Greyparrot uses computer vision to improve waste management

Meet Greyparrot, a London-based startup that wants to improve waste management. The company uses computer vision to make sorting more efficient at different stages of the waste chain. And Greyparrot has been selected as a wildcard for the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

The company has been using machine learning with images of different types of waste to train a model that detects glass, paper, cardboard, newspapers, cans and different types of plastics (black trays, PET, HDPE).

Greyparrot can then use a simple camera combined with a computer to sort waste in a fraction of a second.

There are many different use cases for this kind of technology, but it seems particularly promising in sorting facilities. Those facilities already use a ton of machines to separate small and big objects, metal from plastics, etc. But many of them still rely on humans at the end of the process to pick up the last remaining false positive objects.

While it’s never possible to sort everything with a 100% accuracy, you want to get as close as possible to 100%. Sorting facilities create huge cubes of PET plastics and send them to countries on the other side of the world so that they can transform PET into something else.

In some cases, those cubes are not pure enough. For instance, Indonesia regularly refuses containers of waste and send them back to the U.S. or Europe.

Greyparrot wants to help with the last step of the sorting process. The product can be used to assess the purity of a conveyor belt to see if it’s good enough. It can also identify problematic objects and give coordinates to a sorting robot so that it can automatically pick up impurities.

The startup has been testing its solution in facilities in the U.K. and South Korea. It has raised $1.2 million so far.

In the future, Greyparrot also has other ideas of use cases. For instance, you could imagine embedding Greyparrot’s technology in a smart bin to automatically sort waste from the very beginning. You could also use Greyparrot in reverse vending machines and credit your account when you return plastic bottles.

https://ift.tt/2oKoxPH Greyparrot uses computer vision to improve waste management https://ift.tt/2LM1Mnm

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StrattyX lets you buy and sell shares using automated rules

StrattyX is a trading interface that lets you set up sophisticated “if-this-then-that” rules and execute orders on the stock market. The startup is participating in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

There are plenty of brokers that let you buy and sell shares using a mobile app and a web interface. But if you want to access more sophisticated tools and automate strategies, there’s not much you can do.

StrattyX wants to open up automated trading software to anyone, from non-professional traders who have some savings to professional day traders. The startup focuses on this specific part of the process.

It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t want to become an online stock broker. Instead, the company integrates with existing brokers, such as Robinhood, TD Ameritrade and many others as long as they support trading via an API. It acts as an interface and executes orders on your behalf.

You can create rules based on multiple different factors. In addition to traditional stop-loss and stop-limit orders, you can say that you want to buy or sell shares if something happens on Twitter, in the news or on the stock market.

Here are a few examples of rules you can create:

• If @realdonaldtrump tweets something that contains “China” or “tariff,” sell Apple shares.
• If the value of EUR drops by 2% against USD, buy LVMH shares.
• If news headline contains “Tesla delays deliveries,” sell Tesla shares.

Interestingly, StrattyX will provide a marketplace of strategies. If a star investor starts using StrattyX to define a set of automated rules, other users could follow the same strategy.

StrattyX then wants to go one step further by giving you the tools to train a model using machine learning and user-generated data sets. You could imagine a feature that lets you upload a .csv file with price history and different types of data points, such as SEC filings, earnings, etc.

The company is also working on a feature that would show you news headlines that you’d rate with a Tinder-style swipe gesture — swipe right if you think it’s good news, swipe left if you think it’s bad news.

StrattyX is launching its mobile app today. It’s a sort of minimum viable product for now — some features are still in beta. The company is also working on a desktop version that would be useful for professional traders in particular.

StrattyX initially costs $5 per month per user, with more expensive plans for bigger teams and whether you execute a lot of orders through the product. The startup is looking to raise a seed round in the coming months.

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LifeCouple wants to improve your romantic relationship

Good relationships require ongoing commitment and work. LifeCouple, launching today in public beta at TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, wants to help make that work a bit easier for you and your partner.

Through its app, LifeCouple enables couples to address and monitor any challenges in their relationship. The startup does this by serving up content designed to encourage people to look more closely at their relationship across four key areas: trust, communication, conflict and intimacy. The content includes daily relationship challenges, ice breakers to help approach tricky conversations, digital gifts and more.

LifeCouple is designed to supplement couples therapy, its founder Sean Rones told TechCrunch.

“It’s not a replacement to therapy but it’s a complement to it,” he said. “I don’t think this can 100% solve your problem but it can give you the tools to solve your problems.”

Additionally, Rones envisions couples therapists using this tool to further assist their clients.

Just how startups use technology to track fitness and health, LifeCouple aims to help people create relationship goals, address those goals and track them over time. The ideal is for people to spend about 15 minutes per day to get the most out of it, Rones said.

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“What motivated me is after many different startups, I’ve learned that in order to be somewhat successful, you have to be tackling a really big problem,” he said.

LifeCouple is currently free, but is working to determine the cost moving forward. In the first two months of its soft launch, LifeCouple amassed 2,500 users in the U.S.

“What we’re trying to do is create something that can help — even if it’s just 10 couples that stay together,” Rones said.

This year, LifeCouple raised a $575,000 seed round. The plan is to do a full launch in January.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J LifeCouple wants to improve your romantic relationship https://ift.tt/2LHDeMu

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Zola, the $650M wedding portal, taps the travel market with an expansion into honeymoons

The wedding industry is estimated to be worth some $100 billion in the U.S. alone, and now one of the fastest-growing companies in that space — the wedding planning site Zola — is making a move to augment its position with a sidestep into travel. Today at Disrupt (our conference in San Francisco), the company is announcing Honeymoons, which will let couples plan, book and raise money for their post-nuptial travels at the same time that they plan the main event.

The beta invite is open for those interested from today. To start off, couples will be able to plan itineraries and book accommodations, with flights getting added in after the launch as part of a bigger effort to own the end-to-end marriage experience.

“Over time, we want to book all your travel needs, both before and after the wedding,” said Shan-Lyn Ma, the company’s CEO and founder.

Zola’s business today is based around pre-wedding organization: users can set up free websites, design and print (paid) wedding invitations, and create Zola-based gift registries for family and friends to buy goods for the couple through the site — a business that has been successful enough to net the company more than $140 million in funding and a $650 million valuation.

But the average time spent planning weddings is 13-18 months, and so Honeymoons will be one way for Zola to extend that relationship not just in terms of money spent — honeymoons is estimated to be a $12 billion industry in the U.S. — but time spent using Zola, which in turn can help build a tighter relationship for whatever moves the company might make in the future. (One very obvious next step: parenting-related content and products.)

The Honeymoons feature also brings something else to Zola: a little breathing space. The online market for wedding planning is old and massive — it’s one of the first kinds of e-commerce sites that emerged with the rise of the world wide web itself, and as such there are a lot of large and incumbent competitors. However, “honeymoons” has been generally a more fragmented space, where people plan their own trips themselves via sites that cater to other kinds of travel like vacations, making “online honeymoon planning” far less of an industry per se, and making Zola’s move into the area relatively less pressured.

Ma said that the decision to launch the business came from couples requesting the feature, and it’s taking the rollout relatively slowly. The service will start with a limited number of markets that Zola chose based on them already being popular honeymoon destinations. The plan will be to expand the list to many more locations over time.

“We know where all the key destinations are based on demand from couples,” she added.

Within that list, Zola has negotiated special packages for accommodation and flights. It will also come with a personalized twist: couples input their preferences and are offered honeymoon packages designed to fit their tastes.

“Through our technology and our team of travel experts, couples can tell us, this is what they would love to do for their honeymoon,” explained Ma. “This is their general travel style, budget and dates. Then we will send back an itinerary…[and they can] book with us from there. At launch next month, it will be focused first and foremost on accommodation and experiences. Over time, we would aim to help you with everything you need to do on your honeymoon,” she said.

Ma said thousands of customers have already signed up for the waitlist for the new honeymoons product, which will officially launch next month.

Zola already has a strong connection to a wider marketplace that taps into how millennials and younger consumers, in general, like to shop today, offering a Houzz-style approach of letting users create “look books” for their aesthetics, and giving them flexibility to either register for specific items, or to cash out in gift cards that can be used on other goods and services.

The Honeymoons move will give the company an opening to working with other companies much more closely, specifically those in the travel industry, to create cohesive experiences. Given how many weddings today are focused around “destinations,” this also opens the door to planning events for more than just the couples involved.

https://ift.tt/30FG5tH Zola, the $650M wedding portal, taps the travel market with an expansion into honeymoons https://ift.tt/2oQIKDk

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WeWork expected to announce major layoffs

WeWork, the co-working business once valued at $47 billion, is expected to announce significant layoffs this month, following reports the company was looking to slash as many as 5,000 roles, or one-third of its workforce, Bloomberg reports.

Now expected to go public in 2020 at a valuation as low as $10 billion, WeWork is also in negotiations with JPMorgan for a last-minute cash infusion to replace the capital expected from the now-postponed IPO, per reports. The company, now a cautionary tale, has been working with bankers in recent weeks to reduce the sky-high costs of its money-losing operation.

News of potential layoffs come about two weeks after co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Neumann resigned from his post and the 9-year-old company postponed its highly-anticipated initial public offering. Neumann is now serving as the company’s non-executive chairman, succeeded by WeWork’s former vice chairman Sebastian Gunningham and the company’s president and chief operating officer Artie Minson.

The embattled company has been struggling to satisfy Wall Street skeptics, who were floored by the company’s eye-whopping valuation. Since Neumann’s resignation, WeWork has begun several cost-cutting initiatives and is reportedly looking to sell off several of its acquisitions, including Managed by Q, Conductor and Meetup.

Layoffs are a natural next step for the business as it aims to carve out a clear path to profitability, now a requisite for a 2020 IPO. To float at any point in the future, after all, WeWork must prove elevating “the world’s consciousness” will eventually lead to profits.

WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.

“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”

We’ve reached out to WeWork for comment.

CEO ouster, looming layoffs and devaluation turn WeWork into cautionary tale

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We’ll have self-flying cars before self-driving cars, Thrun says

Once you get up high enough, you don’t have to worry about a lot of the obstacles like pedestrians and traffic jams that plague autonomous cars. That’s why Sebastian Thrun, Google’s self-driving team founder turned CEO of flying vehicle startup Kitty Hawk, said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF today that we should expect true autonomy to succeed in the air before the road.

“I believe we’re going to be done with self-flying vehicles before we’re done with self-driving cars” Thrun told TechCrunch reporter Kirsten Korosec.

Why? “If you go a bit higher in the air then all the difficulties with not hitting stuff like children and bicycles and cars and so on just vanishes . . . Go above the buildings, go above the trees, like go where the helicopters are!” Thrun explained, but noted personal helicopters are so noisy they’re being banned in some places like Napa, California.

That proclamation has wide reaching implications for how cities are planned and real estate is bought. We may need more vertical takeoff helipads sooner than we needed autonomous car-only road lanes. More remote homes in the forest that have only a single winding road that reaches them like those in Big Sur, California might suddenly become more accessible and thereby appealing to the affluent since they could just take a self-flying car to the city or office.

The concept could also have wide-reaching implications for the startup industry. Obviously Thrun’s own company Kitty Hawk would benefit from not being too early to market. Kitty Hawk announced its Heaviside vehicle today that’s designed to be ultra quiet. If the prophecy comes true, Uber which is investing in vertical take-off vehicles could also be in a better position than Lyft and other ride-hailing player focused on cars.

Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

To make sure its vehicles don’t get banned and potentially pave the way for more aerial autonomy, Kitty Hawk recently recruited former FAA Administrator Mike Huerta as an advisor.

Eventually, Thrun says that because cars have to navigate indirect streets but in the air “we can go in a straight line, we believe we will be roughly a third of the energy cost per mile is Tesla.” And with shared UberPool style flights, he sees the cost of energy getting down to just “$0.30 per mile”.

But in the meantime, Thrun is trying to get people, including me, to stop saying flying cars. “I personally don’t like the word ‘flying car’, but it’s very catchy. The technical term is called eVTOL. These are typically electrically propelled vehicles, they can take off and land vertically, eVTOLs, vertical takeoff landing, so that you don’t need an airport. And then they fly very much like a regular plane.” We’ll see if that mouthful catches on, and if the skies get more congested before the roads thin out.

https://ift.tt/2OgWpOT We’ll have self-flying cars before self-driving cars, Thrun says https://ift.tt/331PHR4

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Orbit Fab raises $3M to make orbital refueling easier, cheaper and more accessible

Orbit Fab, one of the companies competing in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco this week, has closed a seed round of $3 million. The funding comes from Type 1 Ventures, TechStars and others, and will help Orbit Fab continue to build on the great momentum it has already bootstrapped with its space-based robotic refueling technology.

You might remember the name Orbit Fab from a milestone accomplishment the young company achieved earlier this year: Becoming the first startup to supply water to the International Space Station, itself an achievement but also a key demonstration of the viability of its technology for use in orbital satellite refueling. Refueling satellites could have tremendous impact on the commercial satellite business, extending the operating life of expensive satellites considerably, which translates to better margins and more profitable businesses.

Thanks to co-founders Daniel Faber and Jeremy Schiel’s connections in the space industry, from more than 15 years working in space technology businesses in a leadership capacity, the company was able to demonstrate its technology working in space less than a year after Orbit Fab was actually founded. Faber, Orbit Fab’s CEO, and Schiel, the startup’s CMO, met when both were working at Deep Space Industries – Faber as CEO and Schiel as a contractor.

Orbit Fab’s first space payload, the ISS water resupply robot.

“We ended up reconnecting later on and really looking at a few different business models on how to push the industry forward,” Schiel said in an interview. “The one that really landed with customers, and the one that resonated with the industry was refueling satellites. Elon [Musk] has been making rockets reusable – we thought it’s time that we make satellites reusable as well.”

Starting from this realization, the pair founded the company in January 2018. They then secured their first round of pre-seed investment from Bolt in San Francisco in June that year, and also landed two contracts –  including one with NASA, and one with the International Space Station National Laboratory.

“Basically in four-and-a-half months, we got flight-qualified and human-rated from NASA our two tanker test beds that we flew to the International Space Station in December 2018, and March of 2019,” Shield said.

How did they do it with that speed? Faber credits their rapid progress largely to lead engineer James Bultitude, an accomplished space engineer with five payloads on the International Space Station already.

“He took [the project] from a napkin through to flight hardware in four-and-a-half months,” Faber said. “All qualified to NASA human-rated safety standards, which was quite the feat. We really had to push hard on NASA.”

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Faber said that the company’s ability to spur the U.S. space agency into action has been a key driver of its success. In fact, he relayed a story in which their National Lab demonstration payload was actually left off of its intended flight, but the team was able to get its cargo approved by top NASA decision-makers over the course of a weekend and just barely made the cut as a result.

As for working with NASA as a startup, Faber said that it’s become a very different affair, with the agency eager and adapting to working more with younger companies and startups bringing a different pace of innovation to the field.

“The change is almost palpable on the phone with NASA – you can almost hear them changing,” he said.

At Disrupt, Orbit Fab demonstrated their robotic connector for refueling on stage for the first time. The idea is that satellite makers will build their standard nozzles into their designs, and then a robotic refueler will be able to seek out the nozzle, open and then close on to the coupler, forming a solid connection to allow propellant transfer.

Already, Orbit Fab is talking to partners, including Northrop Grumman, and it’s a member of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS), an industry group that aims to make robotic service and maintenance of satellites a viable reality.

https://ift.tt/336CK8F Orbit Fab raises $3M to make orbital refueling easier, cheaper and more accessible https://ift.tt/31Qh948

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T4 wants to transform market research data with a combination of AI and humans

When T4 co-founder and CEO Maks Khurgin was working at Bain and Company, he ran into a common problem for analysts looking for market data. He spent way too much time searching for it and felt there had to be a better way. He decided to build a centralized market data platform himself, and T4 was born. This week the company competes in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield.

What he created with the help of his long-time friend and CTO, Yev Spektor, was built on a couple of key components. The first is an industry classification system, a taxonomy, that organizes markets by industries and sub-industries. Using search and aggregation tools powered by artificial intelligence, it scours the web looking for information sources that match their taxonomy labels.

As they researched the tool, the founders realized that the AI could only get them so far. There were always pieces that it missed. So they built a second part to provide a way for human indexers to fill in those missing parts to offer as comprehensive a list of sources as possible.

“AI alone cannot solve this problem. If we bring people into this and avoid the last mile delivery problem, then you can actually start organizing this information in a much better way than anyone else had ever done,” Khurgin explained.

It seems simple enough, but it’s a problem that well-heeled companies like Bain have been trying to solve for years, and there was a lot of skepticism when Khurgin told his superiors he was leaving to build a product to solve this problem. “I had a partner at Bain and Company actually tell me, “You know, every consulting firm has tried to do something like this — and they failed. Why do you think you can do this?””

He knew that figuring out the nature of the problem and why the other attempts had failed was the key to solving the puzzle. He decided to take the challenge, and on his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Bain and started T4 the next day — without a product yet, mind you.

This was not the first time he had left a high-paying job to try something unconventional. “Last time I left a high paying job, actually after undergrad, I was a commodities derivatives trader for a financial [services company]. I left that to pursue a lifelong dream of being in the Marine Corps,” Khurgin said.

T4 was probably a less risky proposition, but it still took a leap of faith that only a startup founder can understand, who believes in his idea. “I felt the problem first-hand, and the the big kind of realization that I had was that there is actually a finite amount of information out there. Market research is created by humans, and you don’t necessarily have to take a pure AI approach,” he said.

The product searches for all of the related information on a topic, finds all of the data related to a category and places it in an index. Users can search by topic and find all of the free and paid reports related to that search. The product shows which reports are free and which will cost you money, and like Google, you get a title and a brief summary.

The company is just getting started with five main market categories so far, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking, data centers and eSports. The founders plan to add additional categories over time, and have a bold goal for the future.

“Our long-term vision is that we become your one-stop shop to find market research in the same way that if you need to buy something, you go to Amazon, or you need financial data, you go on Bloomberg or Thomson. If you need market research, our vision is that T4 is the place that you go,” Khurgin said.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J T4 wants to transform market research data with a combination of AI and humans https://ift.tt/2V91Ssz

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Civic Champs app gives nonprofits the tech tools to manage volunteers

Nonprofits employ 10% of the U.S. workforce and generate some $2 trillion in revenue each year and yet, many charitable organizations are still using pen and paper to track their volunteers.

Civic Champs, a startup that presented onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, has developed a platform that aims to give non-profits the tech tools they need to better manage volunteers.

“The nonprofit market is underserved by technology companies,” co-founder and CTO Mike Jeffery told TechCrunch.

Civic Champs is initially focusing on volunteer management. However, the mobile app, which was built with React Native for Android and iOS, can be broadened over time.

For instance, the company recently launched a micro-donations feature that automatically converts volunteers to donors. The feature will integrate a number of payment options, including Stripe, Apple Pay, and Plaid/Dwolla for ACH donations.

The Civic Champs platform uses geolocation and geofences to automate volunteer-hour tracking. The seemingly simple task of checking volunteers into events and tracking their time can take a small nonprofit 10 hours per month to manage, according to the company. Civic Champs co-founder and CEO Geng Wang says their platform can slash that task down to an hour per month.

Civic Champs designed a mobile-first platform. However, the company’s co-founders say they understood that not all volunteers will have smartphones or want to use the app. So they developed three ways to use the platform.

Volunteers can use the Civic Champs mobile app to check in at events and track their hours. The platform has also been adapted to web-based kiosks, which nonprofits can use to make it easier for tech-averse volunteers to check in. A volunteer’s hours can also be tracked through a nonprofit’s administrative features on both the app and the web. All three tracking methods — mobile, web kiosk, or by administrator — synchronize volunteer tracking across platforms and between users and potentially multiple organizations.

With the launch of Civic Champs, Wang, who co-founded the startup with Jeffery and Ryan Underdahl, is now solidly in serial entrepreneur territory. Wang’s first startup, RentJungle, was an apartment search engine, which was acquired in 2014 by The Rainmaker Group. Wang’s second startup, a social media marketing firm called Community Elf that has since been rebranded as Cosmitto, was acquired in 2017 by private equity firm Topanga Partners.

For his third go around, Wang told TechCrunch he wanted to do something more mission-driven. The original idea was to create a mobile game for volunteering. This “Pokemon Go” of volunteering would let users contribute in small ways — like helping cities collect data on physical assets, such as traffic lights and fire hydrants using GPS and photo uploads.

But that idea quickly morphed into something larger when Geng started talking to volunteer organizations and learned the challenges were far more basic and widespread.

“Essentially, nine out of the 10 organizations we talked to still track their volunteers on pen and paper forms,” Geng said. “As a former consultant, I thought well that’s sort of crazy. That’s a lot of time that you’re spending on paperwork that you could direct back to the community and in certain, more impactful ways.”

The co-founders pivoted away from gamification and started developing a mobile platform that nonprofits can use to track volunteers. The company officially launched in January 2019.

Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in a pre-seed round and also received $29,000 in non-dilutive grants through the Indiana University CLAPP competition and the Indiana Technical Assistance Program.

The company is still figuring out its pricing structure. Civic Champs does have 34 customers, 24 of which are paid clients. The remaining 10 are pilots. The business model, which is set up like a Software-as-a-Service product, charges between $25 a month for its smallest customer up to $450 a month for its largest client.

The Rotary Club, Habitat for Humanity and The Audubon Society are among its customers.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Civic Champs app gives nonprofits the tech tools to manage volunteers https://ift.tt/2VkTial

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Meet Vise AI, the startup reimagining portfolio management

The founders of Vise AI met when they were 13, a couple of teenagers more interested in applied artificial intelligence than English class. Fast-forward several years and the pair has relocated from the Midwest to San Francisco to raise money for a financial technology business they’ve been self-funding since 2016.

As teenagers with an inordinate amount of AI knowledge, Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra proved to be quite useful to large businesses, investment bankers and other financiers. Leveraging their AI know-how, they were paid $700 per hour by a consulting firm to teach financial “experts” about AI. Mehrotra, according to Vasavada, is a mathematical prodigy: “And that translates extremely well to AI, right, because what underlies AI is math,” Vasavada, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vise AI, tells TechCrunch. “We had the ability of articulating what AI is to investment bankers in a way that they would understand. Whereas most expert explanations would be really complex and very technical.”

Meanwhile, school was on autopilot. “I was taking phone calls in English class,” Vasavada said. “It wasn’t very good but we were making a lot of money.” Ultimately, that money funneled into the early makings of a real business, Vise AI, which automates portfolio management using AI and machine learning. Launching onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today, the SEC-registered investment advisor will begin customer on-boarding next week. In short, the platform analyzes clients’ investment needs and builds them a personalized portfolio of stocks, bonds and other assets, then provides investment manager tools to automate management.

“It’s an unsexy industry that makes all of the money in finance,” said Mehrotra, co-founder and chief technology officer of Vise AI.

For now, the team is going after independent advisory shops, those without a flock of analysts available at their beck and call and who need outsourced investment management. Ultimately, they plan to pursue the big wealth managers. The business has also been approved as a subadvisor by TD Ameritrade Institutional, which has thousands of independent RIAs on its platform.

“The icing on the cake is what we refer to as portfolio intelligence,” Vasavada explains. “We can provide unique insights, justifications and logic as to why specific investment decisions were made — talking points to make the advisor look smarter with the clients because it’s a relationship game with these advisors, so tools that will help build their relationships and help empower their relationships, while still delivering a better portfolio to the client is the type of solution that really needs to be built in this space.”

“We are literally giving them bite-sized portfolio intelligence,” adds Mehrotra. “Because most of them aren’t really doing the investment management themselves, right? So they’re either using some ETF allocation tool, like Betterment for Advisors, or something like that, where it’s just a standard set of ETFs and there really isn’t any personalization.”

We felt like we were turning away tons of money. Vise AI co-founder Samir Vasavada

Vasavada, hailing from Cleveland, and Mehrotra, raised just outside Detroit, met years ago at a Northwestern University summer research program. The two have since established themselves as AI experts, supporting high-profile clients (who they can’t name due to non-disclosure agreements) as consultants and completing the fintech conference circuit a few times over. But when it came to raising venture capital to exit the era of self-funding and launch their AI-enabled portfolio manager, they were clueless.

Their first infusion of outside capital came in the form of a $20,000 uncapped note from Dorm Room Fund. A little something to help them through the daunting fundraising process. But their first real pitch meeting was with none other than Vinod Khosla, the billionaire founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures. Khosla’s son, Neal Khosla, had worked on the investment team at Dorm Room Fund and made the introduction.

Khosla passed and the Vise team realized they had no idea what they were doing. They began refining their pitch. After reaching out to roughly 1,000 different investors (Vasavada created a detailed CRM to track all their cold pitches) they raised $2 million from co-leads Keith Rabois, a co-founder at PayPal and a partner at Founders Fund, and Ben Ling of Bling Capital, two investors who were, ironically, former general partners at Khosla Ventures. Great Oaks Ventures, Flatiron Health co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, Future Advisor founder John Xu, NFX’s Pete Flint and Contrary Capital also participated. Vasavada and Mehrotra said that once they had tapped two high-profile leads, offers came flooding in, including from VCs who had rejected them just weeks before.

“This was our first round of fundraising ever,” says Mehrotra. “So in the beginning, a lot of it was just like, figuring out how things worked and learning how to best pitch the company because it is a niche market. I think once we got the momentum … We felt like we were turning away tons of money.”

We want to empower advisors to be better at their jobs. Vise AI co-founder Runik Mehrotra

Once they reach $50 million in assets under management, Vise plans to raise a much larger round of funding to help the team expand and open an office in New York.

Vise is targeting a market worth trillions in one of the most valuable industries in the world. To succeed in the long term, the startup will have to infiltrate a decades-old network relying on legacy technology, as well as battle Silicon Valley’s narrative that robo-advisors will soon make the financial advisory space obsolete. According to their thesis, companies like Betterment and Wealthfront are successful with tech-rich millennials, but once one accumulates “real wealth,” it’s a conversation with a human being they’re looking for, not an easy-to-use app.

“We want to empower advisors to be better at their jobs, so they can focus on actually building better relationships and holding their clients’ hand,” said Mehrotra.

Betterment keeps growing as fintech competitors rise

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Art on blockchain pioneer Verisart raises $2.5M for art and collectibles certification

A lot of talk has been made about verifying valuable items on an immutable blockchain, but the main pioneer in this space has been Verisart, which appeared a few years ago to use a blockchain to create certification for the fine art and collectibles market. But despite the blockchain hype of the last few years, Verisart eschewed the fundraising bonanza, preferring instead to perfect its model and build partnerships.

That changes today with the news that it has raised $2.5 million in seed financing in a round led by Galaxy Digital EOS VC Fund. Further investment has come from existing investors Sinai Ventures and Rhodium. The funding will be used to expand Verisart’s commercial platform for authentication and further expand in the art world.

Co-founder and CEO Robert Norton commented: “With this new round of funding, we’re able to scale our business and ramp up our partnership integrations. The art world is quickly realizing that blockchain provides a new standard in provenance and record-keeping and we’re looking forward to extending these services to the industry.”

The $325mm Galaxy EOS VC Fund is a partnership between Galaxy Digital, a blockchain-focused merchant bank, and Block.one, the publisher of EOSIO, the blockchain protocol.

The funding will go towards extending the product and engineering team and launching a suite of premium services aimed at artists, galleries and collectors. The company recently appointed Paul Duncan, formerly the founding CTO of Borro, the online lending platform for luxury assets, to lead the engineering team.

In 2015, Verisart was the first company to apply blockchain technology to the physical art and collectibles market. It’s also working with some of the world’s best-known artists including Ai Wei Wei and Shepard Fairey to certify their works of art. In 2018, Verisart won the ‘Hottest Blockchain DApp’ award at The Europas, the European tech startup awards.

It’s also been the first blockchain certification provider on Shopify to offer digital certification for limited editions, artworks and collectibles.

Other players are now entering this growing blockchain-for-art market. Codex Protocol is a new startup also putting art on the blockchain.

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TikTok explains its ban on political advertising

Already under fire for advancing Chinese foreign policy by censoring topics like Hong Kong’s protests and pro-LGBT content, the Beijing-based video app TikTok is now further distancing itself from U.S. social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with a ban on political ads on its app.

The company today says it will not allow political ads on TikTok, noting they don’t fit in with the experience the short-form video app aims to offer.

“Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” says Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook.

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level – including election-related ads, advocacy ads, or issue ads,” he says.

TikTok further explains that it wants to be known as a place for creative expression, and one that creates a “positive, refreshing environment” that inspires that creativity.

It will further encourage these goals through its products like its fun filters and effects as well as its brand partnerships.

Today, TikTok offers a range of ad opportunities, including in-feed video ads, launch screen ads, and other native ads like its sponsored hashtag challenges. It also more recently launched a beta version of the TikTok Creator Marketplace, which will help to connect brands with TikTok creators for their marketing campaigns.

“Throughout all of this, however, our primary focus is on creating an entertaining, genuine experience for our community,” Chandlee continues. “While we explore ways to provide value to brands, we’re intent on always staying true to why users uniquely love the TikTok platform itself: for the app’s light-hearted and irreverent feeling that makes it such a fun place to spend time,” he says.

Political ads don’t fit with this agenda, the company believes.

But running those sorts of ads also come with significant challenges, as Facebook has found.

It had to create a system to verify the credentials of political advertisers, for example, which requires them to submit identification information like their street address, phone number, business email and website matching the email, tax ID number, or U.S. Federal Election Commmission ID number. It also launched a publicly searchable database of political ads, for transparency’s sake.

As a Chinese-run company, TikTok may not have the resources to run a similar operation. In fact, it seemed to be having trouble cracking down on the hate speech found on its app last year, VICE had reported.

The ban on political ads isn’t really new to TikTok, it’s more of a reiteration of the existing policy — but it’s a statement that TikTok hadn’t made before.

The company tells Techcrunch it decided to address the policy proactively in order to be transparent about its advertising policies — especially as interest in marketing opportunities continues to grow on the platform.

 

 

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