Sitting silently with your eyes closed isn’t fun, but it’s good for you… so you probably don’t meditate as often as you’d like. In that sense, it’s quite similar to exercise. But people do show up when prodded by the urgency and peer pressure of scheduled group cycling or aerobics classes. What’s still in the way is actually hauling your lazy butt to the gym, hence the rise of Peloton’s in-home stationary bike with attached screen streaming live and on-demand classes. My butt is particularly lazy, but I’ve done 80 Peloton rides in four months. The model works.

Now that model is coming to mindfulness with the launch of Journey LIVE, a subscription iOS app offering live 15-minute group meditation classes. With sessions starting most waking hours, instructors that interact with you directly and a sense of herd mentality, you feel compelled to dedicate the time to clearing your thoughts. By video and voice, the teachers introduce different meditation theories and practices, guide you through and answer questions you can type in. Each day, Journey also provides a newly recorded on-demand session in case you need a class on your own schedule.

” ‘I tried Headspace’ or ‘I tried Calm .’ With a lot of the current meditation apps, people go on but they drop off very quickly,” says Journey founder and CEO Stephen Sokoler. “It means that there’s an interest in meditating and having a better life but people fall off because meditating alone is hard, it’s confusing, it’s boring. Meditating with a live teacher who can connect with you and say your name, who makes you feel seen and heard makes a huge difference.”

Journey subscriptions start at $19.99 per month after a week-long free trial. That feels a bit steep, but prices drop to $7.99 if paid annually with the launch discount, or you can dive in with a $399 lifetime pass. The challenge will be keeping users from abandoning meditation and then their subscription without resorting to growth hacking and annoying notifications that are antithetical to the whole concept. Journey has now raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Canaan and joined by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Betaworks and more to get the company rolling.

Sokoler’s own journey could set an example of the possibilities of sticking with it. “Meditation changed my life. I was fortunate enough to move to Australia, find a book on Buddhism, and then I had the willpower to start practicing meditation every day,” he tells me. “I lost 85 pounds. People ask me how I lost the weight and they expect me to say a diet like keto or Atkins, but it was because of the program I was in.” Suddenly able to sit quietly with himself, Sokoler didn’t need food to stay occupied or feel at ease.

The founder saw the need for new sources of happiness while working in employee rewards and recognition for 12 years. He built up a company that makes mementos for commemorating big business deals. Meditation proved to him the value of developing inner quiet, whether to inspire happiness, calm, focus or deeper connections to other people and the world. Yet the popular meditation apps ignored thousands of years of tradition when meditation would be taught in groups that give a naturally ethereal activity more structure. He founded Journey in 2015 to bring meditation to corporate environments, but now is hoping to democratize access with the launch of Journey LIVE.

“You could think of it as a real-life meditation community or studio in the palm of your hand,” Sokoler explains. Instructors greet you when you join a session in the Journey app and can give you a shout-out for practicing multiple days in a row. They help you concentrate on your breath while giving enough instruction to keep you from falling asleep. You can see or hide a list of screen names of other participants that make you feel less isolated and encourage you not to quit.

Finding a market amidst the popular on-demand meditation apps will be an uphill climb for Journey LIVE. While classes recorded a long time ago might not be as engaging, they’re convenient and can dig deep into certain styles and intentions. Calm and Headspace run around $12.99 per month, making them cheaper than Journey LIVE and potentially easier to scale.

But Sokoler says his app’s beta testing saw better retention than competitors. “If you’ve ever been to the New York Public Library, there’s so many books versus going to a local curated bookstore where something is right there for you. This is much more approachable, much more accessible,” Sokoler tells me. “There’s a paradox of choice, and having so many options makes it hard for people to stick with it and come back every single day.”

With our phones and Netflix erasing the downtime we used to rely on to give our brain a break or reflect on our day, life is starting to feel claustrophobic. We’re tense, anxious and easily overwhelmed. Meditation could be the antidote. Unlike with cycling or weightlifting, you don’t need some expensive Peloton bike or Tonal home gym. What you need is consistency, and an impetus to slow down for 15 minutes you could easily squander. We’re a tribal species, and Journey LIVE group classes could use camaraderie to lure us into the satisfying void of nirvana.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Journey launches its real-time group ‘Peloton for Meditation’

When Epsagon launched last fall, the Israeli startup had an idea to monitor serverless architectures, specifically AWS Lambda. But the company didn’t want to confine itself to monitoring a narrow class of applications, and today it announced it is now able to monitor a broader set of microservice development approaches.

CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says when it launched, the startup wanted to take aim at serverless and Lambda seemed to be the prime tool for doing that. “Our product was basically a tracing, troubleshooting and monitoring tool that was automatically doing all of that for the Lambda ecosystem. And since then, we’ve seen actually a bigger shift [beyond] just Lambda,” he said.

That shift was to a broader view of this kind of deployment across a set of modern applications involving microservices. When developers move to these modern approaches, it becomes impossible to launch an agent to help monitor what’s happening. Yet the developers still need visibility into the applications.

To help, the company is launching a tracing and logging tool together, a first for this type of monitoring, according to Shapira. “Today, with engineering and DevOps working closer than ever, being able to automatically trace microservices applications without using an agent and combine the tracing and the logging in one platform is extremely valuable,” he said.

Shapira says that over time the company plans to expand this idea and support more frameworks out of the box to allow this kind of open tracing across different tools. “We need to provide support for more and more frameworks becoming popular. Lambda is just one framework,” he explained.

Serverless is somewhat of a misnomer. The servers are still there, but instead of programming to launch on a particular server, virtual machine (VM) or set of VMs, the cloud infrastructure vendor provides whatever infrastructure resources a developer requires at any given moment automatically.

Microservices encompass the idea that instead of building a monolithic application, you break it down into a series of smaller services, typically launching them in containers and orchestrating the containers in a tool like Kubernetes.

The company only came out of stealth last October, so it’s still early days, but it is already expanding, opening a sales office in the U.S. with a four-person staff. The engineering team remains in Israel. It is approaching 20 employees in total.

Shapira wouldn’t talk about exact customer numbers, but says the company has hundreds of users now and is doubling the number of paying customers every month.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Serverless monitoring startup Epsagon expands to cover broader microservices

There’s a new cannabis-infused drink company coming together, helped along by the venture firm DCM, which just plugged $5 million in seed funding into the company.

Called K-Zen Beverages, the months-old startup represents the second cannabis-related investment for DCM after Eaze, the on-demand cannabis delivery platform.

So what’s the appeal? The opportunity to unlock a new market, it seems. Though Bay Area-based K-Zen has yet to roll out its first product — it’s working on three drinks that will be sold as shots and come in lemon chamomile, pink lemonade and wild berry flavors — there aren’t yet throngs of cannabis-infused brands. At least, it remains an open playing field, and the opportunity that K-Zen is chasing looks to be big.

According to one of the boldest predictions so far — unsurprisingly, it’s one that cannabis startups and investors love to cite — the investment bank Canaccord Genuity recently posited that marijuana-infused beverages could hit $600 million in the U.S. by 2022.

Currently, many cannabis-infused beverages, including beer, still lack the psychoactive compound THC because of regulations around it. Companies have instead been infusing their drinks with CBD, a compound that can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants and that has taken off since industrial hemp cultivation was made legal in the United States last year.

But things are changing quickly. Though pot remains illegal at the federal level, 34 states have now legalized medical or recreational marijuana, and more are expected to join their ranks. That largely explains the timing of a startup like K-Zen — whose name blends “kaizen,” a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, and “zen,” a state of calm originally associated with Zen Buddhism. More to the point, it explains why K-Zen isn’t steering clear of THC but will instead sell one drink that features it exclusively, and blends of CBD and THC with the others.

As explains co-founder and co-CEO Judy Yee — a veteran of numerous packaged goods and health and wellness companies — K-Zen is looking to target people like herself, a busy working mother who was looking for new ways to “bring joy into an active lifestyle” and had become “cannacurious” by last year.

In fact, it was after Yee tried topicals, then some experimental beverages, that she began discussing the emerging trend with a friend who Yee had crossed paths with at numerous jobs over the years. As luck would have it, that friend, branding expert Soon Yu, was once funded by DCM. Convinced that he could help Yee sell a product like K-Zen, Yu picked up the phone, shared K-Zen’s vision, and voilà, a check was written.

Now, Yee and Yu just have to have the product made — then sell it.

Yee says K-Zen is on target to roll out its beverages this summer, where they will be made available in dispensaries, beginning in California, and directly to consumers via its site.

The five-person startup may have to educate customers first. The reason: marijuana-infused foods typically take at least an hour to kick in, making it harder for consumers to anticipate how they will feel and what the impact will be of the THC they ingest.

Yee readily acknowledges the challenge and says K-Zen is already considering how to help its customers. “People know what a glass of wine does to them, but [we may] create a pictogram” that helps people understand what to expect and when, depending on the amount of THC in the product.

Very possibly, by summer, more of its future customers will have least tried one cannabis drink, given how quickly people are gravitating to new cannabis products.

Though K-Zen is early to the game, it is not alone. As the outlet Eater recently pointed out, among other upstarts, a Seattle company called Trukino already makes both THC and CBD varieties of apple cider. Another company, California Dreamin,’ sells THC-infused sodas that taste like tangerine.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | K-Zen Beverage, a nascent cannabis-infused drink brand, has raised million in seed funding

Barcelona-based Hubtype has raised a €1 million (~$1.1M) seed round led by Madrid-based early stage VC firm, K Fund. The team last raised when the business was founded, back in February 2016, when they took in €235,000 in a mix of public and angel funding.

Hubtype targets enterprises and developers with customer service focused tools to help build and scale what it describes as “conversational messaging experiences” — aka messaging interfaces that go beyond more basic chatbot-style offerings to support richer interactions and ‘smart’ automation, such as knowing when to hand off to a human agent.

“We know very well that chatbots aren’t enough on their own, as we’ve been building bots for three years. To provide effective and meaningful interactions, companies need to go beyond bots and provide conversational experiences: Micro-apps within the messaging channels that everyone uses daily,” say co-founders, Eric Marcos and Marc Caballé, explaining the wider context around the space as they see it.

“Conversational experiences take the best of chat (conversational user interfaces) and combine elements of graphical user interfaces like websites, apps, etc. Effective ones aggregate AI, decision trees, webviews, human agent hand-off and more. Furthermore, enterprise companies need integration with other APIs and systems, from back-end inventory and order tracking to booking engines, analytics, NLP services and more.”

They argue that orchestrating all these different elements can be “extremely difficult and time-consuming” for businesses lacking a dedicated tech team to handle building and maintaining smooth chat-based customer interactions.

That’s where Hubtype sees an opportunity to elbow in, starting with a b2b focus but aiming to tilt fully at developers over the long term.

Hubtype’s opensource framework for building conversational apps, called Botonic, is based on React.js. Using this it claims a single developer can build, deploy and scale conversational apps across multiple messaging channels (including webchat) — doing away with the need for a full dev team to build and maintain everything.

The team’s goal is to become “the reference platform” for developers to create conversational apps using React.js. Some of the seed funding is therefore pegged for building out Hubtype’s developer relationship program, as well as ploughing into product development and scaling the sales team.

“We’re currently a b2b company and our target customers are enterprise-level companies mainly in banking, insurance and e-commerce/retail,” the co-founders note, adding: “Eight out of more than 20 customers are in the Forbes Global 2000 List, with some ranking in the top 20 such as Volkswagen, Inditex, HP, and Bankia.”

“With this funding round we’re investing in further developments of our framework, including AI capabilities which will allow clients to train their chatbot in one language and roll out automatically in about 100 languages. We’ll also be building our developer relationship program and scaling our sales team,” adds  Caballé in a statement.

Hubtype tells us it expects to reach 100 customers this year — though they’re not disclosing exact customer numbers yet.

“We have a strong presence in the Spanish enterprise ecosystem and within international brands that operate in Europe. We provide our service globally but we’re currently focused on the EU and testing some emerging markets where WhatsApp is prevalent, as we are one of the few official solution providers for the platform globally,” the co-founders add.

Asked about the competitive landscape, Hubtype names Accel-backed Rasa as an “AI centric” bot-builder framework rival with a similar “bottom up” focus on marshalling developers to build adoption.

Another competitor the co-founders point to is Botpress, saying it has a somewhat similar approach while flagging a different business model (focused on “consulting/services centric”).

Microsoft Bot Framework and Dialogflow are two other rival frameworks they name — but again the suggestion is both are AI centric, rather than supporting a richer mix of conversational components.

“The difference between us and our closest competition is that we have a very clear niche (React developers) and we are pioneers in advocating for conversational apps (text+GUI and using NLP and AI as elements) rather than AI or NLP-centric experiences. Most of our competitors are focused on AI and NLP,” they add.

“Our tools focus on building applications that sit at the intersection between text-based and graphic interfaces. We take into account NLP, AI, interactive messages, webviews, managing context, human handoffs and multichannel integrations. Additionally, we aggregate more messaging channels than all or most competitors.”

Commenting on the seed raise in a statement, Jaime Novoa, associate at K Fund, added: “The chatbot industry has undergone a major transformation from text to conversational apps, and Hubtype is leading enterprise companies to build the best customer experiences in a scalable way by using automation. Companies must move from traditional phone and email communication and into a new era of multichannel conversational messaging. Hubtype is an important addition to our investment portfolio, and timing is key.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hubtype raises .1M to help developers build richer chat support