February 24, 2020
Berkeley Founders’ Pledge, South Bay Meetup
Members of GigCapital Global stay plugged into the technology startup world not only out of the deep interests in technology advances, but as part of keeping abreast of the new trends and potential forthcoming market changes. This allows us to not only be informed when seeking and assessing the PPE/SPAC targets, but also ready to assist the targets post combination, whether advising our combination partners in strategic planning and growth, or more tactical market opportunity and threat analyses.
As a Cal engineering alumnus and a prior founder, it was a delightful opportunity to attend the South Bay Meetup of the Berkeley Founders’ Pledge on Feb. 6, hosted by Bessemer Venture Partners in their new downtown Redwood City office. A roomful of Cal alumni, comprising both current and past entrepreneurs and investors, provided a target rich environment to pick up good vibes on some of the hot trends.
FinTech Innovations Continue
Leaving the hot Blockchain based FinTech investments and explorations aside, there has been many innovations across the different segments of the FinTech world, from the bread-and-butter payment processing, where Square launched the trend of multitudes of “mobile” payment vehicles, to niche, high-roller, high-speed trading, there’s a wide swath of financial services in-between that have all benefitted from the adoption of new technologies to not simply “disrupt” the long established practices, but also creating new services and new business models.
Art Armador, the COO and co-founder of EquBot, introduced his 3-year old FinTech startup as currently focusing on applying AI to power equity ETF management and equity index generation. Turns out Art was the only one I talked to at the meet-up that has heard of the SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) before, as one of his potential customers had asked if EquBot’s platform could be used to analyze the SPAC opportunities. (Hmmm, certainly an interesting thought!)
In any case, EquBot combines both fundamental and quantitative analysis, while formulating new investment insights through the use of AI. This appears to be a logical next step to robo-advisors, such as the Sofi Wealth offered by the unicorn Sofi, as well as other pioneers Betterment, Wealthfront, etc. The difference, though, is that EquBot has decided to focus on the asset managers as its target customers, thus tailoring its analytics for ETF and asset management optimizations, instead of retail investors’ portfolio construction.
Lloyd Huang, the other FinTech startup co-founder, introduced his 4-year old company SmartRE as providing a 2-sided market for fractional real-estate ownership, i.e. the marketing of fractional ownership, matching of buyers-seller, to the transaction execution and insurance (presumably that of the fractional title), all done online.
While SmartRE is similar, and could appear to be an extension, to Redfin, the hot Internet-based real-estate brokerage firm that went public in 2017 (and stock price of which just popped last week on earning’s beat), the business concept of enabling fractional ownership to a new class of investors and unlocking real asset’s equity value to the home-owners without being forced to sell their home either outright or through a reverse mortgage, is clearly a FinTech innovation. And, employing an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) and being “the first real estate tokenization platform using Ethereum” definitely puts SmartRE squarely in the FinTech space.
AI-enabled Industrial IoT
It seemed like yesterday when the term Internet-of-things (IoT) took off and took hold of people’s imagination on how pervasively and deeply the impacts of adopting this technology could have on society. Now, industrial automation is a long and well-established practice, whether in the auto, the pharmaceutical, or other manufacturing industries. But, taking the mechanistic automation to “intelligent” manufacturing plants with the introduction of industrial IoT (IIoT) has been touted and dubbed and the Industry 4.0 movement.
New Global Technology, is one such IIoT player, according to Charles Ng, the founder and CTO. Charles apparently took the vision to heart and started his company 10 years ago, at the dawn of the IoT movement. In fact, he’s given up the deep experience accrued from prior marketing and sales leadership roles in the semiconductor industry (with an MBA from Haas), and gone back to his computer science & engineering roots (from CalTech) to lead the development of AI & IoT software and hardware systems. With such deep expertise, and yet a very low profile (only a simple company website and no profile in any of the popular investment community databases), it’s a mystery begging to be uncovered.
Interactive Mobile Video Platform
Ever since Youtube took home video online and mainstream, there’s been many startups following in its footsteps around the world, as well as exploring and innovating new applications of short-form videos. The AdTech and MarTech space have been particularly active in the last few years with short-form videos, which is clearly becoming the more effective and preferred format. In fact, we’ve seen a number of startups in this space that were founded 10+ years ago, which have missed the entry and the takeoff of the video ads, seeing their growth stalled or even declining in the last couple of years, now struggling to catch up and stay in the game. This trend is, of course, on the consumption end of the short-form videos, while most of the production was still being done by the professionals, even though the content management, as well as the editing, have migrated to the cloud.
The 3-year old Fireworks was started to democratize the short-form video production, not only for the marketing/advertisement space, but for “infinite storytelling”, according to Jerry Luk, the co-founder and COO. Thus, Firework appears to be positioning itself to enable the longtail of both the production and the consumption, by serving the producers, the publishers, and the advertisers. Perhaps the video-age counterpart to the quality focused photo sites such as Flickr, Shutterbug, Shutterfly, etc.
Online Book Authoring & On-demand Publication
Lastly, there’s the somewhat related, though with a totally different focus, content production and consumption platform StoryJumper. While StoryJumper is focused on the world of children’s books and enabling/promoting the young authors to write and publish for their peers, the platform and the business model is intended to cover from age 5 to 95, according to John Yen, the CEO and co-founder.
In the age of web and mobile, where we now see 2-year old kids swiping on iPhones/iPads, lowering the barrier for creating story books would seem a no-brainer. On the other hand, the business logic of on-demand printing is one question I’ve yet to confirm with John.