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TestBox launches with $2.7M seed to make it easier to test software before buying
When companies are considering buying a particular software service, they typically want to test it in their own environments, a process that can be surprisingly challenging. TestBox, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a fully working package with pre-populated data to give the team a way to test and collaborate on the product before making a buying decision.
Today the company announced it was making the product widely available; they also announced a $2.7 million seed round from SignalFire and Firstminute Capital along with several other investors and industry angels.
Company co-founder Sam Senior says he and his co-founder Peter Holland recognized that it was challenging for companies buying software to test it in a realistic way. “So TestBox is the very first time that companies are going to be able to test drive multiple pieces of enterprise software with an insanely easy-to-use live environment that’s uniquely configured to them with guided walk-throughs to make it really easy for them to get up to speed,” Senior explained.
He says that until now, even with free versions or free testing periods, it was hard to test and collaborate in that kind of environment with key stakeholders in the company. TestBox comes pre-populated with data generated by GPT-3 OpenAI to test how the software behaves and lets participants grade different features on a simple star rating system and provide comments as needed. All the feedback is recorded in a “notebook,” giving the company a central place to gather all the data.
What’s more, it puts the company buying the software more in control of the process instead of being driven by the vendor, which is typically the case. “Actually, now [the customer gets to] be the one who defines the experience, making them lead the process, while making it collaborative, and giving them more confidence [in their decision],” he said.
For now, the company plans to concentrate on customer support software and is working with Zendesk, HubSpot and Freshdesk, but has plans to expand and add partners over time. It has been talking with Salesforce about adding Service Cloud and hopes to have them in some form on the platform later this year. It also plans to expand into other verticals over time, like CRM, martech and IT help desks.
Senior is a former Bain consultant who worked with companies buying enterprise software, and saw the issues firsthand that they faced when it came to testing software before buying. He quit his job last summer, and began by talking to 70 customers, vendors and experts to get a real sense of what they were looking for in a solution.
He then teamed up with Holland and built the first version of the software before raising their seed money last October. The company began hiring in February and has eight employees at this point, but he wants to keep it pretty lean through the early stage of the company’s development.
Even at this early stage, the company is already taking a diverse approach to hiring. “Already when we have been working with recruiting firms, we’ve been saying that they need to split the pipeline as much as they can, and that’s been something we have spent a long, long time on. […] We spent actually six months with an open role on the front end because we are looking to build more diversity in our team as quickly as possible,” he said.
He reports that the company has a fairly equitable gender and ethnic split to this point, and holds monthly events to raise awareness internally about different groups, letting employees lead the way when it makes sense.
At least for now, he’s planning on running the company in a distributed manner, but acknowledges that as it gets bigger, he may have to look at having a centralized office as a home base.
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Food robotics startup Karakuri unveils automated canteen, plus $8.4M investment led by firstminute
Last week I witnessed for myself how a new kind of robot really could — as sci-fi has been telling us for many years — create and serve us food. Today, Karakuri, a food robotics startup, unveils its first automated canteen to make meals: the “DK-One” robot. It’s also revealing an $8.4 million (£6.3 million) investment, led by firstminute capital, which includes funding from Hoxton Ventures, Taylor Brothers, Ocado Group and the U.K.’s government-backed Future Fund. It has now closed a total of £13.5 million in funding.
Karakuri’s robotic system has been initially designed to make breakfast bowls. But the technology will end up being employed in a large array of scenarios, including restaurants, canteens, buffets, hotels and supermarkets. Possibly even tending vertical farms. Its particular strength is in being able to create extremely tailor-made combinations of food, putting “personalized nutrition” within practical reach. Remember those movies where the food is tailored by a robot? That.
The post-COVID world is also highly likely to embrace this technology due to the robot’s inherent cleanliness and efficiency, compared to human-made food. That said, Karakuri is not positioned to replace humans but to augment them, taking on the boring and repetitive tasks which typically see kitchen staff have far more itinerant careers due to the sheer pressure of low-level jobs where a robot would be far more suitable.
The DK-One robot is Karakuri’s first pre-production machine, which uses the latest in robotics, sensing and control technologies. It’s capable of creating high-quality hot and cold meals, which maximize nutritional benefits, restaurant performance and minimize food waste.
Post COVID restrictions, further on-customer-site trials of the DK-One are expected to take place in the first half of 2021.
The DK-One robot zips around a circular enclosure at a rate of knots, each time measuring accurate portion sizes as determined by an app, where the customer can tailor to their tastes. It means anyone ordering something would be able to track the ingredients, nutrients, calories and quantity of literally every meal.
Up to 18 ingredients can be dispensed per installation, with each ingredient temperature controlled. It will dispense of any ingredient type, including wet, dry, soft or hard food onto plates, bowls or a range of meal containers.
Because it’s so accurate it therefore reduces food waste around portions and allows for real-time data on ingredients. The thin margins restaurateurs typically have could be improved by using such a robot in repetitive tasks, and means employees can be tasked with more complex and fruitful and fulfilling work. It’s also easily integrated into existing commercial kitchens.
Barney Wragg, CEO and co-founder of Karakuri, said in a statement: “This will be the first time we can use a pre-production machine to demonstrate the DK-One’s commercial and nutritional benefits in the real world and thus demonstrate our vision for the future of food.”
Karakuri was founded by Simon Watt and Wragg, two longtime friends and colleagues who previously worked together at ARM. In April 2018 the Founders Factory venture studio invested in Karakuri and Brent Hoberman joined the board as chairman (and is also listed as a co-founder).
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Oto snags $5.3M seed to use AI to understand voice intonation
Oto, a startup spun off from research at SRI International to help customer service operations understand voice intonation, announced a $5.3 million seed round today.
Participants in the round included Firstminute Capital, Fusion Fund, Interlace Ventures, SAP.iO and SRI International . The total includes a previous $1 million seed round, according to the company.
Teo Borschberg, co-founder and CEO at Oto, says the company launched out of SRI International, the same company where Apple’s Siri technology was originally developed. It has been developing intonation data, based originally on SRI research, to help customer service operations respond better to caller’s emotions. The goal is to use this area of artificial intelligence to improve interactions between customer service reps (CSRs) and customers in real time.
As part of the research phase, the company compiled a database of 100,000 utterances from 3,000 speakers, culled from two million sales conversations. From this data, it has built a couple of tools to help customer service operations automate intonation understanding.
The first is a live coaching tool. It’s difficult to have management monitor every call, so only a small percentage gets monitored. With Oto, CSRs can get real-time coaching on every call to raise their energy or to calm a frustrated customer before a problem escalates. “In real time, we’re able to guide the agents on how they sound, how energetic they are, and we can nudge and push them to be more energetic,” Borschberg explained.
He says this has three main advantages: more engaged agents, higher sales conversion rates and better satisfaction scores and cost reduction.
The other product measures the quality of a customer experience and gives a score at the end of each call to help the CSR (and their managers) understand how well they did, simply based on intonation. It displays the score in a dashboard. “We’re building a universal understanding of satisfaction from intonation, where we can learn acoustic signatures that are positive, neutral, negative,” Borschberg said.
He sees a huge market opportunity here, pointing to Qualtrics, which sold to SAP last year for $8 billion. He believes that surveying people is just a part of the story. You can build a better customer experience when you understand intonation of just how well that experience is going, and you put it on a scale so that it makes it easy to understand just how well or how poorly you are doing.
The company has 20 employees today, with offices in New York, Zurich and Lisbon. It has seven customers working with the product so far, but it is still early days.
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