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Metrics that matter: 3 KPIs to track on the path to profitability
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Paris Heymann
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
community, the rallying cry in 2022 was about moving from the growth-at-all-costs mindset toward emphasizing profitability. We believe that in turbulent times, startups and scaleups alike need to ensure: While every company is unique and it’s difficult to create a blueprint for must-track metrics across stages and business models, we’ve found three metrics that provide helpful green, yellow and red diagnostics amidst the deluge of metrics you can track: Paris Heymann The majority of startups and scaleups are focused on burning cash. It makes sense to, because building and scaling an organization requires meaningful investment, often before a company can generate enough revenue to pay the bills. The key is to ensure that burn is prudent and efficient. In general, if you are earning net new ARR of $1 for each dollar spent, you are in a strong position — your net new ARR to burn ratio is 1, which is healthy relative to benchmarks. A ratio greater than 1.5x is best-in-class, and if it’s below 0.6x, a closer look may be warranted. We view cash burn efficiency as an effective shorthand metric to keep an eye on. If you need to spend more than $2 to generate revenue of $1, it may be a signal that growth is being “forced” and is therefore unsustainable. Paris Heymann Profitability is often discussed in absolute terms, but it’s important to remember that companies typically progress toward profitability over time. That progression can either be smooth, pointing to a strong economic core, or it can be more erratic, indicating that closer attention could be warranted.
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Plum launches its money management app in five more countries
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Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Fintech startup is doubling the number of countries where it operates. The company is launching its product in five new European countries — Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece and Cyprus. Originally from the U.K., Plum is a money management app that helps you automatically set some money aside. This way, users can save money without any manual input. It can be particularly useful for people who earn enough money to save money every month, but also tend to spend everything they have in their main bank account. In addition to its home country, Plum currently operates in France, Spain, Ireland and Belgium. There are several ways to save with Plum. The app can connect to your bank account and round up all your transactions in the past week and transfer everything over to a Plum-managed pocket of money. You can also decide to set some money aside every week or whenever you get paid. If you want to go one step further and let Plum think about savings for you, the service can also automatically decide how much it should set aside based on your income and expenses. Users can create different pockets with separate goals. For instance, you could save for your next vacation or for a new bike. Whenever you want to spend money in your Plum account, you can either withdraw money to your bank account or pay with a Plum debit card — but you have to pay a subscription fee to get a card. While users earn interest on their savings in the U.K., that’s not the case in other markets. This is a bit unfortunate as interest rates are currently rising around Europe. Basic savings accounts seem like an attractive product for people who don’t like to think too much about money. Plum users can also use the service to buy and sell shares. In Europe, the startup has partnered with to offer cryptocurrency trading. It works a lot like Bitpanda integrations and . You don’t have to download another app to start buying crypto assets. “We’re delighted to bring Plum to five new European countries and help people manage their finances there. This is a challenging economic period as people are experiencing levels of inflation not seen in decades, leading to cost of living challenges. The need for long-term financial resilience has arguably never been clearer and we created Plum precisely to help people tackle this, helping ensure that your money management is automated and wealth looked after for the future,” Plum co-founder and CEO Victor Trokoudes said in a statement. Creating a Plum account is free. Users can pay €2 per month to create more sub-accounts, unlock more savings rules and get a card. People who choose to pay €9.99 per month can access more stocks and create recurring stock investment rules. There is also a 2.5% conversion fee on crypto transactions. Over the long run, Plum could become a financial hub that lets you access several features and services. Unlike many consumer fintech startups, it doesn’t try to replace your bank account. It acts as a companion app and a sort of mini marketplace. That strategy could turn Plum into a mainstream product with less tech-savvy people.
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YouTube unveils new program that enables students to earn college credits
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
YouTube today that it’s partnering with Arizona State University and educational video company Crash Course to launch a new program that enables students to earn college credit. The Google-owned company says the new program, called College Foundations, is designed to create an affordable and accessible way to earn college credit. Starting today, students can for four courses that start on March 7, 2023, and are eligible for transfer credit. The program does not require applications or a minimum GPA for enrollment. It includes common first-year college courses, including Intro to Human Communication, Rhetoric and Composition, Real World College Math and US History to 1865. The program is expected to expand to 12 available courses by January 2025 to give students a chance to receive credit for an entire first year of college. There is a $25 fee if a student elects to sign up and begin coursework, and a $400 fee to receive college credit for each course. Those who sign up before March 7 will receive a $50 discount. Courses can be taken as often as needed until the student is content with their grade. The credit can then be used at institutions that accept credits from Arizona State University. College Foundations is an expansion of an existing Study Hall partnership between Arizona State University, YouTube and Crash Course, which is an educational channel with over 14 million subscribers and was founded by John and Hank Green. YouTube “Developed and taught by the same faculty who conduct research and teach students on ASU’s campuses, the lessons combine ASU’s academic excellence with Crash Courses’s compelling storytelling — all on YouTube’s wide-reaching platform,” the company said in a . To get started, students can take a free sneak peek at courses and then register for a course of their choice, after which they can start earning credit. Once you’re in a course, you can contact a success coach via email to get help with assignments. You can complete your coursework when it’s convenient for you, but you will have weekly due dates for most of the courses. If you want to access additional support, some instructors hold optional office hours. YouTube has been home to educational content for quite some time now, and the ability to earn college credits takes this content focus even further by providing users with a direct path to formal education. The announcement comes as YouTube recently , a feature that will seek to bring structured learning experience on YouTube in India. Teachers will be able to publish and organize their videos and provide text reading materials and questions right on the video app.
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How global unrest will impact innovation in 2023
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David Magerman
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
and political turmoil of the past year has had a meaningful impact on corporate innovation in the technology industry and beyond. The worldwide battle with COVID, the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the economic fallout of the COVID lockdowns and supply chain disruptions have together created a painful combination of a global recession, global inflation and unpredictable instability in the worldwide economy. All of these factors have led to belt-tightening in the corporate world, layoffs and hiring freezes and a more conservative investment posture from the investment community. Inevitably, these changes will have a chilling effect on innovation in the years to come. However, there is perhaps a silver lining when it comes to the prospects for innovation. In some ways, these market forces might actually serve as an accelerant for creativity and advancement in technology. In the short term, the impact of these negative economic trends and the political instability will be felt by the centers of innovation in both the corporate and startup worlds. Corporations are likely to slash spending on internal and external innovation. That is, they will reduce their research and development budgets and likely focus R&D on projects that can have immediate impacts on profitability at the expense of long-term visionary projects. Corporations will also spend less on collaborations with other innovators and expensive acquisitions of advanced technology. We expect to see more acquisitions of early-stage companies as they become weaker and corporations look to develop new technologies more cheaply by buying at a discount rather than building from scratch.
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Whoops! Is generative AI already becoming a bubble?
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Rebecca Szkutak
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
in the business of predicting the next big thing, even if they get burned in the process. While everyone piled onto crypto in 2021 — and many remain about its future despite this year — 2022 saw the rise of generative AI. But as is the case with any transformative new tech, hype is sure to accompany growing adoption, and generative AI has garnered so much attention and money that many VCs already feel the budding sector will be the next bubble. TechCrunch recently surveyed more than 35 investors working in different geographies, investment stages and sectors about how they were feeling about next year. One of our questions sought their prediction of where the next bubble would be, and almost half of those surveyed mentioned generative AI. While several investors said they were bullish on the new tech overall, they also admitted that the sector was likely to get lost in its own hype. Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures, feels the bubble is already here. “We believe that the applicability of AI to so many use cases will lead to a very large number of startups being funded in the space, including at some eye-watering valuations, and so we think that the next big bubble is already expanding in this area,” he said. This isn’t surprising, given how the sector has burgeoned recently as consumer tools like , and soared in popularity both in and outside the tech community.
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Riot Games hack could help cheaters
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Last week, the video game giant Riot Games that hackers had compromised its “development environment” — where the company stores its source code — with a social engineering attack. While the company reassured its users that “there is no indication that player data or personal information was obtained,” the hack could still be damaging, as hackers got their hands on the source code for Riot’s popular games League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, as well as the source code for the company’s legacy anticheat system. The theft of the anticheat’s source code — even an old system — could help hackers develop better and less-detectable cheats, according to industry experts who spoke to TechCrunch. “From Riot’s perspective it’s bad (beyond just embarrassing) because it makes it easier for cheat developers to understand the game and therefore easier to develop new cheats; it also makes it easier for third-party league servers/clients to get made,” Paul Chamberlain, who led the anti-cheat team that worked on , told TechCrunch. Chamberlain said that the legacy anticheat hasn’t been part of League of Legends for five years, but given that developing cheats “is as much (perhaps more) about the game itself than the anticheat system, having access to the game source code means you don’t have to reverse engineer the released binaries (which are often also obfuscated or encrypted) and gives cheat developers better access to the intent of the game code through comments and variable/function/class names.” “Access to an obsolete anticheat system is mostly a curiosity but it could give some insight into how the anticheat developers think and what the company prioritizes in terms of what needs protection,” Chamberlain explained. Riot itself admitted this risk. In a , the company said that “any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging,” and that its developers are working to assess the impact of the theft and “be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed.” When reached by email, Riot spokesperson Joe Hixson declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions beyond the company’s tweets. An industry insider with knowledge of anticheat systems (who asked to remain anonymous, as he was not authorized to speak to the press) agreed that the theft of the anticheat system’s source code has the potential to hurt Riot and its players. “They are in trouble if the anticheat code gets published,” he said. “If the anticheat source code is disclosed, cheat developers will have an easy time bypassing everything.” The insider explained that Riot’s old anticheat system is probably still being used to prevent a number of cheats and working to detect and block them. The theft of the system may compromise Riot’s ability to identify the hardware used by cheaters — game companies identify and fingerprint the hardware used by cheaters to ban them — as well as the detection systems used to find cheat developers, and may even require a rewrite of the anticheat system. Moreover, the insider said, the source code could even be used by malware developers. “It will be easier to find vulnerabilities in the [game’s] driver that could be exploited by malware,” the insider said. Motherboard that the hackers are demanding Riot Games pay a ransom of $10 million to not publish the stolen code. “We have obtained your valuable data, including the precious anti-cheat source code and the entire game code for League of Legends and its tools, as well as Packman, your usermode anti-cheat. We understand the significance of these artifacts and the impact their release to the public would have on your major titles, Valorant and League of Legends. In light of this, we are making a small request for an exchange of $10,000,000,” read the ransom note obtained by Motherboard.
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Task force proposes new federal AI research outfit with $2.6B in funding
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
The final report from the government’s National AI Research Resource recommends a new, multibillion-dollar research organization to improve the capabilities and accessibility of the field to U.S. scientists. The document presents “a roadmap and implementation plan for a national cyberinfrastructure aimed at overcoming the access divide, reaping the benefits of greater brainpower and more diverse perspectives and experiences.” has been a long time coming: since the establishment of the task force back in 2020 headed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. They haven’t been idle, in that time producing numerous smaller reports and an extensive “blueprint for an AI bill of rights” . The full thing is many pages long, but the executive summary gets to the point: To realize the positive and transformative potential of AI, it is imperative to harness all of America’s ingenuity to advance the field in a manner that addresses societal challenges, works for all Americans, and upholds our democratic values. Yet progress at the current frontiers of AI is often tied to access to large amounts of computational power and data. Such access today is too often limited to those in well-resourced organizations. This large and growing resource divide has the potential to limit and adversely skew our AI research ecosystem. A widely accessible AI research cyberinfrastructure that brings together computational resources, data, testbeds, algorithms, software, services, networks, and expertise, as described in this report, would help to democratize the AI research and development (R&D) landscape in the United States for the benefit of all. To that end, they propose a new independent research organization (under governance of the appropriate agencies and departments) that would make available “a federated mix of computational and data resources, testbeds, software and testing tools, and user support services via an integrated portal.” They advise that this include standing up its own data centers, at least at first, which would be costly and potentially difficult to scale, but rather working with partners who can assign existing resources to the project. (This could be private companies or National Labs, one presumes.) The “operating entity” — that is, the research organization — should also be “be proactive in addressing privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties issues by integrating appropriate technical controls, policies, and governance mechanisms from its outset.” NAIRR Congress would need to fund the new organization to the tune (NAIRR proposes) of approximately $750 million every two years over a six-year period to build out its capabilities, totaling $2.25 billion. It would then require some $60 million to $70 million per year for its ongoing operations. This does not include any associated grants or such programs, which would likely go through the National Science Foundation or other existing programs. Much more detail on how it would all be run is in the full report, but the specifics will of course ultimately have to wait until money and other resources are assigned. “We see the NAIRR as a foundational investment that would amplify efforts across the Federal Government to cultivate AI innovation and advance trustworthy AI,” writes the team in the intro to the final report. “Research, experimentation, and innovation are integral to our progress as a Nation, and it is imperative that we engage people from every zip code and every background to live up to America’s unique promise of possibility and ensure our leadership on the world stage.”
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Consumer advocacy groups want Walmart’s Roblox game audited for ‘stealth marketing’ to kids
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
A number of consumer advocacy groups have a problem with Walmart’s entry into the metaverse. The online retailer last fall announced the launch of two new virtual worlds on Roblox, and , aimed at engaging the next generation of shoppers. The experiences allow Roblox users to play games featuring toys and popular kids’ characters, earn virtual toys that drop from a blimp, complete challenges, and explore “toy worlds,” among other things. But the groups argue that Walmart is blurring the lines between advertising and organic content and doesn’t properly disclose that the content within these virtual worlds are essentially ads and should be labeled as such. Walmart, however, disputes these allegations and says it’s in compliance with U.S. children’s privacy laws. The groups, led by the ad watchdog (TINA.org), sent a letter to the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), asking them to audit Walmart’s Roblox games. CARU is a part of the larger nonprofit BBB National Programs, which oversees a dozen industry self-regulation programs in the U.S. In January 2001, CARU’s program became the first Federal Trade Commission (FTC)–approved Safe Harbor under the U.S.’s children’s online privacy law, . That means participants who adhere to CARU’s guidelines are considered to be in compliance with COPPA, which protects them from any FTC enforcement action. Simply put, being flagged as being potentially noncompliant with CARU’s program is not something a participant would want to happen, as it could put them on the FTC’s radar. In the letter, the advocacy groups write to CARU’s senior vice president Dona Fraser to warn the organization about Walmart’s Roblox experience, Universe of Play, alleging that the virtual world targeted toward young children is deceptively marketing Walmart’s goods and services without providing proper disclosures that the game itself, and the content it contains, are actually ads. In addition, the groups note that Walmart is using CARU’s COPPA Safe Harbor Program seal to convey the message that the game is compliant with the organization’s guidelines. The letter describes various aspects of the Walmart Roblox experience that the groups feel indicate its nature as an “advergame.” This includes how the game is modeled on Walmart’s toy catalog and its use of popular toys and characters, like L.O.L Surprise!, Jurassic World–branded items, PAW Patrol, Magic Mixie, Razor scooters, and others sold in Walmart stores and online. The game also encourages kids to “collect the hottest toys,” where only in fine print does the game note that Similarly, as kids walk around the island, they unlock gift boxes where, again, toys are featured, but the message appears in a barely visible font. These gift boxes reveal top sellers in the toys category, like a VTech smartwatch for kids, popular dolls, race cars, and more. Other inconspicuous ad disclosures appear throughout other parts of the game as well — like signs that the players’ avatars walk by as they collect coins, find toy boxes, or engage in other virtual activities, the letter states. Walmart Similarly, the groups take issue with Walmart Land, another Roblox virtual world where kids can play as avatars and where Universe of Play is also marketed. Both games combined have attracted more than 12 million visits since its launch, the letter states. Both games are also accessible to children of any ages as the “Age Guidelines” for the games on Roblox are labeled as “N/A.” The letter stresses that children under the age of 13 do not “fully understand the persuasive intent” of things like entertainment marketing. “Walmart’s brazen use of stealth marketing directed at young children who are developmentally unable to recognize the promotional content is not only appalling, it’s deceptive and against truth-in-advertising laws,” said TINA.org’s legal director Laura Smith in a press release. “We urge CARU to take swift action to protect the millions of children being manipulated by Walmart on a daily basis,” she added. In addition to TINA.org, the groups who signed the letter include Fairplay, the Center for Digital Democracy, and the National Association of Consumer Advocates. They’re asking CARU to audit Walmart’s games for compliance. However, Walmart, when reached for comment, claims this already took place. In a statement shared with TechCrunch, the retailer said: Because of its younger user base, Roblox has already attracted the attention of other companies looking to market to kids, including (Hello Kitty) and on the platform. Mattel also partnered with Forever 21 in 2021 on a and Kellogg’s debuted “ Outside of kids’ brands, many other companies — like , , , , , , , and — have Roblox’s younger users, too. To what extent Walmart either does or does not have to make adjustments to its Roblox games could help to set precedent as more brands enter gaming worlds and the metaverse and the ad industry defines its practices for this new form of social networking.
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Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
, a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business (B2B) sales, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, Nat Friedman and Y Combinator. CEO Ross Rich says that the new funds, which bring Accord’s total raised to $17 million, will be put toward the startup’s engineering, sales and marketing teams. Accord was co-founded in early 2020 by brothers Ross and Ryan Rich. Ross was one of the first salespeople at Stripe back in 2015, while Ryan was an early sales hire at Google Cloud. The brothers say that they discovered the challenges of modern B2B sales firsthand as their teams scaled from a handful of reps to thousands on the go-to-market team. “We started Accord to solve frustrating challenges in B2B sales,” Ross told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Customers don’t want to talk to sellers. B2B buyers have been conditioned by the business-to-consumer, Amazon-esque, experience and expect no difference in terms of the level of transparency, speed and ease of purchase. Compounded with that fact, there is no system to reinforce a consistent, repeatable sales process, even if you have the ideal sales journey all figured out.” After rounding out Accord’s founding team with ex-LinkedIn exec Wayne Pan, Ross and Ryan kicked things off in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The two built a prototype workspace that sales teams could use to define and execute a repeatable sales process. Accord’s UI. Accord “Typically, sales teams hack together a mix of Google Docs, Sheets, shared Slack channels and other general project management tools to accomplish sales process management,” Ross said. “However, adoption is incredibly low and none of those tools are integrated into the customer relationship management software, so you can’t build prescriptive workflows and all of the customer-engagement data is lost.” Ross argues that Accord’s platform today — available in both free and paid flavors — does what disparate apps cannot: offer the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps and resources with all stakeholders. “ Accord has rivals in Clari and Outreach, both of which recently snatched up early-stage companies (i.e., , ) to develop similar sales orchestration offerings. Ross also mentioned Quip, a company Salesforce acquired in 2016, which embeds collaborative business process documents, spreadsheet and chat inside of Salesforce. But Ross sees Accord as a pioneer in its category (unsurprisingly), with a customer base eclipsing 130 sales organizations at brands including Figma, Affirm, Stripe, Headspace and BetterUp. He’s not anticipating a slowdown; Accord plans to grow its workforce from 13 people today to over 30 by the end of the year. “Recent economic challenges have led to a tightening of budgets, mass layoffs and a focus on efficiency. This causes slower sales cycles for every company — more decision-makers and due diligence for each purchase — but also an immediate re-prioritization of the need for predictability, discipline and rigor when it comes to business-to-business sales and reliably hitting annual recurring revenue targets. The need for Accord is exponentially greater in these challenging times as every company is laser focused on increasing their sales efficiency and effectiveness — exactly what Accord delivers.”
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What to expect from the creator economy in 2023
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Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 2 |
Social media platforms and creator-focused startups haven’t looked too hot this year, as companies like , , and all waged layoffs along with the rest of the tech industry. ad revenue is declining, and creator funds for platforms like have dried up. It might seem like things are bad on the surface, but the creator economy is more than just a buzzword that’s losing interest among venture capitalists. Despite challenges on a platform level, creators are continuing to make a living outside of the bounds of traditional media and will only continue to grow in 2023. In my opinion, the biggest creator news in 2022 was that it would include Shorts creators in the YouTube Partner Program, allowing short-form creators to earn ad revenue for the first time ever. Starting in early 2023, creators will be able to apply to the YouTube Partner Program if they meet a new Shorts-specific threshold of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over 90 days. As members of the Partner Program, these creators will earn 45% of ad revenue from their videos. This is huge, because it’s an open secret that short-form video is hard to monetize. For example, TikTok pays creators through its Creator Fund, a pool of $200 million unveiled in summer 2020. At the time, TikTok said it planned to expand that pool to in the U.S. over the next three years, and double that internationally. That might sound like a lot of money, but by comparison, YouTube paid creators in ad revenue over the last three years. As the pool of eligible creators becomes more saturated, creator funds are pretty — if you’re in TikTok’s creator program and have a video get 1 million views, you might be able to cash out for a small latte. So while these multimillion- (or -billion) dollar creator funds might seem like a beacon for creators, they don’t help too much. Most popular TikTokers make their money from sponsorships and off-platform opportunities, rather than from their videos. TikTok has long been the dominant platform in short-form video, while Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube largely copied the newcomer to keep up. But creators will finally be incentivized to flock to YouTube Shorts once they can actually earn ad money there. The best part? There has never been more pressure on TikTok to follow suit. What’s a buzzword? You know it when you see it. It’s when Facebook rebrands to Meta and you suddenly get hundreds of emails about “the metaverse,” or when a crypto startup declares its commitment to fostering “community” just because it has a semi-active Discord server. You could also classify “creator economy” as a buzzword — I personally find myself cringing whenever I say it out loud, but I stand by the fact that it’s a much easier shorthand than saying “the industry in which talented people on the internet are leveraging social media audiences to develop careers as independent creatives.” But all of these buzzwords actually represent real things. Yes, even the metaverse is a thing, though I’d argue we’re talking more about Club Penguin than whatever Mark Zuckerberg is into. The problem with buzzwords, though, is that they dilute real phenomena into fads that get further muddled by disconnected venture capitalists doubling down on the trend with over-enthusiastic investments. On TechCrunch’s own podcast last week, everyone’s and brand-new dad (!!) Alex Wilhelm he made last year. “The passion economy isn’t sustainable,” he read, quoting his prediction from last year. “Nailed it! Who talks about creators these day? Nobody!” I can forgive Alex because I do hate “passion economy” with the fire of an exploding supernova for each and every follower has on TikTok. The term glorifies the relentless, soul-crushing hustle that people face while trying to “make it” in a field they love, while ignoring that industries that people pursue out of passion (art, nonprofit work, politics) are often the most exploitative of all. I think what Alex is getting at here, though, is that in 2021, venture capitalists poured money into the creator economy in the same way they pursued “trendy” tech like AI and web3. According to retrieved from Crunchbase earlier this year, here’s the breakdown of creator economy funding for the first three quarters of 2022: I don’t think this means that the creator economy is failing, though. It could just mean that the industry is correcting for overinvesting in a bunch of creator-focused companies that creators didn’t actually want or need. Also, you know, the economy. I’ve been saying for that creator economy startups can only succeed if their foremost goal is truly to help creators. In 2021, a year when venture capital flowed like champagne at a Gatsby party, we joked that there were than creators. But that’s a problem for investors, not creators, many of whom operate completely oblivious to the whims of a16z. It’s indicative of an environment that incentivizes tech moguls with no hands-on experience to try to solve problems of an industry that they don’t quite understand, and as a result, the space became deeply oversaturated. I cannot keep track of the number of companies I’ve encountered that attempt to automate the process of securing brand deals or help creators make white label products. I’d go as far as to say that it’s bad for creators when there are too many startups angling for their partnership. We know that most startups are doomed to fail — what happens if you rely on a company to offer your business some sort of service, and then they fail within a few years? This is why I’ve made it a personal policy to always ask creator-focused startup founders how they would plan to protect their creators from harm if their company fails. No matter where the VC funds may fall in 2023, the playbook for creators’ success remains the same. Diversify your income streams, build trust with your audience, and make sure you don’t burn yourself out. Investments into creator economy companies might be down, but creators are continuing to interface with VC money in a way that their audiences don’t often see. Charli D’Amelio and her family have become themselves. MrBeast is seeking funding at a , which isn’t surprising given that other especially successful creators have accomplished the same. In less extreme cases, many creators are growing their businesses through startups like , and , which offer up-front cash in exchange for temporary ownership over a creator’s YouTube back catalog, which means the company gets all of the ad revenue from those videos. These companies operate similarly to venture capital firms. They invest in creators they believe will turn that cash infusion into even more money, giving both parties a return. Despite securing massive funding rounds and mammoth valuations, the model that these companies operate with is still relatively new, and creators should exercise caution, as they should with any business deal.
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Indian fintech KreditBee nears $700 million valuation in new funding
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 6 |
Indian fintech KreditBee has raised an additional $100 million in a funding round, it said, as the lender looks to scale its business in the South Asian market. The new cash infusion is , which KreditBee said has now closed at $200 million. The new funding, led by Advent International, values the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at about $680 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. KreditBee, which also counts Mirae Asset Venture Investments, Premiji Invest and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group among its backers, offers instant micro loans starting as low as $12 to new-to-credit customers and credit of over $3,500 to salaried professionals. The company says its hope is to serve the 400 million new-to-credit customers in India. India’s credit bureau data book is thin, making it difficult for banks and other financial institutions to build confidence to extend credit to the vast majority of the population in the South Asian market. Fintechs use modern-age underwriting systems to lend to customers and a maze of regulatory arbitrage — that is increasingly — to operate. KreditBee works with 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to finance the loans, it said. “We are delighted to welcome a long-term financial and strategic partner in Advent. This reinforces the confidence in our profitable business model and the long-term sustainability of it. The latest round will help us to achieve our vision of serving over 400 million middle income population in the country,” said Madhusudan Ekambaram, co-founder and chief executive of KreditBee, in a statement. The startup said it is on track to bulk its asset under management to over $1 billion in the next six to nine months. Its new funding comes at a time when the deal flow activity has in India as investors grow cautious of writing new checks and evaluate their underwriting models after valuations of publicly listed firms take a tumble. “KreditBee has witnessed several credit cycles and has come out stronger each time reflecting adaptability and resilience of its business model. With this investment, we are strengthening our commitment to back KreditBee’s vision,” said Ashish Dave, chief executive of Mirae Asset Venture Investments in India, in a statement.
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Zillow introduces Calendly-like instant booking for rental property tours
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Real estate marketplace has introduced an instant tour booking feature for renters on its platform. The company now allows users to book an in-person tour directly at a suitable time without having to contact an agent or a property manager. Until now, when someone had to look at a rental property, either they had to rely on a virtual tour on the platform or request a tour, which put them in touch with a property manager, making the process cumbersome. Now, users can instantly book an appointment — it works just like the meeting booking platform . The company said that an instant tour booking feature is available on 2,600 rental properties with more being added at regular intervals. The proptech startup said that it is also planning to add a feature that will allow users to choose the type of tour they want — in-person, self-guided or a live virtual tour — while scheduling. According to a survey conducted by Zillow last year, 71% of users had up to four visits to properties before deciding to rent one. So the platform thinks there is merit in making the scheduling process easier by eliminating the intermediary like an agent. “Touring is a major milestone in the journey of finding a rental, and it’s due for innovation,” Michael Sherman, vice president of Zillow Rentals said in a written statement. “Allowing renters to instantly book a tour removes barriers and delivers a more seamless and convenient experience for renters and property managers. Freeing up the time it takes to coordinate schedules allows renters to focus on finding their perfect place without worrying about when they’ll get a chance to see it, and gives property managers valuable time back for other important tasks.” Zillow , impacting teams like Zillow Offer advisors, sales and back-end staff at Zillow Home Loans and Zillow Closing Services.
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Can Korean digital storytelling platforms captivate North American and European audiences?
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Kate Park
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
want to kindle the popularity of webtoons and web novels in the West on the back of their success in East Asia. Serialized digital comics, also known as webtoons in South Korea, are optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets or websites, which read top to bottom. Digital comics gained broad popularity throughout South Korea and Japan in the early 2000s and caught on . In 2014, Amazon , the largest marketplace for digital comics in the U.S., and last year, the largest bookseller in the world incorporated the Comixology app into Kindle, Some comic apps, such as and the , shut down in 2021, while Comixology was affected by Amazon’s recent layoffs. Still, some big digital comics firms believe switching the medium from print to digital could enable the revival of web- or app-based serialized storytelling like webtoons and web novels. And some South Korea-based Big Tech companies have ambitions beyond the comics and novels world. Earlier this month, Kakao Entertainment, which operates storytelling platforms and a music streaming service, announced it received from sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Singapore’s GIC (Pwarp Investment). The new money will go toward extending its global storytelling content and intellectual properties, around which original series and movies are based, specifically in North America, Kakao pointed out. The funding comes roughly two years after it acquired two U.S.-based storytelling platforms, and serialized fiction app . I caught up with industry sources, including Naver-owned global CEO Junkoo Kim, who founded WEBTOON in 2004, and ‘s global business director, Jayden Kang, to learn more about the webtoon industry and why they want to bet on the business of storytelling. Naver and Kakao, the two largest Korean internet firms, believe storytelling platforms could be the next entertainment blockbuster, coming hot on the heels of the global popularity of K-pop boy band BTS and Netflix’s “ .”
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Here’s what USV plans to do in 2023 with its $200M climate fund
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 3 |
— last month, Union Square Ventures announced that it had raised a $200 million climate fund less than two years after raising its first climate fund. The new fund is certain to add fuel to climate tech as 2023 kicks off after a banner 2022. Nine months ago, it seemed unlikely that the market would repeat the red-hot performance of 2021, during which $44.8 billion was invested across 1,130 deals, according to PitchBook. When the final tallies roll in, it’s that 2022 matched or exceeded those figures. For USV’s general and limited partners, there were many reasons to raise a new fund. Notably, the firm’s existing limited partners were interested in another climate fund for the impact — and because they are looking for a safe investment, said , a member of USV’s investment team. “A lot of investors, including GPs and LPs, are moving away from where it’s risky,” she told TechCrunch. “If you look at climate, it addresses some of the core issues with the market downturn right now, including energy, food and minerals. If you invest in climate, you invest in those.”
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Kakao Entertainment lands $966M from sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s PIF
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Kate Park
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 | null |
Bankruptcy judge rules Celsius Network owns users’ interest-bearing crypto accounts
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
A federal bankruptcy judge ruled cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform, actually belong to the firm — thanks to the fine print. The verdict gives Celsius ownership of the $4.2 billion in cryptocurrency that users deposited into its high-interest Earn program, according to a 45-page from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York on Wednesday. With the Earn program, Celsius allowed users to deposit cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether and receive weekly interest payments. Depending on the time horizon and token, the platform offered as much as 18% interest annually. Celsius had approximately 600,000 accounts in its Earn program, and the accounts held a collective value of approximately $4.2 billion as of July 10, 2022, the filing noted. About $23 million of that value consisted of stablecoins. But all of that is now property of the estate, aka Celsius, the judge ruled. Thanks to Celsius’s “unambiguous” terms and conditions, any cryptocurrency assets — including stablecoins — that were deposited into Earn Accounts, became Celsius’s property, the filing stated. Celsius, which was once one of the world’s largest crypto lenders, in mid-July 2022. At the time, Celsius said it had anywhere between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors. Prior to filing for bankruptcy, Celsius for customers in June, citing “extreme market conditions.” That freeze was never lifted. Now the crypto assets held in those accounts are property of Celsius, the judge ruled. This decision is in stark contrast to the argument thousands of Celsius customers have had in claiming that their deposited funds were, in fact, theirs. Last month, Celsius fought with customers in court over ownership of deposited funds as it about $18 million worth of stablecoins from Earn accounts to fund its organization. Now Celsius can sell those assets. And for those looking to fight the court ruling and get their funds back, it seems unlikely because “there simply will not be enough value available to repay all Account Holders in full,” the filing stated. With bankruptcy proceedings, priority to receiving frozen funds is often given to secured creditors. But the filing deems account holders with the Earn program as unsecured creditors of Celsius, which means their recovery depends on the distributions to unsecured creditors under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan. “If only some Account Holders prevail with their arguments that they own the cryptocurrency assets in their accounts, they hope to recover 100% of their claims, while most of the Account Holders are left as unsecured creditors and may recover only a small percentage of their claims.” Going forward, this verdict can set a precedent for investors across the crypto industry and what one’s terms of use means for people who deposit onto platforms. This could also point to what may happen with other Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings transpiring in the crypto space, like , and , to name a few.
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Amazon Sidewalk adds new partners, plans to open to developers soon
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
At today, Amazon announced that a number of new devices from four manufacturers will soon join its . Sidewalk, Amazon’s long-range, low-bandwidth IoT mesh network that is powered by sharing a small portion of a user’s bandwidth from devices like the company’s Echo speakers and Ring cameras, currently supports the Tile tracker, Amazon’s own Ring cameras and sensors, as well as Level smart locks and CareBand’s senior-care systems. Now you can add sensors from Browan and , Meshify and to this list, though only the Deviceroy system, which will connect solar inverters to the internet, is currently available, with the rest launching later this year. For the most part, these four new partners are not exactly household names. Amazon’s Tanuj Mohan, the company’s GM and CTO for Sidewalk, however, told me that a number of new partners will launch over the course of this year. More importantly, he also said that Amazon plans to open up the Sidewalk network to developers in the first half of this year. This, he noted, will enable virtually anyone who wants to get started with building IoT products to order a reference kit from Amazon’s partners and get going in days, all without having to worry about connectivity. “Anybody who has an idea should be able to go to an AWS website, find a hardware kit from Silicon Labs, TI or from somebody, order the kit and be able to get this kit flowing data via AWS into an application,” he explained. “They can start writing literally as soon as the kit is in their hands. So that is what we expect [when we] open for developers. My vision is that with some of these kits and devices, they could actually try building something real out of it and maybe even in low numbers for proof of concepts to prove their business case in a timespan that was never before possible.” As Mohan noted, one of the major challenges for the Sidewalk team is to get people to change the way they think about IoT connectivity. “The market doesn’t fully appreciate why Sidewalk is different,” he said when I asked him what his team’s hardest challenge is. “They have heard that, oh, Matter solves everything, or Zigbee solves everything, or we have had this forever. But not really. You haven’t had a network that’s just there and a device that ships to your house that you power on and it’s on. Yes, maybe a cell phone with a SIM card does that. But nothing else.” Some manufacturers may have gotten started with Zigbee or Wi-Fi to add smarts to everyday devices like a faucet, he noted, but then learned that people didn’t have a Zigbee hub or just wouldn’t configure it. “It was an investment that wasn’t worthwhile,” he said. “If you look at the percentages of some of these smart things that smartness was forced on, a very low percentage of them ever got connected.” Ideally, that’s not a problem with Sidewalk and while Matter is trying to solve some of these problems, Mohan argued that Sidewalk may actually help Matter to grow because it can provide the initial networking capabilities for the Matter network to allow for setting up new devices. Meshify
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Streamer Plex finally ready to launch a TV and movie rentals marketplace
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Media streamer Plex was years ago, but that announcement arrived just ahead of the pandemic — at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. The company then also faced a host of other issues, including technical concerns, that required the company to reprioritize its plans. Now Plex says it’s finally nearing the launch of a marketplace that will allow consumers to find movies and TV shows for rent or purchase, making Plex even more of a one-stop shop for all your media content. The company said it expects to launch its TVOD store (transactional video on demand, aka rentals) by the second quarter of this year, if not sooner. Asked what the holdup was, Plex admitted the project was more challenging than it first anticipated. “It was a lot harder than we thought,” said Plex co-founder and chief product officer Scott Olechowski. “Getting all the DRM stuff working everywhere — we switched DRM providers. And we had to get approval from all the studios,” he explained. Plex also decided to move away from another third-party partner it had been working with to power its AVOD service (ad-supported video on demand) — a hurdle it decided needed to be completed before launching its rentals marketplace. And then the company was hit with something they’ve now internally dubbed “Androidgeddon.” This was essentially an all-hands-on-deck nightmare technical snafu that was causing streams to randomly stop at ad breaks on Android TV, Android mobile and Amazon Fire TV platforms. The problem was eventually tracked down to a change in an SDK (software development kit) provided by Google, but it took several months to fix, using up all engineering resources in the process. In addition to this combination of factors delaying the launch of its rentals marketplace, Plex over the past year chose to focus on another popular product: its FAST channels, or free ad-supported streaming TV. FAST channels are basically anything that looks like the same kind of TV guide a cable provider offers, similar to something like Pluto TV or Xumo. ( and Amazon offer FAST channels as well, via The Roku Channel’s and , respectively.) This is a growing area of the streaming market and serves as a way for advertisers to reach consumers as cable TV viewership declines. Getty Images FAST channels have been a big area of growth for Plex’s business, consumer engagement, and revenue. This week, the company during that it doubled its FAST programming over the past year to reach over 300 channels, including A+E’s “Crime 360,” Hallmark Movies & More, and “The Walking Dead” on Stories by AMC. In addition, it grew its user base to 16 million monthly active users who have streamed billions of minutes of content, including through FAST programming and ad-supported content, allowing Plex to nearly triple its annual ad revenue. Ad-supported video, however, still outpaces FAST, in terms of ad revenue, but both are growing. While Plex doesn’t publicly disclose its revenue, it’s in the double-digit millions. The company now has 175 employees and, unlike many in the tech industry, hasn’t had to resort to layoffs. In addition, the tightening of ad budgets hasn’t yet hurt its business. “It’s been healthy,” remarked Olechowski. “We haven’t seen from year to year any huge shift in the programmatic market that’s impacted us…we’re pretty happy with where we are,” he said. Plex Video rentals aren’t the only thing on Plex’s roadmap this year. The company is still hoping to launch a subscriptions offering — another idea it’s been — which would allow users to subscribe to paid streamers through Plex. And it aims to introduce recommendations in its “Discover” section launched earlier this year, and its — the latter of which will roll out to all Plex users later this year as well, instead of to just Plex Pass premium subscribers. The company says it wants to introduce a way for users to leave reviews of the shows and movies they watched instead of just leaving a star rating, too, but the timing on that feature isn’t quite as set. All these changes will also include some UX updates (design changes to the user experience).
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New York Attorney General sues former Celsius CEO for defrauding crypto investors
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Alex Mashinsky, co-founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, according to an announcement on Thursday. James that Mashinsky defrauded “hundreds of thousands of investors…out of billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.” The lawsuit also claims that Mashinsky “repeatedly made false and misleading statements about Celsius’s safety to encourage investors to deposit billions of dollars in digital assets onto the platform.” Celsius, which was once one of the world’s largest crypto lenders, in mid-July 2022. At the time, Celsius said it had anywhere between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors. Prior to filing for bankruptcy, Celsius froze withdrawals for customers in June citing “extreme market conditions.” That freeze never lifted. Celsius lost hundreds of millions of dollars of assets through risky investments and Mashinsky misrepresented and hid Celsius’ financial condition, the AG office stated. Additionally, Mashinsky failed to register as a salesperson for the platform and as a securities and commodities dealer, it added. “The law is clear that making false and unsubstantiated promises and misleading investors is illegal,” James said in the release. The NYAG lawsuit aims to ban Mashinsky, a New York resident, from doing any business in the state and require him to pay damages, restitution and disgorgement, for an undisclosed amount. This legal action follows a number of suits by James. Last year, the attorney general and reached a $1 million settlement with for offering unregistered securities, among other things. This announcement follows a from Wednesday stating that cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network actually belong to the firm — thanks to the fine print. The verdict gives Celsius ownership of the $4.2 billion in cryptocurrency that users deposited into its high-interest Earn program, according to a 45-page from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York on Wednesday. Celsius had approximately 600,000 accounts in its Earn program, and the accounts held a collective value of approximately $4.2 billion as of July 10, 2022, the filing noted. About $23 million of that value consisted of stablecoins.
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Alexa Fund’s Paul Bernard talks OpenAI, what’s catching his eye and remaining relevant as Amazon restructures
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Amazon made headlines this month when the company began to work through its . Going, too, are a number of as the company right-sizes for the current state of the economy, the market’s attitude to tech stocks and the current landscape as dictated by its competitors and would-be rivals. One thing that looks like it’s here to stay, though, is the , the company’s venture fund founded back in 2015 and used to back companies in spaces that are strategically interesting to Amazon itself. Initially covering products and services , the interactive voice platform that was launched not long before the fund itself, the Alexa Fund has over the years expanded to cover other areas of AI, connected home, health, media services and more — as limitless, potentially, as Amazon itself sometimes seems to be. Amazon is famously murky when it comes to disclosing discretionary metrics that speak to its size. That’s the case here, too, as it declines to comment on how much it has invested in aggregate through the Alexa Fund, nor anything like AUM (assets under management, or the total valuation of startups in its portfolio). As a general marker, it has invested at least $200 million, based on an and a further commitment of . A few notable exits from the fund, and its growing scope, may well have meant more was pitched in over time. “We invest off the balance sheet so it’s an evergreen process,” and Paul Bernard, the longtime Amazon employee and investment lead who first started the fund, in a conversation with TechCrunch. “We’re not constrained by a certain fund size.” Paul Bernard, Director of the Amazon Alexa Fund. (JORDAN STEAD / Amazon) The fund currently lists 93 companies, but the list doesn’t include startups that might have shut down or been acquired. One estimate puts the total figure at . Corporate investing is sitting in an interesting position at the moment in the venture landscape. Traditional VC funds have tightened, and in many cases drastically slowed down, their investment process — which had become pretty fast and loose in recent, heady years with heavy competition to get into rounds, rocketing valuations, growing audiences for digital services and enough flashy exits to give everyone lots of hope. Now, there is a much stronger focus on making sure that investments do have a more reasonable shot at returns and that they are fitting current and future market conditions. Those are also under pressure further up the food chain, with limited partners more reluctant to deploy capital, even when it’s already been committed. All of that calculus hits differently with corporate VCs that may face their own pressures: If the parent company is struggling, or restructuring, or simply rethinking all cost centers with no stone unturned, that could impact the funds it’s willing to commit to betting on what might or might not be coming around the corner. There is also the big question of what role those corporate investors play between the businesses and the startups. A number of startups over the years have that Amazon picks up intel about what those startups are working on and then launches its own products based on that, to the detriment of the startup in question; and that the Alexa Fund effectively has operated as a Trojan horse in that effort. Amazon has always denied this and suggests that it, like other corporate funds, has long played a role aligning portfolio businesses with strategic interests, sometimes with those investments turning into acquisitions (as in the ), or partnering to develop new services ( ). Another example of how the fund functions as a middle-man comes in the form of , a startup founded by Paul Budnitz that describes itself as an entertainment brand that builds and manages “synthetic artists and influencers.” “The IP and these characters can manifest across all of our media businesses,” Bernard said of Superplastic. “We’ve got these media verticals, games, music, TV and films, but we don’t have a model for how to work with Superplastic. So we dive in and help figure that out.” Corporate VCs have their own challenges beyond the role they play with startups, which are around their corporate profile. How responsive should and can the corporate VC funds be to the in the C-suite. Do they scramble for the next big AI investment because your rival has inked a massive deal to fund one? Arguably you could say that Amazon “missed out” on OpenAI, but just as easily you could say that if there is a future in generative AI (still a debatable point, not just among naysayers) we’re just in the early innings. Being less beholden to a network of limited partners, there is a lot of potential flexibility in a corporate fund like Amazon’s to step out and make investments in areas at a time when others are reducing activity. Case in point: We’ve been hearing that deep tech is going to have an especially hard time of it in the current market climate, being even further from commercialization than so many other areas of tech. It turns out that, according to Bernard, the Alexa Fund’s just invested in a promising deep tech startup alongside another corporate VC. All the same, it too faces pressures. “I think one of the angles on Ring is that all of our investments need to be good venture investments,” said Bernard. “We need it to be financially viable.” Putting all this together, it’s an interesting time to catch up with the Alexa Fund. We sat down with Bernard earlier this month, before Amazon officially announced the cuts last week. In light of those, it’s worth watching how the Alexa Fund evolves. What follows is an edited version of the conversation we had.
We were Amazon’s first venture fund. Amazon hadn’t really done organized venture investing at the time so to pitch the Alexa Fund [to promote] the Alexa service, I wrote a proposal. I was part of the corporate development team doing M&A, and I’d been doing that for a couple years. I pitched the idea and Jeff [Bezos] liked it, so I was turned into a venture investor, trying to figure that out in real time. We came at it initially through the lens of trying to build the Alexa ecosystem. The simple idea was to invest in companies that could advance the art of the possible. At first that was integrations with Alexa, building skills and Alexa voice service (AVS) extensions.
Along the way we found that we were getting pulled and there was a lot of demand for us to broaden our footprint and so that was the next extension of our work, to think more broadly about consumer electronics and smart electronics. That’s still a big, big part of our work today. Now we have this layer of ambient intelligence.
I would say it differently. Now, it’s more that voice is so ubiquitous that most companies that we’re going to have an interest in, in the future of smart electronics for the home or for mobility, most of the time they are considering doing a voice integration anyway.
In the case of Labrador we invested in the founders [Mike Dooley and Nikolai Romanov] before they had a product. [Our deal] was based on customer focus group videos, target customers and the problem they were trying to solve. Also they have the iRobot background… [Amazon is ; the two co-founders previously held senior roles there.] But certainly, when we think about investments, we do it through the lens of how it can advance or take advantage of services that we’re building at Amazon. Once we make an investment, there’s a team at the Fund, where all they do is interface with the portfolio. It almost becomes like extended business development.
New media: synthetic media, virtualization, the metaverse and creator economy stuff. We’re taking on working more with the media part of Amazon, as a new value proposition right now for the portfolio. The fit with an Amazon service or experience is typically very forward leaning. We can see these things that are often first of a kind, have never been done before. It’s a strategic fund that at its core places bets on emerging areas of technology that in themselves can have future relevance; in our case mostly for our devices business, or our media business. There are some companies that cut across the board. CTRL-labs was an example. [Meta .]
We need to make money and be viable, right? Financial performance is not our first priority, but it’s certainly a validation that we know what we’re doing.
I don’t have any more nuanced talking points than what you’re probably already hearing from others, but, look, it’s a time when Amazon is making some choices about how to map what’s going on with the economy to some projects that we don’t feel like we can support anymore. There’s still a massive investment in Alexa. You could quibble about whether it is the right amount or not, but it’s still massive and I don’t think that’s changing. Our work continues to be the same, but I think more what’s probably changing is the venture market itself.
We invest off the balance sheet so it’s an evergreen process. We’re not constrained by a certain fund size. When we announced the fund, we announced $100 million and then another $100 million, but we don’t really talk about cumulative figures. Most of the time, we’re a minority investor and not leading rounds. We have though and are doing a little bit more of that recently, especially in the area of entertainment companies that we are investing in. But most of the time we’re a single-digit percentage owner, entering in Series A and Series B, with check sizes in single millions to $5 million. Unlike institutional investors, who work back from ownership goals where they need a certain percentage of a company, and that defines how much you need to put into it and whether the price is right to get into it, we took a different approach: get into the best deals with the most interesting companies and help them figure out how to work with Amazon, even if it means that we have to be a small investor. Because we’re Amazon, we can make our model work while being a relatively small investor. We invested in Superplastic, which is building virtual characters. The IP and these characters can manifest across all of our media businesses. We’ve got these media verticals, games, music, TV and films, but we don’t have a model for how to work with Superplastic. So we dive in and help figure that out.
There’s a sense that we’re thought leaders out in the field. We’re touching things that are beyond the three-to-five-year plan of like each of the business teams that we work the most closely with. We have a set of eyes and ears and takes on things by virtue of having these investments.
I think the companies that we invest in, they all want to deploy it as part of their systems. So more ubiquity. But what happens with these generative AI systems? Without getting into details of things I can’t talk about, these companies building on top of stuff like OpenAI’s, they’re building classes of products that are going to be conversational and integrate hardware in compelling new ways. I don’t know if you’d call it competitive to like Amazon’s take on the world, but I think it’s going to supercharge how people think about the art of the possible and the intersection of conversational system, there are going to be new kinds of devices.
Ah, I don’t even know that we even evaluated it. I think with all this, I get it’s core. It’s natural language processing. We’ve got a big investment in our way of doing that.
I think if you talk to Amazon engineers, they might say yeah, we have our own foundational models equivalent to, you know, OpenAI, Stable Diffusion and whatever else. And we are approaching it with applications that Amazon has a point of view on what the product that we want to build on them is. My take when I step back and I think about it, like, I think that the momentum, that they are going to create and the art of the possible is just going to be good for moving forward, the whole field, right?
I don’t know the answer to that question. That would be more of like an AWS question. I do think that AWS probably wants all those large foundational models to run on AWS. [Note: OpenAI has a close partnership with and investment from Microsoft; .] In this field of generative AI, there’s a company we invested in through our media lens called Splash [the Alexa Fund co-led a $20 million round in November 2021], which builds machine learning-based music, used first in Roblox games, where their tools are used by Roblox players to create music and perform it on a stage. They’ve got millions of users doing this. What’s really interesting is that it’s democratizing music creation and empowering kids, giving them agency to create music. What Splash is doing is fundamentally generative AI. They’ve released a beta version of text to singing tech, that works off a text prompt: I want to have a song that says “X” and their system generates the lyrics, the music and the voice. They’re working on it as a technology. Music is a much more complicated machine learning problem than ChatGPT and generating search results. It’s going to be a complicated thing because it’s the models getting trained by IP and running on Spotify. I don’t have opinions on that other than it’s gonna be challenging. I suspect that people will say that this sounds like crypto three years ago, but it feels usable right? It’s got customers and the utility is immediate. With crypto, you really had to spin yourself around in circles to try to understand it.
The short answer is not much has changed. Our leadership is active and they engage and they like to hear about what we’re doing. That interest is still very much there. There’s been no shift. In fact, in some ways, it’s the opposite. Might we do more enterprise deals? We’ve invested in some fundamental AI and science and companies and we’ve dabbled a little bit in health. And I think we may end up dabbling more. I have this theory that the consumerization of technology is affecting healthcare, both from a hardware and from a digital services point of view. A company we had invested in last year called Nesos was building a device you put on your ear that stimulates the vagus nerve to treat inflammatory diseases. The company failed. But that kind of thing where you have consumerization of hardware as a vector, that can improve a product. That’s interesting and I could see us doing more of that kind of thing.
No, I think we’re fine with science. We are fine with investing in companies that are at the science stage, the research stage, where there’s enough signal that they’re on the path to a breakthrough. We’ve also recently invested in a deep tech company with Google.
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MeetKai launches new room-scanning tech and metaverse builder
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Not everyone believes that the metaverse — social, VR-centric worlds — has staying power. But MeetKai is among the steadfast optimists. Founded in 2018, the startup initially focused on conversational AI, aiming to build cutting-edge, top-of-the-line voice recognition and speech synthesis tech. It soon broadened its focus, introducing products to help developers build components of metaverse worlds, including “intelligent” NPCs and (less excitingly) ads. This year at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show, MeetKai is launching several new platforms geared toward metaverse creators and users, including a way to digitize 3D spaces and buildings using any internet-connected device with a camera. The 3D-digitizing service, called MeetKai Reality, can bring various objects and spaces from the real world into the metaverse, says MeetKai. After tapping a camera-equipped device to record a few seconds of video, users upload the footage to MeetKai Reality, which renders the captured space in VR. MeetKai’s room-rendering tech. MeetKai While not novel — platforms like Coohom, Matterport and even Zillow could already render spaces from photos — MeetKai CEO and co-founder James Kaplan asserts that MeetKai Reality is the first photo-to-rendering solution tailored for metaverse use cases. “We want to unlock the same cost and time savings for everyone else looking to build in the metaverse,” he said in a statement, noting the potential applications in real estate, interior design, architecture, engineering and retail. MeetKai’s second new product, MeetKai Metaverse Editor, is a bit more differentiating. It allows users without coding experience to build structures and spaces in the metaverse, optionally collaborating with others in real time as they do so. Metaverse-building tools exist, to be sure — startups like provide them. But not all are no-code and , Kaplan currently points out. MeetKai “MeetKai’s metaverse tools can be used a la carte … We want to unlock the same cost and time savings for everyone else looking to build in the metaverse,” Kaplan said. To round out the new product suite, MeetKai is launching MeetKai Cloud AI, which allows developers to plug a cloud-driven voice assistant into an existing virtual environment. Kaplan claims these assistants — which take the form of avatars that can converse on any number of predefined topics — have “real time reasoning capabilities” (although the jury’s out on that) and can “leverage any form of multimedia to instantly interact with end users.” MeetKai In the future, MeetKai plans to develop its own AI language system along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which it expects will vastly improve the quality of conversations with its avatars. “I’m very happy to see our company deliver the world’s leading metaverse and AI technology products, which set a new mark and raise the technology bar in a very competitive industry,” MeetKai co-founder and executive chairwoman Weili Dai said in a press release. “Our vision and mission for MeetKai is to deploy these capabilities to the masses by offering groundbreaking and affordable solutions, accessible from web browsers and any device — like phones, tablets, computers, large screens, not just VR — available anywhere in the world for greater impact and better lives for all.” MeetKai is competing with for dominance in the metaverse space, but it appears to be holding its own, claiming that over 50 million people actively use its tech. Recently, the startup announced a deal with the Los Angeles Chargers to develop new in-stadium and at-home experiences, including an “AI-based” locker room tour. To date, MeetKai has raised over $20 million in venture capital ( ) and has roughly 40 employees.
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Halo’s SleepSure is a baby wearable to keep an eye on the little one
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 4 |
At a preview event at today, baby-sleep experts showed off a wearable for babies, which can track four measurements in real time: heart rate, rollover, skin temperature, and movement. The hope is that, with easier access to this info, parents can rest at ease while their babies rest, at ease. Halo showed off its SleepSure baby tracker for the first time at CES. : Haje Kamps / TechCrunch The company claims it is the first smart monitor that lets parents customize alerts to deliver the information they find most helpful through their baby’s developmental stages. These alerts, combined with the historical sleep data SleepSure records, provide valuable insights so parents or caregivers can adjust their baby’s environment for more optimal sleep. “Our deep expertise in the sleep category has allowed us to really understand parents’ everyday struggles when it comes to helping their baby sleep,” says Halo CEO Doug Gillespie. “For example, when we surveyed our parent testers, a big concern for everyone was their baby getting warm or cold during sleep. SleepSure’s skin temperature measurement is designed to directly address this universal pain point and make it easier for parents to understand how to help their baby.” [gallery ids="2461281,2461277,2461283,2461284,2461282,2461278,2461279,2461280"] SleepSure is designed for babies 0 to 18 months and costs around $250. It includes a wearable monitor with three differently sized fabric bands so a growing baby can keep wearing it. There’s also a base station and a Halo app, which — refreshingly enough — doesn’t require an additional subscription. The product is available now.
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Typhur launches sous vide cooker with 12-inch display
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Come on in, the water is lovely. You wouldn’t have thought there was space for more players in the busy soup that’s the crowded sous vide market, but begs to differ, thank you very much. At , the company released an exquisitely designed $99 temperature sensor and announced its flagship product, the Sous Vide Station. Now, sous vide (which means “under vacuum”) isn’t a new technology. The idea of cooking at lower temperatures for longer to ensure even heat distribution through the food was first described in 1799. For sous vide, you vacuum seal something you want to cook in a bag, and then cook it at a very specific temperature for a specific amount of time. If you have a way of accurately controlling the temperature of the water and a timer, you’re good to go. , so it’s no surprise that Kickstarter is full of sous vide projects, with various degrees of success and a variable amount of sophistication. Typhur skipped Kickstarter, , and is placing itself at the high end of the sophistication scale. “Food is a science that requires precise timing and temperature to extract the best flavor,” said Frank Sun, founder of Typhur Inc. “The process of cooking sous vide style has always been a well-kept secret in high-end restaurants. It’s a technique cherished for its ability to deliver a consistent and exact level of doneness in everything from savory steaks to poached eggs. With Typhur’s comprehensive Sous Vide Station, anyone can become an iron chef in their own home kitchen — even if the cooking is in a small space.” Typhur’s answer to the challenge is admittedly extraordinarily fancy. It packs a 12.3-inch LCD screen, video-based guides and recipes, a powerful 1,750 W heater and circulator and a very cool design indeed. Among other things, the company created reusable vacuum bags and a hand-held air extraction pump that magnetically connects to the side of the machine, where it also wirelessly charges. It wouldn’t look out of place in the most high-design fancy home kitchens. At CES, the team insists that the pricing has not yet been set, but the Typhur website lists it with and a presale price of $700. Preorders are opening “soon.” Typhur’s vacuum pump can be used with the company’s reusable bags. John Bedell/Typhur The company also showed off the first product it is shipping: the Typhur InstaProbe, a $100 temperature probe to see if your food is done. You can buy , but it can’t be denied that the InstaProbe is a fantastically sleekly designed version. Typhur’s InstaProbe has a large, easy-to-read display. An accelerometer means that the numbers always point right way up. Typhur We have no way of verifying Typhur’s claims, so we’ll have to take their word for it, but it is undoubtedly one of the better-looking food thermometers we’ve seen, and there’s no shortage of people who optimize for that sort of thing, so we can absolutely see these showing up in high-end kitchen goods stores and at Silicon Valley barbecues in the near future. The thermometers are shipping now.
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Google is working on cross-device notifications to let you resume media playback on the move
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Google hasn’t had a massive presence at this year’s . But the search giant announced that it is working on a couple of useful media playback features including better playback options for Spotify Connect-compatible devices and cross-device notifications to let you resume media playback on the move. The idea behind cross-device notifications is that you can start playing a playlist or a podcast in your car and resume the playback on your phone or TV. Currently, Google is working on supporting YouTube Music and Spotify for this cross-device playback system. The company said it uses a combination of signals such as Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi and ultra-wideband (UWB), along with the nearby device feature that identifies the proximity of devices. These things enable experiences like showing a notification to resume playback on your phone when you leave your car. What’s more, Google is also working on making it easier to switch playback devices while using Spotify. Just like Google’s Chromecast built-in and , Spotify Connect is a standard that lets you “cast” media playing on Spotify to compatible speakers such as . Currently, users have to use the Spotify app to use Spotify Connect and switch between compatible speakers. But soon they can use Android 13’s revamped media switcher to shuffle between speakers. Google Google didn’t specify when these features will be available to users across the globe. While these are minor enhancements, it’s obvious that Google wants to play nice with Spotify, which has been super critical of Apple. Last year, Google struck a deal with Spotify to make the music streaming service . Now the search company is making Spotify users’ lives easier on its own ecosystem with these enhancements.
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TechCrunch+ roundup: Deep tech fundraising, negative trade secrets, 3 metrics investors love
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Walter Thompson
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Startup board meetings are scheduled several weeks apart, but many founders work until the last minute on the deck updating investors on revenue, the product pipeline, hiring and other essential matters. In this environment, founders who try to “bright side” their numbers into a positive narrative will lose credibility. It’s nice to think so, but you can’t present a detailed plan that will save the day — there are simply too many factors outside of your control. The best move is to make a directional plan, but to craft one, you’ll first need a firm handle on the KPIs your investors are considering before your next fundraise. In a detailed post that includes formulas and benchmarks for calculating incremental profit margin, pre-S&M profit margin and cash burn efficiency, Paris Heymann, a partner at Index Ventures, offers . “In strong macroeconomic times, these metrics can go overlooked and underappreciated, but they are now important as capital efficiency has returned as a critical strategic priority for nearly all companies,” he writes. Thanks very much for reading, Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Patent applications and GitHub Codespaces are obvious pieces of intellectual property but so are the embarrassing mistakes and dead ends that every company encounters. Rivals can learn a lot from your failed A/B tests, unsuccessful email campaigns and wasted engineering cycles, write Eugene Y. Mar and Thomas J. Pardini, attorneys with Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco. In this post, they offer advice for safeguarding your “negative know-how,” along with general tips for defining and managing trade secrets. / Getty Images I learned something today: Successful deep tech startups and SaaS companies generally reach billion-dollar valuations in the same time frame. “The median deep tech startup took $115 million and 5.2 years to become a unicorn,” according to Karthee Madasamy, managing partner at MFV Partners. New companies in this sector raised around $600 million last year, a steep decline from $800 million in 2021. But Madasamy says recent climate regulation, automation and space are just a few factors stirring investors’ interest during this downturn. “As it becomes increasingly difficult to realize big exits in the years ahead, the technologies within deep tech that are transforming entire industries offer some of the only paths to ’10x exits.'” Arye Elfenbein/WildType There’s a lot of hype around plant-based burgers and nuggets, but alternative seafood products are attracting more attention — and funding — from investors these days. “More than $178 million was pumped into alternative seafood in the first half of 2022, and the market’s value is poised to reach $1.6 billion over the next 10 years,” Christine Hall reports. To learn more about this growing space, Christine surveyed four investors to get their thoughts on regulation, the “unique challenges” companies face as they try to reach scale and how they’re approaching growth and risk:
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Ossia is taking its wireless power tech to consumers with a new charging base
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Ossia’s wireless power tech, Cota, has been kicking for a long time now. In fact, we wrote about the thing nearly . Certainly the promises attached to the technology are intriguing: over-the-air power at a distance, without a line of sight. So, where does one sign up? Today at , the Pacific Northwestern firm announced a step toward bringing it to more users. It’s taking the form of the Universal Base, a white labeled product that receives power from a nearby Cota Home node. The technology can be built into a new product or added to an existing one. “Cota is unique in that it automatically sends wireless power over the air safely and reliably, even with people in the room or on the move,” says Ossia CEO Doug Stovall. “Ossia works with companies to license the Cota technology and complete rapid integrations, like this one, which helps expedite time to market. The Cota Universal Base is a springboard for organizations that wish to cut the cord on plug-in charging pads and surfaces and move to Real Wireless Power.” The first commercially available product to utilize the setup will be the universal charging base for the ARCHOS Cota Wireless Power Security Camera. The home security camera can be used untethered, receiving power from the Home node, rather than relying on just battery power. As far as applications go, security cameras make sense. They’re always on and can be a bit tough to wire. Otherwise you have to change the thing. Per the company: It comes with a Cota transmitter that plugs into a wall outlet and continuously charges up to five cameras within a 30-foot range of the Ossia transmitter. Homeowners can monitor power levels and camera footage from a mobile app. This is a seamless user experience that requires no management. An event captured on the security camera can trigger the camera app with nothing extra to download. Preorders for the Cota Universal Base will open early this year. It will start shipping closer to the end of the year.
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Studiobox is a remote video team’s high-def dream
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
brought video production to its knees, but the show must go on, and necessity is the mother of invention. leapt into the breach, creating an interview studio in a box. For the interviewee, a rugged case shows up, delivered by a friendly FedEx delivery person. They open it, plug it in, and call the production team to say they’re good to go. Everything else is controlled remotely. Today at , we took a closer look at the company’s vision for the future of video production and the software it is developing to control it all. “We are here in Vegas controlling every aspect of the shoot, all the camera settings — zoom, pan and tilt, lighting and audio, all from one computer, with one operator,” explains Ian Smith, co-founder of Studiobox, in an interview with TechCrunch at the company’s booth as part of the Dolby.io demo space at CES 2023. “Basically, the software is doing the work of about six crew members. It is great for interviews and talking-head content. Imagine things like newscasters and sports commentators, but also CEOs and top-level executives who want to do internal communication while looking and sounding great,” Smith explains. “I truly believe this box can replace an interview crew.” During the pandemic, the team got its baptism of fire when Amazon decided to reboot the “ ” TV series. “I grew up watching that sketch comedy show and I was super, super happy to get that call. They needed to do these little two-minute comedic segments with eight different celebrities, [who] were spread out all over the world,” says Smith. “We just sent boxes to each of them and got that shoot done with a lot of ease. The interviewees very much appreciated it because no crew members were stomping through their houses. That’s an example where crews might otherwise have had to use Zoom — and using our boxes, they were able to get super high-quality content.” The current-gen Studiobox has everything you need in one place: light, camera, audio, and a number of sockets to plug in more sound and video sources, all in a sturdy case. : Haje Kamps / TechCrunch. The company doesn’t want to be in the business of video production, however, and spent most of the pandemic creating a software suite that makes this functionality available to any film crew that wants to create high-quality content remotely. Right now, the company uses Blackmagic cameras and preconfigured boxes, but the next iteration of the software supports more cameras, starting with Sony and Canon. From there, the company wants to make its solution completely hardware agnostic and put the power of production fully in the hands of its software. The software is still in development, but what the team showed off at CES was deeply impressive. Any number of crew can take control remotely; you can have someone zooming, while someone else adjusts exposure, and a third person adjusts the lighting, while a fourth tweaks the audio, all from the comfort of their wherever-the-hell-people-work-from-these-days. “We haven’t quite figured out the business model yet: There are a lot of potential options. One option might be seats-based pricing tiers where you can hand different permissions to various crew members. I might have a cinematographer and an audio guy here at the same time controlling their respective controls, and you might be paying for those seats. I can also imagine tiers in terms of how much bandwidth you’re going to use for the quality you want,” Smith muses, without committing to anything specific quite yet. “We have a lot of testing to do over the next three months to figure out that pricing structure, but we’d love to do a subscription model where you’re getting a box and the software all as a subscription package. A lot of people that don’t necessarily want to own the gear but want to take advantage of the cost savings of having a box.” Collaborative editing and postproduction are well-worn paths in the film and TV world, but the production itself has seen a lot less innovation over the years. “E “Part of the future plans and what we were excited about is the AI. Automation of the lights and the cameras and audio too. AI is getting very good about being able to isolate the sound of my voice even though the microphone’s 10 feet away, in real time, so all that technology is getting better and better and better,” explains. “That’s one of the benefits of working with — we can actually tap into their enhanced audio API. We were able to start using things like noise cancellation and applying pop filters — all virtually.” The ultimate goal is to let the AI dramatically save the amount of time it takes to set up and create high-quality video content. “We are currently using AI to stream content in real time and optimize the content as we are streaming it, using Dolby’s APIs,” explains El-Shayeb. “There are several hundred data points that we are planning on tracking in the background. They all contribute to features we use to build scalable data pipelines for production. I think what’s really unique about what we’re doing is that all of this happens in the cloud. This is not a local solution. Just being able to do that in real time and stream all those data points and do all those computations to be able to optimize everything. For example, making my voice sound better, controlling the camera’s parameters, or optimizing the lighting.” Even with the best will in the world, internet connectivity can be flakey, but the company has gone out of its way to ensure that recording can continue even if a location has poor internet connection — or none at all. “I think that’s one of the reasons why controlling actual hardware is unique is because an operator can trigger a recording on the camera,” the internet drops out momentarily, perhaps the remote viewers see a loss of resolution, but that won’t affect the camera at all, and the final result still looks perfect.” “We did a shoot at a hospital where we couldn’t get the up and down speeds ahead of time. We knew we might be walking into craziness,” Smith says, laughing, and described that the upload speed turned out to be 0.1 Mb. That isn’t even enough for a Zoom call, let alone a high-quality video production. “I mean, you can look at the footage. It’s great, and I’m very proud. It’s very clean. You can run this whole thing locally, too, without any internet at all, in a pinch. We’ve done that.” The company is at CES looking for customers, partners, and its first round of institutional investors. The software suite will launch in the spring this year.
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How the recently shuttered third-party apps contributed to Twitter’s development
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Ivan Mehta
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Last week, Twitter to effectively ban any alternative Twitter client application. The company’s change came after many popular apps — including — were suspended by the company’s developer platform team without any notice or explanation. The social media company hadn’t been transparent about its decisions to shun third-party clients, only saying it was (which it then had to ), making developers distrust the platform even more. While Twitter has had a rocky relationship with app developers for years, third-party clients have contributed to many critical features that are core to Twitter’s experience today. Below, we’ve rounded up some examples of how the work done by third-party apps became an integral part of the social network: TechCrunch As the era of third-party apps comes to an end, with some companies publishing or other , Twitter owner Elon Musk claims he now wants to make (aka a “super app.”) But given Musk’s treatment of the developer community, the opportunity to source future ideas from the Twitter app ecosystem is now lost to the company, which could hinder future developments.
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Garmin launches a new FDA-cleared ECG app for the Venu 2 Plus
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Garmin is the latest company to give its users the ability to take an ECG reading from their wrist. The company is launching a new that allows users to record their heart rhythm and check for signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), Garmin on Tuesday. The app, which is the company’s first FDA-cleared smartwatch feature, is available for the Venu 2 Plus in the United States. Garmin plans to add support for more devices and regions in the future and notes that these plans require further regulatory approval. Users can use the app to record a 30-second ECG and view their heart rhythm results immediately on the watch or at a later time in the Garmin Connect app. When users take an ECG, the new app uses sensors on the Venu 2 Plus to record the electrical signals that control how their heart beats. The ECG App then analyzes that recording to detect signs of AFib. For context, AFib rhythms occur when the upper and lower chambers of your heart are not beating in sync. Garmin Users can also sync their results to Garmin Connect, which allows users to view their history of ECG results and create reports that can be shared with a healthcare provider. “The ECG App is Garmin’s first FDA-cleared smartwatch feature and we are thrilled to offer this revolutionary tool to our customers as another way to stay on top of their health,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president of global consumer sales, in a press release. “During the early stages of AFib, it’s common for symptoms to be infrequent, making it difficult to detect in a clinical setting. With the new ECG App, Venu 2 Plus customers can conveniently take an ECG recording anytime and optionally create a report of their results to share with their doctor later.” As with other similar apps, Garmin’s ECG app isn’t a diagnostic tool and is instead seen as a way to get a bit more insight into your health. Google, Fitbit, Apple, Samsung and Withings smartwatches have offered ECG features for quite some time now, so Garmin’s new ECG app is a welcome addition to the Venu 2 Plus.
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The Power1 AirPods charging case gets a lot smaller
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
We didn’t make it to the in-person CES last year, but we did manage to get our hands on a few products from the comfort of our own homes. That list included , an iPhone battery case with a built-in slot for AirPods charging. The product’s creator, AXS Technologies, has since done a rethink of the accessory, which debuts at this year’s show. Like its predecessor, the Model 3 relies on the iPhone’s MagSafe feature, but instead of running the full length of the phone, it’s significantly smaller — though the the company says it adds up to 5x battery life for AirPods. There are two modes — one just charges the headphones, while the other charges both them and the phone at the same time. The pad itself has a magnet strong enough to stick to a phone in a MagSafe case. AXS Technologies “Power1 Model 3 is our most significant and advanced design yet giving users the ability to attach our charging system directly on iPhones or on most MagSafe cases” says CEO John Merenda. “Power1 is the first product to offer all-in-one on-device charging of AirPods and iPhone and creates a new category of charging systems.” The product is compatible with AirPods Generations 2 and 3 and is set to start shipping in the spring, priced at $100 — the same as its predecessor.
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Roblox taps former Google Play VP for creator role
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
As bets big on the future of user-generated content, the online game platform ubiquitous in the under-13 age group is staffing up accordingly. The company announced Tuesday that it has hired former Google Play VP Tian Lim to lead the product team for its creator group, the internal division of the company focused on . Lim will focus on building out the company’s beginner-friendly ecosystem for creators, which includes many young users dipping their toes into game development for the first time as well as looking to spin the platform’s dedicated community into commercial success. “I’m excited to engage with the passionate community of developers and creators and help build an immersive, safe and civil metaverse platform,” Lim said. Before joining Roblox, Lim spent five years working on Google’s mobile app ecosystem, Google Play. He served as the and led teams at both Xbox and PlayStation prior to that, including the team that developed avatars for Xbox Live. “I’ve seen many different kinds of ecosystems now, from AAA to mobile,” Lim told TechCrunch. Lim will work with Nick Tornow, who joined Roblox’s creator efforts last year. Tornow serves as VP of engineering for the company’s creator group. Roblox puts a huge emphasis on custom games and other virtual spaces made by its community. While traditional social networks figured out the power — and profitability — of user-created content more than a decade ago, the gaming world has come around to the idea much more slowly. User-generated content or “UGC” is on the rise in the gaming world and creative ecosystems like Roblox, Minecraft and Epic’s Fortnite are well positioned to ride the trend. Roblox — itself in any traditional sense — for building whatever they can think of. In turn, game developers populate Roblox with “experiences,” the company’s name for the millions of portals it hosts that offer everything from chill hang out rooms to slasher horror games to . While no one can seem to agree on what the metaverse will look like or when it will get here, user-generated content generally factors into that conversation — and Roblox is no exception. “I don’t think Roblox is trying to build the metaverse,” Lim said. “It’s building the platform and operating system the metaverse.”
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Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky begins new ‘journey’ with Camino Partners
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
After successfully building Kind Snacks into a multibillion-dollar company, Daniel Lubetzky and his team, including former Kind executive Elle Lanning, have unveiled , a startup incubator and investment platform. Lubetzky, founder and chairman of Camino Partners, built Kind up from just $5 million in initial investment and told TechCrunch he wants to help other companies do the same thing. He intends to deploy $350 million — funds he already has — into the next generation of transformative companies over the next five years, initially beginning with consumer brands. His own journey started 25 years ago with Peaceworks, a company bringing together neighbors in conflict regions, like the Middle East, around collaborative ventures. It was a classic startup story where it took 10 years of lessons — two steps forward, two steps back kind of things — while building the company that prepared Lubetzky to launch Kind. “I was making so many mistakes, but I drew lessons from those, and then the first 10 years of Kind were just like soaring,” he said. With Camino Partners, formerly known as Equilibra, Lubetzky and his team want to help other startups avoid needing 10 years of mistake-making before they have a successful company. Camino, which means “journey” in Spanish, is throwing out the traditional startup playbooks and instead will be guiding entrepreneurs on values, including integrity, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit. It will also take a “meaningful stake” in brands with proven market versatility and customer following, Lubetzky said. “We want to help people not have to go 10 years through the desert and get there faster, but with a dose of humility,” he added. “Today, you have to think about the circumstances and adapt to the changing circumstances, and what I love about my team is that that’s who they are.” Elle Lanning is leading Camino as managing partner after spending 13 years at Kind, most recently holding the role of chief of staff. She said the company isn’t exclusively focused on consumer packaged goods, but is also looking at startups that have culture creation: a culture of ownership, a shared set of values and financially sustainable structure. “We did not have a single sales channel when building Kind, and so understanding the interconnectivity of those and how to think about them in relation is what we’ve seen, in this past year, a lot of brands have started to do,” Lanning told TechCrunch. “They recognize one channel is probably not the path forward. That’s where we also see the unique advantage in our skill set — being able to lay out that kind of broader ecosystem.” Meanwhile, the organization has already incubated Mexican better-for-you food brand Somos, a company Lubetzky co-founded, and invested in companies, including European breakfast and snack brand Belgian Boys, gimMe seaweed and Cava fast-casual Mediterranean grill. Camino Partners will work with partners to select a small number of companies to build from scratch, Lubetzky said. “We will also invest in existing ventures, but where we have a meaningful role,” he added. “We don’t need to have a controlling stake, but it has to be a very meaningful stake. In some cases, we will launch things and be the majority shareholders and in other cases we won’t. In all cases, it has to be very meaningful and it has to be of much greater significance to our partners and to us.”
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Microsoft is sunsetting social VR pioneer AltspaceVR
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Taylor Hatmaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 21 |
AltspaceVR has had a few close calls over the years, but the company that built virtual social spaces well before “metaverse” was a household word is shuttering for good this time. After announcing that it would , Microsoft intervened and the company came . Now, Microsoft is sunsetting AltspaceVR’s virtual reality platform, a web of immersive social spaces that invited people to hang out with friends or colleagues as 3D avatars. AltspaceVR will be no more as of March 10, and Microsoft says it will direct more resources toward its mixed reality platform . “We look forward to what is to come, including our launch of Microsoft Mesh, a new platform for connection and collaboration, starting by enabling workplaces around the world,” the announcement reads. “In the near-term, we are focusing our VR efforts on workplace experiences, learning from and alongside our early customers and partners, and ensuring we deliver a foundation that enables security, trust and compliance.” Outside of gaming, Microsoft has built many of its products with an enterprise-first mindset, and VR and mixed reality is no different. The company notes that it plans to “extend” its VR plans to consumers once they are established for the workplace. AltspaceVR may have never built a formidable user base — a difficult task in VR, given the bespoke hardware required — but the company was to social applications of virtual reality. By 2015, AltspaceVR had where users could mill around wood-paneled rooms with serene views, watch Taylor Swift music videos together or surf the web via a virtual browser. Spatial audio made the experience more immersive, replicating the way that humans perceive sound in real-life environments and laying the groundwork for virtual events. At the time, most resources and attention in VR were being directed toward cutting edge gaming applications — not virtual hangout spaces. Meta launched Horizon Worlds, an AltspaceVR-like experience with its own inoffensive neutral interiors and not-too-lifelike avatars a full six years later. It’s not clear if Microsoft plans to roll the product into its other VR efforts or abandon the project outright. Given the timing, AltspaceVR’s fate is likely linked to , detailed this week. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for additional information about what happens to AltspaceVR’s team and tech in light of the news. Amidst deep tech industry layoffs, Microsoft announced it will reduce 5% of its workforce, impacting 10,000 employees. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed to economic uncertainty and the comedown from the early pandemic’s tech boomtimes as the rationale behind the substantial cuts. “We will continue to invest in strategic areas for our future, meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas,” Nadella said. It’s not clear if Microsoft is tabling some of its metaverse plans or if AltspaceVR is just a casualty of broad, company-wide cuts. It was only a year and change ago that Facebook boldly rebranded itself as “Meta,” plunging the industry into a buzzy hype cycle around a more immersive, possibly VR-powered vision for social networking. A year later, the metaverse discourse has already rapid-cycled through the backlash phase, leaving the future of avatar-driven virtual social spaces hazy. It’s possible that the metaverse never needed special hardware at all — non-VR online worlds continue to thrive in 2023 — but it’s worth remembering a company that was well into exploring those possibilities years before tech’s lumbering giants showed up.
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Amazon ends charity donation program AmazonSmile
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Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 19 |
Just a few days after announcing a significant round of layoffs that will , Amazon is trying to find money wherever it can as the company announced that . AmazonSmile is a donation program that redirects 0.5% of the cost of all eligible products toward charities. It is a that lets you browse and buy items just like on Amazon.com. But Amazon would keep track of your purchases and donate money on your behalf. The company started sending an email to Amazon customers announcing the change. AmazonSmile will remain open until February 20, 2023. “After almost a decade, the program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations — more than 1 million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin,” the company wrote. Since 2013, Amazon through the AmazonSmile program. Bigger organizations likely received a bigger share of those donations while smaller ones only received a few dollars per year. But nonprofits are not going to say no to $400 million… Charities that have participated in the AmazonSmile program will receive a one-time donation from Amazon that will be equivalent to three months of AmazonSmile donations. It’s a sort of severance package for nonprofits. The end of the program is going to have an impact on Amazon’s bottom line in two ways. First, the company no longer has to set aside 0.5% on purchases made on AmazonSmile. Second, there were people actively working on the separate storefront, charity relationships and more. Shutting down AmazonSmile means that the company can lay off some people who were working on the program. Amazon started informing people who are impacted by the layoffs . The timing of this announcement means that the end of the AmazonSmile program is directly tied to the company’s biggest-ever round of jobs cuts. Amazon currently has a of $974 billion. In its most recent earnings report, the company $2.5 billion in operating income. It wasn’t a record quarter, but Amazon isn’t on the verge of bankruptcy.
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Failures are valuable IP: Protect your startup’s negative trade secrets
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Eugene Y. Mar
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
startups are familiar with protecting their inventions with patents, and their secret formulas, source code and algorithms as trade secrets. But they may not be aware of another powerful form of IP protection in California: “Negative trade secrets” are intended to protect a company’s secret know-how gained from extensive research investment about what does work. Consider Thomas Edison’s quote about his lightbulb experiments: “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Imagine that Edison’s assistant quit and was hired by a competitor. The former assistant’s “negative know-how” from Edison’s 10,000 failed attempts would allow his new employer to start on attempt 10,001. But while a trade secret is a company’s intellectual property, an employee’s general knowledge, skill and experience acquired in his or her former employment is not. Where does one draw this line? Does Edison’s former assistant really have to retry all 10,000 prior failures that he knows won’t work? In a high-profile intellectual property case regarding self-driving technology (Waymo v. Uber), Judge William Alsup asked rhetorically, “Is an engineer really supposed to get a frontal lobotomy before they go to the next job?” The answer to this question is obviously no, but companies have other ways to protect this information. Companies and employees should bear in mind some general best practices when protecting and navigating around negative trade secrets. Courts sometimes scrutinize the breadth of alleged negative trade secrets to determine if they prevent others from competing in a particular field altogether. The broader the effect of the trade secret is and the greater its preemptive effect, the more likely a court will refuse to recognize that secret. In one case, a court found that “Plaintiff’s designation of ‘technical know-how’ regarding what does and does not work in [ … ] digital media management software is simply too nebulous a category of information to qualify for trade secret protection.” The court criticized the plaintiff for failing to “identify any specific design routes,” and instead seeking to prevent the defendants from designing any software at all. Any company seeking to protect this type of IP should sufficiently narrow the negative trade secret’s breadth so it doesn’t overlap with an entire field or industry. Negative trade secret claims most often succeed when a company can identify specific documents or data that included negative knowledge and were taken. Such specificity is likely what allowed Genentech’s claims to go forward in a recent pharmaceutical case against JHL. Genentech included specific allegations that the defendants “downloaded and provided to JHL hundreds of confidential Genentech documents filled with proprietary negative know-how.” JHL argued that its protocols differed from Genentech’s, but the court said this did not foreclose JHL’s possible use of Genentech’s negative trade secrets. This negative know-how “would confer JHL the benefit of steering clear of fruitless development pathways, thereby saving precious time and resources.” So if a pharmaceutical manufacturer can identify data that was taken, which contained failed formulas, those failed formulas could be protectable negative trade secrets. For software companies, claims for negative know-how misappropriation may require specific examples of the failed code that was taken. Companies should bear in mind that courts sometimes enforce a negative trade secret as the flip side of a positive trade secret.
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4 investors discuss the next big wave for alternative seafood startups
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
technology has slowed in line with the rest of the venture capital world, the industry recently achieved some milestones that suggest the sector and the government are moving into alignment. In fact, some investors feel that 2023 will be the year when alternative seafood companies and products make notable strides. More than was pumped into alternative seafood in the first half of 2022, and the market’s value is poised to . One of the sector’s biggest investments was , which raised $100 million in a Series B round for its “sushi-grade” cultured salmon. If this momentum held in the past six months, funding into the sector would meet or exceed the $306 million invested in all of 2021, despite the slowdown last year. “Investment has been growing steadily, and we expect this to continue,” said Christian Lim, managing partner at SWEN Capital Partners’ Blue Ocean. “We see the alternative seafood industry achieving key technical and economic milestones faster than the alternative meat space, which indicates a potential for continued acceleration,” he said. Many companies say they are in this for the sustainability factor, and even with the initial for its cultivated chicken-making process, the focus is on getting these alternative foods close to the scalability and cost of traditional meat. “The cultivated seafood industry is beyond needing to solve for the technology — the technology is there and it continues to improve with every iteration,” said Kate Danaher, managing director, S2G Ventures. “Now we need to think about brand-building, labeling, consumer education, scaling production, and developing and improving the supply chain and inputs that will support a scalable industry.” Like other plant-based, cultured and fermented food companies, alternative seafood companies also must figure out the best way to get people to not only give their products a try but to ask for seconds. As we kick off 2023, investors say regulation will help alternative seafood make additional strides, and they are optimistic that traction will be found. Read on to find out how active investors are thinking about alternative seafood, where they see growth, what they are keeping their eye on and more. We spoke with: I do not expect the first alternative seafood unicorn to happen in 2023. The first goal we should all be focused on is demonstration of repeated production runs at viable price points. Cultivated protein companies have made tremendous progress in the development of their products, but the big hurdle is getting a product of consistent quality and cost to the market. To date, we have seen big dollars flowing to support the first wave of cultivated protein products, including in seafood. To achieve the step up in valuations that will eventually lead to a unicorn, companies will have to demonstrate a quality product with margins that fit within a viable business model at scale. Many constituencies need to be “won over” to mitigate the headwinds that cultivated protein is likely to meet as it goes to market, such as industry groups, consumer groups and regulators. Startup founders can support industry growth, commercialization and acceptance by building bridges with industry groups to show that cultivated seafood can be complementary to wild and farmed seafood. Additionally, they should provide transparency into the production process to win over consumer groups and join an association, such as or , who are doing important regulatory work on behalf of the industry. I feel confident that alternative protein products will be available for purchase in the U.S. in the next 12 months, both cultivated seafood and other animal proteins. But for the foreseeable future, that product will be niche, premium and in limited production. Once production capacity constraints are resolved and costs come down, I expect these products to be as widely available as their animal protein counterparts. One area where seafood may have an advantage in speed to market is related to regulation, given the FDA has sole jurisdiction over alternative proteins whereas the USDA and FDA share jurisdiction over animal protein. In addition, seafood has a higher price point and its muscle structure is simpler in comparison to other animal proteins, making it more straightforward to grow a product that more easily replicates wild/farmed species. For cultivated seafood, the technology is there and it continues to improve with every iteration. Now we need to think about brand building, labeling, consumer education, scaling production, and developing and improving the supply chain and inputs that will support a scalable industry. If these products can be more affordable and meet consumer expectations, they can achieve impact at scale — for the animal through less wild fishing, for humans by delivering a seafood product with no toxins or microplastics and for the environment through less waste. Additionally, consumer education will be key. This, in part, includes driving awareness around the true cost of our food beyond what we pay in the grocery store. Consumers are becoming more aware of the externalities and factoring that into their purchasing decisions, but there is much more work to be done in that respect. The good news is that cellular seafood products have reached a stage where they are approaching readiness to go to market from a regulatory, taste and performance perspective. Cellular seafood companies are making amazing advancements in reducing the price and nearing the stage where they are ready for growth capital to scale the business. I expect to see more innovation and investment into the advancement of consumer experience and 3D structures. I fully expect cellular seafood companies to be in a sold-out position in the future, because there is demand from a large early-adopter consumer segment. The next wave of investments will be into infrastructure and companies that build adjacent inputs to outsource parts of the supply chain. We have strong indications that FDA clearance is coming, and that will tick a big box for institutional and later-stage investors. Once this is behind us, it will be about who is in the market showing traction and producing a product at a price point that makes a compelling business case. It will take a clean label and healthy nutritional composition equivalent to seafood, including protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
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DevZero speeds up programmer tasks by shifting developer tools to cloud
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Ron Miller
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Developers tend to build and test software on their local laptops, but these machines often lack the necessary resources to efficiently run a full-scale development environment. Large companies have built custom systems to move development tools and testing to the cloud, but this kind of approach has often been out of reach for smaller companies. , a startup launched by a former Uber engineer, has built a system to enable developers to build and test code in the cloud, lifting the resource burden from the local machine and ostensibly freeing up developer time spent waiting for builds locally. Today the startup announced $26 million in funding, which included a previously unannounced $5 million seed round and a newer $21 million Series A. While it was at it, DevZero also announced general availability of its cloud development platform. Company co-founder and CEO Debo Ray says that his goal is to simplify the development process for engineers, while allowing them to bring whatever tools they wish to make that happen. “When a developer wants to do work, whatever they want to do, how can I give them an environment to actively code and test where they can immediately just get to build it, focusing only on the revenue generating parts of the business and letting DevZero take care of the underlying developer infrastructure,” Ray told TechCrunch. He says that today most developer work is being done on laptops, and compiling in particular can be time-consuming, where the developer’s machine is tied up for big chunks of time. “Local laptops are very resource-constrained. That’s where we are bringing the flexibility and the remote cloud resources to further amplify the developer process,” he said. By moving the development environment to the cloud, it puts more resources to bear on the compilation process, getting developers back to work faster. Ray cut his teeth at Uber. He says when he got there in 2016, there were just a few hundred engineers. That grew to more than 4,000 over the next several years, and developer productivity was a big priority. During his time there, he worked on several projects to move the bulk of the development environment from laptops to the cloud, and he got the idea of building something more generalized. He left the company last January to start DevZero. Today the company has 21 employees and is actively hiring. Ray, who had a startup prior to joining Uber, says that building a diverse organization is important to him, and he believes that it will ultimately result in a better product. “So this is a lesson from my past: Generally what I’ve realized is when you get a bunch of folks from different backgrounds to come together to solve a problem, you end up with the best solution,” he said. As for the $21 million Series A, that was led by Anthos Capital with participation from Foundation Capital, Fika Ventures and Madrona Venture Group. Foundation Capital led the $5 million seed round with help from Fika and Madrona.
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Sunfish’s technology wants to bring affordability to assisted reproduction
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Natasha Mascarenhas
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
, a new startup built by a former director at one of the oldest surrogacy and egg donation agencies in the world, has raised $4 million to build financial assistance tooling for hopeful parents. The round, led by Walkabout Ventures with participation from Hannah Grey VC and Fiat Ventures, comes a little less than a year since the Santa Monica-based startup was first founded. The backing is set to help Sunfish scale its product, which helps families find affordable options within the assisted reproduction journey, whether that is egg freezing, embryo preservation, IVF, egg donor journeys or surrogacy. CEO and founder Angela Rastegar first noticed the dearth of support for assisted reproduction services when she was working at surrogacy agency, Circle. “There’s really not a lot of resources to help the average American understand budgeting, how to plan for a loan, what’s the right size loan for their household, where to get discounts or even how to think about savings based on the cost for raising a family in their city,” she said. The entrepreneur says nearly three-fourths of the people who go through assisted reproduction make over six figures today, despite there being a demand from folks who don’t fall in that bracket. The company partners with IVF clinics, surrogacy agencies and egg banks to find clientele who need more financial resources. Then, it helps them navigate discounts, grants, employer benefits and loan options that fit their backgrounds and needs. It also pairs people with a financial adviser and a cost calculator; an AI component to that calculator is going live later this year that could help offer a more predictive picture of how much having a baby could cost depending on different variables related to health and family history. Baseline, there’s a number of factors that impact the cost of assisted reproduction, such as the number of kids a family wants to have versus the type of resources you already have from insurance or employers. “Typically, to make a baby you need a sperm egg and a womb. If you’re a hetero couple that has all three of those things, that IVF process will be less. If you need to work with an egg donor or a surrogate because you’re a single parent by choice or you don’t have all of those components, if you’re a same-sex male couple, then it’s going to be a lot more expensive,” Rastegar said. The cost range, she explains, can be anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000. Notably, Sunfish doesn’t supply loans itself but instead helps connect aspiring families to loan providers. Her previous company, Origin Finance, offered and serviced loans for family-building options directly to the surrogacy agency that she worked for. While Origin wound down operations in January, Sunfish became an answer to the same problem area, although with a wider, more venture-scale vision. Today, Sunfish helps facilitate loans to a medical provider instead of an individual trying to land a personal loan at a higher, riskier rate. While banks may be open to providing loans, Sunfish helps people better visualize what that loan process may look like, such as total loan cost estimations and the multiple phases of loans that may be required. “This is very different from someone just going out and raising their own facility and just having one set of criteria for which they can approve only one set of borrowers,” Rastegar said. “As more and more lenders are starting to look at this space, and the fertility industry is growing, we wanted to offer the most comprehensive solution to our partners.” The entrepreneur did say they will offer loans in-house in the future, but for now, multiple lenders give the early-stage outfit some flexibility. So far, Sunfish has received more than $20 million in loan requests across hundreds of applicants, but it declined to share how much capital it has ultimately been able to unlock, citing competitive reasons. The company did say, however, that it has supported hundreds of customers across 32 states, a cohort that has received lines of credit ranging from $12,000 to $100,000. The startup surely has its work cut out for it. There are a number of competitors in the space, including round last year to help couples finance IVF treatments. Future Family, which offers 60-month loans to help finance fertility treatments, While Rastegar may have to play catch-up with these VC-backed comrades, she said that Sunfish’s differentiation is clear: Its ambition is to support parents throughout the full journey, from pregnancy to early childhood to raising a child with long-term financial wellness in mind. While step one may be connecting parents to loans, step two and three could look like savings accounts, investment plays and beyond.
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Crypto losses in 2022 dropped 51% year on year to $4B
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Jacquelyn Melinek
| 2,023 | 1 | 5 |
Immunefi’s Crypto Losses 2022 found over $3.9 billion was “lost” last year. While that might seem like a whopping amount of capital to lose track of, it’s down 51.2% compared to 2021, when over $8 billion was stolen, the report found. Crypto losses are defined as a combination of hacks and alleged fraud incidents, Adrian Hetman, tech lead of the triaging team at Immunefi, previously . In 2022, the majority of losses, or $3.77 billion, were from hacks across 134 specific incidents. About $175 million was lost to fraud across 34 incidents in the same time frame. Both decentralized finance (DeFi) and centralized finance (CeFi) experienced major catastrophic events, including the implosion of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem and the downfall of centralized crypto exchange FTX. But overall, DeFi was the main target for (successful) exploits at over 80%, Immunefi stated. DeFi losses increased 56.2% from over $2 billion across 107 incidents in 2021 to $3.18 billion across 155 incidents in 2022. CeFi losses, meantime, fell 87.3% from $6 billion across nine incidents in 2021 to $768.8 million across 13 incidents in 2022. The two most targeted blockchains last year were BNB Chain — crypto exchange Binance’s blockchain ecosystem — and the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum, with 65 and 49 incidents, respectively. Together, BNB Chain and Ethereum represented over half of the blockchain attacks at 63.3%. Trailing behind the two was Solana, with 12 incidents, or 6.7% of total attacks in 2022. Looking back, every quarter had a handful of multimillion-dollar losses, some bigger than others. While each quarter had its losses, the fourth quarter saw the most, with $1.62 billion in total losses across 55 incidents, accounting for almost half of the total losses in the year. But five major exploits — Ronin Bridge’s $625 million, Wormhole’s $326 million, Nomad’s $190 million, BNB Chain’s $570 million and FTX’s $650 million — accounted for about 60% of all losses in 2022. Roughly 5%, or $204 million, of total losses were recovered in 2022. Looking forward to 2023, it’s expected that crypto “losses” will be in the billions again as more players enter the space and capital continues to pour in. Fixing this long-term will be a product of enhanced security measures, something not all projects, blockchains, protocols and other digital asset entities have prioritized. There are also bug bounty and security services platforms that aim to protect web3 businesses and their users — but until these are implemented across the industry as a standard, more will fall to these hacks and fraudulent activities.
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Plant-based seafood startup the ISH Company rides new funding wave toward pipeline commercialization
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
A heart attack three years ago was a wake-up call for Bernard David, founder and CEO of . After being told that he would only eat plants for the rest of his life, he found that this diet eventually made him “long for those old animals that I used to eat.” Instead of caving in to those urges, David went looking for a plant-based company to invest in. Not finding exactly what he wanted, he founded the ISH Company around a central pillar of sustainability and health. ISH stands for Innovative, Sustainable and Healthy. ISH started with plant-based seafood because two-thirds of seafood is consumed away from home, according to David. Plus, the was found to cause four times more greenhouse gas emissions than beef. The B Corp–certified company is doing something unique with its products, what David calls a “whole system approach,” by going through every ingredient that goes into ISH’s food against peer-reviewed scientific literature to ensure that it is nutritionally sound. And, to make its product come as close as it can to traditional seafood, the company’s R&D identified over 25 different textures. Its products are also made from natural ingredients, like coconut and algae, to mimic the flavor of shrimp and other seafood products, which remains a challenge for plant-based and brands to successfully accomplish. “We aren’t creating what I call ‘Franken Foods,’ or highly processed foods,” David told TechCrunch. “No one’s doing that type of screening. For example, methyl cellulose is quite abundant in many plant-based foods. However, it’s a gut irritant and also a diuretic. We don’t think it makes sense to put ingredients like that into products.” Today, the company announced over $5 million in a seed round to speed up the growth and development of its plant-based food products pipeline, of which its Shrimpish and Shrimpish Crumbles are currently in the market. The round was led by ACCELR8 with participation from Stray Dog Capital and a group of angel investors. To date, ISH has raised $10 million in total. as more startups come online with products and venture capital. is one that falls into this category, catching $12 million last year to develop its plant-based salmon filets. Lisa Feria, CEO at Stray Dog Capital, said in a statement that plant-based seafood is poised to reach $500 million in sales, while the market’s value is poised to . ISH launched Shrimpish in early 2022 and is already bringing in revenue, though David declined to go into specifics. David intends for the new capital to support commercialization of the company’s current products and a robust product portfolio of more than 25 products, including salmon, cod, crab and lobster alternatives that will have the same taste and texture as their traditional food counterparts. A plant-based scallops product is also coming, he said. ISH will also go after future partnerships. The company already has a partnership with seafood producer Thai Union, which distributes ISH’s products to restaurants, colleges and universities across the country and in Europe. David believes this gives the company an advantage. “There’s a high cost of failure with seafood,” he added. “People get nervous about how to make it, but chefs know how to make products and meals with seafood.” Up next, David said ISH is working on market development, especially in Europe. The company is also getting inquiries from Asia. “We need to ensure that we have a very efficient and cost-effective, positive gross margin target with manufacturing,” he said. “We also need to ensure that we have a very robust pipeline — we don’t want to come across as a one-trick pony.”
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2022 global smartphone shipments were the lowest in nearly a decade
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 17 |
One of these days I’ll have some positive news to share about the global smartphone market. Today is not that day. The industry capped off another dismal year with a 17% year over year drop for Q4. That number puts the full year’s shipping figures 11% below 2021, per new numbers from Canalys, which refer to it as “an extremely challenging year for all vendors.” It’s been one thing after another from the industry. Slowing figures pre-dated 2020, while the pandemic and its various knock-on effects have continued tossing up roadblocks. For 2022, the same macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted practically every facet of life took their own toll on the industry. Notably, the figures for the quarter and the year were at their lowest in nearly a decade. The firm tells TechCrunch, “we have to go back to 2013 to find lower numbers — and back then the market situation was very different as the technology was a lot more emerging.” Canalys Apple returned to the top spot for Q4, at a quarter of the total market. Samsung held onto No. 2, but still captured the top spot for the entirety of 2022. “The channel is highly cautious with taking on new inventory, contributing to low shipments in Q4,” analyst Runar Bjørhovde said in a new release. “Backed by strong promotional incentives from vendors and channels, the holiday sales season helped reduce inventory levels. While low-to-mid-range demand fell fast in previous quarters, high-end demand began to show weakness in Q4. The market’s performance in Q4 2022 stands in stark contrast to Q4 2021, which saw surging demand and easing supply issues.” It’s a long way of saying the industry saw a bit of a rebound when supply chain constraints began to ease up, but additional external forces reversed those positive trends — and then some. The firm doesn’t expect much in the way of rebound for the remainder of 2023, either, predicting that growth will be “flat to marginal,” as economic uncertainty and inflation remains. Unemployment, interest rate hikes and other issues are expected to have an adverse effect on “mid-to-high-end-dominated markets,” including North America and parts of Europe. That should, to some extent, be counteracted by a bump from China, as the world’s largest smartphone market continues the reopening process.
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Forward Networks raises $50M for digital twin technology to help model, manage and secure complex enterprise networks
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
Digital twins — virtual representations of actual systems — have become an important component in how engineers and analysts build, visualize and operate AI projects, network security and other complicated architectures that might have a number of components working (or malfunctioning as the case may be) in tandem. Today, a startup called — which has built digital twin modeling software geared specifically at helping to operate and maintain enterprise networks — is announcing some funding on the heels of strong growth. The company has raised $50 million, a Series D that it will be using to continue investing in R&D and expanding its base of customers. MSD Partners is leading this round, with new backers Section 32 and Omega Venture Partners also participating alongside previous backers Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), Threshold Ventures, A. Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. GSAM is a strategic backer: Forward focuses on large enterprises as customers, and Goldman Sachs is one of its longtime customers. The company is not disclosing valuation, but for some context notes that in 2019 it was valued at $140 million. Forward has raised $116 million to date and David Erickson, the co-founder and CEO, described this latest round as a “great outcome” in an interview earlier this month. Notably, the Series D was closed in December and took six months to complete — a very different cadence to its , which closed in a flash, he said. It is indeed a tough market out there, even for those building groundbreaking tech in currently trendy areas like digital twinning technology. Part of the selling point for investors, Erickson said, was the company’s progress over the last two years: customers quadrupled, ARR grew 139% between 2021 and 2022, and there has been very little churn, with a 96% retention rate among users. The company’s unique selling point is it claims that it can model and maintain mathematically accurate digital twins of an enterprise’s network, work that was created out of research that Erickson and his three co-founders, Nikhil Handigol, Brandon Heller and Peyman Kazemian, all did while PhD students at Stanford. This is no small task, as typically these networks are hybrid affairs, covering multiple cloud environments — Forward currently supports AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure — alongside numerous on-premises servers and activities. Those digital twins in turn can help operations people understand how and why networks operate as they do, essential for site reliability — that is, making sure they actually work — but also critical data that can be used in understanding and parsing the security posture of that network. “We are the only company on the planet that does this,” Erickson said. (Note: competitors like squarely this claim.) The data that Forward produces can in turn be used with various remediation products or in other ways as the client chooses. “The easiest analogy for this is Google Maps,” Erickson said, which provides a digital twin experience covering not just navigation, but updates on traffic, road conditions, and businesses and their status along those roads. “It’s a massive improvement over paper maps.” It also potentially opens the door to what Forward might or could do down the line in terms of how it evolves its products. For example, currently the company does not offer remediation services based on its findings but that could be an interesting area to address, given the data it has already in its system and the knowledge it possess of what “normal” typically looks like. That potential is what sold MSD on the company. “We are exceedingly excited and optimistic about Forward Networks,” said Victor Hwang, managing director and co-head of MSD Growth, in a statement. “As enterprise network architectures grow and become more complex, the necessity for network security and visibility have dramatically increased. Forward’s robust and scalable platform solution addresses this large and growing market need unlike anything else we’ve seen. As a flexible, long-term partner, MSD Growth seeks to back exceptional growth businesses with proven unit economics and strong commercial acceptance of their products. We’re thrilled to lead the company’s round of funding and support its next stage of growth.” Hwang is joining Forward’s board with this round. Today, a lot of customers are using Forward’s tech for site reliability, but going forward, it looks like security may take a more prominent role. Erickson said that the back in 2020 “was a wake-up call to the world” about the vulnerabilities of supply chains and that led to increased interest in the kind of data that Forward can provide on how a network is operating, including the sources of data going into and out of it. That is easier said than done in enterprise architecture because of the sheer size and surface of these networks. “Step one for us has been to identify places where people can’t get access to the data that they need to even take remediation steps,” he said. One area where it’s unlikely to play is in end point monitoring, which is a pretty well-trodden part of the enterprise stack. “Our focus is on looking at how data gets to and from end points,” Erickson said.
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So much fintech M&A
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Mary Ann Azevedo
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
On Friday, January 13, investment giant announced it was acquiring a minority stake in SMB 401(k) provider startup . Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it definitely caught my attention for a few reasons. For one, as one source told me, BlackRock’s investment is a show of faith in the SMB 401(k) market — one where the firm hasn’t historically played. That same source, who preferred not to be named, pointed out that “SECURE 2.0’s auto-enrollment provisions (among others), will make 401k plans more impactful at the lower end of the market, and Human Interest is well-positioned to execute.” I’ve been writing about Human Interest since March 2020, covering each of its funding rounds since then ( , and ), and following its impressive growth. It achieved unicorn status in August 2021 and at the time was eyeing an IPO. A lot has changed in the markets since then, so this feels like a good outcome for the startup, which was founded by Paul Sawaya and Roger Lee in 2015. Lee (a very nice guy, incidentally) moved on years ago, recently founding another startup, and launching layoff tracker soon after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The deal was just one of many M&A deals in the fintech space that occurred last week. Here’s a rundown of some others: To bring some context around all this M&A, I conducted an email interview with , partner at . Crane predicts we will continue to see a lot of fintech M&A. He told me: “The question I have is who will capitalize on this bear market to scoop up valuable technology or talent. In particular, I’m interested in whether banks can be opportunistic. Some of the large banks have already been active, and the others need to ask themselves whether they are serious about innovation and digital transformation. If they are, they can’t afford to miss this moment.” Of course, he added, much will depend on the macro picture. “If we have a soft landing, and markets head back up, the true bargains may already have passed. And if we are in for a very hard landing, buyers are at risk of catching falling knives—especially in the credit sector,” Crane said. “Getting deals done in these markets is no sure thing. We’ve already seen a number of announced deals fail to close: UBS/Wealthfront, Bolt/Wyre, and now JPMC/Frank (more on that later). Ultimately, the big challenge will be whether buyers and sellers can cross the massive valuation chasm created by the bursting of the fintech bubble.” No doubt the venture slowdown and practically dead IPO and SPAC markets have contributed to the surge in M&A activity. “VCs are telling their portfolio companies they should be prepared to shelter in place for 18 to 24 months, and many have laid off a lot of staff. But what’s the end game? What are you aiming to achieve that will allow you to raise at a reasonable valuation when markets are fully reopened?” Crane asks. “Those who don’t have a clear bridge to the other side of that chasm will be looking for buyers (if they’re smart).” All I know is if we have more weeks like this one, you’re going to have one exhausted fintech journalist on your hands! check pen Reports Jagmeet Singh: “ , a fintech startup offering debit cards to kids, has laid off 104 employees — or over 21% of its total headcount of 485 employees — to “better align with ongoing operating expenses” amid the economic slowdown. TechCrunch learned about the layoff that was announced to its employees earlier this week. The startup later confirmed the development over an email.” More . Digital mortgage platform said last week its slashing its U.S. workforce by 28%, or 340 jobs, in its fourth layoff in less than a year. The company also said that president will step down from his role in the first quarter and remain as a board member. Clearly, the rise in mortgage interest rates has taken its toll. More . Publicly-traded online lending platform is cutting 14% of its workforce, a move that will impact 225 employees, reports , “as higher interest rates discourage demand for loans, and the company forecast fourth-quarter revenue that was below expectations.” , an investing platform with more than 3 million members, announced last week that it has begun through a partnership with fintech startup . According to the two companies, the accounts allow members to invest their cash in U.S. Treasury bills that “are automatically reinvested at maturity and can be sold at any time.” A spokesperson told me that Public’s Treasury accounts “offer members similar flexibility to a high-yield savings account, but are currently offering even higher yields.” Equity management platform had a rough week. As TC’s Connie Loizos reported on January 11: “The 11-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit whose core business is selling software to investors to track their portfolios, has , Jerry Talton, who the company says was fired ‘for cause’ almost three weeks ago, on Friday, December 23.” The case is a bit of a sordid one, considering that “toward the end of Carta’s long list of accusations against Talton, Carta says that Talton both sent and received ‘sexually explicit, offensive, discriminatory and harassing messages with at least nine women including during work hours and on Carta’s systems.'” For his part, Connie also wrote that Talton was put on administrative leave in October of last year after submitting a letter to Carta’s board of directors, flagging various “problems” with the company’s culture. Then, Natasha reported later that day that the company, which was last privately valued at $7.4 billion, had . For one, reported last Thursday that it lost $3.03 billion on its platform solutions business that houses transaction banking and credit card and financial technology businesses since 2020. Reuters : “The disclosure did not provide separate numbers for its direct-to-consumer business, Marcus, which was moved into its asset and wealth management arm. Marcus has also lost money and failed to introduce a checking account. Swati Bhatia, who led the group, earlier this month, according to an internal announcement seen by Reuters.” Meanwhile, is taking a step back from mortgages. CNBC : “Instead of its previous goal of reaching as many Americans as possible, the company will now focus on home loans for existing bank and wealth management customers and borrowers in minority communities.” Interestingly, in an interview with CNBC, CEO Charlie Scharf acknowledged that the bank “will need to adapt to evolving conditions” while remaining confident about its competitive advantage. Specifically, he said: “Given the quality of the five major businesses across the franchise, we think we’re positioned to compete against the very best out there and win, whether it’s banks, nonbanks or fintechs.” To me, it feels like the move to shrink back from the housing market might open up more opportunities for fintechs. Lastly, as referenced above, Forbes on an absolutely crazy account of basically getting duped by the founders of a startup, , that it acquired for $175 million. Here’s an excerpt from the Forbes piece detailing a lawsuit filed by the banking giant, which claims that founder and former CEO Charlie Javice “pitched JP Morgan in 2021 on the ‘lie’ that more than 4 million users had signed up to use Frank’s tools to apply for federal aid. When JP Morgan asked for proof during due diligence, Javice allegedly created an enormous roster of ‘fake customers’ — a list of names, addresses, dates of birth, and other personal information for 4.265 million ‘students’ who did not actually exist.” In reality, according to the suit, Frank had fewer than 300,000 customer accounts at that time.” Oof. What happened to due diligence here??? According to research from , there are said to currently be over 700 active unicorn companies in the U.S., 132 of which are in the fintech industry. The firm’s has revealed the global fintech companies achieving the $1 billion valuation mark the fastest. Proptech tops the list, taking just under six months to achieve unicorn status. Other companies on the list include Magic Eden, Clara, Brex and Pipe. The firm also ranked the . Leading the way is , which actually just got and last November. Ironically, a number of other startups that made the top 10 also happened to conduct layoffs over the past few months, including Plaid, Brex and Chime. Wondering why Utility Bidder cares about fintech? I did, too. Here’s what a spokesperson told me: “Utility Bidder [is] a price comparison site for energy and utility rates, so they have a focus on business finances as well as energy as a whole.” Identity decisioning platform and fintech unicorn recently released its annual . The report found that 70% of financial institutions surveyed lost over half a million to fraud last year and that 27% of respondents lost over $1 million to fraud in the last 12 months. Further, 37% of fintech companies and 31% of regional banks estimated losing between $1 and $10 million to fraud. A spokesperson reached out to me last week after seeing our coverage of Fidelity’s acquisition of Shoobx to let me know that “Morgan Stanley at Work has invested a lot of time and resources” in its Private Markets business, “and continues to see it as an area of growth — especially as we recently just saw an astounding uptick in liquidity events during Q4 2022, which further supports the idea that private companies/startups need an effective software solution to handle these complex transactions.” The firm acquired Solium, a cap table management solution platform now called , in 2019. announced last week its new . Via email, a spokesperson told me: “This new service equips retailers with a fixed rate model and the ability to accept all major contactless payment options including credit/debit cards and mobile wallets — all without hidden fees, long-term contracts or minimum monthly requirements. These benefits enable increased flexibility, agility and greater transparency for retailers of all sizes and industries…” has brought on as its first SVP of global sales. Based in Austin, Ochoa most recently served as VP of sales and customer success at TripActions. Mesh co-founder and CEO Oded Zehavi told TechCrunch via email that Ochoa was brought on “to leverage a surge in customer demand” as the company builds out “new services to meet the needs of larger companies who are more than ready to move off of legacy spend management solutions.” Sounds like Mesh, like competitor Brex last year, is going after more enterprise customers. Speaking of , here’s a fun from former CRO and current Founders Fund partner Sam Blond about “the best outbound campaign” Brex ever ran. Bank sign on glass wall of business center; Image credit: Getty And, I recorded Equity Pod with my incredible co-hosts Natasha Mascarenhas and Rebecca Szkutak: Whew. This was one of the busiest weeks we’ve seen in a while. Hope those of you in the U.S. have a good and restful long weekend, and if you’re outside of the U.S., I hope you have a good and restful weekend as well. Until next time, take good care. xoxoxo — Mary Ann
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Six ex-OneWeb engineers raise $2.5M for Quindar to revolutionize satellite mission management
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
It’s never been cheaper to send a spacecraft to orbit, but many companies are hamstrung by the complex and expensive demands of satellite mission management. wants to change that. The company, which just closed $2.5 million in seed funding, has built a web app for end-to-end satellite operations that it says will enable its customers to get to orbit — and market — faster. Quindar’s six co-founders met while working at British satcom company OneWeb, where they helped develop its satellite operations platform. There, they saw what Quindar CEO Nate Hamet referred to as “red flags”: large amounts of human capital devoted to mission management, along with engineers doing make-buy trades on products that were onerous to integrate and scale. “No one was making this streamline solution and simplifying such a complex workflow, that they had to integrate bespoke products and create what they believe to be the best solution,” Hamet said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “Instead, we’re building that core foundation and baseline as essentially a single service.” The company, which is based in Denver but is remote-first, graduated from Y Combinator last year. With six co-founders, all with technical backgrounds, Quindar has been able to build out its core product in a matter of months, rather than years. The company’s seed round was oversubscribed before YC’s Demo Day, Hamet said. The co-founders include Matt Regan, head of operations; Dave Lawrence, head of strategy; Sunny Bhagavathula, head of product; Shaishav Parekh, head of infosec; and Zach Meza, head of engineering. The seed round includes capital from Y Combinator, FCVC, Soma Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures. Quindar’s value proposition is not just that its web app makes mission management easier; Hamet says that companies can also skip hiring software developers and engineers and use those cost savings — up to a third of the cost of traditional mission management solutions, according to Hamet — toward other parts of their business. The number and span of solutions Quindar is hoping to provide is ambitious. The company’s software platform — what Quindar calls “Mission Management as a Service” — can help startups design their mission, test the satellites, integrate with ground stations, and operate the spacecraft through its life in orbit. It’s providing what Hamet called a “forever commitment”: “This isn’t something that’s just getting you to launch,” he said. “It’s for the five to ten years lifetime of your mission.” Quindar is already working with customers, some on a pilot basis. Right now, the company is focused on working with startups that don’t yet have assets in space, though Hamet said they intend to also work with companies with satellites in orbit. Customers with existing satellites can also use slices of Quindar’s platform for specific functions, like flight dynamics, to mitigate the risks of migrating their software to a whole new platform. Quindar’s currently focused on hiring — the first hires for the six-person-founded company — with open positions for a front-end engineer, site reliability engineer and test engineer. Looking ahead, Quindar is also planning on expanding its offerings to government and commercial customers. The end goal, according to Hamet, is for Quindar “to host all of your software … similar to how AWS revolutionized hosting servers as a service. We’re doing that for the aerospace community.”
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Komprise raises $37M to help companies index, manage and transform data
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
In the enterprise, there’s been an explosive growth of data — think documents, videos, audio files, posts on social media and even emails. to a Matillion and IDG survey, data volumes are growing by 63% per month in some organizations — and data’s coming from an increasing number of places. The same survey found the average number of data sources per organization is now 400 sources, and that more than 20% of companies surveyed were drawing from 1,000 or more data sources to feed their business intelligence and analytics systems. Much of the aforementioned data is unstructured, meaning it’s not organized in a predefined way (unliked, say, a database of names and addresses). That’s problematic, because storing unstructured data tends to be on the difficult side — it’s often locked away in various storage systems, edge data centers and clouds, impeding both visibility and control. This led entrepreneurs Kumar Goswami, Krishna Subramanian and Michael Peercy to found , an unstructured data management platform for enterprise customers. Komprise claims it can scan petabytes of file and object data, bringing visibility on data assets and a dashboard to search for files by metadata, department and original owners. “[Our] customers are enterprises facing exponential data growth, often with petabytes of data under management across multiple sectors, especially healthcare and life sciences, public sector, higher education and financial services,” Goswami, who serves as Komprise’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Komprise is focused on building a strong business with a loyal and growing customer base and has been judicious with external capital. This approach helps us weather potential headwinds as we build a self-sustaining business.” Investors must believe it’s a solid approach, as well, given that Komprise this week managed to close a $37 million funding round from Canaan Partners, Celesta Capital, Multiplier Capital and Top Tier Ventures. To date, the company’s raised $85 million in venture capital, which Goswami says is being put toward go-to-market initiatives, expanding Komprise’s channel partnerships and growing the platform with a “heavy emphasis” on cloud data migration, lifecycle management and self-service for line of business departments and users. The bulk of the investment is equity, but there’s some debt — Goswami wouldn’t give a ratio or percentage. He did reveal, however, that it’s not a “down round” in the sense that Komprise’s valuation increased with its closing. Goswami — who met Peercy while a product VP at Citrix after the company acquired Goswami’s previous startup, Kaviza — explained that Komprise performs analytics to present insights on a company’s data usage. Komprise can create a data management plan to move data to the right place at the right time, he averred, deploying automated workflows to find data across storage environments while tagging and enriching the data and sending it to external tools for analysis. “Komprise can move data as it ages to lower-cost storage such as object storage in the cloud and policies can also be set to delete data after a period. [The platform can move] data without disrupting user access or existing data protection mechanisms thus ensuring greater ongoing data storage and backup savings without any hassles,” Goswami said. “ So what else can enterprises do with Komprise? Goswami pitches it as a compliance solution as well as a means to manage costs. For example, he says, with Komprise, a company can run searches to find sensitive customer data residing on “non-compliant” file shares, or create different retention, storage, deletion and backup policies for data based on its usage and business purpose. Lest potential customers be dissuaded by privacy concerns, Komprise says that it doesn’t store customer data. It only records the metadata or tags about data, and keeps that information in customer-specified and -owned locations. “Storage and cloud vendors all have basic data management and migration features, but Komprise is unique in being able to work across on-premises, cloud and edge environments to deliver, analyze and automate data movement transparently as well as provide ongoing data lifecycle management and smart data workflows,” Goswami said. “Komprise is able to right-size these investments, while helping customers get more value from their existing and future IT infrastructure.” More than a few organizations seem to be persuaded. Komprise claims to have over 300 customers in total, with the largest concentrations in industries like pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, financial services and the public sector (including military). When asked about economic headwinds, Goswami says he doesn’t anticipate them majorly affecting businesses. In fact, he credits the pandemic and related supply chain issues with accelerating — not dampening — 150-employee Komprise’s growth. The company grew 306% from 2018 to 2021, Goswami says, although it’s unclear what exactly “growth” means in this context; Goswami declined to elaborate. “Since the pandemic, customers have accelerated their transformation to the cloud and are more focused on cost optimization. As Komprise helps customers with both of these initiatives, our growth has accelerated during this time. Komprise is focused on building a strong business with a loyal and growing customer base and has been judicious with external capital,” Goswami said. “This approach helps us weather potential headwinds as we build a self-sustaining business.”
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Amazon launches RxPass, a $5/month Prime add-on for all-you-need generic drugs covering 80 conditions
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
More than two years since announcing Amazon Pharmacy to take some of the prescription drugs business away from big (and smaller) drug stores, Amazon is launching a new product to expand its reach in the space. Today, it’s taking the wraps off , a service where Prime users in the U.S. can pay a monthly flat fee of $5 to get as many generic versions of medications as they need. Amazon said that initially the service will cover generic drugs for 80 common ailments — they include, for example, Losartan (the generic for the hypertension drug Cozaar) and Sertraline (the generic for antidepressant Zoloft) and hair-growth pills — and it would not comment on its plans to expand the list. The 80 conditions were selected, so to speak, to make it an offer attractive to a wide base of potential customers. Dr. Vin Gupta, the chief medical officer of Amazon Pharmacy, said that more than 150 million people in the U.S. already take one or more of the medications in the RxPass offering. In addition to RxPass (not to be confused with healthcare service for B2B called ) only being available to U.S. Prime users — one more sweetener for Amazon’s membership tier that started with free shipping but now nets services like entertainment, grocery shopping services, etc. to attract repeat purchasing — RxPass is not open to people on government medical plans like Medicare or Medicaid (Amazon Pharmacy is a provider for these and thus cannot offer it direct). One pays the $5 out of pocket, not on insurance. You sign up for it in your app as a Prime user, under Pharmacy. This is a big and pretty bold move for Amazon; $5/month is the fee regardless of the amount a customer orders, meaning the service is aimed at those who are currently already paying more than this per month for their meds for these 80 conditions, or think that they might over time need to pay more, or are looking for one-stop services with a predictable cost each month. It also competes with a few other things also brewing in the market: namely, Mark Cuban’s effort. Indeed, as with a lot of other services on Amazon’s platform, it’s balanced that promise of convenience carefully against pricing, playing in this case also on a shortcoming in the market and specifically in healthcare. On one hand are the basic predicaments and pitfalls of systems like those in the U.S. that rely on health insurance to operate, and generally are very expensive regardless for users even with those plans, leading many to forego getting what they need. (This is not the only problem with health in the U.S. of course, but a big component of preventative and chronic care.) “Navigating insurance can be a maze and getting to On the other hand are the conveniences and cost benefits of the Prime service being put to work to fill that gap. “Prime members already get fast, free delivery on prescription medications, and RxPass is one more way to save with Amazon Pharmacy. Any customer who pays more than $10 a month for their eligible medications will see their prescription costs drop by 50% or more, plus they save time by skipping a trip to the pharmacy,” said John Love, vice president of Amazon Pharmacy, in a statement. “We are excited to offer our customers surprisingly simple, low pricing on the eligible medications they need each month.” Amazon would not disclose how it arrived at $5 and whether that’s a subsidized figure to attract more users, but data published last year by , citing figures from the OECD, noted that in the U.S. in 2019, annual per-capita out-of-pocket payments for prescribed medicines annually averaged $164. This is not a direct comparison, as this is not a figure that covers 80 conditions, but it is the average, giving an idea of what is spent around the most common conditions that Amazon is also targeting. Its aim also is to net in users for Amazon Pharmacy, which will provide meds for all of the other conditions. The bigger service also provides discounts on generic and non-generic meds (up to 80% and 40% respectively, Amazon says). Amazon has been eyeing up the opportunity to do more in healthcare for many years, buying startups and launching new services and products in aid of that. These have included acquisitions of in 2018 and primary care tech platform in 2022. And in addition to the of Amazon Pharmacy in 2020, last year it launched a telehealth service called . This was the company’s second attempt at telehealth after mothballing Amazon Care (a service for its own employees). The OneMedical deal is still making its way through regulatory approvals, but in the meantime this latest launch of RxPass underscores the company’s intent to keep at this, despite the wider restructuring and 18,000 layoffs at the business that are currently underway.
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Max Q: Things are tough out there
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Hello and welcome back to Max Q! I hate writing intros, so let’s get to it, shall we? In this issue: There is very little room for error in aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturing. For companies that build products like missiles, rocket boosters and avionics, each part must not deviate more than a hairsbreadth from its technical specifications. Despite the precise demands of the industry, however, parts ordering is generally done using systems that are only slightly better than carrier pigeon. To solve this problem, Malory McLemore and Anne Wen founded , a startup that’s building a platform to bring new workflows to parts ordering. The company is hoping that its platform can reduce errors and improve efficiency — two variables that will be key to shoring up America’s industrial base. Stell founders Malory McLemore and Anne Wen. Stell From Seraphim Space CEO Mark Boggett, seven predictions on what the space industry has in store this year. First on the list: cell phone connectivity from space. “Multiple players in the space industry have recently set their sights on direct-to-mobile connectivity from space,” Boggett writes. “While it’s still a very early market with limited existing capabilities, companies such as Apple, T-Mobile, Globalstar, SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are targeting this area. Multiple mobile network operators are already on board, even before some of the first operational spacecraft have been launched.” / Getty Images
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FBI accuses North Korean government hackers of stealing $100M in Harmony bridge theft
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
The FBI accused two groups of North Korean government hackers of carrying out stolen from a company that allows users to transfer cryptocurrency from one blockchain to another. On Monday, the FBI announced that the — two groups linked to the North Korean government by both cybersecurity companies and government agencies — were responsible for the hack against the Horizon bridge, created by the U.S. company Harmony, in June 2022. Citing cybersecurity experts, Reuters last year that North Korea was likely the culprit of the hack, which exploited a vulnerability in the bridge to steal various cryptocurrency assets, such as Ethereum, Binance Coin, Tether, USD Coin, and Dai. The FBI said that on January 13, the North Korean hackers used RAILGUN, a crypto “privacy protocol,” to launder $60 million in Ethereum stolen from Harmony. “A portion of this stolen ethereum was subsequently sent to several virtual asset service providers and converted to bitcoin (BTC),” the FBI in its announcement. “A portion of these funds were frozen, in coordination with some of the virtual asset service providers.” The FBI also published 11 cryptocurrency wallets where the remaining $40 million in stolen bitcoin were moved to. North Korea has a long history of targeting cryptocurrency companies to raise money for the regime, which sees crypto as a way to evade international sanctions and to fund its nuclear weapons program. Last year, the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the U.S. Treasury Department detailing North Korea’s activities targeting crypto companies. , North Korea has stolen around $1.2 billion worth of crypto in the last five years, including $626 million in 2022 alone. Harmony’s Horizon is a so-called blockchain bridge — also known as cross-chain bridges, a tool that allows users to transfer digital assets from one blockchain to another, allowing different blockchains created by different companies to be interoperable. Several of these bridges have had serious vulnerabilities, making them a favorite target for hackers. “Blockchain bridges have become the low-hanging fruit for cyber-criminals, with billions of dollars worth of crypto assets locked within them,” Tom Robinson, co-founder and chief scientist at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, last year. “These bridges have been breached by hackers in a variety of ways, suggesting that their level of security has not kept pace with the value of assets that they hold.” Chainalysis, another blockchain analytics firm, estimated that around $1.4 billion were stolen from blockchain bridges last year.
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Shopping app Temu is using TikTok’s strategy to keep its No. 1 spot on App Store
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
, a shopping app from Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, is having quite the run as the No. 1 app on the U.S. app stores. The mobile shopping app hit the top spot on the U.S. App Store in and has continued to hold a highly ranked position in the months that followed, including as the No. 1 free app on Google Play since December 29, 2022. More recently, Temu once again snagged the No. 1 position on the iOS App Store on January 3 and hasn’t dropped since. Offering cheap factory-to-consumer goods, Temu provides access to a wide range of products, including fast fashion, and pushes users to share the app with friends in exchange for free products, which may account for some of its growth. However, a large number of its new installs come from Temu’s marketing spend, it seems. When in November, the app had then seen a little more than 5 million installs in the U.S., according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, making the U.S. its largest market. Now the firm says the app has seen 5 million U.S. installs this January alone, up 19% from 4.2 million in the prior 22 days from December 10 through December 31. According to Sensor Tower estimates, Temu has managed to achieve a total of 19 million lifetime installs across the App Store and Google Play, more than 18 million of which came from the U.S. The growth now sees Temu outpacing rival Shein in terms of daily installs. In October, Temu was averaging around 43,000 daily installs in the U.S., the firm said, while Shein averaged about 62,000. In November, Temu’s average daily installs grew to 185,000 while Shein’s climbed to 70,000, and last month, Temu averaged 187,000 installs while Shein saw about 62,000. The shopping app’s fast rise recalls how the video entertainment platform TikTok grew to become worldwide in 2021, after years of outsized growth. The video app 2 billion lifetime downloads by 2020, including sister app Douyin in China, Sensor Tower said. Combined, the TikTok apps have now reached 4.1 billion installs. Like Temu, much of TikTok’s early growth was driven by marketing spend. The video app grew its footprint in the U.S. and abroad by heavily leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat’s own ad platforms to acquire its customers. TikTok was famously said to have , even becoming Snap’s biggest advertiser that year, for instance. By investing in user acquisition upfront, TikTok was able to gain a following, which then improved its ability to personalize its For You feed with recommendations. Over time, this algorithm became very good at recognizing what videos would attract the most interest thanks to this investment, turning TikTok into one of the in terms of time spent. As of 2020, kids and teens began spending than they did on YouTube. And earlier this month, indicated all TikTok users in the U.S. were now spending an average of nearly 1 hour per day on the app (55.8 minutes), compared with just 47.5 minutes on YouTube, including YouTube TV. While Temu is nowhere near TikTok’s sky-high figures, it appears to be leveraging a similar growth strategy. The company is heavily investing in advertising to acquire users, whose data it uses to personalize the shopping experience. One of Temu’s key features, in fact, is its own sort of For You page that encourages users to browse trending items. The page is subtitled “Selected for You.” In addition to gamification elements, Temu also puts heavy emphasis on recommending shops and products on its homepage, which is informed by user data and usage. But the app’s growth doesn’t seem to be driven by social media. While the Temu hashtag (#temu) on TikTok is nearing 250 million views, that’s not really a remarkable number for an app as big as TikTok where something like #dogs has 120.5 views. (Or, for a more direct comparison, #shein has 48.3 billion views.) That suggests Temu’s rise isn’t necessarily powered by viral videos among Gen Z users or influencer marketing, but rather more traditional digital advertising. According to , for instance, Temu has run some 8,900 ads across Meta’s various platforms just this month. The ads promote Temu’s sales and its extremely discounted items, like $5 necklaces, $4 shirts, and $13 shoes, among other deals. These ads appear to be working to boost Temu’s installs, allowing the app to maintain its No. 1 slot on the App Store’s “Top Free” charts, which are largely powered by the number of downloads and download velocity, among other things. Of course, having a high number of downloads doesn’t necessarily mean Temu’s app will maintain a high number of monthly active users. Nor does it mean those users won’t churn out of the app after their initial curiosity has been abated. Still, Temu’s download growth saw it ranking as the No. 1 “Breakout” shopping app by downloads in the U.S. for 2022, according to . (Data.ai calculates “Breakout” apps in terms of year-over-year growth across iOS and Google Play.) Because Temu’s growth is more recent, the app did not earn a position on the Top 10 apps in 2022 in either the U.S. or globally in terms of downloads, consumer spend, or monthly active users on this report. Instead, most of those spots still went to social media apps, streamers, and dating apps like Bumble and Tinder. The only retailer to find a spot on these lists was Amazon, which was the No. 7 app worldwide by active users and the No. 8 most downloaded in the U.S. Temu’s marketing investment may not pay off as well as TikTok’s did, though, as other discount shopping apps saw similar growth only to later fail as consumers found that, actually, $2 shirts and jeans were deals that were too good to be true. as consumers grew frustrated with long delivery times, fake listings, missing orders, poor customer service, and other things consumers expect from online retail in the age of Amazon. Temu today holds a 4.7-star rating on the U.S. App Store, but those ratings have become less trustworthy over the years due to the ease with which companies can get away with fake reviews. Dig into the reviews further and you’ll find similar complaints to Wish, including scammy listings, damaged and delayed deliveries, incorrect orders and lack of customer service. Without addressing these issues, Temu seems more likely to go the way of Wish, not TikTok, no matter what it spends.
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Memfault raises $24M to help companies manage their growing IoT device fleets
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 24 |
At the same time Internet of Things (IoT) devices and are becoming more complex, manufacturers are looking for ways to effectively manage the increasing volume of edge hardware. to Statista, the number of consumer edge-enabled IoT devices is forecast to grow to almost 6.5 billion by 2030, up from 4 billion in 2020. Capitalizing on the trends, , a platform that allows IoT device manufacturers to find issues in their edge products over the cloud, has closed a $24 million Series B funding round led by Stripes, with participation from the 5G Open Innovation Lab, Partech and Uncork. The investment brings Memfault’s total raised to more than $35 million following an $8.5 million cash infusion in April 2021. “We sharpened our go-to-market motion in 2022 and saw a clear acceleration in the business,” Memfault co-founder and CEO François Baldassari told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We feel confident that our playbook for sales-led growth is at a level of maturity where we can double down on our investment and accelerate growth. This was not the case a year ago; there is more talent available on the market than at any time since we started the company.” Baldassari first conceived of Memfault while at smartwatch startup Pebble, where he worked alongside Memfault’s other two co-founders, Tyler Hoffman and Chris Coleman, for several years. At Pebble, the trio had to investigate hardware issues that were often difficult to fix remotely, which led them to create cloud-based software and performance monitoring infrastructure to improve the process. After leaving Pebble, Baldassari joined Oculus as head of the embedded software team while Hoffman and Coleman took senior engineering roles at Fitbit. The infrastructure they created at Pebble stuck with them, though, and in 2018, the three reunited to found Memfault. “We offer the tools to de-risk launch, prepare for the inevitability of post-launch issues and deliver a continuously improving, higher-quality product overall,” Baldassari said. “We can help companies ship more feature-rich products with continuous feature updates after the devices are in the field while helping companies stay in compliance with environmental, privacy and security regulations and avoid service-level agreement and warranty violations.” Memfault Stripping away the marketing fluff, Memfault provides software development kits (SDK) that let manufacturers upload performance data and error reports to a private cloud. There, it’s stored, analyzed and indexed so engineers can access it via a web interface to look for anomalies and troubleshoot problems as they occur. Baldassari acknowledged that some manufacturers try to extend software reliability tools to cover hardware or build in-house teams to tackle bugs. But he argues that both approaches end up being more expensive and require more technical resources than deploying a service like Memfault. “You can never anticipate every use case that a user might subject your device to, and there are some bugs that only surface in one in 10,000 instances. Trying to replicate that is nearly impossible,” Baldassari said. “Using Memfault, engineers react to issues in minutes rather than weeks, the majority of issues are automatically deduplicated and a clear picture of fleet health can be established at all times.” While cybersecurity isn’t its main focus, Memfault has sometime rivals in startups like , , Shield-IoT and , whose platforms offer remote tools for monitoring security threats across IoT device fleets. More directly, Memfault competes with Amazon’s AWS IoT Device Management, Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge, Google’s Cloud IoT and startups like Balena and , which sell utilities to seed over-the-air updates and perform high-level troubleshooting. Memfault claims to have a sizeable market foothold regardless, with “hundreds” of companies in its customer base including Bose, Logitech, Lyft and Traeger. And it’s not resting on its laurels. To stay ahead of the pack, Memfault plans to use the proceeds from its Series B to expand its platform’s software support (it recently announced Android and Linux SDKs) and invest in out-of-the-box integrations, adding to its existing partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers including Infineon, Nordic Semiconductors and NXP. Memfault also intends to expand its headcount, aiming to roughly double in size from 38 people to 80 by the end of the year. Baldassari said that Memfault is also exploring ways it could build AI into future products, although that work remains in the early stages. “We see promise in AI’s ability to help us develop sharper anomaly detection and error classification capabilities,” Baldassari said. “We’ve accumulated the largest corpus of hardware and firmware errors in the industry and hope to train AI systems on that data in the future.” Asked about macroeconomic headwinds, Baldassari — who wouldn’t discuss revenue — admitted that the pandemic-spurred chip shortage affected Memfault’s customers and market “quite a bit.” But it turned out to be an blessing in disguise. “In some cases, customers have been unable to find enough chips to produce the number of devices they planned on. In other cases, they’ve had to switch to new chips they’ve not previously had on their devices,” Baldassari explained. “In these cases, Memfault has been a huge help to our customers. Many engineers tell us that they aren’t sure what their firmware will look like running on these ‘Frankenstein’ devices — but with visibility into fleet data, diagnostics and debugging info from Memfault, they’ve been able to ship confidently.” Baldassari volunteered that Memfault has maintained “high” gross margins and a low burn multiple — “burn multiple” referring to how much the company’s spending in order to generate each incremental dollar of annual recurring revenue. (The lower the multiple, the better.) Of course, it’s all tough to evaluate without firmer numbers. But when pressed, Baldassari stressed that Memfault hasn’t been growing at any cost. “We’ve always been focused on building a long-term sustainable business,” Baldassari said. “Although there is a broader slowdown in tech, the global trend is going towards more automation. Most customers and prospects have told us how they are willing to spend on software and automation to stay ahead of competition.”
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Greenlight, kids-focused fintech startup, lays off 104 employees to optimize expenses
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Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 12 |
, a fintech startup offering debit cards to kids, has laid off 104 employees — or over 21% of its total headcount of 485 employees — to “better align with ongoing operating expenses” amid the economic slowdown. TechCrunch learned about the layoff that was announced to its employees earlier this week. The startup later confirmed the development over an email. “The macroeconomic environment has impacted virtually all businesses, including Greenlight. We recently made the difficult decision to better align our ongoing operating expenses with the current environment,” a Greenlight spokesperson said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. The spokesperson said the impacted employees would receive severance, extended medical coverage, and career transition support. The startup announced the decision on Tuesday and now has a workforce of 381 employees. “The company remains committed to its mission to help parents raise financially smart kids. Moving into 2023, Greenlight will be focused on continuing to serve its growing customer base and finding new, impactful ways to improve financial literacy for families,” the spokesperson said. Greenlight offers kids a debit card, banking app and financial education to make them financially smart and independent. Community Federal Savings Bank issues the Greenlight debit card. In December, the Atlanta-headquartered startup a web-based financial literacy library aligned with the K-12 national standards that will be free to schools, teachers and students. In October, it also to its subscription plan called Greenlight Infinity, which is priced at $14.98 per month for the whole family. According to the data on Crunchbase, Greenlight has raised about $556.5 million in total since its inception in 2014. The funding included the that was announced in 2021 at a valuation of $2.3 billion. Greenlight is one of the latest startups to lay off its staff during this challenging time. In the last few days, startups such as , and let many of their employees go to reduce expenses. Big tech companies, including and , have also laid off thousands of workers this month as the economy continues to struggle. Additionally, the growing economic slowdown has impacted prominent fintech startups, including Stripe, which laid off in November. The startup also to $63 billion, TechCrunch reported earlier on Thursday.
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Vista Equity Partners to acquire insurance software company Duck Creek for $2.6B
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Paul Sawers
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
Private equity giant Vista Equity Partners has plans to take private in a $2.6 billion deal. Boston-based Duck Creek, a SaaS-based software provider for the property and casualty (P&C) insurance sector, , initially hitting a market cap of around $5 billion. After peaking at around $7 billion in early 2021, Duck Creek’s fortunes have fallen somewhat, with its valuation plummeting to below $2 billion over the past year, with a closing price of around $13 per share as of Friday. Vista’s $19 per-share offer represents a 46% premium on Duck Creek’s most recent market closing price, and a 64% premium on its volume-weighted average price (VWAP) over the previous 30 days, equating to $2.6 billion, which Vista said it will pay in an all-cash transaction. Duck Creek It’s worth noting that Vista of some of the biggest enterprise deals over the past year, including Citrix, which Vista partnered with Evergreen/Elliott on to acquire . Vista also snapped up automated tax compliance company Avalara , while it sold disaster recovery company Datto . Specific to today’s announcement, Vista also has some history in the insurance software space, having acquired the likes of , and over the past couple of decades. “Vista has an established track record of partnering with leading enterprise software businesses within the insurance industry and related verticals,” Vista managing director Jeff Wilson said in a press release. “We are excited to work with the Duck Creek team as we look to build on their best-in-class platform and solutions, which serve many of the world’s leading P&C insurance carriers.” Vista said that it expects to conclude the transaction in Q2 2023.
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Pasqal raises €100M to build a neutral atom-based quantum computer
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
, a Paris-based quantum computing startup, today announced that it has raised a €100 million Series B funding round let by Singapore’s . In addition to Temasek, existing investors Quantonation, the Defense Innovation Fund, Daphni and Eni Next, as well as new investors European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Wa’ed Ventures and Bpifrance (through its Large Venture Fund) also participated in this round. What makes Pasqal, which was founded in early 2019, stand out in an increasingly crowded field of quantum computing startups is that the company is betting on neutral atoms quantum computing. This is a relatively new and potentially game-changing approach to building quantum processors. Instead of trapped ions (like IonQ) or superconducting quantum computers (like IBM), neutral atom quantum processors use lasers to hold atoms in place with what is essentially an optical tweezer. As you can imagine, building the technology to hold a single atom — and only a single atom — in this trap created its own challenges, but that’s mostly a solved problem now. The advantage here is that once you can do this with hundreds of atoms at the same time, you can create both a very dense matrix of qubits and one that, using holographic methods, you can reshuffle in 3D space as needed for a given algorithm. And all of this happens at room temperature. That almost makes these machines more akin to Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) than more traditional quantum processors. You can find a Pasqal’s paper about this process with more details and it’s also worth noting that Alain Aspect, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement in 2022, is one of Pasqal’s co-founders. Pasqal As Pasqal co-founder and CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond told me, the company has already demonstrated that it can control more than 300 atoms at a time. “It’s very hard to have only one atom in a laser beam and to monitor it and to control it,” he explained. “But once you achieve that, you can almost easily scale that and you can create arrays in any shape you want.” He noted that the qubits are similar to ion-based qubits in terms of their coherence time and fidelity, yet this flexibility and ability to pack these atoms in a very dense array, with only a couple of microns between the qubits, could give this technology an advantage. Reymond noted that with some of these basic capabilities now in place, the team is working on building the quantum control system so it can start implementing quantum algorithms. And while there are startups that focus on building quantum control hardware, none of them are optimized for neutral atoms, he noted, so the company decided to build its own system. Clearly, the Pasqal team is quite optimistic about its system and Reymond believes that the team will be able to show its potential customers “quantum business advantage” in 2024. He believes that this will take a system with 200 to 300 qubits. At this point, most researchers believe that we won’t see the industry trend toward a single technology for solving every algorithm. Instead, different quantum technologies will find their sweet spots for solving different problems. For Pasqal, the team believes that its system will work especially well for graph-centric problems. “There are a lot of computational challenges that you can reframe in the shape of a graph,” he explained. “What we can do with atoms, is we can represent the shape of this graph and embed the complexity of the algorithm in this geometry. In the end, instead of using thousands of quantum gates, just by implementing a couple of them, you can run your algorithm and then you are resilient to errors.” The company is currently working with the likes of Crédit Agricole CIB, BASF, BMW, Siemens, Airbus, Johnson & Johnson and Thales to help them understand where its technology can solve their business needs. “We are very proud of this new milestone in PASQAL’s development that will make the company a world leader,” said Christophe Jurczak, managing partner at Quantonation. “Quantonation has supported the company since its spin-off from Institut d’Optique. It is the first scale-up within Quantonation’s portfolio, and it truly illustrates the excellence of French research and the competitiveness of the French quantum ecosystem.”
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Stell wants to modernize the ‘unsexy’ workflows slowing down America’s industrial base
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 17 |
There is very little room for error in aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturing. For companies that build products like missiles, rocket boosters and avionics, each part must not deviate more than a hairsbreadth from its technical specifications. Despite the precise demands of the industry, however, parts ordering is generally done using systems that are only slightly better than carrier pigeon: generally some combination of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, long-text PDFs attached to email or an A&D company’s internal portal. Communication between companies and suppliers about these highly technical parts can also be bogged down by similarly low-tech, human-driven errors, like forgetting to copy someone on an email. “I had this crazy theory that nothing can really move forward in terms of automation until all of that text, all of those decisions, get digitized,” Malory McLemore said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. To solve this problem, McLemore and Anne Wen founded , a startup that’s building a platform to bring new workflows to parts ordering. The company, which is less than six months old, just closed an oversubscribed $3.1 million pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures and Third Prime VC as it gears up to expand its team and build out its product. The company is hoping that its platform can reduce error and improve efficiency — two variables that will be key to shoring up America’s industrial base. Stell was still just a “crazy theory” when McLemore embarked on an MBA at Harvard Business School. That’s where she met Anne Wen, a fellow graduate who had experience getting space startups off the ground. The idea continued to germinate, but ultimately both McLemore and Wen completed the program unsure of how to move forward. “We left school feeling like we couldn’t figure out how to make this business work,” McLemore explained. “Selling software to aerospace and defense is hard. There aren’t a lot of solutions competing with the big guys for a reason.” McLemore has seen how the A&D supply chain functions up close while working for both established aerospace behemoths and disruptive machining startups. Her experience includes stints at Airbus and Raytheon, where she helped build anti-ballistic missiles and airplanes. Most recently, she was machining-parts startup Hadrian’s first product manager. This experience gave her a look into the parts-ordering process from the perspective of the customer, at Raytheon, and the supplier, at Hadrian. On both ends, she was confronted with inefficiencies, missed deadlines and pointless errors. Even a startup like Hadrian, with millions in funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Lux Capital, still had to deal with the same inefficient inputs from the OEMs. “So I called Anne, and I was like, I think I know how we can do this.” When it comes to parts ordering in A&D, it is not only the technical specifications that need to be communicated to suppliers. Often, parts need to be inspected in certain ways, or tested; those results need to be communicated back to the customer. McLemore said Stell’s platform would also include room for these key deliverables and provide space for communication with customers directly within the software. That the A&D industry has such outdated workflows may seem surprising, but up until now there has been very little pressure on the biggest companies to change their systems. McLemore pointed to the outsized power of this very small, very powerful group of primes relative to the suppliers. But the landscape is changing: More venture capital is pouring into aerospace and defense startups, and there’s increasing pressure to secure these critical supply chains by bringing manufacturing back to American machine shops. Suppliers could have more leverage to demand better workflows, which McLemore says benefits both customers and suppliers. Other things are changing too: Legacy primes have historically been disincentivized from changing any process because it introduces uncertainty and risk. But Stell is hoping competitive pressure from outside the traditional industrial base will also nudge them to rethink their systems while not sacrificing mission assurance. Right now, Stell is “running full speed,” Wen said; she and McLemore are in the process of onboarding Stell’s first dedicated software engineer and are thinking ahead to a design hire. They’re also planning on registering under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the series of regulations that govern technologies related to U.S. defense. The company is aiming to get an alpha prototype to one-two customers by April. That test period will last until summer; once concluded, McLemore and Wen plan to launch to the industry at-large.
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ABL Space Systems’ rocket experiences simultaneous engine shutdown shortly after lift-off
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Launch startup first orbital launch attempt ended in failure Tuesday after all nine engines on the RS1 rocket’s first stage shut down simultaneously. The rocket subsequently hit the launch pad and was destroyed on impact. The rocket took off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island at around 6:27 PM EST. It’s unclear how soon after lift-off the engines failed. The rocket was carrying a technology demonstration CubeSat for data analytics company OmniTeq. While the payload was lost, no personnel were injured by the rocket impact. As is customary with anomalous rocket launches, the company is working with officials from the spaceport and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the cause of the engine shutdown. ABL President Dan Piemont told TechCrunch that while the investigation is still in its early stages, “The simultaneity of the shutdown is a strong piece of evidence but it will take more time for the team to narrow down contributing factors and a root cause.” ABL’s 88-foot-tall expendable rocket RS1 is capable of carrying up to 1,350 kilograms to low Earth orbit, similar to Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha vehicle. The company has previously said that each launch would cost around $12 million, putting it in a growing field of competitors looking to provide rapid launch services at low cost. The failure on Tuesday comes just one day after a Virgin Orbit mission experienced , which ended the mission prematurely. Two other rockets also experienced failures in the past month: Arianespace’s Vega-C and Chinese company Landspace’s Zhuque-2, which would’ve been the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit. ABL has raised $420 million since its founding in 2017, including a $200 million Series B extension round in December 2021 at a valuation of $2.4 billion. Its investors include Lockheed Martin, which purchased a block of up to 58 launches from the startup last April. “The Flight 2 vehicle is fully assembled and ready to begin it’s flight campaign, so we’re champing at the bit to get going on that as soon as the Flight 1 investigation is complete,” Piemont said.
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Daily Crunch: Days after announcing plans to cut 10K jobs, Microsoft invests billions more in OpenAI
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Happy new week! Did you know that TechCrunch has a bunch of amazing newsletters that aren’t this one? If you’re into transportation, don’t miss ’s . writes our weekly (with currently filling in while Greg is on paternity leave); does the newsletter; writes , which is our fintech newsletter; and does the , which is like a weekly newsletter, but for the holes on the side of your head, rather than the front ones. And there are even more than that, so ! — and TechCrunch Live is entering its third season, and is, frankly, ludicrously psyched to be leading the events again this year. The first event is on February 1, 2023, and will feature a timely discussion on Cambly’s Sameer Shariff and Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel are speaking at the first one — stay tuned for what’s coming down the pike! And we have five more for you: / Getty Images Patent applications and GitHub codespaces are obvious pieces of intellectual property, but so are the embarrassing mistakes and dead ends that every company encounters. Rivals can learn a lot from competitors’ failed A/B tests, unsuccessful email campaigns and wasted engineering cycles, writes Eugene Y. Mar and Thomas J. Pardini, attorneys with Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco. In this post, they offer advice for safeguarding your “negative know-how,” along with general tips for defining and managing trade secrets. Three more from the TC+ team: Just when Salesforce thought it was safe to go back in the water, the company now has an activist investor coming in and taking a multibillion-dollar stake. writes that while , there could be something else behind it: “Elliott typically takes a stake in a company to make changes in the way the company operates with the goal of cutting costs and increasing shareholder value. In some cases, it tries to push CEO changes or even sell the company, although that seems less likely in this case.” You be the judge. And we have five more for you:
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Private investment in space dropped 58% last year, even with SpaceX, Anduril monster raises
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Aria Alamalhodaei
| 2,023 | 1 | 19 |
Private investment in the space economy dropped by 58% in 2022 compared to the year prior, with macroeconomic headwinds battering private and public markets, according to from New York-based Space Capital. But while 2023 is shaping up to be another hard year for startups, Space Capital’s report maintains that the external pressures on companies will be a net positive for the industry overall. “Quality companies with product market fit, positive unit economics, and strong leadership will continue to get funded, although valuations will be more in line with historical averages,” Space Capital managing partner Chad Anderson said in the report. “We believe that less speculation will result in fewer competitors, and a larger talent pool that will make the next two years an attractive time to start and invest in space tech companies.” Despite the overall bearish market environment, there was one clear winner last year: SpaceX, which managed to raise $2 billion, its second-largest annual raise since the company was founded in 2002. Notably, other companies that landed major rounds are explicitly targeting the defense sector: These include defense technology startup Anduril, which closed a $1.5 billion Series E; Series E; and Series A. Overall, late- and growth-stage companies were most highly impacted by the more conservative venture investing environment last year, while early-stage investments declined only 4% year-over-year. The total number of rounds in 2022 also decreased by 30% compared to the year prior. While the overall picture from last year is negative, investing did pick up in the fourth quarter: 63% of the year’s deals were made in the last quarter, representing $2.6 billion. The United States continues to lead in total private investment in space companies, with 46% of deals happening here, the report found. China comes in second place with 29%. China’s investment in space infrastructure, which includes launch and tech to build and operate satellites and other space-based assets, continues to climb. The report also looks at emerging industries, like private space stations, in-orbit servicing and mining companies. These companies saw a 63% drop in investment. The majority of the rounds in the fourth quarter of 2022 were early-stage, which reflects that the industry is still very much in its beginnings. Space Capital tracks 1,791 companies across the space sector. Over the last 10 years, investors have poured $273.3 billion of private equity into these companies.
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With a focus on patients with chronic illness, Nourish hopes to help Americans eat better
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Anna Heim
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
Many of us would feel better if we ate better. But for patients with chronic diseases, the issue is more pressing: Fixing their diet is often key to keeping their condition under control. According to the , six in 10 adults in the U.S. have a chronic disease such as diabetes or heart conditions. Millions of these could benefit from professional nutrition guidance but don’t always have the time or means to seek care. Enter , a U.S. startup that connects users with a registered dietitian (RD) via telehealth and helps them get their consultations covered by health insurance. Telehealth is part of the appeal, both for patients and nutritionists, but the RD qualification is an important point too. “All registered dietitians are nutritionists — but not all nutritionists are registered dietitians,” the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics . Unless you seek an RD or RDN (registered dietitian nutritionist), you won’t be sure that your nutritionist is properly qualified for the job — and your insurance will not cover it. Insurance coverage is a big part of Nourish’s value add. The startup’s CEO, Aidan Dewar, told TechCrunch that “94% of our patients are fully covered by insurance and pay nothing out of pocket. Most of the rest just have a small co-pay.” That’s because since 2002, medical nutrition therapy has fallen under the scope of Medicare under certain criteria, a move that led major private insurers to follow suit. On paper, qualified patients who are aware of this could get reimbursed after seeing an outpatient RD, whether online or off. But as often with healthcare in the U.S., the process is cumbersome for practitioners, and many end up not accepting insurance. In contrast, Nourish’s RDs are employed by the company, which took care of closing partnerships with Medicare and major U.S. healthcare companies Aetna, BCBS, Cigna, Humana and United Healthcare in exchange for a fee. Nourish currently employs 50 RDs, but has a waitlist of more than 400 RDs interested in joining its team, Dewar said. Having launched in November 2021, the startup is pacing itself but already reports “millions in revenue” from “thousands of patients seeing dietitians each month.” And by the end of the year, it plans to employ 200 RDs and grow its non-RD team from 18 to around 30. Nourish’s growth plans will be funded by a recent $8 million seed round that brought its total funding to $9.3 million. Led by , it had participation from Susa Ventures, Operator Partners, Box Group and Y Combinator, whose accelerator the startup graduated from in 2021. Dewar also highlighted that several of Nourish’s angel investors built exciting healthcare companies, such as Alto Pharmacy (Jamie Karraker), Headway (Andrew Adams), Rightway Healthcare (Jordan Feldman) and Spring Health (April Koh). “Nutrition has largely been excluded from the healthcare system, despite its importance and connection to people’s health. We love that Nourish is changing that by bringing consumers, registered dietitians, and insurance companies together to build a more affordable and complete nutrition program,” Thrive Capital general partner Kareem Zaki said. Nourish has big goals: By helping people to eat well, the startup is hoping to contribute to solving the American healthcare crisis. “More than half of Americans have a chronic condition related to what they eat, which has contributed to healthcare costs going up and quality-adjusted life expectancy going down,” its founders said. Dewar and Nourish COO Sam Perkins are childhood friends and landed on Nourish’s mission after struggling with chronic conditions themselves (migraines and irritable bowel syndrome, respectively). After experiencing the positive impact of nutritional care, they co-founded their startup together with CTO Stephanie Liu, who had become close friends with Perkins at Princeton. The founders knew firsthand that working with a dietitian was a long-term process, but this vision is also reinforced by the startup’s chief clinical officer, Adrien Paczosa. “We focus on a long-term, sustainable approach — truly a lifestyle change,” she said. “We will never put you on a fad diet that is impossible to maintain, tell you to only eat salad for every meal, make you track everything you eat, or give you some generic, one-size-fits-all meal plan.” Because of this approach, the startup doesn’t see itself as directly competing with weight loss apps. However, it plans to use its seed round to launch an app of its own by the end of the quarter, but with different goals in mind. “The mobile app will augment the core experience of seeing your dietitian, with features including high-quality nutrition content and resources, clinical outcome tracking, and features that help you acquire the food such as integrated grocery delivery (so your RD can prescribe you food in the same way an MD can prescribe medicine),” Nourish explained. The app’s goal is to make sure that patients are achieving the desired outcomes. Indeed, Nourish has two priorities in 2023: growth and outcomes. This road map has to do with how Dewar and his team define success. “It’s [both] about how many people we help and how much we help them.” There’s still plenty of room for Nourish to grow on both fronts: The vast majority of chronic illness patients who could benefit from seeing an RD currently don’t, and even when they do, eating well remains a struggle. Will an app help make their journey easier? Only time will tell.
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GoodOnes raises to help make sense of your mess of a camera roll
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
You know what it’s like — you’ve been on vacation and you’ve taken 28 million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can make a calendar. Ain’t nobody got time for that — and that’s what is here to help you with. The app is in early access mode at the moment, and just closed a $3.5 million round of seed funding to continue its march toward launch. In a nutshell, GoodOnes connects with your Google Photos or iCloud Photos account and helps you select the “best” photos from your enormous library of images. The idea isn’t new; we’ve seen a number of apps try to clean up the mess of images. One example was , which made a similar attempt, fueling its business model of turning everyone into a stock photographer. At least The Roll made sense as a marketing stunt for EyeEm’s core business. What is less clear is how GoodOnes has a path to generating revenue. “We’re really thinking about a subscription layer on top of this product. We saw a lot of willingness to pay from users, especially for the target segment of parents, and grandparents,” explains Israel Shalom, co-founder at GoodOnes, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We have not finalized our subscription model yet. Our primary focus at this point is to build a good user base and get all the feedback to improve it.” The company raised its round from TLV Partners with participation from Liquid2 Ventures (Joe Montana’s fund), as well as Rich Miner (former co-founder of Android), and Peter Welinder (founder of Carousel, sold to Dropbox), as well as many more seasoned operators and funders. With the funding, the company is planning to expand its engineering team. In a world where Google, Apple and the other photo-keeping apps are already making efforts to surface good and interesting photos, is there really space for GoodOnes in the market? “The reality is that these apps have been around for a decade, both on the Apple side and on Google side. What they are doing well is offering safe storage for all your photos,” says Shalom, pointing out that to the degree that the competitor apps are surfacing photos, they aren’t doing a particularly good job, and that his solution is much more customizable. “What’s different about what we’re doing, is that we are leaving you in the driver’s seat.” The app works by learning your preferences, and using your swipe-left-i-love-this and swipe-right-ugh-get-out-of-my-face to train your tastes on an AI. From there, it starts creating galleries of photos that it thinks you like the best. The final gallery or album is created and presented back to the user. “We’re thinking that there’s room for another player big player here. The same way that Netflix is synonymous with streaming and Spotify synonymous with music,” says Shalom. “We would like GoodOnes to be the place where you consume your most personal and most valuable information, which is your personal photos and videos.” The app can de-duplicate, select the best photos and give you a gallery of your favorites. “With the creation of mobile platforms, we ended up delivering powerful computers, digital cameras and streaming devices in everyone’s pocket – we could never have anticipated the volume of new content that would be created,” Rich Miner, who co-founded Android, and is an angel investor in GoodOnes’ round, said in a statement. “GoodOnes brings powerful curation to the deluge of photos we’ve all come to accumulate. I’m very excited about this tool & tech, which is why I was thrilled to invest.” “Parents care a lot about photos, and we’ve seen that they feel guilty and overwhelmed with their photo roll. Having spent my career marketing to families, if you can help a busy parent save time on something they want to do, they’ll be very open to paying for it,” says GoodOnes co-founder Aparna Pande.
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Debunking the myths of why venture investors don’t fund diverse startups
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Dominic-Madori Davis
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
land on a word to explain what is happening to women and minorities within venture. Are such founders overlooked or undersought? Underestimated underrepresented? Marginalized? Discriminated against? Or just ignored? The excuses used to justify these sobriquets are equally scattered. Women received just funds last year because they are only building beauty and wellness companies; there is a lack of a proven track record; it’s too early, they are too risky, and there is a pipeline problem. Maybe she’ll get married, have a family and leave the business behind. And Black founders raised because there aren’t enough of them pitching; they are a minority of the population and thus deserve a minority of the funds; their products and markets tap into something can relate to; there isn’t enough traction, they aren’t qualified; or, as wrote, they aren’t “male, pale and from Yale.” Ah, yes, this explains it all. Women are too emotional to run companies. One female founder told TechCrunch she heard an investor say he wouldn’t invest in a woman-founded company because “she was annoying.” Men, on the other hand, are not annoying. They are competent and qualified, and, as we all well know, sexism and racial discrimination after the civil rights and third-wave feminism movements. Since then, decisions toward people of color and women have been based purely on quantitative and provable facts. Indeed, investors’ fact-based due diligence often leaves out that women-founded companies than male-founded ones. The rest of the data regarding bias in the venture industry is so nebulous that it’s hard to call much of it out. Without transparency, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many people of color and women are pitching, thus making it hard to assess how disproportionate funding to these groups truly is. There is a way, though, to pick apart some common misconceptions. For one, women ( ) are to start a business than men (and companies in increasing amounts), meaning the idea that there aren’t enough women to invest in is simply untrue.
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Forspoken review: Square Enix’s risky new IP arrives half-baked
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Everyone is excited for Final Fantasy XVI, but in an age of endless sequels the fresh and original action RPG Forspoken has gamers hoping that a fun new franchise is being minted. Unfortunately, Square Enix’s risky bet doesn’t quite pay off: It’s an ambitious but disjointed experience that feels for all the world like none of its developers played it. Forspoken (for PC and PS5) follows the popular trope, in which someone from our world is suddenly and inexplicably transported to another, usually a fantasy one in which their modern knowledge and sensibilities work to both their advantage and detriment. In this case, Frey, a young woman from Manhattan with a mysterious origin (but more pressing legal and money troubles) is sent to Athia, a once beautiful land ravaged by a corruptive force and lorded over by four mad, magical matriarchs. Frey must figure out what’s happening and save the world, etc., etc., with the help of a sassy sentient vambrace (Cuff) whose voice only she can hear. The player guides Frey through the world, battling monsters and collecting new gear, and scampering over the landscape using a “magical parkour” system that, while a bit imprecise, does impart a nice sense of speed and agility. Further traversal abilities, like a magical grappling hook, are acquired over time. Combat has Frey swapping between several spell types and eventually elements, peppering monsters from afar or slashing them up close, dancing around them and dodging their attacks. These are upgraded with gear or by completing various challenges, like doing a certain amount of damage to enemies from behind. This is genuinely awesome, but… Square Enix Stand on a cliff’s edge and gaze out at the dramatic landscape, ripe with points of interest to raise stats and collect materials and items, and you could well think you’ve got a good time ahead of you. And in some ways, you’d be right. It’s fun to bound around, zapping baddies and snatching upgrades. The combat is dynamic and occasionally strategic, and boss battles are engaging. The world-building and characters are occasionally inspired and pleasingly diverse, if inconsistently acted — it’s not Shakespeare, but I want to find out what happens next. But the cracks start to show pretty quickly as it begins to feel like the game was rushed out well ahead of readiness. To begin with, it doesn’t run well. The quality-focused graphics settings are pretty much unplayable, and even on the “performance” setting, which lowers the resolution and detail considerably, you get slowdowns. I liked Frey’s actress, but not everyone is as fleshed out. Square Enix There’s a ton of dialogue, but the game also repeats itself a lot. Like a lot. I’ve heard the same quips when sighting an enemy or finding an item or landmark dozens of times. Frey and Cuff exchange barbed dialogue constantly, yet somehow they only recorded a handful of unique conversations, so you hear the same ones over and over. I had to set the “chatter” to “minimal” in the settings because I was so tired of hearing the same thing. (The cringeworthiness of the writing I pass over for now and leave to others to detail… but 😬.) Not only that, but the game frequently freezes you in place for dialogue or quest alerts, which tend to linger in silence for an infuriating three-count before letting you move again. Sometimes you’ll be given back control for only a few seconds before some new cutscene or pop-up takes it back. Combat is splashy but chaotic, with unreliable camera and targeting controls that result in Frey constantly missing with her magic. As enemies get more intense, you’ll often be hit from offscreen, and damage ranges wildly from nearly nothing to one-shot kills by ordinary mobs. The need to pull the haptically resisting R2 trigger many, many times in rapid succession, to do regular attacks, is wearying (you can change this but it’s another thing where one questions why it is that way at all). And the support magic has you constantly dipping out of battle and losing your flow so you can select a trap or area attack that isn’t on cooldown. Now picture stopping every two seconds to switch spells. Square Enix Dodging is done simply by holding down the parkour button, effectively making Frey invincible. There’s a counter system of sorts, but it requires getting hit in the first place, which is a little weird, and was never well explained. There is some variety to the monsters; for instance, a guy shielded from the front that you must incapacitate and hit from behind. Great! But the game also falls into the trap of padding out combat and difficulty by swarming the player. Those shielded guys aren’t so fun to fight when there are 20, coming from every direction. One early boss, already something of a damage sponge, soon reappears as a miniboss, then two guard a gate, then a quest has you fight at once. Because you can really only target one at a time, and they spam fireballs at you, you spend most of the time holding dodge, waiting for a pause in their patterns to do a little spray and pray. Square Enix And while the world is big and realistic, it’s drab and kind of uninteresting. Each ruined town or fort is indistinguishable from the last. The “labyrinths” are short, also nearly identical lines of rooms with non-unique bosses at the end, and actually identical treasure chambers. The lore entries you find are short and vague: “The Varandis Guild built this tower to conduct their researches in. They delved into forbidden magic and were purged after the war of A.G. 3,472. -Quaestor Invicta, Glorious History of Athia.” (I made that one up, but you know the type. You could write one.) Why are any of these places different or cool or important? It’s never clear, so you’re always just kind of traversing an all-purpose fantasy landscape looking for arbitrarily placed stat increases in copy-pasted assets. And because every point of interest is labeled on the map, and chests don’t have anything special in them, you know you can skip (literally) over most of the world. Sure, that’s arguably true of every open world game, but especially so here. The whole thing has the feeling of an alpha or tech demo, basically, or a launch game rushed out to show off certain qualities of the PS5 (it can look gorgeous, for sure, and load times are nonexistent). There are all these systems, but they don’t seem to harmonize; there are all these locations, but they don’t have a reason to exist; there is all this dialogue, but much of it feels almost improvised in how unspecific it is; there are side quests (“Detours”), but few compelling rewards. I had to feed five of them, each with their own little fade-out! For no reason and no reward! Square Enix It’s as if they built the whole game in isolated rooms (with the pandemic, this may even be true) and forgot to have someone play it and ask important questions like “why is it this way?” Why doesn’t the camera snap to the next enemy when you defeat one? Why can’t you just assign support magic to button combos? Why does it take so long for certain UI items to appear or disappear? Why are there grapple points that shoot you so high that landing causes Cuff to think you’ve died? I was running into things that seemed like they’d have been caught in QA or playtesting. It’s too bad, because there is real promise in the setting and art direction, and the landscape really can be impressive and fun to explore at times. When the combat isn’t getting in its own way, it can be a messily fun power trip. I do feel that, like Final Fantasy XV before it, Forspoken can be updated and mostly redeemed with six months or a year of work filling in the gaps, doing polish passes and adding quality-of-life improvements. There’s nothing wrong with a cool open world to explore and fight monsters in — this is a new and original one and plenty of people will enjoy it as-is, but others will recoil at finding janky aspects in such a high-profile game. With luck, Forspoken will eventually achieve its ambitions, but until then I’d say hold onto your money.
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Review: The 2023 Mac Mini is a serious contender with the M2 Pro
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Matt Burns
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Apple’s latest silicon innovations shine in the Mac Mini. The tiny desktop computer is the latest Apple computer fitted with the M2 chipset. For $599, buyers can opt for the M2, or they spend $1,299 for the impressive M2 Pro, which features unique benefits. For the last several days, my M1 Mac Mini sat on the sidelines while the new Mac Mini used the court. This machine soars. As expected, the new SoC lets the machine easily jump through applications and tasks. That said, the M1 Mac Mini released in 2020 has always worked fine. I’ve used one since launch and still find it adequate. It’s not new-phone fast anymore, though. With this M2 Pro, I feel like an F1 driver with a new set of tires and a tank full of gas. I’m ready to go for another hundred laps. I threw everything in my daily rotation at the M2 Pro, and it never blinked. It zoomed through media encoding and heavy photo editing. It conquered benchmarks and put up with Chrome’s never-ending quest for system memory. It’s been a joy to use. The Mac Mini has long been Apple’s most affordable computer. But, occasionally, it was left out of Intel CPU updates over the years, making the computer look unloved and forgotten. Now that Apple is making its chips, the Mac Mini is back in rotation. In 2020, the Mac Mini helped debut the M1 chip. Now in 2023, the Mac Mini, alongside the 14- and 16-inch , is debuting the M2 Pro. Buyers have a couple of options with the M2 Mac Mini. For $599, they can select the base model that features the M2 CPU, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. Spend $799 to upgrade the SSD to 512GB. The M2 Pro is available for $1,299, and for that price, buyers get 16GB of memory and 512GB of SSD storage. Spend more to upgrade the number of cores in the CPU and get more system memory and up to 8TB of local storage. The differences between the M2 and M2 Pro are minor, but consequential. The M2 Pro offers significant advantages for some uses. The M2 Pro has double the amount of transistors over the M2 and has twice the memory bandwidth. The M2 has an 8-core CPU with a 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro has up to a 12-core CPU and up to a 19-core GPU. The M2 Pro also has an additional Thunderbolt controller, allowing it to be equipped with four Thunderbolt ports instead of the two on the standard M2 Mac Mini. This also allows the M2 Pro Mac Mini to support up to three monitors instead of the two from the standard M2. The M2 Pro in my tester set incredible benchmarks. For example, in Geekbench 5, the multi-core benchmark clocked in at 14,991. That’s several clicks over the performance of the M1 Max in the Mac Studio (12,336) and Intel Xeon W-3245 from late 2019 (14,674). The single-core benchmark was even more telling: The M2 Pro scored 1,932, topping the previous record of 1,900 set by the 13-inch M2-powered MacBook Pro. The M1 Mac Mini scored 1,715. Benchmarks only tell part of the story. Let’s look at the placing of the $2,099 M2 Pro against the stock $1,999 Studio M1 Max. Think of the Studio line like super Mac Minis. The Mac Studio with the M1 Pro and Max was released nearly a year ago, in the winter of 2022. Apple will likely refresh it eventually, but as it sits, it offers distinct advantages over the new M2 Pro Mac Mini, even though the benchmarks place the Studio behind the newer computers. The difference comes down to the beefy M1 Max. The Max designation signals the chip has additional CPU cores, video decoding pipelines and Thunderbolt controllers. The $1,999 Studio also ships with 32GB of RAM, wherein it’s an additional $199 surcharge in the Mac Mini. The Mac Studio has a front-facing SD card slot, which I’d love to have on the Mac Mini. Apple is keen to point out that the Mac Mini can play video games. But this isn’t a gaming computer. For the Mac Mini to perform well as a gaming computer, the games must use Metal, which means it’s coded directly for Mac OS. Unfortunately, there are very few games on the market in this format. Apple provided me with a copy of Resident Evil Village, and the graphics are the best I’ve ever seen on a Mac. They look great, and the game is smooth and responsive, but I highly doubt anyone is shopping for a Mac Mini with the primary purpose of playing games. Gaming has never been a Mac selling point. Unfortunately, the M2 doesn’t change that, though it’s lovely to see Apple’s strides in this area. The M2 chip brings the Mac Mini into a new world of performance. The benchmarks show a computer capable of keeping up with the fastest computers Apple has ever made — and now the performance is available at relatively low prices. But do you need the M2 Pro? That’s my lingering question. The M1 chips can handle most daily tasks, and the M2 is built from the same secret sauce. So would I find the M2 Pro a must-have upgrade if it was my money? I don’t think so. I doubt most users would see a difference between an M2 and M2 Pro outside of resource-heavy media editing software. The standard M2 is suited ideally for browsing the internet and using Apple’s built-in apps. And the standard M2 would still be an impressive upgrade over existing systems. The $599 M2 Mac Mini, even with its limited local storage, seems like a killer deal. With the M2 and M2 Pro, the Mac Mini sits among the most powerful computers Apple offers at any price point. And let’s remember one of the Mac Mini’s main selling points: it’s mini. The Mac Min is a tiny package that offers a lot of flexibility. Bundle it with one of Apple’s Studio Displays for a great iMac alternative, or use it with an inexpensive monitor for a low-cost workstation. As always, the Mac Mini is a value proposition, and it’s never looked better than it does now with the M2 and M2 Pro.
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Climate tech roundup: Food waste, wastewater and the UK’s troubled battery industry
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 22 |
Welcome back, climate tech readers! Like , we’ve got a full slate once more, from food waste to wastewater and more. Let’s dive in. Mill Industries After for $3.2 billion, Matt Rogers is no stranger to scaling fast. But unlike last time, Rogers isn’t interested in selling so quickly. “This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey,” he told TechCrunch. Rogers is on a quest to end food waste, which accounts for 6% to 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and his tool to accomplish that is the humble kitchen trash can. Mill Industries’ bin is sleek and tech enabled, dehydrating and grinding food until it resembles dried coffee grounds. Then, when it’s full, it automatically requests a box to mail the dried food scraps to one of Mill’s facilities, where it’s turned into chicken feed. How does it get there? That part . Guillermo Legaria Schweizer/Getty Images Industrial facilities from semiconductor plants to automotive factories use surprising amounts of water. What comes out the other end can be challenging to treat and even more challenging to reuse. Which is why Membrion has developed a ceramic membrane that can filter out heavy metals like lead, arsenic and lithium. The startup is that it hopes will bring in another $3 million. Britishvolt was always a bit of a long shot, but the battery manufacturing startup appears to have missed its target completely. This week, it announced it was declaring bankruptcy, having made little headway on its planned $4.7 billion gigafactory. The company’s fall echoes what happened here in the U.S. just over a decade ago, when A123 Systems stumbled and entered bankruptcy itself. But the British version of the story may not have a happy ending. With A123, the U.S. had time to cover. With global battery supply chains solidifying, . NASA/JPL-Caltech Space programs pride themselves on developing far-out technologies that end up proving their worth here on Earth. Apollo helped catapult computing, and the Space Shuttle did wonders for avionics and materials science. Now, it’s Mars rover Perseverance’s turn. The MOXIE experiment was built to prove that carbon dioxide can be turned into oxygen on Mars. Chris Graves, who worked on the instrument, thought it could help make use of carbon dioxide on Earth, so he started Noon Energy. The company’s carbon-oxygen battery promises to store electricity for long periods of time at fairly low cost. The startup announced a this week. Getty Images Heat pumps and home energy retrofits have been getting a lot of attention as a result of incentives contained within the Inflation Reduction Act. That makes it a good time to be Sealed. The company predicts how much energy a retrofit will save and converts the up-front installation costs, billing homeowners based on the savings. For a company that depends so heavily on data, Sealed’s acquisition of Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense . Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. Sealed plans on offering, though not requiring, InfiSense’s sensors to customers to monitor both energy use and indoor air quality.
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Britishvolt’s bankruptcy is the death knell for the UK’s battery industry
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 19 |
manufacturer startup, announced Tuesday that it was , dealing a punishing blow to the United Kingdom’s automotive sector. The company had been championed by U.K. leaders, who had hoped it would provide a laundry list of benefits: good paying jobs, advanced manufacturing know-how and homegrown battery packs to support the domestic automotive industry. But Britishvolt was beset with delays, and it never came close to its goal of opening a factory that could crank out 38 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries every year. In some ways, Britishvolt’s story echoes that of A123 Systems, the U.S. startup that went bust over a decade ago. The upstart battery company pitched a grand vision for bringing large-scale, cutting-edge manufacturing on shore. Politicians latched onto the idea, supporting a company that could provide jobs in a politically advantageous region. They piled on praise and promised lavish subsidies if the company could deliver. But the startup put the cart before the horse, beginning work long before firm demand materialized. A123 went bankrupt in 2012, and while its collapse was tragic, it didn’t kill the U.S. battery sector. The same might not be true of Britishvolt.
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These 5 companies bootstrapped their way to big businesses while VCs came knocking
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Mary Ann Azevedo
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
as a surprise to some, but not every startup is clamoring to raise venture capital. The reasons some founders shun the process of raising institutional funding vary based on individual circumstances. There are founders who don’t like the idea of giving up equity. Others don’t want to give up control of their operations and/or strategy. And there are many who want to hold on to both equity control. Then there are those for whom raising venture capital is simply not as accessible, such as founders in emerging markets like Latin America. There is no right or wrong way to grow a company. While some companies may stay bootstrapped forever, others decide after years of being in operation that maybe raising outside capital is not such a bad idea after all — especially if they are experiencing rapid growth. Below are the stories of startups that were bootstrapped for years before going the M&A or venture route, as well as one that remains bootstrapped by choice:
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Noon Energy brings Mars tech down to Earth with carbon-oxygen battery system
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
story usually goes something like this: Start an earthbound company, make lots of money, launch a rocket company to go to Mars. If that’s the stereotypical narrative, then Chris Graves has it all backward. Graves started with the Red Planet, helping to develop a key instrument for that’s currently roaming the Jezero crater. That instrument inspired him to invent a novel battery technology that today forms the foundation of his startup, . On Mars, the is intended to test the viability of making rocket-ready oxygen on Mars to enable return trips to Earth, saving mass on the outbound leg of the trip. The device sucks in carbon dioxide and strips off an oxygen atom, which it stores on board. The remaining carbon monoxide is exhausted into the thin Martian atmosphere. Here on Earth, Noon’s carbon-oxygen battery is targeted at larger-scale applications to help bridge intermittencies that naturally occur with wind and solar. It runs a modified version of the same chemical reaction as MOXIE, though the goal is to store electricity rather than produce oxygen.
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Sealed buys sensor startup InfiSense to fuel energy-saving services
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Harri Weber
| 2,023 | 1 | 13 |
Sealed built a business around predicting energy use and getting homeowners to ditch fossil fuels. So, naturally, the company’s first acquisition is a startup that tracks energy on a granular level. Sealed did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said in a that scooping up Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense would help it “cut home energy waste.” Headquartered in Manhattan, Sealed finances and oversees electrification upgrades, such as replacing oil or gas heaters with electric heat pumps and insulation. Ridding homes of fossil fuels can lower energy bills, and . You may have seen this topic in the news recently, because are now the latest flashpoint in a . To that point, InfiSense’s sensors and software monitor air quality in addition to energy use in buildings, and Sealed plans to share this sort of air-quality data with customers down the line. Sealed is unique in covering installation and weatherization costs upfront. Instead, it charges a fixed fee based on the energy its predict homeowners will save over time. If Sealed underestimates a homes’ energy use, it eats the cost — hence the need to hone those predictions. The “lifeblood of our company is our ability to predict people’s energy usage over time, and that relies on great access to data,” co-founder and CEO Lauren Salz said in a call with TechCrunch.
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Germany is looking into PayPal’s terms for merchants
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Veteran tech giant PayPal is facing an antitrust investigation in Germany — where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has it’s looking into its rules on surcharges. The regulator is concerned that restrictions PayPal imposes on merchants could be harming competitors and inflating costs for consumers by restricting price competition. Clauses in PayPal’s terms the FCO said it’s examining include traders not being allowed to offer their goods and services at lower prices if customers choose a cheaper payment method than PayPal; and sellers not being allowed to express any preference for payment methods other than PayPal, or to make an alternative payment tech more convenient for customers. “The fees to be paid by sellers for using a payment service vary considerably depending on the payment method. Retailers usually pass these fees on to the product prices, so that consumers ultimately bear the costs of the payment services, even if these – unlike shipping costs, for example – are usually not reported separately to consumers,” the FCO explained in a [the original is in German; this is a machine translation of that text]. “According to market studies, PayPal is not only the leading provider of online payments in Germany but also one of the most expensive online payment services. According to PayPal’s price list, PayPal’s standard fee in Germany is currently 2.49 – 2.99 percent of the payment amount plus 34-39 cents per payment,” it added. Commenting in a statement Andreas Mundt, president of the FCO, said: “These clauses could restrict competition and constitute a violation of the prohibition on abuse. We will now examine what market power PayPal has and to what extent online retailers are dependent on offering PayPal as a payment method. If merchants are prevented from taking into account the different costs of the various payment methods with corresponding surcharges or discounts, other and new payment methods can hold their own less well in the price and quality competition or not even come onto the market. Payment services with market power could thus gain further leeway for their own pricing. The victims would then be the consumers in particular, who ultimately pay these higher costs indirectly through the product prices.” While German antitrust activity has been garnering wider attention in recent years, after the country updated its competition rules at the startup of 2021 — arming the FCO with greater powers to proactively address the market power of digital giants — the proceeding against PayPal is not one of those special abuse control cases. A spokesperson for the FCO confirmed in this case it’s applying ‘classic’ competition rules — which means the regulator will first need to determine whether has a dominant position for payments before it can assess whether or not there has been any breach. So the proceeding may take some time to run its course. In a separate antitrust action in Europe — also concerning digital payments — the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets forced iOS maker Apple to allow dating apps operating in the market to use non-Apple-based payment technology to process in-app sales. Apple initially sought to challenge the order but after a string of penalty payments and several months of back and forth, it came with a proposal that was accepted by the watchdog . In recent years, the European Union has also been eyeing online payment tech — taking action last year over . Such interventions prefigure bigger and potentially more impactful changes as a major competition reform, called the Digital Markets Act, comes into application across the bloc. This “ex ante” regime will flip the classical antitrust protocol — whereby market power must be assessed and investigation precedes remedy — by applying, up front, a set of fixed rules on platforms designated as competitively significant “gatekeepers”. So as to become more responsive and proactively level the playing field between giants and the smaller competitors that rely on them to reach consumers.
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Wastewater recycler Membrion makes light work of removing heavy metals
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Harri Weber
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
, a venture firm that aims to fund “disruptive water technologies,” is pumping millions into so the Seattle startup can mass-produce its wastewater treatment tech. Membrion claims its ceramic membranes can filter out problematic heavy metals ( the genre, but toxic stuff like lead, arsenic and lithium) for around of evaporative processes. Founder and CEO Greg Newbloom tells TechCrunch that he “wouldn’t recommend drinking the water we purify,” but the executive said the end result “can definitely be reused within an industrial facility,” without having to truck it off-site for treatment. Membrion says its membranes can treat wastewater across a variety of industries, including fossil fuels, semiconductors, automotive and food and beverage production. “When we talk about ‘harsh wastewater,’ we mean wastewater that will literally burn your hand due to the pH and oxidizers present,” explained Newbloom. “These types of wastewaters cannot be treated with existing desalination membrane technology,” he added, so facilities today are stuck with “environmentally damaging alternatives,” such as boiling wastewater and using “single-use materials” to filter out harmful metals and salts. The startup is in the process of raising its Series B amid . Heck, much of the West is , even after that’ve hammered California in recent weeks. Membrion says it’s secured $7 million so far, with a target of $10 million. PureTerra Ventures led the round, while investors such as Safar Partners, GiantLeap Capital and Freeflow also chipped in, per a . “I anticipate that we’ll hit our [fundraising] goal within the next couple of months given the interest we have,” Newbloom told TechCrunch.
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Virgin Orbit mission suffers anomaly in first orbital launch from British soil
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
: Despite successfully reaching second engine cut-off and thus past many of the most difficult parts of launch, the Start Me Up mission has suffered “an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit.” The Cosmic Girl aircraft and crew are fine. Virgin has not detailed the nature of the anomaly but it is clear that the payloads were lost: “The first-time nature of this mission added layers of complexity that our team professionally managed, through; however, in the end a technical failure appears to have prevented us from delivering the final orbit,” . They are investigating the failure. Original story follows: For all the U.K.’s contributions to research and aerospace, one thing it has never had is an actual orbital launch from its soil. That could change today with a mission , hoping to make history — and you can watch it right . The mission, called “Start Me Up” (and we may guess that Virgin’s Richard Branson got The Rolling Stones’ permission over breakfast), will take off at 10:16 p.m. local time (2:16 PST) from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay. It’s in Virgin Orbit’s “horizontal” launch style, meaning the rocket and payload will be strapped to the bottom of the modified 747 Cosmic Girl, which will take it up out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and give it a running start at reaching escape velocity. From there the rocket will accelerate and hopefully reach the target orbit. Although its presence in the space industry is considerable in other ways, the closest the Brits have come to this orbital achievement was in 1971, when a British satellite aboard a British rocket took off from … Australia — it’s the Commonwealth, at least. They’re so excited they practically gave this mission its own coat of arms — rocket rampant upon a field orbital: Virgin Orbit The rest of the heraldry: The diamond shape of the emblem represents the “crown jewel,” the birthplace of Virgin in the United Kingdom. The number 1 indicates the first launch from the U.K. and the laurel leaves are Virgin Orbit’s good luck symbol. The amber borders are Spaceport Cornwall’s yellow color and red and black are Virgin Orbit brand colors. The United States flag represents Virgin Orbit’s country of origin and the United Kingdom flag marks the launch country. Quite! On board the rocket are seven payloads, making this a first in a few other ways, too: You can find more details — launch attitudes and altitudes, details about the spaceport, etc — . And of course you can watch as well below: “Like the great Sir Mick sang, we believe that once we start this up, it will never stop.”
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Climate tech roundup: From solar to CES, this week had something for everyone
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
Hello, climate tech readers! Even without a milestone fusion announcement this week, plenty happened in the climate tech world that’s worth catching up on. From massive solar investments to plant-based steaks and small, modular batteries to back up your home, there’s something for everyone. Let’s dive in. Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg / Getty Images Last year was chock full of battery manufacturers and automakers announcing one gigafactory after another. If this week’s announcement is anything to go by, 2023 might be the year the U.S. solar industry ramps up in a serious way. On Wednesday, Hanwha Qcells, a major Korean manufacturer, announced that it would spend $2.5 billion in Georgia to expand an existing factory and build an entirely new campus that would handle nearly everything in the solar panel supply chain, from silicon ingots to finished panels. The move was spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers investment and production tax credits that should help cover about half the cost of a finished panel, helping to erase some of China’s cost advantage. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has attempted to bolster homegrown solar. But unlike a decade ago, when dozens of companies went bust because of slack demand, cheap Chinese panels and the Great Recession, . Harri Weber for TechCrunch TechCrunch’s Harri Weber made the trek to CES this year, and she saw plenty of climate tech at the massive trade show, which has expanded well beyond VR headsets and home automation (though , too.) From smart hoses and sprinklers to minimize water use to home energy systems, there was plenty to be optimistic about — though there was still some AstroTurf, too, both on the show floor and in what was being hawked in the booths. : Project Eaden Plant-based meat has had a rough few months, with industry leaders getting hammered in the markets. But on the sector. this week, adding €2.1 million in funding to an existing seed round. The Berlin-based startup uses plant-based protein fibers to spin cuts of alternative meat that have a texture that’s much closer to the real thing. Project Eaden has just over €10 million in funding to refine its technology, and it’s planning on future rounds to build a production-scale plant. Daniele Carotenuto Photography / Getty Images It’s no secret that gas stoves are terrible for your health — asthma rates in households that have gas stoves are significantly higher than those without. They’re also . Even though their emissions footprint is small, they let aging gas utilities keep their feet in the door, making it easier for homeowners to keep their fossil fuel systems running long after they should. But why are we talking about gas stoves this week? U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Rich Trumka Jr. made a comment about how they’re a “hidden hazard” and that “any option is on the table” if the industry couldn’t figure out how to clean up its act. Well, that brought the wolves out. Right-wing politicians latched onto Trumka’s statement, hoping to create a new flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars. That might backfire, though, as start looking into the matter themselves. John Deere The right-to-repair movement got a shot in the arm this week when with the American Farm Bureau Federation that would grant access to tools and repair information needed by farmers and other operators to fix the company’s increasingly complex equipment without going through the manufacturer. For farmers and independent repair shops, it’s not a perfect deal, however, because Deere said it would still withhold “trade secrets, proprietary or confidential information.” But given that Deere has long pushed back against right-to-repair requests, this is likely welcome news for farmers, operators and independent shops. And it’ll likely help keep well-functioning equipment in the fields longer. It’s happening: Batteries are taking over. I’ve long anticipated that the of R&D and manufacturing capacity wrought by the shift to electric vehicles would spill over to transform myriad . If this year’s CES is anything to go by, we’ve reached an inflection point. TechCrunch’s Haje Jan Kamps was of battery-based home power solutions at the show this year. Many were stackable. One could be wheeled around your house like a 100-pound wagon. Another carried like a milk crate. And yet another ties into a whole-home system that includes a solar inverter, smart circuit panel, EV chargers and more. If you don’t have a battery in your home yet, you might in the next five years if this CES was anything to go by.
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Thoma Bravo agrees to acquire digital forensics firm Magnet Forensics for over $1B
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
Thoma Bravo, the private equity and growth capital firm, today that it would spend $1.8 billion CAD (~$1.34 billion) to acquire Magnet Forensics, a Waterloo-based company making software used by defense forces and businesses to investigate cybersecurity threats. Magnet Forensics will be purchased by a newly created corporation controlled by Thoma Bravo, Morpheus Purchaser Inc., which will pay Magnet Forensics shareholders a 15% premium over Thursday’s closing price on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Post-buy, Morpheus will be merged with mobile device forensics outfit Grayshift, which Thoma Bravo acquired majority control of last July. The transaction is expected to close by Q2 2023, subject to shareholder and other customary approvals. “We look forward to bringing together the complementary capabilities of Magnet and Grayshift to create a leader in the digital forensics and cyber security space,” Thoma Bravo partner Hudson Smith said in a press release. “Digital evidence is an increasingly critical aspect of investigations and the combined company will be well-positioned to further market expansion, accelerate innovation and provide even greater solutions to its customers.” Launched in 2010, Magnet Forensics develops digital investigation software that acquires, analyzes, reports on and manages evidence from computers, mobile devices, Internet of Things devices and cloud services. The company was founded by Jad Saliba, a Waterloo regional police constable who worked in the police force’s high-tech crimes unit. After incubating Magnet Forensics’ software at the unit, Saliba decided to strike out on his own and sell the tech for a licensing fee, partnering with Jim Balsillie and Adam Belsher, then BlackBerry executives. Before going public, Magnet Forensics attracted an investment from In-Q-Tel, the nonprofit venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community. The company claims that its software is used by more than 4,000 public and private sector customers — e.g. police forces, intelligence agencies, tax officials, border guards and militaries — in over 100 countries, helping investigators protect assets and guard national security. Business was booming prior to the acquisition (granted, Thoma Bravo first submitted a proposal early last October). During its Q3 2022 earnings call, Magnet Forensics reported that annual recurring revenue increased 50% year-over-year to reach $80.9 million while EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — climbed 25% to $5.9 million. Magnet benefited from the expanding market for digital forensics, which is expected to grow from $5.8 billion in 2022 to $10.9 billion in 2028, according to a recent Imarc . Adam Belsher, who serves as Grayshift’s CEO, says that the combination of Grayshift’s mobile access and extraction capabilities and Magnet’s digital investigation suite will position the merged firms strongly — allowing customers to better extract, process, examine, collaborate on and manage digital forensic evidence. “We believe the combination of Magnet and Grayshift will unlock tremendous value for our customers by further integrating and expanding our product suite which will result in more seamless workflows in the recovery and analysis of critical digital evidence to investigations and ultimately contribute to our shared mission of the pursuit of justice,” Belsher said in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with Thoma Bravo and Grayshift to build upon our digital investigation suite to further innovate and continue to serve a growing number of organizations and use cases.” For Thoma Bravo, which now has an estimated more than $114 billion in assets under management, Magnet Forensics is the latest in a series of high-profile software venture purchases. In 2022, the firm spent billions of dollars buying cybersecurity startups Ping Identity, Sailpoint, ForgeRock, Bottomline Technologies and Coupa Software.
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HubSpot co-founder Shah backs Peerlist for a new take on professional networking
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Jagmeet Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
With across more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is a household name in the world of professional networking. But as the platform grew, it shifted some focus to becoming of and . Now a young startup wants to disrupt that. aims to fill this gap by providing a space for professionals to find and connect with one another based on their expertise and qualifications. It’s creating a one-stop destination for professionals to showcase their work experiences, education and connect with like-minded individuals in their domain. Users on the platform can integrate work-attribution sites such as GitHub, Dribbble, Substack and Gumroad. They also can get their work experience and education to add an additional layer of authenticity. The platform uses an individual’s work email to verify their work experience. For verifying educational credentials, users upload their student badge or ID or use their institute’s assigned email ID to get their profiles verified. The startup has plans to verify users’ past work experiences and education by expanding its verification feature over time. “Because many people have their work distributed on different platforms, and developers and designers and tech professionals often write articles on Substrack and share codes on GitHub, we wanted to allow them to build a profile where they can showcase all their work,” said Akash Bhadange, co-founder and CEO of Peerlist, in an interview. Profiles with verified details are available for public viewing in resume and work portfolio formats. Users need to sign up if they want to message a user or get their contact information. Bhadange, a former product and UX designer, founded Peerlist in August 2021 with his wife, Yogini Bende. Bende, who has experience as a front-end developer, oversees the startup’s engineering-related tasks. Bhadange asserted that Peerlist grew its user base to more than 20,000 people — of which 60% are verified — without any marketing spends. The startup plans to spend some of its fresh funding on marketing. It also aims to expand its engineering team from the existing five-people team for product development — alongside a dedicated marketing and sales team. Peerlist hopes to amass more than a million users by the end of the year, said Bhadange. At present, Peerlist does not have a model to generate revenues. The platform, though, does want to monetize the verified user base by charging companies looking to hire professionals on the basis of their work experience and education. As it scales, Peerlist has attracted some investment from many industry insiders. The Delaware-registered startup, with an office in Pune, said it has raised $1.1 million in a seed funding round led by HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah. Other participating investors include Plotch.ai founder and chief executive Manoj Gupta, Moonfrog co-founder and CTO Kumar Puspesh, Dukaan co-founder and CEO Suumit Shah and entrepreneur and angel investor Mohan Rao. The startup plans to deploy the funds to add scores of additional features. One will allow companies to showcase their branding and tech stack on the platform. According to Bhadange, professionals using those profiles will be able to find more details about a firm’s founders and other team members and also see their contributions, such as in writing on blogs or code contributions displayed on GitHub. This will give the professionals a deeper understanding of the company’s culture and technical capabilities and help them make more informed decisions about job opportunities, he said. Additionally, Peerlist has plans to help angel investors get their investment history in startups verified on the platform, making it easier for professionals to connect with and secure funding from these investors. Bhadange said that this particular development was currently at an ideation stage but had the potential to add tremendous value. “The world is ready for some innovation when it comes to online professional networks,” said HubSpot’s Shah, in a statement. “Peerlist is taking on this challenge with a product built for modern times that feels like a breath of fresh air. I invested because this is the need of the hour for this industry, and timing is perfect for such disruption.” Before the all-equity seed funding, Peerlist had raised a small angel funding of $25,000 from ModernLoop engineer head Vishwesh Jirgale and Postman product engineering head Akshay Deo in October 2021.
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Founder and NFX VC James Currier vets startup ideas at TC Early Stage
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Lauren Simonds
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
You have a great idea for a startup, and you’re working hard to build, launch and scale. But, and stay with us here, is your idea truly good? According to James Currier — founding partner of NFX, a VC firm by and for entrepreneurs — good ideas have patterns, and 90% of the ideas he sees at the pre-seed/seed stage will not lead to large exits. Currier — a five-time founder with significant exits across multiple sectors — is arguably the most well-equipped investor-operator to help answer this vital question. It’s why we’re excited to have him join us onstage at on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts. In a session called “How to Make Sure Your Startup Idea Is Actually Good,” Currier will share different tactics, like how to: The session reserves plenty of time for Q&A, so bring your questions. Currier is passionate about helping entrepreneurs and new founders assess their companies early on to make sure they’re tackling the right problem and providing the right solution. Want to dig deeper into this topic? During the show, Currier will also host a roundtable — a focused, small-group discussion — that gives founders even more time to ask questions. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft and Patreon, James Currier has led four VC-backed companies (Tickle, acquired by Monster; WonderHill, acquired by Kabam; IronPearl, acquired by PayPal; and Jiff (acquired by Castlight). Currier’s an early pioneer of some of the most-used tactics in the tech startup world, including user-generated models, viral marketing, A/B testing and crowdsourcing. In 2015, he co-founded NFX, a $475 million early-stage venture firm focused on network-effect businesses. Currier speaks regularly at numerous industry conferences. He’s also been featured in Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch and Silicon Valley Business Journal. You can read his analysis of network effects and growth at . sessions give attendees plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. now and save $200.
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McKinsey, eyeing the MLOps space, buys Tel Aviv–based Iguazio
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
The same day Microsoft billions in OpenAI, McKinsey enterprise-focused AI firm Iguazio for a relative steal. The consulting giant paid around $50 million for Iguazio, a Tel Aviv–based company offering an MLOps platform for large-scale businesses — “MLOps” refers to a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production. In a press release, McKinsey says it plans to use the startup’s tech and team of 70 data scientists to bolster its QuantumBlack platform, McKinsey’s data analytics–focused group, with “industry-specific” AI solutions. “We analyzed more than a 1,000 AI companies worldwide and identified Iguazio as the best fit to significantly accelerate our AI offering — from the initial concept to production, in a simplified, scalable and automated manner,” McKinsey senior partner Ben Ellencweig said in a statement. Over time, he added, the Iguazio and QuantumBlack teams will be fully integrated and work from a single product roadmap, combining the best of both worlds (with any luck). “Iguazio has a state-of-the-art technology that has generated significant market traction with some of our marquee clients and earned them top-industry recognition,” Ellencweig continued. Iguazio, whose customers included Payoneer, was co-founded in 2014 by Asaf Somekh, Orit Nissan-Messing, Yaron Haviv and Yaron Segev. The four previously served in senior roles at XtremIO (acquired by EMC), XIV (acquired by IBM), Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia) and Radvision (acquired by Avaya). Iguazio’s product suite collects data and preps it online or offline, accelerating and automating AI model training for deployment via APIs. Beyond this, Iguazio attempts to streamline machine learning pipeline steps like scaling, tuning and continuous delivery with features such as rolling upgrades, A/B testing, logging and monitoring. Prior to the acquisition, Iguazio managed to raise $72 million in venture capital from investors, including INCapital Ventures, Pitango VC, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and Magma Venture Partners, to CrunchBase data. TechCrunch reported that the startup was valued at $100 million. MLOps might not be as sexy as, say, ChatGPT. But demand is growing. By one , the market for MLOps could reach $4 billion by 2025. Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of startups going after the space, such as , which raised $50 million in November 2021. Other vendors with VC backing include , , , , and Taiwan-based . But for McKinsey, the price — and timing — was apparently right, where Iguazio is concerned. The firm notes that Iguazio is its first acquisition in Israel and that the newly extended team will serve as the foundation for a new QuantumBlack location that McKinsey expects to grow in the coming years. “Attracting exceptional tech talent and expanding our tech ecosystem will enable us to welcome colleagues from around the globe to Tel Aviv’s exciting tech scene,” McKinsey partner Matt Fitzpatrick said in a blog post. Over the past year, McKinsey has made several acquisitions in the data analytics space, including Caserta, a firm specializing in data architecture and engineering. SCM Connections, another recent addition to the consultancy’s portfolio, offers services for digital transformation, including building tech stack infrastructure.
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Babylist makes an even bigger bet on baby products with Expectful acquisition
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Natasha Mascarenhas
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
The overlap, however, is in more than the mission. Both of the company’s CEOs invested in each other’s last venture capital round; Babylist’s CEO and founder wrote a check into Expectful’s ; and Expectful CEO invested in Babylist’s last round, While the two founders didn’t publicly disclose purchase price, both certainly have venture capitalists to answer to. Babylist has raised $50 million in known funding from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Halogen Ventures, 500 Global, Next Play Capital and Marcy Venture Partners. Expectful has raised over $4.2 million in funding from investors including Harlem Capital. Indicator Ventures, Sequoia Scout Fund, Break Trail Ventures and Chinagona Ventures. The long-term vision for the newly combined company is for Babylist to change its relationship with its audience and become a larger, health and wellness media property, Gordon said. While Expectful will stay as a standalone website, Gordon hinted that much of its content will eventually be free to access — different from its currently advertised subscriber-oriented business model. “Having a baby is so wonderful — it’s also overwhelming and isolating,” Gordon said. “When you talk to people going through this — the stuff is one thing, but actually their physical and their mental and emotional health are like much more significant.” With Expectful, she said, the company can talk to its audience in a way that doesn’t make sense for the tech-powered registry side of the business. Babylist’s eye for expansion may be partially attributed to its revenue growth; the company grossed over $240 million in revenue in 2021, although it did not share 2022 revenue on the record. Over eight million people made purchases from Babylist this past year, the company said. Walton She first joined as an adviser to Expectful, seeing it as an opportunity to be entrepreneurial despite delivering her son just weeks prior in a stressful pregnancy. Soon, Expectful’s then-CEO and founder Mark Krassner saw her as a key fit to lead the business, as it pivoted its product strategy to grow beyond recorded meditations. , Walton described Expectful’s plan to mimic Peloton’s playbook of matching premium content with community. Now, the entrepreneur is staying on at Babylist as a board adviser. She says she always saw the company’s exit looking like a merger with a partner in the digital health space. “This acquisition allows us to have a much bigger impact than if we were to stay focused on revenue even,” Walton said. “Women need our products and they need our solution now, we don’t have time to wait to go that route of let’s just keep on growing revenue and have an IPO — it was more like, let’s prioritize impact, and I don’t think enough startups are thinking” that way.
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All that VC dry powder is damper than you think
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Natasha Mascarenhas
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Welcome back to , the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Natasha is back in the Bay, after five weeks away, so some could say, San Francisco is back. As always, you can support me by following me on and The show also tweets from , so follow us there!
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Meta expands its partnership with the NBA to offer 52 games in VR
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Aisha Malik
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Meta is expanding its partnership with the NBA and WNBA to offer more than 50 live VR games on Meta Quest, the company on Monday. Meta Quest is the official headset of the NBA, as Facebook with the league back in 2020. The company will deliver a package of 52 live NBA games, including five immersive 180-degree monoscopic VR games in 2880 on Xtadium and on Meta Horizon Worlds. Meta will also offer a selection of WNBA, NBA G League and NBA 2K League games over the course of the season. In Meta Horizon Worlds, you’ll also be able to access game highlights, recaps and archival content. Users can visit the dedicated starting today to watch NBA content with friends, compete in interactive minigames and support their favorite teams. Meta says that in the future, fans will be able to watch even more content in the app with an NBA League Pass subscription. Meta also announced that it’s partnering with the league to launch NBA-licensed apparel in Meta’s Avatar Store in the coming weeks. Users will be able to purchase their favorite NBA or WNBA team apparel for their avatar and showcase it across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, as well as on Meta Quest. “Meta’s immersive VR technology is opening up new opportunities for sports fans to engage and interact with their favorite NBA teams,” said Meta Director of Sports Media and League Partnerships Rob Shaw in a . “Fans will be able to express their fandom by donning their favorite team’s gear on Avatars and enjoy more live NBA games and experience NBA League Pass in a much more social and immersive way.” The games available in VR on Meta Quest in January include Milwaukee Bucks vs. Detroit Pistons on January 23, Denver Nuggets vs. New Orleans Pelicans on January 24, Denver Nuggets vs. Milwaukee Bucks on January 24, Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Oklahoma City Thunder on January 27, Los Angeles Clippers vs. Cleveland Cavaliers on January 29 and Miami Heat vs. Cleveland Cavaliers on January 31.
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US solar manufacturing gets boost with $2.5B Georgia deal
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 11 |
Act has clearly kickstarted investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing. Last year, automakers and battery manufacturers announced that they’d spend to ramp up EV production in the U.S. Now it’s solar’s turn. Today, Korean solar manufacturer Hanwha Qcells that it’ll spend $2.5 billion to build a new plant in Georgia and expand an existing one. The new plant will crank out 3.3 gigawatts of solar panels annually. That’s enough to supply nearly a fifth of current U.S. demand. Expansion at the other plant will add another 2 gigawatts of capacity. When completed, Qcells’ Georgia facilities will employ 2,500 people and will be capable of making 8.4 gigawatts of solar panels, cementing the Peach State’s status as a leader in solar manufacturing. Qcells’ new campus won’t just be a final assembly plant, either. It will handle just about everything, from turning polysilicon into ingots, slicing ingots into wafters, turning wafers into cells and packing cells into panels. It’s a level of vertical integration that is seldom seen in the U.S.
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John Deere will let farmers repair their own equipment
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Brian Heater
| 2,023 | 1 | 10 |
Here in the U.S., John Deere is, in a word, dominant. According to figures from antitrust nonprofit , the corporation controls 53% of the large tractor market in this country and 60% of farm combines. It’s not the only game in town, but it’s a hard one to avoid. That’s precisely why refusal to allow customers to repair its products has been a major concern for farmers. Over the weekend, Deere and Co. joined the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) in cosigning (MOU) designed to open access to tools and repair information. “This is an issue that has been a priority for us for several years and has taken a lot of work to get to this point,” AFBF President Vincent Duvall said. “And as you use equipment, we all know at some point in time, there’s going to be problems with it. And we did have problems with having the opportunity to repair our equipment where we wanted to, or even repair it on the farm.” Deere SVP David Gilmore adds, “This agreement reaffirms the longstanding commitment Deere has made to ensure our customers have the diagnostic tools and information they need to make many repairs to their machines. We look forward to working alongside the American Farm Bureau and our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain and repair their equipment.” Per the MOU: [Deere] shall ensure that any Farmer, including any staff or independent technician assisting a Farmer at a Farmer’s request, and any Independent Repair Facility that provides assistance to Farmers, has electronic access on Fair and Reasonable terms to Manufacturer’s Tools, Specialty Tools, Software and Documentation. The deal follows mounting pressure from customers to open repairability, amid complaint that — among other things — systems appear to break down at a faster rate. Deere had previously required farmers to visit authorized dealers for repair. There are still some caveats here. Among them, Deere will not “divulge trade secrets, proprietary or confidential information” or “allow owners or Independent Repair Facilities to override safety features or emissions controls or to adjust Agricultural Equipment power levels.” The news is part of a mounting push to allow consumers to repair their own property. Apple, Samsung and Google have all launched their own at-home phone repair programs, as states like New York and Massachusetts have passed their own right to repair laws. A federal version is believed to be in the offing, as well. However, it seems likely that repairs will become more difficult for consumers, as Deere leans into robotics for future systems.
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Wordle clone Quordle acquired by Merriam-Webster
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Paul Sawers
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
, the Encyclopædia Britannica subsidiary best known , has acquired a popular Wordle clone called . Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Little fanfare has been made around the acquisition, but the Quordle website now redirects to its own space on the Merriam-Webster website, while Quordle creator Freddie Meyer quietly issued this statement at the top of the : I’m delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster! I can’t think of a better home for this game. Lots of new features and fun to come, so stay tuned! Quordle is one of a number of knock-offs that emerged in the wake of Wordle’s rise to world fame. Wordle, for the uninitiated, is a simple web-based game that gives users six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with color-coded clues served as feedback if they get any of the letters correct. The New York Times for a seven-figure sum, and in the intervening months the game has apparently to the NYT’s Games offering. The media giant later into its crossword app, and even . It’s also worth noting that last summer, if we needed any further evidence of Wordle’s long-tail cultural and technological impact. Quordle, for its part, builds on the basic Wordle concept, except there are four five-letter words to guess at once, with just nine tries. Each guess must be a genuine word, and each guess applies to each of the four words — the tiles change color to tell the user which guesses are correct, and whether a letter exists in that word but in a different position. Quordle After arriving on the scene , just one month after the NYT bought Wordle, Quordle had reportedly already conjured up 1 million players of launch. Similar to Wordle, Quordle wasn’t much more than a passion project, with creator Meyer saying that he had “no plans to monetise Quordle,” according to reports at the time. That said, the developers did include some ads on the page as an alternative to soliciting donations to cover costs. Fast-forward to today, and Quordle is now in the hands of Merriam-Webster, a brand that has evolved beyond its printed-dictionary foundations that started nearly two centuries ago to include its first website back in 1996, followed by numerous tangential language-focused digital services such as . Among its online properties is an NYT-style portal, which is where Quordle will now reside. “We’re thrilled to announce that Merriam-Webster has acquired Quordle, the hugely popular word game, and a favorite of Merriam-Webster editors,” Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “It will make a great addition to our lineup of games and quizzes, and we look forward to playing along with the millions of Quordle fans every day.”
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Alphabet makes cuts, Twitter bans third-party clients, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings steps down
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Kyle Wiggers
| 2,023 | 1 | 21 |
Howdy, folks! Happy Friday. While our fearless Week in Review leader Greg enjoys parental leave, I’m filling in, curating the latest on the tech news front. It was a roller coaster of a week once again as economic headwinds took a brutal, demoralizing toll, and as chaos reigned at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Somewhere in the midst of all that, Boston Dynamics demoed an improved bipedal robot, Wikipedia launched a redesign and major universities banned TikTok from their campus networks. Yeah — a lot happened. Before we get down to business, a friendly reminder that is on April 20 in Boston. It’s a one-day summit for founders who are in the first stages of growing their companies, who have built a product but don’t know how to monetize, and who have an idea but aren’t sure where to find the resources to turn it into a viable business. At Early Stage, experts will share advice on protecting intellectual property, structuring cap tables, developing target customer personas and more. You won’t want to miss it. Alphabet, the parent holding company of Google, announced on Friday that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce, or roughly 12,000 roles, reports. In an published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to that of other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than what it’s up against today. After prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party Twitter clients altogether. The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s 5,000-some-word was updated with a clause prohibiting “use or access [to] the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications,” a decision that seems unlikely to foster much goodwill at a time when Twitter faces on a of . Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings announced Thursday that he would step down after more than two decades at the company, writes. While news of his departure comes as a shock, Hastings noted in the that Netflix has planned its next era of leadership “for many years.” Netflix will maintain its co-CEO structure in Hastings’ absence, promoting COO Greg Peters to the tandem role with Ted Sarandos. Public universities across a widening swath of U.S. states have banned TikTok in recent months, and two of the country’s largest colleges followed suit earlier this week. As reports, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University took action against the social app, which is owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance — prohibiting campus network and device users from accessing TikTok. The was inspired by executive orders issued by a number of state governors. This week, Wikipedia, a resource used by billions every month, got its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade, writes. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, launched an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use, with additions like improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to commonly used links, and more. Just a few days after announcing a significant round of , Amazon said that , its donation program that redirects 0.5% of the cost of all eligible products toward charities. Amazon claimed that the program had “not grown to create the impact that [it] had originally hoped,” but as notes, since 2013, Amazon through AmazonSmile. Ending it is seems more likely a move to cut costs. If you were one of the nearly 77 million people affected by last year’s T-Mobile breach, you may have a few bucks coming your way. Devin reports that the company will pay $350 million to be split up by customers and lawyers, plus $150 million “for data security and related technology.” The breach apparently occurred sometime early last year, after which collections of T-Mobile customer data were put up for sale on various criminal forums. TechCrunch’s intrepid writes about a demo video this week showing Hyundai-backed Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas, equipped with gripper hands that can pick up and drop off anything the robot can grab independently. The claw-like gripper consists of one fixed finger and one moving finger; Boston Dynamics says that the grippers were designed for heavy-lifting tasks, like Atlas holding a keg over its head during a Super Bowl commercial. Nifty. After weeks of backlash and , Wizards of the Coast — the Hasbro-owned publisher of Dungeons & Dragons — it will now license Dungeons & Dragons’ core mechanics under the license. This gives the community “a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license” to publish and sell works based on Dungeons & Dragons — a massive change of heart for the gaming giant, which was considering implementing a new license that would certain Dungeons & Dragons content creators to start paying a 25% royalty. Whether it’s to pass the time while commuting or to liven up the morning jog, TechCrunch likely has a podcast to suit your fancy. On startup-focused this week, , and jumped on the mic to talk through a diverse news week, including deals from Sophia Amoruso’s new fund, Welcome Homes, and a look at compliment-focused social media apps. , meanwhile, featured Mir Hwang, the co-founder and CEO of GigFinesse, who talked about how his struggles to book music gigs as a teenager pushed him to launch the company that connects artists with venues for live shows. TC+, TechCrunch’s premium channel for deep dives, surveys, guest posts and general analysis, was jam-packed with content this week (as always). Here’s some of the most popular posts: writes about Twitter’s alleged that exposed the contact information of millions of users. In an , Twitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that recent Twitter user data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter’s systems. But as she notes, it’s unclear if Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if any user data was exfiltrated. VCs think a majority of unicorns aren’t worth $1 billion anymore. takes a look at the current investment landscape, finding that many of the companies that reached unicorn status last year are in danger of losing it as economic conditions worsen. Women-founded startups raised 1.9% of all VC funds in 2022, a drop from 2021, writes. That percentage is a notable drop from the 2.4% all-women teams raised in 2021. The decline was expected, but stark nonetheless. Aside from 2016, the last time all-women-led startups raised such a low percentage of funds was in 2012, another period of funding decline caused by economic uncertainty and an election.
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India blocks YouTube videos and Twitter posts on BBC Modi documentary
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Manish Singh
| 2,023 | 1 | 21 |
The Indian government has ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down videos and tweets about a BBC documentary that is critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued the directions “for blocking multiple YouTube videos” and “over 50 tweets” linked to the videos of the first episode of the BBC documentary, Kanchan Gupta, an adviser to the ministry, said Saturday. The ministry issued the directions under the IT Rules, 2021 that gives the ministry the authority to take down posts that it deems undermines the sovereignty and integrity of India, and has “potential to adversely impact India’s friendly relations with foreign countries as also public order within the country,” Gupta said. Both YouTube and Twitter complied with the directions, he said. Gupta called the BBC documentary a “hateful propaganda.” Multiple ministries, including MEA, MHA and MIB, examined BBC’s “malicious documentary” and found it “casting aspersions on the authority and credibility of Supreme Court of India, sowing divisions among various Indian communities, and making unsubstantiated allegations,” he wrote in a Twitter thread. The BBC has not broadcasted the documentary in India. 🚨🚨🚨 Here is a copy of the legal request sent by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to Twitter requiring removal of tweets discussing documentary 'India: The Modi Question' — Lumen (@lumendatabase) BBC aired the first episode of the two-part documentary, “India: The Modi Question” on January 17. The series addresses the 2002 communal riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where Modi was the chief minister at the time. Nearly 800 Muslims and more than 250 Hindus died in the riots, according to official figures. The violence erupted after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire. A special investigation team appointed by India’s apex court a decade later said Modi had taken the steps to control the riots. Another petition questioning Modi’s exoneration was dismissed last year. The BBC series says Modi’s governance has been “dogged by persistent allegations about the attitude of his government towards India’s Muslim population,” according to the description on its website. “This series investigates the truth behind these allegations and examines Modi’s backstory to explore other questions about his politics when it comes to India’s largest religious minority.” Arindam Bagchi, the spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry, said this week that the documentary is a “propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative. The bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset, is blatantly visible.” “If anything, this film or documentary is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again. It makes us wonder about the purpose of this exercise and the agenda behind it and frankly we do not wish to dignify such efforts.” BBC said in a statement that the documentary examines the tensions between India’s Hindi majority and Muslim minority and explores the politics of India’s PM Modi in relation to those tensions. “The documentary was rigorously researched according to highest editorial standards. A wide range of voices, witnesses and experts were approached, and we have featured a range of opinions – this includes responses from people in the BJP [India’s ruling party]. We offered the Indian Government a right to reply to the matters raised in the series – it declined to respond,” a BBC spokesperson said. This isn’t the first time a documentary on Modi has stirred debate. Disney-owned Hotstar, India’s largest on-demand video streaming service with more than 300 million users, that was critical of Modi. An uncensored version of that episode aired on YouTube in India.
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The FTC orders HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2M for lying about lead quality and other matters
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has home services marketplace to pay up to $7.2 million for its use of deceptive and misleading tactics in selling home improvement project leads to service providers, including small businesses operating in the gig economy. The fine is the first gig work–related penalty following the FTC’s fall 2022 that it was prepared to crack down on unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practices taking place in the gig economy. Denver-based to form a new public company called “Angi.” However, the FTC’s charge against HomeAdvisor wasn’t issued until . The Commission said that since at least the middle of 2014, HomeAdvisor had made unsubstantiated, false or misleading claims about the leads it sells to service providers, like general contractors and lawn care professionals. Specifically, it claimed that the Angi affiliate had misrepresented the quality and source of leads, and the likelihood that they would result in actual jobs. The Commission found that HomeAdvisor told service providers its leads resulted in home improvement jobs at higher rates than its own data supported and misled service providers about the cost of its one-month subscription to its platform. The company told service providers the first month of the mHelpDesk subscription, which helps with scheduling appointments and processing payments, was free with an annual membership package. But this was not true, the FTC said. Service providers would end up paying $59.99 more than they expected, it noted. (The mHelpDesk program is an optional add-on to the $287.99 annual membership to the HomeAdvisor network). In addition, the FTC found that while HomeAdvisor claims its leads concern consumers who intend to hire a service professional soon, many of them do not. This is in part because HomeAdvisor would resell leads from affiliates who generate leads from online forms that asked consumers about potential home projects they were considering. However, the company would claim the leads came from its own website, which suggested consumers were seeking out HomeAdvisor’s assistance. The FTC’s complaint also said many of the leads didn’t match the types of services the providers offered or were outside their preferred geographic area, despite HomeAdvisor’s claims to the contrary. “Gig economy platforms should not use false claims and phony opportunities to prey on workers and small businesses,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, at the time of the original FTC order. The new administrative order also bars HomeAdvisor from continuing its deceptive practices and sets up two redress funds to provide money to defrauded service providers. The first fund will make payments of up to $30 to service providers impacted by HomeAdvisor’s misrepresentations about its lead quality. Meanwhile, the second fund will make payments of up to $59.99 to service providers who had been told that the first month of their mHelpDesk subscription was free. In total, HomeAdvisor is required to pay up to $7.2 million for redress, the FTC said. (Update: We earlier referenced this penalty as a “fine.” It is not technically a fine, so we’ve updated the wording.) The Commission voted 4-0 to accept the proposed consent agreement. In response to the FTC’s decision, HomeAdvisor shared the following statement: “We’ve been in business for over 20 years and do not and would not deceive anyone, let alone customers. The FTC’s announcement was about a settlement agreement — one that does not admit nor find any wrongdoing. While confident we could win the case, we decided to settle the matter so we could focus our resources and attention on our business, one we have built by putting our customers first. We’ve earned the privilege of becoming trusted partners to hundreds of thousands of local plumbers, roofers, general contractors and electricians—the people who help protect Americans’ greatest asset: our homes.” This gig economy fine follows other warnings issued by the FTC, including ) to not lie to consumers about potential earnings. This one was sent out to , even if they were not under investigation. It also these companies it had previously sued MLMs like Herbalife and AdvoCare for their promotions of high-earning potential even though most participants made little or no money. Herbalife settled with the FTC for $200 million and AdvoCare agreed to pay $150 million. The with as well for using misleading earnings claims to attract drivers to its Flex platform, and sued for false claims over the higher incomes graduates received.
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A hack at ODIN Intelligence exposes a huge trove of police raid files
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Zack Whittaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 21 |
for imminent police raids, confidential police reports with descriptions of alleged crimes and suspects, and a forensic extraction report detailing the contents of a suspect’s phone. These are some of the files in a huge cache of data taken from the internal servers of ODIN Intelligence, a tech company that provides apps and services to police departments, following over the weekend. The group behind the breach said in a message left on ODIN’s website that it hacked the company after its founder and chief executive Erik McCauley dismissed , which discovered the company’s flagship app SweepWizard, used by police to coordinate and plan multiagency raids, was insecure and spilling sensitive data about upcoming police operations to the open web. The hackers also published the company’s Amazon Web Services private keys for accessing its cloud-stored data and claimed to have “shredded” the company’s data and backups but not before exfiltrating gigabytes of data from ODIN’s systems. ODIN develops and provides apps, like SweepWizard, to police departments across the United States. The company also builds technologies that allow authorities to remotely monitor convicted sex offenders. But ODIN also drew criticism last year for offering authorities a facial recognition system for and using degrading language in its marketing. ODIN’s McCauley did not respond to several emails requesting comment prior to publication but confirmed the hack in filed with the California attorney general’s office. The breach not only exposes vast amounts of ODIN’s own internal data but also gigabytes of confidential law enforcement data uploaded by ODIN’s police department customers. The breach raises questions about ODIN’s cybersecurity but also the security and privacy of the thousands of people — including victims of crime and suspects not charged with any offense — whose personal information was exposed. The cache of hacked ODIN data was provided to , a nonprofit transparency collective that indexes leaked datasets in the public interest, such as caches from police departments, government agencies, law firms and militia groups. DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best told TechCrunch that the collective has limited the distribution of to journalists and researchers given the vast amount of personally identifiable data in the ODIN cache. Little is known about the hack or the intruders responsible for the breach. Best told TechCrunch that the source of the breach is a group called “All Cyber-Cops Are Bastards,” a phrase it referenced in the defacement message. TechCrunch reviewed the data, which not only includes the company’s source code and internal database but also thousands of police files. None of the data appears encrypted. A police document, redacted by TechCrunch, with full details of an upcoming raid exposed by the breach. TechCrunch (screenshot) The data included dozens of folders with full tactical plans of upcoming raids, alongside suspect mugshots, their fingerprints and biometric descriptions and other personal information, including intelligence on individuals who might be present at the time of the raid, like children, cohabitants and roommates, some of whom are described as having “no crim[inal] history.” Many of the documents were labeled as “confidential law enforcement only” and “controlled document” not for disclosure outside of the police department. Some of the files were labeled as test documents and used fake officer names like “Superman” and “Captain America.” But ODIN also used real-world identities, like Hollywood actors, who are unlikely to have consented to their names being used. One document titled “Fresno House Search” bore no markings to suggest the document was a test of ODIN’s front-facing systems but stated the raid’s objective was to “find a house to live in.” The leaked cache of ODIN data also contained its system for monitoring sex offenders, which allows police and parole officers to register, supervise and monitor convicted criminals. The cache contained more than a thousand documents relating to convicted sex offenders who are required to register with the state of California, including their names, home addresses (if not incarcerated) and other personal information. The data also contains a large amount of personal information about individuals, including the surveillance techniques that police use to identify or track them. TechCrunch found several screenshots showing people’s faces matched against a facial recognition engine called AFR Engine, a company that provides face-matching technology to police departments. One photo appears to show an officer forcibly holding a person’s head in front of another officer’s phone camera. Other files show police using , known as ANPR, which can identify where a suspect drove in recent days. Another document contained the full contents — including text messages and photos — of a convicted offender’s phone, whose contents were extracted by a forensic extraction tool during a compliance check while the offender was on probation. One folder contained audio recordings of police interactions, some where officers are heard using force. TechCrunch contacted several U.S. police departments whose files were found in the stolen data. None responded to our requests for comment. ODIN’s website, which went offline a short time after it was defaced, remains inaccessible as of Thursday.
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Climate benefits of killing gas stoves aren’t what you think, but the health benefits are
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Tim De Chant
| 2,023 | 1 | 9 |
be on the chopping block soon. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering banning the appliances in an effort to reduce harmful indoor air pollution, according to a by commissioner Rich Trumka Jr. and to Bloomberg. “This is a hidden hazard,” Trumka told the news organization. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” Honestly, it wouldn’t be a moment too soon. Gas stove use is associated with both and , a leading cause of death worldwide. Even when they’re turned off, they , and the natural gas pumped into U.S. homes , including benzene, hexane and toluene. The health benefits of banning gas stoves would be enormous if only because they’re so widespread. Across the U.S., have natural gas stoves. In some states like California and New Jersey, 70% of households use them. That’s a lot of asthma.
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Daily Crunch: Alphabet CEO lays off 12,000 people, says company ‘hired for a different economic reality’
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Christine Hall
| 2,023 | 1 | 20 |
Happy Friday! Join us in wishing a very warm welcome to the team! He’s joining our crack team of cybersecurity reporters, working alongside Zack and Carly. He just published his first article on TC, about . Welcome aboard!! Enjoy your weekend! — and A $32 million seed round for Chris DeWolfe’s newest gaming company may seem like a throwback to frothier times, like … 2021. But that’s , reports . She points out that that’s a lot of moolah in a volatile market, even coming as it does from two separate a16z funds: the firm’s $600 million debut games vehicle and its $4.5 billion crypto fund, both of which were announced last May. Here’s another handful for ya: Image of WildType’s sushi-grade, lab-grown salmon. Arye Elfenbein/WildType There’s a lot of hype around plant-based burgers and nuggets, but alternative seafood products are attracting more attention — and funding — from investors these days. “More than $178 million was pumped into alternative seafood in the first half of 2022, and the market’s value is poised to reach $1.6 billion over the next 10 years,” she reports. To learn more about this maturing space, Christine Hall surveyed four investors to get their thoughts on regulation, the “unique challenges” companies face as they try to reach scale, and how they’re approaching growth and risk: Three more from the TC+ team: Okay, no more layoff talk. We are going to have some fun, because it’s Friday, damn it! Are you still playing Wordle? Or perhaps you switched to its clone Quordle. Well, , reports. If you’ve never tried it, Quordle is similar to the basic Wordle concept, guessing a word in a certain amount of tries, except there are four five-letter words to guess at once, with just nine tries. It might be just the thing to warm you up on a cold winter’s night. Here’s four more for your Friday enjoyment:
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Wikipedia gets its first makeover in over a decade… and it’s fairly subtle
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Sarah Perez
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
Wikipedia, one of the , and a resource every month, is getting its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia project, today the launch of an updated interface aimed at making the site more accessible and easier to use with additions like improved search, a more prominently located tool for switching between languages, an updated header offering access to commonly used links, an updated for Wikipedia articles and other design changes for a better reading experience. The interface has already been launched on hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia in recent weeks, but is now rolling out to English Wikipedia, it said. The changes being introduced are not very dramatic — in fact, they may not even be immediately noticed by some users. The organization, however, says the update was necessary in order to meet the needs of the next generation of internet users, including those who are more newly coming online and may have less familiarity with the internet. To develop the new interface, the foundation engaged with more than 30 different volunteer groups from around the world, with users in places like India, Indonesia, Ghana and Argentina, among others, all helping to test the update and provide insights into the product development. The goal for the update was to make Wikipedia more of a modern web platform , and to remove clutter, while also making it easier for users to contribute. It additionally aimed to make the desktop web version more consistent with Wikipedia’s mobile counterpart. Among the changes is a newly improved search box that now uses both images and descriptions in its autocomplete suggestions that appear as you type to help direct users to the article you need. This change, like many being introduced, is relatively small but offers a visual clue that could speed up searches and make them more helpful. The Wikimedia Foundation said this update led to a 30% increase in user searches when it was tested — a reminder that even minor changes can have larger impacts on a product’s real-world use. Wikipedia Another change involves an updated sticky header, where you’ll find commonly used links like Search, the Page name and Sections that move with you as you scroll down, staying pinned to the top of the page. That means you’ll no longer have to scroll back up to the top to find what you’re looking for, allowing users to stay focused on reading or editing the content instead. Again, this seems like a smaller tweak but one that decreased scroll rates by more than 15% during tests — something that may be helpful to those who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia navigating between pages and sections, though it largely addresses an annoyance with the site, more so than any real problem. The tests also found that edits people started using with the edit button in the sticky header were reversed less often than those initiated through other edit buttons on the page. Wikipedia Language-switching tools were previously available but are now bumped up to a new, more prominent position at the top right, allowing readers and editors to switch between over 300 supported languages. This could be helpful in emerging markets where multilingual users want to access pages from other languages, at times. Wikipedia The new table of contents section on the left side of articles, which helps people navigate through longer content, will now remain visible as you scroll down the page and helps you to see which section you’re currently reading. This makes it easier to jump around, moving in between various parts of the article as you further investigate a topic. Again, helpful, but not world-changing. Wikipedia Other changes to the site include the addition of a collapsible sidebar for a more distraction-free reading experience and a change to the maximum line width. The foundation explained that limiting the width of long-form text makes for a more comfortable reading experience and improves retention of the content. However, a toggle is available for logged-in and logged-out users on every page if the monitor is 1600 pixels or wider, allowing users to increase the width of the page. Logged-in users can also set a width in their preferences page. The default font size was also increased for better reading comfort. Wikipedia Given the size of Wikipedia’s readership, it’s clear the organization was careful not to make disruptive changes. Today, Wikipedia offers over 58 million articles across more than 300 languages, which are viewed nearly 16 billion times every month, it said. The announcement also noted that no existing functionality was removed as a part of these changes — instead, the focus of the update was on usability improvements and modernizing the site. The makeover, which is also known as “Vector 2022” — a reference to the name of the default Wikipedia skin (Vector — and yes, there are others!) — had been in the works for three years and had been slowly rolled out across the Wikipedia platform ahead of today. As of December 2022, Vector 2022 was the default skin for around 300 Wikipedias globally, and became the default on Arabic and Greek Wikipedias. Today, the update is live on 94% of the 318 active language versions of Wikipedia for all desktop users and is rolling out to English Wikipedia on the desktop.
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Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity
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Carly Page
| 2,023 | 1 | 19 |
its silence over the first security incident of the Musk era: an alleged that exposed the contact information of millions of users. In late December, a poster on a popular cybercrime forum claimed to have scraped the email addresses and phone numbers of 400 million Twitter users by way of , previously blamed for exposing at least 5 million Twitter accounts before it was fixed in January 2022. The subsequent sale of another, smaller dataset containing the email addresses associated with more than 235 million Twitter accounts is said to be a cleaned-up version of the alleged dataset of 400 million Twitter users. Researchers warned that the email addresses, which included the details of politicians, journalists and public figures, could be used to dox pseudonymous accounts. Twitter, or what’s left of the company, last week. In an , Twitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that the data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter’s systems. An absence of evidence, however, is not vindication, as it’s unclear if Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if any user data was exfiltrated. Rather, the company said that hackers had likely been circulating a collection of data pulled from past breaches and said the data did not correlate to any of the data obtained by way of exploiting the bug that was fixed in January 2022. What Twitter is saying may very well be true, but it’s difficult to have confidence in the company’s statement. Twitter’s erratic response raises many of the same questions that regulators will want to know: Who was tasked with investigating this breach, and does Twitter have the resources to do a thorough job?
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TikTok’s ‘corecore’ is the latest iteration of absurdist meme art
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Amanda Silberling
| 2,023 | 1 | 21 |
TikTok goes a little overboard when it comes to categorizing every last aesthetic into its own microtrend. You notice it when calls your music taste , or when you strangely end up at a charity gala in San Francisco and a tech exec asks you if he should be concerned that his teen daughter is obsessed with (yes, this happened to me). Take any noun, add the suffix “core,” and you’re good to go. There is no more natural terminus to this phenomenon than “corecore,” a meta aesthetic from “ ” that uses nihilistic video clips to create something so absurd and meaningless that somehow, it comes back around and makes you feel something. It leans into our impulse to mask all of our emotions in 12 layers of irony, but in the process, gets so earnest that it might not be ironic after all. Take a look at arguably the corecore video, which tallied up 2.2 million likes. It begins with a clip from a salary transparency account, in which people ask strangers what they do and how much money they make. A child says that when he grows up, he wants to be a doctor, and when the host asks him how much he wants to make, he says, “I’m gonna make… people feel okay.” Then, you’re immediately exposed to fast-cycling clips: a timelapse of a busy street; a guy screaming; elderly people playing slot machines in a casino; a TikToker talking about a chicken that lives in the metaverse; and people rushing out of a garage in crisis. Yea Some look like they could come out of an documentary that tells us really obvious truths about how social media makes us lonely; others at all. But most of these videos are tied together by a general malaise — a concern that life has no meaning and technology is alienating us from one another. Within corecore, we see clips of robots at CES talking about how people are afraid of them, demos of new VR headsets and clips from Elon Musk’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This lack of faith in corporate tech innovation is the exact opposite of the ubiquitous “ ” trend, which shockingly isn’t a top-down psyop (… or is it). Corecore has been popular on TikTok since late 2022, but the techno-futurism-doom vibes feel especially appropriate now, as we watch , , , and all wage massive layoffs within weeks. These nichetok posters are probably not reacting to the state of tech employment, but something bigger that encompasses it: how we are all subject to the whims of a few tech guys who can just decide to buy Twitter or make “metaverse” a word that normal people think about. And of course, there’s the added layer of irony that corecore is, too, part of that ecosystem — that people are making TikTok accounts dedicated to creating their own corecore compilations, promising things like “face reveals” once they reach 10,000 followers, using an anti-capitalist, lonely aesthetic to attain social capital. Corecore is not the first meme of its kind. In any given moment in internet culture, there’s usually some sort of absurdist meme in circulation, whether it’s corecore, , , or the on . That’s because it’s very normal, almost cliché at this point, to make nonsensical art in response to a world that doesn’t seem to make any sense. As anyone who’s taken an introductory art history class knows, this is how Dadaist artists reacted to the tragedies of World War I — and now, it’s how contemporary meme-makers respond to the horrifying realization that we are all addicted to scrolling through short-form videos. And it’s how the greatest minds of the weird internet will react again, the next time the world feels a bit too dystopian. In the end, the only thing that really makes sense about corecore is the fact that it exists.
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Lidar companies face a ‘make it or break it’ year
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
That nagging déjà vu feeling kept creeping in earlier this month during in Las Vegas. At every turn, in the newly constructed West Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and even amid the crowded startup grinder at Eureka Park, was a company pitching lidar sensor technology. That might not have been so remarkable in 2017 or 2018. But it’s 2023. The peak of the hype cycle, when hundreds of millions of dollars were thrown into lidar startups, is a distant glint in the rearview mirror. The industry went through the and rode the wave in a pursuit of capital that public markets can provide. How could so many of these lidar sensor companies — nearly two dozen by my count — still be hanging on (and spending considerable money to exhibit at CES) after a boom-and-bust cycle that led to a widespread culling? Lidar, the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world, is considered a critical sensor to support autonomous vehicles and increasingly advanced driver assistance systems. As the optimism and gravitas surrounding autonomous vehicles reached new, dizzying heights, lidar was swept up in investment chaos. Between 65 to 70 companies with active lidar programs existed in 2018, according to industry estimates. As the timelines around the deployment of autonomous vehicles slipped, consolidation seemed inevitable. And it was. Dozens of lidar companies have folded or been swallowed up by another competitor in the past four years. Consolidation was already underway by 2019. It has only ramped up since. And that seek-capital-in-public-markets plan that took off in 2020 hasn’t been as fruitful as some hoped, due to the cost of development and that potentially inflated valuations were based on projected revenue, not actual revenue. Of the nine companies that went public via SPAC mergers — a list that includes Aeye, Aeva, Cepton, Luminar, Innoviz, Ouster and Velodyne — there has been at least one bankruptcy and a merger. Quanergy filed for in December 2022 about 10 months after going public through a merger with a SPAC. Ouster, a SPAC that in 2021, agreed to merge with Velodyne in November 2022 in an all-stock transaction. Lidar company Luminar said it’s able to verify 25 companies with active lidar programs, a figure in line with other estimates in the industry. Lidar sensors and GPS antennas are displayed on a fully autonomous Caterpillar Inc. 777 mining haul truck at the company’s booth during CES. Getty Images / Patrick T. Fallon / AFP So where does that leave the industry today? Walking the floor of CES 2023 one might mistakenly assume that business is booming enough to sustain two dozen companies. It’s not. Snow Bull Capital CEO Taylor Ogan expects many lidar companies will be sifted out this year and the “make it or break it year” for those that remain will be 2024. “I think we will see the big OEMs make lidar commitments in 2023,” Ogan said, adding that a lot of models will be unveiled with lidar. “But 2024 will be the make-or-break year for lidar companies, where we will see whose fancy booths at CES were just that, and who is actually going to deliver.” About of 80% of lidar companies actually putting sensors in cars today are in Asia, according to Ogan. China-based companies Hesai, RoboSense and Livox all have design wins with automakers and have shipped sensors for production models in 2022. Hesai is at the top of the lidar sensor producer heap. The company has shipped more than 103,000 lidar units from 2017 to December 31, 2022, according to a . However, the bulk of that production occurred in 2022, when it made and shipped more than 80,000 sensors. Of those, 62,000 Hesai units have gone to Chinese automakers, including Li Auto, Jidu and Lotus to support advanced driver assistance systems. The remainder were used in other applications such as robotaxis, agriculture, mining, mapping and smart infrastructure. The pace of Hesai’s production is expected to ramp up this year. The company is opening a third factory in Shanghai this year with a capacity to produce 1 million units a year. A Luminar lidar integrated in a Volvo. Volvo Luminar struck a deal in 2020 with Mobileye to for its robotaxi fleet. It has also landed contracts with Nissan and Mercedes. Based on its internal estimates, the company expects that by the second half of the decade (so after 2025) there will be more than 1 million Luminar-equipped vehicles on the road, founder and CEO Austin Russell reiterated . While leadership positions can shift, industry experts still expect the field of lidar companies will continue to shrink. The lidar industry will “directionally” start to look like the millimeter wave radar industry, Mike Ramsey, VP analyst of automotive and smart mobility at Gartner. Today, there are about seven or eight companies such as Aptiv, Bosch, Continental and ZF that supply automakers with millimeter wave radar. “I can’t see why lidar for auto would be different,” Ramsey said. He did add that lidar has more applications outside of auto, which may support a few additional companies.
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Zeekr goes on a hiring spree, Tesla kicks off a price war and Hesai files for an IPO
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 23 |
Before I jump into our regular news roundup, I wanted to bring your attention to , the premium electric car brand owned by China’s Geely Holdings. You might recall that about a month ago, Zeekr filed confidentially for an in the United States. Zeekr, which will spin out of Geely, reportedly aims to raise more than $1 billion and is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion, according to initial reports by Reuters. As the IPO process creeps forward, Zeekr is busy scaling up. And in a big way. Zeekr already employs some 4,500 people, according to the company. Now it’s aiming to add two-thirds more workers to its roster. The company this week that it is hiring 3,000 new workers in more than 30 cities around the world, including for its R&D center in Ningbo and Shanghai in China, and Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s also opening an office in Silicon Valley, although it should be noted an exact location has yet to be decided. Most of these posts are for R&D and engineering in areas like software, battery management, thermal management and electric/electronic architecture. A few hundred are for its sales network, according to the company. Zeekr is not yet. Prepare to start hearing a lot more from this brand. Last week, you may recall I wrote about how and its had entered into a pressure cooker, of sorts. That pressure continues to build as we get new insight into an infamous 2016 “Painted In Black” video that promoted Tesla’s claimed “self-driving” technology. A senior engineer testified that the and apparently of the video, even dictating the words that pop up at the start of the video saying the car is driving itself. The video has been criticized for years now, so for many this will come as no surprise and validates their stance. Question is, can consumers or shareholders argue (in a court perhaps) that they were defrauded by a video that convinced them Tesla’s self-driving technology was more capable than it actually was? Meanwhile, Tesla slashing its prices earlier this month appears to have kicked off a price war with rivals like China’s reducing the cost of its EVs. Tesla has one weapon that other automakers lack: one of the highest profit margins in the biz. Tesla earned $15,653 in gross profit per vehicle in the third quarter of 2022; that’s more than twice as much as Volkswagen Group, four times the comparable figure at Toyota and five times more than Ford Motor, according to a . Price wars don’t always work out. But high profit margins buy Tesla some time. Oh, and against that backdrop, a in San Francisco to answer the question of whether Musk is a fraud or is just too careless with his words. Under the microscope was Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that stated funding was “secured” to take Tesla private at a potential value of . Tesla shareholders who traded the company’s stock in the days after Musk’s tweet are suing the executive for billions of dollars in damages. This didn’t get a lot of press attention in the United States, but it should have. a Chinese lidar company widely considered a lead supplier of the sensor, and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange. Hesai has attracted a lot of venture capital in its lifetime, to date from strategic backers like Baidu, Xiaomi on-demand services giant Meituan and CPE, the private equity platform of Citic as well as VC firms GL Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Qiming Venture Partners. I wrote about Hesai as part of a and how there are still TOO MANY companies. The upshot? A lot of lidar companies will be sifted out in 2023; the following year will be a “make it or break it” moment for those that remain. While Hesai is in a leadership position today, that doesn’t mean it will remain there. And it’s not yet profitable. It should be noted that unlike many other lidar companies out there, Hesai is actually producing and shipping sensors and generates revenue. The company reported in a securities filing that it brought in $112 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year and had a net loss of $23 million during the same period. , a developer of AI chips and systems for vehicles, is considering a Hong Kong initial public offering, . , a cloud manufacturing platform for building electronics from prototype to high-scale production, in a round led by Foundry and joined by BMW i Ventures, as well as existing investors Edison Partners and ATX Venture Partners. , a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, closed a led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Nvidia’s venture capital group, NVentures. Other new investors included B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation and ROBO Global Ventures. Existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates also participated. , the EV charging network operator, will be acquired by a U.S.-based subsidiary of oil company for . , the Toronto-based self-driving trucks startup, landed . The companies didn’t disclose the amount invested, nor many other details about the deal. Waabi contends that having Volvo on board will both provide it with access to the automaker’s extensive industry network and help it explore opportunities for large-scale commercialization. put out for the AV industry and among its top takeaways (this coming from the CFO) : “Independent AV companies will be positioned to advance more quickly toward product deployment and profitability.” is a new that clearly was inspired by the mini Moke. appointed Lt. Gen. (ret.) Scott Howell, former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), to the company’s Advisory Board. has named former USA Truck CEO as its chief operating officer. appointed independent board members and to serve on its government security committee after receiving a non-objection from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. is retiring from his position. He is also leaving the board effective February 1, 2023. will be the new CEO. Yutko was most recently vice president and chief engineer of sustainability and future mobility at Boeing.
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The mirage of dry powder
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Anna Heim
| 2,023 | 1 | 14 |
A recent on TechCrunch+ wondered whether “record levels of dry powder [will] trigger a delayed explosion of startup investment.” The question relied on a postulate: That venture capitalists have raised plenty of funding that remains to be deployed. The idea that dry powder has reached record levels is commonly shared, and it is backed by data.
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Shell snaps up EV charging operator Volta for $169 million
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
A U.S.-based subsidiary of oil company Shell is buying EV charging network operator Volta in an all-cash transaction valued at $169 million. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Shell USA Inc. will acquire all outstanding shares of Class A common stock of Volta at $0.86 per share in cash upon completion of the merger. That represents about an 18% premium to the closing price of Volta stock on January 17, 2023. Volta shares, which have been trading under $1 since November, rose 0.73% following the announcement. Volta, which went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, has an advertising-based business model. The company places its chargers at shopping malls and grocery stores, where EV drivers can power up their batteries for free. The chargers have large media displays, a space where retailers and consumer goods companies can advertise to reach the EV audience. The company caught the attention of investors early in its life, before it took the SPAC route. But the company’s stock price has languished and its cash position is depleted. That lack of cash is tenuous enough that under the acquisition agreement, the Shell affiliate will provide loans to Volta to help the company through the closing. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2023. “Volta’s ability to capture it independently, in challenging market conditions and with ongoing capital constraints, was limited. This transaction creates value for our shareholders and provides our exceptional employees and other stakeholders a clear path forward,” Interim CEO Vince Cubbage said in a statement. The deal, which was unanimously approved by Volta’s board, is the latest example of energy companies snapping up or investing in EV charging infrastructure as demand for electric vehicles grows. BP, Total and France’s EDF are among a growing list of oil companies buying up EV charging assets. Shell previously bought European charging network ubitricity.
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Self-driving truck startup Waabi brings on Volvo VC as strategic investor
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Rebecca Bellan
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
Autonomous trucking startup has bagged Volvo Group Venture Capital AB, the automaker’s VC arm, as a strategic investor. The companies aren’t disclosing the amount invested, nor many other details about the deal, but having Volvo on board will both provide Waabi access to Volvo’s extensive industry network and help the startup explore opportunities for large-scale commercialization. “We’ve been extremely selective in terms of who we bring on board as an investor, and this is the right time for Waabi to bring on a strategic OEM,” Waabi’s CEO and founder, , told TechCrunch. The partnership also symbolizes Volvo’s own commitment to self-driving trucking. Volvo Group has been exploring autonomous mobility solutions for years. As early as 2017, Volvo had developed that would be used for hub-to-hub transportation of goods — a model that Waabi is also pursuing. In 2019, the automaker unveiled Vera, its autonomous, electric “truck” that looks more like a sports car with a trailer placed on top. Last we heard, the to move goods packed in cargo trailers from a logistics center to a port terminal, in partnership with logistics company DFDS, but Volvo says Vera is now just a concept vehicle and potential future solution. More recently, with autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation to jointly develop autonomous semi-trucks, with the Aurora Driver technology stack integrated into the trucks, for the North American market. “We represent for Volvo a strengthening commitment to self-driving trucking, as well as their understanding that there is next-generation technology, and they want to be the leader of next generation technology,” said Urtasun, nodding to Waabi’s AI-first and simulation-heavy approach to autonomy. “They want to be part of that story.” The investment, which is an extension to that was led by Khosla Ventures, comes a few months after the startup that are purpose-built for OEM integration. That means that rather than adding on cameras, lidar and other sensors to an already built truck, Waabi’s Driver — which includes software, sensors and compute power — is manufactured directly into the vehicle from the assembly line. The result to an onlooker is a smoother vehicle exterior — no chunky after-market sensor ornamentation — that’s easier to clean and maintain. “We build deep partnerships with OEMs because we don’t believe in after market installations,” said Urtasun. “So for us, OEM partnerships are the most important partnerships.” Urtasun was mum about whether Volvo will indeed be a future manufacturing partner — although we’d guess that Volvo is — but she did say to stay tuned for news to come in the next few months on that front. Kirsten Korosec that its simulator, in addition to , has also helped the company design its next-gen truck by testing different sensor placement on a digital twin of the vehicle. By building out and testing the truck in simulation, Waabi avoided potentially years of building and testing real-world vehicles, said Urtasun. Aside from the ability to speed up design and production at a fraction of the cost, Waabi’s simulator became a selling point for Volvo because of its safety applications, said Urtasun. “When you say Volvo, what comes to mind for everybody is a symbol of safety, and that’s where we are super aligned in terms of our very differentiated approach to safety that Waabi is providing,” said Urtasun. “Waabi is simulation-centric, instead of deploying large test fleets, and that’s one of the things that Volvo really highlights in terms of their investment.” Urtasun said that OEM partners have also been excited by Waabi’s ability to “scale from day one” due to its simulator. “This is an important stepping stone on our path,” said Urtasun. “We are in a very unique position in terms of the competitive landscape because we have a multi-year runway and we have a very lean approach, which means we can go super fast with a fraction of the cost and people.” Waabi was founded in 2021 and already the company claims to have the most advanced simulator in the industry and a truck that looks like a next-generation truck for most other companies operating today. “What really defines Waabi is that we saw the super capital-intensive approach that is very slow, and instead we said we need to build different technology so we can get there faster and in a much more scalable fashion,” said Urtasun. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Waabi’s promises of fast, cheap scaling will actually pan out. The company has test vehicles on the ground, but has yet to announce any commercial pilots with OEM or shipping partners.
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Didi gets China’s approval to relaunch after 18-month security probe
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Rita Liao
| 2,023 | 1 | 16 |
Eighteen months after its app was suspended in China, ride-hailing giant Didi made a comeback on Monday. The move came as China showed signs of on the internet sector over the past three years. In July 2021, Chinese authorities , citing reasons that the platform was “illegally collecting user data.” Earlier that same month, Didi went public in New York. It was a short-lived celebration for the firm, which raised a hefty $4 billion from the first-time sale, as the event quickly turned out to be the root of its clash with Beijing. Didi, according to multiple reports and an investor memo seen by TechCrunch at the time, that its cross-border data practices were secure before going public in the U.S., where the data of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens could allegedly be subject to scrutiny. The misstep led to by China’s top cyberspace watchdog. It seems like Didi’s period of repentance and rectification is over, as the company on Weibo Monday afternoon: “Our company has taken serious steps to cooperate with the country’s cybersecurity review, deal with the security issues found in the probe, and implement comprehensive rectifications.” With approval from the Cybersecurity Review Office, designated to address data security concerns posed by internet firms, Didi was allowed to resume new user registration for Didi Chuxing, its main ride-hailing platform, effective immediately. Aside from a data revamp, Didi was also reportedly for breaching rules. It finished delisting from the U.S. and to relist on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, an increasingly preferable choice for Chinese tech firms that are navigating rising U.S.-China tensions. Prior to the relaunch of user registration, Didi users were still able to use the app if they already had it on their phones. But the app was besieged by hungry rivals. Alibaba-owned mapping service AutoNavi, for example, has been gaining ground as an aggregator of third-party ride-hailing services, including Didi. The era of unfettered growth in the ride-hailing space is also long gone. China has been in recent years, putting it more in line with the traditional state-owned taxi industry. Following the regulatory overhaul, Didi will surely be much more cautious about the government’s red line. “Going forward, the company will apply effective methods to ensure the security of the platform’s infrastructure and big data in order to safeguard national cybersecurity,” it said in the Weibo post.
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Uber drivers in Europe gain access to Tesla, Polestar and other EVs through Hertz
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Kirsten Korosec
| 2,023 | 1 | 17 |
Uber has expanded an agreement with Hertz to get thousands of ride-hailing drivers behind the wheel of an electric car — this time in Europe. The two companies announced that Hertz will make up to 25,000 EVs available to Uber drivers in European capital cities by 2025. The announcement comes about 15 months after Uber and Hertz kicked off a partnership in North America to make up to available for rent to Uber drivers in the United States. The European deal will offer drivers a bit more choice, according to Uber, making a range of EVs, including Tesla and Polestar, available to drivers. The Europe program will begin this month at Hertz’s London base and eventually expand to Paris, Amsterdam and other capital cities in the region. The Uber-Hertz deal has a two-fold aim. It helps Hertz in its goal to build one of the largest fleets of rental EVs globally and it gets Uber closer to becoming a “zero emissions platform” by 2030. And so far, at least by Uber’s account, the program has proven popular. The company said that to date, nearly 50,000 drivers in the United States have rented a Tesla through this program, completing more than 24 million fully electric trips and over 260 million electric miles. Uber’s goal for all of its trips to be “zero emissions” by the end of the decade will require more than just a deal with Hertz. The company’s , which is in more than 1,400 cities in North America, incentivizes drivers to use all-electric and hybrid vehicles. Uber integrated the program into its service to give members 5% off eligible rides, including Uber Green trips. Uber has also partnered with automakers’ charging network providers, and other EV rental and fleet companies, to provide further incentives, including Ample, Avis and EVgo.
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ODIN Intelligence website is defaced as hackers claim breach
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Zack Whittaker
| 2,023 | 1 | 15 |
The website for ODIN Intelligence, a company that provides technology and tools for law enforcement and police departments, was defaced on Sunday. The apparent hack comes days after that an app developed by the company, SweepWizard, which allows police to manage and coordinate multi-agency raids, had a significant security vulnerability that exposed personal information of police suspects and sensitive details of upcoming police operations to the open web. ODIN provides apps, like SweepWizard and other technologies, to law enforcement departments. It also provides a service called SONAR, or the Sex Offender Notification and Registration system, used by state and local law enforcement to remotely manage registered sex offenders. But the company has also been the subject of controversy. Last year, ODIN was found to be marketing its facial recognition technology for and describing those capabilities in callous and degrading terms. It’s not clear who defaced ODIN’s website or how the intruders broke in, but a message left behind quoted ODIN founder and chief executive Erik McCauley, who largely dismissed Wired’s recent reporting that found the SweepWizard app was insecure and spilling data. “And so, we decided to hack them,” the message left on ODIN’s website said. A defacement message on ODIN Intelligence’s website spelling ACAB, an acronym for “All Cops Are Bastards.” TechCrunch (screenshot) The text of the defacement is ambiguous as to whether the hackers exfiltrated data from ODIN’s systems or if, as it claims, “all data and backups have been shredded,” suggesting that there may have been an attempt to erase the company’s stores of data. Emma Best, co-founder of non-profit transparency collective , told TechCrunch that data was exfiltrated from ODIN’s servers and that the organization was in possession of it. “We received the data the other day and are processing it,” Best said. The defacement note made note of three large archive files, totaling more than 16 gigabytes of data, each named in relation to ODIN’s organization, the sex offenders’ data, and the SweepWizard app. The hackers also left hashes, a unique string of letters and numbers that serve as a signature for each file. Best confirmed that the files that DDoSecrets received matched the hashes in the defacement post. The defacement also included a set of Amazon Web Services keys, apparently belonging to ODIN. TechCrunch could not immediately confirm that the keys belong to ODIN, but the keys apparently correspond with an instance on AWS’ GovCloud, which houses more sensitive police and law enforcement data. ODIN chief executive Erik McCauley did not return emails from TechCrunch with questions about the defacement and apparent breach, but ODIN’s defaced website was pulled offline a short time later.
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Kate is a new car maker focused on micro-cars for everyday use
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Romain Dillet
| 2,023 | 1 | 18 |
Meet , a French company that wants to create a tiny car that you can use for your daily commute and various errands. In addition to CEO Matthias Goldenberg and CTO Pierre Escrieut, Kate is also co-founded by Thibaud Elzière, the serial entrepreneur behind , the startup studio . While Kate is a car manufacturer at heart, it doesn’t want to produce big SUVs with sophisticated entertainment systems. The company wants to change mobility by producing the most minimalistic electric car possible. Instead of starting with the vehicle, Kate is starting with the use case. “We want to sell this to people who really need a vehicle, people who live on the outskirts, in mid-sized cities or even in the countryside,” Goldenberg told me. In Europe, people moving from A to B use a large vehicle — like a regular car — for 84% of their trips. It represents 11% of the CO emissions. And yet, 98% of trips are shorter than 80 kilometers (that’s 50 miles). That’s why it doesn’t make sense to use a car with extremely comfy seats and long-range batteries if you’re just dropping your kid at school and then heading to the office in the small city nearby. You can always rent a car for your next vacation. But creating a new car manufacturer from scratch isn’t that easy. That’s why Kate isn’t exactly a “new company.” Thibaud Elzière invested in a French company called that produces electric vehicles inspired by the . Kate then straight-up acquired NOSMOKE to reuse some of the company’s work on a new type of vehicle. Instead of producing a leisure car that you would park next to your beach house, Kate wants to create a mass-market vehicle. This is what the Kate Original looks like: The Kate Original. Kate On paper, Kate’s upcoming vehicle, the K1, will be an — a heavy quadricycle. There will be four seats and it will reach a top speed of 90 km/h (56 mph). You will be able to drive it with a B1 driving license in France, which you can get at the age of 16 or older. “With the K1, we want to have a vehicle that sits right in the no-go zone between the Citroën Ami that costs €8,000 and the Renault Zoe that costs around €25,000 to €30,000,” Goldenberg said. Kate is targeting an entry price at around €15,000 with a battery range of 200 kilometers (124 miles). Of course, there will be models with better engines and batteries that will cost more. When it comes to design, Kate wants to manufacture a car that is as modular and durable as possible. There will be some connectivity components so that the company can identify issues remotely. But the idea is that you should be able to keep your Kate K1 for years and years. There will be hardware and software updates, but the car should remain usable for a long time even if you don’t change any component. For instance, Kate has opted for LFP batteries (with lithium, iron and phosphate) so that it offers a considerably longer cycle life. The Kate K1. Kate When it comes to the entertainment system, there will be some basic software features in the car. You will be able to play some music or get some directions. But if you want better driving directions or if you want to listen to your own podcasts, you will have to rely on your smartphone. “The smartphone has to be at the center of the experience but you should also be able to drive the car if you’re out of battery,” Goldenberg said. Last year, NOSMOKE/Kate produced nearly 200 vehicles. This year, the company is updating NOSMOKE’s car and calling it the . “Our goal is that we should produce four times more vehicles every year. In five years, we will jump from 200 vehicles per year to 200 vehicles per day,” Goldenberg said. Kate wants to properly introduce the K1 later this year and start selling it in 2024. In other words, the company has ambitious goals and is targeting an unproven market. But given the success of the Citroën Ami in France with wealthy high schoolers in the French countryside, there could be an even bigger opportunity with tiny cars for adults. The Kate Original. Kate
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In race to electrify, Uber wants EVs that sacrifice top speeds, wheels
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Harri Weber
| 2,023 | 1 | 19 |
The clock is ticking for Uber to electrify its fleet, and the rideshare company wants automakers to help by designing cheaper electric vehicles for its drivers. Lawmakers are setting deadlines for rideshare companies to ditch fossil fuels ( ‘s Air Resources Board among them), and Uber has its own electrification deadlines, which range from to . That’s all well and good, but electric vehicles are still too pricey for most people, including . So, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi says Uber is in talks with automakers to build EVs that sacrifice speed, or even a wheel or two, to drive down the sticker price. The CEO didn’t name the specific automakers that Uber is apparently working with, but last year the company debuted “Top speeds that many cars have are not necessary for city driving that’s associated with rideshare,” Khosrowshahi said on Thursday at a event. “We’re also talking about vehicles that are purpose-built” for delivering things like groceries, he added. “You can imagine smaller vehicles — two-wheelers, three-wheelers — that have trunk space that can get through traffic easier that have a much smaller footprint, both in terms of environmental and also traffic footprint, than let’s say a car.” The CEO also said the passenger area could change, with riders potentially “facing each other.” (The executive also didn’t say if Uber would cover detailing costs from the bouts of motion sickness I assume this would trigger.) When it comes to meal and grocery delivery, Uber isn’t the only company to see potential in much smaller vehicles with fewer wheels. Even in markets like the U.S., where aren’t common, several companies have talked up this idea in recent years, including and .
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