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Pepper, founded by five Snap alums, has raised $5.6 million to help startups analyze their spend
For years, startups have been encouraged to grow at all costs. That hasn’t always turned out so well, and founders are feeling pressure for the first time in a long time to do a better job of keeping track of their spending — and their return on investment.
Enter Pepper, an LA-based company that has sealed up $5.6 million in seed funding from Upfront Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Manta Ray Ventures to help direct-to-consumer startups, along with other digitally native businesses, do just that.
It says it can help them better predict and understand how every investment they make is impacting the future health of their business.
Started by a clutch of Snap alums — five of the company’s six founders logged time at the social media company — they say that marketing spend will be a big part of they’re looking at, but Pepper will also analyze other areas where spending could be smarter and more effective, from salaries to office space to travel and entertainment. All “functionally impact a business’s all-in customer acquisition costs,” says Pepper’s CEO, James Borow.
What Pepper will offer specifically, or how it will differ from other financial analytics platforms, is right now impossible to say. Borrow — who previously led Snap’s revenue programs and, before that, sold a social ad platform for $50 million — isn’t ready to share many details about how Pepper works. What he does say is that it will remain free when it launches in beta in the first quarter (you can sign up for a waitlist here), that privacy was designed into “its core” and that it will be rolling out premium paid-for features as 2020 gets underway.
It’s also worth noting that Pepper came together thanks in part to another company that TechCrunch featured earlier this year called Forge Platform — a company that was developing a new toolkit for distributed applications, was advised by Borow and that was founded by his former Snap colleagues Chris Lorenz and Geoffrey Anderson.
As Borow tells it, he knew the two were working on complex analytics tools, and when he began working on the idea for Pepper, he recognized that he’d need a strong analytics team, so they joined forces.
They also combined funding. Indeed, $1 million of the Pepper’s $5.6 million in seed funding is money that Forge had raised from Upfront and Manta Ray, both of which have more recently plugged more money into Pepper.
Borow is also quick to note that beyond the Snap employees who’ve launched the company, there are numerous former and current Snap employees who’ve either invested in or are advising Pepper. Among these is Imran Khan, Snap’s former chief strategy officer; Jeff Lucas, its former head of global sales; Omar Hasan, its former global head of sales finance; Dante DiCicco, its current head of international expansion; and Cristina Grace Borow, who formerly focused on brand partnerships for Snap and is also James Borow’s wife.
“It’s very Snap heavy,” says Borow, because people are “bullish” about what Borow and his co-founders built across their different disciplines at the company.
Snap he adds, has “very deep talent pool.”
Others of Pepper’s co-founders from Snap include its general counsel, Sean Friedland, who previously led Snap’s monetization legal efforts; and Daniel Druger, who previously headed up Snap’s revenue partnerships team (general counsel). Meanwhile, before setting off on their own to create Forge Platform, Lorenz and Anderson had worked as a product lead and an engineer lead, respectively, at Snap.
Pictured above, left to right: Chris Lorenz, Daniel Druger, Geoff Anderson, Sean Friedland, Soraya Belhadj Aissa, James Borow and Spencer Anderson
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San Diego’s Trust & Will raises $6 million for online estate planning
Estate planning in the U.S. is a $180 billion industry and, unlike many of the other areas in the multitrillion-dollar financial services market, it’s one that has yet to see a slew of technology companies come in to try to improve efficiencies.
One notable exception is Trust & Will, the San Diego-based startup that has announced a new $6 million investment to expand sales and marketing, product development and partnerships.
The company joins services like Quicken’s WillMaker and startups like Everplans as relatively new entrants into the technology-enabled estate planning business.
Timing seems good for the company and its other competitors. The $180 billion estate planning business is expected to surge as millennials start having children and begin thinking about their wills. It joins other staid businesses like life insurance and home insurance as a category that’s traditionally been overlooked by entrepreneurs who now see increasingly digital customers make demands of industry participants.
Right now, half of all adults in the U.S. have no will and millions more have out-of-date estate plans, according to Trust & Will. In addition, 45 million parents with minor children have no form of estate plan.
Since its launch in April, Trust & Will has had 60,000 members enroll in the company’s platform; those enrollments represent $15.1 billion in total assets, $2.7 billion in reported life insurance policies, $137 million in charitable commitments and 88% holding real estate assets.
The company has a tiered subscription model offering a $399-$499 service plus an annual subscription fee for the creation of a trust-based estate plan that the company says can avoid probate for the protection and transfer of assets; a $69-$129 level, which includes plans for surviving beneficiaries and asset distribution; and a $39-$49 plan for parents with minor children who aren’t ready to complete a will.
While customers may be able to draft a will themselves and just store it in a safe place, some people will likely gravitate to a digital will. At least, that’s what Link Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Western Technology Investment, Techstars Ventures, Luma Launch and Halogen Ventures are hoping for with their commitment to the company’s Series A financing.
In January, the company closed its first electronic will with help from its industry partner, Notarize. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Cody Barbo, former product ad marketing strategist Daniel Goldstein and product designer Brian Lamb, the company now counts 11 people on staff.
“Trust & Will is another example of how digital services are disrupting traditional industries by offering a convenient and lower-cost estate planning solution that helps consumers protect their valuable assets and loved ones,” said Rob Chaplinsky, a managing director at Trust & Will’s series A lead investor, Link Ventures. “We have been following this category for quite some time and feel that Trust & Will’s product and rapid market traction are second to none. We look forward to leveraging our big data assets to help them scale.”
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Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches with $20.6M led by a16z
Open source has become a critical building block of modern software, and today a new startup is coming out of stealth to capitalise on one of the newer frontiers in open source: using it to build and manage distributed application environments, an approach being used increasingly to handle large computing projects, such as those involving artificial intelligence or scientific or other complex calculations.
Anyscale, a startup founded by the same team that built the Project Ray open-source distributed programming framework out of UC Berkeley — Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica, and Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan — has raised $20.6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation also from NEA, Intel Capital, Ant Financial, Amplify Partners, 11.2 Capital and The House Fund.
The company plans to use the money to build out its first commercial products — details of which are still being kept under wraps but will more generally include the ability to easily scale out a computing project from one laptop to a cluster of machines; and a group of libraries and applications to manage projects. These are expected to launch next year.
“Right now we are focused on making Ray a standard for building applications,” said Stoica in an interview. “The company will build tools and a runtime platform for Ray. So, if you want to run a Ray application securely and with high performance then you will use our product.”
The funding is partly strategic: Intel is one of the big companies that has been using Ray for its own computing projects, alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Ant Financial.
“Intel IT has been leveraging Ray to scale Python workloads with minimal code modifications,” said Moty Fania, principal engineer and chief technology officer for Intel IT’s Enterprise and Platform Group, in a statement. “With the implementation into Intel’s manufacturing and testing processes, we have found that Ray helps increase the speed and scale of our hyperparameter selection techniques and auto modeling processes used for creating personalized chip tests. For us, this has resulted in reduced costs, additional capacity and improved quality.”
With an impressive user list like this for the free-to-use Ray, you might ask yourself, what is the purpose of Anyscale? As Stoica and Nishihara explained, the idea will be to create simpler and easier ways to implement Ray, to make it usable whether you’re one of the Amazons of the world, or a more modest, and possibly less tech-centric operation.
“We see that this will be valuable mostly for companies who do not have engineering experts,” Stoica said.
The problem that Anyscale is solving is a central one to the future of large-scale, involved computing projects: there are an increasing array of problems that are being tackled with computing solutions, but as the complexity of the work involved increases, there is a limit to how much work a single machine (even a big one) can handle. (Indeed, Anyscale cites IDC figures estimating that the amount of data created and copied annually will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.)
While one day there may be quantum-computing machines that can run efficiently and at scale to address these kinds of tasks, today this isn’t a realistic option, and so distributed computing has emerged as a solution.
Ray was devised as a standard to use to implement distributed computing environments, but on its own it’s too technical for the uninitiated to use.
“Imagine you’re a biologist,” added Nishihara. “You can write a simple program and run it at a large scale, but to do that successfully you need not only to be a biology expert but a computing expert. That’s just way too high a barrier.”
The people behind Anyscale (and Ray) have a long and very credible list of other work behind them that speaks to the opportunities that are being spotted here. Stoica, for example, was also the co-founder of Databricks, Conviva and one of the original developers of Apache Spark.
“I worked on Databricks with Ion and that’s how it started,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said in an interview. He added that the firm has been a regular investor into projects coming out of UC Berkeley. Ray, and more specifically Anyscale, is notable for its relevance to today’s computing needs.
“With Ray it was a very attractive project because of the open-source metrics but also because of the issue it addresses,” he said.
“We’ve been grappling with Moore’s Law being over, but more interestingly, it’s inadequate for things like artificial intelligence applications,” where increasing computing power is needed that outstrips what any single machine can do. “You have to be able to deal with distributed computing, but the problem for everyone but Google is that distributed computing is hard, so we have been looking for a solution.”
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Automated web app testing startup ProdPerfect raises $13M Series A led by Anthos Capital
This morning ProdPerfect, a technology startup focused on web application testing, announced a $13 million Series A led by Anthos Capital. Anthos is perhaps best known for investing in Honey, a startup which recently sold to PayPal for several billion dollars.
ProdPerfect, a remote-focused company, closed a $2.6 million seed round earlier in 2019. Fika Ventures and Eniac Ventures took part in the Series A after also putting capital into the company in the company’s preceding seed investment. The startup has now raised $15.7 million across three rounds, according to Crunchbase.
What does ProdPerfect’s product do regarding testing? And what is it going to do with all its new money? TechCrunch chatted with Dan Widing, ProdPerfect’s founder and CEO, to answer those questions, and learn how quickly the company is growing.
Testing
ProdPerfect automates end-to-end testing for web developers. According to Widing, the product “followed some of the lessons of the product analytics industry to build a tool that lets us quantitatively understand how our customers’ live users traverse the customers’ web application.” The company estimates that “many companies are compelled to put around 20% of their engineering budget into staffing a QA engineering department,” spend that it reckons it can help cut.
The web is a big place, with lots of pages and apps and more built and maintained by a global army of developers. Those end products require testing to find errors and bugs that could cause havoc for end users and companies alike. You can test well, or poorly. But according to Widing, the “gold standard of web testing is either directly or indirectly controlling a browser to traverse the site like a user does,” also known as “end-to-end testing.”
The product seems to have found early market traction. According to Widing, 18 months after landing its first handful of customers, his company has reached the 50-customer mark, generating “around $2 million” in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a standard revenue metric for modern software (SaaS) companies.
What’s next
When TechCrunch last covered ProdPerfect, we called it a “Boston-based startup focused on automating QA testing for web apps.” All of that is still true aside from the location. According to its CEO, ProdPerfect transferred its headquarters from Boston to San Francisco earlier in 2019. However, Widing said, ProdPerfect doesn’t focus on the move much, as it views itself as “a remote-first company.”
But no matter where its nexus sits, the company plans on investing heavily in sales and marketing spend (traditional for a Series A-level company looking to quickly expand revenue), and invest in “product development and customer service,” according to Widing. So, tech investments, go-to-market spend and a modest war chest for the future are the game plan for ProdPerfect’s new money. (Widing noted in an email to TechCrunch that “it helps to have a good stockpile” in times of global macro uncertainty, which is a smart perspective.)
The firm ARR figure that ProdPerfect provided will help the market vet its progress over the next few years. The company will probably aim for more than a doubling in size next year, more likely shooting for a tripling. So, how close to $6 million ARR that ProdPerfect can reach in 2020 will be fun to watch. If the firm manages that sort of growth, expect it to raise again to keep investing in its product and go-to-market motion.
Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash
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Satori Cyber raises $5.25M to help businesses protect their data flows
The amount of data that most companies now store — and the places they store it — continues to increase rapidly. With that, the risk of the wrong people managing to get access to this data also increases, so it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing a number of startups that focus on protecting this data and how it flows between clouds and on-premises servers. Satori Cyber, which focuses on data protecting and governance, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed round led by YL Ventures.
“We believe in the transformative power of data to drive innovation and competitive advantage for businesses,” the company says. “We are also aware of the security, privacy and operational challenges data-driven organizations face in their journey to enable broad and optimized data access for their teams, partners and customers. This is especially true for companies leveraging cloud data technologies.”
Satori is officially coming out of stealth mode today and launching its first product, the Satori Cyber Secure Data Access Cloud. This service provides enterprises with the tools to provide access controls for their data, but maybe just as importantly, it also offers these companies and their security teams visibility into their data flows across cloud and hybrid environments. The company argues that data is “a moving target” because it’s often hard to know how exactly it moves between services and who actually has access to it. With most companies now splitting their data between lots of different data stores, that problem only becomes more prevalent over time and continuous visibility becomes harder to come by.
“Until now, security teams have relied on a combination of highly segregated and restrictive data access and one-off technology-specific access controls within each data store, which has only slowed enterprises down,” said Satori Cyber CEO and co-founder Eldad Chai. “The Satori Cyber platform streamlines this process, accelerates data access and provides a holistic view across all organizational data flows, data stores and access, as well as granular access controls, to accelerate an organization’s data strategy without those constraints.”
Both co-founders (Chai and CTO Yoav Cohen) previously spent nine years building security solutions at Imperva and Incapsula (which acquired Imperva in 2014). Based on this experience, they understood that onboarding had to be as easy as possible and that operations would have to be transparent to the users. “We built Satori’s Secure Data Access Cloud with that in mind, and have designed the onboarding process to be just as quick, easy and painless. On-boarding Satori involves a simple host name change and does not require any changes in how your organizational data is accessed or used,” they explain.
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Indian B2B food tech startup HungerBox raises $12M from Paytm and others
HungerBox, an Indian food tech startup that has courted 10 of the 11 largest companies in the country to use its services, today announced it has raised $12 million from Paytm and others as it looks to sign clients in Southeast Asia.
The three-year-old startup’s new financing round, a Series C, was funded by a consortium of Indian and international investors, including payments firm Paytm and NPTK, an Asian VC fund that invests in emerging firms. Existing investors Sabre Partners and Neoplux also participated in the round, which pushes the Bangalore-based startup’s to-date raise to $16.5 million.
HungerBox offers management services to companies and institutions to improve and run their in-house cafeterias and canteens. HungerBox also enables its clients to connect with food partners through an app and get real-time updates of their order.
The startup, which also provides these firms with a point-of-sale machine, helps them get better insight into the quality of food being catered to their employees, and enables scheduled delivery and tracking of orders to address the long queues, said Sandipan Mitra, co-founder and chief executive of HungerBox, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“We all talk about the food delivery to consumers, but not many are looking to improve the quality of food and how it is being catered to tens of millions of employees in the country each day,” he said. “It’s a challenge that has not been addressed well.”
It turns out, when a startup finally looked into the space, many quickly jumped to appreciate it. HungerBox has amassed more than 126 large businesses and institutions — with more than 100,000 workforce each, across 18 Indian cities, said Mitra. Food delivery startups Swiggy and Zomato have started to explore this space, too, in recent quarters.
HungerBox is processing 560,000 orders each day, a figure that is growing 10% every month, claimed Mitra. The startup’s solutions are today employed at more than 535 cafeterias for its clients that work in IT / technology, retail, healthcare, aviation, education, financial services and manufacturing, he said. He declined to reveal the name of the clients, citing confidential agreements.
Annual food sales on the HungerBox platform have exceeded $100 million, he said.
The startup, which employs 1,500 people, will use the fresh capital to fuel its expansion in 10 additional Indian cities and to markets in Southeast Asia, said Mitra.
In a statement, Madhur Deora, president of Paytm, said HungerBox has enabled Paytm to add new use cases for the company’s payments business and digitization of offline transactions.
“HungerBox is the market leader in the institutional food tech space and we will partner closely with them and bring the benefits of Paytm’s ecosystem to HungerBox,” he said.
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Terradepth raises $8 million to build a fleet of autonomous deep-ocean data robots
Plenty of the ocean remains unexplored, even though it’s a huge trove of potentially valuable information. Current methods for mapping and gathering ocean data, especially deep-ocean data, generally require humans in the mix (even if controlling vehicles remotely), are immensely expensive and are not designed for long periods of operation. Startup Terradepth, founded by two ex-Navy SEALs and based in Austin, Texas, is aiming to change all that using autonomous submersible vehicles that can, if deployed as a fleet with adequate scale, provide access to deep-ocean information on a data-as-a-service basis.
The startup has raised $8 million in funding in a new round led by storage hardware company Seagate Technology, and the funding will help it pursue its ambitious goal of demonstrating their technology at work in an open-water environment by next summer. From there, it hopes to scale its operations the following year, and ultimately operate an entire networked fleet of its fully autonomous underwater robots, which it calls “Autonomous Hybrid Vehicles,” or AxV.
Terradepth says that its technology will be able to operate at a scale and cost not previously possible because of their use of autonomous navigation, and it will aim to offer raw data, information processed through their own machine-learning powered analytics layer, or cloud-based third-party analytics. They aim to offer multispectral imaging, surveillance and monitoring/forecasting services for off-shore equipment and resources.
In addition to co-founders Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman, Terradepth’s small team includes a range of roboticists and engineers with expertise in both software and hardware. Their vehicles are designed to alternate between deep ocean passes and trips to the water’s surface, with underwater AxV communicating with the surface-based robots, which are simultaneously recharging, which then pass on data collected to satellites for relaying back to data centers and customers.
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Arbe raises $32 million to bring its high-resolution radar to autonomous vehicles
It’s not enough for an autonomous vehicle to see the world around it. These vehicles need to understand in real time what they’re seeing.
That understanding piece is critical, and it requires being able to identify objects in real time and in any environmental condition. It can mean the difference between an autonomous vehicle that appropriately notices and ignores a plastic bag floating by and one that slams on its brakes.
Tel Aviv-based startup Arbe has developed a high-resolution radar chipset that it says is a game changer for the automotive industry. Now, with a fresh injection of $32 million in capital, it’s pushing to bring it into production and into the hands of Tier 1 suppliers.
Arbe said Monday that it has raised $32 million in a Series B funding round from a number of new investors, including BAIC Capital, Catalyst CEL, MissionBlue Capital and AI Alliance, a joint venture fund that includes Hyundai, SK Telecom and Hanwha Asset Management. Existing investors Canaan Partners Israel, iAngels, 360 Capital Partners, O.G. Tech Ventures and OurCrowd also participated.
Arbe will use the capital to hire more employees. But its big focus in the coming year is to bring its radar systems into full production.
“With the funds raised, Arbe will continue to deploy to the market a real breakthrough in radar technology that empowers Tier 1 automakers and OEMs to finally replace their legacy chipsets with one that truly meets the safety requirements of NCAP and ADAS for years ahead,” CEO Kobi Marenko said in a statement.
Arbe already has five Tier 1 customers — two in China and three in Europe, Marenko told TechCrunch. Marenko wouldn’t name the suppliers.
Arbe developed a high-resolution radar chipset designed to help autonomous vehicles, and even passenger vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems, detect and identify objects. The technology can separate, identify and track hundreds of objects in high horizontal and vertical resolution to a long range in a wide field of view. Arbe says its radar chipset generates an image 100 times more detailed than any other solution on the market today. The system is then able to take those images and simultaneously localize and map the environment.
The high-resolution radar chipset resolves a number of issues found in legacy chipsets, Marenko said, including eliminating false alarms. Arbe’s chipsets also can in real time process massive amounts of information generated by 4D imaging, and mitigate mutual radar interference. A radar system that has high-resolution object separation in azimuth and elevation will theoretically lead to more accurate decision making.
Arbe is so confident in its radar chipset that Marenko says it will enable Level 3 automation in passenger vehicles without requiring lidar, or light detection and ranging radar. Level 3 is a designation by SAE that means conditional automation in which a driver must still be prepared to intervene.
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Building robotic safety inspectors nabs Gecko Robotics $40 million
Gecko Robotics has landed $40 million in financing as it looks to build an additional 40 robots over the next year to meet what the company sees as growing demand for its safety and infrastructure monitoring services.
“We are growing fast solving critical infrastructure problems that affect our lives, and can even save lives,” says Jake Loosararian, Gecko Robotics’ 28-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer, in a statement. “At our core, we are a robot-enabled software company that helps stop life-threatening catastrophes. We’ve developed a revolutionary way to use robots as an enabler to capture data for predictability of infrastructure; reducing failure, explosions, emissions and billions of dollars of loss each year.”
In the three years since its launch in 2016, Gecko Robotics has managed to grow from a small team of Pittsburgh robotics experts hailing from Carnegie Mellon. Indeed, the company has added more than 100 new employees. The hiring push has been largely around creating a team of qualified experts in particular market segments who can operate the robots that Gecko deploys to industrial work sites.
There’s been something of a robotics revolution in the safety and compliance market over the past few years. From automated assembly lines to warehouses and now to chemical plants and refineries, robots are making their presence felt.
And Gecko isn’t the only company that’s trying to tackle the market. Other companies like Invert Robotics, a Christchurch, New Zealand-based company, has built its own competitive robotic safety inspector.
The initial pitch from Gecko managed to attract angel investors like Mark Cuban, Deep Nishar (a managing partner at SoftBank), Josh Reeves and Jake Seid, the managing director at Stone Bridge Ventures.
Now the company adds the Midwestern venture capital juggernaut Drive Capital to its stable of investors.
“We are very excited for the future of robotics in industrial inspection. The Gecko Robotics team are revolutionizing an industry that is in need of a real upgrade and will save lives,” said Mark Kvamme, lead investor and partner at Drive Capital. “I see amazing potential for Gecko’s business model, they are on the path to become a market leader in their industry.”
Gecko Robotics has already opened a 20,000-square-foot office in Houston, and has offices in Houston, Austin and Pittsburgh.
“The robots are amazing, but they’re not going to be able to complete the job done by these experts who have experience of 30 to 40 years,” says Loosararian. “We have thought leaders who go out in the field… they take the robots out and they use their own manual ability and knowledge to provide the expertise to the clients.”
Gecko currently has 60 robots in its stable of robots and will add at least another 40 over the course of the year. “The product at the end is the software license that they pay for annually,” Loosararian says.
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Solve, the startup creating an interactive ‘Law & Order’ for social media, raises $20 million
When “Law & Order” ended its 20-year run in 2010, it had already cemented its place as one of the longest-running television dramas in history. Its success was a testament to the enduring popularity of a good mystery.
Mining that same well of a demand for whodunnits, a roughly one-year-old Los Angeles-based startup called Solve has raised $20 million in financing to update the genre for a new generation of media consumers.
Its eponymously titled social media programming, available on Instagram and Snap, has managed to nab roughly 30 million interactions over the year-and-a-half that it distributed its productions. Now the company is launching a true crime podcast on the iHeartMedia and Apple platforms to tap into another potentially high-growth market.
Solve began as a series developed within the mobile-focused entertainment studio, Vertical Networks. Helmed by Tom Wright and financed by Elisabeth Murdoch (through her Freelands Ventures fund, which Wright also managed) and Snap, the company was one of the early entrants to raise cash as a production studio for mobile content. But it was far from the only studio to see money in mobile-first entertainment. All of the major internet-age media companies had their own mobile strategies.
Murdoch eventually replaced Wright (so that he could work on spinning up Solve as an independent entity) and sold Vertical Networks two months ago to the online media startup, Whistle, for an undisclosed amount.
“I spent a year looking deep, deep, deep into audience behavioral data on Snap and Facebook,” Wright says. “The DNA of what I thought [audience] sensibilities was leading towards was this format.”
As Vertical Networks was winding down, Solve was spinning up with help from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital.
“We’ve seen incredibly popular crime mystery shows across media, including podcasts like Serial and Dirty John, TV shows like Making a Murderer and Law & Order, and movies like The Usual Suspects and Gone Girl,” said Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “Games have attained a first class status as media but we’ve yet to see a crime mystery format game achieve the same success, and Solve is going to right that wrong.”
The gamification element that’s made Solve’s episodes resonate with mobile audiences on social platforms will be a small part of the initial series, says Wright, with plans to expand the interactive elements going forward.
Produced in partnership with SALT audio, whose previous work includes “Blackout” and “Carrier” and iHeartMedia, the 10-episode series uses the same “ripped from the headlines” storytelling for its 30-minute broadcasts and offers listeners clues in leaked audio files, voicemails, courtroom testimony and other evidence to try to guess the killer.
For now, Solve is content to be a studio producing ad-supported media for platforms like Apple, Snap, Facebook, iHeartMedia and other distributors, according to Wright. It’s a different path than studios like Quibi, which is creating its own streaming service dedicated to mobile storytelling and backed by many of the major Hollywood studios.
The current pace of production means that Solve is making 18 original episodes per month. For the 40-year-old Wright, Solve represents a fourth foray into the world of startups. And while he’s not a fan of the crime or mystery genre himself, Wright said that the data around engagement was too compelling to not try to launch a business around it.
“The Internet has changed how we interact with the world from taxis to news to shopping. We believe that Solve can fundamentally change how we interact with narrative video storytelling,” said Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures, in a statement. “When we heard Tom’s vision for short-form video that you not only watch but also must ‘solve‘, we knew that it had enormous potential.”
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