Airbnb nears IPO as Asana and Palantir land their direct listings

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The going has not always been easy but the tech IPOs keep coming. Airbnb itself is almost here, in what is likely to be the ultimate stock market listing of this dramatic year. After the pandemic triggered mass layoffs for the short-term rental marketplace, it has managed to make up all of the lost ground to pre-pandemic projections, TechCrunch and others have reported. Now, news is leaking out that it could seek to raise up to $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation.

The US presidential election in a month, Trump’s positive COVID-19 diagnosis, and various other world events have yet to stop the tech IPO momentum.

This past Wednesday, Palantir and Asana both opted to put a limited number of shares up for sale directly instead of working with a bank to pre-sell portions to favored clients, following in the direct-listings footsteps of Spotify and Slack.

Palantir, which is continuing to get political scrutiny around its government data businesses, and Asana both finished the first few days of trading without any pop to speak of for initial public investors (although other things have been impacting markets in the same time frame). However, both companies have already turned billions of paper funding rounds into liquid money that can start going back to the employees and investors, as intended. And now, each can sail the high seas of public markets with a smaller, friendlier group of stockholders than many, many other public companies have.

We’ve been covering Palantir in great detail recently, but Asana’s entrance provides a broader lesson for the many aspiring SaaS startups out there.

Dustin Moskovitz, who has retained a huge amount of control as a cofounder/investor, told Danny Crichton for Extra Crunch that more than 40% of the task-focused work management provider’s revenue is now coming from outside of North America, with ongoing growth, high customer loyalty and big integrations with other SaaS providers. The results bode well for other SaaS companies considering direct listings, as Alex Wilhelm analyzes for EC:

Asana grew 63% in the six months ending July 31, 2020, compared to the same period of 2019, though that growth rate decelerated to around 57% when only looking at the most recent quarter and its historical analog. Good growth then, if slowing. And Asana’s gross margins were good and improving, coming in at 86% in the six months ending July 31, 2019, and 87% in the same period of 2020. But the company’s net losses were rising in gross and relative terms at the same time. In the six months ending July 31, 2020, Asana lost $76.9 million, up from $30.5 million in the same period of 2019. And, the company’s 77% net loss as a percent of revenue in the two quarters ending in July of 2020 was up from a 50% loss during the same period of the preceding year. Asana also consumed more cash this year than last year, with its operating cash burn rising from $13.1 million during the six months ending July 31, 2019 to $40.3 million in the same period of 2020.

And yet, from a reference price of $21, valuing the company at around $4 billion on a fully diluted basis, shares of Asana have risen to $25.14 at the open of trading this morning (though Asana lost several points today thanks to general market carnage). Current market trackers value the company at $3.86 billion.

Now, on to Airbnb! (And also, Datto!)

Source: Getty Images

Pandemic upsides arrive for cannabis, mental health and language learning

As the world tries to make sense of fresh Q3 data, we took a closer look at a few fresh startup trends. First, the cannabis market seems to be as strong as you’d expect. Matt Burns caught up with a range of weed-tech founders, investors and analysts, who shared almost entirely good news for the emerging sector. Here’s a highlight from Andy Lytwynec, VP, Global Vape Business at Canopy Growth, the cannabis holding company for a range of brands, including the vaporizer preferred by your self-medicated correspondent:

Lytwynec points to Storz & Bickle as a barometer of sorts in judging the impact of COVID-19. The German-based vaporizer company saw an uptick in sales, as reported in Canopy Growth’s latest quarterly report. The company reported a 71% increase during the first quarter ending on June 30. The financial report pointed to Storz & Bickel’s increased sales and distribution expansion as a primary reason for the increase. 

Just try getting a replacement for that mouthpiece you tragically broke at the start of quarantine. And don’t fall for that fake stuff on Amazon or you’ll be huffing plastic. Anyway…

Alex also checked in on mental health funding, which were already coming into their own before the pandemic. The first half of the year was the sector’s biggest yet, with a focus on remote therapy, virtual coaching and anxiety alleviation, although Q2 was down slightly from Q1. More, from Extra Crunch:

Investors are putting dollars to work in 2020 to further the growth mental health startups managed in 2018 and 2019. Per the CB Insights dataset, in Q1 and Q2 2020, these startups saw 106 rounds worth $1.08 billion. In the year-ago period, the figures were 87 rounds worth $750 million. (Unlike some subcategories of wellness startups that CB Insights detailed, mental health upstarts have enough regular VC volume to make year-over-year comparisons reasonable.)

In a different sector of tech-powered mind improvement, Duolingo is now on track to hit $180 million bookings, chief executive Luis von Ahn tells Natasha Mascarenhas for EC. While the language-learning company has seen usage surge from 30 million to 42 million monthly active users this year, it only makes money from 3% of them (those who want to pay to avoid seeing ads, get download access, and other features).

The future of transportation

From Kirsten Korosec, our resident mobility expert and host of our next event:

If you’re interested in tech, transportation and startups — of course you are — you should make our next event a priority. And it’s coming up in just a few days. TechCrunch is hosting TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6 & 7, a virtual event that will bring together the best and brightest minds working on automated vehicle technology, shared micromobility and electrification. We’ll be talking to former Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel about his new venture Redwood Materials, the CEOs of EV newcomers Polestar and Lucid Motors, Formula E driver Lucas di Grassi about a new kind of racing event (hint, scooters!), early stage-investors from Trucks VC, Hemi Ventures and Maniv as well as Uber’s director of policy for cities Shin-Pei Tsay, to name a few. Plus there will be a dedicated networking time, a pitch night on October 5 and a virtual expo. There are a variety of ticket prices to meet your budget, including one for students. But I’m also here bearing gifts: Startups Weekly readers can get 50% off the full price at this link. If you’d just like to check out the startups expo portion, Startups Weekly readers can get in free with this link.

Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Top Indian app developers join global platform rebellion

Manish Singh, our lead reporter covering Indian startups, has been breaking news on the growing dissent against app platform policies. It’s getting epic:

More than 150 startups and firms in India are working to form an alliance and toying with the idea of launching an app store to cut their reliance on Google, five people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The list of entrepreneurs includes high-profile names, such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Paytm (India’s most valuable startup); Deep Kalra of travel ticketing firm MakeMyTrip; and executives from PolicyBazaar, RazorPay and ShareChat. The growing list of founders expressed deep concerns about Google’s “monopolistic” hold on India, home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, and discussed what they alleged was unfair and inconsistent enforcement of Play Store’s guidelines in the country.

Their effort comes days after a small group of firms — including Epic Games, Spotify, Basecamp, Match Group and ProtonMail — forged their own coalition to pressure Apple and Google to make changes to their marketplace rules.

“Where else do these dollars go?”

Danny interviewed SF-based Index Ventures partners Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon about the latest trends in startup fundraising. Here’s a key part about the macro trends, that also explains why all those tech IPOs continue to happen (and do well):

TechCrunch: Given the amount of capital flowing into venture these days, have you noticed any LPs starting to pull back from the market?

Cannon: They’re not pulling back. In fact, it’s like, “Could you potentially take more allocation? And what do you think of these other seed managers?”

I think the way that I’ve got my mind around this is, where else would these dollars go? What are the alternatives for the dollars that are rushing into tech? I don’t know the latest numbers, but it was something like 40% of stock market returns are actually concentrated in Apple [and FAANG]. And then we’re seeing IPOs perform the same.

We’re in a global pandemic that could easily cause [another] recession. A lot of industries like airlines and travel have more exposure. Tech is just relatively more attractive. So if the interest rates are low, which they are, and [economists] have said that they’re going to be low for the coming decades, then you’re going to have lots of capital chasing returns.

Across the week

TechCrunch

Allbirds CEO Joey Zwillinger on the startup’s $100 million round, profitability and SPAC mania

How Twilio built its own conference platform

Working for social justice isn’t a ‘distraction’ for mission-focused companies

Apple removes two RSS feed readers from China App Store

Calling VCs in Rome and Milan: Be featured in The Great TechCrunch Survey of European VC

Extra Crunch

News apps in the US and China use algorithms to drive engagement, discovery

Which neobanks will rise or fall?

9 VCs in Madrid and Barcelona discuss the COVID-19 era and look to the future

Spain’s startup ecosystem: 9 investors on remote work, green shoots and 2020 trends

Healthcare entrepreneurs should prepare for an upcoming VC/PE bubble

#EquityPod

From Natasha:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s VC-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week, Alex is on a much-deserved vacation (but not from Twitter, it seems) so Danny Crichton and I chatted through the news and happenings of the week. Somehow we winded our way through the latest tech controversies, gave Chris Wallace a shout out and ended with some funding rounds. I’ll be out next week so don’t miss me too much, but expect the entire Equity team to be back full-speed in mid-October. Thanks, as always, to our producer Chris Gates for his patience and diligence.

Now, onto a sneak peek of what we got into:

• Moderation continues to be the root of all problems. We got into the anti-semitic comments that were spewed on Clubhouse, and what that means for the future of the audio-only platform. As Danny so eloquently put it: if Clubhouse is having moderation problems even with an exclusive invite-only user base, the problem will grow.
• We also talked about Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s blog post, which triggered a debate between us on whether tech companies can even choose to not be political. For the record, Black Lives Matter is not a political statement. It’s a human statement. Read this op-ed for more.
• I wrote a piece about how a new program wants to be the Y Combinator for emerging fund managers. The whole “YC for X” model usually makes me roll my eyes, but listen to hear why I’m actually optimistic and bullish on programs like these taking off within tech.
• Silver Lake added a $2 billion “long-term” hedge fund backed by Abu Dhabi to its tech finance toolkit. The strategy is a signal to privately backed startups, and potentially a slap in the face to SoftBank.
• For a quick edtech note, I caught up with Duolingo’s CEO this week in one of his rare press interviews. Luis von Ahn explained the app’s surge in bookings, and there’s one key metric we pull out to noodle over.
• Danny explained Gusto’s latest product launch with, wait for it, Gusto. In all seriousness, he brings up interesting points about the future of fintech feeling more full-suite, and free.
• Funding round chatter continued when we unpacked Lee Fixel’s latest investment in India’s Inshorts.
• Finally, we ended with LiquidDeath, which is not the name of a drinking game, but instead the name of a startup that has successfully attracted millions in venture capital for mountain water.

And with that, we will be back next week. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.

Equity  drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/30u1mt5 Airbnb nears IPO as Asana and Palantir land their direct listings https://ift.tt/34q5viV

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Twitter will make users remove tweets hoping Trump dies of COVID-19

President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 result has made Twitter a busy place in the past 24 hours, including some tweets that have publicly wished — some subtly and others more directly — that he die from the disease caused by coronavirus.

Twitter put out a reminder to folks that it doesn’t allow tweets that wish or hope for death or serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone. Tweets that violate this policy will need to be removed, Twitter said Friday. However, it also clarified that this does not automatically mean suspension. Several new outlets misreported that users would be suspended automatically. Of course, that doesn’t mean users won’t be suspended.

tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against *anyone* are not allowed and will need to be removed. this does not automatically mean suspension. https://t.co/lQ8wWGL2y0 https://t.co/P2vGfUeUQf

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) October 2, 2020

On Thursday evening, Trump tweeted that he and his wife and First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. White House physician Sean Conley issued a memo Friday confirming the positive results of SAR-Cov-2 virus, which often more commonly known as COVID-19.  Trump was seen boarding a helicopter Friday evening that was bound for Walter Reed Medical Center for several days of treatment.

The diagnosis sent shares tumbling Friday on the key exchanges, including Nasdaq. The news put downward pressure on all major American indices, but heaviest on tech shares.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter will make users remove tweets hoping Trump dies of COVID-19 Kirsten Korosec https://ift.tt/3l3xEmg
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Daily Crunch: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns

Twitter addresses questions of bias in its image-cropping algorithms, we take a look at Mario Kart Live and the stock market takes a hit after President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. This is your Daily Crunch for October 2, 2020.

The big story: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns

Last month, (white) PhD student Colin Madland highlighted potential algorithmic bias on Twitter and Zoom — in Twitter’s case, because its automatic image cropping seemed to consistently highlight Madland’s face over that of a Black colleague.

Today, Twitter said it has been looking into the issue: “While our analyses to date haven’t shown racial or gender bias, we recognize that the way we automatically crop photos means there is a potential for harm.”

Does that mean it will stop automatically cropping images? The company said it’s “exploring different options” and added, “We hope that giving people more choices for image cropping and previewing what they’ll look like in the tweet composer may help reduce the risk of harm.”

The tech giants

Nintendo’s new RC Mario Kart looks terrific — Mario Kart Live (with a real-world race car) makes for one hell of an impressive demo.

Tesla delivers 139,300 vehicles in Q3, beating expectations — Tesla’s numbers in the third quarter marked a 43% improvement from the same period last year.

Zynga completes its acquisition of hyper-casual game maker Rollic — CEO Frank Gibeau told me that this represents Zynga’s first move into the world of hyper-casual games.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Elon Musk says an update for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft development program is coming in 3 weeks —  Starship is a next-generation, fully reusable spacecraft that the company is developing with the aim of replacing all of its launch vehicles.

Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples — Paired combines audio tips from experts with “fun daily questions and quizzes” that partners answer together.

With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream — Long before the coronavirus, Sora was toying with the idea of live, virtual high school.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Spain’s startup ecosystem: 9 investors on remote work, green shoots and 2020 trends — While main hubs Madrid and Barcelona bump heads politically, tech ecosystems in each city have been developing with local support.

Which neobanks will rise or fall? — Neobanks have led the $3.6 billion in venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups this year.

Asana’s strong direct listing lights alternative path to public market for SaaS startups — Despite rising cash burn and losses, Wall Street welcomed the productivity company.

Everything else

American stocks drop in wake of president’s COVID-19 diagnosis — The news is weighing heavily on all major American indices, but heaviest on tech shares.

Digital vote-by-mail applications in most states are inaccessible to people with disabilities — According to an audit by Deque, most states don’t actually have an accessible digital application.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Index Ventures’ Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon: ‘There’s basically an infinite bid’ for growth-stage startups

The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating.

That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful of years.

One firm that has navigated those changes for decades is Index Ventures, one of the first funds to launch in Europe that has evolved into a multi-stage firm in recent years. The firm last raised a total of $2 billion this past April to continue doubling down on all the deals springing up across the world.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, I interviewed Nina Achadjian and Sarah Cannon, two SF-based partners at Index, to discuss what they are seeing in the market, how VC fundraises have changed and continue to change and how they are adapting to the rise of rolling funds and other new seed vehicles. This was the first time that the two came together for a panel, and our conversation was a real blast.

Index raises $1.2B growth fund and $800M to invest in emerging startups

Here’s an edited and condensed version of the conversation, with highlights of the best insights from the panel.

“It’s not easy to just sit on the sidelines and wait till things sort themselves out.”

TechCrunch: September is traditionally a time for fundraises to kick off for the fall, but in this COVID-19 world, everything is different. Who is fundraising right now and what do you see going on?

Nina Achadjian: Well, there are two things. One, there was an incredible pull from the market for technology tools. So many businesses that had put off buying technology or investing in technology really all of a sudden found themselves in a digitally-first world or a digital-only world and therefore, there was a massive pull for technology products. It’s the reason why companies like Shopify and others in the public markets have had just amazing, record quarters.

The second thing is, in venture when we raise these funds, we have a certain time period to deploy them, usually anywhere from two years to five years. So for us as investors, it’s not easy to just sit on the sidelines and wait till things sort themselves out.

So actually, a lot of venture investors have piggybacked off of this incredible pull from the market side and have been investing, I would say, at the same pace, or even a faster pace than we were before.

“There’s basically an infinite bid for these companies.”

Are those paces the same for all stages?

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Twitter is building ‘Birdwatch,’ a system to fight misinformation by adding more context to tweets

Twitter is developing a new product called “Birdwatch,” which the company confirms is an attempt at addressing misinformation across its platform by providing more context for tweets, in the form of notes. Tweets can be added to “Birdwatch” — meaning flagged for moderation — from the tweet’s drop-down menu, where other blocking and reporting tools are found today. A small binoculars icon will also appear on tweets published to the Twitter Timeline. When the button is clicked, users are directed to a screen where they can view the tweet’s history of notes.

Based on screenshots of Birdwatch unearthed through reverse engineering techniques, a new tab called “Birdwatch Notes” will be added to Twitter’s sidebar navigation, alongside other existing features like Lists, Topics, Bookmarks and Moments.

This section will allow you to keep track of your own contributions, aka your “Birdwatch Notes.”

To detect fake news, this AI first learned to write it

The feature was first uncovered this summer in early stages of development by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who found the system through Twitter’s website. At the time, Birdwatch didn’t have a name, but it clearly showed an interface for flagging tweets, voting on whether or not the tweet was misleading, and adding a note with further explanations.

Twitter is working on a moderation tool to monitor misinformations on Twitter

Moderators can flag tweets, vote on whether it is misleading, and add a note about it

(I made up my own note to show what it currently looks like) pic.twitter.com/YIa6zt58Fj

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 5, 2020

Twitter updated its web app a few days after her discovery, limiting further investigation.

This week, however, a very similar interface was again discovered in Twitter’s code, this time on iOS.

Twitter adds a warning label fact-checking Trump’s false voting claims

According to social media consultant Matt Navarra, who tweeted several more screenshots of the feature on mobile, Birdwatch allows users to attach notes to a tweet. These notes can be viewed when clicking on the binoculars button on the tweet itself.

In other words, additional context about the statements made in the tweet would be open to the public.

New Twitter feature?

‘Birdwatch’?!

Any guesses what it does? pic.twitter.com/1vmpZdTKLi

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) September 30, 2020

What’s less clear is whether everyone on Twitter will be given access to annotate tweets with additional context, or whether this permission will require approval, or only be open to select users or fact checkers.

Twitter early adopter and hashtag inventor Chris Messina openly wondered if Birdwatch could be some sort of “citizen’s watch” system for policing disinformation on Twitter. It turns out, he was right.

Wondering out loud if Twitter's #Birdwatch feature might turn into a kind of "citizen's watch" for disinformation on Twitter… https://t.co/N1YlVkbu8m

— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) October 1, 2020

According to line items he found within Twitter’s code, these annotations — the “Birdwatch Notes” — are referred to as “contributions,” which does seem to imply a crowdsourced system. (After all, a user would contribute to a shared system, not to a note they were writing for only themselves to see.)

Image Credits: Chris Messina

Crowdsourcing moderation wouldn’t be new to Twitter. For several years, Twitter’s live-streaming app Periscope has relied on crowdsourcing techniques to moderate comments on its real-time streams in order to clamp down on abuse.

There is still much we don’t know about how Birdwatch will work from a non-technical perspective, however. We don’t know if everyone will have the same abilities to annotate tweets, how attempts to troll this system will be handled, or what would happen to a tweet if it got too many negative dings, for example.

In more recent months, Twitter has tried to take a harder stance on tweets that contain misleading, false or incendiary statements. It has even gone so far as to apply fact-check labels to some of Trump’s tweets and has hidden others behind a notice warning users that the tweet has violated Twitter’s rules. But scaling moderation across all of Twitter is a task the company has not been well-prepared for, as it built for scale first, then tried to figure out policies and procedures around harmful content after the fact.

Reached for comment, Twitter declined to offer details regarding its plans for Birdwatch, but did confirm the feature was designed to combat the spread of misinformation.

“We’re exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Misinformation is a critical issue and we will be testing many different ways to address it,” they added.

WTF is fake news?

 

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Which neobanks will rise or fall?

Denis Barrier Contributor

Denis Barrier is co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, a global venture capital firm investing across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Alex Lazarow Contributor

Alex Lazarow is an author, a global venture investor with Cathay Innovation and is an adjunct professor with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies MBA program.

The neobank, or digital bank, phenomenon continues to take the world by storm, with global winners, from Brazil’s Nubank valued at $10 billion and Berlin’s N26 valued at $3.5 billion, to Chime, now valued at $14.5 billion as the most valuable consumer fintech in the United States.

Neobanks have led the charge of the $3.6 billion in venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups this year. And as the coronavirus-fueled acceleration of digital transformation continues, it seems the digital bank is here to stay, with some estimates pointing to neobanks reaching 60 million customers in North America and Europe by the end of 2020, and surpassing 145 million by 2024.

The space is also becoming more crowded, a trend which will only accelerate with fintech eating the world and creating greater infrastructure that enables any company to include a bank account as a product extension.

FT Partners Fintech Industry Research, January 2020

As a result, neobanks are not a monolithic model and not all are created equal. Looking underneath the hood of business models across the globe reveals remarkable operational differences and highlights specific features that are more likely to succeed in the long-term.

Five global models of neobanks

Today there are five distinct models that are leading globally:

Interchange-led: Relies on payments revenue, sourced through interchange as the revenue driver. Every time a customer uses the neobank’s card as a payment method they get paid [e.g. Chime / US; Neon (hybrid of 1 & 2) / Brazil].

Credit-led: Leverages a credit-first model, starting off with a credit card or similar offering, and later providing a bank account [e.g. Nubank, Neon (hybrid of 1 & 2) / Brazil].

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Writer pens a $5M seed round for its AI style guide that flags bias and tone

Anyone who writes online or in a word processor has likely gotten used to the inevitable squiggly line denoting a misspelled word or clumsy phrase. But what if you use a word that’s loaded, a phrase that’s too formal or not formal enough, or refer to a group of people in an outdated way? Writer is a service that watches as you type, flagging language that doesn’t match up with your style guide and values, and it just raised $5M to scale up.

Both people and the companies they work for want to improve the way they write, but not just in terms of grammar and spelling. If a company says it’s inclusive, but the language in its press releases or internal blogs are peppered with anachronism and bias, it suggests their concern only goes so far.

“Companies are hungry to put actions behind their words,” said Writer founder and CEO May Habib. “They want to be able to tell a consistent story to their users everywhere that they’re interacting with them. What Writer does is let people know when they’re using insensitive language, or things that could be considered negative, and let companies set brand guidelines.”

Right off the bat let us admit that there is a whiff of the sinister about the idea of a company dictating how its employees speak, though that’s nothing new when it comes to content and official communications. But this isn’t about controlling speech for power — it’s about recognizing that we are all flawed communicators and could use a hand keeping ourselves honest. Less thought police and more a well-informed angel sitting on your shoulder whispering things like, “Hey. Are you sure you want to describe that lawyer as ‘exotic’?”

Examples of things Writer checks for.

There are tons of slip-ups we all make along those lines, less obvious but no less potentially offensive. It’s important in public communications, among other things, to refer to a group by the term they prefer, not the first one that pops into your head; Writer has up-to-date libraries of this information sourced from the communities themselves. Some phrases may have become politically loaded in the last couple years, but you’re not aware; No problem, it has alternatives. You want to avoid unnecessarily gendered language, great, but everyone slips up now and then; Writer can spot it — or make the connection with previous pronouns to make sure you don’t, for example, gender an anonymous source.

Accusations of “political correctness” will dog the service, but as Habib put it: “This is beyond politics; This is about respect for people who live a certain way, or are a certain way, and prefer to use certain terms. We’re trying to help companies create communities of belonging.” And as we’ve seen over and over again in tech, there is often a serious disconnect between the stated aspiration of a company and how people are treated within them. Just using the right words is a pretty low bar to start with, honestly.

Image Credits: Writer

Writer isn’t just a growing blacklist of words you should think twice about using, though. The natural language processing engine at the heart of it is also very concerned with things like sentence complexity, paragraph length, and tone. It has to have this deeper understanding, Habib explained, because “it’s not enough to underline — you need to know what to replace it with, and when you replace it, you need to fit it into the sentence. These are actually hard NLP problems.”

That lets it fit into a variety of roles in addition to promoting inclusive language. It can watch for the usual spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as things like formality, active voice, “liveliness” (whatever that is, I don’t have it), and other metrics that help define a brand.

And of course you can bring in your own style guide so your editors don’t have to roll their eyes at serial commas in headlines, double dashes instead of em dashes, e-mail instead of email, and all the rest of the little nips and tucks that keep a brand’s writing in a generally recognizable shape.

Image Credits: Writer

The service can also switch between style guides or adjust or disable itself in different apps and sites — so internal emails aren’t given the same guidelines as press releases, or a blog post’s style can be differentiated from a newsletter’s.

Obviously Grammarly is a big competitor here, but Habib feels that it and the growing number of in-browser or in-app checking services are very focused on the technical piece. Writer is less about preventing an individual writer’s errors, and more about creating consistency among groups of writers and making sure they are working from the same high-level linguistic standards.

Of course security is also a concern — no one wants a keylogger running on their machine, however helpful it may be. Habib was careful to emphasize that Writer runs locally in the browser as a plug-in, integrating with Word or Chrome for now but with other apps and services on the way. “None of that data ever hits a writer server, and no metadata — all the processing is done in the text area,” she said. The only data that’s sent back is the fact that a given suggestion was used, such as changing “should of” to “should have” or “illegal aliens” to “undocumented immigrants.” No user data is used to train the models and no content apart from the correction itself is sent or stored on Writer’s servers.

Here are a few ways GPT-3 can go wrong

Writer is available now, for $11/person/month (with the obligatory free trial period, of course) for a basic version and some unspecified amount for enterprise deals with multiple style guides, plagiarism detection, and so on. It’s only available in English, and although there is of course demand for the service in other languages, the depth of the NLP model and the specificity of what it recognizes to the language mean it does not generalize well. To take on Spanish or Korean would be to develop an entirely new product. So English it is for now.

The company is new, and has been developing its NLP engine (on the back of a previous effort, which monitored user-facing language in GitHub repos) for 18 months in something like stealth. The $5M seed round, led by Upfront Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Broadway Angels should help the company scale, though it already has some top-tier, household-name customers, so with that and the money its immediate future seems to be secure.

WellSaid Labs research takes synthetic speech from seconds-long clips to hours

https://ift.tt/3cPAzMK Writer pens a $5M seed round for its AI style guide that flags bias and tone https://ift.tt/30qTmsC

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Coinbase lets you withdraw funds to your debit card

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is adding a new way to withdraw funds from your Coinbase account. If you’ve added a compatible debit card to your account, you can transfer USD, EUR or GBP to your bank account nearly instantly.

There are some drawbacks, and the main one is that you’ll pay a lot of fees. In the U.S., Coinbase deducts 1.5% from the transaction, or a minimum $0.55 if it’s a small transaction. In Europe and the U.K., you pay 2% in fees or a minimum fee of £0.45/€0.52.

You also need to have a compatible card. Not all debit cards support incoming transfers. You need to have a Visa card that supports Visa Fast Funds. In the U.S., you can also use a MasterCard card with MasterCard Send.

It’s hard to know whether your bank or card issuer support those features. The best way to figure it out is probably by adding your card to Coinbase and see what Coinbase says.

Coinbase isn’t removing other withdrawal methods. For instance, if you’re looking for a cheaper way to withdraw your funds in Europe, a SEPA bank transfer costs €0.15 per transfer. And Coinbase supports instant SEPA transfers if your bank has enabled that.

The company also lets you link your PayPal account with your Coinbase account. Your funds should hit your PayPal account within a few seconds and there are no fees on Coinbase’s side.

As you can see, there are many ways to move money from your bank account to your Coinbase account. Some of them are slower than others, some of them are more expensive than others. Crypto-to-crypto transactions are a bit simpler by comparison as you only need your recipient’s wallet address to send tokens.

Image Credits: Coinbase

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Air quality monitoring service Airly raises $2 million as fires, pollution force consumers to take note

As smoke from fires chokes the skies in the western U.S. and pollution chokes much of the world, air quality has become yet another issue for civilization to address.

Industrialization and natural disasters wrought by climate change are spewing more toxic matter into the air, and governments around the world are racing to monitor what the combination of catastrophes and economic growth could mean for their citizens.

The ability to get an accurate measurement of the air quality in their home city of Krakow, Poland is what drove the team of engineers that launched Airly to start their business.

Founded by three engineering students, Michal Misiek, Wiktor Warchalowski, and Aleksander Konior, the company combines sensing technologies and software to measure particulate matter and emissions like NOx, SOx, methane, and carbon monoxide in the air.

“We are using software and calibration algorithms to provide the best data,” said Warchalowski, who serves as the company’s chief executive officer. The company is more than just collecting air quality. The three engineers have also developed an algorithm that they say can accurately predict air quality for up to 24 hours based on the data they gather.

The current market for air quality assessment tools stands at roughly $4 billion today and will reach $6.5 billion by 2025. Already, Airly’s technology is being used by around 400 cities across Europe and Asia by several universities and corporations including Philips, PwC, Motorola, Aviva, Veolia and Skanska. The company has also released an API so media, technology, and finance companies can access live air quality data. There’s also an app for consumers who want to get a sense of the air out there.

Airparif, the French-based air quality assessment organization awarded the company an honor for being the most accurate air quality device it had seen.

The company initially started because Warchalowski and his friends were training for a marathon and wanted to see when would be the best time to run so they wouldn’t be exposed to pollution. “When I wanted to run at 5PM and the data was from 2PM it was not up to date,” he said.

Over 2 million people are now using the company’s app. “There are more people like me that need that data,” Warchalowski said.

Aclima and Google release a new air quality data set for researchers to investigate California pollution

Airly makes money by selling its device, which is roughly the size of an iPhone, to consumers and communities, and by charging for access to its API. The devices cost $300 and API access starts at $1,000, according to Warchalowski.

With revenue in hand and the imprimatur of leading air quality monitoring organizations its little wonder that Airly was able to attract venture backing from of Sir Richard Branson’s and Sir Ronald Cohen’s families; Pipedrive co-founder Martin Tajur; Cherry Ventures partner and former Spotify CMO Sophia Bendz; former Gojek CMO Piotr Jakubowski; and Henkel board member Konstantin von Unger, in a $2 million round led by the newly formed investment firm Giant Ventures.

“By building the leading source of air quality data globally, Airly is creating enormous social and economic value,” said Cameron McLain, a managing partner and co-founder of Giant Ventures.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Air quality monitoring service Airly raises $2 million as fires, pollution force consumers to take note https://ift.tt/3naXPt8

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Indianapolis-based Malomo raises $2.8 million to turn order tracking into a branded customer experience

Yaw Aning named Malomo, the service he launched for small businesses to turn their order-tracking services into branded customer experiences, as a tribute to his mother, who was a small business owner herself.

“Malomo” means flowers in Swahili and it was the name of Aning’s mother’s small soap-making business which she built over the years — even as she was battling the cancer to which she would eventually succumb.

The small Indianapolis startup has just raised $2.8 million to expand its services providing a new marketing channel for the Shopify retailers of the world who can always use more ways to reach new customers, Aning said.

The financing came from the San Francisco-based firm, Base 10, and New York’s Harlem Capital, along with commitments from previous investors Hyde Park and High Alpha.

Aning came to entrepreneurship as an Orr Fellow, an Indiana program that takes 10 graduates and places them in high-growth companies. While Aning worked in corporate finance, he was always interested in the startup world, and started is first company, Pocket Tales, an online reading game for children.

That business was followed by Sticks and Leaves, a web design agency that gave Aning his first view into the opportunity that order tracking presented as a space for a better customer experience.

Along with co-founder Anthony Smith, Aning built a service that connects with a single click to the Shopify platform and creates custom, branded tracking pages for each brand. “It’s a landing page for a brand. They use it like they would use any marketing asset,” Aning said. “The strategy is to build up integrations to the other tools merchants use to create rich experiences leveraging those tools.”

As e-commerce booms during the pandemic, Shopify accelerates

 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Indianapolis-based Malomo raises $2.8 million to turn order tracking into a branded customer experience https://ift.tt/3jpsYXH

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With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream

Long before the coronavirus, Sora, a startup run by a team of Atlanta entrepreneurs, was toying with the idea of live, virtual high school. The program would focus on student autonomy and organize its curriculum around projects that learners wanted to work on, such as finding ways to reduce the impact of climate change on the world. Students and teachers would use Zoom and Slack to communicate with each other, with standups everyday to pulse-check progress.

The pandemic has both undermined and underscored Sora’s focus. On one end, the millions of students that flocked home have shown how hard it is to effectively and accessibly teach in virtual settings. On the other end, the pandemic isn’t going away any time soon. Parents and students are desperate for better options.

Sora co-founder Garrett Smiley thinks he can convince parents to approach virtual high school with optimism, their kids and their checkbooks. It all starts with green algae farms.

Smiley said students turn to Sora so they can “start running instead of walking” in their education. He added how the first students in the program spent time building algae farms in their backyards, working with SpaceX engineers and taking college-level math classes upon entrance.

Why hasn’t digital learning lived up to its promise?

Smiley, who co-founded the company with Wesley Samples, says that Sora sells best to students who feel stifled or “held back” from traditional educational institutions. Sora’s product, thus, feels more apt for educationally gifted students than students who might need extra help or support.

At Sora’s heart, it is a private school replacement with a project-based curriculum. How it works beyond that is a little bit more confusing to comprehend. Firstly, students upon enrollment embark on two-week learning expeditions, exploring the answers to broad questions like “how do we recreate an alien species.” As time progresses, students are prompted to create their own projects with check-in calls twice a day. Below is an example of a standup:

Beyond the self-directed study, Sora offers a series of Socratic seminars and workshops.

There’s no such thing as science class, but there are workshops such as “the Physics of Sharks.” Here’s an example schedule of a Sora student:

Image Credits: Sora

The organization is unconventional. Smiley is insistent on the fact that students complete core subjects and standards needed for high school transcript and graduation, including math, science, English and history. Students are also required to take the SAT or ACT, with practice resources provided by the school.

Sora also has an in-person, optional element. Cohorts will be designed by geography. Students are encouraged to meet up with each other outside of school, form sports teams and attend a Sora-sponsored meet-up.

Outside of learning, Sora created a network of more than 50 career mentors and has a suite of services, such as SAT prep and counselors to aid with the college admissions process.

Smiley says that Sora hasn’t yet graduated a class, so they do not have data on most common exit paths, but he added that the company does not promote college as the only option for students.

Sora is working on partnering with the “next generation of college and university replacements,” he says, such as boot camps or internships.

The goal of Sora is to create a community of self-directed and motivated learners.

“We don’t believe schools are in the business of content creation anymore, just typing in Google search engine search specifically you’ll probably find world-class resources to learn a subject,” Smiley said. “So for us, as to be a super successful school, we knew our role was creating this super high-quality community.”

The company had seven students in its inaugural class last year. Now, more than 39 students participate in Sora School, with three-full time faculty. Monthly tuition ranges from $300 to $800 per student.

Tuition is charged in relation to parent income by using a sliding scale, which Smiley says is part of their strategy in making sure Sora is an inclusive and diverse school.

The diversity breakdown of Sora is 67% white, 15% Hispanic, 13% African American and 5% Asian/Middle Eastern. The gender split male to female is 54% and 44%, respectively, with 2% of students identifying as non-binary.

From a mental diversity perspective, Sora lacks key resources needed to support students with special needs. Virtual high school as a product isn’t built for adoption en masse, but instead works best for students who can afford to partake in self-directed and independent learning. Similar to pandemic pods, it could exacerbate the widening inequalities between wealthy and low-income students.

The new school

Smiley says that they “definitely thought about” accessibility and are working on it. Still, he says that Sora is created for “students who perhaps don’t need the extreme structure of an in-person school,” which he estimates to be 95% of the world’s learners.

As Sora scales, a key aspect of its success will be if it is able to balance its hands-on, hands-off approach. The startup announced this week that it has raised a $2.7 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, to bring on more faculty, software engineers for back-end support and managers to work on curriculum development. Other participating investors in the round include Village Global, ReThink Education, Firebolt Ventures, Peak State Ventures, Contrary Capital and angel investor Taylor Greene.

https://ift.tt/36nQJM9 With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream https://ift.tt/3cTiAVE

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Announcing the TC Pitch-Off: Mobility startups

For the past two years, TechCrunch has brought together the best and brightest minds in mobility at for our TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility event. This year, we are adding a little extra twist. On October 5, the day before Mobility 2020, TC is hosting a pitch-off — which only ticket holders can access — highlighting disruptive startups in the mobility space. Startups from all over the world applied and only 10 made the cut.

Founders will pitch on the virtual TC Stage for one-minute followed by an intense Q&A with our judges. After all 10 companies have pitched, the illustrious set of judges – Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital), Natalia Quintero (Transit Tech Lab), Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) – will select the top five companies that will go on to pitch at the main event on October 7 in front of investors, press and thousands of online viewers.

Check out the featured companies here:

Automotus
BuuPass Kenya Limited
DUCKT
fluctuo
HyPoint
Le Car
Movel AI Pte Ltd
ONO (ONOMOTION GmbH)
PreAct Technologies
Shelf.Network

To see the startups pitching on October 5, you can snag an exhibitor pass for just $25. It’ll get you access to the pitch-off, breakout sessions from Chargepoint and access to visit all of the early stage mobility startups in the expo for all the days of TC Sessions: Mobility. But if you really want to take it to the next level, get an all-access General Admission ticket for $195 that gives you access to the main stage speakers, networking and a complementary Extra Crunch membership (worth $99). But you’ll need to grab your tickets before Monday, October 5th when prices increase!

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Announcing the TC Pitch-Off: Mobility startups https://ift.tt/3imMPpa

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Twitter may let users choose how to crop image previews after bias scrutiny

In an interesting development in the wake of a bias controversy over its cropping algorithm Twitter has said it’s considering giving users decision making power over how tweet previews look, saying it wants to decrease its reliance on machine learning-based image cropping.

Yes, you read that right. A tech company is affirming that automating certain decisions may not, in fact, be the smart thing to do — tacitly acknowledging that removing human agency can generate harm.

As we reported last month, the microblogging platform found its image cropping algorithm garnering critical attention after Ph.D. student Colin Madland noticed the algorithm only showed his own (white male) image in preview — repeatedly cropping out the image of a black faculty member.

Ironically enough he’d been discussing a similar bias issue with Zoom’s virtual backgrounds.

Geez…any guesses why @Twitter defaulted to show only the right side of the picture on mobile? pic.twitter.com/UYL7N3XG9k

— Colin Madland (@colinmadland) September 19, 2020

Twitter responded to the criticism at the time by saying it had tested for bias before shipping the machine learning model and had “not found evidence of racial or gender bias”. But it added: “It’s clear from these examples that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll continue to share what we learn, what actions we take, and will open source our analysis so others can review and replicate.”

It’s now followed up with additional details about its testing processes in a blog post where it suggests it could move away from using an algorithm for preview crops in the future.

Twitter also concedes it should have published details of its bias testing process before launching the algorithmic cropping tool — in order that its processes could have been externally interrogated. “This was an oversight,” it admits.

We saw your Tweets about the harm caused by how images are cropped on Twitter.

Today we’re sharing how we test for bias in our systems, and how we plan to rely less on auto-cropping and give you more choice in how images appear in Tweets:
https://t.co/tiSreeoGOA

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 1, 2020

Explaining how the model works, Twitter writes: “The image cropping system relies on saliency, which predicts where people might look first. For our initial bias analysis, we tested pairwise preference between two demographic groups (White-Black, White-Indian, White-Asian and male-female). In each trial, we combined two faces into the same image, with their order randomized, then computed the saliency map over the combined image. Then, we located the maximum of the saliency map, and recorded which demographic category it landed on. We repeated this 200 times for each pair of demographic categories and evaluated the frequency of preferring one over the other.”

“While our analyses to date haven’t shown racial or gender bias, we recognize that the way we automatically crop photos means there is a potential for harm. We should’ve done a better job of anticipating this possibility when we were first designing and building this product. We are currently conducting additional analysis to add further rigor to our testing, are committed to sharing our findings, and are exploring ways to open-source our analysis so that others can help keep us accountable,” it adds.

On the possibility of moving away from algorithmic image cropping in favor of letting humans have a say, Twitter says it’s “started exploring different options to see what will work best across the wide range of images people tweet every day”.

“We hope that giving people more choices for image cropping and previewing what they’ll look like in the tweet composer may help reduce the risk of harm,” it adds, suggesting tweet previews could in future include visual controls for users.

Such a move, rather than injecting ‘friction’ into the platform (which would presumably be the typical techie concern about adding another step to the tweeting process), could open up new creative/tonal possibilities for Twitter users by providing another layer of nuance that wraps around tweets. Say by enabling users to create ‘easter egg’ previews that deliberately conceal a key visual detail until someone clicks through; or which zero-in on a particular element to emphasize a point in the tweet.

Given the popularity of joke ‘half and half’ images that play with messaging app WhatsApp’s preview crop format — which requires a click to predictably expand the view — it’s easy to see similar visual jokes and memes being fired up on Twitter, should it provide users with the right tools.

The bottom line is that giving humans more agency means you’re inviting creativity — and letting diversity override bias. Which should be a win-win. So it’s great to see Twitter entertaining the idea of furloughing one of its algorithms. (Dare we suggest the platform also takes a close and critical look at the algorithmic workings around ‘top tweets’, ‘trending tweets’, and the ‘popular/relevant’ content its algos sometimes choose to inject, unasked, into users’ timelines, all of which can generate a smorgasbord of harms.)

Returning to image cropping, Twitter says that as a general rule it will be committed to “the ‘what you see is what you get’ principles of design” — aka, “the photo you see in the tweet composer is what it will look like in the tweet” — while warning there will likely still be some exceptions, such as for images that aren’t a standard size.

In those cases it says it will experiment with how such images are presented, aiming to do so in a way that “doesn’t lose the creator’s intended focal point or take away from the integrity of the photo”. Again, it will do well to show any algorithmic workings in public.

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Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples

Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinrikus of TransferWise, the co-founders of Runtastic (which was sold to Adidas), Ed Cooke of Memrise and Bernhard Niesner of Busuu.

Founded in September 2019 by Kevin Shanahan and Diego López, who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise, and joined shortly afterwards by Chief Relationships Officer Dr Jacqui Gabb, who is Professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University, Paired combines audio tips from experts with “fun daily questions and quizzes” that partners answer together.

The app has been piloted (and iterated) in Australia for the last six months and is pitched as different to traditional couples therapy, which is often prescribed to couples in distress, in that it is targeting the “full spectrum” of couples who want help building intimacy and improving communication. The idea is that Paired can provide the steps needed by couples to improve their relationship each day.

Available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Paired is free to download but requires a subscription to unlock the full library of content.

Funding for mental health-focused startups rises in 2020

“Our relationship with our partner is one of the most important parts of our lives: it affects our physical health, our mental health, and the lives of our children,” says Kevin Shanahan, co-founder and CEO. “However, there aren’t many solutions to help couples keep their relationship healthy. Most are designed for couples in distress”.

Image Credits: Paired

Shanahan says that Paired prompts you and your partner to take “small, positive steps” to improve your relationship. To do this, the startup works with relationship academics and therapists to create quizzes, audio courses, and tips that “help you to learn more about each other, resolve conflict, and build intimacy”.

Experts collaborating with Paired include University of Washington Professor and Married at First Sight USA’s Dr. Pepper Schwartz, University of Exeter academics Mark Rivett and Hannah Sherbersky, and Oakland University Professor and Marriage and Family Therapist Dr. Terri Orbuch.

After downloading Paired, you’re asked if you’d like to pair with your partner to swap answers. To enable this, you’re given a unique code to share. Alternatively, you can choose to pair later or just use the app by yourself.

“Each day we then prompt you to answer either a question or quiz,” explains Shanahan. “These rotate between different areas of your relationship so you can learn which areas are strong and which have room for growth. If you’re paired with your partner, then when they answer the quiz or question you can unlock each other’s answer and discuss them together.

“In parallel, you begin listening to (and will soon be able to read) audio courses and tips that are presented by top relationship academics and therapists. These are on a range of topics — including sex and intimacy, managing conflict, and parenting — and include couple case studies to learn from and exercises to do outside of the app”.

Shanahan describes Paired’s user base as quite broad, made up of new couples, some who have been together for a long time, long-distance couples and people using the app individually. The majority are aged 30-50 and use the app with their partner.

“Each day they typically use the app for about 5 minutes and (based on anecdotal feedback) discuss their answers outside of the app for another 5 minutes or so,” says the Paired CEO.

Pew: 30% of US adults have used online dating; 12% found a committed relationship from it

https://ift.tt/3n9pomI Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples https://ift.tt/30pSJ2H

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