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Exhibitors at Disrupt 2020: Register now to meet accelerators next week

Published September 3, 2020

Disrupt 2020 is all about helping startups find and create ways to drive their business forward in these most challenging times. We partnered with cela to give exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley one sweet opportunity — networking with 13 accelerators.

If you’re exhibiting — or plan to — don’t miss out on your chance to meet with up to 13 accelerators and pre-interview for their upcoming virtual cohorts. The first in our series of accelerator sessions — where you’ll gather information and pitch your product — takes place next week. Here’s everything you need to know.

Date: September 8

Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. (PT)

Accelerator focus: The following four accelerator programs are designed for the more established startups. You have a customer base. If that describes your startup, review the accelerator websites below. If you’re interested in scheduling a meeting — and you meet the program’s requirements — you can register now on CrunchMatch.

Participating accelerators

NUMA helps early and growth-stage international tech startups fast-track their growth and scale in the U.S. through virtual and in-person startup acceleration programs. You’ll find application requirements here.
Techstars helps grow entrepreneurial ideas into world-changing businesses. You’ll find application requirements here.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator combines seed capital and hands-on help with an expert team to positively impact the trajectory of early-stage startups. You’ll find application requirements here.
Plug and Play’s health program connects the best startups in the world to corporations that want to disrupt the healthcare industry. You’ll find application requirements here.

It’s not too late to take advantage of our accelerator speed networking sessions and reap the benefits that come with exposing your startup to thousands of Disrupt attendees from around the world. Simply purchase a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, and you’re eligible to meet and potentially pitch your way into an accelerator cohort that could change the trajectory of your business.

None of the above-mentioned accelerators fit your startup? Don’t worry, we have two more accelerator sessions on tap.

Date: September 9

Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. PT

Accelerators: She Gets Sh!t Done, Halo Incubator, Startup Boost Pre- Accelerator, Global Startup Ecosystem (Her Future Summit)

Date: September 10

Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. PT

Accelerators: Plug and Play (IoT), Backstage Capital, Plug and Play (enterprise tech), StartEd Accelerator, Quake Capital

Don’t miss your chance to connect with accelerators — and apply to their virtual programs. The first opportunity takes place on September 8, and it’s available only to startups exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020. Want in? Grab a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and crack open a giant can of possibility.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

OrCam Technologies co-founder Amnon Shashua to speak at Sight Tech Global

Published September 3, 2020

If the measure of progress in technology is that devices should become ever smaller and more capable, then OrCam Technologies is on a roll. The Israeli firm’s OrCam MyEye, which fits on the arm of a pair of glasses, is far more powerful and much smaller than its predecessor. With new AI-based Smart Reading software released in July, the device not only “reads” text and labels but also identifies people by name and describes other important aspects of the visual world. It also interacts with the user, principally people who are blind or visually impaired, by means of an AI-based smart voice assistant.

At the upcoming Sight Tech Global virtual event, we’re pleased to announce that OrCam’s co-founder and co-CEO, Professor Amnon Shashua, will be a featured speaker. The event, which will take place virtually on December 2-3, is focused on how AI-related technologies will influence assistive technology and accessibility in the years ahead. Attendance is free and pre-registration is open now.

Shashua is a towering figure in the technology world. He is not only the co-founder of OrCam but also Mobileye, the company that provides the computer-vision sensors and systems for automotive safety and autonomous navigation. Intel acquired Mobileye for $15.3 billion in 2017, the single-largest acquisition of an Israeli company ever.

Shashua started OrCam at the prompting of his aunt, who was losing her sight and hoped that her technologist nephew could apply his prodigious talents as a scientist and AI expert to help. With that goal in mind, he started OrCam in 2010 with co-founder Ziv Aviram. The firm has gone on to raise $130.4 million dollars from investors, including Intel, and sell the OrCam MyEye device to tens of thousands of users in over 50 countries. At $3900 per device in the U.S., the OrCam MyEye is far from affordable for most people, but the firm says the device price will come down as production increases.

At the start of a new era for assistive technology, OrCam’s approach with the lightweight, offline-operating OrCam MyEye is nothing if not thought provoking (the device was recognized as a TIME Best Invention of 2019). Will miniaturization of sophisticated sensors and electronics lead to unobtrusive sensor arrays as the foundation of assistive tech? Will the AI-based natural-language processing lead to an all-purpose, customizable personal assistants that work with abilities as needed?

“In OrCam’s roadmap,” says Shashua, “the ultimate AT must have the right balance between computer vision and natural language processing. For example, the “smart reading” feature recently launched harnesses NLP (natural language processing) in order to guide the device to which text information to extract and communicate to the user. NLP allows the user to specify precisely what he/she needs to know. For example, the “orientation” feature recently launched allows the user to prompt the device to describe the objects in the scene and to provide audible guidance to those objects. We see the “orientation” feature growing with respect to vocabulary, with respect to search (e.g., “notify me when you see a Toilet sign”), and with respect to obstacle avoidance (where is the free-space in the scene). The technological challenge in bringing these desires into reality critically depends on the progress of compute and algorithms.

“By ‘compute,’” says Shashua, “I mean the ever-growing trend to miniaturize processing power enables more sophisticated algorithms to reside on smaller and battery-powered footprint. By “algorithms” I mean the ever-increasing sophistication of deep-tech to mimic human intelligence. Combining the two creates a powerful impact on the future of assistive tech for people who are blind and visually impaired.”

Shashua received a B.Sc in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1985 and his M.Sc in computer science in 1989 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received a Ph.D in brain and cognitive sciences in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while working at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Sight Tech Global is a virtual event on December 2-3 and attendance is free. Pre-registration is open now.

Sight Tech Global welcomes sponsors. Current sponsors include Verizon Media, Google, Waymo, Mojo Vision and Wells Fargo, The event is organized by volunteers and all proceeds from the event benefit The Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Silicon Valley.

Optimizely acquired by content management company Episerver

Published September 3, 2020

Episerver is announcing that it has reached an agreement to acquire Optimizely for an undisclosed sum.

Optimizely was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. It became synonymous with A/B testing, subsequently building a broader suite of tools for marketers to experiment with and personalize their websites and apps, with more than 1,000 customers, including Gap, StubHub, IBM and The Wall Street Journal.

The company had raised more than $200 million in funding from Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, GV and others. Earlier this year, it laid off 15% of its staff, citing the impact of COVID-19.

Episerver, meanwhile, was founded in Stockholm back in 1994 and offers tools for marketers to manage their digital content. Accel-KKR sold the company to Insight Partners for $1.1 billion in 2018. (Today’s announcement describes Insight as a “strategic advisor and sponsor” in the acquisition.)

In a statement, Episerver CEO Alex Atzberger said this is “the most significant transformation in our company’s history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.” It sounds like the idea is to extend Episerver’s capabilities around content and commerce with Optimizely’s experimentation tools.

Insight Venture Partners buys content management platform Episerver for $1.1 billion

“The breakthrough combination of Episerver and Optimizely will transform digital experience creation and optimization, enabling digital teams to replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes,” Atzberger said. “This, along with our shared mission to empower growing companies to compete digitally, makes me thrilled to welcome the Optimizely team to Episerver, as we prove there are no extraordinary experiences without experimentation.”

A company spokesperson said the deal is for a mix of cash and stock. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, with the companies remaining fully staffed and independent until then.

“Winning in today’s digital world requires delivering the best and most personalized digital experiences,” said Jay Larson, who replaced Siroker as Optimizely CEO in 2017, in a statement. “Episerver and Optimizely have a shared vision to optimize every customer touchpoint through the use of experimentation. Together, we will enable our customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before.”

Benchmark-backed Optimizely confirms it has laid off 15% of staff

Avo raises $3M for its analytics governance platform

Published September 3, 2020

Avo, a startup that helps businesses better manage their data quality across teams, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with participation from Heavybit, Y Combinator and others.

The company’s founder, Stefania Olafsdóttir, who is currently based in Iceland, was previously the head of data science at QuizUp, which at some point had 100 million users around the world. “I had the opportunity to build up the Data Science Division, and that meant the cultural aspect of helping people ask and answer the right questions — and get them curious about data — but it also meant the technical part of setting up the infrastructure and tools and pipelines, so people can get the right answers when they need it,” she told me. “We were early adopters of self-serve product analytics and culture — and we struggled immensely with data reliability and data trust.”

Image Credits: Avo

As companies collect more data across products and teams, the process tends to become unwieldy and different teams end up using different methods (or just simply different tags), which creates inefficiencies and issues across the data pipeline.

“At first, that unreliable data just slowed down decision making, because people were just like, didn’t understand the data and needed to ask questions,” Olafsdóttir said about her time at QuizUp. “But then it caused us to actually launch bad product updates based on incorrect data.” Over time, that problem only became more apparent.

“Once organizations realize how big this issue is — that they’re effectively flying blind because of unreliable data, while their competition might be like taking the lead on the market — the default is to patch together a bunch of clunky processes and tools that partially increase the level of liability,” she said. And that clunky process typically involves a product manager and a spreadsheet today.

At its core, the Avo team set out to build a better process around this, and after a few detours and other product ideas, Olafsdóttir and her co-founders regrouped to focus on exactly this problem during their time in the Y Combinator program.

Avo gives developers, data scientists and product managers a shared workspace to develop and optimize their data pipelines. “Good product analytics is the product of collaboration between these cross-functional groups of stakeholders,” Olafsdóttir argues, and the goal of Avo is to give these groups a platform for their analytics planning and governance — and to set company-wide standards for how they create their analytics events.

Once that is done, Avo provides developers with typesafe analytics code and debuggers that allows them to take those snippets and add them to their code within minutes. For some companies, this new process can help them go from spending 10 hours on fixing a specific analytics issue to an hour or less.

Most companies, the team argues, know — deep down — that they can’t fully trust their data. But they also often don’t know how to fix this problem. To help them with this, Avo also today released its Inspector product. This tool processes event streams for a company, visualizes them and then highlights potential errors. These could be type mismatches, missing properties or other discrepancies. In many ways, that’s obviously a great sales tool for a service that aims to avoid exactly these problems.

One of Avo’s early customers is Rappi, the Latin American delivery service. “This year we scaled to meet the demand of 100,000 new customers digitizing their deliveries and curbside pickups. The problem with every new software release was that we’d break analytics. It represented 25% of our Jira tickets,” said Rappi’s head of Engineering, Damian Sima. “With Avo we create analytics schemas upfront, identify analytics issues fast, add consistency over time and ensure data reliability as we help customers serve the 12+ million monthly users their businesses attract.”

As most startups at this stage, Avo plans to use the new funding to build out its team and continue to develop its product.

“The next trillion-dollar software market will be driven from the ground up, with developers deciding the tools they use to create digital transformation across every industry. Avo offers engineers ease of implementation while still retaining schemas and analytics governance for product leaders,” said GGV Capital Managing Partner Glenn Solomon. “Our investment in Avo is an investment in software developers as the new kingmakers and product leaders as the new oracles.”

Nintendo’s latest trick is turning the Switch into an RC controller for an AR Mario Kart game

Published September 3, 2020

Nintendo never ceases to surprise with a seemingly infinite number of ways of transforming its most beloved IP. Hot on the heels of some truly impressive Super Mario Bros. Lego kits comes Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The new toy is a clever mashup of real-life RC cars the Nintendo Switch.

Image Credits: Nintendo

The hybrid portable gaming system utilizes cameras on-board the Mario and Luigi karts to offer an on-screen augmented reality first-person racing experience. There’s a teaser video out now, highlighting the game:

Get ready to experience the fun of Mario Kart in the real world! Use your #NintendoSwitch to control a physical Kart & race through custom courses set up in your home! Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is available in a Mario or Luigi set, and launches on 10/16. pic.twitter.com/dydiND46ad

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) September 3, 2020

As you can see, it offers a familiar Mario Kart feel overlayed on top of your home. There’s a pretty simple set-up process involved, with the user spacing out a series of gates to create a circular course — think of it like a far more fun version of setting up Roomba boundaries. Right now there are only two characters available — Mario and Luigi — each priced at $100. But up to four players can compete with the in-person mode.

Image Credits: Nintendo

From the videos, at least, it looks like a pretty rich experience right out of the box, combining real-world obstacles with familiar characters and environments like snowy levels and Piranha Plant-filled jungles.

Each kit includes one racer, four gates and two sign boards. They go up for pre-order soon and start shipping October 16.

Facebook Watch is getting 1.25B visitors each month

Published September 3, 2020

Facebook is sharing some new growth numbers around its video destination — namely, that Facebook Watch is now receiving more than 1.25 billion visitors every month.

The company isn’t saying specifically how those numbers have changed during the pandemic (when video services like Netflix have seen dramatic growth), but product lead Paresh Rajwat said there was “a really big surge” at the beginning of lockdown and social distancing, and that the surge has not subsided as society begins to reopen.

Facebook Watch launched in 2018. Back in June of last year, the company said that 720 million people were watching at least one minute of Watch content every month.

Rajwat noted that while Watch is built on “the social layer of Facebook,” with videos shareable across Facebook’s many products, the views are happening on Watch itself.

“It is super critical for us to have a destination,” he said, keeping videos from popular creators and publishers separate from the core Facebook experience of interacting with friends and family. “The moment we mix them together, it becomes a completely different product for people.”

Rajwat added that the company isn’t just looking at overall audience size. He argued that when you look at “the reactions and comments and shares” you can see that “the content we have is working.” (Advertisers have wondered about the true extent of audience engagement on Facebook Watch.)

Last year, as tech and media companies were all investing heavily to launch their own streaming services, we argued that Facebook’s efforts with unscripted shows and older content seemed pretty lackluster in comparison. But it sounds like the content that’s working on Watch isn’t the kind of thing you’d find on Netflix or Disney+ — as Rajwat put it, “The angle we’ve taken is to focus more on content that is around social topics to drive conversations.”

Image Credits: Facebook

For example, there’s “Red Table Talk” from Jada Pinkett Smith and family, a talk show that made headlines over the summer for bringing Will Smith and Jada together to discuss their marital issues. Facebook plans to launch another version of Red Table Talk in October, “Red Table Talk: The Estefans,” with Gloria Estefan, her niece Lily and her daughter Emily.

As another example of a successful original Facebook Watch show, Rajwat pointed to “Returning the Favor,” an Emmy-winning program where host Mike Rowe showcases everyday heroes.

Rajwat said that live programming has increased significantly during the pandemic. That includes live sports, with 13.7 million people watching the UEFA Champions League final, making it the most popular football broadcast ever on Facebook Watch. And Facebook recently announced that publishers and other businesses will be able to charge for access to live online events, with Facebook taking no fees for the next year.

The site also added licensed music videos over the summer, with Katy Perry premiering her music video for “Smile” exclusively on Facebook Watch, where it was watched by “millions” of fans.

Image Credits: Facebook

The company-highlighted successful publishers on Facebook Watch include organizations like UFC, large publishers like BuzzFeed and individual creators like Benito Skinner and Brandi Guice, a.k.a. Braannxo, who’s making 98% of her revenue from Facebook Stars and fan subscriptions.

Looking forward, Rajwat said that a big priority is making “more and more investment in showing people what they really are interested in.” To that end, users have already spotted that Facebook Watch is now allowing users to customize their feed by exploring and subscribing to different topics.

Facebook now lets you customize your Watch video feed with #Topics

Daily Crunch: India bans PUBG and other Chinese apps

Published September 2, 2020

India continues to crack down on Chinese apps, Microsoft launches a deepfake detector and Google offers a personalized news podcast. This is your Daily Crunch for September 2, 2020.

The big story: India bans PUBG and other Chinese apps

The Indian government continues its purge of apps created by or linked to Chinese companies. It already banned 59 Chinese apps back in June, including TikTok.

India’s IT Ministry justified the decision as “a targeted move to ensure safety, security, and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace.” The apps banned today include search engine Baidu, business collaboration suite WeChat Work, cloud storage service Tencent Weiyun and the game Rise of Kingdoms. But PUBG is the most popular, with more than 40 million monthly active users.

The tech giants

Microsoft launches a deepfake detector tool ahead of US election — The Video Authenticator tool will provide a confidence score that a given piece of media has been artificially manipulated.

Google’s personalized audio news feature, Your News Update, comes to Google Podcasts — That means you’ll be able to get a personalized podcast of the latest headlines.

Twitch launches Watch Parties to all creators worldwide — Twitch is doubling down on becoming more than just a place for live-streamed gaming videos.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indonesian insurtech startup PasarPolis gets $54 million Series B from investors including LeapFrog and SBI — The startup’s goal is to reach people who have never purchased insurance before with products like inexpensive “micro-policies” that cover broken device screens.

XRobotics is keeping the dream of pizza robots alive — XRobotics’ offering resembles an industrial 3D printer, in terms of size and form factor.

India’s online learning platform Unacademy raises $150 million at $1.45 billion valuation — India has a new startup unicorn.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The IPO parade continues as Wish files, Bumble targets an eventual debut — Alex Wilhelm looks at the latest IPO news, including Bumble planning to go public at a $6 to $8 billion valuation.

3 ways COVID-19 has affected the property investment market — COVID-19 has stirred up the long-settled dust on real estate investing.

Deep Science: Dog detectors, Mars mappers and AI-scrambling sweaters — Devin Coldewey kicks off a new feature in which he gets you all caught up on the most recent research papers and scientific discoveries.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

‘The Mandalorian’ launches its second season on Oct. 30 — The show finished shooting its second season right before the pandemic shut down production everywhere.

GM, Ford wrap up ventilator production and shift back to auto business — Both automakers said they’d completed their contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Samsung’s got a new budget 5G handset and a fitness tracker with a two-week battery

Published September 2, 2020

Yesterday’s overflow Galaxy Unpacked event was about one thing and one thing alone: the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Honestly, it was a bit anticlimactic after its predecessor found Samsung unveiling five new devices. But the singular focus wasn’t for lack of new stuff to show off. In fact, the company just unleashed a whole slew of new products across a wide range of categories, including a gaming monitor, charging pad, refrigerator and washing machine.

There are two in particular I’d like to break out here, however: the new Galaxy Fit 2 band and A42 5G handset. The latter in particular is worth highlighting, given the company’s huge push into 5G this year. Samsung is betting big on pushing early and hard on the next-generation wireless tech.

Early this year, the company announced that it would be standardizing 5G across its flagship products. The company has also made a major push toward embracing the tech on its budget devices, including the A7 and now the A42. 5G hasn’t quite turned out to be the market correction the industry was banking on, due in no small part to a slowdown in sales from the pandemic. Certainly few banked on that. But while Apple has yet to announce a 5G iPhone (give it a month or two, mind), Samsung’s already loaded up.

And importantly, the A42 looks like it may be Samsung’s cheapest 5G offering (though we’re still waiting on exact pricing). Honestly, Samsung wasn’t particularly chatty about the device during an IFA-tied event. Though we do know there’s a quad-camera system and a 6.6-inch display. Honestly, one of the most remarkable things about 5G is how quickly affordable devices have hit the market, thanks in part to the efforts of component makers like Qualcomm .

Image Credits: Samsung

The Galaxy Fit 2 is notable mostly for the inclusion of a 15-day battery (per Samsung). It can autodetect five different kinds of workouts and monitors sleep. It’s nice to see Samsung still offering something up to the dwindling tracker market, even as its (and the world’s) focus has clearly shifted over to smartwatches.

Venture capital LPs are the missing link to solving Silicon Valley’s diversity problem

Published September 2, 2020

Pranavi Cheemakurti
Contributor

Pranavi is an investor and writer currently doing pre-seed and seed-stage B2B SaaS investing at Acceleprise Ventures and writing at publicbeta.substack.com.

In the last few months, we’ve seen much of Silicon Valley finally start to acknowledge generations of systemic racial inequity and take actionable steps to empower and support underrepresented people in tech. Funds are looking to invest capital more equitably and have started to take concrete steps to achieve this goal.

For example, Eniac Ventures and Hustle Fund have started to meet with more Black founders via consultations and encouraging cold inbound pitches. Initiatives like venture capital fellowships run by Susa Ventures and Unshackled Ventures will allow for increased representation in investment teams. While these initiatives are exciting, it’s important to explore how we can enable sustainable change and solve the diversity problem at the root.

It’s as simple as this: Investing in diverse perspectives makes for a far more efficient economy. The data also confirms this, given that homogeneous investing teams had a success rate for M&A and IPOs that was 26.4%-32.2% lower. Data since 1990 shows that approximately only 8% of VCs identify as women, with 2% of VCs identifying as Latinx and less than 1% identifying as Black.

It’s clear that the inequitable deployment of capital that results from homogenous investment teams at VC funds has translated into missed opportunity for outsized financial returns. Since this really comes down to how venture funds operate at their core, an entity that can greatly influence this and reinvent the status quo are VC funds’ limited partners.

Limited partners are the often unheard of backers of venture capital funds. Institutional venture capital funds raise money from sources such as high-net-worth individuals (HNWs), endowments, foundations, fund of funds, banks, insurance/pension funds and sovereign wealth funds that they will in turn use to invest money into high-growth, category-defining startups (the part that you do hear about).

LPs hold a lot of power in the venture financing life cycle as institutional venture capital firms can’t write checks at the scale they do without the external financing that LPs provide. Since LPs are the source of capital, they can control who they invest in (GPs) and how they invest and manage their capital. What if LPs are the missing link who can control the flow of capital to GPs who empower, find and fund more underrepresented entrepreneurs and keep them accountable?

That sounds great, but why does this matter?

Edtech startups find demand from an unlikely customer: Public schools

Published September 2, 2020

School district technology budgets are tight. But Kami CEO and founder Hengjie Wang wanted to make his company’s digital classroom product a go-to tool anyway.

He landed on trying to disrupt the printers.

Wang found that school districts spend an average of $150,000 every year on printed materials. Kami helps teachers digitize worksheets so students can digitally annotate them. Doing the math, Wang says Kami can save districts an estimated $80,000 by getting rid of the need to print handouts every day.

“Districts are apprehensive on paying for tools unless you can also save them money at the same time,” Wang said. With this tactic, the number of school districts using Kami doubled between March and July, going from from 9,987 districts to 17,915 districts. Sales for the startup, which was founded in 2013, grew over 2,000%. Today, Kami is a cash-flow positive business that sells to schools and parents.

When it comes to wide-scale and equitable adoption for edtech startups, success can often hinge on landing contracts that extend to an entire school network. However, budget cuts and red tape have often limited a company’s ability to grow. During the pandemic, consumer edtech startups such as live tutoring or question and answer services have soared now that more kids are learning from home.

However, a second surge in edtech might be upon us. As schools seek to reopen with a hybrid learning solution, Kami and other startups are finding opportunity in one of the hardest institutions to sell to: K-12 school districts.