Cosmos Video — a ‘Club Penguin for adults’ to socialise and work — raises $2.6M from LocalGlobe

Published December 11, 2020

All over the world startups are piling into the space marked “virtual interaction and collaboration”. What if a startup created a sort of “Club Penguin for adults”?

Step forward Cosmos Video, which has a virtual venues platform that allows people to work, hang out and socialize together. It has now raised $2.6 million in seed funding from LocalGlobe, with participation from Entrepreneur First, Andy Chung and Philipp Moehring (AngelList), and Omid Ashtari (former president of Citymapper).

Founders Rahul Goyal and Karan Baweja previously led product teams at Citymapper and TransferWise, respectively.

Cosmos allows users to create virtual venues by combining game mechanics with video chat. The idea is to bring back the kinds of serendipitous interactions we used to have in the real world. You choose an avatar, then meet up with their colleagues or friends inside a browser-based game. As you move your avatars closer to another person you can video chat with them, as you might in real life.

The competition is the incumbent video conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but calls on these platforms have a set agenda, and are timeboxed — they’re rigid and repetitive. On Cosmos you sit on the screen and consume one video call after another as you move around the space, so it is mimicking serendipity, after a fashion.

As well as having a social application, office colleagues can work collaboratively on tools such as whiteboards, Google documents and Figma, play virtual board games or gather around a table to chat.

Cosmos is currently being used in private beta by a select group of companies to host their offices and for social events such as Christmas parties. Others are using it to host events, meetup groups and family gatherings.

Co-founder Rahul Goyal said in a statement: “Once the pandemic hit, we both saw productivity surge in our respective teams but at the same time, people were missing the in-office culture. Video conferencing platforms provide a great service when it comes to meetings, but they lack spontaneity. Cosmos is a way to bring back that human connection we lack when we spend all day online, by providing a virtual world where you can play a game of trivia or pong after work with colleagues or gather round a table to celebrate a friend’s birthday.”

George Henry, partner at LocalGlobe, said: “We were really impressed with the vision and potential of Cosmos. Scaling live experiences online is one of the big internet frontiers where there are still so many opportunities. Now that the video infrastructure is in place, we believe products like Cosmos will enable new forms of live online experiences.”

Citymapper announces subscription service for multiple transportation methods

Published February 20, 2019

Citymapper is becoming a fintech startup, sort of. The company announced a prepaid card called Citymapper Pass for users based in London. This new product is both a subscription service to aggregate all your transportation subscriptions and a plastic card to pay for your rides.

According to Wired, Citymapper will start with two weekly subscription packages. For £30 per week, you’ll get full access to zone 1 and 2 on TfL’s network. For an additional £10 per week, you’ll also get unlimited Santander bike rides and two rides using Citymapper’s ride-sharing service.

This isn’t exactly revolutionary for London commuters, but it’s a start. Eventually, the startup wants to add more transport methods, from dockless bikes to e-scooters and other private networks. But this is going to be a bit more complicated as the startup needs to sign a deal with each company.

You could imagine creating a custom package with your favorite transportation methods and pay once for all services. More interestingly, the plastic card is a good old prepaid card. You can top up your balance just like you’d top up your Revolut account and use that card if you’re traveling to a different zone.

The card should be compatible with Apple Pay and Google Pay. If you travel a lot, Citymapper lets you pause your subscription whenever you want — there’s no long-term commitment.

As urban mobility becomes more fragmented, Citymapper wants to act as an aggregator. Many people already rely on the app to calculate itineraries. But the startup now wants to go beyond mapping. It could be a way to monetize the service as well. You’ll be able to subscribe to Citymapper Pass in March or April.

Citymapper lets you find Ofo, Mobike and scooters around you

Published June 22, 2018

Urban transportation app Citymapper quietly rolled out an app update that lets you find many alternative mobility services in the app. You can now find the nearest dockless bike or electric scooter around you (not the Bird and Lime kind, the motorcycle kind).

The integrations are already live in many cities. The company didn’t add new buttons for each service because it was already getting quite crowded with buses, subways and ride-sharing services.

If you tap the bike button, you get a map view of the streets around you. In addition to traditional bike-sharing services, you’ll now find colored dots representing both Ofo and Mobike . Below the map, you get a list of the closest bikes. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden previously reported that the Mobike integration was coming soon.

But Citymapper also added a new scooter button in multiple cities. As the name suggests, this button helps you locate the closest free-floating scooter that you can unlock with your phone.

In Paris, you’ll find Coup and Cityscoot scooters. In Berlin, you’ll find Coup scooters. In Madrid and Barcelona, you’ll find Muving, ioscoot, eCooltra and Yugo scooters… You get the idea. Chances are all your local options will be there.

Interestingly, electric scooters from Bird and Lime aren’t in there just yet. It might be what everybody is talking about, but you’ll only see Jump and Ford bikes in San Francisco.

For now, all you can do is locate the nearest bike or scooter. You still have to open each individual app to scan the QR code and unlock those vehicles.

But this is an interesting approach. Citymapper doesn’t operate any transportation service. It can be an agnostic player and provide a comprehensive view of what’s around you without any conflict of interest. It doesn’t have to recreate a transportation hub like Lyft or Uber as those two companies recently acquired Motivate and Jump to provide bike-sharing services.

And if you’re visiting a city for the first time, you can open the app to find out how you’ll be able to navigate that new city.

Transit raises another $5M from Accel to become a hub for public transportation

Published September 26, 2017

Transit started off as a slick app that helped you get in a complex metro area with public transportation, but now co-founder Jake Sion has higher ambitions than that: being the go-to spot for getting from point A to point B, regardless of method. WIth bike-sharing, ridesharing, carsharing, and plenty of other methods of transportation that you can plant “sharing-” at the front,… Read More