Phantom Auto raises $13.5M to expand remote driving business to delivery bots and forklifts

Remote driving startup Phantom Auto has raised $13.5 million of financing in a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners — capital used to expand a logistics business targeting sidewalks, warehouses and cargo yards, all the places where autonomy and teleoperation are being deployed today.

The startup, founded in 2017, has raised about $19 million to date. Byron Deeter and Tess Hatch from Bessemer have joined Phantom’s board.

The so-called “race” to deploy self-driving trucks, robotaxi services and other applications of autonomous vehicle technology on public roads has encountered a speed bump of sorts that has sent ripples throughout the nascent industry.

In short: autonomous vehicles are hard and everyone seems to be waking up to that fact.

As deployment timelines have moved, companies have quieted. Some have pivoted, shuttered, or been snapped up in acquisitions by other better capitalized companies looking for talent. Other companies, like Phantom Auto that are adjacent to the industry, are expanding into new areas as they wait for autonomous vehicle developers to catch up.

Phantom Auto co-founder Elliot Katz emphasized that the company is still working with customers deploying autonomous passenger and commercial vehicles on public roads. This new logistics business, however, holds more near-term potential. 

“We continue to be designed into our customers’ stacks who are focusing on AVs on public roads, but it will take some time for autonomous passenger vehicles and commercial trucks to be deployed at scale,” Phantom founder Shai Magzimof said in a statement.

The company is working with some of the largest logistics companies in the world, Katz said. Phantom Auto isn’t providing a full list of customers yet. One named partner is Dutch yard truck manufacturer Terberg.

Katz told TechCrunch that customers include companies launching autonomous delivery robots. They’re also using the platform to remotely operate forklifts and yard trucks equipped with its teleoperation software. Yard trucks are used by major retailers, for example. 

There has been zero innovation with yard trucks in the past 40 years,” Katz said. “And customers in this segment, are itching to gain efficiencies. That’s that’s the name of the game for them. They see this as a path to get there.”

Phantom Auto’s teleoperation platform allows a remote driver, sometimes located thousands of miles away, to take control of an autonomous vehicle if needed. The platform, which uses public cellular networks, isn’t designed to take over in a split second in hopes of avoiding an accident. Instead, it’s used as a safety backup to take control of the vehicle if it encounters a difficult scenario and gets confused, or is even involved in an accident.

In the logistics application, the Phantom Auto system is used in low speed environments. A remote control center could control a company’s yard trucks anywhere in the country.

Phantom Auto isn’t employing the remote drivers in this use case. Instead, Katz said these logistics customers typically want to train their own employees how to use the platform. And this doesn’t necessarily replace drivers who are on the ground operating these yard trucks or forklifts. The system is seen as a way to use workers at one location that is experiencing a lull in activity to remotely operate a busier spot farther away.

For delivery robots, the platform can be used to help the vehicle handle tricky situations like stairs or other complex environments.

https://tcrn.ch/2UGPXoJ Phantom Auto raises $13.5M to expand remote driving business to delivery bots and forklifts https://tcrn.ch/2vbZZiy

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HipChat founders launch Swoot, a social podcast app

{rss:content:encoded} HipChat founders launch Swoot, a social podcast app https://tcrn.ch/2UJcHEx https://tcrn.ch/2Gq2djB April 18, 2019 at 05:34PM

Pete Curley and Garret Heaton, who previously co-founded team chat app HipChat and sold it to Atlassian, are officially launching their new product Swoot today. The app makes it easy for users to recommend podcasts and see what their friends are listening to.

This might seem like a big leap from selling enterprise software — and indeed, Curley said the company was initially focused to creating another set of team collaboration tools.

What they realized, however, was that HipChat is “actually a consumer product that the company just happens to pay for because the employees demand it” — and he said they weren’t terribly interested in trying to build a business around a more traditional “top-down sales process.”

Meanwhile, Curley said he’d injured his back while lowering one of his children into a crib, which meant that for months, his only form of exercise was walking. He recalled walking around for hours each day and, for the first time, listening to podcasts.

“I was actually way behind the times,” he said. “I didn’t know this, that everyone else was listening to them … This is like the dark web of content.”

The startup has already raised a $3 million seed funding round led by True Ventures.

“Pete and Garret both have incredible product and entrepreneurial experience, plus they have built successful businesses together in the past,” said True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan in a statement. “Their focus of solving the disjointed podcast listening experience through Swoot’s elegant design fills a clear gap in media discovery.”

Discovery — namely, finding new podcasts beyond the handful that you already subscribe to — is one of the biggest issues in podcasting right now. It’s something a number of companies are trying to solve, but in Curley’s view, the key is to make the listening experience more social.

He noted that social sharing features are getting added to “literally everything,” including your bathroom scale, except “the one thing that I actually wanted it for.”

Curley also contrasted the podcast listening experience with YouTube: “We don’t realize how big [podcasting] is because there is no social thing where you see that Gangnam Style has 8 billion views, and you realize that the entire world is watching. There’s no view count, no anything that tells you what’s popular.”

So he’s trying to provide that view with Swoot. Instead of focusing on overall view counts (which might not be that impressive in a new app), Swoot gives you two main ways to track what’s popular among your friends.

There’s a feed that shows you everything that your friends are listening to or recommending, plus a list of episodes that are currently trending, with little icons showing you the friends who have listened to at least 20 percent of an episode.

Curley said the team has been beta testing the app by simply releasing it on the App Store and telling friends about it, then letting it spread by word of mouth until it was in the hands of around 1,000 users. During that test, it found that 25 percent of the podcasts that users listened to were coming from friends.

Curley also noted that this approach is “episode-centric” and rather than “show-centric.” In other words, it’s not just helping you find the next podcast that you want to subscribe to and listen to for years — it also helps surface the specific episode that everyone’s listening to right now.

“In the 700,000 shows that exist, if you’re the 690,000 worst-ranked show, but you have one great episode that should be able to go viral, that’s basically impossible to do right now, because audio is crazy hard to share,” Curley said.

In the course of our conversation, I brought up my experience with Spotify — I like seeing what’s popular, but when a friend recently mentioned specific songs that they could see I’d been listening to on the service, I was a bit creeped out.

“It’s funny, I actually thought, how ironic that Spotify is getting into podcasting now [through the acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor],” Curley replied. “They actually had this correct mechanism applied to the wrong thing. Music is a deeply personal thing.”

Why Spotify is betting big on podcasting

Which isn’t to say that podcast listening isn’t personal, but there’s more of an opportunity to discover overlapping interests, say the fact that you and your friends all listen to true crime podcasts.

Curley also said that the app is deliberately to ensure that “the service does not get worse because a ton of people follow you” — so they see what you listen to, but they can’t comment on it or tell you that you’re an idiot for listening.

At the same time, he also said the team will be adding a mode to only share podcasts you actively recommend, rather than posting everything you listen to.

As for making money, Curley suggested that he’s interested in exploring a variety of opportunities, whether that’s integrating with other subscription or tipping services, or in creating ad opportunities around promoting different podcasts.

“My actual answer is, there are a bunch fo people trying to monetize right now, but I don’t think there’s a platform even close to mature enough to even try to monetize podcasting yet, other than podcasters doing their own advertising,” he said. “I think the endgame, where the real money is made in podcasting, actually hasn’t been come up with yet.”

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HipChat founders launch Swoot, a social podcast app

Pete Curley and Garret Heaton, who previously co-founded team chat app HipChat and sold it to Atlassian, are officially launching their new product Swoot today. The app makes it easy for users to recommend podcasts and see what their friends are listening to.

This might seem like a big leap from selling enterprise software — and indeed, Curley said the company was initially focused to creating another set of team collaboration tools.

What they realized, however, was that HipChat is “actually a consumer product that the company just happens to pay for because the employees demand it” — and he said they weren’t terribly interested in trying to build a business around a more traditional “top-down sales process.”

Meanwhile, Curley said he’d injured his back while lowering one of his children into a crib, which meant that for months, his only form of exercise was walking. He recalled walking around for hours each day and, for the first time, listening to podcasts.

“I was actually way behind the times,” he said. “I didn’t know this, that everyone else was listening to them … This is like the dark web of content.”

The startup has already raised a $3 million seed funding round led by True Ventures.

“Pete and Garret both have incredible product and entrepreneurial experience, plus they have built successful businesses together in the past,” said True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan in a statement. “Their focus of solving the disjointed podcast listening experience through Swoot’s elegant design fills a clear gap in media discovery.”

Discovery — namely, finding new podcasts beyond the handful that you already subscribe to — is one of the biggest issues in podcasting right now. It’s something a number of companies are trying to solve, but in Curley’s view, the key is to make the listening experience more social.

He noted that social sharing features are getting added to “literally everything,” including your bathroom scale, except “the one thing that I actually wanted it for.”

Curley also contrasted the podcast listening experience with YouTube: “We don’t realize how big [podcasting] is because there is no social thing where you see that Gangnam Style has 8 billion views, and you realize that the entire world is watching. There’s no view count, no anything that tells you what’s popular.”

So he’s trying to provide that view with Swoot. Instead of focusing on overall view counts (which might not be that impressive in a new app), Swoot gives you two main ways to track what’s popular among your friends.

There’s a feed that shows you everything that your friends are listening to or recommending, plus a list of episodes that are currently trending, with little icons showing you the friends who have listened to at least 20 percent of an episode.

Curley said the team has been beta testing the app by simply releasing it on the App Store and telling friends about it, then letting it spread by word of mouth until it was in the hands of around 1,000 users. During that test, it found that 25 percent of the podcasts that users listened to were coming from friends.

Curley also noted that this approach is “episode-centric” and rather than “show-centric.” In other words, it’s not just helping you find the next podcast that you want to subscribe to and listen to for years — it also helps surface the specific episode that everyone’s listening to right now.

“In the 700,000 shows that exist, if you’re the 690,000 worst-ranked show, but you have one great episode that should be able to go viral, that’s basically impossible to do right now, because audio is crazy hard to share,” Curley said.

In the course of our conversation, I brought up my experience with Spotify — I like seeing what’s popular, but when a friend recently mentioned specific songs that they could see I’d been listening to on the service, I was a bit creeped out.

“It’s funny, I actually thought, how ironic that Spotify is getting into podcasting now [through the acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor],” Curley replied. “They actually had this correct mechanism applied to the wrong thing. Music is a deeply personal thing.”

Why Spotify is betting big on podcasting

Which isn’t to say that podcast listening isn’t personal, but there’s more of an opportunity to discover overlapping interests, say the fact that you and your friends all listen to true crime podcasts.

Curley also said that the app is deliberately to ensure that “the service does not get worse because a ton of people follow you” — so they see what you listen to, but they can’t comment on it or tell you that you’re an idiot for listening.

At the same time, he also said the team will be adding a mode to only share podcasts you actively recommend, rather than posting everything you listen to.

As for making money, Curley suggested that he’s interested in exploring a variety of opportunities, whether that’s integrating with other subscription or tipping services, or in creating ad opportunities around promoting different podcasts.

“My actual answer is, there are a bunch fo people trying to monetize right now, but I don’t think there’s a platform even close to mature enough to even try to monetize podcasting yet, other than podcasters doing their own advertising,” he said. “I think the endgame, where the real money is made in podcasting, actually hasn’t been come up with yet.”

https://tcrn.ch/2Gq2djB HipChat founders launch Swoot, a social podcast app https://tcrn.ch/2UJcHEx

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Consumers get another digital home health offering as Tyto Care and Best Buy launch TytoHome

Best Buy is partnering with the Israeli technology company Tyto Care to become the official retailer for the company’s all-in-one digital diagnostics kit through its physical stores in California, the Dakotas, Ohio and Minnesota, and through its online store.

Tyto previously sold its technology through healthcare plans, making its handheld examination device (with attachments that act as a thermometer, a stethoscope, an otoscope and a tongue depressor) available to families with insurance that wanted to reduce the cost of checkups through remote monitoring. The company’s handheld device comes with an exam camera so it can prompt users where to position the device to get the most accurate readings.

 

Now, through Best Buy, consumers can buy the company’s kit for $299.99. Through a partnership with American Well, users of the TytoHome kit have access to the company’s LiveHealth Online consultation service (if they live outside of Minnesota or the Dakotas). Which means patients can use the device to perform a medical exam and send the information to a physician for a diagnosis any time of the day or night.

As part of the deal, Tyto Care is partnering with additional regional healthcare systems to provide medical care to consumers throughout the country. The first is Sanford Health, a Minnesota-based not-for-profit health system operating in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. 

For Best Buy, the move builds on the company’s attempts to move quickly into providing digital healthcare services just like it provides technical support through its Geek Squad.

Last year the company bought GreatCall, which sells connected health and emergency response services to the AARP crowd.

“We’re excited to partner with Best Buy, LiveHealth Online, American Well and regional health systems to extend our on-demand telehealth platform across the U.S., enhancing primary care delivery,” said Dedi Gilad, the chief executive and co-founder of Tyto Care, in a statement.

The company, based in Herzliya, Israel, has raised $56.7 million to date from investors, including Sanford Health, the Japanese Itochu Corp., Shenzhen Capital Group, Ping An, LionBird, Fosun Group, Orbimed and Walgreens.

The company said at the time that it would use the cash to expand in the U.S. and to other international markets in Asia and Europe.

“These strategic partnerships will enable us to gain further momentum and accelerate our growth, deepening our foothold in the U.S. and other new strategic markets,” said GiladTyto Care said in a statement at the time.

https://tcrn.ch/2IFElv9 Consumers get another digital home health offering as Tyto Care and Best Buy launch TytoHome https://tcrn.ch/2Zb2a3A

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PathAI raises $60 million for its computer vision-based pathogen detection technology

With a clinical version of PathAI‘s computer vision-based pathogen detection service still at least one year from coming to market, the diagnostic technology developer has snagged $60 million in its latest round of financing.

The company’s tech is used by doctors to analyze cell samples taken from patients to determine the presence or absence of bacterium, viruses, cancerous cells or other disease causing agents.

These days, PathAI’s technology is used less in hospitals for patient care and more by pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs,  according to the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Dr. Andy Beck.

“Our biggest focus today is a research platform we use it to examine new therapeutics for serious diseases,” Beck says. “We see that as a really important problem for patients… accelerating how we get safe and effective medicines to patients.”

That’s an attractive market given that pharmaceutical companies have more money to spend on new technology than hospitals.

When the company does work with pathologists, they’re using the technology for research purposes, says Beck. Any clinical diagnostic work would have to go through trials and be approved by regulators, he says.

“For this direct clinical use it’s in the one to two year timeframe,” he says. 

General Atlantic led the company’s latest round with additional capital coming from previous investors General Catalyst, 8VC, DHVC, REfactor Capital, KdT Ventures, and Pillar Companies.

PathAI has grown its staff to over 60 employees in the past year, and the company has signed partnerships with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Novartis.

As a result of the financing, General Atlantic managing director, Dr. Michelle Dipp will take a seat on the company’s board.

“PathAI’s work could radically improve the accuracy and reproducibility of disease diagnosis and support the development of new medicines to treat those diseases,” said David Fialkow, Managing Director at General Catalyst, in a statement. 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J PathAI raises $60 million for its computer vision-based pathogen detection technology https://tcrn.ch/2PfVyfO

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Kids on 45th just raised millions in seed funding to sell lightly used kids clothes — sight unseen

A seemingly endless number of startups has attracted funding in recent years to make life easier for people with money to spend. They’re sold nice clothes, chic shoes, cool office space, on-demand car services, on-demand laundry services, on-demand cleaning services, anti-aging therapies. It goes on and on.

Overlooked in the process is the overwhelming majority of Americans. In 2015, the top 1 percent of U.S. made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99 percent did, a gap that has been growing. Most families aren’t spending money on making life easier or more glamorous for themselves because they can’t afford it. More, they’re often too busy to think much about it.

There are rare exceptions to startups that cater to more affluent populations. One company that comes to mind is Propel, a New York-based startup whose app helps food stamp recipients improve their financial health. Another is Yenko, a for-profit outfit committed to improving graduation outcomes.

Now, an even newer player has entered onto the scene whose proposition makes all the sense in the world for the many harried, overworked and budget-conscious families out there. Called Kids on 45th, the nearly two-year-old, Seattle-based startup bundles up what it describes as nearly new clothing that suits the current season, and sends it to customers sight unseen for far less than they would pay elsewhere, and requiring a lot less of their time.

The company ties back to a Seattle consignment store of the same name that’s been up and running since 1989. Entrepreneur Elise Worthy describes it as a “cornerstone” of the local parenting community, and she would know. She decided to buy the business two years ago, not only to save it when it teetered on the brink of closure, but to better understand how she might turn it to a scalable enterprise. She learned plenty, too, including that when moms came into the store because their children had outgrown their clothes, they weren’t looking for anything specific. “They were just trying to solve a problem. They didn’t care if it was this pair or that pair; they just needed pants.”

The observation led to a revelation that Worthy could build an online business without creating an elaborate website with photos and clothing descriptions. In fact, she decided to build an anti-browsing experience that allows a shopper to say which sizes are needed, and which types of items (coats, pants, shirts), one sentence about his or her kid’s style and that’s it. It’s highly counterintuitive for today’s e-commerce landscape. But a customer mostly clicks a few boxes, then waits for however many items were ordered — each priced between $3 and $4 — to arrive.

Part of what makes Kids on 45th work as a business is that it’s saving on a lot of fronts. Aside from not creating and maintaining a sophisticated, content-rich website, the company asks customers to donate any unwanted items locally, giving them account credits instead and avoiding what can be a crushing expense for e-commerce concerns: returns. According to the National Retail Federation, return rates on clothing are close to 40 percent when the merchandise is bought online.

The startup, which is bundling clothes for newborns to kids up to age 16, also has systems in place that should enable it to scale, including an exclusive fulfillment relationship with one of the country’s few aggregators of thrift clothing. After paying for clothes that this partner deems to be in high-quality condition — it has plenty of options, thanks to the more than 20 billion pounds of clothing that Americans donate each year — Kids on 45th puts its staff of 15 stylists to work. “We optimize for the mom who is holding both her cell phone and her kid,” explains Worthy. “We want her to be able to check out in less than two minutes, then hand over that hunting experience to us.”

Kids on 45th has a few other things going for it, as well. First, it doesn’t charge on a subscription basis, unlike some other startups boxing up kids’ clothing, like Rockets of Awesome and Kidbox, and it insists that it doesn’t need to. “We don’t want to trap moms,” says Worthy. “We’ll send them reminder emails,” she says, and they come right back. “Our retention is on a par with companies that charge subscriptions. Moms return at the same rate on their own.”

The idea of ordering bundles of kids clothing is also catching on fast. Just yesterday, Walmart announced that it’s partnering with Kidbox to enable shoppers to purchase up to six different boxes from Walmart each year. Each will include four to five items and cost $48, said the company. That’s roughly the same average order size at Kids on 45th, says Worthy — though the startup sends off between 12 to 15 items for the same amount.

Not last, while Kids on 45th is decidedly unflashy, it’s capitalizing on one of the biggest trends in the world right now: growing awareness about landfills throughout the U.S. that are teeming with textiles that could easily be recycled, if only there were more places for it to go.

Certainly, the young company has momentum. It says it has already shipped more than half a million items just a year after launching its online business. It also just raised $3.3 million in seed funding. Its backers include Yes VC, Maveron, SoGal Ventures, Sesame Street Ventures & Collaborative Fund, Liquid 2 VC and Brand Foundry Ventures. No doubt they’re looking for returns, as VCs do. But it’s also an investment about which they can feel good. After all, if Kids on 45th can intercept more of the lightly used goods in the world and put them to smart use, more power to it.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Kids on 45th just raised millions in seed funding to sell lightly used kids clothes — sight unseen https://tcrn.ch/2GrDIU9

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The consumer version of BBM is shutting down on May 31

{rss:content:encoded} The consumer version of BBM is shutting down on May 31 https://tcrn.ch/2ZjQnAb http://bit.ly/2KNMJuY April 18, 2019 at 04:04PM

It might be time to move on from BBM. The consumer version of the BlackBerry Messenger will shut down on May 31. Emtek, the Indonesia-based company that partnered with BlackBerry in 2016, just announced the closure. It’s important to note, BBM will still exist and BlackBerry today revealed a plan to open its enterprise-version of BBM to general consumers.

Starting today, BBM Enterprise will be available through the Google Play Store and eventually from the Apple App Store. The service will be free for the one year and after that, $2.49 for six months of service. This version of the software, like the consumer version, still features group chats, voice and video calls, and the ability to edit and retract messages.

As explained by BlackBerry, BBMe features end-to-end encryption.

BBMe can be downloaded on any device that uses Android, iOS, Windows or MAC operating systems. The sender and recipient each have unique public/private encryption and signing keys. These keys are generated on the device by a FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic library and are not controlled by BlackBerry. Each message uses a new symmetric key for message encryption. Additionally, TLS encryption between the device and BlackBerry’s infrastructure protects BBMe messages from eavesdropping or manipulation.

BBM is one of the oldest smartphone messaging services. Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s original name, released the messenger in 2005. It quickly became a selling point for BlackBerry devices. BBM wasn’t perfect and occasionally crashed, but it was a robust, feature-filled messaging app when most of the world was still using SMS. Eventually with the downfall of RIM and eventually BlackBerry, BBM fell behind iMessage, WhatsApp, and other independent messaging platforms. Emtek’s partnership with BlackBerry was supposed to bring the service into the current age, but some say the consumer version ended up bloated with games, channels and ads. BlackBerry’s BBMe lacks a lot of those extra features so consumers might find it a better platform for communicating.

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VCs bet on cannabis vaping, ED meds and mobile fertility clinics

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a bit of a reunion with Kate and Alex on as usual, with the addition of Extra Crunch denizen extraordinaire Danny Crichton. Danny, you may recall, has been a semi-regular Equity co-host over the past year.

As Kate explains up front, Equity is out a day early this week due to the Big TechCrunch Robotics Affair in Berkeley today. We’ll be back on Friday with IPO news regarding Zoom and Pinterest and we can’t wait.

Ok, all that sorted, what did we talk about? Alex wanted to talk about some market signals that he reads as bullish. Whatever went wrong at the end of 2018 has healed over he thinks because there have been a whole lot of supergiant venture capital rounds and some other stuff.

Next, we gave an example of one of those supergiant rounds in the works. The reported Pax round, which could put $400 million into the cannabis vaping company, intrigues us, especially because Pax is the corporate sibling of JUUL, the now-famous e-cigarette company what sold just over a third of itself for nearly $13 billion last year. A truly staggering deal.

Then we turned to Brex, the fintech startup that was back in the news this week. Why? Because it raised a $100 million debt round as startups of that sort do. Brex provides a credit card made specifically for startups that require no personal-guarantee. Yeah, risky, we know. We talked about that risk and Brex’s plan to target Fortune 500 business in the future.

Rounds for Ro, Kindbody and Carrot Fertility made it a busy week for healthtech, too. Ro is raising at a $500 million valuation to support its three digital health brands: Roman, Rory and Zero. Meanwhile, a pair of fertility startups, Kindbody and Carrot, brought in $15 million and $11 million, respectively.

With Danny back on the show, we extended our reach and discussed the latest in the chip and sensor world. NXP, fresh off a failed, multi-billion dollar exit to Qualcomm put money into Hawkeye Technology, a China-based company working in the car sensor space. Equity’s regular hosts mostly nodded as Danny dropped a lot of knowledge.

All that and we had some fun. We’ll be back before you know it.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J VCs bet on cannabis vaping, ED meds and mobile fertility clinics https://tcrn.ch/2vbNFyI

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Astroscreen raises $1M to detect social media manipulation with machine learning

In an era of social media manipulation and disinformation, we could sure use some help from innovative entrepreneurs. Social networks are now critical to how the public consumes and shares the news. But these networks were never built for an informed debate about the news. They were built to reward virality. That means they are open to manipulation for commercial and political gain.

Fake social media accounts – bots (automated) and ‘sock-puppets’ (human-run) – can be used in a highly organized way to spread and amplify minor controversies or fabricated and misleading content, eventually influencing other influencers and even news organizations. And brands are hugely open to this threat. The use of such disinformation to discredit brands has the potential for very costly and damaging disruption when up to 60% of a company’s market value can lie in its brand.

Astroscreen is a startup which uses machine learning and disinformation analysts to detect social media manipulation. It’s now secured $1M in initial funding to progress its technology. And it has a heritage which suggests it at least has a shot at achieving this.

Its techniques include coordinated activity detection, linguistic fingerprinting and fake account and botnet detection.

The funding round was led by Speedinvest, Luminous Ventures, UCL Technology Fund, which is managed by AlbionVC in collaboration with UCLB, AISeed, and the London Co-investment Fund.

Astroscreen CEO Ali Tehrani previously founded a machine-learning news analytics company which he sold in 2015 before fake news gained widespread attention. He said: “While I was building my previous start-up I saw at first-hand how biased, polarising news articles were shared and artificially amplified by vast numbers of fake accounts. This gave the stories high levels of exposure and authenticity they wouldn’t have had on their own.”

Astroscreen’s CTO Juan Echeverria, whose Ph.D. at UCL was on fake account detection on social networks, made headlines in January 2017 with the discovery of a massive botnet managing some 350,000 separate accounts on Twitter.

Ali Tehrani also thinks social networks are effectively holed-below the waterline on this whole issue: “Social media platforms themselves cannot solve this problem because they’re looking for scalable solutions to maintain their software margins. If they devoted sufficient resources, their profits would look more like a newspaper publisher than a tech company. So, they’re focused on detecting collective anomalies – accounts and behavior that deviate from the norm for their userbase as a whole. But this is only good at detecting spam accounts and highly automated behavior, not the sophisticated techniques of disinformation campaigns.”

Astroscreen takes a different approach, combining machine-learning and human intelligence to detect contextual (instead of collective) anomalies – behavior that deviates from the norm for a specific topic. It monitors social networks for signs of disinformation attacks, informing brands if they’re under attack at the earliest stages and giving them enough time to mitigate the negative effects.

Lomax Ward, partner, Luminous Ventures, said: “The abuse of social media is a
significant societal issue and Astroscreen’s defence mechanisms are a key part of the solution.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Astroscreen raises $1M to detect social media manipulation with machine learning https://tcrn.ch/2IIaIcr

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Weengs, the UK logistics startup for online retailers, collects £6.5M Series A

Weengs, the U.K. logistics startup for e-commerce businesses that need a more convenient way of getting online orders to customers, has raised £6.5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is venture capital firm Oxford Capital, with Weeng’s seed investors, including Local Globe, Cherry Ventures and VentureFriends, following on.

Founded by Alex Christodolou and Greg Zontanos, provides small and medium-sized online stores of various kinds, including eBay and Amazon power sellers and brick ‘n’ mortar stores with an e-commerce component, with a “ship-from-store” logistics solution that handles collection, packing and delivery.

The basic premise is that time costs money, which can make e-commerce quite prohibitive. By outsourcing time-consuming and labour intensive logistics, store owners can put their time into other more profitable and differentiating aspects of their business, such as sales and marketing, and customer experience.

To make this work, Weengs collects orders daily from retailers’ stores, and professionally packs them back at the Weengs warehouse before they are shipped to customers via the couriers the company partners with.

Weengs says it can pack and ship a broad range of products globally, including less obvious items such as plants to musical instruments, electronics and everyday items like cosmetics. It has developed algorithms to pick the most appropriate courier service based on the item and customer priorities.

“Our business is part of the rising omnichannel opportunity we are seeing in retail,” says Pier Ronzi, Weeng’s more recently added co-founder and CEO. “Increasingly, it makes sense for retailers to ship-from-store. Basically cities and stores are becoming distributed inventories that retailers can leverage to increase their business and Weengs helps them [by] offering a one-stop-shop solution for their fulfilment while they can focus on their core activity”.

Since Weengs’ seed round, the team has grown to 70 people and saw Ronzi, who previously worked at McKinsey&Co, join the company. The startup now has around 400 retailers as customers and says it has fulfilled more than 500,000 online orders to date.

“We have learnt that our service saves retailers a huge amount of time and that is the key to our value proposition versus, for example, price,” says Ronzi. Prior to Weengs, customers typically handled fulfilment themselves or used costly fulfilment centres.

To that end, Weengs says it will use the new funding to invest heavily in its new warehouse and accompanying automation and technology. The plan is to “supercharge” operations to be able to fulfil more than 15,000 e-commerce orders per day.

Explains the Weengs CEO: “The packing operations today is mainly manual. In the new automated warehouse we are implementing a process governed by our software and leveraging a packing machine that automatically performs the packing operations: the order item is fed to the machine and, at the end of a quick automated process, the order comes out packed in a very high standard and bespoke box, labelled and ready to be handed over to the carriers. The process becomes heavily automated but we still add the human touch for value added activities such as preparation of fragile items and supervision of the whole process”.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Weengs, the UK logistics startup for online retailers, collects £6.5M Series A https://tcrn.ch/2KLH6gS

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Bankin’ raises $22.6 million for its financial coach

French startup Bankin’ is raising a new $22.6 million funding round (€20 million). The company has managed to attract 2.9 million users in France and wants to become the only app you need to manage your money.

Overall, Bankin’ has raised over $32 million (€28.4 million). Investors include Omnes Capital, Commerz Ventures, Génération New Tech, Didier Kuhn, Simon Dawlat and Franck Lheurre.

Bankin’ first developed an aggregator so that you could view all your bank accounts from a single app. The company has been using a combination of APIs and scrapping to connect to nearly all French banks, 85 percent of Spanish and British banks and 65 percent of German banks.

The app automatically categorizes your transactions and sends you push notifications to alert you of important changes. There’s also a budget feature that can predict how much money you’ll have at the end of the month.

Bankin’ went one step further and started adding transfers from the app. If you want to ditch your bank app, you need to be able to view your balance and your transactions, but you also need to be able to send and receive money.

And now, Bankin’ wants to become your financial coach with automated recommendations and human-powered conversations. The app has been redesigned a couple of months ago to put these recommendations front and center.

For instance, the app can tell you if it’s time to renegotiate your loan, or that you should optimize your savings. The startup partners with other fintech companies, such as Yomoni, Pretto, Transferwise and Fluo, as well as online banks. This could be an interesting acquisition channel for other companies and a good revenue opportunity for Bankin’.

Finally, Bankin’ also sells access to its API called Bridge. For instance, Sage, Milleis Banque, Cegid and RCA use Bridge so that you can connect your third-party bank accounts and view them from your main bank account.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire reasonably. There are now 50 people working for Bankin’ and the startup plans to hire 20 more people this year.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bankin’ raises $22.6 million for its financial coach https://tcrn.ch/2Xmiwom

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Spotinst, the startup enabling companies to purchase and manage excess cloud capacity, acquires StratCloud

Spotinst, the cloud automation and optimization startup founded in Tel Aviv but now with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London too, has acquired AWS partner StratCloud. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I’m hearing it combines both cash and stock and was somewhere in the region of $5 million.

As part of the acquisition, StratCloud’s team of 15 people will be joining Spotinst, including founder Patrick Gartlan, who will become VP, Cloud Services at Spotinst. StratCloud hadn’t raised any venture capital but instead was bootstrapped by Gartlan, who was the former CTO of Cloud Optimization company CloudCheckr.

Founded in 2015, Spotinst enables enterprises to optimize their cloud infrastructure usage by automating the process of using excess — and therefore cheaper — capacity from leading cloud providers.

As TechCrunch’s Ron Miller previously explained, cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, all of which Spotinst supports, have to maintain more resources than they need at any given time. All three companies offer steep discounts to customers who want to access these resources, but they come with a strict condition that the platforms can take those resources back whenever they need them. Which is where Spotinst (and today’s acquisition of StratCloud) comes in.

Spotinst’s platform manages the process of acquiring spare capacity, powered by predictive AI, and seamlessly switches providers before it’s withdrawn. This ensures that cloud computing “workloads” keep functioning, while the customer still receives the best possible price.

Meanwhile, StratCloud tech is described as an “optimization platform” that buys, sells and converts reserved capacity, therefore maximizing savings for on-demand infrastructure. “This leads to lower compute payments, without engineers having to change anything in the applications and infrastructure they manage,” explains Spotinst.

Related to this, Spotinst will migrate StratCloud’s several dozen customers to the Spotinst Platform where they’ll continue to receive all of the current functionality.

Overall, the acquisition means Spotinst can now offer a complete solution for cloud users, including offering reserved instances and unused computer power so that enterprises can run any workload and support large-scale migrations on any cloud provider. In addition, Spotinst says the combined technologies give Managed Service Providers (MSPs) a comprehensive tool to optimize cloud workloads for all of their managed customers.

Spotinst claims over 1,500 enterprise customers in 52 countries, including Samsung, N26, Duolingo, Ticketmaster and Wix. The company currently employs approximately 150 staff across its four offices and has raised $52 million in VC funding to date.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Spotinst, the startup enabling companies to purchase and manage excess cloud capacity, acquires StratCloud https://tcrn.ch/2PlaPMw

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