Companies

Bitmovin, the online video software and infrastructure company founded by two of the creators of the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors Atomico, Constantia New Business, Dawn Capital, and Y Combinator.

The company says the new round of funding will be used to scale its product R&D, field engineering and sales teams worldwide — with the aim being to expand its global customer base of TV streaming providers, internet companies and social media companies. The Series B brings total funding for the 2013-founded company and Y Combinator alumnus to $43 million.

“Bitmovin came about as a spin-off from research we did together at the the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria. During our PhDs we co-created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, which is used by YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc. amongst many others today, and which is used in total for more than 50% of the peak internet traffic,” says Bitmovin CEO Stefan Lederer, who founded the company with CTO Christopher Müller. “The research evolved into the company, with the help of angel investors including senior people at Cisco, Netflix, Accenture, Drupal and DropBox”.

Two years after Bitmovin turned from academic research into a commercial entity, the startup went through Y Combinator as a member of the summer 2015 cohort, which Lederer says was perfect timing. “We also won our first U.S. customers at the same time, which then made the move to California a much easier transition to make. Y Combinator really helped us as founders that started from a technical background. They helped us refine our go-to-market strategy and make products out of the technology that we had created”.

Today the company has offices in Austria, London, New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. The Bitmovin CEO says there is more to come following this round as the explosion of high quality online video content shows no signs of slowing.

The Bitmovin platform — broadly consisting of video compression, playback and analytics APIs — feeds into a growing trend that is seeing consumers expect online video to match the quality and user experience of Netflix and Amazon’s video streaming services. In turn, companies are finding that building an in-house solution can be prohibitively expensive and is prone to becoming obsolete as new codecs come onboard and older video infrastructure technology becomes obsolete.

“Our technology makes it possible to get high quality video to audiences wherever they are and whatever device they may be using – levelling the playing field with traditional media owners and broadcasters,” he explains. “The focus is really on efficiency and performance, making video load faster, stop buffering, increase quality, and reduce the amount of bandwidth one needs to see high quality video.

“We are different from the existing vendors as we are deeply developer and API focussed, with a passion for innovation and disruptive technologies. That’s our background, we are engineers, and we like to build the best products. Thus we’ve been the first ones in many new technologies on the market, setting the bar on performance and efficiency of video streaming”.

On the technology side, recent Bitmovin announcements include the ability to use AI to encode videos more effectively (learning, scene-by-scene how each video is treated so the next one is handled more quickly) and a new video player that can reduce the load time on a typical HTML page by a second.

“We’re also proud to support a new royalty-free codec called AV1, which came out last week (backed by Apple, Bitmovin, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, amongst others). It shifts the tectonic plates in video because it’s the first time that online video innovation will be possible without making payments to a pool of incumbent, traditional media and consumer electronics companies. It helps opens the playing field to internet companies to, potentially, take more of the lead in video entertainment. It also means more predictability as companies will not be affected by changes in patent pools,” says Lederer.

To that end, the Bitmovin founder says customers include Sling, Periscope, The New York Times, ProSiebenSat.1, Red Bull Media House, FuboTV, RTL and iflix. “We are getting a lot of interest in the market, with a lot of new customers. Just last year we had a revenue growth of 3.5x, and we expect similar growth this year, which is great, but at the same time we want to make sure we continue to provide the best service and products to our customers. So we invest heavily in our engineering, solution and support teams, to maintain our DNA as an engineering and developer-first company,” he adds.

from TechCrunch

The future of artificial intelligence (AI), the technology that is seen as potentially impacting almost every industry on the planet, is widely acknowledged to be a war between tech firms in America and China.

In a notable side-note to that battle, China now has the world’s highest-valued AI startup after SenseTime, a company founded in 2014, announced a $600 million Series C investment round. A source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch that the round values the company at over $4.5 billion, while it is also raising an extension to this round. That marks a hefty increase on the company’s most recent $1.5 billion valuation when it raised a $410 million Series B last year.

SenseTime CEO Li Xu said the company plans to use the capital to expand its presence overseas and “widen the scope for more industrial application of AI.”

Beyond the high figures involved — the round is a record fundraising for an AI company worldwide — SenseTime’s investment efforts are notable because of the names that have backed it.

Principally that’s Alibaba, the $429 billion e-commerce giant, which led this Series C round and is reportedly now SenseTime’s largest single investor, according to Bloomberg.

Beyond that, U.S. chipmaker giant Qualcomm signed up last year — seemingly as an early participant in this round — while Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek and China’s largest electronics retailer Suning, which has taken investment from Alibaba, entered the round as new backers. Indeed, Suning’s push to for its store of the future, which was started by that Alibaba investment, uses SenseTime to power its facial recognition payment at staff-less checkouts and also for customer analysis using big data systems.

“SenseTime is doing pioneering work in artificial intelligence. We are especially impressed by their R&D capabilities in deep learning and visual computing. Our business at Alibaba is already seeing tangible benefits from our investments in AI and we are committed to further investment,” said Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman.

SenseTime said it has more than 400 customers across a range of verticals including fintech, automotive, fintech, smartphones, smart city development and more that include Honda, Nvidia, China’s UnionPay, Weibo, China Merchants Bank, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi.

Perhaps its most visible partner is the Chinese government, which uses its systems for its national surveillance system. SenseTime process data captured by China’s 170 million CCTV cameras and newer systems which include smart glasses worn by police offers on the street.

China has placed vast emphasis on tech development, with AI one of its key flagposts.

A government program aims to make the country the world leader in AI technology by 2030, the New York Times reported, by which time it is estimated that the industry could be worth some $150 billion per year. SenseTime’s continued development fees directly into that ambition.

“AI is really changing every profession and every industry. There’s almost nothing that won’t be touched by AI,” investor Kai-Fu Lee, formerly the head of Google in China, said at a TechCrunch event back in 2016.

Even two years ago, the potential was evident, with Lee explaining that teaching, medicine and healthcare were obvious areas for disruption.

Perhaps the main difference between the state of AI development in the U.S. and China is that, in America, much of the technology is being developed in big tech firms like Amazon and Google. In China, however, companies like SenseTime and its rival Megvii (which develops the Face++ platform) are independent entities that operate with the financial backing of giants like Alibaba.

from TechCrunch

Lego Mindstorms have paved the way for many programmable toys. And Austrian startup Robo Wunderkind is building a new kind of Lego-like programmable kit. The startup first launched on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage and just raised $1.2 million (€1 million) from SOSV, Austrian Federal Promotional Bank and multiple business angels.

Compared to many programmable toys out there, Robo Wunderkind is still a Lego-like building kit. This is key as too many toys forget that it’s fun to build something with a few bricks.

Robo Wunderkind also has special blocks to turn your dumb robot into a connected one. In addition to the usual sensors, such as proximity sensors, motion detectors and light sensors, the company also has some more sophisticated ones. You can put a tiny camera in your construction, use an IR blaster and receiver and program a tiny LED screen.

But the best part is that Robo Wunderkind also sells Lego adapters so that you can put together a sophisticated robot that uses both Lego bricks and Robo Wunderkind modules.

The company has two different apps in the store. The first one called Robo Live lets you control your robot in real time. The other one Robo Code has a brand new user interface and now detects the blocks you’re currently using.

Robo Code is where Robo Wunderkind shines because you can put together simple algorithms by arranging virtual blocks in the iPad app. It’s a good way to introduce a kid to conditional statements and loops.

You won’t build a robot as sophisticated as a robot built using Lego Mindstorms. But Robo Wunderkind seems more accessible and good way to try robotics before switching to Arduino and Raspberry Pi when your kid grows up.

The company successfully raised a little less than $250,000 on Kickstarter back in 2015. You can now buy a starter kit for $250. Advanced and professional kits will also be available soon.

from TechCrunch

Fans of Uber in Southeast Asia will have a little more time to continue using the app after Grab, the rival that is acquiring Uber’s business in the region, agreed to extend the life of the app until April 15 while Singapore’s competition commission reviews the merger deal.

Grab had originally intended to close the Uber app by April 8, but that has been delayed by one week following a request from the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS) while it continues to assess the implications of the deal.

Last week, the CCCS said it has “reasonable grounds” to suspect that the deal may fall foul of section 54 of Singapore’s Competition Act. The organization issued an Interim Measures Directions (IMD) to Uber and Grab — the first of its kind in Singapore — which instructed both parties to “maintain pre-transaction independent pricing, pricing policies and product options,” hence the extension of life for Uber’s app.

Grab said it had provided an alternative proposal “which takes into account our role in Singapore’s vibrant point-to-point transport industry and how Grab serves commuters and drivers,” which the CCCS confirmed that it is reviewing.

A Grab spokesperson declined to discuss the details of the proposal with TechCrunch.

At this point it is unclear whether the Uber app will get another extension. Assuming that the CCCS doesn’t come to a conclusion within the next week and the IMD remains, then Uber may live on a little longer in Southeast Asia . But, if the commission is ready to move on, then the April 15 close will happen as scheduled.

Here’s the key segment of concern to the commission:

About the Section 54 Prohibition under the Competition Act & Merger Procedures

Section 54 of the Act prohibits mergers that have resulted, or may be expected to result, in a substantial lessening of competition in Singapore.

CCCS is generally of the view that competition concerns are unlikely to arise in a merger situation unless:

The merged entity has/will have a market share of 40% or more; or
The merged entity has/will have a market share of between 20% to 40% and the post-merger combined market share of the three largest firms is 70% or more.

One major factor is how Grab’s business is viewed. The commision defines the space not as ride-hailing — where Grab would appear to hold a significantly dominant position by acquiring Uber’s business — but instead as “chauffeured personal point-to-point transport passenger and booking services.”

In that respect, taxi companies in Singapore — which allow booking by SMS and phone call, and also offer ride-hailing apps in some cases — may be considered competition which might water down Grab’s market share. Likewise, Grab’s case may be helped by Singapore carpooling service Ryde’s plan to add private car services in an effort to fill some of the gap post-Uber.

Here’s Grab statement in full:

Grab continues to engage closely with the CCCS. We’ve had productive discussions on our alternative proposals, which more appropriately address the CCCS’ objectives during this interim period, and which takes into account our role in Singapore’s vibrant point-to-point transport industry and how Grab serves commuters and drivers. Together with the CCCS and Uber, we’ve agreed that the Uber app will run for another week until 15 April, while the CCCS considers Grab’s proposal. We hope the CCCS will complete its review in an expeditious manner, so that we can continue competing with incumbent transport companies and with new entrants. We will continue working with the CCCS and other relevant agencies to ensure a pro-business and pro-innovation environment, so that Singapore consumers can benefit from new and improved services.

In the meantime, the Grab app operates as per normal. The extension also gives Uber drivers more time to sign up on alternative platforms. Grab has helped thousands of former Uber drivers sign up to the Grab platform and will continue to provide support to those who are interested, as well as to obtain their PDVL.

from TechCrunch

Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck, made famously after hackers made off with more than $400 million in digital token NEM, has been acquired.

The company announced today (in Japanese) that Tokyo-based online brokerage Monex Group will buy it in full. The transaction will see Coincheck become a wholly owned subsidiary of Monex.

The deal is a reaction of the NEM hack, with Coincheck recognizing that it needs to strengthen its management system and organization as a whole. That’s in direct response to Japan’s Financial Services Agency, which requested that the exchange make changes in the wake of the January hack — which saw Coincheck reimburse affected users.

Japan is the world’s first market to regulate cryptocurrencies, and the country has given its approval to over 26 exchanges that operate there, both locally and international. The Coincheck incident seems to serve as a wakeup call, however, and authorities clamped down on six others who were told to beef up their organizations to prevent more scandals or security issues. Added that, a number of regulated exchanges have announced plans to team up to create a self-regulatory body to add further scrutiny.

from TechCrunch

Coinbase has launched a new fund called Coinbase Ventures to invest in early-stage cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. In a blog post, Coinbase head of corporate and business development Emilie Choi said that the fund’s goal is to strengthen the sector.

“At least in the beginning, our goal is simply helping the most compelling companies in the space flourish,” she wrote. “This means we don’t have the strategic requirement of formalizing partner relationships with such companies, as some corporate venture programs do. Our focus is on building strong relationships and helping spur the development of the ecosystem.”

This includes investing in companies that may potentially compete with Coinbase because “it’s in everyone’s interest to see the ecosystem innovate,” Choi added. She also said the fund will keep an eye on founders who have worked for Coinbase and “enthusiastically invest in ideas from our own alumni network.”

One potential benefit of helping other cryptocurrency and blockchain companies grow is lending more stability to the sector, which is currently under scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and considered risky by many investors. In an interview on CNBC’s “Fast Money,” Coinbase chief operating officer Asiff Hirji said that as more mature investors take an interest in cryptocurrency, that will “dampen volatility to some extent.”

There’s been “tremendous take up on the fund, well beyond anything we were expecting,” he added and that it “confirmed what we thought, that there is actually more demand on the investor side than on the trader side.” While Coinbase doesn’t have current plans to add more cryptocurrencies to its exchange, investing in promising startups will help it find promising tokens, Hirji said.

from TechCrunch

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

Procurement isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but for large businesses, it’s an area where inefficiencies can quickly affect the bottom line. Simply getting a complete view of all of the products and services that a company buys is a challenge in itself, though, which in turn makes it hard to find savings, ensure compliance with company policy or government regulations or detect potential fraud. Suplari wants to change this by bringing its AI systems to bear on this problem.

The company today announced that it has raised a $10.3 million Series A round led by Shasta Ventures. Existing investors Madrona Ventures and Amplify Partners also joined this round, as well as new investors Two Sigma Ventures and Workday Ventures.

“Suplari uses advanced artificial intelligence on top of existing enterprise systems to proactively uncover the highest-value opportunities to pursue and empower the CFO or Chief Procurement Officer to unlock savings and profit that can be invested in growth, innovation, and their people,” said Suplari CEO and co-founder Nikesh Parekh in today’s announcement.

The company’s cloud-based service allows businesses to analyze all of their procurement data across platforms and formats. This data can include contracts, purchasing data, product usage information and data from corporate credit card accounts.

A number of Fortune 1000 customers have already signed up for the service and Supplari argues that it has helped its customers save software licensing fees by 33 percent and consolidate $200 million in professional service and temporary labor suppliers.

from TechCrunch