Month: February 2020

Tesla’s Model 3 is among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020, according to Consumer Reports. The nonprofit organization released its “Top Picks” of the year on Thursday, and it included Tesla’s most affordable vehicle alongside cars from automakers including Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Kia and Lexus.

The Model 3 was chosen as one of three vehicles in the $45K-$55K category, alongside the Lexus RX and the Toyota Supra. CR lauded its “thrilling driving experience,” including “impressive handling and quick precise steering [that] help it feel like a sports car.” They did ding it slightly for having a “stiff ride” overall, but said that that’s more than made up for by its long EV battery range and emission-free eco-friendly qualities.

Consumer Reports also specifically called out a worry about the Model 3 that “Autopilot, an optional system on the vehicle, does not require the driver to stay engaged, creating safety concerns.” Tesla has always positioned Autopilot as a driver-assist feature that still requires a driver to be ready to take over control at a moment’s notice, but critics have suggested its implementation can lead to misuse resulting in inattentiveness.

Clearly, that concern wasn’t enough to prevent CR from counting the Model 3 among its top recommendations for vehicles in 2020. Tesla also ended up ranking 11th overall out of 33 automakers in Consumer Reports’ 2020 automotive brand report card, climbing eight positions from last year. The Model 3, and the rapid improvements that Tesla was able to make in its production as it scaled assembly of the vehicle, clearly helped it in the eyes of the consumer-focused nonprofit.

Source: Tech Crunch

Over the past twelve months, Maven, the benefits provider focused on women’s health and family planning, has expanded its customer base to include over 100 companies and grown its telehealth services to include 1,700 providers across 20 specialties — for services like shipping breast milk, finding a doula and egg freezing, fertility treatments, surrogacy and adoption.

The New York-based company which offers its healthcare services to individuals, health plans, and employers has now raised an additional $45 million to expand its offerings even further.

Its new money comes from a clutch of celebrity investors like Mindy Kaling, Natalie Portman, and Reese Witherspoon and institutional investors led by Icon Ventures and return backers Sequoia Capital, Oak HC/FT, Spring Mountain Capital, Female Founders Fund and Harmony Partners. Anne Wojcicki, the founder of 23andMe, is also an investor in the company.

“Maven is addressing critical gaps in care by offering the largest digital health network of women’s and family health providers,” said Tom Mawhinney, lead investor from Icon Ventures, who will join the Maven board of directors, in a statement. “With its virtual care and services, Maven is changing how global employers support working families by focusing on improving maternal outcomes, reducing medical costs, retaining more women in the workplace, and ultimately supporting every pathway to parenthood.”

In the six years since founder Katherine Ryder first launched Mayven, the company has raised more than $77 million for its service and become a mother of two boys.

“You go through this enormous life experience; it’s hugely transformative to have a child,” she told TechCrunch after announcing the company’s $27 million Series B round, led by Sequoia. “You do it when your careers is moving up — they call it the rush hour of life — and with no one supporting you on the other end, it’s easy to say ‘screw it, I’m going home to my family’ … If someone leaves the workforce, that’s fine, it’s their choice but they shouldn’t feel forced to because they don’t have support.”

Some of Mayven’s partners include Snap and Bumble to provide employees access to its women’s and family health provider network. The company connects users with OB-GYNs, pediatricians, therapists, career coaches and other services around family planning.

Source: Tech Crunch

Increased competition from competitors like Hulu and YouTube TV and even Netflix has finally taken its toll on Dish’s live TV streaming service, Sling TV. This week, the company reported its first-ever decline in Sling TV subscribers, with a drop of 94,000 customers in the fourth quarter. In the year-ago Q4, Sling TV had gained 50,000 subscribers, for comparison. The streaming service ended the year with 2.59 million total subscribers, Dish says.

In prior quarters, Sling TV’s gains have helped to offset some of the losses from Dish’s traditional pay-TV business. But in the fourth quarter of 2019, both sides of Dish’s business appear to be in jeopardy. On the pay-TV front, the company lost around 100,000 subscribers, in addition to 94,000 it lost from Sling TV.

By year-end 2019, Dish had 11.99 million total subscribers compared with the 12.32 million it reported at the end of 2018.

Although five-year-old Sling TV was one of the first TV streaming services to hit the market, in the years since it’s battled for cord cutters’ dollars against a growing number of alternatives. In addition to YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV has also had to compete against niche live TV services like Philo and sports-focused fuboTV.

But Sling TV also today faces competition from other streamers, even if they’re not squarely aimed at cord-cutters who want access to live TV. After all, consumers have only so much money in the budget for entertainment — and today, there are so many options for streaming TV besides Netflix. CBS, for example, streams news, TV and sports via its CBS All Access service; premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Starz, and Showtime offer their own over-the-top subscriptions; Amazon Prime Video is wrapped into Amazon’s expensive annual membership; and now new services from Disney and Apple have also arrived.

In the months ahead, the market will expand even further as new streaming services Peacock (NBCU), HBO Max (WarnerMedia/AT&T), and Quibi prepare to launch.

Sling TV’s drop in subscribers follows a price hike announced in December which raised prices of its two tiers from $25 each to $30, or $45 for both. It also follows a number of programming changes to the Sling TV lineup, the company noted.

In Dish’s 10-K regulatory filing, it explained:

“This decrease in net Sling TV subscriber additions is primarily related to increased competition, including competition from other OTT service providers, and to a higher number of customer disconnects on a larger Sling TV subscriber base, including the impact from Univision, AT&T and Fox RSNs’ removal of certain of their channels from our programming lineup.”

In June and November 2018, Univision removed channels from the Sling TV lineup, some of which were restored with a March 2019 agreement. In October 2018, AT&T removed HBO and Cinemax channels from the Sling TV lineup, which have not been restored. And in July 2019, Fox Regional Sports Networks removed its channels from the Sling TV lineup. The channels have since been acquired by Sinclair.

With programming in a constant state of flux, while subscription prices increase, many consumers don’t see the value in over-the-top television — especially when there’s so much to watch elsewhere and for much less.

In addition, Sling TV’s app isn’t as well-designed as those from rivals like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV, or as innovative when it comes to the roll out new features or personalization technology. Hulu, for example, customizes recommendations based on viewer behavior and now, explicit signals from new Like and Dislike buttons. Sling TV, meanwhile, didn’t bother with personalized recommendations until last year.

Dish is already diversifying, in light of the bad news ahead for pay-TV. As a part of its deal with T-Mobile and Sprint ahead of their merger, Dish is acquiring Sprint’s prepaid business, including Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile, plus all of Sprint’s 800 MHz spectrum. Dish will utilize T-Mobile and Sprint’s cell sites to run its own wireless business for seven years, while it builds its own 5G network, the agreement said. The company may also look for strategic partners as it grows its wireless business, the company noted on the earnings call today.

Source: Tech Crunch

We’re not in immediate danger of any asteroids colliding with Earth – at least not as far as anyone’s aware. But it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, and there is an expected near-miss coming up in 2029. Accordingly, it’s probably best to be prepared, and MIT researchers have developed a system that could help determine the best possible method to avoid a collision – long before the situation becomes desperate.

An MIT team led by former MIT graduate student Sung Wook Paek describe a ‘decision map’ in newly published research that would take into account the mass and relative momentum of an approaching asteroid, as well as the expected time we have before it enters into a so-called ‘keyhole’ – basically a gravitational halo around Earth that, once entered, all but guarantees the asteroid will collide with the planet.

The MIT-developed decision map basically details three different choices in terms of how to deflect an approaching asteroid: Launching a projectile at it to alter its course; sending a scout first to get accurate measurements to inform the best possible development of said projectile; and sending two scouts, in order to get measurements and also potentially nudge the object using propulsion, setting it up for an easier projectile-based knockout later on.

Time is the key factor in the model based on simulations run using asteroids Apophis and Bennu, two known objects we know relatively a lot about, including the locations of their gravitational keyholes in terms of proximity to Earth. The tests showed that with five or more years, the best course is to send two scouts and then the projectile. Between two and five years out, you’re most likely to succeed with the single scout followed by a projectile fired from Earth. At one year or less, the bad news is that nothing seems all that likely to succeed.

The official plan for avoiding impacts from near-Earth objects involves potentially firing nuclear weapons at them, which is not a super popular option. This method developed by MIT could help mean it never comes to that, provided our advanced detection methods are effective enough.

Source: Tech Crunch

TechCrunch is returning to U.C. Berkeley on March 3 to bring together some of the most influential minds in robotics and artificial intelligence. Each year we strive to bring together a cross-section of big companies and exciting new startups, along with top researchers, VCs and thinkers.

In addition to a main stage that includes the likes of Amazon’s Tye Brady, U .C. Berkeley’s Stuart Russell, Anca Dragan of Waymo, Claire Delaunay of NVIDIA, James Kuffner of Toyota’s TRI-AD, and a surprise interview with Disney Imagineers, we’ll also be offering a more intimate Q&A stage featuring speakers from SoftBank Robotics, Samsung, Sony’s Innovation Fund, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and more.

Alongside a selection of handpicked demos, we’ll also be showcasing the winners from our first-ever pitch-off competition for early-stage robotics companies. You won’t get a better look at exciting new robotics technologies than that. Tickets for the event are still available. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks at Zellerbach Hall.

Agenda

8:30 AM – 4:00 PM

Registration Open Hours

General Attendees can pick up their badges starting at 8:30 am at Lower Sproul Plaza located in front of Zellerbach Hall. We close registration at 4:00 pm.

10:00 AM – 10:05 AM

Welcome and Introduction from Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch) and Randy Katz (UC Berkeley)

10:05 AM – 10:25 AM

Saving Humanity from AI with Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley)

The UC Berkeley professor and AI authority argues in his acclaimed new book, “Human Compatible,” that AI will doom humanity unless technologists fundamentally reform how they build AI algorithms.

10:25 AM – 10:45 AM

Engineering for the Red Planet with Lucy Condakchian (Maxar Technologies)

Maxar Technologies has been involved with U.S. space efforts for decades, and is about to send its sixth (!) robotic arm to Mars aboard NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. Lucy Condakchian is general manager of robotics at Maxar and will speak to the difficulty and exhilaration of designing robotics for use in the harsh environments of space and other planets.

10:45 AM – 11:05 AM

Automating Amazon with Tye Brady (Amazon Robotics)

Amazon Robotics’ chief technology officer will discuss how the company is using the latest in robotics and AI to optimize its massive logistics. He’ll also discuss the future of warehouse automation and how humans and robots share a work space. 

11:05 AM – 11:15 AM

Live Demo from the Stanford Robotics Club 

11:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Book signing with Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley)

Join one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence as he signs copies of his acclaimed new book, Human Compatible.

11:35 AM – 12:05 PM

Building the Robots that Build with Daniel Blank (Toggle Industries), Tessa Lau (Dusty Robotics), Noah Ready-Campbell (Built Robotics) and Brian Ringley (Boston Dynamics)

Can robots help us build structures faster, smarter and cheaper? Built Robotics makes a self-driving excavator. Toggle is developing a new fabrication of rebar for reinforced concrete, Dusty builds robot-powered tools and longtime robotics pioneers Boston Dynamics have recently joined the construction space. We’ll talk with the founders and experts from these companies to learn how and when robots will become a part of the construction crew.

12:15 PM – 1:00 PM

Q&A: Corporate VC, Partnering and Acquisitions with Kass Dawson (SoftBank Robotics America), Carlos Kokron (Qualcomm Ventures), and Gen Tsuchikawa (Sony Innovation Fund)

Join this interactive Q&A session on the breakout stage with three of the top minds in corporate VC.

1:00 PM – 1:25 PM

Pitch-off 

Select, early-stage companies, hand-picked by TechCrunch editors, will take the stage and have five minutes to present their wares.

1:15 PM – 2:00 PM

Investing in Robotics and AI: Lessons from the Industry’s VCs with Dror Berman (Innovation Endeavors), Kelly Chen (DCVC) and Eric Migicovsky (Y Combinator)

Leading investors will discuss the rising tide of venture capital funding in robotics and AI. The investors bring a combination of early-stage investing and corporate venture capital expertise, sharing a fondness for the wild world of robotics and AI investing.

1:50 PM – 2:15 PM

Facilitating Human-Robot Interaction with Mike Dooley (Labrador Systems) and Clara Vu (Veo Robotics)

As robots become an ever more meaningful part of our lives, interactions with humans are increasingly inevitable. These experts will discuss the broad implications of HRI in the workplace and home.

2:15 PM – 2:40 PM

Toward a Driverless Future with Anca Dragan (UC Berkeley/Waymo), Jinnah Hosein (Aurora) and Jur van den Berg (Ike)

Autonomous driving is set to be one of the biggest categories for robotics and AI. But there are plenty of roadblocks standing in its way. Experts will discuss how we get there from here. 

2:15 PM – 3:00 PM

Q&A: Investing in Robotics Startups with Rob Coneybeer (Shasta Ventures), Jocelyn Goldfein (Zetta Venture Partners) and Aaron Jacobson (New Enterprise Associates)

Join this interactive Q&A session on the breakout stage with some of the greatest investors in robotics and AI

Disney Robotics

Imagineers from Disney will present start of the art robotics built to populate its theme parks.

3:10 PM – 3:35 PM

Bringing Robots to Life with Max Bajracharya and James Kuffner (Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development)

This summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be a huge proving ground for Toyota’s TRI-AD. Executive James Kuffner and Max Bajracharya will join us to discuss the department’s plans for assistive robots and self-driving cars.

3:15 PM – 4:00 PM

Q&A: Building Robotics Platforms with Claire Delaunay (NVIDIA) and Steve Macenski (Samsung Research America)

Join this interactive Q&A session on the breakout stage with some of the greatest engineers in robotics and AI.

3:35 PM – 4:00 PM

The Next Century of Robo-Exoticism with Abigail De Kosnik (UC Berkeley), David Ewing Duncan, Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley), and Mark Pauline (Survival Research Labs)

In 1920, Karl Capek coined the term “robot” in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords. One hundred years later, in the context of increasing inequality and xenophobia, the panelists will discuss cultural views of robots in the context of “Robo-Exoticism,” which exaggerates both negative and positive attributes and reinforces old fears, fantasies and stereotypes.

4:00 PM – 4:10 PM 

Live Demo from Somatic

4:10 PM – 4:35 PM

Opening the Black Box with Explainable AI with Trevor Darrell (UC Berkeley), Krishna Gade (Fiddler Labs) and Karen Myers (SRI International)

Machine learning and AI models can be found in nearly every aspect of society today, but their inner workings are often as much a mystery to their creators as to those who use them. UC Berkeley’s Trevor Darrell, Krishna Gade of Fiddler Labs and Karen Myers from SRI will discuss what we’re doing about it and what still needs to be done.

4:35 PM – 5:00 PM 

Cultivating Intelligence in Agricultural Robots with Lewis Anderson (Traptic), Sebastian Boyer (FarmWise) and Michael Norcia (Pyka)

The benefits of robotics in agriculture are undeniable, yet at the same time only getting started. Lewis Anderson (Traptic) and Sebastien Boyer (FarmWise) will compare notes on the rigors of developing industrial-grade robots that both pick crops and weed fields respectively, and Pyka’s Michael Norcia will discuss taking flight over those fields with an autonomous crop-spraying drone.

5:00 PM – 5:25 PM

Fostering the Next Generation of Robotics Startups with Claire Delaunay (NVIDIA), Scott Phoenix (Vicarious) and Joshua Wilson (Freedom Robotics) 

Robotics and AI are the future of many or most industries, but the barrier of entry is still difficult to surmount for many startups. Speakers will discuss the challenges of serving robotics startups and companies that require robotics labor, from bootstrapped startups to large scale enterprises.

5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Unofficial After Party, (Cash Bar Only) 

Come hang out at the unofficial After Party at Tap Haus, 2518 Durant Ave, Ste C, Berkeley

Final Tickets Available

We only have so much space in Zellerbach Hall and tickets are selling out fast. Grab your General Admission Ticket right now for $350 and save 50 bucks as prices go up at the door.

Student tickets are just $50 and can be purchased here. Student tickets are limited.

Startup Exhibitor Packages are sold out!

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Source: Tech Crunch

Patreon, a platform for creators to earn monetary support from fans, is busting out the checkbook. The startup isn’t playing VC quite yet with newly-launched Patreon Capital but they are hocking non-equity cash advances (loans!) for Patreon customers in need of some extra cash for big creative rollouts. Patreon has already made about a dozen of these micro-loans to creators, Hot Pod reports.

Patreon, which has raised $165 million, seems unlikely to massively overhaul its fee structure for its existing userbase given the pushback, so it’s best option forward appears to be leveraging its customer network to sell auxiliary services. A lending arm makes a lot of sense.

For ambitious creators, it’s one more service to entice them to building out their subscriber network through Patreon. For Patreon, it could also be a way to hold onto successful creators that might be tempted to venture out on their own. Plenty of creator efforts aren’t ever going to be capable of delivering venture-sized returns, but these small entities can repay a loan, the issue is obviously landing one.

Patreon has access to data on up-and-comers that it likely feels is too good not to make use of. While betting on influencers likely isn’t worth the headaches for YouTube or Facebook, it’s easy to see why this might be an interesting proposition for startups that can support customers on their platform while also landing returns.

Terms appear to be structured around boosting revenue split fees for Patreon earn-outs, though we don’t know exactly what kind of returns Patreon is aiming to earn from these cash advances.

As Hot Pod reports:

Patreon provided the team with a cash advance of around $75,000 to cover the production budget for the series, with the expectation for Multitude to pay back a slightly greater sum from Next Stop’s Patreon earnings over the next two years. (Neither party disclosed the exact figure that Multitude needed to funnel back.) As a matter of risk mitigation, the Patreon revenues of another Multitude show, Join the Party, will be taken as collateral if Next Stop isn’t able to generate enough return to fully pay Patreon back after the two year period.

Source: Tech Crunch

A new startup called Arize AI is building what it calls a real-time analytics platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The company is led by CEO Jason Lopatecki, who has also served as chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer at TubeMogul, the video ad company acquired by Adobe. TubeMogul’s co-founder and former CEO Brett Wilson is also an investor and board member.

While Arize AI is only coming out of stealth today, it’s already raised $4 million in funding led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Wilson and Trinity Ventures.

And it’s already made an acquisition: A Y Combinator -backed startup called Monitor ML. The entire Monitor ML team is joining Arize, and its CEO Aparna Dhinakaran (who previously built machine learning infrastructure at Uber) is becoming Arize’s co-founder and chief product officer.

Lopatecki and Dhinakaran said that even when they were leading two separate startups, they were trying to solve similar problems — problems that they both saw at big companies.

“Businesses are deploying these complex models that are hard to understand, they’re not easy to troubleshoot or debug,” Lopatecki said. So if an AI or ML model isn’t delivering the desired results, “The state of the art today is: You file a ticket, the data scientist comes back with a complicated answer, everyone’s scratching their head, everyone hopes the problem’s gone away. As you push more and more models into the organization, that’s just not good enough.”

Similarly Dhinakaran said that at Uber, she saw her team spend a lot of time “answering the question, ‘Hey, is the model performing well?’ And diving into that model performance was really a tough problem.”

To solve it, she said, “The first phase is: How can we make it easier to get these real-time analytics and insights about your model straight to the people who are monitoring it in production, the data scientist or the product manager or engineering team?”

Lopatecki added Arize AI is providing more than just “a metric that says it’s good or bad,” but rather a wide range of information that can help teams see how a model is performing — and if there issues, whether those issues are with the data or with the model itself.

Besides giving companies a better handle on how their AI and ML models are doing, Lopatecki said this will also allow customers to make better use of their data scientists: “[You don’t want] the smallest, most expensive team troubleshooting and trying to explain whether it was a correct predictions or not … You want insights surfaced up [to other teams], so your head researcher is doing research, not explaining that research to the rest of the team.

He compared Arize AI’s tools to to Google Analytics, but added, “I don’t want to say it’s an executive dashboard, that’s not the right positioning of the platform. It’s an engineering product, similar to Splunk — it’s really for engineers, not the execs.”

Lopatecki also acknowledged that it can be tough to make sense of the AI and ML landscape right now (“I’m technical, I did EECS at Berkeley, I understand ML extremely well, but even I can be confused by some fo the companies in this space”). He argued that while most other companies are trying to tackle the entire AI pipeline, “We’re really focusing on production.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Dell Technologies announced today that it was selling legacy security firm RSA for $2.075 billion to a consortium of investors led by Symphony Technology Group. Other investors include Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and AlpInvest Partners.

RSA came to Dell when it bought EMC for $67 billion in 2015. EMC bought the company in 2006 for a similar price it was sold for today, $2.1 billion. The deal includes several pieces, including the RSA security conference held each year in San Francisco.

As for products, the consortium gets RSA Archer, RSA NetWitness Platform, RSA SecurID, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence — in addition to the conference. At the time of the EMC acquisition, in a letter to customers, Michael Dell actually called out RSA as one of the companies he looked forward to welcoming to the Dell family after the deal was completed:

I am excited to work with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, Virtustream and RSA teams, and I am personally committed to the success of our new company, our partners and above all, to you, our customers.

Times change however, and perhaps Dell decided it was simply time to get some cash and jettison the veteran security company to go a bit more modern, as RSA’s approach no longer aligned with Dell’s company-wide security strategy.

“The strategies of RSA and Dell Technologies have evolved to address different business needs with different go-to-market models. The sale of RSA gives us greater flexibility to focus on integrated innovation across Dell Technologies, while allowing RSA to focus on its strategy of providing risk, security and fraud teams with the ability to holistically manage digital risk,” Dell Technology’s chief operating officer and vice chairman Jeff Clarke, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Meanwhile, RSA president Rohit Ghai tried to put a happy spin on the outcome, framing it as the next step in the company’s long and storied history. “The one constant in every episode of our existence has been our focus on the success of our customers and our ability to endure through market disruption by innovating on behalf of our customers,” he wrote in a blog post on the RSA company website.

The deal is subject to the normal kinds of regulatory approval before it is finalized.

Source: Tech Crunch

Back in 2018, OurPath emerged as a startup in the U.K. tackling the problem of diabetes. The company helped customers fight the disease, and raised a $3 million round of funding by combining advice from health experts with tracking technology via a smartphone app to help people build healthy habits and lose weight.

Now rebranded as Second Nature, it has raised a fresh $10 million in Series A funding.

New investors include Uniqa Ventures, the venture capital fund of Uniqa, a European insurance group, and the founders of mySugr, the digital diabetes management platform, which was acquired by health giant Roche .

The round also secured the backing of existing investors including Connect and Speedinvest, two European seed funds, and Bethnal Green Ventures, the early-stage Impact investor, as well as angels including Taavet Hinrikus, founder of TransferWise.

This new injection takes the total investment in the company to $13 million.

Competitors to the company include Weight Watchers and Noom, which provides a similar program and has raised $114.7 million.

Second Nature claims to have a different, more intensive and personalized approach to create habit change. The startup claims 10,000 of its participants revealed an average weight loss of 5.9kg at the 12-week mark. Separate peer-reviewed scientific data published by the company showed that much of this weight-loss is sustained at the six-month and 12-month mark.

Under its former guise as OurPath, the startup was the first “lifestyle change program” to be commissioned by the NHS for diabetes management.

Second Nature was founded in 2015 by Chris Edson and Mike Gibbs, former healthcare strategy consultants, who designed the program to provide people with personalized support in order to make lifestyle changes.

Participants receive a set of “smart” scales and an activity tracker that links with the app, allowing them to track their weight loss progress and daily step count. They are placed in a peer support group of 15 people starting simultaneously. Each group is coached by a qualified dietitian or nutritionist, who provides participants with daily 1:1 advice, support and motivation via the app. Throughout the 12-week program, people have access to healthy recipes and daily articles covering topics like meal planning, how to sleep better and overcoming emotional eating.

Gibbs said: “Our goal at Second Nature is to solve obesity. We need to rise above the confusing health misinformation to provide clarity about what’s really important: changing habits. Our new brand and investment will help us realize that.”

Philip Edmondson-Jones, investment manager at Beringea, who led the investment and joins the board of directors of Second Nature, said: “Healthcare systems are struggling to cope with spiraling rates of obesity and associated illnesses, which are projected to cost the global economy $1.2 trillion annually by 2025. Second Nature’s pioneering approach to lifestyle change empowers people to address these conditions.”

Source: Tech Crunch