“Enjoy a light, social high,” says the funky bottle of California Dreamin’ cannabis -infused sparkling pomegranate juice. Launching today at Y Combinator Demo Day, California Dreamin’ is serving up an alcohol alternative that still gets you lit, but without the same hangover or health issues.

Each bottle contains 10 milligrams of THC — an industry-standard dose of the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The company only uses sativa, the more energizing, euphoric type of pot, compared to the more body-relaxing indica variety. That’s compared to some competing marijuana beverages with as much as 100mg — enough that a single sip will get you high and a bottle will lay out all but the hardiest stoners. “We want it to be a light, head high feel,” says Seven Cities Beverage Company aka California Dreamin’ co-founder Amy Ludlum. “We don’t want to give anyone couch lock. We want it to be social.”

Meanwhile, the taste marries fruity sweetness with a hint of earthy plant life complexity that will titillate long-time cannabis fans. Bottles come in other flavors, like tangerine, grapefruit and cranberry apple, and will retail for about $8 to $10 each. Cases are rolling out to recreational dispensaries in San Francisco, like The Barbary Coast, over the next week.

California Dreamin’ has succeeded in creating a beverage with the light-hearted brand, logical dosage and agreeable taste to be something you can drink casually and socially, not just when you want to get ridiculously high. That makes it a better alternative or complement to drinking alcohol. It’s certainly not for everyone. Paranoia, anxiety and post-high grogginess are all common side-effects of sativa, and you shouldn’t drive while blazed. But there are plenty of people who want an option to unwind that doesn’t involve a literal poison, or smoking a burning plant that can hurt your lungs.

The only problem is that California and other states with legal recreational marijuana ban the sale of anything cannabis related anywhere that serves alcohol. That means you aren’t likely to see California Dreamin’ in a bar any time soon, but you could throw a pretty fun backyard barbecue. But with 1 million medical marijuana users out of 28 million California adults, and with over half of the voting population supporting cannabis legalization, there’s plenty of room to build a brand in this space.

Inebriation is America’s true national pastime. You could see it as people just seeking an escape from daily troubles, but it’s also a way to shift our thinking to get a new perspective on the world. Considering how much we pay for entertainment that’s merely stimulus we filter through our perception, $10 to pleasantly alter that perception is not a half-baked idea.

British startup Made.com says that “a new tier 1 global institutional investor” has made an important investment commitment in the furniture company. This mysterious investor is willing to lead a new $56 million round (£40 million) with existing investors Partech Ventures, Level Equity and Eight Roads Ventures also participating.

It sounds like the funding round isn’t finished just yet, so Made.com could end up raising more than that.

More interestingly, the company has shared some details about its balance sheet. In 2017, the company has been profitable in the U.K., France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. And if you take into account the entire company in all countries where it operates, Made.com is currently cashflow positive.

In 2017, the company has generated a net revenue of $178 million (£127 million), which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2016. So it sounds like Made.com is on the right path to profitability.

And that’s why the company also announced that Adrian Evans is joining the company as CFO. He previously worked at Yoox Net-A-Porter. This release sounds like Made.com is now optimizing the company for a potential IPO.

The company sells quality furniture at an affordable price. Made.com wants to disrupt high-end furniture stores by controlling everything from manufacturing to the e-commerce platform. This way, the company doesn’t have to pay as many middle players and can offer cheaper prices.

As e-commerce is also becoming the norm, it fosters competition with furniture giants, such as IKEA. Going to Made.com’s website is as easy as going to IKEA’s website after all.

Earlier this month, two former Google staffers quietly launched a new app that’s designed to help users overcome technology’s uncanny valley and develop a more healthy relationship with the ubiquitous electronic assistant that “lives” in our pockets.

Called Maslo, the new app (and the company behind it), in the words of its founders, was built to develop a “personified AI technology that interacts with empathy and playfulness.”

At its core, the first iteration of Maslo is a daily check-in tool that encourages and develops mindfulness, according to founders Ross Ingram and Cristina Poindexter.

Once downloaded, Maslo is a voice-activated journaling tool with a basic status update feature that encourages users to log an emoji representation of their emotional state at a particular moment and spend a minute talking to the app about what’s going on.

The idea, the founders say, is to have Maslo evolve and personalize as users interact with it. You can see what the company’s blobby AI looks like below.

Ingram, who was a former Sphero employee working on projects like the BB-8 before he joined Google, has thought deeply about how technology intersects with the human psyche and how people create bonds with the technologies they use.

“We started building robots in 2010 and in the 2012 to 2013 time frame we wondered what this would look like if we added some personality to this — and some kind of relationship,” says Ingram. “Whenever we launched these robots out into the world… people had this desire to connect on a deeper level… people wanted to share aspects of themselves with the robot.”

Meanwhile, his co-founder noticed the same behaviors from people who were interacting with the Google assistants in their early days.

“A  lot of these interactions were non-utility queries,” says Poindexter, a Yale-educated sociologist, who worked on Google’s soon-to-be-announced assistants in the Pixel phone and Google Home in 2016 when she and Ingram first met. 

“There was this need to go in and help people on a deeper level… I have a background in sociology and I look at it from a users’ perspective of what do people need,” Poindexter says. “A lot of these interactions [with the assistant] were mulling things over and needing a place to express them… and Google can’t deliver on that and from a brand perspective Google didn’t want to.”

That’s perfectly clear from Google’s latest commercial.

By contrast, Maslo wants to be a space where people can more comfortably address the emotional aspects of user’s lives.

“It’s the way we define an assistant versus a companion… assistants help things get done in the external world and companions are going to help us get things done in our internal world,” says Ingram. 

“There are going to be different classes of machines that interact and relate to humans on different levels,” Poindexter adds. “We are seeing thousands of people using machines for assistant-based things… we know that where this is going we’re going to start talking more to whatever you want to call them — assistants or companions — and Alexa won’t help you figure out if you need help.”

With Ingram’s experience in design and hardware, the two came to the conclusion (as they relate in a blog post about Maslo’s early days), that technology “can help us become more human, and less robotic.”

Ingram left Google in December of 2016 and Poindexter followed in February. The two moved down to Los Angeles and began collaborating on the project that would eventually become Maslo.

Over the long-term, the two founders think of Maslo as a gateway to interacting with other services that a user may need — and one that is completely focused on security. Other tools can help with therapy, self-improvement, education or entertainment, and Maslo wants to be the funnel that prompts users to take advantage of those services when necessary.

Importantly, in this era of increased privacy protection, the two have built Maslo so that most of the user information that Maslo collects stays on a user’s device rather than on servers that the company hosts. “Privacy and trust is the most critical to us,” says Ingram. “We’ve designed the architecture in a way that does keep a lot of the sensitive information on the phone. We do have to upload some things to the cloud in a secure way to continue to develop Maslow’s back end and machine learning… [But] we don’t have access to the actual voice note… we are able to interpret whatever is shared using our algorithms.”

Meanwhile transformative powers of technology and the ways in which it can provide a positive influence in people’s lives isn’t just rhetorical hyperbole for Ingram — he’s experienced it himself.

At 16 years old, Ingram, who grew up in a small town in rural Colorado, faced three felony charges and expulsion from his high school for stealing a computer. Always interested in technology, Ingram came from a working class family that didn’t have enough money for him to indulge in his favorite pastime.

The brush with the law could have landed him in jail, but Ingram was sent to a diversion program to keep kids out of prison; while there, the young developer decided to pursue a career in computer science. He enrolled in Denver’s Metropolitan Community College, and while attending class managed to talk his way into a job with Sphero.

Ingram met the Sphero founders when they were just a collection of Boulder-based Android developers going through the Techstars program. When the company raised its first round, Sphero hired Ingram as its seventh employee and his career was off to the races.

“Going through that experience… helped me develop my sense of identity and figure out where I wanted to go in life,” Ingram says. “That’s very much what we’re focused on with Maslo today. Maslo is a reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and developing the tools you need to have that sense of self.”

Several studies (including this one from the University of Iowa) discuss the positive effects of journaling on mental health and addressing trauma. And Poindexter said that’s where Maslo wants to begin.

“In the beginning there needs to be some sort of joy in the exercise,” she says. “We really want to reflect back to people what they’re saying… [Maslo] holds up a mirror… it’s a sounding board and doesn’t necessarily give you the answers but shows you what you might already know.”

Over time, the two co-founders expect that the application will evolve to become more personalized as users develop a relationship with the AI they’re talking to. “The way that Maslo looks and the way Maslo animates and talks will be something that happens down the road,” says Ingram. “Being able to build this sense of companionship between machine and the user so that it is this safe space to access is very important.”

HQ Trivia was removed from the App Store following a controversial ending to a $25K game on Sunday night, according to Business Insider.

HQ has introduced a new high-stakes version of the game where one winner takes home a larger prize. However, on Sunday night, no one won the $25K.

The company posted on its Twitter account that moderators kick players who break the company’s TOS.

HQ would not be specific about what rules were broken, but BI reports that Twitter users had suggested it was due to jailbroken iPhones, which could be running software that gives users a leg up in the trivia competition.

For those who missed the game last night, two players remained for the final question. One was removed due to breaking the TOS, and the remaining player missed the last question, resulting in no winner.

Cheating seems to be a growing problem with HQ Trivia. There are countless guides online about how to cheat, including obvious methods like using voice dictation and a second device to Google search each question. The time limit makes that more difficult, but not impossible.

But as HQ grows its prize pot — the original prize was $1000 — cheating on the platform, and the methods by which people cheat, is only bound to intensify.

Even more bizarre, the app was seemingly removed from the App Store following the game. It has since re-appeared on the App Store.

HQ says that last night’s game and HQ’s removal from the App Store are unrelated events. A spokesperson from the company confirmed Mashable’s report that the app was removed because of a clerical error. Long story short, someone at HQ forgot to update the expired credit card info in the developer portal of the App Store.

App analytics firm Apptopia confirmed that HQ Trivia was removed from the App Store briefly, and that it has been falling in ranking for the past 30 to 60 days.

We reached out to Apple and haven’t heard back. We will report back as soon as we know more.

Desktop Metal has had no issues raising interest (or funding) in the manufacturing world. The metal 3D printing company announced today that it’s score another $65 million in backing, bringing its total to $277 million. This latest round was led by Ford, and also includes addition money from previous backer, Future Fund. 

Ford’s interest in company that 3D prints metal is pretty clear, of course, and the automotive giant is taking things a step further by adding its Chief Technology Officer Ken Washington to Desktop Metal’s Board of Directors.

The tech isn’t quite ready to start printing out cars on Ford’s production line just yet, but the companies told CNBC that they’re working toward that seeming inevitability. Desktop Metal already produces a printer built specifically for factory production.

Slated for release in 2019, the company’s Production system is a push to make its technology scalable on the production line. The core of Desktop Metal’s tech binds powders into polymers and cook them in a furnace. The company claims its tech is 100-times faster and 20-times cheaper than existing 3D printing technologies.

Ford joins an already impressive roster of names that have invested in the startup, including Google Ventures (GV), GE Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Lowe’s. BMW iVentures, has also seen the potential in tech — the automotive giant’s VC wing invested in Desktop Metal this time last year, with an eye toward the future, stating that the company “is shaping the way cars will be imagined, designed and manufactured.”

It’s time to welcome another startup to the clear-teeth-aligner market. Meet ArchForm, a Y Combinator-backed teeth-aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices. The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth-aligner startups and cut down on the cost of Invisalign.

The cost of braces and invisible aligners — those clear, mouthguard-like pieces of plastic — varies, but treatments can range from $4,685 to $6,500 for adolescents, and adult treatments can cost up to $7,135, according to a 2013 American Dental Association survey. Last year, the orthodontics market saw $11 billion in revenue, according to market research company IBISWorld.

ArchForm is trying to tap into the growing accessibility of the 3D printer market to enable orthodontists to 3D print their own clear aligners in-office. Orthodontists currently pay about $1,700 per patient to Invisalign, the company says. So in order to make money, orthodontists sometimes charge patients upwards of $7,000. ArchForm charges orthodontists just $50 per patient.

“I was inspired to start the company because I worked in my father’s orthodontic office,” ArchForm founder Andrew Martz told TechCrunch in an email. “I saw that 3D printers had advanced far enough to make these devices in dental offices, and knew from experience that easy-to-use software to virtually move the teeth was the missing piece to allow every orthodontist to 3D print their own aligners.”

In the last couple of years, a number of teeth-aligner startups have emerged. The pack includes the likes of SmileDirectClub, Uniform Teeth, Candid and Orthly. None of the startups are exactly the same, but all aim to reduce the cost of clear aligners, as well as the number of visits to the orthodontist — with some even cutting out the in-person orthodontist visit altogether. ArchForm takes a different approach by enabling local orthodontists to simply enhance their existing businesses.

“We believe that orthodontists do a better job of treating most patients when they can physically be there to treat them,” Martz said. “To make clear aligners work, raised buttons/attachments are placed on teeth as a way for the aligner to grip the teeth and make them fully straight. Tele-dentistry companies don’t have these — which are a very fundamental part of orthodontic treatment.”

In ArchForm’s current customer base, 75 percent of orthodontists who sign up to use the software already have 3D printers.

“If they don’t already have one, the rest are looking into buying a 3D printer, because they only cost $3350 and Invisalign costs $1750/patient,” Martz said.

For the orthodontists who would rather not invest in their own 3D printer, they can send the design to orthodontic laboratories that are equipped with 3D printers and powered by ArchForm’s software.

Pinterest is looking to continue to increase its portfolio of ads, though sometimes that can take a little while to see the light of day — and that includes a new-ish tool called Shopping Ads that’s slowly getting opened to more marketers and advertisers.

Getting new ad formats is important for a smaller company looking to build out an advertising business, as it has to show potential advertisers it can offer an array of tools to play with as they experiment with that service. The company said today that it’s expanding those shopping ad tools to hundreds of additional advertisers after launching a pilot program last year as it looks to continue to ramp up that tool. Pinterest has to be able to convince marketers that it should be a mainstay advertising purchase alongside Facebook and Google, which are able to routinely show returns in value for their advertising spend.

Shopping ads automatically create promoted pins from an existing product feed for a retailer. That means it’s basically one less thing for retailers to worry about as they add more and more content to the service. Most of Pinterest’s content online is business content as users share products they might be interested in one day buying or already own. As Pinterest gets more and more data on this, they’ll have a better handle on what ads work best, and hope that businesses will hand off the process in full to something more automated.

Pinterest hopes to capture that routine user behavior of planning what they want to do next, whether that’s an outfit to wear that day or some kind of major event or purchase down the line. Getting a hold of those users in the moment they might be interested in a new product is key to the company’s pitch to advertisers. You can more or less consider this a continued test as the company starts to slowly give the tool to the advertisers it works with before it becomes generally available. If it works, it could probably end up down the line in the hands of all advertisers, which could help for small- to medium-sized businesses without a lot of experience build out their early marketing campaigns.

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

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 391st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 22, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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Sramana Mitra: Explain the Zomato business model that you think is going to scale. Rehan Yar Khan: Zomato occupies premium mindshare when it comes to food. From that, you can develop several...

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Sramana Mitra: What is the typical round size? Ron Heinz: We typically put in between $3 million and $6 million. Our ownership structures tend to be between 15% to 25%. Our average check size upfront...

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It has been over a year since the San Mateo-based spend management firm Coupa (Nasdaq: COUP) went public. The stock has done well so far, and was recently trading at life high levels. The recently...

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Sramana Mitra: Was there any specific type of clients that you were getting traction with? Anthony Ferry: Finance and banking companies were a big one. Hospitality was another big one. We built some...

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Sweden-based Detectify, which offers a website vulnerability scanner that is in part powered by the crowd, has raised €5 million in new funding. The round was led by New York-based venture capital and private equity firm, Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors, Paua Ventures and Inventure, also participated.

Founded in late 2013 by a self-described group of “white-hat hackers” from Sweden, the now 20-person strong company offers a website security tool that uses automation to scan websites for vulnerabilities to help customers (including developers) stay on top of security. The more unique part of the service, however, is that it is in part maintained — or, rather, kept up to date — via the crowd in the form of Detectify’s ethical hacker network.

This sees top-ranked security researchers submit vulnerabilities that are then built into the Detectify scanner and used in customers’ security tests. The really clever part is that researchers get paid every time their submitted module identifies a vulnerability on a customer’s website. In other words, incentives are always kept aligned, giving Detectify a potential advantage and greater scale compared to similar website security automation tools.

“Companies are building applications and users happily enter their data into these applications, but the applications are built from mix of technologies that are changing rapidly (open source, plugins, funky js-frameworks), without a clear vendor “responsible” for the security,” says Detectify co-founder and CEO Rickard Carlsson, explaining the problem the startup set out to solve.

“As no clear vendor is responsible for communicating about security [as compared to a Windows patch, for example], the knowledge sits in the community. We wanted to build a platform that takes the knowledge from white-hat and supercharges it with automation”.

Put more simply, developers typically have a long backlog of things to do and security testing often “falls between the cracks” because of limited time. It’s also near-impossible for any single developer to manually security test their code while keeping up with the latest vulnerabilities. By using automation, the wisdom of the crowd, and via integrations with popular developer tools, Detectify aims to help catch security issues before every new release and as part of a developer’s normal workflow.

To that end, Detectify already counts customers spanning a range of industries and company sizes, including Trello, Le Monde, and King. “It might have been easier to target a specific segment but we have a land and expand strategy. We also aim to make the internet a safer place, hence we want to offer our solution to organisations of all sizes,” says Carlsson.

Meanwhile, he does concede that automated vulnerability scanning tools aren’t new, but says one key difference is that the Detectify team comes from the world of ethical hacking instead of the world of compliance. “Our tool offers a great UI/UX, high-quality results and the latest security tests thanks to our crowdsourcing,” he adds.

By adding a cryptocurrency exchange, a web version and stock option trading, Robinhood has managed to quadruple its valuation in a year, according to a source familiar with a new round the startup is raising. Robinhood is closing in on around $350 million in Series D funding led by Russian firm DST Global, the source says. That’s just 11 months after Robinhood confirmed TechCrunch’s scoop that the zero-fee stock trading app had raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation. The new raise would bring Robinhood to $526 million in funding.

Details of the Series D were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The astronomical value growth shows that investors see Robinhood as a core part of the mobile finance tools upon which the next generation will rely. The startup also just proved its ability to nimbly adapt to trends by building its cryptocurrency trading feature in less than two months to make sure it wouldn’t miss the next big economic shift. One million users waitlisted for access in just the five days after Robinhood Crypto was announced.

The launch completed a trio of product debuts. The mobile app finally launched a website version for tracking and trading stocks without a commission in November. In December it opened options trading, making it a more robust alternative to brokers like E*Trade and Scottrade. They often charge $7 or more per stock trade compared to zero with Robinhood, but also give away features that are reserved for Robinhood’s premium Gold subscription tier.

Robinhood won’t say how many people have signed up for its $6 to $200 per month Gold service that lets people trade on margin, with higher prices netting them more borrowing power. That and earning interest on money stored in Robinhood accounts are the startup’s primary revenue sources.

Rapid product iteration and skyrocketing value surely helped recruit Josh Elman, who Robinhood announced yesterday has joined as VP of product as he transitions to a part-time roll at Greylock Partners. He could help the company build a platform business as a backbone for other fintech apps, they way he helped Facebook build its identity platform.

In effect, Robinhood has figured out how to make stock trading freemium. Rather than charge per trade with bonus features included, Robinhood gives away the bare-bones trades and charges for everything else. That could give it a steady, scalable business model akin to Dropbox, which grew by offering small amounts of free storage and then charging for extras and enterprise accounts. From a start with free trades, Robinhood could blossom into a hub for your mobile finance life.

Fitness-oriented New Yorkers aren’t facing a shortage of classes that they can sign up for, but the prices can add up — Clément Benoit, founder of a new startup called FitHouse, said boutique classes cost an average of $35 per session.

FitHouse, on the other hand, is charging $99 per month for unlimited classes. Contrast that not just with a traditional studio, but also with ClassPass, where pricing in NYC ranges from $45 (for two to four classes) to $135 (for eight to 12 classes) per month.

In many ways, FitHouse offers a more traditional model than ClassPass — instead of giving subscribers access to a classes run by other studios and instructors, it’s building a studio of its own. Benoit said this gives the company more control over the experience, and a bigger piece of the revenue, which he said “we redistribute to both the user and the instructors.”

Beyond the pricing, Benoit said FitHouse also stands out because of its approach to real estate. It’s looking to take over empty spaces that require a minimum amount of investment to make them ready for classes. And it’s signing six-month leases with the possibility of a longer-term extension, so that it can quickly spin up new locations in new neighborhoods, with a minimum of risk.

FitHouse has already opened its first location in New York’s Bowery neighborhood, with plans to launch 12 locations across the city over the next year.

Benoit also said he’s attracting the best instructors by putting them front-and-center in FitHouse’s marketing and scheduling, and by paying them 10 to 25 percent more than they’d normally make to teach a class. (Though to be clear, these instructors aren’t working with FitHouse exclusively.)

Benoit, by the way, is a tech entrepreneur who sold his last-mile delivery startup Stuart to GeoPost last year. (And he’s already raised a $3 million round from Global Founders Capital, Xavier Niel and Fabrice Grinda.) He admitted that FitHouse’s technology isn’t the most flashy part of the offering, but he said it’s still important that the startup created its own frontend and backend infrastructure.

“Just the fact that we have information on the user, we can deliver a personalized check in: You came last week, you had a great class with this instructor, how did you like it?” he said. “No studio does that. They don’t control the tech.”

Seven million women (and men) love theSkimm. 

With its daily newsletters designed to keep you in the loop on the latest news and pop culture, theSkimm has developed a loyal following, and even recruits fans called “Skimm’bassadors” to help spread the word.

That word-of-mouth hype is helping, and the startup has seen enough growth to warrant more funding. TheSkimm is announcing a $12 million round led by GV (Google Ventures), with participation from Spanx founder Sara Blakely as well as existing investors like RRE Ventures and Homebrew.

Co-founded in 2012 in New York by former TV news producers Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the company has expanded beyond its newsletters targeting millennial women and offers subscription products, too. TheSkimm’s app includes a calendar of upcoming news and televised events. It also has podcasts and an e-commerce business.

Revenue is said to have more than doubled year over year since 2016, partly due to the subscriptions, but also due to native advertising and affiliate licensing. The staff has doubled, as well, and recently moved into a new headquarters.

The latest funding, which adds to the more than $16 million already raised, will be used to add more subscription services and also further expand into video and podcasting.

TheSkimm also has plans for data analysis.

The rapid consumer adoption of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home has opened opportunities for developers creating voice apps, too. At least that’s true in the case of Volley, a young company building voice-controlled entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa and Google Home. In less than a year, Volley has amassed an audience north of 500,000 monthly active users across its suite of voice apps, and has been growing that active base of users at 50 to 70 percent month-over-month.

The company was co-founded by former Harvard roommates and longtime friends, Max Child and James Wilsterman, and had originally operated as an iOS consultancy. But around a year and a half ago, Volley shifted its focus to voice instead.

“When we were running the iOS business, we were always sort of hacking around on games and some stuff on the side for fun,” explains Child. “We made a trivia game for iOS. And we made a Facebook Messenger chatbot virtual pet,” he says. The trivia game they built let users play just by swiping on push notifications — a very lightweight form of gameplay they thought was intriguing. “Voice was sort of the obvious next step,” says Child.

Not all their voice games have been successful, however. The first to launch was a game called Spelling Bee that users struggled with because of Alexa’s difficulties in identifying single letters — it would confuse a “B,” “C,” “D” and “E,” for example. But later titles have taken off.

Volley’s name-that-tune trivia game “Song Quiz” was its first breakout hit, and has grown to become the No. 1 game by reviews. The game today has a five-star rating across 8,842 reviews.

Another big hit is Volley’s “Yes Sire,” a choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling game that’s also at the top of Alexa’s charts. It also has a five-star rating, across 1,031 reviews.

The company says it has more than a dozen live titles, with the majority on the Alexa Skill Store and a few for Google Assistant/Google Home. But it only has seven or eight in what you would consider “active development.”

Unlike some indie developers who are struggling to generate revenue from their voice applications, Volley has been moderately successful thanks to Amazon’s developer rewards program — the program that doles out cash payments to top performing skills. While the startup didn’t want to disclose exact numbers, it says it’s earning in the five-figure range monthly from Amazon’s program.

In addition, Volley is preparing to roll out its own monetization features, including subscriptions and in-app purchases of add-on packs that will extend gameplay.

The company’s games have been well-received for a variety of reasons, but one is that they allow people to play together at the same time — like a modern-day replacement for family game night, perhaps.

“I think a live multiplayer experience with your family or people you’re good friends with, where you can have a fun time together in a room is fairly unusual. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t crowd around my iPhone and play games with my friends. And even with consoles there are significant barriers in understanding how to play,” says Child.

“I think that voice enables the live social experience in a way that anyone from five years old to 85 years old can pick up immediately. I think that’s really special. And I think we’re just at the beginning. I’m not going to say we’ve got it all figured out — but I think that’s powerful and unique to these platforms,” he adds.

Volley raised more than a million in seed funding ahead of joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 class, in a round led by Advancit Capital. Other investors include Amplify.LA, Rainfall, Y Combinator, MTGx, NFX and angels Hany Nada, Mika Salmi and Richard Wolpert.

The startup is currently a team of six in San Francisco.