Cambridge Analytica is refuting a report by Facebook today that said Cambridge Analytica improperly attained data on up to 87 million users. Instead, it claims it only “licensed data for no more than 30 million people” from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan’s research company Global Science Research. It also claims none of this data was used in work on the 2016 U.S. presidential election when it was hired by the Trump campaign, and that upon notice from Facebook immediately deleted all raw data and began removing derivative data.
The whole statement from Cambridge Analytica can be found below. We’ve requested a comment from Facebook about the incongruencies in the two companies’ positions and will update if we received a response.
The he-said-she-said of the scandal seems to be amplifying as Facebook continues to endure criticism about weak data privacy policies and enforcement that led to the Cambridge Analytica fiasco that’s seen Facebook’s market cap drop nearly $100 billion.
NEW DELHI, INDIA – OCTOBER 9: Co-founder and chief executive of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg gestures as he announces the Internet.org Innovation Challenge in India on October 9, 2014 in New Delhi, India. Zuckerberg is on a two-day visit to India aimed at promoting the internet.org app, which allows people in underdeveloped areas to access basic online services. (Photo by Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Today Facebook announced the 87 million figure as a maximum number of people potentially impacted and said it would notify those users with an alert atop the News Feed. It also rewrote its Terms of Service today to clarify how it collects and works with outside developers, and announced sweeping platform API restrictions that will break many apps built on Facebook but prevent privacy abuses. Zuckerberg then held a conference call with reporters to give insight on all the news.
Cambridge Analytica has repeatedly denied assertions about interactions with Facebook data, but Facebook hasn’t backed down. Instead, Facebook has used Cambridge Analytica as an example of abuse it’s trying to combat, and as a justification for cracking down on developers both malicious and benign around the world.
Cambridge Analytica responds to announcement that GSR dataset potentially contained 87 million records
Today Facebook reported that information for up to 87 million people may have been improperly obtained by research company GSR. Cambridge Analytica licensed data for from GSR, as is clearly stated in our contract with the research company. We did not receive more data than this.
We did not use any GSR data in the work we did in the 2016 US presidential election.
Our contract with GSR stated that all data must be obtained legally, and this contract is now a matter of public record. We took legal action against GSR when we found out they had breached this contract.When Facebook contacted us to let us know the data had been improperly obtained, we immediately deleted the raw data from our file server, and began the process of searching for and removing any of its derivatives in our system.
When Facebook sought further assurances a year ago, we carried out an internal audit to make sure that all the data, all derivatives, and all backups had been deleted, and gave Facebook a certificate to this effect.
We are now undertaking an independent third-party audit to demonstrate that no GSR data remains in our systems.
Since the dawn of the internet, the titans of this industry have fought to win the “starting point” — the place that users start their online experiences. In other words, the place where they begin “browsing.” The advent of the dial-up era had America Online mailing a CD to every home in America, which passed the baton to Yahoo’s categorical listings, which was swallowed by Google’s indexing of the world’s information — winning the “starting point” was everything.
As the mobile revolution continues to explode across the world, the battle for the starting point has intensified. For a period of time, people believed it would be the hardware, then it became clear that the software mattered most. Then conversation shifted to a debate between operating systems (Android or iOS) and moved on to social properties and messaging apps, where people were spending most of their time. Today, my belief is we’re hovering somewhere between apps and operating systems. That being said, the interface layer will always be evolving.
The starting point, just like a rocket’s launchpad, is only important because of what comes after. The battle to win that coveted position, although often disguised as many other things, is really a battle to become the starting point of commerce.
Google’s philosophy includes a commitment to get users “off their page” as quickly as possible…to get that user to form a habit and come back to their starting point. The real (yet somewhat veiled) goal, in my opinion, is to get users to search and find the things they want to buy.
Of course, Google “does no evil” while aggregating the world’s information, but they pay their bills by sending purchases to Priceline, Expedia, Amazon and the rest of the digital economy.
Facebook, on the other hand, has become a starting point through its monopolization of users’ time, attention and data. Through this effort, it’s developed an advertising business that shatters records quarter after quarter.
Google and Facebook, this famed duopoly, represent 89 percent of new advertising spending in 2017. Their dominance is unrivaled… for now.
Change is urgently being demanded by market forces — shifts in consumer habits, intolerable rising costs to advertisers and through a nearly universal dissatisfaction with the advertising models that have dominated (plagued) the U.S. digital economy. All of which is being accelerated by mobile. Terrible experiences for users still persist in our online experiences, deliver low efficacy for advertisers and fraud is rampant. The march away from the glut of advertising excess may be most symbolically seen in the explosion of ad blockers. Further evidence of the “need for a correction of this broken industry” is Oracle’s willingness to pay $850 million for a company that polices ads (probably the best entrepreneurs I know ran this company, so no surprise).
As an entrepreneur, my job is to predict the future. When reflecting on what I’ve learned thus far in my journey, it’s become clear that two truths can guide us in making smarter decisions about our digital future:
Every day, retailers, advertisers, brands and marketers get smarter. This means that every day, they will push the platforms, their partners and the places they rely on for users to be more “performance driven.” More transactional.
Paying for views, bots (Russian or otherwise) or anything other than “dollars” will become less and less popular over time. It’s no secret that Amazon, the world’s most powerful company (imho), relies so heavily on its Associates Program (its home-built partnership and affiliate platform). This channel is the highest performing form of paid acquisition that retailers have, and in fact, it’s rumored that the success of Amazon’s affiliate program led to the development of AWS due to large spikes in partner traffic.
Chinese flag overlooking The Bund, Shanghai, China (Photo: Rolf Bruderer/Getty Images)
When thinking about our digital future, look down and look east. Look down and admire your phone — this will serve as your portal to the digital world for the next decade, and our dependence will only continue to grow. The explosive adoption of this form factor is continuing to outpace any technological trend in history.
Now, look east and recognize that what happens in China will happen here, in the West, eventually. The Chinese market skipped the PC-driven digital revolution — and adopted the digital era via the smartphone. Some really smart investors have built strategies around this thesis and have quietly been reaping rewards due to their clairvoyance.
China has historically been categorized as a market full of knock-offs and copycats — but times have changed. Some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies have come out of China over the past decade. The entrepreneurial work ethic in China (as praised recently by arguably the world’s greatest investor, Michael Moritz), the speed of innovation and the ability to quickly scale and reach meaningful populations have caused Chinese companies to leapfrog the market cap of many of their U.S. counterparts.
The most interesting component of the Chinese digital economy’s growth is that it is fundamentally more “pure” than the U.S. market’s. I say this because the Chinese market is inherently “transactional.” As Andreessen Horowitz writes, WeChat, China’s most valuable company, has become the “starting point” and hub for all user actions. Their revenue diversity is much more “Amazon” than “Google” or “Facebook” — it’s much more pure. They make money off the transactions driven from their platform, and advertising is far less important in their strategy.
The obsession with replicating WeChat took the tech industry by storm two years ago — and for some misplaced reason, everyone thought we needed to build messaging bots to compete.
What shouldn’t be lost is our obsession with the purity and power of the business models being created in China. The fabric that binds the Chinese digital economy and has fostered its seemingly boundless growth is the magic combination of commerce and mobile. Singles Day, the Chinese version of Black Friday, drove $25 billion in sales on Alibaba — 90 percent of which were on mobile.
The lesson we’ve learned thus far in both the U.S. and in China is that “consumers spending money” creates the most durable consumer businesses. Google, putting aside all its moonshots and heroic mission statements, is a “starting point” powered by a shopping engine. If you disagree, look at where their revenue comes from…
Google’s recent announcement of Shopping Actions and their movement to a “pay per transaction model” signals a turning point that could forever change the landscape of the digital economy.
Google’s multi-front battle against Apple, Facebook and Amazon is weighted. Amazon is the most threatening. It’s the most durable business of the four — and its model is unbounded on two fronts that almost everyone I know would bet their future on, 1) people buying more online, where Amazon makes a disproportionate amount of every dollar spent, and 2) companies needing more cloud computing power (more servers), where Amazon makes a disproportionate amount of every dollar spent.
To add insult to injury, Amazon is threatening Google by becoming a starting point itself — 55 percent of product searches now originate at Amazon, up from 30 percent just a year ago.
Google, recognizing consumer behavior was changing in mobile (less searching) and the inferiority of their model when compared to the durability and growth prospects of Amazon, needed to respond. Google needed a model that supported boundless growth and one that created a “win-win” for its advertising partners — one that resembled Amazon’s relationship with its merchants — not one that continued to increase costs to retailers while capitalizing on their monopolization of search traffic.
Google knows that with its position as the starting point — with Google.com, Google Apps and Android — it has to become a part of the transaction to prevail in the long term. With users in mobile demanding fewer ads and more utility (demanding experiences that look and feel a lot more like what has prevailed in China), Google has every reason in the world to look down and to look east — to become a part of the transaction — to take its piece.
A collision course for Google and the retailers it relies upon for revenue was on the horizon. Search activity per user was declining in mobile and user acquisition costs were growing quarter over quarter. Businesses are repeatedly failing to compete with Amazon, and unless Google could create an economically viable growth model for retailers, no one would stand a chance against the commerce juggernaut — not the retailers nor Google itself.
As I’ve believed for a long time, becoming a part of the transaction is the most favorable business model for all parties; sources of traffic make money when retailers sell things, and, most importantly, this only happens when users find the things they want.
Shopping Actions is Google’s first ambitious step to satisfy all three parties — businesses and business models all over the world will feel this impact.
A co-founder of Smartsheet, the enterprise collaboration startup that just filed for an IPO, is taking a hard right turn into the world of agriculture robotics. Brent Frei tells Geekwire that he has been working on an automated system for clearing rocks from land. It’s a bit unexpected, but far from a bad idea.
While doing a little farming work with his kids last year, including the less than stimulating task of picking up big rocks and throwing them in a tractor trailer, it occurred to him that this was precisely the kind of thing that an automated platform would be good at.
There are some semi-automated solutions, but nothing simple enough that you could just plop it on a few acres and tell it “go grab all the rocks this big or bigger.”
Why not apply all the tech that’s going into watering, growing, and picking to this? It seems at the very least he might make something that he himself could use, so he started TerraClear in October to create a “Roomba for rock picking.”
It’s still a ways off even from prototype stage, but it’s a great example of how wide open the world is to new applications of computer vision and robotics if you keep your mind open.
Many will rightly say that raising money as a startup in Southeast Asia is no easy thing, but up-and-coming online fashion service Zilingo sure doesn’t seem to have problems on that front.
The round was led by new investor Sofina — an investor in Flipkart-owned fashion site Myntra among others — and existing backers Burda and Sequoia India. Zilingo’s other existing investors, including Tim Draper, SIG, Venturra, Beenext, Manik Arora, all took part with Amadeus Capital joining the party, too.
Raising this much money is rare over the lifecycle of any startup in Southeast Asia, but to do it less than 2.5 years after launching your product is unprecedented.
E-commerce is a hot space in the region but few companies have made the jump to Series B and beyond with success, in order to make the leap Singapore-headquartered Zilingo has gone about things in a different way to others in its immediate space.
Beyond consumer sales
The company started out in Thailand in 2015 when it was founded by Ankiti Bose (CEO) and Dhruv Kapoor (CTO). Bose, a former analyst with Sequoia India and McKinsey, had the idea of bringing traditional sellers online after visiting Bangkok and marveling at the rich variety of fashion items being sold at street markets.
Now, however, the company has risen above online sales to a position as a platform that caters to merchants, retailers and brands for both B2C and B2B sales. That’s been enabled by an early focus on providing basic services for retailers beyond just an online storefront.
We noted when we first wrote about Zilingo that the company offered a seller management tool which handled processes like inventory management, stock and sales for small retailers who might not already be digital. Aside from boosting touch points with merchants, its key target, these services have evolved over time and become both an additional revenue generator and an important defensive moat for Zilingo’s business, while not to mention providing insight and direction for product development.
Zilingo’s e-commerce site sells directly to consumers in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and it ships internationally to four more countries. Its tech team is in India while it has supply bases in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, but it has pushed on.
With financial services from third parties, a ‘style hunter’ that aggregates upcoming trends from fashion watchers and icons, product sourcing, and content and photography services, the targets have expanded to include professional fashion sellers, SMEs, brands, and B2B buyers located outside of Southeast Asia.
The idea is no longer just about bringing the longtail of market sellers online, but instead to enable increased efficiencies for all. That means organization services, financial products and sales for the longtail merchants, but trend analysis, B2B sales/sourcing and more advanced options to the more sophisticated end of brands and larger retailers.
Zilingo co-founders Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor
“We realized that the longtail is a good way to start, but if you want to build the biggest player in this space, then you have to have all the supply,” Bose told TechCrunch. “The reason they’d stay with us is because they have a dependence with us.”
Bose said that Zilingo doesn’t pressure its merchants to use Zilingo.com for consumers sales — although it is obviously preferential — which means it has a potential in that allows it to start working with those who are on rival services, which chiefly includes Rocket Internet’s well-funded Zalora business.
So a brand using Zalora for sales, for example, might source its products or materials from sellers on Zilingo. Further down the line, Zilingo could use that relationship to persuade it to open a Zilingo.com store.
That has seen revenue skyrocket. While Bose isn’t revealing exact sales figures, she said that revenue has grown “over 10X” in the last 12 months with more than 10,000 sellers and two million products now on the Zilingo.com platform.
That jump is primarily thanks to a move into Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, the emergence of B2B sales — i.e. labels or merchants using Zilingo to buy fashion items to then sell to consumers — and some of the optional, paid-for services such as loans or credit. Now, Bose said, the once-core B2C business from Zilingo.com accounts for just 40 percent of the revenue.
That platform strategy goes some way to explaining why investors are doubling down on the business despite a “bloodbath” — as Bose puts it — in the B2C fashion commerce space in Southeast Asia.
Zalora is the big player, while others include JD.com-backed Pomelo and Singapore’s Love Bonito, both of which have raised low double-digit USD rounds to move into brick and mortar retail. Zilingo, meanwhile, has transcended the sales race by building a product that can live without a dependency on its Zilingo.com e-commerce service.
Looking to U.S. and Europe
The company is putting that to the test this week with the launch of a B2B service for U.S. and Europe-based fashion sellers and labels.
ZilingoAsiaMall.com is a destination where smaller retailers and other B2B buyers can source fashion items from Southeast Asia-based resellers for similar prices to that which top global fashion names enjoy, but without the commitment of massive order volumes.
Zilingo Asia Mall
“Major global fashion brands source most apparel from Asia at $1.5/piece for massive quantities of over a million pieces,” a Zilingo representative explained. “We saw how Zilingo could leverage its existing Asian supply chain network built from its consumer business to drive value for the American and European fashion businesses. ZAM has figured out how retailers can source quality, current products at $2/piece for quantities as low as 200 and also make it an easy experience.”
“Some 49% of all exports globally in fashion come from ASEAN, China and Bangladesh [so] we are basically sitting at the source,” Bose told TechCrunch.
“Merchants want to buy from our B2B platforms and sell on B2C channels, Zilingo could be one of them,” she added. “It’s a high margin profitable business and we want to scale that up.”
Future plans
Zilingo said it still has its Series B round in the bank so that, combined with this newest funding, gives it quite the war chest for investment.
Aside from pushing its international strategy, the company plans to add more tech services to its merchant ecosystem while also expanding its Zilingo.com e-commerce site deeper into Southeast Asia. The Philippines is top of the list, but opening up in Vietnam and Malaysia is also on the planner.
The company will also continue to build its brand and market share in its existing Southeast Asian markets. There’s a particular focus on Indonesia where it recently signed up actress Pevita Pearce to front its first TV ad campaign.
As for raising more money right after the Series B, Bose said that the timing felt right.
“The logic behind raising this round is that Southeast Asia is heating up but fashion doesn’t have a big leader because Zalora is stumbling, but it is also the only high margin vertical in e-commerce,” she said.
“When things are going well, there’s momentum, and we figured that we might as well use that because this is a fantastic time to be running a startup in Southeast Asia — people are taking the region seriously,” she added, referencing increased investments from Tencent and Alibaba.
Unbelievably, Zilingo closed the Series C round “weeks” after its Series B, according to Sequoia India managing director Shailendra Singh. Bose explained that investors had begun to see the results of the B2B push and were keen to double down right there and then.
Luckily for the rest of the market, there are no imminent Series D plans at this point… apparently.
As part of its ongoing efforts to patch its systems against the Meltdown and Spectre chip flaws, Intel indicated last month that it would be issuing fixes as far back as 2005’s Yorkfield processors. But in a new guidance document the company announces that many of these older platforms will not receive fixes after all.
Specifically, work has been stopped on Spectre Variant 2 mitigations for the chip generations known as Bloomfield, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown, Jasper Forest, Penryn, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale and Yorkfield. (You can find more specifics at this great list of Intel codenames on Wikipedia.)
Variant 2 is the toughest of the chip flaws to block or work around, so the creation of fixes is nontrivial — Intel isn’t just copying and pasting stuff into a microcode update for each of these.
Micro-architectural characteristics that preclude a practical implementation of features mitigating Variant 2
Limited Commercially Available System Software support
Based on Customer inputs, most of these products are implemented as “closed systems” and therefore are expected to have a lower likelihood of exposure to these vulnerabilities.
In other words: it’s super hard, they’re barely supported and few people are using them where the bugs could be exploited.
It’s a reasonable walkback of the scope of Intel’s mitigation efforts, especially when you look at the size of the list of platforms that are having the problems addressed. Still, system administrators may want to cast an eye over their inventory to make sure no chips of these generations get exposed to the untamed wilds of userland.
And for users, the Penryns (Core 2 Duos in particular) were very popular and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people were still running an old laptop with one — they were in all kinds of things back in ’08. If you’re one of those sentimental types like me that keeps these things around, you should probably avoid doing anything critical on them.
The App Store shrank for the first time in 2017, according to a new report from Appfigures. The report found the App Store lost 5 percent of its total apps over the course of the year, dropping from 2.2 million published iOS apps in the beginning of the year, to 2.1 million by year-end.
Google Play, meanwhile, grew in 2017 – it was up 30% to more than 3.6 million apps.
Appfigures speculated the changes had to do with a combination of factors, including stricter enforcement of Apple’s review guidelines, along with a technical change requiring app developers to update their apps to the 64-bit architecture.
Apple had also promised back in 2016 that it would clean up its iOS App Store by removing outdated, abandoned apps, including those that no longer met current guidelines or didn’t function as intended. That cleanup may have well stretched into 2017, as app store intelligence firms only started seeing the effects in late 2016. For example, there was a spike in app removals back in October 2016.
Then in 2017, Apple went after clones and spam apps on the App Store. Combined with those apps that weren’t 64-compatible and those that hadn’t been downloaded in years, the removals reached into the hundreds of thousands over a twelve month period. Apple later went after template-based apps, too, before dialing back its policies over concerns it was impacting small businesses ability to compete on the App Store.
To see the App Store shrink, given these clear-outs, isn’t necessarily surprising. However, Appfigures found that removals of existing apps weren’t the only cause. iOS developers weren’t releasing as many apps as they had during the growth years, it also claims.
Android developers launched 17 percent more apps in 2017 to reach 1.5 million total new releases. But iOS developers launched just 755,00 new apps – a 29 percent drop and the largest drop since 2008.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean developers weren’t creating as many iOS app – it could mean that Apple’s review team has gotten tougher about how many apps it allows in. Thanks to the spam and clone app crackdown, fewer apps of questionable quality are being approved these days.
In addition, some portion of the new Android app releases during the year were iOS apps being ported to the Google Play platform. More than twice as many apps came to Android on 2017, than Android apps coming to iOS, the report said.
The full report also developed into the numbers of cross-platform apps (450K are on both stores), the most popular non-native tools (Cordova and Unity), the rise in native development, the countries shipping the most apps (U.S. followed by China), and the Play Store’s growth.
Mark Zuckerberg refuted a Reuters story yesterday that said Facebook would not bring Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation privacy safeguards around the world. “Overall I think regulations like this are very positive” Zuckerberg said on a conference call with reporters today. “We intend to make all the same controls available everywhere, not just in Europe.”
Zuckerberg noted that “Is it going to be exactly the same format? Probably not. We’ll need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with different laws in different places. But let me repeat this, we’re going to make all the same controls and settings available everywhere, not just in Europe.”
GDPR goes into effect on May 25th, and places requirements on data controllers, forcing them to explain to people what personal data they intend to collect and why. It’s focused around consent. Facebook has made its own moves to boost consent for ad targeting. TechCrunch reported that Facebook plans to implement a Custom Audiences Certification Tool that will require businesses to pledge that they had the consent to collect user email addresses and phone numbers that they’re uploading to Facebook for ad targeting.
GDPR also lets users request a copy of their personal information free-of-charge and get a response within a month. It gives people the right to not be subject to significant decisions by businesses that impact their privacy. Users also have some rights to erase their personal data if they withdraw consent or it’s no longer necessary for the reason it was collected. Violations can trigger hefty fines.
Zuckerberg’s statements indicate that the progressive, privacy-first legislation passed in the European Union will benefit everyone. The inability to make unilateral changes to people’s privacy and the right to erasure could hamper some of Facebook’s ability to roll out new products and require it to build stronger systems to comply with user requests. But given how much Facebook earns from our data, making it jump through some hoops to give users more agency seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
IfOnly, a San Francisco-based online marketplace that offers more than 3,000 unique experiences to its adventuresome users, has raised $20 million in Series D funding led by MasterCard, which was joined by other strategic investors, including Hyatt Hotels and Sotheby’s.
It has another new announcement, too: The company has brought aboard a new CEO, John Boris, who spent the previous six years as the chief marketing officer at the personalized photos and products company Shutterfly.
The latter wasn’t necessarily something the company saw coming. Until recently, IfOnly was led by serial entrepreneur and founder Trevor Traina. But in January, Traina — a financial supporter of President Donald Trump — was nominated for an ambassadorship to Austria, and last Thursday, he was sworn in at his Pacific Heights home in San Francisco.
With Traina off to Vienna, Boris will steer the company’s growth, and its newest strategic partners should help.
Both MasterCard and Hyatt, for example, offer the kinds of experiences featured at IfOnly to help make their offerings a bit stickier for customers.
Meanwhile, Sotheby’s, known of its auctions business, has similarly been getting into the business of experiences. In December, anyone willing to pay enough could enjoy an after-hours tour of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, before being treated to an authentic Venetian dinner. Another experience recently auctioned off by Sotheby’s: the ability to host a private lunch or dinner for 10 at the iconic Philip Johnson Glass House in Connecticut.
Both of these opportunities were expected to fetch in the tens of thousands of dollars — which is in the range of plenty of experiences featured on IfOnly. Among the costlier options available right now on its platform is a private concert with the band Third Eye Blind — which requires that interested parties “request a quote” — and a one-of-a-kind crystal pet pendant by L.A. designer Irene Neuwirth, who, for $21,000, will also carve out enough time to say hello.
IfOnly is also going after a much broader audience — one that may be looking for fresh experiences that won’t cost an arm and a leg. It seems to be making some progress on that front, too.
The company has now attracted two million registered users, and Boris says that roughly 25 percent of them engage regularly with the platform. Two years ago, when we spoke with Traina about the company’s Series B round, IfOnly experiences were only available in San Francisco, L.A. and New York. Now, the platform features experiences in eight cities. It also seems to feature a greater breadth of experiences, and many more affordable options. (Among them: glass blowing in L.A.’s Hermosa Beach, Calif., for $99 per person.)
The company has plenty of competition, of course. Its most daunting rival may well be Airbnb, which is deriving a growing percentage of its revenue from travel services and bookable excursions with locals.
Asked about this, Boris stresses that every experience on IfOnly is “vetted,” suggesting that Airbnb might not be controlling quality as tightly. He also says he welcomes the attention that Airbnb is paying to experiences. “It legitimizes that there’s a multibillion-dollar market here,” he says.
IfOnly has now raised more than $40 million altogether. Other investors in its newest round of funding include the venture firms New Enterprise Associates, Founder’s Fund, Khosla Ventures and TriplePoint Capital.
Pictured above: a photo on IfOnly of a Half Dome adventure hike in Yosemite. Price: $290 per person.
As the e-commerce industry continues to explode, one startup that’s benefiting is Boston-based 6 River Systems.
The business, which builds robots that speed up production in warehouses, has raised $25 million in Series B financing in a round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures and iRobot.
6 River says it has gained early traction with its robot, “Chuck.” Jerome Dubois, founder and CEO, said that he believes 6 River has built “the first and only collaborative robot with the associates in the aisles doing the work.” In other words, 6 River aims to help humans be more efficient.
Chuck keeps warehouse employees on task by guiding them through the facility through each step of the packaging process. It can glide around the room and also has a touchscreen to help workers locate items. Chuck uses sensors to help detect worker productivity. It’s also been designed to help with employee training.
6 River isn’t worried about eliminating humans and instead believes there is an opportunity to help industries that have a “massive labor shortage” for warehouse suppliers. “There aren’t enough people to fill the jobs,” Dubois claims.
Right now 6 River has deployed 600 robots to 30 sites. These robots have helped pack medical supplies, retail products and “nuts and bolts” in industrial spaces.
There’s “been very little automation outside of conveyor belts,” said Matt Murphy, at Menlo Ventures, about why he invested. Murphy, who’s on the board at 6 River, stated “there needed to be a second-generation robotics system to replace what Amazon started six years ago when they bought Kiva.”
6 River is particularly focused on building relationships with Fortune 100 businesses and offers its robots through SaaS licensing. They also can be rented for a one or two-year term.
The startup plans to use the funding to build out its own software. It also wants to expand to Europe.
The startup has described itself as “the Match.com of brands and creators on YouTube,” collecting data about video creators and connecting them with marketers who want to use their skills and reach their audience.
In the announcement, Fullscreen suggests that Reelio’s technology will allow the company to offer a more complete set of services around influencer marketing.
“The integration of Reelio’s platform into our network brings us one step closer to building a complete solution for the future of brand marketing, which we believe will be social-first and content-driven,” said Fullscreen General Manager Pete Stein in a statement. “The strength of Reelio’s data, technology, and team will be a huge asset to our company, and we’re excited to work alongside them as we continue to enhance our influencer marketing offerings.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Variety reports that the entire 50-person Reelio team (including co-founder and CEO Pete Borum) will be joining Fullscreen.
Reelio had raised $8 million in funding from investors including e.ventures, Tremor Video co-founders Jason Glickman and Andrew Reis and former Bertelsmann president Thomas Hesse. Fullscreen, meanwhile, is owned by Otter Media, the joint venture between AT&T and the Chernin Group.
