This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one.

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned.

The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there’s no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company.

Corporation documents, filed with the state, list a “Thomas S. Lee Jr.” as its president. A search on LinkedIn showed Lee, a software developer whose previous experience includes co-founding two San Diego-based companies, as president of Kache.ai. Since reaching out to Kache.ai, all references of the company have been removed from LinkedIn.

However, the address listed on the corporation’s state filing tells a different story. Kache.ai’s documents filed with the state lists an address in St. Helena, Calif. The property is owned by Levandowski’s father and stepmother, according to property tax and title records reviewed by TechCrunch. Levandowski’s stepmother Suzanna Musick was CEO of another one of Levandowski’s startups, called 510 Systems.

The company didn’t return calls for comment. However, other unnamed sources within the global autonomous vehicle ecosystem confirmed to TechCrunch that Levandowski is connected to the company.

Little is known about Kache.ai. The word “Kǎchē” in Chinese means truck, which could signal a connection to China. Although TechCrunch was not able to independently verify if Kache.ai has any outside partners or backers yet.

The company’s website, which at one point listed an email contact for Lee and described its mission, is now blank except for a single image of a jagged mountain ridge. TechCrunch was able to review and capture screenshots of the website prior to the changes, one of which is shown above. At that time, the Kache.ai website said the company was working on “the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology for the commercial trucking industry.” The employment opportunities section of the now erased website once said:

We’re developing the solution for the next level of on-the-road self-driving trucks. Our development philosophy is based on a fast moving, very aggressive agile team approach and we’re seeking both software and hardware engineers that thrive in such an environment.

It appears the company is hiring at every level, from mapping and database experts to people with robotics and simulation skills. The website also noted that the company is looking for software engineers with experience in convolutional neural networks as well as computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

The website said Kache.ai is located in the San Francisco area.

A not so unlikely return

To outsiders, Levandowski’s return to the autonomous vehicle stage might have seemed improbable just a year ago. To former colleagues and others who know him, it was inevitable. However, outside a few vague remarks that Levandowski was “working on something,” his return (until now) was mostly based on rumor and speculation.

Levandowski is part of the brain trust of autonomous vehicle technology that for years was largely confined to academic research.

That began to change on March 13, 2004 when 15 teams brought their autonomous vehicles to the desert outside of Barstow, Calif. They were there to compete in the Grand Challenge, a 142-mile race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski’s “blue team” had the distinction of being the only one to bring a two-wheeled vehicle, an autonomous motorcycle they called Ghostrider. The vehicle is now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

And while not a single team completed the course, it prompted DARPA to hold two more autonomous vehicle challenges. The endeavor fueled the interest and passion of a few dozen people who would later go on to lead Google’s self-driving project, head AV R&D efforts at large companies or look for ways to move the autonomous vehicle needle forward. Levandowski was one of them.

In 2007, Levandowski joined Google, where he was one of the principal architects of Google Street View. The engineer had other projects too, notably a startup called 510 Systems that made and sold sensor systems to his employer, Google. 510 Systems was a pioneer of using light ranging and detection systems known as LiDAR to make maps. Google quietly bought 510 Systems and another one of his startups, Anthony’s Robots, in 2011.

A meteoric rise and fall

After nearly nine years at Google, Levandowski left the company with fellow Google employee Lior Ron. The pair founded Ottomotto, which later became Otto, along with Don Burnette and Claire Delaunay.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The race to deploy autonomous vehicles had heated up, creating a frenzied winner-takes-all environment. Competition between companies to attract talent pushed up salaries and incentives. For those who had been on the ground floor at Google’s self-driving project and other high-profile startups and academic positions, the world was theirs for the taking. The venture capital community didn’t just take note; they poured money into the effort. Large automakers and Tier 1 suppliers looking for an edge started snapping up startups brimming with self-driving technology talent.

Uber’s purchase of Otto for an eye-popping $680 million in August 2016 — just months after its founding — was just one example of the feeding frenzy. As part of the acquisition, Levandowski became head of Uber’s self-driving car research. (Documents filed as part of the lawsuit between Waymo and Uber suggest the pay out might have been as low as $220 million.)

But the buzz around the size of the Otto deal would soon be replaced with a different, more unwelcoming kind of attention.

Nine months after the acquisition, Uber was embroiled in a trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet. And Levandowski was out of a job.

The lawsuit, filed against self-driving truck startup Otto and its parent company Uber in February 2017, alleged patent infringement and stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit made a number of allegations specifically against Levandowski, including that he downloaded more than 14,000 confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation. Waymo contended that Otto and Uber were using key parts of its self-driving technology, specifically related to its light detection and ranging radar. This technology, known in the industry as LiDAR, measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car.

The case went to trial in February 2018. After days of titillating testimony, including from former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the two parties reached a settlement agreement. Uber agreed to not incorporate Waymo’s confidential information into their hardware and software. Uber also agreed to pay a financial settlement that includes 0.34 percent of Uber equity, per its Series G-1 round $72 billion valuation. In other words, Waymo got about $244.8 million in Uber equity.

Six weeks later, Uber would be grappling with the tragic fatal accident involving one of its self-driving test vehicles in Tempe, Ariz.

The other three Otto founders have all left Uber, as well. Burnette, the last one to depart, founded an autonomous vehicle company in April called Kodiak Robotics with Paz Eshel, who formerly worked at Battery Ventures.

Kache.ai next chapter

Levandowski’s return will likely raise questions, and possibly even anger, among people within Uber and Waymo. However, it’s unclear if Kache.ai will even use LiDAR, the sensing technology at the heart of the trade secrets lawsuit and one of Levandowski’s talents.

Some autonomous trucking startups have avoided LiDAR except for use in mapping because they argue that the sensors aren’t practical on a heavy-duty autonomous truck traveling on highways at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. Instead, autonomous trucking companies like TuSimple use multiple cameras, which have better resolution. If Kache.ai bypasses LiDAR — which at this point is unclear — it could help alleviate IP concerns and attract investors.

For now, the beginning of Kache.ai’s story is tied to Levandowski’s past, which is marked by engineering prowess and ingenuity as well as legal and ethical missteps. The remaining chapters will reveal whether the unique value prop of what Kache.ai is developing is strong enough to render all of that moot.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners was...

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After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your precise measurements.

“Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional tailors from just two photos on your phone. Simply take a front photo and a side photo and upload to our cloud and you will receive a push notification within minutes when your Bodygram sizing report is ready,” said CEO Jin Koh. “In the sizing report you will find your full body measurements including neck, sleeve, shoulder, chest, waist, hip, etc. Bodygram is capable of producing sizing result within 99 percent accuracy compared to professional human tailors.”

The technology is a clever solution to the biggest problem in custom clothing: fit. While it’s great to find a service that will tailor your clothing based on your measurements, often these measurements are slightly off and can affect the cut of the shirt or pants. Right now, Koh said, his team offers free returns if the custom shirts don’t fit.

Further, the technology is brand new and avoids many of the pitfalls of the original body-scanning tech. For example, Bodygram doesn’t require you to get into a Spandex onesie like most systems do and it can capture 40 measurements with only two full-body photos.

“Bodygram is the first sizing technology that works on your phone capable of giving you highly accurate sizing result from just two photos with you wearing normal clothing on any background,” said Koh. “Legacy technologies on the market today require you to wear a very tight-fitting spandex suit, take 360 photos of you and require a plain background to work. Other technologies give you accuracy with five inches deviation in accuracy while Bodygram is the first technology to give you sub-one-inch accuracy. We are the first to use both computer vision and machine learning techniques to solve the problem of predicting your body shape underneath the clothes. Once we predicted your body shape we wrote our proprietary algorithm to calculate the circumferences and the length for each part of the body.”

Koh hopes the technology will reduce returns.

“It’s not uncommon to see clothing return rates reaching in the 40-50 percent range,” he said. “Apparel clothing sales is among the lowest penetration in online shopping.”

The system also can be used to measure your body over time in order to collect health and weight data as well as help other manufacturers produce products that fit you perfectly. The app will launch this summer on Android and iOS. The company will be licensing the technology to other providers that will be able to create custom fits based on just a few side and front photos. Sales at the company grew 175 percent this year and they now have 350,000 buyers that are already creating custom shirts.

A number of competitors are in this interesting space, most notably ShapeScale, a company that appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt and promised a full body scan using a robotic scale. This, however, is the first commercial use of standard photos to measure your appendages and thorax and it’s an impressive step forward in the world of custom clothing.

Or Arbel doesn’t like spending too much time on design. His startup Yo only let you send your friends the word “Yo” after all. That messaging app made waves with its minimalism, but quickly petered out. Now Arbel is back with a new company called Anima that could let app designers build more complex products in less time.

Anima makes a set of plug-ins for popular interface design platform Sketch. Auto-Layout creates responsive designs. Launchpad exports Sketch designs to HTML. Without funding, the bootstrapped startup’s products have quietly amassed 100,000 users, and several thousand paying customers

Today, Anima is announcing it’s been admitted to Y Combinator’s prestigious accelerator. And it’s launching Timeline, which allows interactive designs made in Sketch to be exported directly into functioning code. That’s a process that usually requires frustrating back-and-forth exchanges between designers and coders.

“As it turns out, communicating design specs in the form of mock-ups, GIFs and even hand-waving leads to details getting lost in translation,” Arbel tells me. “Imagine a painter that instead of painting themselves, gives verbal instructions to someone else for how to paint their art. Obviously, that’s less than ideal. This is exactly what the process is like.” But with Timeline, software serves as the middleman between designers and code.

“If there is one thing I don’t like to do, it’s repetitive work,” Arbel tells me. “Creative people are much happier when working on creative tasks rather than repetitive, mundane work.”

One strategy to avoid running in circles is to work with a team you trust. Arbel and his co-founders have been building startups together for a decade. He met Avishay Cohen and Michal Cohen at Ben-Guriun University in Israel after those two finished their military service.

Eventually, Arbel’s expanded team of engineers was working on a complex user interface for two months. Then “the designer shows up with a long list of UI bugs one week before launch. To the engineers, the implementation looked exactly like the specification, but to the designer, everything was completely off.” Arbel believed there had to be a better way.

Now, Anima’s products are being used by individual designers at Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, and the startup is profitable. Meanwhile, Arbel says, “I wound down Yo two years ago as we failed to find a product-market fit,” but notes that “Yo is operating in auto-pilot mode. A few thousand of Yo’s avid users are still using and loving the product.” Yo recently asked those loyalists to back a Patreon monthly donation campaign to keep it running.

Still, Timeline will have a tough time living up to the standards of these dominant companies. Turning design nuance into smooth code is exceedingly difficult. Other startups like Invision and Zeplin already offer products to simplify the design-to-code hand-off. And building an entire startup on top of Sketch could be risky, as decisions that impact Anima’s products are beyond its control.

Arbel is trying to mitigate those risks. It’s planning to build plugins for other design platforms. And he believes that in “the component-based movement led by React, there is a unique opportunity to use this technology to make this process a hundred times better.”

Some potential clients might not have total faith in a design tool from the inventor of Yo. But if Anima can save them money, designers might give it a shot. “The most expensive resource in tech is engineers’ time,” Arbel concludes, claiming that, “We shorten a process that takes two weeks to a click of a button.”

BuildDirect, the Vancouver, BC.-based online home improvement store, went through a tough transition in recent months. In late October 2017, the company’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Booth stepped back from his job days before the company filed for the Canadian equivalent of bankruptcy protection. It then installed former Amazon executive Dan Park, who had joined the company only a few weeks before, as its new CEO. Under Park, BuildDirect successfully restructured its debt and balance sheet and by late March of this year it emerged from bankruptcy protection with new funding in place to help it find its feet again.

Unsurprisingly, this process led to much soul-searching at the company, which had long been seen as a high-flying success story. “What contributed to us exiting [the bankruptcy process] so successfully was that the business model was sound,” Park told me. “But what happens when a startup evolves in its journey is that it takes on loans and debt to fund its operations and it had some of that build-up of debt.” Now, however, Park argues, BuildDirect finds itself in the “strongest position in its 19-year history.”

With this process behind it, it’s maybe no surprise that BuildDirect is now looking ahead and rethinking its overall strategy. To do so, the company is announcing the hire of four new executives. Ken Stanick, the former director of Sales & Channels at Amazon Business, is joining as the company’s new chief revenue officer, a new role at BuildDirect. Mukund Mohan, who was previously a director at Amazon Business and responsible for its automated quoting and analytics products, is joining as the company’s new CTO. Godwin Pavamani, the former global product leader for Prime Samples and head of Vendor Management PC/IT category at Amazon, is now BuildDirect’s chief merchandising officer and the GM of its marketplace, while Stephanie Roberts, formerly the CFO of Specialized Bicycle Components and Old Navy, is joining as the interim CFO.

With this team in place, Park believes that BuildDirect is now in a position to execute on a strategy that looks a bit different from its existing model. Historically, BuildDirect always focused on both homeowners and professionals (with a bit of B2B business thrown in), but going forward, the focus will shift away from homeowners who are looking to renovate their homes.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward, as Park told me. “What we found with homeowners when we looked at the data, even those with high discretionary income, is they would make maybe one home remodel in their lifetime,” he explains. Pros, however, almost guarantee repeat purchases. Also, homeowners who are attempting a DIY remodel need a lot of handholding, while pros are somewhat easier to work with.

So going ahead, BuildDirect will focus its energies more directly on marketing to these professionals, though it will still sell to homeowners, too. That means a bit of rebranding and a site redesign, but also new services that are specifically tailored toward general contractors, flooring installers, interior designers and other home remodeling pros.

Park also noted that he plans to bring more ancillary services to the site that maybe help homeowners connect with the right pros, a model that’s working quite well for the likes of Houzz. And indeed, BuildDirect may end up partnering with existing services that already have an established user base. In addition to that, the company will continue to build out its logistics product, the Gateway Supply Chain, which is open to all shippers that want to deliver to consumers bulky goods from anywhere in the world.

Instagram has been incredibly busy of late, announcing IGTV, Instagram Lite and a slate of features including Stories Soundtracks. But the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service doesn’t show any signs of letting up.

Android Police today noted that Instagram is testing a feature that would allow users to post questions to their followers and receive answers.

Instagram already offers the ability to publish polls to followers with multiple-choice options for answering. But this test seems to point toward the option to offer lengthier responses to users’ questions.

One user in Indonesia sent to Android Police a screencap of the feature(pictured above), and a user in Spain also spotted the feature. That said, we still have very little information on just how this might work.

Right now, when a user posts to their Story, their followers can respond via DM. With more open-ended questions and responses, it’s unclear if responses will still come in via DM or be bundled together as part of the story.

The latter seems more in keeping with Instagram’s push to make Stories as interactive as possible. The open-ended question could serve as a jumping off point for a collaborative story comprised of everyone’s responses.

That said, this feature hasn’t been confirmed by Instagram, though we’ve reached out and will update the post when we learn more.

Harper Wilde has raised a $2 million funding round led by venture capital firm CRV, which the company told TechCrunch it’s excited to use to not only build its workforce but to further its mission of providing women across the country with comfortable and empowering bras.

Graduate school friends Jenna Kerner and Jane Fisher launched Harper Wilde together in 2017 to address the fact that shopping for bras is awful. From local outlet malls to expensive online retailers, Kerner and Fisher bonded over their frustration and disillusionment with uncomfortable and over-sexualized bras.

“We had all of these friends and colleagues and family members who are incredible women who were doing surgery, or running board meetings, or fighting a court case, and wearing these horrible bras underneath it all,” Kerner told TechCrunch over the phone. “We really [wanted] to help empower those women.”

Together Kerner and Fisher surveyed more than a hundred women to find out what they wanted in a bra and created Harper Wilde to try to deliver it.

“We just kept hearing over and over again, it’s really not about the bras,” Kerner said. “There are thousands of bras out there. It’s about sorting through all of them, how expensive they are and the condescending in-store experience.”

Unlike other popular online lingerie shops, Harper Wilde doesn’t offer dozens of styles or cover its pieces in lace or small bows. Instead, it focuses on offering a no-fuss bra in a growing variety of sizes and nude colors designed for the day-to-day hard work and successes of women, all at $35 per bra (bra prices can range from $9.99 from retailers like Fruit of the Loom all the way up to $69.50 at Victoria’s Secret.)

To bring these options to its customers in an accessible way, and avoid the overwhelming dressing room experience, Harper Wilde has taken a card out of Warby Parker’s playbook and offers customers free home try-ons of three bra options, with free returns.

Since its launch just over a year ago, Harper Wilde has seen 20 percent growth month over month and the founders say they’re not only excited to grow Harper Wilde’s collection and staff, but to continue its efforts to give back to communities of women through its #LiftUpTheLadies initiative.

The company has partnered with The Girl Project to help spread access to education in more than 120 countries and have worked to ensure a sustainable supply chain for the women overseas manufacturing its products.

“It’s one thing when you tell women you’re going to take the BS out of bra shopping, but it’s a whole different level when you say we stand for empowering women and this is how we do it,” Kerner said. “People’s eyes light up and they [say] how important of a time it is to stand for that. They’re happy to see a bra company that stands for more than just sex.”

This article has been updated to reflect that CRV led Harper Wilde’s funding round and that the founders met in graduate school instead of undergrad.

Sramana Mitra: In your deal flow, what kind of trends are you seeing? Andrew Cain McClary: On the tools side of things, I feel like everyone feels it’s a prerequisite to put AI or machine learning in...

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Folks riding the OnePlus bandwagon will be pleased to learn that the phone maker today introduced a red version of the OnePlus 6.

The company is calling the phone the OnePlus 6 Red, and the new model follows on the success of the OnePlus 5T Lava Red.

Here’s what OnePlus CEO Pete Lau had to say in a statement:

Deciding on this color was not without its challenges. We see individual colors as a way to express certain feelings or ideas. To us, red exudes enthusiasm and personality. It also represents an inner confidence and courage. There is a kind of power in red, which the OnePlus logo has always tried to articulate. We hope you feel similarly empowered when you hold the OnePlus 6 Red this summer.

The OnePlus 6 debuted in May with a starting price of $529. Specs include a 6.28-inch display at a 19:9 aspect ratio, a Snapdragon 845 chip, 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage and Oxygen OS on the front end.

OnePlus has impressed with its ability to remain competitive in a landscape where Apple and Samsung reign supreme. Even HTC, the old king of the smartphone castle, has today announced that it’s cutting 1,500 jobs.

The OnePlus 6 Red will be available starting July 10, with sales in India beginning on July 16. The price will be the same as other OnePlus 6 variants.

Oden Technologies, the Industrial IoT startup that provides manufacturing data analytics, has closed $10 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by European venture capital firm Atomico, which appears to be revving up its “Industry 4.0” investment strategy following a recent investment in CloudNC. A number of existing investors also participated including EQT Ventures, and Inbox Capital. Noteworthy, Atomico founder and CEO Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype, has joined the Oden Technologies board.

Originally founded in London but now based in New York, Oden Technologies pitches itself as an Industry 4.0 company that has built its own industrial IoT hardware and “big data architecture” to offer a platform for manufacturers of any size to analyse and optimise factory production via the cloud.

Put simply, the Oden device plugs into almost any kind of manufacturing machine, while its “software adaptors” integrate data from existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and quality control software on the manufacturing line. This data is then uploaded to Oden’s cloud analytics platform in real-time to give manufacturers the full production picture, including real-time factory floor monitoring.

So, why is this significant? Essentially, the retrofittable Oden device and resulting data analytics makes the existing factory floor smarter. This includes the ability to spot manufacturing defects or aspects of a machine’s degrading performance that could lead to defects, and more broadly, ways to further optimise production throughput and uptime.

The result is a reduction in waste (think: products that need be discarded or are ultimately returned by customers), and an increase in efficiency more generally, helping tech-driven factories retain their competitive edge.

In a call with Oden Technologies co-founder and CEO Willem Sundblad, he said that the company’s mission is to help manufacturers achieve “perfect production,” in terms of not only making better products but also making them faster, cheaper and with much less waste.

Traditionally manufacturers haven’t had access to the right data and insights to make factories more efficient and productive. However, with the collision of big data, cloud services and new industrial IoT hardware, this is quickly changing and is the exact space that Oden operates in.

In terms of what data Oden’s device captures, Sundblad explained that it typically consists of metrics that relate to machine process, health, the processing of the part/product, and quality. “The raw data is mostly available in the machines but then we analyse it to provide answers,” he says.

In addition, Oden captures things like the melt pressure of the material, the temperature profile when the material melted, dimensional read outs to understand the quality of the product, and water temperatures from cooling tanks. Other data points include revolutions per minute on moving parts inside of a machine, the motor load of the motors, and the speed of production, to name just a few.

“We analyze and process that data so customers understand how much excess material they are putting on the product, was the quality Ok, and if not why, alerting for when things are bad or will be bad, and [doing] trends analysis for how the product can be optimised. It all comes back to ROI for customers, which always comes from more uptime, less scrap and more good quality output”.

Atomico’s Zennström echoes these sentiments, arguing that manufacturing has until now remained “relatively untouched” by digital technology. As a result, it still has major areas of inefficiency. “The combination of IIoT, Big Data analytics, cloud computing and machine learning marks a new era for industry,” he says. This will see Industry 4.0 technologies not only increase efficiency and reduce waste, but also enable smaller batch sizes, more personalised products and greater product innovation.

Meanwhile, Oden says it will use the new funding to further expand its R&D and engineering teams in New York, and to accelerate customer growth with new sales teams in the manufacturing hubs of Illinois, Ohio and Texas.

The company also recently hired Deepak Turaga, Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, as its VP of Data Science. He’ll be helping Oden with its machine learning and AI efforts, and has previously worked at IBM as the Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager of the AI First ML and Planning Group.

Electronic signature company and Billion Dollar Unicorn DocuSign went public in April on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker DOCU. It recently announced strong results in its first earnings report...

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We’re seeing some excellent European companies make successful transitions into becoming global software companies. This is an excellent and inspiring story for European startups to emulate. Sramana...

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Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.

TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.

Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur First, the company builder that invests in technical and domain expertise talent and helps those individuals start companies. The startup is also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the U.K. tax payer-funded London Co-investment Fund.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, who was instrumental in the development of Amazon’s AI-powered digital assistant Alexa, is also an angel investor in Bloomsbury.

Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands. In one scenario, the startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock. Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF — given that it invests pre-seed — is likely to have had a larger multiple.

Given the price and the stage Bloomsbury AI were at, the acquisition also has more than a whiff of acqui-hire to it, although there is some IP in the deal. I understand from one source that Bloomsbury AI’s CTO/Head of Research, Sebastian Riedel, was the biggest draw. He is considered to be a leading expert in the area of NLP, and is a professor at UCL. According to his LinkedIn, he also co-founded and is an advisor to Factmata, the U.K. startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat “fake news”.

Which brings us to the possible reason for why Facebook is acquiring Bloomsbury AI, a startup that I’m told was phenomenally strong when viewed as a group of researchers, but less so when it comes to getting a commercially viable product out of the door. The company’s sole product is an API called Cape that lets developers add question & answer functionality to websites and other documents.

Indeed, a source who claims to have some knowledge of Facebook’s intentions says the U.S. tech giant may be planning to put the Bloomsbury AI team on the task of helping it develop technology to fight fake news on the platform and solve other aspects of its glaring moderation problem.

Other areas of Facebook’s product that might benefit from the Q&A technology that powers Cape include being used as a workplace tool for companies to discover content in documents, or on Facebook’s consumer offering as a way of significantly improving its search and knowledge-base functionality.

It is also understood that Bloomsbury AI being based in London was a factor, as Facebook aims to have an AI presence in the U.K. capital city and is thought to be sourcing further acquisitions here.

Multiple sources have confirmed the deal to us, although Facebook declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Ingrid Lunden

Kasaz, a new startup from Sebastien Marion — who founded Comufy, which was acquired by games company King in 2014 for a minimum of $11.8 million — is on a mission to bring much-needed transparency and a better user experience to the Spanish real-estate market. The company has built a property online marketplace that makes it easy to list properties for sale and for buyers to access the information required to know if a property is worth viewing and potentially making an offer.

“Looking for a property in Spain, and more generally in continental Europe is an ordeal,” Marion, who co-founded Kasaz with Idriss Farhat, tells me. “There are many friction points and the typical time to completion is over four months. When one decides to buy a flat, one would typically start on one of the leading real-estate portals. From a foreigner’s perspective, however, the quality of the leading real-estate platforms in Spain is shocking”.

To help with this, each listing on Kasaz is verified, as are prospective buyers, and duplicate listings from competing agencies are prohibited. The Kasaz platform also lets buyers and sellers communicate with each other, including the ability to book viewings online, and provides additional services such as professional photography, video or 3D tours, and professionally written property descriptions.

“Compared to the leading U.K. platforms, such as Rightmove and Zoopla, it feels like Spain’s leading real-estate portals have been frozen for a decade,” continues Marion. “For example, seeing a list of property for sale in Barcelona on Idealista.com, the leading real-estate portal in Spain, will require a minimum of 7 clicks versus 2 in Zoopla. Worse, you will see no statistics about the area, no trends, no information about past sale prices nor nearby transport systems, schools etc”.

In contrast, Kasaz claims to provide the most accurate location and property information and Marion says that where that isn’t possible, properties are rejected. The site also displays more general information about an area, such as transport links and other amenities e.g. shopping, transport and sightseeing possibilities.

“House buyers in Spain are tired of being misled. Thanks to the quality of information available in Kasaz, a buyer can analyse the whole market in a fraction of the time it took in the past. Our mobile app even allows you to visualise the real properties for sale around you, something that until today has not been possible due to the low quality of the information,” he adds.

Since launching 6 months ago, Kasaz claims to already list nearly half of the unique inventory available for sale in Barcelona and says it works with over 100 agencies. The startup plans on expanding to the rest of Spain shortly, with Madrid up next.

It makes money by charging real-estate agencies a monthly fee to list on the platform, while individual home-owners can list for free. “Both agencies and home-owners can also buy extra services such as 3D virtual tours, 360° professional videos, Facebook lives, or professional photos,” explains the Kasaz founder.

This feature from Geekwire brings together the main highlights of the second edition of Geekwire Cloud Tech Summit held in Washington last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links....

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Sramana Mitra: Just to double-click on what you said, would you fund a company that has a good level of technology and a good understanding of the business, but still needs another half a million to...

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Meet OpenPhone, a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. The company has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.

“Both my cofounder and I grew up in families were all of our income was dependent on the businesses our parents were running. Later, I joined a software company building back office tools for home improvement contractors,” co-founder and CEO Mahyar Raissi told me.

“There I noticed two important things. First, most of our users were using their personal phone numbers for business and they absolutely hated that. They’d have to put their numbers online or give it out to strangers. This meant getting constant calls when they were spending time with their families or when they were busy doing work. Second, contractors who communicated more professionally and were more responsive had more successful businesses and earned more money.”

OpenPhone is an app for iPhone, iPad and Android. After downloading the app, you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.

After that, you can receive calls and messages in the OpenPhone app. Your professional and personal calls and texts will get a clear separation.

There are many advantages in having a second phone number. You can set up a different voicemail, you can also set your availability to control your business hours. You also get voicemail transcription through the OpenPhone app.

OpenPhone uses VoIP and routes all your calls and texts through your internet connection. You get unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada as part of your subscription.

Eventually, OpenPhone wants to add new features to make it more collaborative. You could imagine sharing your phone number with other team members in your company. It sounds a bit like Aircall, but OpenPhone wants to focus on small companies with less than 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: Since 2013, there have been 50,000 to 70,000 seed investments. By seed, I mean the entire spectrum of pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and pre-Series A. That’s a lot of companies. The number...

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