Month: May 2018

BrainQ, an Israel-based startup that aims to help stroke victims and those with spinal cord injuries treat their injuries with the help of a personalized electromagnetic treatment protocol, today announced that it has raised a $5.3 million funding round on top of the $3.5 million the company previously raised. The company’s investors include Qure Ventures, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.com, Norma Investments, IT-Farm and a number of angel investors, including Valtech Cardio founder and CEO Amir Gross.

When we last talked to BrainQ earlier this year, the team was working on two human clinical trials for stroke patients in Israel. At that time, the company had closed its first funding round and had also recently started to work with Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, too.

The general idea behind BrainQ is to use the patient’s brainwaves to generate a tailored treatment protocol. No AI company would be complete without data — it’s what drives these algorithms, after all — and the company says it owns one the largest Brain Computer Interface-based EEG databases for motor tasks. It’s that database that allows it to interpret the patient’s brain waves and generate its treatment protocol.

BrainQ EEG reader device

“We are on the verge of a new era where AI- based precision medicine will be used to treat neurodisorders, which do not have a sufficient solution to date,” said BrainQ CEO Yotam Drechsler in today’s announcement. “At BrainQ, we are thrilled by the opportunity to bring this vision to life in the world of neuro-recovery. In a short time, we have already achieved significant results and are looking forward to the opportunity to push our technology and expand our operations, further positioning BrainQ as a leader in the world of BCI-based precision medicine.”

As is typical for Israeli startups, the team’s background is quite impressive and includes former members of the country’s elite intelligence units and academics with a background in AI and neuroscience.

from TechCrunch

Prisma, a Berlin and San Francisco startup that is betting big on GraphQL — the data query language originally developed by Facebook to make it easier for front-end code to talk to application servers — has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.

Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins led the round, with participation from a number of angel investors, many of whom have deep roots in the developer and/or open source space, including Nick Schrock, one of the creators of GraphQL itself.

TechCrunch first learned of Kleiner’s pending investment in Prisma (formerly Graphcool) back in March, when the deal hadn’t yet closed. In a brief call yesterday, Prisma co-founder and CEO Johannes Schickling confirmed the investment and explained that the startup sought to raise from West Coast VCs and investors, rather than European VCs, who “really understand Open Source,” noting that any serious developer offering has to take a bottom up approach in order to become adopted by the wider developer community.

To that end, Schickling tells me Prisma itself has pivoted away from its narrower Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model to an Open Source one, with the core offering — dubbed “Prisma 1.0” — released as a standalone infrastructure component under an Apache 2 open source license.

The company is building what it describes as the GraphQL data layer for all databases, in recognition that modern backends typically combine and connect to multiple specialised databases e.g. Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Neo4j etc. This requires complex “mapping logic” to the underlying databases, which is precisely the heaving-lifting that Prisma has set out to solve. Prisma wants you to be able to access all of your databases in a single GraphQL query.

Schickling says the new funding will be used to bolster the team, including opening an office in San Francisco in addition to its Berlin engineering base. On the product roadmap is support for more databases. Prisma currently plugs into MySQL and Postgres, but plans to add the likes of MongoDB, Elastic, and Cassandra.

Alongside the startup’s open source product, it offers Prisma Enterprise to enable critical security workflows (compliance, access control, audit logging etc.) and Prisma Cloud for teams to collaborate and easily manage databases.

Prisma’s other seed investors include Robin Vasan (board member of HashiCorp, Couchbase, InfluxData), John Komkov (Fathom Capital), Augusto Marietti (CEO Kong), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Zeit), Spencer Kimball (CEO CockroachDB), and Nicholas Dessaigne (CEO Algolia).

from TechCrunch

AnyDesk, a startup that offers remote desktop software powered by a bespoke video codec, has scored €6.5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from angel investors, including Chris Hitchen, and previous backer Andreas Burike.

The Stuttgart, Germany-based company says it will use the injection of cash for further development of the AnyDesk product and to grow the technical and commercial teams.

“AnyDesk’s mission can be summarised as overcoming distances,” co-founder and CEO Philipp Weiser tells TechCrunch. “Today, people need to work with their teams and content just as quickly and effectively when working remotely as they do when in the office. Legacy remote desktop offerings do not enable this — they are complicated, frustrating and slow. At best, you can do a presentation or help a colleague install a printer. Some ideas are born out of frustration and we decided to re-engineer the remote desktop for today’s workplace”.

To that end, as well as modern-day apps for Windows, MacOS, various flavours of Linux/Unix, Android and iOS, the AnyDesk team has created a proprietary video codec called “DeskRT” that has been engineered especially for graphical user interfaces. It transmits 60 frames per seconds and prioritises low latency.

As a result, the startup says users generally experience high quality video and sound, and image transmission that is fast and fluid enough to forget that you are using a different computer. That’s because, unlike traditional screen sharing, AnyDesk is built for collaboration.

“We created AnyDesk so that anyone, anywhere can get their work done,” says Weiser. “More than 50 million users worldwide have downloaded AnyDesk. We have more than 7,000 business customers, including Spidercam, Amedes and Sun Chemical”.

There is a free version of AnyDesk for personal use, and various professional tiers, all the way up to large enterprise use.

Meanwhile, the AnyDesk co-founder concedes that there a number of other players in the rather crowded remote desktop software space. They include LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Splashtop, and Citrix GoTo. However, he claims AnyDesk is better than current offerings as the startup has approached the remote desktop from a “software-design focused angle” and created an architecture and a custom video codec specifically for the purpose of low latency transmission.

“Some competing products use expensive hardware for this, but this is not the case with AnyDesk. We’ve achieved superior performance in a software-only solution. This means AnyDesk provides people with the experience they’ve come to expect when consuming content. When you view a website or video on your devices, chances are you don’t think about the web browser or media player working in the background. You are focused on the content. AnyDesk works in the same way, running behind-the-scenes so you can be productive, creative and get on with your work”.

As an aside, EQT Ventures is talking up the way it discovered AnyDesk, namely via the VC firm’s “Motherbrain” AI platform. The software claims to scan the tech startup ecosystem online for specific signals related to a company’s performance. Based on these digital footprints, it then flags the most promising companies and surfaces the relevant structured and unstructured data to the EQT Ventures team.

Of course, this sort of approach isn’t unique to EQT — most VC firms of a certain size use data tracking as part of their deal discovery and evaluation, and newer VCs such as InReach Ventures and Fly Ventures make a virtue of this — but it is perhaps noteworthy nonetheless.

from TechCrunch

French startup Welcome to the Jungle is raising a funding round of $8.4 million (€7 million) from XAnge, Bpifrance and Kima Ventures, as well as existing investors Jean-Paul Guisset and Michael Benabou.

Welcome to the Jungle is taking a different approach to job recruitment. The startup isn’t going to find employees for you. Instead, Welcome to the Jungle wants to give you the tools and exposure to get enough inbound applications.

The company started by profiling hundreds of tech companies in Paris. Instead of creating a giant Excel spreadsheet, Welcome to the Jungle works with a video crew, photographers and a writing staff to produce high quality content about your company. Think about it as glossy paper articles with Condé Nast-like production budget.

All of this is pricy. Companies pay for these profiles and get their own page on Welcome to the Jungle’s website. In addition to that, Welcome to the Jungle also produces quarterly magazines for a hundred universities and a thick paper magazine once per year.

And it’s true that Welcome to the Jungle has covered a ton of companies in Paris. When you think about a company name, chances are you can find a profile on Welcome to the Jungle.

Overall, a thousand companies partnered with Welcome to the Jungle. The website now attracts 600,000 unique visitors every month. For engineers, you can now filter depending on your skill set and your technical stack.

In addition to that, the startup has been slowly ramping up its software-as-a-service recruitment platform called Welcome Kit. Imagine somebody reads about your company in Welcome to the Jungle’s magazine and then ends up on a poorly designed job page.

Welcome Kit replaces the “Jobs” link in your website’s footer. The platform lets you list positions, create application forms and track candidates. Basic features are free and you can pay for additional features and branding options.

With today’s funding round, it’s time to look further. The company now wants to expand to another country, which could be Spain. It’s going to be a slow expansion as Welcome to the Jungle needs to put together a local team in each country to create content.

from TechCrunch