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New program for female angel investors launched

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4 weeks ago

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venture capital
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A new accelerator program for women corporate and technology executives aims to boost the number of women performing deal-making venture capital gains.

The new development comes from Highline BETA, a startup co-creation and a new venture development company operating in the U.S. and Canada. Highline BETA has relaunched the Female Funders Angel Academy, an accelerator program aimed at female corporate and technology executives as they pursue angel investing.

Forging a new path for female investors

In Canada, for example, just six percent of deal-making venture capitalists and 20 percent of angel investors are female. To help address this, Female Funders is collaborating with the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) to put together a new standard of education in angel investing.

In 2017 the Female Funders program was acquired by Highlined BETA in 2017. The re-launched scheme will focus on three key pillars, each of which is intended to speed up pathways to enable first investment for women angel investors.

These pillars are:

  • blended education
  • investment opportunities supported by local experts and peer guidance
  • a curated network of women executives, investors and innovators

Commenting on the revamped scheme, Executive Director of Female Funders and the chief operating officer of Highline BETA Lauren Robinson said: “There are a handful of incredibly talented women investors today —but we need more…We talk a lot about the growth of female entrepreneurship, and we see the tides starting to shift.”

Creating culture change

However, a culture change is required to make this happen. Robinson adds: “Without representation on both sides of the table — among both entrepreneurs and investors — we won’t see real change.”

The Academy is central to the structural and cultural changes needed to help bring more female investors forwards. With this venture, those who sign up to the Academy will begin an eight-week self-paced training program. The curriculum extends to the fundamentals of angel investing, like deconstructing the mechanics of a successful deal.

After the program is completed, Angel Academy members will have the opportunity to write their first investment cheque for startups and to co-invest alongside Highline BETA.

Tim Sandle
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Investment

Amazon rival Rakuten buys mobile ordering and pickup startup Curbside

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1 week ago

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June 12, 2018

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ecommerce
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Rival to Amazon and Japanese retail giant Rakuten has acquired Silicon Valley mobile ordering and pickup startup Curbside. Details of the all-cash deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition could be a boon for the Japanese e-commerce company.

Mobile solutions for brick and mortar businesses

Founded in 2013 by former Apple engineers Jaron Waldman and Denis Laprise, Curbside has a suite of features that deal with all aspects of mobile commerce for restaurants and brick and mortar retail stores. Their most popular feature, ARRIVE, tracks customer’s journeys to predict when they’ll be approaching and arriving to have the product ready in an instant.
In its suite, Curbside’s offers programs that build online stores, fill online orders in-store and grow store traffic.

According to Tech Crunch, the terms of the “all-cash” deal were not released. Curbside has previously raised between USD$40 and $50 million from investors like CVS, Index Ventures, Sutter Hull Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Chicago Ventures

According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Curbside was valued at more than USD$100 million in 2015 during its last venture round.

Part of the family

In the press release from Curbside, co-founder and CEO Jaron Waldman writes, “For our customers and partners the headline is that nothing will change. Curbside will operate independently as a Rakuten-owned company with our team, services, partners and product offerings all remaining intact.”

Yaz Iida, President of Rakuten USA, Inc said in a press release “Welcoming Curbside to the Rakuten family is all about the consumer, and we are excited to be able to empower consumers with even more ways to enjoy shopping.”

Mario Pinho, CFO of Rakuten, welcomed Curbside “to the Rakuten family” on LinkedIn.

Earlier this year, Rakuten announced that it’s building a customer loyalty program based on blockchain technology, and building its own cryptocurrency, Rakuten Coin.

Lisa Cumming
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Investment

How brick and mortar grocers benefit from digital transformation

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2 weeks ago

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June 9, 2018

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grocery store
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Brick and mortar grocery retailers have the potential to adopt artificial intelligence to help with stocking their stores, pricing their products and being competitive with online retailers like Amazon.

Michael Feindt, the founder of AI firm Blue Yonder that specializes in helping retailers adopt AI to change how they carry out their core processes, wrote an article in Silicon Republic about how grocery chains can use AI to operate smarter.

With online grocers rapidly adopting AI, Feindt writes that it’s important for brick and mortar retailers to “move beyond their legacy infrastructure and adopt the technologies of digital transformation.” These technologies include AI and machine learning.

To stay competitive in a market that’s increasingly focused on consumer satisfaction, Feindt writes that adopting AI can help grocery chains stock their stores more efficiently in an effort to reduce waste and ensure customers get what they want, as well as price their products according to real-time data on deals and promotions offered by other stores.

Feindt writes that stock and pricing in brick and mortar stores — two traditionally human-led domains — need to start using the data they have, and use AI to help process that data.

Paul Clarke, the CTO at Ocado (the company behind the grocery robots shown earlier) told The Telegraph that AI is “critical” to the industry, and where it’s heading.

“From our point of view artificial intelligence is the one to rule them all when it comes to the set of disruptive technologies that power our business and we already make extensive use of machine learning across our platform,” said Clarke. “But really we just think we’re getting started.”

It’s also easier than ever before for grocery chains to go beyond self-service checkouts and start using AI to optimize business, below is an infographic detailing 65 tech startups that use artificial intelligence, virtual reality… etc to usher grocery store operations into the future. This list is packed, but it’s not exhaustive.

From using AI to combat food contamination to giving allergy-sufferers peace of mind when shopping to programming shopping carts to follow consumers around the store, there are endless ways that AI can enhance grocery operations and produce tangible results.

Lisa Cumming
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Culture

Mozilla announces grants for projects on how AI affects society

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2 weeks ago

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June 7, 2018

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mozilla
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Mozilla recently announced the creation of seven new five-figure grants for “technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives.”

Under their “Creative Media” awards track, Mozilla is offering a total of $250,000 in awards comprised of two $50,000 awards ($47,500 award + $2,500 MozFest travel stipend) and five $25,000 total prize packages ($22,500 award + $2,500 MozFest travel stipend). Mozilla says they’re specifically looking for projects that focus on AI and machine learning.

Mozilla wants these grants to go to researchers who can help the public to better understand how threats to a “healthy internet” are impacting their lives. These projects can be presented in a variety of mediums such as videos, games, browser extensions and data visualizations.

To be eligible for this award, projects must already be in-progress, at either the conceptual or prototype stage. They also have to be “freely available on the web,” have the ability “to be broadly shared,” and must include “privacy-respecting mechanisms.”

This isn’t Mozilla’s only project that has the aims of teaching people more about the changing face of technology.

From briefs to explainers to graphics, Mozilla has been attempting to make it easier for people to understand how things work.

Applications for this grant are open now and close on August 1.

Lisa Cumming
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