Архив рубрики: Recent Funding

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Pliops lands $100M for chips that accelerate analytics in data centers

Analyzing data generated within the enterprise — for example, sales and purchasing data — can lead to insights that improve operations. But some organizations are struggling to process, store and use their vast amounts of data efficiently. According to an IDC survey commissioned by Seagate, organizations collect only 56% of the data available throughout their lines of business, and out of that 56%, they only use 57%.

Part of the problem is that data-intensive workloads require substantial resources, and that adding the necessary compute and storage infrastructure is often expensive. For companies moving to the cloud specifically, IDG reports that they plan to devote $78 million toward infrastructure this year. Thirty-six percent cited controlling costs as their top challenge.
That’s why Uri Beitler launched Pliops, a startup developing what he calls “data processors” for enterprise and cloud data centers. Pliop’s processors are engineered to boost the performance of databases and other apps that run on flash memory, saving money in the long run, he claims.
“It became clear that today’s data needs are incompatible with yesterday’s data center architecture. Massive data growth has collided with legacy compute and storage shortcomings, creating slowdowns in computing, storage bottlenecks and diminishing networking efficiency,” Beitler told TechCrunch in an email interview. “While CPU performance is increasing, it’s not keeping up, especially where accelerated performance is critical. Adding more infrastructure often proves to be cost prohibitive and hard to manage. As a result, organizations are looking for solutions that free CPUs from computationally intensive storage tasks.”
Pliops isn’t the first to market with a processor for data analytics. Nvidia sells the BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). Marvell has its Octeon technology. Oracle’s SPARC M7 chip has a data analytics accelerator coprocessor with a specialized set of instructions for data transformation. And in the realm of startups, Blueshift Memory and Speedata are creating hardware that they say can perform analytics tasks significantly faster than standard processors.
Image Credits: Pliops
But Pliops claims to be further along than most, with deployments and pilots with customers (albeit unnamed) including fintechs, “medium-sized” communication service providers, data center operators and government labs. The startup’s early traction won over investors, it would seem, which poured $100 million into its Series D round that closed today.
Koch Disruptive Technologies led the tranche, with participation from SK Hynix and Walden International’s Lip-Bu Tan, bringing Pliops’ total capital raised to date to more than $200 million. Beitler says that it’ll be put toward building out the company’s hardware and software roadmap, bolstering Pliops’ footprint with partners and expanding its international headcount.
“Many of our customers saw tremendous growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks in part to their ability to react quickly to the new work environment and conditions of uncertainty. Pliops certainly did. While some customers were affected by supply chain issues, we were not,” Beitler said. “We do not see any slowdown in data growth — or the need to leverage it. Pliops was strong before this latest funding round and even stronger now.”
Accelerating data processing
Beitler, the former director of advanced memory solutions at Samsung’s Israel Research Center, co-founded Pliops in 2017 alongside Moshe Twitto and Aryeh Mergi. Twitto was a research scientist at Samsung developing signal processing technologies for flash memory, while Mergi co-launched a number of startups — including two that were acquired by EMC and SanDisk — prior to joining Pliops.
Pliop’s processor delivers drive fail protection for solid-state drives (SSD) as well as in-line compression, a technology that shrinks the size of data by finding identical data sequences and then saving only the first sequence. Beitler claims the company’s technology can reduce drive space while expanding capacity, mapping “variable-sized” compressed objects within storage to reduce wasted space.
A core component of Pliops’ processor is its hardware-accelerated key-value storage engine. In key-value databases — databases where data is stored in a “key-value” format and optimized for reading and writing — key-value engines manage all the persistent data directly. Beitler makes the case that CPUs are typically over-utilized when running these engines, resulting in apps not taking full advantage of SSD’s capabilities.
“Organizations are looking for solutions that free CPUs from computationally-intensive storage tasks. Our hardware helps create a modern data center architecture by leveraging a new generation of hardware-accelerated data processing and storage management technology — one that delivers orders of magnitude improvement in performance, reliability and scalability,” Beitler said. “In short, Pliops enables getting more out of existing infrastructure investments.”
Pliops’ processor became commercially available last July. The development team’s current focus is accelerating the ingest of data for machine learning use cases, Beitler says — use cases that have grown among Pliops’ current and potential customers.
Image Credits: Pliops
The road ahead
Certainly, Pliops has its work cut out for it. Nvidia is a formidable competitor in the data processing accelerator space, having spent years developing its BlueField lineup. And AMD acquired DPU vendor Pensando for $1.9 billion, signaling its wider ambitions.
A move that could pay dividends for Pliops is joining the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project (OPI), a relatively new venture under the Linux Foundation that aims to create standards around data accelerator hardware. While Pliops isn’t a member yet — current members include Intel, Nvidia, Marvell, F5, Red Hat, Dell and Keysight Technologies — it stands to reason that becoming one could expose its technology to a larger customer base.
Beitler demurred when asked about OPI, but pointed out that the market for data acceleration is still nascent and growing.
“We continue to see both infrastructure and application teams being overwhelmed with underperforming storage and overwhelmed applications that aren’t meeting company’s data demands,” Beitler said. “The overall feedback is that our processor is a game-changing product and without it companies are required to make years of investments in software and hardware engineering to solve the same problem.”
Pliops lands $100M for chips that accelerate analytics in data centers

Datch secures $10M to build voice assistants to factory floors

Datch, a company that develops AI-powered voice assistants for industrial customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Blackhorn Ventures. The proceeds will be used to expand operations, CEO Mark Fosdike said, as well as develop new software support, tools and capabilities.
Datch started when Fosdike, who has a background in aerospace engineering, met two former Siemens engineers — Aric Thorn and Ben Purcell. They came to the collective realization that voice products built for business customers have to overcome business-specific challenges, like understanding jargon, acronyms and syntax unique to particular customers.
“The way we extract information from systems changes every year, but the way we input information — especially in the industrial world — hasn’t changed since the invention of the keyboard and database,” Fosdike said. “The industrial world had been left in the dark for years, and we knew that developing a technology with voice-visual AI would help light the way for these factories.”
The voice assistants that Datch builds leverage AI to collect and structure data from users in a factory or in the field, parsing commands like “Report an issue for the Line 1 Spot Welder. I estimate it will take half a day to fix.” They run on a smartphone and link to existing systems to write and read records, including records from enterprise resource and asset management platforms.
Datch’s assistants provide a timeline of events and can capture data without an internet connection; they auto-sync once back online. Using them, workers can fill out company forms, create and update work orders, assign tasks and search through company records all via voice.
Fosdike didn’t go into detail about how Datch treats the voice data, save that it encrypts data both in-transit and at rest and performs daily backups.
“We have to employ a lot of tight, automated feedback loops to train the voice and [language] data, and so everyone’s interaction with Datch is slightly different, depending on the company and team they work within,” Fosdike explained. “Customers are exploring different use cases such as using the [language] data in predictive maintenance, automated classification of cause codes, and using the voice data to predict worker fatigue before it becomes a critical safety risk.”
That last bit about predicting worker fatigue is a little suspect. The idea that conditions like tiredness can be detected in a person’s voice isn’t a new one, but some researchers believe it’s unlikely AI can flag them with 100% accuracy. After all, people express tiredness in different ways, depending not only on the workplace environment but on their sex and cultural, ethnic and demographic backgrounds.
The tiredness-detecting scenario aside, Fosdike asserts that Datch’s technology is helping industrial clients get ahead of turbulence in the economy by “vastly improving” the efficiency of their operations. Frontline staff typically have to work with reporting tools that aren’t intuitive, he notes, and in many cases, voice makes for a less cumbersome, faster alternative form of input.
“We help frontline workers with productivity and solve the pain point of time wasted on their reports by decreasing the process time,” Fosdike said. “Industrial companies are fast realizing that to keep up with demand or position themselves to withstand a global pandemic, they need to find a way to scale with more than just peoplepower. Our AI offers these companies an efficient solution in a fraction of the time and with less overhead needed.”
Datch competes with Rain, Aiqudo and Onvego, all of which are developing voice technologies for industrial customers. Deloitte’s Maxwell, Genba and Athena are rivals in Fosdike’s eyes, as as well. But business remains steady — Datch counts ConEd, Singapore Airlines, ABB Robotics and the New York Power Authority among its clients.
“We raised this latest round earlier than expected due to the influx of demand from the market. The timing is right to capitalize on both the post-COVID boom in digital transformation as well as corporate investments driven by the infrastructure bill,” Fosdike said, referring to the $1 trillion package U.S. lawmakers passed last November. “Currently we have a team of 20, and plan to use the funds to grow to 55 to 60 people, scaling to roughly 40 by the end of the year.”
To date, Datch has raised $15 million in venture capital.
Datch secures $10M to build voice assistants to factory floors

Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity

Mobile well-being apps topped 1.2 billion downloads last year, while leading meditation app Calm alone pulled in $118.2 million in revenue, data from Sensor Tower indicates. That may leave some to believe the digital well-being market is essentially solved, but a new startup, Lumi Interactive, believes the opposite is true. The Melbourne-based, women-led company has identified a under-explored niche in the mobile market that involves translating offline, self-care activities into games as a means of reducing our collective stress and anxiety.
While most mobile games focus on having users compete against one another or achieve some sort of goal, the startup’s forthcoming title Kinder World’s main aim is to help users relax. It accomplishes this through short, snack-sized sessions where it asks players to care for virtual houseplants by taking care of themselves in the real world.
In the game, players are encouraged to perform simple acts of kindness — like practicing daily gratitude, for example — in order to improve their own well-being and that of the game’s wider community. The game features a variety of non-stressful activities — like watering houseplants, interacting with animal neighbors and decorating a cozy room with plants, among other things.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
In some ways, this recalls how many of us spent months in creative play during the height of the pandemic engaged with games like Animal Crossing, the popular Nintendo game whose pressure-free environment helped many relax and pass the time under COVID-19 lockdowns. In Animal Crossing, players designed indoor and outdoor spaces, shopped for outfits and home accessories, planted flowers and chitchatted with animal pals.
As it turns out, the pandemic played a big role in Lumi Interactive’s founding, too, the company told TechCrunch.
“In late 2020, we were a small team of three, exhausted by the pandemic and a hard year for the business,” explains Lumi Interactive co-founder and CEO Lauren Clinnick. “We decided to take two weeks to refresh ourselves with a game jam to make something totally new, and mental well-being was very much on our minds. We’d also all become closer to nature over the harsh Melbourne lockdowns and wanted to examine why houseplants had become part of a self-care routine for so many people we knew,” she says.
That gave rise to a question as to whether houseplant care could be brought into the digital world, and the team prototyped Kinder World as a result.
“It had a spark of something special after just two weeks, and the concept tested very strongly with our target audience straight away,” Clinnick says.
Both Clinnick and Lumi Interactive co-founder Christina Chen had a background in gaming before founding their new company and had known each other for nearly a decade. Clinnick first entered the games industry as a marketing consultant for games like Crossy Road, co-founded a boutique games marketing agency, then moved into direct games development. Chen, meanwhile, had a technical background that saw her working on payments at Xbox Live and later as a senior producer at PopCap in Shanghai before co-founding games publisher Surprise Attack (now known as Fellow Traveller).
The duo had bonded over their mutual love for data, underserved player communities and the new opportunities they believed were still on the horizon for mobile gaming, Clinnick says.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
As the team investigated the idea for a more collaborative, self-care-focused title, they discovered that many of today’s consumers weren’t finding satisfaction with mainstream well-being apps.
“When we actually interviewed users — especially Gen Z and millennial women and nonbinary folks — we found that 97% had dropped out of apps like Headspace and Calm, citing they ‘felt like work’ or became another thing for them to fail at,” says Clinnick. “Instead they often have fragmented relaxation hobbies such as gaming, houseplants, Squishmallow collecting, crafting and ASMR. These are mostly distraction activities that helped their short-term anxiety but didn’t help them build important resilience skills in the long term,” she says.
Lumi Interactive responded to this feedback by making sure their game was designed in a way where you couldn’t fail, no matter how you played. For instance, all the activities in the game are optional and the virtual houseplants will never die.
“We’ve consciously made these choices to prevent a burdened feeling for players,” says Clinnick. 
In keeping with a strategy to co-develop the game along with their community, the startup turned to TikTok to test various elements, like game design, the art style and to find out what interested their users.
Now a full-time team of 12 and growing, Lumi Interactive closed on $6.75 million in seed funding in March in a round led by a16z — which it’s officially announcing this week. Other investors include 1Up Ventures, Galileo Ventures, Eric Seufert’s Heracles Capital and Double Loop Games’ co-founder and CEO, Emily Greer.
The startup is using the funds to grow the team so it can further develop the larger concept it calls “crowd healing,” informed by Lumi Interactive’s full-time well-being researcher, Dr. Hannah Gunderman, Ph.D. The company believes the idea — which references sharing kindness with others through self-care style gameplay — could become a new gaming category.
Lumi Interactive, of course, is not the first to imagine games that aren’t goal-focused. There are games that are interactive stories or graphic novels or other indie projects, but they often still have the gamer play through the experience to come to a conclusion. Kinder World, meanwhile, would be something players come back to whenever they need to relax, which is why the company is considering a subscription offering, in addition to standard in-app purchases. It’s also exploring online-offline experiences with physical items that could unlock certain game benefits or activities. 
Kinder World is currently in alpha testing on iOS and Android and aims for a full release later in 2022.
Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity

Tiger Global backs SaaS omnichannel social commerce platform SleekFlow in $8M funding

Social commerce — the process of buying and selling products or services directly through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — is becoming the most natural way for consumers to make purchases since people use social media and messaging apps almost every day.
SleekFlow, an omnichannel social commerce platform that helps businesses build customer flow automation from messaging and live video to transactions, has closed $8 million Series A funding led by Tiger Global Management. Transcend Capital and AEF Greater Bay Area Fund, managed by Gobi Partners GBA, also participated in the round.
“Consumers now spend 80 percent of their time on social platforms, and it is already a habit to discover and buy products directly from here,” said founder and CEO of SleekFlow Henson Tsai. “SleekFlow aims to drive this e-commerce revolution by being the top social commerce unified hub — merging conversations, product catalogs, payment solutions, and order management into one for businesses.”
Image Credits: SleekFlow
Founded in 2019, SleekFlow now serves more than 5,000 businesses across the globe, including NARS Cosmetics, Bossini, Lalamove Hong Kong and PSB Academy. The company claims that it saw approximately 500% revenue growth after its recent pre-Series A funding backed by Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund (AHKEF) in May 2021. (SleekFlow did not provide its baseline for that growth.)
The Hong Kong-headquartered startup will use the fresh capital for its market penetration into Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore and Malaysia, as well as the U.K. and other countries in Europe. In addition, the latest funding will enable SleekFlow to enhance its product development with fintech and data analytics functions, one-click checkouts via social media platforms, and easy in-chat payment integrations for online to offline (O2O) and e-commerce brands’ seamless workflow.
The startup has recently launched a fintech product social-to-payment feature to provide a comprehensive solution for both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses. In Southeast Asia alone, about 90% of digital merchants use digital payments for profitability and survival, the company says, adding that the chat-to-checkout tool is significant in driving sales and conversions from various digital sales channels. SleekFlow also introduced a new sales and analytics and customer service performance tracking that helps users track and analyze consumer profiles and behaviors for personalized communications after its partnership with Shopify last November.
The global social commerce market is projected to rise to $6.2 trillion by 2030.
According to the company, one in five dollars spent on retail in Southeast Asia is transacted through social media, and more consumers are looking to businesses offering convenient communications. SleekFlow integrates multiple messaging channels such as Official WhatsApp Business API, Facebook Messenger, Instagram chat, SMS and Telegram to address the challenges of managing multiple messaging and social media platforms.
“Despite the economic downturn, the social commerce market is going stronger than ever, reaching $474 billion in 2021,” Chibo Tang, managing partner of Gobi Partners GBA said in a statement. “Eight in 10 U.S. businesses anticipate increased sales via social media within the next three years. SleekFlow’s innovative solutions will help these global commerce businesses meet the evolving needs of customers who are turning to social channels to purchase more than ever before.”
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Tiger Global backs SaaS omnichannel social commerce platform SleekFlow in $8M funding

Local news app News Break raises $115M

The popular news app News Break is announcing that it has raised $115 million in new funding.
The press release claims this round makes News Break “one of the first new unicorns of 2021,” but the startup declined to disclose its actual valuation.
Founder and CEO Jeff Zheng said that when he started the company in 2015, the goal was to differentiate itself from other news aggregation apps by focusing on local news, and to “help or empower these local content creators.”

To be clear, you can find similar stories in News Break that you’d see in other news apps (there’s a whole section for coronavirus news, for example, and this morning you’ll see plenty of headlines about yesterday’s violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol), but you’ll also see plenty of stories that are highlighted specifically based on your location.

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“Technology is interweaving with every aspect of the company — in how we empower local publishers and local journalists to generate content more effectively and to reach an online audience more effectively,” Zheng said. “We have AI tools to help provide all these relevant articles … We have location profiles and what you’re most interested in, which we basically match against the content.”

Jeff Zheng. Image Credits: News Break

The local focus may be increasingly valuable given the broader economic challenges facing the local news business — as Zheng put it, there’s “strong user demand” for local news but “weak supply.” And the strategy seems to have paid off for News Break so far, with the app reaching the top spot in the News category of Apple’s U.S. App Store multiple times (it’s currently ranked No. 4), and in Google Play as well. The startup says it’s currently reaching 12 million daily active users.
Zheng said that while News Break already shares ad revenue with publishers, he’s hopeful that the value it provides those publishers will only grow over time: “We want to give as much money back to the creators as possible.”
When I suggested that publishers and journalists may be leery about relying too much on a third-party platform to reach their audience, Zheng argued that News Break’s incentives are very different from the big internet and social media platforms.
“We are local-centric,” he said. “If local publishers are struggling, if the newspapers are diminishing every year, then sooner or later we are out of business.”
And while Zheng previously led Yahoo Labs in Beijing and was also founding CEO at Chinese news startup Yidian Zixun — plus, the startup has team members in Beijing and Shanghai — he emphasized that this is a “U.S. high-tech company incorporated in Delaware, headquartered in Mountain View,” with the majority of its workforce in the United States and a focus on the U.S. market. The distinction could become important if News Break continues to grow, given the U.S. government’s current attempts to ban some Chinese companies.

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News Break previously raised $36 million in funding. The new round was led by Francisco Partners, which is taking a seat on the News Break board. IDG Capital also participated.
In a statement, Francisco Partners Principal Alan Ni said:
News Break’s breakout multi-year successes in the local news space is what first brought them to our attention. We are inspired by their mission and extremely impressed by the work they have done to bring local-news distribution into the 21st Century through cutting-edge machine learning and media savvy. We are thrilled to be partnering with News Break’s talented leadership team as they continue to drive local news innovations while also rapidly expanding their business into adjacent local verticals beyond news.

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Local news app News Break raises $115M