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Brazil’s tech startups begin to expand globally

Published May 8, 2018

Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

Traditionally, many Brazilian startups have been content to focus on growing their revenues and market share on the “Ilha de Santa Cruz” (Island of the True Cross, as Brazil was named by a Portuguese sea-captain in 1500). There is plenty to feast on here with a growing middle class, the citizens’ voracious appetite for social and digital media consumption and a population of nearly 211,000,000. More so than other major entrepreneurial centers, Brazil’s founders are known for bootstrapping early-stage companies and avoiding global expansion, as the capital can be costly and lead to a dilution in shares in their startups.

Yet, as the country that is home to the world’s eighth largest economy slowly pulls out of a long recession with its first annual uptick in GDP last year, increasingly the “Brazilians are coming” to compete in more international markets — and more rapidly than ever before. Entrepreneurial expansion outside the country is on the rise as the startup ecosystem becomes more mature, and against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of global investment coming into Brazil from China, Japan, Europe, Silicon Valley and beyond. Indeed, international investment in LatAm startups has “more than doubled since 2013.”

Another trend that’s providing more Brazilian companies with the capital needed to fuel their global expansion is the “flurry of equity deals” during the first part of 2018, “ahead of the presidential elections in October that are expected to prompt volatility in the markets,” according to Bloomberg Markets. For example, NYSE’s biggest IPO since Snap earlier this year raised nearly $2.3 billion for Brazilian fintech PagSeguro (NYSE:PAGS), a payment processing company similar in business model to Jack Dorsey’s Square. It was the largest IPO of a Brazilian company since 2011.

Brazil’s export of fast-growth startups is on the rise

There has been a growing stream of Brazilian startups that have begun to shift focus to the U.S. during the last two years. Mosyle, founded in 2012 by Alcyr Araujo, is now based in the U.S. and used in more than 4,000 schools to help ensure that kids’ mobile device experiences are fun, safe and educational with more parental and teacher involvement.

Pipefy, which announced $16 million in Series A funding last month and was originally based in Curitiba, Brazil, has recently relocated its global HQ to San Francisco. More than 8,000 companies in 146 countries around the world use its operations-excellence platform today.

Similarly, PSafe, a mobile security, privacy and performance platform company, moved its global headquarters to San Francisco last August and now has more than half of its revenues from the U.S.

A fast-growth Brazilian startup called Gympass, which offers a corporate benefit plan to keep employees fit and healthy, has quietly grown into a global business in less than six years. Born in the country that places second in overall number of gyms, Gympass lets a company’s employees make unlimited visits to a growing network of multiple gyms and pay less than half the normal monthly fee. Last month, the company announced its launch in 12 key markets in the U.S., adding 3,000 new workout facilities to its global network of 30,000. Its corporate partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Metlife, PayPal and P&G.

The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast.

Belo Horizonte-based Hotmart, a comprehensive platform to sell digital products like e-books, online courses and software that was founded in 2011, has expanded into Europe, including opening new offices in Madrid, Paris and the Netherlands. It’s also expanded into Colombia.

São Paulo-based Movile, a leader in mobile marketplaces with a big dream of making life better for a billion people through mobile apps, has seen tremendous growth since its founding in 1998. It now employs more than 1,500 people and impacts the lives of more than 100 million people around the globe. Its food-delivery market, iFood, is now booming on all continents, and Naspers and the fund Innova Capital invested a new $82 million round last December, with a singular focus on growing iFood’s market share.

Since its foundation, Movile has raised more than $250 million to accomplish more than 20 mergers, acquisitions and investments in startups beyond iFood, including Maplink, PlayKids, Pointer, Rapiddo, SuperPlayer and Sympla, among others.

Smart strategy and networking resources boost success

With the advent and growth of SaaS platforms, a fast-emerging global on-demand economy and some entirely original business models, many Brazilian startups are poised for success as they scale from being regional plays to any number of international markets. Typically, when more than a quarter of a startup’s business is coming in from international markets — as was the case with Pipefy and its cloud-based platform — the timing is ripe to land and expand outside a company’s home country.

In choosing international markets, a smart strategy for tech startup founders is to analyze those regions that possess high broadband and mobile-device adoption, readily available payment infrastructures, political stability, level socioeconomic playing fields, fair tax requirements and an easy-to-navigate regulatory environment. One useful rule of thumb to help obtain a basic understanding is to compare the overall internet population by country versus GDP per capita. This exercise will generate a model to prioritize countries with larger numbers of prospects with high levels of disposable income.

Another critical element for optimizing success is a solid understanding of regional differences and key variances across international markets — from cultural nuances to regulatory impacts to diverse approaches to conducting business. Identifying and tapping local network resources early on can make a world of difference.

The maturing startup ecosystem in Brazil has benefited hugely from access to Cubo, the largest entrepreneurial hub in Latin America, and its constant intermingling and exchange of ideas between startup founders, investors, academics and government officials.

In Silicon Valley, BayBrazil has been hugely impactful in connecting and building a tight-knit community of Brazilian and U.S. professionals, founders and scholars living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a global scale, organizations like Endeavor have sparked high-impact entrepreneurship and success around the planet.

The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast. A recent rise in startups born and bred in Brazil that are being exported to international markets around the globe to further scale and propagate is a trend to be celebrated.

Saúde! (Cheers)

MoviePass parent drops 31% on looming cash crunch

Published May 8, 2018

The big question in the media world today is whether MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson can stanch the bleeding of its cash flows before it becomes insolvent.

In a new filing today with the SEC, Helios informed investors that it had $15.5 million in available cash, with another $27.9 million in accounts receivable from members of MoviePass on longer-term subscriptions. Under accounting rules, those dollars can’t be used to fund current expenses. The company said that it has lost $21.7 million a month between September and April this year.

Investors dumped the stock following the filing, and the stock was down 31 percent at the close of the equity markets today.

While linear math would seem to indicate that the company is on track for insolvency in a matter of days, the filing and its CEO are maintaining an optimistic line. The company said that following a series of product changes, including more verification that a subscriber actually watched a film themselves, it should reduce its cash loss on the service by 35 percent during the first week of May.

In an interview with TechCrunch, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe struck a positive view on the future of the business. He argued that unlike in the past, where a new app or service would raise venture capital and then invest it in the business, you can just handle capital concerns as you need them. “Today what you do is you raise enough money month by month to fund essentially that negative cash flow,” he said. “We are 100% confident that we have the committed funding to do it.”

In order for the company to avoid insolvency, the company will need to continue to sell its common stock to investors on a regular basis to fund that negative cash flow. The company said that sales of its common stock will need to begin this month in order to fund operations. If the company is unable to do so, “we may be required to reduce the scope of our planned growth or otherwise alter our business model, objectives and operations, which could harm our business, financial condition and operating results,” it wrote in the filing.

Google announces an update to its website optimization tool Lighthouse

Published May 8, 2018

Google today said it is rolling out Lighthouse 3.0, an update to its tools that help developers optimize their websites and audit their performance.

The new update is centered around more precise and actionable metrics, such as page load time and the components of the site that might be slowing it down. Google has been working to ensure that websites are able to run quickly and smoothly through products like Google AMP. Getting all those websites running in an optimized fashion can increase engagement across the board, and the new version of lighthouse is designed to drill even further down to what’s happening. Google announced its launch today at Google I/O 2018.

All this is important for Google, too. If Google is going to be the service surfacing up all these websites, getting people in to the best experiences means users will end up expecting that kind of performance. They’ll then come back to Google to get all that information, even if it means going to Google to search for their favorite services that they access through a website.

But if developers are going to figure out where their websites are failing, they might need to test smaller components bit-by-bit to figure out what’s happening. Lighthouse gives developers a way to look for the failing indicators of a website and find out exactly what might be making the experience less than optimal. The more granular the tools, the more information they can use in order to figure out how to improve those websites.

Gamalon scores $20 M led by Intel Capital

Published May 8, 2018

Gamalon wants to change the game when it comes to understanding text-based customer communications. Instead of using neural networks to learn about a vast corpus of information, the startup takes a different approach, putting the text in a database and building decision trees to very rapidly train the data to arrive at the required information. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital.

Other participants in the round included .406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures along with existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised by the company since inception in 2013 to $32 million including backing from DARPA in earlier rounds.

Gamalon CEO Ben Vigoda says they developed a new approach to analyzing customer interactions because the state of the art in AI and machine learning was too much of a black box.

His company wants to change that by making the whole process much more interactive. To that end Gamalon also released a new tool called Idea Studio, a product that can automatically build learning trees to help users arrive at answers extremely fast or allow a business analyst or data scientists to simply enter a series of queries and build a decision tree on the fly based on the text. With neural networks, Vigoda says, the user has no control over the end result, but with Idea Studio you can edit the trees and refine the results immediately.

Gamalon Idea Studio decision tree. Photo: Gamalon

The product still needs a way to review all of the text-based content, of course, but instead of having humans categorize it all manually, with Gamalon you import your data into a database, do analytics on it and then make it available for rapid categorization and response.

This could have multiple utilities, whether for customer service agents to find answers very quickly or customers to interact with bots and find answers much faster. Analysts could use it to locate answers to business issues, and it’s sophisticated enough for data scientists to build machine learning projects based on a large corpus of data.

You can build a learning tree by entering related text to train it. GIF: Gamalon

Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation says they like how Gamalon puts machine learning into hands of many different employees around the customer information use case. “We want enterprises of all levels of AI capability to take full advantage of this growing volume and complexity of data. Gamalon’s unique approach can help users better understand billions of customer communications, customize individual responses, and take action to better serve those customers,” Rao explained in a statement.

The company is based in Cambridge, MA and has 23 employees. They have six large customers including Avaya.

Intel Capital pumps $72M into AI, IoT, cloud and silicon startups, $115M invested so far in 2018

Published May 8, 2018

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the computer processor giant, is today announcing $72 million in funding for the 12 newest startups to enter its portfolio, bringing the total invested so far this year to $115 million. Announced at the company’s global summit currently underway in southern California, investments in this latest tranche cover artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud services, and silicon. A detailed list is below.

Other notable news from the event included a new deal between the NBA and Intel Capital to work on more collaborations in delivering sports content, an area where Intel has already been working for years; and the news that Intel has now invested $125 million in startups headed by minorities, women and other under-represented groups as part of its Diversity Initiative. The mark was reached 2.5 years ahead of schedule, it said.

The range of categories of the startups that Intel is investing in is a mark of how the company continues to back ideas that it views as central to its future business — and specifically where it hopes its processors will play a central role, such as AI, IoT and cloud. Investing in silicon startups, meanwhile, is a sign of how Intel is also focusing on businesses that are working in an area that’s close to the company’s own DNA.

It’s hasn’t been a completely smooth road. Intel became a huge presence in the world of IT and early rise of desktop and laptop computers many years ago with its advances in PC processors, but its fortunes changed with the shift to mobile, which saw the emergence of a new wave of chip companies and designs for smaller and faster devices. Mobile is area that Intel itself acknowledged it largely missed out.

Later years have seen still other issues hit the company. For example, the Spectre security flaw (fixes for which are still being rolled out). And some of the business lines where Intel was hoping to make a mark have not panned out as it hoped they would. Just last month, Intel shut down development of its Vaunt smart glasses and reportedly the entirety of its new devices group.

The investments that Intel Capital makes, in contrast, are a fresher and more optimistic aspect of the company’s operations: they represent hopes and possibilities that still have everything to play for. And given that, on balance, things like AI and cloud services still have a long way to go before being truly ubiquitous, there remains a lot of opportunity for Intel.

“These innovative companies reflect Intel’s strategic focus as a data leader,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement. “They’re helping shape the future of artificial intelligence, the future of the cloud and the Internet of Things, and the future of silicon. These are critical areas of technology as the world becomes increasingly connected and smart.”

Intel Capital since 1991 has put $12.3 billion into 1,530 companies covering everything from autonomous driving to virtual reality and e-commerce and says that more than 660 of these startups have gone public or been acquired. Intel has organised its investment announcements thematically before: last October, it announced $60 million in 15 big data startups.

Here’s a rundown of the investments getting announced today. Unless otherwise noted, the startups are based around Silicon Valley:

Avaamo is a deep learning startup that builds conversational interfaces based on neural networks to address problems in enterprises — part of the wave of startups that are focusing on non-consumer conversational AI solutions.

Fictiv has built a “virtual manufacturing platform” to design, develop and deliver physical products, linking companies that want to build products with manufacturers who can help them. This is a problem that has foxed many a startup (notable failures have included Factorli out of Las Vegas), and it will be interesting to see if newer advances will make the challenges here surmoutable.

Gamalon from Cambridge, MA, says it has built a machine learning platform to “teaches computers actual ideas.” Its so-called Idea Learning technology is able to order free-form data like chat transcripts and surveys into something that a computer can read, making the data more actionable. More from Ron here.

Reconova out of Xiamen, China is focusing on problems in visual perception in areas like retail, smart home and intelligent security.

Syntiant is an Irvine, CA-based AI semiconductor company that is working on ways of placing neural decision making on chips themselves to speed up processing and reduce battery consumption — a key challenge as computing devices move more information to the cloud and keep getting smaller. Target devices include mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors and drones.

Alauda out of China is a container-based cloud services provider focusing on enterprise platform-as-a-service solutions. “Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive,” Intel said.

CloudGenix is a software-defined wide-area network startup, addressing an important area as more businesses take their networks and data into the cloud and look for cost savings. Intel says its customers use its broadband solutions to run unified communications and data center applications to remote offices, cutting costs by 70 percent and seeing big speed and reliability improvements.

Espressif Systems, also based in China, is a fabless semiconductor company, with its system-on-a-chip focused on IoT solutions.

VenueNext is a “smart venue” platform to deliver various services to visitors’ smartphones, providing analytics and more to the facility providing the services. Hospitals, sports stadiums and others are among its customers.

Lyncean Technologies is nearly 18 years old (founded in 2001) and has been working on something called Compact Light Source (CLS), which Intel describes as a miniature synchrotron X-ray source, which can be used for either extremely detailed large X-rays or very microscopic ones. This has both medical and security applications, making it a very timely business.

Movellus “develops semiconductor technologies that enable digital tools to automatically create and implement functionality previously achievable only with custom analog design.” Its main focus is creating more efficient approaches to designing analog circuits for systems on chips, needed for AI and other applications.

SiFive makes “market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture,” founded by the inventors of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans.

Watch Google I/O developer keynote live right here

Published May 8, 2018

Google I/O is nowhere near done. While the mainstream keynote just ended, the company is about to unveil the next big things when it comes to APIs, SDKs, frameworks and more.

The developer keynote starts at 12:45 PM Pacific Time (3:45 PM on the East Cost, 8:45 PM in London, 9:45 PM in Paris) and you can watch the live stream right here on this page.

If you’re an Android developer, this is where you’ll get the juicy details about the next version of Android. You can expect new possibilities and developer tools for you and your company. We’ll have a team on the ground to cover the best bits right here on TechCrunch.

Android blatantly copies the iPhone X navigation gestures

Published May 8, 2018

Google unveiled some of the new features in the next version of Android at its developer conference. One feature looked particularly familiar. Android P will get new navigation gestures to switch between apps. And it works just like the iPhone X.

“As part of Android P, we’re introducing a new system navigation that we’ve been working on for more than a year now,” VP of Android Engineering Dave Burke said. “And the new design makes Android multitasking more approachable and easier to understand.”

While Google has probably been working on a new multitasking screen for a year, it’s hard to believe that the company didn’t copy Apple. The iPhone X was unveiled in September 2017.

On Android P, the traditional home, back and multitasking buttons are gone. There’s a single pill-shaped button at the center of the screen. If you swipe up from this button, you get a new multitasking view with your most recent apps. You can swipe left and right and select the app you’re looking for.

If you swipe up one more time, you get the app drawer with suggested apps at the very top. At any time, you can tap on the button to go back to the home screen. These gestures also work when you’re using an app. Android P adds a back button in the bottom left corner if you’re in an app.

But the most shameless inspiration is the left and right gestures. If you swipe left and right on the pill-shaped button, you can switch to the next app, exactly like on the iPhone X. You can scrub through multiple apps. As soon as you release your finger, you’ll jump to the selected app.

You can get Android P beta for a handful of devices starting today. End users will get the new version in the coming months.

It’s hard to blame Google with this one as the iPhone X gestures are incredibly elegant and efficient — and yes, it looks a lot like the Palm Pre. Using a phone that runs the current version of Android after using the iPhone X is much slower as it requires multiple taps to switch to the most recent app.

Apple moved the needle and it’s clear that all smartphones should work like the iPhone X. But Google still deserves to be called out.

Android P Beta is available today

Published May 8, 2018

There was plenty of talk about Android P at today’s big I/O kickoff — but when can you actually download the thing? Right now, as a matter of fact, if you’ve got one of a handful of compatible handsets. You can find the upgrade here, if you dare.

The list includes the Pixel, naturally, but the company’s also partnering with a whole bunch of third-party developers, to allow a lot more users to try an early build of the mobile operating system. The list includes handsets from Nokia, Vivo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Sony, Essential and Oppo. It’s a pretty broad spectrum of handsets, though there are some key absences here, including, notably, Samsung, HTC, LG and Huawei.

The new version of the operating system includes a number of visual upgrades, a change over the Oreo’s additions, which were largely in the backend. There are also some key new gesture based functions, putting Android more inline with recent updates to iOS for the iPhone X and the new Adaptive Battery feature, which gets more juice out of existing hardware by throttling power on under used apps.

Google rolls out app time management controls

Published May 8, 2018

Google today announced at its I/O developer conference a new suite tools for its new Android P operating system that will help users better manage their screen time, including a more robust do not disturb mode and ways to track your app usage.

The biggest change is introducing a dashboard to Android P that tracks all of your Android usage, labeled under the “digital wellbeing” banner. Users can see how many times they’ve unlocked their phones, how many notifications they get, and how long they’ve spent on apps, for example. Developers can also add in ways to get more information on that app usage. YouTube, for example, will show total watch time across all devices in addition to just Android devices.

Google says it has designed all of this to promote what developers call “meaningful engagement,” trying to reduce the kind of idle screen time that might not necessarily be healthy — like sitting on your phone before you go to bed. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the other big changes:

Google’s do not disturb mode is getting additional ways to ignore notifications. Users can turn their phones over in order to automatically engage do not disturb, a gesture that Google is calling “shush.” Google is also reducing visual notifications in addition to texts and calls when do not disturb is activated.
Google is also introducing a “wind down” mode that activates before users go to bed. Wind down mode changes the screen color to a grayscale, and lowers the brightness over time. This one is geared toward helping people put their phones down when they’re going to bed.
Users can set time limits on their apps. Android P will nudge users when they are approaching that time limit, and once they it it, the app will turn gray on the launcher in order to indicate that they’ve exceeded the screen time they wanted for that app.

The launch had been previously reported by The Washington Post, and arrives at a time when there’s increasing concerns about the negative side of technology and, specifically, its addictive nature. The company already offers tools for parents who want to manage children’s devices, via Family Link – software for controlling access to apps, setting screen time limits, and configuring device bedtimes, among other things. Amazon also offers a robust set of parental controls for its Fire tablets and Apple is expected to launch an expanded set of parental controls for iOS later this year.

Android P leverages DeepMind for new Adaptive Battery feature

Published May 8, 2018

No surprise here, Android P was the highlight of today’s Google I/O keynote. The new version of the company’s mobile operating system still doesn’t have a name (at least not as of this writing), but the company’s already highlighted a number of key new features, including, notable, Adaptive Battery.

Aimed at taking on basically everyone’s biggest complaints about their handset, the new feature is designed to make more efficient use of on-board hard. Google’s own DeepMind is doing much of the heavy lifting here, relying on user habits to determine what apps they use, when, and delegating power accordingly.

According to the company, the new feature is capable of “anticipating actions,” resulting in 30-percent fewer CPU wakeups. Google has promised more information on the feature in the upcoming developer keynote. Combined with larger on-board batteries and faster charging in recent handsets, the new tech could go a long ways toward changing the way users interact with their devices, shift the all night charge model to quick charging bursts — meaning, for better or worse, you can sleep with your handset nearby without having to worry about keeping it plugged in.