French startup Exotec Solutions raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million) from Iris Capital with existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Breega also participating.
The startup has built an automated robot called the Skypods to optimize e-commerce warehouses. It’s easy to forget about it when you click on “buy now”, but there are a ton of people walking through endless aisles of products every day to pick up your next order.
Exotec is selling a complete solution to replace part of your warehouse with a robot-managed area. France’s second biggest e-commerce website Cdiscount has been experimenting with Exotec and now plans to buy more robots, racks and stations in the coming months.
Skypods are low-profile robots that can carry a standardized box and bring it back to a human operator. But the Skypods don’t just move on flat grounds. They can move up and down a rack and grab a box from the shelves.
This is the most visual part of Exotec, but designing efficient logistics software for automated warehouse solutions is arguably even harder. The startup promises few errors and the ability to add more racks and robots without having to stop your fulfillment center.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to build and sell a thousand robots by 2019. It’s clear that e-commerce companies won’t switch to Exotec overnight. Many companies face huge spikes of demand during the holiday season for instance. So they need to make sure that it can handle a lot of pickups during the most demanding times.
Other companies, such as CommonSense Robotics focus on smaller warehouses and groceries with a warehouse-as-a-service approach. Overall, automated fulfillment centers seem like the future. Warehouses are constrained and predictable environments. And this is perfect for automated systems. Now let’s see who is going to grab more market share in this space.
When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .
While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.
In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.
Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.
At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:
Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.
Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.
Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.
Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.
Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.
Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.
Amino has raised a big Series C round of funding — $45 million from GV, Venrock, Union Square Ventures, Goodwater Capital and Time Warner Investments, with Hearst Ventures joining as a new investor.
The company started out with apps focused a handful of topics like K-pop, anime and Doctor Who, but it later added the ability for anyone to launch a new community in the main Amino app, and there are now more than 2.5 million communities.
Of course, some of these communities are more active than others, and there’s some overlap between them — but Max Sebela, who’s general manager for Amino’s English-language apps, said there’s less than you might think, because “each interest is actually a universe of micro interest.” For example, there might be one community focused on sharing strategy and tactics around the video game Overwatch, while another might revolve around sharing Overwatch fan art.
Ultimately, Sebela said it’s up to the founders and leaders of each community to decide what the community wants to focus on, and which product features they want to use to enable that. Meanwhile, Anderson said Amino is constantly tweaking its algorithms to make sure it’s surfacing the best communities for each user.
“Instead of one big, blue ocean, we provide a million lakes and help you find the exact right one,” he added.
Perhaps even more impressive than the number of communities is the amount of time the average user spends in Amino — more than 70 minutes per day.
One of the initial inspirations for the startup was a real-world anime convention, and Amino getting closer to that experience with the addition of features like live voice and video chat, as well as the screening room, where you can watch videos with other users.
During our conversation, Sebela opened up one of the K-Pop communities on his phone and was quickly able to listen in on a chat room where multiple users were singing along together. (Sadly, we didn’t join the singing.)
“The technology not super unique,” Anderson acknowledged. “What makes it really special is, I can voice chat with my friends on a lot of idfferent networks, but here I can hop in and join a voice chat with 10 Harry Potter fans who I may not know in my real life.”
While these features are already live, Anderson said they’ve been “downplayed” while Amino tests them out and works out the kinks. Now it’s ready to put them “front-and-center” in the app.
It’s also been testing out ways to make money, which Anderson said will occur primarily through a subscription service — though apparently it’s too early for him to offer more details.
Swedish telehealth startup Kry has closed a $66 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel, Creandum, and Project A.
It raised a $22.8M Series A round just over a year ago, bringing its total raised since being founded back in 2014 to around $92M.
The new funding will be put towards market expansion, with the UK and French markets its initial targets. It also says it wants to deepen its penetration in existing markets: Sweden, Norway and Spain, and to expand its medical offering to be able to offer more services via the remote consultations.
A spokesperson for Kry also tells us it’s exploring different business models.
While the initial Kry offering requires patients to pay per video consultation this may not offer the best approach to scale the business in a market like the UK where healthcare is free at the point of use, as a result of the taxpayer funded National Health Service.
“Our goal is to offer our service to as many patients as possible. We are currently exploring different models to deliver our care and are in close discussions with different stakeholders, both public and private,” a spokesperson told us.
“Just as the business models will vary across Europe so will the price,” he added.
While consultations are conducted remotely, via the app’s video platform — with Kry’s pitch being tech-enabled convenience and increased accessibility to qualified healthcare professionals, i.e. thanks to the app-based delivery of the service — it specifies that doctors are always recruited locally in each market where it operates.
In terms of metrics, it says it’s had around 430,000 user registrations to date, and that some 400,000 “patients meetings” have been conducted so far (to be clear that’s not unique users, as it says some have been repeat consultations; and some of the 430k registrations are people who have not yet used the service).
Across its first three European markets it also says the service grew by 740% last year, and it claims it now accounts for more than 3% of all primary care doctor visits in Sweden — where it has more than 300 clinicians working in the service.
In March this year it also launched an online psychology service and says it’s now the largest provider of CBT-treatments in Sweden.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, said: “Kry offers a unique opportunity to deliver a much improved healthcare to patients across Europe and reduce the overall costs associated with primary care. Kry has already become a household name in Sweden where regulators have seen first-hand how it benefits patients and allowed Kry to become an integral part of the public healthcare system. We are excited to be working with Johannes and his team to bring Kry to the rest of Europe.”
As well as the app being the conduit for a video consultation between doctor and patient, patients must also describe in writing and input their symptoms into the app, uploading relevant pictures and responding to symptom-specific questions.
During the video call with a Kry doctor, patients may also receive prescriptions for medication, advice, referral to a specialist, or lab or home tests with a follow-up appointment — with prescribed medication and home tests able to be delivered to the patient’s home within two hours, according to the startup.
“We have users from all age groups. Our oldest patient just turned 100 years old. One big user group is families with young children but we see that usage is becoming more even over different age groups,” adds the spokesman.
There are now a number of other startups seeking to scale businesses in the video-call-a-doctor telehealth space — such as Push Doctor, in the UK, and Doctor On Demand in the US, to name two.
Metaboards, an Oxford-based startup that is developing new wireless charging technology, has secured $5 million in funding. The round is led by Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), with participation from RT Capital Management, and Woodford Investment Management. The burgeoning company will use the new funds to expand the team with the aim of bringing its patented ‘metamaterials’-based wireless charging tech to market.
Founded in 2016 by professors and published researchers from Oxford University, Metaboards is applying the use of ‘metamaterials’ to potentially create a much-better wireless charging solution that would negate some of the shortcomings of today’s tech. This will include removing the need for alignment between the charger and device, and the ability to charge multiple devices without multiple charging points.
More broadly, metamaterials are new types of materials made up of compounds such as plastics or metals that are arranged in ‘geometric structures’ that have properties not found in nature. The most extreme example could be an ‘invisibility’ cloak! However, metamaterials are a hot area of industrial research that has a plethora of more tangible applications. Metaboards thinks wireless charging is definitely one of them.
In a brief call, Metaboards CEO Nedko Ivanov, who previously led audio and haptics company Redux — which we reported was acquired by Google last year — told me the startup already has a working prototype that it will demo at the next CES and Mobile World Congress. It is also in discussions with various OEMs to explore ways to bring products to market based on the tech.
As well as negating the need for alignment, which, Ivanov notes, means that current wireless charging solutions aren’t that different to actually plugging a device into a charger, Metaboards’ solution has much better vertical reach/penetration. So, for example, rather than having to drill into a table to retro-fit a charging solution, in theory Metaboards’ technology could be placed on the underside of a table and effectively charge through it. Add in the ability to charge multiple devices on the same surface and things get interesting.
“Metaboards’ technology makes it possible to charge tablets, games consoles and controllers, computers and any other non-metal electronic device at the same time and on the same surface,” says the company. It also points to a recent report from Grand View Research that predicts that the global wireless charging market will be worth $22.25 billion by 2022.
Adds Ivanov in a statement: “This investment will help us to grow the company and extend our capabilities across all wireless power technology platforms to ensure we offer universal capabilities. We already have interest from companies looking into licensing the technology in the next six to 12 months”.
Naspers, the South Africa-based firm that famously backed Chinese giant Tencent in its infancy, is in talks to invest in Singapore-based startup Carousell, according to two sources with knowledge of discussions.
Carousell offers a mobile app that combines listings with peer-to-peer selling across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That makes it well-aligned with Naspers’ portfolio, which features some of the world’s largest classifieds services including OLX, which covers 45 countries, Letgo in the U.S. and Avito in Russia.
TechCrunch understands that Naspers is pursuing a deal with Carousell with a view to making it the firm’s key play in Southeast Asia and other parts of the APAC region.
Discussions are at a relatively early stage so it isn’t clear what percentage of the company that Naspers is seeking to acquire, although it would be a minority investment that values the Carousell business at over $500 million. The deal could be a first step towards Naspers acquiring a controlling interest in the business further down the line, one source said.
Carousell declined to respond when asked for comment.
“It is our company’s policy to neither acknowledge nor deny our involvement in any merger, acquisition or divestiture activity, nor to comment on market rumors,” Naspers told TechCrunch in a statement.
Timing of the discussions is notable since Carousell announced a $85 million investment round in May. (TechCrunch broke news of the round the previous October.) That deal — the startup’s Series C — took it to $126 million from investors to date and added big names to the Carousell cap table. EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and Singapore’s DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, took part in the Series C, which also included existing backers Rakuten Ventures, the VC linked to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia India and 500 Startups.
Carousell is highly-regarded in Singapore for being one of the first home-grown startups to show promise — its three founding members each graduated the National University of Singapore, NUS.
Aside from raising significant investor capital, it has scaled regionally it is battle against larger and better-funded e-commerce rivals Alibaba -owned Lazada and Shopee, a business from NYSE-listed Sea. In May, Quek told TechCrunch that Carousell has helped sell over 50 million items between users and it currently has over 144 million listings.
The firm remains best known for its Tencent deal, which is legendary in investment circles. Back in 2001, it bought 46.5 percent of Tencent for $32 million. Over time that was diluted to 33 percent, but it grew significantly in size as Tencent’s business took off, going on to become Asia’s first $500 billion company last November. Naspers resisted the urge to sell until March 2018 when it parted with two percent of the firm in exchange for around $9.8 billion.
Every once in a while, you meet an entrepreneur who is both fully present, but also has a head full of dreams. That was my experience meeting and hosting Alex Zhavoronkov, the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, a few weeks ago in Vienna at the Pioneers conference. There, he gave a presentation on how he is going to defeat aging using a set of deep learning AI tools, and also told me that I am going to live forever because I am young enough to benefit from the tech he is developing.
I am a huge skeptic to be frank (particularly anytime deep learning gets bandied about), but after chatting with him both before and after getting on stage, I can’t preclude the possibility that aging is something that might be within humanity’s (or at least Zhavoronkov’s) grasp to control.
That belief in the company’s mission is reflected in a set of twin announcements today. The company announced that it has received a strategic round of financing led by WuXi AppTec, a Chinese integrated R&D services platform, along with Peter Diamandis’ BOLD Capital and Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore-based Temasek. In addition, the company announced a strategic partnership with WuXi, in which Insilico’s inventions will be tested by WuXi. The terms of the round were not disclosed, but Insilico has raised $14 million previously from investors according to Crunchbase.
Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov
In order to understand the company’s technology, we need to understand a bit more about how therapeutics are developed. In the classical model used by pharmaceutical companies, scientists in an R&D lab investigate naturally-occurring molecules while searching for potential therapeutic properties. When they find a molecule that could be a candidate, they begin a series of tests to determine the treatment efficacy of the molecules (and also to receive FDA approval).
Rather than going forward through the process, Insilico works backwards. The company starts with an end objective — say stopping aging — and then uses a toolbox of deep learning algorithms to devise ideal molecules de novo. Those molecules may not exist anywhere in the world, but can be “manufactured” in the lab.
The key underlying technique for the company is what are known as GANs, or generative adversarial networks with reinforcement learning. At a high-level, GANs include a neural net “generator” that creates new products (in this case, molecules), and a discriminator that classifies the new product. Those neural nets then adapt over time in order to compete against each other more effectively.
GANs have been used to create fake photos that look almost photorealistic, but that no camera has ever taken. Zhavoronkov suggested to me that clinical patient data may one day be manufactured — providing far more data while protecting patient privacy.
While Zhavoronkov has bold dreams about conquering aging, today the company is focused more broadly on creating an inventory of new molecules that could provide new therapeutics, albeit particularly focused on longevity (here is the company’s research paper on PubMed). Under the company’s new strategic partnership, WuXi will then take those new molecules and test them for efficacy in actual clinical settings.
As the company develops its technology, Zhavoronkov wants to offer a “longevity-as-a-service” engine that could power global longevity research using deep learning. That means providing a platform for researchers to find new molecules, identify which ones might be most promising as therapeutics, and then set them up for clinical trials to be used in actual clinical practice.
While Zhavoronkov is CEO, he is first a researcher. He has published extensively on his and his team’s discoveries while also leading a lab of 52 researchers. The hope is that the basic research that the team is producing can be commercially translated into industry, and ultimately, purchased by the largest pharmaceutical giants in the world.
It may be early days, but Zhavoronkov is deeply ambitious about Insilico’s potential to halt aging. Even if those dreams are difficult to accomplish, the technology built along the way could radically change our drug pipeline, and that will provide relief for all kinds of diseases.
San Jose-based Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed $250M Series D funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, bringing its total raised to date to $410M. The enterprise software company offers a hyperconverged data platform for storing and managing all the secondary data created outside of production apps.
In a press release today it notes this is only the second time SoftBank’s gigantic Vision Fund has invested in an enterprise software company. The fund, which is almost $100BN in size — without factoring in all the planned sequels, also led an investment in enterprise messaging company Slack back in September 2017 (also a $250M round).
“Cohesity pioneered hyperconverged secondary storage as a first stepping stone on the path to a much larger transformation of enterprise infrastructure spanning public and private clouds. We believe that Cohesity’s web-scale Google-like approach, cloud-native architecture, and incredible simplicity is changing the business of IT in a fundamental way,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a supporting statement.
Also participating in the financing are Cohesity’s existing strategic investors Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, along with early investor Sequoia Capital and others.
The company says the investment will be put towards “large-scale global expansion” by selling more enterprises on the claimed cost and operational savings from consolidating multiple separate point solutions onto its hyperconverged platform. On the customer acquisition front it flags up support from its strategic investors, Cisco and HPE, to help it reach more enterprises.
Cohesity says it’s onboarded more than 200 new enterprise customers in the last two quarters — including Air Bud Entertainment, AutoNation, BC Oil and Gas Commission, Bungie, Harris Teeter, Hyatt, Kelly Services, LendingClub, Piedmont Healthcare, Schneider Electric, the San Francisco Giants, TCF Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and WestLotto — and says annual revenues grew 600% between 2016 and 2017.
In another supporting statement, CEO and founder Mohit Aron, added: “My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data — backup, test and development, analytics, and more.
“Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started.”
The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100 billion, is set to be the largest IPO raise since Alibaba went public in the U.S. in 2014. That prospect got a boost with a dose of positive financial growth despite a loss incurred by one-off payments.
The document, which was filed was an application to issue a CDRs as part of a dual-listing that would include Mainland China, showed that Xiaomi’s revenue for the quarter jumped to 34 billion RMB, or $5.3 billion. That’s compared to 114.6 billion RMB ($17.9 billion) in total sales for all of last year, according to digging from TechCrunch partner site Technode.
While Xiaomi posted a loss for the quarter, the firm actually posted a 1.038 billion RMB ($162 million) profit for the period when one-time items are excluded. Xiaomi previously registered a 43.9 billion RMB ($6.9 billion) loss in 2017 on account of issuing preferred shares to investors (54 billion RMB) but it did post a slim profit in 2016.
China is, as you’d expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. India is Xiaomi’s most successful overseas venture, having built the business to the number one smartphone firm based on market share, and Xiaomi is pledging to double down on other global areas.
Interestingly there’s no mention of expanding phone sales to the U.S., but Xiaomi has pledged to put 30 percent of its IPO towards growing its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, Russia “other regions.” Currently, it said it sells products in 74 countries, that does include the U.S. where Xiaomi sells accessories and non-phone items.
Despite its design progress, relative age as an eight-year-old company and the fact it is shooting for a $100 billion, Xiaomi left some spectators disappointed when it wheeled out a very iPhone X-looking new device earlier this month. While the company claims the Mi 8 is packed with new technology, it’s hard to look past the fact that a number of its visual designs are identical to Apple’s flagship smartphone. Xiaomi could have made a stronger statement of intent with the launch, but it will hope its financials can do the talking as it moves into the last moments of preparation before its public listing.
Those not looking at the Bitcoin markets lately will either gasp or smile. Bitcoin, down from its all time high of around $19,000, is now floating at $6,785 as of this writing. To many this means that either the Bitcoin experiment is over or, to many more, that it has just begun.
There are plenty of folks who will have been hurt by this crash. I was speaking with a Romanian entrepreneur about his friend who bought BTC on a credit card only to find that he is wildly underwater. The volatility is also frightening to folks who might have gotten in on the last run up only to find themselves back at the start. I pity the poor waiter who a friend saw making Bitcoin trades at $18,000 during his shift. I hope he sold.
But there are no signs that the cryptocurrency train is stopping. Startups around the world are all examining – and doing – ICOs. Plenty of early crypto miners and buyers still have enough cash to play around in all sorts of ways. Bitcoin naysayers like R3 are figuring out that bankers didn’t want to hear “blockchain, not bitcoin” after all once they realized that bitcoin, like their beloved equities and commodities, was just another place for them to play.
And people are still active in the market. That’s important. As this Coindesk analysis notes, the markets will be deeply volatile during this stretch and could remain so as risk-taking buyers snap up coin on the downswing.
Don’t believe me? This is the seven day trading volume for almost all of the exchanges.
Ultimately these moves make up one of the most interesting forms of intergenerational and international wealth transfer we’ve ever seen. Whereas this wealth transfer once came in the form of inheritances and joint ventures, cryptocurrencies enable an almost instantaneous partners ship between the old and young and the near and far. It’s a fascinating economic time and I doubt it will let up any time soon.
Sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down. That’s the best advice any smart person can give anyone in any market. However, the signs point less to a flatline and more to a gut-wrenching EKG full of ups and downs. The patient, however, is not dead yet.
