While an increasing number of companies are investing in AI, many are struggling to get AI-powered projects into production — much less delivering meaningful ROI. The challenges are many. But a commonly recurring one is data management. The data that companies need to train, run and fine-tune AI models is disorganized, siloed, and otherwise unoptimized. […]
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TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that was created with a service like OpenAI’s DALL·E 3, it will automatically have an “AI-generated” label attached to it to notify viewers that it was […]
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Diddo is an API for streaming services and other platforms to integrate shoppable videos, enabling consumers to buy their favorite characters’ clothing and accessories directly on their screens. The company announced Wednesday that it raised $2.8 million in seed funding.
Diddo was founded in late 2022 by Rishi Nair, Ryan Sullivan and Pamela Chen, and started as a Google Chrome extension built for Nair’s and Sullivan’s mothers who are “Selling Sunset” fans and wanted to dress like their favorite reality TV stars. Now, the company has developed an API that uses proprietary computer vision AI technology to identify products in TV shows and movies. The AI also pulls comparable products so shoppers can buy lower-priced dupes if, for instance, Kim Kardashian’s $700 Balenciaga T-shirt is outside of their price range.
The funding round was led by Link Ventures, with participation from Neo, Dante D’Angelo (Valentino), Erica Lockheimer (LinkedIn), Camille Ricketts (ex-CMO of Notion), an unnamed Disney exec and Scott Forstall, who is known for leading the Apple team that created iOS, among others.
The new capital will support product development and expand the company’s eight-person team. The company recently hired Rob Sussman (also a Diddo investor) as COO; he’s the former Sundance CFO and executive vice president of MGM+ (formerly Epix).
Diddo has signed deals with 12 companies so far, including Dailymotion, Mux, the Highlights App, social sports platform PlayersOnly, film and TV collective The Big Picture, fashion brand Blair New York and more. The company also revealed that it’s actively in talks with Hulu and another streaming giant.
Diddo says its API stands out from competitors due to its computer vision technology, which sits within a platform’s video player.
“We’re the only company that’s doing it so far,” Nair told TechCrunch. “These companies don’t have to send their video outside of their ecosystem. That’s a huge deal because all these media companies [think] it’s a non-starter if they have to send their video outside the API to run the computer vision. So, what we’ve been able to figure out is setting our computer vision within their video ecosystem so that we can go fully from video ingestion to commerce capabilities without leaving.”
One of the challenges about this, however, is that running computer vision over a video that is being watched by millions of users simultaneously is “incredibly tolling on the end user’s device,” Nair said. “In order to avoid this issue, we have decided to build out the product with a time-stamped approach to documenting the products. By this, we run the computer vision once over the video, where it identifies all of the products found within the content and puts them in a time-stamped database. Because the products in on-demand content do not change, we only need to run it one time on our side and require nothing from the streamer or the end user.”
Additionally, no QR codes are required (like Peacock’s Must ShopTV feature), and products are not presented as intrusive advertisements (see Roku’s shoppable ads), so users aren’t removed from the viewing experience.
With Diddo, people can view all items in an interactive storefront after the episode has finished. They then complete the purchase through a native checkout capability, which includes integrations with major e-commerce services, such as Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento and Salesforce Cloud. Diddo also collects user data on which products people are interested in to recommend similar items to them in the future.
Diddo takes a 4% to 6% fee on all purchases made on the platform.
The recent funding round follows Paramount’s partnership with AI-powered shoppable technology Shopsense AI. The streamer debuted its new mobile shopping experience on April 7. Last week, Amazon’s Prime Video and Freevee released a free, ad-supported channel for shoppable livestreams.
Space station module developer Gravitics scored a $1.7 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to develop orbital platforms to enable responsive space missions.
The contract is part of a larger push from the Force to procure space capabilities — like launch, satellite payload integration, and even satellite operations — from private industry on timelines that have been previously unheard of. The initiative is called tactically responsive space, or TacRS, and it’s already resulted in record-breaking missions: Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket left the pad just 27 hours after it received its launch notice from the Space Force under its TacRS contract last year.
While Gravitics was unable to provide more details as to the exact concept of operations, startup co-founder and CMO Mike DeRosa did clarify in an email that the company is not putting a module on a rocket for a tactically responsive launch. Instead, the mission is related to developing “platforms to enable a new kind of tactically responsive space mission,” he said.
The $1.7 million contract was awarded by SpaceWERX in partnership with Space Systems Command’s Space Safari Program Office. In a statement, Space Safari’s director of operations Lt Col Jason Altenhofen, said Gravitics’ module “offers an unconventional and potentially game-changing solution for TacRS.”
“As we look into the future, the innovative use of commercial technologies will be an important aspect to solving some of our toughest challenges,” he said.
Gravitics will be working with several other companies under the contract, including Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, Space Exploration Engineering and Eta Space. While there are scant concrete details about how the firms will work together, the company said the partners will “assist in refining mission architecture, developing use-case specific outfitting, and developing flight hardware.”
Rocket Lab and True Anomaly were awarded separate responsive space contracts for a mission called Victus Haze earlier this month. Under that contract, each company will build spacecraft that will then be rapidly commissioned and readied for rendezvous operations in orbit.
Berlin-based finmid — one of the many startups building embedded fintech solutions, in its case targeting marketplaces that want to provide their own payment and financing options — has raised €23 million ($24.7 million) in a Series A round to further build out its product and enter new markets. The round values the company at €100 million ($107 million), post money.
Marketplaces — typically two-sided businesses that bring together retailers or other third-party providers with customers to buy their products or services — are very classic targets for embedded finance companies, not least because they host a lot of transaction activity already, so it makes sense for them to build in more functionality around that to improve their own margins.
Players like Airwallex, Rapyd, Kriya, and many more are among those building for that opportunity. But finmid believes it has the potential to lock in more business specifically in its home region. Small and medium-sized businesses in Europe typically look to banks to borrow money. The rise of fintech has opened the door to SMBs accessing more, varied sources of financing than ever before, and an increasing number are doing so.
The startup believes that it makes more sense for SMBs to access capital via business partners than via a bank or neobank, and they will do so. “In an ideal scenario, you don’t have to get out of that context,” finmid’s co-founder, Max Schertel, told TechCrunch in an interview.
It also makes sense for marketplaces to offer these services itself: a captive audience of customers and the customers of their customers means they are sitting on a trove of data that can help produce, for example, more personalized financing offers.
As one example of how that works, Schertel said that food delivery brand Wolt uses finmid’s tech to offer cash advances to some of its restaurant partners directly inside its app. Unlike a bank, Wolt has access to the restaurants’ sales history, and finmid helps it leverage that data to decide who will see a pre-approved financing offer.
Image Credits: finmid
The working capital doesn’t come from Wolt, but from finmid’s financing partners. Both finmid and the platform earn a percentage of every transaction. “We have banking relationships with a lot of the large banks,” Schertel said.
For a platform like Wolt, embedding finmid is a way to make life easier for restaurants while generating additional revenue without much additional effort. That’s a fairly straightforward value proposition, as long as partners are willing to give the startup’s API a go.
In its early days, finmid’s pitch wasn’t an easy sell to VCs, Schertel said. Embedded finance may get a lot of hype, but it is still an approach that requires signing on partners to get any results. That takes patience that not all VCs will have.
However, finmid managed to find investors who have stuck around since it started during the pandemic, and have helped the company raise €35 million in equity funding to date. Before this new Series A, the company raised €2 million in pre-seed and €10 million in seed funding, finmid’s other co-founder, Alexander Talkanitsa, told TechCrunch.
That support seems to be paying off. According to Schertel, once you are running on a platform like Wolt, “success really compounds.”
“I like [my] job today a lot better than I did a year ago,” he joked.
Schertel and Talkanitsa met at challenger bank N26, whose founder, Max Tayenthal, is now one of their investors alongside VC firms Blossom Capital and Earlybird VC.
The co-founders learned a crucial lesson at N26: financial infrastructure leaves no space for mistakes. “You have to invest a lot in reliability,” Schertel said.
Finmid has an API that connects several data points from the platform, and can also plug in other sources of information on the prospective borrower, like a bank would do.
To make the user experience more fluid, finmid can let its clients display pre-approved capital offers that end users can decide to take or not.
The company also offers a product called B2B Payments that allows partners to finance trading between their users. Marketplaces such as Frupro (for fruits and vegetables), VonWood (for timber), and Vanilla Steel (for metal) use this product.
The new money will go towards hiring, and Schertel said the startup is looking for people with deep experience in specific areas, especially finance.
The company is also looking to expand into other countries. First on the list is Italy, but there are no plans to open an office there, Schertel said. Talkanitsa spends half his time in Vienna, and finmid has an office in Berlin.
Bitkraft Ventures — a games investor based out of Denver, Colorado, but with European founders — is raising its third fund, coming in at $275 million. The fund will make seed and Series A investments in gaming studios and platforms to support game production. The moves come at a time when games investments have actually declined 72% year on year, according to a recent PitchBook report.
Founded by games industry veteran Jens Hilgers, Bitkraft has over 130 companies in its portfolio, and more than $1 billion in assets under management.
The VC is an investor in the Frost Giant studio, which Hilgers seemed particularly excited about.
“Frost Giant has set out to build a successor in the real-time strategy space. The team had previously been involved in building StarCraft and they’re now launching a game called Stormgate. It’s highly anticipated and has had great early reviews. That is a good example of the type of games company we invest in.”
Other investments include Anzu, an in-game ad platform; Carry1st, a mobile gaming platform focused on Africa; InWorld, a social platform; Karate Combat, a martial arts league; and Immutable, the creator of the Gods Unchained crypto-based game.
He said the firm’s LP base is a mix of family offices and institutional funds, and confirmed a major global sportswear player as an LP but was not at liberty to release the name.
“The strategy we pursued with the second fund is about 30 to 35 companies, average ticket size about $4 million, 50% of the initial capital and 50% follow-on. That strategy has looked successful so far. We’re rated top decile in the latest Cambridge Associates ranking, and we’re happy with that performance,” he added.
Perhaps the best way of positioning Bitkraft is to compare it to Play Ventures in Singapore, which has raised $222.9 million across four funds but also invests across several types of games platforms.
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