Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The design world is in a state of full-fledged competition. Never in history have designers and their respective teams had so many options to choose from. As both demand and supply grow, design players are working to build out the most comprehensive experience possible for their users.

Adobe, the incumbent in the space, is today launching the Adobe Creative Cloud Plugin Accelerator. Essentially, individuals and teams interested in taking some time to build out plugins for Adobe XD can get themselves three months at Adobe’s HQ, access to Adobe’s product, design and engineering team, as well as a $20K per person stipend to offset expenses.

To be clear, Adobe is not taking equity in these projects and participants will leave Adobe HQ with 100 precent ownership over their built IP.

The Adobe Creative Cloud Plug-in Accelerator is supported by Adobe’s Fund for Design, a $10 million venture fund launched in May 2018. Both the fund and the accelerator are meant to open up Adobe, which has historically been a more closed ecosystem.

“For a company like Adobe, we’re flexing a new muscle by working with outside parties, in house, at Adobe Headquarters,” said Design Principal at Adobe Khoi Vinh. “It’s a real change of thinking from the Adobe of five or ten years ago, but we’re embracing the community’s energy here.”

It was less than a year ago that Adobe opened up Adobe XD to integrate with other tools, such as UserTesting and Airtable, among others.

Vinh says that, for now, Adobe isn’t sure exactly how many teams or individuals it will accept into the accelerator. As it’s the first time the company has done something like this, it’s not adhering to a specific number of participants or a rigid curriculum. Vinh says that some teams might have a clear vision of what they’re building and simply seek one-to-one advice from the engineering or product teams, whereas others might want a more collaborative environment to brainstorm and build out the idea itself.

One thing that is clear, however, is that Adobe is looking for hyper early-stage projects.

“What ended up happening with the Fund for Design is that the grants and investments made a lot of sense for people who were founders and already had companies,” said Vinh. “The Plug-In Accelerator is meant to target people who are even earlier stage than a founder and maybe not ready to start their own company.”

The hope is that teams of one to three will have the chance to build great plug-ins for Adobe XD, making the platform more attractive to clients as Figma and InVision make a run for those same users.

Adobe isn’t the first design tool firm to launch a venture fund. InVision launched the $5 million Design Forward Fund in late 2017.

Folks interested in the Creative Cloud Plugin Accelerator can apply here.

Techstars - Boston is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. Over the years, it has helped contribute to the Boston startup ecosystem, graduating 155 startups over that time, some of which have gone onto successful exits, while raising over $1 billion in funding.

Among those, the biggest is PillPack, the online pharmacy that Amazon acquired last year for almost a $1 billion, while Kinvey, a mobile backend startup, sold for $49 million in 2017 to Progress Software.

Other successful grads from the Boston program include Localytics, a mobile analytics platform, which has raised almost $70 million; Snyack, a security startup, which has raised over $60 million; and Placester, an online real estate ad company which has raised over $100 million.

Clement Cazalot, Techstars-Boston managing director, says he got his start in Boston as a startup founder 8 years ago when Techstars invited him to bring his French company, docTrackr.com, to Boston. That company was eventually sold to Intralinks in 2014 for $10 million, and Cazalot went onto become managing director of Techstars in 2017.

He says the ten-year anniversary was a good time to look back at the contributions the organization has made to the Boston startup ecosystem. Techstars-Boston only accepts a single cohort each year consisting of 10 companies. “With the accelerator piece, our goal is to become co-founder of these companies. In every program, we only invest in and help just 10 companies once a year in order to be able to go extremely deep with all of them. And we truly are co-founders, not just for the three months of the program, but throughout the entire lifecycle of the company,” he explained.

Sravish Sridhar, founder and CEO of Kinvey, and a graduate of the 2011 Techstars cohort, says the experience contributed to him building a successful company. “In my own journey as founder of Kinvey, Techstars helped me accelerate Kinvey through its vast and valuable mentor network, right up to our successful exit,” he said.

As companies graduate, not unlike Y Combinator, it helps build up a network of startup founders, who can in turn help the next generations of startups. Early on, when there was no network. Cazalot explained that the company was able to find local Boston tech companies to step up and help the fledgling incubator.

Even today, it reaches out to the broader Boston tech community to expand its network with successful companies like Avid Technology, Constant Contact, HubSpot, iRobot, and RunKeeper helping out, according to the company.

Techstars is more than its Boston location with a presence in 150 countries. Among its most successful 50 graduates across the program are SendGrid, sold to Twilio last year for $3 billion, DigitalOcean and SalesLoft. Boston boasts 11 places in the company’s Top 50.

Move over, Flexport. There is another player looking to make waves in the huge and messy business of freight logistics. Zencargo — a London startup that has built a platform that uses machine learning and other new technology to rethink how large shipping companies and their customers manage and move cargo, or freight forwarding as it’s known in the industry — has closed a Series A round of funding of about $19 million.

Zencargo’s cofounder and head of growth Richard Fattal said in an interview that the new funds will be used to continue building its software, specifically to develop more tools for the manufacturers and others who use its platform to predict and manage how cargo is moved around the world.

The Series A brings the total raised by Zencargo to $20 million. This latest round was led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Tom Stafford, managing partner at DST Global; Pentland Ventures; and previous investors Samos, LocalGlobe and Picus Capital, all also participated in the round.

Zencargo is not disclosing its valuation, nor its current revenues, but Fattal said that in the last 12 months it has seen its growth grow six times over. The company (for now) also does not explicitly name clients but Fattal notes that they include large e-commerce companies, retailers and manufacturers, including several of the largest businesses in Europe. (One of them at least appears to be Amazon: Zencargo provides integrated services to ship goods to Amazon fulfilment centers.)

Shipping — be by land, air or sea — is one of the cornerstones of the global economy. While we are increasingly hearing a mantra to “buy local”, the reality of how the mass-market world of trade works, is that components for things are not often made in the same place where the ultimate item is assembled, and our on-demand digital culture has created an expectation and competitive market for more than what we can source in our backyards.

For companies like Zencargo, that creates a two-fold opportunity: to ship finished goods — be it clothes, food or anything — to meet those consumer demands wherever they are; and to ship components for those goods — be it electronics, textiles or flour — to produce those goods elsewhere, wherever that business happens to be.

Ironically, while we have seen a lot of technology applied to other aspects of the economics equation — we can browse an app anytime and anywhere to buy something, for example — the logistics of getting the basics to the right place are now only just catching up.

Alex Hersham, another of Zencargo’s co-founders who is also the CEO (the third is Jan Riethmayer, the CTO), estimates that there is some $1.1 trillion “left on the table” from all of the inefficiencies in the supply chain related to things not being in stock when needed, or overstocked, and other inventory mistakes.

Fattal notes that a lot of what Zencargo is not only trying to replace things like physical paperwork, faxes, and silos of information variously held by shipping companies and the businesses that use them — but the whole understanding and efficiency (or lack thereof) that underlies how everything moves, and in turn the kinds of businesses that can be built as a result.

“Global trade is an enormous market, one of the last to be disrupted by technology,” Fattal said. “We want not just to be a better freight forwarder but we want people to think differently about commerce. Given a choice, where is it best to situate a supplier? Or how much stock do I order? How do I move this cargo from one place to another? When you have a lot of variability in the supply chain, these are difficult tasks to manage, but by unlocking the data in the supply chain you can really change the whole decision making process.”

Zencargo is just getting started on that. Flexport, one of its biggest startup competitors, in February raised $1 billion at a $3.2 billion valuation led by Softbank to double down on its own freight forwarding business, platform and operations. But as Christian Saller, a partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures describes it, there is still a lot of opportunity out there and room for more than one disruptor.

“It’s such a big market that is so broken,” he said. “Right now it’s not about winner-take-all.”

Just Eat — the marketplace for online food delivery which IPO’d but which is now under increasing pressure from several avenues, not least Uber and Deliveroo — has decided to add to its ‘quiver of arrows’ by acquiring Practi, a software service that provides independent restaurants and small chains with tablet-based Point of Sale (PoS) and restaurant management systems.

The acquisition cost is an initial £6.7m ($8.7m) with further payments dependent on the business achieving certain commercial milestones.

The hope is that this will strengthen Just Eat’s hold on restaurant partners on its platform, either by deploying new tablets with new restaurants or by incorporating Practi’s software on Just Eat’s Orderpads. By using the Orderpads Just Eat will effectively ‘lock in’ these restaurants because it incorporates both PoS, cash and card payment handling, inventory management, kitchen operation and employee management systems, all within a single software package across multiple devices.

Previously, Just Eat acquired Flyt, which connects Just Eat’s platform to restaurants chains’ existing PoS systems. The Practi platform will, instead, be used to target restaurants that do not already have PoS and restaurant management systems.

Practi’s founders, Ohad Folman and Edan Folman, will stay on to manage the business.

Peter Duffy, Just Eat’s interim CEO said in a statement: “We are very excited about the acquisition of Practi. We found that many of our restaurant partners were calling for this type of software to help manage their businesses. It will play a vital role in supporting small and medium sized restaurants as it transforms how they run their restaurants and deliver the best service for customers through Just Eat.”

TikTok, the user-generated video sharing app from Chinese publisher Bytedance that has been a global runaway success, has stumbled hard in one of the world’s biggest mobile markets, India, over illicit content in its app.

Today, the country’s main digital communications regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, ordered both Apple and Google to remove the app from its app stores, per a request from High Court in Madras after the latter investigated and determined that the app — which has hundreds of millions of users, including minors — was encouraging pornography and other illicit content.

This is the second time in two months that TikTok’s content has been dinged by regulators, after the app was fined $5.7 million by the FTC in the US over violating child protection policies.

The order in India does not impact the 120 million users in the country who already have the app downloaded, or those on Android who might download it from a source outside of Google’s official Android store. But it’s a strong strike against TikTok that will impede its growth, harm its reputation, and potentially pave the way for further sanctions or fines against the app in India (and elsewhere taking India’s lead).

TikTok has issued no less than three different statements — each subsequently less aggressive — as it scrambles to respond to the order.

“We welcome the decision of the Madras High Court to appoint Arvind Datar as Amicus Curae (independent counsel) to the court,” the statement from TikTok reads. “We have faith in the Indian judicial system and we are optimistic about an outcome that would be well received by over 120 million monthly active users in India, who continue using TikTok to showcase their creativity and capture moments that matter in their everyday lives.”

(A previous version of the statement from TikTok was less ‘welcoming’ of the decision and instead highlighted how TikTok was making increased efforts to police its content without outside involvement. It noted that it had removed more than 6 million videos that violated its terms of use and community guidelines, following a review of content generated by users in India. That alone speaks to the actual size of the problem.)

On top of prohibiting downloads, the High Court also directed the regulator to bar media companies from broadcasting any videos — illicit or otherwise — made with or posted on TikTok. Bytedance has been working to try to appeal the orders, but the Supreme Court, where the appeal was heard, upheld it.

This is not the first time that TikTok has faced government backlash over the content that it hosts on its platform. In the US, two months ago, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that the app violated children’s privacy laws and fined it $5.7 million, and through a forced app updated, required all users to verify that they were over 13, or otherwise be redirected to a more restricted experience. Musically, TikTok’s predecessor, had also faced similar regulatory violations.

More generally the problems that TikTok is facing right now are not unfamiliar ones. Social media apps, relying on user-generated content as both the engine of their growth and the fuel for that engine, have long been problematic when it comes to illicit content. The companies that create and run these apps have argued that they are not responsible for what people produce on the platform, as long as it fits within its terms of use, but that has left a large gap where content is not policed as well as it should be. On the other hand, as these platforms rely on growth and scale for their business models, some have argued that this has made them less inclined to proactively police their platforms to bar the illicit content in the first place.

Most work involving computers is highly repetitive, which is why companies regularly have developers write code to automate repetitive tasks. But that process is not very scalable. Ideally, individuals across an entire business would be able to create automated tasks, not just developers. This problem has created a new category called process automation. Startups in this space are all about making companies more efficient.
Most of the existing tools on the market are code-based and complicated, which tends to make it tough for non-technical people to automate anything. Ideally, you would allow them to train software robots to handle repetitive and mundane tasks.

This is the aim of Leapwork, which today announces a Series A investment of $10m, from Londons’s DN Capital and e.ventures out of Berlin. The company already has many clients, from tier one banks and global healthcare firms, to aerospace and software companies, and now plans to expand in the US. Its customers typically already have a lot of experience with tools such as Tricentis, MicroFocus, UiPath and BluePrism, but employ Leapwork when code-based tools prove limiting.

Founded in 2015 and launched in April 2017, Leapwork has an entirely visual system, backed by a modern tech stack. Instead of using developer time, staff automate tasks themselves, without writing any code, with a simple user interface that is likened to learning Powerpoint or Excel. Leapwork estimates it can save 75% of an employee’s time.

Christian Brink Frederiksen, Leapwork’s CEO and co-founder said: “About half of our business comes from the US and this investment will enable us to serve those customers better as well as reaching new ones.”

Leapwork has found traction in the areas of software testing, data migration, and robotic process automation in finance and healthcare. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, Leapwork has offices in London, UK, San Francisco, USA, Minsk, Belarus, and Gurugram, India.

Thomas Rubens, of DN Capital, said: “From the outset we were impressed by Leapwork’s product, which we believe will change the automation landscape. Every company has repetitive tasks that could be automated and few have the developer resource to make it happen.”

The founders began in June 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark, after having worked for almost two decades in enterprise software and business-critical IT. They launched their first pilot in July 2016 and after working with Global2000 pilot customers in the US and Europe, went live with the Leapwork automation platform in March 2017.
Prior to this funding the company was bootstrapped by the founders as both had previous successful exits.

The U.S. healthcare system spends roughly $190 billion every year on physical therapies prescribed to treat muscular and skeletal disorders, and Sword Health has raised $8 million in a new round of financing to slash those costs.

The New York-based company was founded in Europe four years ago and recently relocated to the U.S. where spending on musculoskeletal disorders has skyrocketed to become the second most costly ailment in America, the company said.

Sword Health focuses on five key pathologies — lower back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain and physical therapy in the wake of knee and hip replacement surgeries.

“Lower back pain is the most important one in terms of chronic pain, then knee and shoulder pain” says Sword Health founder and chief executive Virgilio Bento.

Khosla Ventures led the round with undisclosed angel investors. It’s the first funding for Sword since it raised a $4.6 million seed round last April.

Bento launched the company after identifying the lack of availability of good physical therapy when his brother was recovering from a car accident and needed access to better care.

The company has a hardware solution that’s set up in consultation with a specialist either remotely or in the home. The specialist will monitor a user of Sword Health’s system of wearable devices on a tablet that’s equipped with the company’s software. After guiding a patient through a therapy session, the patient can then perform the exercises on their own in the comfort of their home.

Since its launch the company has treated 1,000 patients with its technology, according to Bento.

Sword isn’t the only company that’s looking to cut costs for physical therapy. Another European transplant to U.S. shores, Hinge Health, grabbed a $26 million round about eight months ago to tackle the American market with digital treatments for musculoskeletal diseases.

Sword, which has offices in New York, San Francisco, and Porto said that it would use the new money in part for clinical validation of its therapies. The company has already published a study in “Nature Scientific Reports”, which reviewed the efficacy of the company’s treatment regimen for patients who’d had total knee replacement surgeries. 

“We already proved we could make the impossible possible by developing a new technology many thought unthinkable,” said Bento, in a statement. “With this round we want to go from the possible to the inevitable.”

Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into healthcare startups pitching lower cost alternatives to traditional services and one of their primary targets is diagnostics.

As investors look to back services that can pitch lower cost alternatives to customers, companies like EverlyWell, the Disrupt Battlefield alumnus which just raised $50 million in new financing start to look more appealing.

Since its launch on our San Francisco stage in 2016, EverlyWell has expanded from eight test kits that use blood, saliva, or urine to diagnose a variety of ailments (from food sensitivities to high cholesterol to fatigue) to now pitching a total of 35 in-home testing offerings to consumers.

The same pressures on American consumers continue to drive EverlyWell’s growth. More employees are opting for high deductible plans offered by employers, which means that they’re paying more out of pocket for medical expenses. And increasingly consumers are looking at in-home or DIY tests as a way to reduce costs and improve care by preemptively testing for certain conditions.

While this may result in over-testing, EverlyWell’s use of established testing facilities to perform its diagnostics means that users don’t face the same kind of risks of a bad result that they would from relying on newer technologies, says EverlyWell chief executive, Julia Cheek.

Indeed, the vast majority of the tests that EverlyWell provides are what Cheek calls “wellness panels” that are tests which can be initiated by a consumer without the need for a doctor’s referral. The company’s top tests are its testosterone, metabolism, Vitamin D, food sensitivity and STD tests, Cheek says. A fact that’s unsurprising given that those are the tests that the company advertises most heavily around.

EverlyWell is going to use the new cash primarily for brand building, says Cheek. And to expand the company’s array of products and services even further while building on its retail footprint. The company already counts CVS and Humana as partners ad began selling its test kits in target stores nationally earlier this month.

The company has a host of competitors across all of its offerings ranging from Modern Fertility and Future Family, which are both focused on women’s fertility, to 23andMe, the juggernaut of genetics testing which has raised over $750 million for its gene testing services.

Unlike 23andMe, EverlyWell doesn’t provide its test results to third parties that aren’t clinicians working with customers after the completion of a diagnostics screening, says Cheek.

“We do not sell or share data or results,” Cheek says. “[Except] to share with the physician network — they have to be able to review the medical information from the physician and the lab-testing network.”

Backing the company’s latest investment round are longtime investors Goodwater Capital, Next Coast Ventures, and NextGen Venture Partners along with new investor Highland Capital Partners.

“Lab testing is arguably one of the most important steps in preventing and managing illness, but has been largely ignored by digital health companies,” said Eric Kim, managing partner at Goodwater Capital, in a statement. “With a clear consumer pain point and a strong executive team that integrates both consumer and healthcare expertise, EverlyWell is successfully navigating an entrenched industry to offer consumers an opportunity to take charge of their own health.”

Facebook is pulling away from its ambitions to provide peer-to-peer money transfers via Messenger in Europe. Today, the company announced that it would be discontinuing the service — which let individuals send money to each other — in the two countries in the region where it had rolled it out, the UK and France on June 15 of this year. It appears that for now, the service will remain active in the US, where Facebook holds a number of money transmitter licenses.

It’s not shutting down payments altogether in Europe: it will continue to let people make charitable donations through Facebook itself.

“On 15 June 2019, we will discontinue P2P services on Messenger or through Facebook messages for all residents in the UK and France,” the company noted in a short statement on its main help page for the payments service. “While you won’t be able to exchange money with friends and family, you’ll still be able to complete other transactions through Facebook, such as making donations to charitable organisations.”

Facebook has also started sending out notices to those who were using the service in the two countries. It’s never been clear just how many of them there were.

After getting a license at the end of 2016, Facebook made its first foray into P2P payments in Europe for people over the age of 18 in November 2017, taking on the likes of PayPal and others in the remittance world.

The move was long in the making: there had been rumors of Facebook developing social payments, and even acquiring a startup to help make it happen, for years before this as the market for remittances and people using social networks to make financial transactions to each other started to take off.

In particular, in developing markets, where transfer fees for services like Western Union are high and the amount of people holding bank accounts is low, remittances using mobile handsets have become a key way for people to send money to each other, either because they’re supporting family or to pay each other for a service or goods. Mobile — and Facebook’s supremacy in social graphs and messaging with the likes of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram all a part of the Facebook stable — made it a natural fit for something like this.

But in the end, the launch of P2P payments in France and the UK was a baby step — you could never transfer money to international recipients, and new countries were never added — that never grew up. The company reported in its last financial results that payments and other services generated just $274 million in the quarter, compared to $16.64 billion in advertising. Europe accounted for a measly $64 million of that.

Facebook does not explain why it decided to pull back on the strategy, but apart from question marks over just how popular the service actually was, there have other developments at the company and the wider payments space in Europe that could potentially have been factors.

Come September 14 of this year, there will be a new payment directive put in place across Europe called Strong Customer Authentication, requiring extra checks to be made for a user’s identity in any online transaction. It’s not clear how and if Facebook was preparing for this change.

Perhaps more interestingly, the company is reportedly working on a cryptocurrency that would allow for people on its messaging networks to send money to each other. If such a product really does get rolled out, it may be that Facebook would use that to become its primary P2P payment mechanism.

We have contacted Facebook and will update this post as we learn more.

Between Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud Drive, consumer cloud storage is a crowded space. And yet, a small Swiss company called pCloud has managed to attract over 9 million users over the past five years. The company recently reached profitability with a team of 32 people.

If you’re familiar with Dropbox, pCloud won’t surprise you. The service lets you backup and sync files across your devices. You get 10GB for free and you can pay for more storage and features.

Unlike Dropbox or OneDrive, pCloud acts more like an external hard drive. When you install the app on your computer, everything stays in the cloud by default. On macOS, the company uses Fuse to create a new virtual hard drive in the Finder.

If you right click on a folder, you can choose to download it on your computer for offline access. It creates a new folder on your local hard drive that remains in sync with your pCloud account. Similarly, you can add existing folders to pCloud from the settings panel. These folders will remain permanently in sync as long as you keep the app running on your computer.

pCloud also supports LAN syncing, which means that if you have multiple devices on the same Wi-Fi network, they’ll transfer files using your local network instead of the internet. Dropbox also has this feature.

On mobile, you can access your files using the mobile app. Like many competitors, pCloud also lets you automatically back up your camera roll to your pCloud account.

Now le’s talk about security. Just like other cloud storage services, pCloud doesn’t encrypt your files by default — pCloud uses encryption on files while they’re in transit though. When you sync a file using pCloud, the company can theoretically retrieve that file. If you’re serious about privacy, you shouldn’t use cloud storage services at all.

But pCloud also offers an optional add-on called pCloud Crypto. This feature lets you create a secret folder that you can unlock with a password. When you add a file to this folder, it is encrypted on your device and then sent to pCloud’s server. If you don’t have that password, you can’t unlock the file. It means that pCloud and authorities can’t retrieve those files without you.

When it comes to pricing, pCloud costs $3.99 per month for 500GB of storage and $7.99 per month for 2TB of storage. pCloud Crypto costs an additional $4.99 per month. You can also buy lifetime subscriptions for $175 for 500GB, $350 for 2TB and $125 for Crypto. This is expensive, but it could convince some users who are not into subscriptions.

Even though it seems incredibly complicated to compete with Microsoft, Google, Apple and Dropbox, I’m glad to see that it’s still possible to build an alternative product with some differentiating features. pCloud will probably never be as big as Dropbox, but it is an interesting company to follow.