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Headroom, which uses AI to supercharge videoconferencing, raises $5M
Videoconferencing has become a cornerstone of how many of us work these days — so much so that one leading service, Zoom, has graduated into verb status because of how much it’s getting used.
But does that mean videoconferencing works as well as it should? Today, a new startup called Headroom is coming out of stealth, tapping into a battery of AI tools — computer vision, natural language processing and more — on the belief that the answer to that question is a clear — no bad Wi-Fi interruption here — “no.”
Headroom not only hosts videoconferences, but then provides transcripts, summaries with highlights, gesture recognition, optimised video quality and more, and today it’s announcing that it has raised a seed round of $5 million as it gears up to launch its freemium service into the world.
You can sign up to the waitlist to pilot it, and get other updates here.
The funding is coming from Anna Patterson of Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI venture fund); Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital (a specialist VC backing companies building visual technologies); Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, now of AME Cloud Ventures; Ash Patel of Morado Ventures; Anthony Goldbloom, the co-founder and CEO of Kaggle.com; and Serge Belongie, Cornell Tech associate dean and professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning.
It’s an interesting group of backers, but that might be because the founders themselves have a pretty illustrious background with years of experience using some of the most cutting-edge visual technologies to build other consumer and enterprise services.
Julian Green — a British transplant — was most recently at Google, where he ran the company’s computer vision products, including the Cloud Vision API that was launched under his watch. He came to Google by way of its acquisition of his previous startup Jetpac, which used deep learning and other AI tools to analyze photos to make travel recommendations. In a previous life, he was one of the co-founders of Houzz, another kind of platform that hinges on visual interactivity.
Russian-born Andrew Rabinovich, meanwhile, spent the last five years at Magic Leap, where he was the head of AI, and before that, the director of deep learning and the head of engineering. Before that, he too was at Google, as a software engineer specializing in computer vision and machine learning.
You might think that leaving their jobs to build an improved videoconferencing service was an opportunistic move, given the huge surge of use that the medium has had this year. Green, however, tells me that they came up with the idea and started building it at the end of 2019, when the term “COVID-19” didn’t even exist.
“But it certainly has made this a more interesting area,” he quipped, adding that it did make raising money significantly easier, too. (The round closed in July, he said.)
Given that Magic Leap had long been in limbo — AR and VR have proven to be incredibly tough to build businesses around, especially in the short to medium-term, even for a startup with hundreds of millions of dollars in VC backing — and could have probably used some more interesting ideas to pivot to; and that Google is Google, with everything tech having an endpoint in Mountain View, it’s also curious that the pair decided to strike out on their own to build Headroom rather than pitch building the tech at their respective previous employers.
Green said the reasons were two-fold. The first has to do with the efficiency of building something when you are small. “I enjoy moving at startup speed,” he said.
And the second has to do with the challenges of building things on legacy platforms versus fresh, from the ground up.
“Google can do anything it wants,” he replied when I asked why he didn’t think of bringing these ideas to the team working on Meet (or Hangouts if you’re a non-business user). “But to run real-time AI on video conferencing, you need to build for that from the start. We started with that assumption,” he said.
All the same, the reasons why Headroom are interesting are also likely going to be the ones that will pose big challenges for it. The new ubiquity (and our present lives working at home) might make us more open to using video calling, but for better or worse, we’re all also now pretty used to what we already use. And for many companies, they’ve now paid up as premium users to one service or another, so they may be reluctant to try out new and less-tested platforms.
But as we’ve seen in tech so many times, sometimes it pays to be a late mover, and the early movers are not always the winners.
The first iteration of Headroom will include features that will automatically take transcripts of the whole conversation, with the ability to use the video replay to edit the transcript if something has gone awry; offer a summary of the key points that are made during the call; and identify gestures to help shift the conversation.
And Green tells me that they are already also working on features that will be added into future iterations. When the videoconference uses supplementary presentation materials, those can also be processed by the engine for highlights and transcription too.
And another feature will optimize the pixels that you see for much better video quality, which should come in especially handy when you or the person/people you are talking to are on poor connections.
“You can understand where and what the pixels are in a video conference and send the right ones,” he explained. “Most of what you see of me and my background is not changing, so those don’t need to be sent all the time.”
All of this taps into some of the more interesting aspects of sophisticated computer vision and natural language algorithms. Creating a summary, for example, relies on technology that is able to suss out not just what you are saying, but what are the most important parts of what you or someone else is saying.
And if you’ve ever been on a videocall and found it hard to make it clear you’ve wanted to say something, without straight-out interrupting the speaker, you’ll understand why gestures might be very useful.
But they can also come in handy if a speaker wants to know if he or she is losing the attention of the audience: The same tech that Headroom is using to detect gestures for people keen to speak up can also be used to detect when they are getting bored or annoyed and pass that information on to the person doing the talking.
“It’s about helping with EQ,” he said, with what I’m sure was a little bit of his tongue in his cheek, but then again we were on a Google Meet, and I may have misread that.
And that brings us to why Headroom is tapping into an interesting opportunity. At their best, when they work, tools like these not only supercharge videoconferences, but they have the potential to solve some of the problems you may have come up against in face-to-face meetings, too. Building software that actually might be better than the “real thing” is one way of making sure that it can have staying power beyond the demands of our current circumstances (which hopefully won’t be permanent circumstances).
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Grid AI raises $18.6M Series A to help AI researchers and engineers bring their models to production
Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers work more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute.
Falcon co-founded the company with Luis Capelo, who was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier. Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to take PyTorch Lightning, which launched about a year ago, and turn that into the core of Grid’s service. The main idea behind Lightning is to decouple the data science from the engineering.
The time argues that a few years ago, when data scientists tried to get started with deep learning, they didn’t always have the right expertise and it was hard for them to get everything right.
“Now the industry has an unhealthy aversion to deep learning because of this,” Falcon noted. “Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor [have] the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.”
As Falcon noted, Grid is meant to help data scientists and other ML professionals “scale to match the workloads required for enterprise use cases.” Lightning itself can get them partially there, but Grid is meant to provide all of the services its users need to scale up their models to solve real-world problems.
What exactly that looks like isn’t quite clear yet, though. “Imagine you can find any GitHub repository out there. You get a local copy on your laptop and without making any code changes you spin up 400 GPUs on AWS — all from your laptop using either a web app or command-line-interface. That’s the Lightning “magic” applied to training and building models at scale,” Falcon said. “It is what we are already known for and has proven to be such a successful paradigm shift that all the other frameworks like Keras or TensorFlow, and companies have taken notice and have started to modify what they do to try to match what we do.”
The service is now in private beta.
With this new funding, Grid, which currently has 25 employees, plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Falcon tells me that he aims to build a diverse team, not in the least because he himself is an immigrant, born in Venezuela, and a U.S. military veteran.
“I have first-hand knowledge of the extent that unethical AI can have,” he said. “As a result, we have approached hiring our current 25 employees across many backgrounds and experiences. We might be the first AI company that is not all the same Silicon Valley prototype tech-bro.”
“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago,” Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon told me. “So intrigued in fact I remember rushing into a closet in Helsinki while at a conference to have the privacy needed to hear exactly what Will and Luis had built. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.”
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Lanturn, a Singaporean tech-enabled corporate services provider, raises $3 million seed round
Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures.
Spun out from Zave, a Singaporean management app (and another startup in East Ventures’ portfolio), two years ago, Lanturn now has almost 400 clients. It focuses on startups and SMEs, acting as a “one-stop online corporate services” solution, and uses its internal tech platform to differentiate from other corporate service providers.
Lanturn’s services include helping companies incorporate in Singapore and handling visa applications for new hires. It is led by chief executive officer Velisarios Kattoulas.
Kattoulas told TechCrunch that Lanturn’s seed funding will be used for hiring and to develop its technology.
In a statement about the investment, East Ventures managing partner and co-founder Batara Eto said, “We are pleased to support solutions that enable agility and adaptability among businesses, especially in the wake of the pandemic, and Lanturn provides that by leveraging technology to streamline corporate services and empower businesses to make more informed data-driven decisions.”
Other participants in the round included individual investors Alex Turnbull; RVP Equity managing partner Saki Georgiadis; Meiyen Tan, the head of Oon & Bazul’s restructuring and insolvency practice; White & Case Asia-Pacific partner Chris Kelly; and Next Billion Ventures venture partner Tiang Foo Lim.
Lanturn’s clients range in size from very early-stage startups with only one person, to small and mid-sized asset managers, SMEs and tech firms that have more than 100 employees spread across several countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic meant there was less demand for Lanturn’s services this year than the company had expected, but on the other hand, “the pandemic has highlighted to clients that because Lanturn has its own cloud-based corporate services platform, we can serve them as well today as we could before the pandemic,” Kattoulas said. “That’s helped us maintain momentum, and it’s one reason we’ll grow more this year than almost any cloud-based or traditional corporate services firm.”
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YC grad DigitalBrain snags $3.4M seed to streamline customer service tasks
Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with at those hackathons was DigitalBrain, a layer that sits on top of customer service software like Zendesk to streamline tasks and ease the job of customer service agents.
They ended up in Y Combinator in the Summer 2020 class, and today the company announced a $3.4 million seed investment. This total includes $3 million raised this round, which closed in August, and previously unannounced investments of $250,000 in March from Unshackled Ventures and $150,000 from Y Combinator in May.
The round was led by Moxxie Ventures, with help from Caffeinated Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, Weekend Fund, Underscore VC and Scribble Ventures, along with a slew of individual investors.
Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says that after he and his partner Dmitry Dolgopolov met at a hackathon in May 2019, they moved into a community house in San Francisco full of startup founders. They kept hearing from their housemates about the issues their companies faced with customer service as they began scaling. Like any good entrepreneur, they decided to build something to solve that problem.
“DigitalBrain is an external layer that sits on top of existing help desk software to actually help the support agents get through their tickets twice as fast, and we’re doing that by automating a lot of internal workflows, and giving them all the context and information they need to respond to each ticket, making the experience of responding to these tickets significantly faster,” Dinakaran told TechCrunch.
What this means in practice is that customer service reps work in DigitalBrain to process their tickets, and as they come upon a problem such as canceling an order or reporting a bug, instead of traversing several systems to fix it, they choose the appropriate action in DigitalBrain, enter the required information and the problem is resolved for them automatically. In the case of a bug, it would file a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it would take all of the actions and update all of the records required by this request.
As Dinakaran points out, they aren’t typical Silicon Valley startup founders. They are 20-year-old immigrants from India and Russia, respectively, who came to the U.S. with coding skills and a dream of building a company. “We are both outsiders to Silicon Valley. We didn’t go to college. We don’t come from families of means. We wanted to come here and build our initial network from the ground up,” he said.
Eventually they met some folks through their housemates, who suggested that they apply to Y Combinator. “As we started to meet people that we met through our community house here, some of them were YC founders and they kept saying I think you guys will love the YC community, not just in terms of your ethos, but also just purely from a perspective of meeting new people and where you are,” he said.
He said while he and his co-founder have trouble wrapping their arms around a number like the amount they have in the bank now, considering it wasn’t that long ago that they were struggling to meet expenses every month, they recognize this money buys them an opportunity to help start building a more substantial company.
“What we’re trying to do is really accelerate the development and building of what we’re doing. And we think if we push the gas pedal with the resources we’ve gotten, we’ll be able to accelerate bringing on the next couple of customers, and start onboarding some of the larger companies we’re interested in,” he said.
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Tone raises $4M to help e-commerce brands text with their customers
While many companies are using chatbots and other forms of automation to manage their communication with customers, Boston-based Tone is betting that humans will remain a key part of the equation.
“The traditional models of bots and humans is, ‘Hello, I’m a bot, now you get to battle with me to finally get to a human,’ ” said Tone CEO Tivan Amour. “Our version of that is, ‘I’m a human using AI to get you the answers you need more quickly.’ ”
Amour and his co-founders Vlad Pick and Kyle Weidman previously created a bicycle startup called Fortified Bicycle, and he said they “figured out that the best way to close our customers on these $750 to $1,000 orders was to actually engage them in text message conversations.”
After all, when it comes to “high consideration” purchases like bicycles, people usually want to discuss their questions and concerns with another human being. Over time, the Fortified team built what Amour said was a “semi-automated system” to help its sales team stay on top of these conversations.
“We started bragging to our friends about it, ‘You’ve gotta do this, it’s the future of mobile commerce,’ ” he recalled. “And they’d say, ‘Okay, that’s cool, but we don’t have any of the systems of doing that, we don’t have the salespeople.’ ”
Tone’s founders
So after selling Fortified Bicycle, Amour and Pick created Tone to help any e-commerce business manage similar text message conversations. Tone employs its own team of human agents to actually do the texting, assisted by software that helps them find the information they need.
It integrates with e-commerce systems like Shopify and Magento, and it’s already working with more than 1,000 brands like ThirdLove, Peak Design and Usual Wines — which are seeing as much as a 26% increase in revenue and a 15% increase in order size.
Amour also noted that specific Tone agents are assigned to specific brands, which means that customers will be talking to the same person whenever they have a question for that business. In some cases, customers have been talking to the same agent for months or years. (Update: Tone clarified that this isn’t a person, but a single persona that’s probably an amalgamation of multiple agents.)
“Particularly in a post-COVID world, it’s pretty clear that online shopping has become the dominant form of shopping, but I think nobody has thought about how you replace that human experience that you get in traditional retail,” he said.
Tone is announcing today that it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Bling Capital, with participation from Day One Ventures, One Way Ventures, TIA Ventures and executives from Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Uber.
With the new funding, Amour said Tone will be able to build out the “relationship automation” aspect of the product. He also suggested that the platform could eventually expand beyond text messaging, but it sounds like that’s not a big priority.
“In theory, we’re a conversational sales platform more than we are an SMS company,” he said. “However there are a bunch of trends right now [such as the growth of mobile commerce] that make SMS the most obvious place for this sort of innovation.”
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Tokyo-based virtual reality game developer Thirdverse gets $8.5 million Series A
Thirdverse, the virtual reality game developer behind “Swords of Gargantua,” has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by JAFCO, with participation from Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures and Incubate Fund, and will be used for hiring, co-founder Masaru Ohnogi told TechCrunch.
Based in Tokyo, Thirdverse was started four years ago as Yomuneco, but relaunched as Thirdverse in June to align with its corporate mission of creating a “Third Place inside the Metaverse,” where “each person has choices in his or her own hands and can live whatever life he or she wants to.” The company is currently focused on multiplayer virtual reality games, but its ultimate goal is to combine virtual reality with blockchain technology to create “VR worlds” where people can create online communities.
The concept has taken on a new relevancy, as COVID-19-related stay-at-home orders prompted organizations to bring online gatherings, including conferences, concerts and even their offices.
Users have also spent more time playing online games during the pandemic, with titles that have a social element, like “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” proving especially popular.
“Our sales and active users started increasing in late March as people started spending more time at home,” said Ohnogi. “And this increased engagement has remained consistent, even as some communities have lifted stay-at-home orders.”
Most of Thirdverse’s current users are located in America, and Ohnogi said many of them use Oculus Quest headsets. During Facebook’s href=”https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/16/facebook-is-officially-killing-off-the-oculus-rift-line/”> virtual reality conference last month (which itself was held virtually), the tech giant announced it would release its new Oculus Quest 2 in Japan this month. Ohnogi said this is a big opportunity for Thirdverse because many Japanese people will see the new headsets in retail stores. “As one of the earliest leading VR companies in Japan, we’ve already seen a huge number of traction. We are really excited about it.”
Thirdverse is currently preparing to release other virtual reality games, including “Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds,” a multi-player shooter game that will be available later this year for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive VR and Valve Index headsets.
In a statement, Sisu Ventures and Presence Capital founding partner Paul Bragiel said, “In the rapidly growing VR gaming landscape, Thirdverse stands out as having strong leadership, deep relationships and a big vision to become the category leader in this market.”
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Strike Graph raises $3.9M to help automate security audits
Compliance automation isn’t exactly the most exciting topic, but security audits are big business and companies that aim to get a SOC 2, ISO 207001 or FedRamp certification can often spend six figures to get through the process with the help of an auditing service. Seattle-based Strike Graph, which is launching today and announcing a $3.9 million seed funding round, wants to automate as much of this process as possible.
The company’s funding round was led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Amplify.LA, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and Green D Ventures.
Strike Graph co-founder and CEO Justin Beals tells me that the idea for the company came to him during his time as CTO at machine learning startup Koru (which had a bit of an odd exit last year). To get enterprise adoption for that service, the company had to get a SOC 2 security certification. “It was a real challenge, especially for a small company. In talking to my colleagues, I just recognized how much of a challenge it was across the board. And so when it was time for the next startup, I was just really curious,” he told me.
Image Credits: Strike Graph
Together with his co-founder Brian Bero, he incubated the idea at Madrona Venture Labs, where he spent some time as Entrepreneur in Residence after Koru.
Beals argues that today’s process tends to be slow, inefficient and expensive. The idea behind Strike Graph, unsurprisingly, is to remove as many of these inefficiencies as is currently possible. The company itself, it is worth noting, doesn’t provide the actual audit service. Businesses will still need to hire an auditing service for that. But Beals also argues that the bulk of what companies are paying for today is pre-audit preparation.
“We do all that preparation work and preparing you and then, after your first audit, you have to go and renew every year. So there’s an important maintenance of that information.”
Image Credits: Strike Graph
When customers come to Strike Graph, they fill out a risk assessment. The company takes that and can then provide them with controls for how to improve their security posture — both to pass the audit and to secure their data. Beals also noted that soon, Strike Graph will be able to help businesses automate the collection of evidence for the audit (say your encryption settings) and can pull that in regularly. Certifications like SOC 2, after all, require companies to have ongoing security practices in place and get re-audited every 12 months. Automated evidence collection will launch in early 2021, once the team has built out the first set of its integrations to collect that data.
That’s also where the company, which mostly targets mid-size businesses, plans to spend a lot of its new funding. In addition, the company plans to focus on its marketing efforts, mostly around content marketing and educating its potential customers.
“Every company, big or small, that sells a software solution must address a broad set of compliance requirements in regards to security and privacy. Obtaining the certifications can be a burdensome, opaque and expensive process. Strike Graph is applying intelligent technology to this problem — they help the company identify the appropriate risks, enable the audit to run smoothly and then automate the compliance and testing going forward,” said Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. “These audits were a necessary pain when I was a CFO, and Strike Graph’s elegant solution brings together teams across the company to move the business forward faster.”
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GrubMarket raises $60M as food delivery stays center stage
Companies that have leveraged technology to make the procurement and delivery of food more accessible to more people have been seeing a big surge of business this year, as millions of consumers are encouraged (or outright mandated, due to COVID-19) to socially distance or want to avoid the crowds of physical shopping and eating excursions.
Today, one of the companies that is supplying produce and other items both to consumers and other services that are in turn selling food and groceries to them, is announcing a new round of funding as it gears up to take its next step, an IPO.
GrubMarket, which provides a B2C platform for consumers to order produce and other food and home items for delivery, and a B2B service where it supplies grocery stores, meal-kit companies and other food tech startups with products that they resell, is today announcing that it has raised $60 million in a Series D round of funding.
Sources close to the company confirmed to TechCrunch that GrubMarket — which is profitable, and originally hadn’t planned to raise more than $20 million — has now doubled its valuation compared to its last round — sources tell us it is now between $400 million and $500 million.
The funding is coming from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Reimagined Ventures, Trinity Capital Investment, Celtic House Venture Partners, Marubeni Ventures, Sixty Degree Capital and Mojo Partners, alongside previous investors GGV Capital, WI Harper Group, Digital Garage, CentreGold Capital, Scrum Ventures and other unnamed participants. Past investors also included Y Combinator, where GrubMarket was part of the Winter 2015 cohort. For some context, GrubMarket last raised money in April 2019 — $28 million at a $228 million valuation, a source says.
Mike Xu, the founder and CEO, said that the plan remains for the company to go public (he’s talked about it before), but given that it’s not having trouble raising from private markets and is currently growing at 100% over last year, and the IPO market is less certain at the moment, he declined to put an exact timeline on when this might actually happen, although he was clear that this is where his focus is in the near future.
“The only success criteria of my startup career is whether GrubMarket can eventually make $100 billion of annual sales,” he said to me over both email and in a phone conversation. “To achieve this goal, I am willing to stay heads-down and hardworking every day until it is done, and it does not matter whether it will take me 15 years or 50 years.”
I don’t doubt that he means it. I’ll note that we had this call in the middle of the night his time in California, even after I asked multiple times if there wasn’t a more reasonable hour in the daytime for him to talk. (He insisted that he got his best work done at 4:30 a.m., a result of how a lot of the grocery business works.) Xu on the one hand is very gentle with a calm demeanor, but don’t let his quiet manner fool you. He also is focused and relentless in his work ethic.
When people talk today about buying food, alongside traditional grocery stores and other physical food markets, they increasingly talk about grocery delivery companies, restaurant delivery platforms, meal kit services and more that make or provide food to people by way of apps. GrubMarket has built itself as a profitable but quiet giant that underpins the fuel that helps companies in all of these categories by becoming one of the critical companies building bridges between food producers and those that interact with customers.
Its opportunity comes in the form of disruption and a gap in the market. Food production is not unlike shipping and other older, non-tech industries, with a lot of transactions couched in legacy processes: GrubMarket has built software that connects the different segments of the food supply chain in a faster and more efficient way, and then provides the logistics to help it run.
To be sure, it’s an area that would have evolved regardless of the world health situation, but the rise and growth of the coronavirus has definitely “helped” GrubMarket not just by creating more demand for delivered food, but by providing a way for those in the food supply chain to interact with less contact and more tech-fueled efficiency.
Sales of WholesaleWare, as the platform is called, Xu said, have seen more than 800% growth over the last year, now managing “several hundreds of millions of dollars of food wholesale activities” annually.
Underpinning its tech is the sheer size of the operation: economies of scale in action. The company is active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Texas, Michigan, Boston and New York (and many places in between) and says that it currently operates some 21 warehouses nationwide. Xu describes GrubMarket as a “major food provider” in the Bay Area and the rest of California, with (as one example) more than 5 million pounds of frozen meat in its east San Francisco Bay warehouse.
Its customers include more than 500 grocery stores, 8,000 restaurants and 2,000 corporate offices, with familiar names like Whole Foods, Kroger, Albertson, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, Raley’s Market, 99 Ranch Market, Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Fresh Direct, Imperfect Foods, Misfit Market, Sun Basket and GoodEggs all on the list, with GrubMarket supplying them items that they resell directly, or use in creating their own products (like meal kits).
While much of GrubMarket’s growth has been — like a lot of its produce — organic, its profitability has helped it also grow inorganically. It has made some 15 acquisitions in the last two years, including Boston Organics and EJ Food Distributor this year.
It’s not to say that GrubMarket has not had growing pains. The company, Xu said, was like many others in the food delivery business — “overwhelmed” at the start of the pandemic in March and April of this year. “We had to limit our daily delivery volume in some regions, and put new customers on waiting lists.” Even so, the B2C business grew between 300% and 500% depending on the market. Xu said things calmed down by May and even as some B2B customers never came back after cities were locked down, as a category, B2B has largely recovered, he said.
Interestingly, the startup itself has taken a very proactive approach in order to limit its own workers’ and customers’ exposure to COVID-19, doing as much testing as it could — tests have been, as we all know, in very short supply — as well as a lot of social distancing and cleaning operations.
“There have been no mandates about masks, but we supplied them extensively,” he said.
So far it seems to have worked. Xu said the company has only found “a couple of employees” that were positive this year. In one case in April, a case was found not through a test (which it didn’t have, this happened in Michigan) but through a routine check and finding an employee showing symptoms, and its response was swift: the facilities were locked down for two weeks and sanitized, despite this happening in one of the busiest months in the history of the company (and the food supply sector overall).
That’s notable leadership at a time when it feels like a lot of leaders have failed us, which only helps to bolster the company’s strong growth.
“Having a proven track record of sustained hypergrowth and net income profitability, GrubMarket stands out as an extraordinarily rare Silicon Valley startup in the food technology and ecommerce segment,” said Jay Chen, managing partner of Celtic House Venture Partner. “Scaling over 15x in 4 years, GrubMarket’s creativity and capital efficiency is unmatched by anyone else in this space. Mike’s team has done an incredible job growing the company thoughtfully and sustainably. We are proud to be a partner in the company’s rapid nationwide expansion and excited by the strong momentum of WholesaleWare, their SaaS suite, which is the best we have seen in space.”
Updated with more detail on the valuation.
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Writer pens a $5M seed round for its AI style guide that flags bias and tone
Anyone who writes online or in a word processor has likely gotten used to the inevitable squiggly line denoting a misspelled word or clumsy phrase. But what if you use a word that’s loaded, a phrase that’s too formal or not formal enough, or refer to a group of people in an outdated way? Writer is a service that watches as you type, flagging language that doesn’t match up with your style guide and values, and it just raised $5 million to scale up.
Both people and the companies they work for want to improve the way they write, but not just in terms of grammar and spelling. If a company says it’s inclusive, but the language in its press releases or internal blogs are peppered with anachronisms and bias, it suggests their concern only goes so far.
“Companies are hungry to put actions behind their words,” said Writer founder and CEO May Habib. “They want to be able to tell a consistent story to their users everywhere that they’re interacting with them. What Writer does is let people know when they’re using insensitive language, or things that could be considered negative, and let companies set brand guidelines.”
Right off the bat let us admit that there is a whiff of the sinister about the idea of a company dictating how its employees speak, though that’s nothing new when it comes to content and official communications. But this isn’t about controlling speech for power — it’s about recognizing that we are all flawed communicators and could use a hand keeping ourselves honest. Less thought police and more a well-informed angel sitting on your shoulder whispering things like, “Hey. Are you sure you want to describe that lawyer as ‘exotic’?”
Examples of things Writer checks for. Image Credits: Writer
There are tons of slip-ups we all make along those lines; less obvious, but no less potentially offensive. It’s important in public communications, among other things, to refer to a group by the term they prefer, not the first one that pops into your head; Writer has up-to-date libraries of this information sourced from the communities themselves. Some phrases may have become politically loaded in the last couple of years, but you’re not aware; no problem, it has alternatives. You want to avoid unnecessarily gendered language, great, but everyone slips up now and then; Writer can spot it — or make the connection with previous pronouns to make sure you don’t, for example, gender an anonymous source.
Accusations of “political correctness” will dog the service, but as Habib put it: “This is beyond politics; this is about respect for people who live a certain way, or are a certain way, and prefer to use certain terms. We’re trying to help companies create communities of belonging.” And as we’ve seen over and over again in tech, there is often a serious disconnect between the stated aspiration of a company and how people are treated within them. Just using the right words is a pretty low bar to start with, honestly.
Image Credits: Writer
Writer isn’t just a growing blacklist of words you should think twice about using, though. The natural language processing engine at the heart of it is also very concerned with things like sentence complexity, paragraph length and tone. It has to have this deeper understanding, Habib explained, because “it’s not enough to underline — you need to know what to replace it with, and when you replace it, you need to fit it into the sentence. These are actually hard NLP problems.”
That lets it fit into a variety of roles in addition to promoting inclusive language. It can watch for the usual spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as things like formality, active voice, “liveliness” (whatever that is, I don’t have it) and other metrics that help define a brand.
And of course you can bring in your own style guide so your editors don’t have to roll their eyes at serial commas in headlines, double dashes instead of em dashes, e-mail instead of email and all the rest of the little nips and tucks that keep a brand’s writing in a generally recognizable shape.
Image Credits: Writer
The service can also switch between style guides or adjust or disable itself in different apps and sites — so internal emails aren’t given the same guidelines as press releases, or a blog post’s style can be differentiated from a newsletter’s.
Obviously Grammarly is a big competitor here, but Habib feels that it and the growing number of in-browser or in-app checking services are very focused on the technical piece. Writer is less about preventing an individual writer’s errors, and more about creating consistency among groups of writers and making sure they are working from the same high-level linguistic standards.
Of course security is also a concern — no one wants a keylogger running on their machine, however helpful it may be. Habib was careful to emphasize that Writer runs locally in the browser as a plug-in, integrating with Word or Chrome for now but with other apps and services on the way. “None of that data ever hits a writer server, and no metadata — all the processing is done in the text area,” she said. The only data that’s sent back is the fact that a given suggestion was used, such as changing “should of” to “should have” or “illegal aliens” to “undocumented immigrants.” No user data is used to train the models and no content apart from the correction itself is sent or stored on Writer’s servers.
Writer is available now, for $11/person/month (with the obligatory free trial period, of course) for a basic version and some unspecified amount for enterprise deals with multiple style guides, plagiarism detection, and so on. It’s only available in English, and although there is of course demand for the service in other languages, the depth of the NLP model and the specificity of what it recognizes to the language mean it does not generalize well. To take on Spanish or Korean would be to develop an entirely new product. So English it is for now.
The company is new, and has been developing its NLP engine (on the back of a previous effort, which monitored user-facing language in GitHub repos) for 18 months in something like stealth. The $5 million seed round, led by Upfront Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Broadway Angels should help the company scale, though it already has some top-tier, household-name customers, so with that and the money, its immediate future seems to be secure.
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With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream
Long before the coronavirus, Sora, a startup run by a team of Atlanta entrepreneurs, was toying with the idea of live, virtual high school. The program would focus on student autonomy and organize its curriculum around projects that learners wanted to work on, such as finding ways to reduce the impact of climate change on the world. Students and teachers would use Zoom and Slack to communicate with each other, with standups everyday to pulse-check progress.
The pandemic has both undermined and underscored Sora’s focus. On one end, the millions of students that flocked home have shown how hard it is to effectively and accessibly teach in virtual settings. On the other end, the pandemic isn’t going away any time soon. Parents and students are desperate for better options.
Sora co-founder Garrett Smiley thinks he can convince parents to approach virtual high school with optimism, their kids and their checkbooks. It all starts with green algae farms.
Smiley said students turn to Sora so they can “start running instead of walking” in their education. He added how the first students in the program spent time building algae farms in their backyards, working with SpaceX engineers and taking college-level math classes upon entrance.
Smiley, who co-founded the company with Indra Sofian and Wesley Samples, says that Sora sells best to students who feel stifled or “held back” from traditional educational institutions. Sora’s product, thus, feels more apt for educationally gifted students than students who might need extra help or support.
At Sora’s heart, it is a private school replacement with a project-based curriculum. How it works beyond that is a little bit more confusing to comprehend. Firstly, students upon enrollment embark on two-week learning expeditions, exploring the answers to broad questions like “how do we recreate an alien species.” As time progresses, students are prompted to create their own projects with check-in calls twice a day. Below is an example of a standup:
Beyond the self-directed study, Sora offers a series of Socratic seminars and workshops.
There’s no such thing as science class, but there are workshops such as “the Physics of Sharks.” Here’s an example schedule of a Sora student:
Image Credits: Sora
The organization is unconventional. Smiley is insistent on the fact that students complete core subjects and standards needed for high school transcript and graduation, including math, science, English and history. Students are also required to take the SAT or ACT, with practice resources provided by the school.
Sora also has an in-person, optional element. Cohorts will be designed by geography. Students are encouraged to meet up with each other outside of school, form sports teams and attend a Sora-sponsored meet-up.
Outside of learning, Sora created a network of more than 50 career mentors and has a suite of services, such as SAT prep and counselors to aid with the college admissions process.
Smiley says that Sora hasn’t yet graduated a class, so they do not have data on most common exit paths, but he added that the company does not promote college as the only option for students.
Sora is working on partnering with the “next generation of college and university replacements,” he says, such as boot camps or internships.
The goal of Sora is to create a community of self-directed and motivated learners.
“We don’t believe schools are in the business of content creation anymore, just typing in Google search engine search specifically you’ll probably find world-class resources to learn a subject,” Smiley said. “So for us, as to be a super successful school, we knew our role was creating this super high-quality community.”
The company had seven students in its inaugural class last year. Now, more than 39 students participate in Sora School, with three-full time faculty. Monthly tuition ranges from $300 to $800 per student.
Tuition is charged in relation to parent income by using a sliding scale, which Smiley says is part of their strategy in making sure Sora is an inclusive and diverse school.
The diversity breakdown of Sora is 67% white, 15% Hispanic, 13% African American and 5% Asian/Middle Eastern. The gender split male to female is 54% and 44%, respectively, with 2% of students identifying as non-binary.
From a mental diversity perspective, Sora lacks key resources needed to support students with special needs. Virtual high school as a product isn’t built for adoption en masse, but instead works best for students who can afford to partake in self-directed and independent learning. Similar to pandemic pods, it could exacerbate the widening inequalities between wealthy and low-income students.
Smiley says that they “definitely thought about” accessibility and are working on it. Still, he says that Sora is created for “students who perhaps don’t need the extreme structure of an in-person school,” which he estimates to be 95% of the world’s learners.
As Sora scales, a key aspect of its success will be if it is able to balance its hands-on, hands-off approach. The startup announced this week that it has raised a $2.7 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, to bring on more faculty, software engineers for back-end support and managers to work on curriculum development. Other participating investors in the round include Village Global, ReThink Education, Firebolt Ventures, Peak State Ventures, Contrary Capital and angel investor Taylor Greene.
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