Assistive technologies will be a $26 billion dollar market, and investors are only now addressing it
Rohan Silva is obsessed with social mobility and why certain groups are so under-represented in the technology industry.
He co-founded Second Home, a coworking space looking to bring together disparate civic-minded, cultural, creative and commercial entrepreneurs at sites in Lisbon, London and (now) Los Angeles, and he has spent years examining how gender, race and class impact access to technology as a now-reformed politician. Throughout that work though, one area that he says he overlooked was accessibility and entrepreneurship focused on people with disabilities.
“At Second Home, we pride ourselves on having a diverse community. I can count on one hand the number of founders with disabilities we have in our community, so there is definitely something going profoundly wrong,” Silva says.
Enlisting the help of the European venture capital fund Atomico, Silva has set up a micro-investment fund of £100,000 to tackle the problem.
“It’s a large amount compared to what I have and a small amount compared to most venture capital funds,” he explains. “The much bigger prize here is the ability to fund technologies that have the opportunities to improve the lives of people with disabilities.”
Silva isn’t alone. Organizations like Not Impossible Labs, a Los Angeles-based company, and startups like OrCam Technologies, eSight, B-Temia, Kinova Robotics, Open Bionics, Voiceitt and Whill are harnessing technology to bring solutions to people with disabilities across the world.
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Mozilla previews a redesigned and faster Firefox for Android
Mozilla today announced the first preview of a redesigned version of Firefox for Android that promises to be up to two times faster. The new version also introduces an easier to use and rather minimalist user interface, as well as support for collections, Mozilla’s new take on bookmarks. The new browser also features Firefox’s tracking protection, which is on by default. Over time, this preview will become the default Firefox for Android.
A few years ago, with Quantum, the Firefox team make a number of under-the-hood improvements to the browser’s core backend technologies. Now, it is doing something similar with GeckoView, Mozilla’s browser engine for Android. Implementing the technology the team developed for this in the browser now “paves the way for a complete makeover of the mobile Firefox experience,” the organization writes in today’s announcement.
“While all other major Android browsers today are based on Blink and therefore reflective of Google’s decisions about mobile, Firefox’s GeckoView engine ensures us and our users independence,” says the Firefox team. “Building Firefox for Android on GeckoView also results in greater flexibility in terms of the types of privacy and security features we can offer our mobile users.”
An early version of Firefox with GeckoView is now available for testing on Android under the Firefox Preview moniker. Mozilla notes that the user experience will sill change quite a bit before it is final.
When you first launch it, Preview opens up a new default experience that lets you sign in to a Firefox account, decide on whether you want a light or dark theme (or have the system switch automatically depending on the time of day), turn on privacy features and more.
One feature I really appreciate is that, by default, the preview puts the URL bar at the bottom of the screen, so that it’s within easy reach of your thumb. If you swipe up on the URL bar, you get both a share and bookmark icon, too. That takes some getting used to but quickly becomes second nature.
I haven’t run any formal benchmarks, but the preview definitely feels significantly snappier and smoother than any previews Firefox version on Android, up to the point where I wouldn’t hesitate to make it my default browser on mobile, especially given its built-in privacy features. I haven’t run into any hard crashes so far either, but this is obviously a beta version, so your mileage may vary.
For the rest of the year, the team will focus on optimizing the preview for all Android devices, but for now, it’s already worth a look if you’re looking to play with a new mobile browser on your Android device and not afraid of the occasional bug.
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Fellow raises $6.5M to help make managers better at leading teams and people
Managing people is perhaps the most challenging thing most people will have to learn in the course of their professional lives – especially because there’s no one ‘right’ way to do it. But Ottawa-based startup Fellow is hoping to ease the learning curve for new managers, and improve and reinforce the habits of experienced ones with their new people management platform software.
Fellow has raised $6.5 million in seed funding, from investors including Inovia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Garage Capital and a number of angels. The funding announcement comes alongside the announcement of their first customers, including Shopify (disclosure: I worked at Shopify when Fellow was implemented and was an early tester of this product, which is why I can can actually speak to how it works for users).
The Fellow platform is essentially a way to help team leads interact with their reports, and vice versa. It’s a feedback tool that you can use to collect insight on your team from across the company; it includes meeting supplemental suggestions and templates for one-on-ones, and even provides helpful suggestions like recommending you have a one-on-one when you haven’t in a while; and it all lives in the cloud, with integrations for other key workplace software like Slack that help it integrate with your existing flow.
Fellow co-founder and CEO Aydin Mirzaee and his co-founding team have previous experience building companies: They founded Fluidware, a survey software company, in 2008 and then sold it to SurveyMonkey in 2014. In growing the team to over 100 people, Mirzaee says they realized where there were gaps, both in his leadership team’s knowledge and in available solutions on the market.
“Starting the last company, we were in our early 20s, and like the way that we used to learn different practices was by using software, like if you use the Salesforce, and you know nothing about sales, you’ll learn some things about sales,” Mirzaee told me in an interview. “If you don’t know about marketing, use Marketo, and you’ll learn some things about marketing. And you know, from our perspective, as soon as we started actually having some traction and customers and then hired some people, we just got thrown into it. So it was ‘Okay, now, I guess we’re managers.’ And then eventually we became managers of managers.”
Mirzaee and his team then wondered why a tool like Salesforce or Marketo didn’t exist for management. “Why is it that when you get promoted to become a manager, there isn’t an equivalent tool to help you with that?” he said.
Concept in hand, Fellow set out to build its software, and what it came up with is a smartly designed, user-friendly platform that is accessible to anyone regardless of technical expertise or experience with management practice and training. I can attest to this first-hand, since I was a first-time manager using Fellow to lead a team during my time at Shopify – part of the beta testing process that helped develop the product into something that’s ready for broader release. I was not alone in my relative lack of management knowledge, Mirzaee said, and that’s part of why they saw a clear need for this product.
“The more we did research, the more we figured out that obviously, managers are really important,” he explained. “70% of customer engagements are due to managers, for instance. And when people leave companies, they tend to leave the manager, not the company. The more we dug into it the more it was clear that there truly was this management problem – management crisis almost, and that nobody really had built a great tool for managers and their teams like.”
Fellow’s tool is flexible enough to work with specific management methodologies like setting SMART goals or OKRs for team members, and managers can use pre-set templates or build their own for things like setting meeting talking points, or gathering feedback from the colleagues of their reports.
Right now, Fellow is live with a number of clients including Shoify, Vidyard, Tulip, North and more, and it’s adding new clients who sign up on a case-by-case basis, but increasing the pace at which it onboard new customers. Mirzaee explained that it hopes to open sign ups entirely later this year.
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Fungible raises $200 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund to help companies handle increasingly massive amounts of data
Fungible, a startup that wants to help data centers cope with the increasingly massive amounts of data produced by new technologies, has raised a $200 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners and its existing investors. As part of the round, SoftBank Investment Advisers senior managing partner Deep Nishar will join Fungible’s board of directors.
Founded in 2015, Fungible now counts about 200 employees and has raised more than $300 million in total funding. Its other investors include Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital and Walden Riverwood Ventures. Its new capital will be used to speed up product development. The company’s founders, CEO Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet, say Fungible will release more information later this year about when its data processing units will be available and their on-boarding process, which they say will not require clients to change their existing applications, networking or server design.
Sindu previously founded Juniper Networks, where he held roles as chief scientist and CEO. Serlet was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple before leaving in 2011 and founding Upthere, a storage startup that was acquired by Western Digital in 2017. Sindu and Serlet describe Fungible’s objective as pivoting data centers from a “compute-centric” model to a data-centric one. While the company is often asked if they consider Intel and Nvidia competitors, they say Fungible Data Processing Units (DPU) complement tech, including central and graphics processing units, from other chip makers.
Sindhu describes Fungible’s DPUs as a new building block in data center infrastructure, allowing them to handle larger amounts of data more efficiently and also potentially enabling new kinds of applications. Its DPUs are fully programmable and connect with standard IPs over Ethernet local area networks and local buses, like the PCI Express, that in turn connect to CPUs, GPUs and storage. Placed between the two, the DPUs act like a “super-charged data traffic controller,” performing computations offloaded by the CPUs and GPUs, as well as converting the IP connection into high-speed data center fabric.
This better prepares data centers for the enormous amounts of data generated by new technology, including self-driving cars, and industries such as personalized healthcare, financial services, cloud gaming, agriculture, call centers and manufacturing, says Sindu.
In a press statement, Nishar said “As the global data explosion and AI revolution unfold, global computing, storage and networking infrastructure are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Fungible’s products enable data centers to leverage their existing hardware infrastructure and benefit from these new technology paradigms. We look forward to partnering with the company’s visionary and accomplished management team as they power the next generation of data centers.”
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Cathay Innovation leads Laiye’s $35M round to bet on Chinese enterprise IT
For many years, the boom and bust of China’s tech landscape have centered around consumer-facing products. As this space gets filled by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and more recently Didi Chuxing, Meituan Dianping, and ByteDance, entrepreneurs and investors are shifting attention to business applications.
One startup making waves in China’s enterprise software market is four-year-old Laiye, which just raised a $35 million Series B round led by cross-border venture capital firm Cathay Innovation. Existing backers Wu Capital, a family fund, and Lightspeed China Partners, whose founding partner James Mi has been investing in every round of Laiye since Pre-A, also participated in this Series B.
The deal came on the heels of Laiye’s merger with Chinese company Awesome Technology, a team that’s spent the last 18 years developing Robotic Process Automation, a term for technology that lets organizations offload repetitive tasks like customer service onto machines. With this marriage, Laiye officially launched its RPA product UiBot to compete in the nascent and fast-growing market for streamlining workflow.
“There was a wave of B2C [business-to-consumer] in China, and now we believe enterprise software is about to grow rapidly,” Denis Barrier, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cathay Innovation, told TechCrunch over a phone interview.
Since launching in January, UiBot has collected some 300,000 downloads and 6,000 registered enterprise users. Its clients include major names such as Nike, Walmart, Wyeth, China Mobile, Ctrip and more.
Guanchun Wang, chairman and CEO of Laiye, believes there are synergies between AI-enabled chatbots and RPA solutions, as the combination allows business clients “to build bots with both brains and hands so as to significantly improve operational efficiency and reduce labor costs,” he said.
When it comes to market size, Barrier believes RPA in China will be a new area of growth. For one, Chinese enterprises, with a shorter history than those found in developed economies, are less hampered by legacy systems, which makes it “faster and easier to set up new corporate software,” the investor observed. There’s also a lot more data being produced in China given the population of organizations, which could give Chinese RPA a competitive advantage.
“You need data to train the machine. The more data you have, the better your algorithms become provided you also have the right data scientists as in China,” Barrier added.
However, the investor warned that the exact timing of RPA adoption by people and customers is always not certain, even though the product is ready.
Laiye said it will use the proceeds to recruit talents for research and development as well as sales of its RPA products. The startup will also work on growing its AI capabilities beyond natural language processing, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, in addition to accelerating commercialization of its robotic solutions across industries.
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Denver and Providence are next up for Verizon’s 5G rollout
There’s going to be a point in the not so distant future when the addition of new 5G cities won’t be news. After several years of hype, however, we’re still not quite there. The 5G picture is set to be quite different by year’s end, but for now, the big network war is one of inches.
Verizon (our boss’s boss’s boss) is flipping the switch in Denver today. The mile-high city is going ultra wideband this week, followed by Providence, Rhode Island on Monday July 1.
As for the devices that can actually access those speeds — that, too, is fairly limited. The list currently includes the LG V50, the Moto Z (plus 5G mod) and Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. That scant three puts the company in contention for most 5G handsets at the moment.
The addition of Providence and Denver brings the list up to four, along with Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon is promising a full 30 cities by year’s end. The carrier says subscribers can expect spreads to top out at around 1.5 Gbps, with average download speeds at around 450 Mbps.
Coverage will be consented in specific neighborhoods from the sound of it, meaning handsets will likely jump back and forth between 5G and LTE. Here are the specifics on that,
In Denver, Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in areas of Highlands, South of 37th between Tejon and Navajo Streets. Coverage can also be found throughout LoDo and around Coors Field. Businesses and consumers will also have 5G Ultra Wideband service in the Central Business District around popular landmarks like the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Sculpture Park, and outside Paramount Theatre. Areas of Capitol Hill and Northern Sections of The Denver Tech Center will also have Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service.
In Providence, Verizon business and consumer customers will initially see 5G Ultra Wideband service in parts of College Hill, Federal Hill, Mt. Hope, and around landmarks like Brown University (Erickson Athletic Complex, Wriston Quadrangle), Rhode Island School of Design and Providence College.
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Amperity update gives customers more control over Customer Data Platform
The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give customers more control over the platform.
Chris Jones, chief product officer at Amperity, says this is an important step for the startup. “If you think about the evolution of our company, we started with an idea that turned into a [Marketing Data Platform], which was the engine that powered all of that, but that engine was largely operated by our delivery team. We’re now putting the power of that engine into the customers’ hands and giving them the full access to that,” Jones explained.
That is giving customers — which include Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom and The Gap — the power to control how the software works in the context of their companies, rather than using a black box approach where you have to use the software as delivered. He says that customers want the ability to start using the system to gain insights on their own.
One of the primary pieces in the newest version of Amperity to allow them to do that is Stitch, a tool that lets users pull together all of the interactions from a customer in a single view — ingesting the data, sorting, deduplicating it and delivering a list of all the interactions a brand has had with a given customer. From there, they can use the new Customer 360 visualization to get a more graphical view of the data.
Amperity Stitch Screenshot: Amperity.
Jones says companies can use this data to help different groups within a company, whether marketing, sales or service, understand the customer better before or during an interaction. For example, a marketer can segment the data in a very granular way to find all of the regular customers who aren’t part of the company loyalty program, and deliver them an email listing all of the benefits of joining.
Amperity launched in 2016, and has raised $37 million across two rounds. Its most recent funding came in 2017, a $28 million investment led by Tiger Global Management, according to Crunchbase data.
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Volkswagen launches WeShare all-electric car sharing service
Making good on plans revealed last year to debut an EV-exclusive car sharing service, Volkswagen is actually launching its fleet for customers – debuting WeShare, a new shared service similar to Car2Go or GM’s Maven, but featuring only all-electric vehicles. Initially, WeShare will be available only in Berlin, where it’s launching today with 1,500 Volkswagen e-Golf cars making up the on-demand rental fleet.
The plan is to add 500 more cars to the available population by early next year, specifically the e-up! electric city company car, and then it’ll also play host to the brand new ID.3 fully electric car when that’s officially launched. VW is still targeting the middle of next year for a street date for that vehicle, which is part of its all-new ID line of vehicles designed from the ground-up based on its next-generation electric vehicle platform. In terms of new geographies, WeShare will look to launch In Prague (in partnership with VW Group sub-brand Skoda) and also in Hamburg, both some time in 2020.
WeShare has a coverage area that includes the Berlin city centre and a little bit beyond the Ringbahn train line that encircles it. The cars are available in a “free-floating” arrangement, meaning they’ll be free to pickup and park wherever public parking is available. This one-way model, which is the one used by competitor Car2go, is distinct from the round-trip style rentals preferred by Zipcar, for instance. It’s more convenient for customers, but more of a headache for operators, who have to worry about ensuring cars remain in the rental zone and are parked appropriately and legally.
WeShare will also take responsibility for recharging the vehicles as needed, and will do so using the public charging network that’s available in Berlin, but later on it will seek to incentive actual users of the system to charge up when vehicles need it.
Car sharing, especially one-way, has had a hit-and-miss track record to date. Car2go shuttered operations in Toronto, for instance, due to incompatibility with city operations regarding parking in the case of Toronto. VW notes in a release that in Berlin, however, the number of car sharing users has grown from 180,000 people in 2010 to 2.46 million in early 2019.
Volkswagen also owns and operates a fully-electric ridesharing service called MOIA, which has built its own fit-for-purpose vehicle and which currently operates in Hamburg and Hanover. Last year, VW said the two mobility service operations, which offer very different service models, will work together in future.
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Jewelry startup AUrate raises $13M
AUrate, a startup selling gold jewelry directly to consumers, announced today that it has raised $13 million in Series A funding.
The company’s co-founders Bouchra Ezzahraoui and Sophie Kahn said that AUrate’s prices range from $50 to $3,000, but they’re really aiming for what Ezzahraoui called “this new market sweet spot” of $300 to $500. And while that’s not exactly cheap, she said customers are getting a piece of fine jewelry made from real gold, which would normally be priced at $1,200 or more.
The jewelry is produced by local partners in New York City, and the gold comes from sustainable sources. Kahn also said while fine jewelry has traditionally been created “by men for women,” she designs AUrate’s pieces, and she’s “always looking for a balance between bold and feminine, which represents our women.”
In addition to selling jewelry online, AUrate also operates two brick-and-mortar stores in New York, with a third under construction in Washington, D.C. And it introduced something called Curate, where the company will send up to five recommended pieces to customers, which they can try at home with no commitment.
Founded in 2015, AUrate says its online revenue has been growing consistently by 400 percent every year, while its brick-and-mortar retail business has been doubling. Also noteworthy: 40 percent of its customers return for additional purchases, and 90 percent of customers are women.
The new funding was led by Michael Platt’s Bluecrest Capital, with participation from Point King Capital, Arab Angel Fund and Drake Management.
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Skubana raises $5.4M for its e-commerce operations software
Skubana, a startup promising to help e-commerce business manage what can be a dizzying array of logistical challenges, is announcing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Defy Partners, with participation from Advancit Capital and FJ Labs. Early Skubana backer Brian Lee — who co-founded The Honest Company, ShoeDazzle and LegalZoom, and is also involved as a Defy Sage — is joining Skubana’s board of directors.
“When I first launched Shoedazzle and The Honest Company, one of our primary challenges was understanding how our products performed across channels,” Lee said in a statement. “Skubana solves a core problem that thousands of brands face and no other competitor solves well.”
CEO Chad Rubin said these were issues he faced when he started his own e-commerce business, Crucial Vacuum, a decade ago. In fact, Rubin’s co-founder and CTO DJ Kunovac (who was working at McKesson health IT) recalled visiting Rubin’s warehouse and saying, “What you’re experiencing right now is effectively where healthcare was a decade or two ago.”
The problem, Kunovac argued, is that there was separate software and systems for every part of the process. What was needed was a “horizontal platform of commerce.”
So with Skubana, Rubin and Kunovac have built a software platform that handles shipping, inventory management, restocking and more. The main thing Skubana doesn’t handle is the creating the actual online storefront and shopping cart. Instead, it’s built to take care of everything that a business needs to do once those orders start coming in.
As Rubin put it, “If Shopify is a city, then we’re everything underneath the ground.”
By bringing all the data together from various sales channels and applying and machine learning, the company says it can improve profitability and reduce issues like selling more product that you have in the inventory. There’s also an app store to integrate Skubana with other systems.
“We’re completely replacing these siloed, fragmented pieces of software,” Rubin said.
Brands already using the software include Bird Rides, Valvoline, and Deathwish Coffee. Kunovac noted that Skubana isn’t “entry-level software” — when brands sign up to use it, they’ve usually a growing a commerce business, which is when “the laws of physics have started to take over.” In other words: “They come to us from pain.”
With the new funding, Skubana says it will double its size in the next 18 months, build a number of new products and continue to invest in its app store ecosystem.
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