Technology

Chargify, the payment management service owned by Scaleworks, has launched a new tool for billing management.

The new product is designed to remove limitations and allow payers to assign or reassign payment responsibility for subscriptions or groups of subscriptions, according to the company.

Called WhoPays, the new service is pitched to businesses as a way to consolidate and manage their payments with different subscribers in an organization.

According to the company, the launch of the product required the re-engineering of its underlying invoice architecture — centering it around the hierarchies of employees that can be involved in making purchasing decisions.

&One of our customers sells API services primarily to developers. They noticed that there&d be multiple developers in different parts of their company… each with their own subscription. The customer didn&t know that the multiple subscriptions were connected and sometimes being paid by the same credit card,& said Chargify chief executive Tom Rotem. &They want to make sense of their own customer organizations and subscriptions and are having a hard time doing it. What we&re launching is exactly what they need to fix the pain around that chaos.&

Billers can model out their relationships with customers to create the hierarchies of decision-making so users can group subscriptions so the responsible payer receives one consolidated invoice that can be paid in one transaction.

&WhoPays is the capstone feature on the new invoice-first architecture we&ve been building to make subscriptions more relational,& said chief technology officer and co-founder Michael Klett in a statement.

On the heels of Apple this morning inking a $600 million deal to acquire IP, talent and licenses from Dialog Semiconductor in Europe, it has also confirmed another acquisition of a smaller startup in the region.

Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked on segmentation technology, a more efficient way to &cut out& figures from their backgrounds in digital images and videos, reportedly for over $30 million.

This type of technology can be used, for example, to make quicker and more accurate/realistic cut-out images in augmented reality environments, but also for more standard applications like school photos. That was actually the first market the startup targeted, in 2015, although it appeared to shift strategy after that to build up IP and make deeper inroads into video. You can see a demo of how its technology works at the bottom of this post.

Rumors of the deal started to surface yesterday, first in Danish financial newspaper Børsen, without confirmation from Apple. We reached out, and Apple has today finally confirmed the deal with its standard statement: &Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discussour purpose or plans.&

From what we understand, the acquisition happened a while back — which lines up with a LinkedIn profile for Toke Jansen, who had been a co-founder of Spektral but now notes that as of December 2017 he has been a manager of computational imaging at Apple.

Others associated with the company — including the other co-founder,Henrik Paltoft — have not updated their profiles, so itunclear how many others have joined. Børsen reports that the deal includes the companyengineers and was in the region of 200 million Danish kroner, which is equivalent to around $31 million.

Spektral href="https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/10/cloudcutout-applies-machine-learning-to-image-editing/">started life as CloudCutout, built on algorithms from JansenPhD. The startup initially pitched its product as a cheaper and more efficient &green screen& technology, to remove primary images from their plain (typically green) or standard-pattern backgrounds, with an early iteration of the product built by training the system on over 100,000 professional cutouts.

Spectralfirst application may have been the fairly retro world of school pictures, but whatmost notable here is what Spektral might contribute to Appleimaging business. That could be for applications that Apple has yet to launch, but also to improve the quality of those that are already in the market, from legacy products like PhotoBooth through to ARKit, the companyplatform for mobile development.

Segmentation could help add live filters to human figures in a photo but can also be effective in occluding AR environments behind figures to make digital AR content appear to interact with the position of humans.

Spektralsegmentation technology is also able to run on mobile phones, making it potentially a quicker and more efficient way of processing AR images directly on devices. And one of its main selling points is how it copes with very fine details, such as hair.

&To provide high quality cutouts, the core of our engine exploits recent advancesin spectral graph theory and neural networks. The computation of pixel transparencies (the alpha channel) for a single image involves solving multiple large-scale equation systems, as well as carryingoutmultiple feed-forward passes in our neural networks,&we reported the founders saying when the startup raised a seed round. (It raised more funding in 2017, $2.8 million from Litecap and Amp Ventures, to diver deeper into video.)

&We pose the problem of determining an alpha channel of an image as a machine learning task. Compared to usual chroma keying, this allows us to consider a much broader range of backgrounds since the model will learn, i.e., texture representations from existing training data.&

Computer vision has been a focus (sorry!) for Apple for a while now.The iPhone and Mac giant has made more than 40 acquisitions in Europe in the last 10 years — I guess we may still have some hunting to do — and a number of its acquisitions both in Europe and elsewhere have been in the area of computer vision. They have included Akonia Holographics, InVisage Technologies, Regaind, Vrvana, SensoMotoric Instruments, Indoor.io, Flyby Media, Emotient, Faceshift, Metaio, Polar Rose and more.

SPEKTRAL from Spektral on Vimeo.

Additional reporting Natasha Lomas.

On 29-30 November, thousands of early-stage startups across Europe and beyond will attendDisrupt Berlin 2018 and spend two program-packed days exhibiting and exploring the very latest in tech innovations. In a crowd that size, it helps to have a tool to find and connect with the right people.

Thatwhy we&re making our CrunchMatch platform available to all Disrupt Berlin attendees. Last year, our free business match-making service connected investors and founders to discuss potential funding opportunities based on similar goals and interests. Now CrunchMatch can help everyone network more efficiently.

We&re talking founders and investors looking to connect, developers in search of employment, founders hunting for collaborators or startups recruiting tech talent — the list goes on. CrunchMatch can save you valuable time and help you make valuable connections.

Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard, has first-hand experience with the power of CrunchMatch, which he used to secure meetings with multiple VCs at Disrupt Berlin 2017. Those connections, and the relationships he built, paid off.

In a recent email, Heron told us that TestCard &just closed $1.7 million in funding (which is thanks to you and your team, bless you!) You guys are fantastic — the lifeblood of the startup scene.&

And several founders who attended Disrupt San Francisco this past September used CrunchMatch and walked away from their meetings with term sheets.

Representing the investment point of view, herewhat Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, said about his CrunchMatch experience.

&It makes vetting deals extremely efficient. I scheduled more than 35 meetings with startups using CrunchMatch, and we made a significant investment in one, who came to our attention through Startup Battlefield.&

Ready to simplify your networking at Disrupt Berlin Herewhat you need to know. When we open CruntchMatch, all registered attendees will receive an email explaining how to access the platform and fill out their profiles. Your profile spells out your role and the type of connections you want to make. CrunchMatch kicks into gear and makes suggested connections and then — subject to your approval — the platform handles all the scheduling details.

Disrupt Berlin 2018takes place 29-30 November.Still need a ticket Buy your pass right here. We can&t wait to see you in Berlin! And be sure to use the CrunchMatch advantage — itthe most efficient way to find your people and fuel your dream.