Daily Crunch: Remote workspace platform Gable raises $12M Series A

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TikTok just can’t dodge the watchful eyes of the watchmen: Earlier this year, Taylor reported that a string of universities banned TikTok from devices. Last week, Paul reported that the European Commission threw the kibosh on having TikTok on work devices, and today, Amanda reported that Canada followed suit for its government devices. The bans are coming down over concerns that China-based TikTok can be used to spy on its users.

— Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Raise the roof: Continuing to work remotely in 2023 remains a hotly contested issue in today’s workplaces. What if we told you that Gable can give your company better remote working options? Still with us? Okay, Haje writes about how Gable raised $12 million to not only show your remote employees a nearby workplace, but also show them if any of their colleagues are there so they can connect.
• The world in the palm of your hand: Reporting from Mobile World Congress, Brian sat down with OnePlus’ COO Kinder Liu to discuss the company’s first foldable phone.
• Closing the feedback loop: Engaged customers are where your company can get some of its best ideas for new products. Cycle snagged $6 million to help companies collect all of that customer feedback for a more streamlined product management process, Romain writes.

Startups and VC

Bain Capital Ventures is doubling down on what works, literally, Natasha M reports. The venture firm, one of Bain’s 11 financial divisions, has raised $1.9 billion across two funds, one for seed for growth-stage startups that hovers around $1.4 billion, and one for later-stage opportunities that closed around a third of that, at $493 million.

Devin reports that the FTC, fresh off announcing a whole new division taking on “snake oil” in tech, has sent another shot across the bows of the overeager industry with a sassy warning to “keep your AI claims in check.”

And we have five more for you:

• A job well done, Kyle: Bonusly is a startup aiming to help employees get recognized for quality work, and it just told TechCrunch it raised $18.9 million, writes Kyle. He deserves a bonus for an article well written.
• DTCtR: Christine asks, Want to go from direct-to-consumer to retail? This startup has a platform for that.
• Yeah, you can do that: Entitle raises $15 million seed round to modernize permissions management, Frederic reports.
• Who markets the marketeers: Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich started a VC firm to scale what “founders are starving for,” Natasha M reports.
• A high-flying startup: Astroscale closes new funding to grow in-orbit servicing and orbital debris cleanup tech, Aria reports.

Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it

Image Credits: Andriy Onufriyenko (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The generative AI models that have made headlines and memes in recent months weren’t cooked up in someone’s garage or basement.

“Only well-funded institutions with access to a massive amount of GPU power are capable of building these models,” says Encord co-founder Eric Landau, who recommends using the iterative process of active learning to “leapfrog the AI production gap and build models capable of running in the wild more quickly.”

In a TC+ post aimed at ML team managers, he shares tactics for leveraging active learning and addresses the perennial buy-versus-build dilemma.

Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it

Three more from the TC+ team:

• A show of force: With 5 activists in the mix, Salesforce will report earnings Wednesday, reports Ron.
• Buy now, profit later: How much progress is Klarna making toward profitability? wonders Alex.
• A legal influence: Nicholas Saady explores key legal issues for influencers and brands (and how to deal with them).

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

As you can see from our stories today, Brian has been writing a lot about new phones lately. In this particular article, he spoke with Nothing’s Carl Pei about the company’s expansion strategy and its upcoming Phone (2) and how it will run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is really going all in on this artificial intelligence thing for Bing. Frederic reports that the software giant brings the new Bing to Windows 11 while also launching Phone Link for iOS.

And we have five more for you:

• Give me fiverr: Fiverr now has a white-glove offering to help businesses hire project managers, Kyle writes.
• Give me your best interconnected web: Flipboard now has a Mastodon integration among other Fediverse offerings, Sarah reports.
• Give me a game fix: Lorenzo entered the world of gamers trying to fix a video game “taken over” by hackers, and what results is a delightful read.
• Give me a spot south of the border: Mexico’s president confirms that Tesla’s next factory will be in that country. Kirsten has more.
• Give me a hot minute: Mike writes that 6G is coming, just not yet.

Daily Crunch: Remote workspace platform Gable raises $12M Series A by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Mozilla leads Mastodon app Mammoth’s pre-seed funding

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that’s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, who invested in the company’s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff.

The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2. The latter was impacted by Elon Musk’s Twitter API changes which put an end to third-party Twitter clients, prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon.

Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that’s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem.

Now, the team at Mammoth is just three full-time employees and a handful of contractors. And while the total investment round is undisclosed, Decrem characterized the pre-seed as a small amount — “a million or two is the general round” at this stage, he says.

Mammoth is a free Mastodon app for iOS that makes it easier to get started

The new Mammoth founder’s background is both in open source and consumer apps, in addition to entrepreneurship.

In ’99, Decrem worked on a Linux startup called Eazel which aimed to make Linux easier to use. While others on that project later ended up building Safari and other technology at Apple, Decrem found himself at the Mozilla Foundation ahead of the Firefox 1.0 launch. There, he ran marketing and business affairs and worked on branding and the international launch. He was also a part of the search monetization discussions, including the initial Google search deal.

He later went on to more entrepreneurial efforts including the VC-backed social web browser Flock (which received its fair share of TechCrunch coverage back in the day), followed by an early smartphone game maker Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge. The latter landed him at Disney following an acquisition, as the head of the mobile games group, which put out products like the “Where’s My Water” series and some “Temple Run” titles.

Some of these prior efforts had also involved the same approach of finding and partnering with existing developers, Decrem notes, including the original Tap Tap Revenge developer. Later at Disney, he found a developer in QA who had built a No. 1 game on the App Store, but not under Disney’s branding. Decrem brought the developer into his group and gave him the space to create what became “Where’s My Water?,” a title that’s seen a billion-some downloads by now.

“The way I like to do things is you find somebody special and then get out the way and support their vision,” Decrem explains. “I saw that spark in [Mammoth founder] Shihab [Mehboob], and that’s why we’re working together.”

The two were teamed up as Decrem was running a small lab that had been working on decentralization projects, including a crypto app called KyrptoSign, for legal documents on the blockchain, as well as an art collective. But when Mastodon came along, the team pivoted, acquired Mammoth and now it’s the group’s only focus.

Image Credits: Mammoth

For Decrem, the appeal of Mastodon was not just that it’s an open source Twitter clone — something he said only felt “mildly interesting” — but how it was a place where communities were forming.

“It reminded me of Firefox 0.7, which is what I got involved in Mozilla — the Firefox launch,” Decrem says. “I was like, there’s just people nerding out here, doing cool shit…that feels exciting and interesting and everything I like about the internet — communities building and organizing themselves.”

“This thing is half microblogging, but half people organizing communities — like Reddit, or maybe like Discord,” he continues. “This is like a digitally native social system. And it’s decentralized. That’s freaking cool.”

Other companies seem to think it’s cool too. Today, Flipboard announced it was joining the decentralized social web. Medium already has, and Tumblr said it would.

The challenge, of course, for Mammoth, will be not just making the decentralized social web more appealing to more newcomers but also successfully maintaining and generating revenue from the app itself. Decrem says the company plans to have a subscription plan available in a few months that will range from $3-5 per month, at least half of which will likely go toward its server bills.

But revenue is not the immediate focus — growing its user base comes first. As for now, Mammoth has at least a year’s worth of funding thanks to Mozilla’s backing, Decrem says. And they’re willing to be patient, he notes.

Mozilla leads Mastodon app Mammoth’s pre-seed funding by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Bonusly, a startup aiming to help employees get recognized for quality work, raises $18.8M

Employee recognition is a key retention tool in a competitive jobs market. According to a recent SurveyMonkey poll, 82% of staffers consider recognition an important part of their happiness at work, while an equal percentage — 82% — report feeling happier overall as a result of receiving (presumably deserved) work recognition. It’s not just employees who see the value. In an industry poll, 56% of HR leaders told the Society for Human Resource Management that employee recognition programs help with recruiting top talent.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that startups facilitating employee recognition and the doling out of merit-based rewards have gotten a lot of investor attention. WorkAngel, a mobile-first employee reward and recognition platform, has raised millions of dollars to date from prominent VC backers. So has Fringe, which is developing an HR employee benefits platform with customizable perks.

Another vendor in the space is Bonusly, which was launched in 2013 by co-founder and CEO Raphael Crawford-Marks. The startup today announced that it raised $18.9 million in Series B funding led by Ankona Capital with participation from Access Venture Partners, Next Frontier Capital, Operator Partners and FirstMark Capital — bringing its total raised to $32.4 million.

“I ran Bonusly as a side project for a couple of years prior to raising a seed round, and grew the company organically until 2020 when the company raised its first round of funding,” Crawford-Marks told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Since our Series A, we have seen our valuation more than triple, despite the multiple compressions that have occurred in today’s market — a strong recognition of the value we already provide and the even greater opportunity that lies ahead.”

Bonusly’s platform attempts to capture and analyze data on how organizations work and connect, informing HR teams and managers. Every month, employees get an allowance to give small bonuses to their colleagues to recognize their contributions. Bonuses appear in a feed so everyone can see the work happening across their team.

As for the bonuses, they can be spent on gift cards from popular brands like Amazon and Hulu, as well as on cash and charitable donations. Crawford-Marks says that Bonusly users receive an average of two recognitions from peers and managers every week.

Image Credits: Bonusly

“Our platform and data put us in a unique position to enter the performance management space with capabilities that are extremely difficult for the competition to duplicate,” Crawford-Marks said. “We don’t think there’s value in adding features like 1:1 or OKR templates that everyone else has. Instead, we want to lean into and expand upon what people already love about Bonusly.”

Of course, there’s a risk that platforms like Bonusly become a popularity contest. An MIT study found that merit-based rewards have the potential to actually increase bias and reduce equity in the workplace.

Crawford-Marks argued that Bonusly’s requirement that recognition contain a written reason and be tagged with a company value or goal prevents explicit — or implicit — biases from getting in the way. “Given Bonusly enables positive communication at work that is focused on effort and achievement, rather than personality, it can actually mitigate any notion of a popularity contest,” he added.

Crawford-Marks also asserted that customers were generally happy with Bonusly’s platform, pointing to the growing subscriber base.

“As of the end of January 2023, we have 3,175 current customers and 396,813 current users,” Crawford-Marks said. “After deploying Bonusly, more than nine in ten Bonusly customers see improved employee engagement, 88% see a morale increase and 89% experience better employee satisfaction.”

Take those stats with a grain of salt. But what you can count on is continued technical improvements to the platform — at least according to Crawford-Marks. In the near term, the focus will be improving Bonusly’s analytics capabilities; recently, Bonusly introduced new tools that make it clearer how each department and team is using Bonusly and how that compares to benchmark usage across Bonusly’s clientele.

Crawford-Marks says that Bonusly is also in the process of expanding its rewards catalog, adding non-U.S. redemption options in addition to travel and experiences “at scale.” AI is another area of exploration for Bonusly — specifically AI to “spotlight work that might have otherwise gone unnoticed” and “encouraging peer-to-peer recognition to promote stronger team connections,” Crawford-Marks says.

When asked about potential economic headwinds ahead, particularly in regard to funding, Crawford-Marks stressed that Bonusly is “capital efficient” and “knows how to make every dollar count to grow.” However, he declined to say whether the company plans to add to its 108-person workforce before the end of the year.

“The value we deliver to customers has become even more critical as organizations navigate the inevitable changes characterized by the need to be more efficient coupled with the on-going ‘great resignation’ and tight labor market,” Crawford-Marks said. “It’s a platform that empowers real-time recognition to highlight accomplishments big and small in a very positive and public way ultimately fosters stronger cultures and builds resilient companies that weather the storm.”

Bonusly, a startup aiming to help employees get recognized for quality work, raises $18.8M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it

Eric Landau Contributor

Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord, he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University.

During the past six months, we have witnessed some incredible developments in AI. The release of Stable Diffusion forever changed the artworld, and ChatGPT-3 shook up the internet with its ability to write songs, mimic research papers, and provide thorough and seemingly intelligent answers to commonly Googled questions.

These advancements in generative AI offer further evidence that we’re on the precipice of an AI revolution.

However, most of these generative AI models are foundational models: high-capacity, unsupervised learning systems that train on vast amounts of data and take millions of dollars of processing power to do it. Currently, only well-funded institutions with access to a massive amount of GPU power are capable of building these models.

The majority of companies developing the application-layer AI that’s driving the widespread adoption of the technology still rely on supervised learning, using large swaths of labeled training data. Despite the impressive feats of foundation models, we’re still in the early days of the AI revolution and numerous bottlenecks are holding back the proliferation of application-layer AI.

Downstream of the well-known data labeling problem exist additional data bottlenecks that will hinder the development of later-stage AI and its deployment to production environments.

These problems are why, despite the early promise and floods of investment, technologies like self-driving cars have been just one year away since 2014.

These exciting proof-of-concept models perform well on benchmarked datasets in research environments, but they struggle to predict accurately when released in the real world. A major problem is that the technology struggles to meet the higher performance threshold required in high-stakes production environments, and fails to hit important benchmarks for robustness, reliability and maintainability.

For instance, these models often can’t handle outliers and edge cases, so self-driving cars mistake reflections of bicycles for bicycles themselves. They aren’t reliable or robust so a robot barista makes a perfect cappuccino two out of every five times but spills the cup the other three.

As a result, the AI production gap, the gap between “that’s neat” and “that’s useful,” has been much larger and more formidable than ML engineers first anticipated.

Counterintuitively, the best systems also have the most human interaction.

Fortunately, as more and more ML engineers have embraced a data-centric approach to AI development, the implementation of active learning strategies have been on the rise. The most sophisticated companies will leverage this technology to leapfrog the AI production gap and build models capable of running in the wild more quickly.

What is active learning?

Active learning makes training a supervised model an iterative process. The model trains on an initial subset of labeled data from a large dataset. Then, it tries to make predictions on the rest of the unlabeled data based on what it has learned. ML engineers evaluate how certain the model is in its predictions and, by using a variety of acquisition functions, can quantify the performance benefit added by annotating one of the unlabeled samples.

By expressing uncertainty in its predictions, the model is deciding for itself what additional data will be most useful for its training. In doing so, it asks annotators to provide more examples of only that specific type of data so that it can train more intensively on that subset during its next round of training. Think of it like quizzing a student to figure out where their knowledge gap is. Once you know what problems they are missing, you can provide them with textbooks, presentations and other materials so that they can target their learning to better understand that particular aspect of the subject.

With active learning, training a model moves from being a linear process to a circular one with a strong feedback loop.

Why sophisticated companies should be ready to leverage active learning

Active learning is fundamental for closing the prototype-production gap and increasing model reliability.

It’s a common mistake to think of AI systems as a static piece of software, but these systems must be constantly learning and evolving. If not, they make the same mistakes repeatedly, or, when they’re released in the wild, they encounter new scenarios, make new mistakes and don’t have an opportunity to learn from them.

Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Bitwise Industries lands $80M to expand its sprawling software dev business

In 2013, Irma Olguin Jr. — a third-generation Mexican American and the first in her family to go to college — was working on making coding instruction available to disadvantaged members of her community. During her work, she met Jake Soberal, an intellectual property lawyer, who shared Olguin’s desire to leverage the tech industry to effect change at the local level.

Olguin and Soberal started by co-founding Geekwise Academy, a coding and tech skills bootcamp that teaches HTML and JavaScript. Then — to boost the hiring pipeline for Geekwise graduates, and under a newly formed parent company called Bitwise Industries — they launched Shift3 Technologies, a software development house that creates managed services for Salesforce, DocuSign and various other software-as-a-service apps.

As Fast Company notes, Bitwise made headlines in 2019 when it raised $27 million — one of the largest Series A rounds ever secured by a company with a female Latinx founder. Historically, female founders have received just 12% of venture capital investment for their businesses.

Olguin and Soberal’s latest venture through Bitwise is commercial real estate — the two develop and turn previously blighted buildings into coworking spaces, restaurants, theaters and more. Evidently impressed with the three-pronged business model, investors — including Kapor Center, Motley Fool, the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Citibank — poured $80 million into Bitwise this week, bringing the company’s total capita raised to over $200 million.

The new cash will be used to support Bitwise’s expansion into Chicago and the growth of the startup’s other locations, Olguin told TechCrunch in an email interview. She and Soberal plan to eventually bring Bitwise’s businesses into 40 cities nationwide.

“Bitwise Industries’ approach has delivered business value in the form of digital transformation nationwide resulting in unprecedented company growth despite global economic instability,” Olguin said. “This latest raise, led by a group of distinguished investors, acknowledges the role technology plays in driving economic impact in previously underserved communities, and validates our model making it possible for us to roll out our proven approach into other parts of the country.”

It’s tough to capture Bitwise’s business in a sentence — it’s sprawling — but the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from partnering with organizations to build digital solutions. Olguin claims that Bitwise has over 500 customers across 15 states, with dozens of agencies and municipalities, for which it’s providing software implementation services.

For example, Bitwise helps Salesforce and DocuSign customers design, build and deploy apps that streamline the business’s process. The firm also delivers custom app and website design services, plus access to a pool of contract-basis software developers.

Bitwise’s Bakersfield, California building. Image Credits: Bitwise

Bitwise — whose revenue Forbes estimated at $40 million in 2020 — claims to have helped create 15,000 jobs in just one of the cities where it operates. One of its larger initiatives was the “Digital New Deal,” a program in collaboration with California state and local governments to provide students in Bitwise’s apprenticeships the opportunity to work with government agencies on tech-related projects. Olguin says that, to date, Bitwise has renovated over a million square feet of real estate in underserved downtown areas and supported the skilling of over 10,000 people.

“We operate outside major tech hubs to reach people who have been overlooked,” Olguin said. “Bitwise Industries is working to change entrenched bias and make people in positions of power see that sharing privilege actually strengthens companies.”

It’s a noble mission for a commercial venture. To his credit, Olguin doesn’t play down Bitwise’s for-profit status — or its profitability. To the contrary, he spotlights the startup’s many recent strategic acquisitions, which include Salesforce implementation firm Esor Consulting Group, Denver-based software developer Techtonic, DocuSign partner Stria and technical institute the Array School.

“Our funding is driving participation in the digital economy from groups of people who were previously left out of these types of opportunities,” Olguin said. “No one is doing what we are doing at the scale we are doing it across the country.”

Hillel Moerman, a partner at Goldman Sachs, added in an emailed statement: “Goldman Sachs believes that Bitwise has shown a strong track record in training and upskilling talent to successfully find placement in the highly competitive technology labor market. Filling the talent gaps is not only pertinent for the sector, but also key to creating economic opportunity for those in underserved communities and we are excited to support Bitwise in its continued growth.”

Bitwise currently has 10 locations with more than 500 employees, a number that’s triple what it was three years ago. Olguin says that she expects to see similar growth by the year’s end.

Bitwise Industries lands $80M to expand its sprawling software dev business by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Want to go from direct-to-consumer to retail? This startup has a platform for that

While the global pandemic was still in full force, Dipti Desai, who had been building data platforms at Uber at the time, started working with a nonprofit selling masks on Shopify. As she helped them build out their digital storefront, Desai began talking to other brands about their challenges with regard to data.

“It was really hard for them to understand what was going on in their business,” Desai told TechCrunch. “At the same time, these brands and businesses were starting to think about what comes next after being direct-to-consumer, wanting to see their retail and wholesale data all together.”

Dipti Desai, founder and CEO of Crstl Image Credits: Crstl

Looking at that more, she found that expanding beyond direct-to-consumer into retail, online marketplaces and wholesale was a challenge for small businesses. So, she decided to take that on and founded Crstl, a San Francisco–based SaaS application and platform that is now making its national launch after raising $4.4 million in seed funding to continue developing its no-code electronic data interchange (EDI) for brands, manufacturers and wholesalers.

The company is joining the ranks of those, like Logicbroker, tapping into EDI, which is how information is transferred digitally from one company to another. They are also among those doing no-code for smaller brands without developer resources, similar to other e-commerce enablement startups Popup and Rebuy. In Crstl’s case, it is providing data connectivity so brands can transact with the largest retailers and distributors.

Here’s how it works: Crstl has created an AI-driven network of trading partners and integrations and offers a no-code EDI workflow for businesses to quickly connect and begin transacting with the network. It also provides transparent pricing along with compliance, testing and certification, including generating compliant shipping labels and packing slips.

Desai, CEO, said that a few short months after launching, Crstl has made some big strides: It is working with over 50 companies and has already enabled 50,000 business-to-business shipments, accounting for millions of dollars, between brands and large retailers, including Walmart, Target, Whole Foods and CVS.

The $4.4 million seed round was led by Mastry Ventures with participation from Village Global, Alumni Ventures, SuperAngel VC, OnDeck, Mensch Capital Partners, Harizury, and a group of individual founders and executives.

Desai said the round closed a year ago but went unannounced until now. It is being used for additional hiring and commercialization.

“We’re tackling a very hard, nuanced problem in a very big market that’s gone under-addressed for a very long time,” Desai added. “We had to dig very deep on the technical side and had a lot of proof points that we wanted to get in front of before we were intentional about talking about it. This capital also brings us a lot of incredible connections in an industry that really, truly operates as a giant ecosystem.”

Why the ‘last click’ in e-commerce matters — and how to get it right

Want to go from direct-to-consumer to retail? This startup has a platform for that by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback

Meet Cycle, a French startup that is building a collaboration tool for product managers where they can collect data from various tools, work on the next product iterations and close the feedback loop with the most engaged customers.

The company raised a total of $6 million across two funding rounds, including a recent funding round led by Boldstart that closed late last year. The startup is backed by eFounders, the European startup studio focused on SaaS products. Base Case, The 20VC Fund, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Hummingbird Ventures and 60 angels also invested in the company — it’s a long list of investors*.

Like many software-as-a-service products, Cycle first acts as a single source of truth. Many product teams rely heavily on products like Confluence, Notion or Google Docs. But they also have to check GitHub issues, Intercom messages and more.

“The issue we are trying to solve is an issue that every product manager faces. Product information is scattered across many different products,” Cycle founder and CEO Mehdi Boudoukhane told me. “As your company scales, you get feedback from users, the sales team, the customer success team and the marketing team.”

And yet, in most cases, product management becomes a black box. Other teams in the company don’t really know when something is going to ship or — worse — if their feedback will have an impact in one way or another.

Cycle has built integrations with popular startup products like HubSpot, Intercom and Slack. Once everything is in Cycle, product teams can organize feedback so that everything related to one feature is grouped together.

Product managers then use Cycle to write their Product Requirements Documents with a rich-text editor that supports embeds. It’s a collaborative editor with the ability to mention your teammates.

“Designers produce visuals, developers produce codes and product managers produce documents,” Boudoukhane said. The idea is that product managers could spend most of their day in Cycle — on average, product managers who use Cycle spend 3 hours per day in the product. And product managers don’t have to manually export their documents to other tools as Cycle offers integrations with Linear, GitHub or Notion.

Image Credits: Cycle

The worst thing that can happen when you read feedbacks from clients who have decided to end their contracts with you is when they say that there is a missing feature in your product even though… the feature exists. They just didn’t know about it.

So when something finally ships, Cycle helps you close the loop with your customers and coworkers. For instance, the sales team will receive a notification in HubSpot. “Sales teams can then reach out to clients who talked about the feature that was just shipped,” Boudoukhane said.

Having a clear line of communication with your customers is a good way to prevent churn and keep your customers engaged with your product. Some companies like Capitaine Train or Superhuman have been pretty good on this front according to Boudoukhane.

Cycle competes with Productboard or even Jira. But with its lightweight and collaborative approach, Cycle hopes that everyone in the company will interact with its product in one way or another to give feedback and contribute, making it easier to build a product-led company.

* Some individuals who invested in Cycle include Scott Belsky (Founder at Behance), Shreyas Doshi (ex-Product Lead at Stripe), Kelton Lynn (Director of Product Management at Google), Youcef Es-skouri (Head of Product at Dropbox), Omar Pera (Product Lead at Meta), David Hoang (VP Design at Webflow), Jonathan Widawski (CEO at Maze), Mark Pundsack (ex-VP Product at GitLab), Antoine Martin (Founder at Zenly), Marie Gassée (ex-VP Growth at Confluent), Mary Nelson (CCO at Aircall), Olivia Teich (ex-Product Director at Dropbox), David Apple (ex-Head of Sales & Customer Success at Notion), Eric Wittman (ex-CRO at Figma), Sriram Krishnan (ex-Head of Growth at Tinder), Jeremy Le Van (Founder at Sunrise), Brad Menezes (ex-Director of Product at Datadog), Guy Podjarny (Founder at Snyk), Nick Candito (Co-founder at Flatfile), Romain David (ex-Product Manager at Uber) and Kyle Parrish (VP Sales at Figma). I told you it was a long list.

Image Credits: Cycle

Cycle is a new product management hub that centralizes all customer feedback by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Using predictive LTV to juice up marketing campaigns

Ido Wiesenberg Contributor

Ido Wiesenberg is co-founder and CEO of Voyantis, a predictive growth platform.

More posts by this contributor

• Use predictive marketing to cut CAC at your PLG B2B startup

As a marketing veteran, you’re likely familiar with the concept of LTV (lifetime value) and its importance in determining the success of your acquisition strategies. But, are you utilizing predictive LTV in your day-to-day decision-making? If not, you’re missing out on a powerful tool that can give you a competitive edge and an opportunity drive growth for your business.

Predictive LTV is a method of precisely estimating the future value of a customer, based on their historical behavior and other relevant data. By combining this prediction with traditional metrics such as CAC (customer acquisition cost), you gain a new dimension of knowledge that was previously inaccessible to you. This allows you to make more informed decisions that balance the cost of acquisition with your predicted return on investment.

In a sense, not using predictive LTV to inform decisions is like going on a hike, not knowing where it will end and how hard it will be. You may have a general idea of where you’re going, but without advanced tools and technology, you could easily get lost, sidetracked or miss your destination altogether.

Identifying high-value customers early in their life cycle is one of the biggest benefits of predictive LTV. You can use this to build more targeted, effective acquisition strategies, that focus on acquiring and retaining customers. In addition, you can decide how much to invest in acquisition and retention efforts based on your customers’ predicted lifetime value.

CAC-only optimization

CAC-only optimization. Image Credits: Voyantis

CAC and predictive LTV optimization

CAC and predictive LTV optimization. Image Credits: Voyantis

Balancing risk and growth with predictive LTV

Before delving into the different approaches to predictive LTV, it’s important to understand the type of decisions that predictive LTV can inform. Predictive LTV can play a crucial role in shaping a business’s day-to-day decision-making. Here are some examples of how it can be incorporated:

Using predictive LTV to juice up marketing campaigns by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

Pagos raises $34M as the demand for ‘payment intelligence’ rises

With global digital payments revenue expected to reach $14.79 trillion by 2027, payment infrastructure has arguably never been more critical. But at the same time the tech is becoming essential, the costs and complexities associated with it are increasing. One recent survey shows that merchants’ satisfaction with their payment processors has declined massively, particularly when major technical hurdles arise.

Seeking to find solutions to these problems, Klas Bäck, Albert Drouart and Dan Blomberg founded Pagos, a “payment intelligence” infrastructure startup. Made up of payment experts with backgrounds from Braintree, PayPal and Stripe, Pagos turns disparate digital payments data into actionable insights without requiring customers to change their payment processors.

CEO Bäck and Drouart held senior leadership positions at Braintree/Venmo and PayPal over the last eight to nine years; Braintree/Venmo was acquired by PayPal in September 2013. Blomberg, for his part, has launched seven startups and sold five over the last two decades.

“Payment processing is fundamental to customer relationships, revenue and a business’s bottom line, but is getting more and more complex to manage well,” Bäck told TechCrunch via email. “Most companies don’t have the tools, data, or knowledge to develop or execute on an effective payment strategy; even those that do often leave significant opportunities on the table. Pagos was founded on the principle that almost all companies need help to be more data driven around their payment execution.”

Payments infrastructure vendors aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but there’s a growing amount chasing after the massive market opportunity. Streamline, headquartered in San Francisco, recently raised $4 million for its business-to-business-focused payments product suite. Kushki is a much larger player — the Ecuadorian payments infrastructure startup landed $100 million last year at a $1.5 billion valuation.

So what does Pagos bring to the table? Bäck claims that it uniquely allows companies to stream and store their payments data — including commerce and fraud data — in one place. From a single dashboard, customers can visualize the data and keep track of metrics, including transaction, payment authorization and risk performance.

Pagos’ financial monitoring dashboard. Image Credits: Pagos

Pagos offers connections to payment processors such as Adyen, Chase, Braintree, PayPal, Stripe and WorldPay, as well as data ingestion APIs so that businesses can stream payments data and custom metadata into the platform.

“Our action products bring together a company’s data and provide APIs to give developers and business stakeholders in a company the ability to build more sophistication in their payment stack to address issues such as churn, risk, and cost — ask Pagos for recommendations on what credentials, where, and how to send your transactions for maximum upside,” Bäck said. “Pagos is different because we are not trying to offer new plumbing; we want them to use the collection of vendors and partners they have better, which could include changing processes and systems to address issues.”

In terms of customers, Bäck says that Pagos, whose platform has processed over a billion transaction events, is focused on companies that sell or bill their customers online as well as firms that service them, like fraud providers, payment orchestration platforms, acquirers, payment service providers, vertical software-as-a-service companies and marketplaces. Current clients include Adobe, Eventbrite, GoFundMe, Peek and Warner Bros Discover.

“Pagos allows businesses to see what’s going on inside a payments stack,” Bäck said. “Use cases include adding new payment partners and payment method, identifying optimal payment methods and routes, tracking payments and chargeback metrics and optimizing recurring billing to reduce churn.

Some investors see the value proposition. Pagos today closed a $34 million Series A round led by Arbor Ventures with participation from Infinity Ventures, Underscore VC and Point 72 Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to $44 million, which Bäck says is being put toward funding new hires in engineering, product development and “faster customer implementation.”

“We actually weren’t seeking additional capital right now. However, we were flooded with inbound investor interest and recognized a unique opportunity to scale our customer base even faster, especially in today’s volatile economic climate,” Bäck said. “This opportunistic Series A round was substantially oversubscribed.”

As for what the future holds, Bäck says he isn’t too concerned about the challenging macroeconomic climate for startups. He avers, in fact, that the pandemic spurred a rush to e-commerce that, while since simmered down, has had lasting effects.

To Bäck’s point, the pandemic led to a measurable increase in the use of digital payments. The World Bank’s Global Findex 2021 database found that — in low and middle-income economies excluding China — over 40% of adults who made merchant in-store or online payments using a card, phone or the internet did so for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

“Backend financial infrastructure remains critical. Now more than ever, helping companies sell more and reduce their costs resonates quickly,” Bäck said. “Over the last 9-12 months, many companies have been extra focused on reducing their cost of operation. This is something Pagos is particularly well-positioned to help with — most companies can even get started without any integration work, making the return on investment extremely fast.”

Within the next year, Pagos plans to “greatly expand” the remote software, product, sales and account management teams within its 41-person workforce, Bäck says.

Pagos raises $34M as the demand for ‘payment intelligence’ rises by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Cloud security startup Wiz, now valued at $10B, raises $300M

Cybersecurity continues to be a major area for investment among businesses — and VCs. While a decline from the previous year, venture capital funding in the cybersecurity sector totaled $18.5 billion in 2022, according to Momentum Cyber.

The popularity comes in part from the rise in cyberattacks. Check Point Research reports that global cyberattacks increased by 38% in 2022 compared to 2021, and nearly nine in ten company boards told Gartner in a recent survey that they view cybersecurity as a “business risk” rather than solely a technical or IT issue.

Plenty of startups have benefitted from the boom. But one that’s done especially well is Wiz, a cloud security company founded by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik. Wiz today announced that it raised $300 million in a Series D round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Greenoaks Capital Partners and angel investors including Starbucks owner Howard Schultz and French business magnate Bernard Arnault, valuing Wiz at around $10 billion post-money.

Bringing its funding to nearly $1 billion ($900 million), CEO Rappaport says the new cash will be put toward product development and hiring well into the new year. “When we first launched Wiz, we set out to design a product with the world’s leading enterprises in mind, and all the complexity and operational considerations their dynamic cloud environments present,” he told TechCrunch in an email interview. “With Wiz, companies are developing a new maturity level in their cloud environments by improving security, increasing visibility and driving agility.”

“Explosive” is the right word. Wiz’s success in securing financing is impressive considering that startups are increasingly failing to command the high valuations that were common in past years. As per the aforementioned Momentum Cyber report, the value of deals in the cybersecurity sector in 2022 dropped by more than a quarter versus 2021. PitchBook data shows a decline in cybersecurity valuations at the seed and Series A stages in particular.

New York-based Wiz — which claims that it’s the world’s largest cybersecurity unicorn and the fastest software-as-a-service company to achieve a $10 billion valuation — was founded in March 2020. The initial team worked together for over 20 years including as Microsoft’s cloud security group leads and as the co-founders of enterprise cybersecurity firm Adallom, which was acquired by Microsoft for $320 million.

Rappaport was the previously the GM at Microsoft’s Israel R&D department, where Luttwak was the CTO. Costica, for his part, was the partner director of product management at Microsoft’s cloud security division.

Wiz’s cloud dashboard, which offers a range of configuration options.

Rappaport, Luttwak and Costica worked alongside Reznik at Adallom, and all joined Microsoft after the acquisition.

Wiz, like other cloud security platforms, analyzes infrastructure hosted in public cloud services such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more for risk factors that could allow hackers to gain control of assets and obtain sensitive customer data. The company maintains a “security graph” that correlates information across the different areas that a company’s trying to protect, whether that’s the network, identity, secrets or workloads.

“This new approach to cloud security disrupts the agent-based security model and utilizes an agentless, API-centered approach to seamlessly scan cloud workloads,” Rappaport said. “Wiz said goodbye to contextless alerts and, instead, at the heart of the product lies the Wiz security graph.”

By showing these correlations, Wiz argues that it can help plug security holes and find issues much faster than rival solutions.

“Wiz shows every C-level the risk level of each application running in their cloud,” Rappaport continued. “The risk alerts are actionable, allowing developers to focus on fixing the critical most issues and for managers to understand their risk across the different teams and apps.”

That’s a lot to promise, though — particularly in light of just how large and diverse the market for cloud security solutions is today. Sentra, which finds data in the cloud and offers remediation plans for data security teams, raised $30 million in January. Cloud infrastructure security startup Gem Security landed $11 million in February. There’s also Dig Security, Laminar and Opus Security — cloud security orchestration and remediation platforms that have between them raised tens of millions of dollars in capital.

Beyond the uptick in breaches, the widespread move to the cloud is motivating the fundraising and market expansion. A 2021 survey from O’Reilly shows that cloud adoption is steadily rising across industries, with 90% of organizations now using cloud computing — up from 88% in 2020. A separate report from PwC finds that 74% of executives are deeply involved in cloud strategy, with 70% saying they’re making cloud-related talent and upskilling decisions.

Very predictably, cloud adoption has opened up companies to risks that they didn’t necessarily anticipate. In its 2022 poll, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) revealed that 67% of organizations store sensitive data in public cloud environments. And according to the CSA’s poll from the previous year, cloud issues and misconfigurations — including cloud provider issues and security misconfigurations — are the leading causes of data breaches and outages.

“Cloud is the biggest transformation to InfoSec since inception, changing the way organizations deliver and ship software,” Rappaport said. “Cloud development is decentralized by nature, with decentralized infrastructure and development, and enabling organizations to build faster than ever before. Security organizations need to change their operation model to support the dynamic and decentralized nature of cloud, and address the unique challenges cloud presents around exposure and pace of changes and attacks.”

Wiz’s product sort of sells itself, then. In fact, Wiz claims to be the fastest company ever to $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), scaling from $1 million to $100 million in ARR in just over 18 months (from February 2021 to approximately July 2022). The company now counts 45% of the Fortune 100 among its customer base, including BMW, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce, Slack, Colgate and Blackstone.

To accommodate the growth, Wiz has invested heavily in hiring, expanding its workforce from roughly 500 in summer 2022 to 650 today across offices in Austin, Dallas and Washington, D.C. Short of an IPO, the plan is to double Wiz’s workforce by the end of the year and continue growing in the U.S., Rappaport says, including public agencies within the federal government. (The office in Washington, D.C. is no doubt a part of that plan.)

“Wiz is rapidly becoming the center of the cloud security ecosystem,” Patrick Backhouse, a partner at Greenoaks, said in a press release. “Just two years ago, securing the cloud environment meant relying on a scattered collection of point solutions and add-ons. But today, Wiz has built a comprehensive cloud-native platform that gives customers actionable insights within minutes, showing them their areas of vulnerability, the risks they face, and how to resolve them. We rarely see a business gain traction or garner customer love so quickly, and we are thrilled to partner with Assaf and his team as they pursue the next chapter in their journey.”

Cloud security startup Wiz, now valued at $10B, raises $300M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Going private: A guide to PE tech acquisitions

Jeff Laborde Contributor

Jeff Laborde, CFO of JAGGAER, has more than 25 years of technology finance experience, including heavy involvement in both running private equity-backed software companies and transacting with PE firms in technology M&A.

Private equity (PE) firms spent a record $226.5 billion on take-private transactions globally in the first half of 2022, which is 39% higher than the same period in 2021. While overall mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity slowed significantly in the second half of last year with equity market volatility, the volume of large acquisitions by PE firms looking to capitalize on a period of lowered valuation expectations is rebounding as a result of bottoming valuations and a large supply of public company targets.

When public companies underperform, PE firms in pursuit of equity value creation opportunities are eager to purchase and take these organizations private.

Despite economic cycle peaks and troughs, these types of transactions represent a large and growing share of overall M&A activity. With this growth in the volume of PE-backed transactions, it’s increasingly important to understand the basics of these transactions and the potential implications on key stakeholders, including customers, partners and employees of the acquired company, in particular, those who are left to wonder how the acquisition will affect them.

Why do PE firms purchase publicly traded companies to take them private?

PE firms are investment funds that specialize in buying underperforming businesses with the goal of fixing performance and selling the business later for a profit. While PE firms can also buy private companies or take minority ownership stakes in businesses, their traditional approach has most often been to acquire publicly traded companies and take them private.

The software industry has seen significant take-private activity in the last year — Coupa, Citrix, Anaplan, Zendesk, Duck Creek and more — and the volume of such transactions is likely to increase given many newly public software companies (those listed in the last three to four years) are trading below their IPO valuations.

There are many reasons a PE firm chooses to buy a publicly traded company. The most common return on investment drivers (which by no means are mutually exclusive) are to significantly improve cash flows from operations, fix the company’s business operations and take advantage of untapped growth opportunities.

What happens after an acquisition is announced?

After the buyout agreement is signed and publicly announced, typically a deal will go into a multimonth pre-closing period while regulatory approvals are processed, debt financing is raised and closing conditions are satisfied. During this pre-closing period, the management of the acquired business generally freezes new investments, which often includes reduced hiring and the transition to near-term cost-rationalization.

The new PE owner will use this time to firm up its plans to shift short and long-term focus, including weighing the depth and breadth of cost cuts, changes to business practices and operations and defining new strategic priorities. Unfortunately, these pauses and changes create significant uncertainty and disruption for key stakeholders, especially employees and customers.

What happens after the multimonth pre-closing period?

Once all approvals and closing conditions are satisfied, the acquisition will close. The company will be de-listed and the PE firm officially owns the company. Most PE firms have a playbook for optimizing the operations of newly acquired companies and will begin to rapidly implement those strategies. Common changes include new leadership and corporate strategy reflective of the PE firm’s long-term experience managing through economic cycles and industry-specific market nuances.

Going private: A guide to PE tech acquisitions by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

Anthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups

Anthropic, a buzzy AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has begun offering partners access to its AI text-generating models.

The first commercial venture to announce that it’s integrating Anthropic models is Robin AI, a legal tech startup that’s raised over $13 million from investors including Plural, Episode 1 and the Google Black Founders Fund. Quora’s experimental chatbot app for iOS and Android, Poe, uses Anthropic models, but it’s not currently monetized.

Robin CEO Richard Robinson disclosed few details regarding the Anthropic relationship, but told TechCrunch that Robin worked to fine-tune an Anthropic model on a data set of legal text to draft and negotiate contracts.

“We are very fortunate to be Anthropic’s launch partner for the legal sector — the team’s focus on AI safety aligns with our ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ software-as-a-service product — deliberately designed to manage the risk of even the most advanced models ‘hallucinating,'” Robinson said in a statement.

Robin AI is one of the first commercial ventures to use Anthropic models.

Anthropic has been relatively quiet about its plans to productize its work in the generative text AI space, preferring instead to focus on academic research. But late last year, the company launched a closed beta for an AI system, called Claude, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that appeared to improve upon the original in key ways. Claude was created using a technique Anthropic developed called “constitutional AI,” which aims to provide a “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions — letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles (e.g. avoid giving harmful advice) as a guide.

Preliminary impressions of Claude were good. But like ChatGPT, the system suffered from limitations, like giving dangerous answers to questions (e.g. how to make meth at home) and making inconsistent, factually wrong statements.

It’s unclear whether the model Robin’s using is Claude or some derivative — neither Robin nor Anthropic would say. And even after repeated prodding, Anthropic wouldn’t reveal how many partners it’s currently working (or how they came to work with them) with and how many models it plans to open up to commercial usage.

But no doubt, Anthropic is feeling some sort of pressure from investors to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars that’ve been put toward its AI tech.

Most recently, Google pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake in the startup. Under the terms of the deal, which was first reported by the Financial Times, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems.”

Anthropic wasn’t founded with a profit-driven mission, curiously. Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched the company in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees including OpenAI’s former public policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus.

But AI systems are expensive to develop and maintain. Ballooning costs led Anthropic to pursue outside backing, including a $580 million tranche from a group of investors including disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.

Whether startup partnerships — and Big Tech investments — denote a shift in Anthropic’s priorities isn’t yet clear. But what is clear is that the company believes its technology is differentiated to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Cohere and AI21 Labs, all of which offer paid access to their text-generating AI via APIs.

Anthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Born of drone tech, InsureTech Flock raises $38M Series B to nudge commercial drivers towards safety

It’s only human nature. If you tell a driver their insurance premium will go down if they drive more safely, then – it turns out – they will probably drive more safely. Scale that up to entire commercial fleets and the costs saving can become extremely significant. However, the trick is to do the tracking in the first place.

So it’s fascinating to think that research into how to insure drones led to the creation of UK startup Flock, which uses real-time data to ensure car fleets.

Ed Leon Klinger and Antton Pena were both working on two academic research papers, the former at Cambridge University, the latter at Imperial College London, when they had an idoea. “The first product we launched was in the drone industry. It was a pay-as-you-fly drone insurance product that used drone data. And, actually, that was our stepping stone into commercial motor. We built technology. And we built a capability to use real time data by being born in the drone industry,” Klinger tells me.

Stumbling on the idea of insuring drones only when they were flying, led Klinger and Pena realised that cars could be insured the same way, as well as adding in the idea of gamifying drivers into driving more safely.

The result was Flock in 2018, which went on to raise $17 million in a Series A in 2021.

And, while Uk based Zego has raised $281.7M to date to off something similar (as regards fleet tracking for insurance), Flock now appears to be in Zego’s rear view mirror. Indeed, insurance behemoths such as AIG and Allianz are likely to be as much compeitors in this space today.

Flock has now added to its war chest with a $38 million Series B funding, led by Octopus Ventures (via Octopus partner Malcolm Ferguson) , with CommerzVentures. Also participating were existing investors including Social Capital (led by Chamath Palihapitia), Dig Ventures (the family office of MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason), Anthemis, and Foresight Ventures. Flock’s Series A was led by Palihapitia in 2021.

Flock now lays claim to over 600 commercial fleet customers, including Jaguar Land Rover, Europe’s electric car subscription company Onto, and a third of the UK’s independent Amazon fleets, it says.

Flock says its use of telematics allows customers to understand risk and identify high-risk drivers and routes. This helps them reduce crash frequency by as much as 10%. Thus safer driving is then rewarded with lower insurance premiums.

Klinger, Flock’s CEO told me on a call: “We’ve grown revenues about 30 times since the Series A. We’ve only recently launched our motor fleet product and we’ve landed about 600 commercial customers. Those are commercial fleets. About one third of the UK is Amazon fleets and we now ensure about one third of those fleets. We’ve also partnered with about 100 commercial insurance brokers in the UK and I believe that is one of the core reasons that we were able to raise a Series B.”

The funding round comes at a time when Series B and growth stage funding rounds are somewhere rarer, which makes Flock’s achievement more notable in terms of the fundamentals of the business and team.

The round will be used to to expand into new segments of the commercial motor industry as well as new geographies.

Malcolm Ferguson, Partner, Octopus Ventures, said in “a statement: “Flock has a vision that can make the world safer not just for today’s vehicles but for the connected and autonomous vehicles of tomorrow.”

Born of drone tech, InsureTech Flock raises $38M Series B to nudge commercial drivers towards safety by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Mapping out the future of AR, ThirdEye is taking on Google and Microsoft in real-life scenarios

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah go up against the behemoths, especially when it comes to AR glasses. We already have Microsoft’s Hololens and Google Glass is being marketed as an enterprise device. But ThirdEye thinks its up for the challenge.

ThirdEye is a spin-off of a project for the Department of Defense. Stealthily, it has been making steady in-roads into the AR smart glasses and the accompanying AI software space.

The ThirdEye glasses may look like safety goggles — and they are, to some degree — but they do much more. The company’s second-gen X2 MR lets people access documents or schematics hands-free while working on a project. Live digital information can be projected onto the user’s field of view; it can also relay live images to a tablet or phone, allowing colleagues to provide guidance or oversee an activity. There’s also a low-resolution thermal sensor built into the glasses. And they’re lightweight.

The company quickly found a customer in the military, which is making use of the tech for classified things. But, ThirdEye CEO Nick Cherukuri told TechCrunch that the glasses could be used for more mundane applications, as well, like helping technicians make repairs in remote settings.  

A combat medic gets instructions via the ThirdEye glasses. Image Credits: ThirdEye

And that’s just the beginning. ThirdEye’s technology became especially important during the pandemic; the glasses allowed for clearer treatment options and diagnoses without too many people having to come into contact with each other. ThirdEye saw its opportunity and developed HIPAA-compliant telehealth AR software to go with it. 

In August 2022, the U.K.’s National Health Service launched a trial where community nurses wore the goggles when making home visits. By transcribing a patient’s visit record directly to their notes (with their consent), the company says its glasses could reduce the amount of time nurses spent focusing on paperwork rather than with their patients.

The glasses could also help to reduce the need for doctors’ appointments or even hospital admissions by allowing health care professionals to share live footage with colleagues, giving patients an opportunity to get second opinions or more detailed diagnoses. The thermal imaging sensor can be used to assess wound healing, too.

Mapping out the future of AR, ThirdEye is taking on Google and Microsoft in real-life scenarios by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch