Bestmile, a transportation software startup, has raised $16.5 million in a Series B round led by Blue Lagoon Capital and TransLink Capital.

Existing investors Road Ventures, Partech, Groupe ADP, Airbus Ventures, Serena and others also participated in the round. The company, which launched in 2014, has raised $31 million to date.

Bestmile has developed fleet management software that orchestrates the delicate balance between demand for, and supply of transportation. Managing fleets isn’t new. However, the emergence of new and varied ways for people and packages to move within cities has created new opportunities for software companies.

Bestmile is aiming to become the preferred platform for public transit operators, automakers and taxi companies that offer ride-hailing, microtransit, autonomous shuttle services and even robotaxis. While Bestmile emphasizes the ability of the platform to manage more futuristic means of travel, namely autonomous shuttles, fleet management software is designed to be agnostic. This means it will work for human-driven fleets like traditional taxi cabs as well as autonomous shuttles and, someday, robotaxis.

The startup’s investors also see opportunities for the platform that extend beyond microtransit, ride-hailing and autonomous shuttles. For instance, Airbus Ventures sees Bestmile as a key enabler for urban air mobility, according to Thomas d’Halluin, a managing partner at the Airbus’ venture arm.

The platform works by collecting real-time data such as weather, traffic, demand and vehicle telemetry. It then uses the data to squeeze the most out of the fleet. That means balancing demand from customers with the cost of operations.

The startup, which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland and has an office in San Francisco, already has a number of customers, including autonomous shuttle operators. The company’s software is managing 15 deployments globally. Bestmile announced earlier this week that it has partnered with Beep, an autonomous shuttle company in Orlando, Fla.

Blue Lagoon partners Rodney Rogers and Kevin Reid have joined Bestmile’s board. Rogers is now board chairman. The pair, which have first-hand experience as co-founders, should be able to provide the kind of insight needed to scale a company. Rogers and Reid co-founded enterprise cloud services company Virtustream, which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2015 for $1.2 billion. The business is now part of Dell Technologies.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bestmile raises .5 million to manage human and AI-driven fleets

It’s a countdown to savings, startup fans. Calculate it any way you like — 72 hours, 4,320 minutes or 259,200 seconds — you have just three days left to save up to $1,300 with early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. The deadline strikes at exactly 11:59 p.m. (PST) on August 30. Buy your early-bird pass right now and save.

One of the many reasons Disrupt SF draws more than 10,000 people from around the world is to hear an impressive array of speakers — leading experts and top players in the startup world. They’ll address crucial topics like security and the challenges of protecting your most valuable asset: your customers and their data.

That issue applies to startups and multinationals alike, and we’re thrilled to have Google’s Heather Adkins, IOActive’s Jennifer Sunshine Steffens and Duo’s Dug Song join us to discuss how to build a secure startup from the ground up without slowing growth. That’s just one example — you can peruse the Disrupt agenda here.

Need more reasons to attend Disrupt SF on October 2-4? Let us count the ways. Networking — with more than 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors exhibiting in Startup Alley, you’ll find opportunity upon opportunity to build your network. Whether you’re an investor hunting for a startup to round out your portfolio, a founder in search of an angel or a software engineer cruising for a new gig, Startup Alley is your networking mecca.

Want to prepare ahead of time? We’ve got you. Search our directory of startups exhibiting in Startup Alley. Then be sure to take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free business-matching platform. Once you fill out your profile, CrunchMatch automatically matches companies based on mutual business interests and goals. It suggests meetings and sends out invitations (which recipients can easily accept or decline).

Don’t miss the always-epic Startup Battlefield. We have a fierce cadre of early-stage startups ready to take the Main Stage to launch, pitch and demo their product to the world and a tough panel of judges. Oh yeah — they’re also competing for $100,000 and a chance to change the trajectory of their business. It’s a live-action thrill ride and an opportunity to see the next generation of household tech names — it can and has happened. Fitbit, Mint, Box and a host of other companies launched at a TechCrunch event.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4, but you have only three days left to take advantage of our early-bird pricing and save up to $1,300. Don’t waste time counting the minutes. Buy your tickets before the deadline hits at 11:59 p.m. (PST) on August 30. We can’t wait to see you in San Francisco!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Only 3 days left for early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt SF 2019

The traditional world of publishing has been challenged hard by the digital revolution. Reading as a pastime has been in significant decline, in part because of the proliferation of screens and options for what to watch and do on them. On the other hand, Amazon has led the charge in changing the economics of publishing: the returns on book sales, and profits to publishers and writers, have all seen margins squeezed in the e-reader universe.

A Berlin-based startup called Inkitt has built a crowdsourced publishing platform to buck those trends. It believes that there is still a place for reading in our modern world, if it’s presented in the right way (more on that below), and today it is announcing a $16 million round of funding that underscores its success to date — the Inkitt community today has 1.6 million readers and 110,000 writers with some 350,000 uploaded stories, with a run-rate of $6 million from a new “bite-sized”, immersive reading app it launched earlier this year called Galatea — and its ambitions going forward.

How big are those ambitions? Ali Albazaz, Inkitt’s founder and CEO, said the mission is to build the “Disney of the 21st century.” Digital novels are just the beginning, in his view: plans include a move into audio, TV, games and film, “and maybe even theme parks.”

But before we ride a rollercoaster based on The Millennium Wolves — one of the best sellers on the platform, with $1 million in sales in the first six months of its release; 24-year-old author Sapir Englard is using her royalties to finance her jazz studies at Berklee in Boston, Massachusetts — Inkitt is starting small.

In addition to continuing to search for authors that might make good Galatea fodder, it’s going to add 10 new languages in addition to English, along with more data science to improve readership and connecting audiences with the stories that are most engaging to them. The company has sourced some of its most successful works from places like India and Israel, so the thinking is that it’s time to make sure non-English readers in those countries are also getting a look in.

“It’s a long plan, and we’re working on it step by step,” Albazaz said in an interview this week. “We are looking for the best talents and the best stories, wherever they are being told. We want to find them, unearth them and turn them into globally successful franchises.”

The Series A is being led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation also from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, angel investor Itai Tsiddon, Xploration Capital, Redalpine Capital, Speedinvest, and Earlybird. Inkitt is not disclosing its valuation, but it had raised $5 million before this (including this seed round led by Redalpine).

Fiction for the people

Inkitt got its start several years ago with a very basic idea: an app for people (usually unsigned authors) to upload excerpts of fictional works in progress, or entire fiction manuscripts — novels specifically — to connect them with readers to provide feedback. It would gather data that it collected from these readers to provide more insights into what people wanted to read, to feed its algorithm, and to give feedback to the writers.

It was a simple concept that competed with a plethora of other places where unpublished writers can get their work out there (including Kindle).

But then, six months ago, that concept of data-based, crowdsourced writing and reading took an interesting turn with the launch of Galatea.

With this, Inkitt selects the stories that perform the best on its first app — most readers, most often completed reading, best feedback, most recommended, and so on — and its in-house team of editors and developers reformat them for Galatea as short-form, bite-sized “mini episodes” that come with specific effects attuned to each page you read to make the experience more immersive.

This includes features like sound, haptic effects like the phone vibrating with crashes and heartbeats, fire spreading across the screen in a burning moment, and a requirement for users to swipe to proceed to the next section. (It’s a fitting name for the app: Galatea was the ivory statue that Pygmalion carved that came to life.)

As Albazaz describes it, Galatea was created as a response to the generation of consumers whose attention is constantly being diverted through notifications, and who have become used to getting information in short bursts.

“Nowadays you have Snapchat, Instagram and the rest, and they all send you notifications, but when you read you need a lot of attention,” he said.

So the solution was to cut down the page size to a paragraph at a time.

“Instead of flipping pages as you would on an e-reading app, you flip paragraphs.” These take up no more than about 20% of the screen, he said.

A reader gets one “episode” (about 15 minutes of reading, with several pages of text) free every day, so in theory you could read books on Galatea without paying anything, but typically people buy credits to continue reading a bit more than that each day, and it works out on average to about $12 per book in revenue. Inkitt is now adding multiple thousands of users (installs) each day across its two apps.

In addition to making this about tailoring a reading app to what consumers are most likely to do on a screen today, it’s about rethinking the model for how to source literature to disseminate in the first place.

“We all love stories and the way we create and consume them is evolving continuously,” said KP partner Ilya Fushman. “Inkitt’s rich and dynamic story format is rapidly capturing the imagination of a new generation of readers. Their content marketplace is connecting consumers with authors around the globe to entertain and democratize publishing.”

To date, the focus has very much been on original content that Inkitt has sourced itself. The basic model leaves a lot on the table, though. For one, what about all of the literature that has already been published in the world that either hasn’t really hit the right chord yet with readers, or classics, or popular works that might just be a little more interesting with the Galatea treatment?

On the other hand, the Galatea model seems to be inherently biased towards the most obvious “hits” — page turners that are engaging from the get-go, or are written on themes that have already proven to be popular. What about the wider body of literature that might not be accessible page-turners but are definitely worthwhile reading, stories that might one day become a part of the literary canon. For every Harry Potter series, some still want and need a Finnegan’s Wake or Milkman.

Albazaz has an answer for both of those: he says that his startup has already been approached by a number of publishers to work on ways of using its platform for their own works, and so that is something you might imagine will get turned on down the line. And he acknowledged the blockbuster element of the work on the platform now, but said that as it grows and scales its audience, it will be looking for works that appeal to a wider range of tastes.

The company’s business is a veritable David to Amazon’s Goliath, but one thing Inkitt has going for it is that it offers those who will take a chance on its platform a promise of making a good return.

Albazaz claims that the average writer on Galatea earns 30 to 50 times more than what would be earned via Amazon, which he calls “a horrible partner to work with as a publisher.” He wouldn’t comment exactly on the royalties split is on Inkitt, or whether that higher figure is due to more readers or a better cut (or both), except that he said that there are simply “more readers” of your work, “making you more money.”

It’s also a more flexible platform in another regard: if you want to publish elsewhere at the same time, you can. “No one is locked in,” he said. “Our mission statement, which we have across the wall in our office, is to be the fairest and most objective publisher. That’s the only way you will discover hidden talents.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Inkitt raises M led by Kleiner Perkins to publish crowdsourced novels in ‘mini-episodes’

Ride-hailing company Grab is going to focus some of its efforts on Vietnam with a $500 million investment over the next five years to grow its activities in the country.

While Grab started as a ride-hailing company, it is now much more than that. The company has become a “super app” that you can open to order a ride, order food from restaurants, make payments, get insurance products, loans and much more. It is mostly active in Southeast Asia.

The company recently announced that it would use some of the $7 billion that it has raised to date to bet on Indonesia. Grab plans to invest $2 billion in Indonesia to modernize the country’s transportation infrastructure. The Indonesian government is supporting the move, and Grab is using this opportunity to capture market share.

With today’s move, Grab is essentially doing the same thing at a smaller scale in Vietnam. In particular, Grab is once again partnering with government officials. It has announced a “Tech for Good” road map in the country that should foster Vietnam’s economic development at large.

Grab plans to provide work opportunities in 63 cities in order to fight unemployment. The company is looking for drivers, delivery persons and merchants. They will be able to access credit and insurance products. Of course, this plan will only work if there are enough Grab customers in those cities over the long term.

The company plans to invest in local startups through GrabVentures. Grab will also launch programs to improve digital and financial literacy. Finally, Grab plans to share data with local governments in order to tackle traffic congestion and pollution.

When it comes to metrics, Grab is already quite big in Vietnam. For instance, the company is currently handling 300,000 food deliveries per day through GrabFood. It represents a 400% increase in gross merchandise volume during the first half of 2019. Grab drivers have generated close to $1 billion in revenue over the years.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Grab promises to invest 0 million into Vietnam

Software APIs help different tools communicate with one another, let developers access essential services without having to code it themselves and are critical components for driving a platform-driven strategy. Yet they require solid documentation to help make the best use of them. ReadMe, a startup that helps companies customize their API documentation, announced a $9 million Series A today led by Accel with help from Y Combinator. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 cohort.

Prior to today’s funding announcement, the company had taken just a $1.2 million seed round in 2014. Today, it reports 3,000 paying customers and that it has been profitable for the last several years, an unusual position for a startup. In spite of this success, co-founder and CEO Gregory Koberger said as the company has taken on larger customers, they have more sophisticated requirements, and that prompted them to take this round of funding.

In addition, it has expanded the platform to use a company’s API logs to help create more dynamic documentation and improve customer support kinds of scenarios. But by taking on data from other companies, it needs to make sure the data is secure, and today’s funding will help in that regard.

“We’re going to still build the company traditionally by hiring more engineers, more support people, more designers, the obvious stuff, but the main impetus for doing this was that we started working with bigger companies with more secure data. So a lot of the money is going to help make sure that we handle that right,” Koberger explained.

Image: ReadMe

He says this ability to make use of the API logs has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the company, as the data provides a valuable window into how people use the APIs. “It’s amazing how much you get by just actually seeing what the server sees. When people are having problems with an API, they can debug it themselves because they can actually see the problems, the support team can see it as well,” Koberger said.

Accel’s Dan Levine, whose firm is leading the investment, believes that having good documentation is the difference between making and breaking an API. “APIs don’t just create technical integration, they create ecosystems around core services and underpin corporate partnerships that generate billions of dollars. ReadMe is as much a strategy as it is a service for businesses. Providing clean, interactive, data-driven API documentation to make developers love working with you can be the difference between 100 partnerships or 1,000 partnerships,” Levine said.

ReadMe was founded in 2014. It has 22 employees in their San Francisco office, a number that should increase with today’s funding.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ReadMe scores M Series A to help firms customize API docs

Duolingo is one of the most popular apps on the market for folks who want to learn languages. And now, the service is giving users a way to truly “carpe diem” by offering a course in Latin.

If you’re wondering why Duolingo is offering lessons for a language that hasn’t been commonly used since the 8th century, that’s totally fair. Here’s the scoop: Latin is the backbone for a variety of romance languages, as well as the language of origin for plenty of words across a number of languages, including English.

Studying Latin gives folks a way to study the infrastructure of a handful of other languages.

Moreover, there are plenty of historians, linguists and professors who wish to read in their original Latin form works like “The Aeneid” by Virgil or “Metamorphoses” by Ovid.

Duolingo uses mini-games to help users learn languages. Mini-courses reward users for finishing a course and take away “a life” (like a video game) when users make a mistake. The company hopes that the end result of a user finishing a course is that they’re able to read, write, speak and comprehend that language.

Moreover, Duolingo has troves of data around how people actually learn languages, and uses machine learning to tweak and improve its service based on that data.

Duolingo has raised more than $100 million across five rounds of funding since it launched in 2011, according to Crunchbase.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Duolingo is now offering a beta version of Latin courses