Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Robotic Process Automation has been the name of the game in enterprise software lately — with organizations using advances in machine learning algorithms and other kinds of AI, alongside big-data analytics to speed up everything from performing mundane tasks to more complex business decisions.

To underscore the opportunity and growth in the market, today a startup in the wider segment of process automation is announcing a significant fundraise. Signavio, a company founded out of Berlin that provides tools for business process management — “providing the ‘P’ in RPA,” as the company describes it — has picked up an investment of $177 million at what we understand is a valuation of $400 million.

This round is large on its own, but even more so considering that before this the company — founded in 2009 — had only raised around $50 million before now, according to data from PitchBook. This latest capital injection is being led by Apax Digital (the growth equity team of Apax Partners), with DTCP. It notes that existing investor Summit Partners is also keeping a stake in the business with this deal.

The company was founded by a team of alums from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, who used research they did there for creating the world’s first web modeller for business process management and analytics as the template for Signavio’s own Process Manager. (The name “Signavio” seems to be a portmanteau of “navigating through signals”, which essentially explains the basics of what BPM aims to do to help a business with its decision-making.)

Partly because it’s raised so little money, Signavio has been somewhat under the radar, but it has seen a huge amount of growth. It says that revenues in the last 12 months have grown by more than 70%, and its software  is used by more than one million users across 1,300 customers — with clients including SAP, DHL, Liberty Mutual, Deloitte, Comcast and Puma. It counts Silicon Valley as its second HQ these days, that trajectory will be followed further with this latest funding: Signavio says the funding in part will be going to international expansion of the business.

“10 years ago, we set out on a journey to tackle the time-consuming practices that limit business productivity,” said Dr. Gero Decker, CEO and co-founder of Signavio, in a statement. “This significant new investment further validates our approach to solve business problems faster and more efficiently, unleashing the power of process through our unique Business Transformation Suite. We are thrilled to welcome Apax Digital as our new lead partner, and look forward to building upon our success to date by leveraging our partners’ operating capabilities and global platforms for our international expansion.”

The other area of investment will be the company’s technology suite. While BPM has been around for years as a concept — and indeed there are a number of other companies that provide tools that are compared sometimes to Signavio’s such from biggies like IBM and Microsoft through to Kissflow and others — what’s interesting is how it’s had a surge of interest more recently as organizations increasingly start to add more automation into their IT infrastructure, in part to reduce the human labor needed for more mundane back-office tasks, and in part to reduce costs and speed up processes.

Robotic process automation companies like UiPath and Blue Prism bring some of the same processing tools to the table as Signavio, although the argument is that the latter — which says it helps to “mine, model, monitor, manage and maintain” customers’ data — provides a more sophisticated level of data crunching that can be used for RPA, or for other ends. (It also works with several of the big RPA players, mainly Blue Prism but also UiPath and Automation Anywhere.)

“As businesses have become more global, and workforces more distributed, business processes have proliferated, and become more complex,” noted Daniel O’Keefe, Managing Partner, and Mark Beith, Managing Director, of Apax Digital, in a joint statement. “Signavio’s cloud-native suite allows employees across an enterprise to collaborate and transform their businesses by digitizing, optimizing and ultimately automating their processes. We are tremendously excited to partner with the Signavio team and to support their vision.” The two will also be joining Signavio’s board with this round.

Hotel dry-cleaning is the absolute worst. Seriously. Have you ever attempted to get clothes cleaned on the road? You’ll routinely end up paying $10-15 per shirt. As someone who travels a lot for business, I’ve found myself seeking out local 24 hour cleaners to cut out the middle men.

But Presso, one of a number of startups who took to the stage at the Rise conference in Hong Kong this week, has developed a novel way to put dry cleaning in the hands of hotel guests. The Indiana-based startup is the brainchild Purdue graduates, Nishant Jain and Thibault Corens. The pair have developed a sort of dry cleaning vending machine designed to live in hotel hallways.

Guests looking for a quicker, cheaper clean swipe a card and manually enter the specifics of the garment they need cleaned (future updates will use a combination of AI and computer vision to identify clothes, but for now that’s left up to the user). From there, the system takes overarm cleaning and pressing clothes in around five minutes, using steam and cleaning fluids.

The system is also able to clean clothes with considerably less water and electricity than traditional washing. Though Jain notes that stains are still a blind spot for the system. Presso isn’t designed to remove those — instead, it’s set up for a quick clean and press, ahead of a business meeting.

The kiosk is currently being piloted in 16 Holiday Inns in the midwest. Jain tells TechCrunch that the locations are already looking to move fully to Presso systems for the sake of added convenience — and to cut out the time and difficulty of working with outside dry cleaners to deal with guest laundry.

So far the startup has raised $261,000, primarily from HAX. Its founders will be seeking additional fundraising later this year.

Four months after being announced, so-called “robotic umpires” have made their debut in baseball’s Atlantic League. The addition is one of several tweaks currently being piloted in the independent league in an attempt to update some fundamentals of America’s pastime.

The system utilizes TrackMan radar to determine whether a pitch is a ball or strike, a Doppler-based system that’s already in use at 30 Major League Baseball Stadiums and many more minor league parks. Information from the system is relayed to a human umpire via an iPhone and earpiece.

The system isn’t replacing home plate umpires entirely, and for now the human ump is required to monitor pitches as a kind of fail-safe. They can also ultimately override TrackMan’s calls. Among other things, the system isn’t set up to detect checked swings — when the batter stops a swing midway to let the ball pass.

“Until we can trust this system 100 percent,” the game’s umpire Brian deBrauwere told ESPN, “I still have to go back there with the intention of getting a pitch correct because if the system fails, it doesn’t pick a pitch up, or if it registers a pitch that’s a foot-and-a-half off the plate as a strike, I have to be prepared to correct that.”

Robo umps are one of a number of features currently being tested in the Atlantic League, with the intention of potentially bringing them to the majors, should things go well. Other changes include adjusting the mound’s distance from home plate and a three-batter minimum for pitchers.

We’re opening the doors for you to showcase your tech and talent to the international startup community at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December.

How? Buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Disrupt Berlin attracts thousands of attendees from more than 50 countries around the world — including hundreds of investors and international media outlets. Plant your company directly in their path as they explore Startup Alley looking for emerging trends, potential partners, investment possibilities, collaboration and connection.

Check out what some of your peers have to say about exhibiting in Startup Alley.

“Startup Alley gave us the chance to show our technology to the world and have meaningful conversations with investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers. It was a massively positive experience.” — Vlad Larin, the co-founder of Zeroqode.

“Exhibiting in Startup Alley is the best training ground for early-stage startup founders, and it was a game-changer for us. We received more insight into our product development process, and we engaged with media and potential investors. It’s a tremendous opportunity to grow.” — David Hall, co-founder, Park and Diamond.

It’s super early-bird season, and that means you can score a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package for €745 + VAT. That price covers one exhibition day and three Founder passes.

You’ll get access to everything that Disrupt Berlin offers: all of the stages including the Startup Battlefield competition, speakers, interactive workshops, Q&A Sessions, the complete attendee list via Disrupt Mobile App, CrunchMatch — TechCrunch’s free networking platform — the complete press list, networking parties, exclusive video content access once the conference ends and a slew of other perks.

Speaking of perks. Every startup that exhibits in Startup Alley has a chance to win a Wild Card entry to the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. TechCrunch editors will choose two outstanding startups as Wild Card teams. Both teams will compete head-to-head in Startup Battlefield for $50,000 equity-free cash, the Disrupt Cup — and a metric ton of investor and media attention.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, and when Gelegenheit klopft, savvy early-stage startup founders answer. Open the door for opportunity and buy your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact TechCrunch’s sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Google said today that it has started to display discounts from restaurants in its Maps app in India as the Mountain View giant works to expand its ever growing reach and relevance in one of its key overseas markets.

The company today rolled out an update to add three new features to Google Maps app in India. Users can now see a new ‘offers’ option in the ‘explore tab’ that will display promotional offers from local restaurants. Google said it has partnered with EazyDiner, a table reservation platform, to display offers from over 4,000 restaurants. The feature is live in 11 metro cities in India.

Restaurant offers are just the beginning, as the company plans to ink deals with more partners and expand to more categories in future, it said. Users can also book a table to a restaurant directly from the Maps app. Google did not reveal the financial agreement it had with EazyDiner, a five-year-old New Delhi-based startup that has raised more than $13 million to date.

The new offering comes as Google explores way to make more money off Google Maps. The company maintains a Google Maps Platform for enterprise customers, and has increased its access price over the years, but it has yet to monetize the consumer-facing part of the service in a significant way.

As part of today’s announcement, the company has also revamped the ‘explore tab’ in India to “reflect the rich diversity of local neighborhoods and communities,” said Krish Vitaldevara and Chandu Thota, Directors of Google Maps, in a blog post. As part of the fresh paint job, Google said it has added seven shortcuts to give users quick navigation to restaurants, ATMs, shopping, hotels, pharmacy, and of course, offers.

Additionally, there is also an option in the explore tab to get directions to top areas in each city. The company said it uses machine learning to identify these areas. “Besides your own city, you can also look up other Indian cities by just searching the city name — an easy way to get up to speed before you travel,” Vitaldevara and Thota wrote.

The third feature, dubbed ‘For You’, displays personalized recommendations for new restaurants and other trending places. Users in India can now also follow a business and get updates and news on events

“This feature also uses the ‘Your Match’ score, which uses machine learning to combine what we know about millions of places with the information you’ve added — restaurants you’ve rated, cuisines you’ve liked, and places you have visited. The first time you use this feature you can select the areas/localities you are interested in, and get more personalized and relevant recommendations over time,” the executives wrote.

Google continues to bulk up its Maps offerings in India. In recent months, it has added the ability to check if a cab goes off the usual route, and look for real-time status of trains and buses, among other features.

The company, which has amassed over 300 million users in India, continues to use the nation as a testbed for many of its services. This approach has helped Google, which operates Android mobile operating system that runs on 98% of smartphones in India, gain wide adoption in the country.

But it has also instilled an antitrust probe on its influence in the nation.

Rivigo, a tech startup in India that wants to build a more reliable and safer logistics network, has raised $65 million as major investors continue to place big bet on opportunities in overhauling trucking system in the country.

The Series E round, which has not closed, for the five-year-old startup was led by existing investors Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners.  The startup, which has raised more than $280 million to date, said it aims to be profitable by March next year.

Rivigo operates a tech platform that tracks and manages shipments and ensures that drivers are available at all times and trucks are as fully loaded as possible. The platform also automatically rotates drivers so that they can get enough rest and see their family while the trucks keep moving. Drivers use an app to navigate maps and accept assignments.

“Relay trucking is now very well established where relay truck pilots lead better life and customers gets exceptional service. With technology and freight marketplace, we now want to bring relay to every truck in the country,” Deepak Garg, founder and CEO of Rivigo, said in a statement.

Rivigo, which competes with heavily-backed startups such as BlackBuck, owns its own fleet of trucks while also operating a freight marketplace. This separates it from competitors that serve purely as an aggregator — or Uber for trucks, if you will.

The startup, which claims to have the largest reach in India, said it would use the capital to further expand its network and tech infrastructure in the country.

“From building algorithmically complex models to accurately predicting the life journey of a consignment to creating a dynamic pricing engine for the freight marketplace, the company is working on hundreds of unique problems at scale,” said Garg.

India’s logistics market, despite being valued at $160 billion, remains one of the most inefficient sectors that continues to drag the economy.

Last month, Rivigo launched National Freight Index that shows live tariff rates for different lanes and vehicles in the country in a bid to bring more transparency to the ecosystem.

More to follow…

Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent, the company told TechCrunch this evening.

Apple has apologized for the bug and for the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while a fix is made.

The Walkie Talkie app on Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted an invite from each other to receive audio chats via a ‘push to talk’ interface reminiscent of the PTT buttons on older cell phones.

A statement from Apple reads:

We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent.  We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.

Apple was alerted to the bug via its report a vulnerability portal directly and says that there is no current evidence that it was exploited in the wild.

The company is temporarily disabling the feature entirely until a fix can be made and rolled out to devices. The Walkie Talkie App will remain installed on devices, but will not function until it has been updated with the fix.

Earlier this year a bug was discovered in the group calling feature of FaceTime that allowed people to listen in before a call was accepted. It turned out that the teen who discovered the bug, Grant Thompson, had attempted to contact Apple about the issue but was unable to get a response. Apple fixed the bug and eventually rewarded Thompson a bug bounty.  This time around, Apple appears to be listening more closely to the reports that come in via its vulnerability tips line and has disabled the feature.

Earlier today, Apple quietly pushed a Mac update to remove a feature of the Zoom conference app that allowed it to work around Mac restrictions to provide a smoother call initiation experience — but that also allowed emails and websites to add a user to an active video call without their permission.

Apple has opened a design and development accelerator in Shanghai — its first for China — to help local developers create better apps as the iPhone maker looks to scale its services business in one of its key overseas markets.

At the accelerator, Apple has begun to hold regular lectures, seminars and networking sessions for developers, the company said this week. It is similar to an accelerator it opened in Bangalore about two years ago.

In India, where Apple has about half a million app developers, the accelerator program has proven crucially useful, more than three dozen developers who have enrolled for the program have told TechCrunch over the years. Participation in the accelerator is free of cost.

Apple said more than 2.5 million developers from greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, actively build apps for its platform. These developers have earned more than $29 billion through App Store sales. More than 15% of Apple’s revenue comes from greater China, according to official figures.

“Developers here in China are leading the world with some of the most popular apps on the App Store, and we are proud to be providing this additional support for them. From education to health to entertainment, the innovation we see here is incredible and we can’t wait to see what these talented developers will come up with next,” said Enwei Xie, Apple’s head of developer relations, Greater China in a statement.

The launch of the design and development accelerator comes at a time when growth of iPhone sales has slowed down in the nation (and elsewhere), though some devices such as the iPad continue to see strong momentum. The slower growth for Apple’s marquee product is in part a direct result of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

“We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States. As the climate of mounting uncertainty weighed on financial markets, the effects appeared to reach consumers as well, with traffic to our retail stores and our channel partners in China declining as the quarter progressed,” Tim Cook wrote to shareholders ahead of Q1 2019 earnings report.

Some analysts expect Apple will report a surge in its services revenue in the third quarter, thanks to a turnaround in China.

The design and development accelerator in the country’s largest city would help developers create more quality apps, which would then improve user experience and incentivize more spendings on Apple’s ecosystem of services and products.

At its developer accelerator in India — the company’s maiden development centre of its kind anywhere — many developers who work for major companies such as Flipkart and Paytm have participated in the program and used the learnings from the sessions to improve their companies’ apps. Many Apple employees and other experts are readily available at these sessions to coach developers.

The Cupertino-giant has also opened other design and coding programs in many other markets over the years. In March, Apple said it was expanding app development curriculum at partner schools in Singapore and opening a second developer academy in Indonesia. It also maintains a similar program in Italy. Earlier this year, Apple also accepted 11 app development companies founded by women to an entrepreneur camp.

It’s a breakup of some sort, but with no hard feelings. The team behind Paris-based VC firm Otium Venture is creating a new management company called Frst and raising a new fund.

But first, let’s talk about Otium Venture. Smartbox founder Pierre-Edouard Stérin’s family office created Otium Venture and Otium Brands to manage his startup investments. Over the past four years, the Otium Venture team participated in a dozen seed rounds, such as Payfit, Doctrine and Owkin. It represented around $45 million in total (€40 million).

With Frst, the Otium Venture team is essentially creating a spinoff company with no connection to Pierre-Edouard Stérin’s family office. The team is still led by Pierre Entremont and Bruno Raillard, with Judith Tripard and Gabriel de Vinzelles also following them.

Frst is a more traditional VC firm with multiple limited partners investing in the first Frst fund (yep, first Frst fund). The firm has already raised $67 million (€60 million) from the European Investment Fund, Bpifrance, Axa Venture Partners, Ilkka Paananen and Mikko Kodisoja from Supercell, Michaël Benabou from Vente-Privée, Stanislas de Quercize from Cartier and others.

Eventually, Frst plans to reach $90 million (€80 million) with this fund.

Frst plans to invest at the seed level with investments ranging from €0.5 million to €3 million. They’re focusing on Paris-based startups and say that big tech companies are bound to appear here in France.

As for existing Otium Ventures investments? Pierre-Edouard Stérin and the Frst team have set up a consulting contract so that they can follow their investments after the change.

TheAsianparent, Southeast Asia’s largest online community and content platform for mothers with 23.5 million monthly active users, announced today that it has raised a Series C led by Fosun Group, the Chinese conglomerate. The amount was undisclosed, but a person familiar with the deal says it was between $10 million to $30 million. E-commerce giant JD.com also participated, along with ATM Capital, Redbadge Pacific and returning investors Global Grand Leisure and WHG Holdings.

The new funding will be used on theAsianparent’s new e-commerce business and its expansion into new markets in Asia and Africa, focusing first on Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Roshni Mahtani, the founder and CEO of Tickled Media, theAsianparent’s publisher, tells TechCrunch it looks for countries with high birth rates but relatively few online resources and communities for new parents. The site will have its own branding for African markets and launch first in Nigeria with localized content and a social network.

TheAsianparent, which currently has a team of 180 people across 12 countries and is headquartered in Singapore, will focus on building its e-commerce business in Asia markets first, specifically Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore, with JD.com providing advice on things like logistics. TheAsianparent will start selling products through its site and launch its own direct-to-consumer brand later this year.

“The way I see it is that for media companies to be relevant, you need to have content, community and commerce, so that it becomes very easy for consumers to trust you for content and community, and also be able to buy products that you recommend and that have been created for their communities,” says Mahtani, who launched theAsianparent as a parenting blog in 2009.

TheAsianparent’s mobile app, which includes articles, community features and baby development trackers, launched in September 2018, has been installed 1.6 million times so far. Mahtani says the theAsianparent had a traffic growth rate of about 70 percent before funding and expects it to increase by a much faster rate now. It is expected to make $10 million in revenue this year and reach $100 million within the next five years.

In a prepared statement, Wilson Jin, the chairman of Fosun RZ Capital, said “TheAsianparent, as the largest maternal and child community in Southeast Asia, has won the trust of young mothers in Southeast Asia and has a huge commercial space. In the past few years, theAsianparent has fully verified its business development and product evolution capabilities , it is an outstanding entrepreneurial team.”