ZappRx Raises $5.6 Million In Series A Funding To Expand The Company

Tapingo Orders Up $22 Million In Series C Funding To Grow Beyond The College MarketPharmacy coordination platform ZappRx announced it has raised $5.6 million in Series A funding today. The new financing will go to further build upon ZappRx’s prescription data automation technology and help to scale operations for the startup.
ZappRx solves a unique dilemma in the prescription medication industry. Many pharmacies still use fax or phone to transfer medical prescription information from the doctor and ZappRx believes its main competitor is actually the fax machine. It can be frustrating for patients to find out the prescription paperwork has been lost or didn’t come in through on fax when the patient needs it.
ZappRx automates the process between doctor and pharmacy by sending information over an app in real-time instead of by fax to ensure these specialty patients get the medications they need.
ZappRx began with the goal to become the go-to app for prescription communications among all doctors, pharmacists and patients throughout the country. However, with just six employees at the time, that seemed to be a bit too lofty of a goal. The startup shifted focus to specialty pharmacies that provide care to patients with acute or chronic conditions instead. ZappRx says this was because it saw more of a need in the market for specialty medications to chronically ill patients. These are the patients that frequent the pharmacy the most to pick up various medications or must specialty order them.
This new round allows the company to hire more people to help execute on more deals with large pharmaceutical companies. ZappRx recently hired 17 people with the new financing and plans to hire 15 more in the near future.
Related ArticlesZappRx Lands $1M To Rethink Prescription Processing With A Pharmacy-Agnostic Mobile Checkout Platform
The round was led by GlaxoSmithKline’s funding arm SR One, with participation from early stage life sciences venture firm Atlas Ventures. ZappRx was SR One’s first investment in digital health, and both firms had participated in the previous round. This now puts the total amount of funding at $8.8 million for ZappRx.
Managing partner at SR One Jens Eckstein was bold on the firm’s renewed commitment to ZappRx’s vision. “We strongly believe in ZappRx’s ability to alleviate these inefficiencies…and to innovative IT solutions for our industry,” he said.

By: Unknown On 02:24

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Japan’s SmartNews Raises Another $10M At A $320M Valuation To Expand In The U.S.

Alibaba Signs Distribution Deal With BMG, Its First Music Partner Outside Of AsiaWhile general sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google stake their claims as news portals, apps focused squarely on reading news continue to duke it out.
The latest development comes from SmartNews, a popular app founded in Japan that competes against the likes of Flipboard and Nuzzel in the news recommendation and aggregation space. The startup behind it has raised $10 million to expand its presence in the U.S — specifically to staff up its San Francisco office. It’s on the hunt especially for machine learning and data science specialists to continue honing its recommendation algorithms, co-founder Kaisei Hamamoto tells me.
SmartNews, which now has 10 million downloads and 1 million monthly active users in the U.S., says that the $10 million in funding was made on a pre-money valuation of $320 million. As a point of comparison, Flipboard was last valued at $800 million back in was December 2013, when it last disclosed fundraising (Flipboard has raised just over $160 million to date).
This latest injection comes in the form of a bridge round led by games company GREE, with participation also from Globis Capital Partners, Atomico, Mixi and Social Venture Partners — all previous investors in SmartNews. Hamamoto and his co-founder Ken Suzuki are currently in the U.S. working on raising a larger Series C round, as well as signing the final details for a new office space. To date, SmartNews has now raised $50 million.
SmartNews’ move into the U.S. and the new funding come on the back of a strong year for the startup. In addition to its 1 million MAUs in the U.S. since launching a U.S. edition in October 2014, it has around 4 million MAUs in Japan, where it launched first.
That popularity is also being played out in the app stores, where over the last several months SmartNews has managed to remain consistently in the top 10 in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to App Annie figures. In doing so, it has more often than not outranked more higher-profile rivals like Flipboard.
Machine learning but not for news junkies
The company’s co-founders believe that part of the reason for SmartNews’ growth is because of how the app has been built built. Many aggregation service will claim to have intelligent algorithms directing what articles get recommended to users; SmartNews claims its are better.
The machine learning-based recommendations focus not only on what you click on to read, but where you pause when you are browsing in the app, and what people read and pause near when they like the same things you do, comparing all of this against a massive trove of articles, to deliver to users a clean interface of things they may want to read. (Hence, the “smart” of SmartNews.)
The algorithms, they claim, which can be fine tuned based on location and other parameters, are also why the company is able to grow quickly into so many markets — it’s now present in over 150 — without staffing up significantly or raising enormous amounts of cash, music to investors’ ears, too, it seems.
“The news is international, but not all news apps truly are,” Niklas Zennstrom said in a statement. “SmartNews machine learning is the key to breaking through to general consumers, even the emerging/developing world on mobile: SmartNews algorithms pick what’s trending and culturally relevant in different countries and regions. This is the breakthrough needed to scale news delivery to billions of mobile devices.”
What SmartNews doesn’t need to work is your social graph. In other words, no logins to Twitter and Facebook. This has a few advantages. One is just in terms of the kind of results you end up getting (avoiding the so-called “Filter Bubble” of too-narrow information).
This also means that not only is the app less dependent on third parties to propel its engine, but for those who are not happy about social networks collecting more data on them, it’s one less app to worry about. Interestingly, this fact also makes it attractive to another company, Google, which uses SmartNews to power news delivery in Google Now.
Hamamoto also contends that another reason why SmartNews is doing so well is that it tries to position itself as an app for the general public, not journalists, or tech buffs or news junkies — a target customer triumvirate that, some believe, has been a big failing of many of other news aggregation apps.
Hamamoto is all too aware of the pitfalls of building news apps for power users: his previous app, Crowsnest, aggregated news based on Twitter shares and RSS feeds and then delivered the results in a list. “It focused too much on personalisation and news junkies,” he says. “That was one reason why it failed. Based on that I built SmartNews. We try to keep our algorithms out of the way now.”
Publishers and making money
The other side of SmartNews’ business, working with publishers, has continued to develop at the same time. Globally, the company now works with over 150 publishers. Led by Rich Jaroslovsky, SmartNews’s VP of content and a former journalist himself, the company has signed on MSNBC, TIME, Buzzfeed, HuffingtonPost, VICE, Medium, Quartz, AOL, Upworthy, People, Vox, MTV News, The Verge, AP, Reuters, USA Today and Fox News.
Suzuki says that over 80 of the wider pool of publishers get at least 1 million pageviews — still an important metric for ad-based businesses — each per month via Smartnews. (Some get significantly more, some get much less.)
It’s on the publishing side that SmartNews will be focusing its monetizing efforts.
For now, SmartNews’ only revenue generation has been in the form of a small roll out of ads in its app in Japan. These run both near stories in SmartNews’ stream, as well as alongside stories when you click to read them. SmartNews’s take is to make ads relevant to the content (eg, food ads alongside food articles), and to only take a cut when the ads are in the stream (alongside articles, the publishers get all the proceeds).
The other area where the company will be turning on sales soon are in subscriptions and paywalls.
“A lot of publishers are interested in subscriptions, and they have been having a hard time developing something themselves,” Hamamoto says. “We are very open to launching something like this.” He says it’s likely to be based around the idea of a monthly rate, which would let users pay for specific channels dedicated either to a subject, or to a specific publisher.
The ads are not likely to launch in the U.S. until there are more MAUs, while the subscriptions will probably be turned on later this year, Suzuki says. “It’s a big part of the reason why we are moving so fast.”

By: Unknown On 04:05

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LocoMotive Labs, Maker Of Todo Math App, Raises $4M To Expand In Asia

Math can be fun, but try telling that to a small child stuck behind a desk doing endless drills and worksheets. Founded by a former game developer, startup LocoMotive Labs’ mission is to make learning mathematic basics entertaining for all children, no matter their learning styles.
Its flagship app, Todo Math, has already been downloaded 1.1 million times, and now the Berkeley, California company has picked up a series A of $4 million to expand into Asia.
The round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea and TAL Education Group and brings LocoMotive Labs’ total raised so far to $5.15 million. Returning investors K9 Ventures, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund, Joe Gleberman, D3Jubilee, and Jerry Colonna also participated.
LocoMotive Labs will first focus on China because the country currently accounts for half of its new users. Its apps have already been downloaded 350,000 times there.
Founder Sooinn Lee was inspired to launch LocoMotive Labs by her son, who has special needs. After he was born, Lee and her husband, also a game developer, began to brainstorm ways to keep kids like him motivated once they start school. Todo Math and other LocoMotive Labs apps, however, are made for all kids between the ages of three and eight, not just those with learning disabilities.
“We come from Korea, where academic environment is particularly competitive and intense,” Lee says. “We thought, how could our son have a good experience in his early academic career? That was our motivation to start this company.”
LocoMotive Labs’ goal is to instill confidence in kids who might struggle with traditional exercises and worksheets.
“If they feel like failures at an early age, it gives them a negative self-concept. If they keep failing, they think ‘I’m done. I don’t like math,'” Lee says.
A Friendlier Alternative To Cram Schools
While there are many other math-learning apps available, Lee thinks of programs like Kumon as LocoMotive Labs’ main competition. Founded in 1958 in Japan, Kumon is designed to reinforce math and reading concepts with a series of worksheets and teaching sessions. After school programs like Kumon (often referred to as “cram schools”) are extremely popular in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries (and also operate in the U.S.). But Lee says that paper worksheets aren’t the best way for very young children to learn math basics.
“As a game designer, I believe we can solve it in a much better way in the mobile era. Three year olds can touch and swipe before they even hold a pen,” she says, adding “games are designed for users. If they don’t want to play it anymore, it’s done. They give it a F and it’s done.”
To keep children engaged, Todo Math uses an exploration game with treasure boxes and other rewards that kids can unlock as they solve different levels of problems. LocoMotive Labs’ follows Universal Design for Learning concepts, which encourages educators to take different learning styles into account when designing teaching materials.
For example, children in the age group targeted by Todo Math are at widely different stages of motor development, so kids can either write or drag-and-drop numbers. The app also lets kids decide how math problems are presented. They can pick a word problem, play with tally sticks, or move around blocks. As they use the app, it will begin to tailor lessons to their learning preferences.
Bringing American Education To Asia
Todo Math is aligned with U.S. Common Core standards, but Lee says that early math curriculums followed by different countries aren’t too different (for example, Common Core has similarities with math education in Singapore and Japan). The process of localizing LocoMotive Labs’ apps for new markets will focus mainly on changing cultural references in word problems.
The bigger challenge of expanding into Asia, Lee says, is convincing educators and parents that mobile apps are a suitable alternative to paper worksheets and flashcards. Todo Math is already accepted by teachers in the U.S.—in fact, it is currently used in about 1,000 classrooms. Lee hopes that the program’s adaptability—and the fact that it keeps children engaged—will convince parents to use it instead of sending their kids to cram school.
One of LocoMotive Labs’ goals for its international expansion is to bring U.S. attitudes toward learning to Asia, where pedagogy often centers on rote memorization. While Lee acknowledges that the effectiveness of Common Core and other U.S. educational programs are widely debated, she says that Asian students can benefit from their focus on developing critical thinking skills.
“I know Asian parents and governments are still skeptical, but kids are learning in a new era. Schools still focus on memorization, but children can use tools like Google Search and access a larger way of learning beyond just memorizing answers,” she says.
 

By: Unknown On 09:34

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Perion Buys France’s MakeMeReach For Up To $13M To Expand In Social Ads And Europe

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By: Unknown On 13:12

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Borro Gets $19M From Rocket Internet, OurCrowd To Expand Its Online Pawnshop For Luxury Goods

Borro, the U.S. and UK-based online platform that people borrow money and put up luxury items as collateral, is today announcing $19 million in new funding led by strategic investments from Israel’s OurCrowd and Berlin’s Rocket Internet.CEO and founder Paul Aitken tells me that the funding will be used for two main areas: moving into new geographical markets and more financial services. Specifically, tapping into Rocket Internet’s expertise, Borro will soon be making its way to entering emerging markets in South America and Asia, and using know-how from OurCrowd it plans to expand the instruments that it uses to finance its loans, with new features including a LendingClub-style crowdfunding platform, and more extended loan times beyond the six-month range Borro offers today.Although Borro is not disclosing its valuation, Aitken tells me it is a

By: Unknown On 10:46

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