Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: YouTube upgrades Premieres with trailers, themes and a live pre-show option

• December 2, 2020
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YouTube today is launching three new features designed to improve its “Premieres” experience, including trailers, themes, and live stream “pre-shows” that later redirect to the main event. Premieres, which first arrived in 2018, are designed to give creators the ability to leverage the revenue generation possibilities that come with live videos without having to actually

YouTube today is launching three new features designed to improve its “Premieres” experience, including trailers, themes, and live stream “pre-shows” that later redirect to the main event. Premieres, which first arrived in 2018, are designed to give creators the ability to leverage the revenue generation possibilities that come with live videos without having to actually “go live.”

Instead, Premieres allow creators to promote a scheduled video release by pointing fans to a landing page with a live chat in the sidebar, just like other live videos. This lets creators take advantage of money-making features like SuperChat, Stickers, ads, and Channel Memberships.

However, some creators want to engage with fans live ahead of their video premiere. The new “Live Redirect” feature will now make it a more seamless experience when they do so, as it allows creators to host a live stream that redirects to the upcoming Premiere just before it starts. This gives creators time to build up their audience ahead of the video’s release, as they can now not only join the chat to engage fans, but also live stream to their fans directly.

Image Credits: YouTube

YouTube says it tested this feature over the past several months with We Are One Film Festival, New York Comic-Con, BTS, Cardi B, and Justin Bieber, in advance of today’s launch.

Another new feature will allow creators to upload a pre-recorded video that will be featured on the Premiere landing page before the main event. This trailer can range from 15 seconds to 3 minutes in length, and works to create hype for the premiere ahead of its release. Creators can also encourage their fans to set a reminder so they won’t miss the video’s launch.

Image Credits: YouTube

The video countdown experience that plays just before their Premieres go live can also now be customized A new set of Countdown Themes will include those designed for different vibes or moods, like calm, playful, dramatic or sporty, for example.

Image Credits: YouTube

Since their launch, Premieres have been used by over 8 million YouTube channels, including big names like BLACKPINK, Tiny Desk, James Charles, Supercell, and Cirque du Soleil, among others. Their adoption significantly grew during the pandemic, the company also notes. Since March 1, 2020, YouTube has seen over 85% growth in daily Premieres, with over 80% of the channels having never before used a Premiere until this year.

The first two features will arrive to creators with at least 1,000 subscribers starting today, but Countdown Themes won’t be available for a couple of months, YouTube says.

News: Walmart+ takes on Prime by dropping $35 minimum on Walmart.com purchases

• December 2, 2020
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Walmart+, the retailer’s lower cost alternative to Amazon Prime offering same-day delivery of groceries and other items, is making its service more appealing with today’s launch of a new perk. The company says that starting on Friday, December 4, it will remove the $35 shipping minimum on orders from Walmart.com for its members. However, this

Walmart+, the retailer’s lower cost alternative to Amazon Prime offering same-day delivery of groceries and other items, is making its service more appealing with today’s launch of a new perk. The company says that starting on Friday, December 4, it will remove the $35 shipping minimum on orders from Walmart.com for its members. However, this doesn’t apply to the same-day orders of groceries or other items fulfilled by Walmart stores, but rather online shopping where orders are placed through Walmart’s traditional e-commerce channels.

That means there’s no longer a minimum order requirement on the next-day and two-day shipping that’s offered on items shipped from Walmart.com, no matter the basket total. The change, arriving only a couple of months after Walmart+’s launch, positions the new program as more of a true alternative to Amazon Prime, as Prime’s biggest perk has always been its free shipping service that encourages consumers to shop online without worrying about minimum order sizes.

Meanwhile, Walmart+’s biggest perk until now had been its same-day delivery service, with a particular focus on groceries — similar to Instacart or Amazon Fresh. The program actually grew out of Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited, an earlier version of the service that had also involved having Walmart store staff pick orders which are then handed off to delivery partners. In the past, those partners have included Postmates (now acquired by Uber), DoorDash, Roadie, and Point Pickup, among others. More recently, Walmart acquired last-mile delivery operation JoyRun, to bring more of its delivery logistics business in-house. 

Unlike some grocery delivery services, Walmart’s advantage in same-day is that it could also fulfill orders of other everyday items from its store shelves, not just food and household goods. When Walmart+ launched in mid-September, it promised same-day delivery of over 160,000 items.

The program also includes a small handful of other perks like fuel discounts at nearly 2,000 Walmart, Murphy USA and Murphy Express stations and access to Scan & Go to skip the checkout lines when shopping in-store. Today, Walmart said it’s also expanding the fuel savings to over 500 Sam’s Club gas stations, too.

While Amazon Prime has expanded over the years to include all sorts of benefits, like free music and streaming video, e-books, audiobooks, gaming perks, and more, Walmart+ so far remains focused on core features like shipping benefits and cost savings. And coming in at $98 per year (or $12.95/mo), it’s cheaper than Prime’s $119 per year membership.

Walmart declined to share how many customers have signed up for Walmart+ so far, but notes the program is available at over 4,700 stores, including 2,800 stores that offer delivery — the latter which reaches 70% of the U.S.

News: Aerospace’s Steve Isakowitz to speak at TC Sessions: Space 2020

• December 2, 2020
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A mere two weeks remain until we kick off TC Sessions: Space (December 16 & 17), our first conference focused on the technology designed to push galactic boundaries and the people making it happen. Building successful space programs, whether private, public or hybrid combination, requires a well-trained workforce — today and for generations to come.

A mere two weeks remain until we kick off TC Sessions: Space (December 16 & 17), our first conference focused on the technology designed to push galactic boundaries and the people making it happen. Building successful space programs, whether private, public or hybrid combination, requires a well-trained workforce — today and for generations to come. That’s why we can’t wait for Building the Workforce of the Future, a breakout panel discussion featuring Steve Isakowitz.

Isakowitz is the president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, a national nonprofit corporation that operates a federally funded research and development center. It addresses complex problems across the space enterprise focused on agility, innovation and objective technical leadership.

In his 30+ year career, Isakowitz has held prominent roles across the government, private, space and technology sectors, including at NASA, U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Prior to joining Aerospace, he was president of Virgin Galactic, where his responsibilities included the development of privately funded launch systems, advanced technologies and other new space applications.

Building the Workforce of the Future focuses on what’s required to advance the United States’ leading role in space, namely developing a workforce that’s up to the challenge. Panelists also include Dava Newman, MIT’s Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics, and Yannis C. Yortsos, Dean, USC Viterbi School of Engineering; Zohrab Kaprielian Chair in Engineering, University of Southern California.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created opportunities to imagine new models for how and where to train the next generation of scientists and engineers. This session will explore how universities and industry can work together to integrate professional experience into the curriculum and how universities and industry can work together to build robust talent pipelines that create digitally fluent, agile workers for the future.

The panelists will weigh in on strategies to build diverse workforces — with different perspectives and experiences that drive innovation — as well as new approaches that promote continuous learning for workers throughout their careers.

The space industry requires a deep bench and a long pipeline of engineers and scientists. Tune in to Building the Workforce of the Future for the latest thinking on this vital topic. It’s one session you don’t want to miss.

Late registration tickets are still available as are discounts for groups, students, active military/government employees and for early-stage space startup founders who want to give their startup extra visibility.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

News: Salesforce announces new Service Cloud workforce planning tool

• December 2, 2020
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With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. It wasn’t easy to manage and route requests when CSAs were in one place, it’s even harder with many working from home. To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing

With a pandemic raging across many parts of the world, many companies have customer service agents spread out as well, creating a workforce management nightmare. It wasn’t easy to manage and route requests when CSAs were in one place, it’s even harder with many working from home.

To help answer that problem Salesforce is developing a new product called Service Cloud Workforce Engagement. Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager for CRM Applications at Salesforce points out that with these workforces spread out, it’s a huge challenge for management to distribute work and keep up with customer volume, especially as customers have moved online during COVID.

“With Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, Salesforce will arm the contact center with a connected solution — all on one platform so our customers can remain resilient and agile no matter what tomorrow may bring,” Patterson said in a statement.

Like many Salesforce products, this one is made up of several key components to deliver a complete solution. For starters, there is Service Forecast for Customer 360, a tool that helps predict workforce requirements and uses AI to distribute customer service requests in a way that makes sense. This can help in planning at a time with a likely predictable uptick in service requests like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, or even those times when there is an unexpected spike.

Next up is Omnichannel Capacity Planning, which helps managers distribute CSAs across channels such as phone, messaging or email wherever they are needed most based on the demand across a given channel.

Finally, there is a teaching component that helps coach customer service agents to give the correct answer in the correct way for a given situation. “To increase agent engagement and performance, companies will be able to quickly onboard and continually train agents by delivering bite-size, guided learning paths directly in the agent’s workspace during their shift,” the company explained.

The company says that Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will be available in the first half of next year.

News: Orbit raises $4M for its community experience platform

• December 2, 2020
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Orbit, a startup that is building tools to help organizations build communities around their proprietary and open-source products, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado. A number of angel investors, including Chris Aniszczyk, Jason Warner and Magnus Hillestad, as well as the a16z’s Cultural Leadership

Orbit, a startup that is building tools to help organizations build communities around their proprietary and open-source products, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado. A number of angel investors, including Chris Aniszczyk, Jason Warner and Magnus Hillestad, as well as the a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund also participated, in addition to previous backers Heavybit and Harrison Metal.

The company describes its service as a “community experience platform.” Currently, Orbit’s focus is on Developer Relations and Community teams, as well as open-source maintainers. There’s no reason the company couldn’t branch out into other verticals as well, though, given that its overall framework is really applicable across all communities.

Orbit team: Patrick Woods, Nicolas Goutay, Josh Dzielak

As Orbit co-founder Patrick Woods told me, community managers have generally had a hard time figuring out who was really contributing to their communities because those contributions can come in lots of forms and often happen across a wide variety of platforms. In addition, the sales and marketing teams also often don’t understand how a community impacts a company’s bottom line. Orbit aggregates all of these contributions across platforms.

“There is a lack of understanding around the ways in which community impacts go-to-market and business value,” Woods told me when I asked him about the genesis of the idea. “There’s a big gap in terms of the tooling associated with that. Many companies agree that community is important, but if you put $1 in the community machine today, it’s hard to know where that’s going to come out — and is it going to come out in terms of $0.50 or $100? This was a set of challenges that we noticed across companies of all sizes.”

Image Credits: Orbit

Especially in open-source communities, there will always be community members who create a lot of value but who don’t have a commercial relationship with a company at all. That makes it even harder for companies to quantify the impact of their communities, even if they agree that community is an important way to grow their business and that, in Orbit’s words, “community is the new pre-sales.”

At the core of Orbit (the company) is Orbit the open-source community framework. The founding team of Woods (CEO) and Josh Dzielak (CTO) developed this framework to help organizations understand how to best build what the team calls a “high gravity community” to attracts new members and retains existing ones — and how to evaluate them. You can read more about the concept here.

Image Credits: Orbit

“We’re trying to reframe the discussion away from an extractive worldview that says how much value can we generate from this lead? It’s actually more about how much love can we generate from these community members,” Woods said. “Because, if you think about the culture associated with what we’re trying to do, it’s fundamentally creative and generative. And our goal is really to help people think less about value extraction and more about value creation.”

At the end of the day, though, no matter the philosophy behind your community-building efforts, there has to be a way to measure ROI and turn some of those community members into paying customers. To do that, Orbit currently pulls in data from sources like GitHub, Twitter and Discourse, with support for Slack and other tools coming soon. With that, the service makes it far easier for community managers to keep tabs on what is happening inside their community and who is participating.

Image Credits: Orbit

In addition to the built-in dashboards, Orbit also provides an API to help integrate all of this data into third-party services as well.

“One of the key understandings that drives the Orbit vision is that a community is not a funnel and building a community is not about conversions, but making connections; cultivating dialog and engagement; being open and giving back; and creating value versus trying to capture it,” A16Z’s Casado writes. “The model has proven to be very effective, and now Orbit has built a product around it. We strongly believe Orbit is a must-have product for those building developer-focused companies.”

The company is already working with just under 150 companies and its users include the likes of  Postman, CircleCI, Kubernetes and Apollo GraphQL.

The company will use the new round, which closed a few weeks ago, to, among other things, build out its go-to-market efforts and develop more integrations.

News: Wellory raises $4.5M for its ‘anti-diet’ nutrition app

• December 2, 2020
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Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding. The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA Player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others.

Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding.

The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA Player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others.

Wellory founder and CEO Emily Hochman (who was previously the head of customer success at WayUp) told me that she struggled with dieting in college, to the point where she was risking chronic illness and infertility. As a result, she became determined to gain a better understanding of nutrition and her own health, eventually studying and becoming a certified health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

Hochman said that through Wellory, she wants to offer that same understanding to others, which she said has created a “managed marketplace” matching users with a licensed nutritionist, registered dietitian or certified health coach. Those coaches create a personalized plan for losing weight or achieving other health goals, then continue to provide feedback as users share photos of each meal and additional health data.

For example, she said that a customer who had just given birth and was interested in postpartum weight loss would get matched with a coach who specializes in that area.

“The thing that is so important is that we build personalized plans,” she added. “We don’t have anything that says, ‘At Wellory, we do these 10 things and that’s a standard diet.’ We’re actually going to help you learn how to make smart and healthy decisions.”

Wellory CEO Emily Hochman

Wellory officially launched in September, but Hochman said some beta testers have been using the service for nine, 10 or 11 months. She said early customers include people who are interested in weight loss, those who need nutrition advice due to chronic illness and “optimizers” who simply want to make sure they’re eating as healthily as possible.

She also noted that although customers usually sign up with a specific goal in mind, “once they hit their goal, because the power of a strong relationship, they say, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I was, let’s keep building, let’s make sure I can sustain this.’”

The app is available on iOS and Android and currently costs $59.99 per month. Hochman plans to introduce additional pricing tiers. and she said the funding will allow Wellory to expand the technology and marketing teams, and to explore new partnerships.

“As a data technology investor, we get approached by different types of wearable or diagnostic companies nearly every week,” said Jake Yormak of Story Ventures in a statement. “We love the category but what we saw in Wellory was a way to put a human coach at the center of understanding this health data. With nutrition as the wedge, Wellory has built a trusted relationship with people who affirmatively want to better understand and improve their wellbeing.”

News: Dear Sophie: Hacks for the March 2021 H-1B lottery?

• December 2, 2020
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We’ve been so focused on building our startup that we haven’t kept up with all the recent changes. What are we supposed to do?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Late-breaking update: since the time of writing this Dear Sophie column, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White struck down two of the H-1B rules mentioned: increasing the prevailing wage and restricting the definition of “specialty occupation.” I’ll keep you posted on any further developments down the road, but for today, the entire nonimmigrant visa classification program is strengthened. Yay!

Dear Sophie:

The startup I am co-founding will be sponsoring my co-founder for a visa in the March 2021 H-1B lottery.

We’ve been so focused on building our startup that we haven’t kept up with all the recent changes. What are we supposed to do?

—Focused in Foster City

Dear Focused:

You are right on track as the time to start is now. In December, we usually kick off our H-1B planning and prep work with startups, companies, HR and people ops, employees and recruits for the spring lottery. Although there are a lot of recent proposals and changes, please go ahead now and initiate retaining counsel to put any and all potential candidates in the lottery.

Although there are several new rules slated to go into effect in December and early January, these are subject to potential removal by President-elect Biden and may also be the topic of a great deal of litigation, so we should proceed as usual. H-1B visas for specialty occupations are still available. In my recent H-1B podcast, I discuss what the 2021 lottery will look like and there’s a free H-1B guide for you to download. Same as before, you can also check out the podcast episode on What Makes a Strong H-1B Petition.

Looking into my crystal ball, the three new rules that may have the biggest effect on the H-1B process are:

• A new rule by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), which went into effect immediately when it was announced in October. That rule substantially increased the minimum wage that employers are required to pay to H-1B candidates. According to the Cato Institute, the average H-1B employer will have to increase wage offers to H-1B candidates by more than 30%. It’s not worth being concerned about this potential wage increase now as you don’t have to commit to a proposed wage for your future H-1B hire until your candidate is actually selected in the lottery and you prepare and file the full petition in Q2. And even then, the new wage wouldn’t take effect until the H-1B is approved and the earliest possible start date is October 1, 2021. So don’t let it scare you.

• Another rule proposed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in November seeks to replace the random H-1B selection process — or lottery — with a new selection process that would prioritize the selection of H-1B candidates based solely on the highest wages paid by the employers who sponsor them. It does not consider the experience of the candidate nor whether the candidate is a specialized worker in an in-demand field, such as medicine or research. Once again, we have no idea when and if this will actually go into effect. Although it sounds scary, it might actually be great for funded startups that need more predictability than a random lottery about whether key hires will be able to join the team.

• Finally, a rule proposed by USCIS in October requires an H-1B candidate to have a bachelor’s or higher degree specifically related to the specialty occupation the H-1B candidate is applying for and H-1B employers must show the position is directly related to the education degree. This for sure will be the subject of lots of litigation. If you’re hiring folks for professional or tech roles and you have funding to pay them, this isn’t really an issue, just an annoyance, and you can avoid questioning by doing a very thorough job on the original petition, which my firm specializes in.

So tips and tricks: I am recommending that everyone begin preparing based on the H-1B lottery in 2020 and to consult with an immigration lawyer to devise a strategy and discuss options. Your co-founder needs to remain in valid legal status if they are already in the United States. If your startup/co-founder is not selected to apply for an H-1B, check out 7 of the Most Startup Friendly Visas Explained for alternative options.

Your startup may want to explore whether it can bypass the H-1B visa altogether by sponsoring your co-founder for either an O-1A extraordinary ability visa, an EB-1A extraordinary ability green card or an EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card. If you would like to learn more, we will be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, December 16 at 11 a.m. PST. We will have a special promotion and a freebie for those who attend. Register here!

If you proceed with pursuing an H-1B, make sure your startup has the appropriate corporate structure and documentation in place that demonstrates a valid employer-employee relationship exists between your startup and your co-founder. That includes making sure your co-founder will have a true employee relationship with the company and they will be hired, supervised and can be fired. Listen to my podcast episode on what startups should know about sponsoring their first H-1B candidate.

Your startup will need to register your co-founder for the H-1B lottery on March 1. The USCIS registration fee is only $10 so it’s easy to do it for everybody who might benefit. The registration process closes on March 20. If your startup is selected to apply for an H-1B on behalf of your co-founder, USCIS will inform your startup by March 31. Your startup will have until June 30 to submit its H-1B petition. Over the next few months, your startup and your co-founder can start assembling documents and evidence so that you’ll be ready if your startup/co-founder is selected to apply for an H-1B. If not selected in March, there may be a second digital lottery at the beginning of Q3 for any remaining H-1B visa slots.

I’ll continue to keep you and the other Dear Sophie readers informed on the latest changes to the H-1B lottery process here in this column, so stay tuned!

You got this — go for it!

Sophie

Have a question? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer here. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!

News: Google acquires Actifio to step into the area of data management and business continuity

• December 2, 2020
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In the same week that Amazon is holding its big AWS confab, Google is also announcing a move to raise its own enterprise game with Google Cloud. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Actifio, a data management company that helps companies with data continuity to be better prepared in the event of a

In the same week that Amazon is holding its big AWS confab, Google is also announcing a move to raise its own enterprise game with Google Cloud. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Actifio, a data management company that helps companies with data continuity to be better prepared in the event of a security breach or other need for disaster recovery. The deal squares Google up as a competitor against the likes of Rubrik, another big player in data continuity.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement; we’re looking and will update as we learn more. Notably, when the company was valued at over $1 billion in a funding round back in 2014, it had said it was preparing for an IPO (which never happened). PitchBook data estimated its value at $1.3 billion in 2018, but earlier this year it appeared to be raising money at about a 60% discount to its recent valuation, according to data provided to us by Prime Unicorn Index.

The company was also involved in a patent infringement suit against Rubrik, which it also filed earlier this year.

It had raised around $461 million, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, TCV, Tiger, 83 North, and more.

With Actifio, Google is moving into what is one of the key investment areas for enterprises in recent years. The growth of increasingly sophisticated security breaches, coupled with stronger data protection regulation, has given a new priority to the task of holding and using business data more responsibly, and business continuity is a cornerstone of that.

Google describes the startup as as a “leader in backup and disaster recovery” providing virtual copies of data that can be managed and updated for storage, testing, and more. The fact that it covers data in a number of environments — including SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, virtual machines (VMs) in VMware, Hyper-V, physical servers, and of course Google Compute Engine — means that it also gives Google a strong play to work with companies in hybrid and multi-vendor environments rather than just all-Google shops.

“We know that customers have many options when it comes to cloud solutions, including backup and DR, and the acquisition of Actifio will help us to better serve enterprises as they deploy and manage business-critical workloads, including in hybrid scenarios,” writes Brad Calder, VP, engineering, in the blog post. :In addition, we are committed to supporting our backup and DR technology and channel partner ecosystem, providing customers with a variety of options so they can choose the solution that best fits their needs.”

The company will join Google Cloud.

“We’re excited to join Google Cloud and build on the success we’ve had as partners over the past four years,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO at Actifio, in a statement. “Backup and recovery is essential to enterprise cloud adoption and, together with Google Cloud, we are well-positioned to serve the needs of data-driven customers across industries.”

News: Loon’s stratospheric balloons are now teaching themselves to fly better thanks to Google AI

• December 2, 2020
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Alphabet’s Loon has been using algorithmic processes to optimize the flight of its stratospheric balloons for years now – and setting records for time spent aloft as a result. But the company is now deploying a new navigation system that has the potential to be much better, and it’s using true reinforcement learning AI to

Alphabet’s Loon has been using algorithmic processes to optimize the flight of its stratospheric balloons for years now – and setting records for time spent aloft as a result. But the company is now deploying a new navigation system that has the potential to be much better, and it’s using true reinforcement learning AI to teach itself to optimize navigation better than humans ever could.

Loon developed the new reinforcement learning system, which it says is the first to be used in an actual product aerospace context, with its Alphabet colleagues at Google AI in Montreal over the past couple of years. Unlike its past algorithmic navigation software, this one is devised entirely by machine – a machine that’s able to calculate the optimal navigation path for the balloons much more quickly than the human-made system could, and with much more efficiency, meaning the balloons use much less power to travel the same or greater distances than before.

How does Loon know it’s better? They actually pitted the new AI navigation against their human algorithm-based prior system directly, with a 39 day test that flew over the Pacific Ocean. The reinforcement learning model kept the Loon balloon aloft over target areas for longer continuous periods, using less energy than the older system, and it even came up with some new navigational moves that the team has never seen or conceived of before.

After this and other tests proved such dramatic successes, Loon actually then went ahead and deployed across its entire production fleet, which is currently deployed across parts of Africa to serve commercial customers in Kenya.

This is one of few real-world examples of an AI system that employs reinforcement learning to actively teach itself to perform better being used in a real-life setting, to control the performance of real hardware operating in a production capacity and serving paying customers. It’s a remarkable achievement, and definitely one that will be watched closely by others in aerospace and beyond.

News: AgentSync lands consecutive rounds as insurtech booms

• December 2, 2020
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This morning AgentSync, an insurtech startup focused on agent compliance management, announced a new funding round worth $6.7 million. The financing event, led by well-known SaaS founder David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, included dollars from both Operator Collective and prior investors. The new capital will help AgentSync move faster, with co-founder and  CEO Niranjan Sabharwal saying

This morning AgentSync, an insurtech startup focused on agent compliance management, announced a new funding round worth $6.7 million.

The financing event, led by well-known SaaS founder David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, included dollars from both Operator Collective and prior investors.

The new capital will help AgentSync move faster, with co-founder and  CEO Niranjan Sabharwal saying that it is pulling hires earmarked for next year into 2020. He added that this most recent fundraising cycle consumed far less time than the round that preceded it.

TechCrunch asked what the company is calling this round, which was raised via a SAFE note instead of as a priced equity investment. Sabharwal said that it could be called a Seed-Extension, which seems reasonable.

The new investment was raised at a cap of around 4x its previous conversion ceiling.

TechCrunch last covered AgentSync this August, when the startup announced a $4.4 million funding round. Akin to fellow early-stage startup Welcome, which announced a second 2020 raise earlier today, AgentSync managed to quickly raise again.

In AgentSync’s case, it’s not hard to parse why the company was able to: It’s growing very quickly.

According to an interview with Sabharwal, the company has seen its revenue scale 4x since the start of the pandemic, and 10x in the last year. The timeframes around those metrics are slightly relaxed, but the raw growth underscores that AgentSync is onto something.

Sabharwal founded the company with his spouse Jenn Knight and recently moved the company’s HQ to Denver from San Francisco.

AgentSync’s product, born out of a tool that Zenefits developed while rebuilding itself, helps insurance companies and other players in the insurance space ensure that agents are compliant (hence its name). And while that conceit might sound like a modest effort, it’s a complex effort given a multi-stakeholder environment, regulatory conditions, and an antiquated market.

The company saw strong initial traction, reporting $1.9 million ARR during its August round. Doing some mental math, if AgentSync was doing around $1 million ARR in March, it would be at around $4 million ARR today. That feels roughly correct, given the 4x-since-March metric, and the $1.9 million ARR datapoint from mid-Q2 2020.

According to Sabharwal, AgentSync now has more than $10 million in the bank, meaning that the startup is very well capitalized to continue scaling in the coming quarters. New investor Sacks is bullish about how large AgentSync could become, telling TechCrunch in an email that its “market is huge,” and that the “insurtech revolution is [still] in its infancy.”

But while AgentSync is growing quickly and has found reasonable product-market fit — 17% of its net ARR today was driven by what the company descried as net-organic expansion, to pick an example — it still has the hallmarks of an early-stage startup like inconsistent sales cycle length, according to several deals that the CEO detailed during an interview. However, the company recently hired a sales team after a period of time when Sabharwal was in charge of  selling; the company’s selling process should accelerate in coming quarters.

The CEO told TechCrunch that until recently he was selling AgentSync solo with no enterprise sales experience. If he could do it, he reasoned, others will be able to as well. Sabharwal serves as the startup’s CEO, while Knight is its CTO.

Closing, Insurtech is hot, meaning that AgentSync is growing amidst fertile market ground and investor interest. Another few quarters of similar growth and we could be hearing about its Series A.