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Kik launches beta product after $100 million ICO
Kik made waves last year after a successful $100 million ICO. Now the company has released its first beta product related to its Kin token. Called Kinit, it’s a simple wallet that enables users to earn, store, and spend its tokens.
“Kinit is a fun, easy way to earn Kin, a new cryptocurrency made for your digital life. Earning Kin is just like playing a game, only better, because you get rewarded for completing fun daily activities like surveys, quizzes, interactive videos and more,” reads the Google Play Store description. You can download the app for Android here.
The Kin token is unique for a few reasons. First it is not a traditional ERC-20 token and is instead uses Ethereum for liquidity and the on the Stellar network to improve transaction speed. Further, the company is spending a great deal – about $3 million – to get developers to develop on the token through its KinEcosystem site. The Kinit app is the first effort to get normal users to adopt the tool.
The app makes it possible for users to generate a few dollars in value per day and then exchange those dollars for gift cards and perks. According to CCN, Kik has created a product without a business model and instead it wants to drive the adoption of the token through giveaways.
“Kinit is the first publicly available app dedicated to Kin. Our goal with Kinit is to get Kin into more consumers’ hands. It’s a major step towards making crypto truly consumer-friendly through fun and engaging experiences, and we plan to learn and iterate based on real-world user behavior. We’re excited to get even more people earning and spending Kin — all on the Kin Blockchain,” wrote Rod McLeod, Kik’s VP of communications. The app currently asks you to complete surveys in order to get discounts and gift card codes for products.
With the rise of the product-less ICO it’s clear that Kik has the right idea. By encouraging usage they drive up the token price and token velocity and by launching a general beta full of cutesy imagery and text they are able to avoid the hard questions about developer adoption until far into the future. While the KinIt app is probably not what most Kin holders wanted to see, it’s at least an interim solution while the team builds out sturdier systems.
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Y Combinator to give $10K to 100 grads of its online Startup School
Y Combinator wants to lure more companies into the funnel for its accelerator while democratizing free access to startup knowledge. It’s simultaneously moving up and down market to conquer the acceleration space, with both its recent Series A program for more mature startups and $1 million in grants for high potential founders from its extra-early-stage online course.
Today the entrepreneurship academy announced that the third year of its Startup School program will begin August 27, offering a 10-week set of lectures on how to build, grow and monetize a startup. More than 13,000 companies signed up last year, with 2,800 of the best receiving a YC alumni mentor, and 1,587 completing the program with an online Demo Day. It proved a powerful feeder, leading to 38 being admitted to YC’s core accelerator program that charges 7 percent equity for $120,000 in funding. Those included patent law firm Cognition IP, customer feedback platform Thematic and internet service provider Necto.
Startup School 2017’s participants came from around the world
But this year, YC is going to give 100 high-potential companies that complete the course a $10,000 grant for no equity in return. The cash comes from YC’s own bank account, filled from exits of its portfolio companies over the years and other revenue streams. These prizes could pique the interest of more founders around the world and keep them committed to following through with the self-directed learning. Interested companies can sign up here.
“Useful advice around how to grow products, how to sell, all the mechanics for starting a startup . . . there’s unending demand for that,” says Geoff Ralston, a YC partner and founder of RocketMail that was acquired and became Yahoo Mail. “In some countries it’s the only career path available,” he declares with a bit of the hyperbole Silicon Valley is known for. “In the U.S., it’s become way more mainstream than it ever was years ago.”
The last two years’ Startup School programs have included lectures from WhatsApp’s Jan Koum and Box’s Aaron Levie on how to build a product, Stripe’s Patrick Collison and Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann on hiring and culture, and investors Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway on how to raise money. YC won’t be running the program in partnership with Stanford University like last year, but still hopes to reach as many companies.
Box CEO Aaron Levie gives a Startup School lecture on building product
“Getting the most out of Startup School requires putting a lot in. I watched every lecture, took notes, attended all the office hours, and participated in the online community, and it was all worth it,” said Cognition IP co-founder Bryant Lee. “The learning experience will save you a ton of time down the road.”
Beyond the lectures and shot at the grants, YC will be offering participants more than $50,000 in credits to Amazon Web Services and other enterprise tools, plus discounted payment processing from Stripe. Graduates will also receive an online meeting with a YC partner later in the year to help them prep for applying to the core accelerator. Ralston says YC is already accustomed to vetting thousands of applications, so he’s confident it can sift through the Startup School students to find the gems.
The program effectively creates a vacuum that sucks in startups so YC can start forging a relationship with them. That’s critical, as it needs access to the best companies to make its program profitable since so many early-stage startups are destined to fail or end up generating paltry returns as acqui-hires by bigger corporations.
Startup School founders may be paired with a mentor like YC alum Christian Van Der Henst of Platzi for weekly online office hours
When asked if the “school” might delude some young wantrepreneurs, convincing them to abandon traditional higher learning or safer jobs to launch a company, Ralston countered, saying “I have to reject the idea that knowledge about what it takes to start a startup is weaponized or dangerous to people. I think there are way larger risks in the dynamicism and changes in the wold today than the risks of trying to start a startup or work at a startup and learn an incredible set of skills that are valuable in life or business.” At the very least, having their startup blow up in their face should build character.
“It can be tough for people if and when their startup doesn’t work out,” Ralston concludes. “But it can be tough when you work at a company for 10 years and get fired and don’t know where to go from there.”
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Okta nabs ScaleFT to build out ‘Zero Trust’ security framework
Okta, the cloud identity management company, announced today it has purchased a startup called ScaleFT to bring the Zero Trust concept to the Okta platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While Zero Trust isn’t exactly new to a cloud identity management company like Okta, acquiring ScaleFT gives them a solid cloud-based Zero Trust foundation on which to continue to develop the concept internally.
“To help our customers increase security while also meeting the demands of the modern workforce, we’re acquiring ScaleFT to further our contextual access management vision — and ensure the right people get access to the right resources for the shortest amount of time,” Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest said in a statement.
Zero Trust is a security framework that acknowledges work no longer happens behind the friendly confines of a firewall. In the old days before mobile and cloud, you could be pretty certain that anyone on your corporate network had the authority to be there, but as we have moved into a mobile world, it’s no longer a simple matter to defend a perimeter when there is effectively no such thing. Zero Trust means what it says: you can’t trust anyone on your systems and have to provide an appropriate security posture.
The idea was pioneered by Google’s “BeyondCorp” principals and the founders of ScaleFT are adherents to this idea. According to Okta, “ScaleFT developed a cloud-native Zero Trust access management solution that makes it easier to secure access to company resources without the need for a traditional VPN.”
Okta wants to incorporate the ScaleFT team and, well, scale their solution for large enterprise customers interested in developing this concept, according to a company blog post by Kerrest.
“Together, we’ll work to bring Zero Trust to the enterprise by providing organizations with a framework to protect sensitive data, without compromising on experience. Okta and ScaleFT will deliver next-generation continuous authentication capabilities to secure server access — from cloud to ground,” Kerrest wrote in the blog post.
ScaleFT CEO and co-founder Jason Luce will manage the transition between the two companies, while CTO and co-founder Paul Querna will lead strategy and execution of Okta’s Zero Trust architecture. CSO Marc Rogers will take on the role of Okta’s Executive Director, Cybersecurity Strategy.
The acquisition allows the Okta to move beyond purely managing identity into broader cyber security, at least conceptually. Certainly Roger’s new role suggests the company could have other ideas to expand further into general cyber security beyond Zero Trust.
ScaleFT was founded in 2015 and has raised $2.8 million over two seed rounds, according to Crunchbase data.
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Swim.ai raises $10M to bring real-time analytics to the edge
Once upon a time, it looked like cloud-based serviced would become the central hub for analyzing all IoT data. But it didn’t quite turn out that way because most IoT solutions simply generate too much data to do this effectively and the round-trip to the data center doesn’t work for applications that have to react in real time. Hence the advent of edge computing, which is spawning its own ecosystem of startups.
Among those is Swim.ai, which today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series B funding round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from Silver Creek Ventures and Harris Barton Asset Management. The round also included a strategic investment from Arm, the chip design firm you may still remember as ARM (but don’t write it like that or their PR department will promptly email you). This brings the company’s total funding to about $18 million.
Swim.ai has an interesting take on edge computing. The company’s SWIM EDX product combines both local data processing and analytics with local machine learning. In a traditional approach, the edge devices collect the data, maybe perform some basic operations against the data to bring down the bandwidth cost and then ship it to the cloud where the hard work is done and where, if you are doing machine learning, the models are trained. Swim.ai argues that this doesn’t work for applications that need to respond in real time. Swim.ai, however, performs the model training on the edge device itself by pulling in data from all connected devices. It then builds a digital twin for each one of these devices and uses that to self-train its models based on this data.
“Demand for the EDX software is rapidly increasing, driven by our software’s unique ability to analyze and reduce data, share new insights instantly peer-to-peer – locally at the ‘edge’ on existing equipment. Efficiently processing edge data and enabling insights to be easily created and delivered with the lowest latency are critical needs for any organization,” said Rusty Cumpston, co-founder and CEO of Swim.ai. “We are thrilled to partner with our new and existing investors who share our vision and look forward to shaping the future of real-time analytics at the edge.”
The company doesn’t disclose any current customers, but it is focusing its efforts on manufacturers, service providers and smart city solutions. Update: Swim.ai did tell us about two customers after we published this story: The City of Palo Alto and Itron.
Swim.ai plans to use its new funding to launch a new R&D center in Cambridge, UK, expand its product development team and tackle new verticals and geographies with an expanded sales and marketing team.
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Self-driving car startup Zoox is raising $500 million at a $3.2 billion valuation
Zoox, a once-secretive self-driving car startup, is closing a $500 million raise at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. Prior to the deal, Zoox was valued at $2.7 billion, Zoox confirmed to TechCrunch. The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings its total amount of funding to $800 million.
Zoox’s plan, according to Bloomberg, is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous. Meanwhile, ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft are also working on autonomous vehicles, as well as a number of other large players in the space.
Zoox, which turned four years old this month, is a 500-person company founded by Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson. In the meantime, head over to Bloomberg for the full rundown.
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Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman moves into chairman role
Scott Heiferman, Meetup CEO and co-founder, is today moving into the chairman role at the community-building startup.
Meetup launched in 2003 with a simple goal: to give communities an easy way to meet up in real life. The company has since grown to 40 million members, with 320,000 Meetup groups and around 12,000 Meetups per day around the world.
Late last year, WeWork acquired Meetup for a reported $200 million. According to WeWork, thousands of Meetups were already happening in WeWork locations. Plus, WeWork has been holding its own events focused on community building, so the acquisition seemed like a natural fit.
That said, Heiferman has spent 16 years running Meetup on a day-to-day basis, and is ready to move into a visionary role and appoint someone else to take over leading the team and scaling the company out further. Meetup co-founder Brendan McGovern is moving on from the company, but didn’t share with TechCrunch his future plans.
In the meantime, Meetup is looking for a new CEO.
Here’s what Heiferman had to say in an email to the company:
Team,
Here’s a little summary…
Today I announced I’ll be moving into the role of Chairman at Meetup, and we’re starting the search for a new CEO. Brendan will move on from Meetup at that point.
We hired 100 people so far this year, so we want to add to Meetup’s leadership team. I’ll become Chairman to make room for a new CEO who loves the day-to-day of leading a big team to serve millions of people.
Meanwhile, I’m most obsessed with Meetup reinventing itself to help a billion people create real community in the 2020’s.
The ultimate goal of these changes is for Meetup to have much more positive impact in the world. To be great at the here-and-now. And great at the around-the-corner.
This is a big deal, I know. I care deeply about finding a CEO who will add to this team, grow us, expand us, and make us better than before; a bold move and a fresh generation of leadership.
Scott
FAQs
What’s happening?
We’re looking for a new CEO of Meetup. After we find a new CEO, I’ll move into the role of Chairman. Brendan will move on (when the new CEO comes) to pursue new adventures.
What’s Chairman; what’s CEO?
CEO leads the team and is ultimately responsible for decisions and results. Chairman is involved in strategy and vision.
Why are we looking for a new CEO?
I’ve always been open to the boldest moves to serve our mission — that’s why we joined WeWork last fall. WeWork believes in our potential and they see the incredible opportunity we have to grow and innovate to serve the next 100 million — or billion — members. But to get there, we need more attention and clarity on operational excellence. By stepping into the role of Chairman, where my primary job will be focusing on the vision of serving 10X more people, we can bring in a leader whose primary talent is larger-scale operations and methodical growth processes to complement my skills and accelerate Meetup’s growth.
When is this happening?
The search is kicking off now. It’s a top priority but it could take time to find the right person to join our team. I’m highly involved in the search – as are Shiva Rajaraman and Adam Neumann. I will remain CEO until our new CEO starts, keeping us moving toward our goals.
What are we looking for in a CEO?
It’s a very high bar. Thankfully it’s one of the best jobs in the world. A few of the key criteria:
–Huge belief in our mission and potential
–Success leading a 250+ team to significantly grow a technology product (ideally consumer marketplace/platform/network) by methodically and strategically focusing on key levers
–Operates with the integrity and authenticity that’s always been a part of MeetupWhat will the process be for interviewing and selecting a new CEO?
Shiva, Adam and I are primarily involved in the search and decision. All 12 Meetup Leadteamers will interview final candidates. The new CEO will report to Shiva.
Will there be more changes the leadership team?
There aren’t any changes planned right now. But we’re always open to Changing the Company, and Meetup is going to continue evolving to have the impact we want to have in the world.
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Ultimate Software is acquiring PeopleDoc for $300 million
Public company Ultimate Software is acquiring French startup PeopleDoc for $300 million in cash and stock. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. These two companies both make HR solutions.
Ultimate Software has been around for a while. It went public in 1998 and switched to a software-as-a-service solution in 2002 — this solution is called UltiPro. It lets you manage all things HR, from payroll to benefits, time management, onboarding, performance management and more.
PeopleDoc is a younger French startup that has raised over $50 million. As the name suggests, PeopleDoc lets you centralized all HR documents related to you in a single location. They can come from multiple sources and systems, they’ll all be there.
The startup has also worked on an onboarding solution and other tools to automate HR processes as much as possible. For instance, you can use PeopleDoc to communicate with the HR team and notify them of a change.
Ultimate Software has around 4,100 customers, which represent around 38 million employees. So it’s clear that the company is going after big clients. Each customer employs 9,200 people on average.
PeopleDoc has a thousand customers and serves 4 million employees. While PeopleDoc is significantly smaller than Ultimate Software, it’s a notable acquisition for the startup.
Ultimate Software says that it plans to spend $75 million in cash when the acquisition closes. PeopleDoc shareholders will receive another $50 million a year later.
Finally, Ultimate Software is spending around $175 million in stock for the rest of the acquisition. The company has been doing incredibly well on the stock market, consistently going up over the past ten years.
There are two reasons behind the acquisition. First, Ultimate Software has been mostly focused on American customers. With today’s acquisition, Ultimate Software will be able to convince new international customers, particularly in Europe.
Second, PeopleDoc will continue to operate as a subsidiary as these two companies don’t exactly do the same thing. In fact, Ultimate Software will start distributing PeopleDoc’s services to its own customers next year.
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Ocean Solutions Accelerator names its first wave of conservation startups
Early this year the Sustainable Oceans Alliance announced it would be starting its own accelerator with a focus on conservation. The nonprofit has just announced the Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s first wave of startups: a particularly varied and international lineup that’s easy to root for.
You may also remember that the SOA was one of the beneficiaries of the mysterious Pineapple Fund, administered by a mysterious cryptocurrency multimillionaire. No doubt that has helped get the accelerator on its feet in good time.
The startups — which I’m getting to, be patient — will receive an initial investment to cover the cost of relocating to the Bay Area for eight weeks this summer. There they will receive the loving care of the collection of academics, founders, officials and others in or around the Alliance, plus some important “personal development and executive training” intended to keep your company alive long enough to ship a product.
Interestingly, applications were only open to founders 35 years and under, presumably to get that young blood into the conservation game. Here are the five companies selected to take part:
SafetyNet, from London, makes light-emitting devices that attach to fishing nets and can be programmed to attract or discourage certain kinds of fish. This prevents a boat from catching — and subsequently throwing away — thousands of the wrong fish, a huge waste.
CalWave came out of Berkeley a couple of years ago and has been testing and refining its wave-harvesting renewable energy system, and in fact won a big Department of Energy grant just last year. Now presumably the team is looking to go from prototype to product and do some big installs.
Loliware’s edible cups.
Loliware has created seaweed-based straws and cups that are so compostable you can do it yourself — like, in your mouth. The items last for a day in a drink (or with a drink in them) but when you throw it away it’ll totally dissolve in about two months — or you could literally eat it. The New Yorkers were on Shark Tank and I’m guessing they ate one on camera. You can already order them on Amazon and people say they’re actually pretty tasty.
Etac, a Mexican company from Culiacan, has few details on its site, but SOA’s press release says the company “designs and produces functional nanomaterials for energy and environmental applications, such as oil spill and wastewater cleanup.” I believe them.
And because there can’t be an accelerator without a blockchain startup in it, there’s Blockcycle, based in Sydney, which aims to create a marketplace around waste materials that would normally go to the landfill but could also be valuable to recyclers, reusers and so on. (Turns out there was an uptick in blockchain applications after the Pineapple Fund thing.)
All five companies will present their ideas on September 11 at an event (specifically, a gala) timed to coincide with California Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. And then in October they’ll present again in Bali at the Our Ocean Youth Summit.
“These ocean entrepreneurs are a beacon of hope at a time when new, bold approaches are needed to fast-track innovation and sustain the health of our planet,” said SOA founder and CEO Daniela Fernandez. “By supporting these incredible startups, we are encouraging young people to take ownership of the environmental threats facing their communities, bet against consensus and re-invent existing markets to benefit, instead of harm, our climate, and ocean.”
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Standard Cognition raises another $5.5M to create a cashier-less checkout experience
As Amazon looks to increasingly expand its cashier-less grocery stories — called Amazon Go – across different regions, there’s at least one startup hoping to end up everywhere else beyond Amazon’s empire.
Standard Cognition aims to help businesses create that kind of checkout experience based on machine vision, using image recognition to figure out that a specific person is picking up and walking out the door with a bag of Cheetos. The company said it’s raised an additional $5.5 million in a round in what the company is calling a seed round extension from CRV. The play here is, like many startups, to create something that a massive company is going after — like image recognition for cashier-less checkouts — for the long tail businesses rather than locking them into a single ecosystem.
Standard Cognition works with security cameras that have a bit more power than typical cameras to identify people that walk into a store. Those customers use an app, and the camera identifies everything they are carrying and bills them as they exit the store. The company has said it works to anonymize that data, so there isn’t any kind of product tracking that might chase you around the Internet that you might find on other platforms.
“The platform is built at this point – we are now focused on releasing the platform to each retail partner that signs on with us,” Michael Suswal, Co-founder and COO said. “Most of the surprises coming our way come from learning about how each retailer prefers to run their operations and store experiences. They are all a little different and require us to be flexible with how we deploy.”
It’s a toolkit that makes sense for both larger and smaller retailers, especially as the actual technology to install cameras or other devices that can get high-quality video or have more processing power goes down over time. Baking that into smaller retailers or mom-and-pop stores could help them get more foot traffic or make it easier to keep tabs on what kind of inventory is most popular or selling out more quickly. It offers an opportunity to have an added layer of data about how their store works, which could be increasingly important over time as something like Amazon looks to start taking over the grocery experience with stores like Amazon Go or its massive acquisition of Whole Foods.
“While we save no personal data in the cloud, and the system is built for privacy (no facial recognition among other safety features that come with being a non-cloud solution), we do use the internet for a couple of things,” Suswal said. “One of those things is to update our models and push them fleet wide. This is not a data push. It is light and allows us to make updates to models and add new features. We refer to it as the Tesla model, inspired by the way a driver can have a new feature when they wake up in the morning. We are also able to offer cross-store analytics to the retailer using the cloud, but no personal data is ever stored there.”
It’s thanks to advances in machine learning — and the frameworks and hardware that support it — that have made this kind of technology easier to build for smaller companies. Already there are other companies that look to be third-party providers for popular applications like voice recognition (think SoundHound) or machine vision (think Clarifai). All of those aim to be an option outside of whatever options larger companies might have like Alexa. It also means there is probably going to be a land grab and that there will be other interpretations of what the cashier-less checkout experience looks like, but Standard Cognition is hoping it’ll be able to get into enough stores to be an actual challenger to Amazon Go.
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Dialpad dials up $50M Series D led by Iconiq
Dialpad announced a $50 million Series D investment today, giving the company plenty of capital to keep expanding its business communications platform.
The round was led by Iconiq Capital with help from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amasia, Scale Ventures, Section 32 and Work-Bench. With today’s round, the company has now raised $120 million.
As technology like artificial intelligence and internet of things advances, it’s giving the company an opportunity to expand its platform. Dialpad products include UberConference conferencing software and VoiceAI for voice transcription applications.
The company is competing in a crowded market that includes giants like Google and Cisco and a host of smaller companies like GoToMeeting (owned by LogMeIn), Zoom and BlueJeans. All of these companies are working to provide cloud-based meeting and communications services.
Increasingly, that involves artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) to provide on the fly transcription services. While none of these services is perfect yet, they are growing increasingly accurate.
VoiceAI was launched shortly after Dialpad acquired TalkIQ in May to take this idea a step further by applying sentiment analysis and analytics to voice transcripts. The company plans to use the cash infusion to continue investing in artificial intelligence on the Dialpad platform.
Post call transcript generated by VoiceAI. Screenshot: Dialpad
CEO Craig Walker certainly sees the potential of artificial intelligence for the company moving forward. “Smart CIOs know AI isn’t just another trendy tech tool, it’s the future of work. By arming sales and support teams, and frankly everybody in the organization, with VoiceAI’s real-time artificial intelligence and insights, businesses can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and ultimately their bottom line,” Walker said in a statement.
Dialpad is also working with voice-driven devices like the Amazon Alexa and it announced Alexa integration with Dialpad in April. This allows Alexa users to make calls by saying something like, “Alexa, call Liz Green with Dialpad” and the Echo will make the phone call on your behalf using Dialpad software.
According to the company website, it has over 50,000 customers including WeWork, Stitch Fix, Uber and Reddit. The company says it has added over 10,000 new customers since its last funding round in September, 2017.
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