Aidoc, the Tel Aviv startup using AI to analyse medical scans, has raised $27 million in Series B funding. The round is led by Square Peg Capital and brings total funding to date to $40 million. The company’s previous backers include Israeli VC TLV Partners, Magma Ventures and Emerge.

Offering a solution aimed at radiologists — and already deployed commercially across 100 sites — Aidoc claims to be able to detect high-level visual abnormalities from various types of medical scans. The idea is that by working in tandem with humans, it’s able to flag the most critical and urgent cases where a faster diagnosis and treatment could save lives.

Initially providing support for CT scans, the Israeli startup recently reached its millionth analysed patient scan. It says it is adding support for oncology and X-ray. The oncology solution will automatically and instantly detect, measure and compare tumour size with past scans as soon as the radiologist opens the image. I’m also told that another feature on the upcoming roadmap is support MRI scans.

Meanwhile, Aidoc has grown its team from 5 people to 60 since we last covered the company in early 2017. It has also taken part in a number of published clinical studies in various journals and has had its algorithms cleared by the FDA and achieve European CE marks.

“From the 100 sites we’re already working with, mounting evidence is demonstrating real value to patients,” says Aidoc co-founder and CEO Elad Walach. “We feel a responsibility to get this technology into as many hospitals as possible, as soon as possible”. The company aims to be deployed in 500 hospitals within the next two years.

Walach says that Aidoc is working with the American College of Radiology DSI to continuously monitor the performance of the company’s commercially deployed solution. The aim is to provide public visibility on the real-life clinical impact, which he argues is crucial for the continued adoption of AI technologies within medical practice.

Engaging Care, the Swedish heathtech startup founded by Annica Belfrage and Charlotta Tönsgård (who was previously CEO of online doctor app Min Doktor), has raised €2.5 million in seed funding. The round is co-led by two European venture capital firms: Connect Ventures and Crowberry Capital.

It follows the company’s €800,000 pre-seed funding in July from a number of well-known European investors. They include Neil Murray’s The Nordic Web Ventures, Hampus Jakobsson (venture partner at BlueYard Capital and co-founder of TAT, which sold to Blackberry for $150 million), and Sophia Bendz (Atomico Partner and former Global Marketing Director at Spotify).

Aiming to digitise healthcare beyond traditional electronic medical record systems, Engaging Care is developing a SaaS and mobile apps to enable healthcare providers to better connect and communicate with patients. Its first product, launched late last year, is a communications platform that allows healthcare providers to share information and interact with patients in a secure way.

The SaaS is already deployed with several paying customers who use the platform on a daily basis for both their healthcare professionals and patients.

“Interaction between healthcare professionals and patients is generally speaking still a very analog activity,” Egaging Care CEO Tönsgård tells me. “The work is centered around exchanging information at face-to-face meetings. Our healthcare professionals are a scarce and expensive resource, and sometimes their time is wasted in a careless way”.

Tönsgård argues that digital technology is the solution, and that new digital tools such as Engaging Care enable the knowledge built up by healthcare teams to be accessible to more patients “faster and easier”. This in turn frees up medical professionals to spend more time on the things that actually matter. “Our tool allows healthcare teams to have a reliable place to collect knowledge and communicate effectively with their patients,” she says.

As one example, the Organ Transplant Unit at Sweden’s Skåne University Hospital are using the Engaging Care application to complement face-to-face knowledge sharing with a digital library accessible to both patients and their team 24/7. This is enabling patients to have more autonomy over their healthcare and make better informed decisions.

“One of the challenges when it comes to the digitization of healthcare is the high workload that already exists. For that reason, we will continue to release new features that lower the threshold for adoption, making it easier for professionals to integrate our tools into their day-to-day work,” adds Tönsgård.

“We believe that safe, scalable communication is the key to increase the efficiency of healthcare long term, while also helping patients to become more aware and independent about their own health. One specific feature we’ll be focusing on the next months is to enable patients and healthcare professionals to prepare physical meetings beforehand. Our trials with clinics show that this is an important path to both more efficient meetings and meetings with higher quality”.

Home owners in the US spend upwards of $300 billion annually on home repairs and maintenance — a huge sum that often comes with another, more hidden cost: the stress of finding reliable tradespeople, managing those jobs, and (in the worst-case scenario) picking up the pieces if things go wrong.

Now, a startup called Super has built what it believes is a “fix” for that problem: a subscription service for maintenance and repair services for your property. Today, it’s announcing a Series B of $20 million to continue scaling that business across the US after growing its business 400 percent each year for the past two years.

The funding is being led by Aquiline Technology Growth (ATG), with participation Munich Re Ventures, Liberty Mutual from the insurance industry, Moderne Ventures, Joe Lonsdale’s firm 8VC, the Qatar Investment Authority and Solon Mack Capital. It’s an impressive mix, as it underscores Super’s traction and credibility among those close to its field: Munich Re Ventures and Liberty Mutual are insurance powerhouses; Aquiline and Moderne focus on insurance and real estate startups, QIA has extensive investments in the construction sector, and Solon Mack is the family office of the Mack real estate entrepreneurs.

Jorey Ramer, the founder and CEO of Super, said he came up with the idea for Super after he sold his previous company, Jumptap — an advertising network acquired by Millennial Media (which is now part of Verizon by way of its acquisition of AOL, just like TechCrunch). Having been an apartment renter and dweller for all of his adult life, he found himself buying property when he moved to the Bay Area, and it came with more than a little reluctance because of the headache of taking care of his new home.

“I liked being a renter,” he said in an interview. “You pay a fee, and you know what to expect.” (Indeed, “Super” is double word play meaning “great” but also the nickname for the superintendent that often handles the maintenance and repair in an apartment building.)

Looking at the state of the market, he said he wasn’t very happy with the services that were already out there offering to provide maintenance and care, which he found were too entrenched in their old way of doing things (something that I’d agree with from personal experience as a homeowner in England, by the way).

“These companies have prioritized costs over service,” he said. “Yes, they have built service provider networks, but they are not service providers that you would invite into your own home if you were finding them directly. The whole system creates incentives to do the least amount of work possible, or upsell work that you just don’t need. They are deeply ingrained systems that needed to be reinvented from scratch.”

And that is what Super is aiming to do. Right now, the company provides links through to vetted providers of repair and maintenance services that are priced in tiers of $20, $60 or $90 per month depending on levels of service (for example: appliance, home, premium home; breakdown coverage; expanded coverage, and so on). Today there is a $75 copay on all repairs and other work, but as the company continues to hone its business model and relationships with suppliers — including those who might sell its service to home owners such as the companies selling the actual homes — that is likely to change.

“The long term vision,” Ramer said, “is eventually to cover 100 percent of your repair and maintenance in your home. You will never have to pay for anything because everything will be included in the subscription.”

Super is touching on an emerging but very interesting point here. Just as companies like Uber and Lyft have helped change the conversation about the future of transportation services, companies like Opendoor are changing the dynamics and conventions around how people buy and sell — and potentially own — homes. That’s presenting a big opportunity to rethink every stage of that process, bringing in new players like Super, and old players like Angie’s List that are now taking new approaches; to also reconsider not just what they offer to the market, but what channels they use to find customers. (It’s an area that Amazon, unsurprisingly, is also eyeing up, since the home is the ultimate platform for just about everything else it offers to the market in terms of products and services.)

Ramer said that while Super today is primarily selling directly to homeowners, there are many options open in the future for how its service might be bundled with others, be they buying the property, or buying insurance, or even buying the white goods and other things that will eventually fill those homes.

“Super has developed an effective, convenient platform to provide premium care and repair services for homeowners,” said Max Chee of ATG in a statement. “Super is tackling an industry that is ripe for innovation with a smart, technology-forward approach, and we are excited to work with Jorey and the rest of the team at Super to help continue that exciting trajectory.”

Bizzabo, the New York and Tel Aviv-based events management platform, has raised $27 million in Series D funding. Leading the round is Viola Growth, along with new investor Next47.

We’re also told that previous backers, including Pilot Growth, followed on. The new funding brings the total raised by the company to $56 million.

Originally launched in 2012 as a networking app for event attendees, Bizzabo now claims to be the leading end-to-end “Event Success Platform”. As it exists today, one way to describe the cloud-based software is akin to ‘Salesforce for events’: helping enterprises create, manage and execute every aspect of a live event.

As TechCrunch’s Catherine Shu previously wrote, the SaaS automates time-consuming event tasks related to email, social media and web marketing, and contact management.

There’s an increasing data play, too, with the ability to crunch and analyse event data to help event organisers garner more registrations, increase revenue, and improve the overall attendee experience.

“Our vision is to provide a data-driven and personalized journey for attendees,” Bizzabo CEO and co-founder Eran Ben-Shushan tells me. “An 800-person conference should feel like 800 unique in-person event experiences. By leveraging hundreds of data points throughout the attendee journey, our customers can deliver extremely personalised promotion campaigns, custom-tailor the event agenda and proactively cater to each attendee action”.

As an example, Ben-Shushan says an attendee at a user conference can receive recommended sessions, business introductions, and even sponsored offers based on interest and intent expressed before, during, and after the event.

To that end, Bizzabo says its Series D will be used to expand the platform’s capabilities and continue to help enterprise and mid-market organizations “build data-driven, personalized and engaging professional event experiences”. The will include growing its R&D and own marketing teams, adding to the more than 120 current employees in its New York and Tel-Aviv offices.

Ben-Shushan reckons that on average 25 percent of a B2B company’s marketing budget is spent on live events. This has resulted in the number of professional events increasingly exponentially each year, such as conferences and seminars, trade shows or other experiences.

However, it remains a challenge to create, manage, market and measure the success of events while maximizing ROI — which is where Ben-Shushan says Bizzabo comes in.

Bizzabo’s better known customers include Inbound, SaaStr, Forbes, Dow Jones, Gainsight, and Drift. Meanwhile, the event management space as a whole is said to be worth $500 billion.

Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors has come a long way since Qualcomm’s outsize $44 billion to acquire it fell through last year. In an announcement released on Tuesday, NXP said it’s agreed to back and partner with Hawkeye Technology, a Chinese company specializing in automotive radars, as part of an ambition to capture the rapid growth of sensor-powered vehicles in China.

Financial terms of the investment were undisclosed, but the tie-up will see Hawkeye providing a suite of technical know-how to NXP. That includes the Chinese company’s engineering team, a research lab it set up with Southeast University in the Chinese city of Nanjing, and its 77Ghz radar, a long-range sensing technology that enables cars to detect crashes down to sub-millimeter accuracy.

Under the agreement, NXP and Hawkeye will work together to create reference designs rather than retail products.

“The fast development of ADAS [Automatic Data Acquisition System] and autonomous driving technologies has raised new requirements for vehicle-based millimeter radar,” said Alex Shi, co-founder and chief executive of Hawkeye. “By partnering with NXP, Hawkeye will focus on providing advanced millimeter wave radar system level solutions as well as comprehensive technical support for Tier 1 customers.”

The deal is a smart move for NXP, whose claim to fame is its chips for car-related applications, as it strives to be a key player in China’s autonomous driving race. Hawkeye may be little known, but not its CEO. Shi was the former boss of Banma Network, a joint venture between ecommerce behemoth Alibaba and Chinese state-owned automaker SAIC Motors, which is the key force to commercialize Alibaba’s connected car solutions.

In April 2015, Shi and a group of other prominent auto figures from China founded Hawkeye with an initial registered capital of 30 million yuan ($4.5 million).

The Hawkeye funding arrived less than a year after Qualcomm dropped its proposed buyout of NXP, which was set to be one of the largest in the semiconductor space but ended up as a collateral damage in rising trade tensions between China and the U.S. Qualcomm had mulled buying NXP as early as September 2016.

China remained a focus for NXP, which assured that its alliance with Hawkeye is evidence of its “confidence in the Chinese market” and “determination to continuously invest in the country,” said NXP president Kurt Sievers in a statement.

“Innovators in automotive, like Hawkeye and Southeast University, have become the driving force for the transformation of China’s automotive industry. We are pleased to collaborate with these excellent partners, leveraging NXP’s leadership in the fast-growing radar semiconductor market to improve road safety,” Sievers added.

Aptiv, the U.S. auto supplier and self-driving software company, is opening an autonomous mobility center in Shanghai to focus on the development and eventual deployment of its technology on public roads.

The expansion marks the fifth market where Aptiv has set up R&D, testing or operational facilities. Aptiv has autonomous driving operations in Boston, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Singapore. But China is perhaps its most ambitious endeavor yet.

Aptiv has never had any AV operations in China, but it does have a long history in the country including manufacturing and engineering facilities. The company, in its earlier forms as Delphi and Delco has been in China since 1993 — experience that will be invaluable as it tries to bring its autonomous vehicle efforts into a new market, Aptiv Autonomous Mobility President Karl Iagnemma told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

“The long-term opportunity in China is off the charts,” Iagnemma said, noting a recent McKinsey study that claims the country will host two-thirds of the world’s autonomous driven miles by 2040 and be trillion-dollar mobility service opportunity.

“For Aptiv, it’s always been a question of not ‘if’, but when we’re going to enter the Chinese market,” he added.

Aptiv will have self-driving cars testing on public roads by the second half of 2019.

“Our experience in other markets has shown that in this industry, you learn by doing,” Iagnemma explained.

And it’s remark that Iagnemma can stand by. Iagnemma is the co-founder of self-driving car startup nuTonomy, one of the first to launch a robotaxi service in 2016 in Singapore that the public—along with human safety drivers — could use.

NuTonomy was acquired by Delphi in 2017 for $450 million. NuTonomy became part of Aptiv after its spinoff from Delphi was complete.

Aptiv is also in discussions with potential partners for mapping and commercial deployment of Aptiv’s vehicles in China.

Some of those partnerships will likely mimic the types of relationships Aptiv has created here in the U.S., notably with Lyft . Aptiv’s self-driving vehicles operate on Lyft’s ride-hailing platform in Las Vegas and have provided more than 40,000 paid autonomous rides in Las Vegas via the Lyft app.

Aptiv will also have to create new kinds of partnerships unlike those it has in the U.S. due to restrictions and rules in China around data collection, intellectual property and creating high resolution map data.

TED is unveiling the eight participants in the second year of The Audacious Project, a program aimed at helping nonprofits pursue their most ambitious goals.

TED’s Chris Anderson told reporters yesterday that this is “an attempt to solve one of the most annoying things about the nonprofit world” — the fact that organizations have to raise money “one bloody meeting at a time.” And since often they can’t get all the money they need, “they end up cutting back their dreams.”

So The Audacious Project (which TED runs with support from social impact advisor The Bridgespan Group) asks nonprofits to lay out their “biggest dream” on the TED stage. Comparing this to an IPO, Anderson said this is an “Audacious Project Offering designed to attract — not investment to make money out of shares, but investment to make change.”

Anderson also contrasted this approach with traditional philanthropy, which has been criticized with the question, “Why should rich people get to decide what to do about the world?”

“You can argue about that topic all day, but The Audacious Project has been specifically designed from the ground up to avoid that criticism,” he said. “This is a scenario where anyone in the world can apply” to participate, with the winners selected based on “what actually has a chance of working” and “how effective are the leaders.”

TED says the eight recipients were chosen from more than 1,500 applications. And even before taking the stage tonight, The Audacious Project helped them raise $280 million in funding.

Anderson said he doesn’t expect the funding to increase “massively” after the nonprofitstake the stage, “but we think that in terms of the number of people engaged, it will increase a lot.” And that could also translate into more fundraising down the road.

Here are this year’s recipients:

• The Center for Policing Equity plans to use data capture technology to bring measurable behavior change to police departments.
• Educate Girls is partnering with 35,000 volunteers to persuade parents and elders in remote Indian communities to register girls who are out-of-school and to support them so they stay enrolled.
• The Institute for Protein Design is trying to design new proteins to create new medicines and materials.
• The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is working to make plants more effective at capturing and storing carbon in their roots.
• The END Fund plans to bring treatment for parasitic worms to 100 million people, while also providing access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene education.
• The Nature Conservancy aims to protect 4 million square kilometers of the ocean by buying up the debt of 20 island and coastal nations — in exchange for government commitments to protect their marine areas.
• Thorn is building tech products to fight child sexual abuse online, for example by making it easier to locate the victims.
• Waterford UPSTART aims to help 250,000 children prepare for kindergarten by providing proactive family coaching and personalized learning.

A Chinese student has filed a lawsuit against JD.com founder and chief executive Richard Liu, alleging the billionaire businessman raped her in Minnesota back in August, four months after local prosecutors decided not to press charges.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Hennepin County on Tuesday, is seeking damages of more than $50,000. It identifies the student as Jingyao Liu (not related to Richard Liu), an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota.

JD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. Liu has maintained his innocence through his lawyers throughout the investigation. Liu said on social media in December that he had “broken no laws” but felt “extreme self-admonishment and regret” for the pain that his behavior “on that day” brought to his family and wife, who is an internet celebrity known as Sister Milk Tea.

In December, Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman said he was not charging Liu because “there were profound evidentiary problems which would have made it highly unlikely that any criminal charge could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” He further emphasized his decision “had nothing to do with Liu’s status as a wealthy, foreign businessman.”

Liu’s case has drawn widespread interest in China where the tale of Liu’s rags-to-riches has inspired many. If charged and convicted, Liu could face up to 30 years in prison.

JD’s stock immediately tumbled after the student first accused Liu in August over concerns that the case will hamper his ability to run the company, which is the arch-rival to Jack Ma’s Alibaba and faces growing competition from ecommerce upstart Pinduoduo. The company’s shares have slowly crawled back since December after the Hennepin County Attorney decided not to charge the founder.

From “blitzscaling” to “move fast and break things,” startups are focused on growth and speed – that’s change at scale. I see that focus in the startups in my accelerators and students in my classes at USC. But something related that we rarely talk seriously about is what happens when that growth, speed, and change affects other parts of an existing system. That’s deemed to be outside of our concern.

The business and social effects of change might be more commonly noticed, but today I want to talk about health effects, both positive and negative, that can come from a big and rapid change.

One of the preventable diseases that still kills a large number of people is malaria, spread by mosquitoes. Humans have dealt with this disease for centuries. Even in the US, malaria was only eradicated in 1951.

As high a toll as malaria takes, the number of annual deaths has decreased a lot. While in 2015 there were 212 million malaria cases and 429,000 deaths, just 20 years earlier the numbers were much higher, with estimates of 300 – 500 million cases with 3 million deaths.

The decrease in malaria deaths is multifactorial but mainly came from a few initiatives: the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, better medicines that can be taken temporarily, and the reduction of mosquito breeding sites like standing water.

While bed nets and medication have helped reduce human suffering and deaths due to malaria, it seems obvious to take the next step and try to eliminate malaria entirely. But since there is still no effective vaccine against the plasmodium parasite spread by mosquitoes plans for eliminating malaria often call for eradication of mosquitos, or specifically the Anopheles gambiae species that carry human malaria strains.

This approach — eradication of a targeted species that is the disease vector — is relatively uncommon. Some who question the approach warn against unintended consequences of such an effort. They are right to want to understand the larger effects, so the next questions are how do we make this decision? And are we cruel for not eradicating mosquitoes if we can? Would this decision be delayed if malaria were still a problem in the US? Do we even have the authority to attempt intentional species eradication? How do we even make these decisions?

The comparison that last question usually draws is that of smallpox eradication. When, in 1980, the disease was determined to be eliminated from human populations it was a triumph of decades of vaccinations and swift response to outbreaks.

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL – MARCH 04: Aedes aegypti mosquito, the species which transmits the dengue virus, chikungunya fever and zika is photographed on March 04, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by William Volcov/Brazil Photo Press/LatinContent/Getty Images)c

There are several ways to attempt Anopheles gambiae eradication. Since mosquitoes have gained resistance to many classes of insecticides and the plasmodium parasites also have resistance to antimalarial drugs, other methods are used.

One way is the release of large numbers of sterilized males. This process was successfully applied to the screw-worm fly in the US in the 1950s. A similar approach could be taken with mosquitoes as well. It’s a temporary solution since even a small number of non-sterilized mosquitoes that manage to mate can rebuild a population. The Debug project has an ongoing trial of this technique with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry Zika, yellow fever, and dengue fever.

There is also a program to use CRISPR gene editing to introduce genes for infertility into the mosquito population.

The approach taken with smallpox – too vaccinate the disease away – doesn’t work with malaria, at least not yet. Current versions of the vaccine require four separate inoculations spread over weeks. Even then the efficacy rate is around 39%. (And vaccines are a technique that would enable the mosquitoes to continue to bite humans, who are immune from malaria.) So that brings us back to the idea of eliminating mosquitoes.

A starting point to evaluate that decision is to take mosquitoes as part of a system that will change if they are eliminated. Taking a whole systems approach isn’t so much delaying a solution as it is trying not to create a new problem by the quick actions mentioned above.

The other side of the equation is that malaria-carrying mosquito species are not large sources of food for other animals. The non-biting males are among the many insects that pollinate different types of plants, but are only major pollinators of one type of orchid. Note also that biologist E. O. Wilson is in favor of mosquito eradication.

But if malaria-carrying mosquito eradication happens, there are other potential negative outcomes. At least one of them could affect more than the current number of people dying from malaria today.

People change their habits. Without mosquitoes keeping the human population away from prime mosquito habitats like swamps and rain forests, more people may move to these areas. People may then push out other animals and prepare unoccupied lands for logging and farming. Also, people may hunt and eat more “bush meat,” a source of other cross-species diseases, including Ebola and AIDS.

Stating the potential negatives of eliminating malaria is easy outside of a malaria infected area. Could we make an attempt at estimating potential deaths from both options?

Publishers don’t always love Google’s AMP pages, but readers surely appreciate their speed, and while publishers are loath to give Google more power, virtually every major site now supports this format. One AMP quirk that publisher’s definitely never liked is about to go away, though. Starting today, when you use Google Search and click on an AMP link, the browser will display the publisher’s real URLs instead of an “http//google.com/amp” link.

This move has been in the making for well over a year. Last January, the company announced that it was embarking on a multi-month effort to load AMP pages from the Google AMP cache without displaying the Google URL.

At the core of this effort was the new Web Packaging standard, which uses signed exchanges with digital signatures to let the browser trust a document as if it belongs to a publisher’s origin. By default, a browser should reject scripts in a web page that try to access data that doesn’t come from the same origin. Publishers will have to do a bit of extra work, and publish both signed and un-signed versions of their stories.

Quite a few publishers already do this, given that Google started alerting publishers of this change in November 2018. For now, though, only Chrome supports the core features behind this service, but other browsers will likely add support soon, too.

For publishers, this is a pretty big deal, given that their domain name is a core part of their brand identity. Using their own URL also makes it easier to get analytics, and the standard grey bar that sits on top of AMP pages and shows the site you are on now isn’t necessary anymore because the name will be in the URL bar.

To launch this new feature, Google also partnered with Cloudflare, which launched its AMP Real URL feature today. It’ll take a bit before it will roll out to all users, who can then enable it with a single click. With this, the company will automatically sign every AMP page it sends to the Google AMP cache. For the time being, that makes Cloudflare the only CDN that supports this feature, though others will surely follow.

“AMP has been a great solution to improve the performance of the internet and we were eager to work with the AMP Project to help eliminate one of AMP’s biggest issues — that it wasn’t served from a publisher’s perspective,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “As the only provider currently enabling this new solution, our global scale will allow publishers everywhere to benefit from a faster and more brand-aware mobile experience for their content.”