Reliable Robotics is bringing remote piloting to small cargo planes

Nearly one year ago, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk stealthily made aviation history when it landed at a small airport in Northern California, marking the completion of the first successful remote-piloted flight of a passenger airplane in the United States.

The company behind this milestone in commercial aviation history is Reliable Robotics, a startup founded in 2017 by former SpaceX and Tesla engineers who previously brought autopilot to the electric vehicle auto driving masses and made the Dragon rocket soar.

The company has raised $33.5 million in venture funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures and Teamworthy Ventures, and is now making its pitch to potential customers in the logistics and shipping industry.

Robert Rose, the co-founder of Reliable Robotics, comes from a family of flyers. Both of this grandfathers flew in World War Two, and he has done stints as a pilot himself. In fact, the company’s origins stem from Rose’s attempts to get back in the cockpit and behind the yoke.

“Flying’s hard,” Rose said. “It requires a lot of cognitive ability.”

But a lot of that cognitive ability are tasks that Rose, with his experience designing Tesla’s autopilot system and the flight systems for both the Falcon and Dragon spacecraft, knew could be automated. Helping Rose to automate these tasks is Juerg Frefel, the company co-founder, vice president of engineering and the former leader of the team behind the computing platform for the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecrafts.

Reliable’s systems aren’t fully automated, there’s still a pilot behind the scenes, but that pilot is monitoring systems and controlling the plane remotely, rather than sitting in the cockpit.

Reliable started its experiments with retrofitting existing planes with autonomous systems in much the same way that Tesla began its journey into manufacturing, by using existing frames for aircraft rather than designing its own.

Control systems inside a Cessna retrofitted by Reliable Robotics. Image Credit: Reliable Robotics

“We spent the first portion of our flight test program focused on the C172. We thoroughly tested every aspect of our system in simulation and conducted rigorous safety checks before operating the aircraft without a pilot on board and are now proud to share what we’ve been working on,” said Rose, in a statement.

The company started with the Cessna 172 Skyhawk but graduated to the larger Cessna 208 Caravan. The Caravan, which is designed as a passenger plane, is also used by logistics companies like FedEx for shipping. In June, the company demonstrated a fully remote landing for the Caravan over the San Jose approach path — a particularly heavily trafficked route.

“There’s never been a privately funded program that’s ever done anything like that before,” said Rose.

Enabling remote piloting and automating certain aspects of flight has tremendous potential to drive down costs and improve efficiencies in an industry that’s struggling with multiple stresses.

“Automated aircraft are going to fundamentally shift the entire airline business, and Reliable Robotics is well positioned to be a key player in this new market,” said David Neeleman, a founder of several commercial airlines, including JetBlue (and an investor in Reliable Robotics).

The company’s autonomous platform can be applied to any fixed-wing aircraft, but Reliable’s co-founder and chief executive doesn’t expect to be selling components. Instead, Reliable Robotics will retrofit and operate aircraft as a service for its customers, Rose said.

“Initially, by necessity, we’re going to have to operate this as a service,” said Rose. “The certification of systems for air. If you want to operate in the airspace you have to certify your maintenance plan, your procedures… the entire business needs to be certified by the FAA… If for the first time someone operates an aircraft with no pilot on board that entire business is going to have to be certified. At least for the first several years we see this being operated as a service.”

Reliable conducted its first retrofit and flight on a Cessna Caravan owned by FedEx, which operates around 235 planes in its fleet, according to Rose. Several other shipping companies also use the Caravan for air logistics.

“There’s a communication component, a ground network, a control center for operating the thing. It’s entirely a vertically integrated enterprise,” Rose said. “Integrated hardware that allows us to control flight systems and get telemetry and data [and that’s] integrated into a custom computer that can process this and fly the aircraft and integrated into a ground network so a pilot in our control center can oversee the operations of the plane.” 

Rose said the pitch to customers is increasing pilot utilization. “How could the economics change if [pilots] could teleport from one aircraft to the next after they’re done flying?” Rose said. “Our system enables you to more efficiently utilize the pilot and more efficiently utilize the aircraft.” 

Closeup of a Reliable Robotics’ control system. Image Credit: Reliable Robotics

 

Decrypted: Tesla’s ransomware near miss, Palantir’s S-1 risk factors

Another busy week in cybersecurity.

In case you missed it: A widely used messaging app used by over a million protesters has several major security flaws; a little-known loophole has let the DMV sell driver’s licenses and Social Security records to private investigators; and the U.S. government is suing to reclaim over $2.5 million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers from two major exchanges.

But this week we are focusing on how a Tesla employee foiled a ransomware attack, and, ahead of Palantir’s debut on the stock market, how much of a risk factor is the company’s public image?

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THE BIG PICTURE

Russian charged with attempted Tesla ransomware attack

$1 million. That’s how much a Tesla employee would have netted if they accepted a bribe from a Russian operative to install malware on Tesla’s Gigafactory network in Nevada. Instead, the employee told the FBI and the Russian was arrested.

The Justice Department charged the 27-year-old Russian, Egor Igorevich, weeks later as he tried to flee the United States. According to the indictment, his plan was to ask the employee to deliberately deploy ransomware on the Gigafactory’s network, grinding the network to a halt for a ransom of several million dollars. The would-be insider threat is likely the first of its kind, one ransomware expert told Wired, as financially driven hackers continue to up their game.

Tesla founder Elon Musk tweeted earlier this week confirming that Tesla was the target of the failed attack.

The attack, if carried out, could have been devastating. The indictment said that the malware was designed to extract data from the network before locking its files. This data-stealing ransomware is an increasing trend. These hacker groups not only encrypt a victim’s files but also exfiltrate the data to their servers. The hackers typically threaten to publish the victim’s files if the ransom isn’t paid.

As ransomware gets craftier, companies must start thinking creatively

Dorian raises $3.1M for its no-code, interactive storytelling platform

With Dorian, co-founder and CEO Julia Palatovska said she’s hoping to empower fiction writers and other storytellers to create their own games.

The startup is announcing that it has raised $3.15 million in seed funding led by March Capital Partners, with participation from VGames, Konvoy Ventures, London Venture Partners, Michael Chow (co-creator of the Twitch series “Artificial”), Andover Ventures and talent management company Night Media.

Palatskova previously worked in gaming as the head of business development at G5 Entertainment, and she said she’d also become entranced by narrative games and interactive fiction. And while there are existing interactive fiction platforms, she saw “an opportunity that I felt was missing,” particularly in the fact that those platforms are “entirely single player, with no opportunity to play and collaborate with other people.”

So she gave me a quick tour of the Dorian platform, showing me how, without coding, a writer can essentially design characters and backgrounds by choosing from a variety of visual assets (and they’ll eventually be able to upload assets of their own), while using a flowchart-style interface to allow the writer to connect different scenes in the story and create player choices. And as Palatskova noted, you can also collaborate on a story in real-time with other writers.

“In terms of writer productivity, I would say there is almost no difference between creating interactive fiction on our engine and just writing fiction,” she said.

Image Credits: Dorian

From what I could see, the resulting games look similar to what you’d find on platforms like Pocket Gems’ Episode, where there aren’t a lot of technical bells and whistles, so the story, dialogue and character choices move to the forefront.

When I brought up the open-source game creation software Twine, Palatskova said Twine is “just a tool.”

“We want to be more like Roblox, both the tools and the distribution,” she said.

In other words, writers use Dorian to create interactive stories, but they also publish those stories using the Dorian app. (The writer still owns the resulting intellectual property.) Palatskova noted that Dorian also provides detailed analytics on how readers are responding, which is helpful not just for creating stories, but also for monetizing via premium story choices.

In fact, Dorian says that in early tests involving around 50,000 players, writers were able to improve monetization by 70% after only one or two iterations. And Palatskova noted that with Dorian’s games — unlike an interactive film such as “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” —”It’s fast and easy to test multiple branches.”

Dorian is currently invite-only, but the plan is to launch more broadly later this year. Palatskova is recruiting writers with and without gaming experience, but she also expects plenty of successful contributions to come from complete novices. She wants Dorian to be “a completely open platform, like Roblox or Twitch for writers.”

“Dorian’s success in creating an interactive platform that values storytelling while prioritizing monetization for its writers is a game-changer,” said March Capital’s Gregory Milken in a statement. “Julia and her team are creating a community that is primed to capture the attention of today’s influential but underrepresented audiences of diverse content creators.”

Roblox raises $150M Series G, led by Andreessen Horowitz, now valued at $4B

In a post-NDA world, does transparency help founders identify conflicts of interest?

Once upon a time, fintech founders could pitch 10 investors before closing a round in a relatively hushed way. Entrepreneurs could even ask VCs to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to keep their information confidential. Today, everyone is a fintech investor and no one signs NDAs.

This changed dynamic puts founders in a difficult position.

Nabeel Alamgir, CEO and founder of Lunchbox, struggled to raise his first institutional check for his restaurant tech startup. After searching for more than a year, Alamgir found an investor who understood his vision. Better yet, the investor had connections to restaurants in New York City that Alamgir wanted to land. So, Alamgir shared everything about Lunchbox, from the financials, to the product integration road map and go-to-market strategy.

After a month of due diligence, the investor ghosted Alamgir. Four months later, that same investor’s portfolio company launched a product mimicking Lunchbox.

“I did not do due diligence on them as they were doing on me,” he said. “And I forgot all my rules. Most rules go out the window as cash is running out.”

Alamgir’s experience is a classic case of back-channeling, a sometimes unfortunate yet uncommon occurrence for founders in Silicon Valley. It’s not a secret that investors share intel with each other as a competitive advantage; but as venture capital grows as an asset class and more investors break into the industry, the way information disseminates will become even more elusive and broad.

Alamgir advises early-stage founders who are looking to raise their first check to “contain excitement.”

Brother Unveils New Professional Label Maker

Do you want to step up labeling in your small business? If yes, then the recent offering from Brother can interest you.

Brother International Corporation recently added the newest member to its CUBE Bluetooth® wireless technology label maker series. Named as P-touch CUBE XP (PT-P910BT), this label maker is designed considering the needs of businesses.

Brother P-touch CUBE XP Label Maker

It comes with pre-designed templates that users can access through Brother’s software applications to make label printing easier.

An Overview

The P-touch CUBE XP is a connected label maker. And it offers high-print resolution up to 1½” (36mm).

The label maker has the following features:

Print High-Quality Label Tapes

WIth P-touch CUBE XP, you can get high-resolution printing for durable, crisp, easy-to-read labels at up to 360 dpi for sharp graphics, texts, and barcodes. What’s more, you can use Brother P-touch TZe laminated label tapes up to ~1½ in. (36mm) wide for durable labeling.

Brother P-touch TZe laminated label tapes come in a wide range of types and colors. So you can easily get labeling to meet your needs.

Simple App Integration

You can easily print labels using either iPrint&Label app or P-touch Design&Print2 app from your smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. With P-touch Editor, you can create customized templated with various designs.

What’s more, with Brother Software Development Kits (SDK), you can access to label printing within your own app or software.

Easy to Get Started

P-touch CUBE XP is shipped with a ~1.4” (36mm) wide x ~13.1’ (4m) long white laminated starter label tape. So you can start printing labels right out of the box.

It features a 2-year limited warranty along with Brother At Your Side support for the life of the label maker. And P-touch CUBE XP costs $299.99, according to Brother’s US website.

How Small Business can Leverage P-touch CUBE XP

P-touch CUBE XP can help help your small business in many ways.

Following are some organization and identification Ideas:

• Create and print custom barcodes that can help you efficiently manage and track your business’s assets
• Handle storage and general labeling tasks easily with a variety of tape sizes and colors
• Create clear, influential signage labels for office and warehouse areas
• Prints price tags for your products
• Create different labels for cables and files for easy identification

In short, you can employ P-touch CUBE XP to handle any organization & identification task.

Jacquie Hunter, Director of Labeling Product Marketing at Brother, said in a prepared statement, “Finding ways for your retail shop, restaurant, or small business to stand out is more important than ever in this evolving business landscape,”

“We developed the P-touch CUBE XP specifically with small and medium business users in mind, and are excited to introduce business and developer audiences to a tool that enhances their brand by bringing another level of professionalism and consistency to their customer,” Jacquie concluded.

About Brother International Corporation

Brother International Corporation is a leading company offering world-class printers, sewing machines, and many other acclaimed business solutions. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brother Industries Ltd. Click here to know more about the company.

Image: brother-usa.com

This article, "Brother Unveils New Professional Label Maker" was first published on Small Business Trends

There’s a growing movement where startup founders look to exit to community

Traditional roadmaps for startups center around this idea of the exit. Oftentimes, the ideal exit in the minds of startups and venture capitalists goes one of two ways: IPO or acquisition by another company.

But there are other ways for startups to exit that could potentially bring more value to a larger variety of stakeholders. Exit to Community (E2C), a collaborative working project led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Enterprise Design Lab and Zebras Unite, explores ways to help startups transition investor-owned to community ownership, which could include users, customers, workers or some combination of all stakeholders. Today, the group released a digital and physical zine designed to serve as an introduction to Exit to Community.

“The purpose of the zine is to provide an initial roadmap to all of the aspects of the conversation that need to happen so we can save founders pain in recognizing and validating they’re in the wrong fit and we need to co-create what does fit,” Zebras Unite co-founder and zine co-author Mara Zepeda told TechCrunch. “It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not like there’s this other perfect thing that everyone needs to do. I describe it as running a Cambrian explosion of experiments in order to figure out what this future is. It’s not just one thing. That’s how what we’re doing is really different. Sometimes there are these niche products or movements that pop up and say, “this is the answer. There isn’t one answer for this moment.” 

These alternative exit models also have the potential to to open the door for founders in other markets, E2C co-organizer Nathan Schneider told TechCrunch. He pointed to tiphub, a company focused on Africa and the African Diaspora, that had been looking for alternative ways to support founders given there isn’t a huge mergers and acquisitions market in Africa.

“Because of the infrastructure that exists in the financial market, we don’t have the same set of realities that a very active VC industry does in Europe or the U.S.,” tiphub Partner Chika Umeadi told TechCrunch. “There’s just not as much private equity activity or M&A activity. We believe we have a strong hypothesis for how we can manufacture companies quickly, but we still need to build the other side of the market. There are companies that are valuable, but we now have to think about alternative methods of exiting.”

Already, there are a handful of examples out there of what exiting to community can look like. Buffer, a social media management platform, bought out its investors in 2018 because it became “clear that Buffer had become less of a fit for VC funding,” Buffer CEO and co-founder Joel Gascoigne wrote in a blog post at the time.

Then, in 2019, SEO and Conductor bought back its content marketing company from WeWork. Now, the company is majority employee-owned.

“It was a dream that we always had that we would own the company and we gave a huge amount of ownership to all the people and now the company is almost entirely employee-owned,” Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik told me earlier this year. “And now we have everything we want to go and make our mission a reality.”

Outside of the tech industry, E2C points to Organically Grown Company, an organic produce distributor based in Oregon that transitioned from an employee- and grocer-owned operation into a community-owned one.

“These types of glimpses suggest that it’s possible,”Schneider said.

For investors, while IPOs and acquisitions can elicit high returns, not all of the startups in their portfolios will be candidates.

“Their current exit options limit what kind of returns and outcomes they can see for their portfolio companies,” Schneider said. “If a startup ends up not being a candidate for an IPO or acquisition, E2C can still help them get their money back, or get a decent return. There’s also a class of investors trying to thread the needle of financial return with social return, and are looking for models that can help facilitate that.”

Beyond the zine, the next step is to crate a peer learning cohort of founders who are exploring some of these options. Down the road, the hope is to create standard documents for startups that make it easy for founders to pursue these alternative paths.

RealPage acquires real estate IoT startup Stratis

RealPage, a publicly traded full-service property management technology firm with over 12,200 clients worldwide, today announced that it has acquired Stratis IoT,  a startup that provides IoT services to the real estate industry, with a focus on access and energy management tools.

“RealPage aims to become a leading provider in the burgeoning rental property automation market, and thereby create significant opportunity for operators to increase rents, improve sustainability, add operational efficiencies, reduce operating costs and enhance the customer experience for the company’s approximately 19 million units throughout the United States,” said RealPage CEO Steve Winn. “The smart building technology also provides a launching pad for expanded international operations, thanks to Stratis’ existing international presence.”

Stratis is currently installed in about 380,000 homes in the U.S., Japan, UK and several countries in Europe and Latin America. Both Stratis and RealPage target a wide range of the real estate industry, ranging from multifamily units to student housing, vacation homes and commercial real estate.

Image Credits: Stratis

Traditionally, the real estate market wasn’t always the first to adopt modern technologies. That’s quickly changing now, though, in part because of the promise of IoT, which isn’t just a boon to renters looking for modern solutions in their apartments but also represents the possibility of significant cost savings for the industry. RealPage argues that smart technology can generate a revenue lift of $55 per unit, for example, and that’s the kind of saving (and higher revenues) that will push even legacy B2B platforms to modernize.

One area where Stratis stands out is its ability to integrate with a wide variety of third-party solutions.

“Holistic building-wide access and utility management and control are integral to building optimization and the resident experience, which have become increasingly intertwined,” said Stratis IoT CEO Felicite Moorman. “RealPage and Stratis IoT combine two industry-leading, best-in-class platforms to create a powerhouse of control and single-app resident experience for multifamily, student housing, and beyond.”

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. It’s worth noting that RealPage isn’t a stranger to making acquisitions to bring its technology up to speed. A year ago, the company acquired Hipercept, for example, a firm that provided data services and data analytics to the institutional real estate market. Then, in December, it also acquired Buildium, a SaaS property management solution with over 2 million units under management. In 2019, the company said planned to spend just over $100 million on acquisitions.

The last decade in real estate, and a peek into the next one

 

Capchase raises $4.6M to deliver fast cash to SaaS companies

As a business model, SaaS has expanded to epic size. A number of major SaaS companies filed to go public last week, and there are now thousands of SaaS startups growing all around the world. That scale makes it easier for banks and financial institutions to offer tailored solutions to this market around everything from equity to debt.

We’ve talked a bit about SaaS securitization the last few weeks, a crop of new financial products that use the metrics of a SaaS company to underwrite its debt (e.g. better churn = more debt available and at better terms) as opposed to traditional benchmarks like total revenue and company age. We also did a deep dive with Kentik CEO Avi Freedman on how he approached his recent venture debt fundraise and the terms he got across his five term sheets.

SaaS securitization will disrupt VC’s biggest returns this coming decade

Every SaaS company these days is considering its financial options and the tradeoffs between equity and debt. But sometimes, they just need cash, and cash as quickly as possible. Startups sign contracts with customers that might be paid over a year or more, but they want to access that cash now, and at the best terms possible. The product that solves this problem is known as an accounts receivable line, and you can go to many banks to get them, with all the drudgery of that process.

Or, four founders hope, you’ll head to Capchase.

Capchase is an online platform for rapidly getting cash from your accounts receivable. Startups upload key details of their customer contracts and financial history to Capchase, and the company uses its underwriting algorithms to quickly assess the quality of those contracts and extend a debt line. The startup calls itself part of the “non-dilutive revolution,” and it’s headquartered in Boston.

“We’re targeting B2B SaaS or ‘X-as-a-service’ companies with recurring revenue, and we’re targeting companies around the seed to Series B/C stage having more than $1 million of ARR and at least eight months of revenue generating history,” Miguel Fernández, CEO and co-founder, said.

He linked up with three other founders earlier this year to launch Capchase: Luis Basagoiti, Ignacio Moreno, and Przemek Gotfryd. Fernández and Gotfryd met while at Harvard Business School where Fernández was thinking about “working capital and cash conversion cycle optimization” after his previous experiences at SaaS companies. Gotfryd had previously worked at growth investor TCV in London, where he acutely saw the challenges of raising non-dilutive cash.

Capchase’s team. Photo via Capchase.

Despite its early operational history, the company has already raised its own cash quickly. It closed on $4.6 million in VC seed funding led by Caffeinated Capital, Bling Capital, and SciFi VC, along with a number of angels.

To get cash early today, startups often resort to negotiating terms with their customers, offering discounts — sometimes massive discounts — for them to pay an entire contract’s value upfront. Fernández saw an opportunity to arbitrage the difference between interest rates and those discounts with Capchase.

From a user’s perspective, after syncing their startup’s financial data to Capchase, they will see a projection of what their runway extension will look like after selecting a debt line, and then Capchase will extend its terms after going through an underwriting process (“which takes a couple hours now, and is very rapidly decreasing to take minutes” Fernández said). In terms of traction, he said that “we’re working with around 3-4 customers right now.”

Startups are charged a discount on their total contract value, which is where Capchase makes its money. For instance, if $100,000 is going to be paid by a customer over the next twelve months, Capchase may offer $95,000 to the startup upfront, and keep the remaining $5,000 as those payments roll in. That discount fluctuates based on the startup in question and the payment risk of the underlying customer contracts.

Fernández said that venture debt is often cheaper on a pure interest rate basis, but that once additional elements of those products are added in such as warrants, the simplicity of Capchase’s product will prove competitive for founders.

Simpler, easier, and fully digital financial products are always welcome, and Capchase hopes that it will nestle itself in a suite of new financial products for SaaS founders looking to avoid dilution and extend their cash longer.

5 days left to save on early bird passes to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 kicks off in 37 days, but the countdown clock on early-bird pricing runs out in just five. Engage with the mobility community’s brightest minds, makers, visionaries and investors from around the globe on October 6-7. Buy your early-bird pass before the bird expires September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT), and you’ll save $100 over full price.

Why attend TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? It offers beaucoup benefits, but let’s start here. Whether you’re launching a mobility startup or you’re an established player, you’ll gain valuable insight to help position and grow your business.

“I learned a lot from the breakout sessions. An official from the Los Angeles DOT spoke about the city’s plan to build pathways for micro mobility vehicles. Access to experts sharing that kind of information is essential for anyone launching a micro mobility startup. — Parug Demircioglu, CEO at Invemo and partner at Nito Bikes.”

“As a mobility company, we need to stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the space and know what others are doing. TC Sessions: Mobility helps us tap into the latest trends, like which cities are open to new services, which ones are having a harder time and what’s going on with MDS — probably the hottest topic at this point.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

Now that you’ve heard directly from your peers, let’s talk about what’s on the mobility menu. A kickass agenda for starters. Let’s take a peek.

• Setting the Record Straight — Argo AI has gone from unknown startup to a company providing autonomous vehicle technology to Ford and VW — not to mention billions in investment from the two global automakers. Co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky will talk about the company’s journey, what’s next and what it really takes to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology.
• The Future of Trucking — TuSimple co-founder and CTO Xiaodi Hou and Boris Sofman, former Anki Robotics founder and CEO who now leads Waymo’s trucking unit, will discuss the business and the technical challenges of autonomous trucking.

You’ll hear interviews with top founders, technologists and investors. You’ll also hear from big players, like Lyft and Uber, and household giants like Porsche and Audi who can see the mobile writing on the wall. But we also have plenty of room for newbies and upstarts. In fact, we’ve added a pitch-off to this year’s lineup. We’ll announce more details on how early-stage mobility startup founders can apply to compete, so stay tuned.

Don’t miss out on the mobility event of the year — or miss out on serious savings. You have just five days left to beat the clock and save $100. Buy your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 before September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Don’t let the early bird flip you the worm.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Semalytix picks up €4.3M to build the world’s largest patient experience data set

Semalytix, a Bielefeld, Germany-based startup that offers pharmaceutical companies an AI-powered data tool to better understand real-world patient experiences, has raised €4.3 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is venture capital firm btov Partners, with participation from existing investor Fly Ventures and several unnamed angels. Semalytix will use the injection of cash to expand its business development with pharma companies and the wider healthcare market.

Founded in 2015 as a spin-out of research group Semantic Computing, Semalytix pitches itself as a data and AI analytics startup that wants to bring more real-world evidence to the development of new drugs and treatments. Its flagship product, dubbed “Pharos,” is a patient research tool that pulls in and cleans up various unstructured public data — such as blogs, forums, social media etc. — and then applies algorithms to deliver real-time patient insights into unmet needs, treatment experience and how severely a disease impacts the lives of those who suffer from it.

“Our vision is that we help make patient insights a real Northstar KPI in drug development,” Semalytix co-founder and CEO Janik Jaskolski tells me. “Due to new regulatory initiatives (and public pressure), pharma needs to demonstrate patient-centricity in drug development, [and] include the patient perspective into decision making and produce evidence that their treatments provide value in the real world. For patients, that value usually doesn’t consist of, for example, having their blood sugar lowered by an additional 3%. Instead, they care about improving their quality of life, being able to play longer with their kids or simply having an easier time going about their everyday tasks.”

However, Jaskolski argues that such patient insights and related evidence is difficult to obtain. “If asked, a patient will often tell a different story about how a disease impacts their life and what they need to improve it, compared to what a doctor would say. Which is why we don’t analyse physician or hospital data. Instead, we are looking at already existing public data that patients share online, in their own authentic voice, all around the world.”

Semalytix’s AI claims to be able to identify, read through and summarise millions of online patient journeys in a highly scalable way. The AI is also able to turn this data into online target populations for different diseases, and covers 11 different languages. “It does so by applying WHO, FDA and EMA inspired algorithmic research instruments to make the analysis transparent and scientifically meaningful for pharma,” adds Jaskolski.

Image Credits: Semalytix

Meanwhile, although electronic health records, patient registries and similar data sources are already receiving much attention from startups, Jaskolski argues that the largest source of unstructured patient data that exists today is being overlooked and yet holds a lot of potential to “improve patient care, identify new therapeutic opportunities, inform clinical trial development and even help accelerate development of novel therapies for rare conditions.”

Semalytix’s business model is a tried and tested one. The startup sells enterprise licenses for access to its platform. A company can buy a license for 12 months or more for specific diseases. “Each license enables disease-specific sub-group analyses, assess populations and create cohorts based on the severity of different disease burdens, treatment experiences, and quality of life,” adds the Semalytix CEO.

“Over time, we want to include more and more diseases into the platform and provide a unique patient data stream to pharma but also to the payer and regulator side of healthcare.”

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative backs Indian education startup Eruditus in $113 million fundraise

Mumbai-based Eruditus, which works with top universities globally to offer more than 100 executive-level courses to students in over 80 nations, said on Monday it has raised $113 million in a new financing round as it looks to further scale its business to reach more learners.

The Series D financing round for the 10-year-old startup was co-led by Leeds Illuminate and Prosus Ventures. Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and existing investors Sequoia India and Ved Capital also participated in the round, which brings Eruditus’ to-date raise to more than $160 million. Eruditus is now valued at over $700 million, a person familiar with the matter said. Avendus Capital was the financial advisor to Eruditus on this transaction.

Eruditus maintains a tie-up with over 30 top-tier universities, including MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, UC Berkeley, IIT, IIM and NUS. The universities and Eruditus work to develop courses that are aimed at offering higher education to students. These courses cost anything between $5,000 to $40,000.

There’s no shortage of startups that offer similar courses to students for free or at the price of a cup of coffee. At a conference last year, Ashwin Damera, Eruditus co-founder and chief executive of Eruditus, said his startup provides a range of additional offerings, including tailored learning, and tracks the outcome of the course in a student’s life.

The startup, which has offices in six countries and employs more than 650 people, said it has enrolled 50,000 students in the past 12 months.

Eruditus is the second startup that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has backed in India. Its first investment in the country, Byju’s, also operates in the edtech market. (In fact, it’s grown to become the most valued edtech startup in the world.)

“Eruditus serves as a critical innovation partner for top universities as they expand online course offerings in response to workforce needs and market demand,” said Vivian Wu, managing partner, Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in a statement. “We’re excited to support the growing partnerships between U.S. universities and those in India, China and Latin America that are making truly high-quality education accessible to a broad and diverse range of students.”

Eruditus said it will use the fresh capital to partner with more universities and expand in emerging markets. It said it also wants to invest in developing career-ready courses to help the workforce acquire the skills they need to survive in the post-pandemic world.

“Eruditus’ goals are a great match for ours — democratizing access of quality resources for a much broader audience. The value of the teachings of the great institutions has been rationed to those who can physically and monetarily access their facilities. Eruditus unlocks those assets and enables those institutions to help a whole new cohort of learners around the globe,” said Ashutosh Sharma, head of Investments for India at Prosus Ventures, which has invested in six edtech startups, including Byju’s.

How To Make Zoom Meetings Actually Enjoyable

I think it’s fair to say that we are all sick and tired of zoom meetings.

Meetings, in general, are mostly a waste of time but at least you get to interact with other humans in person.

Covid-19 has turned meetings on their head and they have become a drudgery of time.

Tips for Enjoyable Zoom Calls

Here is how to make zoom meetings actually enjoyable.

Email It Over Zoom It

We’ve all been in those zoom meetings where you sit there thinking “this all could have been sent in an email.” This is the fastest way to lose attention and turn it into drudgery. The key to success is to email ahead of an agenda and keep the meeting succinct.

As Andrew Roderick states 

“Make the focus around teamwork, and give each person a section to present a project/issue/anything they are working on for 5 minutes, and allow a 5-minute discussion afterward where everyone can help, offer support, feedback on what’s being done. Hosting your team meetings in this way allows you to ensure each team member is actively engaged and involved, while also making sure priorities from each team member are discussed.”

As an additional note make sure to set a hard out. A time that the meeting ends and you don’t go over. Respecting peoples time is a great way to keep people engaged.

Practice Your On-Camera Speaking Skills

Nothing is worse than having a boring presenter be it in person or on camera. Just like public speaking, presenting on camera is a learned skill anyone can achieve if they have the right guidance. Here are 10 tips to speaking on camera

Dress to Impress

Even though no one can see what you are wearing below the computer desk, you want to suit up.

Know what makes you look good too. As Dagmar Spichale says “Patterned tops make me look more awake and refreshed, and patterned button-downs are especially flattering because they create an elongated neckline that doubles to showcase subtle jewelry to its best advantage. My secret hack is wearing perfume and/or my favorite heels — no-one notices but I KNOW!”

Use Interactive Whiteboard Tools

As Mollie Suggests “To make things interesting in our collaboration sessions, we use Mural in Zoom for whiteboarding. It’s an interactive software where everyone could help in mapping out and bouncing off ideas about a project. We use photos, sticky notes, and doodling tools in brainstorming and getting things together.

Kevin builds on this idea “Sometimes, you just have to draw something out on a whiteboard to help everyone else understand what you mean. Using a tablet for your Zoom calls makes it much easier to sketch out diagrams and flowcharts to engage the other meeting participants.“

Start With A Common Interest

With the plethora of various TV shows, Netflix movies, and online entertainment. Its good to engage people in a common interest. As Jason VanDevere states “I discuss with my team a TV show we all agree on that’s worth watching. After a new episode, we spend the first five minutes of the meeting openly discussing the show. Did the episode ending surprise you? Were you shocked a particular character got killed off? How would you rate the episode?

This can be any television show, sports game, Netflix series, or YouTube show. With all the content out there, surely there’s has to be something out there your team can agree on. Participation is also optional. Employees that prefer not to participate may simply log in five minutes later.

I find that everyone appears to be more engaged in the meeting after coming off a discussion of a common interest.”

Use the 8% Rule

As Michael, the CEO of Teambuilding explains “Any Zoom meeting should have at least 8% of its time dedicated to non-meetings activities. This time could include icebreakers, trivia questions, dance breaks or any other light activity. This “off-time” can quickly reenergize attendees to participate in the more dense content of the meeting

Engage with Outside Interest

Willie Greer states “I always make time for stories. Zoom fatigue is real and can take a toll on a person’s mental and emotional aspect, so relaxing time is a must during meetings. Personally, I ask my employees how they are, is there anything they want to share, like their new hobbies during the lockdown, or online businesses they want to promote. It refreshes their minds after work and before leaving the meeting.”

A lot of people who are working from home are also starting side projects, and side businesses.  You never know what interesting hobbies people have or side business they create. Some of the most used Google Tools have started as side projects of employees. What is your side project? For example, I’ve created an entire side project focused on Unicorns.

Rotate The Hot Seat

Getting everyone to talk can be a bit of a challenge, but an easy way to do that is to call on participants throughout the meeting. Call on the first person and let that person choose the next person to speak. It keeps everyone alert and focused because they could be next!

Use Visual Cue Cards

We’ve all experienced an interruption during a meeting. Your speaker is presenting when someone pipes in with their 2 cents. This can be fine when you are in person because we can naturally slip in with perfect timing but due to the delay of zoom, it throws everyone off.

That’s where visual cue cards can come in and keep the rhythm of the zoom meeting flowing. I use visual cue cards made by DigiCards. 

They seamlessly integrate with my digital team and keep meetings running smoothly. I especially love the timing cards to let me know there are a few minutes left in the presentation.

These are just some of the best tips when it comes to making your zoom call more enjoyable. Let me know what I missed or if there are any other suggestions to make zoom meetings actually enjoyable.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "How To Make Zoom Meetings Actually Enjoyable" was first published on Small Business Trends

Frugal startups should pay attention to how JFrog’s IPO prices

In last week’s IPO wave, one company fell a bit by the wayside amongst filings from better-known companies like Asana and Palantir. JFrog, a company that TechCrunch reported helps allows developers and companies deliver application updates “in the background without disturbing the user experience” when it raised $165 million in 2018, is positioned for an exciting debut.

Why? The unicorn — the same 2018 round valued JFrog at around $1.2 billion according to PitchBook data — has a unique blend of growth, margins and profitability that should make its pricing cycle incredibly interesting.

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JFrog will give us an insight into how Wall Street will value a fast-growing, managed software company that also doesn’t lose money. It’s not something we see often, and other market hopefuls like the aforementioned Asana and Palantir are far from similar levels of profitability.

Let’s take a quick look at what JFrog would be worth if it were a more normal — read: less profitable — SaaS company, and then ask what it might be worth as a cash-generating, recently profitable concern. The numbers are pretty surprising.

JFrog

If you want more on the basics of JFrog’s business and why developers and companies care about the company, head here. We’re only doing numbers today.

Back to the basics as a refresher from early last week, here’s what you need to know about JFrog’s business:

• Revenue grew from $63.5 million in 2018 to $104.7 million in 2019 and from $46.1 million to $69.2 million from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020. Those gains of 65% and 60.1%, respectively, put JFrog on a comfortable growth pace for a company doing nine-figure revenues.
• JFrog has lost less money as it has grown. From $1.00 per share in 2018 to $0.20 per share in 2019, and from $0.08 per-share in the first half of 2019 to just $0.02 per share in the first half of 2020.
• JFrog’s gross margins have been 81% or better in every mutliquarter period we have record of.
• JFrog’s operating cash flow has improved over time as well, rising from +$8.6 million in 2018 to $10 million in 2019, and from +$0.415 million in the first half of 2019 to +$5.9 million in the first half of 2020.
• And, after some quarters of extremely limited losses, JFrog posted its first known (since Q1 2018) GAAP profitable quarter in Q2 2020, generating $1.7 million in net income off of revenues of $36.4 million in the same period.

Now ask yourself, what is that company worth?

The New Paper offers a ‘fact-first’ news digest in text message form

Tired of signing up for email newsletters? Then maybe it’s time to try out The New Paper‘s news digest, which arrives in the form of a daily text message rounding up the biggest headlines.

The Indianapolis-based startup is announcing that it’s leaving private beta testing. It raised $300,000 in pre-seed funding last year, including $80,000 from a pitch competition held by Elevate Ventures (the VC fund based by Indiana State).

Founders Michael Aft and John Necef told me that they started The New Paper with the intention of creating  email newsletters at first (something Necef has experience with, having served as head of growth at The Hustle), but they decided that text messages offered the best way to, in Aft’s words, “do daily news right.”

“Think about the volume of email you get everyday,” he continued. “It’s this stressful, noisy, environment where you get spam and e-commerce messages. Text is easy, it’s clean, it’s extremely convenient, it’s intimate.”

In fact, Necef said that “a common anecdote” they’ve heard from early subscribers is the fact that they sign up for email newsletters “with the best of intentions” but then those newsletters end up sitting unread in their inboxes. (Think of it as the digital equivalent of those piles of unread New Yorkers.)

Of course, the fact that text messaging is such a personal channel also means that readers aren’t likely to stick around unless they’re actually getting what they want. But Aft said he embraces the challenge of meeting that higher bar: “You’re never going to forget that you subscribed.”

Image Credits: The New Paper

In fact, The New Paper needs to provide value not just because it’s delivered via text message, but because it’s a paid product — after a weeklong free trial, it costs $5 per month. And more than 7,000 paying subscribers have already signed up.

Currently, the digest consists of six headlines, all linking to reporting from other publications, plus a link to The Daily Dash, which provides a high-level snapshot of stock market performance, the current state of the coronavirus pandemic and more.

Both Aft and Necef emphasized that The New Paper’s approach is “fact first.” Of course, there are plenty of news organizations that tout their objectivity and devotion to accuracy, but the pair seemed particularly determined to present their readers with a “common set of facts” about a story that everyone can agree on, regardless of their political leanings.

To illustrate the company’s approach, Aft pointed to the recent report on Russian election interference by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rather than trying to make any “second order conclusions” about the report — conclusions that could be influenced by a writer or editor’s political beliefs — he said The New Paper focused on what was factually indisputable, namely that the committee had released its report.

As soon as he said that, I imagined editors past and present tearing their hair out — not because they’re liberals determined to make the Trump Administration look bad, but because the report’s findings (that Russian intelligence worked to interfere with the election, and that members of the Trump campaign were happy to accept the help) is the real news, rather than the simple fact of the report’s release.

Image Credits: The New Paper

In other words, emphasizing objectivity and facts sounds good, but it also risks leaving out crucial context or analysis. Plus, it’s become increasingly clear that facts rarely change people’s minds.

Still, despite my quibbles with the approach, I’m happy to report that I’ve been receiving the digest for the past week, and I’ve found it to be a convenient, comprehensive catch-up on the day’s news, with links that make it easy to learn more.

For now, Aft and Necef are writing the digest themselves, though they said much of the ranking and sorting is done by algorithms. Over time, they’re hoping to hire on both the technology side and the editorial side. They also plan to expand into other channels like email and voice.

Asked whether the subscription business model means that they don’t have to pursue a mass audience, Aft replied, “We think it’s so critically important to give people a common set of information. To make this a viable business model, do we need to be 100 million strong? Of course not. Is that the goal we’re targeting? Absolutely, because we are so passionate about the problem.”

TheSkimm closes its $12M Series C with big names Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks on board

Equity Monday: What if no one gets to buy TikTok?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This weekend was a welcome reprieve from last week’s insane news cycle inside the world of technology and money. If you are still catching your breath from the Great IPO Wave of last Monday, we feel you. Here’s what we got into this morning:

• The TikTok sale could be in trouble, this time due to China changing its rules on sales of tech firms that have certain algorithms. TikTok parent company Bytedance intends to comply with the rules, but what impact the news could have the sale of the social service is unclear as of yet, though the developments are not good if you were in favor of a deal.
• American tech shares are set to rise once again after setting records last week.
• Equity is back on YouTube, hell yeah!
• From the weekend: Medium’s growth in both traffic (pageviews) and income (paying subscribers) is super impressive according to its latest reporting. And the publishing platform and media company is doubling-down on product to fend off upstarts like the popular Substack. Per a Bloomberg report, tech IPO fundraising could set a record in 2020. And, to ground us in a macro-economic sense, Chinese banks are being forced to take a profit hit to support other companies.
• In the funding round domain, Semalytix raised €4.3 million in Series A funding according to TechCrunch for its pharmaceutical-AI service. And India-based Eruditus raised $113 million for its executive-focused education service. That’s a lot of money, but like we’ve been saying, edtech is hot.
• And, finally, will there be enough horns for all these hot SaaS rounds that are getting done in a blur today? What if SaaS revenue multiples slip by 20%? Then what? When deals go so fast that due diligence suffers, the hangover can last a bit.

And that is the week’s Monday ep, thanks for sticking with through our super-busy week last week. Whew!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

The Pandemic is Motivating 96% of New Entrepreneurs in 2020

Ninety-six percent of new entrepreneurs say the pandemic is motivating or giving them the motivation they needed to start their own business. This positive statistic comes from Azlo, a banking platform for small business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

In mid-March 2020, Azlo witnessed an uptick in new accounts opening. Wanting to understand the reasons behind the boost in business, Azlo conducted a survey. ‘The COVID Economy’ report interviewed 1,000 of Azlo’s newest customers across the United States.

The Unexpected Impact of the Pandemic

Since the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic started to escalate in March, businesses have been plagued with negativity. Azlo’s research shows the unexpected impact of the pandemic. It shows how the health crisis has provided many entrepreneurs with the impetus they needed to kickstart their venture.

More Time to Get a Business Off the Ground During the Pandemic

The research found encouraging growth in the “COVID Economy” with the pandemic giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to start a business.

50% of the survey participants said they had more time to get their venture going during the health crisis. This is because other activities were put on hold. 40% of respondents said the pandemic gave them the prompt they needed to start their business.

The “COVID Economy” is Here to Stay?

Rather than being an isolated trend, the study found the renewed sense of confidence in the “COVID Economy” is here to stay. This could give encouragement to entrepreneurs that may be hesitating about starting a venture. Knowing that the pandemic has acted as a motivator for others, could inspire indecisiveness entrepreneurs to take action.

As Jonnita Dockens of Confidante Consulting commented in Azlo’s ‘The COVID Economy’ report: “COVID really motivated me to do something that I was thinking about pre-COVID. It was almost as if COVID was the sign telling me, “You need to do this because everything’s going digital.”

Reasons Why COVID Pushed Entrepreneurs to Start a Business

The survey asked new business owners how the outbreak motivated them to start their own ventures.

63% said they wanted to work for themselves. Over half (58%) said they had a desire to pursue something they were passionate about. 46% of respondents said they felt their business idea was solid.

Money was also a key motivator in the wave of new businesses emerging during the pandemic. 32% of new small business owners said they wanted to make more money than they felt they could in employment. 30% of participants say the started a side business to supplement income from employment.

What is in the Pipeline for COVID-19-Born Businesses?

The crop of COVID-19-born business owners are serious and are in it for the long term, the research found.

37% of the new business owners surveyed said they feel the pandemic created a marketing opportunity. Almost 40% of founders say they either already have employees or intent to hire in the near future.

Almost all (96%) of small business owners say they intend to keep their business going, even as the economy improves.

Azlo’s research proves that small businesses continue to be the backbone of the US economy. Even during times of crisis, with the right attitude and focus, small businesses can start a new and thrive.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "The Pandemic is Motivating 96% of New Entrepreneurs in 2020" was first published on Small Business Trends

How SCORE Is Helping Small Businesses Through Their Resilience Hub

One of the most important organizations that has always helped small businesses is SCORE with its 300 chapters and over 10,000 volunteers. They are there to offer help when entrepreneurs want it. Now during the pandemic, their free assistance is needed more than ever.

SCORE has established a special Resilience Hub to let small business owners connect with a mentor and help them navigate to specific COVID resources, discounts, grants, training materials and guides for industries. This site includes how to access a network where people can learn from each other.

Interview with Bridget Weston, SCORE Association

On the Small Business Radio Show this week, Bridget Weston who is the CEO of the SCORE Association, says her organization always has focused on being accessible to entrepreneurs even before the pandemic. For a long time, they have focused on using video technology to connect with small business owners wherever they were. Since they closed their in-person operations, Bridget believes they “did not miss a beat. Our services are up and so is the quality according to the people we help.”

In the early days of the pandemic, Bridget says small businesses were most concerned about how to get access to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) to increase their chances of survival. They are now helping people figure out how to fill out the PPP Loan Forgiveness application. Bridget is hopeful that there will be a second round of PPP for small business owners that really need it. Because “we need to have longer-term solutions since it is not going away anytime soon”.

SCORE is now focusing on helping small business owners engage and educate their customers even if it does not hit the bottom line today. Bridget believes it is critical to stay “top of mind so when you are ready to open your business again and customers are ready to come back, they will think of you.” In fact, she is seeing a trend in new startups as well which is typical during times of economic disruption.

Listen to the entire interview on the Small Business Radio Show.

READ MORE:

• Startup Trends

Image: score.org

This article, "How SCORE Is Helping Small Businesses Through Their Resilience Hub" was first published on Small Business Trends