TC
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Snap acquires AR startup WaveOptics, which provides tech for Spectacles, for over $500M
Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and projectors used in AR glasses. These overlay virtual images on top of the views of the real world someone wearing the glasses can see, and Snap worked with WaveOptics to build its latest version of Spectacles.
The deal was first reported by The Verge, and a spokesperson for Snap directly confirmed the details to TechCrunch. Snap is paying over $500 million for the startup, in a cash-and-stock deal. The first half of that will be coming in the form of stock when the deal officially closes, and the remainder will be payable in cash or stock in two years.
This is a big leap for WaveOptics, which had raised around $65 million in funding from investors that included Bosch, Octopus Ventures and a host of individuals, from Stan Boland (veteran entrepreneur in the UK, most recently at FiveAI) and Ambarish Mitra (the co-founder of early AR startup Blippar). PitchBook estimates that its most recent valuation was only around $105 million.
WaveOptics was founded in Oxford, and from what we know it will continue to be based in the UK.
We have been covering the company since its earliest days, when it displayed some very interesting, early, and ahead-of-its-time technology: waveguides based on hologram physics and photonic crystals. The important and key thing is that its tech drastically compresses size and load of the hardware needed to process and display images, meaning a much wider and more flexible range of form factors for AR hardware based on WaveOptics tech.
It’s not clear whether WaveOptics will continue to work with other parties post-deal, but it seems that one obvious advantage for Snap would be making the startup’s technology exclusive to itself.
Snap has been on something of an acquisition march in recent times — it’s made at least three other purchases of startups since January, including Fit Analytics for an AR-fuelled move into e-commerce, as well as Pixel8Earth and StreetCred for its mapping tools.
This deal, however, marks Snap’s biggest acquisition to date in terms of valuation. That is not only a mark of the premium price that foundational artificial intelligence tech continues to command — in addition to the team of scientists that built WaveOptics, it also has 12 filed and in-progress patents — but also Snap’s financial and, frankly, existential commitment to having a seat at the table when it comes not just to social apps that use AR, but hardware, and being at the centre of not just using the tech, but setting the pace and agenda for how and where that will play out.
That’s been a tenacious and not always rewarding place for it to be, but the company — which has long described itself as a “camera company” — has kept hardware in the mix as an essential component for its future strategy.
Powered by WPeMatico
LinkedIn is the reason Apple made the M1 chip
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still shocked. But happy-shocked, like when you get a new toy and it is covered in static electricity.
Anyhoo, we had a packed show with much, much left on the floor as we tried to shoehorn the week into our time slot. Here’s what we got into:
- The world of connections: Fave raised $2.2 million to connect fandoms, Somewhere Good raised $3.75 million to build feedless micro-communities, and both Spokn ($4 million) and Spot ($5 million) are hoping to use the spoken word to connect companies and their staffs. Honestly we think that the overall connection-community world is super exciting.
- Piano, one of those startups we actually have the luck of using, raised $88 million for analytics, subscription and personalization tools. We get into why the round makes sense, and why one investor stood out more than the others.
- Corporate media: Coinbase is building out a media-ish org (Alex wrote about it here on his personal blog; Scrawler.co has more on the matter), and with TheSkimm hoping to find a corporate home and The Hustle doing the same, we had to dig into the matter. Our take is that content marketing is a response to expensive social advertising. And that it’s fine. And that it is not news.
- Shoutout Forbes and its new union effort. Well done.
- Uptrust raised $2 million, which let us talk about the venture-sized opportunity in fighting the billions of dollars wasted on useless mass incarceration.
- And then we chatted about the public markets. Monday.com’s IPO is filed, Marqeta’s IPO is filed, Squarespace’s direct listing is done, and more. It’s hectic out there for late-stage startups.
The show flew by, much like our days recently, simply because it was so fun and jam-packed with news. And we got to make jokes about our listeners and Monday.com PR timing, so what else could we ask for? Talk soon!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Powered by WPeMatico
Decentralized Komorebi Collective launches to back female and nonbinary crypto founders
As decentralized currencies have taken off in recent months, there’s been renewed attention around DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, as a means of bringing together groups of investors who can deploy capital as a unit while voting collectively on those investments. In the spirit of blockchain, they aim to bring greater transparency to investment decision-making.
A number of high-profile DAOs have launched in recent months as the fervor for crypto mania increased. Komorebi Collective, launching today, is a new organization founded by women in the blockchain space that will be making investments exclusively in “exceptional female and nonbinary crypto founders,” founding member Manasi Vora tells TechCrunch.
The group is comprised of a number of core team members largely assembled from the crypto nonprofit she256 and the organization Women in Blockchain, including Vora, Eva Wu, Kristie Huang, Medha Kothari and Kinjal Shah, who will collectively do most of the heavy lifting behind finding and presenting investments to the group. Other hand-selected members who committed a minimum of $5,000 USD will likely have a lighter commitment.
Each investment will be voted on by all the collective’s key signers, some 36 in total, the majority of whom are female.
“DAOs level the hierarchy of a venture fund by ensuring everyone is going to have a seat at the table,” says Shah, who is also an investor at crypto VC firm Blockchain Capital. “We are very careful in approaching the backers that are really mission-aligned.”
Other members of the DAO include firms like Kleiner Perkins, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly Capital, IDEO CoLab Ventures and Stacks Accelerator alongside a number of individuals and founders who work at firms like Twitter, Coinbase, Skynet Labs, Celo Labs and Gitcoin.
The organization itself is built on the Syndicate Protocol, a project that shares some of Komorebi Collective’s backers.
The group hopes the structure of their organization will be able to take a mission-driven approach that improves diversity in the crypto space while proving the sustainability of the DAO model. Despite an explosion in startup investments in the past year, women-led startups received just 2.3% of venture dollars invested in 2020, a study in HBR found.
“There’s so much more room to grow when it comes to female founders getting funding and I want to be part of the solution,” Shah tells TechCrunch.
Powered by WPeMatico
Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round
TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Tenaya Capital, UOB Venture Management and Vertex Ventures.
Openspace and Intudo are returning investors from TaniHub’s $10 million Series A, announced in May 2019. The new funding brings its total raised to about $94 million.
Founded in 2016, TaniHub now has more than 45,000 farmers and 350,000 buyers (including businesses and consumers) in its network. The company helps farmers earn more for their crops by streamlining distribution channels so there are fewer middlemen between farms and the restaurants, grocery stores, vendors and other businesses that buy their products. It does this through three units: TaniHub, TaniSupply and TaniFund.
TaniHub is its B2B e-commerce platform, which connects farmers directly to customers. Then orders are fulfilled through TaniSupply, the company’s logistics platform, which currently operates six warehousing and processing facilities where harvests can be washed, sorted and packed within an hour, before being delivered to buyers by TaniHub’s own couriers or third-party logistics providers.
Finally, TaniFund is a fintech platform that provides loans to farmers they can use while growing crops and pay off by selling through TaniHub. Co-founder and chief executive officer Eka Pamitra told TechCrunch its credit scoring system is based on three years of performance, the company’s agriculture value chain expertise and partnerships with financial institutions.
“More than 100 data points are considered when doing the credit risk assessment. For example, for cultivation financing products, TaniFund tailors each credit scoring based on agriculture risks and market risk of each commodity, on top of the typical borrower E-KYC scoring and process,” he explained. “Beyond credit scoring, having TaniSupply and TaniHub as a standby buyer within the ecosystem also helps to mitigate risk of each loan. TaniFund aims to further boost its credit scoring system with smarter data processing and better machine learning models.”
Pamitra said TaniHub will use its new funding to build the upstream and midstream parts of its supply chain — in other words, new cultivation areas, processing, packing centers and warehouses. The company will also expand its coverage beyond Java and Bali to source and sell locally, and continue improving its supply-demand forecast model to help farmers plan crop cultivation and timing, with the goal of reducing price fluctuations and maintaining a consistent supply. Pamitra added that TaniHub will also explore precision farming technology.
Over the last couple of years, TaniHub has started exporting several types of fruits and spices to the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Korea. This year, it plans to focus on expanding within Indonesia because the F&B (food and beverage) market there is worth $137 billion and the Indonesian agriculture sector is still highly fragmented, Pamitra said.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, TaniHub says it was able to grow its revenue 600% year-on-year in 2020 as demand for online groceries increased.
“We postponed our branch expansion plan and focused on increasing the seven existing warehouses’ since there was a surge of demand on the B2C segment and the process of onboarding farmers. This benefited us since the adoption of purchasing fresh groceries online increased significantly, and the willingness of farmers to work with us became remarkably high because the local traditional markets were closed due to lockdowns,” Pamitra said. “Since COVID-19, the eagerness of provincial governments to open communications for TaniHub to work with local farmers and SMEs in their region has been quite impactful.”
TaniHub is now working with several Indonesian government agencies, including the Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs, to onboard more farmers, F&B businesses and increase exports.
In a press statement, MDI Ventures director of portfolio management Sandhy Widyasthana said, “TaniHub Group has an important role in transforming the agriculture sector and has proven that its presence can deliver positive impact on the quality of life of farmers. We hope our investment can help them continue their work and expand their coverage to more and more farming communities in Indonesia.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Rakuten and Beyond Next invest $1.4M seed funding in farm-to-table startup Secai Marche
Farmers and food businesses, like restaurants, deal with the same issue: a fragmented supply chain. Secai Marche wants to streamline agricultural logistics, making fulfillment more cost-efficient and enabling food businesses to bundle products from different farmers into the same order. The company is headquartered in Japan, with operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. This week, it announced 150 million JPY (about $1.4 million USD) in pre-Series A funding from Rakuten Ventures and Beyond Next Ventures to build a B2B logistics platform for farmers that sell to restaurants, hotels and other F&B (food and beverage) businesses.
This round brings Secai Marche’s total raised to about $3 million. The capital will be used to expand its fulfillment infrastructure, including a network of warehouses and cold chain logistics, hire more people for its engineering team and sales and marketing.
Secai Marche was founded in 2018 by Ami Sugiyama and Shusaku Hayakawa, and currently serves 130 farmers and more than 300 F&B businesses. Before launching the startup, Sugiyama spent four years working in Southeast Asia, including managing restaurants and cafes in Malaysia. During that time, she started to import green tea from Japan, intending to sell it directly to customers in Malaysia. But she realized supply chain inefficiencies not only made it hard to meet demand, but also ensure quality for all kinds of ingredients.
Meanwhile, Hayakawa was operating a farm in Japan and working on agriculture control systems that predicted weather and crop growth to help farmers maintain consistent quality.
Both Sugiyama and Hayakawa ended up at consulting firm Deloitte, researching how to create a more efficient supply chain for Japanese agricultural exports to Singaporean F&B businesses. Policies implemented by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s administration aim to increase Japanese agricultural exports from 922.3 billion JPY (about $8.5 billion) in 2020 to 2 trillion JPY (about $18.5 billion) by 2025, and 5 trillion JPY (about $46.1 billion) in 2030.
Seche Marche’s goal is to make it easier for farmers to sell their crops to F&B businesses domestically or overseas.
“We found that not only farmers in Japan, but also all farmers in Southeast Asia have the same problem in terms of the current supply chain,” Sugiyama told TechCrunch. “So we left Deloitte and started our own business to connect not only farmers in Japan, but farmers in all Asian countries.”
Secai Marche’s logistics management tech is what differentiates it from other wholesaler platforms. It uses an AI-based algorithm to predict demand based on consumption trends, seasonal products and farmer recommendations, said Hayakawa. Secai Marche runs its own warehouse network, but mostly relies on third-party logistics providers for fulfillment, and its platform assigns orders to the most efficient transportation method.
This allows F&B businesses to consolidate orders from farmers, so they can order smaller batches from different places without spending more money. About 30% of Secai Marche’s products are shipped to other countries, while the rest are sold domestically.
Secai Marche is reaching out to farmers who want to increase their customer base. About 30% of its products currently come from Japanese farms, 50% from Malaysia and the rest from other ASEAN countries. Sugiyama and Hayakawa said the COVID-19 pandemic affected Secai Marche’s expansion plans because it originally planned to enter Singapore this year, but had to slow down since they were unable to travel and meet with farmers.
On the other hand, many farmers have started selling directly to consumers through social media like Instagram or Facebook, and have approached Secai Marche for help with fulfillment, logistics, repacking and quality control.
Correction: Funding amount corrected to say $1.4 million instead of $1 million.
Powered by WPeMatico
Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed
Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, but many major platforms still focus on large cities. This means people in smaller cities or rural areas need to deal with longer wait times for deliveries. Social commerce company Mio is taking advantage of that gap by building a reseller network and logistics infrastructure that can offer next-day delivery to tier 2 and 3 cities.
The startup, which currently focuses on fresh groceries and plans to expand into more categories, announced today it has raised $1 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Venturra Discovery and Golden Gate Ventures. Other participants included iSeed SEA, DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram and Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founders of Indian social commerce unicorn Meesho.
Rajaram, Aatrey and Barnwal will become advisors to Mio co-founder and chief executive officer Trung Huynh, former investment associate at IDG Ventures Vietnam. Other founders include An Pham (who also co-founded Temasek-backed logistics startup SCommerce), Tu Le and Long Pham.
Founded in June 2020, Mio now claims hundreds of agents, or resellers. They are primarily women aged 25 to 35 years old who live in smaller cities or rural areas. Most join Mio because they want to supplement their household income, which is usually below $350, Huynh and Venturra investment associate Valerie Vu told TechCrunch in an email.
The social commerce model works for them because they are part of tight-knit communities that are already used to making group orders together. On average, Mio claims that its resellers make about $200 to $300, earning a 10% commission on each order, and additional commissions based on the monthly performance of resellers they referred to the platform.
Mio is among a crop of social commerce startups across Asia that leverage the buying power of areas where major e-commerce players haven’t reached dominance yet. For example, lower-tier cities fueled Pinduoduo’s meteoric rise in China, while Meesho has built a distribution network in 5,000 Indian cities. Other examples of social commerce areas focused on smaller cities and rural areas include “hyperlocal” startup Super and KitaBeli, both in Indonesia, and Resellee in the Philippines.
Social commerce companies typically don’t require resellers to carry inventory. Instead, resellers pick which items they want to market to their buyers. In Mio’s case, most of their resellers’ customers are friends, family members and neighbors, and they promote group orders through social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or Zalo, Vietnam’s most popular messaging app. Then they place and manage orders through Mio’s reseller app.
To address delivery challenges, Mio is building an in-house logistics and fulfillment system, including a new distribution center in Thu Duc that can distribute goods to all of Ho Chi Minh and the surrounding five cities in Binh Dong and Dong Nai provinces. Vu and Huynh said Mio can process up to tens of thousands of daily order units at the center. Mio is also able to perform next-day deliveries for orders that are made prior to 8 p.m.
To lower logistics costs and ensure quick delivery times, Mio limits the number of products in its inventory. The company currently focuses on grocery staples, including fresh produce and poultry, and plans to add FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) and household appliances, too, especially white-label goods that have a higher profit margin.
Mio’s new funding will be used on its distribution center, and hiring for its tech and product teams. The startup plans to add more personalization options for product categories and resellers, so they can build their own brand identities.
Powered by WPeMatico
Telemedicine startups are positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world
Telemedicine, in its original form of the phone call, has been around for decades. For people in remote or rural areas without easy access to in-person care, consulting a doctor over the phone has often been the go-to approach. But for a large swath of the world used to taking half a day off work just for a 15-30 minute doctor’s appointment, it may seem like telemedicine was invented only last year. That’s mostly because it wasn’t until 2020 that telemedicine, in its myriad forms, debuted into the mainstream consciousness.
It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.
Telemedicine has faced an uphill battle to become more relevant in the U.S., with challenges such as meeting HIPPA compliance requirements and insurance companies unwilling to pay for virtual visits. But when COVID-19 began raging across the globe and people had to stay home, both the insurance and healthcare industries were forced to adapt.
“It’s been said that there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen,” said StartUp Health co-founders Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes in the company’s 2020 year-end report. That statement couldn’t be truer for telemedicine: Around $3.1 billion in funding flowed into the sector in 2020 — about three times what we saw in 2019, according to the report. A health tech fund and insights company, StartUp Health counts Alphabet, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz as some of its co-investors.
Now that people see the benefits and conveniences of “dialing a doc” from the kitchen table, healthcare has changed forever. It’s impossible to predict how healthcare institutions will operate post-pandemic, but with so many people now accustomed to telemedicine, startups that provide services around virtual care continue to be poised for success.
The state of telemedicine
Major players in the field now look at the state of healthcare as, “before COVID and after COVID,” Stoakes told Extra Crunch. “In the post-pandemic world, there’s a significant transformation that’s occurred,” he said. “It’s all accelerated; the customers have shown up. There’s more capital than ever and consumers and physicians have adapted quickly,” he added.
In the U.S., healthcare is first and foremost a business, so while there are treatment approaches that have long been proven to improve patient outcomes, if they didn’t make sense financially, they weren’t instituted at scale. Telemedicine is a great example of this.
A 2017 study by the American Journal of Accountable Care showed that telemedicine can be quite useful for managing healthcare. “The use of telemedicine has been shown to allow for better long-term care management and patient satisfaction; it also offers a new means to locate health information and communicate with practitioners (e.g., via e-mail and interactive chats or video conferences), thereby increasing convenience for the patient and reducing the amount of potential travel required for both physician and patient,” the study reads.
But as we’ve seen, it took a global healthcare emergency to drive widespread adoption of virtual healthcare in the U.S. Now that investors recognize the potential, they are increasingly pouring money into startups that promise to take telemedicine to the next level. Some of the investors backing these newer companies include StartUp Health, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Alphabet, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Maveron, First Round Capital, DreamIt Ventures, Human Ventures and Tusk Venture Partners.
Powered by WPeMatico
Portside raises $17M for its business aviation management platform
Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors I2BF Global Ventures and SOMA Capital.
The idea behind Portside, which was founded in 2018, is that it lets business aviation companies and flight departments manage everything from flight operations to maintenance, crew and staff scheduling, expense management for crew members and staff, and financial data to help them operate more efficiently. It’s basically everything you need to run your flight department in a single solution, but it also integrates with virtually all of the existing scheduling, accounting, expense management and maintenance tools a flight department or fractional ownership operation is likely using today.
Image Credits: Portside
While the COVID pandemic put a halt to most forms of private aviation early on, that market saw a quick rebound. Portside says it saw its revenue grow almost 300% in 2020 and that it added more than 50 aircraft operators in multiple countries to its user base.
“This infusion of new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow our global engineering and customer success teams,” said Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside. “We appreciate the strong support we have received from both our existing and new investors in this round. They have collectively demonstrated their confidence in our strategy and intentional approach to cloud-based digital transformation of the global business aviation industry.”
Portside is not alone in this market. Companies like Fl3xx, for example, offer similar solutions for flight departments and at the lower end, tools like Flight Circle offer a subset of these features for general aviation clubs and partnerships.
“Portside has progressed rapidly since inception and is entering the next stage of fulfilling its vision of becoming the undisputed leader in cloud-based solutions for business aviation,” stated John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global Management. “In our view, Portside represents the future of the industry, and we are pleased to partner with a company we believe will continue to create significant value for many years to come.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Snap announces Story Studio, a new standalone app to edit stories
During Snap Partner Summit, Snap announced a brand new app focused on creators. Named Story Studio, this standalone iOS app gives you several editing tools so you can make your content look as professional as possible.
Story editing tools are still in Snapchat — nothing is changing on this front. But if you’ve been creating content for Spotlight, a TikTok-like feed, or if you’re a Snap star, you may need more powerful editing tools. Many creators choose to edit their stories on a computer.
But many creators also want to do everything on their phones. That’s why there are already a few powerful video editing tools out there. But Snap is making its own app so that it works better with Snapchat.
With Story Studio, you can see what’s trending on Snapchat already. It includes sounds, topics and lenses. This way, you can remix popular content and create your own take on the current meme.
Snap says that Story Studio lets you trim your shots with frame-precise editing. You can add captions, stickers and other visual elements. You can also take advantage of the company’s licensed music catalog.
And because it’s supposed to be a serious app for serious stories, you can save a project and edit it later.
When you’re done, you can share your video with Snapchat — you can use it to post a story or a Spotlight video. But Story Studio is also going to work with other platforms. You can save it to your camera roll or export your video to other apps on your phone.
Story Studio is launching later this year. It’s going to be available on iOS exclusively for now.
Image Credits: Snap
Send a gift to your favorite creator
While Snapchat started as an app to chat with your friends, it’s clear that the company now wants to attract a generation of creators with the right tools and monetization options. Creators have become a competitive space for social apps, such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube with YouTube Shorts and Snapchat.
Snap’s own take on short viral videos have been working relatively well so far. Spotlight reaches 125 million monthly active users on Snapchat. The number of users watching at least 10 minutes of Spotlight per day has grown by 70% between January and March.
In addition to Story Studio, Snap is launching a web platform for Spotlight. This way, people can watch Spotlight content without launching Snapchat even when they’re browsing the web on their desktop computer. It could be a way to attract new Snapchat users as well.
But creators in particular are going to like this website as you can upload videos to Spotlight from Chrome or Safari.
When it comes to monetization, Snap is distributing $1 million every day to Snapchat users who create the top Snaps for Spotlight — 5,400 creators have earned $130 million since November 2020. The company will stop giving away $1 million per day on June 1st. Snap only says it plans to give millions every month.
But creators will be able to start accepting gifts directly on Snapchat. When Snapchat users reply to a story, they can buy Snap Tokens and send them as a gift — a virtual item with real-life value. The company hasn’t detailed how it plans to split revenue between Snap and creators. Gifting will roll out on Android and iOS later this year.
Powered by WPeMatico
Esper raises $30M Series B for its IoT DevOps platform
There may be billions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around building (and updating) the software for them still leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round, builds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.
The company argues that there are thousands of device manufacturers who are building these kinds of devices on Android alone, but that scaling and managing these deployments comes with a lot of challenges. The core idea here is that Esper brings to device development the DevOps experience that software developers now expect. The company argues that its tools allow companies to forgo building their own internal DevOps teams and instead use its tooling to scale their Android-based IoT fleets for use cases that range from digital signage and kiosks to custom solutions in healthcare, retail, logistics and more.
“The pandemic has transformed industries like connected fitness, digital health, hospitality, and food delivery, further accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices. But with each new use case, better software automation is required,” said Esper CEO and co-founder Yadhu Gopalan, who founded the company together with COO Shiv Sundar. “Esper’s mature cloud infrastructure incorporates the functionality cloud developers have come to expect, re-imagined for devices.”
Image Credits: Esper
Mobile device management (MDM) isn’t exactly a new thing, but the Esper team argues that these tools weren’t created for this kind of use case. “MDMs are the solution now in the market. They are made for devices being brought into an environment,” Gopalan said. “The DNA of these solutions is rooted in protecting the enterprise and to deploy applications to them in the network. Our customers are sending devices out into the wild. It’s an entirely different use case and model.”
To address these challenges, Esper offers a range of tools and services that includes a full development stack for developers, cloud-based services for device management and hardware emulators to get started with building custom devices.
“Esper helped us launch our Fusion-connected fitness offering on three different types of hardware in less than six months,” said Chris Merli, founder at Inspire Fitness. “Their full stack connected fitness Android platform helped us test our application on different hardware platforms, configure all our devices over the cloud, and manage our fleet exactly to our specifications. They gave us speed, Android expertise, and trust that our application would provide a delightful experience for our customers.”
The company also offers solutions for running Android on older x86 Windows devices to extend the life of this hardware, too.
“We spent about a year and a half on building out the infrastructure,” said Gopalan. “Definitely. That’s the hard part and that’s really creating a reliable, robust mechanism where customers can trust that the bits will flow to the devices. And you can also roll back if you need to.”
Esper is working with hardware partners to launch devices that come with built-in Esper-support from the get-go.
Esper says it saw 70x revenue growth in the last year, an 8x growth in paying customers and a 15x growth in devices running Esper. Since we don’t know the baseline, those numbers are meaningless, but the investors clearly believe that Esper is on to something. Current customers include the likes of CloudKitchens, Spire Health, Intelity, Ordermark, Inspire Fitness, RomTech and Uber.
Powered by WPeMatico