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This tiny agtech company thinks it has figured out something its better-capitalized rivals haven’t

Published April 17, 2018

In November, we told you about Farmers Business Network, a social network for farmers that invites them to share their data, pool their know-how and bargain more effectively for better pricing from manufacturing companies. At the time, FBN, as it’s known, had just closed on $110 million in new funding in a round that brought its funding to roughly $200 million altogether.

That kind of financial backing might dissuade newcomers to the space, but a months-old startup called AgVend has just raised $1.75 million in seed funding on the premise that, well, FBN is doing it wrong. Specifically, AgVend’s pitch is that manufacturers aren’t so crazy about FBN getting between their offerings and their end users — in large part because FBN is able to secure group discounts on those users’ behalf.

AgVend is instead planning to work directly with manufacturers and retailers, selling their goods through its own site as well as helping them develop their own web shops. The idea is to “protect their channel pricing power,” explains CEO Alexander Reichert, who previously spent more than four years with Euclid Analytics, a company that helps brands monitor and understand their foot traffice. AgVend is their white knight, coming to save them from getting disrupted out of business. “Why cut them out of the equation?” he asks.

Whether farmers will go along is the question. Those who’ve joined FBN can ostensibly save money on seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and more by being invited to comparison shop through FBN’s own online store. It’s not the easiest sell, though. FBN charges farmers $600 per year to access its platform, which is presumably a hurdle for some.

AgVend meanwhile is embracing good-old-fashioned opacity. While it invites farmers to search for products at its own site based on the farmers’ needs and location, it’s only after someone has purchased something that the retailer who sold the items is revealed. The reason: retailers don’t necessarily want to put all of their pricing online and be bound to those numbers, explains Reichert.

Naturally, AgVend insists that it’s not just better for retailers and the manufacturers standing behind them. For one thing, says Reichert, AgVend’s farming customers are sometimes offered rebates. Customers are also better informed about the products they’re buying because the information is coming from the retailers and not a third party, he insists. “When a third party like FBN comes in and tries going around the retailers, the manufacturers can’t guarantee that FBN is giving the right guidance about their products.”

In the end, its customers will decide. But the market looks big enough to support a number of players if they figure out how to play it. According to USDA data from last year, U.S. farms spent an estimated $346.9 billion in 2016 on farm production expenditures.

That’s a lot of feed and fertilizer. It’s no wonder that founders, and the VCs who are writing them checks, see fertile ground. This particular deal was led by 8VC and included the participation of Precursor Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, FJ Labs and House Fund, among others.

Guestfriend automates chatbot creation for restaurants

Published April 17, 2018

While chatbots might sound like an interesting experiment for restaurants and other small businesses, they probably can’t devote much time or money to building them. So a startup called Guestfriend is planning to make the process as fast and easy as possible.

The company has raised $5 million in seed funding from Primary Venture Partners, Techstars Ventures and betaworks. It’s led by Bo Peabody, a venture partner and entrepreneur in residence at Greycroft who also co-owns the Mezze Restaurant Group. Peabody compared the current moment to the year 2000, when “every small business woke up and said, ‘I need a website.’”

“That moment is coming for chatbots,” he predicted.

But rather than asking a restaurant owner or employee to go online and design the conversational flow of a chatbot themselves, Guestfriend can automatically create a chatbot based on information that’s already online — hours, menu, support for dietary restrictions and so on. In that sense, Peabody said, “It’s really just a website that you talk to.”

“The ah-ha moment was when I realized that building a bot for my restaurant was virtually impossible to do as a one-off, but all of the answers to almost any question are available online, mostly in structured APIs,” he said.

GuestFriend

Peabody suggested that the real challenge was building natural language technology that could support the range of questions that someone might ask — for example, all the different ways that people might ask about the dress code. That’s one reason why it was important to target a specific industry, though he eventually plans to expand into home services, retail, spas/salons/exercise and hotels. (“It’s really the Yelp verticals.”)

Guestfriend chatbots work across platforms, including SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Google search results (via Google My Business), with plans to support speech platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

The company is actually building these chatbots without waiting for restaurants to sign up. (You can try them out on the Guestfriend website.) The idea is that publishers with restaurant listings can also incorporate them as a new way to interact with their sites.

At the same time, restaurants can come in and claim their chatbots, which will be updated accordingly everywhere that they’re available. The restaurant can then be as hands-on or as hands-off as they want.

I brought up the fact that I often visit restaurants’ Facebook Pages in the hopes of answering more timely questions, like whether or not a restaurant is staying open despite bad weather or a holiday. Peabody suggested that as with social media or a website, the up-to-dateness of the information will depend on the restaurant — some of them might want to update every day with things like daily specials. For others, a completely automated approach might be the most appealing.

Huawei refocuses on existing markets amid US woes

Published April 17, 2018

Huawei is readjusting its approach the U.S. In an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the company asserted its commitment on existing customers and markets. It’s a shift in focus for a company that has been aggressively targeting new territories, looking to expand its position as the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer.

It’s understandable, of course. There are some opponents not even a behemoth like Huawei is likely to overtake, the United States government chief among them. This year has been a succession of rained-on parades for Huawei. At CES in January, the company had a long-awaited carrier deal pulled out from under it, just before taking the stage. That left mobile chief Richard Yu fuming in off-script remarks as the event drew to a close.

Late last month, as the company was planning to announce a new high-power flagship, news got out that Best Buy was planning to phase out its Huawei stock. The timing of the two announcements led to some fairly awkward press briefings in both cases. Best Buy and AT&T’s cold feet are understandable, of course, as top U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned against buying the company’s products over spying concerns.

Huawei, for its part, is clearly positioning this as the story of a company that’s caught in the crossfires of escalating tensions between two global superpowers — a point of view that likely contains at least a kernel of truth. As rhetoric ramps up between the U.S. and China through trade tariffs and angry tweets, this whole thing is likely to get worse before it gets any better.

Eric Xu, who is one of a trio of rotating CEOs that make up the company’s unique upper echelons, said in the meeting, “It is beyond myself to clearly explain what is going on between the two countries.”

As The Wall Street Journal notes, Huawei recently laid off five U.S.-based employees, including a senior spokesperson who repeatedly and regularly went to bat for the company. We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment, and will update as soon as we hear back.

For now, it seems like a stark contrast to Yu’s reaffirmation of the company’s commitment to the U.S., when he told the press, “We are committed to the U.S. market and to earning the trust of U.S. consumers by staying focused on delivering world-class products and innovation.”

This latest comment sounds a bit more bleak — understandably so. The U.S. is a tough market to conquer, even when the government isn’t actively working to dissuade people and agencies from buying your product.

Update: Huawei offered TechCrunch a response to the news of layoffs,

Like every company, we continually evaluate our organization and align our resources to support our business strategy and objectives. Any changes to staffing size or structure are simply a reflection of standard business optimization.

Resy rolls out a new suite of tools for restaurants

Published April 17, 2018

Resy launched in the summer of 2014 with a simple premise: If you want a premium reservation at a restaurant on short notice, you should be able to pay for it. Four years and 160 markets later, Resy has changed a lot since then.

But today, the company is about to change things up even more.

This morning, Resy has announced a brand new suite of tools for restaurants, including a new inventory management system called ResyFly.

As it stands now, restaurants have two options when it comes to inventory management for their reservations. They can choose a slot system, where diners are seated at 6pm, 8pm and 10pm, or they can opt for a flex system, where they take reservations as they’re called in and build the night’s reservations based off what comes in first.

Unfortunately, most restaurants have to choose between these two systems, as there are no inventory management systems that offer the ability to do both, according to Resy.

ResyFly uses Resy’s troves of data to determine the best way for restaurants to eliminate gaps in their inventory throughout a given night, taking into account things like date, time, weather and even the average time spent eating at a given restaurant. The tool gives restaurants the ability to schedule different floor plans, reservation grids and hours of operation for special days like Valentine’s Day.

Alongside ResyFly, the company is also introducing Business Intelligence, a window into important information like KPIs, revenue and ratings with third-party information from platforms like Foursquare layered in and integrated with POS software providers to offer real-time revenue reporting.

But sometimes you want direct feedback from the customer. To that end, Resy is launching Resy Surveys, which gives a restaurant the opportunity to send a custom survey to customers about their experience. Resy is also integrating with Upserve, giving Resy’s restaurant partners insights into their guests’ preferences and favorite dishes, as well as info on dining companions, frequency of bookings and historical spend.

And while Resy is focused on refining the product, the company is also focused on growth. That’s why Resy has announced the launch of Resy Global Service, which lets Resy distribute inventory to partners like Airbnb. (It’s worth noting that Airbnb led Resy’s $13 million funding round in 2017.)

Finally, Resy is working on a new membership loyalty program called Resy Select, which will launch at the end of the month. Resy Select is an invite-only program that gives restaurants insights into Resy’s hungriest users, and gives those users benefits such as exclusive booking windows, priority waitlist, early access tickets to events and other exclusive experiences like meeting the chef or touring the kitchen.

Resy books more than 1 million reservations on the platform each week. The company no longer charges users for reservations, but rather charges restaurants by feature, instead of cover, with three tiers ranging from $189/month to $899/month. That said, the company is not yet self-serve on the restaurant side, but founder and CEO Ben Leventhal said the team is thinking about introducing it in the future.

“The key challenge and key opportunity is to do everything we can to make the right choices about what we build and the order we build it in,” said Leventhal. “Our goal is to stay focused on restaurants, as a significant amount of the tech we build is built in conjunction with our restaurant partners.”

Drift raises $60 million to be an Amazon for businesses

Published April 17, 2018

When you’re raising venture capital, it helps if you’ve had “exits.” In other words, if your company has been acquired or you’ve taken one public, investors are more inclined to take a bet on anything you do.

Boston -based serial entrepreneur David Cancel has sold not just one, but four companies. And after a few years running product for HubSpot, he’s in the midst of building number five.

That startup, Drift, managed to raise $47 million in its first three years. Now it’s announcing another $60 million led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors CRV and General Catalyst. The valuation is undisclosed.

So what is Drift? It’s “changing the way businesses buy from businesses,” said Cancel. He wants to eventually build an alternative to Amazon to make it easier for companies to make large orders.

Currently, Drift subscribers can use chatbots to help turn web visits into sales. It has 100,000 clients including Zenefits, MongoDB, Zuora and AdRoll.

Drift “turns those conversations into customers,” Cancel explained. He said that technology is comparable to what is commonly used for customer service. It’s the “same messaging that was used for support, but used in the sales context.”

In the long-run, Cancel says he hopes Drift will expand its offerings to compete with Salesforce.

The company wouldn’t disclose revenue, but says it is ten times better compared to whatever it was in the past year. And it’s on track to grow another five times this year. This, of course, means little without hard numbers.

Yet we’re told that the new round means that Drift will have $90 million in the bank. It plans to use some of the funding to make acquisitions in voice and video technology. Drift also plans to expand its teams in both Boston and San Francisco, with new offices for both. The company presently has 130 employees.

Elon Musk’s Boring Co. raises $113 million to chase a pipe dream

Published April 16, 2018

Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company has raised $113 million to fund its vision of the near/distant future of transportation, according to newly filed SEC docs first spotted by CNBC.

The startup, which is centered around the goal of creating underground tunnels, plays a central part in Musk’s integrated view of urban transportation that he hopes will shape how the public moves about in a quick and efficient way. Last month, Musk announced that the company would be adjusting its plans to prioritize pedestrian traffic over vehicles.

A major part of the company’s early efforts have been in fighting for permits and contracts with city governments. Though Musk has indicated that he hopes to use the company to alleviate the problems of LA traffic, the company is also currently actively engaged in working with cities across the U.S.

Today’s documents don’t offer much insight into the details of the round beyond the cash amount and the fact that there were 31 undisclosed participants in the equity funding. The company has gotten some press for its less than conventional “fundraising methods” so far, where it has sold pre-orders of branded hats and, yes, flamethrowers.

Someone made a game where you ride the rapidly changing prices of cryptocurrencies

Published April 16, 2018

The cryptocurrency world is a strange one, but at least it has a sense of humor. A new game has you riding a little crypto-car along the wildly fluctuating prices of major and minor currencies. It’s quite ridiculous, and it isn’t even a bad game!

It’s called Crypto Rider, predictably, and is very much a spawn of the popular Line Rider type of game, though (hopefully) different enough that there won’t be any cease and desists forthcoming.

You select your car, then pick a chart to ride — most are a ride from a coin’s humble start to its highest value. But there’s a mountain-like “total market cap” track, a “drag race” where you need to clear a valuation gap and one that must be depressing for BTC holders: a bumpy downhill ride from $20K to $7,850. New tracks should appear in time, as new cryptocurrencies rise and fall.

The game is cute — there are fun messages along the track, and the exhaust is tiny coins — and you collect coins toward unlocking new cars. I’m pretty sure they’re just aesthetic changes, but I’m gunning for a Dogecar anyway.

“The game was a side project for me to do in my own time,” wrote back Daniel Fahey, founder of the developer, SuperFly Games. “So the first original 10 tracks were what I felt were needed to give the game some replayability. But after the reception the game has received during its launch day, I will certainly be adding more tracks.”

It’s free, it’s dumb and it’s a fun way to waste a few minutes while you inadvertently lampoon the hubris of this rushed attempt to overthrow existing financial systems.

“I hope people find the game funny because it certainly wasn’t meant to be serious,” Fahey wrote. “It’s a bit of light-hearted fun in a somewhat serious space.”

Blockchain stuff is promising and we’ll get there eventually. But as the game seems to emphasize, it’ll probably be quite a ride.

You can download Crypto Rider for iOS or Android.

Utah’s Pluralsight unveils IPO filing

Published April 16, 2018

Pluralsight, the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing.

Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.

Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.

In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million.

This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015.

Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015.

Pluralsight has been around since 2004. Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing.

The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1 percent of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4 percent and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1 percent.

Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel.

Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “PS.”

A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses.

Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.

It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014.

After a slow first couple of months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.

Netflix nears a $150B market cap as its subscribers continue to balloon

Published April 16, 2018

Just last quarter Netflix passed a $100 billion market cap — and we might already be talking about it as a $150 billion company before too long with yet another big financial quarter that sent its stock soaring.

Netflix, again, beat out some expectations Wall Street held for the first quarter and provided a pretty good outlook for the next quarter as well, where it said it expected to add around 6.2 million new subscribers. In the first quarter, Netflix added 7.41 million new subscribers — around 2 million of them domestic and the rest internationally. The company continued to see some pretty strong streaming revenue growth, which was up around 43% year-over-year in the first quarter this year, to around $3.6 billion.

With all this, Netflix now has nearly 119 million paid streaming memberships — and it wasn’t all that long when Netflix finally said just over two years ago that it would begin opening up in hundreds of new countries internationally. The company’s shares are up around 6% in extended trading, sending its market cap up north of $140 billion. And all this subscriber growth, too, comes before we’re seeing a new tie-up with Comcast’s cable subscriptions that may end up driving that even more. As usual, Netflix expects to lose a ton of money and says it expects between -$3 billion to -$4 billion in free cash flow, but that’s usually not what investors are looking for.

One of the big questions Netflix still has right now is what kind of price tag it will carry as a tack-on to a Comcast subscription. Earlier this week, the companies announced that Comcast would bundle Netflix in to its cable subscriptions, offering yet another entry point for Netflix to ferret up potential consumers that haven’t quite cut the cord yet but still might be interested in Netflix’s content. Netflix normally carries a price tag of around $13.99, but the companies have not said what its price will be as part of a cable bundle yet.

Following Netflix’s last earnings report — which it, as you might expect, included some blowout subscriber numbers — the company rocketed past a market cap of $100 billion. Since then it’s only been an upward trend for Netflix, which prior to its first-quarter report was worth more than $130 billion. Despite increasing spend on original content, that subscriber number is still mostly where it gets its market value because it’s a forward predictor of its revenue.

Netflix late last year said it expected to spend between $7 billion and $8 billion on original content this year, a number that seems to periodically get an upward revision and is still a dramatic step up from 2017. The company in its report today said it expected to spend between $7.5 billion and $8 billion on original content, and expects that marketing and content spend to weight toward the second half of 2018.

But it has to continue to invest in original content because it is a way to attract new subscribers, and also because it’s content that it can more easily distribute across different geographies and itself has control of the rights and what happens to it. It relies on shows like Stranger Things or Altered Carbon to bring in new users, which then hopefully stick around and eventually help recoup the cost of those shows — and then the cycle starts anew.

FCC dings T-Mobile $40M for faking rings on calls that never connected

Published April 16, 2018

T-Mobile will pay $40 million as part of a settlement with the FCC for playing ringing sounds to mislead customers into thinking their calls were going through when in fact they had never connected in the first place. The company admitted it had done so “hundreds of millions” of times over the years.

The issue at hand is that when someone is trying to call an area with poor connectivity, it can sometimes take several seconds to establish a line to the other party — especially if a carrier itself does not serve the area in question and has to hand off the call to a local provider. That’s exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and there’s nothing wrong with it — just a consequence of spotty coverage in rural areas.

But what is prohibited is implying to the caller that their call has gone through and is ringing on the other end, if that’s not the case. Which is also exactly what T-Mobile was doing, and had been doing since 2007. Its servers began sending a “local ring back tone” when a call took a certain amount of time to complete around then.

As the FCC estimates it, and T-Mobile later confirmed:

Because T-Mobile applied this practice to out-of-network calls from its customers on SIP routes that took more than a certain amount of time on a nationwide basis and without regard to time of day, the LRBT was likely injected into hundreds of millions of calls each year.

It’s not just a bad idea: it’s against the law. In 2014 the FCC’s Rural Call Completion Order took effect, prohibiting exactly this practice, which it called “false audible ringing”:

[O]ccurs when an originating or intermediate provider prematurely triggers audible ring tones to the caller before the call setup request has actually reached the terminating rural provider. That is, the calling party believes the phone is ringing at the called party’s premises when it is not. An originating or intermediate provider may do this to mask the silence that the caller would otherwise hear during excessive call setup time. As a result, the caller may often hang up, thinking nobody is available to receive the call. False audible ringing can also make it appear to the caller that the terminating rural provider is responsible for the call failure, instead of the originating or intermediate provider.

Users and carriers complained after this rule took effect, and also sought remedy with T-Mobile directly. The FCC looked into it and T-Mobile reported that it had solved the problem — but complaints continued. It became clear that the company had been violating the rule for years and in great volume and had not in fact stopped; hence the settlement and $40 million penalty.

T-Mobile will also have to take action within 90 days to stop the practice (if it hasn’t already) and issue regular reports to the FCC every year for the next three years that it is still in compliance. You can read the full consent decree here (PDF).

Update: FCC Commissioner Clyburn points out in a separate statement that despite evidence of widespread consumer harm, there’s nothing for users in the settlement.

[T]here is absolutely nothing in this consent decree to compensate consumers. Prior consent decrees have included direct-to-consumer benefits, such as refunds or discounts, or notifications to customers who have been impacted.

Despite demonstrating a clear and tangible consumer harm, in this consent decree, consumers are treated as a mere
afterthought.

The $40 million civil penalty, which will be paid to the U.S. Treasury, is dwarfed by larger, unpaid fines recently proposed against individual robocallers—and the volume of potential violations here outpaces any robocalling action the Commission has taken. And the compliance plan does not contain any concessions that would explain such a massive discount.