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Elementary Robotics has raised $3.6 million in seed funding to begin building a manufacturing facility and expand its presence in Los Angeles as the city continues to grow as a hub for robotics and automation. 

Earlier this year, Embodied announced a $22 million round for its personal robotics platform focused on healthcare and wellness, while InVia Robotics collected $20 million for its own take on the robotics industry.

With lead investors like Fika Ventures and Fathom Capital, and co-investors, including Toyota AI Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Riot.vc, Osage University Partners and Stage Venture Partners, Elementary Robotics is readying itself for commercial pilots with a few undisclosed customers as it proves out its technology.

Elementary Robotics was co-founded by Bill Gross, the brains behind an increasingly resurgent Idealab incubator, and Arye Barnehama, a former head of design at the augmented reality startup DAQRI.

Gross and Barnehama met through a mutual friend in the robotics industry in Los Angeles, the chief executive of Embodied, Paolo Pirjanian, Barnehama wrote in an email. That was around 2017, when the two first began brainstorming how they would build their company. After about a year of research, the company launched with an initial investment of $1.2 million.

At the time, Barnehama had taken time off from DAQRI and had begun thinking about how to use the technologies he’d developed around computer vision and visualization to have more of an impact on human lives. 

“After working in AR on work process automation and making that information useful to humans, I became excited about the idea of designing robots that could leverage these new technologies to actually work alongside humans and the positive impact that could have on the world,” Barnehama wrote in an email.

That thinking became the seeds for Elementary Robotics and was one of the aspects of the company that attracted Toyota AI Ventures as a co-investor.

According to a statement from Jim Adler, the founding managing director of Toyota AI Ventures, “Arye and the Elementary Robotics team share our commitment to improve the quality of human life through AI and robotics. They have the talent, expertise, and vision to deliver on that commitment.” 

The investment is part of the corporate investment arm’s call for innovation through its Toyota Research Institute (TRI). “We launched the first call with TRI’s mobile manipulation team to give talented entrepreneurs a nudge in both direction and capital to make assistive robots more useful, safe, and affordable” said Adler.

Barnehama was tight-lipped about the specifics of the technology that Elementary is using for its robotic stack. “Nothing is final because we are still quite early, but we’re using 3D depth-sensing cameras along with proprietary custom hardware elements. Beyond that I can’t comment further right now,” the chief executive said.

And Barnehama was equally vague about the company’s mission. “We are building our robots to augment current human output and performance, and enable existing workforces to have greater throughput as well as focus on more complex, human judgment-centered decisions. We look to automate high-repetition tasks and processes while avoiding large upfront capital expenditures and complex multi-year custom builds,” he wrote in an email.

In a separate email, Gross laid out exactly what he found so promising about Elementary’s combination of machine learning and image recognition tools software and robotics.

“Up until now, robotic actuation was mostly about super rigid, super stiff, super strong, repeatable actuation, mostly for manufacturing. But with the recent advances in computer vision, machine learning, and adaptive learning, now you can have a robot that is gentler, less stiff, but MORE (sic) accurate using vision as your feedback system,” Gross wrote. “In other words, to get to the right place, you don’t have to rely on precise repeatability – instead you can FIND (sic) the right place dynamically with cameras and depth sensors, cheaply, and in real time.This is a game-changer, and opens up a new frontier of lower cost, easier to program, easier to use robotics for more mainstream operations.”

As a result of the investment, Fika Ventures co-founder and managing partner Eva Ho will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

Elementary is only Fika’s second investment in a hardware company, and Ho said that the commitment was driven by Arye himself.

“I met Arye almost a year before we wrote the check — and he really articulated a very clear vision of where he saw the gaps were in the robotics industry,” according to Ho. “During his customer research, he was pained by how difficult it was for companies to get robots into production environments — that the investment not only in the expensive robots but the type of talent you needed… to make them work, was so prohibitive… Arye and Bill felt there had to be a better way to introduce automation of repeatable tasks into a multitude of environments in a way that consumers have been trained by Google and Apple.”

In addition, the proximity to some of the world’s best public sector robotics labs makes a compelling case for Los Angeles as a burgeoning hub for the robotics industry.

“Los Angeles is a great place for this, because we have a close relationship with Caltech and JPL,” according to Gross. “JPL is the forerunner in the world of distant robotic missions that have to be failsafe, and amazing research is going on at Caltech on the mechanics and systems. And LA is great for all the design resources as well, with Art Center, and all the great studios with people who are great at human interaction and story-telling. So we’re excited to be building this company in LA.”

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Adtech cybersecurity company Devcon announced today that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.

Over the past couple of years, ad fraud has become a bigger concern in the industry, but Devcon co-founder and CEO Maggie Louie said most existing solutions focus on things like verifying ad quality and confirming that impressions aren’t coming from bots. Devcon, in contrast, functions more like “a Norton AntiVirus of adtech” preventing attempts by bad actors who are “using adtech as a catalyst to attack consumers and companies.”

In other words, Louie said Devcon works with ad networks and publishers to “eliminate 99 percent of the nefarious things that are making their way through the system.” It says it can block malicious ads on an individual basis, whether they include pop-ups and redirects or unauthorized tag injectors. Customers can then view the individually blocked ads and see where they came from, and there’s also a dashboard that shows how much money is being lost to fraud.

Louie pointed to the recent DOJ indictment of eight individuals allegedly involved in a digital ad fraud scheme as a sign that the issue is becoming more serious.

“Some of these attacks have some very concerning potential outcomes [for consumers], so being able to stop those before they get out is akin to stopping a water contamination at the source level,” she added.

At the same time, she argued that this is a particularly challenging area for security, because there’s been “a lack of crossover between cybersecurity and ad ops,” leading to a dearth of “security people or cybersecurity people who understand adtech.”

In contrast, the Devcon team combines media veterans like Louie (who was recently vice president of audience at the Athens Banner-Herald and also worked at the Los Angeles Times) with “white hat” hackers like co-founder and CTO Josh Summitt (who was previously on the ethical hacking team at Bank of America). It’s also hired former FBI Cyber Squad Supervisor Michael F. D. Anaya as its head of global cyber investigations and government relations.

In fact, Devcon says it assisted law enforcement in the first-ever conviction for online ad theft and money laundering, which resulted in a four-year prison sentence.

Devcon was founded in Memphis, Tennessee but has since expanded its headquarters to Atlanta, and it was part of this year’s Techstars Barclay accelerator in London. The seed funding was led by Las Olas VC — among other things, Louie said it will allow Devcon to further develop its machine learning technology to automatically identify emerging threats.

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PetaGene, the Cambridge, U.K.-based genomics data compression startup, has raised $2.1 million in further funding. Leading the round is U.S. venture firm Romulus Capital, with participation from other unnamed investors Silicon Valley and London. It brings total funding to $3.2 million.

Previous investor Entrepreneur First, the company builder backed by Greylock Partners, also followed on. PetaGene is an alumnus of EF6, although notably its two founders Dan Greenfield and Vaughan Wittorff already knew each other from their time at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge University. Both hold PhDs from Cambridge University, too.

The new funding will be used by the company to grow its technical team based in Cambridge, its global sales team, and further expand PetaGene’s product offerings. I’m also told the new funding comes off the back of signing a large contract with a major undisclosed pharmaceutical company.

“As whole genome sequencing becomes more and more commonplace, the amount of data it creates places great strain on infrastructure. We help organisations with managing that data,” says PetaGene co-founder Dan Greenfield. “Through our compression technology, we make that data up to ten times smaller and faster to transfer for research and analysis, democratising precision medicine in the process”.

As it stands, the storage and processing of genomics data adds a significant extra cost and acts as a bottleneck for how fast data can be worked with. By some estimates genomics data will reach 40 exabytes per year by 2025 (exabytes, by the way, is a lot of data!). Therefore, better file compression technology has the potential to be a major enabler of innovation and research based on genomics, including developing new personalised medicine and treatments.

Key to this, PetaGene says its software enables compression of huge amounts of genomic data without compromising on access and data quality. The company claims its products go beyond regular data reduction techniques.

“We have dedicated extensive R&D to building extremely high performance compressors for genomic data, the result being that we outperform existing state-of-the-art compression, sometimes by a factor of 6x or more,” explains Greenfield.

“At the same time our customers want to be assured that the original file can be exactly recovered. Other compression solutions unfortunately aren’t able to restore the original file, and can even sometimes discard or modify internal content without telling their users. We’ve spent a great deal of effort to make sure we preserve the original file bit-for-bit, even providing commercial guarantees to our customers. I can’t really go into the details of our secret sauce here, but we’re very proud of our industry-leading performance, and we continue to keep improving it”.

Krishna K. Gupta, founder and general partner of Romulus Capital, says he was impressed by the part of the genomics value chain PetaGene is targeting, which led the firm to first invest in 2017. “Since then, their ability to successfully develop their product for the cloud and the strong interest from potential customers have only served to reinforce our view,” he says.

Meanwhile, PetaGene’s target customers span pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutions, clinical labs in hospitals, and genomic sequencing companies.

“Our clients pay for our software according to the savings they make,” adds the PetaGene co-founder. “The greater the reduction in size of their data files, the more revenue we receive, and the more they are saving in storage and data transfer costs. We don’t charge our clients for accessing or decompressing the compressed data”.

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Candid, a teeth aligner startup that aims to make straight teeth more accessible and more affordable than Invisalign, is evolving its direct-to-consumer business. In addition to its at-home impression process, Candid recently started enabling people to come into a physical office to get their teeth scans completed.

Today, Candid is opening physical storefronts in San Francisco, Austin, Columbus, Ohio and Santa Monica, Calif. This is in addition to the two locations in New York City, one in Boston and one West Hollywood, Calif. By the end of next year, Candid aims to have 75 locations across the U.S.

Candid, which 3D prints its FDA-approved aligners, is designed for people who need mild to moderate orthodontic work. It costs $1,900 upfront or $88 per month over two years, while braces can cost up to $7,000 and Invisalign can cost up to $8,000.

In Candid’s physical locations, customers can get their teeth scanned and order aligners within 30 minutes. The studios are operated by Candid’s orthodontists and dental assistants.

This is on the heels of Candid’s $15 million Series A round led by Greycroft last November. SmileDirectClub, a major competitor of Candid, raised $380 million in October at a $3.2 billion valuation.

But Candid doesn’t seem too fazed, having seen 15x growth year over year and expecting to potentially raise more funding in Q1 of next year, Greenfield told TechCrunch

“The advantage is, if you don’t have access or live two hours away from the city, the impression kit is a viable and effective way,” Greenfield said. “But if you live in a city with a Candid studio, we recommend you come in for a scan.”

This is similar to Uniform Teeth’s strategy. Uniform Teeth, which raised $4 million earlier this year, is a clear teeth aligner startup that competes with the likes of Invisalign and Smile Direct Club. The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite.

It’s worth noting that the in-person approach aligns more with the values of the American Association of Orthodontists, which has taken issue with the likes of SmileDirectClub and other teeth-straightening services that don’t require in-person visits with a licensed orthodontist.

As Candid grows and opens more physical locations, it wouldn’t be surprising if the company starts to try to funnel more people through the door than through the virtual shopping cart.

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Dataiku wants to turn buzzwords into an actual service. The company has been focused on data tools for many years, before everybody started talking about big data, data science and machine learning.

And the company just raised $101 million in a round led by Iconiq Capital with Alven Capital, Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and FirstMark Capital also participating.

If you’re generating a lot of data, Dataiku helps you find a meaning behind data sets. First, you import your data by connecting Dataiku to your storage system. The platform supports dozens of database formats and sources — Hadoop, NoSQL, images, you name it.

You can then use Dataiku to visualize your data, clean your data set, run some algorithms on your data in order to build a machine learning model, deploy it and more. Dataiku has a visual coding tool, or you can use your own code.

But Dataiku isn’t just a tool for data scientists. Even if you’re a business analyst, you can visualize and extract data from Dataiku directly. And because of its software-as-a-service approach, your entire team of data scientists and data analysts can collaborate on Dataiku.

Clients use it to track churn, detect fraud, forecast demand, optimize lifetime values and more. Customers include General Electric, Sephora, Unilever, KUKA, FOX and BNP Paribas.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double its staff. The company currently works with 200 people in New York, Paris and London. It plans to open offices in Singapore and Sydney as well.

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On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for education apps.”

It’s launching Kahoot! Ignite, a new accelerator for like-minded startups that are pushing the boundaries of education through gaming and other means.

In addition to that, Kahoot today also said it would move stock exchanges in its home market of Norway, going from the smaller OTC exchange to the Merkur Market, which CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth explained in an interview is also an exchange for private companies, but one that will be able to provide more transparency to the startup’s bigger investors en route to an eventual full public listing. As of last week’s Disney news, the startup is now valued at $376 million.

Participating in the Ignite accelerator, Furuseth said, will give Kahoot the option to invest in startups in each cohort, and if it makes sense for the startup in question, they will build content that will be usable on the Kahoot platform.

“We have close to $30 million in the bank and are in a financial market where we can get more capital,” he said. “We don’t need to invest, but if we want to, we can.” 

The startup today has some 60 million games on its platform, with a good portion of those created by users themselves (making it more like a YouTube than a Netflix). The idea is that bringing in outside developers (in this case, by way of the accelerator) could inject more innovation and interesting takes on the concept of “educational gaming” — not unlike how Netflix and Amazon engage outside studios to develop originals for its platform, alongside what they develop themselves or buy in through deals with rights holders.

In addition to the carrots of investment and distribution on the Kahoot platform — which is likely to hit 100 million monthly active users this month (Furuseth said he was confident of the number today) — Kahoot is offering mentorship to potential cohorts in areas like monetization and product development. Given the fact that educational aides can come in all shapes and sizes, that might not take the form of a piece of content for the Kahoot platform.

“Putting something on Kahoot could be an outcome, but we’re also interested in ‘network products,’ which have the same desire to enable learning,” Furuseth said.

The company today has a double focus, with games for K-12 students as well as for enterprise environments. “Learning is the main topic,” he added. “We like to have the mix.”

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By the time you hear about a research project online or in the news it’s probably already gone through countless iterations and changes. Until Morressier, however, that early stage research was done separately by researchers who barely interacted with each other.

Morressier is a service for early stage research. This means it allows researchers to “raise the profile of their conference posters, presentations and abstracts and showcase their work from the very beginning.” Because most early stage research appears at conferences few of us ever see, by making projects more visible at those conferences we all get better research.

“We focus exclusively on the findings from the earliest stage of the research process, content that was traditionally restricted to halls of universities and conferences,” said co-founder Sami Benchekroun. “By bringing this content online and making it accessible, scientists can avoid repeating their peers’ mistakes and easily build on each other’s findings.”

“We help scientists showcase and gain attribution for their previously hidden early-stage research via individual DOIs. On the basis of our content we can showcase signals and trends in science at a far earlier stage than our competitors,” he said.

The service is live now and has raised over $6 million with help from Redalpine and Cherry Ventures.

“After witnessing the vital exchange happening at academic conferences around the world firsthand, the cofounders were inspired to launch Morressier to digitize the traditionally offline research from these events and ensure the conversation continues year-round. Our aim is to help scientists make progress faster by making previously hidden early-stage research discoverable and accessible,” said Benchekroun.

I spoke to the founder at Disrupt Berlin this year. You can check out the video below.

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Price f(x), a startup that offers cloud-based pricing software, has raised €25 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is European B2B technology growth investor Digital + Partners, and consulting firm Bain & Company. Prague-based Credo Ventures and London-based Talis Capital, which both backed Price f(x) at Series A, have also participated in this new round.

Founded in 2011, Munich-based Price f(x) provides a modular SaaS solution for price optimisation management (PO&M) and configure-price-quote (CPQ) for enterprises of any size.

Pricing optimisation software typically helps companies accurately define the price of goods across a vast and constantly changing spectrum of data and variables. This can include things like customer survey data and segments, competitor data, operating costs, inventories, and historic prices and sales.

CPQ software aggregates these variables, thus enabling companies to configure products or services in the most optimal way (i.e. bundling, up-sells, etc.), and price them according to costs, competition and local economic factors.

This end result is that is that it can drastically speed up and improve the accuracy of the quoting process to give customers the best price possible in accordance with all of the above factors.

Price f(x) says it currently serves over 80 global, blue-chip B2B and B2C customers across a variety of industries, including Robert Bosch, SchneiderElectric, Owens- Illinois, Iron Mountain and Sonoco. The company has also developed a strong partner ecosystem with leading global technology, consulting and integration providers, including new backer Bain & Company, and SAP.

Notably, Price f(x) is in the midst of litigation with U.S. competitor Vendavo over a number of patent disputes. In December 2017, Vendavo launched a lawsuit against Price f(x), which the German company refutes. And earlier this week, Price f(x) filed petitions for “Covered Business Method (“CBM”) Review” of four Vendavo patents, and says it will imminently file a fifth, which together will cover challenges to all of the patent claims that Vendavo has asserted in litigation between the two parties.

“Price f(x) has become the leading SaaS pricing solution provider on the market through its customer centric approach and by offering a feature rich, highly flexible pricing tool that is also risk free and fast to implement,” says Marcin Cichon, CEO and co-Founder of Price f(x), in a statement. “Our success is based on the continued satisfaction and loyalty of our customers. This new funding will allow us to help even more businesses to thrive by further expanding our existing platform capabilities and also introducing a new product offering for the SME market segment”.

“For most companies, pricing is the single most effective lever to boost earnings,” says Ron Kermisch, Bain & Company’s global pricing leader. “Yet many companies leave money on the table because they do not set the best price or ensure customers actually pay the price they have determined. Bain & Company sees investing in Price f(x) as a great opportunity to help Price f(x) to become the de-facto standard in pricing and with that to be also the best-of-breed competitive weapon for Bain’s clients, to stay at the cutting edge of pricing”.

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