Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source Large Language Models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation, three times its valuation in December, to compete more keenly against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources. We understand […]

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Since E-bike manufacturer Ride1Up closed a $6.5 million Series A led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund, the San Diego-based company has seen steady sales growth since its launch in 2018, especially as consumers switched to ebikes during the pandemic over public transit. Indeeed, last year ebikes reportedly outsold EV and plug-in hybrid automobiles.

So it was high time we tried out one of their bikes.

While the Ride1Up Prodigy is a mid-drive electric bike at an affordable price, this belies its quality as an electric bike, even at this price point.

Most hub motor electric bikes (these have the motor in the center of a wheel) can be slightly awkward to ride because of this drive positioning. Not so with the Ride1Up, which I found had a very natural feel when riding.

Even though mid-drive bikes can be pricier, somehow the Ride1Up Prodigy has managed to come in at a relatively affordable $2,295 – an unusual price-point for this design.

With plenty of power at your disposal, via the German-made Brose TF Sprinter motor (which is incidentally, pretty quiet) you will literally fly off the mark at the lights.

A small assist can get much faster just by pushing harder on the pedals, which made me wonder if some clever algorithm was at work.

Although limited to a set 15.5 mph (25 km/h) speed by law in European zones, the bike will hit 28 mph (45 km/h) if unfettered elsewhere, and has a published 30-50 miles (50-80 km) of range.

Ride with the power on all the time and you will only get the 30 miles. But at the lower power level you could easily get to the 50 mile range, should you need it. Most people will end up in the middle, which is plenty of scope.

There is no throttle, so you must continually pedal, but this means you will end up getting more range, which is fine for a commuter or a leisure ebike like this.

Featuring hydraulic disc brakes, aluminum fenders, Selle Royal Viento saddle, rear rack, built-in LED lighting, Shimano Alivio transmission (with 9 speeds), and a handlebar display, the bike doesn’t seem to skimp on the extras.

The Ride1Up Prodigy XR, has a step-through frame and the XC version is a cross country version with a suspension fork.

Ride1Up Prodigy Tech Specs
Motor: Brose TF Sprinter mid-drive
Top speed: 28 mph (45 km/h)
Range: 30-50 miles (50-80 km)
Battery: 36V 14Ah (504Wh)
Weight: 50 lb (22.7 kg)
Load capacity: 300 lb (136 kg)
Frame: Aluminum alloy
Brakes: Dual-piston hydraulic disc brakes
Extras: Brose color display, Shimano Alivio 9-speed transmission, front and rear LED lights, included high-quality rack and fenders, kickstand
Price: In the region of $2,295

Now with VC backing, Ride1Up is producing affordable mid-drive ebikes, like the Prodigy by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

The IPO market is still frozen like a Nordic lake dotted with fishing huts, but there are signs that a thaw is now in sight.

News from Insider indicates that TripActions, a unicorn in the corporate travel and expense category, has filed confidential paperwork to go public. Per the publication, the company is targeting a Q2 2023 public debut at around a $12 billion price tag. (Bloomberg’s Katie Roof, a former TechCruncher, first reported that TripActions was eyeing an IPO).

The news warmed our hearts, as we have heartily missed S-1 filings, a particular flavor of startup news that we feasted on during the 2021 boom but were forced to learn to live without this year as falling public-market prices and lackluster returns from some prior debuts slammed shut the IPO window a few quarters back.

Mix in the fact that we are — still — expecting a late-2022 Instacart S-1 filing and perhaps even debut, we now have not merely two IPOs on our dockets, but two potential decacorn public offerings. These are going to be big, noisy, large-dollar transactions that will provide valuable data concerning market appetite for tech shares generally and shed light on two important startup sectors’ respective worth. Hell yeah, we’re excited. Nothing like a little new data to fill in the gaps in our understanding of today’s market.

Today, we’re going to discuss what we hope to learn from each IPO filing and which startups will be impacted by those particular data points.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Recall that Instacart had a huge pandemic run, growing quickly before swapping CEOs, reaccelerating growth, and sticking to its IPO-timing guns.

TripActions is different. The pandemic didn’t help its business right away — in fact, it roughed it up a little. But the company shook up its model, expanding its product mix in the process, and now, with business travel coming back, is apparently satisfied with its results to the point where an IPO is in the cards.

S-1 hopes, IPO dreams

Starting with Instacart because it’s ground that we’ve trod before, we know that the company’s revenue is accelerating and that it reached terrific scale thanks to COVID-19 shifting consumer behavior closer to its product.

We also recently learned that the company is slowly trimming staff, likely to get its profit metrics in the right spot to sell stock to public-market investors; the word of the day is profit, or perhaps “efficiency instead of merely growth,” after all.

The upcoming TripActions IPO has us hype by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Financial institutions have struggled to develop their own technologies, hence the rise of neo-banks which used Open Banking regulations to build their own Fintech stacks. That has led to a wave of innovation, and startups have hungrily devoured the opportunities to ‘platformise’ the financial work.

The latest is fintech SaaS provider Toqio which has now closed €20 million in funding.

We last caught up with Toqio, a fintech platform with a white label digital finance SaaS that allows anyone to launch a new fintech product, last year when it raised $9.4M Seed.

This time round, the €18.7M Series A investment was led by AlbionVC and includes Aldea Ventures, as well as previous investors Seaya Ventures, Speedinvest, SIX FinTech Ventures and angel investors, including Leandro Sigman, Board Member at Endeavor Spain. Plus, there is a €1.3M grant from The Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) a public organization for technology development in Spain. 

Toqio’s customers include Crealsa, Paysme, Blackstar Capital and MovePay, and has a marketplace that includes include Clear.Bank, Currencycloud, Modulr, and Railsr. 

Eduardo Martinez Garcia, CEO & Co-Founder of Toqio, said in a statement: “After rapidly growing our team and entering the Spanish market, we’ll now be broadening our focus within Europe, including expansion into France and Germany.”

The round was led by Emil Gigov and Jay Wilson of AlbionVC with Jay Wilson joining the Toqio Board of Directors following the investment. 

Jay Wilson, Investment Director at  AlbionVC, added: “The digitization of finance is only just beginning and Toqio has a massive market to go after.”

Team has grown across all offices – London (HQ), Madrid and Nairobi. Over 100 in the past year. 

Founded in 2019 by Eduardo Martínez and Michael Galvin, the teams behind Toqio previously built a small business SaaS startup, Geniac, which was acquired by Grant Thornton.

Why build any fintech any more when you can just raise €20M and white-label it to banks? by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

As younger consumers are shifting to social apps that focus on video and more personal forms of social networking, a new social app called Studio, launching today, is introducing a group camcorder experience that allows groups of friends to share videos with one another in private albums.

These albums, or “studios” as they’re called, are available to everyone in the group as a way to record and share everyday memories or vlogs in a more creative format than seen in your standard group chat.

The app is today launching to the general public, backed by $3.3 million in seed funding led by GV’s M.G. Siegler.

Studio co-founder and CEO Matt Hidalgo, previously of Cockroach Labs and Twitter, explains how the startup landed on this idea of collaborative short-form video.

Initially, the team had explored other ideas in social, including a photo-based bookmarking tool called Collie, which confirmed there was some level of user demand for a collaborative, but private, social networking experience. That app gained traction with high schoolers over the summer who used it to make bucket lists.

But the format Collie used didn’t quite hit the mark, leading the team to turn to the idea of using video instead.

“The younger generation…have this insatiable appetite and desire to consume video and to create video,” says Hidalgo. “And it’s still a format that I would say is very under-explored — a lot of the bigger apps that are out there do video and video editing in a very distinct way that stems from where they started,” he says. “We believe that there’s a lot more interactivity and dimension to explore with video.”

Image Credits: Studio

With Studio, users open up the app to a camera that looks like an old-fashioned camcorder, then record videos that are up to 10 seconds long which are saved to the private, shared albums known as studios. The idea is to use the albums as a way to record and stitch together the group’s everyday memories in a way that elevates them creatively. It shouldn’t feel like you’re recording causal Snapchat videos, but rather mini-episodes of a broader story. Hidalgo likens the experience to crafting collaborative “TV shows,” in a sense.

The company landed on this idea when it found its power users were leveraging the app to record highlights for their school clubs or sports teams — like recording videos for game day or other events. It reminded Hidalgo of how his parents would film home movies that would entertain the family as they watched them back over the years. Studio aims to offer a similar vibe.

Image Credits: Studio app

However, the app as it stands today, is more barebones than some might expect from today’s social apps which are often cluttered with AR effects, filters, editing tools, and more. In Studio, you can invite friends to a room, record 10-second videos together (which are aggregated each day as “episodes”), add captions — and not much more.

It felt odd that there wasn’t even a built-in way to “react” to friends’ videos, by adding likes or comments, as is standard on social apps. But that’s by design, Hidalgo notes.

“Our prevailing way of building product was to build the most stripped-down version possible [and] test out the core mechanic,” he says, adding that the app has no commenting or chatting. Instead, users are meant to react by recording their own videos to continue the “episode.”

Of course, the idea for a group video app isn’t novel. Studio shares some similarities with other video apps from years past, like the video texting app Glide which once topped Instagram for a time. The concept is also reminiscent of Flashtape, the video texting app from the creators of YOLO, but lengthens the supported video time frame from 1 second to 10 as a differentiator.

Still, top social app BeReal wasn’t entirely novel either — it’s very much inspired by an older social app, FrontBack. It simply introduced the dual camera concept to a new generation of users, and has now grown to reach 46 million global installs and a top 10 position on the App Store in over a dozen countries.

GV’s Siegler, who returned to seed investing around a year and a half ago, says he’s interested in the potential for new social apps catering to a younger audience.

“With what’s going on with the large companies…it does feel like there’s this time of — if it’s not a full-on changing of the guard, it feels like people are at least opening up again to trying new things,” he explains. “There’s been this lingering feeling that these [larger social] networks are getting up there in age. The demographics have shifted — and young people are looking for what’s next and are trying different types of networks.”

Image Credits: Studio co-founders

He believes Studio’s team is looking to build more slowly and methodically to capture its audience, instead of trying to blow up overnight as a viral sensation, as many social apps now do today on TikTok.

“There’s going to be a lot of micro-pivots along the way and, listening to their user base about what it is that they actually want to build,” he notes.

New York-based Studio is a team of three co-founders, including Aditya Mohile (previously of Facebook) and Chris Chao, in addition to Hidalgo, as well as two interns. It’s currently hiring a founding designer and founding engineer.

Other investors include Mercury Fund, Pareto Holdings, and various angels such as Cockroach Labs CEO and cofounder Spencer Kimball, Gumroad CEO and cofounder Sahil Lavingia, Behance CEO and cofounder Scott Belsky, Anchor cofounder Mike Mignano, Square founding designer Robert Andersen, Yummy CEO and cofounder Vicente Zavarce, Kevin Carter, Brat CEO and cofounder Darren Lachtman, and the Black Angel Group.

Studio’s private group camcorder app lets friends create ‘episodes’ by combining 10-second videos by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Meta is facing a fresh call to pay reparations to the Rohingya people for Facebook’s role in inciting ethnic violence in Myanmar.

A new report by Amnesty International — providing what it calls a “first-of-its kind, in-depth human rights analysis” of the role played by Meta (aka Facebook) in the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya in 2017 — has found the tech giant’s contribution to the genocide was not merely that of “a passive and neutral platform” which responded inadequately to a major crisis, as the company has sought to claim, but rather that Facebook’s core business model — behavioral ads — was responsible for actively egging on the hatred for profit.

“Meta’s content-shaping algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya,” Amnesty concludes, pointing the finger of blame at its tracking-based business model — aka “invasive profiling and targeted advertising” — which it says feeds off of “inflammatory, divisive and harmful content”; a dynamic that implicates Facebook for actively inciting violence against the Rohingya as a result of its prioritization of engagement for profit.

UN human rights investigators warned in 2018 that Facebook was contributing to the spread of hate speech and violence against Myanmar’s local Muslim minority. The tech giant went on to accept that it was “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” spreading on its platform. However it has not accepted the accusation that its use of algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a potent fuel for ethnic violence as a result of its ad systems’ preference for amplifying polarization and outrage — leading the platform to optimize for hate speech.

Amnesty says its report, which is based on interviews with Rohingya refugees, former Meta staff, civil society groups and other subject matter experts, also draws on fresh evidence gleaned from documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugens, last year — aka the Facebook papers — which it says provides “a shocking new understanding of the true nature and extent of Meta’s contribution to harms suffered by the Rohingya”.

“This evidence shows that the core content-shaping algorithms which power the Facebook platform — including its news feed, ranking, and recommendation features — all actively amplify and distribute content which incites violence and discrimination, and deliver this content directly to the people most likely to act upon such incitement,” it writes in an executive summary to the 74-page report.

“As a result, content moderation alone is inherently inadequate as a solution to algorithmically-amplified harms,” it goes on. “Internal Meta documents recognize these limitations, with one document from July 2019 stating, ‘we only take action against approximately 2% of the hate speech on the platform’. Another document reveals that some Meta staff, at least, recognize the limitations of content moderation. As one internal memo dated December 2019 reads: ‘We are never going to remove everything harmful from a communications medium used by so many, but we can at least do the best we can to stop magnifying harmful content by giving it unnatural distribution.’

“This report further reveals that Meta has long been aware of the risks associated with its algorithms, yet failed to act appropriately in response. Internal studies stretching back to as early as 2012 have consistently indicated that Meta’s content-shaping algorithms could result in serious real-world harms. In 2016, before the 2017 atrocities in Northern Rakhine State, internal Meta research clearly recognized that ‘[o]ur recommendation systems grow the problem’ of extremism. These internal studies could and should have triggered Meta to implement effective measures to mitigate the human rights risks associated with its algorithms, but the company repeatedly failed to act.”

‘Relentless pursuit of profit’

Amnesty says the Facebook Papers also show Meta has continued to ignore the risks generated by its content-shaping algorithms in “the relentless pursuit of profit” — with its executive summary citing an internal memo dated August 2019 in which a former Meta employee writes: “We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world. We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform.”

“Amnesty International’s analysis shows how Meta’s content-shaping algorithms and reckless business practices facilitated and enabled discrimination and violence against the Rohingya,” it continues. “Meta’s algorithms directly contributed to harm by amplifying harmful anti-Rohingya content, including advocacy of hatred against the Rohingya. They also indirectly contributed to real-world violence against the Rohingya, including violations of the right to life, the right to be free from torture, and the right to adequate housing, by enabling, facilitating, and incentivizing the actions of the Myanmar military. Furthermore, Meta utterly failed to engage in appropriate human rights due diligence in respect of its operations in Myanmar ahead of the 2017 atrocities. This analysis leaves little room for doubt: Meta substantially contributed to adverse human rights impacts suffered by the Rohingya and has a responsibility to provide survivors with an effective remedy.”

Meta has resisted calls to pay reparations to the (at least) hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees forced to flee the country since August 2017 under a campaign of violence, rape and murder perpetrated by Myanmar’s military Junta. And is facing legal class action by Rohingya refugees who are suing the company in the US and the UK — seeking billions in damages for its role in inciting the genocide.

Amnesty has added its voice to calls for Meta to pay reparations to the refugees.

Its report notes that Meta has previously denied requests by Rohingya refugee groups for support funding, such as one by refugee groups in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, asking it to fund a $1M education project in the camps — by saying: “Facebook doesn’t directly engage in philanthropic activities.”

“Meta’s presentation of Rohingya communities’ pursuit of remedy as a request for charity portrays a deeply flawed understanding of the company’s human rights responsibilities,” Amnesty argues in the report, adding: “Despite its partial acknowledgement that it played a role in the 2017 violence against the Rohingya, Meta has to date failed to provide an effective remedy to affected Rohingya communities.”

Making a series of recommendations in the report, Amnesty calls for Meta to work with survivors and the civil society organizations supporting them to provide “an effective remedy to affected Rohingya communities” — including fully funding the education programming requested by Rohingya communities who are parties to a complaint against the company filed by refugees under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises via the Irish National Contact Point.

Amnesty is also calling on Meta to adopt ongoing human rights due diligence on the impacts of its business model and algorithms, and cease the collection of “invasive personal data which undermines the right to privacy and threatens a range of human rights”, as its report puts it — urging it to end the practice of tracking-based advertising and adopt less harmful alternatives, such as contextual advertising.

It also calls on regulators and lawmakers which oversee Meta’s business in the US and the EU to ban tracking-based targeted advertising that’s based on “invasive” practices or involving the processing of personal data; and regulate tech firms to ensure that content-shaping algorithms are not based on profiling by default — and must require an opt-in (instead of an opt-out), with consent for opting in being “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous”, echoing calls by some lawmakers in the EU.

Meta was contacted for a response to Amnesty’s report. A company spokesperson sent this statement — attributed to Rafael Frankel, director of public policy for emerging markets, Meta APAC:

“Meta stands in solidarity with the international community and supports efforts to hold the Tatmadaw accountable for its crimes against the Rohingya people. To that end, we have made voluntary, lawful data disclosures to the UN’s Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar and to The Gambia, and are also currently participating in the OECD complaint process. Our safety and integrity work in Myanmar remains guided by feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions, including the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar; the Human Rights Impact Assessment we commissioned in 2018; as well as our ongoing human rights risk management.”

Amnesty’s report also warns that the findings of what it calls “Meta’s flagrant disregard for human rights” are not only relevant to Rohingya survivors — as it says the company’s platforms are at risk of contributing to “serious human rights abuses again”.

“Already, from Ethiopia to India and other regions affected by conflict and ethnic violence, Meta represents a real and present danger to human rights. Urgent, wide-ranging reforms are needed to ensure that Meta’s history with the Rohingya does not repeat itself elsewhere,” it adds.

Meta urged to pay reparations for Facebook’s role in Rohingya genocide by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

So-called ‘stakeholder capitalism’ has not had the most illustrious of histories. Yes, there have been ‘Walmart Associates’ who were able to own stock in the company, or ‘John Lewis Associates’ (in the UK), but it’s hardly made the average person well off. At least they got something? In tech startups, however, tech founders are helped by many people along the way, most of whom will never work for the company but who can have an enormous affect at the early stage. That one intro to an investor, for instance, can be a game-changer. But tech founders have what is known as “founders amnesia” which means that when eventually they get that $20 billion exit, they somehow forget all the people that helped them along the way.

Koos (which, in Estonian, means ‘together’ and ‘alongside’) offers a standardized API allowing companies to offer a form of ‘stake’ in a company’s success, and – breaking news – it doesn’t use blockchain tokens to do it.

Unlike a loyalty program, the Koos ‘equity-like’ platform pays out to stakeholders only when the company meets predefined business goals. Koos claims this means the platform is much more ROI-positive and rewards those who contributed to the company’s success, unlike, say, a simple loyalty scheme for customers.

How it works: a company defines a business goal; sets out when the business goal is met; records meaningful actions via its tokens (not blockchain ones); and pays out via the Koos platform on results.

Founded earlier this year by serial entrepreneur and the former CIO of the Estonian Civil Service, Taavi Kotka, Koos says it can be used by companies to issue ‘stakes’ (but not options or shares) in companies more easily than issuing said options or shares, it claims.

It’s now raised $4 million in seed funding led by relatively new European VC Plural, with participation from investors including LocalGlobe, Tiny.vc and Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First.

This follows an angel pre-seed round of $600,000 from a number of Estonian founders such as Taavet Hinrikus, former CEO of Wise, Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport, Markus Villig, founder of Bolt, and Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of Verrif.

It will now build out its platform across the UK and Europe, with a legal framework that complies with EU and UK law.

Kotka, who led the Estonian government’s policies around digital democracy and e-government for four years, said in a statement: “We have come up with a digital tool that allows businesses to engage and reward their community, widening the circle of people who have access to equity-like incentives which in turn increases the pool of people who will advocate for the business and want it to succeed.”

The startup says it now has 27 companies running its platform, including start-ups, NGOs, SMEs and larger corporations. Koos makes its money via an onboarding fee, a monthly retainer, and 1% of all rewards (tokens) created by the programmes on the Koos platform. 

For any service consumed on Forus’ platform, 1% will be given as a Koos token to the client, 1% to the service provider and 1% to contributors.

Sten Tamkivi, adviser and Plural Platform co-founder, said in statement: “Plural wants to invest to help create a more equal society. We believe that broader community ownership leads to more meritocratic systems so that wealth can be distributed based on actual contributions. Koos has come up with a way to track the support of all stakeholders in a community or business, without having to give away equity. We anticipate that the platform Koos is building will become an essential building block of many startups, funds and communities including charities and NGOs.”

Can companies issue stakes in their success without using shares or options? This startup thinks so by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Doccla, a Sweden founded but London-headquartered health tech startup that sells a remote patient monitoring platform to hospitals to run so-called ‘virtual wards’, has closed a £15 million (~$17M) Series A funding round a year after raising a $3.3M seed.

The Series A is led by US VC General Catalyst, with participation from funds managed by healthcare investors KHP Ventures (a collaboration between King’s College London, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust). Existing investors Giant Ventures, who led the seed round, and Speedinvest also backed the Series A — which sees Chris Bischoff, MD at General Catalyst, joining the board.

General Catalyst is an investor in US remote care health tech unicorn Cadence which also sells a remote monitoring service, so could be seen as a potential competitor to Doccla. Although the (currently) different target markets (US vs Europe) and specific product presentation — we understand Cadence is focused on populations with chronic disease, while Doccla talks in terms of building virtual wards/’Hospital at Home’ — are, evidently, distinct enough to convince the VC firm there’s value in backing both for growth.

Doccla’s growth trajectory must certainly have helped: The 2019-founded startup only launched its remote patient monitoring service during the pandemic but says it’s now present in a fifth (20%) of all Integrated Care Systems (ICS) in the UK, with patient intake from 20+ hospitals. In total it says it’s monitored 50,000+ patients to date. (NB: ICS are a feature of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in England — essentially partnerships between relevant organizations and local authorities with the goal of joining up the planning and delivery of health services across their region.)

The startup’s platform allows clinical staff from hospitals to monitor the vital signs of those under treatment remotely (either continuously or intermittently) — freeing up hospital beds for new patients to be admitted by enabling early discharge via at-home monitoring. That’s important because the NHS suffers from a particular low average number of beds per 1,000 people compared to other OECD EU nations, with just 2.4 beds vs the OECD EU average of 4.6 and Germany’s average of 7.9.

It sells an end-to-end remote patient monitoring service which covers provisioning the devices used for monitoring (including pre-configured smartphones with large fonts to improve accessibility for the visually impaired/frail etc; and wearable medical devices to measure a wide range of physiological parameters); and taking care of software integration, logistics and customer service, and tech support for the elderly and non-digital natives — with its pitch being that it differentiates from competitors by significantly reducing the workload on hospital staff.

Doccla says its current clients include a number of NHS trusts across the UK, including Northampton General Hospital, Cambridgeshire Community Services, and Hertfordshire Community Trust.

On the competition front, it name-checks Huma, Current Health, and Docobo as UK rivals — but co-founder Martin Ratz points to three main areas where he argues it’s serving up something “very different”.

“For starters, we are CQC [Care Quality Commission, aka the independent regulatory body for healthcare providers in England] accredited and therefore can take clinical responsibility for patients, reducing the workload for healthcare personnel,” he tells TechCrunch. “We are device agnostic and are not pushing our own device. Finally, our service layer enables us to deliver market leading patient compliance — exceeding 95% across all pathways.”

The Series A funding injection will be ploughed into further developing its tech stack to support the integration of more medical devices into its patient monitoring platform and electronic healthcare record systems; and for data analytics and AI — to “expand clinical capacity and availability” to meet demand for “virtual hospitals that alleviate pressures on healthcare systems”, as it puts it.

Or, put another way, with both beds and doctors in chronically short supply AI-powered efficiencies are the new, transformative tool to enable already stretched-to-breaking point health services to (safely) stretch even further — or that’s the claim.

“In the future, we will be able to cover additional clinical specialties, with an even more advanced level of care as well as logistical improvements of the service delivery,” suggests Ratz.

Asked what Doccla is using AI for, he confirms it’s working on developing predictive alerts that could help clinicians monitor more patients.

“Doccla will use data insights to develop automation and AI for further improvement of service delivery and clinical outcomes,” he tells us. “This will include various support tools for clinicians, such as predictive alerts.”

There are plenty of safety pitfalls here, given — for example — the bias risks around AI if training data is not representative of the patient population, so how Doccla goes about integrating automated alerts and other AI-powered support tools into its platform without compromising patient safety will certainly be one to watch. (Getting regulatory accreditation on such features will also be less straightforward, with more agencies and oversight bodies in play.)

Still, it looks important that Doccla’s investor roster includes a fund with direct links to a number of NHS Trusts.

Image credits: Doccla

On the question of scalability, especially around patient support — which may require a lot of patient one-to-one interactions with tired and/or frail people who may not be accustomed to using connected technology — Ratz says: “Doccla places significant value on our service layer, as it’s crucial to building and scaling a virtual hospital. In particular, new models of care, especially at the intersection with behavioural change, require it. Doccla’s virtual patient support teams, as well as our clinical teams, are highly efficient and enjoy economies of scale.”

Also on the slate for the Series A: Expansion to new European markets and segments, per Ratz. But he won’t be drawn on where exactly it’s eyeing for new launches. “Doccla’s current focus is the UK where we serve a range of customers and our European expansion will be shaped by upcoming public tenders, notably those in larger markets,” he says, adding: “I can say that we’re already in dialogue with significant operators in several countries.”

The funding will also be used for fuelling the startup’s growth by running virtual clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry, according to Ratz — presumably with the fully informed consent of any patients who agree to sign up to such trials. (Doccla’s current privacy policy states that it will not share users’ personal data — and further claims to “only collect the data that we need to deliver care safely and effectively”.)

The startup’s platform is able to serve a “very diverse range” of patients, from palliative care to pre- and post-surgery patients, says Ratz — although this type of remote care is clearly not suitable for every type of patient (even if you’re going to start throwing AI into the mix).

“The largest patient groups we work with include COPD [Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and heart-related health. The applicability of remote care is exceptional however some patient groups — for example, those who require in-person support such highly acute patients or people with dementia — are less suited for remote monitoring,” he says.

Commenting on the Series A funding in a statement, General Catalyst’s Bischoff added: “The virtualisation of hospital wards is a critical step in efficiently expanding health resources and enabling timely, safe transition of care into the home. Doccla has immense potential and is driving real impact by not only providing a much-needed lifeline for overwhelmed hospitals but also improving patient outcomes through remote monitoring. The founders’ vision to drive more digitally-enabled, decentralised healthcare that combines physical and virtual pathways aligns with General Catalyst’s Health Assurance thesis. Importantly, their partnership approach with NHS Trusts echoes our core values of radical collaboration and responsible innovation — innovation that improves society. At General Catalyst, we support companies that bring about powerful, positive change that endures, and we believe Martin, Dag and the team will do just that.”

‘Virtual ward’ startup Doccla gets Series A injection as it eyes AI tools by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Una Brands, an e-commerce aggregator focused on brands in the Asia-Pacific region, announced the first close of its Series B round at $30 million today. The funding was led by White Star Capital and Alpha JWC Ventures.

Headquartered in Singapore, Una Brands has a presence in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United States, and over 200 employees. It launched in 2021 with $40 million in funding, and has now raised a total of about $100 million.

Over the last year, Una Brands has acquired more than 20 e-commerce brands in six countries, including ergonomic furniture vendors ErgoTune and EverDesk+. After taking over operations, Una Brands expanded those brands into Australia and grew revenue by over 40% in less than a year. In total, Una Brands says it now has annualized revenue of more than $50 million and is expected to achieve group profitability by the end of this year.

While many other e-commerce roll-up companies (like Thrasio) focus on brands that sell on Amazon, Una Brands covers multiple e-commerce platforms to reflect how fragmented the industry is in Asia. For example, it looks for brands on Shopify, Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia, in addition to Amazon.

Una Brands will use its new funding on more acquisitions in categories like home and living, mother and baby, and beauty and personal care. The capital will also be used to further the development of its proprietary technology for expanding e-commerce brands across multiple channels. Its tech stack includes tools for brand management, marketing, supply chain and accounting, and process automation and advanced analytics.

E-commerce aggregator Una Brands gets $30M to acquire more APAC brands by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

When UiPath announced in April that it was bringing on veteran enterprise executive Rob Enslin as co-CEO, it was a big surprise. UiPath had gone public the prior year, while Enslin was leaving Google Cloud after only two years, just as it was beginning to find its footing.

But at the time, UiPath faced some harsh realities in the public markets.

Perhaps that’s why co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines was ready to bring in an industry leader who understood the enterprise market. Dines led UiPath through some heady times, topping out with a private valuation of $35 billion in early 2021. At that point, the markets were strong, an IPO was in sight, and the future looked bright.

But since then, the company has had to deal with a market that’s been particularly unforgiving to SaaS companies. Today, UiPath’s stock price sits around $12.60 per share, down from a 52-week high of almost $60. Its market cap has plunged to less than $7 billion, a fifth of its final private valuation.

Enslin clearly has his work cut out for him.

The co-CEO, who spent 27 years at SAP before joining Google a couple of years ago, said that he has had the privilege of working with two companies that were “defining technologies of their era.” He believes that UiPath is similarly positioned in the area of automation – and that he’s up for the challenge to help it get there.

UiPath co-CEO Rob Enslin still sees plenty of potential despite stock turbulence by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

At its Search On event this afternoon, Google announced a number of shopping-related changes and new features across areas that include visual shopping, personalization and buying with the help of trusted reviews. The additions aim to help the company better attract online consumers to shop on Google, instead of starting their searches directly on Amazon — as has become the norm for many online shoppers today.

Of significant concern, Amazon has been steadily eating into Google’s core search advertising business over the years and is projected to capture 14.6% of the U.S. digital ad revenue market share by 2023, data from Insider Intelligence indicates. Google’s share meanwhile, is expected to drop to 24.1% by that time, down from the 31.6% share it had in 2019, the report said.

To combat this threat, Google has been investing heavily into its Google Shopping services, including by making listings free for merchants then integrating those free listings into Google Search results. Now, the search and ads giant has grown its shopping graph to 35 billion product listings — a figure that’s increased by nearly 10 billion over the past year, the company notes.

One of the new ways Google hopes to better compete is to make shopping on Google feel more fun for consumers than if they simply ran a product search on Amazon’s site.

On this front, the company is launching a new feature called “Shop the Look” in the U.S. which will be discoverable as part of the now more visual shopping experience on Google. This feature will position a shoppable display of products alongside lifestyle imagery, guides, and other tools in your search results. It can also be triggered by typing the word “shop” ahead of your query, like “shop bomber jackets,” for instance.

Image Credits: Google

To “shop the look,” users will be able to view the product they had searched for — like a jacket — along with other items that complete the outfit, which can also be shopped from the same tool, similar to features previously launched with Google Lens.

They’ll also be able to see trending products that are popular right now within the same category of the item they searched for from across different brands and designers. (Google defines trending as those products that meet a certain threshold for an increase in searches and user interactions over the past week, it says). These features will arrive in the U.S. this fall.

To make shopping listings themselves more compelling, Google will soon begin to pilot test a 3D shopping feature for shoes, to follow up on its existing support for 3D home goods — a change that Google claims delivered increased engagement. Users interacted with 3D images almost 50% more than static images, the company said.

Initially, the 3D imagery will be tested with a handful of retail partners to start before scaling up. To support this, the company developed a way to automate 3D asset creation. Via machine learning improvements, Google can now use just a handful of product photos to build the 3D image. This new model relies on a neural radiance field technology, a type of neural network also known as NeRF, which can create novel views of 3D scenes using 2D images, Google explains.

Initially, the pilot will include a handful of merchants like Van’s and Skechers, but Google expects to add more over time, including smaller sellers.

“While some merchants have this kind of 3D imagery available, for many others — especially the smaller merchants — creating these types of 3D assets can be really expensive and time-consuming,” said Lilian Rincon, Senior Director of Product for Shopping at Google. “We really think has the potential to change the game for small merchants and we’re excited to get it out,” she added.

Image Credits: Google

Another new feature is designed to help people make more complex shopping decisions that typically require a lot of research.

Typically, consumers will read a variety of sources to make a decision about a more high-value product, including product reviews, news, online articles, recommendation sites, customer reviews, and more. To simplify this process, Google has introduced a new “Buying Guide” which will aggregate the most helpful resources from across a range of trusted sources, including Google user reviews, articles, product reviews and more. This feature has launched in the U.S. but will expand to include more insight categories soon.

Image Credits: Google

In addition, Google will add a new tool called “Page Insights” to the Google app in the U.S. in the months ahead. This will allow consumers to learn more about the products on a website, including their pros and cons and star rating. They can also opt-in to receive price drop updates on the items they’re tracking.

However, one of the biggest changes coming to Google Shopping is the addition of opt-in personalization, arriving in the U.S. later this year.

While companies like Meta and Snap have struggled with the impact of Apple’s privacy changes (App Tracking Transparency) that allowed users to opt-out of tracking, limiting sites’ ability to show them personalized ads, Google’s response to the privacy crackdown is to allow consumers to directly choose to personalize their shopping experience with intentional clicks.

To do so, consumers can tap buttons to direct Google to remember the types of categories they want to shop — like “Women’s Department” instead of the “Men’s Department,” for example — or even tap to choose favorite brands to ensure those are highlighted in their future Google Shopping search results. The company says the idea was prompted by its user research, as consumers told the company they were frustrated with seeing irrelevant search results.

Google says the user is in control of these settings and can turn them on or off at any time.

“We’ve taken a lot of time to do this very carefully because we absolutely want to make sure that people feel like they’re in control…if you, at any point, don’t want to share this information with Google — if you want to turn it off…you can do that,” says Rincon.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also adding new shopping filters that appear on pages as you search for various products, which will now adapt to search trends. That is, you might see “wide leg” or “bootcut” appear when shopping for jeans right now, because those styles are currently popular across Google.com searches. These “dynamic filters” are live now available in the U.S., Japan, and India, and will arrive in more regions over time.

Finally, the Google mobile app will highlight suggested styles based on your past shopping searches and what others have been shopping for on Google. You can tap on these suggestions and see where to buy the products via Google Lens.

Image Credits: Google

Combined, Google believes these changes will help to make shopping on its platform easier and, in some cases, more fun for consumers. But the larger reality here is that Google needs to find a way to keep users from diverting their searches to other sites, like Amazon, as doing so impacts its ability to sell ads and its bottom line.

Google revamps shopping with 3D images, shoppable looks, buying guides, and more personalization by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

A new Google feature that will allow users to search using both images and text combined in to find local retailers who offer the apparel, home goods or the food you’re looking for will soon roll out to users in the U.S., Google announced today at its “Search On” event. The company had first previewed this feature at its Google I/O developer conference this May, signaling a development that seemed to be built in a future where AR glasses could be used to kick off searches.

The capability builds on Google’s A.I.-powered “multisearch” feature introduced in April, which let users combine a photo and text to craft custom searches, initially around shopping for apparel. For instance, you could search Google using a photo of a dress but then type in the word “green” to limit search results to just those where the dress was available in that specific color.

Multisearch Near Me, meanwhile, expanded this functionality even further, as it could then point the user to a local retailer that had the green dress in stock. It could also be used to locate other types of items, like home goods, hardware, shoes, or even a favorite dish at a local restaurant. 

“This new way of searching is really about helping you connect with local businesses, whether you’re looking to support your local neighborhood shop or you just need something right away can’t wait for the shipping,” said Cathy Edwards, VP and GM of Search at Google.

Image Credits: Google

At Google’s developer conference, the company had previewed how the feature would work, as users could leverage their phone’s camera or upload an image to begin this different type of search query. The company also demonstrated how a user could one day pan their camera around the scene in front of them to learn more about the objects in front of them — a feature that would make for a compelling addition to AR glasses, some speculated.

However, this feature itself was not yet available to users at the time — it was just a preview.

Today, Google says Multisearch Near Me is going to roll out to U.S. users in the English language “this fall.” It didn’t give an exact launch date.

Plus, the multisearch feature itself (without the local component) will also expand to support over 70 languages in the next few months.

Google to launch its image and text-based ‘Multisearch Near Me’ local search feature in the U.S. by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch