Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has raised a new fund of its own to continue scaling globally.

The $115 million first close was led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested. They include Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), Alex Chesterman (co-founder of Zoopla) and EF alumnus Rob Bishop (who co-founded Magic Pony Technology, which was bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million in 2016).

This new fund — which EF says is one the largest pre-seed funds ever raised — will enable the talent investor to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years. EF currently operates in Bangalore, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Paris.

This will translate to the creation of around 300-plus venture-backed companies, three times the number of startups it has helped create since EF was founded by McKinsey colleagues Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck all the way back in 2011.

As part of the same announcement, EF says that General Partner Joe White has relocated to Silicon Valley, where he’ll focus on growing EF’s investor network on the West Coast. Perhaps the move shouldn’t come as a total surprise — White is the husband of Wendy Tan White, who was recently recruited by Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X) in Mountain View — but either way it feels like a smart move from EF’s perspective, as the talent investor, which is also backed by Reid Hoffman’s Greylock, seeks to create further ties to Silicon Valley.

Comments co-founder and CPO Bentinck: “We pioneered a new model of talent investing, and it’s encouraging to see this become a new frontier for venture capital. We believe the world is missing out on some of its best founders because of ecosystem constraints, a lack of co-founders and difficulties getting early pre-company funding. Entrepreneur First is changing that.”

EF is also sharing some data with TechCrunch, revealing for the first time numbers related to the number of EF graduating startups that have gone on to raise outside capital. For the 2015 “vintage” cohort, there were 16 seed rounds, eight Series As and now two Series Bs. For 2016, 24 seeds and five A rounds so far. For 2017, 41 seeds and two A rounds. And for 2018, 57 seeds and one Series A already.

“The graph shows the volume of EF companies funded by VCs each year since 2015 (e.g. only those that raise a successful seed, not just those funded by EF),” White tells me. “The average age to Series A is 40 months according to PitchBook, or 60 months to Series B. Many of our companies are already ahead of that schedule, but many more will reach these milestones in the next 12 months.”

Below follows an email Q&A with EF co-founder Matt Clifford to find out more about the new fund and where it positions the so-called talent investor going forward.

TC: You’ve announced the first close of a new fund — $115 million. What is the remit for the fund and how does it fit into the broader EF program and funnel? Is it mainly for follow-on funding so EF doesn’t get too diluted for the most promising companies it helps create?

MC: The main thing we’re doing with this fund is taking our talent investing model global. We’ve always said the world’s missing out on some of its best founders and now we’ve got the capital to change that. It’s true it’s a lot bigger than our last fund, but that’s mainly driven by scaling internationally, not by a change in investment strategy. This fund will do stipends, pre-seed, seed and Series A investing in all our companies globally. It gives us capacity to fund 2,000 individuals around the world over the next three years.

We’ll absolutely be backing the best Entrepreneur First companies up to their Series A, but we’ve been doing that since 2016, so no change there.

TC: An earlier SEC filing suggested the fund was going to be much bigger. What happened?

MC: As far as I know, you have to file the hard cap with the SEC, but that’s not a target. This is a first close, not a final close, but with $115 million we can fully fund all six sites for three years, which is great.

TC: Like previous EF funds, the new fund’s LPs include many known founders and angel investors from the London tech scene and beyond. But this time around I gather you have some quite large institutional LPs, too, including from the U.S. How were those conversations different this time or was it simply the Reid Hoffman effect after Greylock Partners became an investor in EF itself?

MC: Yes, this is definitely a “growing up” fund for us. Our first “fund” in 2013 was under £400K, so a lot’s changed! Almost all this capital comes from institutional LPs and they include some of the best investors in venture capital funds globally. EF is a totally new stage of VC – talent investing – and LPs are quite rightly naturally fairly conservative. So Joe and I and the rest of the team have put in a lot of work to get institutions comfortable with something radically different and we feel it’s really paid off.

Certainly having Reid and others involved has helped a lot, but EF is just generally a very different beast from when we closed the last fund: the portfolio is now valued at well over $1.3 billion; we’ve had $300 million of exits; the fastest growing alumni companies have been funded by some of the best VCs in Europe and the US, etc. So across the board we had a lot more to show.

TC: EF began life calling itself a “talent-first” investor based on the EF program recruiting potential founders pre-team and pre-idea, which made you an outlier at the time. In that sense, you were — and I hesitate to use the word — ‘disrupting’ startup founding and traditional career paths. But now it’s starting to look like the EF model is a ruse to disrupt early-stage venture capital… or is that too simple an analysis?

MC: Haha! Alice and I are still much more interested in disrupting careers than disrupting VC. What I would say is that we believe we’re heading for a world where many more of the most talented people will become founders and most of those people won’t be in established tech ecosystems. We think that makes the opportunity hard to capture for traditional VC, because it assumes away the real problems – above all, where to find a world-class co-founder.

But we’re very much ecosystem players. I think we’ve now co-invested with pretty much every seed fund in Europe and SE Asia and I think they’d all tell you we play nice.

TC: It’s been reported that in a bid to expand globally, EF has come up against scaling issues with regards to matching founders and company formation. I’ve heard from my own sources that there were teething problems in Berlin, for example. What’s really going on?

MC: It’s definitely the conventional wisdom that VC isn’t scaleable, but I think we’re proving that wrong. If you take our core metric of co-founder matching, our most recent European cohorts had the highest matching rate so far – over 80% of people who joined us found a co-founder (though of course we don’t fund every team that forms). Similarly if you look at our first Paris cohort, it has one of the highest investment rates of any cohort we’ve ever done (and we’ve done 21 cohorts so far). Honestly, we’re really happy with the way the international expansion went, though I’d be the first to say that scaling is hard and we’ll make mistakes!

TC: We’ve seen a few EF clones appear. Sincerest form of flattery or blatant opportunism? And which, if any, part of EF is defensible?

MC: I always remember Paul Graham being asked this about YC clones and saying he felt “like how JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote a book called Henry Potter.” Joking aside though, I think YC has shown that highly defensible network effects in VC are possible. There are literally hundreds of YC clones and yet 95% of the value in accelerators has accrued to YC. I think we’re on track for something similar in the talent investing space.

The key way to think about defensibility is at the level of the customer – i.e. the founder. Which talent investor do you want to join? You want to join the one with the highest quality potential co-founders. Which one has that? Well, unsurprisingly, the one with the track record, the best alum, the best network, etc. Once you’ve established that – and EF is 5 or 6 years ahead of the clones – it’s very difficult to catch up and the advantage compounds quickly.

TC: You shared some stats with regards the success rate of EF startups and the figures look encouraging. But what we don’t yet still have are many exits. This isn’t surprising given that you invest incredibly early, so it will take time for startups to move through the cycle, but it also means that LPs backing EF continue to take a leap of faith. Is that a fair statement and what was the major pushback you got from LPs that declined not to join EF on this next phase of your journey?

MC: For sure, that’s fair. The numbers look great on paper, but it’s way too early to see significant cash returns. In fact, right now we don’t want more exits, as we want our best companies to keep growing privately for as long as possible. Last year, the portfolio raised more money than they had in the history of EF before that put together, so we’re feeling very positive.

It’s definitely true that some LPs don’t want to invest until you’ve returned a whole fund, but fortunately lots of them put in a lot of time to understand the model and were willing to partner with us for the long-term. This will be a big year for the portfolio – no big exits, I hope, but lots of momentum on revenue, product and funding for sure.

TC: Lastly, you now have a general partner and EF’s CFO Joe White (who I understand was instrumental in helping to raise this new fund) posted to Silicon Valley, where he’ll be helping to grow EF’s investor network on the West Coast. How important is U.S. venture capital to EF’s future and when can we expect to see EF launch a program across the pond?

MC: Yes, Joe and I spent a lot of time on planes and in the U.S. last year to pitch LPs! The vast majority of the capital in this fund is U.S.-based and, of course, Reid and Greylock are there too. What Joe, Alice and I all believe is that Silicon Valley remains perhaps the best place in the world to scale a tech company, even if it’s no longer the essential place to start one. This means that being able to build relationships with the best U.S. VCs is a key competitive advantage for an EF company.

We’ve already seen some of this, with Insight leading Tractable’s B round and Founders Fund leading Massless’s (EF LD9) seed. But Joe being there full time is an ideal way for us to accelerate this and I think you’ll see a bunch of EF companies raise U.S.-led B and C rounds this year. The key is the right capital at the right time.

We’re still thinking hard about our next stage of expansion. It’s hard to see a major need for EF in Silicon Valley itself, but there may be a big opportunity in other parts of North America. Watch this space…

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 432nd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Wednesday, February 20, 2019, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Navid Alipour: Our LP’s said “We want you to start other companies that are applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning to clean structure data.” By applying this AI, you...

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As online gaming becomes the new social forum for living out virtual lives, a new startup called Medal.tv has raised $3.5 million for its in-game clipping service to capture and share the Kodak moments and digital memories that are increasingly happening in places like Fortnite or Apex Legends.

Digital worlds like Fortnite are now far more than just a massively multiplayer gaming space. They’re places where communities form, where social conversations happen and where, increasingly, people are spending the bulk of their time online. They even host concerts — like the one from EDM artist Marshmello, which drew (according to the DJ himself) roughly 10 million players onto the platform.

While several services exist to provide clips of live streams from gamers who broadcast on platforms like Twitch, Medal.tv bills itself as the first to offer clipping services for the private games that more casual gamers play among friends and far-flung strangers around the world.

“Essentially the next generation is spending the same time inside games that we used to playing sports outside and things like that,” says Medal.tv’s co-founder and chief executive, Pim DeWitte. “It’s not possible to tell how far it will go. People will capture as many if not more moments for the reason that it’s simpler.”

The company marks a return to the world of gaming for DeWitte, a serial entrepreneur who first started coding when he was 13 years old.

Hailing from a small town in the Netherlands called Nijmegen, DeWitte first reaped the rewards of startup success with a gaming company called SoulSplit. Built on the back of his popular YouTube channel, the SoulSplit game was launched with DeWitte’s childhood friend, Iggy Harmsen, and a fellow online gamer, Josh Lipson, who came on board as SoulSplit’s chief technology officer.

At its height, SoulSplit was bringing in $1 million in revenue and employed roughly 30 people, according to interviews with DeWitte.

The company shut down in 2015 and the co-founders split up to pursue other projects. For DeWitte that meant a stint working with Doctors Without Borders on an app called MapSwipe that would use satellite imagery to better locate people in the event of a humanitarian crisis. He also helped the nonprofit develop a tablet that could be used by doctors deployed to treat Ebola outbreaks.

Then in 2017, as social gaming was becoming more popular on games like Fortnite, DeWitte and his co-founders returned to the industry to launch Medal.tv.

It initially started as a marketing tool to get people interested in playing the games that DeWitte and his co-founders were hoping to develop. But as the clipping service took off, DeWitte and co. realized they potentially had a more interesting social service on their hands.

“We were going to build a mobile app and were going to load a bunch of videos of people playing games and then we we’re going to load videos of our games,” DeWitte says. 

The service allows users to capture the last 15 seconds of gameplay using different recording mechanisms based on game type. Medal.tv captures gameplay on a device and users can opt-in to record sound as well.

“It is programmed so that it only records the game,” DeWitte says. “There is no inbound connection. It only calls for the API [and] all of the things that would be somewhat dangerous from a privacy perspective are all opt-in.”

There are roughly 30,000 users on the platform every week and around 15,000 daily active users, according to DeWitte. Launched last May, the company has been growing between 5 percent and 10 percent weekly, according to DeWitte. Typically, users are sharing clips through Discord, WhatsApp and Instagram direct messages, DeWitte said.

In addition to the consumer-facing clipping service, Medal also offers a data collection service that aggregates information about the clips that are shared by Medal’s users so game developers and streamers can get a sense of how clips are being shared across which platform.

“We look at clips as a form of communication and in most activity that we see, that’s how it’s being used,” says DeWitte.

But that information is also valuable to esports organizations to determine where they need to allocate new resources.

“Medal.tv Metrics is spectacular,” said Peter Levin, chairman of the Immortals esports organization, in a statement. “With it, any gaming organization gains clear, actionable insights into the organic reach of their content, and can build a roadmap to increase it in a measurable way.”

The activity that Medal was seeing was impressive enough to attract the attention of investors led by Backed VC and Initial Capital. Ridge Ventures, Makers Fund and Social Starts participated in the company’s $3.5 million round as well, with Alex Brunicki, a founding partner at Backed, and Matteo Vallone, principal at Initial, joining the company’s board.

“Emerging generations are experiencing moments inside games the same way we used to with sports and festivals growing up. Digital and physical identity are merging and the technology for gamers hasn’t evolved to support that,” said Brunicki in a statement.

Medal’s platform works with games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and Oldschool Runescape (where DeWitte first cut his teeth in gaming).

“Friends are the main driver of game discovery, and game developers benefit from shareable games as a result. Medal.tv is trying to enable that without the complexity of streaming,” said Vallone, who previously headed up games for Google Play Europe, and now sits on the Medal board. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many emails can you replace with a video? As offices fragment into remote teams, work becomes more visual and social media makes us more comfortable on camera, it’s time for collaboration to go beyond text. That’s the idea behind Loom, a fast-rising startup that equips enterprises with instant video messaging tools. In a click, you can film yourself or narrate a screenshare to get an idea across in a more vivid, personal way. Instead of scheduling a video call, employees can asynchronously discuss projects or give “stand-up” updates without massive disruptions to their workflow.

In the 2.5 years since launch, Loom has signed up 1.1 million users from 18,000 companies. And that was just as a Chrome extension. Today Loom launches its PC and Mac apps that give it a dedicated presence in your digital work space. Whether you’re communicating across the room or across the globe, “Loom is the next best thing to being there,” co-founder Shahed Khan tells me.

Now Loom is ready to spin up bigger sales and product teams thanks to an $11 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins . The firm’s partner Ilya Fushman, formally Dropbox’s head of product and corporate development, will join Loom’s board. He’ll shepherd Loom through today’s launch of its $10 per month per user Pro version that offers HD recording, calls-to-action at the end of videos, clip editing, live annotation drawings and analytics to see who actually watched like they’re supposed to.

“We’re ditching the suits and ties and bringing our whole selves to work. We’re emailing and messaging like never before, but though we may be more connected, we’re further apart,” Khan tells me. “We want to make it very easy to bring the humanity back in.”

But back in 2016, Loom was just trying to survive. Khan had worked at Upfront Ventures after a stint as a product designer at website builder Weebly. He and two close friends, Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath, started Opentest to let app makers get usability feedback from experts via video. But after six months and going through the NFX accelerator, they were running out of bootstrapped money. That’s when they realized it was the video messaging that could be a business as teams sought to keep in touch with members working from home or remotely.

Together they launched Loom in mid-2016, raising a pre-seed and seed round amounting to $4 million. Part of its secret sauce is that Loom immediately starts uploading bytes of your video while you’re still recording so it’s ready to send the moment you’re finished. That makes sharing your face, voice and screen feel as seamless as firing off a Slack message, but with more emotion and nuance.

“Sales teams use it to close more deals by sending personalized messages to leads. Marketing teams use Loom to walk through internal presentations and social posts. Product teams use Loom to capture bugs, stand ups, etc.,” Khan explains.

Loom has grown to a 16-person team that will expand thanks to the new $11 million Series A from Kleiner, Slack, Cue founder Daniel Gross and actor Jared Leto that brings it to $15 million in funding. They predict the new desktop apps that open Loom to a larger market will see it spread from team to team for both internal collaboration and external discussions from focus groups to customer service.

Loom will have to hope that after becoming popular at a company, managers will pay for the Pro version that shows exactly how long each viewer watched. That could clue them in that they need to be more concise, or that someone is cutting corners on training and cooperation. It’s also a great way to onboard new employees. “Just watch this collection of videos and let us know what you don’t understand.” At $10 per month though, the same cost as Google’s entire GSuite, Loom could be priced too high.

Next Loom will have to figure out a mobile strategy — something that’s surprisingly absent. Khan imagines users being able to record quick clips from their phones to relay updates from travel and client meetings. Loom also plans to build out voice transcription to add automatic subtitles to videos and even divide clips into thematic sections you can fast-forward between. Loom will have to stay ahead of competitors like Vidyard’s GoVideo and Wistia’s Soapbox that have cropped up since its launch. But Khan says Loom looms largest in the space thanks to customers at Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Red Bull and 1,100 employees at HubSpot.

“The overall space of collaboration tools is becoming deeper than just email + docs,” says Fushman, citing Slack, Zoom, Dropbox Paper, Coda, Notion, Intercom, Productboard and Figma. To get things done the fastest, businesses are cobbling together B2B software so they can skip building it in-house and focus on their own product.

No piece of enterprise software has to solve everything. But Loom is dependent on apps like Slack, Google Docs, Convo and Asana. Because it lacks a social or identity layer, you’ll need to send the links to your videos through another service. Loom should really build its own video messaging system into its desktop app. But at least Slack is an investor, and Khan says “they’re trying to be the hub of text-based communication,” and the soon-to-be-public unicorn tells him anything it does in video will focus on real-time interaction.

Still, the biggest threat to Loom is apathy. People already feel overwhelmed with Slack and email, and if recording videos comes off as more of a chore than an efficiency, workers will stick to text. And without the skimability of an email, you can imagine a big queue of videos piling up that staffers don’t want to watch. But Khan thinks the ubiquity of Instagram Stories is making it seem natural to jump on camera briefly. And the advantage is that you don’t need a bunch of time-wasting pleasantries to ensure no one misinterprets your message as sarcastic or pissed off.

Khan concludes, “We believe instantly sharable video can foster more authentic communication between people at work, and convey complex scenarios and ideas with empathy.”

After raising $24 million in funding led by Salesforce in April 2018, the startup IFTTT — which provides an API platform so that people can create short scripts for apps to work together — has announced that its co-founder Linden Tibbets has stepped down as CEO after 10 years leading the company. Chris Kibarian, who most recently was the CEO of Monster.com owner Randstad Digital Ventures, has taken on the role, and joined the board in the process. Tibbets, meanwhile, is staying on as IFTTT’s chief design officer.

Kibarian is a self-described turnaround specialist who has worked across a diverse set of businesses. In addition to restructuring Monster — a legacy from the first dot-com boom that was acquired for $429 million in 2016 — it got causes-based crowdfunding platform YouCaring into fighting form under its private equity owner. (YouCaring eventually bought Generosity.com from Indiegogo and then itself got acquired by GoFundMe.)

At IFTTT, his task will be to “realize IFTTT’s full potential and become the connectivity platform trusted by every person and business in the world,” Tibbets notes in a Medium post.

It’s notable that when IFTTT announced $24 million in funding last year, it was the first infusion of money to come to the company in four years — a relatively long time in the world of Silicon Valley startups. In the interim the company had made a few moves to launch new products, including those generating revenue, but had largely operated without much fanfare or attention (a little like the functional premise of IFTTT itself, to be honest).

On the other hand, the startup has some strong investors who appear to be rooting for it. In addition to Salesforce, its backers include IBM and the Chamberlain Group (best known for a variety of brands for automatic entry gates and garage door openers), Fenox Venture Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, Greylock, NEA, Norwest, SV Angels and more.

And in another, if modest, sign of optimism, between 2014 and 2018 IFTTT’s valuation went up. Its current valuation, according to PitchBook, is $249 million, compared to its post-money valuation of just under $210 million in 2014.

However, looking at the wider industry, you can see where IFTTT may have stalled in its growth, or at least in realising its full potential, as Tibbets puts it.

Tibbets writes that 2018 was “the best year in our company’s history” — noting record usage and over 700 services available for linking on its platform across verticals like retail, banking, food, automotive, government, health, education, and entertainment — but he doesn’t break out any specific usage numbers.

Last year, when it announced funding, the company said it had 14 million registered consumers (it did not disclose how many were active), 75 million Applets since launch, more than 5,000 active developers building services and more than 140,000 building Applets on the IFTTT Platform. Products from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, BMW, Samsung, IBM, MyQ, and Verizon are among those touched by IFTTT scripts.

However, the wider landscape for connecting different apps together (IFTTT stands for “if this then that”) has been a tricky one to develop as a business.

Ordinary consumers — beyond early-adopting power users — may not be as likely to want to build such scripts (or “recipes” as IFTTT once called them before rebranding to “Applets”), and the most obvious integrations now often come as standard features in products or apps themselves.

Developers, meanwhile, may want to write their own scripts or use more sophisticated platforms that can provide deeper analytics or functionality around an integration. (For example, there are competing services like Microsoft’s Flow, and products that provide their own integration functionality that replace the need for using IFTTT, such as Alexa from Amazon, even while there are also ways to write integration scripts for Amazon products via IFTTT.)

“The biggest development in 2018 wasn’t growth in usage or our ecosystem, but growth for our business,” Tibbets writes tellingly. “We found concrete validation that connectivity is a real challenge for any brand looking to grow and retain their customers.”

I had thought that was actually IFTTT’s mission from the start. More to the point, if Kibarian can best figure out how to fit IFTTT into the current market, then that might turn out to be the most lucrative Applet of all.

The gig economy has been under much scrutiny as of late due to the way it pays — or, skirts around paying — its independent contractors. Thumbtack, a platform for finding professionals to do anything from home maintenance do DJing a party, is now offering benefits to some of its independent contractors.

“In a time where it feels like all the stories are about some tug of war between labor and a platform, I hope what this highlights is that there are opportunities for working together and to find solutions that are in service of the broad set of pros and their needs,” Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta told TechCrunch.

This is thanks to Thumbtack’s new pilot partnership with Alia, a portable benefits platform. Alia, which is a project of the National Domestic Workers Alliances Lab, enables customers to contribute to their cleaners’ benefits. These benefits entail paid time off, life insurance and coverage for disabilities, accidents and critical illnesses.

“There’s been a lot of talk about portable benefits,” Thumbtack Zappacosta told TechCrunch. “Really, what we need to do is start experimenting, start learning, start trying and start doing. We found this is a great way to start and improve our relationships with pros.”

Initially, Thumbtack will only offer benefits to its housecleaners in California and New York. Through the partnership, Thumbtack customers will be able to contribute any amount of money to go toward the professionals’ benefits, with the suggested donation being $5. For the first six months, Thumbtack will also contribute $25 to each pro (up to $20,000 in total) who joins Alia.

The relationship between a housecleaner and resident can be very personal and intimate, Zappacosta said. That’s why he believes there is an opportunity to leverage that relationship. Still, customers might not be as willing to contribute as Thumbtack hopes they’ll be, and Zappacosta understands that other approaches may be necessary.

“This is one shot on a goal,” Zappacosta said. “The only way we’re going to learn exactly what works best is by trying. The private sector alone won’t be able to solve this problem. It will require a government solution to make it easier for folks to access benefits who are out of traditional employment structures. This is the start of a long road.”

Kairos, the facial recognition startup that found itself in turmoil following the ouster of founder and then-CEO Brian Brackeen last October, has raised $4 million in funding from E. Jay Saunders, CEO of Domus Semo Sancus. This brings Kairos’s total funding to $17 million.

As of November, Kairos had just enough money to get through Q1 of this year. At the time, Brackeen was looking to raise $5 million for the company and had already secured $3.5 million from Beyond Capital Markets, contingent upon Brackeen rejoining the company. Fast-forward to today and Brackeen is still out of the company and the interim CEO, Melissa Doval, has been appointed permanent CEO.

The drama started back in October when New World Angels president and Kairos board chairperson Steve O’Hara sent a letter to Kairos founder Brian Brackeen notifying him of his termination from the role of chief executive officer. The termination letter cited willful misconduct as the cause for Brackeen’s termination. Specifically, O’Hara said Brackeen misled shareholders and potential investors, misappropriated corporate funds, did not report to the board of directors and created a divisive atmosphere.

Kairos sued Brackeen who then countersued the company in November, seeking to hold Kairos and Kairos CEO Melissa Doval, then interim-CEO, accountable “for intentionally destroying his reputation and livelihood through fraudulent conduct, the publication of malicious falsehoods, and the commission of illegal corporate acts.”

The suits are still in litigation.

Kairos is trying to tackle the society-wide problem of discrimination in artificial intelligence. While that’s not the company’s explicit mission — it’s to provide authentication tools to businesses — algorithmic bias has long been a topic the company, especially Brackeen, has addressed.

“I have always admired Kairos and its visionary work in pushing face-recognition technology beyond law-enforcement uses, while also ensuring its applications fall under self-imposed, ethical standards,” Doval said in a press release. “I’m especially proud to be leading our company’s dynamic team in my beloved hometown, as well as our innovative R&D team in Singapore, and look forward to making this inspiring brand even stronger.”

With Doval officially at the helm, Kairos says it stands by Brackeen’s earlier intent to not sell to law enforcement. Moving forward, Doval says Kairos has “great opportunities in the online dating and online gambling verticals to pursue.”

“We want to find ways and solutions for our product to protect people, not persecute them,” she said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Age and identity verification in these two verticals are very important and it is dire for these industries to ensure the safety of minors and we would like to be an integral part of that.”

Through investment and partnership with DSS, Kairos will also create a solution for banks for identity verification.

“I could not be happier about his investment and to see him at the helm of the board as executive chairman,” Brackeen said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The resignations of the former chairman as well as the other board member, who caused so much angst for the company and its shareholders, are concrete signs of progress. E. Jay has been instrumental in this progress and healing.”

For Brackeen, his plan is to launch a venture fund that uses AI to reduce bias in investment decisions. Called Lightship Capital, the fund will “also license out our AI to other venture capital firms, so they too can eliminate bias from their investment funnel. We look forward to seeing which firms take us up on that offer.”

SendBird, a San Francisco-area startup, helps developers add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code. It’s an idea similar to Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications. Today, the company announced a $52 million Series B investment.

The round was led by Iconiq Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, Y Combinator and Funders Club also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $70 million, according to Crunchbase. Y Combinator is contributing to this round and SendBird was actually a member of the 2016 winter class.

The company gives developers the ability to add messaging to their apps without a fuss. “We are a very flexible, fully customizable, white label messaging capability. We come with a fully managed infrastructure. So basically, you can log into any mobile applications or websites out there, and use our messaging capability,” company founder and CEO John Kim explained.

Kim says it is applicable in any application that requires communication. That could be online gaming, dating apps or an on-demand delivery service — any case where two people need to communicate quickly. It provides the value prop of any API-driven service in that it enables developers to add messaging capability to an application with a couple of lines of code, saving them from having to create a service like this themselves from scratch.

They offer tiered pricing based on number of users using an application with SendBird messaging capability along with premium features for additional cost, such as chat moderation tools or automated translation.

In addition to the API, the company also offers SDKs for iOS and Android along with JavaScript, React Native, .NET and Unity.

The process is simple enough that the company has attracted 50,000 developers, running on almost 12,000 applications, and accounting for more than a billion messages every month. Customers include the NBA, Yahoo! Sports and Glu Mobile.

The company has been growing quickly. In 2017 it had just 25 employees. Today, Kim reports that they have 74 and are adding additional people at a rapid clip. He said he will use the money to continue expanding to meet growing market demand, to publicize the company and grow a team of marketing and sales people to sell the tool directly to developers.

So far its success has been mainly driven by word of mouth, but part of what they want to do with the new funds is get the word out and increase their market presence.

Redis Labs, a startup that offers commercial services around the Redis in-memory data store (and which counts Redis creator and lead developer Salvatore Sanfilippo among its employees), today announced that it has raised a $60 million Series E funding round led by private equity firm Francisco Partners.

The firm didn’t participate in any of Redis Labs’ previous rounds, but existing investors Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital all participated in this round.

In total, Redis Labs has now raised $146 million and the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development.

Current Redis Labs users include the likes of American Express, Staples, Microsoft, Mastercard and Atlassian . In total, the company now has more than 8,500 customers. Because it’s pretty flexible, these customers use the service as a database, cache and message broker, depending on their needs. The company’s flagship product is Redis Enterprise, which extends the open-source Redis platform with additional tools and services for enterprises. The company offers managed cloud services, which give businesses the choice between hosting on public clouds like AWS, GCP and Azure, as well as their private clouds, in addition to traditional software downloads and licenses for self-managed installs.

Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,” he said.

It’s worth noting that he stressed that Francisco Partners has a reputation for taking companies forward and the logical next step for Redis Labs would be an IPO. “We think that we have a very unique opportunity to build a very large company that deserves an IPO,” he said.

Part of this new competitive environment also involves competitors that use other companies’ open-source projects to build their own products without contributing back. Redis Labs was one of the first of a number of open-source companies that decided to offer its newest releases under a new license that still allows developers to modify the code but that forces competitors that want to essentially resell it to buy a commercial license. Ofer specifically notes AWS in this context. It’s worth noting that this isn’t about the Redis database itself but about the additional modules that Redis Labs built. Redis Enterprise itself is closed-source.

“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.”

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new U.K. startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level.

Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls “AI triangulation” — simultaneously applying artificial intelligence algorithms to oversee, monitor and defend an organization’s network appliances, endpoints and “investigator bots” covering multiple microservices — has raised $6.4 million in seed funding.

David Atkinson — the startup’s CEO and founder who had previously been the commercial director for Darktrace and before that helped pioneer new cybersecurity techniques as an operative at the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense — said that Senseon will use the funding to continue to expand its business both in Europe and the U.S. 

The deal was co-led by MMC Ventures and Mark Weatherford, who is chief cybersecurity strategist at vArmour (which itself raised money in recent weeks) and previously Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Others in the round included Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon, a security startup incubator in London.

As Atkinson describes it, triangulation was an analytics concept first introduced by the CIA in the U.S., a method of bringing together multiple vectors of information to unearth inconsistencies in a data set (you can read more on triangulation in this CIA publication). He saw an opportunity to build a platform that took the same kind of approach to enterprise security.

There are a number of companies that are using AI-based techniques to help defend against breaches — in addition to Darktrace, there is Hexadite (a remediation specialist acquired by Microsoft), Amazon is working in the field and many others. In fact I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any IT security company today that doesn’t claim to or actually use AI in its approach.

Atkinson claims, however, that many AI-based solutions — and many other IT security products — take siloed, single-point approaches to defending a network. That is to say, you have network appliance security products, endpoint security, perhaps security for individual microservices and so on.

But while many of these work well, you don’t always get those different services speaking to each other. And that doesn’t reflect the shape that the most sophisticated security breaches are taking today.

As cybersecurity breaches and identified vulnerabilities continue to grow in frequency and scope — with hundreds of millions of individuals’ and organizations’ data potentially exposed in the process, systems disabled, and more — we’re seeing an increasing amount of sophistication on the part of the attackers.

Yes, those malicious actors employ artificial intelligence. But — as described in this 2019 paper on the state of cybersecurity from Symantec — they are also taking advantage of bigger “surface areas” with growing networks of connected objects all up for grabs; and they are tackling new frontiers like infiltrating data in transport and cloud-based systems. (In terms of examples of new frontiers, mobile networks, biometric data, gaming networks, public clouds and new card-skimming techniques are some of the specific areas that Experian calls out.)

Senseon’s antidote has been to build a new platform that “emulates how analysts think,” said Atkinson. Looking at an enterprise’s network appliance, an endpoint and microservices in the cloud, the Senseon platform “has an autonomous conversation” using the source data, before it presents a conclusion, threat, warning or even breach alert to the organization’s security team.

“We have an ability to take observations and compare that to hypothetical scenarios. When we tell you something, it has a rich context,” he said. Single-point alternatives essentially can create “blind spots that hackers manoeuvre around. Relying on single-source intelligence is like tying one hand behind your back.”

After Senseon compiles its data, it sends out alerts to security teams in a remediation service. Interestingly, while the platform’s aim is to identify malicious activity in a network, another consequence of what it’s doing is to help organizations identify “false positives” that are not actually threats, to cut down on time and money that get wasted on investigating those.

“Organisations of all sizes need to get better at keeping pace with emerging threats, but more importantly, identifying the attacks that require intervention,” said Mina Samaan of MMC Ventures in a statement. “Senseon’s technology directly addresses this challenge by using reinforcement learning AI techniques to help over-burdened security teams better understand anomalous behaviour through a single holistic platform.”

Although Senseon is only announcing seed funding today, the company has actually been around since 2017 and already has customers, primarily in the finance and legal industries (it would only give out one customer reference, the law firm of Harbottle & Lewis).

Meet Metronaut, an app for smartphones and tablets that could change the way you play classical music. The startup behind the app, Antescofo, raised a $4.5 million funding round (€4 million) and has attracted 160,000 downloads.

Daphni and OneRagTime are leading the round, with Nobuyuki Idei, Yann LeCun, Sophie Gasperment and Thibault Viort also participating.

Metronaut lets you play a musical instrument with a professional orchestra playing all the other instruments with you. It isn’t just an audio player — the app leverages your device microphone to listen to your music and adjust the tempo of the other instruments.

The startup has recorded professional musicians in a studio so that you can play the flute without hearing the flute coming out of your speakers or headphones.

And if you still need to practice, you can set your own tempo while you learn your part — nothing will be distorted. You can record your performance, annotate the score and track your progress.

The company is betting on a freemium model. You can download the app for free and play for 10 minutes per month. If you want to experience the app without any limit, you need to buy a monthly subscription for $10 per month.

While the app works with dozens of instruments, most people use it to play the piano, the violin or the flute. Singers can also use the app.

And content is key with this service. People will keep subscribing if there’s enough content for their own instruments in the catalog. So let’s see if Antescofo is going to use today’s funding round to record even more content and turn the app into an essential service for musicians.

I first encountered the founders of Litho, a new hardware and software startup developing a new finger-worn controller, at London’s Pitch@Palace last April. The event sees startups pitch in front of the British royal family and other esteemed guests, and naturally the company’s young founders, 24-year-old Nat Martin (CEO) and 25-year-old Charlie Bruce (CTO), were a little overawed by the occasion, just like many of the other founders pitching that day. However, perhaps unbeknownst to them, Litho was also one of the more notable companies, not least because, as the saying goes, hardware is hard.

Fast-forward to today and the young company is ready to show the world the first publicly available iteration of what it has been building: an innovative finger-worn device that provides control over various “spatial interactions” and should find applications ranging from AR and VR to the smart home and the control of other IoT devices. The next stage for Litho is to offer the controller and access to its SDK to developers who join the startup’s beta programme for $199/£179.

“Computing is increasingly structured around the real world rather than the desktop,” says Litho’s Nat Martin. “With the advent of smart devices such as lights, thermostats and door locks, physical things are becoming digitally connected. Equally, with the advent of AR, digital things are becoming physically anchored in the real world. These are two sides of the same coin — digital interactions are entering physical space.”

However, the status quo is for the smartphone to be the primary interface for these spatial interactions, but smartphones were designed to interact with 2D content on screens and are therefore struggling to make the leap. “Trying to interact with objects in the real world through a smartphone is like trying to do heart surgery with a spork,” says Martin. “More often than not our phones end up being a frustrating barrier to the digital world, rather than a tool to enable interactions with it.”

To solve this problem requires a combination of hardware and software, while the Litho device itself is described as an unobtrusive finger-worn controller that connects via Bluetooth Low Energy to a smartphone or AR headset. The controller has a capacitive touch surface on the underside, which allows for precise 2D input, scrolling and tapping. But, more significantly, it also has an array of motion sensors and provides haptic feedback.

The Litho SDK uses the popular 3D game development platform Unity, and Martin says developers will be able to make apps that can not only identify the direction (/vector) in which the wearer is pointing, but what they are pointing at in the real world. It also provides an interaction framework of off-the-shelf solutions for core interactions, including templates for tools such as object creation, movement and deletion, making it easier for developers to quickly build “delightful and intuitive experiences.”

“Having an input device designed from the ground up for 3D interaction opens a whole new paradigm of mobile interactions,” he adds. “Instead of an awkward and frustrating interface, developers can create precise yet effortless interactions in 3D space. This opens up a whole new range of use cases — architects and designers can create precise 3D models in the context of the real world, and gamers can create a virtual theme park in their back garden simply by pointing and drawing. At home, instead of opening up a smartphone app, searching for the right bulb and operating a virtual dimmer, you can simply point and swipe to dim your lights.”

Meanwhile, Litho has already picked up a number of notable investors. The burgeoning startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from U.S. venture firm Greycroft, Paul Heydon (an early investor in Unity and Supercell) and Chris Albinson (who co-led investments in DocuSign, Pinterest and Turo), along with several other unnamed angel investors.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average size of each customer? What is an average deal size? I’m trying to understand your business. Is it a business that generates $2,000 or $200,000 per customer?...

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Responding to popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Navid Alipour was recorded in January 2019. Navid...

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