Startups
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Spotinst rebrands as Spot and announces new cloud spend dashboard
Spotinst, the startup that helps companies find lower-cost spot instances in the cloud, announced today that it was rebranding as Spot. It also announced a brand new cloud usage dashboard to help companies get a detailed view of their cloud spend.
Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO at Spot, says the new product is designed to give customers much greater insight and visibility into cloud usage and spending.
“With this new product we’re providing a more holistic platform that lets customers see all of their cloud spending in one place — all of their usage, all of their costs, what they are spending and doing across multiple clouds — and then what they can actually do [to deploy resources more efficiently],” Shachar told TechCrunch.
The visibility means that customers can see across cloud vendors and get a big picture view of how they are deploying cloud resources to optimize their usage, which could be useful for the financial side of the house and IT.
“We’re basically bifurcating all of our customers’ cloud infrastructure and telling them this is what you should run on spot instances, this is what you should run on reserved instances and this is why you should keep on-demand instances,” he said.
The new product builds on the company’s core competency: helping customers deploy cheaper spot and reserved instances from cloud infrastructure vendors in an automated fashion.
Spot instances are a product where cloud vendors deploy their unused resources for much lower cost, while reserved instances provide a discounted rate for buying resources in advance for a set price. However, spot instances have a big catch: when the cloud vendor needs those resources, you get kicked off. Spot helps in this regard by safely moving the workload to another available spot instance automatically.
Spot was founded in 2015 and has raised more than $52 million, according to Crunchbase. Shachar says the company is in the $30 million revenue range and this new product should help drive that higher.
Powered by WPeMatico
Mammoth Media launches CatchUp, an app that summarizes the latest news and trending content
A new app called CatchUp might be useful for anyone who’s struggling to keep up with the latest headlines, podcasts and Netflix shows.
CatchUp is the latest offering from Mammoth Media, the startup behind chat fiction app Yarn and social polling app Wishbone. Founder and CEO Benoit Vatere told me that the product started out as a book summary app called Booknotes, but early users kept asking, “Why don’t you summarize more than books?”
So that’s exactly what CatchUp does, recapping the latest news and entertainment topics. The summaries should feel pretty familiar to anyone who’s watched videos on mobile social app — they’re vertically-oriented, broken up into slides, accompanied by text captions and last for just a few minutes.
Vatere told me that the topics are chosen based on what’s trending, either in Mammoth’s apps or more broadly in social media.
For example, when I opened CatchUp this morning, I watched a video laying out the basic info around the big topic one everyone’s mind: the coronavirus pandemic. Then I moved onto something lighter, a video breaking down the different streaming services available now.
It sounds like the CatchUp team is moving quickly. Vatere said they should be responsive to trends, creating new videos in just a day or two. At the same time, he said the app should offer a mix of news-y videos that will eventually disappear (“too much content kills retention in the app”) alongside more evergreen content.
Image Credits: Mammoth Media
He emphasized that this is very much an initial version of the app, and that the CatchUp team plans to iterate based on what users respond to. It’s English-only for now but could eventually add other languages. The company’s plans also include introducing monetization later on, starting with advertising and then eventually adding in-app purchases and subscriptions.
Vatere also suggested that while a CatchUp summary should stand on its own, it could also encourage deeper engagement.
“If you’re thinking, everybody is talking about ‘Love is Blind,’ what is this … you can listen for two minutes and understand the dynamic, understand what’s happening,” he said. “Then if it sounds really interesting to you, you can watch it. But if not, now you understand what’s being said.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Humio announces $20M Series B to advance unlimited logging tool
Humio, a startup that has built a modern unlimited logging solution, announced a $20 million Series B investment today.
Dell Technologies Capital led the round with participation from previous investor Accel. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $32 million, according to the company.
Humio co-founder and CEO Geeta Schmidt says the startup wanted to build a solution that would allow companies to log everything, while reducing the overall cost associated with doing that, a tough problem due to the resource and data volume involved. The company deals with customers who are processing multiple terabytes of data per day.
“We really wanted to build an infrastructure where it’s easy to log everything and answer anything in real time. So we built an index-free logging solution which allows you to ask […] ad hoc questions over large volumes of data,” Schmidt told TechCrunch.
They are able to ingest so much data by using streaming technology, says company EVP of sales Morten Gram. “We have this real time streaming engine that makes it possible for customers to monitor whatever they know they want to be looking at. So they can build dashboards and alerts for these [metrics] that will be running in real time,” Gram explained.
What’s more, because the solution enables companies to log everything, rather than pick and choose what to log, they can ask questions about things they might not know, such as an on-going security incident or a major outage, and trace the answer from the data in the logs as the incident is happening.
Perhaps more importantly, the company has come up with technology to reduce the cost associated with processing and storing such high volumes of data. “We have thought a lot about trying to do a lot more with a lot less resources. And so, for example, one of our customers, who moved from a competitor, has gone from 80 servers to 14 doing the same volumes of data,” she said.
Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director and lead investor at Dell Technologies Capital, says that his firm recognized that Humio was solving these issues in a creative and modern way.
“Humio’s team has created a new log analysis architecture for the microservices age. This can support real-time analysis at full-speed ingest, while decreasing cost of storage and analysis by at least an order of magnitude,” he explained. “In a short-period of time, Humio has won the confidence of many Fortune 500 customers who have shifted their log platforms to Humio from legacy, decade-old architectures that do not scale for the cloud world.”
The company’s customers include Netlify, Bloomberg, HP Aruba and Michigan State University. It offers on-prem, cloud and hosted SaaS products. Today, the company also announced it was introducing an unlimited ingest plan for hosted SaaS customers.
Powered by WPeMatico
Espressive lands $30M Series B to build better help chatbots
Espressive, a four-year-old startup from former ServiceNow employees, is working to build a better chatbot to reduce calls to company help desks. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B investment.
Insight Partners led the round with help from Series A lead investor General Catalyst along with Wing Venture Capital. Under the terms of today’s agreement, Insight founder and managing director Jeff Horing will be joining the Espressive Board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $53 million, according to the company.
Company founder and CEO Pat Calhoun says that when he was at ServiceNow he observed that, in many companies, employees often got frustrated looking for answers to basic questions. That resulted in a call to a Help Desk requiring human intervention to answer the question.
He believed that there was a way to automate this with AI-driven chatbots, and he founded Espressive to develop a solution. “Our job is to help employees get immediate answers to their questions or solutions or resolutions to their issues, so that they can get back to work,” he said.
They do that by providing a very narrowly focused natural language processing (NLP) engine to understand the question and find answers quickly, while using machine learning to improve on those answers over time.
“We’re not trying to solve every problem that NLP can address. We’re going after a very specific set of use cases which is really around employee language, and as a result, we’ve really tuned our engine to have the highest accuracy possible in the industry,” Calhoun told TechCrunch.
He says what they’ve done to increase accuracy is combine the NLP with image recognition technology. “What we’ve done is we’ve built our NLP engine on top of some image recognition architecture that’s really designed for a high degree of accuracy and essentially breaks down the phrase to understand the true meaning behind the phrase,” he said.
The solution is designed to provide a single immediate answer. If, for some reason, it can’t understand a request, it will open a help ticket automatically and route it to a human to resolve, but they try to keep that to a minimum. He says that when they deploy their solution, they tune it to the individual customers’ buzzwords and terminology.
So far they have been able to reduce help desk calls by 40% to 60% across customers with around 85% employee participation, which shows that they are using the tool and it’s providing the answers they need. In fact, the product understands 750 million employee phrases out of the box.
The company was founded in 2016. It currently has 65 employees and 35 customers, but with the new funding, both of those numbers should increase.
Powered by WPeMatico
TripActions lays off hundreds amid COVID-19 travel freeze
The coronavirus demand crunch has taken another bite: Palo Alto-based corporate travel-focused unicorn TripActions has confirmed laying off hundreds of staff.
Per this post on Blind — written by someone with a verified TripActions email address — the company laid off 350 people. Business Insider reported the same figure yesterday, and the Wall Street Journal said the layoffs amount to between one-quarter to one-fifth of the startup’s total staff, citing a person familiar with the situation.
Update: A spokesman for TripActions told us the number of impacted employees impacted is “less than 300” — although he qualified the remark by saying the figure includes 25 people who were offered other roles within the company.
In an earlier email to Crunchbase News TripActions confirmed axing jobs in response to the COVID-19 global health crisis — saying it had “cut back on all non-essential spend.” It did not confirm exactly how many employees it had fired at that point.
“[We] made the very difficult decision to reduce our global workforce in line with the current climate,” TripActions wrote in the statement. “We look forward to when the strength of the global economy and business travel inevitably return and we can hire back our colleagues to rejoin us in our mission to make business travel effortless for our customers and users.”
“This global health crisis is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes, and our hearts go out to everyone impacted around the world, including our own customers, partners, suppliers and employees,” it added. “The coronavirus has had [a] wide-reaching effect on the global economy. Every business has been impacted including TripActions. While we were fortunate to have recently raised funding and secured debt financing, we are taking appropriate steps in our business to ensure we are here for our customers and their travelers long into the future.”
Per the post on Blind, TripActions is providing one week of severance to sacked staff and medical cover until end of month. “With [the coronavirus pandemic] going on you think they would do better,” the OP wrote. The layoffs were made by Zoom call, they also said.
However TripActions’ spokesman disputed the details about severance and medical cover, saying it is offering severance packages for U.S. employees that include two months of company-paid COBRA health insurance coverage, extending health benefits through the end of June, along with a minimum of 3 weeks salary.
He added that U.S. employees who were given notice yesterday were told their last day would be April 1, 2020 — meaning their health benefits continue through the end of April.
Travel startups are facing an unprecedented nuclear winter as demand has fallen off a cliff globally — with little prospect of a substantial change to the freeze on most business travel in the coming months as rates of COVID-19 infections continue to grow exponentially outside China.
However, TripActions is one of the highest valued and best financed of such startups, securing a $500 million credit facility for a new corporate product only last month. At the time, Crunchbase recorded $480 million in tracked equity funding for the company, including a $250M Series D TripActions raised in June from investors including a16z, Group 11, Lightspeed and Zeev Ventures.
Before the layoffs, the company had already paused all hiring, per one former technical sourcer for the company writing on LinkedIn.
This post was updated with additional comment from TripActions
Powered by WPeMatico
Looking back at Zoom’s ascent a year after it filed to go public
Zoom, a video chat service then popular with corporations, filed to go public on March 22, 2019.
Best known in venture and corporate circles, Zoom was far from a household name at the time. However, the groundwork for its 2020-era consumer breakthrough during the novel coronavirus epidemic was detailed during its IPO march in the years leading up to its public debut.
The company didn’t begin trading until mid-April last year, but it was through its March 2019 IPO filing that its name took on new prominence; here was a quickly growing software as a service (SaaS) business that was posting profits at the same time. As the rate at which unprofitable companies went public set records, Zoom’s growth and positive net income helped it gain brand recognition even before its shares began to trade.
Investors certainly recognized this was a rarity among SaaS companies, sending its IPO share price up 72% in its first day. The company’s equity has risen more than 100% since that first close, more than doubling in less than a year. Not bad in a market that has turned ice-cold in recent weeks.
To understand how Zoom became so valuable as a business — and later as a consumer product — let’s go back in time to consider its product and business strategies. As we’ll see, to become the video chat tool that everyone is using today, Zoom had to beat a host of entrenched competition. And it did so while making money, helping set the financial stage for its prominence today.
Product history
Powered by WPeMatico
Swiss startup Creal is building display tech for the next generation of AR/VR headsets
After years of hype, the AR/VR space has certainly grown quieter as of late, but some investors are still coalescing behind a vision that the technologies could one day replace mobile if the technical kinks can be worked out.
Creal is a Swiss startup that’s working on some fundamental display technologies that could make VR and AR headsets more comfortable with more life-like optics.
The startup raised a $7.4 million Series A last year from Investiere and DAA Capital Partners. The company announced this week that they received grant funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program to continue working on their light-field display tech.
Light-field displays are a category of displays that are quite a bit different than anything you’ve seen. While existing AR and VR headsets can show you stereoscopic 3D by displaying slightly different images to each of your eyes, future headsets will allow you to change what’s in and out of focus based on where your eyes are looking. The big optics issue this solves for is called the vergence-accommodation conflict, and it allows for interacting with objects closer to your face and functionally makes reading in VR quite a bit more effective as well.
Here’s a “through-the-lens” demo of the startup’s technology from a video posted last year:
There are varying degrees of how the technology is implemented. Magic Leap rolled out a lightweight version of its technology in its headset that leverages a pair of focal planes that are switched between with eye-tracking. This “varifocal” approach is also something that Facebook is investing in; they’ve showcased prototype headsets that allow users to shift their focus between multiple planes.
Creal is having to deal with some of the same struggles as its big company counterparts have when it comes to making sacrifices in order to miniaturize the technology. Integrating their tech into a virtual reality headset is the nearest-term target for the company, though they have ambitions to integrate into lightweight AR headsets within the next several years.
Startups building tech like Creal may be particularly at risk to a global recession, when investment in frontier technologies typically takes a big hit. A prolonged period of economic instability will almost certainly tilt the scales in the favor of big tech companies like Facebook, as startups approaching the same advances will likely be forced to push out roadmaps and cut costs in order to survive.
While Oculus has seen some recent success in expanding the VR market niche, augmented reality hardware has been an incredibly tough sell for startups. A number of companies in the space shut down last year, including Meta, ODG and Daqri. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Magic Leap was positioning itself for a sale after raising billions of dollars in funding.
Powered by WPeMatico
Control each other’s apps with new screensharing tool Screen
It’s like Google Docs for everything. Screen is a free interactive multiplayer screensharing app that gives everyone a cursor so they can navigate, draw on and even code within the apps of their co-workers while voice or video chatting. Screen makes it easy and fun to co-design content, pair program, code review or debug together, or get feedback from a teacher.
Jahanzeb Sherwani sold his last screensharing tool Screenhero to Slack, but it never performed as well crammed inside the messaging app. Five years later, he’s accelerated the launch of Screen to today and made it free to help all the teams stuck working from home amidst coronavirus shelter-in-place orders.
Sherwani claims that Screen is “2x-5x faster than other screen sharing tools, and has between 30ms-50ms end-to-end latency. Most other screen sharing tools have between 100ms-150ms.” For being built by just a two-person team, Screen has a remarkable breadth of features that are all responsive and intuitive. Sherwani says the startup is making due with “no funding, 100% bootstrapped, and I’d like to keep it that way” so he can control his destiny rather than being prodded for an exit by investors.
A few things you can do with Screen:
- Share your screen from desktop on Mac, Windows and Linux while chatting over audio or video calling in a little overlaid window, or join a call and watch from your browser or mobile
- Use your cursor on someone else’s shared screen so you can control or type anything just like it was your computer
- Overlay drawing on the screenshare so you can annotate things like “this is misspelled” or “move this there,” with doodles fading away after a few seconds unless your hold down your mouse or turn on caps lock
- Post ephemeral text comments so you can collaborate even if you have to be quiet
- Launch Screen meetings from Slack and schedule them with Google Calendar integration
- Share invite links with anyone with no need to log in or be at the same company, just be careful who you let control your Screen
Normally Screen is free for joining meetings, $10 per month to host them and $20 per person per month for enterprise teams. But Sherwani writes that for now it’s free to host too “so you can stay healthy & productive during the coronavirus outbreak.” If you can afford to pay, you should, though, as “We’re trying this as an experiment in the hope that the number of paid users is sufficient to pay for our running costs to help us stay break-even.”
Sherwani’s new creation could become an acquisition target for video call giants like Zoom, but he might not be so willing to sell this time around. Founded in 2013, Screenhero was incredibly powerful for its time, offering some of the collaboration tools now in Screen. But after it was acquired by Slack after raising just $1.8 million, Screenhero never got the integration it deserved.
“We finally shipped interactive screen sharing almost three years later, but it wasn’t as performant as Screenhero, and was eventually removed in 2019,” Sherwani writes. “Given that it was used by a tiny fraction of Slack’s user-base, and had a high maintenance cost, this was the correct decision for Slack .” Still, he explains why a company like Screen is better off independent. “Embedding one complex piece of software in another imposes a lot more constraints, which makes it more expensive to build. It’s far easier to have a standalone app that just does one thing well.”
Screen actually does a lot of things well. I tried it with my wife, and the low latency and extensive flexibility made it downright delightful to try co-writing this article. It’s easy to imagine all sorts of social use cases springing up if teens get hold of Screen. The whole concept of screensharing is getting popularized by apps like Squad and Instagram’s new Co-Watching feature that launched today.
The new Co-Watching feature is like screensharing just for Instagram
Eventually, Screen wants to launch a virtual office feature so you can just instantly pull co-workers into meetings. That could make it feel a lot more like collaborating in the same room with someone, where you can start a conversation at any time. Screen could also democratize the remote work landscape by shifting meetings from top-down broadcasts by managers to jam sessions where everyone has a say.
Sherwani concludes, “When working together, everyone needs to have a seat at the table.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Instagram launches Co-Watching of posts during video chat
Now you can scroll Instagram together with friends, turning a typically isolating, passive experience into something more social and active. Today Instagram launched Co-Watching, which lets friends on a video chat or group video chat browse through feed posts one user has Liked or Saved, or that Instagram recommends.
Co-Watching could let people ooh, ahh, joke and talk about Instagram’s content instead of just consuming it solo and maybe posting it to a chat thread so friends can do the same. That could lead to long usage sessions, incentivize users to collect a great depository of Saved posts to share and spur more video calls that drag people into the app. TechCrunch first reported Instagram was testing Co-Watching a year ago, so we’ll see if it managed to work out the technical and privacy questions of operating the feature.
The launch comes alongside other COVID-19 responses from Instagram that include:
- Showing a shared Instagram Story featuring all the posts from you network that include the “Stay Home” sticker
- Adding Story stickers that remind people to wash their hands or keep their distance from others
- Adding coronavirus educational info to the top of results for related searches
- Removing unofficial COVID-19 accounts from recommendations, as well as virus-related content from Explore if it doesn’t come from a credible health organization
- Expanding the donation sticker to more countries so people can search for and ask friends for contributions to relevant nonprofits
These updates build on Instagram’s efforts from two weeks ago, which included putting COVID-19 prevention tips atop the feed, listing official health organizations atop search results and demoting the reach of coronavirus-related content rated false by fact checkers.
But Co-Watching will remain a powerful feature long after the quarantines and social distancing end. The ability to co-view content while browsing social networks has already made screensharing app Squad popular. When Squad launched in January 2019, I suggested that, “With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it.” Facebook tested a Watch Together feature for viewing Facebook Watch videos inside Messenger back in April. And now here we are with Instagram.
The question is whether Squad’s first-mover advantage and option to screenshare from any app will let it hold its own, or if Instagram Co-Watching will just popularize the concept and send users searching for more flexible options like Squad. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality,” Squad CEO Esther Crawford told me. “The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations.”
Squad, which lets you screenshare anything, including websites and your camera roll, won’t be fully steamrolled. When asked if Instagram would build a full-fledged screensharing feature, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said they’re “Not currently working on it . . . screensharing is not at the top of the list for us at Instagram.”
With Co-Watching, Instagram users can spill the tea and gossip about posts live and unfiltered over video chat. When people launch a video chat from the Direct inbox or a chat thread, they’ll see a “Posts” button that launches Co-Watching. They’ll be able to pick from their Liked, Saved or Explore feeds and then reveal it to the video chat, with everyone’s windows lined up beneath the post.
Up to six people can Co-Watch at once on Instagram, consuming feed photos and videos but not IGTV posts. You can share public posts, or private ones that everyone in the chat are allowed to see. If one participant is blocked from viewing a post, it’s ineligible for Co-Watching.
Co-Watching could finally provide an answer to Instagram’s Time Well Spent problem. Research shows how the real danger in social network overuse is passive content consumption, like endless solo feed scrolling. It can inspire envy, poor self-esteem and leave users deflated, especially if the highlights of everyone else’s lives look more interesting than their own day-to-day reality. But active sharing, commenting and messaging can have a positive effect on well-being, making people feel like they have a stronger support network.
With Co-Watching, Instagram has found a way to turn the one-player experience into a multi-player game. Especially now with everyone stuck at home and unable to crowd around one person’s phone to gab about what they see, there’s a great need for this new feature. One concern is that it could be used for bullying, with people all making fun of someone’s posts.
But in general, the idea of sifting through cute animal photos, dance tutorials or epic art could take the focus off the individuals in a video chat. Not having one’s face as the center of attention could make video chat less performative and exhausting. Instead, Co-Watching could let us do apart what we love to do together: just hang out.
Powered by WPeMatico
Revolut launches its neobank in the US
European fintech startup Revolut is launching its app and service in the U.S. Starting today, anybody can sign up and get a Revolut debit card. In the U.S., Revolut has partnered with Metropolitan Commercial Bank for the banking infrastructure — deposits are FDIC insured up to $250,000.
In just a few years, Revolut has managed to attract over 10 million customers by building a financial hub that lets you spend, send, receive and manage money from a single app. The company recently raised a $500 million funding round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion.
But the U.S. has been watching from the sidelines. Tens of thousands of customers have signed up to the waiting list and they’ll now be able to access all of Revolut’s core features.
Like competing challenger banks, such as Chime and N26, Revolut lets you open an account from your phone. After downloading the app, you enter personal details and send a few official documents to comply with know-your-customer regulation.
After that, you get U.S. account details and you can instantly top up your account with a bank transfer or a card transfer. A few days later, you also receive a physical debit card. You can also generate a virtual debit card from the app.
Revolut lets you control your debit card from the app directly. You can receive notifications every time you make a transaction. You can freeze and unfreeze your card, set some limits and restrict some feature, such as online payments or ATM withdrawals.
One of Revolut’s key features is that you can convert from one currency to another based on interbank rate with a low fee — sometimes without any markup for popular currencies and small transactions (more details on foreign exchange fees here). You can hold foreign currencies in your Revolut account or send money to another Revolut user or a bank account in another country.
In the U.S., Revolut offers the ability to receive your salary two days in advance if you share your Revolut banking details with your employer.
Revolut offers a ton of additional features in Europe, but the company is starting with this basic feature set in the U.S. You can expect more features in the future, such as the ability to purchase cryptocurrencies and invest on the stock market.
In Europe, Revolut also offers insurance products through premium monthly subscriptions, mobile phone insurance, savings accounts, credit, rewards and more. Many of those features require partnerships with third-party companies. But it gives you an idea of Revolut’s roadmap in the U.S.
Powered by WPeMatico