is suffering.

The lesson plan focuses on topics like strategies for developing sleep routines, the relationship between sleep and exercise, how sleep can affect your weight and plenty of other quick reads that can help you be more mindful and develop better habits. You’ll also have quick access to statistics on the available sleep data that you’re feeding the app.

The startup is heavily banking on the interest of companies to have well-rested employees, partnering with them to provide their services to employees. Nyxo is also pitching the service directly to consumers with a dedicated app and a $7.99 per month cost.

If city governments had a block-by-block understanding of their city’s own ever changing air quality, how might it impact the decisions they make?

Thats the concept behind Hawa Dawa, the first company pitching today in the TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin Startup Battlefield. Hawa Dawa combines data sources like satellites and dedicated air monitoring stations to build a granular heat map of air pollutants, selling this map to cities and companies as a subscription API.

While the company notes it’s hardware agnostic, it does build its own IoT sensors for companies and cities that might not have existing air quality sensors in place.

(Curious about the name? Co-founder Karim Tarraf tells me it’s roughly based on the words for “air purity” or “air medicine” in a number of languages, including Swahili, Turkish, and Persian.)

With this data, a city could, for example, opt to change how it routes traffic to minimize vehicle exhausts in particularly polluted streets and monitor how changes are actually impacting the air. A real estate company might help customers with pulmonary issues like asthma find potential homes in neighborhoods that tend to have the cleanest air. Shipping companies could potentially use the data to better plan their sea routes to minimize the impact of emissions.

Hawa Dawa’s data currently covers over 20 cities across Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.

They’ve raised over €1.2m to date, with plans to close another “pre-series A” round shortly.

A fleet of Mercedes-Benz S Class vehicles are now plying the roads of San Jose, California as part of a robotaxi pilot project that Daimler and Bosch have been developing for two and a half years, but the launch itself could be chalked up as a mere blip on the autonomous vehicle scene.

At last count, 65 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles in California. And a handful of companies, including Waymo and Zoox, have the additional permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to transport passengers in their robotaxis through the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot.

It’s a milestone for German automaker Daimler and Bosch, one of the world’s largest automotive tech and hardware suppliers, but the most noteworthy aspect is how the pilot has been structured. The companies’ approach provides a marker of sorts for exactly where the “race” to develop and deploy commercial autonomous vehicle stands. In short: this is no sprint. Adventure or expedition racing — a contest that requires strategy, partnerships, expertise in multiple areas, endurance and a head for navigating risk— might be a more apt analogy.

Much of the media coverage has focused on the launch of the pilot or that it will use self-driving Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles, the Sonderklasse (special class) of the automaker’s portfolio. What might have been missed is that this is really two projects in one.

It was just a couple of months ago that Tines, the cybersecurity automation startup, raised $4.1 million in Series A funding led by Blossom Capital, and now the Dublin-based company is disclosing an $11 million extension to the round.

This additional Series A funding is led by venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Index Ventures and previous backer Blossom Capital. The extra cash will be used to continue developing its cybersecurity automation platform and for further expansion into the U.S. and Europe.

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, and subsequently joined by former eBay and DocuSign colleague Thomas Kinsella, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work. The pair had bootstrapped the company as recently as October.

“It was while I was at DocuSign that I felt there was a need for a platform like Tines,” explained Hinchy at the time of the initial Series A. “We had a team of really talented engineers in charge of incident response and forensics but they weren’t developers. I found they were doing the same tasks over and over again so I began looking for a platform to automate these repetitive tasks and didn’t find anything. Certainly nothing that did what we needed it to, so I came up with the idea to plug this gap in the market.”

To remedy this, Tines lets companies automate parts of their manual security processes with the help of six software “agents,” with each acting as a multipurpose building block. The idea is that, regardless of the process being automated, it only requires combinations of these six agent types configured in different ways to replicate a particular workflow.

In addition, the platform doesn’t rely on pre-built integrations to interact with external systems. Instead, Tines is able to plug in to any system that has an API. “This means integration with commercial, off-the-shelf products, or existing in-house tools is quick and simple, with most security teams automating stories (workflows) within the first 24 hours,” says the startup. Its software is also starting to find utility beyond cybersecurity processes, with several Tines customers using it in IT, DevOps, and HR.

“We heard that Eoin, a senior member of the security team at DocuSign (another Accel portfolio company), had recently left to start Tines, so we got in touch,” Accel’s Seth Pierrepont tells TechCrunch. “They were in the final stages of closing their Series A. However, we were so convinced by the founders, their product approach, and the market timing, that we asked them to extend the round”.

Pierrepont also points out that a unique aspect of the Dublin ecosystem is that many of the world’s largest tech companies have their European headquarters in the country (often attracted by relatively low corporation tax), “so it’s an incredibly rich talent pool despite being a relatively small city”.

Asked whether Accel views Tines as a cybersecurity automation company or a more general automation play that puts automation in the hands of non-technical employees for a multitude of possible use cases, Pierrepont says, given Hinchy and Kinsella’s backgrounds, the cybersecurity automation sector should be the primary focus for the company in the short term. However, longer term it is likely that Tines will be adopted across other functions as well.

“From our investment in Demisto (which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks earlier this year), we know the security automation or SOAR category (as Gartner defines it) very well,” he says. “Demisto pioneered the category and was definitively the market leader when it was acquired. However, we think the category is just getting started and that there is still a ton of whitespace for Tines to go after”.

Meanwhile, in less than a year, Tines says it has on-boarded 10 enterprise customers across a variety of industries, including Box, Auth0 and McKesson, with companies automating on average 100 thousand actions per day.

Good morning, and welcome to another Disrupt!

Today, we come to you from beautiful (and cold) Berlin, Germany, for Day 1 of Disrupt Berlin.

On the Main Stage, we’ll hear from European tech leaders like Hiroki Takeuchi (GoCardless), Sebastian Siemiatkowski (Klarna) and the senior partners at Atomico, including Sophia Bendz, Siraj Khaliq, Hiro Tamura and Niall Wass. Bob van Djik, CEO of Naspers and Disrupt SF speaker, returns to the stage today alongside Brainly CEO Michal Borkowski.

On the Extra Crunch stage, thought leaders across the industry will provide insights on how to better build a startup. For instance, we’ll have a panel on How To Raise Your Series A, with Jessica Holzbach (Penta), Louise Dahlborn Samet (Blossom Capital) and Hannah Seal (Index Ventures). We’ll also hear from Sophie Alcorn (Alcorn Immigration Law), Karoli Hindriks (Jobbatical), Holger Seim (Blinkist) on How to Scale Your Startup Globally.

And, of course, throughout the day, we’ll collectively enjoy pitches from the Startup Battlefield. Fourteen startups will launch their products live on stage in front of a panel of expert VC judges. The winner will take home the Disrupt Cup, $50,000, and eternal glory.

It’s going to be an amazing day. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

Twitter is changing the way it processes uploaded images, and the new way of doing things will be much-appreciated by any photographers sharing their work on the platform. Twitter engineer Nolan O’Brien shared that the platform will now preserve JPEG encoding when they’re uploaded via Twitter on the web, instead of transcoding them, which results in a degradation in quality that can be frustrating for photo pros and enthusiasts.

There are some limitations to keep in mind – Twitter will still be transcoding and compressing the thumbnails for the images, which is what you see in your Twitter feed. But once users click through, they will get the full, uncompressed (at least, not additionally compressed) image you originally uploaded, provided it’s a JPEG.

Twitter will also still be stripping EXIF data (data that provides more information about the picture, including when, how, and potentially where it was taken or edited) which is readable by some applications. The platform has previously done this, and it’s good that it does, because while sometime photographers like to peek at this info to check things like aperture or ISO setting on a photo they admire, or to transmit copyright info, it can also potentially be used by people with bad intentions to spy on things like location.

The example above posted by O’Brien is actually a really illustrative one when it comes to showing what kind of detail and quality can be preserved when Twitter doesn’t further compress or transcode your JPEG photos. This is a small, but great feature tweak for the platform, and hopefully it continues to make Twitter more photo-friendly in future.

Every year, TechCrunch dives deep into the international startup scene to find innovative startups to compete in Startup Battlefield – TechCrunch’s famous global startup competition. Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019, 14 companies will face off for the infamous Disrupt Cup, $50,000 USD equity free prize money and the attention of investors and press from around the globe.

How does it work? Founders apply for the program through an extensive application process. The TechCrunch editorial team combs through hundreds of applications to select the top teams. Selected companies go through training to perfect their stage pitch, refine their demos and sharpen their business models.

On day one of the event, founders will pitch for 6 minutes, including a live demo on the Main Stage at TC Disrupt Berlin, in front of a live audience and live streamed to the world. After the pitch, teams will face an intense Q&A with our panel of expert judges from industry and VC. The top companies you see pitch today will go on to pitch again in the final round of Startup Battlefield tomorrow – same pitch, but a new panel of expert judges. This year’s Finals judges include Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch), Andrew Reed (Sequoia), Andrei Brasoveanu (Accel), Lila Preston (Generation Investment) and Carolina Brochado (Softbank Vision Fund).

This year’s Startup Battlefield batch is particularly diverse hailing from Ethiopia to Finland, United States, to right here in Berlin, companies represent all corners of the globe. Founders are breaking the mold in music AI, drug development, online-offline gamified learning, and citizen networks. You’ll hear from commodities insurance innovators to customized sleep coaching, and more companies changing the face of tech in their industries.

Startup Battlefield begins at 11:15am with Startup Battlefield moderator and Senior Writer Anthony Ha.To learn more about Startup Battlefield, click here. You can watch the TechCrunch Disrupt live stream here.

11:15am-12:15pm – Startup Battlefield Session 1

Teams Presenting: Hawa Dawa, Nyxo, Teooh, Gmelius, Inovat 

1:15pm-2:15pm – Startup Battlefield Session 2

Teams Presenting: Nodle, Clideo, Stable, BeBlocky, Scaled Robotics 

4:25pm-5:25pm – Startup Battlefield Session 3

Teams Presenting: Wotch, Genesis Therapeutics, Arcona AI, WildCard

Wayv is taking a big step towards mainstreaming the cannabis industry. Wayv Payments, launching today, is said to be the first digital, compliant payment solution for the cannabis supply chain. From growers to distributors to consumers, this solution should reduce the entire industry’s reliance on stacks of cash by providing a credit-card like transaction to all. More so, Wayv Payments is compliant with California’s stringent laws, allowing companies to redirect capital from compliance management.

This is the latest project from Wayv, which launched its distribution product a few months back. With both systems in place, Wayv is set to be a major force in the cannabis market — a familiar position with founder Keith McCarty who also founded Eaze.

Wayv is working with Hypur on this project. Wayv Payments gives cannabis companies a line of credit that will allow the businesses to have predictability around payments without paying any payment fees. The solution provides customers with complete transparency around payments. The dashboard enables customers to see incoming and outgoing payments as well as computing taxes and fees.

“Businesses will no longer be beholden to inefficient and unpredictable payments with WAYV as the industry’s facilitator and partner,” said WAYV CEO and Founder Keith McCarty said in a released statement. “We provide a turnkey solution that is the most efficient, least costly way to exchange capital and products throughout California.”

McCarty says this solution is compliant with all the regulations in the cannabis industry, including generating manifests for transportation.

“It’s required by state law that manifests are generated and submitted to the state,” McCarty said to TechCrunch. “At any given time, you can be pulled over, and there can be an audit on it. And if those things are not being done you’re in jeopardy to lose your license that can cost millions of dollars.”

The system’s API is designed to track a product from feed to sell — meaning, from the moment it’s planted to hitting a retailer’s shelf. McCarty says this process is often currently done by teams of people and can now be done automatically while eliminating mistakes.

This solution is needed to help ease the burden on legal cannabis operators. Without something like this, he says, illegal operators will continue to thrive in the heavily regulated industry. With Wayv, it helps reduce lost payments and products while abiding by the changing regulations.

Right now, this product is only available in California, though the company built it in a way to easily scale it to other markets.

I spoke to McCarty in length about funding a cannabis company and he feels the company needs to dominate a particular market before expanding, and that seems to be his strategy here as well.

Wefox Group, the Berlin-based insurtech startup behind the consumer-facing insurance app and carrier One and the insurance platform Wefox, is disclosing $110 million in a second tranche of Series B funding. Sources tell TechCrunch that this gives the company a pre-money valuation of $1.65 billion. WeFox Group declined to comment on the financials.

The Series B extension is led by Omers Ventures, the venture capital arm of Canadian pension fund Omers. Merian Chrysalis and Samsung Catalyst Fund, also participated, along with existing investors.

It follows an earlier Series B of $125 million in March, led by Abu Dhabi government-owned Mubadala Ventures, with participation from Chinese investor Creditease. Wefox’s other existing investors include Target Global, Salesforce Ventures, Seedcamp, Idinvest and Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher’s investment vehicle Sound Ventures.

In a call, Wefox co-founder and CEO Julian Teicke told me the Wefox Group has grown revenues to over $100 million, and now services more than 500,000 customers, claiming that this makes it Europe’s “leading insurtech”.

He also revealed that the company has grown to 400 employees, which, he says means he can no longer remember every employee’s name. “That sucks,” he tells me, revealing that it was only this summer when the company was smaller that he won a company-wide bet for being able to do just that.

Breaking WeFox Group’s revenue down further, the company’s direct to consumer insurance brand, One Insurance, has increased annual revenues by nearly tenfold this year to $30 million. It also claims to be Germany’s fastest growing provider for household and private liability insurance.

Perhaps more significantly, Teicke says One’s loss ratio (what percentage of premiums earned is subsequently paid out in claims) is below 40%, which is much better than the industry as a whole. He pinned that on WeFox’s use of data, which, he says, enables One to understand risk in a much more technology-driven and granular way.

Meanwhile, Teicke says the new funding will be used to continue ramping up international expansion in 2020. Wefox is active in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain, and I understand has quietly launched in Italy.

Adds Henry Gladwyn, principal at OMERS Ventures, in a statement: “We are thrilled to continue our support of Julian and the incredibly ambitious Wefox Group team as they continue to disrupt and re-invent the insurance industry. We believe wefox Group’s approach to revolutionizing insurance – empowering the consumer and prioritizing solutions for secured data-driven experiences – will deliver significant value for the entire trade”.