For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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Corvus Insurance, a two-year-old, Boston-based insurance company that uses data across more than 50 criteria to predict and prevent losses for its corporate customers in the food and pharmaceutical industries, has attracted $10 million in funding from .406 Ventures and Hudson Structured, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures.

The company had previously raised $4 million seed funding led by Bain.

It’s an interesting company. Much of the data it extracts comes from Internet of Things sensors that can be used to predict the likelihood of a claim, including pressure on a roof owing to the weight of snow, for example. But it also relies on other data from all around, including videos, mobile phones and social media and turns them into tools for risk management.

Founder Philip Edmundson is a veteran of the insurance industry, having previously founded and sold a brokerage business in 2015. As he told the outlet Business Insurance earlier this year, he jumped back into the business after spying a fresh opportunity to focus not on getting rid of the middleman — which is the objective of many insurtech startups — but instead on the claims piece of the insurance business, which consumes far more of each dollar spent in the industry.

When it comes to shipping, for example, he’d said that if a company has a claim or multiple claims around food spoilage with a certain shipper or region, similar instances can be avoided by planning around those situations with recommendations from Corvus . (An agreement between Corvus and one of the largest temperature sensor companies in the world, Sensitech, certainly helps on this front.)

The company is focused for now on the food and pharmaceutical industries because both use sensors everywhere — on vehicles, machines, HVAC systems — for insurance and for regulatory reasons. But presumably, if it can prove its use case, it will expand its target market over time.

In the meantime, it’s part of a fast-growing, and increasingly crowded, landscape. As of last month, global fundraising for insurtech startups surpassed the volume reached in all of 2017, according to advisory firm Hampleton Partners’ latest insurtech M&A market report, which says 204 deals had been closed as of October, compared with 202 last year and 174 in 2016. All told, investors plugged $2.6 billion into those 204 deals — nearly the $2.7 billion that was plugged into insurtech startups in 2015.

Apparently all of those deals are leading to a lot of dealmaking, too. According to the report, the insurtech sector has seen 151 acquisitions since 2016, including by legacy players, as well as private equity firms.

Note: An earlier version of this story relied on an SEC filing that showed Corvus had raised $8 million but was targeting $10 million. Since publishing, Corvus has shared information about its completed financing, including its new backers.

Walking into the office of Viktor Prokopenya — which overlooks a central London park — you would perhaps be forgiven for missing the significance of this unassuming location, just south of Victoria Station in London. While giant firms battle globally to make augmented reality a “real industry,” this jovial businessman from Belarus is poised to launch a revolutionary new technology for just this space. This is the kind of technology some of the biggest companies in the world are snapping up right now, and yet, scuttling off to make me a coffee in the kitchen is someone who could be sitting on just such a company.

Regardless of whether its immediate future is obvious or not, AR has a future if the amount of investment pouring into the space is anything to go by.

In 2016 AR and VR attracted $2.3 billion worth of investments (a 300 percent jump from 2015) and is expected to reach $108 billion by 2021 — 25 percent of which will be aimed at the AR sector. But, according to numerous forecasts, AR will overtake VR in 5-10 years.

Apple is clearly making headway in its AR developments, having recently acquired AR lens company Akonia Holographics and in releasing iOS 12 this month, it enables developers to fully utilize ARKit 2, no doubt prompting the release of a new wave of camera-centric apps. This year Sequoia Capital China, SoftBank invested $50 million in AR camera app Snow. Samsung recently introduced its version of the AR cloud and a partnership with Wacom that turns Samsung’s S-Pen into an augmented reality magic wand.

The IBM/Unity partnership allows developers to integrate into their Unity applications Watson cloud services such as visual recognition, speech to text and more.

So there is no question that AR is becoming increasingly important, given the sheer amount of funding and M&A activity.

Joining the field is Prokopenya’s “Banuba” project. For although you can download a Snapchat-like app called “Banuba” from the App Store right now, underlying this is a suite of tools of which Prokopenya is the founding investor, and who is working closely to realize a very big vision with the founding team of AI/AR experts behind it.

The key to Banuba’s pitch is the idea that its technology could equip not only apps but even hardware devices with “vision.” This is a perfect marriage of both AI and AR. What if, for instance, Amazon’s Alexa couldn’t just hear you? What if it could see you and interpret your facial expressions or perhaps even your mood? That’s the tantalizing strategy at the heart of this growing company.

Better known for its consumer apps, which have been effectively testing their concepts in the consumer field for the last year, Banuba is about to move heavily into the world of developer tools with the release of its new Banuba 3.0 mobile SDK. (Available to download now in the App Store for iOS devices and Google Play Store for Android.) It’s also now secured a further $7 million in funding from Larnabel Ventures, the fund of Russian entrepreneur Said Gutseriev, and Prokopenya’s VP Capital.

This move will take its total funding to $12 million. In the world of AR, this is like a Romulan warbird de-cloaking in a scene from Star Trek.

Banuba hopes that its SDK will enable brands and apps to utilise 3D Face AR inside their own apps, meaning users can benefit from cutting-edge face motion tracking, facial analysis, skin smoothing and tone adjustment. Banuba’s SDK also enables app developers to utilise background subtraction, which is similar to “green screen” technology regularly used in movies and TV shows, enabling end-users to create a range of AR scenarios. Thus, like magic, you can remove that unsightly office surrounding and place yourself on a beach in the Bahamas…

Because Banuba’s technology equips devices with “vision,” meaning they can “see” human faces in 3D and extract meaningful subject analysis based on neural networks, including age and gender, it can do things that other apps just cannot do. It can even monitor your heart rate via spectral analysis of the time-varying color tones in your face.

It has already been incorporated into an app called Facemetrix, which can track a child’s eyes to ascertain whether they are reading something on a phone or tablet or not. Thanks to this technology, it is possible to not just “track” a person’s gaze, but also to control a smartphone’s function with a gaze. To that end, the SDK can detect micro-movements of the eye with subpixel accuracy in real time, and also detects certain points of the eye. The idea behind this is to “Gamify education,” rewarding a child with games and entertainment apps if the Facemetrix app has duly checked that they really did read the e-book they told their parents they’d read.

If that makes you think of a parallel with a certain Black Mirror episode where a young girl is prevented from seeing certain things via a brain implant, then you wouldn’t be a million miles away. At least this is a more benign version…

Banuba’s SDK also includes “Avatar AR,” empowering developers to get creative with digital communication by giving users the ability to interact with — and create personalized — avatars using any iOS or Android device.Prokopenya says: “We are in the midst of a critical transformation between our existing smartphones and future of AR devices, such as advanced glasses and lenses. Camera-centric apps have never been more important because of this.” He says that while developers using ARKit and ARCore are able to build experiences primarily for top-of-the-range smartphones, Banuba’s SDK can work on even low-range smartphones.

The SDK will also feature Avatar AR, which allows users to interact with fun avatars or create personalised ones for all iOS and Android devices. Why should users of Apple’s iPhone X be the only people to enjoy Animoji?

Banuba is also likely to take advantage of the news that Facebook recently announced it was testing AR ads in its newsfeed, following trials for businesses to show off products within Messenger.

Banuba’s technology won’t simply be for fun apps, however. Inside two years, the company has filed 25 patent applications with the U.S. patent office, and of six of those were processed in record time compared with the average. Its R&D center, staffed by 50 people and based in Minsk, is focused on developing a portfolio of technologies.

Interestingly, Belarus has become famous for AI and facial recognition technologies.

For instance, cast your mind back to early 2016, when Facebook bought Masquerade, a Minsk-based developer of a video filter app, MSQRD, which at one point was one of the most popular apps in the App Store. And in 2017, another Belarusian company, AIMatter, was acquired by Google, only months after raising $2 million. It too took an SDK approach, releasing a platform for real-time photo and video editing on mobile, dubbed Fabby. This was built upon a neural network-based AI platform. But Prokopenya has much bolder plans for Banuba.

In early 2017, he and Banuba launched a “technology-for-equity” program to enroll app developers and publishers across the world. This signed up Inventain, another startup from Belarus, to develop AR-based mobile games.

Prokopenya says the technologies associated with AR will be “leveraged by virtually every kind of app. Any app can recognize its user through the camera: male or female, age, ethnicity, level of stress, etc.” He says the app could then respond to the user in any number of ways. Literally, your apps could be watching you.

So, for instance, a fitness app could see how much weight you’d lost just by using the Banuba SDK to look at your face. Games apps could personalize the game based on what it knows about your face, such as reading your facial cues.

Back in his London office, overlooking a small park, Prokopenya waxes lyrical about the “incredible concentration of diversity, energy and opportunity” of London. “Living in London is fantastic,” he says. “The only thing I am upset about, however, is the uncertainty surrounding Brexit and what it might mean for business in the U.K. in the future.”

London may be great (and will always be), but sitting on his desk is a laptop with direct links back to Minsk, a place where the facial recognition technologies of the future are only now just emerging.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Miriam Rivera was recorded in October 2018. Miriam...

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Airbnb has completed a much-needed hire ahead of its rumored 2019 initial public offering.

The hospitality giant has brought on as its chief financial officer Dave Stephenson, a long-time Amazon vice president and former president of Big Fish Games. Stephenson replaces the company’s head of global financial planning and analysis, Ellie Mertz, who served as interim head of finance as Airbnb searched for its replacement for former CFO Laurence Tosi.

Mertz has been promoted to VP of finance.

Tosi, who had previously led finance at The Blackstone Group, left Airbnb in February to focus on his investment firm, Weston Capital Partners, amid a report from The Information that he and Airbnb co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky had disagreed over “how to balance the financial stability needed to go public.” The Wall Street veteran was focused on financial discipline, while Chesky wanted to invest in innovation and “areas that might not yield profits for a while.”

Tosi was credited with leading the company to profitability quicker than many of its fellow technology “unicorns.” Airbnb says it’s profitable on an EBITDA basis and cash flow positive with a $5.5 billion balance sheet. It reportedly recorded upwards of $3 billion in revenue in 2017.

Stephenson joined Amazon in 1999 and ended his tenure at the e-commerce powerhouse as the vice president and CFO of its worldwide consumer business. He left Amazon for a brief stint between 2011 and 2013 to head up the Seattle-based game developer Big Fish Games.

“In the years ahead, [Stephenson] will be Airbnb’s quarterback for long-term growth, driving us to be even more efficient and leverage what makes Airbnb unique to create new businesses and continue to expand,” Chesky wrote in a blog post this morning.

Stephenson is the second Amazon executive to jump ship to San Francisco-based Airbnb this year. He follows Amazon’s former VP of Prime & Delivery Experience Greg Greeley, who was hired as the home-sharing company’s president of homes in March. Greeley similarly spent nearly two decades under Jeff Bezos and was credited with helping build Amazon Prime, as well as Amazon’s European business.

The well-funded company now employs more than 4,000 and boasts a $31 billion valuation — making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Since it was founded by Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2008, it’s raised $4.4 billion in venture capital funding, most recently securing a $1 billion Series F from Capital G, TCV, Temasek, Bracket Capital and others.

Airbnb is expected to bring liquidity to its investors via a highly anticipated IPO as soon as June 30, 2019. It will likely chase Uber to the public markets, giving 2019 two of the largest IPOs of the decade.

Uber, in a similar fashion, recently hired a CFO, too — a role crucial for any company eyeing an IPO. The ride-hailing businesses’ choice was Nelson J. Chai, the former CEO of insurance and warranty provider Warranty Group.

According to the FY18 Economic Survey, India’s logistics industry is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 10.5% from $160 billion in 2018 to $215 billion by 2020. Indian...

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We have done several spotlight posts on entrepreneurship in different parts of the world: Colorado, Utah, Czech Republic, Florida, Illinois. Today, we will look at Arizona’s entrepreneurship...

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Hope all of you had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend! This feature from The New York Times compiles this year’s notable fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times...

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By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis draws from her extensive experience as a serial...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Sramana Mitra: If you start with the intent of doing that, that addresses some of those issues. My last question is, you have talked about Checkpoint at the beginning. Checkpoint is a relatively...

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Meet Upflow a French startup that wants to help you deal with your outstanding invoices — the company first started at eFounders. If you’re running a small business, chances are you’re either wasting a ton of time or a ton of money on accounts receivable.

Most companies currently manage invoices using Excel spreadsheets, outdated banking interfaces and unnecessary conversations. Every time somebody signs a deal, they generate an invoice and file it in a spreadsheet somewhere.

Some companies will pay a few days later. But let’s be honest. Too many companies wait 30 days, 40 days or even more before even thinking about paying past due invoices. You end up sending emails, calling your clients and wasting a ton of time just collecting money. You might even feel bad about asking for money even though you already signed a deal.

In France, most companies use bank transfers to pay invoices. But business banking APIs are not there yet. It means that you have to log in to a slow banking website every day to check if somebody paid you. You can then tick a box in an Excel spreadsheet.

If everything I described resonates with you, Upflow wants to manage your invoices for you. It doesn’t replace your bank account, it doesn’t generate invoices for you. It integrates seamlessly with your existing workflow.

After signing up, you can send invoices to your client and cc Upflow in your email thread. Upflow then uses optical character recognition and automatically detects relevant data — the customer name, the amount, the due date, etc.

You can view all your outstanding invoices in Upflow’s interface to see where you stand. The service gives you a list of actionable tasks to get your money. For instance, Upflow tells you if you have overdue payments and tells you to contact your client again.

You can set up different rules depending on your clients. For instance, if you have many small clients, you can automate some of those messages. But if you only work with a handful of clients, you want to make sure that somebody has manually reviewed each message before Upflow sends them.

By default, you write your emails in Upflow so that your other team members can see what happened. You can browse invoices by client to see if somebody has multiple unpaid invoices. Upflow lets you assign actions to a particular team member if they’re more familiar with this specific client.

But all of this is just one part of the product. Upflow also generates banking information with the help of Treezor. This way, you can put your Upflow banking information on your invoices.

When a customer pays you, Upflow automatically matches invoices with incoming payments. This feature alone lets you save a ton of time. The startup transfers money back to your company’s bank account every day.

Upflow co-founder and CEO Alexandre Louisy drew me the following chart when we met. It’s probably easier to understand after reading my explanations:

In other words, Upflow has created a brick that sits between your company’s back office and your customers. Eventually, you could imagine more services built on top of this brick as Upflow is learning many things on your company.

According to Louisy, small and medium companies really need this kind of product — and not necessarily tech companies. Those companies don’t have a lot of money on their bank accounts, don’t have a big staff and need to save as much time as possible.

Now let’s see if it’s easy to sell a software-as-a-service solution to a family business that has been around for decades.

Meet BlueCargo, a logistics startup focused on seaport terminals. The company was part of Y Combinator’s latest batch and recently raised a $3 million funding round from 1984 Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, Sound Ventures, Kima Ventures and others.

If you picture a terminal, chances are you see huge piles of containers. But current sorting methods are not efficient at all. Yard cranes end up moving a ton of containers just to reach a container sitting at the bottom of the pile.

BlueCargo wants to optimize those movements by helping you store containers at the right spot. The first container that is going to leave the terminal is going to be at the top of the pile.

“Terminals spend a lot of time making unproductive or undesired movements,” co-founder and CEO Alexandra Griffon told me. “And yet, terminals only generate revenue every time they unload or load a container.”

Right now, ERP-like solutions only manage containers according to a handful of business rules that don’t take into account the timeline of a container. Empty containers are all stored in one area, containers with dangerous goods are in another area, etc.

The startup leverages as much data as possible on each container — where it’s coming from, the type of container, if it’s full or empty, the cargo ship that carried it, the time of the year and more.

Every time BlueCargo works with a new terminal, the startup collects past data and processes it to create a model. The team can then predict how BlueCargo can optimize the terminal.

“At Saint-Nazaire, we could save 22 percent on container shifting,” Griffon told me.

The company will test its solution in Saint-Nazaire in December. It integrates directly with existing ERP solutions. Cranes already scan container identification numbers. BlueCargo could then instantly push relevant information to crane operators so that they know where to put down a container.

Saint-Nazaire is a relatively small port compared to the biggest European ports. But the company is already talking with terminals in Long Beach, one of the largest container ports in the U.S.

BlueCargo also knows that it needs to tread carefully — many companies already promised magical IT solutions in the past. But it hasn’t changed much in seaports.

That’s why the startup wants to be as seamless as possible. It only charges fees based on shifting savings — 30 percent of what it would have cost you with the old model. And it doesn’t want to alter workflows for people working at terminals — it’s like an invisible crane that helps you work faster.

There are six dominant players managing terminals around the world. If BlueCargo can convince those companies to work with the startup, it would represent a good business opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: You invest in both healthcare IT and cybersecurity and your partners invest more in the life sciences angle of it. Dafina Toncheva: Correct. I actually invest in cybersecurity and...

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Krishna Srinivasan is Founding General Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, a firm focused on investing in Texas. Great conversation!

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I barely slept my second night at Chunking Mansions. The loud neighbors, the hot Hong Kong air, the landlord banging on the door after midnight: None of these things are particularly conducive to a peaceful rest, and for once in my life I actually looked forward to attempts at shut eye on the 15-plus hour flight home in the morning.

For all the dread of returning to the notorious Hong Kong hostiles that evening, after a day of exploring the area, I was actually looking forward to strapping Silentmode’s PowerMask to my head — closing my eyes and embracing the luxury of forgetting where I was for a few precious minutes.

I’d tried this weird thing earlier in the day, in the middle of the Brinc accelerator’s well-lit meeting room. The whole thing was oddly soothing, if fairly awkward — a big, foam black-out mask with headphones embedded on either side. Probably not the sort of thing you want to wear out in the open, though Lucas Matney happily modeled it above — because we clearly don’t have enough pictures of our in-house VR guy wearing weird crap on his head over at TechCrunch.com.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the minute or two I spent with the mask on, wondering if this is how pet parrots feel when you cover their cages with a blanket for the night. Maybe that’s just the jet lag talking.

It’s a momentary respite from the cloying terrors of the world, a way to briefly trick our overactive brains into thinking, yeah, sure, everything is just fine with some New Age music, breathing exercises and, most importantly, just complete and utter darkness.

I’m a sucker for this stuff. I have the Calm app on my phone and started getting pretty into the Muse headset before leaving for my two-week trip. I’ve shared the fact that I’m a bad and anxious meditator plenty of times before on these pages, but find even my failed attempts to be useful.

Someone described the PowerMask as a kind of small-scale take on a sensory deprivation tank, and sure, why not? I’ve had worse nights.

A bit of a wrinkle in all of this: it isn’t a sleep device, exactly. Or at least the company isn’t branding it as such. Initially pitched as a “Power Nap” product, there does appear to be some in-house confusion with regard to how exactly to position the product. Certainly the startup wants to distinguish itself from the 8 million connected sleep masks I see at tech events, particularly when traveling in Asia.

The company surprisingly doesn’t discuss current zeitgeisty startup phrases like meditation or mindfulness, either.

“We are on a much bigger mission to train the world in the art of relaxation,” co-founder Bradley Young writes in a followup email. The company’s site is far less subtle, with language rarely heard outside of supplement ads. “Reach peak state,” it writes in bold all caps font, “become a peak human.” I mean, sure, why not?

That last bit of hyperbole is courtesy of the company’s focus on something called CVT (Cardiac Vagal Tone). Silentmode claims the device can be used to help us normal folk achieve the resting heart rate of an athlete. Look, here’s a graph:

I won’t go too deep into that stuff here, because frankly, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Though I can see how buying some blackout curtains for your head b/w “psychoacoustic and therapeutic sonic experiences” could go a ways toward helping one chill the eff out. It did bring a momentary and much needed respite from my vaguely horrific lodging experiences.

Despite the company’s move away from sleep talk, it also went a ways toward helping me crash on this flight. The music is soothing, and while the padded headset isn’t a pillow exactly, it’s a lot more comfortable than just leaning your head on the seat in front of you. Assuming you can get over the awkwardness of wearing a giant thing on your head. Of course, no one looks good sleeping on a plane, weird head accessory or no.

At $199, it’s not cheap. And the company plans to offer premium audio through an additional app subscription. Silentmode is also working with some large companies to pilot these products in office spaces where relaxation is a rare commodity, indeed.

It took all of 14 minutes for the Soundbrenner Core to hit full funding. Not too shabby. Last week, the wearable maker closed out its campaign with more than 10x its $50,000 goal. A few days later, we sat down with the startup at the headquarters of Hong Kong-based accelerator, Brinc.

Soundbrenner has already made a bit of a name for itself with Pulse. The connected, wrist-worn device brought some clever innovation to the metronome, that old familiar piano-mounted accessory long banished to the dustiest corners of the music shop. The wearable offers haptic feedback that can be synced across an entire band to keep everyone on the beat. The company sold 60,000 of the things.

Admittedly, simplicity is one of the best things the product has going for it, but Soundbrenner figured it could take things a bit further — and apparently 2,477 Kickstarter backers agreed. The Core (which can be pre-ordered through the a separate Indiegogo page), is being positioned as a “4-in-1 tool.”

First is the vibrating metronome, which allows up to five musicians to sync to a beat, via feedback that’s around 7x that of a standard smartwatch. Wearers can also tap the screen to create a manual beat.

The most introducing bit here is probably the modularity (which arrives, fittingly, around the time the company started receiving mentorship from Mistfit co-founder Sonny Vu). The magnetic display snaps off and attaches to a guitar tuning pegs, where it can test tuning via vibration. There’s also a built-in decibel meter and some standard push notifications — though it’s far from full smartwatch functionality, which is probably for the best.

The Core is smaller than its predecessor, but it’s not small, exactly. The company says this was intentional, at least in part, as these devices have become a kind of calling card among musicians. Beats a secret handshake, I guess.

Berlin-based Zizoo — a startup which self describes as booking.com for boats — has nabbed a €6.5 million (~$7.4M) Series A to help more millennials find holiday yachts to mess about taking selfies in.

Zizoo says its Series A — which was led by Revo Capital, with participation from new investors including Coparion, Check24 Ventures and PUSH Ventures — was “significantly oversubscribed”.

Existing investors including MairDumont Ventures, aws Founders Fund, Axel Springer Digital Ventures and Russmedia International also participated in the round.

We first came across Zizoo some three years ago when they won our pitching competition in Budapest.

We’re happy to say they’ve come a long way since, with a team that’s now 60-people strong, and business relationships with ~1,500 charter companies — serving up more than 21,000 boats for rent, across 30 countries, via a search and book platform that caters to a full range of “sailing experiences”, from experienced sailor to novice and, on the pricing front, luxury to budget.

Registered users passed the 100,000 mark this year, according to founder and CEO Anna Banicevic. She also tells us that revenue growth has been 2.5x year-on-year for the past three years.

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Revo Capital’s managing director Cenk Bayrakdar said: “The yacht charter market is one of the most underserved verticals in the travel industry despite its huge potential. We believe in Zizoo’s successful future as a leading SaaS-enabled marketplace.”

The new funds will be put towards growing the business — including by expanding into new markets; plus product development and recruitment across the board.

“We’re looking to strengthen our presence in the US, where we’ve seen the biggest YoY growth while also expand our inventory in hot locations such as Greece, Spain and the Caribbean,” says Banicevic on market expansion. “We will also be aggressively pushing markets such as France and Spain where consumers show a growing interest in boat holidays.”

Zizoo is intending to hire 40 more employees over the course of the next year — to meet what it dubs “the booming demand for sailing experiences, especially among millennials”.

So why do millennials love boating holidays so much? Zizoo says the 20-40 age range makes up the “majority” of its customer.

Banicevic reckons the answer is they’re after a slice of ‘affordable luxury’.

“After the recent boom of the cruising industry, millennials are well familiar with the concept of holidays at sea. However, sailing holidays (yachting) are much more fitting to the millennial’s strive for independence, adventure and experiences off the beaten path,” she suggests.

“Yachting is a growing trend no longer reserved for the rich and famous — and millennials want a piece of that. On our platform, users can book a boat holiday for as low as £25 per person per night (this is an example of a sailboat in Croatia).”

On the competition front, she says the main competition is the offline sphere (“where 90% of business is conducted by a few large and many small travel agents”).

But a few rival platforms have emerged “in the last few years” — and here she reckons Zizoo has managed to outgrow the startup competition “thanks to our unique vertically integrated business model, offering suppliers a booking management system and making it easy for the user to book a boat holiday”.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s build on that and understand your geographical preferences. Are you investing only in Silicon Valley or are you investing more broadly? Dafina Toncheva: When it comes to...

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Wluper, the London-based tech startup building a conversational AI to power knowledge-based voice assistants, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding. Leading the round is “deep tech” VC IQ Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, Aster, and Magic Pony co-founder Dr Zehan Wang.

Founded in 2016 and originally backed by Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures, Wluper’s “conversational AI” is initially targeting navigation products with what it describes as “goal-driven dialogue” technology that is designed to have more natural conversations to help with various navigation tasks.

The ‘secret sauce’, as it were, is that Wluper believes voice assistants work much better when the underlying AI is tasked with becoming an expert in a more narrow and specialist domain.

“When we think of intelligent assistants like Alexa or Siri, the only time you’ll believe they’re really good is if they understand you properly; most of the time, they simply can’t,” says Wluper co-founder Hami Bahraynian. “It is not the speech recognition which fails. It is the missing focus and lacking reasoning of these systems, because they all can do a lot of things reasonably well, but nothing perfectly”.

Describing the goal of “general” conversation AI as one that could take 15, 20 or more years to achieve, Bahraynian says that in the interim what is needed is “intelligent agents” that are created for a certain purpose, now.

“This is exactly what we do,” he says. “We build domain-expert conversational intelligence, which does one thing, understanding everything transport-related, but that one thing perfectly”.

Furthermore, Wluper’s approach is able to make clear assumptions regarding what the user is talking about, and therefore claims to be able to understand much more complex questions and in a more natural way. This includes multi-intent queries, and follow-up questions to enable a “true” conversation, says Bahraynian.

In addition, Wluper has been conducting R&D in what comes after the “understanding” bit of the NLP pipeline, leading the startup to undergo further research on a machine’s “knowledge acquisition” capabilities, which it believes is a crucial piece of the puzzle needed to solve conversational AI.

“Even if naturally asked user queries are eventually understood correctly, extracting and providing relevant and useful information from the right places is even more challenging, and with current mostly ruled-based approaches, ultimately impossible to scale,” adds Bahraynian.

“We work on this problem by moving away from traditional handcrafted methods and work on new ways to optimise a machine’s knowledge acquisition and finding the right balance between structured and unstructured data in order to provide more meaningful results”.

Meanwhile, Wluper’s seed investment will be used to hire more engineers and research scientists to expand the startup’s research and development capabilities.