AI startup Adarga has closed a £5 million Series A fundraising by Allectus Capital. But this news rather cloaks the fact that it has been building up a head of steam since its founding in 2016, building up what they say is a £30 million-plus sales pipeline through strategic collaborations with a number of global industrial partners and gradually building its management team.

The proceeds will be used to continue the expansion of Adarga’s data science and software engineering teams and to roll out internationally.

Adarga, which comes from the word for an old Moorish shield, is a London and Bristol-based startup. It uses AI to change the way financial institutions, intelligence agencies and defence companies tackle problems, helping crunch vast amounts of data to identify possible threats even before they occur. The startup’s proposition sounds similar to that of Palantir, which is known for working with the U.S. military.

What Adarga does is allow organizations to transform normally data-intensive, human knowledge processes by analyzing vast volumes of data more quickly and accurately. Adarga clients can build up a “Knowledge Graph” about subjects and targets.

The U.K. government is a client as well as the finance sector, where it’s used for financial analysis and by insurance companies. Founded in 2016, it now has 26 employees — including data scientists from some of the U.K.’s top universities.

The company has received support from Benevolent AI, one of the key players in the U.K. AI tech scene. Benevolent AI, which is worth $2 billion after a $115 million funding round, is a minority shareholder in Adarga. It has not provided financial backing, but rather support in kind and technical help.

Rob Bassett Cross, CEO of Adarga, commented: “With the completion of this round, Adarga is focused on consolidating its competitive position in the U.K. defence and security sector. We are positioning ourselves as the software platform of choice for organisations who cannot deal effectively with the scale and complexity of their enterprise data and are actively seeking an alternative to knowledge intensive human processes. Built by experienced sector specialists, the Company has rapidly progressed a real solution to address the challenges of an ever-growing volume of unstructured data.”

Bassett Cross is an interesting guy, to say the least. You won’t find much about him on LinkedIn, but in previous interviews, he has revealed that he is a former army officer and special operations expert who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded the military cross.

The company recently held a new annual event, the Adarga AI Symposium, at the The Royal Institution, London, which featured futurist Mark Stevenson, Ranju Das of Amazon Web Services and General Stanley A. McChrystal.

Matthew Gould, head of Emerging Technology at Allectus Capital, said: “Adarga has developed a world-class analytics platform to support real-time critical decisioning by public sector and defence stakeholders. What Rob and the team have built in a short time is a hugely exciting example of the founder-led, disruptive businesses that we like to partner with – especially in an ever-increasing global threat landscape.”

Allectus Capital is based in Sydney, Australia and invests across Asia-Pacific, the U.K. and the U.S. It has previously invested in Cluey Learning (Series A, AUS$20 million), Everproof, Switch Automation and Automio.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Adarga closes £5M Series A funding for its Palantir-like AI platform

Visual search has become a key component for how people discover products when buying online: If a person doesn’t know the exact name of what he or she wants, or what they want is not available, it can be an indispensable tool for connecting them with things they might want to buy.

Now, one of the companies building technology to do this has raised a round of funding to expand its business further into the U.S., and not just across digital platforms, but to tap further into the opportunities of bringing visual search into the world of physical commerce, too, by way of smart mirrors and apps for store assistants to better help customers.

Syte, a Tel Aviv startup that works with fashion retailers like Farfetch and River Island, as well as those that sell a wider variety of goods like Argos, Sainsbury’s and Kohl’s, has raised $21.5 million in funding. The Series B was led by Viola Ventures, with participation from Storm Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Axess Ventures and Remagine Ventures.

Syte has now raised $32 million, including a previous round in 2017; it’s not disclosing its valuation but is projecting 300% revenue growth this year.

The use of visual search — using computer vision to “read” a picture, match it up with its metadata and then find pictures of products that are similar to it — has become commonplace in e-commerce in recent years.

Among the many other companies that have this kind of tech — including visual search platforms like Pinterest and social media platforms themselves — Syte’s approach is notable in how it engages shoppers in the process of the search. Users can snap pictures of items that they like the look of, which can then be used on a retailer’s site to find compatible lookalikes. Retailers, meanwhile, can quickly integrate Syte’s technology into their own platforms by way of an API.

Lihi Pinto Fryman, Syte’s CMO who co-founded the company in London with husband Ofer Fryman, Idan Pinto and Dr Helge Voss, said in an interview that the company spent about three years developing its technology — spurred initially by her own surprise, when she was working as an investment banker, at not being able to find a particular dress she spotted in a magazine — and only launched a product about 18 months ago.

Since then, she says Syte has seen “super hyper” growth because of the gap the company is filling.

The crux of the problem goes something like this: Retailers both online and offline have found that a new generation of shoppers are less interested in visiting their storefronts.

They are instead shopping by browsing social media platforms like Instagram and buying from there, which essentially opens those retailers to whole new set of competitors, and puts them potentially at a great disadvantage, as they are not as well-equipped to speak to that audience or anticipate what interests them to trigger sales.

“Young people are on Instagram for hours each day,” Fryman said. Indeed, Instagram is one of the only big social networks that’s seeing usage rise at the moment. “Retailers need to find a way to compete with that and remain in the market, and they can’t just continue what they’ve always done.”

On the other hand, while there are a number of visual search tools out in the market, not all of them are useful enough. “If you are searching for a ruffled floral yellow dress but you get a blouse, it just doesn’t cut it,” she noted. “And if it takes seven seconds to get an answer, that’s also not good, because people will give up after two seconds. Millennials and Gen Z shoppers have a very short attention span, so you need to be accurate and fast.”

The idea is that a product like Syte’s addresses both of these issues, and then some. In addition to its camera-based search service, it provides a recommendation engine to retailers, plus tagging services for its back catalog to complete the service.

“Rarely do we find companies that have managed to solve a technological problem that tech giants have been working for years to solve without success,” says Ronen Nir, general partner at Viola Ventures, in a statement. “The feedback from the market is clear and swift and the rate of adoption of Syte’s solution is unparalleled. We are excited to lead a significant funding round that would be able to take the company to the next level.”

Syte’s more recent foray into physical commerce is an interesting turn as well. Smart mirrors have been more of a wishlist item than something that has seen critical mass adoption so far in changing rooms.

If the idea does catch on, I wonder what kind of a digital divide it might create among retailers, though, since the cost of refurbishing changing rooms to include these, along with all the backend changes that would need to be made, will likely be only the kind of service that bigger or high-end boutiques will be able to shoulder.

More interesting, perhaps, is the idea of app-based tools for assistants, many of whom already carry a smartphone and would likely be grateful for recommendations to help sell better to customers.

“We have a vision to transform product discovery, and thus the e-commerce experience, for both retailers and consumers.” said Ofer Fryman in a statement. “That vision is what has led us since we founded Syte, and it is what continues to lead us as we enter this stage.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Syte snaps up .5M for its smartphone-based visual search engine for e-commerce

Brave Care, the YC-backed urgent care clinic for kids, has today announced the close of a $5 million seed round of funding.

The company graduated out of the recent batch of Y Combinator companies but sat out of demo day because this round was already oversubscribed, according to co-founder Darius Monsef .

Investors that participated in the round include Sesame Street (via their partnership with VC Collaborative Fund), Greycroft, Refactor, Fifty Years, Indicator Ventures, and Founder’s Co-op.

Portland-based Brave Care launched in July with the goal of creating a pediatric-focused urgent care clinic that could both serve companies and save them from spending thousands of dollars on visits to the emergency room.

In 2015, there were approximately 30 million pediatric emergency room visits in the United States — 96.7% of them were treat-and-release visits.

Brave Care wants to be there for parents and kids when the situation calls for something in-between their regular doctor and the emergency room.

The facility was built specifically for children. The waiting rooms are kid-friendly, the instruments in the patient rooms are kid-sized and the general philosophy behind Brave Care focuses on taking extra time to clarify the diagnosis and the treatment options clearly and patiently to parents.

The company also has plans to introduce a triage tool that walks parents through symptoms and helps them decide if they should head to an urgent care clinic or straight to the emergency room.

The funding will allow Brave Care to build out a new electronic health records system that would streamline check-in, foster communication with parents during and after a visit and help physicians and nurses spend more time focused on the patient and less time typing notes on their computers.

“We can’t build a tech-enabled health care business on someone else’s platform,” said Monsef.

Moreover, Brave Care will use the funding to open new, more lightweight facilities in the Portland area that can act as spokes to the main hub facility, where the company has expensive but not oft-used equipment like an X-ray machine or a full-service lab.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | YC-backed Brave Care raises million for pediatric urgent care clinics

Fully autonomous cars may (or may not) be just around the corner, but in the meantime, a startup that’s building in-car apps to help human drivers pass the time when behind the wheel has raised a round of funding.

Drivetime — which makes voice-based trivia quizzes, games and interactive stories that people can play while driving — has raised $11 million in funding led by Makers Fund (a prolific investor in gaming startups), with participation from Amazon (via the Alexa Fund) and Google (via its Assistant investment program).

The startup today has eight “channels” on its platform consisting of games and stories that you can access either within a limited free-to-play tier or via a paid subscription ($9.99 a month or $99.99 a year). The plan is to use the funding to continue expanding that catalog, as well as investing in deeper integrations with its new big-name strategic investors, who themselves have longstanding and deep interests in bringing more voice services and content to the in-car experience.

Co-founder and CEO Niko Vuori told TechCrunch that his ultimate ambition is for Drivetime to become “the Sirius XM of interactive content” for cars, with hundreds of different channels of content.

In keeping with those plans, along with the funding, Drivetime is today announcing a key content deal.

It has teamed up with the long-running, popular game show Jeopardy to build a trivia channel for the platform, which lets drivers test their own skills and also play against other drivers and people they know. The Jeopardy channel will source content from the TV show’s trove of IP and come with another familiar detail: it will be narrated by Alex Trebek, with a new quiz getting published every weekday for premium users.

That social element of the Jeopardy game is not a coincidence. The San Francisco-based startup is founded by Zynga alums, with Vuori and his co-founders Justin Cooper and Cory Johnson also working together at another startup called Rocket Games since leaving the social games giant and exiting that to gaming giant Penn National for up to $170 million. That track record goes some way to explaining the strong list of investors in the new startup.

“Social and interactive formats are the next frontier in audio entertainment,” said Makers Fund founding partner Jay Chi, in a statement. “Niko, Justin Cooper and Cory Johnson, with a decade-long history of working together and a proven track record in building new platforms, is the best team to bring this idea to life.”

“Gaming and entertainment are among customers’ favorite use cases for Alexa, and we think those categories will only grow in popularity as Alexa is integrated into more vehicles,” said Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund at Amazon, in a separate statement. “Drivetime stands out for its focus on voice-first games in the car, and we’re excited to work with them to broaden the Alexa Auto experience and help customers make the most of their time behind the wheel.”

In addition to the three investors in this latest round, prior to this Drivetime had raised about $4 million from backers that include Felicis Ventures, Fuel Capital, Webb Investment Network (Maynard Webb’s fund) and Access Ventures.

Vuori declined to say how many installs or active users the app has today — although from the looks of it on AppAnnie, it’s seeing decent if not blockbuster success on iOS and Android so far.

Instead, the company prefers to focus on another stat, its addressable market, which it says is 110 million drivers in North America alone.

Meanwhile, adding a Jeopardy channel is building on what has worked best so far. The most popular category at the moment is trivia, with Tunetime (a “name that tune” game) coming in second and storytelling a third.

Drivetime’s premise is an interesting one. Drivers are a captive audience, but one that has up to now had a relatively limited amount of entertainment created for it, focusing mainly on music and spoken word.

However, the rise of voice-based interfaces and interactivity using natural language — spurred by the rise of personal assistant apps and in-home hubs like Amazon’s Echo — have opened a new opportunity, developing interactive, voice-based content for drivers to engage with more proactively.

You might think that this sounds like a recipe for a car accident. Won’t a driver get too distracted trying to remember the fourth president of the United States, or who was known as the father of the Constitution? (Hint: It’s the same guy.)

Vuori claims it’s actually the reverse: Having an interactive game that requires the driver to speak out loud can focus him or her and keep the driver more alert.

“We are double-dipping in safety,” he said. “On the one hand, we embody the safety aspects of Alertness Maintaining Tasks (AMTs). But we also act as a preventative, meaning that while players engage with Drivetime, they are not engaging with anything else.”

While the content today may serve as a way of keeping drivers from doing things they shouldn’t be doing while in a car, there is another obvious opportunity that might come as drivers become less necessary and will need other things to occupy themselves.

Longer term, the Jeopardy deal could usher in other channels based on popular game shows. Sony Pictures Television Games, which owns the rights to it, also owns Wheel of Fortune and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

“We are thrilled to work with Sony Pictures Television Games to bring Jeopardy, the greatest game show on the planet, to an underserved audience that desperately needs interactive entertainment the most – the 110 million commuters in North America driving to and from work by themselves every day,” said Vuori said in a statement.

Interestingly, despite the growth of “skills” for Alexa or apps for Google Home and other home hubs, and the overall popularity of these as a way of interacting with apps and sourcing information, Vuori says that he hasn’t seen any competition emerge yet from other app developers to build voice-based entertainment for drivers in the way that Drivetime has.

That gives the company ample opportunity to continue picking up new users — and more deals with publishers and content companies looking for more mileage (sorry) for their legacy IP and new business.

“Drivetime is one of the early pioneers in creating safe, stimulating entertainment for drivers in the car,” Ilya Gelfenbeyn, founding lead of the Google Assistant Investments Program, noted in a statement. “More and more people are using their voice to stay productive on the road, asking the Google Assistant on Android and iOS phones to help send text messages, make calls and access entertainment hands free. We share Drivetime’s vision, and look forward to working with their team to make the daily commute more enjoyable.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Drivetime nabs M from Makers Fund, Amazon and Google to build voice-based games for drivers

AI now touches every aspect of how a company operates — from forming the core of the service itself, through to customer interactions, building new things and helping with mundane paperwork and other back-office tasks. Today, one of the faster-growing startups in the latter category is announcing a round of funding as it continues on its own path: AppZen, which builds AI-powered tools to automate functions within the finance department, has raised another $50 million in funding led by Coatue Management, with previous investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating.

We understand from sources that this funding has been raised at a $500 million valuation, which is a huge hike. For some context, the company in October of last year raised a $35 million round led by Lightspeed that put it at a post-money valuation of $175 million.

The Series C — which brings the total raised by the company to just over $100 million — will be used to continue expanding the platform and its capabilities, CEO Anant Kale said in an interview (Kale co-founded the company with Kunal Verma, who is its CTO).

To date, AppZen’s biggest product has been a service that automatically audits expenses — comparing, for example, an employee’s charges with travel that person has undertaken (along with many other data points) to see if the charges match up; as well as making sure the expenses are compliant with company policies and raising flags when they are not.

This is the product that has won the company a ton of business from huge businesses, which now number 1,500 (another point of comparison: this is more than double the 650 customers it had last October). AppZen users include Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, three of the top 10 banks in the U.S., four of the top 10 media companies, three of the top 10 pharmaceutical manufacturers, two of the top five aerospace companies, a number of other software providers and Verizon (which happens to own us).

Going forward, while the company continues to see a lot of traction with its existing products in auditing how a company pays out money, the plan will be to build that out to other functions of the finance department, covering, for example, other areas where the finance department makes evaluations to determine spend and money collection (billing) across the business.

“There have been so many decades where nothing new was developed for finance departments,” Kale said of the opportunity.

That’s an opportunity that is so big — enterprise IT overall is forecast by Gartner to be a $1 trillion market this year — that AppZen will be facing a large range of competitors, not just those applying automation and AI to auditing expenses but those coming from other angles like robotic process automation (RPA) that are looking to expand from their computer-vision-based tasks into a deeper set of tools addressing other back-office needs. And that’s before you consider the number of other giant businesses (such as SAP) that provide expense management software, the very tools that AppZen is helping to be used in a better way by their clients.

For now, though, AppZen is growing fast, and has secured a formidable place as a reliable partner for its customers.

“AppZen allows enterprises to do something they’ve never been able to do – audit 100 percent of their spend at scale and with the team they have, all before payments go out the door. AI lets these enterprises dramatically reduce spend, comply with policy and streamline process,” said Thomas Laffont, senior managing director for Coatue Management, in a statement. “When we met Anant, Kunal and the team, we were struck by their AI expertise and finance transformation vision, not to mention the company’s clear and rapid execution in the market. ”

At the end of the day, however, even with all the strides that artificial intelligence has helped us make, there is always a catch. In this case, automating more repetitive tasks and calculations that had been the domain of humans doubtless must reduce operational costs in an organization, and generally speed up the process, but AI is not always perfect, and sometimes replacing people with those systems makes it very hard to query results if there is a hiccup.

“Our goal is to make sure employees don’t get too frustrated,” Kale said of the learning process, words that apply not just to the companies building these services, but those organizations buying them, too.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | AppZen nabs M to build AI tools for expenses and other finance team work