Technology

Have you ever wondered why photos on Airbnb, UberEats and your favorite hotel platform always look so good French startup Meero has been working on a marketplace and AI-powered technology to make it easy to get good photos of products and places.

The company has raised a new $45 million round led by Alven Capital and Idinvest. Eight months ago, Meero already raised $15 million from Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures, Alven Capital and White Star Capital.

&We focused on this idea because we wanted to make the web beautiful,& co-founder and CEO Thomas Rebaud told me last year. &We realized that we are all on Instagram and that photos are beautiful. But then, you go on a marketplace and photos aren&t great.&

The company first looked at the real estate market and partnered with real estate companies to optimize the photography process as much as possible.

It starts with finding a photographer. Instead of working with hundreds of photographers in hundreds of cities, Meero lets you find a photographer in over a hundred countries. Prices, contracts and processes are all standardized in order to avoid any surprise. Meero takes a cut on every transaction.

After the shooting, photographers usually have to spend hours selecting and editing the best photos. This usually takes even longer than the shooting itself.

Meero has been working on AI-powered algorithms so that you don&t have much to do. You upload your photos, and the service will automagically take care of the editing. By speeding up this process, a photographer can work on more projects. And Meero can also cut variable costs drastically — this is key when it comes to Meeroscalability.

With todayfunding round, the startup is going to open new offices in the U.S. and somewhere in Asia. Meero will also hire more computer vision experts in France.

Meero currently has 40,000 clients and processes a new transaction every 30 seconds. Clients usually get photos within 24 hours. The company now also lets you order videos from the same platform.

The TechCrunch crew is practically giddy to be heading to São Paulo, Brazil to host the inaugural Startup Battlefield Latin Americaon November 8, 2018. This is the first time we&ve hosted an event in Latin America, and we&re stoked to cover and support the regionfast-growing startup scene.

We&re looking for 15 of Latin Americabest pre-Series A startups to go head-to-head in our premier startup pitch competition. The application deadline is August 6 at 5 p.m. PST, but if your company fits our description, why wait Apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield.

Herehow it all works. You must meet certain eligibility requirements — see that info listed below. Our crack team of TechCrunch editors (seriously, they have mad skills when it comes to spotting potential-laden startups) review every eligible application and will select 15 companies to join us onstage at São PauloTomie Ohtake Institute.

Each team receives free pitch-coaching from TechCrunch editors, so they&ll be primed and ready to do their best come the big day. The competition begins with three preliminary rounds — five startups per round will each have just six minutes to pitch their company and present their product demo to top-tier VC judges in front of a live audience of 500 people.

The judges have six minutes following each pitch to ask the team probing questions. Of the 15 startups, a fortunate five will be chosen to move on to the finals and pitch again — this time to a fresh set of judges. And from those five finalists comes one shining startup to be named champion of the first Startup Battlefield Latin America.

The winning founders receive US$25,000, plus a trip for two to the next TechCrunch Disrupt, where they can exhibit for free in Startup Alley. Who knows They might even qualify to participate in that DisruptStartup Battlefield.

Just participating in Startup Battlefield offers big perks — no winning required. Media exposure is almost as important as cold, hard cash at this startup stage, and we&ll record every Startup Battlefield session on video and post them all on TechCrunch.com. Marketing professionals start your engines!

Plus, every Battlefield competitor becomes part of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This group of more than 750 companies — including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, Cloudflare, Vurb and many more — has collectively raised more than $8 billion and created more than 100 exits. We can&t wait to add 15 great Latin American founders to that elite cohort.

OK, lettalk eligibility. These are the requirements founders need to meet:

• Have an early-stage company in &launch& stage
• Be headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean — including dependencies and constituent entities) Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
• Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by August 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Startup Battlefield Latin Americatakes place on November 8, 2018 at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. If you think your pre-Series A startup has what it takes to win our premier startup pitch competition, don&t wait another minute. Take your shot at making your startup dreams come true — and make some TechCrunch history in the process. Apply to Startup Battlefield Latin America today.

Pointy​,​ the​ ​startup​ ​that​ offers tech to help ​bricks and mortar​ ​retailers put their stock online so that it can be discovered via search engines, has picked up $12 million in new funding. The Series B round is led by Polaris Partners and Vulcan Capital, and brings total funding for the Irish company to $19 million.

Founded on the premise that people often resort to e-commerce behemoths like Amazon because they can&t find the same item locally, Pointy has developed a hardware and cloud software solution that makes it easy to create a bespoke website as means of making local stock discoverable online. Specifically, the ​&Pointy​ ​box&​ hardware ​gadget connects to a storebarcode scanner and automatically puts scanned items on a Pointy-powered website for the store.

Store pages are then optimised for search engines, so that when you search for products locally — say your favourite artisan beer — a Pointy-powered result shows up and encourages you to visit the store and make a purchase. In other words, this is about helping local retailers drive more footfall, but with very little additional overhead.

Pointy CEO and co-founder Mark Cummins says the Series B round will be used by the startup to accelerate growth and build on increased uptake by U.S. retailers. It currently counts 5,500 retailers using Pointy in total, with 70 percent from the U.S, and the remaining in Canada, U.K. and Ireland. &To put the U.S. number in context, just under 1 in 200 U.S retailers is now using Pointy,& a company spokesperson tells me.

Since we last covered Pointy, it has extended its reach considerably via partnerships with Lightspeed, Clover and Square, which allows retailers using these POS systems to use the Pointy platform for free because it doesn&t require the purchase of the $499 Pointy device. The startup has also partnered with Google via the search giantnew See WhatIn Store (SWIS) program so that shoppers can discover what a store sells within Googlesearch and maps pages.

&For all the hype around e-commerce and the media narrative of ‘Retail Apocalypse&, people still make the vast majority of their purchases in local stores,& adds Cummins in a statement. &But local retailers have lost out in not having their products visible online — we solve that problem for them&.

Meanwhile, Pointyprevious backers include Draper Associates, Frontline Ventures, and notable angel investors such as Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Lars Rasmussen (co-founder of Google Maps), Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), and Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo).