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Microsoft today launched Viva, a new “employee experience platform,” or, in non-marketing terms, its new take on the intranet sites most large companies tend to offer their employees. This includes standard features like access to internal communications built on integrations with SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft tools. In addition, Viva also offers access to team analytics and an integration with LinkedIn Learning and other training content providers (including the likes of SAP SuccessFactors), as well as what Microsoft calls Viva Topics for knowledge sharing within a company.
If you’re like most employees, you know that your company spends a lot of money on internal communications and its accompanying intranet offerings — and you then promptly ignore that in order to get actual work done. But Microsoft argues that times are changing, as remote work is here to stay for many companies, even after the pandemic (hopefully) ends. Even if a small percentage of a company’s workforce remains remote or opts for a hybrid approach, those workers still need to have access to the right tools and feel like they are part of the company.
Image Credits: Microsoft
“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a pre-recorded video. “As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”
He argues that every organization will require a unified employee experience platform that supports workers from their onboarding process to collaborating with their colleagues and continuing their education within the company. Yet as employees work remotely, companies are now struggling to keep their internal culture and foster community among employees. Viva aims to fix this.
Unsurprisingly, Viva is powered by Microsoft 365 and all of the tools that come with that, as well as integrations with Microsoft Teams, the company’s flagship collaboration service, and even Yammer, the employee communication tool it acquired back in 2012 and continues to support.
There are several parts to Viva: Viva Connections for accessing company news, policies, benefits and internal communities (powered by Yammer); Viva Learning for, you guessed it, accessing learning resources; and Viva Topics, the service’s take on company-wide knowledge sharing. For the most part, that’s all standard fair in any modern intranet, whether it’s from a startup provider or an established player like Jive.
Viva Insights feels like the odd one out here, especially after Microsoft’s kerfuffle around its Productivity Score. The idea here is to give managers insights into whether their team (but not individual team members) are at risk of burnout, for example, in order to encourage them to turn off notifications or set daily priorities (a good manager, I’d hope, could do this without analytics, but here we are, in 2021). It’s also meant to help company leaders “address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends.” Sure.
Because this is Microsoft in 2021, there’s also a lot of talk about employee well-being in today’s announcement. For most employees, that means fewer meetings, more focus time and turning off notifications after work. Obviously there are technical tools to help with that, but it’s really a question of company culture and management. I’m not sure you need analytics integrated with LinkedIn’s Glint for that, but you can now have those, too.
“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and well-being so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/microsoft-launches-viva-its-new-take-on-the-old-intranet/
Genetics testing and genome research company 23andMe is set to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition corp (SPAC) VG Acquisition Corp, a vehicle set up by Richard Branson and his company Virgin Group. The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close to spend on product development, hires and other growth strategies, and will value the company at around $3.5 billion, close to the total cited by an earlier report detailing the talks leading up to this deal.
23andMe, founded in 2006 and led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has raised a total of just under $900 million to date, including an $85 million Series F round announced last December. The company was one of the first to debut at-home genetic testing for individual consumers, providing kits that people can use to find out more about their own DNA, and what it says about their potential health issue, ancestry and more.
More recently, the company has turned its massive genomic data store into an opt-in genetic research resource that is used for discovery of future therapies and treatments. It also monetizes through aggregated, anonymized sharing of the data it collects with third-parties, for research and business purposes.
The deal will include $25 million each invested into the private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction that accompanies the merger from Wojcicki and from Richard Bransons. It’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year, and the resulting company will be listed on the NYSE under the ticker “ME.”
The current SPAC craze has proved a path to an exit for a number of startups, and long-private companies like 23andMe that technically still fit our definition because of the lack of an exit event, but that have also seemed content to rely on private investors to supply their cash reserves for a long time.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/23andme-set-to-go-public-via-a-virgin-group-spac-merger/
Monkey, a financial marketplace for receivables in Latin America, has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
Quona Capital and Kinea Ventures co-led the round.
The São Paulo-based startup was founded in 2016 by a trio that includes former Citi investment banker Gustavo Müller, Bruno Oliveira (who worked in strategic planning for Telefonica) and Felipe Adorno, an ex-senior developer for Netshoes and Infracommerce.
Monkey has developed what it describes as Supply Chain Finance (SCF) programs for small and medium enterprises. So what does that mean exactly? It pairs up SMEs with large enterprises such as Brazilian petrochemical giant Petrobras and Fiat Chrysler, and banks. Through its network, the company claims that buyers can “find the best receivables in the market, suppliers get the best sales conditions, and sponsors strengthen their businesses and production chains.”
Monkey was founded on the premise that the Brazilian financial system is highly concentrated among just a few players, with little competition — a common refrain in Latin America.
“You have high rates, the spreads are crazy and it’s almost impossible for small and medium companies to access additional capital at a reasonable price,” CEO Müller told TechCrunch.
Monkey’s goal, he said, is to solve SMEs frustrations by creating “a competitive environment that brings multiple financial institutions onto Monkey’s platform to compete for the purchase of SMEs’ receivables with top tier buyers.”
Today, Monkey has 55 large companies on its platform, many of whom signed on in 2020, leading the startup to see its trading volume surge from about $187 million to $1.5 billion over the course of the year.
Jonathan Whittle, partner and co-founder of Quona Capital, said his firm — which invests in startups focused on fintech for inclusion in emerging markets — was impressed with what he described as Monkey’s “novel approach.”
By combining buyer-sanctioned marketplaces and auction-based pricing through a multi-funder platform, small and medium enterprises in Brazil have access to credit in a way that they never have before, making the cost of capital more affordable, he said.
“What we’re excited about with Monkey is how it is opening up access to Supply Chain Finance for all the suppliers of larger enterprises, not just the large and mid-sized ones that have typically had access to it,” Whittle told TechCrunch.
The startup plans to use its fresh capital to double its team of 40 in 2021, and to grow operations not only in Brazil, but across Latin America by providing the same offerings for its own clients in other countries. It also plans to use the money to improve user experience and roll out new products such as a credit card marketplace.
“We actually think that what they’re doing is fundamentally different to the way that Supply Chain Finance has been done anywhere around the globe,” Whittle said. “Typically these have been relationships between one bank and a buyer. And what Monkey is doing is kind of turning it on its head with a value proposition that we think is super strong for all three participants in the marketplace.”
Quona’s other investments in the region include Creditas, BizCapital, Neon, Contabilizei, Kovi, Konfio, Klar and ADDI.
Kinea Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on investments in the financial services and technology space. The new fund is part of one of the main alternative investment managers in Brazil, Kinea Investimentos, which was founded in 2007 in a partnership with Itaú Unibanco, and currently has US$13 billion in assets under management.
Monkey had previously raised about $1.5 million through two seed rounds.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/brazils-monkey-nabs-6m-series-a-for-financial-marketplace/
London and Barcelona based audio-as-a-service SaaS startup Aflorithmic has scooped up $1.3 million in seed funding from Crowd Media Holdings, an Australia-based company focused on influencer-based ‘social commerce’ and marketing.
It’s taking a 10% stake in Aflorithmic, per a press release, where it says the strategic investment is aimed at enabling it to offer FaceTime conversations with celebrities through “best-in-class voice cloning technology”.
Two year old Aflorithmic may not have chosen a name that trips off the tongue but it’s all about speech and audio. It’s built a platform that offers fully automated, scalable audio production by using AI-driven synthetic media, (“ethical”) voice cloning, and audio mastering — which can be delivered to people’s ears via websites, mobile apps, smart speakers and so on via its APIs.
“Text in beautiful audio out” is its pithy slogan.
Sample clips on its website illustrate the personalization element with synthesized (robot-voiced) voice overs greeting a named customer before plunging into the detail of whatever content it’s been programmed to deliver.
Some of Aflorithmic’s current customers are using its tools to create audio books for kids, for personalized narration of wellness/nutrition programs and even a robot butler concierge service for hotel guests, to name a few. Its business thesis is that demand for audio far outstrips the ability of studio-produced human-spoken voiceovers to deliver.
Hence it reckons synthesized media will be needed to plug the demand gap — serving up infinite permutations of a voice track, each one personalized to a particular customer of the brand or enterprise.
At the same time, the popularity of podcasts and live-voice streaming shows no sign of abating — speaking to the staying power of audio in a video-heavy era.
Aflorithmic’s new investor, Crowd Media Holdings, has rather more ambitious designs on what its tools can help it do — and talks about ‘completely reshaping the way consumers engage in ecommerce’.
The specific driver for its investment in Aflorithmic (aka ALFR) is a plan to blend synthesized voice with video to let fans engage in “immersive” video chats with simulated versions of their favorite celebrities.
Taking a stake in the audio startup to partner on that project helps it de-risk that plan, it said.
“ALFR brings the audio tech that will replicate a celebrity’s accent, tone and mannerisms as if the celebrity were on the other end of a call,” Crowd Media writes, noting that “the actual content” the (future) cloned celebrity will sweetly whisper to your face will be “driven by” its own AI-driven chatbot technology — based on drawing on a knowledge base of answers built up from responding to more than 180M user-submitted questions (“via text-only mediums”).
Turning all that text into soothing synthesized voice is where Aflorithmic comes in. While the video piece of the cloned celebrity plan entails 3D imaging — with the tech for that being provided by three other synthetic media firms (UK-based Forever Holdings, digital human makers Zoe01 and Uneeq).
More broadly, Crowd Media says it will be integrating Aflorithmic’s technology into other of its social commerce applications, including its AI-driven chatbot (CM8) — which is targeted at customer service use cases across sectors like marketing, education, and health sectors.
For its part, Aflorithmic says it will be using the new funding for R&D for its API audio-production engine, voice cloning, and talent acquisition.
It offers its API-based audio-as-a-service to a range of customers — noting use-cases such as “hyper-personalized newsletters and podcasts” and voice cloning for marketing applications.
It also touts a “vast” voice library for customers to choose a robot speaker. But it also lets them record a snippet of their own voice to create personalized audio content through its voice cloning AI.
“Users can compose professional-quality pieces including music and complex audio engineering, then deliver the final product to any device or platform such as websites, mobile apps, or smart speakers — all without any previous production experience,” it writes.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Timo Kunz, co-founder, and CEO at Aflorithmic, said: “We are excited to learn from Crowd’s experience in empowering companies to reach mass markets, and are pleased to accompany them as they define the future of social commerce. We believe audio creation as we know it is making way for automated, scalable, dynamic audio experiences — and companies like ours are at the forefront.”
“Synthetic audio production has a seemingly endless range of functions — the potential within marketing applications alone is mindblowing,” he added. “Imagine Kim Kardashian being a personal shopper for each of her 200M followers, or Lewis Hamilton explaining why YOU personally need the new Pirelli P Zero Rosso. All of this is just around the corner with our tech.”
Alforithmic’s other two co-founders are Peadar Coyle and Björn Ühss.
The startup’s claim of “ethical” voice cloning points to the challenges inherent for all companies working on commercial tools to power the production of synthesized media.
While a cloned celebrity might just sound like a bit of fun, there is huge potential for misuse and abuse via individual voice cloning — from phishing scams and identity theft to emotional manipulation and blackmail.
In an ethics section of its website Alforithmic offers a brief nod to the risks in “making personalized audio scalable”.
“With great innovation comes great responsibility,” it writes, adding: “We are committed to ethical, fair, transparent AI following the UK´s and European Union’s Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. All our work and voice models and algorithms are only trained on and with the full compliance and approval of the individual data owner.” (We’ve asked for more details on how it prevents misuse of the voice cloning tech.)
On the competitive front, the startup points to Descript, which raised a $30M round just last month — and acquired another voice cloning startup, Lyrebird, back in 2019 — although its tools cover both video and audio vs Alforithmic being more fully focused on automating the entire audio production process.
