More than three years ago, we told you about Call9, a young, Palo Alto, Calif.-based telemedicine startup that wanted to reduce unnecessary visits to emergency rooms by those who call 911 most frequently, which is people in nursing homes.

The company’s co-founders — Celina Tenev, a radiology postdoctoral fellow from Stanford, and Timothy Peck, who worked previously as an emergency medicine physician and faculty at Harvard Medical School — met while working part-time for a now-defunct startup and shared a disbelief that the patient experience still typically includes spending several hours in an emergency room.

Unfortunately for Tenev and Peck and investors who wound up plugging $34 million into the startup —  including Index Ventures, YC, the YC Continuity Fund, Index Ventures, 8VC and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki — Call9 is shutting down after failing to raise further funding. About 100 people are losing their jobs as a result.

The company, which provided medical equipment and a video platform (via iPad) that enabled doctors to talk with nursing home residents, says its struggle owed to the country’s very slow adoption of “value-based care” — in which doctors are paid based on patient outcomes — rather than the current “fee-for-service” model on which the healthcare industry still relies largely. As CNBC reported last week, Call9’s business plan involved landing deals with insurance plans to split the savings from avoiding an outcome like an unnecessary emergency room visit.

Still, the outlet noted that other startups are selling outcomes-based services to insurers with more success. Among them: Cityblock, a company that spun out of Alphabet and provides healthcare services to low-income people on Medicaid. Cityblock has raised roughly $85 million, including from 8VC.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Venture-backed telemedicine startup Call9 is shutting down

A new startup using computer vision software to turn security cameras into gun-detecting smart cameras has raised $2.2 million in venture capital funding in a round led by Bling Capital, with participation from Upside Partnership and Tensility Venture Partners.

Aegis AI sells to U.S. corporations and school district its technology, which scans thousands of video feeds for brandished weapons and provides threat-detection alerts to customers within one second, for $30 per camera, per month. Coupling AI and cloud computing, Aegis integrates with existing camera hardware and video management software, requiring no on-site installation or maintenance.

“We can take over the role of a security guard with much higher accuracy at a much lower cost,” Aegis co-founder and chief product officer Ben Ziomek tells TechCrunch.

The financing round comes as a fresh cohort of businesses look to new technologies to protect against gun violence. AI-based gun detection is an unproven method, but investors and entrepreneurs alike are hopeful it represents a new era in threat-detection and safety. Seattle-based Virtual eForce, Israel’s AnyVision and Canadian tech startup SN Technologies are among the startups focused on improving security systems across the globe.

For Aegis co-founder and chief executive officer Sonny Tai, protecting against gun violence is personal. The first-time founder, who previously spent nearly a decade in the Marine Corps, grew up in South Africa where gun violence was all too common.

“We had a close family friend who was fatally shot in his own home 20 years ago,” Tai tells TechCrunch. “This prompted my mother to decide that we should immigrate to the U.S. On my end, it inspired a lifelong passion in me. I had to do something about the U.S. gun epidemic.”

Aegis AI co-founders Sonny Tai (left) and Ben Ziomek

Lacking engineering expertise, Tai looked to Ziomek for technical support. Ziomek previously spent several years at Microsoft, most recently leading engineering and data science teams within the company’s AI program. Together they built Aegis, which is currently in the process of uprooting from Chicago to establish headquarters in New York City.

The pair spent 18 months building the technology they say can reliably recognize weapons in security camera footage. They had to take an “aggressive” data augmentation approach to develop the AI, Ziomek explains, as opposed to just scraping the web for images of weapons to feed to the platform.

“If you look at most of the state of the art computer vision models, they are really built specifically for the task of differentiating hundreds of different objects and the objects are very large,” Ziomek said. “We are looking for hard-to-see objects; we honed our system to look for small, dark objects in highly-complex scenes.”

“Traditionally — even if you’re working at Google or Microsoft — you scrape the internet for cats or hot dogs and you use a model based on that,” he added. “What happens when you do that same approach for weapons? You get product images, Instagram shots from people at the shooting range; all of these have no resemblance to real security camera footage.”

To teach its software to identify weapons, Aegis began by scrubbing the web for photos of weapons, then they reached out to key influencers in the personal safety space, who proved to be essential resources throughout the process. To complete the data collection process, they got their hands on real security footage and even took their own posed photos holding weapons to fill in any of the AI’s blind spots.

With a fresh bout of funding, Aegis will develop its technology to detect other threats, including bombs and vehicles.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | VCs bet on Aegis AI, a startup using computer vision to detect guns

Meditation app unicorn Calm wants you to doze off to the dulcet tones of actor Matthew McConaughey’s southern drawl or writer Stephen Fry’s English accent. Calm’s Sleep Stories feature that launched last year is a hit, with more than 150 million listens from its 2 million paid subscribers and 50 million downloads. While lots of people want to meditate, they need to sleep. The seven-year-old app has finally found its must-have feature that makes it a habit rather than an aspiration.

Keen to capitalize on solving the insomnia problems plaguing people around the world, Lightspeed tells TechCrunch it has just invested $27 million into a Series B extension round in Calm alongside some celebrity angels at a $1 billion valuation. The cash will help the $70 per year subscription app further expand from guided meditations into more self-help masterclasses, stretching routines, relaxing music, breathing exercises, stories for children and celebrity readings that lull you to sleep.

The funding adds to Calm’s $88 million Series B led by TPG that was announced in February that was also at a $1 billion valuation, bringing the full B round to $115 million and Calm’s total funding to about $141 million. Lightspeed partner Nicole Quinn confirms the fund started talks with Calm around the same time as TPG, but took longer to finish due diligence, which is why the valuation didn’t grow despite Calm’s progress since February.

“Nicole and Lightspeed are valuable partners as we continue to double down on entertainment through our content,” Calm’s head of communications Alexia Marchetti tells me. The startup plans to announce more celebrity content tie-ins later this summer.

Broadening its appeal is critical for Calm amidst a crowded meditation app market that includes Headspace, Simple Habit and Insight Timer, plus newer entrants like Peloton’s mindfulness sessions and Journey’s live group classes. It’s become easy to find guided meditations online for free, so Calm needs to become a holistic mental wellness hub.

While it risks diluting its message by doing so much, Calm’s plethora of services could make it a gateway to more of your personal health spend, including therapy, meditation retreats and health merchandise from airy clothing to yoga mats. But subscription fees alone are powering a big business. Calm quadrupled revenue in 2018 to reach $150 million in ARR and hit profitability.

Calm is poised to keep up its rapid revenue growth. After the launch of Sleep Stories, “it was incredible to see the engagement spike up and also the retention,” says Quinn. Users can choose from having McConaughey describe the wonders of the cosmos, John McEnroe walk them through the rules of tennis, fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and more.

Quinn tells me “Sleep Stories is now a huge percentage of the business, and also the length of time people spend on the app has gone up dramatically.” She tells me that so many startups are “trying to invent a problem where there isn’t one.” But difficulty snoozing is so widespread and detrimental that users are eager to pay for an app instead of a sleeping pill. Having the Interstellar actor talk about the universe until I pass out sounds alright, alright, alright.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Calm raises M to McConaughey you to sleep