Startups

Meeting camera startup Owl Labs lands $25M and partnership with HP • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, HP, Matrix Partners, playground global, Robotics & AI, Spark Capital, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership with HP, Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt says, which will see HP invest in Owl Labs’ various product offerings while providing sales coverage and outreach with enterprise customers. HP, notably, recently acquired Poly, which developed a range of video and voice devices and software for virtual conferencing. Weishaupt sees no conflict, arguing that Poly’s products are complementary with Owl Labs’ and show “HP’s commitment to transforming the workplace to a hybrid model.” “The funding will allow Owl Labs to continue its accelerated growth … Owl Labs will use the investment to support product development and increase global adoption of the company’s products, including the [Owl Labs’] product line,” Weishaupt told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The funding will also be used to expand Owl Labs’ global footprint and deepen go-to-market partnerships starting with a commercial agreement between Owl Labs and HP France, where HP will sell Owl Labs’ products through their local sales team.” Owl Labs was founded by Mark Schnittman and Max Makeev in 2014, who sought to develop a better videoconferencing experience than cameras at the time could achieve. (Weishaupt, a former CarGurus exec, joined Owl Labs as CEO in early 2019.) Drawing on their work at iRobot, the Schnittman and Schnittman created Owl Labs’ first product, the auto-swiveling Meeting Owl Pro, after testing the concept by putting a laptop on a spinning stool. Today, Owl Labs sells several products, including a dedicated whiteboard camera, meeting room control console and its latest-generation meeting camera, the Meeting Owl 3. The Meeting Owl 3 features a mic and speaker array paired with a 360-degree camera, which zooms in on whoever’s speaking. There’s countless “intelligent” meeting cameras on the market, including from heavy hitters like Microsoft and Google. But Weishaupt makes the case that Owl Labs’ software is a differentiator. Called the Owl Intelligence System, it allows customers to connect up to two Meeting Owls to expand their video and audio range and add facial recognition including for masked faces. “Meeting Owl 3 is the only 360-degree videoconferencing device on the market that can be connected to others to expand reach in larger spaces,” Weishaupt said. ” Owl Labs’ technology learns the space to create a more seamless experience, getting smarter over time.” Owl Labs got caught in a negative press cycle earlier this year when a security firm, Modzero, uncovered vulnerabilities in several models of the Meeting Owl and whiteboard camera that attackers could’ve exploit to obtain sensitive data. Owl Labs patched the exploit, which doesn’t appear to have majorly dented sales — Weishaupt says that over 130,000 organizations are using Owl Labs products including 84 Fortune 100 companies. “We can share that we’ve had a solid growth trajectory with more than 3x revenue growth year-over-year and 7x revenue growth since the pandemic began,” Weishaupt said, declining to share more precise revenue figures. “Owl Labs became the first company to build AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing solutions for hybrid organizations. Owl Labs as a company was hybrid pre-pandemic and are experts at using technology to bridge the gap between remote and in-person work environments.” To date, Boston-based, over-100-employee Owl Labs has raised $47 million in funding.

Binance’s CEO isn’t sweating the FTX implosion • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Binance, Crypto, EC Cryptocurrency, EC News Analysis, FTX Bankruptcy, ftx binance, StartupsNo Comments

The crypto market is trying to pick up the pieces after it was thrown into massive disarray last week when the previously third-largest crypto exchange, FTX, imploded and filed for bankruptcy. “It’s obvious that people are jittery, interested and somewhat nervous about what’s happening in the industry,” Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, CEO of the largest crypto exchange Binance, said during a Twitter Space on Monday. “I want to say, short-term it is painful. But, I think this is good for the industry long-term.” Zhao acknowledged that a lot of people lost money recently and many still have money stuck with FTX, so “there will be pain.” But he hinted that market conditions should improve down the line. “The industry is not going away and the other strong industry players are now even stronger,” he said. Last week, a number of crypto exchanges, including Binance, Crypto.com, KuCoin and OKX said they would begin publishing proof-of-reserves in an effort to reassure customers and investors that their funds are safe in the wake of the FTX debacle. Last week, Zhao emphasized the importance of transparency, tweeting, “All crypto exchanges should do merkle-tree proof-of-reserves.” Proof-of-reserves (PoR) are independent audits by third parties that aim to provide transparency and evidence that a custodian holds the assets it claims to own on behalf of its clients. These exchanges join other crypto businesses like Gemini, BitGo, and Paxos, to name a few, which have used PoR for many years to prove billions of dollars in value, Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, told ZebethMedia on Friday. “Now we’re increasing transparency in the industry, we’re increasing security in the industry, and we’re increasing communications with regulators all around the world,” Zhao said today. “I think five years later, when we look back at this, the industry will be stronger.”

The startup and venture markets are coming back to square one • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Startup Trends, startup valuations, Startups, The Exchange, VentureNo Comments

What goes up must come down” is a cliche that is also a bastardization of Newton’s third law. It’s also a good reminder that when it looks like the business market has changed fundamentally, we’re often really just seeing a temporary aberration. This idiom rings true when we consider the cycle of tech valuations (up and then down), venture capital (up and then down), and the pace at which new unicorns are being minted (also up and then down). These three trends are linked, obviously, but what gave us pause recently was the realization that we haven’t merely seen declines in recent quarters: instead, there’s been a whole-cloth return to pre-COVID norms. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Take tech valuations, for example: It struck us this morning while drafting the weekly kick-off Equity episode that the value of tech stocks — measured through our favorite software-company tracking index — is today trading around the value it had in early 2020, just before and after the massive COVID-induced sell-off hit American stocks: Please excuse our annotation method — it’s Monday. It’s clear that the 2020-2021 boom in software valuations was more of an anomaly than a new-normal. Besides, the fact that the companies in the index grew over the last few years but are worth less today implies that they might have been overvalued even pre-COVID. If today’s prices hold up, they will indict not only the excess of the recent past, but the overvaluations of the 2010s as well.

Cleanup, aisle FTX • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Equity Monday, Equity podcast, FTX, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Here’s what we got into on our Monday episode, a weekly kick-off of sorts: Stocks are mixed around the world, up in parts of Asia and Europe, but down sharply in the United States to start the week. Crypto prices have recovered modestly, but remain sharply depressed from the last week. The FTX damage continues to reverberate. Speaking of crypto, the FTX saga continues. The latest includes a hack on Friday, and a massive emission of new FTT tokens that was so poorly received that major exchanges pulled deposits of the now-radioactive security. All the exchange drama has led to other exchanges taking fire, and Coinbase looking great in contrast. Elsewhere in tech-land: Fake meat raises a bunch more money, Klarna is doing some neat product work, India has unbanned VLC, which was a head-scratcher to begin with, and e-commerce infra startups are still raising capital! And that’s all the time we had this morning! More Wednesday! Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday and Wednesday, and at 6 a.m. PT on Fridays, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. ZebethMedia also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together, and more!

Gradient backs Butter’s operating system for food distribution businesses • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Butter, food, food distribution, food supply chain, Gradient Ventures, StartupsNo Comments

Many small to mid-sized food distributors still run on pen and paper. This makes it difficult to pinpoint things like how certain products are performing and customer churn. It also makes it hard for businesses to comply with the FDA’s new food traceability regulations. Butter’s solution is an all-in-one management system that helps distributors run their businesses while serving as a system of record to help them comply with food safety rules. Butter announced today that it has a $9 million Series A led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other participants included Uncommon Capital, Notation Capital and angel investor Jack Altman. The new funding will go toward hiring for Butter’s sales and engineering teams. Butter was founded by Winston Chi and Shangyan Li in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. COVID’s impact on the food industry highlighted how outdated the supply side is, Chi told ZebethMedia. While companies like Toast, DoorDash and Square addressed different parts of sales and management, there was still little innovation on the supply side, and many businesses relied on paper systems and phone calls. Chi is familiar with the challenges faced by food businesses because his parents ran a battery-cage chicken farm in China for more than twenty years. “They’d wake up between 3-4AM every day waiting for deliveries and collecting payments. I witnessed firsthand the cumbersome process of logging orders and tracking receivables. My dad rarely would have a night that didn’t involve calling customers or tracking down misplaced orders or payments,” Chi told ZebethMedia. “If my parents were still doing wholesale, we would’ve had to shut down our business due to COVID. With my tech background, I feel a need to help this industry.” Butter was created to digitize the process for food distributors who sell to restaurants and supermarkets, while also giving food businesses analytics to help them run their businesses more efficiently. Butter manages many parts of operations, from sales and inventory to payment and e-commerce storefronts. This way, the platform can tell users when they need to restock products, in what quantity and on what date. Analytics available through the platform for distributors include how much money they make per day. Chi said many only have a rough idea. “For example, the second day after we onboarded a seafood distributors, the distributor asked ‘is it true that I only make 20% on salmon?’ We were able to quickly point to our data and show this to him,” Chi said. He told he spent over half of his time on salmon everyday and after this, he was able to make necessary adjustments to scale his business.” Butter tells distributors which customers are active, who is ordering less and who is churning, so they know before customers stop making purchases. It also analyzes which products sell best in revenue and profit, including what products are being returned the most often, which causes distributors to lose money. The platform also makes it easier for them to comply with the new FDA traceability rule, because it acts as a system of record for distributors’ inventory. Chi explained that before the new regulations, only a few products, like oysters, had strict traceability rules. But the new traceability regulations cover more than 30 categories. “Recently, a Butter customer told me it used to take him 8-10 hours of there was a recall,” Chi said. “He’d have to sift through piles of paperwork to pinpoint certain orders, buyers and transaction dates,” Chi said. “Now with Butter, we can do that in a few clicks.” Butter is currently used by 6,000 restaurants across California and in total manages $300 million in cash flow and sales operations. Chi says that customers who have worked with Butter over the last 12 months have seen an average of 47% growth in sales revenue. Butter onboarded many customers by working with distributors, who send invitations to customers to use Butter for free. Once they log in, their previous transaction history, customized order guide and updated pricing is available in the Butter account. In a statement about the investment, Gradient Ventures partner Wen-Wen Lam said, “Butter has a huge opportunity to revolutionize the entire food supply chain. We’re impressed with Winston and Shangyan’s attention to detail in building their product. They are deeply in tune with their customer’s pain points and dedicated to solving less obvious problems for distributors, which is why they’ve had great adoption by suppliers including major wholesalers. We’re excited to support their team as they build and scale.”

4 moves your firm must make now • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC Fintech, Fintech, fintech infrastructure, fintech software, fintech startup, StartupsNo Comments

Grant Easterbrook Contributor Grant Easterbrook is a fintech consultant based in Amsterdam. His work has been cited in the media over 150 times. He also co-founded Dream Forward, which was acquired in 2020. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the fintech phenomenon. Companies such as E*TRADE, Rocket Mortgage, and TurboTax began to disrupt the established financial services sector well before 2012, but that year marked the turning point when fintech morphed into a sustained movement that would drastically change how most people manage their money. If you’re a fintech startup, you will face four main types of competitors over the next decade: Traditional financial firms offering more of a “super app” experience with strong member benefits and perks; Advanced decentralized finance protocols that can offer financial products that involve real-world assets; Increasingly common embedded financial products sold by non-financial firms; A government-issued CBDC in many (but not all) countries. Your firm will need a very strong value proposition to compete with all four types of competitors. This leaves most firms with two options over the next decade. One avenue is to specialize in a handful of products or services that you believe will have value on their own that consumers will sign up for despite robust competitor ecosystems. Alternatively, you need to develop a comprehensive strategy to compete and build a compelling suite of products, services and perks. How can fintech startups prepare to compete in the next decade? Here are four steps you can take to remain competitive. Any corporate strategy document will remain a fantasy on paper if your tech infrastructure is outdated and incapable of meeting your future needs. Your tech stack must support fintech’s cutting edge The foundational step of any long-term strategy for the 2020s is to revamp your firm’s tech stack to support future needs. You will need modern tech infrastructure that can support greater cross-product automation, a sophisticated AI assistant, more integrations with external parties such as the crypto ecosystem, and non-financial perks/benefits. The process for improving your tech stack varies based on the type of firm. If you work for a large bank still running COBL, the first step is likely a massive investment in a multi-year process to migrate to a modern and streamlined tech infrastructure. If you are a relatively young fintech company, you generally have more “white space” to design your stack. The challenge for smaller companies isn’t dealing with decades of tech debt; rather, it’s optimizing limited engineering resources to build the best possible tech stack. Modernizing tech infrastructure is a difficult and expensive proposition. Generally speaking, the best way to get company leadership on board with such investments is to highlight what competitors are doing to help them understand the competitive threat.

222 wants to match perfect strangers for bespoke, real-life experiences • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in App, Apps, Social, startup, StartupsNo Comments

As anyone who’s moved to a city sight unseen can tell you — this reporter included — making platonic connections isn’t easy. Adult friendships are fickle beasts in metros of millions, where casual friends are cheap currency. Statistics back up my anecdotal evidence. According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, an increasing number of people can’t identify a single person as a “close friend.” In 1990, only 3% of Americans said that they had no close friends, while in 2021, that percentage rose to 12%. Many a startup has attempted to “solve socializing” with apps, algorithms and social nudges, or a combination of those three things. Bumble, for instance, has experimented with a communities feature that lets users connect with one another based on topics and interests. Patook took a Tinder-like approach to matching potential friends, using AI both to connect users and block flirtatious messages. But not everyone’s found these experiences to be especially fulfilling. “[I’m alarmed] by the tech industry’s lack of focus on building social products that are truly social rather than purely built to capture attention and exploit our desire for external validation,” Keyan Kazemian told ZebethMedia in an interview. He’s one of the three co-founders of 222, a social events app that aims to — unlike many that’ve come before it — facilitate meaningful and authentic connections. “Our society’s brightest minds — our fellow scientists, engineers and product managers — are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars not to solve the existential problems of loneliness, climate change, space travel, cancer and aging but to instead find new ways to keep an already mentally ill society consuming endless content, always fighting for more of their attention,” Kazemian continued. “We’re building a product to swing the pendulum in the other direction.” Kazemian co-launched 222 in late 2021 with Danial Hashemi and Arman Roshannai. They initially came together over a university-funded project around predicting social compatibility among a group of strangers. Toward the end of the pandemic, Kazemian, Hashemi and Roshannai — all Gen Zers (at 23, Kazemian is the oldest) — curated intimate dinners in Kazemian’s backyard over wine and pasta for friends of friends who’d never met each other, using machine learning and a psychological questionnaire to craft the guest lists. “Folks loved the backyard dinners so much they convinced us to try to replicate it with real venues,” Kazemian said. “In early 2022, we moved to Los Angeles and started partnering with brick and mortar locations, creating a marketplace between hyperlocal venues and members looking to discover their city and meet new people through unique social experiences.” That marketplace became 222. Today, anyone between the ages of 18 and 27 can sign up for an account — the founding team is focused on the Gen Z crowd presently. There’s no app — just a basic Typeform workflow — and the sign-up process is designed to be simple. Once you provide your name, email address and date of birth, 222 has you answer roughly 30 Myers-Briggs-type questions covering topics from movie, music and cereal preferences to political views and religious affiliation. 222’s onboarding survey. Some are uncomfortably personal — you’ll be asked about your income level, sexual orientation and college major — but Kazemian says it’s in the interest of narrowing down potential matches. “All of our data is encrypted and used only to better each 222 member’s social experience,” he added when asked about 222’s privacy practices. 222’s small print also indicates that data from the app is being analyzed as a part of a university social science project — a continuation of the one Kazemian, Hashemi and Roshannai led a year ago. Opting out requires contacting the company. Image Credits: 222 After answering additional questions about your personality (e.g. “Is social activism is incredibly important for you?”, “Are you willing to have uncomfortable and difficult conversations with your friends?”) and go-to social activities (e.g. drinking, watching sports, going out to nightclubs), 222 has you list dietary restrictions and your ZIP code. You’re then asked to choose which factors you find most important in meeting new people (e.g., social scene, political leanings), and it’s finally off to the races. Or it should be. When I tried to sign up, the website threw an internal server error. I eventually received a text confirming my enrollment, but it included a link to a webpage that endlessly loaded. Kazemian chalked it up to teething issues and promised a fix. When the Typeform is working properly, Kazemian says, an algorithm behind the scenes factors in the answers to those 30-some questions to determine which of 16 categories your personality falls into. Once that’s decided, you’ll be notified if you’re selected for a 222 event — for example, dinner at a local venue partner of 222’s — which are currently held weekly and cost $2.22 to attend. Those who aren’t recruited for the dinner can choose to join for post-event mingling. So is the algorithm any good? Kazemian asserts that it is, and that, furthermore, 222 is one of the few social apps directly training and matching based on real-life experiences. “Most dating apps don’t do any sort of matching at all and rather focus solely on an Elo-type score, like in chess. Users on those products are only exposed to those that have a similar ‘yes-swipe-to-no-swipe ratio to themselves,” Kazemian said. “[By contrast,] based on our member’s onboarding questionnaire, 222 develops a psychological profile for each new sign up … Our algorithm will then not only pair each member with the best possible group of strangers for a given experience, it will also curate an itinerary for the evening with the best possible consumer experience — which speakeasy, café, concert or restaurant will this group of individuals have the best time at.” That’s quite a claim to make considering Tinder and even Facebook has dabbled with helping strangers connect at events. But algorithmic robustness aside, users might be wary of attending events

Zenlytic develops commerce-specific, self-serve business intelligence tool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, business intelligence, Commerce, Ryan Janssen, Startups, Venture, ZenlyticNo Comments

Zenlytic, a business intelligence tool for commerce, secured $5.4 million in seed funding to continue developing its natural-language interface for non-technical users who want to corral their customer acquisition, conversion and retention software into one tool without needing a data team. Bain Capital Ventures led the round and was joined by other investors, including Primary Venture Partners, Correlation Ventures, Company Ventures, Habitat Partners (Red Antler) and the Sequoia Scout Fund. As my colleague Kyle Wiggers wrote earlier this year, business intelligence is getting some love from venture capital firms as the category yields more solutions for managing and analyzing large amounts of data so customers can identify new revenue opportunities. However, Ryan Janssen, co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, is out to turn business intelligence on its head by doing something he believes the industry says it’s doing but has never really delivered — true self-serve capabilities. Prior to starting the company, Janssen and co-founder Paul Blankley were data scientists consulting with commerce brands on how to use data and noticed that no matter the size, they had similar issues. “One of the biggest ironies is they have a wealth of data to make decisions, but because their core product is not tech, they generally have smaller tech teams, are late to develop tech teams,” Janssen told ZebethMedia. So they set out to build their own take on business intelligence with Zenlytic, what he described as a true self-service tool specifically designed for commerce companies. Users can unite all of their customer acquisition, conversion and retention SaaS tools into one cloud data warehouse and access customizable analytics. “Unreliable data is worse than no data at all,” Janssen added. “Brands need customer logic, but today’s tools are typically one-size-fits-all. Our tech unlocks better self-serve by rolling up natural language capabilities powered by GPT-3 and OpenAI to make it feel like you are having a conversation with an internal data person.” The $5.4 million in new funding is spread across two rounds, including one that happened about two years ago and the other one, led by Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, this year. Friend told ZebethMedia that commerce is one of the core focuses of the firm and he spent most of his career in commerce analytics. While looking for new software companies helping brands do things they couldn’t do before, he found Zenlytic and saw that it was doing something that he had recognized a need for, but could not find. “We didn’t have nearly the brilliance of Ryan and Paul, but did think there needed to be a self-serve way for people to ask questions about their business data without having to hire an analytic team,” Friend said. “We stumbled into Zenlytic and when we saw versions of the product, we were blown away by their idea of being able to ask a question and have the machine do all the analysis. That is a dream for people running brands.” Meanwhile, Zenlytic is very much still in its early stages, so there wasn’t much to report on traction, according to Janssen, and much of the funding will go into expanding the company’s team as it moves toward being a product-led business. He expects the company to triple its team of four people in the next year as it adds more product and analytics folks to develop additional capabilities.

Vow’s first cultured meat product close to Singapore unveiling after $49.2M Series A • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Blackbird, Cultured meat, George Peppou, Prosperity7 Ventures, Startups, Venture, VowNo Comments

Another cell-based meat company is poised to have its meat products introduced in restaurants. Vow’s first product brand, Morsel, which was created from its cultured meat technology, will go into Singapore restaurants by the end of this year. Singapore was the first nation to approve cultured meat products for sale, with Eat Just being one of the first companies to sell its lab-grown chicken there. This milestone comes as the three-year-old Australian company, which touts itself as “Australia’s first cell-based meat company,” raised $49.2 million in Series A funding. Cell-based technology is one of the solutions increasingly used that creates meat from the cells of animals instead of the animals themselves. This is not only to save animals from slaughter, but to provide a more sustainable method of food production. Vow co-founder and CEO George Peppou told ZebethMedia that scaling and manufacturing are the biggest single costs for the company and a driver for going after funding. “Before the round, we had an underlying product and customers who were interested,” he said. “We had built Factory 1 and had everything in place going into the regulatory process in Singapore, Australia and the U.S. However, there was way more demand than supply. If we could raise a large Series A, we could introduce Morsel to multiple markets and prove out the big view on what the food looks like.” Morsel is a cultured umami quail product, and the way chefs are experimenting with it is to position it on the menu, not as quail, but as a new type of meat. It has a roasted umami flavor with aromatic seafood notes, providing a more unique experience and something that you would expect to see on a fine-dining menu, Peppou said. Blackbird and Prosperity7 Ventures, an Aramco Ventures growth fund, co-led the Series A and was joined by Toyota Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Grok Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Peakbridge, Tenacious Ventures, HostPlus Super, NGS Super and Pavilion Capital. The new capital comes nearly two years after Vow grabbed $6 million in seed funding. The company was focusing its technology on more exotic meats, like buffalo, kangaroo or alpaca. At the time, it was also building a design facility and laboratory in Sydney, and in October announced that the facility was open. When it is fully operational, the company said it will produce “as much as 30 tonnes” or 66,100 pounds of cultivated meat each year. But as we’ve discussed many times within this publication, scale continues to be a challenge for cultured meat producers due to the cost of the materials and volume needed to reach price parity with current meat products and eventual company profitability. To put this in perspective, it is feared that as the human population nears 9 billion by 2050, a meat-centric diet will not yield enough calories to feed everyone. Giant food producers and startups alike are collectively trying to find a way to produce more food, and plant-based has been identified as one of the ways to do it. Currently, Vow’s Factory 1 is working on producing between one kilo, or two pounds, and tens of kilos every few days, Peppou said. He believes the company has a good strategy for achieving a bigger scale, and with the new capital will speed up getting its Morsel product to market, future product development and hiring across new divisions, like product and marketing. Peppou expects to grow the manufacturing team from four people to between 15 and 20 people in the next few months. By the middle of next year, the overall Vow workforce will be around 80 people. It is also expanding manufacturing by beginning the development of its second factory that the company said will be “100x larger” than its first. “Currently, every part of the process is a long way before hitting the factory’s physical limits, which is intentional,” he added. “We will continue to test with a high margin for error and then ramp up close to capacity while also looking at what Factory 2 needs to look like.” Singapore and Australia currently have a bespoke approval process for cultured meat products and a clear regulatory framework for that approval, Peppou said. He expects to be able to get Morsel to market within a year in both of those countries. The U.S., however, is “a bit more ambiguous because there isn’t a specific regulatory framework, so the timeline for introducing products is less clear,” Peppou added.

Real-time data startup Quix raises a $12.9M Series A round led by MMC Ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in big data, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

The complexity of streaming data technologies – not just streaming video but any kind of streaming data – has created a headache around dealing with that high speed data processing. Accordingly, companies like Spark, Flink have spring up to address this ksqlDB. Many are either either java-based solutions or SQL-based analytics solutions. However, UK startup Quix says it is a platform for developing event-driven applications with Python, which can have uses in, say, physics-based data modelling and anomaly detection in machine learning. It’s now raised a £11m / $12.9m Series A funding round led by London-based VC MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures (out of Berlin) and Passion Capital (London). The Quix founders are familiar with real-time decision-making, having worked in Formula 1, where success is based on milliseconds. In fact one of its customers is McLaren, as well as mobility startup Voi, and the National Health Service (UK), among others. In a statement, Mike Rosam, Co-Founder at Quix, said: “Many companies are struggling to combine raw technologies like Kafka into real-time data capabilities… This new capital will fuel our mission to simplify event-driven data engineering so that more companies can build modern data-intensive apps.” Oliver Richards, Partner at MMC Ventures, added: “We have been doing an increased amount of research in the data infrastructure space, it is clear that there is a growing demand for real-time streaming data, both across consumer and B2B use cases.”