Sramana Mitra: It sounds like when you did the cloud strategy, you almost did it with a different product. Even though the technology was the same, the positioning was quite different. The board...
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Going to the dentist can be anxiety-inducing. Unfortunately, it was no different for me last week when I went to discuss Uniform Teeth’s recent $4 million seed funding round from Lerer Hippeau, Refactor Capital, Founder’s Fund and Slow Ventures.
Uniform Teeth is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.
“For us, we’re really focused on transforming the orthodontic experience,” Uniform Teeth CEO Meghan Jewitt told me at the startup’s flagship dental office in San Francisco. “There are a lot of health care companies out there that are taking areas that aren’t very customer-centric.”
Jewitt, who spent a couple of years at One Medical as director of operations, pointed to One Medical, Oscar Insurance and 23andMe as examples of companies taking a very customer-centric approach.
“We are really interested in doing the same for the orthodontics space,” she said.
Ahead of the first visit, patients use the Uniform app to take photos of their teeth and their bite. During the initial visit, patients receive a panoramic scan and 3D imaging to confirm what type of work needs to be done.
Last week during my visit, Jewitt and Uniform Teeth co-founder Dr. Kjeld Aamodt showed me the technology Uniform uses for its patient evaluations.
In the GIF above, you can see I received a 3D panoramic X-ray. The process took about 10 seconds and it’s about the same exposure to X-rays as a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Dr. Aamodt said.
“With that information, we’re able to see the health of your roots, your teeth, the bone, your jaw joints, check for anything that could get worse during treatment,” Dr. Aamodt said.
Below, you can see the 3D scan.
Next is looking in-between the teeth. From here, the idea is to get a much more holistic view, Dr. Aamodt said. This is where things got interesting.
If you look at the bottom left of the photo, under my back bottom tooth, you can see a dark circle below the tooth. Dr. Aamodt gently pointed that out to me.
“That tells me there’s bacteria living inside of your jaw,” he explained. “A lot of people have this. It’s pretty common so don’t beat yourself up for it.”
This is when he told me I’d likely need to get a root canal to get rid of it. Mild panic ensued.
Dr. Aamodt went on to explain that, if I were a patient of his looking to get my teeth straightened, he would recommend that I first get the root canal before any teeth movement. That’s because, he explained, moving teeth at that point could potentially result in further infection.
“The concern about that is when we move a tooth with that, the infection will get worse and you could risk losing that tooth,” he told me.
Although I was freaking out internally, I continued to move ahead with the process. Next up was the 3D scan, which results in something fancy called a 3D Cone Beam Computed Tomography. This, Dr. Aamodt said, is what really sets Uniform Teeth apart in precision tooth movement.
This process takes the place of dental impressions, which are made by biting into a tray with gooey material. I didn’t feel like getting my bottom teeth scanned, but below is what the top looks like.
At this point Uniform Teeth would share its recommendations with the patient. My personal recommendation was to go see my dentist and, if I’m interested in straightening my teeth, come back once my roots are in a healthy enough state.
From there, I’d receive a custom treatment plan that combines the X-ray plus 3D scan to predict how my teeth will move. After receiving the clear aligners in a couple of weeks, I’d check in with Dr. Aamodt every week via the mobile app. If something were to come up, I could always set up an in-person appointment. Most people average about two to three visits in total, Jewitt said. All of that would add up to about $3,500.
The reason Uniform Teeth requires in-office visits is because 75 percent or more of the cases require additional procedures. For example, some people require small, tooth-colored attachments to be placed onto the clear aligners. Those attachments can help move teeth in a more advanced way, Dr. Aamodt said.
“If you don’t have these, then you can tip some teeth but you can’t do all of the things to help improve the bite, to create a really lasting, beautiful, healthy smile,” he explained.
Uniform Teeth currently treats patients in San Francisco, but intends to open additional offices nationwide next year. As the company expands, the plan is to bring on board more full-time orthodontists.
“Right now, we’re an employment-based model and we’d really like to continue that because it allows us to control the experience and deliver a really high-quality service,” Jewitt said.
A lot of companies say they care about the customer when, in reality, they just care about making money. But I genuinely believe Uniform Teeth does care. After I left with my tail between my legs that day, I called my dentist to set up an appointment. The following day, my dentist confirmed what Dr. Aamodt found and proceeded to set me up to get a root canal. A few days later, Dr. Aamodt checked in with me via the mobile app to ask me how I was doing and to make sure I was getting it treated. I was pleased to let him know, as Olivia Pope likes to say, “It’s handled.”
Dave Hornik: In the venture-backed world, there have been very few apps that have turned into big interesting things. There are big games that have gotten very large. Those are tricky businesses...
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Printify, a startup all the way from Riga, Latvia, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Google AdSense pioneer Gokul Rajaram as it looks to expand its services in the U.S. and build out its team in Latvia.
Today, roughly 50,000 e-commerce stores use Printify’s services for printing-on-demand, according to the company.
Together with Lumi, which can handle packaging for consumer-facing startups, Printify is making the notion of becoming a brand as seamless as possible by taking much of a vendor’s legwork out of the equation.
The company keeps its customers’ billing information on file and links with the back-end ordering system of almost any e-commerce platform.
When an order comes in, Printify gets an API notification to begin working on a product. The company then sends print-ready files to an on-demand manufacturer that can print a design and ship a product within 24 hours.
Printify founder James Berdigans came up with the idea for the company after starting a business making accessories for Apple products.
“We wanted to print custom phone cases and we thought we’d find an on-demand manufacturer and it would be easy,” says Berdigans. That’s when Printify was born.
The company first integrated through Shopify and began to see some traction in November 2015, but because the company didn’t own its own manufacturing, quality became a concern.
In 2016, Berdigans pivoted to the marketplace model because he saw demand coming from a growing number of small business owners like himself that needed access to a selection of quality printing houses.
New direct-to-garment printing and digital printing on t-shirts is going to grow very rapidly over the next few years, according to Berdigans.
A graduate from the 500 Startups accelerator program, the company is already profitable and hoping to capitalize on its success with this new funding to expand its engineering team.
“In just two years, Printify has become profitable and is growing at a rapid pace. With this
investment, we plan to double our Riga team in 2018. That will create at least 30 new jobs,
most of which will be in programming, design, and customer support,” said Printify co-founder
Artis Kehris in a statement.
Purple Carrot announced this morning that it has raised $4 million in strategic funding from Fresh Del Monte Produce.
The company, which delivers completely plant-based (vegan) meal kits to subscribers, was founded in 2014. It has, in part, gotten attention through celebrity involvement, first by enlisting food writer Mark Bittman as its chief innovation officer (Bittman departed in 2016), then by partnering with football star and notorious strawberry hater Tom Brady to launch TB12 meal kits.
Purple Carrot had previously raised $6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The company says that this new investment will allow it to improve its supply chain, get access to more retail opportunities and explore expansion into other categories.
“Securing this strategic investment from Fresh Del Monte is a huge validation of our business model, and an important step forward for our company,” said Purple Carrot founder and CEO Andy Levitt in the announcement. “Helping people eat more plant-based foods represents our differentiated, purpose-driven commitment to making the planet and the people who live on it healthier.”
Fresh Del Monte (which is the company behind Del Monte pineapples and other produce) is just the latest established player in the food and grocery world to invest in meal delivery startups. Last year, for example, Unilever backed Sun Basket and Nestlé led a $77 million round for Freshly.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 399th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 10, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to...
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Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is that you are open to doing even pre-seed investments? Greg Sands: Yes. They tend to be in more experienced founders or people that we’ve known for a longer period...
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May 7, 2018
Ahhhh. The new Gmail client for the web is finally here. And a lot of things are fixed. The two things I like the best are really simple but dramatically increase my email throughput.
+name: When I add someone to an email thread, I use the shortcut â+nameâ to indicate to everyone on the thread that Iâve added them. I started doing this around 2008 (I canât remember where I picked it up from, but I think it might have been Mark Pincus at Zynga.) It started appearing in some Google apps a few years ago (Docs and Inbox) and it is now in the main email client. For example, if I want to copy Amy on something, instead of having to put her email address in the To: field, I now merely need to say +Amy Batchelor in the body of the email and Gmail does the rest. Yay â finally.
Send threading: If you are on a fast internet connection, this wonât matter to you. But, if you do email on a plane or a house in Longmont, Colorado (where I regularly have internet performance that is < 5 MB) you will love this feature. The only annoying thing is the endless (and unnecessary) popup that informs you that Gmail has sent your message (itâs no big deal on a desktop, but bothersome on a laptop.) Either way, I no longer have to sit and wait while Gmail is trying to complete the send process.
My guess is that the combination of these two features increases my email throughput by 25%. And, for someone who processes hundreds of inbound emails a day, this helps a lot.
There are a lot of other fun things under the hood and a nice new paint job on the surface. Nothing is dramatic, but overall itâs definitely an update. If you havenât gotten it yet, tell your Google administrator to turn it on for your domain. Then click Settings in Gmail (the little gear icon on the top right and select the first option âTry the new Company Name Mailâ.
Update: In my ongoing love affair with Canada, it turns out that Googleâs new version of Gmail made in Kitchener.
Also published on Medium.
According to a recent market report, the global visual analytics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22% to reach $7.7 billion in 2023. Data analytics firm Tableau (NYSE: DATA) is a leading...
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Machine learning may be the tool de jour for everything from particle physics to recreating the human voice, but it’s not exactly the easiest field to get into. Despite the complexities of video editing and sound design, we have UIs that let even a curious kid dabble in them — so why not with machine learning? That’s the goal of Lobe, a startup and platform that genuinely seems to have made AI models as simple to put together as LEGO bricks.
I talked with Mike Matas, one of Lobe’s co-founders and the designer behind many a popular digital interface, about the platform and his motivations for creating it.
“There’s been a lot of situations where people have kind of thought about AI and have these cool ideas, but they can’t execute them,” he said. “So those ideas just get like shed, unless you have access to an AI team.”
This happened to him, too, he explained.
“I started researching because I wanted to see if I could use it myself. And there’s this hard to break through veneer of words and frameworks and mathematics — but once you get through that, the concepts are actually really intuitive. In fact even more intuitive than regular programming, because you’re teaching the machine like you teach a person.”
But like the hard shell of jargon, existing tools were also rough on the edges — powerful and functional, but much more like learning a development environment than playing around in Photoshop or Logic.
“You need to know how to piece these things together, there are lots of things you need to download. I’m one of those people who if I have to do a lot of work, download a bunch of frameworks, I just give up,” he said. “So as a UI designer I saw the opportunity to take something that’s really complicated and reframe it in a way that’s understandable.”
Lobe, which Matas created with his co-founders Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges, takes the concepts of machine learning, things like feature extraction and labeling, and puts them in a simple, intuitive visual interface.
As demonstrated in a video tour of the platform, you can make an app that recognizes hand gestures and matches them to emoji without ever seeing a line of code, let alone writing one. All the relevant information is there, and you can drill down to the nitty gritty if you want, but you don’t have to. The ease and speed with which new applications can be designed and experimented with could open up the field to people who see the potential of the tools but lack the technical know-how.
He compared the situation to the early days of PCs, when computer scientists and engineers were the only ones who knew how to operate them. “They were the only people able to use them, so they were they only people able to come up with ideas about how to use them,” he said. But by the late ’80s, computers had been transformed into creative tools, largely because of improvements to the UI.
Matas expects a similar flood of applications, even beyond the many we’ve already seen, as the barrier to entry drops.
“People outside the data science community are going to think about how to apply this to their field,” he said, and unlike before, they’ll be able to create a working model themselves.
A raft of examples on the site show how a few simple modules can give rise to all kinds of interesting applications: reading lips, tracking objects’ positions and angles, understanding gestures, generating realistic flower petals. Petals? Well, why not? You need data to feed the system, of course, but doing something novel with it is no longer the hard part.
And in keeping with the machine learning community’s commitment to openness and sharing, Lobe models aren’t some proprietary thing you can only operate on the site or via the API. “Architecturally we’re built on top of open standards like Tensorflow,” Matas said. Do the training on Lobe, test it and tweak it on Lobe, then compile it down to whatever platform you want and take it to go.
Right now the site is in closed beta. “We’ve been overwhelmed with responses, so clearly it’s resonating with people,” Matas said. “We’re going to slowly let people in, it’s going to start pretty small. I hope we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.”
Why has San Francisco’s startup scene generated so many hugely valuable companies over the past decade?
That’s the question we asked over the past few weeks while analyzing San Francisco startup funding, exit, and unicorn creation data. After all, it’s not as if founders of Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox and Twitter had to get office space within a couple of miles of each other.
We hadn’t thought our data-centric approach would yield a clear recipe for success. San Francisco private and newly public unicorns are a diverse bunch, numbering more than 30, in areas ranging from ridesharing to online lending. Surely the path to billion-plus valuations would be equally varied.
But surprisingly, many of their secrets to success seem formulaic. The most valuable San Francisco companies to arise in the era of the smartphone have a number of shared traits, including a willingness and ability to post massive, sustained losses; high-powered investors; and a preponderance of easy-to-explain business models.
No, it’s not a recipe that’s likely replicable without talent, drive, connections and timing. But if you’ve got those ingredients, following the principles below might provide a good shot at unicorn status.
First, lose money until you’ve left your rivals in the dust. This is the most important rule. It is the collective glue that holds the narratives of San Francisco startup success stories together. And while companies in other places have thrived with the same practice, arguably San Franciscans do it best.
It’s no secret that a majority of the most valuable internet and technology companies citywide lose gobs of money or post tiny profits relative to valuations. Uber, called the world’s most valuable startup, reportedly lost $4.5 billion last year. Dropbox lost more than $100 million after losing more than $200 million the year before and more than $300 million the year before that. Even Airbnb, whose model of taking a share of homestay revenues sounds like an easy recipe for returns, took nine years to post its first annual profit.
Industry stalwarts lose money, too. Salesforce, with a market cap of $88 billion, has posted losses for the vast majority of its operating history. Square, valued at nearly $20 billion, has never been profitable on a GAAP basis. DocuSign, the 15-year-old newly public company that dominates the e-signature space, lost more than $50 million in its last fiscal year (and more than $100 million in each of the two preceding years). Of course, these companies, like their unicorn brethren, invest heavily in growing revenues, attracting investors who value this approach.
We could go on. But the basic takeaway is this: Losing money is not a bug. It’s a feature. One might even argue that entrepreneurs in metro areas with a more fiscally restrained investment culture are missing out.
What’s also noteworthy is the propensity of so many city startups to wreak havoc on existing, profitable industries without generating big profits themselves. Craigslist, a San Francisco nonprofit, may have started the trend in the 1990s by blowing up the newspaper classified business. Today, Uber and Lyft have decimated the value of taxi medallions.
Not making money can be the ultimate competitive advantage, if you can afford it, as it prevents others from entering the space or catching up as your startup gobbles up greater and greater market share. Then, when rivals are out of the picture, it’s possible to raise prices and start focusing on operating in the black.
You can’t lose money on your own. And you can’t lose any old money, either. To succeed as a San Francisco unicorn, it helps to lose money provided by one of a short list of prestigious investors who have previously backed valuable, unprofitable Northern California startups.
It’s not a mysterious list. Most of the names are well-known venture and seed investors who’ve been actively investing in local startups for many years and commonly feature on rankings like the Midas List. We’ve put together a few names here.
You might wonder why it’s so much better to lose money provided by Sequoia Capital than, say, a lower-profile but still wealthy investor. We could speculate that the following factors are at play: a firm’s reputation for selecting winning startups, a willingness of later investors to follow these VCs at higher valuations and these firms’ skill in shepherding portfolio companies through rapid growth cycles to an eventual exit.
Whatever the exact connection, the data speaks for itself. The vast majority of San Francisco’s most valuable private and recently public internet and technology companies have backing from investors on the short list, commonly beginning with early-stage rounds.
Generally speaking, you don’t need to know a lot about semiconductor technology or networking infrastructure to explain what a high-valuation San Francisco company does. Instead, it’s more along the lines of: “They have an app for getting rides from strangers,” or “They have an app for renting rooms in your house to strangers.” It may sound strange at first, but pretty soon it’s something everyone seems to be doing.
A list of 32 San Francisco-based unicorns and near-unicorns is populated mostly with companies that have widely understood brands, including Pinterest, Instacart and Slack, along with Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. While there are some lesser-known enterprise software names, they’re not among the largest investment recipients.
Part of the consumer-facing, high brand recognition qualities of San Francisco startups may be tied to the decision to locate in an urban center. If you were planning to manufacture semiconductor components, for instance, you would probably set up headquarters in a less space-constrained suburban setting.
While it can be frustrating to watch a company lurch from quarter to quarter without a profit in sight, there is ample evidence the approach can be wildly successful over time.
Seattle’s Amazon is probably the poster child for this strategy. Jeff Bezos, recently declared the world’s richest man, led the company for more than a decade before reporting the first annual profit.
These days, San Francisco seems to be ground central for this company-building technique. While it’s certainly not necessary to locate here, it does seem to be the single urban location most closely associated with massively scalable, money-losing consumer-facing startups.
Perhaps it’s just one of those things that after a while becomes status quo. If you want to be a movie star, you go to Hollywood. And if you want to make it on Wall Street, you go to Wall Street. Likewise, if you want to make it by launching an industry-altering business with a good shot at a multi-billion-dollar valuation, all while losing eye-popping sums of money, then you go to San Francisco.
Shenzhen-based home robotics company UBTECH announced this week that it has closed a massive $820 million Series C. The round, led by Tencent and a whole slew of other investors, follows a $100 million Series B and $20 million Series C.
The bipedal robotics maker certainly isn’t a household name here in the States — though the company’s taken a few baby steps over here, including a walking Stormtrooper robot released alongside The Last Jedi. It also debuted a “robotic butler” with a tablet face back at CES in January that seemed more proof of concept than shipping product — though UBTECH has promised a broad 2019 release date.
CEO James Zhou has promised the company will use this huge backing to accelerate its vision of bringing robots into the home.
“As technology evolves to include more voice and touch capabilities, people need new devices that communicate and interact more naturally and intuitively at home, at school and at work,” he said in a release tied to the announcement. “While trends in robots and robotics are developing, no company has yet stepped forward with the resources, vision and products ecosystem to transform robot fantasy and fiction into robot reality. UBTECH is bringing this reality to life by expanding the possibilities for innovation.”
The company says the funding will go into R&D, hires and expanding its global footprint. UBTECH is one of a number of companies pushing home robotics beyond the Roomba, including a rumored upcoming device from Amazon. The technology has been a tough nut to crack in the preceding decades, but an $820 million investment certainly couldn’t hurt.
May 4, 2018
Iâve been investing in natural food related business for a while. I do this partly because Iâm interested in what we eat, but mostly because I canât make angel investments in tech companies anymore because of my Foundry Group fund agreements. And I enjoy making angel investments â¦
Boulder is the starting point for the natural foods industry, dating back to the founding of Celestial Seasonings in 1969. A year ago, the New York Times had a long article titled Foodies Know: Boulder Has Become a Hub for New Producers that explains why Boulder is so popular among natural foods companies. The number of food meetups and events in Boulder (including Startup Weekend Boulder Food + Tech) as well as events and initiatives all around the state of Colorado has reached a critical mass. Our friend, Kimbal Musk, who according the the New York Times Wants to Feed America, Silicon Valley-Style is based in Boulder (and, ahem, not Silicon Valley.)
Iâm also excited about the startup activity outside of Boulder/Denver. My partner Seth and I have been actively involved in the creation of The Greater Colorado Venture Fund that launched earlier this year to support entrepreneurs in smaller communities in Colorado. Iâve been involved in Startup Colorado for almost a decade now and am proud of their emphasis on supporting entrepreneurship in all shapes and forms outside the Front Range.
An event in June brings these two dynamics together. If you are an entrepreneur or investor in a food related startup, ENGAGE Delta, Naturally Boulder, and Startup Colorado are bringing the foremost experts in the food industry from across the state to help go from recipes to products and products to profits. The event is 6/21-22 in Hotchkiss. I know Hotchkiss well as Amy has family there and Iâve spent many long weekends there. Itâs a beautiful spot for an event like this.
You can RSVP to the event here and make sure to enjoy some good food for me.
Also published on Medium.
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Jennifer Carolan, Co-founder and General Partner at Reach Capital, a venture firm with 100% focus on EdTech. The conversation was an excellent...
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Heidi Roizen: The point is to understand the terms and understand how they impact not only your return but the motivations of everyone else around the table. When you set up a situation where someone...
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Italian startup Freeda Media is raising a $10 million Series A round led by Alven Capital. U-Start and business angels are also participating in the round.
Freeda Media runs the popular Freeda Facebook page. With nearly 1.4 million likes, the page has an impressive reach. 24 million unique users see Freeda content every month in Italy, including 100 percent of millennial women who live in Italy. The company is also quite active on Instagram.
In other words, Freeda Media is a new media company that runs mostly on social media platforms. Many of the Facebook posts are short videos, social cuts with subtitles and quick interviews. Some posts link to Freeda’s own website for more traditional articles with text and photos. But there’s no front page per se.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to other markets, starting with Spain. More interestingly, Freeda is still quite young as it took them 15 months to reach this level.
The company compares itself with other media brands for women, such as Elle, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or Man Repeller. According to CrowdTangle, Freeda has a much higher engagement rate compared to its direct competitors.
Freeda Media’s business model is branded content and native advertising. But the startup is looking at other potential revenue streams. There’s clearly a risk of branded content overload for social-first media organizations. When you build a Facebook audience based on trust, your reputation can also quickly deteriorate and the algorithms can turn on you. So far, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.
Internationalization is going to be key to foster Freeda’s growth. If Freeda can replicate the same impressive numbers in multiple countries, the startup could end up convincing bigger advertisers and distributing more or less the same content in multiple countries.
Last quarter Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) announced plans to bring overseas cash stock back into the country in view of the change in the tax code. This quarter, it announced a record share repurchase plan...
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Sramana Mitra: If you look at the last six months of your deal flow, could you synthesize some of the most interesting trends that you have observed? Guy Resheff: A common one is artificial...
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Today’s 398th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, May 3, 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 398th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, May 3, 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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