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Around is the new floating head video chat multitasking app
You have to actually get work done, not just video call all day, but apps like Zoom want to take over your screen. Remote workers who need to stay in touch while staying productive are forced to juggle tabs. Meanwhile, call participants often look and sound far away, dwarfed by their background and drowned in noise.
Today, Around launches its new video chat software that crops participants down to just circles that float on your screen so you have space for other apps. Designed for laptops, Around uses auto-zoom and noise cancelling to keep your face and voice in focus. Instead of crowding around one computer or piling into a big-screen conference room, up to 15 people can call from their own laptop without echo — even from right next to each other.
“Traditional videoconferencing tries to maximize visual presence. But too much presence gets in the way of your work,” says Around CEO Dominik Zane. “People want to make eye contact. They want to connect. But they also want to get stuff done. Around treats video as the means to an end, not the end in itself.”
Around becomes available today by request in invite-only beta for Mac, windows, Linux, and web. It’s been in private beta since last summer, but now users can sign up here for early access to Around. The freemium model means anyone can slide the app into their stack without paying at first.
After two years in stealth, Around’s 12-person distributed team reveals that it’s raised $5.2 million in seed funding over multiple rounds from Floodgate, Initialized Capital, Credo Ventures, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, Crashlytics’ Jeff Seibert, and angel Tommy Leep. The plan is to invest in talent and infrastructure to keep video calls snappy.
Not Just A Picturephone
Around CEO Dominik Zane
Around was born out of frustration with remote work collaboration. Zane and fellow Around co-founder Pavel Serbajlo had built mobile marketing company M.dot that was acquired by GoDaddy by using a fully distributed team. But they discovered that Zoom was “built around decades-old assumptions of what a video call should be” says Zane. “A Zoom video call is basically a telephone connected to a video camera. In terms of design, it’s not much different from the original Picturephone demoed at the 1964 World’s Fair.”
So together, they started Around as a video chat app that slips into the background rather than dominating the foreground. “We stripped out every unnecessary pixel by building a real-time panning and zooming technology that automatically keeps callers’ faces–and only their faces–in view at all times” Zane explains. It’s basically Facebook Messenger’s old Chat Heads design, but for the desktop enterprise.
Calls start with a shared link or /Around Slack command. You’re never unexpectedly dumped into a call, so you can stay on task. Since participants are closely cropped to their faces and not blown up full screen, they don’t have to worry about cleaning their workspace or exactly how their hair looks. That reduces the divide between work-from-homers and those in the office.
As for technology, Around’s “EchoTerminator” uses ultrasonic audio to detect nearby laptops and synchronization to eliminate those strange feedback sounds. Around also employs artificial intelligence and the fast CPUs of modern laptops to suppress noise like sirens, dog barks, washing machines, or screaming children. A browser version means you don’t have to wait for people to download anything, and visual emotes like “Cool idea” pop up below people’s faces so they don’t have to interrupt the speaker.
Traditional video chat vs Around
“Around is what you get when you rethink video chat for a 21st-century audience, with 21st-century technology,” says Initialized co-founder and general partner Garry Tan. “Around has cracked an incredibly difficult problem, integrating video into the way people actually work today. It makes other video-call products feel clumsy by comparison.”
There’s one big thing missing from Around: mobile. Since it’s meant for multitasking, it’s desktop/laptop only. But that orthodoxy ignores the fact that a team member on the go might still want to chime in on chats, even with just audio. Mobile apps are on the roadmap, though, with plans to allow direct dial-in and live transitioning from laptop to mobile. The 15-participant limit also prevents Around from working for all-hands meetings.
Competing with video calling giant Zoom will be a serious challenge. Nearly a decade of perfecting its technology gives Zoom super low latency so people don’t talk over each other. Around will have to hope that its smaller windows let it keep delays down. There’s also other multitask video apps like Loom’s asynchronously-recorded video clips that prevent distraction.
With coronavirus putting a new emphasis on video technology for tons of companies, finding great engineers could be difficult. “Talent is scarce, and good video is hard tech. Video products are on the rise. Google and large companies snag all the talent, plus they have the ability and scale to train audio-video professionals at universities in northern Europe” Zane tells me. “Talent wars are the biggest risk and obstacle for all real-time video companies.”
But that rise also means there are tons of people fed up with having to stop work to video chat, kids and pets wandering into their calls, and constantly yelling at co-workers to “mute your damn mic!” If ever there was a perfect time to launch Around, it’s now.
“Eight years ago we were a team of locals and immigrants, traveling frequently, moving between locations and offices” Zane recalls. “We realized that this was the future of work and it’s going to be one of the most significant transformations of modern society over the next 30 years . . . We’re building the product we’ve wanted for ourselves.”
One of the best things about working remotely is you don’t have colleagues randomly bugging you about superfluous nonsense. But the heaviness of traditional video chat swings things too far in the other direction. You’re isolated unless you want to make a big deal out of scheduling a call. We need presence and connection, but also the space to remain in flow. We don’t want to be away or on top of each other. We want to be around.
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Spectro Cloud launches with $7.5M investment to help developers build Kubernetes clusters their way
By now we know that Kubernetes is a wildly popular container management platform, but if you want to use it, you pretty much have to choose between having someone manage it for you or building it yourself. Spectro Cloud emerged from stealth today with a $7.5 million investment to give you a third choice that falls somewhere in the middle.
The funding was led by Sierra Ventures with participation from Boldstart Ventures.
Ed Sim, founder at Boldstart, says he liked the team and the tech. “Spectro Cloud is solving a massive pain that every large enterprise is struggling with: how to roll your own Kubernetes service on a managed platform without being beholden to any large vendor,” Sim told TechCrunch.
Spectro co-founder and CEO Tenry Fu says an enterprise should not have to compromise between control and ease of use. “We want to be the first company that brings an easy-to-use managed Kubernetes experience to the enterprise, but also gives them the flexibility to define their own Kubernetes infrastructure stacks at scale,” Fu explained.
Fu says that the stack, in this instance, consists of the base operating system to the Kubernetes version to the storage, networking and other layers like security, logging, monitoring, load balancing or anything that’s infrastructure related around Kubernetes.
“Within an organization in the enterprise you can serve the needs of your various groups, down to pretty granular level with respect to what’s in your infrastructure stack, and then you don’t have to worry about lifecycle management,” he explained. That’s because Spectro Cloud handles that for you, while still giving you that control.
That gives enterprise developers greater deployment flexibility and the ability to move between cloud infrastructure providers more easily, something that is top of mind today as companies don’t want to be locked into a single vendor.
“There’s an infrastructure control continuum that forces enterprises into trade-offs against these needs. At one extreme, the managed offerings offer a kind of nirvana around ease of use, but it’s at the expense of control over things like the cloud that you’re on or when you adopt new ecosystem options like updated versions of Kubernetes.”
Fu and his co-founders have a deep background in this, having previously been part of CliQr, a company that helped customers manage applications across hybrid cloud environments. They sold that company to Cisco in 2016 and began developing Spectro Cloud last spring.
It’s early days, but the company has been working with 16 beta customers.
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Addapptation snares $1.3M seed to build a better UX for Salesforce
Addapptation, a startup that wants to build a practical design layer on top of Salesforce and other enterprise tools, announced a $1.3 million seed investment today.
2048 Ventures led the round with participation from East Coast Angels, The Millworks II Fund and additional angel investors from New Hampshire, where the firm is located
Co-founder Sumner Vanderhoof says the startup’s goal is to build a user experience platform for enterprise tools like Salesforce . “Our goal is to help make simple, easy to use Salesforce.com solutions built on the addapptation UX platform.
“At the end of the day, we’re really helping transform the way companies work, making their employees more efficient, making the job they do easier and more consistent, so they have a bigger impact on the companies that they work for,” Vanderhoof told TechCrunch.
He says they do this by looking at the company workflow and what issue the customer is trying to solve — such as a problem converting deals through the sales cycle. They will then help build tools and an interface to make it easier to pinpoint this information with the goal of being able to reuse whatever solutions they create for other customers.
He says the platform is template-driven and designed to quickly go from idea to solution. A typical solution takes no longer than two weeks to build and implement. Once a customer is using addapptation, employees can log into the addapptation platform or it can be a layer built into Salesforce providing a more guided experience.
The company has built around 40 plug-ins for the platform, including a heat map that identifies where sales is likely to find the best opportunities to close a deal. The solutions they build are designed to work online or on mobile devices as needed.
Photo: addapptation
Vanderhoof says that the company has a good relationship with Salesforce, and it doesn’t compete directly with the company. “Their main focus is providing tools for a wide audience. Ours is extending the platform beyond what it can do,” he said.
The two founders, Vanderhoof and his wife Carla, took three years building the platform, essentially bootstrapping before taking today’s funding. The company has 15 employees in its Exeter, NH, headquarters and has 20 customers including Comcast and Ingram Micro.
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Hashicorp soars above $5B valuation in new $175M venture round
The rise of the cloud over the past decade has forced software developers and DevOps engineers to completely rearchitect the modern web application, ensuring scalability, performance, and security. That’s a really painful proposition when done manually, which is where Hashicorp comes in to play. The company’s suite of products helps everyone in the tech workforce from IT admins to software developers operate in the cloud (mostly) effortlessly and natively.
The company’s products have long garnered rave reviews from technical staffs, and now the company is looking at a brand new massive valuation.
The SF-based startup announced today that it has raised $175 million in Series E financing from Franklin Templeton Investments at a scorching $5.1 billion valuation. For context, when we last covered the company back in late 2018, its valuation was only a “paltry” $1.9 billion following a $100 million round led by growth investor IVP.
The company in its release today touted its success in doubling revenues and customers every year for four straight years as the key reason behind the flush valuation. The company is making a (not so) subtle point that David McJannet, who joined the company as CEO in mid-2016 following a stint as an EIR at Greylock, has seen some success in his new role.
Hashicorp CEO David McJannet. Photo via Hashicorp
The company, founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012, is one of the major pioneers in helping companies build high-quality infrastructure that’s a mix of multi-cloud providers, private cloud, and even legacy systems.
It’s most well-known product is Terraform, which allows developers to write repeatable rules around enterprise infrastructure rather than a patchwork of different scripts that might not work as its writers intended. The idea is that with a consistent framework, Hashicorp’s product can help companies reduce costs (by protecting against, say, over-provisioning of resources) while also helping to balance scale and performance. The company’s other products include Consul around network automation, Vault for security, and Nomad for application deployment.
Hashicorp touches on a bunch of competitive products, but its cohesive set of tools and strong outreach to the developer community has set itself apart from the competition in recent years.
Franklin Templeton is a fairly late stage investor that has funded such enterprise companies as Cloudflare, which went public last year, logs management platform SumoLogic, and cybersecurity business Tanium, all according to Crunchbase.
With a hefty $5.1 billion valuation, the company narrowly missed the catastrophic decline of SaaS stocks over the past few weeks, which have been buffeted by the rapidly spreading global pandemic. But with a new war chest and a focus on a popular and growing enterprise market, the company seems poised to continue its growth.
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To make locks touchless, Proxy bluetooth ID raises $42M
We need to go hands-off in the age of coronavirus. That means touching fewer doors, elevators, and sign-in iPads. But once a building is using phone-based identity for security, there’s opportunities to speed up access to WIFI networks and printers, or personalize conference rooms and video call set-ups. Keyless office entry startup Proxy wants to deliver all of this while keeping your phone in your pocket.
“The door is just a starting point” Proxy co-founder and CEO Denis Mars tells me. “We’re . . . empowering a movement to take back control of our privacy, our sense of self, our humanity, our individuality.”
With the contagion concerns and security risks of people rubbing dirty, cloneable, stealable key cards against their office doors, investors see big potential in Proxy. Today it’s announcing here a $42 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from former funders Kleiner Perkins and Y Combinator plus new additions Silicon Valley Bank and West Ventures.
The raise brings Proxy to $58.8 million in funding so it can staff up at offices across the world and speed up deployments of its door sensor hardware and access control software. “We’re spread thin” says Mars. “Part of this funding is to try to grow up as quickly as possible and not grow for growth sake. We’re making sure we’re secure, meeting all the privacy requirements.”
How does Proxy work? Employers get their staff to install an app that knows their identity within the company, including when and where they’re allowed entry. Buildings install Proxy’s signal readers, which can either integrate with existing access control software or the startup’s own management dashboard.
Employees can then open doors, elevators, turnstiles, and garages with a Bluetooth low-energy signal without having to even take their phone out. Bosses can also opt to require a facial scan or fingerprint or a wave of the phone near the sensor. Existing keycards and fobs still work with Proxy’s Pro readers. Proxy costs about $300 to $350 per reader, plus installation and a $30 per month per reader subscription to its management software.
Now the company is expanding access to devices once you’re already in the building thanks to its SDK and APIs. Wifi router-makers are starting to pre-provision their hardware to automatically connect the phones of employees or temporarily allow registered guests with Proxy installed — no need for passwords written on whiteboards. Its new Nano sensors can also be hooked up to printers and vending machines to verify access or charge expense accounts. And food delivery companies can add the Proxy SDK so couriers can be granted the momentary ability to open doors when they arrive with lunch.
Rather than just indiscriminately beaming your identity out into the world, Proxy uses tokenized credentials so only its sensors know who you are. Users have to approve of new networks’ ability to read their tokens, Proxy has SOC-2 security audit certification, and complies with GDPR. “We feel very strongly about where the biometrics are stored . . . they should stay on your phone” says Mars.
Yet despite integrating with the technology for two-factor entry unlocks, Mars says “We’re not big fans of facial recognition. You don’t want every random company having your face in their database. The face becomes the password you were supposed to change every 30 days.”
Keeping your data and identity safe as we see an explosion of Internet Of Things devices was actually the impetus for starting Proxy. Mars had sold his teleconferencing startup Bitplay to Jive Software where he met his eventually co-founder Simon Ratner, who’d joined after his video annotation startup Omnisio was acquired by YouTube. Mars was frustrated about every IoT lightbulb and appliance wanting him to download an app, set up a profile, and give it his data.
The duo founded Proxy in 2016 as a universal identity signal. Today it has over 60 customers. While other apps want you to constantly open them, Proxy’s purpose is to work silently in the background and make people more productive. “We believe the most important technologies in the world don’t seek your attention. They work for you, they empower you, and they get out of the way so you can focus your attention on what matters most — living your life.”
Now Proxy could actually help save lives. “The nature of our product is contactless interactions in commercial buildings and workplaces so there’s a bit of an unintended benefit that helps prevent the spread of the virus” Mars explains. “We have seen an uptick in customers starting to set doors and other experiences in longer-range hands-free mode so that users can walk up to an automated door and not have to touch the handles or badge/reader every time.”
The big challenge facing Proxy is maintaining security and dependability since it’s a mission-critical business. A bug or outage could potentially lock employees out of their workplace (when they eventually return from quarantine). It will have to keep hackers out of employee files. Proxy needs to stay ahead of access control incumbents like ADT and HID as well as smaller direct competitors like $10 million-funded Nexkey and $28 million-funded Openpath.
Luckily, Proxy has found a powerful growth flywheel. First an office in a big building gets set up, then they convince the real estate manager to equip the lobby’s turnstiles and elevators with Proxy. Other tenants in the building start to use it, so they buy Proxy for their office. Then they get their offices in other cities on board…starting the flywheel again. That’s why Proxy is doubling down on sales to commercial real estate owners.
The question is when Proxy will start knocking on consumers’ doors. While leveling up into the enterprise access control software business might be tough for home smartlock companies like August, Proxy could go down market if it built more physical lock hardware. Perhaps we’ll start to get smart homes that know who’s home, and stop having to carry pointy metal sticks in our pockets.
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n8n, a ‘fair code’ workflow automation platform, raises seed from Sequoia as VC firm steps up in Europe
When concerns about the novel coronavirus — and subsequent changes in activity — are not bringing productivity to a halt (and perhaps especially in times of needing to be as efficient as possible), one of the bigger IT trends has been a push to streamline how people work by creating better integrations between the different apps that they use. Today, a startup out of Berlin, Germany is announcing seed funding to help it enter the fray of those that are helping make those integrations happen seamlessly and more reliably.
n8n, a Berlin-based company that has built a “fair code” workflow automation platform to let developers quickly integrate any of the apps that they use to work together automatically — from standard third-party APIs to internal tools created by developers themselves — has picked up a seed round of $1.5 million to continue building out its service, and specifically to introduce its first commercial elements after announcing its existence last October and meeting an unexpected surge of interest.
“I was surprised, but it seems like people were waiting for me,” Jan Oberhauser, n8n’s founder and CEO, said in an interview, who added that n8n has picked up “a lot of traction” so far.
The investment is being co-led by UK’s firstminute Capital and Sequoia, with participation also from Runa Capital, Tiny VC and System.One, as well as Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite & Xoom, Ilkka Paananen, co-founder of Supercell, and Nan Li and Daniel Liem of Obvious Ventures (individually, not via Obvious).
Within that pretty impressive list, investment represents a significant step in particular for Sequoia, as it is the storied firm’s first seed investment in Germany amid a much bigger push into the region. The Silicon Valley VC has been quietly putting down roots in the European market over the last several months, including scouting for talent and local deals. The first hire in that process was announced this week: Luciana Lixandru, poached after years at Accel, is the firm’s first European partner, but for now this isn’t extending to raising a local fund.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Sequoia will continue to invest in Europe out of its U.S. funds and doesn’t have any plans to launch any funds in Europe at this time.
There are a number of other firms, startups as well as much bigger outfits, that have identified the opportunity for making tools to help developers and others who are less technical to stitch together disparate apps. They include other startups like Zapier, RapidAPI, and Tray.io, as well as companies that have well and truly transitioned out of the startup phase of life, such as MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce for the princely sum of $6.5 billion).
Oberhauser is well aware of all of these, because he is a developer himself who has tried them all — and found them all lacking, for a number of reasons. Either they were too pricey, or not flexible or robust enough to use in the wide variety of niche applications that he was using in his previous life in film production, or required a ton of reading of arcane documentation, or lacked the ability to scale or operate on his own company’s infrastructure rather than in the cloud. His answer was to build n8n, first for his own purposes and then to consider how it might be something that could be turned into a service for others.
One of the unique things about n8n is that it’s not “open source” per se, but is built on a model that is somewhat akin to it that is referred to as “fair code”.
The idea here is to take some of the free and flexible aspects of building (and third-party developers building upon) open source, while also trying to create a model that lets the original developer of the code make money off of it — either by offering services around it (similar to the kind of integration and other work that has sprouted around open source) — or, indeed, by charging for it when the user passes a certain size, or wants to use it in a different format, such as on a SaaS model.
Oberhauser is not only a user of fair code, but has become something of a pioneering entrepreneur in the space, also helping to run a site, appropriately called Fair-Code.io to encourage more fair code developers.
“Free and sustainable; open but pragmatic; community oriented; meritocratic and fair” is how n8n describes it, although there are definitely plans for n8n to bring in monetising elements into the mix.
The current version is one that can be hosted by a user locally — which in itself is a key part of the proposition for companies to meet certain data protection compliance, or to ensure themselves against any changes that might happen with n8n over time — and that will remain free to use.
“If the company goes bust or changes policy, you are in trouble,” Oberhauser said of platforms that don’t freely share their code. “That means they can never go to insurance or government organizations, for example. And people really like and care about data privacy, and are getting like that more every day. They want to own it and change it. Developers want to have access to the the code that is underlying and extend it really easily. What we have built you can integrate and use forever.”
But n8n also plans to launch a version under a SaaS model that be charged on a typical SaaS subscription model, which is due to launch next month. “If you want to run it on our cloud, you pay a fee,” Oberhauser said.
The second way it plans to make money is through consulting, support and integration services, which will take another year likely to launch (remember the startup is only five months old).
The third area for making money will be through licensing fees for larger users (a size which it has yet to determine) but even now the service as it stands “can be deployed to 1 million people” and still be free, Oberhauser said.
Right place, right time
Oberhauser, pictured here, said his startup came to the attention of Sequoia and London firm firstminute (the London VC co-founded by Brent Hoberman, Spencer Crawley and Henry Lane-Fox that specialises in early stage investments and counts VCs like Atomico as partners) through the responses that he got to his short post on HackerNews, and then subsequent hunt on Product Hunt.
n8n had been invited to Y Combinator to be a part of its cohort but declined because Oberhauser didn’t want to relocate from Berlin, where he has a young family to help support and where he intended to found the company (joining YC would have included incorporation in Delaware, which also didn’t interest Oberhauser). In fact, he built all of n8n bootstrapped as a side hustle while working part-time at other places, such was the need for income before this seed round.
That kind of grit, combined with identifying and fixing a clear gap in the market addressing what a defined audience (in this case, developers) needs, in a scalable way, with the proof being immediate interest and take-up from said target market, seemed to make the startup a no-brainer for funding.
“As talent is becoming more scarce, every organization is looking to get more from the great people they have,” Matthew Miller, a partner at Sequoia who has also worked closely with Docker, Confluent, Tessian, and Graphcore, said in a statement. “This is driving a surge in automation solutions in every industry. We were impressed by n8n’s early adoption in the open source community and Jan’s vision to build an open and flexible solution in this space, and we’re thrilled to have n8n as our first seed investment in Germany.”
Although Sequoia has yet to set up a full-fledged outpost here, sources have told us (and there have been reports) that this is intention, with the timeline being to set it up later this year. This is with the caveat of recent events related to the Novel Coronavirus pandemic, which have included a huge drop in the stock market and a major reassessment of business activities, which could materially change that course.
But more generally, having Sequoia — which has been involved some of the most high-profile startup exits of recent years, perhaps most famously Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp — operating a bigger office in Europe would represent a big vote of confidence in the region. European VC firm Atomico projected in November 2019 that there would be $35 billion of investment this year in European technology, a high water mark for the region. That represents an opportunity both in terms simply more startups but also later rounds for the biggest of these, both areas where Sequoia would want to be more active, is my guess.
Although Sequoia hasn’t announced any Europe-specific fund yet, the firm seems to currently have no shortage in raising money. It was reported last month that the VC is currently raising a fresh $1.3 billion, earmarked for Asia. And as recently as late December, it filed papers to raise $1 billion for US growth rounds and $2.4 billion for China.
Without committing (‘at this time’) to any region-specific funds, Sequoia is getting increasingly active in Europe anyway.
Even before hiring Lixandru (a hire it had been working on since last year, we understand), the firm had been making later-stage investments in Europe for years, including investments in Skyscanner (acquired by Ctrip), Wunderlist (acquired by Microsoft) and more recently Tessian.
This latest funding in n8n signals how now it is diversifying into a wider set of investment opportunities. These include not just earlier rounds like this first seed investment in Germany. But also newer technologies: for example, as part of the investor group putting $12 million into cryptocurrency wallet Argent earlier this week.
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Heartbeat Health raises $8.2M to improve cardiovascular care
While you’ve probably spent a lot of today thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that other health issues aren’t going away — and that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States.
Heartbeat Health is a startup working to improve the way that cardiovascular care is delivered, and it announced today that it has raised $8.2 million in Series A funding.
Dr. Jeffrey Wessler, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, is a cardiologist himself, and he told me that he “stepped off the academic cardiology path” about three years ago because he “saw some of the work being done in digital health space and became incredibly enamored of doing this for heart health.”
Wessler said that the delivery methods for cardiovascular care remain almost entirely unchanged. To a large extent that’s because the existing model works, but there’s still room to do better.
“As of the last seven or so years, we’re in a new era where we’ve figured out how to treat people well once they get sick,” he said. “But we’re doing a very bad job of keeping them healthy.”
To address that, Heartbeat Health has created what Wessler described as a “digital first” layer, allowing patients to talk with experts via telemedicine, who can then direct them to the appropriate provider — who might be a “preferred Heartbeat partner” or not — for in-person care.
This initial interaction can help patients avoid “a lot of inefficiencies,” he said, because it ensures they don’t get sent to the wrong place, and “kick[s] things off right with evidence-based, guideline-based testing, so that they’re not just falling into the individual practice habits of random doctors.”
In addition, Heartbeat Health tries to collect all of a patient’s relevant heart data (which might come from wearable consumer devices like an Apple Watch or Fitbit) in one place, and to track results about which treatments are most effective.
“Ultimately, we want to be the software, the technology powering it all, but we don’t want to leave any patient behind at the beginning,” Wessler said.
He added that the program works with most commercial insurance and is already involved in the care of 10,000 New York-area patients. And apparently it’s been embraced by the cardiologists, who Wessler said always tell him, “We’ve been waiting for that layer to come in and unify this incredibly fragmented system, as long as it works with us and not against us.”
The funding was led by .406 Ventures and Optum Ventures, with participation from Kindred Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Designer Fund and Max Ventures.
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Deep North raises $25.7M for AI that uses CCTV to build retail analytics
Amazon and others have raised awareness of how the in-store shopping experience can be sped up (and into the future) using computer vision to let a person pay for and take away items without ever interacting with a cashier, human or otherwise. Today, a startup is announcing funding for its own take on how to use AI-based video detection get more insights out of the retail experience. Deep North, which has built an analytics platform that builds insights for retailers based on the the videos from the CCTV and other cameras that those retailers already use, is today announcing that it has raised $25.7 million in funding, a Series A round that it plans to use to continue expanding its platform.
Deep North’s AI currently measures such parameters as daily entries and exits; occupancy; queue times; conversions and heat maps — a list and product roadmap that it’s planning to continue growing with this latest investment. It says that using cameras to build its insights is more accurate and scalable than current solutions that include devices like beacons, RFID tags, mobile networks, smartphone tracking and shopping data. A typical installation takes a weekend to do.
The funding is being led by London VC Celeres Investments (backer of self-driving startup Phantom AI, among others), with participation also from Engage, AI List Capital and others. The startup is not disclosing its valuation, and previously Deep North has not disclosed how much it has raised.
Previously known as VMAXX, the Bay Area-based startup, according to CEO and co-founder Rohan Sanil, currently is in use by customers in the US and Europe. It does not disclose customer names, but Sanil said the list includes shopping centers, retailers, commercial real estate businesses and transportation hubs.
There are a number of retail analytics plays on the market today, but up to now the vast majority of them have been based on using other kinds of non-visual (and non-video) data to build their pictures of how a business is working, including logs of sales, card payments, in-store beacons, in-store WiFi and smartphone usage.
This list is, indeed, extensive and already provides a startling amount of data on the average shopper, but it has its drawbacks. Some people don’t use in-store WiFi; beacons are not as ubiquitous as CCTV; certain shopping data is a false positive, in the sense that if you don’t buy anything, it’s harder to track why not and where everything went wrong in getting you to shop; and perhaps, most importantly, you can’t see how shoppers are behaving, where they are looking and walking.
“The data collected [by these other means] is only 30-60% accurate and then extrapolated,” Sanil notes in a blog post. And that is not the only challenge. “The other is the enormous cost of the technology along with the software – which requires a team of programmers to get anything beyond stock analysis – plus being locked into a single vendor.”
Video systems “make a lot more sense,” he adds, and so does using those that are already installed in retailers’ locations. “The customers we see have no interest in deploying and paying for additional infrastructure, when the average store has several cameras already, and a typical big box store has dozens. Making our vision work means quantifying what a camera can see – and seeing through the cameras already in use.” The company typically integrates with 60-70% of a company’s installed cameras to run its analytics.
It’s that differentiation that has attracted investors. “Deep North’s platform allows retailers to gain real time insights on data points that were previously unattainable in the physical world. By leveraging existing video footage to understand activity and behavior, operators can now make informed decisions with the help of their prescriptive analytics engine,” said Azhaan Merchant of Celeres Investments, in a statement.
CCTV has had a problematic profile in the world of data privacy, where people pinpoint it as enemy number one in our rapidly expanding surveillance economy, and have ironically pointed out that it rarely is fit for the purpose it was originally set out to serve, which is deterring and identifying shoplifters. It’s notable to me that Deep North doesn’t actually ever use the term CCTV. (“Customers use a variety of terms for their cameras including CCTV, camera networks and loss prevention cameras so we’ve chosen to use a broader term that encompasses them,” a spokesperson said.)
Whatever you choose to call them, if a retailer has already made the leap into having these cameras installed, using them for analytics gives that business another way of getting a better return on investment. Sanil says that in any case, its platform is respectful of privacy.
“Deep North is not able to ascertain the identity of any individual captured via in-store footage,” he said. “We have no capability to link the metadata to any single individual. Further, Deep North does not capture personally identifiable information (PII) and was developed to govern and preserve the integrity of each and every individual by the highest possible standards of anonymization. Deep North does not retain any PII whatsoever, and only stores derived metadata that produces metrics such as number of entries, number of exits, etc. Deep North strives to stay compliant with all existing privacy policies including GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.” (It has operations in Europe where it would need to comply with GDPR.)
Still, Deep North’s combination of computer vision with retail technology is a signal of a bigger trend. Many providers of security cameras have started to incorporate retail analytics into their wider offerings, and those that are concentrating on check out, like Amazon but also startups like Trigo, are likely also to consider this area too. Longer term, as retailers, but also their IT providers, look to get more intelligence about how their businesses are working in a bid for better margins, we’re likely to see even more players in this space.
For Deep North, that might mean also expanding into a wider set of products that not only are able to generate insights into how people shop, but then to use to those to build recommendations into how stores are laid out, or prompts to shoppers for what they might consider next as they browse.
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Zume co-founder goes from pizza to climate-friendly food with $2.7 million in funding
Before leaving SoftBank-backed Zume Pizza in November 2018, co-founder Julia Collins knew what her next move would be: climate-friendly food. Today, Collins is announcing Planet FWD’s $2.7 million seed round led by BBG Ventures with participation from Cleo Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Kapor Capital and others.
What’s unique about this round, Collins told TechCrunch, is that 99.5% of the funds came from people of color and/or women. That was deliberate, she said. What’s also deliberate is the startup’s mission to combat climate change by building a climate-friendly food platform and snack brand.
“For me, the question has always been, how can we reform our food systems so that they work better for people and work better for the planet?” Collins said. “That’s been the thread that has connected all of my work in food. It’s always been how can we change the existing infrastructure and the ways of doing business so that we create better outcomes.”
In 2017, Collins learned she was about to become a parent — something she hadn’t expected. That’s what led to, what she describes as, a sudden shift in consciousness where she realized she would soon become responsible for another human being.
“When I learned I was going to be a parent, I decided I was going to become a climatarian,” Collins said. “So that meant not just being a vegetarian or living a plant-based lifestyle, but wanting to live a planet-based lifestyle. So I went from being a plant-based eater to a climatarian. So I started thinking about how I could make food choices that would have better outcomes for the climate.”
This is where the focus on regenerative agriculture comes in. Regenerative agriculture is a farming technique that aims to reverse the effects of climate change by capturing carbon in soil and aboveground biomass, which ultimately increases biodiversity, enriches soils and improves watersheds. But unlike organic foods, where those specific farms are relatively well-known and identified, that can’t be said for regenerative agriculture. This is where the food platform comes in.
“When it came to the regenerative food landscape, nothing had been codified or mapped yet,” Collins said. “And so, as I started to pull together the ingredients for my climate-friendly snacks, I amassed this really exhaustive library of all this information about these farms. And I thought that was really interesting because anybody who wants to create a climate-friendly food product needs a universal set of information that just wasn’t available. And here I was building it in a little spreadsheet. And so I looked up and I realized this is actually software that I’m building.”
It’s this software that is powering Planet FWD’s food production. The startup’s first product is a cracker, which launches later this year. The next product will likely be chips, Collins said.
“A lot of what we’re doing with this snack product is engaging consumers and trying out this climate-friendly positioning to see whether or not it actually resonates with people,” she said.
Ideally, Planet FWD will be able to show there’s consumer demand for climate-friendly products, Collins said. From there, she hopes that would encourage more farmers to implement these regenerative agriculture practices. At this point, it’s unclear how many farms are focused on regenerative agriculture, but Collins has so far identified hundreds of them.
Since leaving Zume, the robotic pizza company has struggled. Earlier this year, the company was forced to lay off 360 employees and shut down its pizza-making and delivery business. Now, the company is focused solely on food packaging.
“It was very, very hard for me to decide to step away,” Collins said about leaving Zume. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. Maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do professionally. I’ve had a year-and-a-half to make my peace and find distance from it, but it’s been difficult and painful to see. At some point, you have to look back and it’s hard to look back and know that I don’t have any control or influence around anything that’s happening now — either the way that it’s being messaged or the actual function of the company. I’m still an owner in the company, and I still have hope they’re going to get to a really good outcome. But I am powerless.”
Now and in the foreseeable future, Collins will be focused on climate-friendly foods and food production.
“All of us have to eat every day, but what if as a result of our eating, we were able to actually draw down carbon and reverse climate change. Much of what we talk about in terms of solutions are consume less and produce less but when it comes to food we all need to eat. What if, as a result of the way you ate, you could actually contribute to the solution.”
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Men’s at-home health startup Vault takes in $30 million from Tiger Capital
Vault, an at-home healthcare practice specializing in men’s medicine has announced the raise of $30 million in funding from Tiger Capital Group, Declaration Capital and Redesign Health to reach more potential patients and expand to more areas beyond New York, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, where it currently offers treatments.
Founder and CEO Jason Feldman, who formerly headed Amazon’s Prime Video Direct and Global Innovation teams before launching Vault last summer, told TechCrunch his startup aims to bring specialized medicine into men’s homes to give them “a better body, better sex and a better brain.”
He tells TechCrunch he started the company after noticing how many of his male friends seemed embarrassed about medical conditions or simply didn’t know they could do something about it.
Vault operates on the assumption men face certain barriers to going to the doctor for things like hormonal imbalance and erectile dysfunction. The startup tries to remove these barriers by making it easy to book at-home appointments and get a work-up with a nurse practitioner.
“I want to de-stigmatize men’s health.” Feldman told TechCrunch. “You tell a guy to go see the doctor about his heart health and he likely won’t but you tell him you’ll bring him a doctor to help his penis and it’s a different story.”
Like many new concierge medical services that have popped up in the last few years, Vault does not take insurance, instead signing patients up via membership for $133 to $300 per month, depending on the type of service you sign up for. Compare that to Forward, which caters to both men and women and offers unlimited in-office visits and testing for $149/month or Roman, a men’s “digital clinic,” which offers free online evaluations, $15 doctor’s visits and prescription medications for similar services to Vault like erectile dysfunction, hair loss and testosterone support — although Roman requires patients see a physical doctor of their choosing within the last three years before they’re able to get prescriptions via digital services.
But Feldman doesn’t think his startup is anything like what’s out there right now, claiming it as the first national men’s healthcare provider. Vault offers specialty packages like testosterone therapy or the “sex kit” for an increased sex drive or stronger erections, something that sometimes diminishes as men age.
So far, Feldman has signed up over 500 medical practitioners to come to various home locations and has hired a chief medical officer to ensure medical standards are being met. He now plans to use the new funding to open up operations in 42 cities across the U.S. and work on spreading the word to all men nationwide that Vault is here for them.
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