招聘文本分析创企Textio,获800万美元A轮融资来源:猎云网(编译:竹子)
Textio,一家分析特定情景中的词汇和语言的创企,今天宣布完成了由Emergence Capital领投的800万美元A轮融资。Cowboy Ventures、Bloomberg Beta和Upside Partnership也参与了此次融资。
Textio的第一款工具瞄准的是人才并购领域如招聘。创始人Snyder发现,某些特定的词汇和设计对应聘者更有吸引力,于是这些预测分析就被吸纳进了Textio的服务里。Textio可以分析一个公司的职务说明、绩效考核与其它备案,并判断这些文案是否可以为公司取得最佳效果。
该软件利用人工智能技术扫描招聘文本信息,然后向公司建议进行调整,以提高该公司吸引能力强的应聘者的机会。比如,有重点句的职位招聘总是比没有的更吸引求职者。Textio的软件还会建议各公司引进更多样化的应聘者。例如女性职场人士通常不会参与办公室内斗,或通常不会从事代码类的工作。
Textio成立于去年秋天,它的两位创始人 Kieran Snyder 和 Jensen Harris 分别是微软和亚马逊的前员工,Kieran Snyder之前致力于科技公司中性别歧视的研究,同时曾在微软、亚马逊任职语言学家,Jensen Harris曾在微软工作过16年。Textio创办后不到5个月,就在今年2月份拿到了150万美元的融资。
Textio主要以三个方面来衡量相关的科技短语:一是申请包含该短语岗位的应聘者人数;二是满足该词语要求技能的应聘者在全部应聘者中的百分比;第三是工作招聘发出后多久能够招到相关的人才。
虽然目前它的用处在于职位招聘,但很明显,这些技术可以被用到其他很多方面,比如邮件、简历以及其他各类信息。如果技术运行良好,理论上它可以为各类文档搭建分数库,这或许也是吸引投资人的地方。
Textio还有其他有价值的过人之处吗?大概就是它的客户了吧。目前使用Textio服务的企业有Twitter、Atlassian、Starbucks、Square和Microsoft等等。自然语言处理技术有广阔的应用领域,这又是对投资人的另一大强烈吸引。
Snyder表示,Textio目前可以识别出超过6万句短语词组,而这一数据还在持续增长。它会研究词汇是以何种方式组合在一起,比如词组中动词的密度和其他语法相关的特性。基于以上种种,最后给出评定分数。
当然,Textio也有不少潜在的竞争对手,诸如IBM Watson理论上也能分析文本并给出类似的结果。不过Snyder表示他们的优势在于专注的内容领域更具体。
Textio, A Startup That Analyzes Text Performance, Raises $8M
Textio CEO Kieran Snyder took a quantitative approach to how language worked in her linguistics studies. And when she and her co-founder Jensen Harris were leaving Microsoft to start a new company, it was only natural that it would be centered around language in some way.
That’s how Textio, a startup that analyzes text for how well words and phrases perform in certain scenarios, was born. The company today said it raised $8 million in a financing round led by Emergence Capital. Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Upside Partnership also participated in the financing round.
“We had this premise that word processing in text hadn’t been disrupted in a while, from command line to GUI,” CEO Kieran Snyder said. “We had the internet come along, it was about social and sharing, and we think that AI and the set of related technologies is the next big disruptor of text. If you know the performance of a document before it’s ever published then you can fix it before it’s published.”
Textio’s first tool looks at talent acquisition documents — like job postings — to determine how well they will perform among candidates. Certain words and layouts attract more candidates than others, Snyder found, and those predictive analytics are baked into the service. For example, Textio shows that job postings with bullet points tend to perform better than job postings without them.
Right now it’s used for talent acquisition documents, but it’s pretty easy to see that the technology can be applied to documents that include common phrases — such as email, resumes, or other kinds of messages. If the technology works, it can theoretically begin building up scores for those kinds of documents, which is likely what attracted investors to the product and the team.
Another reason it might be so valuable to investors? Its customers. Already Textio is being used by companies like Twitter, Atlassian, Starbucks, Square and Microsoft. Natural Language Processing technology has very broad applications if done right, which makes it an attractive bet for many investors.
Textio recognizes more than 60,000 phrases with its predictive technology, Snyder said, and that data set is changing constantly as it continues to operate. It looks at how words are put together — such as how verb dense a phrase is — and at other syntax-related properties the document may have. All that put together results in a score for the document, based on how likely it is to succeed in whatever the writer set out to do.
Given who’s likely using Textio, it’s important that it feels easy to use — hence the highlighting and dropdown boxes rather than readouts. Snyder said, at its core, Textio can’t feel like a statistics tool, and that’s probably because the kinds of people using it might not always be NLP experts.
Of course, there are potential competitors in the space when it comes to natural language processing. There are tools like IBM Watson that can analyze text and, in theory, pull off a similar result. But Snyder says Textio’s results will be better because they are content-specific — like in the case of talent-acquisition documents.
Source:TC
为企业提供Uber式按需服务,Bringg获500万美元A轮投资
为企业提供按需服务的创企Bringg目前A轮融资500万美元。
这家创企计划用这笔资金推动其网页和移动平台进入按需领域,提供企业类似于实时驾驶追踪、派件、警报、移动信息等服务。
截至目前,Bringg已共计获得了750万美元的投资。这家办公场所设立在特拉维夫和纽约的创企已将业务扩张到了50多个国家(包括欧洲、亚洲和非洲),共拥有数百位客户。
Bringg创办于2013年,由首席执行官Raanan Cohen和首席技术官Lior Sion联合创办。前者是通信企业MobileMax的前创始人兼首席执行官;后者是以色列叫车服务GetTaxi和在线项目管理软件Clarizen.com的前首席技术官。
Bringg可以为企业提供当今顾客所需的Uber类配送服务的操作技术,例如司机可以在行驶的同时提供配送服务、接收短信提醒和追踪快件等等。
从商业层面讲,Bringg整合了现有系统的功能,例如网络和移动派件、快件追踪、司机和客户间的交流应用、收集签名等。
这家创企还和一些更小规模的公司展开了合作,例如食品配送服务Lish和Zuppler。此外,Bringg发现企业市场——即已拥有1000名以上配送司机的企业更有市场发展潜力,其中包括想和亚马逊一较高下的大型零售商、服务提供商和家庭配送企业。
联合创始人表示Bringg的目标受众正是这些已具备配送服务但仍想扩大市场份额的大企业。
如今Bringg已拥有近24个大企业级用户,本轮融资将用于扩大企业在美国和以色列的18人团队以及提升服务内容(包括整合按需订购系统功能在内),进一步扩大市场份额,吸引更多大型机构进行合作。
Bringg Lets Any Business Offer Uber-Like Experiences To Their Customers
Uber has set the standard for mobile transportation apps, allowing customers to order, pay for and view their driver’s location right from their mobile device. Now, a new startup called Bringg wants to offer a similar level of visibility for any delivery-based service or those with drivers en route – whether that’s a mom-and-pop dry cleaner making their daily runs, restaurants making deliveries, or even service technicians heading out on calls.
The company was founded in 2013 by Raanan Cohen (CEO), the former founder and CEO of MobileMax; and Lion Sion (CTO), previously the CTO of GetTaxi and Clarizen.com. Bringg has been operating in a beta period over the past six months, testing the service with a handful of customers representing different types of businesses, including food-delivery services Lish and Zuppler, for example. It’s now launching to the public.
Explains Sion, the two co-founders had discussed the idea for Bringg as far back as two years ago while lamenting over the fact that the revolution that came about with transportation apps, like Uber or GetTaxi, hadn’t yet translated itself into other areas.
“Why is it that when I’m ordering pizza for my kids, we don’t know when the delivery person is coming, exactly?,” Raanan complained to his friend.
Recalls Sion, “he said, why is it that the same solution you have with taxis – why is it not yet out there for others?”
So the two began working to develop a way for any company to integrate an on-demand service offering an Uber-like user experience into their own products – web, mobile or otherwise. With Bringg, the idea is not to create consumer-facing mobile applications similar to Uber’s, but instead to allow a business to communicate with customers about the status of their driver’s whereabouts however they see fit.
Businesses can opt to use Bringg’s web-based interface, its APIs and mobile SDKs for iOS, Android and JavaScript, or any combination they like. For example, a company could choose to send out an email or SMS containing a link that popped open an HTML5 web page that showed the driver en route in real time. Or the company could choose to integrate Bringg’s SDK into its own native mobile app, if one already existed.
Bringg’s technology stops short of handling order processing and payments. However, it’s able to integrate with a number of point-of-sale solutions, as well as online and offline ordering solutions, notes Sion. The service is sold on a software-as-a-service basis to customers starting at $10 per month per driver. A $20 per month per driver option is also available, which allows businesses to further customize the service – for example, branding it with their own logos or customizing the SMS messages customers receive.
Meanwhile, on the business owners’ side, Bringg offers reporting features that help them gain insight into their deliveries, as they’re able to see things like how long deliveries take, or distances traveled, and more. Businesses can also manage and dispatch drivers, and track them in real time.
During the company’s beta period, Bringg found that they didn’t have to sell businesses on the concept of what they were offering, which is something that surprised them, says Sion.
“We thought we’d still be trying to convince people that on-demand is happening and it’s something you need to do,” he says. “But it turns out, everybody gets it…it was very easy to get people to join.” The company hasn’t yet done much PR or marketing, but already has 100 developers working with its products.
“People just heard about us and came,” Sion says.
Headquartered in Israel, but now expanding to New York, Bringg is a 13-person team and is backed by $2.5 million in funding from strategic partner ITURAN, a fleet-management company.
Source:TC
编译:孙媛