Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytical platform for private market data, in a very atypical place for an entrepreneur: the bathroom in his Carmel, Indiana, high school. Now the 17-year-old’s startup is emerging from stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding.
Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcount, similar to competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as well as data points like company credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, and where top engineers are currently working, in addition to other metrics. If that sounds a little like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that’s intentional. Zhu said Aviato’s goal is to build a platform that resembles what SignalFire has built internally; in fact, he said that his startup has worked closely with the firm’s founder, Walter Kortschak, to build out its product.
Zhu told TechCrunch that he credits his early interest in venture capital and startups from being in the right place at the right time during the boring days of the pandemic, learning about the space from Discord group chats he joined in 2020, when he was 13, that included people like Sam Altman.
This interest led him to launch a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021; it was acquired 10 months later. Shortly after, he joined Bachmanity Capital, which backs early-stage companies that have strong government application potential. Building the fund is when he got the idea for Aviato. He realized that while data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data, they were lacking that analytical layer that he thought was missing to make these platforms really useful.
“Aviato came from the idea that private market data has been historically super unstructured,” Zhu said. “That’s why funds are spending tens of millions of dollars to make their internal databases.”
To build Aviato, a nod to HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV show, Zhu took meetings from his high school bathroom. He’d set up in the stall with a green screen, a ring light and an excuse to be out of class. Zhu ended up getting kicked out of school for doing so, but not before he was able to land customers like NEA, Republic Capital and 8VC.
Aviato’s $2.3 million seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital and SoftBank, among others. Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund, made a personal investment in the startup a few years ago. Bahn told TechCrunch that he took a meeting with Zhu after the teenager sent him one of the better cold emails Bahn had ever received. Bahn described that Zoom call as bizarre.
“He had his braces on,” Bahn recalled about Zhu, who was 14 years old at the time. “He clearly looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The really strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”
Bahn said he made a $3,000 investment at the time and joked that he probably was flushing it down the figurative, and literal, toilet. But now, three years later, he feels differently as Zhu has matured and the product has come to fruition.
“I started to play with the product myself; it’s pretty elegantly made,” Bahn said. “He’s already proven to me one thing: the quality of people he’s hired. His more executive team, they are very serious builders.”
Last fall, the startup brought on David Razavi, the former CTO of LowerMyBills and former product lead at LendingTree, as a co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel rounds out the founding team and serves as CTO. Kessel was the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built out the developer-focused data application platform’s data infrastructure.
Zhu has now moved to San Francisco and is working to finish his high school degree online. He said that his parents are still a little confused about what he is doing, and his mom may still want him to be a doctor, but Zhu doesn’t seem too concerned about that.
“We’ve built a product, and a lot of people like it,” Zhu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds and more. I want to sell to every single person that works with private markets in general. We will be able to replace PitchBook.”
Image Credits: WSO2 / CEO and co-founder Sanjiva Weerawarana
Sri Lanka isn’t renowned for its startup ecosystem, but one company has been something of an outlier in the South Asian island nation these past two decades. WSO2, an open source enterprise software provider with customers such as Samsung, Axa, and AT&T, recently agreed to be acquired by private equity giant EQT, at a valuation TechCrunch reported at the time to be north of $600 million. (We can now confirm that the valuation was in fact exactly $600 million.)
The transaction, which remains subject to regulatory approvals, means that EQT will become WSO2’s sole owner, procuring all outstanding shares, including those of WSO2’s investors and current and ex-WSO2 employees.
This liquidity event could also create significant wealth among those inclined to start their own ventures, given that 30% of the proceeds will be going to those employees.
“This shows that equity is important — one of the things that we have insisted on from day one is that every employee has been a shareholder,” WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana told TechCrunch in an interview. “That’s very important, and it’s a concept that has not been understood here before, because there haven’t been companies that exited and gave any amount of meaningful financial return. Seeing is believing, right? Talk is cheap.”
Thriving through war and unrest
Founded out of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in 2005, WSO2 is a middleware stack constituting tools such as API management, similar to Apigee (Google acquired for $625 million), and identity and access management (IAM), along the lines of $15 billion publicly traded Okta.
The main driving force behind this has been Weerawarana, a computer scientist and key figure in the open source community over the past 25 years, both as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and more recently as the creator of Ballerina, a cloud-native general-purpose programming language for integrating distributed systems.
Prior to WSO2, Weerawarana worked within IBM’s research and development team in the U.S., where he helped develop web service specifications such as WSDL and BPEL. And it was there that the seed for WSO2 was sown.
“I actually tried inside IBM to build a new kind of middleware stack, but IBM wasn’t interested,” Weerawarana said. “So the only option was either start a company or give up on the idea.”
Weerawarana spawned WSO2 in August 2005 alongside two co-founders: Davanum Srinivas, who left after two years, and Weerawarana’s former IBM colleague Paul Fremantle, who would go on to serve as CTO until stepping down in 2015 (he later rejoined and then left again, but remains an advisor today).
Notably, WSO2’s center of gravity has remained in Sri Lanka, despite a long-standing civil war and external pressure to relocate to the U.S., where Weerawarana had lived previously for 16 years.
“I came back [to Sri Lanka] in 2001, and two weeks before I landed in Colombo, the airport was attacked by a terrorist group — there were still pieces of planes on the ground,” he said. “In 2005, the war was still going on. Sri Lanka as a country has not been able to maintain a consistent calm environment for us, but that’s okay.”
Today, 80% of WSO2’s 780 employees are in Sri Lanka, with the remainder spread across a smattering of hubs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
“I wanted to show we could build a product-oriented tech company from Sri Lanka,” Weerawarana continued. “There had never been a company like this, and at that time there wasn’t even a company out of India like this. Indian companies were very services-oriented, as were Sri Lankan companies. But one of the big prices [for staying in Sri Lanka] was that at pretty much every funding round, the majority of investors would ask when I was moving back [to the U.S.]. And my answer was always the same: ‘I’m not moving back.’”
Investors weren’t the only ones who pressured WSO2 to move: Customers and competitors have also used its location against it at various junctures.
“Some of our competitors fought against us, saying, ‘Do you know where they are located?’ and that becomes a challenge,” Weerawarana said. “Then we’ve had customers saying, ‘You’re located way over there. Why are you charging us these prices?’”
On the flip side, WSO2’s geographic setting gave it the pick of technical talent, owning mostly to the fact that it was a product-based business in a sea of services.
“We’ve never had a problem with engineering and technical talent. We’ve been able to hire the best people in Sri Lanka for the last 19 years,” Weerawarana said. “If you are a creative engineer, would you rather work for a services company, or be in a role where you could be creative and work on top-of-the-line technology?”
WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana speaks to media during a product launch in Colombo on February 26, 2014.Image Credits: Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images
Intel inside
After WSO2 raised a small round of angel funding in 2005, Intel’s VC arm emerged as its earliest backer, investing in 2006 and through several follow-on rounds in subsequent years.
Intel Capital’s initial $2 million cash injection was critical to WSO2’s early growth and was the result of fortuitous timing. Pradeep Tagare was a senior investment manager at Intel Capital at that time and met Weerawarana through their associations with the Apache Software Foundation. Tagare was looking to invest in an open source startup to complement a duo of other open source investments it had made — one into Java-centric application server company JBoss (which Red Hat later acquired for $350 million) and another into database company MySQL (which Sun later snapped up for $1 billion).
“We were looking at a bunch of open source investments as a strategic initiative for Intel, essentially to build an alternate stack on Intel hardware,” Tagare explained to TechCrunch. “We had invested in JBoss, and we invested in MySQL. So we were now looking for an open source middleware company, and WSO2 fit the bill exactly.”
Tagare’s thesis was that countries situated in Asia would not only stand to benefit from the open source movement, but would also be likely to contribute a lot. Open source software development is naturally distributed, opening up the coding and collaboration process to those who didn’t work at the Big Tech companies of those times.
“Now they could contribute — before, it was all really controlled by the Microsofts and the Oracles of the world,” Tagare said. “Its location wasn’t necessarily a requirement, but being based in Asia just made WSO2 even more interesting.”
Much has changed in the 20 years since WSO2 arrived on the scene. With the advent of cloud computing and microservices — software built from smaller, loosely connected components that can be developed and maintained independently and that conveniently rely on APIs — WSO2 has been well-positioned as enterprises transition from legacy monolithic applications.
Now with the AI revolution in full swing, WSO2 is also set to capitalize given that APIs and IAM are key components of the AI stack — from integrations through authentication and beyond. Moreover, WSO2 is integrating AI into its own products, recently debuting a new API manager that allows developers to integrate an AI-powered chatbot into their APIs to allow non-coders to test APIs using natural language.
According to Crunchbase data, WSO2 raised $133 million over the years. However, Weerawarana clarified that only $70 million was primary capital. Other rounds, like the $93 million Series E round two years ago led by Goldman Sachs, consisted of equity and debt.
However the funding is sliced and diced, there’s no ignoring the fact that WSO2 was a startup dinosaur by the time EQT came calling. After all, most successful VC-backed companies reach an exit within 10 years.
So what gives?
“We’ve had multiple people wanting to buy our company through the years, but I resisted because I always wanted to build a company that would reach an IPO — an independent business, basically,” Weerawarana said.
That all changed in May, when WSO2 accepted an offer from EQT Private Capital Asia (formerly Baring Private Equity Asia), a private equity firm EQT acquired in 2022 for more than $7 billion. The difference this time was simple: One of WSO2’s controlling shareholders “wanted to get liquidity,” according to Weerawarana.
“Because they had more than 50%, it becomes a control transaction,” he said.
That shareholder was San Francisco-based Toba Capital, a VC firm set up by Vinny Smith in 2012 after he sold Quest Software to Dell for more than $2 billion. Quest had previously invested in WSO2, equity that transferred to Dell through that acquisition — but Toba bought that stock back from Dell and went on to make further investments in WSO2, including buying Intel Capital’s portion. Toba Capital partner Tyler Jewell also replaced Weerawarana as CEO for a two-year period, with Weerawarana returning to the hot seat in 2020.
Weerawarana says the company has been cash-flow positive since 2017 and profitable “since around 2018,” but it hasn’t had the luxury of vast pools of capital that would allow it to look at “multiple year strategies.” This is something it will be able to do under EQT, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms.
Indeed, WSO2 says it will hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by Q3 this year, which is one of the key reasons EQT came calling.
“WSO2 really has all the ingredients we look for in a software business,” EQT partner and global co-head of services Hari Gopalakrishnan told TechCrunch. “Deep and long-lasting enterprise client relationships, successful product-led-growth, technically robust products, and prudent financial management. Pick a strength, WSO2 probably has it.”
From the outside, selling to private equity might not seem like the dream outcome for a founder with ambitions to go public and who values his company’s independence. But Weerawarana insists that this outcome will better enable WSO2 to do just that.
“I started the company to make something that lasts. One of the reasons we didn’t sell it previously is that we knew that would be the end of it,” he said. “EQT doesn’t have any other businesses in this domain, they’re trying to build around WSO2, not merge it with something else. Their goal is to build the company for five years, which aligns with what I wanted, and gives us five years to get to an IPO.”
Driving force
Image Credits: Marek Antoni Iwanczuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
While running WSO2 is a time-consuming endeavor on its own, Weerawarana keeps busy with other initiatives such as a philanthropic effort called the Avinya Foundation, which he established in 2022 to support economically disadvantaged children via vocational education programs.
In 2017, Weerawarana also started driving for Uber, a move he says was designed to make it more socially acceptable in Sri Lanka to work in such jobs. If a successful businessman like him can do it, then anyone can.
“I would be coming home from work and I would just pick somebody up along the way,” he said. “The main point I was trying to get across was that somebody who does a driving job is no different to somebody who does any other job — they’re just offering a service and you pay for it. We have this mindset here that people who do certain kinds of jobs are not the same as other kinds of people. And breaking that is very important — doing Uber-driving is part of it. The Avinya Foundation is also focused on that problem, trying to support all our skilled workers, such as tradespeople.”
The pandemic, among other global events, put a temporary halt on Weerawarana’s Uber driving exploits; because people were doing it for survival, he didn’t want to take money from people who needed it.
“I will do it again — things are getting much better,” he said. “Tourism is almost back to normal, so the demand will be there, and it might make sense for me to drive. But I don’t want to take any business from somebody else.”
Image Credits: WSO2 / CEO and co-founder Sanjiva Weerawarana
Sri Lanka isn’t renowned for its startup ecosystem, but one company has been something of an outlier in the South Asian island nation these past two decades. An open source enterprise software provider with customers such as Samsung, Axa, and AT&T, WSO2 recently agreed to be acquired by private equity giant EQT, at a valuation TechCrunch reported at the time to be north of $600 million — we can now confirm that the valuation was in fact exactly $600 million.
The transaction, which remains subject to regulatory approvals, means that EQT will become WSO2’s sole owner, procuring all outstanding shares including those of WSO2’s investors and current and ex-WSO2 employees — 30% of the proceeds will be going to those employees.
This liquidity event could also create significant wealth among those inclined to start their own ventures.
“This shows that equity is important — one of the things that we have insisted on from day one is that every employee has been a shareholder,” WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana told TechCrunch in an interview. “That’s very important, and it’s a concept that has not been understood here before, because there haven’t been companies that exited and gave any amount of meaningful financial return. Seeing is believing, right? Talk is cheap.”
Thriving through war and unrest
Founded out of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in 2005, WSO2 is a middleware stack constituting tools such as API management, similar to Apigee which Google acquired for $625 million; and identity and access management (IAM), along the lines of $15 billion publicly traded Okta. The main driving force behind this has been its founding CEO Weerawarana, a computer scientist and key figure in the open source community over the past 25 years, both as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and more recently as the creator of Ballerina, a cloud-native general purpose programming language for integrating distributed systems.
Prior to WSO2, Weerawarana worked within IBM’s research and development team in the U.S., where he helped develop web service specifications such as WSDL and BPEL. And it was there that the seed for WSO2 was sown.
“I actually tried inside IBM to build a new kind of middleware stack, but IBM wasn’t interested,” Weerawarana said. “So the only option was either start a company, or give up on the idea.”
So in August 2005, Weerawarana spawned WSO2 alongside two co-founders: Davanum Srinivas, who left after two years; and Weerawarana’s former IBM colleague Paul Fremantle, who would go on to serve as CTO until stepping down in 2015 (he later rejoined and then left again, but remains an advisor today).
Notably, WSO2’s center of gravity has remained in Sri Lanka, despite a longstanding civil war and external pressure to relocate to the U.S. where Weerawarana had lived previously for 16 years.
“I came back [to Sri Lanka] in 2001, and two weeks before I landed in Colombo, the airport was attacked by a terrorist group — there were still pieces of planes on the ground,” he said. “In 2005, the war was still going on. Sri Lanka as a country has not been able to maintain a consistent calm environment for us, but that’s okay.”
Today, 80% of WSO2’s 780 employees are in Sri Lanka, with the remainder spread across a smattering of hubs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
“I wanted to show we could build a product-oriented tech company from Sri Lanka,” Weerawarana continued. “There had never been a company like this, and at that time there wasn’t even a company out of India like this. Indian companies were very services-oriented, as were Sri Lankan companies. But one of the big prices [for staying in Sri Lanka] was that at pretty much every funding round, the majority of investors would ask when I was moving back [to the U.S.]. And my answer was always the same: ‘I’m not moving back.’”
Investors weren’t the only ones who pressured WSO2 to move: Customers and competitors have also used its location against it at various junctures.
“Some of our competitors fought against us, saying, ‘do you know where they are located?,’ and that becomes a challenge,” Weerawarana said. “Then we’ve had customers saying ‘you’re located way over there, why are you charging us these prices?’”
On the flip side, WSO2’s geographic setting gave it the pick of technical talent, owning mostly to the fact that it was a product-based business in a sea of services.
“We’ve never had a problem with engineering and technical talent — we’ve been able to hire the best people in Sri Lanka for the last 19 years,” Weerawarana said. “If you are a creative engineer, would you rather work for a services company, or be in a role where you could be creative and work on top-of-the-line technology?”
WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana speaks to media during a product launch in Colombo on February 26, 2014Image Credits: Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images
Intel inside
After WSO2 raised a small round of angel funding in 2005, Intel’s VC arm emerged as its earliest backer, investing in 2006 and through several follow-on rounds in subsequent years.
Intel Capital’s initial $2 million cash injection was critical to WSO2’s early growth, and was the result of fortuitous timing. Pradeep Tagare was a senior investment manager at Intel Capital at that time, and met Weerawarana through their associations with the Apache Software Foundation. Tagare was looking to invest in an open source startup to complement a duo of other open source investments it had made — one into Java-centric application server company JBoss (which Red Hat later acquired for $350 million), and another into database company MySQL (which Sun later snapped up for $1 billion).
“We were looking at a bunch of open source investments as a strategic initiative for Intel, essentially to build an alternate stack on Intel hardware,” Tagare explained to TechCrunch. “We had invested in JBoss, and we invested in MySQL. So we were now looking for an open source middleware company, and WSO2 fit the bill exactly.”
Tagare’s thesis was that countries situated in Asia would not only stand to benefit from the open source movement, but would also be likely to contribute a lot. Open source software development is naturally distributed, opening up the coding and collaboration process to those who didn’t work at the big tech companies of those times.
“Now they could contribute — before, it was all really controlled by the Microsofts and the Oracles of the world,” Tagare said. “Its location wasn’t necessarily a requirement, but being was based in Asia just made WSO2 even more interesting.”
Much has changed in the 20 years since WSO2 arrived on the scene. With the advent of cloud computing and microservices — software built from smaller, loosely connected components that can be developed and maintained independently and which conveniently rely on APIs — WSO2 has been well-positioned as enterprises transition from legacy monolithic applications.
Now with the AI revolution in full-swing, WSO2 is also set to capitalize given that APIs and and IAM are key components of the AI stack — from integrations through authentication and beyond. Moreover, WSO2 is integrating AI into its own products, recently debuting a new API manager that allows developers to integrate an AI-powered chatbot into their APIs to allow non-coders to test APIs using natural language.
According to Crunchbase data, WSO2 had raised $133 million since its inception, however Weerawarana clarified only $70 million was primary capital. Other rounds, like the $93 million Series E round two years ago led by Goldman Sachs, consisted of equity and debt.
But however the funding is sliced and diced, there’s no ignoring the fact that WSO2 was a startup dinosaur by the time EQT came calling — most successful VC-backed companies reach an exit within 10 years.
So what gives?
“We’ve had multiple people wanting to buy our company through the years, but I resisted because I always wanted to build a company that would reach an IPO — an independent business, basically,” Weerawarana said.
That all changed in May, when WSO2 accepted an offer from EQT Private Capital Asia (formerly Baring Private Equity Asia), a private equity firm EQT acquired in 2022 for more than $7 billion. The difference this time was simple — one of WSO2’s controlling shareholders “wanted to get liquidity,” according to Weerawarana.
“Because they had more than 50%, it becomes a control transaction,” he said.
That shareholder was San Francisco-based Toba Capital, a VC firm set up by Vinny Smith in 2012 after he sold Quest Software to Dell for more than $2 billion. Quest had previously invested in WSO2, equity that transferred to Dell through that acquisition — but Toba bought that stock back from Dell, and went on to make further investments in WSO2 including buying Intel Capital’s portion. Toba Capital partner Tyler Jewell also replaced Weerawarana as CEO for a two-year period, with Weerawarana returning to the hotseat in 2020.
Weerawarana says the company has been cash-flow positive since 2017, and profitable “since around 2018,” but it hasn’t had the luxury of vast pools of capital that would allow it to look at “multiple year strategies.” This is something it will be able to do under EQT — one of the world’s biggest private equity firms.
Indeed, WSO2 says it will hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by Q3 this year, one of the key reasons EQT came calling.
“WSO2 really has all the ingredients we look for in a software business,” EQT partner and global co-head of services Hari Gopalakrishnan told TechCrunch. “Deep and long-lasting enterprise client relationships, successful product-led-growth, technically robust products, and prudent financial management. Pick a strength, WSO2 probably has it.”
From the outside, selling to private equity might not seem like the dream outcome for a founder with ambitions to go public and who values his company’s independence. But Weerawarana insists that this outcome will better enable it to do just that.
“I started the company to make something that lasts — one of the reasons we didn’t sell it previously is that we knew that would be the end of it,” he said. “EQT doesn’t have any other businesses in this domain, they’re trying to build around WSO2, not merge it with something else. Their goal is to build the company for five years, which aligns with what I wanted, and gives us five years to get to an IPO.”
Driving force
Uber logo on top of carImage Credits: Marek Antoni Iwanczuk/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
While running WSO2 is a time-consuming endeavor on its own, Weerawarana keeps busy with other initiatives such as a philanthropic effort called the Avinya Foundation, which he established in 2022 to support economically disadvantaged children via vocational education programs.
However, in 2017 Weerawarana also started driving for Uber, a move he says was designed to make it more socially acceptable in Sri Lanka to work in such jobs — if a successful businessman like him can do it, then anyone can.
“I would be coming home from work and I would just pick somebody up along the way,” he said. “The main point I was trying to get across was that somebody who does a driving job is no different to somebody who does any other job — they’re just offering a service and you pay for it. We have this mindset here that people who do certain kinds of jobs are not the same as other kinds of people. And breaking that is very important — doing Uber-driving is part of it. The Avinya Foundation is also focused on that problem, trying to support all our skilled workers, such as tradespeople.”
The pandemic, among other global events, put a temporary halt on Weerawarana’s Uber driving exploits — because people were doing it for survival, he didn’t want to take money from people who needed it.
“I will do it again — things are getting much better,” he said. “Tourism is almost back to normal, so the demand will be there, and it might make sense for me to drive — but I don’t want to take any business from somebody else.”
Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytical platform for private market data, in a very atypical place for an entrepreneur: the bathroom in his Carmel, Indiana, high school. Now the 17-year-old’s startup is emerging from stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding.
Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcount, similar to competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as well as data points like company credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, and where top engineers are currently working, in addition to other metrics. If that sounds a little like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that’s intentional. Zhu said Aviato’s goal is to build a platform that resembles what SignalFire has built internally; in fact, he said that his startup has worked closely with the firm’s founder, Walter Kortschak, to build out its product.
Zhu told TechCrunch that he credits his early interest in venture capital and startups from being in the right place at the right time during the boring days of the pandemic, learning about the space from Discord group chats he joined in 2020, when he was 13, that included people like Sam Altman.
This interest led him to launch a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021; it was acquired 10 months later. Shortly after, he joined Bachmanity Capital, which backs early-stage companies that have strong government application potential. Building the fund is when he got the idea for Aviato. He realized that while data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data, they were lacking that analytical layer that he thought was missing to make these platforms really useful.
“Aviato came from the idea that private market data has been historically super unstructured,” Zhu said. “That’s why funds are spending tens of millions of dollars to make their internal databases.”
To build Aviato, a nod to HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV show, Zhu took meetings from his high school bathroom. He’d set up in the stall with a green screen, a ring light and an excuse to be out of class. Zhu ended up getting kicked out of school for doing so, but not before he was able to land customers like NEA, Republic Capital and 8VC.
Aviato’s $2.3 million seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital and SoftBank, among others. Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund, made a personal investment in the startup a few years ago. Bahn told TechCrunch that he took a meeting with Zhu after the teenager sent him one of the better cold emails Bahn had ever received. Bahn described that Zoom call as bizarre.
“He had his braces on,” Bahn recalled about Zhu, who was 14 years old at the time. “He clearly looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The really strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”
Bahn said he made a $3,000 investment at the time and joked that he probably was flushing it down the figurative, and literal, toilet. But now, three years later, he feels differently as Zhu has matured and the product has come to fruition.
“I started to play with the product myself; it’s pretty elegantly made,” Bahn said. “He’s already proven to me one thing: the quality of people he’s hired. His more executive team, they are very serious builders.”
Last fall, the startup brought on David Razavi, the former CTO of LowerMyBills and former product lead at LendingTree, as a co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel rounds out the founding team and serves as CTO. Kessel was the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built out the developer-focused data application platform’s data infrastructure.
Zhu has now moved to San Francisco and is working to finish his high school degree online. He said that his parents are still a little confused about what he is doing, and his mom may still want him to be a doctor, but Zhu doesn’t seem too concerned about that.
“We’ve built a product, and a lot of people like it,” Zhu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds and more. I want to sell to every single person that works with private markets in general. We will be able to replace PitchBook.”
Probabl isn’t your average AI startup, as this new French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a well-known French technology research institute.
As for scikit-learn, with more than 45,000 stars on GitHub, this Python module is widely used by machine learning teams working on tabular data. It can be used for model fitting, predicting, cross-validation, etc.
Unless you’re an ML developer, this might be the first time you’re hearing about scikit-learn. But many big companies have relied on the library for their own products, such as Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com and Dataiku.
Some of the contributors behind scikit-learn and other Inria-backed open source libraries have decided to create a company to ensure that these projects remain actively developed and properly funded with revenue-making activities.
Researchers who are joining this project include Camille Troillard, Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger and Fabien Gandon.
Yann Lechelle, the former CEO of cloud hosting company Scaleway, spent four months as Entrepreneur in Residence at Inria working on this project. Following the spin-off from Inria, he will assume the role of CEO of Probabl.
“We are a software publisher, but our first commercial offerings will include professional services, training and certification, specifically around scikit-learn,” Lechelle told me. “Our scope will be broader to cover the complete data cycle from organization and cleaning to machine learning and MLOps.”
As a company, Probabl now has three types of shareholders:
Public shareholders, such as Inria’s investment subsidiary Inria Participations, the French government through its French Tech Souveraineté program;Private shareholders, such as Costanoa Ventures;And finally individual contributors.
They will all play a part in the governing body of the newly formed organization. Probabl is calling itself a company with an industrial and digital sovereignty mission. As a result, it wants to release truly open source projects, which hasn’t been the case lately in the AI industry.
Google Chrome is getting a new AI writing generator today. At its core, this Gemini-powered tool is essentially the existing “Help me write” feature from Gmail, but extended to the entire web and powered by one of Google’s latest Gemini AI models. The company first announced this new tool in January and it remains in its “experimental” phase, meaning you must explicitly enable it.
To get started, head to the Chrome settings menu and look for the “Experimental AI” page. From there, you can easily enable the new writing feature, as well as Google’s new automatic tab organizer (which I haven’t found particularly useful or smart so far) and the new Chrome theme manager). For now, the AI writer is only available in English on Windows, Mac and Linux. After that, right-click on any text field and select “Help me write.” You can use this to write something completely new and Gemini can also rewrite existing text.
Image Credits: Google
If you’re subscribed to Gemini Advanced, this new tool will not give you access to an enhanced writing model, a Google spokesperson told us. It’s very much meant for short-form content like emails or support requests and a bigger model may not even be of much help there anyway.
One nifty feature here is that the tool will take into account the site you are on when it makes its recommendations. “The tool will understand the context of the webpage you’re on to suggest relevant content,” Google engineering director Adriana Porter Felt writes in today’s announcement. “For example, if you’re writing a review for a pair of running shoes, Chrome will pull out key features from the product page that support your recommendation so it’s more valuable to potential shoppers.”
As with the “Help me write” feature in Gmail, it’s easy enough to change the length and tone of the results, too.
It’s important to note that the text, content and the URL of the page you are using the service on will be sent to Google under its existing privacy policy. Google explicitly notes that this information “is used to improve this feature, which includes generative model research and machine learning technologies,” which includes a review process with humans in the loop. Caveat scriptor.
Image Credits: Google
Google’s Duet AI can now write your emails for you
OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer — for better and worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this is not simply a rebadged version of Google’s longstanding and very good Magic Eraser.
Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in a bid to show the world that it has AI ambitions of its own. It’s likely the Oppo-owned company has been working on AI Eraser for some time now — though the world has known about Google’s version since the Pixel 6 event back in March 2021 (Magic Editor, meanwhile, debuted a year back at I/O 2023).
From the sound of its press material, the company went and built this thing ground-up, starting with its own first-party large language models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company notes in its press material. “The proprietary LLM behind the new feature has been trained on a vast dataset that allows it to comprehend complex scenes. Through this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser is able to intelligently substitute unwanted objects with contextually appropriate elements that naturally elevate the photo’s appeal, empowering users with the ability to make high-quality photo edits anywhere and at any time.”
An AI-powered eraser is an undeniably handy feature, but it’s also one that Google knocked out of the park immediately. It’s probably not the best use of one’s R&D resources to go head to head on that feature — especially a feature that is currently available across iOS and Android devices via Google Photos.
More than anything, this appears to be OnePlus’s attempt to plant its flag into what has very much shaped up to be the year of the smartphone. Hopefully next time, it will use those resources to build something that truly differentiates itself from existing properties.
AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4. It will not, however, be coming to the R12-D12.
How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels — a man worth untold millions, who during the COVID-19 pandemic outright bought the small Central Amsterdam Airbnb he’d been living in — spend his days? From the looks of it: building AI-powered meeting-summarizing apps. Go figure.
In a post this week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open source app he built with his “OCTO” (Office of the CTO) team to transcribe and summarize their conference calls. Distill takes an audio recording of a meeting (in formats like MP3, FLAC and WAV), analyzes it, and generates a summary along with a list of to-do items. It can optionally spit out that summary and list to platforms such as Slack via custom integrations.
An example summary from Vogel’s Distill meeting summarizer, powered by Amazon tech.Image Credits: Distill
As one might expect of an app from Amazon’s CTO, Distill relies conspicuously on paid Amazon products and services to do the computational heavy lifting. AWS Transcribe carries out Distill’s transcription; Amazon S3 provides storage for the meeting audio files; and Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI development suite, handles summarization.
But why create a meeting summarizer when there are countless tools out there that would satisfy the purpose? Well, I have to imagine that Vogels thought, why not? He has tons of resources at his disposal and seemingly enough spare time for hobbyist programming projects. Per the blog, he’s already trying his hand at porting Distill’s codebase from Python to Rust. (Being the CTO is nice work if you can get it.)
One unique thing about Distill is that it lets you select which AI model performs the meeting summarizing. By default, it’s Sonnet, a midrange model in Anthropic’s Claude 3 family. (Amazon’s large stake in Anthropic might’ve had something to do with that design decision.) But any model hosted in Bedrock will work, like Meta’s Llama 3 and models from AI startups Mistral, AI21 Labs and Cohere.
Vogels doesn’t promise that Distill won’t make mistakes.
“Remember, AI is not perfect,” he writes. “Some of the summaries we get back … have errors that need manual adjustment. But that’s OK, because it still speeds up our processes. It’s simply a reminder that we must still be discerning and involved in the process. Critical thinking is as important now as it has ever been.”
I’d argue that having to be “involved” in summarizing kind of defeats the point of an automatic summarizer. You might as well hire a stenographer. But you’ll never catch Vogels badmouthing the tech his employer’s selling. And that, I’d wager to say, is why he’s still CTO.
