TechCrunch |
- Spotify launches new fund to support independent open source projects
- Elemental, Muirwoods Ventures and Pear VC discuss investor opportunities at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022
- GM reveals first images of the EV Chevy Corvette (and teases AWD)
- What will Elon actually do if he buys Twitter?
- Circa wants to make first-of-the-month rent payments obsolete
- The Station: Lyft’s bikeshare play, Tesla’s Q1 warning and big bucks for Musk’s tunnel startup
- Twitter said to be close to a deal with Elon Musk
- Arrow saves online shopping carts in Southeast Asia
- Zenda gets $9.4M to streamline school fee payment and management
- Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to take on hyperloop project
- Fishy business: Rooser raises $23M for its seafood trading platform
- Hear how Front raised serious cash from unconventional investors on TechCrunch Live
- Deep Science: AI simulates economies and predicts which startups receive funding
| Spotify launches new fund to support independent open source projects Posted: 25 Apr 2022 07:40 AM PDT Spotify has announced that it’s launching a Free and Open Source Software Fund to support independent open source projects. The company says the purpose of the fund is to bring attention to independent open source projects and give back to developers. The new fund will start at €100,000. Spotify’s open source tech lead Per Ploug said in a blog post that “this is just a starting amount” and that as with any new program, the company wants to test it before deploying it more broadly. The company will donate the money to different open source projects over the course of the year. The funds will provide financial support to developers and help them maintain their projects, including fixing security vulnerabilities. Spotify will target projects that are independent and actively maintained. The company also noted that nominations are informed by dependency data across its repositories. Projects select for the fund also cannot be run by people employed at Spotify. “Spotify uses open source software to power the best audio experience for creators and listeners around the world,” the company said in a blog post. “In fact, we are like many other tech companies who rely on open source. And yet, open source developers often make these projects available for us to use without any compensation. That is why today we are announcing the Spotify FOSS Fund, with the purpose of donating money and bringing attention to independent open source projects. These projects support and enable our engineering teams to do their best work, and we want to recognize that.” The company’s internal R&D team, including engineers, data scientists, researchers and more, will nominate projects that they think deserve support. Spotify’s fund committee will then select projects from eligible nominees. The recipients of the fund will be announced in May. Spotify says that it has open sourced more than 200 tools to the public over the past decade, but that it’s time for it to “do more.” The company says that the new fund will have a direct impact on the sustainability of specific open source projects, but that in order to create a fully sustainable ecosystem, there needs to be more solutions. To further this effort, Spotify says that it has joined the the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to support open source security initiatives. The announcement comes as Spotify recently closed down its Greenroom Creator Fund. In an email sent to creators who had applied to the fund, Spotify informed applicants the creator fund "will not be moving forward." The email further explained that Spotify plans to "shift toward other initiatives for live creators" instead. It also hinted that the company would introduce other new monetization options for live content creators in the future. |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2022 07:30 AM PDT Building and scaling a successful mobility startup can require a jaw-dropping amount of capital, and early-stage startup founders stepping into that high-priced arena need a clear-eyed understanding of existing and overlooked opportunities, saturated markets and the trends driving them. That's why we're thrilled to announce that Yoon Choi, co-founder and partner at Muirwoods Ventures, Mar Hershenson, co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC and Gabriel Scheer, director of innovation, focused on mobility and energy, at Elemental Excelerator will join us for a panel discussion at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 on May 18 and May 19 in San Mateo, California. Book your pass today, before prices increase on May 15, and you save $200! What can you expect from this wide-ranging discussion? These early-stage investors will address the hottest trends, including urban air mobility, traffic management, auto fintech and EV infrastructure, and whether founders can still find opportunity in AVs, an industry that has undergone massive consolidation in the past two years. We’ll also ask them about how to get the attention of investors, what they look for in a founder and which areas within mobility are ripe for disruption. All three panelists bring extensive knowledge and unique perspectives, and we can't wait to get the conversation started. As co-founder and partner at Muirwoods Ventures, Yoon Choi counts Ampup, Civil Maps and Kodiak Robotics among her many notable deals. Before Muirwoods, Choi spent 18 years as a venture investor and strategic partner to many Silicon Valley startups and founders. Choi also founded Forest Ventures, a seed fund focused on the automotive sector, and she served as an investment director at SAIC Capital, a leader in China's automotive industry. Prior to SAIC, she led the Corporate Venture Group at Maxim Integrated, where she oversaw strategic technology acquisitions and venture investments. Earlier in her career, Choi was a founding member at Samsung Ventures. Mar Hershenson is co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC, a seed-stage investment firm in Palo Alto. She backs companies like Guardant Health, DoorDash, Gusto and Branch. She has her doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, taught Stanford's Analog Circuit Design course for more than a decade and now teaches entrepreneurship at the university's engineering school. A three-time startup co-founder (Barcelona Design, Sabio Labs and Revel Touch), Hershenson has received many awards, including the renowned T35 Young Innovator Award by MIT (for her technical work) and the prestigious Marie R. Pistilli Women in Engineering Achievement Award (for her work in entrepreneurship). She is also a founding member of All Raise and the Equity Summit. Gabriel Scheer, the director of Innovation, leads the mobility and energy portfolio for Elemental Excelerator, a Hawaii-based climate tech accelerator founded in 2009. His portfolio includes more than 70 companies such as Chargetrip, eMotorWerks, RideScout and Xos Trucks. Prior to joining Elemental, Scheer was on Lime's founding team, where he spent three years working on government relations, data policy and transit partnerships globally. Scheer also worked and consulted for Chariot, Zipcar, Superpedestrian and Spin. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from these expert early-stage startup investors about the hottest mobility trends, market disruption opportunities, insider tips on catching investor attention and more. TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them. Buy your pass today, before prices increase on May 15, and you save $200!
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| GM reveals first images of the EV Chevy Corvette (and teases AWD) Posted: 25 Apr 2022 07:23 AM PDT The great American sports car is going electric. General Motors President Mark Reuss shared the news this morning, and released the first images of the upcoming electric Chevrolet Corvette. He says the vehicle could be available for sale as soon as “early next year.” And the electrification of the Corvette is least exciting part of the announcement. The video clearly shows the front tires are powered, meaning only thing: The Corvette is going all-wheel drive. Chevy appears to be building for an AWD future. Automotive rumors peg the unannounced, high-performance Corvette C8 Z06 to sport AWD, and the video here all but confirms the arrangement in the EV version, too. It appears that the EV Corvette will be based on the existing mid-engine Corvette platform, which leaves plenty of room in the front and back for motors on each axle. With internal combustion affairs, vehicles require significant retrofitting to make room for all-wheel drive’s extra driveshafts and differentials. With EVs, it just takes another motor and some computer programming. According to Reuss, the electric Corvette utilizes GM’s Ultium platform, which is underpinning numerous upcoming GM EVs including the Hummer EV, Silverado EV, and Blazer EV. General Motors has been quiet about replacing the Corvette’s small block chevy with batteries and motors. The first murmurs of the vehicle came several years back when GM moved the Corvette team into EV building in Warren, Michigan. And today’s announcement doesn’t shed a lot of light onto the subject either. GM did not release expected price point, battery range, or 0-60 mph times. Corvette faithful knew this days was coming. The Corvette is the quintessential American sports car, and since nearly the beginning, a small block Chevy V8 has been its beating heart. An electric Corvette will, of course, lack the comforting rumble of a V8, but the electric motors will no doubt make up for it with explosive performance — especially if it comes equipped with motors on each axle. |
| What will Elon actually do if he buys Twitter? Posted: 25 Apr 2022 07:02 AM PDT Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what's going on to kick off the week.
And we have a live show coming this week! Get stoked, details to follow. Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. |
| Circa wants to make first-of-the-month rent payments obsolete Posted: 25 Apr 2022 07:01 AM PDT Paying rent on time can mean the difference between having a place to live, and well, not. Circa believes there is a simpler way to help renters keep a roof over their heads. The Maine-based payment technology company has created a mobile-first platform to enable renters to pay on time, in full, each month. And, if you run into problems and can't pay the entire rent, Circa provides the option to break up the payments. Co-founder and CEO Leslie Hyman told TechCrunch that over $15 billion in rent is paid late every month in the United States. Not only does that hurt their credit and their housing situation, but it also challenges the relationship between the renter and the property owner. She shared some interesting stats, including that about 30% of rent payments come in later that the fifth of the month, and that 5.9 million renters, or 15%, were behind in payments, accounting for something like $41 billion in arrears monthly in the U.S. On the property owner side, evictions can cost them between $3,500 and $10,000, and they often have only an average success rate of 17% on debt collection. Hyman's background is in life insurance, and she had previously worked for large entities like AIG and MelLife, helping them build new businesses based on payments. She explained that when insurance premiums would bill at the beginning of the month, some 20% of them would not go through and need to be rebilled. When they started listening to the customer support calls that came through, many customers would be asking for a different date, when funds would be available. That's when she and her co-founder, Heman Duraiswamy, who has a background in residential real estate ownership, took a look at the pain of paying bills and started Circa in 2019. Circa completed the Techstars accelerator program at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine in 2021. "We started to understand what’s happening in America where if you look at the critical bills of housing, transportation and health, those all have the beginning of the month, and they add up to on average over $2,600," Hyman said. "With income volatility increasing 40% in the past 50 years, you begin to question why we bill on the first of the month."  Circa CEO Leslie Hyman. Image Credits: Circa Circa's aim is to get out ahead of late rent, and in turn, foster a better relationship between property owner and renter. It is working with 1,000 units under management in the Northeast, Pennsylvania and in Sun Valley. It raised $2 million — with another bit of money coming in soon — to expand the kinds of properties it can work with. Investors in the round include Maine Venture Fund, Techstars and Hub Investment Group. Its sweet spot is properties with between 1,000 and 10,000 units. The app and web platform integrate with the property owner's current property management software. Circa will promote to residents that it is there. Renters set up an account in minutes and can choose their payment method and schedule the payment — a feature that can be changed anytime if money is tight. There is an option to pay in full or split up the payments and have money pulled on different weeks. Circa sends notifications letting the renter know the payment is coming out of their account, and there is the ability to make a last-minute change. Circa makes money in a few ways: The company charges the property owner $1 per unit per month in a SaaS fee. Hyman explained that the owner actually recoups some of that cost because Circa charges the resident only when they do a flexible payment schedule. The company will then do a 50-50 revenue share with the property owner. For example, with a $1,000 rent the resident would pay $15 that month to do the flexible payment schedule. Of that $15, half goes back to the property. In addition, the company offers credit reporting and takes over a property's arrears management in a way not done by others, Hyman said. "We have a transition in that same app that the residents are already comfortable with that is smooth and natural and goes straight from not making it at the end of the month into 'would you pay a portion of that missed rent for the upcoming months,'" she added. "Others have people who go out and have a conversation with a resident. It is enormously labor intensive, and at a time when property managers have the highest turnover ever recorded. We take that heavy lift off their shoulders." |
| The Station: Lyft’s bikeshare play, Tesla’s Q1 warning and big bucks for Musk’s tunnel startup Posted: 25 Apr 2022 04:00 AM PDT The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. As I mentioned last week, the agenda is out for TC Sessions: Mobility 2022. I think we put together a pretty sweet program and there will be a couple of more announcements to come. I do have a special offer to my subscribers who are interested in the event. Complete the form found here to receive a code for a free Expo Only ticket to TC Sessions: Mobility. We have 15 free Expo Only passes available, and will be given out on a first-come-first-served basis. Once you complete this brief form you will be sent an email during the week of April 25 with your offer. If you’re not one of the first 15, we will send you a code for a significant discount as we want to thank you for subscribing to the Station! The Expo Only passes won’t give you access to the main stage (that’s where I will be!) but it will let you mix it up with startup founders in the expo area, attend the breakout sessions and get exclusive analyst content online with replays of the breakout sessions on May 20 only. A few other recommendations: Check out this EV SPAC guide (TC+ subscription) from Jaclyn Trop. Think of this as a living document that we will continue to update. As she writes: “If 2020 and 2021 were the years of the SPAC, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the reprimand.” Please check out another TC+ story from Rebecca Bellan. This is the latest in her ongoing founder Q&A series. This week, she interviewed Steer founder Anuja Sonalker. And for fun, I propose that Stellantis make three of the Jeep concepts I recently tested during Easter Jeep Safari. As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to Kirsten at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec. Micromobbin’
Lots to get to this week; let’s dig in. Putting the "hell" in HelbizHelbiz finally got around to publishing its 2021 earnings (quite late, I may add), and I decided to take a look at it under a microscope to try to make sense of it all. I'm still maddeningly confused as to how this company is keeping its head above water as it continues to spend far more than it earns with little cash to back up its wild forays into new business verticals – from shared micromobility and advertising to cryptocurrency and ghost kitchens, a sports streaming platform, and most recently, collabing on electric car rentals. Going through the earnings sheet, which shows nearly $80 million in losses on a $12 million revenue and a CEO being paid close to $3 million, Alex Wilhelm and I wanted to know: Is Helbiz's business philosophy based on the tried-and-true method of throwing wet spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks? And that what sticks will magically help the company raise more capital? Cites |
| Twitter said to be close to a deal with Elon Musk Posted: 25 Apr 2022 03:50 AM PDT As unlikely as it may have once seemed, reports indicate Elon Musk may actually end up the owner of a newly-private Twitter after all. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times are reporting that Twitter’s board is seriously considering Musk’s offer to buy the company, with the corporate governing body’s attitude towards the offer changing following Musk’s outlining of his plan to source the funds to make real his $46.5 billion offer to buy the company. Twitter’s board met on Sunday to discuss Musk’s offer, and the NYT reports that they then entered into negotiations with Musk early on Monday morning to hammer out additional details including the timeline for close and what, if any, financial protections Twitter would enjoy were any potential deal to go south post-announcement. Both reports stress that the deal is not yet final and could still fall apart, but given where we started it’s kind of amazing that it’s even gotten this far. Musk’s bid was initially seen by critics as undervaluing the company significantly despite it representing a premium on the current, depressed Twitter stock price, and the board even instituted a ‘poison pill’ policy to try to block Musk from acquiring a much more significant ownership position in the company. If you need to catch up on all the wild twists in this story so far, check out our recap. It sounds like either way, we’ll have another instalment to share at some point today. |
| Arrow saves online shopping carts in Southeast Asia Posted: 24 Apr 2022 11:00 PM PDT Even in markets where credit card penetration is high, shopping cart abandonment is still a major source of concern for online vendors. Now imagine the situation in Southeast Asia, where many countries have scores of e-wallets, buy now pay later services and other forms of payment. Bank transfers are also popular option for online purchases, but involve several steps, which increases the risk of cart abandonment. Arrow wants to make the checkout process easier by acting as a layer on top of payment gateways. It supports more than 50 different payment methods, including all the major ones in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (including Atome, GrabPay, Boost and GoPay). The company announced today that it has raised $4.8 million led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from Alpha JWC and Zinal Growth. Angel investors including AIG and Maxis board member Ooi Huey Tyng, Paysend chief operating officer Steve Vickers and Coinbase head of Southeast Asia Hassan Ahmed also participated in the round.  Arrow's co-founders: Sudhan Raj, Sebastian Roervig and Neo Liat Beng Launched 15 months ago, Arrow was founded by Liat Beng Neo and Sebastian Roervig and is now used by 100 merchants. Liat Beng Neo told TechCrunch that a major reason for cart abandonment is that "the current checkout processes in the region do not account for its incredible diversity. Southeast Asia is made up of eleven different countries, each with their own unique e-commerce habits and nuances." For example, he added that some regions have poor internet connectivity, so customers may drop out of the checkout process if it involves clicking multiple webpages. Even popular payments, like bank transfers, involve several steps, and each one means the risk of a customer changing their mind about a purchase. In addition to payment methods, Arrow also integrates shipping information and affiliated loyalty programs, so customers see everything on a single checkout page. Arrow can be integrated into shopping platforms like WooCommerce or Magneto or through APIs that let merchants replace their existing storefronts with Arrow. For social commerce, retailers get a checkout link they can message to their customers. Arrow can be used by all kinds of merchants, but is focused on FMCG and other discretionary goods and services, Liat Beng said, because those tend to have high cart abandonment rates. It also caters in particular to merchants who deal in high order volumes, since they would benefit the most from improvements to cart abandonment rates, he added. Arrow is currently active in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and plans to focus on those three markets for now, while planning for expansion into the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. |
| Zenda gets $9.4M to streamline school fee payment and management Posted: 24 Apr 2022 11:00 PM PDT Zenda, a UAE-based startup looking to change how parents pay school bills, and the way educational institutions manage fee collection, is eyeing Africa as its next frontier for growth. Zenda (formerly nexopay) told TechCrunch it plans to enter the continent through Egypt – its third market after India – in the coming months, as it embarks on a growth drive accelerated by a $9.4 million seed funding it has raised. Through its app, Zenda allows parents to pay fees directly to schools, all while streamlining collections by enabling schools to accept and manage payments online. This means that parents no longer need to provide bank deposit slips as proof of payment because all transactions on Zenda happen in real-time. The startup also has an embedded financing option that extends tuition fee credit to parents on a flexible repayment structure. The startup was founded in June last year by Raman Thiagarajan and Haseeb Ahmed, both ex-McKinsey & Company staff, is the duo's second venture. Thiagarajan said that the Zenda borrows from their first social edtech startup dubbed nexquare – a management and data analytics system for schools, educators and regulators. Thiagarajan, who previously led McKinsey's financial services practice in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, told TechCrunch that their first startup helped them understand the education market at a granular level, enabling them to build a fintech solution that solves the challenges encountered by parents and the schools around fee payment and management. "Fee payments in schools are mostly manual, and where it is digital, it is cumbersome, expensive and has a manual aspect to it," said Thiagarajan. "With all the knowledge we have from our previous venture, we understand the education sector. And so, we have a parent-facing app… we also deeply integrate into educational institutions to remove the friction for both the parents and the schools," he said.  In the long-term, Zenda is envisioned to go beyond school fee payment by encompassing other personal financial management aspects. Image Credits: Zenda Among the investors that took part in the seed round were STV, COTU Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and VentureSouq. The STV general partner Ihsan Jawad said, "Raman, Haseeb and the team have identified a compelling gap in the market and in supporting families on a topic that is very important to them. Seeing their strong traction over the past several months, we couldn’t be more excited about Zenda. The UAE itself is a $8+ billion market for private education fees and they are already well poised to capture leadership." Since launch, Thiagarajan says, Zenda's users have increased 20 times, with the app reaching over $100M in annual contracted payment volumes by the close of last year. And the startup is eyeing greater growth this year as it accelerates its expansion beyond the U.A.E using the new funding, which will also support the refinement of its product. "Most of the funding is going to be used in the area of market development and customer experience," Thiagarajan said. In the long-term, Zenda is envisioned to go beyond school fee payment by encompassing other personal financial management aspects. "Our mission is to help families thrive. We aim to make it easier for families to manage their money, and to enable their financial wellness … We see a need for family-centric products that are simple and collaborative." |
| Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to take on hyperloop project Posted: 24 Apr 2022 08:10 PM PDT Elon Musk said Sunday via Twitter that his tunnel-building-for-urban-transport business The Boring Company will attempt to build a high-speed, and still theoretical, hyperloop in the coming years. In 2013, Musk put out a white paper that outlined the idea of a transport system that could send passengers and cargo in pods through a low-pressure tube at speed in access of 700 miles per hour. He never took on the project. Instead, Musk shared basic engineering plans and encouraged others to develop the concept. While several companies and researchers have been steadily working on hyperloop for nearly a decade, there is not yet a working example of the system anywhere in the world. Musk founded The Boring Company in December 2016 on the premise that finding fast and effective ways to dig networks of tunnels for vehicles and high-speed trains would end traffic congestion. The Boring Company has landed some contracts with cities, but nothing that uses hyperloop or high-speed transport. It’s most mature project in Las Vegas uses Tesla vehicles to shuttle people along a 1.7-mile section of underground tunnels at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Last year, the company received initial approval for a special use permit and franchise agreement that will allow the Boring Company to expand its Vegas Loop system to a 29-mile route with 51 stations that would include stops at casinos along the Las Vegas Strip, the city’s football stadium and UNLV. It would eventually reach the McCarran International Airport. Musk’s Sunday tweet, in which he was responding to another tweet listing cities with the worst traffic in the world, comes less than a week after The Boring Company raised $675 million in a Series C funding round that pushed its valuation to $5.7 billion.
He also claimed hyperloop, like other underground tunnels, will be also immune to surface weather conditions such as hurricanes. However, there is well documented evidence of subways, which are located in underground tunnels, flooding. For instance, the New York subway flooded in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the coast. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has since installed floodgates in 68 low-lying subway and Port Authority Trans-Hudson) stations in Lower Manhattan.
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| Fishy business: Rooser raises $23M for its seafood trading platform Posted: 24 Apr 2022 04:46 PM PDT The fishing market globally was worth $253 billion in 2021, and despite the controversy that swirls around the industry, that figure continues to grow. Today a startup that has built a platform to make the business of fishing more efficient — and thus the process overall more traceable and less prone to waste — is announcing a round of funding to ride on that wave. Rooser, which provides a marketplace for sourcing fish aimed both at those fishing and those buying for wholesale, trade or retail, has raised $23 million — funding that it will be using both to expand into more markets, and to continue building more functionality into its platform. Today the company’s focus is on stock management, providing tools to help suppliers manage this, as well as to handle and track sales and assess the wider marketplace for their products. Soon, the plan will be to incorporate more quality control tools, supply chain finance, personalization for buyers and sellers to connect more likely trades; and further down the line, the startup will also bring more business intelligence and analytics into the mix for its customers. It currently has some 45 “species” on sale totaling more than 71,000 kilograms but does not disclose specific customer numbers apart from noting that it has over 300 active users and has enabled some 50,000 transactions to date (its business model is to take a commission on each transaction). Index Ventures is leading this round, with participation also from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Point Nine Capital, as well as Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field, and David Nothacker, co-founder and CEO of freight and cargo startup Sennder, Previous to this Series A, Point Nine and Eos Advisory — a Scottish firm based out of St Andrews — had funded Edinburgh-based Rooser with just over $3 million, bringing the total raised to around $26 million. Valuation is not being disclosed. The crux of the problem that Rooser is aiming to fix is that fishing is a huge and growing industry, but it’s been built on the back of major inefficiencies — inefficiencies that have time and again proven to be disastrous for more than just businesses, but for wider economic and ecological ecosystems. Joel Watt — the CEO who co-founded the company with chief commercial officer Nicolas Desormeaux, COO Erez Mathan, and CTO Thomas Quiroga — saw this situation firsthand when he was running his own fishing business. Originally an accountant by training, Watt hails from the north of Scotland (with an accent my American ear sometimes found hard to penetrate to match), and after years working for a big firm, he returned to his roots and hometown to start a fishing business — not a tech-based marketplace and budding big-data analytics play, but an actual, wet-floors, cold-rooms, and yellow boots fishing operation following in his family’s footsteps, with both his father and grandfather having also worked in fishing. In nearly 10 years of operations, he scaled that business to 50 people and £10 million in turnover, “and it was then that we started to see just how inefficient it was,” he said. Fishing business’s greatest problem, he said, is uncertainty. “You have the boats and fisheries, those turning the products into things you can eat, wholesalers and distributors, and then restaurants and fishmongers. All of those need one-to-one communication, but there are in reality many actors and many price points,” he said. The market is massive — 140,000 related business entities just in Europe — but typically those working without leaning on any platform to access wider customer bases and manage those relationships can only handle 20 contracts at a time, no matter how much fish they have to sell. On the subject of fish to sell, that too is an issue. There are 250 types of fish typically sold in the fishing trade, but when you add in the range of sizes and other variables, it comes out to what Watt said was 35,000 SKUs, and there is little consistency in pricing across that landscape. “No one knows how much anything costs.” Add to that the many layers of people in the chain, and stages that they each manage, and the delays that brings into what is a highly perishable product, and you have a messy situation. For every two fish or other seafood items pulled out from the water, only one gets eaten. So Watt did what any accountant who pivots into building and running a fishing business might do: he started to look into software that could help manage the business aspects of his operation. Rooser is a word from the Doric dialect used in Watt’s region of Scotland, and it means “watering can.” “A team member in my fishing business made a comment about how we seemed to always be fighting a fire somewhere,” Watt said. The idea is that Rooser the software is now helping to fight those fires. Indeed, that software, called Sea.Store, was effective and others started asking to use it, too. Buyers on the platform can source seafood from 13 different countries, although Iceland, Watt said, is the biggest sourcing country at the moment. As for buyers, France currently accounts for 95% of all sales. France indeed is a very big market for seafood, but it’s not the only one. Boosting it as the main buyer was intentional on Rooser’s part, he said. “We wanted to get fit in one market and then develop a supply side,” he said. “Now we can easily move into other countries as we spread across Europe.” Georgia Stevenson, the Index partner who led the investment, said that part of the interest for Index here was how successful Rooser has been so far in addressing this particular vertical’s needs and building a marketplace to match that. “It’s enabling less wastage, but it’s also just empowering seafood traders to do their jobs better,” she said. And while there have been plenty of critics lambasting the fishing industry for overreaching in their activities, depleting stocks; and equally the industry itself seems to just get increasingly bureaucratic, Stevenson said she believed that Rooser addressed both of these issues. “We have been investing in categories and infrastructure to be more sustainable and we see Rooser as consistent with that.” |
| Hear how Front raised serious cash from unconventional investors on TechCrunch Live Posted: 24 Apr 2022 02:13 PM PDT Front’s cap table reads like an honor role of investors. CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin raised funds from numerous Silicon Valley firms and individual investors. On April 27 she’s speaking on TechCrunch Live to share her strategy that allowed her company to raise funds from less traditional VCs. One of those VCs is also speaking on the episode. Frederic Kerrest led Front’s $59 million Series C. He’s also the co-founder and COO of Okta, and a senior advisor to Blackstone’s growth fund. Check out Kerrest’s podcast and upcoming book with the same titles: “Zero to IPO.” I just finished reading the book, and it’s a fantastic resource that I highly recommend. The book is structured to walk founders through the various stages of building a startup, starting with forming an idea to raising early funds to preparing for a public offering. This event opens on April 27 at 11:30 am PT / 2:30 pm ET with networking and pitch practice submissions. The interview begins at 12 pm PT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 pm PT. Register here for free. TechCrunch Live records weekly on Wednesday at 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET. Join us! Click here to register for free and gain access to Front’s pitch deck, enter the pitch feedback session and access the livestream where you can ask the speakers questions. |
| Deep Science: AI simulates economies and predicts which startups receive funding Posted: 24 Apr 2022 02:00 PM PDT Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter. This week in AI, scientists conducted a fascinating experiment to predict how “market-driven” platforms like food delivery and ride-hailing businesses affect the overall economy when they’re optimized for different objectives, like maximizing revenue. Elsewhere, demonstrating the versatility of AI, a team hailing from ETH Zurich developed a system that can read tree heights from satellite images, while a separate group of researchers tested a system to predict a startup’s success from public web data. The market-driven platform work builds on Salesforce’s AI Economist, an open source research environment for understanding how AI could improve economic policy. In fact, some of the researchers behind the AI Economist were involved in the new work, which was detailed in a study originally published in March. As the coauthors explained to TechCrunch via email, the goal was to investigate two-sided marketplaces like Amazon, DoorDash, Uber and TaskRabbit that enjoy larger market power due to surging demand and supply. Using reinforcement learning — a type of AI system that learns to solve a multi-level problem by trial and error — the researchers trained a system to understand the impact of interactions between platforms (e.g., Lyft) and consumers (e.g., riders).
“We use reinforcement learning to reason about how a platform would operate under different design objectives … [Our] simulator enables evaluating reinforcement learning policies in diverse settings under different objectives and model assumptions,” the coauthors told TechCrunch via email. “We explored a total of 15 different market settings — i.e., a combination of market structure, buyer knowledge about sellers, [economic] shock intensity and design objective.” Using their AI system, the researchers arrived at the conclusion that a platform designed to maximize revenue tends to raise fees and extract more profits from buyers and sellers during economic shocks at the expense of social welfare. When platform fees are fixed (e.g., due to regulation), they found a platform’s revenue-maximizing incentive generally aligns with the welfare considerations of the overall economy. The findings might not be Earth-shattering, but the coauthors believe the system — which they plan to open source — could provide a foundation for either a business or policymaker to analyze a platform economy under different conditions, designs and regulatory considerations. “We adopt reinforcement learning as a methodology to describe strategic operations of platform businesses that optimize their pricing and matching in response to changes in the environment, either the economic shock or some regulation” they added. “This may give new insights about platform economies that go beyond this work or those that can be generated analytically.” Turning our attention from platform businesses to the venture capital that fuels them, researchers hailing from Skopai, a startup that uses AI to characterize companies based on criteria like technology, market and finances, claims to be able to predict the ability of a startup to attract investments using publicly available data. Relying on data from startup websites, social media, and company registries, the coauthors say that they can obtain prediction results “comparable to the ones making also use of structured data available in private databases.”
Applying AI to due diligence is nothing new. Correlation Ventures, EQT Ventures and Signalfire are among the firms currently using algorithms to inform their investments. Gartner predicts that 75% of VCs will use AI to make investment decisions by 2025, up from less than 5% today. But while some see the value in the technology, dangers lurk beneath the surface. In 2020, Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that an investment algorithm outperformed novice investors but exhibited biases, for example frequently selecting white and male entrepreneurs. HBR noted that this reflects the real world, highlighting AI’s tendency to amplify existing prejudices. In more encouraging news, scientists at MIT, alongside researchers at Cornell and Microsoft, claim to have developed a computer vision algorithm — STEGO — that can identify images down to the individual pixel. While this might not sound significant, it’s a vast improvement over the conventional method of “teaching” an algorithm to spot and classify objects in pictures and videos. Traditionally, computer vision algorithms learn to recognize objects (e.g., trees, cars, tumors, etc.) by being shown many examples of the objects that have been labeled by humans. STEGO does away with this time-consuming, labor-intensive workflow by instead applying a class label to each pixel in the image. The system isn’t perfect — it sometimes confuses grits with pasta, for example — but STEGO can successfully segment out things like roads, people and street signs, the researchers say. On the topic of object recognition, it appears we’re approaching the day when academic work like DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image-generating system, becomes productized. New research out of Columbia University shows a system called Opal that’s designed to create featured images for news stories from text descriptions, guiding users through the process with visual prompts.
When they tested it with a group of users, the researchers said that those who tried Opal were “more efficient” at creating featured images for articles, creating over two times more “usable” results than users without. It’s not difficult to imagine a tool like Opal eventually making its way into content management systems like WordPress, perhaps as a plugin or extension. “Given an article text, Opal guides users through a structured search for visual concepts and provides pipelines allowing users to illustrate based on an article's tone, subjects and intended illustration style,” the coauthors wrote. “[Opal] generates diverse sets of editorial illustrations, graphic assets and concept ideas.” |
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