EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million.

Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, the company has installed its hardware in five stores in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand globally using the new investment. Standard Cognition co-founder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal tells TechCrunch the company is counting on support from European VC firm EQT Ventures, which led the deal, to launch its technology in Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the Standard Cognition autonomous checkout experience: A customer walks into one of Standard Cognition’s partners’ stores and one of 27 overhead cameras (more or less depending on the size of the store) will identify you by shape and movement, not facial recognition. The customer then opens the company’s iOS or Android app and a special light pattern flashes, allowing the cameras to tie you to your account and payment method. Finally, grab whatever items you need and leave the store. No checkout is required for Standard Cognition to bill you. It even works without an app: Shop like normal and then walk up to a kiosk screen, the cameras identify what items you have chosen and you can pay with cash or credit card.

News of Standard Cognition’s Series B comes shortly after Amazon confirmed plans to open three additional Amazon Go stores, the e-commerce giant’s cashierless convenience stores. Amazon opened its first Amazon Go store in Seattle in 2016, though Standard Cognition, which operates only one branded brick-and-mortar store of its own, was first to plant roots in San Francisco. Standard Cognition, however, has no plans to open any more of its own stores because “running stores takes a lot of effort,” said Suswal. Instead, the company plans to bring its cashierless experience to other retail chains with the fresh funds.

Standard Cognition announces its Series B financing just eight months after closing a $40 million Series A. Suswal, justifying the lightning-fast growth, said 2019 has been Standard’s “year of deployment,” next year will be “the year of repeatability” and 2021 will be “the year of scale.” The company has raised a total of $86 million in venture capital funding.

“Traditional brick and mortar retailers are caught in a perfect storm,” EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell said in a statement. “From the encroachment of behemoths like Amazon into every inch of the market to changing consumer attitudes, as busy people demand an ever more efficient shopping experience, margins are being squeezed like never before. The talented and driven Standard Cognition team have worked quickly to build a product that allows physical retailers, of all sizes, to tackle these challenges.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Standard Cognition lands M at 5M valuation to battle Amazon Go

Amazon’s Alexa ushered in a new dawn of user interfaces, bringing voice into the mix as a viable option. Dozens of companies have sprouted because of this, not least of which being Airbud.io.

Airbud allows any company to add a voice interface to its website. The company just closed a $4 million round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from ERA and Spider Capital.

Airbud was co-founded by Israel Krush, Uri Valevski and Rom Cohen after the team saw the growth of voice interfaces and wondered how to capitalize on it.

By allowing companies to add voice/chat bot utility to their websites, Airbud hopes to increase retention of end-users on sites and give them easier access to the information they seek. Krush says that Airbud is focusing on websites that you have to be on, rather than the ones you want to be on.

That means Airbud clients are mostly in the healthcare space and travel space, helping end-users find a physician or book a flight using their voice.

Most importantly, Airbud operates on a plug and play system, meaning that clients don’t have to do the usual heavy lifting involved in creating a chat bot. Most of the time, folks who implement chatbots have to build a conversation tree. Airbud uses existing information scraped from the website, paired with an easy plug-and-play system for clients, to automatically build out a knowledge graph and have conversations with end-users.

Airbud charges based on the number of indexed pages and traffic to those pages.

The company plans to use the funding to increase the size of its team from seven to 15.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Airbud raises million to add a voice interface to your website

Space startup ispace, which is headquartered in Japan but has a European subsidiary based in Luxembourg, will take part in PROSPECT, a program run by the European Space Agency (ESA) that intends to extract water from the Moon’s southern pole, with a target mission date of 2024 or 2025.

PROSPECT isn’t just a cool reference to the actual act of prospecting — in typical space science style, it stands for something. Specifically, “Package for Resource Observation and in-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Commercial exploitation and Transportation,” which is clearly a mouthful. But it describes more fully what the project is: a payload that the ESA is creating to be delivered via a lunar mission planned by Russia’s Roscosmos. ESA’s payload will in fact prospect, looking for lunar water ice in the regions of lunar pole permanently bathed in shadow.

ispace’s contribution will take the form of providing talent via three members of the company selected to help plan, operate and make sense of data retrieved by the mission. ispace Europe’s Carlos Espejel, a Space & Earth Mine Planning Engineer, will lead a key element of the mission tasked with investigating in-situ resource exploration (meaning using the resources on-site for future Moon missions) from a prospecting perspective.

Founded in 2010 in Tokyo, ispace raised more than $100 million in funding in 2018, which it will put toward two lunar missions planned for 2020 and 2021 launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ispace Europe tapped by the European Space Agency for mission to extract water from the Moon

When it comes to turning the wheels of the internet, crowdsourcing is a key component of the engine: the power of people can fund big ideas and good causes; it can help you decide what (or what not) to buy, read, watch or listen to when faced with too much choice; it can help unite opinion; or it can aid in misleading us.

Now, a startup founded in Poland using crowdsourcing for information gathering and e-learning is announcing a growth round of funding. Brainly, a Quora-style platform that helps students find and contribute answers to typical homework questions in subjects like math, history, science and social studies, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in funding — money that speaks to the momentum both of the company and the concept.

The funding was led by Naspers, which was also an investor in the company’s $14 million round in 2017, with participation also from Runa Capital and Manta Ray. It brings the total raised by the company to $68.5 million. Valuation is not being disclosed, including whether this was an up  or down round. For some context, the company was estimated to have a post-money valuation of $134 million in its last round, per PitchBook.

It’s likely that number is up: Brainly currently has 150 million users in 35 markets, growing 50% from 2018, when it had 100 million users. And the company is now turning its focus to a lucrative market for e-learning. The plan — according to CEO and co-founder Michał Borkowski — will be to use some of the funds to help the company break into the U.S., which today only accounts for about 10 million of its user base, but in total has some 76 million students overall.

He added that another area of focus will be monetization. The company today operates a freemium-style service, where the majority of users do not pay to access the site but in turn get served ads, while others choose to pay $3 per month for more features and no ads. Borkowski would not say how many paying users the company has today.

Brainly’s focus — to become a reliable and helpful network for students when they get stuck on a problem in their homework — was surprisingly an area that hadn’t really been tapped when Brainly was founded in 2009. Borkowski said that he and his co-founders — Lukasz Haluch and Tomasz Kraus — came up with the idea when they were already in college. “We would have loved to have had something like this in high school,” he recalled. (Brainly’s original name in Poland when it started out was “Zadane,” which means homework.)

Reliable is the key word here. There may not be many apps on the market today directly competing with Brainly; there is the wider internet and specifically Google, where you can enter anything from natural language questions to actual equations to get answers and explanations of those answers.

The problem today is that you also can get a lot of irrelevant or incorrect or incomplete information in those searches, too, and that is the opportunity for Brainly: to provide a more curated selection of responses specifically to the kinds of questions that students might come across in their homework.

That’s not to say that Brainly is perfect today. In my quick test of searching on a few topics in history and math, I saw a mixed bag of results, some accurate and some obviously plagiarised and some just wrong.

Borkowski said that the company uses a few levers to moderate questions and answers: users can report incorrect information, a team of human moderators also assess reported and other content and there are algorithms that scan recently uploaded questions and answers. (Contributing is unpaid, but regular contributors get invited into a program where they are paid to provide answers, he said.) Borkowski wouldn’t specify what the “strike rate” was for legit postings versus those that needed to be modified or removed, but presumably as Brainly continues to grow, the need to manage the quality of the platform’s content will only grow, too. 

There are a lot of opportunities for how Brainly might shape its product over time: for example, specific markets often have core curricula that students will learn, and standardised tests that they are being taught to take (AP exams in the U.S., for example; or GCSEs and A-levels in the U.K.). Systematically working on making sure that Brainly covers those comprehensively could make it a really coveted and used app for students taking those classes and preparing for those exams.

Another is doubling down on the company’s global remit. A lot of e-learning has been focused around English, and it’s notable that Brainly has been working across a number of other languages, too, from Polish and Russian to Spanish and a number of Asian languages. This gives the company an opportunity not just to expand its user base, but its usefulness in educational initiatives globally.

“We have been impressed by Brainly’s growth over the past 10 years, particularly in the U.S. and high-growth markets like India, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil,” said Larry Illg, CEO of Naspers Ventures, in a statement. “At Naspers, we back companies seeking to address big societal needs like education, helping them fulfill their vision with the ultimate aim of achieving global scale. Brainly has the potential to serve the needs of hundreds of millions of students around the world and Michał and the team are building an invaluable service for learners everywhere.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Brainly, a crowdsourced homework helper for students, raises M to expand in the US

With a successful launch from the Gobi Desert blasting off at around 1:10 PM Beijing time (1:10 AM ET), Chinese space launch startup ispace (which, awesomely, is also called StarCraft Glory Space Technology Co.) became the first private Chinese commercial space launch provider. The company’s SQX-1 Y1 rocket delivered two commercial satellites to an orbit of about 300 km (about 186 miles) above Earth.

The launch is the first successful commercial mission for the SQX-1 Y1 solid-propellant rocket developed by ispace, which is a four-stage design that can carry up to 260 kg (around 575 lbs) and weights around 68,000 lbs.

This is a major milestone for the Chinese space industry, and ispace beats out a healthy crop of competitors, including LandSpace and OneSpace, both of which did not succeed in earlier attempts to be the first in China to the private launch market.

Founded in October 2016, ispace secured a Series A funding round of an undisclosed amount in June, including investment from CDH Investment, Matrix Partners China and Shunwei Capital . The company completed sub-orbital flights in 2018 as precursors to the SQX-1 Y1 rocket.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ispace becomes the first private Chinese company to launch satellites to orbit