Grow Credit, the startup that launched last year to help customers build out their credit scores by providing a credit line for online subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix, has added Mucker Labs as an investor and closed its seed round with $2 million in total commitments.

The Los Angeles startup founded by serial entrepreneur Joe Bayen, had been bootstrapped initially and then received funding from a clutch of core angel investors before signing a deal with Mucker earlier this month, according to Bayen.

Using the Marqeta platform, Grow Credit can extend a loan to customers to expand their subscription services. Using the Mastercard network for payments, and Marqeta’s tools to restrict payment access, Grow offers credit facilities to its customers to pay for their monthly subscriptions. By using Grow Credit for those payments, users can improve their credit scores by as much as 61 points in a nine-month span, says Bayen.

The company doesn’t charge any fees for its loans, but users can upgrade their service. The initial tier is free for access to $15 of credit, once a user connects their bank account. For a $4.99 monthly fee, customers can get up to $50 of subscriptions covered by the service. For $9.99 that credit line increases to $150, Bayen said.

Increases to a user’s credit score can make a significant dent in their costs for things like lease agreements for cars, mortgages for houses and better rates on other credit cards, said Bayen.

“Everything is cheaper, you can get access to a credit card with lower interest rates and better rewards,” he said. “We’re looking at ourselves as the single best route to getting access to an Apple card.”

Additional capital for the new round came from individual investors like DraftKings chief executive, Jason Robins; former National Football League player and hall of famer Ronnie Lott; and Sebastien Deguy, VP of 3D at Adobe.

Coming up, Grow Credit said it has a deal in the works with one very large consumer bank in the U.S. and will be launching the Android version of its app in a few weeks.

Two months after Quibi’s high-profile launch as a short-form mobile-native TV app led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, it is evident the startup is greatly underperforming relative to the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on content and marketing. 

According to a Wall Street Journal report, “daily downloads peaked at 379,000 on its April 6 launch day but didn’t exceed 20,000 on any day in the first week of June, according to Sensor Tower.” The article says Quibi is on pace for just 2 million subscribers by year-end, from its predicted 7.2 million. Most of the current subscriber base is on free trials, so even just maintaining the current pace of subscriber growth for several more months will be challenging. Quibi hasn’t released any of its own stats on subscribers, which it almost certainly would do to combat the negative perception among investors and press, if the stats showed a lot of traction.

I argued in 2018 that Facebook should turn its IGTV into a Quibi competitor, and I continue to believe there’s untapped opportunity for premium, mobile-native storytelling apps. So what went wrong with Quibi? There appear to have been four key mistakes:

1. Miscalculating the risk of launching during the COVID-19 lockdown.
2. Failing to see the central role of interactivity in mobile-native entertainment.
3. Creating misaligned financial incentives with the wrong content partners.
4. Launching Quibi like a movie instead of like a startup.

The developers behind Fleksy have launched an SDK for Android and iOS to scale demand for white labelling of their AI keyboard software which bakes in privacy-safe next-word prediction. Swipe-style input (which it calls Fleksywave) is also in beta and slated to roll out soon.

Fleksy competes for smartphone users’ digits with giants like Google’s Gboard and Microsoft-owned Swiftkey, offering a standalone Android keyboard app with smart app suggestions — and the differentiating pledge that your personal information is safe from data mining (as the AI runs locally).

Barcelona-based ThingThing took over development of the Fleksy keyboard in 2017, after the original team had been acqui-hired by Pinterest. The Spanish startup went on to fully acquire the keyboard tech — setting themselves up to build out a licensing business where they can offer fully flexible white labelling for app (or device) makers that want to offer a custom keyboard to their users.

The indie dev team behind the keyboard app reckon the bulk of their revenue will be coming from b2b licensing down the line. “We’re growing really fast on that market,” says CEO Olivier Plante. “Conversion is surprisingly high… The projections show that the b2b SDK business will represent at least 60%-70% of own business model.”

One such earlier implementation of the tech saw the Fleksy keyboard deployed on the ultramobile Palm handset. It’s had other device makers as customers, as well as customizing keyboards for third party apps in spaces such a cyber safety, healthcare and government, per Plante, though he says they’re under NDA so aren’t able to disclose the names of any other customers.

While the team has been doing custom implementations of Fleksy on an ad hoc basis for a while now, the SDK opens the door to scaling this side of the business.

“Since the companies need it we see that the licensing model is quite promising for us, and now we have this tool that gives them the ability to work on their own — with little help. So it’s really about this scalability,” he tells TechCrunch. “We quickly saw it was important to scale this.”

In terms of where demand is coming from, Plante says they’re seeing traction from Europe and the U.S., and also have some customers in Asia and Africa. “This is where we really sit in the sweet spot,” he argues. “We’re European, so privacy is with us. Antitrust laws are with us — and then, on the other side, the big giants don’t have those types of interesting projects on the side. It’s all mass scale and those types of things.”

“The Chinese and Asian competition is just not in that touch point with Europe and the Americas,” he adds. “They’re out of reach and they’re very hard to deal with is what we heard, in terms of just language barriers and the way they work. Fear of being copied and these types of things.”

On specific use cases for a custom keyboard, he says customers come with “very, very different needs”. And sometimes after having tried to build their own keyboard — before deciding that the level of polish required to get a “proper keyboard” means they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

“Some of them are in cyber safety,” he says of current licensees. “They are trying to solve a problem where there is maybe data leaks, protection of the individual against a greater threat. On the other side they are governments that are trying to make their messaging app really secure — so the keyboard and the message app are one encapsulated whole that cannot be penetrated… We also have demand in the medical environment.”

Plante points out the security risk of having a secure messaging app user who’s running a third party keyboard which uploads user data to the cloud. “You have a high risk of a data leak,” he argues.

“One particular common ground with all these players is this focus on ‘your technology’s offline; there’s no contact with the external world. There’s no tricky things you’re trying to do [in the background]. You’re exactly what we need and you have exactly the flexibility that we need’,” he adds. “What we focus on is providing our technology — we don’t deal with any personal data handling whatsoever… we don’t want to deal with that.”

Another area where it’s seeing some traction is in the videogaming space — giving the example of PC gaming keyboard makers wanting to offer a related experience to mobile users and not knowing how to go about making software themselves. Plante also reckons there will be growing demand for ergonomic customization of keyboards within apps that are targeted at elderly or very young device users — who may not fare well with standard keyboard layouts.

Being a lean startup is another selling point for Fleksy, as he tells it — enabling the team to cater to smaller business needs than keyboard-owning tech giants would typically bother with.

“One of the key aspects that we have is that we built from the ground up — all the technology that we have in the keyboard is ours. From the algorithm; the way it works; the layout of the keyboard; different languages; there’s no blackbox,” he adds. “We can do a lot of things — adding specific words to the dictionary, tweaking the autocorrection so it gears toward more of a specific type of population that uses a specific type of names and words. There’s so much control over whatever we want to do with the keyboard —  the clients are demanding things and we say yeah we can do this.”

While the locus of ThingThing’s business has shifted onto licensing (currently via tiered pricing, depending on number of keyboard users), it continues to offer the Fleksy keyboard as a b2c free-to-download app on Android. And while getting traction as a small indie keyboard app clearly remains challenging, the consumer app functions as a testing ground for new Fleksy features and a showcase for the growing pipeline of b2b clients. 

“For the b2c side we’re trying to experiment a bit how we can find the right balance between the end user — a free app with monetization in a certain way that doesn’t 1) use your personal data and 2) doesn’t become a bit gimmicky,” says Plante. “So we’re trying to play around those and experiment.”

“We see a lot of interest from brands out there, app developers that really want to be in the keyboard because it has added value for them… and also a user uses a keyboard about 100x-120x per day. Which is a lot of times. So there’s a lot of companies that want to be there in this space,” he adds.

As movie theaters reopen across the United States and the world, there are lingering questions about what kinds of measures those theaters will be taking to keep staff and moviegoers safe in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

These concerns were illustrated last week, when AMC CEO Adam Aron said in an interview that the theater chain would not be requiring that patrons wear masks except in locations where they’re legally required to do so — because the company “did not want to be drawn into a political controversy.” Naturally, those comments prompted a controversy of their own, leading AMC to reverse its decision.

So it makes sense for NBCUniversal-owned movie ticketing app Fandango to highlight the different safety measures that theaters are taking.

It’s useful from an informational perspective, so that moviegoers understand and prepare for the experience in theaters, and perhaps choose theaters based on how serious they seem about safety. But it’s also a savvy marketing move, as those theaters will need to convince moviegoers that it’s safe to return.

Image Credits: Fandango

The new features include what Fandango is pitching as a “one-stop shop” to view the safety measures announced by more than 100 theater chains, with information about auditorium occupancy, social distance seating, mask/protective equipment policies, enhanced cleaning measures and special concession arrangements. There will also be instructional videos, social distance seating maps and a way to search for reopened theaters by location.

Because movie theaters have been closed for the past few months, Fandango also says it will be extending for another 60 days expired rewards from its Fandango VIP+ loyalty programs.

“We are working closely with our friends in exhibition to help get their ticketing back online and film fans back in seats with peace of mind,” said Melissa Heller, Fandango’s vice president of domestic ticketing, in a statement. “In addition to our new product features, Fandango’s mobile ticketing will be an added benefit, helping moviegoers and cinema employees reduce the number of contact points at the box office and throughout the theater.”

Update: In response to my question about whether moviegoers should feel safe going back to theaters, the company sent me the following statement from Fandango managing editor Erik Davis:

Let’s face it, there’s nothing like watching a movie on the big screen, and some movies like ‘Tenet’ and ‘Mulan’ beg to be seen on the biggest screen available, so there’s definitely a demand. Moviegoing decisions are personal: which movie, which format, which theater are you going to see it in. And now with health & safety protocols different for each state, county or theater chain, it’s useful to know what the theaters are offering before you go. Fandango is gathering all the info in one place to help fans return to the movies with peace of mind, and at the right time that is best for them.

If you haven’t checked out Quibi and the lack of Chromecast support was the thing holding you back: Now’s the time.

Just a few weeks after adding AirPlay support, Quibi has released another update that brings Chromecast support into the mix.

The update is live on the iOS App Store now, and is rolling out to Android devices through the week. In a tweet, Quibi Chief Product Officer Tom Conrad says that he expects the Android update to be available to all by Friday.

Quibi’s launch hasn’t been the resounding success the company hoped for, with founder Jeffrey Katzenberg openly saying that it was “not close to what we wanted.” Putting aside whether anyone wants to watch content on their phone in 10-minute chunks, the timing certainly didn’t help; they built a thing meant to be consumed on-the-go at a time when many, many people are anything but on-the-go.

Will AirPlay or Chromecast or any other streaming option be the thing that spikes their numbers? Probably not. But for the folks who were already considering Quibi but didn’t want to be stuck watching it on their phone, it could be enough to get them to give it a spin.