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Four days left on early-bird savings for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Published September 1, 2020

Want to save $100 on your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Silly question, right? Of course, you do. Here’s the thing. You have just four days left to buy in at the lowest price. Knock this easy task off your to-do list and buy your pass before the early-bird savings disappear on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Now congratulate yourself on being both a savvy startupper and a savvy shopper.

The expanded all-virtual session runs October 6-7 and, obviously, it will look and feel very different from last year’s live event. But the content, the experts, the connections and the opportunities remain as real and plentiful as ever.

Engage with experts during interactive breakout sessions, hear top mobility founders, investors, movers and shakers in both one-on-one interviews and moderated panel discussions. Cast your eyes upon the event agenda to see just some of the speakers and the topics they’ll tackle — we’ll add more in the coming weeks.

One big advantage to this all-virtual session is global reach. Whether you’re in Europe, Africa, Australia, South America or another region in the U.S., you can learn about the latest trends, meet and connect with attendees, expand your network and discover new opportunities — without stepping foot in Silicon Valley.

“TC Sessions: Mobility exceeded my expectations in terms of useful content. Every panel discussion I attended, every interaction I had was relevant to my work or to my daily life, because we don’t stop living at 5 p.m.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.

“Attending TC Sessions: Mobility helps us keep an eye on what’s coming around the corner. It uncovers crucial trends so we can identify what we should be thinking about before anyone else.” — Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

Pro Tip 1: Want to bring your team to cover more ground and discover even more opportunities? Take advantage of our group discount when you book four or more passes.

Pro Tip 2: This one’s for the up-and-coming generation of mobility visionaries — grab a budget-friendly student pass here and start expanding your career network with mobility’s best and brightest. Just $50 (a $145 savings) until prices go up.

Let’s review, shall we? TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 takes place on October 6-7, but early-bird pricing ends in just four days — on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) to be precise. Be savvy. Buy your pass today and save $100.

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

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Student-led accelerator Envision reaches demo week for class one, looks to class two

Published September 1, 2020

Back in early July, TechCrunch covered the Envision Accelerator. The program was put together by a group of students and recent graduates, often with some early venture capital experience, to help give some young startups a boost, and to shake up industry diversity metrics at the same time.

Now on the other side of their first batch’s official program and into its investor week, Envision shared a number of statistics regarding that first cohort, and talked about plans for its second.

What I appreciate about the Envision group is that by simply going out and making their own accelerator, they have shown that it is possible to attract a diverse group of startups to a program. How diverse? Let’s find out.

The Envision cohort

According to data provided to TechCrunch by Annabel Strauss and Eliana Berger from the Envision team (more on them here, if you’re curious), 17 companies made it into the first group. Of those 17 companies and their founding teams, around one-third of founders were black, around one in five were Latinx and more than 75% had a female founder.

Those are impressive metrics, frankly, especially when we consider what other groups have managed in recent sessions. Envision’s founders also skew young, not a surprise, given that the effort was effectively students making a program for their fellow students, with a three-to-one bias in favor of undergrads versus graduate students.

We’ll list the participating companies with links to their sites below, as per usual with this sort of accelerator roundup.

But, before we do, a few notes on how the first batch went down. When we last talked about Envision, they were still fundraising to pull together more capital to give to their selected companies. The idea was to provide $10,000 in equity-free capital, along with an eight-week program of lectures, networking and hands-on help from the Envision collective and a group of advisors.

According to Strauss and Berger, Envision was able to raise all the money that it needed to provide funding to its selected companies, though not every team picked up the full $10,000, with the duo noting that the amount varied based somewhat on need.

It will not be clear for a bit if the companies that went through Envision’s maiden class manage to raise more capital, scale, and become success. But for the Envision team itself, round one went well enough that a second effort is just around the corner.

And when it comes to that second push — or class, really — Envision remains in a hurry. After putting together its initial cohort while building its own organization on the fly, the group is going to kick off its second batch in October, giving it slim breathing room between cohorts.

There’s a reason for the haste, however. First, Envision wants to add two weeks to its programming, bringing the accelerator to a total of 10 weeks to include more training, and to fit that into the current semester, October was the kickoff month. Strauss and Berger noted that some students are taking leave during the first semester of this academic year.

More on Envision itself when we hear more on how the first batch did in attracting investor interest.

Here are the companies from batch one:

  • Adora: Adora is a personalized, digital campus visit platform that makes compelling visits accessible to everyone.
  • Devie: Devie is a parent coaching app that guides parents through challenges in a personal, accessible and actionable way.
  • Forage: Forage is a mobile application that provides real-time pricing at grocery stores so families can save money.
  • Holdette: At Holdette, we make professional work wear with real pockets for women entering the workforce for the first time.
  • Justice Text: Justice Text makes video evidence management software to produce fair outcomes in the criminal justice system.
  • Klara: Klara is a data science platform transforming the way consumers discover skincare and haircare products.
  • Mindstand: Mindstand helps leaders identify implicit bias, employee engagement and culture fit within their internal communications.
  • MODE: MODE helps people discover and purchase clothes through a personalized, social shopping experience.
  • Mylabox: Mylabox is a cross-border e-commerce marketplace enabling SMBs in LatAm to access high-quality overseas products.
  • Nibble: Nibble is a platform solving food waste by helping restaurants sell excess meals and ingredients at a discount.
  • Pareto: Pareto is building a library of quick-to-launch workflows that startups can deploy for operations as they scale.
  • Schefs: Schefs is a platform for college students to facilitate and participate in themed conversations over a virtual meal.
  • UrConvey: UrConvey is a safe app that makes it easy to ride share with people you know by harnessing your network.
  • Vngle: Vngle is a decentralized grassroots news network bringing “various angles” of local reality coverage to news deserts.
  • Wellnest: Wellnest is a joyful journaling app that increases mindfulness by prioritizing user experience, voice and insights.
  • Winkshare: Winkshare is a secure messaging app designed for the modern relationship. Your relationship, your business.
  • Yup: Yup rewards valuable opinions across the web. Rate anything, earn rewards for accuracy, and gain status.

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Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold arrives September 18 for $2,000

Published September 1, 2020

As far as launches for revolutionary products are concerned, the Galaxy Fold could have gone a lot better. It’s not for lack of hype, of course. Years of prelude punctuated by Samsung’s own breathless expectations provided plenty of build-up, but in the end, the device felt like a partially baked disappointment.

A number of early units broke for a variety of reasons. Samsung recalled the foldable, went back to the drawing board and released it on a delayed timeline. I ran into issues with my second sample pretty quickly. At the end of the day, the device just demanded a level of gingerliness most users can’t really afford with a day-to-day mobile device.

The Galaxy Fold Z 2, which was the centerpiece of today’s Unpacked annex event, is largely devoted to addressing the biggest complaints about the original. Given the issues with the original, that’s about as admirable a goal as any. We were all aware that the Galaxy Fold was going to be a learning process for Samsung — and certainly there’s a certain degree of throwing caution to the wind — but relative to the company’s other device, it just didn’t feel finished.

Image Credits: Samsung

We certainly didn’t feel comfortable advising people to purchase the device for $2,000. The Fold Z 2 is priced the same (which is to say still prohibitively expensive for most), but it could be the product the first gen should have been. I’m going to wait until we’ve had sufficient review time to say anything definitive about the device, but in Samsung’s defense, the company does seem to have addressed most of the major issues with the original — thanks in no small part to some advances introduced with Flip last year.

The biggest update here is the addition of what the company calls “Ultra Thin Glass” to the primary foldable 7.6-inch display. That was one of the largest pain points of the original — as cool as the technology is, it’s not worth a lot if the touchscreen can’t withstand touches. The technology here is more or less the same as what Samsung introduced with the Flip.

Image Credits: Samsung

The same goes for the new “sweeper” technology, which builds in a brush to wick away particles that might otherwise fall into the phone. This was another issue with the original — crap was getting behind the screen, causing damage when pressure was applied to the front by the user. This is the third-generation of the feature, according to Samsung, sporting a thinner brush than the original. Per the company:

To achieve this, Samsung developed new innovative sweeper technology to achieve the same level of protection in a smaller space. The Galaxy Z Fold2 Hideaway Hinge features revolutionary slim cutting technology, modified fiber composition and adjusted fiber density.

That’s a fancy way of saying they made thinner bristles. The hinge has also been improved to allow the device to stand at a variety of angles. That’s going to be an important point as the company looks to compete directly with the likes of Microsoft’s Surface Duo and any other dual-screen devices coming down the road. That’s augmented by Flex Mode (another Flip addition), which reconfigures the screen to make the best use of the partially open display.

Image Credits: Samsung

The other big update here is the addition of a much larger front-facing screen. At 6.2 inches, the front of the device is actually a serviceable display for use while the device is closed. Last time around, the front-facing screen had a weirdly long aspect ratio and wasn’t really great for anything but notifications. The company seemingly took something away from Huawei’s first dip into the foldable category.

The new Fold has 5G support, of course — that’s now standard across the company’s flagships, along with some mid-tier devices. That’s coupled with a beefy 4,500 mAh of battery life (split in two, each behind a display), 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There’s only one memory/storage option for the device for the States, which will run $2,000.

That entitles the buyer to the Galaxy Z Premier service, which includes on-demand support for the phone and a one-time replacement after accidental screen damage. There’s also a bunch of other perks thrown in, like Founders Card membership and access to golfing, or dinner at a Michelin-star restaurant. I would have preferred a pair of Galaxy Buds, to be honest, but Samsung’s really pushing the luxury angle here.

The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is up for pre-order September 2, and starts shipping on the 18th.

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InCountry raises $18M more to help SaaS companies store data locally

Published September 1, 2020

We’re seeing a gradual expansion of national regulations that require data from SaaS applications to be stored locally in the country where it’s sourced and used. Today a startup that’s built a service around that need — specifically, data residency-as-a-service — is announcing some funding to continue building out its company amid strong demand.

InCountry, which provides a set of solutions — comprising software as well as some consultancy — that helps companies comply with local regulations when adopting SaaS products, has raised $18 million in funding.

This is technically an extension to its Series A, but in keeping with the growth of its business, it comes with a big bump to its valuation: the startup is now valued at “north” of $150 million. Founder and CEO Peter Yared said this is more than double the valuation of its previous round a little over a year ago. 

The money is coming from a mix of strategic and financial investors. It’s being led by Caffeinated Capital and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, with participation from new investor Accenture Ventures and previous investors Arbor Ventures, Felicis, Ridge Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Team Builder Ventures. Accenture is one of InCountry’s key channel partners, reselling the software as part of bigger data management and integration contracts, Yared tells me.

The company has seen a decent bump in its business in the last year, expanding to 90 countries from 65, where it provides guidance and services to store and use data in compliance with legal requirements. Alongside that it has an increasingly long list of software packages that it covers with its products. The list currently includes Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twilio, Mambu and Segment, with customers including a large list of enterprises including stock exchanges, banks and pharmaceutical companies.

“This company was based off a crazy thesis,” Yared said with an almost incredulous laugh (he has a very jocular way of talking, even when he’s being serious). “Now it’s 20 months old, and our customers are banks, pharma giants, stock exchanges. We are proud that large institutions can trust us.”

A big bump in its business in recent times has been in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, which are two main regions when it comes to data residency regulations and therefore ripe ground for winning new customers — one reason why Mubadala is part of this round, Yared said.

“At Mubadala we are committed to backing visionary founders whose innovations fuel economies,” said Ibrahim Ajami, head of Ventures at Mubadala Capital. “Since day one, InCountry’s cloud solution has addressed a massive challenge in this era of regulation by giving businesses the tools to grow internationally while remaining compliant with data residency regulations. We’re doubling down on our investment and are supporting InCountry’s expansion into the MENA region because we believe they are the best team to help drive global business forward.”

Partly due to the growing ubiquity, flexibility and relatively cheap cost of cloud computing, software as a service  has been on a fast growth trajectory for years now. But even within that trend, it has had a huge boost in 2020 as a result of the global health pandemic.

COVID-19 has given the need for remote computing, and being able to access data wherever you happen to be — which in many cases today is no longer in your usual office space. On top of that, we have a lot more “wiggle room” in business, with organizations quickly scaling up and down with demand.

The knock-on effect has been a big boost for SaaS. But that growth has come with some caveats, and one of the biggest alongside security has been around data protection, and specifically national requirements in how data is stored and used. Arguably, SaaS companies have been more concerned with scaling their software and business funnels than they have been with how data is handled and how that has changed in keeping with local regulations, and that’s the opportunity that InCountry has stepped in to fill.

It provides not just a set of software to store and handle data in a secure way, but also an extensive list of legal advisors with expertise at the local level to help companies get their data policies in order. It’s an interesting model: While InCountry’s been an early mover in identifying this market opportunity and building technology to address it, it’s buffered its competitive position not with a sole focus on technology, but an extensive amount of human capital to get each implementation right.

That can prove to be a costly thing to get wrong. In the EU in July, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) put down the EU-US Privacy Shield — a framework that let businesses transfer personal data between the European Union and the United States while ensuring compliance with data protection regulations. This has impacted some 5,000 companies, which now have to rethink how they handle their data. The fine for not complying with storing data locally means that they can be fined up to 4% of their revenues.

Yared tells me that for now, the main competitor to something like InCountry has been companies building their own policies in house. Some of those solutions would have been done completely in house and some in partnership with integrators, but all of them were hard to scale and were painful to maintain, one reason why companies and their business partners are turning to working with his startup.

“Accenture Ventures is pleased to support InCountry as it continues to expand globally,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures, in a statement. “InCountry’s software solutions are helping companies address the critical issue of becoming and remaining compliant with a multitude of data residency laws. This expansion will help support enterprises as they unlock their business across borders.”

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Fresh off $200M Series D, Gong acquires early-stage startup Vayo

Published September 1, 2020

Gong announced a $200 million Series D investment just last month, and loaded with fresh cash, the company wasted no time taking advantage. Today, it announced it was buying early-stage Isreali sales technology startup Vayo. The companies did not share terms of the deal, but Gong CEO Amit Bendov said the deal closed a couple of weeks ago.

The two companies match up quite well from a tech standpoint. While Gong searches unstructured data like emails and phone call transcripts and finds nuggets of data, Vayo looks at structured data, which is essentially the output of the Gong search process. What’s more, it handles large amounts of data at scale.

“Vayo helps find customer interactions at a large scale to identify trends like customers likely to churn or usage is going up, or your deals are starting to slow down — and they do this for structured data at scale,” Bendov told TechCrunch.

He said this ability to identify trends was really what attracted him to the company, even though it was still at an early stage of development. “It’s a perfect fit for Gong. We take unstructured data — emails, audio calls video calls — and extract insights. Customers, especially with a large organization, don’t want to see individual interactions but high order insights […] and they’ve developed [a solution] to identify trends on large data volumes for customer interactions,” he said.

Vayo was founded in 2018 and raised $1.7 million in seed capital, according to Crunchbase. Joining forces with Gong gives them an opportunity to develop the technology inside a company that’s growing quickly and is extremely well capitalized, having raised more than $300 million in the last 18 months.

Avshi Avital, CEO at Vayo, who has joined Gong with his four fellow employees, gave a familiar argument for selling the company. “With Gong we found the perfect partner to realize this mission faster and maximize the impact of the technology we built given the scale of their customer base and growth potential,” he said.

The plan is to fold the Vayo tech into the Gong platform, a process that will take three to six months, according to Bendov.

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Bambuser raises $45M after shifting focus to live video shopping

Published September 1, 2020

Bambuser is a name you may not have heard in a while, but the Stockholm-headquartered company is announcing today that it has raised $45 million in new funding this year, with $34.5 million of that amount raised during the pandemic.

Bambuser’s history goes back more than a decade (the first TechCrunch coverage appeared in 2008). CEO Maryam Ghahremani told me that the founders’ idea — using smartphones to stream live video journalism — made them “very, very much ahead of their time.”

However, being ahead of your time isn’t always a good thing, and Ghahremani that the company has also struggled with having “too little capital” (although it publicly listed on Nasdaq First North in 2017) and also with turning its technology into a great product and a scalable business model.

So Ghahremani was brought on to change all that two years ago. She told me she soon saw an opportunity in the growth of live video shopping, particularly in China, with potential clients starting to ask whether Bambuser had any products for this. It didn’t at the time, but it quickly shifted focus and launched its first live video shopping products last fall.

“We didn’t plan for the pandemic to hit the world,” Ghahremani said. “We started this because we believe that this is going to be the future of retail.”

At the same time, she suggested that the pandemic — and the resulting shutdowns and struggles of brick-and-mortar retail — have accelerated the transition, giving Bambuser’s business a big boost. The company’s offering has been used by brands including H&M, Motivi, Moda Operandi, Frame, LUISAVIAROMA and Showfields, and it says that in Q2, net sales were up 669% year-over-year.

Bambuser CEO Maryan Ghahremani

Bambuser CEO Maryam Ghahremani (Image Credits: Bambuser)

While e-commerce and social media platforms are expanding their support in this area, Ghahremani said brands are turning to Bambuser because they want to offer a live shopping experience while still owning the brand experience, the customer data and the transaction itself.

She also emphasized that Bambuser is focused on being a business-to-business product, rather than a consumer shopping platform.

“We are trying to create not another Instagram or Facebook or marketplace, because we believe other [companies] are already doing that,” she said. “We’re not even interested in going into that battle. What we’re trying to do, what we need to do is help the larger brands.”

Participants in the new funding include Consensus Asset Management, Handelsbanken, Harmony Partners, Lancelot Asset Management, Tenth Avenue Holdings and TIN Fonder .

Among other things, Ghahremani said she’d hoped to create a physical presence in the United States earlier this year, but those plans were delayed by the pandemic. Still, she’s now planning to open a New York office this quarter. And in the meantime, the U.S. has already become the company’s largest market.

 

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12 Paris-based VCs look at the state of their city

Published September 1, 2020

Four years after the Great Recession, France’s newly elected socialist president François Hollande raised taxes and increased regulations on founder-led startups. The subsequent flight of entrepreneurs to places like London and Silicon Valley portrayed France as a tough place to launch a company. By 2016, France’s national statistics bureau estimated that about three million native-born citizens had moved abroad.

Those who remained fought back: The Family was an early accelerator that encouraged French entrepreneurs to adopt Silicon Valley’s startup methodology, and the 2012 creation of Bpifrance, a public investment bank, put money into the startup ecosystem system via investors. Organizers founded La French Tech to beat the drum about native startups.

When President Emmanuel Macron took office in May 2017, he scrapped the wealth tax on everything except property assets and introduced a flat 30% tax rate on capital gains. Station F, a giant startup campus funded by billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel on the site of a former railway station, began attracting international talent. Tony Fadell, one of the fathers of the iPod and founder of Nest Labs, moved to Paris to set up investment firm Future Shape; VivaTech was created with government backing to become one of Europe’s largest startup conference and expos.

Now, in the COVID-19 era, the government has made €4 billion available to entrepreneurs to keep the lights on. According to a recent report from VC firm Atomico, there are 11 unicorns in France, including BlaBlaCar, OVHcloud, Deezer and Veepee. More appear to be coming; last year Macron said he wanted to see “25 French unicorns by 2025.”

According to Station F, by the end of August, there had been 24 funding rounds led by international VCs and a few big transactions. Enterprise artificial intelligence and machine-learning platform Dataiku raised a $100 million Series D round, and Paris-based gaming startup Voodoo raised an undisclosed amount from Tencent Holdings.

We asked 12 Paris-based investors to comment on the state of play in their city:

Alison Imbert, Partech

What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally?

All the fintechs addressing SMBs to help them to focus more on their core business (including banks disintermediation by fintech, new infrastructures tech that are lowering the barrier to entry to nonfintech companies).

What’s your latest, most exciting investment?

77foods (plant-based bacon) — love that alternative proteins trend as well. Obviously, we need to transform our diet toward more sustainable food. It’s the next challenge for humanity.

What are you looking for in your next investment, in general?
Impact investment: Logistic companies tackling the life cycle of products to reduce their carbon footprint and green fintech that reinvent our spending and investment strategy around more sustainable products.

Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about?
D2C products.

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
100% investing in France as I’m managing Paris Saclay Seed Fund, a €53 million fund, investing in pre-seed and seed startups launched by graduates and researchers from the best engineering and business schools from this ecosystem.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders?
Deep tech, biotech and medical devices. Paris, and France in general, has thousands of outstanding engineers that graduate each year. Researchers are more and more willing to found companies to have a true impact on our society. I do believe that the ecosystem is more and more structured to help them to build such companies.

How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city?
Paris is booming for sure. It’s still behind London and Berlin probably. But we are seeing more and more European VC offices opening in the city to get direct access to our ecosystem. Even in seed rounds, we start to have European VCs competing against us. It’s good — that means that our startups are moving to the next level.

Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work?
For sure startups will more and more push for remote organizations. It’s an amazing way to combine quality of life for employees and attracting talent. Yet I don’t think it will be the majority. Not all founders are willing/able to build a fully remote company. It’s an important cultural choice and it’s adapted to a certain type of business. I believe in more flexible organization (e.g., tech team working remotely or 1-2 days a week for any employee).

Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times?
Travel and hospitality sectors are of course hugely impacted. Yet there are opportunities for helping those incumbents to face current challenges (e.g., better customer care and services, stronger flexibility, cost reduction and process automation).

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?
Cash is king more than ever before. My only piece of advice will be to keep a good level of cash as we have a limited view on events coming ahead. It’s easy to say but much more difficult to put in practice (e.g., to what extend should I reduce my cash burn? Should I keep on investing in the product? What is the impact on the sales team?). Startups should focus only on what is mission-critical for their clients. Yet it doesn’t impact our seed investments as we invest pre-revenue and often pre-product.

What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two.
There is no reason to be hopeless. Crises have happened in the past. Humanity has faced other pandemics. Humans are resilient and resourceful enough to adapt to a new environment and new constraints.

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Salesforce beefing up field service offering with AI

Published September 1, 2020

Salesforce has been adding artificial intelligence to all parts of its platform for several years now. It calls the underlying artificial intelligence layer on the Salesforce platform Einstein. Today the company announced some enhancements to its field service offerings that take advantage of this capability.

Eric Jacobson, VP of product management at Salesforce says that when COVID hit, it pretty much stopped field service in its tracks during April, but like many other parts of business, it began to pick up again later in the quarter, and people still needed to have their appliances maintained.

“Even though we’re sheltering in place, the physical world still has physical needs. Hospitals still have to maintain their equipment. Employees still need to have equipment replaced or repaired while working at home and people still need their washing machine [or other appliances] repaired,” Jacobson said.

Today’s announcements are designed in some ways for a COVID world where efficiency is more critical than ever. That means the field service tech needs to be prepared ahead of time on all of the details of the nature of the repair. He or she has to have the right parts and customers need to know when their technician will be there.

While it’s possible to do much of that in a manual fashion, adding a dose of AI helps streamline and scale that process. For starters, the company announced Dynamic Priority. Certainly humans are capable of prioritizing a list of repairs, but by letting the machine set priority based on factors like service agreement type or how critical the repair is, it can organize calls much faster, leaving dispatchers to handle other tasks.

Even before the day starts, technicians receive their schedule and, using machine learning, can determine what parts they are most likely to need in the truck for the day’s repairs. Based on the nature of the repair and the particular make and model of machine, the Einstein Recommendation Builder can help predict the parts that will be needed to minimize the number of required trips, something that is important at all times, but especially during a pandemic.

“It’s always been an inconvenience and annoyance to have somebody come back for a follow-up appointment. But now it’s not just an annoyance, it’s actually a safety consideration for you and for the technician because it’s increased exposure,” Jacobson explained.

Salesforce also wants to give the customer the same capability they are used to getting in a rideshare app, where you can track the progress of the driver to your destination. Appointment Assistant, a new app, gives customers this ability, so they know when to expect the repair person to arrive.

Finally, Salesforce has teamed with ServiceMax to offer a new capability to get the big picture view of an asset with the goal of ensuring uptime, particularly important in settings like hospitals or manufacturing. “We’ve partnered with a long-time Salesforce partner ServiceMax to create a brand new offering that takes industry best practice and builds it right in. Asset 360 builds on top of Salesforce field service and delivers those specific capabilities around asset performance insight, viewing and managing up time and managing warranty processes to really ensure availability,” he said.

As with all Salesforce announcements, the availability of these capabilities will vary as each is in various forms of development. “Dynamic Priority will be generally available in October 2020. Einstein Recommendation Builder will be in beta in October 2020. Asset 360 will be generally available in November 2020. Appointment Assistant will be in closed pilot in US in October 2020,” according to information provided by the company.

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InfoSum raises $15.1M for its privacy-first, federated approach to big data analytics

Published September 1, 2020

Data protection and data privacy have gone from niche concerns to mainstream issues in the last several years, thanks to new regulations and a cascade of costly breaches that have laid bare the problems that arise when information and data security are treated haphazardly.

Yet that swing has also thrown up a whole series of issues for organisations and business functions that depend on sharing and exchanging data in order to work. Today, a startup that has built a new way of exchanging data while still keeping privacy in mind — starting first by applying the concept to the “marketing industrial complex” — is announcing a round of funding as it continues to pick up momentum.

InfoSum, a London startup that has built a way for organizations to share their data with each other without passing it on to each other — by way of a federated, decentralized architecture that uses mathematical representations to organise, “read” and query the data — is today announcing that it has raised $15.1 million.

Data may be the new oil, but according to founder and CEO Nick Halstead, that just means “it’s sticky and gets all over the place.” That is to say, InfoSum is looking for a new way to use data that is less messy, and less prone to leakage, and ultimately devaluation.

The Series A is being co-led by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. A number of strategics using InfoSum — Ascential, Akamai, Experian, British broadcaster ITV and AT&T’s Xandr — are also participating in the round. The startup has raised $23 million to date.

Nicholas Halstead, the founder and CEO who previously had founded and led another big data company, DataSift (the startup that gained early fame as a middleman for Twitter’s firehose of data, until Twitter called time on that relationship to push its own business strategy), said in an interview that the plan is to use the funding to continue fueling its growth, with a specific focus on the U.S. market.

To that end, Brian Lesser — the founder and former CEO of Xandr (AT&T’s adtech business that is now a part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia), and previous to that the North American CEO of GroupM — is joining the company as executive chairman. Lesser had originally led Xandr’s investment into InfoSum and had previously been on the board of the startup.

InfoSum got its start several years ago as CognitiveLogic, founded at a time when Halstead was first starting to get his head around the problems that were becoming increasingly urgent in how data was being used by companies, and how newer information architecture models using data warehousing and cloud computing could help solve that.

“I saw the opportunity for data collaboration in a more private way, helping enable companies to work together when it came to customer data,” he said. This eventually led to the company releasing its first product two years ago.

In the interim, and since then, that trend, he noted, has only gained momentum, spurred by the rise of companies like Snowflake that have disrupted the world of data warehousing, cookies have started to increasingly go out of style (and some believe will disappear altogether over time) and the concept of federated architecture has become much more ubiquitous, applied to identity management and other areas.

All of this means that InfoSum’s solution today may be aimed at martech, but it is something that affects a number of industries. Indeed, the decision to focus on marketing technology, he said, was partly because that is the industry that Halstead worked most closely with at DataSift, although the plan is to expand to other verticals as well.

“We’ve done a lot of work to change the marketing industrial complex,” said Lesser, “but its bigger use cases are in areas like finance and healthcare.”

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Virtual Mobility startup pitch night applications open

Published August 31, 2020

TechCrunch is on the hunt to feature 10 early-stage mobility startups at our virtual TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 pitch night. The pitch-off event, originally set for May, will now be held October 5th — the evening before Mobility 2020. 

The top five companies from pitch night will take the stage at the main event with industry heavy hitters like  Boris Sofman of Waymo, Nancy Sun of Ike and Trucks VC’s Reilly Brennan. Now we are shining a light on game changing startups — hardware and software breaking the mobility mold. From battery advancements to mapping, fuel processing to micromobility, TechCrunch wants the next generation of mobility’s brightest on stage. The process is simple:

Apply. TechCrunch editorial will review every application and demo video submitted. Companies will be reviewed based on innovation, scope of impact, uniqueness of product idea and potential for exit — IPO or acquisition. Selected companies will get to pitch onstage, receive two complimentary event tickets, an hour training with the Startup Battlefield Editor and a spot in CrunchMatch (TC’s meeting matching program).

Pitch Part I. The top 10 startups from around the world will be selected to pitch live to the TC audience on the virtual stage. After a private pitch coaching session, founders will have one minute to pitch, followed by a Q&A with our expert panel of investor and industry expert judges.

Pitch Part II. The top five companies from pitch night will get a prime slot to pitch and demo their product on the main stage at Mobility 2020 in front of thousands of TC viewers — press, industry leaders and VCs.

The deadline to apply is September 15th. Selections will occur on a rolling basis so get your application in ASAP!

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