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Hired raises $30M to build an easy subscription pipeline for company hiring
Recruiting is one of the latest industries to get a data science makeover through companies like Hired and Triplebyte, but the former hopes to turn it into a subscription business just like other enterprise software companies — and has raised a new pile of funding to do that.
Hired looks to serve as a one-stop recruiting point for both companies and potential candidates. The startup collects information like a basic profile, some thoughts on what those candidates are looking for, and your resume information, and then crunches that through a series of back-end algorithms and processes in order to figure out the best match for that candidate. It then points those candidates to hiring managers at companies that are looking for a strong pipeline of candidates, though the company now hopes that they will be able to build a kind of recurring revenue model for those companies with its subscription business. Hired today also said it has raised $30 million in new financing led by the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario.
“Outside of your choice of life partner your choice of where to work is the second most important decision to make,” CEO Mehul Patel said. “You spend most of your time at work, and any misery or joy you take back to your life partner. When you look at recruiting, it’s a massive industry, and to companies it’s existential to find great talent — but it’s massively broken. Ask anyone who searches for a job whether it works great, and you are going to get a unanimous answer that it doesn’t.”
Chances are you’ve gotten a few pitches on LinkedIn to go throw your information on Hired, but that’s all part of the performance marketing that the company hopes to use to get a robust set of candidates onto the platform. By doing that, it can continue to not only have a steady stream of candidates, but also collect more and more information on what candidates might be the best fit. For example, a school might not be the best indicator of future success, while the number of followers on a Github account could be a better barometer for the performance of the candidate. It’s a pretty intuitive result, but not one that hiring managers are likely actively tracking unless they already know that’s the best protocol.
Through that, Hired tries to compress the amount of time it takes for a company to say it needs a candidate and then that candidate actually getting hired. The subscription idea is that hiring managers will be able to just post a position — whether it’s new or back-filling an existing role — and keep that steady stream of candidates coming. Patel said the company has been able to squish that threshold down to around 25 days, which was one data point they could flag investors on in order to convince them that the model was working. (The company, which did not disclose its bookings, also said its bookings grew 300% year-over-year, which is a big number but without a point of reference isn’t so useful.)
“We’re seeing the importance of data not just to drive the outcomes — that data lets you compare against other companies and makes sure you’re better hiring for any company,” Patel said. “We have data about which companies are successful, or why aren’t they successful, and we can share that and help companies figure out their best practices. That combination of helping companies hire predictably, or using high quality talent and doing that with great insight, is [where we think we’ll succeed].”
That subscription model is also going to be an important one as a hedge against a potential downturn, where hiring might slow. If the startup is able to convince companies that it is a viable pipeline that they should be paying a recurring fee, it might be able to absorb the shock of a recession and a slowdown in hiring and prove useful in cases like incremental hiring and back-filling old roles. The company also said that it has hired John Kelly to be its vice president of revenue, who previously worked at companies like SAP, Oracle, and FindView.
There’s going to be plenty of competition, especially as these companies are able to collect more and more data. There’s Recruit Holdings, the mega-Frankenstein of companies that include Indeed and GlassDoor (which the company acquired for $1.2 billion), that would likely provide the largest hurdle to cover. Patel said Hired should be able to close the time gap between finding the candidate and the hiring process, which would be the primary metric of success for the company, faster than other companies.
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Nginx lands $43 million Series C to fuel expansion
Nginx, the commercial company behind the open source web server, announced a $43 million Series C investment today led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity.
NEA, which has been on board as an early investor is also participating. As part of the deal, David Campbell, managing director at Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division will join the Nginx board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $103 million, according to the company.
The company was not willing to discuss valuation for this round.
Nginx’s open source approach is already well established running 400 million websites including some of the biggest in the world. Meanwhile, the commercial side of the business has 1,500 paying customers, giving those customers not just support, but additional functionality such as load balancing, an API gateway and analytics.
Nginx CEO Gus Robertson was pleased to get the backing of such prestigious investors. “NEA is one of the largest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and Goldman Sachs is one of the largest investment banks in the world. And so to have both of those parceled together to lead this round is a great testament to the company and the technology and the team,” he said.
The company already has plans to expand its core commercial product, Nginx Plus in the coming weeks. “We need to continue to innovate and build products that help our customers alleviate the complexity of delivery of distributed or micro service based applications. So you’ll see us release a new product in the coming weeks called Controller. Controller is the control plane on top of Nginx Plus,” Robertson explained. (Controller was launched in Beta last fall.)
But with $43 million in the bank, they want to look to build out Nginx Plus even more in the next 12-18 months. They will also be opening new offices globally to add to its international presence, while expanding its partners ecosystem. All of this means an ambitious goal to increase the current staff of 220 to 300 by the end of the year.
The open source product was originally created by Igor Sysoev back in 2002. He introduced the commercial company on top of the open source project in 2011. Robertson came on board as CEO a year later. The company has been growing 100 percent year over year since 2013 and expects to continue that trajectory through 2019.
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Meditation app Calm hits a $250M valuation amid an explosion of interest in mindfulness apps
Just a few years ago, it might have been a bit of a challenge to convince investors that a mindfulness app would end up being a big business — but thanks to an increasing focus on mental health from both startups and larger companies, companies like Calm are now capturing the excitement of investors.
From meditation sessions like you might find on other apps to tracks called “sleep stories” designed to help people get control of their sleep, Calm serves as a suite of content for users focusing on mental wellness. It’s one of an increasingly hot space centered around mental wellness and maintaining a sort of mindfulness in the hope that it’ll convert into a daily habit and help people just generally feel, well, more calm. The company says it has raised $27 million in a new financing round that values it at a $250 million pre-money led by Insight Venture Partners with Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures also participating. Before this, Calm raised around $1.5 million in seed funding.
“There’s definitely a bias toward the physical body in fitness,” co-founder Michael Acton Smith said. “For a long time there’s been a certain amount of embarrassment and shame talking about our own feelings. A lot of people are realizing that we’re all, at different times, going through tough times. I think that’s part of the culture we’ve grown up in. Everything’s been about improving the efficiency and improving the effectiveness and the external circumstances. We haven’t considered the internal circumstances the same way. The same thing isn’t true of eastern philosophies. This crossover is just beginning to happen in a big way.”
Calm, at its core, is a hub of content centered around mindfulness ranging from in-the-moment sessions to tracks that are designed to soothing enough to help people get ready to go to sleep. Everything boils down to trying to help teach users mindfulness, which is in of itself a skill that requires training, co-founder Alex Tew said. This itself has morphed into a business in of itself, with the company generating $22 million in revenue in 2017 and reaching an annual revenue run rate of $75 million.
And the more content the company creates, and the more people come back, the more data it acquires on what’s working and what isn’t. Like any other tech tool or service, some of the content resonates with users and some doesn’t, and the startup looks to employ the same rigor that many other companies with a heavy testing culture to ensure that the experience is simple for users that will jump in and jump out. For example, it turns out a voice named Eric reading stories about being on a train struck a chord with users — so the company invested more in Eric.
“It’s a tricky balance,” Tew said. “Sometimes we’ll launch things that we think are popular but don’t end up being popular, but there’s never been any kind of dramatic errors. We try to create content that will appeal to the biggest range of users. We speak to our customers and find out what they would like.”
Calm’s focus is built off of an increasingly important topic the technology industry is grappling with — mental health. As more and more users pick up Calm and start listening to the tracks, the company can start to figure out what kinds of sessions or tools are helping people want to come back more often and, in theory, start feeling better with those kinds of practices. If you talk to investors in the valley, helping founders manage the highs and lows of starting a company is increasingly part of the discussion, with the refrain that ‘people are at least talking about it now’ showing up more and more often. That’s also helping companies like Calm and Headspace attract funding from the venture community.
“It does feel like a major societal shift,” Acton Smith said. “Just a few years ago no one talked about mental health, it was very much in the shadows. As more politicians talk about it, as the media treat it as something normal and healthy to do, more and more people step out of the shadows and into the light. We realize the brain is pretty much the most complex thing in the known universe, it’s not surprising it goes wrong every now and then. To be able to talk about that and understand it is a very healthy and positive thing. It just feels like we’re at the start, 50 years ago the wave began around physical fitness, jogging, aerobics, and now we’re at the start of this new wave.
Calm and other mindfulness apps are not the only companies at play here. Indeed, the two largest direct owners of smartphone platforms — Apple and Google — this year announced a suite of tools geared toward trying to manage the amount of time users end up glued to their screens. While those are centered around helping users manage their time on their phones, it does show that even the largest companies in the world are increasingly aware of the potential negative effects their devices may have spawned from people spending all their time on their phones.
But by extension, Calm is not the only app where people can throw on some headphones and listen to a soothing voice with a British accent. Headspace is another obvious player in the space, having also raised a substantial amount of funding. Tew said the goal is to remain focused on simplicity, which in the end will keep people coming back over and over — and then end up continuing to drive that business.
“There was a lot of skepticism around Calm and this category as recently as a year ago,” Acton Smith said.” People were concerned that there was a lot of competition, and wondered whether people would really pay for this. We’ve quite convincingly shown we’ve answered all those questions with the growth we’ve had in our user numbers and our revenue. This is a successful business with very high margins and a huge addressable market. If you think about Nike, and the physical exercise boom being worth tens of billions, there’s no reason why mental wellness won’t be.”
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Startup Grind founders raise $6.4M for community event platform Bevy
The founders of entrepreneurial community Startup Grind have a startup of their own — Bevy, which announced today that it has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding.
The funding comes from Upfront Ventures, author Steve Blank, Qualtrics founders Ryan Smith and Jared Smith, and Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard.
CEO Derek Andersen (who founded and runs both Bevy and Startup Grind with CTO Joel Fernandes) said that the product was created to deal with Startup Grind’s challenges as the team tried to organize events using a mix of Eventbrite, Meetup and MailChimp,
“It worked fine at first, but a few years later, we looked up and we had hundreds of cities, and we had maybe 500 people that were working on it, and it was too much,” Andersen said. “For the first time in many years, we started to get smaller instead of bigger. We were spending all of this time just running triage and maintenance on the platform.”
So in early 2016, the team built its own event management software, with what Andersen said was “no intention of anyone else using it.” But eventually, he realized that other companies were facing similar problems, so he launched Bevy as a separate startup to further develop and commercialize the product.
“We really focus on the smaller, community events,” Andersen added. “If you just do a conference, Eventbrite is great — I’ve hosted thousands of events on Eventbrite. But if you want to host five or 10 events a month or jack that number up anywhere above that, and you don’t want to hire 10 people, then that’s really what we’re perfect to do.”
Usually, these are events where community members play a big role, or are even doing most of the organizing themselves. So beyond supporting tasks like creating event listings, sending out promotional emails and managing sponsorships, Andersen said one of Bevy’s big differentiators is the ability to precisely control which users are authorized to perform different roles at different events.
In addition, Andersen said that with Bevy, companies can create fully branded experiences and get full access to the customer data around their events. Customers include Atlassian, Duolingo, Docker, Evernote and Asana.
Andersen also suggested that the company is taking advantage of a broader shift in marketing, where companies are relying more on their own customers and communities.
“All the best companies do it today,” he said. He predicted that in the future, “Every company will have a customer-to-customer marketing strategy. Now we’ve made it affordable and turnkey.”
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Keepsafe launches a privacy-focused mobile browser
Keepsafe, the company behind the private photo app of the same name, is expanding its product lineup today with the release of a mobile web browser.
Co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura argued that all of Keepsafe’s products (which also include a VPN app and a private phone number generator) are united not just by a focus on privacy, but by a determination to make those features simple and easy-to-understand — in contrast to what Belkoura described as “how security is designed in techland,” with lots of jargon and complicated settings.
Plus, when it comes to your online activity, Belkoura said there are different levels of privacy. There’s the question of the government and large tech companies accessing our personal data, which he argued people care about intellectually, but “they don’t really care about it emotionally.”
Then there’s “the nosy neighbor problem,” which Belkoura suggested is something people feel more strongly about: “A billion people are using Gmail and it’s scanning all their email [for advertising], but if I were to walk up to you and say, ‘Hey, can I read your email?’ you’d be like, ‘No, that’s kind of weird, go away.’ ”
It looks like Keepsafe is trying to tackle both kinds of privacy with its browser. For one thing, you can lock the browser with a PIN (it also supports Touch ID, Face ID and Android Fingerprint).
Then once you’re actually browsing, you can either do it in normal tabs, where social, advertising and analytics trackers are blocked (you can toggle which kinds of trackers are affected), but cookies and caching are still allowed — so you stay logged in to websites, and other session data is retained. But if you want an additional layer of privacy, you can open a private tab, where everything gets forgotten as soon as you close it.
While you can get some of these protections just by turning on private/incognito mode in a regular browser, Belkoura said there’s a clarity for consumers when an app is designed specifically for privacy, and the app is part of a broader suite of privacy-focused products. In addition, he said he’s hoping to build meaningful integrations between the different Keepsafe products.
Keepsafe Browser is available for free on iOS and Android.
When asked about monetization, Belkoura said, “I don’t think that the private browser per se is a good place to directly monetize … I’m more interested in saying this is part of the Keepsafe suite and there are other parts of the Keepsafe Suite that we’ll charge you money for.”
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Riskified prevents fraud on your favorite e-commerce site
Meet Riskified, an Israel-based startup that has raised $64 million in total to fight online fraud. The company has built a service that helps you reject transactions from stolen credit cards and approve more transactions from legitimate clients.
If you live in the U.S., chances are you know someone who noticed a fraudulent charge for an expensive purchase with their credit card — it’s still unclear why most restaurants and bars in the U.S. take your card away instead of bringing the card reader to you.
Online purchases, also known as card-not-present transactions, represent the primary source of fraudulent transactions. That’s why e-commerce websites need to optimize their payment system to detect fraudulent transactions and approve all the others.
Riskified uses machine learning to recognize good orders and improve your bottom line. In fact, Riskified is so confident that it guarantees that you’ll never have to pay chargebacks. As long as a transaction is approved by the product, the startup offers chargeback protection. If Riskified made the wrong call, the company reimburses fraudulent chargebacks.
On the other side of the equation, many e-commerce websites leave money on the table by rejecting transactions and false declines. It’s hard to quantify this as some customers end up not ordering anything. Riskified should help you on this front too.
The startup targets big customers — Macy’s, Dyson, Prada, Vestiaire Collective and GOAT are all using it. You can integrate Riskified with popular e-commerce payment systems and solutions, such as Shopify, Magento and Stripe. Riskified also has an API for more sophisticated implementations.
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Lyft’s app code reveals unlaunched bike or scooter feature
Lyft hasn’t acquired a bike-sharing startup or gotten a scooter permit yet, but it’s already preparing its app for them with a feature codenamed “last mile.” Code and screenshots dug out of Lyft’s Android app reveal a way to search a map for last-mile vehicles, and scan a QR code or enter a pin to unlock them.
These materials come to TechCrunch from Jane Manchun Wong, who’s recently established herself as a prolific app code investigator. Her work has led to TechCrunch scoops on Instagram video calling and Usage Insights, Twitter encrypted DMs and Facebook’s personalized emoji Avatars that were confirmed by the companies.
Lyft’s entrance into last-mile vehicles could win customers looking for quick, cheap and exciting transportation beyond the longer car trips it already offers. Renting scooters or bikes from the same app as its car rideshare options would allow it to compete with dedicated last-mile provides like LimeBike and Bird that don’t benefit from the customer cross-pollination. It would also help it keep up with Uber, which recently acquired electric bike-share startup JUMP.
The screenshots show a map you can browse to find nearby vehicles plus a “Scan to ride” button. That brings up a barcode scanner for unlocking the vehicle, though there’s also an option to enter four-digit pin code on your phone for unlocking. Code reveals that vehicles can have a status of “Idle, Unlocking, In Ride, Locked, or Post Ride.”
Lyft is one of a dozen companies the SF Chronicle reports have applied for five dockless scooter permits from San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Regarding these new in-app materials, a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch, “As has been reported I can confirm that we’ve submitted an application to the SFMTA but we aren’t sharing any further details at this time.”
Lyft is vying for a permit alongside Uber, Spin, LimeBike, Bird, Razor, Scoot, Ofo, Skip, CycleHop, Ridecell, and USSCooter. SF recently banned scooter rentals after an unregulated invasion by several of these companies saw the vehicles strewn on sidewalks, obstructing pedestrians.
Lyft’s Android code includes new “last mile” features
Meanwhile, The Information reports that Lyft is in talks to acquire Mobike, offering $250 million or more for the startup that operates NYC’s Citi Bikes, and SF’s Ford GoBikes. But Axios reports Uber is trying to muscle in with its own bid, which could block Lyft or at least force it to pay a higher price. Lyft already offers bike rentals in Baltimore, but only through the Baltimore Bike Share app, not its own.
Some might see all this as premature, with scooter rentals existing in few cities and considerable backlash from some citizens. But given the alternatives are either slow walking, or ridesharing that can increase traffic congestion, create more carbon emissions and be quite expensive for short trips, many who give scooters a shot are finding them quite pleasant.
A driver displays Uber and Lyft ridesharing signs in his car windscreen in Santa Monica, California, U.S., May 23, 2016. About a half dozen ride-hailing firms have rushed into Texas tech hub Austin after market leaders Uber and Lyft left the city a little over a month ago in a huff over municipal requirements that they fingerprint drivers. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/Files
Hopefully, cities will focus on giving permits to dockless bike and scooter companies willing to incentivize proper parking, bike lane riding and helmet usage, and that build reliable hardware that doesn’t end up broken or out of battery on the streets. Given Lyft’s more cooperative brand in comparison to Uber’s more confrontational style, it could leverage its public perception to gain access to markets with these vehicles.
If those permits or acquisitions come through, Lyft clearly wants to move fast to get last-mile transportations in customers’ hands and under their feet.
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Brex picks up $57M to build an easy credit card for startups
While Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi were giving up on their augmented reality startup inside Y Combinator and figuring out what to do next, they saw their batch mates struggling to get even the most basic corporate credit cards — and in a lot of cases, having to guarantee those cards themselves.
Brex, their new startup, aims to try to fix that by offering startups a way to quickly get what’s effectively a credit card that they can use without having to personally guarantee that card or wade through complex processes to finally get a charge card. It’s geared initially towards smaller companies, but Dubugras expects those startups to grow up with it over time — and that Brex is already picking up larger clients. The company, coming out of stealth, said it has raised a total of $57 million from investors including the Y Combinator Continuity fund, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner, financial services VC Ribbit Capital and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella. Y Combinator Continuity fund partner Anu Hariharan and Ribbit Capital managing partner Meyer Malka are joining the company’s board of directors.
“We want to be the best corporate credit card for startups,” Dubugras said. “We’re don’t require a personal guarantee or deposit, and we can give people a credit limit that’s as much as ten times higher. We can get you a virtual credit card in literally 5 minutes, versus traditional banks, in which you’d have to personally guarantee the card and get a low limit and it takes weeks to approve.”
Startup executives go to Brex’s website, sign up, and then put in their bank account info. They then use that banking information to underwrite the card, with the idea being that the service can see that the start has raised millions of dollars and doesn’t have the kind of wild liability that those banks think they might have given how young they are. Once the application is done, companies get a virtual credit card, and they can start divvying up virtual cards with custom limits for their employees. The company says it has attracted more than 1,000 customers and is now opening up globally.
The cards are designed to have better spending limits, and also offer company executives more granular ways to assign those limits to employees. The cards have to be paid off by the end of the month, and the rolling balance for those cards is dependent on the amount of capital each startup has available. The total limit available is, instead, a percentage of the company’s cash balance available. So rather than having to go through the process of getting approved for a card, the service can look at how much money is in a startup’s bank account and adjust the spending limit for all those cards accordingly.
Another aspect is automating the whole expense and auditing process. Rather than just going through typical applications like Concur and inputting specifics, card users can send a text message of a receipt through Brex associated with each transaction. Users will just get a text message about a charge — like a cup of coffee for a meeting with a potential business partner — and reply to that text with a message of the receipt to log the whole process. Everything is geared toward simplifying the whole process for startups that have an opportunity to be a bit more nimble and aren’t bogged down with complex layers of enterprise software. Each expense is looped in with a vendor, so executives can see the total amount of spending that’s happening at that scale.
The ability to have those dynamic spending limits is just one example of what Dubugras hopes will make Brex competitive. Rather than slotting into existing systems, Brex has an opportunity to recreate the back-end processes that power those cards, which larger institutions might not be able to do as they’ve hit a massive scale and get less and less agile. Dubugras and Franceschi previously worked on and sold Pagar.me, a Brazilian payments processor, where they saw firsthand the complex nature of working with global financial institutions — and some of the holes they could exploit.
“It’s not like we’re two geniuses that came up with a lot of things that no one came up with,” Dubugras said. “Implementing them with third-party processors is hard, but we didn’t have any of [those integrations], so we can rebuild them from scratch. It’s hard for banks to throw money at a problem and build those tools. We’ve rebuilt the way that these things work internally — they’d have to change fundamentally how the system works.”
While there are plenty of startups looking to quickly offer virtual cards, like Revolut’s disposable virtual card service, Brex aims to be what’s effectively a corporate card — just one that’s easier to get and works basically the same as a normal card. Users still have to pay off the balance at the end of the month, but the idea there is that Brex can de-risk itself by doing that while still offering startups a way to get a card with a high limit to start paying for the services or tools they need to get started.
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Bet money on yourself with Proveit, the 1-vs-1 trivia app
Pick a category, wager a few dollars and double your money in 60 seconds if you’re smarter and faster than your opponent. Proveit offers a fresh take on trivia and game show apps by letting you win or lose cash on quick 10-question, multiple choice quizzes. Sick of waiting to battle a million people on HQ for a chance at a fraction of the jackpot? Play one-on-one anytime you want or enter into scheduled tournaments with $1,000 or more in prize money, while Proveit takes around 10 percent to 15 percent of the stakes.
“I’d play Jeopardy all the time with my family and wondered ‘why can’t I do this for money?’ ” says co-founder Prem Thomas.
Remarkably, it’s all legal. The Proveit team spent two years getting approved as “skill-based gaming” that exempts it from some laws that have hindered fantasy sports betting apps. And for those at risk of addiction, Proveit offers players and their loved ones a way to cut them off.
The scrappy Florida-based startup has raised $2.3 million so far. With fun games and a snackable format, Proveit lets you enjoy the thrill of betting at a moment’s notice. That could make it a favorite amongst players and investors in a world of mobile games without consequences.
“I could spend $50 for a three-hour experience in a movie theater, or I could spend $2 to enter a Proveit Movies tournament that gives me the opportunity to compete for several thousand dollars in prize money,” says co-founder Nathan Lehoux. “That could pay for a lot of movies tickets!”
Proving it as outsiders
St. Petersburg, Fla. isn’t exactly known as an innovation hub. But outside Tampa Bay, far from the distractions, copycatting and astronomical rent of Silicon Valley, the founders of Proveit built something different. “What if people could play trivia for money just like fantasy sports?” Thomas asked his friend Lehoux.
That’s the same pitch that got me interested when Lehoux tracked me down at TechCrunch’s SXSW party earlier this year. Lehoux is a jolly, outgoing fella who became interested in startups while managing some angel investments for a family office. Thomas had worked in banking and health before starting a yoga-inspired sandals brand. Neither had computer science backgrounds, and they’d raised just a $300,000 seed round from childhood friend Hilt Tatum who’d co-founded beleaguered real money gambling site Absolute Poker.
Yet when he Lehoux thrust the Proveit app into my hand, even on a clogged mobile network at SXSW, it ran smoothly and I immediately felt the adrenaline rush of matching wits for money. They’d initially outsourced development to an NYC firm that burned much of their initial $300,000 seed funding without delivering. Luckily, the Ukrainian they’d hired to help review that shop’s code helped them spin up a whole team there that built an impressive v1 of Proveit.
Meanwhile, the founders worked with a gaming lawyer to secure approvals in 33 states including California, New York, and Texas. “This is a highly regulated and highly controversial space due to all the negative press that fantasy sports drummed up,” says Lehoux. “We talked to 100 banks and processors before finding one who’d work with us.”
Proveit founders (from left): Nathan Lehoux, Prem Thomas
Proveit was finally legal for the three-fourths of the U.S. population, and had a regulatory moat to deter competitors. To raise launch capital, the duo tapped their Florida connections to find John Morgan, a high-profile lawyer and medical marijuana advocate, who footed a $2 million angel round. A team of grad students in Tampa Bay was assembled to concoct the trivia questions, while a third-party AI company assists with weeding out fraud.
Proveit launched early this year, but beyond a SXSW promotion, it has stayed under the radar as it tinkers with tournaments and retention tactics. The app has now reached 80,000 registered users, 6,000 multi-deposit hardcore loyalists and has paid out $750,000 total. But watching HQ trivia climb to more than 1 million players per game has proven a bigger market for Proveit.
Quiz for cash
“We’re actually fans of HQ. We play. We think they’ve revolutionized the game show,” Lehoux tells me. “What we want to do is provide something very different. With HQ, you can’t pick your category. You can’t pick the time you want to play. We want to offer a much more customized experience.”
To play Proveit, you download its iOS-only app and fund your account with a buy-in of $20 to $100, earning more bonus cash with bigger packages (no minors allowed). Then you play a practice round to get the hang of it — something HQ sorely lacks. Once you’re ready, you pick from a list of game categories, each with a fixed wager of about $1 to $5 to play (choose your own bet is in the works). You can test your knowledge of superheroes, the ’90s, quotes, current events, rock ‘n roll, Seinfeld, tech and a rotating selection of other topics.
In each Proveit game you get 10 questions, 1 at a time, with up to 15 seconds to answer each. Most games are head-to-head, with options to be matched with a stranger, or a friend via phone contacts. You score more for quick answers, discouraging cheating via Google, and get penalized for errors. At the end, your score is tallied up and compared to your opponent, with the winner keeping both player’s wagers minus Proveit’s cut. In a minute or so, you could lose $3 or win $5.28. Afterwards you can demand a rematch, go double-or-nothing, head back to the category list or cash out if you have more than $20.
The speed element creates intense, white-knuckled urgency. You can get every question right and still lose if your opponent is faster. So instead of second-guessing until locking in your choice just before the buzzer like on HQ, where one error knocks you out, you race to convert your instincts into answers on Proveit. The near instant gratification of a win or humiliation of a defeat nudge you to play again rather than having to wait for tomorrow’s game.
Proveit will have to compete with free apps like Trivia Crack, prize games like student loan repayer Givling and virtual currency-based Fleetwit, and the juggernaut HQ.
“The large tournaments are the big draw,” Lehoux believes. Instead of playing one-on-one, you can register and ante up for a scheduled tournament where you compete in a single round against hundreds of players for a grand prize. Right now, the players with the top 20 percent of scores win at least their entry fee back or more, with a few geniuses collecting the cash of the rest of the losers.
Just like how DraftKings and FanDuel built their user base with big jackpot tournaments, Proveit hopes to do the same… then get people playing little one-on-one games in-between as they wait for their coffee or commute home from work.
Gaming or gambling?
Thankfully, Proveit understands just how addictive it can be. The startup offers a “self-exclusion” option. “If you feel that you need to take greater control of your life as it relates to skill-gaming,” users can email it to say they shouldn’t play any more, and it will freeze or close their account. Family members and others can also request you be frozen if you share a bank account, they’re your dependant, they’re obligated for your debts or you owe unpaid child support.
“We want Proveit to be a fun, intelligent entertainment option for our players. It’s impossible for us to know who might have an issue with real-money gaming,” Lehoux tells me. “Every responsible real-money game provides this type of option for its users.
That isn’t necessarily enough to thwart addiction, because dopamine can turn people into dopes. Just because the outcome is determined by your answers rather than someone else’s touchdown pass doesn’t change that.
Skill-based betting from home could be much more ripe for abuse than having to drag yourself to a casino, while giving people an excuse that they’re not gambling on chance. Zynga’s titles like Farmville have been turning people into micro-transaction zombies for a decade, and you can’t even win money from them. Simultaneously, sharks could study up on a category and let Proveit’s random matching deliver them willing rookies to strip cash from all day. “This is actually one of the few forms of entertainment that rewards players financially for using their brain,” Lehoux defends.
With so much content to consume and consequence-free games to play, there’s an edgy appeal to the danger of Proveit and apps like it. Its moral stance hinges on how much autonomy you think adults should be afforded. From Coca-Cola to Harley-Davidson to Caesar’s Palace, society has allowed businesses to profit off questionably safe products that some enjoy.
For better and worse, Proveit is one of the most exciting mobile games I’ve ever played.
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SpeakSee makes it simple for a deaf person to join a group conversation
There’s a great deal of activity in the fields of speech recognition and the “Internet of Things,” but one natural application of the two has gone relatively unpursued: helping the deaf and hard of hearing take part in everyday conversations. SpeakSee aims to do this (after crowdfunding, naturally) with a clever hardware design that minimizes setup friction and lets everyone communicate naturally.
It’s meant to be used in situations where someone hard of hearing needs to talk with a handful of others — a meeting, a chat at dinner, asking directions and so on. There are speech-to-text apps out there that can transcribe what someone is saying, but they’re not really suited to the purpose.
“Many deaf people experienced a huge barrier in asking people to download the app and hold the phone close to their mouth. These limitations in the interface meant no one kept using it,” explained SpeakSee CEO and co-founder Jari Hazelebach. “But because we designed our own hardware, we were able to customize it towards the situations it will be used in.”
SpeakSee is simple to use: A set of clip-on microphones live in a little charger case, and when the user wants to have a conversation, they hand those microphones out to whoever will be talking. The case acts as a wireless hub for the mics and relays the audio to the smartphone with which it’s paired. This audio is sent off, transcribed quickly somewhere in the cloud, and displayed on the deaf user’s phone.
Critically, though, each microphone also intelligently and locally accounts for its speaker and background noise.
“Naturally the microphones pick up speech from multiple people,” said Hazelebach. “So we included sensors that tell the microphone what direction the sound is coming from, and the microphones exchange these values. So we can determine which microphone should pick up which person’s speech.”
The result is quickly transcribed speech divided by speaker, delivered quickly and with decent accuracy (there’s always a trade-off between turnaround time and how the process is). And no one has to do anything but wear a mic. (They have a patent pending for this multi-microphone system.)
Hazelebach’s parents are deaf, and he grew up seeing how their ability to interact in ordinary circumstances was being limited.
The mics aren’t exactly small… but that’s how you know they’re real working hardware and not imaginary.
“As you can imagine my parents were the first to test this out,” he said. “At first we had a lot of issues but soon we started engaging with others. We wrote a post on a deaf blog and out of nowhere 200 people signed up. So we’ve been testing in the field with groups in the U.S., and also in the U.K. and the Netherlands.”
Right now English speech recognition is considerably ahead of Dutch and other languages, so the transcriptions will be better for the former, but even so the devices should work with any of 120 languages supported by the cloud service. Transcription is free for up to 5 hours of audio monthly, after which it’s a $10/month subscription. But if it works, it may be more than worth the money.
The team has a finished prototype but is seeking crowdfunding to get production off the ground. “We need to improve the electronics to meet specifications, battery life for example. We expect to ship in February of 2019,” Hazelebach said. Pre-orders are set at $350 for a dock and three mics.
The usual caveats (primarily “emptor”) apply when backing an Indiegogo type campaign — but at the very least, having spoken to the creator, I feel pretty sure this is a real, working product that just needs a boost to get to market.
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