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Chime has agreed to stop using the word ‘bank’ after a California regulator pushed back
Chime can apparently call itself the “fastest-growing fintech in the U.S.,” but it has agreed to stop referring to itself as a “bank,” per a new report out of American Banker.
Evidently, the eight-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit was the target of an investigation by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation after Chime used “chimebank” in its website address, as well as used “bank” and “banking” elsewhere in its advertisements, according to the agency in a settlement agreement.
As noted by AB, Chime made the decision to settle ahead of a deadline imposed by the regulatory body.
The development shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with banking laws. No outfit can represent itself as a bank or credit union unless it’s licensed to engage in the business of banking. The commission that pushed back on the startup issues such licenses and regulates state-chartered banks in the state of California through the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation and said in the settlement that “at all relevant times herein, Chime was not licensed to operate as a bank in California or in any other jurisdiction, nor was it exempt from such licensure.”
Chime has at times attempted to draw a distinction between itself and a bank. When the company raised its most recent round of funding — a $485 million Series F round last September that valued the business at $14.5 billion — CEO Chris Britt told CNBC: “We’re more like a consumer software company than a bank . . . It’s more a transaction-based, processing-based business model that is highly predictable, highly recurring and highly profitable.”
Still, Chime, like many newer fintech companies, has seemingly embraced the term “neobank” and “challenger bank,” and perhaps it’s no wonder. It’s certainly easier to convey to consumers what it is selling, which is banking services that include — in this case — debit cards, spending accounts and savings accounts, all offered through users’ mobile phones.
Given the settlement, expect to see more startups like Chime make clearer that in most cases, they do not have a bank charter and instead are being provided services by banks that do. In Chime’s case, for example, it now makes more plain on its website that it is a “financial technology company” and “not a bank” and that its services are being provided by the The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank, which are both FDIC members.
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Applications for the TC Early Stage Pitch-Off in July are open
Early-stage startups — now is your time to shine at the TechCrunch Early Stage event on July 8 and 9. This is part two of the highly successful event from April where top experts train and teach founders how to build, launch and scale their companies. In April we hosted the inaugural TC Early Stage Pitch-Off with 10 top companies from around the globe. TC is on the hunt to feature a new batch of 10 companies this summer to pitch in front of TC editors, global investors, press and hundreds of attendees. Step into the spotlight now. Apply here by June 7th.
The Pitch. Ten founders will pitch onstage for five minutes, followed by a five-minute Q&A with an esteemed panel of VC judges. The winner will receive a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to Extra Crunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.
The Training. Nervous to pitch onstage in front of thousands? Fear not. After completing the application, selected founders will receive training sessions during a remote mini-bootcamp, communication training and personalized pitch-coaching by the Startup Battlefield team. Selected startups will also be announced on TechCrunch.com in advance of the show.
Qualifications. TechCrunch is looking for early-stage, pre-Series A companies with limited press. Our last pitch-off had one of the most geographically diverse batches from a TC event. The Early Stage Pitch-Off is open to companies from around the world, consumer or enterprise and in any industry — biotech, space, mobility, impact, SaaS, hardware, sustainability and more.
Founders, don’t miss your chance to pitch your company on the world’s best tech stage. Apply today!
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Supercell likes Metacore’s games so much it just gave it another $180M credit line
Metacore, a Finnish mobile games company, seems to have an amazing “relationship” with Supercell, another (quite successful) Finnish mobile games company.
Back in September 2020, Metacore raised $17.7 million in equity from Supercell and another $11.8 million line of credit, sometimes also called a debt round. That amazing relationship appears to be ongoing. Because Metacore has now raised yet another debt round from Supercell, but this time for €150 million ($180 million). These guys really like each other.
The simple reason for this is two words: Merge Mansion. This game has been so spectacularly successful that Supercell clearly wants a stake in that success, and it has the cash reserves to make that bet.
The puzzle discovery game has 800,000 daily players, and an annual revenue run rate of more than €45 million, so it’s really on a growth curve.
Why so successful? Well, players have really loved the idea that they can literally merge two items they pick up in the game to make a brand new thing. So for instance, you can merge two rakes and you get another kind of tool that you can then can use somewhere else. This is a very unique mechanic in mobile games.
Supercell is also enamored of Metacore’s games development strategy: It creates games with two- to three-person teams and only adds resources when a game takes off. This innovative approach to game development is at least part of the reason Supercell is doubling down on its investment, not just Merge Mansion itself. It’s a sort of “fail-fast” approach to game-making that is clearly paying dividends.
So why this approach to the latest financing?
I spoke to CEO and co-founder Mika Tammenkoski, who told me: “Yes, it is a credit line. We are more about scaling up the company as we are scaling up revenue. We already have meaningful revenue, we can invest the money, and we can expect a certain kind of return on investment. So this is the cheapest investment that we can get. Equity investment would dilute us. So this makes sense from that point of view. With Supercell, we have a really great partner backing us. They know exactly what is ahead of us. They know exactly the kind of challenges that we have, and that makes us aligned in that sense… We both think long term, we both want to scale the game as big as possible. And with Supercell we get the best terms overall.”
So there you have it. Metacore and Supercell are locked in an embrace which any other outside investor is going to have to invest in big to get a look in on the action.
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How 4 New Jersey pools turned into a startup that just raised $10M
As the oldest of 12 children, Bunim Laskin spent much of his teen years looking for ways to help keep his siblings entertained. Noticing that a neighbor’s pool was often empty, Laskin reached out to ask if his family could use her pool. To make it worth her while, he suggested that they could help cover her expenses for maintaining the pool.
Soon after, five other families had made the same arrangement with her and the pool owner had six families covering 25% of her expenses. This meant that the neighbor was actually making money off her pool. The arrangement sparked a business idea in Laskin’s mind. At the age of 20, he founded Swimply, a marketplace for homeowners to rent out their underutilized pools to local swimmers, with Asher Weinberger.
The Cedarhurst, New York-based company launched a beta in 2018, starting with four pools in the New Jersey area.
“We used Google Earth to find houses, and then knocked on 80 doors with a pool,” CEO Laskin recalls. “We got to 100 pools organically. Word of mouth really helped us grow.” The site was pretty bare bones, he admits, with potential customers only able to view photos of the pools and connect with the pool owner by phone.
That year, Swimply did around 400 reservations and raised $1.2 million from friends and family.
In 2019, Swimply launched what he describes as a “proper” website and app with an automated platform. It grew “four to five times” that year, again mostly organically. In an episode that aired in March 2020, the company appeared on Shark Tank but went home without a deal.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Swimply, Laskin said, pivoted right into the pandemic.
“We were the perfect solution for people when the world was falling on its head,” he said. The company restructured its offering to ensure that pool owners did not have to interact with guests. “It was the perfect, contact-free, self-serve experience to hang out and be with people you quarantined with.”
The CDC then came out to say that it was safe to swim because chlorine could help kill the virus, and that proved to be a big boon to its business.
“On one end, it was a way for people to have a normal day and on the other, it helped give owners a way to earn an income, at a time when many people were being affected financially,” Laskin told TechCrunch.
Business took off in 2020 with revenue growing 4,000% and now Swimply is announcing a $10 million Series A round. Norwest Venture Partners led the financing, which also included participation from Trust Ventures and a number of angel investors such as Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra; Rob Chesnut, former general counsel and chief ethics officer at Airbnb; Ancestry.com CEO Deborah Liu and Michael Curtis.
Swimply is now operating in a total of 125 U.S. markets, two markets in Canada and five markets in Australia. It plans to use its new capital in part to expand into new markets and toward product development.
Image Credits: Swimply
The way it works is pretty straightforward. Swimply simply connects homeowners that have underutilized backyard spaces and pools with those seeking a way to gather, cool off or exercise, for example. People or families can rent pools by the hour, ranging in price from $15 to $60 per hour (at an average of $45/hour) depending on the amenities. New markets that Swimply has recently expanded to include Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina and the California cities of Oakland, San Luis Obispo and Los Gatos.
“The shifting mindset from younger generations about ownership is a huge contributor to increased growth of the Swimply marketplace,” said co-founder Weinberger, who serves as Swimply’s COO. “Swimming is the third most popular activity for adults and number one for children, and yet no other company has tackled the aquatic space to make swimming more affordable and accessible…until now.”
While the company declined to provide hard revenue figures, Laskin said Swimply was seeing “seven digits a month in revenue” and 15,000 to 20,000 reservations a month. Families represent the most popular reservation.
“People can book and pay through our platform, and only 20% of hosts ever meet their guests,” Laskin said. “We’re enabling a new kind of consumer behavior with what we’re doing.”
The company is planning to use its new capital to also rebuild much of its tech infrastructure and boost its customer support team to be more “readily available.”
It is also now offering a complimentary up to $1 million worth of insurance per booking for liability as well as $10,000 for property damage.
Swimply has a little over 20 employees, up 10 times from two people in December of 2020. It plans to double that number over the next few months.
The company’s model has proven quite lucrative for some owners, according to Laskin.
“Last year, there were some owners who earned $10,000 a month. One owner in Denver earned $50,000 last year and he had signed up toward the end of the summer. He should make over $100,000 this year,” Lasken projects.
Its only criteria is that owners offer a clean pool. Eighty-five percent of hosts offer restrooms as well. If they don’t, they are limited to one-hour reservations with a max of five guests. Swimply has also partnered with local pool companies, and if they pay one of its owners a visit and certify that pool, that owner gets a badge on the site “so guests get an additional level of security,” Laskin said.
Ed Yip of Norwest Venture Partners admits that when he first heard of the concept of Swimply, he “didn’t know what to make of it.”
But the more he heard about it, the more excited he got.
“This is the Holy Grail for a consumer investor. We’re not changing consumer behavior, but rather [we] productize the experience and make it safer and easier on both sides,” Yip told TechCrunch.
What also gets the investor excited is the potential for Swimply beyond just swimming pools in the future.
“We’re seeing a ton of demand from hosts wanting to list hot tubs and tennis courts, for example,” Yip said. “So this can turn into a marketplace for shared outdoor resources and that’s a huge market opportunity that adds value on both sides.”
Indeed, the concept of monetizing underutilized space is a growing concept. Earlier this year, we reported on Neighbor, which operates a self-storage marketplace, raising $53 million in a Series B round of funding. Neighbor’s unique model aims to repurpose under-utilized or vacant space — whether it be a person’s basement or the empty floor of an office building — and turn it into storage.
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The morality and efficacy of going public earlier
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Chris dug into the world of the IPO. Not just the numbers and the metrics and the calculations of valuations at diluted, and non-diluted, share counts. No. We wanted to talk about the morality and efficacy of going public.
So to round out our conversation we enlisted Steve Cakebread, the CFO of Yext, and Garth Mitchell, the CFO of Latch. Cakebread is known for being aboard the Salesforce, Pandora and Yext IPOs. Mitchell has sat on both sides of the table during the IPO process, and is currently helming the money equations as Latch approaches the public markets via a SPAC.
For more context, Yext, a company that first launched at a TechCrunch event back in 2009, provides data tooling and search software to businesses, while Latch builds software and hardware for rental-focused buildings. Yext is public. Latch will be in a few months.
Back to our topic, we asked Cakebread to talk about his thesis on why going public earlier than later can help a company’s maturity process and can help provide greater returns to the general public. The CFO has written a rather good book about the IPO process more generally and what it means for a company’s internal processes, but his morality notes especially stood out because it’s an argument far less noisy than the POP critics. Baked beans come up, somehow!
We also asked Mitchell to talk about Latch’s choice to go public, and what opportunities and challenges the SPAC route brings for the company. Of course, there’s a SPAC joke in there (or two), but we get into broader “what’s next” debates about if more companies will start to leave the private world, venture capital’s role in this whole mess and the financial lift of going to the public market.
Hope you enjoy the show, and get excited: Equity is going to have more guests on from time to time, and we welcome any suggestions you want to throw at us.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
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Timescale grabs $40M Series B as it goes all in on cloud version of time series database
Timescale, makers of the open-source TimescaleDB time series database, announced a $40 million Series B financing round today. The investment comes just over two years after it got a $15 million Series A.
Redpoint Ventures led today’s round, with help from existing investors Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. The company reports it has now raised approximately $70 million.
TimescaleDB lets users measure data across a time dimension, so anything that would change over time. “What we found is we need a purpose-built database for it to handle scalability, reliability and performance, and we like to think of ourselves as the category-defining relational database for time series,” CEO and co-founder Ajay Kulkarni explained.
He says that the choice to build their database on top of Postgres when it launched four years ago was a key decision. “There are a few different databases that are designed for time series, but we’re the only one where developers get the purpose-built time series database plus a complete Postgres database all in one,” he said.
While the company has an open-source version, last year it decided rather than selling an enterprise version (as it had been), it was going to include all of that functionality in the free version of the product and place a bet entirely on the cloud for revenue.
“We decided that we’re going to make a bold bet on the cloud. We think cloud is where the future of database adoption is, and so in the last year […] we made all of our enterprise features free. If you want to test it yourself, you get the whole thing, but if you want a managed service, then we’re available to run it for you,” he said.
The community approach is working to attract users, with over 2 million monthly active databases, some of which the company is betting will convert to the cloud service over time. Timescale is based in New York City, but it’s a truly remote organization, with 60 employees spread across 20 countries and every continent except Antarctica.
He says that as a global company, it creates new dimensions of diversity and different ways of thinking about it. “I think one thing that is actually kind of an interesting challenge for us is what does D&I mean in a totally global org. A lot of people focus on diversity and inclusion within the U.S., but we think we’re doing better than most tech companies in terms of racial diversity, gender diversity,” he said.
And being remote-first isn’t going to change even when we get past the pandemic. “I think it may not work for every business, but I think being remote first has been a really good thing for us,” he said.
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Cymulate nabs $45M to test and improve cybersecurity defenses via attack simulations
With cybercrime on course to be a $6 trillion problem this year, organizations are throwing ever more resources at the issue to avoid being a target. Now, a startup that’s built a platform to help them stress-test the investments that they have made into their security IT is announcing some funding on the back of strong demand from the market for its tools.
Cymulate, which lets organizations and their partners run machine-based attack simulations on their networks to determine vulnerabilities and then automatically receive guidance around how to fix what is not working well enough, has picked up $45 million, funding that the startup — co-headquartered in Israel and New York — will be using to continue investing in its platform and to ramp up its operations after doubling its revenues last year on the back of a customer list that now numbers 300 large enterprises and mid-market companies, including the Euronext stock exchange network as well as service providers such as NTT and Telit.
London-based One Peak Partners is leading this Series C, with previous investors Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Growth and Dell Technologies Capital also participating.
According to Eyal Wachsman, the CEO and co-founder, Cymulate’s technology has been built not just to improve an organization’s security, but an automated, machine learning-based system to better understand how to get the most out of the security investments that have already been made.
“Our vision is to be the largest cybersecurity ‘consulting firm’ without consultants,” he joked.
The valuation is not being disclosed, but as some measure of what is going on, David Klein, managing partner at One Peak, said in an interview that he expects Cymulate to hit a $1 billion valuation within two years at the rate it’s growing and bringing in revenue right now. The startup has now raised $71 million, so it’s likely the valuation is in the mid-hundreds of millions. (We’ll continue trying to get a better number to have a more specific data point here.)
Cymulate — pronounced “sigh-mulate”, like the “cy” in “cyber” and a pun of “simulate”) is cloud-based but works across both cloud and on-premises environments and the idea is that it complements work done by (human) security teams both inside and outside of an organization, as well as the security IT investments (in terms of software or hardware) that they have already made.
“We do not replace — we bring back the power of the expert by validating security controls and checking whether everything is working correctly to optimize a company’s security posture,” Wachsman said. “Most of the time, we find our customers are using only 20% of the capabilities that they have. The main idea is that we have become a standard.”
The company’s tools are based in part on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a knowledge base of threats, tactics and techniques used by a number of other cybersecurity services, including a number of others building continuous validation services that compete with Cymulate. These include the likes of FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Randori, Khosla-backed AttackIQ and many more.
Although Cymulate is optimized to help customers better use the security tools they already have, it is not meant to replace other security apps, Wachsman noted, even if the by-product might become buying fewer of those apps in the future.
“I believe my message every day when talking with security experts is to stop buying more security products,” he said in an interview. “They won’t help defend you from the next attack. You can use what you’ve already purchased as long as you configure it well.”
In his words, Cymulate acts as a “black box” on the network, where it integrates with security and other software (it can also work without integrating, but integrations allow for a deeper analysis). After running its simulations, it produces a map of the network and its threat profile, an executive summary of the situation that can be presented to management and a more technical rundown, which includes recommendations for mitigations and remediations.
Alongside validating and optimising existing security apps and identifying vulnerabilities in the network, Cymulate also has built special tools to fit different kinds of use cases that are particularly relevant to how businesses operate today. They include evaluating remote working deployments, the state of a network following an M&A process, the security landscape of an organization that links up with third parties in supply chain arrangements, how well an organization’s security architecture is meeting (or potentially conflicting) with privacy and other kinds of regulatory compliance requirements, and it has built a “purple team” deployment, where in cases where security teams do not have the resources for running separate “red teams” to stress test something, blue teams at the organization can use Cymulate to build a machine learning-based “team” to do this.
The fact that Cymulate has built the infrastructure to run all of these processes speaks to a lot of potential of what more it could build, especially as our threat landscape and how we do business both continue to evolve. Even as it is, though, the opportunity today is a massive one, with Gartner estimating that some $170 billion will be spent on information security by enterprises in 2022. That’s one reason why investors are here, too.
“The increasing pace of global cyber security attacks has resulted in a crisis of trust in the security posture of enterprises and a realization that security testing needs to be continuous as opposed to periodic, particularly in the context of an ever-changing IT infrastructure and rapidly evolving threats. Companies understand that implementing security solutions is not enough to guarantee protection against cyber threats and need to regain control,” said Klein, in a statement. “We expect Cymulate to grow very fast,” he told me more directly.
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Revel’s Frank Reig shares how he built his business and what he’s planning
It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service.
In fact, since the beginning of 2021, Revel has launched an e-bike subscription service, an EV charging station venture and an all-electric rideshare service driven by a fleet of 50 Teslas.
So we caught up with Reig to talk about what he learned from building the company, how Revel’s business strategy has evolved, and what lies ahead.
Before we get to the good stuff, here’s some background:
The idea for Revel seems like it came from the classic entrepreneur’s guidebook: Reig had a need that no existing company addressed. He’d seen mopeds used as major, if not dominant, forms of transportation as he traveled around Europe, Asia and Latin America, and he wondered why this logical (and fun) mode of transport was largely absent from American cities in general, and in his hometown, New York City, in particular.
So in 2018, Reig quit his job, raised $1.1 million from 57 people, and launched a small pilot program involving 68 mopeds in Brooklyn. In May 2019, he raised $4 million in VC funding, which helped him expand to 1,000 electric mopeds across Brooklyn and Queens. Revel secured another $33.8 million in September 2019, in a round that included funding from Ibex Investments, Toyota Ventures, Maniv Capital, Shell and Hyundai, according to Reig. This has allowed the founder to execute a grander plan to build an electric mobility company.
The company now operates more than 3,000 e-mopeds in New York City, and has another 3,000 across Washington, D.C., Miami, Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.
TechCrunch: You’ve added three new business lines and told us previously that you have more on the way. That’s a lot.
Frank Reig: Yes, we have had a busy start to 2021! We began the year announcing our fast-charging stations across the city that will help fill the large gap in infrastructure to support the wide-scale adoption of EVs. We launched our e-bike subscription program to offer New Yorkers another way to navigate their city, and with our newly announced electric ride-sharing program, we are solving the “chicken and egg” problem of EV charging and demand. We are focused on building out these business lines and our moped business as well and very much looking forward to what is to come.
When shared micromobility companies expand, they often just offer different vehicles. You seem to be going, “Ok, we’ll offer a different vehicle — an e-bike, but it’s a subscription. And we’re also doing electric vehicle chargers, and let’s add an EV rideshare to the mix.” It’s pretty broad.
If we’re talking about electrifying mobility in major cities, it starts with infrastructure. And we’re the company rolling up our sleeves and doing it now by building that infrastructure and operating fleets. Because in a city like New York, the infrastructure does not exist for electric mobility.
There are a few Tesla superchargers around the city, usually behind parking paywalls, so you have to pay the garage to even use it. And, of course, you need a Tesla for that infrastructure to even be relevant. And when you think about other public fast-charging access points in the city, they are few and far between. We’re building 30 in one site and many more beyond that in 2021.
New York is a complicated city to operate in, so it’s easier for us to add e-bikes as a service because I already have the infrastructure and on-the-ground operations that we built with the mopeds. I have multiple warehouses throughout this city. I have full-time staff that I’ve employed, from field technicians to mechanics, and a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles on the streets in New York. So it’s a natural extension of the platform to be able to add another product to it, to reach a new type of user, or to supplement the use case of our current moped users. All we needed to do was finance some e-bikes, and then you have another line of business.
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Cased announces $2.25M seed round to help developers work in production environments
An issue every developer faces is dealing with problems on a live application without messing it up. In fact, in many companies such access is restricted. Cased, an early stage startup, has come up with a solution to provide a way to work safely with the live application.
Today, the company announced a $2.25 million seed round led by Founders Fund along with a group of prestigious technology angel investors. The company also announced that the product is generally available to all developers today for the first time. It’s worth noting that the funding actually closed last April, and they are just announcing it today.
Bryan Byrne, CEO and co-founder at Cased says he and his fellow co-founders, all of whom cut their teeth at GitHub, experienced this problem of working in live production environments firsthand. He says that the typical response by larger companies is to build a tool in-house, but this isn’t an option for many smaller companies.
“We saw firsthand at GitHub how the developer experience gets more difficult over time, and it becomes more difficult for developers to get production work done. So we wanted to provide a developer friendly way to get production work done,” Byrne explained.
He said without proper tooling, it forces CTOs to restrict access to the production code, which in turn makes it difficult to fix problems as they arise in production environments. “Companies are forced to restrict access to production and restrict access to tools that developers need to work in production. A lot of the biggest tech companies invest in millions to deliver great developer experiences, but obviously smaller companies don’t have those resources. So we want to give all companies the building blocks they need to deliver a great developer experience out of the box,” he said.
This involves providing development teams with open access to production command line tools by adding logging and approval workflows to sensitive operations. That enables executives to open up access with specific rules and the ability to audit who has been accessing the production environment.
The company launched at the beginning of last year and the founders have been working with design partners and early customers prior to officially opening the site to the general public today.
They currently have five people including the four founders, but Byrne says that they have had a good initial reaction to the product and are in the process of hiring additional employees. He says that as they do, diversity and inclusion is a big priority for the founders, even as a very early stage company.
“It’s very prominent in our company handbook, so that we make sure we prioritize an inclusive culture from the very beginning because [ … ] we know firsthand that if you don’t invest in that early, it can really hold you back as a company and as a culture. Culture starts from day one, for sure,” he said.
As part of that, the company intends to be remote first even post-pandemic, a move he believes will make it easier to build a diverse company.
“We will definitely be remote first. We believe that also helps with diversity and inclusion as you allow people to work from anywhere, and we have a lot of experience in leading remote-first culture from our time at GitHub, so we began as a remote culture and we will continue to do that,” he said.
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Cognixion’s brain-monitoring headset enables fluid communication for people with severe disabilities
Of the many frustrations of having a severe motor impairment, the difficulty of communicating must surely be among the worst. The tech world has not offered much succor to those affected by things like locked-in syndrome, ALS and severe strokes, but startup Cognixion aims to with a novel form of brain monitoring that, combined with a modern interface, could make speaking and interaction far simpler and faster.
The company’s One headset tracks brain activity closely in such a way that the wearer can direct a cursor — reflected on a visor like a heads-up display — in multiple directions, or select from various menus and options. No physical movement is needed, and with the help of modern voice interfaces like Alexa, the user can not only communicate efficiently but freely access all kinds of information and content most people take for granted.
But it’s not a miracle machine, and it isn’t a silver bullet. Here’s how it got started.
Overhauling decades-old brain tech
Everyone with a motor impairment has different needs and capabilities, and there are a variety of assistive technologies that cater to many of these needs. But many of these techs and interfaces are years or decades old — medical equipment that hasn’t been updated for an era of smartphones and high-speed mobile connections.
Some of the most dated interfaces, unfortunately, are those used by people with the most serious limitations: those whose movements are limited to their heads, faces, eyes — or even a single eyelid, like Jean-Dominique Bauby, the famous author of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
One of the tools in the toolbox is the electroencephalogram, or EEG, which involves detecting activity in the brain via patches on the scalp that record electrical signals. But while they’re useful in medicine and research in many ways, EEGs are noisy and imprecise — more for finding which areas of the brain are active than, say, which sub-region of the sensory cortex or the like. And of course you have to wear a shower cap wired with electrodes (often greasy with conductive gel) — it’s not the kind of thing anyone wants to do for more than an hour, let alone all day every day.
Yet even among those with the most profound physical disabilities, cognition is often unimpaired — as indeed EEG studies have helped demonstrate. It made Andreas Forsland, co-founder and CEO of Cognixion, curious about further possibilities for the venerable technology: “Could a brain-computer interface using EEG be a viable communication system?”
He first used EEG for assistive purposes in a research study some five years ago. They were looking into alternative methods of letting a person control an on-screen cursor, among them an accelerometer for detecting head movements, and tried integrating EEG readings as another signal. But it was far from a breakthrough.
A modern lab with an EEG cap wired to a receiver and laptop — this is an example of how EEG is commonly used. Image Credits: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
He ran down the difficulties: “With a read-only system, the way EEG is used today is no good; other headsets have slow sample rates and they’re not accurate enough for a real-time interface. The best BCIs are in a lab, connected to wet electrodes — it’s messy, it’s really a non-starter. So how do we replicate that with dry, passive electrodes? We’re trying to solve some very hard engineering problems here.”
The limitations, Forsland and his colleagues found, were not so much with the EEG itself as with the way it was carried out. This type of brain monitoring is meant for diagnosis and study, not real-time feedback. It would be like taking a tractor to a drag race. Not only do EEGs often work with a slow, thorough check of multiple regions of the brain that may last several seconds, but the signal it produces is analyzed by dated statistical methods. So Cognixion started by questioning both practices.
Improving the speed of the scan is more complicated than overclocking the sensors or something. Activity in the brain must be inferred by collecting a certain amount of data. But that data is collected passively, so Forsland tried bringing an active element into it: a rhythmic electric stimulation that is in a way reflected by the brain region, but changed slightly depending on its state — almost like echolocation.
The Cognixion One headset with its dry EEG terminals visible. Image Credits: Cognixion
They detect these signals with a custom set of six EEG channels in the visual cortex area (up and around the back of your head), and use a machine learning model to interpret the incoming data. Running a convolutional neural network locally on an iPhone — something that wasn’t really possible a couple years ago — the system can not only tease out a signal in short order but make accurate predictions, making for faster and smoother interactions.
The result is sub-second latency with 95-100% accuracy in a wireless headset powered by a mobile phone. “The speed, accuracy and reliability are getting to commercial levels — we can match the best in class of the current paradigm of EEGs,” said Forsland.
Dr. William Goldie, a clinical neurologist who has used and studied EEGs and other brain monitoring techniques for decades (and who has been voluntarily helping Cognixion develop and test the headset), offered a positive evaluation of the technology.
“There’s absolutely evidence that brainwave activity responds to thinking patterns in predictable ways,” he noted. This type of stimulation and response was studied years ago. “It was fascinating, but back then it was sort of in the mystery magic world. Now it’s resurfacing with these special techniques and the computerization we have these days. To me it’s an area that’s opening up in a manner that I think clinically could be dramatically effective.”
BCI, meet UI
The first thing Forsland told me was “We’re a UI company.” And indeed even such a step forward in neural interfaces as he later described means little if it can’t be applied to the problem at hand: helping people with severe motor impairment to express themselves quickly and easily.
Sad to say, it’s not hard to imagine improving on the “competition,” things like puff-and-blow tubes and switches that let users laboriously move a cursor right, right a little more, up, up a little more, then click: a letter! Gaze detection is of course a big improvement over this, but it’s not always an option (eyes don’t always work as well as one would like) and the best eye-tracking solutions (like a Tobii Dynavox tablet) aren’t portable.
Why shouldn’t these interfaces be as modern and fluid as any other? The team set about making a UI with this and the capabilities of their next-generation EEG in mind.
Image Credits: Cognixion
Their solution takes bits from the old paradigm and combines them with modern virtual assistants and a radial design that prioritizes quick responses and common needs. It all runs in an app on an iPhone, the display of which is reflected in a visor, acting as a HUD and outward-facing display.
In easy reach of, not to say a single thought but at least a moment’s concentration or a tilt of the head, are everyday questions and responses — yes, no, thank you, etc. Then there are slots to put prepared speech into — names, menu orders and so on. And then there’s a keyboard with word- and sentence-level prediction that allows common words to be popped in without spelling them out.
“We’ve tested the system with people who rely on switches, who might take 30 minutes to make 2 selections. We put the headset on a person with cerebral palsy, and she typed our her name and hit play in 2 minutes,” Forsland said. “It was ridiculous, everyone was crying.”
Goldie noted that there’s something of a learning curve. “When I put it on, I found that it would recognize patterns and follow through on them, but it also sort of taught patterns to me. You’re training the system, and it’s training you — it’s a feedback loop.”
“I can be the loudest person in the room”
One person who has found it extremely useful is Chris Benedict, a DJ, public speaker and disability advocate who himself has Dyskinetic Cerebral Palsy. It limits his movements and ability to speak, but doesn’t stop him from spinning (digital) records at various engagements, however, or from explaining his experience with Cognixion’s One headset over email. (And you can see him demonstrating it in person in the video above.)
Image Credits: Cognixion
“Even though it’s not a tool that I’d need all the time it’s definitely helpful in aiding my communication,” he told me. “Especially when I need to respond quickly or am somewhere that is noisy, which happens often when you are a DJ. If I wear it with a Bluetooth speaker I can be the loudest person in the room.” (He always has a speaker on hand, since “you never know when you might need some music.”)
The benefits offered by the headset give some idea of what is lacking from existing assistive technology (and what many people take for granted).
“I can use it to communicate, but at the same time I can make eye contact with the person I’m talking to, because of the visor. I don’t have to stare at a screen between me and someone else. This really helps me connect with people,” Benedict explained.
“Because it’s a headset I don’t have to worry about getting in and out of places, there is no extra bulk added to my chair that I have to worry about getting damaged in a doorway. The headset is balanced too, so it doesn’t make my head lean back or forward or weigh my neck down,” he continued. “When I set it up to use the first time it had me calibrate, and it measured my personal range of motion so the keyboard and choices fit on the screen specifically for me. It can also be recalibrated at any time, which is important because not every day is my range of motion the same.”
Alexa, which has been extremely helpful to people with a variety of disabilities due to its low cost and wide range of compatible devices, is also part of the Cognixion interface, something Benedict appreciates, having himself adopted the system for smart home and other purposes. “With other systems this isn’t something you can do, or if it is an option, it’s really complicated,” he said.
Next steps
As Benedict demonstrates, there are people for whom a device like Cognixion’s makes a lot of sense, and the hope is it will be embraced as part of the necessarily diverse ecosystem of assistive technology.
Forsland said that the company is working closely with the community, from users to clinical advisors like Goldie and other specialists, like speech therapists, to make the One headset as good as it can be. But the hurdle, as with so many devices in this class, is how to actually put it on people’s heads — financially and logistically speaking.
Cognixion is applying for FDA clearance to get the cost of the headset — which, being powered by a phone, is not as high as it would be with an integrated screen and processor — covered by insurance. But in the meantime the company is working with clinical and corporate labs that are doing neurological and psychological research. Places where you might find an ordinary, cumbersome EEG setup, in other words.
The company has raised funding and is looking for more (hardware development and medical pursuits don’t come cheap), and has also collected a number of grants.
The One headset may still be some years away from wider use (the FDA is never in a hurry), but that allows the company time to refine the device and include new advances. Unlike many other assistive devices, for example a switch or joystick, this one is largely software-limited, meaning better algorithms and UI work will significantly improve it. While many wait for companies like Neuralink to create a brain-computer interface for the modern era, Cognixion has already done so for a group of people who have much more to gain from it.
You can learn more about the Cognixion One headset and sign up to receive the latest at its site here.
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