Haje Jan Kamps

November 4, 2021

Paranoid and on the move? Arlo Go 2 brings battery power and cell data to the surveillance mix

Aimed at construction sites, vacation homes or for other hard-to-reach locations, Arlo‘s new Arlo Go 2 LTE/Wi-Fi Security Camera is at your beck and call to keep an eye out for thieves, sneaks and other scoundrels.

The company is also peddling its Arlo Secure subscription service, which gives users access to a rolling 30-day library of cloud recordings, in addition to computer vision analysis of the footage with personalized person, animal, vehicle and package detection. The service also includes an Emergency Response feature, which can dispatch emergency services to the camera’s location at the touch of a button.

The cameras are rugged, with a weather-resistant design to withstand the test of the elements, provide secure local storage to microSD cards and have connectivity built in. The cameras can phone home to the company’s servers using your Wi-Fi connection if and when it’s available, or LTE networks as either a primary or fallback option when the Wi-Fi goes down for the seventh time just when the latest episode of your favorite TV show gets good.

“Arlo Go 2 builds on the success of its Arlo Go predecessor, serving as the most versatile solution for anyone seeking wire-free security for hard-to-access locations,” said Tejas Shah, senior vice president of Product and Chief Information Officer at Arlo. “Arlo Go 2’s ability to operate on either a mobile network or Wi-Fi puts the power in the hands of the user, allowing them to select the best connection for their use case.”

Arlo Go 2 is equipped with GPS positioning so you can keep tabs on them — making it easy to locate multiple devices across a larger area, or to go find your camera if bitter irony should strike and the thieves leave your house alone and instead just wander off with the cameras themselves. The cameras also feature two-way comms with speakers and a microphone so you can troll your would-be burglars from a safe distance, and a built-in siren so you can signal to your intruders that they’re being watched.

Carrying a $250 price tag, the cameras will be available through Verizon now-ish, with additional carriers becoming available next year.

November 3, 2021

Spartan Radar raises a total of $25M to help radar compete with lidar tech

Take a dollop of machine learning, a handful of radar sensors and a market that is clamoring for autonomous cars not mowing down hordes of pedestrians, and you’ve got yourself a particularly frothy fundraising environment. Hot on the heels from the $10 million round Spartan Radar announced in August, the company today announced it snagged another $15 million from investors led by Prime Movers Lab. Additional investors include 8VC and Mac VC.

Not half shabby for a company that didn’t exist two years ago — it was founded in 2020. The company is putting itself in the mix in the intersection between the car’s radar and its self-driving tech. It argues that the radar technology on current and next-generation autonomous vehicles (AV) is pretty decent, but that the car often doesn’t know what to make of what the radar “sees,” and ends up making mistakes in the process.

“The automotive industry’s pivot to lower levels of automation makes radar more attractive than lidar,” Spartan Radar founder and CEO Nathan Mintz maintains. “While showing lots of initial promise, lidar is failing to live up to all the hype, but the need for high-resolution systems hasn’t gone away. The processing power finally exists to utilize advanced algorithms like super-resolution in real time to make radar a far better option for automakers.”

The company calls its product Biomimetic Radar and claims that it can mimic human perception processes for enhanced focus and context. It says its algorithms dramatically speed up processing and reduce radar’s historic shortcomings, including lower resolution and false detections. This, in turn, clears the way for ADAS level 2 and beyond in terms of safety and commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles.

The company’s software can be deployed on almost all existing radar systems, and while the company didn’t comment on any specific deals it has in the pipeline, the two rapid-fire funding rounds would suggest there are customers waiting in the wings.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing evidence that lidar-based systems can behave like the distracted drivers they were intended to replace. Spartan’s radar systems are a leap forward in autonomous vehicle technology, bringing AVs and ADAS systems to where they need to be for the needs of the industry today,” said David Siminoff, general partner at Prime Movers Lab, who will be joining the company’s board.

“After billions of dollars in investments and several AV companies going public, the industry is finally ready to move beyond R&D to commercialize at scale in defined use-cases like last-mile delivery, trucking and robo-taxi. OEMs and AV developers need safe, robust sensor solutions that are ready to go to market next year and we’re prepared to meet that need,” Mintz said.

November 2, 2021

LightForce Orthodontics wolfs down $50M to straighten out that crooked smile of yours

Everyone’s set of teeth are different enough that orthodontics has traditionally been part artistry, part medical witchcraft. In the late 1990s, Invisalign changed the industry with customizable aligners, but it turns out that aligners only serve 30% of orthodontics patients. For the rest, there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation — until LightForce came along and shook things up. With the snappy slogan “one size fits one”, LightForce Orthodontics creates custom, 3D-printed brackets and placement trays for braces. In this case, more custom means better: Patients enjoy shorter treatment times, and orthodontists are able to offer tooth movement treatment plans with incredible precision — down to a thousandth of a millimeter.

LightForce Orthodontics has seen stratospheric growth over the past year — 500% revenue growth, while the team grew by 300%. Investors paid attention, and one investor, in particular, wanted to get its fangs into the company and place itself on the cap table. Kleiner Perkins cut its teeth in the business of orthodontics 25 years ago, making a boatload of money from its investment in Invisalign. They are back for another bite of the apple, leading the $50 million Series C round into LightForce, with participation from the company’s past investors, including Matrix Partners, Tyche Partners and AM Ventures.

“One thing we talk about all the time here at this company is that we put patients first in every decision we make. Everything we do always goes to the lens of ‘is it the best thing for the patient’. Even our all-hands start with a patient: how did we help somebody? The market we are really unlocking is the teen and adolescent market, which represents 75% of all cases in the U.S. Think about adolescent psychology: that’s when kids are forming their sense of self,” explains CEO and co-founder of LightForce, Dr. Alfred Griffin III, DMD, PhD, MMSc, who still practices as an orthodontist four days per month. “I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve seen personally as an orthodontist, where mom will come in and say ‘my son gets teased’ for this or for that. With LightForce, we can help that patient faster and reduce the number of appointments and reduce the amount of time they have to be out of school. We get them to a better result by leveraging technology.”

The company previously raised a $14 million Series B round just over a year ago, and wasn’t in the market for more money just yet, but when Kleiner Perkins came knocking, LightForce decided to take the call and see if there was a deal to be made.

LightForce’s custom bracket (left) can be placed and aligned with sub-millimeter precision, in addition to being the right shape for the tooth. A traditional bracket is shown on the right. Image Credits: LightForce Orthodontics

“We raised a little bit earlier than we had planned. There were some very well-known VCs that were keeping tabs on us that had seen us in the past, but we were a bit too early for them. Kleiner Perkins was always one that was on my mind, as one that I would love to work with — especially with Wen Hsieh himself. He has a deep background in 3D printing and hard tech. He’s done a lot of the best hard-tech deals,” explains Griffin. “Kleiner Perkins is one of the only venture capital groups that has done anything significant in orthodontics. It was 20 years ago, but Align Technology changed orthodontics, for the better in my opinion. Two value props came out of Align Technology. One was the aesthetic benefits, which unlocked the adult segment. The second thing is the digital nature of what they do.”

“A lot of these innovations come from people who are not from the industry,” says Wen Hsieh, the partner at Kleiner Perkins who led the investment. “Alfred is an orthodontist himself, and it has made a world of difference. Because he’s a doctor himself, he already knows where to insert into their workflow. What part of their normal workflow is eliminated, what part is enhanced, how they can spend more or less time, how it impacts the dental tech, how it impacts the footprint of the office, how it impacts how often the patient has to come in, and so on. Meanwhile, Alfred is taking in the knowledge from other areas, such as from simulation and from 3D printing.”

If you’re sitting here scratching your head about why people can’t just use Invisalign and be done with it… I had a very similar question. It turns out that aligners can only push, not pull. Pulling teeth down to align with other teeth is something braces are great for, but aligners aren’t able to accomplish. The other aspect is compliance: Aligners have to be worn 22 hours per day, and, well, people just aren’t very good at that. As Griffin points out: “Mom isn’t going to get mad at their teenager if the treatment is going too slowly. They’ll both blame the orthodontist.”

The LightForce brackets are 3D-printed, and so are the trays they come in. This enables orthodontists to place the brackets exactly where they need to go on the teeth. The new brackets are semi-translucent, which means they appear to be the same color as the teeth, leaving them much less visible. Image Credits: LightForce Orthodontics

This investment is good news for teeth-havers, but it’s also great news for 3D printing fans. Orthodontics is one of the world’s biggest commercial users of 3D printing technology — Invisalign is currently the world’s biggest 3D printing company — and that trend isn’t going to change as LightForce now has the bank balance to go and buy a godawful number of printers themselves.

With the $50 million cash-injection into the company’s war chest, the battle for the braces can commence in earnest. The new funds will help scale LightForce operations and go-to-market efforts to enable more orthodontic practices around the country to combine the digital benefits seen with aligner therapy with the tooth-moving efficiency and quality outcomes seen with braces. It’s going to be an exciting, but complex journey: Scaling an operation where every set of hybrid ceramic braces is custom-printed for each client is fantastically challenging both logistically and operationally.

“Scaling, mass customization is a very unique problem that most talk about in theory, but very few have dealt with in practicality,” admits Griffin. “There’s around 200 of us in the company right now, and we will probably double that over the next year. Sales and engineering are probably going to be the biggest expenses, but in terms of headcount, we will need to grow the most in manufacturing technicians, both in terms of physical and digital manufacturing.”

November 1, 2021

Music wearable Mictic raises $2.5M to get you shredding, scratching and strumming

Switzerland-based Mictic has created a pair of wearables that turns thin air into your concert hall. Imagine a theremin without the theremin, hooked up to a clever loop station, and you’ve got the right idea. Just from the demos and descriptions, it’s the kind of startup you’d scratch your head over and talk about in the bar after a long day of CES, for it to never be heard of again. Mictic, however, rose above the gimmicks sufficiently to raise a $2.5 million seed round from PTK Capital — and even adds music megastar Moby to its cap table.

The Mictic device is a pair of wristbands that includes sensors to measure your movements. It connects to your smartphone, and the app unlocks music-making creativity for beginners with no music skills at all. At launch, the app will offer 15 sounds and soundscapes, including a variety of musical styles and genres.

The startup has one of the stranger inception stories — it started with a game of badminton. The founders went along to a game of tennis, which was canceled due to rain, and the game was moved indoors instead. The founders were discussing how anti-climactic the game is, from an aural enjoyment point of view. So they went and hacked together a product that turns every slap of the shuttlecock into an epic explosion or other sound effects. From there, the team added a bunch of other soundscapes, changed the interface and ended up building a full-on musical instrument.

In addition to the pre-made soundscapes, the company’s founders are excited about the potential of their product as a more serious musical instrument.

“People can connect with Ableton, and they can use Mictic the same way they would use any MIDI controller. We hope that people will find new ways of using our product,” says the company’s CTO Matthias Frey. “We are also planning to expand our platform business in the very near future. Once the product is out, one of the next steps for users is for them to be able to create their own soundscapes quite easily.”

The funding round will enable the company to grow further and to test out its product in the market. Mictic currently consists of 10 people, and it is hoping to grow further.

“We really had to bootstrap for a while and then we built this fundraising round. Our next step is to put the product out as soon as possible. We’re proud of it and we are looking forward to getting a sense of how people are planning to use the product,” says Mictic’s CEO Mershad Javan. He agrees that $2.5 million isn’t going to be enough to fulfil all of the company’s dreams; “It’s not a whole lot of money, but to us it is a matter of shipping our product to our customers, and then hopefully ramp up from there. As soon as we can actually bring in some key data and business insights, we can continue to grow and probably raise another round of funding fairly quickly after.”

In its press materials, Mictic makes a big deal of Moby being on the company’s cap table, and is excited about the potential for collaboration and advisor potential, but admits that the musician was a relatively minor participant in the round, investing less than 10% of the $2.5 million round. In addition to investing directly in Mictic, the musician is a limited partner (i.e. an investor) in PTK Capital, the venture firm leading Mictic’s round.

Mictic opened up for preorders over the weekend, and the weird and wonderful musical instruments can be yours for a cool $119. The company expects to be shipping in the next month or so.

Update: An error snuck in, and we stated that the Mictic product cost $199. That has been updated to the correct price: $119

October 29, 2021

Luma raises $4.3M to make 3D models as easy as waving a phone around

When online shopping, you’ve probably come across photos that spin around so you can see a product from all angles. This is typically done by taking a number of photos of a product from all angles, and then playing them like an animation. Luma — founded by engineers who left Apple’s AR and computer vision group — wants to shake all of that up. The company has developed a new neural rendering technology that makes it possible to take a small number of photos to generate, shade and render a photo-realistic 3D model of a product. The hope is to drastically speed up the capture of product photography for high-end e-commerce applications, but also to improve the user experience of looking at products from every angle. Best of all, because the captured image is a real 3D interpretation of the scene, it can be rendered from any angle, but also in 3D with two viewports, from slightly different angles. In other words: you can see a 3D image of the product you’re considering in a VR headset.

For any of us who’ve been following this space for a while, we’ve seen for a long time startups trying to do 3D representations using consumer-grade cameras and rudimentary photogrammetry. Spoiler alert: It has never looked particularly great — but with new technologies come new opportunities, and that’s where Luma comes in.

A demo of Luma’s technology working on a real-life example. Image Credits: Luma

“What is different now and why we are doing this now is because of the rise of these ideas of neural rendering. What used to happen and what people are doing with photogrammetry is that you take some images, and then you run some long processing on it, you get point clouds and then you try to reconstruct 3D out of it. You end up with a mesh — but to get a good-quality 3D image, you need to be able to construct high-quality meshes from noisy, real-world data. Even today, that problem remains a fundamentally unsolved problem,” Luma AI’s founder Amit Jain explains, making the point that “inverse rendering,” as it known in the industry. The company decided to approach the issue from another angle.

“We decided to assume that we can’t get an accurate mesh from a point cloud, and instead are taking a different approach. If you have perfect data about the shape of an object — i.e. if you have the rendering equation — you can do Physics Based Rendering (PBR). But the issue is that because we are starting from photographs, we don’t have enough data to do that type of rendering. So we came up with a new way of doing things. We would take 30 photos of a car, then show 20 of them to the neural network,” explains Jain. The final 10 photos are used as a “checksum” — or the answer to the equation. If the neural network is able to use the 20 original images to predict what the last 10 images would have looked like, the algorithm has created a pretty good 3D representation of the item you are trying to capture.

It’s all very geeky photography stuff, but it has some pretty profound real-world applications. If the company gets it way, the way you browse physical goods in e-commerce stores will never be the same. In addition to spinning on its axis, product photos can include zooms and virtual movement from all angles, including angles that weren’t photographed.

The top two images are photographs, which formed the basis of the Luma-rendered 3D model below. Image Credits: Luma

“Everyone want to show their products in 3D, but the problem is that you need to involve 3D artists to come in and make adjustments to scanned objects. That increases the cost a lot,” says Jain, who argues that this means that 3D renders will only be available to high-end, premium products. Luma’s tech promises to change that, reducing the cost of capture and display of 3D assets to tens of dollars per product, rather than hundreds or thousands of dollars per 3D representation.

Luma’s co-founders, Amit Jain (CEO) and Alberto Taiuti (CTO). Image Credits: Luma

The company is planning to build a YouTube-like embeddable player for its products, to make it easy for retailers to embed the three-dimensional images in product pages.

Matrix Partners, South Park Commons, Amplify Partners, RFC’s Andreas Klinger, Context Ventures, as well as a gaggle of angel investors believe in the vision, and backed the company to the tune of $4.3 million. Matrix Partners led the round.

“Everyone who doesn’t live under a rock knows the next great computing paradigm will be underpinned by 3D,” said Antonio Rodriguez, general partner at Matrix, “but few people outside of Luma understand that labor-intensive and bespoke ways of populating the coming 3D environments will not scale. It needs to be as easy to get my stuff into 3D as it is to take a picture and hit send!”

The company shared a video with us to show us what its tech can do:

October 29, 2021

MIT’s CSAIL self-driving water taxis launched in the Amsterdam canals

Granted, there aren’t many cities where self-driving water taxis are a viable option, but Amsterdam may just be one of those places. This week, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory launched the first self-navigating, fully autonomous robot boats. They call ’em Roboats (geddit?), and they made their maiden voyages in the canals today.

The boats are big enough to carry five people. The team suggests they can also be used to collect waste, deliver goods and do other boaty things that people do with boats. The straight-out-of-Blade Runner vessels are battery-powered and can charge wirelessly when they’re at the dock. The team claims there’s enough juice on board for 10 hours of operation.

To autonomously determine a free path and avoid crashing into objects, Roboat uses lidar and a number of cameras to enable a 360-degree view. Navigation is done much like you would in a car — using GPS to figure out a safe route from where it is to where it’s going.

Roboat is now merrily floating about in the canals of Amsterdam. Image Credits: Roboat

“We now have higher precision and robustness in the perception, navigation and control systems, including new functions, such as close proximity approach mode for latching capabilities, and improved dynamic positioning, so the boat can navigate real-world waters,” says MIT professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. “Roboat’s control system is adaptive to the number of people in the boat.”

One clever aspect of the Roboat is that the boat is built on an universal platform — a hull that can be used for multiple purposes, along with its batteries and propulsion systems. The top deck can be switched out, making it possible to deploy it in different ways, for different use cases.

“As Roboat can perform its tasks 24/7, and without a skipper on board, it adds great value for a city. However, for safety reasons it is questionable if reaching Level A autonomy is desirable,” says Fábio Duarte, a lead scientist on the project. “An onshore operator will monitor Roboat remotely from a control center. One operator can monitor over 50 Roboat units, ensuring smooth operations.”

You can see the technology in action on Roboat.org.

October 29, 2021

Freshly launched Span Drive continues Span’s mission to smarten up your home

Gone are the days when your A/C and washer/dryer were the movers and shakers (electrically speaking) in your house. These days, electric vehicle chargers, solar power and battery storage solutions set more electrons a-dancin’. Span is one of the companies running point on adding some smarts to the process. The company today launched the Span Drive, an EV charger that is making it possible to further empower your EV based on various rules.

Our homes are becoming more and more electrified, and modern units, in particular, can have power draws that homes of an older design don’t have. A/C and heating, heat pumps, water heaters, washers and dryers, induction cooktops, electric ovens, EV chargers and battery-based electrical storage can draw tremendous amounts of power. In addition, more and more homes have solar installed, which means a huge chunk of electricity going in the other direction. Between all of this, our homes are getting more complex and power-hungry, but the truth is that not all of these appliances run at the same time. This is the conundrum facing modern electric design: Your house may have a 100-ampere maximum power delivery from the grid, you may have 180 amps’ worth of appliances, but you probably won’t use them all at the same time. The problem is that you have to assume that, at some point, the homeowner will turn every appliance on at once, and the power company is going to get very grumpy — at least until your main circuit breaker cuts you off.

That is one of the challenges Span solves. The company launched its smart home electric panel in May, and announced a $20 million funding round a few months earlier. Today, it launches the Span Drive, a $500 electric car charger that extends the functionality of the $3,500 electric panel with some extra smarts targeted at one of the most power-hungry devices in a modern home: the electric vehicle.

“We are able to allow homes to continue to add electric appliances without having to bear the cost and time expense of upgrading the service from 100 to 200 amps, or from 200 to 400,” says Arch Rao, Span’s CEO.

“It’s not so much just that the panel is upgraded. We’re fundamentally rethinking what that device in our home needs to be, to enable much better power management and integration of clean energy and electric devices. The traditional panel was doing a very good job of being a safety device: It used to be the device where your power came in and got distributed out to different appliances and circuits in your home. And if your circuits were operating at a level that was unsafe, it would shut off the circuit. This is what a breaker does, and that hasn’t really evolved in about 100 years: It’s serving as a passive safety device,” explains Rao. “The location where the breaker panel sits is the most obvious place for innovation to happen: The panel sits at the intersection of the grid and all the things in your home. That isn’t just your appliances, but your solar system, your electric vehicles, your storage system, etc. The new panel that we’ve built performs the function of a passive safety device but does an order of magnitude more than that, in that it is the device that can safely disconnect or reconnect into the grid.”

This connecting to and from the grid aspect is key for people who want to try to live off the grid. Being able to turn a home into an island, at least electrically speaking, is one of the things that makes Span’s systems so interesting, from a future-proofing point of view. It also means that the panel can make your home operate independently for longer during a power outage. In a home with power-storage solutions installed it can get extra clever. When the panel detects a power cut, it can turn off non-essential electric devices. For example, it might turn off your thermostat to keep your fridge and freezer running for as long as possible so your food doesn’t go bad.

Span Drive is a sleek, competitively priced EV charger that extends the functionality of the Span Panel. Image Credits: Span

The system can be controlled with an app, which enables you to set up “rules” for how you want your house to operate. For example, you could choose for the A/C to run only when it can be powered by solar. Or you could choose to pump 48A into your car for an hour to fast-charge it, while the panel shuts off power to some of your other high-draw devices to keep the total power consumption under 100 amps. The reverse use case is also possible: Charge the car as fast as possible, with as many amps as you can, and if you put on a load of laundry, your A/C and you start making dinner with your electric oven and induction stove-top, the Span Drive simply drops the electric current that’s available to your car until your kids are fed and your clothes smell like lavender and group hugs again.

Alternatively, if you use your EV only rarely, you could program the Span Drive to only ever charge your car with solar power. Undoubtedly, this is a smugness multiplier for Tesla owners wanting to beat Ferraris off the stoplights in your own local reproduction of “Tokyo Drift: Less Vroom, More Whine.”

Of course, the Span panel itself can only turn circuits on or off, but because it knows how much power each circuit is drawing, it would be possible to use additional devices to get more granular control over your home. That’s probably part of the thinking from Amazon, as it participated in Span’s recent investment round — and the company announced Alexa compatibility.

In a way, it feels as if Span is adding a lot of smarts to a traditionally dumb part of the home. Power is about as un-sexy as it comes, but as appliances get smarter and the IoT wave swallows up larger and larger parts of the devices we use every day, it seems as if Span is building a micro-power-grid across your home, with discrete zones and powerful features that nobody quite knows how to use yet. To his credit, the CEO seems to be aware of that, and agrees that his company is in the middle of a land grab for the future of our homes.

“Where we sit, we have the type of persistence that very few products do. We are on your walls and stay there for the next 30 years or so. Of course we are thinking about future-proofing. The functionality we offer today is differentiated from anything our competitors are doing. Being focused on the future makes us fundamentally better than incumbent solutions,” argues Rao.

October 26, 2021

Testlio raises $12M to help software developers scale testing

While software development frameworks make developing software faster and easier than ever, pre-deployment testing gets more and more complex by the day. Over the past decade, Testlio has grown exponentially and positioned itself as an “Elance for Software Testing.” In addition to its own team of 150 or so, the company now commands an army of 10,000+ vetted freelance testers across 150 countries around the world. The round of fundraising enables the company to double down on its own software platform for software testing management and further shore up its sales and operations.

“We work with companies that produce digital products. That includes companies like Amazon, American Express, Fox, Microsoft, Netflix, the NBA, SAP, ViacomCBS and many more. We work with some really, really big companies, and we’ve become an extended part of their quality organization,” says Steve Semelsberger, who joined Testlio as its CEO back in 2018. “We also have offerings that are tuned for early-stage companies, who may have recently raised a Series A round and are looking to better scale their testing and quality capabilities.”

The company today announced that it has closed $12 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Spring Lake Equity Partners and was oversubscribed. It included participation from Series A co-leads Altos Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. With the round, Jeff Williams, partner at Spring Lake Equity Partners, joins the Testlio board of directors.

The company wouldn’t give a precise valuation, but Semelsberger suggests that the valuation for its series B was north of $100 million.

Testlio’s CEO Steve Semelsberger. Image Credits: Testlio

“We’ve been profitable for 10 quarters, and actually had 75% of our cash from the Series A round,” explains Semelsberger, who highlights that the company is aiming to invest heavily in R&D for a while to focus on rapid growth. “A lot of Series B rounds now are really big, and I would consider a $12 million round relatively small. Our strategy here is to keep the total capital into the company less than our revenue run rate. It’s an interesting way to look at fundraising. But we think this Series B raised can take us, possibly as far as we need to go.”

Testlio has exceeded a $20 million annualized revenue run rate this year after previously raising only $7.5 million in seed and Series A capital. The company has increased revenue by 50% and employees by nearly 100% year-over-year.

The company makes the case that demand for a more impactful approach to software testing has skyrocketed with the unprecedented proliferation of digital technologies, and that product and engineering teams are under pressure to increase development velocity and deliver exceptionally high-quality user experiences.

As part of the fund-raise, the company carved out a significant pay-out to its existing employees.

“Twenty-five percent of the round will go — or has already gone — to our employees. We decided to allow anybody who had been with us for more than three years to sell a minority part of their vested equity,” explains Semelsberger. Of course, with the fresh $12 million hitting the bank account, the company is about to go on a hiring spree, and distributing some equity to its existing staff may prove to be a shrewd investment as a recruiting tool. “The idea came from experiences that a number of us have had, where sometimes it does take a while for a company — especially a company that is as intentional as ours — to reach liquidity. The way we implemented this is that employees who had been with us for more than three years were able to sell up to 19% of their vested options. The idea was that this would reward people who had been here for a while and also show others who have just joined that Testlio, that the equity is really worth something.”

In addition to hiring and building out the sales org, the company is planning to invest in its own platform, designed to make complex testing processes easier to manage and resource. The platform is a SaaS solution that enables Testlio’s customers to receive burstable and efficient testing experiences powered by “an optimized mix of humans and machines.”

“We’ve built a testing management platform. Today, our platform team consists of about 50 people, which includes product managers, product designers, designers, engineers, AI, ML, data scientists and so forth,” explains Semelsberger. “That team has created a system that manages the workflow of testing itself: test-case test definition, integration between manual and automated testing, and it’s also very much a logistics management system.”

“Testlio is exactly the kind of company that Spring Lake Equity Partners loves to work with: growing, capital-efficient, innovating effectively and in the middle of a massive market,” said Jeff Williams, partner at Spring Lake Equity Partners. “We’ve been impressed by the Testlio team over the last two years that we’ve gotten to know them and we’re bullish for what’s ahead.”

October 26, 2021

Voxel raises $3M to make warehouse security cameras more safety conscious

Warehouses and distribution centers are already blanketed in security cameras, but unless someone is actively monitoring them, a lot of the footage goes unexamined. Voxel wants to change that by inviting its on-premises pixel-peeping machine-vision robots to take a closer look, notifying managers when something isn’t up to snuff. The company just raised a $3 million seed round to continue building its tech and rolling out beyond its first set of beta customers.

MTech Capital — a VC fund focusing on insurance tech — led the funding round, and its insurance focus suggests the direction Voxel has been moving with its technology. The main push is toward reducing workers’ comp and general liability insurance claims.

“We are connecting to existing security cameras, and we have a computer that sits on-site. It runs our algorithms looking for things that can lead to injury or high-risk situations for companies. We’ll detect issues that are precursors to accidents — anything from protective equipment such as hard hats, safety vests, or safety harnesses when someone’s elevated,” explains Alex Senemar, CEO of Voxel. In addition to personal safety equipment, the company’s tech can detect issues with powered vehicles, like trucks, forklifts and carts. “We’re looking at powered vehicle safety — are people speeding, not stopping at intersections, or other types of unsafe behaviors. We’re also looking at ergonomics risk, which is like a pretty large driver of injuries in the workplace. Anything from lifting, poor lifting form, overreaching. We also detect spills, to prevent slip-and-fall accidents, blocked aisles and vehicles that are parked where they shouldn’t be.”

Screenshot of the Voxel dashboard.

The company was founded a year ago, and quickly scaled to a staff of 11. The company’s longer-term vision is to become a “Risk OS” for site management. The team suggests that it is particularly focused on behavioral change and site culture, rather than a more punitive approach.

To date, Voxel has had four beta customers, two of whom converted into paying customers. The company’s pricing plan starts at $50,000 per month per site, which includes the first set of cameras, and goes up from there as a company adds more sites and more cameras to the mix.

“We have some great initial customers and we started seeing some incredible results, with the impact of the six-month trial periods. The customers started converting, and our goal right now is to get our business to a scaleable place,” says Senemar. “At our first site, they were having an injury per month. During the six months of our trial, they had zero. It’s too early to say that that’s statistically significant, and we need a lot more of these studies to start showing the value of preventative monitoring, but we are off to an extremely promising start.”

The company runs a hybrid architecture, where all the initial analysis and computer vision is done by adding an on-premises computer. If a safety event is detected, that is uploaded and made accessible on the SaaS online dashboard.

“We believe Voxel’s technology is a gamechanger in the category of workplace safety, both in monitoring and risk prevention,” said Brian McLoughlin, co-founder and partner at MTech Capital. “We have seen countless workplace safety solutions using wearables and other IoT sensors, but Voxel is the first solution that can drive down insurance costs and improve safety using a company’s existing security camera infrastructure. The customer can see a 360-degree view of the worksite with the ability to spot dangerous conditions and intervene in real time.”

I suggested to the founder that building a company around a highly litigious market like the U.S. could limit the international expansion possibilities for Voxel in the long run, but the CEO of the company disagreed. “As things get more litigious, the cost of these things are significantly more. Injuries are pretty expensive in general, but I think there’s definitely countries where the value prop is much more clear,” says Senemar, suggesting that countries in Western Europe spend a lot of money in this space too, but more for regulatory reasons rather than due to litigation risk. “Safety monitoring can often be a reactive and manual process, and it can be difficult to identify the root cause of injuries. In 2019 alone, U.S. employers spent $171 billion on more than 5 million injuries. Our technology gives them a way to prevent these injuries on a scale that would be nearly impossible to do without it.”