I’m looking for idea validation on my product idea, and I’m definitely stepping outside my comfort zone by posting this, but here it goes. <gulp>
The product is a platform where teammates can share new ideas, provide feedback, and collaborate more efficiently.
It solves the problem of ideas and feedback getting lost in email, Slack, meetings, etc. It’s a central place where everyone can express their opinion, and action can even be taken on ideas.
This would be especially helpful cross departmentally where often times teams don’t know the right people to contact there, and they could publish an idea specifying #marketing (for example) and have the marketing team easily review their ideas.
There’s an easy three column format to provide feedback so you know exactly where people stand on issues, and everyone can see how their peers feel. There would be an option for anonymity both for the person posting and for the comments if desired.
Varada, a Tel Aviv-based big data query acceleration company, recently announced a $ 12M (approx €10M) Series A round of funding led by MizMaa Ventures, an early-stage VC venture capital firm, with participation by Gefen Capital.
The existing investors including Lightspeed, StageOne Ventures, and F2 Venture Capital also participated in the round. The funding comes as the Israeli startup is preparing to launch its data virtualisation platform in general availability.
What problem does Varada solve?
Right now, the data space is driven by two emerging technologies: data lake and data virtualisation. Notably, the data lake enables organisations to avoid extensive, pre-consumption ETLs (Extract, Transform, Load) and significantly cut down on time-to-market.
With data virtualisation, disparate data sources are unified and data consumers can now query any data from a single end-point. This eliminates the heavy IT operations burden of configuration, modeling, and movement of data. However, the current data virtualisation options are hamstrung by scaling limitations and this is the problem Varada aims to solve.
“Varada is solving the biggest headaches of data infrastructure teams while giving business units the tools to quickly and cost-effectively turn their priceless data assets into value for customers,” says Eran Vanounou, CEO of Varada. “I know this problem firsthand, as I was the CTO of LivePerson before joining Varada. When I met the founding team, I was blown away at their vision for how to solve one of the thorniest problems in big data. The platform we’re building enables revolutionary ease-of-use, fast time-to-market, and cost control. This round of Series A funding will accelerate the progress of our solution and allow us to quickly scale our plans to deliver the new standard for data virtualisation.”
“Zero data-ops” solution
According to Varada, it is building a platform to revolutionise data virtualisation by offering an agile, “zero data-ops” solution. The company’s patented indexing technology uses machine learning to accelerate relevant and high-priority queries automatically without any overhead to query processing or any data maintenance. As per the company, the indexing works transparently for users, and indexes are managed automatically by Varada’s proprietary cost-based optimiser.
Varada was founded by David Krakov, Roman Vainbrand, and Tal Ben Moshe, veterans of the Dell EMC XtremIO core team, and is dedicated to leveraging new architecture to take on the challenge of data and business agility. The company has headquarters in Tel Aviv, with U.S. offices in San Mateo, California.
A couple of months after securing €25M funding, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot! has acquired Danish startup Actimo, an employee engagement platform.
The Oslo-based startup said that it is acquiring 100% of the shares in Actimo ApS and the purchase is being made between $ 26M (approx €22M) and $ 33M (approx €28M) in a combination of cash and share. The sale is expected to be completed in October 2020.
“We are excited to welcome the Actimo team to be part of the fast-growing Kahoot! family” says Kahoot! CEO, Eilert Hanoa. “This acquisition will further extend Kahoot!’s corporate learning offerings, by providing solutions tailored for the frontline segment, as well as to solidify company culture and engagement among remote and distributed teams in companies of all types and sizes.”
How does this acquisition benefit Kahoot?
The acquisition boosts another segment of Kahoot!’s business – corporate customers. Together with Actimo, the edtech company aims to enhance corporate learning and engagement tools by combining features from the Actimo platform with the learning approach, scale, and reach of Kahoot. Moreover, it will continue to develop Kahoot! 360, the company’s product for corporate learning scaled to enterprise.
Actimo – mobile workspace for remote employees
Actimo, based in Denmark, is on a mission to help companies connect efficiently with their employees. To date, more than 200 enterprise companies, such as Circle K, Hi3G, and Compass Group, use Actimo to transform the way they engage and motivate their employees. Currently, Actimo has annually recurring revenue (“ARR”) of approx $ 5 million (approx €4.2M).
“We are thrilled to join forces with Kahoot! in our mission to develop next-level solutions that connect remote employees and boost employee engagement and productivity,” says Eske Gunge, CEO at Actimo. “Being part of Kahoot! and with our experience of working with innovative and ambitious enterprises across industries, we can together set a new standard for corporate learning and engagement.”
Making learning awesome
Founded in 2013 by Morten Versvik, Johan Brand, and Jamie Brooker, Kahoot! aims to make learning interesting through gaming. In the last 12 months, more than 200 million games have been played on the Kahoot! platform with over one billion participating players in 200 countries. The company is headquartered in Norway with offices in the US, the UK, France, Finland, and Poland.
A couple of months after securing €25M funding, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot! has acquired Danish startup Actimo, an employee engagement platform.
The Oslo-based startup said that it is acquiring 100% of the shares in Actimo ApS and the purchase is being made between $ 26M (approx €22M) and $ 33M (approx €28M) in a combination of cash and share. The sale is expected to be completed in October 2020.
“We are excited to welcome the Actimo team to be part of the fast-growing Kahoot! family” says Kahoot! CEO, Eilert Hanoa. “This acquisition will further extend Kahoot!’s corporate learning offerings, by providing solutions tailored for the frontline segment, as well as to solidify company culture and engagement among remote and distributed teams in companies of all types and sizes.”
How does this acquisition benefit Kahoot?
The acquisition boosts another segment of Kahoot!’s business – corporate customers. Together with Actimo, the edtech company aims to enhance corporate learning and engagement tools by combining features from the Actimo platform with the learning approach, scale, and reach of Kahoot. Moreover, it will continue to develop Kahoot! 360, the company’s product for corporate learning scaled to enterprise.
Actimo – mobile workspace for remote employees
Actimo, based in Denmark, is on a mission to help companies connect efficiently with their employees. To date, more than 200 enterprise companies, such as Circle K, Hi3G, and Compass Group, use Actimo to transform the way they engage and motivate their employees. Currently, Actimo has annually recurring revenue (“ARR”) of approx $ 5 million (approx €4.2M).
“We are thrilled to join forces with Kahoot! in our mission to develop next-level solutions that connect remote employees and boost employee engagement and productivity,” says Eske Gunge, CEO at Actimo. “Being part of Kahoot! and with our experience of working with innovative and ambitious enterprises across industries, we can together set a new standard for corporate learning and engagement.”
Making learning awesome
Founded in 2013 by Morten Versvik, Johan Brand, and Jamie Brooker, Kahoot! aims to make learning interesting through gaming. In the last 12 months, more than 200 million games have been played on the Kahoot! platform with over one billion participating players in 200 countries. The company is headquartered in Norway with offices in the US, the UK, France, Finland, and Poland.
Gravity Sketch, the London-based product design and collaboration platform that utilises virtual reality, has raised $ 3.7 million in funding.
The seed round was led by Kindred Capital, with participation from Point Nine Capital and previous investor Forward Partners. It brings the total amount raised by Gravity Sketch to $ 5.4 million. In addition, the startup previously received grant funding from InnovationRCA and the James Dyson Foundation.
Founded in 2014 by Oluwaseyi Sosanya, Daniela Paredes and Daniel Thomas, Gravity Sketch wants to change the way physical products are designed, developed and brought to market. It offers 3D design software for cross-disciplinary teams so they can “create, collaborate, and review” in a much more frictionless way, including via virtual reality, in which collaboration can take place in 3D and real time. The idea is to help speed up development cycles, especially involving globally distributed and increasingly remote teams.
“Collaboration is increasingly important as time frames are shortened and consumers request products sooner, with more features, and produced more sustainably,” says Oluwaseyi Sosanya, CEO and co-founder of Gravity Sketch. “There is also a surge in multinational companies growing globally distributed design and engineering teams, who need to stay connected in order to deliver with the same accuracy they once did being in the same location. Small-to-mid-sized design firms who service large companies must also adopt this approach in order to win business — they often gain work from international clients that are unable to meet face to face as frequently as their domestic clients, and are also held to extremely high standards of delivery.”
In addition to pressure brought about by faster product cycles and remote working, the product design process itself isn’t always optimum, involving multiple teams with different disciplines and software tools and a jump from 2D to 3D. “When we talk about designing a physical product, we’re imagining this object in 3D,” says Sosanya. “However, for many years we have had to bring out that idea through 2D mediums, or through rough physical models. All physical products start with 2D sketches, which are then painstakingly translated to digital 3D models and then produced through standard manufacturing processes.”
To mitigate this, Gravity Sketch brings the designer into the digital 3D space from the initial sketch phase, which gives them greater control over the initial idea and how it develops. The full design team can then join the same VR space to get a full understanding of the design from the designer’s perspective before investing time and resources.
“The designer can more accurately get all stakeholders on the same page at the ideation phase,” Sosanya explains. “With VR we can leverage the fact that everyone thinks in 3D and offer a solution that sidesteps the 2D visualisation step which is present in every design process, so users can think in 3D and create in 3D. It’s sort of like a Zoom meeting in 3D, helping everyone understand the yet to be materialised product from their own vantage point.”
Furthermore, content created in Gravity Sketch can further the design pipeline, meaning there is no need to create different views of a design or have to create a 3D model in another tool. Gravity Sketch designs can be exported to almost all of the CAD tools on the market with a claimed 100% accuracy.
It seems to be resonating, too, with some of the world’s leading companies, such as Ford, Nissan and Reebok using Gravity Sketch, alongside 60 universities and over 50,000 creative professionals worldwide.
Meanwhile, Gravity Sketch says the new funding will enable the company to scale up the platform to become “entirely hardware-agnostic.” It currently works with a range of virtual reality hardware, and is in beta for iPad, mobile and desktop.
There are some changes at the helm of Blade, the French startup behind Shadow. Mike Fischer is going to work for the company and become chief executive officer. Jean-Baptiste Kempf is joining the company as chief technology officer.
Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For a monthly subscription fee, you can access a gaming PC in a data center near you. Compared to other cloud gaming services, such as GeForce Now or Google’s Stadia, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 instance. You can install anything you want — Steam, Photoshop or Word.
The company has been growing rapidly over the past few years and raised more than $ 100 million in total. Last year, the company announced ambitious plans, with a wide-ranging partnership with OVHcloud and high-end configurations.
At the same time, co-founder Emmanuel Freund stepped aside as CEO, with Jérôme Arnaud taking over. There have been multiple delays with the new product offering and the company is no longer working with OVHcloud. Freund left the company in April and, as INpact Hardware reported in July, Arnaud has been on the way out for a couple of months.
All of this leads us to today’s announcement. Mike Fischer, the company’s new CEO, has been quite active in the video game industry. In the past, he has worked at Sega, Bandai Namco, Microsoft and Epic Games. He was the president and CEO of Square Enix between 2010 and 2013.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is a well-known figure in the open-source community. For the past 14 years, he has been the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind popular media player VLC. VideoLAN has also contributed to widely used video encoding technologies. He also founded VideoLabs, a company that works on VLC-related integrations and support.
The company is still working on rolling out the new Ultra and Infinite configurations to European users who pre-ordered. It originally planned to start rolling out new tiers in the U.S. starting this summer but the company now says it expects to launch these new tiers by the end of the year.
For customers in the U.S., there are no pre-orders, there will simply be a button to upgrade in your account when it’s available. LG invested in the company earlier this year and the service will go live in South Korea later this year, as well.
For most people, buying a home is the single biggest investment in their lifetime. For existing homeowners, the process becomes a bit more stressful when they need to consider selling their old home. Orchard allows homeowners to manage this delicate balancing act by allowing you to purchase a new home before you have sold your existing property. Orchards agents handle the entire process of getting you into your new home and selling your old home; handling listing, cleaning, and showings. Cofounder Phil DeGisi shares more about how Orchard is making the homeownership process easier and the company’s recent round of funding from investors that include Revolution Growth, FirstMark, Navitas, Accomplice, and Juxtapose. AlleyWatch
