This is a dense discussion on decision support systems capable of handling complex problems. Requires technical knowledge to follow. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our readers to yourself...

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Today’s 425th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Tuesday, December 18, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 425th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Tuesday, December 18, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) has been transforming its operations to stay in step with the industry’s trends. For the past few years, it has been shifting toward a subscription-based model from the...

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Sramana Mitra: Is it software or is it content that you’re delivering in a SaaS mode? Dror Ben Naim: This is software. We’re talking about a tool for designers, developers, and subject matter...

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Animoca Brands will produce and publish blockchain-based versions of RollerCoaster Tycoon and Goon Squad worldwide (excluding China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau); the new titles will feature the integration of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The term of the Agreement extends through to 31 March 2022.

In honor of this exciting announcement I’d like to propose the following blockchain-based products available for license to those hunting for a quick buck:

Blockchain! The Musical
Blockchain Cereal
Blockchain Brand Kombucha
Blockchain & Me, An Alien Adventure
Blockchain Whiskey
Blockchain Soda
Blockchain The Miniseries
Blockchain Lingerie – Shake His Merkle Tree
Blockchain Brand Firestarters
Blockchain Pessaries For Her
Blockchain French Ticklers
Blockchain Getaway Cars
Blockchain Killer Apps (rumored not to exist)
Blockchain Airlines
Blockchain Margarita Mix
Blockchain Cowboy Hats
Blockchain Burgers
Blockchain Dance Studios
Blockchain Pants

Tonsser, the Copenhagen-based startup that offers a “football performance app” aimed at youth soccer players who want to build their own online profile and potentially get discovered by a bigger club, has raised €5.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Alven Capital, with participation from existing investors SEED Capital and Wellington Partners

Currently launched in eight European countries — including France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — and claiming more than 800,000 football players registered on the app, Tonsser could well be described as akin to a LinkedIn for youth soccer players, perhaps with a bit of Instagram thrown in, but actually the company’s mission is a lot more defined than that.

As reiterated in a call this week with Peter Holm, the soccer app’s co-founder and CEO, Tonsser wants to make it easier for young soccer talent to become better players by learning and being inspired by each other and through sponsored competitions and soccer skills content. And, perhaps more lofty, the Danish startup wants to make the beautiful game more meritocratic by enabling unsigned talent to be discovered by professional football clubs through the app, and in turn help the soccer industry become more accountable. Impressively, he says this has already started happening.

At the heart of this mission is Tonsser’s increasing emphasis on using technology and data — namely, sporting metrics — to help bubble up undiscovered players. The iOS and Android app’s features include the ability to create your own soccer profile, upload and share photo and videos of match highlights, add various match and team stats, and follow other clubs and players. Tapping into some of this data is Tonsser’s algorithm that gives every player registered on the app a dynamic score.

“After a match the Tonsser algorithm computes a rating for each player based on the individual performance, the performance of the team and ‘Man of the Match’ votes from teammates,” explained Holm in a follow-up email.

“The rating system has been developed and tested over the past 3 years with pro licensed coaches and academies to provide the most accurate calculation for each player. Match after match and season after season the rating becomes the reference point for each player and the gateway for leaderboards, awards like Team of the Week and Player of the Season and also for pro trials, scout reports and the chance of getting discovered by clubs and scouts”.

It’s this data — or discovery engine — along with brand partnerships, and sponsored content, competitions and trials (see video below), that forms Tonsser’s business model. The app is free for players and coaches, but scouts pay for special access. Related to this, I’m told that premier League clubs like Huddersfield are now using Tonsser to identify and scout youth talent.

To enhance this in 2019, Tonsser will add integrations with “automated video recordings” using computer vision, enabling players and teams to catch and share their match highlights in a simple way. It is also working on how to accommodate data from wearables to track physical performance and potentially feed this into the Tonsser score.

Meanwhile, Tonsser says the new investment will be used to support growth and to maintain the startup as the leading community for youth players. Holm says that 86 percent of French youth teams from 15-19 are now using Tonsser,. The app will launch in England in Spring 2019 and is preparing a global roll out that will include the U.S. and beyond.

YouGov, the international data and analytics group, has acquired ‘social analytics’ startup Portent.IO, a company that it had previously invested in. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand the acquisition includes Portent.IO‘s technology, clients and its team, including its data scientists.

“We’re all staying on and the entire team including myself have 3-year lock-ins,” Portent.IO co-founder and CEO Hamish Brocklebank tells me. “We are also going to be rebranded as ‘YouGov Signal’ and the existing team will continue to run the business — I’ll be MD & founder of YouGov Signal, for example — but with the added operational, administrative and technical support of the broader YouGov family”.

As well as YouGov providing financially backing for Portent.IO, the two firms had also been working together, with Portent.IO utilising YouGov data within its solution, which mainly focussed on the film and television industry. This includes using YouGov’s panel to survey consumers and using YouGov Profiles data to help media teams plan their marketing campaigns by “mining” audiences around movies, programmes, and actors.

Portent.IO’s customer base includes Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, the BBC, along with other major film studios and a number of TV networks.

“Without trying to be too buzzwordy, we’re a data science-focused social listening and digital media analytics platform,” says Brocklebank. “In short, we track social, news, product reviews and digital data around movies, TV shows, sports teams and now brands across the web and across 40 countries. This data includes text analysis data, view counts of videos, comments, likes, retweets and more”.

Meanwhile, the acquisition is said to enable YouGov to increase the scope of its offering and provide clients with better social monitoring and data science analytics tools. And although Portent.IO’s tech is currently focussed on the entertainment industry, YouGov plans to extend its application across other sectors.

“The platform plugs into YouGov’s wider product suite – complementing its current services, including data products, data services, and custom research – to provide a 360 degree view of marketing campaigns,” says the two companies in a statement.

“Our data science team and advance machine learning NLP tools will be assisting with YouGov’s ongoing data science efforts and a lot of our text classification tools can be applied to their broader market research efforts,” adds Brocklebank. “Our expertise in the film and TV space will [also] help YouGov expand further into that market”.

Every year I teach an MBA course at Stanford about the exciting opportunities for tech investors and entrepreneurs in developing economies. When we designed the syllabus back in 2013, Rocket Internet was still firing on all cylinders on four continents. The unapologetic machine built to copy big American internet companies created billions of dollars for the Samwer brothers and its backers. During Rocket’s golden years, the best startups in the developing economies seemed to inevitably have an original reference in Silicon Valley.

Accordingly, we added a class about the opportunity of replicating business models to seize this information arbitrage. Call it the second-mover advantage.

Despite my conviction about the model, the copycat word  —  short for replicating startups and attached to these ventures  —  annoyed me from the start. More than a term to describe a straightforward recipe to launch, I see it as an unconscious way to belittle an entire group of hard-charging founders and investors.

Indeed, while in foreign eyes, we have been building a Mexican Kickstarter, a Middle Eastern Uber, an Indian Amazon or a Colombian Postmates, I argue visionary founders are taking a simple idea that already exists and creating new worlds.

Gateway to entrepreneurship

While impact is the final goal, founders can approach the journey in different ways. The most common approach in the startup world is to use the business method, or more pompously, the design thinking methodology. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” mentors keep telling a succession of startup clusters in acceleration programs. The best and “leanest” way to product market fit is by starting small then keep iterating the solution until you nail it.

A second way to start is favored by engineers and scientists: Take a new promising technology or a forgotten molecule, then find a big problem. Keep iterating until you find a problem worth solving, like a hammer looking for a nail.

A third way is starting like painters create, building skills by copying classics, or like a new chef cooks by starting with iconic recipes: replicate a proven idea and iterate until you find traction.

Until a few years ago it was ostensibly the only way to scale in developing economies. The model helped raise local capital from risk-averse investors who needed reassurance. The playbook to scale was unfolding a couple of years ahead and served as a guide to founders without previous startup experience and no local role models. The potential acquirer was identified and sometimes contacted in advance. Founders weren’t crazy and investors weren’t dumb.

Riding the next wave

According to conventional wisdom, new ecosystems around the world grow through the following three stages, be them in developing economies or more developed countries. First, local and foreign entrepreneurs replicate successful models focused on local markets. Then as the ecosystem evolves, founders start applying existing technologies to solve local problems. Finally, as the tech space matures, new technologies begin to flourish.

In my opinion, those stages never happen sequentially as stated by ecosystem observers. Successful startups that started with a foreign inspiration can outgrow the master. If they are not bought into submission by the first mover, some of the most famous copycats reinvented the original and made it better: Mercado Libre is much more relevant in the e-commerce space than eBay . Flipkart is hardly an Amazon, not to mention WeChat. These companies are in turn some of the most prolific tech innovators on the globe. Truly ecosystems evolve organically in unique ways reflecting their history, geopolitical environment, economic structure and cultural features.

Two ways to defend the status quo: “It’s been done before” and “It’s never been done before.” –Thibault @Kpaxs

In defense of talent

Recently, it’s hard to hear American observers use the word copycat to describe any American company. After all, Guilt replicated VentesPrivees and Lime, Chinese dockless bike sharing and many more examples. All American startups are treated as innovators while the rest as mere followers.

Recently, Chinese or Indian startups seem to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding their originality. Is it because these regions have become more innovative? Maybe. But it’s also because these ecosystems have gained the respect of Silicon Valley. Indeed, Chinese consumer tech surpassed decisively the U.S. as the most important country in terms of investments.

So here’s my humble suggestion to our wealthier and more accomplished colleagues: stop using the c-word with founders. It’s offensive. Most probably, these founders are facing more challenges to build their companies and lower odds for success that the first mover. If anything, they have more merit than the originals.

As for founders, when they call you a me-too, remember all teams started somewhere, somehow. In fact, most started like Bob the Builder before turning into Einsteins. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where you start. You can start by applying a new technology or protocol. You can start with a problem you feel passionate about. You can start by replicating a business model. It doesn’t really matter if you take a big swing at the future and trust you will figure out how to make it happen. It doesn’t matter what label they use while you change the world for the better.

Moonbug, a kid-focused media business founded by a pair of entertainment executives, has brought in a $145 million Series A investment led by The Raine Group, a merchant bank that supports technology, media and telecom efforts.

Venture capital firms Felix Capital and Fertitta Capital also participated in the financing.

Moonbug, headquartered in London, acquires and distributes media content made for kids. Recently, the company completed its first IP acquisition of Little Baby Bum, a children’s sing-along show popular on YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. According to a Los Angeles Times report, one of the show’s videos is the 20th most popular video in YouTube history, boasting 2.1 billion views. In total, Moonbug says Little Baby Bum has clocked in 23 billion views across multiple platforms.

With its Series A investment, Moonbug will amp up its M&A activity to expand its portfolio of content that “helps children build essential life skills.” Moonbug chief executive officer René Rechtman, who spent the last three years as the head of digital studios at The Walt Disney Co., says they plan to acquire eight media businesses.

Rechtman and John Robson, a former senior vice president of digital distribution at Paramount Pictures and vice president of global content at HTC, launched Moonbug earlier this year.

“I see an independent creator and I put them in very simple brackets: one is high viewership and engagement and one is quality of IP,” Rechtman told TechCrunch. “If they have both of those, I am very interested.”

Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused affiliate of Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, has set a $360 million target for its fourth flagship venture fund, according to a document filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today.

If the target is reached, the fund will be Lightspeed China’s largest yet, per PitchBook. Lightspeed China’s previous two funds each closed on $260 million. The VC raised $168 million for its debut fund in 2013.

Lightspeed China is led by David Mi (pictured). Mi, an investor in multiple billion-dollar Chinese companies, was previously the director of corporate development at Google, where he helped lead the search giant’s investment in Baidu. He joined Lightspeed in 2008 and established the firm’s China presence in 2011. Yan Han, a long-time Lightspeed investor and a founding partner of the firm’s Chinese branch, is also listed on the filing.

Lightspeed China has backed e-commerce platform Pingduoduo and loan provider Rong360, a pair of Chinese “unicorns” that both completed U.S. initial public offerings since 2017. Typically, the firm makes early-stage investments in the internet, mobile and enterprise spaces. 

Earlier this year, Lightspeed Venture Partners filed to raise a record $1.8 billion in new capital commitments. This month, it tacked five new partners onto its consumer and enterprise investment teams, including Slack’s former head of growth and Twitter’s former vice president of global business development.

Lightspeed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fintech startup N26 recently launched in the U.K. with a single product offering. You could sign up to a free account that gives you free payments around the world, but no insurance and no free withdrawals in foreign currencies.

The company just added a second tier to its lineup in the U.K. And N26 is choosing to focus on N26 Metal in the U.K. You can now sign up to a Metal account for £14.90 per month (€16.59).

In other N26 markets, people can currently subscribe to N26 Black for €9.90 per month or N26 Metal for €16.90 per month. It’s interesting to see that N26 is using its fresh start in the U.K. to simplify its offering and target premium customers. The startup can still change its mind and launch N26 Black later down the road.

Basic customers can pay anywhere in the world without any foreign fee. The company uses Mastercard’s foreign exchange rates and doesn’t add anything on top. But ATM withdrawals in a foreign currency still cost 1.7 percent of the total amount.

Metal customers get the same perks in the U.K. and other European countries, such as foreign ATM withdrawals with no fee, a travel insurance package from Allianz and dedicated customer support.

N26 also provides partner offerings for N26 Metal subscribers. For instance, you can work from a WeWork office for free one day per month. Deals vary from one country to another; British customers get airport lounge access thanks to LoungeKey.

Your mileage may vary depending on your favorite airport, as LoungeKey doesn’t have a lounge in all terminals in all airports around the world. Now let’s see if N26 users outside of the U.K. will get a similar service in the future.

RightHand Robotics announced a $23 million Series B this week. That brings the pick and place robotic arm manufacturer’s total funding up to around $34 million, including last year’s $8 million Series A.

The robotics startup has impressed investors with the dexterity and speed of its robotic picking system, having recruited some big VC names along the way. This latest round is led by Menlo Ventures, along with investments from GV (nee Google Ventures) joining the likes of existing investors Playground Global, Dream Incubator and Matrix partners.

Picking and placing has been a difficult robotics problem and one that’s only become more pronounced with the growth of fulfillment centers from the likes of Amazon. The online mega-retailer purchased logistics robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million back in 2012, and has been rumored to be working on its own pick and place system.

As part of this round, former Kiva CEO Mick Mountz will be joining RightHand’s board of directors. “RightHand is picking up where we left off,” he said in a press release tied to the news. “Customers saw products coming directly to operators for picking and packing and would ask: ‘Why don’t you also automate this step with a robotic arm and gripper?’ But that was a difficult problem that we knew would require years of research and technical breakthroughs.”

RightHand will be using the funding to build out its technical and business teams.

Matthew Sappern: There are a lot of people who feel that artificial intelligence and machine learning is much further along than it really is. There is so much data out there right now. I think...

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B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a “social finance” app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in seed-round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social wants to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social interactions.

As it exists today, the B-Social app and accompanying card enables users to have control over everyday spending, track expenditures and create groups between friends to split bills and record settlements. It’s currently in the hands of a limited number of beta testers, spanning employees, investors, friends and family, with plans for a wider U.K. launch in February next year.

“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed tells me. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world.”

The idea was born in part out of Valimahomed’s own frustrations and is informed by his belief that individuals are often a bank themselves, lending and borrowing to friends and family by making shared purchases and then getting paid back.

“A simple example might be that you pay for flights for two or more people and then get paid back individually,” he says. “For multiple transactions, this becomes complex, often resulting in the trip organiser having to create a spreadsheet to work out what people owe across multiple transactions.”

To simplify this problem, B-Social wants to let you to make purchases with your card, which are flagged as an expense on behalf of a group of individuals. From here the bank to be will enable all members of a group — and where groups can be ad hoc and temporary or more long-term — to continuously see who is owed how much and to get paid back easily within the app and record settlements.

Dubbing this future proposition as the seeds of a “social bank,” the B-Social CEO cites competitors as traditional high-street banks that currently dominate the U.K. consumer market (the so-called big 5 have around 87 percent market share in the U.K.).

“We are aiming at winning a part of their market share by targeting customers looking for a bank as social as they are that offers a unique digital experience in order to help change the banking ecosystem forever,” Valimahomed tells me, although he also concedes that challengers such as Monzo, N26, Starling and Revolut have also built some basic social features into their apps.

“Our entire technology and product focus is to build a bank from scratch through a social lens,” he says.

The ride-hailing giant Careem is now in the delivery business as the company seeks new verticals in its ever-increasing fight against other services in the Middle East, including Uber. Starting with food delivery in Dhabi and Jeddah, the company sees the delivery service, called Careem Now, expanding to pharmaceuticals. according to a report by Reuters. Careem is investing more than $150 million into the service.

“We believe the opportunity for deliveries in the region is even bigger than ride-hailing,” chief executive and co-founder Mudassir Sheikha told Reuters. “It is going to become a very significant part of Careem over time.”

Careem Now will operate independently from its ride-hailing business. It will have its own app and Careem is building the service as a dedicated call center.

This comes as the company is trying to close a $500 million funding round. Back in October, it announced it had already raised $200 million from existing investors. Prior to this announcement, rumors were swirling that several companies, including Didi Chuxing, could acquire Careem.

The constant strikes at both Ola and Uber following a cut in driver incentives have taken a toll on their growth. Ola and Uber together grew just 20% to 3.5 million rides per day in 2018 across all...

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K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures — all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.

“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so — where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache versus other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”

K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.

Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years — compiled from doctors’ notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data — K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis. 

With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or, what Bloch calls “Dr. Google,” which often produce broad, downright frightening and inaccurate diagnoses. 

Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians

In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.

K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and, in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation. 

Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1,000 people in the U.S., primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.

K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases, where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.

The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.

With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising, with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.

Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes

With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.

Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.

The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy co-pays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.

Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps — such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.

The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-10 years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.

By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.

This conversation delves into the personalized learning design system space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Smart Sparrow to our readership. Dror Ben Naim: I’m the...

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