Browsing Tag: Startups

More evidence has emerged that the e-scooter sharing market faces a bumpy ride, as news circulates that authorities in Madrid have revoked licenses for all three operators in the city.

Lime, Wind and Voi, are being given a maximum of 72 hours to remove scooters from the city’s streets, whilst I understand it follows a recent change in mobility laws in Madrid that stipulate where and at what speed e-scooters can be driven.

Specifically, e-scooters can only operate in designated bike lanes and only on roads that have a speed limit below 30 kilometres per hour. Sidewalk and pedestrian areas were also recently banned following Spain’s first death from an e-scooter accident in August.

Meanwhile, my sources in Madrid tell me a meeting has just taken place between the city’s transport authorities to presumably find a resolution for the conflict. The outcome of those talks isn’t yet known, although the path to compliance may actually be relatively simple.

Lime, Wind and Voi will almost certainly need to make changes to their respective apps, which could include geo-fencing where the e-scooters can be ridden, as well as communicating those restrictions to users and legally enforcing them via their terms of service. In other words, this may yet prove to be little more than a speed bump in the current e-scooter race, which is frenzied, to say the least.

Asked to comment on the situation in Madrid, Voi — which has made a virtue out of its ability to work with local governments and transport authorities — issued the following statement:

Voi is working closely with the authorities in Madrid to make sure that our app complies fully with the city’s new guidelines. We are confident that we will be able to get our scooters back on the streets of Madrid in a short time, to help residents and visitors travel around the city quickly and safely, in an environmentally-friendly, low-impact way.

Wind also responded, issuing the following statement:

WIND offers a convenient, inexpensive and quick access to short distance transportation in urban areas. We are putting a strong focus on user-friendliness and road safety. We are collaborating with the city government in Madrid. Our team met with the authorities today. We look forward to continue working with the city to fulfill this new requirement issued today.

I’ve also reached out to Lime and will update this article if and when I hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Madrid authorities order Lime, Wind and Voi to halt e-scooter sharing in the Spanish city

FortressIQ, a startup that wants to bring a new kind of artificial intelligence to process automation called imitation learning, emerged from stealth this morning and announced it has raised $12 million.

The Series A investment came entirely from a single venture capital firm, Light Speed Venture Partners. Today’s funding comes on top of $4 million in seed capital the company raised previously from Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Eniac Ventures.

Pankaj Chowdhry, founder and CEO of FortressIQ, says that his company basically replaces high-cost consultants who are paid to do time and motion studies and automates that process in a fairly creative way. It’s a bit like Robotics Process Automation (RPA), a space that is attracting a lot of investment right now, but instead of simply recording what’s happening on the desktop, and reproducing that digitally, it takes it a step further in a process called “imitation learning.”

“We want to be able to replicate human behavior through observation. We’re targeting this idea of how can we help people understand their processes. But imitation learning is I think the most interesting area of artificial intelligence because it focuses not on what AI can do, but how can AI learn and adapt,” he explained

They start by capturing a low-bandwidth movie of the process. “So we build virtual processors. And basically the idea is we have an agent that gets deployed by your enterprise IT group, and it integrates into the video card,” Chowdhry explained.

He points out that it’s not actually using a camera, but it captures everything going on, as a person interacts with a Windows desktop. In that regard it’s similar to RPA. “The next component is our AI models and computer vision. And we build these models that can literally watch the movie and transcribe the movie into what we call a series of software interactions,” he said.

Another key differentiator here is that they have built a data mining component on top of this, so if the person in the movie is doing something like booking an invoice, and stops to check email or Slack, FortressIQ can understand when an activity isn’t part of the process and filters that out automatically.

The product will be offered as a cloud service. Chowdhry’s previous company, Third Pillar Systems, was acquired by Genpact in 2013.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | FortressIQ raises M to bring new AI twist to process automation

Fivetran, a startup that builds automated data pipelines between data repositories and cloud data warehouses and analytics tools, announced a $15 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners.

Fivetran helps move data from source repositories like Salesforce and NetSuite to data warehouses like Snowflake or analytics tools like Looker. Company CEO and co-founder George Fraser says the automation is the key differentiator here between his company and competitors like Informatica and SnapLogic.

“What makes Fivetran different is that it’s an automated data pipeline to basically connect all your sources. You can access your data warehouse, and all of the data just appears and gets kept updated automatically,” Fraser explained. While he acknowledges that there is a great deal of complexity behind the scenes to drive that automation, he stresses that his company is hiding that complexity from the customer.

The company launched out of Y Combinator in 2012, and other than $4 million in seed funding along the way, it has relied solely on revenue up until now. That’s a rather refreshing approach to running an enterprise startup, which typically requires piles of cash to build out sales and marketing organizations to compete with the big guys they are trying to unseat.

One of the key reasons they’ve been able to take this approach has been the company’s partner strategy. Having the ability to get data into another company’s solution with a minimum of fuss and expense has attracted data-hungry applications. In addition to the previously mentioned Snowflake and Looker, the company counts Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Redshift, Tableau, Periscope Data, Salesforce, NetSuite and PostgreSQL as partners.

Ilya Sukhar, general partner at Matrix Partners, who will be joining the Fivetran board under the terms of deal sees a lot of potential here. “We’ve gone from companies talking about the move to the cloud to preparing to execute their plans, and the most sophisticated are making Fivetran, along with cloud data warehouses and modern analysis tools, the backbone of their analytical infrastructure,” Sukhar said in a statement.

They currently have 100 employees spread out across four offices in Oakland, Denver, Bangalore and Dublin. They boast 500 customers using their product including Square, WeWork, Vice Media and Lime Scooters, among others.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fivetran announces M Series A to build automated data pipelines

Changes are afoot at Techstars NYC. Over the summer, Alex Iskold announced that he would be leaving his role as the program’s managing director, and other staff members are departing as well. Now Techstars says Jenny Fielding is taking charge of the program.

Fielding is already a Techstars veteran, having run a number of its industry-focused corporate accelerators, such as Techstars IoT, the Barclays Accelerator and the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. She’s also one of the co-founders at The Fund, a new early-stage fund that backs New York City founders.

Techstars, meanwhile, has become increasingly focused on corporate partnerships, but it still operates a handful of independent, industry-agnostic programs based in cities like Boulder, Boston and New York.

In a blog post, Fielding said that by taking on her new role, she’s “doubling down on my commitment to the NYC tech community.” She continued:

My goal is to build even deeper ties with local organizations that foster community and promote inclusivity … New York is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and Techstars is committed to having founders, mentors, partners, and program staff who reflect this mix of people and cultures. Further supporting this mission of inclusion, Techstars continues to deepen relationships with the many universities and civic initiatives that foster innovation.

The next Techstars NYC class will begin in July of 2019. Applications open on January 7.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Jenny Fielding takes over as managing director of Techstars NYC

It’s been a whirlwind few months for Forethought, a startup with a new way of looking at enterprise search that relies on artificial intelligence. In September, the company took home the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield trophy in San Francisco, and today it announced a $9 million Series A investment.

It’s pretty easy to connect the dots between the two events. CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas said they’ve seen a strong uptick in interest since the win. “Thanks to TechCrunch Disrupt, we have had a lot of things going on including a bunch of new customer interest, but the biggest news is that we’ve raised our $9 million Series A round,” he told TechCrunch.

The investment was led by NEA with K9 Ventures, Village Global and several angel investors also participating. The angel crew includes Front CEO Mathilde Collin, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and Learnvest CEO Alexa von Tobel.

Forethought aims to change conventional enterprise search by shifting from the old keyword kind of approach to using artificial intelligence underpinnings to retrieve the correct information from a corpus of documents.

“We don’t work on keywords. You can ask questions without keywords and using synonyms to help understand what you actually mean, we can actually pull out the correct answer [from the content] and deliver it to you,” Nicholas told TechCrunch in September.

He points out that it’s still early days for the company. It had been in stealth for a year before launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. Since the event, the three co-founders have brought on six additional employees and they will be looking to hire more in the next year, especially around machine learning and product and UX design.

At launch, they could be embedded in Salesforce and Zendesk, but are looking to expand beyond that.

The company is concentrating on customer service for starters, but with the new money in hand, it intends to begin looking at other areas in the enterprise that could benefit from a smart information retrieval system. “We believe that this can expand beyond customer support to general information retrieval in the enterprise,” Nicholas said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Forethought scores M Series A in wake of Battlefield win

One of Europe’s most popular fitness applications is poised to flourish in the U.S. market with the help of several Los Angeles-based investors.

Freeletics, headquartered in Munich, Germany, is today announcing its first round of private capital after bootstrapping since 2013. The $45 million Series A was co-led by FitLab, Causeway Media Partners and JAZZ Venture Partners, with participation from Courtside Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures and ward.ventures. Sports teams including the San Francisco 49ers and the Boston Celtics also invested, though Freeletics chief executive officer Daniel Sobhani declined to comment on any partnerships that may be in the works between the startup and the athletes.

As you might expect from the name, Freeletics operates its mobile fitness coaching app on a freemium model, with tiered pricing beginning at $11.99 for one month or $74.99 for a year-long membership. The app, which offers fitness content and AI-powered training plans tailored to individual users, initially focused on Germany but has since grown in popularity across Europe and in the U.S.

“We want to be there for people who want a long-term athletic lifestyle,” Sobhani told TechCrunch. “There are hundreds of millions of people who would love to make a change to their health and fitness but only a fraction of those actually make it. Helping people at scale to solve such a common problem is a tremendous benefit for the person but also for society.”

Freeletics chief executive officer Daniel Sobhani.

Sobhani says Freeletics now has 31 million users in more than 160 countries and will use its first bit of VC backing to grow its American user base — where it’s experienced 120 percent growth over the last six months. The company also plans to add a Netflix-style training platform, where “unlimited relevant training plans” will be available to paying users, as well as nutritional guidance to help people stay fit. The startup, however, has no plans to expand into hardware.

“Most of the people out there that want to become fitter or healthier are reverting to choices that have been there for decades, like going to the gym or running but without broader context or understanding,” Sobhani said. “Or they are turning to books or very restrictive diets. Tech solutions are so much better because they can adjust to you; they can make sure what you’re doing is effective.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Freeletics raises M for its AI-powered mobile fitness coach

​Mixcloud​, the audio streaming platform that is popular for long-form content, such as radio shows and DJ sets, has launched a “fan-to-creator” subscription service in a bid to find new ways of monetizing and ensuring both artists and curators get paid.

Dubbed “​Mixcloud Select,” the new feature lets listeners subscribe to a Select creator’s channel so they can directly support them, and contribute to the licensing cost of the music played in the shows. Subscribers get an enhanced listening experience that includes the ability to download shows to listen offline and view upfront track lists, making it feel a lot more like on-demand and less tied to the legacy of over-the-air radio.

Nico Perez, co-founder of Mixcloud, frames Mixcloud Select as a pioneering move toward building a “fair and sustainable ecosystem” that works for audio creators, artists and listeners. “We want to enable fans to get closer to the culture and communities they care about, while ensuring that everyone involved in the creative process is recognized and rewarded accordingly,” he says in a statement.

That’s very much inline with the conversation Perez and I had back in April when TechCrunch reported on Mixcloud’s first ever funding round (despite being founded ten years ago). At the time the Mixcloud founder hinted at a consumer-facing subscription service, as well as discussing the licensing groundwork the company had laid. It comes as no surprise therefore to see Select launch.

Mixcloud has previously announced direct licensing deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Merlin, Warner/Chappell Music Publishing, ICE (a joint initiative between PRS, GEMA, and STIM) and many others. Related to this, the company has a proprietary content ID system that claims to identify individual tracks and underlying rights holders.

Mixcloud Select initially goes live with 47 creators who have already used the Mixcloud platform to build listener communities, and covers a wide range of genres and scenes. Creators range from international DJs including Afrojack, Nicole Moudaber, Lefto and John Digweed to homegrown Mixcloud stars such as DJ Blighty and Low Light Mixes; independent radio stations Brooklyn Radio, Soho Radio and Red Light Radio; record labels Defected Records and Axtone Records; and curators Clash Magazine and Stamp the Wax.

Channel subscriptions start at ($/£/€) 2.99 per month, with the ability for creators to set a higher price. Subscriptions renew monthly and can be cancelled anytime.

Mixcloud also says it will collaborate with creators to roll out additional new features, such as offering exclusive content and direct messaging with subscribers. All creators can now register their interest in joining Select in the near future.“

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mixcloud rolls out ‘fan-to-creator’ subscription service

Bios, a neural engineering startup originally based out of Cambridge, U.K. and now with an additional newly opened R&D office in Montreal, Canada, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The company is developing a “neural interface” that combines advances in hardware, big data, and machine learning/AI, which it’s hoped can be used to develop new cutting-edge treatments on organs and nerve systems throughout the body.

The round is led by Real Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, and Ariel Poler (founder of the Human Augmentation syndicate on AngelList). Other funds and angel investors participating include Endure Capital, Heuristic Capital Partners, K5 Ventures, and Charles Songhurst (former GM corporate strategy at Microsoft).

The startup and Y Combinator alumnus is also disclosing additional non-dilutive funding in the form of grants and awards from Cisco, MassChallenge UK, and Innovate UK. Michael Baum’s Founder.org was also an early backer.

Formerly known as Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), Bios’ first product is described as akin to a “USB connector for the body” and has been used to develop a Prosthetic Interface Device (PID) that allows amputees to connect a range of prostheses directly to the nervous system. The PID is about to enter clinical trials and enables neural signals sent by a person’s nervous system to be interpreted and in turn control a connected artificial body part.

Bio is co-founded by computational neuroscientist Emil Hewage and bioengineer Oliver Armitage, and in a brief call the pair explained that the R&D involved to develop the PID saw the young company not only make significant breakthroughs in the hardware required, including developing safe and accurate hardware, but also enabled the company to amass a very large neural dataset and further develop its algorithms for future use cases.

More broadly, the challenge in this field is how to collect and process large amounts of neural data and then accurately interpret the neural signals, which Hewage and Armitage say are incredibly noisy, continuously changing and travel throughout the body at incredible speed. In other words, a job best suited to machines underpinned by machine learning/AI.

Further into the future, Bios wants to directly connect to the nervous system via its neural interface and then use AI to “read and write” onto the nervous system to deal with the root cause of various chronic conditions. The detection and potential to “correct” neural signals could mean, for example, the development of an alternative way of treating high blood pressure that doesn’t rely on conventional medicine or can treat drug-resistant hypertension.

The plan is for Bios to develop some products and treatments of its own, but also to partner with various companies and organisations. The premise is that the company can focus on the core interface and related AI, while the eventual applications can be as wide and vertical as advancements and interest allows. Related to this, Bios is advocating and helping to push industry standards and formats for neural data.

On that note, Bios says it will use the funding to double its technical team, and further develop its core neural interface technologies. In addition it plans to expand access for commercial and academic partners through a variety of tools, datasets, and algorithms for “discovering and leveraging biomarkers in neural data”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bios raises .5M to further develop its ‘neural interface’ and new ways to treat chronic medical conditions

Zopa, the U.K. peer-to-peer lending company that wants to become a bank, has been awarded a bank license by the U.K.’s financial regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). The company wants to expand beyond P2P loans and investments to offer things liked savings accounts and credit cards.

Technically, however, this is only regulatory part one and Zopa’s bank licence comes “with restrictions,” meaning that it can’t launch fully just yet. Known as the ‘mobilisation’ phase of the license process, Zopa should eventually be granted a full licence once it meets various conditions set by the regulators.

In a statement, Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana says acquiring a banking licence is the starting point that will see the company become a “major force” in retail banking. “When we pioneered the peer-to-peer lending model globally in 2005, we did so by listening to customers and creating a better product for them. We will bring the same focus to our banking products – drawing on tech innovation, our values of fairness and transparency, and better customer service,” he adds.

Once launched, Zopa’s bank will sit alongside its existing business, creating what the fintech says will be the first hybrid peer-to-peer and digital bank offering. It will roll out a money management app, and various financial products.

When the bank-to-be announced the second part of a £60 million funding round last month, a spokesperson told me this will include FSCS-protected savings accounts and P2P investments (including Innovative Finance ISAs) for investors, and personal loans, car finance and credit cards for people looking to borrow.

Zopa also says it will steer clear of hidden fees and charges, and is placing a lot of emphasis on customer service, delivered via its app or over the phone.

However, whether or not any of the above will be enough to stand out from an increasingly crowded challenger bank space in the U.K. which includes Monzo, Starling, Tandem and many others, remains to be seen. With that said, a fintech nerd can never have enough new banking upstarts.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Zopa, the UK P2P lending company, secures bank license

French startup Agricool is raising another $28 million round of funding (€25 million). The company is working on containers to grow fruits and vegetables in urban areas, starting with strawberries.

Bpifrance, Danone Manifesto Ventures, Marbeuf Capital, Solomon Hykes and other business angels participated in today’s funding round. Some existing investors also participated, such as daphni, XAnge, Henri Seydoux and Kima Ventures.

It might sound crazy but containers can be more efficient than traditional agricultural methods. For instance, a container lets you control the temperature, the humidity, the color spectrum and more. Agricool uses a ton of LEDs to replace the sun.

The result is quite telling. You can grow strawberries all year round, save water as a container is limited when it comes to space, save on transportation and more.

In other words, you end up with locally-produced, GMO-free, pesticide-free strawberries. You can already buy some of those strawberries in a couple of Monoprix in Paris.

Agricool plans to launch a hundred containers by 2021 in Paris and in Dubai. That’s why the company is going to hire around 200 people by 2021 to support this growth rate. Eventually, Agricool also plans to expand to other fruits and vegetables.

I’ve already covered Agricool multiple times in the past. The startup is still following the same roadmap, but with more funding. And it sounds like it requires a lot of capital to build this network of containers as there are not a lot of them out there. But it’s a promising product that could help cut down on gas emissions.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Agricool raises another million to grow fruits in containers