Startups

Dataloop secures cash infusion to expand its data annotation tool set • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in AI, data labeling, Enterprise, machine learning, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Data annotation, or the process of adding labels to images, text, audio and other forms of sample data, is typically a key step in developing AI systems. The vast majority of systems learn to make predictions by associating labels with specific data samples, like the caption “bear” with a photo of a black bear. A system trained on many labeled examples of different kinds of contracts, for example, would eventually learn to distinguish between those contracts and even extrapolate to contracts that it hasn’t seen before. The trouble is, annotation is a manual and labor-intensive process that’s historically been assigned to gig workers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. But with the soaring interest in AI — and in the data used to train that AI — an entire industry has sprung up around tools for annotation and labeling. Dataloop, one of the many startups vying for a foothold in the nascent market, today announced that it raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) Capital and Alpha Wave Global. Dataloop develops software and services for automating aspects of data prep, aiming to shave time off of the AI system development process. “I worked at Intel for over 13 years, and that’s where I met Dataloop’s second co-founder and CPO, Avi Yashar,” Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Together with Avi, I left Intel and founded Dataloop. Nir [Buschi], our CBO, joined us as third co-founder, after he held executive positions [at] technology companies and [lead] business and go-to-market at venture-backed startups.” Dataloop initially focused on data annotation for computer vision and video analytics. But in recent years, the company has added new tools for text, audio, form and document data and allowed customers to integrate custom data applications developed in-house. One of the more recent additions to the Dataloop platform is data management dashboards for unstructured data. (As opposed to structured data, or data that’s arranged in a standardized format, unstructured data isn’t organized according to a common model or schema.) Each provides tools for data versioning and searching metadata, as well as a query language for querying datasets and visualizing data samples. Image Credits: Dataloop “All AI models are learned from humans through the data labeling process. The labeling process is essentially a knowledge encoding process in which a human teaches the machine the rules using positive and negative data examples,” Shlomo said. “Every AI application’s primary goal is to create the ‘data flywheel effect’ using its customer’s data: a better product leads to more users leads to more data and subsequently a better product.” Dataloop competes against heavyweights in the data annotation and labeling space, including Scale AI, which has raised over $600 million in venture capital. Labelbox is another major rival, having recently nabbed more than $110 million in a financing round led by SoftBank. Beyond the startup realm, tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Snowflake and Microsoft, offer their own data annotation services. Dataloop must be doing something right. Shlomo claims the company currently has “hundreds” of customers across retail, agriculture, robotics, autonomous vehicles and construction, although he declined to reveal revenue figures. An open question is whether Dataloop’s platform solves some of the major challenges that exist in data labeling today. Last year, a paper published out of MIT found that data labeling tends to be highly inconsistent, potentially harming the accuracy of AI systems. A growing body of academic research suggests that annotators introduce their own biases when labeling data — for example, labeling phrases in African American English (a modern dialect spoken primarily by Black Americans) as more toxic than the general American English equivalents. These biases often manifest in unfortunate ways; think moderation algorithms that are more likely to ban Black users than white users. Data labelers are also notoriously underpaid. The annotators who contributed captions to ImageNet, one of the better-known open source computer vision libraries, reportedly made a median of $2 per hour in wages. Shlomo says it’s incumbent on the companies using Dataloop’s tools to affect change — not necessarily Dataloop itself. “We see the underpayment of annotators as a market failure. Data annotation shares many qualities with software development, one of them being the impact of talent on productivity,” Shlomo said. “[As for bias,] bias in AI starts with the question that the AI developer chooses to ask and the instructions they supply to the labeling companies. We call it the ‘primary bias.’ For example, you could never identify color bias unless you ask for skin color in your labeling recipe. The primary bias issue is something the industry and regulators should address. Technology alone will not solve the issue.” To date, Dataloop, which has 60 employees, has raised $50 million in venture capital. The company plans to grow its workforce to 80 employees by the end of the year.

6 key metrics that can help SaaS startups outlast this downturn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Column, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Column, EC How To, Enterprise, enterprise saas, growth tactics, SaaS management, StartupsNo Comments

Sudheesh Nair Contributor Sudheesh Nair is CEO of ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence company that has built an intuitive Google-like interface for data analytics. Before ThoughtSpot, Sudheesh was president at Nutanix. More posts by this contributor A blueprint for building a great startup founding team With the economy slowing and businesses tightening their belts, the coming months will be make or break for many startups. Business is shifting from a “growth at all costs” mindset to one that is more measured. This means leaders need to know where to conserve cash, where to target spend effectively and which customers are at risk of churn so they can take proactive steps accordingly. SaaS companies are in a better position than most because they have access to the data that can guide these decisions. They inherently know not only that a customer bought a product, but who is using it, how they’re using it and how often. Management teams should pay close attention to this data for signs of changing customer behavior and watch their sales pipeline for clues about where to target spend and where to cut costs. At a high level, leaders need to understand — before it becomes obvious — if the slowdown this year is affecting demand at their company and where that’s happening. The goal is to pick up on warning signs early and course-correct as you go, and those signs are often hidden in the breadcrumbs. Do you know what your customers are thinking? Not all industries are affected equally, so don’t assume your customers will cut spending this year just because the headlines are bleak. When thinking about metrics for SaaS companies, it’s helpful to look at how current customers are using your product so you can identify areas of concern and take action. You should also read the tea leaves in your pipeline to understand where to cut back and where to invest. Every CFO is looking closely at contracts to evaluate areas for cost-cutting. Only those technologies offering real value will survive, so SaaS vendors need to get ahead of this. Traditional customer satisfaction metrics like NPS are a lagging indicator and will not help you respond quickly enough. Instead, look at the following areas to be more proactive: How much are customers using your product? You can measure usage trends with points of access, number of registered users, volume of queries or some other metric depending on your product. The point is, as a SaaS company, you should not have to guess who is using your product, when, why, how much and if that’s changing. Say you have a customer that logs in and uses your product 10 times a day, and that number hasn’t increased over the last year. It’s a sign they are not adding new use cases and creating new value.

Loop lassos ex-Uber talent and money to finally fix freight invoicing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Fintech, Founders Fund, logistics, Loop, payments, Startups, UberNo Comments

Matt McKinney was a data science manager at Uber, helping launch Uber Freight, along with software engineer Shaosu Liu. One of the main problems the pair saw there was that while they were able to grow the top line, they found it difficult to grow the bottom line because they were “losing a bunch of money” to bad debt and late payments. When digging in to understand why, the duo realized that “there’s so much complexity in a single freight bill.” For example, they found out that 20% of all freight invoices have an error. They also discovered it takes 50 days on average to process and pay a single invoice. “A lot of people in this business aren’t like Uber — they don’t have 250 engineers working on problems to figure this out,” McKinney explains. “So Joe’s Trucking in Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, probably has very similar billing and payment problems as Uber Freight.” In speaking to about three dozen shippers, carriers and brokers in the industry, McKinney and Liu kept hearing the same thing: “It’s hard for us to get paid and it’s hard for us to pay.” “So as an entrepreneur, when you hear that pain described so vividly verbatim 35 different times, you kind of, you know that the pain is your opportunity to build a product that doesn’t exist in the market,” he told ZebethMedia in an interview. So the pair spent nights and weekends building a prototype for Loop, a startup that sits at the intersection of logistics and payments, before leaving Uber in May of 2021 to focus full time on the business. Soon after, they raised a $6 million seed round co-led by Susa Ventures and 8VC. And then earlier this year, they raised a $24 million Series A round led by Founders Fund. Both financings were not previously publicly announced. During their exploratory phase, three of the 35 companies — unnamed large enterprises — they talked to told them if they built a tool to help solve the problem that they would help test out the prototype and be its first customers. Since then, the company has developed open APIs that it says “ingest data and streamline shipment document capture.” More specifically, the company said it uses natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision to digitize workflows and reconcile payments and that its technology “accommodates the lack of standardization and is able to extract data from a variety of document types and data sources to validate invoice accuracy, so that invoices and payments can be cleared in close to real-time,” or even to real time, depending on when the user wants to release their funds. Loop goes as far as to claim that its tech can reduce the lag time between the time an invoice is received and paid from 50 days to 3 days, as well as reduce invoice errors to “near 0%.” The startup’s target customers are shippers that manufacture or distribute goods (think Walmart, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nike). They also can work with brokers, or 3PLs, who broker a transaction between a truck driver and shipper. Loop launched its product offering in March and in its first month, did $25 million in booked total payment volume. Today, it’s doing over $1 billion in total payment volume. Image Credits: Loop One of the tailwinds that helped Loop, believes McKinney, is the COVID pandemic-driven secular shift of paper to electronic methods of payments. Also, geopolitical issues and the pandemic exposing vulnerabilities in the global supply chain have led to a surge in freight costs, which means that shippers “are looking for every way to cut costs,” he said. Loop’s aim is to help these companies minimize cost and be more efficient. And, McKinney claims, it can bring payments down Loop makes money by taking a percentage of total payments volume. It’s a fixed percentage based on tier, and as a company advances tiers, the percentage they pay goes down. A consumption-based revenue model was important to the pair, McKinney told ZebethMedia. “We want to align incentives so that if you’re getting value out of the product, you’re going to be using it more,” he said. “And that’s how we should get paid.” The company today has 35 employees, with engineers hailing from Uber, Google, Meta and Flexport. In fact, one senior software engineer from Flexport cold emailed Loop about a job. When he told Flexport founder and then-CEO Ryan Peterson that he was leaving for Loop, Peterson reached out. “He said, ‘You just stole one of our No. 1 engineers,’” McKinney said. “I want to know what you’re doing and I want to invest.” And so he did. Also showing no hard feelings in backing the company are Uber co-founders Garrett Camp, through his venture firm, Expa, and Ryan Graves, through his family office, Saltwater Capital. And more than 10 of Loop’s 35 employees came from Uber. Other investors include FourMore Capital, Lineage Ventures, Nichole Wischoff, 9Yards Capital, McVest Co, Mark Pincus and OEL Ventures. “We’re simplifying logistics payments but we’re also generating data and that data, and the quality of the data, is what differentiates us from a lot of the competition as well,” McKinney said. Founders Fund principal John Luttig, who led the Loop investment, told ZebethMedia via email that his firm was drawn to the startup because it is using a tech-first approach to eliminate friction for all parties in the supply chain “while competitors are simply throwing more people at the problem.” “As the domestic logistics renaissance continues and more companies look to reshore U.S. manufacturing, Loop’s technology will only become more valuable,” he added.

Dropit picks up $25M to digitize brick-and-mortar stores and unify inventories • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Commerce, dropit, eCommerce, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in 2014, London-based Dropit counts retail brands including L’Occitane, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Estee Lauder as customers, in addition to shopping malls. At its core, Dropit is all about enabling brands to sell their in-store inventory online, essentially converting brick-and-mortar outlets into something akin to a local distribution hub — customers buy their goods digitally, with Dropit’s “smart sourcing” technology finding the nearest physical location to the customer that the goods are located, and dispatching accordingly. So even if a brand or outlet already has online inventory for specific goods, Dropit brings their offline inventory into the mix and joins all the dots to expedite delivery and minimize the impact of shipping goods from further afield. On top of that, a major selling point for retailers in shopping malls is that Dropit can also aggregate a mall’s entire brand network into a single online marketplace. This is particularly important at a time when shopping mall foot traffic has yet to fully rebound post-pandemic, as it means the mall stores can generate sales round-the-clock regardless of in-person visits, while also allowing customers to purchase from multiple outlets simultaneously. Dropit: Aggregating shopping mall stores into a single marketplace Integrated At the heart of Dropit’s platform are integrations — it can connect to any point in the sales or fulfilment chain, which is one of the reasons Dropit founder and CEO Karin Cabili says that it’s not in direct competition with any other in-house or external retail system, whether it’s Shopify or some other ecommerce platform. “Dropit has set out to solve a macro problem created by the retail industry’s duplication of inventory and lack of ability to combine local store presence with last-mile delivery,” Cabili told ZebethMedia. “One of our key strengths is unifying data and systems. In this effort, we have built integrations with many systems, including Shopify, which has done a fantastic job in the realm of ecommerce, creating a user-friendly platform that is recommended for SMBs.” Through integrations with multiple third-party couriers, Dropit allows brands and malls to offer same-day or next-day shipping spanning in-store and online transactions, though curbside pickup is offered too. It also allows merchants to consolidate their deliveries and pickups to minimize split shipments. “Dropit’s mission is to solve a core problem of efficient optimization for the retail industry, while taking care not to harm the level of service provided to the customer,” Cabili added. The Dropit platform showing courier options By way of example, a retailer wanting to use Dropit as part of its existing tech stack could deploy Dropit in between the order, warehouse, point-of-sale (POS), and ecommerce (e.g. Shopify) systems on one side, and the checkouts, payments, and couriers on the other. The retailer can decide for themselves what value they want to extract from Dropit, for example they may simply want fulfilment and capacity for pick-and-pack at a store, and curbside pickup or courier delivery. “Dropit connects to existing systems to fill gaps without the need to invest any additional capital or technological resources,” Cabilit explained. It’s worth noting that in addition to powering the backend for retailers and malls, Dropit also offers a consumer-facing mobile app for shoppers that like to shop in person, but don’t want to carry bags around with them. So they basically search for participating stores through the app, shop as normal, but when they get to the (physical) checkout, they scan a little Dropit QR code at the outlet and select where they want their bags delivered to. Dropit’s consumer app Expansion Since its launch six years ago, Dropit has been gaining steady traction across Europe and North America. And last year it was enlisted by Primaris in Canada to power Primarché, touted as the “world’s first first multi-mall, multi-brand marketplace” — essentially, it brings Primaris’ national mall network into a single online entity. This separates Dropit from something like Mall of America (MOA) in Bloomington, Minnesota, which has created a similar online marketplace but for stores in a single mall. Dropit had previously raised $25 million across two hitherto undisclosed rounds of funding in 2016 and 2018, and with a fresh $25 million in the bank, the company is well-financed to expand in its existing markets with plans to grow specifically in the U.S. where it already has an office in Austin, Texas. Dropit’s Series C round was led by Vault Investments, with participation from Tiga Investments, Axentia, Sugarbee, and others including former Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren, who sits on Dropit’s board of directors.

500 Global, GIZ establish bootcamp for accelerators in Africa to help them define sustainable business models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in 500 Global, StartupsNo Comments

Silicon-Valley based VC firm 500 Global and German’s economic development agency Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) will train managers of leading accelerators in Africa over the next two years, to help them establish sustainable business models that commandeer greater influence in their ecosystems. The program, dubbed Bootcamp for Accelerator Managers (BAM), will use project-based teaching and real-world scenarios informed by 500 Global’s work running over 80 accelerator programs across the globe, and GIZ’s Make-IT in Africa experience in igniting innovation on the continent. Fifteen accelerators from key tech hubs, including Uganda, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania will participate in the program. Accelerators provide all-round support to early-stage startups, including helping them find product-market fit, funding and access to investors. However, being startups too, accelerators also face failure due to a couple of challenges including liquidity issues. “500 Global is thrilled to be working alongside GIZ to ensure that African accelerators have the tools they need to support startups,” said 500 Global’s Africa Lead Mareme Dieng. The VC firm, previously an accelerator dubbed 500 startups, rebranded to 500 Global a year ago. “500 has been investing in companies in Africa for a decade and continues to be excited about the growth of the African tech ecosystem. We believe that the next phase of this evolution will be led by home-grown accelerators, like the ones joining BAM,” said Dieng. 500 Global said the participating accelerators were picked based on experience, length of existence, leadership positions in their markets and track record — some of their graduates must have raised follow-on capital. The first cohort will begin the program on November 14, with a five-day in-person training to be held in Kenya, followed by a year-long virtual program. “This program represents another cornerstone in Make-IT in Africa’s efforts to support African innovation on a local, pan-African and global scale,” said head of Make-IT in Africa, Matthias Rehfeld. “Together with our partner 500 Global, we use a hands-on approach to bring together African accelerators with seasoned coaches, while simultaneously building bridges between African and international networks. Beyond the scope of the program, African entrepreneurs and startups can benefit from the best practices applied by accelerators across the continent,” said Rehfeld.

Privilège Ventures launches $20M fund investing in women-led startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Privilège Ventures, Startups, Venture, venture capital, women foundersNo Comments

Lugano, Switzerland-based venture capital fund Privilège Ventures just launched its fourth fund. The CHF 20 million (just over $20 million) fund is earmarked for women-led early-stage startups across Europe. “We don’t just want to support women,” Jacqueline Ruedin Rüsch, founding general partner at Privilège Ventures said in an interview with ZebethMedia. “The data shows women in the driver’s seat produce better ROI.” The firm says that its investment thesis is based on the statistical evidence that women perform better than men in leadership roles. “The numbers are staggering. It’s not just about being ethical and doing good: global GDP would grow 6% if rates of entrepreneurship were equal between men and women,” said Lucian Wagner, Privilège Ventures founding general partner in a press statement. The firm’s thesis is backed up by research from Boston Consulting Group on investment and revenue data over a five-year period. The study also showed that startups founded and co-founded by women received less than half the average investments made into companies led by men, even though the female led startups generated 10% more revenue over time. “There are very few funds worldwide dedicated to backing female founders, and despite the rapid growth in the VC industry the percentage of female or gender-diverse-led teams is falling,” said Rüsch. “I started my professional life in the banking sector in Switzerland: this was, and partially still is, a very male-driven sector. I became used to being one of the few females in big conference rooms and I didn’t even pay any more attention to it. But when I got pregnant the first reaction from my senior colleagues was, ‘When will you stop working?’ This was quite shocking, I must admit.” As Alex reported back in July, PitchBook data suggests that the percentage of venture capital deals that included at least one woman founder fell from 19.4% to 18.2%. In Europe, the numbers are even more dire. Privilège suggests that in Europe, female founders receive barely 1% of total VC investments. Privilège Ventures’ LPs are mainly high net-worth individuals and family offices, the firm says, and the fund aims to write 15-20 early-stage checks, with initial investments in the $250,000 range. “I really like to invest in founders at the very beginning of their journey. Often we meet them even before they have incorporated their company and we track them, coach them and see how they take their first steps in the entrepreneurial journey. Given our focus in seed stage, we feel it is key to be as close as possible with our companies and for this reason we have a preference for our local market, Switzerland, and the surrounding European countries,” Rüsch explains. “We are not specialized in a specific sector but we have some preferences, namely in med\tech, deep tech and in general for the digital economy. We like to enter as soon as possible, even pre-seed, and are happy to continue investing in the best companies up to Series A.” The firm says it would love to see more companies trying to solve “real” problems — solutions that can save lives, preserve the planet and products that are not just “nice to have” but are “must-have.” “Our overall portfolio already counts over 30% of companies with a female co-founder. As we aim to invest only in top-performing teams, we need to guarantee a strong deal flow and for this reason, we will look not only to Switzerland but to Europe as well with a higher focus on certain countries such as Italy, France and Germany, being closer to us,” says Rüsch, explaining why investing specifically in women continues to make sense for the fund. “Some will point to the simple fact that having different viewpoints in the room leads to more thoughtful decision-making — some will point to women having battled through a lot of hassles to get where they are. We see firsthand that women are driven to tackle problems that have been overlooked in tech — but can have a profound impact on the world. We already have startups in our portfolio with female founders or leaders working on using neurotech to improve sleep, fungicides to improve food and biomarkers to continually measure proteins and hormones to prevent and monitor health conditions, just to name a few.”

Satellite startup Constellr wins backing to build out its water-monitoring platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Satellites, Space, StartupsNo Comments

We are living in the era of so-called microsatellites, which are equipped with thermal cameras and other regalia to, for instance, alert farmers before crops are damaged, predict droughts, and aid in the juggling of supply chains. Climate change is making less land available for agricultural food production, leading to strict regulations on the use of water and fertilizer. Wasted water now costs €220Bn a year, according to some estimates, and is expected to reach a staggering €2Tn by the end of the decade. To tackle this, the Germany-based Constellr satellite startup has now raised $10M in seed funding, co-led by Lakestar and VSquared, with participation from early and new supporters FTTF, IQT, Amathaon Capital, Natural Ventures, EIT Food, OHB Venture Capital, Next Humanity, and Seraphim. This space-based water monitoring system checks the Earth’s surface temperature and, soon, also it’s chemical composition. The platform will also look at water availability across the globe, daily. Constellr will use the cash to develop its first two satellites, which take measurements beyond the infrared wavelengths (8-14 microns) to calculate surface temperature and thus measure water distribution. The investment shows there is ongoing investment in space infrastructure coming out of Germany. Lakestar and Vsquared are also investors in space startup Isar Aerospace, showing that Europe is keeping pace with geographies like the US and China in an era when space sovereignty is more important than ever.

Fintecture wants to replace paper checks or manual transfers for B2B payments • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Fintech, Open Banking, payment, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Fintecture, a French startup that wants to upgrade B2B payments. While many payment companies have focused on B2C payments with Stripe leading the way, B2B payments haven’t changed much over the years. “In the U.S., there are still a lot of paper checks. In Europe, it’s mostly transfers and manual reconciliation,” Fintecture co-founder and CEO Faysal Oudmine told me. But this underinvestment in the B2B market is weird as those transactions represent a much larger volume than B2C transactions. That’s because the average B2B transaction is much larger — we are talking about tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. In order to provide a product that works better, Fintecture is approaching the market in different ways. There’s no single solution that is going to work for all companies. With its first payment method, Fintecture relies on open banking. The company has signed partnerships with big corporate clients, such as Edenred or Bricoman, so that these companies’ own clients pay them using Fintecture. When they click on a Fintecture link (or scan a QR code in store), they can then connect to their bank account and confirm the transaction from there. The first transaction requires a bit of onboarding, but it’s already easier with the second transaction. 200,000 companies have interacted Fintecture at some point to pay for products or services. They either initiate an instant payment or a normal transfer with an instant confirmation. Fintecture guarantees that the money will arrive on the big company’s bank account eventually. Fintecture created a second method so that customers can pay from their banking interface. Essentially, the startup generates virtual IBANs so that it can automatically reconcile incoming payments. “The payer receives a tracking link that works like a DHL link so that they know what’s the status of their money in the payment flow,” Oudmine said. Fintecture’s third product is a way to let your customers pay in multiple installments. Fintecture takes care of fraud and payment processing so that you don’t have to use a BNPL provider. Instead, companies can unlock a credit line with their banker directly knowing that the money will arrive eventually. It’s usually much cheaper than borrowing money from a BNPL company. Finally, Fintecture can also handles refunds. “Here we have a solution that automates part of the reimbursements with integrated KYC and AML features as well as instant payments,” Oudmine said. Fintecture asks companies to connect to their bank accounts to check their identity directly. Overall, 7,000 businesses collect payments using Fintecture. Around a thousand of them use the product directly while the rest relies on integrations in Pennylane, Libeo, Regate and other fintech products. Fintecture raised a $26 million Series A funding round (€26 million) this year. Investors include Target Global, Eurazeo, RTP Global, Samaipata, Allianz Trade, Société Générale and various business angels. There are currently 80 people working for the startup — and the company plans to hire another 40 employees.

Bump builds a central hub for all your APIs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in api, bump, Bump.sh, dev tool, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Bump, a French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs across your organization. The company automatically generates documentation for your APIs so that other teams always know how to use certain APIs. Over time, Bump becomes the central repository for all things related to your APIs. It acts as a single source of truth with information that remains up to date and changelogs so that you can see what’s new. This summer, the company raised a $4 million funding round (€4 million) led by Galion.exe and Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund. Business angels also participated in the round. An API is an application programming interface. Developers use APIs so that two different services or applications can interact with each other. Companies also use APIs for their own internal use cases. By relying on APIs, different teams can work on different parts of the same application. All they have to do is make sure that they are using APIs properly to push changes or fetch information from a different area of the product. And that’s where Bump is particularly useful. APIs break all the time. Development teams change some parameters, add attributes, improve a feature or send a different result than the one expected. “There are even team members that are less technical that use APIs,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Charrier told me. “Product, developer relationship or marketing people need to know what’s happening.” That’s why Bump has built a documentation generator for APIs. It works with both RESTful and message-driven APIs, which makes it stand out from other solutions that tend to focus on RESTful APIs. You can integrate it in your workflow in many different ways. For instance, you can trigger Bump using a GitHub action, use Bump’s command-line interface in a script, or interact with Bump using Bump’s own API — yes, it’s an API for APIs. The idea is that everyone in the company can start using Bump, even if some teams do things differently. Once all the APIs are documented on Bump, whenever there’s a change, Bump can send notifications and highlight changes compared to the previous version. The result is that Bump becomes the API portal for the entire company. When someone joins the company, they can easily see the logic behind some components just by browsing Bump’s hub. When I talked with Sébastien Charrier, he compared Bump’s approach to GitHub. You can always export your documentation and leave the platform, but the nice thing about Bump is that you can see all the diffs. Up next, the startup wants to turn its product into a collaboration platform. And that’s what’s going to improve the product’s stickiness. So far, 250 companies are actively using the product, such as Meilisearch, Memo Bank, Canopy Servicing and Forto. The startup plans to hire 20 people in the coming months.

Meet Seoul-based accelerator SparkLabs’ 19th batch of startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Apps, demo day, early-stage startups, Seoul, SparkLabs Korea, Startup Accelerator, Startups, VentureNo Comments

SparkLabs Korea, a Seoul-based seed to early-stage accelerator, held a demo Day on Thursday for its 19th cohort of companies. The latest demo day marks its tenth year after SparkLabs launched its accelerator program in December 2012. The accelerator has backed more than 270 startups since its inception in 2012, co-founder and partner of SparkLabs Eugene Kim told ZebethMedia. The program has two cohorts a year — one starting in January and the other in June — Kim said, adding that the program is 16 weeks long. SparkLabs admits 10 to 15 companies per cohort and invests up to $100,000 into each startup in exchange for 6% equity. Kim noted that the investment is made either with a SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) or stock purchase agreement — a decision that is up to the startup to make. During its program, SparkLabs provides funding, mentorship and access to administrative and legal advisory support for startups. In addition, participating startups get co-working space, will attend weekly classes and have access to four to six mentors who have expertise in various industries, not just in South Korea but global regions. SparkLabs, a member of the global accelerator network (GAN), has been using international best practices for accelerators from the beginning, Kim said. He added that its partners and mentors are all former entrepreneurs and have global business experience in both the U.S. and Asia. The accelerator also operates other government-supported programs like TIPS, a tech incubator program for startups in South Korea, and manages later-stage investment funds, Kim noted. SparkLabs began in Korea to find and help local Korean startups in their seed stage and help them go global. Though the majority are based in Korea, the accelerator gets applicants from other countries looking or planning to enter Korea or Asia, according to Kim. When asked if SparkLabs Korea is a subsidiary of SparkLabs Group, Kim said it’s not a group structure. Each accelerator entity, such as SparkLabs Korea, SparkLabs Taiwan and SparkLabs Cultiv8, is a separate entity with its own accelerator fund. Kim said in an interview with ZebethMedia that as the program focuses on early-stage seed startups, some teams pivot or change their business focus as they try to find product market fit (PMF). “Not all teams end up pitching at demo day. If the teams feel they want to focus on building their traction or PMF, they can choose to pitch at a later demo day,” Kim said. Here’s the list of nine companies in the most recent cohort at SparkLabs. The 19th cohort ends with a demo day on November 3. Vetflux: A telehealth veterinary platform that provides an artificial intelligence-based chatbot for vet clinics and pet owners. It offers two apps connecting vets with their pet patients. The Vetflux app is for pet owners to get the latest information about pet care, while the other, called Vetflux +, is for vets to organize workflows. Amondycare: Amondycare’s app lets mental health therapists manage their workflows and administrative work from patient appointments to sales. YKring: A social app, Kevin’s Club, helps college students make the most of their college life outside the library or dorms. YKring says it enables users to find out what’s going on in the community to find clubs or a group of people with similar interests to do activities together. YKring, which launched its service in January, claims that it has more than 2,500 users with $35,000 in sales as of October 2022. Its monthly subscription fee is ~$20. DataBean: This startup develops a cooling system for data centers. Its service SmartBox allows for thermal management. Fasket: Fasket is a quick commerce startup that operates an instant grocery delivery business in South Korea. Gyverse: Gyverse develops a fridge for dry-aged meat using IoT and AI. Users can dry age beef at home by interconnecting Gyverse’s smart devices to its app to monitor the temperature and humidity. Moverse: A 3D motion marketplace that allows users to access and buy 3D motion data sources for the use of metaverse, games, movies, animation and augmented reality. R-Materials: R-Material’s platform, called the Hybrid-generator system, enables solar and wind to convert power sources. MyShop Cloud: An online to offline (O2O) platform that wants to digitize the value chain of dried fish, from wholesale to the retail market. Its service Dasiwoorida, which analyzes the dried fish price and transactions, recommends products for customers. SparkLabs is currently open to applications for its 20th batch program until November 11. The accelerator will finalize its selections in December and looks to start the 20th batch in January. South Korea, which attracts the third largest amount of venture capital funding in Asia — about $6.45 billion annually — following China and India, currently has 16 unicorns to date.