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Scalarr raises $7.5M to fight mobile ad fraud
Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.
The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.
At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut down Zenna completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.
The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).
Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.
She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.
“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and Jerry game, so they are ahead of you and we are trying to catch them.”
As for why machine learning works so much more effectively, she said, “Only ML could help you predict the next step, and with ML, you should be able to detect abnormalities that are not classified. Right after that, our analytics should be able to take a look at those abnormalities and decide whether something is statistically important.”
Scalarr’s Series A was led by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, with participation from TMT Investments, OTB Ventures and Speedinvest. Among other things, the company will use the money to expand its presence in Asia and continue developing the product.
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Beacons debuts a ‘link in bio’ mobile website builder that helps creators make money, not just list links
Today, there are a number of website builders aimed at creators who want to point fans to a dedicated landing page from their social media profile. If you’ve spent any time on TikTok or Instagram, you’ve likely come across one of these simplified “link in bio”-style websites — like those hosted by Linktree, for example. A new startup called Beacons is now entering this market with the goal of making “link in bio” websites even more powerful. Its website builder offers creators an expanded set of tools to monetize their community, including through donations, sales, paid requests, affiliate shopping and more.
After signing up for the service, Beacons walks the user through a series of questions, many which can be answered with just a “yes” or “no.” For example, Beacons may ask the user if they want to accept donations or collect followers’ emails, if they make TikTok or YouTube videos, and which category they’re in, in terms of the content they create.
This information is used to set up their Beacons landing page with the right content sections, which Beacons calls “blocks.” At launch, Beacons offers around a dozen of these configurable blocks, like email and SMS collection modules, video embed blocks for TikTok or YouTube creators, music blocks for embedding a track or album, a Twitter block to embed a tweet or Twitter profile, and link blocks, similar to Linktree, among others.
There’s even a “friends” block, which is like a modern-day Myspace Top 8. This lets you link out to your friends on either Beacons, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok.
An area where Beacons differentiates itself from other “link in bio” website builders, however, is with its set of “monetization” blocks. Today, it has four tools for creators who want to generate revenue from their online presence. One of these is similar to Cameo, as it allows the creator to set up a menu of options to take fan requests for personalized content. For instance, fans could ask a fitness influencer to critique their routine, or they could pay to have their burning questions answered by someone they admire. The creator can then send out a personalized response either publicly or privately.
Other monetization blocks allow creators to accept donations or sell digital downloads — like e-books or paid video content, for instance.
Image Credits: Beacons
The fourth, and perhaps most interesting, monetization block is a TikTok shopping feature. It allows creators to embed their TikTok videos where they recommend products directly on their Beacons website. From here, they can add affiliate links to the products in question, allowing them to directly generate revenue when fans purchase the items they’ve featured.
This particular feature comes at an opportune time. Today, TikTok is only beginning to formalize its plans around e-commerce. In a recent presentation to marketers, TikTok spoke of its plans to launch new online shopping tools that would allow brands to more directly reach TikTok’s younger audience. TikTok has also partnered with Shopify on social commerce, and has experimented with live video shopping, including with a holiday event hosted by Walmart.
But TikTok’s creators have already been driving shopping trends across categories like fashion, beauty, home décor, household items, toys and much more, to the point that “TikTok made me buy it,” has become a common excuse for the impulse purchases prompted by TikTok’s viral content. By allowing creators to now more directly and financially benefit from these trends is the next logical step.
Image Credits: Beacons
The idea for Beacons comes from co-founders Neal Jean, Jesse Zhang, Greg Luppescu and David Zeng. Neal, Jesse and David met while in the PhD program at Stanford studying different areas of research, like machine learning and AI. Greg, meanwhile, did his Master’s at Stanford, then went on to work at Apple on the Apple Watch team.
Neal, Jesse and David had teamed up on Beacons and went through the Y Combinator Summer 2019 batch, iterating on ideas and pivoting the product several times. Some of those early concepts may eventually return — like a Shopify integration that would connect creators with brands selling on Shopify, for example.
The broader focus, however, had always been on helping creators make money, says Neal.
“Even before our current product, we were really focused on trying to help creators solve monetization,” he explains. “When we kind of made this mini-pivot into the more Linktree-like product, we thought about building features that can help creators actually generate revenue — which I don’t think Linktree or any of the existing incumbents in the space were doing. Even today, you can’t actually make any money through Linktree,” he notes.
Linktree, of course, is only one of many “link in bio” websites on the market today, which means Beacons still faces a lot of competition. Other rivals include Linkin.bio, Lnk.bio, Shorby, Tap.bio, Feedlink.io, Link in Profile, Milkshake, Campsite, bio.fm, url.bio and biolincs.me, for example.
Unlike some of its competitors, Beacons offers its tools for free and instead monetizes through a premium plan ($10/mo) that allows creators to use their own custom domain. It also makes money by taking a percentage of sales on the requests and sales blocks, which is either 9% on the free plan or 5% on the paid plan. This rev share doesn’t bring in much money today — only “hundreds” of dollars — but the team believes that will scale as the startup grows and gains a large user base.
“Our strategy is…to continue building out more of these different kinds of revenue streams for creators,” says Neal. “And as we do that, I think, the fraction of transactional revenue will become higher relative to the subscription revenue than it is today.”
Since launching in private beta last September, Beacons has seen 90,000 sign-ups and now has over 20,000 people who are considered active users of the product — most arrived in the last couple of months when the service began to roll out some of its newer features. So far, Beacons hasn’t done any paid marketing, with around 77% of new users coming to Beacons because they saw it on someone else’s profile.
The team raised a small, post-YC angel round of around $600,000 but is looking to fundraise in the future.
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With its new Pulse app, App Annie offers a more digestible view of its data
Mobile analytics and market data company App Annie launched a new app today that CEO Ted Krantz said is built not for the analyst who’s “immersed in the data,” but rather the executive who needs “a much more elevated, top-down view.”
The biggest new piece of the company’s Pulse app is something called the App Annie Performance Score, which Krantz compares to a FICO score for mobile apps. The idea is to take an app’s user acquisition, engagement, monetization and sentiment and boil them down into a single score that benchmarks how the app is performing relative to the competition.
Krantz said that eventually, the performance store could become more customizable for each customer, so that “you can tailor it to the metrics that matter to you.” The app also highlights any shifts in key app metrics and identifies potential causes, and it includes a newsfeed showing what’s happening to the apps and markets that a user follows.
Image Credits: App Annie
The goal, Krantz added, is to provide executives with a quick overview of the data they need without requiring them to dig through it or wait for a report — especially as “mobile is becoming such an imperative.” It’s the team’s “aspiration” to create an app that executives check every day, though he’s not necessarily expecting that to happen initially.
The Pulse app is based on App Annie’s market-level data, so Krantz said it shouldn’t be affected by Apple’s upcoming privacy changes. At the same time, he acknowledged that the company’s broader goals of bringing together first-party and third-party data are starting too look “a little tricky.”
App Annie Pulse is currently available on iOS, with the company planning to launch an Android version in the second quarter of this year. And while the full features of Pulse are only available to paying App Annie customers, Krantz said there are also plans for “revamping the free side of the equation and make that a little more meaty.”
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Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed
The founders of Accord, an early-stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale firsthand.
In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.
Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.
The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord
Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan, to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B salespeople and buyers to interact.
As co-founder Ross Rich points out, these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.
“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.
Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.
With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make a more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at nine people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.
As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering, ‘Do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.
It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well-positioned to succeed.
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Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform
SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.
Nobl9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.
The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.
Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work with and appreciate Google’s site reliability engineering frameworks.
As they started looking into what to do next, that experience led them to look into productizing these ideas. “We came to this conclusion that if you’re going into Kubernetes, into service-based applications and modern architectures, there’s really no better way to run that than SRE,” Kurc told me. “And when we started looking at this, naturally SRE is a complete framework, there are processes. We started looking at elements of SRE and we agreed that SLO — service level objectives — is really the foundational part. You can’t do SRE without SLOs.”
As Singer noted, in order to adopt SLOs, businesses have to know how to turn the data they have about the reliability of their services, which could be measured in uptime or latency, for example, into the right objectives. That’s complicated by the fact that this data could live in a variety of databases and logs, but the real question is how to define the right SLOs for any given organization based on this data.
“When you go into the conversation with an organization about what their goals are with respect to reliability and how they start to think about understanding if there’s risks to that, they very quickly get bogged down in how are we going to get this data or that data and instrument this or instrument that,” Singer said. “What we’ve done is we’ve built a platform that essentially takes that as the problem that we’re solving. So no matter where the data lives and in what format it lives, we want to be able to reduce it to very simply an error budget and an objective that can be tracked and measured and reported on.”
The company’s platform launched into general availability last week, after a beta that started last year. Early customers include Brex and Adobe.
As Kurc told me, the team actually thinks of this new funding round as a Series A round, but because its $7.5 million Series A was pretty sizable, they decided to call it a Series A instead of a seed round. “It’s hard to define it. If you define it based on a revenue milestone, we’re pre-revenue, we just launched the GA product,” Singer told me. “But I think just in terms of the maturity of the product and the company, I would put us at the [Series] B.”
The team told me that it closed the round at the end of last November, and while it considered pitching new VCs, its existing investors were already interested in putting more money into the company and since its previous round had been oversubscribed, they decided to add to this new round some of the investors that didn’t make the cut for the Series A.
The company plans to use the new funding to advance its roadmap and expand its team, especially across sales, marketing and customer success.
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SecuriThings snares $14M Series A to keep edge devices under control
Managing IoT devices in a large organization can be a messy proposition, especially when many of them aren’t even managed directly by IT and often involve integrating with a number of third-party systems. SecuriThings wants to help with a platform of services to bring that all under control, and today the startup announced a $14 million Series A.
Aleph led the round with participation from existing investor Firstime VC and a number of unnamed angels. The company has raised a total of $17 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Roy Dagan, company CEO and co-founder, says that he sees organizations with many different connected devices running on a network, and it’s difficult to manage. “We enable organizations to manage IoT devices securely at scale in a consolidated and cost-efficient manner,” Dagan told me.
This could include devices like security cameras, along with access control systems and building management systems involving thousands — or in some instances, tens of thousands — of devices. “The technology we build, we integrate with management systems, and then we deploy our capabilities which are focused on the edge devices. So that’s how we also find the devices, and then we have these different capabilities running on the edge devices or fetching information from the edge devices,” Dagan explained.
Image Credits: SecuriThings
The company has formed partnerships with a number of key device manufacturers, including Microsoft, Convergint Technologies and Johnson Controls, among others. They work with a range of industries including airports, casinos and large corporate campuses.
Aaron Rosenson, general partner at lead investor Aleph, says the company is solving a big problem managing the myriad devices inside large organizations. “Until SecuriThings came along, there were these massive enterprise software categories of automation, orchestration and observability just waiting to be built for IoT,” Rosenson said in a statement. He says that SecuiThings is pulling that all together for its customers.
The company was founded in 2016 originally with the idea of being an IoT security company, and while they still are involved in securing these devices, their ability to communicate with them gives IT much greater visibility and insight and the ability to update and manage them.
Today, the company has 30 employees, and with the new investment it will be doubling that number by the end of the year. While Dagan didn’t cite specific customer numbers, he did say they have dozens of customers with deal sizes of between five and seven figures.
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Powder raises $14 million for its social app for game clips
Meet Powder, a French startup that helps you share video clips of your favorite games, follow people with the same interests and interact with them. The company has raised a $14 million Series A round led by Serena.
Powder wants to build the video infrastructure for social gaming. While many communities of gamers already share content on Twitch, Discord and Reddit, there isn’t a dominant mobile app focused on gaming.
You could call it an Instagram or Snapchat for gamers, but the startup has built specific tools that make it similar and yet different from those mainstream social platforms.
Powder can capture video content from any platform. You can record with your console and access your footage by connecting your account with Powder. You can capture videos on your PC using the company’s desktop app. You can also capture videos of mobile games.
The company tries to identify the most relevant events in your favorite game — it can be when you score a goal on Rocket League, when you are the last person standing in Fortnite, etc.
You can then trim your video, add filters, music and stickers and share a video with your followers. Other users can share reactions, add comments and send messages.
Image Credits: Powder
Overall, the company has raised $18 million and is pretty transparent about its funding story. In August 2018, the company raised a $400,000 pre-seed round with Kima Ventures and the co-founders of Zenly, Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo. In March 2019, General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Dream Machine, SV Angel, Brian Pokorny, Florian Kahn and Guillaume Luccisano invested $1.5 million.
Around May 2020, the company had to raise a $1.3 million seed extension with Alven Capital, Seraam Invest, Farmers, Maxime Demeure, Jean-Nicolas Vernin and some existing investors. Bpifrance and CNC also put some money in the company. And now, Serena is leading the $14 million Series A round with General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Alven Capital, Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund, Secocha Ventures, Turner Novak and Kevin Hartz also participating in today’s round.
As you can see, it’s been a long and winding road. That’s because Powder didn’t come up with its social app for gamers overnight. The company tried many different consumer apps. It would iterate on an idea for a few weeks and then kill the concept if it didn’t pan out. With Powder, the company seems to have found a great distribution mechanism to attract more downloads, leading to more users.
“The idea behind Powder started in December 2019. We had already worked on several projects and none of them really took off. We thought we would create a community first and then a product,” co-founder and CEO Stanislas Coppin told me. He previously co-founded Mindie, a music video app.
Powder started as a Discord server with tens of thousands of members. The team then developed an app that would appeal to that community, the “metaverse camera” as Coppin says. Overall, 1.5 million people have downloaded the iOS app since its launch.
There are three other co-founders: Barthélémy Kiss, Yannis Mangematin and Christian Navelot. There are 18 employees and the company just launched on Android.
Image Credits: Powder
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Podz turns podcasts into a personalized audio newsfeed
Podz is the latest startup trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery, with backing from investors like M13, Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
“Even though podcasts have gained a lot of momentum — there are 100 million folks in the U.S. who listen to podcasts — we still haven’t seen that crossover behavior, where audio becomes a part of everyday lives,” CEO Doug Imbruce argued. “We think that’s because the experience of discovering and consuming podcasts is ancient. It literally feels like browsing the web in 1997.”
Imbruce’s name may be familiar to longtime TechCrunch readers, as he was previously the chief executive at Qwiki, which won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 (Cloudflare was one of the runners up), then acquired by Yahoo a few years later.
By Imbruce’s own admission, Qwiki never quite lived up to his hopes for remaking online media consumption, but he said that its vision of “machine-created media” offered “a taste of the future” — a future that he’s hoping to help usher in with Podz.
The problem the startup aims to solve is pretty straightforward. Because podcasts often consist of 30 or 60 minutes or more of spoken-word audio, they’re difficult to browse, and when you discover new ones, it’s usually through word-of-mouth recommendations or clunky search tools.
While tools like Headliner make it easier for podcasters to promote their content with short clips on social media, Podz automates that creation process and makes those clips the centerpiece of the listening experience.
Image Credits: Podz
In the Podz mobile app, users browse what the startup calls “the first audio newsfeed,” consisting of 60-second podcast clips. These clips are designed to highlight the best moment from each podcast, making it easier to sample a much wider array of titles than the ones to which you currently subscribe. Each clip should stand on its own, but if you want to dive deeper, you can save the full episode for listening later.
These clips are created automatically, and Imbruce said “the beating heart of the Podz platform” is a machine learning model that “identifies the most engaging parts of podcasts.” The model was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio, in consultation with journalists and audio editors.
For example, here are the clips chosen from the three most recent episodes of the Original Content podcast — our reviews of “Soul,” “The White Tiger” and “Bridgerton.” Each clip seems reasonably self-contained, and although I was a little dismayed to discover that they all focused on me (rather than my more eloquent co-hosts), a Podz spokesperson explained that’s because the app focuses on “the highest density speakers.”
The Podz newsfeed is personalized to your interests (and, if you choose, it also can draw on the podcasts you follow in Apple Podcasts and the accounts you follow on Twitter). Imbruce said it should become smarter over time as it observes listener behavior.
He added that the team is hoping to introduce more creative and monetization tools for podcasters over time: “We are really hopeful that we can both increase amount of audio being created by 10x and increase the monetization of audio by 100x.”
In addition to Imbruce, the Podz founding team includes CTO Seye Ojumu, Head of Design Rasmus Zwickson and iOS lead Greg Page. The startup has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from M13, Canaan Partners, Charge Ventures and Humbition, as well as notable angel investors like Couric, Hilton (who’s launching her own podcast) and Mara Schiavocampo (The Trend Reporter).
“We are living in a golden age of audio, but only 1% of podcasts reach an audience of 5,000+,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told me via email. “Podz plans to grow the audience for existing audio but the real focus will be on growing new audio by leveraging their creator tools. Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz. Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”
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Sharify makes it super simple to rediscover your city’s social side
The pandemic has upended many aspects of urban life but perhaps the most visible upheaval is to citydwellers’ social lives, with curfews calling time on traditional night life across much of the Western world and social distancing putting a chilly spin on opportunities for getting together with people outside your usual circle. Who knew leaving the house was going to seem like such a mission?
Opportunities to escape the city entirely — such as by jetting off somewhere — remain severely limited or even impossible right now, depending on where you live. And for many urbanites COVID-19 may feel as if it’s turned the advantages of city living on its head, despite lockdowns generally not being as hard-line as they were at times last year and vaccines now (slowly) being rolled out.
Sharify is a startup that reckons it can help with the weird flatness of pandemic city living. It’s a real-time events app (iOS and Android) that wants to bring back a little of the serendipitous joy of urban living by making it easier to discovery things going on around you — maybe even just a few blocks away. To do this it’s combined real-time event listings with a map view (via the medium of emoji-style icons plus filters) to quickly and cheerfully surround you with stuff that’s happening in the vicinity.
Though the business idea predates COVID-19, Sharify isn’t blind to the changes wrought by the pandemic. And the app displays a star icon next to events that are deemed COVID-19 ‘safe’ — a subtle promotion meaning the organizer has measures in place to reduce the risk of contagion, such as controlling venue capacity, providing disinfectant hand gel and ensuring tables/seating are safety spaced. (Which may well be legal requirements for a venue to be open for business, of course.)
At the same time, the app lets users share their own meeting plan with other users — potentially encouraging a bunch of strangers to meet up to play some music or hang out in the park or whatnot — so its appropriateness for the pandemic moment in which we find ourselves does depend on how you use it.
It’s open to social swings or roundabouts, you could say. (And limits on when/how clubs and bars can open may well be pushing a socially oriented and app-savvy demographic toward alternative ways (and tools) to mingle with strangers.)
More broadly, Sharify invites users to rethink the concept of travel and trips — asking them to refocus their attention and energy on discovering entertaining things to do without having to go far or plan far ahead. Because, well, what else can anyone really do right now? Apart from stay at home ofc.
The app does have two ‘view’ modes: One for events geared towards locals and/or a dedicated ‘tourist’ view to cater to those wanting to do more typical sightseeing — though content for the latter is obviously thinner on the ground at the moment. (And, well, ‘tourism’ as a concept is starting to feel rather quaint and old-fashioned vs properly exploring your own backyard.)
Officially Sharify is launched in Barcelona, Madrid and New York City — but says it’s “expanding quickly” and touts being “present” in 25+ cities around the world (presumably with a lighter events cadence vs those three).
I tested the app in Barcelona and quickly found a bunch of local events that looked interesting — at least compared to another night of thumbing through the Netflix catalogue — from a Banksy art exhibition, to a stand up comedy show (in English!), lots of theatre, a bunch of markets, yoga classes and a skateboarding event all going on within, at most, a couple of miles and days from where I’ve been spending the vast majority of my time for, like, almost a whole entire year.
Just the act of seeing stuff still going on in a city which, frankly, hasn’t felt very familiar or open for much of anything for close to 12 months was a bit of an eye opener.
After so much time locked down indoors maybe we all need a bit of a nudge/visual reminder that life is still going on — and socializing is still possible (with appropriate safety measures and distancing) — beyond the front door and away from the Zoom screen (or any other screen tbh). Even if I’m not about to sign up for everything I spotted in the app. But feeling like I could is almost exciting enough.
As well as providing key details about each event (when, where, any website etc), Sharify lets you signal an intent to go that’s visible to other users by ‘joining’ an event. It also hosts per event chat where those who have joined are invited to “talk to people who join the plan” — which is another neat little nudge to get users excited about going to a local thing, maybe without their usual friend group in tow.
Sharify isn’t disclosing how many users it has but it says it has 100,000+ monthly event views (3K+ daily), and 5,000+ events every month. (On Google Play the app has had 10,000+ installs.)
Where users create their own plans to advertise to others it touts an impressively high “join” rate of 95%. (Albeit saying you’re going to something you found via an app isn’t the same as actually turning up.)
To encourage users to discover and attend others’ events, Sharify displays a smilie face on the map in locations where several people are up for ‘sharing plans’ — listing the number of people theoretically up for joining in stuff around there and nudging you to ‘create a plan in this area’ to tap into that potential guest pool.
It also lets you drill down to check out micro profiles of these (public) socially interested locals — displaying a first name, perhaps a photo and any ‘interests’ if they’ve chosen to select some from its curated lists of culture, hobbies, sports and social activities etc. (Happily there’s no option to message individual users via their profile so no fear of stupid in-app spam.)
Location-based and social sharing is not new, of course. Indeed, it’s an idea that’s been around the tech block so many times the sound of a ‘real-time events map’ probably triggers a fuzzy feeling of ‘haven’t I seen this before somewhere?’ The deja vu may be real but context is ever shifting, is the point. Or, to put it another way, here and now, in an open-ended pandemic, going about finding something to do probably looks and feels quite a bit different to how you did it, pre-March 2020.
Put simply: Best laid plans are toast. Friends who don’t live in the same city are likely reachable only on Zoom or by text. And at very least you’re dealing with hard limits on how far you can range for your entertainment in time and space.
Local and/or virtual is the new global, all of a sudden. So Sharify reckons its real-time events map is just the ticket/tonic in this curtailed context — by cheerfully surrounding you with nearby stuff to do. The 2017-founded startup says it’s been growing “despite” the pandemic.
“We’re stuck at home, and we saw all the Netflix series. Is there any plan near my home for this afternoon? Event agendas simply don’t work in this user case. That’s why we built a real-time map,” says co-founder and CEO Gemma Prenafeta. “And the problem we will face in some months from now: I’m not stuck at home anymore. Where do I find new events easily?”
“As Sharify is a collaborative platform, we let people share their own events for free, we scrape different event sources such as Google and Tiqets, and we highlight those businesses that want to promote themselves,” she adds, giving a succinct explainer on how the app populates the map view with stuff to do.
Social maps aren’t new, of course — and features like Snap Map, which was added to Snap’s social network via its acquisition of Zenly, certainly has a bit of overlap (while Sharify’s smiley octopus logo on a yellow background has more than a little of Snap’s ghost in look and feel), though Snap Map is more obviously focused on friends’ location and social sharing vs Sharify being about event discovery, first and foremost. (Friends may follow from this real-life socializing, is the suggestion.)
There are also event discovery network startups (like calendar-focused IRL). But, again, with such a glance-friendly map view, Sharify is paying closer attention to immediacy/hyper-local event discovery vs IRL — which pivoted to helping people surface virtual events as the pandemic shuttered lots of real world events last year and has since focused on building out its own social network.
“The ‘immediacy’ factor is key at Sharify, as you can see what’s happening, in real-time,” says Prenafeta. “We say going to a local event is a kind of ‘Local Trip’. Traveling before was about taking flights, now it’s about taking a Bird or a eCooltra to an event nearby.”
Whether mapping real-time events is a standalone business or a feature/tool that could just be added to a dominant platform/social network is perhaps a more pressing question for this fledgling startup. And it’s notable that tech (and mapping) giant Google added a ‘Community Feed’ to Maps late last year.
Facebook has also had an ‘Events Near Me‘ feature on its platform for years. Albeit, anything listed inside its walled garden has to contend with all the baggage Facebook brings with it. So an indie app with a fresh approach should have a chance to attract users who wouldn’t be caught dead on Facebook (even in a pandemic).
Sharify has certainly come up with a really effortless way to spark a sense of possibility — to feel like you can cut through the monotony of lockdown life — just by firing up a super simple overview of stuff going on around you.
It then layers on some more powerful tools that are designed to help you find others to do stuff with, which adds a subtle but maybe deeper hook in these socially distanced times.
“Life is still pretty locked down, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to know what’s open and what isn’t, close to our house,” suggests Prenafeta. And, well, it’s pretty hard to argue with that.
She’s looking beyond the pandemic too — back to more normalcy and anticipating helping local businesses announce their reopenings, once that’s possible. The team is “currently working on a seed investment round to prepare for the post-pandemic momentum”, she says.
So far the Barcelona-based startup has raised a pre-seed and an angel round led by IESE Group, per Prenafeta — with a total of €501,000 (~$600k) invested to date into what has turned out to be a contextually fresh twist on the old SoMoLo trend.
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Daily Crunch: Reddit raises $250M
Reddit raises more funding, Shopify expands payments to Facebook and a study suggests that the Apple Watch might be able to predict COVID diagnoses. This is your Daily Crunch for February 9, 2021.
The big story: Reddit raises $250M
This latest funding announcement comes after Reddit has returned to the headlines, with the WallStreetBets subreddit playing a crucial role in the spectacular rise and fall of GameStop shares (along with other stocks). The company also ran a five-second Super Bowl ad on Sunday, consisting of a single static image.
Reddit announced the round in a blog post that said the money comes from “existing and new investors” and will allow the company to “make strategic investments in Reddit including video, advertising, consumer products and expanding into international markets.”
The tech giants
Shopify expands its payment option, Shop Pay, to its merchants on Facebook and Instagram — This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform.
CD Projekt hit by ransomware attack, refuses to pay ransom — “We have already secured our IT infrastructure and begun restoring data,” the game company said.
Spotify confirms it’s (finally) testing a live lyrics feature in the US — Though the streaming music service today offers live lyrics in a number of markets, it has not done so in the U.S. for many years.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Swarm’s low-cost satellite data network is now available to commercial clients — One of the original startups that set out to create a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation to provide a data network here on Earth is now open for business.
Mighty Buildings nabs $40M Series B to 3D print your next house — The startup says it can 3D print a 350-square-foot studio apartment in just 24 hours.
Seed firm Eniac Ventures raises $125M for its fifth fund — The size of Eniac’s funds has grown dramatically over the past decade, from its $1.6 million first fund in 2010 to its $100 million fourth fund in 2017.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Decrypted: A hacker attempted to poison Florida town’s water supply — Oldsmar is a small town in Florida that became the center of the cyber world this week.
Are SAFEs obscuring today’s seed volume? — SAFEs are a quick and cheap method for raising capital.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Announcing the agenda for TC Sessions: Justice — Our second-ever dedicated event to diversity, equity, inclusion and labor in tech is coming up on March 3.
Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing — The investigation, dubbed the “Warrior Watch Study,” used a dedicated Apple Watch and iPhone app and included participants from Mount Sinai staff.
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