Turner “Tfue” Tenney, one of the world’s premier streamers and esports pros, has filed a lawsuit against esports organization Faze Clan over a “grossly oppressive, onerous and one-sided” contract, according to THR.

The complaint alleges that Faze Clan’s Gamer Agreement relegates up to 80% of the streamer’s earnings from branded content (sponsored videos) to Faze Clan, and that the contract hinders Tfue from pursuing and earning money from sponsorship deals that Faze Clan hasn’t approved.

Tfue’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman of Freedman + Taitelman, took the complaint to the California Labor Commissioner with issues that span far beyond financial contracts. Freedman wrote that Faze Clan takes advantage of young artists and actually jeopardizes their health and safety, noting an incident where Tfue was allegedly pressured to skateboard in a video and injured his arm. Freedman also wrote that Faze Clan pressured Tfue to live in one of its homes where he was given alcohol before being 21 years old, and encouraged to illegally gamble.

From the complaint:

In one instance, Tenney suffered an injury (a deep wound that likely required stitches) which resulted in permanent disfigurement. Faze Clan also encourages underage drinking and gambling in Faze Clan’s so-called Clout House and FaZe House, where Faze Clan talent live and frequently party. It is also widely publicized that Faze Clan has attempted to exploit at least one artist who is a minor.

Faze Clan issued the following statement on Twitter following the news:

Faze Clan claims that it has taken no more than 20% of Tfue’s earnings from sponsored content, which amounts to a total of $60,000. The owner of Faze Clan, Ricky Banks, took to Twitter to make his case, showing the incredible growth of Tfue’s popularity across Twitch and YouTube since signing with Faze Clan.

As it stands now, Tfue boasts more than 120 million views on Twitch, more than 10 million YouTube subscribers and 5.5 million followers on Instagram.

Banks also reiterated Faze Clan’s official statement saying that the company has taken 20% of Tfue’s earnings from branded deals, totaling $60,000.

The Tfue claim, however, seems to take issue with the content of the agreement, not necessarily its execution, and the general legality of these types of gamer agreements across the esports landscape. Moreover, the complaint alleges that Tfue lost potential earnings due to his agreement with Faze Clan and their own conflicts of interest with various brands interested in a sponsorship.

Many officials claim that governments should regulate Facebook and other social platforms, but few describe what it actually means. A few days ago, France released a report that outlines what France — and maybe the European Union — plans to do when it comes to content moderation.

It’s an insightful 34-page document with a nuanced take on toxic content and how to deal with it. There are some brand new ideas in the report that are worth exploring. Instead of moderating content directly, the regulator in charge of social networks would tell Facebook and other social networks a list of objectives. For instance, if a racist photo goes viral and is distributed to 5 percent of monthly active users in France, you could consider that the social network has failed to fulfill its obligations.

This isn’t just wishful thinking as the regulator would be able to fine the company up to 4 percent of the company’s global annual turnover in case of a systemic failure to moderate toxic content.

The government plans to turn the report into new pieces of regulation in the coming months. France doesn’t plan to stop there. It is already lobbying other countries (in Europe, the Group of 7 nations and beyond) so that they could all come up with cross-border regulation and have a real impact on moderation processes. So let’s dive into the future of social network regulation.

Facebook first opened its doors

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in April 2018, it felt like regulation was inevitable. And the company itself has been aware of this for a while.

Raisin, the pan-European fintech marketplace for savings and investment products, is headed to the U.S., announcing plans to roll out a similar offering across the pond.

The German company, which is backed by the likes of PayPal, Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Thrive Capital, wants to bring greater competition and easier savings and deposit account opening to U.S. customers. The deposits market in the U.S. is said to be $12.7 trillion, and yet Raisin claims most Americans could be getting a much better return on their savings.

Despite the U.S. Federal Reserve raising interest rates and most consumers having ample opportunities to optimise their savings in theory, Raisin says shopping around for a competitive savings rate often involves too many hurdles for many American to bother. This includes finding out where good rates are available, assessing the quality of offers and, in some instances, switching from your existing primary bank.

In contrast, Raisin’s marketplace model claims to address these issues by making the range of offers transparent, whilst also creating a convenient and simple way to access the best rates on the market. Part of its remedy is that users only have to sign up to Raisin once, including regulatory checks, in order to access any of the offers from partner banks on its platform.

To kick off the new U.S. expansion, Raisin has hired Paul Knodel as U.S. CEO. Boasting 20 years financial industry experience, prior to joining Raisin he held executive and senior management positions at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, as well as TD Ameritrade, E-Trade and robo-advisor Wealthfront. Most recently Knodel led Wealthfront’s extension of its product suite into cash savings.

In addition, Raisin’s American expansion is being supported by the German government’s U.S.-based “German Accelerator” program. Each year 12 of Germany’s most promising startups are selected with the aim of helping them break into America.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, Raisin says it has more than 175,000 customers who have invested almost €13 billion into Raisin marketplace deposits. This year has also seen the fintech company acquire Germany’s MHB Bank, and close €100 million in Series D investment.

Sramana Mitra: You said you did the startup right after your MBA. So did you then bootstrap it to launch this? Whom did you launch it with? Matthew Elenjickal: I started the MBA program fully aware...

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Growth marketing is critical to a startup’s survival, but it’s not always clear how to successfully pull it off. How do you jump the chasm from one to 10 million customers? Should you recruit an in-house growth team or hire an agency? How do you actually get content marketing to work? How much money should you spend before writing off or doubling down on a marketing channel? What does it take to build an extraordinary team at every stage of your startup?

There isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to growth, but we are tapping some of the most brilliant minds in growth marketing to share their experiences and advice to entrepreneurs.

Last month, we launched an initiative to find the industry’s best growth marketing agencies, and since then entrepreneurs from all around the world have submitted their nominations.

If you haven’t already, take two minutes to nominate a growth marketing agency that has helped your company scale and reach its target customers.

We’re zeroing in on a short list of top firms, and we’ll begin publishing their profiles in the next few weeks, but founder recommendations, like yours, help determine who we feature.

Similar to our work with startup lawyers and brand designers, our goal is to make it easier and faster for entrepreneurs to find the right service provider, but without real and relevant founder recommendations, we can’t accomplish our mission. Growth is the latest iteration of Verified Experts (with more to come).

Help us support early-stage startups by nominating a growth marketing agency you’ve worked with.

Have any questions? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The real estate industry is experiencing a bit of a rejuvenation. After years resisting the influence of tech, the industry is now feeling the entrance of e-buyers, as well as a variety of software to streamline the process. One such tech company looking to infiltrate real estate is FlareAgent, which launches today out of Y Combinator.

FlareAgent was founded by Abhi CVK and Rashid Aziz. The duo, who just graduated out of NYU, first built FlareAgent when Rashid’s dad, a real estate agent, was asked by his boss (Mr. Brown) about finding software that might speed up the process of completing a transaction.

Abhi and Rashid built something that ended up helping grow the real estate firm from 20 deals per month to more than 100 deals/month. How?

FlareAgent lets all parties collaborate on a transaction from the comfort of their own home or office. From purchase offers to escrow documents to the closing agreement, FlareAgent allows brokers and clients to view and interact with various documents to speed up the time to close.

This used to be done manually by brokers, who’d have to fax or mail or hand-deliver documents to and from various parties in the transaction. If changes take place to the paperwork, this process may start over from scratch.

With FlareAgent, all the time spent changing and sharing documents manually can be done online.

To be clear, a transaction doesn’t actually go through FlareAgent. In other words, the money changing hands from buyer to seller doesn’t flow through the FlareAgent platform. But all the documents that need to be reviewed, amended and signed can be handled on FlareAgent.

To make money, the company charges a monthly subscription to brokers using the platform.

Thus far, FlareAgent says it has around 100 active agents on the platform and has processed more than 2,500 transactions (worth $550 million in property value) since its inception.

The best salespeople like to pride themselves on having both a sixth sense when it comes to closing a deal, and a healthy amount of persuasive magic to get a sale over the line. Now, a startup that says it can help any salesperson be like those top people, and help those top people be even better, has raised a large round of funding to take its own company to the next level.

People.ai, which has built a platform to ingest all the data that salespeople generate in the course of their work, and then use it to provide guidance to them to help source and close more deals, is today announcing that it has raised another $60 million in funding, which it will use to continue growing the business and building partnerships with new channels, such as system integrators to target bigger enterprises.

Alongside this, it is also launching a new product that it calls “The Wire” — a feed of insights that salespeople can access to find leads, pick up tips on how to approach them and ultimately to sell to them.

“Some people say it’s what LinkedIn should have been,” Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai’s founder and CEO, said in an interview. It helps, he said with a little laugh, that People.ai had managed to recruit David Flink to lead up project management at the startup. Flink joined earlier this year, having worked for nearly three years at LinkedIn on areas like search and discovery. 

The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but sources tell us it is around $500 million — specifically in the “mid-nine-figures.” The big number is partly the result of the startup’s strong growth so far: It has already ingested 350 million sales activities, 40 million contacts, a sales pipeline of $300 billion and $100 billion in closed and won deals. Its revenues have been growing 5X year-over-year, with customers squarely so far in the tech camp that surrounds the San Francisco-based startup. They include Red Hat, Lyft, Zoom, New Relic and Splunk.

This latest round is being led by Iconiq, the VC that includes the family office of Marc and Priscilla Zuckerberg, among others, with participation from previous investors Andreessen Horowitz (which led its previous round just seven months ago), Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and Y Combinator (where it was in a cohort in 2016).

There have been a number of startups and tech giants (Oracle and Microsoft being just two) that have been applying AI mechanics to the world of sales — specifically to help improve one aspect or another of the process. Startups range from those that use Robotic Process Automation to do some of the mundane work around data entry, to those that analyse conversations to parse them for clues to help close deals, to those that offer predictive analytics and those that are using AI to replicate sales agents altogether.

People.ai’s approach, says Rogynskyy, is not to replace salespeople but to “supercharge” the teams by using AI to ingest “high-value, low-volume activity.” Sitting in the background, requiring no active input from the user, it picks up all the “exhaust” produced in the process of a day, and uses it to produce cheat sheets to salespeople so that they can use them when speaking to clients to help them close deals, providing interesting insights, relevant facts and other details.

That is now going to be augmented with The Wire, which takes some cues from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, providing a stream of information to the viewer, and tapping into the concept of “graphs” to source names of people and information that is most relevant to the viewer (without the ads, of course).

Rogynskyy points out that his company currently has more than 65 patents (secured and in progress) on intelligent matching, and the plan longer term will be to take the sales model and apply it to a wider range of industry verticals. These are likely to include areas like real estate, financial services and recruitment (areas where the product is already being used in smaller use cases, he noted). 

“This model is applicable to any area where you are building external, complex relationships at scale,” he said.

Future Family is a startup aiming to make fertility services like IVF and egg freezing more accessible. They work with doctors and clinics to make the pricing of these services more predictable and upfront, then offer monthly payment plans to help customers spread the cost (often in the tens of thousands of dollars) over a few years.

In its recent user research, Future Family found that around 70% of their new customers had yet to see a fertility doctor; they were starting the process online, often without the next steps mapped out. With that in mind, today they’re rolling out a new membership plan that offers users a dedicated fertility coach, and helps them find a doctor in their area.

The membership will cost $200, which gets you:

Two and a half hours with a dedicated fertility coach, who will video chat with you on your schedule and platform of choice to help you figure out what’s next. Future Family CEO Claire Tomkins tells me their coaches are all registered nurses with clinical fertility experience, many of whom the company recruited from top U.S. clinics. The coach can help you figure out the first steps, prep you to meet with your doctor and help you understand your lab results.Recommendations on doctors/clinics in your area, based on things like distance, cost and your personal preferences, like the doctor’s gender and whether they’re part of a large hospital or a smaller clinic.Upfront service pricing; as Future Family already works with these doctors, they’re able to tell you how much it’ll all cost before you dive in.

The membership will also offer a way for members to sign up for one of Future Family’s financing plans — but Claire Tomkins tells me that there’s no lock in. If a customer does the video coaching and doctor matching and already has the payment side of things figured out, the promised prices will all still apply.

The new membership program will go live today.

Meet French startup Kard, a challenger bank that works a lot like N26 or Revolut. But Kard is all about convincing teens that their first bank account is going to be a Kard account — a bit like Step in the U.S.

When I talked with Kard co-founder and CEO Scott Gordon, he kept saying that Kard was a product for Generation Z. While I’m not a fan of that buzzword, it still looks like a well-designed app with some personality.

“Gen Z is a generation that has been forgotten by traditional banks,” Gordon said. “Seventy percent of their transactions are digital transactions,” he added later. Many teenagers borrow their parents’ card for those expenses.

Kard wants to empower teens with their own bank account, their own IBAN and their own Mastercard debit card. Instead of controlling every expense, parents can just top up the Kard account and let their child spend it however they want — you can top up with a bank transfer or using another card — just like in Revolut. Opening an account is free.

Like other electronic wallet apps, opening a Kard account is much simpler than opening a traditional bank account in France. You can sign up in a few minutes from your phone and confirm your identity later by sending a photo of your ID, etc.

After that, you get an account that you control from a mobile app. You can block and unblock the card, see transactions and send and receive money in real time with other Kard users. It ticks all the right boxes that you’ve come to expect if you have a bank account from a challenger bank.

In a couple of months, you’ll also be able to create money pots, round up your transactions to save some money, donate money to nonprofits, etc.

Kard is also borrowing a few ideas from Venmo. Users will be able to share expenses with their group of friends in the Kard app. Many teens already share a photo of their brand new sneakers on Snapchat for instance. Kard wants you to use their own app for this kind of content.

The startup raised $3.4 million (€3 million) back in January from Kima Ventures, Jean-Pascal Beaufret, Jambu Palaniappan, Francis Nappez, Julien Lemoine, Jason Dorsey and David Amsellem.

While the service is not live yet, you can sign up to the waiting list on the company’s website. Kard’s positioning is interesting. The startup doesn’t need to convince people to open yet another bank account — the company is tapping an endless funnel of new users by focusing on teens.

Like all startups focused on teens, it faces a dilemma. It has to retain its users as their needs become more complex and attract new teens as the product becomes more complex.

According to a Persistence market research report, the global enterprise information management solutions market is estimated to grow to $70 billion by 2025. Waterloo, Canada-based OpenText (Nasdaq:...

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Startups that are disrupting and unlocking the lucrative world of financial services continue to unlock big funding rounds for themselves.

Today, Marqeta — which helps third parties like Square, Affirm, DoorDash, Kabbage and Instacart build and offer card services to their customers — announced that it has raised a Series E of $260 million led by Coatue Management.

Marqeta plans to use this growth round to continue building out its platform with an emphasis on global expansion, founder and CEO Jason Gardner said in an interview. He added that the funding values the startup at close to $2 billion.

While the company is not yet profitable, it’s growing fast: Gardner said Marqeta has doubled revenues each year for the last three years, and he expects that the next step for the nine-year-old company is likely an IPO in the next 18 months.

The news today confirms our scoop about the funding two months ago. (When it was still raising, the total was $250 million.)

In addition to Coatue, other new investors include Vitruvian Partners, Spark Capital, Lone Pine and Geodesic, with participation from several of Marqeta’s existing investors: Visa, ICONIQ, Goldman Sachs, 83North, Granite Ventures, CommerzVentures and CreditEase.

“We’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Marqeta,” said Kris Fredrickson, partner at Coatue Management, in a statement. “We believe that the company has a world class team, industry leading technology, and the ability to bring about profound change in card issuing and the global payments infrastructure. The company’s momentum over the last several years is a testament to the team’s hard work and the scale of the opportunity at hand.”

The growth of the internet and the use of smartphones for e-commerce has had a big impact on financial transactions: fewer people and businesses are paying and getting paid in cash, and card usage — both physical and virtual — is on the rise. Citing research from Edgar, Dunn & Company, Marqeta estimates the volume of the card issuing industry — that is, transactions made via cards — to be worth around $45 trillion.

“Visa and Mastercard have interconnected every single merchant that accepts cards, and that is still growing significantly,” Gardner said, but that expansion is coming at the same time that banks have been pricey and slow to move to accommodate the long tail of new opportunities for payment services. That is the opportunity that Marqeta is seizing, by providing quick and flexible options to any kind of commerce company that wants to make the move into issuing cards to its customers, along with supporting services around them such as payment reconciliations, real-time fund transfers and customer interactive voice response services. Gardner notes that while credit remains king, alternatives like debit and virtual cards are growing the fastest.

On the international front, the company opened an office in London recently to start to capitalise on building more inroads to providing card-related services to so-called “challenger banks” (examples include N26, Monese, Starling and Revolut) that have emerged with lower fees and app-friendly interfaces to tap into a growing base of younger working people, and older consumers who have grown tired of bank fees and poor options to move their money digitally.

A recent report from Accenture, cited by Reuters, noted that challenger banks collectively now account for 14% of the banking market’s revenues in Europe, or €206 billion ($238 billion) compared to just 3.5% of the U.S. market (which is worth $1.04 trillion).

Further afield, Gardner said the company has its eye on Asia, where he says growth in the past year has been “stagnant,” largely because its a “cash-centric culture.” However, government efforts to bring more transactions into the digital 21st century will lead to about 30% growth next year — an opportunity Gardner said Marqeta will want to try to cash in on.

Generation Investment Management, the firm co-founded by environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore, was built on the premise of backing sustainable startups. Now, as the idea of sustainability starts to gain wider traction, the firm is doubling down on the concept.

Today, Generation is announcing that it has closed a $1 billion Sustainable Solutions Fund for growth investments. As the name implies, it plans to put the $1 billion to work backing later-stage startups that work on sustainability in at least one of three areas — environmental solutions; healthcare; and financial inclusion, including the future of work — and are creating financially sustainable businesses out of that focus.

Typical investments will range from $50 million to $150 million, and there have already been two made out of the fund before it closed, both indicative of the kinds of investments Generation plans to be making.

Andela — the startup that pairs companies needing engineering talent to work on projects with developers based out of Africa — in January announced a $100 million round. Also that month, Sophia Genetics — the company that applies AI to DNA sequencing to help formulate more accurate medical treatments — raised $77 million led by the firm.

Other companies that Generation has backed include Asana, DocuSign, gogoro, CiBO, M-Kopa, Ocado, Optoro and Seventh Generation.

This is Generation’s third growth fund and the largest raised by the firm to date, which itself is a sign of the swing we’ve seen in the tech world.

In general, founders, workers and investors all remain relentlessly focused on growing new ideas. But along with that there has been a rising conscientiousness of the massive role that tech plays in shaping the world, and so some are now trying to make more of an effort to use that for more meaningful outcomes.

“You are seeing how sustainability is attracting high-performing entrepreneurs,” said Lilly Wollman, partner and co-head of the Growth Equity platform, in an interview. “They care about the mission, and that is also driving financial performance.”

“We believe that we are at the early stages of a technology-led sustainability revolution,” said Al Gore, chairman and co-founder, in a statement, “which has the scale of the industrial revolution, and the pace of the digital revolution.”

In the case of Generation, it’s also an indication that the firm — which has $22 billion under management today — is providing impressive enough returns on its mission to drive more interest from LPs to grow the commitment to back it.

“There is a recognition of this momentum,” added Lila Preston, a partner who is the growth platform’s co-head, “of the 15 years the firm has already spent on this concept and the work it’s put into it. We see this as a movement, but one with a road map based on research and understanding.”

It’s also notable to me that the two people leading the growth team are women. Wollman noted that 60% of the Generation team is female, with the employee base spanning eight nationalities. “The firm believes more diversity leads to better outcomes,” she said.

Consumers are also playing a big role. Of all the good, bad and ugly that has been wrought by the rise of social media, one of the positives has been how social platforms have been used to raise awareness of issues such as climate change and inclusion. We may be getting into more online fights with our distant cousins (and closer friends and relatives), and sometimes issues like trying to curtail emissions gasses seems like an insurmountable challenge. But some will also use what they read about and watch online as inspiration to try to make a change.

“One of the things that is so interesting in this moment is that we are at an inflection point,” said Wollman. “Sustainability is winning on economics alone. You see sustainable products and solutions that are both efficacious and cheap. People are buying electric vehicles not just because they are green, but because they are starting to become cheap enough, and provide better performance.”

That’s bringing in a new wave of investors to the mix, and it’s interesting to see how some more conventional investors are even starting to take a bigger step into making mission-driven investment decisions. (Just yesterday, in the U.K., Balderton co-led a large round for Wagestream, a startup aimed at helping promote financial inclusion by creating a way to easily and cheaply draw down money from monthly paychecks. Generation hinted that it too might be making an investment in a startup working in a similar area in the weeks to come.)

“It helps to have a set of co-investors to ask questions related not only to ‘what are your growth metrics’ but ‘how does what you are doing affect the wider world,’ ” said Preston. “We are finding an increase of sophistication, which we think is positive recognition. Given the context of our shift, whether it’s a new economic model or climate change, we are going to need masses of capital to drive sustainable solutions and re-frame what is successful.”

Sramana Mitra: So, it’s a $175 million fund. What stage? Is there a comfort zone in terms of investing? Hemant Mohapatra: We come in early. We love series A and seed. Those are the two stages...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 445th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 23, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Ravin.ai, an Israel and U.K.-based startup developing AI to autonomously inspect vehicles for damage, has closed a $4 million seed round. The investment was led by Pico Venture Partners, with participation from Shell Ventures and “automotive entrepreneur” Adam Draizin. It marks Shell Ventures’ first Israel investment.

Founded in 2018 and based in Haifa and London, Ravin combines computer vision and deep learning to detect and analyse damage in vehicles via standard cameras, such as a smartphone or CCTV cameras. The startup is initially targeting car rental companies but also eyeing up other markets for its tech, including fleet companies within the shared mobility space and used car marketplaces.

“We have all rented and bought used cars in our lives and there is always some discomfort associated with true car condition: Ravin’s mission is to create transparency around damage wherever vehicles operate or change hands,” Ravin co-founder and CEO Eliron Ekstein, who previously helped launch Shell’s digital business arm, tells me.

“Damage in vehicles is a massive problem, if you consider that vehicles get damaged almost every five seconds. For the consumer it’s a big headache because you’re never really sure if the car you’re picking up for rental, or the one you just bought, has some kind of hidden damage. For car rental, dealers and insurance companies, this translates to losses of over $100 billion due to damage undetected in time, overestimated repairs and the overhead of dealing with claims. This problem will only get worse as more vehicles are shared and people buy their cars online.”

In contrast, Ekstein says Ravin provides the needed transparency to facilitate easier transactions. This is delivered via what he claims is an “objective” vehicle condition report generated via the startup’s AI using off-the-shelf cameras. Vehicles can be scanned via a mobile phone walk-around (similar to a panoramic view experience) or by driving through a set of CCTV cameras.

“From there we create a 360-degree view of the vehicle and expose any damages, and in many cases some underlying problems, reasons and repair action,” says Ekstein. “This leads to frictionless rental and sharing of vehicles and minimises unnecessary arguments as both sides know about the vehicle condition. It also helps car buyers verify a vehicle condition, and finally helps insurance companies validate claims quickly.”

More broadly, Ravin wants to provide an almost “DocuSign-like” experience, where people can hand cars over in confidence, which Ekstein says is really what the sharing economy is all about.

To that end, Ravin says it has commercial partners across the U.S. and Europe, including Avis’ Heathrow Airport location. It plans to use the new funding to further develop its technology products and to expand commercial reach across North America, Europe and Asia.

This is a terrific case study of smart execution on a complex domain by an entrepreneurial team. Read on ! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you...

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Jose Deustua, Managing Director at UTEC Ventures, talks about Peru’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

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Quadric.io, a startup founded by some of the folks behind the once-secretive bitcoin mining operation “21E6,” has raised $15 million in a Series A round that will fund the development of a supercomputer designed for autonomous systems.  

The round was led by automotive Tier 1 supplier DENSO and its semiconductor products arm NSITEXE, which will also be one of Quadric.io’s customers for future electronic systems in all levels of autonomous driving solutions. Leawood VC also participated in the Series A round.

The company says it will use the injection of capital to build out its product and hire more people, as well as business development.

Pear, Uncork Capital, SV Angel, Cota Capital and Trucks VC are seed investors in Quadric.io.

The roots of Quadric.io grew from a seemingly disconnected mission to produce an agricultural robot designed to transform the way vineyards were managed. The company launched in 2016 by CEO Veerbhan Kheterpal, CTO Nigel Drego and CPO Daniel Firu — all co-founders of 21 Inc. The bitcoin startup, once known as 21E6, would later rebrand as Earn.com before being acquired by Coinbase for $100 million.

Quadric’s original plan was stymied by some real-world fundamentals. The power-hungry ag robot was weighed down by batteries that became too unwieldy to move amongst vineyard rows and the processing time to turn loads of environmental data into actual actions based on algorithms were too slow.

Quadric was looking for a chip designed for processing on the edge and that supported decision making in real time — all while crunching data faster and sipping, not slurping power. That need grew into Quadric’s core product today: a supercomputer that the company says hits that sweet spot of increased computational speed and reduced power consumption.

Kheterpal noted in a recent post on Medium that Intel’s CPUs work “very well for standard computer processing” and Nvidia’s GPUs have “ushered in astounding new graphics processing for gaming and much more.” But, he argued, Quadric needed something neither of those companies could provide: a chip designed for processing on the edge.

The company created a single unified architecture in the supercomputer that enables high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The supercomputer, which is built around the Quadric Processor, is plug-and-play. This means people can plug in their sensor set and build their entire application to support “near-instantaneous” decision making, Quadric says. The company claims that early testing of Quadric’s system has shown up to 100 times lower latency and a 90% reduction in power consumption. 

Quadric designed the instruction set, chip architecture and system architecture of the chip. System-level manufacturing is done at a contract manufacturer in Santa Clara, Calif., while chip manufacturing and assembly is done in Asia.

Quadric argues this underlying technology is a prerequisite for companies developing autonomous systems that will be used in the construction, transportation, agriculture and warehousing industries. The underlying tech that supports autonomous machines used in these industries either lacks the performance or solves only a small part of the full application, according to Quadric.

The startup contends that machines with autonomous functions require processing speed and responsiveness “on the edge” — meaning at the machine level, not in the cloud.   

Other companies, most recently Tesla, have opted to build their own chips to meet this specific need. But as Kheterpal notes, not all companies have the resources to build the tech from the ground up. 

“ Quadric is a plug and play option that eliminates the need for building heterogeneous systems with significant hardware and software integration costs — thereby taking years off of product development roadmaps,” Kheterpal wrote.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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