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TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups‘ 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator’s latest companies.
Demo days are regular affairs, but they always feature a crop of startups that could build the next tech giant, so we pay attention. Especially in the COVID-19 era, when demo days have gone virtual. Now it’s easier than ever for investors, and journalists, to tune in.
TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator’s virtual demo days, as well as regular batches from the various Techstars accelerators around the world.
But, today we’re talking favorites from 500 Startups’ latest cohort. Jonathan Shieber will take the baton first, followed by Alex Wilhelm.
Demo day standouts
- What: A new way to browse online.
- Why we like it: The browser and tab model hasn’t changed much since the days of Netscape and organizing online information is increasingly a complicated mess of a hundred tabs (at least on my browser). Stack is pitching a new way to organize information that’s more interactive, more organized and easier to visualize.
- What: Low-code A/B testing of monetization mechanics and subscriber services for apps.
- Why we like it: Helping to give app developers tools to better understand where, how and why monetization breaks down and offer tools to fix it makes Adapty a standout among this YC cohort. The app economy is still a multibillion dollar business and getting customers to stick around remains a huge problem. Anything that can help is a boon for company builders.
Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021.
The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet
Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large companies use to share content with their employees.
What makes this new platform, called Viva, any different? Well, it integrates with Microsoft’s other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Yammer, along with LinkedIn Learning and other training services, and it also includes team analytics.
In a pre-recorded video, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft is launching this because, “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. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”
The tech giants
Venmo to gain crypto, budgeting, savings and Honey integrations this year — The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory.
Google to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera — Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone.
HubSpot acquires media startup The Hustle — HubSpot says content is an increasingly important part of its business, with customers finding its products through things like YouTube videos and HubSpot Academy.
Startups, funding and venture capital
23andMe set to go public via a Virgin Group SPAC merger — The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close.
Accel backs Mexican startup Flink’s effort to bring consumer investing to Latin America — Since launching its first brokerage product in July of 2020, Flink has surpassed 1 million users and 800,000 active brokerage accounts.
Tovala, the smart oven and meal kit service, heats up with $30M more in funding — This is the second round of funding for the startup in the space of six months.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Four strategies for deep tech founders who are fundraising — Step one: Use storytelling to highlight your big vision.
Why one Databricks investor thinks the company may be undervalued — The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far.
Extra Crunch is now hiring for reporter, editor and project manager positions — Extra Crunch is about to turn two years old and we now have a lot of demanding subscribers. (We love them, of course.)
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
A growing number of startups are creating APIs to assess and offset corporate carbon emissions — It was only a matter of time before application programming interfaces came for the carbon credit offsets.
The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020 — That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019, according to data from Synergy Research Group.
China’s national blockchain network embraces global developers — Last year, an ambitious, government-backed blockchain infrastructure network launched in China.
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.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/daily-crunch-microsoft-rethinks-corporate-intranet/
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!
So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:
- Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company’s Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.
- RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That’s a lot of cash for very little dilution.
- Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company’s growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.
- Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the dating market may be in the future.
- In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion.
- Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat.
- Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times.
- And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for ecommerce automation, and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser.
- Make sure to read Natasha’s profile of the new Expectul CEO here.
- And, we closed on some Miami news.
And somehow we still have another entire day before the weeks is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020’s storms.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts
As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big mergers and beef up federal resources for antitrust enforcement. Klobuchar’s bill, the Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, seeks to address consolidation across industries, calling out “dominant digital platforms” specifically.
“While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem,” Klobuchar said. “We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate.”
Klobuchar now leads the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, a corner of Congress already signaling its interest on reform that would impact big tech.
The new bill would bolster the Clayton Antitrust Act, a 1914 bill that created a framework for the rules around competition that are still applied today. Specifically, it would amend that bill to reinterpret its standard for evaluating anti-competitive mergers, changing the language to prevent any deal that “create[s] an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition” rather than the current wording.
The aim is to catch potentially anti-competitive behavior earlier in the game — an outcome that would address the government’s current conundrum, in which federal regulators are now awkwardly reevaluating mergers that evolved into monopolistic behavior years after the fact.
The bill would also put the onus on merging companies to prove that they don’t pose a risk of reducing competition, taking that burden off of the government in specific cases. Those rules would apply to “mega-mergers” worth $5 billion or more and in which a company with 50 percent market share seeks to buy a current or potential competitor.
Klobuchar’s proposal also seeks to add a provision to the Clayton Act against conduct that puts competitors at a disadvantage — a rule that would address some of the murkier areas of anti-competitive behavior that stretch beyond outright mergers and acquisitions.
Citing lacking enforcement budgets, the bill also sets out a $300 million infusion for the Justice Department’s antitrust division and the FTC. At the FTC, that money would help create a new division within the agency for research on markets and mergers.
The bill will be co-sponsored by Senators Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey, all Democrats on the antitrust subcommittee. And while it’s a single party endeavor for now, the antitrust reform could attract support from Republicans in Congress like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who signaled his interest in antitrust changes that target large tech companies as recently as this week. Hawley also sits on the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee.
Klobuchar stops short of calling for large tech companies like Facebook and Google to be broken into their component parts, a move that has attracted some support from lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in recent years. In the midst of emerging multi-state lawsuits targeting big tech companies, the FTC announced its own antitrust case against Facebook late last year, pushing for the company to be broken up.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/klobuchar-antitrust-law-enforcement-reform-act-booker-markey/
Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks, to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the world of healthcare — specifically, to speed up the process of voice communication between entities in the fragmented U.S. healthcare industry.
Infinitus uses “voice RPA” to become the machine-generated voice that makes calls from, say, healthcare providers or pharmacies to insurance companies to go through a series of questions (directed at humans at the other end) that typically need to be answered before payments are authorized and other procedures can take place. Those conversations are then ingested into Infinitus’s platform to parse them for relevant information that is input into the right fields to trigger whatever actions need to happen as a result of the calls.
The startup is coming out of “stealth mode” today but it has been around for a couple of years already and has signed on a number of large healthcare companies as customers — for example, the wholesale drug giant AmerisourceBergen — and is in some cases contributing its technology to public health efforts around the current coronavirus pandemic, with one organization currently using it to automate a mass calling system across several states to get a better idea of vaccine availability to help connect the earliest doses with the most vulnerable groups that need them the fastest.
It made 75,000 calls on behalf of 12,000 providers in January alone.
Infinitus’ public launch is also coming with a funding kicker: it has picked up $21.4 million in Series A funding from a group of big-name investors to build the business.
The round is being co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, with Gradient Ventures (Google’s early stage AI fund), Quiet Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Tau Ventures also participating, along with individual investments from a selection of executives across the worlds of AI and big tech: Ian Goodfellow, Gokul Rajaram, Aparna Chennapragada and Qasar Younis.
Coatue is shaping up to be a huge investor in the opportunity in RPA. Earlier this week, it emerged that it co-led the latest investment in UiPath, one of the leaders in the space, having been a part of previous rounds as well.
“Coatue is proud to have led the Series A in Infinitus,” says Yanda Erlich, a general partner at Coatue. “We are big believers in the transformative power of RPA and Enterprise Automation. We believe Infinitus’ VoiceRPA solution enables healthcare organizations to automate previously costly and manual calls and faxes and empowers these organizations to see benefits from end-to-end process automation.”
The problem that Infinitus is addressing is the fact that healthcare, in particular in the privatized U.S. market, has a lot of time-consuming and often confusing red tape when it comes to getting things done. And a lot of the most immediate pain points of that process can be found in voice calls, which are the primary basis of critical communications between different entities in the ecosystem.
Voice calls are used to initiate most processes, whether it’s to obtain critical information, follow up on a form or previous communication, or pass on some data, or of course provide clearance for a payment.
There are 900 million calls of these kinds made in the U.S., with the average length of each call 35 minutes, and with the average healthcare professional who works in an administrative role to make those calls dedicating some 4.5 hours each day to being on the phone.
All of this ultimately adds to the exorbitant costs of healthcare services in the U.S. (and likely some of those inscrutable lines of fees that you might see on bills), not to mention delays in giving care. (And those volumes underscore just what a small piece Infinitus touches today.)
Founder and CEO Ankit Jain — a repeat entrepreneur and ex-Googler who held senior roles in engineering and was a founding partner at Gradient at the search giant — told TechCrunch in an interview that the idea for Infinitus first occured to him a couple of years ago, when he was still at Gradient.
“We were starting to see a lot of improvements in voice communications technology, turning text into speech and speech into text. I realised that it would soon be possible to automate phone calls where a machine could carry out a full conversation with someone.”
Indeed, around that time, Google itself had launched Duplex, a service built around the same principle, but aimed at consumers, for people to book appointments, restaurant tables and other services.
He determined that just being able to talk like a human and understand natural language wasn’t the only issue, and not even the main one, in enterprises applications like healthcare environments, which rely on specific jargon and particular scenarios that are probably less rather than more like actual human interactions.
“I thought, if someone wanted to build this for healthcare it would change it,” he said. And so he decided to do just that.
Jain said that Infinitus is using public cloud speech to text systems but the natural language processing and flows to triage and use the information gained from the conversations are built in house. The specialization of the content and interactions potentially is also one reason why Infinitus might not worry so soon about cannibalization from bigger RPA players, at least for now.
The fact that services like these — the new generation of robocalls, as it were — can sound “lifelike”, like actual humans, has been something that consumer versions have aspired to, although that hasn’t always worked out for the best. Duplex, for example, in its early days came under criticism for how it’s excellent quality might actually be deceptive, because it wasn’t clear to users they were speaking to a machine logging their responses in a data harnessing exercise. Jain notes that Infinitus is actually intentionally choosing voices that sound like bots to help make that clear to those taking the calls.
He said that this also “helps reduce the level of chatter” on the conversation and keep the person speaking focused on business.
On that front, it seems that while Infinitus works like other voice RPA services, connected up with live, human agents who can take over calls if they get tricky, that hasn’t really needed to be used.
“Today we don’t need to triage with humans because we see high enough success rates with our system,” he said.
You might wonder, why hasn’t the healthcare industry just moved past voice altogether? Surely there are ways of exchanging data between entities so that calls could become obsolete? Turns out that at least for now that isn’t something that will change quickly, Jain said.
Part of it is because the fragmentation in the market means it’s hard to implement new standards across the board, covering hundreds of insurance payers, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical groups, billing and collections organisations and more. And when it comes down to it, a phone call ends up being the easiest route for many admins who might have to typically deal with 100 different payment companies and other entities, each with a different logging mechanism. “It’s a lot of cognitive load, so it’s often easier to just pick up the phone,” Jain said.
Bringing in voiceRPA like Infinitus’s is part of that long haul to update the bigger system.
“By automating one side we are showing the other side that it can be done,” Jain said. “Right now, there are just too many players and getting them agree on one standard is a gargantuan task, so trying to winning one small piece after another is how it’s done. It should not be voice, but by the time standards bodies agree on something else, the world has moved on.”
