Battlefield 200

Ambr wants to solve the billion-dollar burnout problem by tracking employees’ working habits • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Ambr, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, burnout, Disrupt, Enterprise, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Worker burnout is real. Reports suggest that work-related chronic stress could be costing businesses up to $190 billion annually in reduced output and sick days, not to mention the much-discussed “Great Resignation” where workers are jumping ship in search of a greater work-life balance. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared burnout an “occupational phenomenon,” adding it to its International Classification of Diseases. This is a problem that Ambr is setting out solve, with a platform that promises to address worker burnout preventatively. The company is demoing its wares at TC Disrupt this week as part of the Battlefield 200, and we caught up with the founders before and during the event to take a closer look at an early iteration of its product. Ambr was founded in February this year by Zoe Stones, Steph Newton and Jamie Wood, a trio of former Uber managers who witnessed the impact of worker burnout firsthand. “Burnout was a problem across our teams, and as managers and individuals, we didn’t know what to do to prevent it,” Chief Product Officer Wood explained. “We researched the causes of burnout and learnt that burnout is primarily the result of workplace factors like poor relationships, unmanageable workloads, poor time boundaries and a lack of control.” The founders, who are all based in London, are in the process of making their first hires and raising a pre-seed round of funding, which it said it expects to close “in the coming weeks.” Burnout data Ambr’s technology currently relies on self-reported check-in data from Slack, with a configurable survey-like system for gathering feedback from workers. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr But while this kind of in-app survey functionality isn’t exactly unique, the company is in the process of developing additional tools to proactively figure out whether a workforce is at a higher risk of hitting burnout. This includes using natural language processing (NLP) to identify whether workers are happy to talk about what they’re doing outside of work or whether they always talk shop. This will mean using data from an open-ended question in the daily Slack check-in survey, which asks “What’s on your mind today? Share any work or non-work topics.” The idea here is that if a worker only ever mentions work stuff, then they may be at risk of burnout, though in reality it’s probably an imperfect indication given that people are less inclined to talk about personal things with an automated survey than they would be with a human work colleague. Worker feedback. Image Credits: Ambr While all NLP analysis is apparently anonymized, with the resulting aggregated data only accessible to management, it would be better applied to more organic conversations within public Slack channels or Zoom calls, though this would obviously raise greater privacy concerns even if the data is anonymized. At any rate, this gives some indication as to the types of things that Ambr are working on as it looks to automate the process of assessing burnout risk. “We’re investigating other features and integrations in the future that may leverage NLP but nothing yet on our product roadmap,” CEO Zoe Stones said. Elsewhere, the company is exploring using anonymized data from other workplace tools such as email and calendar software. This could work in a number of ways. For example, it could detect whether someone is emailing excessively in the evening or on weekends, or perhaps they have wall-to-wall meetings for 90% of the week — a scenario that could force someone to work far more than their allotted hours to keep their head above water. Wood also said that there’s potential farther down the road to integrate with human resource information systems (HRIS) to identify workers not taking their full vacation allowance. Ultimately, this gives companies valuable data on work culture, helping them address smaller issues before they escalate into full-blown problems. Ambr analytics. Image Credits: Ambr “Nudges, not nags” But spotting risk factors is just one element of this. Ambr is also working on “nudges” that serve workers gentle reminders inside their core workplace tools, perhaps suggesting ways they could cut down on out-of-hours work. “Initially, we’re delivering nudges through Slack, but we plan to rapidly expand into using Microsoft Teams and also a Google Workspace add-on,” Wood explained. “It is important to highlight that nudges are used sparingly — only when we think they can have a meaningful positive impact on behavior. Our principle is nudges, not nags.” Ambr’s ethos can perhaps be juxtaposed against the myriad meditative, mental health and well-being apps that have raised bucketloads of cash in recent years. Indeed, Ambr’s approach is more along the lines of, “why fix something when you can stop it from happening in the first place?” “We are beginning to transition to a world of work where employees are demanding more from their employers — Ambr will enable companies to adapt to this new reality, particularly as hybrid and remote working becomes the norm and as more Gen Zers enter the workforce in the coming years,” Wood said. Beyond the usual health and well-being players which, according to Wood, typically have lower adoption rates given that they’re not integrated into workers’ day-to-day tools, there are a number of startups with a similar approach to Ambr. These include Humu, which uses nudges to encourage behavioral changes, though it’s not specifically focused on countering burnout. And then there is Quan, which issues well-being recommendations to users based on self-reported assessments. Ambr’s closed beta went live in June this year, and it said that it has been gradually onboarding new customers from its waitlist, including startups and “later-stage growth companies” globally. It expects to launch publicly in early 2023. In terms of pricing, Ambr is pursuing a standard SaaS model with customers paying a monthly per-employee fee.

Handoff is creating a more equitable workforce through job sharing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, caregiving, DEI, employment, Handoff, job sharing, jobs, management, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Storyblocks is Handoff’s first pilot partner. (Left to right) job-share partner Jodie Reyes, Handoff founder LaToria Pierce, Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard and job-share partner Redeit Admassie. Image Credits: Handoff Many qualified workers are failed by the current model of work in the United States, where jobs are either part time or full time. Working 40 set hours a week is difficult for people like caregivers, but part-time jobs don’t have the same benefits or career-advancing potential. Handoff, one of the startups in ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200, wants to make a concept called job sharing, in which two people split the responsibilities and pay of a full-time position but get the same benefits, more widespread. Founder and CEO LaToria Pierce started working on Handoff while she was taking part in Ideas42 Venture Studio. Pierce was asked to build from lived experience and challenges. She took inspiration from her mother, who was a single parent, and set out to make a solution that was inclusive of single moms. She spent a year talking to mothers in the workforce and employers. “What I discovered is that there was this mismatch and the ‘why’ hit me — how come we aren’t seeing working mothers at certain organizations in certain roles? The 40 hour a week experience is a barrier for many parents and caregivers,” said Pierce. “They’ve got the skills, they’ve got the tenure and they’ve got the tenacity, but time can be an issue.” Part of Handoff’s software for facilitating job shares. Image Credits: Handoff Job sharing is already commonly used in many European countries, and Handoff’s mission is to scale it in the United States, too, by helping employers create a foundation to start offering job-sharing roles. Its minimum viable product is a job-sharing enablement tool that makes sure a job-sharing relationship is manageable and that work is split equally between the two people in it. When Handoff launched its first pilot program, “talent started showing up in droves,” said Pierce. So the startup set up a talent connection portal for them that fast-tracks employers to qualified, pre-vetted talent. Job sharing can help diversity, equity and inclusion by getting more women, women of color and caregivers into the workforce, said Pierce. Handoff’s talent pool has a wide range of professional and educational backgrounds, including people with a high school degree and 10-plus years of experience, people who have MBAs, and people who have worked in the public or public sectors. 98% of the people who come through Handoff’s portal are caregivers and 75% are people of color. Organizations are looking for people to fill business administration, executive and admin assistants, human resources and marketing roles. Pierce says those spaces are Handoff’s sweet spots because employers see high turnover and need to fill multiple positions but are struggling to hire qualified employees. It also recently kicked off a pilot program with group care homes, many of which already use a job-sharing system, to test Handoff’s software for employee coordination. Handoff’s go-to-market plan includes working with employer partners (it is currently used by organizations like stock media service Storyblocks). It is now raising its pre-seed fund and targeting $500,000 to $1 million. The higher amount would give Handoff an extended runway of 18 months.

As healthcare goes remote, Equipt Health brings medical hardware to the home • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Equipt Health, Hardware, medical equipment, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

It’s no secret the pandemic has pushed healthcare to become virtual, in theory making it easier for patients to attend appointments and access the care they need. But Rebecca Weisinger, CEO and co-founder of Equipt Health, has seen plenty of patients falter in the long process of qualifying for devices they need. Equipt is a home medical equipment company; it aims to streamline the process for providers and patients to access medical equipment needed for care. Weisinger told ZebethMedia because of patients’ physical limits and lack of resources to make the process easier it has to be “connective, informative, transparent.” Though Weisinger has seen access issues professionally, personally she has also seen her friends and family experience hardships in accessing medical equipment due to the various layers of complications. Equipt aims to make the process easier by being the packager, the logistics, the clinician (via its provider network), providing technical support, and the return of data from connected devices. Although the company launched earlier this year as part of Y Combinator’s Winter cohort, it is certified to deliver DME (durable medical equipment) and HME (home medical equipment) devices across 24 states. The company is looking at expanding its reach in the near future, according to Weisinger. Currently, the company has been able to focus its efforts on sleep apnea products through the creation of Helio Sleep, a sub-brand of Equipt. The at-home sleep test offered by Equipt through Helio Sleep. Image Credits: Equipt Health Equipt provides patients a home sleep test that is later interpreted by a sleep physician, and if they qualify, the company will guide the patient on the next steps of getting medical equipment, ranging from CPAPs to alternative devices through Helio Sleep. “We created Helio Sleep to give users a better way to understand and improve their health through sleep tests, best-in-class treatment devices and access to board-certified physicians,” read the Helio Sleep launch announcement. “24M Americans are currently undiagnosed for sleep apnea, leaving them not only tired but also at risk for serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.” In addition to proving a more integrated path for patients, Equipt partners with medical device companies looking to go to market. Once a company is ready to launch medically cleared equipment, the company can market the product on its site to help fulfill demand. This feeds into its financial model where the company charges for DME and HME consultations. At the moment Equipt is not accepting insurance payments for care but is transitioning to “providing insurance reimbursement or insurance payments.” Although the company’s first focus is the sleep apnea market, Weisinger explained she hopes to expand services to cater to individuals with more chronic conditions. “We want to help a lot of the new medical device companies and support them as they go to market,” Weisinger said. “But at the same time, we think there’s great opportunities in the infusion pumps based around treating diabetic patients, home dialysis equipment, and other home medical devices that would include breast pumps and other like mobilization devices or hospital home.”

RIF Robotics powers robots that inspect and organize surgical equipment • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, RIF Robotics, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Several years ago, Kevin DeMarco’s aunt was an operating room nurse who asked DeMarco — knowing that he programmed robots for a living — if there was a robot that could prepare surgical equipment. After investigating the problem with a colleague at Georgia Tech, where DeMarco was working as a research faculty member, he decided to leave his position to create the robot that his aunt once mused about. In this quest, DeMarco ended up co-founding RIF Robotics, one of the startups in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. Led by DeMarco, Sergio García-Vergara and a third co-founder, Collin Farill, who’s an industrial designer by trade, RIF Robotics seeks to use a combination of AI and robotics to relieve healthcare workers of the burden of mundane tasks so they can focus on clinical work. Image Credits: RIF Robotics Sterile processing — the cleaning of medical equipment — is also tough on technicians performing it, who have to spend hours each day inspecting and cleaning tools. Some equipment requires over 100 steps to disinfect, and the pace in busy hospitals can be relentless. The costs can add up, too. One study estimates that just 20 instrument errors that end up creating delays in the operating room can cost a hospital as much as $3,385. Extrapolating out to a year, the cost to the hospital would be about $48,000, the research found. RIF isn’t tackling cleaning. But the startup claims its prototype product, which was developed in less than two months, can save surgeons time by identifying, classifying and manipulating four different instruments and assembling a small surgical tray. Two machine learning systems — an image segmentation system and an object classifier, trained on sets of both real and synthetic images of surgical tools — help a robotic manipulator arm grasp and move the instruments. “The major challenges that the sterile processing industry is facing are a lack of experienced surgical technicians, instrument-level tracking, infection traceability and cost traceability,” DeMarco told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Medical device manufacturers are interested in knowing how their equipment is used and degrades in the field. Instrument-level data will also help them to decide where to send sales reps. Hospitals are interested in instrument-level data because it will help them operate more efficiently by improving instrument-level tracking and instrument inspection. Currently, most hospitals only track at the tray level, but the industry wants to be able to track at the instrument level.” Image Credits: RIF Robotics Future prototypes will be able to recognize more tools and determine if there’s any leftover “bioburden” (i.e., blood and bone) on instrument surfaces and evaluate instruments’ sharpness and overall condition. But even in its current form, DeMarco believes that RIF has built a product hospitals would use. “Three Atlanta hospitals and the Veterans Affairs are interested in our product,” he said. “We have a collaborative research and development agreement with the Veterans Affairs, which allows us to conduct customer discovery and pilot studies at their facilities … [We’ll deploy] three alpha versions of our systems at local Atlanta hospitals, where we already have existing connections.” RIF is currently bootstrapping — DeMarco claims that the company has a burn rate of less than $1,000 per month. But the team isn’t naïve about the long road ahead. RIF is going after an $800,000 debt pre-seed round and hopes to hire a medical device industry expert after the round concludes. The company, which is pre-revenue, also expects to require three rounds of funding and close to four years before it reaches profitability. RIF Robotics’ co-founders pose for a photograph in scrubs. Image Credits: RIF Robotics There’s also competition from vendors like RST Automation, which sells a semi-automated medical tool identification and organization system. Steris and R-Solution Medical — two other rivals, albeit not direct ones — are developing robots to transport and store surgical trays and equipment. DeMarco claims that RIF’s solution is more capable. But the proof will be in the pudding — RIF aims to turn its prototype into a manufacturable product by fall 2023. “The healthcare industry is starving for innovation,” DeMarco said. “We are protecting ourselves from the potential headwinds by developing products and solutions that are directly asked for by the industry and the end users.”

Theneo wants to bring Stripe-like API documentation to all developers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in API documentation, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Enterprise, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, TheneoNo Comments

A new company is taking a leaf out of Stripe’s API playbook with a platform that makes it easy for any company to create clear API documentation, while also allowing non-technical team members to contribute to the process. Demoing as part of the Battlefield 200 cohort at TC Disrupt this week, ZebethMedia met up with Theneo to find out how they plan to get their slice of the $4.5 billion API management market — a figure that’s predicted to rise to nearly $14 billion within five years. APIs, or “application programming interfaces,” are the glue that hold most modern software together. They’re what allow Uber to offer in-app messaging without building the entire infrastructure themselves from scratch, fitness apps to visualize your running history through maps and online merchants to support payments powered by Stripe. Internally, companies also create their own APIs to connect all manner of back-end systems and data stores. In short, APIs are the hidden, often unsung heroes of the modern technological era. But creating an API that’s easy to use and adopt by developers comes with inherent challenges. It isn’t enough to just build the API — its features, functionality and deployment instructions need to be recorded and presented in a format that’s easy to follow. Getting the API documentation right is imperative, which is where Theneo is hoping to make its mark. Sample API documentation from Theneo. Image Credits: Theneo Stripe-like API docs Theneo co-founder and CEO Ana Robakidze said that she’d worked on hundreds of APIs in a previous role heading up an engineering team, concluding that quality API documentation is often lacking. “I personally witnessed the effect API documentation had on our project’s delivery, cost, and efficiency,” Robakidze said. “As a result, as a team leader, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort searching for a tool that would assist us in creating excellent API documentation — similar to what Stripe has, as it is considered one of the best in the industry. The problem with most of the tools is that they were either time-consuming or had too many limitations.” The root of the problem, according to Robakidze, is that developers aren’t necessarily technical writers — they’d much rather “create another API than document it,” she said. Consequently, a lot of internal APIs specifically (i.e. APIs built for connecting a company’s internal systems and apps) either go completely undocumented, or if they are documented, aren’t synchronized and maintained as the API evolves. This issue is compounded as developers come and go within a company, often leading to an unwieldy mess. “Theneo was created through frustration, with the aim of making high-quality API documentation quick to generate, and simple to maintain,” Robakidze said. With Theneo, developers connect their GitHub repository or upload their API collection, and Theneo then analyzes everything and delivers the required API documentation. It also offers an AI assistant that uses natural language processing (NLP) to improve the documentation, including automatically describing the different API attributes, which are basically the parts of the API specification that developers need to request, send and delete data, and so on. So a “create customer” object, for example, contains various attributes each with a definition so that the user (i.e. developer) knows exactly what the attribute is for. “Our AI assistant develops descriptions for these fields, which often take a developer or technical writer a significant amount of time to create, especially when there are thousands of fields in your APIs,” Robakidze explained. Theneo: Sample API document showing fields / attribute descriptions. Image Credits: Theneo While Theneo is designed to automate the process as much as possible, it’s clearly not going to deliver a gift-wrapped API documentation entirely off its own volition — it acknowledges that developers and other team members will need to fine-tune formats and wording, add more images or whatever it needs. “We analyze the API, parse it, and then return an already well-structured API doc,” Robakidze said. “The user can then choose whether to add more details, such as images, and different API widgets, and add team members so they can collaborate.” While the engine underpinning Theneo is the same across both internal and external APIs, the company provides additional tooling for the latter, acknowledging that third-party developers appreciate a slicker interface that’s easier to follow. So this basically amounts to a white-label product that can be tailored and branded in accordance with the company’s requirements. In terms of pricing, Theneo currently has a basic plan that costs around $20 per month per user, rising to $45 per month for unlimited API projects on the business plan. It also offers an enterprise plan that unlocks features such as customized branding and the ability to self-host. It’s also working on a completely free version, though Robakidze said this wasn’t ready for prime time quite yet. Theneo co-founder and CEO Ana Robakidze. Funding The Y Combinator (YC) graduate has already raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding since it was founded exactly a year ago, and this week confirmed it’s in the process of raising further funding. And it also unveiled an updated documentation editor, which Robakidze described as something akin to “Figma for APIs,” designed for everyone involved in a software project to contribute, regardless of their technical prowess. “We realized that there are multiple players when it comes to building APIs or API docs, and that it is crucial for these users to collaborate,” Robakidze explained. “Similar to what Figma did with collaboration, our API documentation editor allows users to collaborate, so managers and non-technical members can easily work together on content and produce high-quality documents.” Robakidze said that the company is pretty much open to working with any size and type of business, and it’s currently working with some 3,000 companies, spanning everything from fintechs and government agencies to agriculture companies. “Our biggest customers are fintech companies, usually with 20-plus developers,” Robakidze said. It’s somewhat fitting that Theneo is seeing particular traction within fintech, given that it’s looking

Date night? Relationship app Sparks wants to help you plan a lovely evening • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, sparks, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

There’s an abundance of dating apps on the market, but there aren’t many apps that aim to keep the spark alive after you enter a relationship. Enter Sparks, an app catering to existing couples looking to introduce new and fun experiences to their lives. The Barcelona-based startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, debuted as an MVP in May 2021 and officially launched this week. The startup was founded by CEO Ankit Nayal, who came up with the idea for Sparks after reflecting on his relationship with his partner. He found that he and his partner were often too busy to find things to do together, and that it was impossible to find a new activity that they were both interested in. Drawing on this experience, Nayal decided to create an app focused on helping couples enhance their relationships by finding new experiences, whether it’s choosing a new movie, recipe, game, restaurant or vacation. “There are so many apps to help you find a partner,” Nayal told ZebethMedia. “But once you find a partner, you leave those apps and there’s nothing left to help you in your relationship. That’s where I noticed a gap and wondered why we don’t have a tool focused on improving relationships.” Some may wonder why they need an app to help them make decisions with their partner. To that, Nayal says the app isn’t trying to replace communication between couples, it’s instead looking to get rid of the hassle of planning dates or discovering new experiences. Image Credits: Sparks Sparks offers a curated selection of experiences and date ideas that you and your partner can parse through in a Tinder-like swipe interface. You can swipe through movie suggestions, new recipes, vacation ideas, etch. Once there’s a match, the app will let you know there’s something that both you and your partner are interested in doing. The startup is looking to raise a pre-seed round in the first quarter of 2023 and plans to use the funding to add more features to the app, while also integrating a deeper personalized experience for couples. In terms of the future, Nayal says he sees Sparks turning into a network of super-apps that are able to help couples in additional ways. “Long term, we have bigger goals,” Nayal said. “Living in China and operating businesses there, we got well-versed with the ecosystem of super-apps and one company being the holder of multiple key apps. We want to bring the same, but to relationships. Ideally we see ourselves creating different faces of Sparks, such as Sparks: The Long Distance Relationship App, The Parents App, The Couples Finance App and so on.”

Deep Render believes AI holds the key to more efficient video compression • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Deep Render, Disrupt, machine learning, Media & Entertainment, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Chri Besenbruch, CEO of Deep Render, sees many problems with the way video compression standards are developed today. He thinks they aren’t advancing quickly enough, bemoans the fact that they’re plagued with legal uncertainty and decries their reliance on specialized hardware for acceleration. “The codec development process is broken,” Besenbruch said in an interview with ZebethMedia ahead of Disrupt, where Deep Render is participating in the Disrupt Battlefield 200. “In the compression industry, there is a significant challenge of finding a new way forward and searching for new innovations.” Seeking a better way, Besenbruch co-founded Deep Render with Arsalan Zafar, whom he met at Imperial College London. At the time, Besenbruch was studying computer science and machine learning. He and Zafar collaborated on a research project involving distributing terabytes of video across a network, during which they say they experienced the shortcomings of compression technology firsthand. The last time ZebethMedia covered Deep Render, the startup had just closed a £1.6 million seed round ($1.81 million) led by Pentech Ventures with participation from Speedinvest. In the roughly two years since then, Deep Render has raised an additional several million dollars from existing investors, bringing its total raised to $5.7 million. “We thought to ourselves, if the internet pipes are difficult to extend, the only thing we can do is make the data that flows through the pipes smaller,” Besenbruch said. “Hence, we decided to fuse machine learning and AI and compression technology to develop a fundamentally new way of compression data getting significantly better image and video compression ratios.” Deep Render isn’t the first to apply AI to video compression. Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users. Elsewhere, there’s startup WaveOne, which claims its machine learning-based video codec outperforms all existing standards across popular quality metrics. But Deep Render’s solution is platform-agnostic. To create it, Besenbruch says that the company compiled a dataset of over 10 million video sequences on which they trained algorithms to learn to compress video data efficiently. Deep Render used a combination of on-premise and cloud hardware for the training, with the former comprising over a hundred GPUs. Deep Render claims the resulting compression standard is 5x better than HEVC, a widely used codec and can run in real time on mobile devices with a dedicated AI accelerator chip (e.g., the Apple Neural Engine in modern iPhones). Besenbruch says the company is in talks with three large tech firms — all with market caps over $300 billion — about paid pilots, though he declined to share names. Eddie Anderson, a founding partner at Pentech and board member at Deep Render, shared via email: “Deep Render’s machine learning approach to codecs completely disrupts an established market. Not only is it a software route to market, but their [compression] performance is significantly better than the current state of the art. As bandwidth demands continue to increase, their solution has the potential to drive vastly improved commercial performance for current media owners and distributors.” Deep Render currently employs 20 people. By the end of 2023, Besenbruch expects that number will more than triple to 62.

Meet E-liza Dolls, the startup that’s building dolls to help young girls learn to code • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Disrupt, e-liza dolls, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

E-liza Dolls, a Berkeley-based startup, is aiming to challenge the gender gap in STEM by helping young girls learn to code using dolls. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, builds dolls that include programmable computers that girls can code through an app. The startup was founded in 2021 by Eliza Kosoy, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, who is focused on the intersection of child development and artificial intelligence. Kosoy originally came up with the idea for the dolls in 2017 while she was working at MIT in an AI lab that was mostly made up of men. Kosoy says she realized that if only a certain group of people were designing the future of AI and technology, it would only benefit that group, which is when she had the idea to come up with a way for young girls to learn to code. Kosoy wanted to find a way for girls to learn about coding without having to give up their interests, which is why she decided to combine dolls and technology. Regardless of what people may think about gendered toys, the purpose of E-liza dolls is to help girls feel confident when it comes to exploring STEM by giving them a product that is designed specifically for them. The market is filled with toys that are designed and marketed for and by males. Of course girls can play with these toys too, but some of them may prefer to play with something that is designed for them. “We want to expose young girls to technological concepts and encourage creative thinking through hardware and software, preventing girls from being influenced by generational stereotypes,” Kosoy told ZebethMedia. “Parents have so few options; they feel they need to force their daughters to play with STEM products designed for boys in order to get their daughters on a STEM path. We believe little girls don’t have to sacrifice their interests in order to play with educational STEM toys.” E-liza Dolls is currently in talks with manufacturers and plans to launch on Kickstarter in early 2023. Kosoy says the team is one prototype away from the Kickstarter launch, as the startup plans to add a few iterations to the dolls and enhance their design features. After the initial launch on Kickstarter, the company plans to release the product officially in mid-2023. The 18″ dolls operate via a piece of hardware embedded in each doll. The device has a screen and is Bluetooth-enabled to receive code via the doll’s companion app. Girls can plug in different sensors or use the built-in sensors to code the doll to do different things, such as building a security alarm for your room using a distance sensor or creating a truth detector using a heartbeat pulse sensor. Since launching, E-liza Dolls has received $100,000 in funding from AIX Ventures. The company is currently in the midst of raising a pre-seed round that consists of funding from several angel investors, including poet Rupi Kaur.

Alaffia Health taps AI to detect errors in hospital bills • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Alaffia Health, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The multi-decade rise in healthcare costs isn’t expected to reverse course any time soon. In search of a fix, Adun Akanni and TJ Ademiluyi co-founded Alaffia Health in 2020, one of the startups participating in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. The healthtech company uses machine learning to try to identify fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare claims. “We leveraged key insights from our family’s medical billing company in founding Alaffia,” Ademiluyi told ZebethMedia in an interview. “We determined that the majority of the waste in the system results from natural human error, lack of transparency in claims processing, and misaligned incentives between healthcare providers and payers. We founded Alaffia to tackle these issues using nascent machine learning and AI, built on top of deep healthcare domain expertise.” Alaffia sells services primarily to health insurance payers and enterprises that provide their employees health coverage. Using AI to extract and standardize data from hospital bills, including various medical billing procedure codes and dates of service, the platform aims to reduce payers’ spending by finding errors and overcharges within the bills sent by healthcare providers. The causes of medical billing errors are myriad, but often arise from double billing, missing the payer submission deadline and a failure to capture patient information. Non-specific diagnostic codes are another common issue, leading to instances of upcoding and undercoding. Upcoding is when a coder reports a higher-level service than patients received or never had performed, while undercoding is when billing codes don’t capture the full scope of work performed by a physician. Medical expenses are expected to grow by an average of 5.1% from 2021 to 2030, reaching $6.8 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and a significant portion of those expenditures are derived from errors in health insurance claims. It’s estimated that about 80% of claims in the U.S. contain at least one medical billing error, and that as much as $300 billion is lost to provider fraud, waste and abuse each year. Image Credits: Alaffia Health “This is a quite challenging technical problem due to the lack of data standardization in the healthcare system, so we’ve rigorously trained machine learning models using training data generated by our in-house annotation team,” Ademiluyi said. Alaffia reviews facility bills for errors such as “unbundling” — i.e., using multiple codes for individual parts of a procedure — while checking the accuracy of more complex claims like implants and surgeries. The company says it taps registered nurses, certified coders and certified billers to cross-reference the AI’s findings, as well as a clinical review team that examines each claim and corresponding medical record. When asked about competitors, Ademiluyi says he sees “legacy industry participants” who manually process and review claims as Alaffia’s principal rivals. But Alaffia isn’t the only startup attempting to tackle the medical billing error problem with AI. Anomaly, which works with insurance companies and providers, offers an AI-driven platform designed to detect irregularities in medical bills. There’s also Nym, whose technology converts medical charts and electronic medical records from physician consultations into auditable billing codes automatically. Alaffia has managed to gain traction in the space, however — and funding. Ademiluyi claims the company’s services currently cover over 300,000 health plan members in aggregate. And to date, Alaffia has raised $6.6 million in venture capital from backers including Anthemis, 1984 Ventures, Aperture Venture Capital, Tau Ventures, Twine Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund. Ademiluyi says that 2022 revenue is on pace to more than double year-over-year. The near-term plan is to expand Alaffia’s commercial footprint and product offerings, he added, starting with hospital bill review services direct to patients. The company currently employs “just over” 20 people and expects to hire five more by the end of the year. “Fortunately, we operate in an industry resistant to recession. Regardless of pandemics, macro trends, or the outlook for interest rates, people will still visit the doctor to receive care,” Ademiluyi said. “When patients receive care, it leads to further healthcare spending, which benefits our business as we review generated hospital bills for errors. As we move into a slowdown in the market, large enterprises — both health insurance institutions and employers whom we support are actually looking at ways to lower their expenses, which we directly support by reducing healthcare spending. As such, we believe the pandemic and current slowdown in the economy to be a net positive for the business.”

Vitag launches NFC-powered ‘sticky notes’ for visual instructions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Hardware, NFC, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VitagNo Comments

While QR codes emerged as something of a technology poster-child during the pandemic, garnering a new lease of life in everything from restaurant menus to contactless payments, there remains a certain inelegance to the matrix barcode system. Usability remains a sticking point, both in terms of the effort it takes to create content and align it with a QR code, and also from the end-user’s standpoint who has to open their camera app to scan the QR code — something that might not even work in low-light situations. Throw into the mix aesthetics (who’s ever seen an attractive QR code?), and there’s a strong case to be made for an alternative that brings the QR code spirt to a more user friendly format. This is a problem that Vitag is setting out to address, with an NFC product designed for video instructions. Or, “video sticky notes,” as the company calls them. Founded in Dallas in March this year, Vitag is officially announcing its private beta today at TC Disrupt, where the company was selected as one of ZebethMedia’s Battlefield 200 startup cohorts. We caught up with cofounders Sean Jackson (CEO) and CTO Daniel Reiling to get a sneak peek into what exactly it’s looking to achieve. Vitag cofounders: Daniel Reiling (CTO) and Sean Jackson (CEO) Image Credits: ZebethMedia Videos on tap Vitag’s product consists of two core “things”: a mobile app for people to record instructional videos or upload existing material from their device, and a physical NFC-enabled tag that they can program the video to. All the end-user then has to do is tap their phone on the tag, and the video pops up on their screen, demonstrating to an AirBnb guest how to use the A/C system or where the recycling goes. Vitag in action Image Credits: Vitag Of course, it’s easy enough to achieve all this through QR codes — there are many online services for generating QR codes which someone can then tether to a YouTube video that they created. What Vitag does, though, is provide the tools for creating the video, managing tags, and hosting the actual video itself — it has built its own hosting service on top of Google Cloud, with the content viewable only to those with access to a unique URL, which is activated when users tap their phone to a tag. “We created our own service where you can capture a video on your phone, it goes to our servers, and it’s hosted there,” Reiling said. It may seem more intuitive to have just used an existing white-label video hosting service from a company like Vimeo, but the founders explained its reasoning for building its own hosting service: it’s about scalability, controllability, and customizability. While Vimeo might be great for a company to host its own videos, when it comes to potentially hundreds or thousands of Vitag’s own customers who need their own individual accounts for creating and storing hundreds or thousands of videos, this requires full control of the experience from creation through to hosting. The entire back-end and front-end packaged in a single platform. “Our goal is to remove complexity from the process of sharing instructions,” Jackson said. “We believe people are tired of cobbling together different technologies to complete a task — from QR code generators, to different hosting platforms, to desktop publishing tools, to printers, to adhesives — and everything else required.” However, it’s not purely about video. A customer can configure their tag so that it links to a static text page, a photo, URL, or whatever they want. The company offers $2 pre-printed tags specific to a certain type of business, for example restaurants or retail, while creators can also order personalized tags with their own individual text and a choice of different backgrounds. It’s also worth noting that companies can elect to have QR codes printed on the NFC tags for those who prefer to use QR codes, Vitag: Customization interface Image Credits: ZebethMedia Furthermore, Vitag also supports NFC tags from third-party providers, with an in-app function for users to format the tags to work with Vitag. The company said that it’s also planning additional tools in the future, including a desktop app with additional features for small businesses and enterprise customers. NFC surge NFC, or near-field communication as it’s more formally known, is hardly a new technology, but it has taken its time to properly hit the mainstream consciousness, where it still pretty much resides in the payments domain. But its recent growth has been aided somewhat by recent adoption from big tech companies such as Apple, which started to fully embrace NFC with iOS 13 back in 2019 — instead of only allowing iPhone apps to read NFC tags, Apple started to allow apps to write directly to blank tags, and interact through native protocols. The company also recently launched a new “tap to pay” feature that allows iPhones to accept contactless payments over NFC. Elsewhere, NFC is also being used as a replacement for business cards, allowing people to exchange information just by tapping phones. So while QR codes have seen a major resurgence in recent years and are unlikely to being going away any time soon, NFC is on something of an upwards trajectory too, which is where Vitag wants to make its mark. “We believe that consumers are becoming more comfortable with ‘tap to’ events, with payments being the most used today,” Jackson said. “And as more people become exposed to digital business cards the market adoption of ‘tap to’ will only increase.” For now, Vitag is looking to serve the short-term rental property market in the U.S., which Jackson identified as a particularly powerful use-case for video instructions. But plans are afoot to target all manner of verticals, from restaurants and retail stores to gyms. “As we shared our vision of what this technology could do, we found use-case after use-case from almost everyone we encountered,” Jackson explained. “People that stayed in rentals wanted to use them