Nate Redmond: Investors including myself sat and looked at the company and didn’t quite understand the size and scope of the opportunity. Being an expert in hospitality didn’t necessarily help you....

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The artificial intelligence revolution is underway in the world of technology, but as it turns out, some of the most faithful foot soldiers are still humans. A startup called Scale, which works with a team of contractors who examine and categorise visual data to train AI systems in a two-sided marketplace model, announced that it has raised an additional $18 million in a Series B round. The aim will be to expand Scale’s business to become — in the words of CEO Alexandr Wang, the 21-year-old MIT grad who co-founded Scale with Lucy Guo — “the AWS of AI, with multiple services that help companies build AI algorithms.”

“Our mission is to accelerate the development of AI apps,” Wang said. “The first product is visual data labelling, but in the future we have a broad vision of what we hope to provide.”

Wang declined to comment on the startup’s valuation in an interview. But according to Pitchbook, which notes that this round actually closed in May of this year, the post-money valuation of Scale is now $93.50 million ($75 million pre-money).

The money comes on the back of an eventful two years since the company first launched, with revenues growing 15-fold in the last year, and “multiple millions of dollars in revenue” from individual customers. (It doesn’t disclose specific numbers, however.)

Today, Scale’s base of contractors numbers around 10,000, and it works with a plethora of businesses that are developing autonomous vehicle systems such as General Motors’ Cruise, Lyft Zoox, Nuro, Voyage, nuTonomy and Embark. These companies send Scale’s contractors raw, unlabelled data sets by way of Scale’s API, which provides services like Semantic Segmentation, Image Annotation, and Sensor Fusion, in conjunction with its clients LIDAR and RADAR data sets. In total, it says it’s annotated 200,000 “miles of data” collected by self-driving cars.

AV companies are not its only customers, though. Scale also works with several non-automotive companies like Airbnb and Pinterest, to help build their AI-based visual search and recommendation systems. Airbnb, for example, is looking for more ways of being able to ascertain what kinds of homes repeat customers like and don’t like, and also to start to provide other ways of discovering places to stay that are based not just on location and number of bedrooms (which becomes more important especially in cities where you may have too many choices and want a selection more focused on what you are more likely to rent).

This latest funding round was led by Index, with existing investors Accel and Y Combinator (where Scale was incubated), also participated in this Series B, along with some notable, new individual investors such as Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Justin Kan (two YC alums themselves who have been regular investors in other YC companies). This latest round brings the total raised by Scale to $22.7 million.

When Scale first made its debut in July 2016 as part of YC’s summer cohort, the company presented itself as a more intelligent alternative to Mechanical Turk, specifically to address the demands of artificial intelligence systems that needed more interaction and nuanced responses than the typical microtask asked of a Turker.

“We’re honing in on AI broadly,” Wang said. “Our goal is to be a pick axe in the AI goldrush.”

Early efforts covered a wide spread of applications — categorization/content moderation, comparison, transcription, and phone calling as some examples. But more recently the company has seen a particular interest from self-driving car companies, and specifically the ability to look at, understand and categorise images of what might appear on a road with the kind of recognition that only a human can provide for training purposes. For example, to be able to identify a scooter versus a wagon, a piece of asphalt or an article of granite-colored clothing on a person that could potentially look like asphalt to an unsuspecting camera, or whatever.

“This sub-segment of AI, autonomous vehicles, really took off after we launched, and that segment has been the killer use case for us,” Wang said.

My experience in talking with autonomous car companies and those who work with them has been that many of them are extremely guarded about their data, so much so that there are entire companies being built to help manage this IP standoff so that no one has to share what they know, but they can still benefit from each other.

Wang says that the same holds for Scale’s clients, and part of its unique selling point is that it not only provides data identification services but does so with the assurance that its systems retain none of that data for its own or other companies’ purposes.

“We don’t share across different silos and are very clear about that,” Wang said. “These companies are very sensitive, as are all AI companies about their data and where it goes, and we’ve been able to gain trust as a partner because will not share or sell data to any other parties.”

Scale uses AI itself to help select contractors. “We have built a bunch of algorithms and AI to vet and train contractors,” Wang said. In the training, “we provide feedback and determine if they are getting good enough to do the work, and in terms of ensuring the quality of their work, our algorithms go through what they are doing and verify the work against our models, too. There are a lot of algorithms.”

For clients who are calling in data from the public web — for example Pinterest or Airbnb — Scale uses a broader contractor pool that could include stay-at-home moms, students or others looking for extra money.

For clients who are sensitive about the data that’s being analysed — such as the car companies — the conditions are more restricted, and sometimes include centres where Scale controls the machines that are being used as well as how the data sets can be viewed.

This is one reason why Scale isn’t simply focused on growing the numbers of contractors as its only route for growing business. “We’ve noticed that when you have people who spend more time on this they do better work,” Wang said.

Wang said the Series B funding will be used to expand the kind of work Scale does for existing customers in the area of visual data analysis, as well as to gradually add in other categories of data, such as text.

“Our first goal is to improve algorithms for customers today,” he said. “There is no limit to how accurate they want to make their systems, and they need to be constantly feeding their AI with more data. All of our customers have this, and it’s an evergreen problem.”

The second is to diversify more outside driving and the visual data set, he said. “Right now, so much of the success has been in processing imagery and robotics or other perception challenges, but we really want to be the fabric of the AI world for new applications, including text or audio. That is another use of funds to expand to those areas.”

“Fabric” is the operative word, it seems: “Scale has the potential to become the fabric that connects and powers the Artificial Intelligence world,” said Mike Volpi, General Partner, Index Ventures, in a statement. “For autonomous vehicles in particular, Scale is well-positioned to take over an emerging field of data annotation regardless of which players ultimately come out on top. Alex…has recruited a highly talented and technical team to tackle this challenge and their progress is evident in the marquee list of customers they’ve won in such a short amount of time.”

Chinese AI startup Tianrang has raised a $26 million (RMB180 million) funding round from China’s Gaorong Capital and co-lead CMB International Capital. Other investors included Ziniu Fund and Chinese fintech company Wacai. In 2016, the company raised an angel round led by Gaorong Capital and participated in by Shanghai Jindi Investment Management Ltd.

Based on deep learning and other AI technology, Tianrang provides data analysis and smart solutions for enterprises. It was founded by in 2016 by Xu Guirong, former director of Alibaba’s Ali Cloud and chief scientist at Alibaba’s cloud platform Alimama. So no slouch on the AI front.

Tianrang claims to be able to automatically collect and analyze marketing trends and purchase-related information on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, allowing vendors to make better marketing decisions.

Wang Hongbo, chief investment officer at CMB International Capital says: “With algorithm and AI, Tianrang lowers the requirement of complex machine decision-making and makes it accessible and scalable for commercial use.”

Tianrang also plans to set up a project to apply machine learning to the urban development of cities, led by Jessie Li, a professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology of Pennsylvania State University.

Our body is continuously storing and consuming energy to keep us alive — but understanding which fuels are being used and why is the Holy Grail of things like weight loss and body hacking. Today’s weight-loss market is saturated with generic products because — guess what — trying to tailor-make a solution for an individual is usually hard and expensive.

For a while now there’s been a technology around which can measure the metabolic gases found in your breath. The theory goes that if you can do that, everyone can work out what they should be eating and when. A few startups have tried, but nothing really took off. Now a new startup is having a crack and has secured significant funding to go for it.

Lumen is a pocket-sized device that measures the gases in your breath and translates that reading via an app into advice that gives you daily personalized meal plans.

As I said, this technology was tried by a startup called PATH Breath+Band, which had a similar device in 2016, but which didn’t take off.

The difference with Lumen is that it’s raised a decent war chest, as well as blowing up on Indiegogo.

It’s now raised a total of $7 million over the past four and a half years, from a host of investors. These include Disruptive VC, Oren Zeev, Red Swan Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Gigi Levy, Sir Ronald Cohen, Avishai Abrahami (Wix Founder) and RiverPark Funds. As part of that funding it’s also – in the last few days – raised more than $1 million on Indiegogo.

The founders are Merav Mor, a doctor of physiology (PhD) and cell biology and her twin sister, Michal Mor, also a doctor of physiology (PhD) and cell biology. CEO Daniel Tal is also a co-founder and also founded Wibiya, which was acquired by Conduit. It probably doesn’t hurt that the renowned Frog design helped in the, well, design.

As endurance athletes, the Mors began researching if there was a way for them to understand the impact of their nutrition and workouts on their bodies to improve their athletic performance. They came across a metabolic measurement called RQ (Respiratory Quotient), which is the gold standard for measuring the metabolic fuel usage of an individual. Top-performing athletes have been using this measurement for years, but the methods for measuring it are invasive (blood test), lengthy (1+ hour in metabolic chambers) and expensive (upwards of a few hundred dollars).

After four years of research and development they developed Lumen, with the ability to measure an individual’s RQ in one breath. What once took over an hour to measure, and a team of nutritionists and scientists to analyze, can now be done in less than three minutes. Michal and Merav’s technology is patent-pending.

So far Lumen says more than 300 beta users have lost an average of 6.8 lbs within the first 30 days of using the device.

Now, they do have competitors. These include Habit, which does pre-packaged personalized meals; Breezing, a technology that requires three minutes of continual breathing and the purchase of new cartridges with every measurement ($5); and Levl, which is a small home-lab setup that measures metabolism and ketosis and costs between $100-150/month. Then there is Ketonix, a computer-connected device that will only provide data on fat burn for users on a strict ketogenic diet.

But with Lumen you just buy the device and the app is free. No cartridges, filters or replacements.

All in all it’s quite a compelling proposition, so it will be interesting to see if Lumen can succeed where others have failed.

InVision continues its slow march toward design world domination, today announcing the hire of Mike Davidson who will take over as Head of Partnerships and Community.

Davidson was previously the VP of Design at Twitter, where he built a 100-person team that was responsible for every aspect of Twitter’s user experience and branding, including web, mobile web, native apps and business tools.

Before Twitter, Davidson worked at ESPN/Disney until 2005, when he founded NewsVine, which was purchased by NBCNews in 2007. Davidson then took on a vice president roll for five years before starting at Twitter.

At InVision, Davidson will oversee partnerships, product integrations, strategic acquisitions and community building. This includes leading InVision’s Design Leadership Forum, which hosts private events for design leaders from big companies like Facebook, Google, Lyft, Disney, etc. Davidson will also work with the new Design Transformation team at InVision to help create educational experiences for InVision’s customers.

Davidson says he plans to spend the next 30 to 60 days talking as little as possible, and listening to the feedback he hears from his team around what can be improved.

“InVision has a seamless workflow that includes everyone in the company in the design process,” said Davidson. “If there’s one goal I’d like to realize, it’s that. Design is a team sport these days, which wasn’t the case 10 or 20 years ago.”

In Davidson’s own words, the position at InVision is “less about business to business and more about designer to designer.” Davidson will be meeting predominantly with the design teams from various companies to discuss not only how InVision can help them build better experiences, but how InVision can incorporate those design teams’ personalities into the product.

InVision was built on the premise that the screen is the most important place in the world, considering that every brand and company is now building digital experiences across the web and through mobile applications. CEO Clark Valberg hopes to turn InVision into the Salesforce of design, and partnerships, acquisitions and product integrations are absolutely vital to that.

“We couldn’t be more excited to have an authentic leader like Mike step into this role to help us further build out our design community — which is as important to us as our product — and to help drive design maturity inside of every organization,” said Valberg. “Digital product design is shaping every industry in the world, and as the leader in the space, we see it as our responsibility to support and foster community and advanced education.”

This discussion delves into the depths of the decade-long evolution of the DevOps space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well Quali. Lior Koriat: I am the CEO of...

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In Don Burnette and Paz Eshel’s view, trucking is the killer app for self-driving technology.

It’s what led Burnette to leave the Google self-driving project and co-found Otto in early 2016, along with Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Claire Delaunay.

And it’s what would eventually prompt Burnette to leave Uber — the company that acquired Otto — and co-found with former venture capitalist Eshel a new driverless-trucks startup called Kodiak Robotics.

“It was no secret that Uber was primarily focused on the car project and 80 to 90 percent of my time was focused on the car project,” Burnette told TechCrunch. “But I still felt that trucking was the killer app for self-driving. I still believe that. I wanted to focus 100 percent of my time on trucking.”

Now he and Eshel can. Kodiak Robotics, which was founded in April, is coming out of stealth loaded up with venture capital.

Kodiak Robotics announced Tuesday it has raised $40 million in Series A financing led by Battery Ventures. CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tusk Ventures also participated in the round. Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Kodiak’s board.

Kodiak Robotics will use the funds to expand its team and for product development. The company has about 10 employees, according to Eshel, who was a vice president at Battery Ventures, where he led the firm’s autonomous-vehicle investment project.

Burnette noted the core engineering team — many of whom have experience in shipping self-driving vehicles on public roads — has been assembled.

The pair weren’t ready to discuss the company’s go-to-market strategy. They did share the basic vision though: use self-driving technology to ease the current strain on the freight market.

The trucking industry is a primary driver of the U.S. economy. Trucks moved more than 70 percent of all U.S. freight and generated $719 billion in revenue in 2017, according to the American Trucking Association. Meanwhile, “full-truckload, over-the-road nonlocal drivers,” a term used to describe drivers who haul goods over long distances, are in short supply. This long-haul sector, which employs about 500,000, was short 51,000 truck drivers last year — up from a shortage of 36,000 in 2016.

Burnette and Eshel see an opportunity for driverless trucks to help close that gap.

“We believe self-driving trucks will likely be the first autonomous vehicles to support a viable business model, and we are proud to have the support of such high-profile investors to help us execute on our plan,” Burnette said.

They also revealed the company’s technical approach.

Kodiak Robotics plans to use light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR as well as camera, radar and sonar technologies. “Pretty much everything you can imagine self-driving cars using in a comprehensive sensor fusion type system,” Burnette said.

Engineers will focus on developing the full self-driving system stack from the company’s own hardware and software architectures. However, Kodiak Robotics is not going to build any sensors. Instead it will use sensors from third-party suppliers.

Today’s 410th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Tuesday, August 7, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 410th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Tuesday, August 7, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) recently reported a lackluster second quarter that beat analyst estimates for earnings but missed the revenue estimates. Its outlook was also disappointing. eBay’s Financials...

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Sramana Mitra: Is it a glove that you’re selling? I’m trying to understand the form factor of the product that you’re selling here. Brian Lim: They’re white stretch gloves with LED lights at their...

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Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks.

The latest to partner with Flux is the U.K. food chain itsu, which sells Asian-inspired fast food. Under the deal — positioned as a trial for now — the food merchant will use Flux to power paperless receipts across all 72 of its U.K. stores. Customers paying with cards issued by Flux partner banks who have opted-in will receive digital itemised receipts directly into their banking apps when they shop at itsu.

Founded by former early employees at Revolut, the Flux platform bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, it currently partners with challenger bank Starling, and has a closed trial with Monzo. After graduating from Barclay’s fintech accelerator, Flux also recently got added to Barclays via its Launchpad app, which is used by a subset of customers who want to get in on the bank’s latest innovations early.

On the merchant side, in addition to today’s announced itsu partnership, Flux works with EAT and pod in the U.K., and has an upcoming trial with Costa Coffee.

Asked how Flux is overcoming its chicken and egg problem, and how conversations with banks and merchants have changed over the last few months, Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa says the startup faces the same challenge as any marketplace. However, she believes the company has built a solid foundation for what she dubs the “Flux Flywheel”, borrowing from Amazon’s Amazon Flywheel concept.

“For every bank we add on, we unlock the opportunity to provide Flux to those cardholders. With increasing access to cardholders, we can attract more retailers. With more retailers we can engage the banks, as their cardholders now have more places to use Flux. And so the cycle begins again,” explains Barbosa.

“We are now at the stage where in addition to our partnership with Starling Bank, for example, we’re integrated and live with one of the largest consumer banks in the U.K., Barclays, via their Launchpad app. On top of that we recently announced the largest coffee chain in the U.K. will trial Flux… We are having very different conversations now than we were even three months ago. The conversation has changed from why should I be interested in this to how could I tailor this for my business given the validation that inevitably comes with partnering with such familiar brands”.

However, despite the undoubted progress Flux has made, it is notable that a number of partnerships have launched as a trial only, suggesting both banks and merchants are being a little tentative in how they deploy the startup’s technology. Barbosa says that isn’t unusual, especially when deciding to invest in nascent technology from a relatively small startup.

“What we’re building is completely new as we’re liberating receipt level data at scale, and so it’s not unusual for our partners to want to test out the waters and describe our work together as a trial before entering a longer term commitment,” she says. “The main reason being, how do they know if their customers will love it? What’s exciting is we’ve now entered a phase where we’ve generated more than enough proof points to dispel that concern from the get go”.

The removal of conspiracy enthusiast content by InfoWars brings us to an interesting and important point in the history of online discourse. The current form of Internet content distribution has made it a broadcast medium akin to television or radio. Apps distribute our cat pics, our workouts, and our YouTube rants to specific audiences of followers, audiences that were nearly impossible to monetize in the early days of the Internet but, thanks to gullible marketing managers, can be sold as influencer media.

The source of all of this came from Gen X’s deep love of authenticity. They formed a new vein of content that, after breeding DIY music and zines, begat blogging, and, ultimately, created an endless expanse of user generated content (UGC). In the “old days” of the Internet this Cluetrain-manifesto-waving post gatekeeper attitude served the slacker well. But this move from a few institutional voices into a scattered legion of micro-fandoms led us to where we are today: in a shithole of absolute confusion and disruption.

As I wrote a year ago, user generated content supplanted and all but destroyed “real news.” While much of what is published now is true in a journalistic sense, the ability for falsehood and conspiracy to masquerade as truth is the real problem and it is what caused a vacuum as old media slowed down and new media sped up. In this emptiness a number of parasitic organisms sprung up including sites like Gizmodo and TechCrunch, micro-celebrity systems like Instagram and Vine, and sites catering to a different consumer, sites like InfoWars and Stormfront. It should be noted that InfoWars has been spouting its deepstate meanderings since 1999 and Alex Jones himself was a gravelly-voice radio star as early as 1996. The Internet allowed any number of niche content services to juke around the gatekeepers of propriety and give folks like Jones and, arguably, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, Gawker founder Nick Denton, and countless members of the “Internet-famous club,” deep influence over the last decades media landscape.

The last twenty years have been good for UGC. You could get rich making it, get informed reading it, and its traditions and habits began redefining how news-gathering operated. There is no longer just a wall between advertising and editorial. There is also a wall between editorial and the myriad bloggers who write about poop on Mt. Everest. In this sort of world we readers find ourselves at a distinct loss. What is true? What is entertainment? When the Internet is made flesh in the form of Pizzagate shootings and Unite the Right Marches, who is to blame?

The simple answer? We are to blame. We are to blame because we scrolled endlessly past bad news to get to the news that was applicable to us. We trained robots to spoon feed us our opinions and then force feed us associated content. We allowed ourselves to enter into a pact with a devil so invisible and pernicious that it easily convinced the most confused among us to mobilize against Quixotic causes and immobilized the smartest among us who were lulled into a Soma-like sleep of liking, sharing, and smileys. And now a new reckoning is coming. We have come full circle.

Once upon a time old gatekeepers were careful to let only carefully controlled views and opinions out over the airwaves. The medium was so immediate that in the 1940s broadcasters forbade the transmission of recordings and instead forced broadcasters to offer only live events. This was wonderful if you had the time to mic a children’s choir at Christmas but this rigidity was bed for a reporter’s health. Take William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow’s complaints about being unable to record and play back bombing raids in Nazi-held territories – their chafing at old ideas are almost palpable to modern bloggers.

There were other handicaps to the ban on recording that hampered us in taking full advantage of this new medium in journalism. On any given day there might be several developments, each of which could have been recorded as it happened and then put together and edited for the evening broadcast. In Berlin, for example, there might be a bellicose proclamation, troop movements through the capital, sensational headlines in the newspapers, a protest by an angry ambassador, a fiery speech by Hitler, Goring or Goebbels threatening Nazi Germany’s next victim—all in the course of the day. We could have recorded them at the moment they happened and put them together for a report in depth at the end of the day. Newspapers could not do this. Only radio could. But [CBS President] Paley forbade it.

Murrow and I tried to point out to him that the ban on recording was not only hampering our efforts to cover the crisis in Europe but would make it impossible to really cover the war, if war came. In order to broadcast live, we had to have a telephone line leading from our mike to a shortwave transmitter. You could not follow an advancing or retreating army dragging a telephone line along with you. You could not get your mike close enough to a battle to cover the sounds of combat. With a compact little recorder you could get into the thick of it and capture the awesome sounds of war.

And so now instead of CBS and the Censorship Bureau we have Facebook and Twitter. Instead of calling for the ability to record and playback an event we want permission to offer our own slants on events, no matter how far removed we are from the action. Instead of working diligently to spread only the truth, we consume the truth as others know it. And that’s what we are now chafing against: the commercialization and professionalization of user generated content.

Every medium goes through this confusion. From Penny Dreadfuls to Pall Mall sponsoring nearly every single new television show in the 1940s, media has grown, entered a disruptive phase that changes all media around it, and is then curtailed into boredom and commoditization. It is important to remember that we are in the era of Peak TV not because we all have more time to watch 20 hours of Breaking Bad. We are in Peak TV because we have gotten so good at making good shows – and the average consumer is ravenous for new content – that there is no financial reason not to take a flyer on a miniseries. In short, it’s gotten boring to make good TV.

And so we are now entering the latest stage of Internet content, the blowback. This blowback is not coming from governments. Trump, for his part, sees something wrong but cannot or will not verbalize it past the idea of “Fake News”. There is absolutely a Fake News problem but it is not what he thinks it is. Instead, the Fake News problem is rooted in the idea that all content deserves equal respect. My Medium post is as good as a CNN which is as good as an InfoWars screed about pedophiles on Mars. In a world defined by free speech then all speech is protected. Until, of course, it affects the bottom line of the company hosting it.

So Facebook and Twitter are walking a thin line. They want to remain true to the ancillary GenX credo that can be best described as “garbage in, garbage out” but many of its readers have taken that deeply open invitation to share their lives far too openly. These platforms have come to define personalities. They have come to define news cycles. They have driven men and women into hiding and they have given the trolls weapons they never had before, including the ability to destroy media organizations at will. They don’t want to censor but now that they have shareholders then they simply must.

So get ready for the next wave of media. And the next. And the next. As it gets more and more boring to visit Facebook I foresee a few other rising and falling media outlets based on new media – perhaps through VR or video – that will knock social media out of the way. And wait for more wholesale destruction of UGC creators new and old as monetization becomes more important than “truth.”

I am not here to weep for InfoWars. I think it’s garbage. I’m here to tell you that InfoWars is the latest in a long line of disrupted modes of distribution that began with the printing press and will end god knows where. There are no chilling effects here, just changes. And we’d best get used to them.

Google has acquired GraphicsFuzz, a company that builds a framework for testing the security and reliability of Android graphics drivers. The news, which was first spotted by XDA Developers, comes on the same day Google announced the release of Android 9 Pie.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the news to us but declined to provide any further information. The companies also declined to provide any details about the price of the acquisition.

The GraphicsFuzz team, which consists of co-founders Alastair Donaldson, Hugues Evrard and Paul Thomson, will join the Android graphics team to bring its driver-testing technology to the wider Android ecosystem.

“GraphicsFuzz has pioneered the combination of fuzzing and metamorphic testing to yield a highly automatic method for testing graphics drivers that quickly finds and fixes bugs that could undermine reliability and security before they affect end users,” the team explains in today’s announcement. The company’s founders started their work at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and received funding support from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the TETRACOM EU project.

While this is obviously not the splashiest of acquisitions, it is nevertheless an important one. In the fractured Android ecosystem, graphics drivers are one of the many pieces that make a phone or tablet work — and when they don’t, it’s often immediately obvious to the user. But broken drivers also expose a phone to security exploits. GraphicsFuzz uses the same kind of fuzzing technique, which essentially throws lots of random data at a program, that’s also becoming increasingly popular in other areas of software development.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison was recorded in...

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Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how Brian built his. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you...

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ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) recently reported a strong second quarter that beat estimates. However, the company’s revenue outlook for the third quarter was below analyst estimates. ServiceNow’s Financials...

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Business travelers have become an increasingly important part of Airbnb’s business, according to a new blog post. The company says that Airbnb for Work, which launched in 2014, has seen bookings triple from 2015 to 2016, and triple again from 2016 to 2017. In fact, Airbnb says that almost 700,000 companies have signed up for and booked with Airbnb for Work.

Interestingly, the breakdown of companies working with Airbnb for traveler lodging are pretty diverse — employees from large enterprise companies (5,000+ employees) and employees from startups and SMBs (one to 250 employees) take a 40-40 split, with the final 20 percent of Airbnb for Work bookings going to mid-sized companies.

In July of 2017, Airbnb started making its listings available via SAP Concur, a tool used by a large number of business travelers. Airbnb says that this integration has been a huge help to growing Airbnb for Work, with Concur seeing a 42 percent increase in employees expensing Airbnb stays from 2016 to 2017. Moreover, 63 percent of Concur’s Fortune 500 clients have booked a business trip on Airbnb.

One interesting trend that Airbnb has noticed is that nearly 60 percent of Airbnb for Work trips had more than one guest.

“We can offer big open areas for collaborations, while still giving employees their own private space,” said David Holyoke, global head of business travel at Airbnb. “We think this offers a more meaningful business trip and it saves the company a lot of money.”

Given the tremendous growth of the business segment, as well as the opportunity it represents, Airbnb is working on new features for business travelers. In fact, in the next week, Airbnb will be launching a new feature that lets employees search for Airbnb listings on a company-specific landing page.

So, for example, a Google employee might search for their lodging on Google.Airbnb.com, and the site would be refined to cater to Google’s preferences, including locations close to the office, budget, and other factors.

While the growth has picked up, Holyoke still sees Airbnb for Work as an opportunity to grow. He said that Airbnb for Work listings only represent 15 percent of all Airbnb trips.

But, the introduction of boutique hotels and other amenity-driven listings such as those on Airbnb Plus are paving the way for business travelers to lean toward Airbnb instead of a business hotel.

Plus, as mobility and relocation become even more important to how a business operates, Airbnb believes it can be a useful tool to help employees get started in a new town before they purchase a home.