Technology

Nnamdi Okike, a first generation American whose parents immigrated from Nigeria, and Aaron Holiday, whose mother worked in the collections department of Sears and whose father was a substance abuse counselor in New Orleans, are not typical venture investors. And their firm, 645 Ventures, which just closed on $40.6 million for its second fund, is certainly not a typical venture fund.

Both men are firm believers in the power of data to help make better investment decisions, and both men are using that belief as the core tenet of their rapidly growing venture capital fund.

Holiday and Okike are using their backgrounds as technology driven analysts at Goldman Sachs and Insight Venture Partners (respectively) to build a new model for early stage investing.The two men believe they can have a greater geographical breadth and reach companies at earlier stages of their development by leveraging tools that automate the heavy lifting of the investment business.

For Holiday, the growth of 645 Ventures from its first fund of $8 million to the current $40 million under management is a testament to the firmtechnology-first investment thesis. A computer scientist who grew up in New Orleans& sixth ward and attended Morehouse College, Holiday began his professional career developing algorithms for high frequency trading at Goldman Sachs.

Not content with just developing the algorithms, Holiday wanted to assume a more active role in managing money and found himself drawn to venture capital. He attended business school at Cornell and began working with the UniversityBR Venture Fund, a small $4 million direct investment vehicle for venture capital.

From there he moved to Gotham Ventures, the New York-based affiliate fund of DFJ, and met Okike through an entrepreneur that both men were working with.

Okike had already been involved in angel investing and had taken a job at Insight Venture Partners in 2002 just after the dot-com bubble burst. As an analyst with the firm, the Worcester, Mass. native (his parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria) and Harvard alum, tracked the renaissance of the tech industry with Web 2.0 and thought that the data-driven approach that Insight used could be applied to earlier-stage startups.

&What I was seeing was that there was a proliferation of data on startups that you could use to drive an outbound sourcing models on startups,& Okike said. &Insightmodel was a team and using data that they were acquiring manually.What I started to see was that you could automate a lot of the data collection and you could do it earlier.&

Nnamdi Okike and Aaron Holiday, co-founders of 645 Ventures

Okikeobservations aligned directly with what Taylor saw too, and after a few conversations the two men raised $8 million for the first 645 Ventures fund in late 2014 and closed in 2015.

That first fund has already garnered successes with deals like MM.Lafleur, the womensubscription clothing company, and Iterable, a marketing automation business, according to Holiday.

And with the second fund, the firm has attracted notable backers including:Princeton University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Spelman College, and tech investors like Albert Wenger, a general partner at Union Square Ventures; First Round Capital founder, Howard Morgan;Ken Chenaultthe former chief executive of American Express and a general partner and chairman at General Catalyst; andMellody Hobson, the President of Ariel Investments.

&We agreed that the next wave of outbound deal sourcing was going to be earlier,& says Okike. And that the firm can uncover great deals across a broader geographical area, when investment decisions are more data driven. &One of our core beliefs is that you can build a geographically distributed fund through better data.&

As for the firmname, the local phone code for MarthaVineyard both evoked fond childhood memories for Okike and foregrounded the firms numerical and data-driven approach for Taylor. &When you saw the number, alphanumerically, numbers show up at the top of a list before names, so it would be good to have a number as the name of the firm,& Taylor said.

Google CloudText-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs are getting a bunch of updates today that introduce support for more languages, make it easier to hear auto-generated voices on different speakers and that promise better transcripts thanks to improved tools for speaker recognition, among other things.

With this update, the Cloud Text-to-Speech API is now also generally available.

Letlook at the details. The highlight of the release for many developers is probably the launch of the 17 new WaveNet-based voices in a number of new languages. WaveNet is Googletechnology for using machine learning to create these text-to-speech audio files. The result of this is a more natural sounding voice.

With this update, the Text-to-Speech API now supports 14 languages and variants and features a total of 30 standard voices and 26 WaveNet voices.

If you want to try out the new voices, you can use Googledemo with your own text here.

Another interesting new feature here is the beta launch of audio profiles. The idea here is to optimize the audio file for the medium you&ll use to play it. Your phonespeaker is different from the soundbar underneath your TV, after all. With audio profiles, you can optimize the audio for phone calls, headphones and speakers, for example.

On the Speech-to-Text side, Google is now making it easier for developers to transcribe samples with multiple speakers. Using machine learning, the service can now recognize the different speakers (though you still have to tell it how many speakers there are in a given sample) and it&ll then tag every word with a speaker number. If you have a stereo file of two speakers (maybe a call center agent on the left and the angry customer who called to complain on the right), Google can now use those channels to distinguish betweenspeakers, too.

Also new is support for multiple languages. Thatsomething GoogleSearch App already supports and the company is now making this available to developers, too. Developers can choose up to four languages and the Speech-to-Text API will automatically determine which language is spoken.

And finally, the Speech-to-Text API now also returns word-level confidence scores. That may sound like a minor thing — and it already returned scores for each segment of speech — but Google notes that developers can now use this to build apps that focus on specific words. &For example, if a user inputs ‘please set up a meeting with John for tomorrow at 2PM&into your app, you can decide to prompt the user to repeat ‘John& or ‘2PM,& if either have low confidence, but not to reprompt for ‘please& even if has low confidence since itnot critical to that particular sentence,& the team explains.

Back in March, Nest and Yale teamed up to release a smart door lock to complement Nestthen brand-new video doorbell. Ita solid piece of hardware, but it had a curious quirk for something made under Googlewatch: it didn&t work with Google Home or Google Assistant.

That&ll change later this week.

On August 29th, the lock will be getting an update that adds Google Assistant and Home support to bring a handful of voice-powered tricks into the mix. Things like:

• Locking the door with a &Hey Google& command
• Asking Google Assistant whether or not the door is locked
• Add locking the door to part of a custom, multi-step routine, like a &Goodnight& routine that shuts off the lights, turns off the TV and bolts the doors.

You&ll be able to lock the door by voice — but, itworth noting, not unlock it… because, you know, security. If some rando can shout to lock your door, itan annoyance — but if they can stand outside the door and unlock it just by shouting loud enough, thata whole different story. Google Assistant has tech to identify users by their voice, but itnot quite up to the task of playing bouncer at your front door. So no unlocking by voice at this point.

Alas, no word on support for any other voice-powered assistants, such as AmazonAlexa or Siri (by way of HomeKit) on iOS. While some of Yaleother smart locks support other voice assistants, they&ve yet to make any promises with this one.