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Zephr raises $8M to help news publishers grow subscription revenue
Zephr has raised $8 million in a new funding round led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (owned by media giant Bertelsmann).
The London-headquarted startup’s customers already include publishers like McClatchy, News Corp Australia, Dennis Publishing and PEI Media. CEO James Henderson told me via email that rather than creating “a monolithic product that tries to do a bit of everything,” Zephr is “focused entirely on the experience and journey for the prospect or customer,” driving an average 150% increase in conversion rates and 25% increase in subscription revenue within the first six months.
Henderson added, “By offering the right product, package or message at the right time to the right person, Zephr improves conversion rates, drastically decreases churn and drives new, stable revenue.”
To do this, Zephr largely relies on the publisher’s first-party data about its readers — Henderson said that this data is “by far the most important and powerful type of data that Zephr both uses and generates.” But it also takes advantage of contextual data, such as “time of day, to location, device or consumption patterns.”
He also noted that Zephr is a no-code tool, allowing non-technical members of the marketing, revenue and product teams to use a drag-and-drop editor to create different customer journeys.
Image Credits: Zephr
Asked how the pandemic has affected the startup’s business, Henderson said there were both “positive and negative indicators,” with newsrooms seeing record readership but in some cases also freezing spending.
“As firms prepare for a ‘post-pandemic’ world, we are beginning to see our markets seize the opportunity of all these new potential subscribers and invest in subscription models — and in Zephr.” he said. “In publishing and news media, the old model of dominant advertising revenue is on the way out and we are well-placed to capitalize on that interest.”
The new funding also includes financing from Silicon Valley Bank UK Branch and brings Zephr’s total funding to $11 million. Previous investors include Knight Capital and Nauta Capital.
According to the company’s funding announcement, this money will go toward further product development (with a focus on increased personalization), as well as expansion across the United States, Europe and Asia.
“The recent weakness in the advertising market increased pressure for media companies to diversify revenue streams and aim to introduce or optimize subscription models,” said BDMI Managing Director Urs Cete in a statement. “We recognise Zephr’s excellent technology that empowers publishers to galvanise the online subscription opportunity and create customer journeys that are truly unique.”
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Why Slack and Salesforce execs think they’re better together
When Salesforce bought Slack earlier this week for $27.7 billion, it was in some ways the end of a startup fairytale. Slack was the living embodiment of the Silicon Valley startup success fantasy. It started as a pivot from a game company, of all things. It raised $1.4 billion, went from zero to a $7 billion valuation to IPO, checking off every box on the startup founder’s wish list.
Then quite suddenly this week, Slack was part of Salesforce, plucked off the market for an enormous sum of money.
While we might not ever know the back (Slack) room maneuvering that went on to make the deal a reality, it is interesting to note that Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told me in an interview this week that he was not actually trying to sell the company when he approached Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor earlier this year. Instead, he wanted to buy something from them.
“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn’t really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he’d get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.
At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.
Big money, big expectations
From the Salesforce perspective, Taylor says that the Slack deal was worth the money because it really allows his company to bring together all the pieces of their platform, one that has expanded over the years from pure CRM to include marketing, customer service, data visualization, workflow and more. Taylor also said that having Slack gives Salesforce a missing communication layer on top of its other products, something especially important when interactions with customers, partners or fellow employees have become mostly digital.
“When we say we really want Slack to be this next generation interface for Customer 360, what we mean is we’re pulling together all these systems. How do you rally your teams around these systems in this digital work-anywhere world that we’re in right now where these teams are distributed and collaboration is more important than ever,” Taylor said.
Butterfield sees a natural connection between what people do in the course of their work, what machines do behind the scenes in these systems of record and engagement and how Slack can help bridge the gap between humans and machines.
He says that by putting Slack in the middle of business processes, you can begin to eliminate friction that occurs in complex enterprise software like Salesforce. Instead of moving stuff through email, clicking a link, opening a browser, signing in and then finally accessing the tool you want, the approval could be built into a single Slack message.
“If you have hundreds of those kinds of actions a day, there’s a real opportunity to increase the velocity, and that has an impact, and not just in the minutes saved by the person doing the approval, but the speed of how the whole business operates,” Butterfield said.
Competing with Microsoft
While neither executive said the deal was about competing with Microsoft, it was likely an underlying reason that the companies decided to join forces. They may prove better together than they are separately, and both have complicated histories with Microsoft.
Slack has had an ongoing battle with Microsoft and its Teams product for years. It filed suit against the company last summer in the EU over what it called unfairly bundling of Teams for free with Office 365. In an interview last year with The Wall Street Journal, Butterfield said that he believes Microsoft sees his company as an existential threat. Hyperbole aside, there is tension and competition between the two enterprise software companies.
Salesforce and Microsoft also have a long history, from lawsuits in the early days to making friends and working together when it makes sense after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, while still competing hard in the market. It’s hard not to see the deal in that context.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal said the deal was at least partially about catching Microsoft.
“To get to a market cap of $1 trillion, Salesforce now has to take MSFT head on. Until now, the company has mostly been able to stay in its own swim lane in terms of products,” Agrawal told TechCrunch.
As for Butterfield, while he saw the obvious competition, he denied the deal was about putting his company in a better position to compete with his rival.
“I don’t think that was really an important part of the rationale, at least for me,” he said, adding “the competition with Microsoft is overblown. The challenge for us was the narrative. They’re just good PR or something that I couldn’t figure out,” he said.
While Butterfield cited a list of large clients in enterprise tech, insurance and banking, the narrative has always been that Slack was favored by developer teams, which is where it initially gained traction. Whatever the reality, with Salesforce, Slack is definitely in a better position to compete with any and all comers in the enterprise communications space, and while it will be part of Salesforce, the two companies also have to figure out how to maintain some separation.
Keeping Slack independent
Taylor certainly recognizes that Slack’s current customers are watching closely to see how they handle the acquisition, and his company will have to walk a fine line between respecting the brand and product independence on one hand, while finding ways to create and build upon existing hooks into Salesforce to allow the CRM giant to take full advantage of its substantial investment.
It won’t be easy to do, but you can see a similar level of independence in some of Salesforce’s recent big-money purchases like MuleSoft, the company it bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, and Tableau, the company it bought last year for more than $15 billion. As Butterfield points out, those two companies have clearly maintained their brand identity and independence, and he sees them as role models for Slack.
“So there’s a layer of independence that’s like that [for Mulesoft and Tableau] because it’s not going to help anyone call us Chat Cloud or something like that. They paid a lot of money for us, so they want us to do more of what we were already doing,” he said.
Taylor, whose opinion matters greatly here, certainly sees it in similar terms.
“We want to make sure we have a real integrated value proposition, a real integrated platform for developers, but also maintain Slack’s technology independence, technology agnostic platform and its brand,” he said.
Better together
As for the companies coming together, both men see a lot of potential here to merge Slack communications with Salesforce’s enterprise software prowess to make something better, and Taylor sees Slack helping link the two with workflows and automations.
“When you think about automation, it’s event driven, these long-running processes, automations. If you look at what people are doing with the Slack platform, it’s essentially incorporating workflows and bots and all these things. The combination of the Salesforce platform where I think we have the best automation intelligence capabilities with the Slack platform is incredible,” Taylor said.
The challenge these two men now face as they move forward with this acquisition, and all of the expectations inherent in a deal this large, is making it work. Salesforce has a lot of experience with large acquisitions, and they have handled some well, and some not so well. It’s going to be imperative for both companies that they get this right. It’s now up to Taylor and Butterfield to make sure that happens.
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SunCulture wants to turn Africa into the world’s next bread basket, one solar water pump at a time
The world’s food supply must double by the year 2050 to meet the demands of a growing population, according to a report from the United Nations. And as pressure mounts to find new crop land to support the growth, the world’s eyes are increasingly turning to the African continent as the next potential global bread basket.
While Africa has 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land, according to the African Development Bank, the countries on the continent face significant obstacles as they look to boost the productivity of their agricultural industries.
On the continent, 80% of families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, but only 4% use irrigation. Many families also lack access to reliable and affordable electricity. It’s these twin problems that Samir Ibrahim and his co-founder at SunCulture, Charlie Nichols, have spent the last eight years trying to solve.
Armed with a new financing model and purpose-built small solar-powered generators and water pumps, Nichols and Ibrahim have already built a network of customers using their equipment to increase incomes by anywhere from five to 10 times their previous levels by growing higher-value cash crops, cultivating more land and raising more livestock.
The company also just closed on $14 million in funding to expand its business across Africa.
“We have to double the amount of food we have to create by 2050, and if you look at where there are enough resources to grow food — all signs point to Africa. You have a lot of farmers and a lot of land, and a lot of resources,” Ibrahim said.
African small farmers face two big problems as they look to increase productivity, Ibrahim said. One is access to markets, which alone is a huge source of food waste, and the other is food security because of a lack of stable growing conditions exacerbated by climate change.
As one small farmer told The Economist earlier this year, “The rainy season is not predictable. When it is supposed to rain it doesn’t, then it all comes at once.”
Ibrahim, who graduated from New York University in 2011, had long been drawn to the African continent. His father was born in Tanzania and his mother grew up in Kenya and they eventually found their way to the U.S. But growing up, Ibrahim was told stories about East Africa.
While pursuing a business degree at NYU Ibrahim met Nichols, who had been working on large-scale solar projects in the U.S., at an event for budding entrepreneurs in New York.
The two began a friendship and discussed potential business opportunities stemming from a paper Nichols had read about renewable energy applications in the agriculture industry.
After winning second place in a business plan competition sponsored by NYU, the two men decided to prove that they should have won first. They booked tickets to Kenya and tried to launch a pilot program for their business selling solar-powered water pumps and generators.
Conceptually solar water-pumping systems have been around for decades. But as the costs of solar equipment and energy storage have declined, the systems that leverage those components have become more accessible to a broader swath of the global population.
That timing is part of what has enabled SunCulture to succeed where other companies have stumbled. “We moved here at a time when [solar] reached grid parity in a lot of markets. It was at a time when a lot of development financiers were funding the nexus between agriculture and energy,” said Ibrahim.
Initially, the company sold its integrated energy generation and water-pumping systems to the middle income farmers who hold jobs in cities like Nairobi and cultivate crops on land they own in rural areas. These “telephone farmers” were willing to spend the $5,000 required to install SunCulture’s initial systems.
Now, the cost of a system is somewhere between $500 and $1,000 and is more accessible for the 570 million farming households across the word — with the company’s “pay-as-you-grow” model.
It’s a spin on what’s become a popular business model for the distribution of solar systems of all types across Africa. Investors have poured nearly $1 billion into the development of off-grid solar energy and retail technology companies like M-kopa, Greenlight Planet, d.light design, ZOLA Electric and SolarHome, according to Ibrahim. In some ways, SunCulture just extends that model to agricultural applications.
“We have had to bundle services and financing. The reason this particularly works is because our customers are increasing their incomes four or five times,” said Ibrahim. “Most of the money has been going to consuming power. This is the first time there has been productive power.”
SunCulture’s hardware consists of 300-watt solar panels and a 440-watt-hour battery system. The batteries can support up to four lights, two phones and a plug-in submersible water pump.
The company’s best-selling product line can support irrigation for a two-and-a-half acre farm, Ibrahim said. “We see ourselves as an entry point for other types of appliances. We’re growing to be the largest solar company for Africa.”
With the $14 million in funding, from investors including Energy Access Ventures (EAV), Électricité de France (EDF), Acumen Capital Partners (ACP) and Dream Project Incubators (DPI), SunCulture will expand its footprint in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Senegal, Togo and Cote D’Ivoire, the company said.
Ekta Partners acted as the financial advisor for the deal, while CrossBoundary provided additional advisory support, including an analysis on the market opportunity and competitive landscape, under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Kenya Investment Mechanism Program.
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Gift Guide: Games on every platform to get you through the long, COVID winter
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.
It’s a great time to be a gamer — I mean, what else is there to do? And with the prospect of a long winter and lonely holiday season ahead of us, here’s a list of games on all the major platforms that you can really sink your teeth — and a few dozen hours — into.
Buying for a gamer and have no idea what’s worthwhile? Once you’ve figured out which gaming system is their platform of choice, any of these should be guaranteed wins.
This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.
All major platforms
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
Image Credits: Ubisoft
I genuinely enjoyed AC: Odyssey’s gorgeous landscapes and main characters, but the game systems felt disconnected and arbitrary. That’s much less the case with AC: Valhalla, which tells a similarly sprawling tale of Vikings in England but works a little harder to put it together into a cohesive whole. It’s still very much “Ubisoft Game, but with Vikings” but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Price: $50 from Amazon
Minecraft Dungeons
I thought this game was a bit limited when it first came out, but since then it has gotten several new areas and cross-platform multiplayer. Between that and its simplified systems and PG-level violence, Minecraft Dungeons is a great option for families that want to fight monsters together.
Price: $20-30 (depending on platform) from Mojang
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
Reviewers agree: The new CODBLOPS is definitely more CODBLOPS. The latest in the gritty military series is the one everyone will be playing for the next year, so it’s definitely a must-have for quite a few people.
Price: $50-60 (depending on platform) from Amazon
Cyberpunk 2077
Image Credits: CD Projekt Red
Cyberpunk 2077, the futuristic RPG from the creators of the Witcher, isn’t out yet, but it’s one of the most anticipated titles in recent years and your special someone might like the idea that they’re getting it day one. Of course if it’s anything like The Witcher 3, they’re probably going to want to wait a few months for the bugs to get ironed out. But hey, it’s an option.
Price: $50 from Amazon
PS4 and PS5
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Image Credits: Sony
This semi-sequel to the much-lauded 2018 Spider-Man is smaller in scale but plays even better. Plus it has a wonderfully inclusive cast and tone and feels authentic, where the original, for all its strengths, had a pretty flat take on New York. Bonus: If you buy the PS5 version of Miles Morales, you get the remastered 2018 game for free. I’d argue you’re simply not going to find a better bang for your buck right now with any other new game.
Price: $50 on Amazon
Demon’s Souls
Image Credits: Sony
The only “true” next-generation game out there right now is a remake of a PlayStation 3 game, and in many ways it feels like it. But in other ways, it’s the most amazing game on the market right now. If your loved one has enjoyed Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro and other incredibly hard games, this is the one to get.
Price: $70 on Amazon
Ghost of Tsushima
Between Nioh 2, Sekiro and Ghost of Tsushima, there’s a real bumper crop of samurai and ninja action to be had. But Ghost is the broadest and most beautiful of them all — if not necessarily the deepest.
What it lacks in challenge… first of all, is more than made up by the difficulty of those other two games I mentioned, give me a break. But Ghost’s draw is in the unity and beauty of its game world and systems. For example, instead of a quest marker or arrow pointing toward your objective, the wind is just always blowing in that direction. Amazing, right? The single player campaign is remarkably well acted, and a free update has brought a surprisingly extensive multiplayer co-op mode as well. This is truly a game you can lose yourself in. Just don’t start trying to collect everything or you’ll never leave the first area.
Price: $40 on Amazon
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Image Credits: Vanillaware
This totally unique game came out of left field and obsessed me for two solid weeks. A combination of adventure game, visual novel and tactical action game, 13 Sentinels puts you in charge of a bunch of high school kids piloting giant robots to save the world from alien invaders. (In case you can’t tell, it’s a Japanese production.)
Sound familiar? That’s the idea — and then it starts pulling rugs out from under you and doesn’t stop until the last few minutes. The labyrinthine story, which progresses simultaneously through 13 interwoven narratives, is the very best kind of sci-fi mind-boggler and a pleasure to unravel from start to finish. The combat is also compelling and satisfying, if not particularly deep or challenging. There’s simply nothing else like this out there.
Price: Currently $30 from GameStop
Xbox One and Series X
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Image Credits: Microsoft
If your loved one is a Halo fan, they’re likely very sad since Halo: Infinite, once a launch title for the new console, won’t be coming out until next year. But it can’t hurt to have the original games all updated and beautified to play through as an appetizer. Plus there’s the famous Halo multiplayer to get everyone through the winter.
Price: $30 from Amazon
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Image Credits: Sega
The latest in the long-running and beloved Yakuza series of character-driven adventures of Japanese gangsters set in a fictional Tokyo neighborhood, this one changes up the style with a turn-based combat system and new protagonist — but some are calling it the best yet.
Price: $35 from Amazon
Gears Tactics
Image Credits: Microsoft
No one really expected that the Gears of War series would lend itself to a tactics game in the style of XCOM — let alone that it would leapfrog others in the genre and become one of the best you can get, period. Naturally it isn’t quite the urgent, visceral experience that Gears normally is, but this is a surprisingly deep and engrossing game.
Price: $38 from Amazon
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The sequel to the lauded “metroidvania” Ori and the Blind Forest is technically on several platforms, but the Series X seems to be the absolute best one on which to play it. With beautifully updated art and a silky-smooth framerate, this will look better on that new 4K HDR TV than many “real” next-generation games. But don’t let the beautiful yet cute art style make you think this will be a cakewalk. Like the first in the series, you’ll need some serious dexterity to complete this platformer.
Price: $30 from Moon Studios
Risky move: Preorder Halo: Infinite
No one is quite sure whether the first Halo of the next generation is going to be as good as everyone hopes, and a delay to early next year didn’t allay anyone’s fears. That said, many a gamer will cherish the idea of playing the latest in this venerable series day one, so pre-ordering a copy is a possibility if none of the other games really ring their bell.
Price: $60 from Amazon
Switch
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Technically this is also a “toy,” because it’s real-life RC carts zooming around your home on an augmented-reality racetrack. We thought it was tons of fun, and it’s a great way to take video games off the TV and into real life… kind of. Just be aware that every player needs their own cart and their own Switch.
Price: $99 from Best Buy
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Don’t go into this game expecting a full-on new Zelda title and you’ll do just fine. This is definitely an action game, and a big, rather mindless one at that. But it’s hard to resist the concept of playing as Link, Zelda or any of the champions from Breath of the Wild and dispatching enemies by the hundreds.
Price: $50 on Amazon
Super Mario 3D All-Stars
Image Credits: Ninendo
Okay, I gave Nintendo some guff over the perfunctory nature of this collection of amazing games. I’ve wanted to replay Mario 64 for years and was waiting for Nintendo to touch it up just a bit — but it, and Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy, are virtually unchanged in this retro package. Really, you couldn’t make it widescreen? But for most, the chance to play these games again (or for the first time) on the Switch is worth the price of admission, period.
Price: $60 from Amazon
PC
Spelunky 2 and/or Hades
The “roguelite” genre, with its randomly generated levels and complex interlocking systems, has grown in popularity and sophistication for years — and here we have two fine examples that take the genre in different directions.
Spelunky 2 is the most traditional, in a way. Sequel to one of the best games out there, this one adds more variety, more weirdness and more challenge to the unforgiving platforming of the original. Like before, every death (and there will be a lot) is avoidable and while some runs may last only seconds, it’s hard to be deterred when you know that if you just paid a little more attention, or saved your bombs, or went over that other way… just one more game. (Pro tip: Buy a couple copies for friends and indulge in jolly cooperation.)
Hades combines the procedurally generated levels with an incredibly beautiful art style and an ingenious story and progression system. Escaping from the ever-shifting landscape of Hades, you’re going to die over and over, but as a young god, that’s more inconvenience than obstacle. Meanwhile every death and every inch of progress moves you closer to the mystery of your birth in a clever modern take on Greek mythology. It’s honestly hard to imagine how Hades could be improved in almost any way.
Price: $20 for Spelunky 2 on Steam | $25 for Hades on Steam
Crusader Kings III
Image Credits: Paradox
This long-awaited strategy title puts you in the throne room of a European medieval dynasty, where you can do… pretty much anything to get ahead. Assassinations, proxy wars, brutal taxes, religious cannibalism, strategic marriages… it’s all on the table. This is a story-telling engine that’s remarkably robust and, once you get past the initial learning curve, very fun. It’s also very, very nerdy, and proud of it.
Price: $50 on Steam
Other options
Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros
Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch
This little gadget has the original Super Mario Bros., its sequel (not the weird one — what we knew as “The Lost Levels”) and a remade LCD game all built in. It’s a charming device and the games play well, plus you can turn it off and resume progress later, making it that much easier to get through the whole game.
Price: $50 (but finding one in stock can be challenging.)
Backbone One for iPhone
Image Credits: Backbone
Got a friend who prefers to game on their phone? The Backbone is built for them. This snap-on controller brings buttons and analog triggers (and good ones, at that!) into the iOS gaming world, along with a surprisingly solid companion app that can do things like record your gameplay and help you edit and post your highlight reels. It only works with select iOS titles, but the library is growing. TechCrunch Editor-In-Chief Matthew Panzarino reviewed it in October and gave it his stamp of approval with very little reservation.
Price: $99 from Backbone
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Find out how startups like Skyroot and Bluefield are building new industries at TC Sessions: Space 2020
At our fast-approaching first TC Sessions: Space event, which is happening December 16-17, we’re going to be highlighting some of the most exciting startups and founders tackling big problems with innovative and groundbreaking solutions.
Some of those companies are focused on building tomorrow’s spacecraft, and others are working on in-space technologies that could become the next big anchor upon which countless other businesses are built.
Two of the companies joining us at TC Sessions: Space are Skyroot and Bluefield. Skyroot is India’s first private space launch startup, founded in 2018 with the goal of developing a low-cost and reliable launch vehicle to help democratize access of space.
More panels from TC Sessions: Space
Founder, CEO and CTO Pawan Kumar Chandana will join us to talk about building his new business, his experience developing rockets for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and how Skyroot’s Vikram-series launch vehicles plan to achieve the company’s ambitious goals.
Bluefield Technologies is focused on an entirely different, but potentially just as impactful opportunity: Observation, monitoring and analysis of methane emissions data on Earth. Their satellite-based methane observation technology offers a new high bar of precision and detail.
Bluefield founder and CEO Yotam Ariel will join us to talk about what becomes possible across a range of industries once you offer them the ability to track up to 90% of the Earth’s methane emissions with pinpoint accuracy, at costs that are up to 100% cheaper than existing solutions on up to a daily basis.
We’ll have conversations with Chandana, Ariel and others as part of our “Founders in Focus” series, just one small part of the all-star agenda at TC Sessions: Space. Tickets are still available at the Late Registration price, with discounts for students, government/military employees and groups, so grab yours below to attend this fully virtual event.
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Space startup Aevum debuts world’s first fully autonomous orbital rocket launching drone
Launching things to space doesn’t have to mean firing a large rocket vertically using massive amounts of rocket-fuel-powered thrust — startup Aevum breaks the mould in multiple ways, with an innovative launch vehicle design that combines uncrewed aircraft with horizontal take-off and landing capabilities, with a secondary stage that deploys at high altitude and can take small payloads the rest of the way to space.
Aevum’s model actually isn’t breaking much new ground in terms of its foundational technology, according to founder and CEO Jay Skylus, with whom I spoke prior to today’s official unveiling of the startup’s Ravn X launch vehicle. Skylus, who previously worked for a range of space industry household names and startups, including NASA, Boeing, Moon Express and Firefly, told me the startup has focused primarily on making the most of existing available technologies to create a mostly reusable, fully automated small payload orbital delivery system.
To his point, Ravn X doesn’t look too dissimilar from existing jet aircraft, and bears obvious resemblance to the Predator line of UAVs already in use for terrestrial uncrewed flight. The vehicle is 80 feet long, and has a 60-foot wingspan, with a total max weight of 55,000 lbs including payload. Seventy percent of the system is fully reusable today, and Skylus says the goal is to iterate on that to the point where 95% of the launch system will be reusable in the relatively near future.
Image Credits: Aevum
Ravn X’s delivery system is designed for rapid response delivery, and is able to get small satellites to orbit in as little as 180 minutes — with the capability of having it ready to fly and deliver another again fairly shortly after that. It uses traditional jet fuel, the same kind used on commercial airliners, and it can take off and land in “virtually any weather,” according to Skylus. It also takes off and lands on any one-mile stretch of traditional aircraft runway, meaning it can theoretically use just about any active airport in the world as a launch and landing site.
One of they key defining differences of Aevum relative to other space launch startups is that what they’re presenting isn’t theoretical, or in development — the Ravn X already has paying customers, including over $1 billion in U.S. government contracts. Its first mission is with the U.S. Space Force, the ASLON-45 small satellite launch mission (set for late 2021), and it also has a contract for 20 missions spanning nine years with the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. Deliveries of Aevum’s production launch vehicles to its customers have already begun, in fact, Skylus says.
The U.S. Department of Defense has for quite some time now been actively pursuing space launch options that provide it with responsive, short turnaround launch capabilities. That’s the same goal of companies like Astra, which was originally looking to win the DARPA challenge for such systems (since expired) with its Rocket small launcher. Aevum’s system has the added advantage of being essentially fully compatible with existing airfield infrastructure — and also of not requiring that human pilots be involved or at risk at all, as they are with the superficially similar launch model espoused by Virgin Orbit.
Aevum isn’t just providing the Ravn X launcher, either; its goal is to handle end-to-end logistics for launch services, including payload transportation and integration, which are parts of the process that Skylus says are often overlooked or underserved by existing launch providers, and that many companies creating payloads also don’t realize are costly, complicated and time-consuming parts of actually delivering a working small satellite to orbit. The startup also isn’t “re-inventing the wheel” when it comes to its integration services — Skylus says they’re working with a range of existing partners that all already have proven experience doing this work but haven’t previously had the motivation or the need to provide these kinds of services to the customers that Skylum sees coming online, both in the public and private sector.
The need isn’t for another SpaceX, Skylus says; rather, thanks to SpaceX, there’s a wealth of aerospace companies that previously worked almost exclusively with large government contracts and the one or two massive legacy rocket companies to put missions together. They’re now open to working with the greatly expanded market for orbital payloads, including small satellites that aim to provide cost-effective solutions in communications, environmental monitor, shipping and defense.
Aevum’s solution definitely sounds like it addresses a clear and present need, in a way that offers benefits in terms of risk profile, reusability, cost and flexibility. The company’s first active missions will obviously be watched closely, by potential customers and competitors alike.
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iPhones can now automatically recognize and label buttons and UI features for blind users
Apple has always gone out of its way to build features for users with disabilities, and VoiceOver on iOS is an invaluable tool for anyone with a vision impairment — assuming every element of the interface has been manually labeled. But the company just unveiled a brand new feature that uses machine learning to identify and label every button, slider and tab automatically.
Screen Recognition, available now in iOS 14, is a computer vision system that has been trained on thousands of images of apps in use, learning what a button looks like, what icons mean and so on. Such systems are very flexible — depending on the data you give them, they can become expert at spotting cats, facial expressions or, as in this case, the different parts of a user interface.
The result is that in any app now, users can invoke the feature and a fraction of a second later every item on screen will be labeled. And by “every,” they mean every — after all, screen readers need to be aware of every thing that a sighted user would see and be able to interact with, from images (which iOS has been able to create one-sentence summaries of for some time) to common icons (home, back) and context-specific ones like “…” menus that appear just about everywhere.
The idea is not to make manual labeling obsolete — developers know best how to label their own apps, but updates, changing standards and challenging situations (in-game interfaces, for instance) can lead to things not being as accessible as they could be.
I chatted with Chris Fleizach from Apple’s iOS accessibility engineering team, and Jeff Bigham from the AI/ML accessibility team, about the origin of this extremely helpful new feature. (It’s described in a paper due to be presented next year.)
Image Credits: Apple
“We looked for areas where we can make inroads on accessibility, like image descriptions,” said Fleizach. “In iOS 13 we labeled icons automatically — Screen Recognition takes it another step forward. We can look at the pixels on screen and identify the hierarchy of objects you can interact with, and all of this happens on device within tenths of a second.”
The idea is not a new one, exactly; Bigham mentioned a screen reader, Outspoken, which years ago attempted to use pixel-level data to identify UI elements. But while that system needed precise matches, the fuzzy logic of machine learning systems and the speed of iPhones’ built-in AI accelerators means that Screen Recognition is much more flexible and powerful.
It wouldn’t have been possible just a couple of years ago — the state of machine learning and the lack of a dedicated unit for executing it meant that something like this would have been extremely taxing on the system, taking much longer and probably draining the battery all the while.
But once this kind of system seemed possible, the team got to work prototyping it with the help of their dedicated accessibility staff and testing community.
“VoiceOver has been the standard-bearer for vision accessibility for so long. If you look at the steps in development for Screen Recognition, it was grounded in collaboration across teams — Accessibility throughout, our partners in data collection and annotation, AI/ML, and, of course, design. We did this to make sure that our machine learning development continued to push toward an excellent user experience,” said Bigham.
It was done by taking thousands of screenshots of popular apps and games, then manually labeling them as one of several standard UI elements. This labeled data was fed to the machine learning system, which soon became proficient at picking out those same elements on its own.
It’s not as simple as it sounds — as humans, we’ve gotten quite good at understanding the intention of a particular graphic or bit of text, and so often we can navigate even abstract or creatively designed interfaces. It’s not nearly as clear to a machine learning model, and the team had to work with it to create a complex set of rules and hierarchies that ensure the resulting screen reader interpretation makes sense.
The new capability should help make millions of apps more accessible, or just accessible at all, to users with vision impairments. You can turn it on by going to Accessibility settings, then VoiceOver, then VoiceOver Recognition, where you can turn on and off image, screen and text recognition.
It would not be trivial to bring Screen Recognition over to other platforms, like the Mac, so don’t get your hopes up for that just yet. But the principle is sound, though the model itself is not generalizable to desktop apps, which are very different from mobile ones. Perhaps others will take on that task; the prospect of AI-driven accessibility features is only just beginning to be realized.
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Microsoft launches Azure Purview, its new data governance service
As businesses gather, store and analyze an ever-increasing amount of data, tools for helping them discover, catalog, track and manage how that data is shared are also becoming increasingly important. With Azure Purview, Microsoft is launching a new data governance service into public preview today that brings together all of these capabilities in a new data catalog with discovery and data governance features.
As Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data, told me, this has become a major pain point for enterprises. While they may be very excited about getting started with data-heavy technologies like predictive analytics, those companies’ data and privacy-focused executives are very concerned to make sure that the way the data is used is compliant or that the company has received the right permissions to use its customers’ data, for example.
In addition, companies also want to make sure that they can trust their data and know who has access to it and who made changes to it.
“[Purview] is a unified data governance platform which automates the discovery of data, cataloging of data, mapping of data, lineage tracking — with the intention of giving our customers a very good understanding of the breadth of the data estate that exists to begin with, and also to ensure that all these regulations that are there for compliance, like GDPR, CCPA, etc, are managed across an entire data estate in ways which enable you to make sure that they don’t violate any regulation,” Kumar explained.
At the core of Purview is its catalog that can pull in data from the usual suspects, like Azure’s various data and storage services, but also third-party data stores, including Amazon’s S3 storage service and on-premises SQL Server. Over time, the company will add support for more data sources.
Kumar described this process as a “multi-semester investment,” so the capabilities the company is rolling out today are only a small part of what’s on the overall road map already. With this first release today, the focus is on mapping a company’s data estate.
Image Credits: Microsoft
“Next [on the road map] is more of the governance policies,” Kumar said. “Imagine if you want to set things like ‘if there’s any PII data across any of my data stores, only this group of users has access to it.’ Today, setting up something like that is extremely complex and most likely you’ll get it wrong. That’ll be as simple as setting a policy inside of Purview.”
In addition to launching Purview, the Azure team also today launched into general availability Azure Synapse, Microsoft’s next-generation data warehousing and analytics service. The idea behind Synapse is to give enterprises — and their engineers and data scientists — a single platform that brings together data integration, warehousing and big data analytics.
“With Synapse, we have this one product that gives a completely no-code experience for data engineers, as an example, to build out these [data] pipelines and collaborate very seamlessly with the data scientists who are building out machine learning models, or the business analysts who build out reports for things like Power BI.”
Among Microsoft’s marquee customers for the service, which Kumar described as one of the fastest-growing Azure services right now, are FedEx, Walgreens, Myntra and P&G.
“The insights we gain from continuous analysis help us optimize our network,” said Sriram Krishnasamy, senior vice president, strategic programs at FedEx Services. “So as FedEx moves critical high-value shipments across the globe, we can often predict whether that delivery will be disrupted by weather or traffic and remediate that disruption by routing the delivery from another location.”
Image Credits: Microsoft
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Everlywell raises $175 million to expand virtual care options and scale its at-home health testing
Digital health startup Everlywell has raised a $175 million Series D funding round, following relatively fast on the heels of a $25 million Series C round it closed in February of this year. The Series D included a host of new investors, including BlackRock, The Chernin Group (TCG), Foresite Capital, Greenspring Associates, Morningside Ventures and Portfolio, along with existing investors including Highland Capital Partners, which led the Series C round. The startup has now raised more than $250 million to date.
Everlywell, which launched to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 as a participant in Startup Battlefield, specializes in home healthcare, and specifically on home healthcare tests supported by their digital platform for providing customers with their results and helping them understand the diagnostics, and how to seek the right follow-on care and expert medical advice.
Earlier this year, Everlywell launched an at-home COVID-19 test collection kit — the first of this type of test to receive an emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its use that allowed cooperation with multiple lab service providers over time. The COVID-19 test kit joins its many other offerings, which include tests for thyroid hormone levels, food and allergen sensitivity, women’s health and fertility, vitamin D deficiency and more. I spoke to Everlywell CEO and founder Julia Cheek about the raise, and she acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was definitely behind the decision to raise such a large amount so quickly again after the close of the Series C, since the company saw a sharp increase in demand coming out of the coronavirus crisis — not only for its COVID-19 test kit, but for at-home digital healthcare options in general.
“We obviously have a very successful COVID-19 test,” she said. “But we’ve also seen three-fourths of our test menu just explode at well over 100% year-over-year growth, and several of our tests are at 4x or 5x growth. That is really representative of this shift in consumer health behavior that will continue in a big way in many different verticals that include testing, and making things more convenient, digitally-enabled, and in the home.”
Like other companies built on solving for a shift to more remote and virtual care options, Cheek said that Everlywell had already anticipated this kind of consumer demand — but COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the pace of change, which is why the startup put together this round, at this size, this quickly (she says they started the process of putting together the Series D in September).
“We’ve been talking about the digital health movement, and the consumer-directed movement probably for a decade now,” she told me. “I do believe that this will be the watershed moment, unfortunately. But hopefully, we will come out on the other side of the pandemic and say, ‘There are some good things that happened broadly for healthcare.’ That is the hope of what we lean into everyday, and fundamentally, why we went out and raised this amount of capital in this tremendous growth year.”
Image Credits: Everlywell
Everlywell has also expanded availability of its products this year, with distribution in more than 10,000 retail locations across Target, Walgreens, CVS and Kroger stores across the U.S. The company also landed a number of new partnerships on the diagnostic lab and insurance payer side, as well as with major employers — a key customer group as employers shoulder the largest share of healthcare spending in the U.S. due to employee benefit plans. Cheek says that despite their commercial and enterprise customer wins, the focus remains squarely on consumer satisfaction, which is what distinguishes their offering.
“Our COVID-19 test is 75% new people buying our product, and it has an NPS [net promoter score] of 75,” she said. “And then it’s the most highly referred product, and also one of our top tests where people buy other tests. Experience matters here — we know that if someone is a promoter of Everlywell, if they rate us a nine or a 10, on NPS, they are five times more likely to purchase again on the platform.”
That’s not new for Everlywell, according to Cheek — customers have always had a high degree of satisfaction with the company’s products. But what is new is the expanded reach, and the realization among many Americans that virtual care and at-home options are available, and are effective.
“What you have is this lightbulb moment for Americans in a new way that care can be delivered where then they definitely don’t want to go back,” she said. “It’s not just for Everlywell. This is all of these verticals, that have really shifted consumer behavior around healthcare in the home, and I think that will be somewhat permanent. That is the main driver here, and is what we’re seeing, and it’s why Everlywell has resonated so well with so many Americans.”
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Taking on the business scenario-planning giants, Pigment raises a $25.9M Series A led by Blossom Capital
Realizing that modern, complex businesses can no longer be adequately managed using spreadsheet-style programs, the founders of Pigment decided there had to be a better solution. Their business forecasting platform has now raised a substantial Series A of $25.9 million, led by Blossom Capital. Also participating was New York-based FirstMark Capital and Frst, as well as angel investors including Paul Melchiorre, former CEO of business planning giant Anaplan, and David Clarke, the ex-CTO of Workday, another business planning incumbent.
Those last two investors are significant because Paris-based Pigment competes with both Anaplan and Workday. Also of note is the fact that another planning product, Adaptive Insights, was sold to Workday for $1.6 billion.
Pigment has so far secured large-scale enterprise and pre-IPO startup clients for its beta product, including a major European bank — although it declined to name any of its clients so far.
Pigment says it aims to overhaul the painful experience of using error-prone spreadsheets and inflexible software to do business forecasting, instead presenting a dashboard-like approach in real time through charts, simulations and continuous modeling.
Eléonore Crespo, co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, said in a statement: “We’re a bit like Minecraft for business strategy – with that kind of creative, organic potential for the user. Standard planning solutions are basically mechanical, treating a business like a machine with levers that you just push and pull.”
Ophelia Brown, partner at Blossom Capital, said: “Existing planning software was built around 20th-century models of how to do business. Pigment is a 21st century platform that reflects the way successful companies need to work today – socially and environmentally conscious, proactively scanning the horizon for risks and opportunities, and capable of unlocking new opportunities in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.”
Pigment was founded in 2019 by Crespo, a former data analyst at Google and investor at Index Ventures, and Romain Niccoli, the former CTO and co-founder of Criteo — the adtech company which IPO’d on Nasdaq in 2013.
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