Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Dental Intelligence, a Utah-based analytics and workflow automation platform for dental practices, raises $34M Series A (FinSMEs)
Dental Intelligence, a Utah-based analytics and workflow automation platform for dental practices, raises $34M Series A — Dental Intelligence, Inc., a Pleasant Grove, UT-based analytics and workflow automation platform for dental practices, raised a $34m Series A growth round of funding.
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As it readies a test for vaping additives, cannabis testing company Cannalysis raises $22 million
Cannalysis, a testing company for cannabis, has raised $22 million in a new round of financing as it prepares to bring a new test for vaping additives to the market.
The test, which the company is preparing to unveil later this week, will test for the presence and amount of Vitamin E acetate, a chemical compound that may be linked to the aping related illness that has swept through the U.S. in the past month.
Cannalysis chief executive Brian Lannon said the new product was developed in response to the current crisis in the cannabis industry over illnesses related to vaping cannabis products.
“The big story that’s been going out over the last week isn’t the product that’s going out in cannabis, but an additive called Vitamin E acetate. We have developed a test for that,” Lannon says. “As part of the different compliance testing that’s required, it’s not mandated to test for any of these additives… What I’m anticipating based on the phone calls we’ve been getting is that a lot of our customers want to get the test to show that they’re not using the stuff.”
The Santa Ana, Calif.-based company tracks cannabis products across its companies supply chain and provides data management and integration services for its customers so they can immediately update their own tracking systems with the results of Cannalysis’ tests. It also integrates directly with consumer services like Weedmaps, so consumers can get third party verification of the strength of the dosage.
Quality assurance for cannabis products isn’t just a matter of legal compliance. The percentage of THC that’s available in different strains can impact the price producers can charge for their product, Hannon says.
“The price of a cannabis product can vary greatly based on its potency,” he says. “Right now the number in the market is 20 percent. If your product tests at 18 percent instead of twenty percent, that can mean a huge difference in cost.”
While testing variance is a problem for the industry, Cannalysis says its highly automated lab, which relies on robotics and machine learning to increase the speed and accuracy of its testing, along with the integrated software services it offers to customers, exceeds the standards for ISO accreditation.
Certainly that’s what attracted CanLab, the nation’s largest testing service to commit $22 million to the company as a strategic investor.
Lannon says the new cash will be used to expand into new markets including Oregon, where the company has already made an initial hiring push, and other highly regulated cannabis markets.
A serial entrepreneur who previously founded an action sports apparel company called HK Army and MetaThreads, an esports clothing company, Lannon came to the cannabis industry initially as a user of the substance. As the market matured his interest was piqued in developing technologies that could ascertain the quality of various cannabis products.
His timing was exceptional. Investors have spent nearly $16 billion on North American cannabis companies in 2018, double the amount invested just three years ago, according to data from the analytics company New Frontier Data cited by the Associated Press. And the Marijuana Business Factbook projects that the economic impact of the legal industry was somewhere between $20 billion and $23 billion in 2017. Its a number that coiuld grow to $77 billion by 2022.
Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph on the company’s earliest days, the streaming wars, and moving on
Netflix is today a company whose valuation hovers around $130 billion, but it was, of course, once a little startup, and in his new book “That Will Never Work,” Netflix’s cofounder and its first CEO Marc Randolph takes readers on a fun and surprisingly vivid journey through the streaming giant’s earliest days.
It’s also instructive, though this is more memoir than business book, and Randolph, who is the great nephew of Edward Bernays — a public relations pioneer — turns out to be a very compelling writer, explaining in sometimes humbling detail how and why the company eventually outgrew him, and the reason he doesn’t regret stepping away when he did.
In fact, rather than lament past decisions, Randolph seems to relish his longtime work as a startup advisor, one who often has no financial ties to the companies he helps. As he explains it, there is a “role for someone in a founder’s life who isn’t a board member or an investor or an employee. The role of a founder-CEO is extremely lonely. You can’t always be fully forthcoming with your board or investors or employees. And if you go to your peers and you bring them an issue, they don’t really understand. So it’s very valuable for a founder who doesn’t have an ulterior motive but also understands a problem well enough that they can give really good advice.”
We had a chance to catch up with Randolph earlier today to discuss the book and his current relationship with his Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, who he met when the company that Hastings began running in 1991, Pure Atria, acquired Randolph’s company, Integrity QA Software, (They both found themselves searching out the next big thing when Pure Atria was itself acquired.)
Randolph also shared why it took him 16 years to tell his story about what has become one of the most impactful companies in the history of television.
TC: We’re still zipping through the book but there is a lot of great storytelling here, from scenes with you and Reed carpooling to the office together, to some of earlier startup ideas you ran past him and he didn’t think much of, including customized baseball bats. Did you write this alone?
MR: Of course, I had help, you can’t write about something as important as Netflix by yourself. Over the course of one-and-a-half years, I spent tons of time on the phone and [engaged in] email correspondence and in meetings with everyone I could track down, because I wanted to hear all those stories again. But this isn’t a ghostwritten book and it’s not a as-told-to book. I did write it with the help of a great editor. In fact, the book was originally conceived as more of a self-help book, but my editor came back and said, “You shouldn’t do this as a ‘you’ book. Make it a ‘me’ book. Make the lessons you’ve learn over your career implicit instead of explicit.”
But I’ve been writing all my life. I was a direct marketing guy [before founding Netflix]. I had to restrain myself from writing things like, “Frankly, I’m puzzled,” and “But wait! There’s more!”
TC: You left Netflix in 2003. Why not write a book sooner?
MR: I needed to wait all that time. Even though I needed to tell the story, I didn’t really understand the lessons. It has taken me working with other early-stage companies and mentoring them and investing in them to make these connections. Why did Netflix work? What were my failings? What could I have done better?
TC: You’re pretty candid in the book about not being punctual and not having great attention to detail, but these are minor offenses.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Facebook, London Police Partner to Track Terror Livestreams
TRB TN 2019 – Post Graduate Asst Admit Card Download
RSCB Recruitment 2019 – Apply Online for 715 Banking Asst, Manager & Other Posts
Apple Invests $250 Million in iPhone Glass Supplier Corning
HTC names former Orange exec Yves Maitre as its new CEO; HTC had $770M in revenue in 2018, the first time its annual revenue fell below $1B as a public company (Steve Dent/Engadget)
HTC names former Orange exec Yves Maitre as its new CEO; HTC had $770M in revenue in 2018, the first time its annual revenue fell below $1B as a public company — HTC announced that it has appointed a former executive from telecom giant Orange, Yves Maitre, as its new CEO.
Havas Group acquires majority stake in independent digital agency Langoor
Chinese video game giant NetEase reports Q4 revenue up 3% YoY to ~$4B and net profit down 29% to ~$903M, below ~$1.2B est., as it pushes self-developed games (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)
Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal : Chinese video game giant NetEase reports Q4 revenue up 3% YoY to ~$4B and net profit down 29% to ~$903...
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Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal : An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protégé confirmed by ...
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