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B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a ‘social finance’ app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in Seed round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social want to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social interactions.

As it exists today, the B-Social app and accompanying card enables users to have control over everyday spending, track expenditure, and create groups between friends to split bills and record settlements. It’s currently in the hands of a limited number of beta testers, spanning employees, investors, friends and family, with plans for a wider U.K. launch in February next year.

“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed tells me. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world”.

The idea was born in part out of Valimahomed’s own frustrations and is informed by his belief that individuals are often a bank themselves, lending and borrowing to friends and family by making shared purchases and then getting paid back.

“A simple example might be that you pay for flights for two or more people and then get paid back individually,” he says. “For multiple transactions, this becomes complex often resulting in the trip organiser having to create a spreadsheet to work out what people owe across multiple transactions”.

To simplify this problem, B-Social wants to let you to make purchases with your card, which are flagged as an expense on behalf of a group of individuals. From here the bank to be will enable all members of a group — and where groups can be ad hoc and temporary or more long-term — to continuously see who is owed how much and to get paid back easily within the app and record settlements.

Dubbing this future proposition as the seeds of a “social bank,” the B-Social CEO cites competitors as traditional high street banks that currently dominate the U.K. consumer market (the so-called big 5 have around 87 percent market share in the U.K.).

“We are aiming at winning a part of their market share by targeting customers looking for a bank as social as they are that offers a unique digital experience in order to help change the banking ecosystem forever,” Valimahomed tells me, although he also concedes that challengers such as Monzo, N26, Starling and Revolut have also built some basic social features into their apps.

“Our entire technology and product focus is to build a bank from scratch through a social lens,” he says.

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The ride-hailing giant Careem is now in the delivery business as the company seeks new verticals in its ever-increasing fight against other services in the Middle East including Uber. Starting with food delivery in Dhabi and Jeddah, the company sees the delivery service expanding to pharmaceuticals according to a report by Reuters. Careem is investing over $150m into the service.

“We believe the opportunity for deliveries in the region is even bigger than ride-hailing,” Chief Executive and Co-Founder Mudassir Sheikha told Reuters. “It is going to become a very significant part of Careem over time.”

Called Careem Now, the service will operate independently from its ride-hailing business. It will have its own app and Careem is building the service a dedicated call center.

This comes as the company is trying to close a $500m funding round. Back in October, the company announced it had already raised $200m from existing investors. Prior to this announcement, rumors were swirling around the company that several companies including Didi Chuxing could acquire the company.

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K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Primary Ventures, BoxGroup, Bessemer Venture Partners and Max Ventures – all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds.

Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO, Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.

“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so – where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache vs other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”

K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.

Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years – compiled from doctors notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data – K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis. 

With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or – what Bloch calls – “Dr. Google”, which often produce broad, downright frightening, and inaccurate diagnoses. 

Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians

Users are able to see cases and diagnoses that had symptoms similar to their own, with K Health notifying users with serious conditions when to consider seeking immediate care. (K Health Press Image / K Health / https://www.khealth.ai)

In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers, and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.

K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation. 

Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1000 in the US, primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.

K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.

The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.

With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.

Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes

With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology, and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.

Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior, and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.

The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy copays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.

Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps – such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.

The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-ten years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.

By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.

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They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the increasingly competitive world of banking, perhaps poaching your best people also counts. In a move that is bound to raise eyebrows in London’s fintech ecosystem and beyond, Megan Caywood, who up until this week was Starling Bank’s Chief Platform Officer, is joining banking incumbent Barclays.

According to sources, Caywood, who led Starling’s marketplace banking efforts — a key pillar of the challenger bank — handed in her notice two weeks ago, whilst Starling Marketplace partners were informed last week. I understand she is currently on “gardening leave” and will officially become Managing Director, Head of Barclays Consumer Strategy early next year.

With an academic background in cognitive science research, and a Silicon Valley import — having worked at Xero and Intuit in the U.S. — Caywood joined Starling in June 2016 where she soon became an important lieutenant to Starling CEO and founder Anne Boden, often appearing publicly as the second face of the challenger bank. I understand, however, that the pair remain good friends and that Starling threw a leaving party for Caywood last week.

Megan Caywood speaking at a Startup Grind event in London moderated by TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear

Meanwhile, the move to Barclays is thought to be primarily motivated by the impact Caywood believes she can have at a large bank compared to an upstart, according to a source familiar with her thinking. Caywood has always talked passionately about making financial services work better for consumers and has long-argued that banks working with fintech startups is the best way to achieve this.

Related to this, Caywood’s new title at Barclays makes no reference to marketplaces, even though my fintech sources tell me Barclays is rumoured to be working on more third-party integrations. As a pointer, the incumbent bank has a number of existing partnerships, including with London startup Flux to offer itemised digital receipts and loyalty within the Barclays Launchpad app.

It is also noteworthy that Caywood’s title doesn’t include ‘UK’, and I understand that her remit is going to be international, perhaps expanding across the pond based on her Silicon Valley roots and the fact that she is American.

During her two and a half years at Starling, Caywood helped design and rapidly roll out the Starling Marketplace, which includes an open API and a marketplace of third-party financial services that sit inside of the Starling app. Marketplace partners include Flux, mortgage broker Habito, travel insurance provider Kasko, and investment products Wealthify and Wealthsimple, amongst others.

I’ve reached out to Caywood, who declined to comment, instead referring me to Barclays’ PR.

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Meeshkan, a Finnish startup that made quite a splash at the recent Slush conference, has quietly raised €370,000 in pre-seed funding to continue developing its “ChatOps” product for machine learning developers.

Deployed on Slack, the bot allows developers to “rapidly stop, restart, fork, tweak, monitor, deploy and test machine learning models” without interrupting the collaborative workflows they are accustomed to or being forced to go back and forth between disparate developer tools.

Under the hood, Meeshkan says it uses patent-pending tech for speedily partitioning of data-flow across distributed infrastructure. Related to this, the burgeoning company is currently partnering with Northeastern University and CUDA to develop “zero-downtime” checkpointing of ML models in TensorFlow and PyTorch.

In an email exchange, Meeshkan founder Mike Solomon explained that training ML models is currently done through command line interfaces and web dashboards, which is not optimum for collaboration. This is because teams typically need to communicate about ML model training, make decisions about models, act on these decisions instantly, and react to push notifications about a job’s status, none of which can conveniently happen through the command line or web dashboards.

“My generation writes less and less code, but we are iterating on it faster and faster with incremental changes,” he says. “In machine learning, this could be a small tweak in the learning rate of a model. In unit testing, this could be covering the corner case of an API that returns null values in certain circumstances. What unites these scenarios is that developers are dealing with externalities, like data or a third-party API, and trying to build fast on top of them. A world-class IDE, while it helps with lots of problems, does not provide much value for these small tweaks. We’ve found that what developers need is a frictionless environment to make the tweak/test/learn loop turn as fast as possible”.

To begin fixing this, Solomon tells me that Meeshkan set out to create a bot on Slack that helps teams monitor and tweak the training of their ML models in realtime. “For ML engineers, we found that they spent hours on Slack discussing what to do with their models but had to resort to arcane and byzantine hacks to apply, document and archive these changes,” he says.

“We made a simple bot where teams can turn their discussions on Slack about things like changing a learning rate or a batch size into action, right from Slack. From this simple idea, the floodgates opened. Developers really quickly let us know what they wanted to control from Slack, some of which is trivial to implement, some of which is profoundly difficult and leads us to uncharted engineering territory”.

Meeshkan has several patent-pending algorithms from the resulting work. Solomon also explained that the same underlying problem exists in continuous integration and “data wrangling” as well, and that the team is developing a suite of products that address this concern.

This includes a second product called unmock.io, which brings the same idea to testing and continuous integration and has seen traction at AWS re:Invent. “We look to be releasing more tools along this line during Q1 of 2018,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Meeshkan’s pre-seed backers include Risto Siilasmaa and Kim Groop (First Fellow Partners), Finnish angel Ali Omar, Christian Jantzen’s Futuristic.vc, and Neil Murray’s The Nordic Web Ventures.

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