Technology

When it comes to the internet, content may be king, but in many cases, the emperor has no clothes: that is to say, the masses may click on interesting stories, video, music and other media, but building a lucrative business around that content can be a struggle, with advertising-based models often providing little in the way of margins except for the very biggest properties (and even then, it can a tough balancing act managing costs).

A startup called Minute Mediabelieves that it has found a way through that challenge with a platform that brings in user-generated content across a number of its own mostly-sports-based media properties — built organically and by way of acquisition — and it then syndicates that content also through third-party publishing partners.

Today, the startup is announcing a $40 million round to continue its growth — specifically to continue investing in its publishing platform; to invest in properties that it already owns; and to make more acquisitions.

Led by LondonDawn Capital with participation from other unnamed previous investors (a list that includesBattery Ventures, Goldman Sachs, ProSieben, Qumra Capital, Vintage Investments, Gemini Ventures, North Base Media, La Maison, Remagine Ventures, Hamilton Lane and Maor Investments) the funding brings the total raised by Minute Media to $160 million.

The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but last year we understood from a source very close to the company to be between $200 million and $300 million. Given that it grew around 100% last year, that likely puts the current valuation closer to $300 million.

Minute Media may not be a name you know very well, but if you are a consumer of sports content online, you may have come across some of its properties and articles. Its holdings currently number seven titles and include names like 90min.com (which focuses on soccer, hence the name: the startupfounder and CEO Asaf Peled is a football fanatic), as well as FanSided, The Players& Tribuneand Mental Floss. (Others include12up, DBLTAP and The Big Lead.)

Some of these Minute Media built from scratch, but many have come to it courtesy of the bigger picture of the media industry today: titles are created, gain an audience, and then get shifted around in the world of online publishing when the previous owner has not been able to make the business case for the site work.

For example, FanSided came to Minute Media by way ofan acquisition just last month: Meredith sold it, reportedly for $15 million, as part of a larger divestment of &non-core& assets it has been making post its acquisition of Time, Inc. in 2018 (it once sat under Sports Illustrated).

The Players Tribune runsstories written by athletes themselves — some extremely timely, such as this one from Sabrina Ionescu, a rising star in womenbasketball, published just on Monday, in the same week that her name has been making waves because of her speech at the Bryant memorial service, plus her heroic work on the court. The site was founded by baseball legend Derek Jeter and sold in November last year to Minute Media.

Mental Floss, something of a cult click-bait title, lost its way after Facebook algorithm changes: now its home is also at Minute Media.

While this might look mainly like a media play, there is a technology story underpinning what Minute Media has built the spans, B2C, B2B and C2C distribution.

For starters, there is the centralised content management system that runs the sites, &an open CMS system that allows any casual fan to create rich content,& as Peled has described it to TechCrunch. This has had as many as 20,000 contributors on it, covering a variety of languages beyond English; the number of pieces — selected by human editors — published across all its platforms is less than 1,000 per day. Only the most prolific and longstanding contributors get paid; others contribute for free.

Advertising features on Minute Mediaproperties, but is only one piece of how the company makes money, since that same platform is also a licensing-based B2B and B2C play: it links up to about a dozen other publishers and media partners, which use it both to syndicate content out and bring in content from other places: the thinking goes that bringing in syndicated content from elsewhere can help the other publishers bring down their operating costs while still continuing to expand the content (and thus traffic) on their own sites.

Last summer, Peled told me that thebalancebetween ad and licensing revenues were &around 50/50, but no doubt the B2B open platform is easier to sell and is growing faster.&

Sports content has shaped up to be an extremely important segment in the world of online media. Done right, it can breed a legion of engaged and very loyal visitors — readers, listeners — who are willing to do more than just click once and move on. That has helped some of the more interesting sports sites build paid content models — see The Athletic — and others spin out media empires based on still evolving platforms like podcasting — see the huge success of The Ringer and its recent sale to Spotify.

Minute Media fits into that bigger picture with its own take on how to build and scale a publishing empire. Without some of the overhead that has weighed down other online publishing plays, the startup has built a concept for publishing that appears to have a kind of sustainability to it.

&Minute Mediabest-in-class platform enables publishers to create, distribute and monetize high-quality content,& saidHaakon Overli, general partner at Dawn Capital, in a statement. &The company is quickly establishing itself as a major player in the new generation of online publishing, empowering creators and audiences alike. Following explosive revenue growth in 2019, we&re pleased to back the team once again, allowing them to accelerate R-D and commercial efforts further still.&

Welcome to the $100 million ARR club, BounceX.

This morning (evening, timezone depending), BounceX, a New York-based marketing technology startup, announced that it has reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold, adding its name to our running list of companies that have crossed over into nine-figure revenue while remaining private.

BounceX also announced a name change to Wunderkind, a move that its CEO Ryan Urban told TechCrunch signaled &a new chapter& for the firm. Summarizing the executivecomments: After seven years in business and quite a lot of work building out its product line and revenue base, BounceX wants to think of itself as something more than merely another SaaS company; the name Wunderkind, in his view, demands that what they create &has to be extraordinary,& fitting into the idea.

Normally we&d gently tease such plainly stated aspirations, but with $100 million in ARR and a history of efficient growth behind the goal, we won&t. Instead, lettalk about what the company does, and how it has grown to the size that it has.

Whata BounceX?

I&ll spare you the details and explain what the company does without buzzwords, as best I can.

It starts with Web traffic. Everyone has it. But often you, an online retailer, don&t know who is coming to your website. BounceX (Wunderkind) can help you figure that out, matching anonymous web traffic to email addresses. Now you know some of the folks coming to your site, and how to reach them. Next, Wunderkind can help you send those identified folks targeted emails that match what is known about that person, or email address. The result of all this work is material revenue scale — the company claims that its technology boosts &behaviorally triggered emails to over 9%, on average, of a retailerdigital revenue.&

For those doing the math at home, 9% is a lot.

All this works out for Wunderkind as well, with its ability to help companies drive revenue assisting it in landing deals. The company closes new customers pretty efficiently, with Urban telling TechCrunch that his companyCAC-to-LTV ratio is &is probably the highest in [its] industry,& and has &been going up over time.&

How does it do that? By the company having what it called &really high [deal] close rates.& Fine, but how does the tech drive the companyclose rate? By promising results and cutting itself off if it fails.

Wunderkind runs short-term pilots with potential customers, say four months long. The company will only move to a more traditional SaaS contract if it sufficiently drives revenue for the potential customer. According to Urban, &90 to 95% of the time& his company &deliver[s] the guaranteed revenue.&

And the customer converts, voila!

This method of snagging customers led to Wunderkind having some pretty stellar SaaS metrics. Picking one from TechCrunchcall with the CEO, &a lot of [Wunderkind sales] reps have north of $3 million quotas a year and they hit,& he said, meaning that they meet that high expectation.

So what?

You can probably see where this is going: What happens when a company has a very strong customer value to customer acquisition cost structure, and a very efficient sales team? It doesn&t burn a lot of capital. Unsurprisingly, Wunderkind has been super efficient to date, with Urban telling TechCrunch that &the amount of equity [his company has] actually put to work is probably sub-$35 million,& with less than $50 million in equity capital raised. The company also has debt lines that it can use, the CEO noted.

Getting from $0 in ARR to $100 million while spending around $35 million in equity-sourced funds is pretty bonkers, but perhaps even more nuts is the fact that, per the CEO, Wunderkind got through its first four years on $1.5 million in external money. Urban chalked the low-burn results to the founding team and early employees having experience working with one another, and building features &purely focused on improving experience [and] driving revenue.&

Thatenough for now, we&ll write about the company more when it reaches its next ARR threshold, executes a secondary transaction to put off an IPO, or files. The lesson from today is that itpossible to build a SaaS company to-scale with far less revenue than I thought possible. Anyhoo, Wunderkind joins the $100 million ARR cadre with what I think is the second-best result in terms of efficient growth. Only boostrapped Cloudinary has cleaner metrics, though with a smaller ARR total for now.

For more on the $100 million ARR club, you can check out this and this to read about other companies that have been inducted this year.

Snapask, an on-demand tutoring app, announced today that it has raised $35 million in Series B funding. Earmarked for the startupexpansion in Southeast Asia, the round was led by Asia Partners and Intervest.

Launched in Hong Kong five years ago, Snapask has now raised a total of $50 million and operates in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and South Korea. Its other investors have included Kejora Ventures, Ondine Capital and SOSV Chinaccelerator (Snapask participated in its accelerator program).

Founder and CEO Timothy Yu said Snapask will expand into Vietnam and focus on markets in Southeast Asia where there is a high demand for tutoring and other private education services. It will also open a regional headquarter in Singapore and develop video content and analytics products for its platform.

The company now has a total of 3 million students, with 1.3 million who registered over the past twelve months (including a recent surge that Yu attributes to students studying at home after COVID-19 related school cancellations). Over the past year, 100,000 tutors have applied, taking Snapaskcurrent total to 350,000 applicants.

Yu says that over 2 million questions are asked by students each month on the platform, with each subscriber typically asking about 60 questions a month, during tutoring sessions that last between 15 to 20 minutes. The majority, or about two-thirds, of the questions are about math and science-related topics.

One thing all of Snapaskmarkets have in common are highly-competitive public exams to enter top universities, says Yu. The exams have both a positive and negative effect on education, he adds.

&Students have a very clear objective about what topics they need to study, so that is driving a very lucrative market in the tutoring industry. But I think what Snapask focuses on is that exams are important, but you should do it the right way. We&re about self-directed learning. Itnot necessary to go to three-hour classes every day after school. If you need specific help on a question, you can ask for it immediately.&

While at university, Yu worked as a math tutor, and sometimes spent a total of two hours commuting to sessions that lasted the same amount of time. In markets like Malaysia or Indonesia, many educators chose to work in major cities, leaving students in rural areas with less options. The goal of Snapask is to help solve those issues and connect tutors with more students.

Yu says the average time for students to connect with a tutor after asking a question is about 15 to 20 minutes, which it is able to do because of machine learning-based technology that matches them based on educational styles, subject and availability. Snapaskmatching algorithms are also based on how students engage with tutors (for example, if they respond better to concise or longer, more elaborate answers). Students can also pick up to 15 to 20 tutors for their favorites list, who are prioritized when matching.

Yu says Snapask screens tutors by looking at their university transcripts and public exam results. Then they go through a probation period on the platform to assess how they interact with students. The platform also tracks how many messages are sent during a tutoring session and response times to make sure that tutors are explaining students& questions instead of just giving them the answers.

Tutors can talk to up to 10 students at a time through Snapaskplatform. Yu says Snapask tutors in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea who spend about two hours per day answering questions usually make about $1,200 a month, while those who work about four to five hours a day can make about $4,000 to $5,000 a month. The company uses different pricing models in Southeast Asian markets, and Yu says tutors there can make about 50% to 60% more than they would at traditional tutoring jobs.

Other study apps focused on students some of the same markets as Snapask include ManyTutors and Mathpresso, whose products combine tutoring services with tools that let students upload math questions, which are then scanned with optical character recognition to provide instant answers. Yu says Snapask is focusing on one-on-one tutoring because it wants to differentiate by creating a &holistic experience.&

&A lot of students come to Snapask after using OCR tools, which we know that user surveys, but they can&t get to certain steps. They still need someone to help them understand what is happening,& he says. &So we try not to use technology for every component in teaching, but to make it more efficient and scalable, and we&re creating a holistic experience to differentiate us.&

UK startup Babylon Health pulled app data on a critical user in order to create a press release in which it publicly attacks the UK doctor who has spent years raising patient safety concerns about the symptom triage chatbot service.

In the press release released late Monday Babylon refers to Dr David Watkins — via his Twitter handle — as a &troll& and claims he&targeted members of our staff, partners, clients, regulators and journalists and tweeted defamatory content about us&.

It also writes that Watkins has clocked up &hundreds of hours& and 2,400 tests of its service in a bid to discredit his safety concerns — saying heraised &fewer than 100 test results which he considered concerning&.

BabylonPR also claims that only in 20 instances did Watkins find &genuine errors in our AI&, whereas other instances are couched as ‘misrepresentations& or &mistakes&, per an unnamed &panel of senior clinicians& which the startupPR says &investigated and re-validated every single one& — suggesting the error rate Watkins identified was just 0.8%.

Screengrab from Babylonpress release which refers to to Dr Watkins& &Twitter troll tests&

Responding to the attack in a telephone interview with TechCrunch Watkins described Babylonclaims as &absolute nonsense& — saying, for example, he has not carried out anywhere near 2,400 tests of its service. &There are certainly not 2,400 completed triage assessments,& he told us. &Absolutely not.&

Asked how many tests he thinks he did complete Watkins suggested itlikely to be between 800 and 900 full runs through &complete triages& (some of which, he points out, would have been repeat tests to see if the company had fixed issues he&d previously noticed).

He said he identified issues in about one in two or one in three instances of testing the bot — though in 2018 says he was finding far more problems, claiming it was &one in one& at that stage for an earlier version of the app.

Watkins suggests that to get to the 2,400 figure Babylon is likely counting instances where he was unable to complete a full triage because the service was lagging or glitchy. &They&ve manipulated data to try and discredit someone raising patient safety concerns,& he said.

&I obviously test in a fashion which is [that] I know what I&m looking for — because I&ve done this for the past three years and I&m looking for the same issues which I&ve flagged before to see have they fixed them. So trying to suggest that my testing is actually any indication of the chatbot is absurd in itself,& he added.

In another pointed attack Babylon writes Watkins has &posted over 6,000 misleading attacks& — without specifying exactly what kind of attacks itreferring to (or where they&ve been posted).

Watkins told us he hasn&t even tweeted 6,000 times in total since joining Twitter four years ago — though he has spent three years using the platform to raise concerns about diagnosis issues with Babylonchatbot.

Such as this series of tweets where he shows a triage for a female patient failing to pick up a potential heart attack.

Watkins told us he has no idea what the 6,000 figure refers to, and accuses Babylon of having a culture of &trying to silence criticism& rather than engage with genuine clinician concerns.

&Not once have Babylon actually approached me and said ‘hey Dr Murphy — or Dr Watkins — what you&ve tweeted there is misleading&,& he added. &Not once.&

Instead, he said the startup has consistently taken a &dismissive approach& to the safety concerns heraised. &My overall concern with the way that they&ve approached this is that yet again they have taken a dismissive approach to criticism and again tried to smear and discredit the person raising concerns,& he said.

Watkins, a consultant oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust — who has for several years gone by the online (Twitter) moniker of @DrMurphy11, tweeting videos of Babylonchatbot triage he says illustrate the bot failing to correctly identify patient presentations — made his identity public on Monday when he attended a debate at the Royal Society of Medicine.

There he gave a presentation calling for less hype and more independent verification of claims being made by Babylon as such digital systems continue elbowing their way into the healthcare space.

In the case of Babylon, the app has a major cheerleader in the current UK Secretary of State for health, Matt Hancock, who has revealed hea personal user of the app.

Simultaneously Hancock is pushing the National Health Service to overhaul its infrastructure to enable the plugging in of &healthtech& apps and services. So you can spot the political synergies.

Watkins argues the sector needs more of a focus on robust evidence gathering and independent testing vs mindless ministerial support and partnership ‘endorsements& as a stand in for due diligence.

He points to the example of Theranos — the disgraced blood testing startup whose co-founder is now facing charges of fraud — saying this should provide a major red flag of the need for independent testing of ‘novel& health product claims.

&[Over hyping of products] is a tech industry issue which unfortunately seems to have infected healthcare in a couple of situations,& he told us, referring to the startup ‘fake it til you make it& playbook of hype marketing and scaling without waiting for external verification of heavily marketed claims.

In the case of Babylon, he argues the company has failed to back up puffy marketing with evidence of the sort of extensive clinical testing and validation which he says should be necessary for a health app thatout in the wild being used by patients. (References to academic studies have not been stood up by providing outsiders with access to data so they can verify its claims, he also says.)

&They&ve got backing from all these people — the founders of Google DeepMind, Bupa, Samsung, Tencent, the Saudis have given them hundreds of millions and they&re a billion dollar company. They&ve got the backing of Matt Hancock. Got a deal with Wolverhampton. It all looks trustworthy,& Watkins went on. &But there is no basis for that trustworthiness. You&re basing the trustworthiness on the ability of a company to partner. And you&re making the assumption that those partners have undertaken due diligence.&

For its part Babylon claims the opposite — saying its app meets existing regulatory standards and pointing to high &patient satisfaction ratings& and a lack of reported harm by users as evidence of safety, writing in the same PR in which it lays into Watkins:

Our track record speaks for itself: our AI has been used millions of times, and not one single patient has reported any harm (a far better safety record than any other health consultation in the world). Our technology meets robust regulatory standards across five different countries, and has been validated as a safe service by the NHS on ten different occasions. In fact, when the NHS reviewed our symptom checker, Healthcheck and clinical portal, they said our method for validating them &has been completed using a robust assessment methodology to a high standard.& Patient satisfaction ratings see over 85% of our patients giving us 5 stars (and 94% giving five and four stars), and the Care Quality Commission recently rated us &Outstanding& for our leadership.

But proposing to judge the efficacy of a health-related service by a patientability to complain if something goes wrong seems, at the very least, an unorthodox approach — flipping the Hippocratic oath principle of ‘first do no harm& on its head. (Plus, speaking theoretically, someone whodead would literally be unable to complain — which could plug a rather large loophole in any ‘safety bar& being claimed via such an assessment methodology.)

On the regulatory point, Watkins argues that the current UK regime is not set up to respond intelligently to a development like AI chatbots and lacks strong enforcement in this new category.

Complaints hefiled with the MHRA (Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) have resulted in it asking Babylon to work on issues, with little or no follow up, he says.

While he notes that confidentiality clauses limit what can be disclosed by the regulator.

All of that might look like a plum opportunity for a certain kind of startup ‘disruptor&, of course.

And Babylonapp is one of several now applying AI type technologies as a diagnostic aid in chatbot form, across several global markets. Users are typically asked to respond to questions about their symptoms and at the end of the triage process get information on what might be a possible cause. Though BabylonPR materials are careful to include a footnote where it caveats that its AI tools &do not provide a medical diagnosis, nor are they a substitute for a doctor&.

Yet, says Watkins, if you read certain headlines and claims made for the companyproduct in the media you might be forgiven for coming away with a very different impression — and itthis level of hype that has him worried.

Other less hype-dispensing chatbots are available, he suggests — name-checking Berlin-based Ada Health as taking a more thoughtful approach on that front.

Asked whether there are specific tests he would like to see Babylon do to stand up its hype, Watkins told us: &The starting point is getting a technology which you feel is safe to actually be in the public domain.&

Notably, the European Commission is working on risk-based regulatory framework for AI applications — including for use-cases in sectors such as healthcare — which would require such systems to be &transparent, traceable and guarantee human oversight&, as well as to use unbiased data for training their AI models.

&Because of the hyperbolic claims that have been put out there previously about Babylon thatwhere therea big issue. How do they now roll back and make this safe? You can do that by putting in certain warnings with regards to what this should be used for,& said Watkins, raising concerns about the wording used in the app.&Because it presents itself as giving patients diagnosis and it suggests what they should do for them to come out with this disclaimer saying this isn&t giving you any healthcare information, itjust information — it doesn&t make sense. I don&t know what a patientmeant to think of that.&

&Babylon always present themselves as very patient-facing, very patient-focused, we listen to patients, we hear their feedback. If I was a patient and I&ve got a chatbot telling me what to do and giving me a suggested diagnosis — at the same time ittelling me ‘ignore this, don&t use it& — what is it?& he added. &Whatits purpose?

&There are other chatbots which I think have defined that far more clearly — where they are very clear in their intent saying we&re not here to provide you with healthcare advice; we will provide you with information which you can take to your healthcare provider to allow you to have a more informed decision discussion with them. And when you put it in that context, as a patient I think that makes perfect sense. This machine is going to give me information so I can have a more informed discussion with my doctor. Fantastic. So theresimple things which they just haven&t done. And it drives me nuts. I&m an oncologist — it shouldn&t be me doing this.&

Watkins suggested Babylonresponse to his raising &good faith& patient safety concerns is symptomatic of a deeper malaise within the culture of the company. It has also had a negative impact on him — making him into a target for parts of the rightwing media.

&What they have done, although it may not be users& health data, they have attempted to utilize data to intimidate an identifiable individual,& he said of the companyattack him.&As a consequence of them having this threatening approach and attempting to intimidate other parties have though letbundle in and attack this guy. So itthat which is the harm which comes from it. They&ve singled out an individual as someone to attack.&

&I&m concerned that thereclinicians in that company who, if they see this happening, they&re not going to raise concerns — because you&ll just get discredited in the organization. And thatreally dangerous in healthcare,& Watkins added. &You have to be able to speak up when you see concerns because otherwise patients are at risk of harm and things don&t change. You have to learn from error when you see it. You can&t just carry on doing the same thing again and again and again.&

Others in the medical community have been quick to criticize Babylon for targeting Watkins in such a personal manner and for revealing details about his use of its (medical) service.

As one Twitter user, Sam Gallivan — also a doctor — put it: &Can other high frequency Babylon Health users look forward to having their medical queries broadcast in a press release?&

The act certainly raises questions about Babylonapproach to sensitive health data, if itaccessing patient information for the purpose of trying to steamroller informed criticism.

We&ve seen similarly ugly stuff in tech before, of course — such as when Uber kept a ‘god-view& of its ride-hailing service and used it to keep tabs on critical journalists. In that case the misuse of platform data pointed to a toxic culture problem that Uber has had to spend subsequent years sweating to turn around (including changing its CEO).

Babylonselective data dump on Watkins is also an illustrative example of a digital serviceability to access and shape individual data at will — pointing to the underlining power asymmetries between these data-capturing technology platforms (which are gaining increasing agency over our decisions) and their users who only get highly mediated, hyper controlled access to the databases they help to feed.

Watkins, for example, told us he is no longer able to access his query history in the Babylon app — providing a screenshot of an error screen (below) that he says he now sees when he tries to access chat history in the app.He said he does not know why he is no longer able to access his historical usage information but says he was using it as a reference — to help with further testing (and no longer can).

If ita bug ita convenient one for Babylon PR…

We contacted Babylon to ask it to respond to criticism of its attack on Watkins. The company defended its use of his app data to generate the press release — arguing that the &volume& of queries he had run means the usual data protection rules don&t apply, and further claiming it had only shared &non-personal statistical data&, even though this was attached in the PR to his Twitter identity (and therefore, since Monday, to his real name).

In a statement the Babylon spokesperson told us:

If safety related claims are made about our technology, our medical professionals are required to look into these matters to ensure the accuracy and safety of our products. In the case of the recent use data that was shared publicly, it is clear given the volume of use that this was theoretical data (forming part of an accuracy test and experiment) rather than a genuine health concern from a patient. Given the use volume and the way data was presented publicly, we felt that we needed to address accuracy and use information to reassure our users. The data shared by us was non-personal statistical data, and Babylon has complied with its data protection obligations throughout. Babylon does not publish genuine individualised user health data.

We also asked the UKdata protection watchdog about the episode and Babylon making Watkins& app usage public. The ICO told us: &People have the right to expect that organisations will handle their personal information responsibly and securely. If anyone is concerned about how their data has been handled, they can contact the ICO and we will look into the details.&

Babylonclinical innovation director, Dr Keith Grimes, attended the same Royal Society debate as Watkins this week — which was entitled Recent developments in AI and digital health 2020 and billed as a conference that will &cut through the hype around AI&.

So it looks to be no accident that their attack press release was timed to follow hard on the heels of a presentation it would have known (since at least last December) was coming that day — and in which Watkins argued where AI chatbots are concerned &validation is more important than valuation&.

Last summer Babylon announced a $550M Series C raise, at a $2BN+ valuation.

Investors in the company include Saudi ArabiaPublic Investment Fund, an unnamed U.S.-based health insurance company, Munich ReERGO Fund, Kinnevik, Vostok New Ventures and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, to name a few helping to fund its marketing.

&They came with a narrative,& said Watkins of Babylonmessage to the Royal Society. &The debate wasn&t particularly instructive or constructive. And I say that purely because Babylon came with a narrative and they were going to stick to that. The narrative was to avoid any discussion about any safety concerns or the fact that there were problems and just describe it as safe.&

The cliniciancounter message to the event was to pose a question EU policymakers are just starting to consider — calling for the AI maker to show data-sets that stand up its safety claims.

Stonly is building a service for customer support teams so that they can share step-by-step guides to solve the most common issues. The startup just raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Accel with business angels also participating, such as Eventbrite CTO Renaud Visage and PeopleDoc founders Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse.

The startup isn&t building a chatbot for customer support — chatbots usually don&t understand what you mean and you end up contacting customer support anyway. Stonly believes that scripted guides with multiple questions work much better than both chatbots and intimidating knowledge bases.

But the company is well aware that it isn&t going to replace Zendesk or Intercom overnight. Thatwhy a Stonly guide is a module that you can embed in your existing tools. The startup currently supports Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Front.

This way, if somebody contacts you on Front or Intercom, you can reply with a Stonly guide to help your users solve their own issues (at least if ita common issue). Stonly is also launching its own more traditional knowledge base powered by Stonly guides so that your client can access common questions through a chat widget.

Putting together a Stonly guide doesn&t require any technical skills. After defining the steps, you can write text, add images, videos and buttons in a web interface. Stonly also supports translations.

And itbeen working well for the startupfirst clients. For instance, Dashlane noticed a 25% decrease in opened tickets for their most frequent issues after using Stonly. Other clients include Devialet, Happn and Calendly.

With todayfunding round, the startup is expanding to the U.S. with a new office in New York and David Rostan joining as head of revenue — he was previously VP of Sales and Marketing at Calendly.

The student loan crisis in the U.S. has left venture capitalists searching for novel approaches to financing higher education, but can the same systems designed for helping coders in Silicon Valley get jobs at Google help underserved students in developing countries become part of a global work force?

Similar to the buzzy San Francisco startup Lambda School, Microverse is a coding school that utilizes ISAs, or Income Share Agreements, as a means of allowing students to learn now and pay later with a fixed percentage of their future salary. Microverse isn&t aiming to compete heavily with Lambda School for U.S. students, however, they are looking more heavily at courting students in developing countries. The startup currently has students in 96 countries, with Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon and India among their most represented, CEO Ariel Camus tells TechCrunch.

The pitch of bringing the ISA model worldwide has attracted investor interest. The startup tells TechCrunch it has just closed $3.2 million in seed funding from venture capitalists including General Catalyst and Y Combinator.

Lambda School and its ilk have excited plenty of investors. There has also been plenty of scrutiny and some questions on whether quickly scaling to venture-sized returns or building revenue by selling off securitized ISAs ends up pushing these startups toward cutting corners.

Microverse, for its part, is already built quite lean. The program has no full-time instructors. The entire curriculum is a self-guided English-only lesson plan that relies on students that are just months ahead in the program serving as &mentors.& Students are expected to spend eight hours per day pushing through the curriculum with assigned study partners and peer groups, graduating in about eight months on average, Camus says.

&The average starting salary for us — itof course lower and thatexpected,& said Camus. &The only way we can offer as good or better learning experience as Lambda or any other campus-based education in the U.S. — with salaries that will usually be lower — is if our costs are lower, and thatwhy we have designed the entire system to allow us to scale faster. We don&t have to hire teachers, we don&t have to create content and that allows us to adjust to changes in the market and new technologies much much faster.&

While Lambda SchoolISA terms require students to pay 17% of their monthly salary for 24 months once they begin earning above $50,000 annually — up to a maximum of $30,000, Microverse requires that graduates pay 15% of their salary once they begin making more than just $1,000 per month, though there is no cap on time, so students continue payments until they have repaid $15,000 in full. In both startups& cases, students only repay if they are employed in a field related to what they studied, but with Microverse, ISAs never expire, so if you ever enter a job adjacent to your area of study, you are on the hook for repayments. Lambda SchoolISA taps out after five years of deferred repayments.

Without much of the nuance in how Lambda School or Holberton School have structured their ISA terms, Microversestructure seems less amenable, but Camus defends the terms as a necessary means to getting around under-reporting.

&When you use a cap, you&re using a perverse incentive for under-reporting,& Camus says. &In the U.S. where you can enforce tax reviews, thereno need to worry about that and I think itbetter if you can cap it, but in most of the developing countries where there is not a strong tax system, it isn&t a possibility.&

For students that qualify for terms for repaying this ISA, they are, again, on the hook for $15,000. Charging such a hefty fee for an online course without full-time instructors geared toward students in developing countries could be controversial for a venture-backed startup, but it will also put a heavy burden on the school to keep their students satisfied and help them find employment via its network of career counselors.

The CEO acknowledges the high price of Microverseinstruction. &It is huge,& but he says that the premium is necessary to build a business around getting students in developing countries careers in the global workforce. Microverse is keeping its total number of admitted students small early on so that it can ensure itmeeting their needs, Camus says, noting that Microverse accepts just 1% of applicants, adding 70-80 students to the program per month.

&This conversation around the ISA in the U.S. is so hot that you have to frame it in such a different way when you&re talking about students in developing and emerging countries. Like, there are no alternatives,& Camus says. &…if you can find a value proposition that aligns with their goals and gives them some international and professional exposure, that gives them a world-class education… thata very compelling proposition.&