Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Snap announced its latest slate of Originals programming

• October 6, 2020
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Snap, the social media platform for Gen Z, launched its latest slate of Snap Originals today, in a sign that not every media company has failed to capture the imagination of an audience with short form content. Even as Quibi’s billion dollar gambit continues to falter, Snap is forging ahead with a slate of new

Snap, the social media platform for Gen Z, launched its latest slate of Snap Originals today, in a sign that not every media company has failed to capture the imagination of an audience with short form content.

Even as Quibi’s billion dollar gambit continues to falter, Snap is forging ahead with a slate of new short form series with episodes averaging no longer than five minutes.

Taking their talent from social media, sports, music, and traditional entertainment, Snap’s shows feature entertainers like Loren Gray, Trippie Redd, Swae Lee, Haden Smith, MK Asante, Colin Kaepernick and Kevin Hart. As Snap says, truly some of the world’s greatest storytellers.

Here’s a list of what Snap is running:

• Honestly Loren (ITV America’s Sirens Media) – Watch as the famous-since-thirteen singer and social media celebrity, Loren Gray, confronts existential dread in a docuseries that’s set to premiere in 2021.
• Life’s a Tripp (Trooper Entertainment) – Musician Trippie Redd and some celebrity friends will go on an exploration around America to confront some of the country’s greatest and most pressing issues — from drug addiction to police reform — in what’s sure to be informational five minute installments set to air in 2021.
• Swae Meets World (Big Fish Entertainment) – This Swae Lee documentary due for a 2021 release follows the artist as he prepares to launch his first solo album.
• The Solution Committee (Westbrook Media) – Jaden Smith tackles racial and social justice issues with the help of activists and entertainer friends like Justin and Hailey Bieber, Common, Bella Hadid, Willow Smith, Janelle Monáe, Phoebe Robinson, Yara Shahidi and Lena Waithe. The series, which premiered in late September addresses policing and criminal justice reform, voting access, gender justice, housing, economic justice, climate change and education reform.
• Good Luck Voter! (Snap Inc.) – Snap unveiled this three-part series last week starring Loren Gray, Ross Smith, Erin Lim, Kimberly Jones, MK Asante and more which is designed to share information and memes on voting and American politics. The series was written by Peter Hamby of Snapchat’s “Good Luck America.”
• While Black with MK Asante (Main Event Media, an All3Media America company, and MK Asante Productions) – In the second season of this Snap vehicle, viewers will watch host MK Asante continue to explore what it means to be young and Black in America. The series will kick off with a special voting episode airing 10/25/20 before the series returns this November 2020.
• Colin Kaepernick VS the World (season 3; COMPLEX) – The third season of this Snap series will document the life of Kaepernick, the former quarterback and current civil rights advocate and his ongoing battles for racial justice. Docuseries premieres 2021.

Finally, Kevin Hart will star in an unscripted series called Coach Kev, made to inspire Snapchatters to live their “best life” — a life, presumably best lived and documented through Snap. The series premieres this Saturday, October 10.  

News: Salesforce Ventures launches $100M Impact Fund to invest in cloud startups with social mission

• October 6, 2020
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When Salesforce Ventures launched the first $50 million Impact Fund in 2017, it wanted to invest not only in promising cloud businesses, but startups with a socially positive mission. Today, the company launched the second Impact Fund, this time doubling its initial investment with a new $100 million fund The latest fund is also designed

When Salesforce Ventures launched the first $50 million Impact Fund in 2017, it wanted to invest not only in promising cloud businesses, but startups with a socially positive mission. Today, the company launched the second Impact Fund, this time doubling its initial investment with a new $100 million fund

The latest fund is also designed to help bring more investment into areas that the company feels needs to be emphasized as a corporate citizen beyond pure business goals including education and reskilling, climate action, diversity, equity and inclusion, and providing tech for nonprofits and foundations.

Suzanne DiBianca, Chief Impact Officer and EVP of Corporate Relations at Salesforce says the money is being put to work on some of the world’s most pressing social issues. “Now more than ever, we believe business can be a powerful platform for change. We must leverage technology and invest in innovative ideas to drive the long-term health and wellness of all citizens, enable equal access to education and fuel impactful climate action,” DiBianca said in a statement.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials says that this investment is consistent with their commitment to social issues. “This fits right in with Salesforce’s efforts on making business a force for change. They talk it, they walk it, and they invest in it,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Claudine Emeott, Director of Impact Investing, in a Q&A on the company website, said that as with the first fund, the company is looking for cloud companies with some ties to Salesforce that address these core social components and can have a positive impact on the world. While there is a social aspect to each company, it still follows a particular investment thesis related to cloud computing. Her goal is to have a portfolio of cloud startups by next year that are addressing the set of social needs the firm has laid out.

“I hope that [by next year] we have made numerous investments in companies that are addressing today’s concurrent crises, and I hope that we can point to their measurable impact on those crises. I hope that we can point to exciting new integrations between our portfolio companies and Salesforce to tackle these challenges together,” Emeott said.

Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, says that while he doesn’t always agree with Salesforce on every matter, he admires their social bent. “As an analyst, I might battle with them on some of their products, the things they do in the market and their messaging, but as a human being, I applaud them for their deep commitment to the common good,” he said.

Salesforce has always had a social component to its corporate goals including its 1-1-1 philanthropy model. While Salesforce isn’t always completely consistent as with its contract with ICE, it does put money and personnel toward helping in the communities where it operates, encouraging volunteerism and charitable giving from the top down and modeled across the organization.

This investment fund, while looking at the investments through a distinctly Salesforce lens, is designed to fund startups to help solve intractable social problems, while using its extensive financial resources for the betterment of the world.

News: Amazon’s Josh Miele and Ann Toth talk Alexa and the future of accessibility at Sight Tech Global

• October 6, 2020
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When Alexa launched six years ago, no one imagined that by today there would be hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices or that Alexa would become part of so many lives. For people who are blind or visually impaired, voice assistants are a huge convenience, whether you are calling a loved one, cooking a meal,

When Alexa launched six years ago, no one imagined that by today there would be hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices or that Alexa would become part of so many lives. For people who are blind or visually impaired, voice assistants are a huge convenience, whether you are calling a loved one, cooking a meal, checking a sports score, or asking for the weather or time. This fall, Alexa introduced personalization and conversational capabilities that are steps toward a more human-like, digital factotum.

It’s exciting to announce that Amazon’s Josh Miele, Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon’s Lab126, and Anne Toth, Director of Amazon’s Alexa Trust, will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-based, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired.

The show, a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Silicon Valley, launched on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Registration is open. 

Josh Miele (Photo: Barbara Butkus)

“Before Alexa,” says Miele, who is a blind scientist with numerous inventions to his credit and a Ph.D. from UCBerkeley in psychoacoustics, “people newly experiencing vision loss would need to learn how to use a computer or phone with a screen reader in order to shop online or download audio books. With Alexa, using only voice commands, people with visual and motor disabilities can also make phone calls, get recipes, play music, schedule reminders, set timers, and more.

“The experience is made possible,” says Miele, “by Alexa’s confluence of voice recognition, natural language processing and deep learning—a powerful indicator of what is possible, but clearly there are still gaps to close.”

Ann Toth was a pioneering accessibility advocate at Yahoo, where in 2003 she commissioned the first usability studies to determine how Yahoo’s services worked with assistive technology, such as screen readers.

“To be brief,” she says, “they didn’t. The user stories and videos from that first study fundamentally changed how we thought about this issue and marked the moment I moved from being curious to being an advocate.” As the leader of the Alexa Trust team at Amazon, Toth is focused on accessibility, privacy and deepening customer trust in Alexa-enabled devices. 

Ann Toth

“Alexa-enabled devices,” says Toth, “have the benefit of being born in an era when these issues are no longer seen as offering secondary benefits to our customers. When our devices become more accessible, they become better for everyone. There is no upper threshold for what that means.” 

At Sight Tech Global on December 2-3, attendees will hear from Toth and Miele about upcoming Alexa feature advances and the underlying technologies. Get your free pass now.

Sight Tech Global welcomes sponsors. We are grateful to our current sponsors, who include Verizon Media, Google, Waymo, Microsoft,  Amazon, Ford, Mojo Vision, Humanware and Wells Fargo.

The event is organized by volunteers and all proceeds benefit The Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Silicon Valley.

News: Trump is already breaking platform rules again with false claim that COVID-19 is ‘far less lethal’ than the flu

• October 6, 2020
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Facebook and Twitter took action against a post from President Trump Tuesday that claimed that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu. Trump made the tweet and posted the same message to Facebook just hours after arriving back at the White House following a multi-day stay at Walter Reed medical center, where the president

Facebook and Twitter took action against a post from President Trump Tuesday that claimed that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu. Trump made the tweet and posted the same message to Facebook just hours after arriving back at the White House following a multi-day stay at Walter Reed medical center, where the president was treated after testing positive for COVID-19.

Facebook took down Trump’s post outright Tuesday, stating that it “[removes] incorrect information about the severity of COVID-19, and have now removed this post.” Twitter hid the tweet behind a warning saying that it broke the platform’s rules about spreading misleading or harmful COVID-19 misinformation.

“We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy by making misleading health claims about COVID-19,” a Twitter spokesperson said.

Taking down one of the president’s posts is rare but it wasn’t a first for Facebook. In August, Facebook removed a video Trump shared in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19. The clip originally aired on Fox News.

On twitter, Trump’s tweet will have “significantly limited” engagement, meaning that it can’t be retweeted without quoting, liked or replied to, but it will remain up because it’s in the public interest. By the time Twitter took action on the tweet it had more than 59,000 retweets and 186,000 likes.

Facebook and Twitter both created new policies to address the spread of pandemic-related misinformation earlier this year. In the pandemic’s earlier days, the false claim that COVID is comparable to the flu was a common refrain from Trump and his allies, who wished to downplay the severity of the virus.  But after months of the virus raging through communities around the U.S., the claim that COVID-19 is like the flu is an even more glaring lie.

While much remains not understood about the virus, it can follow an aggressive and unpredictable trajectory in patients, attacking vital organs beyond the lungs and leaving people who contracted it with long-lasting health effects that are not yet thoroughly studied or understood. Trump’s own physician has said the president “may not be out of the woods yet” in his own fight with the virus.

In recent months, the president’s social media falsehoods had shifted more toward lies about the safety of vote-by-mail, the system many Americans will rely on to cast votes as the pandemic rages on.

But less than a day out of a multi-day stay at the hospital where he was given supplemental oxygen and three experimental treatments, it’s clear Trump’s own diagnosis with the virus doesn’t mean he intends to treat the health threat that’s upended the economy and claimed more than 200,000 lives with any seriousness at all.

Instead, Trump is poised to continue waging a political war against platforms like Twitter and Facebook — if the results of the election give him the chance. Trump has already expressed interest in dismantling Section 230, a key legal provision that protects platforms from liability for user-generated content. He tweeted “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” Tuesday after Twitter and Facebook took action against his posts saying the flu is worse than COVID-19.

News: Google adds ‘Stories’ to its search app for iOS and Android

• October 6, 2020
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Google announced today it’s introducing a Stories feature to its Google app for iOS and Android, which now reaches over 800 million people per month. In a new carousel within the app, users in supported markets will be presented with a row of tappable visual Stories from participating publishers. These Stories can include full screen

Google announced today it’s introducing a Stories feature to its Google app for iOS and Android, which now reaches over 800 million people per month. In a new carousel within the app, users in supported markets will be presented with a row of tappable visual Stories from participating publishers. These Stories can include full screen video, photos, and audio and can link out to the publisher’s other content, if desired.

The company has been developing its own Stories product for some time. In 2018, it introduced AMP Stories, based on technology developed for Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project. The Stories, which are already integrated into mobile Google Search, are meant to give Google its own alternative to the Stories offering found in other apps like Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. But, in Google’s case, Stories are focused on publisher content.

Image Credits: Google

Today, Google is referring to this visual content as “Web Stories,” not AMP Stories, and is integrating the experience into the Google search app in the U.S., India and Brazil to start.

Here, users will see the row of Web Stories at the top of the Discover tab, where they can tap to enter the full-screen Story experience. Like Stories found in other apps, you can tap to move forward to the next page in a Google Web Story or swipe to move to a different Story in the carousel.

Image Credits: Google

Publishers are responsible for authoring their Stories and have control over Story monetization, hosting, and sharing and adding links to the Stories, Google notes. To create these Stories, the publishers can use drag-and-drop tools like the Web Story editor for WordPress, MakeStories, or NewsroomAI. Technical users can instead opt to code Web Stories themselves.

Early adopters of the format have been using Web Stories on their homepage, on social channels, in newsletters, and more, in addition to having them featured in Google Search, the company says.

Image Credits: Google

Google has been working with a number of publishers to help them create Web Stories for Search and now, its native mobile app. Partners include Forbes, Vice, Refinery29, USA Today, Lonely Planet, Now This, Thrillist, Popsugar, The Dodo, Bustle, Input, Nylon, The Hollywood Reporter, Blavity, PC Gamer, Golfweek, and many others. The publishers and Google collaborated on the new product and helped build out its features, Google says.

To date, over 2,000 websites have published Stories that have been indexed by Google.

The update to the Google app on iOS and Android is rolling out today.

News: Tone raises $4M to help e-commerce brands text with their customers

• October 6, 2020
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While many companies are using chatbots and other forms of automation to manage their communication with customers, Boston-based Tone is betting that humans will remain a key part of the equation. “The traditional models of bots and humans is, ‘Hello, I’m a bot, now you get to battle with me finally get to a human,’”

While many companies are using chatbots and other forms of automation to manage their communication with customers, Boston-based Tone is betting that humans will remain a key part of the equation.

“The traditional models of bots and humans is, ‘Hello, I’m a bot, now you get to battle with me finally get to a human,’” said Tone CEO Tivan Amour. “Our verison of that is, ‘I’m a human using AI to get you the answers you need more quickly.’”

Amour and his co-founder Vlad Pick previously created a bicycle startup called Fortified Bicycle, and he said they “figured out that the best way to close our customers on these $750 to $7,000 orders was to actually engage them in text message conversations.”

After all, when it comes to “high consideration” purchases like bicycles, people usually want discuss their questions and concerns with another human being. Over time, the Fortified team built what Amour said was a “semi-automated system” to help its sales team stay on top of these conversations.

“We started bragging about it to our friends about it, ‘You’ve gotta do this, it’s the future of mobile commerce,’” he recalled. “And they’d say, ‘Okay, that’s cool, but we don’t have any of the systems of doing that, we don’t have the salespeople.’”

Tone’s founders

So after selling Fortified Bicycle, Amour and Pick created Tone to help any e-commerce business manage similar text message conversations. Tone employs its own team of human agents to actually do the texting, assisted by software that helps them find the information they need.

It integrates with e-commerce systems like Shopify and Magento, and it’s already working with more than 1,000 brands like ThirdLove, Peak Design and Usual Wines — who are seeing as much as a 26% increase in revenue and a 15% increase in order size.

Amour also noted that specific Tone agents are assigned to specific brands, which means that customers will be talking to the same person whenever they have a question for that business. In some cases, customers have been talking to the same agent for months or years.

“Particularly in a post-COVID world, it’s pretty clear that online shopping has become the dominant form of shoping, but I think nobody has thought about how you replace that human experience that you get in traditional retail,” he said.

Tone is announcing today that it has raised $4 million in seed funding from led by Bling Capital, with participation from Day One Ventures, One Way Ventures, TIA Ventures and executives from Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Uber.

With the new funding, Amour said Tone will be able to build out the “relationship automation” aspect of the product. He also suggested that the platform could eventually expand beyond text messaging, but it sounds like that’s not a big priority.

“In theory, we’re a conversational sales platform more than we are an SMS company,” he said. “However there are a bunch of trends right now [such as the growth of mobile commerce] that make SMS be the most obvious place for this sort of innovation.”

News: Apple will announce the next iPhone on October 13

• October 6, 2020
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Apple just sent out invites for its upcoming hardware event, all but confirming the arrival of the next iPhone. The event is scheduled nearly a month to the day after the its last big event, which gave us the Apple Watch Series 6 and two new iPads. A new iPhone was conspicuously absent from the

Apple just sent out invites for its upcoming hardware event, all but confirming the arrival of the next iPhone. The event is scheduled nearly a month to the day after the its last big event, which gave us the Apple Watch Series 6 and two new iPads.

A new iPhone was conspicuously absent from the proceedings — not an entirely unexpected turn of events, of course. CEO Tim Cook confirmed earlier this year that there would be a delay the arrival of the company’s new flagship, owing to COVID-19 hardware supply chain issues.

Image Credits: Apple /

The iPhone 12 is set to finally deliver 5G connectivity to Apple’s product line, coupled with a new design, chip and a push to OLED for all entries in the line. There are expected to be three new models in all, ranging from 5.4 to 6.4 inches. The company will, no doubt, also be using the occasion to release additional hardware. Audio seems like a pretty obvious addition — perhaps we’ll finally be seeing the company’s long-awaited over-ear headphones, the AirPods Studio.

The event kicks off virtually at 10AM PT. As ever, we’ll be bringing you the news live.

News: Google Assistant comes to gaze-powered accessible devices

• October 6, 2020
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People who rely on gaze-tracking to interact with their devices on an everyday basis now have a powerful new tool in their arsenal: Google Assistant. Substituting gaze for its original voice-based interface, the Assistant’s multiple integrations and communication tools should improve the capabilities of the Tobii Dynavox devices it now works on. Assistant will now

People who rely on gaze-tracking to interact with their devices on an everyday basis now have a powerful new tool in their arsenal: Google Assistant. Substituting gaze for its original voice-based interface, the Assistant’s multiple integrations and communication tools should improve the capabilities of the Tobii Dynavox devices it now works on.

Assistant will now be possible to add as a tile on Tobii’s eye-tracking tablets and mobile apps, which present a large customizable grid of commonly used items that the user can look at to activate. It acts as an intermediary with a large collection of other software and hardware interfaces that Google supports.

For instance smart home appliances — which can be incredibly useful for people with certain disabilities — may not have an easily accessible interface for the gaze-tracking device, necessitating other means or perhaps limiting what actions a user can take. Google Assistant works with tons of that stuff out of the box.

“Being able to control the things around you and ‘the world’ is central to many of our users,” said Tobii Dynavox’s CEO, Fredrik Ruben. “The Google assistant ecosystem provides almost endless possibilities – and provides a lot of normalcy to our community of users.”

Users will be able to set up Assistant tiles for commands or apps, and automate inquiries like “what’s on my calendar today?” The setup process just requires a Google account, and then the gaze-tracking device (in this case Tobii Dynavox’s mystifyingly named Snap Core First app) has to be added to the Google Home app as a smart speaker/display. Then Assistant tiles can be added to the interface and customized with whatever commands would ordinarily be spoken.

Image Credits: Google / Tobii Dynavox

Ruben said the integration of Google’s software was “technically straightforward.” “Because our software itself is already built to support a wide variety of access needs and is set up to accommodate launching third-party services, there was a natural fit between our software and Google Assistant’s services,” he explained.

Tobii’s built-in library of icons (things like lights with an up arrow, a door being opened or closed, and other visual representations of actions) can also be applied easily to the Assistant shortcuts.

For Google’s part, this is just the latest in a series of interesting accessibility services the company has developed, including live transcription, detection when sign language is being used in group video calls, and speech recognition that accommodates non-standard voices and people with impediments. Much of the web is not remotely accessible but at least the major tech companies put in some good work now and then to help.

News: Despite pandemic, Amazon Prime Day expected to generate nearly $10B in global sales

• October 6, 2020
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A new forecast released today estimates Amazon’s delayed Prime Day sales event will top last year’s by bringing in an estimated nearly $10 billion in worldwide sales when it runs later this month. According to eMarketer, which released its first-ever Prime Day forecast, consumers will continue to spend heavily on e-commerce and seek out deals

A new forecast released today estimates Amazon’s delayed Prime Day sales event will top last year’s by bringing in an estimated nearly $10 billion in worldwide sales when it runs later this month. According to eMarketer, which released its first-ever Prime Day forecast, consumers will continue to spend heavily on e-commerce and seek out deals ahead of the 2020 holiday season, benefitting the major sales event.

The firm says of the total $9.91 billion in Prime Day 2020 global sales, $6.17 billion will be generated by U.S. consumers.

This is ahead of what Prime Day achieved in years past. In 2019, the sales event delivered $6.93 billion in sales, eMarketer says, with $4.32 billion from the U.S.. Total Prime Day sales in 2016, 2017 and 2018, were at $1.5 billion, $2.47 billion, and $4.13 billion, respectively.

These estimates are fairly in line with those from other firms. For example, Internet Retailer had estimated Prime Day 2019 reached $7.16 billion in global sales, up from $4.19 billion in the year prior. Amazon doesn’t detail Prime Day sales volume, specifically, but last year said it had sold over 175 million items during the event.

Image Credits: eMarketer

Forecasting for this year’s Prime Day, of course, has been much more difficult due to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the e-commerce industry. The health crisis has disrupted supply chains, causing delays, while consumer demand can be unpredictable. Some past boosts in e-commerce spending for major retailers was also closely tied to government stimulus checks.

Due the to pandemic, Amazon this year decided to move its annual sales holiday from mid-July to October for most markets. Meanwhile, the retailer ran Prime Day in India in August — later than it had been held in prior years, but ahead of other countries’ Prime Day events planned for 2020. Following the India event, Amazon reported record seller participation, and said it gained at least 1 million new subscribers for its Prime membership program.

Despite the changes to Prime Day, the analysts at eMarketer believe Prime Day’s predictability will help to continue to drive traffic and sales this year.

“Since Prime Day’s 2015 debut, Amazon has expanded the scale and spectacle of the event in a mostly predictable fashion,” said Andrew Lipsman, eMarketer principal analyst. “The generally incremental changes from year to year gave customers and sellers a better sense of what to expect, with Lightning Deals and heavily discounted Echos and Fire TVs taking center stage. Sellers developed a playbook for their promotions and advertising strategy and could plan their inventory accordingly,” he added.

Though Prime Day doesn’t officially begin until October 13, Amazon has already started to run some early deals for Prime subscribers, including a discounted Echo Show 5 ($45 instead of $90), a discounted Echo Auto ($30 off at $19.99), cheaper Echo Dots, as well as discounts on an Amazon TV-powered Insignia 4K TV, Blink Mini devices, and others.

Prime Day has also typically inspired a range of competitive sales, given that Amazon’s event would drive an increase in online shopping that benefitted other e-commerce retailers. As of March, as many as 37% of digital retailers said their Prime Day plans were up in the air because of coronavirus, but 56% said they still expected Prime Day sales would perform well, eMarketer noted.

So far, Target has planned a massive sale, Target Deal Days, to compete with Prime Day, which promises Black Friday-like discounts on hundreds of thousands of items on the same days that Prime Day runs. Walmart, on the other hand, said it would run its event starting earlier, on Sunday Oct. 11 through Oct. 15.

News: Nivelo nabs $2.5M seed to reduce risk in digital ACH payments

• October 6, 2020
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As we plunge deeper into the pandemic, online transactions have become increasingly important, and ACH transactions, the ones that help us get direct deposit of our paychecks or pay our bills are growing ever more essential. Nivelo, an early stage startup from a former JP Morgan executive wants to take the risk out of ACH

As we plunge deeper into the pandemic, online transactions have become increasingly important, and ACH transactions, the ones that help us get direct deposit of our paychecks or pay our bills are growing ever more essential. Nivelo, an early stage startup from a former JP Morgan executive wants to take the risk out of ACH transactions and today the company announced a $2.5 million seed investment, which closed in mid-August.

FirstMark, Barclays and Anthemis led the round with help from Dash Fund and several individual investors. While the company was announcing its first funding, it also launched a private beta of a Risk Scoring API for payments.

Company co-founder Eli Polanco says that ACH payments are a huge business, but mostly haven’t been updated for quick and safe digital transactions “We protect digital payments in real time, but taking a step back our focus is ACH payments, which are the most ubiquitous payment channel in the U.S.,” Polanco told TechCrunch.

To give you a sense of how big this business is, more than $55 trillion worth of transactions moves through the ACH channel annually, yet Polanco says for the most part, it remains mired in legacy technology. Her company wants to update the risk component by building a set of APIs that companies can tap into and understand the risk associated with a particular transaction.

“We’re unbundling this risk assessment service and packaging it in the easiest way possible in the form of APIs and embedding it into the most critical payment use cases in the U.S.,” she said.

Polanco, who is a Black woman who grew up in the Dominican Republic, started the company in January and went to raise money. She had a lot going for her including a strong background in payments products, a working product and paying customers. While she faced a lot of due diligence, she expected that, especially as a newly minted founder at a time when she couldn’t meet with investors in person.

Still, she knows the odds for Black founders are abysmal, but she says she could only come armed with data and tell her story. “I know that discrimination and racism exist in the world, but I can just live and play offense as much as possible and come prepared,” she said. Ultimately she prevailed and got her funding.

She said that the pandemic has reinforced how important having a safe digital payment system is. “COVID really shone a light into how unprepared we are for where the world is moving to. When COVID happened and a lot of folks were no longer able to rely on checks and cash […] it elevated the prominent rise of moving to digital payments,” she said. And investors saw this too.

Polanco says that she is also building her financial services tooling with the idea of leveling the playing field for everyone. “My hyper focus on risk infrastructure is directly tied to my outsider experience as an immigrant. When you’re trying to get access to any financial service, you’re always the edge case in the risk models that they have, and you’re always going to have additional friction. So when you grow up as a product manager who has always experienced this, you always have a keen sight on building accurate, but accessible FinTech tools,” she said.

Nivelo is taking its first steps as a company with this funding, but it’s on its way with an alpha product and a future road map of products and services. The company is live with a couple of thousand customers today.