Tech Blog - Page 1013 of 2384 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Simple Feast raises $12M from Balderton and 14W to expand its weekly meat-free meal-box deliveries

Published August 23, 2018

The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why? Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree it’s also pretty good for your health. But when most of us have been brought up with animal protein in the middle of our plates, it often feels pretty hard to achieve. At the same time, fast food delivery has been taking off, but we’re still eating the same thing: meat.

So a Danish startup has come along to try to solve this. Simple Feast delivers sustainable food to people’s homes in biodegradable boxes, and it’s now raised a $12 million series A funding round led by Balderton Capital in London, with participation from 14W in New York. Existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders are also re-investing the round.

Simple Feast offers what it describes as ready-to-eat plant-based food that is “sustainably produced, organic, and delivered straight to the doorstep” in biodegradable boxes every week. The meal solution delivers weekly boxes with three prepared plant-based and 100 percent organic meals ready to serve in 10 minutes.

In this respect it’s not unlike other startups, such as HelloFresh, with the main difference being that all the food is plant-based.

Jakob Jønck, CEO and co-founder of Simple Feast, says: “Climate change is real. There is no Planet B and we are facing what is arguably the biggest challenge in human history. This is a big investment for a small company, but it’s a drop in the ocean considering the challenge at hand, the politicians and industries we are up against.”

He and Thomas Ambus, co-founder/CTO, started thinking more deeply about Simple Feast when Under Armour acquired Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, their previous startups, in the spring of 2015 and got serious about it in 2016. “Ever since founding Endomondo and heading up International Operations for MyFitnessPal, I always felt a missing link when trying to move towards a healthy, sustainable diet — an actual product that didn’t compromise on taste, nor convenience, but solved the huge challenges involved with embarking on this journey towards eating plants first and foremost,” says Jønck.

Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital, says: “With a global transition towards plant-based food, we believe Simple Feast is uniquely positioned to change the way we eat and create awareness about the impact of our food choices.”

The main target is families, with the parents in their 30s and 40s. “We find that women are still predominantly the decision maker when it comes to food for the family. Our most typical customers are women in a relationship in their 30s with one or two kids. Our customers are also politically interested, above the average,” says Jønck.

They are competing with restaurants, meal kits and take-away. “We are disrupting both the restaurant and the meal kit industry. Nobody has ever taken the challenge of creating climate-friendly, plant-based food seriously while serving it directly to consumers. We don´t make compromises on taste, nor convenience, and we don´t believe that we have seen that before,” he told me.

Plant-focused startup The Sill raises $5M

Published August 22, 2018

The Sill, a startup that sells potted plants online and in physical stores, announced this weekend that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Raine Ventures.

The company was founded in 2012 and has now raised a total of $7.5 million. It was bootstrapped until last year, when it raised seed funding from Brand Foundry Ventures, Halogen Ventures, BBG Ventures, Tuesday Capital, Blueseed and The Chernin Group. (BBG Ventures is backed by TechCrunch’s parent company Oath.)

That seems like a long time for a startup to go without outside funding, and indeed, CEO Eliza Blank acknowledged that she “probably waited too long to go out and raise.” Still, she said those first few years also gave her time to find the right business model (like focusing “exclusively on the direct-to-consumer business,” rather than selling to offices as well).

And while it’s easy to group The Sill among all the startups using the internet to build a consumer business around a traditional category of retail, Blank said her vision is bigger than “just putting plants online and being another direct-to-consumer brand.”

After all, there are plenty of people (myself included) who are interested in owning plants but don’t really know how to care for them properly. And our casual interest level probably isn’t going to get us to the local horticultural society to learn more.

The Sill

Blank said she founded the company in response to her own experience wanting to buy plants, and realizing how limited the resources were for learning “how to approach the category as a newbie.”

So The Sill doesn’t just sell you a plant (along with basic care instructions). It also allows you to ask questions of the company’s plant experts — and with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar stores in New York City, it also offers weekly workshops.

“We have a much longer relationship than a typical transaction business,” Blank said. “Making the purchase is almost like the start — or maybe the middle — of a conversation.”

The company says it sold more than 75,000 products in the last six months, with sales up 500 percent year-over-year, and anticipated revenue for the year of more than $10 million.

A new unicorn is born: Root Insurance raises $100 million for a $1 billion valuation

Published August 22, 2018

Root Insurance, an Ohio-based car insurance startup with a tech twist, said Wednesday it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round led by Tiger Global Management, pushing the company’s valuation to $1 billion.

Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Scale Venture Partners all participated as follow-on investors in this latest round.

The car insurance company, founded in 2015, plans to use the funds to expand into existing markets and make inroads into new states, as well as hire more employees such as engineers, actuaries, claims and customer service to support increased scale.

Root provides car insurance to drivers. Not exactly a new concept. But it establishes the premium customers based on their driving along with other factors. Drivers download the app and take a test drive that typically lasts two or three weeks. Then Root provides a quote that rewards good driving behavior and allows customers to switch their insurance policy. Customers can purchase and manage their policy through the mobile phone Root app.

Root says its approach allows good drivers to save more than 50 percent on their policies compared to traditional insurance carriers.

The company uses AI algorithms to adjust risk and sometimes provide discounts. For example, a vehicle with an advanced driver assistance system that it deems improves safety might receive further discounts.

“Root Insurance is leading digital innovation in U.S. auto insurance,” Lee Fixel, a partner at Tiger Global Management said in a statement. “This industry is ripe for change, and we are excited to invest in a team that has the expertise, vision, and momentum to deliver real results. We look forward to growing our partnership with Root and helping them expand their footprint across the United States.”

The company has grown from its home market of Ohio into 20 other states in the past two years. The company plans to expand to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., by the end of 2019.

Drive Capital and Silicon Valley Bank are also investors in the company.

Crater rebrands as Shyft to focus on helping global nomads move

Published August 22, 2018

After finally settling on a new apartment, packing your last box and rushing out to pick up your moving van for the measly three hours you could book it — have you ever taken a moment to think, “Wow, this is so easy?”

Nope, and neither has anybody else. But Shyft, a logistics platform company based in San Francisco, is hoping to change that.

Originally named Crater, the company announced today a re-brand of its name and mission to focus on helping improve the corporate relocation process for millions of movers per year. The company is bringing with it three years of experience developing software and technology to help moving companies provide better estimates and service to customers.

“We spend hours thinking about these global citizens who are moving everyday and literally shifting their lives,” Shyft CMO Rajiv Parikh told TechCrunch. “They’re moving to new communities, they’re finding new schools, they’re finding new opportunities. It’s a monumental and pivotal moment in someone’s life.”

The process works two-fold. First, Shyft is continuing its partnerships with moving companies and selling its software to them in order to help update their portals and make the process as seamless as possible for their existing customers. As part of these partnerships, Shyft is able to create a reliable network of moving companies and services that it can utilize in the second part of its service — connecting with corporate Fortune 500 companies to help their transferees easily and intuitively complete their moving process.

Through the platform, employees planning a move can fill out information like how many boxes they’re moving, what their housing needs will be and even what kind of food they like and dietary restrictions they have. With this data, Shyft will help direct them to the services they need and work to help them best integrate into their new communities.

Shyft works with corporate companies’ lump-sum funds to help employees find the best price possible for their move. And transferees can use the services for free (or be reimbursed the difference).

“A traditional moving company is focused on moving — dollars and cents — [and] they want the largest and the biggest moves out there,” Shyft CEO Alex Alpert told TechCrunch. “From our perspective, we’re agnostic to that. If it’s in someone’s best interest to sell their sofa and buy a new one, we want to help facilitate that.”

In a recent collaboration with eBay, the company says it has seen large increases in the number of employees using its portal instead of trying to figure out logistics on their own.

“We have monitored the use of Shyft in our lump sum program and have seen a marked increase in the willingness of employees to engage with Shyft to identify the best solution to their moving needs,” eBay Director of HR Global Mobility Eric Halverson said in a statement. “Shyft is helping our employees optimize their lump sum allowance with a variety of moving solutions geared to their personal needs and circumstances.”

Alpert says that Shyft is now focusing on growing and refining its service, and this summer was accepted to join Moderne Venture’s summer Passport Program. The seven-month industry immersion program is designed to help companies refine their go-to-market strategies and network with others working in the real estate, finance, insurance and home-services spaces.

Latch raises $70M for its apartment smart lock system

Published August 22, 2018

Latch announced this morning that it has raised $70 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Brookfield Ventures, the investment arm of Brookfield Asset Management. As part of the deal, Brookfield Properties will also be installing Latch systems in its multi-family properties that are currently under development.

“We are thrilled to support Latch, the clear market leader in a nearly $25 billion space that is expected to grow at twice the rate of traditional access over the next several years,” said Brookfield’s Josh Raffaelli in the funding announcement.

Lux Capital, RRE Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Third Prime, Camber Creek, Corigin Ventures, Tishman Speyer and Balyasny Asset Management also participated int he new funding.

Latch’s smart lock system is designed for apartment buildings rather than single family homes, allowing you to open doors with a smartphone, keycard or door code. It also allows residents to create temporary access codes for guests and service providers.

Speaking of service providers, Latch announced a pilot partnership with UPS earlier this summer that will allow UPS drivers to receive unique credentials for entering buildings to make deliveries.

Latch was founded five years ago, but stayed in stealth mode until 2016. It previously raised $26 million funding.

Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha is coming to Disrupt SF 2018

Published August 22, 2018

2018 has been the year that AR promises came face-to-face with reality. While Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore sparked a ravenous response from developers that had grown worried about VR’s near-term market and the fate of AR headsets from Microsoft and Magic Leap, little seemed to resonate deeply with consumers.

That realization is part of the reason AR startups working on backend services and more base level development pipelines have seen so much success. Onstage at Disrupt SF 2018, we’ll be chatting with Anjney Midha, the CEO of an AR startup called Ubiquity6.

The startup was founded just a year ago but has already raised more than $37 million to solve some of the hardest augmented reality problems that companies like Google and Apple are working hard to solve, as well. Its backers include Google’s Gradient Ventures, First Round, Benchmark and KPCB, where Midha previously ran a small fund.

The company is tackling problems like multiplayer interactions and world mapping as well as issues key to more immersive gameplay like making sure that virtual objects stay tied to physical markers in-between gaming sessions. Ultimately, the company’s work is aiming to promote the Ubiquity6 app to be a hub for AR experiences that will have a development backbone that enables much deeper AR interactions for users.

Ubiquity6 is ambitious about the scale of their AR capabilities. While so many companies are focusing their efforts on how to capture AR interactions taking place in the living room, Ubiquity6 is actively working to map entire cities so it can deliver massive AR experiences that can turn heads (or at least phones).

We’re looking forward to chatting with Midha and hearing about how his startup is planning to compete with some of the world’s biggest tech companies in building out a digital reality that’s projected onto our own.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.

The top 10 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day S18 Day 2

Published August 22, 2018

Fifty-nine startups took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2, and among the highlights were a company that helps developers manage in-app subscriptions; a service that lets you create animojis from real photos; and a surplus medical equipment-reselling platform. Oh… and there was also a company that’s developed an entirely new kind of life form using e coli bacteria. So yeah, that’s happening.

Based on some investor buzz and what caught TechCrunch’s eye, these are our top picks from the second day of Y Combinator’s presentations.

You can find the full list of companies that presented on Day 1 here, and our top picks from Day 1 here.

64-x

With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute), 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries. Basically they’ve engineered a new life form that they want to use for novel kinds of bio-manufacturing.

Why we liked it: These geniuses invented a new life form.

CB Therapeutics

Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of 10 and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.

Why we liked it: Using manufacturing processes to make industrial quantities of what looks like nature’s best painkiller at scale is not a bad idea.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.

The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.

Ajaib

Indonesia is a country in transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.

China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans work out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.

Why we liked it: If Ajaib’s wealth management plans (to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar it manages) work out — and with a total market of $370 billion in savings in Indonesia — the company could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard.

Grin

The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.

Why we liked it: Scooters are so 2018. But there’s a lot of money to be made in mobility, and as the challenge from Bird and Lime to Uber and Lyft in hyperlocal transit has revealed, there’s no dominant player that’s taken over the market… yet.

Emojer

Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves goes viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.

Why we liked it: As the company’s chief executive said, Snap was for sexting, and Facebook was hot or not, so who says the next big consumer platform couldn’t be the Trojan horse of easily generated selfiemojis (akin to Elf Yourself)?

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil, India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.

Why we liked it: Selling lower-cost medications for rare diseases in countries that previously hadn’t had access to them is a good business that’s good for the world.

Medinas Health

Tackling a $75 billion problem of healthcare waste, Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural healthcare centers.

Why we liked it: Finding uses for hospital equipment that’s been lying fallow in corners is a big business. A $75 billion business if Medinas’ estimates are correct. Add helping cut costs for rural medical facilities and Medinas is a business we can get behind.

And Comfort

Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.

Why we liked it: This direct-to-consumer fashion brand is bringing higher quality, better-designed clothing options to a market that’s underserved and growing quickly. What’s not to like?

ShopWith

Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.

It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.

Why we liked it: The QVC for GenZ not only has a nice ring to it, it’s a recipe for making cash registers hum. A mobile-first, influencer-based shopping company is something that we’d definitely not call an impulse purchase.

Mail digitizing service Earth Class Mail acquires receipt digitizing service Shoeboxed

Published August 22, 2018

Earth Class Mail, a company that digitizes your physical mail so you don’t have to go to the mailbox every day, today announced that it has acquired receipt scanning and expense tracking service Shoeboxed.

The reason Earth Class Mail would be interested in Shoeboxed is pretty obvious, given that both companies focus on taking the pain out of dealing with paper. Both services will continue to operate as usual, though we’ll likely see some deep integrations between the two over time.

Shoeboxed, which launched 11 years ago, currently digitizes over five million documents per year for its more than 1 million customers in 90 countries. Its main market is small businesses in the U.S., which make up 500,000 of its users.

“When we started in 2008 and put the first iPhone app in the app store to scan receipts, there was one other powerhouse around helping small business go digital — Earth Class Mail,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Tobias Walter tells us. “The combined power of our two companies will be a massive shift for small businesses to finally become paperless and say goodbye to old workflows that cost them hours of their productivity. I could not be happier with the new home we found for the company, the team and our customers!”

What sets Earth Class Mail apart from the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery service is that it not only scans the outside of the envelopes that you are about to receive but that you can also give the company permission to scan all the documents inside, too (and the price you pay for the service depends mostly on how many of these full scans you want per month). While Oregon-based Earth Class Mail had to file for bankruptcy protection in 2015, its new leadership team turned the company around. The company says that its annual run rate is now $10 million, up 20 percent since Jess Garza become its new CEO last December.

Walter also notes that users would occasionally send unopened envelopes, too, but the company wasn’t allowed to open them. These customers can now easily become Earth Class Mail users.

Over the course of its existence, Shoeboxed only raised a moderate amount of funding, with a $580,000 Series A round led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners in 2008 (when Series A rounds were still much smaller than today) and a $1.4 million Series B round in 2011. The financial details of today’s acquisition were not disclosed.

Slack must use cash hoard to find new ways to keep competition at bay

Published August 22, 2018

It was quite a week for Slack, wasn’t it? The enterprise communications platform confirmed this publication’s earlier report that it had scored another $427 million investment on an over-the-moon valuation of over $7 billion. Slack took a market that had once been in the doldrums and turned it into something significant by making itself more than a communications tool.

It changed the game by making itself a work hub. Through APIs and UI updates, it has made it simple for countless third parties (like Evernote) to integrate with Slack and provide the long-sought workplace hub for the enterprise. Instead of task switching, you can work mostly in one place and keep your focus on your work.

It’s quite a value proposition and it has enabled Slack to raise $1.2 billion (with a b) across 11 funding rounds, according to data on Crunchbase. They have grown to 8 million daily active users. They boast 70,000 teams paying to use it. Whatever they are doing, it’s working.

Competing with corporate behemoths

That said, Slack’s success has always been a bit surprising because it’s facing off against giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, all gunning for this upstart’s market. In fact, Microsoft is giving Teams away for free to Office 365 customers. You could say it’s hard to compete with free, yet Slack continues to hold its own (and also offers a free version, for the record).

Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t require customers to use any particular toolset. Microsoft Teams is great for Microsoft users. Google Hangouts is great for G Suite users. You’re already signed in and it’s all included in the package, and there is a huge convenience factor there, but Slack works on anything and with anything and companies have shown there is great value in that.

The question is can Slack continue to play David to these corporate behemoths or will patience, bushels of cash on hand and a long view allow these traditional tech companies to eventually catch up and pass the plucky newbie. Nobody can see into the future, but obviously investors recognize it takes a lot of capital to keep up with what the competition is bringing to the table.

Expanding their reach

They also clearly have some confidence in the company’s ability to keep growing and keep the titans at bay or they wouldn’t have thrown all of that moolah at them. Up until now, they seem to have always found a way, but they need to step up if they are going to keep it going.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst with Constellation Research, who keeps a careful eye on the enterprise collaboration market, says in a recent video commentary that it’s great they got all this money, but now that someone has shown them all of this dough, they have to prove they know what to do with it.

“For Slack to continue to be successful, they need to expand beyond what they are currently doing and really, truly redefine the way people communicate, collaborate, coordinate around their work. They need to branch out to project management, task management, content creation — all sorts of things more than just collaboration.”

What comes next?

Lepofsky says this could happen via a build or buy scenario, or even partnering, but they need to use their money strategically to differentiate the product from the hefty competition and stay ahead in this market.

The other elephant in the room is the idea that one of the competing mega corporations could make a run at them and try to acquire them. It would take a boat load of money to make that happen, but if someone had the cojones to do it, they would be getting the state of the art, the market share, the engineering, the whole package.

For now, that’s pure speculation. For now, Slack is sitting comfortably on a huge cash pile, and perhaps they should go shopping and expand their product set with their newly found wealth, as Lepofsky suggests. If they can do that, maybe they can keep the technology wolves from the door and make their way down the path to their seemingly inevitable IPO.

Monument Valley is becoming a movie

Published August 22, 2018

Monument Valley, the award-winning and beautifully designed mobile puzzler from ustwo Games, is being turned into a movie, according to a report from Deadline. While the game involves a manipulating Escher-like architecture in order to guide a princess through her quest, the movie version will feature live-action characters being thrown into the game’s “mind-bending world,” the report says.

Paramount Pictures and Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road Pictures have selected Patrick Osborne to direct the movie, which the studios hope to turn into a franchise. There’s already more material for them to use, if that’s the case – Monument Valley’s sequel continued the story, this time guiding a mother and a child through the magical architecture.

Osborne won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for “Feast,” and is now directing “Nimona” for Fox and Blue Sky, based on the popular graphic novel. That experience could serve him well for this unusual choice.

“Monument Valley is a one of a kind experience, at once small in its meditative, simple gameplay, as well as enormous in its sense of history,” Osborne told Deadline, in a statement. “I’m privileged to be handed the reins to Ida’s mysterious kingdom, to play in her world of impossible architecture where seeing things differently is everything. I am thrilled to bring this unique world to theaters with the talented storytellers of Paramount and Weed Road.”

Dan Gray, Head of Ustwo Games also noted the company has been waiting for the right opportunity to bring the game to the big screen.

While it’s common for movie studios to option game material for their films, in this case, the choice appears to be largely based the name recognition Monument Valley offers, and the success of films with virtual worlds, as in “Ready Player One.” The game itself has been downloaded over 160 million times worldwide, giving the film version a built-in audience, and has won a number of awards from Apple and others.

Still, it’s hard to contemplate how Monument Valley will make for a compelling movie – the game’s storyline is minimal, lacking in dialog, and really only uses the character as a means of moving players from one puzzle to the next. The beauty of the game is its gorgeous animations and overall design, which are combined with a mesmerizing soundtrack to make gameplay more of a meditative experience. Whatever story will be told by the movie will be largely original, then, it seems.

Deadline says the studio is now looking for a screenwriter to craft that tale alongside Osborne. A release date was not announced.