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Productboard, the San Francisco and Prague-based startup that offers product management software, has raised $10 million in further funding, adding to its Series A in July last year. The round is led by Index Ventures, and sees Index General Partner Jan Hammer joining the board.

Also participating is previous backers Kleiner Perkins, Credo Ventures, Rockaway Capital, and Reflex Capital. It brings total funding for Productboard to $19.7 million, while I understand from sources that the company’s valuation increased three-fold since the A round and is “close to a 9-digit figure”.

Founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan and Daniel Hejl, Productboard has developed a “product management system” to help companies deliver better experiences for customers, faster. Specifically, the cloud software is designed to bridge the gap between customer feedback and feature requests and a company’s product roadmap, thus doing away with the use of desperate tools such as chat apps, email, spreadsheets and Powerpoint.

More broadly, the former Startup Battlefield company fits into and is helping to drive the trend that is seeing winning companies understand they need to become “product-first,” as a new generation of consumers set a much higher bar in terms of product experiences and future expectations.

“As competition in the digital space heats up, it takes only a couple of years for a great new product to dominate the market, [and] companies realize that their only way of survival is to deliver the right products to market faster than others,” Productboard co-founder and CEO Hubert Palan tells me. “That is why Product management has been increasingly critical and growing role. What was once a job based on simply gathering customer requirements to send to engineering teams has become a much more strategic role, gaining more influence in the C-suite”.

However, in spite of the growing importance of product management — from startups to much larger enterprises — Palan says there hasn’t before existed a dedicated system for product teams to ensure that they’re building the right products. While sales people have Salesforce and marketers have Marketo, he says product managers have traditionally had to use an assortment of Powerpoint, email, Post-It Notes, Slack, and “many other generic task management and engineering tools,” which aren’t really up to the job.

Productboard draws from the so-called “Product Excellence” framework, an approach to product management that emphasizes getting the right products to market faster through “deep user insight, a clear product strategy, and coherent roadmap”. The online software wants serve as the system of record — or “single source of truth” — for all customer insights, strategy, and roadmaps in order to help align everyone on what to build next.

Product managers can capture all of their feature ideas organized by user need or product area. Different feature ideas can be prioritised based on objectives, an auto-calculated “User Impact Score,” and other criteria.

Next product managers can consolidate all ideas, requests, and feedback from various channels, such as Intercom, Zendesk, email, Slack, surveys, CRM systems, NPS tools, etc. into a single repository for user insights. They can also import user research and submit notes from meetings with prospects and customers.

Finally, Palan says they’re able to rally everyone around their plans by creating interactive roadmaps. “They can share different versions with different audiences, and all roadmap versions automatically update as plans evolve,’ he explains. Productboard also integrates with engineering task management systems such as JIRA, PivotalTracker, GitHub, and Trello to support communication between product management and engineering teams.

“Our customers span a broad range of categories and industries including SaaS solutions, e-commerce platforms, medical device manufacturers, academic journals, news outlets, book publishers, on-demand services, and brick and mortar stores transitioning to digital storefronts,” adds Palan.

“Our main users are product management teams encompassing everyone from associate product managers to Chief Product Officers. Many of our users are also user researchers, designers, product marketers, project managers and similar roles, who may not have the title of Product Manager, but lead their company’s efforts to deliver the right products for their customers”.

To that end, Productboard claims 1,600 customers. They include UiPath, Envoy, MetroMile, Houzz, Macmillan, Unity, Twilio, SproutSocial, Avast, BambooHR, and many others.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Ss0aDz

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Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken just closed its biggest acquisition to date. The company is buying Crypto Facilities in a nine-figure deal.

Crypto Facilities is an exchange and index provider regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. In particular, Crypto Facilities lets you trade futures on multiple cryptocurrency pairs.

Following this acquisition, some Kraken users can now access both spot and futures trading. The company also has an OTC service for large orders. Futures are limited to six pairs for now.

Kraken currently has 4 million users who traded the equivalent of $90 billion in 2018. In the past, the company had acquired smaller exchanges, such as Coinsetter, Cavirtex and CleverCoin, as well as Glidera and Cryptowatch. While Coinbase is quite popular in the U.S., Kraken has been popular with European customers. It has a large volume of orders in EUR.

Fortune also reports that Kraken is about to close a $100 million funding round. Instead of raising from traditional VC funds, the company has emailed its most loyal customers for this new funding round.

According to Fortune, this unusual path provides multiple advantages. For instance, the company doesn’t have to register the round with the SEC. Kraken has been working exclusively with accredited investors or foreign investors that are covered by an exemption.

I’d love to see the list of investors, but it’s clear that Kraken wants to stay secretive with this funding round.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HQ5f4p

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Warby Parker is today introducing virtual try-on to let shoppers select a pair of frames and instantly see how they look.

The tech was built on Apple’s ARKit, and the feature is only available to users on the Warby Parker iOS app on an iPhone X or later.

Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, attempted to implement a virtual try-on feature on its website, but pulled the feature shortly after it debuted. The issue?

With something like glasses, virtual try-on needs to be as close to reality as possible. Virtual objects can’t be overlaid ‘close to’ the user’s face, but rather match up with all their facial curves, and the placement of the ears, eyes and nose.

“It was really our first time building out a full AR feature as a company, and there were two things that were really important,” said Sr. Director of E-Commerce and Consumer Insights Erin Collins. “The first was getting fit right, which was a technical challenge that required a bunch of revisions. And the second thing was making sure the frame images looked as photorealistic as possible, which meant getting 3D artists to digital render them and lots of revisions to get it pixel perfect on each pair of frames.”

The technology Warby Parker built uses a proprietary algorithm to perfectly place virtual frames on the user’s face. The feature also allows users to quickly snap a screenshot and share with others to get feedback on the frames.

Since inception, Warby Parker developed its ecommerce brand on the back of a relatively low-tech feature: in-home try-on. The company simply sent users five frames of their choice to try on at home and send back later, once they’d made their purchasing decision.

Collins sees the new virtual try-on as a great compliment to that program, while offering a quick and convenient experience for repeat buyers.

“This will make it easier for returning customers to buy glasses without trying them on, but we’re really excited about it as a tool for people to narrow down their home try-on choices,” said Collins.

Warby Parker has raised a total of nearly $300 million in funding from investors such as T.Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and General Catalyst.

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

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Warby Parker is today introducing virtual try-on to let shoppers select a pair of frames and instantly see how they look.

The tech was built on Apple’s ARKit, and the feature is only available to users on the Warby Parker iOS app on an iPhone X or later.

Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, attempted to implement a virtual try-on feature on its website, but pulled the feature shortly after it debuted. The issue?

With something like glasses, virtual try-on needs to be as close to reality as possible. Virtual objects can’t be overlaid ‘close to’ the user’s face, but rather match up with all their facial curves, and the placement of the ears, eyes and nose.

“It was really our first time building out a full AR feature as a company, and there were two things that were really important,” said Sr. Director of E-Commerce and Consumer Insights Erin Collins. “The first was getting fit right, which was a technical challenge that required a bunch of revisions. And the second thing was making sure the frame images looked as photorealistic as possible, which meant getting 3D artists to digital render them and lots of revisions to get it pixel perfect on each pair of frames.”

The technology Warby Parker built uses a proprietary algorithm to perfectly place virtual frames on the user’s face. The feature also allows users to quickly snap a screenshot and share with others to get feedback on the frames.

Since inception, Warby Parker developed its ecommerce brand on the back of a relatively low-tech feature: in-home try-on. The company simply sent users five frames of their choice to try on at home and send back later, once they’d made their purchasing decision.

Collins sees the new virtual try-on as a great compliment to that program, while offering a quick and convenient experience for repeat buyers.

“This will make it easier for returning customers to buy glasses without trying them on, but we’re really excited about it as a tool for people to narrow down their home try-on choices,” said Collins.

Warby Parker has raised a total of nearly $300 million in funding from investors such as T.Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and General Catalyst.

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

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Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G6fiAI

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Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G6fiAI

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Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G6fiAI

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Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G6fiAI

//

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G6fiAI

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Aire, the U.K. startup that wants to give the credit scoring system a 21st century “upgrade,” has raised $11 million in Series B funding. The round is backed by European enterprise VC Crane Venture Partners, with strategic investments from Experian Ventures and Orange Digital Ventures.

Existing investors WhiteStar Capital and Sunstone Capital also followed on, while the company says it will use the additional capital to support “rapid growth,” including U.S. expansion. Aire also plans to further invest in the technology powering its credit insights engine, which aims to make credit checking fairer for consumers who may have a thin credit file, and therefore more valuable to lenders.

“How does a new borrower bypass the catch-22 problem of credit where it takes a while to get a history, but you need credit to start a history…,” says Aire co-founder and CEO Aneesh Varma, when asked the describe the problem the startup set out to solve.

“The system today doesn’t seem to serve everyone, even if they are deserving. Our solution focuses on an approach: The consumer is the best and deepest source of real data about themselves. This first-party data is the only way… [to] deliver win-win outcomes for both the consumer and the lender”.

To solve this conundrum, Varma says Aire can be likened to the role of a “manual underwriter” who tries to better understand a credit applicant’s life and financial situation, but delivered via technology in an automated and scalable way.

“Our main product today steps in to engage with an applicant on a lender’s website when the existing decision engine is unable to reach a full decision,” he explains. “We enable the consumer to supply relevant financial data to us about their circumstances. This is beyond just transactional banking data, and therefore gives us a full picture… looking forward, not just the historical snapshot”

On the backend, Aire’s platform accesses that data to provide ready-to-use outputs for its lending partners to use in real-time. The system is designed to get smarter over time, too, as more performance data of outstanding loans becomes available.

“[This is] where machine learning is very relevant). We also keep researching other methods and data streams that consumers can bring to us, while being on the right side of the privacy concerns,” says Varma.

One of the challenges faced by any company wishing to upgrade credit scoring by employing new data points and machine-learning is not to replicate the existing biases that are arguably ripe within the current system. This is something Varma says he and Aire take very seriously, having experienced some of those prejudices first hand himself.

“We are very insistent on a strong model governance process to ensure we are not biasing against certain individuals or protected traits. This is welded into our culture at Aire,” he says.

“First you have to know what are the biases that exist in the current system that you need to tackle. And then it requires doing the grunt work to involve real human checking and cross-calibrating the models… The challenges we are seeing with algorithms with big tech today are often because some of these companies taking the easy road out. They need to walk in that uncomfortable forest. It’s essential”.

To date, Aire says its algorithmic model has scored over $10 billion of credit across various consumer credit categories, which it reckons gives the startup a competitive advantage as the model improves with both data quantity and quality. The company claims to help lenders access more customers without increasing risk appetite, and says it has seen credit approvals increase by up to 19 percent.

On the lender side, Aire’s customers are credit card companies and retail finance (ie checkout financing), although Varma says longer term finance is also on the roadmap as the company’s models mature. On the consumer side, Aire typically serves working professionals who are earlier in the financial journey. These include various types of self-employment, such as contractors, freelancers, and those operating within the so-called gig economy.

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