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Atom Finance’s free Bloomberg Terminal rival raises $12M

Published December 12, 2019

If you want to win on Wall Street, Yahoo Finance is insufficient but Bloomberg Terminal costs a whopping $24,000 per year. That’s why Atom Finance built a free tool designed to democratize access to professional investor research. If Robinhood made it cost $0 to trade stocks, Atom Finance makes it cost $0 to know which to buy.

Today Atom launches its mobile app with access to its financial modeling, portfolio tracking, news analysis, benchmarking and discussion tools. It’s the consumerization of finance, similar to what we’ve seen in enterprise SaaS. “Investment research tools are too important to the financial well-being of consumers to lack the same cycles of product innovation and accessibility that we have experienced in other verticals,” CEO Eric Shoykhet tells me.

In its first press interview, Atom Finance today revealed to TechCrunch that it has raised a $10.6 million Series A led by General Catalyst to build on its quiet $1.9 million seed round. The cash will help the startup eventually monetize by launching premium tiers with even more hardcore research tools.

Atom Finance already has 100,000 users and $400 million in assets it’s helping steer since soft-launching in June. “Atom fundamentally changes the game for how financial news media and reporting is consumed. I could not live without it,” says The Twenty Minute VC podcast founder and Atom investor Harry Stebbings.

Individual investors are already at a disadvantage compared to big firms equipped with artificial intelligence, the priciest research and legions of traders glued to the markets. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that investing is critical to long-term financial mobility, especially in an age of rampant student debt and automation threatening employment.

“Our mission is two-fold,” Shoykhet says. “To modernize investment research tools through an intuitive platform that’s easily accessible across all devices, while democratizing access to institutional-quality investing tools that were once only available to Wall Street professionals.”

Leveling the trading floor

Shoykhet saw the gap between amateur and expert research platforms firsthand as an investor at Blackstone and Governors Lane. Yet even the supposedly best-in-class software was lacking the usability we’ve come to expect from consumer mobile apps. Atom Finance claims that “for example, Bloomberg hasn’t made a significant change to its central product offering since 1982.”

The Atom Finance team

So a year ago, Shoykhet founded Atom Finance in Brooklyn to fill the void. Its web, iOS and Android apps offer five products that combine to guide users’ investing decisions without drowning them in complexity:

Sandbox – Instant financial modeling with pre-populated consensus projections that automatically update and are recalculated over time
Portfolio – Track your linked investment accounts to monitor overarching stats, real-time profit and loss statements and diversification
X-Ray – A financial research search engine for compiling news, SEC filings, transcripts and analysis
Compare – Benchmarking tables for comparing companies and sectors
Collaborate – Discussion boards and group chat for sharing insights with fellow investors

“Our Sandbox feature allows users to create simple financial models directly within our platform, without having to export data to a spreadsheet,” Shoykhet says. “This saves our users time and prevents them from having to manually refresh the inputs to their model when there is new information.”

Shoykhet positions Atom Finance in the middle of the market, saying, “Existing solutions are either too rudimentary for rigorous analysis (Yahoo Finance, Google Finance) or too expensive for individual investors (Bloomberg, CapIQ, Factset).”

With both its free and forthcoming paid tiers, Atom hopes to undercut Sentieo, a more AI-focused financial research platform that charges $500 to $1,000 per month and raised $19 million a year ago. Cheaper tools like BamSEC and WallMine are often limited to just pulling in earnings transcripts and filings. Robinhood has its own in-app research tools, which could make it a looming competitor or a potential acquirer for Atom Finance.

Shoykhet admits his startup will face stiff competition from well-entrenched tools like Bloomberg. “Incumbent solutions have significant brand equity with our target market, and especially with professional investors. We will have to continue iterating and deliver an unmatched user experience to gain the trust/loyalty of these users,” he says. Additionally, Atom Finance’s access to users’ sensitive data means flawless privacy, security, and accuracy will be essential.

The $12.5 million from General Catalyst, Greenoaks, Global Founders Capital, Untitled Investments, Day One Ventures and a slew of angels gives Atom runway to rev up its freemium model. Robinhood has found great success converting unpaid users to its subscription tier where they can borrow money to trade. By similarly starting out free, Atom’s eight-person team hailing from SoFi, Silver Lake, Blackstone and Citi could build a giant funnel to feed its premium tiers.

Fintech can feel dry and ruthlessly capitalistic at times. But Shoykhet insists he’s in it to equip a new generation with methods of wealth creation. “I think we’ve gone long enough without seeing real innovation in this space. We can’t be complacent with something so important. It’s crucial that we democratize access to these tools and educate consumers . . . to improve their investment well-being.”

Here are the five Startup Battlefield finalists at Disrupt Berlin

Published December 11, 2019

Fourteen startups presented onstage today at Disrupt Berlin, giving live demos and rapid-fire presentations on their origin stories and business models, then answering questions from our expert judges.

Now, with the help of those judges, we’ve narrowed the group down to five startups working on everything from productivity to air pollution.

These finalists will be presenting again tomorrow (at 2pm Berlin time, viewable on the TechCrunch website or in-person at Disrupt) in front of a new set of judges. The winner will receive $50,000 and custody of the storied Disrupt Cup.

Here are the finalists:

Gmelius

Gmelius is building a workspace platform that lives inside Gmail, allowing teams to get more bespoke tools without adding yet another piece of software to their repertoire. It slots into the Gmail workspace, adding a host of features like shared inboxes, a help desk, an account-management solution and automation tools.

Hawa Dawa

Hawa Dawa combines data sources like satellites and dedicated air monitoring stations to build a granular heat map of air pollutants, selling this map to cities and companies as a subscription API. While the company notes it’s hardware-agnostic, it does build its own IoT sensors for companies and cities that might not have existing air quality sensors in place.

Inovat

Inovat makes it much easier for travelers to get reimbursed for the value-added tax, through an app that employs optical character recognition and machine learning to interpret receipts, determine how much VAT you should be owed for your purchase and prepare the requisite forms for submission online or to a customs officer.

Scaled Robotics

Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can produce 3D progress maps of construction sites in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two off. Supervisors can then use the software to check things like which pieces are in place on which floor, whether they have been placed within the required tolerances or if there are safety issues like too much detritus on the ground in work areas.

Stable

Stable offers a solution as simple as car insurance, designed to protect farmers around the world from pricing volatility. Through the startup, food buyers ranging from owners of a small smoothie shop to Coca-Cola employees can insure thousands of agricultural commodities, as well as packaging and energy products.

Gtmhub raises $9M from CRV after posting 400% ARR growth in the last year

Published December 11, 2019

This week Gtmhub announced a $9 million Series A led by CRV. The investment was not a large round, even for an A. But the capital found its way into one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies that we’ve spoken with recently, which made it interesting all the same.

And, the firm was willing to talk about its financial performance in some detail. The combination made its Series A impossible to ignore.

TechCrunch caught up with Gtmhub’s CMO Seth Elliott this morning to learn more.

What it does

Let’s start with OKRs. Objectives and key results, better known as OKRs, are a method for organizational planning. They are famous thanks to their roots in Google’s success, but have since broken free of the technology world and become a well-known planning method for corporations of all sizes and types.

Gtmhub deals with them, providing software and services around OKR implementation, training and tracking. (If you an OKR neophyte, head here for a quick overview of what they are.)

Making OKR software isn’t a differentiator in today’s market. Ally does it (it also raised capital recently), along with WorkBoard, Koan and Lattice, among others.

Given the crowded market, Gtmhub stressed during our call how it thinks of itself as differentiated. The company has three things that it hopes will give it an edge in the market. The first is a focus on enterprise customers. According to Elliott, enterprise-sized clients are his company’s “bread and butter,” from a revenue perspective. Instead of starting with a small or mid-sized business target market and later targeting enterprise-scale customers, Gtmhub is going after the top-end of the market first.

Second, the company’s software is designed to interface with external tooling, allowing for real-time OKR tracking as it ingests information to help teams vet how they are progressing against their goals. And, the firm is working on a marketplace where, over time, customers will be able to learn from existing OKR setups and leverage analytics setups that help with data importation and visibility.

In its own words, Gtmhub is an OKR-centric software company, while “provid[ing] a long-term vision and the execution process necessary to bridge the strategy/execution gap,” according to Elliot.

Notably, Gtmhub, despite its enterprise focus, is not abandoning smaller companies. According to Elliot, the startup is announcing a new, stripped-down, $1 per user per month plan next week called START, aimed at smaller firms.

If START is an attempt to onboard companies when they are small so they can be upsold later, or if it is more a contra-competitor move, isn’t clear. But the new, cheap plan (priced at about 10% of other Gtmhub tiers) could shake up the OKR software space by making table-stakes features worth less than they were before.

Gtmhub’s round

Gtmhub is a distributed company, with offices in Denver, Sofia, Berlin and London for its roughly 60 workers. You might think, given its global footprint and number of employees, that the company had raised lots of capital to fund its operations. The opposite, as it turns out.

The startup’s $9 million Series A dwarfs its preceding rounds, including about $1.3 million in seed capital raised (here) in February of 2018. Aside from those checks and the new capital, all we know about Gtmhub’s fundraising history is that it picked up $100,000 in angel money in early 2017.

All told, Gtmhub has raised just over $10 million to date, making its Series A about 87% of its known raised capital. That’s not the mark of a company built on burn.

Of course, if Gtmhub kept a lid on its expenses by growing slowly, its parsimony might be more sin than virtue; after all, private companies backed with venture dollars are built for expansion.

The opposite, as it turns out.

Growth

Elliot shared a number of notable metrics with TechCrunch that we’ve prepared for you below, in an ingestible format:

ARR growth: Over 400% year-over-year (YoY)
Gross margin: Above 90%, up from over 80% YoY
ACV trends: +650% YoY

Take a moment and square those results with how much capital Gtmhub raised and ask yourself if the performance matches the raise. It doesn’t. I suspect that Gtmhub could have raised a lot more money than it chose to, given its growth rate and other marks of financial health.

But, after expanding to 60 people on less than $3.5 million in known venture, the company probably isn’t too unprofitable, and can do a lot with just $9 million. (Gtmhub could also raise more if it needed to, given its metrics.)

With Gtmhub and Ally each flush with new cash, it’s going to be enjoyable to watch the OKR and OKR-empowered software space grow over the next few years. There will be eventual consolidation, right?

Correction: This post misstated the amount of capital raised by Gtmhub before its Series A and has been corrected.

Photo by Startaê Team on Unsplash

Daily Crunch: Apple adds new iPhone parental controls

Published December 11, 2019

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when

With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day. These limits will apply across phone calls, Messages and FaceTime.

In practice, this means parents could stop their child from texting friends late at night or during the school day. It also allows parents to manage the child’s iCloud contacts remotely.

2. Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund

That’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its second fund in 2016 and triple the $50 million it raised for its debut fund back in 2013.

3. Uber guarantees space for skis and snowboards with Uber Ski feature

Starting on December 17 in select cities, an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app, allowing passengers to order a ride with confirmed extra space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Nundu Janakiram, Uber’s head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this.

4. Accel and Index back Tines, as the cybersecurity startup adds another $11M to its Series A

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work.

5. How Station F is boosting the French tech ecosystem

Three years after unveiling Station F at Disrupt, its director, Roxanne Varza, came back to our stage to provide an update on the world’s biggest startup campus, where there are now 1,000 companies at work.

6. Hyperproof wants to make it easier to comply with GDPR and other regulations

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, Hyperproof is launching a new product to workflows that will allow them to gain compliance in a more organized way.

7. Introducing ‘Dear Sophie,’ an advice column for US-bound immigrant employees

Dear Sophie is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

Apply to the pitch-off at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020

Published December 11, 2019

Mark your calendars and dust off your public-speaking skills. This year, there’s an exciting new opportunity at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI, which returns to UC Berkeley on March 3, 2020. We’ve added a pitch-off specifically for early-stage startups focused on AI or robotics.

You heard right. In addition to a full day packed with speakers, breakout sessions and Q&As featuring the top names, leading minds and creative makers in robotics and AI, we’re upping the ante. We’ll choose 10 startups to pitch at a private event the night before the show opens. Here’s how it works.

The first step: Apply to the pitch-off by February 1. TechCrunch editors will review all applications and select 10 startups to participate. We’ll notify the founders by February 15 — you’ll have plenty of time to hone your pitch.

You’ll deliver your pitch at a private event, and your audience will consist of TechCrunch editors, main-stage speakers and industry experts. Our panel of VC judges will choose five teams as finalists, and they will pitch the next day on the main stage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI.

Talk about an unprecedented opportunity. Place your startup in front of the influential movers and shakers of these two world-changing industries — and get video coverage on TechCrunch, too. We expect attendance to meet or exceed last year’s, when 1,500 people attended the show and tens of thousands followed along online.

Oh, and here’s one more pitch-off perk. Each of the 10 startup team finalists will receive two free tickets to attend TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 the next day.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3. Apply to the pitch-off here by February 1. Don’t want to pitch? That’s fine — but don’t miss this epic day-long event dedicated to exploring the latest technology, trends and investment strategies in robotics and AI. Get your early-bird ticket here and save $100. We’ll see you in Berkeley!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The electric Porsche Taycan Turbo has an EPA range of 201 miles

Published December 11, 2019

The Porsche Taycan Turbo, one of several variants of the German automaker’s first all-electric vehicles, has an EPA estimated range of 201 miles, according to government ratings posted Wednesday.

This is the first variant of the Taycan — Porsche’s first all-electric vehicle — to receive an estimated range from the EPA. The range, which indicates how far the vehicle can travel on a single charge, is far behind other competitors in the space, notably the Tesla Model S. But it also trails other high-end electric vehicles, including the Jaguar I-Pace and the Audi e-tron.

The biggest gulf is between the Taycan Turbo and the long-range version of the Model S, which has an EPA range of 373 miles. The performance version of the Model S has a range of 348 miles. It was also below the Jaguar I-Pace, an electric vehicle that launched in 2018. The EPA has given the Jaguar I-Pace an official estimated range of 234. However, the company recently said it was able to add another 12 miles of range to the vehicle through what it learned in the I-Pace racing series.

The European standard known as the WLTP placed the range of the Porsche Taycan Turbo at up to 279 miles.

Despite the lower EPA range estimate, Porsche said it’s not disappointed.

“We sought to build a true Porsche, balancing legendary performance our customers expect of our products with range sufficient to meet their everyday needs,” a Porsche spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The Taycan is a phenomenal car built to perform and drive as a Porsche should. We stand by that.”

Porsche introduced in September the Taycan Turbo S and Taycan Turbo — the more powerful and expensive versions of its all-electric four-door sports car with base prices of $185,000 and $150,900, respectively.

In October, the German automaker revealed a cheaper version called the Porsche Taycan 4S that is more than $80,000 cheaper than its leading model. All of the Taycans, including the 4S, are the same chassis and suspension, permanent magnet synchronous motors and other bits. However, this third version, which will offer a performance-battery-plus option, is a little lighter, cheaper and slightly slower than the high-end versions of the Taycan that were introduced earlier this year. Theoretically, the 4S should also have a higher range.

Porsche has always said it would have multiple versions of the Taycan. The 2020 Taycan Turbo will be among the first models to arrive in the United States.

While Porsche said it isn’t disputing the EPA range, the automaker did send an email to dealers Wednesday to share additional data that shows a far rosier picture.

Porsche asked AMCI Testing to conduct independent tests to evaluate the Taycan Turbo range, according to an email the automaker sent to dealers for Taycan customers. The independent automotive research firm came up with a range of 275 miles, a result that was calculated by averaging the vehicle’s performance over five test cycles.

Acquia nabs CDP startup AgilOne, which raised $41M

Published December 11, 2019

Acquia announced it has acquired customer data platform (CDP) startup AgilOne today. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.

CDPs are all the rage among customer experience vendors, as they provide a way to pull data from a variety of channels to build a more complete picture of the customer. The goal here is to deliver meaningful content to the customer based on what you know about them. Having a platform like this to draw upon makes it more likely that you will hit the target more accurately.

Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert says he has been watching this space for the last year, and wanted to add this piece to the Acquia tool chest. “Adding a CDP like AgilOne to our existing platform will help our customers unify their data across various tools in their technology stack to drive better, more personal customer experiences,” he said.

In particular, he says he liked AgilOne because it used an intelligence layer while building the customer record. “What sets AgilOne apart from other CDPs are its machine learning capabilities, which intelligently segment customers and predict customer behaviors (such as when a customer is likely to purchase something). This allows for the creation and optimization of next-best action models to optimize offers and messages to customers on a 1:1 basis.”

Like most startup founders, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun sees this as an opportunity to grow his company, probably faster than he could have on his own. “Since AgilOne’s inception, our vision has been to give marketers the direct power to understand who their customers are and engage with them in a genuine way in order to boost profitability and create the omnichannel experiences that customers crave. Through this acquisition, Acquia will enable us to continue to deliver, and build upon, this vision,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at the Real Story Group, has been watching the marketing automation space for some time, as well as the burgeoning CDP market. He sees this move as good for Acquia, but wonders how it will fit with other pieces in the Acquia stack. “This in theory allows them to support the unification of customer data across their suite,” Byrne told TechCrunch.

But he cautions that the company could struggle incorporating AgilOne into its platform. “The Marketing Automation platform they purchased targets mostly B2B. AgilOne is dialed in on B2C use cases and a fairly narrow set of vertical segments. It will take a lot of work to make it into a CDP that could adequately serve Acquia’s diverse customer base,” he said.

Acquia was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1 billion in September, and it tends to encourage its companies to be more acquisitive than they might have been on their own. “Vista has been supportive of our M&A strategy and believes strongly in AgilOne as a part of Acquia’s vision to redefine the customer experience stack,” Buytaert said.

AgilOne raised over $41 million, according to PitchBook data. Investors included Tenaya Capital, Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Fund. It had a post valuation of just over $115 million and was pegged as likely acquisition target by Pitchbook.

AgilOne customers will be happy to hear that Acquia plans to continue to sell it as a stand-alone product in addition to making it part of the Acquia Open Marketing Cloud.

How founder and CTO Dries Buytaert sold Acquia for $1B

Arcona uses machine learning to compose adaptive soundtracks in real time

Published December 11, 2019

Arcona Music took to the stage at Disrupt Berlin today to showcase its adaptive music service. The local startup utilizes machine learning to create musical beds capable of adapting to different contexts in real-time. The user simply needs to input a handful of parameters, and the service will adjust accordingly.

“Give it a style, an emotion and a musical theme, and you can say, ‘play this,’ and the engine will take that blueprint and realize it,” service cofounder Ryan Groves explained, in a conversation with TechCrunch. “If, at any point, the emotion or style changes, it will adapt to that and create this essentially infinite stream of music. You can play a particular song blueprint for as long as is necessary in any dynamic environment.”

The service is still in its infancy, at the moment. Its two founders are its only two full-time employees, along with a part-time developer. Groves and co-founder Amélie Anglade bootstrapped the scrappy startup, which has yet to seek funding.

Groves is a composer and musical theorist who formerly worked at popular AI-based music composition service, Ditty. Anglade is a music information retrieval specialist who worked at SoundCloud.

Rhythm gaming is the first clear application for the service. The popular gaming genre is built around a changing soundtrack and could potentially benefit from music that requires minimal pre-programing. Moving forward, the potential for such a service is far broader.

“In the very long term,” Groves said, “we should see this being almost your own personal orchestra, leveraging augmented reality, GPS and all that stuff, and just responding to your environment as you’re listening.

Childcare benefits startup Kinside launches with $4 million from investors including Initialized Capital

Published December 11, 2019

Childcare is one of the biggest expenses for American parents — and it’s not just families that are taking a hit. Childcare issues cost the United States’ economy an estimated $4.4 billion in lost productivity each year and also impacts employee retention rates. Kinside wants to help with a platform that not only enables families to get the most out of their family care benefits, but also find the right providers for their kids. The startup announced the public launch of its platform today, along with $3 million in a new funding round led by Initialized Capital.

This brings Kinside’s total raised since it was founded 18 months ago to $4 million. Its other investors include Precursor Ventures, Kairos, Jane VC and Escondido Ventures.

Founded by Shadiah Sigala, Brittney Barrett and Abe Han, Kinside began its private beta with 10 clients while participating in Y Combinator last summer. Over the past year, it has signed up more than 1,000 employers, underscoring the demand for childcare benefits.

“Getting meetings with employers has not been the hard part,” Sigala, Kinside’s CEO, tells TechCrunch. “Any subject line that says ‘do you want childcare for your employees?’ immediately gets a response. We hit a nerve there and when we talked with them, we found that the biggest pain they expressed was that their employees were having a hard time finding childcare.”

Kinside co-founders SShadiah Sigala, Brittney Barrett and Abe Han

Kinside co-founders Shadiah Sigala, Brittney Barrett and Abe Han

The U.S. is the only industrialized country without a national law that guarantees paid parental leave. Companies like Microsoft, Netflix and Deloitte offer strong family benefits in order to recruit and retain talent, but offering similar packages remains a challenge, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. As a result, many employees, especially women, leave their jobs to care for their children, even if they had planned to continue working.

“The worst case for bigger, more mature companies is a delayed return to work, which has a real impact on the bottom line because of lost productivity, but the deeper pain is when we lose the women,” Sigala says. “It’s documented that 43% of women in the professional sector will leave the workforce within one to two years of having a baby.”

Other startups focused on early childhood care that have recently raised funding include Winnie, for finding providers; Wonderschool, which helps people start in-home daycares and preschools;and London-based childcare platform Koru Kids.

Before Kinside, Sigala co-founded Honeybook, a business management platform for small businesses and freelancers. When she got pregnant, Sigala began developing the company’s family benefit policies and became familiar with the hurdles small companies face.

While in Y Combinator, Kinside focused on streamlining the process of using dependent care flexible spending accounts (FSA), or pre-tax benefits, for caregiving costs, after its founders saw that the complicated claims process meant only a fraction of eligible parents get full use of the program. Kinside still helps parents with their accounts by partnering with FSA administrators. Now their app also includes a network of pre-screened early childcare providers, ranging from home-based daycares to large preschools across the country.

The startup pre-negotiates reserved spots and discounted rates for its users and gives them access to a “concierge” made up of childcare professionals to answer questions. Parents can search for providers based on location, cost and childcare philosophy. Sigala says the startup’s team found that many childcare providers have a 20% to 30% vacancy rate, which Kinside addresses by helping them manage openings and find families who are willing to commit to a spot. In addition to its app, Kinside also plans to integrate into human resources systems.

Initialized was co-founded by Alexis Ohanian, also a founder of Reddit, and a vocal advocate of paid parental leave. One of the areas the firm focuses on is “family tech,” and its portfolio also includes startups like the Mom Project, a job search platform for mothers returning to work.

In an email, Initialized partner Alda Leu Dennis said the firm invested in Kinside because “we have this fundamental problem of gender inequality which can be partially attributed to imbalances in the workplace and at home. We have a gender wage gap and domestic responsibilities, still, largely falling on the mother. By solving a problem that men and women have—access to affordable and high-quality childcare—we can improve this situation.”

Dennis added, “the business model innovation that Kinside brings to the table is to involve employers in the process of bringing peace of mind and stability to their employees’ home lives and in turn making their employees more productive.”

Sigala says Kinside sees itself as part of the benefits equity movement, including paid parental leave and, eventually, universal childcare for all working parents. The platform’s users are split equally between men and women, highlighting that the need for caregiving benefits cross gender lines and impact an entire household.

“It’s a complex issue. Our infrastructure and society is still designed for single breadwinner households and yet the economy means that for most households, being able to pay the bills depends on having two parents working,” she adds. “I see this as a movement. It’s the right time.”

BMW says ‘ja’ to Android Auto

Published December 11, 2019

BMW today announced that it is finally bringing Android Auto to its vehicles, starting in July 2020. With that, it will join Apple’s CarPlay in the company’s vehicles.

The first live demo of Android Auto in a BMW will happen at CES 2020 next month. After that, it will become available as an update to drivers in 20 countries with cars that feature the BMW OS 7.0. BMW will support Android Auto over a wireless connection, though, which somewhat limits its comparability.

Only two years ago, the company said that it wasn’t interested in supporting Android Auto. At the time, Dieter May, who was then the senior VP for Digital Services and Business Model, explicitly told me that the company wanted to focus on its first-party apps in order to retain full control over the in-car interface and that he wasn’t interested in seeing Android Auto in BMWs. May has since left the company, though it’s also worth noting that Android Auto itself has become significantly more polished over the course of the last two years.

“The Google Assistant on Android Auto makes it easy to get directions, keep in touch and stay productive. Many of our customers have pointed out the importance to them of having Android Auto inside a BMW for using a number of familiar Android smartphone features safely without being distracted from the road, in addition to BMW’s own functions and services,” said Peter Henrich, senior vice president Product Management BMW, in today’s announcement.

With this, BMW will also finally offer support for the Google Assistant after early bets on Alexa, Cortana and the BMW Assistant (which itself is built on top of Microsoft’s AI stack). The company has long said it wants to offer support for all popular digital assistants. For the Google Assistant, the only way to make that work, at least for the time being, is Android Auto.

In BMWs, Android Auto will see integrations into the car’s digital cockpit, in addition to BMW’s Info Display and the heads-up display (for directions). That’s a pretty deep integration, which goes beyond what most car manufacturers feature today.

“We are excited to work with BMW to bring wireless Android Auto to their customers worldwide next year,” said Patrick Brady, vice president of engineering at Google. “The seamless connection from Android smartphones to BMW vehicles allows customers to hit the road faster while maintaining access to all of their favorite apps and services in a safer experience.”

BMW says ‘nein’ to Android Auto