Daily Crunch: Amazon will sunset Cloud Cam service in December, offers customers free Blink Mini

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Oh hey and happy Tuesday, the very last day of May 2022! Tomorrow, for our City Spotlight series, we’re putting the limelight on Columbus, Ohio. We’re also doing a pitch-off with Columbus-area startups. If you want to register for the event, here’s the handy linky-link that will give you all the info you need!  — Haje and Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Amazon retires Cloud Cam to the big electronic home in the sky: It was a Big Tech kind of day today, and first up is Amazon, which informed Cloud Cam users that it will no longer support the device. You might remember that Cloud Cam was one of Amazon’s first home security devices in 2017 — that is until it acquired both Ring and Blink within a year later. Amazon is winding down the service this year, and “Cloud Cammers” will get a complimentary Blink mini and a one-year subscription for their troubles.
• Apple’s iOS 16 leak: Our other Big Tech story involves some Apple news ahead of its WWDC event on June 6. Not sure how much people think about their iPhone’s lockscreen, but Apple does, and a report says the tech giant is about to unleash a significant upgrade that may involve widgets. And Sarah hopes Apple also does something about Focus Mode.
• Crypto may have a remittance payment problem: Could there be a disconnect between Andreessen Horowitz’s views about cryptocurrency’s current usefulness and the low-tech way people still get paid in emerging countries? Anna lays out her argument for why a16z’s crypto bullishness may be a bit premature in these regions.  

Startups and VC

Two new funds got announced this morning; Haje covered Hannah Grey’s $52 million debut fund, focusing on customer-centric founders, and Christine took a look at Bonfire Ventures, which raised a pair of funds, totaling $230 million, targeting B2B software startups. 

Apart from a couple of new funds, it’s been a lively few days on the site over the long weekend, so let’s make like a truffle-hunting pig and dig our snouts in: 

• Hello, world (it says Hello World): I’m pretty intrigued by the startup Kyle covered this morning; Mintlify uses AI to auto-generate documentation based on source code, raising $2.8 million to do so.  
• Go, go, go: Also from Kyle, Railway raised $20 million to make software deployment for apps and services smoother. 
• (data) sharing is (data) caring: Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B, Frederic reports. 
• Didn’t see that one coming: Seemplicity is emerging from stealth with $32 million in funding for a platform that it believes will help security teams assess and respond to security threats, Ingrid reports. 
• They totally bought it: Onramp Funds, an Austin-based company providing financing to e-commerce sellers, secured $42 million in equity and credit to expand its working capital offering, Christine reports. 
• So fast it’ll make your head swvl: Swvl went public a couple of months ago, and today announced it’s laying off almost a third of its workforce, Tage writes. 
• You need your can of Coke how fast?!: Seems like Indonesia is enjoying life in the fast lane, with Rita reporting that 15-minute grocery delivery startup Astro just closed a $60 million round. 

8 IT spending trends for the post-pandemic enterprise in 2022

Market research firm ETR contacted 1,200 IT leaders who oversee a yearly collective IT budget of approximately $570 billion to learn more about their planned spending over the coming year.

Although year-over-year spending is projected to rise just 6.7%, “the need for experienced IT personnel has accelerated, and hiring demand in the space has reached the highest level we have ever seen,” writes Erik Bradley, ETR’s chief analyst.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Payment installments are ‘in’: If you didn’t already know, and thanks to a new partnership between Affirm and Stripe, consumers will see more “buy now, pay later” options when they check out. Though no specific number was written, Mary Ann reports the new offering applies to “businesses that use Stripe’s payments tech” — meaning, millions. And, with the BNPL space as competitive as it is, that certainly gives Affirm a new revenue stream to work with.
• Netflix’s password woes or ‘whoas,’ both apply: There seems to be some confusion in Peru around Netflix’s new policy on account sharing. For Netflix, that meant anyone using someone’s account in the same building. However, a recent survey brought to light two things: one, some subscribers in Peru weren’t notified of the extra charges before being charged them, and two, Netflix’s own customer service agents reported not quite understanding the new policy and helped subscribers get around it. Netflix hopes to roll out the policy this year, but maybe it needs to clarify some things first.
• TikTok secretly created a new feature; let’s see what happens: For those of you who dislike all of the words on top of your TikTok videos, relief is coming in the way of a new feature being tested called “clear mode.” When engaged, it eliminates those pesky usernames, captions and audio information, and in some cases the like, comments and share buttons, too, for what Aisha noted would be “a completely distraction-free viewing experience.”

Ultima Genomics claims $100 full genome sequencing after stealth $600M raise

The appetite for genomic data continues to rise in the field of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but cost is still a factor even sequencing a full genome now costs as little as $1,000. But with claims of reducing that cost by another order of magnitude to $100, Ultima Genomics may even further accelerate this economy.

Ultima says that its sequencing machine and software platform, the UG 100, can perform a complete sequencing of a human genome in about 20 hours, with precision comparable to existing options, but does so at a far lower cost per “gigabase,” which is to say per million base pairs of DNA analyzed.

The technical advances may not be entirely intelligible to people who are not already familiar with how DNA is sequenced, and not being an expert myself I won’t attempt a full explanation. But it helps to understand that essentially the DNA, amplified in a reagent (so basically a lot of the same DNA in a solution), is passed through small channels where fragments bind to certain microscopic mechanisms, which prepare it to be imaged by a lot of base detectors operating in parallel. These sequences are then reassembled into the whole genome by matching their ends together.

Ultima’s claimed advance is threefold. First, rather than having the reagent travel down fluidic channels that must be flushed afterwards in preparation for the next step, the micromachinery (“a dense array of electrostatic landing pads”) is etched onto a 200mm silicon wafer. This well known process uses cheap, readily available stock and can be mass manufactured.

But more importantly, it enables the reagent to be simply deposited in the center of the wafer, which spins to distribute it evenly across its entire surface using centrifugal force. This is efficient, mechanically simple, and allows the resulting sequences to be read “during rotation of the wafer in a continuous process, analogous to reading a compact disc.”

Diagram of the UG 100’s open water process, with an image of the wafer’s micropatterned surface. Image Credits: Ultima Genomics

The second advance is a little more arcane, having to do with the process of preparing and directly reading the DNA — rather than replacing the bases with more machine-readable ones or relying on dicey particle-level imagery, a clever combination of the two is struck. It’s less destructive to the original strands but also doesn’t require error-prone measurements like individual photon counts.

The third advance involves machine learning to accelerate the process of turning optical data (the CD-style scanning signal) into usable data. A deep convolutional neural network trained on multiple genomes and fragments is tuned based on a sample from the genome being sequenced, then set to work verifying and assembling all the tiny pieces of data into the whole genome. This process speeds things up and eliminates error.

There is considerable margin for improvement on the process, primarily in the size and density of the wafer and its surface, leading to improved throughput. This could push the price lower, but for now a 90% reduction is more than enough to go to market with.

Founder and CEO Gilad Almogy (also the first author of many on the paper quoted above), said that the company is currently working with early access partners to put out some early proof of concept studies showing the capabilities of the sequencing technique. The first of these, collaborations with the Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, the Baylor College of Medicine and more are being presented soon or currently available as preprints.

Broader commercial deployment is expected in 2023 (final pricing is undetermined but will likely reflect the advantage conferred by this method over others). I asked Almogy what he felt were the areas of the biotech and medical industry that will benefit most from this new capability.

“We believe genomics will be the first line diagnostic across diseases,” he said, pointing out that it is complementary to many existing techniques and only improves understanding of them.

But the far lower cost could lead to genomic population studies, improving our general understanding of systematic variance in the genome across different groups and over time. “We’re already talking with partners who are interested to do more genomes, but also RNA expression and proteomics at a population scale, said Almogy. This is also key to epigenetic studies that look at methylation and other ways our DNA changes as we age.

“Deep oncology,” or using genetic profiling to characterize and fight cancers, may be one of the earliest clinical applications — and in fact Isabl is way ahead of him on that one. The company’s quick turnaround whole-genome tumor sequencing could be made even quicker.

Isabl’s rapid whole-genome analysis opens the playbook for cancer treatment

Similarly, single cell sequencing (e.g. a blood cell or neuron) could help in both clinical and research environments, but “the cost of sequencing also prevents us from routinely using single cell sequencing for applications like immune profiling,” Almogy said. Reducing the cost so considerably could change that equation.

With sequencing reduced from a billion-dollar process to one you could get done monthly if you wanted to and have it covered by insurance, the biotech industry seems to be on the precipice of yet another data explosion, beyond the scale of the unprecedented one we are already in the midst of. With companies like Ultima multiplying data volumes, the next opportunity is likely to be not in production but management and utilization of this newly deepened sea of information.

Is data observability recession-proof?

Following its $135 million Series D last week, Monte Carlo became the latest unicorn in a fast-rising category: data observability, which the startup defines as “an end-to-end approach to enable teams to deliver more reliable and trustworthy data.”

If you are wondering how serious data quality issues are, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses has an answer: “Data quality issues still plague even the most data-driven companies. Just a few weeks ago, Unity, the popular gaming software company, cited ‘bad data’ for a $110 million impact on their ads business.”

Moses’ startup isn’t the only one to go after the data observability market opportunity. On the same day that Monte Carlo disclosed its newly minted $1.6 million valuation, competitor Cribl confirmed its unicorn status with a new round of funding.

“While smaller than Cribl’s Series C, which came close to eclipsing $200 million, the Series D values the company at $2.5 billion post-money, according to a source. That’s up from $1.5 billion as of August 2021,” TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers noted.

Any three-digit deal would be noteworthy in isolation. Two of them in the same space, even more so. But what really caught our attention is that Monte Carlo’s and Cribl’s deals were announced now, right in the middle of a broad startup downturn.

We know that large rounds can take time to get both closed and disclosed, meaning that Monte Carlo’s and Cribl’s Series D rounds might reflect the state of the market a few weeks ago. But there’s a more recent data point to take into account: hiring, which is still happening.

On one side of the table, companies are still filling the kind of positions that create demand for data quality solutions. “Despite the volatility, data engineers and analytics jobs are increasing and companies are continuing to hire at record numbers for these roles,” Moses told TechCrunch. On the other, data observability startups themselves are hiring. Not just unicorns like Cribl and Monte Carlo, but also competitors like seed-funded startup Sifflet.

Could data observability be recession-proof? To find out, we talked to Moses, as well as Sifflet CEO Salma Bakouk. To complete their firsthand knowledge, we collected notes from two investors familiar with the space: FirstMark partner Matt Turck and Data Community Fund general partner Pete Soderling.

The picture that emerged from our conversations is that tailwinds for the data observability category as a whole might not translate into wins for each and every startup in the space. Why? Let’s explore.

Rising with the data tide

When we mention tailwinds for data observability, it’s because demand is driven by a broader trend. TL;DR: More and more companies are becoming data-driven, and therefore facing the kind of data quality issues that data observability startups are made to address.

Sizing a growing opportunity is never easy, but in our conversations, we heard that data obs could soon be a universal problem for large companies.

“I’m a big believer that every company, both tech and non-tech, is going to need to become not just a software company, but a data company,” Turck said. “That’s why people are excited about the opportunity — it’s a very large market and a huge trend.”

That the addressable market for data observability is large is one thing. But it would be meaningless if target companies themselves weren’t seeing reliable data as a need. According to Moses, that’s increasingly the case in all kinds of sectors.

The Jonas Brothers help launch Scriber, a creator subscription company

The creator economy is “burning up,” and the Jonas Brothers are cashing in.

Launching today with the help of these former teen heartthrobs, Scriber is a creator subscription company geared toward more established figures in entertainment (… like the Jonas Brothers). Joe, Kevin and Nick aren’t just Scriber’s first creators — they also have equity in the company.

Besides catering to more established artists, Scriber differentiates itself from other creator subscription products by functioning solely via SMS. The creator will post a phone number on their social media platforms for fans to text, and after messaging that number, fans can pay a subscription fee via Apple Pay or Stripe to get exclusive content sent to their phone. For this launch with the JoBros, fans will pay $4.99 a month, but the service is only available in the U.S. right now.

Team Jonas is now on Scriber Text GO to 1-844-228-4544

You’ll want to be a part of this

*US Users Only pic.twitter.com/WHVqMN4Qhf

— Jonas Brothers (@jonasbrothers) May 31, 2022

Since Scriber is not an app on the App Store, the platform doesn’t have to pay fees to Apple or Google Play. Instead, creators pay Scriber $1 per month for each subscriber (so if they have 10,000 subscribers, they pay $10,000). The creator also covers Stripe’s 2.9% processing fee.

App Store fees have been a major pain point for creator-focused startups. Fanhouse, for example, instituted a coin system to circumvent Apple’s 30% cut — fans buy coins on the web, then use them in the app to subscribe to creators (they can also pay via the app, but they’ll be charged extra to cover the fees).

Scriber creators retain rights to the content that they upload, and the platform tries to protect the exclusive material from leaking by giving each subscriber a unique link to view uploads. So, if they share that link online, Scriber can easily figure out the source of the leak. This may not help in the case of screen recording and re-uploading videos, though.

Scriber comes courtesy of journalist-turned-entrepreneur Brian Goldsmith, who is serving as CEO and providing most of the startup capital. According to a report from Axios, Goldsmith says he hopes that the already-wealthy celebrities he partners with will use the platform to raise money for philanthropy. The Jonas Brothers are planning to donate about half of their earnings to causes they care about.

This isn’t the Jonas Brothers’ first rodeo when it comes to startups and investments. The three musicians invested in Snackpass, a social food app, and OLIPOP, a celebrity-backed sparkling tonic company.

Kevin Jonas is a founder himself — he launched Yood, a now-defunct food app, and The Blu Market, an influencer marketing company.

 

How Yo inspired the Jonas Brothers to create apps

Artiphon’s delightful Orba handheld synthesizer gets a sequel

I would love to see more companies like Artiphon in the world. Hardware startups with clever ideas and a knack for bringing them to market. Back in November 2020, I spent a good bit of time with the company’s handheld synth/sampler/instrument. It didn’t turn me into Wendy Carlos, but it helped pass a few dark pandemic hours by firing up some music-making neurons.

The device’s strength lies in its extraordinarily low barrier of entry. No lessons or musical aptitude are required — just a free hand or two and the desire to noodle around with sound. Today the device is getting a sequel, in the form of the fittingly named Orba 2. The product looks identical to its predecessor, with a round base and eight touch-sensitive pads arranged in triangles like pizza slices.

Image Credits: Artiphon

The device largely functions the same as the Orba 1, as well, but features a revamped sound engine with new built-in audio samples. Those are augmented by built-in sensors, which let you modify the sound through talking, shaking and spinning the device. There are nine gestures in all. Users also can sample and loop directly on the device or with the connected Orba app.

“We want people to express themselves musically in their everyday lives,” CEO Mike Butera says in a release. “We’ve dreamed of allowing anyone to play any sound they can imagine, anywhere they go, without worrying about historical instrument skills or abstract music theory. Orba 2 finally makes that possible.”

All told, the sampler can record up to five minutes/128 bars on device, coupled with a new feature that helps snap playing to a beat. Clearly the end game is making the system as dummy proof as humanly possible. Though, for more advanced users, it also doubles as a MIDI controller (via USB-C or Bluetooth) for apps including GarageBand, Ableton Live, Logic Pro and Pro Tools.

Artiphon’s Orba handheld synthesizer. Image Credits: Artiphon / mockups-design.com

The Orba 2 runs $150 — notably a $50 premium over its very accessible predecessor. Artiphon has also added a number of new features since the release of the first Orba, including the ability to utilize the device as a video editor.

Felt’s $15 million chance to prove that maps are the next big medium

Despite economic turmoil in the tech world, an Oakland-based startup shows that moonshots are still getting funded. Felt, co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk, wants to disrupt the role of maps in society, and rethink how we think about the medium. The startup allows users to build a map with datasets integrated into it, and work with each other to showcase impact in a less static way than your average Google maps query.

Despite a massive mission — proving that maps are a forgotten yet fundamental medium worth renovating — the co-founders cited proven business models from Figma and Notion, both valued in the billions, as reason to believe in their work. The aforementioned companies both succeeded in rolling out to users for personal use, then pivoting to the enterprise, a playbook that Felt wants to follow (and that VCs can certainly speak the language of).

“That kind of business model and go to market is — I don’t want to say immune, but is a little bit removed from the kind of market fluctuations we’re seeing,” Hashemi said. “It’s really not about consumer spending, it’s not about an advertising business, it’s just day in day out work that businesses are relying on.”

The argument worked. Today, the collaborative software startup tells TechCrunch that it recently closed a $15 million Series A led by Footwork, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Moxxie Ventures and Designer Fund.

Since its seed round, a $4.5 million investment announced in August 2021, Felt has grown its team from seven people to 15 people across Hawaii, California, Missouri, Vermont, Canada and Spain. One of Felt’s team members — Mamata Akella — is even an in-house cartographer — a job title you don’t too often see as part of the early-stage startup ranks.

The funding, and team growth, means that Felt thinks it is ready for the next phase of growth: feedback. The startup launched its platform publicly today after weeks of private beta testing with over 1,000 people. The public beta combined 50 layers of data, such as earthquake history or wildfire data, with a clean interface meant to empower people to draw their own maps. That in and of itself is a feat, the co-founders say, given that data is often fragmented, inaccurate or just straight-up badly formatted.

Image Credits: Felt

Felt is meant to be a continuation of the collaborative software movement underscored by everyday tools like Google Docs and top companies like Notion and Figma, as well as a sequel to Hashemi’s previous company, Remix. Bought by Via for $100 million, Remix is a city transportation planning startup born out of Code for America Hackathon. Felt was the follow-up story, this time taking mapping beyond cities. From August to now, the co-founders say that Felt went from a tech demo to a product with more “commercial legs,” including richer, fact-checked datasets, fewer bugs and, hopefully, a faster load time.

Felt launched with a climate-focused angle, yet that focus feels broader today. Hashemi said that the company is also investing in ways to serve other use cases, such as the sciences need to understand ocean landscape, or the national park’s wanting a better way to track trails.

Image Credits: Felt

Duruk said they no longer view climate as a single industry, but instead as more of a horizontal idea. “Now, every single industry that has a physical presence on Earth has to have climate and weather and fires and floods in mind…it impacts everything.” One example that Hashemi offered up was how maps can help people fleeing the war in Ukraine. How do people offer up houses, get matched or see what’s available?

A lot of these collaboration use cases, he explained, “require a larger audience using the product and pushing the boundaries.”

The next chapter should help Felt with prioritizing which features to launch next or identifying surprising use cases, but it should also give it the pressure to answer some of its most looming challenges, such as how to moderate maps or build processes that limit bad actors. These are massive questions to answer before maps can become the next big medium. The startup is launching with a moderation-first approach in the beginning, banning any kind of criminal and illegal activity such as “the next insurrection map.” Duruk thinks that the public launch will show what gaps they have in their understanding.

“You need to moderate,” said Duruk, who previously worked at Uber and data security company VGS. “I do not believe in opening something up to the world just filled with hopes and dreams, a small number of bad actors can make the experience awful for everyone and turn the platform into a bad place.”

The startup has some well-powered competition. Other than Google Maps and Apple maps, social maps app Zenly, a company owned by Snap, recently announced that it is creating its own mapping data and engine. After three years of work, Zenly wants to integrate social data and mapping data into one frame; focusing less on being “pixel perfect” and more on rolling out a different type of map.

For Felt, this is both competition and an affirmation. While Zenly is going for consumers, Felt wants to be enterprise ready. The success of both efforts depends on the world’s appetite for a new way to map their thoughts. Even if it requires more than going from point A to point B.

Data-sharing platform Vendia raises $30M Series B

Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across applications, platforms and clouds, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by NewView Capital. Neotribe Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Aspenwood Ventures and BMW iVentures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $50 million.

The company was founded by two AWS veterans: the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao. Since launching Vendia, the company added new customers like BMW, Aerotrax and Slalom, who use it to have a single source of truth for their multi-cloud data sharing with some of their partners. As Wagner noted, the company mostly focused on the financial services, travel and hospitality verticals so far, though with the new funding, it’ll likely look to expand to new verticals as well. Wagner also noted that the company recently launched a new product line around CRM data sharing and since the company is seeing a lot of traction around its file-sharing capabilities, it is also investing in that as well.

Currently, Vendia supports AWS and the team recently launched Azure support as well. Support for the Google Cloud Platform is on the roadmap, in addition to the company’s ongoing work to allow its service to connect to an ever-growing number of services.

The fact that it uses a blockchain to do so is somewhat secondary to this (and the company barely mentions it on its homepage), but it’s what allows the company to offer an immutable serverless ledger to its users to ensure data accuracy as well as provenance and traceability. Developers, meanwhile, won’t have to think about this blockchain part of the service as they only have to provide a JSON schema with the data model and Vendia will provide them with a GraphQL API to work with this data.

Image Credits: Vendia

“At the end of the day, our customers have real problems,” Wagner said. “They don’t have a blockchain problem — they’re trying to sell tickets, settle financial transactions, track supply chains. They’ve got real challenges.”

Once the team starts talking to a potential customer’s IT teams, the discussion quickly focuses on blockchains, though, and as Wagner noted, that often includes teaching them about things like immutability and lineage tracing. But for Vendia, the focus is very much on selling a solution to its customers’ problems. “For most of our customers, their core problem is that they have partners and they have problems with sharing data with control, but they don’t want to invest a lot into IT and infrastructure for it,” Rao added and also noted that in today’s job market, even big companies don’t have a lot of IT people sitting around who can take on new projects like this.

Image Credits: Vendia

“Next-gen blockchains like Vendia represent a powerful way to solve age-old supply chain challenges,” said David Bettenhausen, CEO at Aerotrax Technologies. “When connecting partners across the aviation, aerospace and defense supply chain, trust in accurate and verifiable data is paramount. The ability to deliver this trust at scale – with top-notch security and real-time data sharing in a cost-effective way – has made Vendia a critical component within our technology stack. With Vendia, we’ve been able to reinvent our business model to accommodate a frictionless customer onboarding experience and significantly reduced sales cycles.”

The Vendia team tells me that the company currently has about 100 employees and the plan is to use the new funding to double that by the end of the year.

Vendia raises $5.1M for its multicloud serverless platform

Seemplicity emerges from stealth with $32M to consolidate security notifications and speed up response times

Cybersecurity continues to grow in complexity due to the ever-increasing threat landscape — more services in the cloud, more digital operations and more devices mean more attack surfaces and variations for malicious hackers to worm into networks, and thus more tools to fight this — and that is creating more work for operations teams tasked with responding to security threats. Today a startup called Seemplicity is emerging from stealth with $32 million in funding for a platform that it believes will help reduce that load.

Funding for the Israel-based startup is coming in the form of a $6 million seed round and a $26 million Series A. Glilot Capital Partners, by way of its early growth fund Glilot+, is leading the Series A with new backers NTTVC and Atlantic Bridge and previous backers S Capital and Rain Capital also participating. S Capital led its seed round.

Ravid Circus — Seemplicity’s CPO who co-founded the company with Yoran Sirkis (CEO) and Rotem Cohen Gadol (CTO) — said the company was choosing now to come out of stealth and launch publicly with news of its funding in part because the second round had recently closed, and in part because it’s racked up a decent number of customers already: 20 enterprises covering Fortune 500 and publicly-traded companies in various sectors (none of whom are willing to have their names disclosed yet).

Seemplicity is a portmanteau of “see” and “simplicity”, and that is effectively what it is doing: helping DevOps and SecOps teams see a more complete picture of the state of an organization’s security, by simplifying how to view it.

The problem is a pretty basic but thorny one: these days, DevOps teams are faced with a difficult task that in some ways is only getting harder. The number of breaches growing, according to both general and specific accounts; and that is translating to an ever-expanding range of tools targeting different aspects of security covering specific areas and use cases such as applications, SaaS, cloud and endpoint security. But while there has been a big evolution in security towards much more automation to handle a portion of the alerts that are generated by these different security apps, there are still a number of items that require human involvement to address and ultimately resolve.

This in turn results in a huge shower of data that comes down on those DevOps teams that is hard to parse even before any action is taken.

This is where a product like Seemplicity comes into the picture: it takes all of those alerts and orchestrates them, to figure out which are related, which can be bundled together, which are more urgent (because they are central to how something operates, or because it could signal a cascading problem, for example), and which can be fixed by fixing something else.

By doing so, “We allow an organization to fix and remediate more effectively so that they are less in the business of firefighting,” Circus said. “The way to get to shorter times in security incidents is to remediate them faster.” The platform can be configured by organizations, but it also learns from how it is used, Circus said.

This is an especially acute problem for larger organizations, the enterprises that Seemplicity is already serving and targeting for more business. Its customers typically have over 20,000 employees and might have as many as 15 or 20 DevOps and SecOps teams with multiple security programs and protocols already in place, so this is about channelling work more effectively across those organizations, as much as it is about identifying how best to tackle the trove of work. Given that teams are more distributed than ever these days, that’s also a reason for needing better tooling to manage how they work, and what they are working on.

“In fact, I’d say that the main factor is not complexity but just the amount of remediation,” Circus said.

Seemplicity is joining what appears to be a growing number of tools to help manage SecOps — Rezilion is another aiming to improve some of the busywork of SecOps teams; SeviceNow is also building more in this area; and something like Jira, already so ubiquitous in DevOps, might also be used to address this. But Circus said that it looks like Seemplicity is the only purpose-built tool today that aims to consolidate and prioritize notifications from security apps that address all of the different aspects of how a network operates, giving it a kind of moat (at least for now). The three founders come with a collectively long history in enterprise security, meaning that they understand the challenges first hand and have built this product to address those.

“The ever-changing threat landscape of cybersecurity opens up organizations to more risks, necessitating the adoption of more security solutions. Ironically, the more cybersecurity tools a company uses, the less efficient its security team becomes at controlling and reducing risk,” said Lior Litwak, Managing Partner of Glilot+, Glilot Capital’s early growth fund, in a statement. “By streamlining the operational element of cybersecurity and building a dynamic, real-time bridge between security and remediation teams, Seemplicity enables organizations to both significantly improve their cyber risk posture and address their ever-increasing workloads.”

“From the get-go we knew we were dealing with strong founders who are leading subject matter experts. The vision they set out quickly translated into a platform that provides significant value to its customers, which over the past year has continued to grow,” said Aya Peterburg, Managing Partner of S Capital.

“CISOs are having to rethink their security automation and processes as they navigate challenges with access to talent and lead increasingly distributed teams,” said Vab Goel, Founding Partner at NTTVC. “Seemplicity offers a unique, simple, and powerful automation platform that aligns the entire security organization around the highest impact actions.”

SWVL plans to lay off 32% of its team two months after going public

Egypt-born and Dubai-headquartered mobility startup SWVL is planning to lay off 32% of its workforce it said in a statement today.

The company’s LinkedIn profile shows it has over 1,330 employees. Letting go of over 30% of its workforce means that around 400 people will lose their jobs at the mobility company.

Tech companies, private and public, have faced a reckoning in the past few months with their valuations taking a beating. The effect of an economic downturn has also affected their finances leading them to cut costs; the top of the list is letting go of employees.

This downsizing from the Dubai-based startup adds to the long list of global cross-stage layoffs in what has been a rough month for tech employees. Over 15,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in the U.S. alone according to reports. Companies such as Klarna, Getir, Gorillas and Bolt have dismissed portions of their workforce while the likes of Snap, Twitter and Instacart have slowed down hiring entirely.

It’s been a very busy 18 months for SWVL leading up to this news. This March, the company went public via a SPAC merger with U.S. women-led blank check company Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital. It listed at $10 per share and targeted a $1.5 billion valuation but has traded between $4 and $8 for the most part. Its current valuation hovers around $500-$600 million.

All eyes are on Swvl as it starts trading on a SPAC combination

The layoffs are coming just a month after SWVL acquired U.K.-based mass transit group Zeelo for $100 million according to sources. It’s one of five acquisitions SWVL has made within the past year; others include Germany’s door2door, Turkey’s Voltlines (for ~$40 million), Spain’s Shotl and Argentina’s Viapool.

SWVL said that though these acquisitions have contributed to its overall growth, it will need to make reductions on roles automated by investments in its engineering and product and support functions teams.

“The planned layoffs will impact teams responsible for functions that have been automated following investment in engineering, product and support functions,” SWVL said in a statement.

SWVL said it plans to attain profitability next year. Dismissing hundreds of employees is one way to get there. Others include developing its proprietary technology stack and growing its three models — where it makes $5 million in MRR — across existing and new markets, it said in a statement.

SWVL is present in 13 markets globally: the UAE, Egypt, Kenya, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan. According to a source, the majority of the layoffs will come from the company’s Dubai and Pakistan offices.

Whether SWVL will continue its expansion into new markets such as Colombia, Mexico and South Africa, and the U.S. — announced during its SPAC merger — is uncertain.

“Swvl plans to provide monetary, non-monetary and job placement support to help transition certain of its employees to new roles,” the company said in a statement on how it plans to support affected employees.

“As a result of the portfolio optimization program, Swvl’s management currently expects that the company will be cash-flow positive in 2023.”

CEO Mostafa Kandil sent out a letter to his employees addressing the layoffs. Here’s a part of it:

Become Free Cash Flow Profitable in 2023

– Swvl is implementing a portfolio optimization program to focus on its highest profitability operations, enhance efficiency and reduce central costs

– Capitalizes on the highest profitability operations TaaS and SaaS which currently have > 500 contracts in > 10 countries generating > $5m revenue per month

– B2C business is also expected to be contribution margin positive before the end of 2022

– Builds on recent acquisitions of TaaS and SaaS businesses Viapool, Volt Lines, Shotl and pending acquisition of door2door which improve profitability margins

– Benefits from a world class engineering and product team and technology stack which allows for scalability and sustainable growth

Resources

No matter how big, resources are not infinite; cash is meant to be responsibly utilized. We need to be as disciplined as ever, which is why today, May 30, 2022, we announced that our portfolio optimization program to turn cash flow positive in 2023.

As part of that program, we have considered various scenarios that will allow us to demonstrate how much we value our workforce. We believe that Swvl has reached such a level of success only because of the team, and we are also sure that Swvl will continue to get stronger.

What we did:

– Voluntary salary deductions from the top management team

– Reduction of current office spaces

– Freezing our current hiring program

– Freezing travel and accommodation expenses

– Tying expenditures to essential business requirements

People

Effective today, May 30, 2022, we are optimizing our operations in some of our markets while reducing our workforce. The reduction follows an extensive evaluation of team redundancy and how this complements our strategy. We have arranged for one-to-one communications with all of the impacted teammates. Each member of the reduced workforce will receive an invitation to have a conversation with a relevant senior leader to receive clarity on the next steps based on each market’s local laws, severance rules, and best practices.

To those who will leave, I would like to say I am sorry. And more importantly, this is not your fault. You will forever be part of Swvl, and our door will always be open to you in the future. We are incredibly lucky and grateful to have worked with such remarkable talent that many companies would be fortunate to have. Besides your work, what will stay with us is knowing that we genuinely did hire people better than us. I am sure you will continue to have a significant impact wherever you go, as you have done day in and day out at Swvl.

Easing the transition for impacted employees:

– Severance: All impacted employees to receive severance based on gross salary and complete cash payout

– Provident Fund, Gratuity & Leave encashment other legal payments

– All RSU to be considered vested

– Expense claims/OPD claims to be cleared

– All Final Settlements to be taxed as per local requirement

– Payout Transfer to be complete in the next 21 days

Medical Insurance: to be extended for all entitled employees

Stock Options: all unvested stocks for impacted employees to continue to vest as per schedule

Alumni Directory: an alumni network directory to support our impacted workforce

No interview policy for Rejoiners

Laptops to be retained by employees subject to data security requirements

Update: In an email to TechCrunch, CFO Youssef Salem said Swvl is not shutting down operations in any country whether from its existing footprint or planned expansions but rather optimizing its network and headcount in each country.

Ayoken raises $1.4M to grow its NFT marketplace for creatives

Ayoken, an NFT marketplace for creatives, has raised $1.4 million pre-seed funding to enable users grow their revenue streams through digital collectibles.

The startup’s marketplace, Ayokenlabs, will feature digital collectibles from musicians, sports brands and influencers from all over the world.

Ayoken founder and CEO, Joshua King, told TechCrunch that the marketplace is a bridge between fans and artists, and gives supporters a sense of ownership in the success of their idols.

Through the NFT marketplace, he said, fans will have access to tokens such as behind-the-scenes videos and album art. NFT holders will also get other perks like access to unreleased music and exclusive live events by the creatives.

“Through VIP passes, fans will get the ability to actually livestream music by these artists before it arrives on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music. Fans will get discounts for future events too,” said King, who has 14 years’ experience in strategy, growth and innovation consultancy, and entrepreneurship. His career includes helping scale AZA (Bitpesa), a Nairobi-based platform that leverages bitcoin to facilitate cross-border remittances and where he first got introduced to crypto and blockchain technology.

MARA raises $23M from Coinbase Ventures and FTX to build Africa’s portal to the crypto economy

King said Ayoken will over the next few months release NFTs of some major African artists and others across the world.

The London-headquartered startup has already partnered with Ghanaian afrobeats artist KiDi (Dennis Nana Dwamena) for his first NFT drop on the first day of June. King said the cross-chain marketplace (although currently built on Avalanche blockchain) allows crypto and card payments but plans to add mobile money as the startup makes it easier for people in emerging markets like Africa to trade with ease. King said they are negotiating partnerships with a number of telcos in the continent to make this a reality.

“We are reducing friction points for the users by letting people use their cards instead of having to use crypto to buy; we are working on partnerships with telcos that will allow people to use mobile money to make the payment in future too. Nothing comes close to what we are doing and that is why we are able to sign some of the biggest names in the creative industry,” he said.

Users will get token (Ayo) rewards when they buy the NFTs or refer people, which they can redeem later for an NFT.

King said, unlike other NFT marketplaces, they have distribution partners including YouTubers, influencers, newsletters, crypto exchanges and telecoms to promote NFT drops — allowing the creatives to tap a wider audience and not just their fanbase.

“What this means is that celebrities do not have to rely on their social media following to drive transactions. They get instant access to millions of people all around the world at the touch of a button. And our approach is so different to any other NFC marketplace on the planet. We also have a marketing agency to help these creatives succeed in their first NFT drops,” said King.

“They (distribution partners) will get a revenue share based on any transactions generated on their social media promotions.”

Using the funds raised from the investors, among them Founders Factory Africa, Texas-based Kon Ventures, Europe-based venture capital collective Crypto League, Ghana-based R9C Ventures and Maximus Ventures, Ayoken plans to sign a number of exclusive deals with artists and partnerships with telcos, besides growing its team and secondary marketplaces.

“A majority of the funding will go into buying exclusive licenses and into building our tech team; that is the developers and engineers by fourfold,” he said.

eBay launches its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf

Coinbase’s NFT marketplace is off to a lackluster start

Berlin-based B2B BNPL platform Mondu raises $43M Series A led by Valar in the US

Given the likely global recession, small businesses are reaching for new kinds of financing. Thus, the buy now, pay later business model is now expanding into this B2B world at a rate of knots. Playter has raised backing to do this, as has Hokodo, Billie and Tranch, to name a few other players. But in Germany, B2B Payments company Mondu has emerged as a significant entrant to the market.

Mondu has now raised a $43 million Series A round led by U.S.-based venture capital fund Valar Ventures and will use the funding to expand into more European countries later this year.

Previous investors Cherry Ventures, FinTech Collective and tech entrepreneurs and senior executives from Klarna, Zalando, and SumUp also participated. The company has now raised $57 million to date.

Mondu’s BNPL for B2B solutions for merchants and marketplaces offers the main payment B2B payment options and flexible payment terms.

Malte Huffmann, co-founder and co-CEO of Mondu, said in a statement:

The concept of BNPL isn’t new in the B2B world; offline business trade has enjoyed it for decades. But as more companies increasingly move to digital, the need for BNPL for B2B online will grow immensely. We are on the verge of a “digitalization boom,” and Mondu wants to be part of that revolution and drive innovation within the B2B payments space.

Philipp Povel, co-founder and co-CEO of Mondu, said there is a “$200 billion opportunity just in Europe and the U.S., which is bigger than the global consumer BNPL market.”

Since October 2021, Mondu has signed merchant customers across industries such as beauty, cleaning and manufacturing. One example is Ionto Comed, a manufacturer in the beauty sector that supplies salons.

Andrew McCormack, founding partner of Valar Ventures, commented:

BNPL for B2B sits at the intersection of three huge markets that are all in transition. The B2B payments market is immense, and its transition to digital has been accelerated over the past couple of years. The B2B eCommerce market is larger than B2C but is underserved by current offerings, and supply chain financing is a growing need, particularly for SMBs.

Mondu will have to expand quickly. Berlin-based Billie has raised €138.2 million so far, and Tranch in the U.K. has raised $5.6 million.

Indonesia’s Astro raises $60M to work on 15-minute grocery delivery

Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago has long been a headache for logistics companies, but there’s no lack of brave challengers. Jarkata-based Astro, which provides 15-minute grocery delivery, has recently closed a $60 million Series B financing round, lifting its total funding to $90 million since the business launched just nine months ago.

The Series B round was led by Accel, Citius and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors AC Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India. The company declined to disclose its post-money valuation.

The speed at which Astro is attracting investment goes to show the need for hefty upfront investment in the grocery delivery race, which is about establishing a logistics infrastructure quickly and locking in loyal customers ahead of rivals. Founded by Tokopedia veteran Vincent Tjendra, Astro plans to spend its funding proceeds on user acquisition, product development and hiring more staff to add to its current team of 200.

As in many countries around the world, on-demand delivery got a boost during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. But e-grocery penetration in the country remains low and is estimated to be just 0.5% by 2022, compared to China’s 6% and South Korea’s 34% in 2020.

That means there’s a huge opportunity for companies like Astro that are trying to prove the convenience of online grocery ordering over brick-and-mortar visits. The e-grocery delivery market in Indonesia is projected to reach $6 billion by 2025.

Astro offers 15-minute delivery within a range of 2-3 km through its network of rented “dark stores,” which are distribution hubs set up for online shopping only. The company has opted for a cash-intensive model, as it owns the entire user journey going from inventory sourcing, supply chain, mid-mile to last-mile delivery. The benefit of this heavyweight approach is that it gets to monitor the quality of customer experience.

Astro currently operates in around 50 locations across Greater Jakarta, an area with 30 million residents, through a fleet of about 1,000 delivery drivers. Revenues grew more than 10x over the past few months and downloads hit 1 million, the company said.

The startup is competing with incumbents like Sayurbox, HappyFresh and TaniHub to win over users. Its customers range from working professionals to young parents at home “who seek convenience,” said Tjendra.

Grocery delivery is notoriously cash-burning, but Tjendra reckoned margins will improve as the business scales. The company’s main source of revenue is the gross margin it earned from the goods sold and delivery fees customers pay. A large chunk of the business’s costs comes from delivery, which the founder believed “will come down over time as we deploy for hubs and subsequently reduce the delivery distance areas.”

HitPay is a one-stop solution for SMEs

HitPay has almost everything SMEs need to run their businesses.

In addition to being an online payment gateway, it also offers tools like point-of-sale software with card readers, plugins, payment links and no-code online stores.

The Y Combinator alum announced today that it has raised $15.75 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors Global Founders Capital and HOF Capital. It is currently used by over 10,000 merchants in Singapore and Malaysia, with plans to expand into more Southeast Asian markets, including Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Co-founder and CEO Aditya Haripurkar told TechCrunch HitPay started in 2016 as an e-wallet, but then pivoted toward being a SME-facing platform in 2018 as a virtual POS product. As its team began to understand the needs of SMEs more, it started to develop the other tools on the platform.

HitPay’s Series A funding will be used for building a payments infrastructure from the ground up, with the intention of saving SMEs money and helping them expand their business. This will include business tools and payments infrastructure that includes all commonly used payment rails in each market, including bank transfers, cards, e-wallets and BNPL services.

“SMEs have very specific requirements, so we wanted to build a one-stop no code platform,” said Haripurkar. “That entails all our plugins, point of sale software, business software, online stores and recurring payments. We’ll be focusing on building these free SaaS tools in addition to building up payment rails, which are focused currently on Singaporean and Malaysian merchants. But in each country we launch in, that will look very different, so we will look at local payment methods in every country. That’s the biggest challenge for our team and where most of our investment and time is going as well.”

The first step HitPay will take as it expands into new countries is to get regulated in each market it operates in, to allow it to build payment infrastructure for SMEs from the ground up. Then it will integrate the most popular payment methods. For example, in Singapore, HitPay currently works with about 10 to 15 payment methods.

HitPay’s no-code platform allows SMEs to unify their online and offline payment stacks. It is typically used by medium-sized businesses, with annual revenue between $500,000 to $2 million. Most are in the retail segment, but Haripurkar expect that to evolve as well.

Strong Compute raises $7.8M seed round to speed up ML training pipelines

Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. The round includes a total of 30 funds and angels, including the likes of Sequoia Capital India, Blackbird, Folklore and Skip Capital, as well as Y Combinator, Starburst Ventures and founders and engineers from companies like Cruise, Waymo, Open AI, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

The company, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter ’22 batch, promises that its optimizations can speed up the training process by 10x to 1000x, depending on the model, pipeline and framework. As Strong Compute founder Ben Sands, who previously also co-founded AR company Meta, told me, the team has recently made some breakthroughs where it was able to take Nvidia’s reference implementation, which its customer LayerJot used, to run 20 times faster.

Image Credits: Strong Compute

“That was a big win,” Sands said. “It really gave us the sense that there is nothing that can’t be improved.” He didn’t quite want to reveal all of the details of how the team’s optimizations worked, but he noted that the company is now hiring mathematicians and is building tools that give it a more detailed view of how their user’s code interacts with the CPUs and GPUs at a much deeper level than was previously possible.

As Sands stressed, the current focus for the company is to start automating a lot of the current work to optimize the training process — and that’s something the company can now tackle, thanks to this funding round. “Our goal now is to have serious development partners in self-driving, medical and aerial, in order to be looking at what is actually going to generalize really well,” he explained. “We’ve now got the resources to have an R&D team that doesn’t have to deliver something in a two-week sprint but that can actually look at what’s some real core tech that could take a year to actually get a win out of but that can really help with that automated analysis of the problem.”

Strong Compute wants to speed up your ML model training

The company currently has six full-time engineers but Sands plans to double that over the next few months. In part, that’s also because the company is now getting inbound interest from large companies that often spend $50 million or more on their compute resources (and Sands noted that the market is basically bi-modal, with customers either spending less than $1 million or $10 to $100 million, with only a few players in the middle).

Image Credits: Strong compute

Every company that is trying to build ML models, though, suffers from the same problem: training models and running experiments to improve them still take a lot of time. That means the well-paid data scientists working on these problems spend a lot of time in a holding pattern, waiting for results to come in. “Strong Compute is solving the basketball court problem,” said SteadyMD CFO Nikhil Abraham. “Long training times had our best devs shooting hoops all day, waiting on machines.”

And while some of that inbound interest is coming from the financial industry and companies that want to optimize their natural language processing models, Strong Compute’s focus remains on computer vision for the time being.

“We’ve only just scratched the surface of what machine learning and AI can do.” said Folklore partner Tanisha Banaszcyk. “We love working with founders who have long-range ambition and visions that will endure across generations. Having invested in autonomous driving, we know how important speed to market is – and see the impact Strong Compute can have on this market with its purpose-built platform, deep understanding of the $500B market and world-class team.”

Mintlify taps AI to automatically generate documentation from code

Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. CEO Han Wang says that the proceeds will be put toward product development and doubling Mintlify’s core, three-person team by the end of the year.

Ithaca, New York-based Mintlify was co-founded in 2021 by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee — both software engineers by trade. Wang previously co-launched Foodful, an startup that developed a cloud-based monitoring system for cows, and Pe•ple, an online customer community platform that was acquired by Tribe in early 2021. Lee was a co-founder at Pe•ple before briefly joining Duolingo as an engineer.

Wang said the idea for Mintlify came from his and Lee’s experiences in software development, which involved working with documentation that wasn’t always complete or of the highest quality. Their observations agree with a 2017 GitHub survey, which found that 93% of developers consider incomplete or outdated documentation to be a pervasive problem.

“We’ve worked as software engineers at companies in all stages ranging from startups to big tech and found that they all suffer from bad documentation, if it even existed at all,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and those jumping into new codebases. It helps senior devs save time from explaining their code to others in the future. For public-facing and open-source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption.”

Image Credits: Mintlify

Mintlify aims to address the challenges around documentation with automation, specifically auto-generating documentation. The company’s platform reads code and creates docs to explain it, leveraging technologies including natural language processing and web scraping.

Wang declined to reveal more about Mintlify’s technical underpinnings, but generating documentation from code is well within the realm of possibility with today’s AI techniques. That’s evidenced by the fact that Mintlify has several competitors taking similar approaches, including Documatic, whose AI system automatically generates changelogs and explanations from code in addition to documentation.

Wang asserts that Mintlify provides “significantly” higher-quality results than its rivals, and — unlike some — doesn’t force developers to host documentation on a cloud service. “Mintlify’s mission is to solve documentation rot by developing continuous documentation into a standard practice for software teams,” Wang added. “[W]hen engineering managers are actively seeking solutions for better documentation practices, … that’s when we step in.”

Beyond generating documentation, Mintlify routinely scans for “stale” documentation and detects how users engage with the documentation to improve its readability. (Wang emphasized that the platform doesn’t store code and encrypts all user data at rest and in transit.) Mintlify, which is free for individual developers, also integrates with existing systems including Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub for automating task management and development workflows.

According to Wang, adoption of Mintlify’s free plan has been growing 20% every week since its January launch. With the user base now eclipsing 6,000 active accounts, the company plans to shift its focus to a premium offering oriented toward enterprise customers.

“The pandemic standardized a decentralized and asynchronous work environment. This made high-quality documentation critical to achieving efficient communication, onboarding, and product development,” Wang said. “Our expansion into workflow automations is addressing the challenge by targeting the engineering managers with our existing fanbase serving as champions.”

One AI raises $8M to curate business-specific NLP models

Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that spending climbed by more than 30%.

It’s a fiercely competitive market. Beyond well-resourced startups like OpenAI, Cohere, AI21 Labs, and Hugging Face and tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, there’s a new crop of vendors building NLP services on top of open source AI models. But Yochai Levi isn’t discouraged. He’s one of the co-founders of One AI, an NLP platform that today emerged from stealth with $8 million led by Ariel Maislos, Tech Aviv, Sentinel One CEO Tomer Wiengarten, and other unnamed venture firms and angel investors. 

“While the market is growing fast, advanced NLP is still used mainly by expert researchers, big tech, and governments,” Levi told TechCrunch via email. “We believe that the technology is nearing its maturity point, and after building NLP from scratch several times in the past, we decided it was time to productize it and make it available for every developer.”

Image Credits: One AI

Levi lays out what he believes are the major challenges plaguing NLP development. It’s often difficult to curate open source models, he argues, because they have to be matched both to the right domain and task. For example, a text-generating model trained to classify medical records would be a poor fit for an app designed to create advertisements. Moreover, models need to be constantly retrained with new data — lest they become “stale.” Case in point, OpenAI’s GPT-3 responds to the question “Who’s the president of the U.S.?” with the answer “Donald Trump” because it was trained on data from before the 2020 election.

Levi believes the solution is a package of NLP models trained for particular business use cases — in other words, One AI’s product. He teamed up with CEO Amit Ben, CPO Aviv Dror, and CSO Asi Sheffer in 2021 to pursue the idea. Ben previously was the head of AI at LogMeIn after the company acquired his second startup, Nanorep, an AI and chatbot vendor. Dror helped to co-found Nanorep and served as a platform product manager at Wix. Sheffer, a former data scientist at Nanorep, was the principal data scientist at LogMeIn. As for Levi, he was the VP of online marketing at LivePerson and the head of marketing at WeWork.

One AI offers a set of models that can be mixed and matched in a pipeline to process text via a single API call. Each model is selected and trained for its applicability to the enterprise, Levi said, and automatically matched by the platform to a customer’s task and domain (e.g., conversation summarization, sales insights, topic detection, and proofreading). One AI’s models can also be combined with open source and proprietary models to extend One AI’s capabilities.

The platform’s API accepts text, voice, and video inputs of various formats. With One AI’s language studio, users can experiment with the APIs and generate calls to use in code.

“With the maturation of Language AI technologies, it is finally time for machines to start adapting to us,” Ben told TechCrunch via email. “The adoption of language comprehension tools by the broader developer community is the way to get there.”

Image Credits: One AI

One AI prices its NLP service across several tiers, including a free tier that includes processing for up to one million words a month. The stackable “growth tier” adds 100,000 words for $1.

The hurdle One AI will have to overcome is convincing customers that its services are more attractive than what’s already out there. In April, OpenAI said that tens of thousands of developers were using GPT-3 via its API to generate words for over 300 apps. But, with Fortune Business Insights pegging the NLP market at $16.53 billion in 2020, it could be argued that there’s a large enough slice of the pie for newcomers.

Added TehAviv founder and managing partner Yaron Samid: “Language is the most valuable untapped resource, beyond the reach of most products and companies. This is true to most industries and domains and results in negative outcomes that include everything from lost sales, to lower levels of user engagement and loyalty, to reputation damage. Unleashing Language AI allows us to harness the power of this unstructured data and turn it into useful information and insights.”

One AI says that a portion of the seed round proceeds will be put toward expanding its 22-person team, which includes 10 NLP data scientists.