Technology

One ongoing theme in the world of smart homes has been the emergence of gadgets and other tools that can turn &ordinary& objects and systems into &connected& ones — removing the need to replace things wholesale that still essentially work, while still applying technology to improve the ways that they can be used.

In the latest development, a smart home startup from Santa Barbara called Shine Bathroom has raised $750,000 in seed funding to help build and distribute its first product: an accessory you attach to an existing toilet to make it a &smart toilet.&

Ita dirty business, but someone had to do it.

Shineimmediate goal is to flush away the old, ecologically unfriendly way of cleaning toilets; and to provide the tools to detect when something is not working right in the plumbing, even helping you fix it without calling out a plumber.

The longer-term vision is to apply technology and science to rethink the whole bathroom to put less strain on our natural resources, and to use it in a way that lines up with what we want to do as consumers, using this first product to test that market.

&Bathrooms are evolving from places where we practice basic hygiene to where we prepare ourselves for the day,& said Chris Herbert, the founder and CEO of Shine. &Wellness and self care will be happening more in the home, and this is a big opportunity.&

Shinefirst injection of money is coming from two VCs also based in Southern California: Entrada Ventures (like Shine, also in Santa Barbara), and Mucker Capital, an LA fund specifically backing startups not based in Silicon Valley (others in its current portfolio include Naritiv, Everipedia and Next Trucking).

The Shine Bathroom Assistant, as the first product is called, is currently being sold viaIndiegogostarting at $99, with the first products expected to ship in February 2020.

Ita fitting challenge for a hardware entrepreneur: toilets are a necessary part of our modern lives, but they are unloved, and they haven&t really been innovated for a long time.

Herbert admitted to me (and I&m sure Freud would have something to say here, too) that this has been something of a years-long obsession, stretching back to when he made a trip to Japan as a sophomore in high school and was struck by how companies like Totowere innovating in the business, with fancy, all-cleaning (and all-singing and dancing) loos.

&We thought to ourselves, how could we make a better bathroom?& he said. &We decided that the answer was through software. When you take a thesis like that, you can see lots of opportunity.&

Sized similar to an Amazon Echo or other connected home speaker, Shinetoilet attachment is battery operated and comes in three parts: a water vessel, a sensor and spraying nozzle that you place inside your toilet bowl, and a third sensor fitted with an accelerometer that you attach to the main line that fills up the toilettank. The vessel is filled with tap water (which you replace periodically).

That water is passed through a special filter that electrolyzes it (by sending a current through the water) and then sprays it with every flush to clean and deodorize. Shine claims this spraying technique is five times as powerful as traditional deodorizing spray, and as powerful as bleach, but without the harsh chemicals: the water converts back into saline after it does its work. (And to be clear, there are no soaps or other detergents involved.)

Alongside the cleaning features, the second part of the bathroom assistant is Sam, an AI on your phone. Linked up to the hardware and sensors, Sam identifies common toilet problems, such as leaks that trickle out hundreds of gallons of water, by measuring variations in vibrations, and when it does, it sends out a free repair kit to fix it yourself.

Users can also link up Sam to work with Alexa to order the machine to clean, check water levels and do more in the future.

The solution of monitoring vibrations is notable for how it links up with a past entrepreneurial life for Herbert and some of his team.

Herbert was one of two co-founders of Trackr, a Tile-like product that also played on the idea of making &dumb& objects smart: Trackrbasic product was a small fob with Bluetooth inside it that could be attached to keys, wallets, bags and more to find their location when they were misplaced.

The companylonger-term goals extended into the area of IoT and how &dumb& machines could be made smarter by attaching sensors to them to monitor vibrations and sounds to determine how they were working — concepts that never materialised at Trackr but have found a new life at Shine.

On the other hand, Trackr is a cautionary tale about how a good idea can be inspiring, but not always enough.

The startup in its timeraised more than $70 million, from a set of investors that included Amazon, Revolution, NTT, the Foundry Group and more. Ultimately, the basic concept was too commoditized (trackers are a dime a dozen on Amazon), and Tile emerged as the market leader among the independents — a position itused to evolve its product — but even so, thatbefore we&ve even determined if there really is a profitable business to be had here, and if platform companies potentially make their move to upset it in a different way.

Eventually, Trackrteam (including Herbert) scattered and a new leadership team came in and rebranded to Adero . Now, even that team is gone, with the CEO Nate Kelly and others decamping to Glowforge. Multiple attempts to contact the company have been unanswered, although from what we understand, itnot down for the count just yet. (Watch this space.)

&There is still something there, and I hope they can do something,& Herbert said of his previous startup.

Meanwhile, he and several of his ex-Trackr colleagues have now turned their attention to a new shiny challenge, the toilet and the bigger bathroom where it sits, and investors want in.

&We were impressed by Shinevision for a bathroom to better prepare us for our day head and saw a massively overlooked opportunity in the bathroom space,& said Taylor Tyng from Entrada Ventures.

At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Senegalese VC investor Marieme Diop suggested that Silicon Valleyunicorn IPO model might not be right for African startups.

The is largely because the continentstartups face a vastly different macro business environment, Diop explained during a discussion of investing in Africa with 500 Startups& Sheel Mohnot and IFCWale Ayeni. In a subsequent conversation, she clarified an alternative approach for African startups to raise capital from public listings.

&It might be a better option to set lower revenue expectations and have startups list on local exchanges to raise capital from IPOs when they&re ready,& said Diop. &We may be able to create more gazelles at home than unicorns abroad,&

A gazelle at home could be a company valued at $100 million or more and generating revenues of $15 to $50 million, according to Diop.

&We should have a discussion of setting a right valuation, a valuation that is more appropriate to African startups,& she said.

A VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures and co-founder of Dakar Angels Network, Diopperspective comes in the wake of Jumiagoing public on the New York Stock Exchange this April.

The e-commerce venture became the first VC-funded digital company operating in Africa to list on a major global exchange, a fact thatmay have raised expectations for additional $100 million revenue tech firms creating unicorns and IPOs in Africa.

The $100 million revenue pointhas served as the unofficial IPO benchmark for startups and investors; after reaching unicorn status in 2014, Jumia achieved it last year (with big losses in tow).

But as I mentioned in a previous Extra Crunch piece, it will be difficult for startups operating in Africa to hit that revenue mark, even with all the leaps and bounds occurring in the continenteconomies and tech sector. The overall operating environment is still fairly costly and challenging, compared to other regions.

To put the $100 million revenue benchmark in perspective for Africa, the continententire tech VC funding only recently surpassed $1 billion annually, according to Partech data, which means the $100 million rule would requires a company to generate annual revenues up to roughly 10% of the yearly value of VC raised across the entire ecosystem.

Chad Hurley is hunting for what comes after fantasy sports. He envisions a new way for fans to play by watching live and cheering for the athletes they love. Beyond a few scraps of info the YouTube co-founder would share and his new startupjob listings revealed, we don&t know what Hurleygame will feel like. But the company is called GreenPark Sports, and itlaunching in spring 2020.

&There is an absence of compelling, inclusive ways for large masses of sports fans to compete together,& Hurley tells me. &The idea of a ‘sports fan& has evolved -0 it is now more a social behavior than ever before. We&re looking at a much bigger, inclusive way for all fans of sports and esports teams to play.&

Hurley already has an all-star team. One of GreenParkco-founders, Nick Swinmurn, helped start Zappos, while another, Ken Martin, created marketing agency BLITZ. Together they&ve raised an $8.5 million seed round led by SignalFire and joined by Sapphire Sports and Founders Fund. &With this teamimpeccable track record and vision for the future of fandom, this was an investment we had to make,& said Chris Farmer, founder and CEO of SignalFire .

It all comes down to allegiance — something Hurley, Swinmurn and Martin truly understand. Everyone is seeking ways to belong and emblems to represent them. In an age when many of our most prized possessions, from photographs to record collections, have been digitized, we lack tangible objects that center our individuality. Culture increasingly centers around landmark events, with what we&ve done mattering more than what we own.

GreenPark could seize upon this moment by helping us align our identities with a team. This instantly unlocks a like-minded community, a recurrent activity and a unified aesthetic. And when reality gets heavy, people can lose themselves by hitching their spirits to the scoreboard.

Rather than just tabulating results after the match like in fantasy sports, GreenPark wants to be entwined with the spectacle as it happens. &We&re going to be working with a mix of ways to visualize the live game — from unique gamecast-like data to highlight clips. The social viewing experience can be much more than just the straight live video,& Hurley explains.

He came up with GreenPark after selling assets of his video editing app Mixbit to BlueJeans a year ago. Hurley already had an interactive relationship with sports… though one thatreserved for the rich: hepart owner of the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Football Club. Meanwhile, Swinmurn co-founded the Burlingame Dragons Football Club affiliated with San Joseteam, and is on the board of DenmarkFC Helsingør.

Those experiences taught them the satisfaction that comes from a deeper sense of ownership or allegiance with a team. GreenPark will give an opportunity for anyone to turn fandom into its own sport. &We shared a love of sports and set out to look into opportunities around legalized sports betting in the U.S.,& Hurley tells me. But quickly they found &it was obvious the regulated space wouldn&t allow us to innovate as quickly as we wanted,& and they saw more opportunity amidst a younger mainstream audience.

&We&re not ready to disclose publicly the exact detailed gameplay yet,& Hurley says. But herewhat we could cobble together from around the web.

GreenPark Sports lets you &Destroy the other teams& fans& to &climb the leaderboards,& its site says cryptically. According to job listings, it will pipe in live game data, starting with the NBA and expanding to other leagues, and offer cartoon characters with facial expressions and full-body gestures to let users live out the highs and lows of matches. Don&t expect trivia questions or player stat memorization. It almost sounds like a massively multiplayer online fan arena.

As with blockbuster games Fortnite or League of Legends, GreenPark is free-to-play. But a mention of virtual clothing hints at monetization, where you could spruce up avatars with digital team apparel. Hurley tells me, &We are in the perfect storm of the thirst for innovation at the traditional league level, the next level of maturing for esports, investment in sports betting and overall dire need to better understand todaylargest populace of sports fans — millennial / Gen Z.& The closed beta launches in the spring.

Therea massive hole to fill in the wake of the Draft Kings / FanDuel marketing surge a few years ago. Most apps in the space just carry scores or analysis, rather than community. &Whatamazing about being a fan of a team or player is the common bond you have with other fans,& Hurley explains, &where even if you don&t know the other fans of your team — you are all in it to win it — together.&

Publications like The Athletic have proven there are plenty of fans willing to pay to feel closer to their favorite teams. The most direct competitor for GreenPark might be Strafe, which lets you track and predict the winners of esports matches.

People already spend tons of time on building fictional worlds like Minecraft, and money outfitting their Fortnite avatar with the coolest clothes. If GreenPark can create a space for sports fans& self-expression, it could create the online destination for legions of IRL enthusiasts that see who they root for as core to who they are.