The current global lockdown conditions continue to push online sales and e-commerce trends higher. Due to the improvement in its e-commerce business, etailer eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) recently revised its...
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It’s a busy week in the world of quantum computing, and today Tel Aviv-based Quantum Machines, a startup that is building a software and hardware stack for controlling and operating quantum computers, announced the launch of QUA, a new language that it calls the first “standard universal language for quantum computers.”
Quantum Machines CEO Itamar Sivan likened QUA to developments like Intel’s x86 and Nvidia’s CUDA, both of which provide the low-level tools for developers to get the most out of their hardware.
Quantum Machine’s own control hardware is essentially agnostic with regards to the underlying quantum technology that its customers want to use. The idea here is that if the company manages to make its own hardware the standard for controlling these systems, then its language will — almost by default — become the standard as well. And while it’s a “universal” language in the technical sense, it is — at least for now — meant to run on Quantum Machine’s own Quantum Orchestration Platform, which it announced earlier this year.
“QUA is basically the language of the Quantum Orchestration Platform,” Sivan told me. “But beyond that, QUA is what we believe the first candidate to become what we define as the ‘quantum computing software abstraction layer.’ ”
He argued that we are now at the right stage for the development of this layer because the underlying hardware has reached a matureness and because these systems are now fully programmable.
In his view, this is akin to what happened in classical computing, too. “The transition from having just specific circuits — physical circuits for specific algorithms — to the stage at which the system is programmable is the dramatic point. Basically, you have a software abstraction layer and then, you get to the era of software and everything accelerated.”
Sivan actually believes that for the time being, developers will want languages that give them a lot of direct control over the hardware because, for the foreseeable future, that’s what’s necessary to harness the advantages of quantum computing. “If you want to squeeze out everything quantum computers can give you, you better use low-level languages in the first place,” he argued,
For low-level developers, Sivan argues, QUA will represent a paradigm shift. “They shift from having to develop many, many things in an iterative way to actually having a language that can support even their wildest dreams — their wildest quantum algorithms dreams,” he said. “This is a real paradigm shift and these guys are experiencing in its full capacity — and it’s not only the accelerated process of programming and working, but also the capabilities themselves. Once everything is programmed in QUA and then compiled to the Quantum Orchestration Platform, then you also get the full benefit of the underlying hardware.”
The company argues that its QUA language is the first language to combine quantum operations at the pulse level and universal classical operations. Quantum Machines also built a compiler, XQP, which can then optimize the programs for the specific underlying hardware, in this case, Quantum Machine’s Pulse Processor assembly language.
It obviously needs to do all of this in order to create an ecosystem and a community around its language. Of course, if its Quantum Orchestration Platform becomes widely used — and it already has an impressive list of users today — then QUA will also see wide adoption.
“It’s one thing to build a beautiful language,” said Sivan. “But it’s another thing to develop it to be both beautiful and supported by an underlying hardware that is then adopted by itself. And then, the adoption of QUA is also led by the adoption of the Quantum Orchestration Platform, which is itself driven by the capabilities, nothing else.”
Adtech startup Admix is announcing that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding.
The London-based company was founded by CEO Samuel Huber (previously owner of an indie gaming studio) and COO Joe Bachle-Morris (who previously worked in the ad agency world). The company is working to bring ads to games, esports, virtual reality and augmented reality.
In-game advertising is already a huge market, but Admix says it’s differentiated by focusing on building a product that supports game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model.
For developers, Admix offers an SDK for the Unity and Unreal game engines, allowing them to drag and drop into their games ad formats like billboards, posters and 3D spaces. The startup says it’s working with more than 200 developers and is running campaigns from more than 500 advertisers each month, with past advertisers including National Geographic, Uber and State Farm.
“The concept of putting ads in games is obviously not new, but the scalability of our solution is what is revolutionary, delivering instant and consistent revenue to game makers, or streaming platforms,” Huber said in a statement. “This coupled with the fact that 1.5B people play games globally every day, means that gaming is becoming a truly mainstream advertising channel.”
Admix previously raised $2.1 million, according to Crunchbase. The Series A was led by U.K.-based Force Over Mass, with the participation from Speedinvest, Sure Valley Ventures and Nigel Morris (a former Dentsu Aegis executive), as well as other angel investors.
Playbook, aiming to be the Patreon of fitness content, announced the close of a $3 million seed round from several notable angels today. The investor roster includes Giphy founder Alex Chung, StyleSeat founder Melody McCloskey, Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage, Seventh Generation founder John Replogle, former head of growth at Uber Ed Baker, former head of product at Uber Daniel Graf, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, Bird head of growth Brendan O’Driscoll and Uphonest Capital.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing, the fitness space has gone through a transformation. Peloton has surged, ClassPass has pseudo-pivoted and traditional gyms have struggled to find their groove in this new world.
Playbook looked to these fitness ventures, as well as broader entertainment communities, to model its business. The company offers consumers an unlimited subscription for either $15/month or $99/year to consume as much fitness content as they’d like.
Playbook isn’t really built with a focus on the end user, but rather starts from the premise of giving creators the tools they need to foster their own community of users. The startup focuses the vast majority of its energy on offering creators a space where they can create and monetize their content on their own terms.
The startup, co-founded by Jeff Krahel, Michael Wojcieszek and Kasper Odegaard, takes a 20% cut of customer fees, with the rest going to creators in two different forms. The first is based on the creator’s own community that they bring to the platform via a custom link, in which case the creator owns the economics there. This means that, even if a user wanders from their original creator on the platform to another, the original creator still gets an 80% cut from that user. For users that are brought on to the platform by Playbook, and then select a creator’s content, Playbook pays out the creator based on seconds watched.
“Our focus is really on the creator and their community,” said Krahel. “Consumers don’t switch between creators very much. In fact, less than 50% of consumers switch. They’re often very dedicated to their creator. So we look at this more as a Patreon in terms of the business, where we want to give the best tools to the creator who is going to deeply engage with their community and monetize their content and social distribution.”
Interestingly, Playbook isn’t just focused on getting fit. The app, with more than 150 trainers on the platform, also has content around sports training, whether it be for conditioning or working on technique within various sports.
The company has locked in some high-powered creators, including Magnus Lygdback, trainer to Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck; Don Saladino, trainer to Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively; Boss Everline, trainer to Kevin Hart; Hannah Bower, trainer and well-known fit-mom; and yoga and meditation influencer Morgan Tyler.
Playbook says it has a waitlist of several thousand creators that want onto its platform. The company looks for a few things when onboarding a new creator, namely an existing community of followers (on Instagram or YouTube or wherever) and an existing library of content. That’s not to say that new trainers can’t join the platform, but these are two signals that could help close the deal.
Playbook says it’s seeing 140% new creator account growth in 2020.
Playbook also offers an onboarding guide for creators, similar to the Etsy Seller Handbook, to offer a variety of example videos, best practices and other tactics for success.
Of existing creators, women make up 60% of the pool and 15% of creators are people of color. Internally, around a quarter of employees for Playbook are women.
This morning Upgrade, a credit-focused fintech startup, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series D round that the company says gives it a $1 billion valuation. The Upgrade round slots neatly into a few trends TechCrunch has noted in recent quarters, including fintech startups raising at new, higher valuations, and some startups seeing sharp valuation growth on the back of comparatively modest raises.
Other startups that have steeply repriced on small investments, in percentage terms, include Notion more than doubling its valuation to $2 billion earlier this year off a $50 million investment.
In its Series D, Upgrade managed to, ahem, update its valuation from $500 million set during its 2018 Series C. Santander InnoVentures, the CVC associated with the banking giant Santander, led the latest investment.
Given the sheer deluge of fintech news in the last few years, you’re forgiven if Upgrade slipped through your nets. The company is a fintech startup with a credit-focus today, though it intends to add more neobank-like tooling — digital checking accounts, and so forth — in Q3. So, instead of starting with a checking-and-savings structure like so many neobanks, Upgrade kicked off with personal loans and credit cards.
The result of that focus, to hear Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche tell it, is that the company has managed to quickly scale its revenue base. This helps explain why the company raised so little money in its Series D; the company told TechCrunch it is currently on a $100 million run rate (month12, not quarter4) and is cash-flow positive.
On that note, how Upgrade managed to secure capital during the current, less certain era is somewhat clear from its growth story. (Growth, as we keep seeing, is still something VCs want to pour capital into.) According to Laplanche, Upgrade rang up $60 million in revenue in 2019 and expects $160 million this year. That’s nearly a tripling from an eight-figure base in a year — not bad at all.
If Laplanche’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the founder and former CEO of peer-to-peer fintech company LendingClub, which went public in December of 2014. Laplanche ran afoul of regulators during his tenure, leading to his ouster; he founded Upgrade after leaving LendingClub.
Upgrade has a different philosophy than some credit card providers, in the view of its CEO. “Banks have an incentive to keep customers in debt as long as possible,” Laplanche said during an interview with TechCrunch. Upgrade, in contrast, offers lower rates — cards starting at 6.9%, under what the CEO described as a market-normal entry rate of 12% to 13% — and set repayment periods for debts so that customers don’t wind up in a credit cycle that never ends, sapping them of financial health.
The model and Upgrade’s other products, like personal loans, have proved popular, by its own reckoning. The startup told TechCrunch that ten million individuals have applied for credit from the company. That demand has led to rising loan volume — Upgrade expects to do $3 billion in lending this year, including $2 billion in personal loans and $1 billion in credit card volume, it said — and a growing user base.
That user base is part of why the startup is targeting banking in the near future. And that move is why it needed money. Let’s explore.
The startup’s move into banking makes a bit of sense, given that it already has customers. One constant in the fintech world is the offering of more services to existing customers, helping drive up their lifetime value (LTV) and thus making their cost to acquire (CAC) more palatable.
Upgrade is just doing this normal move in reverse. Instead of starting with checking accounts and debit cards, which yield regular interchange incomes, it started in higher-margin credit and is moving into the lower-profit consumer banking world next. Q3, according to Laplanche, is when we should expect to see more from the company on this front.
Which brings us to why Upgrade raised at all. Per its CEO, the company might run cash-flow negative for six to nine months after the launch of its banking tools. Upgrade could roll out the new services slowly, he said, but decided instead to raise external capital and be more aggressive.
Fair enough.
Upgrade is an interesting startup story and a comeback tale of sorts for Laplanche. More as we have it.
Headless CMS company Contentful today announced that it has raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and a number of other new and existing investors. With this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million and a Contentful spokesperson tells me that it is approaching a $1 billion valuation.
In addition, the company also today announced that it has hired Bridget Perry as its CMO. She previously led Adobe’s marketing efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Currently, 28% of the Fortune 500 use Contentful to manage their content across platforms. The company says it has a total of 2,200 paying customers right now and these include the likes of Spotify, ITV, the British Museum, Telus and Urban Outfitters.
Steve Sloan, the company’s CEO who joined the company late last year, attributes its success to the fact that virtually every business today is in the process of figuring out how to become digital and serve its customers across platforms — and that’s a process that has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Ten or 15 years ago, when these content platforms or content management systems were created, they were a) really built for a web-only world and b) where the website was a complement to some other business,” he said. “Today, the mobile app, the mobile web experience is the front door to every business on the planet. And that’s never been any more clear than in this recent COVID crisis, where we’ve seen many, many businesses — even those that are very traditional businesses — realize that the dominant and, in some cases, only way their customers can interact with them is through that digital experience.”
But as they are looking at their options, many decide that they don’t just want to take an off-the-shelf product, Sloan argues, because it doesn’t allow them to build a differentiated offering.
Perry also noted that this is something she saw at Adobe, too, as it built its digital experience business. “Leading marketing at Adobe, we used it ourselves,” she said. “And so the challenge that we heard from customers in the market was how complex it was in some cases to implement, to organize around it, to build those experiences fast and see value and impact on the business. And part of that challenge, I think, stemmed from the kind of monolithic, all-in-one type of suite that Adobe offered. Even as a marketer at Adobe, we had challenges with that kind of time to market and agility. And so what’s really interesting to me — and one of the reasons why I joined Contentful — is that Contentful approaches this in a very different way.”
Sloan noted that putting the round together was a bit of an adventure. Contentful’s existing investors approached the company around the holidays because they wanted to make a bigger investment in the company to fuel its long-term growth. But at the time, the company wasn’t ready to raise new capital yet.
“And then in January and February, we had inbound interest from people who weren’t yet investors, who came to us and said, ‘hey, we really want to invest in this company, we’ve seen the trend and we really believe in it.’ So we went back to our insiders and said, ‘hey, we’re going to think about actually moving in our timeline for raising capital,” Sloan told me. “And then, right about that time is when COVID really broke out, particularly in Western Europe in North America.”
That didn’t faze Contentful’s investors, though.
“One of the things that really stood out about our investors — and particularly our lead investor for this round Sapphire — is that when everybody else was really, really frightened, they were really clear about the opportunity, about their belief in the team and about their understanding of the progress we had already made. And they were really unflinching in terms of their support,” Sloan said.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts (that’s why it hired Perry, after all), but Sloan also noted that Contentful plans to invest quite a bit into R&D, as well, as it looks to help its customers solve more adjacent problems.
Sramana Mitra: Has there been new business for you in the last two months? Bronwyn Spira: Yes, we’ve been very busy. We actually came out of the market with a complementary offer because we could see...
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Apple faces a sudden public backlash from developers large and small against the tax it imposes on some in-app purchases.
Although apps can be hosted on the App Store for free, Apple charges a 15-30% commission on certain purchases made in-app. If, for example, you buy a premium Spotify subscription through its iOS app, Apple takes a 30% cut. The same fee applies to other digital content purchases, such as virtual items or ebooks.
On Tuesday, a buzzy new subscription email service called Hey said Apple was trying to strong-arm it into integrating in-app purchases so it could get this commission, as first reported by Protocol.
Hey, which comes from Basecamp and costs $99 per year, launched on Monday. According to Protocol, the service doesn't let you subscribe or pay inside the iOS app.
Soon after launch, Hey tried to roll out an update fixing some bugs in its iOS app.
It then received an email from Apple rejecting the update. The email suggested Hey had broken the rules by not implementing Apple's in-app purchase system, which automatically takes the 15-30% cut. An Apple reviewer later said that the app may be removed completely if it didn't comply.
Apple's developer guidelines state that while apps can offer users access to services or content they've previously purchased, apps cannot "directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase." They also state that apps can't offer access to new, paid features within the app, they must offer in-app purchase.
Hey's executives had thought the rule didn't apply to them as the app is intended to allow people to sign in to something they are already subscribed to, as is the case with platforms like Netflix and Slack.
"There is no chance in bloody hell that we're going to pay Apple's ransom. I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils. This is profoundly, perversely abusive and unfair," tweeted Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson.
According to Protocol, Apple enforced the rule because it's a consumer app rather than an enterprise app.
Heinemeier Hansson said the enforcement of the policy is inconsistent: "The Basecamp app has been in the App Store for YEARS offering access to a subscription bought elsewhere. The store is FULL of apps doing just that. Even other email apps!"
Stratechery analyst Ben Thompson said on Twitter following the news he has received multiple emails from developers saying they've had a similar experiences and suggested this was a recent re-interpretation of Apple's policy.
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The standoff between Apple and Hey happened the same day the EU launched two antitrust investigations into Apple, one focusing on the 30%Â App Store levy.
The EU probe was set in motion in 2019 when Spotify filed a complaint saying that levying the tax while also running a competing music streaming business (Apple Music) meant the Apple was giving its own service a leg-up by artificially inflating Spotify's prices. Spotify argued that in order to make up for the 15-30% fee it passed on to Apple, it had to put up the price of its own subscriptions.
An ebook company made the same complaint to the EU in March of this year. Although the European Commission did not name the company, the details match a report from the Financial Times that the complainant was Rakuten-owned Kobo. Kobo declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.
Apple hit back, saying the EU is "advancing baseless complaints from a handful of companies who simply want a free ride, and don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else."
Another app developer heavyweight came out swinging against Apple on Tuesday.
Match Group, which owns a host of popular dating apps including Tinder, OKCupid, and Hinge, issued a statement criticizing the in-app purchase tax.
"Apple is a partner, but also a dominant platform whose actions force the vast majority of consumers to pay more for third-party apps that Apple arbitrarily defines as 'digital services.' Apple squeezes industries like ebooks, music and video streaming, cloud storage, gaming and online dating for 30% of their revenue, which is all the more alarming when Apple then enters that space, as we've repeatedly seen," Match Group said in its statement.
"We're acutely aware of their power over us. They claim we're asking for a 'free ride' when the reality is, 'digital services' are the only category of apps that have to pay the App Store fees. The overwhelming majority of apps, including Internet behemoths that connect people (rideshare/gig apps), or monetize by selling advertising (social networks), have never been subject to Apple's payments systems and fees, and this is not right. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this with Apple and create an equitable distribution of fees across the entire App Store, as well as with interested parties in the EU and in the US," it added.
Apple was not immediately available to comment on Match Group's statement when contacted by Business Insider.Â
Spotify, Acast and a host of other major players in the audio industry have signed a pledge promising to improve diversity within their ranks.
Renay Richardson, founder of podcasting startup Broccoli, launched the "Equality in Audio Pact" three weeks ago in the wake of the death of George Floyd, which has forced industries and individuals to reckon with their understanding of racism.Â
The pledge calls on production companies to end unpaid internships, avoid exclusively placing employees on projects related to their ethnicity or sexual identity, publish race and gender pay gap data, stop taking part in panels that "do not represent" the locations where they take place, and "be transparent" about business partnerships.Â
"If you put these things in place, take a snapshot of your workplace today and another one in 18 months," says Richardson. "I guarantee you'll see a difference."Â
Richardson launched the campaign in collaboration alongside four other audio firms: We Are Unedited, Don't Skip, Falling Tree Productions, and Boom Shakalaka Productions.Â
She previously produced "About Race", a podcast series written and hosted by Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of the bestselling "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race". Â
Speaking of the origins of the campaign, she said: "With everything that's happened around the world in the wake of George Floyd's death, we felt like this was a moment for us to demand real change in the audio industry.Â
"Me and my friends have been talking about what it's like to be a person of color in the podcasting world. I've worked in the media for around 20 years, in film and TV and other stuff. I should be feeling more confident by now, but in this industry â and I tell everyone this â I've never felt so black in my life."Â
After signing the pledge, Spotify's UK and Ireland Twitter account tweeted: "We fully support the amazing work being done by [Broccoli]. We have signed the #EqualityInAudio pact."Â
Other big-name signatories include Acast, Bauer Media Group (the home of KISS, Magic, and Absolute), and BBC Radio.Â
"For us, the most important thing was to try and make our demands actionable. Of course I'd like to end racism full stop, but that's not going to happen overnight.
"Hopefully this sets us on the right path."Â
The full list of Equality in Audio Pact signatories can be found here.Â
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
The European Commission opened two simultaneous antitrust investigations into Apple on Tuesday. The probes will center on Apple Pay and the App Store's terms and conditions.Amazon announced it is putting AI cameras in some of its warehouses to see if workers are adhering to social distancing. When employees walk past the cameras, a monitor will use green and red circles to indicate whether workers are standing six feet apart.In a leaked document, Amazon employees shared stories of racism and gender discrimination while calling for a new leadership principle on "inclusion." Members of internal affinity groups and minority employee organizations at Amazon have been circulating a document titled "The case for a 15th leadership principle on inclusion" this month to rally support for the initiative, according to a copy of the document and an email seen by Business Insider.Research from Algorithm Watch suggests Instagram's algorithm systematically boosts seminude pictures. The German nonprofit found posts containing semi-naked women were 54% more likely to appear in the volunteers' news feeds than other photographs, while topless posts from men were 28% more likely to appear.European regulators set a July 20 deadline to decide whether they will allow Google's Fitbit deal to happen or else it will launch a four-month investigation. In order to clear the deadline, Google might have to offer some concessions around how it will handle Fitbit users' data.Human rights activists banned from Facebook say Mark Zuckerberg's "free speech" approach to Trump's posts rings hollow. Facebook said it's reviewing the activists' accounts, but that some may have broken its policies against "praise, support, or representation" for terrorist organizations.Boston Dynamics' lifelike Spot robot is now on sale for $75,000. Spot has already been used in hospitals, agriculture, and police work.Zynn, the TikTok clone accused of stealing content, was removed from both iOS and Android app stores. Zynn did not respond to a request for comment, but told other outlets that the app was removed from app stores over complaints of "plagiarism."AT&T is laying off 3,400 workers and shutting down at least 250 stores. The job cuts are part of the economic effect of the coronavirus pandemic and the carrier's efforts to focus on growth areas, AT&T said.San Francisco's District Attorney is suing DoorDash for classifying workers as contractors instead of employees despite the AB5 gig-worker law. The civil lawsuit is one of the latest examples of how California's AB5 law is upending tech companies' reliance on the gig economy.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
You can also subscribe to this newsletter here â just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know.
African cross-border fintech startup Chipper Cash has closed a $13.8 million Series A funding round led by Deciens Capital and plans to hire 30 new staff globally.
The raise caps an event-filled run for the San Francisco-based payments company, founded two years ago by Ugandan Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled.
The two came to America for academics, met in Iowa while studying at Grinnell College and ventured out to Silicon Valley for stints in big tech: Facebook for Serunjogi and Flickr and Yahoo! for Moujaled.
The startup call beckoned and after launching Chipper Cash in 2018, the duo convinced 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by American football legend Joe Montana — to back their company with seed funds.
Two years and $22 million in total capital raised later, Chipper Cash offers its mobile-based, no fee, P2P payment services in seven countries: Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya.
“We’re now at over one and a half million users and doing over a $100 million dollars a month in volume,” Serunjogi told TechCrunch on a call.
Chipper Cash does not release audited financial data, but does share internal performance accounting with investors. Deciens Capital and Raptor Group co-led the startup’s Series A financing, with repeat support from 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures .
Deciens Capital founder Dan Kimerling confirmed the fund’s lead on the investment and review of Chipper Cash’s payment value and volume metrics.
Parallel to its P2P app, the startup also runs Chipper Checkout, a merchant-focused, fee-based mobile payment product that generates the revenue to support Chipper Cash’s free mobile-money business.
The company will use its latest round to hire up to 30 people across operations in San Francisco, Lagos, London, Nairobi and New York, according to Serunjogi.
Image Credits: Chipper Cash
Chipper Cash has already brought on a new compliance officer, Lisa Dawson, whose background includes stints with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Citigroup’s anti-money laundering department.
“You know in the world we live in, the AML side is very important, so it’s an area that we want to invest in from the get go,” said Serunjogi.
He confirmed Dawson’s role aligned with getting Chipper Cash ready to meet regulatory requirements for new markets, but declined to name specific countries.
With the round announcement, Chipper Cash also revealed a corporate social responsibility initiative. Related to current U.S. events, the startup has formed the Chipper Fund for Black Lives.
“We’ve been huge beneficiaries of the generosity and openness of this country and its entrepreneurial spirit,” explained Serunjogi. “But growing up in Africa, we’ve were able to navigate [the U.S.] without the traumas and baggage our African American friends have gone through living in America.”
The Chipper Fund for Black Lives will give five to 10 grants of $5,000 to $10,000. “The plan is to give that to…people or causes who are furthering social justice reforms,” said Serunjogi.
In Africa, Chipper Cash has placed itself in the continent’s major digital payments markets. As a sector, fintech has become Africa’s highest funded tech space, receiving the bulk of an estimated $2 billion in VC that went to startups in 2019.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Those ventures, and a number of the continent’s established banks, are in a race to build market share through financial inclusion.
By several estimates — including The Global Findex Database — the continent is home to the largest percentage of the world’s unbanked population, with a sizable number of underbanked consumers and SMEs.
Increasingly, Nigeria has become the most significant fintech market in Africa, with the continent’s largest economy and population of 200 million.
Chipper Cash expanded there in 2019 and faces competition from a number of players, including local payments venture Paga. More recently, outside entrants have jumped into Nigeria’s fintech scene.
In 2019, Chinese investors put $220 million into OPay (owned by Opera) and PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale first in West Africa and then the broader continent.
Over the next several years, expect to see market events — such as fails, acquisitions or IPOs — determine how well-funded payment startups, including Chipper Cash, fare in Africa’s fintech arena.
CRM software has become a critical piece of IT when it comes to getting business done, and today a startup focusing on one specific aspect of that stack — sales automation — is announcing a growth round of funding underscoring its own momentum. Outreach, which has built a popular suite of tools used by salespeople to help identify and reach out to prospects and improve their relationships en route to closing deals, has raised $50 million in a Series F round of funding that values the company at $1.33 billion.
The funding will be used to continue expanding geographically — headquartered in Seattle, Outreach also has an office in London and wants to do more in Europe and eventually Asia — as well as to invest in product development.
The platform today essentially integrates with a company’s existing CRM, be it Salesforce, or Microsoft’s, or Kustomer, or something else — and provides an SaaS-based set of tools for helping to source and track meetings, have to-hand information on sales targets, and a communications manager that helps with outreach calls and other communication in real time. It will be investing in more AI around the product, such as its newest product Kaia (an acronym for “knowledge AI assistant”), and it has also hired a new CFO, Melissa Fisher, from Qualys, possibly a sign of where it hopes to go next as a business.
Sands Capital — an investor out of Virginia that also backs the likes of UiPath and DoorDash — is leading the round, Outreach noted, with “strong participation” also from strategic backer Salesforce Ventures. Other investors include Operator Collective (a new backer that launched last year and focuses on B2B) and previous backers Lone Pine Capital, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield and Sapphire Ventures.
Outreach has raised $289 million to date, and for some more context, this is definitely an up round: the startup was last valued at $1.1 billion when it raised a Series E in April 2019.
The funding comes on the heels of strong growth for the company: More than 4,000 businesses now use its tools, including Adobe, Tableau, DoorDash, Splunk, DocuSign and SAP, making Outreach the biggest player in a field that also includes Salesloft (which also raised a significant round last year on the heels of Outreach’s), Clari, Chorus.ai, Gong, Conversica and Afiniti. Its sweet spot has been working with technology-led businesses and that sector continues to expand its sales operations, even as much of the economy has contracted in recent months.
“You are seeing a cambric explosion of B2B startups happening everywhere,” Manny Medina, CEO and co-founder of Outreach, said in a phone interview this week. “It means that sales roles are being created as we speak.” And that translates to a growing pool of potential customers for Outreach.
It wasn’t always this way.
When Outreach was first founded in 2011 in Seattle, it wasn’t a sales automation company. It was a recruitment startup called GroupTalent working on software to help source and hire talent, aimed at tech companies. That business was rolling along, until it wasn’t: In 2015, the startup found itself with only two months of runway left, with little hope of raising more.
“We were not hitting our stride, and growth was hard. We didn’t make the numbers in 2014 and then had two months of cash left and no prospects of raising more,” Medina recalled. “So I sat down with my co-founders,” — Gordon Hempton, Andrew Kinzer and Wes Hather, none of whom are at the company anymore — “and we decided to sell our way out of it. We thought that if we generated more meetings we could gain more opportunities to try to sell our recruitment software.
“So we built the engine to do that, and we saw that we were getting 40% reply rates to our own outreaching emails. It was so successful we had a 10x increase in productivity. But we ran out of sales capacity, so we started selling the meetings we had managed to secure with potential talent directly to the tech companies themselves,” in other words, the other side of its marketplace, those looking to fill vacancies.
That quickly tipped over into a business opportunity of its own. “Companies were saying to us, ‘I don’t want to buy the recruitment software. I need that sales engine!” The company never looked back, and changed its name to work for the pivot.
Fast-forward to 2020, and times are challenging in a completely different way, defined as we are by a global health pandemic that affects what we do every day, where we go, how we work, how we interact with people and much more.
Medina says the impact of the novel coronavirus has been a significant one for the company and its customers, in part because it fits well with two main types of usage cases that have emerged in the world of sales in the time of COVID-19.
“Older sellers now working from home are accomplished and don’t need to be babysat,” he said, but added they can’t rely on their traditional touchpoints “like meetings, dinners and bar mitzvahs” anymore to seal deals. “They don’t have the tools to get over the line. So our product is being called in to help them.”
Another group at the other end of the spectrum, he said, are “younger and less experienced salespeople who don’t have the physical environment [many live in smaller places with roommates] nor experience to sell well alone. For them it’s been challenging not to come into an office because especially in smaller companies, they rely on each other to train, to listen to others on calls to learn how to sell.”
That’s the other scenario where Outreach is finding some traction: They’re using Outreach’s tools as a proxy for physically sitting alongside and learning from more experienced colleagues, and using it as a supplement to learning the ropes in the old way.
“Outreach’s leadership position in the market, clear mission, and value-added approach make the company a natural investment choice for us,” said Michael Clarke, partner at Sands Capital’s Global Innovation Fund, in a statement. “Now more than ever, companies need an AI-powered sales engagement platform like Outreach. Enterprise sales teams are rapidly adopting sales engagement platforms and Outreach’s rapid growth reflects this.”
Like a lot of sales tools that are powered by AI, Outreach in part is taking on some of the more mundane jobs of salespeople.
But Medina doesn’t believe that this will play out in the “man versus machine” scenario we often ponder when we think about human obsolescence in the face of technological efficiency. In other words, he doesn’t think we’re close to replacing the humans in the mix, even at a time when we’re seeing so many layoffs.
“We are at the early innings,” he said. “There are 6.8 million sales people and we only have north of 100,000 users, not even 2% of the market. There may be a redefinition of the role, but not a reduction.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the platform will allow its users to turn off political ads.
"Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say â and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content," Zuckerberg wrote in a USA Today op-ed. "For those of you who've already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you â so we're also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads."
"We'll still remind you to vote," he added.
Facebook will begin implementing the feature for some users on Wednesday and make it available to all users over the next several weeks, a company spokesperson told CNBC.
Users will be able to turn off ads about political, social, and electoral issues from political candidates, super PACs, and other organizations who have a the political disclaimer on them indicating that an ad is "paid for by" a certain entity, CNBC reported.
Zuckerberg also announced in his op-ed that Facebook will take steps to boost voter registration, voter turnout, and marginalized voices ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and that the platform's aim is to help four million people register to vote.
To that end, he said Facebook will create a Voting Information Center with information about registration, early voting, and voting by mail. The center will also include details on how and when to vote, Zuckerberg said, adding that the company expects 160 million people in the US to see "authoritative information on Facebook about how to vote in the general election from July through November."
Zuckerberg also said Facebook will continue working to combat foreign interference on its platform by tracking and taking down "malicious accounts."
The company removed 3.3. billion fake accounts in 2018 and 5.4 billion last year as of November.
Zuckerberg's announcement comes as Facebook continues facing scrutiny over its decision to show political content to users even if that content contains misinformation or false claims.
The social media network has been under the microscope particularly in the last few weeks, after it refused to follow Twitter's lead in fact-checking President Donald Trump's misleading statements on its platform.
Shortly after Twitter fact-checked two of Trump's tweets spreading conspiracy theories about voting by mail, Zuckerberg criticized Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a Fox News interview.
"I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," he said.
Dorsey hit back at Zuckerberg, tweeting: "We'll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make."
He added: "This does not make us an 'arbiter of truth.' Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions."
Zuckerberg appeared to allude to the recent strife over Trump's tweets in his op-ed, writing, "Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say â and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content."
"We have rules against speech that will cause imminent physical harm or suppress voting, and no one is exempt from them," he wrote. "But accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying, even if we viscerally dislike what they say."
Zuckerberg added that he believes the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting.
"I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves," he wrote. "That's why I think we should maintain as open a platform as possible, accompanied by ambitious efforts to boost voter participation."
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wants employees to use June 19, the day known as Juneteenth commemorating the end of slavery in the US, as a day to "reflect, learn, and support each other," according to an internal email obtained by Business Insider.
In the email, Bezos said that he's canceling all of his meetings that day, after having spent a lot of time thinking about the recent events that sparked the current Black Lives Matter movement. Although he didn't call it an official day off for the company, he encouraged all employees to cancel their meetings on Friday too, adding the company is offering online learning opportunities about Juneteenth throughout the day.
Amazon's representative wasn't immediately available for comment. Recode's Jason Del Rey first tweeted about the email.
Amazon is the latest company to instruct employees to cancel all meetings on Juneteenth. Other high-profile companies like Microsoft, Google, and Nike have made similar arrangements for their employees.
The move follows growing calls for support of the Black Lives Movement internally at Amazon. An internal climate activist group encouraged employees to join the protests last week, while a group of employees are also taking steps to add "inclusion" to Amazon's famous leadership principles. Several Amazon executives addressed the issue in internal emails as well.
Here's the full email Bezos sent to employees:
Over the past few weeks, the [S-team] and I have spent a lot of time listening to customers and employees and thinking about how recent events in our country have laid bare the systemic racism and injustices that oppress Black individuals and communities.
This Friday, June 19, is Juneteenth, the oldest-known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. I'm cancelling all of my meetings on Friday, and I encourage all of you to do the same if you can. We're providing a range of online learning opportunities for employees throughout the day.
Please take some time to reflect, learn, and support each other. Slavery ended a long time ago, but racism didn't.
Jeff
WhatsApp's big payments play is finally here.
On Monday, the Facebook-owned messaging app announced that it is adding payments tech to its service in Brazil, allowing its 120 million users in the country to send one another cash and for businesses to process purchases in the app.
It's a significant step in Facebook's vision to build out a fully fleshed commerce and finance setup across its family of apps â and to help recoup the tens of billions of dollars it has poured into WhatsApp over the years.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for a cool $19 billion. Since then, it has grown to become immensely popular, with more than 2 billion users around the world. But it has never been a runaway commercial success for Facebook, in the same way Instagram has been, which after being snapped up in 2012 for a then-eye-watering $1 billion ultimately became an advertising powerhouse that generated more than $20 billion in revenue in 2019, more than a quarter of Facebook's overall revenues for the year.
WhatsApp, meanwhile, remains immensely valuable to Facebook because of its popularity around the world â but it's not contributing to the bottom line in the same way. Attempts to add ads, Facebook's core business, to the app have been abortive. In early 2020, the news broke that the company was disbanding a team that was attempting to implement ads in WhatsApp. Facebook insists that ads are still coming, but not any time soon.
Payments is an ideal answer to this void.
WhatsApp is increasingly used by businesses and consumers to communicate, particularly in emerging markets like India, and the company has built out a suite of tools to help facilitate this. Businesses can build "catalogs" to show off their offerings, and are offered tools to help manage orders and facilitate customer service interactions.
Adding payments tech, which was first trialed in India, allows WhatsApp to own the entire transaction from start to finish â and make some money in the process. Peer-to-peer payments will be free for users, Facebook says, but it will take a cut of payments made to businesses, in the same way that a traditional payment processor would charge a shopkeeper to use its point-of-sale software.
Facebook's overall business remains ads-orientated, and it views payments as a way to boost that too. On a call with analysts after Facebook released its first-quarter financial results for 2020, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected increased commerce and payments functionality across its apps to make its ads business more successful. "[Businesses] basically buy ads inside Facebook or Instagram that send people to chat threads. And then as we build out all these tools around that â around making those threads more valuable, we think that those ads will only increase in value, which is the way we're currently thinking about that business," he said.
WhatsApp's payments functionality is powered by Facebook Pay, similar functionality that the company made for its main app. It's one of a suite of commerce-orientated tools that it has built in recent years â and accelerated work on amid the COVID-19 pandemic that forced businesses around the world to shutter their physical stores.
In May 2020 it announced Shops, a major new feature for Facebook and Instagram that allows businesses to create digital storefronts to list their products online, along with other tools to sell goods via livestreams and other new functionality. Financial services firm Deutsche Bank estimates that Shops could net Facebook an extra $30 billion in annual revenue, through a combination of transaction fees and increased ad spend by businesses attempting to capitalize on the functionality.
For now, WhatsApp is only offering payments tools in Brazil. But if it's a success, the rest of the world is sure to follow. "Payments on WhatsApp are beginning to roll out to people across Brazil beginning today and we look forward to bringing it to everyone as we go forward," the company wrote in a blog post.
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Oracle posted weaker-than-expected sales during its fourth quarter earnings as the tech giant saw "a drop off in deals" due to the coronavirus crisis.
While the tech giant exceeded Wall Street expectations on the bottom line, the stock still slipped about 4% after-hours.Â
"As the quarter progressed, we saw a drop off in deals, especially in industries most affected by the pandemic," CEO Safra Catz told analysts on the company's earnings call. She cited the hospitality, retail, and transportation industries as some of the hardest hit, and said that some customers were forced to delay their payments.
Oracle reported a fiscal fourth quarter profit of $3.12 billion, or 99 cents a share, compared to a profit of $3.74 billion, or $1.07 cents a share for the year-earlier period. Adjusted profit was $1.20 a share. Revenue slipped from $11.14 billion for the year-earlier-period to $10.44 billion in Q4. Analysts were expecting a profit of $1.16 a share on revenue of $10.69 billion.
While Oracle's stock sank after-hours, it has rallied recently as the tech market has recovered. Revenue aside, Oracle also boasted about some notable customer wins in the cloud, where it competes with â and lags behind â market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Founder and chairman Larry Ellison used Tuesday's earnings call to highlight recent gains against its archrivals, including new deals with video conferencing platforms Zoom and 8X8.
"As people compare our cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure and the rest, they're going to pick our cloud," Ellison told analysts on the earnings call. "Once they look, we win."
But Jefferies analyst Brent Thill was unimpressed with Oracle's report, telling clients in a note that the company's overall results â particularly a 22% year-over-year drop in license revenue â suggest it was actually losing share to Amazon and Microsoft.
Valoir analyst Rebecca Wettemann also downplayed the significance of Oracle's recent customer wins.
"Oracle can't depend on customers moving to the cloud in general to save it," she told Business Insider. "Companies are not making big cloud moves right now, but mostly small moves, which aren't enough to move the needle."
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Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings is building a luxury retreat in Colorado, but it's not for his personal enjoyment.
The property will house a training facility for teachers as a part of Hastings' ongoing efforts to reform the United States' public school system, Vox's Theodore Schleifer reported. The camp, called the Retreat Land at Lone Rock, spans 2,100 acres in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and could open as soon as March 2021, per Vox.
A representative for Hastings at Netflix did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the training center.
When it opens, Lone Rock will host groups of 30 teachers from both public and charter schools, who will be able to attend four-day retreats filled with team-building exercises like sports and hiking, use its classroom space, and relax at its on-site spa. The massive $20 million development has been under construction for years, but not even frustrated local residents knew its purpose before Schleifer's report.
Hastings built a $4.8 billion fortune after founding Netflix in 1995. The billionaire has long been interested in reforming America's educational system, pledging to spend $100 million of his personal fortune on education in 2016, Business Insider reported at the time.
Before he was a billionaire, Hastings coauthored a 1998 initiative that made it easier to start charter schools in California, according to the Washington Post, and served on the California Board of Education for four years.Â
Bill Gates spent $1 billion and seven years working on an initiative to improve test performance for students in low-income schools by closely monitoring teacher effectiveness â a similar strategy to Hastings' â but ultimately didn't improve test scores or drop-out rates in the long-term, a 2018 report by independent think-tank RAND revealed. In some cases, the program even "did more harm than good," Jay Greene, a professor of education at the University of Arkansas, wrote on Education Next.
Still, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tapped Gates to help him "reimagine" what New York's public schools will look like when they reopen in the fall after coronavirus closures. Cuomo provided few details of the partnership when he announced it at a press briefing in May, and the Gates Foundation told Business Insider in a statement that more details on the collaboration are forthcoming.
Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark, New Jersey's failing public school system in 2010, but the cash infusion largely failed to improve student outcomes.
With Retreat Land at Lone Rock, Hastings could similarly become a major influence in public education, Schleifer reported.
"I had a bunch of money, and I didn't really want to buy yachts,"Â Hastings told The Wall Street Journal in 2008. "I started looking at education, trying to figure out why our education is lagging when our technology is increasing at great rates and there's great innovation in so many other areas â health care, biotech, information technology, moviemaking. Why not education?"
It's no secret that SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, wants to launch and land its next-generation Starship rocket system over water.
One of the first detailed mentions of the plan emerged during an October 2017 talk Musk gave, in which he updated the world on SpaceX's plans to build cities on Mars and populate them with a million people or more.
During the presentation, Musk shared a video of Starship (then called the Big F---ing Rocket) rocketing passengers from an ocean platform near New York City, then landing them 39 minutes later on a similar floating spaceport near Shanghai. Musk called the high-speed transportation concept "Earth to Earth."
However, plans to actually build ocean launch platforms seemingly lacked teeth for years. That is, until this week: when the aerospace company posted two jobs for engineers who will help "design and build an operational offshore rocket launch facility."
Neither posting mentions "Starship," but both are located in Brownsville, Texas. The city sits about 30 minutes west of the state's southeastern tip, which is where SpaceX is building and testing Starship rocket prototypes (sometimes to explosive effect) amid a community of retiree-age homeowners called Boca Chica Village.
Business Insider first saw the job listings in a tweet by user "Cowboy" Dan Paasch, who lives in Forth Worth and follows SpaceX's activities. Musk later quoted a tweet by another user about the job postings.
"SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth," Musk tweeted on Tuesday.
The concept of ocean-platform launches is not new. A company called Sea Launch, for example, first launched an orbital-class Zenit rocket from a platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in March 1999. (The company used to be managed by Boeing but is now owned by a Russian airline.)
Though SpaceX lacks operational experience launching rockets from ocean platforms, it has landed more than four dozen first-stage rocket boosters â the most expensive part of a launch system, given the numerous complex engines attached to their base â and landing them on drone ships. The boosters are then refurbished and reused, saving SpaceX millions of dollars per use and allowing the company to be price-competitive.
When a Twitter user brought up Sea Launch and its Zenit rocket, Musk responded: "Zenit is an order of magnitude smaller than Starship system & doesn't come back & land."
Now it seems SpaceX is ready to make the leap, with safety as a driving factor.
Homeowners who attended a private meeting with Musk in September 2019 told Business Insider that the entrepreneur described long-term plans to move away from land-based launchpads and instead use offshore platforms near Boca Chica Beach to fly Starship with less risk to the ground.
Starship is divided into two sections: the first-stage Super Heavy booster, which may stand about 22 stories tall, and the upper-stage rocket ship called Starship, which Musk said could ferry up to 100 people to Mars at a time (though presumably more in an Earth transportation design).
A fully stacked Starship-Super Heavy vehicle could weigh more than 9 million pounds, mostly in fuel, and each section returning to Earth would create deafening sonic booms, perhaps three times per day per rocket, or 1,000 launches per year.
"We need to be far enough away so as not to bother heavily populated areas. The launch & landing are not subtle. But you could get within a few miles of the spaceport in a boat," Musk tweeted on Tuesday, adding that a jet-powered Incat ship may be suitable for land-to-platform transportation.Â
SpaceX is currently in the midst of a crash program to develop Starship into a safe and fully reusable launch system.
If it works as Musk envisions, the system could launch several times a day â unheard of in this history of spaceflight â and reduce the cost-per-pound to launch something to space by 1,000-fold or more.
To that end, Musk has told his staff to make Starship "the top SpaceX priority" and has enlisted about 1,000 staff to work on a production facility for the vehicle in Boca Chica â what the CEO sees as the key to making a viable, low-cost system. The company expects the vehicles to fail during tests at its private spaceport, and they often do, but Musk thinks SpaceX may be ready to fly to orbit by the 20th version or so.
SpaceX also recently won a NASA contract to develop Starship into a lunar-landing vehicle. The company also aims to fly Japanese fashion billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon in 2023, then fly the first people to Mars in 2024, Musk reconfirmed in a June 4 tweet.
Amid that work, SpaceX is hoping to get its high-speed Earth transportation system up and running. The ultimate goal with the scheme may be to replace grueling long-haul airplane flights â perhaps to the tune of 1 million to 15 million per day â Caryn Schenewerk, the senior legal counsel for SpaceX, said in January at the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) 23rd annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference.
"There will be many test flights before commercial passengers are carried," Musk tweeted on Tuesday. "First Earth to Earth test flights might be in 2 or 3 years."
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is suing food delivery platform DoorDash for "unlawful and unfair business practices."
According to the complaint, pulled by Mission Local reporter Joe Eskenazi who first reported the news, the company has continued to classify its delivery workers as independent contractors instead of employees in direct defiance of a California law passed to prevent companies from doing just that.Â
The state's AB5 law went into effect in early January 2020 and strives not only to require companies to classify gig workers as employees but also to pay local, state, and federal taxes in accordance with that classification, as Eater SF notes. Boudin's civil lawsuit is asking for DoorDash to classify its delivery workers, known as "Dashers," as employees.
"Today's action seeks to disrupt the essential services Dashers provide, stripping hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, parents, retirees and other Californians of valuable work opportunities, depriving local restaurants of desperately needed revenue, and making it more difficult for consumers to receive prepared food, groceries, and other essentials safely and reliably," DoorDash Global Head of Public Policy Max Rettig said in an email to Business Insider. "We will fight to continue providing Dashers the flexible earning opportunities they say they want in these challenging times."
San Francisco tech companies â including Uber, Postmates, and Lyft â and their business models rely heavily on gig workers. By doing so they're able to avoid the higher costs that come with doling out wages and benefits typically reserved for full-time employees.
DoorDash â which filed to go public in late February â isn't the only firm that has aggressively pushed back on AB5. The company and others like Lyft, Uber, and Instacart have poured millions into a campaign supporting a California ballot measure designed to reverse the AB5 law.
Ride-hailing giant Uber and food delivery company Postmates had also filed a lawsuit in December 2019 arguing that the law was unconstitutional.
But the gig workers are also going to court.Â
As Business Insider's Tyler Sonnemaker reported, drivers with Uber and Lyft in California filed claims against the companies in mid-April. The workers claimed they were owed at least $630 million in back wages as their employers continued to classify them as independent contractors, despite the passage of AB5.
"How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?" is not a question most people expect to be asked in a job interview.Â
But in a world where the hiring process relies on artificial intelligence, bizarre and socially inappropriate questions might not be off limits, at least according to one digital artist who wants to warn us about what the future could hold if we're not careful.
In a new online interactive experience, "An Interview With Alex," Chinese-born and New York City-based multimedia artist Carrie Sijia Wang lets people imagine that world by taking them through a job interview conducted entirely by an AI hiring manager.
Over the course of around 12 minutes, Alex analyzes your facial expressions, speech patterns, and answers to abstract puzzles and intrusive questions like the one above, which Wang told Business Insider are based on a famous study that tried to create intimacy between people by having them ask each other 36 personal questions.
Alex's goal: to determine if you're the right fit for the fictional "Open Mind" corporation, which it says ominously is "the largest, and soon to be only, general purpose company in the world."
Alex tells you that Open Mind values play, connection, openness, and positivity, and is looking for "mini gamers" to win small games that help the company in some opaque way â which you don't need to worry about because you're "fully protected from the consequences of your actions."
"It's kind of making fun of the corporate culture where the emphasis of surface level optimism is key," Wang told Business Insider.
The experience feels like something out of a "Black Mirror" episode, and Wang said she intended it to be that way in an attempt to highlight some of the dangers of relying on AI for things that may need a more human touch.
Wang said that, while the project started out as "speculative fiction" and the narrative may seem a bit far-fetched, she came to realize during her research that "the reality of hiring and employee management is already quite weird and absurd," citing examples like Uber drivers' complaints about being managed by an algorithm.
As AI takes over more aspects of the workplace, it also raises the issue of how â and for whom â these tools work.
"AI takes on the biases of its creators. And it often functions like a black box. As a result, human resources AI manifests as a tool of control and oppression in the workplace," Wang wrote in a blog post accompanying the project, which was funded by the Mozilla Foundation as part of its Creative Media Awards.
While advocates say AI is the key to rooting out human bias and ending discrimination in the hiring process, its critics warn that AI-driven hiring tools are just as biased as the humans who train them â and, in some cases, could actually promote employment discrimination.
Despite those concerns, employers are increasingly relying on AI-driven tools for recruitment and hiring. Amazon, Target, Hilton, Pepsi, and Ikea are just some of the companies who have tested or used algorithms to determine who to hire, and the list is growing, both across industries and from low-wage jobs to white-collar positions.
Assuming that trend doesn't reverse anytime soon, Wang said there needs to be more transparency and education around AI and machine learning because the technology can influence how people act without them knowing it.
"I know it's quite complex, but still I think people should be educated regarding how AI works and how it can easily be used as a tool of control against individuals," she said.
Wang said the next step for the project â pending in-person gatherings being allowed again â is an in-person exhibit with a group interview where participants compete against one another directly and discuss the experience afterward.Â
Up to the challenge? Try Wang's AI job interview for yourself here.
An Interview with ALEX from on Vimeo.
Aaron Holmes contributed reporting to this story.
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