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Snapchat is hedging its bets as its social network shrinks. Today Snap Inc revealed the first class of its startup accelerator called Yellow that offers $150,000 in funding and creativity-centric business education in exchange for seven to ten percent equity stake — in line with other accelerators like Y Combinator. The nine companies will take up a three-month residency in one of Snap’s buildings in Venice, Los Angeles.

The accelerator class ranges from augmented reality and journalism studios to lifystyle brands around weddings and fashion to aesthetic-focused marketplaces like ConBody that pairs you with a muscular ex-convict for workouts.

Yellow calls itself “A launchpad for creative minds and entrepreneurs who are looking to build the next generation of great media companies.” But what it also looks like is a potential acquisition feeder for the company and escape route for its business if Instagram’s competition does end up stealing all its users.

Here’s a look at the first nine companies in Snapchat Yellow, courtesy of write-ups provided by Snap.

ANRK (London, UK) – a new realities studio, exploring immersive storytelling through AR, VR, games and beyond.

• We are passionate about human-centered narratives, and use playful interaction and new technologies to create powerful experiences that connect the digital and physical.

ConBody (New York, NY) – a prison-style fitness bootcamp that hires formerly incarcerated individuals to teach fitness classes.

• ConBody is facilitating an opportunity-filled lifestyle by empowering our community to realize success lies within. We hire formerly incarcerated individuals to build personal discipline through a unique blend of cardiovascular training and bodyweight exercises that take advantage of the resistance properties of everyday objects. We apply military techniques to space constraints intimately familiar to city-dwellers and individuals who reside in small, constrained spaces. In addition, we’re changing the views of formerly incarcerated individuals to be changed by allowing professionals to interact with formerly incarcerated individuals, which allows to give professionals a different perspective on them.

Hashtag Our Stories (Durban, South Africa) – an international mobile journalism (MOJO) network, publishing vertical video stories on social media. Created by citizens, curated by journalists.

• Since September 2017, we’ve empowered 200 citizen storytellers in over 40 countries to produce videos with their phones. We focus on constructive, solutions-based stories and provide more diverse news coverage. Because more cameras and more perspectives means more truth.

IDK (Los Angeles, CA) – the ID for Korean music. We are a digital media company expanding in-depth on the music of Korea and K-Pop as a globally recognized genre; showcasing the Identity of the artists that shape the culture. We provide insightful and rich coverage and content for the global Korean Pop audience.

• We are creating a Global Brand and Destination for an English-Speaking Korean Pop Audience. Our mission is to create rich and stylized content about the Korean Music Genre; less gossip, more news & features. We want to provide a legitimate outlet for Korean Pop Culture; to create emotive, aspirational stories that are visually chic to a young, hyper-aware, and digitally engaged audience.

• As the company begins we will focus on publishing the best in engaging social video content. We will translate this content across platforms, ultimately building brands, shows, and stories that feed the insatiable audience appetite for Korean Pop. From there we will build towards live events, merchandise, and much more.

Love Stories TV (New York, NY) – a video platform for wedding planning and inspiration, bringing engaged couples and event professionals together in a uniquely visual community. Think of us like ‘Houzz’ for weddings: We connect brides and grooms with the ideas, inspiration, products, and services they need for their weddings in a uniquely visual community.

• On lovestoriestv.com filmmakers and newlyweds from all over the world share their professionally produced videos along with the data and details about the wedding. Brides and grooms watch the videos to find ideas, inspiration, products, and services for their wedding. We also have an active community of pre-engaged-brides under the age of 24 who watch the videos on our site, social, and Amazon Prime channel for entertainment. We partner with brands and wedding pros to help them reach brides and grooms on our site and channels via the real wedding films that feature them and original content.

Premme (Los Angeles, CA) – a fashion-first, body-positive lifestyle brand for the plus-size It-Girl.

• Today, 67% of women in America wear plus-sizes – yet plus-size fashion only accounts for 17% of the women’s apparel market. When it comes to media representation, plus-sizes are similarly lacking in positive, aspirational visibility. Premme empowers women who have been historically marginalized through fashion-forward, statement making clothing and visionary, contemporary editorial content and imagery. By creating a relatable, yet aspirational, brand that centers plus-size women, we aim to flip the script on what it means to look and be stylish, while leading the conversation and movement towards truly diverse and inclusive fashion.

SelfieCircus (Los Angeles, CA) – a new kind of circus.

• SelfieCircus creates popup experiences designed to be documented and shared on social media. The company is building a platform to connect artists, brands, and consumers. The first SelfieCircus will open in Los Angeles in late 2018.

Space Oddity Films (Los Angeles, CA) – a content studio exploring tech and culture that creates innovative content for every platform – mobile, digital, AR/VR, video games, feature film and television.

• We tell stories about the convergence of humanity and technology. Our original viral tech horror thriller shorts are the foundation of our brand. Our goal is to make the future now.

Toonstar (Los Angeles, CA) – a digital animation network that creates and distributes daily pop culture cartoons for an “always on” world. Powered by proprietary animation tech, we produce daily, snackable, interactive animated content at unprecedented speed and cost.

• We have a large and highly engaged audience of teens and young adults generating millions of views per week because our content is sticky, shareable, relatable and engineered specifically for social.  We’re a team of studio alumni and media tech innovators who have produced hit digital animated series, built groundbreaking interactive media technologies and launched mega entertainment franchises. Now we’re on a mission to build a nextgen animation network that delivers greater reach + engagement at a fraction of the operating cost.

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Evaneos, the online marketplace for tailor-made travel experiences, has picked up $80 million in Series D funding. Leading the round is Partech, and Level Equity, with participation from Quadrille Capital, and existing backers XAnge, Serena Capital, and Bpifrance.

The injection of cash is to be used to international development, including increasing headcount from the current 180 employees. It brings total funding to around $108 million since being founded in 2009.

Competing primarily with traditional tour operators, Evaneos offers a marketplace for tailored travel experiences that claims to cut out the middle-person -– that is, the tour operators and major travel agencies -– by connecting travellers directly with a community of local travel agents. Through the site you can browse a range of holiday ideas, then contact a local agent living in the destination country to design a tailor-made itinerary.

The draw for consumers is more personalized travel experiences, while local agencies benefit from an additional source of direct revenue, retaining more income for the local economy. Evaneos counts 1,300 local partners based in 160 destinations, and says it aims to add another 500 in 2009.

The product is available in 9 European countries, and Evaneos name checks Germany, France, Italy, Spain & the U.K. as particularly competitive but where it is seeing most business. To date, more than 300,000 travellers have used Evaneos to create and book a trip.

Meanwhile, personalised travel remains a hot sector for investors. In June, TourRadar, the Vienna, Austria-headquartered online travel agency (OTA) that also targets the multi-day touring market, raised $50 million in Series C funding led by the Silicon Valley growth VC firm TCV.

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Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces it’s raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen is taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen is joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive influx of cash, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificial intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two of Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh. have left. He later admitted they had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. It will have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know that it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs. It will have to out-match fellow legal tech startups like Ravel, CaseText, Judicata, Premonition, and more, though they’re often just tools rather than software-equipped law firms.

Kan also cops to his lack of experience in legal. “I think for any full stack vertical startup started by a non subject matter expert (ie. me who is not a lawyer), there is a risk that you come in and are very prescriptive on how things work. Then you build software that says ‘the providers must do it this way!’” Kan tells me. “But the practical reality is that it doesn’t work with the nuanced, non-linear workflows that providers already have. So the technology doesn’t get adopted and fails to provide value. That to me is the biggest upcoming risk.”

Justin Kan, from lifevlogger to legal giant

Yet if Atrium can ease clients into this new world service by service, it could generate network effects that fuel the whole business. It’s just a matter of prioritization. “One of the things I always need to be focused on is…focusing. That’s sometimes a blindspot.” From Justin.tv to Twitch to its acquisition by Amazon to his role as YC partner, Kan delivers but can be frenetic. “As an entrepreneur, I have a tendency to take on too much.”

But after leaving YC because “I had felt like I’d stopped learning”, Kan has found the legal space so full of knowledge and opportunity that it can hold his attention. “Part of why I like this business is because it was so different. I didn’t think it was something that would be as easily competed with” Kan recalls. “I had this calendar company and Google came out with something similar. I told [Twitch co-founder] Emmett ‘We have to do something no one can compete with. At least Google will never do this’. Then they did.”

But unlike with that game streaming startup, Atrium doesn’t have to worry about beating or getting bought by some legal tech giant. Instead, it wants to become one.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2O6fPDk

//

Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces it’s raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen is taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen is joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive influx of cash, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificial intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two of Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh. have left. He later admitted they had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. It will have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know that it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs. It will have to out-match fellow legal tech startups like Ravel, CaseText, Judicata, Premonition, and more, though they’re often just tools rather than software-equipped law firms.

Kan also cops to his lack of experience in legal. “I think for any full stack vertical startup started by a non subject matter expert (ie. me who is not a lawyer), there is a risk that you come in and are very prescriptive on how things work. Then you build software that says ‘the providers must do it this way!’” Kan tells me. “But the practical reality is that it doesn’t work with the nuanced, non-linear workflows that providers already have. So the technology doesn’t get adopted and fails to provide value. That to me is the biggest upcoming risk.”

Justin Kan, from lifevlogger to legal giant

Yet if Atrium can ease clients into this new world service by service, it could generate network effects that fuel the whole business. It’s just a matter of prioritization. “One of the things I always need to be focused on is…focusing. That’s sometimes a blindspot.” From Justin.tv to Twitch to its acquisition by Amazon to his role as YC partner, Kan delivers but can be frenetic. “As an entrepreneur, I have a tendency to take on too much.”

But after leaving YC because “I had felt like I’d stopped learning”, Kan has found the legal space so full of knowledge and opportunity that it can hold his attention. “Part of why I like this business is because it was so different. I didn’t think it was something that would be as easily competed with” Kan recalls. “I had this calendar company and Google came out with something similar. I told [Twitch co-founder] Emmett ‘We have to do something no one can compete with. At least Google will never do this’. Then they did.”

But unlike with that game streaming startup, Atrium doesn’t have to worry about beating or getting bought by some legal tech giant. Instead, it wants to become one.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2O6fPDk

//

Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces it’s raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen is taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen is joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive influx of cash, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificial intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two of Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh. have left. He later admitted they had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. It will have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know that it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs. It will have to out-match fellow legal tech startups like Ravel, CaseText, Judicata, Premonition, and more, though they’re often just tools rather than software-equipped law firms.

Kan also cops to his lack of experience in legal. “I think for any full stack vertical startup started by a non subject matter expert (ie. me who is not a lawyer), there is a risk that you come in and are very prescriptive on how things work. Then you build software that says ‘the providers must do it this way!’” Kan tells me. “But the practical reality is that it doesn’t work with the nuanced, non-linear workflows that providers already have. So the technology doesn’t get adopted and fails to provide value. That to me is the biggest upcoming risk.”

Justin Kan, from lifevlogger to legal giant

Yet if Atrium can ease clients into this new world service by service, it could generate network effects that fuel the whole business. It’s just a matter of prioritization. “One of the things I always need to be focused on is…focusing. That’s sometimes a blindspot.” From Justin.tv to Twitch to its acquisition by Amazon to his role as YC partner, Kan delivers but can be frenetic. “As an entrepreneur, I have a tendency to take on too much.”

But after leaving YC because “I had felt like I’d stopped learning”, Kan has found the legal space so full of knowledge and opportunity that it can hold his attention. “Part of why I like this business is because it was so different. I didn’t think it was something that would be as easily competed with” Kan recalls. “I had this calendar company and Google came out with something similar. I told [Twitch co-founder] Emmett ‘We have to do something no one can compete with. At least Google will never do this’. Then they did.”

But unlike with that game streaming startup, Atrium doesn’t have to worry about beating or getting bought by some legal tech giant. Instead, it wants to become one.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2O6fPDk

//

Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces it’s raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen is taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen is joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive influx of cash, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificial intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two of Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh. have left. He later admitted they had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. It will have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know that it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs. It will have to out-match fellow legal tech startups like Ravel, CaseText, Judicata, Premonition, and more, though they’re often just tools rather than software-equipped law firms.

Kan also cops to his lack of experience in legal. “I think for any full stack vertical startup started by a non subject matter expert (ie. me who is not a lawyer), there is a risk that you come in and are very prescriptive on how things work. Then you build software that says ‘the providers must do it this way!’” Kan tells me. “But the practical reality is that it doesn’t work with the nuanced, non-linear workflows that providers already have. So the technology doesn’t get adopted and fails to provide value. That to me is the biggest upcoming risk.”

Justin Kan, from lifevlogger to legal giant

Yet if Atrium can ease clients into this new world service by service, it could generate network effects that fuel the whole business. It’s just a matter of prioritization. “One of the things I always need to be focused on is…focusing. That’s sometimes a blindspot.” From Justin.tv to Twitch to its acquisition by Amazon to his role as YC partner, Kan delivers but can be frenetic. “As an entrepreneur, I have a tendency to take on too much.”

But after leaving YC because “I had felt like I’d stopped learning”, Kan has found the legal space so full of knowledge and opportunity that it can hold his attention. “Part of why I like this business is because it was so different. I didn’t think it was something that would be as easily competed with” Kan recalls. “I had this calendar company and Google came out with something similar. I told [Twitch co-founder] Emmett ‘We have to do something no one can compete with. At least Google will never do this’. Then they did.”

But unlike with that game streaming startup, Atrium doesn’t have to worry about beating or getting bought by some legal tech giant. Instead, it wants to become one.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2O6fPDk

//

Branch announced today that it has acquired TUNE‘s attribution analytics team and business, a part of the SaaS platform that focuses on optimizing and accurately attributing ad spend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

TUNE, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2009, helps ad platforms tie marketing investments to measurable outcomes. 

Backed by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, Branch creates links between websites and mobile apps, called deep links. The deal will help the company, which supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users, expand its portfolio of linking and attribution analytics tools to become the ultimate marketing and measurement platform for businesses.

“TUNE has always been a steward of Branch’s core values, especially when it comes to putting user experience and privacy first,” Branch CEO Alex Austin said in a statement. “Combining TUNE’s years of learning with Branch’s innovation, raw product execution, and key strategic partnerships is the beginning of a new era of mobile marketing. It’s going to be an incredible ride.”

Formerly known as HasOffers, TUNE was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown. Peter Hamilton joined the startup in 2012 and has served as the CEO since.

The performance marketing company completed a $9.4 million Series A investment in 2013 led by Accel, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015 led by ICON Ventures. For its part, Branch is in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital funding at a unicorn valuation. 

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2NybUSG

//

Branch announced today that it has acquired TUNE‘s attribution analytics team and business, a part of the SaaS platform that focuses on optimizing and accurately attributing ad spend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

TUNE, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2009, helps ad platforms tie marketing investments to measurable outcomes. 

Backed by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, Branch creates links between websites and mobile apps, called deep links. The deal will help the company, which supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users, expand its portfolio of linking and attribution analytics tools to become the ultimate marketing and measurement platform for businesses.

“TUNE has always been a steward of Branch’s core values, especially when it comes to putting user experience and privacy first,” Branch CEO Alex Austin said in a statement. “Combining TUNE’s years of learning with Branch’s innovation, raw product execution, and key strategic partnerships is the beginning of a new era of mobile marketing. It’s going to be an incredible ride.”

Formerly known as HasOffers, TUNE was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown. Peter Hamilton joined the startup in 2012 and has served as the CEO since.

The performance marketing company completed a $9.4 million Series A investment in 2013 led by Accel, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015 led by ICON Ventures. For its part, Branch is in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital funding at a unicorn valuation. 

from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2NybUSG

//

Branch announced today that it has acquired TUNE‘s attribution analytics team and business, a part of the SaaS platform that focuses on optimizing and accurately attributing ad spend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

TUNE, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2009, helps ad platforms tie marketing investments to measurable outcomes. 

Backed by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, Branch creates links between websites and mobile apps, called deep links. The deal will help the company, which supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users, expand its portfolio of linking and attribution analytics tools to become the ultimate marketing and measurement platform for businesses.

“TUNE has always been a steward of Branch’s core values, especially when it comes to putting user experience and privacy first,” Branch CEO Alex Austin said in a statement. “Combining TUNE’s years of learning with Branch’s innovation, raw product execution, and key strategic partnerships is the beginning of a new era of mobile marketing. It’s going to be an incredible ride.”

Formerly known as HasOffers, TUNE was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown. Peter Hamilton joined the startup in 2012 and has served as the CEO since.

The performance marketing company completed a $9.4 million Series A investment in 2013 led by Accel, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015 led by ICON Ventures. For its part, Branch is in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital funding at a unicorn valuation. 

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In what looks like an undeniably good strategic fit, U.K.-based business reporting software startup Supdate has been acquired by equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I’m told it was an all-cash acquisition.

I understand that Crowdcube is essentially buying the Supdate user base and tech/IP, and that Supdate founder Duane Jackson is not joining Crowdcube but will be helping on the technical side during the handover. The idea is that Supdate will become part of part of the existing suite of “post-funding benefits” available to businesses that raise on Crowdcube, such as access to Amazon’s Launchpad Programme.

Founded out of Jackson’s own frustration as an angel investor, whereby startups he’d backed didn’t always keep him updated regularly, Supdate offers SaaS for businesses to create and share company news and metrics with shareholders. The premise was that well-designed software could help streamline and to some degree automate these updates, helping investors stay in the loop without a founder using up too much bandwidth writing reports.

Jackson — who previously founded and sold online accounting software company KashFlow — says that partnering with a crowdfunding platform was “an obvious route to market” for Supdate, which is why he approached Crowdcube. Those conversations quickly progressed to the possibility of Crowdcube acquiring Supdate. The timing was good, too, since Jackson has already begun working on a new venture in the accounting space. Here we go again, you might well say.

Adds Darren Westlake, co-founder and CEO of Crowdcube: “Crowdcube has funded over 600 companies, averaging 350 investors each and so ensuring businesses can easily connect with their shareholders to keep them updated is really valuable to our investor community. We’ve been fans of Supdate for a long time, and when we recently began talking with Duane in more detail, it quickly became obvious that Supdate would be a natural fit for Crowdcube and our growing Funded Club”.

Meanwhile, Crowdcube is giving its alumni of over 600 funded businesses access to Supdate, as well as providing ongoing access to Supdate’s existing customer base.

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