Sramana Mitra: What are the dynamics on the logistics side?  Rob Keve: There is quite a lot there for two reasons. One is consumers have expectations. We’re all sensitized by what the domestic...

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PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates.

The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. While customers are free to customize these any way they like, the templated approach means these businesses don’t require a designer to create quality-looking documents.

Company co-founder and CTO Serge Barysiuk says the startup has had a vision for some time that sales documents would be more interactive than a static PDF or Word document, and they have invested a lot of resources into building a more interactive document editor, while enabling the sales team to see usage statistics like document opens, time on pages and so forth.

“We have added a new document builder editor to our platform, which helps you create documents that you can personalize and merge data, and that are also interactive,” Barysiuk told TechCrunch.

He says this means their documents contain business logic and data, but also has a professional look and feel, whether being viewed online or on a mobile device.

Barysiuk says the company recognizes that some customers will be using Word and other tools to produce boilerplate content, and users can import existing documents into the PandaDoc editor where appropriate.

In addition to the document editing capabilities, the company provides a general workflow to support sales teams from proposal to contract to digital signing — and even collecting funds.

PandaDoc launched in 2011 and has raised just over $21 million on a post valuation of $70 million, according to PitchBook data. The company reports it has 250 employees with over 17,000 customers, the majority of whom are SMBs, who have closed more than $20 billion in deals on the platform.

The company’s last raise was $15 million in 2017, led by Rembrandt Venture Partners.

According to a recent Fortune Business Insights report, the global identity and access management (IAM) market is estimated to grow from $9.5 million in 2018 to $24.8 billion by the year 2026....

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TNL Media Group, the Taipei-based media and journalism company, announced it has acquired mobile ad technology startup Ad2iction. In addition to digital advertising and data analytics, Ad2iction also operates verticals like Agent Movie, a film site, and its brands will remain independently run after joining TNL Media Group.

Ad2iction currently serves about 500 brands with a cloud-based platform, called Ad2 CMP (creative management platform) that helps them analyze behavior and create digital content for displays and mobile devices.

Launched in 2013 with The News Lens, a news site, TNL Media Group expanded through a series of partnerships and acquisitions and now includes a portfolio of content brands dedicated to lifestyle, sports, technology and video content. For example, in 2018 it acquired Taiwanese tech news site INSIDE and sports site Sportsvision. The company focuses on creating Chinese-language content for users in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and English-language articles for international readers, too.

TNL Media Group also recently founded a market research unit called TNLR (with the “R” standing for research) to provide reports that use data analytics from its user base for clients like Dell, Uber and Ford.

Inn a press statement, TNL Media Group founder Joey Chung said “Both companies believe this is the perfect moment for a strategic partnership as we set up to build one of the top content platforms and diversify our product offerings with each bringing in more scale. We look forward to helping Ad2iction’s superior mobile adtech products expand to new clients and international markets while building one of the international Chinese market’s top content and technology service platforms.”

Stefan Batory: At the same time, I was preparing for a Marathon race on the Sands. It’s a marathon across the Sahara desert. You have to carry a backpack with all your food and supplies to survive in...

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Fitness, wallpaper, and lost item-finding startups could have a big new competitor baked into everyone’s iPhones. Leaks of the code from iOS 14 that Apple is expected to reveal in June signal several new features and devices are on the way. Startups could be at risk due to Apple’s ability to integrate these additions at the iOS level, instantly gain an enormous install base and offer them for free or cheap, as long as they boost sales of its main money maker, the iPhone.

It’s unclear if all of these fresh finds will actually get official unveiling in June versus further down the line. But here’s a breakdown of what the iOS 14 code obtained by 9To5Mac’s Chance Miller shows and which startups could be impacted by Apple barging into their businesses:

Fitness – Codename: Seymour

Apple appears to be preparing a workout guide app for iOS, WatchOS and Apple TV that would let users download instructional video clips for doing different exercises. The app could potentially be called Fit or Fitness, according to MacRumors‘ Juli Clover, and offer help with stretching, core training, strength training, running, cycling, rowing, outdoor walking, dance and yoga. The Apple Watch appears to help track your progress through the workout routines.

The iOS Health app is already a popular way to track steps and other fitness goals. By using Health to personalize or promote a new Fitness feature, Apple has an easy path to a huge user base. Many people are afraid of weight and strength training because there’s a lot to learn about having proper form to avoid injury or embarrassment. Visual guides with videos shot from multiple angles could make sure you’re doing those pushups or bicep curls correctly.

Apple’s entrance into fitness could endanger startups like Future, which offer customized workout routines with video clips demonstrating how to do each exercise. The $11.5 million-funded Future actually sends you an Apple Watch with its $150 per month service to track your progress while using visuals, sounds and vibrations to tell you when to switch exercises without having to look at your phone. By removing Future’s human personal trainers that text to nag you if you don’t work out, Apple could offer a simplified version of this startup’s app for free.

Apple Fitness could be even more trouble for less premium apps like Sweat and Sworkit that provide basic visual guidance for workouts, or Aaptiv that’s restricted to just audio cues. Hardware startups like Peloton, which offers off-bike Beyond the Ride workouts with live or on-demand class, and Tempo’s giant 3D-sensing in-home screen for weight lifting, could also find casual customers picked off by a free or cheap alternative from Apple.

There’s no code indicating a payment mechanism, so Apple Fitness could be free. But it’s also easy to imagine Apple layering on a premium feature like remote personal training assistance from human experts or a wider array of exercises for a fee, tying into its increasing focus on services revenue.

Wallpapers – access for third-parties

In iOS 14, it appears that Apple will offer new categorizations for wallpapers beyond the existing Dynamic (slowly shifting), Still and Live (move when touched) options. Apple’s always only offered a few native wallpapers plus the option to pull one from your camera roll. But the iOS 14 code suggests Apple may open this up to third-party providers.

A wallpaper “store” could be both a blessing and a curse for entrepreneurs in the space. It could endanger sites and apps like Vellum, Unsplash, Clarity, WLPPR and Walli that aggregate wallpapers for browsing, purchase or download. Instead, Apple could make itself the ultimate aggregator by being built directly into the wallpaper settings. But for creators of beautiful wallpaper images, iOS 14 could potentially offer a new distribution method where their collections could be available straight from where users install their phone backgrounds.

The big question will be whether Apple merely works with a few providers to add wallpaper packs for free, does financially backed deals to bring in providers or creates a full-blown marketplace for wallpapers where creators can sell their imagery like developers do apps. By turning this formerly free feature into a marketplace, Apple could also start earning a cut of sales to add to its services revenue.

AirTags – find your stuff

Apple appears to be getting closer to launching its long-awaited AirTags, based on iOS 14 code snippets. These small tracking tags could be attached to your wallet, keys, gadgets or other important or easily lost items, and then located using the iOS Find My app. AirTags may be powered by removable coin-shaped batteries, according to MacRumors.

Native integration with iOS could make AirTags super-easy to set up. They also could benefit from the ubiquity of Apple devices, as the company could let the crowd help find your stuff by allowing AirTags to piggyback on the connectivity of any of its phones, tablets or laptops to send you the missing item’s coordinates.

Most obviously, AirTags could become a powerful competitor to the vertical’s long-standing frontrunner, Tile. The $104 million-funded startup sells $20 to $35 tracking tags that locate devices from 150 to 400 feet away. It also sells a $30 per year subscription for free battery replacements and 30-day location history. Other players in the space include Chipolo, Orbit and MYNT.

But as we saw with the launch of AirPods, Apple’s design expertise and native iOS integrations can allow its products to leapfrog what’s in the market. If AirTags get proprietary access to the iPhone’s Bluetooth and other connectivity hardware, and if they’re quicker to set up, Apple fans might jump from startups to these new devices. Apple also could develop a similar premium subscription for battery or full AirTag replacements, as well as bonus tracking features.

Augmented reality scanning – Codename: Gobi

iOS 14 includes code for a new augmented reality feature that lets users scan places or potentially items in the real world to pull up helpful information. The code indicates Apple is testing the feature, codenamed Gobi, at Apple Stores and Starbucks to let users see product, pricing and comparison info, according to 9To5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo. Gobi can recognize QR-style codes for specific locations like a certain shop, triggering a companion augmented reality experience.

It appears that an SDK would allow partners to build their own AR offerings and generate the QR codes that initiate them. Eventually, these capabilities could be extended from Apple’s mobile devices to the AR headset it’s working on so you’d instantly get a heads-up display of information when you entered the right place.

Apple moving to power lighter-weight AR experiences rather than just offering the AR Kit infrastructure for developers to build full-fledged apps could create competition for a range of startups and other tech giants. The whole point of augmented reality is that it’s convenient to explore hidden experiences in the real world, which is defeated if users have to know to download and then wait to install a different app for every place or product. Creating a central AR app for simpler experiences that load instantly could speed up adoption.

Startups like Blippar have been working on AR scanning for years in hopes of making consumer packaged goods or retail locations come alive. But again, the need to download a separate app and remember to use it has kept these experiences out of the mainstream. Snapchat’s Scan platform can similarly trigger AR effects based on specific items from a more popular app. And teasers of Facebook and Google’s eventual augmented reality hardware and software hinge on adding utility to every day life.

If Apple can build this technology into everyone’s iPhone cameras, it could surmount one of AR’s biggest distribution challenges. That might help it build out a developer ecosystem and train customers to seek out AR so they’re all ready when its AR glasses finally arrive.

Startups have welcomed proposals from the European Commission aimed at cutting red tape and shrinking cross-border barriers for small businesses as part of a new EU industrial strategy plan with a twin focus on digital and green transitions unveiled today.

Among the package of measures being proposed by the European Union’s executive body are for Member States to sign up to a “Startup Nations Standard” — which would aim to promote best practices to support startups and scale-ups, such as one-stop shops, favourable employee stock-options arrangements and visa processing to reduce cross-border friction for entrepreneurs starting and growing businesses in the bloc.

In recent years, European startups have organized to campaign for reforms to rules around stock options –with 30 CEOs from homegrown startups, including TransferWise, GetYourGuide, Revolut, Delivery Hero, TypeForm and Supercell (to name a few) signing an open letter to policymakers two years ago calling for legislators to fix what they dubbed “the patchy, inconsistent and often punitive rules that govern employee ownership.”

The effort appears to have made a dent in the EU policymaking universe. Both regulatory and practical barriers are now in the Commission’s sights, with it proposing a joint task force to work on sanding down business bumps.

It also today reiterated a perennial warning against Member States “goldplating” pan-EU rules by adding their own conditions on top. 

“The Single Market is our proudest achievement — yet 70% of businesses report that they do not find it is sufficiently integrated,” said EVP Margrethe Vestager, laying out an industrial strategy package with a big focus on smaller companies, including those with big ambitions to scale. “Across Europe barriers are still preventing startups from growing into European businesses and our report is identifying those barriers and we also then address them in the Single Market enforcement action plan.”

In a letter responding to the Commission’s plan for an EU Startup Nations Standard, 14 European startup founders (listed below) and a number of European startup associations welcomed the proposal — urging EU Member States to get behind it.

“By making it easier to start a business, expand across borders and attract top talent, this new Standard will help to level the playing field with powerful global tech hubs in the US and China,” the tech CEOs and startup advocacy organizations wrote. “We applaud the EU’s ambition of seeking a pan-European solution to address the needs of startups. We are also encouraged that the Commission has specifically called out the treatment of stock options as one of the key issues.

“As highlighted by more than 500 leading European entrepreneurs who joined the Not Optional campaign, the inability of startups to use stock options effectively to attract and retain talent is a major bottleneck to the growth of startups in Europe.”

“The Commission’s proposals will be a major step towards unleashing the full entrepreneurial firepower of Europe – but only if they are adopted and implemented by all Member States,” they added. “That’s why we are today calling on all Member States to sign up to the EU Startup Nations Standard, including a commitment to increase the attractiveness of employee ownership schemes.”

Here’s the list of startup CEOs signing the letter:

Christian Reber, CEO & Founder, PitchFelix Van de Maele, CEO & Founder, CollibraJean-Charles Samuelian, CEO & Founder, AlanJohannes Reck, CEO & Co-Founder of GetYourGuideJohannes Schildt, CEO & Founder, KRY / LIVIJohn Collison, Co-Founder and President, StripeJuan de Antonio, CEO & Co-Founder, CabifyMarkus Villig, CEO & Founder, BoltMiki Kuusi, CEO & Co-Founder, WoltNicolas Brusson, CEO & Co-Founder, BlaBlaCarPeter Mühlmann, CEO & Founder, TrustpilotSebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO & Founder, KlarnaTaavet Hinrikus, Founder & Chairman, TransferWiseTamaz Georgadze, CEO & Founder, Raisin

Also welcoming the stock option proposals, Martin Mignot, a partner at Index Ventures — another backer of the Not Optional campaign — said: “The biggest challenge facing startups today is recruiting and retaining top talent. That’s why we are pleased that the EU Startup Nations Standard addresses stock options, making it easier for startups to allow employees to share in their success.”

“We are pleased to see the European Commission recognise the contribution that startups make to Europe and its citizens, and pursue a pan-European policy initiative to support this growing sector,” he added in a statement. “For too long, the focus in Europe has been on taming US tech giants. Today’s announcement confirms Europe’s ambition to create its own champions.”

EU startup advocacy member association, Allied for Startups, is another signatory to the letter. And in an additional response, it broadly welcomed the Commission’s SME strategy — while pressing for a strong focus on startups as independent actors in the implementation of the strategy, rather than as a sub-category of SMEs.

“The talent-focus of the proposed Startup Nation Standard has significant potential for startup ecosystems, since access to talent is still a bottleneck for startups in Europe,” said Benedikt Blomeyer, the lobby group’s director of EU policy, in a statement.

“Through the SME strategy, we are pleased to see concrete measures such as better startup visas and improved employee stock options on the table. Allied for Startups has repeatedly called for both measures over the past years.”

“Unlike SMEs, startups can only succeed at scale,” he added. “They are global from day one and aim to grow big and fast. Specific measures that work for SMES, for instance a regulatory exemption, might not work for startups. On the contrary, it could incentivise a startup to stay small. To account for these differences, the European Commission should consider a startup strategy that focuses on scalability, complementing the SME strategy.”

Allied for Startups also welcomed the Commission’s general goal of reducing the administrative and regulatory burden for startups within the Single Market — saying the consideration of regulatory sandboxes as part of the support toolkit is “potentially valuable for startups, who build innovative products and services.”

The Commission is also looking to support SMEs to go public in Europe — announcing an SME Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Fund under the InvestEU SME window, which will aim to make IPOs more accessible to local small businesses.

Another push aims to reduce late payments for SMEs, with the Commission noting today that one in four regional small businesses go bankrupt as a result of not being paid on time.

It also said it wants to stimulate investment in women-led companies and funds to “empower female entrepreneurship.” (Notably all the signatories on the aforementioned letter are male.)

Industrial to digital transformation

More broadly, the Commission’s new industrial strategy intends to underpin core EU policy priorities for the next five years — which include a focus on driving the digitization of legacy industries and simultaneous retooling to transition to a carbon neutral economy under the pan-EU Green Deal.

“Europe has the strongest industry in the world. Our companies — big and small — provide us with jobs, prosperity and strategic autonomy. Managing the green and digital transitions and avoiding external dependencies in a new geopolitical context requires radical change — and it needs to start now,” said Thierry Breton, commissioner for internal market, in a statement today.

During a press briefing, Vestager emphasized the Commission’s view that new and more inclusive working methods are needed to deliver on the planned transformation.

“The twin digital and green transitions are posing both opportunities and challenges for the industry in general and for small and medium sized businesses in particular. Business models are changing. All across Europe companies are confronted with consumers’ decreasing trust and increasing demand for transparency,” she said. “The world around us is also changing… Today global competition, trade disputes, the return of protectionism — I think that creates a shared feeling of uncertainty.

“This is challenging Europe’s industry as it sets out to meet the twin transitions. Fortunately, the European industry is coming to this reality from a strong position. Our new strategy is building on Europe’s strength and on our values.”

On the proposals to shift to “inclusive” working methods, Vestager said the aim is “to work much closer with small and large companies, Member States, researchers, academia, social partners and other EU institutions.”

To that end, the Commission is proposing a new industrial forum to enable closer working with such stakeholders that it aims to have set up by September.

It also wants to work on identifying a number of industrial ecosystems — which Vestager said “may require a bespoke approach,” in terms of policy support.

At the press briefing, Breton suggested there could be between 15 and 20 such industrial ecosystems.

“We don’t want to leave anybody out,” he said. “This is an industrial strategy but we all know that underpinning this there are large corporations but many, many, many small ones too and we have to bring these on board. If we don’t have the big and the small we won’t have a dynamic, innovative, living sector.

“A lot of companies do this among themselves already, locally in fact, but we do hope it is going to be done in an even more horizontal manner across the EU and within the internal market,” he added.

Skills is another focus for the SME strategy — with the Commission saying it will expand Digital Innovation Hubs to every region in Europe to help small businesses plug in cutting edge tech, with expanded options for volunteering and training on digital technologies.

Helping SMEs find the skills they need to shift to sustainable ways of working is another stated aim.

The Commission has published a Q&A on the industrial strategy here.

Last month the executive body also set out proposals aimed at encouraging industrial data sharing and reuse, along with proposals for regulating high-risk uses of artificial intelligence.

A further major piece of EU digital policy due later this year is the forthcoming Digital Services Act — which is slated to address platform liabilities and responsibilities, including toward smaller businesses that rely on them as a marketplace.

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology.

At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has filed a complaint in California federal court claiming that Eko has engaged in “a campaign of threats and harassment.”

At the heart of the dispute is Quibi’s Turnstyle technology, which allows viewers to seamlessly switch between landscape and portrait-mode viewing.

Both companies seem to agree that Eko CEO Yoni Bloch met with Jeffrey Katzenberg in March 2017 (before Katzenberg had even founded Quibi) about a possible investment in Eko, and that there was at least one follow-up meeting between Quibi and Eko employees in 2019.

Eko claims that it provided Quibi employees — both while they were working at Quibi and before then, when they were previously at Snap — with details and code behind its technology. Then, after Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman showed off Turnstyle at CES this year, Eko sent a letter to Quibi claiming that the feature infringed on its intellectual property. (According to the Journal’s story, Eko’s lawyers have sent a letter to Quibi but have not filed a lawsuit.)

“Our Turnstyle technology was developed internally at Quibi by our talented engineers and we have, in fact, received a patent for it,” Quibi said in a statement. “These claims have absolutely no merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them in court.”

Meanwhile, in a statement, Eko described Quibi’s technology as “a near-identical copy of its own,” and said the company’s legal motion is “nothing more than a PR stunt”:

It is telling that Quibi filed the motion only after learning the Wall Street Journal was going to publish an article exposing allegations of Quibi’s theft of Eko’s technology … Eko will take the legal actions necessary to defend its intellectual property and looks forward to demonstrating its patent rights to the court.

You can read Quibi’s full complaint below.

Quibi complaint by TechCrunch on Scribd

Monograph, a startup working on cloud-based software that makes project and cost management easier for architects, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Hustle Fund VC and angel investors.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded last year by Robert Yuen, Alex Dixon and Moe Amaya. Each has experience in architecture, design and software development, making them well-positioned to create a management platform tailored for architects.

Monograph was designed to be easy to use, with an emphasis on the onboarding process so firms are encouraged to switch from traditional project management methods, like spreadsheets, to the software. The startup says hundreds of architects, ranging from solo practitioners to firms with more than 60 people, have already signed up. Monograph has been used to help manage more than $125 million in projects, ranging in size from bathroom and kitchen remodeling to building large hotels.

[gallery ids="1956919,1956918,1956917"]

Before Monograph, the three were partners in an agency called Dixon and Moe, working as UI/UX consultants for tech startups and architecture firms.

“Monograph really grew out of the agency as a product we saw solving problems that we saw in our day to day lives as architectural designers, and also in our everyday lives with our friends,” Yuen told TechCrunch. “That’s the loss in the transparency of information between how much time you are spending on work, how projects are going, who is working on it. There is really no accurate way to manage a project and they are growing in complexity each year.”

Like other tech companies in the architecture space, including PlanGrid, Procore and UpCodes, Monograph is designed to streamline aspects of the design and building process, while making it easier for teams to collaborate.

Monograph is currently designed for use by architects and consultants, and includes tools to assign milestones, manage project timelines and for timesheets, billing and invoicing. Data is then used for cost and progress analytics, like MoneyGantt, a feature for budget forecasting.

Yuen says that no matter a project’s size, each team includes architects, designers and engineers. By the end of the year, the company plans to start releasing new versions of Monograph that can be used by structural, electrical and mechanical engineers, as well as other licensed professionals.

The company’s funding will be used to hire for its software engineering and customer support teams.

In a press statement, Homebrew partner Satya Patel said “Monograph offers transformative organization and project management software that is changing the way architects and designers work so that they can deliver better client service, manage costs and earn more profit. We look forward to seeing the company’s continued growth and innovation in a market that has been waiting for modern solutions.”

Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst they assemble something, for instance.

A new U.K. startup hopes to nudge that future on further with a radical new technology which, although it resembles the HoloLens, is in fact a highly accurate helmet-mounted screen that enables construction workers to place beams or bricks in exactly the right locations, thus introducing significant savings in time normally lost due to mistakes.

To further boost its efforts, XYZ Reality has closed a £5 million Series A funding round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction. The company will build out its AR cloud and software platform and build its team to serve the EU market and expand to the U.S. and Asia.

The idea behind it is highly innovative. A dedicated helmet with an attached visor projects a highly accurate hologram — based on laser positioning — in front of the wearer’s face, allowing them to place objects precisely according to plans projected in front of their eyes.

The company claims its HoloSite headset is the “world’s first engineering-grade Augmented Reality device,” that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to a five-millimeter accuracy.

The problem it’s solving is an age-old one. In today’s construction industry, buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. But tradespeople are asked to interpret those 2D drawings and turn them into 3D buildings within construction “tolerances.” This process creates inefficiencies that mean up to 80% of the construction being “out-of-tolerance.” It’s estimated that 7-11% of project costs are wasted this way and, of course, in mega-projects like huge bridges, this amounts to an average of more than $100 million.

Founder, CEO and builder David Mitchell, who has spent his career in the construction industry, says: “Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. But 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.”

Mitchell came up with the idea of eliminating 2D designs after the 2008 recession devastated the industry.

I tried out the headset for myself and found that I could, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, from scratch complete a basic assembly of bricks according to the plans projected in front of my eyes.

XYZ says it is possible to build a bathroom in two hours using the headset, versus a day without it, using the technology.

The hope is that as this technology improves, any tradesperson would be able to work on a construction site with less need for training in 2D plans, but still with a high degree of accuracy.

The project is not without risk. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets for construction, shuttered its HQ last year. Earlier, Osterhout Design Group unloaded its AR glasses patents after acquisition talks with Magic Leap, Facebook and others stalled. Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, including Tencent, also sold its assets earlier this year after the company ran out of cash.

But Amadeus is bullish. Nick Kingsbury, partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said: “Construction is a sector that’s ripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes.”

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of, such as “informed risk selection,” underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this, but it’s just not that simple.

Synthesized is a U.K. startup that tries to reduce friction on preparing all the data that’s needed, to enable insurers to share data safely, complying with regulations. The more that happens, the more innovation can happen, such as insuring for a low-carbon economy, something that will become increasingly important.

It has now raised $2.8 million in a new round of funding co-led by Cambridge-based IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Pretiosum Ventures and a number of finance and technology executives in the U.K. Financing from the round will be used to double the number of its employees in London, and build out its sales and product teams.

Co-founder Nicolai Baldin said: “Synthesized substantially reduces the time to develop and comprehensively test data-driven projects and as a result empowers engineers to build better products and services for end-users. With the new funding from IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, Synthesized is well-positioned to facilitate its business operations to turbocharge development processes across many sectors, such as finance, insurance and healthcare.”

Ed Stacey, managing partner at IQ Capital said: “Responsible organizations are waking up to the need to ensure that their deployed machine learning systems are fair and unbiased, as well as being robust and accurate. Synthesized’s ability to create multiple, balanced data sets in a flexible way gives organizations and their customers the confidence they need in deployed production systems, while also greatly speeding up the development process. Javier Santiso, CEO and founder of Alma Mundi Ventures, said that “The prospects for Synthesized are bright and we see the impact of synthetic data permeating almost every industry.”

Synthesized competes in various ways with products from Gretel AI, Snorkel, Tonic AI, Hazy and Mostly AI.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 475th 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs March 5, 2020

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The apartment rental market in the US will be worth $174.1 billion this year, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help it along by connecting renters with rentals is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Zumper, which provides listings of available rental properties and services (such as rent payments) to help manage landlords’ rental businesses, has raised $60 million, money that CEO and co-founder Anthemos Georgiades said it plans to use to continue both expanding its footprint in the US (its primary market today), as well as to continue building out its platform and the data science behind it, as well as more tools for users of its two-sided marketplace.

This Series D is being led by new backer e.ventures — the VC that originally started out as BV Ventures, the strategic VC arm of publishing giant Bertelsmann — and includes participation from a number of existing investors. Zumper has raised $150 million to date from backers that include Andreessen Horowitz, Axel Springer, the Blackstone Group, Breyer Capital, CrunchFund, Dawn Capital, Goodwater Capital, Greycroft, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Stereo Capital, Foxhaven Asset Management, and others.

The company is not talking about its valuation but we understand that it is more than double the valuation Zumper had in its previous round. For context, that was a $46 million Series C round in 2018 that was made at over $200 million but under $300 million, putting Zumper’s current valuation at between $400 million and $600 million.

Zumper also doesn’t disclose financials but says that it’s been seeing 100% growth year-on-year for its revenues and is on track to have some 80 million people using its platform in 2020, with 13 million visitors per month, typically looking for one-year leases. And within its B2B rental big data play, some 1 million listings are analysed monthly.

The startup’s growth is coming at a pivotal time in the property market.

On one hand, Zumper competes against the likes of other fast-growing startups like Compass, as well as giants like Zillow and more recently Costar (owner of Apartments.com and many others). The latter two have shaped up to be key consolidators, acquiring smaller outfits and bigger rivals that have fallen into trouble to get better economies of scale.

But at the same time, we have seen a fair amount of stress in the industry, caused by the oversupply of inventory in the market, which puts pressure on prices; and some of the biggest and most established players getting hit hard trying to modernise their businesses. As one example, after RentPath — the owner of Rent.com, Rentals.com, ApartmentGuide.com and others — filed for Chapter 11, Costar picked it up for $588 million (that deal has not officially closed).

“Everyone is falling by the wayside,” Georgiades said.

Beyond market trends, there are also consumer trends, with those who are traditional renters looking to buy property, or those who continue renting exploring shorter leases or home shares as ways of saving money and looking for better deals. Zumper notes that some 66% of renters today in the US live in a co-living situation.

Within those wider developments, Zumper — which Georgiades describes as the largest privately-backed rentals platform — has been working on building a modern platform that provides more than just a simple place to discover what’s available in the market.

“We want to add lease signing and more financial offerings for landlords,” Georgiades said, noting that insurance is one area that it is also exploring. “The idea is to build in more peace of mind for our customers, not just more software.”

And it’s doing so by delivering a key demographic that everyone wants to target: millennial users. 

“Zumper is the single best source for younger millennials to find apartments,” he said, noting that one in four Americans will use Zumper this year to search for an apartment. A typical user, he added, is “more mobile,” and averages at 28 years old, and its user base skews female.

Working to serve that demographic and its changing tastes for where and how to put down roots, Zumper has partnerships in place with the likes of Airbnb and Facebook to target different parts of the market. Georgiades said that he does not view either as a competitor, but nor are there plans to expand these relationships at the moment (and he would not comment on whether Airbnb or Facebook has ever tried to acquire Zumper).

“We see ourselves as the Airbnb of one-year leases,” he said. “We start where Airbnb ends.” While today there seems to be a way on Zumper to search for rooms, it doesn’t seem to be optimised for that kind of search, so that is another area where you could see the startup growing.

“Zumper’s progress so far is striking, and it has quickly become the leading independent company focused on the rental market,” said Mathias Schilling Co-Founder & Managing Partner with e.ventures, in a statement. “We believe that Zumper is well positioned because of its focus on providing an exceptional product for renters and great value for landlords and multi-family properties.”

 

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? Rob Keve: We charge a subscription. We’re a software platform. We should not be a pure revenue share. You pay the subscription and can use it for one country or 200...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 476th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 12, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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No-code tools are on the rise, and a YC-backed company called Snapboard is looking to join the fight.

Snapboard, led by solo founder Calum Moore, started when Moore decided to build one product a week for a year as a personal challenge. In the second week, he realized just how many apps and services it took not only to build the product, but to post about it on social media.

He wanted a way to manage all those apps and tools from one dashboard. So he built Snapboard.

Snapboard allows users to link and manage a wide variety of apps and platforms in a single, customizable dashboard. Users can create boards that act as internal tools without getting the product or engineering team involved for an internal project. Moore describes it as “Airtable, but with all of your data already in there.”

More than 50 apps are available on the Snapboard platform, including Shopify, Dropbox, Google Analytics, MailChimp, MongoDB, MySQL, Trello, Zendesk and many more. Moore isn’t concerned with onboarding new integrated apps for Snapboard, as most of the popular tools used by startups and tech firms are API supported.

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The use cases are innumerable, which is just as challenging as it is beneficial. Moore detailed a few examples, including building boards for each individual customer, combining Stripe data with emails sent through Mail Chimp to try to target behavior.

However, the flexibility of the platform means that it can do almost anything, but only if you know what you want to do with it. It can be difficult to evangelize for something that is so nebulous, and can be used so many ways.

Moore says the key is to sprint on building out the template library for Snapboard, offering new users a multitude of options as inspiration.

Snapboard offers a free tier, and then charges $10/month/seat for more advanced features. Thus far, the company has 3,000 registered users and around 230 WAUs.

The company is targeting tech companies but sees the potential for other industries to tap into Snapboard’s internal tool-making platform.

Beyond the difficulty of messaging a platform that can be used in countless ways, Moore identifies UX design as one of the company’s greatest challenges.

“We’re taking something only developers used to be able to do and making it available for everyone else,” said Moore. “If you give a developer a platform, they’ll work their way through it. They’ll find some way to make it work. Whereas, with less technical people, they want products to be very obvious and easy to use. So, for us, it’s about delivering that kind of technical experience in a really non-technical way.”

Snapboard has raised a total of $150K from Y Combinator and will present in the upcoming demo day.

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to eDiscovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. Today, the company announced a $62 million Series C investment.

CapitalG (Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and K9 Ventures also participated. The startup has now raised $96 million, according to the company.

Everlaw co-founder and CEO AJ Shankar says eDiscovery, which has been around for years, has become a classic big data problem. “We help legal professionals sift through huge volumes of evidence in lawsuits and investigations to find the smoking gun and the incriminating email,” Shankar told TechCrunch.

The software also helps teams of legal professionals work together and collaborate around this evidence. “Turns out that the law is incredibly collaborative, and we help these teams create a work product, and communicate and collaborate with each other in a system specifically built for the practice of law,” he explained.

He says this coordination is often done manually in spreadsheets with communication taking place via email, and even companies using legacy eDiscovery software are using systems designed in a time of lower data volumes.

The company offers a variety of tools to help humans locate the information they need to build a case. There is a search feature, of course, and data visualization tools including a timeline tool that helps pinpoint when key events happened. This can help lawyers direct researchers to find evidence within that critical period, greatly narrowing the focus of the search.

And the company also offers both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to help the team find specific bits of information. He acknowledges it will take human ingenuity working with the tool to find what you need. “No one’s handing you anything on a silver platter. It absolutely requires some detective work. It’s iterative and we have tools to help you with that,” he said.

Shankar stumbled into this area of technology when he was still a graduate student in computer science and a law firm came to his department looking for a technical expert. He ended up working with the firm for a couple of years, saw the kinds of technical challenges it faced, and decided to build some tooling to help.

He founded the company 2010, but says the product as it is today really began to take shape in 2015.  The company has over 200 employees with 300 customers, processing 3,000 cases. This includes every state’s attorney general, as well as major law firms.

It’s worth noting the company also offers the product for free to non-profits, educators and investigative journalists.

The company hopes to accelerate growth with this new funding “The investment gives us the opportunity to grow and innovate faster than we’ve ever done before, so I think that’s the opportunity ahead of us,” Shankar said.

Electric, the platform that delivers IT services to small and medium businesses, has today announced that it has raised an additional $14.5 million on its Series B from 01 Advisors, the fund led by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.

Though the funding is a part of the company’s Series B financing, founder Ryan Denehy explained that the deal was signed on an uptick in valuation, though wouldn’t elaborate further.

Electric raised a $25 million Series B led by GGV in January of 2019.

The company allows businesses with small IT teams, or no IT team, to get on the platform and either automate or manage with one click the various administrative facets of that role. Most IT tasks are focused on administration, distribution and maintenance of software programs.

Electric customers ensure that the software is installed on every corporate machine, effectively giving the top IT employee or decision-maker an easy way to grant and revoke permissions, assign roles and make sure software is up to date on various machines.

The hope is that this allows IT specialists to focus on the jobs that are best suited to their skills, such as troubleshooting, hardware installation and other more difficult tasks.

Denehy said this new fundraise was all about bringing strategic operators under the tent, not cash. He explained that at the close of last year, VCs started reaching out to get in on the company’s Series C. The team sat down for a board meeting where they weighed their options, one of which being a $40 million Series C.

“We have no immediate use for most of that money,” said Denehy. “Is it going to make our customers happy or is it going to make us a better-run company? It’s kind of a philosophical question. A lot of founders sort of equate success to the fact that they raised two rounds within six months of each other, and I just took the contrarian view. I wondered what we could actually do to make our company run better and the conclusion was to get the best business leaders and operators in tech to get around the table at our company.”

This brings Electric’s total funding to just over $50 million. Denehy says part of the reluctance around fundraising stemmed from the fact that Electric had tripled top-line growth over the past two years. But that doesn’t mean he had all the answers when it comes to hyper growth and scaling the business.

Costolo recalled when Bain first met Ryan Denehy, and came back excited about his willingness to learn.

“Ryan is a really enthusiastic founder/CEO,” said Costolo. “Some founders know they don’t have the answers to everything and that there’s still a lot to learn, and they want to learn. And Ryan is right down the middle for that.”

Costolo also explained that he’s excited about how well Electric fits in to the dogma of “software is eating the world,” automating these low-level tasks to free up resources and energy for higher-order tasks.

Costolo and Bain operate slightly unusually for a growth-stage fund (01 Advisors writes checks for later A rounds and B rounds). The duo don’t want to take board seats, as they’d rather be “sitting next to the founder instead of across the table from the founder.”

This results in a hands-on approach based on their experience as operators. Remember, Costolo grew Twitter to a market cap of $23.4 billion before stepping down, and Bain spent six years at Twitter as president of Global Revenue and Partnerships before stepping into the COO role.

Costolo and Bain have already brought their hands-on approach to Electric, having conversations with the head of HR around how to introduce HR business partners to different departments and how to scale and set goals for the enterprise sales team.

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling another new product today, this time taking aim at the $350 billion customer service market.

Dubbed Inbox.ai and positioned as “Slack for external communications,” the new product — which is to be offered largely for free — enables customers to communicate with businesses via practically any channel of their choosing. This includes WhatsApp, SMS, Voice, Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, Apple Business Chat, RCS, Line and Telegram — in a bid to meet customers on their own digital, “messaging-first” turf. In terms of message content, at launch there is already support for text, images, video, geolocation and more.

And perhaps crucially, regardless of channel, incoming messages and customer conversations are presented in a single thread for easy ticketing and collaboration amongst support agents. There’s some built in intelligence, too, with “AI” promising to analyse keywords and anticipate customer needs, including providing a list of suggested replies. Agents can also drag and drop components to create auto-replies, and there’s support for things like automated NPS surveys, or rules for message routing.

As you’d expect from a company that has primarily targeted developers, Inbox.ai leverages webhooks for integration with various third-party tools used by enterprises and also comes pre-loaded with support for Shopify, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, and more. This includes the ability to have content created within Inbox.ai synced with other software used by a company for its various communication, sales and other business processes — even if over time, and for some companies, Inbox.ai may become all they need.

In a video call with MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis, he gave me a personal demo of Inbox.ai, including showing how quick the on-boarding process can be for a new business but also for a new customer. He had me WhatsApp a company’s support number and I could instantly see my message show up within the software and was able to send a photo to help with my request and receive other rich media in return.

Vis explained that the impetus for the new offering was his own frustration with customer support from companies in general, who, he says, haven’t adapted to the new world where customers expect to have their issues solved digitally and where it is no longer acceptable to queue for hours on hold or wait 24 hours or more for an email reply.

He says that a quick back of a napkin calculation suggests that, at the age of 35, he has already spent 2 weeks of his life on hold. He also said Inbox.ai wants to solve the continuity of support problem that typically sees customers having to re-explain their issue each time they are handed off to a different support agent or department.

“From a MessageBird perspective, we built these APIs and people [already] have the possibility to build these experiences, so why am I not living in this world?” Vis says rhetorically, after recalling a recent bad experience with his mobile telephone service provider. “I want to live in a world where I can text and have my problems easily solved… What I don’t want is for them to drop me a note into my email and then have to call them”.

So, rather than simply providing developer hooks and carrying out the infrastructure heavy-lifting, MessageBird is betting on its first user-facing product, which, I’m told, raised a few eyebrows amongst the board.

To that end, Vis told me that Inbox.ai was developed by the MessageBird team in 12 months and followed extensive research with customers, support agents and managers. Prior to launch, the software has been tested and is currently used by, HelloFresh and Deliveroo in Europe, Zilingo in Asia, and Join Buggy and Tix Telecom in Latin America.

Challenged on why nobody has really cracked this problem so far, despite a number of attempts to create a single source of customer support “truth,” Vis told me “everybody is talking about it but nobody is doing it”. That’s because you need to understand and then solve three related and difficult problems.

The first is ingesting data from all the various communication channels, for which MessageBird has previous form. The second is “experience generation”: the ability for support agents to easily communicate via rich experiences, such as images, videos, geolocation, tracking codes, discounts etc. That’s something most companies don’t have the developer resources to create, argues Vis. And thirdly is the UI, which has to allow agents to communicate and track tickets seamlessly across channels in a way that is agnostic to where those messages originate from.

“I think this is a new category, I think this is where things converge together,” adds the MessageBird CEO. “We compete with a lot of tools but we’re not any of them. We’re how we think in five years every tool is going to be”.