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Zinc, the London-based company builder tackling various societal problems, has picked up £3 million in seed investment as it readies its second cohort and mission. Backing the round is LocalGlobe, Niklas Zennström’s Atomico, U.K. university LSE, and a number of angel investors.

Launched late last year, Zinc helps build startups almost from scratch. Somewhat similar to Entrepreneur First, it focuses on recruiting potential founders — in this instance, experts in social science, technology, design and business — who through the 9-month programme form new companies.

Each Zinc cohort is tasked with tackling a specific mission around a broader theme. The debut programme, which was used to prove the model and is currently drawing to a close, set out to create startups that can tackle the problem of women’s mental and emotional health. This saw 55 prospective founders and entrepreneurs participate, resulting in 17 new companies being formed.

They span tech-enabled businesses working on problems as diverse as perinatal mental health, loneliness amongst the elderly, young women discovering sexual pleasure, stress-related physical conditions like IBS, women walking safely in cities, new talking therapies, and more. One criteria of Zinc-founded companies is that the resulting solution needs to be applicable globally, and that the problem being tackled affects a large enough number of people in the developed world ie ~100 million or more.

“We try to solve huge societal issues by mobilising talent, ideas and capital, and by taking a mission-led approach,” Ella Goldner, co-founder and GM of Zinc, tells TechCrunch. “Our programme does so by finding the best talent, surrounding them with smarts experts to help them build new tech-enabled scalable businesses, and help them develop products and services that tackle the issues in the context of the mission”.

Zinc’s second mission, which the company builder is currently recruiting for, will see it focus on the 150 million people living in places that have been hit hard by automation and globalisation over the last 20 or 30 years, as traditional industries in those areas have declined (e.g. coal, manufacturing, textiles, shipbuilding, ports and tourism).

“The founders on the programme are a diverse group of entrepreneurial creative individuals who are driven by the mission, and are keen to set up a new business. They have background in tech, the mission’s focus area, or in ops and marketing. The average age is 34 and they are truly diverse in terms of nationalities… We believe in people’s ability to take control over those issues and solve them, rather than relying on public sector to do that,” explains Goldner.

Suzanne Ashman Blair, partner at LocalGlobe, echoes that sentiment and says that Zinc has got off to a great start with its first mission. “To have an impact on society’s deepest challenges, we need to bring together entrepreneurial talent and capital. Zinc has demonstrated that its approach to addressing social problems through technology is a powerful combination”.

LSE’s investment in Zinc also sees it effectively become a founder of the burgeoning company builder. The London university is leading a new consortium of U.K. universities (Oxford, Manchester, Sussex and Sheffield) who will work with the Zinc programme to “turn research insight into new businesses that have commercial and social impact”.

To that end, in addition to Goldner, Zinc lists it founders as Paul Kirby (a former Head of the No 10 Policy Unit and previously a senior partner at KPMG), Saul Klein (co-founder of LocalGlobe and a serial tech entrepreneur), and Professor Julia Black (Pro-Director for Research at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Board Member of U.K. Research & Innovation).

Meanwhile, Zinc says the new £3 million funding will enable it to plan future missions and replicate the success of its launch programme.

The BBC will start running ads in its podcasts, thanks to a partnership with podcast publishing and monetization company Acast.

Acast CEO Ross Adams told me that ads will start running later this week, with the BBC including “bumpers” today announcing the imminent ad launch.

“Podcasts are one way we’re reinventing BBC radio to engage younger audiences with our world class content,” said Bob Shennan, director of BBC Radio and Music, in the announcement. “We’re working with established and new talent to produce shows which are informative and entertaining as only the BBC can be. The BBC has been challenged to generate more commercial income to supplement the licence fee and this new deal will contribute to that.”

To be clear, the BBC will remain ad-free in the United Kingdom, where it’s supported by the aforementioned license fee. Adams said one of the things Acast could offer was the ability to make sure ads were only served outside the U.K. (and to account for edge cases like U.K. military bases in other countries).

Adams said Acast will also be providing the BBC with new data about how the podcasts are performing.

“We give them the data and the dashboard to start really doubling down and focusing on podcasting as a medium,” he said.

According the announcement, this will apply to all BBC podcasts outside the U.K. (subject to rights restrictions), including Global News, The Assassination, World Business Report and Radio 4’s In Our Time. Most podcasts will have a single 30-second ad at the beginning, then another at the end.

Cisco just announced an agreement to acquire Accompany, which uses artificial intelligence to build databases of people and relationships at companies.

Founder and CEO Amy Chang has compared the product to a digital chief of staff or personal assistant, giving executives the context they need before conversations and meetings. Cisco plans to incorporate Accompany technology into its collaboration products, for example by introducing company and individual profiles into Webex meetings.

Cisco says it will pay $270 million in cash and stock in the deal.

The company probably didn’t have to search too hard to find Accompany, since Chang (who previously served as the head of product for Google’s ad measurement and reporting) has been on Cisco’s board of directors since October 2016. As part of the transaction, she’s resigning from the board, effective immediately.

In addition, Chang will be taking over the company’s Collaboration Technology Group. Rowan Trollope, who currently leads the collaboration group, is departing to become CEO at cloud software company Five9.

“Amy has proven to be an effective and innovative leader through her years as an entrepreneur, an engineer, and CEO, and I couldn’t be more pleased to have her and the Accompany team join Cisco,” said Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins in the announcement. “Together, we have a tremendous opportunity to further enhance AI and machine learning capabilities in our collaboration portfolio and continue to create amazing collaboration experiences for customers.”

According to Crunchbase, Accompany has raised around $40 million in funding from investors including CRV, Cowboy Ventures, Iconiq Capital and Ignition Partners.

Cisco also announced today that it’s selling off some of its NDS video assets.

We’ve seen a large wave of used-car sales startups launch across developed markets like the U.S. and Europe, disrupting a marketplace that has largely been untouched for years. Now a startup focusing on the used car-sales opportunity specifically in developing economies is ramping up its activities.

Frontier Car Group, a Berlin startup that has built a used car marketplace targeted specifically at countries outside of Western Europe and North America, is announcing $58 million in funding — $41 million in equity and $17 million in debt funding — to continue expanding its business into Africa, Latin America and Asia, where it has sold 50,000 vehicles since launching at the end of 2016 and is on track to do $200 million in annualised revenues per year.

The Series B brings was led by Balderton Capital and TPG Growth (both of which participated in Frontier’s previous $22 million round), with Fraser McCombs Capitaland Autotech Ventures — two automotive-specific funds — also participating.

Frontier is not disclosing its valuation with this round but a source close to the company said the demand to participate in this round was high and led to two unsolicited Series C term sheets — each for around $100 million — and both on a pre-money valuations of over $200 million.

Developing markets continue to be a huge focus for tech companies when their home countries become to competitive or growth there starts to slow, and that trend has inevitably tipped into startups also targeting those markets from the very start.

Sujay Tyle — Frontier’s 24 year-old American CEO (who comes with an impressive record: he went to Harvard aged 15, and has a degree from there in Economics; and he has also been a Thiel Fellow), who co-founded the company with Peter Lindholm (COO), and André Kussmann (CTO) — said that the choice to launch first and only in countries like Mexico and Nigeria, two of Frontier’s largest markets, was borne out of a couple of reasons.

“I fell in love with the Auto1 model,” he said, in reference to another Berlin startup that earlier this year laid claim to the highest-ever venture round raised by a European startup when it landed €460 million from Softbank, “and I could see how it could be applied to emerging markets. Emerging markets represents nascency.”

Used car marketplace startups in countries like the US or in Europe have been focused on making it easier or faster or more flexible to own a used car — examples being the well-capitalised Fair.com, the now-public Carvana, and Auto1. Frontier’s service (which has different branding in each market) is modelled on these. It first gives would-be sellers online quotes for how much their car might sell for. It then inspects and buys in the vehicle at that price. Would-be buyers then use an app or web to browse stock and arrange for financing.

Tyle says that one of the bigger challenges in developed markets for this model is simply competing against others doing exactly the same thing as each other, leading to a lot of price competition. In contrast, not only is the market less crowded in the countries where Frontier operates, but similar to Uber, Frontier appears to be playing on the idea that alternatives are less good than what Frontier represents.

“The number one channel for car theft in Mexico is classified advertising,” claimed Tyle. “People make deals in cash, but if you show up to a public location with $5,000, that’s a dangerous value proposition. Also, it takes a lot of time and is onerous.”

On the side of supply, he says Frontier is also providing a service that didn’t exist before. “Smaller dealers have a lot of trouble finding cars in these markets, where there are no auction houses or services to import vehicles, so for car dealers, we can provide them with a source of inventory, which also means we have a big impact,” he said.

Frontier has made some lucrative sourcing deals that have helped it get a leg up in some countries. In Mexico City, for example, it has the contract to sell ex-Alamo rentals — “a very lucaratve business,” he added.

If you’ve been following the used-car and automotive startups, you’ll know that it’s been a bumpy road for the space overall. Some of the notable fallen stars have included Beepi, Vroom (which is still going but has shuttered some operations and laid off staff), Carspring and Hellocar in the UK, among others. Tyle said he expects Frontier to be Ebitda-profitable by Q2 of 2019.

“Balderton first invested in FCG a little under 2 years ago and it is staggering what the team have achieved in such a short time, getting to significant scale and building a platform that is capable of being leveraged in many different operating environments,” said Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital. “We are excited to further support the company and look forward to the next chapter of this extraordinary story.”

Mark Norman, Managing Partner at Fraser McCombs Capital, said in a statement: “Fraser McCombs Capital is excited to support the FCG team and their unique software and data platform to transform the used vehicle buying and selling experience in key growth markets around the world.  We’re pleased to bring our global automotive investment and operating experience to the board.”

Update: This post has been updated to reflect that Regulus’ chief executive is Yonatan Zur. 

Over the next 20 years the autonomous vehicle market is expected to grow into a $700 billion industry as robots take over nearly every aspect of mobility.

One of the key arguments for this shift away from manually operated machines is that they offer greater safety thanks to less risk of human error. But as these autonomous vehicles proliferate, there needs to be a way to ensure that these systems aren’t exposed to the same kinds of hacking threats that have bedeviled the tech industry since its creation.

It’s the rationale behind Regulus Cyber, a new Israeli security technology developer founded by Yonatan Zur and Yoav Zangvil — two longtime professionals from Israel’s aerospace and defense industry.

“We’re building a system that is looking at different sensors and the first system is GPS,” Zur says. Using a proprietary array of off-the-shelf antennas and software developed internally, the system Regulus has designed can determine whether a GPS signal is legitimate or has been spoofed by a hacker (think of it as a way to defend against the kind of hack used by the bad guys in “Die Hard 2“).

Zur first had the idea to launch the company three years ago while he was working with drones at the Israeli technology firm, Elbit. At the time, militaries were beginning to develop technologies to combat drone operations and Zur figured it was only a matter of time before those technologies made their way into the commercial drone market as well.

While the technology works for unmanned aerial vehicles, it also has applications for pretty much any type of autonomous transportation technology.

Backing the company are a clutch of well-known Israeli and American investors, including Sierra Ventures, Canaan Partners Israel, Technion and F2 Capital.

Regulus, which raised $6.3 million in financing before emerging from stealth, said the money will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts and to continue to develop its technology.

The company’s first two products are a spoofing protection module that integrates with any autonomous vehicle and a communication security manager that protects against hacking and misdirection.

“We are very excited to lead this round of financing. Sensors security for autonomous machines will become as important as processors security. Regulus identified the key vulnerabilities and developed the best-in-class solutions,” said Ben Yu, a managing director of Sierra Ventures, in a statement. “Having been working with the company since seed funding, Sierra invested with strong confidence in the team to build Regulus into the category leader.”

Hustle 20X’d its annual revenue run rate in 15 months by denying clients that contradict its political views. It’s a curious, controversial, yet successful strategy for the startup whose app lets activists and marketers text thousands of potential supporters or customers one at a time. Compared to generic email blasts and robocalls, Hustle gets much higher conversion rates because people like connecting with a real human who can answer their follow-up questions.

The whole business is built around those relationships, so campaigns, non-profits, and enterprises have to believe in Hustle’s brand. That’s why CEO Roddy Lindsay tells me “We don’t sell to republican candidates or committees. What it’s allowed us to do is build trust with the Democratic party and progressive organizations. We don’t have to worry about celebrating our clients’ success and offending other clients.”

Investors agree. Tempted by Hustle’s remarkable growth to well over a $10 million run rate and 85 million conversations started, Insight Venture Partners has led a $30 million Series B for the startup that’s joined by Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures.

The round comes just 10 months after Hustle’s $8M Series A when it was only doing $3 million in revenue. Lindsay says he was impressed with Insight’s experience with communication utilities like Cvent and non-profit tools like Ministry Brands. Its managing director Hilary Gosher who specializes in growing sales teams will join Hustle’s board, which is a great fit since Hustle is hiring like crazy.

Humanizing The Call To Action

Founded in late 2014, Hustle’s app lets organizers write MadLibs-style text message scripts and import contact lists. Their staffers or volunteers send out the messages one by one, with the blanks automatically filled in to personalize the calls to action. Recipients can respond directly with the sender ready with answers to assuage their fears until they’re ready to donate, buy, attend, or help. Meanwhile, organizers can track their conversions, optimize scripts, and reallocate assignments so they can reach huge audiences with an empathetic touch.

The app claims to be 77X faster than making phone calls and 5.5X more engaging than email, which has won Hustle clients like LiveNation’s concert empire, NYU, and the Sierra Club. Clients pay $0.30 per contact uploaded into Hustle, with discounts for bigger operations. Now at $41 million in total funding, Hustle plans to push further beyond its core political and non-profit markets and deeper into driving alumni donations for universities, sales for enterprises, and attendance for event promoters.

Hustle will be doing that without one of its three co-founders, Perry Rosenstein, who left at the end of 2017. [Disclosure: I know Lindsay from college and once worked on a short-lived social meetup app with Rosenstein called Signal.] Lindsay says Rosenstein’s “real excellence was about early stage activities and problems”. Indeed, in my experience he was more attuned to underlying product-market fit than the chores of scaling a business. “It was Perry’s decision, it was a departure we celebrated, and he’s still involved as an informal adviser to me and the company” Lindsay concluded.

Hustle has over 100 other employees in SF, NYC, and DC to pick up the torch, though. That’s up from just 12 employees at the start of 2017. And it’s perhaps one of the most diverse larger startups around. Lindsay says his company is 51 percent women, 48 percent people of color, and 21 percent LGBT. This inclusive culture attracts top diverse talent. “We see this as a key differentiator for us. It allows us to hire incredible people” Lindsay says. “It’s something we took seriously from day one and the results show.”

Partisan On Purpose

What started as a favored tool of the Bernie Sanders campaign has blossomed into a new method of communicating at scale. “We’re massively humanizing the way these organizations communicate” Lindsay said. “Humans really matter, no matter if what you care about is getting lots of people to come to events, vote, or renew a season ticket package. Having a relationship with another person can cut through the noise. That’s different than your interactions with bots or email marketing campaigns or things where it’s dehumanized.”

Lindsay felt the frustration of weak relationships when after leaving Facebook where he worked for six years as one of its first data scientists, he volunteered for Mark Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us immigration reform organization. Its email got just a 1 percent conversion rate. He linked up with Obama’s former Nevada new media director Rosenstein and CTO Tyler Brock to fix that with Hustle.

Working with Bernie aligned with the team’s political sentiments, but they were quickly faced with whether they wanted to fuel both sides of the aisle — which would mean delivering fringe conservative campaign messages they couldn’t stomach. Hustle still has no formal policy about declining Republican money, and a spokesperson said they point potential clients to TechCrunch’s previous article mentioning the stance. Meanwhile, Hustle is growing its for-profit client base to make shunning the GOP feel like less of a loss. Having Salesforce as a strategic investor also creates a bridge to a potential exit option.

Focusing on the left is working for now. Over 25 state Democratic parties are clients. Hustle sent 2.5 million messages and reached over 700,000 voters — 1 in 5 total — during the Alabama special election, helping Democrat Doug Jones win the Senate seat.

“Let’s build this great business for the Democratic party. Let’s let someone else take the Republicans” Lindsay explains. A stealth startup called OpnSesame is doing just that, Lindsay mentions. But he says “we don’t actually see them as competitive. We see them as potential allies that advocate for the power of p2p texting in getting everyone included in our democracy.” Instead, Lindsay sees the potential for Hustle to lose its sense of purpose and drive as it rapidly hires as its biggest threat.

Long-term, Hustle hopes to propel the right side of history by sticking to the left. Lindsay concludes, “You can really just put on your business hat and see this is a good choice.”

ZeroCater may have made its name in bringing restaurant food to offices for lunch (or other meals), but it has now raised a new fresh round of funding for the next perk it hopes to bring to companies: snacks.

While ZeroCater continues to expand from city to city with new restaurants as it tries to grow beyond just bringing lunch to startups in the Bay Area, it’s now looking to compete with the likes of Aramark to make sure it gains control of the fridges and pantries in offices as its next big line of business. And while it may seem like a perk, as competition for talent continues to heat up regardless of city, those perks are increasingly becoming table stakes to keeping the best people around. To do that, the company today said it has raised a new $12 million financing round led by Cleveland Avenue, with participation by Justin Kan, Romulus Capital and Struck Capital.

“You have more companies trying to compete for the same talent,” co-founder Arram Sabeti said. “When you’re looking at the cost of labor and recruiting great talent, all this stuff is a rounding error. When you’re looking at lunch, for example, the economic argument is pretty obvious.”

As such, getting into that market will be a tricky one — hence the new financing. ZeroCater increasingly has to ingest a lot of new data and form those partnerships, which requires talent. The company already has more than 1,000 SKUs (or options, really) for products it can stock as snacks. ZeroCater is looking to create a suite of tools for managers to help give employees a level of granularity they might be used to when it comes to procuring office equipment, giving them the ability to give specific feedback as to what kind of drinks they might want in their fridge. Those options may even vary from floor to floor, and the goal is to keep track of all of this in a consistent way.

The theory of owning snacks is pretty similar to its goal with restaurants: figure out what employees actually want, and help those businesses get the right products in the building based on employee feedback. Rather than burying a line item in a spreadsheet somewhere, ZeroCater wants to help employers understand what they are buying, and why they are buying it. The goal in the end is to keep their employees happy.

ZeroCater got its start working with restaurants that were trying to either expand their business, or even get off the ground. The company offers an opportunity for restaurants to run a kind of test for their meals and businesses with companies, which get access to good food while enabling those restaurants to run a trial before either introducing new dishes, or even opening up an actual restaurant. The whole point is to create a feedback loop where employees can help inform businesses on what’s good, and what isn’t.

“[Managers] really don’t feel like employees get to participate [in the picking process],” Sabeti said. “They want a mechanism for employees to give feedback and tell the provider what they want to receive. The most feedback [vendors] get is from sending someone to sit with a facilities manager once a quarter. With our product, we have a dashboard where employees can see what’s coming, vote on different items, and then we can collect that feedback.”

Snacks may, indeed, serve as an interesting differentiator in a market that is increasingly complex. Square earlier this month acquired office-ordering startup Zesty as it looks to continue to expand its Caviar service. While that’s one example, it may indeed be a sort of harbinger of increased competition when it comes to office catering — and an example of having to move beyond just restaurants in order to remain competitive.

Paragraf, a Cambridge University graphene spin-out, has closed a £2.9M (~$3.9M) seed round. The funding is led by the university’s commercialization arm, Cambridge Enterprise, with Parkwalk Advisors, Amadeus Capital Partners, IQ Capital Partners and angel investors also participating.

Graphene refers to the one atom-thick latticed carbon material that’s been exciting scientists with its potential for more than a decade. Although turning a nanomaterial with transformative promise into practical and robust commercial products has not turned out to be a cake walk.

Paragraf reckons it’s onto something that can help accelerate developments though, having come up with what it says is a novel (and patent-protected) approach to manufacturing graphene for commercial use-cases — so in larger and better quantities and qualities than the small flakes that have typically been the production rule so far.

The team claims their technique overcomes a raft of problems which have stymied graphene developments to date, such as poor uniformity, reproducibility, limited size and material contamination.

Their wider focus is on producing atom-layer thick 2D materials — with graphene their starting points — for the development of a new generation of electronic devices. And early claims for the nanomaterial included suggestions that it could enable a new generation of flexible, transparent electronics.

“Harnessing the extremely high conductivity, superb strength, very low weight and ultimate flexibility of graphene, Paragraf’s technology is the first ever commercial-scale method validated to reproducibly deliver functionally active graphene with properties targeted to its final device-specific application, with both high quality and high throughput,” is the team’s claim for their approach.

The business has been spun out of the Centre for Gallium Nitride group of Professor Sir Colin Humphreys in the university’s department of materials science. According to Crunchbase Paragraf was founded in 2015.

So far they say they’ve produced layers of graphene with electrical characteristics optimized for producing “very sensitive detectors at commercial scale”, as well as “improved efficiency contact layers for common technologies such as LEDs”.

Among their targets for graphene devices are transistors, where they reckon the nanomaterial could deliver clock speeds several orders of magnitude faster than silicon-based devices; chemical and electrical sensors, where they say it could increase sensitivity by a factor of >1,000; and novel energy generation devices — arguing graphene could tap into “kinetic and chemical green energy sources yet to be exploited by any other technology” (so chalk up another wonder claim).

Of course those are all yet more miraculous sounding claims being made for graphene — the likes of which have been liberally attached to the substance for years. And Paragraf still faces the hard graft of proving out their claims. So it’s a pretty safe bet that multiple years of R&D are still needed before mass market graphene based devices are within the average consumer’s grasp.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners, said: “Graphene has demonstrated some remarkable achievements in the lab, showing great promise for many future electronic technologies. However, without a pathway to commercial viability, scaling from proof of concept to end user accessible products remains beyond the horizon. Paragraf’s novel approach to two-dimensional materials fabrication brings the possibility of mass market graphene based devices a step closer to reality.”

In another supporting statement, Dr Simon Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Paragraf, added: “There’s no doubt that the electronic, mechanical and optical properties of two-dimensional materials such as graphene have the potential to significantly increase performance in a multitude of state of the art technologies. However, until materials like graphene can be delivered in commercially viable, device compatible, functionally targeted forms, the achievements demonstrated at lab scale will not be transferred to real-world products. At Paragraf we have developed the first production technique that allows true scaling of graphene based devices.”

Thomas also told us Paragraf is looking to deliver its first product by the end of this year.

“We will be looking to a Series A raise,” he told TechCrunch. “This will be required to drive expansion of development activities and deliver products from our IP pipeline as opposed to delivering our first product to market. We expect this additional capital will be required in Q3 2019.”

Asked how far out he reckons graphene is from finding its way into real world electronics, he added: “While considerable challenges still exist, some great steps forward have been made over the past year or so and I expect high-tech applications of graphene in consumer technologies to appear in the general market within the next 2-3 years.

“Paragraf’s first applications will be in the sensor product space, enabling a new generation of highly sensitive electronic detectors, initially helping increase energy efficiencies is fields such as the automotive and transport industries then through to consumer smart home and handheld device technologies.”

This report was updated with additional comment

When trying to figure out what to do after an extensive career at Google, Motorola, and Flipkart, Punit Soni decided to spend a lot of time sitting in doctors’ offices to figure out what to do next.

It was there that Soni said he figured out one of the most annoying pain points for doctors in any office: writing down notes and documentation. That’s why he decided to start Suki — previously Robin AI — to create a way for doctors to simply start talking aloud to take notes when working with patients, rather than having to put everything into a medical record system, or even writing those notes down by hand. That seemed like the lowest hanging fruit, offering an opportunity to make it easier for doctors that see dozens of patients to make their lives significantly easier, he said.

“We decided we had found a powerful constituency who were burning out because of just documentation,” Soni said. “They have underlying EMR systems that are much older in design. The solution aligns with the commoditization of voice and machine learning. If you put it all together, if we can build a system for doctors and allow doctors to use it in a relatively easy way, they’ll use it to document all the interactions they do with patients. If you have access to all data right from a horse’s mouth, you can use that to solve all the other problems on the health stack.”

The company said it has raised a $15 million funding round led by Venrock, with First Round, Social+Capital, Nat Turner of Flatiron Health, Marc Benioff, and other individual Googlers and angels. Venrock also previously led a $5 million seed financing round, bringing the company’s total funding to around $20 million. It’s also changing its name from Robin AI to Suki, though the reason is actually a pretty simple one: “Suki” is a better wake word for a voice assistant than “Robin” because odds are there’s someone named Robin in the office.

The challenge for a company like Suki is not actually the voice recognition part. Indeed, that’s why Soni said they are actually starting a company like this today: voice recognition is commoditized. Trying to start a company like Suki four years ago would have meant having to build that kind of technology from scratch, but thanks to incredible advances in machine learning over just the past few years, startups can quickly move on to the core business problems they hope to solve rather than focusing on early technical challenges.

Instead, Suki’s problem is one of understanding language. It has to ingest everything that a doctor is saying, parse it, and figure out what goes where in a patient’s documentation. That problem is even more complex because each doctor has a different way of documenting their work with a patient, meaning it has to take extra care in building a system that can scale to any number of doctors. As with any company, the more data it collects over time, the better those results get — and the more defensible the business becomes, because it can be the best product.

“Whether you bring up the iOS app or want to bring it in a website, doctors have it in the exam room,” Soni said. “You can say, ‘Suki, make sure you document this, prescribe this drug, and make sure this person comes back to me for a follow-up visit.’ It takes all that, it captures it into a clinically comprehensive note and then pushes it to the underlying electronic medical record. [Those EMRs] are the system of record, it is not our job to day-one replace these guys. Our job is to make sure doctors and the burnout they are having is relieved.”

Given that voice recognition is commoditized, there will likely be others looking to build a scribe for doctors as well. There are startups like Saykara looking to do something similar, and in these situations it often seems like the companies that are able to capture the most data first are able to become the market leaders. And there’s also a chance that a larger company — like Amazon, which has made its interest in healthcare already known — may step in with its comprehensive understanding of language and find its way into the doctors’ office. Over time, Soni hopes that as it gets more and more data, Suki can become more intelligent and more than just a simple transcription service.

“You can see this arc where you’re going from an Alexa, to a smarter form of a digital assistant, to a device that’s a little bit like a chief resident of a doctor,” Soni said. “You’ll be able to say things like, ‘Suki, pay attention,’ and all it needs to do is listen to your conversation with the patient. I’m, not building a medical transcription company. I’m basically trying to build a digital assistant for doctors.”

Cleo, the London-based fintech that offers an AI-powered chatbot as a replacement for your banking apps, continues to put together an impressive list of backers. The startup’s early investors already include Entrepreneur First, Moonfruit founder Wendy Tan White, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, and LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, amongst others. Now TechCrunch can reveal that TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus has become a Cleo investor and advisor.

In a call with Hinrikus last week, he explained that the investment came about after he kept hearing of Cleo and its co-founder and CEO Barney Hussey-Yeo from various contacts in the London startup scene. The pair met up around 6 months ago and after learning more about the company’s vision, the TransferWise founder wanted in. “The guy is very low-key, hands on building, [and] focussed on solving a customer problem,” says Hinrikus, “so I was really impressed with that and said, ‘hey, if I can join the party, I’d love to’. And he said, ‘sure, come onboard’.

The customer problem Cleo has set out to solve, as articulated by the TransferWise founder, is helping millennials “live with their money”. The Facebook Messenger chatbot gives insights into your spending across multiple accounts and credit cards, broken down by transaction, category or merchant. In addition, Cleo lets you take a number of actions based on the financial data it has gleaned. You can choose to put money aside for a rainy day or specific goal, send money to your Facebook Messenger contacts, donate to charity, set spending alerts, and more.

“It’s a proactive bank, it’s a bank that talks to you, and tells you on a Monday morning, ‘hey, you know, you can spend £100 this week’. And that’s really valuable for these people,” says Hinrikus. “I think there are a lot of millennials that are super happy with the product. What’s going to come of it, who the hell knows? It’s a long journey ahead, but it’s exciting. Starting by solving one pain-point for these people, there’s a ton of things you can do”.

Cleo’s recent (albeit tentative) U.S. launch hasn’t gone unnoticed, either, with Hinrikus describing growth across the pond as “super impressive”. I understand that Cleo hit 200,000 users in April, and is growing by 3,000 users a day, with the U.S. driving over half of that growth. The company is eyeing up further international moves, too, something the TransferWise founder is well-positioned to help with as one of the few European founders that has scaled a consumer-facing technology company globally.

“I get a kick out of helping the next generation of founders,” he says, citing recent investments in Juro, and Open Cosmos, along with Cleo. “There are lots of people building the next TransferWise, not in a sense of competing with us, but in a sense of building large successful companies that are doing something important. I just enjoy helping these founders navigate the journey. Maybe I think too highly of myself, but I think maybe sometimes I can give some good advice — sometimes bad advice, I’m sure — and I think that’s a way of giving back”.

One interesting aspect to Cleo’s global ambitions is the potential speed the U.K. startup can move at because of the decision not to become a bank in its own right, which would otherwise bring significant capital and regulatory friction. Cleo co-founder Barney Hussey-Yeo has always said that “nobody needs to be a bank to replace your banking app,” especially in light of Open Banking/PSD2 regulation, which is forcing banks to let customers share their data with third-party apps of their choosing.

“I think you can do a lot in the Open Banking way. I think the tools out there are still a couple of years away… [but] PayPal is not a bank, TransferWise is not a bank, Revolut is not a bank, and Cleo is not a bank. Yet you can still do a lot of great stuff,” says Hinrikus.

Meanwhile, although Cleo has begun to experiment with monetisation, including earning affiliate revenue when persuading users to switch gas and electricity providers, the startup’s latest investor describes those efforts as “peanuts” and says it is barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. “There’s a gazillion opportunities,” he says. “If you think about insurance, if you think about investing, if you think about credit, there’s so much you can do. It’s really about being smart and choosing which ones to double down on… If you want to build a really big business, then credit may be the most important”.

Solving complex data-driven problems requires a lot of teamwork. But, of course, teamwork is typically restricted to companies where everyone is working under the same roof. While distributed teams have become commonplace in tech startups, taking that to the next level by linking up disparate groups of people all working on the same problem (but not in the same company) has been all but impossible. However, in theory, you could use a blockchain to do such a thing, where the work generated was constantly accounted for on-chain.

That’s in theory. In practice, there’s now a startup that claims to have come up with this model. And it’s raised funding.

Covee, a startup out of Berlin, has raised a modest €1.35 million in a round led by LocalGlobe in London, with Atlantic Labs in Berlin and a selection of angels. Prior to this, the company was bootstrapped by CEO Dr. Marcel Dietsch, who left his job at a London-based hedge fund, and his long-time friend, Dr. Raphael Schoettler, COO, who had previously worked for Deutsche Bank. They are joined by Dr. Jochen Krause, CTO, an early blockchain investor and bitcoin miner, and former quant developer and data scientist, respectively, at Scalable Capital and Valora.

What sort of things could this platform be used for? Well, it could be used to bring together people to use machine learning algorithms to improve cancer diagnosis through tumor detection, or perhaps develop a crypto trading algorithm.

There are obvious benefits to the work of scientists. They could work more flexibly, access a more diverse range of projects, choose their teammates and have their work reviewed by peers.

The platform also means you could be rewarded fairly for your contribution.

The upside for corporates is that they can use distributed workers where there is no middleman platform to pay and no management consultancy fees, and access a talent pool (data engineers, statisticians, domain experts), which is difficult to bring inside the firm.

Now, there are indeed others doing this, including Aragon (decentralized governance for everything), Colony (teamwork for everything) and Upwork (freelance jobs platform for individuals). All are different and have their limitations, of course.

Covee plans to make money by having users pay a transaction fee for using the network infrastructure. They plan to turn this into a fully open-source decentralized network, with this transaction fee attached. But Covee will also offer this as a service if clients prefer not to deal with blockchain tokens and the platform directly.

Dietsch says: “Covee was founded in the first half of 2017 in Berlin and relocated to Zurich, Switzerland late 2017 where we incorporated Covee Network. Moving to Switzerland was important for us because it has one of the oldest and strongest blockchain ecosystems in the world and an excellent pipeline of talent from institutions such as ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. The crypto-friendly stance of the country means it has all the necessary infrastructure as well as clear regulations for token economies.”

The pond-dwelling Hydra is not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren’t clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, researchers have been able to catalog all of the Hydra’s various moves, allowing them to map those moves to the neurons firing in its weird little head.

“People have used machine learning algorithms to partly analyze how a fruit fly flies, and how a worm crawls, but this is the first systematic description of an animal’s behavior,” said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University . “Now that we can measure the entirety of Hydra’s behavior in real-time, we can see if it can learn, and if so, how its neurons respond.”

Luckily, the little Hydra was pretty predictable. From the report:

In the current study, the team went a step further by attempting to catalog Hydra’s complete set of behaviors. To do so, they applied the popular “bag of words” classification algorithm to hours of footage tracking Hydra’s every move. Just as the algorithm analyzes how often words appear in a body of text to pick out topics (and flag, for example, patterns resembling spam), it cycled through the Hydra video and identified repetitive movements.

Their algorithm recognized 10 previously described behaviors, and measured how six of those behaviors responded to varying environmental conditions. To the researchers’ surprise, Hydra’s behavior barely changed. “Whether you fed it or not, turned the light on or off, it did the same thing over and over again like an Energizer bunny,” said Yuste.

The system used to map the Hydra’s reactions can be used to map more complicated systems. The researchers essentially “reverse-engineered” the Hydra and may be able to use the technique to “maintain stability and precise control in machines, from ships to planes, navigating in highly variable conditions.”

“Reverse engineering Hydra has the potential to teach us so many things,” said Shuting Han, a graduate student at Columbia.