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Eight Sleep CEO says his startup is more than a mattress company
Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep, would prefer that you don’t call his startup a mattress company.
Eight Sleep does sell mattresses, albeit smart ones packed with sensors and temperature regulation controls. The company has raised north of $70 million from backers including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. A great deal of this funding surrounds the idea that there is more untapped potential in the sleep economy than existing players in the space have been able to imagine.
While Franceschetti says he intends for his company to remain private for the “foreseeable future,” Eight Sleep is in a less-than-comfortable spot following Casper’s botched IPO last week. Though Casper’s stock popped on its first day of trading, the process of pricing its shares ended up leaving its private investors a bit less than ecstatic. Casper debuted trading at a value of $575 million, a far cry from the $1.1 billion private market valuation it had previously achieved.
Franceschetti has been aiming to transform Eight Sleep into a company more focused on a robust tech platform than your average bed-in-a-box company. The startup’s initial effort, a smart sleep cover for your existing mattress, evolved into a mattress with a layer of sensors that then transformed into a sensor-laden mattress with a heating and cooling unit, called “The Pod.” The company’s product development has aimed to build out a more end-to-end platform for sleep, something Franceschetti says has made him reticent to compare his company to other direct-to-consumer mattress companies.
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RealityEngines launches its autonomous AI service
RealityEngines.AI, an AI and machine learning startup founded by a number of former Google executives and engineers, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its first set of products.
When the company first announced its $5.25 million seed round last year, CEO Bindu Reddy wasn’t quite ready to disclose RealityEngines’ mission beyond saying that it planned to make machine learning easier for enterprises. With today’s launch, the team is putting this into practice by launching a set of tools that specifically tackle a number of standard enterprise use cases for ML, including user churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection and cloud spend optimization. For use cases that don’t fit neatly into these buckets, the service also offers a more general predictive modeling service.
Before co-founding RealiyEngines, Reddy was the head of product for Google Apps and general manager for AI verticals at AWS. Her co-founders are Arvind Sundararajan (formerly at Google and Uber) and Siddartha Naidu (who founded BigQuery at Google). Investors in the company include Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Khosla Ventures and Paul Buchheit.
As Reddy noted, the idea behind this first set of products from RealityEngines is to give businesses an easy entry into machine learning, even if they don’t have data scientists on staff.
Besides talent, another issue that businesses often face is that they don’t always have massive amounts of data to train their networks effectively. That has long been a roadblock for many companies that want to see what AI can do for them but that didn’t have the right resources to do so. RealityEngines overcomes this by creating realistic synthetic data that it can then use to augment a company’s existing data. In its tests, this creates models that are up to 15% more accurate than models that were trained without the synthetic data.
“The most prominent use of generative adversarial networks — GANS — has been to create deepfakes,” said Reddy. “Deepfakes have captured the public’s imagination by highlighting how easy it to spread misinformation with these doctored videos and images. However, GANS can also be applied to productive and good use. They can be used to create synthetic data sets which when then be combined with the original data, to produce robust AI models even when a business doesn’t have much training data.”
RealityEngines currently has about 20 employees, most of whom have a deep background in ML/AI, both as researchers and practitioners.
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Volterra announces $50M investment to manage apps in hybrid environment
Volterra is an early-stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products.
Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology Ventures and Samsung NEXT. The company, which was founded in 2017, already has 100 employees and more than 30 customers.
What attracted these investors and customers is a full-stack solution that includes both hardware and software to manage applications in the cloud or on-prem. Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla says when he was at his previous company, Contrail Systems, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012 for $176 million, he saw first-hand how large companies were struggling with the transition to hybrid.
“The big problem we saw was in building and operating applications that scale is a really hard problem. They were adopting multiple hybrid cloud strategies, and none of them solved the problem of unifying the application and the infrastructure layer, so that the application developers and DevOps teams don’t have to worry about that,” Singla explained.
He says the Volterra solution includes three main products — VoltStack, VoltMesh and VoltConsole — to help solve this scaling and management problem. As Volterra describes the total solution, “Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.” This includes not only the single management plane, but security, management and operations components.
Diagram: Volterra
The money has come over a couple of rounds, helping to build the solution to this point, and it required a complex combination of hardware and software to do it. They are hoping organizations that have been looking for a cloud-native approach to large-scale applications, such as industrial automation, will adopt this approach.
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Voyage raises $31 million to bring driverless taxis to communities
Voyage, the autonomous vehicle startup that spun out of Udacity, announced Thursday it has raised $31 million in a round led by Franklin Templeton.
Khosla Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company, which operates a ride-hailing service in retirement communities using self-driving cars supported by human safety drivers, has raised a total of $52 million since launching in 2017. The new funding includes a $3 million convertible note.
Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron has big plans for the fresh injection of capital, including hiring and expanding its fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, which always have a human safety driver behind the wheel.
Ultimately, the expanded G2 fleet and staff are just the means toward Cameron’s grander mission to turn Voyage into a truly driverless and profitable ride-hailing company.
“It’s not just about solving self-driving technology,” Cameron told TechCrunch in a recent interview, explaining that a cost-effective vehicle designed to be driverless is the essential piece required to make this a profitable business.
The company is in the midst of a hiring campaign that Cameron hopes will take its 55-person staff to more than 150 over the next year. Voyage has had some success attracting high-profile people to fill executive-level positions, including CTO Drew Gray, who previously worked at Uber ATG, Otto, Cruise and Tesla, as well as former NIO and Tesla employee Davide Bacchet as director of autonomy.
Funds will also be used to increase its fleet of second-generation self-driving cars (called G2) that are currently being used in a 4,000-resident retirement community in San Jose, Calif., as well as The Villages, a 40-square-mile, 125,000-resident retirement city in Florida. Voyage’s G2 fleet has 12 vehicles. Cameron didn’t provide details on how many vehicles it will add to its G2 fleet, only describing it as a “nice jump that will allow us to serve consumers.”
Voyage used the G2 vehicles to create a template of sorts for its eventual driverless vehicle. This driverless product — a term Cameron has used in a previous post on Medium — will initially be limited to 25 miles per hour, which is the driving speed within the two retirement communities in which Voyage currently tests and operates. The vehicle might operate at a low speed, but they are capable of handling complex traffic interactions, he wrote.
“It won’t be the most cost-effective vehicle ever made because the industry still is in its infancy, but it will be a huge, huge, huge improvement over our G2 vehicle in terms of being be able to scale out a commercial service and make money on each ride,” Cameron said.
Voyage initially used modified Ford Fusion vehicles to test its autonomous vehicle technology, then introduced in July 2018 Chrysler Pacifica minivans, its second generation of autonomous vehicles. But the end goal has always been a driverless product.
TechCrunch previously reported that the company has partnered with an automaker to provide this next-generation vehicle that has been designed specifically for autonomous driving. Cameron wouldn’t name the automaker. The vehicle will be electric and it won’t be a retrofit like the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid vehicles Voyage currently uses or its first-generation vehicle, a Ford Fusion.
Most importantly, and a detail Cameron did share with TechCrunch, is that the vehicle it uses for its driverless service will have redundancies and safety-critical applications built into it.
Voyage also has deals in place with Enterprise rental cars and Intact insurance company to help it scale.
“You can imagine leasing is much more optimal than purchasing and owning vehicles on your balance sheet,” Cameron said. “We have those deals in place that will allow us to not only get the vehicle costs down, but other aspects of the vehicle into the right place as well.”
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Frontier technologies are moving closer to the center of venture investment
As the technologies that were once considered science fiction become the purview of science, the venture capital firms that were once investing at the industry’s fringes are now finding themselves at the heart of the technology industry.
Investing in the commercialization of technologies like genetic engineering, quantum computing, digital avatars, augmented reality, new human-computer interfaces, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, robots, and space travel that were once considered “frontier” investments are now front-and-center priorities for many venture capital firms and the limited partners that back them.
Earlier this month, Lux Capital raised $1.1 billion across two funds that invest in just these kinds of companies. “[Limited partners] are now more interested in frontier tech than ever before,” said Bilal Zuberi, a partner with the firm.
Lux Capital just closed on a whopping $1 billion in capital, doubling the amount of money it manages
He sees a few factors encouraging limited partners (the investors who provide financing for venture capital funds) to invest in the firms that are financing companies developing technologies that were once considered outside of the mainstream.
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Mylk Guys wants to be the online vegan grocery store that non-vegans can love
Gaurav Maken, the chief executive officer of the online vegan grocery store Mylk Guys, doesn’t think of his company as a place to just buy food. For him, it’s a testing ground and platform for all of the new food products he expects to be developed as startup entrepreneurs and established food companies start tackling the plant-based and alternative-meat market in earnest.
The company has raised $2.5 million in support of that vision from investors, including Khosla Ventures, Pear Ventures and Fifty Years.
“Today we’re an online grocery store,” says Maken. “We are also a place for cultured meats and any genetically engineered food that allows us to scale our food production and allows us to keep feeding people.”
Maken isn’t wedded to plant-based products and envisions a virtual store stocked with products that create more sustainable consumption options for its customers. In fact, 40% of the company’s customers are not vegan, according to Maken.
“We don’t only think about vegans. We think about sustainable food systems,” says Maken. “Our audience is an educated consumer who wants to have less of an impact from their diet… They’re just folks trying to do better with their eating habits.”
Right now, the company sells around 1,300 products through its site. And the pitch that Maken makes to suppliers is that they can access the data around their customers (unlike other online retailers, whose name rhymes with shmamazon).
“We provide analytics and a way for brands to unlock the data coming from their customers,” Maken says. “Our focus is how can we get you a personalized staple that works for you.”
The company’s top sellers are vegan cheeses like Sparrow Camembert, lines of vegan jerkies and the Beyond Burger, Maken said.
“You can build brands that are successful that are $1 million brands or $5 million brands and the reason why you haven’t is because they haven’t had the platform to provide national distribution to be successful,” says Maken.
Mylk Guys launched in 2018 and went through the Y Combinator accelerator program. Now, with its new capital, the company is focusing on expanding its sales and marketing on the East Coast, opening a new warehouse for distribution and reaching out to the vegan community on the Eastern Seaboard.
The model for selling more sustainable foods directly to the consumer has at least one precedent. Los Angeles-based Thrive Market raised $111 million in a 2016 round of funding for its online sustainable product-focused grocery store.
As recent reports indicate, the sustainable food business is only growing. Citing reports from Ecovia Intelligence, the publication Environmental Leader reported that organic food sales topped $100 billion for the first time in 2018.
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Probably Genetic helps families identify genetic conditions early with AI and DNA tests
Children on the autism spectrum often suffer from other medical conditions. As many as one-fifth of those diagnosed with the neurodevelopmental disorder, which affects communication and behavior, have epilepsy, for example, according to research on the subject.
Probably Genetic, which recently graduated from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, wants to test the DNA of children with autism to provide them early diagnoses of more than 15 severe genetic diseases that are often grouped under the initial autism diagnosis. Using machine learning and direct-to-consumer DNA tests, Probably Genetic hopes to provide families of children on the spectrum with more complete and correct diagnoses and a path to appropriate treatment and therapy.
“There is really low awareness still in the medical community for a lot of these diseases,” Probably Genetic co-founder and chief executive officer Lukas Lange tells TechCrunch. “The actual testing happens really really late in the process … Even once you decide that you want to get your kid genetically tested, that process itself is really difficult because if you don’t have a physician in favor of it, patients spend months lobbying to get the test done.”
The startup, which plans to launch this summer, is backed with venture capital funding from Khosla Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, the Oxford Angel Fund and angel investors. Lange, a current PhD candidate in bioinformatics and genetics at the University of Oxford, said the company is keeping the precise amount of capital they’ve raised private, citing a focus on building the best service for special needs families.
“We measure ourselves by how many families we’ve helped, as opposed to how much money we’ve raised,” Lange said.
Unlike 23andMe, which similarly provides genetic testing direct-to-consumer, Probably Genetic is patient-initiated physician-ordered testing, meaning a physician is in the loop throughout the entire process and a DNA test must be deemed “medically necessary” by a Probably Genetic physician — the company partners with several doctors — before it can be ordered.
Probably Genetic performs whole-exome sequencing, a process that can cost upwards of $5,000, to test for genetic disorders in children already diagnosed with autism. Lange said the team is still determining the price of its genetic tests, but assures it will fall under $1,000, or significantly less than other options on the market. Unfortunately, the tests will not be covered by insurance.
The company doesn’t perform genetic sequencing in-house, rather, it partners with a U.S.-based clinical sequencing provider accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and certified through Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Probably Genetic also partners with a bioinformatics service provider that’s plugged into the lab for data analysis purposes.
Parents of children with autism oftentimes have difficulty having their children tested, as Lange mentioned. Not only are these tests costly and infrequently covered by insurance, but they are also not offered by general care practitioners. A family has to receive a referral from their doctor to visit a specialist who will then have the test ordered. Using Probably Genetic, Lange and his co-founder, chief technology officer Harley Katz, hope to create a one-stop shop for complete and early diagnoses, access to genetic counseling services, and information and resources for families of people on the spectrum.
The genetic counseling services, which exist to help families better understand the results of their genetic tests, will be offered through an external service provider initially. In the long-term, Lange said, Probably Genetic will consider hiring their own full-time counselors.
Lange met Katz, a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, six years ago. The pair quickly realized a common interest in accurate diagnosis, or lack thereof, before they decided to focus on autism and its associated conditions.
“We initially thought we are going to build a catch-all for 7,000 different rare diseases,” Lange said. “Pretty quickly we realized a whole lot of people coming to your door have undiagnosed diseases but not all are genetic in nature so if you try to build a catch-all you wouldn’t be able to help a lot of people. So we decided let’s focus on one area that has a much higher likelihood that the patients that come through your door actually have something genetic.”
According to a 2018 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 59 children is diagnosed with autism. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls.
“There’s a big opportunity here to focus on a category that we know already genetics plays a huge role but still an opportunity to find kids who don’t ‘just have autism’ but where there is actually something bigger at play and autism is only a part of their disease presentation.”
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RealityEngines.AI raises $5.25M seed round to make ML easier for enterprises
RealityEngines.AI, a research startup that wants to help enterprises make better use of AI, even when they only have incomplete data, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed funding round. The round was led by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google founding board member Ram Shriram. Khosla Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Deepchand Nishar, Elad Gil, Keval Desai, Don Burnette and others also participated in this round.
The fact that the service was able to raise from this rather prominent group of investors clearly shows that its overall thesis resonates. The company, which doesn’t have a product yet, tells me that it specifically wants to help enterprises make better use of the smaller and noisier data sets they have and provide them with state-of-the-art machine learning and AI systems that they can quickly take into production. It also aims to provide its customers with systems that can explain their predictions and are free of various forms of bias, something that’s hard to do when the system is essentially a black box.
As RealityEngines CEO Bindu Reddy, who was previously the head of products for Google Apps, told me, the company plans to use the funding to build out its research and development team. The company, after all, is tackling some of the most fundamental and hardest problems in machine learning right now — and that costs money. Some, like working with smaller data sets, already have some available solutions like generative adversarial networks that can augment existing data sets and that RealityEngines expects to innovate on.
Reddy is also betting on reinforcement learning as one of the core machine learning techniques for the platform.
Once it has its product in place, the plan is to make it available as a pay-as-you-go managed service that will make machine learning more accessible to large enterprise, but also to small and medium businesses, which also increasingly need access to these tools to remain competitive.
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As Alzheimer’s costs soar, startups like Neurotrack raise cash to diagnose and treat the disease
As studies show that early diagnosis and preventative therapies can help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s, startups that are working to diagnose the disease earlier are gaining more attention and funding.
That’s a boon to companies like Neurotrack, which closed on $21 million in new financing led by the company’s previous investor, Khosla Ventures, with participation from new investors Dai-ichi Life and SOMPO Holdings.
Last year, the Japanese life insurance company Dai-ichi Life partnered with Neurotrack to roll out a cognitive assessment tool to the company’s customers in Japan.
And earlier this year, the Japanese health insurer SOMPO conducted a 16-week pilot with Neurotrack, where more than 550 of SOMPO’s employees took Neurotrack’s test and followed the Memory Health Program for four months. Neurotrack and SOMPO are now working to deepen and extend their partnership.
“As the global crisis around Alzheimer’s continues to grow, the private sector is joining government and nonprofits to address the problem in their markets. In Japan, for example, traditional insurance companies are developing novel solutions that incorporate Neurotrack’s products to advance better memory health among its population,” said Elli Kaplan, Neurotrack co-founder and CEO. “These partnerships are innovative models that we hope to replicate in other markets, enabling traditional insurance companies to create new markets while helping to address the Alzheimer’s crisis. And now they’re also investing in our company, so these companies have two ways of doing well by doing good.”
Neurodegenerative disorders are becoming a more serious issue for the island nation — and the rest of the world. In fact, over the weekend the G20 first raised the possibility that aging populations could be a global risk.
“Most of the G20 nations already experience or will experience ageing,” Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda, told reporters from Agence France Presse. “We need to discuss problems that arise with societal ageing and how to deal with them.”
In the U.S., the estimated cost of caring for Americans with Alzheimer’s and other dementias was an estimated $277 billion in 2018, according to a study cited by WebMD. Roughly $186 billion of those costs are borne by Medicare and Medicaid, with another $60 billion in payments coming out-of-pocket. That number could top $1.1 trillion by 2050, according to the same report.
Neurotrack uses cognitive assessments that follow eye movements using the camera on a computer or mobile phone to create a baseline for cognitive functions. The company then uses a combination of brain training and diet, exercise and sleep adjustments to try to improve cognitive function and health.
Its technology is one of several different approaches startups are taking to try to provide early diagnoses and potential preventative measures against the disease.
MyndYou, another company tackling neurodegenerative diagnostics, uses an app to monitor movement among its users. The company assesses that data to determine whether there may be any issues related to cognitive function. It recently partnered with the Japanese company Mizuho to test its efficacy among Japan’s aging population.
Then there’s Altoida, another startup that launched recently to tackle the cognitive assessment market. It uses augmented reality and a series of memory tests to assess brain function and attempt to detect neurodegeneration.
Neurotrack’s technology, based on research from Emory University, has managed to attract more than just Japanese corporations. Previous investors like Sozo Ventures, Rethink Impact, AME Cloud Partners and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff have also thrown cash behind the company.
To date, the company has raised more than $50 million, including $6.8 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Aging.
The company said its new investment will be used to develop new partnerships in additional global markets and continue research and development.
“One can now feel empowered to test for potential memory decline, given that Neurotrack’s Memory Health Program can help stave off cognitive decline. This fully integrated platform enables users to assess the state of their memory, reduce future risk for decline, and monitor progress in order to take better control of one’s memory health. We combine these tools with deep analytics to further target and personalize, creating a very powerful precision medicine solution,” said Kaplan. “Just as when you go on a diet, you use a scale to provide evidence that you’re losing weight. Neurotrack now has the equivalent of both a scale to measure and the Memory Health Program for cognitive health. This is a game-changer for dementia risk.”
Japan has national efforts targeting a reduction in the onset of dementia in 6% of people in their 70s by 2025 (the country has the world’s largest population of the elderly, with more than 20% of the country over the age of 65). Roughly 13 million people are expected to develop Alzheimer’s in Japan by 2025.
Part of the company’s success in fundraising comes from the results of a preliminary study that showed improved cognitive functions for people diagnosed with some decline in cognitive function after a year of using Neurotrack’s Memory Health Program. The company claims it has the the first fully integrated, clinically validated platform that can assess a person’s cognition through its cognitive assessment — which can predict conversion from healthy to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or MCI to Alzheimer’s disease within three years at 89% accuracy, and within six years at 100% accuracy.
While that kind of assessment is good, Alzheimer’s symptoms can begin to appear as early as 25 years before the onset of the disease. So there’s still work to be done.
“Neurotrack has built an incredible integrative platform that is transforming our battle with Alzheimer’s,” said Jenny Abramson, founder and managing partner of Rethink Impact. “Elli’s two decades of experience in the private sector and in government are helping her scale this solution to the millions of people suffering from cognitive decline around the world. We couldn’t be more excited to continue to support Neurotrack, given both the financial opportunity and the impact they are already having on this critical disease.”
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Paladin Drones picks up $1.3M to give first responders a live feed of emergencies
In emergency situations, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. Paladin Drones, a company launching out of Y Combinator, wants to use technology to minimize the amount of time between a 911 call and a response through autonomous drones.
The company today announced the close of a $1.3 million seed round with participation from Khosla Ventures and Paul Buchheit.
Paladin’s software allows a drone — right now the software works with DJI drones — to deploy to the location of an incident and let first responders scope out the area beforehand. For example, a Paladin Drone might be deployed to the site of the fire, where it will arrive before first responders in an attempt to map out any dangers and locate hot spots of the fire inside the building.
The hope is to do as much data gathering and analysis as possible before any first responder gets on site. This allows them to jump straight into the process of saving lives and preventing further damage as soon as they arrive, as opposed to taking the time to map out the situation.
According to Paladin, one of the big issues in emergency situations is lack of information. Usually, the only information that first responders have when they get on site is what was gleaned from a 911 call. Because people placing 911 calls are usually in a state of panic, that information can be unreliable.
In fact, that’s how Paladin came to be. Co-founder and CEO Divyaditya Shrivastava had a conversation with firefighters after his friend’s house had burned down while the family was on vacation. The 911 call was placed by a neighbor walking by. The firefighters told Shrivastava that they originally didn’t have the right location of the emergency due to an unreliable 911 call.
“They said that this actually happens about 70% of the time because whenever there is an emergency, generally, the person calling 911 is panicking and can only give so much information,” he said. “That’s when I realized this is a huge problem. These are firefighters trying to save lives and they don’t have good information.”
As a recreational drone pilot, Shrivastava realized there was an opportunity to give firefighters and other first responders a real-time view of the scene to close the information gap. And so Paladin was born.
Shrivastava and his co-founder Trevor Pennypacker recently graduated out of Y Combinator and are running a pilot program with Memorial Village police department just outside of Houston, Texas.
The Paladin Drone technology offers clear benefits to first responders — the average response time for an emergency ranges from 8 to 15 minutes, whereas a Paladin-powered drone can get there in 30 to 90 seconds. That said, there are looming concerns about the invasiveness of this type of surveillance technology.
But Paladin has thought ahead. Not only does the company plan to work with local, state and federal government to ensure that its platform is compliant, but it has also built software to ensure that Paladin Drones record the sky when they’re en route to an emergency, only panning down to the ground when they’re on site.
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