TechCrunch Startup News

Talla is taking aim at the customer service industry with its latest release, an AI-infused knowledge base. Today, the company released version 2.0 of the Talla Intelligent Knowledge Base. The company also announced that Paula Long, most recently CEO at Data Gravity, has joined the company as SVP of engineering. This tool combines customer content with automation, chatbots and machine learning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company. Other investors include Work-Bench, Capital One, Credit Suisse, Google, Microsoft, NASA and Nasdaq Trust. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million. Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Robinhood did to democratize buying individual stocks, Titan wants to do for investing in a managed portfolio. Instead of being restricted to rich accredited investors willing to pour $5,000 or even $500,000 into a traditional hedge fund that charges 2 percent fees and 20 percent of profits, Titan lets anyone invest as little as $1,000 for just a 1 percent fee while keeping all the profits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Once a decentralized digital economy is released into the wild and the coins start to fly, it’s tough to implement fixes to the smart contracts that govern them. That’s why Incentivai is coming out of stealth today with its artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Klarity, a member of the Y Combiner 2018 Summer class, wants to automate much of the contract review process by applying artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. Company co-founder and CEO Andrew Antos has experienced the pain of contract reviews first hand. After graduating from Harvard Law, he landed a job spending 16 hours a day reviewing contract language, a process he called mind-numbing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Credit Karma, the service best known for providing free credit score monitoring and other financial advice(mostly to millennials), is getting into the mortgage business. The company today announced that it has acquired Approved, a mortgage platform that brings modern technology to a process that even today often still involves faxing documents back and forth. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shelf Engine’s team While running Molly’s, the Seattle-based ready meal wholesaler he founded, Stefan Kalb was upset about its 28 percent food wastage rate. Feeling that the amount was “astronomical,” he began researching how to lower it — and was shocked to discovered Molly’s was actually outperforming the industry average. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Noisy open offices don’t foster collaboration, they kill it, according to a Harvard study that found the less-private floor plan led to a 73 percent drop in face-to-face interaction between employees and a rise in emailing. The problem is plenty of young companies and big corporations have already bought into the open office fad. But a new startup called ROOM is building a prefabricated, self-assembled solution. It’s the Ikea of office phone booths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Owl, the two-way dash cam founded by a team of ex-Apple and Dropcam executives, has secured a $10 million Series A1 round led by Canvas Ventures. This brings Owl’s total funding to $28 million. “We’ve seen a lot of pent-up demand for car security, and Owl is tapping into that demand with a product that’s easy to install and use,” Canvas Ventures General Partner Rebecca Lynn said in a statement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The BitFi crypto wallet was supposed to be unhackable and none other than famous weirdo John McAfee claimed that the device – essentially an Android-based mini tablet – would withstand any attack. Spoiler alert: it couldn’t. First, a bit of background. The $120 device launched at the beginning of this month to much fanfare. It consisted of a device that McAfee claimed contained no software or storage and was instead a standalone wallet similar to the Trezor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

HQ Trivia’s app store ranking has continued to sink the past three months, but it’s hoping a new version on your television could revitalize growth. HQ today launched an Apple TV app that lets users play the twice-daily live quiz game alongside iOS Android players. “Everything about the game is still the same – same questions, same time, same rules” says a spokesperson, except you’ll play with the Apple TV remote instead of their phone’s screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As tech’s social giants wrestle with antisocial demons that appear to be both an emergent property of their platform power, and a consequence of specific leadership and values failures (evident as theypublicly failto enforce even the standards they claim to have), there are still people dreaming of a better way. Of social networking beyond outrage-fuelled adtech giants like Facebook and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Frankel Contributor David Frankel is a managing partner at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor You earn a million dollars a year and can’t get funded? Dear auto entrepreneurs, please think outside the gearbox A top-four tech company recently approached the CEO of one of our B2B portfolio companies with a tremendous offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The launch of Fortnite Battle Royale has left Google in a slight predicament. While Google is in no way hard up for cash, Fortnite Battle Royale for Android certainly represented the potential for a relatively big revenue stream for an app. That is, until Epic Games decided it would launch Fortnite for Android from its own website, circumventing the Play Store. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Federacy, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup. Traditionally, bug bounty programs from players like BugCrowd and HackerOne have been geared toward larger organizations. While these certainly have their place, founders William and James Sulinski, who happen to be twins, felt there was a gap in the marketplace, where smaller organizations were being left out of what they considered to be a crucial service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Blissfully, a New York City startup that helps companies understand their SaaS usage inside their organizations, announced it has received a $3.5 million seed round. The investment was led by by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Hubspot, Founder Collective, and several unnamed pre-seed investors also participated. They got a $1.5 million pre-seed investment, bringing the total so far to $5 million, according the company. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Blippar is using AR to help customers find their way indoors Remember the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruz walks through the mall and thousands of holographic ads pop up around him? That reality may not be as far off as we thought. Blippar, the augmented reality startup that launched back in 2011, is today announcing the launch of a new product that would let retailers, airports, commercial real estate owners, etc. place augmented reality content across their space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evolute, a 3-year old startup out of Mountain View, officially launched the Evolute platform today with the goal of helping large organizations migrate applications to containers and manage those containers at scale. Evolute founder and CEO Kristopher Francisco says he wants to give all Fortune 500 companies access to the same technology that big companies like Apple and Google enjoy because of their size and scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Audius wants to cut the middlemen out music streaming so artists get paid their fair share. Coming out of stealth today led by serial entrepreneur and DJ Ranidu Lankage, Audius is building a blockchain-based alternative to Spotify or SoundCloud. Users will pay for Audius tokens or earn them by listening to ads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ed Byrne Contributor Share on Twitter Ed Byrne is an entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of Scaleworks. Do you worry about the so-called “kill zones” of big tech companies? The Economistthinks you should. The theory basically suggests that if your product or service is anyway threatening or accretive to one of these incumbents, they will either force-buy your company or clone it and destroy your market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While this animated fellow looks like something out of NBA 2K18, it’s really an AI that’s learning how to dribble in real time. The AI starts out fumbling the ball a bit and by cycle 95 it is able to do some real Harlem Globetrotters stuff. In short, what you’re watching is a human-like avatar learning a very specialized human movement. To do this researchers at Carnegie Mellon and DeepMotion, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor Home run exits happen stealthily for biotech While tech waffles on going public, biotech IPOs boom Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub. After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Epic Games continues to spread the love… to consumers, at least. Following the launches of Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS earlier this year and Fortnite for the Nintendo Switch earlier this summer, Epic Games is now confirming that the Android version of the game will be available exclusively through the Fortnite website. Users can visit Fortnite.com and download the Fortnite Launcher, which will then allow them to load Fortnite Battle Royale onto their devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Go to Google Maps and zoom out. Halfway out, the map’s perspective changes from a traditional flat map view to an interactive globe. Zoom all the way out and the Earth is presented as a globe with landmasses of the appropriate size. Greenland is no longer the size of Africa and all is right with the world. On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cisco today announced its intent to buy Ann Arbor, MI-based security firm, Duo Security. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco is paying $2.35 billion in cash and assumed equity awards for Duo. Duo Security was founded in 2010 by Dug Song and Jonathan Oberheide and went on to raise $121.M through several rounds of funding. The company has 700 employees with offices throughout the United States and in London, though the company has remained headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skyline AI founders Iri Amirav, Or Hiltch, Guy Zipori and Amir Leitersdorf A mere four months after coming out of stealth mode with $3 million in seed funding, real estate investment startup Skyline AI announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, a returning investor, and TLV Partners, with participation from JLL Spark, a division of real estate investment management firm JLL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This summer’s wedding season required me to buy a new suit. I vowed to be adventurous and buy a color I normally never would have considered. Alas, I opted for a little more movie-theater usher and a little less Jidenna. Had I known about it at the time, I probably would have used Eison Triple Thread, a company that specializes in creating made-to-order suits. Working with someone to create a suit can be a hard enough task. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether it’s doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,” says Tractable co-founder and CEO Alexandre Dalyac when I video called him a couple of weeks ago. “You can probably speed up all of that,” I quip back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with friends and family. But unlike on Facebook, everything in Fabric is private by default and data isn’t shared with marketers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with InitializedCapital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix. First up we had zero choice but to talk about Facebook. The social company’s epic repricing in the middle of the week blotted out the news sun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For many people, their workplaces become like a second family. More companies are recognizing this with better benefits such as longer family leave and wellness programs. But when an employee needs to take a break or is going through a hard time, they can feel alienated–sometimes enough to seek a new job. MentalHappy wants to help them stay connected to their companies with care packages, called Cheerboxes, designed for people experiencing a major life event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Traditionally, companies have gathered data from a variety of sources, then used spreadsheets and dashboards to try and make sense of it all. Outlier wants to change that and deliver a handful of insights that matter most for your job, company and industry right to your inbox. Today the company announced a $6.2 million Series A to further develop that vision. The round was led by Ridge Ventures with assistance from 11.2 Capital, First Round Capital, Homebrew, Susa Ventures and SV Angel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Y Combinator backedZbioticshas spend two years developing what they’re billing as theworld’s first genetically engineered probiotic. The startup’s initial product isn’t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they’ve invented an elixir of ‘next day’ life: Aka a hangover cure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ClassPass today announced the close of an $85 million Series D financing round led by Temasek, the same firm that led the startup’s Series C financing. L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also invested in the likes of Peloton, Equinox, and Pure Barre, also participated in the round. As part of the deal, L Catterton’s Michael Farello will join the ClassPass board. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Betsie Larkin spent the first ten years of her professional career as an EDM artist. She released two solo albums, toured five continents and worked with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten. But after being constantly frustrated by shapewear she wore under her stage outfits, she felt compelled to try her hand at a new industry. That’s how HoneyLove was born. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The fields of computer vision and VR are difficult. But a new company, Send Reality, is entering the race. The Y Combinator-backed company is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walkthroughs of real estate listings. Founder and CEO Andrew Chen said he was the kid back in middle school and high school that spent hours walking around the streets of Paris, NYC and SF on Google Streetview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Doughbies should have been a bakery, not a venture-backed startup. Founded in the frothy days of 2013 and funded with $670,000 by investors including 500 Startups, Doughbies built a same-day cookie delivery service. But it was never destined to be capable of delivering the returns required by the VC model that depends on massive successes to cover the majority of bets that fail. The startup became the butt of jokes about how anything could get funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For people who make investment decisions based on revenues and projected earnings, biotech IPOs are kind of a non-starter. Not only are new market entrants universally unprofitable, most have zero revenue. Going public is mostly a means to raise money for clinical trials, with red ink expected for years to come. That pattern may be one reason the venture capital press,Crunchbase Newsincluded, tends to devote a disproportionately small portion of coverage to biotech IPOs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last weekend, Epic Games put forth its first true effort at official competitive Fortnite Battle Royale. It was a disaster. The private hosts used for the tournament were about as laggy as could be, with pro players getting eliminated simply because they couldn’t move. This tournament was for a total prize of $250K. That’s big money, and big frustration for pro players who were essentially eliminated by the whims of the server gods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The working class of the United States doesn’t get many breaks these days. It’s not just a function of low pay and long hours, but also the incredible uncertainty of income and expenses that makes surviving week-to-week so challenging. One in five Americans have a negative net wealth, even in an economy where the unemployment rate is the lowest in almost two decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sinemia drops prices for its movie ticket subscriptions, which now start a $3.99 per month MoviePass competitor Sinemia is lowering prices on the already low-cost movie ticket subscription plans that it introduced earlier this year. Its monthly prices are being cut by $1 across-the-board. The cheapest plan now costs $3.99 per month, which gets you one standard movie ticket for that month. The priciest one, which covers three tickets (and includes 3D, 4D and IMAX screens), now costs $13.99 per month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PureSec, a startup out of Israel emerged from stealth today to provide a way to make serverless computing more secure. Serverless computing reduces programming to writing functions, so that when a certain event happens, it triggers an automated action. The cloud vendor takes care of the underlying infrastructure and developers just write the code. It may sound like Shangri La for tech, but in reality there are still security concerns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Y Combinator wants to lure more companies into the funnel for its accelerator whiledemocratizing free access to startup knowledge. It’s simultaneously moving up and down market to conquer the acceleration space, with both its recent Series A program for more mature startups, and $1 million in grants for high potential founders extra-early stage online course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kik made waves last year after a successful $100 million ICO. Now the company has released its first beta product related to its Kin token. Called Kinit, it’s a simple wallet that enables users to earn, store, and spend its tokens. “Kinit is a fun, easy way to earn Kin, a new cryptocurrency made for your digital life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Early this year the Sustainable Oceans Alliance announced that it would be starting its own accelerator with a focus on conservation. The nonprofit has just announced the Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s first wave of startups: a particularly varied and international lineup that’s easy to root for. You may also remember that the SOA was one of the beneficiaries of the mysterious Pineapple Fund, administered by a mysterious cryptocurrency multimillionaire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Scott Heiferman, Meetup CEO and cofounder, is today moving into the Chairman role at the community-building startup. Meetup launched in 2003 with a simple goal: to give communities an easy way to meet up in real life. Since, the company has grown to 40 million members, with 320,000 Meetup groups and around 12,000 Meetups per day around the world. Late last year, WeWork acquired Meetup for a reported $200 million. According to WeWork, thousands of Meetups were already happening in WeWork locations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Unacademy founders Roman Saini, Gaurav Munjal and Hemesh Singh Bangalore-based Unacademy will add more educators to its online learning platform, which claims to be India’s largest, after closing a $21 million Series C. The funding comes from Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Blume Ventures (all four firms are returning from Unacademy’s Series B last year). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Centralized crypto exchanges like Coinbase are easy but expensive because they introduce a middleman. Not-for-profit project 0x allows any developer to quickly build their own decentralized cryptocurrency exchange and decide their own fees. It acts like Craigslist, connecting traders without ever holding the tokens itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Holden Page Contributor Share on Twitter Holden Page is an editor and journalist at Crunchbase News. Startups making delivery and transport easier than ever are a hit with venture capitalists, so it’s not a surprise that young tech companies delivering home staples — living room sets, dining room tables, couches and more — are raising big dollars. From 2010 through 2017, venture investors haveoutfittedU.S.-based furniture startups with a little over $1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices