Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Blueshift raises $30M for its AI-based, integrated approach to marketing

• February 24, 2021
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The concept of the “marketing cloud” — sold by the likes of Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe — has become a standard way for large tech companies to package together and sell marketing tools to businesses that want to improve how they use digital channels to grow their business. Some argue, however, that “cloud”, singular, might

The concept of the “marketing cloud” — sold by the likes of Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe — has become a standard way for large tech companies to package together and sell marketing tools to businesses that want to improve how they use digital channels to grow their business.

Some argue, however, that “cloud”, singular, might be a misnomer: typically those tools are not integrated well with each other and effectively are run as separate pieces of software. Today a startup called Blueshift — which claims to offer an end-to-end marketing stack, by having built it from the ground up to include both traditional marketing data as well as customer experience — is announcing some funding, pointing to the opportunity to build more efficient alternatives.

The startup has closed a round of $30 million, a Series C that co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor said it will be using to expand to more markets (it’s most active in the U.S. and Europe currently) and also to expand its technology.

“The product already has a unified format, to ingest data from multiple sources and redistribute that out to apps. Now, we want to distribute that data to more last-mile applications,” he said in an interview. “Our biggest initiative is to scale out the notion of us being not just an app but a platform.”

The company’s customers include LendingTree, Discovery Inc., Udacity, BBC and Groupon, and it has seen revenue growth of 858% in the last three years, although it’s not disclosing actual revenues, nor valuation, today.

The round is being led by Fort Ross Ventures, with strong participation also from Avatar Growth Capital. Past investors Softbank Ventures Asia (which led its last round of $15 million), Storm Ventures, Conductive Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also invested.

The concept for Blueshift came out of Chittoor’s direct experience at Groupon — which acquired his previous startup, social e-commerce company Mertado — and before that a long period at Walmart Labs — which Walmart rebranded after it acquired another startup where Chittoor was an early employee, semantic search company Kosmix.

“The challenges we are solving today we saw first hand as challenges our customers saw at Groupon and Walmart,” he said. “The connected customer journey is creating a thousand times more data than before, and people and brands are engaging across more touchpoints. Tracking that has become harder with legacy channel-centric applications.”

Blueshift’s approach for solving that has been, he said, “to unify the data and to make decisions at customer level.”

That is to say, although the customer experience today is very fragmented — you might potentially encounter something about a company or brand in multiple places, such as in a physical environment, on various social media platforms, in your email, through a web search, in a vertical search portal, in a marketplace on a site, in an app, and so on — the experience for marketers should not be.

The company addresses this by way of a customer data platform (CDP) it markets as “SmartHub.” Designed for non-technical users although customizable by engineers if you need it to be, users can integrate different data feeds from multiple sources, which then Blueshift crunches and organises to let you view in a more structured way.

That data can then be used to power actions in a number of places where you might be setting up marketing campaigns. And Chittoor pointed out — like other marketing people have — that these days, the focus on that is largely first-party data to fuel that machine, rather than buying in data from third-party sources (which is definitely part of a bigger trend).

“Our mission is to back category-leading companies that are poised to dominate a market. Blueshift clearly stood out to us as the leader in the enterprise CDP space,” said Ratan Singh of Fort Ross Ventures in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with the Blueshift team as they accelerate the adoption of their SmartHub CDP platform.” Singh is joining Blueshift’s board with this round.

News: Mozilla beefs up anti-cross-site tracking in Firefox, as Chrome still lags on privacy

• February 24, 2021
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Mozilla has further beefed up anti-tracking measures in its Firefox browser. In a blog post yesterday it announced that Firefox 86 has an extra layer of anti-cookie tracking built into the enhanced tracking protection (ETP) strict mode — which it’s calling ‘Total Cookie Protection’. This “major privacy advance”, as it bills it, prevents cross-site tracking

Mozilla has further beefed up anti-tracking measures in its Firefox browser. In a blog post yesterday it announced that Firefox 86 has an extra layer of anti-cookie tracking built into the enhanced tracking protection (ETP) strict mode — which it’s calling ‘Total Cookie Protection’.

This “major privacy advance”, as it bills it, prevents cross-site tracking by siloing third party cookies per website.

Mozilla likens this to having a separate cookie jar for each site — so, for e.g., Facebook cookies aren’t stored in the same tub as cookies for that sneaker website where you bought your latest kicks and so on.

The new layer of privacy wrapping “provides comprehensive partitioning of cookies and other site data between websites in Firefox”, explains Mozilla.

Along with another anti-tracking feature it announced last month — targeting so called ‘supercookies’ — aka sneaky trackers that store user IDs in “increasingly obscure” parts of the browser (like Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags), i.e. where it’s difficult for users to delete or block them — the features combine to “prevent websites from being able to ‘tag’ your browser, thereby eliminating the most pervasive cross-site tracking technique”, per Mozilla.

There’s a “limited exception” for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-tracking purposes — Mozilla gives the example of popular third-party login providers.

“Only when Total Cookie Protection detects that you intend to use a provider, will it give that provider permission to use a cross-site cookie specifically for the site you’re currently visiting. Such momentary exceptions allow for strong privacy protection without affecting your browsing experience,” it adds.

Tracker blocking has long been an arms race against the adtech industry’s determination to keep surveilling web users — and thumbing its nose at the notion of consent to spy on people’s online business — pouring resource into devising fiendish new techniques to try to keep watching what Internet users are doing. But this battle has stepped up in recent years as browser makers have been taking a tougher pro-privacy/anti-tracker stance.

Mozilla, for example, started making tracker blocking the default back in 2018 — going on make ETP the default in Firefox in 2019, blocking cookies from companies identified as trackers by its partner, Disconnect.

While Apple’s Safari browser added an ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ (ITP) feature in 2017 — applying machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site scripting data to protect users’ browsing history from third party eyes.

Google has also put the cat among the adtech pigeons by announcing a planned phasing out of support for third party cookies in Chrome — which it said would be coming within two years back in January 2020 — although it’s still working on this ‘privacy sandbox’ project, as it calls it (now under the watchful eye of UK antitrust regulators).

Google has been making privacy strengthening noises since 2019, in response to the rest of the browser market responding to concern about online privacy.

In April last year it rolled back a change that had made it harder for sites to access third-party cookies, citing concerns that sites were able to perform essential functions during the pandemic — though this was resumed in July. But it’s fair to say that the adtech giant remains the laggard when it comes to executing on its claimed plan to beef up privacy.

Given Chrome’s marketshare, that leaves most of the world’s web users exposed to more tracking than they otherwise would be by using a different, more privacy-pro-active browser.

And as Mozilla’s latest anti-cookie tracking feature shows the race to outwit adtech’s allergy to privacy (and consent) also isn’t the sort that has a finish line. So being slow to do privacy protection arguably isn’t very different to not offering much privacy protection at all.

To wit: One worrying development — on the non-cookie based tracking front — is detailed in this new paper by a group of privacy researchers who conducted an analysis of CNAME tracking (aka a DNS-based anti-tracking evasion technique) and found that use of the sneaky anti-tracking evasion method had grown by around a fifth in just under two years.

The technique has been raising mainstream concerns about ‘unblockable’ web tracking since around 2019 — when developers spotted the technique being used in the wild by a French newspaper website. Since then use has been rising, per the research.

In a nutshell the CNAME tracking technique cloaks the tracker by injecting it into the first-party context of the visited website — via the content being embedded through a subdomain of the site which is actually an alias for the tracker domain.

“This scheme works thanks to a DNS delegation. Most often it is a DNS CNAME record,” writes one of the paper authors, privacy and security researcher Lukasz Olejnik, in a blog post about the research. “The tracker technically is hosted in a subdomain of the visited website.

“Employment of such a scheme has certain consequences. It kind of fools the fundamental web security and privacy protections — to think that the user is wilfully browsing the tracker website. When a web browser sees such a scheme, some security and privacy protections are relaxed.”

Don’t be fooled by the use of the word ‘relaxed’ — as Olejnik goes on to emphasize that the CNAME tracking technique has “substantial implications for web security and privacy”. Such as browsers being tricked into treating a tracker as legitimate first-party content of the visited website (which, in turn, unlocks “many benefits”, such as access to first-party cookies — which can then be sent on to remote, third-party servers controlled by the trackers so the surveilling entity can have its wicked way with the personal data).

So the risk is that a chunk of the clever engineering work being done to protect privacy by blocking trackers can be sidelined by getting under the anti-trackers’ radar.

The researchers found one (infamous) tracker provider, Criteo, reverting its tracking scripts to the custom CNAME cloak scheme when it detected the Safari web browser in use — as, presumably, a way to circumvent Apple’s ITP.

There are further concerns over CNAME tracking too: The paper details how, as a consequence of current web architecture, the scheme “unlocks a way for broad cookie leaks”, as Olejnik puts it — explaining how the upshot of the technique being deployed can be “many unrelated, legitimate cookies” being sent to the tracker subdomain.

Olejnik documented this concern in a study back in 2014 — but he writes that the problem has now exploded: “As the tip of the iceberg, we found broad data leaks on 7,377 websites. Some data leaks happen on almost every website using the CNAME scheme (analytics cookies commonly leak). This suggests that this scheme is actively dangerous. It is harmful to web security and privacy.”

The researchers found cookies leaking on 95% of the studies websites.

They also report finding leaks of cookies set by other third-party scripts, suggesting leaked cookies would in those instances allow the CNAME tracker to track users across websites.

In some instances they found that leaked information contained private or sensitive information — such as a user’s full name, location, email address and (in an additional security concern) authentication cookie.

The paper goes on to raise a number of web security concerns, such as when CNAME trackers are served over HTTP not HTTPS, which they found happened often, and could facilitate man-in-the-middle attacks.

Defending against the CNAME cloaking scheme will require some major browsers to adopt new tricks, per the researchers — who note that while Firefox (global marketshare circa 4%) does offer a defence against the technique Chrome does not.

Engineers on the WebKit engine that underpins Apple’s Safari browser have also been working on making enhancements to ITP aimed at counteracting CNAME tracking.

In a blog post last November, IPT engineer John Wilander wrote that as defence against the sneaky technique “ITP now detects third-party CNAME cloaking requests and caps the expiry of any cookies set in the HTTP response to 7 days. This cap is aligned with ITP’s expiry cap on all cookies created through JavaScript.”

The Brave browser also announced changes last fall aimed at combating CNAME cloaking.

“In version 1.25.0, uBlock Origin gained the ability to detect and block CNAME-cloaked requests using Mozilla’s terrific browser.dns API. However, this solution only works in Firefox, as Chromium does not provide the browser.dns API. To some extent, these requests can be blocked using custom DNS servers. However, no browsers have shipped with CNAME-based adblocking protection capabilities available and on by default,” it wrote.

“In Brave 1.17, Brave Shields will now recursively check the canonical name records for any network request that isn’t otherwise blocked using an embedded DNS resolver. If the request has a CNAME record, and the same request under the canonical domain would be blocked, then the request is blocked. This solution is on by default, bringing enhanced privacy protections to millions of users.”

But the browser with the largest marketshare, Chrome, has work to do, per the researchers, who write:

Because Chrome does not support a DNS resolution API for extensions, the [uBlock version 1.25 under Firefox] defense could not be applied to this browser. Consequently, we find that four of the CNAME-based trackers (Oracle Eloqua, Eulerian, Criteo, and Keyade) are blocked by uBlock Origin on Firefox but not on the Chrome version.

News: Amazon Echo Show 10 review: Unmoved

• February 24, 2021
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Every new smart home device invites new questions. Questions of privacy, security and what we’re willing to give up for the sake of convenience. It’s not an anti-technology stance to welcome these conversations and assess new products as we invite them into our homes. For my part, my apartment is fairly limited when it comes

Every new smart home device invites new questions. Questions of privacy, security and what we’re willing to give up for the sake of convenience. It’s not an anti-technology stance to welcome these conversations and assess new products as we invite them into our homes.

For my part, my apartment is fairly limited when it comes to smart home tech. I own two large smart speakers and a third smaller one, mostly for the convenience of networking streaming music across different rooms. My smoke detector is connected, for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that my home wasn’t on fire back when I used to leave it for extended stretches. Oh, and a couple of connected lightbulbs, mostly because why not?

Back when Google announced its first-party smart screen, the Home (now Nest) Hub, I thought it was a savvy decision to leave the camera off. Of course, the company included one on its larger Max device, so the option is there, if you want it. Of course, for most of these products, video cameras are a given — and understandably so, with smart screens like the new Echo Show 10 edging into the teleconferencing space as the line between work and home has become far more fuzzy for many.

Amazon’s gotten the message here, with the addition of a large physical shutter button on the top of the device. When slid to the right, the camera on the top right is covered by a white lens cap, contrasted against the black bezel, so it’s easy to spot across the room. Doing so will pop up a notification: “Camera off. Disabling motion.”

The “motion” here refers to the rotating screen — the headline feature of Amazon’s latest take on the Echo Show format. The company is positioning the new tech as a game changer for the category, and while I will say it’s done a good job implementing the feature in a way that works well and quietly, it’s precisely this new addition that reignites the privacy question.

The notion of creating a home device that fades into its surroundings is really out the window with that feature. The Echo uses figure tracking to make sure the display is facing you at all times when using it, drawing attention to itself in the process. One can inherently know and passively understand that a device is using imaging and AI for tracking, but largely effectively ignore it. After all, we’ve got cameras on pretty much everything now. These things are a part of the social media and services we regularly use. When the device physically follows you around the room, however, this stuff is top of mind.

Having used the product for several days, I would say the feature feels unnecessary in most cases — and downright unnerving in some. I’ve placed the Show on my desk next to the computer where I’m typing this, and I’ve mostly disabled the feature. It’s probably something I could get used to over time, but with the relatively limited amount I’m going to spend with it, I prefer to use the product in a stationary manner, manually swiveling the display and flipping the screen angle up and down as needed. I adjust screens all of the time. It’s fine.

Amazon will walk you through the feature during setup, including which direction you want the screen facing as a default and how much rotation it offers on either side. Keep in mind, the system really has no notion of what constitutes “straight ahead, until you adjust the setting sliders accordingly. You can adjust these later in settings, as well. There’s also a “Motion Preferences” option. Here you can limit the applications it will use to follow you, require voice to use the feature or disable it entirely.

Of course, I’m also someone who prefers to keep the camera shutter on while not in use, so that works out just fine. You can’t shutter the camera and have the device continue to move, since it needs to know what it’s seeing to move along with it. I will say that the moving screen has the unexpectedly nice side effect of reminding me when I’ve forgotten to disable the camera.

Amazon’s understandably — and thankfully — been talking up the privacy aspects since the Echo Show 10 was announced. There are eight mentions of “privacy” on the product page, but here’s the key graf:

Built with multiple layers of privacy controls, including a mic/camera off button and a built-in shutter to cover the camera. Easily turn on/off motion at any time by voice, on-device, or in the Alexa app. The processing that powers screen motion happens on device – no images or videos are sent to the cloud to provide the motion feature.

Notably, the tracking feature uses a vague outline of a person, rather than any sort of facial tracking. The image it processes looks more like a blotchy heat map than anything recognizable as an individual or even, generally, a human (though it’s able to distinguish human figures from pets). That, in particular, has been a hot button topic for the company.

The rotating feature is primarily a way to reduce user friction. Amazon notes that existing Echo Show owners will swivel their devices around when they’re, say, using it in the kitchen to cook. The front-firing audio also moves as the screen does. That’s in keeping with the company’s move away from 360-degree audio in recent Echo models. This is either a plus or a minus, depending on how you use the device, and how many people are around. It can also be used to follow you as you move around while video calling (a feature the competition has offered through zooming and cropping).

Amazon’s taken pains in recent generations to improve the audio on these device, prioritizing the “speaker” part of smart speaker, and the new Show certainly benefits from that. I wouldn’t use it as my primary sound system, but sitting here on my desk, it delivers a nice, full sound for its size, even with the screen obscuring a big portion of the front.

The 10.1-inch screen is a nice size, as well. Again, I wouldn’t use it to replace a TV or even a good laptop, but it’s good size for quick videos. It’s a shame Amazon and Google haven’t been able to play nice here, because YouTube has the market cornered on short-form videos that are perfect for this form factor. (If you’re so inclined, you can still access YouTube via the built-in browser, though it’s not exactly an elegant solution.)

Amazon Prime Video certainly has its share of good long-form content and series (it has a ton of trash, as well, but sometimes that’s fun, too), but Amazon’s best play is partnering with third-parties to bolster its offerings. And that’s another spot where Amazon has been improving the Echo experience. Netflix and Hulu are now available on the device for video, and Apple Music and Spotify have been added on the music side.

There are still a number of third-party apps that would be nice additions, but that’s a pretty solid starting point. Not to mention that services like Spotify can be set as the default for music playback. That’s one of those additions that genuinely reduces friction (and honestly, Amazon Music is a far less compelling service than Prime Video at the moment).

Zoom — arguably the most compelling addition from a software standpoint — is coming later. For now, calls are limited to other Alexa devices. Zoom and other third-party teleconference software has the opportunity to create an entire new dimension for these products, especially with the aforementioned blurring of home and work life.

Honestly, where the Show is currently sitting on my desk is really the perfect placement to use it for calls while working on my computer. I’m cautiously optimistic about the implementation. At the very least, it would give me a compelling reason to get more use out of that 13-megapixel camera on a regular basis.

For the time being, I think the most compelling case to be made for both the camera and automatic screen swiveling is as a makeshift security camera. This is another “Coming Soon” feature that requires a Guard Plus subscription. With it, you can set a geofence, with the Show doubling as a smart security camera when you leave home. The system will send an alert if a person is detected in your home while you’re out.

This month has seen rumors that Amazon is working on a wall-mounted smart home hub. The form factor certainly makes sense, essentially serving as an Alexa-enabled touchscreen control for your various connected devices. For the time being, between Show and the Alexa mobile app, I think the bases are covered pretty well — though such a device could certainly lend a more premium experience to the space.

A well-placed Show will address that need for many. Certainly it does the job for my one-bedroom apartment. You can use voice or touch to control lighting, and the screen can monitor feeds from security cameras, including, naturally, Amazon-owned Ring. Additions like these have really made the smart screen category a much more compelling and capable one.

At $249, it’s $20 pricier than the 2018 Show. It’s hard to say how much of the increase is due to the new mechanical turning mechanism, but Amazon offered up a cheaper model without the functionality that’s almost certainly the one I would go for, for reasons outlined above. Again, not everyone will have the same misgivings.

And all told, it’s a well-constructed, nice addition to the Show family and one I don’t mind moving around the old-fashioned way.

News: Everdrop raises $21.8m Series A round led by Felix Capital for its dissolvable cleaning tablet

• February 24, 2021
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It’s almost too simple. You get a tablet made of household chemicals that can be dissolved in water which can become a cleaning spray for the kitchen, glass and bathroom, with no need to ship the water it is dissolved into because it literally comes out of your tap. That was the premise of Munich-based

It’s almost too simple. You get a tablet made of household chemicals that can be dissolved in water which can become a cleaning spray for the kitchen, glass and bathroom, with no need to ship the water it is dissolved into because it literally comes out of your tap. That was the premise of Munich-based startup everdrop and it’s been a hit not just with consumers, but also with investors. It’s now raised an €18m ($21.8m) Series A funding round led by Felix Capital, with participation from HV Capital and Vorwerk Ventures. Everdrop now plans to develop a wider range of sustainable household products and market them across Europe, and eventually the US.

Launched in Dec 2019, the cleaning tablet also removes the need for single-use plastic bottles, thus appealing to environmentally conscious consumers, (unusually for a consumer good company, the startup has 110,000 followers on Instagram).

Everdrop estimates it was able to eliminate over 2.5 million single-use plastic bottles with their tabs.

David Löwe, Co-Founder of everdrop told me in an interview that while it might be possible to clone the company’s formats, it would not be easy to replicate its water hardness calculator: “Plus, the individualizing of the laundry detergent is quite unique. I think there’s no one out there in other countries who are doing that at the moment… But obviously, other companies could potentially do that too.”

Everdrop competes with Grove Collaborative, Blueland and to some extent The Honest Company.

Löwe told me: “If I’m very honest, it would be cool if the other companies would do it because this is something that I’m really convinced about. If we inspire with our success, the big corporations could finally change into more sustainable products.”

As well as the tablet, everdrop now has a range of sustainable laundry detergents, also microplastic-free, which addresses water hardness by tailoring the detergent to the water in the customer’s home area. This means everdrop can save up to 50% of the unnecessary surfactants in the detergent. Laundry detergent is the biggest chemical emitter in private households. Everdrop estimates its approach saves 250 tons of unnecessary surfactants from going into the environment.

Its latest product is a “naked” dishwasher tablet which doesn’t have the plastic wrapper that usually envelops these products.

David Fischer, investor at HV Capital said: “It is incredible how a truly sustainable brand such as everdrop has a similar growth trajectory in its inception year as its D2C peers Hims and DollarShaveClub.”

News: Workiz locks in $13M for productivity tools aimed at home services professionals

• February 24, 2021
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Knowledge workers — those whose professions tend to be anchored to desks or computers — have long been the most obvious and primary focus for a lot of B2B apps and services. But as the wider world migrates to doing more and more on smartphones and other connected devices, the opportunity to build for the

Knowledge workers — those whose professions tend to be anchored to desks or computers — have long been the most obvious and primary focus for a lot of B2B apps and services. But as the wider world migrates to doing more and more on smartphones and other connected devices, the opportunity to build for the rest of the global workforce continues to grow. Today, one of the startups targeting smaller businesses in the area of field service is announcing a round of funding that underscores that trend.

Workiz, which has developed a platform to help small business in the home services space — locksmiths, removals companies, large appliance repairs, and others — book jobs, manage teams, keep in communication with customers, bill them, and also — taking a page from the world of knowledge workers — run data analytics connected to their jobs to optimize business more in the future, has closed a funding round of $13 million.

The funding round was oversubscribed — it actually grew to $13 million in the week between getting pitched this story and writing it — and it comes on the back of a year that has seen double-digit growth exceeding what the startup had expected to achieve in 2020, said CEO Adi (Didi) Azaria in an interview.

Part of the reason has been an uplift from people spending more time working at home, putting their dwellings and the things contained in them through more wear and tear, and/or realizing that they could do some home improvement and vastly upgrade their daily environments.

“If you open the fridge too many times, things get broken and you need these guys to come in,” he said, adding that the demand from customers these days are for people to be using the same tools they are to get work done. “Many field services need software because our expectations as consumers are changing. They see it as a need.”

Workiz’s CEO himself was once a locksmith, similar to co-founders Idan Kadosh and Erez Marom (who co-founded the startup with Saar Kohanovitch), but he might be better known for co-founding his previous startup, Sisense, the business analytics company now valued at over $1 billion.

Workiz is based out of San Diego and Israel, with the latter home to its R&D efforts and a number of its investors. This Series B is being led by Tel Aviv’s New Era Capital Partners, with past backers Aleph, Magenta Venture Partners (which led its Series A), Maor Investments, and TMT Investments also participating in the round.

Valuation is not being disclosed but there are some signs that it’s on the up for the startup. Workiz’s services — the startup’s name incidentally is pronounced not like a cute version of work, “workies”, but like “work is” as the company’s official name is actually Workiz Easy — are live in the U.S. and Canada, and it currently has some 100,000 service professionals using the platform.

Since the startup was founded in 2015 (originally as Send a Job), more than 12 million jobs, 100 million text messages, and $5 billion in job revenue have been initiated through it. 

For a point of comparison, a direct competitor, Jobber, earlier this year closed a $60 million round also after hitting 100,000 service professionals on its platform.

Despite that competition — and it’s a crowded field, with others like ServiceTitan, GE’s ServiceMax, BigChange in the U.K., new approaches like Super, and many others in the market — field service remains a big market, with some 20 million businesses globally focused on home services, with 5 million in the U.S. alone.

The opportunity for a startup like Workiz within that is to figure out what needs are currently not being addressed as well by existing offerings, and building them into its own solution.

One example of that, Azaria points out, has been the company’s voice service. He notes that most field service professionals before the rise of mobile apps had organized and updated customers and head offices of their whereabouts and progress through phone calls.

In some cases that is not hugely efficient, since it only alerts the person you are calling, not a whole team, and sometimes the person you are speaking with is not the person who needs the update most. But, it also remains a key way to connect with customers especially when there are delays. The phone service that the company offers integrates with other details about a job, letting the call become part of the bigger work log for everyone else to see.

Another is scheduling, which has been a complicated issue to manage especially in cases when you have small teams of users who need to work in close conjunction with each other. Workiz’s scheduling tools essentially work like a shared Google Calendar to help match people with skills, locations and jobs to get work booked and done faster.

The company’s toolkit, interestingly, has features that highlight business analytics too: you can currently manage call tracking, lead tracking and a live dashboard to measure how long jobs are taking and whether scheduling is mapping accurately or not. These are next-level tools that do remind me a little of Sisense and point precisely to how software and goals envisioned for the average data/knowledge worker are now being recast for those on their feet and in the field.

This also leaves the door open for the option to build in more lead generation into the platform, essentially creating a marketplace for field service professionals to connect with customers seeking people to do specific jobs, although it’s not an area the company is exploring for now at least.

“At this point we focus on SaaS and making a best-of-breed solution. We’re not in the lead generation market. We try to focus because we understand how challenging it is to be a field service engineer, with phone calls, stress and disorganization,” he said. “Most of them still use pen and paper and need tools to organizse the day. Many of them can advertise or use third party companies for lead generation, although maybe in the future we might do more on that.” For now, he said, the focus will remain on tools to address their more immediate needs just to get through their workdays and helping them be more professional, to “make the service person look larger than what they are.”

“Field service management is a market ripe for disruption, with a technological approach that is both agile and competitive,” said Gideon Argov, managing at New Era Capital Partners, in a statement. “In Workiz, we found all the elements for success, coupled with passionate leadership that started from the field. We are delighted to join the Workiz team.” Argov is joining the board with this round.

News: Joby Aviation takes flight into the public markets via a SPAC merger

• February 24, 2021
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Joby Aviation, a startup that has spent a more than a decade developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, will become a public company through a merger with Reinvent Technology Partners, a special purpose acquisition company from well-known investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The combined company, which will be listed on the

Joby Aviation, a startup that has spent a more than a decade developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, will become a public company through a merger with Reinvent Technology Partners, a special purpose acquisition company from well-known investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will have a pro forma implied valuation of $6.6 billion. Through the deal, Joby is capturing $1.6 billion in cash proceeds — $690 million of which will come from Reinvent’s cash in trust and an $835 million from private investors The Baupost Group, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research LLC and Baillie Gifford. A $75 million convertible note, from Uber, will also be converted into common stock at a $10 per share value.

While SPAC deals typically put in place terms to prevent major shareholders from pulling out their money, this merger puts a long-term lock-up on founder JoeBen Bevirt’s shares for up to five years. The deal also includes an earnout structure with full vesting that cannot be realized until the share price reaches $50 per share, which implies more than a $30 billion market capitalization.

Joby plans to use the capital to fund the launch of passenger service, which is expected to begin in 2024. The company still must complete certification of its aircraft and develop manufacturing facilities, but it is already on its way to achieving both.

Joby has agreed to a “G-1” certification basis for its aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, which specifies the requirements that need to be met by the company’s aircraft for it to be certified for commercial operations.

Joby is also planning to begin construction on a 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, designed in conjunction with Toyota, later this year.

Prior to its SPAC deal, Joby had gained attention and investors over the years as it developed its eVTOL. Toyota became an important backer and partner, leading a $620 million Series C round of funding in January 2020. Nearly a year later, Joby acquired Uber’s air taxi moonshot Elevate as part of a complex deal. Under the terms, Uber offloaded Elevate to Joby Aviation and invested $75 million into the startup. The two companies also expanded an existing partnership.

The $75 million investment was in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made by Uber as part of Joby’s Series C financing round. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup. Joby Aviation had raised $820 million before its bid to become a publicly traded company.

News: Emotive raises $50M to make text marketing more conversational

• February 24, 2021
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While more businesses are turning to text messages as a marketing channel, Emotive CEO Brain Zatulove argued that most marketers are just treating it as another “newsletter blast.” “The reason the channel performs so well is it’s not saturated,” Zatulove said. But that’s changing, and as it does, companies will have to do more to

While more businesses are turning to text messages as a marketing channel, Emotive CEO Brain Zatulove argued that most marketers are just treating it as another “newsletter blast.”

“The reason the channel performs so well is it’s not saturated,” Zatulove said. But that’s changing, and as it does, companies will have to do more to “cut through the noise.”

That’s what he said Emotive provides, by enabling text marketing that feels like a real conversation with another human being, rather than just another email blast. He compared it to the sales associate who would greet you when you first walked into a department store, pre-COVID.

“The online sales associate really didn’t exist,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to provide.”

Emotive saw 466% year-over-year revenue growth in 2020 and is announcing today that it has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $400 million. It was led by CRV with participation from Mucker Capital, TenOneTen Ventures and Stripes.

“Never underestimate the importance of building a product that your customers, and your customers’ customers adore,” said CRV general partner Murat Bicer in a statement. “One of the things that struck us about Emotive is the sheer amount of customer love Brian and Zack get from meal delivery services, manufacturing companies and even toddler shoe brands. Small businesses find it easy to set up campaigns and their customers genuinely prefer communicating with someone over text rather than email.”

Zatulove said he founded the company with Zachary Wise after they’d worked together on cannabis loyalty startup Reefer, eventually deciding there was a bigger opportunity here after their early successes with text marketing. He explained that while Emotive works with larger customers, its sweet spot is mid-sized e-commerce businesses on Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce and Woocommerce.

Since those businesses usually don’t have any salespeople of their own yet, Emotive serves that function. It can start conversations around shopping cart abandonment and promote promote sales and new products, resulting in what the company says are 8% to 10% conversion rates (compared to 1% or 2% for a standard text marketing campaign). Zatuolove said the platform largely relied on human responders at first, and although it’s become increasingly automated over time, Emotive still has an internal team handling responses when necessary.

“We never plan on losing that human touch as part of the dialogue,” he added. “We see ourselves as a human-to-human platform. That’s our biggest differentiator.”

Emotive had previously raised $8.2 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Zatulove said this new round will allow the company to continue developing the product, to grow its headcount to more than 200 people and to open offices in Atlanta and Boston. Eventually, it could also expand beyond texting.

“Longer term, we see ourselves more as a conversation platform, not just as a text message platform,” he said.

News: RecargaPay closes a $70 million Series C

• February 24, 2021
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RecargaPay, a Brazil-based fintech that allows users to top off their prepaid cell phones online, announced this morning that they’ve closed their $70 million Series C. The company, which operates solely in Brazil, was launched in 2010 by Miami-based serial entrepreneur Rodrigo Teijeiro, who is co-founder and CEO.  Unlike in the U.S. where most people

RecargaPay, a Brazil-based fintech that allows users to top off their prepaid cell phones online, announced this morning that they’ve closed their $70 million Series C. The company, which operates solely in Brazil, was launched in 2010 by Miami-based serial entrepreneur Rodrigo Teijeiro, who is co-founder and CEO. 

Unlike in the U.S. where most people have a cell phone plan through a major carrier, in Brazil — a country where the minimum wage is currently $1,100 reals per month (roughly $202 USD) — many people must buy calling cards at local shops to add credit to their phones, which allows them to avoid a monthly recurring bill.

“Most people were using prepaid [phones] for control because they didn’t trust the telephone companies — they didn’t want roaming fees or fees for going over etc.,” said Teijeiro. Many of us can relate to the days when we’d come home from an international trip and have an astronomical phone bill because of roaming fees, but imagine if that were a monthly occurrence?

In 2014, Teijeiro and his co-founders — one of whom is his brother, Alvaro, the CTO — turned the RecargaPay website into an app.

“Before RecargaPay, if your cell phone ran out of credits and it was 10 p.m. and you needed to make a phone call, you’d have to go out and find a shop that sold the prepaid cards to add the credits to your phone — it was super inconvenient,” Teijeiro added. Cell phones caught on quickly in Brazil because it has traditionally been difficult to obtain a landline — an ordeal that often took several months to solidify.

RecargaPay originally had operations in various Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Brazil, as well as in Spain and the U.S. But in 2016 the company decided to focus on the Brazilian market, because not only is it the biggest in LatAm, but it also has the highest penetration of credit cards. 

“The number one mistake investors make when investing in LatAm is that they think that LatAm is one whole market. But especially in fintech, all the regulations are very different. That’s why it’s hard to scale in LatAm,” he said.

The company makes money by charging a monthly fee of $19.99 reals. When a customer makes an online top-off on the app, they get 4% cash back because the cell phone carriers pay RecargaPay the equivalent amount, which it then passes on to the user.

The company, which is EBITDA positive according to Teijeiro, has raised just over $100 million in capital to date and plans to use the $70 million to “expand its financial services offerings to small businesses and consumers, including further development of its popular subscription program Prime+,” the company said in a statement.

Already, RecargaPay offers much more than the ability to top off your cell phone. Other features include the ability to buy gift cards, apply for and receive microloans, refill your public transportation cards and pay bills. Teijeiro explained that RecargaPay and Nubank, LatAm’s largest digital bank, are not direct competitors, but rather operate in the same ecosystem. A lot of Nubank customers who now have a credit card, thanks to the bank’s no-fee cards, can use RecargaPay to top off their cell phones, he added.

According to a 2020 report by TechnoBlog, a Brazilian media outlet, in 2010 about 83% of cell phones in Brazil were prepaid. Today, that number is smaller, but it’s still a whopping 49%. The change started in 2012 with the advent of smartphones in Brazil and the popularization of WhatsApp. While this may sound insane, previously, Brazilians could only call others who used their same cell phone carrier — if they called people in other networks they’d incur a hefty fee.

To get around this problem, Brazilians bought multiple cell phone chips from different carriers and they would have to top off these chips individually. You’d also have to remember which of your contacts used which carrier — mind-blowing, I know. So when WhatsApp launched, it eliminated that problem altogether, hence its massive penetration in the Brazilian market.

RecargaPay’s Series C was co-led by Miami-based Fuel Ventures and Madrid-based IDC Ventures, with additional participation from LUN Partners, Experian Ventures and ATW Partners.

“RecargaPay is a pioneer in the payments sector as one of the first all-in-one platforms to serve such a wide array of everyday needs of Brazilians,” said Maggie Vo, Fuel Venture Capital managing general partner and chief investment officer. “We are thrilled to back a company that is actively improving the lives of so many people by giving them more control over their finances, all the while challenging the status quo of banking systems.”

“Often people think that RecargaPay is for the unbanked, but it’s actually for the unbanked and the banked,” Teijeiro added. “What we always had in mind was to build — in the long-term — a mobile money ecosystem. Our approach was to solve problems one-by-one, and now we have a vertically integrated payment platform that offers financial services.”

News: Symbio is working with Toyota and Nissan to increase robotic assembly efficiency

• February 24, 2021
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Bay Area-based AI startup Symbio today announced its “official launch.” Backed by a total of $30 million in funding, the company has struck deals with both Nissan and Toyota to implement its software in U.S.-based factories. The company says its SymbioDCS technology is capable of dramatically increasing automation with factory robots on the assembly line.

Bay Area-based AI startup Symbio today announced its “official launch.” Backed by a total of $30 million in funding, the company has struck deals with both Nissan and Toyota to implement its software in U.S.-based factories.

The company says its SymbioDCS technology is capable of dramatically increasing automation with factory robots on the assembly line.

“To the end customer, the proposition is pretty straightforward,” CEO and co-founder Max Reynolds tells TechCrunch. “We’re improving the efficiency of their automation. The high-level goal is to increase the capacity of the factory and enable them to build more product, more quickly, more flexibly. “

The company closed a $15 million Series B in December of last year. That adds to a $12 million Series A in 2018, $2.5 million seed two years prior and a $500,000 pre-seed. This latest round was led by ACME Capital, joining existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse Ventures and The House Fund.

“Instead of exclusively providing automation solutions, Symbio is also designing the tools that enable the developers and domain experts working in manufacturing to create their own automation solutions and easily adapt them to new tasks,” UC Berkeley professor Anca Dragan said in a statement tied to the news. “To do this, they are building products that leverage AI strengths and human insight in a symbiotic way.”

Founded in 2014, the company employs around 40, mostly engineers, largely based in California. Reynolds explains that the current level of automated manufacturing in automotive is actually far lower than one might expect. “Assembly is less than 5% automated, across the board,” he says. “Even in this core vertical, there’s a ton of headroom and opportunity for growth.”

News: Walmart’s Flipkart to deploy over 25,000 electric vehicles in India by 2030

• February 24, 2021
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India’s Flipkart said on Wednesday it will deploy more than 25,000 electric vehicles in its supply chain by 2030 as the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant looks to achieve a 100% transition to electric mobility in the next 10 years. The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has partnered with leading EV makers including Hero Electric, Mahindra Electric, and

India’s Flipkart said on Wednesday it will deploy more than 25,000 electric vehicles in its supply chain by 2030 as the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant looks to achieve a 100% transition to electric mobility in the next 10 years.

The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has partnered with leading EV makers including Hero Electric, Mahindra Electric, and Piaggio to build vehicles for its first and last mile delivery fleets across the country.

The announcement comes a day after rival Amazon said it had partnered with Mahindra Electric to develop “close to hundred” electric three-wheeler in India. The American e-commerce giant last year pledged to deploy 10,000 electric vehicles in the country by 2025.

Flipkart said its electric fleet will include two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and four-wheeler vehicles, all of which will be designed and assembled in India. The company said it has already started to deploy two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric vehicles in “multiple locations” in India including Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Guwahati.

In recent years, New Delhi has pushed to replace gasoline and diesel vehicles in India with environmentally friendly electric vehicles. Reuters reported in 2019 that the Indian government was planning to order ride-hailing firms such as Ola and Uber to convert 40% of their fleets to electric by April 2026.

“Electrification of the logistics fleet is a key part of Flipkart’s larger sustainability goal and in line with our commitment to the Climate Group’s EV100 initiative,” said Amitesh Jha, SVP of Ekart and Marketplace at Flipkart, in a statement.

“In this journey of making our logistics fleet completely electric by 2030, we will collaborate and work with leading local players to procure and deploy electric vehicles while supporting the required infrastructure growth. We understand the relevance of electric mobility in achieving both business and sustainability goals and are committed to paving the way for greater adoption of EVs across the country,” he added.

The company said over the past year it has worked to create a network of ecosystem partners across charging providers, skill development agencies, aggregators, and original equipment manufacturers.

The company, which is expected to publicly list later this year, identified three models that will feature in its electric vehicles fleet: Nyx series by Hero Electric, which offers extended driving range of up to 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) per charge; Treo Zor by Mahindra Electric, which features “highest-in-class payload of 550kg (1212.5 pounds)”; and Ape’ E Xtra FX by Piaggio.