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The UK’s medical device regulator has admitted it has concerns about VC-backed AI chatbot maker Babylon Health. It made the admission in a letter sent to a clinician who’s been raising the alarm about Babylon’s approach toward patient safety and corporate governance since 2017.

The HSJ reported on the MHRA’s letter to Dr David Watkins yesterday. TechCrunch has reviewed the letter (see below), which is dated December 4, 2020. We’ve also seen additional context about what was discussed in a meeting referenced in the letter, as well as reviewing other correspondence between Watkins and the regulator in which he details a number of wide-ranging concerns.

In an interview he emphasized that the concerns the regulator shares are “far broader” than the (important but) single issue of chatbot safety.

“The issues relate to the corporate governance of the company — how they approach safety concerns. How they approach people who raise safety concerns,” Watkins told TechCrunch. “That’s the concern. And some of the ethics around the mis-promoting of medical devices.

“The overall story is they did promote something that was dangerously flawed. They made misleading claims with regards to how [the chatbot] should be used — its intended use — with [Babylon CEO] Ali Parsa promoting it as a ‘diagnostic’ system — which was never the case. The chatbot was never approved for ‘diagnosis’.”

“In my opinion, in 2018 the MHRA should have taken a much firmer stance with Babylon and made it clear to the public that the claims that were being made were false — and that the technology was not approved for use in the way that Babylon were promoting it,” he went on. “That should have happened and it didn’t happen because the regulations at that time were not fit for purpose.”

“In reality there is no regulatory ‘approval’ process for these technologies and the legislation doesn’t require a company to act ethically,” Watkins also told us. “We’re reliant on the healthtech sector behaving responsibly.”

The consultant oncologist began raising red flags about Babylon with UK healthcare regulators (CQC/MHRA) as early as February 2017 — initially over the “apparent absence of any robust clinical testing or validation”, as he puts it in correspondence to regulators. However with Babylon opting to deny problems and go on the attack against critics his concerns mounted.

An admission by the medical devices regulator that all Watkins’ concerns are “valid” and are “ones that we share” blows Babylon’s deflective PR tactics out of the water.

“Babylon cannot say that they have always adhered to the regulatory requirements — at times they have not adhered to the regulatory requirements. At different points throughout the development of their system,” Watkins also told us, adding: “Babylon never took the safety concerns as seriously as they should have. Hence this issue has dragged on over a more than three year period.”

During this time the company has been steaming ahead inking wide-ranging ‘digitization’ deals with healthcare providers around the world — including a 10-year deal agreed with the UK city of Wolverhampton last year to provide an integrated app that’s intended to have a reach of 300,000 people.

It also has a 10 year agreement with the government of Rwanda to support digitization of its health system, including via digitally enabled triage. Other markets it’s rolled into include the US, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Babylon says it now covers more than 20 million patients and has done 8 million consultations and “AI interactions” globally. But is it operating to the high standards people would expect of a medical device company?

Safety, ethical and governance concerns

In a written summary, dated October 22, of a video call which took place between Watkins and the UK medical devices regulator on September 24 last year, he summarizes what was discussed in the following way: “I talked through and expanded on each of the points outlined in the document, specifically; the misleading claims, the dangerous flaws and Babylon’s attempts to deny/suppress the safety issues.”

In his account of this meeting, Watkins goes on to report: “There appeared to be general agreement that Babylon’s corporate behaviour and governance fell below the standards expected of a medical device/healthcare provider.”

“I was informed that Babylon Health would not be shown leniency (given their relationship with [UK health secretary] Matt Hancock),” he also notes in the summary — a reference to Hancock being a publicly enthusiastic user of Babylon’s ‘GP at hand’ app (for which he was accused in 2018 of breaking the ministerial code).

In a separate document, which Watkins compiled and sent to the regulator last year, he details 14 areas of concern — covering issues including the safety of the Babylon chatbot’s triage; “misleading and conflicting” T&Cs — which he says contradict promotional claims it has made to hype the product; as well as what he describes as a “multitude of ethical and governance concerns” — including its aggressive response to anyone who raises concerns about the safety and efficacy of its technology.

This has included a public attack campaign against Watkins himself, which we reported on last year; as well as what he lists in the document as “legal threats to avoid scrutiny & adverse media coverage”.

Here he notes that Babylon’s response to safety concerns he had raised back in 2018 — which had been reported on by the HSJ — was also to go on the attack, with the company claiming then that “vested interest” were spreading “false allegations” in an attempt to “see us fail”.

“The allegations were not false and it is clear that Babylon chose to mislead the HSJ readership, opting to place patients at risk of harm, in order to protect their own reputation,” writes Watkins in associated commentary to the regulator.

He goes on to point out that, in May 2018, the MHRA had itself independently notified Babylon Health of two incidents related to the safety of its chatbot (one involving missed symptoms of a heart attack, another missed symptoms of DVT) — yet the company still went on to publicly rubbish the HSJ’s report the following month (which was entitled: ‘Safety regulators investigating concerns about Babylon’s ‘chatbot”).

Wider governance and operational concerns Watkins raises in the document include Babylon’s use of staff NDAs — which he argues leads to a culture inside the company where staff feel unable to speak out about any safety concerns they may have; and what he calls “inadequate medical device vigilance” (whereby he says the Babylon bot doesn’t routinely request feedback on the patient outcome post triage, arguing that: “The absence of any robust feedback system significant impairs the ability to identify adverse outcomes”).

Re: unvarnished staff opinions, it’s interesting to note that Babylon’s Glassdoor rating at the time of writing is just 2.9 stars — with only a minority of reviewers saying they would recommend the company to a friend and where Parsa’s approval rating as CEO is also only 45% on aggregate. (“The technology is outdated and flawed,” writes one Glassdoor reviewer who is listed as a current Babylon Health employee working as a clinical ops associate in Vancouver, Canada — where privacy regulators have an open investigation into its app. Among the listed cons in the one-star review is the claim that: “The well-being of patients is not seen as a priority. A real joke to healthcare. Best to avoid.”)

Per Watkins’ report of his online meeting with the MHRA, he says the regulator agreed NDAs are “problematic” and impact on the ability of employees to speak up on safety issues.

He also writes that it was acknowledged that Babylon employees may fear speaking up because of legal threats. His minutes further record that: “Comment was made that the MHRA are able to look into concerns that are raised anonymously.”

In the summary of his concerns about Babylon, Watkins also flags an event in 2018 which the company held in London to promote its chatbot — during which he writes that it made a number of “misleading claims”, such as that its AI generates health advice that is “on-par with top-rated practicing clinicians”.

The flashy claims led to a blitz of hyperbolic headlines about the bot’s capabilities — helping Babylon to generate hype at a time when it was likely to have been pitching investors to raise more funding.

The London-based startup was valued at $2BN+ in 2019 when it raised a massive $550M Series C round, from investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and a large (unnamed) U.S.-based health insurance company, as well as insurance giant Munich Re’s ERGO Fund — trumpeting the raise at the time as the largest-ever in Europe or U.S. for digital health delivery.

“It should be noted that Babylon Health have never withdrawn or attempted to correct the misleading claims made at the AI Test Event [which generated press coverage it’s still using as a promotional tool on its website in certain jurisdictions],” Watkins writes to the regulator. “Hence, there remains an ongoing risk that the public will put undue faith in Babylon’s unvalidated medical device.”

In his summary he also includes several pieces of anonymous correspondence from a number of people claiming to work (or have worked) at Babylon — which make a number of additional claims. “There is huge pressure from investors to demonstrate a return,” writes one of these. “Anything that slows that down is seen [a]s avoidable.”

“The allegations made against Babylon Health are not false and were raised in good faith in the interests of patient safety,” Watkins goes on to assert in his summary to the regulator. “Babylon’s ‘repeated’ attempts to actively discredit me as an individual raises serious questions regarding their corporate culture and trustworthiness as a healthcare provider.”

In its letter to Watkins (screengrabbed below), the MHRA tells him: “Your concerns are all valid and ones that we share”.

It goes on to thank him for personally and publicly raising issues “at considerable risk to yourself”.

Letter from the MHRA to Dr David Watkins (Screengrab: TechCrunch)

Babylon has been contacted for a response to the MHRA’s validation of Watkins’ concerns. At the time of writing it had not responded to our request for comment.

The startup told the HSJ that it meets all the local requirements of regulatory bodies for the countries it operates in, adding: “Babylon is committed to upholding the highest of standards when it comes to patient safety.”

In one aforementioned aggressive incident last year, Babylon put out a press release attacking Watkins as a ‘troll’ and seeking to discredit the work he was doing to highlight safety issues with the triage performed by its chatbot.

It also claimed its technology had been “NHS validated” as a “safe service 10 times”.

It’s not clear what validation process Babylon was referring to there — and Watkins also flags and queries that claim in his correspondence with the MHRA, writing: “As far as I am aware, the Babylon chatbot has not been validated — in which case, their press release is misleading.”

The MHRA’s letter, meanwhile, makes it clear that the current regulatory regime in the UK for software-based medical device products does not adequately cover software-powered ‘healthtech’ devices, such as Babylon’s chatbot.

Per Watkins there is no approval process, currently. Such devices are merely registered with the MHRA — but there’s no legal requirement that the regulator assess them or even receive documentation related to their development. He says they exist independently — with the MHRA holding a register.

“You have raised a complex set of issues and there are several aspects that fall outside of our existing remit,” the regulator concedes in the letter. “This highlights some issues which we are exploring further, and which may be important as we develop a new regulatory framework for medical devices in the UK.”

An update to pan-EU medical devices regulation — which will bring in new requirements for software-based medical devices, and had been originally intended to be implemented in the UK in May last year — will no longer take place, given the country has left the bloc.

The UK is instead in the process of formulating its own regulatory update for medical device rules. This means there’s still a gap around software-based ‘healthtech’ — which isn’t expected to be fully plugged for several years. (Although Watkins notes there have been some tweaks to the regime, such as a partial lifting of confidentiality requirements last year.)

In a speech last year, health secretary Hancock told parliament that with the government aimed to formulate a regulatory system for medical devices that is “nimble enough” to keep up with tech-fuelled developments such as health wearables and AI while “maintaining and enhancing patient safety”. It will include giving the MHRA “a new power to disclose to members of the public any safety concerns about a device”, he said then.

In the meanwhile the existing (outdated) regulatory regime appears to be continuing to tie the regulator’s hands — at least vis-a-vis what they can say in public about safety concerns. It has taken Watkins making its letter to him public to do that.

In the letter the MHRA writes that “confidentiality unfortunately binds us from saying more on any specific investigation”, although it also tells him: “Please be assured that your concerns are being taken seriously and if there is action to be taken, then we will.”

“Based on the wording of the letter, I think it was clear that they wanted to provide me with a message that we do hear you, that we understand what you’re saying, we acknowledge the concerns which you’re raised, but we are limited by what we can do,” Watkins told us.

He also said he believes the regulator has engaged with Babylon over concerns he’s raised these past three years — noting the company has made a number of changes after he had raised specific queries (such as to its T&Cs which had initially said it’s not a medial device but were subsequently withdrawn and changed to acknowledge it is; or claims it had made that the chatbot is “100% safe” which were withdrawn — after an intervention by the Advertising Standards Authority in that case).

The chatbot itself has also been tweaked to put less emphasis on the diagnosis as an outcome and more emphasis on the triage outcome, per Watkins.

“They’ve taken a piecemeal approach [to addressing safety issues with chatbot triage]. So I would flag an issue [publicly via Twitter] and they would only look at that very specific issue. Patients of that age, undertaking that exact triage assessment — ‘okay, we’ll fix that, we’ll fix that’ — and they would put in place a [specific fix]. But sadly, they never spent time addressing the broader fundamental issues within the system. Hence, safety issues would repeatedly crop up,” he said, citing examples of multiple issues with cardiac triages that he also raised with the regulator.

“When I spoke to the people who work at Babylon they used to have to do these hard fixes… All they’d have to do is just kind of ‘dumb it down’ a bit. So, for example, for anyone with chest pain it would immediately say go to A&E. They would take away any thought process to it,” he added. (It also of course risks wasting healthcare resources — as he also points out in remarks to the regulators.)

“That’s how they over time got around these issues. But it highlights the challenges and difficulties in developing these tools. It’s not easy. And if you try and do it quickly and don’t give it enough attention then you just end up with something which is useless.”

Watkins also suspects the MHRA has been involved in getting Babylon to remove certain pieces of hyperbolic promotional material related to the 2018 AI event from its website.

In one curious episode, also related to the 2018 event, Babylon’s CEO demoed an AI-powered interface that appeared to show real-time transcription of a patient’s words combined with an ’emotion-scanning’ AI — which he said scanned facial expressions in real-time to generate an assessment of how the person was feeling — with Parsa going on to tell the audience: “That’s what we’ve done. That’s what we’ve built. None of this is for show. All of this will be either in the market or already in the market.”

However neither feature has actually been brought to market by Babylon as yet. Asked about this last month, the startup told TechCrunch: “The emotion detection functionality, seen in old versions of our clinical portal demo, was developed and built by Babylon‘s AI team. Babylon conducts extensive user testing, which is why our technology is continually evolving to meet the needs of our patients and clinicians. After undergoing pre-market user-testing with our clinicians, we prioritised other AI-driven features in our clinical portal over the emotion recognition function, with a focus on improving the operational aspects of our service.”

“I certainly found [the MHRA’s letter] very reassuring and I strongly suspect that the MHRA have been engaging with Babylon to address concerns which have been identified over the past three year period,” Watkins also told us today. “The MHRA don’t appear to have been ignoring the issues but Babylon simply deny any problems and can sit behind the confidentiality clauses.”

In a statement on the current regulatory situation for software-based medical devices in the UK, the MHRA told us:

The MHRA ensures that manufacturers of medical devices comply with the Medical Devices Regulations 2002 (as amended). Please refer to existing guidance.

The Medicines and Medical Devices Act 2021 provides the foundation for a new improved regulatory framework that is currently being developed. It will consider all aspects of medical device regulation, including the risk classification rules that apply to Software as a Medical Device (SaMD).

The UK will continue to recognise CE marked devices until 1 July 2023. After this time, requirements for the UKCA Mark must be met. This will include the revised requirements of the new framework that is currently being developed.

The Medicines and Medical Devices Act 2021 allows the MHRA to undertake its regulatory activities with a greater level of transparency and share information where that is in the interests of patient safety.

The regulator declined to be interviewed or response to questions about the concerns it says in the letter to Watkins that it shares about Babylon — telling us: “The MHRA investigates all concerns but does not comment on individual cases.”

“Patient safety is paramount and we will always investigate where there are concerns about safety, including discussing those concerns with individuals that report them,” it added.

Watkins raised one more salient point on the issue of patient safety for ‘cutting edge’ tech tools — asking where is the “real life clinical data”? So far, he says the studies patients have to go on are limited assessments — often made by the chatbot makers themselves.

“It’s one quite telling thing about this sector is the fact that there’s very little real life data out there,” he said. “These chatbots have been around for a good few years now… And there’s been enough time to get real life clinical data and yet it hasn’t appeared and you just wonder if, is that because in the real-life setting they are actually not quite as useful as we think they are?”

Source: Tech Crunch

Optimizely co-founder Dan Siroker said the idea for his new startup Scribe goes back to a couple of personal experiences — and although Scribe’s first product is focused on Zoom, those experiences weren’t Zoom-related at all.

Instead, Siroker recalled starting to go deaf and then having an “epiphany” the first time he put in a hearing aid, as he recovered a sense he thought he’d lost.

“That really was the spark that got me thinking about other opportunities to augment things your body naturally fails at,” he said.

Siroker added that memory was an obvious candidate, particularly since he also has aphantasia — the inability to visualize mental images, which made it “hard to remember certain things.”

It may jog your own memory if I note that Siroker founded Optimizely with Pete Koomen in 2010, then stepped down from the CEO role in 2017, with the testing and personalization startup acquired by Episerver last year. (And now Episerver itself is rebranding as Optimizely.)

Fast-forward to the present day and Siroker is now CEO at Scribe, which is taking signups for its first product. That product integrates into Zoom meetings and transforms them into searchable, shareable transcripts.

Siroker demonstrated it for me during our Zoom call. Scribe appears in the meeting as an additional participant, recording video and audio while creating a real-time transcript. During or after the meeting, users can edit the transcript, watch or listen to the associated moment in the recording and highlight important points.

From a technological perspective, none of this feels like a huge breakthrough, but I was impressed by the seamlessness of the experience — just by adding an additional participant, I had a full recording and searchable transcript of our conversation that I could consult later, including while I was writing this story.

Image Credits: Scribe

Although Scribe is recording the meeting, Siroker said he wants this to be more like a note-taking replacement than a tape recorder.

“Let’s say you and I were meeting and I came to that meeting with a pen and paper and I’m writing down what you’re saying,” he said. “That’s totally socially acceptable — in some ways, it’s flattering … If instead, I brought a tape recorder and plopped in front of you and hit record — you might actually have this experience — with some folks, that feels very different.”

The key, he argued, is that Scribe recordings and transcripts can be edited, and you can also turn individual components on and off at any time.

“This is not a permanent record,” he said. “This is a shared artifact that we all create as we have a meeting that — just like a Google Doc — you can go back and make changes.”

That said, it’s still possible that Scribe could record some embarrassing comments, and the recordings could eventually get meeting participants in trouble. (After all, leaked company meeting recordings have already prompted a number of news stories.) Siroker said he hopes that’s “not common,” but he also argued that it could create an increased sense of transparency and accountability if it happens occasionally.

Scribe has raised around $5 million in funding, across a round led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and another led by First Round Capital.

Image Credits: Scribe

Siroker told me he sees Zoom as just the “beachhead” for Scribe’s ambitions. Next up, the company will be adding support for products like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Eventually, he hopes to build a new “hive mind” for organizations, where everyone is “smarter and better” because so many of their conversations and knowledge are now searchable.

“Where we go after that really depends on where we think we can have the biggest positive impact on people’s lives,” he said. “It’s harder to make a case for personal conversations you have with a spouse but … I think if you strike the right balance between value and privacy and control, you could really get people to adopt this in a way that actually is a win-win.”

And if Scribe actually achieves its mission of helping us to record and recall information in a wide variety of contexts, could that have an impact on our natural ability to remember things?

“Yes is the answer, and I think that’s okay,” he responded. “Your brain has limited energy … Remembering the things somebody said a few weeks ago is something a computer can do amazingly. Why waste your precious brain cycles doing that?”

Source: Tech Crunch

A new auto-injecting pill might soon become a replacement for subcutaneous injection treatments.

The idea for this so-called robotic pill came out of a research project around eight years ago from InCube Labs—a life sciences lab operated by Rani Therapeutics Chairman and CEO Mir Imran, who has degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering from Rutgers University. A prominent figure in life sciences innovation, Imran has founded over 20 medical device companies and helped develop the world’s first implantable cardiac defibrillator.

In working on the technology behind San Jose-based Rani Therapeutics, Imran and his team wanted to find a way to relieve some of the painful side effects of subcutaneous (or under-the-skin) injections, while also improving the treatment’s efficacy. “The technology itself started with a very simple thesis,” said Imran in an interview. “We thought, why can’t we create a pill that contains a biologic drug that you swallow, and once it gets to the intestine, it transforms itself and delivers a pain-free injection?”

Rani Therapeutics’ approach is based on inherent properties of the gastrointestinal tract. An injecting mechanism in their pill is surrounded by a pH-sensitive coating that dissolves as the capsule moves from a patient’s stomach to the small intestine. This helps ensure that the pill starts injecting the medicine in the right place at the right time. Once there, the reactants mix and produce carbon dioxide, which in turn inflates a small balloon that helps create a pressure difference to help inject the drug-loaded needles into the intestinal wall. “So it’s a really well-timed cascade of events that results in the delivery of this needle,” said Imran.

Despite its somewhat mechanical procedure, the pill itself contains no metal or springs, reducing the chance of an inflammatory response in the body. The needles and other components are instead made of injectable-grade polymers, that Imran said has been used in other medical devices as well. Delivering the injections to the upper part of the small intestine also carries little risk of infection, as the prevalence of stomach acid and bile from the liver prevent bacteria from readily growing there.

One of Imran’s priorities for the pill was to eliminate the painful side effects of subcutaneous injections. “It wouldn’t make sense to replace them with another painful injection,” he said. “But biology was on our side, because your intestines don’t have the kind of pain sensors your skin does.” What’s more, administering the injection into the highly vascularized wall of the small intestine actually allows the treatment to work more efficiently than when applied through subcutaneous injection, which typically deposits the treatment into fatty tissue.

Imran and his team have plans to use the pill for a variety of indications, including the growth hormone disorder acromegaly, diabetes, and osteoporosis. In January 2020, their acromegaly treatment, Octreotide, demonstrated both safety and sustained bioavailability in primary clinical trials. They hope to pursue future clinical trials for other indications, but chose to prioritize acromegaly initially because of its well-established treatment drug but “very painful injection,” Imran said.

At the end of last year, Rani Therapeutics raised $69 million in new funding to help further develop and test their platform. “This will finance us for the next several years,” said Imran. “Our approach to the business is to make the technology very robust and manufacturable.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Robotic process automation (RPA) is making a major impact across every industry. But many don’t know how common the technology is and may not realize that they are interacting with it regularly. RPA is a growing megatrend — by 2022, Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations globally will have adopted RPA and its received over $1.8 billion in investments in the past two years alone.

Due to the shift to remote work, companies across every industry have implemented some form of RPA to simplify their operations to deal with an influx of requests. For example, when major airlines were bombarded with cancellation requests at the onset of the pandemic, RPA became essential to their customer service strategy.

According to Forrester, one major airline had over 120,000 cancellations during the first few weeks of the pandemic. By utilizing RPA to handle the influx of cancellations, the airline was able to simplify its refund process and assist customers in a timely matter.

Delivering this type of streamlined cancellation process with such high demand would have been extremely challenging, if not impossible, without RPA technology.

The multitude of other RPA use cases that have popped up since COVID-19 have made it evident that RPA isn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, interest in the usage of RPA is at an unprecedented high. Gartner inquiries related to RPA increased over 1,000% during 2020 as companies continue to invest.

However, there’s one big issue that’s commonly overlooked when it comes to RPA — security. Like we’ve seen with other innovations, the security aspect of RPA isn’t implemented in the early stages of development — leaving organizations vulnerable to cybercriminals.

If the security vulnerabilities of RPA aren’t addressed quickly, there will be a string of significant RPA breaches in 2021. However, by realizing that these new “digital coworkers” have identities of their own, companies can secure RPA before they make the headlines as the latest major breach.

Understanding RPA’s digital identity

With RPA, digital workers are created to take over repetitive manual tasks that have been traditionally performed by humans. Their interaction directly with business applications mimics the way humans use credentials and privilege — ultimately giving the robot an identity of its own. An identity that is created and operates much faster than any human identity but doesn’t eat, sleep, take holidays, go on strike or even get paid.

Source: Tech Crunch

With most of us locked into a square video box on platforms like Zoom, the desire to break away and perhaps wander around a virtual space is strong. These new ways of presenting people – as small circles of videos placed in a virtual space where they can move around – has appeared in various forms, like ‘virtual bars’ for the last few months during global pandemic lockdowns. Hey, I even went to a few virtual bars myself! Although the drinks from my fridge could have been better…

The advantage of this spatial approach is it gives a lot more ‘agency’ to the user. You feel, at least, a bit more in control, as you can make a ‘physical’ choice as to where you go, even if it is only still a virtual experience.

Now SpatialChat, one of the first startups with that approach which launched on ProductHunt in April last year, is upping the game with a new design and the feature of persistent chats. The product debuted on ProductHunt on April 20, 2020, and rose to No. 3 app of the day. The web-based platform has been bootstrapped the founders with their own resources.

SpatialChat now adding a special tier and features for teams running town hall meetings and virtual offices, and says it now has more than 3,000 organizations as paying customers, with more than 200,000 total monthly active users.

The startup is part of a virtual networking space being populating by products such as
Teamflow, Gather, and Remo. Although it began as a online networking events service, its now trying to re-position as a forum for multi-group discussions, all the way up from simple stand-up meetings to online conferences.

SpatialChat uses a mix of ‘proximity’ video chats, screen sharing, and rooms for up to 50 people. It’s now putting in pricing plans for regular, weekly, and one-time use cases. It says it’s seen employees at Sony, Panasonic, Sega, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and McKinsey, as well as educators and staff at 108 American universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and MIT, use the platform.

Almas Abulkhairov, CEO and Co-founder of SpatialChat says: “Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams represent a virtual office for many teams but most of our customers say these apps aren’t a good fit for that. They don’t provide the same serendipity of thought you get working shoulder to shoulder and “Zoom fatigue” became a term for a reason. We want to bring the best from offline work.”

Konstantin Krasov, CPO at DataSouls, who used the platform, said: “We had 2500 people in attendance during a 2-day event that we hosted for our community of 50,000 Data Scientists. SpatialChat enabled us to make a cool networking event, Q/A and AMA with thought leaders in data science.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Coursera, an online education platform that has seen its business grow amid the coronavirus pandemic, is planning to file paperwork tomorrow for its initial public offering, sources familiar with the matter say. The company has been talking to underwriters since last year, but tomorrow could mark its first legal step in the process to IPO.

The Mountain View-based business, founded in 2012, was last valued at $2.4 billion in the private markets, during a Series F fundraising event in July 2020. Bloomberg pegs Coursera’s latest valuation at $5 billion.

The latest financing event brought its cash balance to $300 million, right around the money that Chegg had before it went public. Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda did confirm then that the company is eyeing an eventual IPO.

Coursera has had a busy pandemic. Similar to Udemy, another massive open online course provider planning to go public, Coursera added an enterprise arm to its business. It launched Coursera for Campus to help colleges bring on online courses (credit optional) with built-in exams; more than 3,700 schools across the world are using the software. It is unclear how much money this operation has brought in, but we know that Udemy for Business is nearing $200 million in annual recurring revenue. In February, the company announced that it has received B Corp. certification, which means that it hits high standards for social and environmental performance. It also converted to a public benefit corporation.

GSV, a venture capital firm that exclusively backs edtech companies, had its largest position of its first fund in Coursera. GSV announced a $180 million Fund II yesterday. 

It makes sense that edtech companies want to go public while the markets remain hot and remote education continues to be a central way that instruction is delivered. Other companies from the sector that have gone public in recent weeks include Nerdy and Skillshare, two companies that used a SPAC to make their public debuts. Once – and if – Coursera does go public, it will join these newbies as well as the long-time edtech public companies including 2U, Chegg, and K12 Inc, and Zovio Solutions.

Coursera declined to comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

When I first wrote about Whatnot in February of last year, they were just getting started. Aiming to be the GOAT of collectible toys, they were focusing first on being the go-to trusted spot for buying and selling authenticated Funko Pop figurines.

A few months later, as they expanded into categories like pins and Pokémon cards, the company started to build out a live shopping platform — think of something along the lines of a TV shopping network, but swap out the studios and camera crews for folks at home with iPhones selling to an audience of fellow collectors. The concept had already proven popular in China, and was starting to gain traction amongst buyers of collectibles in the US… but a good chunk of those US live streams were happening on Instagram Live, which isn’t really built for things like bidding or handling payments after a sale occurs. Whatnot saw a gap in the market, and wanted to fill it.

It seems that move is working out well for the team. At the end of 2020, Whatnot raised a $4M seed round; just a few months later, building on the momentum of its live shopping platform and looking to expand into many more categories of collectibles, it has raised another $20M.

The company tells me that this Series A round was led by Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz, and backed by YC, Wonder Ventures, Operator Partners, Scribble Ventures, Steve Aoki, and Chris Zarou.

Whatnot continues to offer a more traditional, non-livestreamed selling platform — but co-founder Grant Lafontaine tells me about “95%” of the team’s focus is on the livestream side of things.

“People really come to us for the live, but then they’re like ‘Eh, I don’t want to sell across 10 different platforms’ so we give them the tools to be a one-stop shop,” he says.

As I wrote back in December, one increasingly popular type of livestream on Whatnot is the “card break”, wherein:

Users pool their money to buy an entire box of trading card packs — often boxes that are no longer being produced and can cost thousands of dollars to obtain. Each user gets a number, each number tied to a pack (or packs) within the box. Each pack is opened on the livestream, its contents sent to the (hopefully?) lucky owner tied to that pack’s number.

So why raise more money? Lafontaine tells me it’s to help them expand into more categories, fast. The company currently focuses primarily on Pokémon cards, Funko Pops, FigPins, and sports cards, but they mention things like comic books, video games, and vintage hardware as natural fits. Diving into a new category means building up a community for it, convincing trusted sellers to hop on their platform and marketing to the right buyers to make it worthwhile. In time, Lafontaine tells me, the team expects to cover 100+ categories.

Source: Tech Crunch

A lot of our communication these days with each other is digital, and today one of the companies enabling that — with APIs to build chat experiences into apps — is announcing a round of funding on the back of some very strong growth.

Stream, which lets developers build chat and activity streams into apps and other services by way of a few lines of code, has raised $38 million, funding that it will be using to continue building out its existing business as well as to work on new features.

Stream started out with APIs for activity feeds, and then it expanded to chat, which today can be integrated into apps built on a variety of platforms. Currently, its customers integrate third-party chatbots and use Dolby for video and audio within Stream, but over time, these are all areas where Stream itself would like to do more.

“End-to-end cryption, chatbots: we want to take as many components as we can,” said Thierry Schellenbach, the CEO who co-founded the startup with the startup’s CTO Tommaso Barbugli in Amsterdam in 2015 (the startup still has a substantial team in Amsterdam headed by Barbugli, but its headquarters is now in Boulder, Colorado, where Schellenbach eventually moved).

Image Credits: Stream (opens in a new window)

The company already has amassed a list of notable customers, including Ikea-owned TaskRabbit, NBC Sports, Unilever, Delivery Hero, Gojek, eToro and Stanford University, as well as a number of others that it’s not disclosing across healthcare, education, finance, virtual events, dating, gaming and social. Together, the apps Stream powers cover more than 1 billion users.

This Series B round is being led by Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, with previous backers GGV Capital and 01 Advisors (the fund co-founded by Twitter’s former CEO and COO, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain) also participating.

Alongside them, a mix of previous and new individual and smaller investors also participated: Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Amsterdam-based Knight Capital; Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin; and Selcuk Atli, co-founder and CEO of social gaming app Bunch (itself having raised a notable round of $20 million led by General Catalyst not long ago).

That list is a notable indicator of what kinds of startups are also quietly working with Stream.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but Schellenbach hints that it is “6x its chat revenues.”

Indeed, the Series B speaks of a moment of opportunity: it is coming only about six months after the startup raised a Series A of $15 million, and in fact Stream wasn’t looking to raise right now.

“We were not planning to raise funding until later this year but then Aydin reached out to us and made it hard to say no,” Schellenbach said.

“More than anything else, they are building on the platforms in the tech that matters,” Senkut added in an interview, noting that its users were attesting to a strong return on investment. “It’s rare to see a product so critical to customers and scaling well. It’s just uncapped capability… and we want to be a part of the story.”

That moment of opportunity is not one that Stream is pursuing on its own.

Some of the more significant of the many players in the world of API-based communications services like messaging, activity streams — those consolidated updates you get in apps that tell you when people have responded to a post of yours or new content has landed that is relevant to you, or that you have a message, and so on — and chat include SendBird, Agora, PubNub, Twilio and Sinch, all of which have variously raised substantial funding, found a lot of traction with customers, or are positioning themselves as consolidators.

That may speak of competition, but it also points to the vast market there for the tapping.

Indeed, one of the reasons companies like Stream are doing so well right now is because of what they have built and the market demand for it.

Communications services like Stream’s might be best compared to what companies like Adyen (another major tech force out of Amsterdam), Stripe, Rapyd, Mambu and others are doing in the world of fintech.

As with something like payments, the mechanics of building, for example, chat functionality can be complex, usually requiring the knitting together of an array of services and platforms that do not naturally speak to each other.

At the same time, something like an activity feed or a messaging feature is central to how a lot of apps work, even if they are not the core feature of the product itself. One good example of how that works are food ordering and delivery apps: they are not by their nature “chat apps” but they need to have a chat option in them for when you do need to communicate with a driver or a restaurant.

Putting those forces together, it’s pretty logical that we’d see the emergence of a range of tech companies that both have done the hard work of building the mechanics of, say, a chat service, and making that accessible by way of an API to those who want to use it, with APIs being one of the more central and standard building blocks in apps today; and a surge of developers keen to get their hands on those APIs to build that functionality into their apps.

What Stream is working on is not to be confused with the customer-service focused services that companies like Zendesk or Intercom are building when they talk about chat for apps. Those can be specialized features in themselves that link in with CRM systems and customer services teams and other products for marketing analytics and so on. Instead, Stream’s focus are services for consumers to talk to other consumers.

What is a trend worth watching is whether easy-to-integrate services like Stream’s might signal the proliferation of more social apps over time.

There is already at least one key customer — which I am now allowed to name — that is a steadily growing, still young social app, which has built the core of its service on Stream’s API.

With just a handful of companies — led by Facebook, but also including ByteDance/TikTok, Tencent, Twitter, Snap, Google (via YouTube) and some others depending on the region — holding an outsized grip on social interactions, easier, platform-agnostic access to core communications tools like chat could potentially help more of these, with different takes on “social” business models, find their way into the world.

“Stream’s technology addresses a common problem in product development by offering an easy-to-integrate and scalable messaging solution,” said Dick Costolo of 01 Advisors, and the former Twitter CEO, in a statement. “Beyond that, their team and clear vision set them apart, and we ardently back their mission.”

Source: Tech Crunch

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming around the corner fast, April 1 & 2nd. And you still have a chance to pitch your startup on the famous TC stage to an amazing line up of judges. On April 2nd, TechCrunch will feature ten top startups across the globe at the Early Stage Pitch Off. Companies will garner the attention of press and investors worldwide. Founders – apply here by March 9th.

The pitch-off will consist of a 5 minute presentation followed by a Q&A with our expert panel of judges. The top three companies will move to a final round, this time with a more in-depth Q&A. The winner will get a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to Extra Crunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

We know you’re excited to know who you’ll be pitching to. So without further ado, here are a few of the judges for the Early Stage Pitch-Off:

Lucy Deland – Inspired Capital

Lucy is a Partner at Inspired Capital. Prior to Inspired Capital, Lucy was on the founding team at Paperless Post, where she spent a decade as COO. In her role, Lucy built and led finance, customer insights & operations, strategic planning, and marketing—driving the company’s growth to a network of 100M hosts and guests. Lucy also led the company to raise $50M in venture financing and grew a team of 100+ in downtown Manhattan.

Bucky Moore – Kleiner Perkins

Bucky Moore is a partner at Kleiner Perkins focusing on developer facing software and infrastructure investments. As an early investor, Bucky serves on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies including Netlify, Materialize, CodeSandbox, Opstrace and Stackbit.

Marlon Nichols – MaC Venture Capital

Marlon Nichols is the founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital (formerly Cross Culture Ventures), which finds entrepreneurs who are building the future for the rest of America. He’s a former Kauffman Fellow and Investment Director at Intel Capital, with an extensive background in technology, private equity, media and entertainment.

Eghosa Omoigui – EchoVC Partners

Eghosa Omoigui is the founder and Managing General Partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed & early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets. Before this, Eghosa was Director, Consumer Internet & Semantic Technologies, with Intel Capital. Representative investments include Lifebank, Migo, Frontier Car Group, SystemOne, Gro Intelligence and KBox.

Neal Sales-Griffin – TechStars

Neal Sáles-Griffin is the Managing Director of Techstars Chicago and a Venture Partner for MATH. Neal is an entrepreneur, investor, and teacher. In 2011, he co-founded the first beginner-focused, in person coding bootcamp. He is active in non-profit and civic engagement across Chicago and in 2018 he ran for mayor.

Sarah Smith – Bain Capital

Sarah Smith is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures where she primarily invests in early- to mid-stage companies across a range of sectors including consumer, SaaS, and marketplaces. Sarah has been deeply involved in high-growth startups as an executive, investor, and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures, and Stanford.

Leah Solivan – Fuel Capital
Leah Solivan is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, marketplaces, and retail. She’s passionate about supporting teams who are taking on world-changing ideas.

Stephanie Zahn – Sequoia Capital

Stephanie Zhan is a partner on the early stage investing team at Sequoia Capital. She grew up in Hong Kong and Beijing and studied Computer Science at Stanford. At Sequoia, she loves partnering with founders pushing the boundaries of creating meaningful experiences in consumer, enterprise, and frontier technology. She has led Sequoia’s investmentsin Rec Room (digital third place), Brud (modern-day Marvel through computer-generated characters that become social media celebrities), Ethos (a modern life insurance company), Graphcore (microprocessors for machine intelligence), Linear (issues tracking tool), Evervault (dev tools for data privacy) and Middesk (background checks for businesses) among others.

Early Stage Day 1 will be filled with must-see panels from the judges above and more:

• How to Build Your Early Team for Future Growth (Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures)
• 10 Things NOT to Do When Starting a Company (Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital)
• Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A (Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins)
• How to Get An Investor’s Attention (Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital)

And that’s not all. If you snag your ticket to TC Early Stage, you get free access to Extra Crunch!  An Extra Crunch membership includes:

• Weekly investor surveys
• Fundraising, growth, monetization and workforce advice from startup experts
• Market analysis
• Late-stage deep dives
• Access to weekly Extra Crunch Live events
• EC Perks Program (save big $$$ on services and products you already use)
• The TechCrunch List

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon is rolling out a new experience for its Fire TV platform that puts more focus on subscription-free streaming and other live content. The company today announced several new services are being integrated into its suite of Live features, including Xumo and its own IMDb TV and Amazon news app. The company also soon plans to add Plex, it notes.

All four of the services are available for free with ads and don’t require a subscription, Amazon says. These channels and their content will appear in Fire TV’s Live tab in the “On Now” rows, as well as in the Universal Channel Guide on the Fire TV app.

With the additions, Amazon says there are now over 400 live streaming channels from across 20 providers that can be accessed from Fire TV’s live channel guide — including services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, Tubi, Pluto TV, Philo, Prime Video Channels, Prime Video Live Events (like Thursday Night Football), and more.

Amazon also notes that more than 200 of those channels are available for free with ads, and don’t need a subscription to watch.

Free, live streaming content is becoming a battleground for both Amazon and Roku, the top two streaming media platforms in the U.S. But they’re taking different approaches to the format.

Amazon’s section showcasing free, live content has become more of a part of its overall Fire TV interface, instead of a separate channel you have to launch. This speaks to Amazon’s design philosophy with Fire TV, whose interface largely resembles that of a streaming service.

“We’ve always taken a content-forward approach when designing Fire TV. When you turn on your TV, you’re going to see shows, movies, and sports — not just rows of apps,” said VP & GM of Amazon Fire TV, Sandeep Gupta. “This philosophy extends to our approach to live content. We’re continuing to invest heavily in Live TV and so are our content partners. We’re expanding that today with the addition of new integrations, Alexa capabilities, and enhanced content discovery mechanisms,” he added.

Meanwhile, Roku offers its own hub with always-on free movies and TV shows, called The Roku Channel, which helps to serve as a starting point for cord cutters who are looking for something to watch after they’ve ditched traditional pay TV. But unlike Fire TV, Roku’s design is, in fact,  “rows of apps.” This makes its interface simple to use and less cluttered — something many people seem to prefer. Here, The Roku Channel is just another app to launch, not a part of the Roku interface.

Roku also makes The Roku Channel available online and as a standalone mobile app, just like other free streaming services. And this week, it integrated most of The Roku Channel’s free content with its main Roku.com website, in order to reach more consumers.

Separately, Fire TV offers its own app, but limits itself to live content, not on-demand, ad-supported shows and movies.

In addition to today’s newly announced live TV integrations, Amazon also says its live TV programs are now Alexa-enabled.

That means you can say things like “Alexa, play Good Morning America” or “Alexa, play the Seahawks game,” to launch a specific live TV program by name. This will work with the Alexa Voice Remote, on the Fire TV Cube, and with Fire TVs paired with an Echo device.

Live TV programs will also appear in the “App Peak” (hover) feature on the newly updated Fire TV interface. This feature will show you what’s on a given channel when you hover over it in the main navigation, and works on Fire TV Stick (3rd gen.) and Fire TV Stick Lite, for the time being.

As a result of its expansions and live TV integrations — not to mention the pandemic that’s kept people at home for entertainment — Amazon says that engagement with live streaming apps on Fire TV has more than doubled in the last 12 months, up by over 130%.

Amazon says the new features are rolling out today to Fire TV devices.

Source: Tech Crunch