Mombox is a curated kit of postnatal products that puts new moms first

Just last week, General Catalyst’s Peter Boyce explained how one of the most important things he looks for in a founder is a personal connection to the problem they’re solving. Kate Westervelt is one such founder.

Westervelt founded Mombox, a curated kit of postnatal care products focused squarely on the mom rather than the child. The company recently closed a $500,000 angel round led by Wayfund and TBD Angels, as well as high-net-worth individuals from organizations like Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Drizly.

Westervelt first came up with the idea for Mombox after having her first child and quickly learning that there were several products she’d need to help her body heal that were difficult to find, especially with a newborn on her hip.

Image Credits: Mombox

The standard Mombox includes organic overnight pads, a peri bottle, perineal ice pack, post-pregnancy panties and other care products to help soothe the body and mind. Mombox also offers a C-section box and a Deluxe Mombox.

For now, the Mombox is a one-time kit — Westervelt said the vast majority of kits are purchased as gifts — but the company has plans to build out the product to include a kit subscription, content and a platform to connect new moms with the care providers they may need during the first year of motherhood. Westervelt calls it a 24/7 pocket concierge, which would allow new mothers to ask questions and get connected with lactation consultants, pelvic floor therapists, marital therapists or whomever else they might need during their first year.

“The myth here, created by a male-dominated medical and maternal wellness community, is that postpartum recovery is six to eight weeks long,” said Westervelt. “The truth is that the body goes through a process known as matrescence, similar to adolescence, where the body and hormones and identity is changing, and that process lasts at least 12 months.”

She went on to say that there is usually just one check-up with a doctor after giving birth and after that, the mom is on her own. Mombox aims to stay with mom for the first 12 months of motherhood and eventually personalize the Mombox experience based on each mom’s journey, whether its breastfeeding or bottle, stay-at-home or working mom, etc.

“The greatest challenge is that the narrative has always been to put the child’s care first,” said Westervelt. “Mothers are willing to martyr themselves for the care of this infant at the expense of their own wellbeing. The challenge is to teach moms that they’re the nucleus. If they’re ok, their babies are ok.”

Westervelt bootstrapped Mombox up until this point (and is the only employee) after first serving as managing Lifestyle editor at Wayfair and then as director of Content Strategy at Purple Carrot. Mombox has spent $0 on marketing up until this point, growing revenue 100% year-over-year since inception on word of mouth.

The new funding will go toward hiring out a team and testing out new marketing strategies to fuel further growth and eventually build out the full-service platform Westervelt envisions.

General Catalyst’s Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce are looking for ‘obsessive’ founders

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MIT professor wants to overhaul ‘The Hype Machine’ that powers social media

More than 3.6 billion people use social media, and its runaway success has left the industry at a crossroads. There are now heated debates in Washington and Brussels over the future of antitrust regulation for this market, whether platform operators should filter certain content (and if so, which types), and how to open the market to new innovators.

To find my way through this thicket of interesting questions, I spoke with Sinan Aral, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who also co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. He has spent years analyzing the social media market, directly participating in its development as chief scientist of SocialAmp and Humin and as a founding partner of Manifest Capital.

This fall, he published his latest book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores what’s next for social media giants. In our discussion, we talked about the landscape of the market today, what responsibilities companies and users have to each other and what come next as the industry evolves.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TechCrunch: Why don’t we start with how the book came together and how you got interested in this topic of digital media and how it affects our decision-making?

Sinan Aral: I started researching social media four years before Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. I have worked with all of the major social media platforms for the last 20 years: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, Yahoo and the rest. I’ve published a number of very large-scale studies, and I’m also an entrepreneur. So, I’ve got a vantage point as a practitioner, but also as a long-time academic leader in this area.

We really have a full-blown social media crisis on our hands, as is obvious if you turn on the TV on any given day.

The reason why I wrote “The Hype Machine” is because essentially, we’ve seen this coming to a head for many years now. We really have a full-blown social media crisis on our hands, as is obvious if you turn on the TV on any given day.

My book takes off from where “The Social Dilemma” documentary and Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” leave off, which is to ask, what can we concretely do to solve the social media crisis that we find ourselves in? The book argues that in order to do that, we have to stop armchair theorizing about how social media works, and we have to stop debating whether or not social media is good or evil. The answer is yes.

The book goes through the fundamentals of how social media works. So, there’s a chapter on neuroscience and social media, and economics and social media, and that eventually informs the solutions in the book, which cover everything from antitrust and competition to federal privacy legislation. How do we secure our elections and our democracy? What do we do about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? How do we balance free speech and hate speech? How do we deal with misinformation and fake news?

I think for a lot of us in tech, we’re a bit stuck. On one hand, these technologies have produced jarring amounts of wealth in the tech industry, but they have also caused a large number of harms. What do we do next?

Let me start by saying that the general framework of the solution is about what I call the four levers: money, code, norms and laws.

Money is the business models, which create the incentives for how the advertisers on the platforms and the users behave. Code is how we design the platforms and the algorithms underlying the platforms, which I go into in great detail. Norms are how we adopt, appropriate and use the technology. And obviously, laws are regulation.

In terms of solutions, I think the entry ticket for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy. Platforms that lack competition don’t have any incentive to change away from the attention economy and their engagement-driven business models, nor do they have any real incentive to clean up their negative externalities in our information ecosystem, whether it’s hate speech or misinformation or manipulation.

Now, when I say competition, the first thing on everyone’s mind is always, “Oh, you mean break up Facebook.” But the point I make in the book — and I take a very clear stance on this — is that breaking up Facebook in this economy doesn’t solve the problem. This economy runs on network effects. The value of these platforms is a function of the number of users on the platform. Economies that run on network effects tend toward concentration and monopoly.

So, if you break up Facebook, it’s just going to tip the next Facebook-like company into market dominance. What we really need is structural reform of the social media economy, and that involves social network portability, data portability and interoperability legislation.

Let me push back on this a bit though. Terms like “data portability” always sound nice as a solution, but have we ever effectively used this tool to open a market?

This isn’t the first time that we’ve done this. During the AOL-Time Warner merger, we forced AOL’s AIM product to become interoperable with Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. And it went from a 65% market share to a 59% market share one year later, down to like 50%, then it ceded the entire market to new entrants three years later.

Another good analogy is number portability in the cell phone market. It used to be that you couldn’t take your cell phone number with you when you switched from one cell phone provider to another, and then we legislated that they had to let you take your number with you. That was akin to a social network at the time, because all of your friends knew to call you at that number.

Research has shown that number portability created about $880 million of consumer surplus every quarter for years and years after it was instituted in Europe, and it created a lot of competition. We should have something very similar in social networks, around social network portability and data portability, so that we could create competition.

Now, if you break up Facebook after these kinds of structural reforms to the market, that’s a different question, but breaking up Facebook without structural reforms to the market economy is like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor. It’s not going to solve the underlying lack of competition that the social media economy has.

“The Hype Machine” details how we might do that and suggests that there could be a stack of commodity messaging formats that would be required to be interoperable. Then, you could have unique messaging formats for every platform on top of that. But things like texts, short-form videos, stories that either persist or disappear, that kind of stuff should have a level of interoperability that’s legislated. The entry ticket to solving the social media crisis is creating competition.

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Get a taste of TC Sessions: Space 2020 with an Expo Ticket

If your event budget is more like dental floss than a shoestring, this is your lucky day. Our $25 Expo Only ticket offers affordable access to an impressive array of presentations — and opportunity — at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17.

Full disclosure: The Expo Only ticket does not include networking with CrunchMatch, the free Extra Crunch membership or access to the main stage programming. You’ll need a late registration pass to tap into those opportunities.

So, what exactly do you get with the Expo Only pass? You can explore the expo area to meet and connect with early-stage startups showcasing their innovative tech and talent. You also get access to all the breakout sessions (11 of them at last count) over the course of two days — including the Fast Money series. You need money to build your startup, and this series teaches you where and how to access grants and other funding opportunities.

Don’t miss the two University Research Showcase sessions, where you’ll hear about the latest space research and emerging space technologies. You’ll gain valuable insight on the current and future state of the space industry. Plus, you’ll have two opportunities to watch live pitch sessions and learn what VCs look for in a pitch deck. Get ready to take copious notes.

Schedule conflict? Don’t stress about missing any of the breakouts — they’ll be available as video on demand after the event. Go ahead, meet with a customer, flesh out your pitch deck — and catch up on anything you missed at your convenience.

Now that you know what’s included, here are four stellar breakout examples. You’ll find complete descriptions of all the breakout sessions in the event agenda.

Fast Money: Learn how SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators work together to connect startups to government organizations and resources in the space industry.

University Showcase — Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part One): will feature scientists and academics from USC, MIT, UCLA, ASU and Caltech, Aerospace Corporation’s partners, sharing insights on their space research and highlighting a range of emerging space technologies.

Pitch Feedback Session: Join us for a pitch feedback session open to all startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2020 moderated by TechCrunch staff.

Starburst x TechCrunch Pitch Me to the Moon: Ten promising early-stage space startups will present their innovations live to a panel of high-profile judges from across the industry.

Don’t let a dental floss budget keep you from attending TC Sessions: Space 2020. Buy your Expo Only ticket now and get ready to discover up-and-coming startups, find funding resources and learn more about the latest space research and technology.

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Tonic is betting that synthetic data is the new big data to solve scalability and security

Big data is a sham. For years now, we have been told that every company should save every last morsel of digital exhaust in some sort of database, lest management lose some competitive intelligence against … a competitor, or something.

There is just one problem with big data though: it’s honking huge.

Processing petabytes of data to generate business insights is expensive and time consuming. Worse, all that data hanging around paints a big, bright red target on the back of the company for every hacker group in the world. Big data is expensive to maintain, expensive to protect, and expensive to keep private. And the upshot might not be all that much in the end after all — oftentimes, well-curated and chosen datasets can provide faster and better insight than endless quantities of raw data.

What should a company do? Well, they need a Tonic to ameliorate their big data sins.

Tonic is a “synthetic data” platform that transforms raw data into more manageable and private datasets usable by software engineers and business analysts. Along the way, Tonic’s algorithms de-identifies the original data and creates statistically identical but synthetic datasets, which means that personal information isn’t shared insecurely.

For instance, an online shopping platform will have transaction history on its customers and what they purchased. Sharing that data with every engineer and analyst in the company is dangerous, since that purchase history could have personally identifying details that no one without a need-to-know should have access to. Tonic could take that original payments data and transform it into a new, smaller dataset with exactly the same statistical properties, but not tied to original customers. That way, an engineer could test their app or an analyst could test their marketing campaign, all without triggering concerns about privacy.

Synthetic data and other ways to handle the privacy of large datasets has garnered massive attention from investors in recent months. We reported last week on Skyflow, which raised a round to use polymorphic encryption to ensure that employees only have access to the data they need and are blocked from accessing the rest. BigID takes a more overarching view of just tracking what data is where and who should have access to it (i.e. data governance) based on local privacy laws.

Tonic’s approach has the benefit of helping solve not just privacy issues, but also scalability challenges as datasets get larger and larger in size. That combination has attracted the attention of investors: this morning, the company announced that it has raised $8 million in a Series A led by Glenn Solomon and Oren Yunger of GGV, the latter of whom will join the company’s board.

The company was founded in 2018 by a quad of founders: CEO Ian Coe worked with COO Karl Hanson (they first met in middle school as well) and CTO Andrew Colombi while they were all working at Palantir, and Coe also formerly worked with the company’s head of engineering Adam Kamor while at Tableau. That training at some of the largest and most successful data infrastructure companies from the Valley forms part of the product DNA for Tonic.

Tonic’s team. Photo via Tonic.

Coe explained that Tonic is designed to prevent some of the most obvious security flaws that arise in modern software engineering. In addition to saving data pipelining time for engineering teams, Tonic “also means that they’re not worried about sensitive data going from production environments to lower environments that are always less secure than your production systems.”

He said that the idea for what would become Tonic originated while troubleshooting problems at a Palantir banking client. They needed data to solve a problem, but that data was super sensitive, and so the team ended up using synthetic data to bridge the difference. Coe wants to expand the utility of synthetic data to more people in a more rigorous way, particularly given the legal changes these days. “I think regulatory pressure is really pushing teams to change their practices” around data, he noted.

The key to Tonic’s technology is its subsetter, which evaluates raw data and starts to statistically define the relationships between all the records. Some of that analysis is automated depending on the data sources, and when it can’t be automated, Tonic’s UI can help a data scientist onboard datasets and define those relationships manually. In the end, Tonic generates these synthetic datasets usable by all the customers of that data inside a company.

With the new round of funding, Coe wants to continue doubling down on ease-of-use and onboarding and proselytizing the benefit of this model for his clients. “In a lot of ways, we’re creating a category, and that means that people have to understand and also get the value [and have] the early-adopter mindset,” he said.

In addition to lead investor GGV, Bloomberg Beta, Xfund, Heavybit and Silicon Valley CISO Investments participated in the round as well as angels Assaf Wand and Anthony Goldbloom.

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Singapore is poised to become Asia’s Silicon Valley

Long established as a global financial center, Singapore also looks set to become the “Silicon Valley of Asia.”

Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba are reportedly planning regional hubs in the city-state, with ByteDance in particular expected to add hundreds of jobs over the next three years. They will join an international coterie of tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Stripe, Salesforce and Grab, that already have headquarters or significant operations, including engineering and R&D centers, in Singapore.

This means startups will have to compete more aggressively for talent. But having a diverse cluster of big tech companies helps the ecosystem by providing more resources, including mentorship and early funding opportunities, say Singapore-based investors. In the long term, the presence of global tech giants, coupled with homegrown unicorns like Grab, Sea (formerly known as Garena) and Trax, may also mean more exit opportunities for startups.

The Singaporean government continues to create new initiatives that make it attractive to tech companies and entrepreneurs.

While the United States-China trade war may have prompted Chinese companies like Tencent and ByteDance to move more of their operations to Singapore, it’s not the only reason, said AppWorks partner Jessica Liu, who oversees the venture firm and accelerator’s programs in Southeast Asia.

Many already had investments in Southeast Asian companies and were eyeing markets there as well, particularly Indonesia. “Some of it is probably due to the trade war over the past two years and other difficulties they’ve faced in the States,” she told Extra Crunch. “Strategically, they also have to find another big market with long-term potential for growth, and I think that’s why they are targeting Southeast Asia.”

Government policy pays off

Proximity to important growth markets isn’t the only reason tech companies find Singapore desirable. Regulations also play a role. Liu said, “The Singaporean government has already done a good job, from a policy and tax perspective, for startups and big tech companies to set up and incorporate in Singapore,” making the country an “intuitive” choice for regional headquarters.

A lot of what makes Singapore attractive to tech companies today can be credited to government initiatives that have been in play for more than a decade, said Kuo-Yi Lim, co-founder and managing partner at early-stage investment firm Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Before Monk’s Hill Ventures, Lim served as chief executive officer of Infocomm Investments from 2010 to 2013. Infocomm Investments is backed by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, a government agency that is responsible for promoting the IT industry in Singapore.

“One of its explicit mandates was to look at bringing in top-tier tech companies to set up shop in Singapore, and ideally focus on product development activities, in addition to marketing activities like sales,” said Lim. “That’s always been a very explicit part of the government’s strategy to grow the tech industry.”

Over the past few years, companies like Google and Facebook have set up substantial operations in Singapore, along with fast-growing startups like Twilio, which came in after receiving investment from Infocomm.

“That strategy has been in play for almost 10 years, even longer, and I think we’re seeing the fruits of that now, with ByteDance, as well as Tencent, et cetera,” Lim said. “In terms of impact, I would say in general it has been very positive in terms of the vibrancy of the ecosystem, bringing in more depth of talent across multiple functional areas and bringing more richness in the different types of players across different verticals.”

Other factors made Singapore an attractive base for tech companies, including the fact it is a primarily English-speaking country, has a large number of international schools and was already filled with other multinational companies.

Timing was also crucial.

“Between 2010 and 2020, Southeast Asia went through a sea change, a lot of mobile first, which made it more meaningful for companies to set up local operations,” said Lim. “All those dovetailed nicely during that time.”

The Singaporean government continues to create new initiatives that make it attractive to tech companies and entrepreneurs. For example, it recently launched the Singapore Blockchain Innovation Programme (SBIP), with the aim of helping companies commercialize blockchain technology.

Competing for the same talent pool

All this means that the pool of tech talent in Singapore, which has a population of 5.6 million, is in especially high demand. Moving teams of employees to Singapore can be expensive, said Liu, and as a result, many companies have satellite engineering teams in Vietnam, India and Taiwan, especially for front-end engineers.

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Edtech boom continues as IntellectoKids raises $3M from Allrise Capital and others

The rush to capitalize on the shift to online learning, post-pandemic, continues. IntellectoKids, a developer of educational apps for children aged 3 to 7 years, has raised $3 million in a Series A financing led by U.S.-based Allrise Capital and other investors, including Genesis Investments.

The platform offers parents of preschool children “gamified” educational content and structured lessons available on mobile devices.

The startup will now launch a Classroom feature with learning tracks in five core Kindergarten and Grade 1 courses, including Math, Phonics, Science, Arts and Logic.

In addition to the current B2C model, the founders expect in 2021 to offer primary schools and kindergartens IntellectoKids’ platform as an online supplement to support their offline educational process.

IntellectoKids was founded by Mike Kotlov and Andrey Kondratyuk in 2017, who each have three young children.

Kotlov said: “On the education scene, preschool education is becoming a highly vibrant market. The pandemic showed that preschool kids can effectively consume educational content online and autonomously. Clearly, there is a growing need for this type of product among parents and businesses now; however, once the pandemic is over the online education is here to stay for sure as it has already become intertwined with offline and benefited the overall educational process.”

IntellectoKids says it has more than 2 million installs across North America and Central and Northern Europe.

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German Bionic raises $20M led by Samsung for exoskeleton tech to supercharge human labor

Exoskeleton technology has been one of the more interesting developments in the world of robotics: Instead of building machines that replace humans altogether, build hardware that humans can wear to supercharge their abilities. Today, German Bionic, one of the startups designing exoskeletons specifically aimed at industrial and physical applications — it describes its Cray X robot as “the world’s first connected exoskeleton for industrial use,” that is, to help people lifting and working with heavy objects, providing more power, precision and safety — is announcing a funding round that underscores the opportunity ahead.

The Augsburg, Germany-based company has raised $20 million, funding that it plans to use to continue building out its business, as well as its technology, both in terms of the hardware and the cloud-based software platform, German Bionic IO, that works with the exoskeletons to optimize them and help them “learn” to work better.

The Cray X currently can compensate up to 30 kg for each lifting movement, the company says.

“With our groundbreaking robotic technology that combines human work with the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we literally strengthen the shop floor workers’ backs in an immediate and sustainable way. Measurable data underscores that this ultimately increases productivity and the efficiency of the work done,” says Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of German Bionic, in a statement. “The market for smart human-machine systems is huge and we are now perfectly positioned to take a major share and substantially improve numerous working lives.”

The Series A is being co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund, a strategic investment arm from the hardware giant, and German investor MIG AG, one of the original backers of BioNtech, the breakthrough company that’s developed the first COVID-19 vaccine to be rolled out globally.

Storm Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (founded and led by Eric Benhamou, who was the founding CEO of Palm and before that the CEO of 3com) and IT Farm also participated. Previously, German Bionic had only raised $3.5 million in seed funding (with IT Farm, Atlantic Labs and individual investors participating).

German Bionic’s rise comes at an interesting moment in terms of how automation and cloud technology are sweeping the world of work. When people talk about the next generation of industrial work, the focus is usually on more automation and the rise of robots to replace humans in different stages of production.

But at the same time, some robotics technologists have worked on another idea. Because we’re probably still a long way away from being able to make robots that are just like humans, but better in terms of cognition and all movements, instead, create hardware that doesn’t replace, but augments, live laborers, to help make them stronger while still being able to retain the reliable and fine-tuned expertise of those humans.

The argument for more automation in industrial settings has taken on a more pointed urgency in recent times, with the rise of the COVID-19 health pandemic: Factories have been one of the focus points for outbreaks, and the tendency has been to reduce physical contact and proximity to reduce the spread of the virus.

Exoskeletons don’t really address that aspect of COVID-19 — even if you might require less of them as a result of using exoskeletons, you still require humans to wear them, after all — but the general focus that automation has had has brought more attention to the opportunity of using them.

And in any case, even putting the pandemic to one side, we are still a long way away from cost-effective robots that completely replace humans in all situations. So, as we roll out vaccinations and develop a better understanding of how the virus operates, this still means a strong market for the exoskeleton concept, which analysts (quoted by German Bionic) predict could be worth as much as $20 billion by 2030.

In that context, it’s interesting to consider Samsung as an investor: The company itself, as one of the world’s leading consumer electronics and industrial electronics providers, is a manufacturing powerhouse in its own right. But it also makes equipment for others to use in their industrial work, both as a direct brand and through subsidiaries like Harman. It’s not clear which of these use cases interests Samsung: whether to use the Cray X in its own manufacturing and logistics work, or whether to become a strategic partner in manufacturing these for others. It could easily be both.

“We are pleased to support German Bionic in its continued development of world-leading exoskeleton technology,” says Young Sohn, corporate president and chief strategy officer for Samsung Electronics and chairman of the board, Harman, in a statement. “Exoskeleton technologies have great promise in enhancing human’s health, wellbeing and productivity. We believe that it can be a transformative technology with mass market potential.”

German Bionic describes its Cray X as a “self-learning power suit” aimed primarily at reinforcing lifting movements and to safeguard the wearer from making bad calls that could cause injuries. That could apply both to those in factories, or those in warehouses, or even sole trader mechanics working in your local garage. The company is not disclosing a list of customers, except to note that it includes, in the words of a spokesperson, “a big logistics player, industrial producers and infrastructure hubs.” One of these, the Stuttgart Airport, is highlighted on its site.  

Roam debuts a robotic exoskeleton for skiers

“Previously, efficiency gains and health promotion in manual labor were often at odds with one another. German Bionic Systems managed to not only break through this paradigm, but also to make manual labor a part of the digital transformation and elegantly integrate it into the smart factory,” says Michael Motschmann, managing partner with MIG in a statement. “We see immense potential with the company and are particularly happy to be working together with a first-class team of experienced entrepreneurs and engineers.”

Exoskeletons as a concept have been around for over a decade already — MIT developed its first exoskeleton, aimed to help soldiers carrying heavy loads — back in 2007, but advancements in cloud computing, smaller processors for the hardware itself and artificial intelligence have really opened up the idea of where and how these might augment humans. In addition to industry, some of the other applications have included helping people with knee injuries (or looking to avoid knee injuries!) ski better, and for medical purposes, although the recent pandemic has put a strain on some of these use cases, leading to indefinite pauses in production.

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Facebook publicly launches its collaborative music video app, Collab

Collab, Facebook’s experimental app for making collaborative music videos, is today launching out of private beta testing with a public release on the App Store. The app is one of now many projects from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tests out new ideas that could ultimately influence Facebook’s next steps in social media. Collab itself first emerged in late May, as the pandemic forced users to stay home and find new ways to entertain themselves online.

For musicians, the pandemic has meant the lack of live concerts, which had been a key way they connected with fans. They, too, turned to online platforms to experiment with live-streamed concerts and jam sessions in order to keep those connections flowing. At the same time, short-form videos took off, led by TikTok, which also includes collaborative features like duets and stitches, which allow users who don’t know each other to incorporate each other’s content into their own.

Collab stepped into this space with its combination of short-form video and the collaborative aspects of modern social media, but with a direct focus on music.

In the app, a “collab” is a selection of three 15-second long independent videos, stacked on top of each other, that play in sync. For example, a collab could consist of a guitarist, drummer and a singer, each playing alongside each other in their respective videos. Users can either create a collab by playing along with someone else’s video or, if you lack musical experience, you can just swipe on one of the three rows to choose a different video to slot into the mix from those available.

When you first open Collab, you’re presented with an endless scrolling feed of these “collabs,” which you can swipe through to find one you want to join or mix. As you discover musicians you like to play along with, you can favorite them in the app to be notified when they post new clips. This also personalizes the main feed.

Indie pop artist morgxn is one of the musicians who joined Collab during the beta earlier this year.

“This year, I was dropped by my record label the same day that Billie Eilish [posted] about me — about my song ‘Home’ being inspiring to her song ‘Bad Guy.’ So I had this catastrophic thing happening as we were entering quarantine, while the internet was giving me this boost of confidence.”

Morgxn decided to release his song “Wonder” on Collab, asking fans to come make a video with him by playing along. That song now has 43 million streams. There’s even a Spanish-language version, thanks to Collab.

“If anything came from this year where everything kind of fell apart, I also was really inspired to find new ways to do everything,” morgxn says. “If you leap, you might find something incredibly exciting, new and fresh. That’s how I ended up on Collab, and I’m excited.”

During the beta, Facebook made improvements to the app’s audio syncing capabilities and other technical aspects.

The app itself will handle the complexities of audio and video syncing by offering in-app tools that can nudge your clip back into alignment when you’re off, so the resulting “collab” will be perfectly synced. Facebook also tested Collab with dozens of headsets and hardware configurations to optimize Collab for a variety of different setups. Users can now even use external audio interfaces to bring music from electronic instruments, like keyboard, guitars, and drum kits into their recordings.

The app doesn’t offer a direct integration to Facebook, but the company notes that musicians are often using their bio to post links to their various social media presences, which may include their Facebook or Instagram profiles or pages. However, the videos you create in Collab can be exported to other places through the iOS share share, meaning you can publish to your Instagram Story or even to rival TikTok. The export will be watermarked to allow for attribution as the video is more widely distributed, too.

The mechanics in Collab could allow for different types of mashed up videos in the future — like videos that include dance or humor, for instance, which have made an appearance during the beta. But for the time being, Facebook is remaining focused on music, says Collab Product Lead, Brittany Mennuti.

Image Credits: Facebook

Mennuti, who had studied both Fine Arts and Business while in college, leads a small team inside Facebook with other creatives, including artists and musicians.

“I knew that I had to get really embedded in the community of musicians and music enthusiasts to build this product — and that’s exactly what we did. We created a Facebook group for our beta testers, and we communicate with them in that group daily, she says. In the group, musicians post questions, suggestion and share their music. “Aside from helping us figure out their needs, the most beautiful thing about this group is that they’ve actually connected with one another — there’s like a real community blossoming within the beta of people who might not have ever made music together.”

As it goes public, Facebook’s goal for Collab is to carve out a niche in the short-form video space that offers something more than a TikTok clone, like Instagram’s Reels or Snap’s Spotlight. However, to what extent Collab would live on independently, if it succeeded, rather than being merged into one of Facebook’s larger products remains to be seen.

Collab is live in the App Store in the U.S.

 

 

 

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iCIMS acquires video recruiting startup Altru for $60M

Enterprise recruiting company iCIMS is announcing that it has acquired Altru.

iCIMS declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but a source with knowledge of the companies told us that the price is a combination of cash and stock, totaling around $60 million.

Founded in 2000, iCIMS offers a “talent cloud” used by more than 4,000 employers attract, engage and hire new employees, and to help existing employees continue to develop their careers.

Former Marketo chief executive Steve Lucas became CEO in February, and he told me that that the recruiting world is overdue for reinvention. After all, every company says they want to hire the most talented people around, so he wondered, “Well, okay, if you want that, why do you create such boring content? Why do you take a job that is exciting and should demand amazing human beings and create this super boring job description?”

Lucas sees video as a key piece of the solution, allowing companies to bring more “authenticity” to what can be a stuffy and bureaucratic process. Just over a month ago, iCIMS announced another acquisition in this area — Paris-based Easyrecrue.

Altru raises $1.3M to improve recruiting with employee videos

Lucas said that while Easyrecrue has created tools to enrich video interviews, Altru can be most helpful earlier in the recruiting process, when companies are trying to stay connected with the most promising candidates and get them excited about a potential job.

Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah (who founded the startup with CTO Vincent Polidoro — they’re both pictured above) told me that while the company started out with a focus on recording and sharing employee videos for recruitment, its asynchronous videos are become used more broadly across companies. He suggested that’s particularly true this year,  while teams are working from home and everyone’s looking for ways to communicate that are more expressive than Slack and don’t require putting “another 30-minute Zoom call on your calendar.”

In fact, Lucas said that before talking to me, he’d actually been recording videos on Altru to explain the acquisition to his own team. He praised the platform’s ease of use, joking, “If I can use this thing, anybody can use it.”

Rehmatullah said the entire Altru team will be joining iCIMS, where he’ll become vice president of content strategy. The goal is to continue operating Altru as a standalone product while also finding new ways to integrate it into the iCIMS platform.

Altru previously raised a total of $1.3 million from Birchmere Ventures, Active Capital and Techstars.

Why CEOs should spend up to half their time recruiting

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Cledara, the SaaS purchase and management platform, raises $3.4M funding

Cledara, the SaaS purchase and management platform that helps bring greater viability and control over a company’s sprawling software subscriptions, has raised $3.4 million in additional funding.

The round is led by Nauta Capital, with participation from existing investor Anthemis. It comes off the back of the startup growing revenues by 20x in 2020 — including 7x since August, although Cledara isn’t breaking out specific numbers.

Founded in July 2018 by Cristina Vila, after she experienced the SaaS management problem first-hand while working at London fintech Dopay, Cledara has developed software to let companies track and manage their SaaS usage and spending, including analytics to help understand if it is money well-spent. Vila has since been joined by co-founder and COO Brad van Leeuwen, who was previously an executive at banking platform Railsbank, which is also a Cledara customer.

Another Cledara feature is unlimited virtual debit cards to empower employees and outside teams to purchase appropriate SaaS offerings independently. This includes the option for management to approve every purchase before it happens and access real-time updates on what everyone is buying. Part of Cledara’s revenue comes from interchange fees via said card spend, along with employing a SaaS model itself with paid subscriptions.

Cledara picks up pre-seed funding to help companies manage their SaaS spending

Counting over 100 customers overall, other businesses using Cledara include Florence.co.uk, Unmind.com, and Butternut Box. To that end, Cledara claims its customers reduce software spend by up to 30%, while saving “hours” of manual admin work each month on things like chasing SaaS invoices, bookkeeping and “complying with GDPR and outsourcing regulations for regulated fintech”.

Image Credits: Cledara

The product is available in over 20 countries across Europe, including U.K., France, Ireland, Germany and Spain. Meanwhile, Cledara says it will use the new investment to accelerate product growth and for further international expansion, including plans to enter the U.S.

“The continued acceleration of growth means we really need to grow the team: we’ve had to slow down customer on-boarding in the past month because of bottlenecks,” says van Leeuwen. “We will be growing the team 4x before mid next year across all parts of the business — support, success, product, engineering, compliance, marketing and sales. This round brings us the funding to do that, and more”.

More than half of those new hires are likely to be in Barcelona, after Cledara opened a Spain office 4 months ago to ensure it can continue to access talent outside of the U.K. post-Brexit.

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Appboxo gets $1.1 million seed to build a mini-app ecosystem for all developers

Pioneered by WeChat almost four years ago, mini-apps are now common in China and India, and gaining traction in other markets, too. Mini-apps, or lightweight apps designed for integration into host apps, allow smartphone users to access several services through one app, saving them data and storage space. They also give host apps more ways to make revenue. But most mini-app ecosystems are currently tied to a specific app or company. Appboxo, a Singapore-based startup, wants to make mini-apps more accessible by allowing any developer to turn their app into a “super app.”

Appboxo announced today it has closed $1.1 million in seed funding, led by FF APAC Scout, a Founders Fund vehicle; 500 Startups’ Southeast Asia-focused 500 Durians fund; Plug and Play Ventures; and Antler. The new funding will be used on product development and to add more mini-apps to Appboxo’s ecosystem.

The startup currently works with about 10 host apps, including Booking.com, Klook and Zalora, and has about 80 mini-apps on its platform. Examples of how host apps have used mini-apps include travel apps that added hotel, restaurant and activities bookings; and mobile wallets that integrated insurance-buying and e-commerce services.

Appboxo was founded in 2019 by chief executive officer Kaniyet Rayev and chief technology officer Nursultan Keneshbekov while participating in Antler’s Singapore incubator program. Rayev told TechCrunch that the two initially wanted to build an all-in-one travel app, with different travel-related services integrated into one platform.

“But when we actually started developing it, we realized there is no easy way to plug in third-party services,” Rayev said. They began thinking of ways for developers to create and offer mini-apps as a plug-and-play solution.

India’s most popular services are becoming super apps

The mini-app economy is currently siloed, with apps or companies like WeChat, ByteDance, Meituan, Paytm, PhonePe, Grab and Go-jek either developing mini-apps for their own use, or running mini-app marketplaces for their users. But last year, the W3C Chinese Web Interest Group started looking at ways to standardize mini-apps. The group, including people from Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Intel, Xiaomi and China Mobile, published the first working draft of its white paper in September 2019 about how mini-apps can be created to work across platforms.

“It was a really perfect time for us to read that paper, because it was around the time we started our platform,” said Rayev.

Adding mini-apps can increase engagement because users open apps more frequently if they can access different services through it. It also gives app developers more ways to generate revenue through affiliate partnerships, commissions or transactions fees.

But many native app developers simply don’t have the resources to develop their own mini-apps, so Appboxo simplifies the process with an SDK that allows them to integrate any of its platform’s mini-apps. A second barrier for many app developers is working out business and development partnership deals with mini-apps, so Appboxo helps guide them through the process, too.

Since Appboxo is based in Singapore, a lot of its current users are in Southeast Asia, and it also plans to target India, too. While mini-apps are less common in Europe and the United States, where most smartphone owners still use apps with one core offering, Rayev said that is starting to change. For example, Uber announced it was merging its ride-hailing and food delivery service, Uber Eats, into one app, last year, while Snap introduced Minis a few months ago.

Appboxo already has partners in Europe, and “the whole super app concept is coming to the Western world,” Rayev added. “Hopefully we can find some new partners in the rest of the world as well.”

Snap turns on Minis, bite-sized third-party apps in Snapchat

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Reddit acquires Dubsmash

Reddit announced that it has acquired short video platform Dubsmash. The deal’s terms were undisclosed. Dubsmash will retain its own platform and brand, and Reddit will integrate its video creation tools. Its co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit.

According to Crunchbase data, the app has raised $20.2 million from investors including Lowercase Capital, Index Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Heartcore Capital and Sunstone Life.

Dubsmash is now one of TikTok’s biggest rivals, but struggled for several years after a brief stint of popularity in 2015 during its first incarnation as a lip-sync video app. In 2017 it began transforming itself into a social platform and moved its headquarters from Berlin to Brooklyn. By the beginning of this year, Dubsmash’s share of the United States’ short-form video market was second only to TikTok when counted by app installs, and it reportedly held acquisition talks with Facebook and Snap.

How Dubsmash revived itself as #2 to TikTok

Credit for much of Dubsmash’s success goes to Black and Latinx users. While many of TikTok’s highest-profile stars are white, Dubsmash is known for its large communities of Black and Latinx content creators. The polarization between the two apps began to gain more attention earlier this year, when the New York Times published a piece about how dance moves by Black Dubsmash stars are frequently appropriated without credit by TikTok influencers, which means their creators miss out on opportunities like larger followings, brand deals and industry connections.

Reddit has its own issues with racism, and has been criticized for not doing enough to stop hate speech or giving moderators of subreddits targeted by racist trolls enough support.

Last year, founder and former chief executive officer Alexis Ohanian called for his position on Reddit’s board to be filled with a Black candidate when he stepped down, which current CEO Steve Huffman said the company would honor as part of a larger effort to address hate speech on the platform announced during anti-racism demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer. Ohanian’s position was filled by Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel.

Reddit names YC’s Michael Seibel to board, following co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s exit

In its announcement today, Reddit linked its acquisition of Dubsmash to its inclusion efforts, acknowledging that the app’s “communities are driven by young, diverse creators—about 25 percent of all Black teens in the U.S. are on Dubsmash, and females represent 70 percent of users.”

It also said the integration of Dubsmash’s video creation tools will enable Reddit’s users to “express themselves in original and authentic ways that are endemic to our communities.”

Since launching native videos in 2017, Reddit said usage has increased sharply, growing 2X in 2020 alone. Much of Reddit’s content is still text-based, however, with video, gifs and images often shared from other sources, so Dubsmash’s integration can help Reddit build out its own video platform.

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