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Trump says he won’t return to Twitter if his account is reinstated | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that he will not be returning to Twitter if his account is reinstated, according to a statement he provided to . Trump’s comments about Twitter come on the same day that the company has announced that it offer to acquire the publicly traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $44 billion. The announcement led to speculation that Trump may return to the social media platform if he is allowed to do so, but it looks like he’s not interested and is instead planning to formally join his own Truth Social platform over the next seven days. “I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth. The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter.” Twitter Trump in January 2021 citing concerns over the “risk of further incitement of violence” following the January 6 attack on the capitol. While Trump had , the company had maintained his account under its special guidance for world leaders and information in the public interest. Trump’s comments from today come as shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which announced a deal in October to acquire Trump Media & Technology Group, as Twitter officially announced its deal with Musk. It’s possible that Truth’s shaky start could cause Trump to change his mind about rejoining Twitter down the road. Trump’s media group released its app today in February, but the app remained unavailable to users for quite some time. Truth is being marketed as an alternative to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. If Trump does end up posting on Truth regularly this week, it will mark the former president’s return to social media following his ban from numerous platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. So far, he’s only posted on Truth once. As for Twitter, Musk says that “free speech” is key to Twitter’s future. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and “the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.” How’d we get here, you may ask? Here’s a of the Elon Musk-Twitter saga. |
Reddit officially launches its Community Funds program with a $1 million investment | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | Reddit is investing $1 million in its Community Funds program, the company on Monday. The company has been experimenting with its Community Funds program for the past six months and provided financial support to help Reddit users bring their ideas for events and projects to life. Throughout the duration of the experiment, Reddit funded 13 projects that were nominated by communities on its platform. Among the 13 projects was a digital conference for history buffs and a community-designed musical artist billboard in Times Square. With this new $1 million investment, Reddit says it’s making the Community Funds official in order to to create more opportunities for its users. Starting in June, Reddit will invite communities to submit ideas for projects, events, contests and more. The company will accept nominations for projects needing between $1,000 to $50,000 in funding. Projects will be selected based on their creativity, feasibility and community impact. Reddit plans to build out more submission details and guidelines in the future. “We want to foster more opportunities for connection by making Community Funds official, with $1 million in funding,” Reddit said in a blog post about the announcement. “Community Funds aligns with our mission of bringing community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. We believe that empowering communities to do more by awarding funds to support their best ideas is one way we can accomplish this.” As part of the initial experiment, Reddit provided $5,000 to fund a photography competition and another $5,000 to fund a comic-creation competition. The company also provided $5,000 to gift 25 children whose families were facing financial hardship with $200 worth of gifts on Christmas. Reddit also provided $5,000 to fund a nomination-based gifting event for r/pan streamers. It’s worth noting that Reddit isn’t the only digital platform to launch a community fund, as Facebook launched a in 2020 to provide funding to support “local communities’ efforts to build their resilience and social cohesion around the world.” Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Reddit out the ability to search comments, alongside a few other search-related features. With the new comment search function, users no longer have to click on several comments to find threads when looking for a particular conversation. You can now search for comments directly via a new “comments” tab in the search bar. Reddit also introduced a simpler design for search results based on user feedback on both desktop and mobile. |
Google’s Pixel Watch may finally be on its way | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | again. Someone leaves a prototype , prototype makes its way into some blogger’s hands, chaos ensues. It’s hard to imagine another device coming along soon that’s shrouded in the same layer of security as the . Both gadgets and tech journalism have evolved since those halcyon days, but nothing like a high-profile leak to get the blood pumping in these old typing fingers. Companies’ protect-the-IP-at-all-cost approach has shifted, too, over the past decades. Plenty of firms have come to understand the power of well-timed leaks. That’s not to say that any of the Pixel Watch news we’ve seen in recent weeks and months has been intentional — it’s just hard to imagine any of us saying much about an upcoming Google wearable if some information hadn’t found its way online. The weekend’s restaurant leak comes a few days after a popped up online. The timing of everything seems to point to the imminent announcement of the moderately anticipated wearable. Given that I/O kicks off at the Shoreline Amphitheater in just over two weeks, it seems reasonable to infer that — at the very least — we’ll be getting a taste in mid-May. Google really needs to make a splash here. Google’s history with wrist-worn wearables has been — in a word — spotty. It’s been 7.5 years since the company launched Android Wear. The product arrived with plenty of hardware partners — companies like Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC. Honestly, it’s a pretty good snapshot of the Android ecosystem, and fittingly two of those four have either stopped making phones or at least gotten close. Samsung drifted away from Android Wear fairly quickly — opting instead to develop its own unique flavor of Tizen. More recently, Motorola has moved to Moto Watch OS for its latest device — it’s a lightweight RTOS (real-time operating system) similar to what OnePlus uses on its watches. Google’s wearable operating system continued to stagnate for a number of years, as Apple — and to a lesser extent Samsung — dominated the smartwatch category. In 2018, however, it got a rebrand. represented a shot at a free start. “We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible with wearables and there’s even more exciting work ahead,” the company wrote in a post. The change didn’t result in a massive shift in market share — though a number of more recent moves have helped move the needle. Most notable thus far is a reunion with Samsung. “ finds the firms joining forces in a bid to go toe to toe with Apple, starting with the Galaxy Watch 4. For Samsung, it means access to a Play apps. Third-party support has long been a major sticking point for the industry. For Google, it means suddenly having their operating system on a LOT more devices. Samsung was doing perfectly fine, thank you very much, on the wearable front without Google’s help. Granted, it wasn’t going to surpass the Apple Watch any time soon, but the company still sells a lot of devices. I suspect the onus was on Google to convince the hardware company that it was still all-in on Wear OS. One thing you can’t deny is that the software giant is more than willing to spend its way to the top here. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that Google purchased . “Wearables, built for wellness, simplicity, personalization and helpfulness, have the opportunity to improve lives by bringing users the information and insights they need quickly, at a glance,” Wear OS VP Stacey Burr said at the time. “The addition of Fossil Group’s technology and team to Google demonstrates our commitment to the wearables industry by enabling a diverse portfolio of smartwatches and supporting the ever-evolving needs of the vitality-seeking, on-the-go consumer.” I now realize I started that specific post with the words, “Rumors about a Pixel Watch have abounded for years.” That puts a fine enough point on precisely how long we’ve been talking about the damn thing. That specific deal was soon eclipsed by Google’s . The deal passed regulatory scrutiny, in spite of some reasonable concern over what Fitbit’s new partner would be doing with the massive volumes of data these devices collect. “This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy,” Google SVP Rick Osterloh noted at the time. “We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers’ privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data.” Now this technological turducken goes even deeper. Fossil acquired . Fitbit, struggling to expand into smartwatches, for $20.3 million the following year. Honestly, it was a bargain, and it actually resulted in a great smartwatch with the Versa. Ultimately, however, it seems it was too little, too late as Fitbit opted to sell itself to Google. Certainly, we’ve got the ingredients for something exceptional here. Given the recency of the Fitbit acquisition, it’s hard to know exactly how much of its tech would make it into a first-gen Pixel Watch. It stands to reason, however, that the subsidiary’s strong health focus will play a central role in Google wearables, going forward. The company’s still developing some important stuff, including a new always-on A-Fib detector. All of this comes together as Google has revamped its first-party hardware. The Pixel division underwent a reckoning/restructure after years of middling sales. That gave us the truly excellent Pixel 6. Thing is, Pixel phones have always been pretty good, even if their sales haven’t reflected it. Google’s not starting from scratch here, exactly (not if you count all the work Timex and Fitbit, et al. have done), but we are effectively talking about a new category for the company, so it’s worth tempering your expectations accordingly. So we’re left with a prototype left at a bar. It’s round, with a glass back and a crown that appears to function similarly to the Apple Watch. The device sports a proprietary band and a pair of buttons around the edges. It’s likely a prototype, but all of that comports with earlier rumors and the tale of a bartender who was holding onto the product for a customer who apparently never came back for the thing. Assuming we’ve got about two and a half weeks for the announcement, that gives us all enough time to craft some think pieces about whether the Pixel Watch is too little and/or too late. Google has already bought its way into a significant portion of wearable marketshare with the Fitbit acquisition, but it’s once again entering a mature and crowded market — something it struggled to maintain with the first several generations of Pixel phones. |
Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44B acquisition offer | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he’s making good on one of the biggest of his musings. Twitter has announced that it has accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the publicly traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $44 billion. Moments after the news broke that Twitter trading was halted, the company issued a confirming that it was accepting Musk’s offer to take the social network private. “The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing,” Twitter’s Independent Board Chair Bret Taylor said of the deal. “The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders.” In the press release, Musk repeated his refrain that “free speech” is key to Twitter’s future, though most of his ideas for how to optimize the social network, including adding new products, fighting spam and opening up its algorithms, are things the company was already in the process of doing prior to his dramatic intervention. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.” It’s not clear from Musk’s statement what exactly he means by “authenticating all humans” — is that just the ongoing work of ridding the platform of spammy bots or a new, stricter stance on non-human automated accounts? If the latter, that would certainly change Twitter’s flavor as a social platform that’s long been home to useful and occasionally delightful bot accounts. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and “the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.” Until those matters are resolved, it’s not a done deal. The news comes after from overnight that Twitter — contrary to earlier statements about the poison pill it would prefer over Musk acquiring it — was entertaining the offer. The Twitter/Musk acquisition dance has been a pretty short one, especially considering the size of the deal: It started less than a month ago, when Musk first took to Twitter to make about and what it’s not doing well, only for Twitter to disclose on April 4 that Musk had in fact taken a significant — some 9.2% of shares in the company. A Musk-shaped seat on the board before being . Shareholders were annoyed with Musk and over what they believed was obvious share price manipulation. And Musk? Musk doubled down and said that actually he’d just . That was on April 14. The board balked and the made a viral interlude in the world of corporate tech news. But Musk, currently the world’s richest individual on paper, simply pressed on, spelled out how he would , and suddenly everyone started to take him seriously. Money always talks. Overnight — last night — the about Twitter considering the deal after all. The news is bound to upset a lot of people — Musk has a tendency to polarize, and so does Twitter, so it’s basically a given. And so it will be intriguing to see what that spells out about Twitter as a business. It will also be worth watching to figure out just what Musk’s agenda or intention may be. Moguls buying up media properties is not exactly novel — we’d argue it’s the next (big) step up in the same trajectory that includes yachts and other iconic assets. Musk, however, has been a Twitter power user for a long time, which means it’s likely that he will be approaching this as more than an investors’ vanity play or a purely financial play. He has ideas. And even if you don’t like him, you have to admit he’s smart. He may have plans to turn Twitter into a bigger and profitable business. Or, he may have already decided that Twitter is much more fun as an expensive plaything and a lever for juicing other interests (which is, for all intents and purposes, the only thing we have proof of him using Twitter for so far). Whichever it is, if he has his way he will now have a mouthpiece that he can control as he pleases. We’ll update this post as we learn more. |
Here’s why we’re about to see an explosion of hyperreal artificial humans online | Mike Butcher | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | Synthetically generated versions of real people that can be can be programmed to say anything sounds like a scenario from the latest episode of “Black Mirror.” But in fact, production-grade video-based characters based on real people — which can talk about any product or subject at all, in a hyperlifelike manner — are arguably going to be part of the next wave in areas like e-commerce and remote learning. Further, a Hollywood celebrity could simply license out their avatar to explain products, at a scale that would make it impossible to physically film. But perhaps more realistically, “digital twins” like this make much more convincing videos than invented characters, because of their humanlike qualities. The market for this technology is expanding. Key players in the space include SoulMachines (which has raised $135 million) and Synthesia (raised $66.6 million). Back in 2020 we reported how , a New York and Tel Aviv startup which creates AI-driven synthetic characters based on real humans, had closed a $5 million seed funding round. It’s now raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Also participating in the round was Galaxy Interactive, Remagine Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Semble Ventures, Cerca Partners, Digital-Horizon and Eynat Guez. The startup plans to expand its Reals platform, a self-service platform allowing businesses “to create human-led video automatically, from just text, in a matter of minutes” said the company in a statement. This, says the firm, converts people into virtual human characters for commercial and professional use cases. The human is first captured on video, then Hour One’s AI generates a virtual twin. This could be a virtual receptionist, salesperson, HR representative or language teacher, for example. To some extent, Hour Pen’s view that the shift to remote work has meant video and more immersive media — such as for educational content — has become much more important, is correct. Therefore this kind of video people will be expanded. Hour One CEO and Founder Oren Aharon said in a statement: “Very soon, any person will be able to have a virtual twin for professional use that can deliver content on their behalf, speak in any language, and scale their productivity in ways previously unimaginable.” “The power and accuracy of generative AI continues to improve at an extremely rapid pace, and Hour One is at the vanguard,” added Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners. “You just type in some text, and behind the scenes the incredibly scalable Hour One infrastructure creates a fluid and realistic video of an avatar talking along with matching voice and graphics. The team’s grand vision is to be able to embed this extraordinary capability within any software product or allow it to be invoked in real-time via API.” Berlitz, the language and culture training giant, now uses Hour One to generate video, featuring virtual instructors across thousands of its videos. Hour One has also partnered with NBCUniversal, DreamWorks and Cameo, the latter of which allows celebrities to record paid videos for fans. The appearance of the likes of SoulMachines, Synthesia and Hour One raises questions about how this technology might well also be abused. Watermarking videos as “artificial” might be one way to prevent this, but we are still swimming in uncharted waters here. Hour One says it has an ethical policy code for how its technology is used. We are definitely going to see some “interesting” scenarios appear around this technology, which is proliferating much faster than the startups themselves. |
Musk’s Boring Company to begin ‘full-scale’ hyperloop testing this year | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | Elon Musk’s tunnel startup The Boring Company plans to begin “full-scale” testing of hyperloop, a still theoretical transportation system that sends passengers in autonomous electric pods through a tube at speeds in excess of 600 miles per hour. Musk Monday, just a day after announcing the company would and less than a week since The Boring Company at a $5.7 billion valuation. Musk first floated the idea of hyperloop published in 2013. Musk didn’t personally pursue the project and instead shared the basic engineering plans and encouraged others to take on the challenge. SpaceX, another Musk company, also hosted a hyperloop competition between 2015 and 2019 for students and hobbyists to design and build a subscale prototype transport vehicle. A one-mile hyperloop test track, itself a prototype, was constructed in October 2016. Other companies, including Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) haven’t deployed any commercial operating versions of the proposed transport systems yet. Until these past few days, Musk’s public commentary and activity around hyperloop had seemed to fizzle with the exception of the annual contest. And even that shifted from the hyperloop pod to tunneling. In September 2021, The Boring Company hosted the Not-a-Boring Competition, which challenged engineers to build tunneling machines. Technical University of Munich, or Tum, . Tum has won previous hyperloop competitions as well. The Boring competition is coming back in 2022 with teams invited to design, build and race their own tunneling machines at TBC’s factory in Texas. Teams will compete in four categories, including the fastest to complete the tunnel, design, accuracy of the tunnel and tightest turn. The idea of hyperloop has attracted other engineers, researchers, startup founders and even Virgin’s Richard Branson. Despite years of effort and some progress, there is not yet a working example of the system anywhere in the world. |
Brianne Kimmel’s new $35 million fund isn’t yet tempted by all of web3 | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | While web3, the metaverse and virtual HQs feel like the loudest features of the “future of work” startup category, founder has a more down-to-earth definition. The solo-GP has spent the past few years backing companies that will help modern workers, from to to a . “We do want to be very mindful and intentional that we want to build software for the average person or software that enables more access to meaningful ways to make money,” she said. “I find in the current state, the metaverse and even web3 to a large degree, is not accessible just yet.” Worklife does invest in web3 companies but only when the business has a strong stance on education or serving people beyond those who work in tech, she said. It’s a perspective that her own investors believe enough in to dole out more money behind her efforts. Kimmel tells TechCrunch that she raised $35 million for her second future work-focused fund — , per SEC filings that have since been removed. When asked about the gap, the investor, , said that she is eventually launching a structure that will let Worklife continuously fundraise and scale total assets through smaller funds, SPVs and an evergreen entity. Still, today’s tranche marks a second chapter for Worklife, one that comes amid a still present pandemic. After publication of this story, Worklife’s PR team sent a statement to TechCrunch saying that “the reason she retracted the filing is because she chose to raise more capital under this structure and push the launch of her second fund to later this year – given that existing insiders wanted to put more capital in right now.” , initially with a $5 million first close fund backed by the likes of Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, NFX, Slow Ventures and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. At the time, Kimmel was one of the first female solo-GPs to splash on the scene, also joined by , and and At launch, Worklife said that 40% of the new fund’s deals will come from SaaS School, a biannual workshop for entrepreneurs that Kimmel founded while at Zendesk. Now, it seems that Kimmel is taking a more expansive approach. She says Worklife has already written five checks out of the new funds with an average check size of $2 million and post-money valuation at $20 million. Worklife’s first fund ultimately closed at $13 million, and Kimmel says The firm doesn’t track specific numbers on how many first-time founders it backs, but did say it writes first checks for operators who are leaving tech companies and starting their first companies. All but one of Kimmel’s investments have had a female founder, something she wants to take a “stronger stance on ensuring” in the second fund. There’s also a large focus on backing immigrants, something that Kimmel, a Ukrainian-American, says has stayed consistent since the firm’s debut. Worklife’s performance has largely been driven by a select group of unicorns in the portfolio, which include Deel, Webflow, Hopin, Tonal, Clubhouse, Pipe and Public. Still, despite the pandemic’s disruption of how we work, some companies that boomed during the first two years of distributed work have been facing corrections. Worklife invested in Hopin, for example, one of its most successful bets Kimmel spoke about the layoffs saying that “those are very natural growing pains that happen over the course of a company’s history. A surprising thing that a lot of outside people forget is the fact that that growth from zero to $100 million in ARR was compressed into two years.” She pointed out that Hopin’s chief business officer Armando Mann has played an important role in hiring other executives to manage growth. As for Clubhouse, another Worklife portfolio company, growth has been nuanced. In around a year after first raising capital, Clubhouse and reached mass-market virality. The company then faced issues with moderation, especially around the proliferation of an antisemitic room. As the world opened up, downloads “With Clubhouse specifically, scaling any social network is incredibly hard,” Kimmel said. “I find that the platforms like Twitter where you already have distribution, that’s where you’re more likely to see the contribution rate from users be much higher.” That said, Kimmel pointed out that Worklife has gone on to invest in Flow Club, a productivity-focused social networking app and Moment House, a live media platform for musicians. With new millions behind Kimmel, the remote work category will get a surely appreciated chunk of focus and reality. |
Sapphire Ventures’ Cathy Gao on how VCs can help early-stage startups weather volatility | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 4 | 25 | about early-stage startups, we tend to focus on the internals — and understandably so. It’s easiest to home in on the things you can control: developing products, building a team, finding the right investors. All are important and foundational to developing a startup, of course. But as much as we’d like to believe that the right product developed by the right team is enough to ensure a firm’s success, things in this world are never that simple. When Cathy Gao closed out our Early Stage event last week, she had one big word on her mind: volatility. The Sapphire Ventures partner (who primarily focuses on later stage) has plenty of experience on both sides of the fence. In addition to working as a VC, she currently sits on a number of startup boards, including SafeGraph, Involve.ai, Gem and Medable. Prior to her time at Sapphire, Gao focused on finance, strategy and product at Gusto during the fintech’s Series B round. We tend to have a short memory when it comes to things like volatility and instability — especially now that we’re well into year two of a pandemic. But Gao is quick to point out that the world was grappling with both before COVID gained a foothold. When she worked at Gusto 2016, there was already plenty of uncertainty. “Donald Trump was elected president of the United States,” she noted. “Brexit happened, the price of oil plunged, and the world was battling a Zika virus. All in all, 2016 was a very volatile year for the markets. … Because of all the market volatility that year, and a lot of alarmist news headlines internally in the finance team, we were saying, ‘Winter is coming,’ and we got prepared against market volatility. Ultimately, winter never came.” |
SLAMcore just raised $16M to help robots get around | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | The more of our world we share with robots, the more important it is to help them find their way. Founded in 2016, navigation is at the heart of what London-based SLAMcore does. In fact, it’s right there in the name — SLAM being a common robotics acronym for “Simultaneous localization and mapping.” The company has developed technologies that can be deployed on a wide range of robotics systems, from vacuums to the more advanced autonomous systems being deployed in warehouses across the U.S. Its algorithms are used to help robots identify the space they’re navigating. The firm also cites a key buzzword — noting that such systems can be applied for finding one’s way around the metaverse. Fittingly, SLAMcore notes that Meta has already begun to use some of its existing technolgoies. There’s also been a fair amount of financial interest in the firm, as the pandemic has radically accelerated the adoption of robotics and automation over the last couple of years. Today it’s announcing a $16 million Series A. The round was led by ROBO Global Ventures and Presidio Ventures. Samsung Ventures, Toyota Ventures and Yamato Holdings also joined the round, along with Amadeus Capital, Global Brain, IP Group, MMC and Octopus. This follows a $5 million seed round raised by the company toward the outset of the pandemic. “For far too long, robots have not been able to navigate physical spaces with the level of accuracy and efficiency that we know is possible,” founder and CEO Owen Nicholson said in a release. “As they become more available to companies and consumers alike in years to come, SLAMcore is determined to ensure that as many designers as possible have access to the algorithms needed to optimize their products.” The firm says the round will go toward expanding its consumer-grade suite of offerings. |
Your MVP is neither minimal, viable nor a product | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Whenever I talk about minimal viable products with product-driven startup founders, I often find myself in a frustrating conversation. The term MVP is such a profound misnomer; a good MVP is not viable, and it is certainly not a product. Chances are it isn’t as minimal as you want it to be either, come to think of it. In the world of lean startups, founders have to stay hyper-focused on figuring out how to fail as fast as possible. Ideally, you fail to fail, which means you end up with a functioning business. A lot of the “trying to fail” approaches involve looking at your business opportunities and contemplating where your business might fail in the future. Then go and figure that part out. It’s no good to build the world’s best platform for selling Beanie Babies if the entire customer base is already happy using eBay and wouldn’t switch away, even if your product is superior. It’s no good to create a great lock specifically for rideshare scooters if it turns out that the scooter companies don’t care if the scooters get stolen. It would be great if there was a way to figure out if anybody would buy your product before you write a single line of code. So where do MVPs come in? As a startup, you have a hypothesis; . Eric Ries — yes, the guy who wrote “The Lean Startup” — famously uses Dropbox’s MVP as an example. It was not a fully fledged product, full of features. It was not a product with a lot of features stripped away. . The response to that video was the confirmation the company needed: If they build it, they’ll be able to find a customer base for its yet-to-be-built product. So that’s what they did: Built the product, and became a huge success. Designing a good MVP means thinking outside of the box. How little code can you write? Can you get away with doing no design? If your biggest question is whether you can attract customers for a customer acquisition cost that makes sense, could you run just an advertising campaign and a check-out page, and then just refund whoever places an order? If that sounds like fun but you’re worried about brand risk, could you create a fake brand and get an answer to your product? The trick is to think carefully about the hypothesis — what needs to be true about your product, the market, the problem space you are entering, the customers you are hoping to attract and the competitive landscape? How sure are you that your assumptions are correct? Designing a good MVP is an art, but it starts with a really good question. Here are a few examples: In a nutshell, the key is to think very carefully about what the question is, and then come up with elegant, low-lift ways of asking that question. Instead of shipping code, could a survey work? Could a video demo get you the answers you need? Can you call 50 customers and ask them circumspect questions and see if they suggest the feature you are thinking about as a potential solution to the problem? They might surprise you in two ways: Your customers may either overwhelmingly want what you’re suggesting (great!), they may hate it (also great — it means you don’t have to waste time and money developing something they don’t want) or they may have a completely different way of solving the problem that hits the sweet spot, is cheaper to develop and helps them feel involved with your process. I don’t have a suggestion for a better name for MVP, just don’t fall into the trap of thinking of it as a product, being viable or, necessarily, being small, simple or easy. Some MVPs are complex. The idea, though, is to spend as little of your precious resources as you can to get an answer to your questions. |
Daily Crunch: Startup that transforms real-world items into NFTs raises $6.9M seed round | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Hello and May the 3rd be with you. Did we get that meme right? Today, we are thrilled to see a16z planning $50 (that’s $500 million) worth of investments in its newest fund. We are also and executes a round of layoffs – and It’s all fintech all the time on the site today, with a $65 million round going to Kevin to build , Neobank , Banking giant Truist acquiring , and Point raising $115 million to help homeowners . Health tech startup myNurse (formerly known as Salusive Health) lost a bunch of patient data in a breach and . It claims it has nothing to do with the breach, but gives no reason for the shutdown. Curiouser and curiouser. We also loved ’s story today about Graphite, which took a leaf out of Slack’s book by . Gotta love a good pivot story. / Getty Images Glen Evans, a partner on Greylock’s core talent team, joined Senior Editor Walter Thompson at TechCrunch Early Stage to talk about how founders can optimize the recruiting and hiring process, find and develop talent, and uncover some best practices for closing candidates. “The state of the job market is more competitive than I’ve ever seen it,” said Evans, who has two decades of experience overseeing recruiting and team-building at fast-growing companies including Slack, Facebook and Google. “There’s a very limited supply of talent and probably the largest demand I’ve ever seen, so it’s really important for people to think about how to differentiate and build the foundations and the habits to get talent right in the early days,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.” |
Match names Zynga President Bernard Kim as CEO, replacing Shar Dubey | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Dating app giant Match is getting a new CEO. Just over two years after , Match CEO and 16-year employee Shar Dubey is stepping down. The company today, alongside its first-quarter , Shar Dubey will resign as an officer of Match Group but will remain on the company’s board and continue to serve as an adviser. , the current president of Zynga, will become CEO effective May 31 and will join Match’s board of directors. Kim has been president of Zynga since 2016 and has overseen a number of key functions, including global marketing, user acquisition, revenue, consumer insights, data science, product management, mergers and acquisitions, and communications, Match said, in announcing the news. Kim was also instrumental in the company’s expansion into new markets including blockchain and hypercasual gaming, as well as to new platforms like Nintendo Switch, Snapchat and smart home devices. He also helped quadruple Zynga’s market cap ahead of its in January 2022. Before Zynga, Kim spent nearly 10 years at EA, as SVP of Mobile Publishing, and previously worked at The Walt Disney Company. The move to bring in a mobile gaming exec to lead a dating app company is an interesting choice, particularly as Match is looking to grow its business beyond traditional, swipe-based matchmaking and into the so-called “metaverse.” Match has spoken previously about its , complete with a virtual goods-based economy, real-time audio and the ability for online daters to meet up in a virtual space to have conversations. In addition, Match’s flagship dating app Tinder began in a new Tinder Explore section, meant to help push the boundaries of where dating and in-app socializing overlap. And , now powering various products across Match, Meetic, Pairs and POF, is pushing Match further into online social. Given Kim’s background with Zynga — a company that originally built its empire as a social gaming platform on top of Facebook’s platform — the new exec may be able to offer insights as to how to guide Match as it expands into new, interactive and social spaces. “I’m honored to join Match Group’s talented team at such a pivotal time, as the company continues to see powerful momentum, strong user engagement and passionate employees who are driven to bring joy to millions of users from all walks of life,” said Bernard Kim, in a statement. “I have tremendous admiration for Shar Dubey’s leadership and for Match Group’s powerful mission to create meaningful connections for every single person worldwide today and in the future.” “I feel privileged that I am able to step down from a day-to-day operating role and have the time and headspace to focus on what is hopefully the ‘give back’ chapter of my life,” stated Shar Dubey. “As a director and an adviser, I will have the flexibility to stay close to aspects of the business I love — product and strategy. I leave the company in great hands. With Bernard’s energy, fresh thinking and extensive mobile technology and consumer business experience, combined with the over 70 years of institutional knowledge and category experience of our brand CEOs and leaders at Match Group, I am ever so excited about this next phase of the company and the category.” The company reported Q1 of $799 million, up 20% year over year, Wall St. estimates of $794 million and operating income up 10% year over year of $208 million, representing a 26% operating margin. Tinder’s direct revenue grew 18% over the prior year driven by 17% growth in paying subscribers to reach 10.7 million. Across all dating app brands, Match’s monthly active users approached 100 million by the end of the quarter. The company, however, warned that Google’s change to force payments through its own system would lead to an estimated $6 million of negative impact beginning June 1. Match’s stock dropped 6% after earnings were reported. |
Lyft continues its COVID recovery, but investors are far from impressed | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | American ride-hailing company Lyft reported Tuesday its , a report that showed continued improvement from the loss of business it experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Q1, the former startup unicorn generated revenues of $875.6 million, up some 44% from the year-ago period. Besting its guidance, the company’s CEO Logan Green said in a release that the company’s larger than anticipated revenue haul “was driven by increased demand and resilient driver levels.” Investors had expected the company revenues of $846.0 million, per Yahoo Finance data. However, that wasn’t enough to lift Lyft’s shares, which fell by more than 12% in after-hours trading. The company’s sequentially declining rider figures and the specter of driver incentives soured investors on the company’s results. Still, Lyft’s business has improved off of deep COVID lows. In Q1, for example, Lyft saw its active rider count reach 17.8 million, up nearly 32% from its year-ago result of 13.5 million. And those riders are spending more than they did at the start of 2021, with Lyft’s “revenue per active rider” metric rising to $49.18 in Q1 2022 compared to $45.13 in the year-ago period; the more recent number is some 9% greater than its comparative 2021 result. How did the rising revenue figure translate into profits? In GAAP terms, an acronym that denotes standard American accounting methods, Lyft had a very unprofitable quarter, posting a net loss of $196.9 million. Though an improvement from its year-ago GAAP net loss of $427.3 million, the company’s Q1 2022 net loss represents a material percentage of its revenues. In adjusted terms, the news is better. Lyft’s adjusted EBITDA for Q1 2022 was $54.8 million, up more than $127 million from a year-ago negative tally. The era of ride-hailing companies managing positive adjusted EBITDA continues, in other words. Thus far Lyft seems to be doing well, so why are its shares down? The following chart from its earnings presentation provides hints: Lyft While Lyft did post strong gains in terms of active ridership and revenue per rider compared to year-ago results, the company is seeing some softening in its recent results, including a notable decline in per-rider revenue compared to Q4 2021 levels, and a second quarter of sequential declines in active ridership. For investors looking for future growth from the company, those metrics are not encouraging. Adding to the bad news, Lyft’s contribution result — essentially its ride-hailing top line minus revenue costs, with certain items added back in — of $502.5 million in Q1 2021 was smaller than what it recorded in both Q3 and Q4 of 2021. So while it is clear that Lyft has done yeoman’s work to climb out of its prior COVID doldrums, its near-term growth path is less clear than investors might have wished. Uber, Lyft’s domestic archrival, reports its own Q1 results tomorrow. We’ll get a better look then at the American ride-hailing market in those numbers, along with an early set of data regarding the financial health of the delivery market, something that Lyft has long eschewed. |
Roku snags Martha Stewart, Emeril and others for its original programming push | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | It is the second day of NewFronts, and the announcements continue. Roku today said it will extend its content library in hopes to target audiences who are fans of lifestyle, cooking, home renovation and reality television. The company has two new co-production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios, giving The Roku Channel seven original series starring food and lifestyle personalities Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and Chris Kimball. The deals will also bring over 3,000 episodes of library content, adding to the over 70,000 programs already on the streamer. The new original series coming to The Roku Channel include “Martha Cooks,” “Martha Holidays” (working title), “Martha Gardens,” “Emeril Cooks,” “Emeril Tailgates,” “Milk Street’s Cooking School” and “Milk Street’s My Family Recipe.” Rob Holmes, vice president, Programming, Roku, said in a statement, We are thrilled to bring our viewers this standout content from culinary and cultural powerhouses Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, and Chris Kimball — for free. The Roku Channel’s impressive reach, incredibly engaged user base, and successful monetization model continues to make it an attractive destination for content partners and established talent to elevate their programming and connect with streaming audiences at scale. These exciting first-of-their-kind partnerships for Roku with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios showcase our unique ability to drive value across the streaming ecosystem. In its , The Roku Channel reported a total of 20.9 billion hours streamed, up 14% from last quarter. These new deals demonstrate Roku’s interest in free food and lifestyle content for its viewers and how the company plans to continue subscriber growth. During the presentation, Roku also shared that it would be adding even more original content to The Roku Channel, like its first-ever Spanish language cooking series “Delicioso,” home improvement programs like “Honest Renovations” with Lizzie Mathis and Jessica Alba, and more. Holmes said that this new slate was handpicked to align with the audiences that love this type of content. “Great dramas and comedies, amazing lifestyle shows, new reality and competition formats that are built for the streaming generation.” He then announced The Roku Channel’s new reality rom-com “To Paris for Love: A Rom Com,” because his argument was that streamers “love binging reality dating shows — because who doesn’t?” In 2021, reported that across platforms, reality was a top contender in streaming lists. In a time where major competitors (like ) fumble the ball with content, the FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) service is positioning itself as a tempting option for binge-watchers who desire free content. |
Argo AI, Zoox and Coalition for Reimagined Mobility to discuss what makes a ‘good AV citizen’ | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Developers of autonomous vehicles have long promised that the technology will fundamentally change the way people, packages and freight move around the world. But will these robotaxis, self-driving trucks and delivery bots be good citizens in the cities in which they operate? And what does a “good AV citizen” even look like? We’ve invited three experts to our stage to sift through this complex subject and talk about how design, the vehicle’s self-driving system and a developer’s approach to operations can affect the accessibility, equity, safety and usability of AVs. We’re excited to announce that Argo AI’s chief corporate responsibility officer Summer Fowler, Riccardo Giraldi, who is senior director at Zoox and Alisyn Malek, executive director at the Coalition for Reimagined Mobility will join us at on May 18 and May 19 in San Mateo, California. This panel discussion will explore issues such as inclusive product design for physical accessibility and operational equity to ensure that both private and public AVs are available in all communities. Good AV citizenship also means a vehicle that safely interacts with the cyclists, pedestrians and human-driven cars it will encounter every day. We’ll dig into the challenges in meeting these goals. Fowler and her team are responsible for community engagement, workforce development, environmental sustainability, philanthropy and volunteerism. She also oversees diversity, equity and inclusion, and she’s dedicated to ensuring that Argo AI remains committed to, and accountable for, the social and environmental effects of its operations. Prior to joining Argo, Fowler served as technical director of cybersecurity risk and resilience at Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT cybersecurity division, a technical member at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and a software engineer at Northrop Grumman. Giraldi leads the Zoox Experience team to define the future of autonomous mobility and design an unprecedented experience for passengers and cities. Prior to joining Zoox, Giraldi worked at Microsoft leading the incubation of innovative products, including Microsoft HoloLens, Mixed Reality applications and Surface devices. He focuses on the evolution of our relationship with technology to invent and design innovative solutions to help improve people’s lives and accelerate our progress toward a more sustainable future. Malek, a change maker in the mobility and automotive sectors, has led organizations, driven investments and developed products. She focuses on building consensus among automakers, global mobility players and regulators in advancing mobility policy. From EV product development, corporate venture and strategy at General Motors to developing the first-of-its-kind AV transportation solution as the co-founder and COO of , Malek has a deep understanding of the automotive and emerging transportation industries. Join Argo AI’s Summer Fowler, Zoox’s Riccardo Giraldi and Reimagined Mobility’s Alisyn Malek for what promises to be an exciting conversation about building AVs for all through accessibility, equity and inclusion. breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them.
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Snap unveils a Cameo partnership, new ad format and more original programming | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Building on the stream of announcements around creators and AR from its , Snap today introduced several more initiatives across advertising and content during its presentation at the . Most notably, the company is launching a new creator program in partnership with celebrity greeting app Cameo, a new advertising product called Snap Promote and a slate of new original programs. A new global offering, the was built by Snap and created by Cameo for Business. The program allows Snapchat’s video advertisers the ability to partner with Cameo’s top talent to create custom short-form video ads for the social app, the company says. This includes the over 45,000 celebs on Cameo, like actors, athletes, musicians, reality stars, influencers and others. It also potentially offers another way for top creators to make money by connecting them with new advertiser partnerships via Snapchat following last year’s launch of Snap’s Creator Marketplace. Snap During its beta phase, Mattress Firm partnered with a range of Cameo talent, driving an 8-point lift in ad awareness, which is 2x the category norm, notes Snap. The Snap Ads portion of the campaign also had a video view rate of 3x the retail category average, it said. Participants in the campaign included public figures, athletes and stars like Erin Andrews, Mario Cantone, Kerri Walsh Jenning, The McFarland Family, Lyanna Kea, Davina Potraz, Mary Fitzgerald, Johnathan Taylor, Ron Harper and Shareef O’Neal. However, few of these are established on Snapchat, instead favoring platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Other tests from Kraft and Molson Coors were also run during the beta, Snap says. Another new announcement emerging from the NewFronts is a new Snap advertising product, Snap Promote. This solution is aimed at content partners on Discover, offering a way to expand beyond their organic reach with Snapchat’s For You feed on the Stories page. The ad product, which is already integrated with Snap’s Ads Manager, was recently tested with the NFL, which resulted in 7x as many Snapchat users, on average, subscribing to the NFL profile on Stories. Of course, the NewFronts are also a time when businesses pitch their latest content to media ad buyers, not just their programs and features. Here, Snap announced a slate of new original programming, noting that over 80% of the U.S. Gen Z population had watched at least one Snap Original last year. Snap Among the shows announced were the following (in Snap’s own words): The company said it’s also renewing “Charli Vs. Dixie,” featuring the TikTok stars, along with “The Me And You” show, which uses Snapchat’s own Cameo technology (not to be confused with the celeb app) to turn Snapchat users into the actors in shows the film with friends. Snap additionally said it has extended its after 205 million people watched sports content on Snapchat in 2021. And, for the first time, the NFL and NBA will collaborate with Snap on a number of Spotlight Challenges for its in-app TikTok competitor, Spotlight, in the year ahead. Amid growing concerns about the brand-safety aspects of social media content, Snap promoted its ongoing equity partnership pledge as a means of showcasing why its platform should be in media buyers’ considerations. Snap said it’s working to highlight content from a diverse community across its original programming. Partners who make the pledge commit to a variety of inclusivity initiatives including diverse staffing both on and off camera as well as organic partnerships with advocacy groups. are partners: Bunim-Murray Productions, Eagle Vision, Future Studios, Kids at Play, Leopard USA, Liquid Light, Maven, NEO Studios, Ovrture, Portal A, Propagate Content, LLC, Propagate Content’s Big Breakfast, Unanimous Media and 44 Blue Productions, a Red Arrow Company. Snap The company also revisited some of AR shopping announcements from last week, including its in-app virtual try-on experience called Dress Up, its 3D Asset Manager improvements, Camera Kit for AR Shopping and more. Snap said that over 250 million Snapchatters have engaged with AR shopping Lenses more than 5 billion times since January 2021, which is another way for brands to participate on its platform. |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Creating financial models, UiPath’s plummet, pitch deck pro tips | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | When robotic process automation company UiPath filed to go public in March 2021, the startup had just closed a $750 million round that helped it clinch a $35 billion valuation. Although its initial IPO price range was slightly below that figure, post-debut, it bounced back to a $43 billion valuation at $90 per share. As of this writing, however, A year ago, “RPA was the fastest-growing area in enterprise software,” wrote Enterprise Reporter Ron Miller at the time. The sector was “growing at over 60% per year, and attracting investors and larger enterprise software vendors to the space.” Last quarter, UiPath grew its revenue by 39%, so “the company fits neatly into the high-growth SaaS bucket,” wrote Ron and Alex Wilhelm. Even so, its valuation has plummeted to just under $10 billion. To better understand this reversal of fortune, they looked at declining revenue multiples for SaaS companies and took a closer look at the RPA market to see whether the sector still has as much potential as many believed. “They are the strongest company in the segment and well financed in this growing market,” said Forrester analyst Craig Le Clair. Did UiPath’s valuation get hit by the same shrink ray affecting other software companies, or are other factors at work? According to Ron and Alex, “the case of UiPath … is slightly hard to grok.” Thanks very much for reading TC+ this week! Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images The pressures facing first-time founders are enormous. In addition to building a team and raising funds, they must also quickly become familiar with basic business operations. The upside: Setting up and maintaining financial models isn’t difficult, and once they are are populated with data, it’s easier to stay on track when hiring, fundraising and calculating runway. In a comprehensive TC+ article, Slidebean co-founder and CEO Jose Cayasso shows how to create spreadsheets that will help scale teams, track expenses, identify KPIs and “understand how fast your company can grow.” / Getty Images At TechCrunch Early Stage, Managing Editor Matt Burns hosted Lotti Siniscalco, a partner at Emergence Capital, for a session on pitch deck basics. Between their conversation and audience questions, Siniscalco identified several basic best practices, along with potential potholes where many founders tend to twist their ankles. “If your business requires a lot of preparation to understand the nuances before you meet the VC, you probably need to reframe your story a little bit and simplify,” she said. “You have two minutes to make an impression, so take out the things that are not must-haves.” / Getty Images To paint a detailed picture of the competitive landscape for product-led growth cybersecurity companies, investor Ross Halieliuk tracked over 800 products in a market map that includes more than 600 vendors. His map uncovered several trends redefining PLG adoption right now in the cybersecurity industry, and some of it is bad news for early-stage startups. In this environment, most CISOs are experiencing “vendor overload,” which means small players that lack a robust network and large marketing budgets can’t participate in the same sales channels as incumbents. If your investors won’t approve a series of invitation-only dinners with your target clients, what are your options? / under a license. Felicis Ventures Partners Viviana Faga and Niki Pezeshki appeared at TechCrunch Early Stage to share advice for SaaS founders in growth mode: “If you really want to take down the 800-pound gorilla, you need to make a product that is significantly better,” said Pezeshki. “And all of the things that we’ve talked about prior to this one point kind of lead to this ’10x better’ concept.” Here’s of their presentation and the audience Q&A session. |
Wordle! (but not that Wordle!) is now in the hands of mobile tech firm AppLovin | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | After the popular online game , an unrelated older mobile game that shared the same name benefitted, gaining an explosion of downloads as iPhone users mistook it for the web game making headlines. Now the developer of the iOS game Wordle!, Steven Cravotta, has cashed in on this case of mistaken identity — he’s handed off his game to mobile marketing firm and game maker AppLovin in an undisclosed deal. Neither AppLovin nor Cravotta would comment on the deal terms, but AppLovin confirmed the iOS app Wordle! is now run by its studio Lion Studios Plus. A rep for Cravotta said “Steven cannot comment on the acquisition at this time.” While you may have now , later , you may have missed the story earlier this year about how a mobile game of the same name was blowing up on the App Store. Cravotta said he had been surprised to find a game he created as a teenager five years ago suddenly being downloaded 40,000 times per day, up from just 10 downloads per day the month before, had reported at the time. As it turned out, iPhone users had gone to the App Store in search of the Wordle game everyone was talking about and had been downloading Cravotta’s game by mistake. Cravotta’s Wordle! game was similar to the online version that everyone was playing. He said he had created it as a teen because he wanted to make something that would challenge people’s minds and be a great game for kids. But the app never took off. Cravotta promoted it for around half a year, he says, before deciding to move on to other things. “It just sat in my developer account for the longest time getting maybe one to two downloads a day for six years … until all this craziness happened,” Cravotta tells TechCrunch. The popularity of the web game, however, continued to boost the downloads for the mobile title in 2022. “It was more than 40,000 [downloads],” Cravotta notes, correcting the earlier estimates. “It was up to six figures of downloads — hundreds of thousands — at one point,” he says. The mobile game monetized through paid advertisements and in-app purchases. While Cravotta could have tweaked the game to make even more money to capitalize on the surge of users, he left it untouched. “I just kind of let it run and do its thing,” he says. According to data from Sensor Tower, the mobile game was downloaded approximately 18.9 million times. The vast majority of the installs (>99.6%) arrived after the web game went viral — with downloads spiking on Jan. 12, 2022. From Feb. 12, 2022 onward, the game has seen 13.7 million downloads — or about 72% of its lifetime installs since its April 2016 launch, the firm said. And despite the fact that it’s not the game users were seeking out, it’s managed to hold some gamers’ attention. Today, the iOS game is still the No. 19 mobile game in the U.S. by average monthly active users as of the first quarter, right behind bigger titles like Among Us and just ahead of notable games like Minecraft and PUBG Mobile. While no one would have really blamed Cravotta for just sitting back and cashing checks, he wanted to do something more with his good fortune. In February, Cravotta reached out to the founder of the viral web game, Josh Wardle, whose hit title had given his own such a boost. He then announced generated by his Wordle! game to a charity that both he and Wardle agreed upon — , Boost Oakland. “I think my generation really wants to come together to make the world a better place instead of going after each other,” says Cravotta, 24. “There’s a million ways Josh and I could have gone to battle over this whole thing. But instead, we united forces and did something great.” What’s interesting, however, is that the game’s publisher account was updated from Cravotta to AppLovin-owned on Feb. 16, 2022 — which indicates the actual acquisition would have likely taken place before that date. News of the $50,000 donation, though, started making the rounds after Cravotta announced it via on Feb. 24, 2022. We did it man! One of the greatest moments of my life! Extremely proud to support ! — Steven (@StevenCravotta) Asked if perhaps the donation was funded by way of an AppLovin acquisition, and not just Wordle!’s revenue, Cravotta declined to comment. He couldn’t speak to anything related to the deal, the game’s proceeds or even if he was under some sort of NDA with regard to the AppLovin agreement. AppLovin similarly declined to comment, noting only that Lion Studios was bringing Wordle! to millions of mobile players around the world, and that the game is “exclusive to mobile devices.” Sensor Tower estimates Wordle! has generated close to $3 million to date. Cravotta, who still has a , says he’s moved on to a different side project following the Wordle! craze. He’s now working on an app called PuffCount, which aims to help people quit vaping. The app now has 200,000 downloads and is being promoted across TikTok, where the account has 90,000 followers and has generated 50 million views. The developer says he’s happy that what happened with Wordle! has given him the opportunity to promote this project, which he views as “an opportunity to help people live healthier lives.” “I’m really happy that I was able to donate $50,000. And I’m really proud to have this platform to encourage young entrepreneurs to take bets on themselves,” Cravotta says. |
Bunq to acquire group expenses app Tricount | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | , a European challenger bank based in Amsterdam, has announced that it plans to acquire , a popular mobile app to manage group expenses. Bunq isn’t disclosing the terms of the transaction and the acquisition is pending regulatory approval. Tricount is a simple yet effective way of tracking expenses as a group. For instance, if you are traveling with friends or if you live with roommates, the Belgian startup lets everyone add expenses, which can be useful when it’s not the same person buying things for the group. At any point in time, group members can check who owes what so that they can settle up. Tricount offers additional options. For instance, you can add expenses in multiple currencies or split expenses unevenly. Tricount has amassed quite a large user base with 5.4 million users. The app is free with ads. There’s also an optional subscription that unlocks pro features, such as CSV exports and statistics. It competes with other mobile apps, such as . “Tricount’s commitment to simplicity, transparency and community perfectly aligns with our own values. I’m very happy that we’re able to offer Tricount’s users many new ways to make life easy,” Bunq founder and CEO Ali Niknam said in a statement. While Bunq lets you split a payment with friends, the feature is designed for a group of people who use Bunq. Tricount is a bank agnostic solution. This is an interesting move as these startups don’t offer the same thing at all. Bunq is a challenger bank with account numbers, debit cards and, yes, subscription fees. On the other hand, Tricount is a lightweight, mostly free utility app with some virality factor as it only works with groups. Tricount has a large audience but doesn’t generate as much revenue per user as Bunq. It could act as the top of the funnel for Bunq products and services. While Tricount’s app is available globally, the company focuses specifically on users living in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Italy. Bunq also operates in these markets. “We fully subscribe to Bunq’s mission and are very proud to be a part of it. I’m excited for the many opportunities this gives our users,” Tricount co-founder and CEO Jonathan Fellon said in a statement. In other news, Bunq is announcing a handful of new features today. With Jackpot, users can participate in a lottery by paying with their Bunq card, adding money to their account and inviting friends. The app has been slightly rearranged. Users can now customize the home tab with accounts, cards and other features. In the community tab, users can now respond to posts from the app. |
Exclusive look at patent filings reveals Our Next Energy’s plans for a no-compromise EV battery pack | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | their futures on electric vehicles, they’re beginning to confront the hard realities of economics and physics. Prices for nickel and cobalt, two key elements used in EV batteries today, have skyrocketed, far outpacing inflation. At the same time, existing lithium-ion battery technology is improving, just not fast enough. That’s sent companies searching for alternatives, from solid-state batteries to exotic materials and components. Many of those are years away from commercial use, though. , founder and CEO of , thinks we already have many of the pieces we need. Ijaz wants to take two battery types — one optimized for daily commutes and the other for long road trips — and stuff them into the same pack. The idea is to let each type play to its strengths while the other covers for its weaknesses. ONE after driving a Tesla 752 miles on a single charge but not much was known about its technology. But now, TechCrunch has reviewed ONE’s patent applications and has an exclusive look at how, exactly, the company plans to merge different battery types into an uber-pack that’s twice as energy dense as what’s in today’s EVs while still being able to handle everything from daily commutes to bladder-busting multistate journeys. If ONE can deliver, its technology could help free consumers from range anxiety while also making EVs cheaper and safer, potentially unlocking a wave of purchases. Typically, EV batteries use one type of battery chemistry, and that chemistry has to be optimized to balance competing demands, including how much energy they can store, how safe they’ll be in crashes and how long they’ll last before they break down. Oh, and they shouldn’t be too expensive. It’s no easy task, and in the end, the battery ends up compromising on at least one of those goals. Ijaz realized that while it’s unreasonable to try to fulfill all of those objectives with cells of a single type, it’s possible across a group of cells. All Ijaz had to do was figure out a way to make them work together. |
Apple snags longtime Ford exec as the iPhone maker powers up EV car project | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Apple has hired a longtime Ford executive to provide the iPhone maker with automotive expertise, signaling that its mysterious car project is still alive. Desi Ujkashevic, Ford’s global director of safety engineering, will join the software giant’s efforts to develop a fully electric autonomous car, which has been beset by delays, regulatory issues and executive departures. Bloomberg, which was , cited unnamed sources. Ujkashevic served in several roles since joining Ford 31 years ago, including developing EVs, vehicles exteriors and interiors and chassis components, according to her LinkedIn profile. She has worked on a range of Ford and Lincoln SUVs, as well as Ford’s Fiesta and Focus compact cars. Most recently, she has been responsible for all current and future program safety strategy (including autonomous vehicles), corporate rule-making, advanced strategy development, field service actions and program safety compliance, according to . She was previously engineering director for North American vehicle programs. Ujkashevic could help Apple navigate regulatory hurdles the company faces in testing self-driving prototypes on public roads. Her expertise in engineering and safety protocol can also help guide Apple in its project. Apple and Ford have poached from each other’s executive talent pool since the Cupertino, California-based company launched its so-called Project Titan in 2014. The project is perhaps Silicon Valley’s best known secret and rumors have swirled around its existence for years. In 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly acknowledged the program and said the company was . Most of the news out of the program in the five years since Cook’s remarks has been about new hires or high-profile departures. In September, , who had led Apple’s special projects team, to provide the automaker with expertise in software and advanced technology. Field, a former Tesla executive who helped launch the Model 3, was replaced by Apple Watch lead Kevin Lynch. Lynch said he aims to . |
Deal-flow newsletters surface gold nuggets for investors | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | one day fund 1,000 companies per batch? Its president, Geoff Ralston, . But for the tech press, the possibility creates a conundrum: We can do our best to , but we can’t cover in its early days. This situation, it turns out, creates an opportunity for an emerging source of startup curation: deal-flow newsletters. “The early-stage part of the tech industry deserves to be documented as it’s where every startup’s journey begins, and there are so many compelling ideas being tried,” said Martin Bryant, whose PreSeed Now newsletter . “This newsletter’s sweet spot is companies that have moved beyond an idea on the back of a napkin but are yet to raise external equity investment.” Investors are the target audience of PreSeed Now and its peers, such as Spain’s . The new U.K. newsletter doesn’t have numbers to share yet, but Vermú does, and they show proof of demand: It garnered in mere months. Do investors want what deal-flow newsletters offer? And what’s in it for newsletter creators and the startups they feature? Let’s dive in. There are several reasons why investors sign up for a deal-flow newsletter, Bryant and Vermú co-creator Aitor Rodríguez told TechCrunch. Business angels are a big part of the readership, as are early-stage VCs — both types of investors are constantly looking for outstanding startups to add to their pipeline. As for later-stage funds, they like companies to show on their radar well in advance to know what’s coming. |
Twitter Circle, a ‘Close Friends’-like feature, is testing | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Twitter Circle, the app’s spin on an Instagram-like “Close Friends” feature, is finally testing. The feature was teased as one of many potential product updates , and last month, it due to a bug. Now, a small number of users can shitpost to their 150 closest friends as the feature enters a live testing phase. Screenshot by TechCrunch Twitter says that the feature is in its early stages, which is why only some users have access. Even if you yourself can’t make a Twitter Circle, you can see tweets from users who do have the feature, so long as you’re in their Circle, of course. When you build your Circle, Twitter will recommend that you add mutuals that you interact with often (odds are, those people might be your close friends). You can add people who aren’t following you, but they probably won’t see your tweet since … they aren’t following you. When you reply to a tweet that someone sent out to their Circle, other members of the Circle can see your response and interact with it (unless if you’re on private). Some Tweets are for everyone & others are just for people you’ve picked. We’re now testing Twitter Circle, which lets you add up to 150 people who can see your Tweets when you want to share with a smaller crowd. Some of you can create your own Twitter Circle beginning today! — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) When you add or remove people from your Twitter Circle, they won’t know, so don’t worry about accidentally sending out awkward notifications. Unlike Google+ Circles ( ), you only get one Circle, so choose its purpose wisely. To tweet to your Circle, click the oval above the text box when you’re writing a tweet, then change the audience from “Everyone” to “Twitter Circle,” the same way you would tweet to a . We can only hope Elon Musk understands that apply to Twitter Circle tweets, too. |
Hiring top startup talent on a budget during the Great Resignation | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | wasn’t ginned up by corporate media to sell advertising impressions — if you’re trying to hire, the struggle is real. Since the pandemic began, the percentage of workers who quit their jobs reached a 20-year high, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. found that most workers exit for one of three reasons: They’re not making enough money, aren’t being offered opportunities to advance, and perhaps most importantly, many feel like they’re being disrespected. These factors mean that early-stage startups can no longer compete on the basis of salary and benefits alone. Instead, hiring managers must convince prospective hires that they will be joining a supportive culture where they can expand their skills while contributing to (and participating in) the company’s success. To learn more about how founders can optimize the recruiting and hiring process, find and develop talent, and uncover some best practices for closing candidates, I spoke with Glen Evans, a partner on Greylock’s core talent team, at TechCrunch Early Stage. “The state of the job market is more competitive than I’ve ever seen it,” said Evans, who has two decades of experience overseeing recruiting and team building at fast-growing companies including Slack, Facebook and Google. At Greylock, he leads a team that advises portfolio companies on recruiting and talent acquisition. “There’s a very limited supply of talent and probably the largest demand I’ve ever seen, so it’s really important for people to think about how to differentiate and build the foundations and the habits to get talent right in the early days,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.” Before staffing up, Evans said founders and hiring managers should first develop a process that can scale as the team grows. “I’ve seen a lot of companies do this very loosely, and it leads to a lot of problems down the road,” said Evans. “Create a process that is structured, organized and repeatable, where you have clear lanes and clear coverage areas for the interviewers. Don’t make it too rigid, but have some structure so you can train new hires.” Each person involved must have a clearly defined role, but it’s also key that each aspect of the hiring process aligns with marketing, branding, product value and the company’s overall mission. To promote cohesion, train employees on basic best practices for interviews and create scorecards that highlight desired criteria. “Scorecards will help you align to the signals, have the right questions, create some structure and then communicate it to make sure people are following it,” said Evans. “They’re not hiring by gut instinct — they have actual facts that they can tie back to why this person will be a good hire.” The catchphrase originated in a drama about high-pressure real estate sales tactics, but it’s also a mantra for early-stage founders in team-building mode. Evans said team members need to carve out time every week for recruiting, meeting candidates and tapping their networks to source new hires. |
Deal-flow newsletter PreSeed Now to introduce future UK crown jewels to investors | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Pre-seed startups are often too early for showtime, but not for deal-flow newsletters. Launching today, deal-flow newsletter will present early-stage startups from around the U.K. to investors twice a week, with one in-depth company profile per issue. “U.K. companies, and particularly the earliest-stage companies, don’t necessarily get covered by the existing tech press,” founder said. A former tech journalist himself, he understands why, but also long wished that something like PreSeed Now existed. “And then last year, I realized that other people kind of wanted it as well.” In addition to its geographic focus, the newsletter has a type. “The sweet spot for PreSeed Now is B2B and deep tech startups that have built, or are building, something and have founders with credible domain expertise,” Bryant wrote in the newsletter’s . A former editor-in-chief at The Next Web, Bryant has “run a newsletter in some form since 2016,” he . This time, he opted for a subscription-based approach, he told TechCrunch. “For something like this that is providing business value, there’s a lot to be said for a paid subscription model … and it provides a sustainable way of running the newsletter.” While he only has nice words for Revue, Bryant chose Substack for its more advanced features and flexibility for paid newsletters. ( .) PreSeed Now will be available for free for the next two weeks. After that, the subscription model will kick in, with a price tag of £10 per month or £100 per year — some $125. In parallel, a free subscription tier will offer a monthly roundup of the startups covered in recent weeks. gives a good sense of the direction the newsletter is taking. Bryant’s first pick is , whose business isn’t exactly glamorous: Its focus is sewage tech. “I never expected to launch this newsletter with an article that includes a quote that begins, ‘The joy of sewage is …’ but here we are,” Bryant joked. In 1,500 words, Bryant explained why Untap is worth untapping — its “almost real-time COVID monitoring could transform how we live with viruses.” He doesn’t omit mentions of challenges and competitors along the way, but this actually helps add context to an otherwise fairly technical business. Bryant honed these skills as a consultant, “working with startups, helping them with the way they communicate and put themselves forward into the world. … I’ve always enjoyed helping make sense of companies that are emerging, maybe before they’ve even made sense of what they’re doing themselves.” With PreSeed Now, Bryant is hoping to help both the startups and his readers looking for deal flow. “It’s sometimes a little harder for companies that have more of a niche focus to gain the interest of certain kinds of investors who maybe wouldn’t consider them without seeing them in a context that frames them in a wider market and explains a bit more about them.” This niche focus is often found in deep tech ventures, where startups can have “a very scientific or engineering-focused view of the world and don’t necessarily think about or prioritize how they sell what they do.” As it happens, it is also a sector that is , and in which investors . For its own deal flow, PreSeed Now will rely on talking to universities, accelerators and programs like Entrepreneur First, of which Untap was part; Conception X, which helps those with doctoral degrees become founders; and Ignite NI, which focuses on Northern Ireland. Drawing in these connections will help Bryant make sure that the startups he curates are both credible and diverse. He expects founders to come from a large range of backgrounds, including underrepresented ones. “There are all sorts of people you wouldn’t expect to fit the traditional stereotype of a tech founder. It’s important to reflect those people and their expertise and approach to building a company, because sometimes it’s a bit different.” Backgrounds aside, PreSeed Now will also be diverse in its geographic scope. Bryant is based in Manchester, and his background includes time supporting emerging startups in the North of England at Tech North. With this in mind, he won’t only feature startups from London and the Southeast, but also from Belfast, Edinburgh and other places across the U.K. Getting featured can be validating for entrepreneurs outside of the usual spotlight, Bryant said. “Sometimes they maybe don’t feel as part of the tech scene, as welcomed by the whole of the tech scene as they should be, and representing them through a newsletter like this can be a positive thing.” But PreSeed Now’s target customers are investors, not startups. Will the prospect of deal flow outside of their usual focus and pattern-matching convince them to subscribe? Only time will tell, but that’s Bryant’s bet. |
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We need app store competition, not Apple’s 1960s-style paternalistic monopoly | Karen Gullo | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | A pair of bills moving through Congress would force some of the largest tech companies to cede control over how people find and use mobile apps, leading to more competition and lower prices. But Big Tech companies, especially Apple, want to scare people with dire warnings that the bills would put their security in jeopardy. Tellingly, Big Tech firms are not so loud about other things jeopardized by the bills — their app store monopolies and ability to make more money off mobile customers and app developers. Pro-competition bills — and — would open up the largest app stores, including Apple’s and Google’s, by requiring them to allow competing third-party app stores and alternate channels for in-app payments. The bills would also stop the largest app store operators from preferencing their own apps over competitors’. iPhone users would have the freedom to install less expensive third-party apps and choose to shop at third-party app stores. While some alternative app stores might have a greater volume of malicious apps, others may take a stronger approach to security and privacy than Apple — one that isn’t limited by the drive to enhance a monopolist’s bottom line. Alternative app stores or app-vetting services could also offer important security- and privacy-enhancing apps that Apple has banned from iOS devices. Nothing in the bills would stop Apple and Google from vetting apps for their phones for privacy and security or prevent them from offering new protective measures. So, because they trust Apple’s vetting of apps and are happy with the apps Apple lets them download, many iPhone users will choose to stick with the App Store. For those users, nothing will change under these bills. The choice would be theirs. But Apple doesn’t want that. It wants to decide what, and how, users can purchase mobile apps. And it’s not just because the company is concerned about users’ privacy and security, which indeed it is. No, it’s also because Apple wants to protect its monopoly profits. Apple gets a of what users pay for an app, a cost to developers that gets passed on to consumers. Locking users and developers into the App Store helps drive Apple’s profit margins on the service into the stratosphere — to more than 70% by . We shouldn’t be naïve to think that such a bonanza, and not just security concerns, motivates Apple. In 2020, for example, , an application development software company, from making important security fixes on its new paid email service HEY because it violated App Store rules. The “violation”? HEY developers through Apple to ensure that Apple received its 30% cut. Apple threatened HEY that until changes were made, security updates would be blocked. This was despite HEY following the same payment pathway that Netflix and Amazon have always used. Following a public pressure campaign and negative press, Apple relented and allowed the security fixes to proceed, but other app innovators face the same threat. Apple’s claims that letting users have more choice would put them in harm’s way is the same old paternalistic take on a market that we saw when it sought to maintain its mid-20th-century monopoly over telecommunications. The country has rejected these paternalistic arguments in the past. Not Apple. In , a lawsuit in which the maker of Fortnite alleges that Apple has an illegal monopoly in iOS app distribution, Apple claims that only its complete control over app distribution and in-app payments can protect users. Yet, it bans apps and features that would serve a wider range of security and privacy needs, like VPN apps for international travelers and apps that tell the user if their device has been jailbroken. ( in the case siding with Epic.) While the to find that Apple is a monopolist, she recognized that things must change. She wouldn’t let Apple delay enforcement of a California court ruling that says the company can no longer prohibit developers from pointing to other means of payment besides Apple’s own payment systems. She also embraced the idea that Apple could vet iOS apps for security but still allow iPhone users to get mobile apps from other sources that also screen for security and privacy. Monopolistic control is not the way to ensure user security. Competition, not walled gardens, is the best way to create better, safer products. Apple’s fear-mongering that competition would prevent it from addressing security is disingenuous, because monopoly control over app distribution is simply not necessary to protect users. In fact, it makes users less secure. Congress should see through Apple’s attempts to foment fear about a world where it does not have complete control over iPhone customers’ App Store experience and pass these pro-competition bills. Users can have choice security. |
Digital health startups brace for a post-Roe world | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | , the Supreme Court is set to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, a precedent that protects a women’s choice to have an abortion. The move, still yet to go through, would be devastating to the women’s reproductive rights movement and a stunning jolt to healthcare in the United States. In response to the looming potential shift, the founders of digital health startups spoke up about how the overturn will impact women. For many startups, especially those explicitly focused on women’s health, the future could directly clash with the mission they’ve raised millions and spent years trying to scale: expand access to healthcare across the board. Nathalie Walton, the chief executive of Expectful, said that restriction “to women’s access to safe abortion services will lead to adverse health implications for countless women.” Walton took her post at the helm of Expectful after herself going through a pregnancy that almost killed her. The haunting experience made her an example of a reality she had long known: to be a pregnant Black woman is to be at risk, regardless of economic background. While Expectful largely works with women who are on the journey to motherhood, the app dedicates an entire unpaywalled section of its content to how to navigate pregnancy loss. It is in the process of adding a section on abortions to its library, too, and that should be finalized by end of month. “As state laws evolve in the wake of the Court’s forthcoming decision, we will continue to create content and programs to support all women, regardless of their unique situation,” Walton added. Expectful is one of a growing number of venture-backed digital health startups aimed at serving women. According to data from PitchBook, investment in healthcare companies with a female founder or co-founder accounts for 43% of dollars raised by women last year. In 2011, the share was less than 25%. The growing profile of female-founded healthcare startups includes Maven, which made history last year Founded by Kate Ryder, Maven started as a support service for pregnancy loss and high-risk care management as the founder herself waded through the emotions and confusion of going through a miscarriage. Today, the platform works with employers to give employees a suite of services ranging from preconception to post-pregnancy to family care. A core tenant of the company is “that all people have the fundamental right to make private decisions about their bodies and their well-being, and to decide when, if and how to have a child,” Ryder wrote in a statement on LinkedIn this morning. Ryder said that Maven has been mobilizing since last September when the Texas legislature passed a law that banned abortion after six weeks and ahead of the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade. She said that Maven Wallet, an app that helps consumers calculate the cost of reproductive procedures and facilitate reimbursement, will be leveraged to help ”American companies cover expenses for women seeking out-of-state care.” The company is also providing options counseling and a forum for people to learn about their choices. Hey Jane is a digital abortion clinic that connects patients to licensed medical providers and delivers abortion pills to doorsteps. Co-founder Kiki Freedman said that the overturn makes abortion care via mail “now likely to be the most viable form of access for most of the country.” The startup believes it will be able to operate in the six states it presently operates in: New York, California, Washington, Illinois, Colorado or New Mexico. Freedman estimates that these states account for 52% of abortion volume nationwide. A hurdle, she expects, will be a lack of education among consumers on medication-induced abortions. The majority of abortions performed in the U.S. are via medication, except she says that only 1 in 5 people know it’s an option. “It s imperative that we continue to educate people about this safe, effective and common abortion option,” she wrote in a statement. Hey Jane is preparing for a surge in patients and has already seen an increase after the aforementioned Texas ban. Freedman said that it’s important for California and New York to prioritize legislation that would protect providers, in-state and out of state patients and clinics. “While we wait for the official decision to come down, Hey Jane is more dedicated than ever to putting the power back in people’s hands through telemedicine abortion care,” she said. Lauren Berson founded digital fertility program Conceive to better support women on one of the loneliest journeys in healthcare. She tells TechCrunch that Conceive stands by its decision to help all women maintain access to good care “and will do everything in our power to live our values.” The startup is donating to local abortion funds and is marching today at 5 p.m. “And most importantly continuing to educate our community on how abortion is healthcare! The key thing is this is just a draft. Not yet final. And maybe the wake up call everyone needed,” she said. Lux Capital partner Deena Shakir has spent years investing in digital health startups that focus on women’s health and equity, including Alife, Waymark and Maven. “Like many women and allies at the intersection of healthcare, tech and policy, my phone has been buzzing with notifications from texts, WhatsApp, Slacks, Discords, emails, calls,” she told TechCrunch. Her top priorities are mobilizing public discourse, donations and offering resources to employees and employers. “Reproductive rights are human rights, and women’s health is population health. They are inextricable,” she tells TechCrunch. “While a tough road ahead, I’m heartened by the women founders, investors and legislators committed to addressing this. More soon.” |
A diminished Firefox turns 100 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 5 | 3 | Mozilla launched of its Firefox browser today, but more so than a day for celebration, it feels like a day for nostalgia. That’s a nostalgia for a time when Firefox was truly revolutionary after it broke out of the Mozilla Application Suite back in 2002 and quickly threatened the hegemony of the utterly dismal Internet Explorer. But also a nostalgia for the open web, which Mozilla was able to champion when Firefox still had a dominant market share. It’s much easier to lead when your product has 30% market share and growing (like Firefox had around 2010) and your biggest competitor is declining quickly, but it’s hard to make your voice heard when you are under 4%. Today’s Mozilla, after many lean years, seems to be on a path to , but its dependence on Google makes for an uneasy alliance as Mozilla tries to champion online privacy in a world dominated by the giant advertising company it utterly depends on. Firefox, too, is now a perfectly competent browser — but so is every other browser. It’s no secret that over the years, Mozilla got distracted. There were efforts to build a for affordable smartphones (which still lives as a fork under the KaiOS banner), VR browsers, arguments over whether there should be sponsored tiles on Firefox’s new tab page, a WebRTC video chat service and much more. Today, with Firefox Relay and the Mozilla VPN, it seems the organization has refocused a bit. Its focus on privacy resonates more today than it ever did — but for now, that hasn’t changed the browser’s fortune. Even today, for most users, privacy is a nice to have but not a reason to switch browsers, especially when there are plenty of extensions that can essentially do the same (though Firefox’s are a game changer and should be available in every browser, as far as I’m concerned). Yet with all of the resources being poured into Chromium, it’s hard to see how Firefox and its Gecko engine will remain competitive in the long run. Browsers today are incredibly complex pieces of software. With Servo, Mozilla started a project to build a new engine from scratch. That was in 2012. Ten years later, we’re only seeing pieces of that in Firefox — and when Mozilla laid off many of its employees in 2020, that included the Servo team. There also hasn’t been a lot of innovation around Firefox lately, all while Chromium-based browsers are finding their niches, with , for example, tapping into the market for advanced users who want endless customizability, going for the privacy-conscious crypto fans and keeping the Windows faithful happy after finally ditching Internet Explorer (despite occasional missteps into bloatware). It doesn’t help that Mozilla never made it easy to build new user experiences around its browser engine while Chromium made it a core feature. Users may not care about the engine underneath their browsers, but developers who want to experiment with new browser paradigms will always opt for Chromium. The web is better off today because of what Mozilla built with Firefox. I hope we’ll see version 200 eight years from now. |
Alan raises another $193 million for its medical one-stop shop startup | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | French startup has raised a new €183 million funding round ($193 million at today’s exchange rate). The company sells its own health insurance products and has expanded to other medical products and services. In other words, Alan wants to build a healthcare super app and a one-stop shop for all your questions and needs when it comes to your health. “We decided to raise again at the start of the year,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve told me. “We’ve been receiving some investment requests. We could see that markets could turn around and we didn’t know how long it was going to last. Now, we are self-sustaining and will be until we reach profitability.” Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), the venture fund of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, is leading the round. Existing investors are also participating in this new round, such as Temasek, Index Ventures, Coatue, Ribbit Capital, Exor, Dragoneer and Lakestar. Today’s round is a Series E round and it comes just a year after the startup . While Alan has essentially raised the same amount of money twice, the company’s post-money valuation has jumped quite drastically. Last year, the startup was valued at €1.4 billion. It has now reached a €2.7 billion valuation (that’s respectively $1.5 billion and $2.9 billion at today’s exchange rate). Alan’s core business and biggest revenue source hasn’t changed. The company is a health insurance company built for the 21st century. After getting approval from regulators, Alan has built its own underwriting engine. The company can now sign up clients of all sizes and from all industries. Big companies can tweak every single parameter to build the right insurance package for them. As for people who are covered by Alan’s health insurance, the experience is better than with other insurance companies. Alan tries to automate as many processes as possible so that the user experience is as seamless as possible. For instance, if you’re paying at the doctor’s office and it’s a simple bill, Alan automatically processes the bill and transfers money to your bank account via an instant transfer. The result is that you are often reimbursed before you are back home. France’s national healthcare system will also reimburse its part automatically, but that usually takes a few days. “We keep rolling out our model, which is 100% based on the loss-ratio formula. We sell insurance products at cost — more or less. And then we add our membership fee on top. This model works really well,” Samuelian-Werve said. And the company has managed to attract 300,000 members so far across 15,000 companies. Alan now says it generates an annualized revenue of €200 million. Alan Alan’s founders have been clear about their vision from the . They don’t just want to build an insurance company. They want to build a healthcare startup that expands beyond insurance products. Very quickly, users discovered that they can use the Alan app to find a health professional near them using Alan Map. The company is also working with general practitioners so that they can answer your questions from a chat interface. Not all of those side bets have worked. A year and a half ago, Alan Alan Baby, a second app focused on your baby’s health. It provided a mix of content, some community discussions and the ability to start a discussion with a doctor. The company is going to shut down Alan Baby in the coming weeks. “In 2022 and 2023, mental health is going to be a very high priority. That’s why we decided to shut down Alan Baby so that we could reallocate resources,” Samuelian-Werve told me. When it comes to mental well-being, Alan offers a consumer app following the . There’s also a B2B service called Alan Mind. The company provides exercises and content. Employees can also contact an expert whenever they need to. Some companies subscribe to Alan Mind exclusively. Others add the Alan Mind package to their existing Alan contract. With Alan Clear, Alan now also offers a way to try on glasses using augmented reality. If you find a pair that you like, you can buy it directly through the app. By the end of 2025, Alan wants to reach profitability. It will require 3 million members, but the startup also plans to hire 1,000 people by then. The company currently operates in France, Belgium and Spain. There won’t be any new market in 2022, but Alan could launch a new country in 2023. While Alan has ambitious goals, it currently has a tiny market share. “96% of the French population has health insurance coverage. We still have less than 1% in market share,” Samuelian-Werve said. “We are at the very beginning of our story. It is a first baby step but everything is still ahead of us,” he added. Alan |
Binance gets regulatory nod in France, paving the way for Europe push | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, has gained regulatory approval to provide digital asset services in France, the first European country where it has acquired such permission, the company said in a on Thursday. The greenlight was granted by the country’s market and banking authorities and arrived months after several regulatory setbacks that the exchange faced on the continent. “Effective regulation is essential for the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency,” says Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, in a statement. In November, France’s financial industry regulator said that Binance must focus on “anti-money laundering compliance” if it wanted regulatory support to set up a regional hub in Paris. The U.K. published a in August saying the company did not have the written consent to operate there. Germany also issued a similar . Binance has been busy trying to show European regulators its commitment to practice compliance and promote the region’s blockchain ecosystem. In November, Binance to “support the development of the French and European blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem” as well as to set up an R&D hub in France. Originally founded in China, Binance has largely pulled out of the country following Beijing’s sweeping crypto ban. Many Chinese-founded crypto firms have moved their core management to Singapore, which is quickly emerging as a regional hub for blockchain startups. Binance is still seeking a new home and in December that it would withdraw its license application and close down operations in Singapore. |
Sidekick Health grabs $55M for digital-first care programs | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Digital therapeutics plus pills? Iceland’s has developed a gamified digital care platform that’s designed to support healthcare outcomes by applying personalized behavioral lifestyle nudges, including alongside clinical treatments like drugs, to augment, extend and support patient care for a range of chronic diseases and conditions from cancer to cardiovascular health, diabetes and arthritis — a formula that’s now scored it $55 million in Series B growth funding. The new round is led by London-based VC firm Novator Ventures, with participation from Wellington Partners, Asabys Partners and Frumtak Ventures, as well as a U.S.-based strategic investor which it’s not disclosing yet but says will be revealed at a later stage. The 2014-founded startup raised a from many of the same investors. As the Series B closes, Novator Ventures’ general partner and founder Birgir Mar Ragnarsson is joining Sidekick’s board. Commenting in a statement, he said: It has been impressive to follow the rapid growth of the company from the close of its A round 18 months ago. The company may have begun in the Nordics but I am proud to say that Sidekick is now a globally recognized digital therapeutics player. Novator Ventures recognizes the immense opportunities presented by third-generation therapeutics and Sidekick’s ability to scale and operate at the global level. We look forward to working closely with the Sidekick team to transform how healthcare is delivered. Sidekick Health still isn’t breaking out overall customer numbers (it’s a B2B digital health business so its targeting health insurance firms and pharma companies) but says it’s inked partnerships with some of the biggest names in healthcare — such as U.S.-based Anthem to offer “digital-first” care programs, and global pharma giants Bayer and Pfizer, to develop what it describes as “integrated combination therapeutics consisting of a molecular drug and a digital therapeutic.” The startup tells us its platform has helped 40,000+ patients globally at this stage, with its products currently available in six languages. It largest markets are Europe and the U.S., while it has offices in the U.S., Germany, Sweden and its home market of Iceland. Flush with growth funding it says it has a big U.S. push planned. “Europe and the U.S. are currently our largest markets but we are forging some partnerships in Asia,” it tells TechCrunch. “But it is early days, and we will be focusing hard on increasing our commercial footprint in the U.S. going forward. “Sidekick will use the funding to support and expand our existing U.S. presence. Our North American strength and focus is exemplified by the recent additions of Pamela Stahl (CCO and president, North America) and Mitchell Mudra (COO) to the team. By 2026, it is estimated a billion people will be served by some form of DTx [digital therapeutics] annually. Coupled with the U.S. spending a very high proportion of GDP on healthcare, the U.S. is a market where our products and services will achieve the strongest patient outcomes.” The startup tells TechCrunch it grew revenue threefold in 2021 — attributing that growth to a mix of existing and new commercial relationships. “This year Sidekick plans to double our team from 120 to 240 team members across our four office locations,” it adds. Pharma giants look keen on digital therapeutics not only as a scalable tool to (potentially) augment the efficacy of their drugs with app-based support (e.g., by putting digital tools in patients’ hands that can help remind them to take pills and support them in other ways, such as to make beneficial lifestyle changes around diet and exercise, or get on-demand help with mental health issues or pain management, etc.), but as a way to extend the value of medicines — enabling drug giants to file new patents linking existing medicines to digital therapeutic programs that are far cheaper and easier to develop and iterate than he costly business of drug discovery and research. “We are building toward a portfolio of over 40 medical-grade digital therapeutics by 2026,” says Sidekick, discussing its product roadmap. “Currently, 18 are in Research & Development, with a total of 14 commercial partnerships secured so far, either with payers or pharma partners or, in some cases, both.” “Sidekick has commercialized digital therapeutic products already, in therapeutic areas ranging from rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and breast cancer,” it adds. “We will prioritize a substantial amount of our resources toward expanding our oncology portfolio, as well as investing into increased personalization, which will allow us to serve people with multiple chronic conditions even better.” With Series B funding in the bank, Sidekick also has more partnerships in the works — with three new collaborations set to be announced in the coming months including one focused on supporting patients with breast cancer by helping patients manage side effects. The startup has published a number of studies aimed at proving out the efficacy of its digital therapeutics — including looking at use of its platform to reduce stress and fatigue in patients with ; or this small feasibility study into improving disease management for patients with ; and this small randomized control trial examining use of its digital lifestyle program for outpatient treatment of , to name a few — and it says it takes “life science-grade evidence generation very seriously to ensure that we offer clinical companies a clinical-grade product for their patients.” “Top 10 and 20 pharma and Top 3 Payers are partnering with us on their ‘future of franchise’ assets, in areas like oncology, metabolic, cardiovascular, and immunology and immunotoxicology,” it adds, suggesting that its “life science quality evidence rigor and approach to precision medicine is driving this.” |
Hikvision shares plummet after report that the Biden administration is considering more sanctions | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Hikvision shares after a that the Biden administration is planning to impose more sanctions on the surveillance camera company, accusing it of enabling human right abuses. The Financial Times reports that the sanctions would have “far-reaching consequences because companies and governments that deal with Hikvision … would risk violating U.S. sanctions.” According to the Financial Times, this would be the first time that the White House has imposed these kinds of sanctions on such a large company. The company is the world’s largest manufacturer of surveillance equipment. In 2019, Hikvision and Dahua, another surveillance tech company, for its role in enabling human rights violations among Muslim minority groups in China, including the Uyghurs. And under , U.S. persons are barred from investing in Hikvision. But many municipalities in the U.S. still use Hikvision cameras. , at least a hundred U.S. counties, towns and cities have bought surveillance equipment made by Hikvision and Dahua. They are able to do so because federal actions do not apply at the state and city level. In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, a Hikvision spokesperson said, “The potential action by the U.S. Government, as reported, remains to be verified. We believe any such sanction should be based on credible evidence and due process. We look forward to being treated fairly and without bias.” Hikvision is among a slew of Chinese tech companies that the U.S. government has targeted with individual actions rather than having a coordinated plan to contain their rise. TikTok . More recently, under the Biden administration, Weibo was by the Securities and Exchange Commission. DJI, along with seven other companies, was , for alleged involvement in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. The drone maker was already on the Department of Commerce’s Entity list, meaning American companies can’t sell it components unless they have a license. |
Cameo conducts layoffs a year after hitting unicorn status | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Cameo, a platform that allows fans to buy personalized videos from celebrities, has laid off 87 members of its staff, according to a tweet from CEO Steven Galanis. The layoffs, , impacted a quarter of the overall workforce and was a result of the company needing to balance costs with cash reserves. “Today has been a brutal day at the office. I made the painful decision to let go of 87 beloved members of the Cameo Fameo,” Galanis wrote on Twitter. “If you’re looking to hire hungry, humble, smart, kind, curious, learning machines who love to win — and you see Cameo on their resume — look no further.” TechCrunch reached out to Cameo for further specifics but a spokesperson only provided the following statement from Galanis: To support both fan and talent demand during the pandemic lockdowns, Cameo’s headcount exploded from just over 100 to nearly 400. We hired a lot of people quickly, and market conditions have rapidly changed since then. Accordingly, we have right-sized the business to best reflect the new realities. The decision to reduce our headcount was a painful but necessary course correction to ensure that we regain focus as well as achieve the agility to navigate new challenges, the ability to optimize our financial resources, and time and space to nurture newer business segments like Cameo for Business, Represent and web3 that we believe will be as big as the core business that put us on the map. We are bullish on the intermediate and long-term future of Cameo, and the actions we have taken to balance our costs with our cash reserves will best position the company to take full advantage of those growth opportunities. A number of recently laid off employees spoke to TechCrunch, on the condition of anonymity, about the cuts. They say that teams across all organizations were impacted, including the C-suite roles of chief product officer, chief people officer, vice president of marketing and the CTO. Severance packages were offered to employees, including eight weeks of base salary. “I know it was a really hard decision that they handled with maturity and didn’t come easily to them,” a former employee said. “Especially knowing some of our executive staff was impacted, you could tell it wasn’t something done to protect any specific group of people but rather to improve the company as a whole.” As for the actual communication of layoffs, a laid-off employee said that they heard about the reduction in workforce in the news before they were notified. Employees were eventually sent a calendar invite and received the news via Zoom. Today’s layoffs come a little over a year after the company, which has backing from Google Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins, These days, though, the coveted $1 billion valuation status — that many companies hit during the pandemic — seems to be coming with growing pains. Cameo’s cuts come amid a broader pullback in the private tech sector, after public tech stocks have spent months seeing share prices slashed. This week, Amazon aggregator after being valued at nearly $5 billion in 2021. Robinhood, a consumer investing and savings company, announced that it is cutting 9% of staff, roughly 300 people. Other companies that have scaled down team size include and At one point, Cameo was making impressive money — largely due to the pandemic’s impact on the creator economy and virtual life. that, in 2020, the company made a gross revenue of $100 million, up 4.5x over the past two years, tech rightfully became more critical than ever for the services that it provided to the average human, whether it was empowering an entirely distributed workforce or helping us get access to health services via a screen. In this case, a light-hearted app that connected fans to celebrities brought the creator economy and joy to us during a Very Online Moment. Yet, tech at large also became vulnerable. Pandemic-era growth has always had a caveat: The tech companies that found product-market fit and demand beyond their wildest dreams are the same tech companies that knew their win was at least partially dependent on a rare event. Cameo’s layoffs mean that the startup needs to rethink how it will build, and this time, that answer is hopefully not at the cost of its own employees. |
Bull City Venture Partners is the opposite of flashy — and its backers approve | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | is the opposite of flashy. The 20-year-old, generalist venture outfit only invests in two to four companies each year. It mostly invests in founders who’ve been around the block at least once, catching them as early in their new adventure as possible. And from its headquarters in Durham, North Carolina, it largely invests in East Coast startups located between Philadelphia and Atlanta. Investors seem to approve of its deliberate approach. According to firm founder Jason Caplain, the outfit just closed on $50 million in capital commitments for its fourth fund, roughly doubling the size of its previous fund, which was itself a big step up from the firm’s first two funds ($15 million and $5 million, respectively). It’s not the kind of fast rise that industry watchers have grown accustomed to seeing in recent years. Caplain insists that’s kind of the point. “We’re driven by carry,” he says, referring to the profits a venture firm makes off its successful bets. “We’re not asset gatherers” who make a living off management fees. Seemingly, Bull City is holding its own, having filled a bit of a vacuum in the market when it launched. Indeed, Caplain, a Massachusetts native who moved to Durham in the late ’90s to work for Red Hat, says he decided to launch a venture firm partly because Red Hat had turned to investors far away in California (Benchmark and Greylock) before it went public in 1999. “The goal initially was to create a fund where future Red Hats could turn for capital,” says Caplain, who wound up raising money from Red Hat’s former CEO, COO, head of engineering and head of business development over the years. (Before Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019, the company itself invested in Bull City’s previous fund.) Today, the firm remains focused largely on local companies, more of which are being launched by employees of regional giants like Epic Games and SAS Institute, a 40-year-old analytics behemoth that is reportedly planning to go public by 2024. But Caplain — joined by longtime partner , with whom he leads the firm (they also brought aboard a newer addition, , last fall) — says the partnership is now focused on the East Coast more broadly and that, 10% of the time, it invests even further afield. For example, in 2020, the firm of LaunchNotes, a Bay Area-based firm, because of an earlier relationship with its founder, Tyler Davis. The strategy is paying off, says Caplain. While it’s been a while since Bull City had a portfolio company go public — the handful over the years include the multichannel commerce company ChannelAdvisor (its IPO was in 2013) and Motricity (which went public in 2010 and was folded into another outfit several years later after a lackluster performance) — numerous portfolio companies have been acquired in recent years. Among these, the Durham-based e-commerce marketplace Spoonflower sold to Shutterfly last August for a reported . Caplain suggests Bull City also saw a nice return from the 2019 acquisition of the performance management outfit VividCortex to SolarWinds for . Bull City isn’t exactly leaning into more startups, based on that momentum. W The one thread throughout, says Caplain, is a founding team “that makes me want to quit my job and go work there” and that further needs — and wants — the firm’s help. “We can’t differentiate by check size,” he says, “so our competitive edge is to be a great partner and to ensure the founders we work with have an incredible experience with us. We want them to make referrals and come running back to us when they start their next company.” |
Twitter tries to woo anxious advertisers with a slate of premium video content at the NewFronts | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Twitter returned to the this evening to pitch its upcoming premium video content slate to advertisers, as it had in previous years. But this time around, the company is faced with a group of media buyers who are worried about the future of the social network as a “brand-safe” platform for their marketing efforts. As have noted, some Twitter advertisers have already begun planning how to stop spending on Twitter if Elon Musk’s takeover leads to the service becoming a more toxic and abusive social network. Advertisers understand that Musk’s vision of Twitter as a “ is one that doesn’t necessarily align with their interests. Brands are historically adverse to having their messages appear next to abusive and divisive speech, hate speech and misinformation. And if Musk were to roll back Twitter’s existing content moderation controls, it could lead to an increase in the sort of content that brands like to avoid becoming more prevalent across Twitter’s platform. In recent days, Twitter attempted to assuage advertisers’ fear by with assurances that Twitter would remain a safe place for them in the future by separating their ads from any harmful content. But businesses know that Twitter can’t make promises about changes Musk has yet to make. Twitter knows that, too — in , Twitter warned that a loss of ad dollars is one of the risk factors related to the acquisition. In previous years, Twitter’s presentation at the NewFronts has a more tepid affair. The company isn’t really thought of in the same space as larger streamers and media companies like , or . And it tends to have less to offer than rival social media companies like Meta and now — all of which have already presented this week. This time, however, Twitter didn’t just have to pitch its content, it had to convince advertisers it has enough relevant and interesting content to retain them as partners, despite the changes ahead. While the presentation fell short of being the “spectacle” sources promised, it did include a lot of loud music and boisterous cheering from the audience for every announcement (which was … not suspicious at all). Essentially, Twitter aimed to convince advertisers that their content would be available in a brand-safe zone on Twitter thanks to its upcoming premium video partnerships. Twitter After taking the stage, Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette promised the audience the company’s investments in its video and ads business would continue. “I hope that you see that we are going to continue to invest in the parts of our business that bring scroll-stopping content to the timeline,” she said, first pointing to Twitter’s premium video product before highlighting its ad program’s success. “Twitter Amplify has been one of our fastest-growing products over this past year, proving that it’s turnkey products like this that drive real results for you,” she continued. “We’re committed to growing our audience. We are committed to investing in our product innovation, and we are committing to increasing the velocity with which we ship products. We’re committed to deepening the relationships with the top rights holders and premium content publishers in the world and also across this country. This is extremely important to us because we know it matters for you to be able to connect your brands with the people that matter to you. So I hope that you have seen this commitment from us tonight,” she said. Twitter’s content lineup — which this year included both video and audio deals, thanks to Twitter Spaces — wasn’t significantly differentiated from the type of deals that are expected for the social network, however. Twitter The company announced an expansion of a partnership with Condé Nast for live events like Vogue’s Red Carpet at the Met Gala, the Vanity Fair Oscar Party Red Carpet and the Pitchfork Music Festival. It said it will also include other content from Wired, Bon Appetit and The New Yorker, plus highlights, Twitter Moments and multiple Twitter Spaces (audio events) per month. Twitter is also expanding its partnership with Essence and the WNBA. The former will showcase highlights from events like the Essence Festival of Culture and the Global Black Economic Forum; weekly clips from series like “The Receipts” and “Essence Uncovered” and monthly Spaces. The WNBA and Twitter are announcing a multiyear extension of their now six-year partnership, which will include 12 live games during the 2022 season. For the first time, the @WNBA account will also host Spaces throughout the season and during WNBA tentpole events and the offseason. E! News, meanwhile, will launch a new livestreaming show for Twitter called “While You Were Streaming,” hosted by Danielle Robay. The show covers popular TV shows like “Stranger Things,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” “The Real Housewives” and others, where Robay will be joined by a rotating selection of guests, experts and past stars. Twitter Twitter will also newly partner with Revolt to bring music, lifestyle, urban entertainment, sports and social justice content to the platform, including “Drink Champs,” a hip hop podcast; Revolt Summit; “The Crew League,” where artists compete on the basketball court; financial literacy series “Assets Over Liabilities;” and “Revolt Black News Weekly.” The company also said it will be the first social partner to test an integration with NBCU’s cross-platform video-certified measurement partner, iSpot. Advertisers who purchase Amplify sponsorships from NBCUniversal will gain additional insights about the incremental audience generated by their Twitter media campaigns with this deal. Finally, Twitter said it will launch a pilot program that will bring real-time highlights about global events to the platform. The program will allow advertisers to promote and run pre-roll on live event pages with the highlights, which will allow Twitter users to discover content in their timeline and in the Explore tab. “At the heart of advertising is a desire to not just reach consumers but to connect with them around something they care about. Twitter Amplify helps brands get there,” Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s VP and new head of U.S. Client Services, said in a statement shared ahead of the event. “When advertisers tap into Twitter’s premium video content, they are aligned with the topics that our uniquely engaged audience is already obsessing over. Premium, brand-safe content that serves diverse communities is more important than ever today. We’re grateful to find new ways to expand this inventory on Twitter, giving our advertisers and marketers a place to drive incremental reach and results” Wheeler added. Personette concluded tonight’s presentation with an offer of gratitude to the brands (still?) working with Twitter. “Your partnership makes us better each and every day. And we are exceptionally grateful for how you stand with us … ,” she said. |
From partners to competitors: What Stripe’s latest move means for Plaid | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Earlier today, payments giant announced a new product that fills in some significant gaps in its play to be the financial services layer for merchants and other businesses whose models are based on enabling transactions, . That new product is called and the company says it will give Stripe’s customers a way to connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is pretty much exactly what another fintech giant, Plaid, already does. And the move by Stripe positions the company directly against Plaid, a former partner. A quick backgrounder for the unacquainted: Stripe was valued at a year ago and now inching closer to an IPO. Founded in 2010 by John Collison (president) and his brother Patrick Collison (the CEO), Stripe saw the value of building a simple way for developers to integrate payments into any app or site by way of a few lines of code, at a time when digital and specifically online payments were starting to take off. , which — as mentioned above — helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, in April of 2021 raised at a valuation of $13.4 billion. The nine-year-old company made headlines last year when the deal it had struck to be acquired by consumer credit giant Visa for $5.3 billion fell through due to regulatory concerns — an event that many say turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the startup. The tension now is that some people, including Plaid CEO and co-founder Zachary Perret, believe that Stripe may have used its relationship with Plaid to glean information on how to build this sort of product. Both Plaid and Stripe declined to comment on the topic. But in a in response to Stripe PM Jay Shah’s own about his company’s new product, Perret wrote: “Wow! Jay, you took interviews with Plaid & asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years, and your team sent repeated RFP’s (under NDA!) to us asking for tons of detailed data. I wish y’all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods.” Interestingly, Stripe’s new product is powered by Plaid competitors MX and Finicity. While some might argue that Plaid doesn’t own the open banking market, others appear to be more upset about the fact that Stripe may not have been transparent with Plaid about its intentions. And while Perret is not talking to the media, he’s been pretty vocal about the differences between Plaid’s offering and what Stripe just released. In that exchange, he goes back and forth with an “Edwin” from Stripe on various aspects of what the two companies do. The news is likely not a shock to Perret or Plaid because on March 29, he quoted a tweet from Patrick Collison regarding Stripe’s launch of its first ACH support product, saying only that it was “cool” to see that company’s announcement and that there was “lots to come.” Those updates to Stripe’s ACH Debit product were a hint of the news today considering that it was launched with the ability to instantly verify bank accounts, a feature that is competitive with Plaid’s Auth product. The two companies were partners considering that at one time. On Plaid’s site, there are details of a partnership between the two companies to “offer frictionless money transfers without the need to ever handle an account or routing number.” The language there said: Use to instantly authenticate your customer’s account and automatically generate a Stripe so that you can accept ACH payments via their . This guide is designed for those who already have a ACH-enabled account at both Stripe and Plaid. If that’s not you, head over to the to get started. You’ll be able to sign up for a Plaid account from there. No word on if that partnership is still in place. But in light of today’s news, even if it technically still is, its future appears on shaky ground. |
AutoRabit, which develops tooling for Salesforce CRM devs, lands $26M | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | , which provides CI/CD tools for Salesforce customer dev teams, today announced that it raised $26 million in a Series B funding round led by Full In Partners, bringing the startup’s total raised to $52.5 million. CEO Meredith Bell says that the new cash will be put toward product development and expanding the size of AutoRabit’s 135-person workforce. AutoRabit was founded in 2015 by Vishnu Datla with the goal of creating a suite of dev tools for companies using Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) products. Datla, a former Cisco consultant, previously launched TechShopy, a business process management solutions vendor specializing in platforms like OpenText and Pega. “Fortune 1000 companies in regulated industries need to manage their Salesforce environments and Salesforce development with the same rigor and vigilance they have learned to apply to the rest of their more traditional IT apps and systems,” Bell told TechCrunch in an email interview. “But Salesforce is different, and without the right DevSecOps solutions that are created specifically for the differences in the Salesforce environment, Salesforce customers can see security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and mounting technical debt.” AutoRabit’s tooling platform offers features including version control, deployment, testing, data loading and sandbox management — all ostensibly tailored to Salesforce software devs’ needs. AutoRabit also helps to manage and merge branches of CRM code from multiple developers, leveraging metadata to identify and commit code from across teams and scanning the code for vulnerabilities using a rules-based system. AutoRabit Beyond this, AutoRabit can back up and recover Salesforce data, metadata, file attachments, chats, knowledge articles and custom datasets. The platform’s subscription plans include daily unlimited backups, and Bell claims that it can handle the transfer of millions of Salesforce records while ensuring data integrity between source and destination environments. Customers might be understandably wary of storing their backed-up CRM data in a third-party cloud. Fortunately, AutoRabit offers self-hosted plans and dedicated, isolated cloud instances, as well as packages specific to industries like healthcare, life sciences and banking and finance. “Salesforce was created to be a CRM, not a development platform, so the standard suite of dev tools are missing, and AutoRabit’s flagship product … was created to fill that gap,” Bell said. “One of the biggest challenges in Salesforce is the lack of tools available for monitoring and securing the software supply chain.” There’s certainly an appetite for tools and services built on top of the Salesforce ecosystem. to Forbes, Salesforce now has more than 19% share of the CRM market. One estimates that the market for third-party Salesforce services alone reached $9.12 billion in 2019. For its part, AutoRabit claims to have 400 customers, with a special concentration in regulated industries. Sensing a larger opportunity, Bell says that AutoRabit plans to invest a portion of the new funding in AI and machine learning technologies for automation. “As AutoRABIT leverages this funding round to continue building out our Salesforce toolset, machine learning and AI will play a major role in anomaly detection, monitoring developer and user behavior, and implementing zero-trust access models across systems,” he added. |
Aurora unveils fleet management platform to optimize autonomous operations | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation has unveiled a fleet management platform that can be used to help optimize operations for the startup’s trucking and ride-hailing products. announced the platform, named , alongside its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, during which the company presented investors with a series of milestones on its path to commercializing its trucking product, Aurora Horizon, and launching its ride-hail product, Aurora Connect, both of which rely on the same autonomous stack. Once Aurora reaches commercialization, Beacon will give customers access to real-time data of their vehicles, such as health, status and current location, as well as real-time alerts about things like vehicle status, ETA, traffic conditions, updates to missions and major weather events, the company says. All of these tools will be in addition to Beacon’s ability to schedule, dispatch, monitor and coordinate fleets, which Aurora is already using on fleet operations today. One real-world example Aurora gave is in the event of a tire with low air pressure; an alert will be sent to the fleet manager, who can then redirect the vehicle to a nearby service center. The startup is using Beacon with its active commercial pilots today including with , and, most recently, — all three of which involve hauling freight autonomously in Texas. The learnings from those partnerships helped inform the creation of Beacon, the company said. “This level of insight into and control over the real-time location, status, and objectives of autonomous vehicles will help Aurora’s customers maximize their utilization and responsiveness to shifting conditions and network demands,” Aurora said in a statement. Beacon also provides remote support in the event that an Aurora Driver-powered vehicle encounters a situation that it hasn’t run into before and can’t figure out, like getting pulled over by law enforcement, something AV peer . Eventually, as the company approaches commercial deployment, Beacon is meant to be offered alongside the Aurora Driver, the company’s self-driving system, as a product that can be incorporated via API into the existing systems of carriers, fleets and networks, according to Aurora. Aurora closed out the first quarter of the year with an operating loss of $143 million, which is down from $192 million during the same quarter last year. Similarly, its net loss this quarter was $77 million, down from $189 million last year. The company ended the quarter with nearly $42 million in “collaboration revenue” for development work associated with the company’s agreement with Toyota, which will support its planned ride-hailing product. In March, the company , which will be tested in Texas on high-speed routes. Ultimately, collaboration revenue is not revenue, and as a pre-revenue company, Aurora declined to provide any guidance, allowing the company to finish its call, including Q&A, in about 30 minutes. Aurora ended the quarter with $1.5 billion in cash and short-term investments, money that the company will use to continue to develop the Aurora Driver for scaled commercial deployment, focusing on getting its trucking product to market first. The company also expects to get an additional $52 million in cash from Toyota over the remainder of the year, which should help it to develop its ride-hailing product further, according to Richard Tame, Aurora’s CFO. Aurora shares are up slightly after hours, and are currently trading at $4.10 at the time of this writing. |
Dear Sophie: Any USCIS updates on automatic work extensions and premium processing? | Sophie Alcorn | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Hungry, Your desires for security and freedom resonate with so many! Some exciting updates from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on the topics of automatic work extensions and premium processing are just in; it’s wonderful news that USCIS is committed to improving its quality of service. They’ve been backlogged due to the pandemic, funding issues and paper-based processing, which I recently explained in my on the state of immigration. USCIS just announced the , a new final temporary rule that will soon take effect to reduce backlogs and strains on the workforce. Previously, there was a 180-day automatic EAD extension for certain categories; it will be extended up to 360 days for a total of up to 540 days, from May 4, 2022 to October 26, 2023. This announcement will benefit many categories, such as H-4, L-2 and E-1/E-2/E-3 spouses, as well as asylees and asylum-seekers, TPS holders and applicants for adjustment of status. In this year’s H-1B lottery, which closed in March, USCIS received a record 483,927 registrations, which was a whopping 56.8% increase from 2021. Of the 85,000 H-1Bs allocated each year, 20,000 are earmarked for individuals with a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. university. USCIS reported that about 31% of all registered individuals had advanced degrees. Unlike the annual H-1B lottery registration process, which is digital, actual H-1B petitions are still paper-based. Filing an initial H-1B petition or an extension requires submitting the application form and supporting documents in hard copy to USCIS. Joanna Buniak / For extensions, beneficiaries of H-1B petitions are by the I-797 Receipt Notice for the timely-filed Form I-129 petition by the employer, up to 240 days. This is why some employers choose not to invest in premium processing for H-1B extensions. |
Daily Crunch: European startup studio eFounders unveils its next-generation CRM tool | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Happy Star Wars Day. These are not the 4th of Mays you’re looking for. But it is a pretty awesome newsletter we’ve got for you today, so there’s that. Extra special good news if you’re a student: Our events team put together a deal for you, with a chance to get a free ticket to Disrupt! Yeeeeeessssssss — if you’re a current student or recent graduate, book any and you’ll automatically be eligible to participate in our student pitch competition for a chance to win a free Disrupt 2022 ticket. If you’re into clean air and water and surviving and stuff, come check out our , for example. – and Eric Ries has contributed a lot to the startup world, being a pioneer in the Lean Startup movement, but he’s got a couple of things to answer for as well. Not least, the term . In his piece, raves about how . We really like this story, and Haje (who is writing this section) is a little weirded out by tooting his own vuvuzela (that’s a real instrument, not a sex joke), talking about himself in the third person singular the first person plural in the same paragraph. Here we are, wrestling with language, doing our best. It seems like everyone wants to crawl further upstream and invest in earlier and earlier stage companies. We’re pretty excited to see , with a brand new “standard deal” model for pre-seed investments. Over on our subscription site TC+, dug into the severity of . Moar Newz: / Getty Images For years, consumers have used substances like cannabis and microdoses of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms to elevate their mood and sharpen mental focus. Now that regulators and clinicians are reevaluating these drugs, investors are exploring what this mind-expanding market has to offer. In the U.S, more than 400 clinics offer ketamine therapy, and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, is on track for FDA approval in 2023. In Oakland and Denver, “magic mushrooms” have already been decriminalized for adult use. To learn more about the applications attracting VCs to psychedelics, reporter Anna Heim interviewed five who are active in the sector: , saying today it will export locally produced Indian goods worth $20 billion by 2025, up from the . Soon you will be able to get an NFT with your tall decaf cappuccino (if you know, you know). , and we report that the idea behind it is not only to “help Starbucks better connect with younger people,” but also to “provide a way to create incremental traffic and revenue, not only in terms of retail, but also incremental revenue as a result of its own business.” by the end of the year in an effort to “control, limit, and monitor transfers of data to and from the EU,” we report. It seems this is a continued effort by Google to be in better compliance with regulatory privacy laws. Here are some other stories we think you’ll like: |
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Formula 1’s Fernando Alonso launches first e-bike at Miami Grand Prix | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Alonso’s bike will be sold online at or in-store at SimplyEV and Simply Mac locations across the U.S. for $3,999. |
Match Group Google Play Store complaint triggers Dutch antitrust probe | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | A competition complaint against Google’s Android Play Store by Match Group, the company which owns Tinder and a number of other dating apps, has led to a preliminary investigation by the Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) into whether the tech giant is abusing a dominant position, the regulator said today. Match Group declined to comment on the substance of its complaint — but the ACM confirmed it has received “a request for enforcement regarding the Google Play Store.” “Dating-app providers allegedly are no longer able to use a payment system other than Google’s payment system. In addition, dating apps claim they are no longer allowed to refer to other payment methods either,” the ACM also said in a short press statement. “Dating-app provider [Match Group] has asked ACM to assess whether Google abuses its dominant position with these practices. ACM will therefore conduct a preliminary investigation in response to this request.” The regulator declined to answer questions about the complaint. In its own statement, a Google spokesperson told us: The ACM has been locked in as applied to local dating apps — which led it to order that Apple must allow dating apps to use alternative payment processing services and issue a series of fines as the regulator judged Apple had failed to comply with the order. The fines hit the maximum allowed for by an associated court order by the — €50 million — when the ACM said it was considering a revised offer by Apple. However, according to , the regulator has decided Apple’s offer still does not comply with its order and it reports being told on Monday that the ACM is preparing a new order with new penalty payments. The enforcement tug of war between the ACM and Apple from the European Commission, with EVP Margrethe Vestager hitting out at Apple for deliberating choosing to pay a fine rather than comply in remarks back in February. That’s notable because the Commission itself will in charge of enforcing a new ex ante competition regime against the most powerful tech giants which is due to come into force across the EU later this year. The bloc’s lawmakers agreed the final details of the (DMA) — cementing a regime that will enforce a set of operational rules on so-called “internet gatekeepers” which look set to shrink Apple’s and Google’s ability to micromanage how business users must operate on their app stores. Under the incoming pan-EU regulation, fines can scale up to 10% of global annual turnover for gatekeeper non-compliance with the regulation’s up-front obligations. That means DMA enforcements are both likely to flow faster and be harder for Big Tech to ignore than traditional ‘ex post’ competition interventions. |
Instagram test makes it easier to get product and service quotes from businesses | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Instagram is testing a new “Get Quote” button with select businesses on its app, Meta on Wednesday. The new button allows users to set up custom questions to ask customers prior to starting a conversation. Once customers fill out the questionnaire, they can then quickly request a quote from a business about a product or service. Select businesses can now put a “Get Quote” button on their Instagram profile or add a “Get Quote” sticker in their Stories. The new feature marks the latest push by Instagram into e-commerce by making it easier for customers and businesses to interact with each other on the platform. Meta notes that the new button should make it easier for businesses to generate leads and manage conversations. The new feature is rolling out as part of National Small Business Week. Meta is also introducing a slew of other features across its apps. Among the new features is a new capability in Messenger that will allow businesses to send promotional message campaigns to customers who opt in. The company is also making it easier to create Facebook and Instagram ads that open up to a WhatsApp chat by making it possible to create full ads directly from the WhatsApp Business app so that small businesses find new customers and grow faster. In addition, Meta’s Inbox service, which allows businesses to manage customer messages across Messenger and Instagram Direct, is now being integrated with WhatsApp as part of a small test. Meta says that by centralizing communications, businesses will be able to manage messages better and save time. The company plans to share more information about these tests in the future. “We’re announcing new tools for businesses to manage conversations and ads, as well as more ways to generate leads and share more about their business. These tools can improve how small businesses (SMBs) connect with customers and identify higher quality leads,” Meta said in a about the new features. Meta says people’s preferences for how they communicate with businesses are evolving and that they want to be able to communicate with businesses in the same way that they message with friends and family, which is why it’s aiming to make it easier for businesses to start conversations with these new features. |
As Dropbox heads into earnings, it desperately needs a win | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | file storage and sharing service will report its first-quarter earnings tomorrow, and for the former unicorn and present-day public company, the stakes appear quite high. Dropbox is coming off a year of growth stuck in the low teens, with to prove even slower growth in 2022. The performance Dropbox reports Thursday could bolster the company’s growth narrative, boost its guidance for the year, encourage its share price and assuage investors. Alternatively, the opposite is possible; if Dropbox reports earnings that disappoint the investing community, the company could see its share price fall further. The company has a 52-week high of $33 per share. The stock was down over 2% this morning at $21.30, but up from the 52-week low of $19.90. Dropbox has a market cap of just over $8 billion. That kind of performance, with falling valuation, decelerating growth and a stagnant share price, is bait for takeover deals, meaning that Dropbox’s ability to rip cash out of its operating business could help make it an enticing target for a hostile acquisition. The idea is not mere theorizing; erstwhile Dropbox competitor Box recently about its leadership, and Zendesk’s performance with external investors, forcing the customer support company . With tech valuations far from recent historical highs, Dropbox could find itself in the crosshairs of private equity firms, and a poor earnings report could kick off unwelcome deal-making. Let’s talk about the company’s recent and expected results, how vulnerable it may be, and, finally, who might want to buy it (if it comes to that). In the , Dropbox reported revenues of $565.5 million, up 12.2% from the year-ago period. For the full year, Dropbox did even better, posting 12.7% growth as it reached some $2.158 billion in revenue for the year. Fast growth? No. Solid? Sure. But when Dropbox looked ahead in its guidance during concerning 2021, the company’s expectations for this year were less encouraging. For 2022, Dropbox anticipates $2.32 billion to $2.33 billion in total revenue, figures that work out to growth of 7.51% to 7.97%, which, to be blunt, is not great. Single-digit growth is not a place that any public company wants to hang around in — unless it has a fat dividend and is content to keep costs low. Dropbox is not such a company. It is worth noting that Dropbox’s Q1 guidance of $557 million to $560 million worth of revenue brackets , according to Yahoo Finance data. At the same time, we wonder whether investors would be enthused if Dropbox posted in-line revenue of $558.95 million. What would a narrative-changing result be for Dropbox? In our view, to shake the malaise, a beat on revenue in Q1 and at least some modicum of guidance expansion for the year. Else, we could be looking to start a countdown clock. There are a few places where Dropbox could find a new home. The most obvious is private equity — selling the company to a financial entity. Such deals tend to target slower-growing, cash-generating entities that could support a heavy debt load and perhaps have a shot at lower costs or even accelerated growth. |
Pinterest quietly launches a livestreaming app for video creators | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Pinterest on Monday launched a new app aimed at making it easier for creators to livestream to its platform. The new Pinterest TV Studio app for and will allow select creators to go live on Pinterest as well as use multiple devices in order to achieve different camera angles, the app’s description states. The company didn’t announce the app’s debut — perhaps because it’s not broadly available to all creators at this time. Instead, upon first launch, creators have to enter in a code or scan a barcode that Pinterest provides in order to gain access to the livestreaming tools the app provides. Pinterest However, the addition of a dedicated livestreaming app is another example of how Pinterest is rethinking its place in the broader social media landscape, where TikTok’s rise has pushed other platforms to adopt a video-first focus. Today, major social players including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube have a TikTok-like short video feature available, and most offer features for creating live video content. Pinterest, meanwhile, has been working on its own video efforts with the launch of Idea Pins, a sort of video-first mashup of both TikTok-stye short-form video content and tappable Stories. The company last week said it’s seen over 25% growth in the save rate of Idea Pins quarter over quarter. And Pinterest users who follow multiple video creators on the site tend to visit Pinterest more often than those who do not, the company shared. Meanwhile, Pinterest last November also — a series of live, shoppable videos from creators focused on food, home, fashion, beauty, DIY and more. The shows air live, then later become available for on-demand viewing. The platform was initially only available to select, hand-picked creators at the time of launch, including folks like Christian Siriano, Monica Suriyage, Tom Daley, Manny MUA, Robyn Schall and others. It had earlier in the year inside the Pinterest app with top creators. According to data from Sensor Tower, the brand-new Pinterest TV Studio app has been live on the and since May 2, 2022. It has not seen enough downloads to rank the app on any app store charts and the firm isn’t able to estimate the total downloads at this time. However, the app is available in several markets outside the U.S., including Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Germany — signaling a potential global expansion of Pinterest TV efforts. Pinterest confirmed the launch with a statement but said it didn’t have more to share about the app at this time. “With more Creators developing innovative programming with Pinterest TV on the Platform, we’re continuously experimenting with new ways to help Creators bring their ideas to life,” a spokesperson said. |
Make human services more accessible without losing the ‘human’ touch | Alon Laniado | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | other automation tools to enhance the delivery of human services can make exclusive services like career coaching available to more people. But for this to happen, the human and tech aspects of a service must be balanced. My study of 65+ startups operating as tech-enhanced human services (TEHS) suggests that while companies should be ambitious about what tech can do for scaling a human service, they should also ensure that the human component of the service is not compromised. Many startups are automating parts of tasks historically performed by people while holding on to the human quotient for the parts that provide the best outcomes for clients. This is based on the premise that because certain services, like concierges, require people as part of the solution, fully automated apps are not enough. But, human time is often expensive and limited. By integrating technology with human expertise, companies can render their services more affordable and accessible. TEHS companies can be found in numerous industries — I’ve identified 66 such companies, of which 19 are unicorns operating in over 10 verticals. These companies all use various technologies to streamline parts of their service that require the time of a human expert. Alon Laniado For example, connects people with experts who help them shop for clothing and other personal items online. It uses surveys and algorithms to match clients’ preferences to clothing inventory. This is further curated down to a final product list by style experts who chat with clients about individual needs, including specific attire for events or incorporating the requirements of a medical condition. By reducing the time a stylist needs to spend on the process, Wishi is able to charge $40 to $90 per client. The company’s co-founder, Clea O’Hana, says partners like Farfetch and Saks Fifth Avenue who use Wishi have seen a sharp increase in transactions. “[That’s] thanks to the more granular data we capture from clients and the relation of trust they have with their stylist,” says O’Hana. Three conditions appear necessary for a company to enhance their service with tech. |
Porsche joins $400M bet on lithium-silicon batteries to juice up future EVs | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Porsche has read the room. With its first electric vehicle now the quintessential 911 sports car, the German automaker is responding by upping its bet on EVs, in part via a hefty investment in lithium-silicon battery developer Group14 Technologies. Porsche injected $100 million into Group14 as part of a larger $400 million Series C funding round. Other investors that chipped in include Canadian pension fund OMERS, Decarbonization Partners, private equity firm Riverstone, Vsquared Ventures and Moore Strategic Ventures. Group14’s key technology is a silicon-carbon powder that can either replace or augment graphite anodes. Graphite is used in most of today’s lithium-ion batteries, and it’s a sensible anode because it’s stable and can store a reasonable amount of energy. Yet as automakers push for higher energy densities, graphite is being pushed up against its limits. Silicon is an attractive alternative since it’s able to hold far more lithium — theoretically up to 10 times more. But that same benefit is also the silicon’s Achilles’ heel. Because silicon absorbs so much lithium, the molecular-scale expansion and contraction can degrade the anode’s structure, leading to premature failure. Group14 is one of many startups racing to develop silicon-based anodes that can be repeatedly charged and discharged without breaking down. To do that, the company infuses a porous carbon scaffold with a silicon-containing gas. The end result is a carbon compound that’s peppered with nanoscale silicon particles. Those particles serve to grab hold of lithium ions while the carbon scaffold serves as a stable structure so the anode doesn’t decompose as it’s used. Group14 says that its carbon-silicon material can be blended with graphite anodes, too, and that it can be dropped into an existing battery production line with few modifications. The startup claims that its SCC55 material can store 50% more energy than traditional graphite anodes. It has one battery materials plant online currently and has two more in the works, one a joint venture with SK Group that’s coming online later this year and another that’ll start producing in 2023. Group14 appears to be targeting production for Porsche battery packs in 2024. For an automaker like Porsche, which built its reputation on lightweight, high-performance sports cars, the prospect of a smaller and more powerful battery must be appealing. Advancing battery tech is key to decarbonizing the auto industry, which accounted for in 2018, per Greenpeace. Yet, this potentially beneficial deal does little to wipe away the dirty track record of some of Group14’s investors, a few of whom are prolific fossil fuel backers. Decarbonization Partners, for example, is a joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek. The pair has backed some intriguing, sustainability-focused firms such as mushroom leather startup , yet also recently pledged to “continue to invest in and support fossil fuel companies.” The $97.3 billion investing giant has a tendency to talk out of . OMERS’ also includes several crude oil and gas ventures, though the pension fund has promised to reach net-zero emissions across its investments by the distant year of 2050. For Group14, the new deal represents a big step up — by nearly a factor of 10. Prior to the raise, the Woodinville, Washington-based startup had reportedly secured a combined or so in venture dollars and government grants. |
China’s EV darling Nio turns to Hong Kong and Singapore amid US delisting risk | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Nio, an electric vehicle upstart from China, is planning to list its shares in Singapore, which will make the city-state the third base where it trades as geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. heighten. Nio on Friday that it is seeking a secondary listing of its Class A ordinary shares “by way of introduction” on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited, a way to list securities already in issue on another exchange. The company’s shares will continue to be primarily listed and traded on the New York Stock Exchange, where it debuted . Earlier this year, Nio completed a . The announcement came after the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission added over 80 companies to a of mostly Chinese companies facing expulsion from U.S. exchanges, which includes Nio and other tech behemoths like microblogging platform Weibo, video streaming site Bilibili, e-commerce platforms JD.com and Pinduoduo, Tencent Music Entertainment (Tencent’s music streaming empire) and gaming company NetEase. Li Auto and Xpeng, which are Nio’s rivals in China, are also on the list. The delisting watchlist represents a longtime standoff between accounting authorities in China and the U.S. In 2020, the Trump administration demanding more visibility into the books of U.S.-listed foreign firms, zeroing in on the auditing practices of Chinese entities. But the policy has not sat well with countries reluctant to turn over the data of their homegrown businesses, fearing national security risks. A handful of Chinese tech companies have acted preemptively by pursuing secondary listings well before they were put on the watchlist. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange saw a wave of “ ” by giants like , JD.com and NetEase, which would help them attract investors at home who are more familiar with their businesses while hedging against the risk of being kicked off U.S. bourses. |
A second Apple Store files to hold a union election | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 4 | Apple store employees in Towson, Maryland have and to hold an official union election. This marks the third Apple retail location in recent weeks that has taken significant steps toward becoming the first formally recognized Apple union, following stores in and . Calling themselves AppleCORE (Coalition of Organized Retail Employees), the union claims to have the support of the majority of employees at the store and is operating with the support of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers ( ). “We have come together as a union because of a deep love of our role as workers within the company and out of care for the company itself,” AppleCORE’s to Apple CEO Tim Cook says. “To be clear, the decision to form a union is about us as workers gaining access to rights that we do not currently have.” AppleCORE hasn’t yet listed specific demands it wants from Apple. Workers at the Atlanta store, represented by the Communications Workers of America, said in a statement that retail workers at Apple have been denied a living wage, cost of living adjustments and equitable stock options. , the union at the , is seeking a minimum pay of $30 per hour, more robust benefits including increased tuition reimbursement, more vacation time and better retirement options like higher 401(k) matching. Right now, Apple retail wages range between $20 and $30 per hour, plus some Apple stock. Apple retail workers also have access to healthcare and tuition reimbursement benefits. In order to gain formal recognition, these unions must earn over 50% of votes at an election, orchestrated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Atlanta store could be first to unionize, as they’re expected to vote . As of its announcement to file for an election, over 70% of more than 100 employees at the Atlanta store had indicated support for the union. |
Haun Ventures leads $50M round in NFT startup Zora Labs | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | The NFT ecosystem continues to chug along, but the vast majority of volume is still moving through the centralized halls of NFT marketplace OpenSea, leaving crypto VCs eager to find new channels. Katie Haun’s new firm, Haun Ventures, has led its first deal in NFT startup . The $50 million funding round values the company at $600 million. Zora’s protocol allows artists and developers to create NFT marketplaces and collections. Zora has its own primary marketplace where users can list NFTs, similar to OpenSea, but the vast majority of NFTs sold on its protocol take place on third-party sites. Crypto organizations like publishing startup Mirror and collective FWB have leveraged Zora’s protocol to sell NFTs to community members. In addition to Haun Ventures, backers in the round include Coinbase Ventures and Kindred Ventures. Haun notably led OpenSea’s Series B while at a16z, earning a seat on the board. |
Tony Fadell cleans out his garage | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | what I unearthed when I cleaned out my garage and found photos of everything I’ve ever made?” Tony Fadell tweeted in mid-April. It was a rhetorical question. Anyone with a passing interest in the last two decades of consumer hardware would jump at the opportunity to see what the man behind the iPod, iPhone and Nest Thermostat had stashed away in those giant Home Depot boxes. The literal garage cleaning preceded the metaphorical variety, with this week’s publication of “ .” The book charts Fadell’s path to some of consumer electronics’ most iconic hardware designs. It’s concerned with, above all, the “why” of product design. It’s a word he uses 50+ times over the course of our 30-minute conversation. Anyone want to see what I unearthed when I cleaned out my garage and found photos of everything I’ve ever made? — Tony Fadell (@tfadell) We reached out to Fadell’s team following the tweet, asking if we might be able to get in on the garage sale. They happily complied, sending along a dozen images that provide a rough guide of the product designer’s career, from the early days through his time at Nest. The story starts in the early 90s, when he joined General Magic, fresh out of the University of Michigan. The Apple spinoff’s trials and tribulations were highlighted in a 2018 documentary of the same name that features Fadell among the talking heads. “The reason you should care about the story of General Magic is that it involves something fundamental, and that is: Failure isn’t the end, failure is actually the beginning,” the company’s spokesperson says at the end of the trailer and the top of the film. Courtesy of Tony Fadell Above is a prototype of one of General Magic’s spectacular and inspiring failures, the Walkabout. “All we had was big boards and a big LCD,” Fadell explains. “That was something I got to work on, when I was there. You look at the technology of the day, and we were solving problems for ourselves. We weren’t solving problems that people had. Very few people had email in 1991, 92. Nobody was downloading apps — it wasn’t fast enough to contemplate. Even mobile/wireless communications. There was ticketing. You could book travel. There wasn’t even a web yet. There was no Wi-Fi, no mobile phones, no data networks.” Timing, as they say, is everything. Fifteen years before the iPhone arrived, it’s safe to say that the Walkabout was a bit early to the party. Operating largely in secret, the company sought to resolve internet pain points a decade before they were on most people’s radar. “I think a lot of people were dreaming this stuff up,” Fadell explains. “We were one of the first incarnations of actually putting this stuff together well before the technology — or, more importantly, society — was ready for it. They didn’t know they were going to have these problems because they didn’t have them until they showed up 15 years later. When you’re designing in that kind of vacuum, this is what comes out. It was amazing. Everyone’s like, ‘this is so cool, but why do I need it?’” This brings us to the “why.” Or the “why, why, why,” as Fadell excitedly puts it. It’s the three-word question any product designer must answer before getting to the “how, how, how” — as tempting as it might be to tackle that second part first. It’s one of those concepts that’s obvious in hindsight, but difficult in the thick of things, when you’re surround by a group of smart people looking to make cool things. Fadell says the seemingly obvious notion came into stark relief during a round of the word game, Scramble. “That’s what everyone was using it for,” he says. “There was almost nothing else people were using it for, day in and day out. And then you start scratching your head, going, ‘how much does this cost? Who’s going to buy it? What’s it for.’ And that’s when you start realizing you spent three or four years of your life on it, and what could it be used for? We have this general capability. What could it be used for?” Courtesy of Tony Fadell The research would eventual give rise to an early generation of PDAs like Sony’s Magic Link and Philips’ Velo. “I was reading about how to write a business plan and presentation, and it was like, ‘what’s the why?’” Fadell explains. “The why? I swear, it took four or five days to start to even think in those terms of why, why, why? Because that was my whole life, thinking what, what, what?” After a stint at Philips, Fadell once again found himself ahead of the adoption curve — albeit significantly less this time. Attempts to bring the Fuse music player to market were hamstrung, in part, by funding that had dried up as a result of the recent dot-com bubble burst. Two years later, however, he found himself realizing those dreams on a far larger stage at Apple, with the development of the first iPod. Three years later, the company began working in earnest on a smartphone. After the Motorola ROKR E1 proved a major non-starter, the company shifted focus to in-house design, borrowing heavily from iPod learnings and designs. Courtesy of Tony Fadell “That is a prototype that a third-party manufacture sent to me, saying, ‘We’re capable. Look at this cool thing we did,’ and ‘I think you should pick us because we can help you with this iPod Phone concept,’” Fadell says of the above shot. “The top and the bottom have a swivel, so you can have either the number pad or click wheel or camera. It was really cool that people were thinking about it. It wasn’t half bad! It doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but it’s not bad thinking.” Courtesy of Tony Fadell Initial work on the iPhone started in a similar place. “We did iPod Plus Phone,” says Fadell “You took the headset, which had a microphone on it and the one ear thing. You could use the Click Wheel to select numbers and names, or you could dial with it, like a rotary phone, which was the ultimate death of it. You couldn’t enter anything, because there’s no textual input. But it was an iPod Classic with a phone in it. Walk it back from the third-party prototype, and we were there, too.” Courtesy of Tony Fadell Fadell says it was Steve Jobs who pushed the team on marrying the iPod’s success with the secretive phone project. The company had, after all, developed something iconic and inutive with the iPod click wheel, so why would it go and do something as foolhardy as cannibalizing the input device with a touchscreen? Courtesy of Tony Fadell “[Jobs] had very clear views on things — until they weren’t clear,” he says. “Or it became very clear that they wouldn’t work. He pushed us very hard on making the iPod Plus Phone work. We worked weeks and weeks to figure out how to do input with the click wheel. We couldn’t get it, and after the whole team was convinced we couldn’t do it, he was like, ‘keep trying!’ At some point we all said, ‘no, it isn’t going to work.’” The ”iPod Plus Phone” was one of three concepts that eventually resulted in the first iPhone. Courtesy of Tony Fadell “There was the fullscreen iPod, because we had video at the time,” he explains. “We had the screen plus the wheel, so let’s make the wheel virtual on the screen and have a single touch display. The third thing, from a hardware perspective, was a touchscreen Mac, which was multi-touch. That was being worked on in another part of the company. A company called FingerWorks was purchased by Apple. A guy named Steve Hotelling came up with the idea of a multi-touch screen, but it was the size of a ping-pong table. It had a projector in the middle of it, and all that stuff. We had to go and cram that all down and combine the cell phone functionality from the iPod Plus Phone and the screen capability and the virtual interface together.” Fadell’s Jobs stories paint a familiar vision of a visionary whose perfectionism could often result in long hours in Cupertino. We made a decision early on that we weren’t going to have glass on [the iPhone],” he says. “And after it was revealed to the world, Steve was like, ‘we gotta have glass on it.’ You have all of the mechanical and rigidity issues that you have to design for. If you design for plastic, instead of glass, it’s a very different experience. In the span of two months, we had to move from plastic to glass and reengineer everything, including the antennae to get it right.” Courtesy of Tony Fadell In 2008, The Wall Street Journal that Fadell was leaving the company. “People familiar with the matter said Mr. Fadell planned to take time off after leaving the company though he may still keep a role at Apple as a consultant,” the paper wrote. Apple, unsurprisingly, refused to comment on “rumors and speculation.” Fadell would once again launch his own company. This time out, however, it fared far better. Founded in 2010 with fellow Apple ex-pat, Matt Rogers, Nest would be acquired by Google four years later, serving as the foundation of the company’s smart home offerings. It was a big jump from the world of music players and phones to thermostats and smoke alarms. You go from more or less entertainment to this thing that’s highly functional and has zero design around it,” Fadell says of the Nest Thermostat. “You need it to control the temperature — but why you really need it is to control the money you spend. That’s where we had to change the narrative, and that’s why the storytelling was so critical at Nest. One was to make it look cool to draw people in. And two, why do you need to pay five to 10 times more for this thing? It’s technology in service of something really important. But nobody cared.” When he’s not promoting a book or cleaning his garage, Fadell serves as the principal at , helping startups bring their visions to life. “Many companies that come to me with hardware, I ask why they need it,” he says. “I try to get rid of the hardware, if I can, because it’s too much friction. I see so many people getting distracted because it’s a cool thing. What we do is make sure the hardware is absolutely necessary — that it’s in service of the planet, societies or health. We care about funding things that are going to help fix those things.” |
Lyft brings shared rides back to more US cities in bid to win riders | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Lyft is bringing back shared rides to San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, Las Vegas and Atlanta this May, the company on Thursday, noting that the popular reduced fare service will be expanding to other markets in phases throughout the year. The company originally abandoned its carpooling service in March 2020 when the pandemic made it clear no one would want to ride in a small, enclosed space with other riders, let alone a Lyft driver. Last summer, Lyft brought back a limited version of shared rides , and the company says it also re-launched the service in Miami in Q3 2021. Uber also ditched its Uber Pool service in March 2020, but . Bringing back shared rides is an interesting move to make in the wake of that revealed decreased revenue per rider quarter-over-quarter and a company that is still working to turn a profit. Carpooling has the potential to be a money sucker in the short term, largely because Lyft doesn’t have the scale yet for discounted fares to reach favorable unit economics. Even with scale, discounting prices in order to get people to use the service can be risky, especially if, for example, a rider selecting a shared ride doesn’t get paired with any other riders. Lyft would still honor the quoted price and pay the driver a fixed amount, so the result would be Lyft subsidizing rides and making less money on them. Rides with Lyft have been pricier than usual due to an ongoing driver shortage that has led to increased demand for rides. This is largely how the company was able to beat its own revenue expectations in the first quarter, despite the number of active riders steadily declining since Q3 2021. Lyft took a $350 million hit in Q1 trying to incentivize drivers to come back to the platform, and on Thursday said that shared rides would be completely optional for drivers through 2022 without penalty. (Note: This could imply that Lyft drivers have historically received penalties to either their ratings or access to the app for choosing to opt out of carpools, which drivers have described as a hassle due to inefficient routing.) However, if the driver shortage continues, Lyft will have to keep charging higher fares for rides and, thus, will lose more riders. This is where the shared rides comes back in. While the service likely won’t be a profitable one for Lyft at first, it might alleviate the driver shortage and bring riders back to the platform for the long haul. Carpooling with Lyft won’t look exactly the same as it did pre-pandemic. The company will restrict each shared ride to just two passengers, which Lyft says will make for more efficient rides with fewer unnecessary detours. It also means that each ride request will be limited to one person, so riders can’t book a shared ride for two people at this time. Riders will now also be able to request a shared ride ahead of time to get even more affordable pricing, the company says. “The further in advance a rider books, the more discounted the ride,” said Lyft in a blog post. In terms of rider and driver etiquette, Lyft said masks are optional, and everyone should respect each other’s choices about masking up. |
Lithium-ion recycler Li-Cycle lands $200 million to power future EVs | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Metals and fossil fuels behemoth Glencore is pumping $200 million into battery recycler Li-Cycle as part of a larger, symbiotic supply deal inked by the two firms. Under the new agreement, the Swiss materials giant will ship burnt-out batteries and scraps to Li-Cycle, which will recover the high-demand metals so they can be reused in electric vehicle batteries and other applications. Li-Cycle uses a spoke-and-hub approach for recovering the materials. At their spoke facilities, they shred spent batteries and use a water-based system to begin to break down the batteries. Known as hydrometallurgical processing, the technique uses less energy than pyrometallurgical processing, the other major method that basically melts batteries down. While the hydrometallurgical approach can recover more minerals, too, one downside is that it produces more wastewater that must be treated. From its spoke facilities, Li-Cycle ships a substance known as black mass to its hub facilities for further processing. There, it separates the black mass into a variety of materials, including those that can be used to make new lithium-ion batteries. Glencore will be providing Li-Cycle with black mass for processing as well as manufacturing scrap. Securing a supply of scrap could be advantageous for the startup since it is easier to recycle than whole batteries. After news of the convertible financing deal broke, Li-Cycle’s stock shot up nearly 9% to a high of $7.89 per share during regular trading hours. The six-year-old recycling firm debuted on the New York Stock Exchange last August via a $1.55 billion merger. On top of the $200 million from Glencore, the battery recycler recently secured an additional from LG and from the infamous fossil-fuel booster Koch Industries. Glencore said in an investor update that it intends to boost its recycling operations around the world, a shift for the company that is known more for mining virgin ore than diverting waste from landfills. The mining giant says the move should help bring down the carbon intensity of its materials. Glencore has said that it is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050. |
Daily Crunch: Larry Ellison leads investor group chipping in $7.1B toward Musk’s Twitter buyout | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | What’s a five-letter word containing ERUSS? You made the GUESS — USERS, that’s what — and tens of millions of them have joined The New York TIMES after , according to ‘s REPORT. As LOYAL players, we ADORE it. – and , a few days ago, and for a medical one-stop shop. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening in the world of startup naming, but we’re here for it. We’re looking forward to hearing from Wendy, Talesha and Fred next. Come with me, and you’ll see, a world of pure appreciation: TechCrunch Momentum, a B2B company that makes sales process automation software, accidentally convinced an early investor to lead its seed round the founders had even created a pitch deck. “We showed up on a Friday board meeting. On Monday, they were like, ‘Hey, do you have five minutes? We want to sit down with you,’” said CEO and co-founder Santiago Suarez Ordoñez. “They literally put a term sheet on the table with the exact terms we wanted.” |
Lucid is raising prices on its luxury Air EV by as much as 13% | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Lucid Group is the latest automaker to up the price of its electric vehicles. The company announced Thursday alongside its that it was raising prices of the variants of its luxury Air sedan, beginning June 1. The price hikes push the base price of the Air sedan as much as 13%. All existing reservation holders will not experience price hikes, the company said, noting that updated pricing for Canada will be made public on June 1. Considering that Lucid disclosed it has 30,000 reservations for the Air, it will be awhile before the company sees the benefit from these raised prices. The Air Grand Touring will increase about $15,000 to a cost of $154,000; the Air Touring will cost $12,400 more at $107,400; and the Air Pure will go up $10,000, to $87,400. The Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance model, the price of which was announced two weeks ago, will remain the same at $179,000, the company said. All of these prices are for base models, so the final price tag could be much higher for customers. Other automakers like Tesla and have announced similar increases in price for their electric vehicles, blaming ongoing supply chain issues from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, , for the rising costs from suppliers, which are now being passed on to the consumer. In Rivian’s case, the company was initially going to raise prices for reservation holders as well, but quickly reversed that decision. “Similar to many companies in our industry, we continue to face global supply chain and logistics challenges, including Covid-related factory shutdowns in China. We are working closely with our suppliers to mitigate the impact of disruptions,” Sherry House, Lucid’s CFO, said in a statement. “While any extended disruptions could result in an impact to our production forecast, today we are reiterating our 12,000-14,000 vehicle production forecast for 2022 based on the information we have at this point combined with our mitigation plans.” Lucid’s guidance for deliveries remain unchanged, and the company said it still expects Air Grand Touring Performance deliveries in June, as well as Air Touring and Air Pure expected later this year. The Project Gravity SUV remains on target to begin production in the first half of 2024, according to Lucid’s CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson. Last quarter, Lucid , a figure it promised in its Q3 earnings. The EV startup said it is experiencing strong demand with more than 30,000 customer reservations as of today, which represents potential sales of $2.9 billion, the company said. Whether it will be able to keep up that demand with its current price jump is another question, but presumably those who are rich enough to buy a Lucid vehicle anyway will see an extra $12,000 as merely pocket change. The company also noted that it recently signed a deal in which the government of Saudi Arabia committed to purchase up to from Lucid over the next 10 years. This deal, which was announced last month, follows a loan agreement from the Saudi government that the companies entered into in late February, according to Lucid’s with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agreement commits Saudi Arabia to provide loans of up to $1.4 billion to Lucid, provided the government can reduce that availability of capital under certain circumstances. Lucid Motors closed out the quarter with $57.7 million in revenue, which the company says is driven mainly by customer deliveries of 360 vehicles over the three months ending on March 31. That is up massively from the $313,000 the company pulled in during the same quarter last year. It’s also more than analysts’ expectations of $53.43 million, according to estimates. Lucid’s balance sheet shows nearly $5.4 billion of cash on hand, which the company says is sufficient to fund operations well into 2023. That aligns with analyst expectations around easing of supply chain issues in the second half of the year, which will allow the company to ramp up production and potentially stick to its longer-term growth roadmap, including expanding its production line-up and overseas availability. Lucid has also been dealing with a few lawsuits from investors who largely allege the company made false and misleading statements regarding the expected start of production for the Lucid Air, as well as an regarding its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. IV and Atieva Inc. A Thursday filing also revealed a more recent action against the company filed on April 1 by shareholder Victor Mangino based on similar allegations relating to statements updating projections and guidance provided in late 2021 to early 2022. The case is still ongoing. |
Peloton reportedly looks to sell up to a 20% stake amid struggles | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | In February, Peloton CEO John Foley as the connected fitness pioneer cut 2,800 jobs. No one could say the news was unexpected. The firm was experiencing dramatic turmoil after flying high from pandemic sales and then falling back down to Earth. Add to that 2021’s massive product recall and you’ve got a rough couple of years for the executive. But even with former Spotify CFO Barry McCarthy stepping into the role, it seems the company isn’t out of the woods. “This appointment is the culmination of a months-long succession plan that I’ve been working on with our Board of Directors, and we are thrilled to have found in Barry the perfect leader for the next chapter of Peloton,” Foley said at the time. “I look forward to working with him and invite you to welcome him with open arms.” A says Pelton is actively courting investors to buy between 15 and 20% of the company in a bid to right the ship. The deal could bring some much-needed cash, as Peloton attempts to regain its footing amid gym reopenings and increased competition. Investment from the right firm could also return confidence that the company is back on the right track. The move would be a decidedly less dramatic one than earlier reports that it’s been looking for an outright sale, courting a buyer with deep pockets like Amazon. It seems plausible, however, that Peloton’s new leadership is attempting to get the company in a better place to help return some value before a sale. Weeks before he exited the company, Blackwells Capital’s Jason Aintabi for Foley to be fired and for the company to explore a sale. We’ve reached out to Peloton for comment. |
Fortnite is back on iOS through Xbox Cloud Gaming | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Microsoft is throwing its weight behind Epic Games in the fight against Apple — and bringing Fortnite back to iOS in the process. The company announced Thursday that it had to make Fortnite available on Apple devices through its game streaming service, Xbox Cloud Gaming. Fortnite is back, but you still won’t be able to just waltz into the App Store and ask for it. To play, you’ll need to hop onto Apple’s Safari browser and visit a process that’s less straightforward but only takes a few minutes to set up, if that. You won’t need a paid subscription to start playing, though you will need to log in to a Microsoft account and link that up with your Epic Games account. Take your Victory Royale to the Cloud. Drop into on your phone, tablet, or PC with Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) for free. No install or subscription required: — Xbox (@Xbox) Technically, the new Microsoft workaround is the second loophole that brings the hit shooter back to iPhones and iPads. In January, Nvidia announced that through the chip-maker’s own game streaming service GeForce Now, though Microsoft’s experience is likely to be more appealing. Epic kicked off a battle against Apple back in 2020 when the Fortnite-maker tried to skirt the company’s 30% cut of in-app purchases, getting the hit game kicked off iOS in the process. Epic sued Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating antitrust laws. While a California court didn’t agree, it did to point customers toward payment processes beyond the company’s infamous walled garden. Microsoft and Apple once had a well-branded rivalry, but competitive tensions between the two companies have cooled in recent years. Apparently, between a spicy Apple commercial last year featuring the “I’m a PC” actor John Hodgman and Microsoft going out of its way to pair up with Epic, one of Apple’s most outspoken critics, that Microsoft is betting big on cloud gaming so it makes sense for the company to partner with Epic, one of the rare gaming companies that has seamless cross-platform online multiplayer totally dialed in at this point. It’s also a useful defensive position against Apple on an issue that’s already created a rift between the companies. Apparently, Apple to launch an expansive all-in-one Xbox Cloud Gaming iOS app by requiring individual games to be downloaded separately — a restriction that explains why Microsoft is pointing people to the browser for Fortnite instead of the App Store. Microsoft says that Fortnite will be its first popular free-to-play cloud gaming title, but not its last. “At Xbox we want to make gaming accessible to the 3 billion players around the world, and cloud has an important role in that mission,” Xbox Cloud Gaming Head of Product Catherine Gluckstein said. “Quite simply we want you to have more choice in both the games you play and the way you choose to play them.” |
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6 places where investors look for problems when you’re fundraising | Bill Petty | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | looking to raise capital? If so, before you open the door to potential investors, your financial house might need a little spring cleaning. As a growth equity investor, we meet with many founders who have a solid handle on the day-to-day operations of their business and have some of the basic financial “pillars” in place. They have a basic accounting system, know how to construct a budget and have policies and procedures for accounts receivable and accounts payable. This is a great start, but investors usually bring a different level of scrutiny to your operations and financials, and they have a much higher expectation for what “good” or “great” looks like. It’s the difference between inviting a friend over for dinner and preparing for an open house. With a friend, you might tidy up and shove a few things in the closet. If you have buyers coming to look around, they’re going to open that closet. It pays to be ready. During due diligence, every investor is looking for an accurate view of your business performance, value and potential. They build that picture through a series of data and information requests to try and answer these important questions: The details of every diligence process look different, but you can count on one thing: Having a plan is key. It takes effort and hours to gather, verify and package all this information for external review, so it helps to know what data and documents will be needed well before you enter the process. Otherwise, it can be a real distraction to the business. Let’s take a closer look at each of the six standard information requests, and what investors are really looking for when they deep-dive into your data. Financial statements provide an overall view of the health of the business, and a high-level year-by-year and month-by-month snapshot of growth. |
Amazon Labor Union president tells Senate that workers’ rights aren’t a ‘Democrat or Republican’ issue | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Back in February, Amazon tried to labor organizer Christian Smalls for bringing food to warehouse employees during a union drive. One unfathomably monumental labor victory later, and today, the New Yorker is speaking before the Senate and visiting President Joe Biden at the White House. Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union president who led the JFK8 warehouse’s , testified today in a for the Senate Committee on the Budget. Chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the hearing posed the question of whether tax dollars should support companies that violate labor laws. Representatives from other groups like Good Jobs First, the Teamsters and the Heritage Foundation joined the hearing as well. “The types of things Amazon is doing… Breaking the law, intimidation… These are real things that traumatize workers in this country,” Smalls said in his opening statement. “We want to feel that we have protections. We want to feel that the government is allowing us to use our constitutional rights to organize.” Across the country, Amazon workers have of trying to quash labor organizing. Last year, Amazonians United co-founder Jonathan Bailey with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), stating that the company violated labor laws by retaliating against him for organizing. He said he was detained and interrogated by a manager for 90 minutes after organizing a walkout. The NLRB found merit to these allegations and filed a federal complaint against Amazon. The company settled, and as part of the settlement agreement, was required to remind employees via emails and on physical bulletin boards that they have the right to organize. Bailey’s complaint to the NLRB was one of 37 against Amazon between February 2020 and March 2021, according to . But just months after this settlement, Amazon was found to have a Staten Island employee from distributing pro-union literature in the break room. Amazon filings with the Department of Labor revealed that the company spent on anti-union consultants last year alone. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) defended Amazon, accusing Senator Sanders of unfairly targeting the company. “You’re singling out a single company because of your political agenda to socialize this country,” Senator Graham said. “Every time I turn around, you’re having a hearing about [how] anybody who makes money is bad.” Graham outlined that the NLRB has a process in place for workers to file complaints if they feel they are being treated unfairly, saying that he disagreed with a Senate hearing taking place at all. “You can have oversight hearings all you like, but you’ve determined Amazon is a piece of crap company. That’s your political bias,” Graham told Sanders. “[Amazon is] subject to laws in the United States, they shouldn’t be subjected to this.” Christian Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), speaks during an ALU rally in the Staten Island borough of New York, U.S., on Sunday, April 24, 2022. Senator Bernie Sanders visited Staten Island to meet with workers who this month successfully organized the first union in the country at an Amazon facility and workers at a separate facility who will be voting next week on whether to join a union. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images In response, Smalls directed his opening statement to Senator Graham. “I think that it’s in your best interest to realize that it’s not a left or right thing. It’s not a Democrat or Republican thing. It’s a workers’ issue,” Small told the senator. “We are the ones that are suffering in the corporations that you’re talking about, […] in the warehouses that you’re talking about. So that’s the reason why I think I was invited today to speak on that behalf, and you should listen, because we do represent your constituents as well.” He continued, “The people are the ones that make these corporations go, it’s not the other way around.” At Senator Sanders’ urging, Smalls explained the working conditions of the now-unionizing fulfillment center where he used to work. He said that workers commuted from all boroughs of New York, as well as parts of New Jersey, which meant that they would commute for about two and a half hours each way, work a 10- to 12-hour shift, and receive minimal break time. He testified that hundreds of union busters came in from across the country, as well as from overseas. These representatives would host “captive audience” anti-union meetings every 20 minutes with groups of 50 to 60 workers. Smalls said that these captive audience presentations happened four times per week. “Imagine being a new hire at Amazon. Your second day, you don’t even know your job assignment, and the first thing they do is march you into an anti-union propaganda class,” Smalls said. He added that the facility was plastered with anti-union signs, telling workers to vote no to unionization and emphasizing that unions require a dues expense on the workers’ part. Just met the President lol he said I got him in trouble 😈 gooooooooooood ✊🏽 — Christian Smalls (@Shut_downAmazon) The hearing also addressed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which recently passed in the House. Currently, in 27 “ ” states, employees cannot be forced to join a union or pay dues, but if the PRO Act passed, it would “right-to-work” laws. Union organizers believe, though, that “right-to-work” laws exist to , since it’s already federally illegal to force someone to join a union. If the PRO Act passes in the Senate (which isn’t expected, since Democrats don’t have enough seats to overcome the filibuster), it would be one of the of labor legislation since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which protects the rights of employees to organize. After the hearing, Smalls and a number of other labor organizers President Biden at the White House. “Just met the President lol he said I got him in trouble,” Smalls tweeted, likely referring to the backlash Biden experienced after for the Amazon union — “gooooooooooood.” |
‘Climate entrepreneurs deserve fast capital’: Enduring Planet unwraps a new fintech platform | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | , a new fintech firm that exclusively funds climate entrepreneurs, is taking the wraps of its first product after securing $5 million in debt and equity financing. The company aims to deliver fast debt capital to startups and small businesses that focus on climate, such as by mitigating emissions or helping humanity adapt to the disastrous effects of burning fossil fuels. “When the world’s on fire, it’s pretty important that we move quickly and not take six months to underwrite a deal,” co-founder and CEO Dimitry Gershenson said in a call with TechCrunch, pledging to deliver checks up to $500,000 in under 30 days to companies that meet certain criteria. Out of the gate, Enduring Planet offers revenue-based financing to companies that bring in more than $25,000 per month. In exchange, companies must hand over a chunk of their monthly revenue (up to 7%) to Enduring Planet, in addition to as much as 3% more off the top, and a 1% fee, until the loan is paid back. So far, it’s funded two startups: New Sun Road, which builds software for renewable microgrids, and Aquaoso, a climate risk data company. Lots of revenue-based financing options have cropped up in recent years, including offerings from and , which slurp up sales data to predict future revenue. Enduring Planet does this too, casting its model as an alternative (or supplement) to dilutive venture dollars. In the VC world, founders hand over some control of their business to venture capitalists — and, by extension, their limited partners, many of whom are entrenched in the fossil fuel industry. By contrast, Enduring Planet doesn’t take shares or collateral, but it has other requirements, including that businesses have sizable gross margins (north of 35%) so they can weather the monthly payments. The model is incompatible with startups with razor-thin margins, such as emerging electric vehicle firms, but there’s some flexibility built in: “If a startup is having a bad month, they are not on the hook for a big principal and interest payment,” said Gershenson, adding that Enduring Planet is “already piloting a second instrument that allows us to offer non-dilutive capital to entrepreneurs” who don’t qualify for revenue-based financing. Enduring Planet’s $5 million raise includes approximately $2.4 million in pre-seed equity and $2.6 million in debt, the latter of which is funding its first loans ahead of future raises. The company’s backers include Climate Capital, Common Sense Fund, KD Venture Partners, Keiki Capital, Portland Seed Fund and Susquehanna Foundation. |
Twitter rolls out new Spaces features, including access to analytics for hosts | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Twitter is rolling out a number of new features for its live audio Spaces product this week. The social media giant is giving hosts and co-hosts on iOS and Android about their Spaces. For example, hosts and co-hosts can now get information about how many total live listeners tuned in to the broadcast, how many times it was replayed and how many people spoke during the Space. The new analytics feature was first introduced as a test available to a of hosts in March, but is now available to all hosts and co-hosts on the platform. Access to analytics will make it easier for hosts to plan their audio content and see how many people they’re reaching. learn more about your Space ✍️ Hosts and co-hosts on iOS and Android will now have access to analytics like total live listeners, total replays, and speakers — take a look and let us know what you think! — Spaces (@TwitterSpaces) In addition, Twitter is that will tweet out a Space card once hosts start a Space. Twitter says the new feature will make it easier for users to engage with and share Spaces. The company also says the new feature, which is now rolling on both iOS and Android, should make it easier for users to see and participate in conversations. With this new feature, hosts will no longer have to manually link to their Spaces in a tweet to promote it when starting one. Twitter is also for users to learn more about the Spaces they see at the top of their timeline. Currently, the purple card that appears at the top of your timeline doesn’t give you that much information about a specific Space. Starting today, some users on Android will see more information on the Space bar, including details about who’s hosting, what topics are involved, who’s shared a tweet and more. wanna learn more about the Space you see at the top of the tl? Starting today, some people on Android will see more info on the Space bar like who’s hosting, Topics, who’s shared a Tweet and more. Tell us what you think! — Spaces (@TwitterSpaces) The company is also making it easier for users to follow Spaces hosts. When a Space concludes, users will now see a list of the co-hosts and speakers and have the option to follow them. The new feature is rolling out now for both iOS and Android users. Twitter has been introducing several Spaces features over the past few months to build out the offering. The company recently started that allows select hosts to clip 30 seconds of audio from recorded Spaces to share them with others on Twitter. Twitter on Spaces Recordings, a feature that will let hosts share tweets with audio recordings of past Spaces. |
Unusual Ventures just closed a $485M fund by promising hands-on (full-time) help | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | , a now 30-person outfit founded nearly five years ago by former Lightspeed Ventures investor John Vrionis and serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, has closed its third fund with $485 million in capital commitments, says Vrionis. It’s not a huge step up from the $425 million that Unusual raised for its second fund in late 2019, and that’s very much by design, says Vrionis, who is the firm’s sole managing director but has bought aboard three general partners in the past year. Among these is serial entrepreneur Lars Albright (he sold his last two companies to and , respectively); Sandhya Hegde, who was previously an investor at both Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital; and Wei Lien Dang, a co-founder of the cloud-native security company StackRox, which sold to Red Hat . Bansal remains highly involved in the firm, too, according to Vrionis, who says Bansal sits on a handful of boards for Unusual. Bansal also oversees Unusual’s “founder services” program, wherein the firm plants team members like Albright and venture partners like Nextdoor co-founder Sarah Leary who have a stake in the fund inside portfolio companies for months at a time on a full-time basis in order to help them achieve so-called product-market fit and otherwise strengthen them. (“It’s the difference between me giving you a course on sleep training and being a night nurse,” says Vrionis of the program.) It’s somewhat remarkable, Bansal’s involvement, given that he is also CEO of two(!) startups that Unusual has stakes in. One of these, a developer tools company called , announced a $230 million Series D round last week at a valuation of (which is the same amount Cisco for one of Bansal’s earlier companies, AppDynamics, in 2017). Bansal’s second company, , a startup offering services designed to protect APIs from cyberattacks, meanwhile announced $60 million in Series B funding (including, of course, from Unusual) at a valuation of more than . Still, the hands-on help of people like Bansal and others inside Unusual (including operating partner Scott Schwarzoff, the former VP of product marketing at Okta) is critical in a market gone haywire, suggests Vrionis. “There are so many people trying to be early-stage investors — the old multistage firms, some of the newer entrants who come from the hedge fund world, incubators,” he says. “But while the supply of capital available to founders has gone up, so has their need for people who have experience to spend the time to help them.” Still, founders have to pass the bar first. Unusual invests in only 12 or so companies each year, writing initial checks of between $2 million and $10 million initially at the seed or pre-seed stage where the firm can be the first institutional money a startup raises. The firm — whose biggest bets in terms of capital committed are Traceable and Vivun, a maker of “ ” software — will make exceptions, says Vrionis, but not often. One “opportunistic” investment it made was a check into the security operations company Artic Wolf Networks, which has filed confidentially for an IPO, though its CEO says there is for the move. Unusual is also an investor in the fintech company Carta, which was already a Series C-stage company by the time Unusual was formed. And it backed the trading platform Robinhood in one of its later rounds. As for other criteria, Vrionis says that just more than 50% of the founders who Unusual has backed so far are “repeat successful founders” because they know well the importance of laying the foundation for the future. (“The reason 90% of startups fail by year five is so many of them have not done the right things early,” Vrionis says.) He also says core areas that Unusual is “super interested in” includes infrastructure software, SaaS, fintech, e-commerce and social marketplace businesses. Asked whether Unusual has a “web3” strategy, he says Unusual has “actually been quite active there. It’s one of these key platform shifts that you’re fortunate to be around if you’re in the business at a time like this. It’s everything from the infrastructure to support the blockchains and the decentralized nodes, to the applications themselves. We’ve actually made some unannounced investments in both that you’ll be hearing about publicly soon.” So far, he adds, Unusual has just taken equity, but the team has “definitely discussed the idea of how the tokens participate in the investments as well.” |
Oops, I think they broke the blockchain | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | Hello and welcome back to the podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious. On this week’s episode, we talked about the virtual land sale that (temporarily) broke the blockchain. Yuga Labs’ now-infamous NFT drop was — to put it lightly — chaotic. Users swarmed the sale like it was a Supreme drop in 2017, overwhelming the entire Ethereum network and resulting in lots of failed transactions and exorbitantly high gas fees. We explained what went wrong and explored some (potential?) conspiracy theories about the fiasco, which seem to spring up anytime a major event happens in the web3 world. Next, we went through some big news from an OG of the decentralized internet — Wikipedia — that’s decided to reject crypto donations, and talked about the beef between regulators and crypto that heated up this week after a major flex by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Jill Gunter occupies a unique spot within the crypto world as both a venture partner at Slow Ventures and co-founder of a new layer-one blockchain project, Espresso Systems (you can learn more about that in Anita’s article ). As a former credit trader at Goldman Sachs, Jill is used to explaining the nuances of crypto to friends and colleagues in the tradfi (traditional finance) world. We were excited to have her on the show to break down some complex concepts in simple, understandable terms, from why popular blockchains don’t maintain user privacy to how new projects should approach developer acquisition. |
Crypto gaming is growing, but can it reach people outside of the web3 world? | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | big for the play-to-earn gaming scene, which goes hand-in-hand with the crypto world, but as the games become more advanced and provide more opportunities for users, what’s next for the industry? Perhaps it’s building out the gaming experience or creating new openings for non-crypto-native players to enter the space, but there’s a range of opportunities and challenges for builders and gamers. “The goal is to bring the Web 2.0 traditional gaming masses to web3,” Alex Paley, co-founder of Solana-based blockchain gaming studio , said to TechCrunch. “The only way you do that is by removing as many artificial barriers as possible.” The blockchain gaming industry grew 2,000% in the past year, according to a DappRadar and Blockchain Game Alliance from Q1 2022. The report added there were $2.5 billion in investments for the blockchain gaming space last quarter, compared to the $4 billion raised for the sector across all of 2021, showing a significant acceleration in money pouring into this space. While the web3 gaming world is known for play-to-earn economies, a number of crypto gaming studios are offering free-to-play options for new users who want to experiment but might not want to fully commit. About 10 years ago, amid the height of mobile gaming’s free-to-play era, the free games market was huge. From Angry Birds to Candy Crush, there were myriad ways for non-gamers (and seasoned gamers) to pick up their phones, download an app and play within minutes. Candy Crush has existed in both a free and premium way for 10 years and, in turn, generated billions in total revenue and over $1 billion in revenue in 2020 alone, according to a by Business of Apps. “That was the beauty of free-to-play; it greatly expanded the audience of people who can try your game, and it’s equally as important to do that in web3,” Paley said. Now, some crypto games are considering the free-to-play model as a way to help new gamers enter the often gated crypto gaming market, which is known for having a play-to-earn model. “We see a great future for web3 gaming, and in many ways I see the introduction of blockchain into gaming as transformative as free-to-play gaming was to mobile,” Phil Sanderson, managing director and co-founder of , said to TechCrunch. But there need to be more accessible games through easier onboarding for the non-crypto-native audiences, and the fun factor will drive their success at the end of the day, Sanderson noted. Last month, launched the Origin version of the game, which allows people to try it out and get up to three free characters, known as Axies, without paying for them. “I think having free starter Axies is an important moment for NFTs, because people can fall in love with the IP and universe and try it out and see if it’s for them before making huge economic decisions,” Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin, Axie Infinity co-founder, . In order to expand the web3 gaming world, these blockchain-based games have to prove to players that their games are fun, then figure out a way to get them to work and contribute to the economy by playing the game, Paley said. And what’s most important is creating something enjoyable, aside from the financial incentives that crypto play-to-earn games provide. “The number one priority is ensuring we’re creating a fun product,” said Michael Wagner, creator of . “It doesn’t matter how good the financial incentives are. Our focus is on building a cool, high-quality experience that will attract people in. Of course we have the financial incentives as well, but that’s just an enhancement to the gameplay.” |
Budgeting and planning for your first digital product | Charles Fry | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | mobile, IoT or web3 product, the one question I’m asked almost always is: How much will it cost to build? I get this question often from entrepreneurs who know their business but don’t have experience creating software. Since there’s a different answer for nearly every situation, I have a few key points that are always helpful for business leaders considering a digital product for the first time. There are five main points you should consider when developing a digital product. The first, and most important, is to establish how much you can afford to spend. Then, you can reframe the issue into how much of a working, functional digital product can be built with that budget and how long it will take to do that. If you’re a non-technical entrepreneur and don’t know where to start, you can consider some typical ballpark ranges. The budgets and timeframes for new end-user software products tend to fall into one of several categories. Start by determining how much you can spend to develop the product. Many variables impact these product development costs. Expenses can change significantly depending on the extent to which pre-built components or middleware can be used, how stringent the security or compliance requirements are and the variety of users or use cases the product needs to support. Establishing your bracket will anchor conversations with your financial and internal stakeholders, and help guide your selection of the right software development partner if you decide to outsource. Of equal importance is the question of what your project needs to achieve. Be clear with your development partner on the goals for the project. For example, it could be: We worked with an engineering consulting company that had a software-driven idea for its human resource management business. Their owner wasn’t a software expert, and the company had limited seed funds. We shaped a project plan that included research, architectural diagrams, sample screenshots and a realistic budget for building the product. The deliverable was a professional PowerPoint presentation that helped the company secure funding to create the first full version of the SaaS platform. For under $50,000, the entrepreneur was able to achieve his goals without having to review a single line of code. |
Knit picking | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | here and guessing you don’t need me to tell you why we wanted to chat with Amazon at . Well before we were discussing how the pandemic has radically transformed automation, the retail giant had already begun to transform the category. Amazon’s got hundreds of thousands of robots deployed in fulfillment centers across the country, with a push dating back to its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems. Wherever you happen to land on conversations about labor and automation, there’s little question the company had begun putting ideas into practice while many were still speaking theoretically about how robots will eventually change work. The company has continued pumping money into the category. In 2019, it acquired the Playground-backed autonomous cart startup, Canvas Technologies, and just the other week it detailed the first phase of which includes investments in Agility, BionicHive and newcomer, Mantis Robotics. There’s a sense in which Amazon has jumpstarted warehouse robotics, as companies are looking toward robotics firms in a bid to compete with its dominance. Amazon’s VP of Global Robotics, , alongside already announced guests , (not all on the same panel, of course — though, wouldn’t that be wild?). We’ll be talking about the company’s robotics journey thus far, recent investments and what future warehouse and logistics operations will look like (including the roles human workers will and won’t play). Oh, and I also wanted to point out that the month prior at our first major climate event at UC Berkeley. That’s part of a recycling panel that will also feature Novaloop’s Miranda Wang and Nth Cycle’s Megan O’Connor. I spoke to Horowitz at an online-only event last year about the fascinating role that robotics, computer vision and machine learning are already playing in the world of waste sorting. Speaking of the less glamourous side of things, Boston Dynamics dropped a pair of videos aimed at recontextualizing the firm’s offerings. “No Time to Dance” does what it says on the tin. The Hyundai-owned firm entered the public consciousness through a couple of decades’ worth of viral videos. As it has begun to commercialize products like Spot and Stretch, we’re going to see an attempt to walk the line between lighthearted YouTube videos (plus the occasional Super Bowl ad) and a bid to have its products taken seriously as tools for jobs like inspections and logistics. Boston Dynamics Along with the new videos comes . Quoting from Boston Dynamics: SLAMcore Earlier this week, London-based robotics vision firm a $16 million Series A. Led by ROBO Global Ventures and Presidio Ventures, the round follows a $5 million seed from early on in the pandemic. It’s clear the company is among those startups benefiting from increased automation, offering robotics systems a better way to naviate their environment. It also tossed in a reference to the metaverse for good measure. There are some interesting discussions to be had around robotic systems as real-world analogs there. Says founder and CEO Owen Nicholson, “For far too long, robots have not been able to navigate physical spaces with the level of accuracy and efficiency that we know is possible. As they become more available to companies and consumers alike in years to come, SLAMcore is determined to ensure that as many designers as possible have access to the algorithms needed to optimize their products.” VisionNav Robotics’ name certainly seems to imply that the company operates in a similar space as SLAMcore, though the Shenzhen-based firm specializes in autonomous forklifts and other logistics robotics. This week it announced that put its valuation at half-a-billion. That money will go toward R&D and further commercialization. “Before, we were mostly providing indoor solutions. Now that we are expanding to unmanned truck loading, which is often semi-outdoors, it’s inevitable we will be operating in strong light,” VP Don Dong told Rita. “That’s why we are adapting a combination of vision and radar technologies to navigate our robots.” MIT CSAIL Some extremely fun . I give you Banana Fingers. CSAIL has developed a system for autonomously knitting soft, touch-sensitive wearable robotics. Applications included everything from assistive gloves to soft exoskeletons. “Using digital machine knitting, which is a very common manufacturing method in today’s textile industry, enables ‘printing’ a design in one go, which makes it much more scalable,” the paper’s lead, Yiyue Luo said in a release. “Soft pneumatic actuators are intrinsically compliant and flexible, and combined with intelligent materials, have become the backbone of many robots and assistive technologies — and rapid fabrication with our design tool can hopefully increase ease and ubiquity.” It’s also worth highlighting the , which brings together MassRobotics, Pittsburgh Robotics Network and Silicon Valley Robotics to help bolster startups, collaboration and just generally advocate for the industry. “The role of robotics cluster organizations must grow to keep pace with rapid expansion of robotics in the U.S. Our organizations have always worked together informally but are now collaborating strategically to increase U.S. economic productivity and sustainability,” Silicon Valley Robotics’ says in a release. “The United States is the global thought leader in robotics, automation and AI, and we are applying these technologies for both the greater good and to meet global challenges.” Don’t you love it when a cluster comes together? Cybernetix Ventures Some more big news for early-stage robotics came with Tuesday’s launch of investment firm . MassRobotics’ co-founder Fady Saad is serving as a general partner, and the advisory board includes some big names like Helen Greiner, Steve Ricci, Rick Faulk, Peter Wurman and Elaine Chen. The firm will be investing $50 milion in robotics, AI and automation companies. Says Saad: With the launch of Cybernetix, robotics startups will have access to a one-of-a-kind fund from the robotics community, led by robotics leaders, for robotics. It’s clear to us that robotics is a distinct investment class, separate from established categories like software and biotech, with its own investment models, metrics and portfolio engagement. The majority of investors are just starting to figure out the true value of innovative, early-stage robotics opportunities. With the establishment of this fund, we’re here to influence what will have the greatest long-term impacts, and share the full extent of our expertise and networks with the companies we believe in. Bear Robotics From the “Things I Missed” department comes news that Bear Robotics’ Rita robot is rolling out to an additional 51 Chili’s restaurants, adding to the existing 10. The company tells TechCrunch that this is the largest deployment of Bear’s robots in the U.S. We’ve written a bunch of Bear and other serving robots in the past, but the gist is that the systems are more about augmenting – than outright replacing – wait staff. Rather than being able to serve customers directly, they essentially operate an extra set of arms. Thank you, and May the Cinco de Mayo be with you. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
On Deck cuts 25% of staff, scales back accelerator | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | , a tech company that connects founders to each other, capital and advice, has laid off 25% off its staff, per sources familiar with the company. The layoffs were announced today during an internal all hands meeting, and impacts about 72 people. Sources say that mostly operations and investing roles were impacted by layoffs. Severance packages were offered and include eight weeks of paid base salary, as well as 12 weeks of healthcare. It’s unclear if any executives were cut, but TechCrunch has reached out to On Deck for further comment and has not yet heard back. Co-founders Erik Torenberg and David Booth did however confirm the layoffs published after this story went live. “As a community-centered company, our people have always been our highest priority. Our focus in the coming days will be on fully supporting our team – both those departing On Deck and those who will help us build the future,” the post reads. On Deck, not to be confused with small business lender OnDeck, is a company that provides capital and network support for emerging fund managers and founders. Launched in June 2019, the company first announced a Founders Fellowship and has recently grown to offer more niche programs on specific verticals. In two years since launch, the company claims it has helped founders start over 1,000 companies and fill keep hiring roles. One of the startup’s newer programs is ODX, an accelerator program that offers a $125,000 check, program and network support, in exchange for 7% of a company. The program has backed 150 companies to date. Despite this alleged growth, sources close to the company say that ODX is likely going to be scaled back and potentially even shut down. On Deck was originally raising a fund between $100 million and $150 million from Tiger Global, the early-stage market. It appears that On Deck never closed that large of a fund and landed closer to $40 million. “Add into that missed sales targets on the revenue side of the biz and a ridiculous hiring sprint, they now have [nine] months of runway pre-cuts,” one of the sources said. The startup last raised known venture capital funding in March 2021, In an email obtained by TechCrunch, co-founders Erik Torenberg and David Booth addressed staff about the layoffs and the accelerator. “In 2021, we launched ODX, our accelerator. We saw an opportunity to stand up and try our hand at innovating a stagnant accelerator market. By many accounts, we succeeded in this goal,” the email reads. “Unfortunately, over the same time period, the market began shifting dramatically. A few months in, the capital and accelerator markets were materially different from where they had been when we started. These factors forced us to reflect and consider how On Deck would continue for the future, support our communities and ensure long-term sustainability.” The co-founders went on to say that they take “full responsibility. not just for what brought us to this point, but also for making sure we do right by team members.” |
The costs of driver incentives are weighing on Lyft, Uber | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 5 | 5 | nearly a third of their value yesterday after the ride-hailing company , despite the company beating market expectations for revenue. If you delve a little deeper, it seems the market was instead focused about something else entirely: Slightly soft guidance on revenue growth in Q2 2022 when compared to analyst expectations, as well as the cost of driver incentives — supply stimulants that impact the company’s economic profile. During the Lyft earnings call, analysts focused on the cost of incentivizing drivers to participate in the company’s two-sided marketplace, and they were not assuaged by its CEO and CFO’s responses. Uber’s shares also fell in the wake of its earnings report. To understand the driver-incentive issue, we’ll first explore Lyft’s situation, and then compare it to what Uber said. The two companies are related and share competitive territory, but market reaction to their current state was sharp and notable. Let’s talk about it. In its , Lyft CFO Elaine Paul said the company expects revenues between $950 million and $1 billion in the second quarter, in line with current of about $995 million. (It’s worth noting that before the company’s report was digested by analysts, that figure was $1.02 billion.) But more worrisome were Paul’s comments on the company’s profitability. Per the above-linked transcript (emphasis ours): In terms of profitability, we expect Q2 contribution margin will be approximately 56%, which reflects the impact of growth investments on our leverage. , the overall marketplace, and some additional brand marketing. As a result, we expect adjusted EBITDA of between $10 million to $20 million for Q2. Lyft’s adjusted EBITDA came to $54.8 million in Q1, implying that the company is about to eat heavily into its limited adjusted profitability in the second quarter, partially thanks to investments in its driver supply. In its earnings call, Lyft stressed that while demand for rides can change rapidly — COVID-19 made that plain during its various waves — shifting driver supply takes more time. CEO Logan Green said that “supply adjustments” to its marketplace “are like moving the Titanic.” Unfortunate metaphor aside, it seems that Lyft is going to spend to boost driver supply in anticipation of future demand; the company expects to grow more quickly this year than the 36% it posted last year, a feat that will require more cars available for hailing. |
Traceable AI nabs $60M to secure app APIs using machine learning | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | , a startup offering services designed to protect APIs from cyberattacks, today announced that it raised $60 million in a Series B round led by IVP with participation from BIG Labs, Unusual Ventures, Tiger Global Management and several undisclosed angel investors. The new capital values the company at more than $450 million post-money, and CEO Jyoti Bansal — who’s also the co-founder of BIG Labs and Unusual Ventures — says that it’ll be put toward product development, recruitment and customer acquisition. APIs, the interfaces that serve as the connections between computer programs, are used by countless organizations to conduct business. But because they can provide access to sensitive functions and data, APIs are an increasingly common target for malicious hackers. to Salt Labs, the research division of (which sells API cybersecurity products, granted), API attacks from March 2021 to March 2022 increased nearly 681%. Gartner that 90% of web-enabled apps will have more attack surfaces exposed in APIs than user interfaces and that API abuses will become the attack vector for most companies in 2022. Bansal saw the writing on the wall four years ago, he said, when he co-founded San Francisco-based Traceable with CTO Sanjay Nagaraj. Bansal is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded app performance management company (which was acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion) and (which recently raised a $230 million Series D). Nagaraj, a Harness investor, has long been close within Bansal’s orbit, previously serving as the VP of software engineering at AppDynamics for seven years. “APIs are the glue that keeps modern applications and cloud services together. As businesses large and small migrate en masse from monolithic to highly distributed cloud-native applications, APIs are now a critical service component for digital business processes, transactions, and data flows,” Bansal told TechCrunch in an email interview. “However, sophisticated API-directed cyberthreats and vulnerabilities to sensitive data have also rapidly increased. Businesses need machine learning here. To have zero trust you need API clarity. You can no longer easily buy or hire security people, so you need to solve these vulnerabilities via technology.” Like several of its competitors, including Salt, Traceable uses AI to analyze data to learn normal app behavior and detect activity that deviates from the norm. Via a combination of “distributed tracing” and “context-based behavioral analytics,” the startup’s software — which works on-premises or in the cloud — can catalog APIs including “shadow” (e.g. undocumented) and “orphaned” (e.g. deprecated) APIs in real time, according to Bansal. Traceable describes distributed tracing as a technique involving the use of “agent modules” that collect diagnostic data from within production apps as code executes. Context-based behavioral analytics, meanwhile, refers to understanding the behavior of APIs, users, data and code as it relates to an organization’s overall risk posture. “APIs often expose business logic that threat actors use to infiltrate applications and private data. Every line of code needs to be observed in order to properly secure modern cloud-native applications from next-generation attacks,” Bansal said. “Automated and unsupervised machine learning allows Traceable to go deeper and complete the API security requirement better than anyone. As its name suggests, Traceable traces end-to-end application activity from the user and session all the way through the application code.” Traceable AI’s monitoring dashboard. Traceable AI Traceable provides a risk score based on “a calculation of likelihood and the possible impact of an attack,” using 70 criteria (reportedly). The software also maps app topologies, data flows and unique security events, including runtime details on APIs and data stores. to Crunchbase data, companies that describe themselves as securing APIs received $193.4 million in venture funding from late 2019 to June 2021, underlining the opportunity that investors see in the technology. Traceable has done quite well for itself despite the competition. Bansal says that the company has a number of paying customers, and — to spur further adoption — Traceable recently released its tracing technology in open source. Dubbed , it enables enterprises to monitor apps with technologies similar to those powering the Traceable platform. “The very nature of the pandemic fallout further helped accelerate digital transformation that was already under way. The creation and adoption of millions of microservices and APIs has been a core underlying enabler for the rapid growth of digital services,” Bansal said. “As different organizations have either created, adopted, or used millions of … APIs, it has greatly increased the attack surface vulnerable to API based attacks which cannot be detected or stopped by traditional security solutions. This problem requires a completely new approach to detect and stop these new attacks.” While Bansal declined to reveal annual recurring revenue when asked, Traceable’s total capital stands at $80 million — the bulk of which is going toward supporting product development and research, he said. “Businesses use Traceable’s rich forensic data and insights to easily analyze attack attempts and perform root cause analysis,” Bansal continued. “Traceable applies the power of machine learning and distributed tracing to understand the DNA of the application, how it is changing, and where there are anomalies in order to detect and block threats, making businesses more secure and resilient.” |
South Korea’s RECON Labs raises $4.4M to help shoppers visualize products by creating 3D models in AR | Kate Park | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Augmented reality (AR) can help customers shopping online preview products before making a purchase, and is a growing area of investment for e-commerce businesses. According to a recent survey of 16,000 Snapchat users in 16 markets, want to use AR and VR for online shopping. Now, a South Korean augmented reality (AR) startup called , which enables e-commerce customers to create 3D models within a few hours by taking a short video of products via its platform , has raised $4.4 million. The company will use its Series A funding to increase its headcount and enhance its platform PlicAR, which helps automatically turn a 2D image into a 3D view of its products without requiring any special skills in 3D modeling. RECON Labs CEO Seong-hoon Ban told TechCrunch that the firm works with a number of e-commerce marketplaces and retailers, including furniture companies that want to help their clients visualize products in 3D models in actual life-size in augmented reality. The company currently offers its service to more than 22 small and medium companies in South Korea, and is in discussion with potential customers in the fashion, toy and food sectors, Ban said. Retailers can save time and costs by using PlicAR without building their own 3D modeling platform, he added. RECON Labs claims it has more than 10,000 products that are 2D converted into 3D content. The platform will let users download, upload, view, sell and buy 3D assets through its web-based service in the future, like Sketchfab, which was acquired by Epic Games in 2021, Ban said. RECON Labs The startup also recently partnered with The Sandbox, a San Francisco-based game company, to develop a tool that will allow users to create 3D characters and items. RECON Labs says it plans to roll out a 3D creator’s app next year. It also aims to open an office in Silicon Valley for U.S. expansion in the fourth quarter of 2022. Its previous backers, including Kakao Ventures, Shinhan Capital, Lotte Ventures and Naver D2SF, participated in the latest round, bringing its total raised to $4.8 million since its inception in 2019. New investors Korea Investment Partners, Hanwha Techwin and Kakao Brain also joined in the round. “We will create a service that can easily and conveniently create and utilize 3D content as simple as anyone creating images or video content. Our vision is to grow to provide any types of 3D assets for AR and metaverse environments,” said Ban. |
Andreessen Horowitz plans $500 million investment in Indian startups | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Andreessen Horowitz, which made its maiden India investment last year, is looking to get aggressive in the world’s second largest internet market. The Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm has earmarked about $500 million to back Indian startups, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The firm, which led a funding round in the Bengaluru-based cryptocurrency exchange , is also looking to hire for several investment roles in the country, people familiar with the matter said. A number of partners at the firm including Seema Amble and Sumeet Singh have engaged with several Indian startups in recent months, people familiar with the matter said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The firm — which in January said it had — is exploring investment in an Indian startup that operates an opinion sharing platform at a valuation of about $250 million, one person said. It has also engaged with a Bengaluru-headquartered early-stage cross-border payments startup, another person said. We are “starting to see them look more seriously,” said an investor at a top tier fund in India. He declined to be named. If the firm, which is colloquially called a16z, goes ahead with the plan, it would be the latest high-profile investor to become actively involved in India, home of and where tech giants Google, Facebook and Amazon have collectively deployed at least $20 billion over the past decade. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment Friday. The firm has been exploring markets like India for years and has been open about the complexity of entering new regions. In a talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business six years ago, a16z co-founder and general partner Marc Andreessen (pictured above) said it was “extremely tempting” to back startups in emerging markets. But it was also challenging for a venture fund to expand to more countries, he explained. Venture capital is a “very hands-on process of understanding the people you’re working with for both evaluating the company and work with the company.” “If it continues to be a hands-on business like that then there is the problem of geographic remoteness, which is if I’m not present in another geography, do I really know those people to make the decisions. So what a bunch of firms have been trying to do is staff local teams. But then there’s the fundamental problem that if the local team is really good, then they can easily leave and run their own firms. If they are bad, they stay working for me…which has its own issues.” With valuations getting a broader correction in the private market (as well as public), now would be a good time for the firm to chase deals in the country. Scores of firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, B Capital, Ribbit Capital, Dragoneer, D1 and James Murdoch’s Bodhi Tree (who previously invested in India through Lupa) have increased the pace of their investments in the world’s second most populous nation in the past two years. Several of their peers/rivals, including Sequoia, Lightspeed and Accel that each have operated in India for over a decade have either raised new country-specific funds in recent months or are in the process of raising one. Lightspeed India Venture Partners is looking to , TechCrunch reported last week. SoftBank, Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global have also notably doubled down on India in recent quarters. SoftBank alone and plans to invest up to $10 billion this year, it said. Tiger Global has helped mint nearly two dozen unicorns in India in the past 18 months. On the web3 front, scores of investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Sino Global, Hashed and FTX Ventures, have engaged with multiple startups in the country in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. |
Stellantis, Trudeau invest $2.8 billion to boost EV production in Canada | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Stellantis will spend $2.8 billion (CAD $3.6 billion) to increase production of electric vehicles at two of its Canadian plants, the company said on Monday. The funding is a portion of the Stellantis dedicated to electric vehicles and new software over the next year in its push to move away from internal combustion engines and be carbon net zero by 2038. Stellantis North America chief operating officer Mark Stewart, alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, announced the overhaul of the Windsor and Brampton, Ontario facilities during an event at the automaker’s Automotive Research and Development Center in Windsor. About a third of the fresh funds will come from the Canadian government and the Ontario government, which plan to invest up to $410.7 million (CAD $529 million) and $398 million (CAD $513 million), respectively, alongside Stellantis, a signal that Canada is keen to support domestic production of EVs at a time when advancing climate change initiatives coincide with increasingly dire supply chain constraints. “Today’s deal on made-in-Canada electric vehicles is yet another investment in our workers and in our future,” said Prime Minister Trudeau at the event. “We’re building a world-class Canadian auto industry, an innovative economy and a clean, strong future for everyone. This is what a healthy environment and a healthy economy looks like.” The funding will add more than 650 engineering jobs to the Windsor R&D center, according to Stellantis. The company also said an additional 2,500 jobs will be created at the , which was announced in October last year. At the time, Stellantis said only that its new factory would be built in North America, but it’s now clear the automaker has its sights set on Ontario. Stellantis, which owns a range of vehicle brands, including Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram and Peugot, has not yet said which brands would be affected; however, it’s likely there will be continued work on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid and other Chrysler EVs, as well as some electrified Dodge cars. The as well as the Chrysler Voyager and Grand Caravan, the latter for the Canadian market only. At said Chrysler, best known for its minivans and being a family-friendly brand, will become all-electric by 2028. At the same time, the automaker unveiled its Airflow Concept, an all-wheel-drive electric SUV. Meanwhile, the Brampton facility is home to the production of the Chrysler 300 and the Dodge Challenger and Charger, all three of which are on their way out. Dodge has said it plans to launch an electric muscle car, . Retooling at Windsor is expected to begin in 2023, and retooling and modernization at Brampton in 2024, with production at the latter reesuming in 2025, complete with an “all-new, flexible architecture to support the company’s electrification plans,” the company said in a statement. Stellantis said it would announce at a later date which brands will be affected by the fresh funds. Regardless, we can expect the vehicles produced in those factories to feature the automaker’s new software technology, from which Stellantis has said it plans to generate . All new Stellantis vehicles by 2024 will feature the automaker’s platforms, including the “STLA Brain,” a cloud-connected technology that allows for over the air software upgrades; the “SmartCockpit,” a platform built with Foxconn that delivers applications like navigation, voice assist, e-commerce marketplace and payment services; and “AutoDrive,” developed with BMW to deliver automated driving features. For those who want a high-tech hit now, Pacificas of this model year can upgrade to get an Amazon Fire TV to stream or download shows and movies or get information from Alexa, . Through its 14 brands, Stellantis currently has 29 electrified models on sale globally. By the end of the decade, the automaker hopes to reach 75 BEVs globally, 25 of which will target the U.S. market. Recently, Stellantis revealed its first-ever fully electric Jeep SUV, which is expected to launch next year, as well as its new Ram 1500 BEV pickup, which is expected for 2024. |
LinearB wants to help development teams optimize their workflows | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | , a startup that helps engineering leaders optimize the workflow of their development teams, today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Tribe Capital. New investor Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures and 83North, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $71 million. The company says it managed to grow its user base from 1,500 development teams in 2021 to over 5,000 today. It currently counts Bumble, BigID, Cloudinary, Unbabel and Drata among its users. One of LinearB’s most important promises is that it goes beyond simply giving engineering managers access to more dashboards about developer efficiency. Instead, LinearB wants to also provide them with more insights into how they can optimize the development workflow as well. It does so by integrating with a wide variety of existing DevOps tools to aggregate data about how teams work. It tracks metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore when things go off the rails and change failure rates. LinearB That data is at the core of what LinearB does and provides something akin to a baseline for developer productivity in a given company. But from there, users can then also dig deeper to see where there are bottlenecks in their workflows or which team members may have a bit too much on their plate right now. In addition, LinearB then also helps teams set their own goals so they can track their own progress, and also helps them automate routine tasks like creating Jira tickets (because while it’s often at the core of what a development team does, nobody enjoys managing Jira tickets). This focus on providing value for everybody from the VP of Engineering down to the individual developer is also a core tenet of the service, LinearB CEO and co-founder Ori Keren told me. Both he and his co-founder Dan Lines previously worked as VPs of R&D and engineering — and that was the user persona they had in mind when they started building the service. Keren tells me they had some early success with that, but decided that in order to really provide the most value for their customers, they had to change course. “Our true philosophy is that improvement has to come from the bottom up,” he said. “You got to have the developers using that tool, you got to have team leaders, frontline managers. So really quickly, we identified that if we want to be a successful company — I wouldn’t say we pivoted, but we kind of adjusted quickly and said: when you onboard to the tool, it has to have something for every persona in the engineering organization: the developers, the team leaders and also for the engineering managers.” That’s something the team learned in early 2020 and with the COVID pandemic hitting just around this time, a lot of companies saw the need to accelerate their own projects around accelerating their development processes. And while developers may not care too much about tracking the cost of their projects and instead about cycle time, both draw from the same data. The company says its users are seeing deployment speeds increase by 64% during the first 120 days of using the project. “We’re not just building a tool that helps dev teams, we’re creating a community of engineering leaders that want to improve the way software development happens,” said LinearB COO and co-founder Dan Lines. The company plans to use the new funding to expand across its own development teams but also to expand its go-to-market efforts. In terms of product, the team is doubling down on its workflow optimization tools, Keren said. “We’re going to invest a lot in developer workflow optimization,” he said. “We believe that developer productivity, if you want to be great at it, you have to be helping developers — these are the people who are doing the work.” |
Don’t miss the roundtable roundup at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | |
Daily Crunch: Google unveils new options for removing personal data from search results | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | and / Getty Images |
Rivian lands $1.5B incentives package to build massive EV factory in Georgia | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Rivian will receive a $1.5 billion incentives package to build its massive factory in Georgia, posted Monday by the state’s Department of Economic Development. That sizable carrot — the biggest in the state’s history — comes with several commitments from Rivian, including that it will hire 7,500 people who will earn an average annual salary of $56,000 by the end of 2028. Under the agreement, Rivian has agreed to continued maintenance of these jobs through 2047. Rivian has to make repayments to the state and joint development authority (JDA) in any year in which it is 80% below its maintenance. Rivian also agreed to invest $5 billion into the factory project located near Atlanta during that same timeframe. The incentives package is comprised of a mix of tax credits and other subsidies. State and local incentives totaled $1.28 billion. An additional $198 million of site and road improvements is also part of the package. The state and the joint development authority are contributing the 1,978 acres of land for the project, which is worth an estimated $83 million. The state is also spending about $26.7 million to provide a rough-graded 500-acre pad for Rivian and $2.77 million on survey, design and permitting for all site development costs. The state and its Department of Transportation will also cover $47 million plus a $4.67 million in contingencies for road work that includes road widening, traffic signals and a new interchange. State and local governments will share the $7.4 million cost of wetland and stream mitigation. Local governments will also provide $12.3 million for sanitary sewer, $5 million for water and $500,000 for natural gas connections, according to the documents. Construction is expected to begin in summer 2022 with production beginning in 2024. Rivian announced in December plans to build a second factory east of Atlanta in Morgan and Walton counties that will have double the annual production capacity of its plant in Normal, Illinois. The Georgia factory, which is supposed to include co-located battery cell production facility, will have a targeted annual production capacity of 400,000 vehicles a year. The company that it picked the site due to the combination of sustainable business operations, talent pool, and proximity to supply chain and logistics. As ideal as the location may be for Rivian, some local residents have protested what has been described as largest economic development project in the history of Georgia. Their concerns run the gamut from the environment and groundwater to worries that the factory will increase traffic, cause urban sprawl and change the rural character of the area. The state’s Department of Economic Development said the agreement was crafted to ensure that Rivian follows locally required standards pertaining to water quality, groundwater recharge and runoff and local ordinances. The issue became so controversial, even , that the state took over the approval process. “We believe that this approach will enable the state to provide additional resources to improve the process of public input and feedback by consolidating it into a single forum rather than three individual jurisdictions that have separate rules, regulations and ordinances,” Department of Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson . |
Max Q: Hold fire | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. In this issue: Launcher demonstrated full thrust on its 3D-printed E-2 engine from NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The test demonstrated about 22,046 pound-feet of thrust (about 10 metric tons) using LOX/Kerosene at 100 bars of combustion pressure. Though they’re still a ways off from getting to orbit, a successful test like this is a huge step toward a working launch vehicle. The Launcher Light will be small and very efficient, aiming for a low cost to orbit and quick turnaround. But of course first it needs working engines. This is only one milestone among many to come for the engine; a turbopump with the necessary 3x pressure of the nominal combustion pressure is being tested in parallel. They’ll be integrated after being individually tested, and the resulting integrated engine will then begin its own proving phase. Watch the test below: Are satellite mega-constellations incompatible with cleaning up space junk in low Earth orbit? OneWeb founder Greg Wyler doesn’t think so. His new venture, E-Space, is aiming to reconcile the two by sending up a mesh communications satellite network composed of spacecraft that will also capture small debris before deorbiting at the end of their useful life. “When we talk about building 100,000 satellites or more [ … ] we are carefully monitoring to make sure that we are significantly, hundreds of times, less impactful and basically in the noise from a probability of collision perspective,” Wyler said. “So while we have more satellites than anyone else we have a negligible increase in the probability of collision.” Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg via Getty Images In news that surprises no one, the FAA has delayed its environmental review of SpaceX’s sprawling launch facility in Texas and its Starship program until at least May 31, the fourth such time that the agency has pushed back its own deadline. SpaceX cannot conduct an orbital test of Starship, the ultra-super-heavy reusable launch vehicle, until it is given the regulatory green light. The FAA has been working on the programmatic environmental assessment since November 2020, and has received more than 18,000 public comments on the project. “The FAA is working toward issuing the final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) for the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy on May 31, 2022,” the agency said in a statement. “SpaceX made multiple changes to its application that require additional FAA analysis.” SpaceX NASA Ingenuity, the NASA helicopter that’s currently flying around Mars, captured this amazing photo of the landing gear the Perseverance rover used to land on the red planet last February. As on Twitter: “Space debris crash-landed on another world snapped by an aerial drone. What a timeline we live in.” |
Biden to provide $3.1B to support domestic production of EV batteries | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | President Joe Biden’s administration said it will provide $3.1 billion in funding to support the domestic production of advanced batteries that will spur electric vehicle adoption. Proponents of the funding, which is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enacted last year, say supporting local battery initiatives will alleviate fluctuations in global oil markets, specifically the surging price of gas caused in large part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The White House said on Monday it will also set aside a separate $60 million in grants for battery recycling initiatives, both of which will support an effort to “reduce our reliance on competing nations like China that have an advantage over the global supply chain,” according to a Department of Energy statement. The announcement comes about a month after Biden said his administration would trigger the Defense Production Act to secure U.S. sources of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese that are used for EV batteries and energy storage. Most of those minerals are processed in Asia today. As of 2020, China alone controlled 80% of the world’s raw material refining, 77% of the world’s cell capacity and 60% of the world’s component manufacturing, due to its large domestic battery demand. The $3.1 billion will help U.S. companies build new factories and retrofit existing ones to make EV batteries and related parts. Tesla has been producing batteries on U.S. soil for years now, but other American automakers, most notably and , are also setting aside billions of dollars of investment to control the supply chain at home. to produce battery cells in the U.S. at multiple factories, and to do the same. to build a battery plant in Arizona, though it has not confirmed which automaker it will supply batteries to. Panasonic is seeking sites to build a factory in Oklahoma or Kansas and to start production in 2025. |
Finally, VR for your mouth | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Teams have tried a number of different ways to get the lower half of the face into the act with VR. That includes, and I’m quoting directly here, “a tiny robotic arm that could flick a feather across the lips or spray them with water.” They’ve also largely ruled out a piece that directly covers the mouth — VR users ultimately didn’t like the sensation of having both their eyes and mouths covered at the same time, which, fair enough. Ultimately, a team at Carnegie Mellon University settled on a much more practical method of offering added tacticity: ultrasound waves. at the school attaches a device to the bottom of a headset, sending the waves down toward the lips to create a kind of haptic sensation. The technology operates similarly to the way hardware makers create virtual buttons on devices. The added twist here, however, is that ultrasound waves are capable of traveling through the air. They can only do so for short distances, but it’s enough to make the journey from the bottom of a VR headset to wearers’ mouths. The device utilizes 64 transducers arrayed in a curved configuration, which mix constructive and destructive amplification to vary the effect. So, all of this presents the big question of why. Before you go getting any ideas, the end goal here is the same as with any VR peripheral: increasing immersion. The team cites ideas like raindrops, wind and, god forbid, a virtual bug crawling across your real lips. Among other things, the team notes that the mouth is a prime target because — like the hands — there’s a lot of sensation. “You can’t really feel it elsewhere; our forearms, our torso — those areas lack enough of the nerve mechanoreceptors you need to feel the sensation,” says co-author, Vivian Shen. Results of immersion will vary. Turns out things like cobwebs don’t work great, because it doesn’t make sense to have that feeling localized to the face. Ditto for a drinking fountain, because feeling the sensation without the actual water isn’t particularly convincing. Nevertheless, the team is continuing to iterate on the product, and working to make it smaller and lighter. “Our phased array strikes the balance between being really expressive and being affordable,” Shen says. |
Health startup myNurse to shut down after data breach exposed health records | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | myNurse, a healthcare startup that provides chronic care management and remote patient monitoring services, said it will shut down at the end of the month after reporting a data breach that exposed personal health information of its users. The startup, which launched , said in filed with the California attorney general’s office that it discovered a breach on March 7 during which an unauthorized individual accessed the company’s protected health data. The data breach notice warned that patients’ demographic, health, and financial information was accessed, including names, phone numbers, dates of birth, but also medical histories, diagnoses, treatments, lab test results, prescriptions, and health insurance information. myNurse said in the data breach notice that its decision to shutter its business “is unrelated to the data security incident,” but did not provide a reason for the unexpected shutdown. The company said it began notifying affected patients on April 29, the same date as its data breach notification, more than seven weeks after the breach was discovered. myNurse co-founder and chief executive Waleed Mohsen provided TechCrunch with a short statement saying the company was considering “how best to adjust our business model amid a changing healthcare landscape,” but declined to answer any of our questions about the data breach, including why it took the company seven weeks to notify affected patients or if myNurse had carried out a third-party security audit of its systems prior to the breach. Mohsen also declined to say how many patients are affected in total. Under the law of California, where myNurse is headquartered, companies must notify the attorney general’s office if more than 500 people are affected. |
MIT used autonomous knitting to create these soft robotic banana fingers | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | The MIT CSAIL team calls them “banana fingers,” and I can’t really disagree. They’re oblong and bright yellow, but as visually arresting as they are at first glance, they do serve a function. The glove is effectively a kind of soft robotic. Its uses pneumatic actuation (air power, if you will) to serve as an assistive wearable. If you, say, have an issue with muscle control, the gloves could, quite literally, help you get a grip by pumping air in to help them open and close. One of the things that makes the project extra interesting is the use of conductive yarn, which gives the gloves a kind of built-in sense of touch. The glove was created with a system called “PneuAct” — a portmanteaux of pneumatic actuator — detailed in a new . It utilizes an autonomous machine knitting system. “A human designer simply specifies the stitch and sensor design patterns in software to program how the actuator will move, and it can then be simulated before printing,” MIT writes. “The textile piece is fabricated by the knitting machine, which can be fixed to an inexpensive, off-the-shelf rubber silicone tube to complete the actuator.” Banana fingers are one of a handful of different prototypes created by the lab. The list also includes a standalone soft robotic hand and a quadrupedal robot that uses air pressure to walk. Extrapolating out futher, CSAIL envisions more complex systems, including things like exoskeletons. The wearable soft robotics could be used to assist with moving other body parts. MIT CSAIL “Using digital machine knitting, which is a very common manufacturing method in today’s textile industry, enables ‘printing’ a design in one go, which makes it much more scalable,” the paper’s lead, Yiyue Luo says. “Soft pneumatic actuators are intrinsically compliant and flexible, and combined with intelligent materials, have become the backbone of many robots and assistive technologies — and rapid fabrication with our design tool can hopefully increase ease and ubiquity.” Exoskeletons have become an increasingly popular category of robotics in recent years, with a focus on work and mobility. While a majority of them utilize harder material, many startups have begun focusing on softer versions made from textiles that trade overall strength for a design that works more comfortably with the human form. |
This is what the Edit Tweet feature could look like on Twitter | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Twitter’s work on its is continuing. While several people last month already spotted , what we didn’t yet know was how edited tweets would appear to users viewing them on Twitter, or how the edited tweet’s original text could be read. Now, we’re able to see what Twitter is building to highlight that tweets have had edits made to them. According to reverse engineer , the Edit Tweet button will allow users to create a new tweet with different content. But to make sure Twitter users know the tweet has been changed from the original, a label (alongside an icon of a small pen or pencil) will appear at the bottom of the tweet. The label’s text will simply say “Edited.” And if you click on the word “Edited,” you’ll be taken to the tweet’s edit history. Wong notes that currently users will have 30 minutes to make tweet edits. That’s a bit longer than needed to quickly correct a spotted typo — something already allows for. But it’s long enough to clarify or reword a tweet that could be beginning to blow up and go viral for the wrong reasons. How an old Tweet edit looks like on Twitter Web App: — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) Wong had earlier related to the work-in-progress Edit Tweet feature in the recent build of the Twitter web app had indicated the Edit button wasn’t actually correcting or changing the text in the original tweet — it was creating a new tweet with the updated content. She had said the new, edited tweet would include the list of old tweets prior to the edit, but we didn’t yet know how Twitter would address this critical context in its user interface. Her latest findings, which Wong says she found in development within Twitter’s web app, give us a better idea. Because the new, edited tweet and old tweet are actually different entities, it’s possible that someone could still link directly to the out-of-date version. In that case, the user would see the old tweet with a label that states “There’s a new version of this Tweet” directing them to the updated version with the new text. The feature appears to be in the early stages of development, as Wong pointed out to TechCrunch that the “Edited” label itself looks small and inconsistent with the rest of Twitter’s user interface. But as the feature is not yet live, that’s something that will likely be corrected ahead of a more public launch. Though a relatively minor update, this does help give Twitter users an idea as to how Twitter is thinking about the Edit Tweet feature from the perspective of how the addition would impact the user experience on Twitter, as well as the company’s own backend systems. As some , allowing people to actually edit the text in the original tweet would have meant both the old and new versions would point to the same tweet ID, which could complicate things from an engineering standpoint. It could have been a nightmare for caching systems based on the tweet ID, they said. Instead, Twitter is giving the edited tweet a new tweet ID, but linking to the older versions from the most recent one. the current unreleased version of Edit Tweet reuploads media (images, videos, GIFs, etc) instead of reusing them. an inefficient use of the bandwidth and media processing power, might be lossy too. plus it turns my video into an image (mishandling media type) — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) Wong additionally noted the Edit tweet feature will re-upload the media attached to the original tweet (e.g. images, videos, GIFs, etc.) instead of reusing them, which seemed inefficient. But this may not be how the feature works further down the road. Reached for comment, Twitter confirmed Wong’s latest finding is a part of the same in-development “Edit Tweet” feature spotted earlier, but declined to share more about its plans. Last month, Twitter first the ground-shaking news that it was actually going to offer users a way to edit tweets — a longtime user request and one that incoming has also been pushing for. The company has not said when the feature would go live to the public, but said Twitter Blue subscribers could expect to be able to try out the feature “in the coming months.” |
Amazon workers reject bid to unionize a second Staten Island warehouse | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Weeks after for Amazon union organizers in Staten Island, a second location in the borough has soundly defeated plans to follow suit. The “no” vote scored a decisive victory this time out, at 618 to 380. In all, 998 of the 1,633 eligible workers cast a vote. With only two voided ballots, the results appear far more straightforward than the recent Bessemer, Alabama re-vote, though the National Labor Relations Board still needs to officially sign off. Voting took place via secret ballot for four days last week. The relatively small number of ballots meant the board was able to complete counting in a matter of hours. The news comes as a major blow to union efforts, which had a good deal of wind in their sales following last month’s victory. Last weekend, the site saw visits from leading progressive politicians, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Christian Smalls, the fired Amazon worker who led Staten Island organizing efforts, . “Despite todays outcome I’m proud of the worker/organizers of LDJ5 they had a tougher challenge after our victory at JFK8,” Smalls wrote on Twitter. Our leads should be extremely proud to have given their coworkers a right to join a Union [Amazon Labor] will continue to organize and so should all of you.” Amazon, which had previously suggested the NLRB exercised undue influence in the JFK8 vote, savored today’s victory. “We’re glad that our team at LDJ5 were able to have their voices heard,” spokesperson Kelly Nantel told TechCrunch. “We look forward to continuing to work directly together as we strive to make every day better for our employees.” For its part, the worker-led Amazon Labor Union promised more organizing, writing, “The organizing will continue at this facility and beyond. The fight has just begun.” |
New Zealand gets its first crypto, web3-focused VC fund | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | The last few months have seen a wave of VC firms dedicating entire multimillion-dollar funds to the advancement of technology in the crypto, blockchain and web3 space. Most recently, , closed its third fund for an oversubscribed $650 million. Earlier this year, to back crypto startups and buy tokens; for its second crypto-focused early-stage fund; and . By comparison, the $5 million web3/crypto fund that’s just been launched by New Zealand-based VC Global from Day 1 (GD1) might seem like small potatoes. However, GD1 Crypto Fund 1 is notable because it is the country’s first dedicated fund in an industry that can potentially be a space both for startups and local investors to win. New Zealand startups in all aspects of the , from Easy Crypto, a platform for buying cryptocurrency, to Veve, a company that makes and sells NFTs for enterprise and recently , to Fluf World, a metaverse space made up of 3D-animated rabbits with their own personalities. These startups, and others like them, are largely backed by offshore investment, but GD1 wants -based investors to have access to what it sees as “the future of the internet,” according to Nawaz Ahmed, an angel investor and crypto veteran who recently joined GD1 as general parter for this fund. “The point of the fund is to support the local ecosystem while also being able to invest in great offshore opportunities and be able to provide our LPs with the best opportunities across the world,” said Nawaz. |
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Amazon aggregator Thrasio begins layoffs, names new CEO | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | A day of reckoning has come for , one of the bigger startups buying up and consolidating third-party Amazon sellers. TechCrunch has learned from sources that the company, valued last year at between $5 billion and $10 billion, is going to be laying off a portion of its employees this week. That news is coming at the same time that Thrasio is changing its leadership: today it that Greg Greeley, a former president of Airbnb and a longtime Amazon executive, is joining its board and taking on the role of CEO this August. He will be succeeding Carlos Cashman, one of the co-founders of the company, who will remain on Thrasio’s board as a director. The layoffs and new CEO appointment are the latest developments in a series of ups and downs for Thrasio in the last six months that underscore some of the challenges in the aggregator business model: – In April 2021, when Thrasio was announcing a $100 million raise, co-founder Josh Silberstein — who at the time was co-CEO at the company with Cashman — that Thrasio was eyeing up a public listing to raise more money for expansion, either through a traditional IPO or via a SPAC; it was also appointing a new CFO to oversee the process. – The SPAC idea started to take shape over the summer, potentially valuing Thrasio as high as $10 billion. But then the new CFO left in July, just three months after joining; Silberstein subsequently left the company in September; and by the beginning of , the SPAC option was delayed, reportedly due to problems that arose during a financial audit. – Yet by the end of that month, Thrasio announced another private fundraising, a led by Silver Lake, which was when it hit its $5-10 billion valuation. – Last week, people were sharing allegedly looking for investors in the company via a special purpose vehicle at a $2.7 billion valuation. Tellingly, the sender has gone silent (meaning: it may well be a hoax). The company declined to comment. Unfortunately, the layoffs are not a hoax. TechCrunch confirmed the rumors with the company, and we have also been shown an internal memo that explains how they will be carried out: people will be getting informed by their managers over the next two days (Tuesday and Wednesday). The company said in the memo that it “made the decision to reduce the size of the Thrasio team,” but it has not confirmed how many employees will be impacted. We understand that the layoffs will be part of a bigger reorganization. In that memo to employees, Cashman and Thrasio president Danny Boockvar write that in order to keep Thrasio on its trajectory, the company would need to make certain “strategic and operational changes.” “This is not an easy decision – especially within a culture like ours that is shaped around community and sharing,” they added. Employees being let go will receive “severance, healthcare, job support, and accelerated vesting of some of your options,” as well as career transition support and an alumni network for continued support, the memo mentioned. Their final working day will be May 13. Thrasio was founded in 2018 by Cashman and Silberstein to capitalize on a very Amazon-like economy of scale: the Amazon Marketplace has millions of businesses and brands selling on it (nearly 2 million active sellers by ) and there is a business to be built in bringing some of them together to run more efficient production, marketing and analytics, and fulfillment across them. The businesses would be picked up by Thrasio, which would invest in tech to run them better and more profitably as e-commerce operations, both on Amazon and potentially outside of it as well — a new kind of Procter & Gamble for the twenty-first century. It raised nearly $3.4 billion in funding to build out its business, acquiring hundreds of brands, with investors including the likes of Silver Lake, Advent International, Oaktree, Upper90, Harlan and more. When it raised its $1 billion round last October, it was buying businesses at a rate of 1.5 per week and had several hundred brands in its portfolio. Dozens of other aggregators followed in Thrasio’s wake — some 150 according to Thrasio’s estimates, collectively raising some $15 billion in capital to fuel those ambitions — eyeing up the same opportunity as Thrasio was chasing. Thrasio itself became a top-five seller on Amazon. It’s not clear why a financial audit would have stalled Thrasio’s SPAC last year, but it speaks to some of the challenges of running a business and accounting for it when it’s evolving at a fast pace, and at its heart is about bringing multiple other businesses together. The concept of consolidating repetitive processes across multiple retailers sounds like a great idea in theory. “What happens when you get into that price range is that it gets hard to grow your business and manage it,” Silberstein told me last year, citing SEO, marketing and supply chain management as some of the challenges. “That means as you grow from $1 million to $10 million, the margins would decrease and it gets even harder to make returns. We simply observed the reality that all these great companies had reached a point between a lack of access to capital and simply not being able to keep doing what they do. We thought, if we acquire 10-20 of these we would have the scale to build best in breed supply chain, marketing and so on. We would fix the problem.” But in reality Thrasio has been building a business spanning a number of different consumer categories, geographies and demographics. Integrating even similar businesses can be costly and difficult (and it often goes wrong). And aggregators generally position themselves as solving those issues with tech, but in some cases, aggregators are not building as much technology as you might think: they are buying third-party tools to help with SEO, fulfillment and more. In that context, the move to bring in Greeley — whose roles at Amazon included running its global Prime program — suggests that the company wanted a more seasoned executive at the helm to keep its long-term strategy on the right path, especially given Greeley’s background and track record in the consumer marketplace space. Cashman has also been grappling with another controversy outside of Thrasio. He is facing a by Stacy Chang, an investor who left Founders Fund to join Cashman in a new venture capital firm called Arrowside Capital. She alleges he dismissed her after deciding not to move forward with the firm, and she is seeking damages, including for work she says she did over a six-month period. Thrasio also alludes to growing too big, too fast in the joint memo to employees. “Now, as we assess our strategy for the road ahead, we need to take the time to properly absorb and grow the businesses we have acquired, make sure we have rigorous processes and controls, and then look to re-scale our team in the optimal areas for growth.” They went on to say that some of that included “refining” its M&A team to be able to handle acquisitions and integrate them into the company’s processes, as well as “undergoing our transformation in an environment with a pandemic, a war, a sharp rise in inflation, supply chain disruptions and changing consumer behaviors.” This is unlikely to be the final chapter for Thrasio, which remains the owner of hundreds of big-selling e-commerce brands. But the big question will be whether it continues as a single entity under Greeley, and whether it continues to grow as it has; or whether it takes a course to “rationalize” some of the many investments and acquisitions it has made over the years. “Just four years ago, the innovative team at Thrasio created an entirely new way for this community of entrepreneurs to achieve their business goals and see the reach of their products expand – and Thrasio continues to blaze the trail,” Greeley noted in a statement today. “It’s been truly remarkable – and it’s still early in a marketplace with nearly $400 billion in total third-party sales in 2021 and trillions more in the broader retail ecosystem.” |
Inclusive fintech is hard to do right, so Line has a different direction | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | of fintechs claiming to build a more inclusive, mission-driven fintech platform for lower-income individuals. However, hurdles like required credit history or predatory interest rates and fees limits an entire cohort of people from engaging in our financial systems. , the founder and CEO of , thinks he can get users onboard for his vision of a more inclusive financial network. His startup doles out emergency lines of funds to people — as low as $10 — without charging interest or demanding proof of credit history and income. Over time, as trust grows from repayment, so does a customer’s ability to request larger checks. To bring the customer’s point of view into financial services, Krishnaiah has landed millions of dollars in new funding for his startup. He tells TechCrunch that Line has raised $7 million in equity financing and $18 million in debt, totaling $25 million in a round led by Massive. Other investors participated in the round, including TASC Ventures, Goodwater Capital, SustainVC, Avesta Fund, Strada Education Network, The Josephine Collective, Overtime VC, Techstars and Kelmhurst. With new capital behind him, Krishnaiah believes that Line’s biggest disruption, and the reason it will work through consumer trust issues with the larger fintech world, is perspective. The entrepreneur, a former Uber driver, has lived the experience that he’s now trying to disrupt. “The champions of people creating products? They were never themselves in financial harm the way I was or my family was,” he said. “Because of that, the solutions that have been created have been more islands that are in-operable, non-inclusive and don’t talk to each other.” Growing up poor, the entrepreneur detailed years where he couldn’t afford new shoes, despite being in his growing years, which has landed him arthritis to this day. He was almost kicked out of the national debate championship because he couldn’t find a clean shirt, and he often had to choose between eating to protect his sugar levels, or taking the bus to school. His parents grew up in “extreme poverty,” which also informed his perspective. “People building products today either in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, have not been through this,” Krishnaiah said. Investors often told him that his product, giving small checks of instant cash, could easily be replaced if someone in need just asked a friend to Venmo them, he recalls. “For the same reasons I could not ask a friend to give me money so I could eat and then take the bus, it was just not a reality… and people cannot resonate with that reality because they have never been there and done that.” Line founder and CEO, Akshay Krishnaiah. Line Line, a public benefit corporation, charges a monthly subscription fee, starting at $1.97, in exchange for instant cash. Once repaid, users are able to slowly build toward bigger checks, and trust that could be used to underscore credit worthiness. The company, which came out of stealth last July, has had 500,000 people register from over 5,200 cities across all 50 states. The company also said registrations are up 100% month over month, and have grown the service from instant cash to larger checks as rapport is built. To date, around 60% of Line’s users are women, and the company’s internal team is 40% women; parity is the ultimate goal. The startup also claims that it is profitable, with revenue growing 300% quarter over quarter. It’s great news for Line, especially across a greater reckoning in fintech startups, but perhaps even more meaningful for the clientele that it serves. The company couldn’t be financially viable if early users weren’t paying back their loans, establishing trust and expanding their tasks. While Line didn’t offer specifics, it said that most users return their checks within the same month, and retake the same cash “line” after; a revolving line of emergency funds. “As soon as they refill their line, it’s fully available for them, so it’s not like it’s gone, they have to wait till next month,” he said. “Instead of finding the least risky customers, we’re adjusting our underwriting and our technology to the risk profile of the customer,” he said. The algorithm that decides who gets what fund weighs things like inflation, caretaking responsibilities and hourly jobs. Of course, there are still challenges ahead for the startup: How does it vet for early users, and what happens when the startup scales and volatility is introduced into payback cycles? Today, technically anyone can use Line, but eventually will the platform need to be more picky so only those who need it most are able to ask for emergency funding? The founder hopes that Line’s growth can signal to the broader fintech industry that there’s a better way to build for low-income individuals. “And we don’t want to be a neobank, just to be very clear,” he added. |
Don’t worry about VCs’ returns if you can exit your startup early | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | watching the recent wave of shows on disgraced startups (from Theranos to WeWork), you might be under the impression that startup founders have no sense of responsibility. In my experience, however, the opposite is much more common: Entrepreneurs tend to feel guilty about things that are just part of startup life. For instance, many founders feel quite badly about merely admitting that they wouldn’t say “no” to a good enough acquisition offer, or telling their investors they’d do so. Why does it matter if founders tell investors that they might take an exit before their company reaches IPO scale? I think the reasoning goes something like: “What’s good enough for me might not be good enough for my backers,” or a life-changing amount of cash for a founder might be too small an investment multiple for an investor. And sometimes, these concerns are not just guilt rearing its head, but also the fear that VCs won’t let an acquisition go through if it happens too early in a startup’s lifecycle. There are many reasons to stick it out at your startup, but if you’re worried about your investors when faced with an exit, here’s why you shouldn’t be. Letting people down is never pleasant, but that’s how it can feel to sell a startup early. Will investors be disappointed that your company never fulfilled its destiny? Well, yes, but only to a certain extent, and that’s where portfolio math comes into play. Investors hedge their bets by making many investments, though they still hope that each of those bets pay off. However, they also know that it won’t happen. They’re in the game fully aware that that some of their investments will simply have to be written off, and a handful more will land somewhere in between success and outright failure. But investing in startups still makes sense, because outliers will return their original investment value many times over. In venture capital, big home runs have become a fixture. They have a name, too: “Fund makers,” and they signify an investment that generates more liquidity than the entire fund backing it. In a , VCs John Backus and Hemant Bhardwaj coined a new term for these fund makers: “dragons.” They encouraged fellow investors to favor them over unicorns. “Unicorns are for show. Dragons are for dough,” they wrote. |
Amazon is going to make it easier to load your own books onto Kindle | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 5 | 2 | Amazon is… a company that could bear to have of an track . At the time of publication, warehouse workers in Staten Island are fighting for by voting in yet another . But hey, those folks in Seattle make a pretty good e-reader. Since it’s Amazon, though, Kindles make it a little challenging to upload e-books that you didn’t purchase from them. Amazon e-books use the company’s proprietary AZW3 file type, whereas basically everyone else in the world uses EPUB. So, if you want to use a Kindle (they’re affordable and nice, okay) but don’t want to give Amazon any extra money after that purchase, you’d have to buy an e-book, convert it into an AZW3 file (thanks, ), and then email it to a specific address associated with your Kindle device. Only after all that could you read your more-ethically-purchased book on your begrudingly-purchased-from-Amazon Kindle. Finally, in “ ,” we won’t have to take quite as many steps to just read some gosh darn books, according to an update on Amazon’s Help & Customer Service page. With this impending change, we will bask in the luxury of simply emailing ourselves EPUB files, which Amazon will convert into a Kindle-compatible file. Technology is amazing. Amazon also plans to discontinue the MOBI file type, a final relic from its 2005 acquisition of . Mobipocket’s technology helped Amazon launch the first Kindle two years later, which retailed for a $399. You could buy a Nintendo Wii for $250 in 2006, for comparison. It was a different time, I suppose. |
Coinbase’s lost momentum | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | Hey everyone, and welcome back to Last week, we talked about how the crypto industry needs to take a moment to reflect on buying the love of its followers. This week, we’re looking at the unhappy misfortunes of America’s favorite public crypto company To get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday, you can subscribe on Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images Though crypto markets have been relatively stable since last week’s bombastic dump-o-rama, gloom was on the menu this week for institutional investors and retail buyers prophesying crypto winters falling upon all ye households for the next several years. The message from VCs to crypto startups and mega corps alike was “cut the fat” — a statement which doesn’t jibe too well with the lavish launch parties and plans to quintuple hiring that plenty of founders seemed to be working toward last month. It’s been a period of unprecedented boom for crypto startups, but life has been looking a bit less pleasant for Coinbase since Bitcoin and the public markets hit their frothy peak in November of last year. Coinbase is currently trading below $65 per share after a more than 80% decline from its November all-time high. A lot of other public market tech stocks are also feeling the hurt, but relative to just how much revenue Coinbase pulled in last year, it’s clear investors have nuked their expectations for the company’s future performance. Coinbase did $7.4 billion in net revenue in 2021 and is currently rocking a market cap below $14 billion. That’s nuts. Public market investors may not have the rosiest view of Coinbase, but the question is how this really impacts the company. Well, the firm is adjusting its growth expectations for one thing. COO Emilie Choi announced this week that the company was hitting the brakes, “Heading into this year, we planned to triple the size of the company. Given current market conditions, we feel it’s prudent to slow hiring and reassess…” This is expected, but isn’t great for a company that has several cash-swolen competitors all chasing their market share. The company has been diversifying its offerings looking to leverage its network and provide more of a browser for the nascent web3 world, but it’s unclear what kind of consumer pickup the crypto world is looking at over the next year compared to the past couple, something which has left the company in a fairly grim position for the near-term… , Animoca Brands has grown into one of the biggest firms in the metaverse, play-to-earn gaming and NFT worlds, but its co-founder Yat Siu told TechCrunch there’s a new sector the company wants to enter: education. No, not education about crypto topics, but more general educational tooling that could apply to more than one discipline. Siu said he hopes to drive the teacher economy with a “learn-to-earn” or “teach-to-earn” model, so both teachers’ and students’ time can be rewarded in the form of a token or cash. This push could be a new wave for the crypto ecosystem to implement additional ways to earn rewards. Thanks for following along, and get Chain Reaction in your inbox every Thursday by subscribing on the Lucas Matney |
Pear, now nearly 10 years old and with numerous hits, looks to close its biggest fund by far | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | Pear, a Palo Alto, Ca.-based venture firm that we’ve been tracking since its outset in 2012, looks to be raising a fourth fund that’s targeting $410 million in capital commitments, shows a new . It would be a big step up from Pear’s first three funds, which closed progressively with $50 million in 2013, $75 million in 2016 and $160 million in capital commitments in 2019, including from a longtime limited partner, the University of Chicago. Reached for comment, co-founder Pejman Nozad emailed back, “I can’t comment!” Nozad and co-founder Mar Hershenson have long been the first stop for prominent early-stage investors that are looking to fund nascent teams, given the firm has been among the earliest backers in a notable number of companies that have gone to raise ever-bigger rounds and higher valuations, including the now publicly traded companies DoorDash and Guardant Health. Other startups to attract capital from Pear before nearly any other firm was aware of their existence include the deep-linking startup Branch, which closed on in funding in February at a $4 billion valuation; Gusto, valued at $9.5 billion last summer when it raised in funding; and Aurora Solar, a firm that provides software services for the solar industry and was valued at $4 billion in February when it closed a round. Like other firms, Pear is likely to see the valuations of its still-private portfolio companies slide downward — possibly by a lot — depending on how long this correction lasts. Hershenson, who joined TechCrunch for a mobility-focused event this week, noted on stage that startups are in for a bumpy ride, given how frothy the market had grown. Asked if the , Hershenson answered: “Maybe for a little while it’s over … The problem is that the market was priced too high in 2021, and we’re all adjusting to that price change, and that changes how companies raise money. “Everybody knows that the stock market is down a lot,” she’d said. “Software stocks are down in some cases 80%. [Meanwhile] if you’re a private company, and you were very lucky and you raised money in 2021, you may have gotten a multiple of 100x on your ARR. Today, those multiples are 10x or 20x. That means that if your company was $2 billion [at the time of your fundraise], your company is [now] worth $200 million.” Even with a steep reset in prices, however, Pear’s success to date is undeniable. It’s also unlikely. Nozad, very famously, was earlier a rug dealer who insisted on toting rugs to his clients’ homes, where during the course of long conversations, they would learn about the rug and he would learn about their business. He eventually became a scout for his boss and a trusted friend to some very powerful people. “He has a good sniffer, and I trust the guy,” Sequoia’s Doug Leone back in 2012. “He’s like me, from the earth.” Sequoia has, in fact, backed a number of companies that Pear has funded, including Guardant Health and DoorDash. Meanwhile, his partner, Mar Hershenson, was also very much an outlier when the two struck out on their own. Despite founding several companies previously — one of which Nozad backed — and though she holds an M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, she is a native of Spain and even more unusual in VC circles a decade ago, she is a woman who had not previously cut her teeth at someone else’s venture firm. That may not seem very notable today but in 2012, but it put Hershenson in rare company. As for the team’s newest bets, Pear hosted an invite-only demo day earlier this week, coverage of which we’ll have for readers soon. (Unlike Y Combinator, the outfit holds a demo day each year for a comparatively limited number of companies — typically around 10.) In the meantime, some of its other recent checks have gone to Sudozi, a two-year-old Austin, Texas startup that provides a SaaS platform to help enterprises improve their money management capabilities and that just this month announced a seed round led by Pear. Pear also recently wrote a follow-on check to Osmind, a two-year-old, Bay Area-based startup that makes software to chart and update patient information and documents, with a focus on mental health. The outfit raised in Series B funding led by DFJ Growth, an announcement it also made earlier this month. |
Why founders should start talking now to bankers and potential buyers | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | Founders have gotten the memo that the ground is shifting under their feet right now. What to do about it is the question. Already, teams are making plans to scale back their spending to preserve capital. They’re making painful staff cuts toward that same end — or else instituting hiring freezes. But they should also be thinking a lot harder about building relationships with bankers and the larger companies that might conceivably be interested in acquiring their startup, say two attorneys who work on both the ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ side of transactions, with both large companies and venture-backed outfits, and who both have more than 20 years of experience. Indeed, to better understand some of the options founders may have, we talked earlier today with Denny Kwon and Scott Anthony, both of whom represent the white shoe law firm Covington & Burling (where former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is also an attorney). They answered a range of questions that we thought startups might be wondering about right now. Our chat has been edited lightly for length. DK: There is certainly a feeling of more pressure on sellers to get deals done as quickly as possible in light of the fact that there’s a lot of market volatility right now and they don’t know how buyers may be reacting to a significant decline in their stock price. Smaller companies are also facing the prospect of a slightly more challenging fundraising market, so alternatives for them are narrowing. DK: It’s much more challenging to price deals with a significant stock component in this market. With any volatility, you don’t get a clear sense of the inherent value of a share, so all-cash deals are much more favorable to targets. DK: Whenever we see volatile markets, where valuations were incredibly high [and are] being reset, it always takes time for sellers’ expectations to reset as well, so although they may be a temporary [lull in activity] because of the market, if there’s a ‘normalization’ that’s to come, we’ll probably see M&A activity, especially where valuation expectations are reduced on both the buyers’ and the sellers’ side. My sense [right now] is that buyers may view the market correction as being potentially opportunistic but sellers may not have the same expectations because they may hope for a rebound in the near future. Once seller expectations come down and they continue to hear from VCs that funding may not be as available as it was 6 to 12 months ago, they’ll be even harder pressed to turn away acquisition offers that come in. DK: The pending deals I’m working on are continuing apace. SA:There’s valuation pressure, but it’s hard to gauge [the degree]. Certainly, we have companies that were racing to close valuations [before Russia invaded Ukraine] and [that period since] has changed everyone’s expectations. I think there’s concern on the company side that investors are sitting out and that’s driving valuations down. Companies with revenues and good prospects will weather any downturn better — they always have. Sector wise, it will depend, but the whole stablecoin [debacle] hasn’t helped the crypto stuff. DK: It’s top of mind for all practitioners, but there’s a dichotomy in that some transactions are reportable and others are not. For those that are reportable — the threshold is approximately $100 million — we’re spending an incredible amount of time analyzing the potential for regulatory issues. DK: From that initial approach from an acquirer, the time period can vary from a few weeks if there is alignment right away, up to several months if the target company wants to see if there is other interest. A lot depends on how compelling that first offer may appear. Once you get to a handshake on a valuation, it’s usually a six- to eight-week process to get a signed definitive agreement. SA: If the [startup] is the one that is making the decision to find a buyer, then the process – maybe they hire bankers, maybe they use board members’ connections to reach out to strategics – the process and timing can be very different depending on how quickly they need the money and how quickly they can get potential buyers interested . . . and the size of the company, but buyers are still going to run their diligence process. DK: Many companies at an inflection point that need to raise money to fund their growth or expansion are going to have a difficult decision to make, which is to either raise a new round where the valuation may not meet their expectations or [where they see a lot of dilution], or an M&A exit, where they see proceeds now but lose out on [potential] upside. DK: I’d be advising startups to talk to bankers and keep relationships up with people at the larger companies they know simply because we may be in for a longer-term correction, where funding becomes even more challenging than it has been over the last couple of months. SA: Having relationships with the bankers is prudent so if you have to check the market, you have those relationships already. Also, keeping in contact with customers and bigger strategic partners that would be natural buyers for the company could short-circuit any kind of sale process later. |
Daily Crunch: South Korea’s special financial crimes unit is investigating Do Kwon | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | What is that we hear? Is that the Friday, May 20, 2022, on the calendar and the soft, alluring siren’s song of a weekend that’s right around the corner? Why, yes, that must be it! Our events team is busy putting together an awesome TechCrunch Disrupt, and we are psyched about Startup Battlefield, where the winner will walk away with a $100,000 check to continue building the future it is envisioning. . — and Today, we got a wee bit excited about Haje’s somewhat-expletive-filled rant about . We also loved ’s piece about Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky’s love for small phones. “ ” Migicovsky laments. Also, and tag-teamed on a pair of articles about Sony’s new earbuds. Brian (“As someone who tests a lot of earbuds over the course of a year, the LinkBuds S are among the best sounding and most comfortable I’ve had in my ears”), and Haje double-clicked on . Strap on your dancing shoes, there’s a veritable dance party of more news coming your way: We also have a roundup of some of the awesome stories that came out of our Mobility event: / Getty Images Just as a sales team builds and refines its funnel, early stage founders in fundraising mode can create an investor funnel that will help sustain their company for years to come. Oriana Papin-Zoghbi, CEO and co-founder of women’s health startup AOA Dx, shared her investor breakdown with TC+: “When building an investor funnel, vocalizing what you want is crucial to finding the right investors,” says Papin-Zoghbi. “Finding the right investors is like finding the right team members — you need to be upfront about your expectations and address what you want them to bring to the table.” |
Hyundai to open $6.5B EV factory in Georgia | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | Hyundai is the latest automaker to announce plans to open an EV factory in Georgia, the same state where Rivian is preparing to break ground on its Hyundai’s $6.5 billion EV and battery manufacturing facility outside of Savannah will further the state’s goal of becoming a major regional hub for the EV industry. As sales of electric vehicles start to surge, the Peach State aims to establish a closed-loop battery-electric ecosystem that includes rare-earth mining, battery and chip production, and auto parts manufacturing, according to state officials. Hyundai’s capital investment, which includes , represents the largest economic development deal recruited by Georgia, officials said Friday. Hyundai expects to create 8,100 jobs at the 2,293-acre site. Georgia has become aggressive in its efforts to attract manufacturers, awarding Rivian the of $1.5 billion to build a plant on 2,000 acres east of Atlanta. In return, Rivian has pledged to hire 7,500 workers at an average annual salary of $56,000 by the end of 2028. However, the project has ; residents have ranging from land preservation to the use of tax dollars. The issue became political, as opponents of the Rivian plant mobilize against Gov. Brian Kemp ahead of his race for re-election in November. Rivian plans to break ground this summer and open by early 2024. Hyundai’s site represents a collaboration among four Georgia counties that used proceeds from selling property to Amazon to help fund the $61 million land purchase. The partnership, which calls itself the Savannah Harbor-Interstate 16 Corridor Joint Development Authority (JDA), pooled the plots to create a “shovel-ready mega-site” for a large manufacturer. Hyundai said the plant will begin production in 2025 with the 300,000 vehicles per year. Officials hope to replicate the model to attract more mega-site manufacturing projects to the state. , a South Korean EV lithium-ion battery maker, is building a $2.6 billion EV battery complex nearby. The company, which said its plant will be able to power 310,000 electric vehicles annually, has contracts with Ford and Volkswagen. |
Even Amazon can’t quite figure out what Astro is for | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | robot has been scurrying its way around my apartment for the past few weeks. It has no arms to scratch its own head in confusion, but I am willing to do that for him. As part of Amazon’s Day 1 Editions program, the robot is a $1,000 invitation-only program with limited numbers of robots available, as the company is trying to get them into consumers’ hands with a question: How would you use this? The company suggests that some use cases include home monitoring — an autonomous home-security system that can wander around from room to room. Astro has the ability to patrol a home with Ring Protect Pro, pop its periscope camera to see the counters, detect unidentified people when in “away mode,” send alerts when it hears sounds like glass breaking and more. You can also use it when you’re home — if you hear the dog barking at night, you can send Astro to see what’s happening without having to leave the cozy cocoon of your duvet-burrito. The company also suggests that Astro might be a good solution for offering remote care. Your loved one can ask Astro to set and deliver reminders, or you can use to stay connected. Plus, Astro works with Alexa Together, which allows for remote care for aging loved ones, or for offering care for people who have mobility challenges or other disabilities. Amazon also offers companionship as a potential use case — it suggests all the fun things Astro can do (things like “Astro beatbox,” or “what’s your favorite animal?” are top items, the company suggests), and it has other features that make it seem more like a pet than a Skynet-harboring robot of death and destruction. The whole purpose of a Day 1 Edition product is for Amazon’s product teams to get their most ambitious projects into customers’ hands faster so they can provide feedback that, in this case, will help shape the Astro experience. It makes sense. Right now, Astro is a robust system and can handle a wide array of commands and tasks that customers are finding useful. The robot has a little carrying tray and a USB port for extensions that will give it any number of interesting new powers, extendable by hackers and tech-savvy users, much in the same way that someone can write and deploy an Alexa skill today. Astro’s sensors mean it doesn’t bump into things too often. And the paint along the bottom of the chassis, and the scrapes on the walls of my apartment, indicate that Astro still has a little bit of learning to do on that front. for TechCrunch Personally, throughout my time with Astro, I thought the robot was adorable. The speakers are good, and it’s kinda fun to have a boombox trail around and play your tunes or podcasts as you are doing chores. As a piece of first-generation tech, it’s an impressive feat that has tremendous potential. But that alone isn’t enough to make a product. In a world where the environment is front of mind, we could do with fewer gadgets that will end up in landfills eventually, not more, and so I find myself wondering what this thing is for. I can imagine a number of niche use cases — including the ones listed above — but I keep being unclear on whether this is a device that needs to exist at all. I spoke with Anthony Robson, the principal product manager for robotic technologies and consumer robotics at Amazon, to try to get to the bottom of things. It quickly became clear that Astro’s ambition is sky-high, and that the Amazon team doesn’t quite know which direction that ambition will take it. By design, it claims, which I have some respect for, but it seems weird to me to take a “let’s build it and see if they will come, and what they will use it for” approach. Don’t misunderstand me; I do believe there are places and use cases where Amazon’s adorable little robot friend makes a lot of sense — but when I talk to startups day in and day out, it feels really jarring. I wouldn’t let a startup get away with a solution looking for a problem, and so it feels curious to be tempted to let Amazon — who really should know better — off the hook. “This is the very first robot in a brand new category of robots. When we started this program, we were like, why not us? Why not Amazon? You know, we have this great ecosystem with Alex and the AI chops to be able to do this. Let’s do it, let’s learn from customers,” comments Robson. “We went out and did a lot of research around what kinds of things people could envision robots helping them in their home. The home monitoring capabilities were certainly the most popular thing people could envision. I’d love to be able to check if I left the stove on, or whether my back door is unlocked. I’d love to be able to check if I need to buy bananas because the fruit bowl is empty. I want to be able to check if the kids came home or to be notified when they come home. I want to be able to talk to them and find them in the house. So that was a very popular use case that people identified. There are a number of use cases.” Astro’s cargo bay is sizeable and has a USB-C port to extend its functionality further. An SDK to build software for Astro is in the works, Amazon suggests. for TechCrunch The ideas came fast and thick, and every time I found myself wondering; yes, but… Really? Would customers potentially pay $1,000 to solve this problem? Of course, the additional flexibility of the Astro platform broadens the potential quite a bit. “We insisted on having some level of extensibility. We’re gonna learn so much about every home — and every home is going to be different and have different needs. So we added a cargo bay area with a USB port, and asked the question ‘how can we extend this platform to do more things for more people?’ We didn’t envision at the beginning of this program that we would have a pet food dispenser at the launch event,” marvels Robson. “We have customers who are working in their home offices on either side of the house sending things to each other using their Astro. We are learning, we are listening and we are adapting. We’re going to extend Astro’s capabilities as we learn from customers.” The product team does have a few things on its wish list that it wasn’t able to prioritize for launch for various reasons. “There are a lot of things that, simply from a practical perspective, we couldn’t add. Astro doesn’t climb stairs, for example. The level of complexity that would add to the product would simply make it too costly, and make it so it’s not accessible to as many people as we would like,” explains Robson. “We had to make trade-offs like that. We would have liked the periscope camera to go that little bit higher. But we had to compromise and say, you know, this is just enough to see over the counters. That is perfect — that keeps the device small.” The product team also suggests that it wanted Astro to be able to move around much faster. At its current pace, you can out-walk it if you stroll briskly through the hallways of your mansion — but speed also equals trade-offs. The laws of physics start getting in the way pretty quickly, in other words. “A The Astro team hasn’t launched a developer toolkit for the Astro robot yet, but that’s on its way, too. “We’re working hard with strategic partners. I think [an Astro SDK] is going to be happening. We want to bring that intelligent motion capability to more and more skills and accessories in the future,” says Robson. “It is not something we have ready today, but it’s coming very soon. We’re working on it as hard as we can.” The periscope camera pops out and extends telescopically, enabling Astro to look over obstacles and on countertops. A very elegant design choice. for TechCrunch The comms team for Astro is excited about the potential of the robot as a comms and monitoring tool. It tells the story of one customer; their father-in-law had fallen out of his wheelchair. The family used Astro to communicate and coordinate emergency service responses to help him get back up. Giving additional, roaming assistance to people living independently seems like a powerful use case — except for the quirk of Astro not being able to climb stairs or open doors. I did have a couple of fun interactions with Astro that surprised and delighted me. For example, as one part of the setup process, Astro tells you to take a couple of steps back to make space for it to leave its charging dock. As it did that, I swear it flicked the screen representing its “face”, much like one would wave one’s hands to shoo someone away. I was never able to get Astro to do it again, and the product team wasn’t able to confirm whether I hallucinated that, or whether that’s something Astro actually does. “You know, that’s the thing when you give a robot a body language, depending on what it has to do, it’s going to move in the way it needs to move. Sometimes those things end up being interesting combinations,” laughed Robson. “So I can’t think of exactly why that would happen, but… I have been surprised by Astro before.” Astro is an extraordinarily well-thought-out robot on a technical level. The big wheels mean it can climb over thresholds between rooms with no issues. It got stuck on my bath mat a few times but managed to dislodge itself every time, which is impressive. When I was testing Astro, I also had a foster kitten, and Astro and Chairman Meow seemed to become good friends, with the two of them chasing each other around the apartment. Astro ran over Meow’s tail once, and Meow got his revenge by folding over the bath mat, trapping Astro in the bathroom for a few hours. I’m not convinced Meow did that on purpose, to be fair, but it did strike me as funny. The periscope camera is an extraordinarily clever feature that dramatically increases the usefulness of Astra, and the wayfinding tech is impressive. Telling Astro to go to the kitchen, and having it dutifully scurrying its way around my stacks of Amazon deliveries, office chairs and the odd shoe strewn along the flow was entertaining. A lot of work went into making Astro seem non-threatening. It moves slowly and gingerly near people and pets, it doesn’t bump into stuff all that much, and when it does, it does so carefully. The screen and Astro’s “face” are expressive, and cute, and invite a high degree of trust and user-friendliness. It shows that Amazon has the capacity of building incredibly capable robotics, even when it is compromising on product issues along the way. It’s been fun to have Astro wandering about my apartment for a few days, and most of the time I seemed to use it as a roving boom box that also has Alexa capabilities. That’s cute, and all, but $1,000 would buy Alexa devices for every thinkable surface in my room and leave me with enough cash left over to cover the house in cameras. I simply continue to struggle with why Astro makes sense. But then, that’s true for any product that is trying to carve out a brand new product category. I won’t miss it when I return it to its corporate office to be passed on to the next journalist who will be taking a closer look, which is rarely a good sign, but I hope that Amazon learns enough so it becomes better at telling the story of its adorable little robot. It is, truly, a solution that is carefully and adorably scurrying around looking for a use case. If Astro’s persistence is any indication, it will eventually find one. |
Digital biomarkers are healthcare’s next frontier | Sunny Kumar | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | temperature, hemoglobin A1c levels and other biomarkers have been used for decades to track disease. While this information is essential for chronic condition management, these and many other physiological measurements are typically captured only periodically, making it difficult to reliably detect early meaningful changes. Moreover, biomarkers extracted from blood require uncomfortable blood draws, can be expensive to analyze, and again, are not always timely. Historically, continuous tracking of an individual’s vital signs meant they had to be in a hospital. But that’s not true anymore. Digital biomarkers, collected from wearable sensors or through a device, offer healthcare providers an abundance of traditional and new data to precisely monitor and even predict a patient’s disease trajectory. With cloud-based servers and sophisticated, yet inexpensive, sensors both on the body and off, patients can be monitored at home more effectively than in a hospital, especially when the sensor data is analyzed with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technology. A major opportunity for digital biomarkers is in addressing neurodegenerative diseases such as mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Neurodegenerative disease is a major target for digital biomarker development due to a lack of easily accessible indicators that can help providers diagnose and manage these conditions. A definitive diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease today, for example, generally requires positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or other imaging studies, which are often and . Digital biomarkers have the potential to unlock significant value for healthcare providers, companies and, most importantly, patients and families, by detecting and slowing the development of these diseases. |
Indian launch startup Skyroot successfully completes full-duration stage test | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 5 | 20 | , the first private Indian company to design, build and test a solid rocket propulsion stage, has reached another key milestone in the development of its Vikram-I launch vehicle: a full-duration test of the rocket’s third stage. The third stage, dubbed Kalam-100 in homage to Indian rocket scientist and former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is just one part of the company’s debut rocket. Vikram-I includes three solid fuel stages, plus a liquid-fueled kick stage that’s designed to serve the small satellite launch market. It’s designed to carry up to 480 kilograms to low-inclination orbits, and the company says on its website that it’s designed to be assembled and launched from any launch site within 24 hours. Vikram-I is one of a trio of rockets Skyroot is currently developing; the other two, Vikram-II and Vikram-III, will be able to carry heavier payloads with multiple orbital insertions, Skyroot says. The test-firing of the rocket stage took place at a private test range in Nagpur City, India, CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana told TechCrunch in an email. That range belongs to Skyroot investor and industrial explosives, ammunitions and propulsion systems manufacturer Solar Industries India. The next steps will be test firings for Stage 1 and Stage 2, Chandana said. The company’s existing funding, including an $11 million Series A and a $4.5 million bridge round, will cover most of the costs of testing. Skyroot is in the process of raising a Series B to take the company to “multiple orbital launches,” he said. All this funding should get Skyroot to a technology demonstration launch by the end of this year, with the company’s first commercial orbital mission early next year. That launch would take off from India’s spaceport on Sriharikota Island, and would make Skyroot the first private Indian company to build and launch private rockets. |
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