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So much software is dedicated to helping businesses improve interactions online, whether it be aimed at sales, marketing or customer service.

But despite the prevalence of the internet and an increase in digital commerce, the fact remains that over 85% of commerce still happens offline in the United States.

Enter Rillavoice, a new startup with a niche focus: building speech analytics software for field sales teams who sell in person as opposed to via Zoom or over the phone. The company has just raised $3.7 million in seed funding in a round led by Crew Capital, an under-the-radar venture firm co-founded by UiPath co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Dines and UiPath chief strategy officer Brandon Deer.

In its first year of sales, New York-based Rillavoice has grown to seven figures of annual recurring revenue and is “cash flow positive,” according to co-founder and CEO Sebastian Jimenez Bienen, who declined to reveal hard figures. Interestingly, before even launching its software to the public, the startup received significant inbound from “very large” companies, which validated the need for the offering, he said.

“In May and June of 2020, we started getting some of the biggest companies in retail looking inbound on our site, including Fortune 500s and 50s,” Bienen recalls. “They would ask ‘Is this a real thing? How big are you guys?’ We were doing no marketing. But that [interest] told me we had something. And some of them are customers today.”

Due to competitive reasons, Rillavoice is reluctant to name many of its clients, but Bienen did share a few of its “dozens” of customers, including Window Nation, Rebath and Fortune 500 company Duke Energy. Its software is industry-agnostic and can be applied to a variety of industries, including home services, telecom, solar energy, pharma, insurance, CPG, payments and retail.

“Most sales people in America and around the world do not spend their days sitting in an office, talking to their customers on Zoom,” Bienen said. “They speak with their customers offline, face to face, in their businesses, in their homes, and in their stores…there are billions of face-to-face interactions every month.”

Rillavoice’s software works by allowing sales reps to record conversations with customers, automatically transcribing those conversations to text and then applying machine learning to gain insights that can be used to improve sales practices.” In simpler terms, the aim of the software is to analyze outside sales teams’ conversations with customers, understand what they say and how they say it and generate insights for managers.

That collection and analysis of data serves a few other purposes: to save time on the part of sales managers, who often spend many hours shadowing sales reps or manually listening to recorded sales calls to provide feedback. Ultimately, the end goal is to help boost revenue for the company.

“The software offers 100 to 1000x more visibility and gives insights 100x faster,” Bienen said. “Our AI is basically doing the ride along for you.”

What gives Rillavoice’s software edge, according to Bienen, can be traced back to one of its co-founders, Michael Castellanos, who previously figured out a way to better predict autism by the sound of children’s voices. In doing so, Castellanos became “obsessed” with artificial intelligence. That ability to apply deep learning to analyze sound has been the foundation of Rillavoice’s software, which the company says leverages “proprietary signal processing and natural language processing algorithms.”

“It’s really difficult to process audio in person at scale in an accurate way,” said Bienen. “Others who have tried just didn’t figure out the technical complexities.”

Rillavoice spent its early days building and iterating on its offering. It formally started selling its software in January, and is growing ARR by 30% to 50% monthly, according to Bienen. Other co-founders include Chris Martin and Lukasz Niepolski.

The company received significant interest from investors but ultimately agreed to Crew Capital leading its round mostly due to the fact that the team were operators themselves. It also was impressed with the level of due diligence that the venture firm’s team conducted.

“We talked to some other funds but Crew Capital were so number-driven. They called our customers and asked them the right questions. They really dug deep, and we actually learned a lot as founders, such as what numbers we needed to be tracking,” Bienen told TechCrunch.

For the unacquainted, UiPath is one of the leaders in the quickly growing robotic process automation (RPA) space. In early 2021, that company raised $750 million at a staggering $35 billion valuation.

“Rillavoice is transforming outside sales,” said Dylan Reider, partner at Crew Capital. “Many industries’ sales are predicated on reps engaging customers in the field, away from an office setting. Customers love Rillavoice’s mobile-first, user-friendly SaaS platform because it increases sales rep productivity, drives more revenue for the business, and increases managers’ coaching efficiency. At Crew Capital, we back founders with a bold vision to augment or completely reshape an industry through technology, and that is exactly what Rillavoice is doing in outside sales.”

The firm has quietly backed over 40 companies in the U.S., Europe and Latin America since it was founded two years ago. It started out as a vehicle for joint angel investing for the two general partners, who later brought in Reider to lead the investment team. It is completely separately from UiPath and its venture arm.

“Our model is that a founder has a high degree of flexibility similar to what you’d expect from an angel. We’re willing to either take board seats or target ownership percentages, but we call that flexibility with a really high degree of support,” Reider told TechCrunch. “We’re hands-on to the extent our founders want us to be.”

Check sizes tend to be in the low digit single millions of dollars, and the firm doesn’t typically lead investments but rather serves as more of a “strategic” investor.

Also participating in Rillavoice’s seed financing are Entrepreneurs Roundtable Fund, Jason Calacanis’s Launch Fund, Broom Ventures, Comma Capital and the NYU Innovation Venture Fund.

Rillavoice plans to use its new capital primarily to 5x its team of 10.

TechCrunch’s weekly fintech newsletter, The Interchange, launched on May 1! Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

A tool for analyzing face-to-face sales pitches lands funding from UiPath co-founder by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

X1, a consumer fintech startup which recently launched an income-based credit card to the public, has raised an additional $15 million in funding.

This round caught our attention for a few reasons. For one, a consumer fintech raising in this environment is a bit counter to the narrative that startups in the space are generally struggling. (For example, digital bank Chime recently laid off 12% of its workforce, or about 160 people.)

Also, notably, X1’s latest financing comes just six months after the San Francisco-based company raised $25 million in a July Series B round. It also is not only not a down or a flat round, the cash infusion boosts X1’s valuation by 50%, according to Deepak Rao, co-founder & CEO of X1.

Rao unfortunately declined to reveal the new valuation or number of cardholders but he did share some other very interesting information around the company’s financials. When X1 started raising for its Series B in late March/early April, it was generating about $1 million per month in revenue, he said. By October, the startup was doing about $3 million in revenue. With these numbers, the company’s annual revenue run rate is $36 million. Very impressive for a company that only went live in private beta 13 months ago and launched its credit card to the public in mid-September – after amassing 600,000 people on its waitlist.

Gross merchandise value (GMV), also known as spend, too has jumped, according to Rao – from $50 million in July to $55 million in October to an expected $60 million this month. The company is projecting $1 billion in annualized spend for 2022.

That sort of rapid growth caught the attention of several investors, who reached out to X1, Rao told TechCrunch in an interview.

“In the beginning we weren’t considering [raising more money so soon],” he said. “But since it felt like we are one of the few companies in the consumer fintech space getting interest and growing at a good pace and responsibly, we thought we should capitalize on it.”

New investor Soma Capital led X1’s B1 raise, which Rao said was not an extension and closed in early November. Also participating in the latest financing was The Points Guy founder & CEO, Brian Kelly, and Cruise CEO, Kyle Vogt, bringing the series B round total to $40 million. The startup’s long list of previous backers include FPV, Craft Ventures, Spark Capital, Harrison Metal, SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, the Chainsmokers, Global Founders Capital, actor Jared Leto, Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, Jeremy Stoppelman, Affirm and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Y Combinator Partner Ali Rowghani.

X1 has raised over $60 million since inception, including a $12 million Series A that closed in 2020 but was announced in January of 2021.

Interestingly, X1 did not fundraise at all in 2021, opting instead to keep its “head down focused on growth and long-term customer value.” This might have actually worked in the company’s favor considering that it was not among the many fintechs that raised at inflated valuations that they are currently trying to defend.

“There just aren’t that many fairly priced companies out there,” Rao told TechCrunch.

In conjunction with the B1 raise, X1 also announced today the launch of a new investing platform that will allow its cardholders to buy stocks with their earned reward points.

The new trading platform will live within X1’s app and will be rolling out to a select number of cardholders in beta in the next several weeks. The plan is for it to be live to the general public by year’s end or early January depending on how the initial rollout goes. Unlike users of current trading apps, X1 cardholders with access will be able to buy stocks by using earned reward points.

“By using credit card points to buy stock instead of cash or their savings, we feel this is a safe way for many consumers to start investing,” said Rao, who admits the company is hoping to compete with the likes of Robinhood. “There is no real downside as their investing is technically free.”

The startup first made headlines for its unique model which allows it to underwrite customers based on their income rather than their credit scores. (Since then, other players have emerged with similar models – such as Tomo Credit, which offers credit based on cash flow rather than credit).

X1 doesn’t charge an annual fee for its stainless steel Visa card, has no late or foreign transaction fees and rewards users with “points.” The company also claims that its card is “smart” in that it has built software features that work with the credit card. For instance, my colleague Romain Dillet wrote in 2020, “you can track your subscriptions from the X1 app, you can also generate an auto-expiring virtual card for free trials that require a credit card. You also get notifications for refunds.”

To date, X1 has given over $10 million in reward points.

Interchange fees on purchases represent X1’s primary source of revenue. But it also makes money by giving users incentives – in the form of additional rewards – to shop directly in the shopping portal inside its app using its card. When its cardholders do shop via that portal, X1 gets commission from the featured merchants, which include the likes of Nike.com, Sephora, Kate Spade, Apple, Macy’s and Warby Parker, among others.

X1’s plans for its new capital is market expansion, building out new products and hiring its product and engineering teams. Presently, the company has 36 employees and Rao claims all its growth thus far has been organic.

In recent months, X1 has already made a couple of very high-profile hires, including luring away Abhi Pabba from Apple, where he worked as manager of credit risk out of the tech giant’s Austin office. for the Apple Card, Abhi Pabba, has left the company. Pabba today serves as X1’s chief risk officer.

The company also recently hired Kieran Brady – a former managing director of Barclays, where he started the British bank’s fintech practice – to serve as X1’s chief financial officer (CFO).

When asked if the CFO hire meant that X1 had its sights on going public, Rao said that is the goal in the longer term.

“We want to do things the right way, and not get caught up in the hype cycle,” he said. “It’s extremely critical for a consumer fintech business to meet all the regulatory requirements and have all the foundations set up to build an enduring business.” (For example, he said the company already does audits – something other companies could learn from).

Rao started X1 with Siddharth Batra, who also previously served as Twitter’s director of engineering, in 2020 after previously founding ThriveCash together.

“There is so much to love about X1 and at the heart of it are Deepak and Siddharth – the visionary founders with an uncanny knack for product and the superlative ability to listen to the customer’s voice,” said Mir Faiyaz, partner at Soma Capital. “X1’s radical product-market-fit, and the team’s ability to be a magnet for top-tier talent and investors alike is a symptom of the perfect storm of founder-market-fit, a bold vision, and brilliant execution.”

X1 is not the only fintech company to raise an up round in recent months. TripActions, which in 2020 expanded from being a travel expense management company to a general corporate spend management startup, in October raised a combination of equity and debt at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion, up from its prior valuation of $7.5 billion.

TechCrunch’s weekly fintech newsletter, The Interchange, launched on May 1! Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

X1 gets 50% valuation boost, aims to give consumers a way to buy stocks via credit card reward points by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Along with its Android update for December, Google has launcheda new appcalled Reading Mode today. It helps people with visual imparities and dyslexia read the content on the screen — especially articles.

The newly released app works on any device running Android 9.0 or above. Once you install it on your phone, you will have to turn on the toggle for the app under the Accessibility settings. This allows the app to have a floating button on the screen all the time, so you can turn any app or webpage into a more accessible version.

Reading Mode turns the content on the current screen into a simpler format. It features controls for adjusting contrast, font type, line space, and size. What’s more, you can ask it to read out the content on the screen and control the playback speed. The app also allows you to quickly change the reading voice as well. Users can also turn on a toggle to have the app highlight current text being read by the voiceover feature.

Google already offers a number of accessibility tools including a screen reader with TalkBack and a built-in Braille keyboard. As the name suggests, Reading Mode have been specifically designed to read or listen to long text, such as online articles. It isn’t meant to read everything that is on the screen like buttons and their purposes

Google’s Reading Mode app helps visually impaired people read long-form content by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Google is rolling out its Android feature updates for December across phones, watches, and Google TV. These updates include an accessible reader mode, a new YouTube Search widget, shareable digital car keys, new action tiles for Wear OS, along with some holiday special features.

Here’s a roundup of everything Google is rolling out.

Phone

The Android December update brings an accessible reader mode that helps folks with dyslexia or visual imparity to consumer content better. The mode lets users control contrast, font type, and size for better visibility. Plus, it has a text-to-speech function with speed control so they can listen to the articles online. You have to install the Reading Mode app on your phone and follow the instruction to turn on the shortcut.

Google is also introducing a new YouTube home screen widget that has easy access to the search bar, Home, Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library.

Beginning next week, users will be able to cast a title to a compatible TV directly from the Google TV app. This allows you to play something while looking for other stuff to watch, switch to another app to check an update, and use the phone as a remote as well. The company first talked about this feature back in May at its Google IO developer conference.
Google Photos is adding new designs for collages, made by Australian husband-and-wife visual duo DABSMYLA and renowned watercolor artist Yao Cheng Design, for the holiday season. You can select photos in the Google Photos app, add them to a collage, and browse through these new styles to create a final frame.
Gboard’s Emoji Kitech also adding support for the blue heart , snowman , and snowflake for emoji mashups during the holiday season.

Car

Google first started rolling out support for digital car keys to unlock your car last year. With this new update, it will now allow you to share access to your car with friends and family on Pixel and iPhones. The company said you can use the digital wallet app to view and change access to the digital car key. It added that this feature will soon be available on some other devices running Android 12 and up.

Watch

Wear OS update includes the introduction of new Tiles — widget-like screens to access information quickly — including favorite contacts and time of sunrise and sunset. It already has Tiles for Google Maps to let you access directions to saved places like work and home, and Google Keep to start a new note or a list. The company also has an API for third-party developers to take advantage of the Tiles format on Wear OS.

Google has updated the Keep app on Wear OS to make notes and lists have a better format to be read on a watch with support for custom backgrounds, photos, and drawings. Plus, you can view labels and collaborators to a list.
The search giant is adding support for the Adidas running app to Google Assistant. The update, rolling out over the next week, will allow you to use the Assistant to start more than 30 exercises through a voice command on your watch. You can say “Hey Google, start a run with Adidas Running” to start tracking your run with the app.

For enabling new features in individual apps like Google TV and Gboard, you will need to update those apps to their latest version.

Android’s December update features includes accessible reading mode and sharable car keys by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

In what can only be characterized as a stunning turn of events, Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced his resignation yesterday, claiming he wanted to return to his entrepreneurial roots. Whatever his reasons, it was a shock to all who cover this company, and it’s safe to say that few if any saw this coming — even his mentor, Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff.

Taylor is a Silicon Valley mover and a shaker. He’s worked at big companies like Google and Facebook. Until recently, he was board chair at Twitter, helping lead the social media giant through this turbulent year of Musk-induced madness until its new owner dissolved its board last month.

He also has small-company experience as former CEO at FriendFeed, an early social networking outfit, and Quip, which Salesforce bought in 2016 for a hefty $750 million.

Taylor and Benioff seemed to hit it off immediately after Quip joined Salesforce, and the relationship was (and apparently remains) deep and heartfelt. As a result, Taylor raced through the ranks at the CRM giant to co-chairman and co-CEO in just four years.

When Jeff Bezos stepped back as CEO at Amazon last year after leading the company since its founding in 1994, we speculated that Benioff could be the next executive to take that step. The logical choice, the heir apparent, appeared to be Taylor, who was poised to take over whenever Benioff decided to spend more time in Hawaii.

Instead, we have Taylor walking away and Benioff in charge for the foreseeable future.

No one seemed to see Bret Taylor stepping away from Salesforce (even Marc Benioff) by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Today’s Google Doodle lets you make, play and share your own mini arcade game to honor the memory of videogame pioneer Jerry Lawson. Lawson led the team that developed the first home video gaming system with interchangeable game cartridges. Today would have been his 82nd birthday.

The interactive Doodle starts off by taking you through a short experience that introduces you to Lawson and his legacy. The first part of the experience is a tutorial that teaches you about the basic controls and editing features. From there, you can navigate to five ready-to-play games. You can play the games as they are, or you can click on the pencil icon to edit them.

If you want to create your own game, you can navigate to the home screen and click on the empty cartridge icon with a plus sign on it. Once you’re done with your creation, you can use the share button to send it to your friends.

The five ready-to-play games were designed by three American artists and game designers: Davionne Gooden, Lauren Brown and Momo Pixel.

Lawson was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940 and had tinkered with electronics from an early age. He started his career in Palo Alto, California and joined Fairchild Semiconductor as an engineering consultant. He led the development of the Fairchild Channel F system (the F stands for fun), which was the first home video game system console that featured interchangeable game cartridges, an eight-way digital joystick and a pause menu. The system paved the way for future gaming systems like the Atari, SNES, Dreamcast and more.

In 1980, Lawson left Fairchild to start his own company, VideoSoft, which was one of the earliest Black-owned video game development companies. VideoSoft created software for the Atari 2600, which popularized the cartridge Lawson and his team developed.

Google’s latest Doodle lets you create your own mini arcade game by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The team at the newly popular Twitter alternative Hive is in over their head. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.

The researchers, a part of a German collective called Zerforschung, claimed they confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities to Hive’s team, noting it was initially difficult to reach a point of contact at the company. Several days later, Hive replied, claiming the issues to be fixed, a Zerforschung blog post explains. However, the researchers found this was not the case so they took their concerns to the public, warning people against using Hive’s app.

Shortly after, Hive announced it was temporarily shutting down its servers to address these problems. It also claimed, across several tweets, that they never told the researchers the issues were “fixed” but that they were “fixing” them, eventually deciding to go offline until problems were addressed.

It’s an unusual way to patch bugs, to say the least, and one that raises questions about the development workflow at the company. Is there not a dev environment where code is fixed, then staged for a release? How bad was the code that it requires a full stop of company operations to rework it?

These aren’t the first concerns that have been raised about Hive in the weeks following its rapid growth, which has been fueled by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Today, a number of Twitter users are unhappy with the direction Musk is taking the social network and have been seeking out alternatives. This has led to sizable boosts to the user bases of other social apps, including Mastodon, CoHost, Tumblr, CounterSocial, Post News, Koo, and Hive, among others.

But it’s also led to increased scrutiny for Hive, a smaller app that until recently was a two-person team. The company has not always been fully transparent about its inner workings, corporate structure, moderation capabilities, or sources of funding. This tends to leave Hive users looking for information on their own, then raising questions about what they dig up.

For example, one of the issues that popped up in the past couple of weeks involved the resurfacing of an older, problematic tweet posted by a former employee, Gil Malfabon, who created Hive’s design system. Hive publicly confirmed Malfabon was no longer with the company, and he privately confirmed the same to TechCrunch. While the designer currently appears listed on tax filings (PDF) as an officer, he says next year’s filing should be accurate.

Hive also recently told TechCrunch it now has two other employees in addition to the 24-year-old founder and self-taught coder Kassandra Pop (who goes by other online usernames like Raluca and Salem.). But Pop wouldn’t disclose the full names of her team members when asked, referring to them only as Joshua and Pablo. She said they didn’t want the attention. The company has also grown to some 2 million users, according to aBusiness Insider report published on Nov. 22, but hasn’t explained how it’s being funded. (Recent tweets hint that funding conversations are in the works, however.)

In terms of the product, Hive has also faced several issues. When the company’s server reached capacity under the influx of new users in late November, Hive allowed duplicate usernames to be created. It said that there could be other duplicate usernames from when Hive first launched, as well. The company claims the issue is now fixed, but it’s an obvious security concern as duplicates could allow for impersonation. In addition Hive frequently replies to Twitter users’ requests for usernames to “free up” their preferred handles for them, as it did recently for YouTuber iJustine — a sort of ad hoc system to address its lack of verification procedures.

Worse, the company has grown a network to millions of users without moderators, security teams, or staff focused on GDPR or other regulatory compliance. This could be chalked up to naivete, perhaps, about what it means to run a social network in 2022, but it’s also reckless and negligent. But Hive may get away with it, if the funding arrives.

Pop told Insider she planned to use future funds to hire moderators to filter out gore, violence and child exploitation content, to give you an idea of the urgency. Hive has been asked for comment but did not immediately reply.

Twitter alternative Hive shuts down its app to fix critical security issues by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Firefox developer Mozilla is making a rare foray into the world of mergers and acquisitions, with news that it has snapped up recently-shuttered California-based productivity startup Pulse.

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the deal is tantamount to an “acqui-hire,” with Mozilla looking to deploy the Pulse team across an array of machine learning (ML) projects.

“We’re acquiring Pulse for the incredible team they have built,” Mozilla chief product officer Steve Teixeira told TechCrunch. “As we look to continue to improve user experiences across all of our products, ML will be a core part of that.”

Feel the pulse

Founded out of Menlo Park in 2019, Pulse in its initial guise was a “virtual office” platform called Loop Team, but after honing the idea for a couple of years it pivoted and rebranded last November. Pulse, essentially, was an automated status-updating tool that used signals based on pre-configured integrations and preferences set by the user.

For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar.

But Pulse sported myriad integrations with business tools that brought similar functionality. For example, users could link Pulse with Zoom, so that whenever they start a video meeting, a telephone emoji automatically displays in their Slack status to tell people they are unavailable.

Shutting shop

Pulse had flown largely under the radar since it started rolling out to a small group of users last December, but the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user.

The company was among TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 startups at TC Disrupt in October, and TechCrunch interviewed Pulse cofounder and CEO Raj Singh at the event for a potential future startup profile piece. Singh said at the time that it was planning to raise a seed round of funding early in the new year, something that obviously won’t be happening now. When quizzed on whether Pulse was more like a feature that the big tech platforms could just build themselves, rather than a sustainable business in its own right, Singh was adamant that Pulse could thrive as a standalone product. While he acknowledged that companies such as Microsoft or Google might well want to develop a similar automated status update tool for their own products, they were less incentivised to make it work well as an integrated feature that plays ball with various third-party tools.

Pulse was all about communicating things to colleagues around the world passively, regardless of what tools they were using or what timezone they’re in. This is particularly important with remote work becoming the norm, and Pulse was looking to find its niche at a time when workplace culture is rapidly changing.

“A lot of people actually want to update their status, but it’s tedious,” Singh told TechCrunch in October. “But there’s hundreds of signals, and the thing we realised was status is not just ‘availability’, it’s actually a way to communicate empathy.”

While Pulse did have plans to expand beyond Slack into other workplace communication tools including Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, the company abruptly announced in late October that it was shutting down. In an email distributed to customers at the time, the company attributed this to “market conditions,” noting that it was finding it difficult to raise fresh capital — but it did confirm that it had found a buyer, the identity of which was unknown until today. Singh also said in the email that there was a chance that the buyer could resurrect Pulse in some form, but there is little indication that Mozilla has such a plan on its radar.

What’s next

To the casual observer, Slack was probably the obvious contender to acquire Pulse. For starters, there is the fact that Pulse had been focused exclusively on Slack status updates. But on top of that, Singh had previously founded a smart calendar app called Tempo AI which he sold to Salesforce for an undisclosed sum in 2015.

Singh then joined Salesforce to help with the initial transition of Tempo AI’s technology into Salesforce’s Inbox app. And as we now know, Salesforce went on to acquire Slack in 2020, so with Singh’s connections to Salesforce and his product’s close alignment with Slack, there seemed like only one possible suitor here.

Alas, Slack hasn’t acquired Pulse — the Mozilla Corporation has. It is something of a surprise, if for no other reason than Mozilla isn’t renowned for its M&A endeavors, though it is starting to ramp up its investment efforts after launching its first venture capital fund last month. But its only known acquisition to date was back in 2017, when it snapped up Pocket, a popular read-it-later web-clipping service that Mozilla had already integrated into its Firefox browser two years previous.

As a side point, Pulse itself had been on something of an acquisition spree this year, buying rival status updating service Holopod back in January, followed by audio-based communications platform Commons in March. Then in May, news emerged that Pulse had acquired team communication startup Lounge.

“Our strategy [with M&A] is pretty straightforward — we look for opportunities to bring on talent and technology that helps us improve experiences for our customers,” Teixeira said. “With Pulse, this is about supplementing the skillsets we have here already as a way to speed up our development efforts. We have a high bar for any acquisition, but if we find teams and technologies with incredible talent that share our mission and vision for the future of the internet, we are absolutely open to pursuing a transaction.”

As it happens, Pocket may be an early beneficiary of the Pulse acquisition. While Mozilla ultimately plans to deploy the Pulse team across various projects, Teixeira says that an early focus will be on using ML to improve personalization in Pocket, which presumably means in the form of content recommendations.

It’s worth noting that Mozilla has dabbled with ML a fair bit in the past, including experimental projects inside Firefox that recommend content to users, as well as tracking prices across myriad online stores. The company is also leveraging ML across various voice and speech projects.

“We see opportunity to use ML in virtually all of our products, including Firefox, as a foundation for improving the experience for all of our customers,” Teixeira said.

Mozilla hasn’t revealed how much it’s doling out for the startup, but Pulse had only raised around $4.7 million in pre-seed funding according to Crunchbase data, and given its difficulties in raising fresh capital, it’s safe to assume that Mozilla hasn’t broken the bank here.

What Mozilla is getting for its money is six people, including Pulse’s three founders Raj Singh, Jag Srawan, and Rolf Rando, each bringing significant engineering, ML, and product execution experience to Mozilla’s ML efforts. Singh actually created his previous startup Tempo AI as a project inside SRI International, the Stanford research institute responsible for Siri. He rejoined SRI as executive in residence (EIR) after leaving Salesforce, remaining there until founding Pulse (then Loop Team) nearly four years ago.

“In building Pulse, we enabled a variety of machine learning experiences to make distributed teams feel more connected,” Singh noted. “Finding ways to use AI and machine learning to simplify tasks for users is our passion.”

Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

One element of the 2021 venture capital apotheosis that doesn’t get enough attention is corporate venture capital. CVC boomed through last year, leading TechCrunch to interviewa number of CVC investors last August to better understand the trend.

As with other forms of venture capital, CVC has pulled back some this year.

Accelerators also had a pretty good run through 2021: Recall that Y Combinator cohort sizes reached new records and the group boosted the amount of capital that it invested in batch companies.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There was a lot of money flying around, and it seemed to come from every corner of the business world; hell, how many corporate-sponsored Techstars programs are there today? It makes sense that if we saw more corporate venture money and more aggressive accelerator activity through the last boom, the two would at times overlap.

Corporate interest in startup investing has cooled this year, posting declines in deal value for four quarters and deal volume for two. And the massive accelerator cohorts of yesteryear seem slightly out of tune with the current market; who is going to fund all the Series A rounds for those startups, given that we’re seeing kinks develop in the venture pipe?

The up-and-down CVC world is not putting some folks off. TechCrunch covered an interesting new fund-accelerator-CVC-ish group called UP.Labs earlier this year. Its model brings together the corporate desire to leverage new technologies and the big company needed to innovate faster than startup scale would normally allow, crossing the combination with targeted startup construction. (The group isn’t into the “incubator” tag, we noted previously; it calls its accelerator a “venture lab.” More on that in a moment.)

How Up.Labs threads the needle between corporate venture capital and accelerators by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

LinkedIn, the social platform for the working world for networking and recruitment, hasn’t been the biggest name in headlines when it comes to how social media is leveraged for spam, scams and fake news, but they’re all significant problems on the platform that will only get bigger as traffic grows (as it’s doing currently, at a rate of 34%/year), and as/if businesses and people fly from other social networks and look to the likes of LinkedIn, which now has some 875 million members, for more targeted business interactions.

Today the company made a couple of announcements related to its direct messaging service — your private inbox that sits alongside your public feed — that speak to this theme: LinkedIn is rolling out a “focused” option for incoming messages with others relegated to an “other” box; and it’s turning on new automatic spam and harassment detection and a new feature to report unwanted messaging.

The new features are critical for the health of LinkedIn and its wider business.

The company says that there are some 21 inMails — direct messages — sent every second with job opportunities at the moment. (For those of you who feel like you get a lot of unwanted solicitations… that’s a global figure, not just for you!) Having an experience full of spam and other junk will turn off people from using the service, which will make it less effective for outreach for recruiters, and thus less likely they pay send those messages on LinkedIn.

But the kernel within that business logic is the other reason: it’s important for everyday users’ experience. LinkedIn’s transparency report from earlier in the year found that LinkedIn proactively removed 70.8 million spam and scam messages on its platform, and that users reported a further (mere) 179,000. I’m guessing that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what people could report were it easier to do so.

Looking at the company’s itemization of unwanted content over the last couple of years, it’s notable how it’s grown overall (misinformation wasn’t even category until the latter half of 2020. Does that mean that LinkedIn didn’t care if it existed? Or that it didn’t exist? Or that it was too small to cover? Regardless, it’s there now and it’s growing.)

There is an underlying question a lot of you might be asking about all of this, which is: isn’t LinkedIn just one big platform for spam, in the form of unsolicited efforts from people getting in touch to try to get something out of you or fishing for something? In which case, it’s a challenge to think of how LinkedIn will use its AI algorithms, formidable as they are, to separate what you really want to see out of all of that, spam or just otherwise unwanted contact.

That’s a bigger problem for the company, but actually one for a lot of other social media too — although the businesslike/business-lite nature of LinkedIn definitely seems to carry a more serious undercurrent to it all — one reason why the FBI came out saying investment fraud on LinkedIn in particular was a “significant threat” to the platform and its users.

Focused messagesinclude “the most relevant new opportunities and outreach,” the company says. Other will have everything else. LinkedIn says that the system works using AI algorithms, meaning there is a degree to which it’s also learning from what you open and engage with to know what to send where in future.

The spam reporting, meanwhile, will come in the form of a new action that is offered to you when you read or triage you mail, “report an inappropriate message.” The automated tools, quietly already being rolled out, “warn you when harassment is detected within private messaging,” LinkedIn says. It either gets sent directly to spam or if it’s questionable, it stays in your inbox with a label you see before reading. You can take action on these as with regular messages to report spam or abuse.

Alongside these, LinkedIn says that it’s adding live captioning on the video messaging feature it provides to improve accessibility — part of a bigger raft of features it’s been putting into messaging after rebuilding the platform to include not just video messaging, but editing abilities and other features to better handle inboxes to turn them into a destination part of the site.

The bigger messaging makeover has been especially notable given how little evolution Twitter has brought to its direct messaging experience over the years, and how Facebook’s similarly gone slower in Messenger after the bot-flurry, with more interesting feature updates coming instead to Instagram and WhatsApp.

The new features were being tried out in smaller groups before now — I am on its premium tier, and I seem to have had the “other” and “focused” feature in my inbox for a while now — but now they are going global, the company tells me.

LinkedIn rolls out focused inbox and messaging safety tools as it gets to grip with spam and scams by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch