Author: Haje Jan Kamps

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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Heart to Heart raises $750K to bring sweet, sweet flirtation to your ear holes

Radio has long been described as the most intimate of media. Quips about putting radio on the internet aside, the persistent popularity of podcasting and the cockamamie climb of Clubhouse shows that audio-based platforms will continue to echo around the upper echelons of the ecosystem for a while yet. Joining the fray is Heart to Heart, an audio-first dating app aiming to bring back some intimacy to the process of finding the right person for your next foray, whether that’s a saucy encounter or a mate for life.

“I used to act, and from my time in acting, I saw how much voice, and audio experiences drive intimacy between people,” explains Joshua Ogundu, co-founder and CEO of Heart to Heart. “When it came down to the dating apps, it was never something I could get into. I felt like you needed to come up with a textual one-liner. That was never my way of approaching romantic conversations.”

Heart to Heart is pushing back against the endless swiping and messaging of many of its competitors, offering a contrasting experience to sending the same opening line to dozens of people or typing with your thumbs until deep into the night.

“I believe that the best consumer investments come from people who have unique insights on consumer behavior and ways that new tech products can allow new forms of social interaction,” said Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures, who led the pre-seed investment round. “I have been a big fan of Josh’s TikTok videos for some time and his ability to poke at the tech industry with timely, relevant videos really showcased his creativity and ability to communicate via short-form video. I think the idea around confirming photos, storytelling, and audio will yield a product that really speaks to people’s unmet needs around communication and will create a whole new way for people to connect.”

While Precursor doesn’t particularly focus on audio-first startups, the team has seen a number of opportunities in that space. It was an early investor in Howard Akumiah’s company, Betty Labs (acquired by Spotify), as well as Isa Watson’s company (Squad), Falon Fatemi’s company (Fireside) and several others that are still in stealth.

“I believe that there is a major wave of interesting activity happening around non-music audio and I believe that we are still in the early innings of non-music, audio-driven social experiences,” says Hudson. “The last two companies that I feel really innovated in this category were Tinder and Bumble. I think Josh and his team have a new mechanic that feels differentiated and unique and I think it has the potential to be the foundation for a new way for people to meet and get to know each other in ways that aren’t easily accomplished today.”

Joshua Ogundu, co-founder and CEO of Heart to Heart

Joshua Ogundu, co-founder and CEO of Heart to Heart (Photo provided by Heart to Heart)

The company raised the pre-seed round of $750,000. The round was led by Precursor Ventures, and Bryce Roberts of OATV & Angelica Nwandu of The Shade Room partnered on the investment, as well as Marie Rocha at Realist Ventures. In addition, a number of angel investors joined the round, including Chris Bennett (Wonderschool), Andy Weissman (USV) and Gregory Levey (Robinson Huntly).

“The main thing we are trying to accomplish with the $750K, is to focus on building our iOS app, and making LA our first launch market,” says Ogundu. “Dating is such a local experience, and it makes sense to us to build and improve locally, then scaling it up from there.”

“Voice is so intentional and intimate, and that is exactly what we’re building here at Heart to Heart,” says Ogundu, suggesting that the voice mechanic is helpful in a dating context because it helps slow people down. “I think that because it takes more energy to send that voice snippet to someone, you’ll be more intentional with who you even look to strike up conversations with.”

The founding team consists of Joshua Ogundu, who wears the CEO hat. He is joined by Arihant Jain and Komal Shrivastava, who have been heading up the engineering and design efforts. The company hopes to get its product to market by the end of the year.

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Intelligent Implants raises $8.7M to help you grow a spine

Spinal surgery is not for the faint of heart at the best of times, but Intelligent Implants raised €7.5 million ($8.7 million) to make spinal surgery less of a pain in the backside. The company’s smart implants’ first application is in spinal fusion surgery — where two or more vertebrae are permanently connected to improve stability, correct a deformity or reduce pain. Globally, more than a million of these surgeries are performed, but they are typically seen as a last resort because of the risk of complications or continued pain after the operation.

Intelligent Implants uses wireless implantable electronics to stimulate, steer and monitor bone growth. The company points out that the current state-of-the-art post-operation management is potentially long-term dependence on physical therapy and/or painkillers. Intelligent Implants is wading into the market to add a more tech-forward solution to the mix.

The company’s smart, active implants aren’t the first devices in this category. You’ll be familiar with pacemakers and cochlear implants, which have been available since the 1950s and 1970s, respectively. Intelligent Implants’s innovation is in creating a solution that doesn’t require wires or batteries. The product is placed between vertebrae with the same standard surgical procedure as current non-active implants.

The implant is then powered externally through induction, much like how your phone might use a wireless charging pad. This creates an electric field that stimulates and guides bone growth.

“I don’t wish this surgery on anyone, but if you have to do it, we have to make sure that the outcomes are as good as they can be,” said John Zellmer, CEO of Intelligent Implants.

The electrodes that are used for stimulation can also be used as sensors. The device consists of a standard orthopedic implant, with some additional magic thrown in. The magic, in this case, is a number of electrodes that can be used for neuromodulation to aid bone growth, along with some antennas and electronics to control it all. After fusion surgery, the patients wear a spinal corset to keep everything in place where it is meant to be — and that’s a convenient place to keep the power and control units for the device.

Zellmer explains that Intelligent Implants get the sensor side of the equation almost as a side effect of the bone-growth stimulation. He explains that the device can do impedance measurements. Bone doesn’t conduct very well, so when the graft material is gradually replaced by bone in the body, the electrical signature changes, and in the process you can measure the bone growth.

Intelligent Implants co-founders Erik Zellmer, John Zellmer and Martin Larsson. Image Credits: Intelligent Implants

The company’s product — called SmartFuse — just received a Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA, which, among other things, means that the government agency believes that “the device provides for more effective treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating human disease or conditions.” The company explains that, in order to be part of the program, it completed large-animal trials on sheep, which showed three times more bone growth and cut the time to fusion down by 50%.

“It is pretty uncommon to get a Breakthrough Device Designation based on pre-clinical data,” said Zellmer, who points out that most BDDs are based on human trials. “We definitely did a big dance around the office when we got the news.”

The company has so far been using sheep for its trials to date — sheep or goats being the most commonly used animals for orthopedic trials. The company is aiming to do its first human clinical trials in 2023.

“After a family member suffered from poor outcomes we decided to tackle this hard problem. We knew our solution would only work if our team had strong domain knowledge, long-term commitment and if we could fit our technology into the current practices (standard-of-care) of surgeons,” said Zellmer. “We are now more than halfway in bringing our product SmartFuse to market, and the FDA’s decision is a confirmation that our approach was sound.”

The company was part of the SOSV HAX tech program, before graduating and announcing it is closing its seed round today. It raised €4.5 million ($5.2 million) from EU’s EIC Accelerator, with participation from SOSV, and an additional €3 million ($3.5 million) from a group of Swedish angel investors.

“We met the SOSV partner Bill Liao back in 2015, and he has been supporting us ever since. That’s a long time for a venture firm, and they have done a really amazing job, both in terms of helping us from an operational perspective, but also supporting us in every round since then,” says Zellmer. “I think that is spectacular: We are doing something really hard here. This is a Class 3 device, an active implantable device with a stimulation system. What we are doing is totally new, and bringing that into the orthopedics field shows vision and guts.”

“Creating implantable technology is about as hard as it gets, and Intelligent Implants have been tremendously steady in its progress. We are proud to keep supporting them on this journey to help millions of patients and serve a market poised to reach $9B in a few years”, says Bill Liao, general partner at SOSV.

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Intelligent Implants raises $8.7M to help you grow a spine

Spinal surgery is not for the faint of heart at the best of times, but Intelligent Implants raised €7.5 million ($8.7 million) to make spinal surgery less of a pain in the backside. The company’s smart implants’ first application is in spinal fusion surgery — where two or more vertebrae are permanently connected to improve stability, correct a deformity or reduce pain. Globally, more than a million of these surgeries are performed, but they are typically seen as a last resort because of the risk of complications or continued pain after the operation.

Intelligent Implants uses wireless implantable electronics to stimulate, steer and monitor bone growth. The company points out that the current state-of-the-art post-operation management is potentially long-term dependence on physical therapy and/or painkillers. Intelligent Implants is wading into the market to add a more tech-forward solution to the mix.

The company’s smart, active implants aren’t the first devices in this category. You’ll be familiar with pacemakers and cochlear implants, which have been available since the 1950s and 1970s, respectively. Intelligent Implants’s innovation is in creating a solution that doesn’t require wires or batteries. The product is placed between vertebrae with the same standard surgical procedure as current non-active implants.

The implant is then powered externally through induction, much like how your phone might use a wireless charging pad. This creates an electric field that stimulates and guides bone growth.

“I don’t wish this surgery on anyone, but if you have to do it, we have to make sure that the outcomes are as good as they can be,” said John Zellmer, CEO of Intelligent Implants.

The electrodes that are used for stimulation can also be used as sensors. The device consists of a standard orthopedic implant, with some additional magic thrown in. The magic, in this case, is a number of electrodes that can be used for neuromodulation to aid bone growth, along with some antennas and electronics to control it all. After fusion surgery, the patients wear a spinal corset to keep everything in place where it is meant to be — and that’s a convenient place to keep the power and control units for the device.

Zellmer explains that Intelligent Implants get the sensor side of the equation almost as a side effect of the bone-growth stimulation. He explains that the device can do impedance measurements. Bone doesn’t conduct very well, so when the graft material is gradually replaced by bone in the body, the electrical signature changes, and in the process you can measure the bone growth.

Intelligent Implants co-founders Erik Zellmer, John Zellmer and Martin Larsson. Image Credits: Intelligent Implants

The company’s product — called SmartFuse — just received a Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA, which, among other things, means that the government agency believes that “the device provides for more effective treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating human disease or conditions.” The company explains that, in order to be part of the program, it completed large-animal trials on sheep, which showed three times more bone growth and cut the time to fusion down by 50%.

“It is pretty uncommon to get a Breakthrough Device Designation based on pre-clinical data,” said Zellmer, who points out that most BDDs are based on human trials. “We definitely did a big dance around the office when we got the news.”

The company has so far been using sheep for its trials to date — sheep or goats being the most commonly used animals for orthopedic trials. The company is aiming to do its first human clinical trials in 2023.

“After a family member suffered from poor outcomes we decided to tackle this hard problem. We knew our solution would only work if our team had strong domain knowledge, long-term commitment and if we could fit our technology into the current practices (standard-of-care) of surgeons,” said Zellmer. “We are now more than halfway in bringing our product SmartFuse to market, and the FDA’s decision is a confirmation that our approach was sound.”

The company was part of the SOSV HAX tech program, before graduating and announcing it is closing its seed round today. It raised €4.5 million ($5.2 million) from EU’s EIC Accelerator, with participation from SOSV, and an additional €3 million ($3.5 million) from a group of Swedish angel investors.

“We met the SOSV partner Bill Liao back in 2015, and he has been supporting us ever since. That’s a long time for a venture firm, and they have done a really amazing job, both in terms of helping us from an operational perspective, but also supporting us in every round since then,” says Zellmer. “I think that is spectacular: We are doing something really hard here. This is a Class 3 device, an active implantable device with a stimulation system. What we are doing is totally new, and bringing that into the orthopedics field shows vision and guts.”

“Creating implantable technology is about as hard as it gets, and Intelligent Implants have been tremendously steady in its progress. We are proud to keep supporting them on this journey to help millions of patients and serve a market poised to reach $9B in a few years”, says Bill Liao, general partner at SOSV.

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Mesh++ raises $4.9M to make the world more connected than ever

If you’re standing at the water’s edge of the San Francisco Bay, chances are that you have half a dozen high-speed internet providers clamoring for your attention, eager to give you gigabits of internet. That isn’t the case for billions of people in rural communities around the world, who often have to make do with sub-par — if any — service. That’s the market Mesh++ is aiming to serve, and the company just snagged a couple of sacks of cash to help them realize its mission. Headquartered in Chicago and Nairobi, the team is focused on bringing internet connectivity to rural and underserved communities.

On paper, the solution is elegant. You plug a wireless router into power, and the router looks for other nearby Mesh++ routers. They connect and share any available internet connectivity across the mesh network. Each router becomes a node, further spreading the Wi-Fi love across the land. The company claims a single node can blanket 10 acres of Wi-Fi connectivity, supporting up to 100 people. If a local internet connection goes down due to connectivity or power failure, the rest of the network picks up the slack — and if there’s a full breakdown, the network can be used for internal communication, including messaging and news alerts within the network.

The internet connection can come from anywhere — whether via ethernet, via cellular modems, via multiple points — you have a set of Ethernet or cellular modems, throughout the network, and you’re able to aggregate the bandwidth from all those sources. So that creates a redundant network where if one of those fails the others can fill in. The cool thing about that, versus having a set of separate networks that are all fed separately, is that it creates a very trusted network where, for example, you might be deploying a fiber network in a very old city where the fiber infrastructure is already starting to fail. And having a network like this, that can aggregate the sources, means you can trust a normally untrusted source, because if it fails, nothing really major happens. So, we can create very resilient networks.

In addition to routine connectivity when everything is working as planned, the network should be able to survive disaster situations. This was tested a couple of years ago, when Hurricane Ida knocked out a huge swathe of connectivity across New Orleans; the company claims its network continued without any downtime.

Of course, there is no shortage of plays for rural and remote internet connectivity, but I’m struck by how Mesh++’s solution is coming at the challenge from a place of access and equality. It is certainly more equalitarian than Elon Musk’s Starlink, to pick an example out of outer space, but at the same time it is easy to imagine a combination of Starlink for internet gateway purposes and Mesh++ for the local distribution of rural internet connectivity.

“There are a number of companies out there who can give you gigabit internet connections anywhere in the world,” says Mesh++’s CEO Danny Gardner, suggesting that Starlink may, in fact, be a good fit. “It would be a dream partnership. The challenge that a lot of these companies face, is that you can, in theory, serve a few hundred people per satellite, and the last-mile internet connectivity is the challenge. For them, partnering with a technology like ours that can get connectivity to anywhere, we will be able to connect the world’s remaining 3 billion people.”

The company is betting that it can out-execute even the big cellular data providers, and the team seems pretty unfazed by the competition offered by LTE or 5G networks.

“Look, T-Mobile promised to cover most of the U.S. with sub 6 Ghz 5G connectivity. But the truth is that if they haven’t covered it yet with 4G because they determined that wasn’t financially sustainable, then it’s not gonna happen with 5G either,” Gardner surmises.

In addition to having built out test networks in a number of American cities, the company has a presence in Nairobi, with a five-person subsidiary there.

“When we first started the company, it was primarily geared towards emerging markets and the need for internet access,” says Gardner. “At first, we didn’t realize how big of a problem it is here at home in the U.S. Slowly over time, we shifted more towards fixing the connectivity problems in our own backyard.”

Mesh++ has raised a $4.9 million seed led by impact investor World Within, with participation from new investors Lateral Capital, Anorak Ventures, First Leaf Capital and existing investors SOSV, GAN Ventures, TechNexus and Illinois Ventures.

“The fundraising marks a major shift in the company, from a pure R&D-driven company over the past few years, and towards focusing more on sales, and turning the company into a more mature organization,” says Gardner. “The fundraising unlocks us being able to partner with customers and distributors to connect as many people as possible, and to get the product out there.”

The company is playing into the macro-economic trend of ensuring that every home in the U.S. can be covered by internet connections. There is lots of funding available for last-mile networks, especially in the U.S. — now over $80 billion in the last few years. That’s not enough for fiber to every home — the economics and logistics of that only works in areas with higher population densities. This is where mesh networks might just be the key. Mesh++ claims that its technology cuts the infrastructure cost for installation from more than $400 per household to $29 or thereabouts. The savings are primarily in the labor costs and ease of installation, rather than the cost of the hardware that needs to be installed on-site.

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With Real Tone, Pixel 6 aims to improve your portraits, whatever your skin tone

It makes sense that phone manufacturers are paying extra attention to how faces show up in photos, and the new Pixel 6, announced by Google today, introduces a suite of new AI-powered tools to make humans show up better than ever. The two highlights are Face Unblur — which helps reduce blur on moving faces — and Real Tone. The latter is some AI-powered post-processing magic – powered by Google’s brand new Tensor chip –  aiming to make faces with all skin tones show up as well as possible.

Whether you’re taking selfies or someone-elsies, the vast majority of photos taken with a smartphone are of human beings. Traditionally, it has been extremely hard to get the exposure to look good for photos where multiple faces appear in the photo — especially if the faces all have different skin tones. The new Pixel 6 brings a layer of computational photography to the mix to ensure that everyone who appears in the photo looks as good as they can. The Pixel team worked with a diverse set of expert image-makers and photographers to tune the white balance, exposure and algorithms. They claim that this ensures that the photos work for everyone, of every skin tone.

Google highlights that it sees Real Tone as a mission and an improvement on its camera systems, rather than a conclusive solution to the challenges facing photographers. The company has invested substantial resources into ensuring that all people — and particularly people of color — are better represented in the way cameras capture their faces.

“My mother is a dark-skinned Black woman, my father is a white German. My whole life there’s been a question: How do we get one picture where everyone looks good,” said Florian Koenigsberger, Advanced Photography product marketing manager for the Android team, in a briefing interview ahead of the release of the new phones. “The new camera is a step along the journey. Google’s diversity numbers are not a mystery to the world, and we knew we definitely had some shortcomings in terms of lived experience and who could speak authentically to this.”

The camera team worked with photographers, colorists, cinematographers, direc1tors of photography and directors to get a deeper understanding of the challenges in lighting and capturing a diverse set of skin tones — and in particular people with darker skin tones. Among others, the team leaned on the experience from a broad spectrum of professionals, including Insecure’s director of photography Ava Berkofsky, photographer Joshua Kissi, and cinematographer Kira Kelly. 

“We focused on bringing this really diverse set of perspectives, not just in terms of ethnicity and skin tones, but also a variety of practices,” said Koenigsberger. “The colorists were actually some of the most interesting people to talk to because they think of this as a science that happens in the process of creating images.”

The Google product team worked with these imaging experts to give them cameras and challenged them to shoot extremely challenging imaging situations, including mixed light sources, back-lighting, interiors, multiple skin tones in one image, etc.

“We had to learn where things fall apart, especially for these communities, and from there we can figure out what direction we can take from there,” Koenigsberger explains. “The imaging professionals were very frank, and they were directly in the room with our engineers. I helped facilitate these conversations, and it was fascinating to see not just the technical learnings, but also the cultural learning that happened in this space. I am talking about ashiness, darker skin tones, textures. The nuances for mid-tones can vary.”

The process starts with the camera’s facial detection algorithms. Once the camera knows it is looking at a face, it can start figuring out how to render the image in a way that works well. In testing across devices, Google’s team found that the Pixel 6 consistently performed better than those from competing manufacturers, and even the older-generation Pixel phones.

It isn’t immediately clear how the feature works in practice, and whether it does global edits (i.e. applies the same filter across the entire image), or whether the AI edits individual faces as part of its editing pass. We are hoping to take a deeper look at this specific aspect of the camera functionality to see how it works in practice very soon.

The camera team highlights that the work done in this space means that the training sets for creating the camera algorithms are more diverse by a factor of 25. The Real Tone feature is a core part of the camera algorithms, and it cannot be turned off or disabled.