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For businesses, protecting trademarks is often a lengthy and expensive process, especially if they have multiple brands. Digip digitizes much of the process, helping its customers file trademarks by themselves instead of going to law firms. The Stockholm-based legaltech startup announced today it has added $1.3 million to its seed round, bringing the total to $3.4 million. The new funding was led by Industrifonden and Seed X, with participation from family offices and angel investors.

Founded in 2020, Digip now has 500 customers in 42 countries, ranging from startups to large enterprises that make hundreds of dollars in revenue. Digip currently makes about $500,000 in annual recurring revenue and that amount is forecasted to grow 3x during the 2022 fiscal year. Over the last year, Digip has also expanded its IP service into the United States and other international markets.

Co-founder and CEO Viktor Johansson told TechCrunch that Digip was founded after its team saw that entrepreneurs are reluctant to use traditional law firms that bill by the hour. To file trademarks, businesses usually ask a lawyer to conduct trademark searches. They are billed per search, which adds up quickly if a business has multiple brands they need to trademark. Then they have to pay for a lawyer to file trademark applications. But the process doesn’t end there. Businesses also have to monitor their trademarks in markets where they own it, and that is another charge.

Digip combines all these steps into one online workflow. Instead of charging for different parts of the process, its customers pay a flat monthly or yearly subscription fee, plus application fees charged by trademark offices.

Businesses can use Digip to research trademarks and get on-demand advice from its team for free. If they become subscribers, they can then use Digip’s platform to manage their trademark applications in 180 countries. The platform enables this with a trademark warehouse that has updated trademark data. Data collection and updates are automated as Digip enter new markets.

It also trains AI/ML algorithms for searches that cover 100 languages and manages customers’ trademarks by reading and interpreting trademark data. This enables onboarding to be automated and makes Digip’s process scalable.

Johansson said Digip initially considered offering its service to law firms, but decided not to since they are slow at adopting legal tech. But Digip does have a global network of lawyers that its customers can go to for support.

Johansson said that Digip’s largest markets are the United Kingdom, Nordic countries and the European Union, and it’s seeing more demand from the United States, Canada and Australia. Many of its customers are venture-backed businesses that run digital businesses in sectors in sectors including SaaS, deep tech, direct to consumer, life science, metaverse, blockchain and fintech.

“A cool thing with trademarking is that you pick up on early business trends,” Johansson said. “We have been involved in some interesting projects with emerging technologies that will hit the markets in coming years. This is a really fun and exciting part of our setup.”

Johansson said Digip’s closest competition are still law firms, but it also considers lawyers to be close collaborators. “Because digitization of legal has been slow many companies are stuck in legacy bills by the hour trademark solutions,” he said. “Some law firms that rely significantly on trademark filings are our competitors, whilst other law firms that do not do significant business through trademark filings see us as a great potential partner for them.”

Over the next few months, Digip will launch several new features. These include an open API that will let partners integrate Digip’s technology into their workflows. Johansson said users will see a significantly improved trademark search on Digip.com. The company will also expand into new markets over the next 12 months.

Digip digitizes the process of applying for trademarks by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

HR organizations are faced with a widening skills gap, economic headwinds and changing expectations around work. It’s no surprise, then, that burnout and exhaustion are widespread in HR, with one survey finding that 42% of teams are struggling under the weight of too many projects and responsibilities.

Change starts with personnel and management, some might argue. Others leaning more technoutopianist might proffer HR tech as a solution. While there’s a fair amount of dissatisfaction with HR tech vendors (at least according to some data), to be fair to the tech-positive crowd, many companies see real value in HR tech. According to a recent Sapient report, over half of businesses with more than 500 employees plan to increase HR tech spending by an average of 21% into the coming year.

One beneficiary of that increased spending is London-based Beamery, a startup developing a talent lifecycle management platform. Beamery today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series D round that values the company at $1 billion, bringing the company’s total raised to date to $228 million.

Teachers’ Ventures Growth (TVG), a part of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, led the round. “I believe Beamery is well-placed to win because it provides a solution that you can rely on through different economic cycles,” TVG’s Avid Larizadeh Duggan said in an emailed statement. “Beamery is helping the world’s largest employers with this talent agility, and allowing them to unlock the potential of their workforce.”

Certainly, Beamery gained impressive traction this year, growing the size of its customer base to “hundreds” of enterprises and over 25,000 users. Revenue from Fortune 500 clients rose by over 250% compared to June 2021, when Beamery closed its Series C round, according to the company, while net retention grew to 135%.

“Beamery’s … talent lifecycle management platform gives organizations, such as General Motors, VMWare and Johnson & Johnson, the intelligence they need to make the right decisions about their workforce and supports them through each stage of the talent lifecycle – from recruiting to talent mobility and development to upskilling,” Beamery CEO Abakar Saidov told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The new funding will support continued investment in our platform and tech capabilities and help to build out global sales footprint.”

Beamery was founded in 2013 by Saidov and his brother, Sultan Saidov, along with Mike Paterson. The Saidov brothers say their vision for Beamery had it origins in their experiences as children of immigrants, when they became aware of the structural challenges associated with work. Paterson was previously an analyst at Morgan Stanley, while the Saidov brothers worked at Goldman Sachs — Abakar as a commodities trader and Sultan as a mergers and acquisitions analyst.

Founded as Seed Jobs, Beamery uses AI to identify potential job candidate matches for open roles. Like many candidate-vacancy matching platforms, Abakar Saidov says that Beamery ranks skills based on the industry a company’s hiring for and a candidate’s relevant work experiences.

“Beamery uses [AI] in our talent lifecycle management platform to give companies the intelligence they need to plan for business needs and gaps, understand the skills and capabilities they have and attract, retain, upskill and redeploy their workforce successfully,” Abakar Saidov said. “[O]ur models are not meant to replace humans; instead, they give relevant information to human decision makers to make better decisions.”

Given the increased scrutiny over candidate-recommending AI systems, Abakar Saidov was quick to note that Beamery shows how various factors, including skills, seniority, proficiency and industry, influence its recommendations and to what degree. Beamery is among the vendors that could be subjected to a New York City regulation — the Automated Employment Decision Tools law, set to go into effect in January — that would ban employers from using AI hiring tools unless a bias audit can show they won’t discriminate.

Abakar Saidov says that Beamery recently completed a third-party audit for bias in its AI capabilities, which involved “rigorous testing” of the platform’s machine learning models. (Abakar Saidov didn’t proactively share a copy of the report with TechCrunch; we’ve requested one.) The company also partnered with Parity AI, a startup led by AI ethicist and activist Liz O’Sullivan, to audit the platform on an ongoing basis.

“Within the Beamery … platform itself (i.e. in the application layer), a key differentiator for us is helping customers ensure their own compliance with the myriad of global personal data and privacy standards,” Abakar Saidov said. “We achieve this primarily through the preference center, which lets candidates control their consent, whether and how companies can contact them and control how AI is used against their profile.”

Beamery doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. Competitors in the HR tech software space include 15Five, which raised $52 million in July for its talent management solution. There’s also Gloat, a well-capitalized startup building AI-powered internal jobs marketplaces. Eightfold is among the most formidable, with an over-$2-billion valuation and backing from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst and Lightspeed.

Broadly speaking, VCs have shown a willingness to put money behind HR tech startups even as other segments underperform. According to an analysis from WorkTech, the first half of this year saw the second-largest global work tech investment, surging to $9.4 billion, with $4.6 billion invested in Q2 alone.

Despite layoffs in the tech industry, job growth has remained resilient despite the economic headwinds, driving demand for HR tech — and spawning new vendors as a result.

To stay ahead, since its Series C, Beamery has doubled down on analytics capabilities, Abakar Saidov says — introducing a dashboard designed to enable companies to better understand their workforce by aggregating skills data across disparate HR systems and tools. The platform also recently rolled out a portal for candidates that provides recommendations for jobs as well as skills they might need to develop to further their careers in their chosen industry. And, as an outgrowth of its acquisition of internal HR sourcing platform Flux, Beamery launched Beamery Grow, which Abakar Saidov describes as a “talent marketplace solution” to help employees gain new skills and connections from within their organizations.

“We are prioritizing enhancements that will let customers quickly and easily leverage their talent data for things like agile workforce planning, as well as ensuring they have real-time intelligence and insights around their current and future workforce allocation, the skills that exist in their organization relative to their business outcomes and their achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion targets,” Abakar Saidov said. “The capabilities that a company will need over the next ten years are in many cases very different from today, and therefore HR tech solutions need to be able to help businesses build, buy or borrow the skills they need to build a future fit workforce.”

Beamery currently has 417 employees. When asked about hiring plans, Abakar Saidov said they’re “in development.”

Beamery, the all-in-one talent management platform, becomes a unicorn by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

China’s abrupt easing of its zero-COVID policy last week has led to a spike in cases and rising fears of the virus. Over the last three years, the authority has used big data to monitor the movement of people and thus control the spread of the virus. Now that the government is gradually undoing some of these tech-enabled restrictions, individuals are turning to private tech firms to manage the pandemic.

At the dawn of the pandemic in 2020, DXY, an online community for health professionals, swiftly introduced a fact-checking feature to fight COVID disinformation. But such grassroots efforts soon faded into the background as COVID cases remained rare in China and treatments happened at centralized, government-directed facilities.

The Chinese authority also rolled out a suite of COVID-prevention apps that became a digital pass for people to move around on a daily basis. These apps track individuals’ health status with diligent, compulsory COVID tests and monitor their potential exposure to the virus through travel history.

China is now doing away with some of these measures. As of Monday, the much-loathed travel tracing app was dropped, providing some relief to those who are wary of the tool being abused to control one’s life. Major cities like Guangzhou and Beijing have advised patients with mild or no COVID symptoms to isolate at home, ending a nearly three-year-long practice wherein those infected with COVID were sent to makeshift quarantine hospitals regardless of their symptoms.

As the virus is expected to spread in the upcoming weeks with people left to their own devices, Chinese tech firms are coming forth with initiatives to help navigate a new wave of infections.

Over the past week, more than a million users have sought medical advice from doctors remotely through JD Health, the healthcare arm of Chinese ecommerce giant JD.com, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. The types of remote healthcare the platform provides include advice on COVID prevention, chronic disease management, recovery plans, and psychological counseling. Asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms are also able to get prescriptions via JD Health.

JD Health introduced the online COVID clinic shortly after China’s snap announcement to phase out some of its most draconian COVID policies. Baidu’s map began showing in real-time the stock status of antigen test kits at local pharmacies, of which demand has surged after China removed compulsory, heavily-subsidized nucleic acid tests. According to JD’s online marketplace, the transaction volume of rapid test kits rose 344% week over week on December 10.

Partly thanks to China’s persistence on zero-COVID, some of the infrastructure for infection prevention is already in place. Smartphone-enabled contactless ordering at restaurants is already a norm across the country. Pickup kiosks that temporarily store food deliveries are also a common sight, doing away with the need for customers and couriers to meet in person.

Some sectors are less resilient to COVID impact. The logistics industry is particularly under pressure as couriers are expected to get hit by the virus like the rest of society, while the demand for express delivery climbs as people rush to hoard medications and isolated individuals rely on grocery delivery. Factory bosses who worry that outbreaks would shut down manufacturing have invested in robots, but many of them are finding the costs of upgrading production lines too high in the short run, some of them told TechCrunch.

As China relaxes zero-COVID, tech firms assume a larger role in fighting the virus by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter today dispersed the Trust & Safety Council, which was an advisory group consisting of roughly 100 independent researchers and human rights activists. The group, formed in 2016, gave the social network input on different content and human rights-related issues such as the removal of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), suicide prevention, and online safety. This could have implications for Twitter’s global content moderation as the group consisted of experts around the world.

According to multiple reports, the council members received an email from Twitter on Monday saying that the council is “not the best structure” to get external insights into the company product and policy strategy. While the company said it will “continue to welcome” ideas from council members, there were no assurances about if they will be taken into consideration. Given that the advisory group designed to provide ideas was disbanded, it just feels like saying “thanks, but no thanks.”

A report from the Wall Street Journal notes that the email was sent an hour before the council had a scheduled meeting with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety Ella Irwin, and senior public policy director Nick Pickles.

This development comes after three key members of the Trust & Safety council resigned last week. The members said in a letter that Elon Musk ignored the group despite claiming to focus on user safety on the platform.

“The establishment of the Council represented Twitter’s commitment to move away from a US-centric approach to user safety, stronger collaboration across regions, and the importance of having deeply experienced people on the safety team. That last commitment is no longer evident, givenTwitter’s recent statement that it will rely more heavily on automated content moderation. Algorithmic systems can only go so far in protecting users from ever-evolving abuse and hate speech before detectable patterns have developed,” it said.

After taking over Twitter, Musk said that he was going to form a new content moderation council with a “diverse set of views,” but there has been no development on that front. As my colleague, Taylor Hatmaker noted in her story in August, not having a robust set of content filtering systems can lead to harm to underrepresented groups like the LGBTQ community.

Twitter disperses the Trust & Safety Council after key members resigned by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Car parts buyers require specific parts to fit specific vehicles, making for a supply-constrained environment. New Zealand-based Partly wants to ease those constraints by connecting parts buyers around the world with the correct parts.

The two-year-old startup is not a car parts marketplace. Rather, Partly powers marketplaces like eBay and Shopify with its database of over 50 million parts from over 20,000 suppliers and OEMs.

“The way the tech works in principle is we work with the suppliers to ingest, structure and standardize all the data,” co-founder and CEO Levi Fawcett told TechCrunch.

Then the company manages that data and pushes it back onto big platforms that buyers are already using to find car parts.

The startup on Monday closed a $21 million Series A to continue growing in Europe, where the majority of its customer base is — aside from marketplaces like eBay, Partly also works with the United Nations and a couple of unnamed Fortune 500 companies. The startup also aims to use the funds to scale more aggressively in the U.S., where it’s actively hiring and building an office. Most importantly, the funds will help Partly double its engineering team to work on the core problem of aggregating all the correct parts of a vehicle just based on a license plate.

“Sounds simple, but it’s a ridiculously hard problem,” said Fawcett, who noted Partly’s team of 50 should cap out over 100 staffers by the end of next year.

A secondary goal for Partly, besides scaling its business, is to represent New Zealand on the world stage. With top tier clientele and no direct competitors, the startup aims to be the largest NZ-based tech firm within five years. To do that, it’ll have to contend with Xero, which is publicly traded on the Australian Stock Exchange and has a market cap of around $7.4 billion, per Google Finance data.

Fawcett, who previously managed and developed hardware simulations at Rocket Lab, said the opportunity to connect part buyers with the correct parts is “monstrous.” In the U.S. alone, consumers spent close to $95.4 billion on motor vehicle parts and accessories in 2021. The auto parts and accessories market is expected to reach a global market size of $2.5 trillion by 2024.

“About 98% of parts ordered today is done on the phone by a parts interpreter, and it’s their job to take the phone call, understand what they’re looking for, find it in the system, figure out what vehicle it’s come from, decide if there are any differences or if it was modified when it came from another country, and then provide the buyer with the right part,” said Fawcett. “It’s that whole process we’re flipping. Instead, you put in your license plate and then pick the part you want. It’s basically taking a super archaic process and radically changing it by removing the human.”

The problem hasn’t been solved at scale before because it requires working across vehicle manufacturers, aftermarket part manufacturers and retailers, and building a common language so all the information across manufacturers is consistent. This not only makes it easier for buyers, but also for sellers that want to better understand their customers.

Ex-Rocket Lab engineer raises $21M for Partly to make buying car parts easier by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch