8VC
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Baton raises $10.5M to create ‘drop zones,’ where truckers can hand off freight
In the trucking industry, “dwell and detention” times are the enemies of efficiency, profits and drivers. More than two billion hours are lost each year due to dwell — the time spent at a distribution yard or facility — and detention — the gap between when unloading or loading is supposed to begin and when it actually does.
Baton, a San Francisco-based startup developed out of 8VC’s incubator program, has developed a business that it believes will solve these long-standing problems for truckers. The company’s name gives a hint at its business model. Baton is developing a network of drop zones, 24-hour facilities it has sub-leased from partners, that are located outside of busy urban centers. Long-haul truckers can pull up and leave their loaded trailers at these drop zones. Baton then partners with local fleets of Class 8 trucks that will arrive at the drop site, grab the load and take the freight to its final destination.
The startup developed a software platform that coordinates vehicles, drop-zones, warehouses and local drivers through a single API. Customers also receive live automated updates via API as loads are delivered.
“In long-haul trucking, there’s a remarkable amount of wasted time,” co-founder Andrew Berberick said in a recent interview. Baton’s pitch is that it eliminates hours wasted with dwell and detention as well as the time spent sitting in traffic. The company says it can also help increase wages for drivers, who are typically paid by the mile and not the hour, as well as cut carbon emissions.
Baton has landed long-haul trucking firms as customers, including CRST, the private freight company that carries loads for some of the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart. And it’s also attracted a variety of strategic investors. The company raised its first $3.3 million from real estate corporation Prologis and 8VC, in a seed round that closed in December 2019. Now, it’s tacking on more capital and investors in a Series A funding round, co-led by 8VC and Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of logistics giant AP Moller-Maersk.
Baton raised $10.5 million in the Series A, and now has a post-money valuation of $50 million, co-founders Nate Robert and Berberick told TechCrunch. Prologis, Ryder, Lineage Logistics, Project44 CEO Jett McCandless, KeepTruckin’ CEO Shoaib Makani, Clarendon Capital operating partner John Larkin, I.S.G founder Trace Haggard and Cooley LLC all participated in the round.
Baton has several drop zones in Los Angeles, with plans to open more in the city. Robert and Berberick said their plan is to open zones in Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas in the next 12 to 18 months.
Baton’s short-term aim is to end waste in human-driven trucking operations. But Robert says the business model is well-positioned to handle what he says will be the first viable applications of autonomous trucks. “The answer is on highways only,” Robert said. “And for that to occur you’ll have to have a nationwide network of transfer hubs.”
Baton is already piloting the idea, which Robert called “autonomous relays,” with an unnamed self-driving trucks company on the Arizona-California border.
“As we see automated and eventually electric trucks become standard for certain routes, the network of Baton hubs and the coordination provided by its software will become seen as core infrastructure. Baton makes the transformation to automated trucking possible,” 8VC partner and co-founder Jake Medwell said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Better Health raises $3.5M seed round to reinvent medical supply shopping through e-commerce
The home medical supply market in the U.S. is significant and growing, but the way that Americans go about getting much-needed medical supplies, particularly for those with chronic conditions, relies on outdated and clumsy sales mechanisms that often have very poor customer experiences. New startup Better Health aims to change that, with an e-commerce approach to serving customers in need of medical supplies for chronic conditions, and it has raised $3.5 million in a new seed round to pursue its goals.
Better Health estimates the total value of the home medical supplies market in the U.S., which covers all reimbursable devices and supplies needed for chronic conditions, including things like colostomy bags, catheters, mobility aids, insulin pumps and more, is around $60 billion annually. But the market is obviously a specialized one relative to other specialized goods businesses, in part because it requires working not only with customers who make the final decisions about what supplies to use, but also payers, who typically foot the bill through insurance reimbursements.
The other challenge is that individuals with chronic care needs often require a lot of guidance and support when making the decision about what equipment and supplies to select — and the choices they make can have a significant impact on quality of life. Better Health co-founder and CEO Naama Stauber Breckler explained how she came to identify the problems in the industry, and why she set out to address them.
“The first company I started was right out of school, it’s called CompactCath,” she explained in an interview. “We created a novel intermittent catheter, because we identified that there’s a gap in the existing options for people with chronic bladder issues that need to use a catheter on a day-to-day basis […] In the process of bringing it to market, I was exposed to the medical devices and supplies industry. I was just shocked when I realized how hard it is for people today to get life-saving medical supplies, and basically realized that it’s not just about inventing a better product, there’s kind of a bigger systematic problem that locks consumer choice, and also prevents innovation in the space.”
Stauber Breckler’s founding story isn’t too dissimilar from the founding story of another e-commerce pioneer: Shopify. The now-public heavyweight originally got started when founder Tobi Lütke, himself a software engineer like Stauber Breckler, found that the available options for running his online snowboard store were poorly designed and built. With Better Health, she’s created a marketplace, rather than a platform like Shopify, but the pain points and desire to address the problem at a more fundamental level are the same.
Better Health head of Product Adam Breckler, left, and CEO Naama Stauber Breckler, right. Image Credits: Better Health
With CompactCath, she said they ended up having to build their own direct-to-consumer marketing and sales product, and through that process, they ended up talking to thousands of customers with chronic conditions about their experiences, and what they found exposed the extent of the problems in the existing market.
“We kept hearing the same stories again, and again — it’s hard to find the right supplier, often it’s a local store, the process is extremely manual and lengthy and prone to errors, they get the surprise bills they weren’t expecting,” Stauber Breckler said. “But mostly, it’s just that there is this really sharp drop in care, from the time that you have a surgery or you were diagnosed, to when you need to now start using this device, when you’re essentially left at home and are given a general prescription.”
Unlike in the prescription drug market, where your choices essentially amount to whether you pick the brand name or the generic, and the outcome is pretty much the same regardless, in medical supplies which solution you choose can have a dramatically different effect on your experience. Customers might not be aware, for example, that something like CompactCath exists, and would instead choose a different catheter option that limits their mobility because of how frequently it needs changing and how intensive the process is. Physicians and medical professionals also might not be the best to advise them on their choice, because while they’ve obviously seen patients with these conditions, they generally haven’t lived with them themselves.
“We have talked to people who tell us, ‘I’ve had an ostomy for 19 years, and this is the first time I don’t have constant leakages’ or someone who had been using a catheter for three years and hasn’t left her house for more than two hours, because they didn’t feel comfortable with the product that they had to use it in a public restroom,” Stauber Breckler said. “So they told us things like ‘I finally went to visit my parents, they live in a town three hours away.’ ”
Better Health can provide this kind of clarity to customers because it employs advisors who can talk patients through the equipment selection process with one-to-one coaching and product use education. The startup also helps with navigating the insurance side, managing paperwork, estimating costs and even arguing the case for a specific piece of equipment in case of difficulty getting the claim approved. The company leverages peers who have firsthand experience with the chronic conditions it serves to help better serve its customers.
Already, Better Health is a Medicare-licensed provider in 48 states, and it has partnerships in place with commercial providers like Humana and Oscar Health. This funding round was led by 8VC, a firm with plenty of expertise in the healthcare industry and an investor in Stauber Breckler’s prior ventures, and includes participation from Caffeinated Capital, Anorak Ventures and angels Robert Hurley and Scott Flanders of remote health pioneer eHealth.
Powered by WPeMatico
That dreadful VPN might finally be dead thanks to Twingate, a new startup built by Dropbox alums
VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a mainstay of corporate network security (and also consumers trying to stream Netflix while pretending to be from other countries). VPNs create an encrypted channel between your device (a laptop or a smartphone) and a company’s servers. All of your internet traffic gets routed through the company’s IT infrastructure, and it’s almost as if you are physically located inside your company’s offices.
Despite its ubiquity though, there are significant flaws with a VPN’s architecture. Corporate networks and VPNs were designed assuming that most workers would be physically located in an office most of the time, and the exceptional device would use a VPN. As the pandemic has made abundantly clear, fewer and fewer people work in a physical office with a desktop computer attached to ethernet. That means the vast majority of devices are now outside the corporate perimeter.
Worse, VPNs can have massive performance problems. By routing all traffic through one destination, VPNs not only add latency to your internet experience, they also transmit all of your non-work traffic through your corporate servers as well. From a security perspective, VPNs also assume that once a device joins, it’s reasonably safe and secure. VPNs don’t actively check network requests to make sure that every device is only accessing the resources that it should.
Twingate is fighting directly to defeat VPNs in the workplace with an entirely new architecture that assumes zero trust, works as a mesh and can segregate work and non-work internet traffic to protect both companies and employees. In short, it may dramatically improve the way hundreds of millions of people work globally.
It’s a bold vision from an ambitious trio of founders. CEO Tony Huie spent five years at Dropbox, heading up international and new market expansion in his final role at the file-sharing juggernaut. He’s most recently been a partner at venture capital firm SignalFire . Chief Product Office Alex Marshall was a product manager at Dropbox before leading product at lab management program Quartzy. Finally, CTO Lior Rozner was most recently at Rakuten, and before that Microsoft.
Twingate founders Alex Marshall, Tony Huie and Lior Rozner. Photo via Twingate.
The startup was founded in 2019, and is announcing today the public launch of its product, as well as its Series A funding of $17 million from WndrCo, 8VC, SignalFire and Green Bay Ventures. Dropbox’s two founders, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, also invested.
The idea for Twingate came from Huie’s experience at Dropbox, where he watched its adoption in the enterprise and saw firsthand how collaboration was changing with the rise of the cloud. “While I was there, I was still just fascinated by this notion of the changing nature of work and how organizations are going to get effectively re-architected for this new reality,” Huie said. He iterated on a variety of projects at SignalFire, eventually settling on improving corporate networks.
So what does Twingate ultimately do? For corporate IT professionals, it allows them to connect an employee’s device into the corporate network much more flexibly than a VPN. For instance, individual services or applications on a device could be set up to securely connect with different servers or data centers. So your Slack application can connect directly to Slack, your JIRA site can connect directly to JIRA’s servers, all without the typical round-trip to a central hub that a VPN requires.
That flexibility offers two main benefits. First, internet performance should be faster, since traffic is going directly where it needs to rather than bouncing through several relays between an end-user device and the server. Twingate also says that it offers “congestion” technology that can adapt its routing to changing internet conditions to actively increase performance.
More importantly, Twingate allows corporate IT staff to carefully calibrate security policies at the network layer to ensure that individual network requests make sense in context. For instance, if you are a salesperson in the field and suddenly start trying to access your company’s code server, Twingate can identify that request as highly unusual and outright block it.
“It takes this notion of edge computing and distributed computing [and] we’ve basically taken those concepts and we’ve built that into the software we run on our users’ devices,” Huie explained.
All of that customization and flexibility should be a huge win for IT staff, who get more granular controls to increase performance and safety, while also making the experience better for employees, particularly in a remote world where people in, say, Montana might be very far from an East Coast VPN server.
Twingate is designed to be easy to onboard new customers according to Huie, although that is almost certainly dependent on the diversity of end users within the corporate network and the number of services to which each user has access. Twingate integrates with popular single sign-on providers.
“Our fundamental thesis is that you have to balance usability, both for end users and admins, with bulletproof technology and security,” Huie said. With $17 million in the bank and a newly debuted product, the future is bright (and not for VPNs).
Powered by WPeMatico
This serial founder is taking on Carta with cap table management software she says is better for founders
Yin Wu has co-founded several companies since graduating from Stanford in 2011, including a computer vision company called Double Labs that sold to Microsoft, where she stayed on for a couple of years as a software engineer. In fact, it was only after that sale she she says she “actually understood all of the nuances with a company’s cap table.”
Her newest company, Pulley, a 14-month-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based maker of cap table management software aims to solve that same problem and has so far raised $10 million toward that end led by the payments company Stripe, with participation from Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC and numerous angel investors.
Wu is going up against some pretty powerful competition. Carta was reportedly raising $200 million in fresh funding at a $3 billion valuation as of the spring (a round the company never official confirmed or announced). Last year, it raised $300 million. Morgan Stanley has meanwhile been beefing up its stock plan administration business, acquiring Solium Capital early last year and more recently purchasing Barclay’s stock plan business.
Of course, startups often manage to find a way to take down incumbents and a distraction for Carta, at least, in the form of a very public gender discrimination lawsuit by a former VP of marketing, could be the kind of opening that Pulley needs. We emailed with Yu yesterday to ask if that might be the case. She didn’t answer directly, but she did mention “values,” as well as sharing some more details about what she sees as different about the two products.
TC: Why start this company? Has Carta’s press of late created an opening for a new upstart in the space?
YW: I left Microsoft in 2018 and started Pulley a year later. We skipped the seed and raised the A because of overwhelming demand from investors. Many wanted a better product for their portfolio companies. Many founders are increasingly thinking about choosing with companies, like Pulley, that better align with their values.
TC: How many people are working for Pulley and are any folks you pulled out of Carta?
YW: We’re a team of seven and have four people on the team who are former Y Combinator founders. We attract founders to the team because they’ve experienced firsthand the difficulties of managing a cap table and want to build a better tool for other founders. We have not pulled anyone out of Carta yet.
TC: Carta has raised a lot of funding and it has long tentacles. What can Pulley offer startups that Carta cannot?
YW: We offer startups a better product compared to our competitors. We make every interaction on Pulley easier and faster. 409A valuations take five days instead of weeks, and onboarding is the same day rather than months. By analogy, this is similar to the difference between Stripe and Braintree when Stripe initially launched. There were many different payment processes when Stripe launched. They were able to capture a large portion of the market by building a better product that resonated with developers.
One of the features that stands out on Pulley is our modeling feature [which helps founders model dilution in future rounds and helps employees understand the value of their equity as the company grows]. Founders switch from our competitors to Pulley to use our modeling tool [and it works] with pre-money SAFEs, post-money SAFEs and factors in pro-ratas and discounts. To my knowledge, Pulley’s modeling tool is the most comprehensive product on the market.
TC: How does your pricing compare with Carta’s?
YW: Pulley is free for early-stage companies regardless of how much they raise. We’re price competitive with Carta on our paid plans. Part of the reason we started Pulley is because we had frustrations with other cap table management tools. When using other services, we had to regularly ping our accountants or lawyers to make edits, run reports or get data. Each time we involved the lawyers, it was an expensive legal fee. So there is easily a $2,000 hidden fee when using tools that aren’t self-serve for setting up and updating your cap table.
TC: Is there a business-to-business opportunity here, where maybe attorneys or accountants or wealth managers private label this service? Or are these industry professionals viewed as competitors?
YW: We think there are opportunities to white label the service for accountants and law firms. However, this is currently not our focus.
TC: How adaptable is the software? Can it deal with a complicated scenario, a corner case?
YW: We started Pulley one year ago and we’re launching today because we have invested in building an architecture that can support complex cap table scenarios as companies scale. There are two things that you have to get right with cap table systems, First, never lose the data and second, always make sure the numbers are correct. We haven’t lost data for any customer and we have a comprehensive system of tests that verifies the cap table numbers on Pulley remain accurate.
TC: At what stage does it make sense for a startup to work with Pulley, and do you have the tools to hang onto them and keep them from switching over to a competitor later?
YW: We work with companies past the Series A, like Fast and Clubhouse. Companies are not looking to change their cap table provider if Pulley has the tool to grow with them. We already have the features of our competitors, including electronic share issuance, ACH transfers for options, modeling tools for multiple rounds and more. We think we can win more startups because Pulley is also easier to use and faster to onboard.
TC: Regarding your paid plans, how much is Pulley charging and for what? How many tiers of service are there?
YW; Pulley is free for early-stage startups with less than 25 stakeholders. We charge $10 per stakeholder per month when companies scale beyond that. A stakeholder is any employee or investor on the cap table. Most companies upgrade to our premium plan after a seed round when they need a 409A valuation.
Cap table management is an area where companies don’t want a free product. Pulley takes our customers’ data privacy and security very seriously. We charge a flat fee for companies so they rest assured that their data will never be sold or used without their permission.
TC: What’s Pulley’s relationship to venture firms?
YW: We’re currently focused on founders rather than investors. We work with accelerators like Y Combinator to help their portfolio companies manage their cap table, but don’t have a formal relationship with any VC firms.
Powered by WPeMatico
Quince launches out of beta with new ‘manufacturer-to-customer’ model
The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically.
The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items, including men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, jewelry and home goods.
After beta testing for a year as “Last Brand,” Quince is launching with a new model called “M2C,” or manufacturer to consumer.
The idea is that Quince goes directly to factories with designs for essentials — not overly patterned or branded items — with an order that can dynamically adjust each week based on demand. As orders start coming in, Quince can work alongside manufacturers to ensure they aren’t over or under producing on a specific SKU. The factory then ships directly to the customer, rather than shipping to a distribution center or store and then again to the final destination.
You might think that factories wouldn’t be as amenable to this model, as they have little to lose when a brand overestimates demand for a SKU and doesn’t sell it through to the customer. But co-founder and CEO Sid Gupta says that this new model is being presented at a pivotal time in retail. Bigger brands, the ones that place orders for 100,000 units, are struggling during the pandemic and shrinking their SKU portfolio.
This leaves the factories with two options: turning to D2C brands or selling through a marketplace like Amazon.
“D2C demand is really fragmented, and most D2C companies are really sub-scale,” said Gupta. “It’s hard to get the efficiency gains out of it. The issue with selling on a marketplace, like Amazon, is you’ve got to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other sellers for the same exact good. If you’re a factory that actually makes high-quality goods, and you pay your workers fairly, and you don’t damage the environment, your cost might be 3% or 5%, higher.”
He added that it’s difficult for a factory to have those factors shine through to the customer on Amazon, and more difficult still to learn how to play the advertising game.
This environment has made manufacturers slightly more open to a new way of doing things.
By working directly with factories, Quince says it’s able to bring the cost of luxury items down significantly, selling a cashmere sweater for approximately $50 instead of $150+, as you’ll often find with other brands. Quince works with more than 30 factories across the world.
Gupta says the company has also thought very deeply about sustainability, setting standards around the materials used (are they organic or recycled?), the manufacturing process (is it ecologically sound?), worker pay and more. The company is also looking into giveback programs to share in the profits with the factories and the workers.
The funding from last fall has allowed Quince to beta test last year and grow the team to 16, including co-founders Becky Mortimer and Sourabh Mahajan. Thirty-five percent of employees are female, and 65% are minorities.
The company’s investors include Founders Fund, 8VC and Basis Set Ventures.
Powered by WPeMatico
Yugabyte lands $30M Series B as open source database continues to flourish
It’s been a big period of positive change for Yugabyte, makers of the open source, cloud native YugabyteDB database. Just last month they brought on former Pivotal president Bill Cook as CEO, and today the company announced it has closed a $30 million Series B.
8VC and strategic investor WiPro led the round with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $55 million, according to the company.
The startup also announced that former Pivotal co-founder Scott Yara would be joining the company’s board. Along with Cook, that brings a distinct Pivotal influence to the company.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan, who was CEO, now holds the title of president. He says that the company has built “a fully open source, high performance distributed SQL database meant for transactional workloads in the cloud.”
Today, in addition to the open source product, it offers a private Database as a Service platform to enterprise customers. This can run on a variety of platforms including public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure. The company also offers a fully managed cloud service, which is currently available on AWS and Google Cloud Platform with Azure support coming in the future.
The founders have quite a pedigree. Muthukkaruppan spent 13 years at Oracle helping build Oracle’s relational engine. Then he moved onto Facebook in the early days where he met co-founders Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin. The founding team worked on database technology that helped scale Facebook from 40 million users to over a billion.
It was that background that really caught the attention of Cook. “First of all, there’s a huge market opportunity here that we think we fit into, and it is unique in the sense of the pedigree that this team has, and what they built and the expertise they have across that whole spectrum of being able to scale and have [a database that is] performant across [geographic] zones,” he said.
As the company gets this investment, it’s not only a period of change inside the organization, it is against the backdrop of the worldwide pandemic and economic fallout from that event, but Muthukkaruppan sees momentum here in spite of the macro conditions.
“With COVID-19, we actually saw an increased sense of urgency across many enterprises, wanting to move businesses to the cloud and improve their operational and go-to-market efficiency around the product that they were bringing to market,” he said. He believes that the company’s database can be a key part of that.
The company currently has 50 employees, but sees doubling that number in the next 12-18 months as interest in the products continues to grow. Cook says the company has a diverse workforce today, and he will continue to build on that in his hiring practices.
“The more inclusive you can be ties to all our principles and values [as a company] already so we’re not changing how we operate,” he says. He says diversity is not only the right thing to do from a human perspective, it also makes good business sense to have a diverse workforce.
Powered by WPeMatico
Invisible AI uses computer vision to help (but hopefully not nag) assembly line workers
“Assembly” may sound like one of the simpler tests in the manufacturing process, but as anyone who’s ever put together a piece of flat-pack furniture knows, it can be surprisingly (and frustratingly) complex. Invisible AI is a startup that aims to monitor people doing assembly tasks using computer vision, helping maintain safety and efficiency — without succumbing to the obvious all-seeing-eye pitfalls. A $3.6 million seed round ought to help get them going.
The company makes self-contained camera-computer units that run highly optimized computer vision algorithms to track the movements of the people they see. By comparing those movements with a set of canonical ones (someone performing the task correctly), the system can watch for mistakes or identify other problems in the workflow — missing parts, injuries and so on.
Obviously, right at the outset, this sounds like the kind of thing that results in a pitiless computer overseer that punishes workers every time they fall below an artificial and constantly rising standard — and Amazon has probably already patented that. But co-founder and CEO Eric Danziger was eager to explain that this isn’t the idea at all.
“The most important parts of this product are for the operators themselves. This is skilled labor, and they have a lot of pride in their work,” he said. “They’re the ones in the trenches doing the work, and catching and correcting mistakes is a big part of it.”
“These assembly jobs are pretty athletic and fast-paced. You have to remember the 15 steps you have to do, then move on to the next one, and that might be a totally different variation. The challenge is keeping all that in your head,” he continued. “The goal is to be a part of that loop in real time. When they’re about to move on to the next piece we can provide a double check and say, ‘Hey, we think you missed step 8.’ That can save a huge amount of pain. It might be as simple as plugging in a cable, but catching it there is huge — if it’s after the vehicle has been assembled, you’d have to tear it down again.”
This kind of body tracking exists in various forms and for various reasons; Veo Robotics, for instance, uses depth sensors to track an operator and robot’s exact positions to dynamically prevent collisions.
But the challenge at the industrial scale is less “how do we track a person’s movements in the first place” than “how can we easily deploy and apply the results of tracking a person’s movements.” After all, it does no good if the system takes a month to install and days to reprogram. So Invisible AI focused on simplicity of installation and administration, with no code needed and entirely edge-based computer vision.
“The goal was to make it as easy to deploy as possible. You buy a camera from us, with compute and everything built in. You install it in your facility, you show it a few examples of the assembly process, then you annotate them. And that’s less complicated than it sounds,” Danziger explained. “Within something like an hour they can be up and running.”
Once the camera and machine learning system is set up, it’s really not such a difficult problem for it to be working on. Tracking human movements is a fairly straightforward task for a smart camera these days, and comparing those movements to an example set is comparatively easy, as well. There’s no “creativity” involved, like trying to guess what a person is doing or match it to some huge library of gestures, as you might find in an AI dedicated to captioning video or interpreting sign language (both still very much works in progress elsewhere in the research community).
As for privacy and the possibility of being unnerved by being on camera constantly, that’s something that has to be addressed by the companies using this technology. There’s a distinct possibility for good, but also for evil, like pretty much any new tech.
One of Invisible’s early partners is Toyota, which has been both an early adopter and skeptic when it comes to AI and automation. Their philosophy, one that has been arrived at after some experimentation, is one of empowering expert workers. A tool like this is an opportunity to provide systematic improvement that’s based on what those workers already do.
It’s easy to imagine a version of this system where, like in Amazon’s warehouses, workers are pushed to meet nearly inhuman quotas through ruthless optimization. But Danziger said that a more likely outcome, based on anecdotes from companies he’s worked with already, is more about sourcing improvements from the workers themselves.
Having built a product day in and day out year after year, these are employees with deep and highly specific knowledge on how to do it right, and that knowledge can be difficult to pass on formally. “Hold the piece like this when you bolt it or your elbow will get in the way” is easy to say in training but not so easy to make standard practice. Invisible AI’s posture and position detection could help with that.
“We see less of a focus on cycle time for an individual, and more like, streamlining steps, avoiding repetitive stress, etc.,” Danziger said.
Importantly, this kind of capability can be offered with a code-free, compact device that requires no connection except to an intranet of some kind to send its results to. There’s no need to stream the video to the cloud for analysis; footage and metadata are both kept totally on-premise if desired.
Like any compelling new tech, the possibilities for abuse are there, but they are not — unlike an endeavor like Clearview AI — built for abuse.
“It’s a fine line. It definitely reflects the companies it’s deployed in,” Danziger said. “The companies we interact with really value their employees and want them to be as respected and engaged in the process as possible. This helps them with that.”
The $3.6 million seed round was led by 8VC, with participating investors including iRobot Corporation, K9 Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Slow Ventures.
Powered by WPeMatico
Stealthy gaming company Wonder is ready to tease its new mystery hardware
Wonder, the incredibly stealthy new gaming company, has quietly created a signup page for information and perks related to its plans for global domination of the gaming market from its Los Angeles headquarters. The company is calling its new campaign the “Alpha Program”, and folks that are interested can get updates on Wonder’s product, provide feedback, and get perks and… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Bloomz raises $2.3 million to connect teachers and students’ families
Education tech startup Bloomz has raised $2.3 million in seed funding for an app that connects teachers and parents, securely. The company’s app features tools that help teachers push updates about students or share photos of them from the classroom back to parents throughout the day. The app also gives educators tools to help coordinate parent-teacher conferences, classroom volunteers… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico