Author : zebethcontrol

Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in content management, developers, Enterprise, funding, headless CMS, seed round, StartupsNo Comments

Payload, which develops a headless open-source content management system (CMS), today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other investors include MongoDB Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Grand Ventures and Exceptional Capital, in addition to a number of angel investors. Unlike most CMS tools, Michigan-based Payload puts its emphasis on developers. Bootstrapped since 2021, the team behind the platform argues that typical app frameworks give developers the tools to create their backends but not the CMS-style user interfaces they would need to manage apps and their content. Image Credits: Payload “To devs, ‘content management system’ is usually a swear word. If an engineer gets assigned a CMS project, it’s less than thrilling. They want to avoid roadblocks, write code and build things they’re proud of — but existing CMS’s get in the way of that left and right,” said CEO James Mikrut, who co-founded the company together with Dan Ribbens (COO) and Elliot DeNolf (CTO). “We’re not competing with Webflow or Squarespace — rather, we’re going to give talented engineers a tool they can trust to build critical content infrastructure.” Instead of building another no-code CMS, the team went in the exact opposite direction and built something more akin to a framework than ‘just’ a pure headless CMS. To get started, developers describe their configuration for Payload in TypeScript and the service creates a Mongo database, sets up REST and GraphQL APIs, handles file storage, authentication and access control — and, of course, creates the admin UI, which defaults to a clean, minimalist look. The company is currently in the middle of its first launch week, a concept that seems to be making the rounds among startups these days. Earlier this year, the team also launched version 1.0 and now that it has raised its first funding round, the plan is to expand the team and invest in the open-source community around Payload. And like most open-source startups, the company plans to launch a managed service, Payload Cloud, to power its monetization strategy and function as a hub for deploying Payload apps.

TheGist taps AI to summarize Slack channels and threads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in AI, aleph, App, Apps, Enterprise, Robotics & AI, slack, summarization, TheGistNo Comments

Itay Dressler and Itzik Ben Bassat, who’ve held various software engineering and executive roles at startups together over the years, are accustomed to exchanging brief messages. Ben Bassat has ADHD, and for that reason prefers to keep texts on the shorter side. But as he and Dressler were faced with wrangling an increasing number of tools at their employers, they came to realize they weren’t the only ones who could benefit from more succinct updates. So they founded TheGist with the grand mission of “simplifying information consumption in workplace communications and data” through instant highlights. The startup’s first product uses AI to scan Slack messages and provide a personalized summary, aiming to filter out noise. And in the enterprise, there’s plenty of noise to filter. According to a 2021 report in Tech Republic, a survey of remote workers showed that 18% suffered from “information overload” while 8% were overwhelmed by the amount of data and apps they were meant to check each day. “There’s an overload of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that aren’t deeply integrated. Different teams use different tools to create information silos,” Ben Bassat told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The integration between those SaaS tools makes the information overload greater, not smaller. There is no reason that in 2022, using AI, employees can’t get the information they need to make better decisions in a short and personalized form.” Installing TheGist’s Slack app — which can summarize both channels and threads — is a straightforward-enough process. Once connected to a workspace, the app can be added or invited to channels that a user wishes to summarize. Typing the command “/gist” summons it, generating a fresh summary — generally a bullet point or two in length — of what happened in the channel, visible only to the person who requested it. Image Credits: TheGist TheGist Slack app can provide summaries covering time scales from one day to several weeks. Beyond this, it can summarize particularly long individual Slack messages. Service is free for up to five summaries but unlimited summaries requires a premium subscription, which starts at $10 per user per month. “We wanted to release a tool that highlights the need for shortening the information overload in companies,” Ben Bassat said. “TheGist is a game changer for decision makers as we enable managers to dramatically increase the amount of workplace information they can consume by digesting it and personalizing it … For employees, we serve them the information they need when they need it so they can be aligned with the organization and make better and more knowledgeable decisions.” That’s a lot to promise. AI, while improving by leaps and bounds, has its limitations; TheGist’s summaries are bound to contain mistakes from time to time. And from a security standpoint, companies might be loathe to let a third-party app process the internal messages — particularly companies in highly regulated industries. Ben Bassat didn’t provide much in the way of detail around TheGist’s AI systems and their development, save that it’s leveraging “multiple open source large languages models” with “specific in-house fine-tuning.” “We are using statistical models to evaluate our models’ output and assess correctness,” Ben Bassat said. “As in every product which is generated by AI, results can have summary errors, and our users are made aware of that.” On the compliance question, Ben Bassat claims that TheGist doesn’t store Slack data other than the specific messages users ask to summarize, which it deletes after the summaries are generated. “We only store analytical and usage data in order to improve our product and personalize the user experience. Users can ask to delete their data according to our privacy policy,” Ben Bassat added. There aren’t a lot of competitors in the Slack summarization space. But there are a few, it’s worth noting. Frame summarizes the previous day’s Slack activity, providing metrics including team responsiveness and auto-detected “high” and “low” moments. Grok, a Slack app, provides summaries of Slack conversations and threads generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. There’s also TLDR, which uses algorithms to spit out Slack message summaries. Image Credits: TheGist But Ben Bassat and co don’t see TheGist’s first app as the endgame. In parallel to it, Ben Bassat says that the company’s on the cusp of releasing “proprietary generative AI solutions” for different platforms in the near future — although it’s not clear for which platforms and what types of generative AI. Ben Bassat didn’t have much to say on the subject, which suggests that the specifics are in flux. “The goal of our platform is to enable anyone to be informed with short updates from any app they use for communication or productivity: Email, texts, project managing tools, doc files and more. Solving this challenge requires a lot of technological focus with a high level of expertise,” Ben Bassat said. “Our vision is to provide accurate summaries and actionable insights across all information-producing apps.” The success of TheGist’s Slack app aside, generative AI is probably a wise path to take. It’s the hot new thing in tech, to be sure, with startups like Jasper, an AI copywriting app for marketers, recently raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. VCs are certainly excited by the prospect; Sequoia Capital said in a blog post from September that it thought generative AI could “create trillions of dollars of economic value.” For its part, TheGist has raised $7 million to date in pre-seed funding co-led by StageOne Ventures and Aleph. Eden Shochat, a partner at Aleph, said via email: “TheGist’s debut tool is only the starting point, and there is so much more to come. In a world where companies create excessive amounts of data, across multiple tools, employees only want to zero in on the insights that matter to them, at the point in time when they are relevant. TheGist is on a mission to create magical tools that work for the user, rather than the other way around.”

Spotify’s video podcast publishing tools expand to creators worldwide • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, Media & Entertainment, podcasts, Spotify, streaming, Video, video podcastsNo Comments

Spotify today is expanding its video podcasting capabilities to creators in more than 180 markets worldwide, which means the functionality is now available in nearly all the markets where Spotify’s podcast creation software, Anchor, is currently available. The feature, first entered wider testing last year, then officially launched in April to a handful of key markets, including the U.S., before rolling out to half a dozen more countries this summer, including parts of Europe. The move puts Spotify in closer competition with YouTube, where video podcasts have been growing in popularity. Last year, YouTube hired a podcast executive, Kai Chuk, to lead its efforts in the space and was said to be been offering cash to popular podcasters to film their shows, Bloomberg reported. This August, YouTube took another big step into this space with the launch of a dedicated podcasts homepage in the U.S. Meanwhile, though Spotify is happy to talk about the expansion of its video recording functionality, the company wouldn’t share any sort of metrics about the traction its video podcasts are seeing — either in terms of creation or viewership. Instead, the company only responded to our inquiries by saying it’s “excited about the growth” as the format is adopted. So far, the adoption of video podcasts on Spotify has included both Spotify Originals and other, independent shows, like “Call Her Daddy,” which became a Spotify exclusive in July 2021, plus “Diary of a CEO,” and the “Always Sunny Podcast,” among others. Spotify also couldn’t confirm if its video podcasts have managed to increase the time users spent directly watching the shows on their phone or laptop, for example. However, the company did note that creators don’t necessarily have to switch to video entirely to leverage the new format. Rather, they can choose to diversify their content types by publishing some visual episodes alongside their traditional audio podcasts. For example, the episode “An Abortion Story” from “Call Her Daddy,” encouraged listeners to pull out their device at various parts to watch the video. With today’s expansion, Spotify says video podcasters can now use Anchor’s tools to reach Spotify’s audience of 456 million monthly listeners, while listeners can take advantage of features like the ability to switch between watching the video and playing the video in the background. Notably, background play is a feature YouTube charges for through its YouTube Premium subscription. But on Spotify, it’s available to all users — including non-subscribers — for free. If Spotify’s video podcast market share grows, this could become a competitive advantage. Spotify has been heavily focusing on podcasting, video and non-video alike, after spending more than $1 billion on podcast-related acquisitions. During the company’s 2022 investor day event, CEO Daniel Ek said that while the company is still in investment mode for podcasts, it believes the vertical has the potential for a 40-50% gross margin. The video feature is not without its challenges, however. Reports this fall indicated Spotify creators were using the podcast tool to illegally pirate movies. Several TikTok videos at the time showed the problem in action. Spotify said it uses technology to discover and remove this sort of infringing content. Piracy isn’t a problem limited to Spotify, of course. In fact, TikTok’s own LIVE feature is often used for finding a movie to watch, as users live stream directly from their TVs. Previously, Spotify had rolled out video podcast publishing to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s now available to most of Anchor’s markets, including Sweden, Netherlands, and regions like SEA (Indonesia), MENA (UAE, Saudi), LATAM (Chile, Argentina, Colombia) and others.

Yakoa raises $4.8M to help detect NFT fraud for platforms and creators • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Crypto, crypto ecosystem, funding, NFT, startupNo Comments

Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told ZebethMedia. One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said. Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities. The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors. The capital will be used to grow its machine learning and data engineering teams internally, according to Graham Robinson, co-founder of Yakoa. The platform identifies an NFT’s first existence across a number of blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon and more. “In terms of blockchains, having every blockchain is on our road map,” Dworschak said. “The belief we have is it doesn’t matter where you mint IP or publish an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable.” Anyone can make “a quick buck off of anyone,” Dworschak noted. “It’s really hard to protect against this stuff ’cause there’s so many assets. In some cases [fraudsters are] photoshopping and cropping or changing colors, when they’re really using someone else’s IP.” “When we’re doing an attribution search, we’re trying to figure out where an asset might be derived from and give as much information as we can,” Dworschak said. “Two assets can be similar and not fraudulent and that’s completely appropriate. There’s a lot of edge cases we need to be aware of and other ones that pop up in a similar vein and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to record their opinion.” “The entire ecosystem is open and we want to continue to make sure it stays that way,” Robinson said. “We’re trying to create the tools for the industry to use and they can use it in their environment.” The name Yakoa came from the saying, “A-OKAY,” but backward, Dworschak said. “When you’re using the blockchain, you want to make sure it’s ‘A-OKAY,’ so that’s why we named it that.” Today, the NFT market has “already demonstrated a lot of potential,” Dworschak said. “It has created types of assets not bound to a specific platform that allows creators to publish their assets and trade them freely across platforms. It’s a brand new method of commerce and it’ll spill over to what’s unimaginable today.” Long-term, fraud protection will be something that can run in the backend for platforms, Robinson said. “There’s a bunch of services that can start from this IP protection.”

Yahaha raises $40M more for its user-generated, low-code immersive gaming platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in China, Gaming, metaverse, Startups, yahahaNo Comments

Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform founded by a group of Chinese gaming vets, made a splash in January when it announced a cumulative $50 million in funding ahead of its alpha launch in April. Now, with 100,000 creators and hundreds of thousands of players, it’s raised a further $40 million to continue building out its product — specifically to bring in monetization features and more social hooks — as well as to hire more talent and for business development. Yahaha is describing this as an extension to its previous round, specifically a “Series A+.” We are asking for an updated valuation, but for some context, when it announced funding 11 months ago, I was told that the valuation was a “few hundred million” (so in the wide range of $300-500 million). The raise and valuation both stand out against a backdrop of slim fundraising, especially for consumer startups. Yahaha styles itself as a dual-headquartered company, but its investors in this latest raise are all out of China and greater Asia. Singapore’s Temasek and Chinese internet giant Alibaba are co-leading this investment, with another Chinese company, 37 Interactive Entertainment, also participating. Previously the company had raised funding from 5Y Capital, HillHouse, Coatue, ZhenFund, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, BiliBili and Xiaomi. The company said it now has more than 150 employees, with offices in Helsinki, Seoul and Shanghai. LinkedIn, which shut down operations in China last year, notes that about half of the company’s employees registered on its platform identify as based out of Shanghai. “Metaverse” as a concept has seen a lot of hype, especially earlier this year — spearheaded in no small part by one of the biggest consumer internet businesses of our time, Facebook, rebranding itself as “Meta” and going all-in on the concept. A lot of that has not come to much so far, one big bellwether being Meta itself knocking back an own-goal in its own efforts. However, most universally agree that gaming has been one of the few highlights, with gamers willing to pay for and use hardware and software to improve the immersive-ness of their experiences. Yahaha is tapping into that opportunity and coupling it with another couple of big trends. User-generated content has long been a popular aspect of gaming and entertainment overall, but more recently it’s taken on a more sophisticated, businesslike aspect: people who in the past might have created media for fun have now become “creators” who see business opportunities in building content and and using it to connect with audiences. Not all of those creators — not many of them at all, in fact — are “technical”, so that is leading to attention (and funding) for companies that are building platforms to help creators create and spin up their business opportunities without a lot of heavy technical lifting. And that’s where Yahaha comes in. The company’s founders — Chris Zhu (CEO), Pengfei Zhang (COO) and Hao Min (CTO) — all worked together as engineers at cross-platform gaming engine Unity — indeed Yahaha has been described to me as being built in partnership with Unity — and their low-code platform aims to do all that heavy lifting behind the scenes. With an eye to creators and the businesses they are building, the new features the product will be getting will include more “monetization modules” and other commercial developments, said Zhu. “We’ve seen fantastic growth in YAHAHA throughout the Early Alpha stage, and with over 100,000 creators signing up to make content with us, we are building on a strong foundation,” Zhu said in a statement. “This round of funding signifies the next step we are taking with YAHAHA, opening up more creator experiences monetization modules. We are also continuing to pioneer by investing in key areas of the community and by building relationships with brands that share our values, aligning ourselves with experts in the fields of game development, 3D asset creation and more. With YAHAHA, we’re not just ushering in the next generation of entertainment, we’re supporting the next generation of creators and giving them the tools and the integrated virtual world platform they need to make great content. There is a litany of opportunities that await us in the virtual world, and we want to be on the cutting edge of it with YAHAHA. To do this, it’s imperative we continue investing in our team and in the community that got us to where we are right now.” The big questions will be whether those noodling around in the early version will stay with Yahaha as monetization comes in, whether that monetization works, whether games are entertaining enough to get players to engage, and of course whether metaverse establishes itself as a permanent fixture in the market, rather than a passing stage, as gamers progress to the next level.

Startup founders go to war with UK government over its moves to appoint bank into key ecosystem role • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Government & Policy, United KingdomNo Comments

Nothing less than a war has broken out between an influential swathe of the UK tech startup community and the British government, after the latter has allegedly sought to hand the curation and promotion of British startups – both inside the UK and abroad – over to a single UK bank. As we covered previously, Tech Nation – a ‘QUANGO’ which has for many years been charged with the task of being the UK’s government-backed ‘startup champion’ – had been bidding for a continuing £12 million contract, starting from March 2023. But this was put out to tender by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and, sources allege, the contract was poised to be granted to banking giant Barclays Bank for the sole operation of the role. The move was branded “insane” and “mad” by some key U.K. industry players ZebethMedia spoke to. Now, an open letter, signed by over 60 startup founders and other key players, has been published by the Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), an independent non-profit that campaigns for policies to support digital startups in the UK. The letter calls on the Government to commit to retaining Tech Nation in its role, a role which it has filled in various guises since September 2011. Should the move go through, claims the 60+ group, Barclays would be in charge of a number of critical services for startups, such as visa sponsorship and applications for staff hired from abroad, as well as the external promotion of the UK’s startup ecosystem globally. Coadec argues this could put it into a conflict of interest on a number of fronts. Signatories to the letter are highly influential in the UK tech scene. They include Brent Hoberman (Co-Founder and Chairman of Founders Forum), Taavet Hinrikus (Co-Founder and Chairman of Wise), Tessa Clarke (Co-Founder and CEO of OLIO), Aron Gelbard (Co-Founder and CEO of Bloom & Wild), Alex Depledge (Founder and CEO of Resi), and Ali Parsa (Co-Founder and CEO of Babylon Health). Because of the alleged moves to hand the contract over to Barclays, the group contends that this might put at risk current services to startups overall (including the visa system and promotional work); would hand a key aspect of government support over to a bank which has bot had the long history of Tech Nation in the ecosystem; and argues that any new arrangements should “add support to the startup ecosystem, not subtract from it”.  In a statement, Dom Hallas, Coadec Executive Director, said the government’s move would mean it would be “pulling away” from the tech startup ecosystem rather than retaining a close interest. This would also be in marked contrast to the ruling Conservative party’s oft-repeated phrase that it is ‘pro-business’. “Amid economic turbulence, startup founders need help more than ever. This means Government backing the ecosystem more – not pulling away. We want to ensure that if changes to support do occur, the things startups value most, including the special visa system for tech, are protected,” said Hallas in a statement. ZebethMedia has reached out to the DCMS for comment and will update this story with their response. • Declaration of interest: Coadec was founded in 2010 by Jeff Lynn, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of online investment platform Seedrs, and myself (Mike Butcher, Editor-at-Large of ZebethMedia, though I no longer have any formal or informal involvement).

5 sustainable best practices for bootstrapped startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in bootstrapping, Column, EC Column, EC How To, startup hiring, StartupsNo Comments

Marjorie Radlo-Zandi Contributor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi is an entrepreneur, board member, mentor to startups and angel investor who shows early-stage businesses how to build and successfully scale their businesses. More posts by this contributor You’ve sold your company. Now what? The art of the pivot: Work closely with investors to improve your odds No matter how successful your startup is, you’ll always need to pay bills and ensure healthy future cash flows. Times of plenty can lull you into thinking funds will always flow into your bank account, because that’s been your reality so far, but the cruel reality is that capital sources can dry up overnight with no warning. To weather uncertainty and maintain emotional equilibrium, it’s good to temper your exuberance and confidence with a dose of realism. One way to do this is through bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is a double-edged sword: Because you have little or no dependence on investors or stakeholders, you won’t give up much of your company in exchange for money, but the downside is that you have less money to invest in growth. There’s also a hybrid model that gets less attention and bears mentioning. An investment colleague of mine in the life science genomics space received $150,000 in angel funding. She later sold her business for hundreds of millions of dollars. She could pull off this extraordinarily successful exit because after the initial angel round, sales of her unique DNA sequencing and genomic services funded the business. With the success of her technology, she was able to rapidly scale the business within the U.S. If you decide bootstrapping is the best choice for your situation, you should first figure out if you’ll self-fund or seek small amounts from angels. Don’t be tempted to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice to meet potential customers in glamorous locations or for meetings in far-flung locations. These five key business strategies and principles will set you up for success: Pick team members wisely Establish your business model and go-to -market strategy to generate cash quickly Adopt a frugal mindset: always watch expenses and negotiate costs Be prepared to take on many roles, including those you feel are menial. Only outsource what’s absolutely essential, such as legal and accounting Pick your team wisely Your first employees are among the most important stakeholders in your business. It’s critical to select people who are invested in the mission and success of your business. They should want to work for a bootstrapped business, as not all will. Look for people who want to be part of the business rather than someone for whom it’s just another job. The right hires will indicate they want to be part of a sustainable business model. You should offer equity vesting over time as a key financial incentive. Because your team will earn this incentive over their tenure with the company, each individual will likely be even more invested in your business’ success. Select employees who can wear many hats, and seek out talent from diverse backgrounds to bring in varied perspectives. I built and ran a startup in food safety diagnostics that I sold to a multi-billion dollar S&P 500 company. We had people across ages, sexes, ethnic backgrounds, education, and geographies. This diversity was critical to our success, because we were doing business in 100 countries. It required us to have a deep understanding of the marketplace and cultural dynamics of each country.

AI-driven fashion platform Shoptrue constantly learns its users shopping habits • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Commerce, e-commerce, Fashion, online shopping, StartupsNo Comments

An A.I.-powered online fashion marketplace, Shoptrue, is launching its website into beta today with plans for a public release early next year. The site blends artificial intelligence and personalized recommendations with taste-driven shopping, the company says, which helps give users a source for style inspiration as well as the ability to create and share outfit ideas with others. Rather than the typical algorithmic approach such as Amazon, which ranks items based on a strong sales history, Shoptrue is A.I.-driven and continually improves its product recommendations based on purchase behaviors and user engagement. That way, users can have more say on what items they see on their curated feeds. The site offers a “One Stop Personal Shop” for the user, which gives fashion suggestions based on their style preferences. Users can eliminate the items they dislike and purchase items directly on Shoptrue through its unified checkout process. Romney Evans, the founder of Shoptrue, told ZebethMedia, “Instead of being a top-down recommendation system, where the user is passive, it’s putting the user in the driver’s seat, back into personalization, giving them the controls.” Image Credits:Shoptrue Shoptrue’s individualized shopping experience begins with an onboarding quiz, which includes questions about your style personality, favorite brands, and color preferences– similar to other personalized e-commerce sites, like Stitch Fix. Shoptrue users can then browse a large selection of merchandise from over 2,000 merchants that range from high-end brands like Alexander Wang, Christian Louboutin, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana, to affordable retailers like Ross, Kohls, Nordstrom Rack, H&M, and Forever 21. There are also “Shops,” or collections created by Shoptrue’s team of editors, that users can explore for inspiration. For instance, the “Girl’s Night Out” lookbook features trendy miniskirts, strappy heels, tanks, graphic pants, and handbags. Users will soon get to create and share their own Shops, Shoptrue says. Peer-generated Shops will also roll out when Shoptrue officially launches out of beta. Image Credits: Shoptrue Shoptrue will also soon launch the ability to pre-filter size and fit specifications, so shoppers only see the products in stock that are in their size. This is a natural step for the company as Evans is also the co-founder of True Fit, the personalization company that built a data platform to help online shoppers find the correct sizes for apparel and footwear. Within the next year or so, Shoptrue users will be able to create a True Fit profile that helps determine what size they are for specific items, Evans explained to ZebethMedia. As Shoptrue evolves, the company plans to add features based on customer feedback. “We invite shoppers everywhere to join us on this journey. It will take time, but today begins our rollout of an exciting stream of innovation and distinctive experiences that will make it easy to get only what you love. We aspire to delight shoppers and earn their trust as we improve their shopping experience every month and every quarter through innovation, trial and error, and by listening to their feedback,” Evans said. With the launch of Shoptrue, Evans has brought on a team of technology and fashion experts, including Brandon Holley, a Condé Nast veteran with over 25 years of experience in fashion, and former Netflix data scientist John Lashlee. Holley is also the founder and CEO of Everywear, a technology platform that’s now incorporated into Shoptrue and helps with custom recommendations and foreseeing purchase behaviors. The startup raised $6 million in seed funding in 2021 to help build, test, and launch its beta. Investors included Signal Peak Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, and Peterson Ventures. The company expects to raise additional funding in 2023. Founder of Shoptrue Romney Evans (left), Chief Fashion Officer Brandon Holley (middle), VP of Data Science John Lashlee (right) Shoptrue’s business model is typical for online marketplaces. When a user completes a transaction with a merchant via Shoptrue, the company takes a commission on those sales. Shoptrue declined to share the commission range but said it was standard for most fashion marketplaces. (Note that Poshmark’s and ASOS Marketplace’s commission is 20%.) There is no fee for brands to participate on Shoptrue. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming increasingly responsible for influencing the shopping habits of young consumers—especially Gen Z. Shoptrue hopes that Gen Z and Millenials will feel empowered to share their Shops and fashion favorites on social media, get help from Shoptrue’s style experts and find other users and influencers that use the platform. Shoptrue’s launch is another example of how AI technology is transforming the e-commerce industry. In June, Pinterest acquired the AI-powered shopping platform The Yes, which builds a personalized fashion feed and continually learns about a user’s style as they shop. Pinterest said the deal would help the company become the home for taste-driven shopping. “We are making it easier for people to find only the things they’re going to love, and then give them the tools to organize and share their style POV with the world,” Shoptrue’s Chief Fashion Director Brandon Holley said in an announcement. “Anybody’s shop has the potential to set off a chain reaction of fashion inspiration that can surprise and delight you from any direction.”

MotherDuck secures investment from Andreessen Horowitz to commercialize DuckDB • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, data analytics, Enterprise, funding, redpoint, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Jordan Tigani — a founding engineer at Google BigQuery, Google’s fully managed data analysis platform — was working as the chief product officer at SingleStore when he noticed that the vast majority of database workloads were small (less than 10GB in size) and low-bandwidth. While vendors were building for massive data sets, the term “big data” was becoming a misnomer thanks to recent advances in hardware, the way Tigani saw it. Around the same time, Tigani got in touch with Hannes Mühleisen, the co-creator of the lightweight database platform DuckDB, to toss ideas for a paid service back and forth. Seeking to launch a product for developers with light database requirements, Tigani — with Mühleisen’s blessing — began building a DuckDB-based cloud service. The service became the cheekily named MotherDuck, a startup independent of the original DuckDB that’s focused on commercializing open source DuckDB packages. “Users want easy and fast answers to their questions — they don’t want to wait for the cloud,” Tigani told ZebethMedia via email. “The fact is that a modern laptop is faster than a modern data warehouse. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users, but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience.” It’s a classic playbook — take an open source tool and build a service on top of it. But while it might not be original, Tigani’s plan has already paid dividends. MotherDuck today announced that it raised $47.5 million across seed and Series A rounds, valuing the company at $175 million post-money. Redpoint led the seed while Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Series A — other investors include Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter. Tigani says that MotherDuck wasn’t planning to raise the Series A so soon after the seed, but did so at the urging of LPs — and for the opportunity to work with a16z. “With this funding, MotherDuck is able to build out their world-class engineering team and add a go-to-market function to provide a cloud analytics platform for organizations that want to use DuckDB in an evolved way,” Tigani said. “At the same time, it allows DuckDB to continue to be a vehicle for academic research.” Tigani claims that MotherDuck’s service — powered by DuckDB, which HackerNoon once described as “mutant offspring of SQLite and Redshift” — allows practitioners to start answering questions from data faster than most existing tooling. It uses local computing resources in concert with the cloud, driving data analytics and other data-heavy workloads. That’s in contrast to typical data warehouse systems that offer reporting and tools almost exclusively for enterprise-scale analytics. As Madrona’s Jon Turow explains in a forthcoming blog post (ZebethMedia got a sneak peak), MotherDuck uses a “hybrid execution” technique to query a data set that’s spread across multiple places. Some of the data might be on a developers laptop, some in the cloud instance and the rest in a different cloud, but MotherDuck makes it possible for a dev to query the combination of these sources. “The platform intelligently decides where to operate upon each bit of data to minimize the costs of compute and data transfer,” Turow writes. The data warehouse concept has existed since the ’80s, but it’s risen to prominence in recent years as companies shift their workloads to the cloud. There’s startups like Firebolt and Hydra, which aim to become the open cloud data warehouse of choice for large companies. Panoply, another player in the data warehouse space, has taken a different approach, developing tools that make it easier for businesses to analyze their data with standard database queries. While Tigani sees MotherDuck as a competitor in the data analytics market alongside data warehouse vendors, he positions the platform as the technological superior alternative. “The high efficiency of DuckDB will allow MotherDuck to be cost-competitive, while also being more performant for most data workloads,” Tigani asserted. “Advances in CPU, memory, disk performance and networks are making existing architectures obsolete. Large distributed analytics clusters are no longer necessary due to these advances. Single-node DuckDB can often be much faster, cheaper and simpler than these distributed systems.” The DuckDB team is involved to a degree with MotherDuck, which in turn is a member of the DuckDB Foundation, the nonprofit that holds much of DuckDB’s IP. DuckDB’s own commercial arm, DuckDB Labs, is a shareholder in the company and contributed code to the cloud platform. Tigani assures me that DuckDB will continue to be freely available under a permissive MIT license and that the original DuckDB team will build, maintain and promote the core DuckDB codebase going forward. Fueled by the fresh capital, MotherDuck plans to expand its small workforce from 13 people to 18 by the end of the year. When asked, he declined to answer questions about the size of the startup’s customer base or revenue, saying it’s too early.

Retool launches Workflows to go beyond the front end • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in automation service, backend automation, developers, Enterprise, low-code, retool, Software, StartupsNo Comments

Since its launch in 2017, Retool has made a name for itself by offering developers an easier way to build line-of-business apps for their internal users. Unlike the many low-code/no-code tools on the market today, Retool’s focus remains squarely on developers, despite its helpful drag-and-drop interface. Now, about half a year after announcing its $45 million funding round, the company is expanding its feature set by adding new tools for building backend workflows, too. Retool Workflows, as the company named this new feature, makes it easy for developers to create automated processes like cron jobs, custom alerts and standard extract, transform, load (ETL) tasks, using a similar graphical interface as the frontend tool, all while adding a lot more flexibility than tools like Zapier. “Some people try to put us in the no code-space or something. You’ll never hear us ever saying that,” Retool CEO and co-founder David Hsu told me. “The reason for that is we actually don’t believe in it really. I think if you look at tools like for example Airtable or Zapier or stuff like that, we think that’s really great if you have a simple use case or a medium-sized use case — it’s great for that. But if you want to build a really advanced use case, like an internal tool that an Amazon might build, for example, then Zapier will be able to get you 50% there very quickly, but the remaining 50% basically becomes impossible.” Image Credits: Retool Instead of going for a no-code approach, the Retool team always built its service for developers first. “We believe in the power of code,” said Hsu. He also noted that the trend he sees is that more and more people now learn how to code and that this is the trend he wants to bet on — not dumbing down the coding experience. Workflows fits right in here, he argues, because it’s very hard to build a low-code/no-code tool that allows you to build complex workflows without quickly hitting the limitations of what these tools can do without resorting to writing custom code (though we’ve seen quite a few companies try). Hsu noted that a lot of customers were already hacking the Retool app to make some of these capabilities work for them. But instead of firing off a cron job, they would write a script that would automatically click a button in a custom app at a certain time to kick off a workflow, for example (which is apparently what one of Retool’s customers did). “Developers need the flexibility of code. They want a toolset that speeds up work withoutnarrowing their options,” said Jamie Cuffe, Product Lead, Retool. “Retool Workflows aims to abstract away the tedious parts of building automations from scratch while preserving the ability to write code to solve the problem.” The Retool team argues that building regular cron jobs, with their arcane format, is both time consuming and error prone — and the final result is hard to maintain and debug. “I really think there is no developer-focused workflows product that I’m aware of. That is why we’re launching this,” said Hsu. In addition to running scripts at regular intervals, Retool Workflows can also use webhooks for a more event-driven approach. That means it could be used for alerting, in addition to more traditional lightweight ETL applications. Indeed, Hsu said that most users in the Workflows beta got started with alerting and notifications and then transitioned to ETL use cases over time. It’s worth noting that this isn’t so much an enterprise integration tool for moving data between applications but still squarely focused on getting this data into Retool-based line-of-business applications. “We needed an efficient way to translate product data in our warehouse into timely, insightfulreporting in Slack,” said Joel McLean, director of product growth at RE/MAX. “With Retool Workflows, my team can easily configure our resources in one place and focus only on writing the logic unique to our business.” The new service will be priced based on data throughput. Each Retool plan, including the free one, will come with 1GB of Workflows data for free, with overages starting at $50/GB. For now, Workflows is only available as a hosted service, but the team is already working on an on-prem version. That’s how many of Retool’s customers are already using its app building tool, including the likes of Stripe, Brex, Coinbase and Plaid, so it only makes sense for the company to do the same for Workflows.