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TC Sessions: Space 2020 launches next week
TC Sessions: Space 2020, our first conference dedicated to galactic endeavors, launches in just one week (December 16-17). We can’t wait to host out-of-this-world experts, innovative agencies and the bold, boundary-breaking startups focused on building a future in space.
If you have not yet secured your seat on the space-race express, do so now while late-registration prices remain in play — prices go up December 15. You’ll also find discounts for groups, students and active military/government employees.
Ready to place your early-stage startup in orbit with industry movers and shakers — and pitch your startup to attendees during the event? Buy a Space Startup Exhibitor Pass. We even offer a super budget-friendly, expo-only pass for $25 (Note: This does not include networking, access to the main-stage programming or the free Extra Crunch membership).
Pro Tip: Not all virtual conferences are created equal. Michael McCarthy, the CEO of Repositax, found unexpected benefits:
The online experience was far more efficient than I anticipated, and the video on demand was a huge benefit. I could attend without disrupting my customer work by moving between the main stage and breakout presentations knowing I could catch anything I missed later.
The two-day event agenda practically vibrates with opportunity. Let’s look at just a few of the many sessions waiting for you:
- Fast Money Breakout Sessions: Learn about the different accelerators, incubators and grant programs available to help you fund and grow your startup. You’ll find six of these breakout sessions spanning the two days. Check the agenda for exact days and times and plan your schedule accordingly. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to find money, um, fast.
- Founders in Focus Series: TechCrunch editors will sit down and talk with four different founders poised to be the next big disruptors in the space industry. Don’t miss this four-part series with Araz Feyzi, co-founder of Kayhan Space; Will Edwards, CEO of Firehawk Aerospace; Pawan Chandana, co-founder of Skyroot; and Yotam Ariel, co-founder of Bluefield Technologies.
- Pitch Feedback Session: Join us for a pitch feedback session open to all startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2020 and moderated by TechCrunch staff.
This may be our first foray into space technology, but we’ve hosted many TC Sessions. Here’s what Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking, told us about her experience:
TC Sessions isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.
TC Sessions: Space 2020 runs from December 16-17. You have just one week left to buy your pass, join your global community of bold boundary breakers and move your space-based business forward.
Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.
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MTG acquires mobile racing game studio Hutch Games for up to $375 million
Sweden’s MTG is making a significant acquisition in the mobile gaming industry. The company is acquiring Hutch Games, the London-based game studio behind popular mobile racing games such as Rebel Racing, F1 Manager and Top Drives.
The acquisition is an important one for MTG as the company is spending $275 million right away and setting aside another $100 million for performance-based payments.
If you’re not familiar with MTG, you probably know its portfolio companies. Over the past few years, MTG has acquired ESL and DreamHack to become an esports leader.
MTG has also acquired InnoGames and Kongregate for their popular web-based and mobile games. And it sounds like MTG isn’t done just yet, as the company plans to acquire more companies in the near future.
MTG explains why the acquisition makes sense in its announcement. Hutch Games isn’t focused on a single game. It has built a portfolio of successful games, which is always a good sign for future growth.
The game studio has also licensed some well-known brands, such as F1. And MTG believes that F1 Manager, Top Drives and Rebel Racing still have a lot of growth potential. Free-to-play mobile games have become games-as-a-service, so you want to keep them popular over the long run.
When it comes to long-term potential, Hutch Games also has more games in the pipeline for 2021 and 2022. Finally, it’s a cost-effective studio, as most employees are developers.
During the first nine months of 2020, Hutch Games generated $56.3 million in revenue and $13.3 million in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). Hutch Games investors included Backed VC, Index Ventures, Initial Capital and angel investor Chris Lee.
As you can see, free-to-play games can be lucrative. That’s why there will be some consolidation in the future. Some companies will use their deep pockets or take advantage of debt to build out big portfolios and the real estate of your home screen, one game at a time.
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Arthur.ai snags $15M Series A to grow machine learning monitoring tool
At a time when more companies are building machine learning models, Arthur.ai wants to help by ensuring the model accuracy doesn’t begin slipping over time, thereby losing its ability to precisely measure what it was supposed to. As demand for this type of tool has increased this year, in spite of the pandemic, the startup announced a $15 million Series A today.
The investment was led by Index Ventures with help from newcomers Acrew and Plexo Capital, along with previous investors Homebrew, AME Ventures and Work-Bench. The round comes almost exactly a year after its $3.3 million seed round.
As CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel explains, data scientists build and test machine learning models in the lab under ideal conditions, but as these models are put into production, the performance can begin to deteriorate under real-world scrutiny. Arthur.ai is designed to root out when that happens.
Even as COVID has wreaked havoc throughout much of this year, the company has grown revenue 300% in the last six months smack dab in the middle of all that. “Over the course of 2020, we have begun to open up more and talk to [more] customers. And so we are starting to get some really nice initial customer traction, both in traditional enterprises as well as digital tech companies,” Wenchel told me. With 15 customers, the company is finding that the solution is resonating with companies.
It’s interesting to note that AWS announced a similar tool yesterday at re:Invent called SageMaker Clarify, but Wenchel sees this as more of a validation of what his startup has been trying to do, rather than an existential threat. “I think it helps create awareness, and because this is our 100% focus, our tools go well beyond what the major cloud providers provide,” he said.
Investor Mike Volpi from Index certainly sees the value proposition of this company. “One of the most critical aspects of the AI stack is in the area of performance monitoring and risk mitigation. Simply put, is the AI system behaving like it’s supposed to?” he wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.
When we spoke a year ago, the company had eight employees. Today it has 17 and it expects to double again by the end of next year. Wenchel says that as a company whose product looks for different types of bias, it’s especially important to have a diverse workforce. He says that starts with having a diverse investment team and board makeup, which he has been able to achieve, and goes from there.
“We’ve sponsored and work with groups that focus on both general sort of coding for different underrepresented groups as well as specifically AI, and that’s something that we’ll continue to do. And actually I think when we can get together for in-person events again, we will really go out there and support great organizations like AI for All and Black Girls Code,” he said. He believes that by working with these groups, it will give the startup a pipeline to underrepresented groups, which they can draw upon for hiring as the needs arise.
Wenchel says that when he can go back to the office, he wants to bring employees back, at least for part of the week for certain kinds of work that will benefit from being in the same space.
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HealNow raises $1.3 million to bring online payments to pharmacies
As the health tech landscape rapidly evolves, another startup is making its presence known. HealNow has closed a $1.3 million round of funding from SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Alabama Futures Fund.
The company was founded by Halston Prox and Joshua Smith. Prox has worked in healthcare for more than a decade with major organizations such as Providence Health, Mount Sinai and Baylor Scott & White, mostly focused on digitizing health records and designing and implementing software for doctors, nurses, etc. Smith, CTO at the company, has been a developer since 2012.
The duo founded HealNow to become the central nervous system for order and delivery of prescriptions, according to Prox. Your average payments processing system isn’t necessarily applicable to pharmacies large and small because of the complexities of health insurance and the regulatory landscape.
Not only is it costly to facilitate online payments for pharmacies, but they also have their own pharmacy management systems and workflows that can be easily disrupted by moving to a new payments system.
HealNow has built a system that’s specifically tailored to pharmacies of any shape or size, from grocery stores to mom and pop pharmacies and everything in between. It’s a white label solution, meaning that any pharmacy can put their brand language on the product.
“We’re embedded in their current workflows and pharmacies don’t have to do anything manual, even if they’re using a pharmacy management system,” said Prox.
When a user looks to get a prescription from their pharmacy, they are sent a link that allows them to securely answer any questions that may be necessary for the pickup, enter insurance info, make a payment and schedule a curbside pickup or a delivery. The tech also integrates with third-party delivery services for pharmacies that offer deliveries.
This technology has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving smaller pharmacies the chance to compete with bigger chains who have digital solutions already set up that allow for curbside pick up. This is especially true now that Amazon has gotten into the space with the launch of Amazon Pharmacy.
HealNow is a SaaS company, charging a monthly subscription fee for use of the platform, as well as a service fee for prescriptions purchased on the platform. However, that service fee is a flat rate that never changes based on the cost of the prescription.
The space is crowded and growing more crowded, with competitors like NimbleRX and Capsule offering their own spin on simplifying and digitizing the pharmacy. One big difference for HealNow, says Prox, is that the startup has no intention of ever being a pharmacy, but rather serving pharmacies in a way that doesn’t disrupt their current workflow or system.
“We’re not a pharmacy, and we want to enable all these pharmacies to be online,” said Prox. “To do that we have to do that in an unbiased way by focusing on being a complete tech company.”
The funding is going primarily toward building out the sales and marketing arms of the company to continue fueling growth. HealNow has a foothold in the West, Southwest and Middle America, and is opening an office in Birmingham to sprint across the East Coast. Prox says the company is processing thousands of orders a day and tens of thousands of orders each month.
HealNow launched in 2018 after graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator .
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WorkRamp raises $17M to ramp up its enterprise learning platform
Remote learning and training have become a large priority this year for organizations looking to keep employees engaged and up to date on work practices at a time when many of them are not working in an office — and, in the case of those who have joined in 2020, may have never met any of their work colleagues in person, ever. Today one of the startups that’s built a new, more user-friendly approach to creating and provisioning those learning materials is announcing some funding as it experiences a boost in its growth.
WorkRamp, which has built a platform that helps organizations build their own training materials, and then distribute them both to their workforce and to partners, has raised $17 million, a Series B round of funding that’s being led by OMERS Ventures, with Bow Capital also participating.
Its big pitch is that it has built the tools to make it easy for companies to build their own training and learning materials, incorporating tests, videos, slide shows and more, and by making it easier for companies to build these themselves, the materials themselves become more engaging and less stiff.
“We’re disrupting the legacy LMS [learning management system] providers, the Cornerstones of the world, with our bite-size training platform,” said CEO and founder Ted Blosser in an interview. “We want to do what Peloton did for the exercise market, but with corporate training. We are aiming for a consumer-grade experience.”
The company, originally incubated in Y Combinator, has now raised $27 million.
The funding comes on the back of strong growth for WorkRamp . Blosser said that it now has around 250 customers, with 1 million courses collectively created on its platform. That list includes fast-growing tech companies like Zoom, Box, Reddit and Intercom, as well as Disney, GlobalData and PayPal. As it continues to expand, it will be interesting to see how and if it can also snag more legacy, late adopters who are not as focused on tech in their own DNA.
WorkRamp estimates that there is some $20 billion spent annually by organizations on corporate training. Unsurprisingly, that has meant the proliferation of a number of companies building tools to address that market.
Just Google WorkRamp and you’re likely to encounter a number of its competitors who have bought its name as a keyword to snag a little more attention. There are both big and small players in the space, including Leapsome, Capterra, Lessonly, LearnUpon (which itself recently raised a big round), SuccessFactors and TalentLMS.
The interesting thing about what WorkRamp has built is that it plays on the idea of the “creator,” which really has been a huge development in our digital world. YouTube may have kicked things off with the concept of “user-generated content.” but today we have TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and so many more platforms — not to mention smartphones themselves, with their easy facilities to shoot videos and photos of others, or of yourself, and then share with others — which have made the idea of building your own work, and looking at that of others, extremely accessible.
That has effectively laid the groundwork for a new way of conceiving of even more prosaic things, like corporate training. (Can there really be anything more comedically prosaic than that?) Other startups like Kahoot have also played on this idea, by making it easy for enterprises to build their own games to help train their staff.
This is what WorkRamp has aimed to tap into with its own take on the learning market, to help its customers eschew the idea of hiring outside production companies to make training materials, or expect WorkRamp to build those materials for them: Instead, the people who are going to use the training now have the control.
“I think it’s critical to be able to build your own customer education,” Blosser said. “That’s a big trend for clients that want both to rapidly onboard people but also reduce costs.”
The company’s platform includes user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality, which also lets people build slide shows, flip cards and questions that viewers can answer. The plan is to bring on more “Accenture” style consultants, Blosser said, for bigger customers who may not be as tech savvy to help them take better advantage of the tools. It also integrates with third-party packages like Salesforce.com, Workday and Zoom both to build out training as well as distribute it.
“Since 2000, we have seen three major technology shifts in the enterprise: the transition from on-premise to SaaS, the growth of mobile, and the most recent – sweeping digital transformation across almost every part of every business,” said Eugene Lee of OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “The pandemic has forced adoption of a digital-first approach towards customers and employees across virtually all industries. WorkRamp’s platform is foundational to empowering both of these important audiences today and in the future. We are bullish on the massive opportunity in front of the company and are excited to get involved.” Lee is joining the board with this round.
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Firebolt raises $37M to take on Snowflake, Amazon and Google with a new approach to data warehousing
For many organizations, the shift to cloud computing has played out more realistically as a shift to hybrid architectures, where a company’s data is just as likely to reside in one of a number of clouds as it might in an on-premise deployment, in a data warehouse or in a data lake. Today, a startup that has built a more comprehensive way to assess, analyse and use that data is announcing funding as it looks to take on Snowflake, Amazon, Google and others in the area of enterprise data analytics.
Firebolt, which has redesigned the concept of a data warehouse to work more efficiently and at a lower cost, is today announcing that it has raised $37 million from Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures. It plans to use the funding to continue developing its product and bring on more customers.
The company is officially “launching” today but — as is the case with so many enterprise startups these days operating in stealth — it has been around for two years already building its platform and signing commercial deals. It now has some 12 large enterprise customers and is “really busy” with new business, said CEO Eldad Farkash in an interview.
The funding may sound like a large amount for a company that has not really been out in the open, but part of the reason is because of the track record of the founders. Farkash was one of the founders of Sisense, the successful business intelligence startup, and he has co-founded Firebolt with two others who were on Sisense’s founding team, Saar Bitner as COO and Ariel Yaroshevich as CTO.
At Sisense, these three were coming up against an issue: When you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power its analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity.
Farkash is something of a technical savant and said that he decided to move on and build Firebolt to see if he could tackle this, which he described as a new, difficult and “meaningful” problem. “The only thing I know how to do is build startups,” he joked.
In his opinion, while data warehousing has been a big breakthrough in how to handle the mass of data that companies now amass and want to use better, it has started to feel like a dated solution.
“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’ ” he said, citing Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue. “We see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”
The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses. It’s a SQL-based system that works on principles that Farkash said came out of academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity.
This is not just a problem at Sisense. With enterprise data continuing to grow exponentially, cloud analytics is growing with it, and is estimated by 2025 to be a $65 billion market, Firebolt estimates.
Still, Farkash said the Firebolt concept was initially a challenging sell even to the engineers that it eventually hired to build out the business: It required building completely new warehouses from the ground up to run the platform, five of which exist today and will be augmented with more, on the back of this funding, he said.
And it should be pointed out that its competitors are not exactly sitting still either. Just yesterday, Dataform announced that it had been acquired by Google to help it build out and run better performance at BigQuery.
“Firebolt created a SaaS product that changes the analytics experience over big data sets,” Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures said in a statement. “The pace of innovation in the big data space has lagged the explosion in data growth rendering most data warehousing solutions too slow, too expensive, or too complex to scale. Firebolt takes cloud data warehousing to the next level by offering the world’s most powerful analytical engine. This means companies can now analyze multi Terabyte / Petabyte data sets easily at significantly lower costs and provide a truly interactive user experience to their employees, customers or anyone who needs to access the data.”
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FTC sues to block P&G’s acquisition of Billie, a razor startup for women
The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of Billie, a NY-based startup that sells razors and body wash.
In the notice, the FTC alleged that the merger would “eliminate innovative nascent competitors for wet shave razors” to the loss of consumers.
Billie was founded in 2017 with the goal of fighting the “pink tax” on goods marketed to women, including razors and body wash. It went up against companies like P&G and Edgewell Personal Care by offering high-quality and cheap razors. The company announced its intent to be acquired by P&G after raising just $35 million in venture capital in June.
“As its sales grew, Billie was likely to expand into brick-and-mortar stores, posing a serious threat to P&G. If P&G can snuff out Billie’s rapid competitive growth, consumers will likely face higher prices,” Ian Conner, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition said in a statement.
P&G has been on a buying spree as of late. Along with the Billie news, Procter & Gamble acquired Walker & Company, which created Bevel, a grooming line for men of color, and Form, a hair-care line for women of color. In February 2019, P&G announced plans to acquire This is L, a feminine-care brand that sells tampons, pads and wipes.
If the FTC wins, this is another blow for direct-to-consumer brands on the base of competition dynamics. In May 2019, Edgewell Personal Care announced it intended to buy Harry’s, another direct-to-consumer shaving brand. In February 2020, the FTC filed a lawsuit to block the deal from happening, similarly citing how the deal would limit competition and innovation in the razor market.
Unlike Harry’s, Billie was bought before it broke into brick-and-mortar retail stores. If the deal doesn’t close, Billie lost precious time it could have used to expand into new locations and markets — and P&G will lose some of its competitive advantage in the women’s shaving world.
Harry’s and Billie’s blocks could negatively trickle down to hurt direct-to-consumer products looking at health and wellness more broadly.
Note that exit market isn’t as dull for all companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) world. We’ve seen deals close like Blue Bunny’s buy of Halo Top, Mars’ acquisition of Kind Bars and, of course, Unilever’s $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club.
Andrea Hernández, a founder and consultant on food and beverage CPG, says that DTC companies often need to partner with mega-businesses to get the distribution scale they need, focusing more on omni-channel presence versus a single seller point.
“It’s very limited for these companies to scale at the same level and grow without incurring debt or needing constant injections of [money],” she said. “Or [you can go] the preferred route which is having BigDaddyCorp come whisk you away. You get a success story and the resources to continue your journey.”
That said, the coronavirus has even impacted food CPG companies by forcing them to slash SKUs (or stock keeping units) and prioritize essential goods. Whereas before, CPG companies might stock a variety of goods for a variety of customer needs, they’re now prioritizing a smaller slice of the pie to manage uncertainty among consumer behavior. Long-term, this means that CPGs might be buying fewer of the Billies and Harry’s of the world and just focusing on what’s working now.
Regardless of how this plays out, today’s news shows that the FTC is paying more attention than ever to consumer and tech.
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DoorDash said to price at $102 per share, doubling its final private price
According to media reports, food-delivery giant DoorDash priced its IPO at $102 per share, ahead of its final IPO pricing range of $90 to $95 per share.
The company’s debut has been warmly anticipated by public investors, as evinced by the company raising its range from an initial target of $75 to $85.
While we’re still waiting for official pricing, the price point makes DoorDash worth $32 billion at the time of its IPO price on a non-diluted basis (we’re using the company’s final S-1/A share count of 317,656,521). That valuation rises if one includes options that have vested but not been exercised, and even more if shares set aside for future compensation are also tallied. CNBC calculates DoorDash’s valuation to be $38.7 billion on a diluted basis.
Regardless, any of the valuation marks for DoorDash at $102 per share are far and away greater than its final pre-IPO valuation of around $16 billion, set this summer when the company took on additional capital. The unicorn raised more money during a growth boom, allowing it to add to its cash reserves ahead of its IPO with limited dilution.
DoorDash, which doubled its private startup valuation, is now incredibly well-capitalized to take on rivals Uber Eats and others. And at a price far above its raised range, it has more cash than it probably hoped for. How it uses that cash to preserve pandemic-driven gains will be a key narrative from the company in 2021.
More when we get official numbers.
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Uber sells air taxi business Elevate to Joby Aviation, shedding its last moonshot
Uber has offloaded its air taxi enterprise Elevate to Joby Aviation, the last of several moonshots to be sold by the ride-hailing company in a pursuit to stick to its core business and reach profitability.
The transaction announced Tuesday is part of a complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an expanded partnership between the two companies. Last year, Uber and Joby, which is developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, signed on as a vehicle partner for Uber’s Elevate initiative. Joby was the first partner to commit to deploying air taxi services by 2023.
The $75 million investment comes in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made as part of Joby’s Series C financing round in January 2020, Uber said. To date, Joby Aviation has raised $820 million. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup.
Under the deal, which is expected to close in early 2021, the two parent companies have agreed to integrate their respective services into each other’s apps.
“Advanced air mobility has the potential to be exponentially positive for the environment and future generations,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “This deal allows us to deepen our partnership with Joby, the clear leader in this field, to accelerate the path to market for these technologies.”
While Joby is considered one of the leaders, Elevate did play a role in shaping the nascent industry, including establishing some of the benchmarks used by competitors.
“The team at Uber Elevate has not only played an important role in our industry, they have also developed a remarkable set of software tools that build on more than a decade of experience enabling on-demand mobility,” Joby Aviation CEO JoeBen Bevirt said in a statement.” These tools and new team members will be invaluable to us as we accelerate our plans for commercial launch.”
One year ago, Uber’s business model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic and Khosrowshahi’s focus on profitability prompted the company to dump its moonshots and double down on delivery with its acquisition of Postmates.
Today, Uber is a company focused on ride-hailing and delivery while keeping its hand in micromobility, logistics and autonomous vehicles through a series of deals struck in 2020.
The Joby-Elevate terms are similar to two other Uber deals this year. In the spring, Uber led a $170 million funding round in micromobility startup Lime. As part of the deal, Lime acquired Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump. The majority of Jump’s 400 employees were laid off. Earlier this week, autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that will value the combined company at $10 billion.
Just like Uber’s deals with Lime and now Joby, Aurora isn’t paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was last valued at $7.25 billion. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Uber said in October that it sold off a $500 million stake in its Uber Freight business to an investor group led by New York-based investment firm Greenbriar Equity Group. The deal valued the unit at $3.3 billion on a post-money basis. Uber has maintained its majority stake in Uber Freight, unlike the Jump, Elevate and ATG deals.
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Former Salesforce chief scientist announces new search engine to take on Google
Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google.
“We are building you.com. You can already go to it today. And it’s a trusted search engine. We want to work on having more click trust and less clickbait on the internet,” he said. He added that in addition to trust, he wants it to be built on kindness and facts, three worthy but difficult goals to achieve.
He said that there were several major issues that led him and his co-founders to build a new search tool. For starters, he says that there is too much information and nobody can possibly process it all. What’s more, as you find this information, it’s impossible to know what you can trust as accurate, and he believes that issue is having a major impact on society at large. Finally, as we navigate the internet in 2020, the privacy question looms large as is how you balance the convenience-privacy trade-off.
He believes his background in AI can help in a consumer-focused search tool. For starters the search engine, while general in nature, will concentrate on complex consumer purchases where you have to open several tabs to compare information.
“The biggest impact thing we can do in our lives right now is to build a trusted search engine with AI and natural language processing superpowers to help everyone with the various complex decisions of their lives, starting with complex product purchases, but also being general from the get-go as well,” he said.
While Socher was light on details, preferring to wait until GA in a couple of months to share some more, he said he wants to differentiate from Google by not relying on advertising and what you know about the user. He said he learned from working with Marc Benioff at Salesforce that you can make money and still build trust with the people buying your product.
He certainly recognizes that it’s tough to take on an entrenched incumbent, but he and his team believe that by building something they believe is fundamentally different, they can undermine the incumbent with a classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” kind of play where they’re doing something that is hard for Google to reproduce without undermining their primary revenue model.
He also sees Google running into antitrust issues moving forward and that could help create an opening for a startup like this. “I think a lot of stuff that Google [has been doing] … with the looming antitrust will be somewhat harder for them to get away with on a continued basis,” he said.
He acknowledges that trust and accuracy elements could get tricky as social networks have found out. Socher hinted at some social sharing elements they plan to build into the search tool including allowing you to have your own custom you.com URL with your name to facilitate that sharing.
Socher said he has funding and a team together working actively on the product, but wouldn’t share how much or how many employees at this point. He did say that Benioff and venture capitalist Jim Breyer are primary backers and he would have more information to share in the coming months.
For now, if you’re interested, you can go to the website and sign up for early access.
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