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Game engine maker Unity believes voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms and it’s buying one of the top companies in the space to bolster what its customers can build on the its platform.

Unity has acquired Vivox, a company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enable gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space. The company also provides text-based chat. No details on deal terms.

“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello tells TechCrunch. “There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox.”

Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox. As Unity looks towards new customers beyond gaming, this acquisition has broader reach as well.

“We’re increasingly supporting industries like architecture, engineering, construction and the auto industry and they talk a lot about collaborating and communicating,” Riccitiello says.

Vivox was originally founded in 2005 and raised over $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. The startup’s name and some of its assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, we are told. The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time; founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue on with the company after its acquisition.

For his part, Riccitiello doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to shake things up at the Framebridge, Massachusetts-based company, which will maintain its offices and 50+ employees situated in The Bay State. Seaver will report directly to Riccitiello.

Though the company’s previous customers include studios like Unity-rival Epic Games that used the tool to bolster voice chat in Fortnite, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to cut off non-Unity customers from using the service, “nothing is changing,” Riccitiello tells TechCrunch.

“It can be nerve-racking to count on something from a smaller company when they might get acquired by a competitor or might go out of business,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity going out of business and I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity being bad hands, we’re sort of Switzerland in our world, we support all platforms and virtually every publisher in the world.”

Asked whether he felt the company’s status as an open platform had been harmed by recent feuds with UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, Riccitiello minimized the issue saying it was a skirmish based on “them claiming a partnership that didn’t exist,” reiterating that “relative to developers, I think they can count on us morning, noon, and night to do the right things for them.”

Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UrkhiF

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Game engine maker Unity believes voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms and it’s buying one of the top companies in the space to bolster what its customers can build on the its platform.

Unity has acquired Vivox, a company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enable gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space. The company also provides text-based chat. No details on deal terms.

“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello tells TechCrunch. “There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox.”

Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox. As Unity looks towards new customers beyond gaming, this acquisition has broader reach as well.

“We’re increasingly supporting industries like architecture, engineering, construction and the auto industry and they talk a lot about collaborating and communicating,” Riccitiello says.

Vivox was originally founded in 2005 and raised over $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. The startup’s name and some of its assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, we are told. The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time; founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue on with the company after its acquisition.

For his part, Riccitiello doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to shake things up at the Framebridge, Massachusetts-based company, which will maintain its offices and 50+ employees situated in The Bay State. Seaver will report directly to Riccitiello.

Though the company’s previous customers include studios like Unity-rival Epic Games that used the tool to bolster voice chat in Fortnite, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to cut off non-Unity customers from using the service, “nothing is changing,” Riccitiello tells TechCrunch.

“It can be nerve-racking to count on something from a smaller company when they might get acquired by a competitor or might go out of business,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity going out of business and I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity being bad hands, we’re sort of Switzerland in our world, we support all platforms and virtually every publisher in the world.”

Asked whether he felt the company’s status as an open platform had been harmed by recent feuds with UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, Riccitiello minimized the issue saying it was a skirmish based on “them claiming a partnership that didn’t exist,” reiterating that “relative to developers, I think they can count on us morning, noon, and night to do the right things for them.”

Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UrkhiF

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Few things are easy in our financial system if you don’t have regular employment. It’s hard to prove (regular) income, which makes applying for a credit card or personal loan much more difficult and time-consuming. That’s particularly tough, since freelancer income is variable, and these sort of income smoothing tools can be critical to make ends meet. Despite those challenges, freelancing is the new normal: if current trends hold true, a majority of the workforce in America could be freelancers within ten years.

SF-based startup Oxygen hopes to give those freelancers some breathing room in their financial lives. Through a digital banking app and a membership program, the startup offers freelancers simple access to credit that can be pulled down or paid off instantly at any time.

The company has raised $2.3 million in the first close of its seed round from investors including Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen. It participated in Y Combinator’s accelerator program last summer.

Hussein Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Oxygen, is used to breaking down old institutions and understands the acute pain of freelancers. A single founder originally from Egypt, Ahmed worked as a consultant in the Bay Area after getting his MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and his PhD in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. “I tried to take a loan out from LendingClub” and they couldn’t verify his income, he explained to me. They then “asked for 10 pages of documentation” since he was a freelancer.

That experience would eventually lead to the core offering of Oxygen, which is efficient and on-going access to a credit line. “When you have this cash flow problem, you can just make one tap,” Ahmed said. “Open the app, take the money out, and repay it whenever you can.”

Oxygen is unique in that it doesn’t charge fees for taking out a loan, but instead assesses a monthly membership fee of $29.99 if a user draws down their credit limit. “If you aren’t using the cash reserve then you aren’t paying the monthly fee,” he said. That model seems attractive to at least some freelancers as Oxygen has seen 80% month-over-month growth since its November launch according to Ahmed.

The company has also taken advantage of some key growth hacks. Oxygen bought advertising on the back of SF Muni buses, which is significantly less visible and popular than advertising on the side of a bus where pedestrians on sidewalks are more likely to see them. Ahmed though saw opportunity. We “decided to go for the back of the bus which is 10x cheaper than the side of the bus, but if you are working for Instagram or DoorDash, then you are actually spending your day behind the bus,” he explained.

The back of the bus is where the working freelancer looks for ads.

In addition to Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen, Oxygen received funding from ZMT Capital (China), Locus Ventures, Endure Capital, PioneerFund, Magic City, Light Bridge, Strawberry Creek, Base Ventures, The House Fund and Sam Yam.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RVBbcy

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Credit cards are a relatively new invention that have entered into something of an innovation rut. Reward programs seem stale, mobile apps remain mired in early-2000s UX paradigms, and all too often, critical financial decisions (and their expensive associated fees) are hidden like booby-traps for users. Little wonder then that consumers are fed up with their credit card providers.

Worse, credit cards are not accessible to millions of people, whether due to a lack of credit history, immigration status, or because they are unlikely to be profitable since they often won’t use certain fee-based services.

Credit card issuer Petal wants to change that status quo, and now has another $30 million to do it.

The New York-based startup announced today that it raised a series B equity round from Valar Ventures, which also led the company’s $13 million series A round almost exactly a year ago (bringing the company’s total to $46.6 million including its seed round). Petal had previously announced in October that it raised a $34 million credit facility to power its product. It was founded in 2016 by a quad of founders including CEO Jason Gross, and currently has 60 employees.

Petal uses a more holistic and comprehensive underwriting model to determine the creditworthiness of credit card applicants compared to traditional banks that rely predominantly on an applicant’s FICO score. The goal is to focus more on cash flows rather than a static score, since that measure provides a more accurate assessment of a potential user’s payback capability. The hope for Petal is that its modern data models will allow more customers to qualify for credit, and for customers who qualify to receive a higher credit line.

After testing its model privately, Petal publicly introduced its Petal credit card product this past October, which is on the Visa network. Among its key features are eliminating many of the fees that credit card issuers have tacked on over the years, including the overdraft fee, late fee, international fee, and annual fees. Petal makes money through interest rates and through the transaction fees charged with use.

The company has seen success with customers so far: more than 100,000 potential applicants signed up during the company’s private beta phase according to Petal, and since then thousands of customers have gotten a Petal card following its public release.

Petal shows options for how to pay a credit card balance, and tries to transparently show the cost of interest when borrowers don’t pay off their whole statement.

Petal’s CEO Gross told me that one of the big goals for this new round of capital was to expand the product to more customers while also offering more features. “The card is really simple, but there is a lot more we want to do over time … and this funding allows us to reach that next level of what we can offer to consumers,” he said. Gross also noted that while there are adjacent opportunities to help consumers around their financial lives, Petal is heads down focused on the credit card market.

Valar Ventures has now led two equity rounds in the company. Gross explained that “the insiders have a lot more information … and they took a look at it and they decided they would rather do it themselves.” Valar has built up an unusually strong consumer fintech portfolio that includes money transfer business TransferWise, smartphone banking service N26, digital investment platform Stash, mobile tax filer Taxfix, and paycheck smoothing / budgeting app Even.

Greyhound Capital joins Petal’s cap table as a new investor in this round. Greyhound is focused on fintech, particularly in Europe. Gross said that he thinks bringing European financial innovation to the U.S. will be critical for Petal’s success. “We are hoping to learn a lot about best practices globally,” he said.

Credit cards have been getting more attention from venture investors recently. In addition to Petal’s series of rounds, Brex, a startup based in Silicon Valley that targets the corporate credit card market, has seen a slew of equity rounds, raising $182.1 million according to Crunchbase.

In addition to Valar and Greyhound, previous investors Third Prime Capital, Rosecliff Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures and Afore Capital joined the round.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Scn5CM

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It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open source time series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product.

The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. With today’s funding, the startup has raised $31 million.

Timescale makes a time series database. That means it can ingest large amounts of data and measure how it changes over time. This comes in handy for a variety of use cases from financial services to smart homes to self-driving cars — or any data-intensive activity  you want to measure over time.

While there are a number of time scale database offerings on the market, Timescale co-founder and CEO Ajay Kulkarni says that what makes his company’s approach unique is that it uses SQL, one of the most popular languages in the world. Timescale wanted to take advantage of that penetration and build its product on top of Postgres, the popular open source SQL database. This gave it an offering that is based on SQL and highly scalable.

Timescale admittedly came late to the market in 2017, but by offering a unique approach and making it open source, it has been able to gain traction quickly. “Despite entering into what is a very crowded database market, we’ve seen quite a bit of community growth because of this message of SQL and scale for time series,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch.

In just over 22 months, the company has over a million downloads and a range of users from older guard companies like Charter, Comcast and Hexagon Mining to more modern companies like Nutanix and and TransferWise.

With a strong base community in place, the company believes that it’s now time to commercialize its offering, and in addition to an open source license, it’s introducing a commercial license.”Up until today, our main business model has been through support and deployment assistance. With this new release, we will be also will have enterprise features that are available with a commercial license,” Kulkarni explained.

The commercial version will offer a more sophisticated automation layer for larger companies with greater scale requirements. It will also provide better lifecycle management, so companies can get rid of older data or move it to cheaper long-term storage to reduce costs. It’s also offering the ability to reorder data in an automated fashion when that’s required, and finally, it’s making it easier to turn the time series data into a series of data points for analytics purposes. The company also hinted that a managed cloud version is on the road map for later this year.

The new money should help Timescale continue fueling the growth and development of the product, especially as it builds out the commercial offering. Timescale, which was founded in 2015 in NYC, currently has 30 employees. With the new influx of cash, it expects to double that over the next year.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Scn2H6

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It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open source time series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product.

The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. With today’s funding, the startup has raised $31 million.

Timescale makes a time series database. That means it can ingest large amounts of data and measure how it changes over time. This comes in handy for a variety of use cases from financial services to smart homes to self-driving cars — or any data-intensive activity  you want to measure over time.

While there are a number of time scale database offerings on the market, Timescale co-founder and CEO Ajay Kulkarni says that what makes his company’s approach unique is that it uses SQL, one of the most popular languages in the world. Timescale wanted to take advantage of that penetration and build its product on top of Postgres, the popular open source SQL database. This gave it an offering that is based on SQL and highly scalable.

Timescale admittedly came late to the market in 2017, but by offering a unique approach and making it open source, it has been able to gain traction quickly. “Despite entering into what is a very crowded database market, we’ve seen quite a bit of community growth because of this message of SQL and scale for time series,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch.

In just over 22 months, the company has over a million downloads and a range of users from older guard companies like Charter, Comcast and Hexagon Mining to more modern companies like Nutanix and and TransferWise.

With a strong base community in place, the company believes that it’s now time to commercialize its offering, and in addition to an open source license, it’s introducing a commercial license.”Up until today, our main business model has been through support and deployment assistance. With this new release, we will be also will have enterprise features that are available with a commercial license,” Kulkarni explained.

The commercial version will offer a more sophisticated automation layer for larger companies with greater scale requirements. It will also provide better lifecycle management, so companies can get rid of older data or move it to cheaper long-term storage to reduce costs. It’s also offering the ability to reorder data in an automated fashion when that’s required, and finally, it’s making it easier to turn the time series data into a series of data points for analytics purposes. The company also hinted that a managed cloud version is on the road map for later this year.

The new money should help Timescale continue fueling the growth and development of the product, especially as it builds out the commercial offering. Timescale, which was founded in 2015 in NYC, currently has 30 employees. With the new influx of cash, it expects to double that over the next year.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Scn2H6