16 October, 2024
Tesla keeps putting its digital history in the memory hole
It seems that the Ministry of Truth has been busy at Tesla. Some sharp-eyed folks, including reporters at Electrek, noticed that Tesla has deleted all of its blog posts prior to 2019. Those blog posts are a digital history of the company, covering everything from CEO Elon Musk’s original master plan, to the first Autopilot fatality in a Model S, to declarations on the capability of its EVs. Neither the company, nor Musk, have explained why.
Lucky for us, archive.org still has a record.
This isn’t the first time Tesla has tried to edit its history. Several years ago, the company removed a post that supported the use of radar as an important sensor for vehicle safety. The company stopped using radar in its EVs in 2021.
10 of the most exciting digital health startups of 2024, according to VCs
In the post-COVID world, VCs say it’s not as easy to get excited about investing in digital health. Deal activity in healthcare IT was relatively flat in Q1 2024 at 74 total deals, valued at about $1 billion total, up only 3% from the year-ago quarter, according to PitchBook data.
Still, promising startups have grabbed investors’ attention this year. TechCrunch spoke with about a dozen healthcare VCs about the companies they think have the most promising future. While recently formed AI-driven startups that are solving staggering administrative challenges in the U.S. healthcare system dominated their recommendations, they also mentioned several slightly older, non-AI-focused businesses.
We narrowed their suggestions to the list of names that more than one VC mentioned, which came in at an even 10 companies. VCs discussed with us the companies that were both in their portfolios and not.
Abridge
What it does: Uses AI to automate medical records based on conversations between doctors and patients.
Founded in 2018 by Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, Abridge is an early entrant into the medical note-taking space and one that has secured integration with the all-powerful Epic Systems health records software.
Why it’s promising: The Pittsburgh-based startup generates excitement among investors and hospital systems eager to free up physicians’ time spent on note-taking. Abridge is the health tech startup that among investors we talked to was mentioned the most.
Some investors said that Abridge is leading its category. Other companies competing to dominate the AI-powered medical note-taking market include Ambience, Nabla, Microsoft-owned Nuance and Suki.
Funding: In February, Abridge raised a $150 million Series C led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million, a mere four months after the virtual medical scribe startup grabbed a $30 million Series B from Spark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, CVS Health Ventures and others.
CodaMetrix
What it does: Founded in 2019, CodaMetrix uses AI to automate medical coding. The company’s technology translates medical notes stored in electronic health records into diagnostic codes, helping to reduce errors and administrative burdens.
Why it’s promising: Medical coding is tedious and error-prone. Entering an incorrect code for a condition or treatment can lead to insurance rejection of claims and other administrative problems. Moreover, the burden of entering codes falls on already busy physicians and nurses, leading to increased stress and burnout.
The company has competitors, including Fathom Health, but investors say that CodaMetrix has one of the largest annotated coding datasets.
Funding and valuation: In March, CodaMetrix grabbed a $40 million Series B from Transformation Capital with participation of returning investors SignalFire and Cressey Ventures. The deal valued the Boston-based company at $220 million, according to PitchBook.
Cohere Health
What it does: Cohere Health expedites health insurance approval process, known as prior authorization, for medical conditions with the help of AI.
Why it’s promising: Prior authorization management could take medical and administrative staff hours as it requires gathering appropriate documentation for submission to health insurers or Medicaid. Cohere Health’s AI can reduce the time it takes to do this to minutes, saving medical and administrative staff hours on these tasks.
Investors say that Cohere is for now the leader in the space, but other startups that expedite health insurance approval for medical conditions include Anterior and Alaffia Health.
Funding: Cohere Health raised a $50 million Series B earlier this year from Deerfield Management with participation from Define Ventures, Polaris Partners, Longitude Capital and Flare Capital Partners.
Grow Therapy
What it does: Grow Therapy connects therapists who want to start independent practices with patients and insurers. Founded in 2020, the startup employs the so-called business-in-box model because it gives mental health professionals tools for filing claims, receiving payments and being matched with patients.
Why it’s promising: The company claims that its business model offers therapists more flexibility than if they were to provide their services through marketplaces like Headway or Lyra. While it’s not clear whether that’s indeed the case, Grow, true to its name, is growing fast, investors say.
Funding and valaution: In April, Grow closed an $88 million Series C led by Sequoia at a $1.4 billion valuation, according to PitchBook data.
Equip
What it does: Four-year-old Equip provides online treatment for kids, teens and adults in all 50 states and accepts most health insurances. Equip providers are also trained to address co-occurring conditions like anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Why it’s promising: About 10% of the U.S. population develops an eating disorder during their lives, but only a fraction of these people receive help, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. The company’s offering brings care to those who don’t live near an eating disorder facility or prefer to be treated online.
Funding and valuation: Equip has secured a total of $110 million in funding from investors, including Optum Ventures and General Catalyst. The company was last valued at $505 million, according to PitchBook data.
Maven
What it does: The New York-based health clinic and benefits platform offers services for fertility, adoption, parenting, pediatrics and menopause through employers, including Microsoft and AT&T. Maven also serves Medicaid patients.
Why it’s promising: Investors say that 10-year-old Maven continues to grow, given that its area of focus — digital health services for women and families — has been historically underserved. While VC interest in women’s health has grown in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 has shined an even brighter spotlight on the need for technologies that serve the female population.
Funding and valuation: Since its founding, Maven has raised nearly $300 million in funding and was last valued in late 2022 at $1.35 billion in a Series E round led by General Catalyst with the participation of VCs, including Lux Capital, Oak HC/FT and Sequoia.
Memora Health
What it does: Memora Health offers virtual AI-based care coordination, reducing administrative burdens for medical staff. The company’s technology uses text messages to communicate with patients, automating tasks like appointment reminders, answering patients’ common questions and collecting data about symptoms and post-procedure recovery.
Why it’s promising: Like many other AI-based healthcare startups, Memora saves medical staff time. The company also helps patients feel more supported on their health journey.
Funding: The company spun out of Harvard Innovation Lab and went through Y Combinator in 2018. Since then, it has raised nearly $80 million, according to PitchBook data. Memora’s investors include General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz.
SmarterDx
What it does: Founded in 2020, SmarterDx uses AI to help hospitals not miss out on revenues by analyzing patients’ lab results, medications and doctors’ notes to find minor errors and omissions in patients’ diagnoses and associated medical codes. The company’s technology reviews patient charts for accuracy before a claim is sent to health insurance or Medicare.
Why it’s promising: Investors say that since SmarterDx helps health systems realize more revenues, the value of the company’s technology is easy to measure.
Funding: In May, SmarterDx raised a $50 million Series B round led by Transformation Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Flare Capital Partners and Floodgate Fund. The latest capital infusion brought the company’s total funding to $71 million.
Summer Health
What it does: The two-year-old Summer Health connects parents to pediatricians who, within minutes, respond to urgent care and behavioral concerns. The company provides its text messaging service directly to consumers and through employers who offer access to Summer Health as a benefit.
Why it’s promising: Busy and worried parents want answers to their children’s health issues right away and around the clock. Summer Health reduces parents’ concerns because they can get fast responses to their questions via an app.
Funding: In April, Summer Health raised its $12 million Series A led by 7wireVentures and existing investors including Sequoia, Lux Capital and Chelsea Clinton’s Metrodora Ventures.
Transcarent
What it does: Four-year-old Transcarent helps large companies save money on providing health insurance to employees. The startup gives employees access to discounted medications, telehealth services and personalized AI-generated answers about their health coverage.
Why it’s promising: Part of the company’s fast rise could be attributed to its founder, Glen Tullman, who previously started Livongo, a chronic condition management company Teledoc acquired for $18.5 billion in 2020.
The company also recently introduced an AI platform that answers members’ questions about coverage, offers clinical information and connects them with medical staff as needed.
Funding and valuation: In May, the company raised a $450 million Series D at a $2.2 billion valuation led by General Catalyst and 7wireVentures.
Startups should create a digital sales room to increase interaction with buyers
Krishna Depura
Contributor
Krishna Depura is the CEO and co-founder of Mindtickle, where he sets the vision and direction for the company. Prior to founding Mindtickle, Krishna was the Director of Product Management at PubMatic and has also worked with leading companies and startups, including Microsoft, Tejas Networks and Infinera.
Facing tighter budgets and unabated economic uncertainty, today’s buyers are scrutinizing deals more closely and asking more questions. An analysis of the state of SaaS buying identified a shift to value-focused spending as a defining trend across SaaS buying in 2023.
The verdict? Buyers are scrutinizing purchases more and sellers are under pressure to provide value in every buyer interaction.
So how can sellers provide value outside of the interactions during meetings and sales calls? Revenue teams have to create new ways to connect and communicate with buyers. I founded Mindtickle, a sales readiness platform, in 2011 to address this issue and help companies prepare their sales teams to tackle any challenge. Closing deals is a skill that can be taught, and over the years, I’ve found that it comes down to forging a personal, transparent relationship with every buyer.
Digital sales rooms offer a new way to achieve just that. Winning sales organizations have now started using digital sales rooms (DSRs) to introduce buyer enablement to the sales enablement ecosystem to create a more interactive and engaging experience for buyers.
Combining DSRs with sales enablement tools
Digital sales rooms are online microsites where sellers can customize and share contracts, mutual action plans, sales content, and more with buyers. It creates a singular link buyers can access and refer back to at any point during their customer journey. It is also a single platform for sales reps and managers to track every action and process throughout the journey. It’s a great place to share and store content like product demos and records of your conversations.
Assets have traditionally been sent as a file or folder over email, which ultimately leads to lost information and buyer disengagement. With the emergence of DSRs and the maturity of on-demand content libraries, buyers now have a single link where all this content is stored, which helps them access the information more easily and keeps them more engaged. Plus, it gives sellers the tools to become more proficient at customizing the buyer experience for every deal.
But now there’s an added benefit: These rooms can also facilitate rep training and coaching. Sales enablement and RevOps teams can look at interactivity — how buyers interact with the content and how their reps respond — in winning sales reps’ DSRs and then infuse those learnings into training programs.
The need to boost predictable income is the main factor behind the growth of the revenue productivity platform market, pushing sales teams to look for a complete platform with content and coaching solutions, conversation intelligence, and buyer enablement. So, when revenue enablement platforms pair up with DSRs, sellers can now make data-informed decisions and drastically improve sales cycles while offering an engaging, personalized B2B buying experience that customers truly want.
How to create personalized experiences with DSRs
Each DSR should be specific to the buyer, so you should refrain from inundating them with content that’s irrelevant to their deal. To do this, think about what stage in the buyer journey they’re in and ask yourself the following questions:
What are your prospects searching for on the internet?What solutions does your product provide for their business?What roadblocks are preventing them from buying?Do they need to share this content with other stakeholders?
On top of relevant content, make sure you also include a support channel for buyers to ask any questions. To keep the ball rolling, it’s important to make the next steps clear, too, which can be done through embedding customized CTAs (calls to action) within each piece of content or creating an action plan that lives in the DSR.
Of course, your DSR is only as good as what’s in it, so your sales content is the real driver of the sales process. Using insights from past successful deals is the best way to learn what kind of content is the most impactful for a sale, which will help simplify the process by empowering the buyer to make their decision.
Building training programs with DSR insights
Digital sales rooms aren’t just for sales reps to interact with buyers.
In DSRs, sales managers have insight into rep performance in real time. How often are reps entering the rooms? What content are they sharing the most with prospects? How are deals progressing or stalling? All these insights provide intelligence about how reps engage with buyers and identify training gaps.
From these insights, sales managers can plan out one-on-one coaching or set up performance discussions, fostering a culture of continuous learning to ensure sellers are offering the best experience to buyers.
Connecting content and training with buyer activity helps shape the outcome revenue teams want, and these insights help bridge the gap between training and business outcomes. To achieve this, you want as much input and data as you can get from the field.
For example, if a salesperson closed several recent deals, their manager can go into the enablement platform to determine what made the call successful. The manager might find that the rep asked multiple questions during certain calls, handled objections particularly well, got the contract over the finish line, and more.
Looking at the behaviors of winning reps is essential to ensuring all your sellers are ready for evolving customer expectations and needs. DSRs, coupled with a conversation intelligence tool that gives visibility into why top reps are winning, allow managers to arm the rest of the team with the appropriate training and content to win, too.
This year, let’s get personal
In the current market, the customer is king. Buyers hold all the cards when browsing deals and sales teams are quickly adapting. The best way to meet the buyer engagement challenge is to offer buyers exactly what they’re looking for — a more interactive, personalized experience. Every piece of content in a DSR is another opportunity to deliver your brand’s value or purpose to the buyer, so make sure to keep the design and content on brand.
The rise of digital sales rooms is marrying sales training and go-to-market with deal progression and buyer engagement. We’re now able to see how sales reps apply training knowledge in the field through how they interact with buyers, all via one platform. This single platform creates a complete revenue productivity tool where revenue-facing teams receive training, deliver personalized buying processes, and close more deals.
Meta challenges EU's Digital Services Act supervisory fee as unfair
Meta is challenging a fee levied by the European Union on larger online platforms under its rebooted e-commerce rules. While a number of tech giants have taken issue with their designations under the law, this is the first suit that’s focused on the supervisory fee. The news of Meta’s legal challenge was first reported yesterday by Politico.
Update: Per Reuters, TikTok has followed Meta and is also challenging the supervisory fee — with a spokesperson telling the news agency it disagrees with it on “a number of grounds,” including what it described as “flawed third party estimates of our monthly active user numbers as a basis for calculating the total amount.”
The EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which goes fully into force on in-scope digital services later this month but is already being applied on a subset of larger platform providers like Meta, makes a provision for charging these so-called very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSE) to help fund the cost of the bloc’s oversight of their businesses.
The regulation stipulates that the amount charged annually should take into account the costs incurred by the European Commission, which is the primary enforcer of the DSA on VLOPs and VLOSE, and should be “proportionate” to the size of the service (based on average active monthly regional users) and also factor in the provider’s “economic capacity,” or that of the designated service (or services) they offer. (In Meta’s case, it provides two services that are designated under the DSA: its social networks, Facebook and Instagram.)
Per the Commission, the total pot of supervisory fees it has collected from VLOPs/VLOSE for 2023 is €45.24 million (~$48.7 million).
The EU is not reporting per company fee payments. But TechCrunch understands Meta’s contribution to that total is just under a quarter — or around €11 million. Google, which is the tech giant with the most services designated under the DSA, is contributing the most — almost half (circa €22 million). Other VLOPs/VLOSE account for smaller amounts (e.g., TikTok is paying about 8.5% or €3.8 million; Apple €3 million; Microsoft €2.7 million; Booking.com €1.45 million).
But there are a handful of designated platforms that aren’t paying anything in the first round as they reported a loss during the preceding financial year — including Amazon, Pinterest, Snapchat and Wikimedia.
The DSA puts an overall cap on the level of annual fees the EU can charge VLOPs/VLOSE — which cannot exceed 0.05% of the worldwide annual net income of the preceding financial year, per Article 43 of the regulation. (In Meta’s case, the company’s full year 2022 revenue was $116.61 billion, implying a maximum possible fee of ~$58.3 million — well below what we understand it has actually been charged under the regulation’s fee calculation mechanism.)
The EU says the existence of this cap means that if a company has reported a loss during the preceding financial year, it does not have to pay the fee. But of course it won’t be drawn into commenting on the effect of any ‘creative accountancy,’ channel stuffing, tax planning or other tactics tech giants might deploy to avoid turning a profit on paper (and not have to pay this fee).
Meta’s legal challenge is focused on this component of how the supervisory fee is calculated, with the tech giant arguing the mechanism is unfair since some companies with a lot of users but that report a loss do not have to pay.
“We support the objectives of the DSA and have already introduced a number of measures to help us meet our regulatory obligations but we disagree with the methodology used to calculate these fees,” said a Meta spokesperson. “Currently, companies that record a loss don’t have to pay, even if they have a large user base or represent a greater regulatory burden, which means some companies pay nothing, leaving others to pay a disproportionate amount of the total.”
As well as taking into account the number of users and revenue platforms have, the EU’s mechanism for calculating the level of supervisory fee factors in how many days platforms have been designated across the year.
While on estimating its oversight costs, the law says the Commission must consider its human resources and other administrative and operational expenses.
Contacted for a response to Meta’s challenge, which is being brought at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg, a Commission spokesperson said: “All Commission decisions are subject to judicial review. It is the right of companies to appeal. However, our decision and methodology are solid. We will defend our position in Court.”
“The differences in payment in the different fees are not comparable across providers due to the differences both in their business models, their market quotas, the number of services that they provide, as well as their net incomes which in some cases can be comparable to the GDP of mid-sized Member States,” the EU’s spokesperson added.
“The supervisory fee needs to reflect and be proportionate to the economic capacity of the provider. It is not meant as a penalty. This is because the purpose of the fee is not to punish the VLOPs and have a deterrence effect (as it is for the fines, which are capped taking into account revenues), but for the regulated entities to contribute to the monitoring and enforcement without affecting their business operations and expenditure related to compliance. This means that if a company has reported a loss during the preceding financial year, it does not have to pay the fee.”
“Whilst certain VLOPs may have had negative net income in a relevant year for calculation of latest fees, these are exceptions which are scrutinized with the most care,” they also told us.
The spokesperson confirmed that all designated platforms “in question” honored their commitments to provide the first tranche of fee payments by the end of December. But it’s worth noting three VLOPs avoided the fee this time as they were designated later than the others: Namely the trio of porn platforms that were designated as VLOPs late last year — which face their user and revenue numbers being crunched next time around.
The EU adopted rules on how to calculate the supervisory fee via delegated act back in March last year. The Commission went on to send the first wave of platforms it designated as VLOPs/VLOSE (April) an estimate of the supervisory costs divided between them (before the end of August). Decisions confirming the level of the fees were then taken in November — and platforms were required to make the payments to the Commission by the end of December at the latest.
Amazon wins interim stay on delivering a public ads archive in early challenge to EU’s Digital Services Act
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