The German pension and insurance industry was a laggard in the world of online a few years ago, but in recent times it has quickly caught up. There’s further evidence of this trend with the news that Xpension (trading as xbAV), an online platform for pensions and life insurance, has raised €25 million in its Series C financing round. This will take its total funding to date to more than €50 million.

The financing round was led by HPE Growth, a growth capital fund. Existing investors Cinco Capital, led by Lars Hinrichs (founder of XING and chairman of Xpension), and Armada Investment, led by Daniel S. Aegerter (founder of Tradex), also participated.

The new funding will be used to scale up Xpension’s corporate pension and life insurance SaaS platform in Germany; expand the offering into private pensions and life insurance and corporate health insurance; and prepare a rollout into other European countries. The company has also launched a video platform for agents to speak to clients, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To date, Xpension has attracted to its platform more than 40 life insurers, 11,000 insurance agents and 3,000 SMEs.

Martin Bockelmann, CEO and founder, commented: “After several years of intensive R&D and broad-based user acquisition, this partnership with HPE Growth allows us to unleash the full potential of our platform in Germany and abroad.”

Tim van Delden, partner at HPE Growth, said: “The move online of the €2.5 trillion global pension and life insurance industry is a huge topic. A SaaS platform like Xpension — which connects life insurers, agents and their corporate and private customers to buy and manage policies — will be a game-changer.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Hinrichs, the active chariman and largest private shareholder, said: “We target not just occupational pensions but the entire segment, which is worth €700 billion in premiums a year. German pensions are the leading pensions segment in Europe. And we are taking advantage of the recent changes in pension policy.”

It would appear that Xpension is in a strong position to potentially open up to end consumers who don’t have pensions, as have similar U.S. platforms, or even to leverage its position to build its own insurance company at some point.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Germany’s Xpension pension platform raises €25M in a Series C growth round

Bustle Digital Group, owner of a portfolio of digital media properties including Bustle itself, says it laid off two dozen staffers today. That includes eliminating the entire staff of The Outline, a culture site that it acquired a year ago.

In a statement, a BDG spokesperson said the company will continue to host The Outline’s archives, and that founder Josh Topolsky will be “exploring alternative paths forward” for its future.

“The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 has forced us to make some tough business decisions,” a BDG spokesperson said. “Most staff will be taking temporary tiered salary reductions and unfortunately, we have eliminated two dozen positions across the company.”

Topolsky (former editor in chief of Engadget and founder of The Verge) founded The Outline in 2016. The site shifted its publication model over time, laying off its writers while maintaining an editorial team that continued to publish freelance content. It was then acquired by Bustle, and Topolsky went on to launch the tech news site Input under the BDG umbrella.

“[I] am tremendously proud of all the weird, funny, interesting, and brilliant stuff we put into the universe, and all the talented writers we were able to publish,” The Outline’s executive editor Leah Finnegan tweeted this morning. “[T]hank you for reading, and [I] hope you will remember what we did fondly.”

BDG, meanwhile, was founded by CEO Bryan Goldberg (pictured above) in 2013. In the past few years, it hasn’t just acquired The Outline, but also Elite Daily, Mic, Nylon and Gawker. In many cases, the deals came after layoffs or other turmoil.

We’re entering what’s likely to be a brutal few months (or longer) for the media industry, as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic pullback in advertising. The layoffs have already started, while BuzzFeed is trying to avoid them by cutting employee pay.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bustle Digital Group lays off staff of The Outline as part of broader cuts

OctoML, a startup founded by the team behind the Apache TVM machine learning compiler stack project, today announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Amplify, with participation from Madrona Ventures, which led its $3.9 million seed round. The core idea behind OctoML and TVM is to use machine learning to optimize machine learning models so they can more efficiently run on different types of hardware.

“There’s been quite a bit of progress in creating machine learning models,” OctoML CEO and University of Washington professor Luis Ceze told me. “But a lot of the pain has moved to once you have a model, how do you actually make good use of it in the edge and in the clouds?”

That’s where the TVM project comes in, which was launched by Ceze and his collaborators at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. It’s now an Apache incubating project and because it’s seen quite a bit of usage and support from major companies like AWS, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Xilinx and others, the team decided to form a commercial venture around it, which became OctoML. Today, even Amazon Alexa’s wake word detection is powered by TVM.

Ceze described TVM as a modern operating system for machine learning models. “A machine learning model is not code, it doesn’t have instructions, it has numbers that describe its statistical modeling,” he said. “There’s quite a few challenges in making it run efficiently on a given hardware platform because there’s literally billions and billions of ways in which you can map a model to specific hardware targets. Picking the right one that performs well is a significant task that typically requires human intuition.”

And that’s where OctoML and its “Octomizer” SaaS product, which it also announced, today come in. Users can upload their model to the service and it will automatically optimize, benchmark and package it for the hardware you specify and in the format you want. For more advanced users, there’s also the option to add the service’s API to their CI/CD pipelines. These optimized models run significantly faster because they can now fully leverage the hardware they run on, but what many businesses will maybe care about even more is that these more efficient models also cost them less to run in the cloud, or that they are able to use cheaper hardware with less performance to get the same results. For some use cases, TVM already results in 80x performance gains.

Currently, the OctoML team consists of about 20 engineers. With this new funding, the company plans to expand its team. Those hires will mostly be engineers, but Ceze also stressed that he wants to hire an evangelist, which makes sense, given the company’s open-source heritage. He also noted that while the Octomizer is a good start, the real goal here is to build a more fully featured MLOps platform. “OctoML’s mission is to build the world’s best platform that automates MLOps,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | OctoML raises M to make optimizing ML models easier