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Berlin’s Wonder raises $11M for a new approach to video chat where you wander and join groups
If this year has taught us a lesson about the world of work, it’s that collectively, we weren’t very well-equipped in terms of the technology we use to translate the in-person experience seamlessly to a remote version. That’s led to a rush of companies launching new services to fill that hole — cloud computing and data warehousing startups, collaboration platforms, sales tools and more — and today one of the latest startups in the area of videoconferencing is announcing a round of funding to see its business scale to the next level.
Wonder, a Berlin startup that has built a platform for people to come together in video-based groups to meet up, network and collaborate, while also having a bird’s-eye view of a larger space where they can more serendipitously, or more intentionally, interact with others — not unlike in an office or other business venue — is today announcing that it has raised $11 million (€9 million) in a substantial seed round.
The funding was led by European VC EQT Ventures, with BlueYard Capital — which led a pre-seed round in the startup when it was previously called “YoTribe” — also participating.
It comes on the heels of the young startup seeing some impressive traction this year.
Wonder now has 200,000 monthly users from a pretty diverse set of organizations, including NASA, Deloitte, Harvard and SAP, which are using it for a variety of purposes, from team collaboration through to career fairs. The company will use the funding both to add in more features as requested by current users, as well as to hire more people for its team, co-founder Stephane Roux said in an interview. Those features will include sharing files and other technical services, but they will not be piled on quickly or thickly.
“We think of this less in terms of content and more about people,” he said. “The core experience is about live interaction, not just repositories of stuff. We want to build a place for collaboration and communication. Interesting ways to carve up a group virtually.”
Now, you may be thinking: another workplace video app? Hasn’t this $14 billion space race already been “won” by Zoom (which some of us now use as a verb for videoconferencing, regardless of which app we actually use)? Or Microsoft or Google or BlueJeans, or whatever it is that your organization has inevitably already signed up and paid for?
But it turns out that for all the growth and use that these other platforms have had, they are sorely lacking in their overall experience, as it pertains to what it’s like to be in physical spaces with other people. One of the key points, it turns out, is that a lot of solutions are not really built with the user experience of the larger group in mind.
Wonder is built around the idea of a “shared space” that you enter. That space comes not from a VR experience as you might expect, but something much simpler that takes a tip from more rudimentary but very effective older game dynamics. You get a single window where you can “see” from an aerial view, as it were, all of the other people who are in the same space, and the areas within that space where they might cluster together.
Those clusters could be designed around a specific interest (such as marketing or HR or product) or — if the product is being used at a career fair, for example, at a list of different companies taking part; or — at a conference — different conference sessions, plus an exhibition space.
You can move around all of the clusters, or start your own, or sit in the margins with another person, and when you do come together with one or more people, you can join them in a video chat to interact. In the future, the plan is to do more than just join a video chat; you might also be able to access documents related to that cluster, and more.
The clusters can be “public” for anyone to join, or set to private, as you might have in a physical meeting room. The overall effect is that, without actually being in a physical space, you get the sense of a collective group of people in motion.
The startup was originally the brainchild of Leonard Witteler, who built a version of this last year as a coding project at university before showing it to friends and family and getting positive feedback.
As another co-founder, Pascal Steck, describes it, he, Witteler and Roux, who all knew each other, had been looking to build a startup together, but around a completely different idea — a portal for photographers and other creatives in the wedding industry.
Given how drastically curtailed weddings and other group gatherings have been this year, that didn’t really go anywhere at all. But the three could see an opportunity, a very different one, with the software that Witteler had built while still a student. So in the grand tradition of startups, they pivoted.
Wonder had previously been called YoTribe, which sounds a little like YouTube and also plays on the idea of groups of friends who come together around special interests.
And from how Steck and Roux described it to me in an interview (over Wonder of course), it didn’t sound like the initial idea was to target enterprises at all, but people who found themselves a bit at a loss when music festivals and other events like that suddenly died a death because of COVID-19.
Indeed, they themselves were all too aware of the state of the market for videoconferencing apps: it was very, very crowded.
“The space is very busy and some great products are already out there. But as soon as you zoom into this space” — no pun intended, Steck said — “when it’s about large group meetings, these other tools do not allow for serendipitous conversations or bottom-up gatherings, and the list gets very thin very quickly. Our focus is around improving presentations, but in the case of large groups, there is just not a lot out there. Especially something building an association as we know it to how we do things in the offline world. We think we have a unique spot in the market.
“A meeting for three people can use Zoom or Teams perfectly. There is no need for anything else, but for larger groups, that is not the case and it seems like the market is really open for something like Wonder.”
The name “Wonder” is an interesting choice when the startup rebranded from YoTribe. Wonder’s main meaning is surprise and discovery, but it has long been thought and assumed that “wonder” is also connected to the word “wander”. (In fact, the two are not related etymologically, but have often crossed paths and wandered into each other’s territories over the centuries.) Similarly, the idea with Wonder the app is that you can “wander” around a room, and find who and what you are looking for in the process.
Wonder is not the only upstart video app that has picked up some attention in the last several months. In fact, there has been a wave of them launching or announcing funding (or both) in 2020 to try to address the gaps — or opportunities — that exist as a result of the features from the current leaders.
Other launches have included mmhmm (Phil Libin’s latest startup that adds lots of bells and whistles to make the presentations more than just a talking head); Headroom (founded by ex-Google and ex-Magic Leap entrepreneurs, using AI to get more meaningful insights from the video conversations); Vowel (which lets people search across video chats to follow up items and dig into what people said across different calls); and Descript, Andrew Mason’s audio effort, now also has video features.
But if anything, a lot of these newer tools fail to address the shortcomings of what it’s like being a part of a big group using a video app. In fact, many of these newer entrants highlight another set of challenges, those of the speaker, who is thus graced with better presentation tools in mmhmm, or given way better insights into the audience with Headroom, etc.
In any case, Wonder has found, serendipitously, a lot of traction from people who have identified and lamented the problems with so much else out there today. The app is still free to use, and the plan will be to keep it that way until some time in 2021, Roux said. Ironically, he pointed out that many of its current customers are asking to be charged, not least because it lends using it more credibility, which is important with IT departments and so on. All that might mean the charging plan gets pushed up sooner.
In any case, even if companies are also using something else, they are also adopting Wonder, and that has in turn piqued the interest of investors who are interested to see where it might go next.
“Throughout COVID-19, real-time video has become the default for both private and professional interactions, and hybrid working is here to stay,” said Jenny Dreier, investor at EQT Ventures Berlin, in a statement. “No other video tools come anywhere near as close to replicating real-life interactions as Wonder, so the product has explosive potential, already foreshadowed with the platform’s stellar organic growth. It’s incredibly exciting to be working with the team and to be part of the journey; I can’t wait to be a part of their next chapter.”
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Zephr raises $8M to help news publishers grow subscription revenue
Zephr has raised $8 million in a new funding round led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (owned by media giant Bertelsmann).
The London-headquarted startup’s customers already include publishers like McClatchy, News Corp Australia, Dennis Publishing and PEI Media. CEO James Henderson told me via email that rather than creating “a monolithic product that tries to do a bit of everything,” Zephr is “focused entirely on the experience and journey for the prospect or customer,” driving an average 150% increase in conversion rates and 25% increase in subscription revenue within the first six months.
Henderson added, “By offering the right product, package or message at the right time to the right person, Zephr improves conversion rates, drastically decreases churn and drives new, stable revenue.”
To do this, Zephr largely relies on the publisher’s first-party data about its readers — Henderson said that this data is “by far the most important and powerful type of data that Zephr both uses and generates.” But it also takes advantage of contextual data, such as “time of day, to location, device or consumption patterns.”
He also noted that Zephr is a no-code tool, allowing non-technical members of the marketing, revenue and product teams to use a drag-and-drop editor to create different customer journeys.
Image Credits: Zephr
Asked how the pandemic has affected the startup’s business, Henderson said there were both “positive and negative indicators,” with newsrooms seeing record readership but in some cases also freezing spending.
“As firms prepare for a ‘post-pandemic’ world, we are beginning to see our markets seize the opportunity of all these new potential subscribers and invest in subscription models — and in Zephr.” he said. “In publishing and news media, the old model of dominant advertising revenue is on the way out and we are well-placed to capitalize on that interest.”
The new funding also includes financing from Silicon Valley Bank UK Branch and brings Zephr’s total funding to $11 million. Previous investors include Knight Capital and Nauta Capital.
According to the company’s funding announcement, this money will go toward further product development (with a focus on increased personalization), as well as expansion across the United States, Europe and Asia.
“The recent weakness in the advertising market increased pressure for media companies to diversify revenue streams and aim to introduce or optimize subscription models,” said BDMI Managing Director Urs Cete in a statement. “We recognise Zephr’s excellent technology that empowers publishers to galvanise the online subscription opportunity and create customer journeys that are truly unique.”
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Fantasy startup Esports One raises $4M more
Esports One, a startup bringing the fantasy approach to esports, is announcing that it has raised an additional $4 million in funding.
When I first wrote about Esports One in April, co-founder and COO Sharon Winter described it as the first “all-in-one fantasy platform” in the esports world, allowing you to research players, create fantasy teams and watch games, with an initial focus on the North American and European divisions of League of Legends.
According to the Esports One team, creating this platform required building out a set of data and analytics products, as well as using computer vision technology that can track game activity (and update player stats) without relying on a publisher’s API.
The startup says its user base has been growing by more than 25% month-over-month. It may also have benefited from the pause in professional sports earlier this year, while CEO and co-founder Matt Gunnin told me recently that he also sees fantasy as a way to make video games accessible to a broader audience — he recalled one Esports One user who introduced his sister to League of Legends using the fantasy platform.
“I use the example of growing up and sitting there with my dad, watching a baseball game, he’s telling me everything that’s happening,” Gunnin said. “Now it’s the opposite — parents are sitting and watching their kids.”
Many parents, he suggested, are “never going to pick up a mouse and keyboard and play League of Legends,” but they might play the fantasy version: “That’s an entry point … if we can make it easily accessible to individuals both that are hardcore gamers playing video games and watching League of Legends their entire life, as well as someone who has no idea what’s going on.”
The new funding was led led by XSeed Capital, Eniac Ventures, and Chestnut Street Ventures, bringing Esports One to a total of $7.3 million raised. The company also recently signed a partnership deal with lifestyle company ESL Gaming.
Gunnin said the money will allow the company to grow its Bytes virtual currency, which players use to enter contests and buy customizations — starting next year, players will be able to spend real money to purchase Bytes. In addition, it’s working on native iOS and Android apps (Esports One is currently accessible via desktop and mobile web).
Gunnin and his team also plan to develop fantasy competitions for Rainbow Six: Siege, Rocket League, Valorant and Fortnite.
“As a fairly new player in the esports world, we’ve seen immense determination and grit from Matt, Sharon, and the whole Esports One team to grow into a household name,” said XSeed’s Damon Cronkey in a statement. “I’m excited to be partnering with a company that will deliver new perspectives and features to an evolving industry. We’re eager to see how Esports One grows in 2021.”
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ANYbotics, Swiss company behind quadrupedal ANYmal robot, announces $22M A round
ANYbotics, the creators of ANYmal, a four-legged autonomous robot platform intended for a variety of industrial uses, has raised a $20 million Swiss Franc (~$22.3 million) round A to continue developing and scaling the business. With similar robots just beginning to break into the mainstream, the market seems ready to take off.
The company spun out of ETH Zurich in 2016, at which point the robot was already well into development. ANYmal is superficially similar to Spot, the familiar quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, but the comparison mustn’t be taken too far. A four-legged robot is a natural form for navigating and interacting with environments built for humans.
ANYbotics is on the third generation of the robot, which has progressively integrated computing units and sensors of increasing sophistication.
“Our current ANYmal C model features three built-in high-end Intel i7 computers that power the robot and customer-applications such as automated inspection tasks,” explained co-founder and CEO Péter Fankhauser in an email to TechCrunch. “The availability of smaller and more performant sensors, propelled by AR/VR and autonomous driving applications, has enabled us to equip the latest ANYmal model with 360-degree situational awareness and long-range scanning capabilities. Where commercially available components are not satisfactory, we invest in our proprietary technologies, which have resulted in core components such as custom motors, docking stations, and inspection payload units.”
The most obvious application for robots like ANYmal is inspection of facilities that would normally involve a human. If a robot can traverse the same paths, climb stairs, open doors and so on, it can do so more frequently and regularly than its human counterparts, who tire and take breaks. It also can monitor and relay its surroundings in detail, using lidar and RGB cameras, among other tools. Humans can then perform the more difficult (and human) work of integrating that information and making decisions based on it. An ANYmal at a factory, power plant, or data center could save costs and shoe leather.
Of course, that’s no use if the bot is fragile; fortunately, that’s not the case.
“In terms of mobility, we have focused on what matters most to our industrial customers: Operational reliability and robustness to harsh environmental conditions,” Fankhauser said. “For example, we design and test ANYmal for day and night usage in indoor and outdoor locations, including offshore platforms with salty air and large temperature ranges. It’s less about agility in these environments but more about reliably and safely performing the tasks multiple times a day over many months without human intervention.”
Swisscom Ventures leads the round, and partner Alexander Schläpfer said that good roots (ETHZ is of course highly respected) and good results from early commercial partnerships more than justified their investment.
“Over 10 years ago, some of our co-founders developed their first walking robots during their studies at ETH Zurich,” said Fankhauser. “Today, the industries are ready to adopt this technology, and we are deploying our robots to our early customers.”
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Wellory raises $4.5M for its ‘anti-diet’ nutrition app
Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding.
The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others.
Wellory founder and CEO Emily Hochman (who was previously the head of customer success at WayUp) told me that she struggled with dieting in college, to the point where she was risking chronic illness and infertility. As a result, she became determined to gain a better understanding of nutrition and her own health, eventually studying and becoming a certified health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
Hochman said that through Wellory, she wants to offer that same understanding to others, which she said has created a “managed marketplace” matching users with a licensed nutritionist, registered dietitian or certified health coach. Those coaches create a personalized plan for losing weight or achieving other health goals, then continue to provide feedback as users share photos of each meal and additional health data.
For example, she said that a customer who had just given birth and was interested in postpartum weight loss would get matched with a coach who specializes in that area.
“The thing that is so important is that we build personalized plans,” she added. “We don’t have anything that says, ‘At Wellory, we do these 10 things and that’s a standard diet.’ We’re actually going to help you learn how to make smart and healthy decisions.”
Wellory CEO Emily Hochman (Image Credit: Wellory)
Wellory officially launched in September, but Hochman said some beta testers have been using the service for nine, 10 or 11 months. She said early customers include people who are interested in weight loss, those who need nutrition advice due to chronic illness and “optimizers” who simply want to make sure they’re eating as healthily as possible.
She also noted that although customers usually sign up with a specific goal in mind, “once they hit their goal, because of the power of a strong relationship, they say, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I was, let’s keep building, let’s make sure I can sustain this.’ ”
The app is available on iOS and Android and currently costs $59.99 per month. Hochman plans to introduce additional pricing tiers. and she said the funding will allow Wellory to expand the technology and marketing teams, and to explore new partnerships.
“As a data technology investor, we get approached by different types of wearable or diagnostic companies nearly every week,” said Jake Yormak of Story Ventures in a statement. “We love the category but what we saw in Wellory was a way to put a human coach at the center of understanding this health data. With nutrition as the wedge, Wellory has built a trusted relationship with people who affirmatively want to better understand and improve their wellbeing.”
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Jitsu nabs $2M seed to build open-source data integration platform
Jitsu, a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 cohort, is developing an open-source data integration platform that helps developers send data to a data warehouse. Today, the startup announced a $2 million seed investment.
Costanoa Ventures led the round with participation from Y Combintaor, The House Fund and SignalFire.
In addition to the open-source version of the software, the company has developed a hosted version that companies can pay to use, which shares the same name as the company. Peter Wysinski, Jitsu’s co-founder and CEO, says a good way to think about his company is an open-source Segment, the customer data integration company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion.
But, he says, it goes beyond what Segment provides by allowing you to move all kinds of data, whether customer data, connected device data or other types. “If you look at the space in general, companies want more granularity. So let’s say for example, a couple years ago you wanted to sync just your transactions from QuickBooks to your data warehouse, now you want to capture every single sale at the point of sale. What Jitsu lets you do is capture essentially all of those events, all of those streams, and send them to your data warehouse,” Wysinski explained.
Among the data warehouses it currently supports are Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostGres and Snowflake.
The founders built the open-source project called EventNative to help solve problems they themselves were having moving data around at their previous jobs. After putting the open-source version on GitHub a few months ago, they quickly attained 1,000 stars, proving that they had delivered something that solved a common problem for data teams. They then built the hosted version, Jitsu, which went live a couple of weeks ago.
For now, the company is just the two co-founders, Wysinski and CTO Vladimir Klimontovich and couple of contract engineers, but they intend to do some preliminary hiring over the next year to grow the company, most likely adding engineers. As they begin to build out the startup, Wysinski says that being open source will help drive diversity and inclusion in their hiring.
“The goal is essentially to go after that open-source community and hire people from anywhere because engineers aren’t just […] one color or one race, they’re everywhere, and being open source, and especially being in a remote world, makes it so, so much simpler [to build a diverse workforce], and a lot of companies I feel are going down that road,” he said.
He says along that line, the plan is to be a fully remote company, even after the pandemic ends, as they hire from anywhere. The goal is to have quarterly offsite meetings to check in with employees, but do the majority of the work remotely.
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Jio Platforms backs SF-based AR gaming startup Krikey
Jio Platforms, the biggest telecom operator in India and which has raised over $20 billion from Facebook, Google and other high-profile investors this year, is leading a financing round of a San Francisco-based startup that develops augmented reality mobile games.
Jio has led the Series A fundraise of Krikey, founded by sisters Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram, the Indian firm said on Wednesday. They did not disclose the size of Krikey’s Series A round, but Jio said Krikey has raised $22 million to date.
Krikey has previously not disclosed any financing rounds, according to their listings on Crunchbase, CBInsights and Tracxn. Jio also did not share who else participated in Krikey’s new round.
As part of the announcement, Krikey has launched Yaatra, a new AR game that invites users to step in an action-adventure story to defeat a monster army. “Using weapons such as the bow and arrow, chakra, lightning and fire bolts, players can battle through different levels of combat and puzzle games,” Krikey said.
Jio subscribers in India will get exclusive access to a range of features in Krikey, available on Android and iOS, including a 3D avatar, and entry to some game levels and weapons. Jio said Yaatra game would also be made available to JioPhone feature-phone users.
Krikey has developed two additional games, including Gorillas, a game the startup developed in partnership with Ellen DeGeneres’s wildlife foundation.
“We believe AR has a huge potential in not just gaming but in many other industries to disrupt the way people interact with the world around them. We are very excited to use the phone as the window back into the natural world and hope that people’s experiences in empathising with birds and guerrillas and different ecosystems will encourage them to start to take real-world conservation behaviour changes,” said Jhanvi in an interview with Cheddar last year.
“Our vision with Krikey is to bring together inspiration and reality in an immersive way. With augmented reality, we are able to bring fantasy worlds into your home, straight through the window of your mobile phone,” said Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram in a joint statement today. They have previously participated in Apple’s female entrepreneur camp.
In a statement, Akash Ambani, director of Jio, said, “Krikey will inspire a generation of Indians to embrace Augmented Reality. Our vision is to bring the best experiences from across the world to India and the introduction of Yaatra is a step in that direction. Augmented Reality gaming takes the user into a world of its own, and we invite every Jio and non-Jio user to experience AR through Yaatra.”
Jio has previously acquired music streaming service Saavn (which has since been rebranded to JioSaavn), and Haptik, a startup that develops conversational platforms and virtual assistants.
We have reached out to Jio and Krikey for more details.
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WaveOne aims to make video AI-native and turn streaming upside down
Video has worked the same way for a long, long time. And because of its unique qualities, video has been largely immune to the machine learning explosion upending industry after industry. WaveOne hopes to change that by taking the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and making them AI-powered — while somehow avoiding the pitfalls that would-be codec revolutionizers and “AI-powered” startups often fall into.
The startup has until recently limited itself to showing its results in papers and presentations, but with a recently raised $6.5M seed round, they are ready to move towards testing and deploying their actual product. It’s no niche: video compression may seem a bit in the weeds to some, but there’s no doubt it’s become one of the most important processes of the modern internet.
Here’s how it’s worked pretty much since the old days when digital video first became possible. Developers create a standard algorithm for compressing and decompressing video, a codec, which can easily be distributed and run on common computing platforms. This is stuff like MPEG-2, H.264, and that sort of thing. The hard work of compressing a video can be done by content providers and servers, while the comparatively lighter work of decompressing is done on the end user’s machines.
This approach is quite effective, and improvements to codecs (which allow more efficient compression) have led to the possibility of sites like YouTube. If videos were 10 times bigger, YouTube would never have been able to launch when it did. The other major change was beginning to rely on hardware acceleration of said codecs — your computer or GPU might have an actual chip in it with the codec baked in, ready to perform decompression tasks with far greater speed than an ordinary general-purpose CPU in a phone. Just one problem: when you get a new codec, you need new hardware.
But consider this: many new phones ship with a chip designed for running machine learning models, which like codecs can be accelerated, but unlike them the hardware is not bespoke for the model. So why aren’t we using this ML-optimized chip for video? Well, that’s exactly what WaveOne intends to do.
I should say that I initially spoke with WaveOne’s cofounders, CEO Lubomir Bourdev and CTO Oren Rippel, from a position of significant skepticism despite their impressive backgrounds. We’ve seen codec companies come and go, but the tech industry has coalesced around a handful of formats and standards that are revised in a painfully slow fashion. H.265, for instance, was introduced in 2013, but years afterwards its predecessor, H.264, was only beginning to achieve ubiquity. It’s more like the 3G, 4G, 5G system than version 7, version 7.1, etc. So smaller options, even superior ones that are free and open source, tend to get ground beneath the wheels of the industry-spanning standards.
This track record for codecs, plus the fact that startups like to describe practically everything is “AI-powered,” had me expecting something at best misguided, at worst scammy. But I was more than pleasantly surprised: In fact WaveOne is the kind of thing that seems obvious in retrospect and appears to have a first-mover advantage.
The first thing Rippel and Bourdev made clear was that AI actually has a role to play here. While codecs like H.265 aren’t dumb — they’re very advanced in many ways — they aren’t exactly smart, either. They can tell where to put more bits into encoding color or detail in a general sense, but they can’t, for instance, tell where there’s a face in the shot that should be getting extra love, or a sign or trees that can be done in a special way to save time.
But face and scene detection are practically solved problems in computer vision. Why shouldn’t a video codec understand that there is a face, then dedicate a proportionate amount of resources to it? It’s a perfectly good question. The answer is that the codecs aren’t flexible enough. They don’t take that kind of input. Maybe they will in H.266, whenever that comes out, and a couple years later it’ll be supported on high-end devices.
So how would you do it now? Well, by writing a video compression and decompression algorithm that runs on AI accelerators many phones and computers have or will have very soon, and integrating scene and object detection in it from the get-go. Like Krisp.ai understanding what a voice is and isolating it without hyper-complex spectrum analysis, AI can make determinations like that with visual data incredibly fast and pass that on to the actual video compression part.
Image Credits: WaveOne
Variable and intelligent allocation of data means the compression process can be very efficient without sacrificing image quality. WaveOne claims to reduce the size of files by as much as half, with better gains in more complex scenes. When you’re serving videos hundreds of millions of times (or to a million people at once), even fractions of a percent add up, let alone gains of this size. Bandwidth doesn’t cost as much as it used to, but it still isn’t free.
Understanding the image (or being told) also lets the codec see what kind of content it is; a video call should prioritize faces if possible, of course, but a game streamer may want to prioritize small details, while animation requires yet another approach to minimize artifacts in its large single-color regions. This can all be done on the fly with an AI-powered compression scheme.
There are implications beyond consumer tech as well: A self-driving car, sending video between components or to a central server, could save time and improve video quality by focusing on what the autonomous system designates important — vehicles, pedestrians, animals — and not wasting time and bits on a featureless sky, trees in the distance, and so on.
Content-aware encoding and decoding is probably the most versatile and easy to grasp advantage WaveOne claims to offer, but Bourdev also noted that the method is much more resistant to disruption from bandwidth issues. It’s one of the other failings of traditional video codecs that missing a few bits can throw off the whole operation — that’s why you get frozen frames and glitches. But ML-based decoding can easily make a “best guess” based on whatever bits it has, so when your bandwidth is suddenly restricted you don’t freeze, just get a bit less detailed for the duration.
Example of different codecs compressing the same frame.
These benefits sound great, but as before the question is not “can we improve on the status quo?” (obviously we can) but “can we scale those improvements?”
“The road is littered with failed attempts to create cool new codecs,” admitted Bourdev. “Part of the reason for that is hardware acceleration; even if you came up with the best codec in the world, good luck if you don’t have a hardware accelerator that runs it. You don’t just need better algorithms, you need to be able to run them in a scalable way across a large variety of devices, on the edge and in the cloud.”
That’s why the special AI cores on the latest generation of devices is so important. This is hardware acceleration that can be adapted in milliseconds to a new purpose. And WaveOne happens to have been working for years on video-focused machine learning that will run on those cores, doing the work that H.26X accelerators have been doing for years, but faster and with far more flexibility.
Of course, there’s still the question of “standards.” Is it very likely that anyone is going to sign on to a single company’s proprietary video compression methods? Well, someone’s got to do it! After all, standards don’t come etched on stone tablets. And as Bourdev and Rippel explained, they actually are using standards — just not the way we’ve come to think of them.
Before, a “standard” in video meant adhering to a rigidly defined software method so that your app or device could work with standards-compatible video efficiently and correctly. But that’s not the only kind of standard. Instead of being a soup-to-nuts method, WaveOne is an implementation that adheres to standards on the ML and deployment side.
They’re building the platform to be compatible with all the major ML distribution and development publishers like TensorFlow, ONNX, Apple’s CoreML, and others. Meanwhile the models actually developed for encoding and decoding video will run just like any other accelerated software on edge or cloud devices: deploy it on AWS or Azure, run it locally with ARM or Intel compute modules, and so on.
It feels like WaveOne may be onto something that ticks all the boxes of a major b2b event: it invisibly improves things for customers, runs on existing or upcoming hardware without modification, saves costs immediately (potentially, anyhow) but can be invested in to add value.
Perhaps that’s why they managed to attract such a large seed round: $6.5 million, led by Khosla Ventures, with $1M each from Vela Partners and Incubate Fund, plus $650K from Omega Venture Partners and $350K from Blue Ivy.
Right now WaveOne is sort of in a pre-alpha stage, having demonstrated the technology satisfactorily but not built a full-scale product. The seed round, Rippel said, was to de-risk the technology, and while there’s still lots of R&D yet to be done, they’ve proven that the core offering works — building the infrastructure and API layers comes next and amounts to a totally different phase for the company. Even so, he said, they hope to get testing done and line up a few customers before they raise more money.
The future of the video industry may not look a lot like the last couple decades, and that could be a very good thing. No doubt we’ll be hearing more from WaveOne as it migrates from lab to product.
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GoSite snags $40M to help SMBs bring their businesses online
There are 12 million small and medium businesses in the U.S., yet they have continued to be one of the most underserved segments of the B2B universe: That volume underscores a lot of fragmentation, and alongside other issues like budget constraints, there are a number of barriers to building for them at scale. Today, however, a startup helping SMBs get online is announcing some significant funding — a sign of how things are changing at a moment when many businesses have realised that being online is no longer an option, but a necessity.
GoSite, a San Diego-based startup that helps small and medium enterprises build websites, and, with a minimum amount of technical know-how, run other functions of their businesses online — like payments, online marketing, appointment booking and accounting — has picked up $40 million in funding.
GoSite offers a one-stop shop for users to build and manage everything online, with the ability to feed in up to 80 different third-party services within that. “We want to help our customers be found everywhere,” said Alex Goode, the founder and CEO of GoSite. “We integrate with Facebook and other consumer platforms like Siri, Apple Maps and search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and more.” It also builds certain features like payments from the ground up.
The Series B comes on the back of a strong year for the company. Driven by COVID-19 circumstances, businesses have increasingly turned to the internet to interact with customers, and GoSite — which has “thousands” of SMB customers — said it doubled its customer base in 2020.
This latest round is being led by Left Lane Capital out of New York, with Longley Capital, Cove Fund, Stage 2, Ankona Capital and Serra Ventures also participating. GoSite is clearly striking while the iron is hot: Longley, also based out of San Diego, led the company’s previous round, which was only in August of this year. It has now raised $60 million to date.
GoSite is, in a sense, a play for more inclusivity in tech: Its customers are not companies that it’s “winning” off other providers that provide website building and hosting and other services typically used by SMBs, such as Squarespace and Wix, or GoDaddy, or Shopify.
Rather, they are companies that may have never used any of these: local garages, local landscapers, local hair salons, local accountancy firms, local dentists and so on. Barring the accounting firm, these are not businesses that will ever go fully online, as a retailer might, not least because of the physical aspect of each of those professions. But they will need an online presence and the levers it gives them to communicate in order to survive, especially in times when their old models are being put under strain.
Goode started GoSite after graduating from college in Michigan with a degree in computer science, having previously grown up around and working in small businesses — his parents, grandparents and others in his Michigan town all ran their own stores. (He moved to San Diego “for the weather,” he joked.)
His belief is that while there are and always will be alternatives like Facebook or Yelp to plant a flag, there is nothing that can replace the value and longer-term security and control of building something of your own — a sentiment small business owners would surely grasp.
That is perhaps the most interesting aspect of GoSite as it exists today: It precisely doesn’t see any of what already exists out there as “the competition.” Instead, Goode sees his purpose as building a dashboard that will help business owners manage all that — with up to 80 different services currently available — and more, from a single place, and with minimum need for technical skills and time spent learning the ropes.
“There is definitely huge demand from small businesses for help and something like GoSite can do that,” Goode said. “The space is very fragmented and noisy and they don’t even know where to start.”
This, combined with GoSite’s growth and relevance to the current market, is partly what attracted investors.
“The opportunity we are betting on here is the all-in-one solution,” said Vinny Pujji, partner at Left Lane. “If you are a carpet cleaner or house painter, you don’t have the capacity to understand or work with five or six different pieces of software. We spoke with thousands of SMBs when looking at this, and this was the answer we heard.” He said the other important thing is that GoSite has a customer service team and for SMBs that use it, they like that when they call, “GoSite picks up the phone.”
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Materialize scores $40 million investment for SQL streaming database
Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open-source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Lightspeed Ventures.
While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year, led by Lightspeed, bringing the total raised to $40 million.
These firms see a solid founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Dataflow project on which the company is based.
Narayan says that the company believes fundamentally that every company needs to be a real-time company, and it will take a streaming database to make that happen. Further, he says the company is built using SQL because of its ubiquity, and the founders wanted to make sure that customers could access and make use of that data quickly without learning a new query language.
“Our goal is really to help any business to understand streaming data and build intelligent applications without using or needing any specialized skills. Fundamentally what that means is that you’re going to have to go to businesses using the technologies and tools that they understand, which is standard SQL,” Narayan explained.
Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round, sees this standard querying ability as a key part of the technology. “As more businesses integrate streaming data into their decision-making pipelines, the inability to ask questions of this data with ease is becoming a non-starter. Materialize’s unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves this problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform,” he said.
They would naturally get compared to Confluent, a streaming database built on top of the Apache Kafka open-source streaming database project, but Narayan says his company uses straight SQL for querying, while Confluent uses its own flavor.
The company still is working out the commercial side of the house and currently provides a typical service offering for paying customers with support and a service agreement (SLA). The startup is working on a SaaS version of the product, which it expects to release some time next year.
They currently have 20 employees with plans to double that number by the end of next year as they continue to build out the product. As they grow, Narayan says the company is definitely thinking about how to build a diverse organization.
He says he’s found that hiring in general has been challenging during the pandemic, and he hopes that changes in 2021, but he says that he and his co-founders are looking at the top of the hiring funnel because otherwise, as he points out, it’s easy to get complacent and rely on the same network of people you have been working with before, which tends to be less diverse.
“The KPIs and the metrics we really want to use to ensure that we really are putting in the extra effort to ensure a diverse sourcing in your hiring pipeline and then following that through all the way through the funnel. That’s I think the most important way to ensure that you have a diverse [employee base], and I think this is true for every company,” he said.
While he is working remotely now, he sees having multiple offices with a headquarters in NYC when the pandemic finally ends. Some employees will continue to work remotely, with the majority coming into one of the offices.
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