Roundup of news and ideas from the world of startups – Week ending 3rd March 2019
News you can use
Why is the wedding industry so hard to disrupt? Weddings are big money — but not for Silicon Valley. Zola, the e-commerce platform reinventing wedding registries by allowing couples to register for products from hundreds of brands — as well as for “experiences” or cash — is the first successful wedding industry startup since the founding of the wedding-planning website the Knot in 1996. It’s currently worth $650 million, following a new $100 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures, NBCUniversal, and Goldman Sachs. It’s the first successful tech startup in the wedding space ever. In its first year, 17,000 couples signed up to do their registries through Zola, a number that looks mildly to not impressive on its face but has been spun compellingly in the press by CEO and co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma: Last spring, she told TechCrunch, “One hundred and fifty people on average see [a wedding’s] registry, and if those visitors believe it’s a better product, [they come to us, too]. It’s built-in virality.” By press time for that piece, 500,000 couples had used the service, proving her math.
Average Student Expects to Make $60k Out of College, Reality is $48,400 – When young adults graduate college and head off into the “real world,” they often feel both excited and nervous. The uneasiness stems from leaving the comfort and fun of a college campus where a student just spent four or more transformative years while the excitement stems from the anticipation of a landing a lucrative job that opens up possibilities far removed from the days of dieting on ramen and Red Bull. However, LendEDU’s most recent study found that college students are overestimating how much they are going to make right out of college compared to what most will likely bring home.
The 10 highest-paying AI jobs – Trends in Artificial intelligence (AI) are closely watched by industry analysts and technologists. Even students planning a career in this dynamic field are closely watching for developments. This week, techrepublic featured “The 10 highest-paying AI jobs, and the massive salaries they command”
Corporate M&A
Walmart Labs acquires Bengaluru-based startup Dataturks – The digital arm of US-based retailing major Walmart has acqui-hired Bengaluru-based startup Dataturks. The acquisition is expected to enhance Walmart Lab’s machine learning capabilities for content enrichment. The retail giant’s digital arm has been on an acquisition spree. It recently acquired Spatialand and Artificial Intelligence Startup Int.ai.
Alphabet invests in a start-up using beams of light on chips for super-fast A.I. – A small start-up in Boston has an oddball idea for a fast and efficient processor for artificial intelligence that could just work: Let there be light. More specifically, Lightmatter’s chip includes an optical component called a Mach-Zehnder interferometer instead of a more common multiplier-accumulator, or MAC, unit. The swap is intended to circumvent limits facing today’s chips. Lightmatter just picked up its first backing from a corporate investor: GV, a venture arm of Google parent company Alphabet. It’s a sign that there’s room for another type of hardware that could speed up AI, which is being eyed in several fields beyond technology, like retail and health care.
Informatica Acquires AllSight, AI-Enabled Customer Insights Startup – Informatica®, the enterprise cloud data management leader, today announced it has acquired AllSight Inc., the Toronto startup and customer insights market innovator, to bring expanded business-user engagement to the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform™, powered by the CLAIRE™ engine, and deliver game-changing capabilities for how organizations maximize customer data and analytics across their enterprises to drive personalized engagement.
Walmart Buys Israeli Artificial Intelligence Startup To “Transform Retail” Retail giant Walmart acquired Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Aspectiva, for an undisclosed sum, Globes reported Tuesday. Though no purchase price was announced, it is said to be several tens of millions of dollars. Aspectiva joined Walmart’s Store N° 8, which serves as an incubator for the retailer. It will stay in its Tel Aviv headquarters.
Failed Startups
Google kills off its messaging App. Will shut Allo by March 2019 – Google recently announced that it is “pausing” work on its messaging platform Allo, in order to put its resources into the adoption of RCS (Rich Communication Services), a messaging standard that has the potential to tie together SMS and other chat apps. “Allo will continue to work through March 2019 and until then, you’ll be able to export all of your existing conversation history from the app,” Google said in a blog post. “We’ve learned a lot from Allo, particularly what’s possible when you incorporate machine learning features, like the Google Assistant, into messaging.”