1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support

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UCSD hospital gets a drone delivery program powered by Matternet and UPS

Published January 29, 2020

Drone delivery may not make a lot of sense for food or parcel delivery yet, but for hospitals it could be a lifesaver. A new test program is being inaugurated at UC San Diego’s Jacobs Medical Center, where Matternet drones operated by UPS will fly blood samples and other items to and from other nearby facilities.

The new program will be the third under Matternet’s belt; an earlier partnership with UPS has made some 1,900 flights at WakeMed hospital in North Carolina, and flights with SwissPost in Zurich resume this month after crashes put them on ice over the summer.

Biological samples and other items that need to be moved quickly generally travel by courier service, which is of course fine sometimes, but not during rush hour. No one wants to have a second spinal tap because the first one got stuck in traffic.

The flights these drones will be undertaking will be autonomous, but with remote monitoring and line of sight from Jacobs to the Moores Cancer Center and Center for Advanced Laboratory Medicine, both of which are less than a mile away.

It’s a big month for Matternet, which in addition to these two concurrent flight test programs recently pulled in a strategic round from the healthcare-focused McKesson Ventures.

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Verkada raises $80M at $1.6B to be every building’s security OS

Published January 29, 2020

Fifty iPads were stolen from Verkada co-founder Hans Robertson’s old company. Only when they checked the security system did they realize the video cameras hadn’t been working for months. He was pissed. “The market lagged behind the progress seen in the consumer space, where someone could buy high-end cameras with cloud-based software to protect their home,” Verkada’s CEO and co-founder Filip Kaliszan tells me of his own attempt to buy enterprise-grade security hardware.

Usually, startups ascend on the backs of fresh technologies and developer platforms. But Kaliszan and Robertson realized that commercial security was so backward that just implementing the established principles of machine vision and the cloud could create a huge company. The plan was to keep data secure yet accessible and train its cameras to take clearer photos when AI detects suspicious situations instead of just grainy video.

At first, few could see the vision through the slow upgrade cycles and basement security rooms common with most potential clients. “The seed and the A were extremely difficult rounds to raise compared to the later rounds because people didn’t believe we could execute what were are proposing,” Kaliszan glumly recalls.

But today Verkada receives a huge vote of confidence. It just raised an $80 million Series C at a stunning $1.6 billion post-money valuation thanks to lead investor Felicis Ventures writing Verkada its biggest check to date. The cash brings Verkada to $139 million in funding to sell dome cameras, fisheye lenses, footage viewing stations and the software to monitor it all from anywhere.

Why sink in so much cash at a valuation triple that of Verkada’s $540 million price tag after its April 2019 Series B? Because Verkada wants to bring two-factor authentication to doors with its new access control system that it’s announcing is now in beta testing ahead of a Spring launch. Instead of just allowing a stealable key fob or badge to open your office entryway, it could ask you to look into a Verkada camera too so it can match your face to your permissions.

“Our mission is to be the essential physical security software layer for every building, and the foundation of a larger enterprise IoT infrastructure,” Kaliszan tells me. By uniting security cameras and door locks in one system, it could keep banks, schools, hospitals, government buildings and businesses safe while offering new insights on how their spaces are used.

The founders’ pedigrees don’t hurt its efforts to sell that future to investors like Next47, Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital, which joined the round. Robertson co-founded IT startup Meraki and sold it to Cisco for $1.2 billion. Kaliszan and his other co-founders Benjamin Bercovitz and James Ren started CourseRank for education software while at Stanford before selling it to Chegg.

Making a better product than what’s out there isn’t rocket science, though. Many building security systems only let footage be accessed from a control room in the building… which doesn’t help much if everyone’s trying to escape due to emergency or if a manager elsewhere simply wants to take a look. Verkada’s cloud lets the right employees keep watch from mobile, and data is also stored locally on the cameras so they keep recording even if the internet cuts out. “Our competitors stream unencrypted video and it’s on you to protect it. We’re responsible for handling that data,” Kaliszan says.

Verkada’s machine vision software can make sense of all the footage its cameras collect. “We can immediately show them all the video containing a particular person of interest rather than manually searching through hours of footage,” Kaliszan insists. “Our platform can use AI/machine learning to recognize patterns and behaviors that are out of the norm in real time.”

For example, a hostage negotiator was able to use Verkada’s system to assess whether a SWAT team needed to invade a building. Verkada can group all spottings of an individual together for review, or scan all the footage for people wearing a certain color or with other search filters.

Indeed, 2,500 clients, including 25 Fortune 500 companies, are already using Verkada. In the last year it has tripled revenue, partnered with 1,100 resellers, launched nine new camera models, added people and vehicle analytics, opened its first London office and is on track to grow from 300 to 800 employees by the end of 2020.

“We call this reinvention,” says Felicis Ventures founder and managing director Aydin Senkut. “One thing people underestimate is how big this market is. Honeywell is valued at $110 billion-plus. There’s a Chinese company that’s over $50 billion. The opportunity to be the operating system for all buildings in the world? Sounds like that market couldn’t be better.” Senkut knows Verkada works because he had it installed in all his homes and offices.

Most enterprise software companies don’t have to worry about the complexities of hardware supply chains. There’s always a risk that its sales process stumbles, leaving it stuck with too many cameras. “We’re still burning money. We’re not there yet or we wouldn’t be raising venture. Because we’re going after a mature market, you can’t come at it with a model that doesn’t make sense. Investors come at it from a hard-nosed approach,” Robertson admits.

“People have a tendency to write off Verkada as a boring camera company. They don’t realize how access control as the second product is going to supercharge the company’s potential,” Senkut declares.

One bullet Verkada dodged is the one firmly lodged in Amazon’s chest. Ring security cameras have received stern criticism over Amazon’s cooperation with law enforcement that some see as a violation of privacy and expansion of a police state. “We don’t have any arrangements with law enforcement like Ring,” Kaliszan tells me. “We view ourselves as providing great physical security tools to the people that run schools, hospitals and businesses. The data that those organizations gather is their own.”

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Coinbase poaches Google Shopping VP as CPO for cryptocommerce

Published January 29, 2020

“We’re trying to shift cryptocurrency from this speculative asset class to driving real-world utility,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tells me. How? Through commerce and micropayments. But now Coinbase has the who to build it. Today the startup announced it has hired away former head of Product for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart and Google Shopping VP of Product Surojit Chatterjee to become Coinbase’s chief product officer.

“I’ve always enjoyed being associated with technology that is on the brink of changing how we live” writes Chatterjee. “Google ads has helped democratize commerce, Flipkart and ecommerce has revolutionized life in India, and I believe Coinbase is going to turn conventional finance on its head.”

Chatterjee spent more than 11 years at Google over two stints, the first as a founding member of Google’s mobile search Ads product that’s grown to tens of billions in revenue per year. When he starts at Coinbase next week, Armstrong tells me he’ll help Coinbase organize its complex array of products, including its cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, stablecoin, incentivized crypto education platform Earn and Coinbase Commerce that lets businesses take payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum and more. Chatterjee replaces Jeremy Henrickson, the former Coinbase CPO who departed in December 2018.

“Surojit is a huge asset here because we’re a product-led company,” Armstrong says. “We have different leaders and they increasingly have responsibilities around P&L. Having one really experienced chief product officer that can mentor them and teach them to own revenues and budgets — really in the model of Google — that will professionalize Coinbase.”

One opportunity Armstrong hopes Chatterjee can help Coinbase seize on is building products for emerging markets where financial infrastructure is weak. “E-commerce is not equally distributed around the world. Micropayments don’t work that well … Him spending time living in India, a developing market, he deeply understands mobile money.” Given the explosion of phone-based payments, the demonetization and the prevalence of cash on delivery methods in India that Flipkart dealt with, “his background is kind of ideal from that worldly perspective,” Armstrong explains.

Chatterjee cites his upbringing as inspiration to deliver “economic freedom for everyone,” as Armstrong says is Coinbase’s mission. “Growing up in India in a poor middle-class household, I saw very closely what a lack of liquid cash does to a family’s lifestyle,” Chatterjee recalls. 

“As a kid I would go with my mom to a local bank to withdraw money. And believe me when I tell you that the process was epic!” It included withdrawal slips, tokens and anxiously trying to match current signatures to versions decades old. When India demonetized and made everyone exchange their cash, “My dad, who was almost 80 at that time, stood in a queue for five hours to get 2000 Rs, which was the per-day limit for the first week. That’s less than $30!” Digital money could ensure people always have access to everything they own.

Surojit Chatterjee (far right) rides along for a Flipkart delivery to understand the consumer commerce experience

In developed countries, Armstrong sees a chance for Chatterjee to enable digital content creators to turn their passion into their profession. “There’s lots of people who lurk on Reddit or Stack Overflow and answer questions … If there was real money on these things, these could be their full time jobs — contributing content on user-generated social sites,” Armstrong predicts. “I think you’d see a lot more contributions, as well.”

Now might be the perfect time to hire Chatterjee since we’re in a lull period for cryptocurrency in the wake of the rush at the end of 2018. “Crypto is always challenging to navigate. In these periods when it’s relatively quiet, we tend to do really well,” Armstrong says. The company grew market share, volume and app installs versus competitors between 50% and 100%, according to the CEO. Referencing ancient war strategy, Armstrong concludes that, “There’s years where you just want to train the soldiers and stockpile resources and you’re basically just preparing. We’re building the company, not just responding to crazy hype.”

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Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo to talk fundraising at Early Stage SF 2020

Published January 29, 2020

Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them.

Struggling to understand the legal aspects of running a company, like negotiating cap tables or hiring international talent? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Wondering how to go about fundraising, from getting your first yes to identifying the right investors to planning the timeline for your fundraise sprint? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Growth marketing? PR/Media? Building a tech stack? Recruiting?

We. Got. You.

Hoffman + Guo

Today, we’re very proud to announce one of our few Main Stage sessions that will be open to all attendees. Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo will join us for a conversation around “How To Raise Your Series A.”

Reid Hoffman is a legendary entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. He was an Executive VP and founding board member at PayPal before going on to co-found LinkedIn in 2003. He led the company to profitability as CEO before joining Greylock in 2009. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Apollo Fusion, Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, Nauto and Xapo, among others. He’s also an accomplished author, with books like “Blitzscaling,” “The Startup of You” and “The Alliance.”

Sarah Guo has a wealth of experience in the tech world. She started her career in high school at a tech firm founded by her parents, called Casa Systems. She then joined Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage tech startups such as Zynga and Dropbox, and advised both pre-IPO companies (Workday) and publicly traded firms (Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia). She joined Greylock Partners in 2013 and led the firm’s investment in Cleo, Demisto, Sqreen and Utmost. She has a particular focus on B2B applications, as well as infrastructure, cybersecurity, collaboration tools, AI and healthcare.

The format for Hoffman and Guo’s Main Stage chat will be familiar to folks who have followed the investors. It will be an updated, in-person combination of Hoffman’s famously annotated LinkedIn Series B pitch deck that led to Greylock’s investment, and Sarah Guo’s in-depth breakdown of what she looks for in a pitch.

They’ll lay out a number of universally applicable lessons that folks seeking Series A funding can learn from, tackling each from their own unique perspectives. Hoffman has years of experience in consumer-focused companies, with a special expertise in network effects. Guo is one of the top minds when it comes to investment in enterprise software.

We’re absolutely thrilled about this conversation, and to be honest, the entire Early Stage agenda.

How it works

Here’s how it all works:

There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the event, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world.

Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.

Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts that we’ve announced. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

Grab yourself a ticket and start registering for sessions right here. Interested sponsors can hit up the team here.

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No pan-EU Huawei ban as Commission endorses 5G risk mitigation plan

Published January 29, 2020

The European Commission has endorsed a risk mitigation approach to managing 5G rollouts across the bloc — meaning there will be no pan-EU ban on Huawei. Rather it’s calling for Member States to coordinate and implement a package of “mitigating measures” in a 5G toolbox it announced last October and has endorsed today.

“Through the toolbox, the Member States are committing to move forward in a joint manner based on an objective assessment of identified risks and proportionate mitigating measures,” it writes in a press release.

It adds that Member States have agreed to “strengthen security requirements, to assess the risk profiles of suppliers, to apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered to be high risk including necessary exclusions for key assets considered as critical and sensitive (such as the core network functions), and to have strategies in place to ensure the diversification of vendors”.

The move is another blow for the Trump administration — after the UK government announced yesterday that it would not be banning so-called “high risk” providers from supplying 5G networks.

Instead the UK said it will place restrictions on such suppliers — barring their kit from the “sensitive” ‘core’ of 5G networks, as well as from certain strategic sites (such as military locations), and placing a 35% cap on such kit supplying the access network.

However the US has been amping up pressure on the international community to shut the door entirely on the Chinese tech giant, claiming there’s inherent strategic risk in allowing Huawei to be involved in supplying such critical infrastructure — with the Trump administration seeking to demolish trust in Chinese-made technology.

Next-gen 5G is expected to support a new breed of responsive applications — such as self-driving cars and personalized telemedicine — where risks, should there be any network failure, are likely to scale too.

But the Commission take the view that such risks can be collectively managed.

The approach to 5G security continues to leave decisions on “specific security” measures as the responsibility of Member States. So there’s a possibility of individual countries making their own decisions to shut out Huawei. But in Europe the momentum appears to be against such moves.

“The collective work on the toolbox demonstrates a strong determination to jointly respond to the security challenges of 5G networks,” the EU writes. “This is essential for a successful and credible EU approach to 5G security and to ensure the continued openness of the internal market provided risk-based EU security requirements are respected.”

The next deadline for the 5G toolbox is April 2020, when the Commission expects Member States to have implemented the recommended measures. A joint report on their implementation will follow later this year.

Key actions being endorsed in the toolbox include:

  •     Strengthen security requirements for mobile network operators (e.g. strict access controls, rules on secure operation and monitoring, limitations on outsourcing of specific functions, etc.);
  •     Assess the risk profile of suppliers; as a consequence,  apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered to be high risk – including necessary exclusions to effectively mitigate risks – for key assets defined as critical and sensitive in the EU-wide coordinated risk assessment (e.g. core network functions, network management and orchestration functions, and access network functions);
  •     Ensure that each operator has an appropriate multi-vendor strategy to avoid or limit any major dependency on a single supplier (or suppliers with a similar risk profile), ensure an adequate balance of suppliers at national level and avoid dependency on suppliers considered to be high risk; this also requires avoiding any situations of lock-in with a single supplier, including by promoting greater interoperability of equipment;

The Commission also recommends that Member States should contribute towards increasing diversification and sustainability in the 5G supply chain and co-ordinate on standardization around security objectives and on developing EU-wide certification schemes.

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Flexibits launches major Fantastical update

Published January 29, 2020

Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, is releasing Fantastical 3.0 on all platforms today — macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. New features include event proposals, interesting calendars, new calendar views and weather forecasts.

I’ve been using the app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for a week. The main difference with Fantastical 2 is that the app is now exactly the same across all platforms. You’ll find the same feature set, the same interface and the same calendar-syncing engine in all those apps.

“Think about it as one app and one platform that’s called Fantastical,” Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons told me.

Now that Fantastical is a unified platform, Flexibits is also switching to a unified pricing model. All apps are free with basic features and you have to subscribe to unlock everything. The free version doesn’t support adding tasks, adding events using the natural language parsing engine, etc.

The Mac app used to cost $49.99, the iPhone app used to cost $9.99 and the iPad app used to cost $4.99. Now, you can subscribe for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year to unlock apps on all platforms.

If you’ve been using Fantastical 2 in the past, you’ll keep all Fantastical 2 features, with a few additions. You still have to subscribe to unlock the full feature set.

While the interface of the Mac app hasn’t changed much, the iPhone app is getting a nice design update. In addition to dark mode, you can now swipe up and down on the top area to switch from the default DayTicker view to a month view and to a full-screen vertical view.

That full-screen vertical view is a great addition. For instance, you can see a week view without having to rotate your phone to landscape, a month view with events details and a year view to quickly jump to another date.

I customized the full-screen week view to display the next four days so that I get larger columns and I can more easily see the details of my events. That view reminds me of Sunrise’s week view, a well-designed calendar app that shut down four years ago.

In the week and day view, you can also zoom in and out by pinching the screen. It’s a great way to see more details or see more hours. Overall, it’s a fluid user experience and I’m sure power users are going to love swiping their fingers across the screen.

Scheduling and a renewed focus on tasks

When it comes to new features, Fantastical now has a built-in meeting proposal feature. When you create an event, you can add other options if you haven’t decided on a specific time just yet. You can see all proposed events in your calendar with a “Proposed” label and your invitee receives an email with event details. When they select a date and time, your proposed events are replaced by a single event.

This feature works with a server back end. And Flexibits didn’t stop there with server-side features. For instance, one of the key features of Fantastical is calendar sets. That feature lets you toggle multiple calendars and task lists and save those settings as a specific view. Your calendar sets now sync across all your devices.

Task management has also been improved. In addition to iCloud Reminders support, Fantastical now also supports task lists in Todoist and Google Tasks.

There’s a new feature called interesting calendars. Google Calendar users are familiar with that feature — it lets you add calendars for holidays, sports, TV, quarterly earnings, etc. The company has partnered with SchedJoules for those calendars.

Finally, you can enable weather forecasts in Fantastical. You can click on weather icons in the DayTicker or week view to check the weather in the coming days. If you’re traveling, you can also open an event to see the weather in that location at the time of your event. The company has partnered with AccuWeather for that feature.

Refining existing features

Flexibits is also using this opportunity to improve some of its most popular features. For instance, the natural language parsing engine has been updated. That feature lets you create events by typing a sentence. For instance, you can say “Team meeting tomorrow at 3pm” to create an event for tomorrow at 3pm called “Team meeting.”

Fantastical now automatically looks up names in your address book to add attendees. For instance, if you type “Lunch with Sarah on Monday at 1pm”, you get a drop-down menu and you can select Sarah in your contacts. She’ll be added as an attendee and receive a calendar invitation. Fantastical also tries to guess locations using the same system.

The natural language parsing engine also supports recurring events, selecting a specific calendar and adding alerts to your events. You can also create tasks by writing “todo Buy baguette tomorrow” for instance.

Another feature that is a nice quality-of-life improvement is Google Hangouts Meet and Zoom support. When you create an event, you can generate a Google Hangouts Meet or Zoom link to create a video-conferencing room associated to your event.

Behind the scene, the iPhone and iPad apps have received a huge upgrade as they now fetch your calendar data directly. They don’t rely on Apple’s calendar engine. Fantastical has a built-in calendar engine, just like the Mac app, which means the iOS app is no longer constrained by Apple’s API.

A new foundation

Switching to a subscription model is a risky move for Fantastical. The app now features live content with weather data and interesting calendars. And Flexibits has to pay those data partners to get this information.

But the main reason why a subscription makes sense is that the old paid app model doesn’t work anymore. Flexibits wants to ship updates more regularly instead of waiting two or three years in order to release a paid update with a ton of new features at once.

Fantastical 3.0 looks like a great foundation to build upon. Sure, subscribing to a calendar isn’t for everyone. But a ton of iPhone users looking for a free calendar app are going to download Fantastical now that it’s a free download.

And people who rely heavily on their calendar will subscribe. As a subscriber, you get a well-designed app that works so much better than Apple’s calendar app, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

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GoDaddy continues to expand beyond websites by acquiring social content startup Over

Published January 29, 2020

GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media.

Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.”

He told me, “Over’s capabilities really target those set of people, who may have an Instagram profile where they need to post visually engaging content but have never gone to GoDaddy.”

This follows GoDaddy’s relaunch of its website-building tools last fall under the new name Websites+Marketing, with additional features around email marketing, search engine optimization and maintaining a presence beyond your website, whether that’s on Facebook or Yelp.

Tsai said Websites+Marketing now has 1 million paying customers, but as more business started using it, “We started noticing users really had trouble creating great content as they go to those platforms. They didn’t know what to post or how to make that post really sing.”

That’s where Over comes in, offering a variety of customizable templates and layouts that should make it faster and easier to create eye-catching visual content. The goal, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Winn, is to “build guitars, not violins” — in the same way that someone can pick up a guitar and “strum a few cords,” they should be able to download Over and quickly “start creating really great content.”

In fact, the startup says it has more than 1 million active users of its own, who are using it to create more than 220,000 projects every day.

Tsai said GoDaddy and Over were initially discussing a partnership, but as it became clear that there was an opportunity to integrate the products more deeply, those discussions led to acquisition talks.

Over will continue to operate as a standalone app, and he said the team will continue to develop new features for the app. At the same time, they’ll be building integrations with Websites+Marketing, for example by taking Over and connecting it “into our insights tool to understand how different elements of [online] presence layer in together, to look at templates and how those actually help different types of small business owners.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Winn said Over had previously raised funding from True Ventures and angel investors, and that the entire 76-person team will be joining GoDaddy. Over will continue to operate out of its Cape Town, South Africa headquarters.

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Mobile messaging startup Attentive raises another $70M

Published January 29, 2020

Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million — this time in Series C funding.

The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated.

CEO Brian Long (who, along with his Attentive co-founder Andrew Jones, sold his previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter) told me that he wasn’t planning to raise money again so soon, but things were going even better than expected, with a client list that has grown to more than 750 businesses, including Coach, Urban Outfitters, CB2, PacSun, Party City and Jack in the Box.

Long noted that it’s always smarter to raise money when things are going swimmingly, rather than dealing with the “not-so-fun process” of trying to raise “when you really need it.”

He added, “When you see that you’re doing that well, you think, ‘Hey, we should hire a lot more people to support this growth.’ And then the other piece is just being able to move faster into new areas.”

Attentive

Long attributed the success Attentive has had thus far to the growing importance of text messages as a channel for businesses to reach consumers, particularly as those consumers are less inclined to open marketing emails or download retailers’ mobile apps. And in contrast to broader messaging platforms, Long said Attentive is “focused on just doing this channel right.”

He said the platform is designed to solve the main problems faced by retailers trying to build a mobile messaging strategy — first, by helping them create a text subscriber list in a way that complies with regulations, then by offering “the ability to send messages that frankly aren’t going to piss people off.”

“We want the messages to be relevant for the consumer, we want to send them things that they care about,” Long said. “The package is on the way, real-time customer service, a product that you were looking at recently is on-sale … there’s a lot of data that you can put to work in order to do it at scale.”

Looking ahead, he hopes to expand beyond the United States and Canada, and to move into industries beyond e-commerce — for example, into more traditional retail, and also to start working with colleges that are looking to attract more applicants.

“Attentive’s growth is a clear indication that people want to interact with brands in new ways, and brands are embracing messaging as an effective way to reach consumers,” said Sequoia partner Pat Grady in a statement. “We are thrilled to double down on our partnership with Attentive so they can continue to deliver fantastic results for their customers and valuable experiences for consumers.”

Attentive has now raised a total of $124 million.

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OpenPhone grabs $2 million for its business phone number app

Published January 29, 2020

Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card.

Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s funding round.

Compared to Aircall and other enterprise solutions, OpenPhone targets small and medium companies that want a mobile-first, easy-to-use solution to take advantage of a second phone number.

For instance, if you’re a freelancer and you hate handing out your personal phone number, OpenPhone lets you separate your personal and professional life more easily.

OpenPhone works on iPhone, iPad and Android. You also can use a web interface to interact with the app from your computer. It currently costs $10 per month per user. For that price, you get a local number, a toll-free number or you can port an existing phone number. Five thousand people are using OpenPhone right now.

You can then use that number for unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada. Behind the scene, OpenPhone uses your internet connection to establish voice-over-IP calls.

The startup has been working on collaborative features so you can use OpenPhone with multiple users. For instance, you can share a phone number with other users so your team can answer text messages faster and pick up the phone more often. The company has also launched a Slack integration that lets you receive a notification when somebody calls or texts your phone number.

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Product Hunt launches beta of YourStack, a home for your favorite things

Published January 28, 2020

The team behind Product Hunt is launching a new social network called YourStack, a platform aiming to connect people that are passionate about products and help them discover what things their friends love.

“It’s super simple, you just search through and create a stack of products you love,” Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover tells TechCrunch. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t just software, but also games and books and beauty products, you name it.”

YourStack’s catalog doesn’t have every product under the sun, but if it’s a tech object, startup service, app or direct-to-consumer thing, chances are you can “stack” it. Once you add it to your profile, you can write a quick little descriptor and also share some tips and tricks you’ve learned about the product in question.

Product Hunt was acquired by AngelList just over three years ago, and since then Hoover and company have grown the platform into a go-to hub for makers looking to launch tech products. The team of 20 is now splitting their time between Product Hunt and YourStack, hoping that the new venture can lead to a platform that’s more centered on people and the products they use. While a social network based entirely around the multi-national brands that people love is something I’d love to hear Bernie Sanders’ thoughts on, it’s clear there’s an open opportunity here.

Social media platforms like Instagram have given influencers a huge platform for paid product endorsements, but because there’s so much schilling, consumers can’t put a ton of trust in the recommendations. Platforms like Twitter have been great for this inside the tech industry, but there’s no UI for it, so you sort of have to be at the right place at the right time, and, furthermore, the tech folks who have these great product insights are too busy being thought leaders.

If YourStack takes off, who knows what it could eventually become, but the goal seems to be to let users gain access to more personal product recommendations. On the product creator side, Hoover believes YourStack could give some great qualitative data that allows makers to understand how customers are using what they’ve built.

The product is in beta right now with a waitlist that’s already a few thousand users deep, but Hoover says the goal right now is to gather feedback.

“With a lot of social products, you don’t know how people are going to use them when they first start,” Hoover tells TechCrunch. “We actually had a very similar approach when we launched Product Hunt, where we let more and more people onto it each day and that was really effective in letting it slowly grow rather than leading people to a bad experience.”

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