disrupt sf 2018
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Origami Labs shows off its voice-powered smart ring
Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.
Origami Labs’ device is the Orii, a smart ring that works with an app on your phone, allowing you to physically touch your finger to your ear to either speak to or listen to your voice assistant.
This involves the use of bone conduction technology, which allows you to hear sounds through the vibration of bones in your face, bypassing the outer and middle ears to stimulate the inner ear directly.
That means you can use Orii to do things like listen to your text messages, send a WhatsApp message to a friend, take a phone call, get information like the time or weather, use reminders, or anything else that Siri or Google Assistant could do.
The ring alerts you with a vibration, then you listen (or speak to its microphone) by raising your finger to your ear.
The company presented its device on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 today, after winning a “wildcard” spot that allowed it to enter the Startup Battlefield competition.
The Hong Kong-based startup was founded by Marcus Leung-Shea and Kevin Wong in 2015.
Wong’s father is visually impaired, which makes using a smartphone more difficult.
“That’s where we got started – just to create a device that helps visually impaired people,” Marcus explains. “But through building the product and launching a Kickstarter, it became clear that this screen-free way of interacting with technology is something that actually a lot of people are looking for. It taps into this sense that we’re spending too much time looking at our devices,” he says.
With other Bluetooth devices, like AirPods, there’s a limit to how long they can be worn comfortably.
Plus, there’s the aesthetics to consider – not everyone wants to be seen wearing their AirPods all the time, out of a sense of style. AirPods and other Bluetooth devices in the ear are also often used as a signal others that you don’t want to be bothered.
Meanwhile, using the assistant through the speaker on the phone isn’t very private.
The startup ran crowdfunding campaigns last year to raise its initial seed round. On Kickstarter, the Orii had 4,000 backers – enough to prove there’s at least some consumer interest in this kind of product, the founders believe.
The first version of the Orii is shipping to its early backers who paid $99 to $150 for the device. It’s a bit large, in comparison to even costume rings, but that’s a solvable problem at scale. A second version of the device, shipping in Q2 2019, will be about 25 percent to 30 percent smaller, Marcus says. This one will come in different colors and enable new features. The company is also working on Alexa integration.
Orii has generated some interest from businesses and consumers. Specifically, luxury hotels and retailers want to test the product as a team communication system because they don’t want their staff looking at screens, which could come across as rude.
Mobile operators in Hong Kong, where the 14-person team is based, are also interested in selling Orii as a bundle with their phones. But all these discussions are in the early stages, Marcus notes.
Origami Labs is backed by its crowdfunding and seed investment from the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Seed Fund.
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Nutrigene wants to personalize your vitamins using your genetic code
Vitamins are proving to be a lucrative industry in the United States. Just last year vitamin sales pulled in roughly $37 billion for the U.S. economy. That’s up from $28 billion in 2010. To cash in on this growing market, several startups have popped up in the last few years — including Nutrigene, a startup combining the vitamin business with another lucrative avenue of revenue in consumer DNA analysis.
Nutrigene believes your genes may hold the secret to what you might be missing in your diet. The company will send you tailor-made liquid vitamin supplements based on a lifestyle quiz and your DNA. You get your analysis by filling out an assessment on the startup’s website, choosing a recommended package such as “essentials,” “improve performance” or “optimize gut health.” After that you can also choose to upload your DNA profile from 23andMe, then Nutrigene will send you liquid supplements built just for you.
Founder Min FitzGerald launched the startup out of Singularity and later accepted a Google fellowship for the idea. Nutrigene then went on to Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class. FitzGerald’s co-founder and CTO Van Duesterberg comes from a biotech and epigenetics background and holds a PhD from Stanford.
PhDs and impressive resumes aside, the vitamin and genetics industries are not without controversy. For every study showing that those who eat a balanced diet don’t benefit from supplements, there are just as many highlighting the benefits of taking your vitamins. Also, coupling vitamin therapy with your DNA seems at a glance dubious. However, Dawn Barry, former VP at Illumina and now president of Luna DNA, a biotech company powered by the blockchain, says it could have some scientific underpinnings. But, she cautioned, nutrigenetics is still an early science.
Amir Trabelsi, founder of genetic analysis platform Genoox, agrees. We interviewed both Trabelsi and Barry previously when Nutrigene first came on our radar. Trabelsi pointed out these types of companies don’t need to provide any proof.
“That doesn’t mean it’s completely wrong,” he told TechCrunch. “But we don’t know enough to say this person should use Vitamin A, for example… There needs to be more trials and observation.”
Nutrigene acknowledges the best supplementation for performance goes beyond just a genetic profile. Our lifestyles, where we live, what we do and what we put in our bodies (or don’t) all can contribute to a deficiency. For better nutritional accuracy, Nutrigene will send you a blood test kit in the mail to test for things like Vitamin D deficiency (a common deficiency in Silicon Valley, according to my doctor). You also can choose to go to a blood testing center to find out what sort of nutritional supplements you’ll need for optimal performance.
One other twist — Nutrigene’s vitamins come in liquid form for what FitzGerald says is the optimum delivery method.
I tried out the program for myself earlier this year, though not for more than a few days as I was pregnant at the time and wanted to stick with the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking. Nothing I saw on the packaging from Nutrigene was dangerous for pregnant women, just run-of-the-mill stuff like vitamin B12, which my genetic analysis said I was prone to be deficient in. But I had already been taking some pretty good prenatal vitamins from New Chapter and a DHA supplement from Nordic Naturals for a year leading up to getting pregnant. I had a very healthy, nearly 9.5 pound baby boy in March. My own doctor, who tested my nutritional levels at the beginning of my pregnancy through a blood sample, did not tell me I had any deficiencies.
That’s not to say it wouldn’t be great for someone else looking for optimal nutrition and wanting a boost through supplementation. It’s also a great industry to get into if you know how to market your products. Though crowded, there’s plenty of room to grow and billions of dollars in the vitamin industry for those who can make their products stand out. DNA analysis and liquid supplementation might just be the thing.
FitzGerald tells TechCrunch that Nutrigene has already shipped 8,500 personalized dosages to customers since launching earlier this year.
For those interested in trying out Nutrigene, you can do so by ordering on the website. Package pricing varies and depends on nutritional needs, but starts at around $85 per month.
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Forethought looks to reshape enterprise search with AI
Forethought, a 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant, has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.
The startup takes a bit of an unusual approach to search. Instead of a keyword-driven experience we are used to with Google, Forethought uses an information retrieval model driven by artificial intelligence underpinnings that they then embed directly into the workflow, company co-founder and CEO Deon Nicholas told TechCrunch. They have dubbed their answer engine ‘Agatha.’
Much like any search product, it begins by indexing relevant content. Nicholas says they built the search engine to be able to index millions of documents at scale very quickly. It then uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to read the documents as a human would.
“We don’t work on keywords. You can ask questions without keywords and using synonyms to help understand what you actually mean, we can actually pull out the correct answer [from the content] and deliver it to you,” he said.
One of first use cases where they are seeing traction in is customer support. “Our AI, Agatha for Support, integrates into a company’s help desk software, either Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and then we [read] tickets and suggest answers and relevant knowledge base articles to help close tickets more efficiently,” Nicholas explained. He claims their approach has increased agent efficiency by 20-30 percent.
Forethought at work in Salesforce Service Cloud. Screenshot: Forethought
The plan is to eventually expand beyond the initial customer service use case into other areas of the enterprise and follow a similar path of indexing documents and embedding the solution into the tools that people are using to do their jobs.
When they reach Beta or general release, they will operate as a cloud service where customers sign up, enter their Zendesk or Salesforce credentials (or whatever other products happen to be supported at that point) and the product begins indexing the content.
Forethought in Zendesk. Screenshot: Forethought
The founding team, all in their mid-20s, have had a passion for artificial intelligence since high school. In fact, Nicholas built an AI program to read his notes and quiz him on history while still in high school. Later at the University of Waterloo he published a paper on machine learning and had internships at Palantir, Facebook and Dropbox. His first job out of school was at Pure Storage. All these positions had a common thread of working with data and AI.
The company launched last year and they debuted Agatha in private Beta 4 months ago. They currently have six companies participating, the first of which has been converted to a paying customer.
They have closed a pre-seed round of funding too, and although they weren’t prepared to share the amount, the investment was led by K9 Ventures. While Village Global, Original Capital and other unnamed investors also participated.
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McCarthyFinch AI services platform automates tedious legal tasks
McCarthyFinch sounds a bit like a law firm — and with good reason. The startup has developed an AI as a Service platform aimed at the legal profession. This week, it’s competing in the 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco.
The company began life as a project at a leading New Zealand law firm, MinterEllisonRuddWatts. They wanted to look at how they could take advantage of AI to automate legal processes to make them more efficient, cost-effective and faster, according to company president Richard DeFrancisco.
“They were working on leveraging technology to become the law firm of the future, and they realized there were some pretty tremendous gaps,” he explained. They found a bunch of Ph.Ds working on artificial intelligence who worked with more than 30 lawyers over time to address those gaps by leveraging AI technology.
That internal project was spun out as a startup last year, emerging as an AI platform with 18 services. MinterEllison, along with New Zealand VC Goat Ventures, gave the fledgling company US$2.5 million in pre-seed money to get started.
The company looked at automating a lot of labor-intensive tasks related to legal document review and discovery such as document tagging. “Lawyers spend a lot of time tagging things with regards to what’s relevant and not relevant, and it’s not a good use of their time. We can go through millions of documents very quickly,” DeFrancisco said. He claims they can lower the time it takes to tag a set of documents in a lawsuit from weeks to minutes.
He says that one of their key differentiators is their use of natural language processing (NLP), which he says allows the company to understand language and nuance to interpret documents with a high level of accuracy, even when there are small data sets. Instead of requiring thousands of documents to train their models, which he says law firms don’t have time to do, they can begin to understand the gist of a case in as little as two or three documents with 90 percent accuracy, based on their tests.
They don’t actually want to sell their platform directly to law firms. Instead, they hope to market their artificial intelligence skills as a service to other software vendors with a legal bent who are looking to get smarter without building their own AI from scratch.
“What we are doing is going to technology service providers and talking to them about using our solution. We have restful APIs to integrate into their technology and do a Powered By-model,” DeFrancisco explained.
The startup currently has 10 trials going on. While he couldn’t name them, he did say that they include the largest law firm in Europe, largest global provider of legal information and the fastest growing SaaS company in history. They are also working on agreements with large systems integrators including Deloitte and Accenture to act as resellers of their solution.
While they are based in New Zealand, they plan to open a U.S. office in the Los Angeles area shortly after Disrupt. The engineering team will remain in New Zealand, and DeFrancisco will build the rest of the company in the U.S as it seeks to expand its reach. They also plan to start raising their next round of funding.
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PoLTE lets you track devices using LTE signal
Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF.
If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need a couple of things — a way to determine the location of the package, and a way to transmit this information over the air. The most straightforward way of doing it is by using a GPS chipset combined with a cellular chipset.
Systems-on-chip have made this easier as they usually integrate multiple modules. You can get a GPS signal and wireless capabilities in the same chip. While GPS is insanely accurate, it also requires a ton of battery just to position a device on a map. That’s why devices often triangulate your position using Wi-Fi combined with a database of Wi-Fi networks and their positions.
And yet, using GPS or Wi-Fi as well as an LTE modem doesn’t work if you want to track a container over multiple weeks or months. At some point, your device will run out of battery. Or you’ll have to spend a small fortune to buy a ton of trackers with big batteries.
PoLTE has developed a software solution that lets you turn data from the cell modem into location information. It works with existing modems and only requires a software update. The company has been working with Riot Micro for instance.
Behind the scene PoLTE’s magic happens on their servers. IoT devices don’t need to do any of the computing. They just need to send a tiny sample of LTE signals and PoLTE can figure out the location from their servers. Customers can then get this data using an API.
It only takes 300 bytes of data to get location information with precision of less than a few meters. You don’t need a powerful CPU, Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth.
“We offer 80 percent cost reduction on IoT devices together with longer battery life,” CEO Ed Chao told me.
On the business side, PoLTE is using a software-as-a-service model. You can get started for free if you don’t need a lot of API calls. You then start paying depending on the size of your fleet of devices and the number of location requests.
It doesn’t really matter if the company finds a good business opportunity. PoLTE is a low-level technology company at heart. Its solution is interesting by itself and could help bigger companies that are looking for an efficient location-tracking solution.
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Stealthy wants to become the WeChat of blockchain apps
Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.
On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.
“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.
Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.
Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.
Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.
All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.
Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.
The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.
“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”
When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.
Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.
A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.
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Vital Software comes out of stealth to make ER visits less terrible
After two years operating in stealth, Mint .com founder Aaron Patzer’s new startup Vital Software is open for business.
Patzer made the announcement Wednesday while on the Next Stage at Disrupt SF.
Patzer’s company, which he co-founded with Dr. Justin Schrager of Emory University, is an enterprise software business that aims to make emergency rooms visits easier and more efficient for patients and doctors. The company is tackling the ER experience first and sees opportunity for the software in a hospital or health care facility, Patzer said.
“It’s a terrible experience, and not just because of the emergency,” Patzer said while on stage.
The software features an easy patient check-in system and uses AI natural language processing to find out more from the incoming patient. The system is dynamic, meaning it can ask follow up questions to the incoming patient to gather more information. By the time nurses see the patient, they’re already equipped with the information they need. The software also provides updates to the patient, such as possible wait times.
The idea is to give doctors and nurses software that is useable, Patzer said, noting that software found in hospitals is outdated. “It’s literally Windows 98 software.”
The company is self-funded, although Patzer noted off stage that they plan to raise funds next year. The company has one customer, a large hospital system he couldn’t name, that is now trialing the software.
In his view, software is constant need for disruption. His timeline: about every 10 years. That just happens to put Mint.com, he said, in a spot ripe disruption.
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Kids’ gaming platform Roblox raises $150M
Roblox, which allows kids to create 3D worlds and games, has raised an additional $150 million in funding.
The company didn’t disclose its valuation in the announcement, but a source with knowledge of the deal told us that it valued Roblox at more than $2.5 billion — the price that Microsoft paid to acquire Minecraft four years ago.
“This is a big year for us that fortifies the dream,” said co-founder and CEO David Baszucki .
Earlier this year, Roblox announced that it had become cash-flow positive, and Baszucki told me the company remains “extremely profitable.” So why raise more money?
“First and foremost, the reason to fundraise is to have a war chest, to have a buffer, to have the opportunity to do acquisitions, to have a strong balance sheet as we grow internationally,” he said.
In order to support that growth, Baszucki said Roblox will be opening offices in some regions like China (“most likely with a partner that hasn’t been announced yet”), but it also requires building out infrastructure like local language and local payment support.
Roblox has now raised a total of $185 million in equity funding. The new round was led by Greylock Partners and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Altos Ventures, Index Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and others.
Greylock’s David Sze has had big successes in both gaming and social media, having backed Facebook, LinkedIn, SGN and others. But he said Roblox is the first company he’s seen to “unify those two together on a platform in a magical kind of way.”
Apparently, Sze has known Baszucki for a long time — their kids went to the same school, and Sze remembered Baszucki bringing an early version of Roblox to the science fair. Gaming companies can be a risky investment, because their business relies on creating new hits, but Sze said Roblox is different.
“They aren’t making the games,” Sze said. “They’re letting the long tail of developers develop all the games on the platform, they’re let users decide what the successes are. It’s much more like a YouTube or much more like an Apple with the App Store.”
In a blog post about the funding, Sze even suggested that some of the next big gaming franchises could emerge from the Roblox platform, a prediction he repeated in our interview
“I’d be surprised if there aren’t some huge, high quality games that aren’t originated on Roblox in the next three-to-five years,” he said.
Roblox says it now has more than 70 million monthly active users, with more than 4 million creators who have built more than 40 million-plus experiences.
Of course, having a big platform with lots of user-generated content also creates risks — as illustrated in a recent incident where characters mimed gang raping a young girl’s avatar. (Roblox said a single server had been hacked, allowing users to upload code that violated the company’s rules.)
Asked whether these risks gave him any pause, Sze said, “User protection, user safety, all the aspects of having of having youth on your platform, it takes those things extremely seriously.”
“Are we perfect? No,” he said. “But I can tell you from inside the company that it’s an incredibly high priority. They’ve already done lots of things to help protect and make the user experience the best, and they have a list of stuff that they’re already working on.”
I’ll be interviewing Baszucki on-stage at Disrupt SF this afternoon, so stay tuned to TechCrunch (or come on out to the event!) for more on the funding and his future plans.
This story has been updated with the corrected amount for Roblox’s total funding.
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Space investors are coming to Disrupt SF 2018
In the past couple of decades, Elon Musk’s efforts with SpaceX have partially kicked off a space race in the VC-funded rocket startup scene. At Disrupt SF 2018, we’re thrilled to host a panel of some of Silicon Valley’s top investors whose firms are eyeing the stars.
Rob Coneybeer from Shasta Ventures, Tess Hatch from Bessemer Venture Partners and Matt Ocko from DCVC will all be joining us to discuss their points of view on the commercial space industry and where the major opportunities lie for startups looking to penetrate the market.
We’ll hopefully get a closer look at some of the dominating trends in the industry from the trio whose careers have taken them through legacy space companies and led them to make several investments in young space startups.
Rob Coneybeer is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, a firm he co-founded back in 2004. He has a masters in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked as an engineer in Martin Marietta’s Astro Space division earlier in his career. Coneybeer has directed a number of investments in the space sector, including Accion Systems, Spire and Vector.
Tess Hatch is an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Hatch has a masters in aeronautical engineering from Stanford and has had stints at NASA, SpaceX, Northrup Grumman and Boeing previous to joining Bessemer. She’s currently the board observer for a number of the firm’s investments, including Spire and Rocket Lab.
Matt Ocko co-founded DCVC seven years ago and has continued to serve as the firm’s co-managing director. Ocko has several decades of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Since its co-founding, DCVC has made investments in Akash Systems, Capella Space, Descartes Labs, Planet and Rocket Lab.
We’ll be dialing into the attitudes among investors regarding the competitive arena and we’ll be looking for insights into how the esteemed group sees the industry transforming in the next decade.
Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5-7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.
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Ubiquity6 CEO Anjney Midha is coming to Disrupt SF 2018
2018 has been the year that AR promises came face-to-face with reality. While Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore sparked a ravenous response from developers that had grown worried about VR’s near-term market and the fate of AR headsets from Microsoft and Magic Leap, little seemed to resonate deeply with consumers.
That realization is part of the reason AR startups working on backend services and more base level development pipelines have seen so much success. Onstage at Disrupt SF 2018, we’ll be chatting with Anjney Midha, the CEO of an AR startup called Ubiquity6.
The startup was founded just a year ago but has already raised more than $37 million to solve some of the hardest augmented reality problems that companies like Google and Apple are working hard to solve, as well. Its backers include Google’s Gradient Ventures, First Round, Benchmark and KPCB, where Midha previously ran a small fund.
The company is tackling problems like multiplayer interactions and world mapping as well as issues key to more immersive gameplay like making sure that virtual objects stay tied to physical markers in-between gaming sessions. Ultimately, the company’s work is aiming to promote the Ubiquity6 app to be a hub for AR experiences that will have a development backbone that enables much deeper AR interactions for users.
Ubiquity6 is ambitious about the scale of their AR capabilities. While so many companies are focusing their efforts on how to capture AR interactions taking place in the living room, Ubiquity6 is actively working to map entire cities so it can deliver massive AR experiences that can turn heads (or at least phones).
We’re looking forward to chatting with Midha and hearing about how his startup is planning to compete with some of the world’s biggest tech companies in building out a digital reality that’s projected onto our own.
The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available here.
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