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MaxRewards banks $3M to reveal best payment methods that reap the most rewards
When Anik Khan graduated from college, his first job was working on credit cards and business expenses at Accenture. There, he found that someone could bring in a couple of thousand dollars just by having the right credit cards and following the rewards and promotions.
It was back in 2017 when he and David Gao got the idea for his company MaxRewards, a digital wallet app that manages credit cards and automatically activates benefits like rewards, cashback offers and monthly credits. It also makes recommendations at the point of purchase on which card would yield the best reward for that purchase.
Going after the some 83% of Americans that have a credit card, the app version was officially launched in 2019, and now the Atlanta-based company is announcing a $3 million seed round co-led by Dundee Venture Capital and Calano Ventures. Also backing the company are Techstars, Fintech Ventures Fund, Service Provider Capital and Fleetcor president Nick Izquierdo.
Tracking his own credit cards manually prior to MaxRewards, Khan recalled in one year, getting $16,000 in rewards. However, utilizing those benefits was time-consuming and difficult, because the rewards and savings aren’t always made evident by the credit card companies.
“Other companies have tried to do something similar, but the issue is you don’t have the reward information or the offers,” Khan told TechCrunch. “If you were to aggregate this information, you still would have to activate all of these things and use them before they expired.”
Users connect their accounts and when they make a purchase, their location is cross-referenced with the merchant and an algorithm is applied to tell the user which card to use. The average app user has six credit cards.
MaxRewards is free to download and use, and the majority of the app’s functionalities are free. Users who want additional features, like the auto activation or rewards, can join MaxRewards Gold and are given the opportunity to choose their own monthly price — the average is over $25 per month — based on the value they expect to gain, Khan said.
MaxRewards offers and benefits. Image Credits: MaxRewards
Ron Watson, partner at Dundee, said his firm invests in seed-stage companies between the coasts and is interested in consumer and e-commerce companies. Watson said he was impressed with what MaxRewards has been able to do with a team of three. He also relates to the company’s mission, having grown up in a lower, middle-class family that did not frequently go on vacations.
When he got his first job and was suddenly flying everywhere, he recalls building up so many rewards to the point where he was able to go on a vacation to Hawaii and only spend maybe $100, he said.
“I used to put my points into a spreadsheet, but as I got older and had kids, I realized how hard it was for the average person to do that and how important it is to have automation,” Watson said. “I downloaded the app, and on the first day, saved $20.”
The company is often compared to NerdWallet or Mint, but in terms of functionality, Khan said he feels MaxRewards is unique due to its credit card system connectors. Rather than rely on third-party aggregators to discover the rewards, MaxRewards leverages its own proprietary connectors to card systems.
There are hundreds of thousands of offers to be discovered, and consumers are asking for even more features, so Khan decided it was time to go after seed funding. He had raised a small seed, about $200,000, from his time at Techstars, but the new funding will enable him to add to his team of three people. He expects to be at 20 by the end of the year. Khan also wants to accelerate its user acquisition, product improvement and compliance.
Next up, the company is going to automate rewards and savings across additional platforms like debit cards, payment apps and cashback apps, as well as create browser extensions and a web app. Khan also wants to do more on the education side with regard to using credit cards in a smart manner.
Arron Solano, managing partner at Calano, met Khan through Techstars and said he is an advocate for using credit cards in the right way. His firm was looking for a company like MaxRewards.
“During our first call, I remember telling my partner that Anik was a bulldog who knew what he was talking about, especially at that stage,” Solano added. “He had strong team members, his vision lined up well and that checked off a massive box for us. He energized us and showed he could find a market with insanely high ‘super users.’ ”
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Playbyte’s new app aims to become the ‘TikTok for games’
A startup called Playbyte wants to become the TikTok for games. The company’s newly launched iOS app offers tools that allow users to make and share simple games on their phone, as well as a vertically scrollable, fullscreen feed where you can play the games created by others. Also like TikTok, the feed becomes more personalized over time to serve up more of the kinds of games you like to play.
While typically, game creation involves some aspect of coding, Playbyte’s games are created using simple building blocks, emoji and even images from your Camera Roll on your iPhone. The idea is to make building games just another form of self-expression, rather than some introductory, educational experience that’s trying to teach users the basics of coding.
At its core, Playbyte’s game creation is powered by its lightweight 2D game engine built on web frameworks, which lets users create games that can be quickly loaded and played even on slow connections and older devices. After you play a game, you can like and comment using buttons on the right-side of the screen, which also greatly resembles the TikTok look-and-feel. Over time, Playbyte’s feed shows you more of the games you enjoyed as the app leverages its understanding of in-game imagery, tags and descriptions, and other engagement analytics to serve up more games it believes you’ll find compelling.
At launch, users have already made a variety of games using Playbyte’s tools — including simulators, tower defense games, combat challenges, obbys, murder mystery games, and more.
According to Playbyte founder and CEO Kyle Russell — previously of Skydio, Andreessen Horowitz, and (disclosure!) TechCrunch — Playbyte is meant to be a social media app, not just a games app.
“We have this model in our minds for what is required to build a new social media platform,” he says.
What Twitter did for text, Instagram did for photos and TikTok did for video was to combine a constraint with a personalized feed, Russell explains. “Typically. [they started] with a focus on making these experiences really brief…So a short, constrained format and dedicated tools that set you up for success to work within that constrained format,” he adds.
Similarly, Playbyte games have their own set of limitations. In addition to their simplistic nature, the games are limited to five scenes. Thanks to this constraint, a format has emerged where people are making games that have an intro screen where you hit “play,” a story intro, a challenging gameplay section, and then a story outro.
In addition to its easy-to-use game building tools, Playbyte also allows game assets to be reused by other game creators. That means if someone who has more expertise makes a game asset using custom logic or which pieced together multiple components, the rest of the user base can benefit from that work.
“Basically, we want to make it really easy for people who aren’t as ambitious to still feel like productive, creative game makers,” says Russell. “The key to that is going to be if you have an idea — like an image of a game in your mind — you should be able to very quickly search for new assets or piece together other ones you’ve previously saved. And then just drop them in and mix-and-match — almost like Legos — and construct something that’s 90% of what you imagined, without any further configuration on your part,” he says.
In time, Playbyte plans to monetize its feed with brand advertising, perhaps by allowing creators to drop sponsored assets into their games, for instance. It also wants to establish some sort of patronage model at a later point. This could involve either subscriptions or even NFTs of the games, but this would be further down the road.
The cutest lil sprite blob I’ve ever seen
#pixelart #gamedev pic.twitter.com/7uBRzs6ix0
— Playbyte (@PlaybyteInc) August 21, 2021
The startup had originally began as a web app in 2019, but at the end of last year, the team scrapped that plan and rewrote everything as a native iOS app with its own game engine. That app launched on the App Store this week, after previously maxing out TestFlight’s cap of 10,000 users.
Currently, it’s finding traction with younger teenagers who are active on TikTok and other collaborative games, like Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite.
“These are young people who feel inspired to build their own games but have been intimidated by the need to learn to code or use other advanced tools, or who simply don’t have a computer at home that would let them access those tools,” notes Russell.
Playbyte is backed by $4 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including FirstMark (Rick Heitzmann), Ludlow Ventures (Jonathon Triest and Blake Robbins), Dream Machine (former Editor-in-Chief at TechCrunch, Alexia Bonatsos), and angels such as Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase; Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus; Ashita Achuthan, previously of Twitter; and others.
The app is a free download on the App Store.
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Ditto raises $1.5 million to help teams collaborate on copy
Even as remote software uptake has boomed during the pandemic, certain workflows have gotten prioritized for specialized toolsets while other team members have been left piecemealing their productivity. Employees designing the copy that directs users and encapsulates company messaging have been particularly forgotten at times, say the founders of Ditto, a young startup building software focused on finding a “single source of truth” for copy.
The startup was in Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch (we selected it as one of our favorites from the class); now Ditto’s founders tell TechCrunch the team has raised a $1.5 million seed round from investors including Greycroft, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Decent Capital, Twenty Two VC, Holly Liu and Scott Tong, among others.
While copy workflows are often very messy when it comes to design and implementation, even the most-organized teams are often left scouring through meandering email threads, screenshot dumps and slack DMs with disparate teams. The founders behind Ditto hope that their software can give copy teams the home they deserve to keep everything organized and synced across projects and applications, ensuring that language is actually finalized and ready to ship when the time comes.
The company’s founders Jessica Ouyang and Jolena Ma were Stanford roommates who saw a lingering opportunity to build a toolset that prioritized copy as its own vertical.
“It’s so easy to couple text with where it lives, like you may think of it as part of the design so a lot of writers have to manage it inside toolsets for design or you may already think of it as part of development so writers end up having to go into the codebase and figure out how to code or manage JSON even though they’re content designers,” Ouyang tells TechCrunch.
Out of the gate, Ditto has been built for Figma, meaning users can easily export text blocks from designs in the app and rework them inside the Ditto web app, pushing updates without having to dig through the designs themselves. The founders say they are currently working on building out integrations for Sketch and Adobe XD as well. Inside the Ditto web app users can access change logs and update the status of particular pieces of text inside a project so that approvals are always certain.
“We find there’s a lot more opportunity to integrate into all of the places where copy is being worked on,” Ma tells us. “We have a lot more we’re hoping to do with our developer integrations and just integrating to all of those places where copy lives, places like A/B testing, internationalization, localization and other workflows.”
Copy development has plenty of stakeholders and the team is looking to experiment with pricing tiers that address that. For now they split up users into editors and commenters paying $15 and $10 monthly (priced annually), respectively, on the startup’s Teams plan. Ditto has a free tier for teams of two, as well as pricing designed for larger enterprise clients.
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Grid AI raises $18.6M Series A to help AI researchers and engineers bring their models to production
Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers work more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute.
Falcon co-founded the company with Luis Capelo, who was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier. Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to take PyTorch Lightning, which launched about a year ago, and turn that into the core of Grid’s service. The main idea behind Lightning is to decouple the data science from the engineering.
The time argues that a few years ago, when data scientists tried to get started with deep learning, they didn’t always have the right expertise and it was hard for them to get everything right.
“Now the industry has an unhealthy aversion to deep learning because of this,” Falcon noted. “Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor [have] the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.”
As Falcon noted, Grid is meant to help data scientists and other ML professionals “scale to match the workloads required for enterprise use cases.” Lightning itself can get them partially there, but Grid is meant to provide all of the services its users need to scale up their models to solve real-world problems.
What exactly that looks like isn’t quite clear yet, though. “Imagine you can find any GitHub repository out there. You get a local copy on your laptop and without making any code changes you spin up 400 GPUs on AWS — all from your laptop using either a web app or command-line-interface. That’s the Lightning “magic” applied to training and building models at scale,” Falcon said. “It is what we are already known for and has proven to be such a successful paradigm shift that all the other frameworks like Keras or TensorFlow, and companies have taken notice and have started to modify what they do to try to match what we do.”
The service is now in private beta.
With this new funding, Grid, which currently has 25 employees, plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Falcon tells me that he aims to build a diverse team, not in the least because he himself is an immigrant, born in Venezuela, and a U.S. military veteran.
“I have first-hand knowledge of the extent that unethical AI can have,” he said. “As a result, we have approached hiring our current 25 employees across many backgrounds and experiences. We might be the first AI company that is not all the same Silicon Valley prototype tech-bro.”
“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago,” Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon told me. “So intrigued in fact I remember rushing into a closet in Helsinki while at a conference to have the privacy needed to hear exactly what Will and Luis had built. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.”
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A SonicWall cloud bug exposed corporate networks to hackers
A newly discovered bug in a cloud system used to manage SonicWall firewalls could have allowed hackers to break into thousands of corporate networks.
Enterprise firewalls and virtual private network appliances are vital gatekeepers tasked with protecting corporate networks from hackers and cyberattacks while still letting in employees working from home during the pandemic. Even though most offices are empty, hackers frequently look for bugs in critical network gear in order to break into company networks to steal data or plant malware.
Vangelis Stykas, a researcher at security firm Pen Test Partners, found the new bug in SonicWall’s Global Management System (GMS), a web app that lets IT departments remotely configure their SonicWall devices across the network.
But the bug, if exploited, meant any existing user with access to SonicWall’s GMS could create a user account with access to any other company’s network without permission.
From there, the newly created account could remotely manage the SonicWall gear of that company.
In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Stykas said there were two barriers to entry. Firstly, a would-be attacker would need an existing SonicWall GMS user account. The easiest way — and what Stykas did to independently test the bug — was to buy a SonicWall device.
The second issue was that the would-be attacker would also need to guess a unique seven-digit number associated with another company’s network. But Stykas said that this number appeared to be sequential and could be easily enumerated, one after the other.
Once inside a company’s network, the attacker could deliver ransomware directly to the internal systems of their victims, an increasingly popular tactic for financially driven hackers.
SonicWall confirmed the bug is now fixed. But Stykas criticized the company for taking more than two weeks to patch the vulnerability, which he described as “trivial” to exploit.
“Even car alarm vendors have fixed similar issues inside three days of us reporting,” he wrote.
A SonicWall spokesperson defended the decision to subject the fix to a “full” quality check before it was rolled out, and said it is “not aware” of any exploitation of the vulnerability.
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CV Compiler is a robot that fixes your resume to make you more competitive
Machine learning is everywhere now, including recruiting. Take CV Compiler, a new product by Andrew Stetsenko and Alexandra Dosii. This web app uses machine learning to analyze and repair your technical resume, allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
The founders are marketing and HR experts who have a combined 15 years of experience in making recruiting smarter. Stetsenko founded Relocate.me and GlossaryTech while Dosii worked at a number of marketing firms before settling on CV Compiler.
The app essentially checks your resume and tells you what to fix and where to submit it. It’s been completely bootstrapped thus far and they’re working on new and improved machine learning algorithms while maintaining a library of common CV fixes.
“There are lots of online resume analysis tools, but these services are too generic, meaning they can be used by multiple professionals and the results are poor and very general. After the feedback is received, users are often forced to buy some extra services,” said Stetsenko. “In contrast, the CV Compiler is designed exclusively for tech professionals. The online review technology scans for keywords from the world of programming and how they are used in the resume, relative to the best practices in the industry.”
The product was born out of Stetsenko’s work at GlossaryTech, a Chrome extension that helps users understand tech terms. He used a great deal of natural language processing and keyword taxonomy in that product and, in turn, moved some of that to his CV service.
“We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates,” he said.
The service is live now and the team expects the corpus of information to grow and improve over time. Until then, why not let a machine learning robot tell you what you’re doing wrong in trying to get a job? That is, before it replaces you completely.
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Pitching a $99 tax advisory service for the masses, Visor has raised $9 million
The only sure things in this life, according to Ben Franklin, are death and taxes. And a new startup called Visor has just raised $9 million in financing to make one of them as painless as possible.
Unlike Nectome, Visor won’t kill anyone, but it may ring the death knell for the high-end tax advisors that most Americans can’t even access to get help filing and paying their taxes. It’s like having a personalized accountant for the cost of a high-end do-it-yourself tax-prep service.
The $9 million Visor raised came from the venture capital firm Defy, with participation from Unusual Ventures, SVB Capital and existing investors like Obvious Ventures, Fika Ventures and Boxgroup, which had put a previous $6.5 million into the company.
The idea for the company had been percolating for co-founder and chief executive Gernot Zacke since he settled in the U.S.
Growing up in Sweden, Zacke was exposed to a much different process for paying taxes. “The experience of filing taxes in Sweden is that you receive a message from the government that stated how much you made and how much you were withholding. That’s it,” said Zacke. “Taxes should be as easy as ordering a cab.”
That’s the service that Visor aims to provide.
“If you think about the market there are two ways to get your taxes done. There’s the DIY space and then there are other online services but it requires the tax payer to fill out the forms and it leaves the tax payer with a little bit of anxiety,” said Zacke. “We’re delivering the CPA experience through the convenience of a web app and a mobile app.”
On average, Americans spend about 13 hours each year dealing with taxes, and the average American doesn’t have the benefits of a professional advisor who can help optimize the process. That’s what Visor wants to provide.
“You provide the same amount of information you provide to a CPA or TurboTax… we make sure that that information is filed securely on AWS and shared between the docs and the backend,” said Zacke.
The target customers for Zacke’s services are folks who have had a change to their tax situation — whether moving, buying a home or any other life event; or folks who have had a CPA and don’t want to pay the higher fees, he said.
Visor currently has an operations team of around 34 people split between San Francisco and Atlanta.
For Zacke, the pain point he’s solving with the Visor service is very real. A former employee of the European investment firm Atomico, Zacke bounced between the U.S. and Europe — eventually running U.S. investments for the firm before leaving to launch Visor.
Other co-founders and senior executives hail from the tax advisory world, and from employee benefits outsourcing services company Zenefits, along with former Venmo and Square developers.
“Taxpayers spend $20 billion a year to get their taxes prepared and are stuck between spending hours filling out DIY tax software and hiring an expensive CPA,” said Zacke, in a statement. “
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A free web tool can predict your hair, skin, and eye color from DNA data
A new tool by researchers at the School of Science at IUPUI and Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands can predict your hair, skin, and eye color from your DNA data. The system, which is essentially a web app that can accept DNA sequences, compares known color phenotypes to known data and tells you the probabilities of each color.
The app, called HIrisPlex-S, can tell colors from even small amounts of DNA like that left at a crime scene.
“We have previously provided law enforcement and anthropologists with DNA tools for eye color and for combined eye and hair color, but skin color has been more difficult,” said forensic geneticist Susan Walsh from IUPUI. “Importantly, we are directly predicting actual skin color divided into five subtypes — very pale, pale, intermediate, dark and dark to black – using DNA markers from the genes that determine an individual’s skin coloration. This is not the same as identifying genetic ancestry. You might say it’s more similar to specifying a paint color in a hardware store rather than denoting race or ethnicity. If anyone asks an eyewitness what they saw, the majority of time they mention hair color and skin color. What we are doing is using genetics to take an objective look at what they saw.”
You can actually try the web app here but be warned: it’s not exactly the most user friendly app on the web. It requires you to know specific alleles for your test subject or upload a set of alleles in a csv file. It is, however, free and looks like it could wildly useful in law enforcement and figuring out what your hair color was before you dyed it purple.
“With our new HIrisPlex-S system, for the first time, forensic geneticists and genetic anthropologists are able to simultaneously generate eye, hair and skin color information from a DNA sample, including DNA of the low quality and quantity often found in forensic casework and anthropological studies,” said Manfred Kayser of Erasmus MC.
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The premise is simple: tap a button, get into an Uber and have no idea where you’re going. Actually, that sounds like a really awful nightmare I had once.