Month: May 2018

Going to the dentist can be anxiety-inducing. Unfortunately, it was no different for me last week when I went to discuss Uniform Teeth’s recent $4 million seed funding round from Lerer Hippeau, Refactor Capital, Founder’s Fund and Slow Ventures.

Uniform Teeth is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.

“For us, we’re really focused on transforming the orthodontic experience,” Uniform Teeth CEO Meghan Jewitt told me at the startup’s flagship dental office in San Francisco. “There are a lot of health care companies out there that are taking areas that aren’t very customer-centric.”

Jewitt, who spent a couple of years at One Medical as director of operations, pointed to One Medical, Oscar Insurance and 23andMe as examples of companies taking a very customer-centric approach.

“We are really interested in doing the same for the orthodontics space,” she said.

Ahead of the first visit, patients use the Uniform app to take photos of their teeth and their bite. During the initial visit, patients receive a panoramic scan and 3D imaging to confirm what type of work needs to be done.

Last week during my visit, Jewitt and Uniform Teeth co-founder Dr. Kjeld Aamodt showed me the technology Uniform uses for its patient evaluations.

In the GIF above, you can see I received a 3D panoramic X-ray. The process took about 10 seconds and it’s about the same exposure to X-rays as a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, Dr. Aamodt said.

“With that information, we’re able to see the health of your roots, your teeth, the bone, your jaw joints, check for anything that could get worse during treatment,” Dr. Aamodt said.

Below, you can see the 3D scan.

Next is looking in between the teeth. From here, the idea is to get a much more holistic view, Dr. Aamodt said. This is where things got interesting.

If you look at the bottom left of the photo, under my back bottom tooth, you can see a dark circle below the tooth. Dr. Kjeld gently pointed that out to me.

“That tells me there’s bacteria living inside of your jaw,” he explained. “A lot of people have this. It’s pretty common so don’t beat yourself up for it.”

This is when he told me I’d likely need to get a root canal to get rid of it. Mild panic ensued.

Dr. Aamodt went on to explain that, if I were a patient of his looking to get my teeth straightened, he would recommend that I first get the root canal before any teeth movement. That’s because, he explained, moving teeth at that point could potentially result in further infection.

“The concern about that is when we move a tooth with that, the infection will get worse and you could risk losing that tooth,” he told me.

Although I was freaking out internally, I continued to move ahead with the process. Next up was the 3D scan, which results in something fancy called a 3D Cone Beam Computed Tomography. This, Dr. Aamodt said, is what really sets Uniform Teeth apart in precision tooth movement.

This process takes the place of dental impressions, which are made by biting into a tray with gooey material. I didn’t feel like getting my bottom teeth scanned, but below is what the top looks like.

At this point Uniform Teeth would share its recommendations with the patient. My personal recommendation was to go see my dentist and, if I’m interested in straightening my teeth, come back once my roots are in a healthy enough state.

From there, I’d receive a custom treatment plan that combines the X-ray plus 3D scan to predict how my teeth will move. After receiving the clear aligners in a couple of weeks, I’d check in with Dr. Aamodt every week via the mobile app. If something were to come up, I could always set up an in-person appointment. Most people average about two to three visits in total, Jewitt said. All of that would add up to about $3,500.

The reason Uniform Teeth requires in-office visits is because 75 percent or more of the cases require additional procedures. For example, some people require small, tooth-colored attachments to be placed onto the clear aligners. Those attachments can help to move teeth in a more advanced way, Dr. Aamodt said.

“If you don’t have these, then you can tip some teeth but you can’t do all of the things to help improve the bite, to create a really lasting, beautiful, healthy smile,” he explained.

Uniform Teeth currently treats patients in San Francisco, but intends to open up additional offices nationwide next year. As the company expands, the plan is to bring on board more full-time orthodontists.

“Right now, we’re an employment-based model and we’d really like to continue that because it allows us to control the experience and deliver a really high-quality service,” Jewitt said.

A lot of companies say they care about the customer when, in reality, they just care about making money. But I genuinely believe Uniform Teeth does care. After I left with my tail between my legs that day, I called my dentist to set up an appointment. The following day, my dentist confirmed what Dr. Aamodt found and proceeded to set me up to get a root canal. A few days later, Dr. Aamodt checked in with me via the mobile app to ask me how I was doing and to make sure I was getting it treated. I was pleased to let him know, as Olivia Pope likes to say, “It’s handled.”

Source: Tech Crunch

This Friday, TechCrunch launches the West Coast debut of TC Sessions: Robotics at UC Berkeley on May 11. There are still a few tickets left, including $45 student tickets, that will get you access to the conference, workshops, and networking reception. With robots as far as the eye can see and top robotics experts abounding, this is one event you won’t want to miss.

Still not convinced? Here are five reasons why you need to be there:

1. Hear From The Best Minds In Robotics 

   Where else can you catch industry leaders like Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics), Andy Rubin (Playground Ventures), Melonee Wise (Fetch Robotics), Ayanna Howard (Zyrobotics), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) and many more all in one place? We’re honored that these leaders will be attending and speaking at the event. Check out more speaker spots here.

1. Get Up Close And Personal With Groundbreaking Robots
   Meet lots of robots and their creators up close, including UC Berkeley’s industrial gripper Dex-Net System, SuitX’s exoskeletons, Agility Robotics’ bipedal Cassie, Boston Dynamics’ new SpotMini and UCLA’s sideways-walking NABi robot.

3. Discover The Robot Categories Taking Over The Startup World
The majority of the top founders and investors in robotics will be on stage and around during breaks to network with and pick their brains. The agenda is impressive and full of top founders, engineers and educators.

 See the full agenda here.

4. Meet Up-And-Coming Early Stage Companies
There will be 11 early-stage robotics-related companies showcasing their startups in the Zellerbach Lobby. These companies are just ripe for investment and in a variety of verticals:BEAR Robotics
DeepMotion
Exyn Technologies
Kadho
MultiplyLabs
Photoneo
Robotical
SAKE Robotics
Taechyon
TRA Robotics
VTRUS

5. Drill Deeper At The Workshops
Discover how to turn your ideas into a venture-backable business at the “Starting Up” workshop. Hear Skydio co-founder Adam Bry describe how his team prototyped their way to a stunning commercial launch for a drone that follows you anywhere. Discover everything you need to know about DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge with Dr. Tim Chung. Attendees will get the chance to ask questions and go deeper into these topics. More details about workshops here.

Join us this Friday, May 11, and get your tickets now before we hit Zellerbach Hall’s capacity limit!

Students, don’t forget, you can get your tickets at a significant discount of $45 right here.

Source: Tech Crunch

We are spending a lot of time discussing what happens to data when you explicitly or implicitly share it. But what about data that you have never ever shared?

Your Cousin’s DNA

We all share DNA — after all, it seems we are all descendants of a few tribes. But the more closely related you are, the closer the DNA match. While we all know we share 50% DNA with siblings, and 25% with first cousins — there is still some meaningful match even between distant relatives (depending on the family tree distance).

In short, if you have never taken a DNA test but one or more of your blood relatives has, and shared that data — some of your DNA is effectively now available for a match.

While this may have seemed like theory a few weeks ago, the cops caught the Golden State Killer by using this method.

Cambridge Analytica

A similar thing happened when data was mis-used by Cambridge Analytica . Even if you never used the quiz app on Facebook platform but your friends did, they essentially revealed private information about you without your consent or knowlege.

The number of users that took the quiz was shockingly small — only 300,000 users participated. And yet, upwards of 50 million (as many as 87 million) people eventually had their data collected by Cambridge Analytica.

And all of this was done legally and while complying with the platform requirements at that time.

Transitive Data Privacy

The word transitive simply means if A is related to B in a certain way, and B to C — then A is related to C. For example, cousins is a transitive property. If Alice and Bob are cousins, and Bob and Chamath are cousins, then Alice and Chamath are cousins.

As private citizens, and corporations, we now have to think about transitive data privacy loss.

The simplest version of this is if your boyfriend or girlfriend forwards your private photo or conversation screenshot to someone else.

Transitive Sharing Upside

While we have discussed couple of clear negative examples, there are many ways transitive data relationships help us.

Every time you ask a friend to connect you to someone on Linkedin for a job or fundraise, you are leveraging the transitive relationship graph.

The DNA databases being created are primarily for social good — to help us connect with our roots & family, detect disease early and help medical research.

In fact, you could argue that a lot of challenges we face today require more data sharing not less. If your hospital cannot share data with your primary care doctor at the right time, or your clinical trial data cannot be accessed to monitor downstream effects, we cannot take care of our citizens’ health as we should. Organizations like NIH and the VA and CMS (Medicare) are working hard to encourage appropriate easier sharing by healthcare providers.

Source: Tech Crunch

Conceiving a product and turning it into a successful high-growth startup is challenging work, but it can be absolutely punishing for underrepresented founders. While a strong product and a great go-to-market is critical for early success, that’s not enough to ensure a successful venture capital fundraise. Instead, what often matters is building relationships with investors, and the evidence is clear that people love to work with people who look just like them.

In an industry dominated by white men, it can be hard for founders to find investors who look like them. That’s why Arlan Hamilton built Backstage Capital. Her firm’s mission is to provide early seed financing exclusively to founders who are women, people of color, and LGBT — groups that are massively underrepresented among Silicon Valley founders compared to the general population.

“I think the figures speak for themselves: less than .2% of all early stage venture funding goes to Black women, while we make up approx 8% of the U.S. population and are one of the fastest growing entrepreneur segments in the country,” she wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch.

My colleague Megan Rose Dickey interviewed Hamilton early last year about raising her firm’s second fund. Dickey wrote at the time that “Hamilton wasn’t able to say the exact size of the second fund but says they’re the size of the catering budget for the Christmas party at Andreessen Horowitz.”

Well, that second fund has now launched and is targeting $36 million in commitments by its final close (Hamilton is continuing to fundraise). And unless A16Z’s Christmas party has gotten even more ritzy than I remember it, it appears that Hamilton has far exceeded her own expectations on what size fund she would be able to ultimately aggregate. The fund’s mission is to specifically focus on black female founders.

The burgeoning size of the fund can also be seen in the size of checks the fund is targeting. Originally, Hamilton said she wanted to target $25-100k seed checks. Now, she foresees the fund investing $1 million checks into 15-20 companies over the next three years, with the remainder of the fund reserved for follow-on investments.

While Backstage certainly has a mission, Hamilton sees a huge potential for outsized returns. “It is my firm belief that because Black women have had to make do with far less for centuries, equipping them with early stage capital that is on par with their white male counterparts has the potential to lead to outsized returns,“ she wrote.

Hamilton pointed to last month’s Vanity Fair spread featuring black women who had raised $1 million in venture capital. “While this was a proud moment for us all, I want to do my part to make sure that number reaches heights such that the next photo shoot isn’t contained in one single room,” she wrote.

The firm has invested in more than 80 portfolio companies, and Hamilton expects to make two or three seed investments out of this new fund by the end of the year.

Source: Tech Crunch

If a company like Facebook can’t even understand why its moderation tools work the way they do, then its users certainly don’t have a fighting shot. Anyway, that’s the idea behind what a coalition of digital rights groups are calling The Santa Clara Principles (PDF), “a set of minimum standards” aimed at Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech companies that moderate the content published on their platforms.

The suggested guidelines grew out of a set of events addressing “Content Moderation and Removal at Scale,” the second of which is taking place today in Washington, D.C. The group participating in these conversations shared the goal of coming up with a suggested ruleset for how major tech companies should disclose which content is being censored, why it is being censored and how much speech is censored overall.

“Users deserve more transparency and greater accountability from platforms that play an outsized role — in Myanmar, Australia, Europe, and China, as well as in marginalized communities in the U.S. and elsewhere — in deciding what can be said on the internet,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian C. York said.

As the Center for Democracy and Technology explains, The Santa Clara principles (PDF) ask tech companies to disclose three categories of information:

• Numbers (of posts removed, accounts suspended);
• Notice (to users about content removals and account suspensions); and
• Appeals (for users impacted by content removals or account suspensions).

“The Santa Clara Principles are the product of years of effort by privacy advocates to push tech companies to provide users with more disclosure and a better understanding of how content policing works,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo added.

“Facebook and Google have taken some steps recently to improve transparency, and we applaud that. But it’s not enough. We hope to see the companies embrace The Santa Clara Principles and move the bar on transparency and accountability even higher.”

Participants in drafting The Santa Clara Principles include the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, New America’s Open Technology Institute and a handful of scholars from departments studying ethics and communications.

Source: Tech Crunch

Global Founders Capital, the venture capital arm of Rocket Internet, has seen a number of its London investment team leave over the last couple of years, but the most significant departure may have only just happened.

According to multiple sources, Daniel Jones, General Partner at GFC, has left the VC firm and is thought to be planning to raise his own fund. A spokesperson for GFC declined to comment on the record when asked to confirm he is no longer at GFC. Jones couldn’t be reached for comment at the time of publication.

Rumours of Jones’ departure began circulating in late March, and sometime in April portfolio companies were informed by GFC about changes in the U.K. team and specifically that he was leaving. Separately I understand from several sources that the reason being given by GFC is that Jones has decided to take up the challenge of raising a fund of his own.

Perhaps a sign of how depleted the GFC London team is right now — in the last two years, the firm has lost associate Julien Bek to Accel, associate Julia Morrongiello to Point Nine Capital, and principle Nicholas Stocks to White Star Capital — a number of portfolio companies are being told that Rocket Internet co-founder and CEO Oli Samwer is to be their main contact for now going forward. He’s primarily being supported by GFC Partner Levin Bunz, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, Jones’ exit from GFC is bound to be a loss to the U.K. tech startup scene, even if he does go on to eventually raise his own fund. He was and remains a popular figure amongst GFC portfolio companies and as a General Partner was always somebody thought to have the ear of Samwer, and therefore an influential figure at GFC and Rocket Internet.

As one source with knowledge of how GFC operated in the U.K. put it: “Daniel Jones was the most important non-Samwer at Global Founders. He constituted at least half of the decision-making and the majority of the legwork on every term sheet GFC issued.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Jones’ U.K. GFC investments include Goodlord, Echo and Nested. In the last few years, the stage-agnostic VC firm has also backed U.K. startups Quiqup, OpenRent, and HomeTouch, amongst others.

Source: Tech Crunch

While the cryptocurrency craze last year brought more consumer attention to blockchain technology, the future of this movement will be in the enterprise. Blockchain’s true potential is its ability to replace the archaic and centralized infrastructure that powers everything from payments to land registries with digital-first, decentralized, and trusted networks of data.

Skepticism, though, abounds. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, has called bitcoin a “fraud,” only to walk back those comments later. He has more recently said that blockchain is “real”. The challenge of course is it is exactly people like Dimon who ultimately control the destiny of blockchain in the enterprise. Without leadership from the top, few CIOs and other buyers are willing to consider such a wildly disruptive new technology.

That has been the experience of Manifold Technology founder and CEO Chris Finan and his co-founder Robert Seger. The two have an intelligence background, with Finan working at DARPA and Defense more broadly and Seger working at the NSA. Seger would go on to become CTO of Morta Security, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, while Finan became director of cybersecurity legislation for the White House before heading to the Valley and working at Impermium, a cybersecurity startup acquired by Google.

Taking advantage of their backgrounds, they got together in 2014 to try to connect blockchain into the enterprise. “We wanted to be the Cisco of enterprise blockchain providers,” Finan explained to me. “We were looking at what we can do to leverage cryptography to build the picks and shovels.”

Over the next few years, they built out a distributed ledger technology built on top of Amazon Lambda. The idea was that serverless technology like Lambda could offer quick scalability to a blockchain from day one, without requiring the kinds of decentralized technology adoption seen in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. “In that way, we try to let Amazon handle this scalability for us,” Finan explained.

There was just one problem: enterprise hasn’t gotten on the blockchain bandwagon yet. “They don’t want to buy a blockchain, they want to flip a switch and have it,” Finan said. He didn’t see institutions looking to migrate their infrastructure to a blockchain model, and “we found ourselves to be an engine manufacturer in a sector that wasn’t buying many engines.“ Even worse, “you definitely see VC interest in the enterprise infrastructure market definitely waning” when it comes to blockchain.

Stymied by the enterprise market, the team started investigating whether it could build consumer applications on top of its infrastructure. What they came up with is Volley, a blockchain-backed augmented reality marketplace to buy and sell goods, which is currently in beta and available in the Apple App Store. This new direction connected with investor appetites, and the company raised a $7 million series A from MalibuIQ, Westlake, and other investors.

The idea of Volley is that current online marketplaces for goods are filled with scams and other security issues. To improve trust and safety issues, Manifold has built a reputation system for buyers and sellers so that transactions are decentralized, but trusted. “We wanted to make it very expensive to make a fake account,” Finan said.

Using augmented reality, the app allows users to explore their world and see things for sale. The hope is that at scale, the app would show users hundreds of things all around them that they might purchase, from the backpack of the person in front of them to a car parked on the street. Right now, the technology only works with iOS and the ARKit library, with the company hoping to launch an Android version shortly.

Finan believes that a consumer marketplace is a near-perfect application of blockchain. “There has to be some sort of need for independent trust guarantees,” he said, which requires that a marketplace be filled with people who don’t trade often with each other and has goods that are not trivially cheap to replace if fraud were to occur. In addition, he believes you have to have “auditability” as well as high throughput for blockchain to make sense.

It’s easy to be cynical about two cybersecurity veterans diving into the consumer world. While Volley has to prove itself as a potential consumer winner, to me what makes the investment here more interesting is that there are two ways to win. Volley itself could become an interesting consumer play, or Volley might help to prove out Manifold’s serverless blockchain technology, which could find renewed adoption in the enterprise in the future. It’s the sort of hedged bet that investors are making in the blockchain space, as we await the further maturation of this brand new market.

Source: Tech Crunch