Apple today introduced a new version of its Apple Watch, the anticipated Apple Watch Series 8, which replaces the prior Series 7 model. The big additions to this upgraded version include a new temperature sensor focused on women’s health, a crash detection feature, and a new low power mode option.

The temperature sensor is a timely arrival given the overturning of Roe v. Wade. With this feature, women can track their ovulation as a retrospective estimate, Apple says. This feature takes advantage of the Series 8’s two-sensor design. The new watch includes one temperature sensor on the back crystal near your skin and another just under the display. This design is meant to minimize bias from the outside environment, the company noted.

Overnight, the Series 8 Watch will monitor body temperate every 5 seconds and can detect changes as small as one degree Celcius. These temperature recordings are saved in the Health app, where users can view their nighttime baseline shifts in body temperatures, which can help to predict ovulation. The data is also encrypted on-device for privacy and can’t be accessed without a user’s passcode, Touch ID or face ID.

Another new feature with this updated device is the Crash Detection feature, which will be able to identify when users are in a severe crash crash. Similar to a service like OnStar, the feature can automatically connect you with emergency services, provide your location, and notify your Emergency Contacts.

The company said this feature relies on two new motion sensors and an improved three-axis gyroscope as well as the high G-force accelerometer. Apple says the accelerometer is capable of measuring up to 256 G’s allowing the device to detect the extreme impacts of a crash. And it samples motion four times faster at over 3000 times a second, so it can sense the precise moment of impact. The feature’s algorithm, meanwhile, was trained on over 1 million hours of real-world driving and crash data.

Other features include support for international roaming, all-day 18-hour battery life, and a new low-power mode that gives you up to 36 hours of battery life on a full charge. But the low power mode doesn’t fully limit the watch’s usability — you’ll still be able to use features like activity tracking and fault detection, while temporarily disabling other features like the always-on display and auto workout detection.

The Series 8 is available starting today in Midnight, Starlight, Silver, and Product Red. It will start at $399 for the GPS version and $499 for cellular.

An SE model, with the same chip at the Series 8 was also announced. It’s available in Silver, Midnight, and Starlight starting at $249 or $299 for cellular.

Apple introduces the Apple Watch Series 8 with a temperature sensor, crash detection and more by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

On the heels of a report detailing how Twitter had once accidentally allowed a conspiracy theorist into its invite-only fact-checking program known as Birdwatch, the company is today announcing the program will expand to users across the U.S. — with a few changes. The rollout will add 1,000 more contributors to this program every week, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. But Birdwatch won’t work the same as it did before, Twitter says.

Previously, Birdwatch contributors could immediately add their fact-checks to provide additional context to tweets. Now, that privilege will have to be earned.

To become a Birdwatch contributor capable of writing “notes,” or annotations on tweets that provide further context, a person must first prove they’re capable of identifying the helpful notes written by others.

To determine this, Twitter will assign each potential contributor a “rating impact” score. This score begins at zero and must reach a “5” for a person to become a Birdwatch contributor — a metric that’s likely achievable after a week’s work, Twitter said. Users gain these points by rating Birdwatch notes that enable the note to earn the status of “Helpful” or “Not Helpful.” They lose points when their rating ends up in contrast with the note’s final status.

Image Credits: Twitter

After a person unlocks the ability to write their own Birdwatch notes, they can begin adding contributions and fact-checks. But the quality of their work could lead them to lose their contributor status once again.

Twitter will first push the user whose notes are being marked “Not Helpful” to improve — by better addressing a tweet’s claims or by fixing typos, for instance. But if they still don’t improve, they will have their writing ability locked. They’ll then need to improve their rating impact score to become a contributor again.

Image Credits: Twitter

Another key aspect is how Birdwatch’s upgraded system involves the use of what the company is referring to as its “bridging algorithm.”

This works differently from many social media algorithms, said Twitter. Often, internet algorithms will determine which content to rate higher or approve based on whether or not there’s a majority consensus — like how a post that gets more upvotes on Reddit winds up at the top of the page, for instance. Or a platform may consider posts that meet certain thresholds for engagement — a factor Facebook considers, among others, when determining which posts make it into your feed.

Twitter’s bridging algorithm, on the other hand, will instead look to find consensus across groups where there are typically differing points of view before it highlights the crowd-sourced fact-checks to other users on its platform.

“To be shown on a tweet, a note actually has to be found helpful by people who have historically disagreed in their ratings,” explained Twitter Product VP Keith Coleman, in a briefing with reporters. The idea, he says, is that if people who tend to disagree on notes both find themselves agreeing that a particular note is helpful, that increases the chance that others will also agree about the note’s importance.

“This is a novel approach. We’re not aware of other areas where this has been done before,” Coleman said.

Twitter, however, did not invent this idea. Rather, the concept arose from academic research on internet polarization, where the idea for a bridging algorithm, or bridging-based ranking, is thought to be a potential approach to create a better consensus in a world where multiple truths sometimes seem to co-exist. Today, each side argues only their “truth” is true, and the other is a lie, which has made it difficult to find agreement. The bridging algorithm looks for areas where both sides agree. Ideally, platforms would then reward behavior that “bridges divides” rather than reward posts that create further division.

In the case of Birdwatch notes, Twitter claims to have already seen an impact since switching to this new scoring system during pilot tests.

It found that people on average were 20% to 40% less likely to agree with the substance of a potentially misleading tweet after they read the note about it.

This, said Coleman, is “really significant from the perspective of changing the understanding of a topic.”

Image Credits: Twitter

What’s more, the system works to find agreement across party lines, Twitter claims. It said there’s “no statistically significant difference” on this measure between Democrats, independents and Republicans.

Of course, this begs the question as to how many Birdwatch notes will actually make an appearance in the wild if they rely on cross-aisle agreement.

After all, there aren’t two truths. There is the truth and what another side wants to present as the truth. And there are a number of people on both sides of this equation, each armed with information that others who think like them will vote up and down (or Helpful or Not Helpful, as in Birdwatch’s case). This is the problem the internet delivered — one of a system where expertise and experience are discounted in favor of a crowd where the loudest voices on digital soapboxes get the most attention.

Birdwatch believes people will come to an agreement on certain points elevated by its crowdsourced fact-checkers as it finds common ground in the basis of fact, but this is ultimately the same promise that fact-checking organizations, like Politifact or Snopes, had promised. But when the facts they uncovered were misaligned with the narrative one side was espousing, the people on the losing team just pointed to the system overall as being corrupt.

How long Birdwatch will escape a similar fate is unknown.

But Twitter says it’s not rolling out Birdwatch more broadly to help counter election misinformation. It just believes the system is now ready to scale.

Plus, the company notes Birdwatch can be used to tackle all sorts of misleading content or misinformation outside of politics — including areas like health, sports, entertainment and other random curiosities that pop up on the internet — like whether or not someone just tweeted a photo of a bat the size of a human, for example.

Also during its pilot phase, Twitter found that people are 15% to 35% less likely to like or retweet a tweet when there’s a Birdwatch note attached to it, which reduces the further amplification of potentially misleading content in general.

“This is a really encouraging sign that, in addition to informing understanding, these Birdwatch notes are also informing people’s sharing behavior,” Coleman pointed out.

Image Credits: Twitter

This isn’t the first time Twitter has tweaked its Birdwatch system. Since launching its tests, it has added prompts that encouraged contributors to cite their sources when leaving notes and made it possible for users to contribute notes under an alias to minimize potential harassment and abuse. It also added notifications that let users know how many people have read their notes.

And while it allows users across Twitter to now rate notes, those ratings don’t change the outcome of the note’s availability — only ratings by Birdwatch contributors do.

The company’s partners, including AP and Reuters, will help Twitter to review the notes’ accuracy, but this won’t determine what shows up in Birdwatch. It’s a distributed system of consensus, not a top-down effort. However, Twitter says that during the 18 months it’s been piloting this project, the notes that were marked “Helpful” were generally those the partners also found to be accurate.

In addition, the Birdwatch algorithm as well as all contributions to the system are publicly available and open sourced on GitHub for anyone to access.

Twitter says it’s been piloting Birdwatch with around 15,000 contributors, but will now begin to scale the program by adding around 1,000 more contributors every week going forward. Anyone in the U.S. can qualify, but the additions will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. The notes can be written in both English and Spanish, but so far, most have chosen to write in the former.

To fight potential bots, Birdwatch contributors will also need to have a verified phone number from a mobile operator — not a virtual number. The accounts can’t have any recent rule violations and will need to be at least six months old.

Around half the U.S. user base will also start seeing the Birdwatch notes that reached the status of “Helpful,” starting today.

Twitter said the new system is not meant to replace its own fact-check labels or misinformation policies, but rather to run in tandem.

Today, the company’s misinformation policies cover a range of topics, from civic integrity to COVID and health misinformation to manipulated media, and more.

“Beyond those, there is still a lot of content out there that’s potentially misleading,” said Coleman. A tweet could be factually true but could leave out a detail that provides further context and impact how someone understood the topic, he suggested. “There’s no policy against that — and it’s really hard to craft policies in these gray areas,” Coleman continued.

“One of the powers of Birdwatch is that it can cover any tweet, it can cover any gray area. And ultimately, it’s up to the people to decide whether the context is helpful enough to be added,” he said.

Twitter expands its crowdsourced fact-checking program ‘Birdwatch’ ahead of US midterms by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Emergency services, long run on legacy platforms, are now getting a big boost of technology, and today one of the bigger players in that space is announcing a round of funding to better target the opportunity. Carbyne, a startup that designs systems used by emergency services to handle calls for medical, public safety, transportation and other urgent needs,  building technology for emergency services, has raised $56 million — a Series C that’s coming on the heels of the company growing revenues 400% in the last year. Today, its tech is installed in emergency response services that cover some 400 million people and handle some 150 million 911 calls annually.

Amir Elichai, Carbyne’s founder and CEO, said in an interview with TechCrunch that the company is targeting (and is on track) to cover 1 billion people by 2024.

“With this new funding our main investment aims are to expand in the U.S., establish a solid partner program to target the opportunity globally we don’t sell directly, and to put more investment in R&D,” he said.

The target is to build more tools to make those working in emergency contact centers smarter and more effective, and ideally less stressed in their jobs. “There is a lot of innovation to be done to improve sentiment analysis, trauma detection and more. Now that more data is coming in, how can [that be used] to help with stress? I’m talking both about the people calling and the people working at these centers.”

Cox Enterprises and Hanaco Growth Fund are co-leading the round with participation also from new backers Valor Equity Partners, General Global Capital, TalC, and Sandiip Bhammer; and previous backers Founders Fund, FinTLV, Elsted Capital Partners, and General David Petraeus, best known perhaps for being the former director of the CIA.

The funding values the company at around $400 million, a three-fold increase over its valuation in its Series B (which came in two tranches, $25 million in January 2021 and a further $20 million a few months later), said Elichai. The startup, founded in Israel — where it still runs its R&D — but now HQ’d in New York, has raised $128 million to date.

Carbyne’s rise comes on the heels of a big moment for urgent care.

Emergency services and the front-line staff running them found themselves in the spotlight with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic: in many cases they became the critical link between masses of people distancing themselves in the physical world for public health reasons, and medical and other urgent services when they were needed.

But that attention also highlighted another urgent detail: emergency services are under huge amounts of pressure, and often they are working with antiquated technology across very fragmented ecosystems. Emergency services centers — the ones that handle and triage 911 calls when they come in — alone number 6,500 in the U.S., and that’s before you consider the other partners in that chain between the individual calling for help and the people who can provide it.

Carbyne, which today is primarily active in the U.S., but potentially might enter other markets over time — effectively sits in the gap between those two poles. It’s building technology to improve the responsiveness of those emergency teams, both in terms of the data that they can use to do their work, and in terms of the way they operate overall. That can include not just more efficient tech to pass requests on to the right people, but also more data to help those in the emergency response centers provide more accurate help themselves.

Its positioning is very practical: in some cases it’s working alongside some of that legacy equipment; in others, it’s stepping in as part of larger digital transformation projects that were introduced after emergency response systems were found to be outdated and no longer fit for purpose, and so we’re seeing more organizations migrating to the cloud.

Some would argue that Covid-19 was actually just a canary in the coal mine, so to speak. There have been a number of forces that are leading perhaps to more rather than less emergency call-outs overall. Climate change is resulting in much more drastic natural disasters; crime rates and mass events that need emergency assistance only seem to be going up;  and the fact that healthcare and public services are getting more complicated to navigate directly are putting a lot more emphasis on how callouts are triaged and handled. All of this lands at the foot of emergency response centers to be ever-more sophisticated nerve centers in the middle of it all.

That’s something that the U.S. government has been trying to get on top of, with the House recently green-lighting a $10 billion package to update legacy infrastructure and implement next-generation 911 technologies like those built by Carbyne. The company has long been touting some of its very biggest deals, such as a partnership with the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, which is using Carbyne’s cloud-based APEX platform.

“Revamping legacy infrastructure in the U.S. is long overdue,” said Davis Roberson, associate vice president of strategy and investments at Cox Enterprises, in a statement. “The technology Carbyne delivers is resilient, interactive, and secure. We are looking forward to working with Carbyne to bring this critical technology to more communities and organizations.”

Carbyne snaps up $56M to speed up emergency services by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Companies like Redwood Materials (raised $792M), Li-Cycle, (Canada, raised $667.7M) and Green Li-ion (Singapore $15M) have made a name for themselves in recycling batteries. The activity of recycling existing lithium batteries remains one of the hardest nuts to crack as the world tries desperately to move to more renewable, clean, sources of energy.

Right now Lithium-ion batteries are one of the few viable solutions for decarbonizing energy, but the world has a high dependence on countries which mine Lithium, which creates undesirable environmental impact, supply chain constraints and geopolitical tensions.

tozero is a new startup out of Germany which says it is offering a novel process to recover critical materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt from lithium-ion batteries.

It’s now raised €3.5m in a Pre-Seed financing round led by Berlin-based Atlantic Labs. Verve Ventures, Possible Ventures, angels and other founders joined the round, for example former VW board member Jochem Heizmann,  as well as co-founders of Personio and FINN, among others.

With the fresh funding, tozero will build their prototype plant in Munich, Germany. This is where one-third of Europe’s lithium-ion batteries are planned to be produced by 2030.

Sarah Fleischer and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, tozero’s co-founders, also have the support and technical advise of Prof. Bernd Friedrich, a pioneer in battery recycling research at IME, RWTH Aachen University.

Tozero’s idea is to put the raw materials from batteries such as lithium, cobalt, nickel etc. back into the market as fresh battery-grade materials to battery producers. If it works, this would decrease the environmental footprint of the battery industry. One can but hope…

Just outside of Munich, a startup plans a new process to recycle Lithium-ion batteries by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

A kiryana owner with one of SnappRetail’s point-of-sale devices

The number of global retailers, department stores and supermarkets operating in Pakistan is increasing, which spells convenience for consumers, but trouble for kiryanas, or small general stores. According to a report by the State Bank of Pakistan, general stores’ growth will slow down, especially in urban centers, as large retail outlets continue to expand their networks.

One reason why kiryanas are struggling to compete is that many still run on pen-and-paper systems. Karachi-based SnappRetail wants to help them digitize all their operations, while also providing micro-loans. The Karachi-based company announced today that it has raised a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Zayn Capital’s BitRate Fund with participation from Antler and Century Oak Capital.

The funding will be used for product development, hiring and expanding SnappRetail to 1,000 customers, with the goal of covering 13 cities by the end of 2024. The startup’s CEO, Adeel Rasheed, told TechCrunch that there are 900,000 grocery retailers in Pakistan and it is targeting 300,000 retailers that contribute 50% of grocery transaction volume.

SnappRetail’s products includes point-of-sale (POS) devices and an end-to-end operations platform (for inventory management, stock ordering and analytics) that it says helps small retailers compete against larger ones. The platform also enables them to accept digital and card payments, and access micro credit for working capital.

SnappRetail was founded in 2021 by Rasheed, Moazzam Ali Khan, Ahsan Aziz and Moiz Ali. The team’s first startup was a retail recruitment consultancy called Resource Linked which helped 100,000 retailers hire employees. Rasheed and Khan’s previous experience include time spent working at consumer giants like Unilever and L’oreal.

Rasheed told TechCrunch that the team’s background in the retail sector led them to launch SnappRetail, since they saw that many kiryanas run on manual systems and don’t have bank accounts.

“What this essentially does is that it makes these store owners miss out on a big opportunity to use technology to gain insights out of sales data and create forecasts, improve financial management, manage inventory better and the list goes on and on,” he said.

SnappRetail monetizes by charging a monthly retail fee from its customers. It also sells retail sales data to large consumer goods manufacturers. Rasheed said that as the company signs up more retailers, it will launch more monetization channels through partnerships for products like working capital loans, B2B aggregation and card payments.

Another startup that is digitizing retail in Pakistan is Bazaar, which announced a $70 million raise earlier this year. When asked how SnappRetail differentiates from Bazaar, Rasheed said that “Bazaar is an app-based B2B platform. We, on the other hand, are deploying a hardware hosted micro-enterprise system in the shop which helps the retailer digitize their core store operations. SnappRetail is more like Square in the USA but for the grocery retail segment and more like Jiomart in India.”

In a statement, Zayn BitRate Fund co-founder and general partner Faisal Aftab said, “Being a proven concept globally, there is no doubt SnappRetail has the right approach to solving the essential problem of the retailer. We were particularly impressed by the experience and maturity this founding team brings to the table, hitting the right balance between hypergrowth and managing the burn.”

SnappRetail helps Pakistan’s kiryanas compete against supermarkets by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Hamburg-based Localyze is gearing up to launch in North America in the coming months — powered by a fresh raise of $35 million in Series B funding that’s being announced today, a little over a year after it disclosed a $12M Series A.

The Series B is led by US VC fund, General Catalyst. Other investors in the round include Visionaries Club, Web Summit Fund and Frontline Ventures, along with Job van der Voort (CEO of Remote) and the founding team at Taxdoo.

Localyze’s valuation is not being disclosed — but we understand it’s a middle range, nine-figure sum.

The Y Combinator-backed startup — which was only founded back in 2018 — has quickly gained traction for a b2b SaaS platform aimed at employers seeking immigration and relocation logistics support. The startup offers admin automation and digital case management tools (plus some human support, of course) to take the strain out of hiring international talent or managing cross-border staff moves.

Targeting the talent war

Localyze says it’s responding to rising demand for increased workplace mobility and working abroad among younger generations — and the ever fierce war for talent suggests employers that are willing but able to facilitate such moves might have the chance to gain a march on less accommodating competitors.

It also points to the increase in multinational companies as helping to drive global employee mobility. While the pandemic effect that gave a huge boost to flexible and remote working has certainly lingered — even if some firms are trying to push ‘back to the office’ mandates.

“I think a lot of companies right now try to find some sort of middle ground where they don’t say you can work in every country worldwide,” suggests CEO and co-founder Hanna Asmussen, discussing recent trends in employee mobility it’s been seeing. “What we’ve seen with our customer base is that they try to find a middle ground where they say these are the ten countries where we have an office or a hub or whatever and then they allow employee to choose one of those.

“Because the work itself is location independent so it doesn’t matter if you work in your office in Berlin or in Madrid or in Lisbon so they actually have more and more of those offers where you can actually temporarily work from abroad where you still have some of the administration work — especially if you’re a non-European citizen. And that’s something that we’re seeing quite a lot in Europe and that’s also going to grow worldwide because a lot of companies naturally have offices [in multiple countries]… So I think actually the middle ground will be an employer being the enabler of also offering employers the chance to work abroad so actually that’s why I think COVID-19 is actually an acceleration of the trend.”

She points to a collaboration it has had for around a year with Remote, a platform for hiring distributed employees (whose CEO is also an investor in this Series B) — which involves Localyze taking care of some of the immigration work linked to Remote-powered hires in EMEA.

“This is super interesting and I think that’s just the biggest proof point of how well those trends fits together,” she suggests.

Growth spurt

When we last chatted to Localyze they were reporting 120+ customers. That’s now grown more than 3x to well over 400, per Asmussen, with revenue also up 6x since last year. Over this time the startup has expanded into 10 markets across Europe.

And while early adopters of the platform are mostly tech startups — Localyze names checks the likes of Pleo, Wefox, and Remote being among its user roster — Asmussen says it has been succeeding with a marketing push to “more traditional companies”. (Though she confirms uptake is still dominated by tech firms — saying maybe around a quarter of customers at this point are “non-tech, non-startup”.)

“We have a tonne of companies in the engineering space, more traditional retail,” she tells TechCrunch. “The next stage would be more global companies — or either European companies that scale to the US or vice versa.

“And then we now start having conversations with the really big global companies. The plan is really that by 2025 we [will] have a coverage of 50 markets globally and we have all the global hubs covered and can serve the really big companies — because I think that’s where the big volume of employees moving across the world is.”

“Long term I do think that the war for talent now is pretty much in every sector so that’s something where also for us now knowing that the same product works in other areas also really broadens the targeting that we have,” she adds.

Localyze also has its sights on expanding into Asia, too, as it shoots to onboard global firms — and is planning to add its first countries in the region in 2023 too.

“In the next two years we’ll try to get as much global expansion as possible — because, in terms of customers, typically the next scale of customer they are already in at least 10-15 different countries so I think the US is already getting us to the next stage but then also targeting the first markets in APAC — probably from mid next year onwards, if everything goes right. That would be the plan.”

North American launch

In the nearer term, as Localyze gears up for its US (and Canada) launch, Asmussen says two of the three co-founders will be splitting their time between Europe and the US as they work on building up a local customer network on the other side of the pond for at least the early part of next year — likely being based in New York.

The US launch itself doesn’t have a fixed date yet but she suggests January 2023 is most likely.

To prepare the ground there, Localyze recently bought a San Francisco-based HR firm, called TruePlan — which was selling a headcount planning product — but purely as an acquihire to beef up its UX and UI smarts as it seeks to polish the look and feel of its platform for the American market, so a chunk of the Series B funding is going into product dev.

“It was kind of a perfect fit in terms of what we needed,” she says of the acquihire. “We knew that now we wanted to double down on product even more — they have some amazing engineers and also on the design side.

“I think the US — and US customers — care more about UX and UI than Europe. I think they also have a different standard… So I think there we knew we had to make a bigger push. I think about two-thirds of the term are on the R&D side and also we got a full US go-to-market team and they sold to HR — and similar target group to what we would do initially — and so it kind of was a perfect fit.”

“Initially it was slightly scary to do that, kind of a week after we closed the Series B — but right now I’m super happy that we did it,” Asmussen adds.

Relocation rivalry

On the competitive front, she says there are differences in different regions. In Europe it’s typically going up against relocation agencies — which combine the relocation and immigration piece — whereas, in the US, she notes there’s tended to be more of a split between those two but also there’s more startup competition to contend with (such as startups focused on relocation support services).

“In the US there have been a couple of companies — Bridge US, they focus more on the software part for HR and then work with immigration lawyers, so they don’t automate that much already on the immigration piece which is what we do,” she suggests — while emphasizing that keeping the immigration side in-house is a differentiator for Localyze’s approach.

Another US immigration rival she mentions is LegalPad — which was acquired by Deel this summer, aka the remote hiring unicorn.

While in Europe she points to veteran Estonia-based startup Jobbatical — which has refocused on relocation in recent years.

“I do think you need to have control over the [immigration] process to ensure certain quality,” she argues, fleshing out how it sees its product standing out. “And also to really reach scale you need to put as much as possible into the product and to really try to focus on a product experience — so one part of the funding is going to overall expansion but the second big chunk is really for the product piece because I think, long term, that’s the only way we can really differentiate ourselves.”

But she agrees the next growth phase will “definitely” entail more competition — adding: “That will be interesting for us.”

Asked whether she sees any reason to be concerned about post-pandemic ‘return to the office’ mandates she says she’s not worried.

“I do think everyone will have to settle on a middle ground [on remote working],” she predicts. “Companies that are really strict about it will have some kind of negative impact.”

Localyze, a SaaS for staff relocation, gets $35M as it gears up for US launch by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

A lot of important data gets lost along the sales pipeline because sales teams use multiple tools, including email, Zoom and WhatsApp, to talk with buyers. Nektar.ai wants to solve the problem of data leakage with its sales productivity platform, which helps SaaS revenue teams manage information across different channels by integrating with different apps and delivering key information to the most convenient collaboration tool, like Slack. Nektar.ai announced today that it is exiting stealth mode after two years, and launching the platform for general availability.

Co-founder and CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya told TechCrunch that Nektar.ai’s capabilities are especially relevant now with the tech downturn, where layoffs, cost cuts and budget freezes mean that companies are laser-focused on productivity. Nektar.ai is meant to fill gaps and data leakage left by CRM tools with its no-code solution, which captures revenue activity data from email, calendar, chat and social channels like LinkedIn across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Vijayvergiya said there are multiple business intelligence tools, like Tableau and Looker, and revenue intelligence and forecasting solutions, including Gong and Clari, but all of these tools rely on CRM data. When a sales team’s CRM is missing key revenue data because of poor user adoption, disconnected systems and siloed teams, that means their analytics are flawed.

He added that poor user adoption of CRMs happens for two main reasons. The first is that sales teams are often too busy to update their day’s work in a CRM. “A B2B salesperson’s day is packed with countless follow-ups, endless meetings, research, discovery, demo, navigating the buying committee, handling competition and doing internal reviews,” Vijayvergiya said, all revenue-generating activities that are important for their quotas. The second reason is that CRMs often have outdated user interfaces, giving sales reps even less incentive to update them.

Nektar.ai stops CRM data leakages by integrating with sales representatives’ inboxes, calendars, meetings (including Zoom and Google Meet), chat (typically Slack) and social media (LinkedIn), and aggregating buyer contacts and sales activities. Vijayvergiya said Nektar.ai’s “capture and sync” accuracy is 95% and all revenue data across the customer lifecycle is added back to a CRM.

“Nektar plugs the CRM data leakage without a user lifting their finger. We basically eliminate the need for user adoption and give all the time back to salespeople to go and sell while relieving their administrative burden,” said Vijayvergiya. The increased visibility into the sales process of different salespeople also means that teams can better understand what sales tactics work best.

TechCrunch last covered Nektar.ai in August 2021, when it raised a seed round of $6 million led by B Capital Group, bringing its total raised to $8.1 million. Its other investors include 3One4 Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Insignia Ventures. During stealth mode, Nektar.ai, which has 32 employees, worked with early customers like Lily.ai, MoEngage and Observe.ai, and said that they saw 30% to 35% pipeline growth and a 18% to 22% increase in deal velocity, because their CRMs were unified with significantly more buyer contacts and sales activity data.

In a statement, Lily.ai senior vice president Pete Lee said “It’s hard to know where to spend your time when you’re not sure if what you’re looking at is accurate. Nektar keeps the data up-to-date and surfaces insights into actual selling time, and inbound vs. outbound activity.”

Nektar.ai exits stealth mode to plug CRM data leakages by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

A new report examing the impact of Apple’s privacy feature, App Tracking Transparency, indicates Apple’s ads business appears to have financially benefitted as a result of the feature’s launch. Now over a year old, App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, reached mass adoption in June 2021, allowing for a comparative year-over-year analysis of the post-ATT mobile ads landscape, which finds how Apple has benefitted from the privacy update.

According to a review by the performance insights platform InMobi’s Appsumer, Apple’s Search Ads business has now joined the Facebook-Google advertising duopoly after growing its adoption by 4 percentage points to reach 94.8% year-over-year, while Facebook’s adoption dropped 3% to 82.8%.

Image Credits: InMobi’s Appsumer

Facebook, or Meta as it’s now called, has long argued that Apple’s ATT would cut into its ad revenues. It has continued to update investors on the “headwinds” ATT is having on its own ability to monetize through advertising — an impact the social media company had estimated would reach $10 billion in 2022, though other analyses put that figure even higher.

Appsumer’s report takes a deeper look into mobile ad spend through an examination of over 100 different consumer apps, where the median spend of its customers hovers around $354,000 per month. The total sample of the annual spend examined in this report is over $500 million and is focused exclusively on advertisers in the North American and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) regions, the firm said.

Notably, the report pointed out that Apple’s Search Ads business had historically lagged behind Facebook and Google’s ads business in terms of channel adoption, at around 75%. But in the post-ATT ads market, Apple’s footprint has grown significantly, allowing it a seat at the table alongside Facebook and Google.

Image Credits: InMobi’s Appsumer

In addition to the growing advertiser adoption of Apple’s Search Ads, the report also found Apple’s business grew its share-of-wallet by 5 percentage points, to reach a 15% share while Facebook’s share-of-wallet dropped 4 percentage points to 28% from Q1 2021 through Q2 2022.

Over the period analyzed, Apple’s Search Ads saw steady gains in terms of share-of-wallet, peaking at 16% in Q4 2021 before being again squeezed in the first half of 2022, as Facebook recovered. Overall, Apple gained 5 percentage points during this time. Facebook’s share-of-wallet was far more volatile, however, starting at 32%, dropping to 24% in Q4 2021, then growing to 28% in Q2 2022 — an indication of how Facebook was struggling with ATT’s rollout.

Image Credits: InMobi’s Appsumer

Google’s share-of-wallet remained more stable as it sees less impact from ATT, the report noted, given the majority of its spend is on the Android platform.

The new report also examined ATT’s impact on other tech companies, like Snap (Snapchat) and TikTok.

It found that TikTok was ahead of Snap in both advertiser adoption and share-of-wallet, though in the past it had been behind Snap on these fronts. However, TikTok’s advertiser adoption dropped nearly 7 percentage points year-over-year to 43.2% while its share-of-wallet remained steady at around 3%. Snap’s advertiser adoption, meanwhile, declined three percentage points year-over-year to 32.7%, after bouncing back from a low of 25.4% in Q1 2022. Its share-of-wallet, meanwhile, was cut in half from 4% to 2%, during this period.

Snap this past week announced layoffs, cutting 20% of staff following an internal announcement it would miss its revenue goals for Q2 2022.

In addition, the report noted that TikTok’s ads business is still new and sees many advertisers in the process of testing the platform to see if it meets their needs. Only some are finding success, so far.

The report arrives amid rumors that Apple could be considering the launch of its own DSP (demand-side platform), which would allow it to increase its Search Ads’ share-of-wallet further by leveraging its first-party data for targeting and measurement. The company also recently expanded its App Store ads from Search to also include listing on the Today tab as well as to individual app pages, giving it more ad slots to sell.

One year later, Apple’s privacy changes helped boost its own ads business, report finds by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Once upon a time, reaching a $1 billion valuation was a Big Deal. But the shine that a so-called unicorn valuation conferred on a startup eroded as more and more private companies reached the threshold — often with less and less to back it up.

TechCrunch, where the term “unicorn” was born, noted the dilution of the denomination by working to collect notes instead on startups that had reached a $100 million revenue run rate, often measured in the form of annual recurring revenue, or ARR.

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That project was continued by a venture capital firm, dubbing startups that reached the nine-figure revenue mark “centaurs,” for obvious reasons. The refocus was useful, as there was more to learn from startups that reached $100 million in revenue than those that were awarded $1 billion in valuation.

But what about former startups that reach 10 figures of revenue? What can we learn from them?

Friends & Family Capital (multi-stage, mostly focused on companies with eight-figure revenue growth at 80% or more) ran an interesting analysis of private companies that sought to find out. Friends & Family compiled its findings into a report that I recently digested. TechCrunch also spoke with John Fogelsong and Colin Anderson from the firm about what they learned from the data.

The result is a series of notes about startups that don’t stop at $10 million or $50 million worth of revenue before they sell to some larger firm. Here’s how the biggest private-market companies got there.

Where winners spend

What comes after unicorns and centaurs? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Somehow, we all became livestreamers during the pandemic, even if it just meant rearranging our office shelves for a better Zoom background. But the pandemic was also a boon for those catering to clients with slightly more advanced needs, such as those who needed dedicated hardware, be that fancy streaming lights, capture cards or entire live production setups. Atem, Elgato and company probably never saw as many searchers on their websites as during the middle of 2020. Another player in this field is YoloLiv, which offers both hardware and software tools for creating livestreaming productions. The company recently launched a number of interesting software updates and sent us its YoloBox Pro to give it a try.

Image Credits: YoloLiv

What makes the YoloLiv boxes stand out is that they are standalone devices that you can use to run a live production with multiple cameras, all without needing a dedicated desktop or laptop to stream.

You can basically think of the YoloBoxes as very thick Android tablets (and they do, in fact, run Android). The Pro version is the flagship model, with an 8-inch screen, three HDMI inputs for bringing in camera feeds, a USB port for connecting a webcam and an SD card reader for bringing in pre-recorded video and saving your recording. There’s also a line in port for bringing in audio and a USB-A port that lets you use the device as a webcam and connect it to a computer and an HDMI out port for a dedicated monitor. To connect the Box to the internet, there’s an Ethernet port for wired connections and Wi-Fi, and there’s even support for LTE connections.

The system runs on a Qualcomm 660 chip and dedicated media encoders, and in my testing, all of that works just as advertised, with up to 60 frames per second.

Image Credits: YoloLiv

The company also offers the 7-inch YoloBox with two HDMI inputs and one USB port for a webcam, but without the ability to use the entire unit as a webcam. The newest member of the family is the 5.5-inch YoloBox Mini, with just one HDMI port and one USB port for adding a webcam. That makes the potential use cases for this a bit limited, but unlike the standard non-Pro YoloBox, you can use it as a webcam.  Most likely, that’s because both the Pro and Mini use Qualcomm’s 660, while the YoloBox uses the less powerful 625 chipset.

The company is also about to release a new box — the Instream — for streamers on Instagram and TikTok, with a focus on vertical video.

As somebody who typically uses OBS or Restream Studio for producing livestreams, moving to the YoloBox took a bit of getting used to. But I can definitely see the appeal of the YoloBox. Setup takes a few minutes. Connecting cameras is a plug-and-play affair — and once you’ve entered your YouTube, Facebook or Twitch credentials, you’re good to go. If you want to get fancy, you can build your own picture-in-picture, side-by-side and split views and easily switch back and forth between them during your show.

Image Credits: YoloLiv

One thing that impressed me is that with every software release during my testing phase, the company launched useful new features. Most recently — and most importantly for somebody who livestreams interviews or podcast recordings — you can now invite people to your shows.

However, if you use the device as a webcam, one thing you have to keep in mind is that there is a slight delay in processing all of the video feeds. We’re talking about maybe half a second, but that’s enough to make conversations harder, and if you don’t feed your audio through the YoloBox but through your computer, it’ll be out of sync. This isn’t the most likely use case for these devices, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Where the device shines is when you use it to produce a live event. Setting up different views is easy and you simply switch using the touch screen. You can set up lower thirds or any other text on the screen and case it in and out as needed, assign names to presenters, etc. There’s a scoreboard, too, for when you’re streaming your school’s football games. Of course, there are also built-in countdown timers and virtually every other feature you would expect. Writing your lower thirds on the touch screen gets a bit old after a while and I’d like to see more features that would make it easier to recycle them from stream to stream, but that’s a minor issue.

A few days ago, YoloLiv launched version 2.0 of the software package for the Pro, which adds a couple of features that I missed while using the device. The most important of those, at least for me, was the ability to copy, reorder and prioritize overlays, and for those who use it to stream sports (or e-sports), there’s now support for instant replays.

Unsurprisingly, all of this takes a fair bit of energy. The YoloBox Pro is powered by a 10,000 mAh battery, which the company says should last about three hours. I got closer to a bit over two hours in my tests, but I was also trying lots of features at the same time. For some features, including adding guests, YoloLiv recommends that you don’t use an external webcam but only the HDMI inputs, and in my experience, that’s correct. The webcam seems to need quite a bit more compute power, and some of these new features do push the device to its limits.

Still, I’ve been impressed by how the company is obviously listening to user feedback and improves the device with every update.

There is clearly a space for a device like this. At almost $1,300, you’re either a very dedicated amateur or maybe a nonprofit that doesn’t need a larger setup, but if you’re good with the number of inputs, I can’t really think of another easily portable solution like this (unless you want to bring a laptop and switcher and a lot more gear). I’m sure professionals will always prefer the hardware controls of an ATEM Mini Pro from Blackmagic (or its larger brethren). But as an all-in-one device, the YoloBox Pro doesn’t really have a lot of competition right now.

The YoloBox Pro is a one-stop shop for your live video productions by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

One of Slack’s main strengths has always been the ability to complete a set of tasks without having to move between multiple applications. DocuSign introduced electronic signature integration inside Slack at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Today, the company announced you can handle the entire contract lifecycle without leaving Slack.

“With the CLM (contract lifecycle management) for Slack integration, you can navigate the full agreement processes — like redlining, reviews and approvals — with DocuSign’s leading CLM solution all from within Slack, and with colleagues and customers alike,” the company explained in a blog post announcing the new capabilities.

During the initial throes of the COVID crisis in 2020, as employees were forced to work from home, it became critical to move as much work as possible into a digital context. As we now move increasingly into a hybrid work world, being able to move documents through an approval process without hard copies, and without constantly shifting between applications, has tremendous utility.

“In today’s hybrid work environment, it’s critical to be able to do business as quickly and as efficiently as possible, streamlining where possible and minimizing the number of apps and tools that stakeholders need to navigate to get deals done,” the company wrote in the blog post. DocuSign is achieving that by integrating each step in the contract signing process right inside Slack, eliminating the need to check various other communications channels and programs to see where the contract is in the workflow.

DocuSign has been looking at various ways of integrating the signing process into the SaaS tools people are using most. This builds on the company’s announcement earlier this year about document signing in Zoom, another application that exploded in popularity during the height of the pandemic lockdown.

According to data from Deloitte, DocuSign is the clear market leader in eSignatures with 75% share. Yet in spite of this DocuSign stock has taken a beating this year down a whopping 65% to this point.

Applications in the metaverse often feel like more of a marketing gimmick than something that a critical mass of consumers would use, let alone pay for. But turn to the enterprise, and there appears to be a very lucrative opportunity that’s well into finding traction. Today, one of the early movers in building solutions for that market is announcing a round of funding to double down on the opportunity.

Varjo, which builds hardware and integrated software for “professional grade” virtual and augmented reality for industrial and other enterprise applications, has raised $40 million, a Series D that it will be using both to continue R&D for its headsets, as well as to delve further into software applications and tools for the Varjo Reality Cloud, its own streaming platform that it launched earlier this year.

The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland — founded and run by longtime veterans from Nokia cast asunder when that company, once a leading smartphone and mobile maker, went into a tailspin last decade — and its backers in this round include a number of big investors out of the region.

They include EQT Ventures, Atomico, strategic backer Volvo Car Tech Fund, Lifeline Ventures, and Tesi, the Finnish government VC and PE fund; with new backers Mirabaud and Foxconn also participating. Varjo describes the latter two as strategic: it’s not clear how the Swiss finance and banking giant is working with Varjo, but Foxconn is being tapped to help manufacture its devices, CEO Timo Toikkanen said in an interview.

Varjo is not disclosing valuation, but data from PitchBook estimates that its last round in 2020 valued it at $146 million and Toikkanen (who used to lead all of Nokia mobile phones business before and after it was acquired by Microsoft) noted that the new valuation is “very positive.”

In a hardware landscape that is dominated by big tech companies — particularly in VR hardware — Varjo is notable for being an independent player, and not one that’s prone to gobbling lots of cash to stay that way: it’s only raised around $150 million since being founded in 2016. Toikkanen declined to say whether Varjo has been approached by others for acquisition, but given that Nokia background, I’d hazard to say that he and others on the team understand first-hand the value of remaining a smaller company when it comes to innovation.

“We are very fond of what we do at this size,” he said. “There are great benefits to independence. We are fast moving and we have the ability to respond to customer needs.”

Perhaps the independence has also lent the company a greater degree of focus. A number of players in the area of XR have been focusing on headsets and applications for consumers, and some would argue that the quality of those efforts has been variable: Meta was roundly ridiculed when Mark Zuckerberg provided a preview its Horizon Worlds expansion; but others are making efforts to improve the experience.

And there are also a number of companies that have also put their money on the B2B opportunity (they include Meta building enterprise applications, HP, and ByteDance-owned Pico), although even in that area, some like Spatial have pivoted away to other aspects of the “metaverse.”

Within that spectrum, Varjo is among those that took a position early on that the first adopters (and perhaps the main ones?) of XR products would be enterprise customers, and it has stuck to it.

”Consumer and corporation expectations towards metaverse are globally high. To meet these expectations, both technology that is easy to use and accurate as well as high-quality software and content are needed. Varjo’s tech – namely, the new XR streaming platform ’Varjo Reality Cloud’ in combination with the company’s XR-3, VR-3 and Aero products – enables professional, fully virtual work in various sectors, anytime and anywhere,” said Keith Bonnici, investment director at Tesi, in a statement. “This then promotes global remote work, boosting efficiency and decreasing CO2 emissions from work travel.”

In terms of its products, Varjo’s focus is on producing premium, business-critical services and devices (read: expensive, but for a customer that is less sensitive on pricing), and to take an approach that virtual and augmented reality would go hand-in-hand as mixed reality. Toikkanen believes that prescience has been integral to its success.

“We have never been a ‘hype’ company,” he said in his understated, Finnish clip. “We have been very consistent in saying that the entry point from the beginning is mixed reality. Eventually everything has worked out to be built that way. We also said that the ultimate incarnation would need to be as good as real life. Pixelated holographic would never be good enough.”

The company currently makes three different headsets — the XR-3, the VR-3 and the Aero, ranging in prices respectively from about $6,500 to $1,500 with additional costs for software subscriptions to use with them (which appear to start at around $1,500 annually), as well as a separate development environments for its Reality Cloud and another next-generation product it calls Teleport that is still in alpha.

Its focus these days is on applications in areas like design and manufacturing, engineering, education, and healthcare, and in addition to Volvo, its customers include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Aston Martin, Kia — in all, about 25% of the Fortune 100, the company said — as well as “various departments across the United States and European Governments.”

With found Urho Konttori, another Nokia alum, on board as Varjo’s CTO, the startup also owns seven patent families related to XR.

“Varjo is very intellectual property-protection oriented,” Toikkanen said, noting that the company has been approached by other tech companies to license that IP, but that it has yet to develop that business. “Today the focus is on building it into our own products and services. That is the way you can can get access.”