Disrupt

Swap Robotics is paving the way for electric solar vegetation cuts and sidewalk snow plowing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Robotics & AI, Startups, Swap RoboticsNo Comments

Swap Robotics, a company that manufactures electric grass-cutting and snow removal robots, presented today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how it’s making sustainable outdoor work equipment. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on facilitating robots that cut grass and vegetation on 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar farms. The company’s secondary focus is sidewalk snow plowing. The startup was founded in October 2019 by CEO Tim Lichti, CTO Mohamed H. Ahmed, Machine Design Lead Spencer Kschesinski and Electrical Design Lead Adonis Mansour. Lichti, Kschesinski and Mansour all attended the University of Waterloo together and then got to know Ahmed during their first year. The team originally planned to develop a robotic cutting solution for sports fields, but kept hearing from landscapers that cutting 1,000+ acre utility-scale solar installations was a challenging job that could use a modern solution. Tim Lichti, CEO at Swap Robotics pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia The team decided it would be their mission to create a solution that could sustainably cut grass in a controlled environment. Swap Robotics was aware that solar vegetation cutting comes with its challenges, as it requires a unique type of cutting deck that is able to get underneath solar panels, and recognized that a robotic solution could address the problem. “Right now, there are a couple of main challenges when cutting all of the vegetation in solar fields,” Lichti told ZebethMedia in an interview. “The way it’s done is unsustainable. It’s done by gasoline or diesel-powered equipment, so there’s obviously a big carbon footprint there. There’s also a high cost from gasoline and diesel itself. The equipment is also going through rough terrain, so there’s a lot of equipment breakdown and costs associated with that. Since what we’re doing is 100% electric, it’s a lot more sustainable. There are also way fewer parts, so it’s not going to break down nearly as often.” Image Credits: Swap Robotics The robots have built-in hydraulics that move the grass cutting blades and the snow plow attachment. The attachments have a “quick swap” system, hence the name Swap Robotics, to make it easier and quicker to switch attachments. The robots’ batteries can also be swapped in five minutes, which allows for nearly 24/7 operation. The robots can also hold more than 1,000 pounds. Within 60 days of debuting its robots in mid-2022, Swap Robotics had over $9 million of signed agreements for solar vegetation cutting. Swap Robotics says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric cutting deck to reach the grass and vegetation underneath solar panels. The company also says it has developed the world’s first 100% electric “rough cut” deck that can easily cut down vegetation up to two-inches in diameter. Lichti says Swap Robotics currently has several robots in commercial operation in Texas, but is unable to disclose which companies are currently using the robots. The startup is also in the midst of releasing a batch of 10 new robots and has ordered supplies for the next batch of 10 robots. The company anticipates additional sales in the future as a result of its new relationship with SOLV Energy. As for the company’s business model, Swap Robotics charges a price per acre. Lichti says the model is convenient because customers are already familiar with paying a price per acre for grass cutting done by humans. The price per acre can vary depending on factors such as the size of the site, frequency of cuts and the terrain. The startup’s goal is to provide customers with 15% to 20% in savings when compared to their current cutting costs per acre. Image Credits: Swap Robotics The startup also announced that it received an investment from SOLV Energy, the largest utility-scale solar building company in the United States, but is unable to disclose the amount. Lichti says the funding is part of its pre-Series A round that it plans to close at the end of October. A large portion of the investment will go toward commercialization of the startup’s robots. The company plans to ramp up operations to have dozens of robots in service. In addition, some parts of the investment will be used for capital expenditure. Prior to this investment, Swap Robotics raised $3 million in the three years after its launch from angel investors and SOSV. The funding was used to get Swap Robotics’ initial batch of a dozen robots into commercial operation. The investment was also used for software, mechanical and electrical development. Swap Robotics at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia Swap Robotics plans to have a larger Series A round in 2023. “Long term, we would love Swap Robotics to be an outdoor robotics platform for work,” Lichti said. “We’ve developed a form factor that is compact, extremely strong and robust and has a built-in hydraulics system that can have dozens of different use cases. I think this makes it an ideal platform for heavy use cases, especially those that sometimes may be seasonal.” Lichti reiterated that the startup’s main focus will largely be on solar vegetation, and that the potential for its additional use cases is part of its longer term vision. As for what these use cases could look like, Lichti noted that the robots could potentially be used for street sweeping or reforestation efforts.

Hormona wants women to track their ‘hormonal health’ with at-home testing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Hormona, hormone tracking, StartupsNo Comments

Quantified health activity is all around us these days, as scores of people use mobile sensing technologies to keep an eye on their well-being by tracking their steps, workouts and even how long and deep they sleep — so why shouldn’t women who cycle (as in menstrual cycle) track monthly changes to their hormone levels? London-based femtech, Hormona, which is pitching its hormone tracker in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt, hopes to encourage people with periods to do just that: Add hormone-monitoring to their quantified health mix. Today it’s announcing the launch of its app in the U.S. after a period of early testing with “a few thousand” women in Europe (it’s been beta testing in Sweden). The 2019-founded U.K. startup has already spent a couple of years in R&D developing an easy-to-perform, proprietary at-home hormone test to underpin a forthcoming monthly subscription business that will enable users of its (freemium) app to pay to regularly test and report their hormone levels. In the near future, in return for “roughly” $40 per month (for the subscription package which includes a supply of self tests), paying users will get feedback on whether they’re inside or outside the normal hormonal range for women their age — and suggestions for treatments if something looks amiss. That’s for starters. Hormona’s overarching goal, as is often the case with femtech startups, is to encourage a critical mass of users to get on-board with a mission to help plug the data gap that persists around women’s health (as a result of medical research being historically skewed towards male biology) — by agreeing to pool data for research aimed at improving understanding of the roles hormones play in areas like fertility and the menopause. (This side is of course optional: Hormona confirms that any studies it engages in involving user data will be consent-based, i.e. requiring the user to opt their information in.) Jasmine Tagesson, COO at Hormona pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “As of now, there isn’t enough data around hormonal health and it’s really affecting every single woman in different stages of her life so it’s a very important topic that we really need to spend more time to do more research and understand,” says Hormona CEO and co-founder, Karolina Lofqvist, ahead of today’s on stage pitch at the Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. “With this test we can really help women to figure out if they have irregular cycles, if they’re going to have problems getting pregnant or if they’re going into menopause,” she continues. “Our full solution is really on hormonal health — and follow[ing] a woman from her first cycle all the way to her last.” “We are hoping that with the data [users opt in] we can do more studies around how women are affected by their hormones, how different connections and different levels between hormones can be connected to hormone related issues such as PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or — eventually, perhaps — endometriosis as well, even if it’s not a direct hormonal issue. But PCOS for sure, and infertility and menopause,” she adds. “There are a lot of things that are connected to your hormones that are currently understudied that we are very excited to do more studies and bring more awareness around.” The startup has raised a total of $1.5 million in early backing from three VC firms so far: SFC Capital and Nascent Invest, as well as Techstars — after going through the latter’s LA accelerator program earlier this year. Cycling through hormone testing Hormona’s at-home hormone tests — which are lateral flow, urine-based tests for (initially) three separate hormones (FSH; progesterone; and estrogen) — will be available from Q1 next year, per Lofqvist, starting in the U.S., with a European launch to follow later. That means, for now, its (free-to-download) app is essentially a general resource that provides information about the function of different female hormones. As tests become available, it’s also designed to funnel users towards regular self-testing (and paying a subscription) to unlock personalized hormonal insights once the testing component of the business launches early next year. “In the app today you can start to understand what is supposed to happen with your hormones and then when the test is available women can confirm that what is supposed to happen is actually happening,” says Lofqvist, going on to explain that subscription users will be testing roughly one hormone per week (using a separate test per hormone) and doing this at home — “without the need for a lab”. The three hormones it’s selected for testing were picked because they’re “connected to so many different issues that we women go through”, she says, adding that they may add tests for more hormones in the future — with testosterone and cortisol being two others of potential interest. The initial batch of hormone tests are performed by users as three separate tests, rather than being bundled onto a single test strip. This is because Lofqvist says that certain hormones need to be tested on certain days to properly understand how levels are changing throughout the cycle. “You don’t test your estrogen on the same day as you test your FSH,” she notes, adding of the individual test dates: “It’s based on our algorithms telling when your estrogen and FSH is supposed to be at the highest or lowest level.” App users need to provide Hormona with some information about themselves (such as their age) and about their cycle (e.g. regular or irregular; and its length) in order that it can calculate personalized testing dates. Lofqvist confirms these dates “can vary a bit” depending on what the user’s goal and age is. While she tells us the overall accuracy of its hormone tests is “on par” with an at-home blood test. “We’ve spent the last two years in order to evaluate antibodies to give us as good result

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.

Activision Blizzard’s Johanna Faries highlights the company’s emerging ‘anti-tox’ strategy • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Activision Blizzard, call of duty, Disrupt, esports, Gaming, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

At ZebethMedia Disrupt today, Activision Blizzard General Manager Johanna Faries elaborated on the company’s plans to clean up some of the worst behavior in the franchise’s community, even as new lawsuits and allegations about its own culture continue to emerge. Last month, Activision Blizzard released a formal code of conduct for the Call of Duty community, which encompasses its broad consumer player base and the competitive scene. While the policy is pretty basic — no harassment, hate or cheating — it’s something the company can point to when it enforces the rules. “I’m happy to say, especially since you know the time that I’ve been in the chair, we’ve really raised the bar in terms of paying attention to ‘what does an anti-tox strategy need to look like? What does creating fair play environments, safe play environments look like?’” Faries said. “We just released for example — and it started in the beta — a first-ever franchise-wide code of conduct, which I know may sound like table stakes, and in many ways it probably is — but it’s here now. Faries noted that Activision Blizzard has teams “focused 24/7” on anti-toxicity, weaving together automated machine learning solutions with human moderation. The goal is to make it easier for players to quickly report bad behavior but also to incentivize the kind of good behavior that should serve as a model for the community. The crackdown on toxic behavior — which often disproportionately impacts marginalized players who still struggle for representation in streaming and gaming — goes hand in hand with weeding out players who cheat, according to Faries. “So there’s more to come on this, but I was really proud to see in addition to Ricochet [anti-cheating tech] and a lot of our anti-cheat anti-hacking initiatives that we’ve rolled out as well… our anti-toxicity focus is one that is a masthead going into this upcoming launch and for years to come,” Faries said. “We’re putting the best systems in place to make sure that players have the tools, but also have again the incentives, to continue to raise the bar of what it means to play fair to play with respect for everyone to play with integrity.” Over the weekend, Activision seemed to put its money where its mouth was, allegedly banning top competitor Doug “Censor” Martin from competing in the Fortune’s Keep tournament, citing his interactions with Call of Duty streamer Nadia Amine. Martin previously filmed a joke marriage proposal to the female player, who has faced a firestorm of sexism and baseless accusations that she’s somehow cheating at the game. In a tweet, Martin said that Activision “blocked him from competing” in the tournament over harassing Amine, though Activision Blizzard hasn’t yet confirmed the claim. If the company did indeed dole out an event ban over directing unwanted attention at a fellow player, it would track with its new emphasis on cleaning up behavior in the notoriously toxic Call of Duty scene.

Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in chief, Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at ZebethMedia Disrupt today in San Francisco. Kaplan asked the audience how many men call themselves “boy bosses.” Nobody raised their hand. “We don’t use the phrase ‘boy boss.’ We only use the phrase ‘girl boss’ because we’ve put women in another category instead of just assuming that a woman can be a leader. And so I don’t like the phrase because of that. I don’t like thinking about women in leadership. It’s just leadership,” Kaplan told the Disrupt audience. She added, “How can we celebrate women, not tear them down, not infantilize what it is to be a woman leader by calling them a ‘girl boss’ and truly make sure that women can lead and do it in their own way.” The three-year-old startup has grown from a 200 person group in NYC to a 20,000 strong organization that has raised $140 million on a $1 billion valuation. Yet they have another 60,000 women who want to join. Kaplan stresses that giving its members a highly curated and valuable experience is more important than growing too fast and losing their value proposition. “The member experience is most important. So when you ask about growth, when we think about how we’ve only scratched the surface of 5 million women [executives] in the US, it is so critical for us to make sure that members are really loving their experience,” she said. It all comes back to the mission, which was born in personal experience, says Childers. “When I started to get in the room where decisions were happening, and I realized that there were differences in the way that conversations were running for different people within the organization, that was just a really eye-opening thing for me,” she said. She decided creating a network of like-minded women could be incredibly helpful. This week the company opened what they call ‘a clubhouse’ in San Francisco, a place for women to meet in person. They have three others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, they expanded outside the U.S into the U.K. for the first time.

Staax thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Fintech, investing, Staax, StartupsNo Comments

For better or for worse, Robinhood helped inspire a new generation of investors to enter the stock market. Now that investing is cool again, upstarts like Staax, which pitched today at ZebethMedia Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, are finding new ways to cash in on its cachet, particularly among young people. Nikki Varanasi, Staax’s founder and CEO, was managing an $800 million fund-of-funds at McKinsey when she began to take notice of the lack of resources available to aspiring investors who wanted to get comfortable with the process. “When I looked at my friend group, who was still shy to invest or didn’t know where to start, I saw this huge gap when it came to institutional investing versus everyday people. There were resources on the market, like Robinhood, or whatever it is, but I think at the end of the day, there are still a lot of barrier points for the everyday, beginner investor to get in,” Varanasi told ZebethMedia. Her initial idea was to gift her friends shares of stock — a thoughtful gesture, she hoped, that could help them kickstart their investing journeys. Oftentimes, the barriers to investing are logistical, she explained. Once someone gets paid, there are a number of different, cumbersome steps they have to go to through in order to invest that money. “Because of the disposable income left in apps [like Venmo], it takes over a week to transfer to your bank and then to your brokerage. So for a lot of people, they just leave their money in there and they don’t invest it and that takes a hit with inflation,” Varanasi said. When Varanasi realized there wasn’t an existing platform that could help her send stocks directly to her friends, thus helping them bypass the onerous aforementioned process, she decided to build it herself. Staax is the result of her efforts, alongside her two co-founders, COO Lucy Yang and CTO Victoria Yang. Staax operates like a full-service brokerage in that its users who sign up open an investment account on its platform. They can buy and sell shares much like they could on Robinhood or Fidelity, Varanasi explained. What sets Staax apart, though, is that it allows for peer-to-peer payments in stock. Nikki Varanasi, CEO and founder at Staax pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “We want to turn assets into payments, because we believe that payments haven’t had a lot of evolution in the last 10 years,” Varanasi said. New users who sign up for Staax link the new brokerage account to their bank account and make a list of their top five preferred stocks to receive. Senders can’t gift shares of stock that aren’t on their recipients’ top five lists, which helps prevent unwanted transactions, alongside a feature that lets a recipient choose if and when to accept a stock gift. I asked Varanasi how the platform handles stock price movements that occur between when the shares are sent and when the recipient accepts them. She explained that the sender could gift someone a share priced at $10 each, for example, which would come out of the sender’s bank account in the form of cash. Then, if that share went up in price to $12, let’s say, the recipient could either accept the gift and would be on the hook for the extra $2, which would come out of their own bank account, or they could choose to accept the $10 in cash rather than in stock. For the sender, this system helps them avoid having to purchase the stock and sell it before sending it to the recipient in the form of cash. “What happens on Staax is we avoid taxes for the sender, because we use a ledger system based on cash on the back end, so you don’t need to own the stock to send it,” Varanasi said. According to Varanasi, the main use cases for Staax outside of gifting tend to be social, such as a friend paying back another friend for buying them coffee, but doing so in stock instead of cash. Staax’s co-founders, Nikki Varanasi, Lucy Yang and Victoria Yang. Image Credits: Staax “It’s not large amounts of money you need to stress about and it’s in the market, but it accumulates over time. And so [as an investor] you’re really in it for the long term strategy,” Varanasi said. It’s still early days for the company, which has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding since its founding in 2020. Its investors include Techstars and Western Union, which invested through an accelerator program for fintechs that Staax took part in, as well as VC firms Lightspeed, Harlem Capital and Hustle Fund as well as angel investor Litquidity (of finance meme account fame). Staax is still figuring out its path to monetization, though taking payment for order flow (PFOF) from market makers who execute trades on behalf of other companies’ users is a likely candidate, Varanasi said. It’s the same process Robinhood uses to make money while keeping its product free for users, but has attracted scrutiny from both customers and regulators. Varanasi said she isn’t worried PFOF will be banned in the U.S., because regulators have been talking about doing so for years but haven’t cracked down. Still, she drew a distinction between her plan to monetize Staax and Robinhood’s implementation of the same system. “We are exploring ways to make revenue on the back end through the trades, but in the most ethical way, because we know that PFOF can be controversial, especially when given to the wrong third party,” Varanasi said. In addition to PFOF, Staax is also exploring charging some users a fee for premium content from influencers and creators who partner with the startup as well as potential B2B partnerships down the line. Ultimately, Staax’s growth depends on its ability to build community because the social component is integral to getting users

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Cityblock Health, Disrupt, healthcare, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Toyin AjayiNo Comments

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022, that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about health care disparities, health care outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current health care system. “Everyone’s like, oh my god, black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance. We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers who they launch into markets with. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and bring over groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional health care system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.”

DigestAI’s 19-year-old founder wants to make education addictive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, digestai, Disrupt, edtech, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

When Quddus Pativada was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him. Just five years later, Pativada has been there and done that — earlier this year, he launched the AI-based app Kado, which turns photos, documents or PDFs into flash cards. Now, as the 19-year-old founder takes the stage for Startup Battlefield, he’s looking to take his company, DigestAI, beyond flashcards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all carry around on our phones. “If we make learning truly easy and accessible, it’s something you could do as soon as you open your phone,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “We want to put a teacher in every single person’s phone for every topic in the world.” Quddus Pativada, founder at DigestAI pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia The company’s AI is trained on data from the internet, but the algorithm is fine-tuned to recall specific use cases to make sure that its responses are accurate and not too thrown off by online chaos. “We train it on everything, but the actual use cases are called within silos. We’re calling it ‘federated learning,’ where it’s sort of siloed in and language models are operating on a use case basis,” Pativada said. “This is good because it avoids malicious use.” Pativada said that this kind of product would be different from smart assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa because the information it provides would be more personalized and detailed. So, for certain use cases, like asking for sources to use in an essay, the AI will pull from academic journals to make sure that the information is accurate and appropriate for a classroom. Despite running an educational AI startup, Pativada isn’t currently in school. He took a gap year before going to college to work on his startup, but as DigestAI took off, he decided to keep building instead of going back to school. Growing up, he taught himself to code because he loved video games, so he wanted to make his own — by age 10, he published a “Flappy Bird” clone on the App Store. Naturally, his technological ambitions matured a bit over time. Before founding DigestAI, Pativada built a COVID-19 contact tracing platform. At first, he just made the app as a tool for his classmates — but his work ended up being honored by the United Arab Emirates’ government. Image Credits: DigestAI So far, the outlook is good for the Dubai-based company. Pativada — who says he feels skittish about the CEO label, and prefers to think of himself as just a founder — has raised $600,000 so far from angel investors like Mark Cuban and Shaan Patel, who struck a deal on Shark Tank for his SAT prep company, Prep Expert. How does a 19-year-old in Dubai capture the attention of one of thee most well-known startup investors? A cold email. Mark, we apologize if this admission makes your inbox even more nightmarish. “I was watching a GQ video of Mark Cuban’s daily routine,” Pativada said. “He said he reads his emails every morning at 9 AM, and I looked at the time in Dallas, and it was about 9 AM. So I was like, maybe I should just shoot him an email and see what happens.” While he was at it, he reached out to Patel, whose educational startup has done over $20 million in sales. Patel hopped on a video call with the teenage founder, and by the next week, he and Cuban both offered to invest in DigestAI. “We raised our entire round through cold emails and Zoom,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “It sort of helped because no one can see how young I look in person.” Before he decided to eschew college altogether, Pativada applied to Stanford and interviewed with an alumnus, as is standard in the admissions process. He didn’t end up getting into the competitive Palo Alto university, but his interviewer, who works at Stanford, did end up investing in his company. Go figure. “Our goal is to work with universities like Stanford,” Pativada said. The company is also targeting enterprise clients. Currently, DigestAI works with some U.S.-based universities, Bocconi University in Italy, a European law firm and other clients. At the law firm, DigestAI is testing a tool that allows associates to text a WhatsApp number to quickly brush up on legal terms. In the long term, DigestAI wants to create an SMS system where people can text the AI asking for help learning something — he wants information to be so accessible that it’s “addictive.” “That is what AI is — it’s almost the best version of a human being,” Pativada said.

Mother Honestly’s new commerce offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiv • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Commerce, Disrupt, Fintech, Mother Honestly, StartupsNo Comments

Being a working parent is challenging. Being a working mother, according to many studies, is extra challenging. Many mothers have had the unfortunate experience of having to choose between their careers and children as the balancing act of both can be overwhelming. Factor in aging parents and the number of women who are caregivers for multiple people is greater than ever. To address this, Blessing Adesiyan launched Mother Honestly. Today, the company reaches more than 1 million working parents, caregivers, employers and business leaders. It has generated about $1 million in revenue since inception. And while its initial focus was on working parents, it has broadened its scope to help caregivers of all kinds — regardless of gender. Now, to further extend its reach, Mother Honestly is presenting a new commerce offering at ZebethMedia’s Startup Battlefield. Adesiyan had her first child while she was in college and remembers taking her daughter with her to an internship she had at one multinational corporation. Upon graduating, she started immediately working with Fortune 100 companies such as PepsiCo, DuPont, BASF and Cargill. Once she got into the workforce, she poured herself into her work while managing her caregiving responsibilities, and concluded early on it was “not designed” for her — “a single mother, a black woman that was a chemical engineer who really wanted to remain ambitious.” She knew she wasn’t the only working mother who felt that way, so she created multiple Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) within those companies around parents and caregiving. A bit scarred from her first foray into the corporate world, Adesiyan admits she was actually “terrified of having more kids” without her career being “solid.” Eventually, she had her second child nine years after giving birth to her first. All of the feelings she had when starting her career began coming back — the recognition of a lack of a reliable and affordable care infrastructure, a lack of support from her supervisors and having to spend a small fortune flying her parents back and forth from Nigeria to take care of her children when she had to travel for work. “I eventually ran out of money, and couldn’t keep flying them back and forth,” Adesiyan recalls. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was when she was consulting for a large chemical company and was asked to travel to Morocco. She called her then-boss, asking if the company could provide a stipend toward meeting some of her caregiving obligations. Her boss’s response, Adesiyan told ZebethMedia, shocked her. “He told me it was important that I keep my professional and personal life separate, and that a male colleague had been doing this for 10 years and had never asked for that kind of support,” she recounts. “So I said, ‘No offense, my colleague is a white man with a stay-at-home wife who subsidizes the cost of care.’” Two weeks later, Adesiyan had landed another job, but she was still angry at the thought that she was “making millions of dollars” for a company which “thought it was too much to support” her caregiving needs. She added: “I was out of the country two weeks at a time, and I was a single mom, an immigrant with no real network to support me.” In frustration, Adesiyan turned to Instagram to ask others how they were effectively managing work and family. “People started sending DMs and videos, and she had amassed about 10,000 followers in three months,” Adesiyan recalls. That turned into a conference in Detroit that had hundreds of attendees from all over the country. And by 2018, Mother Honestly — a startup that Adesiyan says was “somewhat of an external ERG” — was born. The website was initially built to offer content and community to caregivers who needed support. “I wanted to support mothers holistically in balancing their careers and personal lives, and I wanted them to do it honestly without comparing themselves to others,” she recalls. “It became clear that only a parent could actually solve this problem holistically, so I like to think of our product as ‘built by mothers, for everyone.’” By 2020, Adesiyan left her job in engineering to focus full time on her venture. Current customers include Indeed, Care.com, Splendid Spoon, Bobbie, Nanit and more. Past customers include Lincoln, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Bright Horizons, Pacira and others. Bootstrapped since inception, Mother Honestly has thus far made money primarily from brand partnerships with the likes of Indeed, Care.com and Splendid Spoon, doing things like co-creating content for employee caregivers together. The natural evolution of Mother Honestly has led to the creation of something Adesiyan believes has been missing, but is crucially needed, in the workforce: a Work-Life Wallet. Mother Honestly will make money by charging a fee to provide the wallet that would give employees the freedom to spend on things such as caregiving or medical travel. Mother Honestly would serve as a middleman, either denying or approving the expenses based on predetermined categories so that employees would have privacy and not have do disclose personal details to their employers. For Adesiyan, widespread adoption would be a dream come true. “Employers, instead of wasting millions of dollars away at EAP (Employee Assistance Programs) that employees don’t use, can redirect their cash into the hands of their employees via our Work-Life Wallet, which they can customize who gets how much and over what time period,” she said.

Netflix to expand into cloud gaming, opens new studio in Southern California • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Netflix, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

At ZebethMedia Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games. Verdu said that Netflix is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering.” The company will also open a new gaming studio in Southern California. “It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement,” Verdu said on stage. “It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games where wherever you are.” Google’s Stadia and Amazon’s Luna have made the same play, attempting to peddle video games that people can play even if they don’t have an expensive gaming computer or coveted console. But these services have struggled to attain mainstream user adoption. Google recently said that it will shut down Stadia in January. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post. Verdu thinks these products struggled due to their business models, not the technology itself. Mike Verdu, VP of Games at Netflix speaks about “whether game streaming can go mainstream” at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “Stadia was a technical success. It was fun to play games on Stadia,” Verdu said. “It had some issues with the business model, sure.” Both Stadia and Luna have dedicated controllers — but Verdu was reticent to say whether or not we can expect a Netflix gaming controller in the future. He did reveal, though, that Netflix is stepping up its game development by opening an internal studio in Southern California. This is the company’s fifth studio — just last month, Netflix set up shop in Helsinki, Finland, with a former Zynga GM at the helm. Others include Boss Fight Entertainment, Night School Studio and Finland’s Next Games, which are each designed to develop games catering to different tastes. The new California studio will be led by Chako Sonny, the former executive producer on “Overwatch.” At Blizzard Entertainment, “Overwatch” was a massive success, netting billions of dollars. Sonny announced his departure from Blizzard last year in the wake of an SEC probe regarding sexual harassment and discrimination at the dominant gaming company. “He could have done anything, but he chose to come here,” said Verdu. “You don’t get people like that coming to your organization to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re really in it for the long haul and in it for the right reasons.” Since it announced its foray into gaming, Netflix has developed 14 games in its own studios and has 35 games on the service now. In total, Verdu said it has 55 games “in flight” at present. These games include experiences based on original IP like “Stranger Things,” as well as licensed IP like “Spongebob Squarepants.” Netflix is also developing original games. “We hope over time that the balance is like, 50% Netflix IP,” Verdu said. The company still considers itself in the very early stages of its gaming initiative but hasn’t ruled out expansions beyond mobile — though we understand it won’t be heading to the console or VR at this point. The news of the gaming studio launch and cloud gaming plans arrives as Netflix is announcing its Q3 earnings, which sees the streamer beating expectations with the addition of 2.41 million subscribers, bringing the total to 223.09 million. Netflix had forecast a net gain of only 1 million subs in the third quarter. The company also reported earning $7.93 in revenue in Q3 2022, whereas analysts predicted $7.85 billion.