Browsing Tag: Startups

    Startups

    6 CISOs share their game plans for a post-pandemic world

    May 21, 2020

    Like all business leaders, chief information security officers (CISOs) have shifted their roles quickly and dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have had to fight fires they never expected.

    Most importantly, they’ve had to ensure corporate networks remain secure even with 100% of employees suddenly working from home. Controllers are moving millions between corporate accounts from their living rooms, HR managers are sharing employees’ personal information from their kitchen tables and tens of millions of workers are accessing company data using personal laptops and phones.

    This unprecedented situation reveals once and for all that security is not only about preventing breaches, but also about ensuring fundamental business continuity.

    While it might take time, everyone agrees the pandemic will end. But how will the cybersecurity sector look in a post-COVID-19 world? What type of software will CISOs want to buy in the near future, and two years down the road?

    To find out, I asked six of the world’s leading CISOs to share their experiences during the pandemic and their plans for the future, providing insights on how cybersecurity companies should develop and market their solutions to emerge stronger:

    The security sector will experience challenges, but also opportunities

    The good news is, many CISOs believe that cybersecurity will weather the economic storm better than other enterprise software sectors. That’s because security has become even more top of mind during the pandemic; with the vast majority of corporate employees now working remotely, a secure network has never been more paramount, said Rinki Sethi, CISO at Rubrik. “Many security teams are now focused on ensuring they have controls in place for a completely remote workforce, so endpoint and network security, as well as identity and access management, are more important than ever,” said Sethi. “Additionally, business continuity and disaster recovery planning are critical right now — the ability to respond to a security incident and have a robust plan to recover from it is top priority for most security teams, and will continue to be for a long time.”

    That’s not to say all security companies will necessarily thrive during this current economic crisis. Adrian Ludwig, CISO at Atlassian, notes that an overall decline in IT budgets will impact security spending. But the silver lining is that some companies will be acquired. “I expect we will see consolidation in the cybersecurity markets, and that most new investments by IT departments will be in basic infrastructure to facilitate work-from-home,” said Ludwig. “Less well-capitalized cybersecurity companies may want to begin thinking about potential exit opportunities sooner rather than later.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | 6 CISOs share their game plans for a post-pandemic world

    Startups

    RapidAPI raises $25M more to expand its API marketplace

    May 21, 2020

    Less than a year after raising $25M led by Microsoft for its take on building API marketplaces, RapidAPI has rapidly followed that up with another infusion of capital as it reaches 20,000 APIs tracked, integrated, and used across its marketplace by millions of developers. Today the startup is announcing that it raised another $25 million from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, DNS Capital, Green Bay Ventures, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), and Grove.

    This is a second closing of RapidAPI’s Series B, which we first wrote about last year, bringing the total for the round to $50 million and $62.5 million overall. PitchBook notes that the startup’s previous valuation was $80 million, which would put this now at upwards of $105 million but likely higher, considering that the company has scaled by quite a bit. Co-founder and CEO Iddo Gino would not disclose the actual amount in an interview this week.

    APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital world: developers use them to quickly integrate features, data, services and functions into their own apps, removing the need to build and scale all those elements themselves from scratch. But while the big selling point of using APIs is that they allow developers to integrate using only a few lines of code, that doesn’t tell the whole story. The issue is that a lot of API interfaces are not uniform and so sourcing and using a variety of them can become very time-consuming and on aggregate a lot more difficult than the basic concept of API would have you assume.

    “You can’t build everything from scratch, and using APIs makes work a lot more efficient,” co-founder Iddo Gino once said to me. “But each API has a different format and authentication strategy. You have to speak a lot of different languages to use them all.”

    RapidAPI’s approach is to create a framework that not only helps you find the API you are looking for, but lets you integrate them more easily by way of a single API key and SDK. It covers both free and paid APIs, and public as well as “private” APIs. When your company is a subscriber — by way of the RapidAPI for Teams product — it can also help keep track of your own organization’s API work.

    The formula has been a success. There are now 18,000 teams using the Teams product among more than one million developers using the platform overall.

    Within that number, RapidAPI — originally founded in Israel in 2015 and now based also in San Francisco — says that since January, it has added 300,000 new developers, up six-fold monthly compared the the same five months of 2019. The marketplace itself now has 20,000 APIs, doubling in the last year, with 1,000 getting added each month. Contributors to its marketplace include Microsoft, Twilio, SendGrid, Nexmo, Skyscanner and (our former stablemate) Crunchbase.

    RapidAPI doesn’t charge people to use APIs that are already free to use. Rather it makes its money from subscriptions to its API management service as well as through serving paid APIs. It says that paid subscriptions have also grown by 30,000, with those using the enterprise tier — where you can develop your own white-label, in-house version of a marketplace for your own staff and customers — are on the rise with financial services, insurance companies, carriers and healthcare companies among those building marketplaces on RapidAPI’s rails.

    While a lot of businesses, including even tech startups, have had to make big adjustments to work in our new environment and its focus on social distancing to help manage the spread of COVID-19, the same didn’t go for RapidAPI, noted Gino. The company already had remote teams — a consequence of being founded in one country and now essentially having two gravitational poles — and RapidAPI’s team of 75, and its customers, have in their culture working across different environments including virtualised ones.

    What the current climate has pointed to, however, is that RapidAPI is the kind of company that stands to benefit from how other organizations are coping with digital transformation, by helping provide developers with libraries that they can use, wherever they happen to be.

    Another interesting thing that has come up in the current climate is the impact it’s had on what APIs are getting the most calls. In addition to the regular roster of most popular APIs that include communications, payments and other financial services, Gino told me that APIs related to COVID-19 data have emerged as some of the most heavily trafficked, in line with how so many are working to make sense of what is going on, and how they might help the rest of us.

    These include API calls for datasets and geolocation, as well as other statistics, some of which are free and some of which are paid. RapidAPI says that between March 1 and mid-May, the top five COVID APIs had more than 224 million calls with a peak of almost 4.5 million in a single day.

     


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | RapidAPI raises M more to expand its API marketplace

    Startups

    Spruce is eliminating the drudgery of real estate, and has $29M more from Scale to make sales easy

    May 21, 2020

    Real estate is one of those classic industries we always talk about in Silicon Valley: multi-trillion dollars in scale in terms of assets and transaction volume, but still relying on good ole’ pen and paper to get anything actually done. A huge number of companies have launched to digitize all aspects of real estate, from calculating valuations to monitoring operational costs and underwriting mortgages.

     

    One of those companies is New York City-based Spruce, which was founded back in 2016 to digitize the prodigious paperwork that must be completed during a real estate transaction, including handling title, ensuring all closing docs are completed, and monitoring compliance in every geographical jurisdiction they operate in. The company raised a cumulative $19.1 million in Series A funding across two tranches (my colleague Jon Shieber covered the first tranche back in 2017), and now it is poised for even more growth.

    The company is announcing today that it has added $29 million in growth capital led by Alex Niehenke at Scale Venture Partners, with Zigg Capital and Bessemer participating. Niehenke has previously funded companies like Root Insurance, which is focused on offering more competitive car insurance based on realistic data from drivers.

    That seems to be roughly the same thesis here with Spruce — better data and digitalization can massively improve the quality and efficiency of legacy industries.

    “Instead of using local offices with manual communication and manual processes, we provide [our clients] with API’s that allow them to scale effectively and to provide great digital experiences to their customers,” said Patrick Burns, the cofounder and CEO of the company. Burns had previously done product at wealth management startup Betterment, where he also met his cofounder Andrew Weisgall.

    It can be bewildering how all the startups in real estate tech fit together, but this one is simple. Spruce wants to be the workflow tool for real estate transactions, which means that they don’t underwrite mortgages or handle valuations themselves directly. Rather, the platforms wants to be the central nervous system between buyers, sellers, lenders, and all the coterie of other services required to get a transaction closed. The company handles all kinds of transactions from new home purchases by families to investor-to-investor sales.

    What’s interesting is that they have two streams of revenue according to Burns. First, they take a closing fee, which is customary in real estate transactions. Spruce argues that its efficiency cuts the price of closing a transaction, ultimately saving its clients money. Second, the company earns a premium as the agent of record for the title insurance policy agreed to in the transaction, which provides a continual stream of revenue from its clients. Similar to closing fees, title insurance broker fees are customary in the industry.

    It’s a pretty clear value proposition, and that’s helped it grow transaction volume dramatically. According to the company, it has processed $1.25 billion of transactions on its platform, and its revenue has grown 400% annually. With roughly five million existing homes sold in the U.S. each month, that’s still an exiguous chunk of the market.

    The global pandemic underway right now has taken a massive bite out of real estate transactions, particularly for homes, since buyers mostly can’t attend showings due to social distancing policies. The upshot is that those same social distancing policies have also scrambled the traditional real estate closing, which required passels of attorneys and others to work together to get all documents signed. Spruce — and other digitalization startups in the space — are poised to transition more of that legacy paperwork onto their platforms as industry players look for online approaches.

    Burns says the capital will be used to expand Spruce’s product and client partnerships. The company currently has three operations “hubs” in New York, Texas, and California.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Spruce is eliminating the drudgery of real estate, and has M more from Scale to make sales easy

    Startups

    Aspiration, the LA-based fintech focused on conscious consumerism, raises $135 million

    May 21, 2020

    When former Bill Clinton speechwriter and political wunderkind Andrei Cherny launched Aspiration four years ago, the upstart fintech startup was one of Los Angeles’ early entrants into a  financial services market dominated by players from Europe and the financial capital of the U.S., New York City.

    Fast-forward four years and the big New York fintechs are still around, but Cherny’s Aspiration remains undimmed and has today disclosed a $153 million funding round to get even bigger.

    Unlike other financial services startups that compete around a suite of product offerings designed to offer no-fee checking and deposits or upfront cash payments and short-term no-interest loans, Aspiration differentiates itself with a focus on sustainability and conscious consumerism.

    The company first pitched the market with an investment management service like those from Betterment and Wealthfront, but one where customers could choose their own fees. It also guaranteed investments in sustainable companies and a portfolio that would not include fossil fuel companies or other businesses deemed to be less-than-friendly to Mother Nature.

    The conscious consumerism is a through-line that knits together the other products in the Aspiration portfolio, including its Impact Measurement Score product that gives customers a window into how their shopping habits measure up with their desires to be more earth-friendly.

    The company’s just-announced $135 million cash infusion brings the total capital raised to $200 million, and was led by local investor Alpha Edison . Additional new and existing investors — including UBS O’Connor Capital Solutions, DNS Capital, Radicle Impact, Sutter Rock, Jeff Skoll, Joseph Sanberg, Social Impact Finance, the Pohlad Companies, and AGO Partners — also participated in the financing.

    So far, 1.5 million Americans have signed up to use Aspiration’s financial management and banking services, and the company has seen $4 billion in transactions pass through its accounts.

    There’s a whole suite of new services designed to help customers go green, too. The company launched a matching feature where the company plants a tree for every debit card purchase that its customers make, when they round up to the nearest dollar. And it’s offering a premium subscription tier that includes debit cards made from recycled ocean plastic. The card offers higher cash back and interest rates and a feature that offsets the carbon emissions of every mile a customer drives.

    Finally, Aspiration has inked partnerships with other socially conscious companies like Toms and Warby Parker, giving its customers extra cash-back rewards when they shop at those businesses.

    “Aspiration has built deep, trusting customer relationships that are beginning to unlock latent demand for financial services among the tens of millions of conscious consumers,” said Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison, in a statement. “We are excited to lead a great group of investors to fuel Aspiration’s durable growth and lasting impact.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Aspiration, the LA-based fintech focused on conscious consumerism, raises 5 million

    Startups

    Chief, the leadership network for women, raises $15 million in funding

    May 21, 2020

    Chief, the social network dedicated exclusively to women in professional leadership positions, announced today that it has $15 million in funding from its existing investors, including General Catalyst, Inspired Capital, GGV Capital, Primary Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital and BoxGroup.

    The startup is a highly vetted network of women who are leaders in their business, either managing a budget, a large team or both. The women are often at the VP or executive level. The company has more than 2,000 members in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, from companies like Google, IBM, HBO, Chobani, Walmart, Visa, Teladoc, Doctors Without Borders and The New York Times.

    Chief was founded by Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, who saw an opportunity to bring community, mentorship and guidance to a very underserved client: the female business leader.

    Childers was SVP of Operations at Handy and led the launch of Soap.com, serving as GM there through its acquisition by Amazon. Kaplan was on the founding team of Casper, serving as VP of Communications and Brand, before leaving to co-found Chief.

    Chief members are placed into a Core Group, which is industry-agnostic, to receive training from one of the company’s contracted and vetted executive coaches alongside their peers. In these peer groups, members talk about their challenges and receive support and guidance from one another, as well as an executive coach. Members also have access to a community chat feature, and Chief’s events, which include leadership workshops, conversations with industry leaders and community roundtables.

    Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic has put a damper on in-person features of the platform, such as Core Groups and live events. But Chief has moved swiftly to put all these core services on the web for members to attend and participate virtually.

    The company has also fast-tracked the launch of its hiring board, which gives members the ability to privately list great candidates and open positions to the broader network.

    Chief vets its members to ensure that the women on the platform “get it,” as Kaplan likes to say.

    “We all know it gets lonely at the top, and it gets a lot lonelier a lot earlier for women,” said Childers. “Women are on panels or on the circuit and they’re exhausted. This is a community they don’t have to be the one in the spotlight and feel all the pressure, but can actually be supported in a network of women who feel the exact same way. These women are the only person or one of the few people in their organization who have hit that level of leadership, and really need support from people who get it.”

    The company looks at the applicant’s experience, the size of their organization and immediate team, the reporting structure, budget size, awards and credentials, thought leadership and impact, as well as current member nominations.

    Interestingly, no more than 9% of the Chief membership work in a single industry, which leads to cognitive diversity within the community. The average age of a Chief member is 43, and members manage over $10 billion in collective budget at their organizations and more than 100,000 employees.

    Executive-level members pay $7,900 annually, while VP-level members pay $5,800 each year. Chief says that 40% of its members are Executives; the other 60% are VPs. The company says that 30% of its membership base are women of color.

    Chief also operates a Membership Grant program, created to promote diversity of background and thought among members, that brings the cost of an annual membership down to $3,800 for folks coming from non-corporate or underfunded organizations. The company did not disclose what percentage of customers are on the grant program.

    Some napkin math then tells us that Chief is likely generating more than $10 million in revenue in 2020, on the conservative end. Kaplan and Childers say that they have a waitlist of 8,000 to join.

    The new funding will be used to accelerate growth to meet demand in new cities and support the build-out of technology infrastructure. This latest round brings Chief’s total funding to $40 million.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Chief, the leadership network for women, raises million in funding

    Startups

    Couchbase raises $105M Series G funding round

    May 21, 2020

    Couchbase, the Santa Clara-based company behind the eponymous NoSQL cloud database service, today announced that it has raised a $105 million all-equity Series G round “to expand product development and global go-to-market capabilities.”

    The oversubscribed round was led by GPI Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Adams Street Partners and Mayfield. With this, the company has now raised a total of $251 million, according to Crunchbase.

    Back in 2016, Couchbase raised a $30 million down round, which at the time was meant to be the company’s last round before an IPO. That IPO hasn’t materialized, but the company continues to grow, with 30% of the Fortune 100 now using its database. Couchbase also today announced that, over the course of the last fiscal year, it saw 70% total contract value growth, more than 50% new business growth and over 35% growth in average subscription deal size. In total, Couchbase said today, it is now seeing almost $100 million in committed annual recurring revenue.

    “To be competitive today, enterprises must transform digitally, and use technology to get closer to their customers and improve the productivity of their workforces,” Couchbase President and CEO Matt Cain said in today’s announcement. “To do so, they require a cloud-native database built specifically to support modern web, mobile and IoT applications. Application developers and enterprise architects rely on Couchbase to enable agile application development on a platform that performs at scale, from the public cloud to the edge, and provides operational simplicity and reliability. More and more, the largest companies in the world truly run their businesses on Couchbase, architecting their most business-critical applications on our platform.”

    The company is playing in a large but competitive market, with the likes of MongoDB, DataStax and all the major cloud vendors vying for similar customers in the NoSQL space. One feature that has always made Couchbase stand out is Couchbase Mobile, which extends the service to the cloud. Like some of its competitors, the company has also recently placed its bets on the Kubernetes container orchestration tools with, for example the launch of its Autonomous Operator for Kubernetes 2.0. More importantly, though, the company also introduced its fully managed Couchbase Cloud Database-as-a-Service in February, which allows businesses to run the database within their own virtual private cloud on public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

    “We are excited to partner with Couchbase and view Couchbase Server’s highly performant, distributed architecture as purpose-built to support mission-critical use cases at scale,” said Alex Migon, a partner at GPI Capital and a new member of the company’s board of directors. “Couchbase has developed a truly enterprise-grade product, with leading support for cutting-edge application development and deployment needs. We are thrilled to contribute to the next stage of the company’s growth.”

    The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to continue its “accelerated trajectory with investment in each of their three core pillars: sustained differentiation, profitable growth, and world class teams.” Of course, Couchbase will also continue to build new features for its NoSQL server, mobile platform and Couchbase Cloud — in addition, the company will continue to expand geographically to serve its global customer operations.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Couchbase raises 5M Series G funding round

    Startups

    Why don’t more VCs care about good tech (yet)?

    May 21, 2020

    One of the VC partners in a well-established London firm told me straight out:

    Venture capital is money [laughs], it is a risky asset class, perhaps the wildest asset class […] and it has the biggest possible returns.

    I have detailed elsewhere how I think caring more beyond the immediate-return mentality often associated with shareholder value capitalism makes sense (financially and ethically). But the arguments I am making are normative and ideological and don’t describe the status quo of VC investing. The more VCs I speak to — so far more than 150 between Berlin and Silicon Valley — the more it becomes clear that most of them couldn’t care less about environmental, social and governance, impact, sustainability, green tech or what Nicholas Colin calls safety net 2.0. Most VC money last year went into fintech; real estate and automation continue to be big, too. Only a tiny portion of businesses in these areas are remotely “impactful.”

    Why, then, have the big, supposedly much less progressive asset managers and funds — from KKR to BlackRock to JPMorgan Chase — started to announce that they do (intend to) care?

    What are these institutions sitting at the heart of capitalism seeing turning to ESG guidelines, screaming for more regulation and pushing to make portfolios climate-friendly? Why is it that big CEOs want to shift their efforts away from just shareholder value to benefit all stakeholders? Obviously, it must be about money, about a new investment opportunity. Being “good” must be on the verge of becoming profitable. But why are VCs not getting into that in big waves, the investors who are usually ahead of the curve qua their forward-looking business model?

    Don’t get me wrong — there is indeed a class of new VCs that has decided to specialize in impact investing and “social good.” Perhaps with the exception of DBL, most of the funds in this new class, however, have only started recently; none of them will be considered top tier funds yet. Exceptions only confirm the rule, however. While Obvious, itself a B-Corp lead among others by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, is celebrating the Beyond Meat IPO, Greylock is struggling to recruit more than one female into its investment team and is still most keen on blitzscaling marketplaces. While in Germany, Ananda is the only self-fashioned impact investor, sector heavy-hitters such as Holtzbrinck, Earlybird and Point9 are still struggling with the future of e-commerce and SaaS and have discovered gaming as a way of making a 3x return.

    Why? Why is dumb money that sits in KKR and is only supposed to strive for the biggest available profit imposing ESG guidelines on itself while hundreds of clever VC general partners are seemingly closing their eyes and path-dependably follow their old-school patterns chasing disruption everywhere but in “the good” and “impact?”

    Here are six hypotheses and excuses:

    1. It isn’t clear what “impact” even is. While GIIN, the OECD the UN and others are publishing new metrics for ESG and impact measures almost on a daily basis (also reinventing the language around it), the people on the ground doing the investing find it hard to keep up. As many dedicated impact investors I have spoken to, as many different ways of interpreting it I have seen. Some of the VCs I interviewed hence find a relatively easy way out: How are you supposed to aim if you don’t know what your target is?

    2. In the VC world, there aren’t reliable return numbers for impact investing yet. VCs have a strong instinct for herding; while seemingly new territory should be what they are used to, when it comes to proven financial return patterns, they often turn a blind eye. As long as there are no data points to prove — also with regards to communicating with their LPs — that “good tech” makes financial sense in the VC world, many won’t move.

    3. Why change when what has worked continues to work? The VC business model of doing high-risk investments into mostly technology and biotech has worked very well; in fact, the ongoing low-interest rate environment has driven increasing amounts of capital into the asset class that is looking for exactly the kind of above-average returns the traditional VC model has generated. Why change that now?

    4. The others are not really investing real money into impact either. It is true — lots of asset managers and PE investors have publicized their intentions about “going ESG” or “doing impact” widely, but not too much capital has yet been deployed concretely. Bain’s Double Impact fund is $390 million (versus the approximately $30 billion of Bain’s assets under management); KKR’s Global Impact fund is $1 billion, versus around $300 billion under management.

    5. The pressure on other asset managers is much higher. On the one hand, LPs have a bigger influence over big asset managers (and they can often be the ones driving change), and on the other, the KKRs and BlackStones of the world need to overcompensate even more for how bad society thinks they are. Virtue signaling — just like CSR — is a good way of doing that (particularly if there is indeed a financial opportunity).

    6. Lots of people in VC self-select to not care. As a former partner in a famous SV firm put it to me recently: young people don’t become VCs today to do good, they do it to make a fortune and wield power. While the tech world might have once been run by utopians like Steve Jobs, the wheel is now in the hands of techno-libertarians building cities in the sea, buying up NZ and (at times) supporting Trump (to then make money off that connection by extending surveillance). You reap what you sow.

    But even if some of the above excuses are real — for-profit impact is in fact still a tiny asset class (see latest GIIN numbers) for instance — aren’t VCs usually ahead of the game? Contrarian and looking for the next narrative violation? Isn’t it the VCs’ task to sniff up new investment opportunities and sectors first? Most importantly: How long are VCs going to ignore the massively growing consumer appetite for responsible and impactful business (and investing, as KPMG recently found)?

    So, the question remains puzzling for me: When will we see the first Tier 1 VC-firm (after Kleiner Perkins in the 2000s) announce that they’ll start a ‘”good tech” fund?


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why don’t more VCs care about good tech (yet)?

    Startups

    Mapbox and SoftBank form joint venture to provide mapping tech to Japanese developers

    May 21, 2020

    SoftBank Corp. and Mapbox, the mapping data company that competes with Google and Here, announced that they have established a joint venture called Mapbox Japan.

    The JV will provide Mapbox’s mapping platform, including APIs and data services, to developers in Japan. Between June 1 and September 30, Mapbox Japan will also provide up to three months of free support for organizations building COVID-19 related mapping services, including infection cases and statistical data, for developers in the country, which has relied on tracking virus clusters to limit the spread of infections.

    Mapbox collects data from sources including government and commercial databases, and uses them in customizable AI-based APIs, SDKs and other products. Its clients have included Facebook, Snap, the New York Times, the Federal Communications Commission and automotive companies like Land Rover and Rimac.

    Founded in 2010 by Eric Gunderson, Mapbox says its tech now reaches more than 600 million monthly users. SoftBank Vision Fund led Mapbox’s $164 million Series C in 2017. At the time, Gunderson told TechCrunch that part of the funding would be used to expand in Asia through SoftBank’s presence in regions including Southeast Asia and China.

    Mapbox has operated in Japan since July 2019, though that was through partnerships with Yahoo! Japan and Zenrin, one of the country’s biggest mapping software companies. Zenrin also has a partnership with Google Maps, but early last year Google began reducing the amount of mapping data it uses from Zenrin, possibly to focus on building its own trove of mapping data in Japan.

    Working closely with Zenrin opens potential new opportunities for Mapbox in Japan. Last year, Gunderson told Nikkei Asian Review that “we are going to be the number one mapping provider in all of Japan and we’ll be able to do this because we have the best data in all of Japan through our partnership with Zenrin.” The company plans to develop products for the Japanese market that include mapping services for industrial automation.

    In SoftBank’s announcement, Eric Gan, SoftBank Corp. head of business development, said, “I am very excited to bring Mapbox’s technology to Japan to help enterprises enhance their existing mapping services while also creating new customizable location-based services and management tools. We are seeing a significant rise in demand for Mapbox’s products from retail, ride-share, hotel, office-sharing, payment, mobility and manufacturing industries.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mapbox and SoftBank form joint venture to provide mapping tech to Japanese developers

    Startups

    Scribd announces a perks program, giving its subscribers access to Pandora Plus, TuneIn Premium and more

    May 20, 2020

    E-book and audiobook subscription service Scribd has been actively embracing and experimenting with bundling over the past couple of years, creating joint offers with The New York Times and with Spotify and Hulu.

    Today it announced a slightly different take on the idea with Scribd Perks. These perks give Scribd’s paying subscribers (the service costs $8.99 per month) access to a number of additional services at no extra change.

    The initial lineup includes Pandora Plus (ad-free music and podcasts), TuneIn Premium (live sports, news, music and podcasts), Peak (brain training), CuriosityStream (documentaries and series), CONtv + Comics (movies and digital comics), FarFaria (illustrated children’s books that are read aloud) and MUBI (hand-picked films).

    Many of these services are relatively niche — at least compared to Scribd’s previous bundling partners — but they all normally cost between $2.99 and $10.99 per month, so there are some real savings here. It’s an extra incentive for someone to sign up for Scribd, and for existing subscribers to stick around. Meanwhile, these partners presumably get new users and additional revenue.

    In a statement, Scribd CEO Trip Adler said:

    With millions of people around the world continuing to shelter in place, having access to different forms of enrichment is more important than ever before. We’re thrilled to be partnering with leading consumer brands to offer a more accessible way for consumers to easily stay informed, entertained, and connected. Scribd is designed to help people explore the world’s best content, and now, with the launch of our new Scribd Perks platform, there is even more premium content to discover.

     


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Scribd announces a perks program, giving its subscribers access to Pandora Plus, TuneIn Premium and more

    Startups

    Hims & Hers launch Spanish language telemedicine services

    May 20, 2020

    Hims & Hers, the startup focused on providing access to elective treatments for things like hair loss, skin care and erectile disfunction and online telemedicine services, is expanding its services to include a Spanish language option, the company said.

    After Mexico, the U.S. has the second-largest Spanish speaking population in the world, with an estimated 41 million U.S. residents speaking Spanish at home. The population also prefers to receive healthcare information and frequent facilities that offer resources in Spanish.

    Now, with a shortage looming in primary care physicians for rural areas and inner cities and a sky-high rate of Hispanics living without any form of healthcare coverage (roughly 15.1%, according to data provided by the company), Hims & Hers is pitching its telemedicine offering as an option.

    “Language, cost, and location should not be barriers to receiving quality care, which is why we are launching a Spanish offering on our telemedicine platform,” the company said in a statement.

    The company’s $39 primary care consultations at its Hims and its Hers websites will be in Spanish. That will include everything from communications like the patient intake form and instructions to prepare for an online consultation along with a connection to Spanish-speaking healthcare provider.

    “The reason we created Hims & Hers was to break down barriers and provide more people with access to quality and convenient care,” the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Andrew Dudum, said in a statement. “As a telemedicine company, we recognize the need and understand the importance of serving the Spanish-speaking population. We hope those seeking access to care in Spanish find our platform to be a welcoming, inclusive, quality experience.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hims & Hers launch Spanish language telemedicine services