企业在线问答公司AnswerDash（Qazzow）获得种子轮290万美金融资AnswerDash成立于2012年，总部位于美国西雅图。
AnswerDash通过技术嵌入功能答案帮助企业更好地回答消费者的问题，从而帮助企业削减相应的用户支持开支，同时保持用户不流失。
本轮融资由Voyager Capital 领投，Arnold Venture Group、Summit Capital、The W Fund、WRF Capital跟投。
UW spinout AnswerDash raises $2.9M to support growth of online contextual help platform
What started as an idea inside the Information School at the University of Washington is now a full-fledged business that’s raising cash from venture capital firms.
UW-spinout AnswerDash today announced a $2.9 million seed investment round led by Voyager Capital, with participation from existing investors WRF Capital, Summit Capital, the W Fund, and Arnold Venture Group.
AnswerDash, formerly known as Qazzow, wants to fundamentally change how online businesses answer questions that customers might have.
Rather than forcing people to comb through an FAQ or use a written-based solution like email or live chat, AnswerDash’s technology embeds answers within a website’s functionality.
The company helps its clients offer customers instant, contextual answers to a question they may have while browsing a given web page on desktop or mobile. When a user clicks on something they have a question about — this could be an image, link, header, etc. — AnswerDash employs a machine learning search process to retrieve the most relevant questions and answers.
The idea is to reduce the amount of time customers search for answers online, ultimately helping businesses improve the consumer experience while retaining revenue that previously could have been lost due to user frustration.
“By enabling users to quickly and easily find their own answers to commonly asked questions, AnswerDash prevents costly and repetitive help requests that would otherwise arrive via e-mail, phone or live chat,” explained CEO Bill Colleran. “AnswerDash also reduces the likelihood that online shoppers will abandon their shopping activity because they fail to receive answers to their questions simply and intuitively.”
Colleran, a former longtime CEO of Impinj, joined AnswerDash in June when he replaced co-founder Jake Wobbrock, who started AnswerDash back in 2012 with fellow UW professor Andrew Ko and their Ph.D student, Parmit Chilana.
AnswerDash co-founders Jake Wobbrock and Andrew Ko.Wobbrock and Ko have held the CEO and CTO roles, respectively, at AnswerDash for the past three years —Chilana went on to become a professor at the University of Waterloo — but will return to their careers in academia this fall.
Wobbrock told GeekWire that “this was always a planned transition.” The co-founders will remain involved with AnswerDash in an advisory capacity, while Wobbrock will serve as a board observer.
“Our goal as academic co-founders was to take the technology we created out into the world,” he said. “We wanted to get the startup going, get it funded, build a great launch team, refine our product, and get customers and value proof-points. Once we had achieved this, we knew that the best people to take the company to the next level would be seasoned industry executives with years of experience building companies and taking products to market.”
The leadership baton is now passed to Colleran, who previously spent 14 years leading RFID technology-maker Impinj, and VP of Engineering Kevin Knoepp, who joined the team in January after spending more than two decades as a back-end technology executive.
“AnswerDash will continue its evolutionary arc from a small, research-based product team to a vibrant, innovative and fast-growing SaaS company,” noted Colleran.
Colleran said that the company has “matured dramatically” since starting three years ago. Now that the startup has established product-market fit — it has “dozens of customers” like Chef, PetHub, and PipelineDeals — it will use the fresh cash to expand its sales and marketing efforts while continuing to improve the AnswerDash platform.
Colleran has lofty ambitions for AnswerDash, which makes money with a tiered subscription model based on the amount of usage its tool gets and also produces unique analytics to clients that can provide insight into what types of questions customers are asking while browsing through a given website.
“AnswerDash’s service enables more efficient, succinct and clear communication over the web and on mobile devices, so over time our market will grow to include almost every website and mobile app,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity.”
Total funding for the 13-person company is now $5.3 million.
来源：GeekWire
日本在线英语辅导公司Langrich被收购，在线教育已成日本热潮
美国远程教育公司EnglishCentral上周早些时候宣布了对日本公司Langrich的收购。
Langrich总部位于日本东京，提供在线英语辅导一类的服务。签署换股协议后，该公司将并入EnglishCentral，其投资者 KLab Ventures以及Hitomedia 都将成为EnglishCentral的小股东。据KLab公司发言人表示，此次并购标志着第一次日本创业公司被美国同类大公司收购。
Langrich成立于2010年，通过Skype语音软件提供英语教学，授课老师均为菲律宾籍。和其主要竞争对手Rarejob以及DMM一样，Langrich提供一对一教学，并专注于会话技巧。今后，其用户还可以通过电脑或者手机观看录制好的视频课程，并配上EnglishCentral的智能化语音识别技术来学习词汇和发音。
EnglishCentral首席执行官Alan Schwartz在采访中表示：“在日本，我们还将继续使用Langrich作为我们的品牌。”
“EnglishCentral不会更改旗下公司或平台的名称，包括很多在韩国、中国以及巴西的领先的在线学习公司。”
EnglishCentral总部位于马萨诸塞州阿灵顿，每月拥有超过10万付费用户。其服务范围包含全球各地超过100个国家的400多所大学。在扎堆的远程教育领域里，EnglishCentral这家创业公司最大的亮点或许就是有退款保证了。如果学生在三个月内不能得到提升，EnglishCentral会退还全部学费。
Schwartz表示，EnglishCentral将会接手Langrich现有的包括教师在内的260名员工，同时还表示：“我们也会每个月增加几十名教师，并且我们不会再限制教师国籍，菲律宾籍之外的老师也可以考虑。”
日本的补习班（juku），也就是培训学校产业价值大约100亿美元。而英语口语课程就占据了当中很大一块市场。随着互联网的发展，智能手机的日益普及，很多这些课程被搬到了线上。
这对线下实体学校造成了很大冲击，因为对于学习者而言，在线学习更为划算，以至于目前许多实体学校已如强弩之末，而在线教育却已经成了日本最热的创业领域之一。
“2007年，日本最大的实体英语培训学校Nova破产之后，整个日本培训市场一度停滞不前，但近几年，情况有了转机。”Schwartz解释说：“Rarejob现在已经上市了，你可以看到它的财务状况，其注册用户数量增长了将近50%。DMM的增长还要快。它们是日本在线市场上，最主要的两个竞争对手。而去年，我们的收入也增长了90%。”
还有一件事进一步证实了日本在线辅导热潮的火爆，上周的亚洲科技东京舞台上，日本国内的在线教育公司Mana.bo就拿下了特等奖。
Japanese edtech startup acquired by US startup amid online tutoring boom
American edtech startup EnglishCentral earlier this week announced the acquisition of a Japanese startup offering similar online tutoring for English learners. Langrich will be acquired in a share-swap agreement that sees the Tokyo-based startup’s investors – KLab Ventures and Hitomedia – become minority shareholders in EnglishCentral. According to a KLab spokesperson, it marks the first time that a Japanese startup has been acquired by a larger American one.
Founded in 2010, Langrich uses English tutors in the Philippines to provide English instruction via Skype. Like its main competitors, Rarejob and DMM, lessons are one-on-one and focus on conversation skills. Langrich users will now benefit from a video lesson archive for web and mobile, as well as EnglishCentral’s speech recognition technology for studying vocabulary and pronunciation.
“We will keep the Langrich brand as our consumer brand in Japan,” Alan Schwartz, EnglishCentral’s CEO, tells Tech in Asia. “EnglishCentral will remain the name of the company and the name of the platform that we provide to our global partners, including many leading online learning companies […] in Korea, China, and Brazil.”
EnglishCentral, headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, boasts more than 100,000 paying users per month. The service is available in more than 100 countries and at over 400 universities across the globe. Perhaps EnglishCentral’s biggest differentiator in the crowded edtech space is its money-back guarantee – the startup refunds 100 percent of a student’s lesson fees if they don’t level up after three months.
Schwartz says that EnglishCentral will retail all of Langrich’s current employees – a total of 260 including teachers. “We’re also adding dozens of teachers a month, and we will not limit teacher hiring to the Philippines going forward,” he adds.
The Japanese juku – cram school – industry is valued at roughly US$10 billion.Eikaiwa – conversational English lessons – take a big chunk of that market. With strong internet infrastructure and a population that’s increasingly fond of smartphones, many of those lessons are moving online. That could hurt brick-and-mortar schools, which have already faltered, since online learning is more cost effective for learners. This shift to online has created, arguably, one of Japan’s hottest startup verticals.
“After the Nova implosion (once Japan’s largest physical English conversation school, Nova went bankrupt in 2007), the whole market in Japan stalled, but things have changed in last several years,” Schwartz explains. “Rarejob is now public and you can see from their financials they are growing at close to 50 percent in terms of registered users. DMM we believe is growing even faster. They are the main competitors in the online market in Japan that have traction. We grew 90 percent last year in terms of revenue.”
Further evidence of Japan’s online tutoring boom could be seen at Tech in Asia Tokyo’s Arena pitch battle last week, where domestic edtech startup Mana.bo took the grand prize.
Editing by Terence Lee
Source:techinasia
营销数据服务公司Unified获1000万美元投资
Unified成立于2011年，总部位于纽约。
Unified通过行业先进的数据平台为专业营销人员提供分析、方案和广告工具。目前该公司有超过600个客户，包括全球2000强企业和他们的广告代理。
该投资由Silicon Valley Bank提供。
Social Marketer Unified Raises $30M Round Led by iHeartMedia
Unified is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding, plus a $10 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
That sounds like a nice chunk of change, but equally noteworthy is the fact that the equity funding was led by iHeartMedia (the radio and digital media company formerly known as Clear Channel). The two companies previously announced a strategic partnership to develop custom products for advertisers, as well as an investment of undisclosed size.
“We specifically chose iHeart because of the strategic value they brought to table in terms of data sets — it’s not just cash,” said Calvin Lui, Unified’s president and chief strategy officer. After all, Lui noted that in addition to its social advertising business, Unified aims to bring data together from a variety of marketing channels, an approach he contrasted with other social marketing companies that are mere “point solutions.”
“We have such rolling momentum with these major brands that we continue to win flagship relationships with, and all of that is premised on having a system of record for all of our data, so we can collect information from multiple sources, extract value and execute against that,” Lui said.
The new money will allow Unified to continue developing its product and find new markets. Lui emphasized that that doesn’t just mean geographic expansion but also adding new products.
Specifically, Vice President of Corporate Communications Dave Donohue said the company plans to expand its data offerings beyond social media, starting with broadcast advertising — another area where it would make sense to work with iHeartMedia. (To be clear, while Unified expands its data business, the ad-buying product will remain focused on social media.)
It’s been more than three years since Unified announced raising a $14 million Series A. Asked why the company waited so long to raise more money, Lui said that the team knows how to “deploy capital very efficiently.”
“We understand that there are cycles to the business and the industry and we’re here for the long-term,” he added.
Unified customers include Tesla, 22Squared, Lenovo and Toyota. Other investors in the Series B include Advance Publications, Upfront Ventures and Foundry Group.
Over the past couple of years, Unified also acquired analytics companies Awe.sm and PageLever. Donohue said the company is open to making more acquisitions, “but this round isn’t aimed at funding acquisitions.”
来源：TC
Fama：帮助企业找出候选人社交媒体中的“危险信号”
如果你几年前在 Twitter 上发布的一些蠢话影响到了你找工作的机会，可能你会很讨厌这样的事情，不过 Fama 的首席执行官兼联合创始人本·莫纳斯（Ben Mones）表示，一些雇主已经在实施这种社交媒体筛选——只是他们的做法还不是非常全面和系统。
莫纳斯并不认为这种做法是件坏事。毕竟，社交媒体可以让雇主更好地知道这个人是不是适合这份工作，以及他们有没有可能会在网上发布一些有损公司的内容，从而让公司陷入麻烦。
莫纳斯认为，“你在网上是个什么样的人也代表了——如果不是完全对等——你在现实生活中是一个什么样的人。这一点是人们才开始认识到的事情。”
Fama 的客户可以指定他们想要筛选的社交媒体中的“危险信号”，比如吸毒、性内容、偏见或是亵渎等等。该公司会分析文本、图片和视频（部分是利用亚马逊的众包平台 Mechanical Turk)。
莫纳斯表示，一般来说，雇主对于候选人是否在大学里吸过大麻或是酗酒等内容并不怎么关心，他们更关心的是比如对于女性是否给予尊重这样的内容。
莫纳斯还强调，Fama 不会提供推荐。它只是为招聘经理提供额外信息——这种区分可以让该服务避免让人头疼的法律纠纷。
“我们不会给人打分，或得做出关于是否应该雇佣此人的结论，”莫纳斯说。我们所做的是为招聘经理提供足够的经过提炼的数据，这样他们就可以做出决定。我们的做法是推动大家的行动。这有助于确保我们 (或是我们的客户) 不会因诽谤而被控告，因为我们并没有打分。”
此外，莫纳斯表示 Fama 遵守《公平信用报告法》，而且不会突出种族、性别、残疾等 保护类 信息。
Fama 今天宣布了与人力资源工作流及背景调查公司 CARCO 的 合作伙伴关系 ，两家将联合提供产品服务。
Fama Helps Businesses Find Social Media “Red Flags” Before Hiring Someone
Fama Technologies aims to help companies screen potential employees by analyzing their social media posts.
You might not like the idea that something dumb you posted years ago on Twitter could affect your chances of getting a job, but Fama CEO and co-founder Ben Mones said employers are already performing this kind of social media screening — they’re just not doing it very comprehensively or systematically.
And he doesn’t see that as a bad thing. After all, social media can give an employer a better sense of whether someone will be a good fit, and also whether they’re likely to get the company in trouble by posting something offensive.
“Who you are online is very indicative — if not equally indicative — of who you are in the offline world,” Mones argued. “This is what people are just starting to come to terms with.”
Fama customers can identify the “social media red flags” that they want to screen for, whether it’s drug use, sexual content, bigotry or profanity, among other things. The service analyzes text, images and video (in part by leveraging Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk).
Mones said that in general, employers are less interested in, say, whether or not you smoked pot or drank a lot in college, and more in issues like whether or not you act respectfully toward women.
He also emphasized that Fama doesn’t provide recommendations. It just gives hiring managers additional data — a distinction that could help the service avoid thorny legal problems.
“We’re not assigning a score to individuals, or drawing conclusions/making claims about whether or not someone should be hired,” he said. “What we are doing is providing enough distilled data to hiring managers so they can make a decision. Bringing folks to the precipice of action. This helps us ensure that we (or our clients) are never held for libel, because we aren’t scoring.”
He added that Fama is compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and that does not highlight protected classes of information, like race, gender or disability.
Fama also announced a partnership today with HR workflow and background check company CARCO to offer combined products.
来源：TC
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数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮2000万美元投资
据报道，数据分析SaaS Discern获A轮 2000 万美元投资。
Discern成立于2009年，总部位于旧金山。主要功能是通过特有的数据集、有效的专业知识和技术，为用户提供可行的投资见解。
该轮投资由Artiman Ventures领投。
Discern Raises $20M in Series A Financing
Discern, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a financial decision-making platform for investment professionals, raised $20m in Series A financing.
The round was led by Palo Alto-based Artiman Ventures.
The company will use the funding to expand its platform beyond the Energy industry to offer modules for Real Estate, Consumer Retail, Banking/Financial Services and other sectors.
Founded in 2009 and led by Harry Blount, CEO, Discern provides a cloud-based platform connecting financial decision-makers to synthesized data and content that is personalized to an individual user’s investment process. The company’s solution continuously scans the user’s universe of real-time data (public and commercial) then signals the user when new, relevant data surfaces.
Discern data can be viewed by sector, by company, and/or by the user’s own parameters, automating and enhancing the work of the traditional data research associate.
The company also has offices in New York.
来源：FINSMES
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