Europe
Auto Added by WPeMatico
The TechCrunch Germany Survey — Calling Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld, Frankfurt
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.
Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.
This is your chance to put Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld and Frankfurt on the TechCrunch Map!
If you are a tech startup founder or investor in these cities please fill out the survey form here.
We are particularly interested in hearing from women founders and investors.
This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.
These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for Extra Crunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.
In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.
This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.
We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19 and generally how your city will evolve.
We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answer to the questions.
So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.
Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.
Powered by WPeMatico
UK’s IoT ‘security by design’ law will cover smartphones too
Smartphones will be included in the scope of a planned “security by design” U.K. law aimed at beefing up the security of consumer devices, the government said today.
It made the announcement in its response to a consultation on legislative plans aimed at tackling some of the most lax security practices long-associated with the Internet of Things (IoT).
The government introduced a security code of practice for IoT device manufacturers back in 2018 — but the forthcoming legislation is intended to build on that with a set of legally binding requirements.
A draft law was aired by ministers in 2019 — with the government focused on IoT devices, such as webcams and baby monitors, which have often been associated with the most egregious device security practices.
Its plan now is for virtually all smart devices to be covered by legally binding security requirements, with the government pointing to research from consumer group “Which?” that found that a third of people kept their last phone for four years, while some brands only offer security updates for just over two years.
The forthcoming legislation will require smartphone and device makers like Apple and Samsung to inform customers of the duration of time for which a device will receive software updates at the point of sale.
It will also ban manufacturers from using universal default passwords (such as “password” or “admin”), which are often preset in a device’s factory settings and easily guessable — making them meaningless in security terms.
California already passed legislation banning such passwords in 2018 with the law coming into force last year.
Under the incoming U.K. law, manufacturers will additionally be required to provide a public point of contact to make it simpler for anyone to report a vulnerability.
The government said it will introduce legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows.
Commenting in a statement, digital infrastructure minister Matt Warman added: “Our phones and smart devices can be a gold mine for hackers looking to steal data, yet a great number still run older software with holes in their security systems.
“We are changing the law to ensure shoppers know how long products are supported with vital security updates before they buy and are making devices harder to break into by banning easily guessable default passwords.
“The reforms, backed by tech associations around the world, will torpedo the efforts of online criminals and boost our mission to build back safer from the pandemic.”
A DCMS spokesman confirmed that laptops, PCs and tablets with no cellular connection will not be covered by the law, nor will secondhand products. Although he added that the intention is for the scope to be adaptive, to ensure the law can keep pace with new threats that may emerge around devices.
Powered by WPeMatico
BlaBlaCar raises $115 million to build all-in-one travel app
French startup BlaBlaCar has raised a new $115 million funding round (€97 million). While the company is better known for its long distance carpooling marketplace, BlaBlaCar has also added a bus marketplace with the acquisition of Ouibus and an online bus ticketing platform with the acquisition of Busfor.
Existing investor VNV Global is leading the round. Two new investors are also participating — Otiva J/F AB and FMZ Ventures. Otiva J/F AB is a fund created by Avito founders Jonas Nordlander and Filip Engelbert. If you’re not familiar with Avito, they specialize in classified ads for the Russian market. Classified giant and global tech investor Naspers acquired Avito. As for FMZ Ventures, it’s a growth fund created by Michael Zeisser, who previously led investments for Alibaba and was a board member at Lyft and Tripadvisor.
It’s a convertible note, which means that the valuation will depend on the next financial event, such as another fundraising round or an initial public offering. But BlaBlaCar co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson consider it as a “pre-IPO convertible” round as BlaBlaCar still has a ton of cash on its bank account.
“We already had a lot of cash before this round and we still have more than €200 million in cash following this funding round,” Brusson told me.
Even if BlaBlaCar doesn’t go public right away (or doesn’t raise), there’s a clause with a time frame. After a while, those $115 million will convert into BlaBlaCar shares at a $2 billion valuation in case there’s no financial event.
BlaBlaCar’s strategy and goal with today’s funding round could be summed up with three pillars — carpooling, buses and aggregation.
Let’s start with carpooling, BlaBlaCar’s core business. The company started 15 years ago with a simple goal — matching empty car seats with passengers going in the same direction. While last year’s lockdown has impacted carpooling, it shouldn’t be compared with trains or flights.
“With our carpooling network, there’s no fixed costs,” Brusson said. So BlaBlaCar isn’t paying to put empty cars on the road as everything is community-powered. But, of course, as BlaBlaCar takes a cut from each transaction, revenue took a hit during last year’s lockdown.
Activity bounced back last summer and it’s been up and down ever since depending on current restrictions. “Car is and will be the universal connector that doesn’t rely on train stations or bus stops,” Brusson said.
The carpooling marketplace will always remain a strong revenue generator. In 2020 alone, BlaBlaCar had 50 million passengers across 22 markets overall. In other words, never bet against carpooling.
For the past few years, BlaBlaCar’s second pillar has been buses. In particular, buses represent a huge opportunity in emerging markets and Eastern Europe.
There are already a ton of buses on the road, you simply can’t buy tickets online. BlaBlaCar’s total addressable market in this category is huge and the company is mostly focused on moving offline supply to its online marketplace.
That’s why the company is also acquiring Octobus, a Ukrainian company working on an inventory management system for bus supply. “It consolidates our tech stack in the region,” Brusson said.
Finally, BlaBlaCar’s third pillar is all about creating loyal users that keep coming back to the platform. The company wants to build a multimodal app where you can find all shared travel — carpooling, buses and soon trains.
The startup will add train operators on its marketplace by the end of 2021 or early 2022. I asked Brusson whether he wanted to build an Omio competitor. Formerly known as GoEuro, Omio lets you book train tickets, bus tickets and flights on a single platform.
BlaBlaCar wants to follow a different strategy. It wants to focus first on a handful of countries so that it can sell everything a local would expect.
Eventually, you could imagine opening the BlaBlaCar app to find the best way to go from A to B. It could involve a train ticket followed by a carpooling ride to reach a tiny town. Or it could mix carpooling with bus rides. Thanks to BlaBlaCar’s reach, the French startup is uniquely positioned to connect two small cities through shared transportation.
Powered by WPeMatico
FintechOS nabs $60M for a low-code approach to modernizing legacy banking and insurance services
“Challenger” startups in banking and insurance have upended their industries, and picked up significant business, by building more customer-friendly tools and services — more personalized, easier to access and usually competitively priced — than those typically provided by their bigger, incumbent rivals. Now, a startup out of Romania that is building tools to help the incumbents respond with better services of their own is announcing a significant round of funding as its business grows.
FintechOS, which has built a low-code platform aimed at larger (older) banking and insurance companies to help them build new services and analytics on top of and around their existing infrastructure, has raised €51 million ($61.5 million at today’s rates, but $60 million at the time of the deal closing) in a Series B round of funding.
FintechOS’s opportunity has been to target the wave of incumbents in the insurance and banking industries that have been slowly watching as newer players like Lemonade (in insurance) and a huge plethora of challenger banks (Revolut, N26, Monzo and many others) are swooping in and picking up customers, especially among younger demographics, while they have been unable to respond mostly because their infrastructure is too old and big. Turning a huge ship around, as we have seen, is no small task — a situation that has become only more apparent in the last year of pandemic living and the big shift to digital interactions that resulted from it.
“When we launched FintechOS in 2017, we could already see existing solutions to digital transformation would struggle to deliver tangible results. By contrast, our unique approach has quickly inspired a sea-change in how financial institutions address digitization and engage with their customers,” said Teodor Blidarus, co-founder and CEO at FintechOS, in a statement. “Events over the last year have only increased pressure on our industry to evolve and as a result we’re seeing growing demand for our powerful platforms. Our latest round of funding will help us grow at the pace needed to improve outcomes for financial institutions and their customers globally.”
(It is not the only one. Others out of Europe in the space of bringing new tools to incumbent banks to help them make more modern and competitive products include 10x, Thought Machine, Temenos, Mambu and many more.)
The Series B round of funding is being led by Draper Esprit, with Earlybird, Gapminder Ventures, Launchub and OTB Ventures (which all participated in its Series A in December 2019) also participating. There are other backers in the round that are not being disclosed at this time, the startup added. FintechOS is also not disclosing its valuation. The company, based out of Bucharest, has raised just under $80 million to date.
FintechOS is active today in the U.K. and Europe — where it has been growing at a CAGR of 200% and says its services touch “millions” of people, with some of its key customers including the likes of banking giants Societe Generale and IdeaBank and international insurance brokers Howden. The plan will be to continue investing in those markets, as well as expanding internationally.
And it will be adding more services. Today, the banking platform is designed to help banks launch more retail services for consumers and small and medium business customers, and for insurance companies to build new health, life and general insurance products (there are a lot of synergies in how insurance and financial services companies have been built over the years, and so it’s a natural couplet when it comes to building tools for those industries).
In the financial sector, FintechOS lets banks build in new digital onboarding flows, credit cards and loan products, savings and mortgage products. Insurance products include new approaches to generating and handling quotes, customer onboarding and management and claims automation — which may well bring FintechOS into closer contact and collaboration with the most successful startup to come out of its home country to date, the RPA juggernaut UiPath. In all cases, it helps stitch together data from a bank’s own systems with more modern tooling, and to link that up with yet more modern tools to help process that data more easily.
This is “low code,” but it typically means that the company needs to work with third parties to enable all of this. Partners include the likes of integrators and other global services technicians, such as Microsoft, Deloitte, CapGemini, KPMG and so on. (And the founders of the startup themselves come from consulting backgrounds so they well understand the role these companies play in the process of bringing technology into big businesses.)
FintechOS is tapping into a couple of very big trends that have arguably been the biggest in the financial and related insurance industries.
The first of these is the fact that core services around things like credit/loans, current deposits and savings are not just very complex to build but actually have largely become commoditized — similar to digital payments — and so packaging them up and turning them into services that can be integrated by way of an API makes them more easily accessed without the heavy lifting needed to build them from scratch. This lets companies focus instead on customer service or building more interesting tools around those basic services to customise them (for example AI-based personalization). Disintermediating basic functions from the services built around them is arguably a bigger trend, but it has been especially prevalent in enterprise, which has long been a slow-moving space when it comes to innovation in the back-end, and the front-end.
The second of these is the big swing toward using no-code and low-code tools to empower more people within organizations to get stuck in when they can see something not working as efficiently as it could, and building the workflows themselves to improve that. This also applies to trying out and testing new products — again something that typically has not been done in financial and insurance services but can now be possible with low-code and no-code tools.
“Not only is our technology helping financial institutions become customer centric, but it’s also helping them provide products and services to more people and businesses,” said Sergiu Negut, the other co-founder who is FintechOS’s CFO and COO, in a separate statement. “With so many markets still underserved, the ability to tailor offerings to a segment of one offers the opportunity to increase financial inclusion and adheres to our ideal that easy access to financial services is essential. We’re delighted to be working with investors who share our views on how fintech should be transforming the financial services industry.”
Notably, Draper Esprit also has backed Thought Machine, another big player in the world of fintech that is taking some of the learnings and models that have helped new entrants disrupt incumbents, and is packaging them up as services for incumbents, too. It takes a different approach to doing this, not using low-code but smart contracts, which could be one reason why the VC doesn’t see the investments as conflict of interest. They are also tackling an enormous market, and so at least for now there is room for them, and many others in the space, such as 10x, Temenos, Mambu, Rapyd and many others.
“When we met Teo and Sergiu, we were immediately convinced of their vision: a data led, end-to-end platform, facilitated with a low-code/no-code infrastructure,” Vinoth Jayakumar, partner at Draper Esprit, said in a statement. “Incumbent financial services firms have cost-to-income ratios up to 90%, so we see a huge and increasing need for infrastructure software that allows digitisation at speed, ease and lower cost. Draper Esprit builds enduring partnerships; with the team at FintechOS we hope to build an enduring fintech company that will dramatically change financial services experiences for people all over the world.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Payhawk raises $20M to unify corporate cards, payments and expenses
Fintech startup Payhawk has raised a $20 million funding round. QED Investors is leading the round with existing investor Earlybird Digital East also participating. Payhawk is building a unified system to manage all the money that is going in and out.
Essentially, companies switching to Payhawk can replace several services they already use and that didn’t interact well with each other. Payhawk lets you issue corporate cards for your employees, manage invoices and track payments from a single interface.
After signing up, customers get their own banking details with a dedicated IBAN. You can connect with your existing bank account, load funds to your Payhawk account and start using it in multiple ways.
Compared to other companies working on similar products, Payhawk gives each customer their own IBAN, which means they can receive third-party payments.
One of the key features of Payhawk is that customers can issue virtual and physical cards for employees with different rules. You can set up a team budget, configure an approval workflow for large transactions and let Payhawk handle receipt collection from those card transactions.
You can upload invoices to manage them through Payhawk. The startup tries to automatically extract data from those invoices for easier reconciliation. Payhawk also lets you reimburse employees. The service acts as a single source of truth for your company’s spending. Finally, you can connect Payhawk with your existing ERP system.
As a software-as-a-service solution, you pay a monthly subscription fee that will vary depending on optional features and the number of active cards. Clients include LuxAir, Lotto24, Viking Life, ATU, Gtmhub, MacPaw and By Miles. Overall, the startup has 200 clients.
The company has been growing nicely as revenue doubled in Q1 2021. It currently accepts clients in the European Union and the U.K. but it already plans to expand beyond those markets. Up next, Payhawk plans to launch credit cards, more currencies and tighter integration with corporate bank accounts.
Powered by WPeMatico
European VC soars in Q1
A stunning first quarter in venture capital funding was not restricted to the United States; Europe also had one hell of a start to the year.
According to data from Dealroom and Crunchbase News, an investor, and an analyst from PitchBook, European startups put together an impressive fundraising haul. The venture capital world kicked off its 2021 European investing cycle with enough activity to set the continent on the path that would crush yearly records.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Inside the data, there’s lots to unpack, including which sectors of European startups stood out in terms of capital raised, rising seed and late-stage deals, and dollar volume. We’ll also need to discuss exits — the Deliveroo IPO and its various woes was not the only transaction from the period worth understanding.
As with our prior looks at AI startup fundraising and the United States’ own blistering start to the year, we’ll lean on multiple sources to ensure that we have a wide lens. And we’ll keep in mind that all venture capital data lags reality somewhat, as many deals from a particular period are not disclosed or discovered until long after they actually occurred.
In this case, it makes the numbers all the more impressive. Let’s get into the data.
The big numbers
Dealroom was first out of the gate, reporting that European startups had a record quarter in Q1 2021 back when April just got started. Its preliminary results for the first quarter indicated that startups on the continent raised €16.6 billion, or $19.9 billion at today’s exchange rates.
That total was not only a record, but what Dealroom described as double the results of Q1 2020. While we’ve become slightly inured in recent months to the venture capital market’s rapid pace and capital-rich environment, it’s worth considering for a moment, as the first quarter of last year ended, how few of us would have guessed that just a year later — as COVID-19 still harms public health and disrupts life and business — we’d see numbers like this.
The Dealroom data, however, was not all records. Round volume by the group’s estimates was down from the year-ago period, if slightly better than the last few quarters. The general move toward the later-stage and larger-round venture capital market is alive and well in Europe.
Powered by WPeMatico
Alan raises $220 million for its health insurance and healthcare superapp
French startup Alan has raised a $220 million funding round at a $1.67 billion valuation (€185 million and €1.4 billion respectively). Coatue is leading the round with Dragoneer, Exor, and existing investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek also participating.
Alan has been building health insurance products from scratch. When I first covered the company back in 2016, the startup had just managed to get approval from regulators to become an official health insurance company.
Since then, it’s been a not-so-slow-and-steady growth story as the company now covers 160,000 people. Overall, Alan generates over €100 million in annualized revenue. While most of that revenue is spent back on claims, it’s an impressive revenue trajectory.
Like other insurance companies, Alan has some capital requirements to comply with health insurance regulation. Alan has to raise more if it wants to insure more people. But that’s just part of the story as the startup still had enough cash on its bank account for the next 12 to 18 months.
“The context is that we managed to end the year 2020 very strong, finally — and I say finally because it’s been stressful until the last minute,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve told me.
Alan managed to meet its goals and international expansion finally started to take off. Many startups try to raise when they’re in a strong position. You shouldn’t wait until you have your back against the wall and that’s exactly what’s happening here.
“We thought it was the right time and we had multiple term sheets. Even though valuation is really good we first looked at a partner that has a really long-term vision,” Samuelian-Werve said.
With today’s funding round, the company can iterate on its core product — health insurance — and everything that makes Alan a superapp — a single app that lets you access several services. In France, employees are covered by both the national healthcare system and private insurance companies. Alan sells its products to other companies so that their employees are automatically covered by Alan contracts. It’s a sort of B2B2C play.
9,400 companies have opted for Alan in France, Belgium and Spain — the company’s home market remains its main market. Clients include WeWork, Deliveroo, JustEat, Vitaliance and Big Mamma. By 2023, Alan wants to reach 1 million members.
In order to gain more customers, Alan is betting on three pillars — product innovation, customer satisfaction through additional services, and expansions to new verticals and markets.
When it comes to product innovation, Alan has designed a modular insurance builder. Small companies can subscribe to Alan in a few clicks. Big companies can tweak every single parameter to build the right insurance package for them.
After that, the company tries to make it easy to manage your health insurance. You’ll soon be able to automatically manage sick leaves, change the employee affiliation status, etc. As for employees, the company has always promoted a transparent offering. For instance, you should know how much you’re going to pay out of pocket when you see a doctor. You can see a map of doctors around you and how much they charge on average. This way, there’s no surprise.
Alan also tries to reimburse you as quickly as possible. If it’s a straightforward claim, the startup tries to analyze and categorize your claim as quickly as possible and then issue an instant SEPA transfer. Seventy-five percent of claims are reimbursed and available on your bank account in less than an hour.
These core product features definitely contributes to customer satisfaction. But Alan is expanding beyond insurance products with several additional services that should increase retention. For instance, you can chat with a doctor, get medical advice for your baby’s health, get a free meditation app subscription, start a telehealth appointment via a partner, talk with someone about your mental health, etc.
Those services contribute to turning Alan into a superapp for your health. Essentially, as soon as you’re insured by Alan, you become a member and can access all those services without additional charges.
Eventually, Alan plans to launch a personal care guidance service to help you contact the right healthcare professional based on your health issue. In Spain, Alan can already book appointments for you.
Finally, Alan plans to reach new customers through aggressive expansion goals. The company plans to hire 400 people within the next three years and expand to other industries with tailor-made insurance products, such as retail, wholesale and manufacturing.
While the company is still going to focus on France, Belgium and Spain in the near future, it is looking at opportunities across Europe. So let’s see where Alan is going to expand next.
Powered by WPeMatico
Andela begins global expansion in 37 countries months after going remote across Africa
More than a year after the pandemic began, remote work shows no signs of going away. While it has its cons, it remains top of mind for potential employees around the world before joining a new company.
But while most people in Africa still go to physical offices despite the pandemic, a few companies have nevertheless embraced this concept. Andela, a New York-based startup that helps tech companies build remote engineering teams from Africa, was one of the first to publicly announce it was going remote on the continent.
Today, it is doubling down on this effort by announcing the global expansion of its engineering talent. Over the past six months, the company has seen a 750% increase in applicants outside Africa. More than 30% of Andela’s inbound engineer applications also came from outside the continent in March alone. Half this number came from Latin America while Africa saw a 500% increase in applications as well.
When Andela launched in 2014, it built hubs in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to source, vet and train engineers to be part of remote teams for international companies. It also tested satellite models in Egypt and Ghana as substitutes to physical hubs.
The company would issue a call for applications, select a few (less than 1%), pay them a salary for the first six months and provide them with housing and food. It also helped developers improve their skills via training and mentorship. Over 100,000 engineers have taken part in the company’s learning network and community, and, as of 2019, Andela had more than 1,500 engineers on its payroll.
However, after noticing that this model wasn’t sustainable, it began to make changes.
In September 2019, it let go of 420 junior engineers across Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. Nine months later, citing the pandemic, it laid off 135 employees while introducing salary cuts for senior staff. But despite the layoffs, the pandemic provided some form of clarity to how Andela wanted to operate — which was remote, judging by the success of the satellite models.
“In the very beginning, a developer had to be in Lagos to work with Andela. Then it became living in Nigeria. Then Kenya. Then Uganda, Rwanda,” CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch. “Before the pandemic, Andela was opening applications in country after country. The pandemic came and changed that as we opened up to the entire continent.”
Shutting down its existing physical campuses and going remote also helped the company focus on getting engineers with more experience to meet its clients’ requirements. That experiment, which the company conducted in less than a year, is also part of its mission to be a global company.
“That went so well and we thought ‘what if we accelerated it now that we’re remote and just enable applicants from anywhere?’ because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question. We did that and it’s been an amazing experiment,” Johnson added.
Now with its global expansion, its clients can tap into regional expertise to support international growth.
According to a statement released by the firm, it currently has engineers from 37 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe.
Johnson didn’t go into details about how many of these engineers are getting jobs from Andela or even its total developer count. He’s more interested in helping its clients solve the diversity issues that have plagued many Western corporations.
Andela is currently working with eight companies that have hired its engineers in Latin America and Africa. In addition to the diversity play, the CEO says that means Andela engineers get to prove themselves on a global playing field in a way the company has “always wanted to see.”
Andela serves more than 200 customers, including GitHub, ViacomCBS, Pluralsight, Seismic, Cloudflare, Coursera and InVision. GitHub is one company that seems to be benefitting from Andela’s new offerings. The company’s VP of Engineering, Dana Lawson, in a statement said, “As a business in the developer tool space, a lot of us are trying to enter those areas of the world (Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa) where the emergent developers are coming so we can better understand their needs. Having a local presence there with amazing talent is super valuable to building a global product.”
Image Credits: Andela
In its quest to become a global company, going up against competition is unavoidable for the seven-year-old company. But since most of these companies are horizontal marketplaces (providing a wide range of expertise), whereas Andela is vertical, Johnson believes there’s enough market share to be acquired by the company.
“We are focused on building digital products, and because of that, we’re able to do more, essentially, for our customers… That’s where our focus is — [building long-term relationships] and around building great digital products,” the CEO said.
The company was founded by Jeremy Johnson, Christina Sass, Nadayar Enegesi, Ian Carnevale, Brice Nkengsa and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji. It has raised more than $180 million (up to Series D) from firms like Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Generation Investment Management, Google Ventures and Spark Capital, at a valuation of about $700 million.
While announcing the layoffs last year, Andela said it was on an annual revenue run rate of $50 million. But when asked how this number has changed over the past year, Johnson said the company is “growing at a healthier pace as we’ve ever had.”
The future of remote work is global and Johnson believes Andela provides the vital link to talent wherever it is found. The company’s head of talent operations, Martin Chikilian, echoed similar sentiments regarding the expansion.
“We’ve seen exponential growth and interest from engineers from across Africa who want to work with some of the world’s most exciting technology-focused companies,” he said. “Growing our network of talent from Africa to include more markets is a unique proposition and we continue to match talent with opportunity beyond geographical boundaries.”
Powered by WPeMatico
AI-driven audio cloning startup gives voice to Einstein chatbot
You’ll need to prick up your ears for this slice of deepfakery emerging from the wacky world of synthesized media: A digital version of Albert Einstein — with a synthesized voice that’s been (re)created using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio recordings of the famous scientist’s actual voice.
The startup behind the “uncanny valley” audio deepfake of Einstein is Aflorithmic (whose seed round we covered back in February).
While the video engine powering the 3D character rending components of this “digital human” version of Einstein is the work of another synthesized media company — UneeQ — which is hosting the interactive chatbot version on its website.
Alforithmic says the “digital Einstein” is intended as a showcase for what will soon be possible with conversational social commerce. Which is a fancy way of saying deepfakes that make like historical figures will probably be trying to sell you pizza soon enough, as industry watchers have presciently warned.
The startup also says it sees educational potential in bringing famous, long-deceased figures to interactive “life”.
Or, well, an artificial approximation of it — the “life” being purely virtual and Digital Einstein’s voice not being a pure tech-powered clone either; Alforithmic says it also worked with an actor to do voice modelling for the chatbot (because how else was it going to get Digital Einstein to be able to say words the real-deal would never even have dreamt of saying — like, er, “blockchain”?). So there’s a bit more than AI artifice going on here too.
“This is the next milestone in showcasing the technology to make conversational social commerce possible,” Alforithmic’s COO Matt Lehmann told us. “There are still more than one flaws to iron out as well as tech challenges to overcome but overall we think this is a good way to show where this is moving to.”
In a blog post discussing how it recreated Einstein’s voice the startup writes about progress it made on one challenging element associated with the chatbot version — saying it was able to shrink the response time between turning around input text from the computational knowledge engine to its API being able to render a voiced response, down from an initial 12 seconds to less than three (which it dubs “near-real-time”). But it’s still enough of a lag to ensure the bot can’t escape from being a bit tedious.
Laws that protect people’s data and/or image, meanwhile, present a legal and/or ethical challenge to creating such “digital clones” of living humans — at least not without asking (and most likely paying) first.
Of course historical figures aren’t around to ask awkward questions about the ethics of their likeness being appropriated for selling stuff (if only the cloning technology itself, at this nascent stage). Though licensing rights may still apply — and do in fact in the case of Einstein.
“His rights lie with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who is a partner in this project,” says Lehmann, before ‘fessing up to the artist licence element of the Einstein “voice cloning” performance. “In fact, we actually didn’t clone Einstein’s voice as such but found inspiration in original recordings as well as in movies. The voice actor who helped us modelling his voice is a huge admirer himself and his performance captivated the character Einstein very well, we thought.”
Turns out the truth about high-tech “lies” is itself a bit of a layer cake. But with deepfakes it’s not the sophistication of the technology that matters so much as the impact the content has — and that’s always going to depend upon context. And however well (or badly) the faking is done, how people respond to what they see and hear can shift the whole narrative — from a positive story (creative/educational synthesized media) to something deeply negative (alarming, misleading deepfakes).
Concern about the potential for deepfakes to become a tool for disinformation is rising, too, as the tech gets more sophisticated — helping to drive moves toward regulating AI in Europe, where the two main entities responsible for “Digital Einstein” are based.
Earlier this week a leaked draft of an incoming legislative proposal on pan-EU rules for “high risk” applications of artificial intelligence included some sections specifically targeted at deepfakes.
Under the plan, lawmakers look set to propose “harmonised transparency rules” for AI systems that are designed to interact with humans and those used to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content. So a future Digital Einstein chatbot (or sales pitch) is likely to need to unequivocally declare itself artificial before it starts faking it — to avoid the need for internet users to have to apply a virtual Voight-Kampff test.
For now, though, the erudite-sounding interactive Digital Einstein chatbot still has enough of a lag to give the game away. Its makers are also clearly labelling their creation in the hopes of selling their vision of AI-driven social commerce to other businesses.
Powered by WPeMatico
Sales scheduling platform Chili Piper raises $33M Series B funding led by Tiger Global
Chili Piper, which has a sophisticated SaaS appointment scheduling platform for sales teams, has raised a $33 million B round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused VC) also participated. This brings the company’s total financing to $54 million. The company will use the capital raised to accelerate product development. The previous $18 million A round was led by Base10 and Google’s Gradient Ventures nine months ago.
It’s main competitor is Calendly, started 2 1/2 years previously, which recently achieved a $3 billion valuation.
Launched in 2016, Chili Piper’s software for B2B revenue teams is designed to convert leads into attended meetings. Sales teams can also use it to book demos, increase inbound conversion rates, eliminate manual lead routing and streamline critical processes around meetings. It’s used by Intuit, Twilio, Forrester, Spotify and Gong.
Chili Piper has a number of different tools for businesses to schedule and calendar accountments, but its key USP is in its use by “inbound SDR Sales Development Representatives (SDR)”, who are responsible for qualifying inbound sales leads. It’s particularly useful in scheduling calls when customers hit websites and ask for a salesperson to call them back.
Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO, and co-founder of Chili Piper said: “When we started we sold the house and decided to grow the company ourselves. So all the way until 2019 we bootstrapped. Tiger gave us a valuation that we expected to get at the end of this year, which will help us accelerate things much faster, so we couldn’t refuse it.”
Alina Vandenberghe, CPO and co-founder said: “We’re proud to have so many customers scheduling meetings and optimizing their calendars with Chili Piper’s Instant Booker.”
The husband-and-wife-founded company was fully remote from day one, with 93 employees in 81 cities and 21 countries, long before the pandemic hit.
John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global said: “When we met Nicolas and Alina, we were fired up by their product vision and focus on customer happiness.”
TJ Nahigian, managing partner at Base10 Partners, added: “We originally invested in Chili Piper because we knew customers needed ways to add fire to how they connected with inbound leads. We’ve been absolutely blown away with the progress over the past year, 2020 has been a step-change for this company as business went remote.”
Powered by WPeMatico