Monthly Archives: November 2020

News: Facebook launches E.gg, an experimental collage making app

• November 18, 2020
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Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, has today officially launched its latest app, E.gg, to a broader audience. The app, a freeform creation tool described as a “digital zine creator” and “GIF collage bonanza,” was announced earlier this year, but was only onboarding users via a waitlist until now. Today, it’s available in the App

Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, has today officially launched its latest app, E.gg, to a broader audience. The app, a freeform creation tool described as a “digital zine creator” and “GIF collage bonanza,” was announced earlier this year, but was only onboarding users via a waitlist until now. Today, it’s available in the App Store for anyone to download.

The app allows users to create and share canvases, which are basically mixed media “artsy” collages created using a combination of text, images, and/or GIFs. The latter leverages Facebook’s acquisition of the GIF repository Giphy from May. Anything you make in E.gg can be given its own unique URL, allowing others to view your content even if they don’t have the app installed themselves.

However, if you do use E.gg, you can browse through other people’s work directly in the app. And when you discover something on their pages you like, you can easily reuse that content on your own pages with attribution.

When first introducing E.gg this summer, Facebook Product Manager Jason Toff described it as an “experimental new platform for weird and wonderful expressions of who you are and what you love,” adding that the inspiration for the project was the “raw and exploratory spirit on the early Interwebz.”

In other words, the early days of the web resulted in a lot more weird and offbeat creativity, because users were experimenting with what was possible — from dancing baby GIFs to awful font choices to tacky website backgrounds.

The question E.gg aims to answer is whether a more low-pressure, creative tool can help give people the power to express themselves more freely.

Facebook says that during its beta testing phase, people used E.gg to create create fan pages, guides, tributes, profiles, collages, recipes and more.

Unfortunately, the app during its beta period had also been met with complaints from artists who claimed it was stealing their work. They said the tool had pulled in their GIFs without permission or credit. Facebook responded at the time to acknowledge the issues and noted that the reason the app was still in a beta testing phase was to get feedback about the sort of problems it needed to correct before going live. The company said it would hold off on expanding E.gg until it fixed these problems.

Facebook says it has addressed the attribution issues. On the desktop, it’s testing an “attribution” button on the bottom left of each page. On mobile, you can tap “bits” to see who art is by, the company notes.

E.gg is available as a free download from the iOS App Store in the U.S. Users can also view a few sample creations via http://e.gg.

News: Grouparoo snares $3M seed to build open source customer data integration framework

• November 18, 2020
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Creating a great customer experience requires a lot of data from a variety of sources, and pulling that disparate data together has captured the attention of companies and big and small from Salesforce and Adobe to Segment and Klaviyo. Today, Grouparoo, a new startup from three industry vets is the next company up with an

Creating a great customer experience requires a lot of data from a variety of sources, and pulling that disparate data together has captured the attention of companies and big and small from Salesforce and Adobe to Segment and Klaviyo. Today, Grouparoo, a new startup from three industry vets is the next company up with an open source framework designed to make it easier for developers to access and make use of customer data.

The company announced a $3 million seed investment led by Eniac Ventures and Fuel Capital with participation from Hack VC, Liquid2, SCM Advisors and several unnamed angel investors.

Grouparoo CEO and co-founder Brian Leonard says that his company has created this open source customer data framework based on his own experience and difficulty getting customer data into the various tools he has been using since he was technical founder at TaskRabbit in 2008.

“We’re an open source data framework that helps companies easily sync their customer data from their database or warehouse to all of the SaaS tools where they need it. [After you] install it, you teach it about your customers, like what properties are important in each of those profiles. And then it allows you to segment them into the groups that matter,” Leonard explained.

This could be something like high earners in San Francisco along with names and addresses. Grouparoo can grab this data and transfer it to a marketing tool like Marketo or Zendesk and these tools could then learn who your VIP customers are.

For now the company is just the three founders Leonard, CTO Evan Tahler and COO Andy Jih, and while he wasn’t ready to commit to how many people he might hire in the next 12 months, he sees it being less than 10. At this early stage, the three co-founders have already been considering how to build a diverse and inclusive company, something he helped contribute to while he was at TaskRabbit.

“So, coming from [what we built at TaskRabbit] and starting something new, it’s important to all three of us to start [building a diverse company] from the beginning, and especially combined with this notion that we’re building something open source. We’ve been talking a lot about being open about our culture and what’s important to us,” he said.

TaskRabbit also comes into play in their investment where Fuel GP Leah Solivan was also founder of TaskRabbit. “Grouparoo is solving a real and acute issue that companies grapple with as they scale — giving every member of the team access to the data they need to drive revenue, acquire customers and improve real-time decision making. Brian, Andy and Evan have developed an elegant solution to an issue we experienced firsthand at TaskRabbit,” she said.

For now the company is taking an open source approach to build a community around the tool. It is still pre-revenue, but the plan is to find a way to build something commercial on top of the open source tooling. They are considering an open core license where they can add features or support or offer the tool as a service. Leonard says that is something they intend to work out in 2021.

News: Language learning app Duolingo confirms it has raised $35M on a $2.4B valuation

• November 18, 2020
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Last week, we reported that popular language learning app Duolingo, with 500 million total app downloads​, was raising $35 million on a valuation of at least $2.21 billion — the latest chapter in what has become a long book on how e-learning and other education startups are raking in big audiences and significant funding, a

Last week, we reported that popular language learning app Duolingo, with 500 million total app downloads​, was raising $35 million on a valuation of at least $2.21 billion — the latest chapter in what has become a long book on how e-learning and other education startups are raking in big audiences and significant funding, a byproduct of the Covid-19 pandemic driving more people indoors and on to screens for all of their interactions.

(Fittingly, Duolingo’s details were part of a bigger scoop on how another edtech startup, Udemy, was looking to raise $100 million.)

Now Duolingo’s numbers are official. The company has confirmed that it has raised $35 million in funding from two investors, Durable Capital (the firm founded last year by Henry Ellenbogen, previously a star at T. Rowe Price) and General Atlantic. The funding is bringing the valuation of Duolingo up to $2.4 billion.

For some context, this is a sizable jump on the $1.65 billion valuation that Duolingo clocked up earlier this year, when General Atlantic quietly put $10 million into the company.

Part of the reason for the boost is the general market.

Edtech has seen a surge of usage and attention, from educational institutions looking for more effective ways to teach when in-person classes are not possible; from businesses looking for ways to train and engage employees who are now working remotely; from consumers looking to do something more productive beyond watching Netflix and arguing about Trump with distant contacts on Facebook; from educators looking for more inspiration for how to teach concepts that are harder to grasp when students are far flung.

Duolingo itself has been a beneficiary of that. The freemium app — which is free to use with in-app options to pay for extra gamified features, and advertising — says its base of learners has grown by 30% in the last year, with bookings on track to increase 100%.

In what is a boost for investor confidence, these were trends the app was already seeing before the pandemic — the 100% revenue growth has been the rate for the last three years. Duolingo has ranked since 2019 as the highest-grossing education app, according to Sensor Tower.

The company is based in Pittsburgh, and most of its users are in the U.S., but it is also picking up an increasing number of people abroad as well (including my husband, here in London, learning Italian). Asia now makes up 15% of the company’s user base, and as another mark of its position with international users, it has seen a 15-fold growth in people taking its Duolingo English Test as part of the higher-education admissions process.

What will be interesting to see is how Duolingo navigates its next steps. The company was co-founded, and currently led, by reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn and the earliest iteration of its business model was based on the idea that language learners and app users would translate text submitted by paying companies. These days, it makes money from advertising and in-app premium features.

It also has extended into learning for other age groups beyond adults, with a launch earlier this year of an app for children learning to read and write.

That’s speaks to more revenue diversification, which could come in handy when and if the company ever goes public.

“I’m proud of the impact we have achieved while also significantly growing our business,” ​said CEO von Ahn in a statement.

“Duolingo is the kind of business that matches what we look for in our investments: they are mission-driven, have a great culture, and great people that can compound significantly over time,” said Henry Ellenbogen, founder and chief investment officer of Durable Capital Partners LP, in a statement. “Luis is also an incredible entrepreneur, and we’re very excited to partner with Duolingo for their next phase of growth.”

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Luis and Duolingo after initially investing in the business in April 2020,” said Tanzeen Syed, MD at General Atlantic. “Duolingo has successfully built foundational learning technology, an effective and engaging product, and a passionate community of users. We believe the company has additional opportunity to strengthen its market-leading position and expand its product, team, and customer base, while capitalizing on the global acceleration in digital learning.”

Among the other funding deals for edtech startups,

Just looking at some of the most recent deals, Udacity announced a $75 million debt round and said it was finally profitable earlier this month. In October, Kahoot announced a $215 million round from SoftBank. And in September, Outschool raised $45 million (and is now profitable); Homer raised $50 million (from an impressive group of strategic backers); Unacademy raised $150 million and the juggernaut that is Byju’s picked up $500 million from Silver Lake.

There have also been a number of smaller fundraises, new edtech startup launches and other signs of momentum as the bigger market comes to terms with online education being here to say.

News: Bond Vet raises $17 million to be the CityMD of veterinary care

• November 18, 2020
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Bond Vet, the NYC-based tech-forward veterinary startup, has announced the close of a $17 million Series A financing. The round was led by Talisman Capital Partners. The startup has clinics across NYC that are meant to fill the gap between veterinary ERs and the veterinary equivalent of a primary care physician, modeling the business after

Bond Vet, the NYC-based tech-forward veterinary startup, has announced the close of a $17 million Series A financing. The round was led by Talisman Capital Partners.

The startup has clinics across NYC that are meant to fill the gap between veterinary ERs and the veterinary equivalent of a primary care physician, modeling the business after CityMD. Unlike some other new veterinary startups, Bond doesn’t require a membership to book an appointment. Pet parents can either walk in or make an appointment on the website or mobile app.

The startup also provides both urgent care and primary care, including regular vaccinations and check-ups.

Bond puts a particular focus on the design of the clinic itself, with high-friction floors so puppies don’t slip and examination tables that give pet parents the ability to remain close to their furry friend during procedures or examinations when appropriate.

The company also has technology on the back-end for vets and nurses that make the process of providing care more efficient (like with note taking, for example) so that they can spend more time with the patients.

Bond has its own telehealth platform as well, to let pet parents text with their vet before and after appointments, or potentially even replace an appointment and solve the issue remotely.

Cofounder and CEO Mo Punjani explained that the efficiencies built in to Bond Vet allow the company to pass on savings to customers. While primary care services are on par with other vets, according to Punjani, emergency services can be rendered at a much lower cost than a traditional veterinary ER.

Pet spending is set to top $100 billion next year, according to the American Pet Products Association, as millennials opt to use higher-quality products for their animals. Startups across the pet ecosystem have capitalized on this new trend, and Bond Vet is among them.

The Bond Vet team, which includes in-clinic staff and HQ, is about 100 people, and 80 percent of employees are female.

Since launch in June of 2019, Bond has seen upwards of 15,000 unique pets in its clinics. The company plans to use the funding to keep building out its technology stack and expand its physical footprint, with plans to launch clinics in suburban areas next year.

News: Cryptocurrency exchange Liquid confirms hack

• November 18, 2020
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Cryptocurrency exchange Liquid has confirmed it was hacked, but that the scope of the incident is still under investigation. The company’s chief executive Mike Kayamori said in a blog post the attack happened on November 13. The hacker gained access to the company’s domain records, allowing the hacker to take control of several employee email

Cryptocurrency exchange Liquid has confirmed it was hacked, but that the scope of the incident is still under investigation.

The company’s chief executive Mike Kayamori said in a blog post the attack happened on November 13. The hacker gained access to the company’s domain records, allowing the hacker to take control of several employee email accounts, and later compromised the company’s network.

Kayamori said that while cryptocurrency funds are “accounted for,” the hacker may have accessed the company’s document storage. “We believe the malicious actor was able to obtain personal information from our user database. This may include data such as your email, name, address and encrypted password,” he said.

The company said it was “continuing to investigate” if the hacker gained access to documents that users submitted to verify their identity with the exchange, such as a government-issued ID, selfie, or proof of address, which could put users at a heightened risk of identity theft or for targeted attacks.

Liquid told users in an email that they should change their passwords to be safe.

Attacks that target a company’s network infrastructure take advantage of weak or reused passwords that were used to register the company’s domain name. By breaking in and changing those network settings, attackers can invisibly control the network and gain access to email accounts and systems that would be far more difficult through other routes of attack.

Cryptocurrency startups and exchanges are high-value targets for hackers, given the potential for massive financial rewards of a successful breach. In 2018, Nano saw $170 million stolen in a breach, Coinrail lost $40 million after a hack, Bithumb lost $30 million, and Binance and Coincheck each lost a massive $400 million after hackers broke in.

Liquid was founded in 2014, and claims to have facilitated the trade of $50 billion in cryptocurrency over the past year.

More:

• DOJ says it seized over $1 billion in bitcoin from the Silk Road drugs marketplace
• A hacker used Twitter’s own ‘admin’ tool to spread cryptocurrency scam
• Apple, Biden, Musk and other high-profile Twitter accounts hacked in crypto scam

News: Quid raises $320M to loan money to startup employees using their equity as collateral

• November 18, 2020
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Startups that take time to scale before going public or getting acquired can represent big, if long-term, returns for employees that hold equity in them. Big, because tech companies have proven to be some of the most valuable in the world when it comes to exits; long-term, because it might take years for a startup

Startups that take time to scale before going public or getting acquired can represent big, if long-term, returns for employees that hold equity in them. Big, because tech companies have proven to be some of the most valuable in the world when it comes to exits; long-term, because it might take years for a startup to have a liquidity event to give those equity-holding employees some money off the table.

Today, a company called Quid, which has built a business out of giving those employees another option — taking out loans and using their equity as collateral — is announcing a new fund to target that growing opportunity.

After providing loans to employees at some 24 companies, including Unity, Palantir, Crowdstrike, Uber, and Lyft, Quid now has raised a new $320 million fund that it plans to deploy both by collaborating directly with more startups to run programs for their employees, as well directly with employees themselves.

The aim is to select 30 more high-growth startups on track to IPO, and to allocate up to $30 million per company in the form of loans to employees, based on loaning up to 35% of the stock’s current value.

Quid was founded within Troy Capital — an investor that made its name previously with growth-stage investments in Uber, Bird, SpaceX and others — and Troy’s two managing partners, Josh Berman and Anthony Tucker (pictured below), run Quid as well. Berman has a pretty long history in startups and tech, including being one of the founders of MySpace; Tucker is younger and brings a stronger connection with how tech is moving and shaking today.

Quid raised its first fund of $200 million to deploy loans to those whole money was locked up in equity back in 2018, and it was spun out of Troy more formally earlier this year (pre-Covid).

Quid says that this latest fund is backed by Harvard Management Company, Oaktree Capital, Davidson Kempner, and unnamed strategic investors that include board members at leading late stage technology companies — perhaps the very companies that Quid in turn will work with to help give employees more liquidity.

The problem that Quid is tackling — or, in another view, profiting from — is that equity in a potentially hot startup has been a big driver for attracting talent to join what might otherwise turn out to be risky bets. But unlocking the cash connected to that equity typically only comes with a liquidity event. (Indeed, “quid” is double-word play: a reference to liquidity, as well as to slang that means money. In British English, quid is slang for the UK pound currency, which in turn is thought to be a reference to the Latin quid pro quo, which means “something for something.”)

Those liquidity events are not coming as fast these days as in the past, in part because there is so much money swimming around in the venture world that companies can stay private for longer, using venture and private equity funding to fuel their growth without needing to open themselves up to raising capital in a more public way.

While some companies will have secondary rounds — where another investor buys up existing shares — to give employees some liquidity, this isn’t always the case, and those processes can take longer. Those employees may need the cash for buying property, or for some large outlay around education or something else that requires a large payment, or to buy up more options in their company. So Berman and Tucker spotted an opportunity to address that with their own money.

Quid works in a pretty straightforward way: Quid takes a flat 7% annual fee on the amount that a person borrows, and that value is based on how much equity she or he has in a company, and calculations that Quid itself works out that value that equity.

That valuation may be in part based on previous rounds of fundraising, but also if shares are trading on the secondary market as well as other factors, Berman said. The loan against the equity amount is positioned as an alternative to selling shares on the secondary market, with the carrot being that if you’re at a high-growth company, holding on to those shares will give you a bigger return in the longer run.

A person is only expected to pay back the agreed-on sum, based on the value of the equity at the time of the loan, after equity shares can start to be converted into cash. Quid also pays tax bills and basically guarantees the loan itself, in that it assumes a company’s value is going to stay steady or go up.

“If a company turns out to be a Theranos or a WeWork, we take the risk,” said Berman. People are not expected to pay back the full sum in those cases.

The catch is that not everyone is eligible to take out a Quid loan. Berman said that to date it has worked with only 24 companies. It vets companies based on their growth rates, valuation and other factors, and then only chooses a subsection of those.

That list is likely to grow a little larger now, however, not least because Quid has more money to deploy, and because the pool of companies that have hit “unicorn” status of being worth more than $1 billion has also become a lot bigger.

As with so much in the world of investing, it seems like a simple enough idea, so much so that it would be a surprise if it didn’t get copied.

And, when you consider the giant investment vehicles that have landed in the last several years, and the challenges they have had in simply finding enough opportunities for investing their funds, and how that might have possibly led to some particularly bad and indiscrete bets, you can also imagine how such a service might end up being yet another bad bet if not handled well.

“There are a lot of funds that have large amounts of capital,” said Tucker. “But for us, a lot of this is about a customer relationship. It’s about marrying the ability to underwrite a loan with that.”

News: Pokémon GO will bump its max level cap to 50 and add more Pokémon soon

• November 18, 2020
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Since launching four years ago, hitting level 40 in Pokémon GO meant hitting the top. You could still keep catching Pokémon and gathering XP, of course — but that shiny level badge wasn’t going up any higher. That’ll change later this month with an update that bumps the cap to 50, introduces new Pokémon, and

Since launching four years ago, hitting level 40 in Pokémon GO meant hitting the top. You could still keep catching Pokémon and gathering XP, of course — but that shiny level badge wasn’t going up any higher.

That’ll change later this month with an update that bumps the cap to 50, introduces new Pokémon, and makes other gameplay tweaks.

Here’s whats changing:

• New level cap: Starting November 30th, the max level in Pokémon GO will now be 50. Niantic tells me that XP you’ve already accumulated beyond what’s required for Level 40 will count toward new levels. However, there’s more to levels 41-50 than just XP; each new level comes with a set of challenges you must complete, such as completing 100 Field Research tasks or hatching 30 eggs — so no one will be hitting the new cap immediately. Some ultra-dedicated players have accumulated XP many, many times past what’s needed to hit 40, so this twist makes sense.
• XP System Overhaul: Niantic is adjusting how much XP players get for things like catching Pokémon, hatching eggs, etc, primarily to make getting to level 40 a bit less of a grind. Anyone who hits Level 40 before the end of the year will get some special stuff, including an exclusive Gyarados hat for their avatar and a “Legacy 40” medal.
• New Pokémon: A new generation of Pokémon — those from the “Kalos” region originally featured in Pokémon X and Y — will start appearing on December 2nd.
• Seasons: Niantic is introducing the concept of “seasons” to the game. Seasons will change every 3 months based on what hemisphere you’re in, and determine things like what Pokémon you see and which forms certain Pokémon will take. In-game events will now be themed around each season; the in-game player-versus-player battle league, meanwhile, will now be three months long and tied to the same schedule.

Niantic is giving this update a big flashy name for the first time, dubbing it “Pokémon GO Beyond”. It’s the biggest update the game has seen in a long while — definitely the biggest this year.

News: Marissa Mayer’s startup launches its first official product, Sunshine Contacts

• November 18, 2020
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Former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee Marissa Mayer’s startup Lumi Labs is today rebranding to Sunshine and releasing its first official product. Its new app, Sunshine Contacts, aims to be a better tool for organizing, updating and sharing contact information with others. In time, the company envisions a portfolio of consumer-facing applications that simplify

Former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee Marissa Mayer’s startup Lumi Labs is today rebranding to Sunshine and releasing its first official product. Its new app, Sunshine Contacts, aims to be a better tool for organizing, updating and sharing contact information with others. In time, the company envisions a portfolio of consumer-facing applications that simplify common tasks in areas like events, organization, family sharing, scheduling and more.

Founded in 2018 by Mayer and fellow Yahoo and Google vet Enrique Muñoz Torres, Lumi Labs has been focused on using sophisticated technologies, like A.I., to improve the common applications people use every day.

Or, as Mayer puts it, “if technology can drive a car, how come it can’t just organize my contacts, make scheduling easier or do some things that seem a lot more straightforward?” She says the goal with Lumi Labs — or now Sunshine, as it’s called — is to make those everyday apps better and more frictionless.

The company last year released a small experiment that hinted at what was to come with Holiday Helper, a desktop app that helped users more easily put together their holiday mailing list.

That product was not fully fleshed out, however, and Mayer today characterizes it as more of an exercise or a warm up for the Sunshine team.

With the launch of Sunshine Contacts, the company is moving closer towards its goal of using modern technologies to improve mundane tasks.

The new app, at first glance, seems not unlike those introduced in years past with the similar goal of better organizing and updating a user’s contacts, like Mingle, Vignette, Humin, FullContact, Bump, CardFlick, Hashable, My Name is E, CardMunch, Brewster, or any of dozens of startups that once aimed to kill the business card or auto-update your address book.

While most of those early efforts are no more, alternative apps like Cardhop from Flexibits, for example, are still able to attract a loyal user base looking for an expanded feature and more improvements over built-in solutions, like Apple or Google’s own address books, for instance.

Sunshine Contacts’ approach to the market, meanwhile, isn’t just to attract users interested in improved functionality, but to eventually offer a suite of consumer services under the Sunshine brand.

The app itself seems a little underwhelming in terms of its design, a callback perhaps to the Google aesthetic of things that work, but aren’t very pretty.

Sunshine Contacts works by pulling in data, with permission, from your iPhone contacts and from Google Contacts. In then tries to expand upon the basic information these imports offer by identifying your contact’s place of business, if not available, finding their LinkedIn profile, autocompleting missing information, looking up addresses, adding profile pictures, analyzing phone numbers to label them as work or cell, for example, and more. The app can also help to deduplicate address with merges.

If you additionally give Sunshine Contacts access to your Gmail, it can scan the email signature lines in your inbox to further complete the address fields.

This, of course, isn’t a new concept. FullContact did this in years past, as did smaller startups. Services like Evercontact or SigParser offer similar solutions today. Meanwhile, apps like Rapportive popularized the idea of pulling in external data found on the web to present a more detailed view of your email contacts. (The founder has since moved on to expand upon that original concept with Superhuman, a full email client with tons of other bells and whistles.)

When reaching out to a contact, Sunshine Contacts works a little like a personal CRM, by offering you useful context about your relationship, including your most recent email correspondence. You can also share your contact information easily with other Sunshine users by way of its proximity detection data, but this would only be useful if the app got critical mass.

Given that Sunshine Contact’s feature set is not exactly breaking new ground, Sunshine Contacts will need to try to impress on how well it’s able to perform the tasks at hand.

“I think that the artificial intelligence that we’ve deployed in the app really comes through when you look at the quality,” explains Mayer. For example, she says, other apps’ approach to deduplicating contacts is often fairly basic — only recognizing that there were two “Adam Smiths,” but not digging into the details to realize they were different people.

“They don’t take a confidence interval and signal and evidence-based approach,” Mayer says. “So I think you’ll see the A.I. in the in the quality of the merges, the quality of things like name completion, and nickname identification. We’ve done a bunch of things that I think are quite smart and are better than some of the other things that we’ve seen. I also think that our integration with location is particularly innovative,” she adds.

That is, Sunshine Contacts can access a user’s location — again, with permission — to make further inferences about who a user is spending time with more frequently or to make exchanging contacts between two Sunshine Contacts users easier when they’re meeting in person.

But with all the app’s requests for user data — address books, email integration, location data — Sunshine has an uphill battle in terms of gaining user trust after years of being burned by tech companies that promised conveniences only to gather large data stores of personal data for more nefarious purposes than just making life easier.

To address this issue, Sunshine is offering a privacy pledge where it commits to data security practices and promises to never sell user data.

“We take a very strong stance that this data is not and will never be for sale in any shape or form, says Torres. “So, you’re giving us the data for the purpose of making your product experience essentially better and that is the only purpose that we’re going to be using it for,” he continues. “We don’t sell it in aggregate form and individual forum we don’t target advertising based on it. In fact we don’t have any advertising as part of the app,” Torres notes.

Users can also opt in only to the features they want to use. If they don’t want to share location, for instance, they can simply deny the permission.

Instead, Sunshine’s business model will be a direct-to-consumer freemium model, though for now the Sunshine Contacts app is fully free. As the company rolls out additional offerings in the suite, it will opt to monetize each app in the way that’s most suitable — for instance, by making some basic functionality free, then offering paid upgrades to a larger set of features.

The startup raised a $20M seed round in May 2020 from inside and outside investors, including Felicis Ventures, Unusual Ventures, WIN Ventures, as well as numerous angel investors.

The app is launching first on iOS (iOS 11 or higher) on an invite-only basis in the U.S. A web version will later follow as will support for international markets.

News: Welcome raises $12 million to be the ‘Ritz Carlton for event platforms’

• November 18, 2020
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On the heels of Hopin’s $125 million funding round, a newcomer in the virtual events space is gaining steam. Welcome, led by co-founder and CEO Roberto Ortiz, is positioning itself as the “Ritz Carlton for virtual events,” Ortiz told me. Today, it’s announcing a $12 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation

On the heels of Hopin’s $125 million funding round, a newcomer in the virtual events space is gaining steam. Welcome, led by co-founder and CEO Roberto Ortiz, is positioning itself as the “Ritz Carlton for virtual events,” Ortiz told me. Today, it’s announcing a $12 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Y Combinator, Kapor Capital and Webb Investor Network.

“There’s a land grab opportunity in virtual events,” Ortiz said. “What Covid has done is made 2030 2020. What was going to happen in 2030 happened in 2020. Everyone has been forced into this virtual environment.”

It’s that environment that led Ortiz and his co-founders to pivot from a startup that connected restaurants and food wholesalers to a virtual events startup. While today is the official launch date, Welcome has already hosted events for a handful of clients, including Brooks Winery, Freely in Hope and Elevate 2020.

Welcome features a control room for event producers, breakout rooms for attendees, a green room for speakers, white-label branding, networking, audience question & answer functionality and more. Welcome also offers event producers the ability to hold hybrid events that are both online and in person.

Welcome is targeting enterprise customers for annual contracts in the five-figure range, Ortiz said. He didn’t disclose the exact pricing, but says Welcome is likely one of the more expensive virtual events platforms on the market today.

Although Welcome is currently going after the top end of the market, Ortiz said it will be easy to go down market — similar to how Tesla began as a super high-end brand that made its way to offering a more affordable car.

“Welcome is the perfect combination for Kapor Capital: cutting edge technology that is gap-closing or democratizing, a founder whose lived experience points in the direction of giving back, of making time for mentoring, of having the product used for good, and a founding team committed to building a diverse workforce and inclusive culture,” Kapor Capital Partner Freada Kapor Klein said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Obviously, the virtual events space has heat up thanks to the pandemic. But Welcome differentiates itself from its competitors by its ease of set up and quality of the final outcome.

“One person could throw an event that feels like an Apple keynote,” Ortiz said. “That can be done on our platform with one person. With any other platform, you’d need an AV crew to pull something off like that. Welcome gives you the ability to scale virtual events without compromising quality.”

News: Rapid Robotics raises $5.5M for pre-programmed manufacturing robots

• November 18, 2020
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Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Greycroft and Bee Partners. The announcement comes during what has been a solid several months for robotics funding, and more and more companies are looking to automate workforces as the COVID-19 pandemic has ground a lot

Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Greycroft and Bee Partners. The announcement comes during what has been a solid several months for robotics funding, and more and more companies are looking to automate workforces as the COVID-19 pandemic has ground a lot of productivity to a halt.

Manufacturing is one of the sectors of greatest interest on that front, as a business that can’t really afford to go on hiatus. That positions Rapid Robotics fairly well in the field. There are, of course, countless companies vying for a space in the massive industry.

Rapid’s primary value prop is in the training category. Getting robotics up and running in a factory can by an expensive and time-intensive process. The startup believes it has a unique offering with pre-programmed robotics that don’t require the same sort of training — and more or less work out to the box. On-board AI, meanwhile, assures that they’ll continue learning on the job, after they’re up and running.

The company’s primary robot is the Rapid Machine Operator, which factories can rent for around $25,000 a year. It features a six-joint robotic arm inside a safety work cell, computer vision and iPad for manual operation. It can perform a variety of manufacturing tasks, including part inspection, injection molding, pick-and-place and welding.

The company is pitching a potential return to U.S. manufacturing as a key selling point for the product. “Right now, billions of dollars of revenue are flowing offshore due to what I call ‘the automation gap’ for US contract manufacturers,” CEO Jordan Kretchmer said in a release. “The need to automate simple tasks is incredibly high, but the ability to do so has been out of reach for a vast majority of manufacturers. The Rapid Machine Operator is the first robotic solution to close that gap, making US manufacturers more competitive and supply chains more resilient.”

Bay Area-based Westec Plastics has been signed on as a customer.