Author: Thomas Crown

The upstarts of crypto aren’t just aiming to disrupt the startup status quo, some are rivaling traditional venture capital investors, too. That’s particularly evident today after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on daily trade volumes, announced a $1 billion fund to back blockchain and crypto startups.

The ‘Community Influence’ fund, which will be denominated in Binance’s BNB coin, will be aimed at nascent startups and also funds themselves, Ella Zhang — who heads the Binance Labs division — revealed today in an online web broadcast held today in Chinese. For fund of funds investments as an LP, Binance is looking to back funds with at least $100 million in capital and, of course, a focus on blockchain and crypto.

The firm will also launch a Binance Ecosystem Fund which it said will include 20 partners. A Binance spokesperson told TechCrunch that further details of both initiatives will be released soon.

Data from Coinmarketcap.com ranks Binance as the world’s most active crypto exchange, with over $5 billion of crypto traded in the past 24 hours hours at the time of writing. The company calls Hong Kong home but it is in process of relocating to Malta, where it has been welcomed by regulators after it was forced out of Japan when regulators cracked down on its business.

This isn’t Binance’s first run at investment, it has already made deals via its Labs division, which was unveiled earlier this year and is described by Zhang as a “social impact fund.” It led a $30 million investment in MobileCoin — a startup that’s advised by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal and Open Whisper Systems — and it is establishing an incubator that will nurture ideas and young projects with financial backing and mentorship.

The company revealed today that its first incubation project will be Dache Chain, a new blockchain-based ride-hailing service in China. The company is already getting hype because one co-founder is Chen Weixing, the CEO of app development startup Funcity who initially founded Kuaidi Dache, a Chinese ride-hailing startup that eventually became Didi Chuxing, the country’s dominant service that forced Uber’s exit from China.

“This project will utilize blockchain technology to redesign the relationship between the interests and power of entrepreneur, labors, consumers, investors, and organizers. Dache Chain will establish a community ecosystem with value anchoring, and it is expected to achieve a pure shared ecosystem and solve the problem of unfair distribution of productivity and wealth,” Binance said in a statement.

Binance also revealed that, besides MobileCoin, it has made investments in smart contract startup Oasis Labs, verification service Certik, and crowdfunding platform Republic.

This initiative is another example of a major crypto company using its wealth to become an investor and grow its platform through deals with younger companies. I wrote about the trend earlier this year, and since then we’ve seen some notable vehicles emerge including the Ethereum Community Fund, Ripple’s Xpring initiative and EOS-creator Block One’s $1 billion commitment, which has birthed multiple funds that cover some $600 million.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

from TechCrunch

Box announced today that it has purchased Progressly, a Redwood City startup that focuses on workflow. All 12 Progressly employees will be joining Box immediately. They did not disclose the purchase price.

If you follow Box, you probably know the company announced a workflow tool in 2016 called Box Relay along with a partnership with IBM to sell it inside large enterprises. Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box says Relay is great for well defined processes inside a company like contract management or employee on-boarding, but Box wanted to expand on that initial vision to build more complex workflows. The Progressly team will help them do that.

Patel said that the company has heard from customers, especially in larger, more complex organizations, that they need a similar level of innovation on the automation side that they’ve been getting on the content side from Box.

“One of the things that we’ve done is to continue investing in partnerships around workflow with third parties. We have actually gone out and built a product with Relay. But we wanted to continue to make sure that we have an enhancement to our internal automation engine within Box itself. And so we just made an acquisition of a company called Progressly,” Patel told TechCrunch.

That should allow Box to build workflows that not only run within Box, but ones that can integrate and intersect with external workflow engines like Pega and Nintex to build more complex automation in conjunction with the Box set of tools and services. This could involve both internal employees and external organizations and moving content through a much more sophisticated workflow than Box Relay provides.

“What we wanted to do is just make sure that we double down in the investment in workflow, given the level of appetite we’ve seen from the market for someone like Box providing a solution like this,” Patel explained.

By buying Progressly, they were able to acquihire a set of employees who have a focussed understanding of workflow and can help continue to build out that automation engine and incorporate it into the Box platform. Patel says how they could monetize all of this is still open to discussion. For now, the Progressly team is already in the fold and product announcements based on this acquisition could be coming out later this year.

Progressly was founded in 2014 and was headquarted right down the street from Box in Redwood City. The company has raised $6 million, according to data on Crunchbase.

from TechCrunch

If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings.

The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total.

The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session more engaging with the use of connected devices. You might actually remember those annoying clickers in classrooms used to answer multiple choice questions throughout a session, but it is at least one way to engage people in a room — and offering a more robust way of doing that may be something that helps making the session as a whole more productive.

Klaxoon also offers other tools like an interactive whiteboard (remember Smartboards, also in classrooms?) as well as a closed networks for meeting participants that aims to be air-gapped from a broader network so those employees can conduct a meeting in private or if the room isn’t available. All this is wrapped together with a set of analytics to help employees — or managers — better conduct meetings and generally be more productive. All this is going to be more important going forward as workplaces become more distributed, and it may be tempting to just have a virtual meeting on one screen while either working on a different one — or just messing around on the Internet.

Of course, lame meetings are a known issue — especially within larger companies. So there are multiple interpretations of ways to try to fix that problem, including Worklytics — a company that came out of Y Combinator earlier this year — that are trying to make teams more efficient in general. The idea is that if you are able to reduce the time spent in meetings that aren’t really productive, that’ll increase the output of a team in general. The goal is not to monitor teams closely, but just find ways to encourage them to spend their time more wisely. Creating a better set of productivity tools inside those meetings is one approach, and that’s what Klaxoon seems to hope is the one that plays out.

from TechCrunch