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As the worm turns | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | you to mull over this fine Thursday morning: Do agtech robotics need a reset? Granted, we’re dealing with a small sample size here, but a string of news items over the past year have left me wondering why the category is — thus far — failing to live up to some very strong potential. Warehouse fulfillment and last-mile delivery have been the real breakout stars of the pandemic — and understandably so. But given chronic labor shortages and an aging population of farmers (the average age is ~58 years in the U.S. and about a decade older in Japan), this is a huge opportunity for growth. There are a lot of variables, of course. The barrier for effective autonomy is certainly lower in a field than it is on a crowded city street. But there are other factors to deal with, in terms of things like computer vision and machine learning, from identifying weeds to learning to pick fragile crops like berries. There’s also the question of monetization and how eager farmers will be to adopt these new technologies. This has been on my mind in the wake of . I’m going to be very upfront here and admit that I wasn’t familiar with the latter prior to this week’s news. In my defense, the company was young, having formed in 2020. In spite — or, perhaps because — of being founded during a pandemic, it managed to roll out its first prototype device quickly, testing it at farms within six months. Zoox But the acquisition effectively marks the end of Strio as a company. It was an aqui-hire, bringing over a number of employees (including the co-founder and CEO), who will be incorporated into the robotaxi team. They’ll stay put in Boston, however, as Zoox is opening an R&D space in that hub of robotics research. The startup’s strawberry picking ambitions, however, are effectively done. This, of course, reflects the . That startup is taking its strawberry-picking robots out of the fields, as it instead looks to integrate that technology into Bowery’s vertical farms. In that instance, at least, the new owner is directly incorporating the farming technology into (an albeit dramatically different) agtech setting. Traptic Then there are companies like Blue River Technologies and Bear Flag Robotics, both of which were acquired by John Deere. That’s further cementing the long-time tractor maker’s place at the tip of the agtech spear. Between that and the fact that it’s been selling tools to farmers for nearly 200 years, John Deere’s going to to be a tough company to beat. So why not just join them. I think that gets to the heart of the matter, really. Launching a startup is hard. That goes triple for a robotics company. In many cases, acquisition is a perfectly reasonable — or even favorable — outcome. Selfishly, it’s hard to see a promising young company take themselves off the market. But can you blame them? I certainly can’t. If Amazon or John Deere or whoever suddenly knocked on you door with a boatload of money and the opportunity to continue your work with a lot more resources, would you say no? Especially in the wake of what recently happened to a promising company like , which was the darling of agtech robotics not all that long ago. Ford – Agility Robotics shoot in Albany, Oreggon on May 10, 2019. Courtesy of Ford/Photo Tim LaBarge As I mentioned , I with Agility Robotics’ co-founder and CTO, Jonathan Hurst, and Playground Global’s founding partner, Bruce Leak. It offered some insight into — among other things — how charmed Agility’s position feels, having caught the attention of a VC fund willing to invest the time and energy into letting Agility grow and find its market. That’s certainly not something anyone can assume going into this. Says Leak: We were surfing the internet like any good venture capital group, and we ran across the video that Agility released. We were super impressed. This product, at some level, was just an incredible pair of legs. But it could walk for hours and even run across uneven terrain in a very practical way. Seeing something like that, which we thought might not even be possible, we knew we had to meet the Agility team. What’s the solution? Obviously getting more funds supercharged in the space and willing to give agtech robotics sufficient runway would be ideal. Some truly aggressive funding from the government would be a great way to own the space and take control over the U.S. food supply. Either way, I’d be looking at this space a lot more closely. That strawberry is ripe for the picking, should the right robotic arm come alone. Tortoise On the note of finding your market comes interesting , which is pivoting from the white-hot category of last-mile delivery to the red-hot world of autonomous retail. Here that basically means sticking a “mobile store” on the back of Tortoise’s little robots. Fun quote from co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko here about knowing when to pivot and not looking back: You have to know what hyper-growth tastes like, and you have to have the humility to know what the fake version of it tastes like. It’s hard and it’s painful to make these pivots, and you look like an idiot when six months ago you were telling the world last-mile is the next great thing, and now you’re saying something else, but it’s better to suffer some of the indignation of that than to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. Nvidia, meanwhile, wants you to know it’s still invested in that last mile. The components giant , an Uber spinout that makes robots that look like Minions (tell me I’m wrong). Phantom Auto / Post Mates / Serve Robotics. “We see ourselves as a company that’s leading with autonomy and scaling real autonomous robots out in the real world,” says Serve CEO Ali Kashani. “Nvidia is one of the most critical companies to the robotics space as a whole, and they’re also investing in the tools, so it just makes sense for us to work close together given this is a developing space.” Gecko Robotics A big for Gecko Robotics this week. Talk about places in desperate need of government funding. It’s hard to ignore the fact that a bridge collapsed in the startup’s hometown of Pittsburgh the same day the president arrived to talk infrastructure funding. Gecko’s own technology is specifically designed to monitor manufacturing structures for categories like oil and gas, power, manufacturing and defense. (Programmable Worm for Irregular Pipeline Exploration) robot also began life on the defense side. Specifically, the project was birthed out of DARPA’s Underminer program as a way to develop tunneling technology for the military. These days, it’s got a new job — and a set of cockroach-inspired whiskers, which offer tactile feedback to help it navigate around pipes and tunnels. The robot sports fluid-powered muscles that offer enough strength to unclog fat deposits — or fatbergs. The robot is really leaning in to the “dirty” part of the three robotic Ds. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dull? Dirty? Dangerous? |
Amazon, Microsoft and Google have suspended cloud sales in Russia | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | As the war in Ukraine continues, companies as varied as Exxon, Visa, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have suspended sales in Russia. Tech companies like have joined in over the last couple of weeks. We queried the world’s top cloud infrastructure vendors (including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Cloudflare) to find out how each was reacting to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Each company let their public blog posts stand as the message they wished to share, with the exception of Google Cloud, which sent a brief statement stating its position. In a blog post on March 4, that it has no data centers in Russia, and as a matter of policy, it does not do business with the Russian government. It stated that while it had Russian customers, they were all headquartered outside of the country, though it stopped short of saying it would suspend sales. That changed on March 8, when the company updated the blog post to indicate it had “stopped allowing new sign-ups for AWS in Russia and Belarus.” Microsoft also took the action of suspending sales to Russia. “We are announcing today that we will suspend all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia,” Brad Smith wrote announcing the action. That presumably includes Azure infrastructure services. As for Google, the last of the big three cloud infrastructure vendors, it said, “We can confirm we are not accepting new Google Cloud customers in Russia at this time. We will continue to closely monitor developments.” IBM has taken a similar position, announcing in written by CEO Arvind Krishna that it was suspending sales in Russia. “I’ve heard from many of you in response to last week’s announcement regarding the war in Ukraine, and I appreciate your feedback. First, let me be very clear — we have suspended all business in Russia,” Krishna wrote in the post. Cloudflare, which is not a pure cloud infrastructure vendor, helps provide secure internet access via hundreds of data centers around the world, including Russia and Ukraine. As an internet provider, the company thinks it’s important to keep the internet running in the country in spite of calls to shut down service there: “Beyond this, we have received several calls to terminate all of Cloudflare’s services inside Russia. We have carefully considered these requests and discussed them with government and civil society experts. Our conclusion, in consultation with those experts, is that Russia needs more Internet access, not less,” the company wrote . It’s worth noting that in , IDC found that the economic impact on cloud companies taking these actions will likely be minimal. “While IDC expects a steep decline and slow recovery for ICT spending in Russia and Ukraine, the global impact of this decline will be somewhat limited. Combined the two countries only account for 5.5% of all ICT spending in Europe and 1% worldwide,” the firm reported. |
Dot Pad tactile display makes images touchable for visually impaired users | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | used by people with vision impairments, but despite widespread improvements to accessibility on the web and smart devices, innovation for braille-reader hardware has essentially been stalled. Dot has taken a huge step forward with a smart braille device that not only allows for easy display of text, but tactile representations of imagery, potentially opening an entirely new layer for education and accessible content. consists of 2,400 pins in a pixel-like grid that can quickly be set to be in up or down positions, forming letters in braille or easily identifiable shapes. That’s room for 300 braille glyphs, plus 20 more in a more traditionally spaced line below. Crucially, the device also integrates directly into Apple’s VoiceOver screen reading feature, making reading text, icon labels and even graphs or simple images just a tap away. The company, based in Korea, was formed when co-founders Ki Kwang Sung and Eric Ju Yoon Kim found themselves fed up with the lack of options for learning and reading despite so many other advances in computing and interfaces. This isn’t the first digital braille display by a long shot — devices like this have existed for decades, but they’ve been decidedly limited in both quantity and capability. Most commonly you’ll find braille displays for reading and typing digital text, but these are often comparatively clunky one-line machines that haven’t fundamentally changed in many years. These devices are also generally not created with kids and learning in mind. Children with visual impairments are subject to a number of systematic disadvantages, such as a lack of textbooks or activities created with them in mind. It’s this lack that , a toy that helps teach braille at the toddler level. (After this story was published, the American Printing House for the Blind pointed out that development on traditional braille readers has continued and , including some with learners in mind, have been released. But the general design and interface is familiar.) “In the 21st century, it didn’t make sense that visually impaired people cannot access graphical information in a digital way,” said Sung. “There are a lot of innovations out there in every industry, including education, jobs and social network services… the requirement of graphical information is getting higher, which means visually impaired people are getting cut off. Even in the pandemic situation, remote work and education was mandatory… but they didn’t have any solution to do that.” They decided to make a monitor to allow blind and low-vision users to access and interact with the pixel-based images and representations sighted people take for granted. Dot Braille readers are generally extremely complex mechanically, relying on hundreds of tiny hinges and gears to raise and lower the pins on demand — and they must also be robust enough to withstand constant pressure from touching. We’ve seen various innovations over the years from prestigious research institutions, but none have really made it to market. Dot is trying to change all that with not just better, more capable hardware but also deeper integrations with smartphones and tablets. The core innovation of the Dot Pad is, as you might expect, the “dot” itself. How to make dozens or hundreds of these little pins (6 per braille letter) extend and retract reliably and quickly (and not too loudly) has produced a variety of solutions, but Dot’s is entirely new. Dot “We got the idea from the mechanism of speakers,” Sung explained. The tiny electromagnetic actuator vibrates in smartphone speakers but the team adapted it to move a pin up and down instead, using a magnetic ball rotor that locks easily in the up or down position and can unlock and disappear quickly. The whole thing is a fraction of the size of previous mechanisms — “10 times smaller compared to existing piezoelectric braille actuators.” (Dot privately showed me schematics and cutaways of the pins that showed how it’s done, but declined to share those publicly.) This means the company was able to create a grid of thousands of pins with very little space between them, big enough to be read as letters but also dense enough to form patterns representing images. The bottom of the Dot Pad has a dedicated section for traditionally spaced braille but the main grid is better described as a “tactile display” than anything else. I got to play with a pre-production prototype device and it worked very well, refreshing the whole screen in about a second from top to bottom (this is being improved as well, to the point where animation is a possibility) and seemed readily scannable by a user’s hand. Both displays have a flexible protective screen that prevents the pins from getting gummed up and can easily be swapped out. The cells themselves are easily replaced as well. The other big advantage Dot has is its collaboration with Apple. The Dot Pad can be invoked with a gesture, instantly showing whatever the highlighted item is on the display. You can see the process in action in the video below: And there’s a that will let them include and tweak this capability in their apps. (I’ve asked Apple for comment on the API, and will update this post if they reply.) “Many blind/low-vision users around the world rely on iPhone and iPad, due to the industry-leading screen-reader VoiceOver,” said Kim. “We are very excited that Dot’s tactile technology is now optimized for VoiceOver, and that this will expand digital accessibility. Beyond speech or literary braille, these users can now feel and improve their understanding of images.” Obviously the fidelity is somewhat limited, but it can display icons, line drawings and things like graphs very well. Imagine a graph in an article about stocks — sighted people can take it in at a glance, but others must find other ways, like the one built into VoiceOver that represents the graph as a sort of rising and falling tone. Better than nothing, but definitely not ideal. The Dot Pad, powered by VoiceOver and its own image analysis algorithms, will attempt to represent any screen area or element on the display. Text can also be represented, either as a full page of braille letters (arranged in spaced rows like normal) or as the shapes of the letters themselves. This allows the user to better appreciate things like typefaces in logos — there are no serifs in braille, naturally. Actually, it sounds quite interesting to experience large-scale type in that tactile way. Dot More importantly, though, this is a great resource for kids. A child growing up with a visual impairment misses out on a lot, and being able to easily illustrate things like letters, shapes and simple images others take for granted like houses, cats and so on… it’s potentially a game changing addition to K-12 education in the blind community. Part of that is of course close integration with the most common devices out there, so it isn’t just a resource someone has under very specific circumstances. The iPhone and iPad are not just ubiquitous as modern digital devices go, but also have a robust accessibility stack that Dot has tapped into. Of course the vast improvement to voice-powered interfaces has been immensely empowering for people who can’t use graphical interfaces, but braille remains an important option, especially for reading and learning. All these modalities and more must be improved so that opportunity is not bottlenecked by technology. Feedback from the community has been positive; Sung said people have mainly been thinking about the possibilities rather than the limitations. But from the early stages they did increase the “pixel” count to better render images, and they’re working on a library of Dot Pad-friendly custom graphics so that if, for example, the Twitter logo is recognized by the software, it can just use its own version rather than scanning the outline every time. Dot will be making their core tech available for an upcoming Dynamic Tactile Device project led by the American Printing House for the Blind and HumanWare, slated to be launched in 2023; the developer community will have a chance to weigh in based on their experience with the API. Dot Future feature plans include tactile representations of photos — not necessarily the images, but the layout, the positions and descriptions of people, and other aspects could be put on the display. They’re also working on a way to lock the pins at middle heights, for gradations in feel and other uses. And potentially the pad could be used as input as well as display — being able to press down on the pins to send a touch signal to the appropriate part of the screen would be yet another useful feature. Of course, like previous braille displays, the Dot Pad is neither cheap nor simple — though it’s potentially cheaper and simpler than others out there. Manufacturing and assembly is no easy task, and the total cost is difficult to say, especially with inflated prices for chips and other components right now. (It uses thousands of tiny ICs that previously were mainly used for car window control switches — and prices right now are through the roof.) Fortunately, this is exactly the type of device that no one should have to pay for, and for which there are numerous subsidy and other programs. After all, kids don’t have to pay for necessary items like the desks they use at school. And helping people with disabilities get a good education is in everyone’s interest. Better accessibility is of course welcome for its own sake, but it has major knock-on effects, as people who couldn’t learn or participate in an industry finally get a chance to. Dot’s founders noted that they’re working with the Korean and U.S. governments, as well as the blind community and advocacy organizations to integrate the Dot Pad with curricula and use existing funds and methods to pay for them. Developers can learn more about the tactile graphics API and . |
DoorDash is testing a feature that lets you return packages to post offices, FedEx or UPS | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | confirmed it’s testing a new feature called “Return a Package” that allows customers to use the service to return packages to the nearest post office, UPS or FedEx location. The feature is part of a small beta test and is not yet widely available, DoorDash said, and declined to share which markets are offering the option. To use the feature, a customer will first select the option to return a package in the app. They’ll need to have their package already fully sealed with the prepaid shipping label attached. A DoorDash delivery person will then arrive to pick up the package and deliver it to the nearest physical store or post office. They won’t drop off the packages at standalone drop boxes. “DoorDash is always thinking about new ways to provide the communities we serve with access to unparalleled convenience and opportunity through our platform,” a DoorDash spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We continually explore and test new innovations to provide more value to our customers, Dashers and merchant partners.” DoorDash A screenshot provided by DoorDash explains that courier tracking may be different for this delivery option, which isn’t a surprise because, unlike most DoorDash orders, you’ll be sending a package as opposed to receiving an order. “This store decides if its courier or a Dasher delivers your order,” the screenshot also says. “The store and its courier may receive your name, address, delivery instructions, and phone number to help deliver to you.” In terms of compensation, Dashers handling package returns are paid in the same way they would be paid for any other marketplace order, the company said. With this new feature, DoorDash says it wants to help customers avoid the tedious task of taking a package to a post office in order to fulfill a return. The company notes that although returns are common, they can be time-consuming, which is why it wanted to create a way to simplify the return process by leveraging its current local logistics infrastructure. DoorDash also said delivery people on its app are always looking for new ways to earn through the platform and that this new feature will give them an additional option to do so. DoorDash isn’t the only delivery company that has worked to offer such a service. Back in 2015, Uber offered a for customers to send return packages to post offices. The feature was called “Returns” and was powered by UberRush, which in 2018. Similarly, a former on-demand shipping startup called Shyp offered a service that picked up packages and delivered them to their destination. The company in 2018 after struggling to find a scalable model beyond its launching point in San Francisco. |
Quest 2 fitness tracking finally lands Apple Health integration | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Meta’s Quest 2 headset has managed to carve out a surprisingly sizable niche as a high-tech piece of exercise equipment as people use software like Beat Saber and Supernatural to get a cardio workout in. There have been some limits to the experience, though, given the standalone nature of the virtual reality headset. Today, Meta announced that the Oculus Move service is boasting a new integration with Apple Health as well as a mobile view of health stats in the Oculus mobile app. Previously, health data including active time spent, calories burned and goals/progress was only viewable in-headset. Meta hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt on privacy matters over the years, so they are specifying that exporting movement data from the headset to your phone or the Apple Health app is strictly opt-in and that this data will not inform ad suggestions. It’s a fairly low-key (and long overdue) update for the headset, but one which plenty of frequent users will be happy to see landing on their devices at last. At the company’s most recent Connect keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg specifically highlighted the Quest’s popularity as a workout device. “A lot of you are already using Quest to stay fit, it lets you work out in some completely new ways,” Zuckerberg said in the keynote. “It’s kind of like a Peloton, but instead of your bike you just have your VR headset and with it, you can do anything from boxing lessons to sword-fighting to even dancing.” |
Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen back $30M fund exclusively investing in NFT art | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | The world of NFTs is never dull — as long as the money never stops. While investors continue to pour billions into the sector, albeit at a slowing pace, more crypto buyers are spinning up funds to back NFT platforms, projects and the non-fungible tokens themselves. While dedicated funds solely devoted to NFTs as an asset class are starting to pop up, it’s still a risky space for the bigger institutional firms. That’s not stopping those investors from becoming LPs in the NFT funds themselves, though. A number of prominent Silicon Valley crypto VCs have backed a new upstart NFT fund led by Andrew Jiang and Todd Goldberg. The fund is backed by a who’s who of crypto investors, with LPs including a sizable chunk of a16z’s investing team (Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Arianna Simpson and Jon Lai are all backers), as well as Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Electric Capital’s Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer and a host of other investors and founders in the space. The fund plans to invest about half of the fund in so-called “blue-chip NFTs,” including popular projects like CryptoPunks, Art Blocks and Bored Apes, as well as works from popular artists selling singular NFT works. The other half of the fund is going into what Jiang and Goldberg deem as “high potential collections” from artists with smaller existing markets. “NFT assets are what we think are going to be a really big deal over the next decade, like orders of magnitude larger than they are today, because NFTs give us a digitally native way to invest in culture at internet scale,” Goldberg tells TechCrunch in an interview. “We want to become a very high-signal collector that acquires the top assets and is also helpful to creators and builders.” Goldberg says that the firm may also explore doing its own NFT drops, partnering with some of the artists in their portfolio. The NFT market is still raking in billions, but the pace of investment appears to be slowing in recent weeks. In the past 30 days, the OpenSea platform has done $2.3 billion in transaction volume, a 40% decrease over the previous 30-day period, according to blockchain analysis tool . “The market has been frothy, however, we’re kind of entering a bear market, which is actually great for the fund as we are very patient capital,” Goldberg says. “We’ll wait for the best opportunities to enter these positions and then we’ll just hold these things long-term. Long-term, patient capital doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I think in this market where everyone is very short-term focused, it actually is a strategic advantage.” Jiang, who is the primary manager of the fund, previously founded the hardware startup Soda Labs, as well as the YC-backed nonprofit Bayes Impact. Goldberg, who co-founded the ticketing startup Eventjoy, already has a making equity investments in startups, which he operates with Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra. A number of that fund’s portfolio founders are backers of Curated, including Dapper Labs and the founders of NFT startup Manifold. |
We’re breaking down usage-based pricing and growth strategies at TechCrunch Early Stage | Jordan Crook | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Software as a service (SaaS) — both a revelation and a revolution — completely disrupted the decades-old software selling paradigm. It turned buying software from an infrequent, high-cost and, for many companies, time-consuming process into a hosted, monthly and predictable cost-per-seat subscription service. SaaS has essentially become the de facto business model for early-stage startups right on up to global conglomerates. But tech paradigms constantly change, and per-seat subscription-based pricing isn’t a one-size fits all solution. Enter the next evolution: user-based pricing. Rather than selling your software as a contract for a set price and time period, you charge only for what your customer actually uses and nothing more. This pricing model doesn’t work for every SaaS scenario. Case in point: no one wants to pay per-use for Google Workspace. User-based pricing is an increasingly popular way to sell API-based products. Twilio, for example, sells its APIs to other businesses that want to add SMS/telephony capabilities. Other successful SaaS companies with usage-based pricing models include AWS, Datadog, Snowflake and Stripe. Usage-based pricing offers benefits to both the seller and the customer — but is it the right pricing structure for your startup? And how do you use it to grow when old-school SaaS benchmarks, milestones and metrics used to demonstrate a proven strategy aren’t as useful? These questions are just two reasons why we invited Kyle Poyar, the operating partner at OpenView Ventures, to share his knowledge and expertise in the session, at on April 14. Poyar leads OpenView’s growth team, which is responsible for advising portfolio executives on strategies to increase revenue growth and dominate their markets. His specialty? Pricing and packaging strategy — a SaaS company’s most effective, yet overlooked, growth lever. An expert in product-led growth (PLG), go-to-market strategy, usage-based business models and SaaS benchmarks, “usage-based pricing will be the key to successful monetization in the future.” Choosing the right pricing structure for your SaaS startup is essential for long-term success. Join Kyle Poyar to learn about usage-based pricing, why old SaaS metrics won’t cut it and how to scale without them — and which new metrics matter most for your business. sessions provide plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. !
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Failure is complex, especially in the world of startups | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 19 | As I hear about more startups struggling amid shifting market conditions, the great resignation and the general inflection point that begins once a company hits growth stage, it’s worth addressing an elephant in the room that comes around often in the tech versus media debate. How do we cover failure? There’s the argument that startup tensions are inevitable and common, so should we spotlight every time something bubbles to the surface, especially at the cost of an underrepresented founder who may just be doing their best? There’s an argument that the business is messy, so we should report on the issues as we hear about them; and there’s the narrative of the female takedown story, in which people believe that women are targeted by the press more than men due to unreasonably high standards. The tech world has preconceived notions of how a historically overlooked individual should act, and I use that reality to influence my reporting. For example, I once remember asking a prominent female founder about a drama that I was hearing about from her ex-co-founder. She essentially said, “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, it’s that I can’t afford to show vulnerability at this point in my career.” It was a key moment that highlighted why certain people are able to speak up and why certain aren’t empowered in the first place. My opinion here is that you can believe that any powerful founder, especially those with millions of dollars at their disposal, should be held accountable for the company they create — but you can also believe that tips from sources can sometimes be inherently biased. Rigorous vetting — from deciding what a former employee’s incentives are to understanding who can afford to comment — matters. ashley perfectly articulated an important nuance about speaking up i remember asking a prominent female founder ab drama i was hearing. she was basically like, "it's not that i don't want to tell you, i can't afford to show vulnerability at this point in my career." — natasha (@nmasc_) If we track a startup’s upward trajectory, we should track them falling apart. But framing matters, contextualizing matters. If a founder lies to consumers or harasses employees, it’s pretty clear how to identify the individual as the source of the issues; but how we cover it is important. Failure is complex, and it’s hard to attribute failure to a certain moment. Sometimes a startup falls apart because the founder leads a shitty culture, but sometimes venture capital’s incentives can lead to a messy product spree. Who is to blame in this case? The founder for taking money, or VCs for too much pressure? Or the ever-fickle market? We talk , but when we do write a window into a specific example, the nuance is important. Diverse newsrooms and patient editors are key to making sure we’re asking the right questions, and not falling subject to tired tropes. It’s also key that founders treat their staff like humans. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about All Raise’s new CEO, funds to back other funds and Ukraine. As always, you can support me by sharing this newsletter, or The startup story within the war in Ukraine continues to evolve, with companies in the financial services sector having an especially crucial role and set of decisions to make. This past week, to allow users to send money to Ukrainians, Ukraine’s president amid a slew of digital donations and data showed that nearly 7,000 apps have left Russia’s app store since it invaded Ukraine. Some big tech apps remain. I mean, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Our own Romaine Dillet interviewed Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of Digital Transformation, One key part of the interview was when Fedorov talked about Ukraine’s tech strategy, otherwise known as a digital blockade: We call this project digital blockade. And we believe that this is a very crucial component to winning this war. And I think that, in the future, governments will resemble tech companies, not classical governments. Digital platforms provide some vital services. They have become so embedded into the fabric of society. Once you start removing these services from the aggressor, one by one, you actually damage their fabric of society and you make it very uncomfortable for them to go along with their daily lives. We’d like to think of this as a completely new and unexplored battlefield. And this is a complementary measure to sanctions which we expect is going to push the development of Russia back decades. / Getty Images All Raise, a nonprofit that focuses on increasing diversity within venture capital deals and decision makers, has named Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon as the Dixon has spent more than 10 years working to increase representation in the startup world. Prior to All Raise, Dixon was running Founder Gym, an online training center for underrepresented founders that ran 18 cohorts across six continents. A few weeks ago, Dixon announced that Founder Gym’s current cohort will be its last graduating class, as it’s shutting down. Even though All Raise is a nonprofit born specifically to increase representation in tech, Dixon wants to bring a new level of inclusivity to the organization’s mission. Dixon was one of the first Black women in Silicon Valley to raise venture capital and to work at a venture capital firm, she says. The entrepreneur also had two children during the pandemic, which she says added another “expansion” of who she has evolved to as a leader. “I also live these experiences of exclusion bias whether unconscious or conscious — being an only, being one of a few,” “I understand it because I have been very intentional about wanting to understand it. For All Raise, you can absolutely expect that to carry through in my leadership as we make sure that what we are capturing who we are supporting is really a more inclusive space for a realm of identities.” All Raise I wrote a piece this week about the into other funds. , investors are broadening how they invest in money, whether that is backing other emerging fund managers or finally giving Series B rounds the attention they deserve. The startup financing market is changing on a daily basis, which means that we’ll see investors continue to innovate at a similar clip. New data from Carta shows that shifts aren’t hypothetical, As Alex gets to in his piece, from November and December 2021 to January and February 2022 Still, he continues, “Series A rounds on both a median and average basis in the starting months of 2022 remain over the $10 million mark. Looking at valuations, Series C is a sharper example. Alex reports that “average valuations for , with median valuations also taking a firm whack. That’s a huge change, one that backs up our general grousing about the changing public markets and how those price shifts should impact startup valuations, especially among companies that are on a clear path toward an exit.” / Getty Images Techcrunch Early Stage 2022 is April 14, aka right around the corner, and it’s in San Francisco. Join us for a one-day founder summit featuring GV’s Terri Burns, Greylock’s Glen Evans and Felicis’ Aydin Senkut. The TC team has been fiending to get back in person, so don’t be surprised if panels are a little spicier than usual. , and Also, if you missed , we continued the conversation with Equity this week, asking: “ Until next time, |
Stilt secures $114M in debt & equity to help fintechs and neobanks launch credit offerings with its API | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Stilt |
We keep trying to reinvent startup accelerators | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 26 | Critiquing the value of a startup accelerator and demo days has been a decades-long conversation in the world of tech. The programs promise napkin-stage founders help with everything from finding their co-founders to hitting product-market fit to raising that pivotal first check. Led by worldwide programs like Y Combinator, Techstars and 500 Global, startup accelerators have birthed billion-dollar companies such as Coinbase and Stripe and become synonymous with the promise of activation energy. Yet, every few months, entrepreneurs ask the same questions: Is precious equity worth access to a network? Is the true value of the program just an esteemed stamp of approval? Are demo days outdated? Is the best outcome for founders within an accelerator just a new round of financing? Is YC’s batch size just too big to stand out in? We keep trying to reinvent startup accelerators, and that in and of itself tells me that the institution stays relevant, even if imperfect. Asking questions, after all, is the first step in changing the way things are done. In January, I wrote a piece about in how they think about value add services. Days later, Y Combinator announced that to $500,000, up from $125,000 before. With Y Combinator Winter 2022 Demo Day happening next week, we’ll see the first cohort impacted by these changes — and that YC went more remote, more international and This year, as everyone will see, we’re changing the way we cover Demo Day to better reflect what we think is the most important part of accelerators: a way to see how a large cohort of startups is directionally thinking about the biggest problems in a certain subsector. Demo days, it feels like, have fully departed from a traditional presentation and pitch to investors, and more so offer a snapshot of a startup and the growth plus personality of its earliest days. More next week, but in the rest of this newsletter we’ll talk about the outlier world of fintech, an Instacart discount and a cryptocurrency nonprofit overlap. As always, you can support me by forwarding this newsletter to a friend, or Ramp confirmed that it has raised, yet again, The approaching decacorn valuation comes after the company hit unicorn status less than a year ago given that less than one year ago. Jeez. Ramp, and fintech more broadly, feels like an outlier from the market turbulence we’ve been reporting on over the past quarter. Is the financial services sector protected from a broader venture pull back or valuation correction? On Equity this week, Alex and Mary Ann landed on a key takeaway: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch giving us yet another data point in happening to many pandemic-era success stories. As Alex Wilhelm DoorDash, another food delivery company, has seen its price-sales ratio fall from highs the year prior while Uber is hoping to scale its food delivery service. Instacart, still private, cutting its paper valuation ahead of a stock market debut may save it an otherwise bumpy reaction. / Getty Images Crypto reporter Anita Ramaswamy looked into the trend of web3’s wealthy donating in crypto, instead of cash. The story specifically explores how a rush of crypto donations to support Ukraine this month may spark a broader interest in the community to support causes via coins. Beyond the cultural overlap in donations and crypto’s view of a more democratic way to support causes, there’s a technical benefit. Change founder Sonia Nigam, who is building a donation API with Amar Shah, explained the difference between traditional philanthropy and creator utility: The smart contract technology allows impact to live in the product itself, and then give in perpetuity … we’ll see NFT collections go live, and they’ll set a goal; [for example] that of all secondary sales, 2% goes to combating climate change for life. Now, on every single resale, the creator’s initial intent is never lost, which is what gets them really excited. And for nonprofits, unlocking recurring channels for giving is always the number one goal. Bryce Durbin TechCrunch Early Stage 2022 is April 14, aka right around the corner, and it’s in San Francisco. Join us for a one-day founder summit featuring GV’s Terri Burns, Greylock’s Glen Evans and Felicis’ Aydin Sekut. The TC team has been fiending to get back in person, so don’t be surprised if panels are a little spicier than usual. , and She’s already asking the big questions, and , read it here: Until next time, |
Riding an API to platform status | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 19 | Happy Saturday, friends; I hope you are well. As you read this, I have scooted back to my regular digs up in the Northeast, leaving sunny New Orleans behind. Yes, next week’s writing will be more emo on account of the weather. Regardless, there are two things to talk about today, so let’s get busy! — Earlier this week, The Exchange chatted with Shippo founder and CEO about her company’s announcement that it has with Shopify. Shippo is in the shipping game, offering a SaaS offering to merchants that gives them access to bundled, and therefore cheaper, rates for moving goods. Last year the company . (Back in 2019, , Behrens Wu said that her company has SaaS-like gross margins, for reference.) The company has grown quickly, doubling shipping volume in 2020 — which at the time tracked loosely with revenue — and doubled in size back 2019. In early 2021, when we last checked in with Shippo, it had a neat plan ahead of it to keep that growth flowing (emphasis added): Now flush with more capital, what’s next for Shippo? , international expansion (Shippo only does a “little bit” of international shipping, per Behrens Wu), and double-down on what it considers its core customer base. This week, Behrens Wu said that offering shipping is now “table stakes” for both platforms and marketplaces, so individual sellers expect that if you offer them a digital storefront, they expect payments support along with an option for shipping. Shippo wants to be that shipping tool that platforms offer. The CEO said that after getting inbound interest from marketplaces about 18 months ago, her team got to work on building an API for its service that allows others to bake Shippo’s service into their marketplace. There’s a revenue share component in the deal, according to Behrens Wu, but with Shopify and other potential partners offering huge volume gains, the math could pencil out well for Shippo. That’s because its service gets better with volume. The more packages that Shippo helps ship, the better deals it can land with shipping companies around the world. And now it has a way to dramatically expand its total volume, perhaps improving its ability to rip monetary value out of the e-commerce shipping world. We’re going to need to check in with the company in a few months to see how things are going, but it all feels rather bullish. Behrens Wu reached out after noting our reporting on the growth of API-powered startups. Well, now the company has an API that is key to its overall growth trajectory, our thesis holds: SaaS is neat, but APIs could be the future-facing business model to beat. Not to overly savage the expired equine, but insurtech has had an up and down few years. From to big dollars for insurtech marketplaces, we saw a string of IPOs that failed to hold onto value post-debut. It’s been messy. And yet. The Exchange wrote earlier this year that insurtech venture capital activity was despite the barrage of negative news concerning some of the sector’s best-known names. Things were once so hot that we tried to figure out “ ” back in early 2020. Well, the VCs are still at it. This week Policygenius that it has closed a $125 million round. The company’s software essentially allows consumers to find and buy different insurance products online. Given how large the insurance market is, getting folks to the right product is big business. A bit like how Credit Karma was valuable as heck, if you will. Policygenius competitor The Zebra raised $150 million last April, for reference, so the Policygenius round is not an entire surprise. But it does underscore the fact that public-market news can help accelerate a startup sector, but that it can’t — it seems — kill it off. |
China’s driverless delivery startup Whale Dynamic targets US market with $2.5M funding | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 3 | 19 | A nascent Nuro challenger from China has its sight set on the delivery market in the U.S. and just raised some seed funding to advance its ambitions. , a Shenzhen-based autonomous delivery startup founded by Baidu veteran David Chang, said it has closed a seed round of about $2.5 million. Qianchuang Capital, a Beijing-based investment firm managed by veterans from China’s leading financial institutions, led the round, with participation from Shangbang Huizhong, a Chinese fund backed by real estate developers. Founded in 2018, Whale Dynamic is developing Nuro-like driverless delivery vans that are meant to do away with the steering wheel and driver’s seat. And like Nuro, whose delivery bots , it contracts a Chinese manufacturer to produce its self-driving vehicles, the name of which cannot be revealed yet as the deal has not been finalized. Whale Dynamic’s slight edge over Nuro lies in costs, surmised Chang, who worked as a product manager in Baidu’s intelligent driving group. Nuro assembles parts in the U.S., while the complete production of Whale Dynamic’s vehicles, from manufacturing to assembling, happens in China, which gives it a price advantage over its American counterpart. Its vehicles are priced at around $20,000 each. The latest financial injection will enable Whale Dynamic to expand its current team of 30 employees and explore product use cases in China and the U.S. Led by director of engineering Qi Wei, who hailed from Huawei, the company aims to have its first prototype car testing in some Chinese cities in May. In China, Whale Dynamic faces competition from retail tech giants like Meituan and JD.com, which their own goods-only delivery vehicles last year. Chang believes that his company’s technology, which takes the slower and more costly route of conducting R&D and testing on passenger cars rather than building the boxes-on-wheels directly, can better stand the test of time. Whale Dynamic’s testing fleet using passenger cars Chang eventually wants to base his firm in the U.S. and target express delivery services and supermarkets there. “You can test things much more quickly at lower costs in China,” Chang explained regarding why he started out in China. As regulators from China and the U.S. increase scrutiny over tech companies for potential national security risks, businesses that straddle the two countries will have to heed greater regulations or pick sides. TuSimple, a California-based autonomous trucking company , is looking to sell its China unit, . Most of TuSimple’s vehicles operate in the U.S., with a smaller fleet running in China. But U.S. regulators over the firm’s Chinese background and its China office’s access to data, which reportedly led to TuSimple’s decision to offload its China unit. Security compliance is a priority at Whale Dynamic, Chang said. When it enters the U.S. market, the startup will opt for U.S. cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud; its China team will take care of hardware development only. The company’s key suppliers are also American — Ouster for lidar (and Israel-based Innoviz, which has offices in the U.S.) and Nvidia and Intel for chips. Unlike Nuro, which operates its own fleets, Whale Dynamic plans to only offer ready-to-use vehicles and software as a service, leaving the operational part to its clients, which should limit the amount of sensitive data the startup can glean. |
Are we about to see a unicorn selloff? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 26 | Welcome to the weekend! We have a of ground to cover today, so pour some coffee, settle in, and roll with me. Remember when Amplitude , started to trade, and then when it reported Q4 2021 earnings? It was hardly alone amongst public tech companies in taking a haircut in early 2022, but the scale of its repricing stood. Now, Instacart is , albeit on the private markets. Should we expect more private companies to also shake up how they value their share price to better incent new hires to join and current employees to stay? Maybe. GGV’s Jeff Richards had : Yep. There’s no avoiding the market. You can put off reality by raising venture capital and not seeing a repricing until you raise again. Sure. But if you are a late-stage unicorn that has ample cash, how do you figure out your market worth if you don’t raise new funds? If Instacart is the start of a trend, flat really could be — — the new up when it comes to startup valuations. A small fact about me is that I went to school in Chicago, and thus I was in and around the city’s tech scene as a baby journalist. This meant that I went to community events, working to better understand what was going on. I met when Sprout Social was a startup ( ) and I got to go to Uber’s launch dinner in the city back when it was all black cars. (That’s where I met my first TechCrunch reporter, who later helped me get hired at the publication, the first time.) Back then there was a community effort taking off , which hosted events that showed off local tech efforts. It was good fun. Since then, Technori into a media play of sorts, with a podcast and pitch events, helping startups raise capital via equity crowdfunding. I got back into sync with the company when its CEO, , had me on . And now Technori is back in our lens because it’s being sold to , a service that vets and rates startups raising on online platforms. Given that Technori evolved into a platform to help folks raise, the tie-up seems reasonable. The transaction was all-stock, Kitun said. KingsCrowd also has a media strategy, so the two firms have more than a little overlap. Kitun told The Exchange in an interview that he’s excited about the Technori-KingsCrowd deal because it will make vetting startups looking for equity crowdfunding more data-driven, instead of based on his instincts. We’ll have wait to see whether, in time, the pair of companies can drive more total capital into the startup market via the fundraising mechanism, and how much of that lands in Chicago. Widening our lens somewhat, recall that , looking to add more investment variety to its platform. We can somewhat put the Technori and KingsCrowd deal under a similar umbrella, in that the duo want to make one for of newer investment into the hands of the regular person. This is likely not the last we’ll hear of Kitun, as he’s a co-founder at , a separate company. This week I changed roles at TechCrunch, swapping my full-time reporter hat for the editor in chief gig at TechCrunch+. Long-time readers of The Exchange’s will know that much of my work in the past few years has been on the paid site. I am not stopping my writing entirely, but we are aggressively expanding the TechCrunch+ team. So, if you are not yet a member. (For U.S.-based folks, apply the discount code EICEXCHANGE at checkout for 25% off.) It’s going to be one hell of a year. We are making some changes, including a winding-down of the Experts program that has run for a few years. An effort to create a database of startup servicing companies by activity — — was part of our general vibe of helping founders build. But from here on out we’re going to evolve the effort into pieces that are more targeted at squeezing insights from different operators in the market, more than creating a list of possible vendors. This means that we’re leaving a little fruit on the vine, however, so one last note from Experts land about a participant. is the final company we’re including in the old format. As per that old structure, folks wrote in endorsing the group. Mariam Danielova of says that they are reliable, results-oriented, [and] data-driven,” which is about all that you can hope for from a growth-marketing team. Something I learned while clearing the TechCrunch+ decks of prior efforts, and thus spending time reading through older interview files and the like, was the lingering importance of SEO. It came up in Growthcurve founder notes that I parsed, and I wonder if in the new iOS 14 world that we live in it will become all the more important? If so, bully for Google I suppose. Regardless, The Exchange’s own will still be taking on some how-tos that feature external operating experts. It will just look a little different this year. Thanks to everyone who took part in the past and to Growthcurve for being the final entrant in the ledger. Onward! |
This Week in Apps: Google’s alternative billing, Instagram’s chronological feeds, digital driver’s licenses | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 26 | Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the year-end . Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion. Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too. There is no bigger news in the world of apps this week than that of in various markets. To be clear, this is only a pilot program for the time being. And Google so far has only announced one partner: app store agitator and noted critic, Spotify. But ultimately, Spotify says it aims to roll out this third-party billing option in all markets where it sells Spotify Premium, which is 184 worldwide markets. There are several caveats to this news, however. One, is that for developers to avoid Google’s commission. Instead, Spotify and Google negotiated a deal that Spotify has deemed “fair” — but neither party will share the terms. For context, Google Play’s commissions today . And when Google opened up to third-party billing in South Korea, it only , arguing that it was still providing a host of other platform services that it needs to charge for. Presumably, Spotify has managed to get itself a steeper cut. But the lack of transparency around these deals is unfair to the wider app developer community, which has a right to know where the boundaries are and how they’re being determined. For what it’s worth, with this strategy. Another thing to note is this new system isn’t yet finalized. It’s still to be determined how this will appear in the Spotify app’s user interface or how users will go about tracking, managing and canceling subscriptions billed outside the Play Store. Will they have to go to the website through an in-app browser? Can they toggle them on and off right inside the native app? Will Spotify be able to market lower-cost subscriptions to those currently paying through Google Play billing inside the app? We’ll have to wait and see. And while Spotify was touting the worldwide rollout of third-party billing on its app after the tests complete, Google took issue with any dubbing of this system as “global” from the get-go. (No really, we got emails.) Google said it’s starting with “select markets” and those exact regions haven’t been determined at this point. While that may be, it’s definitely worth noting this is not a U.S.-only project, in either of the companies’ opinions. News of the pilot, which signals Google will begin a process to reduce its commissions further, could also increase the pressure on Apple to do the same. With this launch, Apple can no longer point to the other major global mobile app store and argue that the two are basically in line with regard to their commission structure. It’s a wonder Apple has let this battle go on for so long. The fight over commissions has painted Apple in a bad light, soured developer relations and hurt consumers who have to pay higher prices when developers up the cost of in-app purchases to cover Apple’s cut. Apple makes from its App Store, but it’s fighting this battle as if reducing commissions or allowing alternative payments would be the end of its business. (Can someone remind Apple it’s like, super rich?) Besides, not all consumers would even opt for the alternative billing option, even if it were to be permitted, because it’s simply more convenient to use Apple Pay and manage subscriptions in one place inside the App Store. Plus, why can’t Apple find other ways to increase revenues to help make up for lost commission across its App Store operation? Maybe by expanding its enterprise program? Or by offering different service tiers to developers — like those that provided developers with a more direct relationship or better support from the App Store Review team? Or perhaps by giving them options to pay for more frequent expedited reviews throughout the year? After all, these are problems developers already complain about — and the sometimes that results. Apple is very secretive about its App Store revenue — it doesn’t break it out in earnings from other services. And Phil Schiller, who runs the App Store, if Apple’s app marketplace was profitable when questioned in the Epic antitrust trial. (“It doesn’t come up,” he said!) But court testimony indicated Apple’s App Store profit margin in 2019. And the multibillion-dollar operation had , paying out $60 billion to developers after it took its commissions. There had been room for Apple to give a little — — to build a better App Store and get ahead of the coming regulations without all this drama. Instead, it’s fought so hard against the tidal wave of changes, sideloading, alternative billing and third-party app stores if EU regulators get their way. Apple data.ai Instagram Match Group a financial services app that serves a blue-collar workforce, to help expand its financial services offerings. Deal terms were not disclosed. Avail Finance has raised around $38.5 million to date. which makes headbands that let the wearer interact with an on-screen interface using neural activity, if not exactly “thoughts.” Presumably, the goal will be to advance Snap’s Spectacles AR glasses with the technology. Deal terms were not disclosed. according to sources cited by , in a deal valued at around $150 million. The deal could signal a plan to bring the Apple Card to the U.K. market. in a round led by General Catalyst and European VC Peak. The app offers discounts on goods based on how many people buy, and offers in-app games that users play to unlock deals. The app involves shoppers and influencers who livestream from stores then purchase items for customers. The company has 500,000 users in North America, it says. in a round led by Macquarie Capital. The funds will help the company grow its team and expand its APIs to new areas including, eventually, the metaverse. which will be the exclusive partner for Dave’s future crypto offerings. Dave went public last January through a $4 billion merger with SPAC VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings III. The app is aimed at creators, thought leaders, and experts who want to go live on video and host Q&As and introduces a countdown timer to keep questions short and the queue moving. led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The app operates in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, and has over 15,000 community leaders on board. The streamer has launched over a dozen mobile games this year via licensing deals with game makers. Boss Fight has 130 employees and is Netflix’s third studio purchase behind Night School and Next Games. |
SME lending platform Validus acquires Citi Singapore’s CitiBusiness loan portfolio | Kate Park | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | null |
To raise a fund, this agtech outfit built a content company first (now it has $60 million to put to work) | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Rob Leclerc has the kind of pedigree that investors tend to like: He has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Calgary and a Ph.D. in computational biology from Yale. In fact, 10 years ago, what he really wanted to do with his degrees was to find and fund agriculture-related projects that tackle climate change. But a decade ago, “agtech” wasn’t yet a category, and that was problematic when it came to pitching investors on the concept of an investment fund that Leclerc would run with partner Michael Dean, with whom Leclerc had previously operated an agribusiness in West Africa for several years. At the time, “there were a handful of businesses” relating to agtech that investors were aware of, Leclerc said. Think Climate Corp and Impossible Foods and the smart machinery company Blue River. But Climate Corp hadn’t yet sold to Monsanto for . Impossible Foods wasn’t valued in the , as it is today. And Blue River was still years away from its sale to John Deere. “The overarching problem was narrative,” Leclerc said. “People didn’t care about it.” He and Dean might have just given up; instead, they started a San Francisco-based content company called . “We thought if we could get people excited about food and [agriculture], maybe we’d be in a position to [raise a fund later],” Leclerc said. It was a smart bet. Fast forward and after posting more than 4,000 articles to the site and garnering 90,000 subscribers to the site’s weekly newsletter, Leclerc said ’s investment team – which now features four partners – just closed on $60 million in capital commitments for a new fund that they expect will reach $100 million over the next couple of months if things go their way. It’s a huge step up from previous funds that Leclerc and company began raising several years ago – beginning with their newsletter readers. “We first raised a $2.5 million friends-and-family fund,” he said, “but then five months later, we needed more money, so we raised $2 million, then six months later, we raised $5 million.” And so on. It wasn’t the most conventional way to raise money, but AgFunder had this “massive subscriber base” to which it could talk directly about its fundraising efforts, Leclerc said, “and the belief that we know what we’re doing and can spot companies started a lot of conversations that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. It became a structural advantage.” The strategy isn’t unprecedented. Leclerc said he was partly inspired by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who built a brand around entrepreneurship, then used the strength of that brand to launch an investing career. Meanwhile, Arrington was preceded in his path by investor Jason Calacanis, who earlier founded a media company, and more recent examples are beginning to emerge routinely. Among them: Londoner Harry Stebbings used his “Twenty Minute VC” podcast as a springboard into the venture world last year, and Nik Milanović, the author of a two-year-old newsletter called “This Week in Fintech,” in January launched an called the Fintech Fund. Still, newsletter subscribers – no matter how deep their pockets – don’t invest tens of millions of dollars in a team without seeing some results first. And AgFunder (which has since broadened its LP base) already has some about which to brag. Among the 60 companies to so far receive a check from AgFunder was the autonomous tractor startup Bear Flag Robotics, which sold to John Deere last year for ; Root AI, a startup that was developing a harvesting robot for indoor farms and was acquired by AppHarvest for last year; and Greenlight Biosciences, a biotech company focused on RNA research that by merging with a special purpose acquisition company. If you’re curious about how much the firm owned in each of these companies, keep guessing. AgFunder – which tends to write checks of $500,000 as a starting point but also just wrote a check for $3 million – doesn’t think about ownership targets or look to own a specific percentage in a company, Leclerc said. While his team has used special purpose vehicles to maintain their pro rata in several companies, including a still-private molecular coffee company called , he said he doesn’t “get hung up on ownership. For me, the question is, ‘Does this investment return the fund or a multiple of the fund?’ If you get hung up on ownership, you can miss opportunities.” As for criteria, AgFunder looks broadly across the food and “ag value chain,” Leclerc said. It also invests broadly geographically, with bets in India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia, among other places. It’s lot of ground to cover, so the outfit relies heavily on its and the in-house system he has devised to crawl sites and databases for signals that it then distills down to “50 to 100 companies each week” that could be of interest. (One apparent gem it uncovered was Retailo out of Pakistan, a B2B marketplace that connects bodegas with the goods and services they might need, and which recently closed on in Series A funding. AgFunder has now backed it across two rounds.) Yet AgFunder has other sources of deal flow, too, and one of these is, yes, that newsletter readership. Indeed, asked about how it found that coffee company Atomo — which says its product produces than conventional cold brew coffee — Leclerc said the tip came from a limited partner who’d signed on as an investor after first becoming a regular reader. “An LP who’d followed us for a long time on AgFunder News wrote us, saying, ‘You probably see a lot of things; this company you should check out.’ So we did,” Leclerc said. |
Learn which startups strategic mobility investors are seeking at TC Sessions: Mobility | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Marcus Greer is an equity investment analyst at Capital Group where he oversees research for major automotive OEMs along with the autonomous and electric mobility ecosystem. Prior to joining Capital, Greer served as a public equity investor at Fidelity Investments. Earlier in his career, he worked as a private equity associate at Emerson Collective focused on late-stage VC and early-stage growth companies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Nevada.
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This Week in Apps: Instagram’s parental controls, Tile’s anti-stalking update, iOS 15.4 arrives | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 19 | Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the year-end . Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion. Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too. Meta In 2016, referencing research that indicated the average age for a child getting their first smartphone was 10.3 years old; 39% of kids also had a social media account by age 11.4 years old, on average, it said. Earlier reports suggested the average age of kids getting smartphones was even younger. In other words, we’ve known for some time that children were using devices and going on social media apps when they got them. And yet, it’s taken this many years for one of the most-used apps in the world, Instagram, to ? Meta That’s right: This week, Meta announced its broader strategy to finally address the fact that millions of minors were using its services and that, , parents wanted some sort of measure of control over that. The company said its will offer a centralized hub where parents can manage their kids’ accounts across Meta’s apps, initially beginning with Instagram. It also introduced to its VR headset, Meta Quest, three years after its launch, allowing parents to control what apps kids could download and access. Unfortunately, I have to admit, I found Instagram’s parental controls to be lacking in terms of features. At launch, parents can view time spent and set time limits for the app, keep track of which accounts the teen is following and be notified if the teen reports another user. It is better than nothing, but it’s certainly not enough. After all, parents could already view time spent and manage time limits from Google and Apple’s built-in parental controls, so that’s not really new functionality for a parent who was already involved with their kid’s smartphone use. And while the other features are certainly useful, they’re nowhere near as comprehensive as the built-in parental controls Instagram’s main rival, TikTok, offers. Part of that is not fully in Instagram’s control. When Meta announced it was preparing a specialized version of its app experience for under-13 users, aka an Instagram for kids, the backlash from consumers, media and lawmakers was so severe, . But the reality is that kids under 13 are on Instagram, just like they’re already on Snapchat and TikTok and many other apps where getting access to adult experiences is as simple as picking a different birthdate other than their own. Meanwhile, TikTok, in a way, benefited from getting , because it forced the company to address the under-13-year-olds on the app with an age-gated, COPPA-compliant, “limited app” experience called . That means TikTok can offer its service to kids under 13 and then tout to parents how they can control what their kids can see and do through the app’s built-in parental controls. It’s got the pipeline, in other words. And parents feel better that they don’t have to deny TikTok entirely nor do they have to let their kids into the full, and often adult-oriented, world of TikTok. Screenshot of Instagram’s parental controls That said, Instagram still could have done more here with its parental controls. Though it can’t offer a “kids experience,” like TikTok does, it could add other privacy and safety controls. For comparison, TikTok lets parents control whether or not their kids’ profile is private, whether it’s suggested to others in the app, who can send the kid DMs, who can view the kids’ liked videos, who can comment on their posts and even whether or not they can use the Search feature. And this is in addition to letting parents set time limits. Instagram, on the other hand, controls some of these things itself — it defaults young teens to private profiles and uses algorithms to detect potentially suspicious accounts that could be adults trying to contact the teen. Okay, sure, that’s great. But why not put more specific controls into parents’ hands? After all, just because private profiles are the default for younger teens, it doesn’t mean the kid won’t toggle that switch to public later. These are minors; none of this should really be their call. And why do parents have to rely on Instagram’s algorithms to block adult contact? If they don’t want their kids messaging, they should be able to turn that off. Period. Meta didn’t mention if these things are on its roadmap for parental controls. Instead, per its announcement, its next couple of features will involve letting parents set the hours during which their teen can use Instagram and the ability for more than one parent to supervise a teen’s account. Those are fine too, though hardly mission-critical in terms of privacy and safety. Instead, it feels like Instagram wants to be able to it has parental controls while largely focusing on time spent in-app. It doesn’t address the numerous and varied social media concerns and dangers that parents worry about. Instacart Snap Photo by DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images ESPN Twitter Tile led by the Raine Group for its app that allows fiction writers to turn their work into choose-your-own-adventure mobile games which generate revenue through in-app purchases. from Block, Greyhound and others. The investment is Block’s first in Asia. in a Series B extension round led by Coatue and Index. The round values the startup at $1.3 billion. 📈 The company was formed as a merger between ride-hailing superapp Gojek and e-commerce business Tokopedia. 🤝 (formerly Grofers) in an all-stock deal valuing Blinkit at $700-750 million. in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital. Amie is a new social calendar app that seems to have a lot of promise. You can read Romain Dillet’s full , but the key features include the ability to open a to-do list alongside the calendar, then drag and drop those items on the calendar to assign them a date. On the other side are profile icons of team members which you can hover over to see their availability for meetings. The app also has user profiles with support for things like birthdays, notes and recurring reminders, and more. The app will be available on both Mac and iOS, then Android at a later date. You can . |
Daily Crunch: Corporate management startup Ramp doubles its valuation to $8.1B with new financing | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, March 21, 2022! Short and to the point today: Follow our newest hire, , who joined the TechCrunch+ team as a senior crypto reporter. We’re super stoked to have her aboard! – Kicking off the day’s startup news, a report … not about a startup. Instead, , which will a host of startups in the country. TechCrunch reports that “India’s proposed taxation law of virtual digital assets won’t permit individuals to offset loss on one asset against profit from another.” As you can imagine, the news isn’t welcome in many quarters. And to close out our startup coverage today, not all startups are out to make money, and some have more mission-driven objectives than growth goals. Such may be the case – six companies in its 2022 group that we describe as “data-for-climate not-for-profits.” It’s always fun to look at the newest, smallest companies. / Getty Images Content as a service? In the last few years, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify and other enterprise companies have begun scaling their own media operations. Online audiences are accustomed to consuming well-produced videos, podcasts, infographics and other media. As a result, simple blog posts lost their luster years ago, found reporter Ron Miller. To see what startups can learn from SaaS’ new approach to content marketing, he interviewed several analysts and experts. “If I’m a CMO, I have to ask how I get access to these audiences,” said Robert Rose, founder and principal analyst at The Content Advisory. “I can either continue to rent it through the access that Facebook or Google gives me, which are increasingly walled gardens, or I can start to build it on my own or acquire it.” |
With $9.3M in fresh funding, Zestworld plans a newsletter service for creator-owned comics | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | The comics world has seemingly been waiting for a digital revolution since the birth of the internet. Launched in 2007, ComiXology has come the closest to delivering such a play to the medium, so naturally, Amazon went and purchased the service and messed it up. Its most recent offering left subscribers in the lurch, finally leading the brand to admit that the integration “process has been far from seamless,” and promising to respond to user feedback. It is, indeed, not dissimilar from the blowback Kickstarter received following its big blockchain announcement late last year. That service has long been popular with creators, who felt alienated by its recent announcements. More recently, Substack has gotten into the comics, enlisting some big names, including Grant Morrison and Chip Zdarsky, though that service has not been without its share of controversy. Announced last year, is looking to take on the media with its own custom-built platform. Designed specifically for the comics medium, the service has already found a share of high-profile supporters, including Alexis Ohanian and Twitch’s Kevin Lin. “The current landscape for comic creators to publish their work digitally and connect with fans is abysmal,” Ohanian said in a release. “Zestworld is bringing together every aspect of the comic creator business and community into one centralized platform that is disrupting how comic creators publish and own IP, as well as enabling fans to connect with creators directly in entirely novel ways.” Both joined a Series A round led by General Catalyst that provides $9.37 million to deliver on the service’s plans to give creators a comic-optimized newsletter platform, coupled with an IP management tool. IP has, of course, has long been the bread and butter for the mainstream comics industry. One can do all right selling comics at the highest levels, but let’s be honest, licensing is where the money is really made here. “Finding platforms that are creator-driven is a true challenge in comics, and what Zestworld offers is refreshing and transparent,” said Alex Segura, one of the writers involved in the launch. “Zestworld allows creators like me to publish my work on my own schedule, customize benefits and the ways the creative team and I get to interact with my audience, and allows us to maintain full IP-rights ownership to everything we publish through the platform. It’s a hard deal to beat.” Segura is joined by Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Peter J. Tomasi, Eric Canete and Phil Jimenez. Other promised features include community management and “NFTs/metaverse events,” because one can’t launch a service in 2022 without those things. |
Max Q: All eyes on Astra | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Hi folks, welcome back to Max Q. This week we have news on rockets both small (Astra’s Rocket 3.3) and very, very large (NASA’s Space Launch System). Plus further fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and some funding news too. Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. Thoughts, comments and tips can be sent to . You also can catch me on Twitter at . Let’s dive in. Space startup-turned-public company Astra scored a big win on Tuesday, deploying customer payloads to orbit for the first time. The 43-foot tall rocket, designated LV0009, took off from Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex shortly after 11:00 AM on Tuesday. It carried payloads for three Spaceflight Inc. customers, including a CubeSat for Portland State Aerospace Society and a sat-to-sat communications system for NearSpace Launch. The third customer was not announced. The successful mission comes a little over one month after the Astra rocket designated LV0008 experienced in the company’s first mission out of Cape Canaveral in Florida. Astra’s senior director of mission management and assurance, Andrew Griggs, said in a blog post published March 6 the team had identified and resolved the issues leading to the failure. Astra went public via SPAC merger last July, joining a growing group of space companies to eschew a traditional IPO in the path to the public markets. The company in November 2021, but it hadn’t been able to replicate that feat — until now. Each success ups the ante for the launch company. It’s one thing to perform a feat once, or even twice. It’s quite another to do it over and over and over again. We’ll certainly be paying attention to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings announcement on March 31. Astra NASA/Michael DeMocker Twelve years after it was first announced, NASA’s “mega Moon rocket” made its public debut. The integrated Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft was rolled out from the vehicle assembly building at Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, where it then made a nearly 11-hour procession to the launch pad. From there, it will undergo a number of tests to determine flight readiness, including the all-important “wet dress rehearsal,” when the launch system will be loaded with fuel and engineers will practice countdown. NASA hasn’t set an exact date for SLS’s inaugural mission — Artemis 1, which will kick off the agency’s ambitious Artemis program to return humans to the moon — but it could be as early as this summer. It’s been a long time coming. Congress directed NASA to develop SLS to replace the Space Shuttle, the agency’s original spaceflight workhorse, back in 2010. But ever since, the project has faced repeated setbacks and technical issues. A year ago, NASA’s Inspector General’s office issued on the costs and contracts associated with the SLS program, finding that “rising costs and delays” pushed the overall budget for the project far beyond the original scope. NASA’s very large Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA. nathanphoto / Getty Images Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to reverberate across the space sector. This week, the European Space Agency voted to suspend its forthcoming Mars rover mission that was slated to launch this year aboard a Soyuz rocket. In light of the war in Ukraine, ESA members “acknowledged the present impossibility of carrying out the ongoing cooperation with Roscosmos” with respect to the ExoMars mission, . An extraordinary session of ESA’s ruling Council has been called for April 6 to discuss possible alternatives for launch. This will be the first time Europe sends a rover to the red planet. The JWST focused on the bright star at the image center to evaluate the alignment of its 18 mirrors. The Andromeda galaxy imaged from the White Mountains of California. Tony Rowell / Getty Images |
Talkspace-owned Lasting launches new ‘Parenting Guide’ app, its latest self-guided advice service | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | , which is owned by mobile therapy company , has launched a new app aimed at parents. The app, which is called , is designed to help parents become more confident in their approach to raising children. The company says the app gives parents and caregivers access to resources to raise healthy and resilient children. The app offers self-guided sessions and live classes, along with tools that help parents teach their kids how to regulate their emotions. The app includes more than 100 self-guided sessions and live therapist-led classes every week on topics such as secure attachment, self-awareness, discipline, anxiety in kids, whining and complaining, getting kids to listen, strong-willed children and sibling relationships. It also offers more than 30 mental health prompts designed to help parents practice self-care and emotional regulation. In addition, the app includes a section that allows parents to record their thoughts and answer prompts about certain topics. It also includes features for parenting partners, such as a collaborative Q&A section that prompts conversations around parenting approaches. For instance, you and your partner can answer a series of questions to gauge how the other person is feeling about their parenting. If you and a partner disagree on something, the app will prompt you to work it out together. You can also see how many sessions your partner has completed. Lasting says the parenting program was completed by more than 4,000 families in beta testing and that 79% of them said the app helped them parent more effectively. “Today’s parents have an incredibly hard job to do,” said Steven Dziedzic, the founder and senior vice president of Lasting from Talkspace in a statement. “Raising kids used to be done by an entire community, and now many parents are doing everything by themselves. By listening to our customers, we learned that the families in America needed the most help with parenting issues such as anxiety, sibling conflict and emotion-coaching, so we built an app that applies tried-and-true psychological approaches to help them.” The free version of the app includes four sessions. The app’s full content library is available for a monthly subscription that starts at $29.99. Lasting Parenting Guide is available to download on the and Talkspace Lasting in November 2020 for an undisclosed sum and formed “Lasting from Talkspace,” which established Talkspace’s entry into self-guided apps. Lasting’s flagship therapy product, includes guided marriage counseling and sessions about conflict, communication, emotion connection and more. You can pair it with your partner’s app and complete exercises to reflect and unpack your thoughts. The company’s other offering, , includes tools to better manage stress, anxiety, depression and relationship issues. It also includes sessions about body image, burnout, boundaries and more. Talkspace launched back in 2012 with a mission to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible. In 2019, the company announced the close of a led by Revolution Growth. Existing investors, such as Norwest Venture Partners, Omura Capital, Spark Capital and Compound Ventures also participated in the round. |
Be an entrepreneur who leads with transparency | Marjorie Radlo-Zandi | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | , you’ll encounter many hills and valleys growing your company. As much as you want to present positive information to stakeholders, it’s equally important to be forthright when product and financial performance fall short of expectations. As an angel investor who funds promising startups, on occasion — and thankfully it’s rare — I’ve run into less-than-honest behavior. The point where “faking it” translates into stating untruths to investors, customers and oneself is the point at which ego and reality collide — and ego in some cases ends up as the winner. A well-publicized case is that of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of defrauding investors about the diagnostic device company she founded. Less well-known is CEO of cyber fraud prevention company NS8, who allegedly raised $123 million from investors using financial statements that showed millions of dollars of revenues and assets that didn’t exist. These and other equally egregious cases present a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs and investors: Transparency isn’t an option; it’s a necessity. The founder of a company I invested in secretly kept two sets of books: one with correct historical financials, and another with numbers inflated more than 10 times actuals. Sales and product performance had fallen short. His solution was to present the inflated financials to investors. But investors are always on the lookout and sensed something was amiss. We quickly discovered the second set of books after digging into the data. This founder couldn’t secure additional investment in his company and found himself in legal trouble. It’s natural to want to showcase positive news, but presenting challenges is just as critical. Challenges can snowball into bigger issues if you don’t communicate them. Never allow the pressure from investors looking for good news to tempt you to exaggerate or sugarcoat the truth. As a philosophy, “fake it till you make it” was never about playing with the truth. It suggests adopting a mindset that you’ll succeed, even when you’re not confident about achieving success. It’s OK to project an optimistic view on where product development and financials will be in the future. But it’s crucial to present reality, not the reality you were true when reporting on the current state of product development, actual customers and financial performance. One trait that enables founders to take huge risks to create and run with their vision, namely outsized confidence and ego, is the very trait that can cause a few of them to lose the sense of what’s right and wrong. With their moral compass adrift, they deceive to get ahead. In extreme cases, founders on an ego-driven high are addicted to the deception. They imagine themselves as the CEO of the next unicorn. They unleash a stream of untruths that support their made-up reality. These people are trapped in a fantasy space, immersed in hubris. As we saw with the rise and implosion of Theranos, the deception snowballed out of control until, inevitably, the founder was caught in the lie. |
Luminar acquisition brings high-performance laser capabilities in-house | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Luminar, a company that builds vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies for autonomous vehicles, is acquiring high-performance laser manufacturer Freedom Photonics on Monday. The all-stock transaction involves Luminar transferring 3 million shares of its common stock, or about $42.3 million at today’s share price, to Freedom Photonics’s employees . The buy is Luminar’s latest to vertically integrate core lidar components to bring more accurate, lower-cost products to market. “The deal is signed and expected to close in the second quarter, and it really brings Freedom Photonics’s high-powered laser and their related photonic integrated circuit technologies to optimize the performance, as well as advance our cost roadmap, of our future sensors,” Jason Eichenholz, Luminar’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. Whether on city streets or highways, a major problem autonomous vehicle systems face is the ability to see and recognize objects at far distances. In order to get the point density and resolution needed to allow the AV system to determine whether it sees a tire or a person 300 meters ahead on the road, a high-powered laser pulse and high-quality beams are critical, two components that Freedom Photonics excel at, according to Eichenholz. The deal, which follows a multi-year collaboration between the two companies, not only improves the quality of Luminar’s lidar, but it also allows Luminar to control more of the costs in the supply chain. This isn’t because lasers are especially hard to come by, but “lasers with the right performance parameters to unlock autonomy and have proactive safety that can be met in an automotive qualified environment is a lot harder,” said Eichenholz. Lidar is one of the most expensive components of autonomous driving systems, which makes it difficult to commercialize and scale. Cost-cutting is vital and something Luminar is actively pursuing as it advances on its stated goal of achieving a sub-$100 bill of materials for the three key lidar hardware components that Eichenholz refers to as the “three legs of the stool” – the receiver, the ASIC or processing power, and the laser, which it now has from Freedom Photonics. Luminar has already acquired the tech and teams for the other two legs of the stool. Its , enabled Luminar to bring down the cost of receivers from tens of thousands of dollars to $3. And last year’s and its receiver chips also unlocked performance and economics for the company, according to Eichenholz. “Going all-in with Luminar is the perfect opportunity for Freedom Photonics, providing us an accelerated path to at-scale commercialization of our world-class laser chip technologies,” said Milan Mashanovitch, CEO at Freedom Photonics, in a statement. “In addition to helping extend Luminar’s automotive industry leadership, this provides us greater opportunity to simultaneously support and scale customers in other industry verticals.” Freedom Photonics’s staff will also be acquired by Luminar, and its executive team will continue to lead the business upon close of the transaction. Luminar’s share price is down about 2% in after-hours. |
Lawsuit prompts Grubhub to add disclosures about hidden fees | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine today that his office filed a lawsuit against Grubhub for “misleading District residents and taking advantage of local restaurants to boost its own profits.” The alleges that Grubhub violated D.C.’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) in eight different ways, which mostly center on false advertising. The filing references misleading prices (prices are often higher in-app than at the restaurant) and false claims that deliveries via Grubhub+ were free when they still contained a service charge. NEW: We're suing Grubhub for misleading District residents and taking advantage of local restaurants to boost its own profits. Grubhub charges hidden fees and uses bait-and-switch tactics, all while pretending to help local businesses during the pandemic. This needs to stop. — AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) “The company deceived users with a promotion that claimed to support local restaurants during the heart of the pandemic. But in reality, this program cut into struggling restaurants’ profit margins while padding Grubhub’s bottom line,” Attorney General Racine said in a statement. We all deserve to make informed decisions about where and how we spend our dollars—and that’s what we’re fighting for in our new lawsuit against Grubhub. Here are just some of the deceptive practices Grubhub uses, taking advantage of DC residents and restaurants.⬇️ — AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) In an emailed statement, a company spokesperson said: “We are disappointed [the Attorney General’s office] have moved forward with this lawsuit because our practices have always complied with D.C. law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued. We will aggressively defend our business in court and look forward to continuing to serve D.C. restaurants and diners.” The spokesperson added that Grubhub has worked with Racine’s office over the last year to address their concerns. As a result of the lawsuit, a Grubhub spokesperson told TechCrunch that the app will make some messaging changes on its app, which extend to all users, not just D.C. customers. Now, Grubhub will include a disclosure during checkout that prices may be lower in store. Instead of advertising Grubhub+ to offer unlimited free delivery, the company will be more transparent about the actual offer, which provides $0 delivery on orders over $12, though service fees may apply. Grubhub will also make it more clear that customers can place free orders online, but that this only applies if you’re picking up the food. Despite an uptick in delivery orders during the pandemic, food delivery apps have still to turn a profit — even as their business model leaves many gig workers and local restaurant owners with the short end of the stick. Those inequities are increasingly attracting the attention of state and federal regulators. Attorney General Racine’s office has a history of suing delivery apps for deceptive practices. In 2019, Racine for using customer tips to pay delivery drivers’ base wages, depriving drivers of their full tips. A year later, DoorDash was fined $2.5 million, which included $1.5 million to be paid to D.C. workers. |
Tala founder on the fintech’s fundraising success and creating an equitable financial system | Maggie Stamets | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | null |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | null |
French aerospace company Gama raises $2M to develop a solar sail spacecraft | Stefanie Waldek | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Just as sea breezes propel sailboats across the sea on Earth, solar radiation might one day be able to propel spacecraft between the stars. Or at least that’s the hope of French startup . The aerospace company was founded in 2020 by Louis de Gouyon Matignon, Thibaud Elziere and Andrew Nutter, whose goal is to develop a low-cost solar sail that would use light as a means of propulsion for spacecraft. Gama has collected $2 million in funding from the French Public Investment Bank (BPI), the French Space Agency (CNES) and angel investors to demonstrate its technology in space in October. That mission will see a CubeSat launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, after which a 789-square-foot solar sail will deploy at an altitude of 342 miles. “We can test a lot of things on Earth, but testing deployment at these dimensions can only be done in the zero gravity of space,” Nutter tells TechCrunch. (The dimensions suggest the sail should be about 10 meters across.) Solar sails are not exactly a new invention. They were first theorized by astronomer Johannes Kepler, who mused about them in a letter to fellow astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1608. But the first successful deployment of a solar sail didn’t occur until 2010: the “space yacht,” a mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). That same year, NASA launched NanoSail-D, and in 2019, the space advocacy group Planetary Society launched . Now multiple organizations apart from Gama are developing new solar sail missions. will have Illinois-based NanoAvionics design a spacecraft with an 800-square-foot solar sail. Breakthrough Initiatives’ mission, which has received $100 million in funding, plans to send a fleet of hundreds of tiny solar sail-powered spacecraft to the star system Alpha Centauri, located 4.7 light years away. Gama differs in two ways from previous and current missions. “First, the team at Gama strives to iterate and move extremely fast, launching the first of many solar sails in record time,” says Nutter. “Second, we are deploying the sail by gently spinning the satellite, and using the resultant centrifugal force to deploy the petals of our sail. This allows us to save on structural weight and deploy much larger surfaces in due course.” Well ahead of its first launch, the company is already designing its second mission — one that will deploy at higher altitude and will “demonstrate we can steer the sail and provide a reliable low-cost alternative to traditional propulsion technologies,” per Nutter. Solar sails operate almost identically to traditional sails, except that they use photons for propulsion rather than the air molecules making up the wind. Though photons don’t have mass, their momentum as they travel through space can be transferred to a reflective surface — a solar sail made of Mylar or a polyamide — which can propel a spacecraft. The force is slight, but in the vacuum of space, it can add up quickly. It’s possible that a solar sail could propel a spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light — though it would take a while. This would allow spacecraft to eliminate (or at least reduce) the amount of propellant it needs to carry, freeing up mass aboard for other uses. Using solar sails could also prolong the mission duration of a spacecraft, since the vehicle theoretically could be propelled indefinitely. This would be crucial for long-duration deep-space missions, which explains why there’s such an interest in developing the technology further. |
China’s EV upstarts are building their own investment powerhouses | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | The investment game going after automotive startups is getting more competitive in China with not only established venture capital firms joining the fray but also industry veterans. Two mobility-focused funds that recently closed new rounds have the backing of the country’s leading electric car-making upstarts. Rockets Capital, a brand new venture- and growth-stage investment vehicle, announced earlier this month the close of its , with EV maker Xpeng as the anchor investor. Other investors are big institutional names in China, including IDG Capital, Sequoia China, GGV Capital, 5Y Capital and eGarden. The fund looks for opportunities in the auto industry value chain, clean energy and other “frontier technology” areas. The other major close from this week is Nio Capital’s , the Eve ONE Fund II. Investors range from sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, multilateral financial institutions, funds of funds, family offices, pension funds to foundations from across the world. Rockets Capital makes its connection to its EV investor more public. While it operates as an independent investment firm, it will also leverage Xpeng’s “industry expertise and resources” and “incubate technological innovation.” Given the stated mission, it won’t be surprising if some of Rockets’ future portfolio companies also do business or partner with Xpeng. Founded in 2016, Nio Capital has a head start in the investment space. Some of its more notable deals in China include two leading robotaxi companies — and — which is also one of Nio’s suppliers, BP-backed battery swapping Aulton and auto chipmaker Black Sesame. Over the past several years Nio Capital has built a fortress around itself with up-and-coming players in China’s auto industry. Now it’s time to see how Rockets Capital and its patron Xpeng play catch-up and what alliance it can forge to reshape the market. |
Miruku replacing animals with plants to create dairy proteins | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Miruku, a New Zealand-based foodtech company, is applying its molecular farming process to program plant cells to be mini factories for producing proteins and other molecules, like fats and sugars, traditionally made by animals. The company was founded in 2020 by Amos Palfreyman, Ira Bing, Harjinder Singh and Oded Shoseyov, who all have experience in either dairy or plant science. Its alternative dairy proteins technology is currently being developed in Miruku’s labs and greenhouses with corporate and R&D partnerships to scale and be implemented across geographies. Its approach involves breeding and engineering plant crops to turn their cells into dairy proteins, CEO Palfreyman explained. This is different from competitors in the space that are using techniques like precision fermentation, which brews dairy inside fermentation chambers, and recruiting animal cells outside of the animal itself to produce dairy building blocks in cultivation chambers. How Miruku is differentiating itself is by breeding new plant crops that grow real dairy building blocks directly in the plants themselves using the energy of the sun. In that sense, the company is producing proteins more efficiently than cows, thus cutting out the role of the cow to reduce reliance on animal agriculture and the consequent damage to water, soil and atmosphere. “Our protein ingredients will make dairy foods which not only taste and smell like real dairy, but which are also nutritional equivalents to dairy,” he added. “They will help build and repair your body with the same amino acid building blocks that your body uses after you have enjoyed and digested a scrumptious cheese sandwich and they’ll function like real dairy in the making and baking of delicious things like cheesecake or a fine pecorino cheese.” One of the challenges in foodtech is to create enough proteins or feedstock or scaffolding to scale the company, and for Miruku “the challenge of programming a plant to express mammalian proteins in a way that retains their structure and function is actually quite a technical challenge,” noted Palfreyman. He explained that scaling the plants will be straightforward: Once you generate a plant that expresses the target proteins, you then plant the seeds to scale production, whether it’s a handful of them in a greenhouse or hundreds of thousands of them in a field. Where it gets a bit complicated is the engineering and breeding for selected traits, which often requires a trade-off between energy use and expression levels. However, Palfreyman believes Miruku’s use of computational biology and techno economic analyses to model optimum expression levels will address that side of the scalability equation. The company is still in development, but Palfreyman is targeting two to three years before Miruku will see its proteins used in the commercial market. But it will have prototypes and proof of concept sooner than that. He expects the first product to likely be a partnership with an existing food company to provide a protein component that the food company will roll out. Still, Palfreyman touts Miruku as the first molecular farming dairy startup in the Asia Pacific region. It joins other companies around the world, like , also doing molecular dairy farming, , and , tackling animal-free technology to take on an over $500 billion dairy market. We’ve seen a number of them secure venture capital funding in the past six months: Miruku was self-funded by its founders for its first 18 months, and now secured $2.4 million in seed funding. The investment was led by Movac and includes Better Bite Ventures, Ahimsa Investments and the Aspire Fund. This will enable the company to begin to “seriously scale” after finding what Palfreyman said were the right partners to help connect the company to customers and build on milestones for the next round, which he believes will take place in 2023. The new capital will be deployed in adding more technology staff, developing partnerships and speeding up its development programs. Miruku already doubled its headcount this year and Palfreyman expects to grow similarly every year. Miruku was able to gain early traction with big food companies that are working with Miruku to co-develop products. It will also begin running development programs across geographies, some related to environment and climate, while others will be about product types and partnerships with growers, formulators and brands. “It is fair to say we are still an early-stage company, but it is no less accurate to say we are progressing rapidly and gaining great traction with strategic partners close to consumer markets,” Palfreyman added. “Innovation and growth necessitate access to capital, and while we have only just closed our first institutional round, we expect a consequent growth raise in the not too distant future.” |
Apple sends new offer to Dutch antitrust authority over dating apps payments, racks up 9th fine | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Apple has been fined in the Netherlands over an antitrust order related to dating apps. The order requires it to allow local dating apps to be able to use third-party payment technologies if their developers wish, rather than being locked to only being able to use Apple’s in-app payment API for iOS. Since January, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has levied a series of (weekly) penalties against Apple for what it asserts is continued non-compliance with the order. The latest €5 million fine (the ninth) brings the total penalties against Apple on this issue up to €45 million (out of a maximum possible of €50 million if it again fails to satisfy the regulator by next week). Apple has responded to the string of fines over this period by claimed it is complying with the order — despite the regulator clearly taking a different (opposite) view. The ACM has variously described Apple’s response as disappointing and — accusing it of creating an unnecessary barrier for developers who want to take up the legal entitlements to use non-Apple payment tech to process in-app payments, rather than simply letting them easily choose to do so. The tussle has gone on for weeks but, despite yet another penalty now, there may be sign of a shift by Apple: Per the ACM, Apple submitted “new proposals” earlier today — which it said it’s studying to determine whether they pass muster or not. “We will now assess the substance of these proposals,” said an ACM spokesperson in a statement. “In that context, we will also sit down with various market participants. Our aim is to complete this assessment as soon as possible.” The ACM has not disclosed details of what Apple is proposing in this amended compliance offer. (And the regulator did not respond to requests for more detail.) “It should be noted that, until last weekend, Apple still had not met ACM’s requirements,” its spokesperson added. “That is why it has to pay a ninth penalty payment, which means the total amount that Apple must pay currently stands at €45 million euros.” Apple was also contacted for comment on the development but at the time of writing the company had not responded. Apple declined comment. While the ACM’s antitrust order applies only in the Netherlands, and only to a subset of apps (dating apps) — so it may look like rather small fry in the grand, global scheme of Big Tech — the tug-of-war between a national regulator and a platform giant has attracted high-level attention in the European Union, which suggests the enforcement is been closely watched by policymakers at a time when they are simultaneously hammering out the final details of a major competition overhaul. The EU is in the process of finalizing a long-trailed, ex ante reform of digital competition policy (called the aka, the DMA) — which will apply exclusively to the most powerful intermediating Internet platforms. This is relevant because Apple is almost certain to be designated a “gatekeeper” under the DMA — which will bring in a proactive regime of antitrust compliance that’s intended to make digital markets more open and contestable, such as by banning platforms from cross-tying applications or enforcing lock-ins, as well as simultaneously obliging them to support interoperability and enable service switching. So that means Apple is likely to face similar (and, indeed, far broader) pan-EU antitrust orders in the future, which will stipulate how it must (and must not) act vis-à-vis third parties. EU commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who both heads up the bloc’s antitrust division and leads its digital policymaking, raised the Dutch case specifically in a speech — accusing Apple of “essentially” preferring to pay periodic fines rather than comply with a competition ruling it does not agree with. She also warned that obligations related to third party access for Apple’s App Store “will… be one of the obligations included in the DMA”. The incoming pan-EU law will have serious teeth: With fines of up to 10% of annual global turnover the potential for the bloc to respond to systematic rule flouting by imposing a structural remedy which orders a gatekeeper to be broken up. So, for tech giants set to be subject to the DMA, the “comply vs deny” calculus — that’s only possible when a penalty can be written off as a “cost of doing business” — looks set for a radical rebalancing under the rebooted EU competition regime. And where €5 million — or even €50 million — doesn’t move the operational needle, a penalty that could scale to several billions — backed up by a risk that continued dancing around legal requirements might force regulators to reach for their break up hammers — looks like a whole different kettle of compliance fish. |
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter will keep flying on Mars through at least September | Stefanie Waldek | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | It’s been a busy year on Mars for NASA’s helicopter, and it’s not about to slow down now. After 21 flights, the aircraft is still in excellent condition, so NASA has extended its mission through at least September. Ingenuity arrived on the red planet with NASA’s rover on February 18, 2021. Its original mission was simply to demonstrate the ability to fly a helicopter in Mars’ thin atmosphere. After three successful flights proving the technology — and marking the first powered flight on another planet — NASA shifted Ingenuity into an operational mode with a further two flights. Since then, the helicopter has performed 16 flights, further testing its capabilities while helping Perseverance navigate Jezero Crater, but now it’s onto a new mission: to explore the Jezero river delta. “The Jezero river delta campaign will be the biggest challenge the Ingenuity team faces since first flight at Mars,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. The region is hazardous for both Ingenuity and Perseverance, as it’s filled with “jagged cliffs, angled surfaces, projecting boulders, and sand-filled pockets that could stop a rover in its tracks (or upend a helicopter upon landing),” per the release. But that only gives Ingenuity a greater opportunity to demonstrate its scouting skills. The helicopter’s observations will not only affect Perseverance’s upcoming route, but also its science missions as it searches for evidence of microbial life on Mars, taking core samples that could be returned to Earth one day. Plus, the data from Ingenuity’s flights will inform the design of the next generation of Mars vehicles. “Less than a year ago we didn’t even know if powered, controlled flight of an aircraft at Mars was possible,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Now, we are looking forward to Ingenuity’s involvement in Perseverance’s second science campaign.” Ingenuity is currently one leg into at least a three-part series of flights that will take the aircraft from its original flight area across a region known as the Séítah, after which it’ll start exploring the Jezero river delta. Its next flight can happen any day now. “This upcoming flight will be my 22nd entry in our logbook,” Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip of JPL said in a press release. “I remember thinking when this all started, we’d be lucky to have three entries and immensely fortunate to get five. Now, at the rate we’re going, I’m going to need a second book.” Perhaps NASA shouldn’t be so surprised. The agency’s Mars rovers have all had phenomenal life spans that greatly exceed their original mission durations — at times by thousands of Martian sols — so it’s only fair that Ingenuity follows suit. |
Plotlogic scoops up $18M to put hyperspectral imaging to work in the mines | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | Mining is one of the oldest industries out there, but it has increasingly embraced high-tech methods as demand has increased. uses hyperspectral imaging, a technique generally found in labs and satellites, to add a new layer of data and automation to these crucial but often dated operations. Hyperspectral imagery is basically a photo that captures light outside the visible range, allowing differentiation of substances that look the same to human eyes. As with pretty much everything else, nature got there first: birds and insects can see wavelengths we can’t, for a start, and it changes their entire view of the world. We’ve adopted the idea in a variety of circumstances: It’s ultimately a form of spectral analysis, where you bounce radiation off an object and see what’s reflected or absorbed. Every substance has its own spectral signature, from skin to cement to rare earth minerals. The latter category is obviously where Plotlogic is aiming. Founded in 2018 in Brisbane, Australia, Plotlogic makes a multispectral-plus-lidar imaging setup that looks at a pile of rubble extracted from a mine and says, “there’s some lithium, there’s a bit of silver, there’s some sulfur.” (Though I seriously doubt those three will be found in the same pile.) Of course mines already do this sort of analysis at some point. Otherwise how would they know what to refine, truck out and so on? But this usually depends on taking samples to a lab and submitting them to — you guessed it — spectral analysis. Plotlogic is letting this crucial step take place on site, potentially making operations much more efficient. A stationary OreSense machine scanning ore samples, and an example of how those samples might be analyzed. Plotlogic “That’s the real innovation here: embedding it into mining operations and empowering mine staff with real time information,” said CEO and founder Andrew Job. The company first deployed its OreSense machines in 2019, and has been iterating on the product since, with feedback from major mining companies. It can be stationary or mobile, either scanning ore as it goes past on a conveyor belt or going to where it’s been collected. A version on treads allows navigation into locations that people can’t safely visit. The system is designed to fit into existing mining processes, so there’s no need to redesign how you pull ore out of the ground or anything — and though changes do need to be made, they’re justified by increased efficiency, said Job. Andrew Job, founder & CEO of Plotlogic. Photo by Sarah Keayes/The Photo Pitch “We see three types of benefits: financial, environmental sustainability and safety,” he explained. “The operation can process more ore and less waste, making it more profitable. They can be more precise, leaving more rocks and not expending fuel and greenhouse gases moving waste. And finally, it reduces human exposure hours in the mine.” We may have moved past the days of black lung but mining is still a fundamentally challenging and dangerous job. The less time workers are around heavy machinery, enclosed spaces and air filled with powdered rock, the better. Having reliable and rich imagery could also help usher in autonomous mining sooner rather than later, Job suggested. The $18 million A round was led by Innovation Endeavors, with participation from BHP Ventures and Bentley iTwin Ventures — both venture arms of major mining groups — as well as DCVC, Baidu Ventures and Grids Ventures. The plan is to use it to expand commercial deployments and begin working internationally. |
After Anaplan, which SaaS company will private equity target next? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | equity firm Thoma Bravo said . The financial planning software company’s stock has declined sharply in the last six months, which likely gave the PE firm a chance to pounce. The stock market hasn’t been kind to SaaS companies in recent months, which makes us wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of a trend of private equity taking aim at vulnerable SaaS firms. To answer that, let’s quickly unpack the Anaplan transaction and better understand if Thoma Bravo is paying a premium for this company. From there, we’ll be able to get an idea of how much private equity types are willing to shell out for modern tech companies. Afterward, we’ll apply what we’ve gleaned to a host of public SaaS companies that could find themselves answering inbound calls from other private equity concerns. Don’t forget that private equity is in terms of available dry powder, and that money could be looking for a target. Anaplan said to $162.7 million — of which $148 million came from subscription sources — from a year earlier. On a full-year basis, revenue rose just under 32%, meaning that its Q4 growth rate was similar to its full-year outcome. If we convert the company’s Q4 revenue into run-rate revenues, we can apply that figure (about $651 million) against its $10.7 billion purchase price to get a revenue multiple of around 16.4x for the transaction. Recall that we’ve seen declines in software company valuations to the point where SaaS companies growing at more than 30% today have had their when we compare forward revenue projections against their present-day value. Compared to that number, the Anaplan deal price seems to be full-fat. Indeed, with Thoma Bravo paying a roughly 46% premium ($66 per share) for the software company’s shares when compared to pre-deal prices, the PE firm is coughing up close to a Q4 2021 price for Anaplan. To be precise, Anaplan shares peaked at just over $66 a share over the past six months, right in line with the Thoma Bravo offer. This provides a neat little framework for us to work with: Software companies that are trading at depressed prices today could perhaps sell to private entities for their Q4 2021 valuation high-water mark. If that’s the case, we’re quite curious about who else could be in line to surrender their status as an independent company. And we have more than a few names in mind. |
New data underscores a slowing e-commerce market | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | , Ashwin Ramasamy, a , asked on TechCrunch if the “e-commerce shift” the world was seeing as COVID-19 shook up the global economy . The answer was yes. But that doesn’t mean that the same pace of online commerce growth that the world saw during the pandemic will be maintained. Indeed, as 2021 came to a close, data began to indicate . The question at that juncture was whether we were seeing a reversion to growth norms from the pre-COVID era or if growth would slow even more; in the latter case, it would imply that future e-commerce activity was pulled forward, instead of the larger digital commerce pie growing thanks to long-term changes to the economy. New data from Pinduoduo, a huge Chinese e-commerce company, and trailing results from Alibaba and others from the fourth quarter of last year hint that the pull-forward model of recent e-commerce growth is the most likely. For startups, it’s somewhat mixed news. Certainly, any startup selling into the e-commerce market has more TAM than ever to, well, address. But slowing growth means that it will be harder to grow at prior levels, as outperforming the market segment enough to wow venture capitalists will become more difficult. (But certainly not impossible, as .) Let’s parse some of the most recent data to get a handle on where we are today. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the Chinese e-commerce giant just 3% from its year-ago results, posted during the pandemic-accelerated Q4 2020 period. More simply: Pinduoduo barely managed to not shrink compared to its late-2020 results. In numerical terms, Pinduoduo reported $4.3 billion in revenue. That figure in its local currency was RMB27.2 billion, of RMB30.1 billion. Investors had expected a lot more growth than what Pinduoduo was able to deliver, but profits of more than $1 billion helped assuage the market. Pinduoduo is not that much an outlier. |
FedEx app’s test appears to show the ability to track deliveries from other services | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 21 | FedEx has been working on a new feature for its consumer mobile app that would seemingly allow it to better compete with the popular . One of the bigger selling points for Shopify’s Shop is how it allows users to track their purchases and shipments from across services, including not only Shopify, but also Amazon, and other deliveries coming through FedEx, UPS, USPS and other services by importing delivery tracking information from users’ email inboxes. FedEx, meanwhile, appears to be headed in a similar direction with a feature called “Crosstrack,” which tracks a user’s expected deliveries in a separate section from the tab from the one where FedEx deliveries are shown. The feature, which was shared with TechCrunch by a developer, is currently in development. It shows how the mobile app’s search and tracking screen would be split into two tabs: one labeled “FedEx” and another labeled “Crosstrack.” In the Crosstrack tab, FedEx app users could see a photo of their incoming purchase, the sender’s information — like Target, eBay or Wayfair, for instance — and the date of the scheduled delivery alongside the tracking number. When the item has arrived, the app will notate this with green text and a green checkmark. FedEx mobile app screenshot Unlike Shopify’s Shop, this expanded functionality doesn’t extend into shopping or product recommendations — it’s only for tracking, FedEx says. The company confirmed the feature’s development with a statement. “FedEx is constantly exploring digital experience concepts to help meet our customers’ needs. This is one of the many things we have tested with customers,” a FedEx spokesperson said. The company declined to provide additional details about the feature nor would they even confirm that the term “Crosstrack” here actually means “non-FedEx” deliveries. But it’s hard to imagine another use case for having two tabs in the app’s tracking section — only one of which is labeled “FedEx” — for any other purpose. (We gave FedEx the opportunity to correct this description of “Crosstrack,” and they declined to say anything more beyond their statement.) The development, if as described, would be interesting, as it represents the competitive pressure Shopify is having on the wider industry. As e-commerce booms, in part thanks to consumer shifts by the pandemic, the ability to track all packages in one app has become a key selling point for Shop. The Shopify app today is now No. 4 in the Shopping category and has a noteworthy 4.8-star rating across some 3 million reviews, which speaks to consumer demand for this sort of offering. FedEx would do well by serving its audience with a similar feature. It’s worth noting that FedEx, like most major companies, tests many new product experiences, and only a subset of those actually make their way to the public. In this case, the Crosstrack product is considered a “concept” that FedEx is testing, we understand, but it’s not one that the company is ready to announce in terms of a public launch. |
Una Brands teams up with KlickBrands to enter South Korea’s e-commerce market | Kate Park | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | null |
Opaper takes the friction out of social commerce | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | While working her way through grad school, founder Joan McIntosh ran an online bakery. “I would wake up at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., go to a commercial kitchen and go door to door, delivering food or putting it in grocery stores.” After graduating, McIntosh’s professional life became decidedly more high tech—she was senior product manager for data and machine learning platforms at Streetlight Data and then Lacuna Technologies. On a return trip to Southeast Asia (McIntosh was born and raised in Indonesia), she observed the rise of social commerce, or people selling through social media like Instagram and WhatsApp, and was surprised to see it was similar to all the manual work she had put into her online bakery years earlier. “Everything was the same with how I did it,” McIntosh said. “I was just so baffled after working in tech for so many years, like why has nobody improved the process? Why is it still very manual? Why are you sending sellers payment, and then proof of payment like screenshots of bank transfers?” While at Streetlight Data and Lacuna, McIntosh worked on products that optimized pricing, logistics and the supply chain, or “making sure that things are moving the right way, at the right speed, at the right cadence,” she said. Opaper was launched to give social commerce sellers the same type of convenience. After building a minimum viable product that allows social commerce sellers to create an online store, Opaper started onboarding users and raised an oversubscribed seed round of $1 million. Investors include Precursor Ventures, Ratio Ventures, OnDeck, and angel investors Jay Eum, managing partner of GFT Ventures; Bora Chung, chief experience officer at Bill.com; and Frank Nawabi, an executive at Google and founder of Google-acquired Tenor. Then it built a fully remote team of 27 people in less than a year. Opaper is now available on Android and iOS, and just four months after launching, has almost 19,000 sellers in 100 cities onboarded. It targets small vendors, usually one or two people, who have about $2,000 to $5,000 USD gross merchandise value and want to scale, but can’t because they are busy answering questions and taking orders through WhatsApp. “They need time to focus on their product and think about how they can have an offline stores or maybe how to do franchises,” said McIntosh. “Those are the types of customers that we get to focus on more and more these days. It’s not somebody who already has three outlets. It’s somebody who has already started and is screaming ‘How to scale, how to scale?’” While Opaper isn’t targeted to any particular sector, McIntosh said the majority of the businesses it works with are food and beverage companies, including ones that want to avoid the high commissions of third-party delivery apps. Opaper is integrated with 13 different shipping carriers that sellers can offer to their buyers, as well as e-wallets and bank transfers for payments. For customers, Opaper means they don’t have to message back and forth with sellers to pick what goods they want and arrange payment and delivery. Instead, they go to the Opaper link in the seller’s profile and add things to a basket like any other online store. But Opaper doesn’t just make it easier for people to order goods on social media. It also lets sellers “own the direct to consumer experience,” McIntosh said. Opaper lets sellers keep track of that kind of customer data so they can use it for re-engagement and re-targeting. Over time, it also plans to build more supply chain and inventory management tools for sellers, since many social commerce sales are pre-orders. “When I was a bakery owner, I wanted to make sure I knew how much a person was buying so I could retarget them with coupons or loyalty points. It’s something you don’t really get easily from [third-party] marketplaces,” she said. |
Zoox acqui-hires team from robotic strawberry-picking startup, Strio.AI | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Amazon-owned robotaxi firm Zoox that it has acquired Strio.AI. The Boston-based robotics startup was founded in 2020 by MIT alumns to bring autonomous picking and pruning to strawberry crops. It got up and running quickly during the pandemic, bringing its first prototype system to farms in California and Florida within about six months. The acquisition is more of an acqui-hire, really. Strio co-founder and CEO Ruijie He joins Zoox as director of Perception, while four of its senior engineers will be integrated into the team. The move also finds the Bay Area-based Zoox opening its first East Coast R&D site with the Strio team. “During our conversations with RJ and the other members of the Strio.AI team, we were continually impressed by their technical expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and approach to developing state-of-the-art perception systems,” Zoox said in a blog post. “We’re thrilled to welcome them aboard as we continue advancing our autonomous technology.” The acquisition means that Strio will be winding down its ag tech work, instead integrating their work in things like perception into Zoox’s broader robotaxi plans. The move comes a few weeks after for integration into its indoor vertical farms. Like the Zoox move, Bowery’s acquisition effectively took Traptic’s robots out of the field. Conventional wisdom holds that there’s a lot of opportunity for autonomous robotics in ag tech, but many of the main players in the category have had difficulty making it too far down that road. Abundant’s apple-picking robots are another key example. Though for the robotics category in general, acquisition is often a solid outcome, particularly for a young company like Strio. For Zoox, meanwhile, it means access to more talent and a presence in the robotics research hub of Boston. |
UK’s Thirdfort nabs $20M for tools to help with ID verification, and detect money laundering and payment fraud | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Money laundering has been a hot topic of late in the UK, which is facing pressure to not just make tighter rules to track down the origins of money that’s spent on large assets in the country like prime real estate — the capital city has been dubbed by some as the “ ” — but also, in light of sanctions on Russia in recent weeks, actually to enforce those rules. Today, a London startup called , which has built a platform to help professional services firms run more thorough due diligence, and to flag when something is suspicious, is announcing a funding round of £15 million (about $20 million), money that it will be using to continue expanding its services, specifically to build payment infrastructure directly into its platform. The raise, a Series A, was led by Breega, with B2B fintech-focused Element Ventures also investing, along with the founders of ComplyAdvantage, Tessian, Fenergo, R3, Funding Circle and Fidel. MD Olly Thornton-Berry said that he and Jack Bidgood first came upon the idea for Thirdfort after a friend of theirs lost £25,000 while buying a flat in London due to a phishing attack: fraudsters had picked up some data about the deal, and created a domain similar to that of the legal firm the friend was using for the purchase, and with that wrote an email impersonating the friend’s lawyer, asking for the sum to be transferred via a link. It was only weeks later that the friend was legitimately asked for the same sum that they all started to suspect foul play. The friend never recovered that money. The incident, Thornton-Berry said, highlighted how little information both professional services companies require of a customer before entering into a business dealing, and how little protection the client has against more sophisticated fraud attempts. This led to Thirdfort, which provides a big-data toolkit of multiple resources such as data from LexisNexis, ComplyAdvantage, Companies House and more that can be corralled (and picked by the client) to provide different data points about individuals and their sources of money. Thirdfort has built tools first to address the needs of companies in the legal and property markets. The product today comes in two parts. First, there is the “risk engine” built for its business clients, which can be used both for KYC (know your customer) checks as well as to help companies comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. There are around the 700 businesses already using the platform, including law firms DAC Beachcroft, Penningtons Manches Cooper and Mishcon de Reya; and property businesses Knight Frank, Strutt & Parker and Winkworth. Second, there is an app built for consumer customers of those businesses. This has been built on open banking infrastructure to connect up those businesses with the customer’s bank, by way of the banks’ own banking apps, for payments and related transactions to be made in a secure way. This has now been downloaded some 500,000 times. Similar to in the U.S. (which is a potential competitor, if either expands into the other’s market), the pitch here with Thirdfort is that the work that would have had to go into running similar identification and origin-of-funds research would have mostly been drawn-out, largely manual and expensive to run, if it had been run at all. That’s because, unfortunately, it’s often in the interest of a business just to get a deal done, as fast as possible, which provides a major disincentive to run thorough diligence beyond making sure that the money will actually materialize. This is one reason why regulation to enforce that process is important here. But while stronger regulation has been on the a number of times over the years in the UK, it appears that times are changing — under pressure from world events and considerably more and harsh criticism. In sum, companies are and will be compelled to do more of this work, and that presents an opportunity to companies like Thirdfort. Previously, an ID check, and then seeing that this tallies up with data one one of the big identity databases, did the trick. And if a bank statement was needed, often all that professional services companies needed was a fax or PDF of one, but fake versions of these can easily be acquired online (I won’t link to the sites here). “Now, what’s required is a lot more,” Thornton-Berry said. “They need to run an in-depth level of due diligence, seeing bank statements [from banks, to determine] what is moving in and out, asking clients specific questions, diligence checks on gifted money if the sum is specified as a gift. It’s a whole new kind of workflow that’s come into existence with AML going up.” And while Thirdfort today focuses primarily on fraud detection — it’s managed to halt around one dozen dodgy transactions for its customers, Thornton-Barry said — it’s also built for AML diligence and compliance regulations and will likely come into its own when these are run more widely, especially around any large transactions involving international money. “For both consumers and professional services, the risk of fraud and the need for compliance represents a massive burden,” Maxence Drummond, Principal at Breega, said in a statement. “Consumers need to get verified for every transaction, and regulated professionals spend too much of their valuable time on client verification and compliance. |
Apple suspends Search Ads on the Russian App Store ‘until further notice’ | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | After last week’s announcement that it would , Apple has now informed its developer community that it’s suspending its Apple Search Ads service on the App Store in Russia. According to an email shared with developers, Apple Search Ads ads — which allow developers to run advertising campaigns on the App Store — have now been placed on hold in Russia “until further notice.” The email also noted no new Search Ads campaigns will be eligible to run on the App Store in Russia for the duration of the suspension. first reported the news of the Search Ads suspension following from and in the larger mobile app community who shared the news on Twitter. Apple has suspended all search ads on the Russian app store. — James Thomson (@jamesthomson) FYI 👇 — Ariel (@arielmichaeli) Developers said they received the email at the email address they had used to sign up for Search Ads with in the past. However, the emails are not only being directed to App Store developers based in Russia or to those with active Search Ads campaigns in the country — other developers in global markets received the email, as well, even if they weren’t running campaigns in the region. Apple is not commenting on the matter. But TechCrunch confirmed the email (seen above) is legitimate. The move to pause the Search Ads business in Russia follows in the country, limit Apple Pay, and RT News and Sputnik News from the App Store in all markets outside Russia. The company additionally disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a safety measure. Apple had made the announcement after Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to CEO Tim Cook which asked Apple to stop supplying Apple services and products to Russia. The letter additionally asked Cook to block access to the App Store, which Apple has not yet done. However, by suspending the Search Ads business in Russia, Apple is taking another step to further isolate Russia and step away from doing business in the country. |
Better.com plans to lay off about 4,000 people this week, sources say | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | The number ended up being “just over 3,000,” according to a Better.com spokesperson, who confirmed the figure on the afternoon of March 8 and shared a link to the that CFO Kevin Ryan ended up sending to employees on the matter. |
Daily Crunch: Hackers leak nearly 200 gigabytes of internal Samsung source code | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, March 7, 2022! We have a packed newsletter today, so get hype for a news digest. But, first, is , so the excitement-o-meter here in TechCrunch HQ Providence (aka my house) is off the charts. And to add to my general state of animation, we ! – Before we get into our usual rundown of discrete startup news, let’s talk self-driving cars. Pony.ai, a company with roots in both the U.S. and China, , just saw its valuation climb to $8.5 billion with the first close of its Series D. That’s miles above its last valuation of $5.3 billion, and indicates that there is still ample capital in the market for self-driving tech. , I say, as I no longer want to drive. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch The robotics industry is advancing in leaps and bounds, a literal statement for those who’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots pull off a parkour performance. Even so, founders should be prepared to discuss practical applications, as opposed to just touting the benefits of their technology. In a recent episode of TechCrunch Live with Agility Robotics co-founder and CTO Jonathan Hurst and Playground Global founding partner Bruce Leak, they looked back at how Agility’s early pitch deck related its impressive tech to the needs and wants of its prospective customers. “From the customer’s point of view, you can see how they’d look at it and say, ‘Oh, I can imagine how this is going to solve my problem,” says Hurst. “It’s not just technically interesting. That’s the transition right there.” |
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Cityblock co-founder discusses why an affordable, human-centered healthcare model works | Maggie Stamets | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | On Found Live Darrell and Jordan got to chat with Cityblock co-founder and president, Toyin Ajayi. Cityblock provides primary care, behavioral health and social care to folks who have been historically marginalized in the healthcare system, primarily people who are receiving their health insurance through Medicaid, with the goal of providing high-quality holistic care at a lower cost. They do this through a network of physicians, community outreach teams and by working with insurance providers. While Dr. Ajayi was working in a hospital system she became frustrated by the systemic issues that were sending the same patients back to the hospital time and time again. So she began experimenting with ways to extend her care, like giving out her cell phone number, making house calls and being available to explain medications. That idea grew into Cityblock, where that level of personalized care is scaled. They talked about the healthcare system, how providers can improve care, Toyin’s spicy TechCrunch Disrupt panel and answered a few audience questions. Don’t miss the next live episode with Shivani Siroya from Tala on March 17 at 10 am PT/ 1 pm ET. RSVP: and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Connect with us: |
Google’s Android 12L officially launches, will come to select devices this year | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Google in October announced a , a version of the Android operating system designed specifically for large-screened devices. Today, Android 12L is , offering features that will make it easier to use Android on tablet devices. The software will begin to roll out to supported devices from Samsung, Lenovo and Microsoft starting later this year, Google said. The idea with Android 12L was to tailor Android for users on tablets and foldable devices larger than 600sp with an updated user interface, multitasking enhancements and improved compatibility support so apps would offer a better experience by default when run on bigger-screened devices. With Android 12L, for example, the notification shade by showing Quick Settings and your Notifications in a two-column layout. The lock screen also uses a two-column layout to show your notifications and clock. Other built-in system apps, like Settings, are also optimized for the bigger screen, so you can make changes without having to go in and out of each section. Some key interactions have changed, too — like putting the PIN controls and lock screen pattern off to the side of the screen for easier reach. Google Android 12L addresses foldables with an optimized home screen grid and a polished fold-unfold transition, Google notes. 12L also for launching and switching between apps, while gesture navigation helps users do things like flip through recent apps, reveal or hide the taskbar, enter split-screen mode and swipe up to go home. Users on Android 12L can now drag and drop apps directly into split-screen from the taskbar or use a new “Split” action in the overview to start split-screen mode. That means you can watch a YouTube video while you read the news, search the web in the Chrome browser or use Google Maps, for instance. (Split-screen mode wasn’t new, to be clear, but now it’s easier to access in Android 12L and doesn’t require the developer to opt in to support the mode.) And 12L offers visual and stability to Android’s compatibility mode for apps that are not yet optimized for large-screen devices. Google The updated version of Android follows other improvements Google has made to Android tablets in recent years, which included the launch of a in 2020, which is essentially a “kids mode” on tablets; and , launched last year, which offers a one-stop shop for all your content, including movies, shows, books, games and video — all in one destination. While Android 12L is similar to its Apple counterpart, iPadOS, in that it also aims to address the needs of tablet owners, Google stopped short of actually forking Android into a separate operating system as Apple did with iOS and iPadOS. The official launch of Android 12L arrived alongside , the update that brings Google’s Pixel devices the latest set of new features. In this tenth feature drop, Google has added Night Sight support Snapchat, Live Captions for phone calls, language expansions for Live Translate, and other additions. |
What we expect from Apple’s Peek Performance event | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | these virtual events is they’ve really got a way of sneaking up on you. Back in the good ‘ol days of corporate travel, you could expect a few weeks’ heads-up ahead of the big show to allow you the proper time to book a night at the Palo Alto Travelodge (decent Wi-Fi, less decent free breakfast). The move to virtual also means a company doesn’t have to promise you the stars to justify making you sit in front of your computer for an hour. A steady trickle of leaks have been arriving in recent weeks, pointing to what’s likely to be one of the year’s lower-key events for the company. This is bolstered by the standard release cadence. Apple jammed a lot into its fall event last year — like, a lot, a lot. We got the iPhone 13, Apple Watch 7, iOS and a couple of iPads that really stole the show. Chip delays and holidays lined up perfectly for one of the . TechCrunch So, no iPhone 14 or Watch 8 — but we may still be getting a new phone, nonetheless. It’s hard to say the company is overdue to launch a new iPhone SE, because the budget handset has had, at best, an irregular schedule. This would be the third-gen SE, following releases in 2016 and 2020. The budget handset (the last gen started at $399) has earned its fans over the years, including our own Devin Coldewey, who the first time around. Some predictions for the coming new iPhone SE: 1. Mass production in Mar'22. 2. Estimated shipments of 25-30 mn units in 2022. 3. Storage: 64/128/256GB. 4. A15 & 5G support (mmW & Sub-6 GHz). 5. Casing: white, black, and red. 6. Similar form factor design to current SE. — 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) The line is notable for, among other things, serving as the last vestige for Apple’s older industrial design, before iPhones became all screen and notch. Perennial Apple predictor Ming-Chi Kuo was among the first to note the device’s return after a two-year hiatus. The report notes a largely unchanged design, an A15 chip and storage ranging from 64 to 256GB. The star of the show, however, is the addition of 5G on the entry-level device. IPads may once again end up stealing the show. A fifth-gen Air is expected, taking a number of cues from last year’s Mini. Like the iPhone SE, the model hasn’t had an upgrade since 2020. Rumors here include optional 5G, the A15 chip and upgraded camera hardware and software. TechCrunch Last year offered a pair of super-charged riffs on 2020’s M1 chip, and it seems likely we’ll see the M2 land at some point this year (is this the titular performance we’ll be getting a peek at?). If Apple does announce a new chip, it will almost certainly arrive alongside . Leading the pack of rumors this year is a new version of the perennial favorite thin and light MacBook Air. A Mac Mini is also said to be on offer, along with larger, more Pro-like iMacs. Apple The latest rumor to hit the pile is a 27-inch Apple display — one that lowers the barrier a bit from the 32-inch Pro Display XDR the company currently sells. Apple’s no doubt seen an uptick in demand for such products as much of the world moved to remote work over the past couple of years, but $5,000 was almost certainly too rich for most folks’ blood. Lastly, these hardware events always arrive with some OS updates in tow. Expect updates for the latest versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS. The event kicks off tomorrow at . We’ll see you there. |
Uber boosts Q1 profit guidance as the world gets moving again | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | U.S. ride-hailing and food delivery giant Uber raised its guidance for adjusted profitability in the first quarter, a rosier-than-anticipated outlook triggered by a spike in demand. this morning, Uber said it now expects adjusted EBITDA — a heavily-modified profit metric that strips out a host of costs, including share-based compensation — of $130 million to $150 million in the first quarter. That’s up sharply from its prior guidance of $100 million to $130 million, provided during its last month. The upshot? Demand for rides and food delivery is up and nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. On the ride-hailing front, Uber said that it has seen its trips-taken metric recover to 90% of February 2019 results, while gross bookings have returned to 95% strength over the same time period. Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi added in the same filing that “airport Gross Bookings exiting February were up over 50% month-on-month, and that the company is “preparing for the upcoming travel season to be one of the strongest ever.” Importantly, demand for ride-hailing appears to be across all use cases, according to Khosrowshahi, who noted that growth in ridership includes trips for travel, commuting and evening outings. Uber also noted that it has seen “sequential improvement in both of its mobility and delivery segment Adjusted EBITDA.” Why share the nuance when the aggregate numbers have been updated? Uber wants to stress that while its ride-hailing business (“Mobility”) is recovering, that performance boost is not coming at the cost of its food delivery business (“Delivery”). Uber’s food delivery business provided a huge hedge in gross bookings (GMV) terms during the pandemic when ride-hailing cratered as folks stayed at home. There has been market concern that ride-hailing and delivery were two sides of the same coin, meaning that they couldn’t come up heads at the same time; Uber’s latest figures suggest that it is indeed possible. The SEC filing implies that it has more operating leverage than some may have anticipated. Uber shares are off around 1.8 % today, despite starting on a strong note. Tech stocks more generally are suffering today in a global market rout. Lyft has not issued new guidance on its upcoming first quarter earnings. The Uber rival’s previous earnings report show that ridership is on the rebound. The question is if Lyft has seen the same uptick in rides through the first two months of 2022. Notably, Lyft doesn’t operate a food delivery business like Uber. Depending on one’s view on diversification specialization, Lyft’s singular focus on ride-hailing is a strength or weakness. It’s very 2022 that Uber boosted its profit guidance and still managed to see its valuation decline in midday trading; the company has given back all of its pandemic gains in recent months. Indeed Uber’s valuation today is lower than it was in mid-2019, far before it weathered the pandemic, scaled its delivery business, and managed to turn in successive profitable, albeit on an adjusted basis, quarters. It’s tough out there. |
So is there a bottom for tech stocks, or what | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Here at TechCrunch we keep tabs on the stock market. And the stock market has turned into an awful vomit-machine lately, puking up last year’s gains onto its own shirt, and, by extension, the larger technology market and startup-land. Not that this should be news per se; if you have been tracking the markets at all — — you are aware of the general direction of things. That’s good. But things have kept getting worse to the point that it’s time to sit back, and wonder where the hell the bottom is for tech stocks. Long-term bulls of tech companies, and especially the more modern SaaS and on-demand companies that have gone public in recent years, that over a long-enough time horizon nothing happening today matters. And there is some truth to that. But that’s a perspective that the already wealthy can take; for the rest of the world, the market’s shorter-term movements do matter. There are obvious connections between the stock market and startups. A few for flavor: As stocks falls, LPs have less money, and may be less interested in putting capital into VC funds; falling stock prices makes it harder to price acquisitions attractively; a depressed stock market can close the IPO window, limiting exits. And falling share prices can limit the prices at which startups raise, as their comps are in free fall. It’s a long list. Not that your friendly, local seed-stage startup should be waking up at 3 am to check futures data for U.S. markets. Not at all. But tracking the public comps for your sector here and there? Yeah, that’s smart. So let’s do just that. Some damage, starting from a high-level, and then getting a little bit more precise (52-week-high data from , change calculated to closing price today, rounded to nearest point): Holy hell, . Today alone the Nasdaq lost 3.6%, and cloud stocks fell 4.4%. It’s a out there. What’s going on? A combination of rising interest rates, the end of the pandemic trade more generally, decelerating growth rates at some public tech companies and a general reversion toward what we could call historical pricing norms. That last bit is terrifying, because if it turns out that the long-term average revenue multiple for, say, software companies is 8x revenues and not 15x or 25x or more, a lot of startups are going to suffer when they have to translate a fundraise from the market peak to a later fundraise at more parsimonious levels. More as the market evolves, but maybe some worry is warranted as we still don’t know where the bottom really is for tech stocks. |
Apple TV+ begins rolling out to Comcast’s Xfinity platforms | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Apple TV+ is now available across Comcast’s Xfinity platforms, Comcast on Monday. The company said Apple TV+ is beginning to roll out on the Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex and XClass TV today and will be available across all eligible devices in the coming days. You can now access Apple TV+ by saying “Apple TV+” into your Xfinity voice remote or by saying the name of a movie or TV you want to watch from the streaming service, such as “Ted Lasso” or “The Morning Show.” As part of the rollout, Xfinity users will be able to preview some of the streaming service’s content with no sign-up or sign-in necessary from March 15 to 21, including the new film “Greyhound” and the first seasons of several of its series. In addition, Comcast says Xfinity customers who are not currently Apple TV+ subscribers are eligible for a three-month free trial of Apple TV+ when they sign up through their Xfinity device by April 25. “Apple TV+ offers the highest quality programming from the finest creators in the world, and one of the best ways to enjoy it is on the big TV in your living room,” said Peter Stern, Apple’s vice president of Services, in a statement about the launch. “Our work with Comcast lights up that experience for tens of millions of new devices, and we are thrilled that so many Comcast customers have a compelling way to enjoy their new favorite shows on Apple TV+,” he added. The company first revealed plans to support Apple’s streaming service last October when Comcast CEO Brian Roberts that the Apple TV app would be available on Comcast platforms. Apple TV+ in November 2019 for Apple customers and later rolled out to non-Apple platforms, including, that same year, and . Today, it’s also now available across a variety of smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Vizio and Sony; gaming consoles including PlayStation (PS4 & PS5) and Xbox (One, Series X, Series S); and via the web. In December, the service launched on Sky devices (Sky Q and Sky Glass) in the U.K. and Europe. The expansion comes a day before Apple’s , scheduled for 10 AM PT (1 PM ET) on March 8. The company could use this opportunity to introduce a refreshed iPhone SE with 5G connectivity, an updated iPad Air with better specs across the board, new Mac models with Apple Silicon and more. |
Robotics founders: Build your pitch deck around problem-solving, not technology | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | remarkable often feels at odds with the practical. The Cassie robot captured the internet’s imagination ( ) when it debuted in 2017 through a series of Oregon State University YouTube videos. It was one of the most exciting examples of robotics engineering since Boston Dynamics first made the scene. Commercial applications, however, are a different conversation entirely. In a world of purpose-built systems, it’s not the first thing you see when you gaze upon the skinny legs of the ostrich-inspired bipedal ‘bot. When Agility Robotics first spun out of OSU’s College of Engineering, Cassie was being produced for research facilities. It’s a worthy mission, but not exactly a cash cow. In a recent episode of TechCrunch Live, Agility’s co-founder and CTO, Jonathan Hurst, and Playground Global’s founding partner, Bruce Leak, joined us to discuss the robotic company’s journey from the lab to the commercial sector — and the role a good VC firm can play in that journey. The conversation spanned 30 minutes and includes a look at Agility Robotics’ early pitch deck. The deck and video are embedded below. “If you’re building a company that’s building something that is really new and different, where are you going to hire engineers with experience with highly dynamic physical interaction, in the world, with force-sensitive behavior?” asks Hurst. “It’s just not common. Having students using the robots and a whole pipeline of people not only helps us, but it helps the whole infrastructure.” Playground Global, an early-stage investment firm based in Palo Alto, discovered the robot the way most of us did – watching cool videos online. “We were surfing the internet like any good venture capital group, and we ran across the video that Agility released,” says Leak. “We were super impressed. This product, at some level, was just an incredible pair of legs. But it could walk for hours and even run across uneven terrain in a very practical way. Seeing something like that, which we thought might not even be possible, we knew we had to meet the Agility team.” Agility’s seed/Series A pitch deck wasn’t focused on things like addressable market, and its insights into the robots’ practical commercial applications were cursory. What it did, however, was break down the startup’s impressive technologies. Hurst points to a tone shift between the presentation’s first slide, reading “Dynamic robots for human environments,” and its penultimate, “Made for work.” |
Google’s latest Pixel update includes a feature that lets you type responses during calls and more | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Google’s is launching today with several new updates, including a feature that lets you type to talk during phone calls. The updates are rolling out to Pixel 3a through Pixel 5a 5G devices today, while Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro devices will begin receiving the updates later this month. The most notable new feature is aimed toward people who can’t or prefer not to speak on calls, Google says. Now, when you’re on a call, you can see captions of what the other person on the call is saying and you can type back a response that will be read out loud on the other end. You’ll have the option to type out a custom message or choose a pre-written response. The new update is an extension of Google’s Live Caption feature, which automatically captions speech on your device. Google The Pixel update also includes a night photography mode called “Night Sight” for Snapchat. The new mode is meant to make it easier to capture clear low-light pictures and video without having to use flash. Google also announced that the previously Pixel 6-exclusive features will now be available for Pixel 3a and newer phones. The Direct My Call feature helps you get through complicated phone trees when you dial a business. Instead of listening and trying to remember the many options presented (e.g. “Press 1 for hours and locations”), Google Assistant translates the automated messages for you. On the other hand, the Wait Times feature displays the projected time it will take to get through to a person when dialing a toll-free number. Following its on the Galaxy S22 last month, Google Duo’s co-watching and live sharing features are now also coming to Pixel devices. The new features are supposed to make it easier to connect with friends and family on video calls and allow you to do things like host YouTube watch parties or share apps. In addition, Gboard will now offer stickers containing custom text if your language is set to U.S. English. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” said Chris Breithaupt, a product manager at Google, in a about the announcement. “When you’re typing in messaging apps, Gboard can convert your words into colorful stickers built with your exact text. With emoji, emoji kitchen and custom sticker suggestions while you type your Pixel helps you express exactly how you feel,” he added. Google The company is also introducing a new Pixel battery widget that is designed to display up-to-date information about your phone and connected devices, such as Pixel Buds. Google’s Interpreter Mode, which is designed to translate face-to-face conversations, can now also support Spanish, Italian and French. Google also announced that its Recorder app can now transcribe in Italian and Spanish on Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro devices. Support for Assistant Quick phrases is also rolling out in Spanish, Italian and French on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. The launch of this latest Pixel feature drop arrived , a version of the Android operating system designed specifically for large-screened devices. The software will begin to roll out to supported devices from Samsung, Lenovo and Microsoft starting later this year. |
Twitter says it’s trying to fully restore service in Russia | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Twitter’s service continues to be partially accessible in Russia, although the social networking platform confirmed today that it is aware of reports of users in the country having “increasing difficulty” accessing its service, adding that it is investigating and working to restore full access. “We’re aware of reports that people are increasingly having difficulty accessing in Russia. We’re investigating and working to fully restore access to our service,” a Twitter spokesperson told us. A source inside Russia told us they’ve been unable to access Twitter’s website since Saturday — but they also said that its mobile app still works. On Friday suggested Twitter’s service had been blocked by Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, as Putin’s regime continues to clamp down on the free flow of information in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Although, at the time, it has not seen any significant change vs the throttling that’s been affecting its service since the invasion of Ukraine began, and after to protest the war. Twitter’s line has evolved to a tacit confirm of a partial block now. There’s no doubt Russia is trying to tighten its grip on the information sphere around the war in Ukraine. Also Friday, Russia’s parliament targeting independent journalists, with the threat of up to 15 years in jail for reporting ‘fake’ information about the military. The same day the Russian government announced that it would — a move that was seized upon by Facebook/Meta president, Nick Clegg, to couch the social network as a provider of contrastingly “reliable information”. Yet Clegg’s irony-free claim came just a few days after discovery of Russian propaganda spreading on its platform, saying last Monday that it had taken down a network of circa 40 accounts/Pages/Groups on Facebook and Instagram being run out of Russia which had been targeting people in Ukraine with disinformation — just the latest example of state-backed “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (aka disinformation) being hosted on Facebook. So of course it’s never so black & white. (See also: The role Facebook’s ad targeting platform played in enabling the , for an especially notorious example.) Following the invasion of Ukraine, Facebook has also been used to amplify public calls for peace within Russia — such as the local IT workers who used the platform to which went on to garner thousands of signatures from the country’s tech community. Our source inside Russia told us they are still able to access Facebook as of today — but again via its app, not the web. Russia’s ability to fully block access to Western social media platforms looks doubtful, short of more drastic action to technically disconnect the Internet in Russia from the global Internet and block access to VPNs etc (or else by making it illegal for Russians to access anything other than .ru domains) — given the availability of workarounds to blocks on web domains, such as mobile apps and the use of VPNs or . Russia’s attempts to block the Telegram app underline some of the technical challenges of trying to block mobile apps. The draconian content legislation Russia’s parliament agreed Friday also led another social network — TikTok — to , citing concerns for its employees and users. So Putin’s regime is using multiple levers in a bid to control more of the narrative online. It’s also worth noting that, since 2015, Russia has been working on a project to build a national internet, suggesting it has an ambition to be able to fully control the digital information sphere, even if it has not been able to pull that off yet. The war in Ukraine could supercharge Russia’s effort to create self sufficient digital “segments” — as Putin put it , discussing the risk of the West denying Russia’s access to the global Internet (although internal tech development is also likely to be hit hard by Western sanctions). Fast forward to 2022 and it’s Putin that wants to deny Russians’ access to Western segments of the web which he cannot completely control, as In recent days, Europe has also responded to Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine by evolving its own response to Russian propaganda — with EU lawmakers agreeing Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik last week. The ban covers online platforms, like and Facebook, as well as traditional broadcast media (such as satellite). The EU has said the prohibition on RT and Sputnik will last as long as Russia continues the war in Ukraine — also stipulating that it will not be lifted until Putin stops spreading propaganda against the EU and its Member States. |
Slava Rubin and Sahil Lavingia break down crowdfunding options at TechCrunch Early Stage | Jordan Crook | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Sure, you can find plenty of big-name companies that bootstrapped their way to success without any outside investment — Calendly, GoPro, MailChimp and SPANX come to mind. Historically though, the majority of early-stage startups eventually have to move out of their bootstrapping stage to tap into outside sources of capital from institutional investors. But, beyond the classic Series A and B from your local VC, founders have myriad alternative funding routes they can take — like crowdfunding — to raise the money they need to grow. A new SEC regulation significantly increased the pool of money available through regulated equity crowdfunding from $1.07 million in any twelve-month period to $5 million. That’s a five-fold increase, and certainly a tempting reason to consider crowdfunding for your startup. It’s why we’ve invited Sahil Lavingia — the founder and CEO of Gumroad — and Slava Rubin — founder of both humbition and Vincent and a co-founder of Indiegogo — to share their extensive knowledge and experience in the session, at on April 14. Together, they’ll talk about when it makes sense to crowdsource capital, delve into the SEC regulations, explain what they mean and discuss the different options available for founders. There has never been more capital up for grabs, and there have never been so many ways to go about acquiring money to start a business. Once you identify the best funding route for your company, how do you navigate that path successfully? Sahil Lavingia was Pinterest employee No. 2; he left (before vesting) to found Gumroad, an e-commerce platform where creatives sell their digital products directly to customers. Lavingia offers an honest assessment of his Gumroad journey in his essay, , and is the author of the book, “The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less.” In 2020, the self-described “VC-hating VC,” Lavingia founded SHL Capital, which invests more than $15 million a year in early-stage startups, mostly in amounts ranging from $100,000-$250,000. Investments include Figma, Lambda School (now Bloom Institute of Technology) and HelloSign. Slava Rubin co-founded Indiegogo in 2006 and, as CEO for more than a decade, led the organization to become one of the world’s largest crowdfunding platforms with more than $1 billion distributed worldwide. In 2019, Rubin founded Vincent, a platform offering the largest selection of alternative investments, making discovery and due diligence easier for investors and changing how people access them. He is also founder of humbition, a $30 million early-stage venture fund. His angel portfolio includes multiple unicorns, including Hedera, GOAT, Braintrust and Carta. Rubin represented the crowdfunding industry at the White House during the signing of the JOBS Act under the Obama administration and has helped navigate bringing equity crowdfunding to the American public. If you’re hunting for funding and curious about crowdfunding, don’t miss this session. Join Sahil Lavingia and Slava Rubin as they discuss when and why crowdfunding makes sense and explain the SEC’s latest regulations expanding the crowdfunding cash pool. They’ll look at the various offerings to consider and talk about what it takes to crowdfund successfully. will provide you with plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. !
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Google says Chrome on macOS is now faster than Safari | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | Version 100 of Google Chrome will within the next few weeks, but even after all of this time, there’s still some room for speeding up the browser. As Google announced today, version 99 of Chrome on macOS manages to score 300 points on the Speedometer benchmark, which was originally developed by Apple’s WebKit team. This, Google points out, is the fastest performance of any browser yet. Speedometer 2.0 tests for responsiveness, which makes it a good proxy for user experience. It’s been a since competition in the browser market focused on speed, especially now that most vendors bet on the same Chromium codebase to build their browsers (with the exception of Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s WebKit-based Safari). But that doesn’t mean that the various development teams stopped thinking about how to speed up the user experience. As with a lot of mature technologies, we’re just not seeing major breakthroughs these days. That doesn’t mean the rivalry between the different vendors has stopped, even as they are now getting together as part of to better align their browsers with web standards. When a new chip comes along, though, there’s always room for optimization. Originally, Chrome on Apple’s M1 chips had passable performance, but 15 months after the launch of these Arm-based chips, Chrome now runs 43% faster on them, Google also noted today, and also stressed that its browser’s graphics performance now beats Safari’s by 15%, thanks to a couple of new techniques in this area, too. That’s on top of a number of general JavaScript optimizations Google already announced . While there’s no news for Windows users today, Google did note that Chrome on Android will also see some improvements. Loading a page should now be 15% faster, the company says, thanks to some navigation optimizations that prioritize “critical navigation moments on the browser user interface thread.” Are you going to notice any of this? A modern browser on a fast connection renders virtually any page within the blink of an eye. But it doesn’t take much to make software feel more responsive, so the 43% on M1 Macs will surely make you feel more productive as you browse TikTok (or manage your Jira tickets — whatever works for you). |
Instagram’s Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps disappear from app stores | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | A week after Instagram confirmed its plan to in order to better focus on initiatives, like Reels, the company confirmed it’s pulled two more of its older apps from the app stores. This includes its , first launched in 2014, and looping , launched in 2015. According to data provided to TechCrunch by , Hyperlapse and Boomerang’s last day on the app stores before their removal was March 1, 2022. Of the two, Boomerang had a larger install base. Apptopia data indicates Boomerang had seen 301 million lifetime global downloads, compared with just 23 million for Hyperlapse. In addition, Boomerang was still averaging 26,000 downloads per day at the time of its removal, the firm noted. However, Boomerang benefitted from a presence on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, while Hyperlapse was only available on iOS. Instagram did not make a formal announcement about the removals on its , but a few people today tweeted about the apps’ removals, including social media consultant , and Twitter users and . Instagram has removed its standalone Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps — Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) Direct link is still working! — ㆅ (@WFBrother) It’s not surprising to see these two apps get shut down. Both were originally intended as a way to give Instagram users new creative tools without bogging down Instagram’s flagship app. But the company’s concerns about over-stuffing its main app with too many features have long since passed. Today, Instagram offers access to photo and video posts, Stories, like TikTok (Reels), , , limited-time and more. In fact, there’s so much now going on inside Instagram that the company even its main creation tool, the “Compose” button, to the harder-to-reach spot in the top right of the screen instead of the bottom-center. Meanwhile, the need for dedicated creative effects apps no longer makes sense for Instagram, either, as it has long since integrated its suite of creative tools right into the Instagram camera. For instance, when Instagram a couple of years ago — like SloMo, Echo and Duo — it did directly in Instagram itself. And now, when Instagram wants users to get creative with video, it adds features to its Reels product. Plus, when it confirmed the IGTV shutdown, it now wants to make video as simple as possible to both discover and create from within its main app. It’s also worth noting that a former Instagram rival known as over being cut off from Instagram’s social graph, even as it copied Phhhoto’s core feature, looping video, for Boomerang. While Hyperlapse and Boomerang have been pulled from the app stores, Instagram’s , which lets you organize photos into collages, remains available for the time being. Instagram confirmed it is not removing Layout and Boomerang’s features will continue to be supported in app. “We’ve removed support for the standalone Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps to better focus our efforts on the main app,” a spokesperson said. “We’ll continue working on new ways for people to be creative and have fun on Instagram,” they added. |
Klarna shows that BNPL growth is not cheap | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | has been a busy in the last few days, so you will forgive me for missing that Klarna dropped its 2021 financial results last week. We’re remedying that oversight today. Klarna is an interesting company. It’s incredibly , and, despite remaining a private company, reports its earnings on a regular basis. This means that we can check in on how it is performing and learn quite a lot about the larger buy now, pay later (BNPL) market that is awash with startup activity and venture dollars. The mega-unicorn, in other words, provides us a window into a market replete with smaller companies yearning for both niche and mass-market BNPL adoption. And what do Klarna’s earnings tell us? Two things: First, that the BNPL market continues to expand, with consumers happy to transact more and more with the spending model. And, second, that growth in BNPL land is not cheap; Klarna’s operating costs are scaling rapidly and the company’s profitability is suffering. Let’s talk about it! In 2021, Klarna had revenues (“total net operating income”) , leading to an operating loss of 6.58 billion Krona, and a net loss of 7.09 billion Krona. In U.S. dollars at today’s exchange rate, those figures translate to $1.375 billion in revenue, a $658 million operating loss and a $709 million net loss. Klarna had posted a 10.0 billion Krona revenue result in 2020 and a net loss of 1.376 billion Krona. So Klarna grew by around 36% last year in revenue terms, but its net losses multiplied by around 5. |
Antler East Africa closes $13.5M fund to invest in early-stage startups | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | . |
Berlin-based Swobbee wants to bring micromobility battery swapping to Europe | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Swobbee, a Berlin-based startup that’s working on commercializing battery swapping for micromobility vehicles, has raised a $6.5 million Series A led by new strategic investor EIT InnoEnergy, a major accelerator of sustainable energies in Europe that’s supported by the European Union. The startup will rely on both the funds and InnoEnergy’s network in the European green tech space to build out its battery swapping station network across Germany and into two new European countries, according to Thomas Duscha, the startup’s CEO and co-founder. If Swobbee’s business concept sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking about Gogoro, the Taiwanese electric moped-producing, battery-swapping giant that’s absolutely dominating in its home country and expanding across Asia. The company recently launched a and . “Our role model is Gogoro,” Duscha told TechCrunch. “Gogoro’s is a highly vertically integrated model with e-mopeds, but as we know, the e-moped will never be the number one transport mode in Europe, so we believe in small mobility like e-bikes, cargo bikes and kick scooters.” Aside from Swobbee’s focus on smaller micromobility vehicles, there are a few other differences between the German startup and Gogoro’s business models. By manufacturing its own mopeds and forming partnerships with OEMs, Gogoro has been able to commercialize and scale one battery type. Swobbee’s swapping stations can host six different battery types to suit a range of vehicles, and the startup plans to onboard two more battery types this year to open its network to more players. Since its founding in 2017, Swobbee has mainly targeted companies with homogeneous micromobility fleets, like last-mile delivery providers or shared micromobility operators, as a way to test its model and expand. The startup has provided charging infrastructure to logistics providers like Hermes, DHL Logistics and DPD, and it works with shared operator Tier Mobility. While Tier does have its own , the work Swobbee does for Tier – and before the company exited European operations and – is on the back end. Tier employees have used Swobbee stations to swap out the batteries for dockless vehicles on the road. Swobbee has recently signed on one of the “top three” micromobility operators as a client, said Duscha, but he declined to specify. He did say, however, that the nature of that partnership would look a lot like Swobbee’s deal with Tier. The goal for 2022 is not only to expand its fleet customers, but also to reach average consumers with personal vehicles, which is closer to the Gogoro model. “This year, we are piloting together with the European Union a B2C model where we would like to discover if swappable batteries or battery-sharing services could be a thing for European customers,” said Duscha. “We know that in Asia, especially in East Asia, it’s pretty much working, but we need to see if this also works in Europe.” This pilot will involve giving Berliners vehicles without the battery and seeing how they get on using Swobbee’s existing battery swap network to charge up. The logic behind this is that, while many companies exist to sell electric micromobility vehicles directly to customers, there isn’t yet much of a service or maintenance network that allows riders to easily upgrade a battery that will likely die in a few years time, and far before the rest of the vehicle wears out. For the pilot to be successful, Swobbee will need to expand its network. According to Swobbee’s app, the company currently has 19 public stations in Germany, with nine in or near Berlin, four in Stuttgart, two outside Düsseldorf, one in Frankfurt and three in Freiburg. Duscha said the actual number is over 50 because many are exclusive. Swobbee’s current tactic for growing its footprint is to either deploy stations on its own or through partnerships with gas stations, utilities companies or the retail market, Duscha said. Each station is less than 1 square meter, which makes it easier to squeeze into prime real estate in city centers where swapping will be most needed. The Series A brings Swobbee up to a pre-money valuation of about €30 million, or about $33 million, according to Duscha. Later this year, the startup aims to raise an A+ round that will be in the double digits and bring on another strategic partner, such as a large-scale, pan-European utility company or even a vehicle manufacturer from the east that’s open to expanding into new markets. |
Alice&Bob, a quantum computing startup, raises $30M to launch its first fault-tolerant ‘cat qubit’ computers in 2023 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Quantum computing has been something of a holy grail in the world of technology: In theory, it promises an unprecedented amount of processing power that could be used to solve the most complicated problems; in practice, most attempts at building the physical manifestation of the concept produce too many errors as a byproduct to make quantum computers productive at scale. Now a startup out of France believes it has made a breakthrough to solve those issues, and it is announcing some funding to help it apply those advances to building machines it intends to launch next year. — Paris startup that is building what it says are fault-tolerant quantum processors — has raised €27 million (just under $30 million at today’s rates), money that it will use to develop chips and computers and a business model based around exponentially powered quantum-computing-as-a-service, all for a 2023 launch. The Series A is being co-led by Elaia, Bpifrance (by way of its Digital Venture fund), and Supernova Invest, with participation also from Breega. (Elaia and Breega also backed Alice&Bob in a , the year the startup was founded.) The startup’s name is a reference to the two fictional characters that are often used as for hypothetical thought experiments in areas like cryptography and quantum physics. Similarly, the breakthrough building block of Alice&Bob’s system also has a theoretical reference in it. Rather than pursuing ways to reduce faults by throwing more qubits at the problem (qubits being the typical building block of a quantum computing system), Théau Peronnin, the CEO, tells me that Alice&Bob devised a different architecture that it calls a “cat qubit,” a reference to and the idea of something being in “two states” at once, as a way to reduce the faults in processing, thereby to reduce the number of processors needed to overcome those faults. While most approaches to building quantum computer processors have been based around superconducting circuits — Peronnin notes that this is what IBM and Google have been working on — what his startup has devised “is another kind of chip architecture” that automatically corrects the errors. The work it has done so far has been extensive enough that “At the moment, we’re focusing on building the whole machine because we first have to demonstrate that the technology can deliver on its promises,” he said. “But since we’re seeing some competitors, and part of our technology is patented, then the question [of licensing] will be open.” He noted as one example Amazon’s quantum road map, which mentioned the component that Alice&Bob designed 151 times on 118 pages. “I think we can say they are following us.” The global quantum race has been precisely that up to now: Although we’ve seen many announcements from larger tech companies of the work that they are doing, plus a wide swath of startups coming out of academia also looking to commercialize their particular advancements and approaches (Alice&Bob being among the latter), no one has actually reached the finish line just yet with machines that can actually deliver, at scale, the kind of exponential computing that quantum computing promises. Yet it all looks tantalizingly close, and given how the rest of the tech world has advanced — leaps in AI-based concepts and growing ambitions around where they can be applied, a push for using technology to solve some of the world’s most pernicious problems in areas like health and more, and simply to make existing work more efficient — there remains a huge appetite to continue funding startups like this one to see if someone, or something, can make it all come together in the end. “As deep tech investors, we are convinced that some of society’s biggest challenges can be addressed by using breakthrough technologies created in research labs,” Sofia Dahoune, investment director at Elaia, said in a statement. “As such, we regard quantum computing as one of the most promising world-changing technologies that could foster extraordinary progress across a broad range of applications.” |
Game streaming platform Loco raises $42 million to build ‘Twitch for India’ | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Game streaming startup Loco said on Thursday it has raised $42 million as it looks to build what it has described to some investors as “Twitch for India.” Hashed, Makers Fund, Catamaran Ventures, Krafton, Lumikai, Korea Investment Partners and Hiro Capital invested in the startup’s Series A financing, which gives Loco a pre-money valuation of about $145 million, according to two sources familiar with the matter. TechCrunch . The startup — run by Anirudh Pandita and Ashwin Suresh, who previously co-founded content platform Pocket Aces — has raised about $51 million to date. Pocket Aces acquired Loco in 2018. Loco has partnered with several game publishers, including PUBG Corporation, Activision Blizzard and Riot Games for licensing, securing what an investor described as “first-mover advantage.” On its app, users watch and interact with streamers and support them with virtual goods (read: micro-transactions). Loco has amassed 5.3 million monthly active users, 450,000 of whom use the service each day, according to sources familiar with the matter. About 45,000 gamers stream on the app, the sources said. “YouTube offers a leading signal for this gaming content demand, but its product is not built for the game streaming market,” the startup said in its investor deck. Users on the platform were spending as much as 27 minutes each day as of October 2021, Loco said in a slide. According to industry estimations, there are about 100 million users in India who play battle royale games each month, compared to China’s 700 million. “While demand is continuing to grow, gaming community and content supply have not been built by any platform in India,” Loco said in its investor deck. “Loco is the leader in game streaming in India and has the country’s most engaged community of gamers on its platform,” Ethan Kim, co-founder and partner at Hashed, said in a statement. “Users between the ages of 10 and 30 form the bedrock of gaming and esports communities worldwide and India is one of the most interesting global gaming markets, with 40% of its population belonging to this cohort. We believe this new investment round will enable Loco to solidify its dominant position in game streaming and eventually provide the Indian gaming community with cutting edge web3 products and services.” |
Do Americans want to gamble on individual athletes? Marc Lore is betting on it | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | , a seven-month-old, New York-based company, says it’s looking to build a new sports stock market that lets fans bet on athletes just like stocks. Though the plan is to launch this fall, the young outfit has already raised $75 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation from renowned entrepreneur Marc Lore, MLB great Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Global. The investors are betting on more than the idea. Mojo’s co-founder and CEO is Vinit (“Vinny”) Bharara, a childhood friend of Lore who previously co-founded a trading card company with Lore that co-founded Diapers.com with Lore (which ); and more recently sold two more companies. One of these was a publisher that last year; the other was Cafe, a podcast company that Bharara founded with his brother Preet Bharara (the former United States attorney) and . Even with that kind of track record, Mojo seems ambitious. Note that our understanding derives from conversations with gaming and financial industry veterans, a about Mojo, and a published earlier today by Bharara, who writes that he and Lore have been dreaming of this company since knocking around elementary school together. (The company declined to answer our questions today, saying it’s “too early” in its trajectory.) Here’s what we is happening with this company, which already has 40 employees: Unlike other platforms that let you or whether your favorite player will have an , Mojo will invite users to buy futures derivatives (contracts essentially) that assign each athlete the kind of stat you might , one that measures a player’s value in all areas of the game by trying to determine how many more wins he is worth than a replacement. We have no idea exactly Mojo will determine these values, but in his post, Bharara uses phrasing like “objective statistics” and “intrinsic value” and “price integrity,” suggesting that Mojo won’t just be pulling numbers out of its figurative behind. Mojo — which maybe has a clearinghouse partner? — will apparently be on the other side of these contracts, which will invite participants to bet that an athlete’s stats will improve or worsen over time based on a slew of factors, like injuries or anticipated changes to a team’s roster or certain athletes’ tendency to get themselves suspended. (Again, we’re a little bit guessing here, but Bharara — who is running the company with former Walmart.com executive — uses the term “market making” in his post. He also talks in his post about “instant liquidity,” which you can’t get if you’re trying to find another market participant to take the opposite position you’ve taken.) Ultimately, Bharara writes, the plan is to start with one sport — professional football, says Bloomberg — and eventually to “have all sports, thousands of players, and many different markets.” As for whether Mojo needs buy-in from these thousands of players (or their players’ associations), no one we talked with today seems to think so, even while everyone agreed it would be nice if it did. Our friendly sources also suggested it was unlikely that players could bet on themselves — something else we wondered about — given the tech that Bharara says Mojo is building. In his post, he says the plan is to throw “complex engineering, advanced data science, sophisticated market making, and cutting-edge app design” into its platform’s development, so unless Mojo does all these things poorly — it’s possible! — it will likely know exactly who its customers are. Of course, a far more pressing question is whether state gaming commissions will sign off on Mojo. Given how much is at stake — New York has reportedly hauled in nearly in tax revenue since it opened online betting in early January — it seems likely they will, but Bharara told Bloomberg that arrangements with such regulators are a work in progress. It’s also fair to wonder if Americans really want to bet on individual athletes. We suspect that they will. Meanwhile, asked what he makes of the concept, Bradley Tusk — an investor in FanDuel who was once credited for “ ” — told us earlier today via email: “We’ve looked at various ‘stock markets for x,’ and so far, none have really added up. “The question here is whether people would want to buy and sell derivative equity in an athlete when they can also just now bet directly on games and performance,” wrote Tusk. “It feels like Americans have a bottomless appetite for gambling and investing. Mojo better hope that applies here, too.” |
Sony suspends PlayStation store and console sales in Russia | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Sony is the latest company to pull business out of Russia in light of the country’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Sony’s gaming division Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Wednesday that it would cut off hardware shipments and software launches in Russia in light of the Russian government’s escalating hostilities. The company also noted that it would suspend access to the PlayStation store, Sony’s online gaming storefront, and call off the Russian launch of Gran Turismo 7, its hit racing title that’s raked in more than $4 billion across the series to date. — PlayStation (@PlayStation) Sony follows a number of other tech and gaming companies that have suspended their business in Russia, including competitor Microsoft, which announced that it would halt sales in the country . In the earliest days of the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called on the gaming industry to cut off its business in Russia, naming Microsoft and Sony specifically. Fedorov also urged the esports world to suspend any Russian competitors and cancel any events taking place in the country. “In 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple rocket launchers and missiles,” he wrote. You are definitely aware of what is happening in Ukraine right now. Russia declare war not for Ukraine but for all civilized world. If you support human values, you should live the Russian market! — Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) |
Did Netflix ruin Formula 1 with ‘Drive To Survive’? | Jordan Crook | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | If you followed along with the 2021-22 Formula 1 season, you know that Netflix’s latest installment of is certain to be a doozy. Luckily, the wait is nearly over. Drive To Survive Season 4 launches on March 11, and Netflix released the official trailer for the show today. Here’s the thing: There are few, if any shows, that have had quite the same impact on a sport as Drive To Survive has for Formula 1. According to , overall ratings for actual Formula 1 in 2021 were up more than 40%, making it the most-watched F1 season in the U.S. ever. The outlet says that the sport added an estimated 73 fans last year, globally. Americans, who have usually opted for Nascar if not non-automotive sports altogether, are clamoring enough for the sport to add a second U.S.-based race in Miami this year. And yes, there is supposedly a beach club in the center of the track, in true Miami fashion. You can’t draw a straight line from the Netflix docuseries to the growth of Formula 1, but it seems clear that there is at least a correlation if not direct causation. But there is another side to this coin. As a new-ish Formula 1 fan myself, drawn in by the docuseries, I have noticed an incredibly common sentiment among the OG F1 fans: They say that the Netflix show has ruined the sport. Has ruined ? The drama seemed a bit manufactured and race decisions seemed swayed to keeping the season close 🤷🏻♂️ — Mark J (@WendellRuns) Netflix ruined F1. More like a soap now a days. It's happened now, we wait till march 20th now. — Kyle Snape (SGT_UK_GBR) (@Kyle_Snape98) Let me catch you up briefly on this latest Formula 1 season for context. Mercedes AMG Petronas has been dominant in Formula 1 for nearly a decade. The team has come in first place in the World Constructors Championship (how good is your car?) and first place in the World Drivers Championship (how good is your driver?) for seven consecutive years… until last year. With sweeping changes to the sporting regulations forthcoming, Mercedes decided to focus most of its resources and energy on the 2022 season and car, leaving an opening for its rival, Red Bull Racing, to make a play for first place. And it did. Max Verstappen (Formula 1’s resident bad boy and lead Red Bull driver) and Mercedes’ Sir Lewis Hamilton (seven-time Drivers champion and multiple record holder) were neck and neck all season long, trading P1 and P2 — or, first and second place — nearly every single race. Hamilton was behind going into the final four races, and won the first three. The ’21-’22 champion would be determined in the final race, in Abu Dhabi. A nail-biter of a season is rare in the sport, and even moreso since Mercedes absolutely took over. Hamilton led most of the final race, despite a Herculean effort by Checo Perez (Verstappen’s teammate on Red Bull) to hold him up and give Verstappen a chance to overtake. A couple safety cars, one virtual and one real, led Verstappen to change to fresh tires, whereas Hamilton and Mercedes chose to keep track position and leave on the old tires. (A “safety car” comes out during a caution period due to an obstruction on track or some other incident. The safety car rules require the racers to slow down and they are not allowed to overtake.) This is where things get incredibly hairy. The final safety car was caused by a crash. The rules state that during a safety car, all the lapped vehicles should overtake the safety car and take their place in the actual order of cars. (Cars can often get mixed up due to being lapped or going into the pits for tire changes.) The rules also state that after all the lapped cars have assumed their rightful position in line, the safety car should take an additional lap before exiting, at which point racing resumes at the starting line. FIA director Michael Masi ignored those rules, only allowing the cars between Hamilton (the leader) and Verstappen (P2) to unlap themselves. He also brought the safety car in a lap early. In other words, the race should have finished under a safety car, which would have been anticlimactic but would also have been true to the rules of the sport. However, that’s not what happened. With fresh tires, Verstappen , and the Drivers Championship. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of Formula 1 fans who feel that the officials juiced the story line to keep new Netflix fans entranced. To be clear, this wasn’t the first “iffy” call of the season that seemed to level out Hamilton and Verstappen. Anything that would be justifiably upsetting to long-time fans. Others, like Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner (who is randomly married to Ginger Spice), seem pleased to be enjoying the Netflix effect, even if . Like I said, I’m a new fan to Formula 1 precisely of Drive To Survive, so I’m clearly biased. But I think anything that attracts an audience to what I’ve come to find is a fascinating, complex, adrenaline-pumping sport is probably a good thing. Do I think that adjusting or bending the rules in order to produce a better storyline is right? Absolutely not. Am I saying that’s exactly what happened? I haven’t the slightest clue. All I know is that I’m 100% ready to mainline this next season of Drive To Survive on Friday and segue that energy directly into the ’22-’23 season of Formula 1. Who’s with me? |
AI helps historians complete ancient Greek inscriptions damaged over millennia | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | As if being a scholar in ancient Greek wasn’t hard enough fundamentally, the primary texts they rely on are frequently damaged beyond repair, being as they are thousands of years old. Historians may have a powerful new tool in , a machine learning model built by DeepMind that makes surprisingly accurate guesses at missing words and the location and date of the text. It’s an unusual application of AI, but one that demonstrates how useful it can be outside the tech world. The problem of incomplete ancient texts goes across many disciplines in which experts work with degraded materials. The original document might be made of stone, clay or papyrus, written in Akkadian, ancient Greek or Linear A, and describe anything from a grocer’s bill to a hero’s journey. What they all have in common though is the damage accumulated over thousands of years. Gaps where the text is worn or torn off are often called lacunae, and can be as short as a missing letter or as long as a chapter, or indeed an entire story. Filling them in can be trivial or impossible, but you have to start somewhere — and that’s where Ithaca is meant to help. Trained on an huge library of ancient Greek texts, Ithaca (named after Odysseus’s home island) not only can say what a missing word or phrase is likely to be, but can also take a shot at how old it is and where it was written. It’s not going to go filling in a whole epic cycle on its own — it’s meant to be a tool for those who work with these texts, not a solution. A paper published in the journal Nature demonstrates its efficacy, using as an example some decrees from Periclean Athens. Thought to have been written in around 445 BC, Ithaca suggested based on its textual analysis that they were actually from 420 BC or so — in line with more recent evidence. It might not sound like a lot, but imagine if the Bill of Rights was actually written 20 years later! DeepMind As for the text itself, experts in the study got it about 25% right on the first pass; not exactly stellar, though of course text restoration is not meant to be an afternoon lark but a long-term project. Paired with Ithaca, however, they quickly achieved 72% accuracy. This is often found to be the case in other situations where humans ultimately are more accurate but can have their process sped up by quickly eliminating dead ends or suggesting a starting point. In medical data it can be easy to oversee an abnormality the AI might flag quickly — but ultimately it is human expertise that perceives the details and finds the right answer. You can test out a if you have some lacunae-ridden ancient Greek text handy, or use one of their provided examples to see how it fills in requested gaps. For longer pieces or more than 10 letters missing, try it out in . The code is available at . Though ancient Greek is an obvious and fruitful area in which for Ithaca to start, the team is already hard at work on other languages as well. Akkadian, Demotic, Hebrew and Mayan are all on the list, and hopefully more will be added over time. “Ithaca illustrates the potential contribution of natural language processing and machine learning in the humanities,” said Ion Androutsopoulos, a professor at Athens University who worked on the project. “We need more projects like Ithaca to further showcase this potential, but also suitable courses and teaching material to educate future researchers who will have a better joint understanding of both the humanities and AI methods.” |
Daily Crunch: Atlantic Money wants to make international money transfers even cheaper than competitors | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, March 9, 2022! A few notes before we dive into the news: First, our Austin City Spotlight and pitch-off is coming together, so startups, . And we just announced that , which is going to be a treat. – Kicking off our startup coverage today, a few notes from our enterprise reporter Ron Miller. First, Miller , or RPA, market. The gist is that growth in the hot segment is set to slow over the next few years as more AI-first solutions garner more market footing. For companies like former unicorn UIPath, there’s change coming. And Miller . The startup focuses on simplifying cloud operations. Also out today was news regarding . The company was once largely construed as a Robinhood competitor, but with the Otis deal, Public is making a bid to be a more diverse asset investing platform for consumers. Oh, and if you are building a so-called “web3” startup, well, . Now onto the rest of the news! And there was more, of course: . . And . Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Both my co-founder and I have E-2 status. We need to find a quick visa option because a VC investment will dilute our equity, and we will no longer be eligible for the E-2. We are looking at International Entrepreneur Parole as an option since we would easily qualify based on the investment we’re expecting, but we’re concerned about timing. I know IEP is a new option; how long is it taking? Can it be expedited? Should we consider alternatives? Alrighty, it’s time for Big Tech news. Up top, , and I may buy one. And why was TechCrunch ? Well, . And we don’t love facial recognition. |
SpaceX launches 48 more Starlink satellites on an ‘American broomstick’ | Stefanie Waldek | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | It’s up, up and away for another SpaceX Starlink mission. At 5:45 this morning PST, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida, adding 48 new satellites to SpaceX’s 2,000-strong constellation of internet-providing devices orbiting the Earth. This launch was the fourth for the booster, which landed on the drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” in the Atlantic Ocean a few minutes into the mission. While this flight was nothing new for SpaceX — the company has launched seven Starlink missions this year, plus three other missions — there was a particularly interesting quip tossed into the launch sequence. “Time to let the American broomstick fly and hear the sounds of freedom,” called out SpaceX’s launch director before issuing her “go” for launch. That comment refers to a jab made by Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, last week after he in response to the increasingly tense situation between the two countries. “Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what,” he said on a state news broadcast. Though Falcon 9 rockets use SpaceX’s proprietary Merlin engines for propulsion, other American rockets — specifically United Launch Alliances’s Atlas V and Northrop Grumman’s Antares — are powered by Russian engines. ULA has announced that it has enough engines in stock for its upcoming launches, but Northrop Grumman has not issued a statement about how the embargo might affect its missions. In either case, it’s SpaceX that makes up the lion’s share of U.S. rocket launches, and its broomsticks are doing just fine, as today’s launch showed us. The next SpaceX launch is not a Starlink mission, but a crewed one. Scheduled for launch on March 30, the Axiom-1 mission will be the first all-private flight to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX already has quite a bit of experience on the crewed-mission front — it’s already flown four NASA crews to the ISS, plus the Inspiration 4 mission, whose all-civilian crew orbited the Earth in a Crew Dragon capsule for several days. |
The PlayStation version of Roblox is materializing | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | A new job posting from Roblox hints that the company’s loose plans to expand to Sony’s gaming console are getting much closer to becoming a reality. The seeks a PlayStation console senior software engineer to develop a Roblox app for PlayStation — hardware that Roblox’s game platform-within-a-platform has yet to reach. The listing notes that the position will “help build and support our game engine used by millions of users worldwide for the Sony PlayStation platform” including “all parts of the application, from integration with the target platform and user interface adaptations to performance optimization.” Roblox CEO David Baszucki hinted at the company’s expansive vision for additional platforms in 2021, stating that the Nintendo Switch, Sony PlayStation and Oculus Quest all “make perfect sense for Roblox” in the long term. “What you’re seeing right now is an incredible focus on the phone by us, which we believe is an incredibly difficult form factor and the most difficult form factor for that immersion,” Baszucki . “But these are all logical platforms and at the same time, we won’t share any ship dates for them.” Hitting the PlayStation wouldn’t mark Roblox’s console debut. While it might be better known on PC, Roblox back in early 2016 and it still sits in Microsoft’s list of the top 50 most-played games. Roblox is also popular on mobile and regularly tops the charts as the highest grossing game for iPad, beating out Genshin Impact — no small feat. The job listing was by the hiring trend data company RevealEra, and we’d note that it comes with five free catered lunches a week and “unlimited snacks,” an incalculable boon in these times of paycheck-shrinking inflation. Roblox declined to comment on the timeline for a PlayStation rollout, noting only that the company is “hiring like crazy.” |
How to calculate your startup’s TAM, SAM and SOM | Marjorie Radlo-Zandi | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | the size of the market you’re targeting is critical to securing funding for your business. Angel investors and VCs alike want to see a breakthrough product or service that scales and can acquire a significant share of a sizable market. At any stage of investment, be it seed or a Series B, it’s necessary to include a slide in your pitch deck that explains the size of your market from three perspectives — TAM, SAM and SOM. When you present your market size data to investors, they’ll look for TAM, SAM and SOM information. These data points pack a mystique about numbers that can appear colossal and out of reach, but if you approach market sizing methodically, you’ll realize it’s really not that complicated. I recently attended a presentation by a company that produces innovative, nutrient-rich olives and peppers. Because their data point scenario is straightforward and easy to understand, I’ll use it here to explain their TAM, SAM and SOM. While TAM (total available market) tends to cause the most anxiety, it’s the easiest of the data points to handle. TAM describes total revenues within a larger sector. You can calculate TAM three different ways. First is the often attained through publicly available market research reports or extrapolated from publicly available data reports. Next is the , which relies on a calculation of actual and projected pricing, along with the current and total projected use of your products or services. Last is the . This theory applies an educated analysis of the projected value and total anticipated use of your product or service, followed by calculating how much of that value can be reflected in its pricing. Value theory most often applies to entirely new products, services and categories. Let’s apply the theory to Airbnb. Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry by imagining a technology that would enable homeowners to match up with travelers seeking a place to stay. To apply the value theory, assess how much a traveler would be willing to pay for this new type of lodging, how much the homeowner would want to be paid per night, and what Airbnb could collect from the homeowner for using its technology. When a product or service category has already been well-researched, TAM is often calculated using publicly available market research reports. If the product or product category is new and hasn’t been researched thoroughly — which happens often in tech and also applies to other industry verticals — I recommend hiring a seasoned market research consultant to secure TAM data using either a bottom-up or value theory approach. |
Why isn’t the Studio Display also an Apple TV? | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Apple finally delivered what many have been asking for in the Apple enthusiast community: a first-party display that doesn’t cost a minimum of $5,000. The new instead costs $1,600, which is still a lot more than a lot of people want to pay for a monitor, but it’s still probably a welcome addition for many. Apple even put a whole-ass A13 chip inside, which is than the chip that currently powers the 4K Apple TV. Which begs the question: Why the Studio Display also an Apple TV? It’s already got the chip — it might be missing the onboard storage but adding that would be a pretty insignificant task in the quantities required to run tvOS and a few media apps. There are also examples of other companies already doing this: Samsung M-series Smart Monitor’s have a smart TV mode with their awful homespun software onboard. I floated this idea in the TechCrunch Slack and got back some tepid takes about why it doesn’t make sense — you’re hooking the Studio Display up to a Mac that can ostensibly replicate all the functionality of an Apple TV and do a lot more besides, for instance. But actually, the native Apple TV app on macOS is kind of busted. And to get Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video etc. requires going to all their respective sites separately using the browser, which is far clunkier and less elegant than just installing apps to a simplified home screen. Again, there’s a reason Samsung created a line of hybrid smart TV-monitors, and even added more models to the lineup over time. What’s more, I’m willing to bet the Studio Display would actually be a pretty compelling purchase as just a TV on its own. The industrial design is on point, and beats the hell out of most modern television designs, even among the class of TVs that occupy a higher price bracket just on the basis that they look better in a living room (Samsung’s Frame and Serif lineup, for example). Think of this like a stretch goal, but the Studio Display would also make a killer Apple TV because of its built-in webcam, speakers and mic. It could be an amazing headless Zoom (or equivalent) machine for a more lean-back video conferencing experience. I think that’s a bit far afield, however, and it would also require some re-architecting of tvOS and what kinds of apps and services it supports. Apple could’ve added Apple TV functionality to this monitor at essentially no additional cost, however, thanks to that curious A13 chip inclusion, and consumers could either take advantage, or just use it as a regular monitor — it’s all upside. In a perfect world, a future firmware update would include tvOS and make this happen post-purchase. As it stands, I don’t think the Studio Display has any (enough?) storage on board to reasonably run the OS and apps for Apple TV, which strikes me as just a little bit of a missed opportunity. |
null | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 7 | null |
White House issues its executive order on cryptocurrencies | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | The Biden White House showed off a new executive order on Wednesday regarding the regulation of cryptocurrencies. The order essentially lays out a broad strategy for how the government plans to balance consumer protection while ensuring that the United States continues to be a space for innovation in the sector. For those in the crypto sector concerned about aggressive government intervention, the order’s language seems to signal that the Biden White House is uninterested in sweeping near-term reforms and is instead merely focused on ensuring that agencies are on the same page in researching and observing the national security implications of the crypto industry. “The rise in digital assets creates an opportunity to reinforce American leadership in the global financial system and at the technological frontier, but also has substantial implications for consumer protection, financial stability, national security, and climate risk,” a issued by the White House reads. The press release lays out seven major goals of the executive order with added detail: While crypto investors may generally breathe a sigh of relief, fellow lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren who have been highly critical of the crypto space may be less satisfied. In recent months, Warren has criticized the industry, drawing particular attention to the environmental impacts of cryptocurrencies and the investor risks associated with lax regulation of so-called stablecoin issuers and other players in the DeFi ecosystem. The White House’s communications regarding the EO largely seems to avoid calling out any particular coins or projectsm with the exception of noting the price volatility of Bitcoin specifically. There was no mention of particular verticals like DeFi or NFTs, either. A particular concern among some in the crypto industry was that the potential use of cryptocurrencies by wealthy Russian elite to evade sanctions would prompt a crackdown, but one unnamed senior official on a seemed to downplay this possibility. “I will say, on Russia, in particular, the use of cryptocurrency we do not think is a viable workaround to the set of financial sanctions we’ve imposed across the entire Russian economy and, in particular, to its central bank.” A major focus of the order is formally directing several government agencies to begin researching the development of a state-backed cryptocurrency — a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). “This research, along with the framework we will develop for international engagement and competitiveness, will help ensure we preserve the critical role of the United States in the global financial system,” a senior White House official said. President Biden will sign the executive order today, the White House says. |
Colossal grabs $60 million Series A for moonshot mammoth project | Emma Betuel | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Colossal, the company known for its mission to resurrect a woolly mammoth (or at least, an elephant with some very mammoth-like traits), is back with $60 million in Series A funding. But despite the fanfare and cash, there’s not a ton of scientific progress to report. Colossal is spun out of the work of , one of the creators of the Human Genome Project and a geneticist at Harvard and MIT. Church has a track record of both scientific success and out-there ideas. For example, while the rest of the scientific world has used the genetic editing tool CRISPR to tackle disease one or two genes at a time, he has plunged headfirst into editing multiple genes with goals like to create viable organs for human transplant. Church’s lab has also been trying to resurrect a woolly mammoth since theorizing that with the right combination of genetic tweaking and reproductive technologies, this familiar megafauna could rise again. Colossal is basically built around achieving the mammoth moonshot. It has a sponsored research agreement with Church’s lab. But mammoths the major selling point for investors interested in Colossal. As co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm told TechCrunch, it’s the technology that the company is creating en-route to that mammoth that is truly monetizable. That technology ranges from artificial wombs, to stem cell lines, to computational biology software. “The business goal as we go toward the mammoth is developing these technologies that we think have larger applications to human healthcare,” he told TechCrunch. The goal here would be to spin off a few technologies to drive new sources of revenue, and balance out expenditures from other arms of the mammoth experiment. It’s hard to overstate how biologically difficult mammoth de-extinction really is, even when you break down each tiny piece of it. So far, there’s little scientific progress to report. The first key piece of “de-extinction” is having an entire genome for the creature in question. We do have for mammoths, which have been found preserved with soft-DNA containing bits still intact. That DNA is a good start, but it’s little more than an instruction manual. From there they’ll need to take Asian elephant cells, use CRISPR to tweak them gene-by-gene until they resemble something like an Asian elephant-mammoth hybrid. Church’s lab has made progress in that regard: , the team reported that they had tweaked 45 genes in Asian elephant cells. George Church at The New Yorker TechFest in 2016. Craig Barritt / Getty Images What Colossal has to do next is invent nearly all of the tools needed to do that tweaking at scale, and actually carry a hybrid elephant to term. Those inventions are a ways away. First, the company has developed a series of African elephant-induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs), which can be programmed into any cell in the body, says Lamm. Lamm also said the company is planning to publish data on this “in the next few months” but none of it is public right now. But, to create a mammoth, the company will need to do the same for Asian elephants, which hasn’t happened yet. “We’ve developed the precursor to Asian elephant IPSCs, and we’re pretty close,” he said. From there, Colossal has been working on an internal software product, says Lamm. Details on this are very scant, but he described the software as a “no-code biology platform.” Lamm described the product vaguely. But it appears to be a prototype that should allow for easier “genotype to phenotype lookups.” In theory, it should help perform the computational biology needed to link certain genes to certain traits, a necessary part of the de-extinction puzzle. A mammoth carcass preserved by ice. Displayed in Moscow. Cyclonaut / Wikimedia Commons But again, Lamm says this software is a just prototype. He estimates that the company will have something to show the public by Q3 of 2022. Finally, there’s the artificial womb piece of the puzzle. On that front, there’s been a lot of hiring, but not a ton of science. Lamm says the company has started building out the embryologist and ex-utero team. “We’re not to embryos or functional assays on edits or whatnot,” he said. But the company still believes it’s on track to perform 15 of the 45 gene modifications it has targeted anyway. “We believe that we’ll be done with 15 of them this year, and we’re on track to do that,” he continued. If these scientific tools do materialize — and that’s a big if — there definitely is a need for them. There are currently one million plant and animal species threatened with extinction, according to a issued in 2019. Creating the tools to not just “de-extinct” dead species, but help restore those that are still alive could prove very powerful in the future. Lamm acknowledged that Colossal is interested in applying its tools (once created) to those animals. Lamm says the company is beginning computational biology work on a secondary species, the northern white rhino. There are just two female northern white rhinos . “We’re looking very closely at the northern white rhinos as a component of this and we’re starting to do some computational biology and sequencing work on rhinos,” he said. “I think that’s just as important as the de-extinction aspects of our work. So selfishly, I think we have enough capital and we have the right investors behind this to support that as part of our mission.” But the mammoth project remains Colossal’s north star. At the moment Colossal’s more tangible accomplishments are centered around building out the businesses’ infrastructure and brainpower. The company has brought on a head of animal operations, and has started building out an embryology and ex-utero development team. The company employs 48 people, said Lamm. Colossal has also accelerated lab building projects. The company has three operational labs, counting Church’s, and is building a fourth. This lab will be based in Dallas and focus on stem cell biology and gene editing. This Series A round includes investment from Thomas Tull and At One Ventures, with participation from Untamed Planet, Animoca Brands, Breyer Capital, Animal Capital, Arch Ventures co-founder Robert Nelsen, Paris Hilton, Bold Capital, First Light Capital Group, Boost VC, Jazz Ventures, Builders VC, Green Sands Equity, Draper Associates, Charles Hoskinson and others. It brings the company’s total funding to $75 million. Maybe that $75 million and new hires will go on to yield huge scientific steps. Lamm said the funding should provide enough runway to get the company to the viable embryo stage. But for now, the mammoth remains as elusive, and definitively dead, as ever. |
Hire a writer and a lawyer before releasing a cryptocurrency white paper | John Biggs | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | white papers are staid, scientific documents intended to describe a complex, precise method for creating unique blockchain products. In practice, however, white papers are frequently a marketing play intended to help crypto startups . Even so, they are still very much in demand — in certain situations. To find out which types of white papers resonate with potential supporters and investors, I asked a number of crypto creators: What does an effective white paper look like in 2022, and is it still a hard requirement? The short answer is “yes,” but a number of changes in the industry are reshaping the way participants and investors look at white papers. Traditional scientific white papers are falling by the wayside, replaced by documents that read more like a well-designed financial prospectus. We’ve seen a number of white papers in the form of PowerPoint-style decks or even videos. Regardless of format, to achieve the main goal of defining what kind of product you are building, this document will require input from a wide variety of stakeholders. For tokenized securities, for example, white paper authors must work with a legal team to ensure that they are accurately describing a project’s parameters and regulatory compliance. If it’s a fintech product that doesn’t hold client crypto or fiat currency, they can afford to be slightly less regimented. That said, in some cases, a white paper will be an integral part of startup strategy. “Many financial parents or exchanges are not licensed to offer securities, which is why they would look at the white paper or token-issuing memorandum during their due diligence,” said Yana Afanasieva, CEO and founder of . |
Amazon suspends access to Prime Video in Russia, halts shipments to the country | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Amazon is suspending access to Prime Video for customers based in Russia amid the country’s invasion of Ukraine. In a about the announcement, the company also noted that it has suspended the shipment of retail products to customers based in Russia and Belarus. Amazon will also no longer be accepting new Russia and Belarus-based AWS customers and Amazon third-party sellers. In addition, the e-commerce giant will no longer be taking orders for “New World,” which is the only video game it sells directly in Russia. “Given the ongoing situation in Russia and Ukraine, we’ve taken additional actions in the region. As a reminder, unlike some other U.S. technology providers, Amazon and AWS have no data centers, infrastructure, or offices in Russia, and we have a long-standing policy of not doing business with the Russian government,” the company said in the blog post. Last week, Amazon that AWS has been working closely with Ukrainian customers and partners to keep their applications secure. The company says it has been partnering closely with Ukrainian IT organizations to fend off attacks and is working with organizations in Ukraine to share real-time intelligence. The announcement comes as said it’s suspending its service in Russia earlier this week. The move came after the company said last week it would not comply with a new Russian law that requires streaming companies to host 20 Russian propaganda channels. Netflix has also paused all future projects it had planned to produce in Russia. Amazon is joining the growing number of companies suspending operations in Russia amid its attack on Ukraine. Earlier this week, several companies, including PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and more, announced that they were suspending operations in the country. Last week, |
Apply Now! Austin founders pitch at TechCrunch Live | Neesha A. Tambe | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Stay tuned for more info on the illustrious judges we have coming in for the event! |
VW’s futuristic electric bus is real and coming soon (finally) | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | More than five years ago, Volkswagen showed off its vision for its next generation of vehicles — a cheerful two-tone lime yellow and white microbus concept that gave a nod to its T1 van life past and embraced an electric and connected future. That electric microbus future has finally arrived. At least, for Europe. Volkswagen introduced Wednesday two versions of an electric microbus — the ID. Buzz and ID. Buzz Cargo — that will go on sale in Europe in the third quarter of this year as part of the automaker’s plan to sell more than 1 million EVs annually by 2025. Notably absent was pricing and the estimated range of the microbus. U.S. consumers keen to buy the EV will have to wait another year or more. A long-wheelbase passenger model will debut for the North America market in 2023 and go on sale in 2024, according to the German automaker. Just like the concept, the production version of the ID. Buzz and its cargo cousin are based on the automaker’s modular electric drive kit, or MEB. The MEB is a flexible modular system — really a matrix of common parts — that VW Group brands including Audi, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen use to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of producing electric vehicles. About 30% of all electric vehicles in the VW Group are already based on the MEB, including the Volkswagen ID.3, an electric hatchback that is only sold in Europe and the and , along with various variants of the Audi Q4 e-tron. By 2025, the automaker expects more than 80%. There are, of course, critical differences between the conceptual microbus revealed back in January 2017 and the production versions that will be available to consumers. For instance, the ID. Buzz will not have an “autonomous mode,” in which the steering wheel retracts and merges into the instrument panel and then wisks its passengers to their destination. The ID. Buzz and its cargo counterpart will be produced at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles’ main factory in Hannover, where the company plans to shift its battery pack assembly for the vans. The automaker is investing about €100 million to construct a battery system assembly at that factory. Volkswagen The exterior, including the two-tone paint, are largely unchanged from the concept, which really pulls from the original T1 microbus that first debuted in 1950. The ID. Buzz will be offered in 11 colors, including seven single colors such as white, silver, lime yellow, blue, orange, green and black. There will be four two-tone options, always with white tops and either lime yellow, blue, green or orange. Volkswagen will eventually offer consumers a variety of battery and wheelbase configurations. For now, the first European versions of the two microbus vehicles will come equipped with an 82 kWh battery pack mounted in the floor and a single motor on the rear axle that will produce 201 horsepower and 229-pound feet of torque. The top speed will be electronically limited to 90 miles per hour. VW ID. Buzz Volkswagen Both European ID. Buzz versions will come with 18-inch steel wheels and a standard wheelbase of 117.6 inches and total length of 185.5 inches long and 78.1 inches wide. This puts the ID. Buzz close, but not exactly the same, to the wheelbase and length of the VW Eurovans (Westies) that stopped being produced after 2003. The ID. Buzz will have a CCS plug connector and the capability of charging the battery from 5% to 80% in 30 minutes when using a DC fast-charger. The ID. Buzz model line won’t come to market with the ability to “plug and charge,” a software feature that allows the driver to pull up to a public charger and start charging without the hassle of using a credit card or membership card. The company said that will become available via a software update in the future. In Europe, the ID. Buzz and its cargo variant will be capable of bi-directional charging, which will allow the vehicle to push power from its battery into a home. The company said that in the future this can be used for stabilizing the grid, although it should be noted that the company didn’t provide a timeline. The power transfer and communication will take place via an optional DC bi-directional wall box. Volkswagen The passenger version of the ID. Buzz will debut with five seats and depending on the trim level may or may not have electric seat controls. The top trims will come with all the modern comforts, including electrically adjustable controls, a memory feature and even a massage function. A six-seat, three-row configuration will come later. In the back, there is a three-person bench, which can be folded down completely or split 40:60. There are also fold-down tables located in the backs of the front seats, another nod to VW’s microbus past. Perhaps one of the niftier details is the option of adjusting the height of the trunk floor. In all, there will be about 39.6 cubic feet of luggage space. The cargo version will be designed to do what its name implies, haul packages. Behind the front seats is a fixed partition that can be configured to include a window and an opening for loading items. The cargo space is 137.7 cubic feet and has enough room two hold two euro-standard pallets. There will be other ways to configure the ID. Buzz on the fly, such as a movable and removable center console. The upper section of the console has storage bins, a 1.5 quart flip-lid compartment designed to hold a water bottle, and a 1.3 gallon drawer that can hold tablets or laptops. Volkswagen The ID. Buzz also comes with what is now expected technology, including a standard 10-inch digital display tucked behind the steering wheel and a more centrally located 10-inch display for the infotainment system. A 12-inch display with navigation is optional. Underneath that central display, users will find a control bar with digital buttons and touch sliders. The touch sliders are used to regulate temperature and volume; the buttons access menus for the climate, driver assist, driver profiles and the parking functions. Moving to the steering wheel, drivers will find a stalk that shifts the vehicle into neutral, drive or reverse. To the left of the steering wheel, there are digital controls for activating the lights, heating and defrost for the windshield and rear window. To the right are two USB-C plugs and a tray for wireless charging, which is also standard. Because you can never be too connected, there are two more USB-C plugs in the center console. Perhaps one of the more interesting elements is how VW is leveraging internet connectivity and lighting. The company said in its global debut Wednesday that the VW ID. Buzz vehicles will be able to communicate with traffic infrastructure and will be able to receive and send important information using a dedicated communication standard that is independent of cellular network. The ID. Buzz has followed in the tire tread of other ID vehicles in the line up and goes big on the ambient lighting. It comes standard with 10-color lighting, although there is an option to boost that to 30. The lighting is designed to be interactive and users can set the mood by picking different colors or even combinations. The lighting also gives the driver information, including lighting up red to signal danger and the need to brake. Other tech includes an advanced driver assistance system. No word yet on what the U.S. bus will have, but the European version will come standard with features that will assist in keeping the vehicle in the lane and display road signs in the instrument cluster. Optional systems will include cruise control that automatically keep it distanced from other vehicles and a parking assistant, among other options. One optional feature called travel assist uses swarm data to enhance road safety with driving information gathered from other vehicles that have used the road before. The idea is that it can help keep the vehicle in the lane on roads with no lane markings, according to the company. |
Touch ID forever, Face ID never | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | Apple has, thank god, deigned to continue to offer a budget ticket into its planet-spanning luxury funhouse: the iPhone SE 3. If they discontinued this useful item, I’d have to switch to an iPad or back to Android, since the only alternatives have both an ugly notch and the Face ID it contains. Fortunately the new SE should carry us reasonable people right through until Apple reconsiders its position on Touch ID, like it did with USB-A and SD ports. Why do I, and other discerning persons, choose the SE? Well, for one thing it is straight up the cheapest iPhone you can get. For some the argument begins and ends with that. For others, Touch ID is the clincher. But there’s also a legitimate question of whether what you get when you pay more is actually worth it. A bigger screen? Sure, but that’s a drag for some people. The SE may not be as pocket-friendly as it was when it was , but compared to a lot of what’s out there, it’s pretty svelte. And the idea of having it be “all screen” has never appealed to me either. So the screen has rounded corners — where buttons are supposed to be — and then a piece bit out of the top? No thanks. More and better cameras? Well, I don’t want to make a “640 kilobytes ought to be enough” type argument here (that one’s for the ’90s kids) but really… we’ve reached a plateau in camera quality and what you can get out of the SE’s camera (and I’m talking about the last one) is more than good enough to do all the things we all ordinarily do with those images. Let’s be honest: The only time most people see iPhone pictures bigger than their palm is at Apple events. Sure, the camera in the iPhone 13 Pro is better. But it’s all going to Instagram to be viewed for 3/4 of a second on a five-inch screen from two feet away. If you want to get good results from a phone camera, you can do it on any phone from the last few years. What else… computing power? Do you do a lot of video editing and FX work on your phone? Or is it mostly messaging, social media and a handful of casual games that would probably run on a high-end graphing calculator? While having enough resources to quickly switch between apps and not be bogged down by big web services is great, chips left that milestone in the dust long ago. Think about what Apple’s been saying about its new processors, A11, A12, A13 Bionic, etc., every time they come out. Two times faster! Four times faster! Six times faster! Those are cumulative, you know — by this point our phones should be about a thousand times faster than they were a few years ago. Do they feel a thousand times faster? No, because the things people actively do on phones don’t to be done a thousand times faster. Naturally there are less visible processes, like and language engines that have been enabled by specialty chips, but performance hasn’t really been an issue on phones for years. And then there’s Face ID. Look, I know some people like this. But there are a lot of people who don’t. Part of it is the creepiness factor — your face, really? I suppose we’re just old fashioned that way. But a big part of it is practical — there are so, so many situations where I would rather unlock my phone with my thumb, or one of several other fingers I have, rather than pick it up and stare at it. The situations where the reverse is true are few and far between, for me at least. If the unlock mechanism is an always-on face scanner, it’s beyond your control. What if you don’t to activate it? Putting your finger on the scanner is a deliberate choice, a stated user intent that they want to unlock the phone. I can do it in my pocket, or while it’s lying on my desk, with either hand. It’s simple — it works. Holding the phone and looking at it is something most people do half the day anyway — where’s the user intent there? Not to mention the design choice of having one button and some safe bezels to grip is a good one. Since the early days of the iPhone a big draw was the simplicity that the home button added. Whatever you’re doing, whether you’re in a call, a game, a work document… press that button once and it’s gone, you’re at home. Having a button is a thing. Having a bit on the corner you can grip that isn’t made of touchscreen is a thing. I never particularly liked the design of the iPhone 6-8; too much like a jellybean. Better than though. I would switch to the old 5S design or even a notchless 13 Mini form factor, if only there were Touch ID. We had our doubts when it first was introduced, but it quickly became the method with the best balance of security and convenience. I truly don’t care about almost any of the features Apple has added over the last few years. I know there are plenty who will disagree with me, and fortunately the new phones are going to be great for them. But as long as it is an option, I will be choosing the old-school style with Touch ID. Of course I’m aware all the above comes off as slightly crusty. That’s okay. I embrace the crust — and you could too. Join me and let’s yell at clouds together! |
6 methods for reducing bias in candidate sourcing and screening | Steve Bartel | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | several years, an increasing number of companies have pledged to hire a more diverse workforce and begun releasing their diversity numbers annually. The results have been a . With so many organizations saying that diversity hiring is among their top goals and making good-faith efforts to revamp their recruiting practices accordingly, our team wanted to better understand why the results have fallen short. What we found surprised us: Subconscious bias tends to have the strongest impact on historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the early stages of the interview process. For example, the data revealed that while white candidates see higher passthrough rates at the very top of the funnel, Black and Hispanic/Latinx talent see higher passthrough rates across the remaining funnel stages: 62% of Black talent and 57% of Hispanic/Latinx talent are extended offers after on-sites, compared to just 54% of white talent. This suggests that diversity is most often an issue in earlier stages of the interview process, driven at least in part by subconscious bias. Candidates from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups have to work harder to prove themselves than their white counterparts, despite seeing higher offer rates at later stages of the interview process. To help address this issue, I’m sharing six strategies that recruiting teams can use to reduce bias in the early phases of the recruiting process, when candidates are both entering and progressing through interviews. Research has found that many things people list on their LinkedIn profile or résumé have very little, if any, correlation with their future work performance. For example, requiring or being predisposed to four-year degrees from certain institutions biases you toward privilege. Screening for leadership experience can also be racially biased, due to lower representation of non-white people at the executive level. To avoid this, whenever you open a new role, start by asking the question: From there, clarify which competencies and qualifications are absolutely necessary to success in the role, and rather than focusing on the candidate’s experience, education, or — if they’re early in their careers — GPAs, ask yourself what about their history suggests problem-solving skills, cognitive ability and a growth mindset. |
GoPro’s new battery grip triples your action-cam shooting time | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | You just your battery will kick the bucket at the worst possible time, right when you’ve perfected your sick, hella nar-nar skateboard tricks, bruh. The new (who names these things, jeez) has directional audio, 5.3K video, an LED light source and the powered Volta grip. It’s wild to , when the first HERO camera was released, complete with pre-loaded 35mm film and a $22 price tag. The Hero10 is a very different beast indeed. It costs two arms and a number of legs — it will set you back an eye-watering $784.95 (or the equally bizarre price tag of $531.95, if you also sign up for a one-year GoPro subscription). The camera has some fun software tricks up its sleeve as well, including its award-winning HyperSmooth digital video stabilization, and the option to shoot 1/8-speed slow-mo video. “HERO10 Creator Edition is like having Hollywood in your hand. It’s the perfect setup for recording professional-quality video when vlogging, filmmaking or even livestreaming,” says GoPro CEO and founder Nicholas Woodman. “Leave the extra batteries and gear behind, all you need is the Creator Edition, and you can create cinematic magic — all day long. You’ll have to recharge and refuel yourself before you even think about recharging your GoPro.” The Volta battery grip packs an additional 4,900 mAh battery, and is capable of working in conjunction with the camera’s built-in battery to give you four hours of 30fps 4K recording. If you shoot lower resolutions, it stretches that battery life even further. Cleverly, the hand grip has legs; fold ’em out and you have a tripod for stationary shots and/or time-lapse shooting. Volta is also compatible with HERO9 Black, and it will charge any USB-C-compatible device, including GoPro MAX and older GoPro cameras. You can buy it separately for $90.99 if you’re a GoPro subscriber, or $129.99 subscription. |
Daily Crunch: Intel will reportedly buy cloud-optimization startup Granulate for $650M | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 31, 2022! It’s a beautiful day in our neck of the woods, and we have a great lineup of news for you today, so let’s goooooo. Grab your calendar and add these two: We’re doing a on April 26 for the big data aficionados, and now is your last chance to . Don’t worry, it’s Thursday. The weekend is almost here. You can do it; we believe in you. – and We get a teensy bit excited whenever Y Combinator does a set of demo days. I recommend that you read , but if you want a quick summary, read and of our “everything you need to know” posts, make yourself a cup of coffee, and follow that up with our favorite startups and , then pour yourself an adult beverage and wrap it all up with . ‘Tis the season for new venture funds, apparently. Freestyle closed its sixth fund, , while to deploy into the crypto universe. Docker was on the ropes for a little while, there, but hooo boy did it make a comeback. . 🦸 More stories of up, up, and away: / Getty Images Nothing beats experience like experience, which is why we were happy to run a column written by Zach DeWitt, winner of the 2013 TechCrunch Meetup and Pitch-off. DeWitt, who became a VC after selling Drop, Inc. to Snapchat in 2016, shares five essential lessons for first-time founders wandering in the wilderness in search of an investor who’ll be “a true partner.” There’s an inherent power imbalance when asking a stranger for money, but “VCs should work to earn your trust,” writes DeWitt. “In many ways, it’s like finding the right spouse.” |
As counting wraps for the day, mixed results emerge in Amazon union votes | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | As of the close of in the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon Union election, “no” votes are ahead 993 to 875. It’s a positive outcome thus far for Amazon, which has managed to ward off labor organizing in its fulfillment centers for the entirety of its 27-year existence. The margin is, however, significantly smaller than the results of last year’s election, when the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store successfully forced a recount, citing several concerns around Amazon’s practices. Tonight’s results are also not so cut and dry. In addition to 59 voided ballots, 416 are currently listed as “challenged.” As that number could turn the tied for the “yes” vote, a hearing will be held to determine whether the ballots should be added to the final tally. The nature of the challenges is unclear at the moment. Either party may have objected to including them for a variety of reasons. The RWDSU noted in a statement offered to TechCrunch: Every vote must be counted. Workers at Amazon endured a needlessly long and aggressive fight to unionize their workplace, with Amazon doing everything it could to spread misinformation and deceit. We will hold Amazon accountable, and we will be filing objections on their behavior. The tenacity and courage of these workers never wavered in this unnecessarily long process. Workers will have to wait just a little bit longer to ensure their voices are heard, and our union will be with them at every step to ensure their voices are heard under the law. What we do know is that this moment is historic, and the workers in Bessemer, Alabama, have inspired working people all over the country and all over the world to fight for change at their workplaces, including other organizing at Amazon around the country. This fight is the spark of the 21st century labor movement, and we know it will forever transform how Americans view unions in this country. This union election continues to show that the best way for working people to protect themselves and their families is to join together in a union. A date for the hearing has not yet been determined, but is likely to occur over the next few weeks. As with last year’s original election, today’s results have been closely monitored by both Amazon and the union. Amazon has fought fiercely against unionization efforts, for fear that an RWDSU foothold could mark the beginning of a cascading effect. Following early union victories, Starbucks across the country have been leading union drives. It’s a sign of changing views around labor rights, particularly among employees deemed essential workers during the pandemic. Counting for the nearly two-month-long Bessemer mail-in vote coincides with the results of another drive in Staten Island, New York’s JFK8 fulfillment center. There the “yes” vote leads 1,518 to 1,154. Counting has ended for the night and is set to resume tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM ET. Much like the Alabama election, JFK8’s union efforts have been met with significant pushback from Amazon. In February, former-employee-turned-organizer Christian Smalls was among three arrested over trespassing charges. Smalls refuted the charges, telling the media that they were only on-hand to provide workers with lunch. Earlier today, that Amazon had hired Global Strategy Group, a firm with close ties to the Democratic Party, to help combat labor organizing efforts. |
Biden’s answer to high gas prices is to boost US battery production | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | President Joe Biden will trigger the Defense Production Act to secure U.S. sources of critical minerals and materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese that are used to make batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage. The order is in response to spiking gas prices and supply chain constraints caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s also part of Biden’s broader plan to respond to what his administration is cannily calling “Putin’s Price Hike” at the pump. Biden has also called for increased domestic production of oil and a historic release from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help form a bridge across the crisis. “Because of Putin’s war of choice, less oil is getting to market, and the reduction in supply is raising prices at the pump for Americans,” reads . Americans are paying on average $4.225 per gallon at the pump as of Thursday, in comparison to about $2.859 about a year ago, according to data from the . The Defense Production Act allows the president to direct private companies to prioritize orders from the federal government, to allocate materials for national defense and take actions to restrict hoarding of needed supplies. Because Biden is calling for a boost in domestic production, his administration might offer loans to American companies that mine and process battery materials, make purchases or even allow companies to coordinate with each other, which in other circumstances might be an antitrust issue. “The Defense Production Act could provide capital for exploration, mining, processing and production of lithium and other minerals for electric vehicles and stationary grid storage batteries to help strengthen the foundation for a transition to cleaner energy use in the U.S.,” Kelli Hopp-Michlosky, who heads up communications at U.S. chemical manufacturing company Albemarle, told TechCrunch. Albemarle recently started to assess a potential restart of lithium extraction at its Kings Mountain site, according to Hopp-Michlosky, who also noted the company is open to working with the U.S. government on projects using its Silver Peak, Nevada and Kings Mountain, North Carolina resources. Today, about 60% of Albemarle’s lithium goes into energy storage uses like electric vehicles, grid storage and electronics. “Given the rapid growth in demand for EVs, we are increasing our global conversion capacity largely to meet that need for lithium-ion batteries,” Hopp-Michlosky said. It’s unclear exactly how broad the Defense Production Act will be applied. It’s likely that companies securing battery materials and battery manufacturers will also see a boost. in the U.S. for a few years now, and a range of other automakers, like , , , and Volkswagen, have all set in motion plans to build battery facilities in the U.S., often as a joint venture with foreign suppliers like LG Chem, SK Innovation, Samsung and . Even though “the Department of Defense will implement this authority using strong environmental, labor, community and tribal consultation standards,” that rushing production of precious minerals via extraction processes will bring about the next gold rush that will ultimately lead to more environmental degradation. |
E3 2022 canceled, planners say gaming show will return next year | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Back in January, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) announced that it had canceled plans for the return of an in-person E3. The news came as Omicron concerns lingered following the end of the holiday season. Today, the organization confirmed reports that the 2022 version of the gaming show is not happening in any form. The ESA insists that another setback doesn’t spell full disaster for the show, which has traditionally been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center every June. Rather, it insists that a year of retooling will serve to improve next year’s planned hybrid event. “We will devote all our energy and resources to delivering a revitalized physical and digital E3 experience next summer,” the organization said in a statement. “Whether enjoyed from the show floor or your favorite devices, the 2023 showcase will bring the community, media, and industry back together in an all-new format and interactive experience.” Prior to the pandemic, interest in the show has ebbed and flowed over the years. After significantly scaling down in 2006, the show returned to the LA Convention Center in 2009. In 2017, the traditionally trade-only event opened to the public. Three years later, Sony announced that it would not be keynoting at the show, years after EA and Nintendo had made similar moves — though the latter has stuck to a virtual presentation to coincide with the event. COVID-19 shut down the show altogether in 2020, while the following year found it hosting a scaled-down, online-only event. “Our members look to the ESA to deliver an experience that revitalizes the event in a new and exciting way,” the ESA adds. “That’s why we are using this time to shape plans for 2023 and are working with our members to ensure that the revitalized showcase sets a new standard for hybrid industry events and fan engagement.” As companies continue to focus on their own launches and a public warms to virtual events, it remains to be seen what form that will take. |
Better learning through ‘complex dough-manipulation’ | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | A disproportionate number of the early industrial food-making robots we’ve seen have been . I’ve long posited that this is for two key reasons. First: People like pizza. We eat a lot of it. Americans alone eat three billion pizzas a year. Second: It’s relatively easy to make. The dough provides a fairly straightforward platform onto which ingredients are added. I say “fairly” here because there are still complications. There’s really no such thing as easy when it comes to building robots that can execute variations on a task at a large scale. Here it’s the dough that presents the problem. Turning a soft and malleable ball of dough into a pizza crust is one of those things humans have figured out how to do efficiently, but it still proves difficult for robot workers. A team of researchers at MIT, CMU and UC San Diego set out to create what they’ve deemed “complex dough-manipulation.” The system is separated into a two-step process, in which the robot must first determine the task and then execute it using a tool like a rolling pin. The system, , involves teaching robots complex tasks in simulations. MIT notes: A “teacher” algorithm solves each step the robot must take to complete the task. Then, it trains a “student” machine-learning model that learns abstract ideas about when and how to execute each skill it needs during the task, like using a rolling pin. With this knowledge, the system reasons about how to execute the skills to complete the entire task. The researchers say the system outperformed those trained in the more traditional reinforcement learning model. “Our framework provides a novel way for robots to acquire new skills. These skills can then be chained to solve more complex tasks which are beyond the capability of previous robot systems,” says CSAIL grad student, Yunzhu Li. This is robotics, so the whole pizza thing is really an initial problem for a system designed to tackle a lot more tasks. The company points to the emerging field of eldercare robotics as a possible use going forward. |
Behold the robo-berry | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | If you’ve never picked a raspberry, well, first of all that’s too bad, because a fresh raspberry is a beautiful thing. But second, and more immediately relevant in this case, you would not know that there is a technique to it that, surprisingly, robots aren’t super good at because they tend to be… crushy. But designed by Swiss researchers could usher in a new era of gentle, automated robo-pickers. The secret to picking a raspberry is to grip it just enough to get purchase and then pull it downwards off the little stem, apparently called the “receptacle,” which seems backwards. Seems simple — and it is, but only our hands are among the most sensitive and finely controlled constructions in the universe, the culmination of a hundred million years of evolution, outdone only by (I suspect) raccoons. Robots simply don’t have the senses necessary to figure out the perfect technique for picking a berry. But what if it could communicate with the berry to better sense the forces involved and avoid either a a brutal crushing or humiliating failure-to-detach? That’s what Kai Junge, a PhD student at EPFL in Switzerland, aims to accomplish with this “sensorized raspberry,” a silicone and silicon replica berry that provides feedback to the picking machine, allowing it to learn to pick faster and better — and cleaner. “It’s an exciting dilemma for us as robotics engineers,” said professor Josie Hughes, who worked with Junge on the project. “The raspberry harvesting season is so short, and the fruit is so valuable, that wasting them simply isn’t an option. What’s more, the cost and logistical challenges of testing different options out in the field are prohibitive. That’s why we decided to run our tests in the lab and develop a replica raspberry for training harvesting robots.” Apparently the hard part comes just at the moment of detaching, when the force needed to grip the berry on the receptacle suddenly becomes overkill as the object goes from solid to hollow. The replica berry has a fluidic sensor that tells the system how much compression is being experienced by the silicone drooplets, allowing the control model to learn how to adjust its grip as if the berry itself is telling it how much is too much. You can see the berry in action below: The team plans to present their work at RobotSoft in April. And once the raspberry question is decided, they may move on to other berries, tomatoes, grapes… even apricots. The future is looking fresh! |
Goldman Sachs’ OTC Bitcoin options trade ‘doesn’t mean much,’ but can pave way for more institutional involvement | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | to testing the waters with crypto, with institutional clients looking for more exposure in the space. Last week, Goldman was the first major U.S. bank to execute an with Galaxy Digital, which some market players say is foreshadowing more institutional adoption of digital assets. “Crypto markets need large, credible and credit-worthy counterparties to grow the space further,” a source who works with digital assets at a major investment bank told TechCrunch. “Goldman and other Wall Street banks will bring that eventually.” The 153-year-old firm is headquartered in New York City with offices globally and has assets under supervision. Galaxy Digital’s trading unit facilitated and executed the transaction with the investment bank in the form of a Bitcoin non-deliverable option. This means that the firm isn’t directly engaging or holding the underlying crypto, but taking an option with a payoff that’s settled in cash, , head of Europe at Galaxy, explained to TechCrunch. “The trade itself doesn’t mean much, but the fact that it happened and opens the ability for Goldman Sachs to trade this risk is massively significant, and this is just the beginning,” Grant said. “As soon as you get into that part, that set of hurdles, you’re intellectually and operationally free to do other things. It’s not the trade itself, it’s that this will allow us to go in a multitude of directions.” Goldman did not provide additional information requested by TechCrunch before publication. The firm is no stranger to crypto, or Bitcoin more specifically. It first set up a cryptocurrency trading desk in 2018, but shut it down for three years, only to . Since then, the bank dipped further into the crypto world by allowing investors to trade Bitcoin derivatives through block trades on CME Group in May 2021 and providing clients through Galaxy Digital, among other offerings. “I expect the [crypto] space to be a lot more institutionalized in the coming months [and] every investment bank will be involved in the space in the next year or so,” Kevin Kang, a founding principal at , said. “Crypto will become a part of any bank’s offerings and trade like another asset class.” |
Co-founders of Ukrainian startup Delfast discuss navigating through a crisis | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | taught the world how to work from home, but Russia’s war in Ukraine has taught the employees at Delfast, a Ukrainian e-bike startup, how to work from bomb shelters, while on the move and under threat of violence. |
Microsoft acquires process mining vendor Minit to grow its automation offerings | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Signaling its ambitions in the process automation market, Microsoft has acquired , a Bratislava, Slovakia-originated process mining technology vendor, for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced today. Microsoft says that the purchase will “further empower” it to “help … customers digitally transform” by creating a more complete picture of their processes — and identifying which of those processes are ripe for automation. “Minit currently enables businesses to transform the way they analyze, monitor and optimize their processes. Minit’s solutions have helped businesses gain deep insights into how processes run, uncover root causes of operational challenges and help mitigate undesired process outcomes,” Justin Graham, Microsoft’s general manager of process insights, wrote in a on Microsoft’s corporate blog. “[With Minit, our] customers will be able to better understand their process data, uncover what operations look like in reality, and drive process standardization and improvement across the entire organization to ensure compliance at every step.” Microsoft dipped its toes into process mining with the launch of new features in Power Automate in 2019 and the acquisition of Softomotive, an RPA software provider, a year later. But with Minit, the tech giant is doubling down on a software category that could be worth over $11 billion by 2030, to a report from Polaris Market Research. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the whole of the Minit team will join Microsoft — or, indeed, whether the company will remain spread across its current locations. (Minit is now headquartered in Amsterdam, with satellite offices in London and New York.) But CEO James Dening said that customers shouldn’t expect a change in the level of support they’re currently receiving. “We are looking forward to what it means to become part of an industry leader like Microsoft and what that brings us — how we can use that scale and excellence to continue to deliver great solutions to our customers,” Dening wrote in a blog on Minit’s website. “It has been a privilege to lead the company for the last year, and I’m excited to continue my journey with the team, as part of what I consider to be the world’s leading software company.” In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch that the Minit team will move into the Process Insights team and that there will be “no change” to the current work location of Minit team members. is in early stages of determining how Minit will be integrated into its offerings, she said, and the companies will share more details when they’re available. Minit, which was founded in 2015 by Rasto Hlavac and had raised €10.3 million (~$11.40 million) prior to the acquisition, is one of an expanding number of startups developing process mining tools aimed at enterprise clientele. Process mining, also known as task discovery, involves spotting root cause workflow issues and bottlenecks by pulling data from systems including desktop, email apps and workflows. It’s a key part of robotic process automation (RPA), a technology that promises to automate monotonous, repetitive tasks traditionally performed by human workers while at the same time generating logs to identify potential cost savings. As Protocol’s Aisha Counts , process mining has traditionally been done by system integrators who map out processes by analyzing manual workflows. Process mining software is designed to digitize the approach in a way that reduces the expense, time and effort involved. Underlining the appetite for process mining technologies, Celonis, a data processing company, earlier this week acquired Minit competitor Process Analytics Factory, which coincidentally integrates with Microsoft’s Power BI analytics platform. Just in the past several years, RPA vendor Automation Anywhere acquired process discovery and mining startups FortressIQ, Process Gold\ and StepShot; Blue Prism released a task mining solution called Capture; and rivals including ABBYY and Kryon have expanded their process mining offerings. “You know the process space is hot when even Microsoft, with its vast resources, has to buy its way in. I’m sure Microsoft is seeing the same trends that we saw, which drove the combination of FortressIQ and Automation Anywhere,” Pankaj Chowdhry, EVP of discovery at Automation Anywhere and formerly CEO of FortressIQ, told TechCrunch via email. “Customers are starved for process data to help them navigate their transformation journeys and any vendor that doesn’t have best-in-class process capabilities will find itself challenged to offer a compelling solution to their customers.” Microsoft’s Minit acquisition comes at a time when the broader business process automation industry, which remains , heads toward general consolidation. SAP acquired German process automation company Signavio in January 2021, just before ServiceNow got into the RPA segment with the buyout of India-based Intellibot.io. IBM process mining software company MyInvenio in April. And Salesforce’s MuleSoft and Microsoft followed suit with the purchases of automation tech providers and , respectively. “Process mining, discovery and task mining has seen a lot of transformation with many acquisitions in the last year. [It] now appears to be maturing as a market and becoming commoditized under major automation platforms,” Saikat Ray, Gartner senior research director, told TechCrunch via email. “Gartner sees an emergence of automation platform vendors offering process mining and task mining as embedded capabilities, along with RPA.” |
Hiveminded | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | , of a robot dog walking down the streets of Shanghai with a bullhorn strapped on its back. There are those who will, no doubt, view it as a kind of apocalyptic vision. I’d be lying if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. It’s a strange thing, living through history and imagining yourself traveling back in time as recently as 2019 and attempting to describe the scene. A quadrupedal robot bounding along down empty streets in a city with a population topping 26 million. The voice emerging from its back is warning citizens to stay inside, as China begins its largest lockdown in two years, as the country is seeing another spike in the ongoing pandemic. The less cynical part of me (it exists! really!) sees a fascinating little microcosm. We can debate lockdown measures (and certainly China’s specific approach to them) another day. But the image of a robot doing a job designed to curb the spread of the virus’s transmission distills a lot of what I’ve been writing about for the past two years and change. We’ve been waiting decades for robots to have their moment. Truly that moment is right now — because it has to be. After years of discussing automation like some far-off luxury, it’s suddenly a necessity. We put on our flood pants, opened the door, the water’s closing in and suddenly . The act of strapping a bullhorn to the back of the robot may not be the exact application its creators intended, but it’s a time to be nimble and clever. It’s a time to see what these robots can do. I’m not going to tell you that the interest level in robotics and automation is going to remain at a fever pitch once (knock on wood) things go back to whatever form of normal we head into. But plenty of industries are going to be permanently changed by the seeds that have been planted. Much of it will be for the better — as robots improve quality of jobs and life and move people out of harm’s way. But I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as a full-throated techno-optimist, either. The sooner we address the eventual issues, the better. I’ve heard it described as “growing pains,” but I think the phrase does a disservice to very real people who stand to lose very real jobs. Even if, in this newsletter, automation stands to create more jobs than it displaces, how do we help the people impacted in the immediate term? Employee education initiatives like the one are, at least, a good starting point. This topic has been weighing fairly heavily on me in recent weeks as I explore pieces about chip shortages and the supply chain. Conversations around offshoring manufacturing jobs took a similar form. Long run, if we play our cards right, we can create more higher-paid, less back-breaking work. But do you want to be the one to tell undervalued workers that suddenly their services are no longer needed or that they should have learned to code with resources that may or may not have been available to them? In much the same way I believe that startups should focus on having a net positive environmental impact, tech companies that are potentially displacing jobs need to determine how we ensure that a technology making life better for some isn’t actively immiserating others. Let’s have that conversation. I plan to keep discussing it here and onstage at our upcoming robotics event. I expect to discuss it with the startups I speak to going forward and hope my VC readers will do the same. Technology’s role should be improving the sum total happiness for life on Earth. It has the potential, but often lacks the followthrough. This week’s robotics news hits offer myriad ways we can do this, from forestry to factories to bees, which, yes, are good. RE2 The biggest news of the week is of RE2. The $100 million deal includes $30 million in cash (that’s why you do a SPAC) and $70 million in stock. As I noted before, there’s definitely some redundancy here, with Sarcos’ existing tech and RE2’s teleoperation systems. There’s likely to be some consolidation there, but the new acquisition adds some verticals to the fold, including underwater applications and the medical market. Here’s Sarcos’ CEO: This transaction brings an innovative company with a complementary but additive suite of products into the Sarcos family, allowing us to offer a much wider range of solutions to address our customers’ needs. It will also allow us to expand our offerings to new industries such as medical and subsea, deepen our team of robotics experts, and advance the development of AI and machine learning technologies for use in unstructured environments. Treeswift As I noted on Twitter recently, all week as a weird byproduct of covering a pair of startups doing some really interesting work in the natural world. First off is , fittingly named after a family of forest-dwelling birds. The company hopes to replace existing satellite and plane imaging with a swarm of drones designed to track deforestation, give carbon capture readings and help prevent forest fires (as only you and a drone can do). It just raised a $4.8 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $6.4 million. Beewise From drones to drones — founded in 2018, is hoping to help “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), which has led to a 30% annual reduction in bee colonies every year. The company, which just raised an $80 million Series C, builds what amount to robotic hives, designed to protect their tenants from habitat destruction, population, pets and other intrusions. Says the Beewise CEO: Our Beewise team is thrilled to be supported by an incredible roster of investors for our Series C who understand our dedication, tenacity, and passion towards succeeding in saving the bees and reversing the trend of the bee colony collapse. With thousands of orders placed in the U.S. in just the last few months, and with this funding, Beewise will be able to meet incredible market demand through increased manufacturing, develop additional product iterations, and further improve pollination. Flytrex One more bit of drone talk. FlyTrex that it’s expanding delivery service to Texas. Specifically, it will be arriving in Granbury, a town of around 10,000 in the greater Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex. Partners include the restaurant conglomerate behind Chili’s and Maggiano. Some news from Boston Dynamics to close us out this week. The Hyundai-owned firm of its second commercial robot, Stretch. Deliveries for the warehouse robot are set to occur in 2023 and 2024. Meantime, the company has been working with a number of clients, including DHL (which recently made a massive purchase) and clothing retailers Gap and H&M. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
Wordle chaos! Here’s why the popular puzzle game had two answers this week and how to fix it | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Did The New York Times just ruin Wordle? Thankfully, no. When the popular puzzle game was the news media company in January for a low seven-figure sum, the deal came with that there would be “no changes” to Wordle’s gameplay after the move. But that appeared to no longer be true this week when a number of Wordle addicts discovered they were getting different solutions than others who were playing the same day’s puzzle. If that’s the case, this could have destroyed one of Wordle’s key selling points. After all, the joy in Wordle isn’t just guessing the five-letter word in fewer than six tries — it’s sharing your results on social media and comparing how well you did with others. On Wednesday, however, many Wordle players discovered the solution to their puzzle was different than others who played the same game, Wordle No. 284. For some, the winning word was “stove” but for others, it was “harry.” The latter is not referring to a person’s name, we should note, but rather the somewhat outdated that means to “persistently harass” or to “torment by a constant attack.” Wordle players were surprised to find they had a different solution to their puzzle than others and took to social media to . Some noted they had experienced this problem before, indicating the game as they knew it had changed. , for example, pointed out this issue had come up previously with game No. 241 when some users had the solution “agora” and others got “aroma.” But as it turns out, The New York Times isn’t changing how Wordle operates. Instead, the company told TechCrunch it did remove a few more obscure words from the game to make the puzzle more accessible. “Harry,” apparently, was among them. That meant the people who play Wordle daily — leaving the game’s webpage open on their device — weren’t getting the game’s updates. In other words, their version of the game was out of sync with others who loaded up Wordle in a new browser window. “We did not change the way Wordle works,” said NYT spokesperson Jordan Cohen. “We have not made any changes to the basic functionality or rules of the game, and are committed to continuing what makes the game great. We will continue to review the solutions, and remove obscure or potentially insensitive words,” he added. Fortunately, this problem is an easy one to fix. All you need to do is refresh the Wordle website to make sure your game is in sync. After doing so, you won’t receive the obscure words that have been removed from the Wordle database and you’ll be able to properly compare your scores with others. We understand The New York Times is looking to create a more sustainable, long-term solution to this problem in the future, so this type of discrepancy will no longer occur. But that hasn’t yet rolled out. The New York Times Games division attempted to explain the problem on Twitter. But its instructed users to copy and paste a particular URL in their browser, and left some still confused as to what happened or why a fix was needed at all. Good morning Wordlers 👋 Seeing a different answer than your friends? Replay today's puzzle with the "correct" word. Warning: you will have a bonus win added to your stats. Copy and paste this URL in the same browser you play Wordle: — New York Times Games (@NYTGames) The fact that the issue of the “two Wordles” even blew up in the first place, however, is a good indication of how popular the game remains among its fans. In fact, it’s so popular that players weren’t even bothering to close their browser window when they finished the game — knowing full well they would be back tomorrow for the next puzzle. That level of addiction is promising for the game’s future. But the chaos caused by the small tweak also shows how sensitive users will be to further changes, bugs or anything else that changes the nature of Wordle gameplay. Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle, the puzzle first launched in October 2021. Only 90 people were playing it as of November 1st, 2021. But in two months, Wordle had grown to 300,000 users. Today, it has millions of players. What wasn’t yet clear, though, is how many of those players were actually launching Wordle every day. As this incident shows, it must have been quite a few! |
All eyes are on Swvl as it starts trading on a SPAC combination | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Swvl was founded by , Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Sabbah in 2017. The trio started the company as a bus-hailing service in Egypt and other ride-sharing services in emerging markets with fragmented public transportation. Its bus-hailing services enable users to make intra-state journeys by booking seats on buses running a fixed route. Swvl offerings have expanded beyond bus-hailing services, though. Now, the company offers inter-city rides, car ride-sharing, and corporate services in the 10 cities it operates in across Africa and the Middle East. |
The how and why of raising OT security capital | Matt Gatto | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | huge for the cybersecurity market, fueled by rising incidents of cyberattacks, particularly ransomware that disrupted services and held companies hostage. The numbers are striking: Investments in the space more than doubled from the year before to $29.3 billion, according to a by investment bank Momentum Cyber. Two recent funding rounds, in November and February, even exceeded $1 billion. A record 286 M&A deals, worth $77.5 billion, were made, and 14 deals of those were over $1 billion each. This year is off to a promising start with Google’s $5.4 billion of Mandiant in March. The market is responding to the evolving threat landscape. As new types of attacks arise, security vendors respond with new tools in what has become a cat-and-mouse game. This dynamic has driven the market for decades, but things are heating up now that the stakes are higher with hits on critical infrastructure and the U.S. supporting Ukraine in the Russian invasion. One security area that has been seeing particular interest of late is operational technology. Many attacks last year targeted companies that provide basic necessities of life, and consumers felt the pain. In February 2021, someone gained unauthorized access to the water treatment system in Oldsmar, Florida, and tried unsuccessfully to add more lye to the water supply. And last May, drivers on the East Coast panicked when they couldn’t get gasoline after a ransomware attack disrupted Colonial Pipeline’s distribution network. That month, a ransomware attack on Brazilian meat supplier JBS resulted in beef shortages in South America, North America and Australia. JBS ended up paying $11 million in ransom. The transportation industry has also been hit hard in recent years, seeing a from 2020 to 2021, and a since 2017. Recent incidents include attacks on the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the CSX Class I freight railroad. All these attacks on critical sectors have led to a slew of federal action plans and regulations affecting the water sector, pipeline operators and other . In one example, the Department of Homeland Security’s cites a number of elevated risks, including cyber and aging equipment, in guiding industry efforts to strengthen infrastructure security and resilience. As Russian attacks on Ukraine have intensified, the U.S. government is increasingly concerned about Russia launching cyberattacks on American businesses, especially critical infrastructure. On March 15, President Joe Biden signed into law the Cyber Incident Reporting Act, which requires critical infrastructure providers to report cyberattacks to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within 72 hours and ransomware payments within 24 hours. Then, on March 21, the president reiterated earlier warnings, citing “evolving intelligence that the Russian government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks.” Then the on March 24, charging four Russians who worked for the Russian government with hacking operational technology (OT) of companies in the energy sector around the world over six years. For decades, cybercriminals focused on stealing information they could monetize, but now that OT environments are increasingly connected to the Internet, bad actors are trying to shut down infrastructure and conduct cyber-physical attacks like in Oldsmar. The advent of ransomware and targeted attacks on critical infrastructure have changed the game and are putting operational technology security in the spotlight. At the end of the day, OT security is a national security issue. |
Pursuit closes $10M fund to spin up a self-sustaining job training program | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | More Americans than ever want to escape the rut of a low-paying job, but quitting to pursue a new profession is a risky proposition. has raised $10 million in funding for a promising and potentially self-sustaining new model for training up new tech workers in which learners only pay when they land a real position. The job market is a strange one right now: Tons of open positions, but workers are holding out, demanding fair compensation and good working conditions — and many jobs with those in tech won’t give a second look to an applicant without an appropriate degree. Pursuit founder Jukay Hsu observed that there are job training programs out there, but not only do they often cost considerable money up front but their support ends when the classes do. And philanthropy in this area, while generous in some ways, is simply not commensurate to the size of the problem. “Getting the skills is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting hired,” said Hsu. “You can be talented and smart and capable but there are still structural barriers. If you don’t have a degree you won’t even get an interview.” (And the interview isn’t likely to be much fairer, he added.) On the employer side, managers are desperate to fill positions but unwilling to take the risk on an applicant with no degree or relevant job history. But as Hsu pointed out, the truth is entry-level jobs are seldom actually skill-limited — more likely you need someone familiar with the tools and flexible enough to learn on the job. The missing piece is in risk management on both sides of the market: job seekers don’t want to go into debt for training that might not get them a position, and employers don’t want to gamble on someone who doesn’t meet their (not necessarily relevant) qualifications. Pursuit is building a model for job training that mitigates both these risks. On the job seeker side, learners with low or no income can get training and support that costs them nothing unless they get a job earning more than $50,000, at which point they can figure out payment. That of four years of payments of 5-15% of the income from the new job. That’s a hefty commission, to be sure, and there’s something fundamentally distasteful about the idea of lifting someone up and then slicing a piece off their success. But the idea is that the person would be earning way more to start with at the new job and would still have more after these payments. And as the money is going back into the fund, it goes toward covering the upfront costs of the next class of learners. Other options like coding bootcamps cost thousands just to walk in the door. For someone barely able to pay rent, the ability to defer payment is hugely enabling. Program grad Rook Soto and his family. He says, “Pursuit has legit changed my life. I went from being homeless to owning a home.” Pursuit On the employer side, Pursuit works with companies to create an actually skills-based hiring process for a pre-set number of positions, but also advises and helps design onboarding and retention processes that address common causes of attrition. There are three years of post-hiring support — “a crucial aspect of our work that helps companies employ and retain talented individuals who don’t come from typical backgrounds (i.e. have college or advanced degrees, etc.),” Pursuit’s A.J. Walton noted. If it sounds like one of those “good in theory, impractical in reality” ideas, you’re not alone. Hsu was frustrated by the need to prove the model works before anyone would fund the model: “It’s a chicken and egg thing.” But he managed to line up $750,000 to start testing it in 2016, and after observing it long term they are happy to report that it has a success on every front. “It takes four years to see results. Going from Uber drivers to engineers, that’s a three-year cycle — if it was three months they’d already have these skills,” Hsu said. After four years, however, 86% of the cohort had a job, earning on average more than $85,000 — more than double or triple what they were making before. Ninety percent kept their jobs past the first year as well, so it’s not just like a temp placement program. Pursuit Not a bad use of $750,000, right? But the trick is that $750,000 wasn’t , as you might rightly expect from any job program — they got a 6.6% on it, paying it pack in full plus earnings in 2020. Now you understand how that $10 million came their way. The round was led by Blue Earth Capital, with participation from the Inherent Foundation, Pursuit Operating Board Chair Zac Smith, ETF@JFFLabs, Alphadyne Foundation and Ramesh Chandra, as well as donor advised funds Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable. “This second financing round is only because we have these results — and now it’s institutional investors in the lead,” Hsu said. “It means we’ll be able to help a thousand people over the next few years, and it makes us financially self-sustaining. If we can prove it here, there are many more investors interested in this.” That all depends on the ability of the company to scale its offerings. Beyond simply hiring more people and running curricula for more learners, they’ll have to convince more companies to take part. But if the next 1,000 Pursuit fellows follow anything like the trajectory of the last 100, it could be the start of a potentially transformative new path to upward mobility. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 9 | null |
Deepki grabs $166 million to help real estate investors reduce carbon emissions | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | French startup has raised a $166 million Series C funding round (€150 million). The company is building a software-as-a-service platform for the real estate industry. It’s a monitoring and analytics product that helps you take better decisions. Companies using Deepki can track and analyze ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) criteria, starting with carbon emissions generated by their real estate portfolio. You can’t reduce what you can’t measure. As real estate investors want to lower their environmental impact with new and existing projects, Deepki first lets you get a comprehensive overview of your carbon emission performance. Deepki lets you collect and aggregate data, such as energy, water and waste. The company tries to automate this process as much as possible using APIs, web scraping or connections to SFTP servers. It can be a good starting point to see how you stack up compared to legal requirements across various geographies. You can also extract data and use it for certifications. But using a product like Deepki can be particularly useful to see trends over time. From Deepki’s data management and monitoring platform, you can see how your electricity or water consumption changes over time. Big corporate clients with multiple commercial properties can add several locations to Deepki and compare them on the platform. This way, you can prioritize one building over another to implement energy savings plans. It’ll improve your overall carbon trajectory. The Series C round has been led by Highland Europe and One Peak Partners. Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund and Revaia are also participating in the investment. Some existing investors are also putting more money on the table, such as Hi Inov and Statkraft Ventures. “The global real estate sector needs to act now if it is to halve its emissions by 2030 and meet the net zero target by 2050. This represents a huge market opportunity for Deepki. Today’s new funding announcement means that Deepki can make a greater impact and support even more asset owners in taking on the climate change challenge, and we are pleased to have our new partners Highland Europe and One Peak, as well as Revaia and Bpifrance Large Venture on this journey,” co-founder and CEO Vincent Bryant said in a statement. As you can see, Deepki develops a highly specific SaaS platform for clients with very specific needs. That’s why the company also has a consulting service to help Deepki’s customers implement ESG strategies and action plans. The company currently has 150 employees across five European capital cities. Deepki currently monitors buildings in 38 different countries, which represent over 500 million square meters. Clients include AEW, Tikehau, Generali RE, DeA Capital, Allianz Real Estate, Warburg HIH, Azora Capital and Neinver. |
Google Meet gets in-meeting reactions, PiP, end-to-end encryption and more | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Google a major update to Google Meet today that includes a number of long-requested features and plenty that you didn’t even know you needed. There is a long list here, but the main additions are likely in-meeting reactions to give immediate updates to the Meet companion mode, emoji-based feedback, the ability to use Meet right inside of Docs, Sheets and Slides, as well as a new picture-in-picture mode so you can more easily ignore a meeting and the ability to stream a meeting to YouTube. Security is another highlight of today’s announcement. Starting in May, Google is rolling out client-side encryption in Meet, which is currently still in beta. With this, users have full control over the encryption keys and the identity provider used to access those keys. Later this year, Google will also introduce option end-to-end encryption for all meetings. Currently, all Meet data is . Google “Since 2020, it’s become increasingly clear that human connection is crucial,” said Dave Citron, Google’s director of product management for Google Meet and Voice in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “We know we need solutions that help people build connections that can bridge the gap between physical spaces and the somewhere else.” He noted that a lot of these updates today focus on “collaboration equity,” that is, the ability to contribute to meetings regardless of location, role, experience level, language and device preference. One example for this is , which launched earlier this year and allows users to join a video meeting on a second screen. Now, Google is updating this with personal video tiles for every participant in a hybrid meeting, even if they are in a conference room with other participants. “This update will work towards making those in physical space have the same experience as those who are working remotely,” Citron explained. Google Like too many features Google announces these days, these updates will roll out “later this year.” This also means you’ll have to wait until next month to regale your co-workers with emojis during a meeting to “help teams celebrate wins, offer support and share the love,” as a Google spokesperson called it. Picture-in-picture mode will also roll out next month, while automatic noise cancellation on Google Meet hardware is now rolling out to all users on Meet-enabled Logitech, Acer and Asus hardware. The ability to stream to YouTube, which most companies will probably use for webinars and similar outward-facing meetings, is coming later this year. Google also today announced a couple of updates to Spaces, but you’re probably using Slack, so you can find more information about those . Google |
SEC investigates Faraday Future as regulatory crackdown on EV SPACs continues | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 31 | Several executives at EV company Faraday Future have been subpoenaed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as part of an investigation into inaccurate statements made to investors, . The subpoena comes nearly two months after Faraday Future’s internal investigation determined employees made inaccurate statements to investors and that its “corporate culture failed to sufficiently prioritize compliance,” . That prompted Faraday Future to revamp its board, cut the pay of two top executives and suspend at least one other. The SEC’s investigation escalates matters for Faraday Future. It’s also the latest in a string of investigations by the SEC into EV startups that have gone public via a merger with a blank check, or special purpose acquisition, company. Merging with a SPAC was the hot ticket to the public markets in 2020 and 2021. A string of electric vehicle startups took this route in pursuit of the capital needed to develop and build EVs at scale. The SEC has taken notice and initiated investigations into at least a half dozen of them, including , , and . Faraday Future has had a long string of controversies since its founding in 2014. It became a publicly traded company in July 2021 after . in a deal that has since raised the ire of investors and the SEC. A few months after the merger, a short-seller report alleged that Faraday Future had made a number of inaccurate statements. An internal review conducted by a special committee of directors that tapped the expertise of a forensic accounting firm and independent legal counsel soon followed. The committee found that company employees understated the involvement of founder and former CEO Jia Yueting, who is now chief product officer. The review also determined that the company’s declaration that it had received more than 14,000 reservations for the FF 91 vehicle was potentially misleading because only several hundred of those reservations were paid; the remainder, which totaled 14,000, were unpaid indications of interest. The company’s internal controls over financial accounting and reporting also require an upgrade in personnel and systems, the reviewers found. The special committee took a number of actions, including cutting CEO Carsten Breitfeld and Yueting’s pay by 25%. Brian Krolicki stepped down from his role as chairman of the board and chair of the nominating and corporate governance committee and become a member of the audit and compensation committees of the board. Jiawei (Jerry) Wang, the company’s VP of Global Capital Markets, was suspended without pay, and Jarret Johnson, general counsel and secretary, left the company. In the new filing Thursday, Faraday said it “continues to implement the appropriate remedial actions” approved by the internal committee and is continuing with its investigation. Faraday Future also said Thursday that it is unable to file its annual report for the year ended December 2021 and does not expect to meet the extended deadline because the internal investigation is causing delays. |
Meta and Sama face legal action in Kenya for alleged poor work conditions | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 3 | 30 | Meta and , its main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, are facing a lawsuit in Kenya over alleged unsafe and unfair working conditions if they fail to meet 12 demands on workplace conditions brought before them. Nzili and Sumbi Advocates, the law firm representing Daniel Motaung, a former Sama employee who was laid off for organizing a strike in 2019 over poor working conditions and pay, in a demand letter seen by TechCrunch, accused the subcontractor of violating various rights, including that of health and privacy of Kenyan and international staff. Motaung was allegedly laid off for organizing the strike and trying to unionize Sama employees. The law firm has given Meta and Sama 21 days (starting Tuesday, March 29) to respond to the demands or face a lawsuit. In the demand letter, the law firm asked Meta and Sama to adhere to the country’s labor, privacy and health laws; recruit qualified and experienced health professionals; and provide the moderators with adequate mental health insurance and better compensation. “Facebook subcontracts most of this work to companies like Sama – a practice that keeps Facebook’s profit margins high but at the cost of thousands of moderators’ health – and the safety of Facebook worldwide. Sama moderators report ongoing violations, including conditions which are unsafe, degrading, and pose a risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” Motuang’s lawyers said. The imminent suit follows a that detailed how Sama recruited the moderators under the false pretext that they were taking up call center jobs. The content moderators, hired from across the continent, the story said, only learned about the nature of their jobs after signing employment contracts and relocating to its hub in Nairobi. The moderators sift through social media posts on all its platforms, including Facebook, to remove those perpetrating and perpetuating hate, misinformation and violence. Among the many requirements employees are expected to abide by is not disclosing the nature of their jobs to outsiders. The content moderators’ pay in Africa, the article said, is the lowest across the globe. Sama fashions itself as an ethical AI firm. The firm increased employee pay after the exposé. The law firm alleged that Sama failed to grant Motaung and his colleagues adequate psychosocial support and mental health measures, including “unplanned breaks as needed particularly after exposure to graphic content.” The productivity of Sama’s employees was also tracked using Meta’s software — to measure employee screen time and movement during work hours. Sama granted them “thirty minutes a day with a wellness counselor.” “Sama and Meta failed to prepare our client for the kind of job he was to do and its effects. The first video he remembers moderating was of a beheading. Up to that point, no psychological support had been offered to him in advance,” said the law firm. Sama, in a published after the exposé, denied the any wrongdoing stating that it is transparent during its hiring process and has a culture that “prioritizes employee health and wellness. “We understand that content moderation is a difficult but essential job to ensure the safety of the internet for everyone, and it’s why we invest heavily in training, personal development, and wellness programs,” said Sama. “As a global technology company, partner and employer, we take pride in our responsibility to be transparent and honest. It is completely inaccurate to suggest that Sama employees were hired under false pretenses or were provided inaccurate information regarding content moderation work.” , who is leading the legal action, said, “I use Facebook, like many Kenyans, and it’s an important place to discuss the news. But that is why this case is so important.” “The very safety and integrity of our democratic process in Kenya depends on a Facebook — that is properly staffed and where content moderators, the front-line workers against hate and misinformation, have the support they need to protect us all. This isn’t an ordinary labor case – the working conditions for Facebook moderators affect all Kenyans.” A Meta spokesperson, in a response to questions sent by TechCrunch, said, “We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support. We also encourage content reviewers to raise issues when they become aware of them and regularly conduct independent audits to ensure our partners are meeting the high standards we expect of them.” |
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