Canary, an app-powered security camera for your home, finally hit the market in December of 2014, following a crazy-successful IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign in 2013 that raised just shy of $2 million.

And while the New York-based startup doesn't disclose sales numbers, Canary cofounder and CEO Adam Sager told Business Insider at CES 2016 that things have been going very well.

"We've had an incredible year," says Sager. "Our first year was bigger than Fitbit, GoPro, and Dropcam's first year, combined." 

And, despite some initial turnover among its executive team, things indeed look good for Canary: In June 2015, Canary raised a $30 million round of investment from Walden Riverwood Ventures and the Canary camera is receiving lots of positive reviews from satisfied customers — including myself.

Even State Farm has partnered with Canary to offer a break on homeowner's insurance for anyone who had one installed and Verizon is selling them in its stores.

The way Canary works is simple. Take the camera out of the box, place it on a shelf in your home, connect it your Wi-Fi via a smartphone app, and now you can check on the status of your home from your phone. It competes head-on with the Nest Cam, which was born from Google's $555 million acquisition of Dropcam in 2014. 

Sager credits the company's success even in its competition with Nest Cam to the company's focus on just building a good product that people like, rather than feeding into in the seemingly-endless hype cycles over "smart homes" and "connected appliances." 

"We as a company are focused on solving real problems, not invented problems," Sager says. 

As an illustrative example of why Canary is so great, check out this actually highly upsetting compilation sent me of people using it to catch burglars in the act: 

A use-case for the Canary includes helping people catch burglars, sure, but Canary customers are also using it to spot elder abuse, make sure pets are behaving, or just feel more safe about their homes while they're away, he says. Two weeks after the Canary's launch date, Sager says, a retired cop used it to identify the arsonist who burned down his house.

It's why Canary has no current plans to expand beyond the camera, Sager says. When it comes to things like, say, smart light bulbs or even full-fledged alarm systems, he believes there's not enough benefit and too much added complexity. 

"In reality, [do those products] make your life better?" asks Sager.

So while there's a lot of chatter from tech titans and startups alike about using, say, the Amazon Echo or Apple HomeKit or Google Nest or Microsoft Windows 10 as the hub for their connected home strategy, Canary is focusing on its own product first.

Sager highlights how, thanks to constant software updates, the Canary gets better and better, adding features to the app and learning more about how to process and recognize the images and video it captures.

Compare that with the Nest Cam, which has been hit hard by customers over what seems to be a buggy app.

Sager also says that sooner rather than later, the Canary will get a speaker that lets you talk to a pet or a house guest straight from the app. It's also getting a website version of the app, so you can check on your home from a browser. 

With all of that going on, it's just not time yet for Canary to really worry too much about these these next-generation so-called "home automation platforms," Sager says — though it does integrate with Wink, the smart things hub spun out of a startup, Quirky.

"The average person doesn't care about connecting ten devices because nobody has ten devices," Sager says.

SEE ALSO: This app-powered home security camera turned me into an overbearing dog dad

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NOW WATCH: Nest CEO Tony Fadell: Go Work With Your Heroes

Travel comparison apps like Skyscanner and Kayak have been downloaded by millions of people around the world but one company thinks they've been missing a trick.

French startup KelBillet says the variety of transportation modes shown in their search results is too limited.

As a result, it has launched its own app (and website) called Gopili, which includes journey times and prices for a host of slightly different transport providers, including ride sharing operators like Blablacar, coach operators like National Express and Megabus, as well as a bunch of airlines. Users can all purchase tickets through Gopili. 

The team behind Gopili, which launched in the UK last January, claim that their app spares users from having to search journey options across multiple travel apps. For example, let's say you're travelling from London to Manchester, Gopili will save you from having to open the British Airways app, then the National Express app, then the BlaBlaCar app, and so on.

It's a similar idea to Citymapper, which helps people navigate cities — except this app is for longer-distance travel.

The company has raised over €2 million (£1.5 million) and claims that 3.5 million people have made use of Gopoli to date.

Yann Raoul, CEO of Gopili, said: "The UK has an extensive number of transport operators and being able to find journey times and prices across all transportation modes, on one single app, makes the research easy and transparent.

"The Gopili app enables travellers to find quickly the offer that best suits their need for their journey. 48% of our traffic come from Mobile devices, the app was a common request from our users that we’re pleased to offer them."

The company launched Gopili in France first before expanding it to the UK, Spain, Germany and Italy. "We are looking to extend to new countries in 2016," said Raoul.

Gopili also said it is planning to introduce additional transportation options to its platform in the near future but was unable to reveal what they might be.

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NOW WATCH: How Apple makes their Geniuses always seem so happy and helpful

Ask Ida Tin what her goal is, and she struggles to come up with just one. The top of the App Store's health and fitness section would be nice, she says (she's only got to third place before) — or maybe helping every woman on the planet track their reproductive health.

It sounds ambitious, but her female reproductive health app Clue has quickly spread around the world from its launch in Berlin, and now has over 2.5 million active users. Even Apple came to her for help with its own software.

Clue is a period tracking app that uses data inputted by the user to give insight into their cycle. Women input information about their mood, sexual activity, pain, and bleeding, as well as other things. The app uses that to work out their cycle and give them information about it.

The Clue app has a modern design, and users of the app that Business Insider talked to explained that its colourful, almost playful, nature is a reason why they keep using it. "People like that it’s not pink or overly girly," Tin said. "It's not patronising."

That's in contrast to the appearance of apps like Period Diary, Clue's biggest competitor in the App Store:

Tin emphasises that users can share their data with the app's servers, or they can keep it to themselves, storing it offline. It can also be synchronised with Apple's HealthKit platform, which stores health data from lots of different apps.

iPhones can track things like steps and calories burned, but when HealthKit launched, iPhones had no support for female reproductive health. Fusion said that "Apple has a lady problem," and Jezebel wrote that "Apple's new health tracking app forgets that periods exist."

"Maybe they just forgot," Tin says of Apple's decision to release a health tracking app without any period tracking. However, she says that after Apple realised its mistake, it immediately set about trying to make it right. Tin says Clue worked with Apple to help it develop its own period tracking software — essentially creating a competitor to her own app.

"I felt we had a really constructive dialogue with them, helping them figure out what the core things that should go in are," Tin says. "We had an ongoing conversation about what should be there. I felt that they listened."

Apple eventually released an updated health app in June that featured full support for period tracking and female reproductive health. Users could manually add their periods and sexual activity, and Clue's data synced with the app. Clue suddenly had a major new competitor, but it also had a new platform for women to examine their data on.

Clue is also available for women to install on their Apple Watch. Right now that's a pretty niche feature for an app to have, but Tin says that the Apple Watch is a good way for women to get notifications from the app.

She does recognise, however, that the Apple Watch is still a limited platform: "I think our product is very much the first generation MVP (minimum viable product), I think we can probably do a better job. But I do think it’s interesting."

Another thing that Clue is trying out is a series of partnerships with universities and medical institutions. It's working with Stanford University, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and the University of Oxford to provide data for studies. "What they get excited about is having a data set which is so large compared to what clinical studies were before," Tin says.

Clue is clearly out to help women and doctors learn more about female reproductive health, but if it wants to spread around the world, it needs to start making money. Right now the app is free, and Tin says that the company doesn't know how it's going to monetise. However, she does know how she doesn't want to do it: selling user data or introducing ads to the app.

"There are probably many more things that we could do [to make money]," Tin said. "But we are taking our time now to grow and make little experiments with monetisation." She suggested that one way Clue could make money would be charging for more in-depth data-driven information or detailed health advice.

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NOW WATCH: PlayStation's virtual reality device looks incredible

London dominates the UK technology industry but the Scottish capital of Edinburgh is well positioned to capitalise on a global tech market, The Times reports, possibly creating more unicorns in the process.

The number of startups in Scotland has increased 43% over the last five years to approximately 3,000, with Edinburgh reportedly having a growth rate beyond the rest of the UK.

John Peebles, an American CEO of Edinburgh-based training management software provider Administrate, told The Times that Edinburgh is in a "sweet spot" to capitalise on the global technology market.

One of the main reasons for this is because Scottish students get their university fees paid for, meaning they graduate without any debt and are therefore more willing to take a leap of faith and join a startup when they graduate.

"These people can afford to take a risk and are highly trained," Peebles said. "It’s important that Edinburgh is a relatively cheap place to live and people can enjoy a good quality of life."

Students in the US and England on the other hand are graduating with tens of thousands of pounds in debt and in need of a steady job.

It's all very well getting a free education but the calibre of that education is what really counts. Fortunately, Edinburgh has several strong universities within its boundaries or on its doorstep, including Edinburgh University, Glasgow University, and St. Andrews University.

The increasing amount of interest from overseas investors in Edinburgh-based companies could also help the city's startups grow into technology giants.

Edinburgh's fast-growing digital companies like flight comparison website Skyscanner and fantasy sports website FanDuel have been backed by well known investors including Sequoia and Google Capital.

As a result, Edinburgh is one of the few UK cities outside London that has created technology companies with valuations in excess of $1 billion (£677 million), or "unicorns" as they are otherwise known.

The UK government is aiming to diversify the technology sector so that more large firms are created outside London. To date, however, there are only a handful of UK cities that boast companies with unicorn status, including the likes of Cambridge, Bristol and Edinburgh.

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NOW WATCH: Silicon Valley’s most creative designer reveals the next wave of innovation — and we can’t wait

It's no secret that European startup founders often relocate to Silicon Valley as they look to grow their businesses. The vast amounts of venture capital funding on offer and the huge North American market make it a sensible place to try and expand.

But the exodus of Europe's best entrepreneurs to the US comes at a potential cost. Namely, there's no one good left to build (or support those building), world-class technology companies on the same scale as Google, Apple, and Facebook.

However, former Uber exec Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen believes things are starting to change.

Fjeldsoe-Nielsen — who was VP of mobile at Uber before joining London-headquartered Balderton Capital as an investor earlier this year — told Business Insider that an increasing number of European founders are returning from Silicon Valley to launch a startup in Europe or invest in other European businesses they like the look of.

Since becoming a VC, Fjeldsoe-Nielsen has been travelling around Europe, which is where Balderton invests its billions, to try and get a "lay of the land" and see what people are talking about.

"A lot of people are coming back," he said at Balderton's office in up-and-coming tech hub King's Cross. "The exits seem to happen in the US right now but the founders come back. I see that everywhere: Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen."

One of the first engineers at Box (IPO'd), the cofounders of Endomondo (bought by Under Armour), and the cofounder of JustEat (IPO'd), are among the many entrepreneurs that have returned to Europe after successful exits, he continued.

While Fjeldsoe-Nielsen is happy to see European entrepreneurs returning to their home countries, he maintains that Silicon Valley is one of the best places in the world for founders to gain experience.

"I think it’s good for Europeans to go to the Valley and see what happens out there. It absolutely is. It’s almost like you get an education in starting up and networking and hiring and all this stuff."

But why are all the exists (stock market listings and acquisitions) happening in the US?

"The reality is when you look at the big five they’re in the US and they’re acquiring a lot of companies," said Fjeldsoe-Nielsen. Founders have also suggested that they can raise more money on US stock markets like NASDAQ and the NYSE than they can in Europe. However Marcus Stuttard, head of the UK Primary Markets and the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) at the London Stock Exchange, claims this isn't the case.

Fjeldsoe-Nielsen added that we will start to see big companies coming out of Europe in the next five to 10 years. "There’s no doubt about it," he said. "And they will start to acquire."

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NOW WATCH: Silicon Valley’s most creative designer reveals the next wave of innovation — and we can’t wait

This year, I made my first pilgrimage to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s largest tech event.

With over 170,000 registered attendees, CES is a daunting trip for anyone.

But if you can survive the crowds, the travel headaches, and the Uber surge pricing, you can learn a lot about the future of tech — from driverless cars to all--smart everything to a Shaq Attack.

Here are the key things I learned at CES 2016.

SEE ALSO: 17 amazing facts you probably didn't know about Apple

Las Vegas is the perfect place to host the world's largest tech event. Not only does it have the infrastructure to handle 170,000 attendees, but the Vegas casino floor is also full of slot machines that are actually showcases for the latest big-screen curved displays and chair-mounted subwoofers.

The hottest technology of CES 2016, beyond a doubt, was anything having to do with cars. Faraday Future kicked things off with its 1,000-horsepower electric car concept...

...but really, it seems like a lot more of the showfloor buzz was around the more mundane, but still crucial, technology that goes into connecting cars and smartphones, including Google Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

This year's Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas has shown us one thing, that we've firmly arrived in the future of the quantified self. Apps and products all promising to measure and collate certain data about your personal habits spewed the show floor. But one product in particular stood out to us amongst the mix. That's the new Diet Sensor app, which uses SCiO, the world's first pocket spectrometer, to instantaneously scan your food and give you it's nutritional value. 

Produced by Corey Protin

Follow TI: On Facebook

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The founders of DeepMind are about to invest in a UK healthcare startup after they sold their own artificial intelligence company to Google for a reported £400 million, the Financial Times reports.

DeepMind cofounders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman are among a group of investors that are due to back Babylon Health with $25 million (£17 million) this afternoon — an app that allows people to consult a doctor through their mobile phone.

The round was due to close this morning but Business Insider understands that the deal is yet to be signed off. It should be finalised at some point this afternoon.

It's unclear exactly how much Hassabis and Suleyman will invest in Babylon.

The funding round, to be led by Swedish investment group AB Kinnevik, will reportedly allow Babylon to hire engineers and scientists that can build a version of its platform that is powered by artificial intelligence. Hassabis and Suleyman are widely regarded as some of the most prominent minds in the field of artificial intelligence so they may be able to help develop the new AI-powered version of Babylon. 

DeepMind is on a mission to "solve intelligence" and then use that to "solve everything else". The company's self-learning algorithms, or "agents," can already outperform humans on computer games like "Space Invaders" and "Breakout" but the company has no plans to stop there. It's now teaching its algorithms to play 3D racing games and understand other complex puzzles.

AI can change the world

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, said yesterday that AI systems can change the world and help solve "hard problems" like climate change and overpopulation.

An AI-powered version of Babylon is expected to be released within the next two months. The AI version of the app will ask the patient a series of questions about their symptoms before giving them the advice they require.

The idea for the app, currently only available in the UK and Ireland, was coined by former Goldman Sachs banker and Babylon CEO Ali Parsa.

"We are trying to figure out a way to get most of the healthcare people need straight to them on their mobile phone," Parsa told the FT, adding that he wanted to "do with healthcare what Google did with information."

According to the FT, the investment values the three-year-old startup at approximately $100 million (£69 million).

Over 150,000 registered users have signed up to Babylon's subscription health service, which allows people to have a video conference with one of the 100 doctors that are employed full time by Babylon. People can, for example, talk to a therapist over Babylon if they are suffering from "January Blues." People can also use Babylon to book appointments and order medical tests.

Parsa told the FT that his company, which charges users £4.99 a month, has no intention of completely replacing doctors with machines. However, he believes there's a case for using technology to facilitate the screening process and referring patients to trained medical staff when necessary.

"The challenge is how do you deal with the bottleneck that answers people’s questions, check their symptoms so that they don’t go to the doctor, and if they do, they go appropriately?" he told the FT.

The startup has partnered with companies like Samsung, BT, and Citi so that their staff can get access to medical professionals with relative ease. Babylon is also reportedly in talks with the NHS.

Technology investors and Silicon Valley giants are moving in on the healthcare sector as they believe it is ripe for disruption. Alphabet, Google's parent company, incorporated a biotech subsidiary called Calico in a bid to tackle diseases.

Hassabis and Suleyman have invested in a number of other UK technology companies after they were bought out by Google. One example is Dice, an app that allows people to find and purchase gig tickets.

Hassabis attended the same AI conference at New York University yesterday that Schmidt spoke at. Hassabis went to discuss the issue of ethics and artificial intelligence.

DeepMind's third cofounder is Shane Long but he rarely talks in public and doesn't seem to be as active on the investment circuit. 

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NOW WATCH: How Apple makes their Geniuses always seem so happy and helpful

London startup Carwow has raised £12.5 million for its site that aims to help you get the best price on a brand new vehicle by introducing you to a range of dealers.

The startup was launched by James Hind (CEO), Alexandra Margolis and David Santoro in 2013 in a bid to improve the car buying experience.

Carwow allows users to put details into its platform about the car that they want to buy, including the model, year, and spec. The request is passed on to all the dealers on the Carwow platform, and the user receives up to five offers from the best-rated dealers, who they can then contact directly.

The investment round, led by Spotify and Dropbox backers Accel Partners, will help Carwow to fund advertising and the costs associated with training dealers to use the platform. The money will also be used to build several new products and hire more people across the company's sales team.

Previous investors Balderton Capital, Samos Investments and Episode 1 Ventures, also participated in the round, which follows a £4.6 million Series A investment in December 2014.

Hind said in a statement: "We’re excited to roll out our service even further on the back of strong growth in 2015. A new car is an important purchase, typically a person’s biggest after their home. At Carwow, we enjoy working with the industry to make things simpler and more efficient for all involved. This new round of funding gives us the firepower we need to change the way the UK buys cars."

Fred Destin, a partner at Accel, will be joining the board. Destin said in a statement that Carwow reminds him of Zoopla in the early days. "They’re changing the discovery experience through a superb online platform and better information and are creating a win-win for consumers and dealers, brought to you by a wonderful founding team."

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NOW WATCH: This 14-year-old makes up to $1,500 a night eating dinner in front of a webcam in South Korea

The North of England has a new billion-dollar technology company in the form of enterprise software firm Anaplan.

The startup, founded in York, North East England, has raised $90 million (£62 million) in a Series E funding round at a valuation of $1.1 billion (£760 million) for its web-based business-planning and operations platform that competes with products from Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.

The business was founded in a Yorkshire barn in 2006 by CTO Michael Gould. Today it employs between 500 and 600 staff across 12 offices worldwide. Although Anaplan has technically relocated its headquarters to San Francisco, much of its engineering is still done in York, where it employs approximately 80 people. Elsewhere in the UK, Anaplan has offices in Maidenhead and London.

Premji Invest led the round that also included Baillie Gifford, Founders Circle Capital and Harmony Partners, as well as existing investors like Salesforce. Total investment in Anaplan now stands at $240 million (£166 million) and the company has 400 paying customers including large enterprises like HP and Aviva.

Gould told Business Insider over the phone today that the latest funding round will allow Anaplan to build its workforce to approximately 1,200 people over the next year, adding that the majority of those roles will be in engineering and sales.

Raising the funding round wasn't too difficult, Gould said, adding that Anaplan had been talking to investors over the last two months.

"There was a lot of interest but the market has changed in some ways," said Gould. "People are asking harder, tougher questions of businesses to get investment. People are looking at the path to profitability.

"Part of the reason we’re raising money is because we’re not profitable at this stage but we have a very clear path to get there soon."

Despite government efforts, the North of England has struggled to create technology companies as big as those in London, Edinburgh, Oxford or Cambridge. According to a report released last June by research firm GP Bullhound, there is only a single billion-dollar technology startup in the North of England: ao.com. It's a website that sells fridges and washing machines, so although it's a successful business, it's not exactly revolutionary.

Gould said he wasn't sure companies in the North of England were growing to the same size as those in London.

"I think there’s a lot of innovation [in the North]. Perhaps not in software but there is in nanotech in Manchester. There's quite a lot of activity."

The company is now looking ahead to a possible stock market listing but it does not have a date in mind at this stage.

"We’re working towards an IPO," said Gould. "When and whether that happens will depend on a lot of factors. Market conditions aren’t great at the moment."

In order to help prepare for the IPO, Anaplan has appointed a new chief financial officer in the form of James Budge, who has has held executive roles at US tech companies such as Rovi and Genesys.

Here is Anaplan in action:

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NOW WATCH: This is what your phone looks like when you have 8 million Instagram followers

Hooked wants to turn bite-sized narratives into an empire as big as YouTube's, and Silicon Valley investors are starting to notice. 

Hooked turns narrative fiction into bite-sized stories that look more like text message conversations. It's almost voyeuristic to watch the conversation unfold, but each message has readers hitting "Next" to see the next line until it's done.

Each story takes about a minute to read, but it only needs that much time to take you out of this world and into the narrative of another. And that's how it gets people hooked. 

In an investor report from Q4 2015, viewed by Business Insider, the company disclosed that it took in additional funding since September from Silicon Valley elite like Ron Conway's SV Angel and WME Entertainment, a Hollywood talent agency for content creators. 

The company now has $2.9 million raised at a $15 million valuation, its CEO Prerna Gupta confirmed. Of that, $2.1 million is still in the bank, giving the startup a 17-month runway at a time of difficult fundraising conditions.  

"We feel like we've got what we need to make things successful," Gupta told Business Insider. "Our belief is that there's a big opportunity to build something like YouTube that builds on narrative."

Gupta likens it to the invention of the camera. At first, Hollywood filmed plays that were written for theater stages and turned into movies. But soon, filmmakers started developing movies fit for the big screen.

Gupta believes the same thing is going to happen in narrative. Amazon's Kindle app or communities like Wattpad have brought books onto mobile devices, but no one has really mastered creating narrative in a new form, native to mobile and designed to capture a person's short attention span, she believes.

"In our demographic, it seems obvious that the number of people willing to sit down and read for an hour a day is dwindling," Gupta said. "I think it's dying because we haven't adapted it to our pace."

That doesn't mean Gupta wants to kill literature and the book, far from it. She noticed a drop off over the holidays in usage when many readers had the time to read a longer novel and didn't crave the two minute escape that Hooked gives. 

Rather, the two can be complimentary, and Gupta's vision goes beyond transforming literature. She wants to compete with YouTube.

Hooked's text message style conversations opens themselves up to video and photo stories too. Like YouTube, Vine, and Snapchat have created a generation of artists that craft great stories on the platform, Hooked hopes it can inspire the same just with a linear narrative thread to the stories.

According to its investor report, the option for video should be rolled out on Hooked later this year. And that's when the competition with YouTube and Vine will begin.  

SEE ALSO: 12 apps we were obsessed with in 2015

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NOW WATCH: The 7 most memorable roles of 'Harry Potter' star Alan Rickman you may have completely forgotten

Today, Tri Tran is the CEO of a $300 million startup. But when he was 11 years old, he was boarding a 35-foot-long boat with his grandmother and older brother that would transport him from Vietnam to Indonesia, the first leg of a trip that would eventually take the three of them to America.

It was 1986. Tran, the son of two teachers, had been born just months before the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Instead of moving to America before the end of the war, Tran's parents had decided to stay put.

"My dad’s father, my grandfather, had studied abroad before, and his attitude was ‘it’s not easy being in a brand new country like that,'" Tran recalled.

So the family stayed in Vietnam. But Tran's brother, who was six years older than Tran, had ambitions to go to college. Tran's parents knew America would be a better place for their sons to receive an education than war-torn Vietnam.

Tran's parents and the two boys tried escaping the country several times, but something bad always happened that ended up quashing the trip: once, they were discovered by police; another time, they missed the boat that would have taken them out of Vietnam as refugees. One time, the family ended up in jail for 24 hours after being caught escaping, and were later only released when they bribed the police.

What actually led Tran to leave Vietnam was superstition. "The organizer said, ‘Hey, you four people’ — my parents, my brother and I — ‘you four have bad zodiac signs together,’" Tran told Business Insider. "They’re very superstitious, so they’re like, ‘The four of you don’t go together, so you‘ve only got three seats, just choose the three people who will go.’"

Tran's family came up with a plan: Tran, his brother, and his grandmother would go to California together, where Tran's uncle already lived. Tran's parents would stay behind and eventually join them.

In April 1986, Tran, his grandmother, and his older brother boarded the 35-foot-long fishing boat with about 130 other people. "We were packed like sardines on this boat," Tran told Business Insider. "In the first two days, when we were inside Vietnamese water, you have to look like a fishing boat, otherwise it’s illegal, and they’d catch you."

Everyone stayed below deck for those first two days, sitting in the same compartments usually used to hold fish. "It was gross," Tran recalls. "You know — people sitting, jam-packed and throwing up on each other."

After a five-day, six-night trip, Tran's boat arrived in Indonesia, at a refugee camp. Tran remembers "surviving on some basic sustenance" for the first six months the family was there. Then, the paperwork process began: the family made contact with Tri's uncle, who lived in San Jose, California, and they started the process of applying for sponsorship.

"Six months is actually considered very quick, versus other people who stay on those islands for years," Tran says. "It was quick because my uncle is my grandmother's son, so that’s a direct relationship, and she was 64 years old so she was considered senior, and then my brother and I were both under 18, so we were minors."

Having established contact with his uncle, Tran and his brother and grandmother were transferred to Singapore. They eventually boarded a plane that took them to San Francisco, where Tran's uncle was waiting for them. From Vietnam to America, the whole trip took about seven months.

Tran picked up his education in middle school, initially scraping by knowing just a few English words. "I befriended a couple of other Vietnamese kids who knew more English than me, but could translate things for me," Tran says. "Sitting in the classroom was just — the teacher just spoke in English exclusively, so you’re like ‘uh huh, OK, whatever.’"

Eventually, Tran learned English. He and his brother graduated from high school, and both went to MIT. As soon as he graduated in the late 90s, Tran hopped on a plane and came back to Silicon Valley to work at then-hot corporate computing company Silicon Graphics. 

Meanwhile, Tran's parents were still in Vietnam, and they were communicating only via snail mail and eventually through painstakingly coordinated phone calls.

"It was kind of odd hearing my mom's voice because I couldn't even recognize her voice the first time when I heard it. I didn’t know how miserable they were," Tran says. "When I finished college I actually managed to save up enough money to buy a plane ticket, to go back to Vietnam for the first time 11 years later, with my brother."

Tran and his brother sponsored their parents to come to the US. They made the move in 2000, settling down in the San Francisco Bay Area, near Tran.

Tran left Silicon Graphics and worked at startups for a while, but eventually started Munchery, a food delivery startup in 2010. He was tasked with cooking for his family — himself, his wife and his two sons — and found himself constantly looking for an answer to the question: "What's for dinner?"

Now, Munchery is a $300 million company that offers both prepared meals and ready-to-assemble meal kits on-demand and scheduled. It's raised $117 million in VC funding from investors like Greycroft Partners, Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen, Menlo Partners, and Sherpa Capital.

Tran says more than 90 percent of Munchery orders are from repeat customers, and Tran says mobile adoption is really important to him. The company's mobile adoption has increased 10x over the past year. Now, the number of orders on mobile is approaching 50% of all of the orders placed through Munchery.

Right now, Munchery operates in four key geographic areas: the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, and it's looking to expand its footprint in each market it currently serves.

For example, in Seattle, Tran says Munchery will start reaching Tacoma and North Seattle, and in New York, it plans to expand to Long Island, Westchester, and Upstate New York.

SEE ALSO: A startup that's actually getting teens to talk on the phone again just raised $2.2 million

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NOW WATCH: All the new Netflix shows you’ll be binge-watching this year

Startups in Silicon Valley are expected to grow everything, and fast. Venture capitalists expect to see hockey-stick shaped charts, and often founders will try to "hack" growth to deliver that insane speed of growth investors expect. 

That obsession with growth may have gone too far though, warns Y Combinator president Sam Altman. 

"We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly.  That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme—startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any strong idea about what they want to build,"Altman wrote in a blog post. 

By focusing on growth and growth hacking, they're skipping over the step of making sure they are building something great. 

Founders should wait until users love a product so much they spontaneously tell others to use it, Altman says. Once they've hit that metric, then it's time to grow the team and the company, but not before. 

"The very best technology companies sometimes take awhile to figure out exactly what they’re doing, but when they do, they usually pass that binary test before turning all their energy to growth.  It’s the critical ingredient for companies that do really well, and if you don’t figure it out, no amount of growth hacking will make you into a great company,"Altman wrote.

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What will be the next household-name app-based service like Uber? Where are the next “unicorns” – startup businesses which rapidly rise to a $1bn valuation?

The biggest successes of the last few years have all been about software. “There’s an app for that” has gone from being an Apple slogan to a simple truism. But the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and what’s left is much tougher to deliver. It may be expensive to build, pose a tricky technical problem, or simply have some strong incumbents fighting back.

There are revolutions ahead: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and wearable technology are all in their early days. None are yet polished enough to really seize the imagination of users – or even to have been released. Any one of them could prove to be as revolutionary as the smartphone was, opening up new avenues of innovation and, in turn, bringing the startup ecosystem back to where it was in 2010. Just not quite yet.

There are still some companies, however, that are making waves right now.

They include:

TransferWise

Financial technology, or “fintech”, is one of Britain’s best hopes for a worldwide hit, and TransferWise is one of Britain’s best fintech companies. Founded in 2010 by entrepreneurs Taavet Hinrikus (the first employee of Skype) and financial consultant Kristo Käärmann, it aims to undercut the foreign exchange market with an innovative peer-to-peer model. Instead of buying and selling currency directly, it aims to match pairs of sellers who each want the other’s currency, transferring the money directly and skipping brokers’ fees.

The company’s valuation of just under $1bn places it firmly in the big league – even if its actual revenue is reportedly just £6.5m.

Deliveroo

A lot of British success stories exist in local industries where international competition is more difficult – like food delivery and real estate listings. Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t local competition, and the home delivery market is one of the most cluttered of them all: Hungryhouse, Just Eat and DineIn are all doing battle to bring your dinner to your door. But there’s a wide variety of approaches, from JustEat, which focuses on providing a simple web-based order and payment portal for traditional takeaway restaurants, through to Deliveroo, which uses its own staff to transport food from restaurants that otherwise wouldn’t offer to deliver.

Deliveroo was founded by William Shu, an investment banker, and Greg Orlowski, a developer, and raised £127m development cash in three funding rounds over the course of last year.

Made.com

The online designer furniture retailer is one of a few trying to become the Asos of furniture. Asos proved that a good shopping experience, plus big savings over high street prices, could successfully sell clothes, and Made.com is attempting to do the same for tables and chairs. It handpicks furniture designers and passes orders from customers on in bulk. The company was founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Ning Li, who had previously started flash sale business MyFab, and Lastminute.com’s co-founder Brent Hoberman. It is regularly linked with a plans for a stock exchange float that could value it at £100m.

FarFetch

FarFetch specialises in designer clothing and grew out of an offer by founder José Neves to provide a free website for small boutiques to sell online, in exchange for the same products being available on FarFetch’s own platform. That gave it the stock it needed to become a destination in its own right. Now sales on the platform have become a lifeline for many smaller boutiques. It raised £59m in March 2015 – taking its valuation to $1bn and making it one of Britain’s newest “unicorns”.

CityMapper

App development is no longer seen as the road to riches, mainly because few people are willing to pay more than a couple of pounds for a smartphone app, users expect free updates for life and there’s always the risk that one of the bigger tech companies will barge in and do it for free.

But CityMapper, founded by Londoner Azmat Yusuf in 2010, is so good at doing what it does – help users navigate the public transit networks in almost 30 cities, from London to Tokyo – that it’s survived head-to-head competition with Apple and Google.

Nuzzel

“Discovery” is the holy grail of social media: find the way to put the best content in front of users when they log in, and you can guarantee they’ll come back for more. But the best experience hasn’t come from Facebook’s news feed, or Twitter’s disastrous “Discover” feature.

Instead, it’s Nuzzel, a small startup from the creator of one of the first social networks, Friendster. It scans your Twitter and Facebook feeds, finds the best things shared among your network, and gives them to you in a handy digest. That’s something that a lot of apps have promised, but few have pulled off so elegantly. The biggest question about the service is: why hasn’t Twitter bought it?

Jaunt VR

Five years from now, we may be looking back on 2016 as the year virtual reality changed the world in the same way mobile changed the world in 2008. Until the three major platforms launch this year (from Facebook, Sony, and Taiwanese manufacturer HTC), it’s anyone’s guess as to how they will develop.

Gaming will be the immediate focus, but Jaunt is hoping to dominate non-gaming activities. A cinematic VR company, it builds hardware and software for directors to shoot immersive movies, which can be played at home on consumer headsets. The prospect of VR storytelling has split the creative community, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull being one of the loudest voices against the technology. But if it takes off Jaunt, with an executive team drawn from Flipboard and Lucasfilm, hopes to provide the tools required.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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University College London (UCL), a leading UK university, is going to invest £50 million in what it hopes will be the next generation of university spin out companies over the next five years.

The fund, which was launched today, is designed to help academics and student entrepreneurs commercialise their research.

UCL said it will enable scientists to develop a proof of concept, fund licensing projects and create new spinout startups.

Academics working in life sciences, engineering, and information communication technology will be able to apply for investment out of the fund.

Several other universities in the UK have launched their own venture funds in recent years as they look to piggyback on the success of their academics’ work and cash in at the same time.

Last May, the University of Oxford launched the £300 million Oxford Sciences Innovation fund. Imperial Innovations (a fund set up by Imperial College London) has raised £346 million since going public on the London Stock Exchange in 2006. 

Imperial Innovations is contributing £24.75 million to UCL’s new fund. The European Investment Fund, which is part of the European Union’s European Investment Bank, is contributing the same amount. The remaining £500,000 is coming from Albion Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that will manage the fund.

UCL also runs a technology transfer company called UCL Business (UCLB). The university said UCLB has launched over 60 spin-out companies to commercialise intellectual property developed by UCL researchers. Recent UCLB spinouts include Freeline, which is developing gene therapies for blood disorders and Autolus, which is developing cancer immunotherapy treatment.

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Second Home, the quirky East London office space, has raised £7.5 million ($10.7 million) from a host of big name investors to help fund the expansion of its current premises and open up its first overseas space.

Speaking at Digital Life Design conference in Munich today, cofounder Rohan Silva said the funding is coming from venture capitalist Yuri Milner, Tencent chairman Martin Lau, and venture capital firm Index Ventures.

Second Home will also launch in Lisbon later this year, Silva said, adding that it will be done in conjunction with local investor Faber Ventures.

"Right now Lisbon feels like East London just before the tech cluster exploded,"Silva told TechCrunch. "It’s a super-creative city, but there are not enough places for creative people to come together. At the same time, big companies are shrinking, my more people are becoming entrepreneurs and the built environment of cities needs to evolve to keep pace with this."

Second Home was launched just off Brick Lane in 2014 with backing from the likes of Big Brother creator and Arts Council England chair Sir Peter Bazalgette and former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill.

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There's no shortage of well-funded startups that cater to dogs and their owners.

BarkBox, a New York City-based startup, is a subscription-box service catering to dog lovers that's raised $21 million in VC funding. Los Angeles-based DogVacay, a sort of Airbnb for dogs, has raised $47 million.

Now there's a new startup called Bark'N'Borrow that wants to match up dogs in need of a sitter with people who love them.

Founded by Liam Berkeley in 2014, the startup is based in Los Angeles and connects people who want to hang out with a dog — maybe take one for a walk or keep it overnight.

It's free to use for dog owners and dog borrowers, though the service has a professional tier where money is exchanged between dog owners and professional dog walkers and sitters. The startup makes money by taking a cut of the money exchanged on the service's professional tier.

I live in New York City, and it's not easy to convince a landlord here to let you have a dog. I tried out Bark'N'Borrow's service to borrow a dog for a few hours this weekend.

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Liam Berkeley started Bark'N'Borrow in 2014. He and his girlfriend wanted a dog but couldn't have one themselves at the time. So he created a network for people to borrow other people's dogs. You can use Bark'N'Borrow to find a cute dog nearby to take on a walk or hang out with for a few hours. It's free — you don't get paid to take a dog on a walk — though the company has expanded to paid jobs for professional sitters.

When you download the app, you're prompted to make a profile about yourself. I added a picture of me holding my parents' dog.

This is what dog owners see of you, so you want to make it clear you're a dog person. I think I spent longer crafting my Bark'N'Borrow profile than I ever have my Tinder bio.

Bristol startup Brightpearl has raised £7.7 million ($11 million) for its cloud management software that helps retailers manage their businesses. Total investment in the company now stands at £21.4 million ($30.5 million).

The latest funding round comes from venture capitalists including Eden Ventures, MMC Ventures, and Notion Capital, as well as a loan from Silicon Valley Bank and Columbia Lake Partners.

Founded in 2007, Brightpearl's retail and inventory management software aims to help small and medium-size retailers and wholesalers expand and compete with larger rivals by streamlining their sales and supply chains. Businesses use Brightpearl's platform for accounting, inventory, purchasing, customer relationship management (CRM), shipping, and point of sale.

Retailers can integrate the Brightpearl platform with a number of third party systems so they can offer their customers the option to buy products and services from other sites. Amazon, eBay, FedEx, and Shopify can all be integrated with Brightpearl.

The company, which currently has 1,400 customers in 30 countries, said it will use the funding to accelerate the growth of its sales and marketing operation in San Francisco, California. It will also use it to grow its engineering, service, and support teams.

Andrew Hunter, director at Silicon Valley Bank said: "This is an exciting time for Brightpearl. We’re delighted to provide debt funding at this milestone – enabling the team to accelerate growth in 2016 and beyond.

"The software Brightpearl provides its clients makes a big difference to their businesses, enhancing their ability to scale rapidly and stay efficient. Silicon Valley Bank is committed to the thriving SaaS (software-as-a-service) market and we look forward to building a longstanding relationship with Brightpearl as it goes from strength to strength."

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Technology companies in the UK could soon be forced to pay £1,000-a-year for every skilled worker they hire from outside the European Union if immigration recommendations from a government committee are embraced by the Home Office.

Startups wishing to hire a developer from Silicon Valley on a five-year contract would be forced to pay £5,000 up front, for example, while hiring a team of five over the same time period would cost them £25,000.

The proposal, which also applies to other sectors hiring for different roles, was put forward by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) today.

It comes after Prime Minister David Cameron tasked the committee with investigating how to reduce the number of immigrants entering the UK through the Tier 2 visa route, which allowed 151,000 skilled immigrants and their dependents to enter the UK in 2014 year.

Stephen Buckley, head of people at Potato, a London startup that builds complex web applications, said £1,000 a year to hire Silicon Valley engineers is a "pittance considering the salaries involved." He added: "It won't stop companies making those hires."

The MAC said the proposal could raise £250 million to go towards helping train British-based workers in UK firms. 

The MAC also suggested that the government raise the visa's minimum salary threshold and clamp down on IT contractors in order to bring migration down to "tens of thousands" instead of the 336,000 figure that has recently been touted.

Last October, some of the UK’s most powerful tech entrepreneurs — including the founders of Google DeepMind, Citymapper, Shazam, and SwiftKey — warned the Prime Minister against clamping down on immigration.

Sir David Metcalfe, chairman of the MAC, said in a statement that skilled migrant workers make important contributions to the UK economy but he stressed that this needs to be "balanced on their potential impact on the welfare of existing UK residents."

He added: "Raising the cost of employing skilled migrants via higher pay thresholds, and the introduction of an Immigration Skills Charge, should lead to a greater investment in UK employees and reduce the use of migrant lab."

The committee is suggesting that the government raise the minimum salary threshold for the Tier 2 visa from £20,800 to £30,000. However, it also recommends that a "special case" is made for startups.

Raising the overall salary threshold would cut the number of skilled immigrants entering the UK by about 27,600, or 18%, the committee said.

Guy Levin, executive director of Coadec, an organisation that aims to support the UK's digital economy, told Business Insider via email: "Overall think it could have been far worse — the recommendations are on the sensible side, and they reject several of the government's worst ideas (i.e. time limiting shortages, restricting the rights of dependents, and restrict Tier 2 to just a shortage list).

"They do explicitly recognise that new salary thresholds could hit startups (as they also use equity to reward talent), and suggest they might be a special case."

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2015 was a banner year for venture capital: investors poured $128.5 billion into ventures, and 71 startups became billion-dollar companies.

But investors are starting to become more cautious with the money they're pouring into startups.

A new report from CB Insights and KPMG, released Tuesday, examined venture capital activity in 2015 and concluded that although 2015 was a record-breaking year for venture capital, VC funding dropped from $38.6 billion in Q3 2015 to $27.2 billion in Q4.

"The number of deals hit a low not seen since Q1'13," CB Insights noted in its report.

Here are some of CB Insights' main takeaways:

• Deal value dropped from $38.6 billion in Q3 2015 to $27.2 billion in Q4.
• Deal volume decreased just as deal value did, too. In Q3 there were 2,008 VC deals; in Q4, there were 1,742.
• The number of mega-rounds is also shrinking. The number of mega-rounds, defined as a $100 million+ investment in a company, dropped from 72 in Q3 to 38 in Q4.

Is this as good as it gets?

Recently, there's been an increase in chatter among insiders about an impending tech bubble burst. Investors are worried that fast-growing startups have been too reliant on easy venture capital for too long. Their customer acquisition costs are too high, their customer and user growth numbers are increasing because they're depending on VC funding to help them expand into new markets, and all the while they're bleeding cash. 

In addition, late-stage rounds of funding are getting more difficult to raise without revenue growth and a path to profitability.

Successful VC-backed tech sector IPOs in 2015 were few and far between. Though some companies like Fitbit and Atlassian had above-average IPO performance and were met with enthusiasm in the public market, billion-dollar companies like Square, Box, and Apigee went public with market caps below their last private valuations.

The public markets are much harsher than private markets. This means private investors need to reset their expectations, which could be contributing to a slowdown in funding and downward valuation pressure.

This year, CB Insights predicts investors will be more attuned than ever to companies' key fundamentals, investing only in companies that have reasonable burn rates and positive cash flows. The VC database also predicts an increase in M&A activity, even as VC activity may be declining.

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