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Apple’s iPhone 12 starts at $799, sporting 5G and a magnetic adapter

Published October 13, 2020

It took a bit longer than usual (thank COVID-19 for some insurmountable manufacturing delays), but the iPhone 12 is here. And as expected, it comes bearing 5G. The latest version of Apple’s smartphone also arrives in a variety of different sizes, as the company continues to adjust to changing consumer purchasing patterns around mobile devices.

The inclusion of next-gen wireless is, of course, the flagship feature here. Apple is far from the first company to offer 5G on a handset, but given a bit of a bottleneck in adoption given the extremely odd year we’ve been experiencing. According to recent numbers from Canalys, only 13% of handsets shipping in the first half of the year were 5G capable. That means there’s a long way to go, and Apple finally adopting the tech will certainly move the needle.

CEO Tim Cook kicked off the announcement by inviting Verizon (TC’s parent co.) on stage to sell the carrier’s UWB take on the tech and announce that it’s gone “nationwide.” 5G will be available on all of the new models announced today. The specifics of the 5G will vary based on location — here in the States, for example, mmwave will also be available.

As expected, the line gets a full redesign, borrowing cues from the iPad Pro, including a flat edge more in line with older devices than the newer curved models. The device is also 11% thinner and lighter than its predecessor. The redesign also makes it possible for the company to pack more antennas into the edge of the device.

There’s a Corning glass display. Apple says it worked directly with with the Gorilla Glass maker to develop ceramic shield, which it states is around six-times more reliable in drop tests. The smartphone sports an OLED display (which appears to be consistent across the new devices, as well), with double the number of pixels as the iPhone 11.

The handset sports the already-announced A14 bionic chip. Apple’s silicon sports six-cores on its CPU and four on its GPU. The latter will go a ways toward extending its position in mobile gaming. The company used that opportunity to announce that it will be bringing Riot Games’ League of Legends: Wild Rift to the handset. As anticipated, the base model 12 sports a dual-camera rear — with 12-megapixel wide and ultra-wide lenses. Night Mode has been improved across the devices and added to the front camera.

The MagSafe name is back — albeit far removed from the version we all fondly remember from the Mac. Here it refers to a magnetic system built into the rear of the device that lets compatible accessories snap directly onto the device. That includes a slew of different products from Apple and third-parties, including wireless charging pads and cases. The list includes Apple’s own combination phone/Watch charger — not quite AirPower, but still fun.
Speaking of charging, the Lightning port is still very much on-board, in-spite of dropping it on some iPad models. Speaking of dropping things, Apple is getting rid of a bunch of the inbox accessories, including Earpods and the adapter, ostensibly for environmental purposes.
The new iPhone starts at $799 — $100 more than the also-announced iPhone 12 mini. The model will also be joined by the higher-end Pro and Pro Max, priced up to $1,099. The 12 and 12 Pro are available preorder on Oct 16 and starts shipping the 23rd. The Pro Max and mini versions ship on November 13.

 

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DroneDeploy teams with Boston Dynamics to deliver inside-outside view of job site

Published October 13, 2020

DroneDeploy, a cloud software company that uses drone footage to help industries like agriculture, oil and gas and construction get a bird’s-eye view of a site to build a 3D picture, announced a new initiative today that combines drone photos with cameras on the ground or even ground robots from a company like Boston Dynamics for what it is calling a 360 Walkthrough.

Up until today’s announcement, DroneDeploy could use drone footage from any drone to get a picture of what a site looked like outside, uploading those photos and stitching them together into a 3D model that is accurate within an inch, according to DroneDeploy CEO Mike Winn.

Winn says that while there is great value in getting this type of view of the outside of a job site, customers were hungry for a total picture that included inside and out, and the platform which is simply processing photos transmitted from drones could be adapted fairly easily to accommodate photos coming from cameras on other devices.

“Our customers are also looking to get data from the interiors, and they’re looking for one digital twin, one digital reconstruction of their entire site to understand what’s going on to share across their company with the safety team and with executives that this is the status of the job site today,” Winn explained.

He adds that this is even more important during COVID when access to job sites has been limited, making it even more important to understand the state of the site on a regular basis.

“They want fewer people on those job sites, only the essential workers doing the work. So for anyone who needs information about the site, if they can get that information from a desktop or the 3D model or a kind of street view of the job site, it can really help in this COVID environment, but it also makes it much more efficient,” Winn said.

He said that while companies could combine this capability with fixed cameras on the inside of a site, they don’t give the kind of coverage a ground robot could, and the Boston Dynamics robot is capable of moving around a rough job site with debris scattered around.

DroneDeploy bird's eye view of job site showing path taken through the site.

Image Credits: DroneDeploy

While Winn sees the use of the Boston Dynamics robot as more of an end goal, he says that more likely for the immediate future you will have a human walking through the job site with a camera to capture the footage to complete the inside-outside picture for the DroneDeploy software.

“All customers already want to adopt robots to collect this data, and you can imagine a Boston Dynamics robot [doing this], but that’s the end state of course. Today we’re supporting the human walk-through as well, a person with a 360 camera walking through the job site, probably doing it once a week to document the status of the job sites,” he said.

DroneDeploy launched in 2013 and has raised more than $100 million, according to Winn. He reports his company has over 5,000 customers, with drone flight time increasing by 2.5x YoY this year as more companies adopt drones as a way to cope with COVID.

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Spendesk raises another $18 million for its corporate card and expense service

Published October 13, 2020

French startup Spendesk has added $18 million to its Series B round. The company already raised $38.4 million as part of its Series B last year, which means that it raised $56.4 million as part of this round. Eight Roads Ventures is investing in today’s extension round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. The company issues virtual and physical cards for employees, lets you set up an approval workflow and manages expense reimbursements. It can also centralize all your invoices and receipts on the platform.

By centralizing everything on the same platform, it lets you control your spending in real-time and save time on accounting tasks. Reconciliation is easier if you combine transactions and receipts on Spendesk. Clients can also export data to Xero, Datev, Netsuite or Sage.

Image Credits: Spendesk

For big expenses, you can send a request to your manager. If they approve your request, you receive a single-use virtual card for that expense.

Similarly, if your company gives you a physical debit card, you get a pre-defined budget. Your manager can top up your card for big expenses, block ATM withdrawals, block weekend transactions and more. Employees can check their payments from the mobile app, see their card balance and add receipts.

Spendesk is a software-as-a-service product with a monthly subscription fee. While transactions have probably slowed down due to the economic crisis, the company says that its subscription revenue has doubled year-over-year. In just a year, the company grew from 100 to 200 people.

It remains focused on small and medium companies across Europe. There are 40,000 people using Spendesk through their companies. Clients include Algolia, Curve, Doctolib, Raisin and Wefox. The company has hired Joseph Smith as Chief Revenue Officer, pictured left above with the company’s CEO Rodolphe Ardant (pictured right).

Image Credits: Spendesk

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Edge computing startup Edgify secures $6.5M seed from Octopus, Mangrove and semiconductor

Published October 13, 2020

Edgify, which builds AI for edge computing, has secured a $6.5 million seed funding round backed by Octopus Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and an unnamed semiconductor giant. The name was not released but TechCrunch understands it may be Intel Corp. or Qualcomm Inc.

Edgify’s technology allows “edge devices” (devices at the edge of the internet) to interpret vast amounts of data, train an AI model locally and then share that learning across its network of similar devices. This then trains all the other devices in anything from computer vision, NLP, voice recognition or any other form of AI.

The technology can be applied to anything from MRI machines, connected cars, checkout lanes, mobile devices and anything that has a CPU, GPU or NPU. Edgify’s technology is already being used in supermarkets, for instance.

Ofri Ben-Porat, CEO and co-founder of Edgify, commented in a statement: “Edgify allows companies, from any industry, to train complete deep learning and machine learning models, directly on their own edge devices. This mitigates the need for any data transfer to the Cloud and also grants them close to perfect accuracy every time, and without the need to retrain centrally.”

Mangrove partner Hans-Jürgen Schmitz, who will join Edgify’s Board comments: “We expect a surge in AI adoption across multiple industries with significant long-term potential for Edgify in medical and manufacturing, just to name a few.”

Simon King, partner and Deep Tech Investor at Octopus Ventures added: “As the interconnected world we live in produces more and more data, AI at the edge is becoming increasingly important to process large volumes of information.”

So-called “edge computing” is seen as being one of the forefronts of deep tech right now.

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Nym Health raises $16.5 million for its auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing

Published October 13, 2020

A little less than two years after raising its seed round, the Israeli-based Nym Health has added another $16.5 million to its cash haul so it can roll out its technology developing auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing.

The new financing came from investors, including GV (the investment arm of Google previously known as Google Ventures), and will be used by the company to expand its technology development and sales and marketing efforts across the U.S.

Billing has been a huge problem for healthcare systems in the U.S., thanks to complicated coding that needs to be entered to ensure insurance providers pay for the services medical professionals give to patients.

Nym claims to have solved the problem by developing technologies that can convert medical charts and electronic medical records from physician’s consultations into proper billing codes automatically. The company uses natural language processing and taxonomies that were specifically developed to understand clinical language to determine the optimal charge for each procedure, examination and diagnostic conducted for a patient, according to Nym.

The company was founded in 2018 by two former members of Israel’s 8200 cybersecurity unit of the army. Adam Rimon and Amihai Neiderman both wanted to work on something together and Neiderman was set on doing something in the medical space involving natural language processing. Rimon had just finished a doctorate in computational linguistics, so the move into charting and medical coding seemed natural.

“Because of our approach we can generate full audit trails,” said Neiderman. “We can explain how we understood everything in patient charts.”

Having automated processes that are also auditable is important for healthcare providers in case they need to provide justification to insurance companies for the services they performed.

Nym’s software can’t address fraud if physicians are padding their bills with services they didn’t offer, but it can provide an audit and justification for the services that a hospital coded for — and potentially wring more money for hospitals that lose out thanks to improperly coded bills. “On the medical decision-making we never intervene. We assume that the physician is trying to do their best and they’re sticking to the protocol,” said Neiderman. 

Interest in developing better billing systems for healthcare is high among venture investors, considering that coding related denials of payment can cost hospitals $15 billion, according to Nym. It’s a service that brought attention not just from GV, but Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop Capital, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, and angel investors including Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner from Flatiron Health.

“Inaccurate coding is bad for everybody,” says Ben Robbins, a venture partner at GV.

Nym charges between $1 and $4 per chart it analyzes, and is already working with around 40 medical providers in the U.S., according to the company.

 

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Genemod raises cash for its lab inventory management service used by research institutions around the US

Published October 13, 2020

Genemod, a software for laboratory inventory management used by institutions like the University of Washington School of Medicine; the University of California, Berkeley; and the National Institutes of Health; has raised $1.7 million from a clutch of top venture investors.

The small seed round came from Defy.vc, with additional commitments from Omicron, Unpopular Ventures, Underdog Labs and Canaan Partners.

With the capital, the company said it would develop a product management software to complement its existing inventory management service.

These are small stepping stones on the way to paving a new road to pharmaceutical development based on collaborative data-sharing technology, the company said.

It’s a road that companies like Owkin and Within3 have raised big dollars to pave already. They’re just two companies in the market that are building collaborative software for the pharmaceutical industries.

Genemod’s pitch is that it can increase productivity by giving researchers a better window into the tools they have and the tools they need to accelerate the process of experimentation without downtime while waiting for supplies.

“While the life sciences industry is known for developing inventive solutions to some of the world’s biggest health problems, many scientists are working with manual, siloed and inefficient processes,” said Jacob Lee, the company’s chief executive.

Alongside the funding, Defy.vc will serve as a growth partner for Genemod, supporting the company as it works to roll out its product road map for the latter half of the year. Neil Sequeira, co-founder and managing director of Defy.vc, will join Genemod’s board of directors.

Founded in 2018, Genemod was part of the first cohort of Venture Out Startups, a pre-seed investment program designed to encourage entrepreneurs to start their own businesses.

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Join Yext’s Howard Lerman for a live Q&A right now

Published October 13, 2020

Today’s the day! This afternoon at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, Yext CEO Howard Lerman will join TechCrunch for a live chat.

The conversation is part of our continuing Extra Crunch Live series, now in its second season. What are we up to in the second installment of the conversations? The same as before, bringing the most interesting founders and investors ’round for a chat that you can contribute to by bringing your own questions. (Make sure you’re signed up so you can jump right in.)

As we wrote last week, Lerman is not just another public company CEO: His company, Yext, has some old-fashioned history with TechCrunch, having pitched at one of our events back in 2009. It went well, with Yext quickly raising money afterward.

We’ll spend a little bit of time in the past talking about Yext’s history as a startup. I want to know at what stage did Howard begin to consciously prep Yext for an IPO — the company went public in 2017 — and how long until he felt the company was ready? Given that we just came off one of the most active quarters in recent history for technology companies going public, it’s a good time to dig into the matter.

We’ll also get Howard’s take on the public markets in 2020 and whether he was happy with Yext’s IPO timing.

For the early-stage founders in the crowd, we have stuff prepped for you as well. Yext has moved from a business best-known for building a system that helps companies keep their diverse online listings up to date with their most pertinent information, to a search-first company that is leading its customer acquisition cycles with its “Answers” product.

How did the company manage to build the latter while eating off the former, and how has the company balanced its continued development since? What can startups learn from the choices that Yext has made?

And, TechCrunch recently reviewed Howard’s social media posts regarding Black Lives Matter: “As CEO, I will see to it that our company continues to be advocates for equality and justice.” So, how does he view the role of politics inside of tech companies, and what advice does he have for founders who are looking to build a lasting culture?

It’s going to be a great chat. Make sure you’ve signed up for Extra Crunch and I’ll see you in a few hours.

Bring your best questions. Howard is a good chat, so he’ll have something to say if you ask something great. Details after the jump.

Details

Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link shortly before the discussion:

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Nuvemshop, a Latin American answer to Shopify, raises $30 million

Published October 13, 2020

After several failed startup attempts and nine years spent building Nuvemshop into Latin America’s answer to Shopify, the four co-founders of the company have managed to raise $30 million in venture capital funding as they look to expand their business.

The new funding came from previous investor Kaszek Ventures and new lead investor Qualcomm, with participation from FJ Labs, IGNIA, Elevar Equity and Kevin Efrusy, from the longtime Accel Partners investor’s personal wealth.

It’s been a long road since Santiago Sosa, Alejandro Vazquez, Martin Palombo and Alejandro Alfonso first began working together in Buenos Aires. The quartet started on their entrepreneurial journey trying to develop a marketplace software product for Latin America, but when that didn’t take off, they turned their attention to a more basic problem — how to get small and medium-sized businesses selling online.

Now the company boasts 65,000 businesses that use its platform providing everything from billing and payment processing to logistics and shipping solutions transacting over $100 million per month in sales. Operating as Nuvemshop in Brazil and Tiendanube in the rest of the region, the company has offices in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, with plans to expand into Colombia and Peru in 2021.

Nuvemshop began as more of a consulting business and evolved into the suite of software tools that have managed to attract attention from investors like Qualcomm Ventures.

“Nuvemshop’s platform accelerates a company’s digital transformation and has enabled thousands of SMBs across Latin America to go digital by tapping into the company’s one-stop shop of seamlessly integrated solutions,” said Alexandre Villela, senior director of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Latin America. “We share their strong engineering focus and look forward to helping them scale their business with our investment.” 

Nuvemshop raised its first money in 2015 from Kaszek Ventures (a $5 million investment), and, as the business picked up steam, raised $7 million more from local investors.

It makes money by charging a subscription fee that begins at $3 per month and a transaction fee that decreases as customers buy more expensive subscription packages.

Now that the company has an established footprint in the region, it’s going to focus on three new areas of growth, according to chief executive, Santiago Sosa.

Nuvemshop chief executive, Santiago Sosa. Image credit: Nuvemshop

The company plans to launch a payment processing and logistics gateway of its own. That marketplace will give customers access to more robust shipping solutions thanks to the power of bundling lower demand into a single delivery and ordering system. Nuvemshop also pitches its customers an app store for connecting them to new developer tools.

Finally, the company intends to offer a broader array of financial services. It already offers payment processing, but will look to develop additional services around lending based on revenue.

Like Shopify, Nuvemshop provides a necessary ballast to the big e-commerce aggregation sites like MercadoLibre and Amazon. “Everything they do they try to optimize for the buyer,” Sosa said. That places incredible pricing pressure on retailers and Nuvemshop offers a direct sales alternative, with lower fees, according to Sosa.

The pent-up demand that Sosa sees, is fairly astonishing.

“People are talking about e-commerce penetration going from [roughly] 10% over total retail sales to [roughly] 20%, as it has happened in other countries. We see it differently, as we envision a massive disruption around commerce in the next 15 years, and are pretty confident that [roughly] 90% of retail will be somehow tech-enabled,” said Sosa, in a statement. 

 

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Ureeka taps Kevin O’Leary (AKA Mr. Wonderful) to launch SMB curriculum

Published October 13, 2020

Ureeka, an SMB mentorship platform for next-wave entrepreneurs, has today announced the Kevin O’Leary Bootcamp, which will offer members access to an exclusive curriculum of his knowledge and advice.

The startup, which raised $8.6 million in April, looks to offer a full-scale mentorship platform for underrepresented founders across all industries. Alongside offering a community of other entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off of, Ureeka also gives members free access to mentors (experts who are still active in their industry) and paid access to coaches (who continue with the member to tackle specific issues over the course of six months or more).

With the introduction of the Kevin O’Leary Bootcamp, Ureeka is shining a light on coaching circles. Circles place members into a group of five, plus a coach. That coach leads a group conversation each week that focuses on a different pillar of building a business, with concrete tasks given to members to complete.

In the case of the Kevin O’Leary Bootcamp, Ureeka coaches have been trained in his specific curriculum and framework to lead these weekly meetings and pass along his unique flavor of advice.

“He resonates with our audience because he is an entrepreneur,” said Ureeka co-founder Melissa Bradley. “He’s been there, and he’s done that. Second of all, there are a lot of programs out there that are not driven towards outputs or outcomes. Unfortunately, it’s a vicious business model to get stuck in ongoing consulting and that is not his process. He’s going to tell you what you need to do, tell you how to get it done, and get it done, and you see those results.”

Bradley added that several of O’Leary’s portfolio companies were involved with Ureeka early on in the company, which was the original connective tissue between the startup and Mr. Wonderful.

Here’s what O’Leary had to say in a prepared statement:

Underrepresented entrepreneurs, women, people of color are time and time again barred from the type of access so many take for granted, whether it be financial, educational or otherwise. We have to do better. Ureeka is doing incredible work to make tools and connections that are usually reserved for the big fish, actually accessible and all in one place. I’m thrilled to be working with them and to be able to provide small businesses access to my all-star team and resources.

The Kevin O’Leary Bootcamp is 12 months and costs a total of $3,750 across the year, which works out to $312.50/month.

One of the most unique things about Ureeka is that it gives members a series of levers to pull when they run into a problem. They can go directly to their coach to ask a question, and then to a mentor, and then to the peers in their coaching circle, and finally to the broader community.

Co-founder David Jakubowski and Bradley see the greatest challenges to Ureeka as a matter of building trust with users and managing scale.

“With everything going on in the world right now, there are so many people who need help,” said Jakubowski. “It’s not one quick fix. I can’t jump on the phone with anybody in 30 minutes and fix their business. It’s about systemic focus on doing the right things on a repeated basis that will put your business into the best position. There are just so many people who have such dire need right now, whether it’s getting the funding, or getting advice. There are just so many of them that it’s a bit overwhelming.”

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Is the Twilio-Segment deal expensive?

Published October 13, 2020

The Twilio-Segment acquisition was the biggest story of the weekend, and in our current IPO lull, it is the most discussed deal of the moment.

So it hasn’t been a surprise to see folks working to figure out if the $3.2 billion price tag Twilio expects to pay for Segment is cheap, reasonable or expensive.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

We had the same question.

The all-stock transaction is another big deal from Twilio, which previously scooped up SendGrid. Some expected Twilio to be picked up by a larger company after it went public, I’ve been told. Instead, Twilio has become the acquiring entity, boosting its size and adding to its total addressable market (TAM) through deal-making.

But a smart company can still overpay while executing a generally intelligent strategy. So, does the Segment deal look cheap, or expensive? While we don’t have all the data we’d like, a few useful VCs dropped hints about the size of Segment in my DMs.

Our hunt begins with Twilio’s own release on the matter. From there, we’ll bring in some historical data from the deal that Twilio compares the Segment transaction to, compare the resulting multiples to today’s market norms and close with a discussion of the acquiring company’s rising share price. The synthesis of all the elements will give us an answer. And we’ll have some fun at the same time.

The deal

A quick refresher on the deal: Twilio will spend $3.2 billion in shares of itself to purchase Segment. Per the company, the transaction is worth about 6% of the combined entity.

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