Month: February 2021

Babbel, the Berlin-based language-learning platform, today announced that it is now going well beyond its core app-based learning service and is introducing live classes.

Capped at six students, these conversation-driven classes will be taught by certified teachers, using Babbel’s existing methodology. Learners can add live classes to their existing Babbel subscription for an additional fee, starting at $110 for five classes/month, or subscribe to them as a standalone product (though they’ll also get access to the Babbel app as part of their live subscription).

That’s not all, though; Babbel is also introducing language-learning games in its app for the first time, as well as short stories to help learners use their new vocabulary, short snippets of fun facts about various cultures and a new set of videos about different places and languages.

Image Credits: Babbel

This launch follows what was a banner year for Babbel. Besides crossing a milestone at 10 million subscriptions sold, the company also realized $150 million in recognized revenue in 2019, Babbel’s U.S. CEO Julie Hansen told me, and that number is significantly higher this year (though Babbel didn’t disclose any revenue numbers for 2020 yet). She also noted that while the company saw growth across markets, the U.S. saw especially strong growth, with revenue and subscriber numbers up 100%.

Image Credits: Babbel

“In the U.S. […] when we ask people why [they want to learn a language], the ones that say ‘for travel’ are the highest converters normally,” Hansen told me. “So I was in such a panic by mid-March, thinking that our business is going to go to zero. No one’s traveling. And it was just the exact opposite. People found in language learning — as they did in bike riding and sourdough bread baking — a creative outlet, self-improvement or a rewarding investment in themselves.”

As for the live classes, the set of available language combinations is still limited as the company starts to scale the program. For now, English speakers can sign up for Spanish and German classes, while German speakers can get lessons in English and Spanish. The plan is to add additional language pairs over the course of the year.

The overall goal for Babbel, Hansen noted, is to meet the needs of language learners across a wider spectrum, be that videos and podcasts, or these new live lessons. “It’s about embracing a more holistic view of the user’s language-learning experience and meeting their needs at more points along that journey,” Hansen said.

She also noted that providing a live experience is, in many ways, about quality control. “We’ve put a lot of work into teacher recruitment, teacher training, teacher reviews,” she said. “We are giving them the tools to be successful. We’re not just saying: ‘hey, there’s the app, go figure it out.’ There’s materials for every lesson. There’s guidance.”

Currently, Babbel is working with about 100 teachers and, after a quiet beta rollout, the company is now seeing thousands of students in class every week. “The end game for this year should be on a couple hundred teachers and tens of thousands of students in class every week,” Christian Hillemeyer, Babbel’s director of communications, noted.

Image Credits: Babbel

While there are plenty of language-learning apps as live tutoring services, Babbel may be the first service at its scale that aims to combine both. And beyond the live classes, Babbel is leaning into its overall content production beyond the core app features, with more podcasts and the short stories and culture snippets it is now adding to the app and — maybe even more importantly — as free videos and podcasts on YouTube and elsewhere.

In addition to all of the new features, the team also took a look at its existing lessons, and over the course of the last year, its teachers spent a lot of time making the course content more concise and the overall lesson length shorter, based on feedback from its didactics team. The team also introduced a new onboarding flow that includes a placement test so that learners can start using the app at the right level.

Source: Tech Crunch

Nearly a year ago, the spread of COVID-19 ended the daily commute for millions of Americans, an abrupt change that sent the ridesharing industry into a free fall.

Hip, which connected commuters with third-party bus and shuttle operators via an app, was just one of the many mobility-as-a-service startups that watched its clientele and revenue dwindle. Instead of cutting costs and waiting out the pandemic and the disruption it delivered, Hip expanded.

Hip added a business-to-business offering to its platform, a move aimed at companies and manufacturers preparing to bring back workers.

“Instead of holding back we actually doubled down and increased our platform,” CEO Amiad Solomon said in a recent interview, adding that the decision was prompted by discussions they had with large corporations that were struggling with how to safely bring employees back to the office.

The bet has paid off, Solomon said. The company, which employs 20 people at offices in New York City and Tel Aviv, has not only landed new customers, it has also raised $12 million. The funding round was led by NFX and Magenta Venture Partners, with participation by AltaIR Capital and former Uber, Booking.com and Google executives. The funding will be to hire more workers and expand its engineering, sales and operations.

Hip works with companies, in any location, to determine their needs. The company developed an internal tool that companies can use to upload thousands employees and their home addresses. That information is then used to help companies determine their needs and control costs.

On the most basic level, the Hip platform connects companies to the bus and shuttle providers. It offers route planning and has a contact-tracing tool to help companies track COVID-19 infections. Companies can also use the platform to set vehicle capacity controls and add customized features within the app, such as health and consent forms. Employees can use the app to book tickets, reserve seats and track their transportation in real time.

Employee shuttles are not new. The difference, Solomon said, is the flexibility that this platform provides.

“It’s not the same route, it’s not the same people and it’s not the same frequency,” Solomon said. We built out the entire infrastructure, both in terms of technology, but also in terms of our distribution. We now support over 200 cities with our partners in the U.S.”

Hip locked in its first corporation in late October and now has a handful of active customers. There are dozens more companies that are ready to use the platform once they decide to bring workers back, Solomon said.

“Now that we’re working on the corporate side, we see how much opportunity there is,” Solomon said. “I think that we’ll move more and more into this direction of providing modern software systems and the connection between that software and the transportation providers — to be that glue that connects corporations and their ground transportation needs to the world of our vetted partners and providers.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Otonomo, the cloud-based software startup that help companies capture and monetize connected car data, is headed to the public market. The Israeli-based startup said Monday it has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition company Software Acquisition Group Inc. II with a valuation of $1.4 billion.

Otonomo is joining a growing pool of automotive startups that have sidestepped the traditional IPO path in favor of merging with a SPAC, or blank check company.  Arrival, Canoo, Lordstown Motors, Luminar, ChargePoint, The Lion Electric and Proterra are just some of the transportation-related companies that have announced or closed their SPAC mergers in the past several months.

The capital provided by public markets has become too tempting for companies that either have capitally intensive projects — like attempting to become a vehicle manufacturer — or for those that are hoping to speed up their growth. Otonomo falls in the latter camp.

Otonomo said it raised $172.5 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from investors that included Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, BNP Paribas Asset Management Energy Transition Fund and Senvest Management LLC, with support from strategic investors Dell Technologies Capital, and Hearst Ventures. Current Otonomo shareholders will own a majority of the combined company at closing. Otonomo will have more than $307 million in cash proceeds once the companies combine.

Otonomo said it plans to use cash proceeds from the transaction to fund growth and accelerate its entry into new markets and use cases.

Otonomo launched in 2015 with a cloud-based software platform that can capture and anonymize vehicle data, which can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, mapping, subscription-based services, parking, usage-based insurance, traffic management, media and emergency services. The company’s platform is used by 16 vehicle manufacturers, fleets and more than 100 service providers, according to Otonomo.

The company has landed a dozens of customers on its pitch that it can help companies monetize all the date running through their connected vehicles. Otonomo says it securely collects the data, where its then modified so companies can use it to develop apps and services for fleets, smart cities and individual customers. The platform also enables GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data.

Otonomo’s growth can be measured — at least in one way — by examining the number of data points that run through the platform. A year ago, the company said its platform was taking in 2.6 billion data points a day from more than 20 million vehicles through partnerships with automakers, fleets and farm and construction manufacturers. Today, the company said the platform ingests more than 4 billion data points per day from over 40 million global connected vehicles. 

The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021. Ben Volkow continuing to serve as CEO of Otonomo, which will trade on the NASDAQ exchange.

Source: Tech Crunch

Every sport has its practice drills and exercises to help players hone skills between games. Why would esports be any different?

Gwoop, a startup out of Minnesota, wants to be the place where gamers go to train between matches. They’re building up a collection of free browser-based training tools meant to help you measure and improve vital stats like reaction time, mouse control, and aim, and see how your stats compare to the best.

Some of the training games currently up and running:

• Reaction Training: Wait for it…. click! As soon as the screen changes from grey to orange, you click the mouse button. The lower your reaction time (measured in milliseconds), the better. Harder levels throw in more colors to fake you out and give you a bit of pause.
• Visual Speed: Target boxes spawn one-at-a-time all around a 2D plane. Click one, and another appears. The more boxes you click before time runs out, the higher your score.
• Keyboard speed: Straightforward keyboard key-finding practice, because any time spent looking at your keyboard is time not spent dodging shots.

• Mouse control: If you can’t get your mouse to go where you want it, you can’t aim. Gwoop’s mouse control exercise has you drag a ball through a curved track; the more tracks you complete, the higher your score.
• FPS Training Arena: Strafe around a 3D arena (pictured up top), scanning for randomly generated targets and clicking them as they appear. Bonus points for hitting the dead center of a target.

All of the tools are linked back to an analytics dashboard, allowing you to gauge your performance metrics over time. Each skill gets its own leaderboard so you can see, for example, how your average reaction time compares to others worldwide and amongst your friends.

Even in its 3D exercises, Gwoop’s graphics are pretty simple — and that’s intentional. They want it to work for as many players as possible. They’ve got no reason to try to look like a AAA title; the more graphically intense a game is, the more powerful your computer would have to be to run it smoothly. Co-founder Gavin Lee tells me that their goal is to keep it so that “all you need is a computer and the Internet. It doesn’t matter if your device is 10 years old.” Even its 2D exercises have switches you can flip to further simplify the graphics and improve performance.

It’s the same reason they’ve built everything to work in the browser: not requiring any downloads means more people can train, with the added benefit for the Gwoop team of not having to worry about maintaining separate Mac/PC clients.

While the existing exercises might seem focused around improving first-person shooter skills, Lee tells me that they’re aiming to be “genre-agnostic” and are planning expansions tailored to other kinds of games. He mentions a “MOBA Arena” in the works meant to help polish skills required for games like League of Legends or DOTA, and another exercise-in-progress that’s “very Rocket League centric.” Their training tools seem mostly focused on keyboard/mouse users right now, but they’re working on more functionality for players who prefer controllers.

Gwoop is entirely free to players —so how will they make money? Lee tells me they’ve got two different strategies there: they’ll sell additional advanced analytics tools to teams, and, once they’ve got enough players clicking around, hopefully be able to serve as a platform for esports recruiters. Lee says players should be able to opt-in to having their data shared with potential sponsors and esports teams, with Gwoop getting paid to connect the dots. “All these division one schools have these platforms where you can upload football films and get recruited,” says Lee “we want to become that platform [for esports].”

Why the name “Gwoop”? Is it a bit of super cool gaming lingo, or some sort of acronym? Nope! It was just a quick, memorable domain Lee had been holding onto for decades. “I wish I had a better story for you,” he says, “but I bought the domain in 2002 just because I wanted a five letter domain that you could pronounce and was available.” It’s okay, Gavin: most people don’t care why Google is called Google, after all.

The team’s timing is pretty good here. With most people being stuck at home, more people are getting into gaming than ever before. Battle Royale games like Fortnite, PUBG, and Apex Legends are blowing up… but it’s hard to get better in a game where you spend the first ten minutes looting only to get shredded in 10 seconds when a skilled team rotates through. While many titles have dedicated training areas or firing ranges to practice in, they’re usually meant more for quick pre-game warmups and don’t do things like help you track metrics and improvements over time.

The Minneapolis-based team is currently comprised of its three cofounders. It’s self-funded to date, but I’m told a seed round is underway.

Gwoop is currently in semi-closed Beta and generally requires an invite to signup, but Lee tells me that the code #TC2021# should let our readers past the signup gate.

Source: Tech Crunch

Following its $16 million Series B last fall, event discovery network IRL is launching a new website that adds more social features around events, including profiles, chats and the ability to join group events, among other things. With the changes, users will also be able to receive personalized event recommendations, participate in group events, as well as talk about events with their friends, across both web and mobile. The combined efforts make IRL.com feel less like an online event search engine and more like a real social network.

The startup, which had previously focused on real-world events, could have easily imploded last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively shut down the in-person events industry overnight. But it instead quickly pivoted its event discovery app to include virtual events. In April, IRL adapted to the government lockdowns and restrictions on in-person gatherings by indexing online events, like livestreamed concerts, esports events, Zoom parties and more.

The changes, in a way, made IRL more accessible because it became a tool that anyone could use — not only those with the time and money to travel and attend real-world events.

Image Credits: IRL

In fitting with those changes, the company also last year redesigned its mobile app to make it easier for users to find new events to attend remotely.

It organized events into categories like gaming, music, tv, wellness, sports, podcasts, lifestyle and more — including those sourced from partners like TikTok, Meetup, Twitch, Spotify, SoundCloud, HBO, Ticketmaster, Eventbrite and others. (We’re also seeing Apple TV+ shows on the site, but IRL can’t officially confirm if Apple is a partner. We’re told IRL does have permission to display these events, however.)

The new IRL website is meant to better mirror the recently redesigned mobile experience.

As users join IRL.com for the first time, they can pick event categories they’re interested in and find their friends who are already using the service.

Also like the mobile app, you can now click across filters at the top of the website to drill down into events by category — like gaming, music, TV, sports, wellness, lifestyle, podcasts and others. And you can filter to see events taking place this weekend or view IRL’s own suggestions of “Top Picks.”

The site directs users to create their own group events with friends through the new built-in chat feature, which had previously only been available on mobile.

“Because everybody’s at home, there’s a big demand for a web messenger,” notes IRL founder and CEO Abraham Shafi.

Image Credits: IRL

He explains that the startup’s focus around messaging as the basis for a group is what allows IRL to differentiate itself from other groups-focused products. Facebook Groups, for example, are built around the idea of discussion boards, he says. But IRL is instead building its social network around messaging.

“There’s no group chatting app that also allows you to add events,” Shafi says. “We’re seeing that become really valuable for any groups that have upcoming and scheduled activities. It could be a TV show that you really like. Or it could be your friends playing Among Us or playing video games. [On IRL], you can imagine, literally, any type of group — like a book club that meets weekly and has weekly events coming up,” he says.

In addition, students who sign up with an .edu email address can now find on-campus events and groups that are available only to those who attend the same school. These aren’t typically indexed publicly and won’t appear on the IRL homepage.

Image Credits: IRL

The startup’s focus on group messaging has helped the app grow, despite the pandemic.

The company now reports over 10 million monthly active users, and its group messaging feature has been growing at around 30% month over month since August. Today, there are over 30 million chats sent on IRL per day, with over a billion chats that have been sent to date, Shafi says.

In time, IRL plans to expand the site to include more local events as well as deepen its relationship with partners.

For example, the IRL TikTok account has been the first to reach over a million followers. But currently, all the events TikTok posts to the site are hand-curated. IRL says it’s working on a deeper integration that will help pull in more TikTok content, including top trends.

The company also expects to attract more influencers with the website launch, like those who want to build a name for themselves as a “cool curator” of a specific type of event — such as the Sneakerheads account, for instance, which tracks sneaker drops.

Image Credits: IRL

As users participate on the website and app by following events, adding friends, and joining chats, IRL will be able to make better recommendations as to what sort of events they might like to try next.

And as the world recovers from COVID, allowing in-person events once again, the company believes usage will jump.

“When in-person returns — because that’s inevitable — we’ll be supporting that, for sure,” says Shafi, adding that he expects IRL to then “explode.”

“We’re not going to take virtual away. Virtual will always be there … quite honestly, it will probably always be a hybrid,” he says. “This pandemic has allowed us to focus on something that will actually help us grow once we can support both the real and the remote.”

“Me and the team are very grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to build something deeply meaningful in these times — even though at the outset, it would have seemed like we were screwed,” Shafi adds.

Initially, IRL tested the web app’s revamp only with its existing users. But the relaunch of the site now makes the changes accessible to all.

Source: Tech Crunch

Another hour, another billion-dollar round. That’s how February is kicking off. This time it’s Databricks, which just raised $1 billion Series G at a whopping $28 billion post-money valuation.

Databricks is a data-and-AI focused company that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud.

News of the new round began leaking last week. Franklin Templeton led the round, which also included new investors Fidelity and Whale Rock. Databricks also raised part of the capital from major cloud vendors including AWS, Alphabet via its CapitalG vehicle, and Salesforce Ventures. Microsoft is a previous investor, and it took part in the round as well.

But we’re not done! Other prior investors including a16z, T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global, BlackRock, and Coatue were also involved along with Alkeon Capital Management.

Consider that Databricks just raised a bushel of capital from a mix of cloud companies it works with, public investors it wants as shareholders when it goes public, and some private money that is enjoying a stiff markup from their last check into the company.

The company has made its mark with a series of four open source products with a core data lake product call Delta Lake leading the way. You may recall that another hot data lake company, Snowflake, raised almost a half a billion dollars on a $12.4 billion valuation a year ago before going public last September with a valuation twice that. Databricks has already exceeded that public valuation with this round — as a private company.

When we spoke to Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi at the time of his company’s $400 million round in 2019, one which valued the company at $6.2 billion at the time, he said his company was the fastest growing enterprise cloud software companies ever, and that’s saying something.

The company makes money by offering each of those open source products as a software service and it’s doing exceedingly well at it, so much so that investors were tripping over each other to be part of this deal. In fact, Ghodsi said in a conversation with TechCrunch today that his company had targeted a much more modest $200 million raise, but that figure grew as more parties wanted to invest funds into the company. Even with that, Databricks had to turn capital away, he added, after deciding to cap the round at $1 billion.

The extra $800 million that the company raised will be used for M&A opportunities with an eye on talent, spend on establishing a Lakehouse concept, international expansion, while also expanding its engineering team, the CEO said.

Ghodsi also made clear that he does not intend to let the percentage of revenue that the company spends on R&D to drop, as is common at modern software companies — as many SaaS companies grow, they expend more of their revenue on sales and marketing efforts over product spend, something that Databricks wants to avoid by continuing to invest in engineering talent.

Why? Because Ghodsi says that the pace of innovation in AI is so rapid that IP becomes outdated in just a few years. That means that companies that want to lead in this space will have to stay on the bleeding edge of their market or fall back swiftly.

The Databricks model appears to be working well, with the company closing 2020 at $425 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. That figure, up 75% from the year-ago period, is also up from a $350 million run rate at the end of its Q3 2020. (For more on Databricks’ business, product and growth, head here.)

Notably Ghodsi told TechCrunch that this deal only started to come together in December. It’s February 1st today, which means that it took on this bushel of new funding remarkably quickly.

Finally, at $425 million in ARR, is the CEO worried about having a valuation sitting at roughly a 65x multiple? Ghodsi said that he is not. He said that he told his company during an all-hands earlier today that the AI market is a long journey, one that he hopes to be on for decades, and the stock market will go up and down. His point, as far as I could read into it, was that so long as Databricks keeps growing as it has, its valuation will take care of itself (and that seems to be the case so far with this company).

What’s certainly true is that Databricks is now as rich as it has ever been, as large as it has ever been, and in a market that is maturing. Let’s see what it can do with all this money.

Source: Tech Crunch

Companies become industry leaders because of sparks: Ideas that lead to innovation, which shakes up a category. Apple changed the world when it realized that people wanted a PC in their pocket and it had to feel and look good.

Research makes sparks possible. In the modern economy, “eureka” moments are rare, and product-market fit like the iPhone, PayPal, and so many others are the outcome of sparks of innovation, yes — but more importantly, rigorous research. People still have great ideas in the shower, but most of the time, big advances happen after countless hours of market research, A-B testing and the like.

As one might expect, the pandemic has forced research online. The companies that figure out remote research will find success and profitability more quickly than those who are still struggling to. Remote research will remain the rule even as the worst of the pandemic mercifully ends, as our lives will still be upended for months or even years. For those investing in tech companies, newly honed remote research capabilities are a critical yet undervalued asset and a stealth indicator of company health.

The pandemic has been a major challenge for good corporate research. Most researchers — myself included — historically relied on in-real-life, face-to-face conversations with current and potential customers. Now that 2021 is underway, the onus is on organizations to explain how they’ve figured out the remote research problem. They’ve had 10 months to do so, and if they haven’t, they better have a plan for how they’re going to fix it.

Investors, executives and teams from the bottom-up must see — and demand — that companies get research right. Billions of dollars ride on it. No one wants to be Quibi, where good consumer research would have made all the difference.

There are ways to recreate effective research techniques digitally. Leaders should ask what tools researchers are using; what hacks they’ve developed to serve their needs in new and different ways. Are researchers using collaboration tools to draw out ideas and get to know people better? For example, I ask for photo collages of a person’s home life to help understand a person’s context. The next question should be how the research team is using these tools. Are they just giving a presentation, or are they using these tools in an open-ended fashion to spur dynamic conversation? I often use a digital whiteboard to provide a personal touch with real-time drawing and diagramming, which can be fun and even silly. It helps people let their guard down.

Next, leaders need to make sure the company is incorporating research into the design process, regardless of the collaboration difficulties the pandemic has imposed. Researchers and the design team need to answer questions like:

• Is research just a box to check? Or are designers and developers constantly referring to it?
• Is the research team properly elevated, ideally reporting into the chief product officer and sharing insights frequently with the executive team to provide a sharper sense of consumer desires?
• Are researchers given the freedom to learn more about the hacks that consumers are implementing in today’s unusual reality?
• Are designers and developers using the research as a jumping-off point, and do they have permission to design and create in new ways?

In all cases, research should be a core dimension of good product decisions, of sound digital product design and development. If it isn’t, organizations should make changes in 2021.

There is quantitative data to back up this statement. According to InVision’s industry research, only 10% of 2,300 teams surveyed deploy the most design-mature research practices, which increase speed-to-market, revenue and valuation. Only 7% say they rely on customer reviews and co-create products alongside their customers (important research practices).

Put more starkly, it’s likely the companies that are getting investment are not using research in the best possible way. Fewer than 10% of thousands of teams surveyed elevate design research. That means fewer than 10% of organizations are able to meet today’s remote research challenges easily, adapt to new realities quickly and succeed in this extreme time of change. In the throes of a pandemic, that is a problem.

Even after COVID, companies that thrive — or even simply survive — will be design-mature and digital-first. They will derive more of their revenue, interact with customers and gain new research insights digitally. In such an economy, technical and engineering prowess are critical, but all the technical ability in the world is worthless without understanding what consumers want a company to create. It is worthless without feedback. It is worthless without insight that leads to innovation.

It is worthless without a mature design process that uses research to validate, understand and turn the spark of an idea into reality.

Source: Tech Crunch