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Bilibili ups the ante in games with $123 million investment in TapTap

Published April 1, 2021

Competition in China’s gaming industry is getting stiffer in recent times as tech giants sniff out potential buyouts and investments to beef up their gaming alliance, whether it pertains to content or distribution.

Bilibili, the go-to video streaming platform for young Chinese, is the latest to make a major gaming deal. It has agreed to invest HK$960 million (about $123 million) into X.D. Network, which runs the popular game distribution platform TapTap in China, the company announced on Thursday.

Dual-listed in Hong Kong and New York, Bilibili will purchase 22,660,000 shares of X.D.’s common stock at HK$42.38 apiece, which will grant it a 4.72% stake.

The partners will initiate a series of “deep collaborations” around X.D.’s own games and TapTap, without offering more detail.

Though known for its trove of video content produced by amateur and professional creators, Bilibili derives a big chunk of its income from mobile games, which accounted for 40% of its revenues in 2020. The ratio had declined from 71% and 53% in 2018 and 2019, a sign that it’s trying to diversify revenue streams beyond distributing games.

With 170M users, Bilibili is the nearest thing China has to YouTube

Tencent has similarly leaned on games to drive revenues for years. The WeChat operator dominates China’s gaming market through original titles and a sprawling investment portfolio whose content it helps operate and promote.

X.D. makes games, too, but in recent years it has also emerged as a rebel against traditional game distributors, which are Android app stores operated by smartphone makers. The vision is to skip the high commission fees charged by the likes of Huawei and Xiaomi and monetize through ads. X.D.’s proposition has helped it attract a swathe of gaming companies to be its investors, including fast-growing studios Lilith Games and miHoYo, Alibaba, as well as ByteDance, which built up a 3,000-people strong gaming team within six years.

6 investors on 2021’s mobile gaming trends and opportunities

Bilibili’s investment further strengthens X.D.’s matrix of top-tier gaming investors. Tencent is conspicuously absent, but it’s no secret that ByteDance is its new nemesis after Alibaba. The TikTok parent recently outbid Tencent to acquire Moonton, a gaming studio that has gained ground in Southeast Asia, according to Reuters. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is also vying for user attention away from content published on WeChat.

How ByteDance plans to crack the gaming industry

Celonis announces significant partnership with IBM to sell its process mining software

Published April 1, 2021

Before you can improve a workflow, you have to understand how work advances through a business, which is more complex than you might imagine inside a large enterprise. That’s where Celonis comes in. It uses software to identify how work moves through an organization and suggests more efficient ways of getting the same work done, also known as process mining.

Today, the company announced a significant partnership with IBM where IBM Global Services will train 10,000 consultants worldwide on Celonis. The deal gives Celonis, a company with around 1,200 employees, access to the massive selling and consulting unit, while IBM gets a deep understanding of a piece of technology that is at the front end of the workflow automation trend.

Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer at Celonis, says that digitizing processes has been a trend for several years. It has sped up due to COVID, and it’s partly why the two companies have decided to work together. “Intelligent workflows, or more broadly spoken workflows built to help companies execute better, are at the heart of this partnership and it’s at the heart of this trend now in the market,” Milano said.

The other part of this is that IBM now owns Red Hat, which it acquired in 2018 for $34 billion. The two companies believe that by combining the Celonis technology, which is cloud based, with Red Hat, which can span the hybrid world of on premises and cloud, the two together can provide a much more powerful solution to follow work wherever it happens.

“I do think that moving the [Celonis] software into the Red Hat OpenShift environment is hugely powerful because it does allow in what’s already a very powerful open solution to now operate across this hybrid cloud world, leveraging the power of OpenShift which can straddle the worlds of mainframe, private cloud and public cloud. And data straddle those worlds, and will continue to straddle those worlds,” Mark Foster, senior vice president at IBM Services explained.

Celonis pushes beyond process mining into automated workflow tooling

You might think that IBM, which acquired robotic process automation vendor WDG Automation last summer, would simply attempt to buy Celonis, but Foster says the partnership is consistent with the company’s attempt to partner with a broader ecosystem.

“I think that this is very much part of an overarching focus of IBM with key ecosystem partners. Some of them are going to be bigger, some of them are going to be smaller, and […] I think this is one where we see the opportunity to connect with an organization that’s taking a leading position in its category, and the opportunity for that to take advantage of the IBM Red Hat technologies…” he said.

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The companies had already been working together for some time prior to this formal announcement, and this partnership is the culmination of that. As this firmer commitment to one another goes into effect, the two companies will be working more closely to train thousands of IBM consultants on the technology, while moving the Celonis solution into Red Hat OpenShift in the coming months.

It’s clearly a big deal with the feel of an acquisition, but Milano says that this is about executing his company’s strategy to work with more systems integrators (SIs), and while IBM is a significant partner, it’s not the only one.

“We are becoming an SI consulting-driven organization. So we put consulting companies like IBM at the forefront of our strategy, and this [deal] is a big cornerstone of our strategy,” he said.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wants to completely transform his organization

PingPong is a video chat app for product teams working across multiple time zones

Published March 31, 2021

From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was no secret that video chat was about to become a very hot space.

Over the past several months investors have bankrolled a handful of video startups with specific niches, ranging from always-on office surveillance to platforms that encouraged plenty of mini calls to avoid the need for more lengthy team-wide meetings. As the pandemic wanes and plenty of startups begin to look toward hybrid office models, there are others who have decided to lean into embracing a fully remote workforce, a strategy that may require new tools.

PingPong, a recent launch from Y Combinator’s latest batch, is building an asynchronous video chat app for the workplace. We selected PingPong as one of our favorite startups that debuted last week.

Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day: Part 2

The company’s central sell is that for remote teams, there needs to be a better alternative to Slack or email for catching up with co-workers across time zones. While Zoom calls might be able to convey a company’s culture better than a post in a company-wide Slack channel, for fully remote teams operating on different continents, scheduling a company-wide meeting is often a nonstarter.

PingPong is selling its service as an addendum to Slack that helps remote product teams collaborate and convey what they’re working on. Users can capture a short video of themselves and share their screen in lieu of a standup presentation and then they can get caught up on each other’s progress on their own time. PingPong’s hope is that users find more value in brainstorming, conducting design reviews, reporting bugs and more inside while using asynchronous video than they would with text.

“We have a lot to do before we can replace Slack, so right now we kind of emphasize playing nice with Slack,” PingPong CEO Jeff Whitlock tells TechCrunch. “Our longer-term vision is that what young people are doing in their consumer lives, they bring into the enterprise when they graduate into the workforce. You and I were using Instant Messenger all the time in the early 2000s and then we got to the workplace, that was the opportunity for Slack… We believe in the next five or so years, something that’s a richer, more asynchronous video-based Slack alternative will have a lot more interest.”

Building a chat app specifically designed for remote product teams operating in multiple time zones is a tight niche for now, but Whitlock believes that this will become a more common problem as companies embrace the benefits of remote teams post-pandemic. PingPong costs $100 per user per year.

Lowkey raises $7 million from a16z to help game streamers capitalize on short-form video

Published March 31, 2021

While the growth of game-streaming audiences have continued on desktop platforms, the streaming space has felt surprisingly stagnant at times, particularly due to the missing mobile element and a lack of startup competitors.

Lowkey, a gaming startup that builds software for game streamers, is aiming to build out opportunities in bit-sized clips on mobile. The startup wants to be a hub for both creating and viewing short gaming clips but also sees a big opportunity in helping streamers cut down their existing content for distribution on platforms like Instagram and TikTok where short-form gaming content sees a good deal of engagement.

The startup announced today that they’ve closed a $7 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from a host of angel investors including Figma’s Dylan Field, Loom’s Joe Thomas and Plaid’s Zach Perret and William Hockey.

We last covered Lowkey in early 2020 when the company was looking to build out a games tournament platform for adults. At the time, the company had already pivoted after going through YC as Camelot, which allowed audiences on Twitch and YouTube to pay creators to take on challenges. This latest shift brings Lowkey back to the streaming world but more focused on becoming a tool for streamers and a mobile hub for viewers.

Twitch and YouTube Gaming have proven to be pretty uninterested in short-form content, favoring the opportunities of long-form streams that allow creators to press broadcast and upload lengthy streams. Lowkey users can easily upload footage captured from Lowkey’s desktop app or directly import a linked stream. This allows content creators to upload and comment on their own footage or remix and respond to another streamer’s content.

One of the challenges for streamers has been adapting widescreen content for a vertical video form factor, but CEO Jesse Zhang says that it’s not really a problem with most modern games. “Games inherently want to focus you attention on the center of the screen,” Zhang tells TechCrunch. “So, almost all clips extend really cleanly to like a mobile format, which is what we’ve done.”

Lowkey’s desktop app is available on Windows and their new mobile app is now live for iOS.

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Camelot lets Twitch and YouTube audiences pay for what they want to see

Manticore Games raises $100 million to build a ‘creator multiverse’

Published March 31, 2021

The gaming sector has never been hotter or had higher expectations from investors who are dumping billions into upstarts that can adjust to shifting tides faster that the existing giants will.

Bay Area-based Manticore Games is one of the second-layer gaming platforms looking to build on the market’s momentum. The startup tells TechCrunch they’ve closed a $100 million Series C funding round, bringing their total funding to $160 million. The round was led by XN, with participation from SoftBank and LVP alongside existing investors Benchmark, Bitkraft, Correlation Ventures and Epic Games.

When Manticore closed its Series B back in September 2019, VCs were starting to take Roblox and the gaming sector more seriously, but it took the pandemic hitting to really expand their expectations for the market. “Gaming is now a bona fide super category,” CEO Frederic Descamps tells TechCrunch.

Manticore’s Core gaming platform is quite similar to Roblox conceptually, the big difference is that the gaming company is aiming to quickly scale up a games and creator platform geared toward the 13+ crowd that may have already left Roblox behind. The challenge will be coaxing that demographic faster than Roblox can expand its own ambitions, and doing so while other venture-backed gaming startups like Rec Room, which recently raised at a $1.2 billion valuation, race for the same prize.

Rec Room raises at $1.25B valuation from Sequoia and Index as VCs push to find another Roblox

Like other players, Manticore is attempting to build a game discovery platform directly into a game engine. They haven’t built the engine tech from scratch; they’ve been working closely with Epic Games, which makes the Unreal Engine and made a $15 million investment in the company last year.

A big focus of the Core platform is giving creators a true drag-and-drop platform for game creation with a specific focus on “remixing,” allowing users to pick pre-made environments, drop pre-rendered 3D assets into them, choose a game mode and publish it to the web. For creators looking to inject new mechanics or assets into a title, there will be some technical know-how necessary, but Manticore’s team hopes that making the barriers of entry low for new creators means that they can grow alongside the platform. Manticore’s big bet is on the flexibility of their engine, hoping that creators will come on board for the chance to engineer their own mechanics or create their own path toward monetization, something established app stores wouldn’t allow them to.

“Creators can implement their own styles of [in-app purchases] and what we’re really hoping for here is that maybe the next battle pass equivalent innovation will come out of this,” co-founder Jordan Maynard tells us.

This all comes at an added cost; developers earn 50% of revenues from their games, leaving more potential revenue locked up in fees routed to the platforms that Manticore depends on than if they built for the App Store directly, but this revenue split is still much friendlier to creators than what they can earn on platforms like Roblox.

Building cross-platform secondary gaming platforms is host to plenty of its own challenges. The platforms involved not only have to deal with stacking revenue share fees on non-PC platforms, but some hardware platforms that are reticent to allow them all, an area where Sony has been a particular stickler with PlayStation. The long-term success of these platforms may ultimately rely on greater independence, something that seems hard to imagine happening on consoles and mobile ecosystems.

VCs discuss gaming’s biggest infrastructure investment opportunities in 2021

Hex lands $5.5M seed to help data scientists share data across the company

Published March 31, 2021

As companies embrace the use of data, hiring more data scientists, a roadblock persists around sharing that data. It requires too much copying and pasting and manual work. Hex, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a way to dispense data across the company in a streamlined and elegant way.

Today, the company announced a $5.5 million seed investment, and also announced that it’s opening up the product from a limited beta to be more widely available. The round was led by Amplify Partners, with help from Box Group, XYZ, Data Community Fund, Operator Collective and a variety of individual investors. The company closed the round last July, but is announcing it for the first time today.

Co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel says that it’s clear that companies are becoming more data-driven and hiring data scientists and analysts at a rapid pace, but there is an issue around data sharing, one that he and his co-founders experienced firsthand when they were working at Palantir.

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar

They decided to develop a purpose-built tool for sharing data with other parts of the organization that are less analytically technical than the data science team working with these data sets. “What we do is we make it very easy for data scientists to connect to their data, analyze and explore it in notebooks. […] And then they can share their work as interactive data apps that anyone else can use,” McCardel explained.

Most data scientists work with their data in online notebooks like Jupyter, where they can build SQL queries and enter Python code to organize it, chart it and so forth. What Hex is doing is creating this super-charged notebook that lets you pull a data set from Snowflake or Amazon Redshift, work with and format the data in an easy way, then drag and drop components from the notebook page — maybe a chart or a data set — and very quickly build a kind of app that you can share with others.

Hex app example with data elements at the top and live graph below it.

Image Credits: Hex

The startup has nine employees, including co-founders McCardel, CTO Caitlin Colgrove and VP of architecture Glen Takahashi. “We’ve really focused on the team front from an early stage, making sure that we’re building a diverse team. And actually today our engineering team is majority female, which is definitely the first time that that’s ever happened to me,” Colgrove said.

She is also part of a small percentage of female founders. A report last year from Silicon Valley Bank found that while the number was heading in the right direction, only 28% of U.S. startups have at least one female founder. That was up from 22% in 2017.

The company was founded in late 2019 and the founders spent a good part of last year building the product and working with design partners. They have a small set of paying customers, and are looking to expand that starting today. While customers still need to work with the Hex team for now to get going, the plan is to make the product self-serve some time later this year.

Hex’s early customers include Glossier, imgur and Pave.

Pinecone lands $10M seed for purpose-built machine learning database

Moveworks expands IT chatbot platform to encompass entire organization

Published March 31, 2021

When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help questions in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions across all lines of business.

At the time of that funding, nobody could have anticipated a pandemic either, but throughout last year as companies moved to work from home, having an automated systems in place like Moveworks became even more crucial, says CEO and company co-founder Bhavin Shah.

“It was a tragic year on a variety of fronts, but what it did was it coalesced a lot of energy around people’s need for support, people’s need for speed and help,” Shah said. It helps that employees typically access the Moveworks chatbot inside collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and people have been spending more time in these tools while working at home.

“We definitely saw a lot more interest in the market, and part of that was fueled by the large-scale adoption of collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams by enterprises around the world,” he said.

The company is working with 100 large enterprise customers today, and those customers were looking for a more automated way for employees to ask questions about a variety of tooling, from HR to finance and facilities management. While Shah says expanding the platform to move beyond IT into other parts of an organization had been on the roadmap, the pandemic definitely underscored the need to expand even more.

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While the company spent its first several years tuning the underlying artificial intelligence technology for IT language, they had built it with expansion in mind. “We learned how to build a conversational system so that it can be dynamic and not be predicated on some person’s forethought around [what the question and answer will be] — that approach doesn’t scale. So there were a lot of things around dealing with all these enterprise resources and so forth that really prepared us to be an enterprise-wide partner,” Shah said.

The company also announced a new communications tool that enables companies to use the Moveworks bot to communicate directly with employees to get them to take some action. Shah says companies usually send out an email that, for example, employees have to update their password. The bot tells you it’s time to do that and provides a link to walk you through the process. He says that beta testers have seen a 70% increase in responses using the bot to communicate about an action instead of email.

Shah recognizes that a technology that understands language is going to have a lot of cultural variances and nuances and that requires a diverse team to build a tool like this. He says that his HR team has a set of mandates to make sure they are interviewing people in under-represented roles to build a team that reflects the needs of the customer base and the world at large.

The company has been working with about a dozen customers over the last nine months on the platform expansion, iterating with these customers to improve the quality of the responses, regardless of the type of question or which department it involves. Today, these tools are generally available.

Moveworks snags $75M Series B to resolve help desk tickets with AI

Celebrity video request site Cameo reaches unicorn status with $100M raise

Published March 30, 2021

Cameo, the celebrity video site you’re probably familiar with if you’ve celebrated a birthday in the last three years, announced this morning that it’s raised a $100M Series C. The round, which was led by Jonathan Turner with e.ventures, puts the site’s value at just north of $1 billion.

Cameo has been building a good deal of steam in recent years, but the service is among those that managed to get a major boost amid the pandemic, as celebrities and normals alike suddenly found themselves with a lot more time on their hands.

“The pandemic put extra stress on the already unstable business models supporting talent across sports and entertainment ecosystems,” CEO Steven Galanis said in a Medium post tied to the news. “It catalyzed a massive shift in awareness and widespread adoption of direct-to-fan models, which has, in turn, created a new foundation for fan engagement. We exist in an entirely different world today — one in which talent actually want to connect more deeply with their fans, and fans expect unprecedented access to the talent they admire most. This funding will help us create the access and connections that will define the future of the ‘connection economy’ on a global scale.”

This latest round more than doubles the service’s total funding, bringing it up to $165 million. Google Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, UTA, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Valor Equity Partners and Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley) join existing investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, The Chernin Group, Origin Ventures and Spark Capital. There are also some “talent investors” on board, as well, including skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Because, you know, Cameo.

Cameo says some 80% of its standard video requests are booked as gifts, to celebrate things like birthdays. In total, around two million videos have been created through the offering. But the site is looking to grow into additional categories. Last year it added the ability to book celebrities as guests for Zoom video chats (a very pandemic-focused offering).

10 VCs say interactivity, regulation and independent creators will reshape digital media in 2021

Some of the funding will go toward ramping up Cameo for Business (C4B), which brings celebrity videos to events and conferences, as well as ads and sales. Effectively, the service works as a pipeline between businesses and famous people. The company will also be expending its international offering, growing beyond the approximately 20% of videos currently purchased outside the U.S.

Cameo raises $50M to deliver personalized messages from celebrities & influencers

Stockly lets e-commerce websites sell out-of-stock items from a shared inventory

Published March 30, 2021

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.

If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.

The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.

This could be particularly useful for small-scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.

The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

So far, Stockly has been working with Galeries Lafayette, Go Sport, Foot Shop and others. The startup has recently raised a $6 million (€5.1 million) funding round from Idinvest Partners, Daphni, Techstars, Checkout.com CEO Guillaume Pousaz and various business angels.

With this funding round, the company plans to expand its team to 20 people, add new clients and iterate on its product.

Aurora and Volvo partner to bring autonomous long-haul trucks to North America

Published March 30, 2021

The autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation said Tuesday it has reached an agreement with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous semi trucks for North America.

The partnership, which the two companies say will span several years and is through Volvo’s Autonomous Solutions unit, will focus on trucks built to operate autonomously on highways between hubs for Volvo customers. The Aurora Driver technology stack — Aurora’s self-driving software, computer and sensor suite — will be integrated into Volvo trucks.

The announcement comes fresh on the heels of the startup’s recent acquisition of Uber’s self-driving subsidiary and a separate deal with Toyota to develop self-driving minivans. Aurora now has partnerships with two of the three largest trucking manufacturers — Paccar and Volvo — that produce and sell nearly 50% of all Class 8 trucks in the country.

“Our previously announced collaborations with partners such as Paccar will continue in parallel to the collaboration with Volvo,” an Aurora spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As Paccar’s first self-driving technology partner, the unique nature of our partnership enables us to build Paccar’s first redundant truck that will be able to operate without a safety driver, bring it to market first and deploy it broadly.”

Aurora said its Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave lidar — through its acquisitions of companies Blackmore and OURS Technology — will be key to solving autonomous long-range trucking. Lidar, or light detection and ranging radar, is considered to be a necessary component of self-driving systems. Aurora’s pitch is that unlike traditional time-of-flight lidar, its technology provides the long-range visibility needed to be able to spot hazards with enough time to stop or slow down.

Aurora acquires a second lidar company in push to bring self-driving trucks to the road

The announcement also marks a major acceleration for Volvo’s autonomous vehicle arm, Volvo Autonomous Solutions. It’s the business unit’s first deal to bring autonomous trucking to the road.

Since its founding in 2017, Aurora has rapidly become one of the leaders in self-driving tech, attracting backing from Amazon, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. The company was founded by former executives of Uber, Tesla and Google.

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