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Metrist raises $5.5M to provide better cloud service outage data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Enterprise, funding, honeycomb, monitoring, New Relic, observability, outages, StartupsNo Comments on Metrist raises $5.5M to provide better cloud service outage data • ZebethMedia

Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams stay on top of outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million seed round from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures, as well as PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon and StatusPage co-founders Scott and Steve Klein. The overall idea behind Metrist is pretty straightforward, but there are surprisingly few companies doing this. While products like Twitter or StatusPage (which is now owned by Atlassian) allow companies to easily communicate issues with their services to their users, they don’t always reflect every problem and service degradation — something that then comes into play when it’s time to review an SLA agreement or a contract comes up for renewal and the two parties have vastly different perceptions of a product’s reliability. And while application performance monitoring and observability tools like New Relic or Honeycomb can give you some of this data, it’s not their core use case as these services tend to be inward facing. Image Credits: Metrist “Apps are built on top of other apps today,” Metrist co-founder and CEO Jeff Martens told me. “That means if one of them goes down or gets degraded or has some kind of an issue, your app and your business can potentially have the same fate. But current observability tools don’t do anything special for those external dependencies — they still continue to focus inward. You can find out things about your external dependencies — it’s not that you can’t know — but the challenge really becomes verifying so you can take action, but then also hold your vendors accountable.” More than anything else, Metrist wants to become the trusted neutral player that buyers and vendors can refer to when they discuss outages. The service will be a success, Martens said, when Metrists is written into a contract as the third-party independent validator of an SLA. “Too many of the incidents posted to StatusPage simply reference upstream or third-party providers,” said StatusPage co-founder Steve Klein. “It’s exciting that Metrist is going after the root of the problem, creating visibility where before there was none.” Metrist team On the technical side, Metrist uses either an agent or eBPF to gather data about the services a company runs, but it also constantly checks for downtime and service degradations from 21 different cloud regions across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Out of the box, Metrist covers more than 100 services, but customers can also host their own tests or use in-app tests. The team noted that these tests also go well beyond simply checking for a correct HTTP response code. “It’s not just like pinging an API and saying, ‘does this URL return to 200 or 202?’ Say you’re hitting an endpoint and it’s supposed to create a thing in that platform — we actually will call the retrieval API later to see how long it took to create that thing,” Metrist co-founder and CTO Ryan Duffield explained. Customers also get a lot of flexibility when and how they get alerted of an issue. For some, a two-percent increase in latency may be unacceptable, while for others, that’s no issue, for example. Alerts can go to Slack, email Datadog or PagerDuty (and users can create their own alerting systems using webhooks, too). Image Credits: Metrist While Metrist is only announcing its funding today, it’s worth noting that the team actually raised this amount over two different raises, including a pre-seed before the product even existed. Both happened proactively, Martens explained, without the team actually going out to raise. This happened just before the economy and the funding environment changed. “Modern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn’t changed. You wouldn’t dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” Heavybit general partner Joseph Ruscio explained. “Metrist enables teams to proactively know when an external service is down, with the goal of avoiding or mitigating incidents stemming from dependencies. Metrist’s approach to third-party observability ensures teams know authoritatively when SLAs are not met.” Metrist offers a free plan that allows you to monitor up to three services with one day of data retention. Paid plans start at $99/month for seven services and seven days of data retention.

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MLOps platform Galileo lands $18M to launch a free service • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, machine learning, MLops, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments on MLOps platform Galileo lands $18M to launch a free service • ZebethMedia

Galileo, a startup launching a platform for AI model development, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures with participation from The Factory, Walden Catalyst, FPV Ventures, Kaggle co-founder Anthony Goldbloom and other angel investors. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $23.1 million and will be put toward growing Galileo’s engineering and go-to-market teams and expanding the core platform to support new data modalities, CEO Vikram Chatterji told ZebethMedia via email. As the use of AI becomes more common throughout the enterprise, the demand for products that make it easier to inspect, discover and fix critical AI errors is increasing. According to one recent survey (from MLOps Community), 84.3% of data scientists and machine learning engineers say that the time required to detect and diagnose problems with a model is a problem for their teams, while over one in four (26.2%) admit that it takes them a week or more to detect and fix issues. Some of those issues include mislabeled data, where the labels used to train an AI system contain errors, like a picture of a tree mistakenly labeled “houseplant.” Others pertain to data drift or data imbalance, which happens when data evolves to make an AI system less accurate (think a stock market model trained on pre-pandemic data) or the data isn’t sufficiently representative of a domain (e.g., a data set of headshots has more light-skinned people than dark-skinned). Galileo’s platform aims to systematize AI development pipelines across teams using “auto-loggers” and algorithms that spotlight system-breaking issues. Built to be deployable in an on-premises environment, Galileo scales across the AI workflow — from predevelopment to postproduction — as well as unstructured data modalities like text, speech and vision. In data science, “unstructured” data usually refers to data that’s not arranged according to a preset data model or schema, like invoices or sensor data. Atindriyo Sanyal — Galileo’s second co-founder — makes the case that the Excel- and Python script–based processes to ensure quality data is being fed into models are manual, error-prone and costly. A screenshot of the Galileo Community Edition. Image Credits: Galileo “When inspecting their data with Galileo, users instantly uncover the long tail of data errors such as mislabeled data, underrepresented languages [and] garbage data that they can immediately take action upon within Galileo by removing, re-labeling or by adding additional similar data from production,” Sanyal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “It has been critical for teams that Galileo supports machine learning data workflows end to end — even when a model is in production, Galileo automatically lets teams know of data drifts, and surfaces the highest-value data to train with next.” The co-founding team at Galileo spent more than a decade building machine learning products, where they say they faced the challenges of developing AI systems firsthand. Chatterji led product management at Google AI, while Sanyal spearheaded engineering at Uber’s AI division and was an early member of the Siri team at Apple. Third Galileo co-founder Yash Sheth is another Google veteran, having previously led the company’s speech recognition platform team. Galileo’s platform falls into the burgeoning category of software known as MLOps, a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production. It’s in serious demand. By one estimation, the market for MLOps could reach $4 billion by 2025. There’s no shortage of startups going after the space, like Comet, which raised $50 million last November. Other vendors with VC backing include Arize, Tecton, Diveplane, Iterative and Taiwan-based InfuseAI. But despite having launched just a few months ago, Galileo has paying customers from “high-growth” startups to Fortune 500 companies, Sanyal claims. “Our customers are using Galileo while building machine learning applications such as hate speech detection, caller intent detection at contact centers and customer experience augmentation with conversational AI,” he added. Sanyal expects the launch of Galileo’s free offering — Galileo Community Edition — will boost sign-ups further. The Community Edition enables data scientists working on natural language processing to build machine learning models using some of the tools included in the paid version, Sanyal said. “With Galileo Community Edition, anyone can sign up for free, add a few lines of code while training their model with labeled data or during an inference run with unlabeled data to instantly inspect, find and fix data errors, or select the right data to label next using the powerful Galileo UI,” he added. Sanyal declined to share revenue figures when asked. But he noted that San Francisco–based Galileo’s headcount has grown in size from 14 people in May to “more than” 20 people as of today.

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How Metafy founder Josh Fabian caught the attention of 776 by building in public • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in ec gaming, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Gaming, Katelin Holloway, metafy, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments on How Metafy founder Josh Fabian caught the attention of 776 by building in public • ZebethMedia

In over a decade of investing in startups, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has only once offered to fund a founder on the spot. That founder was Josh Fabian, CEO of Metafy, a video game coaching platform. “We were able to just engage and talk like humans, and Josh told us his story in a very different way,” said Katelin Holloway, a founding partner at 776, where Ohanian is general partner. “Not only was it incredibly compelling from a business perspective, it was incredibly compelling from a human perspective.” As Fabian explained at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Metafy has a pretty fun founding story. Once a competitive Yu-Gi-Oh player in his childhood, Fabian was working as a lead designer at Groupon when he became obsessed with mobile gaming. “I would spend my bathroom breaks very productively playing a game called Clash Royale,” Fabian said. He eventually became one of the top 20 players in the world and streamed for up to 4,000 viewers on a daily basis, but he wasn’t making much money — that is, until fans started asking him to pay him for private coaching. In just six months, he made $40,000. When Fabian’s children wanted to get better at the Pokémon Trading Card game, he hired one of the best players in the world. “He offered to teach them for $20-an-hour, which is less than what we pay our babysitter,” Fabian remembered. He said he asked the player if he did Pokémon full-time, but the player said he worked a minimum wage job at a warehouse. That got Fabian thinking about building a business to let people in similar situations make a living off their gaming expertise. This past February, Metafy raised a $25 million Series A round, co-led by 776 and Tiger Global. Building in public

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Retirable secures $6M to plan retirement for those without millions in savings • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Fintech, retirement planning, Startups, VentureNo Comments on Retirable secures $6M to plan retirement for those without millions in savings • ZebethMedia

Retirement plans are usually made by people who feel they can actually quit their jobs at a certain age and have enough money to maintain their lifestyle. But what about those who don’t? Several fintech startups are tackling this problem, including Retirable, which believes that retirement planning should be just as easy to get even if you won’t ever have millions of dollars set aside. The New York-based startup describes itself as a “first-of-its-kind holistic” approach to retirement planning. Building off of a 2019 study by TransAmerica Center that found only one in five workers has a written retirement strategy, the company provides similar offerings to other retirement planning companies: a dedicated advisor and products and services for investing, planning and spending. But that’s where co-founder and CEO Tyler End says the similarities end: not only is it focused on lower net-worth individuals, but it also went all in on retirement “decumulation.” It does this by allocating an individual’s assets into three buckets: cash, stability and growth. The client can see what their income is in real time and how much is safe to spend each month. It also applies this same logic to investments and is working on a debit card that gives cash back into savings. The company offers a free consultation to Americans aged 50 years and older and prices its service at 0.75% on the first $500,000 of managed assets, and nothing after that. End said that translates into roughly 63 cents for every $1,000 managed, which is lower than comparable advisory services. Retirable’s asset allocation dashboard. Image Credits: Retirable “Big players might offer call centers to have somebody help you with your account, but we’re the only ones giving you a dedicated advisor that you can trust that will work with you on your plan that is fiduciary, meaning no commissions,” End told ZebethMedia. “You see a lot of people start with a mission similar to ours of helping everyone, but when people are incentivized to sell, they generally drift in the direction of higher net worth.” End founded the company in 2019 with Ian Yamey and Brian Ramirez, and together with their 15 employees, Retirable built proprietary technology that has designed more than 50,000 retirement plans. A month ago, the company launched its investment management and paycheck products and has started matching its customers with planners. Retirable also grew its revenue by over 25% month over month. Today, the company announced $6 million in additional venture-backed seed funding to give the company $10.7 million in total investment to date. The round was led by Primary and included Vestigo Ventures, Diagram, Portage and Primetime. End said the new funding will be used to accelerate the development of the debit card, continue to grow the advisor team and add new distribution channels, for example, working with Medicare agents, tax planners and estate planners. “One of the interesting things about this demographic is that some people spend way too much way too early,” he added. “When you’re really active in retirement, spending fluctuates as you age. What this debit card does is give both the consumer and the advisor insight into spending amounts and where the money is being spent. Then from that, we can offer discounts on top of savings. It’s a first-of-its-kind of product.”

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Rewind wants to revamp how you remember, with millions from a16z • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, Dan Siroker, Optimizely, rewind, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments on Rewind wants to revamp how you remember, with millions from a16z • ZebethMedia

While there have been quite a few attempts to disrupt search engines, Rewind may be the first I’ve ever seen try to revamp the way we search through our online lives. One app at a time. Built by Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, Rewind wants to help people with their memory. The startup, launching today, uses nifty tech to record how someone scrolls and chats through their day. It creates a searchable recording of what happened when, who said what during that Zoom meeting and every instance someone has ever brought up expense reporting hacks. “The content of discussions, debates and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over,” Siroker said. “With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again….you can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said, a word that appeared on your screen.” Siroker compares the app to a hearing aid, which he says changed his life after he started to go deaf in his 20s. “To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower,” Siroker said. After leaving Optimizely in October 2020, he began looking for different ways to augment human capability. According to LinkedIn, he started a foundation in 2018 to “fund and conduct scientific research in order to accelerate our path toward human mind emulation.” In product form, this goal looks like Rewind. Siroker said that the startup “uses APIs to determine the specific app that is in focus at any given time,” and then creates a timeline of that behavior. It also uses an API to allow deep linking to websites, so people can open in chrome directly from search results. Users don’t need to integrate with Gmail, Dropbox or Slack, but instead just can download and “rewind” to start capturing the apps. Put in practice, if, for example, you forget the URL of the landing page of a new rival app that someone mentioned during a developer stand-up, you can rewind – haha – through your day, find the moment in the meeting someone threw the link on the screen, copy the link and paste. As for the “why now” question, Siroker had an immediate answer: “Apple Silicon (i.e. M1 and M2 chips). Without it, we couldn’t do what we do. We leverage every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) to do everything locally on your machine.” Rewind claims that it compresses raw video recording data up to 3,750x times without a loss of quality; “that means even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of continuous recordings,” the company said in a statement provided to ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement. (Apple is not an investor). Rewind addresses one of the biggest challenges with any app – user trust – head on. The recordings are stored locally on individuals’ Mac computers. In theory, that means that the company doesn’t touch the data. Rewind says that only users have access to their data. Siroker added that users can pause and delete recordings at any time, excluding specific apps like Signal or 1Password or go Incognito mode, saying that “by default, we don’t record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows). Image Credits: Rewind There are still some risks with storing a sensitive, all-encompassing repository of everything you’ve seen, said or heard on a machine. Malware could potentially tap into sensitive data if your computer is compromised, for example. There’s also the awkward dance of a Rewind user recording someone on their screen without their permission; which is illegal in some states. Siroker said that he recommends users ask those they are recording for verbal permission, emphasizing that only the user can have access to the recordings. Still, a user with Rewind may feel less inclined to complain about their corporate parents or share personal stories knowing that there is a recording of it somewhere (delete button doesn’t retroactively work, unfortunately). “While the laws differ from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend users of our product hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than the bare legal minimum, ” Siroker said, speaking about proactive recording consent. “Not only is this the safest approach legally, but it is also just the right thing to do.” As for how this makes people better at remembering instead of just better at not losing track of random things throughout their workday, the jury is still out. If you look through your day, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll remember things more, it may just mean you have more stored memories at your fingertips. Which I guess is a memory aid, but definitely one that requires you to be sitting down at your computer. “The long-term vision is giving humans perfect memory, the product today is all about search,” Siroker said. “That’s where we can have the biggest impact. If you think about it, if we all already had perfect memory we wouldn’t need to search our emails, texts, dcos etc to find things we’ve seen before. We would just remember them.” So far, the company has raised $10 million at a $75 million valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from First Round Capital and others. The app is currently free, Siroker says, but there will be a freemium monthly subscription down the road. And, despite his history in helping companies better market advertising campaigns, Siroker says that Rewind “will never sell your data or do advertising.”

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Qwick raises VC money to match gig workers with hospitality jobs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, gig work, hospitality, labor, startup, StartupsNo Comments on Qwick raises VC money to match gig workers with hospitality jobs • ZebethMedia

Leisure and hospitality workers are quitting at the highest rates of any industry. About 1 million left the workforce in November 2021 alone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why? Seasonality, low pay and monotonous work are among the reasons for the hospitality industry’s churn rate, as well as a perceived lack of career advancement. So what are hospitality businesses to do? Perhaps turn to services like Qwick, a startup that matches workers with hospitality gig contracts. Qwick today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series B financing round led by Tritium Partners, with participation by current investors Album VC, Kickstart, Desert Angels and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Jamie Baxter co-founded Qwick in 2017 with Chris Loeffler. Baxter was previously the segment tech director of risk and financial services at Willis Towers Watson, where he oversaw product and software development. With Qwick, Baxter sought to build a platform that connects service industry workers with food and beverage shifts in real time. Qwick uses a matching algorithm that takes into account factors like distance, the availability of “VIP” workers and supply to fill gigs for hospitality businesses, including stadiums, senior living facilities and corporate catering. “The hospitality industry has been plagued with reputations of low retention rates, low wages and poor management and working conditions for decades,” Baxter told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Qwick aims to combat the issues of working in the industry and reshape what it means to work in hospitality by creating value for its professionals and offering them a livable wage.” To sign up for Qwick, workers have to complete a profile and watch a five-minute virtual orientation. Once they’re vetted, they receive notifications for open shifts. “Qwick requires incoming professionals to go through an orientation including a one-to-one interview,” Baxter said. “Before being granted access to the platform, all Qwick professionals have been certified and vetted for experience, professionalism and commitment to service.” Baxter also says that Qwick utilizes a two-way, five-star rating system to “ensure continued quality and reliability between professionals and businesses,” although it bears noting that similar ratings systems on gig marketplaces have been found to exacerbate biases against minority workers, Booking gigs through Qwick’s mobile app. Image Credits: Qwick Qwick is akin to startups like Stint, Flexy, Indeed Flex, Gig, Limber and Baristas on Tap, which provide short-term workers to businesses across a number of industries. Advocates for the platforms say that they’re making hospitality into a more financially viable profession by increasing job flexibility. But a recent Eater piece found that some workers on hospitality gig startups take home around the local minimum wage and might be forced to make lengthy unpaid commutes. Critics allege that the platforms could leave businesses with less budget for recruitment and training, encouraging them to replace full-time positions with temporary work. Some hospitality employers have signaled they’re willing to embrace temp workers potentially at the expense of salaried employees. In 2017 and 2018, Marriott and Hilton joined with Airbnb and the TechNet coalition (which includes Uber, Lyft and Taskrabbit) to lobby for a federal bill that would classify anyone who finds work through an online platform as an independent contractor. Baxter pushes back against the notion that Qwick is a force for ill, arguing it provides workers with the “freedom” to work on their schedules. “Thousands of business partners across the U.S. rely on Qwick to end understaffing … [We] only partner with reputable businesses known to treat their staff well, and give professionals the agency to work where and when they want,” Baxter said. “Hundreds of thousands of industry professionals have downloaded our app and signed up to work shifts through Qwick.” Qwick workers are paid an average of $9 above minimum wage in the cities where they work, Baxter added. He also noted that Qwick allows businesses to hire gig workers for traditional off-platform employment at no extra cost, unlike some gig work platforms that impose recruitment and hiring fees. In any case, the demand for Qwick’s service seems very robust on the employer side. After a rough patch during the pandemic — Qwick was forced to lay off 70% of the team, and Baxter stopped taking a salary — business has more than recovered, with revenue having grown an astounding 10,000% over the past three years, according to Baxter. And for better or worse, the gig economy shows no signs of contracting. The Pew Research Center reports that 16% of Americans have completed a job via an online gig platform. And Mastercard predicts that the number of global gig workers will rise to 78 million in 2023, up from 43 million in 2018. Qwick is actively working with over 7,000 businesses across 23 metro areas, and the platform has facilitated over 500,000 shifts so far, Baxter added. Qwick’s investors, for one, appear to be confident in Qwick’s long-term trajectory, whether or not it results in the best outcome for workers. In an emailed statement, Tritium Partners managing partner David Lack said: “Qwick’s impressive growth and history achieving success through its innovative hospitality solution, even through an especially challenging few years for the industry, indicate that the company has truly changed the way people work.” To date, Arizona-based Qwick has raised $69.1 million in capital. The company has a staff of just over 270, which Baxter says will expand to around 300 before the end of the year.

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Digital card and gifting platform Givingli nabs $10M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, Commerce, funding, gifting, Givingli, StartupsNo Comments on Digital card and gifting platform Givingli nabs $10M • ZebethMedia

Three years ago, Ben and Nicole Green were planning their wedding and decided to go digital with registries to save on money and materials. But when it came time to gift others, while they preferred going the digital route — as they did with their wedding — they found that digital gifting platforms on the web didn’t meet their criterion. “We noticed there was no platform we would actually want to use,” Nicole Green told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “In combination, I recognized there was a gap in the market for a more genuine and authentic way for people to connect and celebrate one another in the digital age.” So in 2019, Ben and Nicole co-founded Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone. The company today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Seven Seven Six, the VC firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with participation from Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. The proceeds bring the 13-person, Los Angeles–based company’s total raised to $13 million. “We’re doubling down on Givingli because they’ve continued to not just organically grow, but thrive — even during these uncertain times — by productizing kindness & connection,” Ohanian told ZebethMedia via email. “This is as much a social network as it is a gifting platform and it’s been valuable for all sides: artists who design the gifts, brands who are partners, and ultimately the gift givers and receivers who keep coming back and spreading the word.” Image Credits: Givingli Indeed, Nicole sees Givingli as more than your average digital gift marketplace. The service offers messaging features, including group chats with family and friends, who can react with tokens of appreciation to e-cards and e-gifts. Users get reminders for friends’ and families’ birthdays. And for cards, which can be shared via email, text or social media, customers can choose from designs contributed by independent artists and brand partners such as Starbucks, Nike and Target — and add their own photos or videos in addition to writing text. In 2020, Givingli launched a partnership with Snap that brought its gifting service inside of Snapchat via an in-app integration. The company’s current focus is a desktop app, launching soon in early access, which Nicole says will “bring even more features for power gifters.” (Givingli was previously iOS only.) “People are looking for more accessible and practical options to stay connected and celebrate a special relationship in their lives. They’re looking to share love and words of compassion from a distance,” Nicole said. “Givingli is focused on the heart and sentiment of gifting, while sparing our customers from losing time on travel, waste and stress.” Will platforms like Givingli ever replace physical gifting? That seems unlikely (see American Greetings). But there are signs that the demand for digital gifting solutions is growing. A June 2022 survey from Incisiv — sponsored by digital gifting vendor GiftNow, granted — found that 67% of consumers prefer instant digital gifts. Allied Market Research estimates that the market for digital gift cards alone was worth $258.34 billion in 2020. Givingli makes money by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access to the platform, plus additional fees for premium cards. Nicole wouldn’t comment on revenue but said that “millions” of people have used the service to date. “The pandemic has sped things up and we’ve been moving fast to keep up,” Nicole said. “We’re going to use this latest funding round to create more of that value for all members of our community — from loyal and daily users to our trusted brand and loyal partners, with desirable cards and gifts on the platform.”

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Evolito, with an axial-flux motor lighter than Tesla’s, starts ramping up its team • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Hardware, Startups, TransportationNo Comments on Evolito, with an axial-flux motor lighter than Tesla’s, starts ramping up its team • ZebethMedia

Last year YASA, a British electric motor startup with a revolutionary “axial-flux” motor, was acquired by Mercedes-Benz to develop ultra-high-performance electric motors for Mercedes’s AMG.EA electric-only platform. YASA’s axial-flux electric motors had previously garnered a reputation for efficiency, high power density, small size, and low weight. However, the team behind YASA did something quite clever. While Mercedes acquired that automotive rights, they passed on the rights to an aerospace version of the engine. That was taken up by a new entity, complete with YASA’s founders, called Evolito, to develop an electric motor it described as ultra-high-performance, low-weight and best for future EV aircraft. Evolito’s lead investors are Waypoint Capital and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE). YASA’s ‘axial-flux’ motors makes them one-third the weight of other electric motors, more efficient, and with 3x higher power densities than even Tesla’s, according to the company. It’s now emerged that former YASA CEO Dr. Chris Harris will lead Evolito on its path to commercialize electric flight. Chris Harris, Evolito   Harris joined YASA in 2012, scaling the company from 20 employees to more than 300, following 15 years’ leading other high-growth businesses in the UK, Europe and US. He stepped down from his CEO role at YASA in September 2022, but will remain a Non-Executive Director at the wholly-owned Mercedes-Benz subsidiary. A director of Evolito since the company’s spin-out and incorporation, he now becomes Evolito CEO effective immediately.   Evolito acquired UK battery company Electroflight in July 2022, which means it can also offer aerospace OEM & eVTOL customers fully-electric powertrain  solutions. In a statement, Harris said: “Electric flight requires ultra high-power density, super low-weight electric powertrains. Evolito provides best-in-class powertrain solutions for OEMs, leveraging  next-generation axial-flux electric motor technology that’s already proven in automotive.”

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Meet Crowd.dev, an open source user-led growth platform for fostering developer communities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Community-led growth, crowd-dev, open source, Social, Startups, VentureNo Comments on Meet Crowd.dev, an open source user-led growth platform for fostering developer communities • ZebethMedia

Community-led growth (CLG) has emerged as a popular mechanism for driving business, as companies strive to foster an ecosystem of fervent users that draws in new customers organically, serves as a support network for millions, and bangs a company’s drum completely off its own volition. Businesses such as Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, and Figma have grown substantially off the back of their respective communities, which in turn has led to a slew of new technologies dedicated to helping such businesses harness their fanbase, unearth their biggest advocates, and keep that CLG flywheel spinning. Investors have taken note, too: in the past year alone we’ve seen companies such as Commsor raise a $50 million Series B; Common Room secure $52 million; Threado draw in a $3.1 million seed round; and, more recently, Talkbase raise $2 million to power user-led growth for any company. Now, another new company has entered the community-led growth fray with a slightly different approach to the existing players, one focused on developer communities and with open source at its core. Founded out of Berlin in 2021, Crowd.dev brings together data from myriad developer communities including GitHub, Discord, Slack, Twitter, DEV, and Hacker News, and serves up analytics and workflow automations on top of this aggregated data. For example, a developer tool company might want to understand its users better and build relationships both with them and their employers to hone their product and find a better product-market fit. This might involve gathering and viewing all direct and indirect feedback in a single interface, or using one of Crowd.dev’s premium tools such as Eagle Eye which leans on natural language processing (NLP) to identify community discussions ripe for engagement.   Crowd.dev: Eagle Eye app Image Credits: Crowd.dev To help take things to the next level, Crowd.dev has just raised €2.2 million ($2.2 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Lightbird, with participation from Possible Ventures, Angel Invest, and a handful of angel backers. On top of that, the German startup has open-sourced its core platform, a move that goes some way toward differentiating itself in an increasingly crowded space. But first, it’s worth considering why developer-focused firms might need a dedicated platform to steer their community-led growth efforts, given that the incumbents can already be used for any community of users — including developers. Verticals Crowd.dev CEO and cofounder Jonathan Reimer argues that the word “community” has a broad gamut of connotations, and could mean anything from from social media influencers to online learning groups. Ultimately, a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work — a company laser-focused on attracting developers will probably need different tools to a company seeking to attract creators or crypto fans. “There has been hype around community, but also disappointment regarding new tools made to make community-building easier,” Reimer explained to ZebethMedia. “I have tried [existing] tools at previous jobs and was never satisfied as they didn’t match my use-case. Similar to CRMs (customer relationship management software), we believe there will be a verticalization in the community software space. We’re the first going in the developer space.” This “verticalization” is important in terms of building a platform that people actually want to use. In the case of Crowd.dev, which is aiming to create a product that suggests actions that a user can take based on developer community data, specializing in this way allows it to better tailor its product and “build more reliable model,” as Reimer puts it, for example in terms of detecting feedback or evaluating sentiment. “Achieving this for all kinds of communities at the same time would be incredibly hard,” Reimer said. “Developer communities have astonishing similarities, and especially for open source communities, we have access to a ton of historical training data.” Crowd.dev analytics Image Credits: Crowd.dev The open source factor Open source communities have long played a fundamental role in driving adoption of software, which is partly why a growing number of companies choose to make their products available under an open source license. If developers are able to tinker with software themselves with minimal friction, contribute some code, and even add new features, they are more inclined to use the software in their places of work — and thus, they are more inclined to convince their employers that it’s worth paying for premium features on top of the open source product. And this is the main driving force behind Crowd.dev’s focus on open source development communities, and its reasons for open-sourcing its own platform. “We believe that an essential tool for developer-focused, open source companies — as community management is — should be open source itself,” Reimer said. Transitioning to an open source platform may hold other benefits, too. For example, enterprises seeking greater transparency and control over their data can host Crowd.dev on their own infrastructure, and then pay Crowd.dev to unlock access to unlimited users and integrations. Or companies can elect to pay for the hosted incarnation of Crowd.dev, which includes a basic free tier in addition to more advanced enterprise plans. In its short lifespan so far, Crowd.dev claims a fairly impressive roster of customers such as The Linux Foundation and Microsoft, a company that has increasingly embraced open source over the past eight years after a somewhat frosty attitude toward community-driven software in years previous. Reimer said that Microsoft uses Crowd.dev to operate Flatcar Linux, a Linux distribution for container workloads it now operates after acquiring developer Kinvolk back in in 2021. “They use Crowd.dev mainly to analyze community members’ engagement, spot relevant stargazers on GitHub, and create reports,” Reimer said. In truth, Microsoft and its big tech ilk won’t be typical users, due to the fact that most of Crowd.dev’s target customers will be smaller companies seeking growth. But still, it’s an indication of the mindshare that Crowd.dev has managed to secure so far, with “several hundred organizations” joining the company’s beta product since March this year. “Eighty percent of our users are companies between Seed and Series B that see community

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