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Sinclair leads $10.3M investment in rideshare advertising startup Octopus
Octopus Interactive, a startup bringing an interactive TV and ad experience into Uber and Lyft rides, has raised a $10.3 million funding round led by Sinclair Digital Group.
Backseat TVs mixing show snippets and commercials have become a common part of the taxi experience in New York City and elsewhere. Octopus is offering something of a more interactive version of this concept to rideshare drivers, who can use it to keep their passengers entertained and also earn extra money.
Octopus says it provides drivers with tablets that combine games (which can include cash prizes, and can also be sponsored), ride information (like maps and weather) and advertising in a 13-minute loop. Even if the passenger doesn’t win anything, this could help keep them occupied during a long ride, which could lead to higher driver ratings. And if the passenger isn’t interested, they can just mute the screen.
The company says it’s deploying technology to make the advertising smarter, for example with geofences to target ads or increase their frequency in a certain neighborhood, and by offering real-time analytics to advertisers. It also monitors the seat to confirm that there’s actually a passenger sitting there when an ad plays.
After launching in 2018, Octopus says it’s now reaching more than 3 million people each month across 10,000 screens in markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. By working with Sinclair Digital Group — an affiliate of TV giant Sinclair — the startup can bring content from local TV stations onto the platform.
“What we see here is an untapped medium with a truly captive audience that is buckled in and looking to engage,” said Sinclair Executive Chairman David Smith in a statement. “We invested in Octopus because the team has successfully created an innovative and differentiated branding opportunity that we can help scale further.”
MathCapital, an investment firm partnered with programmatic advertising company MediaMath, also participated in the funding.
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Reonomy, a massive database of commercial property intel, raises $60M
The property industry — covering people and businesses that invest in, build, purchase or rent and maintain property — is hugely fragmented when it comes both to data sources and the companies that work within it. Today, a New York-based startup that is building a database that helps bring all of that together is raising a round of growth funding to help it expand outside of the U.S.
Reonomy — a startup that ingests some 100 sources of data, including multiple public and proprietary data feeds and crowdsourced information, and then uses artificial intelligence to crunch it to provide market intelligence that is used by developers, investors, acquirers and anyone else who works in the area of commercial property (otherwise known as commercial real estate, CRE, ranging from buildings zoned for business through to multi-dwelling units, but not single private homes) — has closed a Series D round of $60 million.
Today, the company has more than 100,000 customers — with single customers sometimes covering multiple users — along with a database covering some 50 million properties, accounting for some 99% of the commercial inventory in the country. In all, the database also has 80 million companies, 300 million people (those affiliated with the properties), 38 million mortgages and 68 million property sales.
It’s also continuing to add more data sources: along with this round, Reonomy is announcing new partnerships with CoreLogic, Black Knight and Dun & Bradstreet.
The money comes from a mix of financial and strategic backers — underscoring both the company’s potential, and also the calibre of its current customers. Led by Georgian Partners, the funding also included Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and Citi Ventures (both Reonomy users, as part of its property financing activities), Untitled Investments and previous investors Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital and Primary Venture Partners.
Reonomy is not disclosing its valuation, but Rich Sarkis, the founder and CEO, said that it is “definitely an up round.” The startup, founded in 2013, has raised $128 million to date, and according to PitchBook data, it was valued at $153 million post-money in its last round (in 2018). This likely means the valuation is well above $200 million now.
The expression “safe as houses” was born out of the idea that property is a strong bet, because the price eventually always goes up. But the wider development of the market in modern times has shown that it can be a significantly more volatile area — where arcane algorithms created by quants, a lot of greed and a dose of corruption and world economics can have much stronger impacts, resulting in huge booms and crushing busts of global proportions.
In that context, Reonomy positions itself both as a tool not just to get a better picture of what is going on now, but to better predict what might happen. Given the many disparate sources of information that are compiled into its bigger database, the pitch is that this is a must-have, but the alternative way to get it — building on your own — might otherwise require many man-hours and dollars of investment to achieve and understand.
While some database platforms require technical knowledge to shape and query, the idea here is to “lead users to the water” and make the proposition very non-technical.
The potential usefulness of Reonomy’s insights can have many endpoints, Sarkis said. While one obvious area is in sales, it’s also just as used in areas of research and more. Its customers include not just mortgage lenders and property acquirers, but those who work in the property industry in a more hands-on way, such as roofers who might want to get a list of buildings developed in a certain range of years as a way of building a list of leads for properties that might need a roof replacement.
“What our customers have in common is that they are looking for a solution to understand something about the property market,” he said. “We take the mess of data out there and make sense of it, whether the person using Reonomy is an investor or a roofer or someone that is underwriting loans.”
The company today, Sarkis said, covers about 99% of all commercial real estate in the U.S., and the plan is now to take that concept to international markets, including Canada, Asia, Australia and the U.K. and Europe, markets that are more similar to the U.S. than they are different, he added.
“Reonomy has developed a powerful platform to integrate and resolve sources of commercial real estate data into a single, unique identifier for every CRE asset in the United States,” said Emily Walsh, principal at Georgian Partners, in a statement. “This unique identifier is being leveraged by some of the largest enterprises in the world to tie together their public, proprietary and 3rd party data sources and to create a level of visibility into real estate assets that was previously unattainable.”
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With $6.5M in funding, Aircam offers a fast, easy way to share photos at events
Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.
The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).
In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.
“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”
The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.
Manufacturers already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.
Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ Wi-Fi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.
He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”
In other words, once attendees realize that they have access to professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.
This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.
“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”
Evan Rifkin
As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.)
But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.
Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.
The Rifkins told me they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They also can create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.
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An early look at eFounders’ next batch of enterprise SaaS startups
European startup studio eFounders recently reached a portfolio valuation of $1 billion across 23 companies. And the company doesn’t want to stop there, as it is currently launching three new companies and products.
While software-as-a-service companies are trendy, eFounders has been exploring this space for a few years now. The company regularly comes up with ideas for new companies that improve the way we work.
In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keeps a significant stake in its startups. Ideally, startups raise a seed round and take off on their own after a year or two.
And here’s what eFounders has been working on.
Cycle
Cycle is a product management platform. And if you think about product management, it encompasses many things under one title, such as writing specs, planning a roadmap, assigning tasks and defining cycles or sprints.
Many startups use multiple tools for all those tasks. And sometimes, the tools they were using don’t scale well. Cycle will integrate with GitHub, Figma and Zendesk so that you can handle bugs, improvements and features more efficiently.
Finally, Cycle lets you generate product updates for your customers, create public roadmaps and collaborate with other people in your organization.
It has an Airtable vibe as you can create your own views and workflows depending on your needs. You can display data as a timeline, a to-do list, a kanban view, a normal list, etc.
Folk
Talking about Airtable, Folk is easy to describe. What if Salesforce and Airtable had a baby? It would look more or less like Folk.
Folk lets you manage your contacts more efficiently and collaborate with teammates. You can import your address book from iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Excel and CSV files. You can then sort your contacts into groups, and add notes, reminders and tasks.
You also can create many views to go through your contacts. There’s a spreadsheet-like view, a kanban view, a calendar view and even a space view so you can create table layouts for an event.
It’s worth noting that eFounders CEO Thibaud Elziere is also going to be the CEO of Folk.
Once
Once is a new take on visual presentations. It lets you create stories using a drag-and-drop interface and generate a link to send your stories to your customers. Once supports everything you’d expect from an Instagram story, such as images, text, polls and sliders.
You also can embed tweets, YouTube videos or Google Maps addresses in your stories. The best part is that users don’t need to download an app or follow a brand on Instagram. It works in your mobile browser.
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Airbnb to verify all of its listings
Following the death of five people at a Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental, and a scathing Vice report outlining Airbnb’s failure to prevent nation-wide scams, the company says it will begin verifying all seven million of its listings.
Airbnb properties will soon be verified for accuracy of photos, addresses, listing details, cleanliness, safety and basic home amenities, according to a company-wide email sent by Airbnb co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky on Wednesday. All rentals that meet the company’s new standards will be “clearly labeled” by December 15, 2020, he notes. Beginning next month, Airbnb will rebook or refund guests who check into rentals that do not meet the new accuracy standards.
The long-awaited updates to Airbnb’s security measures come months before the company plans to complete an initial public offering or direct listing and just days after Chesky announced the business would ban “party houses,” and work harder to combat unauthorized parties and abusive host and guest conduct.
“We believe that trust on the internet begins with verifying the accuracy of the information on internet platforms, and we believe that this is an important step for our industry,” Chesky said in the staff email.
Airbnb also will launch a 24/7 Neighbor Hotline, which will allow guests to reach a real Airbnb employee from any location at any time. The company will fully roll-out the service next year. Finally, Airbnb will expand its screening of potentially high-risk reservations globally next year.
The new efforts are led by Margaret Richardson, Airbnb’s vice president of trust, who Chesky tasked with rapidly formulating a response to the Halloween party massacre. The company has also tapped Charles Ramsey, former chief of the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. police departments, and Ronald Davis, the former chief of the East Palo Alto police department, to advise the projects.
“More than eleven years after Joe, Nate, and I started Airbnb, I have been asked what has surprised me most about the world,” Chesky writes. “My answer is two things: that people are, in fact, fundamentally good, and that we are 99% the same. We still believe this, and with these changes, we hope to continue to demonstrate this to the world.”
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Stealth fintech startup Digits raises $10.5 million Series A from Benchmark and others
Stealth fintech startup Digits, from the same team that built Crashlytics to scale then sold to Twitter for more than $100 million, has raised a $10.5 million round of Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Benchmark and has the backing of 72 angels, including founders and CEOs from companies like Box, GitHub, Tinder, Twitch, StitchFix, SoFi and several others.
With the round, Digits also gains a new board member, Peter Fenton, who has served on the boards at AirTable, Twitter, NewRelic, Yelp and elsewhere.
The funding is a big bet on serial entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, who launched and sold their crash reporting service to Twitter, which itself later sold it to Google. At Twitter, the team remained to build out the product and launch new services, like Answers. After the sale to Google four years later, it was then folded into Google’s own developer platform to become the crash reporting tool for Android. Today, it’s still on nearly 5 billion monthly active devices and used inside millions of apps.
Now, the Crashlytics co-founders have returned with most of their original team to develop a new fintech startup, Digits, which describes itself vaguely as “a counting company.”
The company’s focus aims to solve a problem the founders had faced themselves when building Crashlytics.
“As builders, there is nothing more exciting than cracking the next engineering puzzle; than perfecting the next design; than delivering the next capability to customers. And there is nothing more mind-numbing than the paperwork, and spreadsheets, and financial reports, and inscrutable transaction records that are all required to actually operate the business,” a Digits blog post earlier this year explained.
“Globally, most entrepreneurs today have no formal training in business finance. We certainly didn’t. Today, you start a company to solve a real problem for real people, or to offer a service you’re skilled at, or to provide a living for you and your family. You don’t start a company because you want to operate a business—but you have to anyway,” the founders said.
While Digits isn’t talking about the specifics of its new product yet, its software is described as pairing design and machine learning in order to “democratize financial savvy.”
More specifically, it leverages APIs, classification algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide a real-time view into a business’ finances, proactively alert you to what’s important and allow you to deep dive into your data to better understand what’s driving your business.
The company believes its approach to visualizing a company’s finances is unique, and apparently a sizable number of investors agree.
Among the 70+ angels backing Digits are Box CEO Aaron Levie; Adam Bain and Dick Costolo (ex COO and CEO of Twitter); Ali Rowghani (partner at Y Combinator, ex-COO Pixar); SoFi CEO Anthony Noto; Drift CEO David Cancel; AngelList board member Jeff Fagnan; Justin Kan (CEO Atrium, co-founder Twitch, YC partner); StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake; GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; First Republic Bank COO Mike Selfridge; Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop; Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen; DraftKings CEO Jason Robins; LegalZoom co-founder Brian Lee; Gusto CEO Josh Reeves; and Notazie CEO Pat Kinsel.
Though Digits hasn’t publicly launched — the product is in invite-only status for now — it already has live customers and is seeing more than $1.5 billion in transactions processing on its platform, the company says.
And unlike Crashlytics, which was based in Boston, Digits is a 100% remote operation. LinkedIn shows just 10 employees, including co-founders Chang and Seibert.
The team hasn’t said when Digits itself will be publicly unveiled or opened to sign-ups.
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Wardrobe picks up $1.5 million for a new fashion rental marketplace
Wardrobe, a new peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round and its public launch out of beta.
The funding was led by angel investor Cyan Banister and Ludlow Ventures, with participation from GroundUp Ventures, Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk and HQ Trivia founder Rus Yusupov, among others.
Wardrobe was founded by Adarsh Alphons after he had an epiphany about just how many items of clothes in his own house went mostly unused. In fact, The WSJ suggests that most people only wear around 20% of their wardrobe on a regular basis. Alphons says that the average woman has 57 items of clothes in her closet that she doesn’t even wear once a year.
So began Wardrobe.
Wardrobe is a peer-to-peer rental marketplace for vintage, designer and luxury brand clothing. However, unlike Rent the Runway or other sharing economy fashion platforms, Wardrobe uses dry cleaners as hubs for the inventory. This not only allows the company to scale more quickly from geography to geography, but also to remain lean without taking on the risk of big warehouses and complicated logistics around shipping.
Here’s how it works:
Folks who want to rent their clothes on Wardrobe simply fill out a few answers to questions and receive a shipping label in the mail. Once their clothes are approved, they’re sent to a local dry cleaner where they wait to be rented for either 4, 10 or 20 days.
Wardrobe HQ handles everything from storage to shipping to photographing the pieces for the app.
The owner of the clothes makes between 70 and 75% of the rental cost after the cost of dry cleaning.
Interestingly, Alphons learned in beta that users want to not only browse the app for clothes, but follow specific users and closets that they particularly like. So the app is now tailored to let users follow one another and watch each other’s closets, creating an environment that may attract influencers to the platform.
Wardrobe currently has partnerships with more than 40 Manhattan dry cleaners, serving all of the island below 110th Street. Alphons says that each dry cleaner can hold between 100 and 1,000 items of clothing at a time.
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Professional network for women Elpha raises seed funding
As slow-moving LinkedIn leaves room for startups to flourish, Elpha aims to create a tailored online network for women in tech.
The company is not only a graduate of Y Combinator, but was conceived of behind the scenes of the San Francisco accelerator program. Cadran Cowansage, the co-founder and chief executive officer of the startup, was a software engineer at YC from 2016 to early 2019. It was during that stint that she created Leap, a tool meant to help her and her colleagues communicate. Soon enough, she’d granted the entire YC network of female founders access to the tool. Then earlier this year, she decided to spin the company out of YC entirely, rebrand and relaunch as Elpha.
“There’s a velocity that comes with building a startup and the pressure of funding that keeps you moving very fast,” Cowansage, who counts Kuan Luo as a co-founder, said of her decision to make Elpha an independent business.
“I had the idea for a long time,” she told TechCrunch. “I didn’t feel like I really had a big enough network of women who were at my level or a bit further along than I could go to for advice. Things like how do I get this promotion? Or my male peers, they are being paid more than me, what do I do about that? The conversations that are difficult that you really want a woman’s perspective on.”
A hybrid social and professional network, Elpha is meant to offer women in tech a dedicated space to communicate via public forums and direct messages, foster relationships and build their careers. The company, which completed YC this summer, is today announcing a $1.1 million round with participation from Y Combinator, the accelerator’s co-founder, CEO and president (Jessica Livingston, Michael Siebel and Geoff Ralston, respectively), as well as Maveron, Moxxie Ventures, JaneVC, Friale, Kabam co-founder and visiting YC partner Holly Liu, Block Party founder Tracy Chou and Breaker co-founder Leah Culver.
The “LinkedIn for women” charges $12,000 in annual subscription fees to companies who use Elpha to identity potential hires. Cowansage said the company currently has 20 paying customers, many of which are venture-backed startups like Lambda School and Webflow. The Elpha team plans to use the seed investment to hire, host events and continue the development of new products, including a mobile app expected out next year.
Ultimately, Cowansage hopes Elpha will bring together women in media, science, medicine and more.
“There’s a huge opportunity to bring women together across different industries and also create those sub-communities,” she said. “There’s a ton we can do from here.”
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Neural Magic gets $15M seed to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs
Neural Magic, a startup founded by a couple of MIT professors, who figured out a way to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs, announced a $15 million seed investment today.
Comcast Ventures led the round, with participation from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Pillar VC and Amdocs. The company had previously received a $5 million pre-seed, making the total raised so far $20 million.
The company also announced early access to its first product, an inference engine that data scientists can run on computers running CPUs, rather than specialized chips like GPUs or TPUs. That means that it could greatly reduce the cost associated with machine learning projects by allowing data scientists to use commodity hardware.
The idea for this solution came from work by MIT professor Nir Shavit and his research partner and co-founder Alex Mateev. As he tells it, they were working on neurobiology data in their lab and found a way to use the commodity hardware he had in place. “I discovered that with the right algorithms we could run these machine learning algorithms on commodity hardware, and that’s where the company started,” Shavit told TechCrunch.
He says there is this false notion that you need these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary resources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t have to be that way. He says his company not only allows you to use this commodity hardware, it also works with more modern development approaches, like containers and microservices.
“Our vision is to enable data science teams to take advantage of the ubiquitous computing platforms they already own to run deep learning models at GPU speeds — in a flexible and containerized way that only commodity CPUs can deliver,” Shavit explained.
He says this also eliminates the memory limitations of these other approaches because CPUs have access to much greater amounts of memory, and this is a key advantage of his company’s approach over and above the cost savings.
“Yes, running on a commodity processor you get the cost savings of running on a CPU, but more importantly, it eliminates all of these huge commercialization problems and essentially this big limitation of the whole field of machine learning of having to work on small models and small data sets because the accelerators are kind of limited. This is the big unlock of Neural Magic,” he said.
Gil Beyda, managing director at lead investor Comcast Ventures, sees a huge market opportunity with an approach that lets people use commodity hardware. “Neural Magic is well down the path of using software to replace high-cost, specialized AI hardware. Software wins because it unlocks the true potential of deep learning to build novel applications and address some of the industry’s biggest challenges,” he said in a statement.
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Investment platform eToro acquires crypto portfolio tracker app Delta
The multi-asset investment platform eToro, which spans “social” stock trading to cryptocurrency, has acquired Delta, the crypto portfolio tracker app.
Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although one source tells me the deal was worth $5 million. It is not clear if it is stock only or cash (or a mixture of both) and if it is contingent on any future targets being met.
The Delta app helps investors make better decisions regarding their crypto investments by providing tools such as portfolio tracking and pricing data. It very much fits with the evolution of eToro, which not only wants to “own” the commission-free stocks (and ETF) space, but has also ventured ambitiously into crypto — most recently bringing crypto asset trading to the U.S.
Delta’s crypto portfolio tracker app has support for more than 6,000 crypto assets from more than 180 exchanges. It provides investors with a range of tools to track and analyse their crypto portfolios. To date, Delta says it has seen 1.5 million downloads and has “hundreds of thousands” of active monthly users.
The acquisition sees Delta become part of the eToro Group, while the Delta team led by Nicolas Van Hoorde will become part of eToroX, reporting to Doron Rosenblum. “The team will continue to be based in Belgium, working in close collaboration with eToro and eToroX employees across the globe,” says eToro.
Meanwhile, eToro is talking up the fact that it is a regulated platform where you can hold crypto and traditional assets in the same portfolio. The idea with the Delta acquisition is to extend that so you’ll be able to track all your investments in once place, starting with crypto and eventually multi-asset. In addition, you’ll be able to trade from the app via eToroX, eToro’s own crypto exchange.
“At a time when other fintechs state that they are not even targeting profitability, we are proud to be a well funded, profitable business that is growing both in terms of geographical coverage but also product range,” says Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, in a statement.
“We are a trading and investing platform that not only provides clients with access to the assets they want, from commission free stocks and ETFs through to FX, commodities and cryptoassets, but also lets customers choose how they invest. They can trade directly, copy another trader or invest in a portfolio. We believe in empowering our clients and the acquisition of Delta will allow us to add an important new element to our offering.”
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