AlertMedia, an Austin-based startup founded in 2013, is solving the problem of mass communication during crises of all kinds. From natural disasters to active shooter scenarios, AlertMedia combines a mobile app with a monitoring system, both of which connect employees to each other as well as law enforcement and an emergency office. The company, which has raised over $42M, connects organizations to their employees over a variety of platforms, from email to texts. So far it’s been used during the California wildfires, helping Kawasaki Motors contact isolated employees in order to protect them and their families from impending danger.

AlertMedia’s History

Founder and CEO Brian Cruver said the idea occurred to him while he was watching the news coverage of a few different disasters: the Boston Marathon bombings, a Texas plant explosion, and the Newton school shooting.

“I was watching them unfold on the news and became interested in how communication was and wasn’t happening,” he told Crunchbase News. “I noticed that social media was helping the public know what was going on before news media and law enforcement.”

He’s not the first person to come up with a mass communication idea. In April of 2017 RapidSOS completed its Series A round of funding, collecting a total of $14M, while another Austin-based company Zello topped the app store when Hurricane Irma hit Louisiana, its walkie-talkie being instrumental for volunteers getting supplies and work crews to different necessary locations. Zello, however, is simply a walkie-talkie app, while AlertMedia combines SaaS with a team to monitor and connect employees to law enforcement at first alert.

Appeal

AlertMedia has been largely successful at developing partnerships with major organizations. Its customer base includes Greyhound, Volskwagon, J Crew, DHL, AT&T, and the Chicago Stock Exchange. AlterMedia is used in over ninety countries, and has doubled its employees from 50 to 100 from 2017-2018.

“We have a lot of customers in transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and business services,” Cruver told Crunchbase News. “Our platform spans such a wide range of industries that the addressable market for us is huge. That’s largely behind the reason for this funding, so we can meet demand and get the word out. There’s still tens of thousands of organizations around the world that haven’t even heard of us – yet.”

Large organizations with employees in multiple global locations need services like AlertMedia to protect their employees from unforeseen emergencies. Communication with personnel during such times can be tricky, as Cruver noticed when he came up with the idea for the company. While social media helped disseminate information faster, reliability and accuracy was a concern. An app like AlertMedia offers companies a reliable channel to communicate with their employees, and allows them in turn to have a reliable platform to get relevant, time-sensitive information at the time of a crisis.

How it works

The application itself is somewhat complicated, including a mobile app that works with a monitoring system to connect employees to each other, their bosses, as well as local law enforcement. The mobile app is called SafeSignal, which works in conjunction with a physical tether that plugs into employee phones. Pulling the tether is an instant way to send a distress signal to the AlertMedia Monitoring Center, which in turn will contact law enforcement and direct them to the employee’s exact location. The monitoring is 24/7, so AlertMedia workers can be contacted any time of day, any day of the year. The service is paid for through a fixed subscription, one determined based on company size and usage.

The company claims on its website that the SafeSignal app improves employee security, gives them confidence about their safety, and helps them connect to a professional team or law enforcement instantly. AlertMedia also suggests that users who are threatened should let potential attackers know that the alert will have police sent to their location immediately, so it becomes an active deterrent.

Funding

AlertMedia has only five investors, with Silverton Partners, JMI Equity and Next Coast Ventures contributing the majority of funds. The company just raised a $25M round from JMI Equity, and Cruver wrote in the company blog that –

“the investment serves to magnify our commitment to our customers, both current and future. This means expanding in all parts of the business. It means growing our development team to build new innovations in our product, expanding our customer success team so we can continue to deliver unparalleled customer support, and of course, hiring more people in sales and marketing so we can spread the word about what we do.”

This most recent investment was their Series C round, and the company has raised a total of $42M of 5 rounds. The investment, coming in the early days of 2019, got the company covered by Crunchbase News.

As one of the many companies changing how large organizations operate in the age of rapidly changing technology, AlertMedia will hopefully reach its goals of making employees safer in a time of great change.

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According to Life By Spot, Americans under the age of 45 account for less than 5% of the population with life insurance. Companies like Kin Insurance, for instance, offer cover for hurricanes. But the life insurance market seems to have stagnated. Life By Spot believes it can change that, by offering flexible short-term life insurance to those who live each day like it is their last.

Life By Spot – not your traditional insurance provider

The company’s website is quick to make the difference clear with an analogy. It claims that Spot is to traditional life insurance what ride sharing is to car ownership. While that might be a subtle way of calling itself the Uber of life insurance, does the company live up to the claim? The business model is similar. Instead of buying a car as a long-term asset, Life By Spot offers on-the-spot coverage and instant approval. It is more like renting a car, with 1 to 30-day terms. The costs are also lower – plans start at $7 for $50,000 of coverage. It also offers event-based short-term insurance, allowing users to pursue their passions while mitigating the risk through insurance.

The company’s products are designed for the new-age experiential traveler. Planning on going cliff-jumping? Add a small dollar amount to your budget and get invaluable reassurance that you have insurance. The company also makes it a point to list other offbeat activities like lawnmower racing with the tagline that it approves of the activity that your mother won’t.

The company hasn’t yet started operations, but it has already made some critical partnerships. Spot policies for the company will be issued by the Fidelity Life Association and be reinsured by Hannover Life Reinsurance Company of America. The partnership between Hannover and Life By Spot was announced in October 1, 2018. Tony Laudato, the Vice President of Hannover, was quoted in the accompanying press release saying that the partnership with Life By Spot was in line with Hannover’s core tenets of agile underwriting, improved risk selection, and an overall better customer experience.

Can an app-based interface rescue life insurance?

Life By Spot believes that it can save life insurance by making it easier and more accessible. Co-founder of Life By Spot Maria Miller points out that 3 out of 4 millennials think that a $250,000 policy is 4x-6x more expensive than it really is. The company is hoping to break down the myth that life insurance is too expensive or complicated through consumer education. Part of that attempt is to use adventure as a lead acquisition channel.

Miller adds, “Traditional life insurance trigger events have been marriages, births, home purchases, but these [Life by Spot’s offerings] are more geared towards experiences.” The company’s goal is to widen the reach of life insurance products by creating new life insurance products. If you’re about to go scuba diving or kayaking, Life By Spot wants to insure these events. They want to create a new funnel for bigger life insurance policies and products.

Life By Spot’s focus on a smooth UX helps make it more accessible. This helps them reduce the process of getting life insurance down to a few minutes. A simple sign up and instant coverage makes it more millennial friendly. They claim to have simplified pricing and contracts to ensure a straightforward and transparent process. Hannover’s Partnership Solutions Group helped the company build rule-based mechanisms to speed up evaluation. Hannover’s data helps built mortality and morbidity risk models to make the result more accurate, too.

Life By Spot’s logo. Picture credit – Life By Spot’s Instagram

Life By Spot’s $5.85M funding

Matt Randall and Miller started Life By Spot in 2017, after discussions which took place at the InsureTech Connect event that year. Randall, the CEO, is an Austin-based entrepreneur who was previously the Founder and CEO of Twyla, a startup to collaborate with and sell the works of artists. Miller is the Chief Operating Officer and is a former executive at New York Life. In December 2018, the company announced that it had received $5.85M in savings from Silverton Partners, an Austin-based VC firm.

According to Kip McLanahan, General Partner at Silverton, “Life By Spot is redefining the traditional insurance market with a truly innovative suite of products. We believe the time is right for a new take on insurance and Matt and Maria’s vision for Spot is incredibly exciting”. The company intends to focus on product development and marketing when they initiate operations later in the year. With the funding, partnerships, and product idea all in place, Life By Spot looks to make a big splash in the coming year.

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As one of Authors.me’s three co-founders, Monica Landers, points out to thebookseller.com, “countless industries have benefited from the simultaneous adoption of standardized evaluation systems and machine learning insights”.  Authors.me believes there’s no reason that the publishing industry, long-lambasted for being “resistant” to change, shouldn’t do the same.

Why Authors.me is attractive

In 2011, Publishing Perspectives reported that 200 million Americans wanted to publish books. In 2013, Forbes said that 600,000 to 1,000,000 books get published in the country every year, and that half of those are self published. Another report published on BetterStorytelling.net states that 90% of manuscripts in the US are rejected by publishers. This could be for a variety of reasons, like shoddy writing, an unclear idea or premise, or simply being unsuitable for the publishing house the work was submitted to.

Authors.me claims that registering on their site ups writers’ chances of being accepted by publishers by 7 times, and the chances of receiving “positive, forward movement for their manuscript” by 13 times.

It also promises to eliminate, for writers, some of the more frustrating parts of the process of getting in touch with a publisher in order to publish a manuscript. For many writers, one of the most trying aspects of the process is not knowing what decision a publishing house has made on their work.  Authors.me claims that 39% of the writers who submit their work through the platform know definitely that their work has been declined, and only 56% of those on the platform are awaiting reviews on their work.

How authors submit their manuscripts

Authors.me’s submission process, which is currently free for writers, allows prospective authors to upload all the components of their project onto the submission platform, including the hook, a synopsis, the first 30 pages, an author’s bio and the full manuscript. It also asks for details like the manuscript’s target audience, genre and some quotable quotes, after which the project goes into discovery.

At this stage, the submitted project is matched to various publishing houses and agents, who put out specific guidelines on what genres, sub-genres, word counts, keywords or ideas they’re looking to publish or acquire, and other information on the kind of authors they’re looking for. For a small fee, writers can avail of additional marketing services for their manuscripts.

A publishing house, editor or agent can peruse different components, or receive an “editorial snapshot” of a submitted project. With this platform, they have all the information they need to make a decision with their first contact with the author, hopefully eliminating a lot of the time, energy and effort on the publisher’s side spent in tracking down manuscript or author information. It not only allows publishers to search and pre-filter submissions, it also helps them access what  Authors.me hopes will be a much larger pool of writers and manuscripts than would be otherwise available to them.

The author is informed of the publisher’s progress by tracking the publisher’s progress through their submitted materials. This process provides the author with the invaluable information of at what stage their project was rejected: was the publisher hooked through the hook and synopsis, but lose interest at the first 30 pages? Did they even make it past the synopsis? Receiving information like this helps rejected authors streamline and tailor their projects for their next attempts, in addition to giving them real-time feedback from publishers, as opposed to the notorious and often fruitless wait for a call-back from the publisher instead.

A company of storytellers

Founded in 2014 by David O’Brien, Henrik Kjallbring and Monica Landers, the company has received over $1.9M in funding thus far. It’s also a part of Techstars, a global startup accelerator and development program that provides the company mentoring, support and networking.

Authors.me’s major competitors include other text and manuscript discovery platforms like Synapsify, Deep BI, sprout social and Echobox, but founder Lander says that their biggest obstacle is not competitors in the same market, but the nature of the publishing industry itself. As she said in an interview with thebookseller.com in May 2017, ”Publishing is a venerated industry that plans their products a minimum one year in advance if not two or three. So as with many technology startups, the personality of the industry and understandable hesitation to adopt new technologies can stymie, but within the past six months we’ve seen a dramatic change in tide.”

Within just a year of its launch, in 2015,  Authors.me claimed to have helped 58 authors get “discovered” by publishing houses, and 11 signed book deals. By mid- 2017, the platform reported that over 200 of its writers had been formally contracted for publication, and that it has been responsible for over 20 published manuscripts.

Being a self-described company of storytellers and story lovers,  Authors.me plans, in the future, to branch out into other spheres, including working with studios and visual production houses.

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Previously in May, the startup partnered with Live Nation, the parent company of a ticket sales and distribution company, Ticketmaster to help it match user identity to the ticket and redefine its experience. Live Nation’s quarterly report noted: “(Blink Identity) has cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show.”

The partnership and the new funding will now allow the startup to better test its model into the “live event and identity security space” and “run early pilot programs in different venues”.

How Biometric Works

The startup is co-founded by CEO, Mary Haskett and CTO, Alex Kilpatrick, who have previously designed, developed and deployed large scale biometric identification systems internationally. Blink Identity’s website, in fact, claims that their “work with identity in motion technology has resulted in Blink Identity sensors being deployed for operational testing at US military bases around the world.”

But biometric identification, which is a technique that uses unique human characteristics to identify an individual, is not new. It has been around a long time and continues to fascinate numerous startups. There’s evidence that fingerprints were used on clay tablets during Babylonian business transactions in 500 BC. Since then, fingerprints, with the addition of face and retina scan constitute the most of what’s currently being used for recognition.

But how does facial recognition, a market pegged to reach $7.6B by 2022, work when it comes to access to live events? Haskett explains that, “If you buy a ticket, you take a picture with yourself in your phone, you send us a selfie and you enroll. When you walk by the entrance, we have our sensor which takes a picture and matches it to the one you sent us.”

Photo Credit: Blink Identity website

The technology behind this is simple: When an image is submitted, it is processed and converted to a mathematical template which is a unique numerical representation of the image. This template is then compared against stored templates which enables the software to make a confident ‘match’ or ‘no-match’ determination. This seemingly simple technology has far-reaching implications. For instance, a Ticketmaster representative said, “Knowing not just who bought the tickets, but who is sitting in each and every seat, can dramatically change the live event industry in a variety of ways.”

In such scenarios, concerns about privacy are common. The increased personalization can put your personal data at risk but Haskett clarifies that the system is an opt-in. “If people believe their Blink Identity account is an infringement on their personal privacy, people can delete it like they can with their personal social media accounts.” (It’s not clear how users can opt-out or delete their data.) Social networks, on the other hand, are not exactly the paragons of privacy and Blink Identity itself presents its top solution as access to live events where thanks to its technology, it’s “possible to collect usable and shareable data on each person that walks through our biometric entry gateway.” It has also been reported that that there are no actual plans to put this technology into place.

Blink Identity’s Solutions

The startup’s other solutions include healthcare where Blink Identity claims it can help “secure areas easily, and even open a patient’s chart, simply with a doctor’s facial ID recognition” or in commercial buildings where the solution can “not only control initial entry access, but also monitor employee location and space utilization”. But these solutions merely scratch the surface as one of its largest—and easily justifiable—use case of facial recognition is in security.

Recently, Amazon claimed that its facial recognition tool, Rekognition, can “identify up to 100 faces in a single image, track people in real time through surveillance cameras, and scan footage from body cameras”. But after a recent exercise, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that the tool had “incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress (disproportionately people of color), identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime.” ACLU concluded that “Face surveillance threatens to chill First Amendment-protected activity like engaging in protest or practicing religion, and it can be used to subject immigrants to further abuse from the government.” Another study at MIT found that when the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women.

The founders of Blink Identity do not diss these privacy concerns. In fact, CTO Kilpatrick wrote in his own blog that he agrees with ACLU and that “this goes against the principles this country was founded on.”

In the same vein, Blink Identity claims that it is taking privacy seriously. Its website explains that they communicate clearly what personal information they are collecting and “delete data that does not have an agreed upon business use”. But controversies aside, the startup thinks of facial recognition as an impending technological advancement and has continued to innovate.

In September, the startup was invited to participate in the 2018 Biometric Technology Rally, sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate. Blink Identity says that it was the only full in-motion face/iris system participating in the rally. (Iris scanning entails the iris being photographed under IR illumination. The image is then converted into binary which “makes its easy to compare and very accurate.”) The rally’s results for the startup proved to be extraordinary where it claimed that it not only acquired and processed an image in approximately 250 milliseconds, but also that its failure to acquire rate was lower than the other systems.

Iris recognition in different lighting situations. Photo Credit: Blink Identity website

However, when it comes to facial recognition, false matches are an unavoidable problem and one faced by most companies trying facial recognition from Apple, Facebook to Kairos. While a secure facial recognition technology can be used for consenting consumers, the concern is whether it can be used for law enforcement. Kilpatrick writes in his blog that “If you have a watch list at a stadium (for example)…you have a 100,000 person stadium and a face recognition system that is correct 99.99% of the time, you will still have 10 false matches.”

The US is already using facial recognition tech at airports where, recently, the software flagged a person as his face did not match his passport photo. A search followed which revealed his real ID—from the Republic of Congo—in his shoe. Despite the recent application, a system with 99.99% accuracy is rare, and therefore, the question is if we can detain, inconvenience, or wrongly arrest ten people to find that one supposed culprit?

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