Daily Archives: March 23, 2021

News: Facebook will bring back F8 on June 2 as a pared-back, single-day, virtual-only conference for developers

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After a few twists and turns and then ultimately cancelling its F8 developer conference last year over Covid-19 concerns, Facebook today announced a return of the event in a virtual-only format it is calling F8 Refresh. The company today said that it will be holding it as a one-day event on June 2. You can

After a few twists and turns and then ultimately cancelling its F8 developer conference last year over Covid-19 concerns, Facebook today announced a return of the event in a virtual-only format it is calling F8 Refresh. The company today said that it will be holding it as a one-day event on June 2. You can sign up for F8 Refresh here.

It’s a mark of the times to be right-sizing everything to the place we are in right now. So although F8 has grown in size and scope over the years — it typically attracts around 5,000 people and many more to its in-person event — it looks like the social network is taking 2021 to be a little more modest in its approach.

Mark is maybe the operative word here: there will be no Mark Zuckerberg keynote this year, Facebook has confirmed to me. Instead of words from its founder and CEO, Facebook will have Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, VP of Platform Partnerships, delivering the opening presentation at the event, which will as usual provide some updates on new launches for the platform.

It’s another sign of the times that making plans so far in advance, and in person, just won’t cut it right now: there have been too many unexpected developments around the spread, then wane, then resurgence of the pandemic, and even one year later, in multiple parts of the world authorities are still trying to get activity under control to keep the virus in check.

In the past, Facebook has given much more lead time to people for F8, to let developers, partners and other attendees to clear their calendars and organize travel from further afield. Its 2020 two-day event, which had originally been scheduled for May 2020, was announced in November 2019 for example. Of course, in the months following, as Covid-19 took its grip, F8 2020 became one of a wave of events to be cancelled, with Facebook first looking to replace it with a series of local events, but then cancelling everything altogether.

“F8 has always brought together an incredible community of people who are building, innovating, and looking for what’s next. And over the last year, our community of developers enabled growth for businesses of all sizes to adapt to a changed world and accelerate their digital transformation,” noted Papamiltiadis in a blog post. “In recognition of this, we want to bring F8 back to its roots: a place to celebrate, inspire and help developers grow.”

The big question will be what topics Facebook will see fit to tackle in June. Some of the bigger themes hanging over it right now are how it plans to continue growing in developing markets, whether/what it will launch in response to newly rising apps like Clubhouse, how it might diversify its business model beyond advertising, whether we will ever see a launch of Novi and Diem, and how Facebook continues to tackle misuse on its platform.

For a company so huge and influential, there is indeed a lot to potentially cover. But at least for now the focus seems to be more modest as well. Rather than big launches and major announcements, it looks like Facebook will keep the F8 focus more on its ecosystem and the developers in it. Among the areas that Papamiltiadis highlighted will be addressed, he mentioned product tools for building in Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus; technical deep-dive sessions; demos, and panels.

News: Trace announces $8M seed to help companies coordinate budgets

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Trace, an early startup that wants to bring a taste of SaaS to the budgeting side of the house, announced an $8 million seed round today led by Greylock and Uncork Capital with participation from Nyca Partners, Redpoint Ventures and various individual angels. Mike Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO at the company describes Trace as the

Trace, an early startup that wants to bring a taste of SaaS to the budgeting side of the house, announced an $8 million seed round today led by Greylock and Uncork Capital with participation from Nyca Partners, Redpoint Ventures and various individual angels.

Mike Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO at the company describes Trace as the first service designed specifically for finance teams to deal with budgeting. “What Trace is really building is an all-in-one platform where financial decisions are made, and people can work with finance to get work done,” he explained

Trace handles all the core interactions between finance and everyone they need to work with in the business, focusing on budget owners. “In our platform, budget owners are given visibility into their financial targets, so they know what they’re working towards,” he said.

The idea is to build a more coordinated workflow between all the stakeholders in the budget process including finance, the department head, legal, security operations and so forth. Instead of cobbling together a bunch of different tools, Trace is attempting to bring this process into a single service.

Gonzalez has a deep background in this area having spent several years building custom financial systems as a consultant, and later working at Zenefits to build an internal system to track this kind of financial information. He took that knowledge, and along with his co-founders built Trace.

The company launched in 2018, spent the next year building the product and debuted the service in 2019. Although the pandemic has been challenging on a personal and company-building level, it did expose how important having a grip on the financial side of the business was when every penny counts.

For now the startup is taking aim at companies with between 200 and 1500 employees with hopes of ramping up to larger companies over time. Trace currently works with Sage Intacct, Netsuite and QuickBooks ERP financial systems.

It has a dozen employees, mostly in R&D with plans to add to that number as the business grows. As a Hispanic, who co-founded the company with his brother, he says that D&I is a cornerstone of his company building plans.

“We’re both Hispanics, and we grew up in rough neighborhoods without privilege. And so promoting an environment of equal opportunity and inclusion is something that I care deeply about,” he said. He says that they have already begun to invest to drive diversity and it’s a huge priority for the company moving forward.

The company has been distributed from the beginning, so the pandemic didn’t really change that, but as it grows, Gonzalez envisions having an office where people can come together for more collaborative work as needed.

News: Planting seed investments on tech’s frontiers nets KdT Ventures $50 million for its latest fund

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Like other venture investors over the past year, Cain McClary, co-founder of the investment firm KdT Ventures, recently made the jump to Austin. But unlike the rest of them, he was coming from Black Mountain, NC. McClary had spent the better part of the last three years with his co-founder Mack Healy building out a

Like other venture investors over the past year, Cain McClary, co-founder of the investment firm KdT Ventures, recently made the jump to Austin. But unlike the rest of them, he was coming from Black Mountain, NC.

McClary had spent the better part of the last three years with his co-founder Mack Healy building out a portfolio that would be the envy of almost any investor looking at financing startups whose businesses depend on innovations at the borders of current technological achievement.

Since 2017, when the firm closed on the first $3.5 million of what ended up being a $15 million fund (they had targeted $30 million), McClary and Healy managed to find their way onto the cap table of businesses like the green chemicals manufacturer, Solugen; health diagnostics technology developer, PathAI; the Nigerian genetic dataset developer, 54Gene; the novel biomaterials developer, Checkerspot; and the genetics-focused therapy company, Dyno Therapeutics. 

That portfolio — and the subsequent top decile performance that Cambridge Associates has said comes with it — has allowed McClary and Healy to close on an oversubscribed $50 million new fund to invest in promising startup companies.

KdT co-founders Cain McClary and Mack Healy. Image Credit: KdT Ventures

Hailing from a small Tennessee town outside of Leipers Fork (itself a small Tennessee town) McClary studied medicine at Tulane and business at Stanford where he linked up with Healy through a mutual friend.

Healy, who had done stints throughout big Bay Area startups like Airbnb, Databricks, and Facebook brought the software expertise (and some capital to stake the firm) while McClary provided the life sciences know-how.

Together the two men set out to hang their investment shingle at the intersection of software and life sciences that was proving to be fertile ground for new business creation. Each company in the firm’s portfolio depends on both the advances in understanding how to code computers and living cells.

McClary had left California for personal reasons when he launched the fund in 2017 and in 2020 relocated to Austin for professional ones. Healy had already set up shop in the city and it was easier, McClary said to fly out to San Francisco to look for companies from the Austin airport than it was from Ashville.

Also, both men were placing big bets on the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas to become the breeding ground for the type of entrepreneurs that the firm is looking to back.

Mack was there… the Dell Medical School and we think it’s going to be produce the types of entrpereneurs that we want to support. Houston has a med system. I firmly believe that texas has a place at the table in the future 

“The way that we define it is that we like to invest in the physical layer of the world,” said McClary. “That includes not only medicine, but chemicals and agriculture. All of that is driven by some of the things that we have this sourcecode for the physical world.”

Mapping the unmapped corners of the frontier tech startup world means that the firm not only has a presence in Austin, but has hired principals to scour Houston and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina for hot deals.

That doesn’t mean the firm is forsaking California though. One of the most recent deals in the KdT portfolio is Andes Ag, an Emeryville, Calif.-based startup that’s applying yield-boosting microbes directly to seeds in an effort to improve crop performance for farmers.

“The KdT team speaks the language of science, making them an outlier in this area of venture investing,” said JD Montgomery of Canterbury Consulting, a limited partner in KdT’s first and second fund. “They are passionate about building the science companies of the future that will tackle some of the significant challenges our world faces in the next decade and beyond.”

News: Bill Gates wants Western countries to eat “synthetic meat”; Meatable has raised $47 million to make it

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In a recent interview discussing Bill Gates’ recent book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster“, the Microsoft and Breakthrough Energy founder (and the world’s third wealthiest man) advocated for citizens of the richest countries in the world to switch to diets consisting entirely of what he called synthetic meat in an effort to curb greenhouse

In a recent interview discussing Bill Gates’ recent book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster“, the Microsoft and Breakthrough Energy founder (and the world’s third wealthiest man) advocated for citizens of the richest countries in the world to switch to diets consisting entirely of what he called synthetic meat in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Gates’ call is being met by startups and public companies hailing from everywhere from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, London to Los Angeles, and Berkeley to… um… Chicago.

Indeed, two of the best funded companies in the lab-grown meat market hail from The Netherlands, where Mosa Meat is being challenged by a newer upstart, Meatable, which just announced $47 million in new financing.

The company aims to have its first product approved by European regulators by 2023 and notching commercial sales by 2025.

Meatable has a long road ahead of it, because, as Gates acknowledged in his interview with MIT Technology Review (ed. note: I’m available for a call, too, Bill), “the people like Memphis Meats who do it at a cellular level—I don’t know that that will ever be economical.”

Beyond the economics, there’s also the open question of whether consumers will be willing to make the switch to lab grown meat. Some companies, like the San Francisco-based Just Foods and Tel Aviv’s Supermeat are already selling chicken patties and nuggets made from cultured cells at select restaurants.

These products don’t get at the full potential for cellular technology according to Daan Luining, Meatable’s chief technology officer. “We have seen the nugget and the chicken burger, but we’re working on whole muscle tissue,” Luining said.

The sheer number of entrants in the category — and the capital they’ve raised — points to the opportunity for several winners if companies can walk the tightrope balancing cost at scale and quality replacements for free range food.

“The mission of the company is to be a global leader in providing proteins for the planet. Pork and beef and regularly eaten cuts have on environmental and land management,” Luining said. “The technology that we are using allows us to go into different species. First we’re focused on the animals that have the biggest impact on climate change and planetary health.”

For Meatable right now, price remains an issue. The company is currently producing meat at roughly $10,000 per pound, but, unlike its competitors, the company said it is producing whole meat. That’s including the fat and connective tissue that makes meat… well… meat.

Now with 35 employees and new financing, the company is trying to shift from research and development into a food production company. Strategic investors like DSM, one of the largest food biotech companies in Europe should help. So should angel investors like Dr. Jeffrey Leiden, the executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals; and Dr. Rick Klausner, the former executive director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a founder of Juno Therapeutics, GRAIL, and Mindstrong Health, after leaving Illumina where he served as chief medical officer.

Institutional investors in the company’s latest round include Google Ventures founder Bill Maris’ new fund, Section 32,  and existing investors like: BlueYard Capital, Agronomics, Humboldt, and Taavet Hinrikus. 

The company’s first commercial offering will likely be a lab-grown pork product, but with expanded facilities in Delft, the location of one of the top universities in The Netherlands, a beef product may not be far behind.

“[Meatable has] a great team and game-changing technology that can address the challenges around the global food insecurity issues our planet is facing,” said Klausner. “They have all the right ingredients to become the leading choice for sustainably and efficiently produced meat.”

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News: Customer data platform ActionIQ extends its latest funding round to $100M

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ActionIQ, which helps companies use their customer data to deliver personalized experiences, is announcing that it has extended its Series C funding, bringing the round to a total size of $100 million. That number includes the $32 million that ActionIQ announced in January of last year. Founder and CEO Tasso Argyros said the company is

ActionIQ, which helps companies use their customer data to deliver personalized experiences, is announcing that it has extended its Series C funding, bringing the round to a total size of $100 million.

That number includes the $32 million that ActionIQ announced in January of last year. Founder and CEO Tasso Argyros said the company is framing this as an extension rather than a separate round because it comes from existing investors — including March Capital — and because ActionIQ still has most of that $32 million in the bank.

Argyros told me that there were two connected reasons to raise additional money now. For one thing, ActionIQ has seen 100% year-over-year revenue growth, allowing it to increase its valuation by more than 250%. (The company isn’t not disclosing the actual valuation.) That growth has also meant that ActionIQ is getting “a lot more ambitious” in its plans for product development and customer growth.

“We raised more money because we can, and because we need to,” Argyros said.

The company continues to develop the core platform, for example by introducing more support for real-time data and analysis. But Argyros suggested that the biggest change has been in the broader market for customer data platforms, with companies like Morgan Stanley, The Hartford, Albertsons, JCPenney and GoPro signing on with ActionIQ in the past year.

Some of these enterprises, he said, “normally would not work with a cutting-edge technology company like us, but because of the pandemic, they’re willing to take some risk and really invest in their customer base and their customer experience.”

Argyros also argued that as regulators and large platforms restrict the ways that businesses can buy and sell third-party data, platforms like ActionIQ, focusing on the first-party data that companies collect for their own use, will become increasingly important. And he said that ActionIQ’s growth comes as the big marketing clouds have “failed” — either announcing products that have yet to launch or launching products that don’t match ActionIQ’s capabilities.

Companies that were already using ActionIQ include The New York Times. In fact, the funding announcement includes a statement from The Times’ senior vices president of data and insights Shane Murray declaring that the newspaper is using ActionIQ to deliver “hundreds of billions of personalized customer experiences” across “mail, in-app, site, and paid media.”

ActionIQ has now raised around $145 million total, according to Crunchbase.

News: Hopin buys two more companies as it triples down on video focus

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Hopin, a unicorn best known for its online events-hosting service, announced this morning that it has acquired two more companies. The smaller concerns, Jamm and Streamable, were acquired in deals that Hopin declined to detail. However, in an email to TechCrunch, Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said that both companies were “early-stage” concerns. We can infer

Hopin, a unicorn best known for its online events-hosting service, announced this morning that it has acquired two more companies. The smaller concerns, Jamm and Streamable, were acquired in deals that Hopin declined to detail.

However, in an email to TechCrunch, Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said that both companies were “early-stage” concerns. We can infer deal scale from the comment.

Hopin has operated with an acquisitive bent in recent months, announcing an acquisition of StreamYard for $250 million in January in addition to today’s deals.

Jamm sells what it calls “1-click video collaboration for teams,” while Streamable helps other companies upload and stream their videos. After acquiring StreamYard, which provided video livestreaming services, it’s not hard to discern that video is the locus of Hopin’s checkbook focus.

Boufarhat agrees, explaining to TechCrunch that its latest purchases will help his company “build even more technology for customers to make professional-grade video capabilities easily accessible at scale.” The CEO added that his company is “unofficially” calling its efforts “an ecosystem of connection powered by all aspects of video.”

The total addressable market (TAM) for that vision is likely larger than the online-events work that Hopin is best known for, or even the hybrid online/offline events market that the company was originally born to support.

When Hopin announced its StreamYard buy, it had purchased a company with material revenues. Boufarhat’s team decided to keep the startup alive as a standalone product. As Jamm and Streamable are earlier-stage affairs, will they receive the same treatment?

Yes and no. Yes for Streamable, no for Jamm. Per Hopin’s founder, Jamm will be “fully integrated into Hopin’s products,” while Streamable will both live on as an individual product while also finding points of integration into its events platform.

TechCrunch was curious if, as in the StreamYard deal, the amount of revenue that Hopin had purchased was material. It is not, per Boufarhat. So, the last revenue number we have for Hopin, some $70 million ARR disclosed during its $400 million funding round earlier this month, is likely still pertinent. Hopin was valued at $5.65 billion at the time.

The company did disclose that the number of “organizers” using its platform to host events has risen from 85,000 earlier this month to 90,000 as of today. That’s just under 6% growth in less than a month. Hopin’s rapid growth trajectory appears intact for now.

News: Telegram raises $150M from Mubadala and Abu Dhabi CP via pre-IPO convertible bonds

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Messaging platform Telegram, which recently passed 500 million monthly active users but still isn’t monetizing all the digital chatter it hosts — has taken in a little more funding to keep its engines ticking over. Mubadala Investment Company, the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor, is throwing in $75M in exchange for 5-year pre-IPO convertible bonds of

Messaging platform Telegram, which recently passed 500 million monthly active users but still isn’t monetizing all the digital chatter it hosts — has taken in a little more funding to keep its engines ticking over.

Mubadala Investment Company, the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor, is throwing in $75M in exchange for 5-year pre-IPO convertible bonds of Telegram — with Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners investing a further $75M, the pair said today in a press release.

The investment is touted as a strategic partnership, with Mubadala anticipating benefits for Abu Dhabi’s startup ecosystem by having a local Telegram presence drawing in skills and talent to the capital.

Per Reuters Telegram will be opening an office in Abu Dhabi following the investment — building out its regional presence from a Dubai, UAE base.

Commenting in a statement, Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO, said: “We are honoured by the $150M investment into Telegram from Mubadala and Abu Dubai Catalyst Partners. We look forward to developing this strategic partnership to continue our growth in the MENA region and globally.”

To date, Telegram has been bankrolled over a seven+ year lifespan by Durov, who made ~$300M from selling his stake in the vk social network he also founded — aka Russia’s ‘Facebook’ — back in 2015.

But sustaining a messaging platform with half a billion users can’t be done through billionaire bootstrapping alone.

Some additional investment did come in via Telegram’s recent attempt to launch a blockchain platform. However the effort was derailed by US regulators last year — forcing it to refund most (but not all) of the money it had booked for the failed TON platform — so speculation over how Telegram will monetize its platform goes on.

In recent weeks Durov has responded to this chatter via his public Telegram channel to confirm he’s considering introducing ads for “large one-to-many channels” — but pledging he won’t do so in chats.

He has also rejected the notion of using user data to target ads — a move that would undermine the loud privacy promises Telegram repeatedly makes to users to put clear blue water between its platform and the (Facebook-owned) data-mining competition.

“Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts — as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them,” Durov wrote last month.

Telegram’s usage has, meanwhile, continued to swell this year — boosted by users switching from Facebook-owned WhatsApp over privacy concerns. So there’s limited room for copycat monetization, unless Durov is willing to trash his personal ‘pro-privacy, pro-user’ brand. To say that’s highly unlikely is an understatement.

Nonetheless, he has further limited his options by rejecting a series of investment offers in recent months.

A report in Russian press earlier this year said he’d rejected an investment offer for a 5%-10% stake in the company that had valued it at $30BN. We’ve also been told he rejected a higher offer that had valued Telegram at $35BN — and another of $4BN at a $40BN pre-money valuation.

“Durov is afraid of investors of any kind,” one source told us on why he refused to give up any equity.

Debt financing seems to be Telegram’s preferred route at this stage. Back in January The Information reported that it was discussing raising up to $1BN in debt financing from with banks and investors — which would convert to shares in an eventual public offering.

That debt route — via pre-IPO convertible bonds — is now taking shape with today’s investment news out of Abu Dhabi. Although $150M is a lot less than the rumoured $1BN so this may be just an initial tranche. (And may in fact be needed to pay back TON investors’ whose refunds are falling due.)

But with a couple of debt backers sticking their necks out to take a punt on Durov’s anti-establishment alternative — and on the chance of an Telegram IPO by 2026 — the company is in a better position to get buy in from other debt funders, including in the region as it deepens its geographical commitment to the Middle East.

One key attraction for Telegram backers is likely to be its agile product dev. There Durov has repeatedly shown he can deliver — growing usage of his platform with the help of a steady pipeline of user-focused features.

Efforts on the product side at this stage look geared towards pivoting into a Patreon-style platform for content creators to build communities of followers willing to pay for their content (which would thereby enable Telegram to monetize by taking a cut as commission).

“Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators — one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers,” wrote Durov last month. “Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this.”

Just over a month later his channel lit up again with more product news — this time capitalizing on the buzz around social audio with the announcement of the launch of a Clubhouse-clone on Telegram channels dubbed “voice chats 2.0”.

He also announced feature that lets admins of channels and public groups host voice chats for millions of live listeners — taking the cap off the earlier feature. “No matter how popular your talk gets, new people will be able to tune in. It’s like public radio reinvented fo the 21st century,” Telegram’s blog post enthused.

Durov had more developments to tease: One-to-many video broadcasts that will see the platform let users host their own ‘TV stations’ which he said will be coming this “spring”. So Telegram continues to evolve as the social app landscape shifts.

Commenting on the debt financing in a statement, James Munce, CFO and COO of Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners (ADCP), lauded Telegram’s management team’s “unshakeable dedication to building a platform centred around privacy and user experience”.

“We believe this creates a strong value proposition and will be a focal point for social media platforms and a new era of messaging,” he added.

News: Dataminr raises $475M on a $4.1B valuation for real-time insights based on 100k sources of public data

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Significant funding news today for one of the startups making a business out of tapping huge, noisy troves of publicly available data across social media, news sites, undisclosed filings and more. Dataminr, which ingests information from a mix of 100,000 public data sources, and then based on that provides customers real-time insights into ongoing events

Significant funding news today for one of the startups making a business out of tapping huge, noisy troves of publicly available data across social media, news sites, undisclosed filings and more. Dataminr, which ingests information from a mix of 100,000 public data sources, and then based on that provides customers real-time insights into ongoing events and new developments, has closed on $475 million in new funding. Dataminr has confirmed that this Series F values the company at $4.1 billion as it gears up for an IPO in 2023.

This Series F is coming from a mix of investors including Eldridge (a firm that owns the LA Dodgers but also makes a bunch of other sports, media, tech and other investments), Valor Equity Partners (the firm behind Tesla and many tech startups), MSD Capital (Michael Dell’s fund), Reinvent Capital (Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman’s firm), ArrowMark Partners, IVP, Eden Global and investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value, among others.

To put its valuation into some context, the New York-based company last raised money in 2018 at a $1.6 billion valuation. And with this latest round, it has now raised over $1 billion in outside funding, based on PitchBook data. This latest round has been in the works for a while and was rumored last week at a lower valuation than what Dataminr ultimately got.

The funding is coming at a critical moment, both for the company and for the world at large.

In terms of the company, Dataminr has been seeing a huge surge of business.

Ted Bailey, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that it will be using the money to continue growing its business in existing areas: adding more corporate customers, expanding in international sales and expanding its AI platform as it gears up for an IPO, most likely in 2023. In addition to being used journalists and newsrooms, NGOs and other public organizations, its corporate business today, Bailey said, includes half of the Fortune 50 and a number of large public sector organizations. Over the last year that large enterprise segment of its customers doubled in revenue growth.

“Whether it’s for physical safety, reputation risk or crisis management, or business intelligence or cybersecurity, we’re providing critical insights on a daily basis,” he said. “All of the events of the recent year have created a sense of urgency, and demand has really surged.”

Activity on the many platforms that Dataminr taps to ingest information has been on the rise for years, but it has grown exponentially in the last year especially as more people spend more time at home and online and away from physically interacting with each other: that means more data for Dataminr to crawl, but also, quite possibly, more at stake for all of us as a result: there is so much more out there than before, and as a result so much more to be gleaned out of that information.

That also means that the wider context of Dataminr’s growth is not quite so clear cut.

The company’s data tools have indeed usefully helped first responders react in crisis situations, feeding them data faster than even their own channels might do; and it provides a number of useful, market-impacting insights to businesses.

But Dataminr’s role in helping its customers — which include policing forces — connect the dots on certain issues has not always been seen as a positive. One controversial accusation made last year was that Dataminr data was being used by police for racial profiling. In years past, it has been barred by specific partners like Twitter from sharing data with intelligence agencies. Twitter used to be a 5% shareholder in the company. Bailey confirmed to me that it no longer is but remains a key partner for data. I’ve contacted Twitter to see if I can get more detail on this and will update the story if and when I learn more. Twitter made $509 million in revenues from services like data licensing in 2020, up by about $45 million on the year before.

In defense of Dataminr, Bailey that the negative spins on what it does result from “misperceptions,” since it can’t track people or do anything proactive. “We deliver alerts on events and it’s [about] a time advantage,” he said, likening it to the Associated Press, but “just earlier.”

“The product can’t be used for surveillance,” Bailey added. “It is prohibited.”

Of course, in the ongoing debate about surveillance, it’s more about how Dataminr’s customers might ultimately use the data that they get through Dataminr’s tools, so the criticism is more about what it might enable rather than what it does directly.

Despite some of those persistent questions about the ethics of AI and other tools and how they are implemented by end users, backers are bullish on the opportunities for Dataminr to continue growing.

Eden Global Partners served as strategic partner for the Series F capital round.

News: Ghana’s Redbird raises $1.5M seed to expand access to rapid medical testing in sub-Saharan Africa

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For patients and healthcare professionals to properly track and manage illnesses especially chronic ones, healthcare needs to be decentralized. It also needs to be more convenient, with a patient’s health information able to follow them wherever they go. Redbird, a Ghanaian healthtech startup that allows easy access to convenient testing and ensures that doctors and

For patients and healthcare professionals to properly track and manage illnesses especially chronic ones, healthcare needs to be decentralized. It also needs to be more convenient, with a patient’s health information able to follow them wherever they go.

Redbird, a Ghanaian healthtech startup that allows easy access to convenient testing and ensures that doctors and patients can view the details of those test results at any time, announced today that it has raised a $1.5 million seed investment.  

Investors who participated in the round include Johnson & Johnson Foundation, Newton Partners (via the Imperial Venture Fund), and Founders Factory Africa. This brings the company’s total amount raised to date to $2.5 million.

The healthtech company was launched in 2018 by Patrick Beattie, Andrew Quao and Edward Grandstaff. As a founding scientist at a medical diagnostics startup in Boston, Beattie’s job was to develop new rapid diagnostic tests. During his time at Accra in 2016, he met Quao, a trained pharmacist in Ghana at a hackathon whereupon talking found out that their interests in medical testing overlapped.

Beattie says to TechCrunch that while he saw many exciting new tests in development in the US, he didn’t see the same in Ghana. Quao, who is familiar with how Ghanaians use pharmacies as their primary healthcare point, felt perturbed that these pharmacies weren’t doing more than transactional purchases.

They both settled that pharmacies in Ghana needed to imbibe the world of medical testing. Although both didn’t have a tech background, they realized technology was necessary to execute this. So, they enlisted the help of Grandstaff to be CTO of Redbird while Beattie and Quao became CEO and COO, respectively.

L-R: Patrick Beattie (CEO), Andrew Quao (COO), and Edward Grandstaff (CTO)

Redbird enables pharmacies in Ghana to add rapid diagnostic testing for 10 different health conditions to their pharmacy services. These tests include anaemia, blood sugar, blood pressure, BMI, cholesterol, Hepatitis B, malaria, typhoid, prostate cancer screening, and pregnancy.  

Also, Redbird provides pharmacies with the necessary equipment, supplies and software to make this possible. The software —  Redbird Health Monitoring — is networked across all partner pharmacies and enables patients to build medical testing records after going through 5-minute medical tests offered through these pharmacies.

Rather than employing a SaaS model that Beattie says is not well appreciated by its customers, Redbird’s revenue model is based on the supply of disposable test strips.

“Pharmacies who partner with Redbird gain access to the software and all the ways Redbird supports our partners for free as long as they purchase the consumables through us. This aligns our revenue with their success, which is aligned with patient usage,” said the CEO.

This model is being used with over over 360 pharmacies in Ghana, mainly in Accra and Kumasi. It was half this number in 2019 which Redbird has since doubled despite the pandemic. These pharmacies have recorded over 125,000 tests in the past three years from more than 35,000 patients registered on the platform.

Redbird will use the seed investment to grow its operations within Ghana and expand to new markets that remain undisclosed.

In 2018, Redbird participated in the Alchemist Accelerator just a few months before launch. It was the second African startup after fellow Ghanaian healthtech startup mPharma to take part in the six-month-long program. The company also got into Founders Factory Africa last year April.

According to Beattie, most of the disease burden Africans might experience in the future will be chronic diseases. For instance, diabetes is projected to grow by 156% over the next 25 years. This is why he sees decentralized, digitized healthcare as the next leapfrog opportunity for sub-Saharan Africa.

“Chronic disease is exploding and with it, patients require much more frequent interaction with the healthcare system. The burden of chronic disease will make a health system that is highly centralized impossible,” he said. “Like previous leapfrog events, this momentum is happening all over the world, not just in Africa. Still, the state of the current infrastructure means that healthcare systems here will be forced to innovate and adapt before health systems elsewhere are forced to, and therein lies the opportunity,” he said.

But while the promise of technology and data is exciting, it’s important to realize that healthtech only provides value if it matches patient behaviors and preferences. It doesn’t really matter what amazing improvements you can realize with data if you can’t build the data asset and offer a service that patients actually value.

Beattie knows this all too well and says Redbird respects these preferences. For him, the next course of action will be to play a larger role in the world’s developing ecosystem where healthcare systems build decentralised networks and move closer to the average patient.

This decentralised approach is what attracted U.S. and South African early-stage VC firm Newtown Partners to cut a check. Speaking on behalf of the firm, Llew Claasen, the managing partner, had this to say.

“We’re excited about Redbird’s decentralised business model that enables rapid diagnostic testing at the point of primary care in local community pharmacies. Redbird’s digital health record platform has the potential to drive significant value to the broader healthcare value chain and is a vital step toward improving healthcare outcomes in Africa. We look forward to supporting the team as they prove out their  business model and scale across the African continent.”

News: ServiceNow takes RPA plunge by acquiring India-based startup Intellibot

• March 23, 2021
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ServiceNow became the latest company to take the robotic process automation (RPA) plunge when it announced it was acquiring Intellibot, an RPA startup based in Hyderabad, India. The companies did not reveal the purchase price. The purchase comes at a time where companies are looking to automate workflows across the organization. RPA provides a way

ServiceNow became the latest company to take the robotic process automation (RPA) plunge when it announced it was acquiring Intellibot, an RPA startup based in Hyderabad, India. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

The purchase comes at a time where companies are looking to automate workflows across the organization. RPA provides a way to automate a set of legacy processes, which often involve humans dealing with mundane repetitive work.

The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s no-code workflow announcements earlier this month and is part of the company’s broader workflow strategy, according to Josh Kahn, SVP of Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow.

“RPA enhances ServiceNow’s current automation capabilities including low code tools, workflow, playbooks, integrations with over 150 out of the box connectors, machine learning, process mining and predictive analytics,” Khan explained. He says that the company can now bring RPA natively to the platform with this acquisition, yet still use RPA bots from other vendors if that’s what the customer requires.

“ServiceNow customers can build workflows that incorporate bots from the pure play RPA vendors such as Automation Anywhere, UiPath and Blue Prism, and we will continue to partner with those companies. There will be many instances where customers want to use our native RPA capabilities alongside those from our partners as they build intelligent, end-to-end automation workflows on the Now Platform,” Khan explained.

The company is making this purchase as other enterprise vendors enter the RPA market. SAP announced a new RPA tool at the end of December and acquired process automation startup Signavio in January. Meanwhile Microsoft announced a free RPA tool earlier this month, as the space is clearly getting the attention of these larger vendors.

ServiceNow has been on a buying spree over the last year or so buying five companies including Element AI, Loom Systems, Passage AI and Sweagle. Khan says the acquisitions are all in the service of helping companies create automation across the organization.

“As we bring all of these technologies into the Now Platform, we will accelerate our ability to automate more and more sophisticated use cases. Things like better handling of unstructured data from documents such as written forms, emails and PDFs, and more resilient automations such as larger data sets and non-routine tasks,” Khan said.

Intellibot was founded in 2015 and will provide the added bonus of giving ServiceNow a stronger foothold in India. The companies expect to close the deal no later than June.