Trinity Ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Caliber, with $2.2 million in seed funding, launches a fitness coaching platform
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the fitness space for a loop. Caliber, a startup that focuses on one-to-one personal training, is today launching a brand new digital coaching platform on the heels of a $2.2 million seed round led by Trinity Ventures.
Caliber launched in 2018 with a content model, offering an email newsletter and a library of instructional fitness content.
“My co-founders started testing the idea of coaching people individually and that’s where the light bulb really went off,” said co-founder and CEO Jared Cluff. “They saw that more than anything, people need expert guidance and a really genuinely personalized plan for their fitness routine.”
That was the origin of Caliber as it is known today.
When users join the platform they are matched with a Caliber coach. The company says that it brings on about five of every 100 applications for coaches on the platform, accepting only the very best trainers.
These coaches then take into account the goals of users and build out a personalized fitness plan in conjunction with the user, which begins with a video or phone consultation. Once the plan, which is comprised of strength training, cardio and nutrition, is finalized, the coach loads it into the app.
Users then follow the instructions from their instructor via the app and log their progress. Interestingly, these aren’t live video appointments with a trainer, but rather an asynchronous ongoing conversation with a coach that is facilitated by the app.
Users can also integrate their Apple Health app with Caliber to track nutrition and cardio, giving the coach a full 360-degree view of their progress.
Alongside providing feedback and encouragement, the coach ultimately provides a layer of accountability.
This combination of real human coaching in a less synchronous, time-intensive manner has allowed for Caliber to charge at a higher price than your standard workout generator apps but come in much lower than the average cost of an actual, in-person personal trainer.
Most Caliber users will pay between $200 and $400 per month to use the platform. Coaches, which are 1099 workers on Caliber, take home 60% of the revenue generated from users.
Pre-launch, Caliber has more than tripled its membership across the last six months and increased the number of workouts per member by 150%, according to the company. Cluff says the startup is doing north of $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Of the 41 trainers on the platform, 37% are female and about a quarter are non-white. On the HQ team, which totals seven people, one is female and two-thirds of the founding team are LGBTQ.
“The biggest challenge is not dissimilar to the challenge we faced at Blue Apron, where I was most recently, in that we wanted to create the category around meal kits,” said Cluff. “We want to build a category around fitness training in a space that is super fragmented with no branded leader.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Squire balances clean fades with the coronavirus
As far as pandemic-proof businesses go, a startup for barbershops isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind — unless you raised millions just days before barbershops were shut down across the country.
Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon, co-founders of New York-based Squire, a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses they launched in 2016, raised a $34 million Series B led by CRV in early March (after raising $8 million in a Series A round led by Trinity Ventures in 2018). Days later, “everything went to zero,” LaRon recalls of their customer base: All barbershops closed.
The cash quickly went from an opportunistic raise to needed capital. Squire waived all subscription fees, created a site for information called www.helpbarbershops.com and launched a way for patrons to buy online gift cards for their favorite shops. One barbershop sold more than $30,000 in just a few days.
After weathering a hard few months, Squire is now enjoying high demand from barbershops preparing to reopen. The company provides cashless payment, a way to make appointments and is experimenting with a virtual waiting room, all features that barbershops post-pandemic are considering. It is currently live in 45 cities.
During shelter-in-place, some of us have been forced to cut our own hair, as shown by virtual haircuts done over Zoom and even a VC-hosted haircut workshop. But a DIY session won’t replace the intimacy of a barbershop.
Barbershops have long served as gathering places for Black and African American communities as a place to chat, be vulnerable and complain.
In recent years, the culture has moved more into mainstream conversation. Today, there is an entire talk show series, produced by LeBron James, where guests chat while getting a cut. In Atlanta, there’s a singular Atlanta barbershop that serves as an informal gathering ground for the city’s top politicians.
“We learned it resonated with men from all walks of life, all races and ethnicities and was really kind of a universal experience. So we saw an opportunity for a tech company,” LaRon said.
Salvant and LaRon thought of barbershops as places of comfort long before they saw them as a place of business.
“Barbers are part-time therapists for guys,” LaRon said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Salvant and LaRon, friends and then-students at Columbia who were living in Harlem, saw barbershops grow in cultural relevance while the technology behind them remained largely untouched. Long wait times, cash-only and scheduling woes continued to be problems that they themselves faced every time they got their hair cut.
Squire lets businesses schedule appointments, offer loyalty programs and install contactless and cashless payment. The team claims that barbershop operations are more complex than many other types of small businesses because there are multiple parties transacting, plus customers might check out different services from different barbers all within one service. That’s where Squire comes in — to be a point of sale to manage those confusing transactions.
Image Credits: Squire
“We don’t want to replace that relationship a guy had with the barber,” said Salvant. “We just wanted to take away all the annoying things about it.”
Squire makes money by charging a monthly fee based on size and needs of the barbershop, ranging from $30 to $250 per month.
A threat to Squire’s success are small and medium business payment infrastructure companies like Square. The co-founders were confident, noting that Squire is the only venture-backed business that exclusively tailors itself to barbershops, and thus will be the best solution for those businesses. Los Angeles-based Boulevard raised money in November for its salon and spa management software.
But Squire thinks barbershop subculture is niche enough that salon technology doesn’t do the job. Barbers want to partner with businesses that are as passionate as they are.
“They don’t look at it as a job, they look at it as a life calling,” LaRon said.
The high bar is precisely why a healthy chunk of Squire’s early days were defined by LaRon and Salvant sitting in barbershop chairs and asking a lot of questions. In fact, Salvant says he got his hair cut by nearly 600 different barbers.
Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant, the co-founders of Squire. Image Credits: Squire
“Part of them trusting you and you trust them happens if you sit down and get a haircut,” Salvant said. By and large, the feedback the co-founder got from barbers was that they needed a solution for the entire shop, as opposed to Squire’s original product aimed at a customer or individual barber. It gave them the faith to go for a vertical solution versus assuming a horizontal solution such as Square would do the job.
Reid Christian, an investor at Charles River Ventures (CRV) who was part of the Series B, said that he knew Squire would be a success when he experienced the product at Rust Belt Barbering in Buffalo, New York. Christian compared Squire to a “Venmo-like experience” with transactions. He estimates billions of dollars in men’s grooming spend.
When shops broadly reopen, Squire is in a good, timely spot to be adopted by the masses. For the co-founders, the incoming wave of interest was affirmed a long time ago.
Last year, the duo attended the Connecticut Barber Expo. It was an aha moment, as they witnessed over 15,000 make the pilgrimage over to Connecticut to learn about the industry.
“Most people don’t know about it, most people wouldn’t believe it until they saw it,” Salvant said. “It serves as a reminder how powerful it is.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Partnering with Visa, emerging market lender Branch International raises $170 million
The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announced a partnership with Visa to offer virtual, pre-paid debit cards to Branch client networks in Africa, South-Asia and Latin America.
Branch — which has 150 employees in San Francisco, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City and Mumbai — makes loans starting at $2 to individuals in emerging and frontier markets. The company also uses an algorithmic model to determine credit worthiness, build credit profiles and offer liquidity via mobile phones.
“We’ll use [the money] to deepen existing business in Africa. Later this year we’ll announce high-yield savings accounts…in Africa,” says Branch co-founder and chief executive Matt Flannery.
The $170 million round from Foundation Capital and its new debit card partner, Visa, will support Branch’s international expansion, which could include Brazil and Indonesia, according to Flannery. Branch launched in Mexico and India within the last year. In Africa, it offers its services in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania.
A potential Branch customer
The Branch-Visa partnership will allow individuals to obtain virtual Visa accounts with which to create accounts on Branch’s app. This gives Branch larger reach in countries such as Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country with 190 million people — where cards have factored more prominently than mobile money in connecting unbanked and underbanked populations to finance.
Founded in 2015, Branch started operating in Kenya, where mobile money payment products such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa (which does not require a card or bank account to use) have scaled significantly. M-Pesa now has 25 million users, according to sector stats released by the Communications Authority of Kenya. Branch has more than 3 million customers and has processed 13 million loans and disbursed more than $350 million, according to company stats.
Branch has one of the most downloaded fintech apps in Africa, per Google Play app numbers combined for Nigeria and Kenya, according to Flannery.
Already profitable, Branch International expects to reach $100 million in revenues this year, with roughly 70 percent of that generated in Africa, according to Flannery.
In addition to Visa and Foundation Capital, the $170 Series C round included participation from Branch’s existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, Formation 8, the IFC, CreditEase and Victory Park, while adding new investors Greenspring, Foxhaven and B Capital.
Branch last raised $70 million in 2018. The company’s overall VC haul and $100 million revenue peg register as pretty big numbers for a startup focused primarily on Africa. Pan-African e-commerce startup Jumia, which also announced its NYSE IPO last month, generated $140 million in revenue (without profitability) in 2018.
Startups building financial technologies for Africa’s 1.2 billion population have gained the attention of investors. As a sector, fintech (or financial inclusion) attracted 50 percent of the estimated $1.1 billion funding to African startups in 2018, according to Partech.
Branch’s recent round and plans to add countries internationally also tracks a trend of fintech-related products growing in Africa, then expanding outward. This includes M-Pesa, which generated big numbers in Kenya before operating in 10 countries around the world. Nigerian payments startup Paga announced its pending expansion in Asia and Mexico late last year. And payment services such as Kenya’s SimbaPay have also connected to global networks like China’s WeChat.
Powered by WPeMatico
Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together
Appen just announced that it’s acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight’s performance this year.
Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning — for example, Figure Eight (formerly known as CrowdFlower and Dolores Labs) says its technology has been for everything from mapping to stock photography to scanning receipts for expense reports.
Appen, meanwhile, is a publicly-traded company headquartered in Sydney. CEO Mark Brayan described its technology — and its “crowd” of more than 1 million remote workers — as “highly complementary” to Figure Eight, which he praised for its data annotation and self-serve capabilities.
“We know that to compete and to be able to deliver even higher volumes, we need a richer set of technologies,” Brayan said. “That’s where Figure Eight comes in. They are, in our view, the leader in the market of the platform providers.”
As for what this means for the Figure Eight team, he said, “Everybody stays in place,” and that Appen plans to continue investing in the product.
Brayan also noted that Appen previously acquired another data annotation company called Leapforce in 2017, a move that he said provided the company with greater scale.
“The Figure Eight acquisition is the next step of our evolution,” he said. “Step one was to get bigger, step two is to become much more tech forward, which is what we get with Figure Eight.”
San Francisco-based Figure Eight has raised a total of $58 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Canvas Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. As CrowdFlower, it launched on-stage at the TechCrunch50 conference nearly a decade ago.
“I’m extremely proud of the team,” said Figure Eight co-founder Lukas Biewald in a statement. “This is a genuine validation of everything we’ve achieved and a great platform for our teams to combine and continue to do amazing things in AI.”
Biewald (a college friend of mine), along with his co-founder Chris Van Pelt, has moved on to a new startup called Weights and Biases, but he remains involved in Figure Eight as chairman. You can watch their TC50 presentation here.
Powered by WPeMatico
Kite raises $17M for its AI-driven code completion tool
Kite, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine learning to build what is essentially a very smart code-completion tool, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round. The round was led by Trinity Ventures, with personal participation from now-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition to the funding, Kite also today announced that its tools are now significantly smarter and that developers can run them locally on their machines, even if they don’t have an internet connection.
As Kite founder and CEO Adam Smith told me, the idea for Kite is based on the simple fact that a lot of programming is repetitive. “That’s why [developers] spend so much time on Stack Overflow. That’s why they spend so much time debugging really basic errors and looking up documentation, but not so much time looking at how the solution should work,” he said. “We thought we can use machine learning to fix that.”
Standard code completion tools often still use alphabetical sorting, while Kite uses AI to infer what a developer is likely trying to do (though, to be fair, the likes of IntelliSense and others are also starting to get smarter). In its first iteration, Kite, which sadly still only works for Python code right now, sorted its hints by popularity. Unsurprisingly, that was already more useful than alphabetical sorting, and the right answer appeared in the top three results 37 percent of the time.
What’s interesting here is that if you can predict the next part of a line of code with high accuracy, you can start predicting a few more words ahead, too. And that’s exactly what Kite is starting to do now.
To do this, the team had to build its own machine learning models that worked well for code. As Smith told me, Kite first looked at using standard natural language processing (NLP) models, but it turns out that those don’t really work well for code, which has a different structure. As training data, Kite fed the system all the Python code on GitHub .
Looking ahead, what Smith really wants to achieve is what he calls “fully automated programming.” “It’s that Star Trek vision of where you tell computers in a high-level language what to do,” he said. “If it’s ambiguous, the computer will ask questions.”
It’ll take a few more breakthroughs in AI to realize that vision, but for the time being, Kite’s tools are freely available and come with editor plugins for Atom, Sublime Text3, VS Code, Vim, PyCharm and IntelliJ. Currently, about 30,000 Python developers use its tools.
With today’s release, developers can also use these models locally, without the need for an internet connection. That’s a sign of how efficient the models are, but as Smith also acknowledged, running the model locally means his company doesn’t have to manage a complex cloud infrastructure either. This should also make the tool more appealing to more developers — especially in larger corporations — given that the original tool would send all of your code to Kite’s servers (and in that context, it’s worth noting the company managed to create its own little scandal around some open-source contributions that favored its auto-completion engine).
The company plans to use the new funding to build out the team, which mostly consists of engineers. It’ll also build out its product, with a special focus on supporting more languages.
As for its business model, it’s worth noting that Kite did test a subscription service last year, but as Smith argues, that was mostly to test if the company could monetize the service. “Now we want to optimize for growth,” he said and noted that the focus of the company’s monetization strategy will be on enterprise users. Indeed, that’s a common refrain I hear from startups that focus on developers. It’s very hard to sell subscriptions to individual developers, it seems, so most start to focus on enterprises sooner or later.
Powered by WPeMatico
Ne-Yo wants to make Silicon Valley more diverse, one investment at a time
Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton School classroom. The Grammy-winning recording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing.
“I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for him,” Ne-Yo told TechCrunch. “But I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”
It turns out “that actor” is Ashton Kutcher, widely known in Hollywood and beyond for his role in several blockbusters and the TV sitcom That ’70s Show, and respected in Silicon Valley for his investments via Sound Ventures and A-Grade in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Bird and several others.
Ne-Yo, for his part, is known for a string of R&B hits including So Sick, One in a Million and Because of You. His latest album, Good Man, came out in June.
Ne-Yo, like Kutcher, is interested in pursuing a side gig in investing but he doesn’t want to waste time chasing down the next big thing. His goal, he explained, is to use his wealth to encourage people like him to view software engineering and other technical careers as viable options.
“Little black kids growing up don’t say things like ‘I want to be a coder when I grow up,’ because it’s not real to them, they don’t see people that look like me doing it,” Ne-Yo said. “But tech is changing the world, like literally by the day, by the second, so I feel like it just makes the most sense to have it accessible to everyone.”
Last year, Ne-Yo finally made the leap into venture capital investing: his first deal, an investment in Holberton School, a two-year coding academy founded by Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache that trains full-stack engineers. The singer returned to San Francisco earlier this month for the grand opening of Holberton’s remodeled headquarters on Mission Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood.
Holberton, a proposed alternative to a computer science degree, is free to students until they graduate and land a job, at which point they are asked to pay 17 percent of their salaries during their first three years in the workforce.
It has a different teaching philosophy than your average coding academy or four-year university. It relies on project-based and peer learning, i.e. students helping and teaching each other; there are no formal teachers or lecturers. The concept appears to be working. Holberton says their former students are now employed at Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox and Tesla.
Ne-Yo participated in Holberton’s $2.3 million round in February 2017 alongside Reach Capital and Insight Venture Partners, as well as Trinity Ventures, the VC firm that introduced Ne-Yo to the edtech startup. Holberton has since raised an additional $8 million from existing and new investors like daphni, Omidyar Network, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle.
Holberton has used that capital to expand beyond the Bay Area. A school in New Haven, Conn., where the company hopes to reach students who can’t afford to live in tech’s hubs, is in development.
The startup’s emphasis on diversity is what attracted Ne-Yo to the project and why he signed on as a member of the board of trustees. More than half of Holberton’s students are people of color and 35 percent are women. Since Ne-Yo got involved, the number of African American applicants has doubled from roughly 5 percent to 11.5 percent.
“I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”
Before Ne-Yo’s preliminary meetings with Holberton’s founders, he says he wasn’t aware of the racial and gender diversity problem in tech.
“When it was brought to my attention, I was like ‘ok, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed,’” he said. “It makes no sense that this thing that affects us all isn’t available to us all. If you don’t have the money or you don’t have the schooling, it’s not available to you, however, it’s affecting their lives the same way it’s affecting the rich guys’ lives.”
Holberton’s founders joked with TechCrunch that Ne-Yo has actually been more supportive and helpful in the last year than many of the venture capitalists who back Holberton. He’s very “hands-on,” they said. Despite the fact that he’s balancing a successful music career and doesn’t exactly have a lot of free time, he’s made sure to attend events at Holberton, like the recent grand opening, and will Skype with students occasionally.
“I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic.”
Ne-Yo was very careful to explain that he didn’t put money in Holberton for the good optics.
“This isn’t something I just wanted to put my name on,” he said. “I wanted to make sure [the founders] knew this was something I was going to be serious about and not just do the celebrity thing. I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic so we dropped whatever we were doing and came down, met these guys, hung out with the students and hung out at the school to see what it’s really about.”
What’s next for Ne-Yo? A career in venture capital, perhaps? He’s definitely interested and will be making more investments soon, but a full pivot into VC is unlikely.
At the end of the day, Silicon Valley doesn’t need more people with fat wallets and a hankering for the billionaire lifestyle. What it needs are people who have the money and resources necessary to bolster the right businesses and who care enough to prioritize diversity and inclusivity over yet another payday.
“Not to toot the horn or brag, but I’m not missing any meals,” Ne-Yo said. “So, if I’m going to do it, let it mean something.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Weights & Biases raises $5M to build development tools for machine learning
Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that nearly every tech company likes to throw around nowadays — but according to Lukas Biewald, it represents a genuinely new approach to programming.
“Software has eaten a lot of the world, and machine learning is eating software,” Biewald said.
In his view, there are “fundamental” differences between the two approaches: “One important difference is if all you have is the code you used to train the program, you don’t really know what happened … If I had all the code that was used to train a self-driving car algorithm but I don’t have the data, I don’t know what went down.”
Along with Chris Van Pelt, Biewald previously founded CrowdFlower (now known as Figure Eight), which launched nearly a decade ago at the TechCrunch 50 conference, and which has created tools for training artificial intelligence.
Biewald (whom I’ve known since college) and Van Pelt, plus former Google engineer Shawn Lewis, have now started a new company called Weights & Biases to build new tools for machine learning developers. They’ve also raised $5 million in Series A funding from Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.
“Artificial Intelligence has so much potential, but few companies are implementing it yet because the development process is too complicated for all but a small number of highly trained engineers,” said Trinity’s Dan Scholnick, who’s joining the startup’s board of directors. (Scholnick previously backed CrowdFlower.) “W&B aims to dramatically streamline the machine learning software development process so that AI benefits can be unlocked across industries and no longer restricted to the few firms able to hire extremely skilled and extraordinarily expensive AI developers today.”
The eventual goal is to create a whole suite of development tools, but Weights & Biases’ first product records and visualizes the process of training a machine learning algorithm. Biewald explained that this makes it possible for developers to go back and see what they were doing, say, a month ago and to share that information with teammates. And it’s already being used by the nonprofit research company OpenAI.
Biewald added that when he talked to his friends in the field about their biggest problems, this was the first thing that came up. That’s how he hopes to approach future products as well — working with developers to figure out what they really need.
“I don’t want to help with the hype,” he said. “I want to help with the real problems that really get in the way … to make this stuff actually work.”
Biewald also offered more details about his vision for the company in a blog post:
You can’t paint well with a crappy paintbrush, you can’t write code well in a crappy IDE, and you can’t build and deploy great deep learning models with the tools we have now. I can’t think of any more important goal than changing that.
Powered by WPeMatico
Meal kit startup Gobble has raised $15 million in Series B financing from Khosla
Gobble, a 15-minute meal kit delivery service, has raised $15 million in Series B growth financing from Khosla Ventures, TechCrunch has confirmed. Khosla Ventures led the round, along with participation from previous investors A16z, Trinity Ventures and Initialized Capital. Gobble came out of Y Combinator in 2015, around the same time many DIY meal kit services started to falter. For a while,… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Authentication startup Auth0 raises $15M as it beefs up security features
“Identity-as-a-service” startup Auth0 (pronounced “auth zero”) has raised $15 million in Series B funding.
CEO Jon Gelsey said that for many website and mobile app developers, integrating with different login systems can turn into a big headache — and also create security risks. So the company helps those developers manage identity and authentication, whether… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Home furnishings site Dot & Bo is expanding into workplace design, with the launch of Dot & Bo for Business. The e-commerce startup will be offering a free styling service to other startups and businesses who are looking to find the right vibe for their offices.