The Most Overused Startup Pitch Becomes A Super Rare Cards Against Humanity Card

“Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically [some popular startup] but for [some completely unrelated thing].”

If you’ve ever been to any startup event, you’ve probably heard it 14 thousand times.

Now it’s a Cards Against Humanity card. The bad news? You’ll probably never see the card in person, because it’s crazy rare.

In case you’ve somehow managed to go this long without playing it, Cards Against Humanity is a self-declared “party game for horrible people.” It began as a humble Kickstarter campaign, only to find a cult following that helped explode the game into a multi-million dollar company. Take the game Apples To Apples, boil it down to its most ridiculously offensive form, and ta-da! Cards Against Humanity.

The game and all four of its expansions have managed to absolutely dominate Amazon’s “Toys & Games” ranks for two years now.

At a panel at the PAX East conference this past weekend, the team behind the game turned to the audience for suggestions for new cards. Many of the ideas were tossed out on the spot; others were worked into something better; some became instant favorites.

At the end of the panel, though, there was a surprise twist: the ten best suggestions of the day were being turned into actual cards… but only for the few hundred people in attendance. An order was sent off to the company in New England that prints their cards before the panel had even wrapped, and each attendee was given a token (hidden under the seat) to let them pick up their set the next day.

Amongst those picked was the all-too-common pitch:

“Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically ___________, but for _________.”

Alas, since this card debuted in a way that intentionally makes it rare, it might not ever make its way into an official deck. And since only a few hundred sets were printed, most people will probably never actually see the card in person. You could always use one of the provided blank cards to make your own, but that’s not quite as neat. (“Let me tell you about my startup. It’s like CafePress, but for printing decent-looking custom Cards Against Humanity cards.”)

Other cards picked for printing during the panel include the white cards “What The Rock was really cooking”, “Stepping on a god damn friggin’ LEGO.”, “A floor that is literally made of lava.” and a few others that I probably shouldn’t print on TechCrunch.

Sets from the panel are (of course) already popping up on eBay for around 250 bucks a pop.

Native Advertising Startup Adyoulike Acquires Content Amp For $2.5M

French native advertising company Adyoulike acquired Content Amp. According to Rude Baguette, the British company was acquired for $2.5 million. Adyoulike appears to be at the same time an advertising technology company and a more traditional advertising network for native content.

An ad-tech company in native advertising seems counterintuitive — native ads are blog posts, articles and content after all. But for partner publishers, Adyoulike will target your readers, distribute, and let you monitor your ad performance.

Adyoulike also works with brands to create native advertising campaigns and adapt them for multiple formats. One of Adyoulike’s key features is that its native ads can be responsive. If you go to a website in particular on your laptop and on your phone, you will see the same ad in a different format depending on your device.

Content Amp is a more traditional advertising company. It has its own network of websites, and it sells native ads for them. In addition to building this platform, the company also works with brands to create native advertising campaigns.

The acquisition is an easy way for Adyoulike to expand its team in the U.K. The two companies work in native advertising and were probably about to compete for the same clients. This acquisition proves once again that French entrepreneurs are efficient when it comes to developing advertising technology startups.

With Its New Samsung App, Health Startup Lark Moves Away From Hardware

Among the freebies included in Samsung’s just-released Galaxy S5 was a new app from Lark, a health startup that’s been pretty quiet for the past year or so.

In fact, co-founder and CEO Julia Hu told me that Lark has been “pretty much in stealth mode” as it worked on the new app. The vision, she said, is still the same — the company is still trying to provide “personalized health coaching” that’s aimed at people who are less interested in counting their steps and more in general health and wellness.

However, Lark is pursuing that vision in a new way. First of all, Lark’s tips (like observing that you’ve been sitting still for a while and should maybe go for a short walk) are now packaged in a conversational format, with the app asking users questions about their activity and providing suggestions. Hu said this brings the experience closer to interacting with a real-life coach or assistant.

For another, this is a standalone app, rather than the app-plus-wristband that Lark was selling before. Apparently the company worked with Samsung to take advantage of the S5′s low-power sensors to track user activity, no additional hardware required.

Hu suggested that this marks a broader shift away from building hardware, although the company will continue to support existing Lark customers. The app-only approach should make the service more accessible, since users no longer have to buy or charge an additional device. (I tried out the Larklife wristband for a few months but eventually stopped using it.) Why make the change now? Hu said it’s because phones have advanced, so they can collect the necessary data without seriously draining the batteries: “We’ve realized that, in essence, the new smartphone with low power sensors is the ultimate wearable.”

Lark first launched at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in 2010 with a silent alarm product. (The presentation was memorable for its on-stage marriage proposal, and for prompting Sean Parker, who was one of the startup competition judges, to ask, “Are you serious?”) The company later expanded its product to include sleep coaching and broader health tracking and advice.

Last fall, a regulatory filing suggested that Lark had raised another $3.1 million. Hu confirmed the funding to me this week, saying that existing investors put the money in to support the company’s new direction. (Lark’s backers include CrunchFund — which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington.)

The service costs $2.99 a month, with Galaxy S5 users getting a year for free. Hu said the company is looking to launch the new app on other smartphones as well, but there are no concrete plans yet.

Criteo Buys AdQuantic, A Startup That Applies Quantum Physics To Search Marketing

We have discovered that Criteo, the French ad tech company that raised $250 million in an IPO on NASDAQ last October, has quietly made an acquisition. It’s bought AdQuantic, another ad tech startup from France, this one co-founded by two doctors of statistical physics, which has developed a bid management tool for search marketing based on game theory, quantum physics and related mathematical models.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and AdQuantic and Criteo have not made a formal announcement of the acquisition, but Criteo has confirmed it to us in an email:

“We can confirm that Criteo has acquired AdQuantic,” a spokesperson writes. “The talented team at AdQuantic will be a great addition to our staff and we are excited to bring them on board. They will join Criteo with immediate effect.”

That staff includes CEO Olivier de Taisne; co-founder Cedric Chanal (who is AdQuantic’s CEO); but possibly not the other co-founder, Simone De Liberato, who is a board member but also appears to be affiliated with a university in the UK.

AdQuantic has not responded to our requests for comment, but as far as we can see, the Paris-based company had not raised any outside funding that it has publicly disclosed. But we have seen some references to investments in the company. John Power, a director at Saba Capital Management, is listed as an angel investor in AdQuantic on his LinkedIn profile, and Stephane Lopes, a director at Credit Suisse, is listed as a private investor and board member. This BusinessWeek profile page notes a “private placement” in May, 2013.

Criteo is currently trading at just under $37 per share, with a market cap of $2.12 billion.

AdQuantic works with a client base that appears to be primarily French and European, with customers inlcuding PixMania, Etam, LeFAC.com and the TBS Group, among others. Given that the companies have yet to announce any deal, it’s a fair assumption that for now the company will continue business as usual.

Longer term, this is an interesting deal for Criteo. It is already a leader in ad retargeting and other kinds of performance marketing. But this is an increasingly crowded field, so the trick right now is twofold. You need to expand the kinds of services that you offer, and platforms you touch, as an ad tech company- and you need to get more intelligent with your algorithms. An acquisition that Criteo made earlier this year, Tedemis for $29 million, speaks to the first of these strategies with an emphasis in email marketing. This latest deal emphasises how Criteo hopes to improve in the latter area.

Getting more sophisticated in search-based advertising is smart also considering that it’s a business that is likely to see some pressure in years ahead against display advertising. According to a report earlier this week from ZenithOptimedia, the analysts there believe that display revenues will overtake search by 2015.

AdQuantic, whose slogan is “bid with science,” has a rather interesting bid management algorithm that uses statistical analysis for each keyword and similar keywords, for specific moments in time, in order to make accurate projections for what to buy and when. “This is where methods from quantum physics are applied because of the discrete nature of the data,” the company notes.

It also describes, in the parlance of game theory, the “calculated risks” that it determines from its algorithms that give big-picture benefits: “Our algorithms use mathematical models to take calculated risks on each keyword, which might or might not pay off at the keyword level, but generate performances at the campaign level.”

Alongside this, it offers plug-ins to work with existing datasets, a reporting platform and tools to help future campaigns.

As with Criteo’s previous acquisition of Tedenis, AdQuantic is based in Paris and so is one more boost for the startup ecosystem in France – and a win specifically for those startups in Europe built around the very hot field of data science.

Lending Startup Fundbox Raises $17.5M From Khosla To Help SMBs Improve Cash Flow

Fundbox, a startup that helps SMBs improve cash flow from clients, has raised $17.5 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures with SV Angel, Vikram Pandit, former CEO of Citigroup; Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters; Jay Mandelbaum, former Head of Strategy and Business Development for JP Morgan Chase; Emil Michael, SVP of Business at Uber, and other investors participating.

Fundbox wants to solves a simple problem many small businesses in the B2B space face-cash flow from client payout. Most business owners have customer invoices that may take 60-90+ days to get paid. Having to wait that long to clear those invoices puts a strain on their working capital. Fundbox lets small business owners choose invoices they want paid out, and Fundbox puts the money in their account the next day. Fundbox is focused on B2B businesses (companies that invoice for goods or services) rather than B2C businesses (with a point of sale)

Using Fundbox, a small business owner or bookkeeper connects with their accounting and bookkeeping apps, including Quickbooks, Xero, or Freshbooks, and the Fundbox risk engine assesses the customer’s network and invoices for risk automatically and instantly. The user can then view all outstanding invoices through their Fundbox account and choose which invoices to clear.

The company will actually loan the company the amount for the invoice so that the startup can continue paying its bills despite having to wait for the client check. Fundbox will evaluate data around the company’s financial health, the demographics of their customers, and even the seasonal nature of some specific businesses to determine whether to loan the money. Money for funded invoices is transferred to the user’s bank account the next business day. The business is charged fees for the amount loaned, which range between sub-1 percent and three percent. The ideal customer pays back the amount once they get paid by the client. Fundbox rewards customers who receive funds and repay them early, with refunds for early repayment and lower fees the more they use the product.

While the company has been operating in stealth since August 2013, the startup has signed up thousands of active users (small businesses), and clears tens of thousands of invoices daily for businesses in 42 states.

The technology behind Fundbox is their data-driven SMB risk engine, which takes a large amount of data points and builds a better picture of the company’s overall health and likelihood of repayment. It takes 50 seconds to run, and includes no human bias or error, says the company.

There a number of companies that are approaching the small business lending space including Kabbage, OnDeck, CAN and now Lending Club. Even Square is starting to provide working capital to merchants. Fundbox’s take is interesting because it actually connects the invoice to the loan, which can be useful for small businesses.

Startup unveils plans for wearable processor that could offer 30 days of battery life

A relatively unheard of India-based start-up by the name of Ineda Systems has officially announced its own “wearable processor unit”, which could open the door to dramatically better battery life for wearable devices. 

The wearable market has yet to truly explode the way that some analysts have predicted, but that’s not stopping various industry giants and even smaller startups from giving it the old college try. We’ve seen all sorts of different wearable projects from modest devices like the Pebble Smartwatch, to Samsung’s Gear watches and the upcoming Android Wear platform. There’s also headgear such as Google Glass and the list goes on.

So are we standing at a major turning point, where the floodgates are about to burst open, taking wearables to the mainstream? That’s a good question but honestly the jury is still out, as there are still several hurdles standing in the way. Probably one of the biggest hurdles is battery life, particularly when it comes to smartwatches.

Are we standing at a major turning point, where the floodgates are about to burst open, taking wearables to the mainstream?

Many early smartwatches needed nearly daily charging, and while this has improved with newer devices like the Gear 2 and power efficient products like the Pebble, the 3-7 day battery life of modern smartwatches don’t hold a candle compared to the multi-year life of a standard watch. While it’s impossible to deliver year-long battery power to a smartwatch, Ineda Systems is coming as close as humanly possible.

The newly announced Dhanush chip line is said to be able to potentially bring 30-day+ battery life to wearable devices, and will come in four different tiers, ranging from the very basic ‘nano’ to the ‘advanced’ variant. The plan is for these chips to make their way into all sorts of different products including IoT-related devices, fitness trackers and smartwatches. 

Dhanush chips can be combined with low-power MIPS processor cores and Power VR graphics in order to provide a more ‘complete’ wearable solution

The Dhanush chips offer performance anywhere from a measly 10MHz all the way to 500Mhz and will run in an-always on state, allowing them to take around-the-clock readings from sensors, push and pull info from the web at all hours, and so-much more. Dhanush also uses a patent-pending Hierachical computing architecture that is different from architectures like x86 and has its own security built right in.

If you are afraid that the low processor speeds will prevent the Dhanush from providing a quality wearable experience, you’ll be happy to know the chips are designed to be combined with low-power MIPS processor cores and Power VR graphics in order to provide a more ‘complete’ wearable solution for higher-end devices, while still providing excellent battery life.

Dhanush sounds cool, but will the chips make their way into major devices?

Although Dhanush certainly sounds cool and could open the door to month-long battery life, we have to wonder if the company has what it takes to attract big players to the market and become a major player in the wearable space.

For what’s it worth, Ineda Systems does seem to have already attracted the attention and investment dollar of some pretty big players, with some of the company’s investors including Samsung, Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies and many others. In total, Ineda has already raised 25 million to date, has over 180 employees and has several well-known board members including Young Soh, president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics, Krishna Yarlagadda of Imagination Technologies, and several others.

Ineda also says they have already begun conducting customer trials for the chips, and could announce product deals as early as 3 to 6 months from now. If Ineda Systems can eventually get its Dhanush chips to play nicely in wearable products from big-name companies like Samsung, could 30-day battery life be the big push needed in order to take wearables to the next level? Would you consider a smartwatch or other wearable form factor if it boasted near-month-long life without the need for charging in between?

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Startup Financial Services Companies Come Of Age

With one eye on businesses abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis and the other on a new generation of investors, startup companies are now raising significant sums to challenge the hegemony of big banks and investment firms.

Since the beginning of 2013, venture investors committed over $800 million in new funding to develop businesses providing new investment, lending, mortgage and real estate, and wealth management services in the U.S. These startups have had their best quarter so far in 2014, when 13 companies raised $238.2 million in later stage funding — with at least $162 million committed in March alone.

Meyer “Mickey” Malka, the founder of the venture investment firm Ribbit Capital, raised $100 million at the beginning of 2013 to invest behind this thesis.

“We only invest in companies that are disrupting the experience for consumers in financial services,” Malka said. “Over the next ten or fifteen years we are going to see a whole new field of financial services brands that are being built.”

The opportunity to carve out new businesses in vast swaths of traditional financial services firms’ operations means new billion dollar businesses can be made, according to investors and entrepreneurs. “This is one of the only markets that’s actually measured in trillions,” said Adam Nash, the chief executive officer of Wealthfront, a startup investment management firm.  ”The market can be massively inefficient for hundreds of billions of dollars and somehow that is still not enough for the incumbents to go after.”

“Financial services industries are gigantic and are the least suited to making transformational changes in their own businesses,” said one venture capitalist whose firm invested in the $77 million round for OnDeck, a new small business lender.

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer consumer lending company Lending Club is entering the small business lending market, with its own offering. “Since the recession small business lending has contracted,” said Scott Sanborn, the chief operating officer at Lending Club. The company is working on a private offering to a select group of investors to help bankroll the new initiative.

Other startups like CommonBond and Upstart are pitching ways for students to receive or refinance college loans.

On the flip side of the lending and debt market, sits the Ribbit Capital portfolio company Credit Karma, a provider of credit reporting and eventually optimization services. That San Francisco-based company raised $85 million in its own later-stage funding round in March.

“If you think about financial services products over the past twenty years not much has changed. Applications have come online and things have gotten faster, but we think there’s a lot more transparency that we can create and a lot more efficiency,” said CreditKarma chief executive Ken Lin.

Investors are also looking at providing these services to the underbanked with investments in companies like the credit and financial services tracking tool InVenture.

Credit management and lending offerings sit on one side of the ledger, on the other are a host of new wealth management and investment services tools for a new generation of investor. “Over 46% of income in the country will go to Gen Y [the millennials] by 2025,” said Nash. His company, and others like Betterment have seen significant growth on the back of new demand.

“Today we manage about $420 million in investor assets,” said Betterment chief executive Jon Stein. “We grew 4x over the last year… and four times the year before that. We’ve grown about four times just about every year that we’ve been around since we’ve launched.”

Their growth, and that of other wealth management services is partially explained by the fact that the U.S. is on the cusp of an enormous transfer of wealth.

“We’ve got the largest generational transference of wealth ever, happening,” said Jarrett Lillien, the founder of Bendigo Partners and chief executive officer at its portfolio company Kapitall — a new online trading platform. “$40 trillion is going to change hands.”

Kapitall received a $14 million commitment from Lillien’s firm, Bendigo, to try and capture some of that wealth. Unlike Wealthfront, which expects millennials to take a passive approach to investment management, Kapitall wants to engage active retail traders on its platform. It’s the same business that Lillien pursued as an executive at Etrade. “It’s taking something old and making it new again,” he said.

Video Tagging Startup wireWAX Makes Cougar Town Episode Shoppable

wireWAX, which tags up online video with product tags so that users can buy starlight from the video, has signed a distribution deal with major US network TBS to launch a ‘shoppable’ episode of the hit comedy series, Cougar Town. The startup has raised undisclosed finance from London’s Passion Capital. This is tbs’s first use of wireWAX technology.

The characters in the episode attempt to decorate an apartment brands which Target holds in stock. Viewers are able to click or touch items of interest and purchase directly from Target.com from wireWAX’s tags inside the video. This sort of thing has admittedly been done before, but it shows that this startup has been gaining traction from humble beginnings in the UK, when I saw it pitch some years ago at a coworking space in London’s Shoreditch.

The platform has been offering shoppable video to the masses with brands like Nike, GE, NFL, Coach, and L’Oréal Paris USA.

You can see the full episode online here or to see a short Cougar Town clip with the technology, see here.

Data Management Startup Actifio Raises $100M At $1.1B Valuation

Actifio, a data visualization management company that is preparing for an IPO, announced today that it has raised $100 million led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous investors Greylock IL, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. This latest round brings Actifio’s total funding to about $207 million and puts its valuation at $1.1 billion.

Actifio says that it will use its new funding to expand globally and develop new features for its data management products. The startup announced a $50 million Series D in March 2013, at the same time a report said that it is considering an IPO in 2014. Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh told Re/code, however, that the public offering probably won’t happen until next year.

In its announcement, Actifio shared several operating metrics, including 182% year-over-year bookings growth in 2013; over 300 enterprise users worldwide; customers in 31 countries with 44% of bookings from outside the U.S.; and over 1 exabyte of data, 14 petabytes of active app data, and 55 petabytes of physical storage capacity under management.

Actifio’s data storage platform uses virtualization technology that allows businesses to create a single copy of production data and make changes to that master copy. This can help companies cut their storage costs by as much as 90%, says Actifio, and reduce recovery times.

“Having shone a light on the $46 billion global copy data problem, we will use this funding round to expand our copy data virtualization solution across the Global 2000; enable our cloud service provider partners to build thriving businesses powered by Actifio; and extend the reach of our technology down into an even broader base of the mid-market,” said Ashutosh in a statement.

Illustration by Bryce Durbin

Stir, A Kinetic Desk Startup From An Ex-Apple Engineer, Raises $1.5M Led By Tony Hsieh’s Vegas TechFund

As the world continues to see more and more everyday objects become “hardware” controlled through operating systems and internet connectivity, an ex-Apple engineer called JP Labrosse is hoping to take that principle and combine it with elegant design to transform the prosaic world of office desks.

His company, Stir, is today announcing a seed round of $1.5 million as it begins to roll out its first product, the Stir Kinetic Desk, in earnest. The round was led by Zappos’ founder and CEO Tony Hsieh’s Vegas TechFund and its MD Zach Ware, with participation also from biomedical entrepreneur Josh Makower, John R. Woodard, Richard Klein and several Apple alumni.

Just as Labrosse is not your ordinary founder — before and after his stint as a lead engineer on the iPod at Apple, he started many other companies, and has seen more than one exit — the Stir is not your ordinary work table.

You can use the Stir both as a standing and sitting desk, and it has a special engine built in to adjust its height as it “learns” more about you and decides what the best regime would be for you. The desk tracks how you burn calories and the time spent sitting and standing, and creates what Labrosse describes as “magical moments to change things up” between the two.

Part of the desk’s built-in program is something called Active Mode, in which a button on the front of the desk “invites the user to change position at certain times.”

These are minor adjustments of no more than one inch — the movement is called “Whisperbreath” by the company — and the idea being here that, similar to the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory, these small adjustments, over time, have a large effect on your posture and overall fitness.

Its built-in touchscreen lets users also adjust the desk height manually if you’re not quite ready for your desk to start telling you when to stand up and sit down.

With all the ports you might want for the devices that would sit on top of it, and integrated bluetooth and WiFi, it’s sleek and beautiful as well as functional.

(When I saw the desk for the first time alongside a friend, she remarked on how it could nearly double as a dining table if your place is space-constrained and you work from home.)

Labrosse sees the Stir as part of a longer continuum of the new wave of physical products that can help us live our lives better, “not just data for the sake of it but data that provides value.”

Think here about wristbands that monitor your activity and then report the findings back to apps that can use that data to suggest how many calories you’ve burned, and so on.

“We are focused on this notion of finding ways that technology can really support you without you having to actively manage it,” Labrosse says. This will be the key to mass adoption of products like these, he believes.

The Stir is off to a good business start so far. After a rush of positive reviews from both the worlds of tech and furniture, it sold out its first run at a price of $4,000 per desk, with customers including both individuals as well as enterprises, Labrosse says.

Among the latter group, he tells me that there are Fortune 100 companies piloting the desks, with the idea being that they are working out how the desks could “serve their specific needs and configurations.”

And although Labrosse would not confirm it, you can imagine that Hsieh and his position in Vegas both as the head of Zappos and also as a backer of a number of businesses in the city might also play a role in providing a channel for getting these desks into use.

“Stir is one of those unique investment opportunities where the right team comes together at just the right time to lead a sea-change in a historically slow moving market,” said Jen McCabe, who leads the Nimbus hardware portfolio of the Vegas Tech Fund.

“There is sea change happening and we have surfed to the right place,” is how Labrosse puts it.

Going forward, the new funding will be used to expand production, work on distribution (deals in the pipeline for retailers but nothing to announce yet, Labrosse says) and start to look into more ways of developing the Stir desk’s functionality. Key to the last of these will be how the Stir interacts with more devices like wearables and more and basically hands off data from one device when you arrive at your desk, and then back again as you leave it.

Whether this will involve further hardware is not clear yet, but I hope it will do. I have thing or two I’d like to tell my filing cabinet, if only it would listen to me.