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Brands that hyper-personalize will win the next decade
A digital marketing and customer experience leader, Evan Kohn is chief business officer at Pypestream, where he created PypePro, an AI onboarding methodology used by Fortune 500 firms.
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When people reach out to customer service, they’re seeking more than a solution to their immediate problem. They want empathy and understanding. What they’re often met with is a queue.
Nothing frustrates people more than calling customer support and getting stuck in a loop. According to a study by Vonage, 61% of consumers feel interactive voice response (IVR) actively poisons the customer experience — and only 13% found it more helpful than calling a human directly.
Like many solutions, IVR falls short in personalizing the customer experience (CX). A customer calls in for a specific task like paying a bill and instead cycles through a one-size-fits-all menu that in reality fits nobody. Experiences like this clearly indicate to customers a brand doesn’t care about them as a person, only as a case number.
Personalizing the experience is a start, but this isn’t the end. Customers will expect a one-on-one interaction the moment they enter your customer service channel. To make that happen, AI and analytics are creating scalable opportunities to show your customers how much they matter to you. Brands taking advantage of that opportunity can create unrivaled CX that sets them far ahead of their competition.
The personalization buzzword
Personalization has become a popular buzzword in recent years, but true personalization is much harder to attain than many companies realize. That was the case in 2016 when companies first hopped on the chat bandwagon. The potential for a new communication method was there, but the one-size-fits-all approach companies took in developing their interaction platforms created more problems for customers than it solved.
What they missed is how to create digital experiences in which customers converse with automation that adapts based on user context. Information like their product or service history and preferences should be pulled up the moment a customer engages. Data on disposition, tone, sentiment and stated intent should influence how the customer moves through the system and reaches their desired end goal. That navigation should be effortless and go well beyond text-based communications, including immersive UX options like maps, surveys, carousel selections and more — all in a spirit of lowering the cognitive weight for the customer.
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3 views on the future of geographic-focused funds
For many investors, the coronavirus has effectively taken geography out of the equation when it comes to vetting new opportunities.
While this dynamic opens up startups to more investment opportunities, venture capital firms that focus on a specific region are in a thornier spot. The competitive advantage they once had when raising — the notion that they’re focused on an area no one else is — is potentially threatened.
Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and Alex Wilhelm of the TechCrunch Equity crew discussed the future of geographic-focused funds given the uptick of remote investing:
- Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused
- Alex: Geo-focused venture funds will be weakened, but won’t die
- Danny: Geo-focused venture funds are dead (and should never have existed)
Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused
Since 2014, Steve Case and his team have made an annual bus trip across the country to meet startups in emerging startup hubs. Five days, five cities and at least $500,000 of investment dollars given to startups. Case would even offer to fly out promising and hard-to-reach startups to have them join the trip.
The Rise of the Rest fund, with more than $300 million in assets under management, has invested in over 130 startups across 70 cities, including Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.
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Palantir’s concentrated governance is great for execs, but what about shareholders?
A few days ago I wrote down a few notes making a bullish case for Palantir, searching to find good news amidst the company’s huge historical deficits.
Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public markets, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the best possible shot during its impending debut.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
And we finally did get a new S-1/A filing, a document that our own Danny Crichton quickly parsed and covered. What he found was a set of amendments that seem to increase the chance that three Palantir insiders will control more than 50% of the company’s voting power forever, possibly making it a controlled company, which would loose the firm from select regulatory requirements.
Danny dryly noted that “given the diminished voting power of employee and investor shares, it is possible that these voting provisions will negatively impact the final price of those shares.” That’s being polite.
Mulling this over this morning, I kept thinking about Snap, which sold stock in its IPO that gave new shareholders no votes at all, and Facebook, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg as his personal fiefdom. The two are not alone in this matter. There are a number of other public tech companies that provide certain groups of pre-IPO shareholders more votes than others on a per-share basis, though perhaps to a smaller degree than what Facebook has managed.
It feels like many startups (and former startups) have decided over time that having material shareholder input is a bad idea. That, in effect, they must run companies as not merely monarchies, but unquestioned ones, to boot.
I am not entirely convinced that this is the best way to create long-term shareholder wealth.
If you are on the other side of this particular fence, I understand. After all, Facebook is a global juggernaut and Snap has finally managed to eke out stock-market gains to bring its value back around to where it was when it went public. (A three-year journey.)
But those arguments are only so good. You could easily argue that the two companies could have done much more with less self-sabotage (Facebook) and a bit more spend discipline (Snap).
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Mustard raises $1.7M to improve athletic mechanics with AI
Athletic coaching is a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. No surprise, really, given the massive revenue some top athletes are able to generate. Mustard is working to supplant — or at least augment — some of that pricey coaching with the launch of a new mobile app designed to analyze an athlete’s mechanics and offer corrective tips to help them improve.
The company was co-founded by Tom House, a former reliever whose coaching career has earned him the reputation as one of the “father[s] of modern pitching mechanics.”
“Too many kids miss out on the power of play and the many physical and mental benefits of sports—studies show that 70% of kids stop playing sports by the age of 13 due to cost and lack of access to quality coaching. Mustard offers every kid access to the same coaching programs and extensive biomechanical analysis used by the best athletes in the world, and the same personalized training protocols that I use with the Hall of Famers I see in person,” House says in a release tied to the news. “We want to make elite personalized coaching accessible to all.”
Mustard announced this week that it has raised $1.7 million to improve its tool, led by Shasta Ventures and Intersect VC, along with a number of angel investors, including David Novak and Mike Dixon, and all-star athletes Nolan Ryan and Drew Brees. Ryan, in fact, has become one of the main faces of the company, gracing its home page, along with a color scheme that appears inspired by his days with the Astros.
The name isn’t great. It’s a reference to the phrase “put some mustard on it” — which refers to the act of adding a bit of an edge to a throw.
The app is opening up for a limited, free public beta, focused solely on baseball to start. “The product will be entirely free at first,” CEO Rocky Collis tells TechCrunch. “Over time, we will add premium features for a low monthly subscription. Even when premium features are added, we plan to continue to offer a free version of the app that offers tremendous value to users.”
The system relies on the smartphone’s camera and then uses proprietary AI algorithms to monitor the player’s motion and approximate human athletic coaching. For the baseball side of things, the company has employed engineers from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Future sports will be added at some point down the road.
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Qualcomm-powered Chinese XR startup Nreal raises $40 million
Nreal, one of the most-watched mixed reality startups in China, just secured $40 million from a group of high-profile investors in a Series B round that could potentially bring more adoption to its portable augmented headsets.
Kuaishou, the archrival to TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin, led the round, marking yet another video platform to establish links with Nreal, following existing investor iQiyi, China’s own Netflix. Like other major video streaming sites around the world, Kuaishou and iQiyi have dabbled in making augmented reality content, and securing a hardware partner will no doubt be instrumental to their early experiments.
Other backers in the round with plentiful industry resources include GP Capital, which counts state-owned financial holding group Shanghai International Group and major Chinese movie studio Hengdian Group as investors; CCEIF Fund, set up by state-owned telecom equipment maker China Electronics Corporation and state-backed investment bank China International Capital Corporation; GL Ventures, the early-stage fund set up by prominent private equity firm Hillhouse Capital; and Sequoia Capital China.
In early 2019, Nreal brought onboard Xiaomi founder’s venture fund Shunwei Capital for its $15 million Series A funding. As I wrote at the time, AR, VR, MR, XR — whichever marketing coinage you prefer — will certainly be a key piece in Xiaomi’s Internet of Things empire. It’s not hard to see the phone titan sourcing smart glasses from Nreal down the road.
The other key partner of Nreal, a three-year-old company, is Qualcomm . The chipmaker has played an active part in China’s 5G rollout, powering major Chinese phone makers’ next-gen handsets. It supplies Nreal with its Snapdragon processors, allowing the startup’s lightweight mixed reality glasses to easily plug into an Android phone.
“Its closer partnership with Qualcomm will allow it to access Qualcomm’s network of customers, including telecoms companies,” Seewan Toong, an industry consultant on AR and VR, told TechCrunch.
Indeed, the mixed reality developer has already signed a deal with Japanese telco KDDI and in Korea, it’s working with LG’s cellular carrier LG Uplus Corp.
The latest round brings Nreal’s total raise to more than $70 million and will accelerate mass adoption of its mixed reality technology in the 5G era, the company said.
It remains to be seen how Nreal will live up to its promise, secure users at scale and move beyond being a mere poster child for tech giants’ mixed reality ambitions. So far its deals with big telcos are in a way reminiscent of that of Magic Leap, which has been in a legal spat with Nreal, though the Chinese company appears to burn through less cash so far. The troubled American company is currently pivoting to relying on enterprise customers after failing to crack the consumer market.
“Nreal is patient and not in a rush to show they can start selling high volume. It’s trying to prove that there’s a user scenario for its technology,” said Toong.
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Teemyco creates virtual offices so you can grab a room and talk with colleagues
Meet Teemyco, a Stockholm-based startup that wants to reproduce office interactions in a virtual environment. The company wants to foster spontaneous interactions and casual collaboration with a room-based interface. Each employee moves from one room to another just like in a physical office.
If you’re no longer working from an office, chances are you rely heavily on email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or a combination of all those tools. While those tools work perfectly fine for what they’re designed to achieve, many companies feel like important information is getting lost. It’s harder to bump into a colleague next to the coffee machine and ask a quick question.
With Teemyco, each person is working in a virtual room. By default, you work in the lobby. You can consider it as an open space with multiple desks. When you want to get together for a planned or unplanned meeting, you can pull someone from the lobby and create another room.
In that room, you can start an audio call or a video call. You can see your colleagues in the corner of your screen and stay focused on a document at the same time, or you can put a video call in full screen. When someone is done, they can leave the room.
Those interactions are less formal than what you get with video-conferencing services. You don’t have to send a link to a Zoom room, you don’t have to send a calendar invite. People hop in and hop out.
If you’re working on something important, you can move to a focus room so that you don’t get interrupted every 15 minutes. Other people won’t be able to pull you from your virtual desk. If you have to run some errands, you can also put yourself in a room that says you’re not there — those rooms can act as a status.
Teemyco also helps you work next to your favorite colleague. You can create a room and use a walkie-talkie feature for quick interactions throughout the day. And, of course, you can create a break room for non-work-related discussions.
Teemyco is still a young company. The product is only available in beta. The company raised a $1 million seed round led by Luminar Ventures with Antler, Gazella and various business angels also participating.
It’s also not going to work for all companies. I’m not sure it scales well for a company with hundreds of employees, for instance. Introverts might not be fans of real-time communication either.
If you’re a remote-first company, you know that it’s important to have a culture of transparency. And written information is always more transparent than video conferences.
And yet, depending on your corporate culture, something like Teemyco can be useful. It can augment information stored in shared documents and internal communication tools.
It’s an interesting product that proves that the inevitable debate between physical offices and remote teams is not a binary problem. There is some granularity, and companies can adjust the knob depending on specific needs.
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Cyber threat startup Cygilant hit by ransomware
Cygilant, a threat detection cybersecurity company, has confirmed a ransomware attack.
Christina Lattuca, Cygilant’s chief financial officer, said in a statement that the company was “aware of a ransomware attack impacting a portion of Cygilant’s technology environment.”
“Our Cyber Defense and Response Center team took immediate and decisive action to stop the progression of the attack. We are working closely with third-party forensic investigators and law enforcement to understand the full nature and impact of the attack. Cygilant is committed to the ongoing security of our network and to continuously strengthening all aspects of our security program,” the statement said.
Cygilant is believed to be the latest victim of NetWalker, a ransomware-as-a-service group, which lets threat groups rent access to its infrastructure to launch their own attacks, according to Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at security firm Emsisoft .
The file-encrypting malware itself not only scrambles a victim’s files but also exfiltrates the data to the hacker’s servers. The hackers typically threaten to publish the victim’s files if the ransom isn’t paid.
A site on the dark web associated with the NetWalker ransomware group posted screenshots of internal network files and directories believed to be associated with Cygilant.
Cygilant did not say if it paid the ransom. But at the time of writing, the dark web listing with Cygilant’s data had disappeared.
“Groups permanently delist companies when they’ve paid or, in some cases, temporarily delist them once they’ve agreed to come to the negotiating table,” said Callow. “NetWalker has temporarily delisted pending negotiations in at least one other case.”
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Exhibitors at Disrupt 2020: Register now to meet accelerators next week
Disrupt 2020 is all about helping startups find and create ways to drive their business forward in these most challenging times. We partnered with cela to give exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley one sweet opportunity — networking with 13 accelerators.
If you’re exhibiting — or plan to — don’t miss out on your chance to meet with up to 13 accelerators and pre-interview for their upcoming virtual cohorts. The first in our series of accelerator sessions — where you’ll gather information and pitch your product — takes place next week. Here’s everything you need to know.
Date: September 8
Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. (PT)
Accelerator focus: The following four accelerator programs are designed for the more established startups. You have a customer base. If that describes your startup, review the accelerator websites below. If you’re interested in scheduling a meeting — and you meet the program’s requirements — you can register now on CrunchMatch.
Participating accelerators
- NUMA helps early and growth-stage international tech startups fast-track their growth and scale in the U.S. through virtual and in-person startup acceleration programs. You’ll find application requirements here.
- Techstars helps grow entrepreneurial ideas into world-changing businesses. You’ll find application requirements here.
- Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator combines seed capital and hands-on help with an expert team to positively impact the trajectory of early-stage startups. You’ll find application requirements here.
- Plug and Play’s health program connects the best startups in the world to corporations that want to disrupt the healthcare industry. You’ll find application requirements here.
It’s not too late to take advantage of our accelerator speed networking sessions and reap the benefits that come with exposing your startup to thousands of Disrupt attendees from around the world. Simply purchase a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, and you’re eligible to meet and potentially pitch your way into an accelerator cohort that could change the trajectory of your business.
None of the above-mentioned accelerators fit your startup? Don’t worry, we have two more accelerator sessions on tap.
Date: September 9
Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. PT
Accelerators: She Gets Sh!t Done, Halo Incubator, Startup Boost Pre- Accelerator, Global Startup Ecosystem (Her Future Summit)
Date: September 10
Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. PT
Accelerators: Plug and Play (IoT), Backstage Capital, Plug and Play (enterprise tech), StartEd Accelerator, Quake Capital
Don’t miss your chance to connect with accelerators — and apply to their virtual programs. The first opportunity takes place on September 8, and it’s available only to startups exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020. Want in? Grab a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and crack open a giant can of possibility.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Optimizely acquired by content management company Episerver
Episerver is announcing that it has reached an agreement to acquire Optimizely for an undisclosed sum.
Optimizely was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. It became synonymous with A/B testing, subsequently building a broader suite of tools for marketers to experiment with and personalize their websites and apps, with more than 1,000 customers, including Gap, StubHub, IBM and The Wall Street Journal.
The company had raised more than $200 million in funding from Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, GV and others. Earlier this year, it laid off 15% of its staff, citing the impact of COVID-19.
Episerver, meanwhile, was founded in Stockholm back in 1994 and offers tools for marketers to manage their digital content. Accel-KKR sold the company to Insight Partners for $1.1 billion in 2018. (Today’s announcement describes Insight as a “strategic advisor and sponsor” in the acquisition.)
In a statement, Episerver CEO Alex Atzberger said this is “the most significant transformation in our company’s history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.” It sounds like the idea is to extend Episerver’s capabilities around content and commerce with Optimizely’s experimentation tools.
“The breakthrough combination of Episerver and Optimizely will transform digital experience creation and optimization, enabling digital teams to replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes,” Atzberger said. “This, along with our shared mission to empower growing companies to compete digitally, makes me thrilled to welcome the Optimizely team to Episerver, as we prove there are no extraordinary experiences without experimentation.”
A company spokesperson said the deal is for a mix of cash and stock. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, with the companies remaining fully staffed and independent until then.
“Winning in today’s digital world requires delivering the best and most personalized digital experiences,” said Jay Larson, who replaced Siroker as Optimizely CEO in 2017, in a statement. “Episerver and Optimizely have a shared vision to optimize every customer touchpoint through the use of experimentation. Together, we will enable our customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before.”
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Avo raises $3M for its analytics governance platform
Avo, a startup that helps businesses better manage their data quality across teams, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with participation from Heavybit, Y Combinator and others.
The company’s founder, Stefania Olafsdóttir, who is currently based in Iceland, was previously the head of data science at QuizUp, which at some point had 100 million users around the world. “I had the opportunity to build up the Data Science Division, and that meant the cultural aspect of helping people ask and answer the right questions — and get them curious about data — but it also meant the technical part of setting up the infrastructure and tools and pipelines, so people can get the right answers when they need it,” she told me. “We were early adopters of self-serve product analytics and culture — and we struggled immensely with data reliability and data trust.”
Image Credits: Avo
As companies collect more data across products and teams, the process tends to become unwieldy and different teams end up using different methods (or just simply different tags), which creates inefficiencies and issues across the data pipeline.
“At first, that unreliable data just slowed down decision making, because people were just like, didn’t understand the data and needed to ask questions,” Olafsdóttir said about her time at QuizUp. “But then it caused us to actually launch bad product updates based on incorrect data.” Over time, that problem only became more apparent.
“Once organizations realize how big this issue is — that they’re effectively flying blind because of unreliable data, while their competition might be like taking the lead on the market — the default is to patch together a bunch of clunky processes and tools that partially increase the level of liability,” she said. And that clunky process typically involves a product manager and a spreadsheet today.
At its core, the Avo team set out to build a better process around this, and after a few detours and other product ideas, Olafsdóttir and her co-founders regrouped to focus on exactly this problem during their time in the Y Combinator program.
Avo gives developers, data scientists and product managers a shared workspace to develop and optimize their data pipelines. “Good product analytics is the product of collaboration between these cross-functional groups of stakeholders,” Olafsdóttir argues, and the goal of Avo is to give these groups a platform for their analytics planning and governance — and to set company-wide standards for how they create their analytics events.
Once that is done, Avo provides developers with typesafe analytics code and debuggers that allows them to take those snippets and add them to their code within minutes. For some companies, this new process can help them go from spending 10 hours on fixing a specific analytics issue to an hour or less.
Most companies, the team argues, know — deep down — that they can’t fully trust their data. But they also often don’t know how to fix this problem. To help them with this, Avo also today released its Inspector product. This tool processes event streams for a company, visualizes them and then highlights potential errors. These could be type mismatches, missing properties or other discrepancies. In many ways, that’s obviously a great sales tool for a service that aims to avoid exactly these problems.
One of Avo’s early customers is Rappi, the Latin American delivery service. “This year we scaled to meet the demand of 100,000 new customers digitizing their deliveries and curbside pickups. The problem with every new software release was that we’d break analytics. It represented 25% of our Jira tickets,” said Rappi’s head of Engineering, Damian Sima. “With Avo we create analytics schemas upfront, identify analytics issues fast, add consistency over time and ensure data reliability as we help customers serve the 12+ million monthly users their businesses attract.”
As most startups at this stage, Avo plans to use the new funding to build out its team and continue to develop its product.
“The next trillion-dollar software market will be driven from the ground up, with developers deciding the tools they use to create digital transformation across every industry. Avo offers engineers ease of implementation while still retaining schemas and analytics governance for product leaders,” said GGV Capital Managing Partner Glenn Solomon. “Our investment in Avo is an investment in software developers as the new kingmakers and product leaders as the new oracles.”
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