Apps

Apple pledges $450M toward expanding the satellite infrastructure powering Emergency SOS • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apple, Apps, Hardware, infrastructure, iOS, iPhone, satelliteNo Comments

As a part of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund, Apple will invest $450 million in satellite network and ground stations to power Emergency SOS, its service for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro lineups that uses satellite to route emergency calls, the company announced today. The majority of the funding will go to Globalstar, the satellite provider with which Apple has an existing partnership to deliver Emergency SOS when it launches later this month. In part, Apple’s capital infusion will fund the installation of new custom-designed antennas manufactured by California-based company Cobham Satcom. Designed to receive signals transmitted by Globalstar’s satellite constellation, the antennas have already be installed in the satellite provider’s existing ground stations including facilities in Nevada, Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, Florida and Puerto Rico. “The launch of Emergency SOS via satellite direct to iPhone is a generational advancement in satellite communications, and we are proud that Globalstar’s satellites and spectrum assets will play a central role in saving lives,” Globalstart executive chairman Jay Monroe said in a statement. “With Apple’s infrastructure investment, we’ve grown our teams in California and elsewhere to construct, expand, and upgrade our ground stations, and we look forward to the next chapter in Globalstar’s lifesaving technology.” As CNBC notes, Apple’s investment — one of the largest to date out of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund, through which the company has furnished U.S.-based suppliers including Corning, Finisar, XPO Logistics and Copan Diagnostics with over $1.4 billion dollars combined — underscores the costly nature of satellite-based communications. In addition to substantial technical and communications infrastructure, Emergency SOS requires human-staffed call centers. Apple says that over 300 Globalstar employees will work on the service. Emergency SOS doesn’t support ordinary data, voice or text. But it alerts emergency services with a location and other key information. Once users point their phone at a satellite using an orientation guide in iOS, they can choose between preset messages to be sent along with the phone’s battery level and medical info to local EMS. If supported in the region where the emergency call is placed, iPhone users can have a two-way conversation with first responders. If not, Emergency SOS will route communications through Apple-operated local relay stations that act as intermediaries with emergency services. Emergency SOS will remain free for two years to Phone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners when it goes live in late November in the U.S. and Canada. But Apple has left open the possibility of charging for it after that.

Google is launching cross-platform features to make it easier to follow the FIFA World Cup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Apps, fifa world cup, Football, Google, SoccerNo Comments

Google is rolling out a bunch of updates across platforms making it easier for fans to follow the FIFA World Cup starting November 20. These include a daily highlights video from TV networks, customized notifications, a dedicated section on Google TV, and a multiplayer game. Just like for any sport, you can search with phrases like “FIFA World Cup” or the “World Cup” and you’ll get the latest scores from the tournament. You can subscribe to tournament notifications by hitting the bell icon. Plus, you can subscribe to individual teams’ alerts under the notification menu. Scores of these world cup soccer matches will also show live stats and win probability graphs. If users want to follow individual matches but don’t want to search every time for updates they can pin scores to the home screen. To do that, they can tap the “Pin live score” option in the score pane for an ongoing upcoming match. Notably, these features are available for other tournaments and sports as well. Image Credits: Google Google has partnered with FIFA+ and official broadcasters including beIN Sports, BBC, ZDF and more to show daily video recaps under the matches section. So if you have missed out on some key moments, you can easily catch up. Image Credits: Google The search giant is soon adding the ability to rate a player based on how users think they will perform in the tournament. They can also compare these scores with other players. Google usually adds a little browser-based game for big events like this and the World Cup is no exception. Once the real-life match is set with line ups, you can choose a team and try and score as many goals as possible in the game. The score of gamers across the world will be added to that team’s total. You will see that score while playing the game as well. Image Credits: Google The company is adding a new label for businesses that will help users discover places that are showing world cup matches. When you search for “Where to watch the world cup near me,” you will see a label saying “Showing the world cup” in the listing for bars and restaurants in Search and Maps. This label will launch just before the world cup and business owners will be able to apply for it at that time. Image Credits: Google YouTube TV subscribers will be able to watch the world cup on FOX and FS1 with gameplay features like real-time highlights, stats, and scores. They can also stream these matches in ultra-high definition if they have subscribed to the 4K Plus add-on. Google TV will show live matches in the “For You” tab and it will add a new row showing world cup content from partners like FIFA+, ITV, Peacock, Telemundo, and ViX. Image Credits: Google

Google and Twitter veteran maps out a Twitter alternative • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, gabor cselle, Social, social media, Startups, TwitterNo Comments

Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe that kind of chaos as a garbage fire, others see it as something very different: an opportunity. Years-old federated social networks, legacy social platforms that have their own issues, and a cacophony of pre-existing fringe efforts are all emerging as possible alternatives to Twitter. And in that vein, so are completely new ideas. One of these is being hatched by Gabor Cselle, a repeat founder who wants to build what he described to me as “a new Twitter.” In true Valley hustle style, Gabor is still honing in on small details like a name and what, exactly, all this will entail. He’s doing that in real-time, with a multi-tabbed Google Doc that you can view. But as a first step to gathering interest for his New Twitter, Gabor has put together a sign up list for people to register their interest as he works away. (Note: The name on the sign-up page, T2, appears to be an abbreviation for Twitter 2, but Gabor says this is just a placeholder name.) Now you might be asking yourself, why pay attention to this? Isn’t Gabor getting a little ahead of himself here? He doesn’t have a name, or even a product, yet. Well, yes. Gabor is in that sense just one of hundreds of millions of founders out in the world noodling on ideas. But there are a few things that set him and his alt-Twitter effort apart. For starters, he’s a repeat founder who sold his first company, the YC-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, the native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter itself. He’s worked on products at those two titans between and after those acquisitions, and that experience — he focused on Timeline, new-user onboarding and logged-out experiences at Twitter; and on many, many different consumer ideas a director at Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator project — has given him a taste of what’s interesting, and what is not. And also what works, and what does not. Gabor left Google in July 2022 and has since been tweeting out his daily journey to figure out what to do next. (Day 106, for example, was spent at ZebethMedia Disrupt, where he came to see Paul Davison, another hustler, talk about the highlights of Clubhouse and the low lights of Highlight.) His public journal has been giving Gabor some Twitter-style viral momentum and attention and, naturally, insight into conversation about Twitter itself. He tells me that Elon’s initial mobilization to buy Twitter led to a huge whir of interest among his friends and contacts, who chattered in downcast tones about how the whole place would fall apart. Then, Musk did buy it. And then, the layoffs hit — a tipping point for Gabor. “I had been thinking about a new Twitter for a while,” he said. “But after multiple friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week, I thought to myself, ‘This is the thing I’ve been thinking about for so long! Maybe this is the time.’” Gabor is long on big-picture ideas at the moment. “I want to build the next public square for discussion. I want it to be delightful and fun, rewarding and valuable, and safe from harassment,” he tells me. “We’ve had 15-20 years of content moderation experience on the internet now, and so let’s build that in.” He’s also a big fan of Andrew Chen’s Cold Start concept. For his own cold start, Gabor is focusing first on coalescing a critical mass of people — a community to hit the ground running when “T2” launches. According to the Google Doc, this is currently set to be September 2023, a date Gabor tells me he might try to move up. He’s even had some investor interest, which he has been building via iMessage. That inbox includes a former Twitter-exec-turned-investor who he will not name, who has already texted asking how much money Gabor would like to have to get this new bird off the ground. And he’s had plenty of unsolicited advice. Twitter is great for that. “Someone asked last week, why doesn’t someone just start a new Twitter? It would only take 3 days and $50 million,” he said. “That’s what got me first to ask what a roadmap might look like. I think for me it wouldn’t be a three-day build, but it also doesn’t take $50 million.” This brings up many other questions… not least why he thinks he can build what Twitter has never managed to build itself. For now, his hunch is that creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something that’s already big and in operation, and that it definitely won’t be as simple as just bringing together what he calls “the best people,” but also not impossible. “I think right now I’m seeing this empty space,” he said, “and I want to be in that space.” Sign up here if you want to take a gander, too.

Elon Musk details his vision for a Twitter payments system • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, Elon Musk, Fintech, payments, Social, TwitterNo Comments

Elon Musk detailed his vision for Twitter’s plan to enter the payments market during a live-streamed meeting with Twitter advertisers, hosted on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday. The new Twitter owner suggested that, in the future, users would be able to send money to others on the platform, extract their funds to authenticated bank accounts, and later, perhaps, be offered a high-yield money market account to encourage them to move their cash to Twitter. The new remarks followed a report this morning by The New York Times which confirmed Twitter last week had filed registration paperwork that would allow it to process payments. The report cited Twitter’s filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), noting that a business would need to register before it could conduct money transfers, exchange currency or cash checks. In today’s meeting, Musk explained how paid verification, which Twitter is rolling out now with its revamped Twitter Blue subscription, as well as support for a creator ecosystem could pave the way for a payments system on its platform. He stressed that, initially, Twitter would need to make fundamental technology architecture changes in order to better support video. The company was recently reported to be working on a “Paywalled Video” feature that would allow creators to charge for access to their content. This suggests Twitter could be moving into a space where it may try to compete more directly with various social media video providers, like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and others. The Washington Post saw mockups of this concept where a tweet with a video could be unlocked for as little as $1.00. It said creators may be able to choose from preset prices, like $1, $2, $5, or $10 when paywalled videos were launched. As a result, creators would end up with a cash balance as they began to monetize their content. In addition, Musk noted that Twitter’s paid verification program would help in its plan for payments because anyone who subscribed to Twitter Blue would have already been verified by the “conventional payment system.” That is, Twitter Blue subscribers have to sign up using a credit or debit card and have their payments processed through the app stores’ in-app purchase system, which helps to combat fraud. Musk then explained how this payments system could scale saying that, once users gained a cash balance, Twitter could prompt them to move that money on its platform. It could even make a small donation to users’ accounts to get them started. “Now we can say, okay, you’ve got a balance on your account. Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate their account…and say, okay, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks. And you can send it anywhere within Twitter,” Musk said. Later, the user could move their money out of Twitter by transferring it to an authenticated bank account, he added. In the longer term, however, Musk appeared to be toying with the idea of establishing bank accounts on Twitter’s platform that would pay a high-interest rate to attract users. This could become a competitor, perhaps, to Apple’s recently launched Savings Account for its cardholders, various fintechs or other payment providers, like PayPal and Venmo, which encourage their users to retain cash balances within their own ecosystems. Explained Musk, “the next step would be this offer for an extremely compelling money market account where you get an extremely high yield on your balance.” If such a system existed, he believed people would move cash to Twitter. “And then add debit cards, checks, and whatnot and…just basically make the system as useful as possible. And the more useful and entertaining it is, the more people will use it,” he said. The move to enter the payments business also ties to Musk’s larger plan to turn the social media platform into an “everything app” or “super app” called “X.” While that plan today is still fairly vague, the general sense is that Musk aims to combine payments, social networking, entertainment and other things into one experience, similar to China’s WeChat (though that plan could be misguided.) Musk has experience in payments, of course, as he founded an early digital payments company X.com. It’s not surprising that he would try again, given the opportunity Twitter presents. His ideas about Twitter payments, however, may not have been good fodder for a conversation with advertisers who are already worried about Twitter’s long-term commitment to their goals, given the company’s move into subscriptions which signals a desire to reduce reliance on ad dollars. Musk tried to assuage these fears by saying that Twitter was thinking about protecting advertisers’ brand safety in the longer term, not just about its ability to drive short-term sales.

YouTube Music and Premium top 80 million paid subscribers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube PremiumNo Comments

Today, YouTube announced that it surpassed 80 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including customers using free trials. The year-over-year increase of 30 million subscribers is noteworthy and puts the company on track to becoming one of the top streaming music providers. In September 2021, YouTube reported 50 million Music and Premium subs. “We’ve worked hard to build an experience that puts people first, and we’ll continue providing the best, uninterrupted experience across all of YouTube, even on the go,” Adam Smith, VP Product, YouTube, said in a statement. Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music at YouTube and Google, said, “Alongside our music industry partners, we’ve been working hard to make YouTube the best place for every fan and every artist, and today’s news marks a significant milestone in that journey. We’re not stopping here. We’ve got lots to do and look forward to driving more growth and contributions back to the music industry.” In YouTube’s official blog post, Cohen reiterated that, between July 2021 and June 2022, YouTube contributed $6 billion in revenue to the music industry, 30% of which was from user-generated content. The company made the initial announcement in September. YouTube Music Premium costs $9.99/month and allows users to download and listen to music without ads. YouTube Music recently introduced an iOS 16 Lock Screen widget, “Recently Played,” which allows users to quickly access recently played songs, albums, playlists and videos from their lock screen. YouTube Premium is $11.99/month and lets subscribers watch and download ad-free YouTube videos as well as access all the perks of YouTube Music. YouTube ran a short-lived test in October that asked free users to upgrade to Premium to watch videos in 4K. Now, all users can watch high-resolution videos without paying for a Premium subscription. A few days after YouTube ended the test, the company announced it would increase the price of YouTube Premium’s family plan. Despite the new milestone, it’s still behind Spotify, Apple Music and Tencent, a China-only music service. Spotify reported its third-quarter earnings last month, revealing a total of 195 million premium subscribers and 456 million monthly active users. In July, Apple noted that it had 860 million paid subscriptions across the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, cloud services and its other businesses. Tencent Music Entertainment Group has about 82.7 million subscribers across its three music streaming apps.

Spotify revamps its Apple Watch app with larger artwork and new features, like direct downloads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in AppsNo Comments

Spotify today announced it’s revamping its Apple Watch experience. The new version of the small-screen streaming app has been redesigned to make it easier for users to find the music or podcasts they want to hear from the “Your Library” section, as well as catch up with the latest podcast episodes, download playlists for offline listening, and more. Overall, the app has also been updated with larger artwork and smoother animations, making it feel more like a sized-down version of the Spotify mobile app, rather than the text-heavy experience it was previously. First launched in 2018, the Spotify app for Apple Watch has been through a few iterations over the years. Notably, it gained standalone streaming support two years ago, making it a more useful streaming companion for on-the-go listening. Last year, it also helpfully added the ability for Premium users to download playlists and podcasts to Apple Watch for offline listening. This year’s update, meanwhile, seems to be aimed at taking better advantage of the bump in screen real estate provided by more recent Apple Watch models, like the new Series 8 and the slightly older Series 7. You’ll notice the updated app now is more colorful, thanks to the larger artwork, and the titles are easier to read in its new layout. Podcast pages better resemble their mobile counterparts, too, with artwork, the run time, and a big, green play button above the show’s episode list — an improvement on how the older version of the app would just show a list of episodes as text. Image Credits: Spotify With today’s changes, Spotify says the app’s design will make it easier for users to find content, like favorite tracks, artists or episodes in “Your Library.” Here, you’ll also be able to swipe to “like” tracks and you’ll be able to toggle shuffle mode “on” or “off ” before you start playing. Image Credits: Spotify For podcast listeners, the update will now allow you to see where you left off in an episode so you can jump back in and finish listening on your watch. The app will also now mark new episodes with a blue dot so it’s easier to see when your favorite show has updated, similar to how the mobile app uses a blue dot to flag shows with new and unplayed episodes on the home page. Another new feature helps you download content to your Apple Watch without having to use the Spotify app on your smartphone. Before, subscribers who wanted to download playlists, albums, or podcasts would do so by tapping on the “Download to Apple Watch” option in the Spotify mobile app. The updated version of the Spotify app for Apple Watch, however, will allow users to download favorite playlists directly from the Watch app itself. This makes it easier to quickly prep your watch with some music for your workout or run, perhaps, or other times when you plan to leave your phone behind. The updated Spotify Apple Watch app is rolling out starting today and will become available to all users globally in the coming week, the company says. That means you may not see these changes immediately, but should soon. Spotify also suggests that users update their Apple Watch to the latest version of watchOS.

Why mobile subscription management platforms are enjoying tailwinds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Adapty, app revenue, app stores, Apps, EC Consumer Applications, mobile app developers, RevenueCat, StartupsNo Comments

Game engine company Unity and adtech company IronSource finalized their merger this week, aiming to “create an end-to-end for developers to build and monetize games,” ZebethMedia reported. While there’d be a lot to say about the deal from the perspective of game developers, we’d like to look at this from a different angle and wonder who might one day do the same, but for non-gaming apps. Earlier today, we reported that New York-based startup Adapty raised $2.5 million to date to help mobile app developers grow their revenue. While the company is perhaps more focused on customer revenue growth acceleration than some of its competitors, it is not alone in its broader space, which could be described as mobile subscription infrastructure. By magnitude of funding, the leader by far is YC-backed RevenueCat, which has raised $56.5 million in total, including a $40 million Series B in 2021. And with clients like Buffer, Notion and PhotoRoom, it is arguably the one that comes up more often in conversations.

Twitter begins to roll out grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, grey checkmark, Social, social media, Twitter, verificationNo Comments

A day after announcing that it’d denote high-profile accounts in a way distinctive from the blue checkmark now available to all Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter has begun to roll out new badges that denote particular categories of official accounts, including government accounts, major media outlets and some public figures. The move is an attempt to safeguard against information spreading and impersonation on the platform as Twitter grapples with the fallout of expanding eligibility for its blue checkmark, which was previously reserved for vetted, expressly-ID-verified Twitter users. The new badges — a grey checkmark beneath the old blue verification checkmark — designate accounts as “Official,” in line with what app researcher Nima Owji revealed less than a week ago in Twitter’s public code. Accounts including ZebethMedia’s and several government officials, among them U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), show the grey check as of this morning. But from a cursory search, there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme or reason to how the badges have been applied. For example, The Wall Street Journal’s account initially didn’t have a grey badge; The Information’s still doesn’t. Nor does Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s. Image Credits: Twitter Those oversights will be addressed in the coming days presumably — Twitter no doubt has thousands, if not millions, of high-profile accounts to comb through and vet. It’s work it made for itself — as alluded to earlier, the recently-launched Twitter Blue plan that grants subscribers a blue checkmark doesn’t include ID verification, a flaw Twitter users including comedians Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin exploited in the past week to show how easy it is to pose as another account. Silverman, Griffin and others who created satirical handles were banned following Musk’s unilateral decision over the weekend to permanently bar from the platform impersonators who don’t make it clear that they’re engaging in parody.

With new capital, Adapty is betting it can help app devs make more money • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Adapty, app revenue, app stores, Apps, mobile developers, StartupsNo Comments

Mobile developers earned more than $260 billion on Apple’s App Store between its launch in 2008 and the end of 2021. And yet, Apple doesn’t provide an easy way for companies to maximize how much they make from their apps — and neither does Google, which owns the rival Google Play Store. Enter New York City-based Adapty, which hopes to help developers earn more from their apps. So far, it has been doing this mostly by powering A/B testing for paywalls, but it has a broader road map, its co-founder and CEO, Vitaly Davydov, told ZebethMedia. It is never a good time to leave money on the table, but even less so when Apple moves to collect a 30% cut of even more mobile app trade and as overall mobile app spending might be declining, meaning that developers are likely hungrier than ever for additional income. Paywall A/B testing helps optimize revenue, by letting developers figure out which conversion screen will bring the best results. It is one of the main offerings of Adapty, but not its only one: The startup sees itself as growth-focused, rather than infrastructure-focused. Adapty is used by about 2,500 apps, up from 50 when it raised pre-seed funding in 2020. Its team has also grown to some 40 full-time employees, but there’s more hiring to come, according to Davydov, at a time when other startups are laying off staff or freezing hires. Having closed a seed round this year that brings its funding to date to $2.5 million, Adapty is focusing on two goals that require more headcount: geographic expansion and incorporating machine learning. The latter will be used to come up with features including a lifetime value (LTV) prediction tool. Growth2 Adapty’s round was led by Surface Ventures with participation from irrvrntVC, two funds with which the startup connected via 500 Startups. Adapty was one of the companies presenting at the accelerator’s 27th demo day in February 2021 — and one of ZebethMedia’s favorites at the time. Adapty has been “on track” since graduating from the program, Davydov said. Tracking is the word: The startup’s landing page claims “8 million monthly tracked events.” This tracking is done on behalf of Adapty’s clients and fed back to them in the form of analytics and dashboards, which can be used by developers and user acquisition managers alike. Image Credits: Adapty Adapty serves clients big and small, from solo developers on its free tier who may be able to learn from its community and content to larger clients attracted by its growth-focused features. Adapty’s decision to add an LTV prediction tool is inspired both by customer demand and by firsthand experience from Davydov and his co-founders, Kirill Potekhin and Dima Podoprosvetov. The team thinks it is now better placed to predict LTV than app owners themselves. “This is a thing that you are unlikely to be able to repeat internally, because we see a lot of data, and they are diversified — from all categories in the app store[s],” Davydov said. “And by design, we have more knowledge about the app market, while if you have only one application, it only shows your data. We believe we can build much more accurate models because of this.” Adapty isn’t alone in the mobile subscription management category, whose leader is arguably RevenueCat. But its road map connects two trends that seem to be on the rise — leveraging pooled data and applied machine learning. We will keep on tracking these, as well as the ongoing impact of Apple’s privacy policy changes.

Equals secures $15M investment to supercharge spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Apps, Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Startups, worklifeNo Comments

Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine. Co-founded by Ben McRedmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals claims its spreadsheet is one of the few with built-in connections to databases, versioning and collaboration features. Equals isn’t the first startup on a mission to kill the traditional spreadsheet. There’s Airtable, of course, plus upstarts like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for its data analytics and visualization service. But Pinero, Equal’s CEO, claims that Equals is unique in that it doesn’t so much replace the spreadsheet as incorporate additional tools, like live data integrations. “Equals comes from a really simple and obvious insight: that the spreadsheet is the best way to do analysis,” Pinero told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Excel was built nearly 40 years ago. Google Sheets 16 years ago. The way companies work today is meaningfully different. Our data is way more accessible. We should automate much of the painful, manual work of getting data into a spreadsheet. And we’ve learned so much about how teams better collaborate over the past decade. A spreadsheet should incorporate those learnings. That’s Equals.” Customers can tap Equals to build analyses with real-time data directly from a database or data warehouse, with or without using sequel query language. It supports standard formulas and offers templates for common use cases, like tracking recurring revenue and measuring user engagement. Image Credits: Equals Soon, Equals will be able to import scripts to allow users to connect spreadsheets to different APIs and internal tools with JavaScript or Python. Also on the way are pivot tables and connectors to business intelligence apps from Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe and Google Analytics. “Equals represents a massive opportunity to get business stakeholders — typically folks who are neglected from being able to get their own data — access to data. To be able to work with data in a tool they’re comfortable and already know how to use: a spreadsheet,” Pinero said. “No more manual spreadsheets that take hours to manually update across the team. No more dumping data from BI tools into spreadsheets to then do analysis.” That’s a lot to promise, but Pinero is well aware of the hurdles ahead. He doesn’t expect 10-employee Equals to be profitable for a while — the Series A proceeds will go mostly toward R&D, he says; Equals has raised $23 million to date — and the platform will remain gated behind a waitlist pending the next major product release. Pinero claims that “thousands” of people have signed up so far. “It speaks to the excitement and traction with Equals that in this market we’ve been able to raise a significant series A. At our current burn, we have eight-plus years of runway,” Pinero said. “We’re very well positioned to outlast this downturn, however long it may go. As the saying goes, generational companies are built during these downturns, and we plan on making Equals one of those.”