Browsing Tag: Startups

Hasura, a startup working to solve developer problems around connecting to databases when using the open-source GraphQL tool, announced a $9.9 million Series A investment today.

Vertex Ventures US led the round, with participation from SAP.iO Fund and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC. A number of angel investors also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of approximately $11.5 million.

GraphQL is an open-source tool originally developed at Facebook in 2012 and open-sourced a few years later. Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal says the company had been working on helping developers to simplify Kubernetes, but over time, it realized that data access was a bigger problem, so it developed an open-source tool that works with GraphQL to help solve that issue.

“Application developers need access to data sitting in databases. So Hasura is an open-source service that lets you find your databases, set up a little bit of configuration, and then you generate a GraphQL API that’s performant and secure,” Gopal told TechCrunch.

The net result is a kind of Data as a Service API that has solved a big problem for GraphQL users, especially the back-end developers, who had to spend lots of time manually connecting the application to the data sources for front-end developers working with GraphQL. This service creates some code that the front-end developers can drop into their application and connect to the database without a fuss.

It has proven popular, with more than 29 million downloads and counting. The company hopes to make money with an enterprise version that is currently in testing and should be ready soon.

For now, the San Francisco-based company has 40 employees, a number that should rise over the next year with the new funding. The startup hopes to expand the capabilities of the tool, while supporting a wider range of database types.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hasura raises .9M Series A to simplify GraphQL for developers

Tempo wants to be the Peloton of barbells. It’s a 42-inch tall screen with 3D machine vision that tracks and teaches you as you workout. The giant upright HD display makes it feel like your personal trainer is right there with you while you compete with others in live and on-demand classes.

Tempo’s Microsoft Kinect-esque motion sensors scan you 30 times per second and notify you if your form is wrong. It’s all housed in a sleekly designed free-standing cabinet that neatly stores the included barbells, dumbbells, attachable weights, workout mat, recovery foam roller, and heartrate monitor.

Tempo opens for pre-orders today for $1995, requiring a $250 deposit and $39 monthly content subscription before shipping this summer.

“Every single product in the market took a piece of equipment out of a gym and slapped a screen on it” says Tempo CEO and co-founder Moawia Eldeeb. “You need to be able to see a user to actually be able to give them guidance so they can work out safely. We wanted to build a fitness experience from the ground up with training and form feedback at the core of it.”

I demo’d Tempo this week and found the in-home convenience, motivational on-screen personal trainers, and the real-time posture corrections gave me the confidence to lift weights without the fear of injury. It might not feel quite as fun and addictive as Peloton, but it offers a facsimile of personal training that’s more affordable than in-person classes that cost $100 or more.

The idea of democratizing access to trainers is what convinced Eldeeb and the Tempo team to stretch its initial $1.8 million in seed funding for four years. While collecting data from its SmartSpot in-gym weight lifting assessment device, Tempo survived long enough to build this prototype.

“Most investors had given up on us. We built this product and had just $700,000 left” Eldeeb recalls. But once people could try Tempo, “we pitched 10 investors and got 9 term sheets. It got very competitive.” The startup recently walked away with a $17.5 million Series A round from Founders Fund, DCM, and Khosla Ventures. Now Tempo will pour that cash into marketing, retail distribution, R&D, and content production.

A founder’s journey out of homelessness

Tempo’s mission is to change people’s lives for the better like personal training did for Eldeeb. “Training is what took me out of a homeless shelter and got me to where I am I today” he reflects.

Tempo co-founder, CEO, and CPO Moawia Eldeeb

Eldeeb’s family immigrated to the US from Egypt when he was nine. But after an explosion leveled their building, they wound up in a homeless shelter. Eldeeb eventually dropped out of middle school to work in a pizza parlor and help pay the bills. But personal trainers at a local YMCA took him under their wing. He eventually paid his way through a computer science degree at Columbia University by working as a personal trainer to his eventual co-founder and CTO Josh Augustin. “Having trainers say you’re getting stronger taught me I could do something for myself.”

While at school, Eldeeb was developing an idea for a physical therapy wearable while Augustin was building 3D sensors for guiding robot perception. They soon realized that a combination of these ideas “offered us the possibility to deliver on the promise of guiding your form and tracking your progress accurately.”

In 2015, they started a company called Pivot to build SmartSpot — a similar looking upright screen that was designed for gyms. It could track users, but only output raw data about their form, like how bent a user’s knees were during a squat. It then worked with trainers to annotate the data to determine what movement patterns were safe and which were dangerous.

Gym owners bought in because it let them track which trainers were actually helping customers improve. “It held trainers accountable. If you weren’t delivering results, it’d be obvious” Eldeeb tells me. The company built up a dataset of over from over 1 million 3D tagged workouts, from hundreds of gyms, overseen by thousands of trainers. That formed the basis of the artificial intelligence that would let Pivot pivot into Tempo.

Pumping Iron With Tempo

At first, Tempo’s giant screen and black or white armoire can feel a bit daunting. The thing is about six feet tall, though it only takes up as much room as a large chair. It makes efficient use of space, with the barbell and dumbbells racked on the back, an internal shelf for the foam roller and mat, and a soft-closing cabinet on the front with the rubber-coated weight set. Keeping everything together means you won’t have to go digging in your closet to start a work out.

Tempo walks users through an initial computer-vision fitness assessment to understand your strength and flexibility so it can set base levels for its exercises. If you have an injury it needs to nurse, Tempo connects you to a human personal trainer that helps customize your workout plan. Otherwise, it uses your goals and data to set out a progressive regimen that gets a little tougher each day. It even blocks you from jumping into later classes so you don’t strain yourself.

Your workout plan begins with tutorial sessions that teach you to do the exercises with safe and proper form. When I was hunching forward during my squats, Tempo’s computer vision would ding me with instant feedback to keep my knees back and chest up. Then once I’d corrected the issue, it congratulated me with little green checkmarks. “Any product that doesn’t offer that is no better than a DVD or YouTube videos” Eldeeb remarks.

From there I could choose between a variety of class styles and lengths, ranging from high intensity interval training circuits to isolated sessions focused on particular muscle groups. In each, you watch a near life-size personal trainer doing the routines right in front of you while they demonstrate form and drop inspirational quotes.

Tempo is producing seven live classes per day from its San Francisco studio which you can also watch on-demand. You can compete against friends or strangers, and Tempo compares you rep for rep so it’s more about perfect form than reckless speed or weight. The live trainers can actually see all your data and your mistakes on a dashboard as they lead classes, and can call you out for screwing up (though you can deactivate this shame mode). Eldeeb says “knowing the trainer can possibly see your numbers will motivate you to actually do this right.”

The class selection interface is suspiciously similar to Peloton’s, though that at least will make it familiar for some. Over time, you build up an immense collection of data on your performance in each work out, excercise, and muscle. Unlike hitting the gym by yourself, you’ll never struggle to remember how much weight to use or whether you’re improving. Classes are soundtracked with dancey remixes sourced from a partnership with Feed.fm to avoid the royalty issues with original songs that slapped Peloton.

Tempo gives feedback when you’re doing exercises wrong, and when you correct yourself

For a 14-person startup, Tempo is trying to do a ton and that can leave some rough edges. The bluetooth armband heartrate monitor can have connectivity issues and the computer vision doesn’t always register every rep, especially if your posture is off. Classes also fail to include enough stretching to prevent strains, instead devoting the start of classes to warmups that ease you in but might not protect your muscles well enough. My quads were destroyed after my demo.

Tempo still achieves its primary objective: it makes weight lifting accessible. No need to drag yourself to the gym or be beholden to a trainer’s schedule, where I’d always end up arriving late and wasting 25% of my session. The form feedback fixes my core complaint about remote personal training app Future I’ve been using for nine months, which can’t see you. That’s led to minor injuries from bad sit-up posture and other incorrect movements. Tempo can’t catch everything, but it can nip some of the most common mistakes in the bud.

Eldeeb was blunt when asked why Tempo is better than well-funded competitors like $3000 Tonal’s wall-mounted resistance cable-based training system or the $1500 Mirror’s massive screen.

“The biggest problem with Tonal is two-fold. Cables and motors do not last. I want this product to be in your house for 10-plus years. [Tempo] is in gyms running 24/7 in for 3 years and it’s still working. The second biggest thing is just feedback.” While Tonal does include a camera and microphone it might employ in the future, it’s not scanning you to detect when you’re lifting weights crooked like Tempo.

As for Mirror, “What is the difference between ClassPass Live and Mirror? It doesn’t come with any equipment, and there’s no training. It’s just a two-way mirror and a Samsung LED panel behind it with an arduino board” Eldeeb rails. He claims it can’t actually monitor your workouts and that his team’s tests found Mirror would say they’d burned 500 calories when they were literally just sitting on their couch in front of it.

Eldeeb demos Tempo

If the software proves to have high retention so people actually recommend Tempo to friends, the biggest hurdle will be its price. You can buy a couple dumbbells for $50 or get a barbell weight bench for a few hundred. Even if Tempo’s $55 per month financing option plus $39 subscription makes it cheaper than a single personal training session or on-par with a gym membership, it could still seem like a serious commitment.

That feeling is magnified by how all of its equipment and classes and data can feel a bit overwhelming. The startup might have to spend a fortune on retail establishments that can guide users through their first Tempo experience. There’s also no mobile version yet, so you can’t bring the work outs on the road with you.

Eldeeb seems guinely motivated to keep improving the product so it’s better than commuting to work out. “Getting to the gym or class is often half the battle. By bringing the gym to you and structuring the classes to be as efficient as possible, Tempo not only makes improving your health more convenient, but it gives you back your most precious resource: time.”

For those comfortable lifting the cheap weights they have at home or hitting up a budget gym, Tempo might seem needlessly overwrought and expensive. But for anyone who needs more instruction or wants to get a Barry’s Bootcamp-worthy workout at home, Tempo might be just their speed.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tempo reveals M-funded 00 weight lift training screen

Jakarta-based entertainment company Visinema will build its animation business and expand into more Southeast Asian markets after raising a $3.25 million Series A led by Intudo Ventures. Returning investors GDP Ventures and Ancora Capital also participated.

Founded in June 2008 by CEO Angga Dwimas Sasongko, a director and producer, Visinema produces TV shows, feature films, commercials and other content. Its end-to-end operations allow it to control almost every part of content creation, from concept to distribution and monetization. Visinema’s clients have included Unilever, Toyota and Honda. Along with a seed round from GDP Ventures, its Series A brings Visinema’s total raised so far to $5.25 million.

The company will use its funding to grow its animation production by partnering with or acquiring Indonesian animation studios, with plans to release its first animated feature film this year. Called Nussa, the movie began as characters developed for YouTube. Its other segments include Visinema Pictures for theatrical releases; Visinema Content, which creates shows for streaming platforms like Netflix, iFlix and Gojek’s GoPlay; and Visinema Campus, its talent development program.

Chief of business development and partnerships Ajeng Parameswari says Indonesia’s film industry contributed about $69 billion to its economy in 2015, with 7% year-over-year growth; locally produced movies account for about 40% of movies circulating in the country, a number expected to increase 55% this year.

This gives Visinema room to grow in terms of both theatrical releases and content created for streaming platforms, including international services that are launching in Indonesia, like Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Catchplay.

“The landscape is changing fast, as the Indonesian government eases restriction on outside investment in the movie business,” she told TechCrunch.

In a press statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Patrick Yip said, “Indonesia’s domestic film industry has experienced rapid growth over the past few years, both in terms of feature-length films and unique content formats, and there continues to be significant demand for high-grade local content. With in-house produced Hollywood-caliber content, we believe that Visinema is well-positioned to tell more Indonesian stories to audiences both domestically and around the world.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Indonesian entertainment development company Visinema raises .25 million Series A

Twilio is best known for its communications API, which allows developers to add messaging, voice or video to their apps with just a small slice of code. The company’s tools are used by customers like Lyft, Airbnb, Salesforce, Box and Duke University.

The former startup went public in 2016 at $15 a share. Yesterday Twilio’s stock closed at $113.90, giving the company a market cap of about $15.6 billion (after a horrendous week on Wall Street). It’s easy to look at its value (among other measures) and declare Twilio a successful public company. But just like every former startup out there, its ascent wasn’t always so certain.

Founded in 2008, Twilio was once a tentative early-stage company feeling its way forward in the market with an unproven product and more future potential than actual results. Recently, the company’s CEO Jeff Lawson shared a Twilio board deck from March 2010.

Naturally, we read through it — how could we not? — but we also decided to analyze it for you, pulling out what we learned and using the snapshot of Twilio’s history to illustrate how far the company has come in the last decade.

The presentation’s original time stamp lands after Twilio’s Series A and just before its Series B, allowing us to see a company molting from a hatchling to something more sturdy that could stand on its own two feet. The company raised $12 million six months after the deck was presented.

To get everyone on the same page, we’ll start with a little history, and then get into the deck itself. Let’s go!

Where Twilio came from

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Twilio 2010 board deck gives peek at now-public company’s early days

WordPress has become so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that it still drives a huge ecosystem of startups that build tools and services around the platform. One of these is Elementor, a graphical website building platform that you can plug into WordPress to design and publish sites. More than 4 million sites have already been built with the tool — and it’s now seeing a million new sites every six months.

Now the Tel Aviv-based company, which was founded in 2016, has raised its first round of institutional funding — a $15 million round from Lightspeed Venture Partners .

“Elementor’s growth is a wonderful example of the power of community and open-source software,” said Tal Morgenstern, partner at Lightspeed. “The founders set out to solve their own problems as web professionals and ended up with a global, highly involved fan base that kept pushing and shaping the product from the very onset. Every single metric we looked at indicated an exceptionally strong market fit and we’re extremely happy to partner with this team for the next chapter of their journey.”

Elementor gives designers everything from a visual editor to a set of pre-made templates, widgets for most standard use cases and, for paying users, support for building popups, themes and building WooCommerce sites. A lot of these features are available for free, but access to the paid tools starts at $49/year for a single site or up to $199/year for agencies that handle up to 1,000 sites.

“What we have achieved, thanks to our dedicated team and wonderful community, has been truly extraordinary,” said Yoni Luksenberg, CEO of Elementor, “In addressing a very real need, we have claimed a growing stake in a $300 billion market. With this round of funding, we accelerate our goal of allowing every web creator to easily build professional websites.”

The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to accelerate its operations and global community. For 2020 alone, Elementor is planning about 500 meetups, the company says, and will grow its team by 50%.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Elementor raises M for its WordPress website builder

Alkymi, an early-stage startup that wants to bring intelligence to highly manual business processes like copying and pasting financial data from emails and attachments, launched today with a $5 million seed investment.

Canaan Partners led the round with participation from previous investor Work-Bench. SimCorp also contributed as a strategic investor. Under the terms of the investment agreement, Joydeep Bhattacharyya from Canaan will become a member of the Alkymi board.

Company founder and CEO Harald Collet says the startup is bringing machine learning to the business analyst’s in-box with the goal of automating many of the tedious manual parts of the job. The company has created a solution that extracts data automatically that these analysts previously had to copy and paste into applications, spreadsheets or databases.

“What we do is we focus on automating tasks in emails and documents and really focus on helping business analysts in [automating] those tasks where they have been taking and picking out of business data customer and financial data that’s being fed into business processes,” Collet told TechCrunch.

For today, that strictly involves financial services, which is an industry Collet has worked in for two decades, and which could benefit greatly from this approach. He uses an investment asset manager as an example. This person would receive emails with data in them about investments, copy and paste the data into an application or database, and repeat this many times to report on overall investment performance. Alkymi would automatically extract some amount of this data, reducing the overall manual copying and pasting required.

GIF: Alkymi

It takes some time to train the underlying machine model, from hours to days, depending on the size and complexity of the operation, but once that’s done, Collet says the software can deal with what it knows, setting aside what it can’t figure out for a human to intervene, and then learn from that in a typical machine learning loop. Over time, it should allow business analysts to do more analysis, instead of spending time on data entry to get to the analysis part. For now, they are looking at rates starting at 40-50% automation, or more for less complex data sets.

While the company is concentrating on financial services today, the long-term plan is to expand into other verticals over time. For now, it is growing quickly with paying financial services customers. It has also partnered with investor SimCorp, which will offer the service on its platform aimed at financial services professionals.

The company launched in 2017, and Collet spent time talking to potential customers before building the product. It offers an on-prem and cloud version, and bills by the workflow. It has seven employees based in New York City, with plans to double that this year.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Alkymi launches with M seed to automate email data extraction

Tier Mobility operates a scooter service, the kick-scooter-with-a-motor kind. And it has acquired assets from Coup, a now defunct scooter service, the moped kind. Coup shut down late last year, and Tier Mobility plans to take over and start its own shared moped service.

To be clear, Coup is over but its mopeds will stick around. As part of the deal, Tier Mobility now has around 5,000 mopeds and a charging infrastructure. It plans to launch its own moped service in Berlin in May. Both the scooter and moped services will be accessible from the main Tier app.

Coup had a partnership with Gogoro, a Taiwanese electric vehicle company. You can expect to be able to access the same mopeds but with a fresh coat of paint.

“We have gained valuable experience with e-scooters and can now use this effectively in the field of e-mopeds. Many customers want a slightly faster vehicle for medium distances of 4 to 10 kilometres. Now we can now offer these people a very good deal with high-quality vehicles,” Tier Mobility co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner said in a statement.

Before shutting down, Coup was operating in Berlin, Paris and Madrid. It’s unclear whether Tier Mobility wants to launch a moped service in those cities as well.

Tier Mobility currently operates in 55 cities across 11 countries. It is currently focused on Europe. The company is based in Berlin.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Tier Mobility charges its customers for the moped service. Unit economics have been the main issue with Coup.

“Even though Coup is a well-known brand in this market with a loyal customer base that regularly uses our services, operating Coup in the long term has become economically unsustainable,” Coup said when it shut down.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tier Mobility acquires Coup’s electric moped scooters

B-Social, the London-based fintech building what it calls a “social bank,” is announcing that it has raised a further £7.8 million in seed funding.

Once again the injection of capital comes from “high-net-worth” individuals. They include Rudy Karsan from Karlani Capital, although most of the investors remain undisclosed.

It brings the total capital raised by B-Social to £13.25 million, as the company continues the journey to becoming a fully licensed bank. It also plans to re-brand next month to the new name “Kroo”.

Launched in February last year, B-Social currently exists as a “social finance” app and accompanying debit Mastercard. It enables users to make purchases, share and keep track of expenses with friends and family, and negate the headache of “who owes who”. More broadly, B-Social says it is on a mission to improve the relationship people have with money.

“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed told me in late 2018. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world”.

To date, B-Social says it has over 8,500 customers who have spent more than £1 million with their B-Social cards and have shared over 36,000 expenses with friends.

Valimahomed tells me the company has also “significantly progressed” the pre-application stage for acquiring a U.K. banking licence. This includes things like submitting a regulatory business plan, capital and liquidity assessments approval, and challenge sessions completed. He expects to submit the full banking application in Q2 2020.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | B-Social, the UK fintech building a ‘social bank’, raises additional £7.8M ahead of rebrand

When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes. That is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the way of margins except for the very biggest properties (and even then, it can a tough balancing act managing costs).

A startup called Minute Media believes that it has found a way through that challenge with a platform that brings in user-generated content across a number of its own mostly-sports-based media properties — built organically and by way of acquisition — which it then syndicates to third-party publishing partners.

Today, the startup is announcing a $40 million round to continue its growth — specifically to continue investing in its publishing platform; to invest in properties that it already owns; and to make more acquisitions.

Led by London’s Dawn Capital (Minute Media describes itself as based in New York, but its founding team are out of Israel and it grew initially in London, where its CEO current lives) with participation from other unnamed previous investors (a list that includes Battery Ventures, Goldman Sachs, ProSieben, Qumra Capital, Vintage Investments, Gemini Ventures, North Base Media, La Maison, Remagine Ventures, Hamilton Lane and Maor Investments) the funding brings the total raised by Minute Media to $160 million.

The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but last year we understood from a source very close to the company to be between $200 million and $300 million. Given that it grew around 100% last year, and currently is on track for revenues this year of $200 million, that likely puts the current valuation closer to $400-$500 million.

On the shoulders of giants

Minute Media may not be a name you know very well, but if you are a consumer of sports content online, you may have come across some of its properties or articles. Its holdings currently number seven titles and include names like 90min.com (which focuses on soccer, hence the name: the startup’s founder and CEO Asaf Peled is a football fanatic), as well as FanSided, The Players’ Tribune and Mental Floss. (Others include 12up, DBLTAP and The Big Lead.)

Some of these Minute Media built from scratch, but many have come to it courtesy of the bigger picture of the media industry today: titles are created, gain an audience and brand recognition, and then get passed around in the world of online publishing when the previous owner has not been able to make the business case for the site work.

For example, FanSided came to Minute Media by way of an acquisition just last month: Meredith sold it, reportedly for $15 million, as part of a larger divestment of “non-core” assets it has been making post its Owen acquisition of Time, Inc. in 2018 (FanSided once sat under Sports Illustrated).

The Players Tribune, meanwhile, runs stories written by athletes themselves — some extremely timely, such as this one from Sabrina Ionescu, a rising star in women’s basketball, published just on Monday, in the same week that her name has been making waves because of her speech at the Bryant memorial service, plus her heroic work on the court. The site was founded by baseball legend Derek Jeter, and raised some money from big names, but ultimately couldn’t last as an independent startup. It sold in November last year to Minute Media.

And Mental Floss, something of a cult click-bait title (at one point even Monica thumbed through a printed version at Central Perk), lost its way after Facebook algorithm changes. Now its home is also at Minute Media.

On the surface, this might look mainly like an aggregator media play, or on an M&A level something based on the private equity model of hoovering up a lot of tired or slow growing brands with the aim of optimising them and moving on.

But neither is actually accurate. As Peled describes it (and as VCs apparently believe), there is a technology story, and corresponding interesting business model, underpinning what Minute Media has built that spans, B2C, B2B and C2C publishing and distribution.

For starters, there is the centralised content management system that runs the sites, “an open CMS system that allows any casual fan to create rich content,” Peled told TechCrunch.

While this has had as many as 20,000 contributors on it at one time, contributing articles in a variety of languages beyond English, the number of pieces — selected by human editors — published across all its platforms is less than 1,000 per day. Only the most prolific and longstanding contributors get paid; others contribute for free. This forms the basis of the company’s content engine.

That content brings in traffic and advertising on Minute Media’s owned properties, but this is only one piece of how the company makes money. That same platform is also a licensing-based B2B and B2C play: it links up to about a dozen or more other publishers and media partners, which use it both to syndicate content out and bring in content from other places. The logic here is that bringing in syndicated content from elsewhere can help the other publishers bring down their operating costs while still continuing to expand the content (and thus traffic) on their own sites; hence why they partner with (and pay) Minute Media.

Last summer, Peled told me that the balance between ad and licensing revenues were “around 50/50, but no doubt the B2B open platform is easier to sell and is growing faster.”

Sport wins

Although there is other content beyond sports on Minute Media’s platform, sports is a key focus, and for good reason.

Sports content has shaped up to be an extremely important segment in the world of online media. Done right, it can breed a legion of engaged and very loyal visitors — readers, viewers, listeners — who are willing to do more than just click once and move on. If they like what they see, they will come back again, and again. That has helped some of the more interesting sports properties build paid content models — see The Athletic — and others spin out media empires based on still-evolving mediums like podcasting — see the huge success of The Ringer and its recent sale to Spotify.

Minute Media fits into that bigger picture with its own take on how to build and scale a sports publishing empire. Without some of the overhead that has weighed down other online publishing plays, the startup has built a concept for publishing that appears to have a kind of sustainability to it.

“Minute Media’s best-in-class platform enables publishers to create, distribute and monetize high-quality content,” said Haakon Overli, general partner at Dawn Capital, in a statement. “The company is quickly establishing itself as a major player in the new generation of online publishing, empowering creators and audiences alike. Following explosive revenue growth in 2019, we’re pleased to back the team once again, allowing them to accelerate R&D and commercial efforts further still.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Minute Media raises M more for its user-generated, syndication-based sports publishing platform

Snapask, an on-demand tutoring app, announced today that it has raised $35 million in Series B funding. Earmarked for the startup’s expansion in Southeast Asia, the round was led by Asia Partners and Intervest.

Launched in Hong Kong five years ago, Snapask has now raised a total of $50 million and operates in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. Its other investors have included Kejora Ventures, Ondine Capital and SOSV Chinaccelerator (Snapask participated in its accelerator program).

Founder and CEO Timothy Yu said Snapask will expand into Vietnam and focus on markets in Southeast Asia where there is a high demand for tutoring and other private education services. It will also open a regional headquarter in Singapore and develop video content and analytics products for its platform.

The company now has a total of 3 million students, with 1.3 million who registered over the past twelve months (including a recent surge that Yu attributes to students studying at home after COVID-19 related school cancellations). Over the past year, 100,000 tutors have applied, taking Snapask’s current total to 350,000 applicants.

Yu says that over 2 million questions are asked by students each month on the platform, with each subscriber typically asking about 60 questions a month, during tutoring sessions that last between 15 to 20 minutes. The majority, or about two-thirds, of the questions are about math and science-related topics.

One thing all of Snapask’s markets have in common are highly-competitive public exams to enter top universities, says Yu. The exams have both a positive and negative effect on education, he adds.

“Students have a very clear objective about what topics they need to study, so that is driving a very lucrative market in the tutoring industry. But I think what Snapask focuses on is that exams are important, but you should do it the right way. We’re about self-directed learning. It’s not necessary to go to three-hour classes every day after school. If you need specific help on a question, you can ask for it immediately.”

While at university, Yu worked as a math tutor, and sometimes spent a total of two hours commuting to sessions that lasted the same amount of time. In markets like Malaysia or Indonesia, many educators chose to work in major cities, leaving students in rural areas with less options. The goal of Snapask is to help solve those issues and connect tutors with more students.

Yu says the average time for students to connect with a tutor after asking a question is about 15 to 20 minutes, which it is able to do because of machine learning-based technology that matches them based on educational styles, subject and availability. Snapask’s matching algorithms are also based on how students engage with tutors (for example, if they respond better to concise or longer, more elaborate answers). Students can also pick up to 15 to 20 tutors for their favorites list, who are prioritized when matching.

Yu says Snapask screens tutors by looking at their university transcripts and public exam results. Then they go through a probation period on the platform to assess how they interact with students. The platform also tracks how many messages are sent during a tutoring session and response times to make sure that tutors are explaining students’ questions instead of just giving them the answers.

Tutors can talk to up to 10 students at a time through Snapask’s platform. Yu says Snapask tutors in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea who spend about two hours per day answering questions usually make about $1,200 a month, while those who work about four to five hours a day can make about $4,000 to $5,000 a month. The company uses different pricing models in Southeast Asian markets, and Yu says tutors there can make about 50% to 60% more than they would at traditional tutoring jobs.

Other study apps focused on students some of the same markets as Snapask include ManyTutors and Mathpresso, whose products combine tutoring services with tools that let students upload math questions, which are then scanned with optical character recognition to provide instant answers. Yu says Snapask is focusing on one-on-one tutoring because it wants to differentiate by creating a “holistic experience.”

“A lot of students come to Snapask after using OCR tools, which we know that user surveys, but they can’t get to certain steps. They still need someone to help them understand what is happening,” he says. “So we try not to use technology for every component in teaching, but to make it more efficient and scalable, and we’re creating a holistic experience to differentiate us.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | On-demand tutoring app Snapask gets million to expand in Southeast Asia