H1Z1 has spent a couple months on PS4 in an open beta. But today, the Battle Royale game is officially making its debut on the PlayStation platform.

Much like Fortnite Battle Royale, which has swept the gaming world unlike almost any title before it, H1Z1 drops 100 players into a map where they must loot up and survive. Unlike Battle Royale, H1Z1 is relatively more realistic, with a much larger map, more drab colors, and a handful of drivable vehicles.

Interestingly, H1Z1 was one of the earlier Battle Royale games during the game type’s wave of popularity, catching the attention of pro gamers back in 2015. Back then, the game was only available via Steam.

Since, games like PUBG and Fortnite have grown wildly, forcing H1Z1 makers Daybreak to play a bit of catch up.

But today, H1Z1 goes officially live on the PS4, giving gamers who are sick of Fortnite’s bubbly world a chance to get into the Battle Royale world in a different way.

Plus, Daybreak has added in a Fortnite-style Battle Pass for the season, letting PS4 players unlock reward levels for $5.49. H1Z1 is also getting a couple new weapons, including a Sniper Rifle and an RPG, as well as an ARV that can fit a full team of five.

You can check out the launch trailer below:

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-based cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling a new product today that aims to make it easier for enterprises to communicate with customers across various channels of their choosing.

Dubbed “Programmable Conversations” (yes, really!), the product takes the form of a single API that unifies customer interactions across multiple channels into a single conversation thread. Out of the box these include WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, SMS and voice interactions. The idea is that by providing a consolidated view of a customer’s entire communication history with an enterprise, customer support agents and other customer-facing staff will have the firepower to stay on top of their game in terms of the customer service they provide.

Or, put another way, more communication channels inevitably lead to fragmented conversations, which, especially when multiple support staff are involved, can lead to a degradation of service. Programmable Conversations is an attempt to help solve this problem.

In a call with MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis, he told me that more broadly enterprises — and fast-growing startups — no longer have the luxury of dictating how and through what channels customers converse with them. Traditionally, customer service would be delivered via a dedicated phone number, but the plethora of established and emerging online messaging and communications channels has radically increased the number of options customers have and expect.

However, this creates a headache for businesses as each channel needs developer time to be integrated into an existing CRM or business process and additional staffing to service conversations across multiple channels.

It is this heavy lifting that MessageBird’s Programmable Conversations takes care of — keeping conversations in sync across multiple channels, for example, isn’t technically simple — thus cutting down on not just initial implementation time and cost, but also continued maintenance and upkeep.

Vis also explained that Programmable Conversations is designed to enable comms for enterprises that are global — including scale-ups with global ambitions from the get-go — in terms of the territories, carrier integrations and messaging platforms the company supports.

“Delivering communications experiences that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty has to be a focus of businesses today,” adds the MessageBird CEO in a statement. “Consumers today want to connect with businesses in the same way they do with their friends and family – on their own time, via their preferred channel with all the context of previous conversations. With Programmable Conversations enterprises can now easily build a modern communications experience while reducing the burden of their often over-tasked developers”.

Handiscover, a startup that lets you find and book accessible travel accommodation, has raised $700,000 in new funding. The round is backed by Howzat Partners, which has previously invested in a number of successful travel companies, such as publicly-listed Trivago and more recently Lodgify. Tranquility Capital, a Swedish family fund with a background in accessibility, also participated.

Originally launched in June 2015 to enable hosts to list accommodation and have Handiscover’s algorithm classify the accessibility of their properties or rooms, the startup has since evolved into a fully fledged two-sided marketplace, enabling consumers to search for and book travel accommodation based on various accessibility needs. The idea, founder Sebastien Archambeaud tells me, was born from his own experience as the father of 13-year-old Teo (pictured) who has a muscle condition and uses a wheelchair to get around.

“When travelling as the family we got so frustrated about the lack of purposeful information about accessibility of both vacation rentals and/or rooms for hotels,” he says. “That was what planted the first seed in my mind. Having a long background in international management and some previous tech experience and knowledge about building marketplaces, I thought I was well equipped to build a project like that. But as usual it never is as easy at it first sounds”.

Easy it might not be, but Handiscover seems to be making a decent dent so far, and appears more than capable of picking up any slack left by Airbnb’s recent acquisition of lesser-sized Accomable, which it has since shuttered. Handiscover currently lists 28,000 properties and rooms, and covers 83 countries, with more to come.

“Our mission is to enable people with disabilities and special needs (15-20 percent of the population) to travel the world, by being able to find a great choice of accommodations at different price levels, adapted to our users specific needs,” explains Archambeaud. “As there is no international standard for accessibility we created our own, using an algorithm to classify accommodations according to their level of accessibility, in a consumer friendly way”.

Archambeaud says direct competitors are mostly traditional travel agencies that specialise in disability, meaning they might have a website but are mainly focused on selling full holiday packages by phone. “We are more into helping our community travel the ‘modern’ way by bringing the freedom of booking online, when you want and with a large international choice,” he says, revealing that Handiscover will soon be working with travel tech company Amadeus to scale supply in terms of the number of hotels listed.

Meanwhile, asked what he thinks of Airbnb’s acquisition of Accomable, Archambeaud had this to say: “[It] was a great signal that our community is relevant from a business point of view and that Airbnb takes an interest in it. For us it has just been positive so far, both business-wise when talking to investors, but also from a community point of view”.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Slava Rubin, Founder of Indiegogo.com. Slava walked us through the trends on his crowdfunding platform. EcoEscapade As for pitches, we had Logan...

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Do you worry about the so-called “kill zones” of big tech companies? The Economist thinks you should. The theory basically suggests that if your product or service is anyway threatening or accretive to one of these incumbents,  they will either force-buy your company or clone it and destroy your market.

Any entrepreneur that believes this should probably pack up now before it’s too late —  if it’s not a “kill-shot,” it will be some other perceived death-knell that ruins your company.

Starting a company has never been easier. But growing a sustainable business is still difficult  —  as it should be. If you build something customers will pay for ,  you’re going to attract competition from copycats and incumbents. Consider it another type of validation, like product-market fit: competitors think we’re right.

Welcome to being an entrepreneur  —  you are going to be constantly battling  –  lack of cash, lack of customers, aggressive competition, better-funded competitors, underperforming staff, slow-moving sales cycle, or some other as-yet-unknown. The list of pitfalls is long. But enough willpower and perseverance — “blood, sweat and tears” —  will get you to the other side. Eventually. Remember  –  the product of an overnight success is years of hard work.

If this is sounds too daunting  –  don’t do it!

If you enter a market large enough, with deep pocketed and dominant incumbents, you have your work cut out for you. Maybe a nice UI and faster workflow attracted customers and some early adopters  – but guess what  – they are copyable features. Features alone are rarely enough to win a defensible market position.

Try to ignore advice that says you should focus on building the best product as your differentiator — this does not set you up with the highest chance of success. Instead, focus on finding and serving a targeted segment of customers, with a unique set of needs, and tailor your product and service experience specifically for them.

It’s easy for features to be copied  –  but you can’t be both custom and generic at the same time. Custom is a great approach that new entrants can take to get a toehold in a larger market with larger players that must be generic (i.e. Salesforce is a generic CRM, but there are lots of vertical CRMs that successfully compete  — Wise Agent for realtors, Lead Heroes for health insurance).

Presenting a Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the bane of potentially good startups that have been schooled in “anything less than a billion-dollar opportunity isn’t interesting.” Maybe we should reframe it as Potentially Ownable Market (POM). What are the details you can build in the beginning — where your tailored approach gives you instant leadership?

Project management for chefs

Let’s use project management as an example. Maybe a new entrant starts as an app for restaurants, which helps chefs build new menus. Each task list is a “recipe,” each recipe has “ingredients,” with amounts and timing, kitchen location, suppliers, alternatives and “garnishes and sauces.” The app integrates with the stock system and POS, and helps chefs predict inventory needs and staffing based on recipe times/complexity.

The founder has looked around and this is the only project management app that focuses on chefs, giving him an instant potentially ownable market. The business might be able to thrive in this segment alone and become the dominant player with its own kill zone.

Maybe this is the first step; the company gets profitable early growth and becomes sustainable, which funds development to grow the business into other vertical and complementary areas. Over time the business will grow into a large TAM  —  a far better approach than starting off in a large market with clear winners already.

Avoid the battle entirely by creating your own category.

Nate Redmond: Investors including myself sat and looked at the company and didn’t quite understand the size and scope of the opportunity. Being an expert in hospitality didn’t necessarily help you....

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The artificial intelligence revolution is underway in the world of technology, but as it turns out, some of the most faithful foot soldiers are still humans. A startup called Scale, which works with a team of contractors who examine and categorise visual data to train AI systems in a two-sided marketplace model, announced that it has raised an additional $18 million in a Series B round. The aim will be to expand Scale’s business to become — in the words of CEO Alexandr Wang, the 21-year-old MIT grad who co-founded Scale with Lucy Guo — “the AWS of AI, with multiple services that help companies build AI algorithms.”

“Our mission is to accelerate the development of AI apps,” Wang said. “The first product is visual data labelling, but in the future we have a broad vision of what we hope to provide.”

Wang declined to comment on the startup’s valuation in an interview. But according to Pitchbook, which notes that this round actually closed in May of this year, the post-money valuation of Scale is now $93.50 million ($75 million pre-money).

The money comes on the back of an eventful two years since the company first launched, with revenues growing 15-fold in the last year, and “multiple millions of dollars in revenue” from individual customers. (It doesn’t disclose specific numbers, however.)

Today, Scale’s base of contractors numbers around 10,000, and it works with a plethora of businesses that are developing autonomous vehicle systems such as General Motors’ Cruise, Lyft Zoox, Nuro, Voyage, nuTonomy and Embark. These companies send Scale’s contractors raw, unlabelled data sets by way of Scale’s API, which provides services like Semantic Segmentation, Image Annotation, and Sensor Fusion, in conjunction with its clients LIDAR and RADAR data sets. In total, it says it’s annotated 200,000 “miles of data” collected by self-driving cars.

AV companies are not its only customers, though. Scale also works with several non-automotive companies like Airbnb and Pinterest, to help build their AI-based visual search and recommendation systems. Airbnb, for example, is looking for more ways of being able to ascertain what kinds of homes repeat customers like and don’t like, and also to start to provide other ways of discovering places to stay that are based not just on location and number of bedrooms (which becomes more important especially in cities where you may have too many choices and want a selection more focused on what you are more likely to rent).

This latest funding round was led by Index, with existing investors Accel and Y Combinator (where Scale was incubated), also participated in this Series B, along with some notable, new individual investors such as Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Justin Kan (two YC alums themselves who have been regular investors in other YC companies). This latest round brings the total raised by Scale to $22.7 million.

When Scale first made its debut in July 2016 as part of YC’s summer cohort, the company presented itself as a more intelligent alternative to Mechanical Turk, specifically to address the demands of artificial intelligence systems that needed more interaction and nuanced responses than the typical microtask asked of a Turker.

“We’re honing in on AI broadly,” Wang said. “Our goal is to be a pick axe in the AI goldrush.”

Early efforts covered a wide spread of applications — categorization/content moderation, comparison, transcription, and phone calling as some examples. But more recently the company has seen a particular interest from self-driving car companies, and specifically the ability to look at, understand and categorise images of what might appear on a road with the kind of recognition that only a human can provide for training purposes. For example, to be able to identify a scooter versus a wagon, a piece of asphalt or an article of granite-colored clothing on a person that could potentially look like asphalt to an unsuspecting camera, or whatever.

“This sub-segment of AI, autonomous vehicles, really took off after we launched, and that segment has been the killer use case for us,” Wang said.

My experience in talking with autonomous car companies and those who work with them has been that many of them are extremely guarded about their data, so much so that there are entire companies being built to help manage this IP standoff so that no one has to share what they know, but they can still benefit from each other.

Wang says that the same holds for Scale’s clients, and part of its unique selling point is that it not only provides data identification services but does so with the assurance that its systems retain none of that data for its own or other companies’ purposes.

“We don’t share across different silos and are very clear about that,” Wang said. “These companies are very sensitive, as are all AI companies about their data and where it goes, and we’ve been able to gain trust as a partner because will not share or sell data to any other parties.”

Scale uses AI itself to help select contractors. “We have built a bunch of algorithms and AI to vet and train contractors,” Wang said. In the training, “we provide feedback and determine if they are getting good enough to do the work, and in terms of ensuring the quality of their work, our algorithms go through what they are doing and verify the work against our models, too. There are a lot of algorithms.”

For clients who are calling in data from the public web — for example Pinterest or Airbnb — Scale uses a broader contractor pool that could include stay-at-home moms, students or others looking for extra money.

For clients who are sensitive about the data that’s being analysed — such as the car companies — the conditions are more restricted, and sometimes include centres where Scale controls the machines that are being used as well as how the data sets can be viewed.

This is one reason why Scale isn’t simply focused on growing the numbers of contractors as its only route for growing business. “We’ve noticed that when you have people who spend more time on this they do better work,” Wang said.

Wang said the Series B funding will be used to expand the kind of work Scale does for existing customers in the area of visual data analysis, as well as to gradually add in other categories of data, such as text.

“Our first goal is to improve algorithms for customers today,” he said. “There is no limit to how accurate they want to make their systems, and they need to be constantly feeding their AI with more data. All of our customers have this, and it’s an evergreen problem.”

The second is to diversify more outside driving and the visual data set, he said. “Right now, so much of the success has been in processing imagery and robotics or other perception challenges, but we really want to be the fabric of the AI world for new applications, including text or audio. That is another use of funds to expand to those areas.”

“Fabric” is the operative word, it seems: “Scale has the potential to become the fabric that connects and powers the Artificial Intelligence world,” said Mike Volpi, General Partner, Index Ventures, in a statement. “For autonomous vehicles in particular, Scale is well-positioned to take over an emerging field of data annotation regardless of which players ultimately come out on top. Alex…has recruited a highly talented and technical team to tackle this challenge and their progress is evident in the marquee list of customers they’ve won in such a short amount of time.”

Chinese AI startup Tianrang has raised a $26 million (RMB180 million) funding round from China’s Gaorong Capital and co-lead CMB International Capital. Other investors included Ziniu Fund and Chinese fintech company Wacai. In 2016, the company raised an angel round led by Gaorong Capital and participated in by Shanghai Jindi Investment Management Ltd.

Based on deep learning and other AI technology, Tianrang provides data analysis and smart solutions for enterprises. It was founded by in 2016 by Xu Guirong, former director of Alibaba’s Ali Cloud and chief scientist at Alibaba’s cloud platform Alimama. So no slouch on the AI front.

Tianrang claims to be able to automatically collect and analyze marketing trends and purchase-related information on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, allowing vendors to make better marketing decisions.

Wang Hongbo, chief investment officer at CMB International Capital says: “With algorithm and AI, Tianrang lowers the requirement of complex machine decision-making and makes it accessible and scalable for commercial use.”

Tianrang also plans to set up a project to apply machine learning to the urban development of cities, led by Jessie Li, a professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology of Pennsylvania State University.

Our body is continuously storing and consuming energy to keep us alive — but understanding which fuels are being used and why is the Holy Grail of things like weight loss and body hacking. Today’s weight-loss market is saturated with generic products because — guess what — trying to tailor-make a solution for an individual is usually hard and expensive.

For a while now there’s been a technology around which can measure the metabolic gases found in your breath. The theory goes that if you can do that, everyone can work out what they should be eating and when. A few startups have tried, but nothing really took off. Now a new startup is having a crack and has secured significant funding to go for it.

Lumen is a pocket-sized device that measures the gases in your breath and translates that reading via an app into advice that gives you daily personalized meal plans.

As I said, this technology was tried by a startup called PATH Breath+Band, which had a similar device in 2016, but which didn’t take off.

The difference with Lumen is that it’s raised a decent war chest, as well as blowing up on Indiegogo.

It’s now raised a total of $7 million over the past four and a half years, from a host of investors. These include Disruptive VC, Oren Zeev, Red Swan Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Gigi Levy, Sir Ronald Cohen, Avishai Abrahami (Wix Founder) and RiverPark Funds. As part of that funding it’s also – in the last few days – raised more than $1 million on Indiegogo.

The founders are Merav Mor, a doctor of physiology (PhD) and cell biology and her twin sister, Michal Mor, also a doctor of physiology (PhD) and cell biology. CEO Daniel Tal is also a co-founder and also founded Wibiya, which was acquired by Conduit. It probably doesn’t hurt that the renowned Frog design helped in the, well, design.

As endurance athletes, the Mors began researching if there was a way for them to understand the impact of their nutrition and workouts on their bodies to improve their athletic performance. They came across a metabolic measurement called RQ (Respiratory Quotient), which is the gold standard for measuring the metabolic fuel usage of an individual. Top-performing athletes have been using this measurement for years, but the methods for measuring it are invasive (blood test), lengthy (1+ hour in metabolic chambers) and expensive (upwards of a few hundred dollars).

After four years of research and development they developed Lumen, with the ability to measure an individual’s RQ in one breath. What once took over an hour to measure, and a team of nutritionists and scientists to analyze, can now be done in less than three minutes. Michal and Merav’s technology is patent-pending.

So far Lumen says more than 300 beta users have lost an average of 6.8 lbs within the first 30 days of using the device.

Now, they do have competitors. These include Habit, which does pre-packaged personalized meals; Breezing, a technology that requires three minutes of continual breathing and the purchase of new cartridges with every measurement ($5); and Levl, which is a small home-lab setup that measures metabolism and ketosis and costs between $100-150/month. Then there is Ketonix, a computer-connected device that will only provide data on fat burn for users on a strict ketogenic diet.

But with Lumen you just buy the device and the app is free. No cartridges, filters or replacements.

All in all it’s quite a compelling proposition, so it will be interesting to see if Lumen can succeed where others have failed.

InVision continues its slow march toward design world domination, today announcing the hire of Mike Davidson who will take over as Head of Partnerships and Community.

Davidson was previously the VP of Design at Twitter, where he built a 100-person team that was responsible for every aspect of Twitter’s user experience and branding, including web, mobile web, native apps and business tools.

Before Twitter, Davidson worked at ESPN/Disney until 2005, when he founded NewsVine, which was purchased by NBCNews in 2007. Davidson then took on a vice president roll for five years before starting at Twitter.

At InVision, Davidson will oversee partnerships, product integrations, strategic acquisitions and community building. This includes leading InVision’s Design Leadership Forum, which hosts private events for design leaders from big companies like Facebook, Google, Lyft, Disney, etc. Davidson will also work with the new Design Transformation team at InVision to help create educational experiences for InVision’s customers.

Davidson says he plans to spend the next 30 to 60 days talking as little as possible, and listening to the feedback he hears from his team around what can be improved.

“InVision has a seamless workflow that includes everyone in the company in the design process,” said Davidson. “If there’s one goal I’d like to realize, it’s that. Design is a team sport these days, which wasn’t the case 10 or 20 years ago.”

In Davidson’s own words, the position at InVision is “less about business to business and more about designer to designer.” Davidson will be meeting predominantly with the design teams from various companies to discuss not only how InVision can help them build better experiences, but how InVision can incorporate those design teams’ personalities into the product.

InVision was built on the premise that the screen is the most important place in the world, considering that every brand and company is now building digital experiences across the web and through mobile applications. CEO Clark Valberg hopes to turn InVision into the Salesforce of design, and partnerships, acquisitions and product integrations are absolutely vital to that.

“We couldn’t be more excited to have an authentic leader like Mike step into this role to help us further build out our design community — which is as important to us as our product — and to help drive design maturity inside of every organization,” said Valberg. “Digital product design is shaping every industry in the world, and as the leader in the space, we see it as our responsibility to support and foster community and advanced education.”

This discussion delves into the depths of the decade-long evolution of the DevOps space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well Quali. Lior Koriat: I am the CEO of...

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In Don Burnette and Paz Eshel’s view, trucking is the killer app for self-driving technology.

It’s what led Burnette to leave the Google self-driving project and co-found Otto in early 2016, along with Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Claire Delaunay.

And it’s what would eventually prompt Burnette to leave Uber — the company that acquired Otto — and co-found with former venture capitalist Eshel a new driverless-trucks startup called Kodiak Robotics.

“It was no secret that Uber was primarily focused on the car project and 80 to 90 percent of my time was focused on the car project,” Burnette told TechCrunch. “But I still felt that trucking was the killer app for self-driving. I still believe that. I wanted to focus 100 percent of my time on trucking.”

Now he and Eshel can. Kodiak Robotics, which was founded in April, is coming out of stealth loaded up with venture capital.

Kodiak Robotics announced Tuesday it has raised $40 million in Series A financing led by Battery Ventures. CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tusk Ventures also participated in the round. Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Kodiak’s board.

Kodiak Robotics will use the funds to expand its team and for product development. The company has about 10 employees, according to Eshel, who was a vice president at Battery Ventures, where he led the firm’s autonomous-vehicle investment project.

Burnette noted the core engineering team — many of whom have experience in shipping self-driving vehicles on public roads — has been assembled.

The pair weren’t ready to discuss the company’s go-to-market strategy. They did share the basic vision though: use self-driving technology to ease the current strain on the freight market.

The trucking industry is a primary driver of the U.S. economy. Trucks moved more than 70 percent of all U.S. freight and generated $719 billion in revenue in 2017, according to the American Trucking Association. Meanwhile, “full-truckload, over-the-road nonlocal drivers,” a term used to describe drivers who haul goods over long distances, are in short supply. This long-haul sector, which employs about 500,000, was short 51,000 truck drivers last year — up from a shortage of 36,000 in 2016.

Burnette and Eshel see an opportunity for driverless trucks to help close that gap.

“We believe self-driving trucks will likely be the first autonomous vehicles to support a viable business model, and we are proud to have the support of such high-profile investors to help us execute on our plan,” Burnette said.

They also revealed the company’s technical approach.

Kodiak Robotics plans to use light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR as well as camera, radar and sonar technologies. “Pretty much everything you can imagine self-driving cars using in a comprehensive sensor fusion type system,” Burnette said.

Engineers will focus on developing the full self-driving system stack from the company’s own hardware and software architectures. However, Kodiak Robotics is not going to build any sensors. Instead it will use sensors from third-party suppliers.

Today’s 410th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Tuesday, August 7, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 410th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Tuesday, August 7, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) recently reported a lackluster second quarter that beat analyst estimates for earnings but missed the revenue estimates. Its outlook was also disappointing. eBay’s Financials...

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Sramana Mitra: Is it a glove that you’re selling? I’m trying to understand the form factor of the product that you’re selling here. Brian Lim: They’re white stretch gloves with LED lights at their...

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Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks.

The latest to partner with Flux is the U.K. food chain itsu, which sells Asian-inspired fast food. Under the deal — positioned as a trial for now — the food merchant will use Flux to power paperless receipts across all 72 of its U.K. stores. Customers paying with cards issued by Flux partner banks who have opted-in will receive digital itemised receipts directly into their banking apps when they shop at itsu.

Founded by former early employees at Revolut, the Flux platform bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, it currently partners with challenger bank Starling, and has a closed trial with Monzo. After graduating from Barclay’s fintech accelerator, Flux also recently got added to Barclays via its Launchpad app, which is used by a subset of customers who want to get in on the bank’s latest innovations early.

On the merchant side, in addition to today’s announced itsu partnership, Flux works with EAT and pod in the U.K., and has an upcoming trial with Costa Coffee.

Asked how Flux is overcoming its chicken and egg problem, and how conversations with banks and merchants have changed over the last few months, Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa says the startup faces the same challenge as any marketplace. However, she believes the company has built a solid foundation for what she dubs the “Flux Flywheel”, borrowing from Amazon’s Amazon Flywheel concept.

“For every bank we add on, we unlock the opportunity to provide Flux to those cardholders. With increasing access to cardholders, we can attract more retailers. With more retailers we can engage the banks, as their cardholders now have more places to use Flux. And so the cycle begins again,” explains Barbosa.

“We are now at the stage where in addition to our partnership with Starling Bank, for example, we’re integrated and live with one of the largest consumer banks in the U.K., Barclays, via their Launchpad app. On top of that we recently announced the largest coffee chain in the U.K. will trial Flux… We are having very different conversations now than we were even three months ago. The conversation has changed from why should I be interested in this to how could I tailor this for my business given the validation that inevitably comes with partnering with such familiar brands”.

However, despite the undoubted progress Flux has made, it is notable that a number of partnerships have launched as a trial only, suggesting both banks and merchants are being a little tentative in how they deploy the startup’s technology. Barbosa says that isn’t unusual, especially when deciding to invest in nascent technology from a relatively small startup.

“What we’re building is completely new as we’re liberating receipt level data at scale, and so it’s not unusual for our partners to want to test out the waters and describe our work together as a trial before entering a longer term commitment,” she says. “The main reason being, how do they know if their customers will love it? What’s exciting is we’ve now entered a phase where we’ve generated more than enough proof points to dispel that concern from the get go”.