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Mario Kart Tour will test real-time multiplayer in December

Published November 1, 2019

The mobile version of Nintendo’s iconic racing franchise, Mario Kart Tour, will soon support multiplayer races, bringing the game closer to its competitive roots. A limited multiplayer beta test is planned for December, just in time for holiday laziness, but only for paying subscribers — the rest of us will have to wait.

Mario Kart has had a focus on multiplayer since its first (and best, in my opinion) appearance on the SNES, with multiple modes available pitting players together in real time. So despite Mario Kart Tour’s general excellence as far as gameplay and variety, players have been disappointed by the lack of that core aspect of the game.

Sure, you can post high scores and best times, but that’s nothing compared with the feeling of coming from behind in a hard-fought race and beating out half a dozen tough competitors.

Well, players will soon have that opportunity — if they happen to be Gold Pass subscribers. That’s the subscription tier that gives access to extra content in the “free to start” game, and will be a requirement to join the beta.

Naturally this will provoke ire among players who feel they are owed not just a free game, but a free game that gives them everything they want for free. And in fact they may eventually get that, but it’s probably smart for Nintendo to limit this experience at first to paying customers so they can stress-test, balance gameplay and so on. A subpar multiplayer experience is a good way to turn off otherwise interested players.

Still, this feeds into a larger dissatisfaction among gamers with Nintendo’s online and multiplayer strategy. The subscription service required for many popular games on the Switch comes with a selection of Nintendo and Super Nintendo Games, but beyond that the benefits are minimal, and features standard on other platforms for years — voice chat, for instance — are absent or long in coming.

At only $20 a year it’s hardly a big investment, but subscription fatigue is growing among tech-savvy consumers and they are cutting things out where they can. Hopefully Nintendo’s offering will solidify and survive.

Cervest raises £3.7M for Earth Science AI platform to predict climate effects

Published November 1, 2019

Climate risk, including extreme events and the related pressures our environment, are fundamentally affecting the way businesses and governments operate — both tactically and strategically. Increasing climate volatility is causing food supply disruptions and increasing pressure on Enterprises (including financial institutions, insurers and producers) to disclose what’s going on.

The trouble is, while there is a lot of data about all this, its complexity, incompleteness and sheer volume is too vast for humans to process with the tools available today. So just as the climate changes, we are faced with “data chaos.” Equally, other parts of the world suffer from data scarcity, making it much harder to provide useful and timely analysis.

So the challenge is to address these issues simultaneously. So a new startup, Cervest, has created an AI-driven platform designed to inform the decision-making capabilities of businesses, governments and growers in the face of increasing climate volatility.

Cervest, has now closed a £3.7 million investment round to fund the launch of its real-time, climate forecasting platform.

The round was led by deep-tech investor Future Positive Capital, with co-investor Astanor Ventures . The seed-stage funding round brings the company’s total funding to more than £4.5 million.

Built on three years of research and development by a team of scientists, mathematicians, developers and engineers, Cervest says its Earth Science AI platform can analyze billions of data points to forecast how changes in the climate will impact the future of entire countries, right down to individual landscapes.

It does this by combining research and modeling techniques taken from proven Earth sciences — including atmospheric science, meteorology, hydrology and agronomy — with artificial intelligence, imaging, machine learning and Bayesian statistics.

Using large collections of satellite imagery and probability theory, the platform can identify signals, or early-warning signs, of extreme events such as floods, fires and strong winds. It also can spot changes in soil health and identify water risk.

Cervest says the platform could do such things as reveal the optimum location to build a new factory; warn a wheat grower that their crop yield isn’t expected to meet its targets; or be used by insurers to help them set premiums for the next 12 months.

The team comes from a network of more than 30 universities, including Imperial College, The Alan Turing Institute, Cambridge, UCL, Harvard and Oxford, and has published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

A beta version of the platform is due to launch in Q1 2020.

Iggy Bassi, founder & CEO, Cervest said: “Our goal is to empower everyone to make informed decisions that improve the long-term resilience of our planet. Today decision-makers are struggling with climate uncertainty and extreme events and how they are affecting their business operations, assets, investments, or policy choices.”

Sofia Hmich, founder, Future Positive Capital said: “With reports suggesting we have fewer than 60 years of farming left unless drastic action is taken, the need for science-backed decisions could not be greater. Businesses and policymakers hold the key to change and with access to Cervest’s proprietary AI technology they can start to make that change a reality at low cost — before it’s too late.”

Bassi previously ran the impact-led agribusiness GADCO, which was supported by Acumen Fund, Soros, Gates Foundation, World Bank and Syngenta . Its impact was featured in UNDP, World Economic Forum, FT, The Guardian and Huff Post. He previously built a software company focused on data analytics.

Cervest was inspired by Bassi’s experience building a farm-to-market agribusiness whilst confronting first-hand the impacts of climate and natural resource volatilities.

The Cervest team includes eight scientists and four PhDs. Between them, they have published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers with more than 3,000 citations in high-profile titles, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Statistical Society.

Google Maps Incognito mode starts rolling out for Android users

Published November 1, 2019

We’ve known for a while now that Google was bringing the “Incognito mode” concept to Maps, allowing you to run searches and find routes without them automatically being tied to your account history.

If you’ve been digging around trying to find the option without any luck, you weren’t just missing it. Though first mentioned back in May at Google I/O, the company says the rollout is just now officially underway.

Word of the rollout comes via a Google Maps support page, as first spotted by AndroidPolice.

It’s a staged rollout, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see the new feature immediately, even if you’re on the latest version of maps. It’s rolling out in batches, beginning with Android users. Google says it should be available to all Android users in “the next few days.”

Once it’s enabled on your account, you can toggle incognito mode on/off by tapping your profile picture, then flipping the switch. Here’s what that looks like:

So why incognito mode? As we wrote back in May: Whether it’s the holiday season and you’re trying to keep your gift-hunting locations under wraps, or you’re visiting a doctor and would just prefer it not pop up the next time a friend grabs your phone for some quick directions, there are all sorts of reasons you might want to leave fewer breadcrumbs. Remember, though, that while it’s less visibly tied to you, it’s still all stored in ways behind the scenes on Google’s end; the company told Wired earlier this month that while Incognito sessions aren’t tied to an account, they are logged with a unique session identifier that gets reset between sessions.

New Relic snags early-stage serverless monitoring startup IOpipe

Published November 1, 2019

As we move from a world dominated by virtual machines to one of serverless, it changes the nature of monitoring, and vendors like New Relic certainly recognize that. This morning the company announced it was acquiring IOpipe, a Seattle-based early-stage serverless monitoring startup, to help beef up its serverless monitoring chops. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

New Relic gets what it calls “key members of the team,” which at least includes co-founders Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson, along with the IOpipe technology. The new employees will be moving from Seattle to New Relic’s Portland offices.

“This deal allows us to make immediate investments in onboarding that will make it faster and simpler for customers to integrate their [serverless] functions with New Relic and get the most out of our instrumentation and UIs that allow fast troubleshooting of complex issues across the entire application stack,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

It adds that initially the IOpipe team will concentrate on moving AWS Lambda features like Lambda Layers into the New Relic platform. Over time, the team will work on increasing support for serverless function monitoring. New Relic is hoping by combining the IOpipe team and solution with its own, it can speed up its serverless monitoring chops.

Eliot Durbin, an investor at Bold Start, which led the company’s $2 million seed round in 2018, says both companies win with this deal. “New Relic has a huge commitment to serverless, so the opportunity to bring IOpipe’s product to their market-leading customer base was attractive to everyone involved,” he told TechCrunch.

The startup has been helping monitor serverless operations for companies running AWS Lambda. It’s important to understand that serverless doesn’t mean there are no servers, but the cloud vendor — in this case AWS — provides the exact resources to complete an operation, and nothing more.

IOpipe co-founders Erica Windisch and Adam Johnson

Photo: New Relic

Once the operation ends, the resources can simply get redeployed elsewhere. That makes building monitoring tools for such ephemeral resources a huge challenge. New Relic has also been working on the problem and released New Relic Serverless for AWS Lambda earlier this year.

As TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his article about the company’s $2.5 million seed round in 2017, Windisch and Johnson bring impressive credentials:

IOpipe co-founders Adam Johnson (CEO) and Erica Windisch (CTO), too, are highly experienced in this space, having previously worked at companies like Docker and Midokura (Adam was the first hire at Midokura and Erica founded Docker’s security team). They recently graduated from the Techstars NY program.

IOpipe was founded in 2015, which was just around the time that Amazon was announcing Lambda. At the time of the seed round the company had eight employees. According to PitchBook data, it currently has between 1 and 10 employees, and has raised $7.07 million since its inception.

New Relic was founded in 2008 and has raised more than $214 million, according to Crunchbase, before going public in 2014. Its stock price was $65.42 at the time of publication, up $1.40.

With $2.5M in seed funding, IOpipe brings monitoring to serverless applications

New Relic launches platform for developers to build custom apps

Sam Altman’s bet against Slack

Published November 1, 2019

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate and Alex broke the discussion into two main themes. The first dealt with early-stage companies, and the second, as you can imagine, later-stage affairs. Don’t worry, we don’t get to SoftBank for quite some time.

Up top, we dug into Kate’s story about Quill, a formerly stealthy company that could be taking on Slack. That or something similar to Slack . Next, we turned to ManiMe, a startup in the beauty space that raised a smaller $2.6 million round to take on a market that is valued in the billions.

After that it was time to leave the auspices of the early-stage market and move to, of all things, a public company. Grubhub reported earnings this week. It went poorly. Alex wanted to riff over the company’s earnings report and what it could mean for startups that are competing with Grubhub, a leader in the food delivery space that DoorDash and Postmates would prefer to lead themselves.

What impact Grubhub may have on the highly valued on-demand companies isn’t clear yet, but will be pretty damn interesting to see when it does land.

Sticking to the later-stage markets, Alex dug into the problems at Wag, which is struggling and looking for a sale despite raising a castle of cash from the Vision Fund. Kate followed that up with notes on problems at Katerra. The Information is reporting this week that the business is going through a number of layoffs, and we’re wondering if it will suffer the same fate of some of SoftBank’s other investments.

And, finally, the changing face of things at SoftBank itself. The great money spigot is slowly cutting flow. How many unicorns that will strand isn’t yet clear. But surely it can’t be zero.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

EHang, maker of autonomous flying shuttles, files for $100 million IPO

Published November 1, 2019

Chinese autonomous air mobility company EHang has filed with the SEC the paperwork required to go public in the U.S. on the Nasdaq exchange, with a $100 million initial public offering. The company, which has been flying demonstration flights with passengers on board for a while now, is gearing up to launch its first commercial service in Guangzhou after getting approval from local and national regulators to deploy its drones in the area.

At launch, EHang will be using its two-seater vertical take-off and landing craft (VTOL), which has room for two passengers on board. EHang doesn’t just build the aircraft, though — its goal is to build full, multi-aircraft (as many as “thousands,” according to Forbes) autonomous transportation networks that it hopes will serve to alleviate and avoid congested ground traffic. Guangzhou, with an estimated population of more than 13 million, suffers from considerable traffic.

EHang is also building out logistics and cargo transportation capabilities as well as passenger services. The company believes it can offer short, designated cross-city transportation that can cut down on time by as much as 40 to 60%, and once it achieves scale, it also says that costs have the potential to be reduced by as much as 50%.

Founded in 2014, EHang last announced funding in 2015, when it raised $42 million in a Series B round led by GP Capital, with GGV Capital, ZhenFund, Lebox Capital, OFC and PreAngel also participating.

Get student, nonprofit & govt discounts to Disrupt Berlin 2019

Published November 1, 2019

Calling all tech-minded students, nonprofit and government employees — this is your moment. Come and join us at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December at a price you can afford — because great ideas and innovation come from every sector.

Apply for our discounted Innovator passes for students and nonprofit or government employees and enjoy all the early-stage startup goodness of Disrupt Berlin.

Here’s what comes with your Innovator pass: Access to the full conference agenda and all stages — including the Startup Battlefield competition, interactive workshops, more than 400 startups and sponsors in Startup Alley, networking events, access to the full attendee list (via TechCrunch Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch, the attendee networking platform. You’ll also have access to exclusive video content after the conference ends.

Here’s how the discounts work and what you need to know to qualify.

Discounts for students: You must be enrolled in a grade school, high school, college or university program or have graduated within the last six months. Coding schools don’t qualify for a discount; sorry.

Bring a valid student ID, proof of current enrollment or transcripts at registration, otherwise you’ll pay the full on-site price. Note: If you’re younger than 21 years old, you may not have access to some venues. Your reduced Innovator pass costs €135 plus VAT. Tickets are non-refundable.

Discounts for nonprofit and government employees: You must be full-time employees of nonprofit organizations, federal, state or local government agencies, international government agencies or active military employees.

Nonprofit employees — you must provide your email address from your organization during the online registration process. Government and military employees — you must provide your valid .gov email address during the registration process.

At the Disrupt Berlin on-site registration check-in, you must show proof of current employment at your nonprofit (copy of 501c3 documentation) or government organization. Government contractors, including contractors working on government “Cost Reimbursable Contracts,” are not eligible for the government discount.

We accept the following forms of valid government ID:

Government-issued Visa, Mastercard or American Express
Government picture ID
Military picture ID
Federally Funded Research Development Corp (FFRDC) ID

If you don’t present valid nonprofit documentation or government ID at registration, you’ll have to pay the full on-site price. The discounted Innovator pass costs €295 + VAT, and tickets are non-refundable.

Students, nonprofits and government employees — Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Take advantage of these deep discounts and join us to learn, share and experience early-stage startup culture at its best. Apply for a discounted Innovator pass today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Accusonus raises $3.3M to use AI to help content creators repair the audio in their videos

Published November 1, 2019

Accusonus, the Greece and U.S.-based AI company helping content creators improve the audio in their videos, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Athens-based Venture Friends, with participation from Big Pi, IQBility and PJ Tech, along with a syndicate of U.S.-based investors led by Michael Tzannes, who is actually the co-founder of Accusonus (and the former CEO of Aware Inc.).

Launched in 2014, Accusonus has been using AI for various audio and music applications longer than most. The company’s first product was Drumatom, which allows recording engineers to control microphone leakage (also known as bleed or spill) in drum recordings. In 2017, Accusonus followed up with the release of Regroover, an AI software instrument that un-mixes audio loops into stems so that new beat making workflows are possible.

Its products are said to have been used by engineers working with musicians such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Goo Goo Dolls, Super Furry Animals, Wilco, Jennifer Lopez and many others.

However, more recently the company has developed a suite of simple-to-use tools aimed at video content and podcast producers that need to repair or “clean up” audio in their creations. With the amount of content being created growing exponentially — often recorded on smartphones and other consumer equipment or turned around quicker than ever — the market beyond music production is huge.

The company’s thinking, explained co-founder and CEO Alex Tsilfidis, is that Accusonus wants to democratise access to high-quality audio via AI-driven tools that remove the learning curve required by traditional audio software.

He says that inventing new algorithms and “painstakingly” fine-tuning the UX of Accusonus’ products has enabled it to offer audio tools that provide ease-of-use to entry-level users while simultaneously speeding up the workflows of audio and video professionals.

Specifically, the Accusonus Enhancement and Repair of Audio (ERA) tools are able to clean up audio recordings via turning a single “virtual” knob within the software. The ERA tools work as plugins and are compatible with major video and audio platforms. These include entry-level editors, such as Audacity and Garageband, and more high-end offerings, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut, Avid Pro Tools, Apple Logic Pro and Da Vinci Resolve.

Meanwhile, Tsilfidis says there is some advantage to serving both customer groups, too. The company’s professional users often provide feedback that then helps improve its non-professional targeted products (even if there is likely some overlap between the two groups).

Forecast raises $5.5M for its ‘AI-powered’ project management software

Published November 1, 2019

Forecast, a Denmark-based startup that has developed “AI-powered” project management software, has raised $5.5 million in new funding.

The round is led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers SEED Capital and Heartcore. Forecast has raised $10 million in total funding to date.

Founded in late 2016, Forecast describes itself as an AI-powered project management solution that automates manual project management tasks, and brings extra visibility and predictive capabilities to project management. The idea is to help increase collaboration across teams with a better workflow and to improve planning.

Forecast claims that by using its project management software, customers reduce their administrative tasks by 20-40% and gain much better insights into “project risk, resource management and more.”

“Work is going more project-based… leading to an increased need for project management skills and expertise,” Forecast co-founder and CEO Dennis Kayser tells TechCrunch. “Plus, projects are getting more complex. Project management depends on many manual, ongoing updates to stay on time, on budget and on track. That’s why 66% of all projects fail due to human error.”

In addition, as projects become more complex and the data associated with a project increases exponentially, Kayser says the problem is getting worse, which, of course, is where machine intelligence can help. “We don’t learn from our mistakes because no one can keep track of every influencing factor to make crucial adjustments,” he adds.

To tackle this, Forecast uses AI to help keep projects on track and make project management more efficient. The software integrates with existing tools — such as Trello, Slack, Gdrive, Githum and Salesforce — and uses these various external data-points as key indicators for how well a project is running.

“[It pulls in] data from disparate systems and synthesizes it into something human-readable with powerful AI,” explains Kayser. “Everyone on your team can continue to use the tool they prefer without sacrificing dead-simple scheduling, reporting and collaboration for project managers and senior executives. With better insights and tools, project managers can be more efficient and gain insights from increasingly complex projects.”

The use of AI is proactive, too. This includes matching the best person and role to the task, automation of time registration, forecasting the size and duration of tasks and being alerted before a project is in trouble.

With regards to target customers, Kayser says that Forecast is focused on helping IT & services, marketing and computer software development companies that “rely on capacity being predictable and project delivery being successful.”

Forecast currently has “hundreds of customers” in more than 40 countries. The software has helped customers manage more than 40,000 projects with more than 1,000,000 tasks created.

Japanese instant-credit provider Paidy raises $143 million from investors including PayPal Ventures

Published November 1, 2019

Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes a $83 million Series C extension from investors including PayPal Ventures and debt financing of $60 million. The funding will be used to advance Paidy’s goals of signing large-scale merchants, offering new financial services and growing its user base to 11 million accounts by the end of 2020.

In addition to PayPal Ventures, investors in the Series C extension also include Soros Capital Management, JS Capital Management and Tybourne Capital Management, along with another undisclosed investor. The debt financing is from Goldman Sachs Japan, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. Earlier this month, Paidy and Goldman Sachs Japan established a warehouse facility valued at $52 million. Paidy also established credit facility worth $8 million with the three banks.

This is the largest investment to date in the Japanese financial tech industry, according to data cited by Paidy and brings the total investment the company has raised so far to $163 million. A representative for the startup says it decided to extend its Series C instead of moving onto a D round to preserve the equity ratio for existing investors and issue the same preferred shares as its previous funding rounds.

Launched in 2014, Paidy was created because many Japanese consumers don’t use credit cards for e-commerce purchases, even though the credit card penetration rate there is relatively high. Instead, many prefer to pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores and other pickup locations. While this makes online shopping easier for consumers, it presents several challenges for sellers, because they need to cover the cost of merchandise that hasn’t been paid for yet or deal with uncompleted deliveries.

Paidy’s solution is to make it possible for people to pay for merchandise online without needing to create an account first or use their credit cards. If a seller offers Paidy as a payment method, customers can check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses, which are then authenticated with code sent through SMS or voice. Paidy covers the cost of the items and bills customers monthly. Paidy uses proprietary machine learning models to score the creditworthiness of users, and says its service can help reduce incomplete transactions (or items that buyers ultimately don’t pick up and pay for), increase conversion rates, average order values and repeat purchases.