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Circle raises $110 million (or 13,300 BTC)
Cryptocurrency startup Circle has raised a $110 million funding round, which values the company near $3 billion. Cryptocurrency mining company Bitmain is leading the round.
Existing investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group and Pantera are investing more money. Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures are investing in Circle for the first time. Goldman Sachs also invested in the company in a previous round.
It’s hard to describe Circle in a few words because the company has been active on all fronts. For a really long time, the company pitched itself as a social payment company, a Venmo and Square Cash competitor. But Circle is more focused than ever on cryptocurrencies.
The company has been operating one of the largest over-the-counter trading desks for big cryptocurrency investors and exchanges. Circle Trade manages more than $2 billion a month in transactions and is able to fulfill large orders and provide liquidity.
More recently, the company launched Circle Invest, a really simple mobile app for the U.S. market. It lets you buy and sell Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Zcash and Monero in just a few taps. It’s a good way to get started with cryptocurrencies without learning about exchanges and order types. It could become a good Coinbase competitor for small cryptocurrency investors.
And Circle also acquired Poloniex, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S.
But the most interesting projects right now are probably CENTRE and a new tokenized USD coin. There are so many different cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, exchanges and wallets that it has become hard to make everything work together. Cryptocurrencies still suffer from price volatility, so bitcoin can’t be the common denominator.
That’s why Circle is creating a token that is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The USD Coin is based on an open source framework developed by CENTRE and everything should be audited regularly.
CENTRE is a Circle initiative to create a common framework to connect all electronic wallets. This protocol could let you send money to an Alipay user with your Square Cash balance.
It’s clear that Circle wants to build the infrastructure of the cryptocurrency industry. The company will need to convince multiple industry players to work with Circle, but it could help the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole.
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Parsable secures $40M investment to bring digital to industrial workers
As we increasingly hear about automation, artificial intelligence and robots taking away industrial jobs, Parsable, a San Francisco-based startup sees a different reality, one with millions of workers who for the most part have been left behind when it comes to bringing digital transformation to their jobs.
Parsable has developed a Connected Worker platform to help bring high tech solutions to deskless industrial workers who have been working mostly with paper-based processes. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C cash injection to keep building on that idea.
The round was led by Future Fund with help from B37 and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Airbus Ventures and Aramco Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to nearly $70 million.
The Parsable solution works on almost any smartphone or tablet and is designed to enter information while walking around in environments where a desktop PC or laptop simply wouldn’t be practical. That means being able to tap, swipe and select easily in a mobile context.
Photo: Parsable
The challenge the company faced was the perception these workers didn’t deal well with technology. Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle says the company, which launched in 2013, took its time building its first product because it wanted to give industrial workers something they actually needed, not what engineers thought they needed. This meant a long period of primary research.
The company learned, it had to be dead simple to allow the industry vets who had been on the job for 25 or more years to feel comfortable using it out of the box, while also appealing to younger more tech-savvy workers. The goal was making it feel as familiar as Facebook or texting, common applications even older workers were used to using.
“What we are doing is getting rid of [paper] notebooks for quality, safety and maintenance and providing a digital guide on how to capture work with the objective of increasing efficiency, reducing safety incidents and increasing quality,” Whittle explained.
He likens this to the idea of putting a sensor on a machine, but instead they are putting that instrumentation into the hands of the human worker. “We are effectively putting a sensor on humans to give them connectivity and data to execute work in the same way as machines,” he says.
The company has also made the decision to make the platform flexible to add new technology over time. As an example they support smart glasses, which Whittle says accounts for about 10 percent of its business today. But the founders recognized that reality could change and they wanted to make the platform open enough to take on new technologies as they become available.
Today the company has 30 enterprise customers with 30,000 registered users on the platform. Customers include Ecolab, Schlumberger, Silgan and Shell. They have around 80 employees, but expect to hit 100 by the end of Q3 this year, Whittle says.
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Gfycat starts rolling out 360 degree GIF content
GIFs offer a way to compress a ton of information into a small amount of space, and while Gfycat has positioned itself as more of a short-form video centric platform, it’s going to take a step further to see what a step beyond a standard GIF looks like.
The company today said it would be rolling out 360 degree GIF-like short form videos, which will allow users to plant themselves in the middle of what is effectively a looping video like a GIF. While that presents much more of a challenge to users for generating content, CEO Richard Rabbat said the proliferation of tools like 3D cameras and content from the actual producers like video studios would make it an increasingly popular way to interact with short-form content in a compact form factor.
“We’ve always thought that GIFs are amazing from many perspectives,” Rabbat said. “That goes beyond whether you’re looking at the content to use it in messaging, or you’re consuming it for entertainment value, or you’re using it for decoration in the case of the augmented reality effort we’re working on. We want people to really get excited about how they consume the content to the point where they can see the subjects of the content in a much more lifelike way, and really get excited about that.”
It’s not going to be all that unfamiliar from 360 degree videos you might find on Facebook or other platforms. Users on desktop can use their mouse to move a GIF around, while on mobile devices users can pan their phone around in order to see different parts of the GIF. The idea is to give users a way to have a more robust interaction with a piece of content like a GIF in a compact experience without having to strap on a VR headset or anything along those lines.
The company is starting off by rolling out some 360 degree content from Paramount, which is producing 360 degree content around its Mission Impossible films. And while a lot of content on Gfycat — or other platforms — comes from shows, movies or games along those lines, it makes more sense for those studios to use these kinds of tools to increase awareness for their shows or movies.
There are a lot of companies working on figuring out the best messaging experiences around GIFs. But Google acquiring Tenor, a GIF search tool that works across multiple platforms, may have set a bare minimum bar for the value of companies that are looking to help users share GIFs with their friends. Gfycat positions itself as something that’s geared toward more creator tools, and recently said it hit 180 million monthly active users.
“We’re creating experiences that we think are going to enable others and inspire others to create that same kind of content,” Rabbat said.” We expect it’s going to be a subset of what people do with 2D, but a much more immersive experience where people will spend more time looking at the content. From a consumption perspective, by not requiring people to put on VR headsets, we’re making it much more consumer friendly.”
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Index and Atomico back Teatime Games, a stealthy new startup from QuizUp founders
Teatime Games, a new Icelandic “social games” startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds.
Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the European VC fund founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, for the $7.5 million Series A round. I understand this is the first time the two VC firms have done a Series A deal together in over a decade.
Both VCs have a decent track record in gaming. Index counts King, Roblox and Supercell as previous gaming investments, whilst Atomico also backed Supercell, along with Rovio, and most recently Bossa Studios.
As part of the round, Guzman Diaz of Index Ventures, Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, and David Helgason, founder of Unity, have joined the Teatime Games board of directors.
Meanwhile, Teatime Games is keeping shtum publicly on exactly what the stealthy startup is working on, except that it plays broadly in the social and mobile gaming space. In a call with co-founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson yesterday, he said a little more off the record and on condition that I don’t write about it yet.
What he was willing to describe publicly, however, is the general problem the company has set out to solve, which is how to make mobile games more social and personalised. Specifically, in a way that any social features — including communicating with friends and other players in real-time — enhances the gameplay rather than gets in its way or is simply bolted on as an adjunct to the game itself.
The company’s macro thesis is that games have always been inherently social throughout different eras (e.g. card games, board games, arcades, and consoles), and that most games truly come to life “through the interaction between people, opponents, and the audience”. However, in many respects this has been lost in the age of mobile gaming, which can feel like quite a solitary experience. That’s either because they are single player games or turn-based and played against invisible opponents.
Teatime plans to use the newly disclosed investment to double the size of its team in Iceland, with a particular focus on software engineers, and to further develop its social gaming offering for third party developers. Yes, that’s right, this is clearly a developer platform play, as much as anything else.
On that note, Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman says the next “breakout opportunity” in games will see a move beyond individual studios and titles to what he describes as fundamental enabling technologies. Linked to this he argues that the next generation of games companies being developed will “become ever more mass market and socially connected”. You can read much more on Ljungman and Atomico’s gaming thesis in a blog post recently published by the VC firm.
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MemSQL raises $30M Series D round for its real-time database
MemSQL, a company best known for the real-time capabilities of its eponymous in-memory database, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series D round, bringing the company’s overall funding to $110 million. The round was led by GV (the firm you probably still refer to as Google Ventures) and Glynn Capital. Existing investors Accell, Caffeinated Capital, Data Collective and IA Ventures also participated.
The MemSQL database offers a distributed, relational database that uses standard SQL drivers and queries for transactions and analytics. Its defining feature is the combination of its data ingestions technology that allows users to push millions of events per day into the service while its users can query the records in real time. The company recently showed that its tools can deliver a scan rate of over a trillion rows per second on a cluster with 12 servers.
The database is available for deployments on the major public clouds and on-premises.
MemSQL recently announced that it saw its fourth-quarter commercial booking hit 200 percent year-over-year growth — and that’s typically the kind of growth that investors like to see, even as MemSQL plays in a very competitive market with plenty of incumbents, startups and even open-source projects. Current MemSQL users include the likes of Uber, Akamai, Pinterest, Dell EMC and Comcast.
“MemSQL has achieved strong enterprise traction by delivering a database that enables operational analysis at unique speed and scale, allowing customers to create dynamic, intelligent applications,” said Adam Ghobarah, general partner at GV, in today’s announcement. “The company has demonstrated measurable success with its growing enterprise customer base and we’re excited to invest in the team as they continue to scale.”
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Quarterback lets top esports gamers and streamers create their own fan-based leagues
In an effort to tie the top gamers and streamers more directly with their fans, a new company called Quarterback has just raised $2.5 million to create and manage fan-based leagues for the superstars of the esports and streaming world.
The company raked in its seed round from investors led by Bitkraft Esports, which is quickly building one of the most complete portfolios of gaming-related startups in the industry. Additional investors include Crest Capital Ventures, Deep Space Ventures, UpWest Labs and angel investors.
Essentially, it’s a platform for creating gaming leagues and content driven not by game publishers, leagues, or existing streaming sites like Twitch, but by the gamers themselves. It gives streamers and players a new way to reach their audience, the company claims.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Jonathan Weinberg, who acted as the chief executive for Round Robin and held a leadership role in the mobile game studio Spartonix, Quarterback is the latest attempt to get more revenue into the hands of gamers.
Leagues created on Quarterback can host daily challenges, give away prizes and compete against fan clubs devoted to other top players.
Esports streamers and gamers are among the most bankable influencers, pitching to a new generation of consumers that don’t track traditional media sources. The ability to host and own their own channels gives these streamers an ability to create their own game libraries, cultivate a next generation of talent and encourage one-to-one interactions on platforms they control.
“Most streamers and pros struggle to monetize their fan-base and lose touch with their audience when the fans break away to play their own games,” says Jens Hilgers, a founding partner of Bitkraft Esports Ventures. “Quarterback solves this problem in a unique way by helping streamers become an integral part of their fan’s game-play.”
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Auth0 snags $55M Series D, seeks international expansion
Auth0, a startup based in Seattle, has been helping developers with a set of APIs to build authentication into their applications for the last five years. It’s raised a fair bit of money along the way to help extend that mission, and today the company announced a $55 million Series D.
This round was led by led by Sapphire Ventures with help from World Innovation Lab, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $110 million. The company did not want to share its valuation.
CEO Eugenio Pace said the investment should help them expand further internationally. In fact, one of the investors, World Innovation Lab, is based in Japan and should help with their presence there. “Japan is an important market for us and they should help explain to us how the market works there,” he said.
The company offers an easy way for developers to build in authentication services into their applications, also known as Identification as a Service (IDaaS). It’s a lot like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. Instead of building the authentication layer from scratch, they simply add a few lines of code and can take advantage of the services available on the Auth0 platform.
That platform includes a range of service such as single-sign on, two-factor identification, passwordless log-on and breached password detection.
They have a free tier, which doesn’t even require a credit card, and pay tiers based on the types of users — regular versus enterprise — along with the number of users. They also charge based on machine-to-machine authentication. Pace reports they have 3500 paying customers and tens of thousands of users on the free tier.
All of that has added up to a pretty decent business. While Pace would not share specific numbers, he did indicate the company doubled its revenue last year and expected to do so again this year.
With a cadence of getting funding every year for the last three years, Pace says this round may mark the end of that fundraising cycle for a time. He wasn’t ready to commit to the idea of an IPO, saying that is likely a couple of years away, but he says the company is close to profitability.
With the new influx of money, the company does plan to expand its workforce as moves into markets across the world . They currently have 300 employees, but within a year he expects to be between 400 and 450 worldwide.
The company’s last round was a $30 million Series C last June led by Meritech Capital Partners.
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Genoox raises $6M to help physicians better diagnose patients with genomic data
23andMe, Color, and other genomic sequencing startups have exposed demand from consumers for cheap ways to test for potential problems they may have — and Amir Trabelsi hopes to bring that mentality to medical institutions around the world.
That’s the hope for Genoox, a genomic analysis startup that’s geared toward doctors, clinicians and researchers that hopes to lower the cost of getting data from gene sequencing, and speed that process up, in the same ways that 23andMe and Color have done for consumers. Genoox at its heart is a data science company, taking the raw data from a genome sequencing and figuring out how to convey actionable information to medical professionals — and, hopefully, on a more complete scale than just consumer startups targeting specific health problems. The company said it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Triventures, a healthcare-focused venture firm.
“We want to bring [medical institutions] the ability to run clinical applications and use genomic data part of the clinical routine,” Genoox co-founder Trabelsi said. “We understand the direct-to-consumer market is growing and the demand is growing, but there is a gap in clinical applications. Genomic data is complicated especially when it comes to clinical outcomes — how can you make things more actionable for [professionals], how can you reduce the cost and overhead, and how can you filter out what is relevant and not relevant.”
Trabelsi said the goal is not to just hand a patient information based on their genome, but rather target clinical experts that might be able to use that data and better determine diagnoses for patients. The physician is the one that will have the final say in the decision or diagnosis, and the whole point here is to just take massive amounts of data and figure out a few points that a physician can use in order to make a better judgment call. And beyond that, Genoox can update those doctors as more and more research comes out regarding the potential health complications a patient may have.
Right now Genoox is targeting rare diseases — starting from one launching point, much like Color or 23andMe — but hopes to expand beyond that into other processes like carrier screening or hereditary cancer. This is a strategy that those direct-to-consumer companies are also employing, with Color recently rolling out a test that tries to search for hereditary risk for heart conditions like arrhythmia. As companies get more and more data, they’re able to better sift through a person’s genomic information and flag potential aberrations that could signal increased risk for various conditions.
“We see the growing demand for direct-to-consumer, but we’re also seeing more and more clinical practices using genetic data,” Tabelsi said. “It’s still not efficient or 100% there, but I think the next two years we’re going to see dramatically increased use of genetic data of clinical applications or clinical use. It’s not about the tech, which was proven to be powerful by some cases we were able to solve. I think the technology was kind of proven, along the years, and through some papers we published the question was not about the tech but whether the market is here or where are we in using genetic data.”
Genoox, however, is not the only one targeting clinicians with a data-oriented approach to understanding a patient’s genome. Sophia Genetics is also looking to use genomic data and physician input to better diagnose patients, and also raised an additional $30 million in September last year. As the cost of gene sequencing continues to decline, more and more companies will be going after it as a data play — whether that’s in the consumer or clinician-focused space — and that means Genoox will likely not be alone as it looks to snap up the attention of clinicians and professionals.
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Hospitals can save billions by improving operational efficiencies; Qventus just raised millions to help
A lot of money — about $140 billion — is lost every year in the U.S. healthcare system thanks to inefficient management of basic internal operations, according to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
While there are many factors that contribute to the woeful state of healthcare in the U.S., with greed chief among them, the 2012 study points to one area where hospitals have nothing to lose and literally billions to gain by improving their patient flows.
The problem, according to executives and investors in the startup Qventus, is that hospitals can’t invest in new infrastructure to streamline the process that’s able to work with technology systems that are in some cases decades old — and with an already overtaxed professional staff.
That’s why the founders of Qventus decided to develop a software-based service that throws out dashboards and analytics tools and replaces it with a machine learning-enhanced series of prescriptions for hospital staff to follow when presented with certain conditions.
Qventus’ co-founder and chief executive Mudit Garg started working with hospitals 10 years ago and found the experience “eye-opening.”
“There are lots and lots of people who really really care about giving the best care to every patient, but it depends on a heroic effort from all of those individuals,” Garg said. “It depended on some amazing manager going above and beyond and doing some diving catch to make things work.”
As a software engineer, Garg thought there was a simple solution to the problem — applying data to make processes run more effectively.
In 2012 the company started out with a series of dashboards and data management tools to provide visibility to the hospital administrators and operators about what was happening in their healthcare facilities. But, as Garg soon discovered, when doctors and nurses get busy, they don’t love a dashboard.
From the basic analytics, Garg and his team worked to make the data more predictive — based on historical data about patient flows, the system would send out notifications about how many patients a facility could expect to come in at almost any time of day.
But even the predictive information wasn’t useful enough for the hospitals to act on, so Garg and company went back to the drawing board.
What they finally came up with was a solution that used the data and predictive capabilities to start suggesting potential recipes for dealing with situations in hospitals. Rather than saying that a certain number of patients were likely to be admitted to the hospital, the software suggests actions for addressing the likely scenarios that could occur.
For instance, if there are certain times when the hospital is getting busier, nurses can start discharging patients in anticipation of the need for new capacity in an ICU, Garg said.
Photo courtesy of Paul Burns
That product, some six years in the making, has garnered the attention of a number of top investors in the healthcare space. Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners led the company’s first round, and Qventus managed to snag a new $30 million round from return investors and new lead investor, Bessemer Venture Partners. Strategic backer New York Presbyterian Ventures, the investment arm of the famed New York hospital system, also participated.
So far, Qventus has raised $43 million for its service.
As a result of the deal, Stephen Kraus, a partner at Bessemer, will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.
“Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to increase efficiency, improve margins and enhance patient experience, all while reducing the burden on frontline teams, and they currently lack tools to use data to achieve operational productivity gains,” said Kraus, in a statement.
For Kraus, the application of artificial intelligence to operations is just as transformative for a healthcare system, as its clinical use cases.
“We’ve been looking at this space broadly… AI and ML to improve healthcare… image interpretation, pathology slide interpretation… that’s all going to take a longer time because healthcare is slow to adapt.” said Kraus. “The barriers to adoption in healthcare is frankly the physicians themselves…the average primary care doc is seeing 12 to 20 patients a day… they barely want to adopt their [electronic medical health records]… The idea that they’re going to get comfortable with some neural network or black box technology to change their clinical workflow vs. Qventus which is clinical workflow to strip out cost… That’s lower hanging fruit.”
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Lost in Space is coming back for a second season
Netflix today announced that it will release a second season of Lost in Space, the big-budget sci-fi program that debuted in April.
More Danger, Will Robinson. Lost in Space Season 2 is coming. pic.twitter.com/SBEbJaKUIi
— Lost In Space (@lostinspacetv) May 14, 2018
The series is a revamp of the original show from the 1960s. Season One, which included 10 episodes, follows the Robinson family on their journey from Earth to Alpha Centauri. Along the way, they stumble across extraterrestrial life and a wide array of life-or-death situations.
Many of the elements from the original show have been reimagined, not least of which being the role of Mr. Smith going to Parker Posey, who plays the delightfully wicked villain.
We reviewed the show on the Original Content podcast in this episode, and struggled to find any meaningful flaws.
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