Startups
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Alon Gilady, CEO of RenovAI, told me his startup is trying to solve the problem that many of us face when we’re moving into a new home — we aren’t interior designers, but we can’t afford to hire real designers, either.
Apparently Gilady’s co-founder and vice president of products, Alon Chelben, had this issue himself when he moved into a new apartment and tried to use DIY design applications, only to be disappointed by the “very ugly” results.
“He thought to himself, ‘I cannot design,’ ” Gilady said. “From that idea, we realized that there’s an opportunity here.”
While there are other online design services, Gilady said most of them are focused on creating 3D visualizations, or on connecting customers with human designers.
RenovAI (which is part of the current class of startups at Alchemist Accelerator) can also create visualizations, but its focus is on building AI tools that understand the principles of good design. And while the team started out by thinking of the consumer problem, they decided that the best path to market was by working with retailers.
RenovAI’s products can design an entire space based on a customer’s specifications and taste. There’s also RenovAI Scout, which recommends a specific product based on your taste and current room design; and Complete the Look, which recommends items that complement what you’re already buying.
But what does it mean for an AI to understand good design? Gilady said the team has trained its algorithms on “thousands of different floor plans” to understand the rules of how a room should be laid out, and also broken down design into 16 different “substyles.”
“Our picture recommendation engine goes through the images to understand the relations between the items, the color, the palette, the texture and material,” he said. “It does a statistical analysis to understand how things are matching each other, how to create the design rules of every substyle.”
RenovAI already has pilots with online furniture retailers like Made.com and Mobly. And Gilady said that there’s plenty of opportunity for growth, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, as plenty of people are stuck at home and wanting to make improvements.
“I think more and more retailers and mom-and-pop shops are paying more attention to online,” he said. “[They know] that if they offer a more fun and seamless experience online, in the long run, it’s a bigger opportunity and we can reach more customers.”
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This morning, Snap joined a host of startup accelerators shifting its demo day online amid the COVID-19 quarantine. With its third class of startups, Yellow, Snap’s in-house startup accelerator that launched in 2018, brought investors and founders together in private slack channels after a live-streamed presentation.
The event kicked off with a few words from CEO Evan Spiegel and soon transitioned into a succession of live-streamed pitches from the 10 startups in Yellow’s latest batch. The group occupies some familiar spaces for past investments, with a focus on niche social communities, mobile media tools and augmented reality.
Snap investment Hardworkers
The 10 startups in Yellow’s third batch include:
Yesterday, I got the opportunity to chat with Mike Su, who leads the Yellow program at Snap. Su said that shifting to a fully online program was a bit of a shock to the program, which was about one month in when COVID-19’s impact worsened stateside.
Yellow’s small batches are much easier to manage than other accelerator behemoths like Y Combinator that are pushing hundreds of startups through their network. Nevertheless, Su says it was an interesting adjustment shifting the accelerator program to a remote setting, though a later program start date gave them the advantage of seeing how others wrapped up their programs. “We tuned into a bunch of different digital demo days; one of our advantages was being able to learn from others,” he says.
Yellow investment SketchAR
While emerging during a possible recession is far from ideal launch timing, Su believes this class of startups are still in a good position. “When you look across a lot of the companies, actually their work becomes more essential than it ever was before,” Su tells TechCrunch, particularly highlighting the program’s investment in Hardworkers, which is building a professional network for blue-collar workers who have been particularly affected by the pandemic. Another investment from this batch, Mogul Millennial, is building a media brand around connecting Black professionals with professional resources.
“If you look up and down the class, all the founders aren’t just taking after an opportunity, but personally are on a mission to solve a particular problem,” Su says. “So I think that foundation made them more predisposed I guess, to be able to push through this kind of environment.”
While web comics brands and AR sketching might not immediately seem like huge problems during trying times like the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the startups in Yellow’s recent batch are working to solve problems that have proven to be key opportunities for Snap, which has been on a redemptive growth spree since early 2019, locking down young users and seeing its share price surge.
Snap invests $150,000 in each Yellow startup for an equity stake, and while the program does not require batch participants to integrate with Snap’s services, the company has used the program to invest in strategic areas that it has also pushed on the product side.
Earlier Yellow bets skewed more toward content investments as Snapchat was scaling Discover. Now Su says he’s fielding plenty of augmented reality pitches. Su also notes that the accelerator had its most international batch to date this year, with startups from Lithuania, Korea, Mexico and the U.K. making their way to Los Angeles.
“We always start with top-level strategy, with [CEO Evan Spiegel], figuring out overall direction of where we see the world evolving, where we think there are real opportunities and where we think we can make a difference in supporting these companies,” Su says. “And then once we’re aligned on the top-level strategy I think Evan puts a lot of trust in myself and my partner in crime Alex Levitt to find good companies that we’re excited about.”
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As the world looks to reopen after weeks of lockdown, governments are turning to contact tracing to understand the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
Most nations are leaning toward privacy-focused apps that use Bluetooth signals to create an anonymous profile of where a person has been and when. Some, like Israel, are bucking the trend and are using location and cell phone data to track the spread, prompting privacy concerns.
Some of the biggest European economies — Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Ireland — are building apps that work with Apple and Google’s contact-tracing API. But the U.K., one of the worst-hit nations in Europe, is going it alone.
Unsurprisingly, critics have both security and privacy concerns, so much so that the U.K. may end up switching over to Apple and Google’s system anyway. Given that one of Israel’s contact-tracing systems was found on an passwordless server this week, and India denied a privacy issue in its contact-tracing app, there’s not much wiggle-room to get these things wrong.
Turns out that even during a pandemic, people still care about their privacy.
Here’s more from the week.
When Zoom announced it acquired online encryption key startup Keybase, for many, the reaction was closer to mild than wild. Even Keybase, a service that lets users store and manage their encryption keys, acknowledged its uncertain future. “Keybase’s future is in Zoom’s hands, and we’ll see where that takes us,” the company wrote in a blog post. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Zoom has faced security snafu after snafu. But after dancing around the problems, it promised to call in the cavalry and double down on fixing its encryption. So far, so good. But where does Keybase, largely a consumer product, fit into the fray? It doesn’t sound like even Zoom knows yet, per enterprise reporter Ron Miller. What’s clear is that Zoom needs encryption help, and few have the technical chops to pull that off.
Keybase’s team might — might — just help Zoom make good on its security promises.
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Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I’m a startup founder in Israel looking to expand into the U.S. market. What is the best visa option for me and a key member of my executive team to come to the U.S. to establish a sales and marketing office there? I would like my spouse and children to join me if my spouse can also work in the U.S. Is that possible?
— Tenacious in Tel Aviv
Dear Tenacious:
Thanks for reaching out. Based on your situation, the E-2 visa for treaty investors and employees may offer the best option.
An underutilized option, the E-2 visa is ideal for startup founders and employees whose home country has a treaty of commerce and navigation with the U.S. Israelis became eligible for E-2 visas just last year, joining the citizens of 80 other treaty countries. For more details on E-2 visas for founders and employees, check out Episode 16 of my “Immigration Law for Tech Startups” podcast.
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Sleeper is widening its ambitions to esports as the arena sports world goes into hibernation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While CEO Nan Wang has high hopes that the upcoming NFL season can proceed amid the pandemic, he’s hoping to expand his fantasy sports app’s appeal to gamers by launching support for the intensely popular title League of Legends. Wang says that esports support was always in the cards, but that its rollout was never supposed to come this early.
“Originally, the goal was to do arena sports and then strategically select esports that we thought would be big market opportunities,” Wang says. “In the absence of sports, it becomes easier for us to push something that was further out on the roadmap.”
As Sleeper looks to push beyond its 1 million active users, the company is bulking up on funding reserves. The fantasy sports app has closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Kevin Durant, Baron Davis, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Twitch CEO Kevin Lin are also recent investors. In August, the company shared it had raised a $5.3 million Series A led by General Catalyst.
For now, all of Sleeper’s services are free and there aren’t immediate plans to change that. Wang says that delayed and canceled seasons of arena sports is likely going to push out the company’s timelines for beginning to generate revenues.
Sleeper’s investors have hailed the startup as leading the way among a new class of vertical-focused social networks.
“The next social platforms are going to be vertical and look a lot more like games, offering deeper engagement than broad social networking platforms. Sleeper’s leagues provide shared activities between friends, and has some of the best stickiness metrics we’ve seen,” Andreessen Horowitz GP Andrew Chen said in a statement.

With its League of Legends launch, Sleeper is in the position of helping define a fantasy league experience for a popular franchise. The league’s organization isn’t fundamentally different from other fantasy sports. Users recruit a fantasy crew and draft professional esports athletes to their teams. From there, users in a league participate in weekly head-to-head matches with each other, making predictions and leveraging gameplay-specific mechanics.
League of Legends support is a big deal to Sleeper because it also represents the company’s first international foray. Users in the U.S., Europe, Vietnam, Korea and Brazil can participate in this upcoming fantasy season.
On the product side, the startup recently launched voice chat to capitalize on users stuck at home amid the pandemic. Wang tells TechCrunch the team is also hoping to add video chat to the app soon. Wang also notes that Sleeper is on track to launch three new sports this year.
As Sleeper aims to grow around the roadblocks of pandemic lockdowns, Wang and his team hope that their continued focus on social features can ensure the startup’s shared success in the worlds of online gaming and arena gaming.
“The roadmap for us has always been to win both sports and esports because they both have the same underlying motivation,” Wang says. “The most important thing for any sports fan is being able to enjoy it with their friends and family members.”
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As parents across the country are tasked with managing their children’s schooling amid a pandemic, investors are betting on a homeschooling startup that’s aiming to provide parents with services that can simplify the process of giving their kids a tailored education at home.
Founder Ryan Delk says his startup Primer is building the “full-stack infrastructure” that parents need to homeschool their kids, an interactive suite of products that he hopes can “make homeschooling a mainstream option for families.”
His company shared funding details with TechCrunch, disclosing that his startup had closed a $3.7 million seed round led by Founders Fund . Other investors in the round include Naval Ravikant, Cyan Banister and Village Global.
As of 2016, about 2.4 million kids in the United States are homeschooled. Delk says that he’s been “stunned by the lack of infrastructure” available today for parents interested in homeschooling their kids. Delk was homeschooled by his parents from kindergarten through eighth grade, an experience he looks back on fondly, he says.
Primer isn’t offering a dedicated curriculum. So far, they’ve been building tools to help parents acquaint themselves with what’s out there. Primer has already rolled out a pair of free homeschooling resources for parents, including Navigator, a tool to help parents stay compliant with state regulations for homeschooling their kids, as well as Primer Library, a collection of free digital instruction materials.

Since launching its compliance and library tools late last year, the team has been prepping for their next launch, a series of interest-based communities that homeschoolers can join and participate in online. The communities will begin rolling out this August in time for a new school year. Delk says the team is hoping to launch about 5-7 different classes, spanning topics like “rockets, chess and baking,” with instruction from experts and interactions with other students. Primer hasn’t finalized pricing, but the team plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for membership to the communities.
Today, the startup is launching a waitlist for this feature. In a blog post, Delk notes that next year he hopes to launch “several more products that deliver everything parents need to give their children an exceptional homeschooling experience.”
Delk believes that there’s going to be a “huge influx” of new homeschoolers as shelter-in-place winds down and some parents find that homeschooling is something they’d like to pursue long-term. He notes that the products his team is creating are still pretty high-touch for parents and that it isn’t the right fit for everyone, much like homeschooling.
“It’s going to be very hands-on and we’re going to be upfront about that,” Delk says. “We are not building a plant-your-kid-in-front-of-an-iPad-for-six-hours product.”
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When it comes to corporate venture capital, semiconductor giant Intel has shaped up to be one of the most prolific and prescient investors in the tech world, with investments in 1,582 companies worldwide, and a tally of some 692 portfolio companies going public or otherwise exiting in the wake of Intel’s backing.
Today, the company announced its latest tranche of deals: $132 million invested in 11 startups. The deals speak to some of the company’s most strategic priorities currently and in the future, covering artificial intelligence, autonomous computing and chip design.
Many corporate VCs have been clear in drawing a separation between their activities and that of their parents, and the same has held for Intel. But at the same time, the company has made a number of key moves that point to how it uses its VC muscle to expand its strategic relationships and also ultimately expand through M&A. Just earlier this month, it acquired Moovit, an Intel Capital portfolio company, for $900 million (a deal that was knocked down to $840 million when accounting for its previous investment).
“Intel Capital identifies and invests in disruptive startups that are working to improve the way we work and live. Each of our recent investments is pushing the boundaries in areas such as AI, data analytics, autonomous systems and semiconductor innovation. Intel Capital is excited to work with these companies as we jointly navigate the current world challenges and as we together drive sustainable, long-term growth,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement.
The tranche of deals come at a critical time in the worlds of startups and venture investing. Many are worried that the slowdown in the economy, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will mean a subsequent slowdown in tech finance. Intel says that it plans to invest between $300 million and $500 million in total this year, so this would go some way to refuting that idea, along with some of the other monster deals and big funds that we’ve written out in the last couple of months.
The list announced today doesn’t include specific investment numbers, but in some cases the startups have also announced the fundings themselves and given more detail on round sizes. These still, however, do not reveal Intel’s specific financial stakes.
Here’s the full list:
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Atlassian announced today that it was acquiring Halp, an early-stage startup that enables companies to build integrated help desk ticketing and automated answers inside Slack. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.
It was a big day for Halp, which also announced its second product today, called Halp Answers. The new tool will work hand in glove with its previous entry Halp Tickets, which lets Slack users easily create a Help Desk ticket without leaving the tool.
“Halp Answers enables your teams to leverage the knowledge that already exists within your company to automatically answer tickets right in Slack . That knowledge can be pulled in from Slack messages, Confluence articles or any piece of knowledge in your organization,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
Note that integration with Confluence, which is an Atlassian tool. The company also sees it integrating with Jira support for other enterprise communications tools down the road. “Existing Halp users can look forward to deeper (and new) integrations with Jira and Confluence. We’re committed to supporting Microsoft Teams customers as well,” Atlassian wrote in a blog post.
Halp is selling early, having just launched last year. The company had raised a $2 million seed round in April 2019 on a $9.5 million post valuation, according to PitchBook data. The startup sees an opportunity with Atlassian that it apparently didn’t think it could achieve alone.
“We’ll be able to harness the vast resources at Atlassian to continue with our mission to make Halp the best tool for any team collaborating on requests with other teams. Our team will grow and be able to focus on making the core experience of Halp even more powerful. We’ll also develop a deeper integration with the Atlassian suite — improving our existing Jira and Confluence integrations and discovering the possibilities of Halp generating alerts in Opsgenie, cards in Trello, and much more,” the company wrote.
Halp’s founders promise that it won’t be abandoning its existing customers as it joins the larger organization. As a matter of fact, Halp is bringing with them a slew of big-name customers, including Adobe, VMware, GitHub and Slack.
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UpKeep, a mobile-first platform for maintenance and operations collaboration, has today announced the close of a $36 million Series B financing round. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures, Y Combinator, Mucker Capital and Fundersclub.
UpKeep was founded by Ryan Chan. Chan worked at Trisep Corporation, a chemical manufacturing company, before founding UpKeep and saw first-hand how plant maintenance was handled. Despite the fact that the plant had purchased software for facilities maintenance and operations, most of the data was written down on pen and paper before being input into the system because that software was desktop only.
The idea for UpKeep was born.
UpKeep meets maintenance workers where they are, which could be just about anywhere.
With any maintenance job, from changing a lightbulb in an office building to repairing a complicated piece of machinery on the floor of a manufacturing plant, there are usually three parties involved: the requester, the facilities manager, and the technician.
Before UpKeep, the requester would either send an email to the facilities manager or perhaps use some other software to let them know of the problem. The facilities manager would prioritize the various requests of the day and send out technicians to resolve them.
Technicians have to log plenty of information when they’re out on the job, but this usually involved writing this info down on paper and then returning to a desk to input the data into the system.
With UpKeep, the requester can use the app itself to notify the facilities manager of problems, or send an email that flows directly into the UpKeep system. Facilities managers use UpKeep to prioritize and assign issues to their team of technicians, who then receive the work orders right on UpKeep.
Instead of logging information on paper, these technicians can take pictures of the problem and note the parts they need or other details of the job right in the app. No duplication of effort.
UpKeep operates on a freemium model, allowing technicians to manage their own work for free. Collaborative use of the product across an organization costs on a per user on both an annual or monthly basis. The company offers various tiers, from a Starter Plan ($35/month/user) to an Enterprise Plan ($180/month/user).
Higher tier plans offer more in-depth reporting and analysis around the work that gets done. Chan explained that these reports are not necessarily about tracking people, though.
“Yes, we track technicians and it’s a tool to manage work done by people,” said Chan. “But a manufacturing facility really cares much more about the equipment. They can use UpKeep to manage things like how many hours of downtime a piece of equipment has, etc. It’s more targeted toward the actual asset and the equipment versus the person completing their work.”
Chan said that around 80 percent of the company’s 400,000 users are on the free version of the app. Some brands on the app include Unilever, Siemens, DHL, McDonald’s, and Jet.com. Chan said UpKeep saw a 206 percent increase in revenue in 2019.
Important to the company’s future, UpKeep is working with OSHA and a group called SQF (Safe Quality Food) to offer templates around best practices during the pandemic. Now, maintenance workers and facilities staffs have a whole new checklist around sanitation and safety that many businesses are just getting up to speed on. UpKeep is working to make these new practices easier to adopt by providing those checklists directly to facilities managers.
This latest funding round brings UpKeep’s total funding to $48.8 million.
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Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO, at SiMa.ai, has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He decided to put that experience to work in a startup and launched SiMa.ai last year with the goal of building an ultra low-power software and chip solution for machine learning at the edge.
Today he announced a $30 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital with help from Amplify Partners, Wing Venture Capital and +ND Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $40 million, according to the company.
Rangasayee says in his years as a chip executive he saw a gap in the machine learning market for embedded devices running at the edge and he decided to start the company to solve that issue.
“While the majority of the market was serviced by traditional computing, machine learning was beginning to make an impact and it was really amazing. I wanted to build a company that would bring machine learning at significant scale to help the problems with embedded markets,” he told TechCrunch.
The company is trying to focus on efficiency, which it says will make the solution more environmentally friendly by using less power. “Our solution can scale high performance at the lowest power efficiency, and that translates to the highest frames per second per watt. We have built out an architecture and a software solution that is at a minimum 30x better than anybody else on the frames per second,” he explained.
He added that achieving that efficiency required them to build a chip from scratch because there isn’t a solution available off the shelf today that could achieve that.
So far the company has attracted 20 early design partners, who are testing what they’ve built. He hopes to have the chip designed and the software solution in Beta in the Q4 timeframe this year, and is shooting for chip production by Q2 in 2021.
He recognizes that it’s hard to raise this kind of money in the current environment and he’s grateful to the investors, and the design partners who believe in his vision. The timing could actually work in the company’s favor because it can hunker down and build product while navigating through the current economic malaise.
Perhaps by 2021 when the product is in production, the market and the economy will be in better shape and the company will be ready to deliver.
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