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News: Facebook, Instagram users can now ask ‘oversight’ panel to review decisions not to remove content

• April 13, 2021
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Facebook’s self-styled ‘Oversight Board’ (FOB) has announced an operational change that looks intended to respond to criticism of the limits of the self-regulatory content-moderation decision review body: It says it’s started accepting requests from users to review decisions to leave content up on Facebook and Instagram. The move expands the FOB’s remit beyond reviewing (and

Facebook’s self-styled ‘Oversight Board’ (FOB) has announced an operational change that looks intended to respond to criticism of the limits of the self-regulatory content-moderation decision review body: It says it’s started accepting requests from users to review decisions to leave content up on Facebook and Instagram.

The move expands the FOB’s remit beyond reviewing (and mostly reversing) content takedowns — an arbitrary limit that critics said aligns it with the economic incentives of its parent entity, given that Facebook’s business benefits from increased engagement with content (and outrageous content drives clicks and makes eyeballs stick).

“So far, users have been able to appeal content to the Board which they think should be restored to Facebook or Instagram. Now, users can also appeal content to the Board which they think should be removed from Facebook or Instagram,” the FOB writes, adding that it will “use its independent judgment to decide what to leave up and what to take down”.

“Our decisions will be binding on Facebook,” it adds.

The ability to request an appeal on content Facebook wouldn’t take down has been added across all markets, per Facebook. But the tech giant said it will take some “weeks” for all users to get access as it said it’s rolling out the feature “in waves to ensure stability of the product experience”.

While the FOB can now get individual pieces of content taken down from Facebook/Instagram — i.e. if the Board believes it’s justified in reversing an earlier decision by the company not to remove content — it cannot make Facebook adopt any associated suggestions vis-a-vis its content moderation policies generally.

That’s because Facebook has never said it will be bound by the FOB’s policy recommendations; only by the final decision made per review.

That in turn limits the FOB’s ability to influence the shape of the tech giant’s approach to speech policing. And indeed the whole effort remains inextricably bound to Facebook which devised and structured the FOB — writing the Board’s charter and bylaws, and hand picking the first cohort of members. The company thus continues to exert inescapable pull on the strings linking its self-regulatory vehicle to its lucrative people-profiling and ad-targeting empire.

The FOB getting the ability to review content ‘keep ups’ (if we can call them that) is also essentially irrelevant when you consider the ocean of content Facebook has ensured the Board won’t have any say in moderating — because its limited resources/man-power mean it can only ever consider a fantastically tiny subset of cases referred to it for review.

For an oversight body to provide a meaningful limit on Facebook’s power it would need to have considerably more meaty (i.e. legal) powers; be able to freely range across all aspects of Facebook’s business (not just review user generated content); and be truly independent of the adtech mothership — as well as having meaningful powers of enforcement and sanction.

So, in other words, it needs to be a public body, functioning in the public interest.

Instead, while Facebook applies its army of in house lawyers to fight actual democratic regulatory oversight and compliance, it has splashed out to fashion this bespoke bureaucracy that can align with its speech interests — handpicking a handful of external experts to pay to perform a content review cameo in its crisis PR drama.

Unsurprisingly, then, the FOB has mostly moved the needle in a speech-maximizing direction so far — while expressing some frustration at the limited deck of cards Facebook has dealt it.

Most notably, the Board still has a decision pending on whether to reverse Facebook’s indefinitely ban on former US president Donald Trump. If it reverses that decision Facebook users won’t have any recourse to appeal the restoration of Trump’s account.

The only available route would, presumably, be for users to report future Trump content to Facebook for violating its policies — and if Facebook refuses to take that stuff down, users could try to request a FOB review. But, again, there’s no guarantee the FOB will accept any such review requests. (Indeed, if the board chooses to reinstate Trump that may make it harder for it to accept requests to review Trump content, at least in the short term (in the interests of keeping a diverse case file, so… )

How to ask for a review after content isn’t removed

To request the FOB review a piece of content that’s been left up a user of Facebook/Instagram first has to report the content to Facebook/Instagram.

If the company decides to keep the content up Facebook says the reporting person will receive an Oversight Board Reference ID (a ten-character string that begins with ‘FB’) in their Support Inbox — which they can use to appeal its ‘no takedown’ decision to the Oversight Board.

There are several hoops to jump through to make an appeal: Following on-screen instructions Facebook says the user will be taken to the Oversight Board website where they need to log in with the account to which the reference ID was issued.

They will then be asked to provide responses to a number of questions about their reasons for reporting the content (to “help the board understand why you think Facebook made the wrong decision”).

Once an appeal has been submitted, the Oversight Board will decide whether or not to review it. The board only selects a certain number of “eligible appeals” to review; and Facebook has not disclosed the proportion of requests the Board accepts for review vs submissions it receives — per case or on aggregate. So how much chance of submission success any user has for any given piece of content is an unknown (and probably unknowable) quantity.

Users who have submitted an appeal against content that was left up can check the status of their appeal via the FOB’s website — again by logging in and using the reference ID.

A further limitation is time, as Facebook notes there’s a time limit on appealing decisions to the FOB

“Bear in mind that there is a time limit on appealing decisions to the Oversight Board. Once the window to appeal a decision has expired, you will no longer be able to submit it,” it writes in its Help Center, without specifying how long users have to get their appeal in (we asked Facebook to confirm this and it’s 15 days). 

News: Bandwango raises $3.1M to power tourism- and experience-focused deals

• April 13, 2021
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You might think that a startup whose primary customers are tourism bureaus would have had a pretty rough 2020, but CEO Monir Parikh said Bandwango‘s customer base more than doubled in the past year,  growing from 75 to 200. In Parikh’s words, the Murray, Utah-based startup has built a platform called the Destination Experience Engine

You might think that a startup whose primary customers are tourism bureaus would have had a pretty rough 2020, but CEO Monir Parikh said Bandwango‘s customer base more than doubled in the past year,  growing from 75 to 200.

In Parikh’s words, the Murray, Utah-based startup has built a platform called the Destination Experience Engine and designed for “connecting businesses with communities.” That means bringing together offers from local restaurants, retailers, wineries, breweries, state parks and more into package deals — such as the Newport Beach Dine Pass and the Travel Iowa State Passport — which are then sold by tourism bureaus.

Obviously, the pandemic dealt a big blow to tourism, but in response, many of these organizations shifted focus to deals that could entice locals to support nearby businesses and attractions. Parikh predicted that even after the pandemic, tourism bureaus will continue to understand that “local-focused tourism is going to be part of the mix of what we do — locals are your ambassadors, they are the best organic marketing channel.”

Plus, Parikh said that as new privacy regulations make it harder to collect data about online visitors, it’s becoming more challenging for tourism bureaus to “to prove to their funders that they’re having an economic impact.” So where bureaus were content in the past to advertise deals and then link out to other sites where customers could make the actual purchases, selling the deals themselves has become a new way to prove their worth.

Bandwango founder and CEO Monir Parikh

With last year’s growth, Bandwango has raised $3.1 million in seed funding led by Next Frontier Capital, with participation from Kickstart, Signal Peak Ventures, SaaS Ventures, and Ocean Azul Partners. (The startup had previously raised only $700,000 in funding.)

Parikh said that until now, Bandwango has been a largely full service option. The selling point, after all, is that the tourism bureaus already “have great relationships with these local businesses,” but the startup can handle the hard work of “trying to wrangle 200 of their local businesses” to offer deals and accept those deals in-store.

“Our mantra is: We become your back office,” he added. But with the new funding, he wants the startup to build a self-serve product as well. “What I say to my team is that a 90-year-old grandmother, as well as 12-year-old teenager, should be able to come into our platform and say, ‘I want to create a local savings program or an ale trail’ and do it end-to-end, without our assistance.”

And while Bandwango is currently focused on providing a white-label solution to its customers (rather than building a consumer deal destination of its own), Parikh said it eventually distribute these deals more broadly by creating its own “private label brands.”

News: Deeplite raises $6M seed to deploy ML on edge with fewer compute resources

• April 13, 2021
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One of the issues with deploying a machine learning application is that it tends to be expensive and highly compute intensive.  Deeplite, a startup based in Montreal, wants to change that by providing a way to reduce the overall size of the model, allowing it to run on hardware with far fewer resources. Today, the

One of the issues with deploying a machine learning application is that it tends to be expensive and highly compute intensive.  Deeplite, a startup based in Montreal, wants to change that by providing a way to reduce the overall size of the model, allowing it to run on hardware with far fewer resources.

Today, the company announced a $6 million seed investment. Boston-based venture capital firm PJC led the round with help from Innospark Ventures, Differential Ventures and Smart Global Holdings. Somel Investments, BDC Capital and Desjardins Capital also participated.

Nick Romano, CEO and co-founder at Deeplite, says that the company aims to take complex deep neural networks that require a lot of compute power to run, tend to use up a lot of memory, and can consume batteries at a rapid pace, and help them run more efficiently with fewer resources.

“Our platform can be used to transform those models into a new form factor to be able to deploy it into constrained hardware at the edge,” Romano explained. Those devices could be as small as a cell phone, a drone or even a Raspberry Pi, meaning that developers could deploy AI in ways that just wouldn’t be possible in most cases right now.

The company has created a product called Neutrino that lets you specify how you want to deploy your model and how much you can compress it to reduce the overall size and the resources required to run it in production. The idea is to run a machine learning application on an extremely small footprint.

Davis Sawyer, chief product officer and co-founder, says that the company’s solution comes into play after the model has been built, trained and is ready for production. Users supply the model and the data set and then they can decide how to build a smaller model. That could involve reducing the accuracy a bit if there is a tolerance for that, but chiefly it involves selecting a level of compression — how much smaller you can make the model.

“Compression reduces the size of the model so that you can deploy it on a much cheaper processor. We’re talking in some cases going from 200 megabytes down to on 11 megabytes or from 50 megabytes to 100 kilobytes,” Davis explained.

Rob May, who is leading the investment for PJC, says that he was impressed with the team and the technology the startup is trying to build.

“Deploying AI, particularly deep learning, on resource-constrained devices, is a broad challenge in the industry with scarce AI talent and know-how available. Deeplite’s automated software solution will create significant economic benefit as Edge AI continues to grow as a major computing paradigm,” May said in a statement.

The idea for the company has roots in the TandemLaunch incubator in Montreal. It launched officially as a company in mid-2019 and today has 15 employees with plans to double that by the end of this year. As it builds the company, Romano says the founders are focused on building a diverse and inclusive organization.

“We’ve got a strategy that’s going to find us the right people, but do it in a way that is absolutely diverse and inclusive. That’s all part of the DNA of the organization,” he said.

When it’s possible to return to work, the plan is to have offices in Montreal and Toronto that act as hubs for employees, but there won’t be any requirement to come into the office.

“We’ve already discussed that the general approach is going to be that people can come and go as they please, and we don’t think we will need as large an office footprint as we may have had in the past. People will have the option to work remotely and virtually as they see fit,” Romano said.

News: Home gym startup Tempo raises $220M to meet surge in demand for its workout device

• April 13, 2021
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When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts. To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank.

When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts.

To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank. The company plans to use the raise to shore up its supply chain, keep up with increased consumer demand and fuel efforts such as R&D and content. Other participants in the Series C round included Bling Capital, DCM, General Catalyst and Norwest Venture Partners. 

Tempo’s freestanding cabinet, which the company launched in February 2020, includes a 42-inch touchscreen with a 3D motion-tracking camera that consistently scans, tracks and coaches users as they work out.

It currently sells three hardware bundles, starting at $2,495, that include accessories like barbells, dumbbells, a folding bench, a kettlebell system, a squat rack, a workout mat, a recovery foam roller and a heart rate monitor, depending on which bundle customers spring for. Users also pay a $39 monthly subscription to access on-demand and live classes. 

The concept for Tempo came about in 2015 when Eldeeb and Augustin developed SmartSpot, a computer vision-augmented smart screen they sold to gyms that helped trainers analyze and improve their clients’ form during workouts. With the trove of data generated and collected by SmartSpot, Eldeeb and Augustin developed a program that identified fitness users’ most common movement errors and utilized machine learning to offer unique recommendations for each individual user — a program that became part of the foundation for Tempo. 

“Being a personal trainer once, I remember charging $150 an hour,” explains Eldeeb. “I want to create a better experience and offer it to many more people for a lot less. That means we’re going to continue to invest in the core technology that makes that possible.” 

Tempo’s launch came during a particularly opportune time. With the pandemic unfolding, demand for at-home fitness solutions soared. The startup has seen sales surge 1,000% since it began taking pre-orders in early 2020, with delivery delays currently ranging between five to seven weeks — a common issue faced by other at-home fitness companies such as Peloton, Tonal and Echelon. Tempo users have collectively performed 5 million workouts, or clocked 40,000 hours on their devices to date, according to the company. 

“That [supply chain] was definitely an issue,” acknowledges Eldeeb, pointing to production challenges posed by factories temporarily shutting down or reducing operations in 2020. “We were doing this for the first time at scale, and we’d made small quantities of the product before [launch]. But for our first year in the market, we had to solve all those problems and still ship the product, which was a huge undertaking. We basically had to reduce sales because I wanted the factory workers to be safe.” 

For Tempo, the opportunity to scale is enormous, as the global market is estimated to reach $29.4 billion by 2025. With new funding in tow, Eldeeb wants to capitalize on surging demand, with plans of doubling down on logistics and its supply chain, growing employee headcount and expanding its content to offer yoga and boxing classes later this year.  

With vaccinations across the U.S. steadily increasing and gyms reopening, the big question is whether people will stick with their at-home fitness workouts, throw themselves back into their old gym routines or adopt a hybrid model that marries the two. Eldeeb is betting that now that more people have acclimated to working out in their homes, they’ll stay the course out of sheer convenience, pointing to a Consumer Trends report from The New Consumer published earlier this year indicating that 81% of people under the age of 40 prefer to exercise at home. 

If true, then companies like Tempo will continue to reap the benefits of this shift of fitness into the home. 

News: With the right tools, predicting startup revenue is possible

• April 13, 2021
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How do you predict earnings when you are still figuring it out? You need to work on making your revenue predictable, repeatable and scalable; and use tools that will help you create projections.

For a long time, “revenue” seemed to be a taboo word in the startup world. Fortunately, things have changed with the rise of SaaS and alternative funding sources such as revenue-based investing VCs. Still, revenue modeling remains a challenge for founders. How do you predict earnings when you are still figuring it out?

The answer is twofold: You need to make your revenue predictable, repeatable and scalable in the first place, plus make use of tools that will help you create projections based on your data. Here, we’ll suggest some ways you can get more visibility into your revenue, find the data that really matter and figure out how to put a process in place to make forecasts about it.

Base projections on repeatable, scalable results

Aaron Ross is a co-author of “Predictable Revenue,” a book based on his experience of creating a process and team that helped grow Salesforce’s revenue by more than $100 million. “Predictable” is the key word here: “You want growth that doesn’t require guessing, hope and frantic last-minute deal-hustling every quarter- and year-end,” he says.

This makes recurring revenue particularly desirable, though it is by no means the be-all-end-all of predictable revenue. On one hand, there is always the risk that recurring revenue won’t last, as customers may churn and organic growth runs out of gas. On the other, there is a broader picture for predictable revenue that goes beyond subscription-based models.

Ross and his co-author, Marylou Tyler, outline three steps to predictable revenue: predictable lead generation, a dedicated sales development team and consistent sales systems. They wrote an entire book about it, so it would be hard to sum it up here. So what’s the takeaway? You shouldn’t base your projections on processes and results that aren’t repeatable and scalable.

Cross the hot coals

In their early days, startups usually grow via word of mouth, luck and sheer hustle. The problem is that it likely won’t lead to sustainable growth; as the saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there. In between, there is typically a phase of uncertainty and missed results that Ross refers to as “the hot coals.”

Before the hot coals, predicting revenue is vain at best, and oftentimes impossible. I, for one, remember being at a loss when an old-school investor asked me for five-year profit-and-loss projections when my now-defunct startup was nowhere near a stable money-making path. Not all seed investors expect this, so there was obviously a mismatch here, but the challenge is still the same for most founders: How do you bridge the gap between traditional projections and the reality of a startup?

News: Grab a group discount and take your team to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

• April 13, 2021
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Mobility mavens, June 9 will be here before you know it, and that means it’s time to get your strategy ducks in a row for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. You want to make the most of your time at this one-day virtual intensive featuring interactive presentations with the mobility industry’s top movers, shakers and startup

Mobility mavens, June 9 will be here before you know it, and that means it’s time to get your strategy ducks in a row for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. You want to make the most of your time at this one-day virtual intensive featuring interactive presentations with the mobility industry’s top movers, shakers and startup dream makers, amirite?

Take your team to increase your ROI. Right now, you can grab a group discount — at the early bird price — when you buy a block of four or more tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility. Don’t procrastinate. At $70 per pass, you’ll save a couple hundred bucks — but only if you make your purchase by May 5, at 11:59 pm (PT).

Like the old expression says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. You’ll cover more ground and discover more opportunities with your whole team at your side.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 will feature an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, fireside chats and breakouts all focused on the current and future state of mobility — like EVs, micromobility and smart cities for starters — and the investment trends that influence them all.

Investors like Clara Brenner (Urban Innovation Fund), Quin Garcia (Autotech Ventures) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — all of whom will grace our virtual stage. They’ll have plenty of insight and advice to share, including the challenges that startup founders will face as they break into the transportation arena.

You’ll hear from CEOs like Starship Technologies’ Ahti Heinla. The company’s been busy testing delivery robots in real-world markets. Don’t miss his discussion touching on challenges ranging from technology to red tape and what it might take to make last-mile robotic delivery a mainstream reality.

Taking your team also makes you a highly efficient networking unit. Find ad hoc opportunities in the virtual platform’s chat feature or use CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform to zero in on the people best aligned with your business goals. Schedule virtual product demos, pitch investors or recruit new talent.

Here’s what Rachael Wilcox, a creative producer at Volvo Cars, told us about her networking experience at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

“I didn’t think I’d network on a virtual platform but, it turns out, it’s a lot easier to network with more people. Folks just felt more comfortable reaching out. I had conversations with people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise, and that was an unexpected benefit.”

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 take place on June 9, but if you want to take your team — and save 25% in the process — it’s now o’clock. Buy your group discount passes before the early bird price disappears on May 5 at 11:59 pm (PT). Grab your cohort and go!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

News: Temasek and BlackRock form Decarbonization Partners with $600 million to create a zero-emission economy

• April 13, 2021
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The $9 trillion financial management firm Blackrock is collaborating with the $313 billion Singapore investment firm Temasek to back companies developing technologies and services to help create a zero emission economy by 2050. The two mega-investment firms will invest an initial $600 million to launch Decarbonization Partners, and look to raise money from investors committing

The $9 trillion financial management firm Blackrock is collaborating with the $313 billion Singapore investment firm Temasek to back companies developing technologies and services to help create a zero emission economy by 2050.

The two mega-investment firms will invest an initial $600 million to launch Decarbonization Partners, and look to raise money from investors committing to achieving a net zero world and long-term sustainable finacnial returns. The two partners have set themselves a goal to raise $1 billion for their first fund, including capital from Temasek and BlackRock.

The partnership, coming during Earth month, is one of several big multi-billion dollar initiatives that are underway to prevent global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, BlackRock is somewhat tardy to the party. Temasek, for its part, has already made a number of high-profile bets in the alternative meat market — namely in companies like Impossible Foods — and in alternative energy technology developers including Eavor, a geothermal company, and a $500 million bet on a renewable power developer in India.

Meanwhile, a coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates are already on their second billion dollar investment vehicle through Breakthrough Energy, a multi-stage, multi-strategy initiative that includes a venture capital arm as well as other types of financing on the way.

“The world cannot meet its net zero ambitions without transformational innovation,” said Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, in a statement. “For decarbonization solutions and technologies to transform our economy, they need to be scaled. To do that, they need patient, well-managed capital to support their vital goals. This partnership will help define climate solutions as a standalone asset class that is both essential to our collective mission and a historic investment opportunity created by the net zero transition.”

To get a sense of what Decarbonization Partners might back, companies should probably look to the Breakthrough Energy portfolio — the firms share similar interests in new sources of energy, technologies to distribute that energy, building and manufacturing technologies, and material science and process innovations.

It’s a big swing that the firms are taking, but the flood of capital coming into the sustainability sector is commensurate with both the size of the problem, and the potential opportunity in returns generated by solving it.

A report from Morgan Stanley estimated that solving climate change would be a $50 trillion problem, according to a 2019 report from Forbes.

“Bold, aggressive actions are needed to make the global net zero ambition a reality. Decarbonization Partners represents one of several steps we are taking to follow through on our commitment to halve the emissions from our portfolio by 2030, and ultimately move to net zero emissions by 2050,” said Dilhan Pillay, Chief Executive Officer of Temasek International. “Through collective efforts with like-minded partners, we will be able to create sustainable value for all of our stakeholders over the long term, and investors will have the opportunity to help deliver innovative solutions at scale to address climate challenges.”

News: Fortnite-maker Epic completes $1B funding round

• April 13, 2021
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How much is Epic Games worth? Well, we’ve long ago surpasses the realm of dollar figures regular humans can contextualize. With its latest round, the gamer hits an equity valuation of $28.7 billion. Yes, “b” for “billion.” That’s a lot of micro-transactions. Time to start talking metaverse! Best known for the wildly successful battle royale

How much is Epic Games worth? Well, we’ve long ago surpasses the realm of dollar figures regular humans can contextualize. With its latest round, the gamer hits an equity valuation of $28.7 billion. Yes, “b” for “billion.” That’s a lot of micro-transactions.

Time to start talking metaverse!

Best known for the wildly successful battle royale title, Fortnite, Epic just announced another $1 billion funding round, featuring a $200 million Sony Group Corporation investment. The rest of the list is, predictably, a long one, including [deep breath], Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, T. Rowe Price Associates-managed accounts, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, BlackRock managed accounts, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital.

“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse,” CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a statement tied to the news. “Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store.”

Sweeney has plenty of reason to be grateful, as the controlling shareholder.

It’s been a busy several months for the game-maker. The company has been waging an on-going war with the both Apple and Google over in-game payment revenues. A trial expected to feature some of the biggest names in tech is expected to kick off early next month.

Epic has also been using its already extremely deep coffers to purchase game developers and publishing studios, including its March acquisition of Fall Guys-maker Mediatonic. It’s clear the company is amassing a large portfolio of titles through acquisitions, a trend that is almost certain to continue with this latest massive round.

The funding also looks likely to strengthen the company’s ties to Sony, as well. Here’s Sony Group Corporation CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida, also quoted in the press release,

Epic continues to deliver revolutionary experiences through their array of cutting edge technologies that support creators in gaming and across the digital entertainment industry. We are excited to strengthen our collaboration to bring new entertainment experiences to people around the world. I strongly believe that this aligns with our purpose to fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology.

Prior to this round, the company had raised $3.4 billion, including a a $1.78 billion round last August.

News: Bloomscape’s Justin Mast explains how he built a thriving garden startup in Detroit

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Justin Mast has a simple reason for starting his plant retail startup Bloomscape in Detroit. “This is home,” he told me. “This is where I have a really strong network and I knew I’d be able to find a lot of support.” Mast didn’t grow up in Detroit proper, but he’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan’s

Justin Mast has a simple reason for starting his plant retail startup Bloomscape in Detroit.

“This is home,” he told me. “This is where I have a really strong network and I knew I’d be able to find a lot of support.”

Mast didn’t grow up in Detroit proper, but he’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city. He recalled a weekend in Detroit after finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, when he was “totally blown away” by the city’s energy.

And when it came time to launch Bloomscape in 2018, Mast said it made sense to do so from Detroit because of Michigan’s “strong heritage in the horticulture industry” — in floriculture, for example, it ranks as one of the biggest producers in the United States.

That heritage isn’t abstract to him. Mast said his family has been involved in the industry for five generations on his father’s side (including three generations in the Netherlands) and three generations on his mother’s. He worked in the family greenhouse as a child and even starting a roadside plant stand.

Image Credits: Bloomscape

“This was my version of a lemonade stand,” he said — albeit a lemonade stand that became popular enough that Mast needed to recruit his siblings for help, and that eventually provided him with enough money to buy a used car.

Bloomscape launched in 2018, and Mast said that from the beginning, the startup’s advantage was “to really know the ins and outs of the business.” That allowed Bloomscape to ship larger plants (like birds of paradise and Chinese fan palms), and more recently to expand with outdoor plants and garden “bloom kits.”

“By focusing on one of the least glamorized parts of this industry, the supply chain, we are able to design this process for shipping larger plants, at scale, throughout the country,” he said. “We’re shipping out tropical plants in the dead of winter, thousands of times a week, with a real high level of consistency. We know the plants really well, we how they perform, how they move through a supply chain, we know the nuances of FedEx and UPS, we know what growers are growing quality product.”

Bloomscape has raised a total of $24 million, most recently in a Series B last fall led by General Catalyst, with participation from Annox Capital’s Bob Mylod, Home Depot board member Jeff Boyd, former Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees CEO John Replogle and existing investors Revolution Ventures and Ludlow Ventures.

Bloomscape bloom kits

When I asked whether investors had ever pressured him to move the startup to Silicon Valley, Mast said, “We’ve had successful funding rounds, but even in most successful rounds, not everyone’s going to be the right fit.” So it sounds like the issue came up, but Mast made sure that everyone who actually invested saw the startup’s location as an advantage, or at least “if they saw it as a disadvantage, they were willing to overlook it.”

Nor has the location proven to be an issue when it comes to hiring. Mast said the company successfully lured Aaron Averbuch (formerly based in Seattle and a vice president of engineering at Placed and Snap) to Detroit to become CTO. He also noted that Detroit is close to the University of Michigan, and that “all the schools in Chicago and Pittsburgh are within a few hours’ drive.”

Mast added that the last six months have been “a particularly exciting time” to run a startup in Detroit, with the success of companies like StockX, Floyd and Autobooks.

“We’re thrilled to be here,” he said.

News: With a team that helped build the brain behind Alexa, HomeX raises $90M

• April 13, 2021
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HomeX, a home services platform for homeowners and service providers, has raised $90 million in a funding round led by New Mountain Capital. New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in assets under management, was the only institutional investor to put money in this round alongside company executives. The

HomeX, a home services platform for homeowners and service providers, has raised $90 million in a funding round led by New Mountain Capital.

New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in assets under management, was the only institutional investor to put money in this round alongside company executives. The company was bootstrapped until a 2019 $50 million-plus debt financing.

Founded in 2017, Chicago-based HomeX aims to “radically improve” home services by pairing service workers with homeowners, both virtually and in person. It also has built software, and offers services for, contractors that are aimed at helping them drive and manage demand “more efficiently.”

Notably, one of the company’s co-founders, CTO Simon Weaver, and several team members were on the development team of Evi, a startup that had built an AI program that can be communicated with using natural language via an app, that was acquired by Amazon in 2012. That technology was essentially the brain behind Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. 

HomeX uses artificial intelligence to diagnose home issues virtually before a contractor even goes out to a home, with the goal of helping them resolve a problem faster (by having the necessary equipment ahead of time for example), which in turn makes customers happier. 

“We’re using machine-generated content to create solutions that are specific to a homeowner’s issues,” said  co-founder and president Vincent Payen. “Using machines to understand symptoms, the questions to ask and to actually get to a diagnosis and a recommendation or resolution is where AI absolutely shines and allows us to do things that were not possible even three or five years ago.”

Founder and CEO Michael Werner worked in the $500 billion services industry for years (his family founded Werner Ladders) and recognized just how fragmented it was. He also acknowledges that, especially in certain markets, “there’s a terrible imbalance between very high demand and not enough contractors to do the work, or rather, a terrible labor shortage.”

HomeX Remote Assist in particular virtually connects homeowners (via phone, video or chat) with HomeX’s licensed technicians to diagnose and repair common home issues. That business unit has experienced more than 400% growth in less than a year, according to Werner. Last year, the company grew by “about 5x” the number of contractors on its platform. It declined to reveal revenue figures.

Image courtesy of HomeX

“For homeowners, we’re making home maintenance less complicated,” Werner said. “At the same time, we want to help the contractor succeed. Similar to how telemedicine has changed how medicine is delivered, HomeX Remote Assist is going to change the service experience for taking care of your home.”

Another area of HomeX’s business that is growing rapidly is its B2B offering. Home warranty and insurance companies see remote services “as very additive to make their business more efficient,” notes Payen.

“We are using some of our capital toward a pilot program and a number of business development opportunities there,” he said.

For now, while the company is not profitable overall, it is profitable in the services side of its business, according to Werner. In the last 12 months alone, it has served “hundreds of thousands” of clients via its platform, defined by unique virtual and physical appointments.  

New Mountain Capital Managing Director Harris Kealey said his firm viewed HomeX as a business that is primed to reshape the home and commercial services industry.

“The market is massive and the need for change and innovation is substantial,” he said in a written statement.

Another company in the space, Thumbtack, recently expanded into video home checkups. Thumbtack, a marketplace where you can hire local professionals for home improvement and other services such as repairs, in December acquired Setter, a startup which provided its customers with video home checkups conducted by experts, and then offered personalized plans for how to address any issues.

Thumbtack had laid off 250 employees at the end of March 2020, after the company saw big declines in its major markets. Since then, however, CEO Marco Zappacosta told TechCrunch there’s been “a renewed focus on the home and an acceleration of digital adoption.”