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‘Mental fitness’ startup Elevate Labs launches a personalized meditation app called Balance
While investors are already writing big checks for meditation startups, Elevate Labs founder and CEO Jesse Pickard said that none of the existing meditation apps can replace the experience of working with a human coach.
“This experience where you have somebody that meets with you is wildly better than any digital product that’s out there,” Pickard said. “The problem is, it’s not affordable to 99% of the planet.”
So Elevate Labs is launching a new mobile app today called Balance, which is designed to replicate the experience of working with a live meditation coach.
“Even with meditation increasingly getting into the mainstream, it’s a fairly difficult practice to adhere to,” Pickard said. “We take away a lot of that indecision and present you with a path that is unique to you … People live all sorts of different lives: Some people care about stress, some people care about sleep, some people care about focus. But when you and I go into any of the other major apps, we’re getting the exact same recording.”
With Balance, on the other hand, you’re not just browsing through a library of prerecorded content. Instead, the app starts out by asking you about your goals, your meditation experience and more. You’ll then get a set of introductory meditations that may look familiar, but Pickard said that each meditation is actually “a combination of dozens and dozens of clips woven together that’s personalized to you.”
For example, I told the app that I already had experience with meditation, and that my top goal was to stay focused. As a result, my first meditation skipped most of the introductory explanations, and the main exercise was designed to help me focus on the sound of my breath.
Pickard said the app will continue to ask you questions about your experience over time, which in turn will lead to more personalization. The meditations are narrated by coach Leah Santa Cruz, who’s also involved in writing the content, and there are other meditation experts on the Balance team.
The app’s initial 10-day course is free. After that, to get access to additional meditations, you’ll need to pay $11.99 per month, $49.99 per year or $199.99 for a lifetime subscription. In addition to the meditations, Balance also includes a guided activity designed to help people sleep.
On top of launching a new app, Elevate Labs is also announcing that it has raised a $7.1 million Series B led by Keesing Media Group, with participation from Oakhouse Partners.
Under its old name MindSnacks, the company built language-learning games before shifting focus to Elevate, a “brain training” app that has supposedly been downloaded 25 million times and won Apple’s App of the Year Award in 2014. Pickard (who, thanks to the magic of Craigslist, was my roommate for about a year when I was first starting at TechCrunch) said that unlike most of the other apps that are marketed as improving your mind, Elevate focuses on trainable skills like reading, writing and math — rather than, say, improving your memory.
“We’ve been extremely careful about [not] venturing into untrainable skills — things like improving your attention span, those activities are not as provenly teachable,” he said.
It’s been a while since the company has raised outside funding — seven years since MindSnacks announced a Series A from Sequoia. Pickard said the company actually raised another bridge round in 2015, then “buckled down for a number of years and really just had to build a business that actually was sustainable.”
Apparently that’s paid off — he said Elevate Labs was cash-flow positive last year. With a total of $17.1 million in funding, the plan now is to continue supporting and growing Elevate while also launching Balance and building a whole line of related apps.
“We think there’s a really huge brand to be built around mental fitness,” Pickard said.
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Cowboy recruits Sunrise co-founder Jeremy Le Van as VP of Product
Electric-bike maker Cowboy has recruited a well-known name when it comes to mobile app design. Jeremy Le Van co-founded Sunrise, a well-designed calendar app that was acquired by Microsoft back in 2015. Le Van will become VP of Product and lead the development of Cowboy’s mobile app.
Following Sunrise’s acquisition, Le Van worked for Microsoft. Sunrise has been the foundation for the calendar feature of the Outlook mobile app.
“I am incredibly excited to join the Cowboy team and bring my insights into how we can transform the smart bicycle market to make it more appealing to the mobile-first generation,” he said in a statement.
Of course, Cowboy is a hardware company, as it designs and sells an e-bike. The company wants to make e-bikes more efficient. It features an automatic transmission — motor assistance kicks in automatically when you need it the most, such as when you start pedaling, you accelerate or you go uphill.
Cowboy bikes also feature integrated lights (with a rear light that flashes when you break), a rubber and glass fiber belt and a removable battery. Like VanMoof bikes, it has built-in GPS tracking and an integrated SIM card — you unlock the bike with your phone.
But the mobile app is also an essential part of the experience. You can configure the lights, check the battery and get stats from the app. Let’s see how it evolves with today’s appointment.
Cowboy is currently available in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. The startup has raised a €10 million Series A funding round from Tiger Global, Index Ventures, Hardware Club and others.
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Light Phone’s founders discuss life beyond the smartphone
For a seemingly tough pitch, Light has had little trouble getting noticed. The company has run two successful crowdfunding campaigns for a pair of minimalist phones designed to augment or replace the smartphone. Today the startup announced that it will be shipping the second version of the handset, which introduces a handful of features back into the product, like texting.
Ahead of the launch, we spoke to Light’s founders, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier, about funding, feature glut and the future of the handset.
How it all began
Brian Heater: The project essentially started as an in-house at Google, is that correct?
Kaiwei Tang: We met in 2014 in Google’s incubator called 30 Weeks. That’s where we met and started talking about Light Phone eventually.
Joe Hollier: 30 Weeks program was an experiment that came out of the Google creative lab, and their hypothesis was that if given the right resources, guidance, designers might be able to create new creative startups, and that designers should be on the founding table of companies.
So their hypothesis was that we as designers would be able to imagine a new startup in the software application space, and then through designing the end product, which is how the Google creative lab works, we’d be able to inspire the engineers and investors that we would need to make the product a reality.
Brian: What did you see in the market that wasn’t being fulfilled by countless different smartphone companies?
Joe: People were feeling overwhelmed by their smartphone and craving some escape, and we didn’t really see an escape.
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Light’s new minimalist phone is available now for $350
There’s that pesky catch-22 you’ve got to get out of the way when discussing the Light Phone and its successor. There’s an inherent irony to a piece of technology created with the express purpose of weaning us off technology. But it’s 2019, and inherent irony is kind of the name of the game.
Light certainly has its share of supporters. As the company announces that it has both begun shipping the Light Phone II to Indiegogo backers and made the product more directly available through its site at $350 (via pre-order), it’s also revealing its funding for the first time. As of this writing, the company has raised $12.3 million.
The crowdfunding parts we knew about, of course. The original phone raised a solid $400,000 on Kickstarter. The Indiegogo campaign for the second version blew that out of the water at $3.5 million with an emphasis on pre-orders. Turns out VCs are getting in on the action, as well, with $8.4 million raised in seed. Hinge Capital, Bullish, White Bay Group, Able Partners, Product Co-Op and HAX have all chipped in, but the leader is the most interesting of the bunch.
Foxconn is the biggest investor of the bunch. The manufacturing giant, naturally, is also helping the company build the handsets and scale things as Light looks toward retail channels beyond its current online offering.
“They’ve been building smart phones for 20, 30 years,” co-founder Kaiwei Tang told TechCrunch. “When we came to them with the first Light Phone, it was just a simplified, voice-only device. Right after the pitch, I was talking to the sales VP who said, ‘hey Kai, I need Light Phone right now. Smartphone has ruined my life. My kids don’t talk to me.’ ”
A number of other high-profile angel investors were equally taken with the notion of a simplified device that could deliver core functionality while weaning users off of smartphone dependence. John Zimmer (Lyft), Michael Mignano and Nir Zicherman (Anchor), Tim Kendall (Moment) and Scott Belsky (Adobe) have all invested, as well.
Like the original Light Phone, the new version presents a sort of built-in paradox for its creators. If the underlying idea is stripping non-core functionality, isn’t introducing a second version with new features somewhat counter-productive?
The new model will get ridesharing (partner to be announced), music playback (likely via on-board storage for starters), turn-by-turn direction and find my phone features. Among other things, the functionality of those features will be limited by the E Ink display. The phone also finds the company making the jump from 2G to LTE. Users can pop in a SIM from AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile.
“To use an analogy, we’re offering a beautifully designed screwdriver that does one thing well,” says Tang. “Obviously, the Light Phone being an E Ink screen and small size limits it to the users. We don’t encourage people to play videos, or watch video on it. But making a phone call, getting a taxi, listening to music (yes, there’s a headphone jack), recording a voice memo. Maybe down the road they have a calendar reminder, those are the simple tools; it has a clear goal.”
The Light Phone II is probably the least pretty device I’ve reviewed for this site. It’s small, but chunky, like a shrunken e-reader with a screen too small to actually use for e-books. It’s got just enough functionality to (hopefully) free you of your smartphone for hours at a time.
Light says it has sold “tens of thousands” of units. It shipped 15,000 of the first generation and somehow has in the neighborhood of 40,000 reservations it hasn’t filled for the device. The company is looking to push those users toward the Light Phone 2. That device, meanwhile, has around 10,000 pre-orders at present.
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Depop CEO Maria Raga tells us everything about social e-commerce at Disrupt Berlin
Depop started as a simple app to post photos of clothes and offer them for sale. But it has become a cultural phenomenon with millions of users, a vibrant community and even some superusers making a living from the platform. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Depop CEO Maria Raga is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.
Many have tried to merge a social app with a shopping experience, but few have succeeded. Depop is one of them. If you’re an Instagram user, the app looks familiar with its outline icons. But instead of following brands and sometimes buying new items, Depop is all about vintage items, rare sneakers and things you simply can’t find on a regular social network.
Depop users can follow other users, discover items from their favorite brand, get personalized recommendations and, of course, buy and sell items. It’s a social experience that works particularly well on mobile and makes shopping more personal.
Selling something on Depop is as easy as posting photos on a social app. You enter a description, a location, a brand and a price and you’re good to go. After that, other users can buy stuff directly from the app. You can then ship your items and get your money on your PayPal account.
And it’s been a massive success. There are currently more than 13 million users — the vast majority of them are under the age of 26. The company has handled more than $500 million of gross merchandise value since its launch.
Interestingly, some superusers thrived on the platform. Those users are talented when it comes to spotting and acquiring limited-edition clothes, sneaker drops and other valuable items. They sell them on Depop, with some of them generating as much as $100,000 of revenue per year.
Under Maria Raga, Depop has raised more than $100 million. Earlier this summer, the company announced a $62 million funding round led by General Atlantic. It’s clear that Depop is now thriving as both a social app and a marketplace. And I can’t wait to hear how Maria Raga did it.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.
In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.
Maria Raga is the CEO of Depop. Since being promoted to the position in 2016 from VP of Operations, she has presided over every element of the business from finance and engineering to marketing and product. An open and collaborative CEO, Maria is dedicated to her team, which has grown to 150+ employees in 5 offices worldwide in the last three years alone. Perhaps most importantly, since she took over as CEO, she has raised close to $100M in funding, which has helped to grow and nurture the community on Depop – now 13 million users.
Prior to Depop, Maria held successively roles at Groupon and Privalia. Having graduated from Insead MBA, Maria joined Bain & Company as a consultant.
Born in Valencia, Spain, Maria now resides in London with her husband and 2 children. In her spare time, Maria enjoys connecting with Depop’s entrepreneurial Gen-Z constituency and promoting women in the workplace
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Loog launches a trio of new educational guitars
Educational guitar maker Loog returned to Kickstarter this week, some eight years after it first hitting the crowdfunding site. This fourth campaign from the company features a trio of instruments aimed at helping accelerating the learning process.
There are three models, each aimed at a different age group: the Loog Mini (ages 3+), Loog Pro (ages 8+) and Loog Pro VI (ages 12+). The latter of which is the company’s first guitar to sport the standard six strings (versus the three it usually offers).
All have a built-n speaker and amp, reducing the need for additional accessories for a kid’s first instrument. They’re also designed to work with the company’s app, which now utilizes augmented reality (guitAR, if you will), to overlay instructions when using the front facing camera on a mobile device. The are flash cards (for chords), videos and games on-board, as well.
The app also has a song book, featuring a wide variety of popular artists, ranging from The Beatles to Taylor Swift. Kids can slow down and mute tracks to play along karaoke-style, while recording themselves in the process.
Kickstarter prices start at $99 for the Mini, versus $150 at retail. The company keeps going back to the crowdfunding well, but the model has worked pretty well so far. Loog’s started to gain some traction in the music education world and, as evidence by its Kickstarter video, landed in the hands of a couple of actual rockstars in the process.
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Reach Robotics is closing up shop
Reach Robotics, the company behind the spider-like MekaMon robot you might’ve seen on the shelves at the Apple Store, is closing down.
Billed as the “world’s first gaming robot,” MekaMon is part video game, part STEM tool. You could plop it down on the carpet and point your phone at it to battle virtual augmented reality enemies, face off against other MekaMon owners in multiplayer battles or build custom programs for the robot on top of Apple’s Swift Playgrounds.
Here’s a video we did on Reach Robotics a few years back:
Reach Robotics was founded in 2013. They released their MekaMon robot in November of 2017, just a few months after raising a $7.5 million Series A.
News of the shutdown comes from Reach Robotics co-founder Silas Adekunle on LinkedIn (as first noted by The Robot Report), where he writes:
The consumer robotics sector is an inherently challenging space – especially for a start-up. Over the past six years, we have taken on this challenge with consistent passion and ingenuity. From the first trials of development to accelerators and funding rounds, we have fought to bring MekaMon to life and into the hands of the next generation of tech pioneers.
Unfortunately, for Reach Robotics, in its current form at least, today marks the end of that journey.
It doesn’t sound like Adekunle is finished with robotics altogether though. In a public Instagram post, he notes that while “Reach Robotics is closing down today due to tough business circumstances,” he is “looking forward to sharing some exciting new ventures in the Robotics space in Europe and Education in Africa and the Middle East.”
Co-founder John Rees, meanwhile, writes on LinkedIn:
I’m still taking stock of it all but the short version is that it is true what they say – that “hardware is hard” and consumer hardware is even harder due to the reliance on the Christmas sales period.
2019 has been a fairly brutal year for consumer robotics. In March, Jibo, a social robot meant to be cheery and entertaining, personally delivered to owners the news of its impending shutdown with an oh-so-depressing shutdown speech:
The servers for Jibo the social robot are apparently shutting down. Multiple owners report that Jibo himself has been delivering the news: “Maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.” pic.twitter.com/Sns3xAV33h
— Dylan Martin (@DylanLJMartin) March 2, 2019
“Maybe someday, when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes,” said the robot, “you can tell them I said hello.”
Anki, creator of self-driving RC cars and the WALL-E-like robot buddy Cozmo, shut down in April.
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How Zhihu has become one of China’s biggest hubs for experts
Zhihu may not be as well known outside of China as WeChat or ByteDance’s Douyin, but over the past eight years, it has cultivated a reputation for being one of the country’s most trustworthy social media platforms. Originally launched as a question-and-answer site similar to Quora, Zhihu has grown to be a central hub for professional knowledge, allowing users to interact with experts and companies in a wide range of industries.
Headquartered in Beijing, Zhihu recently raised a $434 million Series F, its biggest round since 2011. The funding also brought Zhihu two important new partners: video and live-streaming app Beijing Kuaishou, which led the round, and Baidu, owner of China’s largest search engine (other participants in the round included Tencent and CapitalToday).
Launched in 2011, Zhihu (the name means “do you know”) is most frequently compared to Quora and Yahoo Answers. While it resembled those Q&A platforms at first, it has grown in scope. Now it would be more accurate to say that the platform is like a combination of Quora, LinkedIn and Medium’s subscription program.
For example, Zhihu has an invitation-only blogging platform for verified experts and since launching official accounts, it has become a channel for companies and organizations to communicate with users. A representative for Zhihu told TechCrunch that the platform had 220 million users and 30,000 official accounts as of January 2019 (for context, there are currently about 800 million Internet users in China), who have posted a total of 130 million answers so far.
The company’s growth will be closely watched since Zhihu is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering. Last November, the company hired its first chief financial officer, Sun Wei, heightening speculation. A representative for the company told TechCrunch the position was created because of Zhihu’s business development needs and that there is currently no timeline for a public listing.
At the same time, the company has also dealt with reports that its growth has slowed.
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Bunq simplifies group payment tracking and adds analytics
European challenger bank Bunq is announcing a handful of updates today. You now get a better overview of your account with more insights on how you spend money. If you’re going on vacation with someone else, you can now choose to automatically add transactions to a Slice Group. There are also improvements to VAT management for business users.
Slice Groups are shared accounts for owners of the Bunq Travel Card. You can create a group with multiple Bunq users and then add expenses to the group. You can’t add money to a Slice Group directly. It is essentially a group accounting feature that lets you keep track of who paid for what, who has a positive balance and who has a negative balance.
While you could easily add Bunq transactions to a group, you still had to manually add them every time there are some new transactions. You can now turn on AutoSlice, a feature that lets you temporarily add all card transactions to a Slice Group.
In other news, Bunq wants to give you more information about your spending habits. It starts with a new feature called Bunq Insights. As the name suggests, your payments are now automatically categorized so that you can see a breakdown of what you do with your money.
When you travel, Bunq now gives you information about your travel destination, such as the exchange rate as well as tips and tricks for that country. Bunq users can add recommendations for other Bunq users.
And if you’re always wondering if you’re spending too much money after getting paid, Bunq now tries to predict how much money you’ll have left at the end of the month. The company analyzes your past transactions to predict how much you’re going to spend over the coming weeks.
Finally, Bunq is updating AutoVAT for business users who have to deal with VAT in Europe. In addition to setting aside VAT you’ll have to pay back, the app now counts how much VAT you’ve paid so far so that you know how much you can reclaim. By combining these two figures, you get the exact VAT amount for your taxes.
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Employee survey startup Culture Amp closes $82M round led by Sequoia China
Each unhappy startup may be unhappy in its own way, but there’s still wisdom in understanding what drives employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction across companies.
Culture Amp is just one of the companies aiming to help employees anonymously express how they feel about their place of work, but the Melbourne company is using the anonymized employee survey data from thousands of customers to help them learn from each other and chart which initiatives made a dent.
The eight-year-old startup has picked up a new bout of funding to help it extend its base of customers further.
Culture Amp just closed a sizable $82 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Hostplus, Skip Capital, Grok Ventures, Global Founders Capital and TDM Growth Partners.
The company’s Series E doubles the company’s total funding raised to date, which now sits at $158 million. Culture Amp closed its last major round of funding — a $40 million Series D — in July of last year.
The company’s subscription survey software gives customers all of the templates, questions and analytics that they need to track employee sentiment and visualize the data that they get back. The software can be used for things like quarterly engagement surveys, but it can also power performance reviews, goal-setting and self-reflections.
Employee surveys are certainly nothing revolutionary, but Culture Amp is trying to improve the process by helping its customers start to bring anonymous feedback to the team level so that employees can give more direct feedback to their managers.
CEO Didier Elzinga tells me the company now has 2,500 customers with a collective 3 million Culture Amp employee surveys under their belts. Elzinga tells TechCrunch that harnessing the collective intelligence of its network to predict things like employee turnover is perhaps one of its strongest value propositions.
“Once you understand the experience that people are having, once you know where you should focus, how do we actually help you act on it?” he tells TechCrunch. “A large part is bringing to bear the collective intelligence of the thousands of companies we already have so that you can learn from people that have suffered from the same sorts of problems.”
The 400-person company’s customers include McDonald’s, Salesforce, Slack and Airbnb.
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