Investment - September 2021

The Janvest General Partnership is pleased to announce the execution of Limited Partnership IV’s seventh investment in an Israeli founded emerging technology company. Below you will find information about the business and corresponding investment. We welcome your questions and feedback.

DEAL SUMMARY
Company Name / Twang
Website / www.Twang.io
Offices / Tel Aviv, Israel
Sectors / Voice Enablement
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2021
Number of Board Positions Held by Janvest / One
Total Janvest LP IV Investment / $2,000,000
Total Size of Round / $6,000,000
Notable Co-Investors / Hetz Ventures (Israel) and Samsung Next, the early stage venture arm of Samsung
LP IV Ownership / ~12.5%

TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION
As we highlighted in our June 2021 LP Update, the Speech and Voice Recognition market is expected to grow to nearly $27 billion by 2028 with adoption accelerating across an array of industries including eCommerce, healthcare, defense, retail, education, manufacturing, logistics, and media/entertainment. Within this market, the number of ‘Voice Assistants’ is growing exponentially - in 2020 there were 4.2 billion digital voice assistants used in devices worldwide. By 2024, that number is expected to double to 8.4 billion digital voice assistants. Yet, there are limited solutions and tools for creating and leveraging voice capabilities. To do so requires expensive and bespoke development, as well as compatibility with the three major voice platforms out there (Apple, Amazon, Google). Additionally, ‘voice’ development is a completely new and separate investment that does not capitalize on prior investments such as websites and applications. Therefore, despite the prevalence of voice interface devices (phones, smart speakers, etc.), SMBs and SMEs are for the most part excluded from the ‘voice’ market because of the cost and other barriers to entry. Twang’s vision is to democratize ‘voice’ amongst SMBs and SMEs — enabling run-of-the-mill software developers to roll out conversational interfaces with minimal investment and development effort. The goal is to create a platform that will automatically analyze the structure of a company’s website or application and produce a conversational interface that will allow for customers to naturally converse with the services they require. In other words, any developer working on a website or application could create a ‘voice’ skill that would allow for their customers or clients to engage with them via Siri, Alexa, and Google but without the complex and custom integration. What adds to the market opportunity here is that enterprises of all sizes can uniquely apply ‘voice’ to internal operations — allowing for employees to ask Siri, for example, ‘how much vacation they have left’ or ‘what is the company policy on cell phone expenses’.

MARKET APPLICATIONS
Twang is currently at a pre-product, pre-revenue phase; however, their go-to-market involves three stages:

1. Build a minimum viable product (MVP) tailored to small online retailers, restaurants, gyms, salons, auto repair shops, and other SMBs, of which there are nearly 30 million here in the U.S. alone according to the Small Business Administration (SBA).
2. Once a mature product is available, Twang aims to partner with web agencies who are servicing thousands of SMBs but do not have ‘voice acumen’ internally to offer this capability alongside their web development services. This distribution will also allow Twang to expand their offering to more countries and across more verticals.
3. Offer an internal solution for modern enterprises to be leveraged by their employees and teams

At some point in the development and growth of Twang, the company will have accumulated a real-world dataset of richly annotated data, which can be leveraged to provide advanced Machine Learning-based features that are not currently offered by any solution in the market.

MARKET ADOPTION
Twang is in the process of lining up initial design partners with whom to build, test, and iterate on their platform.

TEAM

 Navot Volk
CEO
- Managing Director, Microsoft for Startups
- Co-Founder & CEO, CrossReader
- Co-Founder & VP R&D, Emblaze
- B.A. Computer Science & Info Systems, The Yezreel Valley College (Israel)

 Dr. Limor Lahiani
CTO
- Principal Engineering Manager - Healthcare, Microsoft
- Principal Software Engineering Manager - Cortana (Voice), Microsoft
- PhD. Computer Science, Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel)
- MSc. Computer Science, Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel)
- Lecturer and Teaching Assistant, Israel Air Force Academy

 Ran Mokady
Advisor
- General Manager, Alexa Shopping Devices (Amazon)
- Director, Alexa Calling and Messaging (Amazon)
- Senior Director of Product, Messaging, and Sharing, Skype
- Senior Director of Program Management, Bing Mobile Search (Microsoft)

 JANVEST VALUE-ADD
Janvest is co-leading Twang’s seed round alongside UK-Israeli fund, Hetz Ventures. The pace at which we conducted our due diligence and got to conviction allowed for a quick syndication and closure of the round. This enabled the Twang team to capitalize on some hiring opportunities of blue chip talent to start working on an initial version of their product. In addition, Janvest began facilitating introductions to prospective design partners in the form of B2C brands and retailers.

Brian Rosenzweig
Atlanta, GA
Brian@Janvest.com

Dafna Winocur Biran
Tel Aviv, Israel
Dafna@Janvest.com

Daniel Frankenstein
New York City, NY
Daniel@Janvest.com