Month: April 2018

Redpoint Ventures has hired Annie Kadavy as its first female general partner. She’ll be on the early stage investment team.

Kadavy has a background in venture capital, having spent several years at CRV. Most recently, she ran strategic operations at Uber’s freight division. She also has an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Kadavy said she “wanted to focus on consumer but have the ability to do a broader set of investing.” Kadavy also “wanted to join an early stage fund that had a growth fund attached to it, so you can learn from both.”

But she’ll be most focused on seed, Series A and Series B rounds. Kadavy plans to look for opportunities in the Bay Area, LA, Seattle and NYC.

In her blog post, she elaborated on her decision to join Redpoint.

“For me, joining a flat and equal partnership was important. While this may be opaque to many, let me tell you, it matters. It is the economic manifestation of how investment decisions are made, how a venture team will work collectively for you (or not), and how that team will evolve over time. This is rare and it exists at Redpoint.”

When Kadavy was at CRV, she sourced or led deals in ClassPass, Patreon, Doordash and she was on the board at Laurel and Wolf. She’s still looking to invest in companies in similar categories.

Kadavy is part of a wave of venture firms finally hiring female partners, in an industry where only 8% are women. Rebecca Kaden recently joined Union Square Ventures, Jess Lee joined Sequoia Capital, and Naomi Pilosof joined Menlo Ventures, to name a few.

There’s also AllRaise, a newly formed organization comprised of the top female venture capitalists. The group is committed to helping the best women find jobs in the industry.

Redpoint has been around since 1999 and has raised $4.1 billion across its funds, according to Crunchbase.

from TechCrunch

Careship, the German marketplace for in-home senior care, has raised €6 million in further funding. The round is led by Creandum, the European early-stage investor best known for being an early backer of Spotify, and will be used by the Berlin startup to further expand nationally.

In addition to Creandum, European ‘impact’ investor Ananda Ventures joined the round, with participation from existing backers Spark Capital, Atlantic Labs, and Axel Springer Plug and Play. Careship had previously raised €4 million, disclosed in January 2017.

Founded in 2015 by siblings Antonia and Nikolaus Albert after they could not find a suitable caregiver for their grandmother, Careship operates a marketplace for caregivers that aims to disrupt the traditional agency model. The marketplace connects families needing elderly care with access to qualified personnel using a “matchmaking algorithm” to help solve the suitability problem.

There are other value-adds, too, such as advising on insurance benefits. In Germany, elderly care is funded by a state health insurance system and Careship co-founder Antonia Albert tells me the company has a 50/50 mix of state-funded and private customers. “If you are care dependent in Germany, you are eligible to care and companionship services and get state-funded budgets for them,” she says. Careship also offers general consultation to help you choose the best care option.

Noteworthy, caregivers on the platform set their own price, similar to the U.K.’s HomeTouch. Likewise, Careship handles billing and coordinating insurances, in addition to keeping families connected and therefore remains a central point of contact and is arguably not prone to disintermediation.

As it stands, Careship is based in Berlin and the service is also available in three other major German cities as well as the area of North Rhine-Westphalia. Albert tells me the new funding will see the startup add more coverage across Germany in 2018 and that the broader aim is to go international. “[The] long-term vision is to make Careship available to as many families as possible in Europe,” she says.

Meanwhile, direct competitors are cited as traditional “ambulatory care provides” in Germany as well as other care platforms, such as Rocket Internet’s Pflegetiger, which operates a full stack not marketplace model, and care marketplace Pflegix.

from TechCrunch

The rise of chatbots and smart speaker-powered voice assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, has produced the need for specialist analytics so that developers can track how well those conversational interfaces are working. Hoping to take a chunk of this nascent market, including competing with Google’s own chatbot analytics product Chatbase, is Istanbul and San Francisco-based Botanalytics.

Previously backed by 500 Startups, the company quietly raised $1 million in seed funding late last year. The round was led by ACT Venture Partners and will be used by Botanalytics to further develop its technology.

This will include enhancing support for “voice first” platforms, and enabling business to gain actionable insights based on customer conversations, including understanding how to improve customer support across various channels. The idea is to be able to optimise voice and chatbot performance for engagement, retention and other KPIs.

As it stands, Botanalytics supports a plethora of existing platforms including all of the big names: Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Messenger, Slack, Twitter, Telegram, Kik, Twilio, Skype, Line, Microsoft Teams, WeChat and Viber.

The analytics offering spans a number of features, such as “fundamental metrics” measurement, segmenting conversations, tracking activities of a chatbot, retention of conversations, live take-over, broadcast messages and the ability to set up funnels.

The Botanalytics tech also claims to be powered by AI (presumably NLP). This makes it possible to track transcripts of any conversation — including rich media such as video, audio, location and images — and compare live conversations with historical ones.

CEO Ilker Koksal tells me the main difference with Botanalytics compared to competitors is that is it positioning itself as a broader conversational analytics play, including newer voice interfaces, and traditional customer support, not just chatbots. “We’re analyzing all conversational channels of companies,” he says.

To that end, Koksal says Botanalytics’ customers are agencies that build bots for clients and companies with various customer support channels. They include Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Ford, L’Oréal and GoPro.

from TechCrunch