Comcast Ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Cooper raises $2M to build a professional network centered on introductions
In a period of social distancing, making new professional connections feels harder than ever. So Amsterdam-based Cooper is building a network that’s all about making and receiving introductions.
“Everything that happens in the network is based on the foundation of introductions,” CEO Robert Gaal told me. “You should never get an unwanted message, and there’s no such thing as a connection request, because it’s not necessary if you have an introduction.”
The startup is launching internationally today and announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.
Gaal (who co-founded the company with CTO Emiel van Liere) described Cooper as “a private professional network that’s not about how many connections do I have, it’s about bringing the people that you already trust into a circle.”
That’s in contrast with existing professional networking sites, which are most useful as “directories” of online résumés, and usually emphasize the quantity of connections, rather than the quality. (I’ll admit that on LinkedIn, I’m connected to a bunch of people I barely know.)
So Cooper tries to take the opposite approach, limiting users’ connections to people they really know. To do this, it can pull data from a user’s online calendar, and it also provides them with a personal invite code that they can share with their professional contacts.
Image Credits: Cooper
Users then post requests or opportunities, which are viewable by their connections and by friends of friends, who can offer to make useful introductions via email or in Cooper itself.
In fact, Gaal said that during the initial beta test, multiple people have successfully used Cooper to find new jobs — sometimes after pandemic-related layoffs, which they’re comfortable sharing with their inner circle but don’t want to broadcast to the world at large.
“There’s more discovery, more trust and you can reinvent other things on top of that — what the résumé is, what mentorship is — if you get trust right first,” he said.
Of course, simply sharing a calendar invite with someone doesn’t really mean you trust them or know them well. Cooper could eventually start looking at other measures that indicate your “connectivity” with someone, like how often you email with them, Gaal said — but the first step is simply recreating the professional circle in which you feel comfortable saying, “Oh, you’re looking for a job? My friend is hiring.”
Yes, those kinds of conversations are already happening offline, but he noted that most of us can only remember “a handful of people” at once. Cooper is making that “marketplace” much more visible and easy to track.
The startup doesn’t sell ads or user data. Instead, Gaal hopes to make money by charging membership fees for features like customizing your profile or promoting your request more broadly.
The startup’s seed funding was led by Comcast Ventures, with participation from LocalGlobe and 468 Capital.
“At a time when the ability to connect is limited, Cooper is building a professional network fostering meaningful and substantive connections,” said Daniel Gulati, founding partner at Forecast Fund and former managing director at Comcast Ventures, in a statement. “We are excited to support the team on their journey ahead.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Papa raises $18 million to expand its business connecting older adults with virtual and in-person companions
The Miami-based startup Papa has raised an additional $18 million as it looks to expand its business connecting elderly Americans and families with physical and virtual companions, which the company calls “pals.”
The company’s services are already available in 17 states and Papa is going to expand to another four states in the next few months, according to chief executive Andrew Parker.
Parker launched the business after reaching out on Facebook to find someone who could serve as a pal for his own grandfather in Florida.
After realizing that there was a need among elderly residents across the state for companionship and assistance that differed from the kind of in-person care that would typically be provided by a caregiver, Parker launched the service. The kinds of companionship Papa’s employees offer range from helping with everyday tasks — including transportation, light household chores, advising with health benefits and doctor’s appointments, and grocery delivery — to just conversation.
With the social isolation brought on by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic there are even more reasons for the company’s service, Parker said. Roughly half of adults consider themselves lonely, and social isolation increases the risk of death by 29%, according to statistics provided by the company.
“We created Papa with the singular goal of supporting older adults and their families throughout the aging journey,” said Parker, in a statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has unfortunately only intensified circumstances leading to loneliness and isolation, and we’re honored to be able to offer solutions to help families during this difficult time.”
Papa’s pals go through a stringent vetting process, according to Parker, and only about 8% of all applicants become pals.
These pals get paid an hourly rate of around $15 per hour and have the opportunity to receive bonuses and other incentives, and are now available for virtual and in-person sessions with the older adults they’re matched with.
“We have about 20,000 potential Papa pals apply a month,” said Parker. In the company’s early days it only accepted college students to work as pals, but now the company is accepting a broader range of potential employees, with assistants ranging from 18 to 45 years old. The average age, Parker said, is 29.
Papa monitors and manages all virtual interactions between the company’s employees and their charges, flagging issues that may be raised in discussions, like depression and potential problems getting access to food or medications. The monitoring is designed to ensure that meal plans, therapists or medication can be made available to the company’s charges, said Parker.
Now that there’s $18 million more in financing for the company to work with, thanks to new lead investor Comcast Ventures and other backers — including Canaan, Initialized Capital, Sound Ventures, Pivotal Ventures, the founders of Flatiron Health and their investment group Operator Partners, along with Behance founder, Scott Belsky — Papa is focused on developing new products and expanding the scope of its services.
The company has raised $31 million to date and expects to be operating in all 50 states by January 2021. The company’s companion services are available to members through health plans and as an employer benefit.
“Papa is enabling a growing number of older Americans to age at home, while reducing the cost of care for health plans and creating meaningful jobs for companion care professionals,” said Fatima Husain, principal at Comcast Ventures, in a statement. “
Powered by WPeMatico
Nurx has $22.5 million in new money, a path to profitability and new treatments for migraines on the way
As the COVID-19 epidemic spread across the U.S. earlier this year, Nurx, like most other digital providers of healthcare and prescription services, saw a huge spike in demand.
Now, with $22.5 million in new financing and a surging annual run rate that could see the company hit $150 million in revenue, the company is emerging as the largest digital practice for women’s health.
“We saw this tremendous surge in need for our contraception and sensitive health services,” says Nurx chief executive Varsha Rao .
The growth hasn’t come without controversy. Only last year, a New York Times article pointed to corner cutting at the startup, which boasts Chelsea Clinton as an investor and advisor.
Undeterred, Rao said the company has now seen tremendous acceleration in all areas of its business. It’s now providing care to more than 300,000 patients on a monthly basis, boasts that $150 million run rate and has new investors like Comcast Ventures, Trustbridge and Wittington Ventures — the investment arm of one of the largest pharmacy chains in Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart.
The new $22.5 million is an extension on the company’s previous $32 million round and will take the company to profitability by 2021, according to Rao.
And while birth control and contraception are still the largest areas of the company’s business, Nurx is growing its range of services, seeing adoption of its testing for sexually transmitted infections including HPV and herpes and a new treatment area for migraines.
That focus on sexual health and what the company calls sensitive health is different from trying to be a primary care provider, says Rao. “Our real focus right now is on our core demographic who are women between the ages of 20 and 40 and really focusing on their needs,” she says. “That’s why migraines make a lot of sense. It’s not exclusively hormone-related, but it often is… One-in-four women experience migraines and they’re largely from hormonal changes… This is a condition we’re well-positioned to address.”
Another way that Nurx differentiates itself from competitors like Hims and Ro, which provide women’s health and contraceptive prescriptions as well, is through its ability to take insurance. “It’s actually pretty challenging to build the system to actually offer insurance,” says Rao. “And yet, we don’t think you can be a true healthcare company if you don’t accept insurance.”
Powered by WPeMatico
How to get the most from your corporate VC after you get the check
Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.
Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies through their full corporate life-cycle.
Raising capital from a corporate VC can bring many benefits beyond just money. Strategic CVCs, who measure ROI based on the strength of the strategic partnership with their portfolio companies as well as the financial return, will typically seek to maximize their relationships with startups for a long time after the investment is made.
Specifically, a CVC investor can offer the following to an entrepreneur:
- Resources and product feedback. CVC parent companies often have deep institutional expertise and teams of subject-matter experts who can advise startups on product development and guide them through issues.
-
Partnerships. CVCs can leverage their supply chain and operations to build new partnerships that otherwise may have taken months or years for startups to create.
-
Distribution. Strategic CVCs can become a distribution channel for a startup, connect that startup with their suppliers, or even use the startup to become a channel for the parent company.
-
Branding halo. If a large company is willing to invest in your startup, it’s a strong signal that your product is good and that your business has a bright future.
-
Acquisition. Many CVCs invest in startups that they may want to acquire down the line. A CVC may also endorse an exit-seeking portfolio company to their partner companies or suppliers.
Granted, seeing results from these benefits takes time, and even the best of intentions during a capital raise process may not always yield an optimal strategic relationship.
Here’s a list of factors to keep in mind for founders who want the best chances of a productive and successful relationship with their CVC.
Know which type of CVC you’re dealing with from the outset. In our previous posts, we outlined the three types of CVCs — experienced institutional investors, industry-specific strategics, and beginner or “tourist” CVCs. As we’ve discussed, be sure to spend time interviewing and building relationships with CVCs to determine which type they are, what kinds of benefits and resources they can offer and what their history looks like in terms of successfully partnering with startups over time. When in doubt, ask other founders who have done deals with them!
Powered by WPeMatico
What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?
Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.
More posts by this contributor
Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies through their full corporate life-cycle.
More posts by this contributor
Corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) are booming in the startup space as large companies look to take advantage of the fast-paced innovation and original thinking that entrepreneurs offer.
For startups, taking funding from CVCs can come with many benefits, including new opportunities for marketing, partnerships and sales channels. Still, no founder should consider a corporate investor “just another VC.” CVCs come with their own set of priorities, strategic objectives and rules.
When it comes to choosing a CVC with which to enter negotiations, the most important step is doing your own diligence beforehand. An entrepreneur’s goal is to find the perfect match to partner with and guide you as you grow your business. So before you start discussing terms, you’ll want to understand what’s driving the CVC’s interest in venture investing.
While traditional VCs are purely financially driven, CVCs can be in the venture game for a variety of reasons, including finding new technology that might generate marketplace demand for their products. An example is Amazon’s Alexa fund, which invested into emerging companies that drive use and adoption of Alexa. Alternatively, a CVC’s parent company may be looking to invest in tech that will help them operate their own products more efficiently, such as Comcast Ventures investing in DocuSign.
As a rule of thumb, the bigger CVC funds like GV and Comcast tend to be financially driven, meaning they’ll be approaching negotiations through a financial lens. As such, the negotiating process more closely resembles an institutional fund. You as a founder have to do the work to figure out what’s driving your CVC — is this a customer acquisition or distribution opportunity? Or are they seeking to find a source of knowledge transfer and/or bring new tech into their parent company?
“Before negotiating, always look at a CVC’s existing portfolio,” says Rick Prostko, managing director at Comcast Ventures. “Have they made a lot of investments, at what stage, and with whom? From this information you’ll see the strategic thinking of the CVC, and you can determine how best to position yourself when you begin negotiations.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Airbnb invests as Zeus corporate housing raises $55M at $205M
As Airbnb absorbs more and more of the demand for housing, it’s exploring how to monetize opportunities beyond vacation rentals. A marketplace for longer-term corporate housing could be a huge business, but rather than build that itself, Airbnb is making a strategic investment in one of the market leaders called Zeus Living, which will list its homes on the Airbnb site.
In just four years of redecorating landlords’ homes and renting them to relocated workers for 30-day stays (or longer), Zeus Living has grown to a $100 million revenue run rate. It boosted revenue 300% in 2019, and now has 250 employees and more than 2,000 homes under management. Zeus makes money by charging landlords one free month of usage, and marking up the rent charged to customers. It could rent out a $4,000 per month home for $5,000 plus take the extra month to earn $16,000 in a year.
Zeus CEO and co-founder Kulveer Taggar tells me, “I fundamentally believe that a lot of human potential is bound by location. At Zeus, we’re deeply committed to making it easier for people to live where opportunity takes them.” It’s already hosted 27,000 residents for a total of 650,000 nights.
Strong margins, swift momentum and that megatrend of more mobile workforces have earned Zeus Living a new $55 million Series B round it’s announcing on TechCrunch today. The funding comes from Airbnb, Comcast, CEAS Investments and TI Platform Management, plus existing investors Alumni Ventures Group, Initialized Capital, NFX and Spike Ventures. The funding comes at a $205 million post-money valuation.
“The opportunity here is huge, consumer spend is going toward housing and everyone needs to stay somewhere. But it’s Kulveer and Zeus’ go-to-market strategy that is impressive,” says Initialized co-founder and managing partner Garry Tan. “Zeus decided to start with corporate rentals, which we believe is the best go-to-market since it is the highest margin, and capital efficiency wins in a space with many competitors. Corporate needs are longer term, consistent and predictable, and partnering with Airbnb strengthens this approach as they expand to build a platform for every city.”
Zeus co-founder and CEO Kulveer Taggar
Zeus previously raised a $2.5 million seed and then an $11.5 million Series A led by Initialized, as well as $10 million in debt to cover taking on properties in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and D.C. Now that it’s scaling up, Zeus could add a sizable debt facility to cover the risk of filling apartments with employees from clients like Brex, Disney, ServiceTitan and Samsara.
Push-button housing
Instead of moving into a bland corporate housing block, struggling to find a place themselves or ending up in expensive long-term Airbnbs, workers moving to new cities can go to Zeus. It takes over apartments, handles maintenance and fills them with branded comforts like Parachute bedding and Helix mattresses that Zeus gets at bulk rates. The startup is betting that as workers move between jobs and cities more frequently, fewer will own furniture and instead look for furnished homes like those Zeus offers.
Thanks to the premium stays it provides, Zeus can charge clients a lucrative rate, while Taggar claims his service is still about half the price of standard corporate housing. For property owners, Zeus makes it easy to get a consistent rent paycheck with none of the traditional landlord work. Zeus takes care of cleaning and key exchanges so owners don’t need to do any chores like if they were running an Airbnb. Its goal is to get the first renters in within 10 days of taking on a property.
The new funding will help Zeus expand to more neighborhoods and cities while retaining a focus on breadth within each market so clients have plenty of homes from which to choose. The startup will be revamping its booking and invoicing tools for enterprise partners, and improving how it sources real estate. Meanwhile, it will be investing in customer care to maintain its high 70s NPS scores so relocated workers brag to their colleagues about how nice their new place is.
“Finding housing is stressful and time-consuming for both individuals and employers. As someone who has moved countries four times, I’ve lived through that tension,” says Taggar. “Zeus Living has built technology to remove complexity from housing, turning it into a service that enables a more mobile world.”
Taggar got into the real estate business early, remortgaging his mom’s house to buy a condo in Mumbai to rent out. After moving to the U.S., he built and sold Y Combinator-backed auction tool Auctomatic with co-founder and future Stripe starter Patrick Collison. It was while working on NFC-triggered task launcher Tagstand that Taggar recognized the hassle of both finding new corporate housing and reliably renting out one’s home. With Uber, Stripe and more startups growing huge by simplifying processes that move a lot of money around, he was inspired to do the same with Zeus Living.
The property tech wars
“Modern professionals travel more frequently, stay longer and seek accommodations that feel like home. As more companies look to Airbnb for Work for extended-stay and relocation solutions, this segment remains a key focus for Airbnb,” says David Holyoke, global head of Airbnb for Work.
“We have great alignment with the Airbnb team in terms of serving the changing needs of business travelers that want the comforts of home when traveling for extended 30-day stays for work or a project,” Taggar follows. Airbnb can help Zeus drive demand thanks to all its inbound traffic, while Zeus offers Airbnb more supply for customers seeking longer stays.
Zeus Living’s co-founders
Zeus’ biggest threat is that it could get overextended, misjudge demand and end up on the hook to pay rent for two-year leases it can’t fill. And now with more funding, there will be added scrutiny regarding its margins, especially in the wake of the WeWork implosion.
Taggar recognizes these threats. “This is a business where we have to be focused on maximizing the gross profit we generate for the investments we make, with the least amount of risk. At Zeus Living, we’re continuously improving the ways we predict and secure demand.” He’s also building out teams on the ground in different markets to ensure regulatory compliance and push for more conducive laws around 30-day (or longer) rental stays.
Property tech has become a heated space, though, so Zeus will have heavy competition. There are traditional corporate housing providers, pure marketplaces that don’t deal with logistics and direct competitors like $66 million-funded Domio and juggernaut Sonder, which has raised a whopping $360 million. Zeus might also see its model copied abroad before it can get there. Over time, landlords and real estate investment trusts like Blackstone could force Zeus, Sonder and others to compete to pay them the most for leases, eating into all the startups’ margins.
At least with Airbnb as an investor, Zeus won’t have to fear a bitter battle with the tech giant over corporate housing. Instead, Airbnb could keep investing to coin off this adjacent market while listing Zeus properties, or potentially acquired the startup one day. For now though, Taggar just wants to prove startups can be accountable in the real world, acknowledging that taking over people’s homes is “a lot of responsibility! Our homes represent hundreds of millions of dollars of assets we manage and we take that very seriously.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Neural Magic gets $15M seed to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs
Neural Magic, a startup founded by a couple of MIT professors, who figured out a way to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs, announced a $15 million seed investment today.
Comcast Ventures led the round, with participation from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Pillar VC and Amdocs. The company had previously received a $5 million pre-seed, making the total raised so far $20 million.
The company also announced early access to its first product, an inference engine that data scientists can run on computers running CPUs, rather than specialized chips like GPUs or TPUs. That means that it could greatly reduce the cost associated with machine learning projects by allowing data scientists to use commodity hardware.
The idea for this solution came from work by MIT professor Nir Shavit and his research partner and co-founder Alex Mateev. As he tells it, they were working on neurobiology data in their lab and found a way to use the commodity hardware he had in place. “I discovered that with the right algorithms we could run these machine learning algorithms on commodity hardware, and that’s where the company started,” Shavit told TechCrunch.
He says there is this false notion that you need these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary resources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t have to be that way. He says his company not only allows you to use this commodity hardware, it also works with more modern development approaches, like containers and microservices.
“Our vision is to enable data science teams to take advantage of the ubiquitous computing platforms they already own to run deep learning models at GPU speeds — in a flexible and containerized way that only commodity CPUs can deliver,” Shavit explained.
He says this also eliminates the memory limitations of these other approaches because CPUs have access to much greater amounts of memory, and this is a key advantage of his company’s approach over and above the cost savings.
“Yes, running on a commodity processor you get the cost savings of running on a CPU, but more importantly, it eliminates all of these huge commercialization problems and essentially this big limitation of the whole field of machine learning of having to work on small models and small data sets because the accelerators are kind of limited. This is the big unlock of Neural Magic,” he said.
Gil Beyda, managing director at lead investor Comcast Ventures, sees a huge market opportunity with an approach that lets people use commodity hardware. “Neural Magic is well down the path of using software to replace high-cost, specialized AI hardware. Software wins because it unlocks the true potential of deep learning to build novel applications and address some of the industry’s biggest challenges,” he said in a statement.
Powered by WPeMatico
Holloway launches in-depth startup guides, aims to rewrite publishing with $4.6M from NYT, tech VCs
Founders need to get smart quickly about the many nuanced aspects of building a company, from understanding weird language in a big term sheet to hiring a key software developer.
But the best practical advice is scattered across blog posts, podcasts and books, and it gets outdated quickly as industry norms evolve. Even experienced founders spend a lot of time searching and still end up with the wrong information.
Holloway has an ambitious solution: Today, it’s launching a library of book-length online guides about work, written and regularly updated by teams of industry experts.
The flagship title is called Raising Venture Capital, which features 340 thoughtfully organized pages in 15 sections and three appendices on all aspects of the funding process. Designed for easy reading and easy searching in spite of the information density and length (it has a 14-hour total read-time), the guide could become a go-to resource for the startup world.
Some sections will be most appealing to newer founders, like the part on whether to raise VC in the first place. Other portions are relevant to even the most experienced serial entrepreneurs — like how to think through potential drag-along and pay-to-play provisions, full-ratchet anti-dilution clauses and other tricky terms one might find. Did you know that investors can include more than 20 types of conditions in a term sheet? Do you know how to handle each one?
With $4.6 million in seed funding from a combination of top tech investors and The New York Times that it is also announcing now, Holloway intends to expand to cover the wide variety of work-related topics about startups and technology, and beyond. The next guide, currently in progress, will be on technical hiring and recruiting. A relatively shorter sample guide on equity compensation is already available for free.
The goal is to democratize access to how the best are doing business today (and take on traditional publishing).
“We didn’t just do this for Silicon Valley and New York,” and other startup-heavy cities, co-founder and chief executive Andy Sparks tells me, “we did this for people in cities like Columbus and Atlanta where startup communities are growing, but knowledge is harder to come by.”
The lawyers and other experts who author and edit the guides could otherwise cost more than $800 an hour, he explains, and won’t have time for many clients in the first place. (The company estimates there are $40,000 worth of legal fees in the VC guide.)
Sparks, previously the co-founder of analytics platform Mattermark, is also the lead author on “Raising Venture Capital” — along with another 20 or so contributors, like Brad Feld of the Foundry Group, and Darby Wong, co-founder of the popular legal document startup Clerky . The lead author of the technical recruiting guide is Ozzie Osman, former head of product engineering at Quora, and a main contributor to it is Aditya Agarwal, the former CTO of Dropbox.
The current pricing is $100 per guide forever (including future updates), with a discount available if you pre-order. Sparks says this may change to ensure the guides stay affordable, as well as cover the very real costs of producing this quality of content.
The big-picture bet is that the startup market is large enough to create strong demand for the initial guides, in the same way that many successful tech startups of this decade have started out serving companies like themselves. Some of the topics that Holloway is working on, like tech recruiting, naturally blend in with the rest of the business world and those wider audiences. Eventually, through expansion into broader work-related topics, Holloway’s online-first approach could compete against the existing book publishing industry at a bigger scale.
This is why the company is investing heavily in its software, in addition to its content. The interface was inspired by the experiences of co-founder Joshua Levy, a veteran technologist who found himself writing popular third-party guides on GitHub about how to use common services like AWS. Features in the software include search results that break out sections and sources, a detailed left-hand index view, a hyperlinked in-house glossary of hundreds of key terms, notes of warning and importance from experts and numerous links to third-party sources.
“We decided to invest in a digital reading experience that makes reading book-length content in a browser a great experience,” Sparks said, “which also means you will land on the right guide when you go hunting for answers on search engines like Google .”
Holloway co-founders Joshua Levy (left) and Andy Sparks (right)
You’ll even see a number of links to TechCrunch and Extra Crunch articles in the guides. Sparks tells me that the company plans to continue to link to a wide variety of sources in the future — so when guest columnists write something great and practical on Extra Crunch, we will help them to get this work featured in Holloway as well. The company is also accepting a variety of contributor types for its guides going forward, which you can find more details about here.
(On that note, we’ve published an excerpt from Holloway’s “Raising Venture Capital” guide, about pro rata terms and issues, on Extra Crunch. Subscribers can go check it out here, and find a special discount to Holloway inside.)
Sparks is careful to say that the current guides are not literally finished, despite all the effort put into them so far. And indeed, they will never be. Holloway is named after the “hollow ways” seen in the European countryside, where well-used roads have gradually sunk through hundreds of years of regular use. The company intends for its guides to be the paths that people who build companies tread year after year, where the knowledge that accumulates from the usage of many forms the clear direction that those in the future take.
The company’s investors include NEA, South Park Commons, The New York Times Co., Precursor Ventures and Comcast Ventures as well as Day One Ventures, Social Capital, Abstract Ventures, 415, Royal Bank of Canada, Lightspeed Ventures, & Full Tilt Capital. Angels include Leo Polovets, Lee Linden, Raj De Datta, Neil Parikh, Mikhail Larionov, Danielle & Kevin Morrill, Srinath Sridhar, Dennis Phelps and Kevin Lee.
Powered by WPeMatico
Orai raises $2.3M to make you a better speaker
Orai, a startup building communication coaching tools, is announcing that it has raised $2.3 million in seed funding.
CEO Danish Dhamani said that he co-founded the company with Paritosh Gupta and Aasim Sani to address a need in his own life — the fact that he was “held back personally and professionally” by lackluster “communications skills and public speaking skills.”
Dhamani said he attended Toastmasters International meetings hoping to improve those skills, where he came to a surprising conclusion — that he could build an algorithm to analyze your speaking abilities and give tips on how to improve.
To be clear, Orai isn’t necessarily trying to replace groups like Toastmasters, or individual speaking coaches. However, Dhamani said the “status quo” involves a “one-to-one” approach, where a human coach gives feedback to one person. Orai, on the other hand, can coach “entire IT teams, entire student bodies.”
“I am a big advocate of personalized, one-on-one coaching as well,” he said. “Orai is not replacing that, it’s enhancing that if used together.”
The startup has created iOS and Android smartphone apps to demonstrate the technology, which offer focused lessons and then assess your progress by analyzing recordings of your voice. (I did the initial assessment, and although I was praised for not using any “filler words,” I was told that I need to slow down — something I hear a lot.)
The real business model involves selling the tools to businesses, which can then assign Orai lessons to salespeople or other teams, create their own lessons and track everyone’s progress.
Attendees of TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF hackathon may recognize the team, which presented a body language analyzer in 2017 called Vocalytics. So you can probably guess that Dhamani’s plans go beyond audio.
The funding was led by Comcast Ventures — Orai was one of the startups at Comcast’s LIFT Labs Accelerator in Philadelphia. (Currently accepting applications for its second class!) In addition to announcing the funding, Orai has signed up famed speaking coach Nancy Duarte as an advisor.
Powered by WPeMatico
K Health raises $25M for its AI-powered primary care platform
K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures — all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.
“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so — where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache versus other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”
K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.
Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years — compiled from doctors’ notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data — K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis.
With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or, what Bloch calls “Dr. Google,” which often produce broad, downright frightening and inaccurate diagnoses.
Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians
Users are able to see cases and diagnoses that had symptoms similar to their own, with K Health notifying users with serious conditions when to consider seeking immediate care. (K Health Press Image / K Health / https://www.khealth.ai)
In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.
K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and, in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation.
Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1,000 people in the U.S., primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.
K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases, where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.
The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.
With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising, with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.
Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes
With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.
Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.
The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy co-pays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.
Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps — such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.
The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-10 years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.
By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.
Powered by WPeMatico