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Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-08-21T09:12:55Z.
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267 krupan 8 hrs 63
內地零售消費增長放緩至約9%，但網購增長卻依舊急速，動輒達三成以上。網購便宜，深得消費者喜愛，這個容易理解，但企業又為何熱中於往線上轉型呢？雖然不用交舖租，但售價也便宜了，還要付費給網購平台，利潤率甚至會下降。
筆者公司樓下是一個大型商場，平日早上人流不多，但幾周前上班時，竟看到一家西餅店外站了數十人，當時只是早上7時多，同事告知，原來當天餅店預售往年大受歡迎的流心月餅。
接單才生產 減庫存壓力
表面上看，預售是為了拉長售賣期，增加銷售額。但實情是，企業能藉此預判需求，憑單生產，減少庫存，能知三日事，富貴萬千年。只是企業猜度每季銷售，十有九錯。預得少、怕做少了生意，但生產多了，不止浪費，還要應付庫存開支。
網購和月餅預售同樣道理，過往到商店買東西，缺貨的話，大概已轉到別家購買。加上每次配送都有物流費用，故商戶貨品上架，永遠只會預多，不會預少。網購出現，一切只是在網上展示，收到訂單才生產或配送，預算容易了許多。且哪件產品受歡迎，一目了然，好賣的快快加單，不受歡迎的便不再生產甚至減價促銷。儘管產品利錢差不多，但庫存管理改善，生意運轉也快了許多。
過去不少企業不做網購，不是不願收訂單，而是物流跟不上。貨品以往全都是一堆堆的送往門市的，現在網上收到一張訂單，到底接還是不接好？難道真的一件也送？企業沒有物流部門，固然不用談。有物流部門或外判第三方物流的，大概也不習慣這種從送貨到送快件的轉變。
直到三、四年前，人工智能之風終於吹到物流業。貨物入倉不再是一板一板的送到某個區域，而是靠數百個小機械人，化整為零的把不同貨物送到不同區域（網上有影片），出倉時則可以憑紅外線和重量監測，大概便已能知道倉務員有沒有執錯貨。物流跟得上，企業遂勇敢往網上走。大型企業可以建立自己的倉庫，但更多的是外判。以往在網上訂了台吸塵機，品牌都不知道怎樣送給你，現在品牌只要把貨送到網購平台的貨倉，一切問題便都迎刃而解了。
物流智能化利好線上生意
之前談過雲端有分Iaas（Infrastructure as a service）、Paas（Platform as a service）和Saas（Software as a service）。什麼是as a service呢？便是從此不買，一切租用便可以了。過往技術所限，電腦硬件、軟件，全都只能買，不能租。硬件永遠買多，軟件則是不能定制，無論需要或不需要的功能，全都一隻光碟賣給你。
科網技術成熟後，什麼都能as a service，現在當然也有Laas（Logistics as a service）。從一板板送，到一張訂單包含不同品牌的SKU都能送，物流條件已經具備，品牌當然樂於上網。
做生意收錢是另一件緊要事，但網購基本上裝兩、三個什麼什麼寶、什麼什麼pay便能應付。在網上看到這麼多小商小販，甚至較線下更有活力，便知道線上做生意，較線下更容易，企業自然更熱中往網上走。
過去幾年科網長升長有，今年以來表現更是冠絕全球股市，但同時佔經濟比例也愈來愈高（兩成多）。以單一行業而言，這比例當然不低。但科網已不只是科技和互聯網行業，還會涉及金融、物流、製造業及汽車等多個行業，從這角度看，你又能否說科網佔經濟比例太高呢？如果全球幾家主要支付企業是網企、幾家最大的物流企業是網購平台，數據分析、汽車企業最大的又是科網企業，並且還要來來去去都是那幾家，那麼你說科網泡沫最終會吹到多大？
執筆之際，納指已升穿8000點。還是那句話，納指見10000點，大概會快過恒指見40000點。
hcl.hkej@gmail.com
(編者按：郝承林著作《致富新世代2──科網君臨天下》現已發售)
歡迎訂購：實體書、電子書
中國菜吃得親切，但，愈吃愈沉悶。
沉悶，因為沒有新意；而到了這年代，飲食不僅追求味道，也期待吃到廚師的智慧和創意、時代的感覺。
中菜少創新，無法進入時代語境，可能由於廚師們受困於傳統思維，跳不出來。
陳腔濫調是，沒掌握傳統烹飪的技巧和精神，就無法創新——就像學習繪畫和書法，要先臨摹古代作品，嫻熟了才能創新和建立自己的風格。
這可能只是迷思——事實是，大部分人被傳統綁死了，根本出不來。
幹嘛一定要在傳統的基礎上創新？
走到街上張開眼睛看看吧——矚目都是現代主義風格建築，那些建築跟西方傳統建築有多大關係？
現代主義建築淵源何在呢？是上世紀二十年代德國包浩斯的創作理念——「由零開始」（Ground from zero），用新的方法解決舊問題，而不是用舊的方法解決新問題。
創新可以和傳統不相干。掌握不好，傳統可以是負累——大部分廚師無法從傳統跳出來，癥結就是「用舊方法來解決新問題」。
那是思維的局限，九成九中國廚師不曉得用新的方式（approach）去演繹傳統中國烹飪。
什麼是新方式（approach）？我常舉的例子是，要一個中國點心師父創新，他會將蝦餃的餡料換成帶子或什麼的，舊瓶裝新酒，根本不是創新；但西廚呢？好像Jean Georges，他將雲吞皮炸成盞，紅菜頭烚熟，冷藏後切粒，置於雲吞皮盞上，形成有趣的鹹甜、冷熱、軟脆味道口感對比；這就是演繹廣東點心的新approach，這才叫創新。
Jean Georges 哪裏學過做廣東點心？怎麼不懂點心技巧和傳統就不能創新？
他掌握的只是基本烹飪技巧和原理，就像包浩斯的學員，懂得點線面和空間設計，就創造出全新的作品來。
紐約佳士得今年10月將舉行一場名為Prints & Multiples藝術拍賣會，當中有人工智能（AI）繪製的肖像畫，亦為首次人工智能繪畫拍賣；佳士得倫敦市中心畫廊懸掛一幅名為Edmond de Belamy的肖像畫，右下角簽名為數學方程式，此為法國藝術團隊Obvious所採用的簽名式。
由3名巴黎藝術家聯合創立的藝術團隊Obvious，所採用的是「生成式對抗網絡」（Generative Adversarial Network, GAN）演算法，分析15000幅十四至十九世紀的繪畫，從中學習風格演變過程，然後創造出Belamy系列繪畫，包括Le Comte、La Comtesse、Le Baron及La Baronne de Belamy；今年2月，Obvious將首幅畫作Le Comte de Belamy售予巴黎收藏家拉瑟雷（Nicolas Laugero-Lasserre），價格1萬歐羅（約91170港元）。
生成器與鑑別器
主辦10月拍賣會的佳士得專家勞埃德（Richard Lloyd）說道，那是一幅肖像畫，「就像250年來所販售的藝術品」。在佳士得的倫敦市中心畫廊白牆上，懸掛一幅金色畫框的作品，畫中主角是一名身穿清教徒式黑色衣服的男子，樣子看來有些迷惘。
Obvious的聯合創始人之一維尼爾（Gauthier Vernier）說道：「整個過程旨在讓人類盡量少參與作品的完成。」他與另兩名25歲的創始人去年4月共同創立團隊，此後透過教授電腦藝術史，展示如何創造繪畫的整個過程，Obvious至今共創作11幅畫作。
所有畫作俱令人迷惑，看起來就像十八世紀的畫作，Obvious採用生成對抗網絡，此為演算法，最早由現為谷歌大腦的科學研究員古德費羅（Ian Goodfellow）在2014年創製。他在蒙特利爾大學時曾撰寫一篇頗具影響力的論文，當中就介紹此種演算法。
首先，Obvious對網絡上的訊息實行編碼，以符合他們的標準；在Obvious負責大量技術工作的人工智能博士生卡塞勒斯–杜普雷（Hugo Caselles-Dupré）說道，「那就像製造一部單車，如果遺漏一個部件，就不會起到任何作用了」；團隊在藝術百科全書（WikiArt）收集15000幅十四世紀至十九世紀的畫像，輸入演算法，其中包括兩部分──生成器（Generator）與鑑別器（Discriminator）；此名博士生說道，生成器學習畫像規則，「例如任何人物都有兩隻眼睛和一個鼻子」，過程耗時大約兩天，然後根據規則創造新的圖像，與此同時，鑑別器鑑別圖像，推測哪些來自於數據集的畫像，哪些是來自生成器的虛假畫像。
當生成器試圖騙過鑑別器時，會從每次失敗中學習。當成功騙過鑑別器時，就有一個新的圖像，並對現有的15000幅圖像作簡單複製或拼湊；卡塞勒斯-杜普雷說：「將之看作第15001張圖片吧，那是原創圖像。」他們將此一新藝術稱為「GAN主義」（GAN-ism）。
團隊的第三位成員福特雷爾（Pierre Fautrel）則有此說法，其人工智能創造的畫作比之在博客或網站上所展示的人工智能藝術品更加值得欣賞，他說道︰「保守的藝術界或更接受實體作品，他們明白我們並非試圖欺騙藝術界，而是真的想成為現代藝術家。」
攝影與微型肖像
雖然Obvious的畫作至目前為止，仍然尚未確定可否被稱為藝術（勞埃德亦如此認為），但團隊對於人們對畫作的興趣卻感到十分驚訝；福特雷爾說道，關於團隊對藝術的看法有一點非常實在，就是他們3名成員當中，「無人會對藝術毫不在意，至於觀看者的反應，要麼就是喜歡，要麼就是討厭，但沒有人會不在乎」。
與哲學問題一樣，有關人工智能能力不斷增強的討論，常常引發人們對失業的擔憂和疑慮。一些人認為，人工智能只需按下一個按鈕，就可創造出成千上萬種創新乃至獨特的圖像，那對賦予藝術品價值的「罕有」原則，無疑構成空前的威脅。
然而，卡塞勒斯-杜普雷卻堅稱，他們並無將人工智能畫作視為可大量生產的人類替代品，他將今天的人工智能實驗，比作十九世紀中期攝影機的出現，當時微型肖像藝術家失業了；他說：「當時人們說攝影並非真正藝術，拍照的人就像機器，我們一直認為，攝影已成為藝術分支。」
相片：網上圖片
撰文 : 占飛
隨著8月接近尾聲，與貿易相關的討論，可能成為主導美國股市本周表現的關鍵。另外，美國本周公布的數據，以反映通脹走勢的個人消費指數最受關注；歐洲方面備受注目的數據，同樣是通脹指標。
回顧美國股市上周表現，標普500指數與納斯特綜合指數均於上周五齊創新高，累計整周分別升0.9%與1.7%，道瓊斯工業平均指數升0.5%。
展望本周，首個受股市投資者注視的消息，將是北美自由貿易協定(NAFTA)現代化議題談判。一般預期，美國與墨西哥之間將達成相關協議，因為墨西哥談判代表上周末指出，涉及的能源與日落條款議題將有望解決；美國總統特朗普也在上周末指出，雙方接近達成協議。如果兩國真的達成協議，加拿大將加入談判，可能結束為期近一年的談判。
另一個備受關注的貿易新聞，則是美國與歐盟之間的貿易談判。有消息指雙方已加快談判步伐。不過，市場最重視的，仍然是中美兩國貿易談判。
第二個市場關注焦點，依然是美國數據。周四，美國將公布7月個人開支與收入表現，其中受市場重視的，是被聯儲局視為通脹指標的個人消費開支(PCE)價格指數變動。市場預期PCE價格升0.2%，高於前一月的0.1%；按年升幅料為2%，前一月為1.9%。
市場的第三個焦點，預期是周三公布的美國第二季本地生產總值(GDP)數據。經濟師預期GDP的按年升幅為4%，略低於原先估計的4.1%，但足以成為2014年第三季以來最大按年升幅。除了GDP數據，美國本周將公布8月消費者信心調查與中西部製造業指數。
有關數據可能影響聯儲局9月議息決定。隨著聯儲局主席鮑威爾上周四發表的維持循序漸進加息觀點後，市場現時普遍仍預期，聯儲局將於9月與12月各加息0.25%。
另外，歐羅區將於周五公布8月通脹數據，同樣引起市場注目。經濟師預期，歐羅區8月名義通脹將升2.1%，與前一月看齊；核心通脹保持在1.1%水平。德國、西班牙、法國與意大利將分別公布本身的通脹數據。有關結果可能影響
歐央行今年底結束量化寬鬆的購債措施，以及明年開始加息的決定。
此外，中國將於周五公布8月製造業指數，市場預期將由前一月的51.2點，降至51點。有關數據可能反映中美兩國貿易戰爆發後、中國製造業表現。
These companies have taken advantage of the growing popularity of cloud computing and are delivering impressive results for investors.
Brian Stoffel (TMFCheesehead) Aug 24, 2018 at 8:38AM If you jumped in a time machine and went 20 years ahead, what would you find?
Some people believe you'd see that Americans barely own any of the things we traditionally have called "ours" as a the result of the sharing economy. In this hypothetical future, autonomous fleets of electric cars will replace the need for garages, and you will no longer need to own tools for random fixes around the house because they'll be provided in a moment's notice by a drone.
The goods and services a person needs will be secured because of access, not direct ownership. There is one area of the economy where this has already happened: software.
As recently as a decade ago, you needed to buy an expensive software license to download an operating system or add other applications to your computer. Today, you pay a small monthly subscription fee for access to software that exists in the cloud, where it is maintained and seamlessly updated. It's called software-as-a-service, and it has the potential to create impressive results for investors. There are several software-as-a-service companies worth investigating.
cloud symbol combined with electronic board, IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.
What is software-as-a-service? To explain this business model, let's break it down to its most basic pieces. What is software? It is any program that can run on a computer or smartphone. The device you hold in your hand is the hardware; the programs and apps you use on them are software.
In the past, download licenses, CDs, or floppy discs with the software on it were fairly expensive one-time purchases. You then installed that software onto your computer, and shelled out the cash for a new version when an important update came out for the software.
That all changed with the onset of the internet and the growth of cloud computing, which uses servers in a separate, centralized location to house and handle large computing tasks. Cloud computing then allows the necessary data to be accessed on demand with a simple internet connection. That change allows companies to give people access to its software programs easily, for a fee, through the internet.
That's the basis of software-as-a-service, or SaaS. The new business model has a host of attractive features for SaaS companies, their customers, and shareholders. Companies benefit from improved efficiencies by not having to manufacture any physical products, customers love that they can use a program or platform at lower subscription prices and benefit from real-time updates to software, and investors enjoy the reliable revenue streams that come with a subscription model.
Perhaps most importantly, the economic moat -- or sustainable competitive advantage -- a SaaS company enjoys is much wider than before. In the past, software companies needed large sales and marketing budgets to advertise each new iteration of their software. Every time a product cycle came up, customers could potentially choose a new provider.
Now, customers are more locked in with a company because of high switching costs. With the ability to update software instantaneously via the cloud and the introduction of monthly subscription fees, there are no "update cycles" to worry about. The more a customer uses a SaaS provider's software, perhaps adding new applications along the way, the more embedded it becomes in that person or company's workflow and daily needs. Switching away to a new provider not only becomes expensive (there's likely lots of data to migrate), it also has the potential to become an enormous headache as people need to learn an entirely new interface and ecosystem. That's a headache most customers want to avoid -- and it's a huge boon to SaaS investors.
What are the key metrics for evaluating SaaS businesses? Assessing a SaaS company's ability to find new customers and keep them within their ecosystem are critically important. While traditional metrics including price-to-earnings (P/E) or price-to-free-cash-flow (P/FCF) play a role, these stocks are frequently richly valued on that basis, so digging deeper offers a better picture.
When it comes to making sure customers stay with a business, some companies use revenue retention rate (RRR), and others use dollar-based net expansion rate (DBNE); both measure the same thing. The figures consider all of the revenue from existing customers in the first year, and compare it to all revenue from the same set of customers in the second year. This approach ignores the effect of new customers to look at churn, or the loss of a customer, and how effectively new customers are purchasing new services.
This helps give clarity as to whether customers are sticking with an SaaS company -- and whether those who do spend more money on additional products. If a DBNE or RRR is below 100%, that means customers are leaving the platform. If it's at 100%, that means customers are staying, but not adding new products. If it's above 100%, that means not only are customers staying, they're also incorporating new services over time. This makes the lifetime value of each customer even greater.
Because the SaaS model largely locks customers in, a well-functioning company should be spending less and less of its revenue on sales and marketing over time. That's because convincing existing customers to add new products shouldn't require an entire sales department. If a product speaks for itself, it should sell add-on products itself.
The best way to measure this is to compare growth in revenue versus growth in sales and marketing from year to year. As long as the former grows faster than the latter, it means customer acquisition costs are going down.
The subscription business model also includes the use of another specific metric: annual recurring revenue, or ARR. When a new customer signs on to a service, they may have only paid a month or two of fees when the quarter ends. Those payments don't reflect the full value of the subscription. ARR takes the monthly payments that are made at the end of the quarter and tells you what the full year's subscription revenue would be if carried out the full 12 months. ARR gives a better view into the health and growth of an SaaS company's revenue streams.
Top software-as-a-service stocks Company
What It Does
Axon Enterprise (NASDAQ: AAXN)
Makes stun guns and police body cameras, and created Evidence.com platform for analyzing body camera footage.
Zuora (NYSE: ZUO)
Helps existing companies transition into subscription-based ones.
Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV)
Provides cloud solutions for pharmaceutical drug companies to store their data.
Paycom Solutions (NYSE: PAYC)
A business platform that tracks all human-resources-related functions including paychecks and health benefits.
Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN)
Has created a suite of customer service software tools for businesses.
AppFolio (NASDAQ: APPF)
Helps track data for property management companies and small legal firms.
New Relic (NYSE: NEWR)
Runs application performance management (APM) software, which helps companies monitor how well their own apps are running.
Axon Enterprise Technically, Axon is not a pure-play SaaS company. It was known as TASER International previously, and its stun guns still account for the lion's share of sales. The company's pivot toward body cameras and creation of a SaaS platform -- Evidence.com -- is the real story here.
The website serves as a storage database for all of the footage shot on body cameras by police officers. The footage can be searched, analyzed, and shared with other districts. Subscription revenue from the SaaS offering jumped 76% in the most recent quarter, and gross profit from the same division jumped 97% -- showing impressive leverage.
While Axon doesn't provide RRR or DBNE statistics, the number of total software seats booked on Evidence.com is a great indicator of the health of the offering. At the end of 2015, there were 45,900 seats booked on Evidence.com. As of the most recent quarter, that number has sky-rocketed to over 300,000 -- thanks in part to Axon acquiring its main rival, Vievu.
The company is already field-testing its second SaaS offering: Axon Records Management, which is expected to be released in mid-2019. The application aims to record unstructured video and audio files and transfer them into accurate and detailed police reports. The end result would be that police officers spend less time on paperwork and more time doing other parts of their jobs.
Zuora Zuora's mission is to bring every company into the "subscription economy." While this isn't technically the same as transitioning every company to SaaS, it has a shared goal of locking customers into an ecosystem via high switching costs and giving companies much more reliable, recurring revenue streams.
Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, Zuora believes, is ill-suited to handle the back-office and billing demands required by subscription-based companies. At least, that's the view that founder and CEO Tien Tzuo got when he was working at SaaS behemoth Salesforce.
While Zuora technically gets revenue for both subscriptions and professional services, the former is the only one worth paying attention to. Professional services are just an on-boarding service offered to new users; the division actually runs at a loss and doesn't reflect any underlying strength at the company.
Since the end of 2015, annual recurring subscription revenue has increased 91% to $130 million. Even more important is that during the first quarter of 2018, Zuora's DBNE came in at 112%, meaning not only that customers were staying with Zuora's subscription billing software but adding more functionality over time.
Veeva Systems Like Zuora, Veeva's founder and CEO Peter Gassner is a former Salesforce employee. Gassner realized that pharmaceutical companies had very specific needs when it came to cloud software -- needs Salesforce wasn't able to meet.
Veeva has two primary offerings: its legacy customer relationship tool, Veeva CRM, which is a cloud-based customer relationship management tool, and its newer, more robust offering, Veeva Vault. Vault has been a real coup for the company as it adds new functionality every year that helps drug companies keep track of everything necessary to bring a compound from the idea stage, through clinical trials, and to the market.
Revenue at the company has jumped 77% to $724 million since the end of 2015. At the same time, existing customers keep adding more and more solutions over time -- primarily through Vault's numerous offerings. The RRR at Veeva was a whopping 121% at the end of last year. And the company's solutions have become so popular that Veeva is now testing out a secured cloud solution for companies outside of the pharmaceutical sector as well.
Paycom Solutions Paycom is attempting to disrupt the legacy model of payroll simplification being a company's main focus by offering paycheck solutions within an SaaS solution, and expanding the scope of what can be tracked on a single platform. Instead of only monitoring paychecks, human resources departments that use Paycom can track recruitment, hiring, health benefits, planned time off, and various other tasks by adding on other software at an additional charge.
The company has been winning over small and medium-sized businesses in droves. At the end of 2013, it had 10,000 customers. By the end of 2017, that client list had jumped all the way to 20,600. Recurring revenue has followed suit, quadrupling over the same time frame to $433 million.
Perhaps the most important factor for investors to know is that the company has been able to keep its RRR steady at 91% for the past three years. On one hand, this may sound ominous. The company is losing 9% of its business every year? On the other hand, it's important to remember that Paycom serves small businesses, many of which naturally have a high failure rate. That's to be expected in a healthy capitalist economy, and it shouldn't count against what Paycom has accomplished.
Zendesk Zendesk's software makes easily customizable methods for companies to handle customer service, including options such as chat and call centers. Zendesk Guide helps a company track all of its interactions with customers to allow for more seamless communication over time, and Zendesk Insights takes all of the data a company accumulates about these interactions and analyzes it in one easy-to-use interface.
The number of companies using Zendesk has grown rapidly -- up 72% over the past three years to 118,900 -- and it has some major companies using its platform such as Netflix, Airbnb, and Stanley Black and Decker.
At the same time, revenue has quadrupled since the end of 2014 to $508 million. As with the other companies on the list, Zendesk's DBNE has been very impressive, clocking in at 119% at the end of 2017. As customers get familiar with Zendesk's offerings, they are not only happy with what they have, they are also adding more and more tools to their subscriptions.
AppFolio AppFolio was the brainchild of two California technology gurus who realized that SaaS would be the wave of the future. They went looking for industries that would benefit from customized SaaS solutions and set about creating the perfect product.
AppFolio got its start by offering property management companies a platform where they could track payments potential renters, host websites, monitor maintenance requests, and track leads. The number of property management clients on its roster has grown from 4,000 in 2013 to over 12,000 today. All the while, the company has done a great job of retaining customers and having them add more tools -- the division's DBNE was 112% last year.
With the acquisition of MyCase in 2012, the company added support for attorneys and small legal firms. Those who use AppFolio's SaaS are able to organize things such as case information and record billable hours on a single platform. While this part of the business is much smaller, it also sports a very strong DBNE of 113%.
Put together, these two SaaS solutions have helped AppFolio double its revenue since the end of 2015.
New Relic Thirty years ago, information technology departments were primarily responsible for making sure a company's desktop computers were working and communicating effectively with the in-house servers. Those days are long gone, and the list of responsibilities is now much longer.
New Relic aims to help these beleaguered departments handle the volume of work they have to cover by taking all of a company's software applications and monitoring them on a single platform. The technology is impressive, and customers are signing up in droves. Over the past five years, New Relic's paid accounts have grown 87% to 17,000. Gartner estimates that the market for this type of APM software is growing roughly 18% per year, and that it could continue to expand.
Recurring revenue, though, has grown even faster, sextupling to $355 million over the past 12 months. That's largely because existing customers have been adding more and more functionality over time. Last year, the company's DBNE clocked in at an eye-popping 141%!
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Brian Stoffel owns shares of AppFolio, Axon Enterprise, Netflix, New Relic, Paycom Software, Veeva Systems, and Zendesk. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Axon Enterprise, Netflix, Paycom Software, Salesforce.com, and Veeva Systems. The Motley Fool owns shares of AppFolio and Zuora. The Motley Fool recommends Gartner, New Relic, and Zendesk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
不少家長都願意買玩具給嬰幼兒期的子女，但隨着孩子成長，玩具常造成浪費。內地租賃平台「玩具超人」看準共享經濟的商機，提供上門玩具派送服務。該平台近期完成3000萬元人民幣（約3442萬港元）A輪融資，領投方為亦聯資本（Engage Capital），上輪投資方起源資本跟投。
玩具超人於2016年創立，總部設於北京海淀區，註冊用戶宣稱500多萬。用戶可在App、微信公眾號下單，玩具超人承擔物流及上門指導服務，講解玩具正確用法。玩具租金按天計算，首次租用須付按金，相當於零售價四分一；交易完成就會退回，退款需時約3至10天。
平台上的原裝玩具，售價由數百至數千元不等，專攻歐美進口貨，當中逾七成屬於中大型如滑梯、彈床、鞦韆等，不易被嬰幼兒破壞。
租賃玩具雖可慳錢，但家長最關心的，往往是衞生問題。玩具超人強調，回廠玩具經乾濕分類後，會經過嚴格消毒流程，包括消毒液擦拭、浸泡清洗，還有蒸氣、熱風、臭氧及紫外線消毒，最後以膠袋無塵封裝，有效殺滅自然菌、大腸桿菌、金黃色葡萄球菌、骨髓灰質炎病毒等。
平台現時共提供10萬件貨品。為加強用戶新鮮感，團隊會與零售代理商合作，導入熱門新產品，款式每月更新之餘，倉庫間亦會定期調動。若家長有育兒問題，也可安排專家親自上門給予意見。
本輪融資完成後，其創辦人及CEO徐舒接受媒體訪問時稱，團隊會在華東、華南等地區建立分倉，或夥拍第三方物流，以服務外地用戶。除了拓展上門業務，亦考慮攻線下市場，開設實體旗艦店，既可提升品牌形象，亦有助分流服務。
花旗國浸浸總統又發爛渣，今次受靶對象是表面獨立性強的聯儲局，炮轟加息令美元走強，美滙唔散就奇，今早低見95邊，短短6個交易日從高位回調2%。
美滙回落，全球股民拍爛手掌，美國標普創新高慶祝，恒指由騰訊(00700)領軍下連升四日，累飆827點或3.05%，企鵝從8月15日低位319元開始計，合共反彈12.7%。
中環共識騰訊績弱因手遊未能變現，現不花時間詳談，近期企鵝反彈力度猛，或者受惠美國支付股帶挈，其中SQUARE(上市代號：SQ)昨日一度破頂創新高，Paypal(上市代號：PYPL)企在高位，似儲力破頂之勢。至於中國最大支付公司唔係阿里巴巴就是騰訊，兩隻股價早前勢頹，部分資金跟風炒支付概念亦不出奇。
講開新經濟股，人工智能(AI)股王英偉達(NVIDIA)(上市代號：NVDA)上周公布業績，2019年第2財季營業收入按年增長40%至31.2億美元，Non-GAAP每股盈利按年大升91%至1.94美元，高於預期的1.85美元。期內遊戲業務收入按年增長52%達18.05億美元，數據中心業務收入大漲83%至7.6億美元；汽車業務營收升13%至1.61億美元，三大業務比市場估計更勁。
季績雖然省鏡，但第三財季收入指引嚇親投資者，預計下財季收入只有32.5億美元(市場預期33.4億美元)，更致命是預測掘礦業務收入零貢獻，持貨者即先走為敬，英偉達績後股價一度質穿240美元關。不過，掘礦過往都對英偉達貢獻甚微，市場冷靜過後，英偉達股價昨晚再次重返250美元上。
英偉達估值絶對是貴，預測市盈率達31.89倍，但貴得有道理！首先英偉達在圖形處理器(GPU)近壟斷地位，市佔率超過七成，GPU為人工智能(AI)晶片必須品，中金估計AI晶片市場規模會由2017年的39.1億美元，升至2022年的352.17億美元，英偉達技術放甩對手AMD幾條街，暫難揾到同業能與英偉達拗手瓜。
其次，伺服器對GPU需求亦愈來愈重要，從英偉達數據中心收入看到，由2016年第4財季收入只有9700萬美元，已升至2019第2財季的7.6億美元，而每季更保持著高逾七成按年增長。市場推算，AI晶片佔伺服器成本會由2016年的2%，提高到2019年約10%，英偉達2020財年數據中心收入則可超過45億美元。
汽車自動駕駛亦是一塊大肥豬肉，預計2022年市場規模會升至52億美元，較2017年8.5億美元，大升5倍，英偉達在自動駕駛(特別是L4/5)晶片研發領先對手四年，幾乎與所有大車廠及一級供應商有合作。Tesla雖與英偉達分手收場，但自動駕駛晶片技術門檻高，短期難有對手取代。
入市策略方面，英偉達近期在100天線(245.78美元)穿梭，較佳買入位置為100天線下，若股價破頂，暫望300美元大關，而過往英偉達上升周期未有試過跌穿50周線(現處227.12美元)，萬一失守宜止蝕。
編按:作者尹德政(Ricky)，醉心投資美股近十載，最大滿足感來自尋找抵買有實力的世界行業領袖，每逢周三、五在「信報網站」及「港股360」撰文。
rickywan@hkej.com
61 matdehaast 4 hrs 32
From yeast-grown Cannibinoids to project management software to consumer apps looking to gauge opinions on college campuses, there was quite the wide variety of spaces represented on the second day of pitches from Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 class.
As we noted yesterday, B2B software and services was the biggest vertical with 30 percent of the 132 startups falling into that slice of the categorical pie. Healthcare-related startups were close behind with 28 percent. Here’s the full breakdown if you’re curious.
Aerospace: 3%
Agriculture: 1%
Automotive: 2%
B2B Software and Services: 30%
Blockchain: 5%
Consumer Goods and Services: 9%
Consumer Media: 7%
Education: 3%
Fintech: 6%
Government: 1%
Healthcare: 28%
Industrial: 1%
Real Estate and Construction: 4%
Below is an exhaustive look at the group of 59 startups that presented today. We swear you’ll feel like you were actually there at the Computer History Museum watching the presentations alongside us. Also, if you’re thirsty for more of the latest picks from one of Silicon Valley’s premiere accelerators check out our list from Day 1.
Mental Happy
Mental Happy is an employee gifting service that assembles what it calls a Cheerbox. Taking sham expressions of care for laboring office drones to the next level, Mental Happy throws out the flowers and ditches the dumb office knickknacks in favor of positive messaging and things they reckon employees can actually use, including food, wellness gifts, and personalized notes. The average price for one of these bundles of joy? $59 on average. Some people are buying, too. The young company says it has already generated $50,000 in sales over the last two months
Titan
With a service that already holds $10 million in assets from thousands of clients, Titan is setting itself up to stand above other consumer-facing fintech offerings. The company is an asset manager that’s building, managing, and explaining its investment theses for normal investors. The company takes its customers through their portfolio using in-app video and other illustrative tools to make understanding strategies easier — and investing with the company more transparent.
Kinside
The cost of childcare is one of the biggest financial burdens American families face, and though there’s up to $30 billion in government money available for childcare in the U.S. each year, it’s locked up in flexible spending accounts that are so complicated that 90 percent of that funding goes unused.
Kinside wants to help by automating the claims process. It also serves as a childcare management tool, letting parents pay their care providers with a Venmo-like feature, while making it simpler for companies to offer childcare benefits that can help attract talented employees. The company, which launched just six weeks ago, says it plans to target employers with more than 20 employees, which is a big market. There are more than 620,000 such businesses in the U.S. As for the total addressable market Kinside sees itself chasing, it’s $2.8 billion.
Read more about Kinside here.
Fixers
Travel and experience marketplace Fixers pitches experiences ranging from yoga retreats to trail running weekends and music festivals that are curated by the locals in-the-know. It’s designed to help travelers discover and book trips they couldn’t find anywhere else. The company has seen $1.7 million in sales in 8 months, with 7,000 activities booked, and the company hasn’t spent a dollar on marketing. The founders assert that millennial travelers are primarily motivated by experiences, rather than destinations. Entrepreneurs like yoga teachers are running businesses and retreats and making money on Fixers.
64-x
With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver, and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute) 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries.
Papa
Papa’s slogan is “grandkids on demand.” To solve the problem of loneliness, Papa connects college students with senior citizen homes. College students are matched with seniors to help them with tasks related to transportation and technology, but mainly the goal is to provide companionship for people who are at risk of loneliness. The founders assert that loneliness puts the country’s more than 50 million seniors at risk for health problems like Alzheimer’s; indeed, Medicare covers Papa through a UPMC health plan because of the more widely accepted belief that socializing well into one’s golden years is a critical component to living a healthier life.
Tall Poppy
Y
Unhappy employees cost money, but Tall Poppy thinks it can help by providing an educational toolkit to help employees who are being harassed online lock down their own presence and do incident response properly.
The brainchild of Leigh Honeywell, a security specialist, the startup grows out of the world that Honeywell has been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since 2008, including at Slack, where she protected colleagues who’d been targeted by outsiders by starting, first, with strengthening their otherwise vulnerable personal accounts, then targeting sites where bad actors congregate.
Tall Poppy will work with customers to gain an understanding of how to protect themselves, but also to be aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers, and for $150 a seat per year, its software is comparable to other risk management tools.
Read more about Tall Poppy here.
AnchorUSD
AnchorUSD is a stable cryptocurrency backed one-for-one by the US dollar. The founding team wants to be the trusted reserve currency of the crypto financial system. They are aiming to develop a service that will provide the most trusted, stable storage of value on the blockchain.
Tether is not trusted, but since there’s no other option it has become the medium of exchange. Anchor wants to replace Tether. It’s built on Stellar and has become the official partner of Stellar, which means they’re cheaper, faster and safer. Transaction costs plus interest on float. The founder claims to have solved Stripe’s scaling problems and the other worked on growth at Facebook.
Ixora
Ixora’s technology wants to do nothing more than enable the creation of photorealistic environments for any kind of visual entertainment, and it says it can do this a heck of a lot more cheaply than big studios.
According to Ixora, major film studios produce 100 blockbuster films each year that feature than 1,000 CGI shots — each costing them roughly $10,000 a pop. Its software can do the same for next to nothing, Ixora says, and it can do it within “hours.” If that pitch isn’t compelling enough, consider beyond movies that TVs, games, and VR experiences are all beginning to require movie-level graphics. With rich photorealistic environments becoming the norm across the entertainment industry (witness “Game of Thrones” and “The Jungle Book” as just two examples), Ixora could be catering to a sizable market for a long time to come.
Berbix
Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Collecting and identifying photo identification becomes a breeze with Berbix, a company that’s aiming to make what amounts to Stripe for identity verification. The company has developed an integration with its software so that companies can cut costs and deter fraud. Founded by two former product and engineering leaders for trust and safety at Airbnb, they’re trying to build identity verification for all kinds of peer-to-peer marketplaces and online platforms, which they see as a $10 billion opportunity (at least).
Dataform
Project management in the pharmaceutical industry is time-consuming, costly, and mostly manual these days. Dataform says it’s changing all of that with its cloud-based project management software. Specifically, the company argues, using its software, data teams no longer need to spend 80 percent of their time on “cleaning preparation,” and just 20 percent devoted to actual analysis. By enabling data teams to produce “data sets in minutes,” says the five-month-old company, data teams need spend no more than half their time on preparing data with the rest spent finding insights.
The market here isn’t enormous to start. Dataform’s founding team — which worked on Google Adsense previously — say they are right now targeting 2,000 customers who are currently using cloud-based warehouses, which they estimate to be a $1 billion market. They also say that’s just a starting point.
CB Therapeutics
Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of ten and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company, SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.
RevenueCat
RevenueCat screenshot
RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.
The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.
Read more about RevenueCat here.
HeyDoctor
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
HeyDoctor is the online prescription service for a growing of startups and services that are pitching medications and prescriptions online. Working with companies like Hims, Romans, and Nurx, HeyDoctor can prescribe and refill prescriptions for medicines ranging from birth control, hair growth or replacement, urinary tract infection treatments, lab work and much more.
The company envisions creating an alternative medical record platform that’s open and accessible to patients and portable among on-demand providers. Already, more than 125,000 primary care visits have been conducted on the platform in the last 6 months. Last month, it made $105,000 in revenue, and it says that number reflects 22 percent growth month over month.
Anima App
Or Arbel, the former chief executive and cofounder of YO, is back with a new company that’s a bit more sophisticated in its goals and complicated in its execution. Arbel is one of the co-founders of the new Y Combinator-backed startup Anima, which allows designers to convert design to code, automatically.
Using the tool, Arbel and his team — individuals who are culled from the engineering and design ranks of Google, Apple, and Amazon –estimate that development teams can save weeks of work, eliminating crosstalk between designers and developers. It has some early believers, too. According to Arbel, Netflix, Google, and Amazon are already using its tools, for which it plans to charge $500 per seat per year.
ShopWith
Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.
It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours, using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.
ZiffyHomes
ZiffyHomes is bringing the co-living model popularized in the U.S. to millennials in India. With a clutch of managed, co-living, furnished apartments already in its portfolio, ZiffyHomes is already serving more than 2,000 young Indian professionals and seeing $2.2 million in annual revenue from the three Indian cities in which it operates. But it has ambitions to cater to up to 60 million more people across the country who fit into its target demographic, and given that it takes 20 percent of the rent paid, you can see how its revenue could grow quickly.
The company has competition, of course. It compares itself to WeWork, yet WeWork itself is making major inroads in India. Another, smaller competitor, a Mumbai-headquartered startup called Awfis meanwhile announced $20 million in new capital last month. But given the relative newness of this model to India and the size of the addressable market, this opportunity looks like a solid one to us.
Reformer Therapeutics
Reformer Therapeutics is developing a pipeline of drugs for many diseases, with an emphasis on deadly triple negative breast cancer that is currently treated with an outdated toxic chemo. Their breast cancer drug is called Reformer 1 and targets cells that cause cancer to spread. The drug has proved safe in human clinical trials, and the team is starting a 3 year FDA trial. The founders met working together at Science Exchange.
Ajaib
Indonesia is a country in a transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.
China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans plan out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.
Emojer
Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves that went viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.
Snark AI
Snark AI helps companies rent GPUs that aren’t in use. It’s one way to potentially reduce the cost of that GPU over time, which may be a substantial investment initially but could produce a meaningful return over time while it isn’t in use. How it works broadly: The startup matches the proper amount of GPU power to whatever a team needs, and then deploys it across a network of distributed idle cards that companies have in various data centers.
Snark’s approach can also ostensibly make “deep learning” run faster. In fact, its founders say the company is already working with five companies (which, okay, fine, could well be other startups in its cohort) to make their research cycles ten times faster.
Read more about Snark AI here.
Scanwell Health
Urinary tract infections are highly uncomfortable and distracting and worse, often become more advanced, fast. It’s long been the case that treatment has required a doctor visit. But as of last month, a young San Francisco-based startup called Scanwell Health began selling directly to consumers the first time and, for now, remains the only FDA-cleared urine testing app that allows someone to test their urine at home using a paper test strip and a camera phone. (Its app uses sophisticated color metrics to analyze the strip and determine what’s what.)
Little wonder there’s some demand for the product. Company founder Stephen Chen said the company sold out of its kits – – 2,000 of them — as soon as they became available. Note the kits cost $5. A call to Scanwell to confirm the results — it relies on outside physicians — costs customers another $25
Read more about Scanwell Health here.
Grin
The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.
Mutiny
Brex -- personalized with Mutiny
Mutiny helps business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies present a message that’s customized to each visitor on their website.
For example, when you visit the homepage of Mutiny customer Amplitude, things like the customer testimonials and the call to action will change depending on the size of your company. As for the size of the opportunity that Mutiny is chasing by helping its customers personalize theirsites? It claims it’s $5 billion.
Read more about Mutiny here.
LemonBox
LemonBox is a startup that lets Chinese consumers buy U.S. health products at affordable prices. Today, it allows Chinese consumers to buy LemonBox-branded daily vitamin packs.
Further down the line, the goal is to expand into more specific verticals, including mother and baby, as well as beauty. It could even move beyond e-commerce with services like consultations with dietary experts.
Read more about LemonBox here.
Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals
Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.
Ubits
Ubits is Lynda.com for Latin America. Ubits offers corporate training classes in Spanish for topics like leadership, sales and Microsoft Excel. Currently, there are no good options available in Spanish, the second most common language in the world. Ubits has 1000 videos on 80 online courses. They have 75 customers including Citi, Dow, Nestle, BNP Paribas, who pay on average $9K a year. They have $700K in ARR, growing 40 percent month over month.There are 40 million office workers in Latin America. They charge $50 per employee per year.
Incentiveai
Cryptocurrency projects can crash and burn if developers don’t predict how humans will abuse their blockchains. Incentiveai has built artificial intelligence simulations that test not just for security holes, but for how greedy or illogical humans can crater a blockchain community.
Crypto developers can use the service to fix their systems before they go live. They can either pay Incentivai to audit their project and produce a report, or they can host the AI simulation tool like a software-as-a-service. Already, the company — founded just two months ago — says it’s seeing $250,000 in revenue from three paying customers, including market forecasting startup Augur, which is perhaps best known for orchestrating the first ICO on the ethereum network.
Read more about Incentiveai here.
Toybox
Toybox is pitching a software service that lets designers communicate changes to developers on any website without ever having to write a line of code. The changes are noted as CSS edits for developers, so the quick fixes can be implemented easily. It reduces the need for communication between designers and developers over minor changes to images or visuals and can significantly speed up production, the company said. The company has picked a $180 price point per seat. They have 400 active users after launching four weeks ago.
Kunduz
Using a network of 7,000 tutors, Turkish test-prep app Kunduz is building a service that the company argues is ten times cheaper and faster than traditional tutoring options. Like its U.S. counterpart, Toot, Kunduz users take a picture of a problem using the app, and then it links the studen with a tutor. Students looking for help typically get an answer in 10 minutes, according to the company, which says that one-third of the questions asked are “repeat” questions and thus can be answered within seconds without the help of a human. Launched in Turkey first, Kunduz has already answered 3 million questions in its home market, where its addressable market is in the $2.4 billion range. Next up, it says, is India.
The Good Food Institute
The current system for making meat is broken. The Good Food Institute, a non-profit promoting meat alternatives and clean meat, is operating as a think tank and accelerator for the plant-based and clean meat sector. It’s designing curriculum for colleges across the country. It currently has 350 entrepreneurs in its ecosystem. And it’s launching a conference around clean meat and plant-based meat. The organization is trying to boost portfolio growth in the plant-based substitute and clean-meat space, and it’s consulting with venture firms that are looking at investing in the industry.
And Comfort
Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.
Bot M.D.
Doctors in emerging markets will have access to an artificially intelligent clinical assistant if the founders of Bot M.D. have their way. The company has developed a bot that can provide answers to questions about drugs, drug interactions and diseases, while also transcribing dictated case notes. For any doctor with a smartphone, Bot M.D. could be their downloadable, affordable, and scalable way to improve patient care in places where the help is sorely needed. The data it gleans from these interactions could prove lucrative, too. As the company notes, pharmaceutical companies shell out $3 billion a year to understand their doctor-customers. If it can be repository for them, it can potentially garner a percentage of that spend.
OKCredit
OKCredit helps small and mid-size businesses in India — the world’s largest base of SMBs — which extend $500 billion of credit to consumers every year…on paper. OKCredit digitizes their transactions and records payment, reducing the burden of these businesses that are currently maintaining and accounting paper account books.
It appears to have struck a chord. Already the company is working with 15,000 businesses, and it hasn’t spent any money on marketing it says. As for the need it’s addressing, it says it’s a $300 billion market.
Emptor
No need to caveat this Emptor. Helping local companies find facilities and maintenance providers like janitors, landscapers and HVAC repair technicians, Emptor bills itself as a Thumbtack for the enterprise and includes a machine learning system that will classify spending and provide recommendations for cost reductions.
That kind of offering could be music to hospitals’ ears. Many hospitals lose money, and those that don’t see margins on average of just 2.6 percent, says the company. Things are poised to grow worse for them, too, owing to a regulation passed in 2015 that could reduce spending on hospital services by up to $250 billion by 2030, according to a study published last year in Health Affairs. If Emptor can give them a way to control their operating expenses and improve their margins, everyone wins.
Dinesafe
Put simply, Dinesafe wants to ensure that outbreaks of food poisoning will be a thing of the past. Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million people, and kill roughly 3,000 people in the U.S. alone each year. Through its website iwaspoisoned.com, the company allows for user-generated reports of food poisoning to detect outbreaks in real time. In fact, the company says it predicted that Chipotle would have food safety issues prior to its spate of outbreaks earlier this year.
The company has 25,000 consumer subscribers and offers data services, surveillance, benchmarking and industry analytics to corporate customers and 280 public health agencies. The service is helpful for restaurants, too. If they want to stay ahead of these trends, they need this data. No wonder 16 restaurant chains are already signed up for the service.
Modern Treasury
Providing payment fulfillment services for businesses that still use old line payment mechanisms like checks, wire transfers or automated clearing houses, Modern Treasury wants to save companies time and money. Acting as a Stripe for non-credit card transactions, the company offers a way for businesses to swap out the homegrown infrastructure and excel spreadsheets they were using to manage payments.
Leena AI
Leena AI is building HR bots to answer questions for employees instantly. The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook, and they’re built and trained using information in policy documents and back-end systems.
Some of of the questions and answers are pretty standard, covering things like vacations and expense reports. But Leena AI also uses natural language processing to understand a company’s unique terminology or just the unusual ways someone might ask those questions.
Read more about Leena AI here.
Abacus Protocol
Abacus Protocol allows any company to tokenize both fungible and non-fungible assets (like commodities, equities, or debt) and automate their compliance demands — like know your customer, SEC registration exemptions and securities restrictions. These functions happen not just at the time of issuance but also on every secondary transaction or transfer of the security token. Using the platform, companies can take advantage of the benefits of tokenizations, making assets more liquid and simplifying bookkeeping without needing to hire a dev team.
HappiLabs
HappiLabs is a virtual lab manager, spanning topics from biotech and brain research to robotics. It’s already working with 26 labs across the country, helping them buy everything from beakers to gloves to specialized machines in a cost-effective way.
Founder and CEO Tom Rugins is a former Ph.D. student and lab manager himself, and he said he was taken aback at how far behind scientific purchasing was from the rest of the retail world.
Read more about HappiLabs here.
Federacy
Federacy has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup. The idea is to make it free and simple for startups to set up bug bounties.
For now, the co-founders are vetting every researcher they bring on the platform. While they realize this approach probably won’t be sustainable forever, they want to control access while they build out the platform.
Read more about Federacy here.
College Pulse
The youngs in Gen Z love to take quizzes and companies love selling to the youngs in Gen Z. Those two truths have the team behind College Pulse salivating about the opportunity they see for their business. Using the company’s service, students can poll their community to find out what’s going on around their campus. Queries range from finding the correlation between sexual activity and GPA, to what’s the most popular spot to get a malt around town. Already active on 33 college campuses around the country, the company is profitable from selling its access to a much-envied audience of open wallets. Founded on Dartmouth’s campus, the company sees a future in an ad-supported content delivery platform for folks who want to know.
Medinas Health
Tackling a $75 billion problem of healthcare waste Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used and surplus medical equipment and supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural health care centers.
OpenPhone
OpenPhone has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.
After downloading the iOS or Android app, you can get a second phone number for $9.99 per month. It can be a local or a toll-free number in the U.S. or Canada. You can also port an existing phone number and get rid of your second phone.
Read more about OpenPhone here.
iLabService
iLabService is a Chinese laboratory monitoring, management and automation service. They use sensors to monitor lab equipment and alert you when something is wrong. They are currently tracking 1500 pieces of equipment. There are 300,000 labs in China using 25 million pieces of equipment. They charge 200 million for the equipment per year, creating a $5 billion market opportunity in China. The founders spotted this massive unmet customer need while working at ThermoFisher.
Splish
The Splish app pops content into video loops of between 1-5 seconds. Photos can be uploaded too, but motion must be added in the form of an animated effect of your choice. So basically, nothing on Splish stays still.
While wobbly, content on Splish is intended to stick around, rather than ephemerally pass away (à la Snaps). The idea is that sharing stuff on Splish is a bonding experience; part of an ongoing smartphone-enabled conversation between mates, rather than a selectively manicured photoshoot. In fact, the startup has quickly zeroed in on teens, primarily because unlike adults who take vacation photos and capture dinner outings that they post to social media, teens “don’t have anything to do,” so it tells them what to post. (These “cues” can include suggestions like that users film themselves chugging hot sauce, for example.) Teens apparently like the idea. Launched six weeks ago, the company says the average user opens the app four times a day. It isn’t disclosing how many users it has attracted so far.
Read more about Splish here.
CowryWise
CowryWise wants to bring the benefits of algorithmically managed investment platforms to Africans across the continent. Taking a page from the Betterment and Wealthfront playbooks that have been popularized in the U.S., CowryWise enables young, high net-worth Africans to invest their money more intelligently — with the machine learning tools previously available only to large financial services institutions.
Radix Labs
Radix Labs wants to be the operating system for laboratories. Organizing lab equipment in a networked fashion could have a dramatic impact on research and development. Today, lab equipment is like maniframes in the 80s, where each device needs to be programmed separately. Running experiments serially can reduce the time it takes to come up with results, letting biologists automate their labs and experimentation to mimic the mass production of manufacturing.
Kyte
Last year, Indian businesses sent 180 billion SMS messages to customers, 60 percent of which was spam according to the team at Kyte. The company’s AI-powered SMS inbox looks to ditch the spam and organize transactions notes as well as coupons for Indian users into a cleanly designed hub. The inbox decluttering startup is growing 13 percent week over week as it looks to capture the 300 million smartphone users in India.
Hypcloud
Hypcloud is building a real estate development financing platform in Germany. The team is hoping to distinguish what they’ve built by enabling more collaborative and efficient negotiation times through a more streamlined workflow that will hopefully give customers quicker access to financing partners. Using the web-based software, clients can negotiate with up to 5 banks at the same time to get better terms.
Miru
Miru built an AR app that shows users what any piece of furniture will look like in their home. The Miru app places items in your living space using a computer vision pipeline that lets you pull items from any retailers website. Ikea has similar services, but only for their own catalogue of products. Furniture visualization is a 6.5 billion market, but that’s just the beginning. While using Miru’s visualization service, the app can map your home and gather data for future home projects like painting and flooring.
Klarity
Klarity wants to automate parts of the contract review process by applying artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing. It offers a subscription cloud service that checks contracts in Microsoft Word documents, making suggestions when it sees something that doesn’t match up with the playbook checklist.
The product then generates a document, and a human lawyer reviews and signs off on the suggested changes, reducing the review time from an hour-plus to 10 or 15 minutes.
Read more about Klarity here.
SF17 Therapeutics
The founding team from precision medicine startup Simpatica Medicine is back with SF17 Therapeutics, a precision medicine analytics platform providing monitoring for pediatric rheumatologists for life-threatening conditions. The technology enables pediatricians to match patients with the right treatment regimen or regimen changes if a course of treatment isn’t working. That same platform is also being used to demonstrate drug discovery capabilities that can identify targets for new drug compound development.
Outvote
Outvote wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote.
While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations like MoveOn involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends. The idea, says its founder, is to learn which of one’s friends and associates are not voting, then pressure them to get to the polls.
Read more about Outvote here.
Curebase
Curebase is aiming to run clinical trials faster and cheaper than anyone else via software that reduces recruitment times, automates manual steps, and lets drug companies distribute their trials to clinics. Considering that clinical trials are logistical nightmares, often coordinated across dozens of locations, any solution sounds like an improvement, and Curebase’s “clinical trial marketplace” says that already, three deals are expected to generate $175,000 in revenue that should help it convince more customers of the merits of its software and full-service support.
OneGraph
OneGraph is a GraphQL service that aims to connect the world wide web’s SaaS APIs and help customers build integrations way quicker than is currently possible. OneGraph has support for than a couple dozen APIs including Stripe, Salesforce, GitHub and more.
DreamCraft
DreamCraft is a platform that lets video game modders create and monetize games without writing code. The company says game modding is a $4 billion industry, but that modders generally don’t make any money because they simply don’t own the original games. On DreamCraft, modders will be able to create new games, while keeping 70% of the revenue and gaining the freedom to host these titles. The co-founders hail from Google and EA, and want to build the platform that will act as the app store for game modders.
Sparkswap
Using the Lightning Network to perform trustless, peer-to-peer swaps, SparkSwap is looking to build a new way to trade cryptocurrency pairs like Bitcoin and Litecoin without depositing assets on an exchange.
ExceptionAlly
ExceptionAlly aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate all the info around providing care and education for a child with special needs, from autism to Down Syndrome.
The first step is education: Based on information provided by the parent, the startup’s platform assists the parent in understanding both the condition itself, what they can expect from a school, and what their rights are (like whether their kid merits a front-row seat or how often teachers are sharing reports on a child’s progress). It can also help parents collaborate with schools and teachers to create individual education plans.
Beyond education planning, ExceptionAlly has plans to replace the costly financial and healthcare planning experts who often cost these same parents upwards of $10,000 a year. How big a business the startup can create is an open question, but we love the idea of parents no longer needing a lawyer or other pricey professional to negotiate on their behalf of their child.
Read more about ExceptionAlly here.
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far, you’re pretty informed on the latest batch, stay tuned a bit later for a rundown of our favorites from today’s group of startups.
日本玄米，其實即是糙米，亦是稻米脫殼後的米，糙米保留了粗糙的外層，包含皮層、糊粉層和胚芽，顏色較精製白米深，英文稱為Brown rice（棕米）。平常的白米是糙米磨去外層後製成，營養幾乎盡失。
糙米保存了完整的稻米營養，富含蛋白質、纖維及維生素B1等，比起白米更富維他命、礦物質與膳食纖維，但由於口感較硬，烹調時間稍長一點，因此現代人更為喜歡白米。
當玄米茶問世後，逐漸受到人們歡迎，因為飲茶之時既能嘗得玄米之香，又能得到它的營養成分。
除了玄米茶外，坊間也有糙米茶，糙米茶即只由糙米沖泡成糙米水，當中並沒有茶葉的成分。糙米茶的營養也很高，只要把糙米炒成黃褐色後，便可以加水煮製飲用，所製成的糙米湯，微量元素及礦物質會進一步被強化，更容易被身體吸收，能促進新陳代謝和腸道蠕動。
撰文：林依純
坊間共享工作空間愈來愈多，騰訊（00700）旗下眾創空間首度跳出內地市場，與VS MEDIA、新世界發展（00017）旗下K11合作，在香港開設新站，主打數碼娛樂及數碼內容創業。通過騰訊的資源，為內容創作者提供流量分成、產業資源、版權保護等服務。
落戶觀塘 月租2000元起
騰訊開放平台部兼內容平台部總經理侯曉楠說，位於觀塘的眾創空間5月試運，昨天正式開幕，現有30個項目進駐，希望藉集團提供的設備，降低創作者的製作成本。計及香港站在內，騰訊已設立36間眾創空間，支援逾20萬名會員和1.5萬個初創項目。K11投資部主管鄭彥斌指出，眾創空間的創作者可優先利用K11的場地接觸大眾，而K11同時會考慮投資具潛力的初創公司。
香港的眾創空間面積達1.6萬方呎，設有多個影音製作設施，900方呎綠幕攝影棚、專業混音及錄音室；另設1600方呎開放式活動場地【圖】、會議室和獨立辦公室等，月租2000元起，最低租用期為3個月，包括共用空間、獨立固定辦公桌和獨立辦公室。
若有任何新聞線索，歡迎電郵至凌通zero@hkej.com
60 runesoerensen 2 hrs 20
https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/
Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC.
This post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage traditional recruiting methods e.g. hiring a recruiter won’t work as well for you as they do for larger companies.
Hiring your first engineer at a startup is incredibly hard. As a founder you’re already stretched dangerously thin on time. There are bugs to fix, customers to close and any number of urgent existential fires that demand your full attention. You know you should be spending more time on hiring but it’s a battle to find it.
The bad news is even once you find the time, much of it will feel like wasted effort. Hiring isn’t the kind of work that provides you constant dopamine hits. It involves a lot of dead ends and frustration.
Start by being clear on what exactly you’re looking for. I’d recommend listing all the specific criteria your dream hire would have. This will be a combination of technical (are they a good engineer?) and non technical (would I work productively with them?). Then mark each candidate you interview against all these criteria and rigorously debate if you think they have enough strengths in some areas to make up for weaknesses in others.
In practice hiring decisions invariably involve tradeoffs. You could trade quality for speed by rejecting solid candidates to wait for the dream one. Or you could trade money for time by paying a candidate above market rate to join now. Founders should be aware of all these tradeoffs and make the one that’s best for your circumstances.
Once you know what you’re looking for, you’re ready to start finding candidates. I’ll go through the strategies available, starting with what I believe is most effective and working through to the least.
Note: As the founder of a hiring platform I’m not neutral in discussing their effectiveness. I have articulated both their advantages and disadvantages and we did make our own first engineering hire through Triplebyte.
Personal Networks
This is the most important source by far. Once your startup scales it’ll become less important as you’ll have more budget to spend on recruiting tools and building a recruiting team. At the start though it’s where you should exclusively focus your energy and only consider other sources when you’ve exhausted all possibilities here.
Hiring someone you’ve already worked with is your best option because you already know if you’ll like working with them. How much you enjoy working with any single person matters less as you grow larger but for your first hire it could be the difference between persevering to success and shutting down the company. (Caveat: startups are also uniquely stressful environments and there’s still some probability you might not enjoy working with your friend under this kind of stress as much as when you were both at a bigger company).
You’ll also have a better chance to convince someone you know to take a risk and join you. Asking anyone to join as your first hire is asking for an order of magnitude greater commitment than pitching an investor to invest. With personal connections you’ll know what would most motivate them to join and you can lean on friends to help convince them to make the leap.
Yet I’m surprised by how often founders don’t fully explore their personal networks for hiring. It’s easy to be quick in assuming that none of your friends are available before even asking them. It’s understandable. Asking your friends to leave their jobs and take a risk with you is scary. It’s also more awkward to be rejected by your friends than strangers. Still, if you’re optimizing for the success of your startup you’ll have to put this aside. Here’s a plan you could follow:
Make a list of the best engineers you know, whether you think they’re available or not. Go through your Facebook and LinkedIn to jog your memory.
Invite them to lunch or dinner with them to talk about your startup.
Make the ask – would you consider joining us?.
Whatever they answer, ask a follow up question – if you did join us, which engineers would you most want to hire?.
Ask for an introduction to those people.
Repeat 2 – 5 with each of the introductions.
Repeat 1 – 6 ad infinitum, I know public company founders who still do this. Expect to be spending at least a third of your time on this alone.
For your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring. As your team grows though you’ll start thinking more about the composition and diversity of your team. Hiring through your personal network usually isn’t the best option for this and the larger a team grows the harder it becomes to change the balance. After your first three hires, I’d suggest continue to work your personal network and supplementing with the strategies below to meet candidates your own network wouldn’t reach.
Hiring Marketplaces
Newer recruiting startups like us (Triplebyte) and Hired operate as marketplaces. There’s candidates on one side and companies on the other. The value to candidates is increasing their number of options and to companies it’s reducing their time to make hires.
These marketplaces are strictly inferior to using personal networks for your first hire. The good ones can attract high quality candidates but most will want to work somewhere that already has an engineering team. They also charge a fee per hire that will usually be around $25,000 for an experienced engineer. Whether that’s good value for you depends on how much funding you’ve raised and how much founder time you’d have to spend on making that hire.
Candidates on these marketplaces are also speaking with multiple companies so you’ll face competition. You can get success though (we’ve had startups make their first hire on Triplebyte). Your results will depend heavily on how effective your pitch and closing process is. I’ve seen a lot of variance in how effective companies are at this. An engineer hired at Gusto (YC W12) through Triplebyte blogged about how much difference there is between companies in just being responsive to him. To get the most from a hiring marketplace you need a polished pitch for why your company is an exciting place to work and a speedy process for moving them from first call to interview and offer.
Despite the disadvantages I still rank (good) hiring marketplaces as your second best option because they provide quick access to a pool of vetted, skilled engineers. The candidates on these marketplaces are mostly motivated to move jobs right now. You can quickly get on the phone to make your pitch and start interviewing the interested ones. This also helps you practice and improve both your pitch and calibration on what exactly you’re looking for. Getting better at pitching will increase your success at hiring in general.
Some of the marketplaces will also do a rigorous technical evaluation of the candidates before accepting them onto the marketplace. If that evaluation is done well, you can skip your own pre-onsite technical screening and expect a higher conversion rate of onsite interviews to offer which saves you time. (The average direct to onsite to offer rate for Triplebyte candidates is 40% vs the industry standard of 20%).
Generate Inbound
As an early stage startup you likely won’t get much organic inbound interest from good engineers. The quickest way to generate this is posting on job sites. However most job sites aren’t frequented by high-quality engineers. They’ll get you volume, not quality and volume alone isn’t what you want. The majority of job applicants for any job posting are below the bar and it creates more work for you to filter them. The job postings I would recommend trying are on sites with a sizable engineering audience e.g. Stack Overflow Jobs, the monthly Hacker News “Who is hiring?” thread (Hacker News job postings themselves are only available to YC companies) and Angel List.
You can also create content that appeals to engineers to generate inbound interest. This is especially easy if you’re working on a particularly exciting idea e.g. self-driving cars. As soon as you publicly announce what you’re doing you’ll get a burst of inbound applications. As this type of startup you’ll always have a hiring advantage by having an easier time getting press and building brand recognition.
Developer tool companies also have an advantage. Your product is already interesting to engineers and you should be investing in writing good quality blog posts about it – both to attract customers and for hiring. Set a goal of writing an article that’s Hacker News front page worthy at least once a month.
If you’re not either of these types of companies you can still blog about the technical choices you’ve made. Have you made any controversial or unusual choices in your stack? If so, write about them. You may alienate some engineers who disagree but you may also capture the full attention of a few who agree strongly e.g. Cognito have especially strong views on testing and wrote about how they use mutation testing (https://blog.cognitohq.com/how-to-write-better-code-using-mutation-testing/). Not only does this get the attention of potential candidates, it creates content that you can also use include in cold outreach (more on that later).
A more time-intensive option is creating interactive content like coding challenges or puzzles, the Netflix algorithm contest being the most famous example. This can definitely work, Robby Walker, founder of Cue (acquired by Apple), wrote about how this worked well for them here (https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/programming-challenges-benefit-job-seekers-and-employers/). It’s a high-risk strategy though. If you can’t design something genuinely interesting then spending time on this will be a boondoggle. If you’re confident in your ability to make something interesting then go for it but run your idea by some engineering friends first to see if it sparks interest.
Finally your inbound conversion will increase the higher quality your job posting is. Invest time in making it stand out. Larger companies default to generic job postings that all look and sound the same (often because they’re literally using the same software to create them). As a startup you can do better. You could make your job posting personal by writing in the first person as founder about why you started this company. You could use an informal tone that doesn’t read like corporate boilerplate. Experiment with what feels right but move away from blandness.
Cold Outreach
Cold outreach is messaging engineers online. This could be on career/recruiting specific platforms like LinkedIn or places where engineers spend time like Hacker News and GitHub. (One advantage a technical founding team has here is they’ll already know where the best places are to look).
The challenge with cold outreach, especially on recruiting-specific platforms like LinkedIn, is the overwhelming number of messages good engineers receive on them. For your message to stand out from the crowd you need to put in work to make it personalized. Greg Brockman has some great advice (https://stripe.com/blog/startup-advice-cold-recruiting) on this.
You’ll also see a greater return if you can hunt down email addresses rather than sending messages. If you’re looking at profiles on LinkedIn, use the Connectifer (https://www.connectifier.com/) Chrome extension to get them. Otherwise do what you can to find an email address (sometimes people include them in their forum profiles or try finding a personal website that might have contact information). If you have any press articles or noteworthy mentions, I’d link to these in the message too. You also need to follow up and expect it’ll take two or three emails before you get a reply.
This approach is how the majority of technical hiring at larger companies is done. Teams of recruiters reach out to candidates and optimize their messaging over time to get more responses. There are tools to help you with this optimization e.g. Sourceress and ZenSourcer. If you send enough messages this approach will work and can result in great hires. If you reach people just before they’ve started interviewing and move quickly, you’ll have a much higher chance of closing them.
The disadvantage is it’s very time consuming and will feel draining. The majority of your messages won’t get replied and you’ll be tempted to give up. You’ll have to commit to spending a certain amount of time per day sending emails and messages. One time saving trick you can consider is giving someone else access to your email and paying them to send the messages on your behalf then you handle the replies. How comfortable you feel doing that is of course your call.
It’s hard to estimate how quickly you might be able to hire through cold outreach. If you’re lucky you could get the right person in for an interview next week. More realistically, I’d expect this approach to take up to 6 months before it results in a hire.
Recruiters
Hiring a technical recruiter to make your first engineering hire is hard to make work. The strategy they’ll probably use is cold outreach and it’s unlikely they’ll achieve higher response rates than messages coming from a founder.
What a recruiter does have more of than you is time and focus. They can send more messages per day and this could get more candidates replying if the gap between their effectiveness and yours is narrow enough. My recommendation if you go down this route would be to find recruiters who work on a contract basis. You can agree on a rate per hour, how many hours they’ll work per week and for what period of time. Then if they’re producing candidates, great. If not, you cancel the contract. Anecdotally, I’m noticing a trend where more of the best recruiters at companies are starting to work as independent contractors for multiple startups.
Before working with a recruiter make sure you’ve invested time in really training them on how to pitch your company well. I’d give them all the information they need, give them a day to prepare and then ask them to pitch it back to you. Only work with them if they do this well.
Meetups
Meetups are difficult to rank on this list because their effectiveness has high variance depending on both the type of event and the type of person you are. Meetups that are primarily business conferences with corporate sponsors who send along some members of their IT department are almost certainly a complete waste of time. Smaller, informal meetups with a deeply technical agenda where people bring laptops and code can be great. Even these will still only be an effective strategy if you’re either:
(1) An engineer who can gain the respect of other engineers through technical conversation. (2) A highly charismatic personality
You need to honestly decide if you’re either of these. If you’re unsure whether you are (2), you probably aren’t. If you’re (1) and tend to avoid group meetups, you’ll have to get over this if you’re the only technical founder. Convincing engineers to join is one sales job you can’t delegate entirely to your cofounder.
Even if you attend great technical meetups and you’re the right type of personality, it’s still unlikely you’ll make a good hire quickly through this channel. The better meetups have fewer people and they’re primarily not there to find a job. It’s a good way to build a network of smart people, which will become valuable as you scale, but not a good bet to solve your problem right now.
Agencies
Traditional recruiting agencies tend to have bad adverse selection bias on the candidates they can engage. Most good engineers won’t work with them and the engineers that do are being sent out to as many companies as possible. I can’t think of a startup I know that made their first engineering hire through a recruiting agency. While I’m sure there are counter examples, it’s more likely using an agency will suck up a lot of your time with little ROI. The best agencies tend to focus more on executive level hiring which won’t be helpful for you.
Conclusion
As I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join. To make any other strategy work you need to treat hiring like you did fundraising and start by refining your message and pitch. Candidates think differently to investors and you’ll need to tweak the message that worked for your fundraise e.g. candidates will think less about your market size and more about your most interesting product challenges.
Once you understand what resonates most about your company with engineers you can switch gears to working through channels to get that message out to potential candidates. Then be prepared for a lot of struggle and rejection until you find the right person. Good luck!
If there are any other strategies you’ve tried with success that should be added here, please do email me (harj@triplebyte.com), I’d love to hear them.
If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, use this link to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire
74 pestkranker 3 hrs 56
From “cheese 2.0” to connecting flights for satellites, Y Combinator showed off a wide array of early stage startups fresh from its YC Summer 2018 batch. A total of 63 companies took to the stage in front of a full audience at the Computer History Museum today in Mountain View to pitch on-off switches for organisms, laundry detergent subscription services, gymless gyms, lab-grown palm oil and sugary sugar substitutes.
It felt like every other startup was trying to make us try vegan chicken nuggets, but from a bird’s eye view this YC batch saw startups clustered around B2B software and services (30% of companies), healthcare (28%), consumer goods and services (9%) and consumer media (7%). (Yes, blockchain companies were right behind, comprising 5% of companies).
For this batch, YC’s efforts to get more female founders on board mostly held steady, with 15% female founders, down one percent from last round’s 16%. YC’s diversity tracking around race showed a little more activity: 11% of this cohort’s founders were black or latinx, up from 9% in the previous group. A total of 19 countries were represented across the 132 companies pitching over two days, and 28% of companies were based outside the US.
Which companies will go on to make a unicorn-sized splash? Are there really that many vegans? To figure it all out, you can read through our full list of the day’s YC S18 companies below (be sure to take a coffee break or two) or check back later for our own picks of today’s most interesting startups. Without further ado…
Public Recreation
The founders of Public Recreation want to take your workout outside. The company offers a modular system of benches, bars and smart lockers that can be installed anywhere and for a subscription price of $50/month customers get access to classes ranging from yoga to strength training and conditioning. Their first pop up is in San Francisco… literally on the corner of Octavia and Hayes.
BlueCargo
BlueCargo is optimizing container management for ports, kind of like Jenga for shipping containers. Normally, a single move costs a port $30, but up to 50% of those moves might not even be needed at all. Due to inefficient shuffling processes, terminals waste as much as $20 billion a year, but BlueCargo would eliminate that waste with machine learning, they say. The company has one paid pilot with France’s port of Saint Nazaire to date with three more in the works around the world. BlueCargo is also about to start working with the port of Long Beach, California — one of the largest ports in the US.
HoneyLove
HoneyLove aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.
The $89 product uses supportive structures inside the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsets, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband. The company has already sold $500k in product
Read more about HoneyLove here.
C16 Biosciences
C16 Biosciences is aiming to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the globe with their lab-grown palm oil, an alternative to a product that is found in a truly massive amount of goods. C16’s alternative grown in bioreactors with yeast is 20 percent less expensive to customers but “doesn’t destroy the planet,” the company says. The startup has already begun early partnerships with a number of beauty and food distributors that together spend about $1.2 billion on palm oil annually.
Kobo360
Kobo360 is a Nigerian startup wants to be the Uber for logistics and trucking in Nigeria… with a twist. With $1.3 million in funding already in the bank, the startup not only has an on-demand trucking solution linking shippers with excess trucking capacity, it has also set up a crowdfunding platform called Kobo Wealth Investment Network, or KoboWIN to enable Kobo drivers to finance new trucks through citizen investors and pay them back directly (with interest) over a 60 month period.
JetLenses
JetLenses is taking on the major contact lens e-commerce sites and other online ordering systems. The startup’s goal is to bring down the cost of prescription products by automating the overhead associated with these businesses, then pass those savings on to consumers.
For example, it automates the process of contacting doctors to verify prescriptions by maintaining a data set of existing practices, automatically faxing the office to verify the prescription and then processing the doctor’s office response.
Read more about JetLenses here.
Higia
By monitoring thermal patterns inside a breast, the startup Higia hopes it can offer women a better, non-invasive method to detect breast cancer. The company’s wearable device, called EVA, can be placed under any sports bra, and offers a new way to fill the gaps that current screening techniques aren’t addressing — things like early breast cancer detection in women with high breast density. The company has already pre-sold 5,000 units in Mexico and will begin shipping them in the fall of 2018.
Read more about Higia here.
CSPA
Founder and head of engineering at Crunchyroll, James Lin knows all about the pain of finding and hiring talented software engineers. That’s why Lin started The Computer Science Proficiency Assessment, which is basically the SAT for software engineers. Lin and his team have created standardized exams that are held in classrooms on or near college campuses and test both practical knowledge and theoretical principles.
Students pay to take the tests and have their results shared with the over 60 companies that are now accepting the results when considering new candidates.
Sterblue
Sterblue is a French drone software startup aiming to get off-the-shelf drones inspecting large outdoor structures up close with automated insights that identify anomalies that need a second look.
The startup’s software is specifically focused on enabling drones to easily inspect large power lines or wind turbines with simple automated trajectories that can get a job done much quicker and with less room for human error.
Read more about Sterblue here.
Cambridge Glycoscience
Looking to bake the perfect treat with a sugar substitute that can mimic not just the sweetness, but the gooey caramelization and sticky sweetness that typically only comes from real sugar? Well YC company Cambridge Glycoscience has the sweetener for you. The company expects to produce its sugar substitutes at a cost that can make low- and no-sugar foods even more accessible for mainstream consumers. So toss that corn syrup and get ready for a new flavor revolution.
Their manufacturing process will let them produce their sugar substitute at scale and they have a patent portfolio to protect their innovation. Notably, they have signed letters of intent with five companies already, including Haribo.
Togg
Yingzhe Fu, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, has been developing this home sensing and automation product at least since his graduation in 2016. Togg’s product is now installed in eight assisted living centers around the U.S. and is able to capture changes in residents’ health including sleep, breathing, bathroom visits and movement speed more accurately than actual caregivers at a facility.
Given the explosion in the number of elderly in need of home care (both in the U.S. and in Fu’s native China), it seems like Fu’s Togg is a product hitting the market at the right time.
AskMyClass
Using smart speakers like the Amazon Alexa or Google Home, AskMyClass is bringing a deeper set of skills to elementary school classrooms. Like homes, schools are quickly picking up on the benefits of smart speaker deployment, and using AskMyClass teachers now can let those speakers handle a range of daily tasks, from vocabulary reviews to refocusing exercises — the software can even take notes and make lists for teachers on the go.
Teachers using it are reclaiming as much as 75 minutes a week in the classroom by using AskMyClass as a kind of teaching assistant. For example, AskMyClass can run math drills with one set of students while another works directly with their instructor. In five weeks, they’ve on-boarded 436 classrooms.
Skydrop
Making e-commerce easier across Latin America, Skydrop is focused on estimating drop-off times, buying and printing shipping labels and handling returns for its customers. Through a network of independent drivers, alongside a logistics platform recreated from the ground up, Skydrop is looking to offer shipping labels at a fraction of the cost by aggregating orders with thousands of like-minded (and like-sized) businesses. Companies simply add Skydrop’s plugin to their own online store and watch their logistics burdens take off.
Cytera CellWorks
Cytera CellWorks hopes to revolutionize the so-called “clean meat” industry through the automation of cell cultures. It uses robotic automation to configure cell cultures used in things like growing turkey meat from a petri dish or testing stem cells.
Originally, the company was going to go for general automation in the lab, but had enough interest from clients and potential business in just the cell culture automation aspect they’re focused on that for now, and changed the name for clarity.
Read more about Cytera CellWorks here.
JITX
Designing circuit boards as a service won JITX a spot in this latest batch of Y Combinator companies. Currently, every circuit board is designed manually by skilled engineers, but using JITX’s machine learning software, circuit boards can be created automatically, which can save both time and money for hardware companies.
Names & Faces
Not Facebook but not LinkedIn either, Names & Faces aims to offer any growing company a simple, fast directory of employees built specifically for that purpose alone. The company wants to solve a problem experienced by everyone at a company from its low level employees to chief executives: when your company gets bigger, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Names & Faces already has more than 100 customers, including L’Oreal, Uber and Fedex with sales doubling month to month.
Buttermilk
Buttermilk offers a variety of Indian dishes at a low price that can be cooked up by simply adding hot water. Based in Seattle, Buttermilk launched in 2017 to the local market and has since expanded to serve their products across the country.
Dishes include Sambar, Daal, Khichdi, Rasam, and Upma, all of which cost $6 each. Buttermilk also sells Basmati Rice for $1.50. And there are “suites,” which pack a handful of meals into one shipment.
Read more about Buttermilk here.
Send Reality
Send Reality is looking to offer full 3D-modeling for virtual walkthroughs of real estate listings. The company sends photographers out to the listing with an iPad, a commodity depth sensor and a specialized Send Reality app. These photographers take hundreds of thousands of photos, and the Send Reality technology stitches those photos together to create a complete 3D model.
Send Reality sells directly to realtors, offering the product for $500 to $800 depending on the size and complexity of the home. In the future, the company can bring down that price point by allowing realtors to scan the home themselves from their own smartphone.
Read more about Send Reality here.
Allotrope Medical
Allotrope Medical has developed an electrical stimulation technology for smooth muscles that allows surgeons to identify critical tissue structures and distinguish functional from dysfunctional urologic and gastrointestinal issues. The Houston-based company is focused initially on decreasing the rate of injury to ureters during surgery.
With over 3 million surgeries performed in the US alone requiring identification and protection of ureters, there’s a $3.2 billion burden on healthcare systems due to injuries. The company is running an active clinical trial in Dallas and aims to be on the market by the end of 2019.
Augmented Radar Imaging
Augmented Radar Imaging wants to address the kind of issues that have caused high profile driverless vehicle accidents. The company aims to solve two problems for current radar technologies: recognizing stationary objects and triggering false alarms.
With a team of radio engineers, physicists and data scientists, ARI has built a wide field-of-view high resolution radar system called Camdar that provides 3D spatial imaging plus velocity data and a solid state sensor with no moving parts that claims to be 300x more accurate than GPS. With 5 radar units per average in a self-driving vehicle, ARI could be looking at a $100 billion market if it can make inroads on those roads.
Canary Technologies
The Canary Technologies co-founders have worked in the hotel industry, and have come to the conclusion that existing hotel software is awful. The company is working to tackle some of this dated software piece-by-piece starting with their far less dated programs used to handle offline booking processes. They’re getting rid of paper contracts with modern software that can make life easier for hotels.
Qurasense
Qurasense doesn’t think your period blood should go to waste. The company has developed a “diagnostic menstrual pad” called the Q Pad that includes an embedded collection strip that passively collects blood samples on a test strip that can be mailed for diagnostic testing which is then turned into data.
So far the company has run 5 clinical trials of a total of 500 women. It has 14 validated blood screening tests and two tests for sexually transmitted diseases and will operate on a $25 a month subscription model. Qurasense is working with Stanford Medicine to become the go-to platform for cervical cancer screening.
Inokyo
Inokyo wants to be the indie Amazon Go, with a cashierless autonomous retail store. Cameras track what you grab from shelves, and with a single QR scan of the app on your way in and out of the store, you’re charged for what you’ve picked up.
The first store is now open on Mountain View’s Castro Street selling an array of kombuchas, snacks, protein powders and bath products.
Read more about Inokyo here.
Tenderd
Based in Dubai and serving the entire Middle East and North African region, Tenderd is an on demand marketplace for heavy equipment like bulldozers and cranes. Think of it as the Uber for heavy equipment. The company began when the company’s founder left San Francisco to run the family business in the United Arab Emirates because of a family emergency. When he took the wheel, he steered the company toward what he realized was the most profitable business — renting out the heavy equipment. However, the process was so slow and cumbersome that the seasoned Bay Area launched Tenderd to solve his — and the region’s — problem.
Momentus
The heart of Momentus’ propulsion technology for space flight is a new system that uses water as a propellant instead of chemicals.
Using water has several benefits, the startup says. One, it’s a fuel source that’s abundant in outer space, and it’s ultimately better and more efficient fuel for flight beyond low Earth orbit.
Read more about Momentus here.
Spero Foods
Spero Foods is joining the legion of companies trying to transform the food industry with substitutes for animal proteins based on data analytics. Founder Phaedra Randolph launched the company after experiencing the transformative benefits of transitioning to a plant-based diet. Most vegetable substitutes for animal proteins lacked the flavor, texture and nutritional heft of their animal corollaries. So Randolph used her background in bioscience and software engineering to tackle the taste issue.
InkHunter
InkHunter is an augmented reality tattoo try-on app. The idea is that you can see how a tattoo might like on your skin before you actually make a booking with the tattoo artist.
The app requires people to anchor the virtual design by making a few pen marks on their skin where they want the tattoo to live. It also supports taking and sharing photos.
Read more about InkHunter here.
Frey
FREY is pitching dudes a new kind of detergent for the new way they live their lives (read on a monthly subscription basis). The company bills itself as an antidote to the tired myth that only women are doing laundry with products that incorporate natural ingredients, heady fragrances and plant-derived surfactants, enzymes, and oils for stain fighting. Add that subscription model and 20% month-over-month growth in the last 12 months and product margins post 60% post-shipping, and that’s a pitch that won’t rinse out in the wash.
Aalo
If you’re tired of the universal sameness of the typical Ikea, West Elm, or CB2-bedecked apartment, well look no further than Aalo, the new YC company that wants you to be your own furniture designer. With a Lego-like (not Legolas) furniture system composed of customizable, hackable and reusable parts, individuals can design their own furniture with a by-the-inch customization system for do-it-yourself designs. Founded by ex-Toyota engineer, Sejun Park, Aalo was created when an attempt to “hack” an Ikea shelf collapsed under the burden of its shoddy materials and zero weight support.
Demonpore
Nanopores identify molecules like DNA and Demonpore is the world’s first mechanical nanopore. Because normal, fixed nanopores require a good fit, they can only look at molecules that fit a pore well, which usually means being limited to DNA. Demonpore can change its size, making it possible to examine any kind of molecule at the nanometer scale. With a founder from Halcyon Molecular and a team of 70 scientists and engineers, Demonpore is developing a universal biomolecular sensor that can measure “virtually any type” of molecule with relevance to human health.
Savvy
Imagine being the all-seeing, all-knowing lookout for all of your company’s interactions with vendors, suppliers, and customers. That’s what the YC-backed startup Savvy is looking to provide to users by bringing together all of a company’s cloud applications into a single view. “Savvy is the glue between your work applications.” Not just slang for pirates, savvy is the know-how for all external interactions and can make businesses more savvy about their communications and operations.
Cloud Workout
Logging onto Twitch may not be the most physically active experience in the world but Cloud Workout wants to take the site’s model and build a fitness empire in its image, bringing fitness instructors to their site who can become fitness personalities and build audiences. The company’s streaming product is in private beta currently.
Synvivia
Genetic engineering is one of the most powerful new tools of the 21st century, but its ascendance has come with attendant fears that the technology may not be able to be controlled when it’s unleashed from a laboratory. YC-backed Synvivia is developing what amount to the kill switch for synthetic biology outside of a lab. Commercializing technology developed by UC Berkeley with grants from the NSF and DARPA, Synvivia’s genetically encoded bio-containment system engineers organisms to only live when they have access to specific, small molecules. These type of control and containment measures are critical for the development of the industry.
RealtyBits
With a service that’s creating blockchain-based tokens for commercial real estate properties, RealtyBits is hoping to increase liquidity for investors and property owners. The goal is to let real estate funds take cryptocurrency investments from verified financiers globally while reducing transaction costs, which can amount to 10% in fund creation and investments across what the company says is a $9 trillion industry.
Taking the Highrise virtual community one step further, #ME is an avatar-based social network where users can make friends and influence virtual people through real time games and experiences. The original bootstrapped social media avatar game from which #ME evolved has already raked in $5 million in sales and attracted over 3 million registered users. At the core of that popularity is the company’s ability to create virtual identities untethered from the real world that appeals to a Gen Z audience, according to the founder’s pitch.
“We’re taking everything we learned from Highrise and building a better one,” says Anton Bernstein, the company’s chief executive. “The next Facebook will be a virtual world. And we launched it 30 days ago.”
Grabb-It
Grabb-It turns a car’s side rear window into a full-color display, playing location-aware ads to anyone who might be standing curbside. The product’s designed for rideshare/delivery drivers, enabling them to make a bit of extra coin while doing the driving they’re already doing.
As the driver crosses town, the ads can automatically switch to focus on businesses nearby. Near the ball park? It might pitch you on tickets for tonight’s game. Over in The Mission? It could play an ad about happy hour at the bar behind you.
Read more about Grabb-It here.
Alpha Vantage
For investors seeking a new way to create alpha from financial market data, Alpha Vantage has an API toolkit to give them a leg up. Using these low-cost APIs, developers can create digital assets like iOS/Android apps and trading monitoring, management and suggestion toolkits. The company already has over 100,000 registered users making over 300 million API requests on a daily basis.
BrainHi
Cofounders Israel Figueroa Fontanez and Emmanuel Oquendo came up with the idea for BrainHi in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. When the devastation wrought by the hurricane made communicating with doctors offices nearly impossible on the island of Puerto Rico, the two founders thought there must be a better way to manage the process. The solution they came up with is an automated answering service that handles phone calls, texts, and Facebook messages with an automated bot that can schedule doctors visits and answer non-medical questions. The company already has 100 doctors, chiropractors, veterinarians in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
BHRD
Managing relationships with shareholders is an expensive business for public companies. Recalcitrant board members, activist shareholders and others can create problems for a management team focused on long-term growth. Using BHRD, companies can focus on targeting and engaging the investors who are aligned with their long term vision, freeing big business to focus on their business, rather than managing shareholder expectations.
Camelot
Camelot is a mobile app for eSports betting… and one of the first companies to blaze a trail in the sure-to-be-lucrative business operating at the intersection of video gaming and sports betting. The company gives fans access to live updates and stats and an interface to bet against friends. In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision there are billions of dollars to be made facilitating betting in any sport — including eSports, Camelot is rolling the dice that it can hit the right number in this emerging market.
Inscribe
Using a web platform and APIs, Inscribe is pitching a service to identify digital forgeries in documents. The company’s technology uses image forensics and machine learning to check documents like bank statements, tax forms, and forms of state and national identification to look for tampered names, figures, text or signatures. The killjoys at Inscribe may finally get rid of the fake ID, but they’re also solving a billion dollar market in online fraud.
Fintual
Betterment, the wildly successful automated financial management and investment platform is getting a Latin American twist with Fintual. The company offers wealth management services through low-fee mutual funds intelligently managed by the same sort of toolkit that used to be available to big banks and the quant programmers that work for them. It’s already a success in the markets it’s selling into, with week over week growth of around 10%.
Four Growers
The robot revolution is coming for agriculture and one of the place where those robots will first raise their flag is in the hothouse. That’s the vision that Four Growers has laid out as it seeks to sell its robots to farms already squeezed by a labor shortage that shows no sign of relenting. The company pitches consistent quality of picked grape or cherry tomatoes and a “workforce” that’s dependable and efficient. Four Growers predicts that it can replace at least four human laborers with its robots representing incredible economic efficiencies for growers.
Annie Cannons
AnnieCannons is a San Francisco-based non-profit coding bootcamp aimed at transforming survivors of human trafficking into software developers or professionals in the technology industry.
Founded by Jessica Hubley and Laura Hackney, the organization aims to help the up to 18,000 people that the Justice Department believes are trafficked in the U.S. every year. The organization reaches out to after-care services organizations around legal aid and counseling services that are interested in placing survivors into a job-training program. Annie Cannons starts out with basic technical and job proficiencies and then works on giving their students into coding and development work.
BuyCoins
BuyCoins wants to be the cryptocurrency exchange for Africa. Emerging markets are the ideal test bed and proving ground for cryptocurrencies and, in some cases, they’re the least able to take advantage of the purported efficiencies that these new platforms offer. BuyCoins is the only exchange in Nigeria that allows Nigerians to buy and sell cryptocurrencies ranging from Bitcoin and Ethereum, to Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, directly with their local bank account or debit card. There’s already $4 billion traded in cryptocurrency in Nigeria and the market is growing quickly.
Mac’d
Mac’d is a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. The company plans to expand through a low cost “ghost kitchen” approach, where it rents out kitchen space and sells its mac and cheese strictly through providers like UberEats, Caviar, DoorDash, Postmates.
And to quote TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey: “The mac and cheese was bomb.”
Read more about Mac’d here.
Penta Medical
For professional athletes nothing is more frightening or career damaging than an injury. And Penta Medical wants to make those fears a thing of the past. The company has developed a wearable cold laser therapy system that purports to relieve muscle and joint pain, increase circulation and relieve muscle spasms all with a tap of a button on the smartphone. Indeed, Penta also tracks injury data, provides coaches and healthcare providers with visual representations and range of motion trends.
Coaches can even track how their team compares with others in a league. It’s important to note that the company isn’t for athletes alone. People in the U.S. are already spending $6 billion and they’re the ideal market for Penta Medical’s smart hardware for chronic pain treatment and management.
Data Driven Bioscience
The 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper cancer diagnoses that Data Driven Biosciences promises for hospitals that use its genomic diagnostic tests could transform untold numbers of lives. Dr. Sandeep Dave, the oncologist and tenured professor from Duke University who founded the company, experienced firsthand how patients and doctors are affected by delays in getting a correct diagnosis of cancer.
Using standard equipment already deployed at hospitals around the country, Data Driven Bioscience is pitching a test that connects with the company’s cloud-based machine-learning software and a database of over 10,000 tumors to diagnose cancers within 24 hours.
Rain Neuromorphics
The founders of Rain Neuromorphics found inspiration for their processor for artificial intelligence applications in the function of the human brain. The company touts its Memristive Nanowire Neural Network chip architecture as being able to train larger, more powerful neural networks than any commercial chip that’s currently on the market. Fast, fully parallel, and ultra scalable, these chips are said to be capable of both online training and low-power inference, to enable complex machine learning applications both in the cloud and directly on a device.
As neurons increase, training time increases dramatically, but the company’s neuromorphic hardware scales well in time, but take up a lot of space on a chip. The company’s new architecture creates a structure that is filled with neurons connected by nanowires, and believes it can build and train the equivalent of $1 billion. With a $2 million letter of intent from OpenAI, several patents filed, and contracts with TSMC, the company is putting its neurons where its synapses are.
Spate
The “Google Trends” for business is exactly what Spate wants to be for its users. The company is pitching a predictive engine that can let companies know what types of latte people will be drinking, the skin care products they’ll be using and the food that their dogs will be eating in the next year. It’s no surprise that the team at Spate is looking to take on Google, since that’s where the company’s founding team cut its teeth.
Their work (initially as one of the famed 20% projects) at the search giant led to a product, which drove decision-making over how to steer some of the world’s largest consumer packaged good brands. They predicted the cold brew and turmeric trends and have a bet that yellow will be the next big color in the fashion world. There’s a spate of information out there, and the company wants to be the funnel to focus that flood of information into the right decisions.
Optic
Optic gives developers a way to grab very common coding use cases that they can drop right into their code. It works by finding the sort of routine additions developers might need, like how to create a form that will add a user to a database, as well as all the ancillary parts that come with it, like tests.
It works within a developer’s IDE, so they don’t have to look externally for the code they need. Right now it works for JavaScript, with Python next on the docket.
Read more about Optic here.
Phiar
Phiar is building an augmented reality navigation app for driving that shows a driver exactly where to go without taking their eyes off the wheel. With efficient AI fit into a smartphone, Phiar’s software can run at 200 fps on a dash-mounted iPhone.
With deep AI and computer vision expertise plus a team with members from Apple, Microsoft and VMware, Phiar wants to build the “killer AR application” to address the 1.7 billion people that use a navigation app each month. Phiar is counting on AR being the next meaningful evolution in driving navigation tech and a software solution that keeps a driver’s eyes on the road in front of them.
Seattle Food Tech
Photo: James A. Guilliam/Taxi/Getty Images
Seattle Food Tech looks to create what effectively looks and feels like a chicken nugget out of plant-based food — all the way down to the puff it gets in an oven.
It’s planning to sell its first product to larger food services companies. That’s the market that’s most useful, environmentally speaking, given that a significant portion of the chicken consumed by the population comes through food services.
Read more about Seattle Food Tech here.
Prodigal Technologies
Prodigal Technologies wants to improve the ways that lenders collect money from borrowers. The company wants to make debt collection, if not kinder or gentler, then certainly more efficient. If a payor misses a payment, lenders can now reach out on any messaging platform and enable lenders to find borrowers where they are. The company has 11 pilots and three paying customers that handle $11 billion in origination of loans. There are $50 billion loans that aren’t paid, and with Prodigal lenders can get a 20% improvement in loan repayment.
Viaopt
In the U.S., trucks are moving goods across the country with roughly 35% of their available cargo space underutilized. Viopt, a software company that aims to be an Uber pool for shipping, thinks it has the solution. If the 65% of underutilized capacity could be filled it would save $30 billion for companies and remove 100 million tons of carbon emissions. By linking small and medium-sized companies with excess capacity, the company hopes to give small retailers the same logistics opportunities that were only available to the largest retailers, shippers, and logistics companies like Anheuser-Busch, Bimbo Bakeries, and Turkey Hill Farms.
Goodly
Perks for employees are becoming a big business in the tight labor market and Goodly wants to make one of the most important perks — student loan repayment — easy and accessible for employers. While the benefits of providing this benefit are universally inarguable, when you look at statistics indicating that women hold two-thirds of student debt and owe half a trillion dollars more than their male colleagues, the perk becomes more persuasive. Couple that with the statistic that African American employees hold 31% more student loan debt than their white peers, and Goodly’s offering looks even better to employers worried about improving diversity.
In all, an employer contribution of less than the cost of a cup of coffee could help the average employee pay off their debts 8.5 years faster. Talk about potentially doing well by doing good. Offers 50% higher retention for millennial employees and is tackling a $5.4 billion market.
Regology
Hoping to take a bite out of the $10 billion market for financial services regulatory compliance, Regology has developed an automated software system to ease the burden for the world’s biggest financiers. Last year companies spent $54 billion on compliance and were still fined $22 billion for compliance failures. The company claims that its software can handle the manual monitoring tasks that took companies months in a manner of hours. Working with wealth management, banking, insurance and cryptocurrency companies, the company’s machine learning software aims to take the sting out of the Security and Exchange Commission’s oversight.
Enveritas
Battling deforestation and child labor in manufacturers’ supply chains with software, Enveritas is helping companies secure themselves against reputational risk and increase efficiency in their operations. Initially focused on coffee companies, the platform Enveritas has built gives coffee companies a way to verify sustainability at origin for the coffee they source. While coffee may be the first industry, the work can be applied to other tropical products including cocoa, cotton, and palm oil (although if C16 — another YC company — has its way, palm oil may not be an issue).
Mylk Guys
Mylk Guys is the 100% vegan online grocery store, I’ve never wanted, but maybe you have. Undoubtedly better for the environment than a carnivorous diet, vegan options can be healthy and they may be tasty, but the foods that combine the two are few and far between. Giving a curated approach to all of the foods on the market, Mylk Guys is the online vegan grocery store aiming to make shopping “simple af”. The company bills itself as the “online vegan Trader Joe’s”. There are 21 million vegans in America that spend $54 billion on groceries.
Numericcal
Simplifying machine learning on edge devices. Machine learning today lives in the cloud and it’s the biggest downside of machine learning in many systems, according to the founders of Numericcal. The solution is to move the processing down to the edge — something that can take two to six months for programmers. Numericcal has 20 billion potential devices that it can service in less time and for less money.
Oxygen
Breaking freelancers from the month-to-month boom-and-bust payment cycles that bind them, Oxygen provides working capital loans to freelancers who can go months without getting a paycheck. The company is more than willing to work with a group of borrowers who collectively make $1.4 trillion in 1099 income annually and who are locked out of loans. Oxygen offers flat-fee access to credit and free mobile banking, all while using machine learning to determine credit worthiness. Freelance workers of the world unite, indeed!
Hepatx
Hepatx is creating therapies for severely damaged livers. Chronic liver disease affects 3.9 million Americans and is the cause of death for over 40,000. The founders of Hepatx are developing a regenerative solution enabling hepatocyte production for therapeutic purposes. That means regenerating liver cells to avoid the cost and morbidity of whole organ transplant. Over 200,000 people in the U.S. need a liver transplant but only a few thousand get some. Hepatx aims to fix the liver by taking fat tissue, turns that into liver cells and introduce that into patients to regrow the liver.
Plexus
Plexus is looking to create a low-cost, flexible glove for controlling augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. It’s a silicone glove, secured by velcro, that doesn’t cover your hands or fingers entirely, so it shouldn’t leave you super sweaty.
The tracking sensors grab the position of where the hands are in space via the magnetically attached tracker and, after calibrating a resting state of the user’s fingers, individual sensors communicate their position to the game engine.
Read more about Plexus here.
We’ll be back again tomorrow for the dozens of startups pitching on Day 2, check back a bit later for our top picks of Day 1 as well.
RingCentral (RNG) completed business day with performance of 0.22% and closed at $89.3 per share value in Friday trading session. The recent trading activity revealed that the stock price is at 138.77% off from its 52-week low and traded with move of -0.83% from high printed in the last 52-week period. The Company kept 67.08M Floating Shares and holds 79.04M shares outstanding.
The company’s earnings per share shows growth of -117.20% for the current year and expected to arrive earnings growth for the next year at 23.74% . Analyst projected EPS growth for the next 5 years at30.30%. The company’s EPS growth rate for past five years was -8.40%. The earnings growth rate for the next years is an important measure for investors planning to hold onto a stock for several years. The company’s earnings will usually have a direct relationship to the price of the company’s stock. The stock observed Sales growth of 34.40% during past 5 years. EPS growth quarter over quarter stands at -276.00% and Sales growth quarter over quarter is at 34.10%.
Shares price moved with -0.83% from its 50 Day high and distanced at 32.10% from 50 Day low. Analyses consensus rating score stands at 1.8. For the next one year period, the average of individual price target estimates referred by covering sell-side analysts is $94.08.
As took short look on profitability, the firm profit margin which was recorded -3.90%, and operating margin was noted at -3.20%. The company maintained a Gross Margin of 76.20%. The Insiders ownership is 1.50%. Company has kept return on investment (ROI) at -29.70% over the previous 12 months and has been able to maintain return on asset (ROA) at -4.10% for the last twelve months. Return on equity (ROE) recorded at -9.50%.
RingCentral (RNG) stock recent traded volume stands with 340626 shares as compared with its average volume of 926.12K shares. The relative volume observed at 0.37.
Trading volume, or volume, is the number of shares or contracts that indicates the overall activity of a security or market for a given period. Trading volume is an important technical indicator an investor uses to confirm a trend or trend reversal. Volume gives an investor an idea of the price action of a security and whether he should buy or sell the security.
Volume analysis is used by technical analysts to determine the strength of price movement, as some believe price follows volume. For example, if the price of a stock is going up, but volume is declining, it can be a bearish signal. On the hand, if price is declining and volume is rising, it is definitely a bearish sign.
The current ratio of 4.3 is mainly used to give an idea of a company’s ability to pay back its liabilities (debt and accounts payable) with its assets (cash, marketable securities, inventory, accounts receivable). As such, current ratio can be used to make a rough estimate of a company’s financial health. The quick ratio of 4.3 is a measure of how well a company can meet its short-term financial liabilities with quick assets (cash and cash equivalents, short-term marketable securities, and accounts receivable). The higher the ratio, the more financially secure a company is in the short term. A common rule of thumb is that companies with a quick ratio of greater than 1.0 are sufficiently able to meet their short-term liabilities.
The long term debt/equity shows a value of 1.24 with a total debt/equity of 1.24. It gives the investors the idea on the company’s financial leverage, measured by apportioning total liabilities by its stockholders equity. It also illustrates how much debt the corporation is using to finance its assets in relation to the value represented in shareholders’ equity.
SMA and Trends:
Moving averages are valuable, as they smooth daily fluctuations, allowing the technical analyst to see the underlying trend without being distracted by the small (daily) movements. A rising moving average usually signals an uptrend, while a falling moving average indicates a downtrend.
Some analysts have adopted the following approach, when it comes to relating the SMA with a particular trend: If the close price of a tradable instrument is above some simple moving average, then the trend must be bullish. If the close price is below some simple moving average, then the trend must be bearish. However, choosing a period for trend estimation is a matter of personal preferences. The period of the SMA will depend on one’s trading style and time frame for trading. Thus, choosing the appropriate period comes with experimentation and, of course, experience. Despite that simple moving averages provide help when identifying a trend, they do so after the trend has begun. Therefore, moving averages are lagging indicators, as they are based on past prices.
RingCentral (RNG) stock moved up 7.98% in contrast to its 20 day moving average displaying short-term an upward movement of stock. It shifted 14.02% up its 50-day simple moving average. This is showing medium-term optimistic trend based on SMA 50. The stock price went above 39.85% from its 200-day simple moving average identifying long-term positive trend.
去年9月到米蘭開會，經常跟紐西蘭來的同事Janine在一起，聽醫學講座、參加內部會議、晚上出席聚會，work hard, play hard。原來她那時剛剛懷了第一胎，自己還懵然不知，跟我們四出品嘗意大利酒。轉眼間，她可愛的兒子已經三個月大了。
我很欣賞她獨立的個性，她把結婚生小孩看作人生重要的一部分，但仍堅持自己的目標，不斷尋求進步。她臨盆在即之前一星期，發短訊問我：「有哪個網站教醫學寫作的技巧？」我以為那是為了工作需要，怎料她說：「我坐在家中悶得發慌，想找個網上課程進修一下。」她是倫大帝國學院的博士後研究員、受上司和下屬尊敬的醫藥顧問，應該當freelancer給人撰寫醫學文獻才對。只是不耐煩，很渴望做點事，我惟有勸她多些休息。
她申請了一年產假，現在每天照顧孩子，又想找方法充實生活。我幫她找到幾個美國長春藤大學的網上課程，特別喜歡耶魯大學的Open Yale Courses。它把我們在英國接觸得比較少的美國文學和歷史，例如美國黑人歷史、海明威文學等，每個題目再細分為二三十個小節，加以分析。而且網上課程是從真正課堂輯錄下來，所以教員都是真材實料的耶魯教授，而非隨便找來的博士生導師。我看The American Revolution第一課，聽歷史學作家Joanne Freeman教授講解美國開國元勳John Adams和Thomas Jefferson的書信往來，坦言無忌地談國家、宗教、哲理、「三大最喜歡的元勳喪禮」等趣事，便急不及待接續看。幸好我這個介紹比肥皂劇有益，不然的話，Janine可以聽一集Dante in Translation，跟小寶寶一起睡個好覺，也是一種精神食糧。