Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: TomoCredit raises $7M to help the cash rich and credit poor

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

It’s difficult to get credit if you don’t have credit. That’s the problem that startup TomoCredit is trying to solve. Co-founder and CEO Kristy Kim came up with the concept for the company after being rejected multiple times for an auto loan while in her early 20s. Kim, who immigrated to the U.S. from South

It’s difficult to get credit if you don’t have credit.

That’s the problem that startup TomoCredit is trying to solve. Co-founder and CEO Kristy Kim came up with the concept for the company after being rejected multiple times for an auto loan while in her early 20s.

Kim, who immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea with her family as a child, was disappointed that her lack of a credit history proved to be such an obstacle despite the fact she had a job “and positive cash flow.”

So she teamed up with Dmitry Kashlev, a Russian immigrant, in January of 2019 to create a solution for other foreign-born individuals and young adults facing similar credit challenges. That fall, the startup (short for Tomorrow’s Credit) was accepted into the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars.

The San Francisco-based fintech offers a credit card aimed at helping first-time borrowers build credit history, based on their cash flow, rather than on their FICO or credit report ratings.

Today, Tomo announced a $7 million seed funding round that included participation from a slew of investors including KB Investment Inc. (KBIC) — a subsidiary of South Korean consumer bank, Kookmin Bank — along with Barclays, Knollwood Investment Advisory, BAM Ventures, Passport Capital, Ulu Ventures and Strong Ventures. 

Angel and individual investors also put money in the round, including: Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton, ex-Venmo COO Michael Vaughan and James Kim, former head of finance at Tinder. 

More than 30 million young adults are considered “cash rich” but with limited credit histories, making their only option to use debit cards, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

TomoCredit is a credit card that operates with a debit card model that is issued by Community Federal Savings Bank, a member of the FDIC. Users make payments on a seven-day automatic payment schedule with no fees or APR applied. Credit limits average around $3,000, but can scale to a maximum of $10,000.  Borrowers can link to their investment accounts to increase their credit limits.  

“We set out to build something that wasn’t just more inclusive, but fundamentally different from existing consumer credit card offerings,” Kim said.

She emphasizes the card is not just for immigrants, but for anyone that is considered “no file or thin file” when it comes to credit history.

Getting rejected for the auto loan made Kim realize that in the U.S., “everything is really difficult without a credit score.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you have income or savings or not,” she said. “I thought it would be really nice if we could leverage different data sources, especially cash flow data, instead of credit history. We are living in 2021 and open banking is popular, so it’s easier to get access to open banking data. And we leverage your cash flow data to underwrite you.”

Another unique aspect of Tomo’s model, Kim believes, is that it makes money through merchant fees and not through the consumers who use its card. 

“Unlike incumbent credit card issuers, we aren’t incentivized by slapping fees on borrowers for making late payments — we make money as our cardholders spend — so we grow as you grow,” Kim added.

TomoCredit cards became available in late summer 2020.

“We didn’t expect much, to be honest, because it was our first launch and we didn’t do any marketing,” she recalls. “However, we are able to get over 300,000 people signing up, and then we are able to pre-approve half of them. Since then, we have been aggressively issuing cards.”

Demand for the company’s card skyrocketed last year after it “went viral” on YouTube and Reddit, Kim said.

“Right after we launch, we got huge jumps in traffic. We found out that many YouTubers were commenting and reviewing Tomo, and the comments were from people who were looking for our solution to build credit score fast and efficiently.”

Today, Tomo has over 10,000 active users and the company plans to issue cards to the remaining pre-approved applicants by this summer.

I was curious if Tomo had trouble convincing investors considering the risk it would be taking on. 

Kim acknowledged having to help them overcome the “emotional and psychological hurdle” of the risk involved with issuing a credit card to people with no credit history.

“I had to help them understand that the environment is changing,” she said. “When you look at the new generation of consumers, especially Gen Z and millennials, you will see that the majority of them have a thin file or no file at all. And that’s not their fault. People have different personal finance behavior than in the past, which makes it harder for traditional lenders to evaluate them.”

Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton is one of the investors TomoCredit won over.

“I spend a lot of my time these days investing in and catalyzing products that right the wrongs that my family and so many others endured as I was growing up,” she wrote via email. “One of those themes is in establishing and maintaining good credit and having an alternative to predatory lending. Tomo Credit feels to me like it is tackling this in a hugely scalable, mainstream way.”

Mariquit Corcoran, group chief innovation officer at Barclays, said she was impressed by Kim’s “tenacity and passion” when she first presented her idea of solving “a real-life problem facing many people who have traditionally struggled to access credit and build a financial profile.”

“I look forward to watching their growth and impact in changing the way an individual’s credit worthiness is determined,” she wrote via email.

Looking ahead, Tomo plans to use its new capital to triple its headcount of 15, mostly with the goal of hiring full stack and data engineers. Recently, it tapped a former LendingClub exec, Chaomei Chen, to serve as its acting chief risk officer. The startup also plans to use the money in part toward product development, such as adding more interactive features.

Tomo is not the only fintech with an alternative credit model. X1 Card sets limits based on your current and future income instead of your credit score. And, Grow Credit is a startup that launched in 2019 to help customers build out their credit scores by providing a credit line for online subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix.

News: Podz turns podcasts into a personalized audio newsfeed

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, with backing from investors like M13, Katie Couric and Paris Hilton. “Even though podcasts have gained a lot of momentum — there are 100 million folks in the U.S. who listen to podcasts — we still haven’t seen that crossover behavior, where

Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, with backing from investors like M13, Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.

“Even though podcasts have gained a lot of momentum — there are 100 million folks in the U.S. who listen to podcasts — we still haven’t seen that crossover behavior, where audio becomes a part of everyday lives,” CEO Doug Imbruce argued. “We think that’s because the experience experience discovering and consuming podcasts is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997.”

Imbruce’s name may be familiar to longtime TechCrunch readers, as he was previously the chief executive at Qwiki, which won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 (Cloudflare was one of the runners up), then acquired by Yahoo a few years later.

By Imbruce’s own admission, Qwiki never quite lived up to his hopes for remaking online media consumption, but he said that its vision of “machine-created media” offered “a taste of the future” — a future that he’s hoping to help usher in with Podz.

The problem that the startup aims to solve is pretty straightforward. Since podcasts often consist of 30 or 60 minutes or more of spoken-word audio, they’re difficult to browse, and when you discover new ones, it’s usually through word-of-mouth recommendations or clunky search tools.

While tools like Headliner makes it easier for podcasters to promote their content with short clips on social media, Podz automates that creation process and makes those clips the centerpiece of the listening experience.

In the Podz mobile app, users browse what the startup calls an “the first audio newsfeed,” consisting of 60-second podcast clips. These clips are designed to highlight the best moment from each podcast, making it easier to sample a much wider array of titles than the ones you currently subscribe to. Each clip should stand on its own, but if you want to dive deeper, you can save the full episode for listening later.

These clips are created automatically, and Imbruce said “the beating heart of the Podz platform” is a machine learning model that “identifies the most engaging parts of podcasts.” The model was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio, in consultation with journalists and audio editors.

For example, here are the clips chosen from the three most recent episodes of the Original Content podcast — our reviews of “Soul,”, “The White Tiger” and “Bridgerton.” Each clip seems reasonably self-contained, and although I was a little dismayed to discover that they all focused on me (rather than my more eloquent co-hosts), a Podz spokesperson explained that’s because the app focuses on “the highest density speakers.”

The Podz newsfeed is personalized to your interests (and, if you choose, it can also draw on the podcasts you follow in Apple Podcasts and the accounts you follow on Twitter). Imbruce said it should become smarter over time as it observes listener behavior.

He added that the team is hoping to introduce more creative and monetization tools for podcasters over time: “We are really hopeful that we can both increase amount of audio being created by 10x and increase the monetization of audio by 100x.”

In addition to Imbruce, the Podz founding team includes CTO Seye Ojumu, Head of Design Rasmus Zwickson and iOS lead Greg Page. The startup has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from M13, Canaan Partners, Charge Ventures, Humbition, as well as notable angel investors like Couric, Hilton (who’s launching her own podcast) and Mara Schiavocampo (The Trend Reporter).

“We are living in a golden age of audio, but only 1% of podcasts reach an audience of 5,000+,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told me in a statement. “Podz plans to grow the audience for existing audio but the real focus will be on growing new audio by leveraging their creator tools. Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz.  Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”

News: Archer lands $1.1B order from United Airlines and a SPAC deal

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Archer Aviation, the electric aircraft startup targeting the urban air mobility market, has landed United Airlines as a customer and an investor in its bid to become a publicly traded company via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.  Archer Aviation said Wednesday it reached an agreement to merge with special purpose acquisition company

Archer Aviation, the electric aircraft startup targeting the urban air mobility market, has landed United Airlines as a customer and an investor in its bid to become a publicly traded company via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. 

Archer Aviation said Wednesday it reached an agreement to merge with special purpose acquisition company Atlas Crest Investment Corp., an increasingly common financial path that allows the startup to eschew the once traditional IPO process. The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with ticker symbol “ACHR,” will have an equity valuation of $3.8 billion. 

The company said it expected to receive $1.1 billion of gross proceeds, including $600 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from investors such as United Airlines, Stellantis and the venture arm of Exor, Baron Capital Group, the Federated Hermes Kaufmann Funds, Mubadala Capital, Putnam Investments and Access Industries. Ken Moelis and affiliates, along with Marc Lore, who is one of Archer’s primary and initial backers, are investing $30 million in the PIPE.

The combined company will also hold about $500 million cash in trust. Prior to the SPAC deal, Archer had raised $60 million in a seed and Series A round.

Separately, the Palo Alto, California-based startup announced that United Airlines agreed to invest in the company. Under the terms of its agreement, United has placed an order for $1 billion of Archer’s aircraft. United has the option to buy an additional $500 million of aircraft. 

Archer has yet to mass produce its electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, which designed to travel up to 60 miles on a single charge at speeds of 150 miles per hour. Archer plans to unveil its full-scale eVTOL later this year and is aiming to begin volume manufacturing in 2023. 

The company is betting that its deal with United Airlines and a previously announced partnership with automotive conglomerate Stellantis combined with capital raised through its SPAC merger, will help speed up its efforts towards commercialization. 

United CEO Scott Kirby couched the investment has one of the ways the airline will help decarbonize air travel.

“By working with Archer, United is showing the aviation industry that now is the time to embrace cleaner, more efficient modes of transportation,” Kirby said. “With the right technology, we can curb the impact aircraft have on the planet, but we have to identify the next generation of companies who will make this a reality early and find ways to help them get off the ground.”

It’s also an investment in a possible new business line that could eventually shuttle United passengers to and from an airport. United estimates that using one of Archer’s eVTOL aircraft could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 50% per passenger on a trip between Hollywood and Los Angeles International Airport — one of the initial cities the startup plans to launch their fleet.

The agreement to go public and the order from United Airlines comes less than a year after Archer Aviation came out of stealth. Archer was co-founded in 2018 by Adam Goldstein and Brett Adcock, who sold their software-as-a-service company Vettery to The Adecco Group for more than $100 million. The company’s primary backer was Lore, who sold his company Jet.com to Walmart in 2014 for $3.3 billion. Lore is now Walmart’s e-commerce chief.

News: Thrasio raises $750M more in equity for its Amazon roll-up play

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The Amazon Marketplace roll-up play is well and truly underway. In the latest development, Thrasio — one of the biggest and earliest movers in the market to consolidate third-party sellers on the platform, with the promise to provide better economies of scale to manage and grow those businesses — announced that it has raised another

The Amazon Marketplace roll-up play is well and truly underway. In the latest development, Thrasio — one of the biggest and earliest movers in the market to consolidate third-party sellers on the platform, with the promise to provide better economies of scale to manage and grow those businesses — announced that it has raised another $750 million at a valuation that is likely to be over $3.75 billion.

The funding is being led by existing backers Oaktree and Advent, and it includes participation from previous unnamed investors. (That list of equity backers has included Peak6, Western Technology Investment, and Jason Finger, the co-founder of one of the early players in food delivery startups, Seamless.)

Thrasio said it will be using the money to continue its rapid pace of buying up more third-party sellers in the “Amazon FBA ecosystem”, a reference to smaller merchants that sell and distribute their products using the “Fulfilment By Amazon” service from the e-commerce giant.

“Thrasio continues its exceptional growth,” said Joshua Silberstein, who co-founded and co-leads the company with Carlos Cashman. “Over the past two months, we’ve been acquiring $1.5 million in revenue per day.” Those are his italics. “Thrasio is now closing two or three deals every week.”

Thrasio to date has acquired nearly 100 FBA businesses says that it reached that number by way of evaluating 6,000 possible companies and 14,000 “category-leading products.”

Six thousand may sound like a big number, but one estimate puts the number of third-party sellers on Amazon at around 5 million, a number that appears to be growing exponentially at the moment, with more than 1 million sellers joining the platform last year.

The size of the opportunity, plus the Amazon-proven promise of economy of scale in the world of e-commerce, are likely two reasons why we have seen so many startups emerging looking to roll them up.

Thrasio’s $750 million fundraise is an all-equity venture round. Based on its $3 billion valuation in January (when it closed a debt round of $500 million), this latest cash injection appears to be coming in at a $3.75 billion valuation, but quite possibly more.

“Quite possibly more” because the news comes at a particularly overheated time in this specific area of e-commerce.

Thrasio’s news came out yesterday afternoon, only hours after we reported on a new rival called Branded, which launched its own roll-up business on $150 million in funding and with a critical detail: one of the “co-founders” is the deep-pocketed European VC firm Target Global.

And that comes on the heels of others in this space — they include, in addition to Thrasio and Branded, Berlin Brands Group, SellerX, Heyday, Heroes, Perch and more — collectively raising or committing from their own balance sheets well over $1 billion in aid of their own efforts to buy up small but promising third-party merchants.

For its part, Thrasio notes that the funding was raised quickly and diluted existing shareholders by 11.1%, and that it has now raised $1.75 in equity and debt.

We have asked Thrasio to confirm its valuation and will update as we learn more.

Thrasio products do not carry any kind of Thrasio branding. But I’m guessing that as Thrasio and its rivals look for a better edge and aim to give the impression of more quality (rather than the fly-by-night feeling that some of these sellers have today), we may see more of that coming out.

Brands that it owns include Vybe Percussion deep tissue massage gun, Circadian Optics bright light therapy lamps, and skincare products from Sdara Skincare, Thrasio said.

In the competition for the best of these, Thrasio claims its marketing and analytics can help these newcomers “compete with top household name labels, quickly becoming the trusted items that consumers turn to for their everyday needs.”

The feverish pace of fundraising in the area of FBA roll-ups feels very much like a bubble in the market — not least because none of these still-young companies have yet to prove that the strategy to buy up and consolidate these sellers is a useful and profitable one.

(The only one that has stated that it is profitable, Berlin Brands Group, has done so on its existing business model, which has involved building a variety of third-party sellers from the ground up itself, not buying up others, with whatever legacy baggage they may carry, good or bad.)

Thrasio is very much in the go-big-or-go-home stage of scaling with funding, and in its favor, although it’s only three years old (founded in 2018), that age has made it one of the oldest and more proven in this current wave.

“In ten years, omnichannel retail will be the backbone of the entire consumer products ecosystem – but today, it’s still in its genesis. Every day, the very fabric of this market is twisting as it continues to evolve,” said Cashman in a statement. “Our balance sheet isn’t built to win yesterday’s battles – it is designed to pursue the accelerating opportunities that accompany these kinds of seismic changes in an industry.”

News: Collective launches a SaaS marketplace for freelancer teams

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Freelancers who work well together in teams are the target for Collective, a French startup that’s launching a software-as-a-service marketplace today. (Not to be confused with Collective, a US-based startup that offers back-office tools for the self employed running a business-of-one.) Collective (the French ‘teams’ edition) is co-founded by Jean de Rauglaudre and Vianney de

Freelancers who work well together in teams are the target for Collective, a French startup that’s launching a software-as-a-service marketplace today. (Not to be confused with Collective, a US-based startup that offers back-office tools for the self employed running a business-of-one.)

Collective (the French ‘teams’ edition) is co-founded by Jean de Rauglaudre and Vianney de Drouas, and is backed by the SaaS-focused startup studio/venture builder, eFounders, which covers expenses during the first 18 months (so how much it ends up investing depends but typically runs to at least a few thousand euros.)

“As a former freelancer, I was really attracted by this new way of working,” says de Rauglaudre, discussing why Collective is focusing on “independents teaming up by mutualizing skills, networks and work methodology in a quest to go faster, think bigger, and find more meaning”, as he puts it.

The startup points to notable Collectives that have emerged in recent years — such as ProductLed.Org and Knackcollective.com in the US, and Mozza.io, Alasta.io and Lookoom.co in France, as feeding the idea.

It argues that the indie ‘collectives’ phenomenon has only been accelerated as a result of the coronavirus pandemic — with companies faced with more uncertainty looking for more resilient and flexible options.

The pair of founders worked with eFounders to hone their fledgling idea. “We understood that collective was the ultimate next step on this market. Though, we noticed that those forms today do not scale (because of so many admin issues), do not shine (because they do not thrive under a standardized reality), and work alone (while solo freelancers have a lot of tools and benefit from a legal existence, collectives are still undeserved). Therefore, we ‘imaginated’ Collective!” de Rauglaudre tells TechCrunch.

For teams of skilled indie workers the lure of Collective is a promise that it combines the benefits of working in an agency — because its SaaS platform automates a bunch of back-office functions like proposals, invoices, contracts and payments — with the flexibility of still being freelance and thus able to pick and choose projects and clients.

“Exhaustive” back-office is the promise from de Rauglaudre. (Which — yes — does include chasing clients for late/non payment of invoices. When we checked that detail he dubbed the service “a perfect combination of flexibility (inherent to collective models) and security (related to our back-office)”. Late freelancer payments are of course an infamous pain-point that’s been targeted by other startups over the years; but Collective is coming with the full back-office package.)

Additionally, Collective offers freelancer teams marketplace visibility — and thus help with their client pipeline.

It’s been soft launched for one month at this point and in that time says 18 collectives have been formed on its marketplace, comprising more than 150 freelancers in total.

Early collectives operating on its marketplace are offering “varied” expertise — from software development, design, product management, and growth — and are already working with five companies. Collective also says it’s speaking with more than 80 companies as it starts its push for scale.

“We did not expect such huge interest in so little time, coming both from independents and companies,” adds de Rauglaudre in a statement. “This confirms our initial realization: That people and companies are looking for more flexible ways of working and that it is by joining forces that we can reach higher. What we’re seeing is the very beginning of the teamwork revolution.”

“While solo freelancers benefit from a legal existence and have dedicated platforms, collectives are still under-served,” says eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere in another supporting statement. “They all operate under different legal structures and struggle to find work because they don’t have the right tools. Collective aims to become the go-to solution to help collectives exist, find work and scale.”

In terms of the underlying trends Collective is aiming to tap into, de Rauglaudre points to “skyrocketing” rates of independent work over the past decade (150%+).

As they investigated further, he says they noticed that more and more freelancers are working together in various forms — suggesting that around a fifth of independents “work as a collective consciously or not”.

“We estimate that +10M freelancers are merging in collectives worldwide but with very various forms (structured or not). They want to team up to increase their revenues (competing against agencies and not solo freelancers) while improving their working mode (not alone any more),” he suggests.

In terms of target sectors/skills for the marketplace to serve (and serve up), he doesn’t think there’s a single template — but Collective is starting by focusing development (on the ‘collectives’ supply side) on design, product, tech, data and growth marketing; and (on the client demand side) on large scale-ups and tech companies.

The business model at this stage is for it to a charge markup (5%-15%) on the client side. The lower fee is charged is the platform isn’t providing the client; while the higher figure is if it is, per de Rauglaudre.

Once all the bells and whistles are ready with the SaaS — in about another month — he says it will also charge a monthly fee on the collective side.

Given the branding clash with the SF-based back-office startup Collective, the French team may want to take that time to consider a name change — maybe ‘Collectif’ could work?

News: Labster gets millions from a16z to bring virtual science lab software to the world

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm with $16.5 billion in assets under management, has poured millions into an edtech startup that sells virtual STEM lab simulations to institutions. Copenhagen-based Labster, which sells virtual science laboratory simulations to schools, announced today that it has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by the prominent

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm with $16.5 billion in assets under management, has poured millions into an edtech startup that sells virtual STEM lab simulations to institutions.

Copenhagen-based Labster, which sells virtual science laboratory simulations to schools, announced today that it has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by the prominent Silicon Valley firm, including participation from existing investors GGV Capital, Owl Ventures and Balderton Capital. Labster has now raised $100 million in total known venture capital to date.

Like many edtech companies, Labster has found itself centered and validated as the pandemic underscores the need for remote work. In April, Labster signed a contract to bring its services to the entire California Community College network, which includes more than 2.1 million students. Months later, the startup brought on $9 million in equity funding to bring GGV’s Jenny Lee onto the board and expand its Asia operations.

“A16z is very excited about investing in technology companies that have a big impact and potential to become massive global successes’,” CEO and co-founder Michael Bodekaer Jensen said. “The fact that Labster is a platform innovating learning at scale is really what attracted them.”

The new capital will help Labster increase its staff, grow into new regions that include Latin America and Africa, as well as invest in new product development to better support teachers.

Jensen says that today’s raise, which is singularly larger than any capital Labster has raised prior, “dramatically increased” the valuation of the company. Jensen did confirm that Labster has not yet hit the $1 billion mark in terms of valuation, nor did he comment on whether the startup had hit profitability or not.

What Jensen did share, though, is that he thinks Labster’s new capital brings the startup one step closer to two big goals: serve 100 million students in the next few years, and become a platform to “enable anyone in the world to customize and build their own simulations on their platform.”

“We’re not a content company,” the co-founder said. “We’re a platform for immersive learning.”

Currently, Labster sells its e-learning solution to support and enhance in-person courses. Based on the subscription an institution chooses, participants can get differing degrees of access to a virtual laboratory. Imagine a range of experiments, from understanding bacterial growth and isolation to exploring the biodiversity of an exoplanet. Along with each simulation, Labster offers 3D animations for certain concepts, re-plays of simulations, quiz questions and a virtual learning assistant.

Jensen is hinting that the startup might finally be able to move past pre-determined learning tracks and into the world of customizable immersive learning. Other startups, including Inspirit, are also aiming to bring the creativity associated with games such as Minecraft or Roblox to the day-to-day schoolwork of students around the world.

With platform ambition, Labster is pausing its virtual reality efforts, which requires acquiring headsets at scale.

“VR is good for learning, but we need to make sure that we understand and provide services and solutions that work with the hardware that institutions already have and are available,” he said, adding that many institutions have been unable to afford headsets for all students. The fact that Labster is stepping away from virtual reality and framing itself as an immersive learning environment is more than a branding decision, but suggests that the future of scalable edtech might look less like goggles and more like a customizable web page.

“In the early days there was definitely a little naïve entrepreneurial mindset to build it and suddenly all teachers will come,” Jensen said. “[VR] was in no way as revolutionary as we hopped and thought of.”

New investments for the startup include Labster Portal, which is a dashboard for teachers to understand how individual students are using the immersive simulations and what lessons make sense to embed together. The company is also focused on landing partnerships with institutions, on either a country or state-wide level or district-level. Jensen says that the bigger the contract, the bigger the discount because it saves them money on onboarding costs. Labster recently signed a deal to bring its technology to the entire country of Denmark.

Labster currently has more than 2,000 colleges, universities and high schools on its platform.

“Post-COVID, the growth will slow,” Jensen said. “When we have conversations with institutions we are increasingly talking about post-COVID and continuing how we can further use Labster in new and innovative ways.”

News: ‘Knowledge hacking’ app Uptime raises $16M

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Uptime, the self-described “knowledge hacking” app, has raised $16 million in seed funding, after officially launching on iOS in January. Positioned as a “micro-learning” platform,” Uptime presents five-minute “knowledge hacks” from books, courses and documentaries. The idea is to let you quickly “grasp ideas and insights from trusted authors, instructors, and creative minds,” without spending

Uptime, the self-described “knowledge hacking” app, has raised $16 million in seed funding, after officially launching on iOS in January.

Positioned as a “micro-learning” platform,” Uptime presents five-minute “knowledge hacks” from books, courses and documentaries. The idea is to let you quickly “grasp ideas and insights from trusted authors, instructors, and creative minds,” without spending too much of your precious time. In return, content creators — from those on The New York Times bestseller list to the most relevant courses and Academy Award-winning documentaries — get a new way to reach audiences who may go on to purchase the full works.

In other words, chalk this up as part content aggregator and discovery, and part lead generation for the actual content creators. Built, of course, for the short attention spans of millennials and Gen Z. Or so the pitch goes.

“Hacks are presented in a unique visual story format, designed to be inspirational and make learning effective, fun, engaging, and shareable – all verified by a team of experts,” explains the company. “At the end of each Hack, the user is presented with the option to buy the book, watch the full documentary or sign up for the course from the original source”.

The seed funding comes from Uptime’s founders — serial entrepreneurs Jamie True and Jack Bekhor, who previously founded LifeWorks (acquired in 2018 for $325 million), and former YouTube and Facebook executive Patrick Walker — alongside other private investors. They include Lord David Alliance, ex-CEO of Tesco Sir Terry Leahy and unnamed members of private equity firm Thomas H Lee (THL).

“The global edtech market was valued at around [over] $89 billion last year, with people spending hundreds of dollars on online courses, building up their soft skills and watching documentaries,” says Uptime’s Patrick Walker. “It’s a huge opportunity for educational content creators but for customers, it leads to information overload and it can be hard to cut through and find the quality in what feels like an oversaturated market.

“With Uptime, we wanted to create something that could be a one-stop shop for knowledge. Instead of sifting through bestseller lists, endless sites of digital courses, and video platforms for documentaries, Uptime presents the best content from only the most trusted experts, organisations and sources. People can select the topics they’re interested in and gain access to the key elements of the content in snackable, easy-to-watch visual stories, audio and text”.

Uptime’s founders say the platform is aimed at anyone who wants to learn but only has a short amount of time, energy and/or limited resources to do so. “It’s perfect for Gen Z, millennials, parents, anyone with an interest in enhancing their personal or career prospects, and a desire to fill their time with constructive and uplifting content,” says Walker.

One criticism that could be levied at an app like Uptime is that it is another example of a parasitic aggregator, essentially monetising other people’s work. Its makers argue the opposite, and say that the app is actually helping to deliver a new audience to a creator’s work by providing a taster.

“At the end of each Hack, there is a link for people to go on and purchase the book, course or documentary, thereby delivering new audiences to creators,” adds Walker. “The authors and creators we’ve reached out to are extremely enthusiastic about their work being on Uptime. We’ve had support from the likes of Lily Cole, Oobah Butler and Dr Tara Swart… The idea is that everyone can benefit from Uptime; the users and the content creators”.

News: Snap partners with ShareChat’s Moj to roll out Camera Kit

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Snap has partnered with ShareChat’s Moj app to integrate its Camera Kit into the Indian app as the American social giant looks to accelerate its growth in the world’s second largest internet market. This is the first time Snap has partnered with an Indian firm for its Camera Kit technology, which unlocks a range of

Snap has partnered with ShareChat’s Moj app to integrate its Camera Kit into the Indian app as the American social giant looks to accelerate its growth in the world’s second largest internet market.

This is the first time Snap has partnered with an Indian firm for its Camera Kit technology, which unlocks a range of augmented reality features, the two companies said. (Snap has partnered with a handful of firms including Triller for Camera Kit globally.)

Eight-month-old Moj creators will be able to use Snap’s AR technology from within the app, while some of the lenses their creators produce will be made available to Snap users, executives with the firms told TechCrunch in an interview.

Wednesday’s move comes amid an ongoing fundraise effort by ShareChat, which operates Moj and is a popular social network in India that caters to users in over a dozen local languages, which is in talks with Google, Snap, Twitter and other investors, TechCrunch reported last month.

Ben Schwerin, SVP of Content and Partnerships at Snap, said in an interview that today’s collaboration is the beginning of a relationship between the two firms, but declined to comment on any investment talks.

Schwerin said the collaboration with Moj will enable Snap to expand the reach of its AR technology to more users in India. Snap, which for years struggled to make inroads in India, has seen an impressive growth in the country in recent quarters. Snap had about 80 million monthly active users in India in the month of December (according to mobile insight firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch), up from about 25 million a year ago.

ShareChat has amassed over 160 million monthly active users in India, while its Moj app, which was launched after New Delhi banned TikTok in June last year, had about 80 million users in September last year, according to the startup.

Scores of startups in India are attempting to cash in on TikTok’s ban in the country. Indian conglomerate Times Internet’s MX Player has launched MX TakaTak, and news aggregator DailyHunt has expanded to short-form video with Josh. Their parent firm last week announced a fundraise of over $100 million, two months after Google participated in another over $100 million round into the startup.

Global giants are also not shying away from the opportunity. Facebook launched Instagram Reels in India last year, and YouTube launched Shorts, which is already garnering over 3.5 billion daily views in India, it said last month.

Moj, which has released 30 Snap-powered lenses for its community at the launch, will develop over 400 lenses in the coming years, some in collaboration with Snapchat Official Lens Creators in India, it said.

“There’s going to be an incredible selection of AR lenses that are customized and localized for Moj’s audience, and we think there’s going to be lots of innovation and usecases that we couldn’t have seen on Snap alone,” said Schwerin, adding that creators have developed over 1.5 million lenses for Snap.

Gaurav Mishra, SVP of Product at ShareChat, said in an interview the partnership will enable Moj users to engage much more deeply with the community and stand above the crowd. He declined to share the level of resources ShareChat was planning to deploy for the creation of lenses. Both the firms declined to disclose financial terms of the deal.

Hardik Shah, who works at SuperFan Studio, one of the largest AR creative firms in India, told TechCrunch the proliferation of Snap’s AR tech will improve the quality of lenses and filters most people in India have access to.

“Brands need to realise that ‘What Disney characters are you’ is very 2019 and should be discarded as an idea in 2021. It’s OK not to do an AR Experience than going ahead with outdated and stale production,” he said.

News: Klarna launches bank accounts in Germany

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Fintech startup Klarna is turning its mobile app into a banking app in Germany. Customers living there can now open a consumer bank account and get a Visa debit card. For now, Klarna is launching bank accounts for a limited number of users. The company expects to roll it out more broadly in the coming

Fintech startup Klarna is turning its mobile app into a banking app in Germany. Customers living there can now open a consumer bank account and get a Visa debit card.

For now, Klarna is launching bank accounts for a limited number of users. The company expects to roll it out more broadly in the coming months.

What you get is a full-fledged bank account with a German IBAN to receive money, set up direct deposits and debits. The debit card works with Google Pay and Apple Pay. You get two free ATM withdrawals per month.

With today’s launch, Klarna wants to build a financial super app. Klarna started as a payment method for e-commerce websites. It lets you pay for expensive goods over multiple installments. Merchants get paid when the initial transaction occurs, with Klarna transparently managing credit lines for customers.

With the company’s mobile app, you can track your past purchases and your upcoming payments. The app also lets you access a marketplace of stores, track deliveries and set up price-drop notifications.

But you couldn’t get a full overview of your finances with this data. Adding a bank account provides full visibility in everything that lands on your bank account and leaves your bank account.

It could open up some new opportunities for credit lines. For instance, if you pay in store for something really expensive with your Klarna card, you could receive a notification that suggests spreading out your expense over three months.

Klarna also plans to add savings goals and savings accounts. The startup has already launched savings accounts in Sweden. It offers flexible and fixed-term savings accounts.

Klarna has built its own core banking system, which means that it doesn’t rely on a banking-as-a-service partner to manage your bank account. It’ll compete with other digital banks in Germany, such as N26 and Vivid Money.

News: With AI translation service that rivals professionals, Lengoo attracts new $20M round

• February 10, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Most people who use AI-powered translation tools do so for commonplace, relatively unimportant tasks like understanding a single phrase or quote. Those basic services won’t do for an enterprise offering technical documents in 15 languages — but Lengoo’s custom machine translation models might just do the trick. And with a new $20M B round, they

Most people who use AI-powered translation tools do so for commonplace, relatively unimportant tasks like understanding a single phrase or quote. Those basic services won’t do for an enterprise offering technical documents in 15 languages — but Lengoo’s custom machine translation models might just do the trick. And with a new $20M B round, they may be able to build a considerable lead.

The translation business is a big one, in the billions, and isn’t going anywhere. It’s simply too common a task to need to release a document, piece of software, or live website in multiple languages — perhaps dozens.

These days that work is done by translation agencies, which employ expert speakers to provide translation on demand at a high level of quality. The rise of machine translation as an everyday tool hasn’t affected them as much as you might think, since the occasional Portuguese user using Google’s built-in webpage translation on a Korean website is very much a niche case, and things like translating social media posts or individual sentences isn’t really something you could or would farm out to professionals.

In these familiar cases “good enough” is the rule, since the bare meaning is all anyone really wants or needs. But if you’re releasing a product in 10 different markets speaking 10 different languages, it won’t do to have the instructions, warnings, legal agreements, or technical documentation perfect in one language and merely fine in the other nine.

Lengoo started from a team working on automating that workflow between companies and translators.

“The next step to take obviously was automating the translation itself,” said CEO and founder Christopher Kränzler. “We’ll still need humans in the loop for a long time — the goal is to get the models to the level where’s they’re actually usable and the human has fewer translations to make.”

With machine learning capabilities constantly being improved, that’s not an unrealistic goal at all. Other companies have started down that road — DeepL and Lilt, for instance, which made their cases by showing major improvements over Google and Microsoft frameworks, but never claiming to remove humans from the process.

Lengoo iterates on their work by focusing on speed and specificity — that is, making a language model that integrates all the jargon, stylistic preferences, and formatting requirements of a given client. To do this they make a custom language model by training it not just with the customer’s own documents and websites, but by continually adding in feedback from the translation process itself.

“We have an automated training pipeline for the models,” said Kränzler. The more people contribute to the correction process, the faster the process gets. Eventually we get to be about three times faster than Google or DeepL.”

A new client may start with a model customized on a few thousand documents from the last couple years. But whenever the model produces text that needs to be corrected, it remembers that particular correction and integrates it with the rest of its training.

While the “quality” of a translation can be difficult to quantify objectively, in this case there’s no problem, because working as a human translator’s tool means there’s a quality check built right in. How good the translation is can be measured by “correction distance,” essentially the amount of changes the human has to make to the model’s suggested text. Fewer corrections not only means a better translation, but a faster one, meaning quality and speed both have objective metrics.

The improvements have won over customers that were leery of over-automation in the past.

“At the beginning there was resistance,” admitted Kränzler. “People turn to Google Translate for everyday translations, and they see the quality is getting better — they and DeepL have been educating the market, really. People understand now that if you do it right, machine translation works in a professional use case. A big customer may have 30, 40, 50 translators, and they each have their own style… We can make the point that we’re faster and cheaper, but also that the quality, in terms of consistency, goes up.”

Although customizing a model with a client’s data is hardly a unique approach, Lengoo seems to have built a lead over rivals and slower large companies that can’t improve their products quick enough to keep up. And they intend to solidify that lead by revamping their tech stack.

The issue is that due to relying on more or less traditional machine learning technologies, the crucial translator-AI feedback loop is limited. How quickly the model is updated depends on how much use it gets, but you’re not going to retrain a large model just to integrate a few hundred more words’ worth of content. It’s expensive computationally to retrain, so it can only be done sporadically.

But Lengoo plans to build its own, more responsive neural machine translation framework that integrates the various pipelines and processes involved. The result wouldn’t improve in real time, exactly, but would include the newest information in a much quicker and less involved way.

“Think of it as a segment by segment improvement,” said applied research lead Ahmad Taie (segments vary in size but generally are logical “chunks” of text). “You translate one segment, and by the next one, you already have the improvements made to the model.”

Making that key product feature better, faster, and easier to implement customer by customer is key to keeping clients on the hook, of course. And while there will likely be intense competition in this space, Kranzler doesn’t expect it to come from Google or any existing large companies, which tend to pursue an acquire-and-integrate approach rather than an agile development one.

As for the human expert translators, the field won’t replace them but may extend their effectiveness by, eventually, as much as an order of magnitude, which may shrink the workforce there. But if international markets continue to grow and with them the need for professional translation, they might just keep pace.

The $20M round, led by Inkef Capital will allow Lengoo to make the jump to North American markets as well as additional European ones, and integrate with more enterprise stacks. Existing investors Redalpine, Creathor Ventures, Techstars (out of which program the company originated), and angels Matthias Hilpert and Michael Schmitt all joined in the round, along with new investors Polipo Ventures and Volker Pyrtek.