Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Fireflies.ai raises $14M for its meeting transcription and automation service

• May 24, 2021
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The Fireflies.ai project is a good reminder that not every startup project goes from idea to unicorn-status in 48 minutes. Instead, the startup’s CEO Krish Ramineni told TechCrunch about how a period of interest in natural language processing (NLP), tinkering with a friend, a stint at Microsoft, and even working on Slack bots led him

The Fireflies.ai project is a good reminder that not every startup project goes from idea to unicorn-status in 48 minutes. Instead, the startup’s CEO Krish Ramineni told TechCrunch about how a period of interest in natural language processing (NLP), tinkering with a friend, a stint at Microsoft, and even working on Slack bots led him to helping found Fireflies.ai (Fireflies), a company that today announced a $14 million raise led by Khosla.

Fireflies is a two-part service. Its first point of business is recording and transcribing voice conversations. Things like video meetings, for example. Next, Fireflies wants to plug your voice data into other applications, helping its customers automate data entry, task creation and more.

Before today’s round, the startup had raised around $5 million, including some micro-rounds, a stint in the Acceleprise accelerator, and a $4.9 million seed round raised in late 2019. That investment included participation from Canaan Partners and well-known angel April Underwood.

That Fireflies has raised more capital is not surprising, given how quickly it has accreted users. According to an interview with Ramineni, more than 10,000 teams use Fireflies today. In individual usage terms, some 35,000 organizations are represented amongst its user base.

As the company launched its product in early 2020, those results sound pretty good.

But TechCrunch was curious if revenue tracked with usage at Fireflies, as is sometimes the case. It does, Ramineni said, adding that his company grew its revenues 300% in the last six or seven months.

How did it manage such rapid growth while only having raised $5 million before, and with a team that is around 90% in its product and engineering teams? By pursuing everyone’s favorite: the bottoms-up sales model. In short, you can use Fireflies for free, but if you run out of meeting credits, other usage-based blockers or the need for different, paywalled functionality, you have to cough up for the product.

Folks are, it appears.

Fireflies is in fact an interesting hybrid of SaaS and usage-based pricing. The higher the paid tier that a user selects, the more minutes of transcription they are apportioned per month. But there are caps, limits that users can buy their way out of. TechCrunch asked Ramineni about it, with the CEO explaining that some customers want to ingest years of saved meetings. Our read is that despite work done by the startup to keep its infrastructure costs low, building pricing guardrails around product usage just makes sense for the startup.

The company will sport SaaS-like gross margins, Ramineni confirmed to TechCrunch.

Looking ahead, Fireflies wants to plug into more and more meeting platforms, and external software. You can currently link your Fireflies account to services like Zapier, Slack and your CRM. Over time, it’s not hard to see how the startup could take more direct commands from meetings, and help users better distribute, file and recall meeting information.

As someone with too many meetings, and too many notes documents spread out across the wasteland that is my Google Drive account, I get why people are using Fireflies today. But if the startup can build a no-code automation platform on top of my note taking? Then I will probably have to buy its service.

Speaking of which, as a final note, working for a Major American Corporation can have its downsides. For example, Ramineni provided TechCrunch with a recording of our interview inside of Fireflies. This was nice, as I prefer to write from both my notes and transcripts to ensure that I am not missing things, or making mistakes. Fireflies kept asking me to log in. I tried with my corporate Google account. Which blocks such log-ins. So I kept getting the same prompt again and again.

Annoying? Sure. Lethal? No.

More when we can squeeze more growth data out of the startup.

News: SiriusXM partners with TikTok on a new music channel, Pandora Playlists, and more

• May 24, 2021
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SiriusXM is leaning into TikTok. The satellite radio company and Pandora parent today announced a partnership with the social video platform to power several new initiatives, including a TikTok channel on SiriusXM, hosted TikTok playlists on Pandora, and re-airings of Pandora LIVE events on TikTok. The hosted playlists on Pandora are the first of the

SiriusXM is leaning into TikTok. The satellite radio company and Pandora parent today announced a partnership with the social video platform to power several new initiatives, including a TikTok channel on SiriusXM, hosted TikTok playlists on Pandora, and re-airings of Pandora LIVE events on TikTok.

The hosted playlists on Pandora are the first of the new initiatives to launch.

Starting today, popular TikTok creators will curate, host and promote their own Pandora playlists to their fans on TikTok, starting with Bella Poarch. The TikTok influencer, who now has 69.6 million followers, is best-known for her viral lip-sync video to “M to the B,” which blew up to become the most-liked video on TikTok. She also makes videos featuring singing, dancing, and gaming content, among other things, and this month released her first single, “Build a B*tch,” which has broken into Spotify’s U.S. and Global Top 50 charts.

As of the time of writing, Poarch’s TikTok announcing her playlists, launched 4 hours ago, has 187.6K likes and 1 million views.

Image Credits: SiriusXM

Other “TikTok Tastemakers,” as SiriusXM has dubbed them, will release their own playlists in the months to come, including Christian Shelton and Nick Tangorra.

In addition, Pandora users will be able to tune into the TikTok Hits Playlist at any time, which features popular and trending songs from TikTok.

Pandora is not the first music streamer to tap into TikTok’s influence for its own ends. Today, TikTok’s trends are driving songs up the Billboard charts and delivering Spotify streams as younger users look for their favorite TikTok songs on their preferred streaming music app. Spotify is now curating TikTok hits across editorial playlists like Viral Hits, big on the internet, Teen Beats, and others. Apple Music also got in on the TikTok action when it introduced 10 new playlists last year aimed at younger, Gen Z users. This included its own Viral Hits playlist, which pulls in top tracks from TikTok and other social media channels.

Among the other SiriusXM initiatives is the soon-to-launch TikTok Radio, a full-time music channel featuring tracks trending on TikTok which will be presented by TikTok creators, influencers and D.J.s. The channel will debut later this summer, and will stream across SiriusXM, including in vehicles as well as in the SiriusXM app for desktop, mobile and connected devices.

TikTok fans will also later be able to watch selected re-airings of Pandora’s original events series, Pandora LIVE — a continuation of Pandora’s live events that went virtual during the pandemic. Pandora LIVE events feature artists from across genres, including country, rock, pop, R&B and more, and have typically been re-aired, in part, the day after on SiriusXM.

Recently, Pandora LIVE celebrated Women’s History Month with a virtual event that included performances by Gwen Stefani and Jazmine Sullivan, which was re-aired on TikTok.

More Pandora LIVE events will soon do the same. SiriusXM says it will announce which events will re-air on TikTok throughout the year.

“We are excited to collaborate with TikTok to create new content that brings the vibrancy of the leading social networking service to life on live radio and our streaming platforms,” said Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM President and Chief Content Officer, in a statement. “The effect TikTok has on music, and pop culture in general, is undeniable. Our platforms will provide a unique opportunity for TikTok creators to engage with our listeners with content experiences that have never been done before in audio,” he added.

@bellapoarch Excited to help launch ##TikTokTastemakers on @pandora Listen exclusively on ##PandoraMusic

♬ Build a B*tch – Bella Poarch

SiriusXM’s move to partner more closely with TikTok could help it to attract a younger set of listeners and subscribers, who may follow their favorite fans over to Pandora to tune into their playlist content. However, it’s unable to benefit from the full impact that working with TikTok could bring as the integrations are split across its two services, instead of being focused on just one.

Plus, SiriusXM, like others, still faces the looming threat of Resso, TikTok owner ByteDance’s own music streaming app that could one day make its way to the U.S., as part of its global expansion efforts. It has the potential to more closely tie TikTok’s music discovery features with streaming, impacting demand for rival services.

For the time being, however, TikTok sees the potential in partnering with a U.S. music streamer.

“We are excited to work with SiriusXM on TikTok Radio and to bring TikTok creators to Pandora to make the trends, music, and creative influences that are playing such a defining role in modern culture even more accessible,” said TikTok’s Global Head of Music, Ole Obermann, in a statement. “We’re really excited to see this come to life and thank the SiriusXM team for being such an innovative and visionary collaborator,” he said.

News: Microsoft’s Surface Duo gets dual-screen gaming support

• May 24, 2021
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In December, Microsoft wrote a blog post highlighting “The year ahead for Surface Duo.” The news highlighted the dual-screen device’s upcoming availability outside the U.S. (including Canada, the U.K., France and Germany this year), as well as a smattering of features. It’s been pretty well acknowledged from most everyone who reviewed the device (us included),

In December, Microsoft wrote a blog post highlighting “The year ahead for Surface Duo.” The news highlighted the dual-screen device’s upcoming availability outside the U.S. (including Canada, the U.K., France and Germany this year), as well as a smattering of features. It’s been pretty well acknowledged from most everyone who reviewed the device (us included), that it’s very much a work in progress.

After making the feature available in beta, Microsoft today is issuing at update to Xbox Cloud Gaming for Android that will unlock some of the product’s entertainment potential. It’s something the company has discussed, and even previewed, but until now, it has remained one of a handful of blind spots.

The app works as you’d expect on the Duo — displaying the game on the top screen and transforming the bottom into a virtual version of an Xbox controller in the Compose Mode orientation. Obviously you can only go so far on that front with a touchscreen, but gaming is genuinely an application where having a second screen can really come in handy.

As Engadget notes, there are now more than 50 titles that support Xbox Touch Controls. Those will be available to users with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

A much-hyped — and eagerly anticipated — alternative to the foldable form factor, the Duo was a disappointment on launch. The company has since dropped the product’s price from $1,500 to $1,000 — not exactly a sign that it was selling well — but continued software support like this is, perhaps, an indication that the company is going to support the line going forward, in spite of early stumbles.

News: Delhi Police, run by India’s central government, raids Twitter offices over manipulated label

• May 24, 2021
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Delhi Police, controlled by India’s central government, on Monday evening raided offices of Twitter in Delhi and Gurgaon as it sought more information on why the social network tagged one of the tweets by ruling partly BJP spokesperson as “manipulated media.” Delhi Police IT Cell team vacated both of Twitter’s offices because the offices were

Delhi Police, controlled by India’s central government, on Monday evening raided offices of Twitter in Delhi and Gurgaon as it sought more information on why the social network tagged one of the tweets by ruling partly BJP spokesperson as “manipulated media.”

Delhi Police IT Cell team vacated both of Twitter’s offices because the offices were closed and there were no Twitter employee to engage, many local TV channels reported.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

New Delhi sent a notice to Twitter last week after the social network labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling party BJP, as “manipulated media.”

In the tweet, Patra had claimed that Congress, the leading opposition party in India, was using a so-called “toolkit” to derail the Indian government’s efforts against the coronavirus pandemic. Alt News, a leading fact-checking organization in India, debunked Patra’s claim.

“Delhi Police is enquiring into a complaint in which clarification is sought from the Twitter regarding the classification of a tweet by Shri Sambit Patra (BJP spokesman) as ‘manipulative’. It appears that Twitter has some information which is not known to us on the basis of which they have classified it as such,” Delhi Police said in statements to local TV channels and other journalists.

“This information is relevant to the enquiry. Special Cell which is conducting the enquiry wants to find out the truth. Twitter which has claimed to know the underlying truth should clarify,” it added.

Several policy executives and the like questioned Delhi Police’s motives.

News: Zeta Global’s IPO filing uncovers modest growth, strong adjusted profitability

• May 24, 2021
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With a rising adjusted EBITDA result and improving adjusted EBITDA margins, Zeta has a profit story to tell investors along with possibly accelerating revenue growth.

Welcome back to the working week. Are you ready to get our hands a little dirty this morning?

Good. We have an IPO to catch up on, one I should have kept with in the past few weeks. Regardless, today we’re looking at Zeta Global’s latest IPO filing ahead of its eventual pricing.

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Zeta Global is not a firm that I am very familiar with, but because Crunchbase notes that the New York-based startup has raised north of $600 million in private capital in the form of both equity financing and debt, it’s a unicorn worth understanding.

The gist is that Zeta ingests and crunches lots of data, helping its users market to their customers on a targeted basis throughout their individual buying lifecycles. In simpler terms, Zeta helps companies pitch customers in varied manners depending on their own characteristics.

You can imagine that, as the digital economy has grown, the sort of work Zeta Global supports has only expanded. So, has Zeta itself grown quickly? And does it have an attractive business profile? We want to know. We’ll also poke around its final private valuation so that we can see how much that number matches up — or doesn’t — to its recent financial results.

Sound good? Let’s find out why Staley Capital, GCP Capital Partners, Franklin Square Group, GPI Capital and others backed the firm.

Zeta Global’s business in brief

It can be useful to dissect a company’s marketing materials not just to see how well they describe themselves, but also to grok how they want to be perceived in the marketplace. Zeta is one such case.

Via its S-1 filings, here’s how it wants you to understand its business:

Zeta is a leading omnichannel data-driven cloud platform that provides enterprises with consumer intelligence and marketing automation software. We empower our customers to target, connect and engage consumers through software that delivers personalized marketing across all addressable channels, including email, social media, web, chat, connected TV (“CTV”) and video, among others.

If that didn’t make a lot of sense, it’s OK.

News: The LatAm funding boom continues as Kaszek raises $1B across a duo of funds

• May 24, 2021
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Long before SoftBank launched its $2 billion Innovation Fund in Latin America, and before Andreessen Horowitz began actively investing in the region, Sao Paulo-based Kaszek has been putting money into promising startups since 2011, helping spawn nine unicorns along the way. And now, the early-stage VC firm is announcing its largest fund closures to date:

Long before SoftBank launched its $2 billion Innovation Fund in Latin America, and before Andreessen Horowitz began actively investing in the region, Sao Paulo-based Kaszek has been putting money into promising startups since 2011, helping spawn nine unicorns along the way.

And now, the early-stage VC firm is announcing its largest fund closures to date: Kaszek Ventures V, a $475 million early-stage fund, believed to be the largest vehicle of its kind ever raised in the region, and Kaszek Ventures Opportunity II, a $525 million for later-stage investments.

Over the years, Kaszek has backed 91 companies, which the firm says collectively have raised over $10 billion in capital. 

MercadoLibre co-founder Hernán Kazah and the company’s ex-CFO, Nicolas Szekasy, founded Kaszek a decade ago after leaving LatAm’s answer to Amazon. Fun fact: the firm’s name comes from a combination of their two last names: Ka-Szek. Rounding out the team are Nicolas Berman, former VP at MercadoLibre, Santiago Fossatti, Andy Young and Mariana Donangelo.

Kaszek founded its first fund in 2011, raising $95 million, an impressive sum at that time. Funds II and III closed in 2014 and 2017, raising $135 million and $200 million, respectively. By 2019, Kaszek had closed on its fourth fund, raising $375 million and its first Opportunity Fund, reserving $225 million for later-stage investing in existing portfolio companies.

It’s notable that in its fifth fund, Kaszek is reserving more of its new capital to fund later-stage investments – a testament to its faith in its current portfolio. Both funds, according to Kaszek, were “several times oversubscribed” with demand coming globally from university endowments, global foundations, technology funds and several tech entrepreneurs.

Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital has been an LP since day one via Sequoia Heritage, its community investment office. Also, Connecticut-based Wesleyan University is an LP with Chief Investment Officer Anne Martin describing the founding team as “internet pioneers.”

In recent years, there has been an explosion of global investor interest in Latin American startups. The region’s startup scene is seeing a surge of fundraises, with new unicorns emerging with increasing regularity. And Kaszek has been at the heart of it all.

“We have been at the epicenter of the technology ecosystem in Latin America since 1999, first with MercadoLibre and now with Kaszek, and have witnessed firsthand the extraordinary  evolution that the sector has experienced since its infancy,” said managing partner and co-founder Kazah. “When MercadoLibre started, the internet penetration was less than 3% and it was mostly dial-up connections. Today, more than two decades later, technology secular trends are stronger than ever before as we are experiencing an acceleration towards digitalization.”

Kaszek has not yet backed any companies out of its newest investment vehicles, but plans to put money in 20 to 30 companies out of its early-stage fund, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $25 million, according to Kazah. Its Opportunity Fund investments will be more concentrated with the firm likely backing 10 to 15 companies with check sizes ranging from $10 million to $35 million. The firm is industry agnostic, with Kazah saying it considers “any industry where technology is playing a transformational role.”

General partner and co-founder Szekasy says that In the firm’s first funds, Kaszek mostly backed first-time entrepreneurs. But in its last early-stage fund, it began backing more teams led by repeat entrepreneurs or by founders spawned out of some of the region’s more successful startups. As many VC firms do, Kaszek describes its investment strategy as providing more than capital, but also becoming partners with the founders of its portfolio companies. For example, Creditas founder and CEO Sergio Furio describes the firm as “the co-founder I did not have.”

While the firm declined to comment on performance, a source with firsthand knowledge of its metrics over the years tells TechCrunch that it’s quite impressive with MOICS ranging from 19.2 for Fund I, 10.5 for Fund II, 4.9 for Fund III and 2.6 for Fund IV – with an aggregate IRR for all funds above 55%.

The firm’s active portfolio currently consists of 71 companies. Kaszek was one of the earliest investors in Brazilian neobank Nubank, just one of 9 unicorns it has helped build over the years. Other unicorns it’s backed include MadeiraMadeira, PedidosYa, proptech startup QuintoAndar, Gympass, Loggi, Creditas, Kavak and Bitso.

The firm’s investments have largely concentrated in Brazil and Mexico (the two startup hotspots of the region) and Colombia but the firm has also backed startups based in other countries in the region such as DigitalHouse (which was formed in Argentina), NotCo (originally founded in Chile) and Kushki (launched first in Ecuador). It has people on the ground in its home base of Brazil as well as Mexico, the United States, Argentina and Uruguay. 

“We have always believed that the strong secular technology trends that we were seeing 20 years ago, evident in the US and a little later in China, were going to happen in Latin America,” Kazah told TechCrunch. “…Everything we predicted back then was going to happen, happened. Maybe it happened later, but it was also much larger and more comprehensive than what we had initially imagined. That is typically what happens with innovations, they take off later than you think, but fly much higher than you ever imagined.” 

News: In a YC “power” play, Gridware girds $5.3M to save humanity from weather

• May 24, 2021
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You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping around like crazy to invest in ideas that push the boundaries in fields far flung from enterprise SaaS. Case in point today: Gridware. It’s

You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping around like crazy to invest in ideas that push the boundaries in fields far flung from enterprise SaaS.

Case in point today: Gridware. It’s a startup I profiled earlier this year when it had just started up in its YC batch. As I wrote about how it wants to save our power grids from the ravages of climate change:

Its approach is to use a small, sensor-laden box that can be installed to a power pole with just four screws. Gridware’s package contains microphones and other sensors to sense the ambient environment around a power pole, and it uses on-board AI/ML processing to listen for anomalies and report them to the relevant managers as appropriate.

Hardware, IoT, infrastructure, utilities and government are five keywords you probably most would have wanted to avoid when pitching investors even a few years ago. But with power disappearing in states like California and Texas for stretches of time, investors have perhaps finally realized there is an opportunity to save the planet and make a bit of money here.

Gridware today announced that it has raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Priscilla Tyler of True Ventures and Seth Bannon and Shu Yang of Fifty Years. CEO and co-founder Tim Barat said fundraising was quite fierce. “We had 130 investors reach out to us, and I wasn’t even able to get back to some of them yet … [I’m] still going back through the emails,” he said. “Even before Demo Day, we had raised a significant portion of our round.”

For him and the Gridware team, they were looking for investors who were mission-driven and really understood the timeline it would take to build the company. “You see a lot of investors say they are mission-driven … but when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, it often goes to consumer technology where it is safer,” he said. Tyler at True leads climate investing for the firm, and True has made a variety of bets in the space. Fifty Years focuses on startups tackling the UN’s list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

You can read more about the company’s product and market in my profile from three months ago, but with the new funding, Gridware wants to double down on building a very intentional team capable of tackling this tough market. “Dealing with this multi-stakeholder business model is very challenging, so bringing on people with the experience, knowledge and wits to deal with this kind of environment is key,” Barat said.

As I explored recently, the disaster response space is probably one of the toughest markets in the world to sell into. Barat acknowledged the intrinsic difficulty, but sees huge potential in the long run. “One of the things that I have observed with the companies being successful — they really spend the time to meet as many stakeholders as possible,” he said. “With consumer, you can stand in front of a shopping mall and talk to 100 customers in a day [but] in govtech, getting 100 meetings even within a year is a huge accomplishment.”

The company will be re-opening its Bay Area office in Walnut Creek next week on June 1.

News: US towns are buying Chinese surveillance tech tied to Uighur abuses

• May 24, 2021
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This story was reported in partnership with video surveillance news site IPVM. At least a hundred U.S. counties, towns, and cities have bought China-made surveillance systems that the U.S. government has linked to human rights abuses, according to contract data seen by TechCrunch. Some municipalities have spent tens of thousands of dollars or more to

At least a hundred U.S. counties, towns, and cities have bought China-made surveillance systems that the U.S. government has linked to human rights abuses, according to contract data seen by TechCrunch.

Some municipalities have spent tens of thousands of dollars or more to buy surveillance equipment made by two Chinese technology companies, Hikvision and Dahua, after the companies were added to the U.S. government’s economic backlist in 2019 after the companies were linked to China’s ongoing efforts to suppress ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, where most Uighur Muslims live. Congress also banned U.S. federal agencies from buying new Hikvision and Dahua technology or renewing contracts over fears that it could help the Chinese government to conduct espionage.

But those federal actions broadly do not apply at the state and city level, allowing local governments to buy these China-made surveillance systems — including video cameras and thermal imaging scanners — largely uninhibited, so long as federal funds are not used to buy the equipment.

Details of the contracts were provided by GovSpend, which tracks federal and state government spending, to TechCrunch via IPVM, a leading news publication on video surveillance, which has followed the Hikvision and Dahua bans closely.

The biggest spender, according to the data and as previously reported by IPVM, showed that the Board of Education in Fayette County, Georgia spent $490,000 in August 2020 on dozens of Hikvision thermal cameras, used for temperature checks at its public schools.

A statement provided by Fayette County Public Schools spokesperson Melinda Berry-Dreisbach said the cameras were purchased from its longtime security vendor, authorized dealer for Hikvision. The statement did not address whether the Board of Education was aware of Hikvision’s links to human rights abuses. Berry-Dreisbach did not respond to our follow-up questions.

IPVM research found many thermal scanners, including Hikvision and Dahua models, produced inaccurate readings, prompting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue a public health alert warning that misreported readings could present “potentially serious public health risks.”

Nash County in North Carolina, which has a population of 95,000 residents, spent more than $45,000 between September and December 2020 to buy Dahua thermal cameras. County Manager Zee Lamb forwarded emails that confirmed the purchases and that the gear was deployed at the county’s public schools, but did not comment.

The data also shows that the Parish of Jefferson in Louisiana, which includes part of the city of New Orleans, spent $35,000 on Hikvision surveillance cameras and video storage between October 2019 and September 2020. A parish spokesperson did not comment.

Only one municipality we contacted addressed the links between the technology they bought and human rights abuses. Kern County in California spent more than $15,000 on Hikvision surveillance cameras and video recording equipment in June 2020 for its probation department offices. The contract data showed a local vendor, Tel Tec Security, supplied the Hikvision technology to the county.

Ryan Alsop, chief administrative officer for Kern County, said he was “not familiar at all with the issues you’re referencing with regard to Hikvision,” when asked about Hikvision’s links to human rights abuses.

“Again, we didn’t contract with Hikvision, we contracted with Tel Tec Security,” said Alsop.

Kern County spent more than $15,000 on Hikvision equipment at its county probation service offices. (Data: GovSpend/supplied)

A spokesperson for the City of Hollywood in Florida, which spent close to $30,000 on Hikvision thermal cameras, said the Chinese technology maker “was the only major manufacturer with a viable solution that was ready for delivery; would serve the defined project scope; and was within the project budget.” The cameras were used to take employees’ body temperatures to curb the spread of COVID-19. The spokesperson did not address the links to human rights abuses but noted that the federal ban did not apply to the city.

Maya Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said a lack of privacy regulations at the local level contributed to municipalities buying this technology.

“One of the problems is that these kinds of cameras, regardless of the country of origin and regardless of whether or not they’re even linked to human rights abuses, have been introduced to various parts of the country — especially at state and city levels — without any kind of regulation to ensure that they comply with privacy standards,” said Wang in a call. “There is, again, no kind of regulatory framework to vet the companies based on their track record, whether or not they have abused human rights in their practices, such that we can evaluate or choose better companies, and encourage the ones with better privacy protections to win, essentially.”

Chief among the U.S. government’s allegations are that Beijing has relied heavily on Hikvision, Dahua, and others to supply the surveillance technology it uses to monitor the Uighur population as part of the government’s ongoing efforts to suppress the ethnic group, which it has repeatedly denied.

United Nations watchdogs say Beijing has detained more than a million Uighurs in internment camps in recent years as part of these efforts, which led to the U.S. blacklisting of the two surveillance technology makers.

In adding the companies to the government’s economic blacklist, the Commerce Department said Hikvision and Dahua “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.” The Biden administration called the human rights abuses a “genocide.”

IPVM has also reported extensively on how the companies’ surveillance technology has been used to suppress the Uighurs. Dahua was found to have race detection in its code for providing “real-time Uighur warnings” to police.

Earlier this year, the Thomson Reuters Foundation found half of London’s councils and the largest 20 U.K. cities were using the technology linked to Uighur abuses. The Guardian also found that Hikvision surveillance technology was used in U.K. schools.

When reached, Dahua pointed to a blog post with a statement, and claimed that “contrary to some reporting in the media, our company has never developed any technology or solution that seeks to target a specific ethnic group.” The statement added: “Claims to the contrary are simply false and we are aware of no evidence that has ever been put forward to support such claims.”

Hikvision did not respond to a request for comment.

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News: Sensor Tower makes its first acquisition with deal for market intelligence company, Pathmatics

• May 24, 2021
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Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has made its first acquisition. The company this morning announced it’s acquiring Pathmatics, a market intelligence company which will now combine its paid digital and social media platform with Sensor Tower’s business. Deal terms were not detailed but include an undisclosed growth investment from Riverwood Capital into Pathmatics.

Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has made its first acquisition. The company this morning announced it’s acquiring Pathmatics, a market intelligence company which will now combine its paid digital and social media platform with Sensor Tower’s business. Deal terms were not detailed but include an undisclosed growth investment from Riverwood Capital into Pathmatics.

The acquisition will allow the companies to offer an expanded set of digital and mobile advertising insights to their respective customers, including new social insights for TikTok, YouTube mobile, and Snap this year, powered by Sensor Tower.

They companies will also introduce digital TV (over-the-top) insights, expanded coverage for mobile apps and ad insights, and will extend Pathmatics’ social and digital coverage globally.

The deal follows Sensor Tower’s first significant fundraising last year, with $45 million also from Riverwood Capital. Though Sensor Tower had been profitable since its launch, now serving more than 350 enterprise-level customers for its app and ad intelligence products, it chose to raise the additional capital in order to further grow its business, with investments in hiring, marketing, infrastructure and other expansions.

With Pathmatics, it’s buying a company that’s also been on its way up. The company had seen over 100% year-over-year growth for its own market intelligence business since launching in 2011. It now has over 250 brands, media and advertising agencies as customers, as well as over 7,000 users of its platform, representing over 200% software-as-a-service growth since 2018.

The two businesses are teaming up at a time when digital advertising is also on the rise, in part due to the shifts in the market attributed to the pandemic. As more businesses began operating online last year, advertisers increased their digital ad spending by 12.7% to $368 billion, per eMarketer. And digital advertising will account for 58% of media spending in 2021.

We understand Sensor Tower acquired both the IP and its over 60-person team from Pathmatics as a result of the acquisition. The entire team will join Sensor Tower with the executive suite now being a combination of both of the company’s leaders. Sensor Tower co-founder Alexey Malafeev will remain as CEO while Gabe Gottlieb, CEO and co-founder of Pathmatics, will become Chief Strategy Officer.

Historically, Pathmatics had provided brands and agencies with all creative used by advertisers, spend and impression, and path to publisher and viewer, to help them reduce waste from their budgets, improve their own marketing, and predict their competitors’ next move.

Going forward, both sets of customers will be able to opt into the other company’s solutions, including mobile, social media, and digital insights. Longer-term, the two companies will work together to bring more products to the market for their over 600 combined customers across 50 countries. Among these is a plan to add Pathmatics’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other digital ad intelligence capture into Sensor Tower, as well as an effort to augment Sensor Tower’s dataset with ad insights beyond app installs.

These features will make the product a better fit for larger brands looking into all aspects of the competitors’ campaigns, ranging from how they’re advertising for app installs to how they’re building brand awareness.

The deal officially closed on May 17, 2021, Sensor Tower says.

Santa Monica-based Pathmatics had raised $7.7 million to date from Upfront Ventures, BDMI and Baroda Ventures.

“As the global economy increasingly shifts to digital, it’s imperative that companies can understand and
navigate the entire digital landscape — from mobile to web and desktop — using accurate and insightful data,” noted Ramesh Venugopal, Principal at Riverwood Capital, in a statement about the acquisition. “The combination of Sensor Tower and Pathmatics presents a unique and valuable offering to customers allowing them to take advantage of a broad range of datasets with increased focus on consumer privacy and deep digital insights that leaders in every industry will need,” he added.

News: Beacons raises $6 million for its link-in-bio homepage builder that lets creators monetize

• May 24, 2021
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Mobile landing page builder Beacons has raised $6 million seed round to expand its vision for empowering creators to make money beyond the cramped confines of their social media profiles. The company, co-founded by Neal Jean, Jesse Zhang, Greg Luppescu and David Zeng, provides anyone who uses social media a single, mobile-optimized link hub to

Mobile landing page builder Beacons has raised $6 million seed round to expand its vision for empowering creators to make money beyond the cramped confines of their social media profiles. The company, co-founded by Neal Jean, Jesse Zhang, Greg Luppescu and David Zeng, provides anyone who uses social media a single, mobile-optimized link hub to display to their followers.

Like competitor Linktree, Beacons gives people a way to link out to other sites directly from their TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter profile, including pointing followers toward potential income streams like donations and affiliate links. Other companies in the “link in bio” space include Shorby, Milkshake, Tap.bio, Link in Profile, bio.fm and Campsite.

Beacons launched in private beta in September 2020 after emerging out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 cohort. Andreessen Horowitz will lead the seed round and is joined by Atelier Ventures, The Chainsmokers’ Mantis Fund, Night Media Ventures and LOUDgg, the Brazilian esports group.

The $6 million seed round will build on $600,000 that Beacons raised in an angel round, allowing the team to hire more engineers and designers to grow its small four-person team of first-time founders.

“I think where we’re really different than Linktree is we let creators customize and personalize their pages all for free and we offer a lot more of those options on our free plan,” Beacons co-founder and CEO Neal Jean told TechCrunch.

“…Creators care a lot about how their website looks so that’s been a good way for us to give creators the features that they want and help us grow our share in the market too.”

To keep creators locked into their own platforms and forthcoming monetization schemes, social media companies don’t offer much support for embedded links, particularly on individual pieces of content. Many also restrict users to one URL in their profiles, putting pressure on creators to maximize the utility of a single link. Beacons reasonably argues that the restrictive design of most social platforms stunts the ability of creators to easily and flexibly make money from their content.

“In the beginning we’re basically building all these different kinds of features for creators to use but I think in the long run the way to make that more scalable is to turn into more of a platform or an ecosystem that lots of people can build on,” Jean said.

“Today, I think we’re probably more like a Wix or a Squarespace for content creators, but in the future I think we want to be a little bit more like Shopify for creators.”

Building on Beacons

Beacons lets users choose between free and premium tiers. At $10 per month, the “entrepreneur” tier offers a couple of killer features worth considering, including support for custom domains and additional “blocks” — the link, text and image slots that comprise a Beacons page.

Beyond premium pricing, Beacons makes money by taking a cut of sales through its handful of monetization-focused blocks, like a shopping-enabled TikTok feed, a digital storefront for videos and ebooks, and a “requests” block that lets creators sell custom content directly to their followers. Beacons’ free plan charges a 9% fee on transactions, while the premium plan cuts that down to 5%.

Landing sites built through Beacons are deeply customizable, hearkening back to the MySpace era of media-rich, curated homepages. The company recently added what it calls the “community block,” a designated place where creators can highlight collaborators they might team up with often on a collab-obsessed platform like TikTok. The company currently counts Sia, Green Day and Russell Brand among its high profile users.

Beacons also supports mobile marketing through email and SMS and analytics to help creators understand their audiences. The company says that its user base has grown by 70% every month since its October launch.

“Today’s content creators and consumers have more sophisticated expectations than existing social platforms allow,” Jean said in the funding announcement. “…With Beacons, creators can control their destiny by directing online traffic to a custom domain that looks awesome, is shareable and ultimately generates revenue.”