Two weeks left to save on TC Early Stage passes

Are you an early stage founder? Then listen up, because we created TC Early Stage just for you. This two-day virtual conference takes place on July 21-22. We’ll provide the details below, but first things first. Early bird tickets cost just $199 for early-stage founders, but this sweet deal flies south on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Avoid the price hike. Buy your ticket now and save $50.

TechCrunch Early Stage sprouted roots in Extra Crunch, our subscription-based editorial content that offers founders extensive analysis and advice on essential topics. Think about Early Stage along the lines of an accelerated accelerator for early founders — only with more experts across a bigger range of the startup ecosystem.

With more than 50 presentations from which to choose, you’ll get your burning questions answered by people who know the score. We’re talking actionable, how-to advice on crucial topics that every early stage founder needs to know — legal, investing, marketing, tech development, recruiting, pitching and a bunch more.

Here’s another reason to get your ticket sooner rather than later. We limit each breakout session to 100 people, and sign-up is on a first come, first serve basis. But don’t fret about missing something essential. Videos of all the sessions will be available on demand after the event.

Ready for a taste of what you can expect to experience at Early Stage? Check out these examples and be sure to check out the agenda here to find out which sessions you want to attend.

• When it comes to fundraising, timing is everything — There are some shockingly common timing mistakes founders make that can turn an otherwise successful fundraise into a failure. Jake Saper, partner at Emergence, will discuss how to avoid them and how to sequence efforts from the time you close your seed to ensure you find the right partner (at the right price!) for Series A and beyond.
• Growth marketing: Minimum viable email — Love it or hate it, email is here to stay. But understanding where it fits into the conversion funnel, and how to maximize its impact can be arduous. Learn from Sound Ventures partner Susan Su how to optimize open rates, deliverability, unsubscribes and conversions for consumer and enterprise products alike.
• Think like a PM for VC pitch success — Your pitch deck is not just a reflection of your business, it’s a product unto itself. Your startup’s success, and avoiding the end of your runway, depends on the conversion rate of that product. Hear from Lo Toney, Plexo Capital founding partner, about how thinking like a PM when crafting your pitch deck can produce outstanding results.

TC Early Stage takes place on July 21-22. Want to keep some money in your pocket and score a seat at your choice of breakout sessions? Buy your early bird ticket now. Prices go up on June 26.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Early Stage? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Snapchat looks to maintain its own friendships — with devs

Over the past few years, Snapchat has been building up an increasingly complex weave of partnerships.

They have their advertising partners that power the vast majority of their monetization efforts. They have app developers on Snap Kit that they are also selling new features like CameraKit and Minis too. They’re bringing game developers on board for their Snap Games initiative, including another partnership with Zynga, which they announced today. They’re also continuing to chase mobile-first original content programming for Snapchat Discover. Sometimes these distinctions can create grey areas. For instance, in a conversation with TechCrunch, Ben Schwerin, Snap’s VP of Partnerships, insists Snapchat isn’t competitive with Quibi, which is an advertising partner.

“Comparing Quibi and Snapchat — and I know it’s easy to do — is like comparing cable TV and Snapchat,” he says.

Snapchat is perhaps better positioned than any other app in the United States to replicate what Tencent’s WeChat has pulled off in China, turning a friend-to-friend messaging app into a national platform. Snap is still a long way from pulling that off, but on Thursday at their annual Snap Partner Summit, they shared some of the required building blocks for making that happen, namely richer third-party experiences via upgrades to their developer kit and a new initiative called Snap Minis.

Snap says they now have 800 developers that have integrated with Snap Kit and that a combined 150 million users access these integrations on a monthly basis.

In the U.S., developers have had a largely frayed relationship with social media companies. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have significantly locked down many of the developer capabilities they launched with, often turning off features that were key to developer experiences overnight. Snapchat’s dedicated developer platform Snap Kit is only two years old at this point, but witnessing the pitfalls faced by Facebook in regard to privacy has allowed Snap to build out a platform that brings developers into the fold with certain features but keeps the real treasure — Snapchat’s social graph — buried inside its walled garden.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Snapchat looks to maintain its own friendships — with devs Lucas Matney https://ift.tt/2UERiKJ
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Pipo Saude raises $4.6 million to bring healthcare benefits management services to Brazil

Pipo Saude, a Brazilian provider of healthcare services for businesses and their employees, has raised $4.6 million in a new round of funding to expand its footprint in Brazil.

“The company’s platform offers recommendations for the healthcare products that fit the team, enabling businesses to improve the quality of life of their employees,” said chief executive and co-founder, Manoela Ribas Mitchell. “We go all the way to the end beneficiaries.”

Pipo Saude helps companies price their insurance appropriately and bring down the medical loss ratio that companies suffer. Medical inflation in Brazil may be worse than in the U.S., with prices rising at around 20% per year.

Like the U.S., people in Brazil often default to hospitals and urgent care facilities when they’re sick or injured; that “urgent care culture,” as Mitchell calls it, drives up the cost for providers and employers. “We try to move the needle toward preventive care and specialist doctors,” Mitchell said.

Backing the company with a $4.6 million round are two of Latin America’s top investment firms — Monashees and Kaszek Ventures. OneVC, the San Francisco-based investment firm that also invests in Latin American tech companies, also participated in the round.

Pipo Saude makes money off of commissions and has a few corollaries in companies like Zenefits (in its earliest days), Amino or the Canadian care benefit management company, Mitchell said.

The company currently has about 30 employees on staff, and some of the new cash will be used to scale the business.

For co-founders Mitchell, Vinicius Correa and Thiago Torres, the healthcare market was an obvious choice when they looked to start their own company. Torres and Mitchell had known each other as students at the University of São Paulo, where they both studied economics. Mitchell and Torres both pursued careers in private equity, where Mitchell worked at Temasek and then at Actis, focusing on healthcare, while Torres also went to Agavia Investimentos.

Correa worked in startups, initially as an employee at Nubank, where he met Mitchell through a mutual friend.

While healthcare may be a tough knot to unravel — especially for a startup — the size of the Brazilian market alone is enormous. “We’re talking about a $50 billion revenue pool,” says Mitchell. “If we want to build a very robust product we have to focus on Brazil for quite a while.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Pipo Saude raises $4.6 million to bring healthcare benefits management services to Brazil https://ift.tt/3fkTqz0

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Facebook’s ‘Deepfake Detection Challenge’ yields promising early results

The digitally face-swapped videos known as deepfakes aren’t going anywhere, but if platforms want to be able to keep an eye on them, they need to find them first. Doing so was the object of Facebook’s “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” launched last year. After months of competition the winners have emerged, and they’re… better than guessing. It’s a start!

Since their emergence in the last year or two, deepfakes have advanced from niche toy created for AI conferences to easily downloaded software that anyone can use to create convincing fake video of public figures.

“I’ve downloaded deepfake generators that you just double click and they run on a Windows box — there’s nothing like that for detection,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a call with press.

This is likely to be the first election year where malicious actors attempt to influence the political conversation using fake videos of candidates generated in this fashion. Given Facebook’s precarious position in public opinion, it’s very much in their interest to get out in front of this.

Facebook is making its own deepfakes and offering prizes for detecting them

The competition started last year with the debut of a brand new database of deepfake footage. Until then there was little for researchers to play with — a handful of medium size sets of manipulated video, but nothing like the huge sets of data used to evaluate and improve things like computer vision algorithms.

Facebook footed the bill to have 3,500 actors record thousands of videos, each of which was present as an original and a deepfake. A bunch of other “distractor” modifications were also made, to force any algorithm hoping to spot fakes to pay attention to the important part: the face, obviously.

Researchers from all over participated, submitting thousands of models that attempt to decide whether a video is a deepfake or not. Here are six videos, three of which are deepfakes. Can you tell which is which? (The answers are at the bottom of the post.)

At first, these algorithms were no better than chance. But after many iterations and some clever tuning, they managed to reach more than 80 percent accuracy in identifying fakes. Unfortunately, when deployed on a reserved set of videos that the researchers had not been provided, the highest accuracy was about 65 percent.

It’s better than flipping a coin, but not by much. Fortunately, that was pretty much expected and the results are actually very promising. In artificial intelligence research, the hardest step is going from nothing to something — after that it’s a matter of getting better and better. But finding out if the problem can even be solved by AI is a big step. And the competition seems to indicate that it can.

Examples of a source video and multiple distractor versions.Image Credits: Facebook

An important note is that the dataset created by Facebook as deliberately made to be more representative and inclusive than others out there, not just larger. After all, AI is only as good as the data that goes into it, and bias found in AI can often be traced back to bias in the dataset.

“If your training set doesn’t have the appropriate variance in the ways that real people look, then your model will not have a representative understanding of that. I think we went through pains to make sure this dataset was fairly representative,” Schroepfer said.

I asked whether any groups or types of faces or situations were less likely to be identified as fake or real, but Schroepfer wasn’t sure. In response to my questions about representation in the dataset, a statement from the team read:

In creating the DFDC dataset, we considered many factors and it was important that we had representation across several dimensions including self-identified age, gender, and ethnicity. Detection technology needs to work for everyone so it was important that our data was representative of the challenge.

The winning models will be made open source in an effort to spur the rest of the industry into action, but Facebook is working on its own deepfake detection product that Schropfer said would not be shared. The adversarial nature of the problem — the bad guys learn from what the good guys do and adjust their approach, basically — means that telling everyone exactly what’s being done to prevent deepfakes may be counterproductive.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3cXQ9nK Facebook’s ‘Deepfake Detection Challenge’ yields promising early results Devin Coldewey https://ift.tt/2XZVPtv
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Why are unicorns pushing back IPOs when the Nasdaq is near record highs?

The unicorns are still at it, Vision Fund 2 or no Vision Fund 2.

This week, Instacart announced that it has raised fresh capital at a valuation north of $13 billion. And, on the tail of that news item, DoorDash is looking to add more cash at a valuation that could stretch to a pre-money valuation that exceeds $15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Both announcements make it plain that late-stage unicorns are still able to attract huge sums despite a putatively uncertain, if recently excitable IPO market.

It’s an interesting state of affairs, as the prices that super-late-stage unicorns are able to charge private investors push their valuations so high that only the largest and richest companies might be able to afford buying them. The result could be a closed M&A window that leaves only an exit hatch marked “IPO.”

Amazon, for example, paid around $13.7 billion for Whole Foods, a chain of U.S. grocery stores that the technology giant also uses as distribution points for parcel delivery. Instacart, the grocery delivery service, is now worth $13.7 billion as well.

As the private company’s final investors won’t want to merely break even on their investment, Instacart

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Take Facebook money and get cloned

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

After a pretty busy week on the show we’re here with our regular Friday episode, which means lots of venture rounds and new venture capital funds to dig into. Thankfully we had our full contingent on hand: Danny “Well, you see” Crichton, Natasha “Talk to me post-pandemic” Mascarenhas, Alex “Very shouty” Wilhelm, and behind the scenes, Chris “The Dad” Gates.

Make sure to check out our IPO-focused Equity Shot from earlier this week if you haven’t yet, and let’s get into today’s topics:

• Instacart raises $225 million. This round, not unexpected, values the on-demand grocery delivery startup at $13.7 billion — a huge sum, and one that should make it harder for the well-known company to sell itself to anyone but the public markets. Regardless, COVID-19 gave this company a huge updraft, and it capitalized on it.
• Pando raises $8.5 million. We often cover rounds on Equity that are a little obvious. SaaS, that sort of thing. Pando is not that. Instead, it’s a company that wants to let small groups of individual pool their upside and allow for more equal outcomes in an economy that rewards outsized success.
• Ethena raises $2 million. Anti-harassment software is about as much fun as the dentist today, but perhaps that doesn’t have to be the case. Natasha talked us through the company, and its pricing. I’m pretty bullish on Ethena, frankly. Homebrew, Village Global, and GSV took part in the financing event.
• Vendr raises $4 million. Vendr wants to help companies cut their SaaS bills, through its own SaaS-esque product. I tried to explain this, but may have butchered it a bit. It’s cool, I promise.
• Facebook is getting into the CVC game. This should not be a surprise, but we were also not sure who was going to want Facebook money.
• And, finally, Collab Capital is raising a $50 million fund to invest in Black founders. Per our reporting, the company is on track to close on $10 million in August. How fast the fund can close its full target is something we’re going to keep an eye on, considering it might get a lot harder a lot sooner. 

And that is that, thanks for lending us your ears.

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

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UK competition watchdog launches investigation into Facebook’s $400M acquisition of Giphy

Facebook wants to be the go-to platform for all of your social needs, but a big move it made last month to take ownership in the world of GIFs — the short, looping videos that people use to convey sentiments in online conversations — may not go as it hopes. The UK Competition and Markets Authority — the country’s antitrust watchdog — today announced that it has launched an investigation into Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy, the popular GIF repository and search engine that it announced last month it would be acquiring, reportedly for $400 million, to integrate into its Instagram team. Specifically, it’s looking to see how and if the deal will lessen competition in the two companies’ respective markets.

“The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is considering whether it is or may be the case that this transaction has resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002 and, if so, whether the creation of that situation may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services,” it notes in the announcement.

The CMA is now opening up the case for comments from third parties, to be submitted by July 3, 2020.

The CMA further noted that while its investigation is ongoing, Facebook can’t continue with activities related to the acquisition, unless it has prior written approval from the CMA. This includes integrating the products, integrating the teams, working on business deals or contracts together. Facebook and Giphy both have confirmed to the CMA that they are complying with the order.

GIFs are so ubiquitous on the web, and so easy (and free) to import and use, that the business model behind them is not that immediately obvious, and so it might seem odd to hear about an antitrust complaint related to the acquisition of a GIF platform. However, this is Facebook — a company that’s long been in the crosshairs of competition regulators both in the US and in Europe — and for what it’s worth, even without big money involved (yet), Giphy is huge when it comes to searching for and using GIFs.

And GIFs stand to occupy a big role in the business of the internet, both in general and more direct ways.

On the direct side, while Giphy up to now has not made any money, there is an obvious opportunity to move into the area of sponsored GIFs, and more services to create and disseminate GIF-based content. For a company like Facebook ever looking for more innovative and varied advertising formats that work in a social media context, the allure of a popular platform to fill out that commercial vision is obvious.

On the more general side, they are a key way to create more engagement in social media, another major goal of Facebook — again, as a route to fuelling more audience and eyeballs to drive more ad business. The two already had an integration before Facebook ever made a move to buy it: a full 50% of Giphy’s traffic came from its integrations with Facebook properties Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook itself, speaking to just how linked the use cases already are for the two.

Facebook has had mergers investigated by the CMA before, although it’s never really been given a hard ride through any of them. Perhaps most notably was the company’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the hugely popular messaging platform: given how both platforms, and others at Facebook, have continued to grow, you could argue that there was some antitrust regret over the no-strings-attached nod that the deal got when it closed — which has led to fines after the fact. So it will be interesting to see if the CMA exercises more foresight, or at least better hindsight, with this deal rather than just going through the motions.

 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J UK competition watchdog launches investigation into Facebook’s $400M acquisition of Giphy Ingrid Lunden https://ift.tt/3cXb8Y3
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Byta, the private music sharing service for pre-releases and more, raises seed round

Byta, the music sharing service for pre-releases and other use-cases where there is a need to share sound files privately, has picked up around $1.4 million in seed funding.

The round was led by the Canada Media Fund, with participation from of private investors. They include musician Scott Kannberg, one of the original members of 90s indie rock bank Pavement, who I’m told discovered Byta as a user of the service.

Launched as an MVP in 2015, today Byta describes itself as “the platform for music before it’s on streaming services”. The service lets anyone send and receive digital audio in a “clean, simple and secure way,” and is said to be used by bedroom artists to large record companies for sharing music files during the pre-release process and for collaboration, such as with bandmates, labels, promoters, writers, and DJs etc.

“Throughout the music ecosystem, everyone is privately sharing audio files and streams, long before tracks and albums are released on streaming services and pressed to vinyl,” explains Byta co-founder and CEO Marc Brown, who has worked in the music industry for 25 years.

“An artist’s music is their currency, and when recipients are not able to listen effortlessly, they will move on. The more time that is taken up by technical delays, the less time there is for listening. Though hard to believe, these simple tasks are difficult to accomplish efficiently on a desktop, and virtually impossible on mobile. Byta enables anyone in the music ecosystem to send and receive digital music in a clean, simple and secure way, on desktop and on mobile”.

With regards to use-cases, Brown says producers and artists of all sizes use Byta to quickly swap tracks in the studio, and that managers and larger labels use the platform to securely share high profile releases with key contacts across the music industry. “Byta is music’s first vertical SaaS, meaning our market is the whole music ecosystem,” he says.

To that end, Byta is competing most directly with generic file sharing services, such as WeTransfer and Dropbox), along with artist streaming platforms like Soundcloud.

Adds the Byta CEO: “Unlike our competitors, Byta is built specifically for music. Byta is the only platform which takes advantage of audio files unique properties: embedded metadata, audio quality and streamability”.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Byta, the private music sharing service for pre-releases and more, raises seed round https://ift.tt/2UBeVUi

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Spike raises $8 million to make your email look like a chat app

Asynchronous chat apps like Slack have done their best to kill email, but maybe the key to chat replacing email is just making email look like chat? That’s the idea of Spike, a productivity startup that has built an email app that organizes emails into chat bubbles with an interface that encourages users to keep it short and simple.

Spike’s software began with a focus solely on re-skinning the email experience, but today they’re also launching support for collaborative notes and tasks into their interface as they look to provide a cohesive solution for productivity. The company is fitting an awful lot of functionality into one window, but they hope that streamlining these apps together can leave users spending less time tabbing through separate windows and more time getting stuff done.

“Email is a collection of your tasks, so why should it be separated from where your other tasks are?” asks CEO Dvir Ben-Aroya.

The new functionality widens the ambitions of the software but also refocuses the app on a more complete business use case. Ben-Aroya admits that the company hasn’t pushed monetization very hard in the past, instead looking to scale up its base of free users in an effort to eventually scale up inside organizations. As the app looks to bring small businesses and larger enterprises onboard, the app is keeping its free tier, but to get past limits on message history and note/task creation users are going to have to upgrade to a $7.99 per month per user plan ($5.99 per month when billed annually).

Alongside its product news, the startup also shared today that it has raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners. Wix, NFX and Koa Labs also participated in the round. The company plans to use the cash to aggressively scale hiring and double its team this year.

“[W]e see a massive addressable market for centralized communication hubs to connect disparate messaging channels,” Insight Partners VP Daniel Aronovitz said in a statement. “The current climate and associated macro-tailwinds behind remote teamwork have only strengthened our belief that there is a sizable and growing demand for digital collaboration tools.”

The company’s platform is compatible with most email services and the app is available on Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.

Email startups are often privy to some of a user’s most sensitive data and can receive a lot of inquiries regarding privacy. As a result, Ben-Aroya believes his company is far ahead of competitors when it comes to safety. “Unlike many other available email clients, we’re never touching, manipulating, using, reusing or selling any part of the user data,” he says.

Spike has raised $16 million in funding to date.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Spike raises $8 million to make your email look like a chat app https://ift.tt/3hjFvuW

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This startup just raised $12 million from top VCs to offer financial planning as an employee perk

Companies increasingly recognize that one of the greatest stresses for their employees is financial wellness. Even at innovative tech startups, people typically bump up against the limits of how much they know about wealth management pretty fast.

But providing financial education to a workforce, which has become increasingly common, is largely useless as most employees will tell you. The information can be hard to navigate, and it’s often not personalized in a way that addresses an employee’s circumstance and goals, which change over time depending on whether they are a recent graduate, getting married or even eyeing retirement.

It’s why so many employed people look to outside apps that promise to help them to not only understand their financial picture but actually manage it. It’s also a missed opportunity, according to a growing number of founders who are working to convince employers to move beyond education and instead offering automated financial planning (with a dash of human involvement) as an employee perk.

Their understandable argument: While offering benefits around fertility, family planning, and mental health are wonderful, companies are missing out on the chance to address the very top priority for their employees, which is how to avoid financial trouble.

Origin, a year-old San Francisco-based company led by Matt Watson — whose last company was acquired in December — is among the newest entrants to make the case.

Freshly backed by $12 million in funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Founders Fund and early Stripe employee Lachy Groom, among others, Origin wants to become the place where employees can track financial milestones, get professional advice from licensed financial planners, and take action, whether it be paying down student debt, building emergency savings or finding the right home and automotive insurance.

Currently staffed by 32 employees, six are financial planners, and they can handle the unique circumstances of “mid thousands of people,” says Watson, who notes that after an employee initially sets up a plan, much can be automated until a life event changes the picture.

“If you use just the tech, you’re only getting limited information,” he says, adding that access to Origin’s planners is “unlimited.”

The company already has 15 customers with between 250 and 5,000 employees, including the social network NextDoor; the cloud communications and collaboration software platform Fuze; and Therabody, whose Theragun therapy tool is used by pro athletes and trainers to pulverize their aching muscles.

All are paying $6 per employee per month because it doesn’t matter how much employees are making, says Watson. “The thing about financial stress is that it impacts everyone pretty evenly. The greater your income, the more stuff you buy.”

Considering that employees spend an estimated two to four hours each week dealing with their personal finances, an offering like Origin’s seems like a no-brainer for employers looking to both improve employee productivity and employee retention.

Indeed, the only thing holding back such offerings earlier in time were the kind of open banking APIs that exist today.

Now, the biggest challenge for Origin is to capture employers’ attention ahead of the competition. For example, another startup that’s also developing financial planning services as an employee perk is Northstar, founded by Red Swan Ventures investor Will Peng. More established players like Betterment that have long catered to individual investors are also focusing more on building up ties to employers that can use their offerings as an employee resource.

Either way, the trend is a positive one for employees, who are right now living through an economic roller coaster and could more generally use a lot more help with both staying afloat and saving for the future.

“Everyone struggles with finances,” says Watson, who worked in high-yield credit trading at Citi in New York before moving to San Francisco to start his last company. “I’m supposed to understand this stuff, and it’s complicated for me.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J This startup just raised $12 million from top VCs to offer financial planning as an employee perk https://ift.tt/30zUD1m

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Kahoot raises $28M for its user-generated educational gaming platform, now valued at $1.4B

As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by users themselves) — has raised a new round of funding of $28 million to keep up with demand.

The Oslo-based startup, which started to list some of its shares on Oslo’s Merkur Market in October 2019, raised the $28 million in a private placement, and said it also raised a further $62 million in secondary shares. The new equity investment included participation from Northzone, an existing backer of the startup, and CEO Eilert Hanoa. While it’s not a traditional privately held startup in the traditional sense, at the market close today, the company’s valuation was $1.39 billion (or 13.389 billion Norwegian krone).

Existing investors in the company include Disney and Microsoft, and the company has raised $110 million to date.

Kahoot launched in 2013 and got its start and picked up most of its traction in the world of education through its use in schools, where teachers have leaned on it as a way to provide more engaging content to students to complement more traditional (and often drier) curriculum-based lessons. Alongside that, the company has developed a lucrative line of online training for enterprise users as well.

The global health pandemic has changed all of that for Kahoot, as it has for many other companies that built models based on classroom use. In the last few months, the company has boosted its content for home learning, finding an audience of users who are parents and employers looking for ways to keep students and employees more engaged.

The company says that in the last 12 months it had active users in 200 countries, with more than 50% of K-12 students using Kahoot in a school year in that footprint. On top of that, it also is used in some 87% of “top 500” universities around the world, and that 97% of Fortune 500 companies are also using it, although it doesn’t discuss what kind of penetration it has in that segment.

It seems that the coronavirus outbreak has not impacted business as much as it has in some sectors. According to the mid-year report it released earlier this week, Q2 revenue is expected to be $9 million, 290% growth compared to last year and 40% growth compared to the previous quarter, and for the full year 2020, it expects revenue between $32 million and $38 million, with a full IPO expected for 2021.

As it has been doing even prior to coronavirus outbreak, Kahoot has also continued to invest in inorganic growth to fuel its expansion. In March, it acquired math app maker DragonBox for $18 million in cash and shares. The company also runs an accelerator, Kahoot Ignite, to spur more development on its platform.

However, Hanoa said TechCrunch tht Kahoot is shifting its focus to now also work with more mature edtech businesses.

“When we started out, we were primarily receiving requests on early stage products,” he said. “Now we have the opportunity to consider mature services for either integration or corporation. It’s a different focus.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Kahoot raises $28M for its user-generated educational gaming platform, now valued at $1.4B https://ift.tt/37m83zl

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Snap lets you play as your Bitmoji in third-party games

Snap is announcing at its Snap Partner Summit that the first games that will take advantage of Bitmoji will roll out soon. The feature has already been announced last year, and it looks like developers can finally take advantage of that SDK. You’ll be able to play a game with you as the hero — or at least the Bitmoji representation of you.

While this feature is reminiscent of Xbox Avatars or Nintendo’s Mii on the Wii, 3DS and Wii U, Bitmoji for Games is a cross-platform solution, from mobile games to console games and PC games. The issue with console-specific avatars are that you can’t support Xbox Avatars on PlayStation consoles for instance — that could be the reason why console manufacturers have been slowly phasing out those avatars. Bitmoji for Games could potentially solve that issue.

Having said that, the initial list of partners only includes mobile games on iOS and Android. Games include Super Brawl Universe from Nickelodeon and Playsoft, Uno from Mattel, Scrabble GO from Scopely and a soon-to-be-announced game from French startup Voodoo.

Let’s hope that Snap will be able to expand its list of partners beyond board games and casual mobile games. For instance, I would totally see Bitmoji for Games in Just Dance.

Here’s a concept video presenting the feature. As you can see, you just have to connect with your Snapchat account to import your Bitmoji to third-party games:

In other news, Snap is adding more games to Snapchat. There are already more than a dozen games that you can play with your friends when you’re chatting with them. Some of them are built in-house while others are developed by third-party game makers.

According to the company, 100 million Snapchat users have played a game since the feature launched last year. On average, users who choose to play Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-inspired game that lets you compete with your friends in mini-games, spend 20 minutes in the game in a given day.

There’s a direct correlation between engagement and monetization as Snap doesn’t rely on micro-transactions and in-app purchases with Snap Games. The company monetizes this feature with video ads.

“We took a look at the state of mobile gaming a few years back and observed that so many successful games on mobile didn’t have your friends that deeply integrated into the experience,” Director of Product Will Wu told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of games you just play solo on the bus or on the airplane or something like that. For us, we were really looking to recreate that experience that we may have had growing up, sitting side by side with our friends playing a game on a couch together. You’re actually looking at the same screen.”

The most interesting new game that the company will release in the coming months is Bitmoji Paint. This game is a sort of casual Minecraft-inspired creativity game. Users play together on the same planet and can paint tiles on the ground. It lets you create pixel art and look at other creations.

Other new games include Bumped Out (Zynga), Friend Quizzes (Game Closure), Ready Set Golf! (PikPok) and Sling Racers (Madbox). They will be released over the coming months.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3hguzhH Snap lets you play as your Bitmoji in third-party games Romain Dillet https://ift.tt/2AZLtRf
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