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Low and no-code application building continues apace. Gently hum “Row row row your code, gently down the streams,” as we talk with the founder behind Rowy, the company that’s like Airtable on a lot of steroids, or Excel on a lot of steroids and a couple of lines of illegal substances. Of course, low-code solutions aren’t new, but they’re usually most useful for low-volume applications, with companies outgrowing their tools and needing to rebuild the tech stack. Rowy is aiming higher, wanting to makeproducts accessible to anyone who is a spreadsheet power user, creating software backends that can develop and scale over time.

“Last week, Chat GPT from OpenAI showed the world a sliver of what the latest AI models are capable of. Large language models and generative AI capabilities are incredible and have opened many people’s eyes to the possibilities. Similarly, Rowy is going to show the world what AI is capable of when it comes to coding,” said Harini Janakiraman, Co-founder and CEO of Rowy in an interview with TechCrunch.

The company told us its aim is to create a system that can turn anybody’s vision into a digital product. “If you can use Excel, then you can use Rowy,” is the chorus the company keeps repeating in its mission to help entrepreneurs bring their projects, companies, and passions to life.

“Our aim is to lower the cost, time, and geographic barriers to entrepreneurship, so that anyone, anywhere with an idea can make it real. We are on the cusp of an entrepreneurial renaissance, and I see Rowy playing a huge part in it at scale,” said Janakiraman. “I am personally driven to make software development easier, simple, and accessible for everyone. More people should be building and innovating. Instead of focusing on the core business functionality, there is a lot of valuable developer time that gets wasted on figuring out how to build, deploy, set up DevOps, and on many other complexities in the development process.”

Speed to delivery is one thing, but the company is really doubling down on making it possible to continue to use Rowy, even after products hit production scale loads from eager users.

The company is based in Australia, and just closed a $3 million funding round on SAFE notes, led by Worklife Ventures (who, notably, are investors in Webflow and WorkOS).

“I am based in Sydney Australia, and thanks to the new norm of working remotely, I was able to connect with top Silicon Valley investors with a deep understanding of the space to support us in this journey. Our investors have helped us unlock great network opportunities for Rowy,” says Janakiraman. “With our lead investor, Brianne Kimmel from Worklife, we found the right partner for us who is aligned with our vision and has backed companies building modern tools for the next generation of makers at the earliest stages.”

With the money freshly and safely deposited in the bank account, the company is focusing on expanding the applicability of its platform to a broader set of backend templates, more extensive demos on its experimentation playground, and more. So far, it has demos for OpenAI GPT-3, Google Cloud Vision, a Stable Diffusion to Twitter Bot, and many more, that anyone can explore, clone, and get started.

“We are also building AI-native experiences in Rowy to help auto-generate backend code. We are seeing promising results with our early users as the generated code is more accurate as Rowy knows the context of your database and cloud platform,” says Janakiraman. “We have also been building Rowy in open-source and have an amazing community of over 6K developers across Github and Discord.”

In addition to raising her startup baby, Janakiraman had a newborn last year, and our conversation took us to what it was like to do both at once.

“Being a mother and a founder has made me way more efficient in how I put my time to use. I have always loved problem-solving and being organized but I think one thing that doesn’t get highlighted is how mothers are naturally amazing at multi-tasking,” she said. “This is something that I have gotten really good at over the last year and is a critical skill for being a founder. This has also made me all the more determined to be building something that creates the highest impact in the lives of builders, makers, and developers – so that they can focus on utilizing their time creating meaningful products.”

If Rowy has its way, if you can use Excel, you can build software by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Just days after co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that he will be stepping down in January. Business Insider first reported the news. Salesforce has confirmed the news with Salesforce by email.

The company also announced that Lidiane Jones, who has been the executive VP & GM for digital experiences clouds at Salesforce, would be taking over for Butterfield, leaving a succession plan that had apparently been lacking when Taylor surprised everyone by stepping down last week.

“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack. He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce and today Slack is woven into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform,” the company said in a statement.

The statement went on to discuss the succession plan: “Stewart also was instrumental in choosing Lidiane Jones as the next Slack CEO to lead it into its next chapter. Lidiane has a strong background in customer and enterprise tech and has been among Salesforce’s leadership for over three years. We’re grateful for Stewart and excited for Lidiane as she takes over the reins at Slack.”

Butterfield came to Salesforce when the company bought Slack for $27 billion at the end of 2020. This comes on top of the news on Thursday, that Tableau CEO Mark Nelson would be stepping down. It makes you wonder, what is going on in the C-Suite at Salesforce.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, who has been watching Salesforce since its earliest days, says this could explain why Benioff looked so upset at last week’s earnings’ call, even beyond the initial shock of Taylor’s announcement. “My first is thought was that things like this usually happen in threes — first was Bret, the next day the Tableau CEO, Mark Nelson, and now this. But with the Bret being the architect of the $27B Slack acquisition and now the founder/CEO announcing his departure within days of each other, you kind of feel like this was the other shoe to drop. And this news must’ve been another reason why Marc was so visibly shaken last week when he announced Bret was stepping down,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Butterfield began is entrepreneurial journey when he helped found the photo sharing site, Flickr in 2004. He sold that company to Yahoo a year later (the current version of Yahoo owns this publication). He would later found a game called Glitch. The game didn’t go anywhere, but the company’s internal communication platform would later become Slack, the company he named in around 2013. It quickly grew in popularity and eventually went public in 2019 before Salesforce bought it in late 2020.

He told TechCrunch at the time of the sale that he had originally approached Taylor about buying Quip from Salesforce. Instead, that discussion led to Salesforce buying his company.

“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn’t really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he’d get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.

At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.

Now Butterfield is stepping away. Perhaps the timing of all these announcements is all a huge coincidence, but it sure feels like piling on at the moment. Salesforce has always had a deep bench of executives, but that talent pool is more than a bit thinned out after these three announcements in quick succession.

Salesforce stock is down almost 5% this morning.

Confirmed: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stepping down in January by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Happy TC Sessions: Space 2022 Eve! Tomorrow’s the big day in L.A. for everyone involved with or interested in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and forging humanity’s future in space. There’s still time to get on board this mission, but the countdown clock is ticking.

Ticket to the flight deck: Buy your pass and explore the expanding opportunities in space.

You’ll hear insights from top founders, investors, key military figures, government officials and execs from established space technology companies. They’ll cover topics ranging from crewed space travel and exploration to revolutions in communications, Earth observation data, manufacturing in space and the role space will play during global conflict.

The event agenda is packed, so we’re going to point out just a few of tomorrow’s highlights to help you make the most of your time. Don’t worry about schedule conflicts — your pass includes video-on-demand access when the event ends.

Okay, let’s take a look at what’s happening tomorrow at TC Sessions: Space.

Backing Big Bets in Uncertain Times

With VC spend cooling in general, and particularly when it comes to space-related startups, what are the current priorities of investors who have backed space startups in the past? If we’re settling in for a relatively long economic downturn, what should startups expect from private space capital looking ahead to 2023? With Jory Bell (Playground Global), Mark Boggett (Seraphim Space) and Emily Henriksson (Root Ventures).

Space Workforce 2030: Inspiring, Preparing and Employing the Next Generation

The dawning space age offers enormous opportunities to explore new frontiers, grow the economy on orbit and strengthen our security. Making the most of this momentous time calls for an innovative workforce that can leverage diverse experiences and perspectives to solve the hard problems we’ll encounter.

The Space Workforce 2030 pledge is a first-of-its-kind effort launched earlier this year that is bringing together more than 30 of the country’s leading space companies to work collaboratively to increase diversity across our industry to build a vibrant workforce for the future.

Hear from Michael Edmonds (Blue Origin), Steve Isakowitz (Aerospace Corporation) and Melanie Stricklan (Slingshot Aerospace) about the work they’re doing to inspire, prepare and employ the next generation of scientists and engineers and how you can play a part in supporting this vital mission. Sponsored by the Aerospace Corporation.

Going Fast in Space Acquisition

The commercial space sector has succeeded in driving down the cost of space-based technology while massively increasing its capabilities. The U.S. defense apparatus has traditionally favored legacy industry partners, but it’s shown a growing interest in turning to startups and new space companies to secure the space domain for the U.S. and its allies. We’ll hear why and how from Frank Calvelli, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisitions and Integration.

Asking and Answering Humanity’s Biggest Questions

After six years heading up NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen is a familiar face to anyone who has followed the agency’s many interplanetary and orbital missions. Now ready to move on to his next chapter, Zurbuchen will speak to how NASA, its mission, and the science it performs are changing — and why it’s more important than ever.

That should be enough to initiate your launch sequence, and of course there’s so much more waiting for you at TC Sessions: Space. Don’t have a pass yet? Buy one now, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Check out what’s happening tomorrow at TC Sessions: Space by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Meta is bringing its age verification technologies to another of its products, Facebook Dating. Though the service has not taken off as a significant Tinder rival, it will now serve as the testing grounds for further experimentation with new age verification technologies, including video selfies and ID uploads, Facebook announced this morning. The company will expand its partnership with online age verification provider Yoti to begin verifying the ages of Facebook Dating users when it suspects they’ve lied about their real age, it says.

As regulators put increased pressure on online companies to enact minor protections, Meta has been investing in various age identification technologies which rely on A.I. While Meta hasn’t fully detailed what sort of signals it looks for to help it make a determination about someone’s age, it has previously said it may scan things like user’s birthday posts. as friends often comment with the poster’s real age in their responses. Meta is already testing this technology on Instagram after having prompted users to begin providing their birthday last year. This summer, it began asking some U.S. users to provide their ID or a video selfie if they said they were 18 or older.

Now, that same test will expand to Facebook Dating, an area of Facebook’s product where having minors participate could be even more problematic.

“We’re committed to making sure people have age-appropriate experiences across our technologies, and as part of this work, we’ve been testing age verification tools and using age detection technology to stop people under the age of 18 from accessing experiences meant for adults,” explained the company in a blog post about the new tests.

Similar to Instagram, when Facebook’s A.I. detects someone may be under the age of 18 trying to use Facebook dating, it will send them a prompt to verify their age.

The user can choose to take a video selfie where they record their face and then a still image from the video is shared with Yoti for age verification. Yoti uses technology that estimates a user’s age based on facial features. Afterward, the image is deleted. Or, if the user prefers, they can choose to verify their age by uploading their ID to Facebook, where it’s encrypted and then stored, the company says. Users can manage how long their ID is saved, notes the company, though its own help documentation notes that it may store IDs for up to 1 year.

Meta says its age verification tools on Instagram have already had an impact. Since its tests in June, it found that approximately four times as many people were likely to complete its age verification requirements when attempting to edit their date of birth to be over 18. This resulted in “hundreds of thousands” of users being placed in their appropriate age groups. It also claims to have stopped 96% of teens who tried to edit their birthdays to over 18 using these tools. And it said 81% opted for Yot’s video selfie to complete the process.

While age verification tech may help to address the problem of minors attempting to use products designed for adults, it raises other concerns. Privacy and consumer advocacy groups are warning that the methods used, particularly those involving ID uploads, are invasive and risky. French data protection authority CNIL also warned that many of today’s systems can be easily circumvented. As seen with Facebook, the privacy risks are already apparent as the company will be storing users’ IDs for an indefinite period of time after upload.

The company says its Facebook Dating test of age verification tools will go live in the U.S. but will expand the tools to other global markets in the future.

Facebook to now test age verification tech on Facebook Dating in the U.S. by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

It’s always hard to run a startup, but at least in 2021, you knew what you were supposed to do: Grow fast.

Now, it’s not so simple.

At your board meetings, you have one investor complaining that you aren’t growing fast enough, another complaining that your burn ratio is too high and another warning you to extend your cash runway. You know you can’t please everyone all the time, but it would be nice to feel like you can please someone sometimes!

Ultimately, it’s not your job to please anyone. You have to choose the right path for your company. In the end, what matters is building a great company — and, a lot of that depends, quite simply, on not running out of money.

Here are my thoughts on how to approach this issue based on my experience as a former CEO and current board member and adviser to several technology companies.

Money is no longer “free,” and that changes everything

When interest rates were near zero, future revenues and profits were nearly as good as revenues and profits today. Capital markets were willing to make massive investments to build what investors believed would be strong profit streams far into the future.

The playbook: Pour money into sales and marketing and become a category leader; eventually, as the market recognizes your leadership, revenue will accelerate. Efficiency in the present didn’t matter because in the future — when the company had scale, a stronger brand, a more mature product and a more educated end user — efficiency would increase.

Well, investors today care about the less-distant future. They care about how much money they need to put into your company to get to that future and when it will arrive. If you can earn more than 6% with investment-grade bonds, speculative earnings that are 20, 30, 40 or 50 years into the future aren’t nearly as valuable as they were when interest rates were near zero.

You aren’t the only one who is confused and stressed

If you raised money in 2020 or 2021, you don’t know what a tough fundraising environment is like, and you’re likely getting contradictory advice from investors and advisers.

Which way is up? The end of free money and the importance of keeping cash on hand by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

It is the first Monday of December, so this show is getting into the holiday spirit. And by that, we mean thinking far too much about the geopolitical-technological landscape, naturally.

Here’s what we got into on our Monday episode!

Stocks in China are ripping higher on news that its drastic COVID-related policies could be starting to ease. It’s a long way from a reopening, but after years of hard-edged lockdowns, Chinese tech companies are breathing a sigh of relief — at least in valuation terms. Shares are down in Europe and the United States.
How much are Chinese equities rallying? Bilibili is in the lead, up around 16% in pre-market trading. The day’s gains won’t cover all prior losses, but for the nation’s beleaguered tech industry, the valuation gains are beyond welcome news.
And sticking to the good news vibe, the fact that the U.S. central bank may slow the pace at which it raises interest rates could provide some useful tailwinds to tech companies.
The Circle SPAC deal is off.
Giraffe360 raised new capital, which surprised us, given our perspective on the housing market.
And we closed with notes on ChatGPT, the thing that everyone on Twitter cannot stop playing with.

Is this what good news feels like? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

To Jae Lee, a data scientist by training, it never made sense that video — which has become an enormous part of our lives, what with the rise of platforms like TikTok, Vimeo and YouTube — was difficult to search across due to the technical barriers posed by context understanding. Searching the titles, descriptions and tags of videos was always easy enough, requiring no more than a basic algorithm. But searching within videos for specific moments and scenes was long beyond the capabilities of tech, particularly if those moments and scenes weren’t labeled in an obvious way.

To solve this problem, Lee, alongside friends from the tech industry, built a cloud service for video search and understanding. It became Twelve Labs, which went on to raise $17 million in venture capital — $12 million of which came from a seed extension round that closed today. Radical Ventures led the extension with participation from Index Ventures, WndrCo, Spring Ventures, Weights & Biases CEO Lukas Biewald and others, Lee told TechCrunch in an email.

“The vision of Twelve Labs is to help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do by giving them the most powerful video understanding infrastructure,” Lee said.

Twelve Labs, which is currently in closed beta, uses AI to attempt to extract “rich information” from videos such as movement and actions, objects and people, sound, text on screen, and speech to identify the relationships between them. The platform converts these various elements into mathematical representations called “vectors” and forms “temporal connections” between frames, enabling applications like video scene search.

“As a part of achieving the company’s vision to help developers create intelligent video applications, the Twelve Labs team is building ‘foundation models’ for multimodal video understanding,” Lee said. “Developers will be able to access these models through a suite of APIs, performing not only semantic search but also other tasks such as long-form video ‘chapterization,’ summary generation and video question and answering.”

Google takes a similar approach to video understanding with its MUM AI system, which the company uses to power video recommendations across Google Search and YouTube by picking out subjects in videos (e.g., “acrylic painting materials”) based on the audio, text and visual content. But while the tech might be comparable, Twelve Labs is one of the first vendors to market with it; Google has opted to keep MUM internal, declining to make it available through a public-facing API.

That being said, Google, as well as Microsoft and Amazon, offer services (i.e., Google Cloud Video AI, Azure Video Indexer and AWS Rekognition) that recognize objects, places and actions in videos and extract rich metadata at the frame level. There’s also Reminiz, a French computer vision startup that claims to be able to index any type of video and add tags to both recorded and live-streamed content. But Lee asserts that Twelve Labs is sufficiently differentiated — in part because its platform allows customers to fine-tune the AI to specific categories of video content.

“What we’ve found is that narrow AI products built to detect specific problems show high accuracy in their ideal scenarios in a controlled setting, but don’t scale so well to messy real-world data,” Lee said. “They act more as a rule-based system, and therefore lack the ability to generalize when variances occur. We also see this as a limitation rooted in lack of context understanding. Understanding of context is what gives humans the unique ability to make generalizations across seemingly different situations in the real world, and this is where Twelve Labs stands alone.”

Beyond search, Lee says Twelve Labs’ technology can drive things like ad insertion and content moderation, intelligently figuring out, for example, which videos showing knives are violent versus instructional. It can also be used for media analytics and real-time feedback, he says, and to automatically generate highlight reels from videos.

A little over a year after its founding (March 2021), Twelve Labs has paying customers — Lee wouldn’t reveal how many exactly — and a multiyear contract with Oracle to train AI models using Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Looking ahead, the startup plans to invest in building out its tech and expanding its team. (Lee declined to reveal the current size of Twelve Labs’ workforce, but LinkedIn data shows it’s roughly 18 people.)

“For most companies, despite the huge value that can be attained through large models, it really does not make sense for them to train, operate and maintain these models themselves. By leveraging a Twelve Labs platform, any organization can leverage powerful video understanding capabilities with just a few intuitive API calls,” Lee said. “The future direction of AI innovation is heading straight towards multimodal video understanding, and Twelve Labs is well positioned to push the boundaries even further in 2023.”

Twelve Labs lands $12M for AI that understands the context of videos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Loft Dynamics, a Swiss startup creating virtual reality (VR) simulation technology for helicopter pilots, has raised $20 million in funding from U.S. venture capital (VC) firms including David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, Sky Dayton, and Up Ventures.

Alongside the funding, the company is also formally announcing its name-change from VRM Switzerland.

Founded out of Zurich in 2016, Loft Dynamics has developed a slew of simulators for some of the most common helicopters, including the single turbine Airbus H125. Through this, budding pilots can engage in realistic training scenarios including night-time flying and carryi out proficiency checks, with force-feedback to simulate system failures and other issues.

On top of that, pilots can also now receive training credits for time spent in a simulator, after the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) authorized Loft Dynamics’ Airbus H125 flight training device back in May.

The company says that its platform goes some way toward addressing the global pilot shortage, a problem exacerbated by the pandemic as pilots elected to go for early retirement or switch careers, as it opens up more training opportunities and reduces many of the costs involved in going out in a real helicopter.

Moreover, Loft Dynamics says that because its simulators are around one-tenth of the size of traditional simulators, they are easier to deploy at scale without requiring purpose-built facilities.

Other companies are using VR simulation to tackle similar workforce shortage problems or otherwise enhance existing training programs. VRAI, for example, is developing technology to support training for the offshore wind industry, while FundamentalVR recently raised $20 million to help train surgeons through VR.

With another $20 million in the bank and a new name, Loft Dynamics is now well-positioned to expand outside of Europe and into the lucrative U.S. market.

“After many years in development, we are ready to expand Loft Dynamics to become a global company and bring our technology and training solutions to the world,” Loft Dynamics’ cofounder and CEO Fabi Riesen said in a press release. “This funding comes at exactly the right moment as we will be able to meet the escalating demand for flight schools and accelerate the range of aircraft types we support.”

Loft Dynamics raises $20M to tackle pilot shortage with VR training by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Indian consumer nutrition platform HealthKart has raised $135 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand in international markets and shore up cash to buy firms, it said Monday.

Temasek led the Gurgaon-headquartered firm’s Series H funding, valuing the 11-year-old startup at about $350 million. The startup, which also counts Sequoia India, Sofina and IIFL among its backers, has raised about $225 million to date, according to market research firm Tracxn.

HealthKart, which sells protein supplements and health accessories, said it is currently on track to generate over $122 million in annual revenue.

“Driving fitness and preventive health by addressing the nutritional gaps is a systemic trend which is taking off in a big way in India. With HealthKart’s R&D capabilities and omni-channel distribution infrastructure, we are excited to lead the way,” said Sameer Maheshwari, founder and chief executive of HealthKart, in a statement.

The startup said it will deploy the fresh funds to expand its offline presence and also scale its operations in international markets. The omni-channel nutrition retailer currently operates over 140 stores across 50 Indian cities.

In 2015, 1MG spun off from HealthKart and became a separate company. Tata Digital acquired majority stakes in 1MG at a valuation of over $400 million last year.

Temasek backs India’s HealthKart in $135 million funding by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

When it comes to user-centered design (UCD), the goal of each design process is the same: create a great product for your end-users.

In normal economic times, the use (or lack) of UCD can greatly influence the success or failure of a project. In this more fiscally constrained environment, the stakes are even higher.

Up until 2022, the capital markets were such that any team with a good idea and reasonable business plan could get funding to launch a new product. Now that investors are more demanding and writing smaller checks, UCD can be the difference between your business launching or never making it off the drawing board.

The UCD approach and checklist

The UCD approach is adaptable to many different scenarios. Nonetheless, you should always remember a few key principles. Here’s a checklist for creating a UCD approach:

Ask a lot of questions to understand why your customers want a problem to be solved.
The optimal number of prototypes/ideas to have at one time is five. Anything else is counterproductive.
Consider if you are solving an emotional problem.
When testing, practice empathy (understanding, not sympathy).
Incorporate design philosophies that address accessibility.

We launched in 2007, right in the middle of the Great Recession, so external funding was not an option. We therefore took a lean approach that eschewed expensive software development and marketing, and instead used UCD for everything from the company name and logo to our first product. Each of the following lessons will be useful for founders looking for some ways to do more with less.

UCD for the business concept

Our original business plan at Inflectra was to launch a software test management tool similar to other more expensive, complex and harder-to-use products already on the market. We believed that a better, simpler product with a more user-friendly user interface at a significantly lower price point would be easy to market and sell without having to build a new market completely from scratch. This product would ultimately become what is now known as “SpiraTest.”

However, before launching the business, we employed UCD principles to ask lots of questions to colleagues, potential customers and users. I was lucky that our target users were software quality assurance professionals and project managers, and I was working for a company that did lots of project management and software testing. I was fortunate to have a ready supply of real-world users to work with.

If you’re a bootstrapped startup, turn to user-centered design to thrive during adversity by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch