Point Nine Capital
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Intenseye raises $4M to boost workplace safety through computer vision
Workplace injuries and illnesses cost the U.S. upwards of $250 billion each year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. ERA-backed startup Intenseye, a machine learning platform, has raised a $4 million seed round to try to bring that number way down in an economic and efficient way.
The round was co-led by Point Nine and Air Street Capital, with participation by angel investors from Twitter, Cortex, Fastly and Even Financial.
Intenseye integrates with existing network-connected cameras within facilities and then uses computer vision to monitor employee health and safety on the job. This means that Intenseye can identify health and safety violations, from not wearing a hard hat to ignoring social distancing protocols and everything in between, in real time.
The service’s dashboard incorporates federal and local workplace safety laws, as well as an individual organization’s rules to monitor worker safety in real time. All told, the Intenseye platform can identify 30 different unsafe behaviors which are common within workplaces. Managers can further customize these rules using a drag-and-drop interface.
When a violation occurs and is spotted, employee health and safety professionals receive an alert immediately, by text or email, to resolve the issue.
Intenseye also takes the aggregate of workplace safety compliance within a facility to generate a compliance score and diagnose problem areas.
The company charges a base deployment fee and then on an annual fee based on the number of cameras the facility wants to use as Intenseye monitoring points.
Co-founder Sercan Esen says that one of the greatest challenges of the business is a technical one: Intenseye monitors workplace safety through computer vision to send EHS (employee health and safety) violation alerts but it also never analyzes faces or identifies individuals, and all video is destroyed on the fly and never stored with Intenseye.
The Intenseye team is made up of 20 people.
“Today, our team at Intenseye is 20% female and 80% male and includes four nationalities,” said Esen. “We have teammates with MSes in computer science and teammates who have graduated from high school.”
Diversity and inclusion among the team is critical at every company, but is particularly important at a company that builds computer vision software.
The company has moved to remote work in the wake of the pandemic and is using VR to build a virtual office and connect workers in a way that’s more immersive than Zoom.
Intenseye is currently deployed across 30 cities and will use the funding to build out the team, particularly in the sales and marketing departments, and deploy go-to-market strategies.
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What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder
Andy Areitio is a partner at the early-stage fund TheVentureCity, a new venture and acceleration model that helps diverse founders achieve global impact.
When you’re running your own venture — especially if it’s your first — it’s unlikely you will find the time to deep dive into how venture capital firms work. Fundraising is distracting for founders and can even hurt their company in the early days. But if you only start learning about VCs when you’re already down the fundraising path, you’ll already be too late.
Founders tend to make a series of classic mistakes when raising funding. Error number one (and two) is to raise the wrong amount of money and to do it at the wrong time. This double whammy results in founders being very diluted too early or not raising enough money to reach the next funding stage.
They can also put all their eggs in one basket too early. I made that mistake. I had signed a term-sheet (a nonbinding agreement) for a €2.5 million Series A round, passed the due diligence process, and the investment committee had approved the deal. But at the very last minute, a claim from one of the angels on my cap table made the prospect investor change his mind. In a Point Nine Capital survey, founders said that the two most stressful elements of raising venture capital are not knowing where in the fundraising process they are and not understanding why VCs have rejected their proposal.
On the other hand, if you know what VCs all about, you’ll be geared up for the ride, know the kind of investor personality you’re aiming for, and crucially — you’ll optimize the value of your equity in the long run. Founders who manage to raise more VC funds end up having a greater value stake in their company when the time comes to IPO, according to statistical research. The learning curve is steep; you’re not just studying VC as an industry, but the individual investors themselves. So, I’ve decided to share the main lessons about VC that I wish I’d known when I was a startup founder chasing venture capital.
1. It’s not about raising, it’s about raising the right amount at the right time
Startups are all about reaching two milestones: (a) product/market fit and (b) a profitable, repeatable and scalable growth model. Once those two corners are turned, the risk of a startup decreases enormously, which is normally reflected in the valuation. As an early-stage founder, if you want to protect your ownership, make sure you’re raising small amounts of money while your valuations are low.
Save your cash until you de-risk your early-stage startup. Then, raise aggressively when you finally have hard evidence that you have a strong product/market fit and a clear growth model. Be sure you understand when your company reaches that stage and becomes a scaleup. You don’t want to be a founder that has successfully raised a Series A round but has very little ownership and a very long road ahead.
Sometimes, the timing is out of your hands. The price of equity in startups is governed by the supply and demand of capital. Investors themselves have to raise money from another type of investor called Limited Partners (LPs), who may hold stakes in a variety of assets. If LPs have a strong interest in VC assets, there is more supply of capital and the price of startup equity will rise. But the opposite is also true. If you take a look at the last two recessions in the United States (2000 and 2008), you will see that the stock market crash coincided with corrections to valuations in the VC market.
So, be strategic and raise when “the market” has a strong appetite for your equity; otherwise, stretch your runway and wait for the right time. Right now, it’s common to see startups postponing their next raise to 2021, looking for stronger winds.
2. Location: Tell me where you are and I’ll tell you how much you’ll raise
I see two conditions for startups to raise a large round: (a) a large market that can justify a sizable exit, and (b) a large VC fund (small funds don’t need super sizable exits to be successful).
Assuming the first condition is met, where can we find those large VC funds? Typically, they’ll be in locations close to large markets, with a track record of sizable exits.
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Cargo.one gets $18.6M to take its air freight booking platform over the pond
Berlin -based cargo.one, which runs a marketplace for booking air freight, has closed an $18.6 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures.
Next47 and prior backers Creandum, Lufthansa Cargo and Point Nine Capital also participated in the round, along with a number of angel investors — including Tom Stafford of DST Global and Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (COO of GoCardless and former chief product officer of Skyscanner).
The August 2017-founded startup says it’s seen bookings rise during the coronavirus crisis travel crunch as airlines seek alternatives to selling seats to passengers.
Over the past 12 months the startup says it’s scaled GMV by 10x and is expecting continued fast-paced growth as COVID-19 accelerates the adoption of digital distribution in air cargo.
The new funding will go on expanding the business, with the team aiming to increase the number of airlines signed up — including beefing up coverage in Europe. Cargo.one is also targeting expanding into North America and Asia — planning to triple headcount to 70 staff by the end of the year via an aggressive hiring drive.
Currently it has 12 airlines signed up to use the platform to book in freight shipments, including Lufthansa, All Nippon Airways, Finnair, Etihad, AirBridgeCargo and TAP Air Portugal. It launched the booking product two summers ago, with Lufthansa Cargo as the first airline signed up.
“Cargo.one is a two-sided marketplace, connecting airlines with forwarders of all sizes,” says co-founder and MD Oliver Neumann, discussing the business model. “We receive a commission fee from the airlines for selling their air freight capacities on our platform. For freight forwarders the access to the booking platform is free.”
The platform offers real-time visibility of available air freight across covered airlines and routes — aiming to replace what can be an arduous process of phone and/or email back and forth for its target users (freight-forwarding offices).
Airlines set prices for air freight products sold via cargo.one .
“The air cargo market has been stuck in the ’90s when compared to the passenger business. The vast majority of air cargo to this day is booked by calling the airlines directly. Many processes are still manual and time-consuming,” says Neumann, who describes the product as “more than just a booking platform.”
“We design, build and maintain custom integrations to our airline partners, creating both the front end for freight forwarders and integrating into the systems of the airlines and helping them improve the back-end infrastructure. That’s why we refer to it as the operating system for air cargo.”
“At cargo.one we are building a 100% digital solution and enable airlines to transform their business digitally. Over the past years, cargo.one has built tailored technical integrations with airline partners that enable them to distribute their capacity online without the need to overhaul their infrastructure,” he adds.
Currently, cargo.one’s platform has some 1.1 million+ air freight offers per month, covering 120+ countries and 300 airports globally.
On the customer side it has more than 1,500 freight-forwarding offices signed up at this point — which it touts as including “21 of the top 25 companies globally.”
“From January to June 2020, cargo.one saw the number of air cargo search requests by freight forwarders quadruple. In response to increased demand from airlines and freight forwarders, we expect to triple the size of the business by the end of the year,” adds Neumann.
Index’s Martin Mignot and Max Rimpel led the Series A investment in cargo.one.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Mignot, said: “cargo.one has formed close partnerships with major global airlines, who have subsequently seen their cargo business expand significantly. Conversations with dozens of other airlines in the Americas and Asia show the clear need for a simple booking engine for air cargo, and early signs of the far-reaching impact it will have on the airline industry and businesses around the world who rely on it to serve their customers.”
Venture capital has been pouring into the logistics space over the past decade, chasing an increasing number of startups spotting opportunities to apply digital efficiencies to the movement of physical goods — including aiming to replace freight forwarders themselves, in the case of another Berlin logistics startup, FreightHub, which raised a $30 million Series B last year for a logistics play that covers sea, air and rail freight.
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Union Square Ventures leads legal tech startup Juro’s $5M Series A
Juro, a UK startup that’s using machine learning tech and user-centric design to do for contracts what Typeform does for online forms, has caught the eye of Union Square Ventures. The New York-based fund leads a $5 million Series A investment that’s being announced this morning.
Also participating in the Series A are existing investors Point Nine Capital, Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise) and Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed). The round takes Juro’s total raised to-date to $8M, including a $2M seed which we covered back in 2018.
London is turning into a bit of a hub for legal tech, per Juro CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey — who cites “strong legal services industry” and “strong engineering talent” as explainers for that.
It was also, he reckons, “a bit of a draw” for Union Square Ventures — making what Juro couches as a “rare” US-to-Europe investment in legal tech in the city via the startup.
“Having brand name customers in the US certainly helped. But ultimately, they look for product-led companies with strong cross-functional teams wherever they find them,” he adds.
Juro’s business is focused on taking the tedium out of negotiating and drawing up contracts by making contract-building more interactive and trackable. It also handles e-signing, and follows on with contract management services, using machine learning tech to power features such as automatic contract tagging and for flagging up unusual language.
All of that sums to being a “contract collaboration platform”, as Juro’s marketing puts it. Think of it like Google Docs but with baked in legal smarts. There’s also support for visual garnish like animated GIFs to spice up offer letters and engage new hires.
“We have a data model underlying our editor that transforms every contract into actionable data,” says Mabey. “Juro contracts look like contracts, smell like contracts but ultimately they are written in code. And that code structures the data within them. This makes a contract manager’s life 10x easier than using an unstructured format like Word/pdf.”
“Still our main competitor is MS Word,” he adds. “Our challenge is to bring lawyers (and other users of contracts) out of Word, which is a significant task. Fortunately, Word was never designed for legal workflows, so we can add lots of value through our custom-built editor.”
Part of Juro’s Series A funds will be put towards beefing up its machine learning/data science capabilities, per Mabey — who says the overall plan at this point is to “double down on product”, including by tripling the size of the product team.
“That means hiring more designers, data scientists and engineers — building our engineering team in the Baltics,” he tells us. “There’s so much more we are excited to do, especially on the ML/data side and the funding unlocks our ability to do this. We will also be building our commercial team (marketing, sales, cs) in London to serve the EU market and expand further into the US, where we already have some customers on the ground.”
The 2016-founded startup still isn’t breaking out customer numbers but says it’s processed more than 50,000 contracts for its clients so far, noting too that those contracts have been agreed in 50+ countries. (“Everywhere from Estonia to Japan to Kazakhstan,” as Mabey puts it.)
In terms of who Juro users are, it’s still mostly “mid-market tech companies” — with Mabey citing the likes of marketplaces (Deliveroo), SaaS (Envoy) and fintechs (Luno), saying it’s especially companies processing “high volumes of contracts”.
Another vertical it’s recently expanded into is media, he notes.
“E-signature giants have grown massively in the last few years, and some are gradually encroaching into the contract lifecycle — but again, they deal with files (pdfs mostly) rather than dynamic, browser-based documentation,” he argues, adding: “In terms of new legal tech entrants — I’m excited by Kira Systems especially, who are working on unpicking pdf contracts post-signature.”
As part of the Series A, Union Square Ventures parter, John Buttrick, is joining Juro’s board.
Commenting in a supporting statement, Buttrick said: “We look for founders with products equipped to change an industry. While contract management might not be new, Juro’s transformative vision for it certainly is. There’s no greater proof of the product’s ease of use than the fact that we negotiated and closed the funding round in it. We’re delighted to support Juro’s team in making their vision a reality.”
Juro’s contract management platform — dashboard view
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Juro grabs $2M to take the hassle out of contracts
UK startup Juro, which is applying a “design centric approach” and machine learning tech to help businesses speed up the authoring and management of sales contracts, has closed $2m in seed funding led by Point Nine Capital.
Prior investor Seedcamp also contributed to the round. Juro is announcing Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise’s co-founder) as an investor now too, as well as Michael Pennington (Gumtree co-founder) and the family office of Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com).
Back in January 2017 the London-based startup closed a $750,000 (£615k) seed round, though CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey tells us that was really better classed as an angel round — with Point Nine Capital only joining “late” in the day.
“We actually could have strung it out to Series A,” he says of the funding that’s being announced now. “But we had multiple offers come in and there is so much of an explosion in demand for the [machine learning] that it made sense to do a round now rather than wait for the A. The whole legal industry is undergoing radical change and we want to be leading it.”
Juro’s SaaS product is an integrated contracts workflow that combines contract creation, e-signing and commenting capabilities with AI-powered contract analytics.
Its general focus is on customers that have to manage a high volume of contacts — such as marketplaces.
The 2016-founded startup is not breaking out any customer numbers yet but says its client list includes the likes of Estee Lauder, Deliveroo and Nested. And Mabey adds that “most” of its demand is coming from enterprise at this point, noting it has “several tech unicorns and Fortune 500 companies in trial”.
While design is clearly a major focus — with the startup deploying clean-looking templates and visual cues to offer a user-friendly ‘upgrade’ on traditional legal processes — the machine learning component is its scalable, value-added differentiator to serve the target b2b users by helping them identify recurring sticking points in contract negotiations and keep on top of contract renewals.
Mabey tells TechCrunch the new funding will be used to double down on development of the machine learning component of the product.
“We’re not the first to market in contract management by about 25 years,” he says with a smilie. “So we have always needed to prove out our vision of why the incumbents are failing. One part of this is clunky UX and we’ve succeeded so far in replacing legacy providers through better design (e.g. we replace DocuSign at 80% of our customers).
“But the thing we and our investors are really excited about is not just helping businesses with contract workflow but helping them understand their contract data, auto-tag contracts, see pattens in negotiations and red flag unusual contract terms.”
While this machine learning element is where he sees Juro cutting out a competitive edge in an existing and established market, Mabey concedes it takes “quite a lot of capital to do well”. Hence taking more funding now.
“We need a level of predictive accuracy in our models that risk averse lawyers can get comfortable with and that’s a big ask!” he says.
Specifically, Juro will be using the funding to hire data scientists and machine learning engineers — building out the team at both its London and Riga offices. “We’re doing it like crazy,” adds Mabey. “For example, we just hired from the UK government Digital Service the data scientist who delivered the first ML model used by the UK government (on the gov.uk website).
“There is a huge opportunity here but great execution is key and we’re building a world class team to do it. It’s a big bet to grow revenue as quickly as we are and do this kind of R&D but that’s just what the market is demanding.”
Juro’s HQ remains in London for now, though Mabey notes its entire engineering team is based in the EU — between Riga, Amsterdam and Barcelona — “in part to avoid ‘Brexit risk’”.
“Only 27% of the team is British and we have customers operating in 12 countries — something I’m quite proud of — but it does leave us rather exposed. We’re very open minded about where we will be based in the future and are waiting to hear from the government on the final terms of Brexit,” he says when asked whether the startup has any plans to Brexit to Berlin.
“We always look beyond the UK for talent: if the government cannot provide certainty to our Romanian product designer (ex Kalo, Entrepreneur First) that she can stay in the UK post Brexit without risking a visa application, tbh it makes me less bullish on London!”
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“You Can’t Bootstrap This Business” Says Marley Spoon CEO, After Recipe-Kit Service Scoops Up $5M Series A
Despite taking at least two fatalities in the U.K. — both Housebites and Dinnr dead-pooled earlier this year — the cook-at-home food delivery startup idea looks like it’s here to stay. After Shuttlecook launched in London earlier this week, the latest to throw its chef’s hat in the ring is Marley Spoon, which has expanded beyond Germany, to launch in the U.K., and… Read More
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Berlin-Based Adtech Startup Remerge Raises $1M For Its Mobile App Marketing Platform
Today, Remerge, another Berlin-based adtech startup, sees its official launch, off the back of a $1 million seed round led by Point Nine Capital. The startup, whose five founders include CEO Pan Katsukis (previously a co-founder of Madvertise), offers what it calls an “audience segmentation and retargeting platform” for mobile app advertisers to let them drill down into discrete… Read More
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