“Whether for AR or robots, anytime you have software interacting with the world, it needs a 3D model of the globe. We think that map will look a lot more like the decentralized internet than a version of Apple Maps or Google Maps.” That’s the idea behind new startup Fantasmo, according to co-founder Jameson Detweiler. Coming out of stealth today, Fantasmo wants to let any developer contribute to and draw from a sub-centimeter accuracy map for robot navigation or anchoring AR experiences.

Fantasmo plans to launch a free Camera Positioning Standard (CPS) that developers can use to collect and organize 3D mapping data. The startup will charge for commercial access and premium features in its TerraOS, an open-sourced operating system that helps property owners keep their maps up to date and supply them for use by robots, AR and other software equipped with Fantasmo’s SDK.

With $2 million in funding led by TenOneTen Ventures, Fantasmo is now accepting developers and property owners to its private beta.

Directly competing with Google’s own Visual Positioning System is an audacious move. Fantasmo is betting that private property owners won’t want big corporations snooping around to map their indoor spaces, and instead will want to retain control of this data so they can dictate how it’s used. With Fantasmo, they’ll be able to map spaces themselves and choose where robots can roam or if the next Pokémon GO can be played there.

“Only Apple, Google, and HERE Maps want this centralized. If this data sits on one of the big tech company’s servers, they could basically spy on anyone at any time,” says Detweiler. The prospect gets scarier when you imagine everyone wearing camera-equipped AR glasses in the future. “The AR cloud on a central server is Big Brother. It’s the end of privacy.”

Detweiler and his co-founder Dr. Ryan Measel first had the spark for Fantasmo as best friends at Drexel University. “We need to build Pokémon in real life! That was the genesis of the company,” says Detweiler. In the meantime he founded and sold LaunchRock, a 500 Startups company for creating “Coming Soon” sign-up pages for internet services.

After Measel finished his PhD, the pair started Fantasmo Studios to build augmented reality games like Trash Collectors From Space, which they took through the Techstars accelerator in 2015. “Trash Collectors was the first time we actually created a spatial map and used that to sync multiple people’s precise position up,” says Detweiler. But while building the infrastructure tools to power the game, they realized there was a much bigger opportunity to build the underlying maps for everyone’s games. Now the Santa Monica-based Fantasmo has 11 employees.

“It’s the internet of the real world,” says Detweiler. Fantasmo now collects geo-referenced photos, scans them for identifying features like walls and objects, and imports them into its point cloud model. Apps and robots equipped with the Fantasmo SDK can then pull in the spatial map for a specific location that’s more accurate than federally run GPS. That lets them peg AR objects to precise spots in your environment while making sure robots don’t run into things.

“I think this is the most important piece of infrastructure to be built during the next decade,” Detweiler declares. That potential attracted funding from TenOneTen, Freestyle Capital, LDV, NoName Ventures, Locke Mountain Ventures and some angel investors. But it’s also attracted competitors like Escher Reality, which was acquired by Pokémon GO parent company Niantic, and Ubiquity6, which has investment from top-tier VCs like Kleiner Perkins and First Round.

Google is the biggest threat, though. With its industry-leading traditional Google Maps, experience with indoor mapping through Tango, new VPS initiative and near limitless resources. Just yesterday, Google showed off using an AR fox in Google Maps that you can follow for walking directions.

Fantasmo is hoping that Google’s size works against it. The startup sees a path to victory through interoperability and privacy. The big corporations want to control and preference their own platforms’ access to maps while owning the data about private property. Fantasmo wants to empower property owners to oversee that data and decide what happens to it. Measel concludes, “The world would be worse off if GPS was proprietary. The next evolution shouldn’t be any different.”

Sramana Mitra: I think this whole unicorn mania has been created by the sheer stupidity of the entrepreneurship media. They’re so driven by funding announcements. Every time somebody has a funding...

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According to a report by TechNavio published last year, the global business accounting software market is estimated to grow at CAGR of 6% to reach $4.1 billion by the year 2021. Blackline (Nasdaq:...

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Targetprocess launched in 2004 in Minsk, Belarus with a mission of making it simpler to manage agile-driven programming projects. It announced it has taken its first funding in its 14-year history, a $5 million Series A led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Zubr Capital, a private equity firm in Minsk.

Why take money after all these years? It’s a long journey from 2004 to now, but Andrey Mihailenko, co-founder of Targetprocess, says the time is simply right to take on more money to expand its market vision. “The goal of taking on this funding is to get bigger. We see the opportunity right now because more companies understand the value of agile to provide faster response to change agents and quicker delivery,” he said.

He said the founders often debated over the years when to take on external investment, but decided to wait until they felt it was the right time to expand. “We delayed because venture capital is not just about money, but giving up some control and having someone else influence some of the decisions. We wanted our vision fulfilled and now seems like a perfect time because agile is [moving beyond] IT into other parts of the organization,” Mihailenko explained.

Like many startups, this one was born out of necessity when one of Mihailenko’s co-founders became fascinated with the agile programming methodology. When he couldn’t find tools to adequately manage the process, he decided to build them, and from that early work Targetprocess was born.

Today, he says his company focuses on agile teams of all sizes as the agile concept has become popularized over time and mainstreamed as an accepted practice. “Our focus is on providing a platform to enable agile teams to visualize the workflow, how they work and making sure their priorities align and that they work in an agile way,” Mihailenko said.

Their persistence appears to have paid off. From the five co-founders, they have grown to 115 employees with over 1000 clients worldwide, according to Mihailenko.The development team remains in Minsk, but they have small offices in Buffalo, NY, London and Berlin.

They plan to use the money to push into new markets by hiring new sales and marketing professionals, who can help them expand and grow. They also intend to enhance the R&D team in Minsk and expect to reach 160 employees in the next 12-18 months.

The uncertainty facing digital businesses as a result of Brexit was front and center during a committee session in the UK parliament today, with experts including the UK’s information commissioner responding to MPs’ questions about how and even whether data will continue to flow between the UK and the European Union once the country has departed the bloc — in just under a year’s time, per the current schedule.

The risks for UK startups vs tech giants were also flagged, with concerns voiced that larger businesses are better placed to weather Brexit-based uncertainty thanks to greater resources at their disposal to plug data transfer gaps resulting from the political upheaval.

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham emphasized the overriding importance of the UK data protection bill being passed. Though that’s really just the baby step where the Brexit negotiations are concerned.

Parliamentarians have another vote on the bill this afternoon, during its third reading, and the legislative timetable is tight, given that the pan-EU General Data Protection Act (GDPR) takes direct effect on May 25 — and many provisions in the UK bill are intended to bring domestic law into line with that regulation, and complete implementation ahead of the EU deadline.

Despite the UK referendum vote to pull the country out of the EU, the government has committed to complying with GDPR — which ministers hope will lay a strong foundation for it to secure a future agreement with the EU that allows data to continue flowing, as is critical for business. Although what exactly that future data regime might be remains to be seen — and various scenarios were discussed during today’s hearing — hence there’s further operational uncertainty for businesses in the years ahead.

“Getting the data policy right is of critical importance both on the commercial side but also on the security and law enforcement side,” said Denham. “We need data to continue to flow and if we’re not part of the unified framework in the EU then we have to make sure that we’re focused and we’re robust about putting in place measures to ensure that data continues to flow appropriately, that it’s safeguarded and also that there is business certainty in advance of our exit from the EU.

“Data underpins everything that we do and it’s critically important.”

Another witness to the committee, James Mullock, a partner at law firm Bird & Bird, warned that the Brexit-shaped threat to UK-EU data flows could result in a situation akin to what happened after the long-standing Safe Harbor arrangement between the EU and the US was struck down in 2015 — leaving thousands of companies scrambling to put in place alternative data transfer mechanisms.

“If we have anything like that it would be extremely disruptive,” warned Mullock. “And it will, I think, be extremely off-putting in terms of businesses looking at where they will headquarter themselves in Europe. And therefore the long term prospects of attracting businesses from many of the sectors that this country supports so well.”

“Essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting the burden on business to find a legal agreement or a legal mechanism to agree data protection standards on an overseas recipient so all UK businesses that receive data from Europe will be having to sign these agreements or put in place these mechanisms to receive data from the European Union which is obviously one of our very major senders of data to this country,” he added of the alternative legal mechanisms fall-back scenario.

Another witness, Giles Derrington, head of Brexit policy for UK technology advocacy organization, TechUK, explained how the collapse of Safe Harbor had saddled businesses with major amounts of bureaucracy — and went on to suggest that a similar scenario befalling the UK as a result of Brexit could put domestic startups at a big disadvantage vs tech giants.

“We had a member company who had to put in place two million Standard Contractual Clauses over the space of a month or so [after Safe Harbor was struck down],” he told the committee. “The amount of cost, time, effort that took was very, very significant. That’s for a very large company.

“The other side of this is the alternatives are highly exclusionary — or could be highly exclusionary to smaller businesses. If you look at India for example, who have been trying to get an adequacy agreement with the EU for about ten years, what you’ve actually found now is a gap between those large multinationals, who can put in place binding corporate rules, standard contractual clauses, have the kind of capital to be able to do that — and it gives them an access to the European market which frankly most smaller businesses don’t have from India.

“We obviously wouldn’t want to see that in a UK tech sector which is an awful lot of startups, scale-ups, and is a key part of the ecosystem which makes the UK a tech hub within Europe.”

Denham made a similar point. “Binding corporate rules… might work for multinational companies [as an alternative data transfer mechanism] that have the ability to invest in that process,” she noted. “Codes of conduct and certification are other transfer mechanisms that could be used but there are very few codes of practice and certification mechanisms in place at this time. So, although that could be a future transfer mechanism… we don’t have codes and certifications that have been approved by authorities at this time.”

“I think it would be easier for multinational companies and large companies, rather than small businesses and certainly microbusinesses, that make up the lion’s share of business in the UK, especially in tech,” she added of the fall-back scenarios.

Giving another example of the scale of the potential bureaucracy nightmare, Stephen Hurley, head of Brexit planning and policy for UK ISP British Telecom, told the committee it has more than 18,000 suppliers. “If we were to put in place Standard Contractual Clauses it would be a subset of those suppliers but we’d have to identify where the flows of data would be coming from — in particular from the EU to the UK — and put in place those contractual clauses,” he said.

“The other problem with the contractual clauses is they’re a set form, they’re a precedent form that the Commission issues. And again that isn’t necessarily designed to deal with the modern ways of doing business — the way flows of data occurs in practice. So it’s quite a cumbersome process. And… [there’s] uncertainty as well, given they are currently under challenge before the European courts, a lot of companies now are already doing a sort of ‘belt and braces’ where even if you rely on Privacy Shield you’ll also put in place an alternative transfer mechanism to allow you to have a fall back in case one gets temporarily removed.”

A better post-Brexit scenario than every UK business having to do the bureaucratic and legal leg-work themselves would be the UK government securing a new data flow arrangement with the EU. Not least because, as Hurley mentioned, Standard Contractual Clauses are subject to a legal challenge, with legal question marks now extended to Privacy Shield too.

But what shape any such future UK-EU data transfer arrangement could take remains tbc.

The panel of witnesses agreed that personal data flows would be very unlikely to be housed within any future trade treaty between the UK and the EU. Rather data would need to live within a separate treaty or bespoke agreement, if indeed such a deal can be achieved.

Another possibility is for the UK to receive an adequacy decision from the EC — such as the Commission has granted to other third countries (like the US). But there was consensus on the panel that some form of bespoke data arrangement would be a superior outcome — for legal reasons but also for reciprocity and more.

Mullock’s view is a treaty would be preferable as it would be at lesser risk of a legal challenge. “I’m saying a treaty is preferable to a decision but we should take what we can get,” he said. “But a treaty is the ultimate standard to aim for.”

Denham agreed, underlining how an adequacy decision would be much more limiting. “I would say that a bespoke agreement or a treaty is preferable because that implies mutual recognition of each of our data protection frameworks,” she said. “It contains obligations on both sides, it would contain dispute mechanisms. If we look at an adequacy decision by the Commission that is a one-way decision judging the standard of UK law and the framework of UK law to be adequate according to the Commission and according to the Council. So an agreement would be preferable but it would have to be a standalone treaty or a standalone agreement that’s about data — and not integrate it into a trade agreement because of the fundamental rights element of data protection.”

Such a bespoke arrangement could also offer a route for the UK to negotiate and retain some role for her office within EU data protection regulation after Brexit.

Because as it stands, with the UK set to exit the EU next year — and even if an adequacy decision was secured — the ICO will lose its seat at the table at a time when EU privacy laws are setting the new global standard, thanks to GDPR.

“Unless a role for the ICO was negotiated through a bespoke agreement or a treaty there’s no way in law at present that we could participate in the one-stop shop [element of GDPR, which allows for EU DPAs to co-ordinate regulatory actions] — which would bring huge advantages to both sides and also to British businesses,” said Denham.

“At this time when the GDPR is in its infancy, participating in shaping and interpreting the law I think is really important. And the group of regulators that sit around the table at the EU are the most influential blocs of regulators — and if we’re outside of that group and we’re an observer we’re not going to have the kind of effect that we need to have with big tech companies. Because that’s all going to be decided by that group of regulators.”

“The European Data Protection Board will set the weather when it comes to standards for artificial intelligence, for technologies, for regulating big tech. So we will be a less influential regulator, we will continue to regulate the law and protect UK citizens as we do now, but we won’t be at the leading edge of interpreting the GDPR — and we won’t be bringing British values to that table if we’re not at the table,” she added.

Hurley also made the point that if the ICO is not inside the GDPR one-stop shop mechanism then UK companies will have to choose another data protection agency within the EU to act as their lead regulator — describing this as “again another burden which we want to avoid”.

The panel was asked about opportunities for domestic divergence on elements of GDPR once the UK is outside the EU. But no one saw much advantage to be eked out outside a regulatory regime that is now responsible for the de facto global standard for data protection.

“GDPR is by no means perfect and there are a number of issues that we have with it. Having said that because GDPR has global reach it is now effectively being seen as we have to comply with this at an international level by a number of our largest members, who are rolling it out worldwide — not just Europe-wide — so the opportunities for divergence are quite limited,” said Derrington. “Particularly actually in areas like AI. AI requires massive amounts of data sets. So you can’t do that just from a UK only data-set of 60 million people if you took everyone. You need more data than that.

“If you were to use European data, which most of them would, then that will require you to comply with GDPR. So actually even if you could do things which would make it easier for some of the AI processes to happen by doing so you’d be closing off your access to the data-sets — and so most of the companies I’ve spoken to… see GDPR as that’s what we’re going to have to comply with. We’d much rather it be one rule… and to be able to maintain access to [EU] data-sets rather than just applying dual standards when they’re going to have to meet GDPR anyway.”

He also noted that about two-thirds of TechUK members are small and medium sized businesses, adding: “A small business working in AI still needs massive amounts of data.

“From a tech sector perspective, considering whether data protection sits in the public consciousness now, actually don’t see there being much opportunity to change GDPR. I don’t think that’s necessarily where the centre of gravity amongst the public is — if you look at the data protection bill, as it went through both houses, most of the amendments to the bill were to go further, to strengthen data protection. So actually we don’t necessarily see this is idea that we will significantly walk back GDPR. And bear in mind that any company which are doing any work with the EU would have to comply with GDPR anyway.”

The possibility for legal challenges to any future UK-EU data arrangement were also discussed during the hearing, with Denham saying that scrutiny of the UK’s surveillance regime once it is outside the EU is inevitable — though she suggested the government will be able to win over critics if it can fully articulate its oversight regime.

“Whether the UK proceeds with an adequacy assessment or whether we go down the road of looking at a bespoke agreement or a treaty we know, as we’ve seen with the Privacy Shield, that there will be scrutiny of our intelligence services and the collection, use and retention of data. So we can expect that,” she said, before arguing the UK has a “good story” to tell on that front — having recently reworked its domestic surveillance framework and included accepting the need to make amendments to the law following legal challenges.

“Accountability, transparency and oversight of our intelligence service needs to be explained and discussed to our [EU] colleagues but there is no doubt that it will come under scrutiny — and my office was part of the most recent assessment of the Privacy Shield. And looking at the US regime. So we’re well aware of the kind of questions that are going to be asked — including our arrangement with the Five Eyes, so we have to be ready for that,” she added.

Since forever, companies have made products for people to buy, but the evolution and reach of the internet has given rise to entirely new brands, some of which are growing at unprecedented speeds thanks to platforms like Instagram and other social media channels — not to mention strong storytelling.

Two of the people leading the e-commerce charge are Glossier’s Emily Weiss and Forerunner Ventures founding partner and managing director Kirsten Green . We’re thrilled to announce that both of them will sit down on stage at TC Disrupt SF to discuss Glossier’s continued rise and the evolution of e-commerce.

Emily Weiss – Glossier

Glossier isn’t even four years old yet, and the brand has already become a household name. The company was launched in 2014 off the back of Weiss’ staggeringly successful beauty blog Into The Gloss.

The premise of the brand is simple. Glossier products are designed for women who love makeup but don’t love looking garish. Part of selling that effortlessly beautiful aesthetic centers on marketing  a narrow product line, one that’s focused on skin care products; a handful of lipsticks, cream cheek colors, and eyebrow mascaras; and well as a single fragrance called “You” that comes in both liquid and solid form.

Beyond the success of the products, Weiss has become a role-model, even a superstar, to many of Glossier’s young customers. Weiss built a foundation of trust with her audience on Into The Gloss, and that has carried over to the Glossier brand.

The originally direct-to-consumer company has also started an offline business with a pop-up shop in NYC, a now converted Dunkin Donuts that generates more sales revenue per square foot than the average Apple Store, according to Weiss.

Glossier has attracted a number of large investments from VCs like Index Venture Partners, Thrive Capital and Forerunner Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to more than $86 million. And sitting on the board is none other than Kirsten Green.

Kirsten Green – Forerunner Ventures

Eight years ago, Kirsten Green launched Forerunner Ventures. Since then, she’s risen to be one of the most prominent and successful investors in Silicon Valley and beyond, with a particular knack for e-commerce investments.

Green has raised more than $300 million and invested in more than 50 companies. Portfolio companies include Glossier, Outdoor Voices, Ritual, Inturn and Indigo Fair, as well as exited companies like Jet.com, Dollar Shave Club, and Bonobos.

She’s a founding member of All Raise, a female mentorship collective, and has been named one of Time’s 100 Most influential people, in Forbes’ 2017 and 2018 Midas List and World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. And lest we forget, she was also named VC of the year at the 2017 Crunchies Awards.

Green’s ability to identify stellar founders and foster e-commerce brands is unparalleled across the ecosystem, and we’re thrilled to learn from her on the Disrupt SF stage.

HQ, the live trivia game that is now seeing up to 2 million players per game, is introducing some new social features, including answer sharing with friends.

The company has been testing this feature across a small group of users already, but on Friday the feature will roll out to all HQ users.

Here’s how it works: Users can connect their address book to HQ and add their friends. Once they have added friends, they can see which of their friends are playing the game alongside them. Users can put their own avatar on the answer to a question to share their choice, which is viewable by friends.

The idea is that answer sharing mimics what many people do while playing HQ IRL, yelling out answers to their coworkers in the office or sharing with their friends and family in a bar or at home.

“We understand the power of the crowd and playing together,” said HQ product manager James Ruben. “That doesn’t necessarily exist everywhere. Our goal is to spread that power to people who maybe aren’t playing in the office together.”

This comes on the heels of HQ’s introduction of “Friends on HQ” from April, which let users see friends playing in the same quiz and see their progress through the game. Answer sharing simply takes that a step further.

Interestingly, answer sharing won’t be available on each HQ Trivia quiz. Instead, the feature will debut on Friday of this week, and continue to be available on Friday games.

“We understand that it’s a change to the game play,” said Ruben. “Friday is an interesting time to experiment and try out answer sharing because Fridays tend to be a bit more social than other days.”

Alongside answer sharing, HQ is also adding yet another social layer to the game with Nearby Friends. The feature will allow HQ players to see other people (not in their address book) who are in the same quiz as them and physically nearby, perhaps in the same office building or in the same bar or restaurant.

Finally, HQ is making it easier to upload the address book and connect with friends on the app.

HQ is an interesting business in that it’s taking an almost old-school approach to advertising/sponsorship. As opposed to social networks like Facebook, which collect as much data as possible about users to sell advertisements against that data, HQ is focused more on getting as many engaged eyeballs in the same place as possible, a bit like television advertising.

HQ doesn’t have that much information on users beyond their phone number, device type, username, and other basic information commonly gleaned by app developers. With the introduction of Friends on HQ, the company gets a bit more insight into users. But that’s not necessarily the reason for the update.

Instead, HQ wants to make these games as engaging as possible, and what’s more engaging than competing with or cheering along your friends and family.

The company is also taking a measured approach to advertising and sponsorship, working with partners that make sense for the HQ community and making those sponsorships as native as possible.

For example, HQ recently ran a $250,000 game with Warner Brothers as a sponsor, plugging the film Ready Player One within the graphics and even in some of the questions. The company also had Duane “The Rock” Johnson host a $300,000 game as part of the actor’s promotion of his upcoming movie Rampage.

Answer sharing will be available to everyone on Friday, but easier address book upload and Nearby Friends are soon to come for Android users.

Trussle, the U.K. online mortgage broker that competes most directly with Atomico-backed Habito, has closed £13.6 million in Series B funding.

Notably, the round is led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments — a division of Goldman Sachs — and Propel Venture Partners, a fund backed by European banking giant BBVA.

In addition, a number of other investors also participated including Finch Capital, which led Trussle’s Series A fund raise, and Seedcamp, which has backed the fintech startup from the get-go.

Launched in 2016, Trussle moves the entire mortgage process online, bringing with it much-needed transparency. One aspect to this — powered by the data it is amassing, coupled with machine learning — is making it infinitely easier to ‘switch’ mortgage when a better deal or lower interest rate becomes available. The same technology-driven approach is being used for those looking to find and apply for a new or first time mortgage.

In a brief call this morning, Trussle co-founder and CEO Ishaan Malhi told me that the new capital will be deployed to further scale up the company, noting that the Trussle team has grown from 14 to 70 people since its Series A in February 2017. A significant portion of these are in product development as the fintech startup moves from what Malhi describes as a transactional proposition, where customers use Trussle at the point of taking out a mortgage, to a “lifetime proposition” that supports customers when they first start thinking about owning their own home and then throughout their financed home ownership.

As an example of this, he pointed me towards Trussle’s mortgage monitoring service, which launched last year. It constantly monitors the market and alerts you when money can be saved by switching to another deal.

However, the longer term vision — and presumably part of what attracted investors — is to return more value based on the data Trussle captures. This could include telling you when it may be advantageous to overpay and giving you an easy to understand dashboard that clearly shows where you are at in the repayment process.

More broadly, Trussle wants to play a major role in making home ownership a reality, especially for younger people for whom is it increasingly out of reach (think: Generation Rent). To do this, he doesn’t rule out partnerships with other fintech startups aligned to that same mission.

Adds Malhi in a statement: “The backing from two prolific and globally renowned fintech investors recognises the brilliant progress we’ve made, but also the scale of our ambition. The funding will enable us to invest significantly in building our brand and our product, but fundamentally will accelerate us towards our vision of digitising the end-to-end journey to make home ownership more affordable and accessible to all”.

Paroon Chadha: There is a nuanced point that I’m trying to make here. I love Chris like a brother. He has worked with me for 10 years. I don’t think there will be another person who’ll ever be...

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Tame, a self-proclaimed “design-driven” tech startup from Copenhagen in Denmark, is on a mission to “solve the chaos of event planning”. The company’s founders, who claim to have previously organised more than thirty large conferences and events, think they have spotted a gap in the market for an all-in-one event planning tool designed specifically to be used by teams.

Like a Swiss Army Knife for event production, the SaaS spans an array of organisational features, such as event program building, an easy way to store the contact details and current status of speakers, and a place to manage suppliers, sponsors and exhibitors. In addition, Tame supports team collaboration in the form of shared file storage, notes, tasks, and messaging.

“Tame is built as a collaborative event planning tool, enabling your entire organisation to plan and streamline all your events from start to finish,” says Tame co-founder Jasenko Hadzic. “With Tame you can stay on top of every event with a complete 360 real-time overview and collaborate with your team and external partners.

Furthermore, Tame includes its own ticketing features that allows event managers to quickly publish programs, speakers, and sponsors “on a beautifully constructed ticketing page, that can be customised to fit every organisation”. The software plays nicely with the wider event ecosystem, too, with an API that enables Tame to integrate with other event technologies currently on the market, thus letting the startup focus solely on “solving the planning of the event,” says Hadzic.

“Tame’s solution replaces tasks currently done in spreadsheets and is the first of its kind customisable enough to consolidate all of your internal event planning in one place and empower your entire team with real-time collaboration,” he adds.

Last month saw the company launch more publicly, opening up the SaaS to self sign-up so that event teams can hit the road running. “As events are stressful, we’ve focused a lot of on building a simple UI that would allow event teams all over the world to get going easily and onboard themselves. Event teams have to get going smoothly and they can’t afford to make mistakes. We know that, so we’ve allowed them to get going very fast,” says Hadzic.

Tame is operating a freemium model: it costs nothing to use for free events but there’s a fixed fee of €1 per paid ticket, which the event organiser can either absorb or transfer to the attendee. “We are all in on transparency, so therefore we don’t offer a percentage fee of the ticket price like many other ticketing solutions out there. In the future, we will offer a premium version of our platform for a fixed monthly subscription fee and this will be our primary business model”.

Meanwhile, the company is also disclosing a seed round of $550,000 from a number of well-known Nordic angel investors with a proven track record in SaaS and product design. They include Tommy Andersen (co-founder and Managing Partner of ByFounders), Hampus Jakobsson (Venture Partner at BlueYard Capital and co-founder of TAT, which sold to Blackberry for $150m), Jacob Wandt (founder of e-conomic, which sold to HG Capital in 2013 for $100m+), Anders Pollas (co-founder and ex-CPO of Podio, the project management tool sold to Citrix for €50 million), and Gregers Kronborg (ex-General Partner of Northzone).

Startups in Brazil, Latin America’s largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, are no longer solely focused on Brazil as their only frontier to conquer. Based on conversations with founders and in tracking the news, dozens of startups born in Brazil have realized they can compete on a global scale and expand their companies quickly by exporting their business models to other regional markets around the world, including Canada, Colombia, Europe, Japan, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

Traditionally, many Brazilian startups have been content to focus on growing their revenues and market share on the “Ilha de Santa Cruz” (Island of the True Cross, as Brazil was named by a Portuguese sea-captain in 1500). There is plenty to feast on here with a growing middle class, the citizens’ voracious appetite for social and digital media consumption and a population of nearly 211,000,000. More so than other major entrepreneurial centers, Brazil’s founders are known for bootstrapping early-stage companies and avoiding global expansion, as the capital can be costly and lead to a dilution in shares in their startups.

Yet, as the country that is home to the world’s eighth largest economy slowly pulls out of a long recession with its first annual uptick in GDP last year, increasingly the “Brazilians are coming” to compete in more international markets — and more rapidly than ever before. Entrepreneurial expansion outside the country is on the rise as the startup ecosystem becomes more mature, and against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of global investment coming into Brazil from China, Japan, Europe, Silicon Valley and beyond. Indeed, international investment in LatAm startups has “more than doubled since 2013.”

Another trend that’s providing more Brazilian companies with the capital needed to fuel their global expansion is the “flurry of equity deals” during the first part of 2018, “ahead of the presidential elections in October that are expected to prompt volatility in the markets,” according to Bloomberg Markets. For example, NYSE’s biggest IPO since Snap earlier this year raised nearly $2.3 billion for Brazilian fintech PagSeguro (NYSE:PAGS), a payment processing company similar in business model to Jack Dorsey’s Square. It was the largest IPO of a Brazilian company since 2011.

Brazil’s export of fast-growth startups is on the rise

There has been a growing stream of Brazilian startups that have begun to shift focus to the U.S. during the last two years. Mosyle, founded in 2012 by Alcyr Araujo, is now based in the U.S. and used in more than 4,000 schools to help ensure that kids’ mobile device experiences are fun, safe and educational with more parental and teacher involvement.

Pipefy, which announced $16 million in Series A funding last month and was originally based in Curitiba, Brazil, has recently relocated its global HQ to San Francisco. More than 8,000 companies in 146 countries around the world use its operations-excellence platform today.

Similarly, PSafe, a mobile security, privacy and performance platform company, moved its global headquarters to San Francisco last August and now has more than half of its revenues from the U.S.

A fast-growth Brazilian startup called Gympass, which offers a corporate benefit plan to keep employees fit and healthy, has quietly grown into a global business in less than six years. Born in the country that places second in overall number of gyms, Gympass lets a company’s employees make unlimited visits to a growing network of multiple gyms and pay less than half the normal monthly fee. Last month, the company announced its launch in 12 key markets in the U.S., adding 3,000 new workout facilities to its global network of 30,000. Its corporate partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Metlife, PayPal and P&G.

Belo Horizonte-based Hotmart, a comprehensive platform to sell digital products like e-books, online courses and software that was founded in 2011, has expanded into Europe, including opening new offices in Madrid, Paris and the Netherlands. It’s also expanded into Colombia.

São Paulo-based Movile, a leader in mobile marketplaces with a big dream of making life better for a billion people through mobile apps, has seen tremendous growth since its founding in 1998. It now employs more than 1,500 people and impacts the lives of more than 100 million people around the globe. Its food-delivery market, iFood, is now booming on all continents, and Naspers and the fund Innova Capital invested a new $82 million round last December, with a singular focus on growing iFood’s market share.

Since its foundation, Movile has raised more than $250 million to accomplish more than 20 mergers, acquisitions and investments in startups beyond iFood, including Maplink, PlayKids, Pointer, Rapiddo, SuperPlayer and Sympla, among others.

Smart strategy and networking resources boost success

With the advent and growth of SaaS platforms, a fast-emerging global on-demand economy and some entirely original business models, many Brazilian startups are poised for success as they scale from being regional plays to any number of international markets. Typically, when more than a quarter of a startup’s business is coming in from international markets — as was the case with Pipefy and its cloud-based platform — the timing is ripe to land and expand outside a company’s home country.

In choosing international markets, a smart strategy for tech startup founders is to analyze those regions that possess high broadband and mobile-device adoption, readily available payment infrastructures, political stability, level socioeconomic playing fields, fair tax requirements and an easy-to-navigate regulatory environment. One useful rule of thumb to help obtain a basic understanding is to compare the overall internet population by country versus GDP per capita. This exercise will generate a model to prioritize countries with larger numbers of prospects with high levels of disposable income.

Another critical element for optimizing success is a solid understanding of regional differences and key variances across international markets — from cultural nuances to regulatory impacts to diverse approaches to conducting business. Identifying and tapping local network resources early on can make a world of difference.

The maturing startup ecosystem in Brazil has benefited hugely from access to Cubo, the largest entrepreneurial hub in Latin America, and its constant intermingling and exchange of ideas between startup founders, investors, academics and government officials.

In Silicon Valley, BayBrazil has been hugely impactful in connecting and building a tight-knit community of Brazilian and U.S. professionals, founders and scholars living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a global scale, organizations like Endeavor have sparked high-impact entrepreneurship and success around the planet.

The spirit of entrepreneurism in Brazil is as infectious as its natural resources are vast. A recent rise in startups born and bred in Brazil that are being exported to international markets around the globe to further scale and propagate is a trend to be celebrated.

Saúde! (Cheers)

The big question in the media world today is whether MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson can stanch the bleeding of its cash flows before it becomes insolvent.

In a new filing today with the SEC, Helios informed investors that it had $15.5 million in available cash, with another $27.9 million in accounts receivable from members of MoviePass on longer-term subscriptions. Under accounting rules, those dollars can’t be used to fund current expenses. The company said that it has lost $21.7 million a month between September and April this year.

Investors dumped the stock following the filing, and the stock was down 31 percent at the close of the equity markets today.

While linear math would seem to indicate that the company is on track for insolvency in a matter of days, the filing and its CEO are maintaining an optimistic line. The company said that following a series of product changes, including more verification that a subscriber actually watched a film themselves, it should reduce its cash loss on the service by 35 percent during the first week of May.

In an interview with TechCrunch, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe struck a positive view on the future of the business. He argued that unlike in the past, where a new app or service would raise venture capital and then invest it in the business, you can just handle capital concerns as you need them. “Today what you do is you raise enough money month by month to fund essentially that negative cash flow,” he said. “We are 100% confident that we have the committed funding to do it.”

In order for the company to avoid insolvency, the company will need to continue to sell its common stock to investors on a regular basis to fund that negative cash flow. The company said that sales of its common stock will need to begin this month in order to fund operations. If the company is unable to do so, “we may be required to reduce the scope of our planned growth or otherwise alter our business model, objectives and operations, which could harm our business, financial condition and operating results,” it wrote in the filing.

Gamalon wants to change the game when it comes to understanding text-based customer communications. Instead of using neural networks to learn about a vast corpus of information, the startup takes a different approach, putting the text in a database and building decision trees to very rapidly train the data to arrive at the required information. Today, it announced a $20 million Series A investment led by Intel Capital.

Other participants in the round included .406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures along with existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised by the company since inception in 2013 to $32 million including backing from DARPA in earlier rounds.

Gamalon CEO Ben Vigoda says they developed a new approach to analyzing customer interactions because the state of the art in AI and machine learning was too much of a black box.

His company wants to change that by making the whole process much more interactive. To that end Gamalon also released a new tool called Idea Studio, a product that can automatically build learning trees to help users arrive at answers extremely fast or allow a business analyst or data scientists to simply enter a series of queries and build a decision tree on the fly based on the text. With neural networks, Vigoda says, the user has no control over the end result, but with Idea Studio you can edit the trees and refine the results immediately.

The product still needs a way to review all of the text-based content, of course, but instead of having humans categorize it all manually, with Gamalon you import your data into a database, do analytics on it and then make it available for rapid categorization and response.

This could have multiple utilities, whether for customer service agents to find answers very quickly or customers to interact with bots and find answers much faster. Analysts could use it to locate answers to business issues, and it’s sophisticated enough for data scientists to build machine learning projects based on a large corpus of data.

Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation says they like how Gamalon puts machine learning into hands of many different employees around the customer information use case. “We want enterprises of all levels of AI capability to take full advantage of this growing volume and complexity of data. Gamalon’s unique approach can help users better understand billions of customer communications, customize individual responses, and take action to better serve those customers,” Rao explained in a statement.

The company is based in Cambridge, MA and has 23 employees. They have six large customers including Avaya.

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the computer processor giant, is today announcing $72 million in funding for the 12 newest startups to enter its portfolio, bringing the total invested so far this year to $115 million. Announced at the company’s global summit currently underway in southern California, investments in this latest tranche cover artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud services, and silicon. A detailed list is below.

Other notable news from the event included a new deal between the NBA and Intel Capital to work on more collaborations in delivering sports content, an area where Intel has already been working for years; and the news that Intel has now invested $125 million in startups headed by minorities, women and other under-represented groups as part of its Diversity Initiative. The mark was reached 2.5 years ahead of schedule, it said.

The range of categories of the startups that Intel is investing in is a mark of how the company continues to back ideas that it views as central to its future business — and specifically where it hopes its processors will play a central role, such as AI, IoT and cloud. Investing in silicon startups, meanwhile, is a sign of how Intel is also focusing on businesses that are working in an area that’s close to the company’s own DNA.

It’s hasn’t been a completely smooth road. Intel became a huge presence in the world of IT and early rise of desktop and laptop computers many years ago with its advances in PC processors, but its fortunes changed with the shift to mobile, which saw the emergence of a new wave of chip companies and designs for smaller and faster devices. Mobile is area that Intel itself acknowledged it largely missed out.

Later years have seen still other issues hit the company. For example, the Spectre security flaw (fixes for which are still being rolled out). And some of the business lines where Intel was hoping to make a mark have not panned out as it hoped they would. Just last month, Intel shut down development of its Vaunt smart glasses and reportedly the entirety of its new devices group.

The investments that Intel Capital makes, in contrast, are a fresher and more optimistic aspect of the company’s operations: they represent hopes and possibilities that still have everything to play for. And given that, on balance, things like AI and cloud services still have a long way to go before being truly ubiquitous, there remains a lot of opportunity for Intel.

“These innovative companies reflect Intel’s strategic focus as a data leader,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement. “They’re helping shape the future of artificial intelligence, the future of the cloud and the Internet of Things, and the future of silicon. These are critical areas of technology as the world becomes increasingly connected and smart.”

Intel Capital since 1991 has put $12.3 billion into 1,530 companies covering everything from autonomous driving to virtual reality and e-commerce and says that more than 660 of these startups have gone public or been acquired. Intel has organised its investment announcements thematically before: last October, it announced $60 million in 15 big data startups.

Here’s a rundown of the investments getting announced today. Unless otherwise noted, the startups are based around Silicon Valley:

Avaamo is a deep learning startup that builds conversational interfaces based on neural networks to address problems in enterprises — part of the wave of startups that are focusing on non-consumer conversational AI solutions.

Fictiv has built a “virtual manufacturing platform” to design, develop and deliver physical products, linking companies that want to build products with manufacturers who can help them. This is a problem that has foxed many a startup (notable failures have included Factorli out of Las Vegas), and it will be interesting to see if newer advances will make the challenges here surmoutable.

Gamalon from Cambridge, MA, says it has built a machine learning platform to “teaches computers actual ideas.” Its so-called Idea Learning technology is able to order free-form data like chat transcripts and surveys into something that a computer can read, making the data more actionable. More from Ron here.

Reconova out of Xiamen, China is focusing on problems in visual perception in areas like retail, smart home and intelligent security.

Syntiant is an Irvine, CA-based AI semiconductor company that is working on ways of placing neural decision making on chips themselves to speed up processing and reduce battery consumption — a key challenge as computing devices move more information to the cloud and keep getting smaller. Target devices include mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors and drones.

Alauda out of China is a container-based cloud services provider focusing on enterprise platform-as-a-service solutions. “Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive,” Intel said.

CloudGenix is a software-defined wide-area network startup, addressing an important area as more businesses take their networks and data into the cloud and look for cost savings. Intel says its customers use its broadband solutions to run unified communications and data center applications to remote offices, cutting costs by 70 percent and seeing big speed and reliability improvements.

Espressif Systems, also based in China, is a fabless semiconductor company, with its system-on-a-chip focused on IoT solutions.

VenueNext is a “smart venue” platform to deliver various services to visitors’ smartphones, providing analytics and more to the facility providing the services. Hospitals, sports stadiums and others are among its customers.

Lyncean Technologies is nearly 18 years old (founded in 2001) and has been working on something called Compact Light Source (CLS), which Intel describes as a miniature synchrotron X-ray source, which can be used for either extremely detailed large X-rays or very microscopic ones. This has both medical and security applications, making it a very timely business.

Movellus “develops semiconductor technologies that enable digital tools to automatically create and implement functionality previously achievable only with custom analog design.” Its main focus is creating more efficient approaches to designing analog circuits for systems on chips, needed for AI and other applications.

SiFive makes “market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture,” founded by the inventors of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans.

Android’s development studio is getting a new update as Google rolls out Android Studio 3.2 Canary, adding new tools for visual navigation editing and Jetpack.

The new release includes build tools for the new Android App Bundle format, Snapshots, a new optimizer for smaller app code and a new way to measure an app’s impact on battery life. The Snapshots tool is baked into the Android Emulator and is geared toward getting the emulator up and running in two seconds. All this is geared toward making Android app development easier as the company looks to woo developers — especially potentially early ones — into an environment that’s built around creating Android apps.

The visual navigation editing looks a bit like a flow chart, where users can move screens around and connect them. You can add new screens, position them in your flow, and under covers will help you manage the whole stack in the background. Google has increasingly worked to abstract away a lot of the complex elements of building applications, whether that’s making its machine learning framework TensorFlow more palatable by letting developers create tools using their preferred languages or trying to make it easier to build an app quickly. Visual navigation is one way to further abstract out the complex process of programming in different activities within an app.

As competition continues to exist between Apple and Google, it’s important that Google ensures that the apps are launching on Google Play in order to continue to drive Android device adoption. The sped-up emulator, in particular, may solve a pain point for developers that want to rapidly test parts of their apps and see how they may operate in the wild without having to wait for the app to load in an emulator or on a test device.

Sramana Mitra: One thing that I find very annoying of what venture capital allows entrepreneurs to do is ignore fundamentals. I think there is a very bad habit in venture-funded companies of ignoring...

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As Slack looks to woo larger and larger companies with the prospect of a simpler workplace collaboration tool, the company said it has now hit 8 million daily active users.

The company said it also has 3 million paid users. A darling in Silicon Valley, Slack was initially able to capitalize on pent-up demand for workplace communications tools that were much simpler and easy to use. Companies like Yammer, Microsoft, and others looked to remake internal communications in ways that looked more like consumer tools in the Web 2.0 era, but Slack came out with an approach that was initially just a slick chat and team communications tool. That helped it rocket to a $5.1 billion valuation and drive its initial adoption among smaller companies and startups.

Slack in September said it had around 6 million daily active users, 50,000 teams and 2 million paid users, and around $200 million in annual recurring revenue. So it’s a pretty significant jump over the past nine months or so, though the company still has to break from the perception that it’s a tool that’s just good for startups and smaller companies. The larger enterprise deals are the ones that tend to drive larger contracts — and additional revenue — as it looks to build a robust business. More than half of Slack’s users are outside the U.S., a signal that it looks to continue to expand into new regions that may demand tools like Slack beyond just domestic markets.

Slack has been trying to roll out additional tools to support those larger companies, rather than just operate as a chat tool that can get out of control when companies have thousands of employees. The company has invested heavily in machine learning tools to make it easier to search for answers that may already exist in some Slack channel or direct message. Slack also rolled out threads, a long-awaited feature that users often demanded though it wasn’t clear how that would exist in Slack’s simpler interface.

There are already startups looking to pick away at niches that the company might not necessarily fill, too. Slite, a startup looking to build a simpler notes tool that would create a smarter internal wiki of sorts, raised $4.4 million last month. There’s also Atlassian’s Stride, which opened up to developers in February this year. And Microsoft has its own Slack competitor, Teams, that continues to get pretty big updates. Slack clearly exposed a lot of pent-up demand for similar tools, and now faces a lot of competition going forward.

Slack started the Slack Fund as a way to woo developers to build tools for Slack, and early last year invested in 11 new companies. The company has been trying to create a robust ecosystem where developers can fill the niches that the company might be missing, but has looks to focus on its core products. The company says there are now more than 1,500 apps in the Slack directory.

In 2016, Walmart announced that it would begin testing grocery delivery in conjunction with Uber and Lyft.

Today, however, Reuters reports that those partnerships have come to an end, which was confirmed by Walmart and Uber.

TechCrunch first reported in 2015 about Uber’s plans to launch a merchant delivery system, wherein goods from retailers would be delivered (via the trunk) and Uber users would be transported to their destination simultaneously.

The deal with Walmart, alongside rival services like Lyft and Deliv, marked massive progress for this merchant delivery system. But things haven’t panned out long term.

“It is incredibly hard to deliver people and packages together,” said one of Reuters’ sources with a delivery company that works with Walmart and has direct knowledge of the matter. “They are two completely different business models.”

Walmart has a number of other channels through which it can offer delivery.

It has partnered with Postmates and DoorDash, but has excluded Instacart from its delivery partners list. According to Re/Code, Instacart was excluded from the partnership opportunity because Instacart wanted Walmart to list its retail items within the Instacart app, whereas Walmart wanted to use Instacart as a delivery partner while exclusively selling items on its own digital property.

This obviously comes at a time where the grocery delivery game is heating up. Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods has put pressure on incumbent grocery retailers to step up their digital presence and delivery capabilities.

Target acquired Alabama-based Shipt for $550 million in December of 2017. Meanwhile, Instacart has raised another $150 million this year, and recently announced a partnership with Walmart-owned Sam’s Club.

We’ve reached out to Uber and will update if/when we hear back.

Update: Uber has responded and provided the following statement:

UberRUSH fell under the team called “UberEverything” which is a collection of big bets, and the beginning of Uber as a platform. Recently we’ve been leveraging our platform into new products like Uber Eats, Uber Health or our aquisition with Jump Bikes. When we launched UberRUSH in 2014, we followed the same thinking, and wanted apply the model to help large and small businesses quickly and reliably move their goods.

After analyzing what made the most sense for our broader efforts, we decided to sunset UberRUSH worldwide on June 30th. Walmart has been an incredible partner for Uber these past few years and we have enjoyed serving Walmart’s customers and delivering their groceries through the UberRUSH platform. We are coordinating with Walmart to make this change as seamless as possible.

We’re already applying a lot of the lessons we learned together to our Uber Eats food delivery business. Since launching Eats two years ago, we’ve seen the business take off, growing through new markets, and forming new partnerships with restaurant owners around the world.

Sramana Mitra: A few trends questions. How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does a seed investor mitigate the Series A gap?...

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