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TFLiving, with $4.8M in seed funding, wants to be the Uber for amenities
TFLiving, looking to bring amenities to residential and commercial spaces, has today announced the close of a $4.8 million seed financing led by Camber Creek. Courtside Ventures, and other strategic investors, also participated in the round.
TFLiving uses technology to connect service providers, like massage therapists, yoga instructors and dog walkers, with property managers and their residents. The service allows residents to sign up for classes or services, as well as request other community events or services, directly from an app.
The most popular use case of the service is fitness, both classes and individual trainings, but TFLiving offers a relatively broad variety of services and experiences to residents at its 300 partnered properties.
Here’s how it works.
TFLiving signs partnerships with property managers of buildings that don’t currently offer amenities, or want to complement existing amenity offerings. After checking out the building, TFLiving determines if there is any under-utliized space in the building, such as a rooftop or a vacant unit, that could be repurposed for community classes.
After evaluating the space, TFLiving surveys residents and determines what they’re interested in via the app, which then serves up options from actual service providers on the service within the guidelines of the property manager’s financial guidelines.
One of the strengths of the business, according to founder and CEO Devin Wirt, is that the cost structure of the platform is highly customizable. Who pays is a question that can be answered by the property manager. If the building has a huge budget for community engagement and the property manager sees value in offering five classes/month and unlimited on-demand massage, they can choose to do so. The property manager can also grant TFLiving access to the building without paying a dime, passing on the full cost of the service to residents.
In most cases, property managers will foot the bill for community events, while residents pay for their own individual services like massage and dog walking.
Because TFLiving’s pricing is based on service and not calculated by number of units, the product can be priced at an affordable cost within the budget of the property and based on demand from the residents.
TFLiving also allows property managers to mark up the class or service and keep a cut of the profit. For example, if a property manager doesn’t have the budget for community classes or services, but doesn’t mind letting residents book individual personal training in the on-site gym, that property manager can mark up the cost of fitness classes by 20% and generate some revenue that could eventually go toward community events.
“One of the things that we stay pretty stringent on is just how far they’re able to market the prices,” said Wirt. “As a core mission of staying affordable to all asset classes, we understand that because we’re not paying a lease, we’re able to charge below market pricing. We still want to stay true to our core mission that we want to provide affordable services.”
Unlike ClassPass, which also connects service providers to users in the fitness space, TFLiving does not dynamically price its various classes and services based on popularity or quality. Fitness classes, for example, are always between $50 and $80, with geography being the main determining factor on specific price.
The company declined to share the revenue breakdown between the company and service providers, but noted that it varies by vertical and that service providers receive a majority of the revenue.
TFLiving currently has agreements with properties across 29 states, with contracts at more than 800 properties, soon covering more than 200,000 units.
Wirt says that he sees the potential to implement TFLiving in commercial spaces as well, such as offices.
Moreover, TFLiving has worked on the tech side to be as useful, not necessarily as prominent, as possible. TFLiving integrates with a variety of property management platforms, from mobile doorman apps to platforms for paying rent to maintenance requests. Residents using those apps can request and book TFLiving amenities straight from those platforms.
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Crypto wallet app ZenGo launches savings mode
ZenGo is expanding beyond the basic features of a cryptocurrency wallet — letting you hold, send and receive crypto assets. You can now set aside some of your crypto assets to earn interests. In other words, ZenGo now also acts like a savings account.
The company has partnered with two DeFi projects for the new feature. DeFi means “decentralized finance”, and it has been a hot trend in the cryptocurrency space. DeFi projects are the blockchain equivalent of traditional financial products. For instance, you can lend and borrow money, invest in derivative assets and more.
If you want to learn more about DeFi, here’s an article I wrote on the subject:
But let’s come back to ZenGo. When you have crypto assets in your ZenGo wallet, you can now open the savings tab, pick an asset, such as Dai, and select what percentage of your holdings you want to set aside.
After that, all you have to do is wait. You get an overview of your savings “accounts” at any time. This way, you can see your total earned interests. Interests are automatically reinvested over time. You can move your money from those DeFi projects back to your wallet whenever you want.
Behind the scene, ZenGo uses the Compound protocol, a lending DeFi project. It works a bit like LendingClub, but on the blockchain. Some users send money to Compound to contribute to liquidity pools. Other users borrow money from that pool.
Interest rates go up and down depending on supply and demand. That’s why you currently earn more interests when you inject DAI or USD Coin in Compound. But that could change over time.
ZenGo also uses Figment in order to stake Tezos. This time, it isn’t a lending marketplace. When you lock some money in a staking project, it means that you support the operations of a particular blockchain. Few blockchains support staking as they need to be based on proof-of-stake.
For the end user, it looks like a savings account whether you’re relying on Compound or Figment. There are other wallet apps that let you access DeFi projects, such as Coinbase Wallet and Argent. But ZenGo thinks they’re still too complicated for regular users.
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VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters
As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly.
Coronavirus fears are now affecting fundraising for startups. I am seeing advice that tells any company that might run out of cash in 2020 to start raising now before things might get a lot tighter. RIPGoodTimes?
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) March 1, 2020
Sequoia Capital sent a letter to its founders on Thursday warning that the coronavirus was a “black swan” event and startups should “brace themselves for turbulence” by considering if they have enough cash and preparing to face supply chain disruptions. The letter also warned they could have a harder time fundraising, similar to the market downturns of 2001 and 2009.
The coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world. Seattle, which has seen a cluster of cases, seems almost a ghost town in some parts, according to entrepreneur and former Madrona Capital partner Shauna Causey. She told TechCrunch that many of the coffee shops and co-working spaces popular among VCs have gone empty in the last week and all of her fundraising meetings are conducted via Zoom.
Given that fundraising can take several months, if their cash out date is 2020, they should be fundraising soon anyway
also hearing from founders it’s already getting hard
— Evelyn Rusli (@EvelynRusli) March 2, 2020
A Singapore-based VC firm told a startup I’m working with that they’re not going to wire the entire $2m investment they committed to in the Series A, which has been in closing the last few weeks. The rationale was to conserve capital due to coronavirus. The funding risk is real.
— Tommy Leep (@leepnet) March 4, 2020
And already there’s some chatter that funding might be drying up for early-stage startups, though Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat tells TechCrunch that startups should always be fundraising as soon as they can to protect themselves from this type of calamity.
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New funding round values catering marketplace Hungry at $100M+
Hungry, a catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs, announced this week that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Hungry tells me that the funding valued the company at more than $100 million (pre-money).
The investors were also pretty impressive: The round was led by Evolution VC Partners and former Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb, who’s joining the startup’s board. Kevin Hart, Jay-Z, Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley, former Obama aide Reggie Love and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner also participated.
CEO Jeff Grass said that he and his co-founders Eman Pahlavani (COO) and Shy Pahlevani (president) got the idea for the company while working at their previous startup LiveSafe.
“LiveSafe was in a food desert, where the best options were Subway and Ruby Tuesday,” Grass said. “We wanted more authentic food and we started thinking about, ‘Is there a better way that taps into local chefs?’ ”
That eventually led to Hungry, which has built up a network of independent chefs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Atlanta, providing catering to companies including Amazon, E-Trade, Microsoft and BCG. The chefs are all screened by Hungry, they cook out of “ghost kitchens” (commercial kitchens that aren’t attached to a restaurant) and then the food is delivered by the Hungry team.
“The food is produced at a much lower cost structure than at a restaurant with a retail location,” Grass said. “And yet you’re not sacrificing on quality. These are top chefs cooking their best dishes — you get higher than restaurant-quality food, but produced at a much lower cost.”
He added that this lower cost also allows the startup to be generous. Specifically, for every two meals sold, Hungry is supposed to donate one meal to end hunger in the U.S., and it has donated nearly 500,000 meals already.
As for the funding, Grass and his team will use it to expand into new markets — he hopes to be in 23 cities by the end of 2021.
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What to consider when employees need to start working remotely
The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates.
If your organization doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won’t have the luxury of conducting a six-month study.
We spoke to a few people who have been looking at the remote working space for more than a decade and asked about the issues companies should bear in mind when a large number of employees suddenly need to work from home.
The lay of the land
Alan Lepofsky, currently VP of Salesforce Quip, has studied the remote work market for more than a decade. He says there are three main pieces to building a remote working strategy. First, managers need to evaluate which tools they’ll be using to allow employees to continue collaborating when they aren’t together.
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Oribi brings its web analytics platform to the US
Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States.
While we’ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren’t built for Oribi’s customers.
“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Shoor told me. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”
She said that Oribi, on the other hand, is designed for small and medium businesses that don’t have large technical teams: “They have digital marketing strategies that are worth a few hundred thousand dollars a month, they have very large activity, but they don’t have a team for it. And I would say that all of them are using Google Analytics.”
Shoor described Oribi as designed specifically “to compete with Google Analytics” by allowing everyone on the team to get the data they need without requiring developers to write new code for every event they want to track.
In fact, if you use Oribi’s plugins for platforms like WordPress and Shopify, there’s no coding at all involved in the process. Apparently, that’s because Oribi is already tracking every major event in the customer journey. It also allows the team to define the conversion goals that they want to focus on — again, with no coding required.
Shoor contrasted Oribi with analytics platforms that simply provide “more and more data” but don’t help customers understand what to do with that data.
“We’ve created something that is much more clean,” she said. “We give them insights of what’s working; in the background, we create all these different queries and correlations about which part of the funnels are broken and where they can optimize.”
There are big businesses using Oribi already — including Audi, Sony and Crowne Plaza — but the company is now turning its attention to U.S. customers. Shoor said Oribi isn’t opening an office in the United States right away, but there are plans to do so in the next year.
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Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6
Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch.
True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration.
The company, which is astoundingly well-funded and led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, says there will be 50 shows live at launch, including:
- “Most Dangerous Game,” a dystopian action thriller starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz
- “Survive,” a drama starring Sophie Turner about the aftermath of a plane crash, based on a novel by Alex Morel
- “Chrissy’s Court,” in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small-claims court
- “Murder House Flip,” in which homeowners try to renovate homes that are infamous for murders committed inside
- “Thanks a Million,” a reality series where celebrities (including executive producer Jennifer Lopez) give $100,000 to regular people who must them pay it forward
- “Last Night’s Last Night,” Entertainment Weekly’s daily recap of late-night shows
- “The Replay by ESPN,” offering daily episodes covering sports news
Quibi says it will release a total of 8,500 episodes across 175 shows in its first year.
Using the company’s “Turnstyle” technology, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between watching videos in portrait and landscape mode. In fact, some shows are designed specifically to offer different-but-complementary viewing experiences in different viewing modes.
The service will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also announcing today that it’s offering a 90-day free trial — but you’ll need to sign up on the Quibi website before the official launch on April 6.
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Horizon raises another $5M to put virtual items on the blockchain and launch its first game
If a player picks up an item in an online video game, who owns that item? The player, or the company that made the game?
In most cases, the answer is probably closer to the latter. The item may be in the player’s digital inventory, but the company can take it away as they please, prevent the player from selling or giving it away, etc.
Horizon Blockchain Games is trying to shift up the idea of ownership in games (starting with their own title), and they’ve raised another $5 million to get it done.
Horizon is working down two paths in parallel here: On one path, they’re building an Ethereum-powered platform called Arcadeum for handling in-game items — establishing who owns any specific instance of an item, and allowing that item to be verifiably traded, sold or given from player to player. Once an item is in a player’s possession, it’s theirs to use, trade or sell as they please; Horizon can’t just take it away. In time, they’ll open up this platform for other developers to build upon.
On the other path, the company is building out its own game — a digital trading card game called SkyWeaver — meant to thrive in its own right while simultaneously showcasing the platform.
SkyWeaver is a fantasy-heavy trading card game perhaps most easily compared to Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It’s free-to-play, and cross-platform across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.
Players in SkyWeaver battle each other using the cards they’ve obtained through buying, earning or trading. There are currently around 500 different cards in all, and each card comes in two different flavors: silver and gold.
ANY card in the game can be purchased in its base “silver” form for $2 — a move the team tells me is meant to level the playing field by enabling anyone with a couple bucks to obtain the cards the playerbase deems most powerful. Meanwhile, a card’s “gold” variant — which changes the card only in appearance, not ability or usefulness — must be earned via competition or bought from other players on the open market. While silver cards can always be bought for $2, gold card values are meant to vary more wildly by rarity/demand.
Cards in SkyWeaver are stored in a player’s Arcadeum wallet on the blockchain — though, for the sake of simplicity, most of the complexities of the blockchain are hidden away behind the scenes. If a player wants to handle things themselves, cards can be transferred to any other Ethereum-based wallet.
SkyWeaver has been in private beta since around July of last year. Horizon’s Chief Architect Peter Kieltyka tells me the game currently has around 12,000 users, with another 92,000 on the wait list.
Horizon first raised $3.75 million in a seed round last year; they’re categorizing this round as an extension of that one. The round is led by returning investors Initialized Capital, and backed by Golden Ventures, DCG, Polychain, CMT Digital, Regah Ventures and ConsenSys.
The company says that SkyWeaver should roll into an open, public beta later this year.
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Mark Cuban backs ChatableApps, developer of a hearing assist app that removes background noise
ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr. Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed money from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time.
Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle — the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) — and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV, who has been tasked with taking the business forward.
“Dr Andy Simpson is our CSO [chief science officer] and inventor,” Tongue tells me. “He brings together the auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, neural signal processing and artificial Intelligence, is an AI maverick and contrarian thinker, and this unusual intersection are what has led to the creation of our proprietary ground up neuroscience-led AI. His prolific research had over 400 citations before he went into stealth mode.”
Since then, the team has been busy (although largely flying under the radar). Chatable’s hearing assistant app is available in the Play Store in open beta but is still considered “pre-launch.”
“We’re in a constant cycle of pre-clinical validation, which is going amazingly,” says Tongue. “We’ve heard ‘life changing,’ and had tears in the eyes… of early adopters.”
Chatable’s O’Driscoll says the company’s technology and approach is “completely unique” because it doesn’t use noise filtering or other DSP techniques. “It’s actually a deep learning neural net approach to speech and noise separation that doesn’t apply filters to the original audio but rather it listens and re-prints a brand new audio stream in near real-time which is a mimic of just the vocal components of the original audio,” he tells me.
Describing Chatable as a “click and go” universal hearing aid, O’Driscoll says the app has been engineered to work on any modern day £100 smartphone and with regular ear buds. “The app produces a clear and loud voice so is easy for the user to hear a conversation, and features two sliders, one to turn up volume, the other to control background noise,” he explains.
More broadly, Tongue believes the “global hearing epidemic” is the biggest health issue at scale that AI can solve, and that Chatable has an opportunity to help millions of people in a life changing way. According to the World Health Organisation there are 466 million people with disabling hearing loss. “I believe Chatable has the power to be the first app able to address a global health epidemic using an everyday smartphone,” he says.
Meanwhile, Chatable plans to generate revenue on a subscription basis, charging £9.99 per month. This is certainly designed to ensure the startup is sustainable and can continue to invest in its product for the long term. (For example, an iPhone version of the app is currently in private beta. However, I hope the price can be brought down over time so that it becomes truly affordable to everybody that needs it.)
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Spindrift, maker of fizzy drinks, has raised $29.8 million
Spindrift, maker of fizzy soda and sparkling water, has raised $29.8 million in a funding round, per an SEC filing. The Charlestown, Mass. company was founded by Bill Creelman and has raised $70 million in known venture capital funding to date, per Crunchbase data.
The company did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Previous investors in the fizzy drink company include Almanac Insights, KarpReilly, Prolong Ventures, VMG Partners and more. Spindrift, founded in 2010, is up against big players, like the beloved and decades-old LaCroix, another sparkling water brand. Spindrift differentiates itself by emphasizing “real fruit” in its drinks. Think cucumbers from Michigan, strawberries from California and Alfonso mangoes from India. A day prior to the filing, Spindrift launched its pineapple flavor.
(In a quick aside looped up with a word we haven’t heard in a while: The company also offered a Golden Pineapple sweepstakes, where 13 winners will get a year’s-supply of free Spindrift and a custom mini-fridge).
Now, it’s worth mentioning that in San Francisco’s Marina district is another fruit-infused direct to consumer brand, sans the bubbles. Hint, founded in 2005 by Kara Goldin, has raised $26.5 million to date from The Perkins Fund and Verlinvest to produce naturally flavored fruit-essence water.
Today, Spindrift raised more than Hint’s total funding in one fell swoop, and both brands, alongside the age-old LaCroix, are synonymous with startup culture and recycling bins. And that tells us that at least according to investors, the future of water is far from, ahem, drying up.
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