Author : zebethcontrol

Nigerian data and intelligence company Stears raises $3.3M, backed by Mac VC and Serena Ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Media & Entertainment, StartupsNo Comments

While studying at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, a group of graduates noticed how difficult it was to get data and information on Africa’s largest economy and their home country, Nigeria. Each had different yet complementary skills — Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode Ogunlana, a software engineer; Abdul Abdulrahim, a data scientist; and Preston Ideh, a corporate lawyer — and in 2017, they launched a media startup to address the dearth of information and data-driven insights in the West African country. Five years on, this startup, Stears, is announcing a $3.3 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital. Serena Ventures, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Melo 7 Tech Partners and Cascador (Empowering Economic Growth Foundation) participated. This news is coming two years after Stears raised $650,000 in pre-seed funding. Last month, it was one of the 60 startups to get accepted into the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 cohort, which included some non-dilutive funding. Stears started as a media publication focused on financial news and insights in Nigeria. Its flagship subscription insights product, Stears Premium, contains content ranging from news and opinion pieces to investigative pieces and deep dives, educating the general public on issues around business and finance, economy, government and policy in Nigeria. The $100-a-year product witnessed significant usage among consumers, particularly employees working in various finance-related institutions across the country. And because these institutions have more spending power, Stears subsequently tailored the product to businesses who wanted to subscribe on behalf of their teams. Some of its subscribers include financial institutions like Sterling Bank, and fintechs like Sparkle, PiggyVest and Paystack. The company says its userbase has grown mainly organically at around 6.5% month-on-month, doubling its total number of users over the last year. “We have a strong understanding of the kind of information people need. So our focus is on standardizing information dissemination and building with the customer in mind,” Ideh told ZebethMedia in an interview. “An essential part of our business model is pushing out high-value subscription data products, for instance, proprietary forecast models. Conversely, the low-value end will be news, so customers’ willingness to spend changes as they go along the spectrum.” The iteration of Stears Premium, alongside the introduction of other products Stears Pro and Stears Advisory, has seen Stears morph into a data and intelligence company. Macro trends and topics like GDP and inflation drive content on Stears Premium. Stears Pro, on the other hand, provides more bespoke content around specific issues such as market entry, country analysis and digital economy for international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and the knowledge workers—people need a great deal of data for their work, which may include roles such as analysts, portfolio managers, researchers and economists—that work in them. But in a bid to support its transition from an insights company to a data company and buoyed by this new investment, Stears is planning a strategy modification for the Pro product. According to the company’s COO and data scientist Abdulrahim, the data outfit is working with international development institutions and financial institutions to produce proprietary and exclusive datasets that don’t exist anywhere else. Therefore, instead of reporting insights from the data it sources, Stears wants to collate data, engage in deep data analytics and present it to its business customers in various formats. “An essential part of our business model is pushing out high-value subscription data products. And as we advance, we’ll do less custom work for this set of customers and focus more on overall data around the same sector,” added Ideh, on the direction Stears is taking with its Pro product. “So the difference in output is such that in the past, we put out reports, but in the future, we’re probably going to put out data feeds. So less text-heavy way of publishing and more of forecast and prediction around sectors that matter to knowledge workers and their organizations.” Stears Advisory — the product where Stears wears its consultancy hat and takes on third-party projects around its core coverage — is taking a rear seat as the company intends to double down on Pro and Premium. CEO Ideh explained that while the Advisory product, which he likens to a research and development (R&D) arm sponsored by different partners, allows Stears to experiment with data collection and analysis and provides the bedrock to carve out further insights, it’s not scalable and lacks the sort of recurring revenue that venture-backed businesses need. Image Credits: Stears So far, the company’s strategy seems to be paying off. Enterprise customers now contribute over 75% of revenues generated, up from 45% in 2021. It also expects revenues to double from last year as half-year revenues for 2022 have already surpassed full-year revenues for 2021. This is compared to the 80% revenue growth between FY 2021 and FY 2020. As a data and intelligence company, Stears finds itself in a sweet spot where it is incentivized to pursue political projects that would draw attention if it were a media or tech company. In 2019, the company embarked on one such project as it developed Nigeria’s first real-time election database. Over 2 million Nigerians used it to monitor the general elections. Ideh said his company intends to relaunch the election data site, this time with more datasets and functionalities, in anticipation of Nigeria’s 2023 elections. “Bloomberg, at its core, is a data company; we love how they approach elections and our approach in 2019 was driven by them,” said Ideh, who has always been vocal about Stears building the Bloomberg of Africa. “This is a big open data effort for us and we are also excited about polling because it is a very important form of data verification currently missing in Nigeria. And so over the election period, we will run and push out statistically representative polls on Nigeria, using strong data mindsets, to get a sense of public opinion issues and achieve more

Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ partners with Bumble to give users a blind-dating experience • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in apple tv, Apps, bumble, dating app, Social, Ted LassoNo Comments

In the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso,” characters Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) and Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) download Bantr, a fictional dating app where users can’t see each other’s photos. Bumble, the women-focused dating app, has now partnered with “Ted Lasso” to bring the experience of Bantr to its users. On Thursday, October 13, Bumble is launching a weekly “Bantr Live” experience, which mimics blind dating by having the user connect via chat without seeing what the potential match looks like. “The premise of Bantr is a dating experience many of our members have expressed interest in over the years. Bantr Live enables our community to connect with someone unexpectedly and learn more about a person before seeing them. We look forward to people on Bumble having fun with Bantr Live and connecting and dating in a new and exciting way,” said Olivia Yu, Global VP of Partnerships, Bumble, in a statement. Every Thursday at 7 p.m. local time, users can RSVP to the weekly event in Bumble’s Date Mode within the app. Bumble will have a reminder on screen with a countdown, so users know when Bantr Live kicks off. Once a user joins, they are randomly paired with someone and have three minutes to direct message a potential match. If things go well, users can choose to match, see each other’s photos and continue the conversation in the app. Bantr Live will be available to Bumble users for free in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. The experience will last until the end of the year. Also, as part of the partnership, Bumble users can redeem a two-month subscription to Apple TV+. Earlier this month, ZebethMedia reported Bumble’s newest blind date feature, which was quietly tested in the U.K. Now we know that this feature is called Bantr Live. The feature competes with Tinder’s “Blind Date” feature, an anonymous chat experience, and its speed dating-like feature “Fast Chat,” which lets users connect before matching. As previously announced, characters from the Emmy-winning series are featured in the newly launched EA Sports video game FIFA 23. Ted Lasso, Coach Beard, Sam Obisanya, Jamie Tartt, Dani Rojas, Roy Kent and Isaac McAdoo appear in the game.

Oh my gourd • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in international space station, Max Q, NASA, Rocket Lab, Space, SpaceXNo Comments

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Will every October issue have a Halloween/autumn pun as its title? I’LL NEVER TELL. In this issue: Blast off for Crew-5 Russia’s rethinking on the ISS News from Firefly, TK and more By the way…We are a little over ONE WEEK away from ZebethMedia Disrupt, which is returning live and in-person to San Francisco on October 18-20. Use this link to receive 15% off passes (excluding online and expo). SpaceX continues to set the industry standard for launch cadence, successfully completing three separate missions in the span of five days. The first was Crew-5 on Wednesday (more on that below), followed by a Starlink mission a scant eight hours later. To cap it all off, it launched two satellites for Intelsat on Thursday night. Crew-5 was a milestone for a few different reasons. The mission (so named because it’s SpaceX’s fifth crewed mission with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program) took off from launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The crew of four — which includes American astronauts Nicole Mann, mission commander, and Josh Cassada, mission pilot; JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, mission specialist; and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, mission specialist — are traveling to the station in a Crew Dragon dubbed “Endurance.” It separated from the Falcon 9 rocket shortly after launch and arrived at the station on Thursday. SpaceX has now delivered 30 humans to space across eight human spaceflight missions. It also marks the first time that a cosmonaut has flown on a SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first time a cosmonaut has flown on an American spacecraft since 2002. Cosmonaut Kikina’s spot on the spacecraft is part of a recent astronaut transportation deal between the U.S. and Russia. American astronaut Francisco Rubio flew to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz last month as part of the deal. Looking ahead, SpaceX’s next CCP mission, Crew-6, will launch in February of next year. The Ax-2 mission, Axiom Space’s second private mission to the ISS, will follow in May. Image Credits: SpaceX Russia is having internal discussions over continuing its participation in the International Space Station (ISS) beyond 2024, despite statements made earlier this summer that the country will pull out of the station program by the middle of the decade. Sergei Krikalev, head of human space programs at Roscosmos, said Monday that the Russian space agency is in discussions to extend its “participation in [the] ISS program with our government and hope to have permission to continue next year.” The about-face comes just a few months after Roscosmos head Yuri Borisov announced Russia’s plans to leave the station after 2024, and instead construct its own orbiting station. The ISS is operated in partnership between the space agencies of U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. America has committed to operate the station through 2030. However, Krikalev admitted that a new Russian station may not be ready by 2025. “We know that it’s not going to happen very [quickly], so probably we will keep flying [on the ISS] until we have any new infrastructure that will allow us to do continuous human presence on low Earth orbit,” he said. Image Credits: NASA More news from TC and beyond ArianeGroup conducted a successful hot fire test of the Ariane 6 second stage, a key milestone in stage qualification testing. The European Space Agency is hoping to launch the Ariane 6 rocket sometime next year. CAPSTONE, NASA’s orbit-charting satellite, has regained three-axis attitude control and remains on track to enter its target orbit around the moon on November 13. Firefly Aerospace can now count itself amongst a small number of space companies to have reached orbit. The company launched its Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 2 on October 1 and declared the mission “100% successful” in achieving its primary objectives. Inmarsat is collaborating with U.K. company Livewire Digital to create a “network of networks” for connectivity across Inmarsat’s geosynchronous satellites, terrestrial 5G and a new constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who bankrolled and flew on the Inspiration4 mission last year, outlined his ambitious plans for the Polaris Dawn series of private human spaceflight missions. The first is expected to launch in partnership with SpaceX in March next year. Redwire is buying QinetiQ Space, a Belgium-based supplier of small satellites and other space infrastructure, for €32 million ($31.1 million). Rocket Lab’s punnily-named “It Argos Up From Here” mission blasted off from the company’s New Zealand launch site on Friday. The dedicated launch carried a General Atomics satellite bus carrying an environmental monitoring payload named Argos-4. Skyrora’s head of government affairs, Alan Thompson, expressed concern over the ongoing vacancy of a key science minister position in the British government. “The new Tory administration has yet to recognize and prioritise the massive opportunities held within the UK Space sector, a truth echoed in 80 days of absence despite the previous incumbent’s commitment and readiness to champion UK Space and Science,” he said in a statement. Space billboards could turn a profit despite costing up to $65 million, according to a new study from Russian researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will see its first launch in over three years. The mission, scheduled for October 28, will deploy two satellites to GEO for the U.S. Space Force. SpinLaunch completed its tenth successful flight test using its suborbital accelerator. Unlike other tests, this one carried test customer payloads from NASA, Outpost and others. SpinLaunch said the test “demonstrated that SpinLaunch partners’ standard satellite components are inherently compatible” with the company’s unique kinetic launch system. United Launch Alliance launched two SES satellites aboard its Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission is part of SES’ effort to collect almost $4 billion in government payouts to clear the C-band. Virgin Orbit has completed a full launch rehearsal for its next flight from Spaceport Cornwall. It will be the first orbital space launch to ever take place from

Singapore-based staffing platform Workmate acquired by Persol Asia Pacific • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Asia, hr, human resources, Persol Asia Pacific, Persol Holding, Singapore, Southeast Asia, staffing, Startups, WorkmateNo Comments

Workmate, a Singapore-based on-demand staffing platform, has been acquired by Persol Asia Pacific, one of the region’s largest HR service providers. Workmate focuses on frontline and essential workers, and the acquisition will allow it to expand its HR solutions throughout the Asia Pacific. Workmate currently operates in Thailand and Indonesia and is expanding operations into Singapore this month. Persol Asia Pacific is part of Persol Holdings, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It is one of the largest human resources companies in Japan and has invested in HR tech companies including Glint. Workmate’s Thailand team Workmate was founded in 2016 to help businesses find frontline staff, while ensuring that workers get consistent employment. About 120,000 frontline workers and more than 800 companies are currently on its platform. The company defines frontline staff as essential workers, typically in low- to mid-skilled work, who provide essential services to the public. Sectors include logistics and warehousing, manufacturing, food and beverage, retail and back office roles like admin and customer service. Workmate provides companies with a pre-vetted pool of workers for both short- and long-term work and uses proprietary AI-scoring algorithms to improve matching quality and attendance rates, worker retention and productivity. The algorithms take into account data points like work experience, location and skills, and combines that with first-hand behavioral data and worker history on Workmate’s platform, like attendance and supervisor ratings. Workmate will retain its own branding after the acquisition and will run independently with Persol Asia Pacific as its parent company.

Thai beauty platform Konvy raises Series A for international expansion • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Asia, beauty, eCommerce, Konvy, Southeast Asia, Startups, ThailandNo Comments

Founded 10 years ago, Konvy is now Thailand’s top beauty e-commerce platform. It plans to accelerate its omnichannel and international distribution with a new Series A of $10 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. Konvy was launched in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur QingGui Huang, who previously managed fashion e-commerce platforms in China. It now works with more than 1,000 brands, representing SKUs of more than 20,000. Its brand portfolio includes L’Oréal, Shiseido, Sulwhasoo, Eucerin and La Roche-Posay. “Konvy had the advantage of starting in Thailand when there were no really significant e-commerce players there at the time,” Huang told ZebethMedia. “We’ve since leveraged our first mover advantage in Thailand to become a leading e-commerce player in the market.” Konvy founders Leon Huang, Pornsuda Vangvidhayakul and QingHui Huang Konvy’s goal is to help local and international beauty brands take advantage of two major trends. The first is that health and beauty purchases are a priority spending category for Thai consumers and the second is that Thailand sees high rates of e-commerce purchases and social media usage, meaning that young people in Thailand spend an average of about two hours and 55 minutes on social media each day. Huang said he confirmed his assumptions about Thai spending on beauty products through conversations with brands, and that drove his desire to start Konvy. “This opportunity of health and beauty being a priority spending category for Thai consumers is a function of both demand and supply circumstances favoring this consumer behavior over the past decades,” he said. “On the supply side, Thailand has been a manufacturing hub for a lot of international brands for more than 40 years. This has spawned as well a thriving local industry. On the demand side, we see that Thai consumers are plugged into this mindset of ‘upgrades’ when it comes to health and beauty, that is to say, it’s not just about accessing such products but actually looking for the best products and high willingness to spend on the latest trends.” Konvy taps into the high rate of social media usage by developing a feedback loop, where engagements on its partner brands’ not only helps Konvy’s existing portfolio, but also helps more brands in the future. For example, as more Gen Z consumers bought products they saw on TikTok during the pandemic, Konvy made itself more present on that channel. In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners founding managing partner Yinglan Tan said, “While there may be stronger competitors from horizontal marketplaces in the future, we believe Konvy is best positioned to be the market leader in the online beauty segment given its long-standing brand equity, brand-centric and community-led approach.”

Airwallex raises $100M to power cross-border business banking, valuation stays flat at $5.5B • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Airwallex, Capital 49, Fintech, Salesforce Ventures, square peg, StartupsNo Comments

The economy may be showing many signs of contraction right now, but many companies still need to do business internationally. Now a startup providing the tools to make and manage those transactions is announcing some funding. Airwallex, the Hong Kong/Australia startup that provides cross-border banking and other financial services for businesses, has raised $100 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business operationally, geographically and with new products in areas like credit and expense management — and for M&A. The funding is coming in the form of an extension to Airwallex’s Series E — technically a Series E-2, after a $100 million extension in November 2021, and the original $200 million in September 2021. It is mostly an inside round with previous backers Square Peg, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, Lone Pine Capital, Hermitage Capital, 1835i Ventures and Tencent all participating; Australian fund HostPlus and an unnamed “leading North American pension fund” also invested. Jack Zhang — Airwallex’s CEO who co-founded the company with Xijing Dai, Lucy Liu and Max Li — told ZebethMedia that business has been on the up in the last year. The company’s revenues have grown by 184%, ARR passed $200 million in September, and it’s processing close to $50 billion in annualized transactions, he said. Customer numbers have doubled, although it only describes the figure as a vague “tens of thousands” of businesses (they include Papaya Global, HubSpot, Plum, GOAT and others). And yet, given the current economic climate, this round was not without its struggles. Namely, it is coming in at a flat valuation of $5.5 billion, level with what Airwallex achieved a year ago, when the valuation catapulted $1.5 billion in the space of a few weeks. “It’s been a more challenging environment to raise money,” Zhang said. He and others on the team could see what was coming around the corner earlier in the year, he added, and although Airwallex still had significant money in the bank — $600 million out of the total $900 million raised as of the end of September, when Zhang and I spoke — the startup chose to raise more, just in case. “Last year it took two weeks to raise $100 million,” he said of the previous fundraise. “This year it took four months. We think it was a good outcome that we were able to raise the money at all.” Last time we covered the company, I noted that Airwallex was going into its Series E extension having fended off two acquisition offers from fast-growing fintechs. I wonder if investors (or Airwallex itself) ask themselves if choosing to stay independent was the right choice. In the meantime, the company continues to grow its own platform on its own steam. Airwallex’s core focus currently is on two areas. Business banking covers banking accounts, money transfer, payment cards, expenses management and B2B payment links. And its platform product is a set of embeddable financial services that customers integrate into their own platforms or websites by way of APIs to power experiences for themselves and their own customers. These include online payments, treasury services to store and manage funds internationally, foreign exchange to power pricing internationally, payouts and card issuing. Airwallex, as we’ve written before, made a splash when it was first founded by doing the right thing at the right time: it did the tough work of integrating with lots of banks and building complex financial services and then made them easy to use (leaning on APIs) so that companies doing business across country boundaries could set up banking and money moving services quickly, initially out of Asia Pacific and eventually globally. “In the last six years, we’ve built more than 50 bank integrations and now offer payments across 95 countries, payments through a partner network,” Zhang told me back in 2021. From that, it moved on to bank accounts and “other primitive stuff” with card issuance and more, he said, eventually building an end-to-end payment stack. That business saw a huge surge in demand (and valuation) in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when — in the absence of in-person activity and people carrying out more aspects of their work and leisure life online — businesses that were already digital saw transactions go through the roof; and those that were more focused on the offline world pre-pandemic found themselves needing to take a sharp digital turn. The big question more recently — both for Airwallex and the many other companies like it such as Stripe, PayPal, Revolut and many more — has been whether those shifts would remain as the world slowly reverted back to pre-pandemic habits and processes. Airwallex’s growth seems to point to more opportunity ahead, although not at the rates that it would have projected a year ago. Its most active markets today are China, the U.K. and North America, Zhang said, and the plan is to continue expanding in specific countries with particularly strong addressable markets. Israel is one of those countries, since just about every business there with a digital angle has international operations to expand outside of their small home market — “Every single startup there is a potential customer!” Zhang exclaimed, adding that it’s also a hotbed for potential acquisition targets, especially right now, since it’s become much more challenging for smaller companies to raise rounds. One area, for example, where Israel is strong, and Airwallex currently doesn’t have a native solution, is in the area of fraud protection. “I’m super interested in that space form an M&A perspective,” Zhang said. Separately to building its own business and pursuing acquisitions to expand inorganically, Airwallex’s founders have been also building out another venture to fuel its business growth, an investment fund. Capital 49, as it’s called, was launched back in July 2021. Unlike other funds aimed at expanding a product’s ecosystem like the Alexa Fund at Amazon or the Slack Fund, Capital 49 is not operated off Airwallex’s balance sheet, instead tapping a number of Airwallex’s

AgriWebb’s software seeks to boost yields, lower environmental impacts for farmers and ranchers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in agriwebb, AgTech, Climate, Startups, sustainable foodNo Comments

AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer and drive the industry’s animal and environmental welfare transparency. The startup said today it has raised another $6.8 million of funding led by Germin8 Ventures and iSelect Fund. In total, AgriWebb has raised $27 million in Series B and about $29.3 million since its inception in 2014. It did not disclose its valuation when asked. Its app allows users to visualize their operations and give insights on animals and grazing, including the best grass location and which animals gain weight. On top of that, it lets ranchers improve their sustainable land management for better profits and leverage the on-farm data they’re recording to make more intelligent business decisions, according to the company. AgriWebb claims more than 16,000 farmers and ranchers globally are using its cloud-based platform and managing approximately 19 million animals on over 136 million acres of grazing land across the globe, including Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. The global beef market is estimated at $500 billion, but the pure farm management software market in its core geographies is estimated at around $3.5 billion, the company executive chairman Justin Webb told ZebethMedia. AgriWebb’s key markets include Australia — where more than 15% of the national herd is managed using its platform — the U.K. and the U.S. Additionally, AgriWebb has partnerships in Brazil and South Africa, Webb said. Unlike most competitors who act as a point solution focused on one or two areas of farm management, AgriWebb’s platform brings together animal management, grazing management and team communication; task and compliance management; and daily record-keeping in one place, Webb explained. “Its grazing insights enable ranchers to maximize productivity, eliminate waste, and validate grazing and animal management decisions in a way that other record-keeping systems can’t touch,” Webb pointed out. Webb founded AgriWebb with John Fargher (chief revenue officer) and Kevin Baum (chief executive officer) in 2014. In Australia, the three founders discovered that farmers were not only interested in the advantages of technology but were also desperately cobbling their own solutions with scrappy spreadsheets and notebooks. “Livestock producers deserve better technology to help them maximize their business and consumers need more reliable provenance for the animal and environmental welfare of their food,” Webb said. “AgriWebb has always been about serving the farmers, and this round of funding doesn’t change our mission; it simply magnifies it.” The latest funding will be used for the international expansion of AgriWebb to ranchers and farmers in the U.S., the U.K., and Latin America, both directly and via partnerships. AgriWebb has secured customers in 28 of the 50 states since its U.S. launch in 2021 and plans to continue rapidly expanding. In addition, the latest funding will enable the company to establish its database. Apart from the funding, AgriWebb recently joined two project proposals to the USDA CSC program, one led by American Farmland Trust and the other by Farm Journal’s Trust in Food initiative, Webb said. Both aim to improve the U.S. beef supply chain’s climate footprint and scale regenerative agriculture practices, Webb continued. One project is focused on improving transparency in the beef supply chain and understanding the GHG impact of different practices; the second aims to scale the adoption of practices through payments for practice changes. “There’s a misconception that agriculture is at odds with climate, but the importance of sustainability and implementing sustainable practices is far from lost on farmers and producers,” Webb said. “In fact, the long-term sustainability and viability of their land are of utmost importance. Talk to any landholder and you’ll understand their long-term goal is to pass on their land in better condition to the next generation. Sustainable and regenerative practices can and do exist in tandem with productive and profitable farms, and we remain steadfast in our endeavor to support producers now and in the future through data that measures, manages and improves the sustainability of the food supply chain from farm to plate.” The company raised its first Series B from investors, including Telus Ventures, Grosvenor Food & AgTech and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation in January 2021. “AgriWebb fits with Germin8’s thesis to invest in the full-stack enterprise software companies within AgTech that bring essential enterprise value to farmers in alignment with practices that are sustainable,” said managing partner at Germin8 Ventures Michael Lavin. “There are very few software offerings capable of accelerating the regenerative agriculture practices our climate stands to benefit from, and even fewer that target livestock production rather than being at odds with it.”

OG App, what exactly was your end game here? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in Apps, business model, copyright infringement, Instagram, Opinion, Startups, The OG AppNo Comments

A couple of weeks ago, Apple removed the OG App from its app store, and today Google followed suit, booting the app from its platform as well. And I’m left scratching my head wondering what the end game was for the founders of the OG App. As far as I can tell, the company basically made a new version of Instagram that strips the advertising out, and brings back the non-algorithmic feed. Don’t get me wrong, I would love that, but there’s no universe in which it was going to be a good idea to essentially steal a bunch of content from Meta (née Facebook), repackage it and feed that content to users. You see, businesses have to make money, and in the case of Instagram, that means showing advertising to its users. “Everyone knows Instagram sucks. We made it better and got a lot of love from users. But Facebook hates its own users so much, it’s willing to crush an alternative that gives them a clean, ad-free Instagram. Apple is colluding with Facebook to bully two teenagers who made Instagram better,” the startup said in a statement to ZebethMedia for Ivan’s story. And that’s where I’m just left shaking my head — that isn’t hating your users, that is protecting the only way you have to make money. Literally any company in the world would fight to protect its bottom line, and stealing wholesale from a mega-corporation with a $360 billion market cap is not a great way to build a startup. The app — and its tens of thousands of downloads — does illustrate one thing though, which is that people are getting pretty bored of Instagram’s ad-heavy business, and according to Sarah’s recent reporting, things are going to get a lot worse. But if you don’t like it, your option is to stop using the offending platform and switch to another. The people behind the OG App will be extraordinarily lucky if it turns out that getting the app yanked from the app stores is the worst thing that happens to them, and as much as I want to encourage young entrepreneurs, I’m really confused why nobody around them stopped them for long enough to say “uhm, maybe this isn’t a great idea.”

After bans by Apple and Google, The OG App ‘will be unable to continue serving users’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the ZebethMedia Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion. Oh, and Haje has written more than 20 Pitch Deck Teardowns over on TC+ — and he’s running low on decks to review. Surely he hasn’t scared everyone away quite yet? Here’s a bit more info about what he’s looking for, and instructions for how you can submit your pitch deck for review! See you tomorrow, dear friends! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Following suit: Today we have another installment of The OG App news. This time Ivan reports that Google also removed it from the Play Store. You might recall that The OG was promising an ad-free Instagram experience. After Meta said an app like that violated its policies, Apple made the first move and removed it a few weeks ago. The day has finally come: Hulu raised its subscription prices today, reports Lauren. It’s a trap!: “If risks to the software supply chain aren’t a boardroom priority yet, they soon will be,” Endor Labs’ co-founder Varun Badhwar told Kyle. The software supply chain startup emerged from stealth today with $25 million to continue developing its graph analysis tech for learning how dependencies are being used within an organization and creating the appropriate risk indicators. Startups and VC “The crude analogy I’ve been using internally is last year was the party and this year is the hangover. That’s really how it feels to me — that we’re starting to understand the excesses of last year,” says Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures in an interview, featured in Mary Ann’s The Interchange newsletter. “We’ve seen now the retrenchment period after the fact. At Index, we’re probably more aggressively investing in what we think the next generation of fintech companies is going to be right now.” Cloud kitchens became popular during the global pandemic as a way for restaurants to reach their communities when people were not going out as much. One of those was Foodology, a Colombia-based cloud kitchen and virtual restaurant company, which just raised $50 million, Christine reports. And we have five more for you: Growth hacking is really just growth testing Image Credits: Guido Mieth (opens in a new window) / Getty Images “Growth hacking” may not be the best phrase to describe the work required to fine-tune marketing campaigns and systems. In truth, successful marketers iterate constantly, measuring and testing efforts to minimize waste and maximize ROI. “If each test can result in a 1% improvement, you’re well on your way to 100% improvement after running 100 tests,” writes Jonathan Martinez, a self-described “marketing nerd” who has driven growth at Uber, Postmates and Chime. The best way to uncover marketing hacks is by using “stringent experimentation frameworks to run countless A/B tests,” advises Martinez, who shares a RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort) scoring spreadsheet, along with his thoughts on acquisition and activation growth hacking. “It’s important to remember there’s no such thing as hacking growth. Instead, you should be thinking about how you can run 100 tests to move the needle forward.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. When one Florida company demanded its employee turn on a webcam during the workday so said company could monitor their work, it learned the hard way that hiring someone from overseas and performing video surveillance was in violation of European human rights policies. Haje has more on what happened. ICYMI over the weekend, Twitter locked Kanye West’s account following an antisemitic tweet, Taylor reported. And this was apparently after Elon Musk tweeted a welcome to Ye, who tweeted that he had been removed from Instagram. And we have five more for you:

Great, now the AI is coming for your grandma’s recipes as well! • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in AI, food, Robotics & AI, yummyNo Comments

We’ve seen AIs create music, pornography and art. The Estonian startup Yummy started off creating a meal-kit startup, but along the way created an AI that can create and adapt recipes based on your taste and dietary restrictions, complete with AI-generated images of what your dishes might look like. “Imagine a world where you would not have to spend years of your life on deciding what to eat, search for recipes, research nutritional information and health benefits, follow diets and do grocery shopping,” says co-founder and CEO Martin Salo in an interview with ZebethMedia. “Imagine we solve this complex problem on your behalf, based on your personal preferences — and got it right every time.” The co-founders of the company started Clean Kitchen together in Estonia back in 2020. The company just raised a round of angel investment to bring meal kits to parts of the world where they aren’t as prevalent as in, say, the U.S. More than just the meal kits, though, the company is carving out a novel slice of the market, making every recipe customizable. “We’re using generative AI and other cutting-edge technologies to build a fully customizable meal planning and grocery shopping experience that delivers on budget, taste, health, variety, while minimizing food waste,” says the company’s CBO, Karl Paadam. “We’re not thinking in terms of individual store items but instead offering customers personalized outcomes.” On the Yummy platform, the company wants to make it as easy as writing a Dall-E prompt; “I want to be eating a varied vegetarian diet that will match my taste preferences, my exercise routine and my budget,” for example. “When we think about the current world of shopping for groceries, it’s all about ingredients or maybe recipes in meal kits, right? You can filter your search or perhaps modify ingredients so you can sort of get what you want, but that takes a fair bit of work,” says Salo. “What if you don’t talk about each ingredient but instead make broader choices? You could say ‘I want five fish dishes,’ then ‘okay, now make it cheaper,’ or ‘I want this to be a balanced diet’. Those things all have specific meanings to humans, but figuring it all out by hand would be a lot of work. Figuring out what all the ingredients contain, and if you change one ingredient, it throws everything off balance. If you do your monthly shop, you might actually go through hundreds of items — do you have time to read all of those labels?” That’s where Yummy throws the AI at the problem, giving users the option to make dishes with variations: The cool thing is that the company’s software doesn’t just generate the new recipes, it also generates the images to go with it. Super cool. “What makes this experience so powerful is that in a short time, when using the service, we will learn to create an endless amount of recipes that will exactly match all your preferences. Always,” laughs Paadam. “You will never have to think about all the complexities in regard to food ever again.” The company argues that these features make it possible to eat healthier with specialty ingredients that are in season, or locally available. “We did some really cool experiments. We’re now opening our meal-kit service in Poland, and we took a couple of our Estonian recipes, and said ‘make them more Polish,’ and suddenly, boom, certain national ingredients that were appearing in the instructions are replaced,” Paadam says. “The more generic ones were replaced with specific, locally available ingredients. This is the magic. We can say ‘make it faster to cook,’ ‘make it sweeter,’ ‘make it low calorie’ or ‘make it low sodium,’ and the AI takes care of it. You do not need to go read the labels to do all that research.” The company is backed by a collective of Estonian founders acting as angel investors, raising $3.6 million from investors including Markus Villig of Bolt, Mart Abramov of TaxScouts, Martin Koppel of Fortumo, Thomas Padovani of Adcash, Marko and Kristel Kruustük of Testlio, etc. as well as Startup WiseGuys, Andreas Mihalovits, Hatcher, DEPO and Exelixis, etc.