McCarthyFinch sounds a bit like a law firm — and with good reason. The startup has developed an AI as a Service platform aimed at the legal profession. This week, it’s competing in the 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco.

The company began life as a project at a leading New Zealand law firm, MinterEllisonRuddWatts. They wanted to look at how they could take advantage of AI to automate legal processes to make them more efficient, cost-effective and faster, according to company president Richard DeFrancisco.

“They were working on leveraging technology to become the law firm of the future, and they realized there were some pretty tremendous gaps,” he explained. They found a bunch of Ph.Ds working on artificial intelligence who worked with more than 30 lawyers over time to address those gaps by leveraging AI technology.

That internal project was spun out as a startup last year, emerging as an AI platform with 18 services. MinterEllison, along with New Zealand VC Goat Ventures, gave the fledgling company US$2.5 million in pre-seed money to get started.

The company looked at automating a lot of labor-intensive tasks related to legal document review and discovery such as document tagging. “Lawyers spend a lot of time tagging things with regards to what’s relevant and not relevant, and it’s not a good use of their time. We can go through millions of documents very quickly,” DeFrancisco said. He claims they can lower the time it takes to tag a set of documents in a lawsuit from weeks to minutes.

He says that one of their key differentiators is their use of natural language processing (NLP), which he says allows the company to understand language and nuance to interpret documents with a high level of accuracy, even when there are small data sets. Instead of requiring thousands of documents to train their models, which he says law firms don’t have time to do, they can begin to understand the gist of a case in as little as two or three documents with 90 percent accuracy, based on their tests.

They don’t actually want to sell their platform directly to law firms. Instead, they hope to market their artificial intelligence skills as a service to other software vendors with a legal bent who are looking to get smarter without building their own AI from scratch.

“What we are doing is going to technology service providers and talking to them about using our solution. We have restful APIs to integrate into their technology and do a Powered By-model,” DeFrancisco explained.

The startup currently has 10 trials going on. While he couldn’t name them, he did say that they include the largest law firm in Europe, largest global provider of legal information and the fastest growing SaaS company in history. They are also working on agreements with large systems integrators including Deloitte and Accenture to act as resellers of their solution.

While they are based in New Zealand, they plan to open a U.S. office in the Los Angeles area shortly after Disrupt. The engineering team will remain in New Zealand, and DeFrancisco will build the rest of the company in the U.S as it seeks to expand its reach. They also plan to start raising their next round of funding.

People like to say that brick-and-mortar retail is dead, but direct-to-consumer businesses continue to dabble with physical stores all the same.

Why? Because brick-and-mortar retail provides businesses with benefits an online shopping platform can’t, namely consumer experiences that create and sustain shoppers’ relationships with brands. 

To help the next generation of digitally native stores expand into the physical world, Uppercase, formerly known as thisopenspace, is launching out of stealth with $3.5 million in venture capital funding. Lerer Hippeau has led the round, with participation from CRV and SV Angels.

Uppercase works with real estate agents, architects and designers to build stores for online brands in New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Co-founder and CEO Yashar Nejati started the company after noticing that online brands were experimenting with pop-up shops then establishing permanent storefronts.

Men’s retailer Frank & Oak, which picked up a $16 million Series C this year, is a great example of that trend. The company began as an internet retailer and now has several stores throughout Canada. Luggage startup Away, trendy shoe company Allbirds and Emily Weiss’ makeup company Glossier have done the same.

“Anyone can launch an online brand,” Nejati told TechCrunch. “Brands truly stand out from the crowd once they grow beyond digital — we’re seeing this with Warby Parker, Casper and Indochino, who will have over 350 stores by the end of 2018. Uppercase is part of a modern growth strategy, providing tech-enabled flexible retail stores for brands to launch, analyze and grow their retail presence.”

So far, Uppercase has built stores for furniture company Joybird and Venus et Fleur, which sells artfully arranged roses.

Early-stage investor Lerer Hippeau has backed a number of direct-to-consumer brands, including the aforementioned Allbirds and Casper.

“We’ve seen the importance of an omnichannel strategy as companies scale,” Lerer Hippeau Graham Brown told TechCrunch. “Uppercase is the perfect partner for brands born online looking to expand into the physical world.”

Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF.

If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need a couple of things — a way to determine the location of the package, and a way to transmit this information over the air. The most straightforward way of doing it is by using a GPS chipset combined with a cellular chipset.

Systems-on-chip have made this easier as they usually integrate multiple modules. You can get a GPS signal and wireless capabilities in the same chip. While GPS is insanely accurate, it also requires a ton of battery just to position a device on a map. That’s why devices often triangulate your position using Wi-Fi combined with a database of Wi-Fi networks and their positions.

And yet, using GPS or Wi-Fi as well as an LTE modem doesn’t work if you want to track a container over multiple weeks or months. At some point, your device will run out of battery. Or you’ll have to spend a small fortune to buy a ton of trackers with big batteries.

PoLTE has developed a software solution that lets you turn data from the cell modem into location information. It works with existing modems and only requires a software update. The company has been working with Riot Micro for instance.

Behind the scene PoLTE’s magic happens on their servers. IoT devices don’t need to do any of the computing. They just need to send a tiny sample of LTE signals and PoLTE can figure out the location from their servers. Customers can then get this data using an API.

It only takes 300 bytes of data to get location information with precision of less than a few meters. You don’t need a powerful CPU, Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth.

“We offer 80 percent cost reduction on IoT devices together with longer battery life,” CEO Ed Chao told me.

On the business side, PoLTE is using a software-as-a-service model. You can get started for free if you don’t need a lot of API calls. You then start paying depending on the size of your fleet of devices and the number of location requests.

It doesn’t really matter if the company finds a good business opportunity. PoLTE is a low-level technology company at heart. Its solution is interesting by itself and could help bigger companies that are looking for an efficient location-tracking solution.

Ford is selling a lot of pickups. Ford

After launching a $36 million fund earlier this year to help support black female founders, Backstage Capital isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Today, the fund’s founder and managing partner Arlan Hamilton announced that it will launch an accelerator to further amplify and support the best companies led by underestimated founders.

The four cohorts will be located in Philadelphia, London, Los Angeles and a fourth city to be determined through a public vote.

“We decided on Los Angeles because the ecosystem is really prime for it,” Hamilton said onstage today at Disrupt SF at Moscone West. “There is just the most diverse group of founders and types of companies they’re building. There is a lot there to pull from.”

With London, Hamilton said she visited the city a few times and was blown away by the founders and the interesting challenges they face there.

“There is a lot of money and a lot of investors, but it reminds me of three years ago in Silicon Valley,” she said. “It’s a melting pot of a city and we can pull from different parts of Europe as a launching pad. And there are several groups of African founders who found their way in the ecosystem in London who are doing great things with great resources but are being overlooked.”

But it was Philadelphia that served as location inspiration.

When Philadelphia is thinking about what it means to become a tech city, it’s not about “how do we retrofit this Silicon Valley model, but more so how do we use technology to do what Philadelphia does best,” said Aniyia Williams of Tinsel and Black & Brown Founders, who was onstage with Hamilton.

Williams will spearhead the Philadelphia chapter of the accelerator to provide more resources for founders there.

“It’s our privilege to be helping out with the Backstage Accelerator. We’ve been thinking through an ecosystem of how to support founders,” Williams said. “Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates of American cities and one of the highest populations of poor black and Latinx people. So for us it’s about closing that wealth gap to address inequity in tech. There needs to be more active participation from everyone.”

Backstage Accelerator will be accepting applications throughout the rest of this month, and six companies will be chosen per cohort. The accelerator will invest $100,000 in each company in exchange for 5 percent equity.

Participants can look forward to a different kind of accelerator experience, Hamilton said, starting with the demo day model.

“Demo day to us seems a little like standardized testing,” she said. “It’s important to a lot of the accelerators, but we’re wondering what could be an alternative to a demo day? We’re just thinking about things through a different lens, and at the same time having very high standards like we always do.”

Hamilton said it took awhile for her to be convinced to launch an accelerator.

“We really do things that we feel we can dominate,” she said. “I just didn’t think we were ready for it; why would there need to be another accelerator?”

She said Backstage reached 100 companies this year and put from $25,000 to $100,000 in those companies, providing strong value.

“In most cases we are the first call our founders make — either for a good or bad reason,” Hamilton said. “We have the most impact without having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s not happening fast enough. We don’t like to wait for other people to catch up to us, so it makes a lot of sense to us today [to launch an accelerator], and it was after very deep and strategic thought to get to this point.”

Christie Pitts, Backstage Capital investment partner and chief of staff, will head up the accelerator, which is one of the programs that came out of Backstage Studio.

“My purpose is changing the narrative in tech and who is allowed to be a successful tech founder,” Pitts told us after the Disrupt panel. “Being a successful entrepreneur is not a zero-sum game. You can have a successful company, and I can have a successful company. And we feel like there is an opportunity in this space for underestimated founders where they can learn how to fundraise.”

To help build out programming and work with the cohorts in the four locales, Backstage Capital will enlist the services of Wayne Sutton and Melinda Epler, co-founders of Change Catalyst, a firm that promotes the importance of creating inclusive tech ecosystems. Microsoft and MailChimp are also partners in the accelerator’s launch. Mark Levy, formerly the global director of people at Airbnb, will also contribute to the accelerator.

Hamilton remains steadfast about the importance of diversity and inclusion in tech.

“I just think that Microsoft and MailChimp are understanding that we’re now the cool kids,” Hamilton said. “It’s the right side of things to be talking about. And you can only talk so much before it’s time to act.”

Hamilton said that the firm’s $36 million fund it announced earlier this year will yield results by the end of the year. She also says we’ll see Backstage with a $100 million fund by the end of 2020.

“We’ll keep doing what feels right to us, and try to leave things a little better than where we found them — that’s always our goal,” she said. “The accelerator will allow us to continue with our growing deal flow. And maybe by 2021, there’s a chance we could be in 10 to 12 cities investing in 100 companies a year.”

mSpy, a commercial spyware solution designed to help you spy on kids and partners, has leaked over 2 million records including software purchases and iCloud usernames and authentication tokens of devices running mSky. The data appears to have come from an unsecured database that allowed security researchers to pull out millions of records.

“Before it was taken offline sometime in the past 12 hours, the database contained millions of records, including the username, password and private encryption key of each mSpy customer who logged in to the mSpy site or purchased an mSpy license over the past six months,” wrote security researcher Brian Krebs.

Bug hunter Nitish Shah found the data and notified mSpy about the leak but couldn’t reach anyone who could shut it down. He showed Krebs how to access the data, which included personal data on customers.

mSpy is a platform that allows parents to see what their children are doing online and, presumably, allow partners to keep tabs on each other. The app allows you to monitor “WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, and other messaging apps” and tracks calls, SMS, and GPS data.

mSpy has leaked data before and Krebs reported a hack in 2015 that the company denied for a full week. This latest leak is less a hack than an oversight in database control.

I’ve reached out to mSpy for clarity on the breach.

Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.

On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.

“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.

Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.

Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.

All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.

Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.

The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.

“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”

When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.

Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.

A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.

The way we get around is changing fast. Between ride services, on-demand car sharing and other methods to have a car only when you need it, owning one is getting less and less compelling. A new startup called Carma offers a happy medium for those who want the convenience of owning a car without the hassle of, well, owning a car. Instead, you just subscribe to it.

Carma launched publicly today at the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. Its system is more flexible than a lease, cheaper than hourly or daily car-share services and precision-targeted at millennials (whatever those are) and dealerships.

It works like this: You pick from a variety of new and newish vehicles sourced from the inventory of car dealerships in the area. For a set monthly fee you basically get to treat it like your car. Insurance is included, as is ordinary maintenance — you’re mainly on the hook for gas and a few incidentals.

Keep paying for as many months as you like, or just one, and when you don’t need the car any more, just give it back to the dealer. Boom, you’re car-free again.

The assumption is that there’s a considerable population of people who are caught between the high-cost, low-commitment world of car and ride sharing and the variable-cost, high-commitment world of ownership. They don’t want to have a $20,000 asset sitting around doing nothing but costing money, but they also don’t want to pay through the nose every time they want to go more than a mile or two. Where’s the medium-cost, medium-commitment option? That’s where Carma intends to fit in.

“If you’re looking for a week, or a trip, there are a lot of good options that are for fractional use, by the mile or the minute, or daily rentals,” explained founder and CEO Azarias Reda in an interview. “This is for someone who needs a car on a daily basis.”

Young, flighty, commitment-averse millennials are the prime demographic, he noted: “Millennials are the biggest consumer of leases. They’re already driving this notion of ‘I want to access this vehicle but not necessarily own it.’ Subscriptions combine those desires.”

Ultimately the cost is more per month than a lease or ownership, but if what the driver values is flexibility, there’s no comparison.

More importantly, it’s a great option for dealerships. These places have all kinds of inventory sitting around that could be deployed in whatever manner they see fit: a couple for extended test drives of new models, a few older ones paying their way despite being the last four on the lot from last year, a different way to monetize overnumerous used vehicles, and so on.

It’s not the only one — Fair and FlexDrive are startups with similar aspirations and are already on the market. And some car manufacturers offer specific, though often luxury-oriented, medium-term subscriptions. Carma, however, is taking a slightly different tack. While those services are direct to consumers, Carma aims to be a white-label backend for similar services branded and operated by local dealerships and finance outfits.

Carma tested the consumer model but found there was friction from usurping the place of primacy for drivers from the dealers themselves. After all, your local Subaru dealer doesn’t just want to be a lot filled with cars — they want to be a known, local presence and trusted maintenance partner to their customers.

So the deal would be that Carma provides all the infrastructure as far as handling insurance, fleet tracking, user agreements and billing, but it all takes place through an app specific to a dealer or group of them. It allows that direct connection between driver and dealer to stay in place while offering the benefits of subscription to both parties. Dealers would pay a monthly license fee based on the size of the fleet.

Organizations that manage leases could also be the client, providing the subscription possibility to multiple dealers they work with. This is the case in one of Carma’s early deployments in Canada, where a leasing outfit with more than a billion dollars (Canadian, naturally) in lease originations has launched its own branded subscription service, AutoONE.

Allowing the dealers to keep their pride may be a serious advantage over national or international branded services that treat them like inventory management modules. And the mobility market is large enough, of course, that several services should be able to compete alongside one another with variations in offerings and inventory.

After all, why pay for a service with built-in insurance if your job pays for it? Alternatively, why have your own if you can get it month by month for a few bucks more? Want to switch your car every month? Want to pay less to be limited to models three years old and back? These variations will certainly all be put into play.

Reda comes from a computer science and fleet management background at the University of Michigan, where of course some of the sharpest minds in automotive tech can be found. The company is a Techstars alum and is backed by them, Fontinalis, Kybba, Right Side Capital, and IDV — terms undisclosed for now.

The mobility space is evolving fast, and it’s companies like these that keep that evolution rolling along.

Ashton Kutcher and Effie Epstein discussed their investment strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. With their VC fund Sound Ventures, they invested in Bird. While they are conflicted on this topic, Kutcher had a passionate answer about scooters.

Here’s a video of what he had to say:

I recommend listening to the video to hear how mad Kutcher was. But if you’re at work, here’s the main quote.

“This is like the simplest one of them all in so much as nobody wakes up in the morning, opens their front door and says ‘god look at how many cars there are, they’re parked everywhere.’ They are fucking parked everywhere! There are cars parked everywhere! It’s ridiculous! They’re clogging the roads, they’re making it impossible to get anywhere you want to go,” Kutcher said.

“But boy do we open up the door and go ‘man there are scooters all over the place.’ Hold on, wait a second, this is aversion to change. And suddenly we go: Alright, we have to regulate the hell out of this because people are complaining. But nobody is complaining about the fact that there are cars everywhere.”

Clinc co-founder and CEO Jason Mars just announced the company is expanding to a third vertical: Automotive. The company, which started in fintech and recently unveiled a product for drive-thru restaurants, is aiming its voice AI service at the automotive industry. The idea is to give automakers a platform that they can integrate into their vehicles that will allow drivers to control and interact with their vehicles through natural language.

Launching alongside the new product, Clinc also revealed a platform to give developers access to the conversational AI. The company says it’s easy enough for developers with little to no experience in machine learning to build with Clinc’s products.

Clinc’s conversational AI is fantastic and the company’s products in other verticals show that if it’s used by automakers, the technology could usher in a new wave of user interfaces. This is not Siri.

The company was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2015 with a solution for fintech and currently has several contracts with major banks such as USAA, Barclays and S&P Global. In most cases, when integrated into the bank’s system, Clinc’s technology emulates human intelligence and can interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. The idea is to let users converse with their bank account using natural language without pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. The company says it works in any language.

With its new developer platform, companies can use Clinc’s system to integrate the company’s natural language processing into their products.

“We’re thrilled to be democratizing the world’s most powerful conversational AI and to be empowering people to solve important problems and to create amazing things,” said Dr. Jason Mars, Clinc CEO. “We’ve taken the complexity out of machine learning infrastructure and we’re giving developers the keys to our AI brain to create and deploy their own customizable virtual assistants.”

Elastic was founded in 2012 by Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness and Shay Banon. Elastic

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Max Whittaker / Getty Images

Age is the No. 1 risk factor behind most diseases in the developed world, according to numerous studies. That’s why Elevian, led by a team of Harvard researchers, is working to develop medicine that treats aging by restoring the body’s regenerative capacities.

Elevian intends to do this using growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11), which the team first identified in 2014, the company announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.

In tests, Elevian has found that giving recombinant GDF11 to older animals stimulates stem cells to repair the tissue damaged by aging and degeneration. The animals in those studies showed a reduction in age-related cardiac hypertrophy, youthful skeletal muscle repair, improved brain function and metabolism, reversal of renal and pulmonary disease and tumor suppression. Moving forward, the plan is to develop medicine that regulates GDF11 and other circulating factors.

“We specifically are trying to eliminate the diseases that come with aging,” Elevian co-founder and CEO, Dr. Mark Allen told TechCrunch. “You could say that an unintended consequence will be that we live longer in a healthier state. We don’t know how much longer. Our goal is not to live longer. Unfortunately a lot of Western medicine is helping us to live longer in a more diseased state. If the focus is on heart disease, people will live longer but increase risk of Alzheimer’s.”

Elevian’s goal is to treat and prevent many age-related diseases, and ultimately eliminate the suffering that comes with those diseases. But in order to do that, it’s going to take a really long time — at least 10 years, to be exact. That’s because Elevian will need separate trials for Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular diseases and others.

“It’s very likely that heart disease is going to be first,” Allen said. “We think that’ll be our first [FDA] approval. Then we’ll seek additional approval for the same drug to be able to market it. Once we’re approved for one indication, physicians can practice off-label uses, but we are not allowed to market it for use for anything else.”

Elevian plans to start a human clinical trial in two years. So “if everything goes according to plan, it will take eight more years” for it to get to market.

“It’s really a result of the regulatory approval process in the United States and several other countries that have very stringent requirements around safety and efficacy tests,” he said.

The first generation of therapy will be expensive, Allen said, but the goal is to eventually get the cost down.

“We have defined as one of our company’s core values to continue to work on next-generation therapies that make this accessible to people regardless of cost,” he said. “The first generation therapy we’re working on is simply replacing natural protein that declines as we age. Natural protein, number one, is expensive to manufacture and it has to be dosed pretty frequently — once daily.”

But Elevian is already working on its second generation that, instead of needing to be injected once a day, will only need to be injected once a month. Elevian is also exploring making pills.

To date, Elevian has raised $5.5 million in funding. Check out the company’s pitch below.

Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, believes there’s opportunity for investment outside of Silicon Valley. Specifically, the firm pegs Denver, Austin and Miami as the most promising U.S. markets for tech startups and investing, outside of the large markets like Silicon Valley and New York, of course.

According to Sound Ventures partner Effie Epstein, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 this morning, Boston is another great market for startups.

She also noted that the firm has a couple of companies coming out of Miami now, and credited Seattle as being a possible player.

“Seattle has always been in the background. I’m kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more out of Seattle,” said Epstein.

However, when asked about the most promising upcoming markets, Seattle wasn’t on the list.

“I would say Denver, Austin, and, shockingly Miami, have been climbing up the ranks,” she said.

The appeal of these markets is that they’re places where people don’t just want to work, they also want to live.

“One of the one of the biggest things relative to those companies being in different markets was they could attract talent at similar to lower prices because the cost of living was lower,” Epstein said, during the Disrupt interview. “So, suddenly people could have better lives working at companies – working on hard problems to solve to make the world a better place – but actually have a life while they were doing that.”

The partners also touched on the possibilities in L.A.

More recently, L.A. startups have been able to actually retain their talent, they said.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve covered Nutanix extensively. Our community knows Nutanix very well. At what stage did you get involved with Nutanix? Anshu Sharma: It was the stage at which it was just an idea....

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