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Seoul-based Ringle raises $18M Series A for its one-on-one English tutoring platform

Published June 9, 2021

Many of the highest-profile English tutoring platforms focus on children, including VIPKID and Magic Ears. Ringle created a niche for itself by focusing on adults first, with courses like business English and interview preparation. The South Korea-based startup announced today it has raised an $18 million Series A led by returning investor Must Asset Management, at a valuation of $90 million. Ringle is preparing to launch a program for school kids later this year, and also has plans to open offline educational spaces in South Korea and the United States.

Other participants in the round, which brings Ringle’s total raised to $20 million, include returning investors One Asset Management and MoCA Ventures, along with new backer Xolon Invest. Ringle claims its revenue has grown three times every year since it was founded in 2015, and that bookings for lessons have increased by 390% compared to the previous year.

Ringle currently has 700 tutors, who are pre-screened by the company, and 100,000 users. About 30% of its students, who learn through one-on-one live video sessions, are based outside of Korea, including in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and Singapore.

Ringle’s co-founders are Seunghoon Lee and Sungpah Lee, who both earned MBAs from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. They developed Ringle based on the challenges they faced as non-native English speakers and graduate students in the U.S. The startup was first created to serve professionals who are already established in their careers or in academia. Its students include people who have worked for companies like Google, Amazon, BCG, McKinsey and Samsung Electronics.

China’s VIPKID, which links English tutors with online learners, raises $500M at $3B+ valuation

Seunghoon Lee told TechCrunch that Ringle creates proprietary learning materials based on current events to keep its students interested. For example, recent topics have included blockchain NFT tech, how the movie “Parasite” portrayed class conflict and global inequalities in vaccine access.

Ringle’s tutors are recruited from top universities and need to submit proof of education and verify their school emails. The company’s vetting process also includes a mock session with Ringle staff. Lee said applicants are asked to familiarize themselves with some of Ringle’s learning materials and lead a full lesson based on its guidance. Ringle assesses candidates on their teaching skills and ability to lead engaging discussions that also hone their students’ language skills.

Part of Ringle’s new funding is earmarked for its tech platform. It is currently developing a language diagnostics system that tracks the complexity and accuracy of students’ spoken English with researchers at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).

The company already has an AI-based analytics system that uses speech-to-text and measures speech pacing (or words spoken per minute), the amount of filler words and range of words and expressions in lessons. It delivers feedback that allows students to compare their performance with the top 20% of Ringle users in different metrics.

The new language diagnostics system that is currently under development with KAIST will start releasing features over the next few months, including speech fluency scoring, a personalized dictionary and auto-paraphrasing suggestions.

The funding will also be used to create more original learning content, and hire for Ringle’s offices in Seoul and San Mateo, California. Ringle also plans to diversify its revenue sources by providing premium content on a subscription basis, and will launch its junior program for students aged 10 and above later this year.

English learning app ELSA lands $15 million Series B for international growth and its B2B platform

To win post-pandemic, edtech needs to start thinking big

Joby Aviation eyes Asia and Europe as early markets alongside North America

Published June 9, 2021

While electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startup Joby Aviation is targeting North America for its initial commercial launch, founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt expects the company to have an early presence in Asia and Europe as well.

Bevirt, who joined the TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 on June 9, didn’t give away the first location; although recent announcements suggest it is narrowed down to Los Angeles, Miami, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. But he did weigh in on what those first cities will look like.

“I imagine that we will have early markets in each of the three regions,” he said. “Our initial launch market will be in North America just for proximity to the nexus of where most of our team is currently. But there are incredible opportunities and cities around the world and we want to provide as much benefit to as many people as quickly as we possibly can. And so that’s why we’re so focused on scaling manufacturing.”

Joby Aviation is expected to begin construction on a 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, designed in conjunction with Toyota, later this year. The company has completed a pilot manufacturing facility already.

Joby, once a secretive startup, has had a far more public six months of late. The company reached a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners, formed by well-known investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Michael Thompson and Zynga founder Mark Pincus. Hoffman also joined Bevirt at the TC Sessions: Mobility event.

Prior to its SPAC deal, Joby had gained attention and investors over the years as it developed its eVTOL. Toyota became an important backer and partner, leading a $620 million Series C round of funding in January 2020. Nearly a year later, Joby acquired Uber’s air taxi moonshot Elevate as part of a complex deal.

Uber sells air taxi business Elevate to Joby Aviation, shedding its last moonshot

Today, Joby is focused on certification, which it has been working on with the FAA since 2018, as well manufacturing its eVTOL aircraft. The company is also starting to put the pieces together for how and where it will operate. And that’s adding to its size. In the past year, Joby has doubled its workforce, which now sits at about 800.

Earlier this month, Joby Aviation announced a partnership with REEF Technology, one of the country’s largest parking garage operators, and real estate acquisition company Neighborhood Property Group to build out its network of vertiports, with an initial focus on Los Angeles, Miami, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

When 2024 arrives, Bevirt anticipates launching in one to two cities in that first year of operation.

“We do want to provide sufficient depth of coverage that consumers get to experience the transformative experience,” Bevirt said. “There have been cases where if a new service launches, and there’s not enough supply, consumers can be frustrated, right. And so we want to make sure we can, that we can really service, at least a portion of the demand and provide a really gratifying experience to our customers. I think that that’s the piece that we really care about as a company, is making customers into raving fans.”

Joby Aviation takes flight into the public markets via a SPAC merger

Spotlight gets more powerful in iOS 15, even lets you install apps

Published June 9, 2021

With the upcoming release of iOS 15 for Apple mobile devices, Apple’s built-in search feature known as Spotlight will become a lot more functional. In what may be one of its bigger updates since it introduced Siri Suggestions, the new version of Spotlight is becoming an alternative to Google for several key queries, including web images and information about actors, musicians, TV shows and movies. It will also now be able to search across your photo library, deliver richer results for contacts, and connect you more directly with apps and the information they contain. It even allows you to install apps from the App Store without leaving Spotlight itself.

Spotlight is also more accessible than ever before.

Years ago, Spotlight moved from its location to the left of the Home screen to become available with a swipe down in the middle of any screen in iOS 7, which helped grow user adoption. Now, it’s available with the same swipe-down gesture on the iPhone’s Lock Screen, too.

You can access spotlight from the lock screen #iOS15 (locked or unlocked) pic.twitter.com/rVC1DqvBkA

— Alex Fife (@alextfife) June 9, 2021

Apple showed off a few of Spotlight’s improvements during its keynote address at its Worldwide Developers Conference, including the search feature’s new cards for looking up information on actors, movies and shows, as well as musicians. This change alone could redirect a good portion of web searches away from Google or dedicated apps like IMDb.

For years, Google has been offering quick access to common searches through its Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base that allows it to gather information from across sources and then use that to add informational panels above and the side of its standard search results. Panels on actors, musicians, shows and movies are available as part of that effort.

But now, iPhone users can just pull up this info on their home screen.

The new cards include more than the typical Wikipedia bio and background information you may expect — they also showcase links to where you can listen or watch content from the artist or actor or movie or show in question. They include news articles, social media links, official websites and even direct you to where the searched person or topic may be found inside your own apps (e.g. a search for “Billie Eilish” may direct you to her tour tickets inside SeatGeek, or a podcast where she’s a guest).

Image Credits: Apple

For web image searches, Spotlight also now allows you to search for people, places, animals and more from the web — eating into another search vertical Google today provides.

Image Credits: iOS 15 screenshot

Your personal searches have been upgraded with richer results, too, in iOS 15.

When you search for a contact, you’ll be taken to a card that does more than show their name and how to reach them. You’ll also see their current status (thanks to another iOS 15 feature), as well as their location from FindMy, your recent conversations on Messages, your shared photos, calendar appointments, emails, notes and files. It’s almost like a personal CRM system.

Image Credits: Apple

Personal photo searches have also been improved. Spotlight now uses Siri intelligence to allow you to search your photos by the people, scenes and elements in your photos, as well as by location. And it’s able to leverage the new Live Text feature in iOS 15 to find the text in your photos to return relevant results.

Apple’s Live Text lets you interact with text in your photos

This could make it easier to pull up photos where you’ve screenshot a recipe, a store receipt, or even a handwritten note, Apple said.

Image Credits: Apple

A couple of features related to Spotlight’s integration with apps weren’t mentioned during the keynote.

Spotlight will now display action buttons on the Maps results for businesses that will prompt users to engage with that business’s app. In this case, the feature is leveraging App Clips, which are small parts of a developer’s app that let you quickly perform a task even without downloading or installing the app in question. For example, from Spotlight you may be prompted to pull up a restaurant’s menu, buy tickets, make an appointment, order takeout, join a waitlist, see showtimes, pay for parking, check prices and more.

The feature will require the business to support App Clips in order to work.

Image Credits: iOS 15 screenshot

Another under-the-radar change — but a significant one — is the new ability to install apps from the App Store directly from Spotlight.

This could prompt more app installs, as it reduces the steps from a search to a download, and makes querying the App Store more broadly available across the operating system.

Developers can additionally choose to insert a few lines of code to their app to make data from the app discoverable within Spotlight and customize how it’s presented to users. This means Spotlight can work as a tool for searching content from inside apps — another way Apple is redirecting users away from traditional web searches in favor of apps.

However, unlike Google’s search engine, which relies on crawlers that browse the web to index the data it contains, Spotlight’s in-app search requires developer adoption.

Still, it’s clear Apple sees Spotlight as a potential rival to web search engines, including Google’s.

“Spotlight is the universal place to start all your searches,” said Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi during the keynote event.

Spotlight, of course, can’t handle “all” your searches just yet, but it appears to be steadily working towards that goal.

Decades-old ASCII adventure NetHack may hint at the future of AI

Published June 9, 2021

Machine learning models have already mastered Chess, Go, Atari games and more, but in order for it to ascend to the next level, researchers at Facebook intend for AI to take on a different kind of game: the notoriously difficult and infinitely complex NetHack.

“We wanted to construct what we think is the most accessible ‘grand challenge’ with this game. It won’t solve AI, but it will unlock pathways towards better AI,” said Facebook AI Research’s Edward Grefenstette. “Games are a good domain to find our assumptions about what makes machines intelligent and break them.”

You may not be familiar with NetHack, but it’s one of the most influential games of all time. You’re an adventurer in a fantasy world, delving through the increasingly dangerous depths of a dungeon that’s different every time. You must battle monsters, navigate traps and other hazards, and meanwhile stay on good terms with your god. It’s the first “roguelike” (after Rogue, its immediate and much simpler predecessor) and arguably still the best — almost certainly the hardest.

(It’s free, by the way, and you can download and play it on nearly any platform.)

Its simple ASCII graphics, using a g for a goblin, an @ for the player, lines and dots for the level’s architecture, and so on, belie its incredible complexity. Because Nethack, which made its debut in 1987, has been under active development ever since, with its shifting team of developers expanding its roster of objects and creatures, rules, and the countless, countless interactions between them all.

And this is part of what makes NetHack such a difficult and interesting challenge for AI: It’s so open-ended. Not only is the world different every time, but every object and creature can interact in new ways, most of them hand-coded over decades to cover every possible player choice.

NetHack with a tile-based graphics update – all the information is still available via text.

“Atari, Dota 2, StarCraft 2… the solutions we’ve had to make progress there are very interesting. NetHack just presents different challenges. You have to rely on human knowledge to play the game as a human,” said Grefenstette.

In these other games, there’s a more or less obvious strategy to winning. Of course it’s more complex in a game like Dota 2 than in an Atari 800 game, but the idea is the same — there are pieces the player controls, a game board of environment, and win conditions to pursue. That’s kind of the case in NetHack, but it’s weirder than that. For one thing, the game is different every time, and not just in the details.

“New dungeon, new world, new monsters and items, you don’t have a save point. If you make a mistake and die you don’t get a second shot. It’s a bit like real life,” said Grefenstette. “You have to learn from mistakes and come to new situations armed with that knowledge.”

Drinking a corrosive potion is a bad idea, of course, but what about throwing it at a monster? Coating your weapon with it? Pouring it on the lock of a treasure chest? Diluting it with water? We have intuitive ideas about these actions, but a game-playing AI doesn’t think the way we do.

The depth and complexity of the systems in NetHack are difficult to explain, but that diversity and difficulty make the game a perfect candidate for a competition, according to Grefenstette. “You have to rely on human knowledge to play the game,” he said.

People have been designing bots to play NetHack for many years that rely not on neural networks but decision trees as complex as the game itself. The team at Facebook Research hopes to engender a new approach by building a training environment that people can test machine learning-based game-playing algorithms on.

NetHack screens with labels showing what the AI is aware of.

The NetHack Learning Environment was actually put together last year, but the NetHack Challenge is only just now getting started. The NLE is basically a version of the game embedded in a dedicated computing environment that lets an AI interact with it through text commands (directions, actions like attack or quaff)

It’s a tempting target for ambitious AI designers. While games like StarCraft 2 may enjoy a higher profile in some ways, NetHack is legendary and the idea of building a model on completely different lines from those used to dominate other games is an interesting challenge.

It’s also, as Grefenstette explained, a more accessible one than many in the past. If you wanted to build an AI for StarCraft 2, you needed a lot of computing power available to run visual recognition engines on the imagery from the game. But in this case the entire game is transmitted via text, making it extremely efficient to work with. It can be played thousands of times faster than any human could with even the most basic computing setup. That leaves the challenge wide open to individuals and groups who don’t have access to the kind of high-power setups necessary to power other machine learning methods.

“We wanted to create a research environment that had a lot of challenges for the AI community, but not restrict it to only large academic labs,” he said.

For the next few months, NLE will be available for people to test on, and competitors can basically build their bot or AI by whatever means they choose. But when the competition itself starts in earnest on October 15, they’ll be limited to interacting with the game in its controlled environment through standard commands — no special access, no inspecting RAM, etc.

The goal of the competition will be to complete the game, and the Facebook team will track how many times the agent “ascends,” as it’s called in NetHack, in a set amount of time. But “we’re assuming this is going to be zero for everyone,” Grefenstette admitted. After all, this is one of the hardest games ever made, and even humans who have played it for years have trouble winning even once in a lifetime, let alone several times in a row. There will be other scoring metrics to judge winners in a number of categories.

The hope is that this challenge provides the seed of a new approach to AI, one that more fundamentally resembles actual human thinking. Shortcuts, trial and error, score-hacking, and zerging won’t work here — the agent needs to learn systems of logic and apply them flexibly and intelligently, or die horribly at the hands of an enraged centaur or owlbear.

You can check out the rules and other specifics of the NetHack Challenge here. Results will be announced at the NeurIPS conference later this year.

AI startup investment is on pace for a record year

Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund closes new $24 million fund

Published June 9, 2021

After making investments in 57 startups together, Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra and Eventjoy founder Todd Goldberg are back at it with a new $24 million fund and big ambitions amid a venture capital renaissance with fast-moving deals aplenty.

“Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund” announced their first $7.3 million fund just weeks before the pandemic hit stateside last year and they were soon left with more access to deals than they had funding to support; they went on to raise $3.5 million in a rolling fund designed around making investments in later-stage deals beyond seed and Series A rounds.

“We closed right before COVID hit and we had one plan, but then everything accelerated,” Goldberg tells TechCrunch. “A lot of our companies started raising additional rounds.”

With their latest raise, Vohra and Goldberg are looking to maintain their wide outlook with a single fund, saying they plan to invest three-quarters of the fund in early-stage deals while saving a quarter of the $24 million for later-stage opportunities. Still, the duo know they likely could’ve chosen to raise more.

“A lot of our peers were scaling up into much larger funds,” Vohra says. “For us, we wanted to stay small and collaborative.”

Some of the firm’s investments from their first fund include NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs, open source Firebase alternative Supabase, D2C liquor brand Haus, alternative asset platform Alt, biowearable maker Levels and location analytics startup Placer. Their biggest hit was an early investment in audio chat app Clubhouse before Andreessen Horowitz led its buzzy seed round at a $100 million valuation. Clubhouse most recently raised at $4 billion.

Superhuman and Eventjoy founders announce $7 million angel fund

The pair say they’ve learned a ton through the past year of navigating increasingly competitive rounds and that fighting for those deals has helped the duo hone how they market themselves to founders.

“You never want to be a passive check,” Goldberg says. “We do three things: we help companies find product/market fit, we help them super-charge distribution… and we help them find the best investors.”

A big part of the firm’s appeal to founders has been the “operator” status of its founders. Goldberg’s startup Eventjoy was acquired by Ticketmaster and Vohra’s Rapportive was bought by LinkedIn while his current startup Superhuman has maintained buzz for its premium email service and has raised $33 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital.

Their new fund has an unusual LP base that’s made up of more than 110 entrepreneurs and investors, including 40 founders that Vohra and Goldberg have previously backed themselves. Backers of their second fund include Plaid’s William Hockey, Behance’s Scott Belsky, Haus’s Helena Price Hambrecht, Lattice’s Jack Altman and Loom’s Shahed Khan.

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra is coming to TechCrunch Early Stage in July

How to start a company in 4 days

Published June 9, 2021

Yin Wu
Contributor

Yin Wu, a three-time YC alum, is founder of Pulley, which offers cap table management tools that help companies better understand and optimize their equity.

Running a startup can be a complicated, difficult process fraught with pitfalls and ample opportunities to make mistakes. But the logistics of setting up a startup should be simple, because over the long run, complicated equity setups and cap tables cost more money in legal fees and administration time.

The logistics of setting up a startup should be simple, because over the long run, complicated equity setups and cap tables cost more money in legal fees and administration time.

My company, Pulley, has helped more than a thousand founders build their cap table and equity structure.

Here’s a tactical guide to get your startup running in just four days.

Day 1: Incorporate

It is now standard to incorporate your company at the seed stage itself. In the U.S., startups incorporate as Delaware C Corporations with 10 million authorized shares. This is the standard setup when you use services like Stripe Atlas or Clerky.

Post incorporation, you need to answer a few questions on how to grant equity to founders and future employees.

First, you should determine how you want to split the equity between the founders. There is no standard for doing so — some founders split shares equally, while others do 49/51 splits for control. Some founders even may have an 80/20 equity split because one founder spent an extra year on the idea.

At the end of the day, a good equity split is one that all founders find fair. If you can’t agree on a structure, you should have a deeper discussion on whether this is the right team to work with for the next decade or more.

Don’t panic: ‘Algorithm updates’ aren’t the end of the world for SEO managers

Published June 9, 2021

Eli Schwartz
Contributor

Eli Schwartz is an SEO expert and consultant with more than a decade of experience working for leading B2B and B2C companies.

Google is just trying to help

First, let’s establish this: Google is only trying to help. The company wants to ensure a pleasurable, high-quality user experience for the searcher. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not a wizard, and its system is not meant to rob and reward sites arbitrarily.

Keep that in mind as we continue.

Google’s algorithms are extensive and complex software programs that constantly need to be updated based on real scenarios. Otherwise, they would be totally arbitrary. Just as bugs are reported and fixed in a software program, search engines must discover what’s not working and create solutions.

Google, like any other software company, releases updates with big leaps forward to its products and services. However, in Google’s case, they are called “major algorithm updates” instead of just product updates.

You are now armed with the knowledge of exactly what a Google algorithm update is. Is it not, then, gratifying to know there is never a reason to panic?

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Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

A drop in search traffic isn’t necessarily hurting you

If a site experiences a drop in search traffic after a major algorithm update, it is rarely because the entire site was targeted. Typically, while one collection of URLs may be demoted in search rankings, other pages likely improved.

Seeing the improved pages requires taking a deep dive into Google Search Console to drill into which URLs saw drops in traffic and which witnessed gains. While a site can certainly see a steep drop off after an update, it is usually because they had more losers than winners.

Any drop is most definitely not because the algorithm punished the site.

Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact

If you see a drop, in many cases, your site might not have even lost real traffic; often, the losses represent only lost impressions already not converting into clicks. With a recent update, Google removed the organic listing of sites that had a featured snippet ranking. I saw steep drops in impressions, but the clicks were virtually unchanged. Gather and study your granular data for a clearer rendering of information rather than assuming the site has become a winner or loser after an update.

Focus on a great user experience, just like Google

Websites that focus on providing an amazing and high-quality experience for users shouldn’t fear algorithm updates. In fact, updates can provide the needed impetus to excel. The only websites that have something to fear are those that should not have had high search visibility in the first place because of a poor user experience.

If your website provides a great experience for users, updates are actually likely to help you because they winnow those poorer quality sites out of the running.

If you focus on a good user experience, there will be pages that may lose some traffic in algorithm updates, but in aggregate, the site will typically gain traffic in most scenarios. Digging into the granular data of what changed will likely support the idea that websites do not suffer or benefit from algorithm updates — only specific URLs do.

Updates are a fact of search life

Google will, and should, continuously update its algorithms. Google’s primary motivation is to have an evolving product that will continue to please and retain its users.

Consider that if Google leaves its algorithm alone, it risks being overrun by spammers that take advantage of loopholes. A search function that provides too many spammy results will soon go the way of AOL, Excite, Yahoo and every other search engine that is functionally no longer in existence. Google stays relevant by updating algorithms.

Updates are a part of search life.

Chase the user, not the algorithm

Instead of chasing the algorithm, which will inevitably change, I believe that every website that relies on organic search should train its focus somewhere more important: on the user experience.

The user is the ultimate customer of search. If your site serves the user, it will be immunized from algorithm updates designed to protect the search experience. There is no algorithm wizard — only SEO masters who have figured out how to apply best processes, best procedures and actions for your website.

Algorithms and updates have only one purpose: help a user find exactly what they seek. Period. If you are helpful to the user, you have nothing to fear.

This post is an excerpt from “Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy.”

Google launches Android 12 Beta 2

Published June 9, 2021

Google today launched the second beta of Android 12. The first beta, which launched at Google’s I/O conference in May, introduced us to the first glimpses of Google’s new “Material You” design system, though many of the promised new features and design tweaks weren’t part of this first beta yet. With this new beta, Google is bringing more of these to its testers (you can sign up for the beta here), including its new privacy dashboard that makes it easier for users to see which apps recently used a phone’s microphone, camera and location.

Other new features available in the beta are the addition of microphone and camera indicators that show users if an app is using those, as well as new Quick Setting toggles to disable app access to them. When access is toggled off, apps will receive blank audio and camera feeds. Related to this, Google is also bringing a clipboard read notification to Android that shows readers when an app is reading from the clipboard.

Image Credits: Google

Also new in beta 2 is a new Internet Panel that makes it easier for you to switch between internet providers, Wi-Fi networks, etc.

Image Credits: Google

With this release, Google is now one release away from reaching platform stability in August. As the company notes, now would be a good time for developers to finish their compatibility testing and release compatible versions of their apps, SDK and libraries. Given the current monthly release cadence, we’ll likely see a final release of Android 12 in September.

Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals

Like before, you’ll need a compatible device to try out the beta. Unlike with some the earlier preview releases, this list includes a lot of non-Google devices, with Sharp joining the beta program today, for example. You can find a full list of supported devices — and instructions for how to get started on non-Google devices — here.

Image Credits: Google

Dear Sophie: What is a diversity green card and how do I apply for one?

Published June 9, 2021

Sophie Alcorn
Contributor

Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.

How does the diversity lottery work?

You must register online in the fall — usually from early October through early November — for the annual random lottery by completing the Electronic Diversity Visa Entry Form (DS-5501). There is no cost to register for the lottery, but be aware that you will be automatically disqualified if you register yourself more than once, and incomplete forms will not be accepted.

Once you complete the online registration form, you will get a confirmation number. Do not lose this number! It is the only way to access the online system that will tell you whether you were selected in the lottery and are eligible to submit a green card application. In May, registrants can log into the online system to find out whether they’ve been selected. No notification will be sent by email or snail mail; checking online by entering your confirmation code is the only way to find out. After you enter your confirmation code online, you will receive a diversity visa number, which you will use to determine when you can file your green card application.

Mythical Games raises $75M to build an NFT game engine

Published June 9, 2021

Even as NFT sales dip below their most speculative highs, startups aiming to tap into their potential are still scoring big funding rounds from investors who believe there’s much more to crypto collectibles than the past few months of hype.

Mythical Games, an NFT games startup based out of Los Angeles, has banked a $75 million raise from new and existing investors betting on the startup’s aim to expand the ambitions of their first title and locate a substantial platform opportunity amid helping developers build blockchain-based gaming experiences.

The round was led by WestCap. Existing investors were joined by 01 Advisors and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund in the Series B funding. The startup has raised a whopping $120 million to date.

The company has been building a title called Blankos Block Party that seems to be Fall Guys meets Roblox meets Funko Pop. The PC game capitalizes on a number of big social gaming trends around user-created content, while adding in a marketplace where users can buy avatar figures and accessories crafted by a variety of artists and designers that Mythical has partnered with. Users can buy or sell the limited run or open edition items through their marketplace. Unlike some other NFT platforms, the goods live on a private blockchain so they can’t be re-sold on public marketplace platforms like OpenSea.

NFT marketplace OpenSea raises $23 million from a16z

Mythical Games is part of a growing movement to bring blockchain-based game mechanics mainstream while leaving behind elements of crypto platforms that are seen as less ready for primetime. Users can purchase avatars on the platform with cryptocurrency through BitPay but they can also pay with a credit card. Users don’t need to walk through the mechanics of setting up a wallet or writing down a seed phrase either.

While the company has big hopes for Blankos as it onboards more users, the bigger investor opportunity is likely in the game engine that the team is building. The startup’s “Mythical Economic Engine” is being designed to help budding game builders create NFT-based marketplaces that won’t get them in any regulatory trouble, marrying compliance across geographies and tools that help creators comply with anti-money laundering laws and know-your-customer frameworks.

“With any new market like [NFTs], it goes through all these different cycles,” Mythical Games CEO John Linden tells TechCrunch. “We think this will actually change gaming for the long haul. The more we talk to game studios, we’re finding more and more potential use cases.”

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry