Thursday, September 2, 2021

TechCrunch

TechCrunch

Report: India may be next in line to mandate changes to Apple’s in-app payment rules

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 03:31 AM PDT

Summer is still technically in session, but a snowball is slowly developing in the world of apps, and specifically the world of in-app payments. A report in Reuters today says that the Competition Commission of India, the country’s monopoly regulator, will soon be looking at an antitrust suit filed against Apple over how it mandates that app developers use Apple’s own in-app payment system — thereby giving Apple a cut of those payments — when publishers charge users for subscriptions and other items in their apps.

The suit, filed by an Indian non-profit called “Together We Fight Society”, said in a statement to Reuters that it was representing consumer and startup interests in its complaint.

The move would be the latest in what has become a string of challenges from national regulators against app store operators — specifically Apple but also others like Google and WeChat — over how they wield their positions to enforce market practices that critics have argued are anti-competitive. Other countries that have in recent weeks reached settlements, passed laws, or are about to introduce laws include Japan, South Korea, Australia, the U.S. and the European Union.

And in India specifically, the regulator is currently working through a similar investigation as it relates to in-app payments in Android apps, which Google mandates use its proprietary payment system. Google and Android dominate the Indian smartphone market, with the operating system active on 98% of the 520 million devices in use in the country as of the end of 2020.

It will be interesting to watch whether more countries wade in as a result of these developments. Ultimately, it could force app store operators, to avoid further and deeper regulatory scrutiny, to adopt new and more flexible universal policies.

In the meantime, we are seeing changes happen on a country-by-country basis.

Just yesterday, Apple reached a settlement in Japan that will let publishers of “reader” apps (those for using or consuming media like books and news, music, files in the cloud and more) to redirect users to external sites to provide alternatives to Apple’s proprietary in-app payment provision. Although it’s not as seamless as paying within the app, redirecting previously was typically not allowed, and in doing so the publishers can avoid Apple’s cut.

South Korean legislators earlier this week approved a measure that will make it illegal for Apple and Google to make a commission by forcing developers to use their proprietary payment systems.

And last week, Apple also made some movements in the U.S. around allowing alternative forms of payments, but relatively speaking the concessions were somewhat indirect: app publishers can refer to alternative, direct payment options in apps now, but not actually offer them. (Not yet at least.)

Some developers and consumers have been arguing for years that Apple’s strict policies should open up more. Apple however has long said in its defense that it mandates certain developer policies to build better overall user experiences, and for reasons of security. But, as app technology has evolved, and consumer habits have changed, critics believe that this position needs to be reconsidered.

One factor in Apple’s defense in India specifically might be the company’s position in the market. Android absolutely dominates India when it comes to smartphones and mobile services, with Apple actually a very small part of the ecosystem.

As of the end of 2020, it accounted for just 2% of the 520 million smartphones in use in the country, according to figures from Counterpoint Research quoted by Reuters. That figure had doubled in the last five years, but it’s a long way from a majority, or even significant minority.

The antitrust filing in India has yet to be filed formally, but Reuters notes that the wording leans on the fact that anti-competitive practices in payments systems make it less viable for many publishers to exist at all, since the economics simply do not add up:

“The existence of the 30% commission means that some app developers will never make it to the market,” Reuters noted from the filing. “This could also result in consumer harm.”

Reuters notes that the CCI will be reviewing the case in the coming weeks before deciding whether it should run a deeper investigation or dismiss it. It typically does not publish filings during this period.

Top Indian payments app PhonePe opens its data firehose to everyone

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 01:11 AM PDT

PhonePe, one of the largest digital payments services in India, on Thursday launched Pulse, a free product to offer insights into how people in the world's second largest internet market are paying digitally.

And PhonePe would know: the Flipkart-backed five-year-old startup said its insights are based on over 22 billion transactions it has processed over the years.

Pulse offers an unprecedented level of understanding of the inroads digital payments and various financial services have made across Indian states, districts and over 19,000 zip codes. The new product offers a range of granular data including how many of its transactions in a state were made between users, to merchants, and to pay utility bills.

The startup, which has anonymized users’ data, will publish new data and analysis periodically and one major report each year, it said. The startup also published its maiden report (PDF) Thursday.

A look at PhonePe’s Pulse product (Screengrab)

PhonePe co-founder and chief executive Sameer Nigam said at a virtual conference that PhonePe is also making its insights available through an API for academics, analysts, the government, policy makers, regulatory bodies, and other players to use at no charge.

More than 100 million Indians have started to transact digitally in the past five years buoyed by New Delhi’s move to invalidate much of the cash in circulation in 2016 and establishment of UPI railroads by retail banks in India that offers interoperability across apps. UPI has emerged as the most popular way Indians pay digitally today and PhonePe commands more than 40% of its market share.

The sudden surge in the adoption of mobile payments has also attracted several international giants — including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Samsung — to launch their payment offerings in the South Asian nation. India’s mobile payments market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion by 2023, according to Credit Suisse.

The rationale behind launching Pulse, an effort that was initially conceptualized by the startup’s communications team, is to offer clarity to people on the digital payments behavior as there have been too much unverified noise in the industry, PhonePe executives said at a virtual event Thursday.

“When we started PhonePe five years back, we struggled to get reliable granular data on digital payments trends across the country. We had promised ourselves that if we are successful and gather enough data on our platform, we would open it for anyone who wants to get deeper insights on the Indian payments industry. We built PhonePe Pulse because we can, and crucially because we should help unlock opportunities for others to build in India,” he said.

When asked about potentially losing the competitive advantage, Nigam said PhonePe is publishing the data for the greater good and he encouraged other players in the industry to also take similar steps. The data could help businesses better inform their decisions, he said.

iPhone inside 30 mins? Germany’s Arive brings consumer brands to your door, raises €6M

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 01:00 AM PDT

In Europe and the US we are very much getting used to groceries being delivered within 15 minutes, with a huge battleground of startups in the space. Startups across Europe and the US have raised no less than $3.1 billion in the last quarter alone for grocery deliveries within 10 or 20-minute delivery promises. But all are scrambling over a market where the average order size is pretty low. What if it was in the hundreds, and didn't require refrigeration?

This is probably going to be the newest “15/30minute” consumer battleground, as high-end consumer goods come to last-mile deliveries.

The latest to Arive in this space is… arive – a German-based startup that delivers high-end consumer brands within 30 minutes. It's now raised €6 million in seed funding from 468 Capital, La Famiglia VC and Balderton Capital.

But stacking its shelves with well-known brands and spinning up last-mile delivery logistics, Arive is offering fitness products, cosmetics, personal care, homeware, tech and fashion. Consumers order via an app, with the delivery coming via a bike-only fleet in 30-minutes or less.

The behavior it’s tapping into is already there. It seems the pandemic has made us all work and play from home, leaving foot traffic in inner cities still below pre-Covid levels.

Arive says it works directly with brands to offer a selection of their products for on-demand delivery, offering them a new distribution channel to a new type of customer that wants speed and convenience.

arive is currently available in Munich and has recently launched in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. The 30-minute delivery guarantee means it doesn't need as many micro fulfillment centers as grocery players, helping it to keep infrastructure costs low.

Maximilian Reeker, co-founder of arive, said: "While the space for hyper-fast grocery delivery is increasingly crowded, we found the brands we love are still stuck in a three-day delivery scheme. For today's time-poor consumers, this is too long."

Bardo Droege, investor at 468 Capital, commented: "Our cities are dynamic, fast-moving places, and people living there want the tools and services that reflect their lifestyles so it's no wonder the 15-minute groceries category has taken off so quickly. We're confident the arive team will take this on."

RISE will return to Hong Kong in 2022

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 12:30 AM PDT

RISE, one of Asia's largest tech conferences, is returning to Hong Kong in March 2022 as an in-person event, and will be held there for at least five years, announced organizer Web Summit today. Last year, Web Summit said RISE would move to Kuala Lumpur, but its return to Hong Kong means the conference will no longer be held in Malaysia's capital, though a spokesperson told TechCrunch that it is plans to host other events there in the future.

RISE will take place at the AsiaWorld-Expo from March 14 to 17, 2022.

In November 2019, while large pro-democracy demonstrations were taking place, Web Summit announced it was postponing RISE to 2021. Then in December 2020, it said that the 2021 event would not be held, and RISE would instead resume in Kuala Lumpur in 2022.

In an emailed statement, a RISE spokesperson told TechCrunch, "The political situation in Hong Kong did not impact our decision to consider Kuala Lumpur as a host city. Rise 2022 was originally meant to take place in Kuala Lumpur. However, this is no longer feasible. We would like to thank the MDEC, who invited us to host RISE in their wonderful city," adding "RISE has already had five successful years in Hong Kong since its launch in 2015. Our long-standing relationship with the city made it a natural decision to stay."

In Web Summit's announcement, co-founder and chief executive officer Paddy Cosgrove said, "We are extremely grateful for the support the city of Hong Kong has given RISE over the last five years, and we couldn't be more excited to return in-person in 2022."

The announcement included a statement from Hong Kong's secretary for commerce and economic development, Edward Yau, who said, "I'm very excited that RISE, the world-renowned tech event, has chosen to return to Hong Kong and stay here in the coming five years."

Stravito raises $14.6M to create a ‘Netflix for enterprise market research’

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 12:01 AM PDT

Market research and insights are often underutilized assets for enterprises but it's usually too hard to find content and there's a lot of duplication, or information isn't used well.

Swedish startup Stravito says it can centralize internal and external data sources and create something more akin to a ‘Spotify or Netflix’ for these kinds of assets, making them far more usable and consumable, they say.

It’s clearly onto something, since it’s now raised a €12.4million ($14.6million USD) series A funding round led by Endeit Capital, with additional investment from existing investors HenQ, Inventure and Creades. To date, Stravito has raised €20.1million ($23.7million USD).

Founded in 2017 by market research veterans and former iZettle employees, Stravito counts among its customers Carlsberg, Edwards Lifesciences, Pepsi Lipton, Danone, Electrolux and Comcast.

Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder at Stravito said: “It has never been more important for the world's largest enterprises to understand and react to their customer's changing behaviors using centralized, vetted company insights. Stravito's technology and platform makes it fast and easy for companies to use research to make better decisions."

On a call with me he added: "We provide a search technology, and a great design, all combined to deliver an intuitive, highly automated cloud service that allows these big companies to centralise internal and external data sources so they can pull out the nuggets they need."

Jelle-Jan Bruinsma, Partner at Endeit Capital, added: "Endeit Capital is always looking for the next generation of international software scale-ups, and Stravito stood out in the Nordics through its impressive work to raise the bar in the multibillion dollar market research and data industry."
Stravito also appointed Elaine Rodrigo, Chief Insights & Analytics Officer at Reckitt Benckiser, to its board of directors.

Stockeld Dreamery loves cheese so much that it raised $20M to make it out of legumes

Posted: 02 Sep 2021 12:01 AM PDT

Cheese is one of those foods that when you like it, you actually love it. It's also one of the most difficult foods to make from something other than milk. Stockeld Dreamery not only took that task on, it has a product to show for it.

The Stockholm-based company announced Thursday its Series A round of $20 million co-led by Astanor Ventures and Northzone. Joining them in the round — which founder Sorosh Tavakoli told TechCrunch he thought was "the largest-ever Series A round for a European plant-based alternatives startup," was Gullspång Re:food, Eurazeo, Norrsken VC, Edastra, Trellis Road and angel investors David Frenkiel and Alexander Ljung.

Tavakoli previously founded video advertising startup Videoplaza, and sold it to Ooyala in 2014. Looking for his next project, he said he did some soul-searching and wanted the next company to do something with an environmental impact. He ended up in the world of food, plant-based food, in particular.

Ooyala Buys Euro Video Ad Startup Videoplaza In Its First Acquisition

"Removing the animal has a huge impact on land, water, greenhouse gases, not to mention the factory farming," he told TechCrunch. "I identified that cheese is the worst. However, though people are keen on shifting their diet, when they try alternative products, they don't like it."

Tavakoli then went in search of a co-founder with a science background and met Anja Leissner, whose background is in biotechnology and food science. Together they started Stockeld in 2019.

Pär-Jörgen Pärson, general partner at Northzone, was an investor in Videoplaza and said via email that Stockeld Dreamery was the result of "the best of technology paired with the best of science," and that Tavakoli and Leissner were "using their scientific knowledge and vision of the future and proposing a commercial application, which is very rare in the foodtech space, if not unique."

The company's first product, Stockeld Chunk, launched in May, but not without some trials and tribulations. The team tested over 1,000 iterations of their "cheese" product before finding a combination that worked, Tavakoli said.

Advances in the plant-based milk category have been successful for the most part, not necessarily because of the plant-based origins, but because they are tasty, he explained. Innovation is also progressing in meat, but cheese still proved difficult.

"They are typically made from starch and coconut oil, so you can have a terrible experience from the smell and the mouth feel can be rubbery, plus there is no protein," Tavakoli added.

Stockeld wanted protein as the core ingredient, so Chunk is made using fermented legumes — pea and fava in this case — which gives the cheese a feta-like look and feel and contains 30% protein.

Chunk was initially launched with restaurants and chefs in Sweden. Within the product pipeline are spreadable and melting cheese that Tavakoli expects to be on the market in the next 12 months. Melting cheese is one of the hardest to make, but would open up the company as a potential pizza ingredient if successful, he said.

Including the latest round, Stockeld has raised just over $24 million to date. The company started with four employees and has now grown to 23, and Tavakoli intends for that to be 50 by the end of next year.

Chinese startups rush to bring alternative protein to people’s plates

The new funding will enable the company to focus on R&D, to build out a pilot plant and to move into a new headquarters building next year in Stockholm. The company also looks to expand out of Sweden and into the U.S.

"We have ambitious investors who understand what we are trying to do," Tavakoli said. "We have an opportunity to think big and plan accordingly. We feel we are in a category of our own in a sense that we are using legumes for protein. We are almost like a third fermented legumes category, and it is exciting to see where we can take it."

Eric Archambeau, co-founder and partner at Astanor Ventures, is one of those investors. He also met Tavakoli at his former company and said via email that when he was pitched on the idea of creating "the next generation of plant-based cheese," he was interested.

"From the start, I have been continuously impressed by the Stockeld team's diligence, determination and commitment to creating a truly revolutionary and delicious product," Archambeau added. "They created a product that breaks the mold and paves the way towards a new future for the global cheese industry."

Cajoo raises $40 million for its instant grocery delivery service

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 09:00 PM PDT

French startup Cajoo is raising some money in order to compete more aggressively in the new and highly competitive category of food delivery companies. Interestingly, the lead investor in today's funding round is Carrefour, the supermarket giant. Headline (formerly e.ventures) is also participating in the round as well as existing investors Frst and XAnge.

Carrefour's investment isn't just a financial investment. Cajoo will take advantage of Carrefour's purchasing organization. This way, Cajoo will be able to offer more products to its customers.

Cajoo is part of a group of startups that try to create a whole new category of grocery deliveries. The company operates dark stores and manages its own inventory of products. Customers can then order items without having to think whether they'll be home when the delivery happens. Around 15 minutes later, a delivery person shows up with your groceries.

The startup competes with Getir, Gorillas, Flink, Zapp and a few others. It also indirectly competes with traditional retailers and their online ordering systems.

"It's a category that is incredibly capital intensive," co-founder and CEO Henri Capoul told me. "We own the entire value chain. If we want to expand, we have to launch hubs, we have to buy products."

With $40 million on its bank account, Cajoo now wants to solidify its strong market position in its home country. The service is currently live in 10 French cities — Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Levallois-Perret, Boulogne-Billancourt, Lille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Montpellier.

And yet, the company is already facing some competition in Paris for instance. But Henri Capoul sees it as market validation. "There are a lot of players that have raised a lot of money. But it's a regulated market. We own all our products and we have to comply with regulation. We can't sell everything at a loss," he said.

While Henri Capoul expects some sort of consolidation down the road, the company is doing everything to remain a big, independent company. "European champions will be national champions first. Right now, some players can overcome a lack of products with discounts. I'm convinced that the future of this category will be represented by three or four local players that are strong in other countries." Henri Capoul said.

Cajoo is currently the only French company operating at this scale in this category. So it's clear that the company sees itself as a market leader in France first. But the company is already looking at other markets as well — Belgium, Italy, Spain, maybe Portugal or Eastern Europe countries.

But first, the company wants to grow its team. The number of employees working in the HQ is going to double by the end of the year. Operations and delivery teams will also grow quite drastically. The company expects a fivefold increase by the end of the year on this front.

Some delivery people are directly hired by Cajoo. But the company is also relying on partners — both contracting companies and freelancers. So the company faces some of the challenges that Deliveroo and Uber Eats also face.

Cajoo might be a great business idea, but users will have to ask themselves whether it really solves an important need or they're just using it because it exists. Instant delivery companies could have a real impact on brick-and-mortar shops over the long run.

Cajoo promises grocery deliveries in 15 minutes

Massachussetts AG greenlights Uber, Lyft-backed gig worker ballot initiative

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 07:15 PM PDT

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey gave a coalition of app-based service providers like Uber and Lyft the go-ahead to start collecting signatures needed to put a proposed ballot measure before voters that would define drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.

Backers of the initiative, which is essentially a MA version of Proposition 22, would need to gather tens of thousands of signatures for the measure to make it to the November 2022 ballot. Despite the fact that last year Healey filed a lawsuit that challenged Uber and Lyft’s classifications of drivers as contractors who are therefore not entitled to benefits like sick leave, overtime or minimum wage, on Wednesday, the AG certified the current measure met constitutional requirements.

The news comes nearly two weeks after a superior court judged ruled California’s Prop 22, which was passed in 2020, unconstitutional. The union-backed Coalition to Protect Workers’ Rights urged Healey to reject the measure under the same grounds, and told Reuters that it is considering suing to challenge the measure.

The Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, the coalition of members including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart, filed the petition for this ballot initiative last month, a move that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he thinks is “the right move.” The proposed initiative would also allow drivers to earn a minimum of $18 per hour in 2023 before tips and provide those who work for at least 15 hours per week with healthcare stipends. Drivers would also be guaranteed at least 26 cents per mile to cover vehicle upkeep and gas.

The coalition has until December 1 to collect and file 80,239 signatures from voters. If they miss that deadline, they can gather an additional 13,374 signatures by July 6, 2022 to get the initiative on the ballot.

Apple announces new settlement with Japan allowing developers to link to external websites  

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 07:00 PM PDT

Apple has reached a settlement with the Japanese regulator to allow developers of "reader" apps to link to their own websites for users to manage their accounts. The change goes to effect in early 2022.

Apple has been facing scrutiny in multiple markets, including the US and South Korea, over how it mandates its own payment systems for developers, with critics accusing it of anti-competitive practices.

In this latest development, the settlement in Japan, from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), will mandate Apple to make a change its polices on the reader apps so that users of purchase content. Reader apps include not just apps for reading, but any app that accesses “purchased” or subscribed media in the cloud for app users to consume. It covers digital magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video and the list includes the likes of Netflix, Spotify, Audible and Dropbox.

Before the change goes into effect next year, Apple will continue to update its guidelines and review process for users of readers apps, according to its statement.

Apple will also apply this change globally to all reader apps on the store.

"We have great respect for the Japan Fair Trade Commission and appreciate the work we've done together, which will help developers of reader apps make it easier for users to set up an manage their apps and service, while protecting their privacy and maintaining their trust," Phill Schiller, who oversees the App Stores at Apple.

Apple seems to be taking the scrutiny it’s facing among lawmakers, developers and the public on board. Last week, it announced several updates that allow developers more flexibility for their customers, and the company also launched a News Partner Program to support local journalist.

Although developers and others have been crying foul for years over restrictive app store practices, Apple has long maintained that it puts its policies in place for the protection of consumers and to create more consistent user experiences.

Be that as it may, as technology, payment systems, and consumer habits have evolved, those criticisms have only grown louder. In that regard, Asia and the US are not the only markets where lawmakers are finally starting to take more action around the issue. In Australia, the Competitions and Consumer Commission is also considering regulations around digital payment systems – rules that would impact not just Apple, but also other dominant players like Google and WeChat.

And just this week, South Korea became the first country to curb Apple and Google from imposting their own payment system on in-app purchases.

Apple has more than 30 million registered developers building iOS apps.

Our favorite startups from YC’s Summer 21 Demo Day, Part 2

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 04:22 PM PDT

From beaming actors into the class room to plucking things out of space, the second day of Y Combinator's S21 Demo Day was a fresh snapshot of what nearly 200 startup teams believe is the future of innovation.

Yesterday, the TechCrunch team covered the first half of this batch, as well as the startups with one-minute pitches that stood out to us. We even podcasted about it! Today, we're doing it all over again. Here's our full list of all startups that presented on the record today, and below, you'll find our votes for the best Y Combinator pitches of Day Two. The ones that, as people who sift through a few hundred pitches a day, made us go “oh wait, what’s this?”

Spark Studio

My experience with Indian culture is that it has a long history of valuing math and science over any other subject, which is why Spark Studio's twist on online enrichment was refreshing. The YC company offers live, extracurricular learning classes for kids in Indian households — with a twist: The classes are about music, art and communication. As seen by the success of Outschool, small-group classes for school-going children can be a scalable way to supplement traditional education. Spark Studio is selling to kids between the ages of 5 to 15, which are highly impressionable, exploratory years.

Growing up, I was the only kid in my predominantly Indian family friend group who didn't gravitate toward STEM. There were no services, other than the local library, to quench my interest in writing and reading. A service like Spark, if it gains the trust of parents, has the potential to make currently unconventional interests more conventional. And with over 400 students, and less than 2% churn, Spark Studio has early inklings it may be onto something. — Natasha

Litnerd

Image Credits: Litnerd

The best books don't feel like homework, they feel like trips into another universe and hangouts with characters that could be friends. Litnerd is trying to scale the feeling of immersive, engaging text to millions of students, while also encouraging better literacy and habit-forming skills. The startup has works read and enacted by actors, making classroom reading into a more entertaining experience for school-age children.

UK now expects compliance with children’s privacy design code

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 04:01 PM PDT

In the U.K., a 12-month grace period for compliance with a design code aimed at protecting children online expires today — meaning app makers offering digital services in the market which are “likely” to be accessed by children (defined in this context as users under 18 years old) are expected to comply with a set of standards intended to safeguard kids from being tracked and profiled.

The Age Appropriate Design Code (aka the ‘Children’s Code’) came into force on September 2 last year however the U.K.’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, allowed the maximum grace period for hitting compliance to give organizations time to adapt their services.

But from today it expects the standards of the code to be met.

Services where the code applies can include connected toys and games and edtech but also online retail and for-profit online services such as social media and video sharing platforms which have a strong pull for minors.

Among the code’s stipulations are that a level of “high privacy” should be applied to settings by default if the user is (or is suspected to be) a child — including specific provisions that geolocation and profiling should be off by default (unless there’s a compelling justification for such privacy hostile defaults).

The code also instructs app makers to provide parental controls while also providing the child with age-appropriate information about such tools — warning against parental tracking tools that could be used to silently/invisibly monitor a child without them being made aware of the active tracking.

Another standard takes aim at dark pattern design — with a warning to app makers against using “nudge techniques” to push children to provide “unnecessary personal data or weaken or turn off their privacy protections.”

The full code contains 15 standards but is not itself baked into legislation — rather it’s a set of design recommendations the ICO wants app makers to follow.

The regulatory stick to make them do so is that the watchdog is explicitly linking compliance with its children’s privacy standards to passing muster with wider data protection requirements that are baked into U.K. law.

The risk for apps that ignore the standards is thus that they draw the attention of the watchdog — either through a complaint or proactive investigation — with the potential of a wider ICO audit delving into their whole approach to privacy and data protection.

“We will monitor conformance to this code through a series of proactive audits, will consider complaints, and take appropriate action to enforce the underlying data protection standards, subject to applicable law and in line with our Regulatory Action Policy,” the ICO writes in guidance on its website. “To ensure proportionate and effective regulation we will target our most significant powers, focusing on organisations and individuals suspected of repeated or wilful misconduct or serious failure to comply with the law.”

It goes on to warn it would view a lack of compliance with the kids’ privacy code as a potential black mark against (enforceable) U.K. data protection laws, adding: “If you do not follow this code, you may find it difficult to demonstrate that your processing is fair and complies with the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] or PECR [Privacy and Electronics Communications Regulation].”

In a blog post last week, Stephen Bonner, the ICO's executive director of regulatory futures and innovation, also warned app makers: “We will be proactive in requiring social media platforms, video and music streaming sites and the gaming industry to tell us how their services are designed in line with the code. We will identify areas where we may need to provide support or, should the circumstances require, we have powers to investigate or audit organisations.”

“We have identified that currently, some of the biggest risks come from social media platforms, video and music streaming sites and video gaming platforms,” he went on. “In these sectors, children's personal data is being used and shared, to bombard them with content and personalised service features. This may include inappropriate adverts; unsolicited messages and friend requests; and privacy-eroding nudges urging children to stay online. We're concerned with a number of harms that could be created as a consequence of this data use, which are physical, emotional and psychological and financial.”

“Children's rights must be respected and we expect organisations to prove that children's best interests are a primary concern. The code gives clarity on how organisations can use children's data in line with the law, and we want to see organisations committed to protecting children through the development of designs and services in accordance with the code,” Bonner added.

The ICO’s enforcement powers — at least on paper — are fairly extensive, with GDPR, for example, giving it the ability to fine infringers up to £17.5 million or 4% of their annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.

The watchdog can also issue orders banning data processing or otherwise requiring changes to services it deems non-compliant. So apps that chose to flout the children’s design code risk setting themselves up for regulatory bumps or worse.

UK watchdog sets out ‘age appropriate’ design code for online services to keep kids’ privacy safe

In recent months there have been signs some major platforms have been paying mind to the ICO’s compliance deadline — with Instagram, YouTube and TikTok all announcing changes to how they handle minors’ data and account settings ahead of the September 2 date.

In July, Instagram said it would default teens to private accounts — doing so for under-18s in certain countries which the platform confirmed to us includes the U.K. — among a number of other child-safety focused tweaks. Then in August, Google announced similar changes for accounts on its video sharing platform, YouTube.

A few days later TikTok also said it would add more privacy protections for teens. Though it had also made earlier changes limiting privacy defaults for under-18s.

Apple also recently got itself into hot water with the digital rights community following the announcement of child safety-focused features — including a child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection tool which scans photo uploads to iCloud; and an opt-in parental safety feature that lets iCloud Family account users turn on alerts related to the viewing of explicit images by minors using its Messages app.

The unifying theme underpinning all these mainstream platform product tweaks is clearly “child protection.”

And while there’s been growing attention in the U.S. to online child safety and the nefarious ways in which some apps exploit kids’ data — as well as a number of open probes in Europe (such as this Commission investigation of TikTok, acting on complaints) — the U.K. may be having an outsized impact here given its concerted push to pioneer age-focused design standards.

The code also combines with incoming U.K. legislation which is set to apply a “duty of care” on platforms to take a broad-brush safety-first stance toward users, also with a big focus on kids (and there it’s also being broadly targeted to cover all children; rather than just applying to kids under 13 as with COPPA in the U.S., for example).

In the blog post ahead of the compliance deadline expiring, the ICO’s Bonner sought to take credit for what he described as “significant changes” made in recent months by platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram and TikTok, writing: “As the first of its kind, it's also having an influence globally. Members of the U.S. Senate and Congress have called on major U.S. tech and gaming companies to voluntarily adopt the standards in the ICO's code for children in America.”

“The Data Protection Commission in Ireland is preparing to introduce the Children's Fundamentals to protect children online, which links closely to the code and follows similar core principles,” he also noted.

And there are other examples in the EU: France’s data watchdog, the CNIL, looks to have been inspired by the ICO’s approach — issuing its own set of child-protection-focused recommendations this June (which also, for example, encourage app makers to add parental controls with the clear caveat that such tools must “respect the child’s privacy and best interests”).

The U.K.’s focus on online child safety is not just making waves overseas but sparking growth in a domestic compliance services industry.

Last month, for example, the ICO announced the first clutch of GDPR certification scheme criteria — including two schemes which focus on the age-appropriate design code. Expect plenty more.

Bonner’s blog post also notes that the watchdog will formally set out its position on age assurance this autumn — so it will be providing further steerage to organizations which are in scope of the code on how to tackle that tricky piece, although it’s still not clear how hard a requirement the ICO will support, with Bonner suggesting it could be actually “verifying ages or age estimation.” Watch that space. Whatever the recommendations are, age assurance services are set to spring up with compliance-focused sales pitches.

Children’s safety online has been a huge focus for U.K. policymakers in recent years, although the wider (and long in train) Online Safety (neé Harms) Bill remains at the draft law stage.

An earlier attempt by U.K. lawmakers to bring in mandatory age checks to prevent kids from accessing adult content websites — dating back to 2017’s Digital Economy Act — was dropped in 2019 after widespread criticism that it would be both unworkable and a massive privacy risk for adult users of porn.

But the government did not drop its determination to find a way to regulate online services in the name of child safety. And online age verification checks look set to be — if not a blanket, hardened requirement for all digital services — increasingly brought in by the backdoor, through a sort of “recommended feature” creep (as the ORG has warned). 

The current recommendation in the age appropriate design code is that app makers “take a risk-based approach to recognising the age of individual users and ensure you effectively apply the standards in this code to child users,” suggesting they: “Either establish age with a level of certainty that is appropriate to the risks to the rights and freedoms of children that arise from your data processing, or apply the standards in this code to all your users instead.” 

At the same time, the government’s broader push on online safety risks conflicting with some of the laudable aims of the ICO’s non-legally binding children’s privacy design code.

For instance, while the code includes the (welcome) suggestion that digital services gather as little information about children as possible, in an announcement earlier this summer U.K. lawmakers put out guidance for social media platforms and messaging services — ahead of the planned Online Safety legislation — that recommends they prevent children from being able to use end-to-end encryption.

That’s right; the government’s advice to data-mining platforms — which it suggests will help prepare them for requirements in the incoming legislation — is not to use “gold standard” security and privacy (E2E encryption) for kids.

So the official U.K. government messaging to app makers appears to be that, in short order, the law will require commercial services to access more of kids’ information, not less — in the name of keeping them “safe.” Which is quite a contradiction versus the data minimization push on the design code.

The risk is that a tightening spotlight on kids privacy ends up being fuzzed and complicated by ill-thought-through policies that push platforms to monitor kids to demonstrate “protection” from a smorgasbord of online harms — be it adult content or pro-suicide postings, or cyberbullying and CSAM.

The law looks set to encourage platforms to ‘show their workings’ to prove compliance — which risks resulting in ever-closer tracking of children’s activity, retention of data — and maybe risk profiling and age verification checks (that could even end up being applied to all users; think sledgehammer to crack a nut). In short, a privacy dystopia.

Such mixed messages and disjointed policymaking seem set to pile increasingly confusing — and even conflicting — requirements on digital services operating in the U.K., making tech businesses legally responsible for divining clarity amid the policy mess — with the simultaneous risk of huge fines if they get the balance wrong.

Complying with the ICO’s design standards may therefore actually be the easy bit.

UK publishes draft Online Safety Bill

The UK’s plan to tackle Big Tech won’t be one-size fits all

 

Here are all the companies from Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 04:01 PM PDT

Welcome back to TechCrunch's continuing coverage of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 Demo Day! This is Day Two. If you haven't caught up yet on what happened during the first day, you can read our recap of all the presenting companies here, our favorites from that first set here, and a quick podcast about all of the above.

Today we're back in the action, listening to a few hundred rapid-fire pitches throughout the day. What follows are short overviews of each company based on their one-minute pitch. Elsewhere on the site we'll soon have our Day Two favorites for you to enjoy, so be on the lookout for that!

Day Two companies

Intellect: A mental healthcare service that provides teletherapy for employers in Asia. They’ve also got a free consumer app at the top of the funnel that has seen 2.5 million users since launching a year ago. The company says it’s grown to $500,000 ARR in the last six months.

MazumaGo: Banking and electronics payment service for construction companies. MazumaGo aims to help this antiquated industry move off of traditional banking and into a unified ledger. The banking infrastructure product puts credit and debit cards into customer hands, starting in the United States.

Pandai: Pandai is helping kids in elementary/high school in Southeast Asia boost their grades with a learning app that replaces take-home workbooks. With more than 1,600 paying subscribers using the app for almost an hour a day, Pandai may be on its way to helping thousands more get the A.

Image Credits: Locale

Locale: Think that DoorDash doesn't have enough food options? Locale is betting that some folks want more options and are willing to pay for that access. The startup wants to help restaurants sell farther from their operations, and its model is showing some early traction. The company's revenue (GMV, perhaps) scaled from $145,500 in July to $192,000 in August. The startup claims 70% retention month to month and an average order of just over $100.

Arrow: Arrow is building one-click-checkout-payment infrastructure for online sellers in Southeast Asia aiming to boost social commerce among small sellers. The team behind Arrow helped launch GrabPay and has already scaled GMV at the startup to $150,000.

Talentdrop: A hiring marketplace where open jobs are posted with “bounties.” If someone you refer is ultimately hired and stays a while, you get the bounty. The company says that $1 million in bounties have been posted to the site thus far.

Infina: A retail investing app aiming to be the Robinhood of Vietnam. Since launch in January, Infina has reached over $2.5 million in assets under management. Its first focus was breaking open mutual funds and fixed-income products, and now it wants to head into stocks and crypto for its younger user base.

BlackOakTV: Black millennials are bigger consumers of streaming content than other demographics, but comparatively little of that content is made with them in mind. Black Oak TV is a subscription streaming service by and for Black creators and stars — could the next Dave Chappelle or Issa Rae come from here instead of YouTube or TikTok?

HEO Robotics: This startup wants to leverage unused time on existing satellites that monitor the planet to find stuff in space. Not trash, like the startup that presented yesterday that wants to clean up space around Earth, but things like other satellites. HEO says that it is selling to the Australian government, and executed a live in-orbit demo during Y Combinator. There are going to be many more satellites in space over time, the company says, which could boost demand for its service.

Gallery : Gallery is building a platform to help developers quickly create self-stage staging environments, saving time and energy. The founding team has experience from Facebook and Goldman Sachs and hopes to tackle what it believes is a $5 billion market for mid-sized engineering teams alone.

Image Credits: Adra

Adra: AI to help dentists find cavities they might otherwise miss. It can also convert fuzzy X-rays into something a bit easier for patients to understand. Currently in a pilot with 20 dentists.

Tantl: Low-code APIs are hot, and a team of Google and Apple engineers are building Tantl to make it speedy, too. Tantl enables developers to build faster internal workflows — for $20 bucks a seat. Think skipping repetitive code, easy authentication and customer user interfaces. The SaaS business launched last week and has onboarded three customers.

Titipku: A huge amount of people in Indonesia want to do their local shopping online like so many of us already do, and Titipku is ready to make it happen. They’re “Instacart for Indonesia” and that’s that. Sales are already popping and the model is proven, so let’s just offer a preemptive congratulations on their success.

Flok: Flok is building what it describes as an Airbnb for corporate offsites. That means the startup is helping connect companies looking to host some IRL activities with a location that will be suitable. In a remote-first area, heading into a remote-friendly future, companies may spend more time and money bringing staff together sporadically. Flok wants to help those events come together. Per the startup, it takes around 15% of bookings and has booked 45 events so far worth around $200,000 in revenue.

Spark Studio: The team at Spark Studio is building a hub for online extracurricular courses designed for kids, reflecting the COVID-era changes to how kids learn on the web. The team is particularly focused on music, art and communication skills, hoping to streamline the wide offerings of the internet into a platform where high-quality, vetted content lives.

BrightReps: A no-code tool meant to help you shift your company’s customer response workflows from flowcharts/spreadsheets into something more easily updated and iterated upon. Founder Brittani Dunlap says the company is profitable with $740,000 in ARR.

Verihubs: Indonesia has a thriving fintech sector, with hundreds of startups and the well-known unicorn Gojek. Verihubs is launching a data and verification platform for regional fintechs to do stuff like authenticate customer identities and access financial data. The service has landed 45 customers, fueling $41,000 in monthly revenue.

Aleph: A lot of banks, fintechs, and other companies want to use the latest financial models but also prefer to rely on the good old spreadsheet. Aleph allows ordinary spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets to have specialized financial tools built right in and always up to date. The best of both worlds, if you really love spreadsheets and financial models!

Sirka: Noom is now so big that startups are looking to take its model to new markets. Sirka is one such company, with a focus on the Southeast Asian region. The startup wants to replicate Noom's science-first approach to weight control, noting that there are 150 million overweight or obese folks in the SEA area. The startup also noted that its users lose 4% of their weight on average. Is that a lot? For me (Alex) at around 160 pounds, that would be around 6.4 pounds.

Watu: Watu wants to help retailers close the sale they almost made. The platform is building a shopping workflow that lives inside emails and allows shoppers to make a purchase without getting tossed back to the mobile web.

Stownest: On-demand, full-service storage spaces for India. They pack up your stuff, store it and bring it back when you need it. The company says it’s helped over 12,000 customers so far, handling over 20,000 pickups/deliveries.

Comet Health: A digital physical therapy platform that combines telehealth with video-based curriculum. Comet Health is launching with a focus on pelvic floor physical therapy and already ran a proof-of-concept pilot in Virginia.

Lemonade Finance: Africa’s banking system is evolving quickly, as we’ve seen from other startups in this batch. Lemonade Finance is a consequence of that — a bank for the millions of Africans who have left for other shores but still need to interact with accounts or people at home, send or receive money and so on. Having encountered this problem themselves, the founders built Lemonade Finance to make it simpler for the African Diaspora to bank abroad.

Parallel Bio: Coming up with ideas for new pharma products, testing them on non-humans and later scaling up to testing on our species takes a long time and is expensive. Parallel Bio claims to have created a human immune system in a petri dish, which can help with testing new drugs sans using humans on the front lines of testing. As with all biotech concerns, I (Alex) struggle to vet the company's possibilities of a tech breakthrough, but the concept here is very neat.

Atmana: The team at Atmana is building a platform to help 15-30-year-olds break technology addictions, specifically addictions to gaming, porn and social media. The company is taking a serious approach with its $90 per year treatment plans, which combine support groups, accountability and education.

Float: Supply chain finance — in other words, they pay for your inventory upfront, you pay them back as it sells. Float co-founder Rob LaFave previously co-founded/sold Foodzie, while co-founder Zack Kim was the CTO of Zaarly. Float says they’ve deployed $50,000 in advances to five customers so far.

Kitchenful: Led by a former Hellofresh executive, Kitchenful thinks that grocery delivery's commidification means it's time for new innovation. The app gives users personalized recommendations for recipes — and then delivers the ingredients straight from a local grocery store. The team has landed partnerships with Walmart, Kroger, Target and REWE for logistics, and has launched in one city so far.

Image Credits: TransAstra

TransAstra Corporation: Space tugs are a hot item in space: small spacecraft that help get other spacecraft where they need to go. TransAstra, from a former Momentus CEO, is using a new, super efficient “solar thermal rocket engine” that he says accomplishes this type of mission better than anything out there. With millions in NASA money and hundreds of millions in LOIs, MOUs and contracts, TransAstra sounds like it’s well on its way to being the biggest name in space tugs.

Comadre: Nubank won't control the entire Brazilian neobanking market if Comadre gets its way. The company is building a new digital bank for low-income families, a group of folks that it says have to pool their funds together to pay bills on time, so they need new tech. The startup intends to charge $8 per family per month, in addition to generating interchange incomes. Of course, fintech is a competitive market, but if Comadre can land a customer base, its revenue story writes itself.

Toku: The startup helps subscription companies collect revenues in Latin America where 15% of recurring charges fail. While traditional options rely on collection agencies, Toku taps cross-channel outreach to connect with subscribers and get them back in the fold.

Makani Science: This team has built what it says is the “world’s first wireless patch that can accurately and continuously monitor breathing.” Co-founder Michael Chu says the company expects to get FDA clearance within a year.

Verde: Small and medium-sized farms in Brazil may now have a new favorite credit card. Verde is a fintech platform that wants to make it easier for farmers to request and access loans. Beyond credit cards, Verde's services include insurance and digital banks.

Anakin: Every e-commerce site wants to know exactly how every other e-commerce site is pricing the same goods, but it’s not always easy to do this systematically and comprehensively. Anakin fills this role, monitoring competing platforms for their clients and providing real-time pricing data so it can be undercut or otherwise responded to in order to snatch up that customer. With three “multibillion-dollar” companies paying half a million bucks a year already, Anakin seems well on its way to success. And maybe it’ll save you a few bucks as well.

TAG: Tag is building a neobank for Pakistan, a market that it claims features 100 million unbanked individuals out of a population of 250 million. The startup said that it is working with employers to help employees get their wages deposited into their TAG account instead of being handed out in cash. The company has local regulatory approval and is live in its market with a debit card product.

FirstIgnite: The team is building a marketplace that pairs companies with university experts to tackle challenges they’re facing. The team already has pilots with University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon, among others.

Perfekto: Pitched as “Imperfect Foods for Latin America,” Perfekto delivers a subscription box of tasty-but-not-necessarily-pretty produce. Co-founder Anahí Sosa previously led the rollout of Uber Grocery in Latin America, and says Perfekto is currently seeing $8,000 in monthly revenue.

SFA Therapeutics: As digital health matures, SFA Therapeutics is the latest to pitch a new focus on treating the root cause of disease, instead of suppressing symptoms for momentary relief. The team is betting on an oral solution for the over 100 million patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases (and who currently deal with painful injections as a mainstream solution). The therapeutics company has a Phase 1B trial underway and referenced "strong clinical data" on their drug's use in combating psoriasis.

Levo: Levo is supercharged savings accounts in Mexico, providing up to three times the average yield (6.5% vs. 2.1%) by combining customers' accounts and negotiating better deals with the banks and other financial organizations they work with. It’s a smart idea in use around the world but apparently not for individual savings accounts in Mexico — for now!

Laudable: The B2B sales process needs to move past the PDF world, Laudable reckons. The startup wants to help its customers find and share videos of their customers using their product to share instead of written testimonials. We have some questions about how its product works, but the startup scaled from $0 to $27,000 in MRR in two months, so it appears to be onto something. Also sales tech tools have raised quite a lot of money in the last year, so there's likely appetite for Laudable.

Monto: Monto’s team is building a platform that provides companies in Mexico with the ability to give workers “salary on demand,” which isn’t an advance but allows workers to request the salary they have already earned between paychecks. Workers are charged a flat rate of $34.50 + VAT.

Mindstate Design Labs: Mindstate says it’s working on “next-gen” psychedelic therapeutics for treating things like PTSD. One thing they’re working on is a “safer MDMA” that they say doesn’t cause post-treatment depression and would allow for a “greater ability to redose for increased efficacy.”

Beau: Small businesses have finally been peer pressured into digitizing their operations for more seamless customer experiences — it only took a pandemic. Beau is building a no-code client workflow for customer communications. With Beau, these businesses can collect submissions, files, payments and send messages to build loyalty (and do their jobs). The minimum viable product has been launched to seven paying customers and 65 active companies.

Ruth Health: Pregnant women receive a lot of care but once the baby is born, there are months of health issues they still have to deal with — and little support provided by existing medical providers. Ruth Health is a telehealth clinic focused specifically on postpartum care, with $150 out-of-pocket sessions to address common women’s issues like painful sex and unwanted urination. Their rallying cry is “for vagina owners, by vagina owners!”

Image Credits: Axolo

Axolo: Offering what it calls a "war room for each pull request," Axolo is a startup building in what we might call the developer productivity space. Its service creates a Slack channel around pull requests that helps engineers avoid swapping from Github back to their internal chats. The company says around 35 organizations are using its product today, and intends to monetize using a freemium model. Axolo will cost around $8 per engineer per month.

Ananya Health: The team at Ananya Health is building a portable medical device that can freeze abnormal cells much cheaper than existing solutions. The team is focused specifically on using the device to treat cervical “pre-cancer” in regions across the world where medical help is hardest to reach.

Noloco : A no-code tool for agencies/real estate firms/small businesses to easily build branded portals for interacting with clients, handling things like communication and file sharing. Co-founder Simon Curran says the company is currently seeing an MRR of $1,500.

Govly: Red tape has a way of bringing people together. Govly helps companies like Cisco and Nutanix come together to bid on government contracts. It wants to grow beyond a SaaS tool and into a marketplace that helps businesses sell into the government. The team hopes to be a better visualization into the business-to-government procurement space.

Walrus: Countless young people in India sign up for their first bank account every year. Walrus thinks it would be nice if they signed up with them — a neobank that offers a simple debit card and tools for saving, budgeting and investing. With a straightforward 1% transaction fee model it could be the simplest way for folks there to start banking.

Image Credits: Mach9

Mach9 Robotics: Ah the modern world, full of wonder and aging infrastructure. Sure, we've built a lot, but a lot of our infrastructure is fraying. And that means inspections are a pretty big deal. But inspecting stuff in the ground is a huge pain in the backside. Mach9 uses a thermal camera attached to a car to peer into the Earth and find infrastructure issues. The company claims three paid pilots.

Algo University: Algo University is taking the ISA learning model to India, training university students there to become solid software engineers. Students also have the option to pay upfront for the education platform, which teams live classes, assignments and contests to help students pick up skills that hopefully land them at top tech jobs.

Therify: Therapy works better when you’re talking to someone that you feel understands you. Therify provides mental healthcare as a benefit to companies, focusing on matching patients with therapists who have similar backgrounds. Co-founder James Murray says it’s currently running $100,000 in paid pilots with “four global companies.”

Jovian: The "Great Resignation" has led companies to get quite nifty with their benefits, with one impact being the rise of investment in employee education. To take advantage of these shifting employer habits, Jovian has an ambitious goal: be the best technical university online. The job-oriented training platform helps professionals shape up on data science and ML skills. It has a monthly revenue of $20,000 and is growing 35% month over month.

Argonaut: Practically every tech company that wants to scale will need to deploy infrastructure to the cloud, causing words like Kubernetes, Terraform and containerization to be uttered. Argonaut automates this deployment as much as possible to reduce or eliminate the need for specialized engineering work, so even dummies like me can launch a company.

Abhi: Here's another startup working on the Pakistani market. Abhi wants to offer instant wage access to workers in the country. Early traction appears to be good, with some $15,000 in total payment volume in its first month. The startup claims to have 45 MOUs — a very non-GAAP sort of contract, if you will — that represent around 200,000 employees. If it converts a few of those into real agreements, Abhi should have enough volume to truly test its model in the country.

Dots: Dots (one of two companies called Dots in this cohort!) is building a software product to help automate online customer communities, plugging into platforms like Slack and Discord and allowing companies to automate certain tasks and help them ensure new community members don’t slip through the cracks.

Stack: Pitched as “Vanguard for India,” Stack is trying to make investing easier for the 130 million middle-income households in the region. Launched six weeks ago, they’ve got 1,000+ users with $250,000 under management.

Epinoma: CRISPR transformed biology, and the world's understanding of the human genome. Epinoma, led by three biogenetic experts, builds off those learnings to apply them to the world of epigenetics. The first application for its protein is for the liquid biopsy market, which the team estimates is a $50 billion opportunity.

Koshex: Obviously the middle class in India needs somewhere to put their money. If they don't want to use Stack (two entries above) then maybe they'll go for Koshex, which bills itself as "Wealthfront for India." Integrated with more than 40 financial institutions already, Kosher is prepared to handle billions of dollars worth of Indian small investments.

Shimmer: Therapy is good and if everyone could access regular therapy it would be good for the world. But there aren't enough therapists, and the service is often too expensive for folks in need — if they can get access. Shimmer wants to bridge the need-coverage gap by offering online mental health support groups that are run by coaches. Peer support can be pretty key to helping with various issues, as anyone in recovery can tell you. The company has 105 users today and claims 2x the retention of traditional therapy.

FrontPage: Building on the retail investor boom, FrontPage wants to build a Public.com for India, helping market investors and traders find a community of people interested in the finance world while browsing trades, charts and new discussions taking place in real time.

HyperGlue: Once you’ve got a big audience, keeping track of what your users are saying about you all around the internet gets tough. HyperGlue analyzes things that people share in places like Reddit and Discord to give product managers an automated breakdown of what people are saying about your product  — the things they hate, the features they want, etc.

Oneistox: Online-cohort based classes for designers, architects and engineers — sold at roughly $900 bucks a pop. Oneistox wants to fill industry skill gaps through the virtual school, which mainly markets to those in their mid-20s and above. Early completion rates are 82%, dozens of percentage points above industry standards from massive open online course providers — signaling its format may just work.

Greenwork: With the huge infrastructure bill coming through, demand for skilled blue-collar labor will be jumping over the next few years. Greenwork wants to organize it with a LinkedIn-like site for these folks, often government-trained experts who need to find a project to apply their skills to. A recruitment and networking platform just for this valuable class of workers could be just the thing to get people back to work.

marketfeed: This is fun. Marketfeed is an app that trains users in India to trade stocks. Its founder claims to be akin to the Jim Cramer of India, with a boatload of YouTube subs to back up the claim. So far the app has reached around $100,000 in MRR. Seeing how popular trading has become in Europe and the United States in the last few quarters marketfeed's general thrust makes sense.

Warrant: Warrant is building a platform that helps developers add authorization and access control to their web and mobile apps. The company’s API manages the complexity while users are able to define rules that meet the needs of their product.

SalaryBox: Not to be confused with “SalaryBook” from yesterday, SalaryBox is also aiming to be Gusto for India, helping the many millions of SMBs there to take their paper-based payroll (etc.) digital. The team says it’s seeing $18,000 in annual revenue just a few months after launch.

Evidence: Code! Code! Code! Evidence helps data teams replace drag-and-drop business intelligence tools with a code-based workflow, which a fancy way to say that it makes work more simple. The company is betting it can build the default front end for data management, as "every company becomes a data company." Evidence of this? Evidence has 46 active projects after launching last week.

Female Invest: Investment is an industry dominated by men, but women command an increasing proportion of investable income. Female Invest aims to educate and mobilize this growing contingent and already has more than 17,000 paying subscribers in its community. Soon they’ll activate trading as well and fulfill their ambition of becoming the “Robinhood for women.”

Inversion Space: Instead of taking stuff to space, Inversion Space wants to bring some back from space. That's an, ahem, inversion of what we tend to hear from space startups. The startup is building a return "capsule" that is four feet in diameter and wants to be able to drop stuff from space back to the planet in under an hour. Notably the startup claims some $225 million worth of LOIs, which may sound like a lot, but given what it costs to do anything in space, keep the number in scale. Inversion is targeting a first launch (drop?) in mid-2023.

Advantage Club: The team is building a wide-ranging platform for employee engagement, teaming perks, exclusive rewards and access to early wages. They’re hoping to bring multiple benefits into a single platform while catering to top customers with their deep web of more than 10,000 brand partners.

DigiBuild: Construction management software built on the blockchain to give a “verifiable single version of truth” to all owners/contractors/subcontractors/etc. Co-founder Rob Salvador says the company is currently seeing an MRR of $58,000, projecting that to grow to $75,000 by October.

Rivia.AI: D2C brands in India need better ways to get their products into ever-impatient consumer hands. Instead of forcing brands to rely on Amazon for two-day delivery speed, Rivia.AI is building its own fulfillment agency to help this customer base get the same outcome, but cheaper. By ignoring Amazon, Rivia.AI is helping e-commerce brands in India achieve two-day shipment, while the startup makes $0.65 on each delivery. Rivia.AI has 2,400 monthly transactions — and a mission to get to the billions.

Palla: Sending money across borders has never been easy. Or rather, if it’s easy, it’s expensive. Palla aims to make it both easy and cheap to send money to and from LatAm, from one person to another. They’re partnering with big fintech and banking companies to get thousands of folks signed up and ready to get cash from out of the country on their debit cards in seconds rather than hours.

Suplias: This is cool. There are 13 million small grocery stores in Africa, Suplias says, which it wants to help supply. The startup offers a B2B mobile marketplace that uses third-party logistics providers to get new inventory to small grocers rapidly. The digitization of SMBs in emerging markets is a well-known trend, but this is a bit different. And if the margins are good, it could scale pretty rapidly. Suplias claims $230,000 in GMV per month today, a figure that it says is growing by 40% each month.

Marble: Marble helps property owners manage their properties from afar. The platform handles rent collection and maintenance in addition to remote showings, collecting $50 per unit per month, significantly undercutting competitor pricing.

Zoios: Analytics for HR that the company says can predict who is going to quit, who is burned out, etc. Co-founder Christian Højbo Møller says they currently have 12 companies as customers paying for 500 seats and have hit an ARR of $24,000.

BoldVoice: Duolingo may be the best-known language learning app on the market, but BoldVoice has a deep focus in one area that unicorn is missing: smart speech. The startup wants to help non-native English speakers find (and flaunt) their voices. The startup uses short-form videos, taught by Hollywood accent coaches who traditionally help actors, to deliver content. The curriculum is built around three Ps: posture, to help with the physical feel of using an English R versus a Spanish R; phonology, the vowels and consonants; and porosity, which is the musicality of an accent. In two months, it has hit $5,000 in monthly revenue from over 200 paid uses. We wrote more about the startup on TechCrunch.

Sleek: Impulse buys on the internet aren’t actually any easier than big buys. You still have to go through the whole checkout process, except on the few shops that offer one-click fire-and-forget checkout. But what if I told you there was a startup offering a browser extension that makes every online shop have a one-click checkout … AND it gives you cash back? That’s the pitch with Sleek’s ML-powered checkout bot. By preventing cart rot they increase sales, collect the commissions and pass on the savings to you. Of course, you’re still out the cost of that impulse buy you would have left behind … but let’s not talk about that.

Cloudanix: Lots of companies now use more than one public cloud provider. So not just AWS, or just Azure, but GCP and others as well. Cloudanix wants to provide a unified dashboard to help companies keep all their public cloud work secure from a single dashboard. Per its website, the startup provides security monitoring and "remediation workflows" when needed. As the world becomes increasingly a multicloud domain, the company could find itself riding a secular shift.

FastFarma: A digital pharmacy that promises 30-minute medication delivery for Latin America, currently operating in Ecuador and Mexico. Co-founder ​​​​Santiago Ribadeneira says the company is currently doing $20,000 in monthly revenue.

Image Credits: Stipop

Stipop: An easy-to-install SDK that developers can use to add stickers to their consumer chat apps. Already has 150,000 stickers designed by 5,000 artists and has been integrated into over 100 apps. Stipop monetizes through brand-sticker partnerships.

Siglo: Internet service providers are complicated to work with, which is always a green light for savvy entrepreneurs. Siglo is disrupting the ISP market for urban communities in Latin America. Focusing on easy-to-pay and simplified processes, Siglos' wireless home broadband service currently connects over 1,700 homes with $26,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Its revenue is growing 30% monthly.

Telivy: SMBs need cyber insurance, and Telivy wants to give it to them. It’s as simple as that. They specialize in this and offer better and cheaper coverage so that SMBs can meet compliance and other requirements easier.

CartX: Shopify's huge growth is drawing startup attention. CartX wants to build something akin to Shopify for the Brazilian market. As companies like Nubank have shown, the Brazilian digital market can prove lucrative. So to see CartX work on its e-commerce infrastructure is not a surprise. The company, now around two years old, is doing just under $1 million in yearly revenue today.

HomeBreeze: A home repair marketplace that is aiming to get rid of the annoying back-and-forth estimate process, instead providing up-front fixed/guaranteed prices and instant service scheduling. They’re focusing on water heaters first. Co-founder Vineet Mehta says the company is seeing over $60,000 in monthly revenue after launching in May.

Tuli Health: Tuli Health is building software that helps pharmacies in the U.K. perform in-house diagnostic tests. It started with COVID testing but is now expanding into allergy testing. Co-founder Jiawei Li says the company has onboarded 147 pharmacies that have run over 7,000 diagnostic tests so far, accounting for $400,000 in revenue.

Alchemy: Sure, Shopify made it easier for businesses to sell online, but how do those same businesses create a dynamic, differentiated experience for their customers? Alchemy is a visual development platform that enables brands to build unique e-commerce experiences, sans the code. It launched in late July and has so far landed 11 initial customers accounting for $2,800 in monthly recurring revenue.

Okani: In LatAm, millions of people without primary care physicians either find a specialist by other means or end up going to the hospital instead. Okani acts as a digital primary care provider living in WhatsApp, so patients can meet with a doctor and get tailored referrals rather than take on the time and expense of a hospital trip.

Image Credits: The Breakaway

The Breakaway: Ah, do you need more motivation to get back on your indoor bike? Is your Peloton sitting idle because you are worried that Matt will judge you for not doing enough Power Zone Max rides? The Breakaway is building a "motivational coaching" application for fitness dweebs like me. Its iOS app will link to your Peloton, so you can, well, cycle more? Better? I would joke that surely the $50 you already pay Peloton is enough, but since we're already paying that, why not tack on more to perhaps cycle a bit more?

Hypercontext: This company says it helps managers run better meetings by streamlining their meetings according to their team’s OKRs and providing a dedicated place for agendas, feedback, follow-up steps, etc. The team says its MRR is currently at $37,000, charging teams $7 per user per month.

Fella: Telehealth for men with obesity. Combines recently FDA-approved medication with health coaching, charging $150 per user per month. The company has worked with 13 patients so far after launching in Texas two months ago.

Bedrock AI: Some of the best gems sit in the footnotes of corporate filings, from 10-K annual reports to Form D filings. Bedrock AI's software extracts key factoids to limit information overload and better supplement those who spend their days working though the fine text of public company data.

Hiration: LinkedIn may have disrupted resumes, but Hiration wants to disrupt LinkedIn's role in the job search process. The startup is building a way for job seekers to quickly create efficient resumes. Through partnerships with over 80 institutions, including Stanford and The University of Texas at Austin, Hiration created 125,000 resumes in August. It has an annual recurring revenue of $500,000.

CellChorus: All kinds of medicines, therapies, vaccines and other research processes need to understand what effects they create on a cell-by-cell level, but observing this directly can be very difficult. CellChorus does it, though, and has trained a machine learning model to watch footage of cell interactions and automatically derive conclusions like which cells perform best and why. They’ve already got traction and have been in multiple prestigious journals, so while it’s not something you’ll be using at home, it could be standard issue tech in medical research soon.

Secoda: Secoda wants to aggregate your company's data in a single place, so that internal teams can better work together and share metadata, queries and more. Part of its pitch is that current tools in its domain are more targeted at enterprise-scale companies, while it wants to target smaller startups to start. That's a standard GTM model for YC startups, but in this case it doesn't bother us. The company claims $40,000 in ARR today.

Flowly: Pairs virtual reality headsets with a heartrate sensor to generate visualizations that the team is proving can reduce pain (and thus, opioid usage). They’ve got a $1.2 million grant from the NIH, and co-founder Celine Tien says the company is currently seeing over $40,000 in monthly revenue.

outloud.ai: Records and analyzes conversations in drive-thru restaurants to help owners figure out the best ways to upsell. Co-founder Sasha Miagkyi says they’re currently analyzing 700,000 orders per month at over 50 restaurants.

Baraka : An investment app built explicitly for the Middle East. Baraka launched one month ago and has attracted over $340,000 in assets under management with 70% week-over-week growth. Its mission is to give local retail investors the ability to put money into the U.S. stock markets.

Image Credits: Genomelink

Genomelink: Once you’ve had your DNA sequenced and analyzed by 23andMe or Ancestry, what else can you do with it? Upload it to Genomelink and you can activate any number of “apps,” — other forms of analysis that show more traits that the big companies don’t list. It’s your genomic data; you can do what you want with it, right?

PAYZE: Pitched as “Stripe for former Soviet Union countries,” PAYZE takes the fragmented payment solutions in the region and unifies them into a single payment platform. Co-founder Giorgi Tsurtsumia says they’re working with 350 merchants 8 months post-launch.

Revery AI: Revery is building a “virtual dressing room” that helps online shoppers visualize how clothing they’re shopping for will actually look like on a person, tapping AI to impose clothing images on models while allowing users to customize said model to look more like they do.

Plug: One API to process payments across multiple providers. Alex Vilhena says they take a 1% cut while saving teams up to 30% in processing fees and have processed over $230,000 to date.

Abbot: This former GitHub team saw firsthand the power of a streamlined, remote-first operating system, and now it's building tools for other startups to do the same. Abbot makes the traditional team chats on Slack or Discord into a command center to get tasks done. It reacts to messages by running programs, deploying software or, heck, even displaying the weather.

Mecho Autotech: Believe it or not, the global logistics revolution is powered by drivers in actual vehicles, and those vehicles need maintenance, which cuts into earnings. Mecho Autotech is tackling the issue in Nigeria, where truckers sacrifice a lot of income to shoddy or inconvenient repairs. Instead, Mecho will let them summon one of the 2,000 mechanics on demand via a web app to fix things when and where they’re needed.

mello: After the absurd last few years, it’s no surprise we’re seeing an uptick in companies focusing on burnout. Mello reduces burnout by regularly checking in with employees, detecting shifts in happiness/productivity and offering up ways you might help them dig their way out. Currently ties into Slack, with plans for Teams/Discord/Google integrations on the roadmap.

Quest: An audio Q&A platform where experts can share advice and stories in short audio clips; think a micropodcasting Quora. The startup is focusing specifically on business advice early on and has over 10 hours of content from speakers at companies like YC and Google.

Concord Materials: Helps construction companies check invoices for accuracy and detect unauthorized charges. Founder Anthony Valente says they’ve got contracts in place to verify over $20 million of GMV.

Baubap: Baubap is a microfinancing platform for the traditionally underbanked in Mexico. The already-profitable mobile-lending app doles out capital to its users with a 90% return rate. Baubap's mission isn't small: It wants to become the largest lender in Latin America.

Image Credits: SnapCalorie

SnapCalorie: Nobody likes counting calories, because (A) calories are great and (B) it’s a pain. But SnapCalorie could at least address B by providing a calorie estimate of a meal from a single image that they claim is more accurate than a nutritionist’s. The founder also co-founded Google Lens and the Cloud Vision API so he knows of what he speaks. Don’t make it too convenient though buddy, because then I would have to use it.

Bree: Zero interest cash advances (up to $100) in Canada; instead of fees, Bree allows users to tip the service when it’s been helpful. Co-founder Alexander Li says the company did $14,000 in advances and saw $1,800 of revenue in July.

Zuma: Zuma is building out an “AI leasing agent” that helps make the most of web interest by responding and following up on every lead. In eight months, the team has grown to $388,000 ARR.

Medium Biosciences: Uses machine learning to find new/novel enzymes for biotech companies. The company says by cutting out much of the trial-and-error, it cuts a 10-week process down to two weeks.

Hyperseed: Already backed by Silicon Valley investors, Hyperseed makes it easier for finance professionals to create custom pricing and billing applications. The full-stack development environment helps finance teams add their thoughts into tech stacks, doing what the no-code team thinks Excel can't.

Glitzi: An alternative to actually going to a salon or spa to get beauty or grooming services, Glitzi is an on-call service that connects beauty professionals directly to clients. The clients get the convenience of home care and the pros make more for the personalized service and no fees or rent for spa space. Everyone wins, and of course everyone is beautiful … that means you!

StandardCode: An API meant to help gaming/social companies deal with COPPA/GDPR compliance, automating the ID/parental approval/age verification process. Charges $0.50 per verification.

Payhippo: Payhippo is building a loan platform for small businesses in Nigeria, hoping to help bring access to working capital that can make a difference. They say that many of these businesses they lend to aren’t able to get loans from the bank due to high collateral requirements and the scarcity of credit scores in the region.

Image Credits: MayaEats

MayaEats: Pitching itself as “Uber for kitchens,” MayaEats works with “underutilized” kitchens to analyze their region/potential audience and build a virtual brand to sell on platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats. Vijayaraj Gopinath says they’ve already processed over 57,000 orders, accounting for $2 million in GMV and a monthly recurring revenue of $30,000.

Contalink: Startups love to build SaaS for sales teams, but Contalink is refreshingly looking at another team for its software-based tool: the accounting department. The platform helps accountants move off of desktop software into the electronic cloud, a shift the team claims will make bookkeeping a much faster task. Starting with a focus on Mexico SMBs, Contalink has landed 2,700 paying users with $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Numary: Moving large amounts of money around within or between organizations is something that needs to be done constantly and flawlessly. Numary wants to be the next standard financial ledger for money movements, starting with an open source base and taking aim at developers — the power behind the power.

Stepful : Helps those without college degrees train for and find entry-level healthcare jobs. Charging $3,000 per student, co-founder Carl Madi says the company has graduated 36 students to date.

Vinco: Vinco is a corporate benefits startup aiming to connect employees at Latin American companies with online education opportunities. The startup’s service is live at more than 30 companies, promising a way to improve employee retention and satisfaction.

Invezo: An investing research/analysis tool for stocks and crypto assets, tying social media data (read: hype!) and financial data together. Lets you, for example, track mentions of a cryptocurrency over Reddit/Twitter/Google/etc. Co-founder Emmett Miller says they’ve doubled weekly active users to over 5,000 in the last month.

Chipax: Describing itself as a "Quickbooks for SMBs in LatAm," Chipax wants to give business owners real-time visibility on receivables and payables. The startup is expanding its revenue opportunities with invoicing and B2B payments. It has landed $1.6 million in annual recurring revenue across over 1,100 customers.

Catena Biosciences: Autoimmune disorders are devastating and difficult to treat. Catena has a new approach born out of work at CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna’s lab. By attaching custom proteins to red blood cells, they can retrain the immune system to cease its mistaken and destructive response, potentially providing a treatment for Graves' disease, celiac disorder, multiple sclerosis and more. Big Pharma is already nosing around, as you might expect, and I predict a large valuation quite soon. (But more importantly, treatments for serious disorders.)

Kapacity.io: Connects to existing devices/products (like HVAC) in a building and controls them via API to reduce electricity costs, aiming for a 25% reduction and taking a cut of the savings.

Ancana: Ancana is a marketplace for fractional ownership of fully managed vacation homes, taking the idea of timeshares and Airbnb and creating a platform for shared homes where owners actually own a percentage of their property. Users collaborate with their co-owners to book time through the platform instead of relying on fixed timelines.

Keyri: A passwordless authentication API, a la WhatsApp’s web/desktop login experience. Tap an in-app button or scan an on-screen QR code to start the sign-in process, then use biometrics to prove you’re you — no passwords to type or share. Co-founder Zain Azeem says the company has four LOIs signed and is already working with 57 startups.

Fitia: The app creates personalized nutrition plans, using ingredients in local grocers, for LatAm users who want to lose weight. Users pay $55 per year, and the now-profitable startup attracts $70,000 in monthly revenue. Beyond trying to democratize the nutritionist, Fitia is also growing a database of over 1 million Latin American foods and recipes.

Evidently AI: Machine learning models are used almost universally in tech stacks, but telling when they’re failing and how isn’t as simple and established as something like “500 Error server not found.” Evidently wants to make tracking and debugging ML systems simpler and easier, so that faults can be identified and fixed faster. As authors of dozens of ML models themselves, the team thinks they’ve got the chops to do it. And who will naysay them?

Adaptyv Biosystems: A smaller, faster chip for biotech companies to synthesize and screen proteins. CEO Julian Englert says their chip is 100,000x smaller than existing options, allowing them to screen “millions of drugs instead of thousands.”; from the data they’ll gather, they’ll build “the world’s largest protein database.”

Awesomic: The team at Awesomic is building a design freelancing platform with a big emphasis on getting design jobs done quickly without the stress of hiring a designer.

Luable: Helps users in Latin America find saving accounts with better yields. Acting as a broker, Luable takes a 1.5% commission. The team says it currently has over $450,000 under management, averaging 2x growth month over month.

Render of a Craft aircraft flying over a city.

Image Credits: Craft Aerospace

Craft Aerospace: Craft Aerospace is designing and testing a totally novel new vertical take-off and landing aircraft designed to fly and land in and around cities, making regional travel faster and cheaper. The design of the aircraft is pretty wild, but it actually makes a lot of sense and could help change SF-to-LA into Tenderloin-to-Silverlake (well, maybe not that, but you get the idea). I wrote more about their new approach here.

Snowboard Software: If you know what the “Snowflake data cloud” is, Snowboard might be for you. Snowboard is a data catalog for Snowflake, allowing you to dig through your data on the platform faster, find data issues, etc. You can self-host it, or they’ll host for you; it’s free to start tinkering with, and you start paying after 1,000 indexed columns. The company says it’s currently seeing $15,000 ARR with four companies onboarded.

Jupe: First up, the Jupe founder who presented had an excellent hat. He was also living in a Jupe in a parking lot. Why? Because Jupe sells glamping-in-a-box. The company has booked some $6.5 million in revenue this year and claims to be profitable. It sells software and hardware and takes a pretty big cut of total spend. Er, is glamping a big industry? I have glamped. It was nice. Perhaps it is growing during the COVID era.

Hera: The team at Hera is building a Calendar app with an emphasis on productivity, with a number of overt and more subtle features aimed at helping people get the most out of their meetings without living in a bloated calendar app.

Astek.: Helps doctors find the right antibiotic faster — an hour, the company says, instead of days — in emergency situations. The company expects to charge $100 per test.

Protego: Founded by ex-Rappi entrepreneurs, Protego helps LatAm companies recover lost revenue. It automates the chargeback process, a process that currently requires quite a bit of manual labor. Since launch, it has attracted $4,300 in monthly recurring revenue and has turned its former employer into a pilot customer.

V-Flow Medical: Millions of Americans suffer from compressed pelvic veins, a dangerous condition usually treated with stents — which have a 20% failure rate. V-Flow has designed a device to treat the huge number of people who need an alternative treatment. With a track record of medical device approvals and exits behind them, the team says they have this whole thing mapped out and hopefully ready to keep hundreds of thousands of people healthy.

bloop: An extension for your code editor that surfaces code examples from each library’s official documentation. Works with VS Code, with support for other IDEs on the way.

Instacrops: An agtech startup focused on helping farmers in Latin America maximize their crop yields using technology like IoT sensors and drones while integrating data sources to help farmers make the best decisions with the best information available.

Bite Ninja: Bite Ninja wants drive-thru restaurants to use its freelancers (ninjas) to help others order and receive food (bites), allowing people to take drive-thru orders from home. One of the co-founders ran a BBQ restaurant chain called Baby Jacks, where he built out the initial concept. The team says it’s currently running pilots with five chains and would make $150,000 per restaurant location.

Pylon: One way to stand out in Y Combinator is to be a fully bootstrapped company making nearly double-digit revenue. That's what Pylon, a platform to help water and electricity companies manage infrastructure, did in its pitch today. The profitable company improves its clients operations by detecting and reducing leakages, consumption theft and uncollected bills.

ClearMix: Organizing an in-person video team at a global company can be tough at the best of times, let alone during a pandemic. ClearMix is a fully remote video production suite that lets video teams record and produce videos quickly and professionally, but entirely online. No doubt it’s going up against some heavy hitters in the Adobe vein, but the need is clear.

Sequin : A fintech play, Sequin wants to give women debit cards to help them build credit — the card features what the company called "live credit reporting" — so that more women can access debt products. The company plans to eventually build a credit card product as well. Per Sequin, it expects to generate around $60 per user per year thanks to interchange incomes.

Teamspace: A remote collaboration platform built by a Facebook product designer who worked on the company’s Workplace product. The startup hopes to reduce team misalignment by giving them a “shared canvas” where they can tackle problems together.

Repool : Pitched as “AngelList for hedge funds,” Repool wants to let more people build hedge funds. “Focus on trading, we’ll take care of the rest,” they say. Co-founder Kevin Fu says the company has two funds onboarded after launching two weeks ago, already accounting for $36,000 in ARR.

SigmaOS: A browser designed for work. SigmaOS wants to be the main tool startups use to access the web, with an interface meant to promote multitasking and collaboration. Flagship features include split-screen capabilities, browser-based collaboration pages and focus mode. The productivity software startup charges $10 a month — and claims it’s gaining one customer every two minutes.

Whalesync: No-code tools are definitely popular (there have been plenty in the last two days) but they don’t solve every problem. And it turns out they create at least one new one — keeping data in sync between no-code tools can be tough and your devs end up having to code a data pipeline anyway. Whalesync connects no-code tools with each other, staving off the “real” coding for another step or two.

Yummy: Co-founded by a Postmates alum, Yummy is building a super app for Venezuela that it intends to expand to Peru and Chile. The company's application includes food, CPG and entertainment products and claims to have expanded to ride-hailing as well. Yummy says that it is doing $1.6 million in monthly GMV, a figure that is growing by 35% each month. If that growth keeps up, expect to hear more about the company.

Level: A fintech financing platform that buys loans from fintech startups helping them gain access to capital to scale faster. The company analyzes the fintech company’s performance and loan portfolio to source low-risk loans it can purchase at a discounted rate.

Inflow: A self-help app for helping people manage ADHD. The company is promising symptom improvement on par with in-person treatment while making it “100x more affordable and accessible.” Co-founder Levi Epstein says Inflow has 2,700+ paying members and is currently seeing $33,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Keeper: Bookkeepers often stick to spreadsheets and email, so Keeper has built a software solution with them in mind. The startup gives bookkeepers a suite of tools to communicate with clients and deliver reports. Focusing on the quiet but complicated has helped Keeper hit $6,400 in monthly recurring revenue.

Jingu Health: Millions of women suffer from vaginal infections with no effective treatment, but Jingu Health is coming to the rescue with a powerful tool. They target the underlying cause of these infections by analyzing the microbiome with computational biology tools and reprogramming it (think “more of this, less of this,” not bioengineered microorganisms). They claim to have the first pill-based treatment. It’s even FDA approved even though it doesn’t need to be … just in case.

Echoes HQ: This one could prove controversial. Echoes wants to measure engineering output and align time spent to different corporate OKRs. If TechCrunch rolled this out to measure writer output, there would be pitchforks in the streets.* Precisely how much engineers want to have their work monitored so that a manager elsewhere can chide them for whatever they deem to be "less than productive" is not clear. However, given how tight the market is for technical talent, if this introduces any sort of material friction, it would drive regretted employee churn, as they say.

*And by streets we mean various Slack channels.

Image Credits: Litnerd

Litnerd : Litnerd wants to help make kids better readers by keeping them more engaged in reading. They livestream actors into the classroom on a weekly basis to act out and advance stories the kids have spent the last few days reading, provide lesson plans for teachers and more. We wrote about Litnerd here!

DocVita: Telehealth has exploded during the pandemic. DocVita is looking to scale telehealth in India further with a platform that connects consumers with generalists and specialists across a wide network. The founders have experience in the healthcare software industry and have scaled the company to $12,000 in monthly GMV after just a few months on the market.

Waterplan: Tech and water may not usually mix well, unless you're Waterplan. The startup helps industrial facilities mitigate water risk, a growing threat due to climate change and deterioration. It has $345,000 in annual recurring revenue thanks to 12 pilot customers.

Moxion Power: I (Alex) half expect this company to announce a SPAC-led deal to go public in the next month. It's building large, mobile batteries that construction sites and other commercial operations can use to provide power in locations where they today use generators. Lower emissions is a win. The company expects to get its first production facility online in Q1 2022. Given the huge interest in EV tech more generally today, we like Moxion's chances of raising the capital it needs to give its business a shot.

Lightly: A machine learning startup that helps ML teams prioritize the data most in need of labeling, pointing them to the data subsets that will have the biggest impact on their overall model accuracy.

Beeper: You probably use like a half dozen chat apps. Beeper merges them all together  — even iMessage, through some hackery involving forwarding messages from a Mac or jailbroken iPhone — and adds things like unified search. Co-founders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray previously worked together at Pebble, the early smartwatch company Eric founded.

Rendalo Maq: A digital broker for construction equipment in LatAm. Clients turn to Rendalo Maq to procure and handle fleet management for construction companies in the region. While the startup's software is focused on used equipment and rentals, it's also a marketplace and operating system.

Basis: Look, if you’re in business automation like me, you understand that a dynamic end-to-end data pipeline is worth its weight in bitcoin. Was that convincing? Okay, I’m not in business automation but I can guess that with the amounts of data coming in and the number of places it needs to go, you want a big-time solution, and that’s what Basis wants to be. “Yes code” instead of no code, giving superpowers to your dev team so they don’t have to hire a specialist in data handling just to make things work.

Levro: Something that I've noticed among lots of smaller companies is building in many countries at once. That means that business itself is increasingly global. Which is great for remote workers, but a bit wonky when it comes to payments and banking. Levro appears to be prepping to help smooth the currency situation by offering a multicurrency banking service. The company dangled a hook during its pitch, offering free payments up to a transaction cap for folks tuned into Demo Day. Let's see if that helps it drive early sign-ups. Its website currently only lets folks sign up for updates, so it may be some time until we fully grok Levro's early traction.

Zazos: A no-code tool for HR teams that helps them build the exact functionality they need and leave out what they don’t while allowing customizations across interfaces, permissioning and data integrations.

Filadd: Helps students in Latin America pass their college entrance exams, then provides them with 24/7 access to tutors until they graduate. Co-founder Joaquin Olmedo says the company is currently seeing $800,000 in annual revenue.

testRigor: A better way to test for quality assurance. TestRigor has created technology that allows companies to run tests that better emulate the way end users engage with their applications. The software claims to be faster, non-engineer friendly, and thus more scalable for its clients. Netflix is one of the customers fueling testRigor's $700,000 annual recurring revenue.

Heimdal: Heimdal pulls valuable minerals out of seawater while simultaneously sequestering carbon dioxide, producing carbon-negative materials for the concrete and glass industries. Cement manufacturing is notoriously a huge polluter, so with regulations coming in, they and everyone else are jonesing for green processes and raw materials. I wrote this up in more detail here!

Unbox: QA doesn't get enough love in the ML world, but it matters. ML models can be biased as heck, or simply broken. Unbox wants to help ML team members, both technical and not, to find issues in ML models and create tests to check to make sure that fixes work. The team hails from Apple. Unbox did not share growth metrics.

Fizz: Fizz is building a debit card that helps college students in the U.S. start building out their credit without having to learn lessons about overzealous credit use the hard way. Building good credit early is critical but can be tough for college students operating on tight budgets, Fizz is building a platform designed for college students specifically.

Mentorcam: A marketplace connecting people with those they admire for advice — sorta like Cameo for 1:1 advice. Charging $20-$300 per video, they saw $7,000 in gross sales in August. Notably, the company says, nearly half of its users are repeat customers.

Telmai: Data quality can make or break a startup, so Telmai wants to be the reliable sidekick that sniffs out inaccuracies or anomalies before you do. The data observability platform uses a no-code onboarding process and claims it can begin working for clients within minutes. Beyond fighting bad data, Telmai offers high-level visualization, and soon, proactive alerts and user inputs for correctness. For data analytics teams, which are constantly deciding whether to escalate a blip, Telmai is meant to take some of the guesswork out of their days and more broadly simplify operations.

Amenli: Amenli is the first licensed online insurance broker in Egypt. Able to sign customers up in a few minutes for low-cost premiums around $200 per year, it’s hard to see how this can be anything but a runaway success assuming they do it right. Go get it, Amenli!

Nash: This is fun. Nash has built software atop mass-market delivery APIs (it listed DoorDash and Uber, among others) to allow other companies to offer same-day delivery. Why is it neat? Because SMBs can't code, having another company plug them into delivery networks could unlock the delivery market for companies that can't afford an engineering team. Per Nash, it has a 10% take rate and is doing around $60,000 in GMV.

Byte Kitchen: Byte Kitchen wants to build ghost kitchens that make the best dishes from the best restaurants in the country, licensing brands and recipes and bringing them access to more markets. Its first kitchen is live, and the team says its has “20+ LOIs with popular restaurants.”

Tenyks: Helps AI developers figure out how/why their computer vision systems are doing what they’re doing and build more reliable systems. With both co-founders having Ph.D.s in “Explainable AI,” this one seems like a good fit. Founder Botty Dimanov says they’re currently working with one customer, with four more getting set up now and seven+ on the waitlist.

Maroo: "Save the date" doesn't exactly scream stable revenue, so Maroo is building a payments service for the wedding industry. The startup is rethinking how the business owners within the wedding industry — from caterers to that charming venue you eye every time you drive past it — receive payments. As for the happy couple, Maroo offers a buy now, pay later service for a more accessible financing option,

Tavus: Here’s one that might make you squint a little. Tavus wants to replace written outreach (think sales emails and such) with computer-generated deepfakes. Yes, you read that correctly. Customize the name, company and other aspects and get hundreds of tailored videos that look just like someone recorded a video message just for the recipient. Is it a good idea? We’ll see … but like it or not it’s here, and it seems to be effective. Let you and I proceed into this strange new world together, my friend.

MarqVision: Monitors the large ecommerce marketplaces and aims to automatically detect/flag counterfeits while providing brands a dashboard for sending take-down requests. Co-founder Mark Lee says that they’ve reached $100k in MRR after launching 9 months ago, citing LVMH (read: Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi, Off-White, etc.) as a client.

Enso: The team at Enso is building a data processing tool that helps automate developer processes that require a ton of repetitive manual work. The no-code platform wants to put components built by its community of experts into the hands of data scientists.

Brite: When your employer offers you a zillion different benefits/insurance options, Brite helps you wade through it and figure out what’s right. Co-founder Ben Hale says they’ve already worked with over 400,000 employees (across 250+ employers) and are seeing an MRR of $28,000.

Metlo: The truth wins, and that's a lesson for life and for startups. Metlo, built by former Facebook and Uber engineers, helps companies store their business metrics (like "daily active users") in a standardized, transparent way across different tools without a bunch of duplicated work. In seven weeks, the startup landed four design partners.

MergeQueue: When you’ve got 20 engineers all coding separately to build a new feature, it can take as long to integrate and reconcile their work as it does to do it in the first place. MergeQueue automates code submission workflows to avoid build failures that result in costly code reviews and delays. The team encountered this issue at Google (easy to imagine) and hacked together their own solution there — now they’ve built something for everyone else to use.

CostCertified: Bringing price transparency to an opaque market is never too bad an idea. CostCertified wants to make the worlds of construction materials and labor more transparent with a marketplace and "real-time quoting engine" that it has built. Per the startup, it has around $250,000 in ARR from SaaS revenues today and intends to take a 1% cut of GMV in the future.

Daily Crunch: Researchers claim Fortress S03 home security system can be remotely disabled

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 03:10 PM PDT

To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 1, 2021. It's a big day in TechCrunch history in that we've been shuffled to a new parent company. More on that in a moment. First, Disrupt attendees, you can now hit up CrunchMatch to meet other cool folks. See you there! — Alex

Fire up CrunchMatch today and start networking with TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 attendees

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Hello, Apollo! TechCrunch is no longer part of Verizon Media Group, a somewhat forgotten subsidiary of the U.S. telco. Instead, we are now part of Yahoo, which is owned, in turn, by Apollo, a large investing company that is publicly traded. Cue the parade. Jokes aside, the long-announced deal has finally been completed. We'll have more notes on our new overlords as soon as we meet them.
  • Inside Amplitude's IPO filing: TechCrunch's coverage of the accelerating IPO market continued today with notes on Amplitude's product-analytics-focused debut. For more on Toast and Freshworks' filings, head here or here. Oh, and Warby Parker here, if D2C is your jam.
  • Sticking to the big-dollar news today, Vista Equity is buying a majority stake in Drift. Based in Boston, Drift focuses on what it calls "conversational" sales tools. The two parties were being coy to a silly level by not disclosing the price paid for Drift, other than that the majority sale of the company values the former startup at more than $1 billion. Why Drift sold to Vista instead of going public is not clear, but we do feel cheated out of its S-1 filing.

Startups/VC

As we write to you today, the TechCrunch team is busy writing thousands of words about the second day of startup pitches from Y Combinator's Demo Day. You can read about every startup that pitched yesterday.

Now, to today's news. First, Berlin Brands, which buys and hopes to scale brands that sell on Amazon, is now worth north of $1 billion after raising a $700 million equity-and-debt round. There is apparently infinite capital available to finance the purchase of smaller e-commerce brands.

So much so that Forum Brands also announced new capital for the activity today. Its $100 million in debt financing may sound small compared to what Berlin Brands just secured, but it's still nine figures of dry powder.

Our favorite startups from YC's Summer 21 Demo Day, Part 1

Twice each year, we turn our attention to Y Combinator’s latest class of aspiring startups as they hold their public debuts.

For YC Summer 2021 Demo Day, the accelerator’s fourth virtual gathering, Natasha Mascarenhas, Alex Wilhelm, Devin Coldewey, Lucas Matney and Greg Kumparak selected 14 favorites from the first day of one of the world’s top pitch competitions.

Read their analysis, then come back later today for their rundown of Day Two.

Our favorite startups from YC's Summer 21 Demo Day, Part 1

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Today's Big Tech news is mostly focused on feature upgrades. Enjoy!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Illustration montage based on education and knowledge in blue

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In case you didn't catch it yesterday: We're giving away one free ticket to Disrupt through the Experts survey. Check out the schedule for Disrupt, and read on to learn about the giveaway details.

  • Have you already submitted a recommendation? That's great — we're counting all previous survey submissions as an entry for the Disrupt ticket.
  • We'll also enter the next 100 survey submissions into the giveaway.
  • Do you want to submit 10 recommendations to increase your chance at winning? We love the enthusiasm, but we ask that you only submit one recommendation for each marketer that you've worked with.
  • Don't know what to say in your recommendation? Start with what traits they had, what they did to help your company, how their work affected your business and go from there!
  • We manually go through all entries, so please don't copy and paste the same response multiple times.
  • Have a question about the giveaway? Send us an email at ec_editors@techcrunch.com.

Community

Jonathan Metrick

Image Credits: Jonathan Metrick

Join Danny Crichton and Mary Ann Azevedo Tuesday, September 7, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT on Twitter Spaces as they talk with Jonathan Metrick about fintech and growth marketing.

3 tips to align your values with your startup’s culture

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 02:24 PM PDT

Mark McClain Contributor
Mark McClain is the founder and CEO of SailPoint, the leader in cloud enterprise security.

You’ve heard the phrase “leading by example,” but what about “leading with values”?

I’ve always led by example by using my values as my guide. Still, it wasn't until I founded my first company that I fully understood the importance of embedding those values into the company, too.

Integrity, individuals, impact and innovation are the “4 I values” that drive my decisions and the actions of those at my company each day. These are not just words on a wall at our HQ or on a mousepad for our remote crew, but values that everyone in the company lives and breathes. Over the last two years, these four values became even more important and continued to guide me, my family and the leaders at our company.

As organizations map out their “return to the workplace” (NOT “return to work,” because we never stopped working) plans, we should not simply go back to how things were before. Instead, let's all take a moment to redesign something that sets everyone up for success, with values as the compass. I think you'll find this approach helps people not only survive, but thrive in the workplace.

Leading with values is, in my experience, the best leadership position to take, and there are three ways to accomplish this goal.

Leave behind old-school mentalities on workplace hierarchy

The tone of the company’s culture comes from the top. The culture you envision for your company will only come about if your employees believe in the practices that you are asking them to implement.

At some point in your career — probably right out of school, a few years in or somewhere in the middle — you experienced a company where treating lower-level employees with less respect is just “a part of the job.” Companies with this type of “paying your dues” mentality tend to work these lower-level employees like grunts until they burn out and leave.

Or they eventually crawl their way up into management-level positions, and the cycle perpetuates itself as they deride the newer crop of employees, eroding any semblance of a healthy culture.

This is not the way.

As a leader, if you want your work environment to indicate inclusivity, support, collaboration and have the essence of a team mentality, you must set the precedent right away. This means stripping away the hierarchy that accompanies work titles and making it clear that your company values contribution based on merit, regardless of position. You are one team, united in your purpose to deliver on your mission, based on your values. This level setting ensures that everyone has skin in the game, and no one has the leeway to treat people poorly.

Don’t get caught in an ivory tower mindset

Early on in my career, I began sharing an office when I could. Those office spaces were purposely not what anyone would consider cool or nice "digs” — not the furniture and certainly not the view. Even as CEO now, I've had someone on the team describe my current office as a closet. But it gets the job done.

Simple signals like this send a powerful message, and the signal must remain consistent. Don’t take a limo; rent a cheap car. Don’t fly first class; fly coach. These may seem like minor details, but one of the biggest pitfalls any CEO can encounter is falling victim to an ivory tower mindset — when you become so out of touch with the people you manage, your employees start to notice.

Make a cognizant effort to know your people. Implement a “management by walking around” strategy. Don’t sit in your office all day; get out on the floor among your people. Drop by their desks and ask them how their day is going. Eat lunch in the break room. Put in the effort to attend new hire onboarding.

Not physically back in the office? Drop into Slack channels and Zoom meetings. I once “Zoom bombed” a baby shower for one of our crew members just to hear all the well wishes, and it made my day and theirs. Overall, just be present and humanize your workspace. It pays off in spades.

Be thoughtful and consistent with workplace practices

The tone of the company’s culture comes from the top. The culture you envision for your company will only come about if your employees believe in the practices that you are asking them to implement. More importantly, you will not grow a solid culture if you don't give these initiatives and practices 100% of your own effort.

For example, one new initiative we rolled out last year is a campaign we call “Free2Focus.” Twice a week, the SailPoint crew is asked to avoid booking meetings for a couple of hours during Free2Focus time. Not only does this address Zoom fatigue, it also gives our crew the chance to catch their breath whichever way suits them best — whether that’s taking a walk, helping with their children’s schooling or just turning off the camera for a bit.

If I want my team to show themselves some grace during the week, I’ve found that I need to apply the same practice. This means not setting up meetings during Free2Focus, not sending emails all hours of the day and night and not judging people for taking breaks when they need them. I trust my team to get the job done largely on their own time and own their own terms. I promise, your employees' performance will be better because of it.

Being a CEO is more than building on a vision, a product or an idea. It’s about leading your people with values to accomplish mutual goals in a way that doesn’t zap them of their morale or dignity. It’s easy to get caught up in all the things that come with a job, but if you don’t put in the effort to immerse yourself and your values into the entire company, you’ll end up too big for your own good — and certainly too big for your company’s good.

It won’t happen overnight, but remember, the smallest things are often the ones that have the biggest impact. If you're the leader, lead by example. It's the only way to build teams that stand the test of time.

How a Vungle-owned mobile marketer sent Fontmaker to the top of the App Store

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 02:02 PM PDT

Does this sound familiar? An app goes viral on social media, often including TikTok, then immediately climbs to the top of the App Store where it gains even more new installs thanks to the heightened exposure. That’s what happened with the recent No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, Fontmaker, a subscription-based fonts app which appeared to benefit from word-of-mouth growth thanks to TikTok videos and other social posts. But what we’re actually seeing here is a new form of App Store marketing — and one which now involves one of the oldest players in the space: Vungle.

Fontmaker, at first glance, seems to be just another indie app that hit it big.

The app, published by an entity called Mango Labs, promises users a way to create fonts using their own handwriting which they can then access from a custom keyboard for a fairly steep price of $4.99 per week. The app first launched on July 26. Nearly a month later, it was the No. 2 app on the U.S. App Store, according to Sensor Tower data. By August 26, it climbed up one more position to reach No. 1. before slowly dropping down in the top overall free app rankings in the days that followed.

By Aug. 27, it was No. 15, before briefly surging again to No. 4 the following day, then declining once more. Today, the app is No. 54 overall and No. 4 in the competitive Photo & Video category — still, a solid position for a brand-new and somewhat niche product targeting mainly younger users. To date, it’s generated $68,000 in revenue, Sensor Tower reports.

But Fontmaker may not be a true organic success story, despite its Top Charts success driven by a boost in downloads coming from real users, not bots. Instead, it’s an example of how mobile marketers have figured out how to tap into the influencer community to drive app installs. It’s also an example of how it’s hard to differentiate between apps driven by influencer marketing and those that hit the top of the App Store because of true demand — like walkie-talkie app Zello, whose recent trip to No. 1 can be attributed to Hurricane Ida.

As it turns out, Fontmaker is not your typical “indie app.” In fact, it’s unclear who’s really behind it. Its publisher, Mango Labs, LLC, is actually an iTunes developer account owned by the mobile growth company JetFuel, which was recently acquired by the mobile ad and monetization firm Vungle — a longtime and sometimes controversial player in this space, itself acquired by Blackstone in 2019.

Vungle was primarily interested in JetFuel’s main product, an app called The Plug, aimed at influencers.

Through The Plug, mobile app developers and advertisers can connect to JetFuel’s network of over 15,000 verified influencers who have a combined 4 billion Instagram followers, 1.5 billion TikTok followers, and 100 million daily Snapchat views.

While marketers could use the built-in advertising tools on each of these networks to try to reach their target audience, JetFuel’s technology allows marketers to quickly scale their campaigns to reach high-value users in the Gen Z demographic, the company claims. This system can be less labor-intensive than traditional influencer marketing, in some cases. Advertisers pay on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis for app installs. Meanwhile, all influencers have to do is scroll through The Plug to find an app to promote, then post it to their social accounts to start making money.

Image Credits: The Plug’s website, showing influencers how the platform works

So while yes, a lot of influencers may have made TikTok videos about Fontmaker, which prompted consumers to download the app, the influencers were paid to do so. (And often, from what we saw browsing the Fontmaker hashtag, without disclosing that financial relationship in any way — an increasingly common problem on TikTok, and area of concern for the FTC.)

Where things get tricky is in trying to sort out Mango Labs’ relationship with JetFuel/Vungle. As a consumer browsing the App Store, it looks like Mango Labs makes a lot of fun consumer apps of which Fontmaker is simply the latest.

JetFuel’s website helps to promote this image, too.

It had showcased its influencer marketing system using a case study from an “indie developer” called Mango Labs and one of its earlier apps, Caption Pro. Caption Pro launched in Jan. 2018. (App Annie data indicates it was removed from the App Store on Aug. 31, 2021…yes, yesterday).

Image Credits: App Annie

Vungle, however, told TechCrunch “The Caption Pro app no longer exists and has not been live on the App Store or Google Play for a long time.” (We can’t find an App Annie record of the app on Google Play).

They also told us that “Caption Pro was developed by Mango Labs before the entity became JetFuel,” and that the case study was used to highlight JetFuel’s advertising capabilities. (But without clearly disclosing their connection.)

“Prior to JetFuel becoming the influencer marketing platform that it is today, the company developed apps for the App Store. After the company pivoted to become a marketing platform, in February 2018, it stopped creating apps but continued to use the Mango Labs account on occasion to publish apps that it had third-party monetization partnerships with,” the Vungle spokesperson explained.

In other words, the claim being made here is that while Mango Labs, originally, were the same folks who have long since pivoted to become JetFuel, and the makers of Caption Pro, all the newer apps published under “Mango Labs, LLC” were not created by JetFuel’s team itself.

“Any apps that appear under the Mango Labs LLC name on the App Store or Google Play were in fact developed by other companies, and Mango Labs has only acted as a publisher,” the spokesperson said.

Image Credits: JetFuel’s website describing Mango Labs as an “indie developer”

There are reasons why this statement doesn’t quite sit right — and not only because JetFuel’s partners seem happy to hide themselves behind Mango Labs’ name, nor because Mango Labs was a project from the JetFuel team in the past. It’s also odd that Mango Labs and another entity, Takeoff Labs, claim the same set of apps. And like Mango Labs, Takeoff Labs is associated with JetFuel too.

Breaking this down, as of the time of writing, Mango Labs has published several consumer apps on both the App Store and Google Play.

On iOS, this includes the recent No. 1 app Fontmaker, as well as FontKey, Color Meme, Litstick, Vibe, Celebs, FITme Fitness, CopyPaste, and Part 2. On Google Play, it has two more: Stickered and Mango.

Image Credits: Mango Labs

Most of Mango Labs’ App Store listings point to JetFuel’s website as the app’s “developer website,” which would be in line with what Vungle says about JetFuel acting as the apps’ publisher.

What’s odd, however, is that the Mango Labs’ app Part2, links to Takeoff Labs’ website from its App Store listing.

The Vungle spokesperson initially told us that Takeoff Labs is “an independent app developer.”

And yet, the Takeoff Labs’ website shows a team which consists of JetFuel’s leadership, including JetFuel co-founder and CEO Tim Lenardo and JetFuel co-founder and CRO JJ Maxwell. Takeoff Labs’ LLC application was also signed by Lenardo.

Meanwhile, Takeoff Labs’ co-founder and CEO Rhai Goburdhun, per his LinkedIn and the Takeoff Labs website, still works there. Asked about this connection, Vungle told us they did not realize the website had not been updated, and neither JetFuel nor Vungle have an ownership stake in Takeoff Labs with this acquisition.

Image Credits: Takeoff Labs’ website showing its team, including JetFuel’s co-founders.

Takeoff Labs’ website also shows off its “portfolio” of apps, which includes Celeb, Litstick, and FontKey — three apps that are published by Mango Labs on the App Store.

On Google Play, Takeoff Labs is the developer credited with Celebs, as well as two other apps, Vibe and Teal, a neobank. But on the App Store, Vibe is published by Mango Labs.

Image Credits: Takeoff Labs’ website, showing its app portfolio.

(Not to complicate things further, but there’s also an entity called RealLabs which hosts JetFuel, The Plug and other consumer apps, including Mango — the app published by Mango Labs on Google Play. Someone sure likes naming things “Labs!”)

Vungle claims the confusion here has to do with how it now uses the Mango Labs iTunes account to publish apps for its partners, which is a “common practice” on the App Store. It says it intends to transfer the apps published under Mango Labs to the developers’ accounts, because it agrees this is confusing.

Vungle also claims that JetFuel “does not make nor own any consumer apps that are currently live on the app stores. Any of the apps made by the entity when it was known as Mango Labs have long since been taken down from the app stores.”

JetFuel’s system is messy and confusing, but so far successful in its goals. Fontmaker did make it to No. 1, essentially growth hacked to the top by influencer marketing.

But as a consumer, what this all means is that you’ll never know who actually built the app you’re downloading or whether you were “influenced” to try it through what were, essentially, undisclosed ads.

Fontmaker isn’t the first to growth hack its way to the top through influencer promotions. Summertime hit Poparrazzi also hyped itself to the top of the App Store in a similar way, as have many others. But Poparazzi has since sunk to No. 89 in Photo & Video, which shows influence can only take you so far.

As for Fontmaker, paid influence got it to No. 1, but its Top Chart moment was brief.

Bright Cellars lands more funding to personalize its subscription-based wines

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 01:51 PM PDT

Bright Cellars, a six-year-old subscription-based wine seller has, like many upstarts, evolved over time. While it once sent its club members third-party wines that fit their particular profiles, Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Bright Cellars says it’s now amassing enough data about its customers that it no longer sells wines made by other brands. Instead, while some of its “original” offerings are admittedly sold by other labels under different names, it is increasingly finding success by directing its winemaker partners to tweak the recipe, so to speak.

“We’re optimizing wine like you might optimize a more digital product,” says co-founder and CEO, Richard Yau, a San Francisco native whose startup entered into a regional accelerator program early on and stayed, though the company is now largely decentralized.

We talked earlier today with Yau about that shift, which investors are supporting with $11.2 million in Series B funding, led by Cleveland Avenue, with participation from earlier backers Revolution Ventures and Northwestern Mutual. (The company has now raised roughly $20 million altogether).

Yau also talked about industry trends that he’s seeing because of all that data collection.

3 issues to resolve before switching to a subscription business model

TC: You’re building a portfolio of wines. What does that mean?

RY: We don’t own any land. We’re working primarily with suppliers [as do big companies like Gallo and Constellation], but at a larger scale than before, so we now get to shape what wines taste like and look like, and we can optimize across variables like how sweet should this wine be? How acidic? What do we want its color and brand and label to look like and which segment of our customers will really enjoy this wine the most?

TC: What’s one of your concoctions?

RY: We have a sparkling wine that's produced in the Champagne method — not a Champagne wine; it’s a domestic wine — using grape varietals that no one uses for sparkling wine, and it's one of the top-rated wines on our platform. Sparkling wine has been really good for us.

TC: How many subscribers do you have?

RY: We can't share that, but we saw an acceleration in not just new subscribers throughout the pandemic but also in terms of seeing a larger share of [customers’] wallets going to D2C, and that impacted us pretty positively. Even as things eased up over the summer, we saw that people were cooking and eating at home more [and drinking wine].

TC: What’s the average price of a bottle of wine on the platform?

RY: $20 to $25.

TC: Where are your grape suppliers?

RY: A lot are on the West Coast, in Washington and California, but we also have grape suppliers internationally, including in South America and Europe.

TC: How many wines do you offer, and how long do you trial a wine?

RY: We’ve tested around 600, and at any given time, we’ll have 40 to 50 wines on the platform. We don't stock everything forever; those that don't do as well, we basically eliminate.

TC: A lot of D2C brands eventually branch into real-world locations. You aren’t doing that. Why not?

RY: It’s possible that we might at some point, but we like being D2C and it makes a lot of sense in a world where our members now work from home and are home to receive packages. It lines up with e-commerce trends in general. If you're not buying your groceries at the store anymore, you aren't buying wines at the store, either.

TC: From where are these bottles shipped?

RY: From a variety of places, but primarily from Santa Rosa [in the Bay Area].

TC: Have you seen the impact the weather is having on California winemakers, some of whom are now spraying sunscreen on their grapes to protect them?

RY: [Climate change] has certainly affected the wine industry. One of the fortunate things about us is we have flexibility in the suppliers we're working with, so from a business-health perspective, we haven't been as affected by that. Because a lot of our operations are in California, we did a couple of years ago have some interruptions with distribution where we weren’t able to ship some days; we were also impacted by warm temperatures. But fortunately, so far for this year, we haven't had any operational or supply-chain disruptions.

TC: Have you been approached by one of legacy firms about a partnership or acquisition?

RY: We've had conversations, more in terms of partnerships because we have lots of data and can help them. For example, we can launch a new wine and get feedback almost like a focus group to figure out who likes what. We can split test two different blends for a wine and figure out which does better. That's where conversations with legacy wine companies have happened.

TC: So they’d pay you for your data.

RY: We’re not opposed to selling data in the future, but we've approached it more like, here's an opportunity to learn about how innovation works at a larger wine company. We don’t expect to be able to do what Constellation does well — with its large salesforce and distributors in every state — but what we can do in a complementary way is understand the consumer.

TC: What have you learned that might surprise outsiders?

RY: Petite sirah [offerings] do as well, if not better than, cabernet and pinot noir on the platform. Cab and pinot are fully 50 times the market size of petite sirah, but we see that our members really like it.

People also like merlot a lot more than they think — pretty much across all demographics. People like to hate merlot, but when we look at red blends that do well . . .

TC: What do people have against merlot?

RY: [Laughs.] Have you ever seen “Sideways?” That has something to do with it, still. Meanwhile, pinot noir remains popular, but people don’t like it as much as [other wine sellers] think.

Rocket Lab boosts its space systems division in quest to become an ‘end-to-end space company’

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 01:30 PM PDT

Peter Beck hasn't been shy about his intention to grow Rocket Lab into more than just a launch provider, but a fully vertically integrated space company that makes spacecraft in addition to sending them to orbit. The company, which he founded in 2006, has taken yet another major stride toward that goal with the news Wednesday that it will open a new production facility to manufacture satellite components at a larger scale than ever before.

The facility will manufacture reaction wheels, critical attitude and stability control systems on satellites. Rocket Lab says the facility, which will be operational in the fourth quarter of this year, will be capable of producing up to 2,000 reaction wheels annually. Given that spacecraft generally have between three and four reaction wheels, it's safe to assume that Rocket Lab customers likely have around 500 individual satellites ready in the pipeline to accept these components. "These are large volumes of supply across multiple constellations," Rocket Lab CEO Beck said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

The news is a marked expansion for Rocket Lab's space systems business, which is already kept busy by the in-house Photon spacecraft and was boosted last year when the company acquired major satellite hardware manufacturer Sinclair Interplanetary. Rocket Lab also offers bespoke Photons for individual use cases — it will be designing the vehicles for forthcoming launches with space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries and two Photons that will be sent to Mars on an upcoming science mission.

Rocket Lab’s Mars mission gets green light from NASA

Historically, spacecraft components have generally been produced on the scale of tens or hundreds, because the barriers to get to orbit were so high. But as the cost of launch has declined (thanks in part to innovations from companies like Rocket Lab) more and more entities are able to send projects to space. That means more satellites, and more reaction wheels. Even today, there are around 200 Rocket Lab-made reaction wheels in orbit, so 2,000 in a single year is a huge jump in scale.

It’s all part of Rocket Lab’s goal of being a fully integrated space services company. A major benefit from the vertical integration for customers, Rocket Lab says, is slashed manufacturing lead times. Beck said that when the company first started producing Photons, they quickly encountered months-long delivery times for reaction wheels, which effectively pushed back their timeline for launching one to orbit.

"If the space economy is to grow in the way that it’s predicted, then this has to be solved," he said. "This is a fundamental problem that has to be solved. The whole space supply chain is characterized by small-scale operations that really lack the ability to produce volume in any scale."

Rocket Lab will be hiring more than 16 roles to support the space systems division and the new production facility, which will otherwise be highly automated; the company said in a statement that the production tools and environmental testing workstations will all be automated, and the metal machining is optimized to operate unattended. Beck said these techniques are very much in line with Rocket Lab's other manufacturing processes — he pointed to Rosie the Robot as a cornerstone of the company's capacity to use automation to rapidly scale its products.

Beck stayed mum about whether the company is planning on scaling the production of other spacecraft components, like the star trackers navigation tool, which Rocket Lab also manufacturers. However, he did say that the company plans on introducing new products — what those will be, he declined to specify. But Beck's stated aim when he started the space systems division is that "everything that goes to space should have a Rocket Lab logo on it.”

That aim goes to Rocket Lab's larger vision, which is becoming an end-to-end space company: combining launch services with spacecraft manufacturing to be able to build in-orbit infrastructure.

"When you combine those things together, you have an immensely powerful platform that you can use to develop infrastructure in orbit and ultimately provide services," he said.

But when asked what kinds of services he was thinking of, Beck played it close to the chest, instead choosing to give a well-known example from a competitor: SpaceX's Starlink internet satellite project, which it builds and launches itself. He stayed mum on what kinds of ventures Rocket Lab might pursue, just saying that the vertical integration gives the company the ability to try new business models.

"The marginal cost for us to experiment is very, very low."

Virtual events startups have high hopes for after the pandemic

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 12:07 PM PDT

Few people thought of virtual events before the pandemic struck, but this format has fulfilled a unique and important need for companies and organizations large and small during the pandemic. But what will virtual events’ value be as more of the world attempts to return to life before COVID-19?

To find out, we caught up with top executives and investors in the sector to learn about the big trends they're seeing — as the sequel to this survey we did in March 2020.

Certain use cases have been proven, they say. Today, you can find numerous small niche events available year-round that might have been buried in the back of a larger in-person conference before 2020. For organizations, internal virtual events can also be instrumental in helping connect and promote engagement for remote-first teams.

However, some respondents acknowledged that low-quality virtual events are growing ever more common, and everyone agreed that there is much more work to be done.

We surveyed:

Xiaoyin Qu, founder and CEO, Run The World

With the pandemic hopefully becoming more manageable soon, do you feel a return to in-person events is inevitable?

Certain types of events will go back to in person. Obviously, something to do with a President’s Club — the company rewards you with a party in Hawaii — that kind of thing will not go virtual. I think events more focused on increasing reach will continue to trend toward virtual.

We're also seeing that many events are getting smaller, more niche. Before the pandemic, if we look at a general pediatric conference, for example, an attendee may only be interested in two topics out of the 200 offered. But now we've seen that there’s a rise in many niche events that focus on very specific topics, which helps streamline these events for attendees.

I think such events are still going to happen virtually just because they’re easier to organize and people can have more in-depth conversations. Internal virtual events for employees is another category that is getting more traction, because companies have been going remote. So many the internal events like the company happy hour — events that help employees engage better — we think that’s still going to happen virtually. So there are a number of use cases we think will continue to be virtual and are probably better virtual.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we'll share the results with everybody.

What sort of trends do you think will emerge once in-person events are possible again?

Another important trend we’re seeing is that a lot of organizers have begun hosting events more frequently. They were doing large conferences in the past, but now they’re pivoting or they’re rethinking their strategy. They realize that hosting maybe 10 events a year is better than hosting one big event every year. A traditional conference is usually multiday, with maybe 200 different topics and 100 different speakers. Now a lot of people are thinking about spreading it out throughout the year.

Agility Robotics’ Digit gets a warehouse gig

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 11:29 AM PDT

A new video from Agility Robotics showcases an increasing familiar sight: advanced, autonomous robots performing boring warehouse tasks. It's not the sort of video that tends to be hugely viral for a company, rather, it's the sort of meat and potatoes proof of concept that companies like Boston Dynamics wedge between flashy videos of parkour and highly choreographed dance sessions.

Ultimately, however, this is precisely the sort of tasks the robots' creators are targeting: the well-known trio of dull, dirty and dangerous. Moving payloads back and forth certainly ticks that first box pretty well. There's a reason warehouse and fulfillment workers often liken their work to robotics.

"The conversation around automation has shifted a bit," Agility CEO Damion Shelton tells TechCrunch. "It's viewed as an enabling technology to allow you to keep the workforce that you have. There are a lot of conversations around the risks of automation and job loss, but the job loss is actually occurring now, in advance of the automated solutions."

Digit, the bipedal robot the company announced back in 2020, had its most high-profile moment in the spotlight after Agility announced a partnership with auto giant Ford back at CES. The auto giant currently owns two of the robots, with long-term plans to utilize the technology for delivery.

Today's video is an attempt to showcase some more short-term solutions, putting Digit to work on more menial tasks.

Image Credits: Agility Robotics

"The value and goal of a machine like Digit is the generality," CTO Jonathan Hurst says. "It's a robot that can operate in human environments and spaces. It's a relatively straightforward thing for very structured, repetitive tasks, to say, ‘there's going to be boxes over there. We're going to tell you which one from a databasing system, and we want you to move it over there.’ Maybe this is something that it does for three or four hours a day and then it goes to a different space and does it three or four hours and then it unloads a tractor trailer."

The company sees Digit's value as a more plug and play solution than something like Berkshire Gray's offerings, which builds a fully automated warehouse from the ground up. There's still programming involved, of course. An Agility rep will appear on-site to pre-map a location and help the robot execute its repetitive tasks.

"In terms of where we can actually deploy and do useful work for a customer, it turns out a lot of the tasks — walk from Point A to Point B, pick up and carry a package — are portable across these environments," says Shelton. “There's no real core piece of technology that you develop, that's different for an indoor environment versus outdoor. It's just the level of maturity. I think we've reached that pretty quickly on the indoor stuff, so it's a logical first place for deployment.”

Image Credits: Agility Robotics

Agility hasn't announced partners beyond Ford, though it says it's currently working with "major logistics companies." It hasn't revealed numbers of Digits sold, either, though it tells TechCrunch that the number is "substantially more" than the dozen Cassie units it sold prior to Digit, largely for research purposes. Sales are largely CapEx at the moment, though the company is exploring other opportunities, such as a RaaS (robotics-as-a-service model).

Agility's team is currently at 56 people, primarily based in Oregon (the company got its start as part of OSU's nascent robotics division), where the robots are primarily manufactured.

"We've grown pretty rapidly since last December," says Shelton. "We're expanding our Pittsburgh office by the end of the year, in addition to the Oregon office. We have a pretty rapid growth rate. As we've been increasing the production rate on the robots, we've had a fair amount of hiring for that. We just moved into a new facility that we remodeled, back in June."

Agility’s two-legged robot Digit is for sale and Ford is the first customer

Where top VCs are investing in manufacturing and warehouse robotics

 

Twitter rolls out paid subscription ‘Super Follows’ to let you cash in on your tweets

Posted: 01 Sep 2021 11:00 AM PDT

After opening applications in June, Twitter is rolling out Super Follows, its premium subscription option, starting today.

The feature, first revealed in February, will allow users to subscribe to accounts they like for a monthly subscription fee in exchange for exclusive content. For creators, Super Follows are another useful tool in the emerging patchwork of monetization options across social platforms.

Eligible accounts can set the price for Super Follow subscriptions, with the option of charging $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 per month, prices fairly comparable to a paid newsletter. They can then choose to mark some tweets for subscribers only, while continuing to reach their unpaid follower base in regular tweets.

Twitter Super Follows

Image Credits: Twitter

Paid subscribers will be marked with a special Super Follower badge, differentiating them from unpaid followers in the sea of tweets. The badge shows up in replies, elevating a follower’s ability to interact directly with accounts they opt to support. For accounts that have Super Follows turned on, the option will show up with a distinct button on the profile page.

Super Follows aren’t turned on for everyone. For now, the process remains application only, with a waitlist. The option lives in the Monetization options in the app’s sidebar, though users will need to be U.S.-based with 10K followers and at least 25 tweets within the last month to be eligible.

U.S. and Canada-based iOS Twitter users will be able to Super Follow some accounts starting today, with more users globally seeing the rollout in the coming weeks. On the creator side, Super Follows are only enabled in iOS for now, though support for Android and desktop are “coming soon.”

Twitter’s ‘Super Follow’ creator subscription takes shots at Substack and Patreon

Twitter says that Super Follow income will be subject to the standard, though controversial, 30% in-app purchase fees collected by Apple or Google. Twitter will only take a 3% cut of earnings for up to the first $50,000 generated through Super Follows — a boon for smaller accounts getting off the ground or anyone who uses the paid Twitter feature as a way to supplement other creator income elsewhere. After an account hits the $50,000 earnings mark, Twitter will begin taking a 20% cut.

Super Follows aren’t Twitter’s first monetization experiment to make it out in the wild. In May, Twitter introduced Tip Jar, a way for accounts to receive one-time payments through integration with the Cash App and other payment platforms. The test is limited to a subset of eligible accounts including “creators, journalists, experts, and nonprofits” for the time being.

Twitter starts to roll out paid Ticketed Spaces on iOS

Last week Twitter rolled out Ticketed Spaces for users who applied for the paid audio room feature back in June. Twitter’s cut from Ticketed Spaces mirrors the same fee structure it uses for Super Follows and users will be able to charge anywhere from one dollar to $999 for advanced ticketing.

The product is the latest in a flurry of activity from the social platform after a lengthy period of product stagnation. But Twitter has been busy in the last 12 months, from releasing and killing its ill-fated Fleets to finally showing signs of life on the kind of anti-abuse features many people have been calling for for years.

Giving users the ability to charge for premium content is a pretty major departure for Twitter, which mostly stayed the course until activist shareholders threatened to oust CEO Jack Dorsey. It’s also a major move for the company into the white-hot creator space, as more platforms add tools to empower their users to make a living through content creation — ideally keeping them loyal and generating revenue in the process.

Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more

The business of Patreon
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

guest post needed

Hi I hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out to discuss the possibility of publishing articles on your website. Along with guest ...