Month: September 2020

ThoughtRiver, a London-based legaltech startup that’s applying AI to speed up contract pre-screening, has announced a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Octopus Ventures. Existing seed investors Crane, Local Globe, Entrée Capital, Syndicate Room, and angel investor Duncan Painter also participated in the round.

The UK startup is one of a number applying AI to automate work that would otherwise be done by legal professions with the aim of boosting operational efficiency. Other startups playing in the space include the likes of Kira Systems, LawGeex and Luminance to name a few.

ThoughtRiver argues it has a different focus vs the majority of contract view companies because it’s focusing on pre-signature contracts — with the aim of making securing a deal faster. “Almost all others are just employed to pull data from existing contracts. ThoughtRiver is as much in demand by Sales teams as it is by Legal,” a spokesman told us.

The Series A investment comes after twelve month’s of what it’s billed as significant growth for the 2015-founded startup, which says its automated contract review software is now being used by the likes of G4S, Singtel and DB Schenker. It launched a service at the end of 2017 and now has more than 25 customers around the world, per the spokesman.

It also trumpets inking a strategic partnership with professional services firm PwC — which will see the latter developing a service for its clients powered by ThoughtRiver’s software, according to a press release.

ThoughtRiver touts up to 95% in time and 80% in cost savings vs an initial contract review that’s carried out by in-house lawyers. And ‘faster contract reviews sum to increased deal flow velocity’ is its overarching claim.

On the tech side, ThoughtRiver has created an ontology of contract legal logic, couched as a series of detailed questions which, combined with its natural language processing (NLP) engine, enables its software to pre-screen contracts by generating a risk assessment. It will also suggest tweaks to the legalese to remediate problems, including via a plug-in for Microsoft Word, where customers’ in-house lawyers may prefer to work.

Other benefits the startup touts are data extraction to power contract analytics at scale — such as for due diligence or to assess the impact of regulatory change. Its sale pitch also suggests that easy access to an overview of contractual positions helps customers by enabling better-informed business relationships.

Image credit: ThoughtRiver

ThoughtRiver has already established offices in New York, Singapore, London, Cambridge and Auckland. It says the new funding will be put towards further growth in the US market, where it will be dialling up sales and marketing efforts. Expanding integrations with major tech partners is also on the cards.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Akriti Dokania, early stage investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “While the legal sector has been slow to adopt AI compared to other industries, ThoughtRiver has a proven business model based on solving a fundamental issue for lawyers. By using an advanced Natural Language Processing engine to drive faster contract reviews and acceleration of deal flow and business growth, legal professionals can work more efficiently than ever. We are thrilled to support the ThoughtRiver team with its plans for global expansion as the firm disrupts an established market and set of processes.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Becoming a successful leader isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. Each startup — depending on the industry and internal culture — has its own needs.

The hard part is figuring out what leadership style best suits the personality of the CEO or founder as well as the needs and culture of their startup and employees who work there.

This year at TechCrunch’s virtual Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we’ll talk to the people who with the expertise and insight to help startup founders and other C-suite level executives — as well as those who someday hope to be in that spot — find the right leadership style for their business. We’re excited to announced that joining us on the Extra Crunch stage to discuss leadership styles is Carolyn Childers, co-founder and CEO of women leadership network Chief, Melissa Bradley co-founder of SMB networking platform Ureeka and Jerry Colonna, co-founder and CEO of executive coaching firm Reboot.io.

The three speakers will dig into what makes a successful leader and how to find the right management style as well as tackle other challenges that founders, CEOs and other executives face while building a company.

Bradley’s company Ureeka gives small business access to the expertise needed to grow their business. She is also founder and managing partner of 1863 Ventures, a business development program, and serves as advisor to the New Voices Foundation and New Voices Fund, as well as the Halcyon Fund. Bradley is the former Co-Chair, National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and was recently named one of The Most Entrepreneurial Women Investors in 2018.

Chief, which Childers and partner Lindsay Kaplan launched in January 2019, is a private network to drive more women into positions of power and keep them there. The organization is designed for senior women leaders. Prior to founding Chief, Childers was senior vice president of operations at Handy, led the launch of the site Soap.com (Quidsi) and acted as its GM through its acquisition by Amazon. Childers’ work landed her on Inc.’s 2019 Female Founders 100 List.

Colonna’s company Reboot.io specializes in executive coaching and leadership development. Colonna, who has experience as an executive, venture capitalist, journalist and board member, is also the author of ‘REBOOT: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.’

You may have heard that we’re taking Disrupt virtual this year, a move that lets us make the event accessible to more people than ever before while keeping everyone safe. Disrupt 2020 is scheduled to run from September 14 through September 19. Buy the Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and get access to all the interviews on our main Disrupt stage, workshops over on the Extra Crunch Stage where you can get actionable tips as well as CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. As soon as you register for Disrupt, you will have access to CrunchMatch and can start connecting with people now. Use the tool to schedule one-on-one video calls with potential customers and investors or to recruit and interview prospective employees.

We’ll see you there!

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Source: Tech Crunch

“Teenage Bounty Hunters” has one of the most memorable — if not entirely appealing — titles of any new show on Netflix .

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the series tells the story of Sterling (played Maddie Phillips) and Blair Wesley (Anjelica Bette Fellini), fraternal twins who end up working for bounty hunter/yogurt shop owner Bowser (Kadeem Hardison) in order to make some extra cash.

While the bounty hunting provides the initial hook for the show, the writers mostly use it as a comic counterpoint as they explore the culture of an affluent, evangelical corner of Atlanta, and then as Sterling and Blair’s relationships become increasingly complicated. The plotting in “Teenage Bounty Hunters” can occasionally feel a bit aimless, but in the end, we  ended up feeling impressed and — despite the show’s silly name —surprisingly invested in the characters.

In addition to “Teenage Bounty Hunters,” we also discuss the news that Netflix is making a series based on Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem” novels.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:39 “Three Body Problem” discussion
12:18 “Teenage Bounty Hunters” spoiler-free review
33:55 “Teenage Bounty Hunters” spoiler discussion

Source: Tech Crunch

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. 

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

How one VC firm wound up with no-code startups as part of its investing thesis

Throughout all the chaos of 2020’s economic upheaval in the startup world, I’ve worked to pay more attention to low-code and no-code services. The short gist of chats I’ve had with investors and founders and public company execs in the past few weeks is that market awareness of no-code/low-code terminology is starting to spread more broadly.

Why? Again, summarizing aggressively, it seems that the gap between what different business units need (marketing, say) and what in-house or external engineering teams are capable of providing is widening. This means there is more total pain in the market, hunting for a solution, often with a tooling budget in hand.

Enter no-code and low-code startups, and even big-company services alike that can help non-developers do more without having to beg for engineering inputs.

I spoke with Arun Mathew this week. He’s a partner at Accel, a venture firm that has invested in all sorts of companies that you’ve heard of — including Webflow, which raised a $72 million Series A last August that Mathew led for his firm. (More on the round here, and notes from TechCrunch on Webflow’s early days here, and here, if you are curious.)

More interesting than that single round is how Accel wound up building a thesis around no-code startups. According to Mathew, Accel had made large investments into companies like Qualtrics, for example, when they were already pretty big and had found product-market fit. That same general approach led to the Webflow deal last year.

At the time, Webflow “wasn’t really defining what they were doing as n- code, they just said ‘we have a very simple drag and drop UI, to build websites, and soon full web applications, very simply,’ ” he told TechCrunch. But, according to Mathew, what Webflow was doing “lined up really well” with the “rising movement of no-code.”

From there, Accel “made a couple [more no-code] investments in Europe where [it has] an early-stage team and a growth team,” along with a few more in India. In the investor’s view, some of the investing activity was “thesis driven because we think [no-code is] a really interesting theme,” but some of the deals “happened opportunistically” where Accel had found “really talented founders in the space that we thought was interesting, executing on a vision that we found appealing.”

In the “span of a year, year-and-a-half,” Accel totted up “seven or eight companies in this no-code space,” which over the last five or six quarters became “a real thesis” for the firm, Mathew said. Accel now has “a global team” of around a dozen people “spending a lot of our time in and around no-code” he added.

Apologies for the length there, but what Mathew said makes me feel a bit less behind. After dipping a toe into learning more about no-code services and tooling (and, yes, low-code as well) it felt somewhat like I was playing catch-up. But as I covered that Webflow round and have since started paying more attention to no-code as well, perhaps you and I are right on time.

(We also recently ran an investor survey on the no-code topic, so hit it up if you want more VC scribbles on the topic.)

Market Notes

For Market Notes this week, we have four things. First, riffs from chats with two public company execs about the software market, some public market stuff and then some neat Airbnb spend data by which I am confounded:

• I spoke with Apple MDM company Jamf’s CFO Jill Putman this week, after her company reported its first set of earnings as a public company. I wanted to know a bit more about the education market — a hot topic here at TechCrunch, given outsized rounds and huge market demand — and the medical world.
• Regarding the software market for education, Putman noted that schools are buying lots of hardware, and that software sales should follow. Our read from that is that the boom in education software is not going to slow for some time as schools work on reopening.
• Ditto the medical market, where Jamf has found uptake as hospitals roll out hardware to patients and families thereof to facilitate all sorts of demand that COVID has engendered. (Hardware needs software, enter Jamf!)
• Chatting with the CFO our key takeaway was that there are still sectors that could generate a continued COVID tailwind, even if not all Jamf customers fit that bill. For startups that did catch a wave, this is probably good news.
• And then there was Yext, a company that helps other companies’ customers find accurate information about them around the Web, and has recently gotten into the search game. Yext launched at a TechCrunch conference back in 2009, which is a neat bit of history. Anyway, Yext is public company now and we wanted to chat about which industries are driving growth for the former startup, and how the general climate for software is for the company, so we got on Zoom with its CEO, Howard Lerman.
• So, which sectors are accelerating from Yext’s perspective? Government, education (again), insurance and financial services. Let that guide your take on the health of various startups.
• Turning to the business climate, Lerman had some notes: “I will tell you in Q2,” he said, “things came back a bit from Q1.” In what sense? Retention rates, for one, according to the CEO. A return to form is welcome, but Lerman did caution that some companies were slower to “pull the trigger on big deals.”
• Lerman also said that his perspective on the macro-climate has bounced back as well from a local-minima set around 30 days ago.

Public company execs are pretty guarded in how they talk because they have to be. But what Putman and Lerman seemed to intimate is that economic damage — provided you are selling to business, and not individuals — seems more contained on a per-sector basis than I would have anticipated. And that there are some good things ahead, at least in a handful of hot sectors.

Opening our aperture a bit, some SaaS companies struggled this week to meet investor expectations, even as more companies added themselves to the IPO queue. It’s going to be very busy for a few quarters. (Speaking of which, you can find the good and bad from the new Sumo IPO filing here.)

The economy is still garbage for many, but at least for companies it’s improving. And on that note, some data regarding Airbnb. According to the folks over at Edison Trends, things are going better for the home-booking site than I would have guessed. Per the group:

• Airbnb’s bookings recovery outstripped its traditional rivals, growing “32% week-over-week” from late April into early June.
• And, most critically: “Airbnb spending in July was up 22% over the previous July, and spending the week of August 17 was 75% higher than the equivalent week in 2019.”

Wild, right? Perhaps that’s why Airbnb has filed to go public.

Various and Sundry

We’re a tiny bit short on space, so I’ll keep our V&S dose short this week to respect your time. Here’s what I couldn’t not share:

• Read this a16z post on the IPO market. It does a great job pulling the Twitter-bullshit out of regular IPO complaints to make some salient points about what is actually good, and bad, about the venerable initial public offering.
• And then read this Fred Wilson piece on SPACs, and how he thinks about them today.
• Fast made a bunch of noise this week, launching its checkout product after a lot of hype. I thought they were doing something more than a product launch, given the sheer number of tweets I kept seeing. Not sure how I feel about the final thing, but I covered their raise earlier this year, so wanted to flag this all the same.
• And, finally, Palantir. In a new S-1 filing, Palantir kinda fessed up to the fact that its structure makes it look like a controlled company. Danny did the digging on the matter here. And then I shouted about it here.
• We got data on Boston’s venture capital results in 2020, broken down by month. Hot damn, that wasn’t really what we expected.
• The JFrog IPO pricing dance is going to tell us how much profits are worth in the SaaS world.
• And Zoom’s insane, bonkers, hell-yeah quarter.

And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes, and thank you so much for reading this little newsletter on the weekends. It’s a treat to write, and I hope you like it.

Hit me up with notes at alex.wilhelm@techcrunch.com. (I don’t know if you reply to this email if I will get the response. But try it so that we can find out?)

Alex

Source: Tech Crunch

No matter how you celebrate Labor Day weekend, we urge you to mask up, keep your distance when grilling burgers and dogs and — most of all — take advantage of our flash sale on Digital Pro passes to Disrupt 2020. Right now, you can save $100 on your pass — whether you observe the holiday or not. We don’t judge.

This sweet deal won’t last long. Buy your Digital Pro pass before Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) when this sale disappears in, well, a flash.

A Digital Pro pass provides access to everything Disrupt 2020 offers from September 14-18. Our virtual venue makes it easy to explore Digital Startup Alley and discover hundreds of new startups from all around the world. That’s also where you’ll find this year’s TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors hand selected this cohort of stellar startups from hundreds of applications. These startups span the tech spectrum, and you won’t want to miss an opportunity to connect and see their demos.

Don’t miss the one, the only, the always-epic Startup Battlefield. It’s the OG of pitch competitions, and we have roughly 20 international contenders ready to throw down hard. They’ll pitch and demo to this impressive list of judges until only one team remains to claim bragging rights, the storied Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in equity-free cash.

As always, we bring the top experts, leaders and visionaries to the Disrupt stages, and this year is no different in that respect. And since virtual equals global, we have time zone-friendly programming for Europe and Asia. Here’s a taste of the Disrupt 2020 agenda.

Looking into the Future: Roelof Botha is the U.S. head of Sequoia Capital. It’s a powerful position but it also comes with great responsibility, including to help steer the company’s portfolio companies through the pandemic and its ripple effects. Hear how Botha is advising founders and why, even in trying times, he expects startup founders to reshape the world.

Live Q&A with Mette Lykke: Come to this live Q&A prepared with your questions for Endomondo’s CEO and co-founder (11:00 AM, CET)

Looking Toward the Future of Tech in China and Silicon Valley: Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital and the creator of the China Internet Report, has invested in over 50 startups including Lightyear/Stellar, Silk Labs, Chirp and Fleksy. Join us in a conversation about which emerging technology trends in China and the United States will leave an impact (1 p.m. HKT).

We can’t fit five days of Disrupt 2020 into one post. You need to see and experience it for yourself, and this is your chance to save $100 off the price of a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass. The sale ends Monday, September 7 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) — now, go fire up that grill.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch

As this pandemically perverse year draws to a close, there’s one thing that’s certain. Everything has changed — at least a little bit.

The U.S. is still grappling with a virus that it has yet to control and a vaccine, once it’s discovered and proven to be effective will take months to be distributed throughout the population. That means the virtual, socially distanced reality that has become the new normal will remain that way for at least a little bit longer.

But what does that mean for startup entrepreneurs who traditionally needed to pound the pavement, shake hands, pass out decks and run the gauntlet of Sand Hill Road or South Park to get financing for their new companies?

Well, if you’re coming to Disrupt (and you should) you’ll hear some fundraising tips and tricks from Y Combinator’s Anu Hariharan, Initialized’s Garry Tan, and GGV’s Hans Tung on how to raise money during these interesting and nerve-wracking times.

The advice is coming from some of the best investors in the industry.

Hariharan most recently worked at Andreessen Horowitz before joining the Y Combinator investment team as a general partner in the Continuity Fund, where she led investments in Boom, Brex, Convoy, Gusto, and Instacart.

And Garry Tan, who co-founded Initialized Capital with Alexis Ohanian in 2013, has backed early stage companies like Coinbase, Flexport, Instacart and Cruise. Before Initialized, Tan was a partner at Y Combinator where he advised and invested in over 1,000 companies. In a previous life, Tan co-founded the YC-backed company Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter, and was an early engineer at Palantir — even designing the company’s logo.

Rounding out our panel is Hans Tung. He’s currently sitting at number ten on the Forbes Midas list, is ranked as one of the top venture capitalists by The New York Times and CB Insights, and has a decades-long career investing in technology companies on at least three continents. At GGV Hans has invested in 16 unicorns including: Affirm, Airbnb, Bytedance, Coinbase, Lime, Meili, OfferUp, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, SmartMi, StockX, Udaan, Wish, Xiaohongshu, and Xiaomi.

These folks can navigate the choppiest of investment waters and certainly have thoughts on how to access capital that can douse the dumpster fire of these terrible economic times.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 through September 18 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your front row seat to see O’Brien live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.

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Source: Tech Crunch

After Beijing unilaterally imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong on July 1, many saw the move as an effort by Beijing to crack down on dissent and protests in the semi-autonomous region.

Soon after, a number of tech giants — including Microsoft, Twitter and Google — said they would stop processing requests for user data from Hong Kong authorities, fearing that the requested data could end up in the hands of Beijing.

But Apple was noticeably absent from the list. Instead, Apple said it was “assessing” the new law.

When reached by TechCrunch, Apple did not say how many requests for user data it had received from Hong Kong authorities since the new national security law went into effect. But the company reiterated that it doesn’t receive requests for user content directly from Hong Kong. Instead, it relies on a long-established so-called mutual legal assistance treaty, allowing U.S. authorities to first review requests from foreign governments.

Apple said it stores iCloud data for Hong Kong users in the United States, so any requests by Hong Kong authorities for user content has to be first approved by the Justice Department, and a warrant has to be issued by a U.S. federal judge before the data can be handed over to Hong Kong.

The company said that it received a limited number of non-content requests from Hong Kong related to fraud or stolen devices, and that the number of requests it received from Hong Kong authorities since the introduction of the national security law will be included in an upcoming transparency report.

Hong Kong authorities made 604 requests for device information, 310 requests for financial data, and 10 requests for user account data during 2019.

The report also said that Apple received 5,295 requests from U.S. authorities during the second half of last year for data related to 80,235 devices, a seven-fold increase from the previous six months.

Apple also received 4,095 requests from U.S. authorities for user data stored in iCloud on 31,780 accounts, twice the number of accounts affected during the previous six months.

Most of the requests related to ongoing return and repair fraud investigations, Apple said.

The report said it received 2,522 requests from U.S. authorities to preserve data on 6,741 user accounts, allowing law enforcement to obtain the right legal process to access the data.

Apple also said it received between 0-499 national security requests for non-content data on between 15,500 and 15,999 users or accounts, an increase of 40% on the previous report.

Tech companies are only allowed to report the number of national security requests in ranges, per rules set out by the Justice Department.

The company also published two FBI national security letters, or NSLs, from 2019, which the company petitioned to make public. These letters are subpoenas issued by the FBI with no judicial oversight and often with a gag order preventing the company from disclosing their existence. Since the introduction of the Freedom Act in 2015, the FBI was required to periodically review the gag orders and lift them when they were no longer deemed necessary.

Apple also said it received 54 requests from governments to remove 258 apps from its app store. China filed the vast majority of requests.

Source: Tech Crunch

We have seen a lot of action this week as the DoD tries to finally determine the final winner of the $10 billion, decade long DoD JEDI cloud contract. Today, the DoD released a statement that after reviewing the proposals from finalists Microsoft and Amazon again, it reiterated that Microsoft was the winner of the contract.

“The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the Government. The JEDI Cloud contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that will make a full range of cloud computing services available to the DoD,” The DoD said in a statement.

This comes on the heels of yesterday’s Court of Appeals decision denying Oracle’s argument that the procurement process was flawed and that there was a conflict of interest because a former Amazon employee helped write the requirements for the RFP.

While the DoD has determined that it believes that Microsoft should still get the contract, after selecting them last October,  that doesn’t mean that this is the end of the line for this long-running saga. In fact, a federal judge halted work on the project in February pending a hearing on an on-going protest from Amazon, which believes it should have won based on merit, and the fact it believes the president interfered with the procurement process to prevent Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post from getting the lucrative contract.

The DoD confirmed that the project could not begin until the legal wrangling was settled. “While contract performance will not begin immediately due to the Preliminary Injunction Order issued by the Court of Federal Claims on February 13, 2020, DoD is eager to begin delivering this capability to our men and women in uniform,” the DoD reported in a statement.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was ready to get to work on the project as soon as it got the OK to proceed. “We appreciate that after careful review, the DoD confirmed that we offered the right technology and the best value. We’re ready to get to work and make sure that those who serve our country have access to this much needed technology,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch.

While it takes us one step closer to the end of the road for this long-running drama, it won’t be over until the court rules on Amazon’s arguments.

Note: We sent a request for comment to Amazon, and will update the story if we hear back from them.

Source: Tech Crunch