Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast where each week we discuss other peoplecopious dollars and lacking sense.
This week was special! Kate and Alex were at Disrupt where they recorded live in front of an audience. Equity has recorded at Disrupt before. Equity has taped before an audience before. But this was the first time that we taped it at Disrupt and in front of an audience that actually had chairs. Progress!
Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures joined us as well, making for an excellent show. Astute listeners among us will recall that Hudson is a former guest on the show, having taken part back in mid-2017.
On to the topics. We discussed the impending Precursor Ventures opportunity fund (more here). We wanted to know why it was of modest size, especially in an era of ever-larger venture capital funds.
Next, we turned to a trio of startup stories, starting with Rhino, a company that is working to shake up the rental deposit market. Hate paying deposits for an apartment? Would you rather pay a small, regular fee? Rhino hopes that you would, and has raised $21 million to build out the idea.
Also on our list of topics was a small upstart by the name of Knowable, which our colleague Josh Constine profiled here. The company sells educational audio bits, and they want you to know they are not a podcasting business. We&re still a bit unclear of the difference between educational audio and podcast, but VCs seem confident enough in the companyprospects, funneling $3.75 million into the project.
The last startup we riffed on is called oollee. The company provides people with an unlimited supply of filtered drinking water for a small monthly fee. Itraised $1 million in pre-seed funding from investors, including Mission Gate Inc. and Columbus Holdings, and, of course, we have thoughts!
After that we touched on the most valuable Y Combinator companies, including Stripe (more here and here), Airbnb and DoorDash. The list of YChits is getting long. And, it provided the perfect segue to Airbnb.
Airbnb intends to go public via a direct listing, according to a whole bunch of recent reports. Every VC in town seems to have opinions about direct listings as the next best path to the public markets; maybe they&re right. Finally, WeWork is selling off a bunch of stuff that it bought recently. Herea list of what it bought, but SpaceIQ, Teem, Conductor and more are said to be on the chopping block.
All that and we had fun! Back to normal next week.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us oniTunes,Overcast, Pocketcast, Downcast and all the casts.
Read more: Why San Francisco is still the gold mine for tech startups
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AI Medical Service, a Tokyo-based company developing AI-based software to help detect gastric cancer, announced today that it has raised a $42.9 million Series B. Investors include Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV. The funding will be used for clinical trials of its software, which looks for signs of cancer in real-time during endoscopies, product development and overseas expansion.
This brings AI Medical Servicetotal funding so far to $57 million, including a previous round of $9 million from the Incubate Fund in August 2018. Founded in 2017, the companysoftware focuses on signs of cancer in gastrointestinal organs, including the esophagus, stomach and intestines, with the goal of reducing the amount of hours doctors and other health professionals need to spend going over scans. AI Medical Service is currently collaborating with 80 medical institutions on joint research for regulatory approval of its products.
Dr. Tomohiro Tada, CEO of AI Medical Service, told TechCrunch in an email that the world market for endoscopy is growing by 10% every year, with Japanese manufacturers holding about a 70% market share. For its expansion strategy, Tada says the company will initially focus on other Asian countries, including Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, where there are high rates of stomach cancer. Then it will focus on the U.S. and Canada.
Research shows that about 15% to 30% of lesions are missed during endoscopy procedures and the goal of AI Medical Service is to increase the accuracy of scan results. Its first product, which uses a deep-learning convolutional neural network (CNN) to analyze medical images, will apply for regulatory approval soon.
There are other companies, including ai4gi, Olympus and Shanghai Wision AI, that are also working on AI-based endoscopy technology, but Tada says AI Medical Service does not see them as competitors because it focuses specifically on AI detection of gastric cancer, whereas ai4gi and Wision AI are developing software for colonscopies.
In a prepared statement, Globis Capital Partners director Satoshi Fukushima said, &We foresee an irreversible trend of doctors diagnosing cancer in collaboration with AI in the near future. Supported by the worldleading medical institutions and specialists in the field and led by experienced management, the endoscopy AI developed by AIM has huge potential to help endoscopists and patients globally.&
Back in May, Tourlane raised $47 million in its ongoing mission to address the complex problems that still exist today around booking group travel. Tourlane has become a major player in this sector.
We&re excited to announce that co-founder/co-CEO Julian Stiefel will be speaking at Disrupt Berlin in December!
Tourlane works directly with service providers and offers customers flights, accommodations, tours, activities and transfer options in one place, thus saving time when coordinating multiple bookings from different vendors or working with offline travel agents. The platform provides real-time pricing, availability, instant trip visualization and drag-and-drop adjustments to make multi-day trip planning easier.
Prior to Tourlane, Stiefel took on a key role in Airbnb marketing team after the company acquired his travel startup back in 2011.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.
In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.
Read more: Tourlane co-founder Julian Stiefel to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December
Write comment (90 Comments)An Indian startup that is increasingly posing a threat to established food and grocery delivery businesses and e-commerce giants just closed a new financing round to expand its business in the nation.
Bangalore-based Dunzo said today it has raised $45 million from Google, Lightbox Ventures, STIC Investment and STIC Ventures, and 3L Capital in a new financing round. The round, dubbed Series D, valued the startup at about $200 million, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The startup has raised $81 million to date.
Dunzo, a four-year-old startup, operates an eponymous hyper-local delivery service. Users get access to a wide-range of items across several categories, from grocery, perishables, pet supplies and medicines to dinner from their neighborhood stores and restaurants.
But thatnot all. You can have Dunzo pick up and deliver anything within a city. Forgot your laptop charger at home? Dunzo will bring it to your office. Part of the servicecharm is that its delivery is fast (most of its deliveries take less than 25 minutes), and as long as the store is not very far away, itnot going to cost you more than a $1.
Dunzo is currently operational in eight Indian cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Noida, Pune, Gurgaon, Powai, Hyderabad and Chennai. The startup said it will use the fresh capital to expand its technology infrastructure and develop partnerships with small and medium businesses to &give them a fighting chance& to compete with major giants.
E-commerce accounts for less than 3% of all retail sales in India, according to industry estimates. Mom and pop stores and other neighborhood outlets that dot tens of thousands of cities, towns, villages and slums across the country drive most of the sales in the nation. Dunzo joins a growing number of startups in India that are attempting to help small and micro merchants embrace technology for the first time to grow their businesses.
&We are on course to building the largest commerce platform in the country with the most efficient logistics solution for each city,& said Kabeer Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Dunzo, said.
As the service scales, it is increasingly becoming a competitor to food and grocery delivery startups such as BigBasket, Swiggy and Zomato. Dunzo founders told TechCrunch that food category already accounts for a quarter of all deliveries it processes.
In recent months, Dunzo has also started to test delivery of smartphones and other products. It recently tied up with Xiaomi to deliver smartphones to users in select parts of India. Unlike Amazon or Flipkart that take a day or two to deliver a phone, Dunzo was getting the new phones to users in 30 minutes. Dunzo has tested a similar partnership with Puma, executives told TechCrunch.
Jayanth Kolla, founder and analyst at research firm Convergence Catalyst, told TechCrunch that by getting a new phone to users in half an hour, Dunzo is able to &offer the instant gratification& — something that plays a crucial role in a personpurchasing decision — that e-commerce platforms in India can&t match today.
But Dunzo remains tiny in comparison to the giants whose businesses it is beginning to disrupt. Today, the startup processes about 2 million orders a month, up from about 50,000 early last year. Swiggy and Zomato, in comparison, process more than 3 million orders a day, for instance. And they are also heavily backed.
In an interesting turn of events, last month Swiggy announced Go, a service that allows users in select cities in India to deliver any kind of item — not just food — within their own city, thereby entering Dunzoterritory. While Swiggy moves beyond food delivery, Zomato is increasingly trying to assume more control over the ins and outs of the food business.
The 11-year-old firm is working on something it internally calls Project Kisan to procure supplies directly from farmers and fishermen, TechCrunch reported earlier. The company has already set up warehouses to store these supplies in many parts of the country, including South Delhi and Pune.
Read more: Google-backed Dunzo raises $45M to expand its hyperlocal delivery startup in India
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Max Kalmykov is the VP of Media and Entertainment at DataArt.
Broadcasters and movie studios alike are starting to explore the huge potential of modern technologies to bring a new generation of filmed entertainment to our TV sets and cinemas. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are the buzzwords that excite
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Write comment (93 Comments)England go into their next game knowing that a win will seal a place for them in the 2019 Rugby World Cup quarter-finals. However, with wet conditions forecast and an Argentina team firmly in win-or-bust mode, it's likely to be a hard-fought battle.
It's a game you can watch live and in full no matter where you are in the world by following our
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