Browsing Tag: Startups

Editor’s note: Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course over the next few weeks. 

In week one of a16z’s Crypto Startup School, a16z general partner Chris Dixon discusses “Crypto Networks and Why They Matter,” giving an overview of the crypto space, the transformative implications of its technology, and the potential for crypto networks to lead a new wave of innovation. And in his talk on “Blockchain Primitives: Cryptography and Consensus,” Dan Boneh, a professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford, provides an introduction to the cryptographic foundation of blockchains and how developers can use them to build new types of applications.

Dixon says that crypto is poised to become the next major computing platform. Like mobile phones and the web before it, crypto offers opportunities for entrepreneurs and developers to build new networks and applications, due to the decentralized blockchain technology that underpins it. He describes blockchains as a new type of computer — a virtual computer that runs on a network of physical computers, with encoded guarantees that it will continue to operate as designed. Just as the rise of mobile phones enabled an explosion of innovation on top of that new computing platform, crypto presents an opportunity for the next such “idea maze,” he says. “Our feeling is this is an incredibly rich design space.”

The architecture of crypto enables new possibilities, Dixon says, starting with digital currency but expanding to general computing and community owned and operated networks. In combination with the digital primitive of tokens, which align incentives among network creators and users, this sets the stage for exponential innovation over the next decade that should echo previous eras of tech growth. “When a lot of really smart people who know computer science start thinking about computer science problems and have an economic incentive to do so, those computers tend to get a lot better.”

In the second presentation in week one, Dan Boneh explains the layers of crypto, including the consensus layer, and how Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin whitepaper proposed a system that enables an unlimited number of participants to contribute to a blockchain without authorization and still come to verifiable consensus. He also talks about cryptographic primitives, how mining works, how blocks are added to the blockchain, public and private keys, and zero-knowledge proofs. These unique features provide a fertile ground for open-source developers.

The application layer, Boneh says, is where a lot of the excitement is, with a “thriving ecosystem” of applications running on the blockchain in the area of decentralized finance (DeFi). While technical, Boneh’s presentation is accessible to those who don’t have a background in cryptography or consensus mechanisms.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Crypto Startup School: A new type of computer drives waves of innovation

Eugene Kaspersky made a name for himself in cybersecurity as CEO of Kaspersky Labs, but the Russian security expert has a new passion project: he’s funding an online accelerator that aims to support entrepreneurs who are building travel and tourism startups.

Businesses that apply must have a focus on Russia, though the accelerator is open to startups based anywhere. There are four categories of focus: travel tech, infrastructure, social impact and sustainability. Kaspersky isn’t taking equity in selected teams, which means founders who get into the program will benefit from free support.

Ten startups will be selected for a two-week online bootcamp, with a virtual demo day planned for June 25. The deadline for applications is May 29, 2020.

We spoke to Kaspersky about setting up the program and why he’s so keen to support a sector that’s being hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

TechCrunch: What is Kaspersky Exploring Russia? Explain the key details of how the program will work and what sort of support will be offered to selected entrepreneurs/startups?

Eugene Kaspersky: The program is a tourism accelerator targeting young travel startups. We decided to help the tourism industry as an industry that has been hit so severely by the pandemic. I think now is the time to… turn life’s lemons into lemonade by using this self-isolation period for personal development and improvement of business projects. We’ll be accepting applications from different industry streams — tech startups, projects that make extreme and leisure tourism more accessible, business projects that are socially significant in the travel and tourism fields and projects that have a positive impact on sustainable development. We’ll choose the 10 most interesting and promising projects to enter the online educational program with lectures, one-to-one coaching sessions and presentations from industry experts. At the end of the program, we‘ll chose three finalists on the demo day, where all 10 participants will be able to pitch their startups to the jury.

You’ve made your name in cybersecurity. Some people may wonder why you’re investing your own resource in travel/tourism startups when many types of businesses are facing huge challenges as a result of the pandemic — so what’s your personal interest in the sector? And what made you choose an accelerator as your way to help?

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why is Eugene Kaspersky funding a travel accelerator during COVID-19?

As with just about any big gathering, the traditional approach to Demo Day — in which a startup incubator debuts all of its latest companies to a huge room full of investors — has been put on hold until further notice.

Instead, more and more accelerators are taking Demo Day fully digital. The latest to go all-remote is Alchemist Accelerator, which will host its first entirely online Demo Day later today.

Alchemist director Ravi Belani tells me they’re aiming to figure out how to make this work for the long haul rather than approaching it as a one-off, building up an internal platform that allows potential investors to easily connect with each company’s founders or see which startups have had the most connection requests. Even if the idea of an in-person demo day returns, he says, it’ll help them expand their audience beyond those who can be in the room.

Want to watch along as the companies present? Alchemist has made a public stream available, which should go live at 2 pm pacific.

Just want a quick breakdown? Here’s all 15 companies that are scheduled to present, plus a little bit about what they’re aiming to do:

Spext: Trim and adjust audio — for a podcast, for example — by editing the transcript in a word processor-style interface.

Flivery: Fully autonomous drone delivery with minimal labor/infrastructure requirements.

Frontier Bio: A 3D printer for printing human tissues, meant to help in the process of things like tissue implants, drug toxicity testing or the development of personalized medicine.

Baseet.ai: A drag-and-drop platform for integrating AI and computer vision into your existing apps, with a marketplace for developers to share what they’ve built.

BeeCanvas: A white-boarding tool for remote teams.

WeConvert: Smart trash bins, meant to help businesses and public spaces better understand how their bins are being used. Their analytics dashboard can help teams figure out things like how often to schedule pickups, or which bins could be better utilized somewhere else.

Harness: A platform meant to help you build out and support startup communities.

Materiall: An AI/ML tool meant to help retailers better understand what an individual customer is looking for and surface it accordingly.

Veeh: A marketplace for local businesses to offer up their free space – idle TVs, empty walls, etc. — as ad space.

Veda Labs: AI for retail spaces (heatmaps, customer demographics, etc.) generated from your existing video/CCTV setup.

CameraOpus: Smartphone-based 3D scanning tool.

FleetSimplify: A customizable fleet management app to connect vehicle fleet owners with potential drivers, source insurance policies, track and monitor repairs, etc.

Renovai: AI-powered interior design tool to let furniture retailers pitch room concepts to potential buyers

BrainHi: An automated, SMS-powered receptionist for dentist and doctors offices, meant to help with things like appointment scheduling when no one is available to answer.

Inti Tech: Robotic solar power cleaning to help solar farms maximize panel efficiency.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Here are the 15 companies presenting at Alchemist Accelerator’s first fully digital demo day

Despite the economic disruptions associated with the coronavirus pandemic, cloud vendors are holding up well as many client companies and their employees work from home.

With stores closed, it’s natural that e-commerce would also perform strongly — after all, it’s also cloud-based, and folks working from home are shifting their shopping from brick-and-mortar to digital. (You can look at the pre-COVID-19 trend here; it has since become an even steeper curve.)

If you track Shopify’s stock price over the last six months, the argument appears to hold up; the cloud’s pandemic boom isn’t confined to remote-work tooling like Slack and Zoom.

A one-year chart of Shopify’s market performance through May 12, 2020

The Canadian phenom helps businesses large and small build online storefronts, offering a reasonable alternative in the midst of a sinking traditional economy. As more businesses must close their stores, a sturdy online presence could be the difference between surviving and going under.

Going beyond online

The public company doesn’t stop with just digital storefronts; Shopify also offers a point-of-sale system for businesses that lets owners track sales wherever they happen. While having physical stores open on a regular basis might not happen for some time, a unified approach to your business in-store and online could help retailers, no matter what happens.

In fact, Shopify counts larger businesses such as Heineken, Staples, General Mills and D-Link as customers. One other factor could also be helping explain Shopify’s growing success: It serves as an alternative for a growing number of firms and online shoppers who don’t want to give their business to online retail giant Amazon.

Having that level of product and customer could help explain why Shopify’s fortunes have been on the rise in spite of the pandemic’s overall impact on the economy. Let’s dig a bit further.

From product to profit

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | As e-commerce booms during the pandemic, Shopify accelerates

The Extra Crunch Live series rolls along next week with something special: My old boss is taking part.

Let me explain. Alexia Bonatsos was once co-editor of TechCrunch and was part of my interview circuit when I first joined the publication. She taught me more than I can write down; Alexia is one of my favorite people.

She’s joining us for an Extra Crunch Live session as she’s now a venture capitalist at Dream Machine VC, a firm she started. Her partner, Niko Bonatsos, is taking part as well. Niko works for General Catalyst, where he’s a managing director.

Dream Machine is a self-described “opportunistic seed fund,” meaning it makes early bets. General Catalyst tends to invest a little later but also has a seed effort that’s worth a few dozen million dollars each year. So, the two are likely focused on different parts of the market, even if there is some overlap.

I won’t lie; I’m excited about this conversation. Alexia is someone who always challenges my thinking, and Niko is a curious VC in that I don’t think he’s ever tried to bullshit me. (Indeed, he swung by the other week to chat with my Equity co-host Danny, which went pretty well. But call that a warm-up for this particular chat.)

What will we talk about? We’ll cover the basics quickly — their current investing pace, changes in the face of COVID-19, that sort of thing — but then we’ll dig into the future. General Catalyst has taken part in a few AI-focused funding rounds in 2020, and Dream Machine says that it “hopes to help exceptional founders make science fiction non-fiction.”

I have some questions.

But I won’t be able to draw all the lines that we ask them to color in for us — you’ll be on hand to help. These Extra Crunch Live chats have been a good reminder that you have a lot of ideas and questions that are worth raising. So, I’ll see you on May 19 in the early afternoon on the East Coast, or the late morning if you’re out West.

Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, you can get an inexpensive trial here.

Let’s have some fun and talk about the future.

— Alex

Details

Here’s the information you’ll need:

• May 19, 11:00 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/5:00 p.m. GMT

  
  Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Extra Crunch Live: Join Alexia and Niko Bonatsos for a Q&A May 19th at 2 pm EDT/11 am PDT

While the world feels paused, in some respects, new startups are still cropping up like usual. Today, 13 companies are graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, based in NY, with $100,000 each in funding from the accelerator.

This is ERA’s 18th class, with the accelerator having launched more than 200 companies since its inception, which have collectively raised more than $500 million.

Let’s meet the companies:

Artists on Go is a marketplace platform that connects individual hairstylists with salon owners. Stylists can rent salon space from owners for $20/hour and keep the revenue they earn from their clients, rather than splitting it with a salon employer. Salon owners, meanwhile, earn revenue on their empty space when they don’t have clients of their own.

Coinapoly is an asset management platform that helps customers go from renters to real estate owners, by letting them buy a part of their home over time while offering better risk-adjusted returns to real estate investors. The company charges fees on managed homes.

FieldClix is a SaaS platform for remote construction projects, specifically tailored toward wireless, solar and broadband construction projects. With carriers pushing toward a 5G roll out, FieldClix allows workers to collaborate on project planning, field resource management, cost tracking, etc. The company has 30 companies on the platform right now, charging a recurring monthly, tiered subscription fee per licensed seat.

Hailify is a B2B platform that looks to utilize on-demand driver fleets during their downtime in between rides. Where drivers are waiting around for their next ride, Hailify offers them a last-mile delivery gig to keep earning even without a rider. Hailify charges the on-demand driver company, and pays out drivers for each delivery made, taking a percentage of each delivery that goes through the platform.

Hazel is tackling the female incontinence space with a re-engineered adult diaper, focusing on fit, function and aesthetics. The D2C business uses new materials and techniques to deliver a disposable product that looks and feels like real underwear. Hazel launches later this fall.

Mouth Off is a dissolvable gum that is meant to eliminate bad breath, not by simply masking the odor but by attacking the molecules in the mouth that produce bad breath. Mouth Off is plant-based and has no sugar or artificial ingredients. The company, which is launching later this fall, offers both a D2C subscription and retail options for purchase.

Nayya is an enterprise business that helps employers find the right health insurance coverage plan for their employees, using data to increase transparency and provide cost-saving insights and information around the doctor network nearby. The Nayya companion product lets employees enroll and helps them throughout the year as they navigate coverage, doctors, and supplemental coverage options. Nayya also offers payroll integration.

As parental leave grows as an important feature for employees and employers alike, Parento offers an insurance-based paid parental leave platform for employers. The company offers predictable pricing allowing for employees to take up to 16 weeks off, alongside offerings for new parent coaching and transition support. The company uses a B2B model, with pricing varying based on employee salary and the existing paid parental leave policy.

RillaVoice gives companies in real-world environments, like grocery stores, fast food chains, hospitals and brick and mortar stores the chance to record and analyze their face-to-face conversations with customers. Using lapel mics and machine-learning technology, Rilla analyzes these conversations to better understand customer experience, conversion, etc. in a way that’s secure, compliant and anonymous. Rilla charges a monthly fee per seat, which ranges from $50/month to $350/month.

Salusion is a SaaS company focused on maximizing HSA tax savings for consumers and their employers. By revamping the health savings account process, Salusion lets users ‘HSA as they go’, and charges employers a fee per employee per month to administer the HSA accounts.

Spotter is a software company targeted at the long-haul trucking industry, helping these companies select the best load for an individual truck and driver based on input criteria like rate, schedule and fuel costs. The platform also provides drivers with pickup and drop-off instructions. Spotter charges fleets a subscription fee per truck.

Top is a multi-channel engagement platform for brands, giving them the chance to collect privacy-compliant data without the use of cookies. Top helps brands create interactive content, such as live voting, games and competitions to collect this data and build customer profiles, which includes data such as shopping preferences and purchase intent. Top charges clients monthly for use of their data and engagement platform.

Undock is a SaaS business focused on scheduling and coordinating meetings. The predictive machine-learning model looks for the perfect meeting time for participants by comparing availability, preferences and behavior. The Undock platform also offers collaborative agenda and note-taking functionality that lays on top of any conferencing platform. Undock operates a freemium model.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Meet the 13 startups graduating out of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

Over the last few weeks all eyes in the crypto world have been glued to the halvening, a nigh-religious moment in the blockchain realm. Every once in a while, the amount of new bitcoin mined — distributed to miners, the folks with fleets of computers powering bitcoin’s database, or blockchain — is cut in half. Why does that matter? It slows the rate at which new bitcoin is introduced to the world as the cryptocurrency marches toward its 21 million coin cap.

That’s to say that, while you weren’t looking, the world of digital tokens and currencies has marched along, maturing to some degree as cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based services settle into slightly more predictable trading ranges.

The companies working in the crypto space are growing up as well, building out better, more sophisticated tooling for retail and institutional investors alike. FalconX is one such company, and today it announced that it has raised $17 million to date.

The crypto trading service — more on what it does in a moment — is backed by a legion of investors including Fidelity-affiliated Avon Ventures, corporate shop Coinbase Ventures, and a host of more traditional players including Lightspeed, Flybridge, Accel, Fenbushi, and Accomplice. Normally we’d curtail the list of investors to merely the most interesting, but in this case it felt reasonable to include them all, as the sheer number of capital shops that put up money for FalconX details that there is still niche and mainstream venture interest in at least some crypto-focused companies.

FalconX is also a company that anyone can understand, which probably helped. The company’s tech helps provide pricing information for cryptocurrencies, offering what it calls the “best” price for a period of time (seconds). That might sound somewhat simple, but it’s not; the crypto world is made up of a host of exchanges, is awash with fake trading volume and has a history of being pushed around by large accounts. To be able to offer a price, and hold onto it, is material.

The company is currently focused on institutional customers, which the company’s founders Raghu Yarlagadda and Prabhakar Reddy loosely described to TechCrunch as those with $10 million AUM (assets under management) and up. This likely makes KYC (know your customers) rules easier for the startup to follow.

FalconX makes money from trading fees, albeit in two ways. It offers either crypto prices with its fees included or on a fixed-fee model. Notably the firm says that crypto-native customers prefer the baked-in approach, while more traditional customers prefer the visible-fee method.

Either way, FalconX’s tech has found an audience. It has executed $7 billion in trading volume in the last 10 months (I asked about the seemingly odd time interval, which the firm explained as its most recent, fully-audited time period; it has seen more total volume during its life.)

That $7 billion volume result is likely why FalconX was able to attract external capital. And the fact that the startup appears to care about treating crypto seriously and not as a way to get around traditional banking regulations.

For example, after FalconX brought up anti-money laundering work during a discussion about regulation, TechCrunch asked the company how far it can look into its transactions to make sure that it isn’t accidentally helping bad folks get money. Yarlagadda responded, saying that “the future of regulation” in his space is “solving some of these problems and showing [them] to the [regulatory] agencies so that they get comfortable about the space.”

How is FalconX going about that? It uses “internal on-chain analytics” as well as third-parties to help get “context [into] which bitcoin addresses, or ethereum addresses, are associated with dark web or terrorist activities” to make sure that its trades are not winding up helping the wrong folks. This isn’t easy; the startup has to look through “six, seven hops” so that it can see if any money that goes through its service is suspect.

That seems pretty good, right? I found it impressive. Even more, after Yarlagadda joked that it’s not cheap to pay for the computing power needed to pull off that work, FalconX told TechCrunch that the expense counts as COGS. Neat!

There’s a fine line when covering anything blockchain-related between producing something that regular folks can understand, and writing something that the crypto-believing world won’t dismiss out of hand as insufficiently nuanced. Summing then, in case I swung too far towards the latter, FalconX built a pricing engine that allows big investors to make trades with more confidence. It gets paid when they trade and is processing lots of volume. That means its revenues are going up. And that’s why it raised more money.

The next question for FalconX is how fast it can scale volume. The faster it can, the more enticing it will prove to investors. And in time, if it does open up to more retail-sized traders, who knows, it could even become a household name.

At least in crypto.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | FalconX raises M to power its crypto trading service

VMware announced today that it intends to buy early-stage Kubernetes security startup Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black, a security company it bought last year for $2.1 billion. The company did not reveal the price of today’s acquisition.

According to a blog post announcing the deal, from Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president at VMware’s Security Business Unit, Octarine should fit in with what Carbon Black calls its “intrinsic security strategy” — that is, protecting content and applications wherever they live. In the case of Octarine, that is cloud native containers in Kubernetes environments.

“Acquiring Octarine enables us to advance intrinsic security for containers (and Kubernetes environments), by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, and via deep hooks and integrations with the VMware Tanzu platform,” Morley wrote in a blog post.

This also fits in with VMware’s Kubernetes strategy, having purchased Heptio, an early Kubernetes company started by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two folks who helped develop Kubernetes while at Google before starting their own company,

We covered Octarine last year when it released a couple of open-source tools to help companies define the Kubernetes security parameters. As we quoted head of product Julien Sobrier at the time:

Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility and a lot of power to developers. There are over 30 security settings, and understanding how they interact with each other, which settings make security worse, which make it better, and the impact of each selection is not something that’s easy to measure or explain.

As for the startup, it now gets folded into VMware’s security business. While the CEO tried to put a happy face on the acquisition in a blog post, it seems its days as an independent entity are over. “VMware’s commitment to cloud native computing and intrinsic security, which have been demonstrated by its product announcements and by recent acquisitions, makes it an ideal home for Octarine,” the company CEO Shemer Schwarz wrote in the post.

Octarine was founded in 2017 and has raised $9 million, according to PitchBook data.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | VMware to acquire Kubernetes security startup Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black

FeaturePeek’s founders graduated from Y Combinator in Summer 2019, which for an early-stage startup must seem like a million years ago right now. Despite the current conditions though, the company announced a $1.8 million seed investment today.

The round was led by Matrix Partners with some unnamed angel investors also participating.

The startup has built a solution to allow teams to review front-end designs throughout the development process instead of waiting until the end when the project has been moved to staging, co-founder Eric Silverman explained.

“FeaturePeek is designed to give front-end capabilities that enable developers to get feedback from all their different stakeholders at every stage in the development process and really fill in the missing gaps of the review cycle,” he said.

He added, “Right now, there’s no dedicated place to give feedback on that new work until it hits their staging environment, and so we’ll spin up ad hoc deployment previews, either on commit or on pull requests and those fully running environments can be shared with the team. On top of that, we have our overlay where you can file bugs, you can annotate screenshots, record video or leave comments.”

Since last summer, the company has remained lean with three full-time employees, but it has continued to build out the product. In addition to the funding, the company also announced a free command line version of the product for single developers in addition to the teams product it has been building since the Y Combinator days.

Ilya Sukhar, partner at Matrix Partners, says as a former engineer, he had experienced this kind of problem firsthand, and he knew that there was a lack of tooling to help. That’s what attracted him to FeaturePeek.

“I think FeaturePeek is kind of a company that’s trying to change that and try to bring all of these folks together in an environment where they can review running code in a way that really wasn’t possible before, and I certainly have been frustrated on both ends of this where as an engineer, you’re kind of like, ‘okay, I wrote it, are you ever going to look at it?’ ” he said.

Sukhar recognizes these are trying times to launch a startup, and nobody really knows how things are going to play out, but he encourages these companies not to get too caught up in the macro view at this stage.

Silverman knows that he needs to adapt his go to market strategy for the times, and he says the founders are making a concerted effort to listen to users and find ways to improve the product while finding ways to communicate with the target audience.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | FeaturePeek moves beyond Y Combinator with .8M seed

LeoLabs has been building out its global network of space-scanning radars for the last couple years, leading up to today’s launch of its Collision Avoidance system, essentially satellite-monitoring-as-a-service. It should prove an indispensable asset to startups that don’t happen to have their own state of the art radar setup.

Space is full of junk, and it isn’t tracked as closely as anyone would like. A bit of debris the size of a pebble could put nearly any satellite out of commission, and there are thousands upon thousands of them in unknown orbits.

Most debris tracking is done by a motley collection of radars administrated by the U.S. Air Force and other government entities, but they’re limited in the precision and accuracy of their readings. LeoLabs aims to augment these capabilities with its own system, which can monitor more and smaller debris.

The company put the finishing touches on its newest radar antenna in New Zealand late last year, completing the network it needed to assemble to provide global coverage. Having kicked the tires for a bit with a group of early customers (Planet, Digital Globe, Black Sky and the Air Force Research Lab), the company is now ready to open the doors to its product to all and sundry.

Like any other modern data product, Collision Avoidance (as it is called) is completely cloud-based. You subscribe to the service and provide the requisite details, allowing the system to identify your assets in orbit. From then on you receive automatic alerts should, for instance, any tracked objects enter a potentially threatening orbit or some new piece of debris come worryingly close to yours (these are called “conjunctions”). It can also provide direct observational confirmation of your satellite’s position and trajectory, should you for some reason suspect the telemetry is off.

Perhaps the most important part is simply that it’s all very responsive. If you’re exploring 10 different possibilities for a maneuver to raise a satellite’s orbit, you don’t need to email the Air Force 10 times and hear back hours or days later. You can check the safety of a maneuver in real time, or once committed, request the radar scan your satellite — within minutes, not days — to make sure that it accomplished it correctly.

That kind of capability has always been lacking in space applications, which are often mired not just in red tape but in uncertainty of timelines and the immense complexity of the crowded zoo that is low Earth orbit. Being able to just sign up for it like any other enterprise service is a huge convenience for both large and small space companies.

Right now LeoLabs has three radars that cover a great deal of the sky, but it’s planning three more to increase the frequency with which satellites can be seen and tracked, especially those in equatorial orbits.

“Never before has a single end-to-end solution, from radars to web application, been available as a commercial off-the-shelf service,” said a proud-sounding Michael Nicolls, co-founder and CTO of LeoLabs, in a press release. “This turnkey SaaS solution puts a simple face in front of the sophisticated cloud-based astrodynamics platform and network of ground-based radars.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | LeoLabs launches its global satellite monitoring and collision avoidance service