Today's issue:

1. Stimy AI and Nurture. Personalised learning for children. AI maths tutor ($425K)

2. SIRIUS. Zoom for musicians. Online music school ($4M)

3. Business travel management- where revenue is growing 70% per year and valuation is already over 2 billion Managing travel and travel through one service ($140M)

4. Skincare. A chain of aesthetic skin care clinics ($1.6M)

5. Food and medicine for rubbish. Start making money from your waste ($5.4M)

6. 24/7 tutoring. Free online tutoring and counselling ($4M)

7. Self-optimising product catalogues. AI adjusts content in real time ($5M)

8. Mobile apps that adjust to posture. SDK to increase conversions and engagement based on 200 smartphone signals ($4M)

9. Marketplaces for ‘returns and surplus’ are gaining popularity. Service selling surplus items at a discount ($18M)

10. Find the best moments in video content and make them ‘viral’ or insert adverts. Video Analysis Services ($1M)

+ my Top10 AI tools

1. Stimy AI and Nurture. Personalised learning for children

Maths edtech company Stimy AI has raised a $425K seed investment. Stimy AI aims to help children between the ages of 10 and 18 around the world who are struggling to learn maths.

The app, available in seven languages, uses advanced artificial intelligence to provide personalised learning support to help students with homework and test preparation. The app not only solves complex maths problems, but also teaches through an engaging and personalised approach.

Nurture is another new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 years old that features interactive content and games. The company's mission is to teach children essential life skills such as communication, financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition and more through story-based adventures in which children can actively participate. On Wednesday, Nurture announced a preliminary round of $2.8M.

The app also has a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between the two screens. Kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen.

What's the trend? Millions of children struggle to learn maths. This problem is particularly pronounced in communities with limited access to education, but affects students around the world. And personalised learning for young children is one of the hottest trends, due to the advent of AI.

More examples.

• ConveGenius is an Indian startup that teaches students online core subjects (K-12) using AI and conversational bots to make learning more fun.

• Yeti Confetti Kids offers personalised learning for students from pre-school to third grade using generative AI.

• Homer is a startup focused on early childhood education through gamification.

How to apply it. Build apps for children of different age groups. For older children, you can help with learning through gamification. For example, retell the plot of classic books or teach stories. And for younger kids, create games that teach basic social skills.

2. SIRIUS. Zoom for musicians

Berlin-based software for musicians SIRIUS has raised $4M in seed funding.

SIRIUS was founded in 2020 by data scientist and piano enthusiast Sebastian Riegelbauer. In collaboration with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's Talent School, he developed SIRIUS as a SaaS video conferencing tool for musicians. But now it's a full-fledged online music school.

SIRIUS offers students and teachers a flexible and modern way to learn music. Students of all ages and backgrounds can find qualified music teachers for personalised online piano, guitar and singing lessons. The platform matches students with the right teachers. It schedules lessons, provides excellent sound quality in online lessons and offers virtual piano, sheet music, metronome, recordings and access to tuition.

What's the trend? 91% of music teachers are self-employed and suffer from job uncertainty, and students in urban areas face long waits. And the sound quality of online music lessons is very poor, as conventional video conferencing classifies musical tones as background noise. In Russia, almost every second Russian, or 46 per cent, according to VTsIOM, would like his or her children to receive a music education in a particular instrument

More examples.

• Trala is an online violin teaching school. The app analyses the sound of the student's violin and gives instant feedback on pitch and rhythm.

• Indaband is a platform for musicians to record videos of themselves performing on instruments and collaboratively create compositions with other users.

  
  How to apply this? Build specialised video calling platforms. After all, there is also a large sector of online tutors and psychotherapists who also need certain features that conventional platforms don't have.

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3. Business travel management- where revenue is growing 70% per year and valuation is already over 2 billion.

Two major rounds (out of the top 3 deals for 2024 in the travel industry) have taken place in recent days in startups in the travel industry and both are related to business travel organisation.

US-based service Engine has raised a record $140m for the industry this year, with the startup's valuation reaching $2.1bn. Engine is a feature-rich service that offers travel booking (connecting business travellers with a network of more than 750,000 hotels, 300 airlines and 40 car rental companies), includes a loyalty system and 24/7 support, and provides the necessary reports and documents on completed trips. It is important to note that according to Crunchbase Engine is profitable and increases its annual revenue by an average of 70%.

Italian service BizAway raised less - $39 million, but it is still a notable amount and the third largest round in the sector. The platform offers a one-click solution for booking and managing travel, saving time and money for businesses.

What's the trend? This investment is indicative of the ongoing recovery of the business travel sector, one of the sectors hardest hit by the COVID pandemic and which has taken longer to recover. Growth is also supported by the spreading post-COVID popularity of hybrid working models, where many companies envisage regular offline meetings in different parts of the world and need services to organise these meetings.

How to use it: create platforms that allow users to plan business trips and team outings, taking into account everything from travel to accommodation and meals.

More examples of business travel services:

• Navan - a cloud-based business travel management solution designed to streamline the booking process with reporting tools;

• TROOP - the service provides users with the ability to plan and organise events by selecting locations and booking tickets, hotels, etc.

Today's issue:
1. “If you can’t overcome it, lead it!” Make the sale of places in queues official - a project with an estimate of $100 million ($10M)

2. DELLI. Marketplace of handmade products. Trend for unique products with a story ($6M)

3. Video surveillance only records, computer vision actually sees, controls and prevents. Synergy of computer vision and IoT sensors ($5.9M)

4. Global social networks are boring. Social networks based on interests are in vogue. Community for Gamers ($30M)

5. “New forms of cashback”? Trade-ins and usage rewards ($6.3M)

6. How to increase conversion and cost per click on your website? Yes, just speed up its work tens of times with the help of AI ($7M)

7. AI assistant for bloggers. Generator of ideas for content to retain the audience

8. Predict what the user will do.Customer Satisfaction Analysis ($2.2M)

9. Old applications in a new wrapper. Share your calendar and tasks ($13M)

10. Augmented reality glasses and AR effects. New from Snap. The Matrix is ​​getting closer.

+ my Top10 AI tools

1. “If you can’t overcome it, lead it!” Make the sale of places in queues official - a project estimated at $100 million

The most famous queue in the world today is, of course, the queue for new iPhones. It may be surprising to some, but this is not the only queue in current times. And people still stand in lines at famous and popular restaurants and clubs. At the same time, as we all know, people sell the queue and people pay to move forward in the queue. So why not make it official (so that the one who created this queue can earn money) and transparent for clients.

LineLeap, which recently raised another $10 million round (with participation from Y Combinator, which has backed the project since its inception), allows people to pay to skip lines at bars. Using the startup's mobile application, users can pay to skip the line at establishments with which LineLeap cooperates. The project began by bringing student bars together on its app, and is now valued at $100 million and currently has 1 million users and over 400 bar partners, on track to process skip-the-line payments this year. for $30 million

Today at LineLeap Users no longer just pay to skip the line, but can also buy tickets to events (from DJ parties to football watch parties and stand-up shows), pay for insurance, pre-order drinks and reserve VIP tables and even VIP bottles. They also receive notifications about special events and promotions, and venue owners have access to transaction reports and analytics.
A social component has also been implemented - users can add their contacts to LineLeap and “check in” at the places you visit, and LineLeap rewards users with points for completing tasks, such as taking photos at an event (points can then be exchanged for “passes”).
What's the trend? Wealthy people strive to save their time and nerves and are willing to pay in order to avoid standing in lines. Projects such as LineLeap allow them to do this officially and simply.

How to use it: develop similar solutions by bringing together partners that allow people to pay for “VIP access” to those partners. Or supplement the services of your business with a similar opportunity - various applications and establishments, for example, offer similar services within their services.

LineLeap - by the way, it’s not the only application for “bypassing” queues.
Similar service, which already existed at the time of start LineLeap is a service Skipit.

More examples

• At airports for travelers with Clear membership - about $189 per year - accompanied to the front row by the company's "ambassadors". Clear has quickly grown to 19 million members and plans to expand into areas such as hospitality, healthcare, financial services and online shopping.

• The dating app Tinder offers membership for $499 per month with a "skip the line" feature that gives priority to the person you're talking to.

• Some ski resorts allow visitors who pay extra to use the express lifts.

• Universal Studios offers an unlimited "Express Pass" starting at $109.99 per person - on top of the price of admission - which lets you skip the line on the spot.

• And, most alarmingly, during the pandemic, wealthy patients in the US paid huge money to be at the front of the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine.

How to apply it? Artificially creating queues and then selling places in them is a cool move for business, it creates additional. demand allows us to sell the same thing, but at a higher price. Look how McDonalds does it (“Delicious, period”).

In the USA, for example, restaurants are designed in such a way that you cannot enter them from the street, only by appointment and reservation of a table 2-3 days in advance. Why isn't this an example of an artificial queue? 

2. DELLI. Marketplace of handmade products

DELLI, an online platform for selling handmade food and beverages, has raised $6M in seed funding. DELLI has demonstrated a 16-fold increase in sales since last year. It offers thousands of new products and sells hundreds of thousands of items, with shoppers doubling the size of their baskets on the platform and returning twice as often.

Products are sold using the "drop" model common in fashion (where a limited number of a new product is released at a certain time). For example, iconic Manchester bakery Pollen recently launched its croissant butter exclusively on DELLI for the first time and sold out twice in less than a week.
On the merchant side, DELLI is developing tools that will enable small producers to start and grow their businesses and easily connect with customers, helping to overcome some of the major obstacles they face in the current supermarket-dominated system.

What's the trend? Shoppers are moving away from processed, mass-produced products and toward small-batch, home-made products. They want to discover new products that have a story behind them. Avito analysts conducted study dynamics of sales of handmade goods on the platform in the first months of 2024. The results showed that Russians increasingly prefer handmade products, reflecting a growing interest in uniqueness, personalization and sustainability. Desserts became the top seller: demand for them soared. Marshmallows are sold 7 times more than last year, edible bouquets - 6 times, chocolate - 5.5 times, candies - 5 times, and chocolate-covered strawberries - 2 times. Handmade sweets remain the top seller - the average price of a box is 800 rubles, but can vary greatly depending on the composition.

More examples. 

• Wikifarmer - a platform for farmers and agricultural producers, which includes its own marketplace for selling manufactured goods directly to consumers. This allows farmers to earn 30-40% more.

• Freshtohome - delivers fresh food from farmers to consumers.

• Homemeal is a homemade food delivery platform that connects chefs with customers. The startup is focused on providing unique experiences and authentic home-cooked food.

How to apply it? Take it and do the same! There is a demand for such solutions in Russia, and not only in the dessert segment. 

3. Video surveillance only records, computer vision actually sees, controls and prevents

What's the trend? Computer vision technologies are becoming an essential tool in the areas of security and automation of production processes. Simple video surveillance, which only records the facts, is no longer enough. Modern businesses need operational control and prevention of unwanted events, and computer vision can provide this.

Recently, investments have been attracted, for example, by the following projects developing services based on computer vision:

• Purple Transform ($5.9 million) - the project uses computer vision, as well as IoT sensors and other sources, data from which is visualized in the service application and automatically detects anomalies and deviations from specified patterns in order to solve security problems or maintain business productivity in real time ;

• Track3D ($4.3 million) - monitors progress and identifies deviations at construction sites, accumulating data from drones, laser scanners and video cameras. Track3D acts as a hub for all visual data about objects under construction, optimizing processes at every stage of construction.

How to use it: computer vision can solve many problems for business - tracking compliance with safety regulations and monitoring productivity, sorting (for example, waste or different types of products), identification of defects, control at construction sites - in all these niches it is quite possible to launch and promote your own services.

More examples of services for various areas in general and for construction in particular:

• Kibsi - a project that creates a no-code computer vision platform that allows companies to implement applications for tracking various objects using existing cameras;

• Voxel — uses AI to analyze the video stream in production and warn about safety violations;

• TuMeke - a project focused on worker safety, using computer vision to monitor work processes to improve safety and collect data for the future implementation of robots;

• Spot AI is a startup that provides monitoring through CCTV cameras using AI. It creates dashboards for event reporting and helps in monitoring worker productivity;

• Buildots — a development that uses computer vision for construction. service, which includes process automation at construction sites and solving quality control problems;

• Reconstruct is a startup that collects information from cameras and sensors at construction sites, and its smart algorithms find deviations in processes and safety violations.

4. Global social networks are boring. Social networks based on interests are in vogue

What's the trend? The current big trend is that internet users are getting tired of the so-called “digital town square” that global social networks represent. And many now prefer communities of interest.

For example, there are the following interesting facts:

• number of jogging app users per year Strava increased by 20% and therefore the developers added a messenger to it so that you can not only keep training statistics, but also communicate;

• social network Ravelry, dedicated to knitting, today already covers over 9 million users;

• audience Goodreads (community of book lovers) has already exceeded 150 million;

• Letterboxd (an app for movie fans), this summer exceeded 14 million users.

Because hobby apps have a nicer atmosphere, people spend more time in them and even get to know each other through them.

Some of the most popular hobbies are probably video games and cars. And recently, investments were attracted to social projects from precisely these niches:

• E-Pal ($30 million) - a community that brings together high-quality gamers from all over the world, where you can communicate and play together;

• RevMatch ($120 thousand) - an artificial intelligence-based platform where it is convenient to search for everything you need for your car and communicate with other car enthusiasts.

How you can use this trend: Users are now looking for more personalized and interest-based social networks. This opens up opportunities for projects that focus on niche interests, creating a healthy atmosphere for participants to communicate and interact.

More examples similar niche projects that were mentioned in our reviews:

• Marigold Health — an anonymous social network in which people with mental illness and substance abusers support each other;

• Kikihub — a social network for people living in the neighborhood;

• Gameram - a social network with mechanics similar to Instagram, but for casual game players

• various communities for pet owners - Pawsr, Petzbe and other.

5. “New forms of cashback”? Trade-ins and rewards for use

What's the trend? We have already noted more than once that in recent years the popularity of projects related to cashbacks and discounts has not decreased. Cashbacks have already become a common tool for attracting customers. But there is a downside to this - an effect similar to “banner blindness” occurs, when cashback begins to be perceived not as something additional and attracting the audience, but as a normal condition of purchase. And some projects are starting to look for a replacement for traditional discounts and cashbacks.

For example, project Fairown ($6.3 million) guarantees redemption after a certain period of use of the purchased product. They claim that you won’t have to wonder what to do with an outdated laptop or something your child has outgrown—the service guarantees in advance that you will buy this item back when you no longer need it. Thus, for the buyer it is like a kind of “deferred discount/cashback” option.

And the project PuffPaw ($6 million) offers vapes and rewards for smoking time - you smoke, you get tokens - in fact, the same cashback for purchased vape cartridges.

How to use it: projects offering discounts and cashbacks always attract a mass audience - users love additional benefits from their purchases. But standard programs blur the buyer’s eye and it makes sense to consider alternative options like the examples given above.

At the same time, we must accept that the creation of loyalty systems and referral programs is practically a necessary condition in marketing.

Let us recall examples of projects related to discounts and cashbacks:

• Fetch Rewards - a project that allows users to make purchases, photograph their receipts and receive points that can be exchanged for gift cards and other rewards;

• Claim - a social network that combines a referral system and a reward system, allowing users to earn and exchange rewards for purchases;

• Checkmate — an extension for Chrome that automatically searches for and applies promotional codes and discounts for users when shopping online;

• Karma — an extension for Chrome that helps users track prices in online stores, offers notifications about price reductions and searches for promotional codes, providing cashback from partner stores;

• Ziscuit is a startup that helps users find cheap products in stores nearby by collecting data about discounts and promotions.

6. How to increase conversion and cost per click on your website? Yes, just speed up its work tens of times with the help of AI

What's the trend? One of the problems with e-commerce is the UX of their websites. Convenience and speed of a website are critical to customer retention. Buyers demand lightning-fast responses on web pages, and every millisecond impacts their experience and also directly impacts sellers' revenue. And at present, the introduction of AI in website optimization can significantly advance the solution to the issue of their speed.

«Nostra AI Edge Delivery Engine» from the project Our(recently raised $8.9 million) speeds up websites by looking at personalized information—such as a shopping cart, for example—and determining what content can be cached to reduce load times. The service engine, combined with another development of the project - “Nostra AI Crawler Optimization”, which improves the performance of the website for bots, ultimately provides a powerful set of tools that provide almost instant results for online sellers.

According to the founder, the service makes websites significantly faster (one of the reviews states, for example, that loading time has been reduced from 600 to 16 ms), clients of the service almost instantly get results and see more than 10% increase in income simply by reducing page loading time .

How to use it: If you have competencies in AI, then it is worth developing services that can improve loading speed indicators, as well as automate the detection and correction of errors on sites, as well as UX analysis and optimization. If your topic is online trading, then you need to take a closer look at such services, since website optimization directly affects conversion and customer retention.

More examples of projects in the field of AI website optimization:

• 404 Error Hound — a service that finds and corrects errors on websites using AI to improve their performance;

• Swifto — A/B testing based on artificial intelligence for website optimization;.

• Flawless — a tool for a quick audit of a website’s UX, helps identify shortcomings in the user interface and gives recommendations for correcting them, which can indirectly affect the speed of the site.

7. Spotter. AI assistant for bloggers

Spotter, a startup offering funding to content creators, announced the launch of its new AI-powered software and raised another $7M.

Called Spotter Studio, the solution is designed to support YouTubers throughout the creative process: helping them brainstorm video concepts, generate cover and title ideas, plan projects, organize tasks, and collaborate with their team. Most notably, it has a feature that analyzes billions of publicly available YouTube videos to get inspiration from similar bloggers.

Spotter's Brainstorm feature generates ideas based on the author's prompts and previous work. There are also override options to further customize the results. For example, it is possible to describe the target audience. So, if the majority of viewers are men, the creators can offer ideas aimed at a female audience. Interestingly, the AI ​​also analyzes more than two billion of the most popular videos on YouTube from similar creators to offer Spotter users recommendations for increasing the popularity of their own videos. The feature, called "Outliers", acts as a "research co-pilot", culling videos from other bloggers that the creator's audience is also watching.

According to the startup, during early beta testing, results showed an average 49% increase in views in the first week compared to videos produced without Spotter Studio.

What's the trend? Results survey, which Odnoklassniki (OK) conducted among more than 500 bloggers, showed that the most exciting topic for bloggers this year was maintaining the interest of the audience. 42 percent of respondents said they care about viewership rates and audience engagement with content.

More examples. TubeBuddy and vidIQ - also artificial intelligence tools designed for creators.

How to apply it? Create the same software for Russian bloggers. Both on YouTube and on domestic platforms that are gaining popularity, for example, the average monthly audience (MAU) of VKontakte in Russia reached 85 million users by the end of the third quarter of 2023. Over the year, the figure increased by 10%.

8. Actionable. Predict what the user will do

Company Actionable, which specializes in predictive customer satisfaction analytics, announced it has raised $2.2M in funding, five months after its launch.

Through its platform, it offers companies the ability to predict the satisfaction of all their customers on a daily basis. Actionable identifies key drivers of customer satisfaction and tracks key metrics in real time using a comprehensive dashboard and widgets.

What's the trend? Services that handle reviews effectively will grow as competition increases and companies that provide the best service will stand out. And the probability of selling to an existing customer is several times higher than to a new client: 60-70% versus 5-20%.

More examples. Plan hate is a service that studies user activity and predicts who may leave the platform in the near future.

How to apply it? It seems that in the Russian Federation such platforms will be of interest only to large companies, but small solutions may well be suitable for medium-sized players. For example, services for AI review analytics.

9. Howbout and Karo. Old applications in a new wrapper

There are many calendaring, scheduling, and to-do list apps that take care of your professional life and help you plan meetings with colleagues and workmates.

But Howbout is an application for finding time to chat with friends. The company is counting on the fact that some Gen Z users are happy to share their entire calendar with friends. The company announced it has raised $8M in Series A funding. The company has raised over $13M in funding to date.

With the app, you can see your own schedule and the schedules of friends who have shared their calendars with you. You can also share your schedule with a wider range of people without sharing your full calendar. There are also tools like voting for availability times or appointments - just like calendars do in a professional environment. The company has over 4 million monthly active users and over 50 million events created in the app.

We've sorted out the calendars, but what about the tasks? After all, it can be difficult to get family members or friends to use the same task management app. iOS application Karo (which means "do it" in Hindi) aims to solve this problem even if the other person is not using the app. 

No app allows me to simply delegate and track tasks that I have for people in my contacts. For example, an accountant, a nurse, a plumber or an electrician. You can simply send them a task so that they receive it in the applications they already use (WhatsApp/Messages). If they don't complete the task, instead of nagging them, the app will send automatic reminders.

What's the trend? The majority of its users are aged 25 or younger, stated that more than 75% of users share their full calendar with at least one friend.

How to apply it? Add network-viral functions to regular applications, as they did Howbout. Look at old applications from a new angle, maybe you, too, will come up with something new from the old one.

10. Augmented reality glasses and AR effects. New from Snap 

Snap recently released AR glasses, which seem more interesting than Apple Vision Pro (do you remember about such a product?)

You may get the feeling that this is all a dead-end branch of development - Apple Vision Pro did not take off, Meta’s plans to create a Metaverse, too (remember that fashionable term “metaverse”?)

But the stakes here are so high that it looks like we will still be driven into the “Matrix”, with the help of yet another smart glasses or “smart contact lenses”, as in one of the episodes of “Black Mirror”.

What's the trend? Augmented reality glasses are a powerful platform shift, even more powerful than the human shift from computers to smartphones. This is essentially control over the main channel of human communication - over vision. Therefore, from the point of view of corporations, it is a completely justified step to spend a couple of billion dollars of investment on the production of the next glasses, because if successful, the reward is incomparably greater.

Glasses allow you to mix real reality and augmented reality. In a philosophical sense, we have been living in augmented reality for so long (we supplement it with media, stories, imaginary entities such as money, freedom, state, religion)

More examples

1. He climbs is a project that uses augmented reality (AR) technologies for retail, including barcode scanning and object recognition. The startup has raised $80M in investment.

2. Fabric is a startup that provides AR solutions for sporting events, allowing spectators to interact through polls and interactive elements. Raised $4M of investment.

How to apply it? Take a closer look at AR tools for content creation. For example, AR studios from Snap and TikTok.

Interesting tools this week

1. Choppity - Cuts out important points in videos based on audio and visual senses.

2. Trooper — create video tutorials for any product.

3. Mneme AI — communicate with notes, documents and books saved on your phone.

4. AIPhone - an application for international calls, converts calls into audio and text in 91 languages ​​and dialects.

5. Silatus is a tool for studying academic, product and market research.

6. Avaturn — Selfie with 3D avatar.

7. AI for Career — helps to build career paths.

8. Docling by IBM is an open source tool that makes PDF conversion easy.

9. Thunderbit — a Chrome extension that automates your everyday tasks

10. SciSpace AI Academic Writer — helps to write scientific articles.