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Revolut lets you purchase gold

Published March 12, 2020

Fintech startup Revolut has introduced a new trading feature for premium users. Starting today, Premium and Metal users can access gold exposure from the app.

Revolut works with a gold services partner (London Bullion Market Association) so that money you spend on gold exposure is backed by real gold held by this partner. In other words, you’re not going to receive gold coins in the mail. You can just invest money based on the price of gold.

The startup has been building a financial hub and already lets you purchase cryptocurrencies and buy public shares. Gold is part of a new feature called Commodities.

There are multiple ways to invest in gold. You can purchase gold exposure directly at market price, set a limit price to auto-exchange gold when it reaches a certain price or get cashback in gold for Metal customers.

At any time, you can convert your gold investment back into fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. If you spend money with your Revolut card and you only have gold, Revolut will use your gold exposure automatically. You can also transfer gold exposure to another Revolut user.

According to the company’s website, Revolut charges a 0.25% markup when you trade gold during the week and a 1% markup from Saturday at midnight to Monday at midnight U.K. time.

It’s worth noting that gold isn’t protected through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the U.K. “However, in the unlikely event of Revolut’s insolvency, all Precious Metals holdings will be sold and proceeds will be credited to your e-money account,” Revolut says. You’ll have to trust their word.

The 7 deadly sins of startups

Published March 12, 2020

Caryn Marooney
Contributor

Caryn Marooney is general partner at Coatue Management and sits on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic. An advisor to Airtable, in prior roles she oversaw communications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and co-founded The OutCast Agency, which served clients like Salesforce.com and Amazon.

Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.

You’ve probably heard of the Seven Deadly Sins, but I bet you’ve never wondered how they apply to starting a company. The answer: surprisingly well!

Over the years, I’ve talked about the seven habits every company should try to avoid and the seven (non-biblical) virtues each company should strive for. Done right, they will help founders focus, save time and avoid some common — and painful — mistakes.

For the purpose of this post, I’ve paired each sin with its closest corresponding virtue.

Sin No. 1: Lust (don’t focus on what other companies have)

As a founder, you have to pay attention to your competitors. Just don’t let that attention turn into lust for what they have — whether it’s a flashy marketing campaign, a fancy office or a killer staff.

Executive lust: Lusting after leadership can be especially tempting. So your competitor hired a rockstar executive who seems to be doing all the right things. It’s easy to think you need your own COO, or CRO, or CCO right now — and they need to be just like the person filling that role at the other successful company that looks nothing like yours.

Think carefully about what you need, why and what role that person will play day in and day out. What strengths and weaknesses do they have? What gaps do you need to fill? And what matters most to your customers and your business? It’s also important to think about your stage and your go-to-market model. When it comes to personnel, one size never fits all.

YC-backed Giveaway is a peer-to-peer marketplace that uses virtual currency

Published March 12, 2020

YC-backed Giveaway lets folks give away their unused or unnecessary items in a marketplace. Unlike other buy and sell or donation platforms, Giveaway uses a virtual currency on the platform to reward people for listing their products for free on the app.

Users earn Karma coins each time they list an item on the website. Folks can then use that Karma to claim items listed on the app.

The first person to try to claim an item offers zero Karma for the item. From there, a countdown begins, allowing others to offer more Karma for the item until the clock runs out. The user who offered the most Karma gets to claim the item. They are then connected to the giver via the app and can set a time and place to meet for the transaction. The person who claimed the item can inspect it and then approve the transaction, triggering the exchange of Karma coin.

Users can also rate and review each other on the platform for the quality of their items.

The app promotes giving items away to earn Karma but does offer a flow for purchasing the virtual currency. One Karma coin is equal to about $.30.

Giveaway was founded by Artem Artemiuk, Siarhei Lepchankou, and Siarhei Stasilovich. The idea came to them when traveling in Austria and coming across a store that allowed customers to choose one item for free.

After building the platform, the trio launched the app in their home market of Belarus and saw strong early growth. Since then, Giveaway has expanded to Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and now the United States.

Artemiuk, Giveaway’s CMO, said the company is laser focused on pre-moderation, which uses a combination of machine learning and human input to ensure that inappropriate items don’t make it on the platform, including drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and weapons.

In terms of business model, Giveaway takes a percentage of all Karma coins purchased on the platform, which account for about 30 percent of all Karma. Giveaway also sees the opportunity to generate revenue through an enterprise product within the app, allowing big corporations to opt for Giveaway over sometimes costly recycling options, and pay for the opportunity to do so.

Giveaway has raised $150K from Y Combinator and will present at the accelerator’s upcoming demo day.

Deep North raises $25.7M for AI that uses CCTV to build retail analytics

Published March 12, 2020

Amazon and others have raised awareness of how the in-store shopping experience can be sped up (and into the future) using computer vision to let a person pay for and take away items without ever interacting with a cashier, human or otherwise. Today, a startup is announcing funding for its own take on how to use AI-based video detection get more insights out of the retail experience. Deep North, which has built an analytics platform that builds insights for retailers based on the the videos from the CCTV and other cameras that those retailers already use, is today announcing that it has raised $25.7 million in funding, a Series A round that it plans to use to continue expanding its platform.

Deep North’s AI currently measures such parameters as daily entries and exits; occupancy; queue times; conversions and heat maps — a list and product roadmap that it’s planning to continue growing with this latest investment. It says that using cameras to build its insights is more accurate and scalable than current solutions that include devices like beacons, RFID tags, mobile networks, smartphone tracking and shopping data. A typical installation takes a weekend to do.

The funding is being led by London VC Celeres Investments (backer of self-driving startup Phantom AI, among others), with participation also from Engage, AI List Capital and others. The startup is not disclosing its valuation, and previously Deep North has not disclosed how much it has raised.

Previously known as VMAXX, the Bay Area-based startup, according to CEO and co-founder Rohan Sanil, currently is in use by customers in the US and Europe. It does not disclose customer names, but Sanil said the list includes shopping centers, retailers, commercial real estate businesses and transportation hubs.

There are a number of retail analytics plays on the market today, but up to now the vast majority of them have been based on using other kinds of non-visual (and non-video) data to build their pictures of how a business is working, including logs of sales, card payments, in-store beacons, in-store WiFi and smartphone usage.

This list is, indeed, extensive and already provides a startling amount of data on the average shopper, but it has its drawbacks. Some people don’t use in-store WiFi; beacons are not as ubiquitous as CCTV; certain shopping data is a false positive, in the sense that if you don’t buy anything, it’s harder to track why not and where everything went wrong in getting you to shop; and perhaps, most importantly, you can’t see how shoppers are behaving, where they are looking and walking.

“The data collected [by these other means] is only 30-60% accurate and then extrapolated,” Sanil notes in a blog post. And that is not the only challenge. “The other is the enormous cost of the technology along with the software – which requires a team of programmers to get anything beyond stock analysis – plus being locked into a single vendor.”

Video systems “make a lot more sense,” he adds, and so does using those that are already installed in retailers’ locations. “The customers we see have no interest in deploying and paying for additional infrastructure, when the average store has several cameras already, and a typical big box store has dozens. Making our vision work means quantifying what a camera can see – and seeing through the cameras already in use.” The company typically integrates with 60-70% of a company’s installed cameras to run its analytics.

It’s that differentiation that has attracted investors. “Deep North’s platform allows retailers to gain real time insights on data points that were previously unattainable in the physical world. By leveraging existing video footage to understand activity and behavior, operators can now make informed decisions with the help of their prescriptive analytics engine,” said Azhaan Merchant of Celeres Investments, in a statement.

CCTV has had a problematic profile in the world of data privacy, where people pinpoint it as enemy number one in our rapidly expanding surveillance economy, and have ironically pointed out that it rarely is fit for the purpose it was originally set out to serve, which is deterring and identifying shoplifters. It’s notable to me that Deep North doesn’t actually ever use the term CCTV. (“Customers use a variety of terms for their cameras including CCTV, camera networks and loss prevention cameras so we’ve chosen to use a broader term that encompasses them,” a spokesperson said.)

Whatever you choose to call them, if a retailer has already made the leap into having these cameras installed, using them for analytics gives that business another way of getting a better return on investment. Sanil says that in any case, its platform is respectful of privacy.

“Deep North is not able to ascertain the identity of any individual captured via in-store footage,” he said. “We have no capability to link the metadata to any single individual. Further, Deep North does not capture personally identifiable information (PII) and was developed to govern and preserve the integrity of each and every individual by the highest possible standards of anonymization. Deep North does not retain any PII whatsoever, and only stores derived metadata that produces metrics such as number of entries, number of exits, etc. Deep North strives to stay compliant with all existing privacy policies including GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.” (It has operations in Europe where it would need to comply with GDPR.)

Still, Deep North’s combination of computer vision with retail technology is a signal of a bigger trend. Many providers of security cameras have started to incorporate retail analytics into their wider offerings, and those that are concentrating on check out, like Amazon but also startups like Trigo, are likely also to consider this area too. Longer term, as retailers, but also their IT providers, look to get more intelligence about how their businesses are working in a bid for better margins, we’re likely to see even more players in this space.

For Deep North, that might mean also expanding into a wider set of products that not only are able to generate insights into how people shop, but then to use to those to build recommendations into how stores are laid out, or prompts to shoppers for what they might consider next as they browse.

Uber and Lyft plunge, erasing recent gains after promising profits

Published March 12, 2020

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

A few weeks ago, Uber and Lyft, kicking bags of the 2019 stock market and regularly cited as examples of venture-backed excess, were back to fighting form.

After encouraging Q3 2019 reports from both ride-hailing giants that included fresh profitability promises and timelines, Uber upped the ante by moving its profitability goal up when it reported Q4 results earlier this year. Shares of the famous company rallied. When Lyft failed to mimic the declaration in its own Q4 earnings report, it was dinged by investors. But from the time of their Q3 2019 earnings reports to recently, Uber and Lyft were coming back up for air.

Suddenly, it was perfectly reasonable to be optimistic about the two ride-hailing companies that had become more famous for their sticky losses than their growth potential; as the pair had matured from upstart to public company, their money-losing methods appeared increasingly permanent, making the Q3 2019 and Q4 2019 profit declarations investor balm.

But after the rally came the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. Since then, the two companies have lost huge amounts of ground. Their shares fell 9.8% (Uber) and 11.8% (Lyft) yesterday alone. In pre-market trading this morning, they are down even more. I wanted to get my head around what could be causing this, so let’s run through each company’s most recent profit forecasts, results, share price gains and losses, and what investors are telling the world through their recent selloff. (Hint: DoorDash’s IPO probably isn’t happening soon.)

YC-backed Legionfarm lets competitive gamers pay to play with pro coaches

Published March 12, 2020

Legionfarm, a YC-backed company, is looking to bring coaches to the competitive gaming world. Esports teams at the very top often have coaches, but the rest of the massive competitive gaming scene has to find a way to improve on their own, either via sheer time played or with creative new training platforms.

There is a huge demand for skilled teammates that can help you hone your skills, while at the same time, there is a broad community of near-pro gamers who haven’t landed a spot on an esports team and want to earn a living with their skills.

Legionfarm is a platform built to solve both problems.

The company was founded by Alex Belyankin, who is a former pro gamer and was once in the top .01 percent of World of Warcraft players.

Competitive gamers can sign up to become a coach on the platform, going through a process that looks at their stats within a particular title. Less than the top 0.1 percent are accepted as coaches and told how to manage sessions, including asking the customer’s goal at the beginning of the session.

On the other side, gamers can pay to play with one (or two) of these coaches in hour-long increments. Legionfarm allows users to specify if they want to play with two coaches, one coach and a friend, or one coach and another customer.

Users can also determine what kind of lobby they want to enter, such as a public or a ranked lobby.

Here’s how it works.

When a user buys a session on the website, they are given instructions to join a Discord bot, which puts them in game chat with the coaches and asks for their gamertag for that specific title. The coaches then invite the customer to a lobby, and fire up the match.

To be clear, Legionfarm coaches are not coming from the same pool of streamers and pro gamers we’ve come to know and cheer on in the esports world. Rather, Legionfarm seeks out the very best and most skilled amateur players based on the publisher’s rankings and stats to become coaches. These are people who otherwise aren’t making money via Twitch or a salary via an esports organization, but are still in the top 0.1 percent of gamers by skill.

In other words, Legionfarm is creating pro gamers, rather than hiring them.

The average cost of a session is $16/hour, with Legionfarm taking half of the revenue and the rest going to the coach.

Legionfarm currently offers nine titles to choose from, including Apex Legends, Fortnite, CoD: Modern Warfare 2019, League of Legends, and Destiny 2. The company has run more than 300,000 gaming sessions with its 7,000 coaches.

Legionfarm is currently available via the web and through a Facebook Messenger bot, with plans to launch an app soon. Founder and CEO Alex Belyankin also teased new functionality that would allow Twitch viewers to request a session with the streamer directly from the chat.

Legionfarm has raised a total of $1.7 million from TMT Investments and Y Combinator, and will present at Y Combinator’s upcoming demo day.

Zume co-founder goes from pizza to climate-friendly food with $2.7 million in funding

Published March 12, 2020

Before leaving SoftBank-backed Zume Pizza in November 2018, co-founder Julia Collins knew what her next move would be: climate-friendly food. Today, Collins is announcing Planet FWD’s $2.7 million seed round led by BBG Ventures with participation from Cleo Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Kapor Capital and others.

What’s unique about this round, Collins told TechCrunch, is that 99.5% of the funds came from people of color and/or women. That was deliberate, she said. What’s also deliberate is the startup’s mission to combat climate change by building a climate-friendly food platform and snack brand.

“For me, the question has always been, how can we reform our food systems so that they work better for people and work better for the planet?” Collins said. “That’s been the thread that has connected all of my work in food. It’s always been how can we change the existing infrastructure and the ways of doing business so that we create better outcomes.”

In 2017, Collins learned she was about to become a parent — something she hadn’t expected. That’s what led to, what she describes as, a sudden shift in consciousness where she realized she would soon become responsible for another human being.

“When I learned I was going to be a parent, I decided I was going to become a climatarian,” Collins said. “So that meant not just being a vegetarian or living a plant-based lifestyle, but wanting to live a planet-based lifestyle. So I went from being a plant-based eater to a climatarian. So I started thinking about how I could make food choices that would have better outcomes for the climate.”

This is where the focus on regenerative agriculture comes in. Regenerative agriculture is a farming technique that aims to reverse the effects of climate change by capturing carbon in soil and aboveground biomass, which ultimately increases biodiversity, enriches soils and improves watersheds. But unlike organic foods, where those specific farms are relatively well-known and identified, that can’t be said for regenerative agriculture. This is where the food platform comes in.

“When it came to the regenerative food landscape, nothing had been codified or mapped yet,” Collins said. “And so, as I started to pull together the ingredients for my climate-friendly snacks, I amassed this really exhaustive library of all this information about these farms. And I thought that was really interesting because anybody who wants to create a climate-friendly food product needs a universal set of information that just wasn’t available. And here I was building it in a little spreadsheet. And so I looked up and I realized this is actually software that I’m building.”

It’s this software that is powering Planet FWD’s food production. The startup’s first product is a cracker, which launches later this year. The next product will likely be chips, Collins said.

“A lot of what we’re doing with this snack product is engaging consumers and trying out this climate-friendly positioning to see whether or not it actually resonates with people,” she said.

Ideally, Planet FWD will be able to show there’s consumer demand for climate-friendly products, Collins said. From there, she hopes that would encourage more farmers to implement these regenerative agriculture practices. At this point, it’s unclear how many farms are focused on regenerative agriculture, but Collins has so far identified hundreds of them.

Since leaving Zume, the robotic pizza company has struggled. Earlier this year, the company was forced to lay off 360 employees and shut down its pizza-making and delivery business. Now, the company is focused solely on food packaging.

“It was very, very hard for me to decide to step away,” Collins said about leaving Zume. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do professionally. I’ve had a year-and-a-half to make my peace and find distance from it, but it’s been difficult and painful to see. At some point, you have to look back and it’s hard to look back and know that I don’t have any control or influence around anything that’s happening now — either the way that it’s being messaged or the actual function of the company. I’m still an owner in the company, and I still have hope they’re going to get to a really good outcome. But I am powerless.”

Now and in the foreseeable future, Collins will be focused on climate-friendly foods and food production.

“All of us have to eat every day, but what if as a result of our eating, we were able to actually draw down carbon and reverse climate change. Much of what we talk about in terms of solutions are consume less and produce less but when it comes to food we all need to eat. What if, as a result of the way you ate, you could actually contribute to the solution.”

Men’s at-home health startup Vault takes in $30 million from Tiger Capital

Published March 12, 2020

Vault, an at-home healthcare practice specializing in men’s medicine has announced the raise of $30 million in funding from Tiger Capital Group, Declaration Capital and Redesign Health to reach more potential patients and expand to more areas beyond New York, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, where it currently offers treatments.

Founder and CEO Jason Feldman, who formerly headed Amazon’s Prime Video Direct and Global Innovation teams before launching Vault last summer, told TechCrunch his startup aims to bring specialized medicine into men’s homes to give them “a better body, better sex and a better brain.”

He tells TechCrunch he started the company after noticing how many of his male friends seemed embarrassed about medical conditions or simply didn’t know they could do something about it.

Vault operates on the assumption men face certain barriers to going to the doctor for things like hormonal imbalance and erectile dysfunction. The startup tries to remove these barriers by making it easy to book at-home appointments and get a work-up with a nurse practitioner.

“I want to de-stigmatize men’s health.” Feldman told TechCrunch. “You tell a guy to go see the doctor about his heart health and he likely won’t but you tell him you’ll bring him a doctor to help his penis and it’s a different story.”

Like many new concierge medical services that have popped up in the last few years, Vault does not take insurance, instead signing patients up via membership for $133 to $300 per month, depending on the type of service you sign up for. Compare that to Forward, which caters to both men and women and offers unlimited in-office visits and testing for $149/month or Roman, a men’s “digital clinic,” which offers free online evaluations, $15 doctor’s visits and prescription medications for similar services to Vault like erectile dysfunction, hair loss and testosterone support — although Roman requires patients see a physical doctor of their choosing within the last three years before they’re able to get prescriptions via digital services.

But Feldman doesn’t think his startup is anything like what’s out there right now, claiming it as the first national men’s healthcare provider. Vault offers specialty packages like testosterone therapy or the “sex kit” for an increased sex drive or stronger erections, something that sometimes diminishes as men age.

So far, Feldman has signed up over 500 medical practitioners to come to various home locations and has hired a chief medical officer to ensure medical standards are being met. He now plans to use the new funding to open up operations in 42 cities across the U.S. and work on spreading the word to all men nationwide that Vault is here for them.

Cloud gaming platform Shadow brings its new plans to the US

Published March 12, 2020

Blade, the French startup behind Shadow, announced plans to overhaul its subscription tiers back in October. The company is now bringing the new plans to the U.S. with a new entry tier at $11.99 per month as well as more powerful options in the coming months.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want — Steam, Photoshop or Word.

Shadow announces new plans for its cloud gaming platform

The current subscription tier, now called Shadow Boost, offers the same performance for a lower price. You get an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, 3.4GHz with 4 cores CPU, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage. It costs $11.99 per month if you sign up to a 12-month plan or $14.99 per month if you pay on a monthly basis.

Later this year, Shadow will also offer two additional plans:

Shadow Ultra: Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU, 4GHz with 4 cores CPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage
Shadow Infinite: Nvidia Titan RTX GPU, 4 GHz with 6 cores CPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage

These plans will cost $24.99 and $39.99 per month respectively if you subscribe to a 12-month plan — or $29.99 and $49.99 per month on a monthly basis.

Shadow Ultra and Shadow Infinite will roll out gradually starting this summer — only a limited number of users will be able to subscribe at first.

It’s worth noting that you’ll be able to add an option to get more storage with any plan. Storage plans include 256GB of SSD performance — anything above that will perform like a more traditional HDD.

The company now has four data centers in the U.S., which means that anybody in the U.S. can now access the service — not just people living on the West Coast or the East Coast.

In Europe, Shadow has had issues rolling out the new plans. While the company originally promised to deliver the new options in February, users who pre-ordered the new plans will only be able to access their new instance by the end of the summer.

Shadow offers apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Apple devices. Apple recently pulled Shadow’s apps from the App Store on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS. The company is still trying to find a solution with Apple to re-release the apps in the App Store.

In other news, the startup has signed a strategic partnership with LG Electronics. Details are thin, but LG is now a shareholder of the company. LG will also offer Shadow with some of its products.

Unitary, an EF alumnus, raises £1.3M seed for its content moderation AI

Published March 12, 2020

Unitary, a startup that’s developing AI to automate content moderation for “harmful content” so that humans don’t have to, has picked up £1.35 million in funding. The company is still in development mode but launched a trial of its technology in September.

Led by Rocket Internet’s GFC, the seed round also includes backing from Jane VC (the cold email-friendly firm backing female-led startups), SGH Capital, and a number of unnamed angel investors. Unitary had previously raised pre-seed funding from Entrepreneur First, as an alumnus of the company builder program.

“Every minute, over 500 hours of new video footage are uploaded to the internet, and the volume of disturbing, abusive and violent content that is put online is quite astonishing,” Unitary CEO and co-founder Sasha Haco, who previously worked with Stephen Hawking on black holes, tells me. “Currently, the safety of the internet relies on armies of human moderators who have to watch and take down inappropriate material. But humans cannot possibly keep up.”

Not only is the volume of content uploaded increasing, but the people employed to moderate the content on platforms like Facebook can suffer greatly. “Repeated exposure to such disturbing footage is leaving many moderators with PTSD,” says Haco. “Regulations are responding to this crisis and putting increasing pressure on platforms to deal with harmful content and protect our children from the worst of the internet. But currently, there is no adequate solution”.

Which, of course, is where Unitary wants to step in, with a stated mission to “make the internet a safer place” by automatically detecting harmful content. Its proprietary AI technology, which uses “state of the art” computer vision and graph-based techniques, claims to be able to recognise harmful content at the point of upload, including “interpreting context to tackle even the more nuanced videos,” explains Haco.

Meanwhile, although there are already several solutions offered to developers that can detect restricted content that is more obvious, such as explicit nudity or extreme violence (AWS, for example, has one such API), the Unitary CEO argues that none of these are remotely good enough to “truly displace human involvement”.

“These systems fail to understand more subtle behaviours or signs, especially on video,” she says. “While current AI can deal well with short video clips, longer videos still require humans in order to understand them. On top of this, it is often the context of the upload that makes all the difference to its meaning, and it is the ability to incorporate contextual understanding that is both extremely challenging and fundamental to moderation. We are tackling each of these core issues in order to achieve a technology that will, even in the near term, massively cut down on the level of human involvement required and one day achieve a much safer internet”.