Many things are better said than read, but the best voice tech out there seems to be reserved for virtual assistants, not screen readers or automatically generated audiobooks. WellSaid wants to enable any creator to use quality synthetic speech instead of a human voice — perhaps even a synthetic version of themselves.

There’s been a series of major advances in voice synthesis over the last couple of years as neural network technology improves on the old highly manual approach. But Google, Apple and Amazon seem unwilling to make their great voice tech available for anything but chirps from your phone or home hub.

As soon as I heard about WaveNet, and later Tacotron, I tried to contact the team at Google to ask when they’d get to work producing natural-sounding audiobooks for everything on Google Books, or as a part of AMP, or make it an accessibility service, and so on. Never heard back. I considered this a lost opportunity, as there are many out there who need such a service.

So I was pleased to hear that WellSaid is taking on this market, after a fashion, anyway. The company is the first to launch from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) incubator program announced back in 2017. They do take their time!

Talk the talk

I talked with the co-founders CEO Matt Hocking and CTO Michael Petrochuk, who explained why they went about creating a whole new system for voice synthesis. The basic problem, they said, is that existing systems not only rely on a lot of human annotation to sound right, but they “sound right” the exact same way every time. You can’t just feed it a few hours of audio and hope it figures out how to inflect questions or pause between list items — much of this stuff has to be spelled out for them. The end result, however, is highly efficient.

“Their goal is to make a small model for cheap [i.e. computationally] that pronounces things the same way every time. It’s this one perfect voice,” said Petrochuk. “We took research like Tacotron and pushed it even further — but we’re not trying to control speech and enforce this arbitrary structure on it.”

“When you think about the human voice, what makes it natural, kind of, is the inconsistencies,” said Hocking.

And where better to find inconsistencies than in humans? The team worked with a handful of voice actors to record dozens of hours of audio to feed to the system. There’s no need to annotate the text with “speech markup language” to designate parts of sentences and so on, Petrochuk said: “We discovered how to train off of raw audiobook data, without having to do anything on top of that.”

So WellSaid’s model will often pronounce the same word differently, not because a carefully manicured manual model of language suggested it do so, but because the person whose vocal fingerprint it is imitating did so.

And how does that work, exactly? That question seems to dip into WellSaid’s secret sauce. Their model, like any deep learning system, is taking innumerable inputs into account and producing an output, but it is larger and more far-reaching than other voice synthesis systems. Things like cadence and pronunciation aren’t specified by its overseers but extracted from the audio and modeled in real time. Sounds a bit like magic, but that’s often the case when it comes to bleeding-edge AI research.

It runs on a CPU in real time, not on a GPU cluster somewhere, so it can be done offline as well. This is a feat in itself, as many voice synthesis algorithms are quite resource-heavy.

What matters is that the voice produced can speak any text in a very natural-sounding way. Here’s the first bit of an article — alas, not one of mine, which would have employed more mellifluous circumlocutions — read by Google’s WaveNet, then by two of WellSaid’s voices.

The latter two are definitely more natural sounding than the first. On some phrases the voices may be nearly indistinguishable from their originals, but in most cases I feel sure I could pick out the synthetic voice in a few words.

That it’s even close, however, is an accomplishment. And I can certainly say that if I was going to have an article read to my by one of these voices, it would be WellSaid’s. Naturally it can also be tweaked and iterated, or effects applied to further manipulate the sound, as with any voice performance. You didn’t think those interviews you hear on NPR are unedited, did you?

The goal at first is to find the creatives whose work would be improved or eased by adding this tool to their toolbox.

“There are a lot of people who have this need,” explained Hocking. “A video producer who doesn’t have the budget to hire a voice actor; someone with a large volume of content that has to be iterated on rapidly; if English is a second language, this opens up a lot of doors; and some people just don’t have a voice for radio.”

It would be nice to be able to add voice with a click rather than just have block text and royalty-free music over a social ad (think the admen):

I asked about the reception among voice actors, who of course are essentially being asked to train their own replacements. They said that the actors were actually positive about it, thinking of it as something like stock photography for voice; get a premade product for cheap, and if you like it, pay the creator for the real thing. Although they didn’t want to prematurely lock themselves into future business models, they did acknowledge that revenue share with voice actors was a possibility. Payment for virtual representations is something of a new and evolving field.

A closed beta launches today, which you can sign up for at the company’s site. They’re going to be launching with five voices to start, with more voices and options to come as WellSaid’s place in the market becomes clear. Part of that process will almost certainly be inclusion in tools used by the blind or otherwise disabled, as I have been hoping for years.

Sounds familiar

And what comes after that? Making synthetic versions of users’ voices, of course. No brainer! But the two founders cautioned that’s a ways off for several reasons, even though it’s very much a possibility.

“Right now we’re using about 20 hours of data per person, but we see a future where we can get it down to one or two hours while maintaining a premium lifelike quality to the voice,” said Petrochuk.

“And we can build off existing data sets, like where someone has a back catalog of content,” added Hocking.

The trouble is that the content may not be exactly right for training the deep learning model, which advanced as it is can no doubt be finicky. There are dials and knobs to tweak, of course, but they said that fine-tuning a voice is more a matter of adding corrective speech, perhaps having the voice actor reading a specific script that props up the sounds or cadences that need a boost.

They compared it with directing such an actor rather than adjusting code. You don’t, after all, tell an actor to increase the pauses after commas by 8 percent or 15 milliseconds, whichever is longer. It’s more efficient to demonstrate for them: “say it like this.”

Even so, getting the quality just right with limited and imperfect training data is a challenge that will take some serious work if and when the team decides to take it on.

But as some of you may have noticed, there are also some parallels to the unsavory world of “deepfakes.” Download a dozen podcasts or speeches and you’ve got enough material to make a passable replica of someone’s voice, perhaps a public figure. This of course has a worrying synergy with the existing ability to fake video and other imagery.

This is not news to Hocking and Petrochuk. If you work in AI, this kind of thing is sort of inevitable.

“This is a super important question and we’ve considered it a lot,” said Petrochuk. “We come from AI2, where the motto is ‘AI for the common good.’ That’s something we really subscribe to, and that differentiates us from our competitors who made Barack Obama voices before they even had an MVP [minimum viable product]. We’re going to watch closely to make sure this isn’t being used negatively, and we’re not launching with the ability to make a custom voice, because that would let anyone create a voice from anyone.”

Active monitoring is just about all anyone with a potentially troubling AI technology can be expected to do — though they are looking at mitigation techniques that could help identify synthetic voices.

With the ongoing emphasis on multimedia presentation of content and advertising rather than written, WellSaid seems poised to make an early play in a growing market. As the product evolves and improves, it’s easy to picture it moving into new, more constrained spaces, like time-shifting apps (instant podcast with five voices to choose from!) and even taking over territory currently claimed by voice assistants. Sounds good to me.

As the streaming world continues to grow, startups are looking to take advantage of the opportunity and grab a slice of the pie, and indeed create new revenue models around it entirely. 

Camelot, a YC-backed startup, is one of them.

Camelot allows viewers to place bounties on their favorite streamers, putting a monetary value on the things they want to see on stream. This could include in-game challenges like “win with no armor,” as well as stream bounties like “Play Apex” or “add a heartbeat monitor to the stream.”

When a viewer posts a bounty, other viewers can join in and contribute to the overall value, and the streamer can then choose whether or not to go through with it from an admin dashboard.

Because internet platforms can often be used for evil alongside good, cofounder and CEO Jesse Zhang has thought through ways to minimize inappropriate requests.

There is an option for streamers to see and approve the bounty before it’s ever made public to ensure that they avoid inappropriate propositions. Bounties are also paid for up front by viewers, and either returned if the creator declines the bounty or pushed through when the streamer completes the task, raising the barrier to entry for nefarious users.

Camelot generates revenue by taking a five percent stake in every bounty completed.

The platform isn’t just for Twitch streamers — YouTubers can also get in on the mix using Camelot and making asynchronous videos around each bounty. Not only does it offer a new way to generate revenue, but it also offers content creators the chance to get new insights on what their viewers want to see and what they value.

Cofounder and CEO Jesse Zhang believes there is opportunity to expand to streamers and YouTube content creators outside of the gaming sphere in the future.

For now, however, Camelot is working to bring on more content creators. Thus far, streamers and viewers have already come up with some interesting use cases for the product. One streamer’s audience bought his dog some treats, and one viewer of Sa1na paid $100 to play against the streamer himself.

Camelot declined to share how much funding it has received thus far, but did say that lead investors include Y Combinator, the Philadelphia 76ers, Soma Capital, and Plaid cofounders William Hockey and Zach Perret.

Venture investors are pouring billions of dollars into feeding their hunger for food and agriculture startups. Whether that trend line is due to enthusiasm for the sector or just broader heavy investing in the VC space is much less clear.

According to a recent report published by AgFunder – a VC and investing marketplace focused on the agriculture and food sectors – the “AgriFood” space is booming. Using data from Crunchbase and several other data partners, the organization published its “2018 AgriFood Tech Investing Report” this morning, finding that investment in AgriFood companies increased 43% year-over-year, reaching $16.9 billion in 2018.

AgFunder classifies AgriFood tech as “the small but growing segment of the startup and venture capital universe that’s aiming to improve or disrupt the global food and agriculture industry.” Their definition is intentionally broad, encompassing everything from crop and livestock biotech, property management systems, and payments, to biomaterials and meat alternatives, all the way up to tech platforms for restaurants, grocers, deliveries and at-home cooks.

While some of the AgriFood tech categories – such as delivery or restaurant software – have long been popular destinations for venture capital, we’re now seeing a more diverse array of startups innovating across the entire food supply chain. According to the report, expansion in AgriFood is fairly consistent across upstream (agricultural and farming) subsectors to downstream (more consumer-facing) subsectors, with each group growing roughly 44% and 42% year-over-year respectively.

The data also shows growth occurring across almost all deal stages. AgriFood saw huge increases in the average deal size and total investment for late-stage companies in particular, as venture-backed startups have grown to global scale. And penetrating and attracting capital from international markets seems more feasible than ever. AgriFood investing, which traditionally has been largely US-centric, is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, with more than half of total funding – and some of the largest rounds – now coming from companies and investors outside the US.

As Airbnb gears up for its big leap into the public markets, it’s expanding its accommodations platform to include more than just treehouses and quirky homes.

Today, the company has confirmed its intent to acquire HotelTonight, the developer of a hotel-booking application that lets travelers arrange last-minute accommodations. The deal was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal, which wrote in January that negotiations for the transaction had “gone cold.”

Airbnb is expected to complete an initial public offering as soon as this year, though co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky has refrained from revealing a specific timeline. Like Uber, which plans to become the ultimate transportation company, Airbnb’s long-term ambition is to build an end-to-end travel platform complete with home sharing, hotel booking, business travel arrangements, experiences and more.

Airbnb declined to disclose terms of its HotelTonight acquisition. Once the deal is complete, the HotelTonight app and website will continue to operate independently, with co-founder and CEO Sam Shank reporting to Airbnb’s president of homes, Greg Greeley.

“We started HotelTonight because we knew people wanted a better way to book an amazing hotel room on-demand, and we are excited to join forces with Airbnb to bring this service to guests around the world,” Shank said in a statement. “Together, HotelTonight and Airbnb can give guests more choices and the world’s best boutique and independent hotels a genuine partner to connect them with those guests.”

Founded in 2010, San Francisco-based HotelTonight garnered a valuation of $463 million with a $37 million Series E funding in 2017, according to PitchBook. In total, the startup has raised $131 million in venture capital funding from Accel and Battery Ventures, which have participated in nearly every funding round for HotelTonight. Other early investors include Forerunner Ventures and First Round Capital.

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Airbnb, for its part, was valued at $31 billion in 2017, with a $1 billion round. In January, Airbnb said it was profitable for the second consecutive year on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis.

HotelTonight offers discounts at hotels in the Americas, Europe and Australia. The company partners with hotels to offer un-sold rooms, catering to business travelers or those looking to make last-minute arrangements. The deal will make it easier for Airbnb users to book hotels without planning weeks or months in advance and will help Airbnb expand its community beyond short-term rental hosts and guests.

Airbnb introduced boutique hotels to its platform in early 2018 and has boasted its quick growth. In 2018, the business said it more than doubled the number of boutique hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels and resorts available. Airbnb’s business travel unit, Airbnb for Work, also had quick success. Launched in 2014, it now accounts for 15 percent of bookings. In total, Airbnb offers some 5 million places to stay in 191 countries.

Airbnb is kicking off 2019 with an acquisitive streak. In January, the company acquired Danish startup Gaest, a provider of a marketplace-style platform for people to post and book venues for meetings and other work-related events. The company again declined to pinpoint the price, though given Gaest had raised just $3.5 million in equity funding, the deal pales in comparison to Airbnb’s HotelTonight acquisition.

2019 is stacking up to be a particularly busy year for unicorn IPOs, some of which were likely delayed by a weeks-long government shutdown at the start of the year. Lyft, which recently unveiled its S-1, is poised to be the first billion-dollar company to exit to the stock markets, followed by Uber, Slack and Pinterest. Will Airbnb nudge its way into that lineup? We’ll see.

French cloud-hosting company Scaleway is rolling out new instances with an Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU. The company is opting for simple pricing with a single configuration that costs €1 per hour ($1.13).

Many companies now use GPU instances to train models for their machine learning-powered app or service. Some companies also leverage these cloud instances to generate 3D models and other GPU-intensive tasks. If you don’t want to buy a bunch of expensive GPUs, you can leverage GPUs on demand with your favorite cloud-hosting company. Once you’re done, you can shut down your cloud instance.

Scaleway’s RENDER-S instance is powered by an Nvidia Tesla P100 with 16GB of HBM2 memory. It comes with 45GB of RAM, 400GB of storage (local NVMe SSD, so it should be super-fast for video processing) and 10 cores of an Intel Xeon Gold 6148 with the AVX-512 instruction set. If you plan to keep your instance running for a while, the RENDER-S instance costs €1 per hour or €500 ($567) per month, whichever is lower.

On Google Cloud, you can get an on-demand instance with an Nvidia P100 for $1.60 per hour in Europe and Asia, or $1.46 per hour in the U.S. Microsoft also sells cloud instances with a P100 GPU for $2.07 per hour. It seems like Scaleway is competing with those offers in particular.

Amazon also has GPU instances on Amazon Web Services. You can find instances with an Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, a more powerful graphics processing unit. Those instances are also more expensive, at more than $3 per hour — prices vary slightly depending on the data center. You also can find AWS instances with older GPUs, but they don’t perform that well.

OVH also offers instances with Tesla V100 GPUs for €2.30 per hour ($2.61). I couldn’t find GPU instances on DigitalOcean or Linode.

Most people probably don’t need GPU instances. But it can be an important factor for companies looking for their next cloud provider. If you want to centralize everything under one bill, you need to pick a company with a large offering.

Sramana Mitra: There’s one topic that I want to explore with you which is very much in line with what you’re saying about the European market in a relative fragmentation due to language, culture,...

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Hammerhead founder and CEO Piet Morgan is a bicyclist, and he started the company because he wanted a better navigation system.

So Hammerhead crowdfunded its first product, the H1, and subsequently built Karoo, a “cycling computer” that supports navigation and training. But Morgan told me his ambitions are bigger than that.

After all, he sees a future where electric bikes need smart range projections, where bike-share fleets need to be managed, where social training programs like Strava can pull data from the bike itself and where any bicycle should come with theft and crash alerts.

“There needs to be a software layer on the bike,” Morgan said. “That’s really what we’re trying to build.”

That future isn’t here yet, however, so Hammerhead is starting out by building a consumer device. And while Morgan eventually plans to license the software to bike manufacturers and other partners, he said there will be a common goal across the business: To build products that cyclists want to use.

That includes the Karoo device itself (currently available for $399) — a mountable, shockproof computer with a high-resolution, anti-glare touchscreen. But Morgan argued that the real differentiator is the software, because the dominant products from companies like Garmin are built with “software that’s pretty rudimentary.”

Karoo, on the other hand, runs on a regularly updated, Android-based operating system called Karoo OS. It includes a mapping and turn-by-turn navigation system that the company said is designed specifically for cyclists. And the real potential may be unlocked when it launches an app store that will allow third-party software to run on the device.

Hammerhead is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Primary Ventures and KB Partners, with Primary’s Steve Schlafman and KB’s Keith Bank joining the board. Courtside Ventures, Maveron, Drummond Road Capital, MapMyFitness co-founder Robin Thurston and Zipp CEO Andy Ording also participated.

“What makes us a compelling venture-scale opportunity is what I believe is really going to be almost a winner-take-all situation,” Morgan said. “The company that [defines] this category is going to be able to own it.”

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A San Francisco-based startup just raised $15 million to solve the complicated problem of transit infrastructure in urban environments. Remix was founded by Tiffany Chu, Dan Getelman, Danny Whalen and Sam Hashemi in 2014 following a project they built during their Code for America fellowships.

The $15 million Series B round was led by Energy Impact Partners, bringing total funding to $27 million.

Remix allows cities to plan public transit infrastructure, quickly computing how a change in a certain bus or train route or the addition of a bike lane might affect the city overall, all through a drag and drop menu. The platform also looks at how to manage private transportation options like ridesharing, dockless bikes and scooters, etc.

“This is an industry that has changed faster in the last five years than it did in the last 50,” said Chu, co-founder and COO. “One of our challenges is explaining to people, the community, what are the impacts of certain decisions around the way things have always been?”

One of the ways Remix measures its own success and allows its users to do the same is through a metric called Jane. Jane is an icon that you can drop anywhere on the map and see how far that fictional person can travel in 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes, and how many jobs they might have access to based on changes in the public transit.

More than 300 cities are using the Remix platform, and the company says that 100 million+ people will be impacted by plans that are either completed or in progress.

Alongside helping cities make better decisions for the community, it also helps those governments better express their decision-making process. This is especially important as governments and citizens weigh the impacts of single-occupancy vehicles on the environment. The EPA says that transportation accounts for 28 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

“Parking is such a huge, huge point of contention for every city and being able to explain to somebody why a transit lane or a bike lane or a parklet might be more beneficial for the community at large as opposed to having people freak out over removal of two parking spots,” said Chu. “That’s a shifting conversation we, as an industry, need to have in order for everyone to start moving in the right direction, away from single occupancy vehicles.”

Remix is currently working with a variety of markets, including Honolulu, Auckland, Dallas, Seattle and New York.

The social investing and trading platform eToro announced that it will finally be launching its platform in the U.S. The platform, which already operates in more than 140 countries, will be available in 30 states and two territories with plans to expand elsewhere in the U.S. after receiving the necessary regulatory sign-offs.

The U.S. platform will only support trading for crypto assets at launch, but eToro plans to add additional asset classes within the next 12 months. In eToro’s existing markets, the company’s 10 million-plus users are able to trade and hold more than 1,500 different asset classes and markets, including stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, commodities and more.

Though eToro even supports more advanced trading strategies — including short-selling and the use of leverage — the platform’s transparency and community engagement features act as great tools for beginners to learn the capital markets and learn how to trade.

EToro is equal parts trading platform, social network and educational resource. Anyone who signs up for eToro can see, comment and copy the trading activity of everyone else on the network, as well as their realized returns and losses to date (though only on a percentage basis to protect sensitive financial information). While learning from the strategies of their peers, users can opt to invest with virtual currency to practice and effectively train before actually risking their own money.

Alternatively, based on a trader’s track record, other users can choose to mimic their portfolio through eToro’s “CopyTrader” feature, which not only proportionally allocates funds to match the trader’s portfolio but can also automatically make any trade the copied investor makes. On top of that, members are also able to share, comment on, engage with or follow specific users, assets or markets — allowing them to participate in the latest debate and news regarding their particular area of interest.

Despite being limited to crypto at launch, almost all the same features available in eToro’s existing geographical markets will be available in the U.S. And alongside its trading platform, the company is launching its digital multi-signature eToro wallet, where users can store, send and receive multiple coins across a multitude of cryptocurrencies.

Using their eToro accounts, U.S. users can now transfer cryptocurrencies to and from their trading account and can easily convert between them, as well. The wallet initially will support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple and Stellar for U.S. users, but the company plans to make additional currencies available in the near future.

The expansion plan, however, doesn’t come without risk. EToro is entering a competitive marketplace — alongside other popular trading platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood — and is launching its crypto-only version in the midst of “crypto winter,” where widespread weakness has plagued the sector.

Part of the strategy is attributable to the fact that crypto is a lighter lift from a licensing perspective relative to other asset classes in the strict and highly fragmented U.S. regulatory environment. But eToro’s launch strategy is also firmly rooted in the company’s belief in the immense market opportunity that exists with the tokenization of assets.

“We think [the tokenization of assets] is a bigger opportunity than the internet and we have to be in the U.S. when it happens, given it’s the financial hub in the world,” eToro founder and CEO Yoni Assia said in a conversation with TechCrunch.

EToro is taking a long-term view with its strategy and isn’t thrown by the current crypto weakness. Assia equated the market softness to the dot-com bubble, where despite the crash, the internet still permeated and disrupted the economy in the long run. And just like with the internet, Assia and eToro believe there will be more than enough room for multiple winners in the broader crypto ecosystem.

The company was the first platform in its markets to support Ethereum and Ripple, and believes that as similar currencies and the next generation of investors mature, eToro will be there to support them wherever they are in whatever way they need.

“When I founded eToro, I envisioned a community where people could trade, invest and share their knowledge in a simple and transparent way,” said Assia. “EToro also acts as a bridge between the old world of investing and a blockchain-powered future, helping our users navigate and benefit from the transition to crypto assets for wealth building.”

When we first wrote about Hooch, it offered a fun, straightforward deal — for $9.99 per month, you could claim one free drink per day from participating bars and restaurants.

Since then, the company launched Hooch Black, a pricier subscription that includes perks like hotel discounts and concierge service. But even then, co-founder and CEO Lin Dai was hinting at plans to use blockchain technology to create what he called “a decentralized model for consumer rewards.”

Now Hooch is delivering on what Dai promised, with a relaunched app that rewards users for their purchases.

“We were super excited about the feedback and response [to Hooch Black] that we saw from our members,” Dai said. “What we decided to do is just completely update the app with rewards for consumers across four different categories — travel, dining, entertainment and e-commerce.”

He noted that while most loyalty programs reward you for using a specific card or for shopping with a specific company, Hooch has partnered with more than 250,000 merchants (including Marriott hotels, TAO restaurants, Starbucks, Uber and Amazon). The company can actually scan the purchases made on any linked debit or credit card, and you’ll be rewarded whenever you spend money with those partners.

The rewards take the form of what Hooch is calling TAP rewards dollars — the exact reward will vary depending on the merchant, but the company says it could be as high as 10 percent of your spending.

Dai said TAP dollars are actually a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, but he emphasized that you don’t need to understand the backend to use the rewards. For most users, TAP dollars will simply be a digital currency they can redeem for hotel bookings, restaurants credits and gift cards.

“Security is our top concern,” Dai added. The idea is to access your transaction history to verify your purchases (Hooch makes money by driving purchases for merchants), but without storing or sharing identifying information. “When we capture the consumer purchase information, we actually don’t capture any of their names or credit card numbers … We don’t store any identity.”

The program also comes with a big perk for enlisting your friends. There is an upfront reward of five TAP dollars, but the real selling point is the fact that you’ll get 20 percent of their rewards — not just on their initial purchases, but for the entire time they use the app.

If you like the Hooch Black plan, you’ll still be able to sign up and pay for it. But the company’s emphasis has shifted to the broader rewards program, which you can join for free.

Bird is launching its new program, Bird Platform, in New Zealand, Canada and Latin America in the coming weeks. First up is New Zealand, where Bird has partnered with a local entrepreneur to manage a fleet of Bird electric scooters. Residents of New Zealand will start to see Bird scooters on the streets next week.

The platform is part of Bird’s mission to bring its scooters across the world “and empower local entrepreneurs in regions where we weren’t planning to launch, to run their own electric scooter-sharing program with Bird’s tech and vehicles,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch.

Bird Platform works by selling the vehicles to these entrepreneurs at cost, then taking a 20 percent cut from the ride revenue.

“That way our interests are super aligned,” VanderZanden said.

As the manager of their own fleets, Platform entrepreneurs will be responsible for recharging the scooters, maintenance and working with cities to obtain permits. Bird first announced Platform in November and intended to roll it out in December. But it took a bit longer than expected to work out the kinks, VanderZanden said. In New Zealand, there is just one entrepreneur on board, but that’s by design.

“We’re trying to keep it one per region so there are not any conflicts,” VanderZanden said.

Bird expects each region to initially operate hundreds and ultimately thousands of scooters. So far, Bird has signed deals with more than five entrepreneurs to operate Bird Platform.

As noted earlier, Bird is only bringing Platform to places where the company wasn’t planning on launching — either at all, or anytime soon.

“Bird Platform is complementary,” VanderZanden said. “We think they’ll be happy staying on Bird Platform. We want to provide the best vehicles and best technology as long as they continue to invest and scale in the region.”

Bird has raised more than $400 million in funding to date and is reportedly in the midst of raising an additional $300 million.

According to a Market Research Future report published last year, the global Human Capital Management (HCM) market is estimated to grow 9% annually to reach $24 billion by 2023. Workday (NYSE: WDAY)...

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Spill, the London-based startup that offers a message-based therapy app to help improve workplace well-being, has picked up £650,000 in seed investment. The round is backed by Passion Capital, Seedcamp and a number of angel investors, including Made.com founder Julien Callede and Urban co-founder Jack Tang.

Founded a little over a year ago by Calvin Benton and Gavin Dhesi, Spill aims to reduce the barriers associated with accessing mental health and well-being services, which it says typically leaves people in the U.K. with two choices: facing long wait times via the National Health Service or paying for expensive private therapy sessions. Instead, Spill is designed as a consumer-styled app that provides access to qualified therapists via text messaging, paid for by employers.

“At the moment, if someone is going through a tricky time, the choices for accessing counselling are between either a months-long NHS waiting list to see a counsellor or forking out upwards of £60 a session to see a private psychotherapist,” Spill’s Dhesi tells me. “Both come with the baggage of an inflexible time commitment and the issue of stigma. We want to make another way possible; available whenever you need it, free at the point of use, and approachable rather than intimidating.”

Counsellors on the Spill app are BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) registered “or equivalent” and communicate using anonymous written therapeutic communication. The startup works with employers, workplaces or universities to make its app available to employees, individuals and students for free and as a workplace or student benefit. Customers include Hargreaves Landsown, Rightmove and Monzo Bank.

“Our typical business customers are progressive organisations of all sizes, from small startups with as few as only 10 employees to larger fast-growing companies,” adds Dhesi. “Typical users are those who are dealing with life’s daily problems and who often think that their problems are ‘too small’ to speak to a professional. In fact, 84 percent of existing Spill users have not previously accessed any kind of mental health guidance or counselling before.”

But can text-based therapy really be effective? I suggest to Dhesi that message-based delivery might feel a bit like a poor person’s talking therapy. Naturally, the Spill co-founder pushes back. “If face-to-face counselling could be easily accessed by everyone who needed it, we wouldn’t need to exist,” he says. “By working via text, rather than the traditional method of face to face, we hope that we can reach a lot more people.”

On the Spill app, you start by answering a few questions about who you are. This includes things like “Who are the most important people in your life” and “How important is work to you?” Then, Spill will match you with your own designated Spill therapist. “You’ll be able to message them whenever you want, and they’ll reply with support, guidance and exercises,” explains the Spill co-founder.

Meanwhile, Spill says the app also provides benefits to counsellors and professionals who want to have a greater impact on more individuals. Co-founder Benton’s mother is a counsellor and his father is a clinical psychologist, arguably giving the team first-hand experience of the “supply side” of Spill’s solution.

Adds Dhesi: “For businesses, our main direct competitors are conventional EAPs (Employee Assistance Programmes). These often are phone lines that have very low usage and designed to help those with severe mental health issues. Spill, on the other hand, is a more preventative measure aiming its service towards life’s everyday problems.”

While SoftBank continues to make big bets on startups out of its $100 billion Vision Fund, it has also launched another vehicle to invest in tech opportunities specifically in Latin America.

Today the group announced the SoftBank Innovation Fund, which is starting out with a $2 billion commitment to invest in tech startups in Central and South America, specifically starting in the countries of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, covering areas like e-commerce, digital financial services, healthcare, mobility and insurance.

Alongside this, it’s establishing a group called the SoftBank Latin America Local Hub, which will partner with companies that are already in SoftBank’s investment portfolio to help them break into the region.

The effort in Latin America is a big win for Marcelo Claure, who has been named CEO of SoftBank Latin America. Claure is already COO of SoftBank Group Corp., as well as CEO of SoftBank Group International and executive chairman of Sprint Corporation — all roles he will continue to keep as he takes on this new challenge.

“Growing up in Latin America I witnessed firsthand the creativity and passion of the people,” said Claure in a statement. “There is so much innovation and disruption taking place in the region, and I believe the business opportunities have never been stronger. The SoftBank Innovation Fund will become a major investor in transformative Latin American companies that are poised to redefine their industries and create new economic opportunities for millions of people.”

This is the first time that SoftBank has created a fund of this kind focused on a single region — although it has spearheaded big bets into specific countries like India in the past — and it appears to be the first time that it has formally established a group to help other portfolio companies expand in a region, although this is likely something that SoftBank would have been doing on an informal basis before now.

News of this fund had been trickling out for some time, although a report in Bloomberg from January, which broke the news, had underestimated the amount that SoftBank would invest in it (it predicted $1 billion, while the actual starting amount is $2 billion).

SoftBank says that it has yet to determine where it will establish its HQ for this new effort. I don’t imagine this question will take on the heated race that we saw unfold around Amazon’s HQ2 decision-making process. Likely candidates will probably be cities where SoftBank has already established operations in the region.

Indeed, SoftBank is no stranger to investing in Latin America as part of its bigger “BRIC” strategy. As a developing market with a growing middle class (more than 50 million people in the region have entered the middle class, generating increased disposable income, SoftBank said), it is one of the fastest-growing regions for tech products and services.

SoftBank estimates that the region accounts for 10 percent of the world’s population and 8 percent of the world’s GDP. Notably — given SoftBank’s previous focus on Asia — it points out that this means it has “two times the GDP of India and half that of China.”

So far, SoftBank’s investments in the region have focused on e-commerce and related consumer services. It was one of the early investors in Uber rival 99 in Brazil (which eventually was taken over by Didi, the Chinese transportation giant that SoftBank also partly owns). It has also put at least $100 million into Loggi, another startup out of Brazil that focuses on delivery services. In Mexico, it is also embarking on a joint venture with Didi to establish transportation services there.

It’s likely the strong track record it has had in those investments so far that led SoftBank to extend its activities there, particularly since it has already established a strong bulkhead in different regions across Asia, including China and India.

“Latin America is on the cusp of becoming one of the most important economic regions in the world, and we anticipate significant growth in the decades ahead,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SBG, in a statement. “SBG plans to invest in entrepreneurs throughout Latin America and use technology to help address the challenges faced by many emerging economies with the goal of improving the lives of millions of Latin Americans. I am grateful to our Chief Operating Officer Marcelo Claure for leading this initiative, in addition to his other responsibilities at SBG.”

As with other SoftBank investments that do not come out of its Vision Fund, the latter will potentially use this as a springboard to get involved, as well.

“Latin America presents significant opportunities for SoftBank Group, and the Vision Fund will have the ability to co-invest alongside the innovation Fund,” said Rajeev Misra, CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, who runs the Vision Fund. “Marcelo and team will offer invaluable expertise to help Latin American companies scale their operations, benefit from the greater SoftBank ecosystem, and grow into global market leaders.”

The Vision Fund has come under some scrutiny because of its ties to Saudi money and the controversy surrounding that government’s human rights policies.

For investors like SoftBank, focusing attention on Latin America makes a lot of sense. Not only does that help it diversify by focusing on another (rapidly growing) region, but it gives the group one more way to sweeten the deal to invest in any fast-growing startup, by offering a helping hand in their efforts to expand to other regions by way of their network of contacts and existing services.

In addition to people getting more well-off in the region, there are other indicators that point to it being a healthy market for tech investment. Latin America has 375 million internet users and 250 million smartphone users, putting it ahead of the U.S. in terms of sheer numbers. And retail e-commerce has nearly doubled in the last three years, going to $54 billion in 2018 from $29.8 billion in 2015.

Similarly, there is a big opportunity ahead because of what the region doesn’t have. Some 400 million people are still without bank accounts or credit histories; and while 79 percent of the population lives in urban areas, those people generally don’t get great access to public transport. Healthcare has also been an area of underinvestment up to now, opening the door to building and expanding medical, wellness and other related solutions.

But to be clear, there are already a ton of companies and entrepreneurs (and talent) in the region, so this is as much about getting closer to them, and helping them grow with funding, as it is about bringing in startups from outside the region to tap these opportunities. SoftBank hopes that by setting out its stall in the heart of it, it will have a shot at profiting from both.

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