Not just hot air: when <a href=https://www.architonic.com/en/microsite/gaggenau/3100496>Gaggenau</a> brought steam into private kitchens 23 years ago, its combi-steam oven sparked a new trend. Since then, it has been full steam ahead into the future of cooking, and to this day, the brand keeps following its trajectory of innovation. The only factors that remain contsant are Gaggenau's three focal points: the designer's vision, high-quality materials and excellent craftsmanship. Because Gaggenau is always testing modern technologies and new possibilities, further ideas are constantly being worked on in the background. This is one of the reasons why their revolutionary combi-steam oven now has convenient automatic programmes that assist amateur chefs to achieve results at the highest level. Everything has been thought of, from the intuitive TFT display to fully automatic cleaning and an automatic door opening function. At this year's <a href="https://www.fuorisalone.it/"target="_blank" r…
If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know I claimed I’d easily get a FULL kitchen reno done for $8,000. That’s a complete strip and new (budget) appliances for a little house I have.
I’m on track and it’s almost done! It’s been a long couple of months. So much DIY and things just take forever.
I’ve even painted all the doors.
Here’s a few progress shots.
It’s not a big space, and I won’t be having overheads – just a huge shelf with a rangehood in the middle.
I aim to have it mostly done in the next fortnight.
If you want to see more, follow my stories (and highlights) on Instagram.
#9 in my ranking of the theatrically released Superman films.
Filmed as a glorified television pilot before they were all that common place, Superman and the Mole Men feels like a subpar two-parter of a series. It eventually became a two-parter in the series Adventures of Superman that filmed after this, starring George Reeves as the eponymous hero, and that's where it probably appropriately belongs. This is technically a feature film, even at only 58 minutes, but it's more accurately remembered as a forgettable entry in a hardly remembered television series.
Clark Kent (Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) have been sent to the remote Texas drilling town of Silsby to do a story for the Daily Planet on the deepest drill in the world. There's a problem, though, that the company representative is trying to shut down the well because of unexplained damage to the drill equipment. He's trying to cover it up, and when Kent and Lane arrive with seemingly no story, it seems as though they are going to go home with nothing to give back to Perry White. That is, until three mole-men rise up from the hole in the ground and give an old man a heart attack. With news of happenings, limited to an old man having a heart attack, Clarke and Lane stay in Silsby to investigate and get their story.
One thing that should be noted is how little Superman is actually in this film. It's usually more of a common criticism with Batman movies that the balance of hero/alter-ego are out of whack, but it's way out of whack here. Superman is barely in the first 50 minutes of this 58-minute film, and that's probably because the problem the characters face is so small. There are larger implications that the movie never explores, but ultimately this is about two strangers wandering into a town and then trying to get out. This is hardly the stuff of Superman adventures. I well know the limits of filmmaking in the early-50s, but the very nature of this conflict is wrong for Superman. This ends up feeling like one of the more pessimistic Twilight Zone episodes than an early adventure of the man in red and blue.
Anyway, two mole-men climb up out of the hole, and they just kind of wander around until they climb into a small girl's bedroom. The small girl rolls a ball to them when her mother walks into the room and screams, alerting the town. So sets off a mole-manhunt led by Luke (Jeff Corey), out to kill the two mole-men no matter what. This is what sets off the whole rest of the film. Three guys out to murder two small men. I get it, to an extent. This is Superman standing athwart humanity and holding himself up as the American ideal, so having a counterexample for him to stand against makes sense. However, Luke ends up the only prominent member of the community, so it ends up feeling like Superman against all of humanity. I don't think that's supposed to be the point.
Luke shoots one on top of a wall, Superman saves the falling one through flight, and the other gets cornered in a remote tool shed that Luke and his buddies set fire to. Well, this sounds like a great opportunity for some daring-do from our great flying superman. He can come in at the last second and save the little guy from certain death. Except he never shows up. The mole man pries lose some floorboards and crawls out in an extended bit that really drags, feeling like we're waiting for Superman to come along. When he never does, and it's just the mole man squirrelling away, everything just feels wrong.
This is such a low stakes affair where Superman ends up doing shockingly little that I find it curious that it excited anyone enough to lead to a television series. The mole man shouldn't be saving himself. Superman should be swooping in at the last second, doing some derring-do conveyed with primitive and adorable early special effects to fly off with the little guy. It's so weird.
Anyway, the guy gets away, gets two more mole men, and they carry around a comically large thing that's supposed to be some kind of gun. Meanwhile, the hospital administrator is threatening to fire the doctor who admitted the mole man into the hospital because they don't treat dogs. It's a metaphor. However, Clark Kent convinces the doctor to perform life-saving surgery anyway, despite the threat of potential radium poisoning, and the mole man is all fixed up in time for the three new mole men to come upon the hospital, nearly kill Luke, and give Superman the time to present their healing friend and show Luke how awful he is by saving his life.
What was I expecting from this? Great art? No, not really. I was expecting competent serial-like thrills, and this fell below that. Stolid, stilted, and not really all that exciting with a curious story that seems to just be about how America is kind of awful, Superman and the Mole-Men is just not that much fun.
Israel refuses to supply Ukrainian forces with SPIK ATGM, keeping more on direct line with Russian President Vladimir Putin and agreement against Iranian assets
The Radio Information Agency [IAR] reported, based on unofficial sources, that Poland had provided Ukraine with eighteen AHS Krab self-propelled howitzers.
B-21A Raider successfully completed the first ground-based load calibration tests. The information was disseminated by Northrop Grumman on May 25 in a statement
Sydney Thomas, who was the first hire at Precursor Ventures, a seed and early-stage focused fund that backs first-time founders, is starting her own venture firm. The investor is going from principal at the firm she joined 6 years ago to the solo-partner behind a new, unnamed firm. The job move may feel like a leap in this environment — as institutionally backed investors warn that emerging fund managers will struggle to raise debut funds given LP freeze-ups — but Thomas doesn’t quite agree.
“I think it’s crazy to start a fund in any environment,” Thomas told TechCrunch. “I haven’t paid a lot of attention to a lot of the discussions because I learned recently that early-stage markets have zero correlation to the stock market more generally; and the over-indexing, or over-correction that is happening in the stock market is not actually reasonable for early-stage investors.”
Thomas declined to share what type of fund she’s raising — if it’s a 506(c) or a 506(b) — or what her average check size could look like. Her firm doesn’t yet have a website or a name, but she’ll spend the next few months heading into builder mode before opening up the inbox for investments.
I'm so excited to share that I'm jumping into the deep end and building a VC fund! My focus will be on the same thesis I've cultivated over the past 5 years – investing in + doubling down on Pre-Seed companies building technologies that make life better for real people. #LFG
While her new gig is clearly still very early stage, Thomas will focus on addressing a gap she noticed during her 6 years — and 250 companies’ worth of experience — at Precursor. She wants to build a fund that backs founders at the pre-seed stage and then doubles down on them in the seed stage.
“It sounds very normalized, but it actually isn’t,” she said. “A lot of other firms and multi-stage firms outsource the pre-seed bucket to a Scout program, and so the partners that actually have the funds aren’t as intricately involved in a founder’s everyday.” This reality means that many of the startups that may turn to a multistage firm for their first checks will get lost in the sea as senior partners don’t really connect with them for follow-on funding. The investor thinks that founders are looking for a high-conviction, pre-seed partner who is interested in leading the next deal. “And given what I’ve seen in the landscape…that is novel,” she added.
As for whether Thomas’s firm is competitive with her former employer, it’s too soon to tell. A lot of the specifics are still being figured out, but, similar to Precursor, she is focusing on first-check funding and early-stage entrepreneurs. The future firm could clearly differ by picking a specific vertical, geography or founder background as an initial focus. For what it’s worth, she’s been working on a thesis since 2017 about companies that give real people more agency over their lives. (Real People would be a good name for a VC firm, just saying.)
Thomas was hired by Charles Hudson, the founder of Precursor Ventures, in 2016 after graduating from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Hudson declined to comment but previously told TechCrunch about Thomas’s interest in the operational work of streamlining solo-GP funds, even when the firm was handling less than $5 million in committed capital. Today, Precursor has raised tens of millions in venture financing to back other startups, and Thomas, who started as an intern, is scaling the playbook elsewhere.
“It feels like getting the avengers back together,” she said, referring to limited partners that she spoke to when first at Precursor. “I'm calling up the same people that I was working with six years ago and I've just been completely floored by the support that I’ve gotten and the good will.”
The investor says she always wanted to start a fund, but it wasn’t until 2020 that she saw barriers to entry in venture actually fall in a meaningful way. The "radical shift" in the venture, as Thomas describes in a post, was underscored by big news items — like the first $1 billion Black-owned fund and the largest women-founded firm — as well as a software push from companies such as "Carta, AngelList, Flow, Allocate, Recast, Raise, Bridge, Coolwater, Strut and others."
Thomas's move means even more given the lack of diversity in partner ranks across the broader venture ecosystem. Despite progress, roles within venture have grown increasingly, and often intentionally, vague over time. At any given fund, there can be principals, investors, partners, investing principal partners and senior associate investors. Depending on the fund, each person could just go under the guise of "partner" and call it a day. Thomas was set to join the partner track at Precursor — she’s been leading deals there for 2 years — but she's jumping ahead to start a career with her own investment autonomy and decision-making authority. Thomas will transition to a venture partner role at Precursor. She said that the role means she can stick to her recurring meetings with founders but declined to comment if she will be staying on Precursor’s payroll or what her financial relationship with the firm will look like.
“Once I started [investing], in very much Virgo energy, I could not stop thinking about it,” Thomas said during the interview. “So, I decided to jump into it.”
While going to great lengths to promote itself as an environmentally conscious tech firm, Apple joined several industry associations that are "fighting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project.
As recently as 2020, the company was an active member of several "business groups that seek to thwart action on global warming," per the report, which cites Apple's memberships with Business Roundtable, BusinessEurope and the Texas Association of Business, among other associations with soot on their hands, so to speak. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
Business Roundtable was among the many corporate-backed groups to oppose the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution last year, which featured a $150 billion plan to boost the development of electric cars and generate more renewable energy. Predictably, the trade group — which also counts Alphabet, Walt Disney and Salesforce as members — fought the legislation over corporate tax hikes.
Another group supported by Apple as recently as 2020, the Texas Association of Business (TAB) came out against the "use of environmental regulatory controls that have the specific effect of promoting an alternative energy policy” in a 2019 statement. The same document laid out the group's opposition to stricter ozone and methane regulations.
"It's not clear how Apple, which calls climate change ‘the defining issue of our time,’ is able to square its association with TAB with its environmental positions," the Tech Transparency Project said. The advocacy group also called out Apple's history of fighting back right-to-repair laws, which aim to curb e-waste.
The Supreme Court just blocked a controversial law that allows Texas residents and the attorney general to sue social media companies over their content-moderation decisions. The law, HB 20, prohibits tech platforms from removing or restricting content based on "the viewpoint represented in the user's expression" and was designed with conservative claims of tech's liberal ideological bias in mind.
HB 20 passed in September but has had a rocky ride through the courts in the months that followed. It was swiftly blocked by an injunction after passing, but a trio of federal appeals court judges paused the temporary injunction earlier this month in a surprise win for the law’s proponents.
The Supreme Court ruling isn’t the final word on HB 20, which still faces a lawsuit from two tech industry groups, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice, challenging its constitutionality.
After the surprise decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unblocked the law earlier in May, the tech trade groups asked the Supreme Court to intervene with an emergency stay. Justice Samuel Alito reviewed the request and ultimately brought the case to the broader Supreme Court for the interim decision.
Justices John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Justice Alito and Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch voted against vacating the ruling.
“While I can understand the Court's apparent desire to delay enforcement of HB20 while the appeal is pending, the preliminary injunction entered by the District Court was itself a significant intrusion on state sovereignty,” Alito wrote in his dissent.
In a statement following the Supreme Court ruling, NetChoice celebrated the win while acknowledging that it is only “halfway there” as the case makes its way to district court.
“Texas's HB 20 is a constitutional trainwreck,” NetChoice Counsel Chris Marchese said. “We are relieved that the First Amendment, open internet, and the users who rely on it remain protected from Texas's unconstitutional overreach."
A diverse collection of students with big ideas will split about $95,000 in prize money after competing in T-Mobile’s Changemaker Challenge. Now, $5,000-10,000 may not sound like a lot to companies pulling in tens of millions, but for a kid just starting out, it could be the difference between pursuing and abandoning a passion project.
The contest is nationwide, asking young folks age 13-18 to submit their project, company, or however they like to define it, and five each in three categories are awarded $5,000. A winner from each category gets an additional $5,000 plus a pitch-off with T-Mo brass, and a chance for a final $5,000 check. You’d think they would throw another five large out there to hit $100,000 even… maybe next year.
There are plenty such competitions out there (last week was Microsoft’s Imagine Cup) and the ideas that surface in them are always refreshingly human in scale and intention.
Take the finalist MedTechConnect, for instance. Sounds like middleware for hospitals, but it’s two teenage cousins in Louisville who have now helped more than 2,000 senior citizens make vaccination and other healthcare appointments by walking them through the digital processes that might otherwise have puzzled them.
“Telehealth access is a basic human right. Solutions must be found, as telehealth will explode in the future… vulnerable people cannot be left behind,” they write. And they’re helping in a very hands-on way — volunteer work for the digital era, perhaps, but also just plain a good idea: a general “tech support for telehealth” for people who don’t have a savvy niece or nephew to consult on such things.
Just because folks like Jacqueline and Amelie aren’t yet quite at the Battlefield stage doesn’t mean we can’t applaud their initiative and insight. They do have one thing in common with many larger startups, however: a total lack of any plan for monetization. In this case however, that is probably a good thing.
Here’s the full list of finalists, by category with winners listed first (descriptions from T-Mo and the applicants themselves, links to their sweet little applications):
“Digital empowerment”:
Safe Teens Online (Guaynabo, Puerto Rico) A global, youth-led peer-to-peer initiative that educates teenagers on online privacy and safety, encouraging inclusivity, safe habits and emotional well-being.
Bridge the Gap Initiative (North Royalton, Ohio) A student-run organization designed to help senior citizens navigate the digital world by teaching them valuable skills like texting and video calling using their smart phones.
STEM for the South Bronx (Bronx, New York) A high school robotics team with a vision to create an education center that is open to the public to explore the world of STEM.
Scholars Program (Fairfax, Virginia) An organization whose goal is to expand STEM education and STEM opportunities for minority groups underrepresented in the field.
MedTechConnect (Louisville, Kentucky) A group working to provide technical and personal support to ensure senior citizens are informed about and have access to vaccinations and basic healthcare technology.
“Equity in Action”:
MiSendero (Santa Barbara, California) MiSendero works to meaningfully integrate Latin American English learners into their school communities by facilitating mutual learning experiences for all students.
Books N Bros (St. Louis, Missouri) A virtual and in-person book club founded to amplify African American literacy and uplift stories with Black and brown characters to encourage more diversity in books.
AUesome (Sunnyvale, California) A therapy kit and a digital app designed for parents, educators and treatment centers to support children on the autism spectrum.
Dorothy's Calculator (Los Angeles, California) A website that curates informational resources on gender identity and offers support spaces for trans and nonbinary youth in the greater LA area.
Signisa (Dobbs Ferry, New York) An organization working to develop an AI-powered sign language learning application offering free, accessible courses.
“Thriving Planet”:
Tobelli (Aurora, Illinois) Biodegradable food packaging that repurposes the cellulose found in tobacco to create a thin, safe material to help reduce waste.
STAR's Food Sovereignty Project (Leupp, Arizona) An effort to expand local gardens and teach community members how to grow and prepare their own meals and help offset food insecurity throughout the Navajo Nation reservation.
Recycle My Battery (Edison, New Jersey) A nonprofit working to reduce the environmental impact of batteries by installing free-to-use recycling bins in public locations throughout their community. (Pictured at top)
Open Source Autonomous Boat (OSAB) (Portland, Oregon) OSAB is working to design and build small autonomous vessels powered by solar energy with the purpose of monitoring and protecting ocean, river and lake environments and ecosystems.
FYDER (San Antonio, Texas) An effort to recycle plastic bulk bags into flexible, durable 3D printer filament to extend the life of otherwise discarded materials.
Some of these are pretty legit. Feel free to look me up when that pre-seed round hits, all.
Ammar Bandukwala is co-founder and CEO at Coder. He builds products that improve developer productivity.
Improving the efficiency of your software engineering team has many advantages, prime among them being the ability to make up for problems in other areas.
Whether you're facing budget constraints, having problems sourcing and retaining talent or simply wanting to boost product iteration, focusing on increasing your engineering efficiencies will yield strong results for a long time to come.
Here are four ways to start optimizing your engineering resources:
Analyze your development workflow
CI/CD pipelines are generally slow and break often, leaving developers frustrated and looking for problems.
A recent report found that 47% of surveyed companies took days to deploy CI/CD pipelines, and only 10% could do it within minutes, which is what time-efficient pipelines should be able to do.
Focusing on increasing your engineering efficiencies will yield strong results for a long time to come.
Why is that important? Puppet found that high-performing IT teams — which could deploy and push code to production faster than their peers — experienced 60 times fewer failures, and recovered from them 168 times faster. It’s paramount to have tools in place that can help you analyze and fix your development workflow.
The first step is to map out all the steps of your CI/CD pipeline. Pipelines today are becoming increasingly complicated: unit tests, integration tests, security tests, compliance checks, load tests and so on. There are countless ways things can slow down or break.
The second step is to put in place tools to monitor and analyze these pipelines. Datadog, Splunk, Athenian and open source DevLake are some tools that can help get you there.
The third step is to spot what is broken and improve what is slow. What's the PR cycle time? How often do you release? Are there specific parts of the pipeline that are problematic? These are the questions to ask, answer and act on to increase your shipping pipeline velocity.
Make your development environments reproducible
Reproducible development environments are slowly becoming an industry standard, but it can be difficult to make an existing environment replicable. Whether it's to allow a new hire to push their first commit on day one or enable your engineering organization to have an identical development environment — replicability is critical.
Containers — democratized by Docker in the last decade — offer one way to reach reproducibility. But because their focus is on application portability, some argue that it's not always the best approach for making development environments reproducible.
Amazon retires Cloud Cam to the big electronic home in the sky: It was a Big Tech kind of day today, and first up is Amazon, which informed Cloud Cam users that it will no longer support the device. You might remember that Cloud Cam was one of Amazon's first home security devices in 2017 — that is until it acquired both Ring and Blink within a year later. Amazon is winding down the service this year, and "Cloud Cammers" will get a complimentary Blink mini and a one-year subscription for their troubles.
Apple's iOS 16 leak: Our other Big Tech story involves some Apple news ahead of its WWDC event on June 6. Not sure how much people think about their iPhone's lockscreen, but Apple does, and a report says the tech giant is about to unleash a significant upgrade that may involve widgets. And Sarah hopes Apple also does something about Focus Mode.
Crypto may have a remittance payment problem: Could there be a disconnect between Andreessen Horowitz's views about cryptocurrency's current usefulness and the low-tech way people still get paid in emerging countries? Anna lays out her argument for why a16z's crypto bullishness may be a bit premature in these regions.
Apart from a couple of new funds, it's been a lively few days on the site over the long weekend, so let's make like a truffle-hunting pig and dig our snouts in:
They totally bought it: Onramp Funds, an Austin-based company providing financing to e-commerce sellers, secured $42 million in equity and credit to expand its working capital offering, Christine reports.
Market research firm ETR contacted 1,200 IT leaders who oversee a yearly collective IT budget of approximately $570 billion to learn more about their planned spending over the coming year.
Although year-over-year spending is projected to rise just 6.7%, “the need for experienced IT personnel has accelerated, and hiring demand in the space has reached the highest level we have ever seen,” writes Erik Bradley, ETR’s chief analyst.
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Big Tech Inc.
Payment installments are ‘in’: If you didn't already know, and thanks to a new partnership between Affirm and Stripe, consumers will see more "buy now, pay later" options when they check out. Though no specific number was written, Mary Ann reports the new offering applies to "businesses that use Stripe's payments tech" — meaning, millions. And, with the BNPL space as competitive as it is, that certainly gives Affirm a new revenue stream to work with.
Netflix’s password woes or 'whoas,' both apply: There seems to be some confusion in Peru around Netflix's new policy on account sharing. For Netflix, that meant anyone using someone's account in the same building. However, a recent survey brought to light two things: one, some subscribers in Peru weren't notified of the extra charges before being charged them, and two, Netflix's own customer service agents reported not quite understanding the new policy and helped subscribers get around it. Netflix hopes to roll out the policy this year, but maybe it needs to clarify some things first.
TikTok secretly created a new feature; let's see what happens: For those of you who dislike all of the words on top of your TikTok videos, relief is coming in the way of a new feature being tested called "clear mode." When engaged, it eliminates those pesky usernames, captions and audio information, and in some cases the like, comments and share buttons, too, for what Aisha noted would be "a completely distraction-free viewing experience."
The appetite for genomic data continues to rise in the field of biotech and pharmaceutical research, but cost is still a factor — even sequencing a full genome now costs as little as $1,000. But with claims of reducing that cost by another order of magnitude to $100, Ultima Genomics may even further accelerate this economy.
Ultima says that its sequencing machine and software platform, the UG 100, can perform a complete sequencing of a human genome in about 20 hours, with precision comparable to existing options, but does so at a far lower cost per “gigabase,” which is to say per million base pairs of DNA analyzed.
The technical advances may not be entirely intelligible to people who are not already familiar with how DNA is sequenced, and not being an expert myself I won’t attempt a full explanation. But it helps to understand that essentially the DNA, amplified in a reagent (so basically a lot of the same DNA in a solution), is passed through small channels where fragments bind to certain microscopic mechanisms, which prepare it to be imaged by a lot of base detectors operating in parallel. These sequences are then reassembled into the whole genome by matching their ends together.
Ultima’s claimed advance is threefold. First, rather than having the reagent travel down fluidic channels that must be flushed afterwards in preparation for the next step, the micromachinery (“a dense array of electrostatic landing pads”) is etched onto a 200mm silicon wafer. This well-known process uses cheap, readily available stock and can be mass manufactured.
But more importantly, it enables the reagent to be simply deposited in the center of the wafer, which spins to distribute it evenly across its entire surface using centrifugal force. This is efficient, mechanically simple and allows the resulting sequences to be read “during rotation of the wafer in a continuous process, analogous to reading a compact disc.”
Diagram of the UG 100’s open water process, with an image of the wafer’s micropatterned surface. Image Credits: Ultima Genomics
The second advance is a little more arcane, having to do with the process of preparing and directly reading the DNA — rather than replacing the bases with more machine-readable ones or relying on dicey particle-level imagery, a clever combination of the two is struck. It’s less destructive to the original strands but also doesn’t require error-prone measurements like individual photon counts.
The third advance involves machine learning to accelerate the process of turning optical data (the CD-style scanning signal) into usable data. A deep convolutional neural network trained on multiple genomes and fragments is tuned based on a sample from the genome being sequenced, then set to work verifying and assembling all the tiny pieces of data into the whole genome. This process speeds things up and eliminates error.
There is considerable margin for improvement on the process, primarily in the size and density of the wafer and its surface, leading to improved throughput. This could push the price lower, but for now a 90% reduction is more than enough to go to market with.
Founder and CEO Gilad Almogy (also the first author of many on the paper quoted above), said that the company is currently working with early access partners to put out some early proof of concept studies showing the capabilities of the sequencing technique. The first of these, collaborations with the Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute, the Baylor College of Medicine and more are being presented soon or currently available as preprints.
Broader commercial deployment is expected in 2023 (final pricing is undetermined but will likely reflect the advantage conferred by this method over others). I asked Almogy what he felt were the areas of the biotech and medical industry that will benefit most from this new capability.
“We believe genomics will be the first line diagnostic across diseases,” he said, pointing out that it is complementary to many existing techniques and only improves understanding of them.
But the far lower cost could lead to genomic population studies, improving our general understanding of systematic variance in the genome across different groups and over time. “We're already talking with partners who are interested to do more genomes, but also RNA expression and proteomics at a population scale, said Almogy. This is also key to epigenetic studies that look at methylation and other ways our DNA changes as we age.
“Deep oncology,” or using genetic profiling to characterize and fight cancers, may be one of the earliest clinical applications — and in fact Isabl is way ahead of him on that one. The company’s quick turnaround whole-genome tumor sequencing could be made even quicker.
Similarly, single cell sequencing (e.g. a blood cell or neuron) could help in both clinical and research environments, but “the cost of sequencing also prevents us from routinely using single cell sequencing for applications like immune profiling,” Almogy said. Reducing the cost so considerably could change that equation.
With sequencing reduced from a billion-dollar process to one you could get done monthly if you wanted to and have it covered by insurance, the biotech industry seems to be on the precipice of yet another data explosion, beyond the scale of the unprecedented one we are already in the midst of. With companies like Ultima multiplying data volumes, the next opportunity is likely to be not in production but management and utilization of this newly deepened sea of information.
Following its $135 million Series D last week, Monte Carlo became the latest unicorn in a fast-rising category: data observability, which the startup defines as “an end-to-end approach to enable teams to deliver more reliable and trustworthy data.”
If you are wondering how serious data quality issues are, Monte Carlo CEO Barr Moses has an answer: “Data quality issues still plague even the most data-driven companies. Just a few weeks ago, Unity, the popular gaming software company, cited 'bad data' for a $110 million impact on their ads business.”
Moses’ startup isn’t the only one to go after the data observability market opportunity. On the same day that Monte Carlo disclosed its newly minted $1.6 billion valuation, competitor Cribl confirmed its unicorn status with a new round of funding.
“While smaller than Cribl's Series C, which came close to eclipsing $200 million, the Series D values the company at $2.5 billion post-money, according to a source. That's up from $1.5 billion as of August 2021,” TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers noted.
Any three-digit deal would be noteworthy in isolation. Two of them in the same space, even more so. But what really caught our attention is that Monte Carlo’s and Cribl’s deals were announced now, right in the middle of a broad startup downturn.
We know that large rounds can take time to get both closed and disclosed, meaning that Monte Carlo’s and Cribl’s Series D rounds might reflect the state of the market a few weeks ago. But there’s a more recent data point to take into account: hiring, which is still happening.
On one side of the table, companies are still filling the kind of positions that create demand for data quality solutions. “Despite the volatility, data engineers and analytics jobs are increasing and companies are continuing to hire at record numbers for these roles,” Moses told TechCrunch. On the other, data observability startups themselves are hiring. Not just unicorns like Cribl and Monte Carlo, but also competitors like seed-funded startup Sifflet.
Could data observability be recession-proof? To find out, we talked to Moses, as well as Sifflet CEO Salma Bakouk. To complete their firsthand knowledge, we collected notes from two investors familiar with the space: FirstMark partner Matt Turck and Data Community Fund general partner Pete Soderling.
The picture that emerged from our conversations is that tailwinds for the data observability category as a whole might not translate into wins for each and every startup in the space. Why? Let’s explore.
Rising with the data tide
When we mention tailwinds for data observability, it’s because demand is driven by a broader trend. TL;DR: More and more companies are becoming data-driven, and therefore facing the kind of data quality issues that data observability startups are made to address.
Sizing a growing opportunity is never easy, but in our conversations, we heard that data obs could soon be a universal problem for large companies.
“I’m a big believer that every company, both tech and non-tech, is going to need to become not just a software company, but a data company,” Turck said. “That’s why people are excited about the opportunity — it’s a very large market and a huge trend.”
That the addressable market for data observability is large is one thing. But it would be meaningless if target companies themselves weren’t seeing reliable data as a need. According to Moses, that’s increasingly the case in all kinds of sectors.
A federal antitrust lawsuit over the long-shuttered alternative app store called Cydia has now been given the green light to proceed, after its initial complaint was dismissed. The Cydia app store, which once featured apps and other tweaks that weren’t permitted by Apple’s official App Store policies, is suing Apple over its alleged unlawful monopoly over iOS app distribution — a monopoly that contributed to the end of Cydia’s business, it says.
The plaintiff, SaurikIT LLC, maker of the rival app store, originally filed its legal challenge back in 2020, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — the same judge who recently issued the Apple-Epic ruling now under appeal — granted Apple’s motion to dismiss the first complaint on the grounds that its claims were outside the statute of limitations. But the judge allowed Cydia to amend its complaint, which was filed in January 2022.
That new complaint is now moving forward, as Judge Gonzalez Rogers has rejected Apple’s motion to dismiss it. Apple had again argued Cydia’s allegations fell outside the four-year window allowed under federal antitrust law, reported Reuters, which first noted the lawsuit’s update this past Friday.
In Cydia’s amended complaint, it says Apple more recently implemented design changes that prevented iOS app distributors from being able to provide apps that were usable on iOS devices. These changes were rolled out from 2018 to 2021, the complaint states, which brings the legal challenge into the permitted time frame for an antitrust argument.
More specifically, the complaint cites 2018 and 2019 technical restrictions like runtime code modification prevention, pointer authentication, physical map codesigning, memory tagging extensions and other control mechanisms designed to target Cydia and other alternative app stores from delivering functional apps. It also references Apple’s contractual restrictions, which prevent developers from using alternative payment mechanisms. And it points out that Apple’s numerous restrictions have impacts on other app stores besides itself, like the newer AltStore.
“…[the] plaintiff has plausibly alleged that Apple engaged in changes in its technological updates, which occurred within the four years preceding the filing of the lawsuit,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in the new filing. “Accordingly, to the extent plaintiff's claims rely on Apple's technological updates to exclude Cydia from being able to operate altogether, those claims are timely,” the decision read.
Cydia is ultimately looking to recoup damages and injunctive relief and wants to move toward a trial by jury. Apple has been given 21 days to respond to the amended complaint.
While Apple continues to battle with iOS developers on other fronts, including with the ongoing Epic appeal, the Cydia lawsuit is particularly interesting because it’s focused on whether third-party app stores have a legal right to exist and do business. Cydia is arguing they do, pointing to the decisions made by the U.S. Copyright Office which declared iPhone jailbreaking legal in 2010. Because Apple lost the case to make jailbreaking illegal, it instead moved to make jailbreaking an impossibility through both technical and contractual means, Cydia is arguing.
It’s a creative tactic to reference the jailbreaking decision and one that allows Cydia to point to all sorts of other changes Apple has made in the years since that ruling. For example, the complaint contrasts how Apple has moved against some rival app stores like AltStore and Cydia as well as against cloud gaming services, but then permitted certain apps to distribute apps, as with WeChat and its distribution of “mini-programs.” Arguably, these are all very different types of experiences, but the case being made is that Apple is making choices designed to restrict certain rivals and not others.
While the complaint itself reads a bit like a grab-bag of antitrust concerns — some of which really have nothing to do with Cydia’s right to operate. At one point, Cydia complains about the $99 per year Apple developer fee; at another, it pleads Spotify’s case for pages — which almost makes you wonder who’s paying Cydia’s legal fees!
Still, it’s interesting to have Cydia in the fight, given the outsized role it’s played in iOS innovation over the years.
As longtime iPhone jailbreakers likely recall, Cydia was once a popular and sizable marketplace filled with apps and tweaks that skirted Apple’s official rules. To use Cydia, consumers would first have to jailbreak their iPhones to circumvent Apple’s security protections — a process that required jailbreaking teams to constantly search for new ways to unlock consumer devices to permit sideloading apps.
Though jailbreaking was sometimes associated with giving users a way to download pirated apps, Cydia also contributed to the development of iOS itself.
Long before users were customizing their iPhones with widgets and custom icons, for instance, Cydia users were downloading theme managers like Winterboard to overhaul their iOS look and feel with custom themes. A popular Cydia tweak SBSettings was iPhone’s first Control Center, before there was a Control Center. Cydia users were also first to have access to things like custom keyboards, private web browsing, dynamic wallpapers, native QR code scanning, screenshot previews, dark modes, auto-updating apps, a card-based app switcher, the ability to delete stock apps, screen recording tools and so much more.
However, Cydia’s ability to actually win this case could be more of a longshot, given that Gonzalez Rogers already declared last year in the Epic ruling that Apple was not a monopolist.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer revealed details during an investor call on Thursday, May 26, about the company's plans to spin off its Starz streaming unit by the end of the summer. He also alluded that there could be more M&A (mergers and acquisitions) for both Lionsgate and Starz if the two were separated.
Feltheimer said, "We are targeting an announcement of our plan by the end of the summer and expect a transaction could close as early as our fiscal fourth quarter." He added that the company is engaged in conversations with bankers and "a number of potential strategic partners."
Although he did not disclose who these possible partners were, the confirmation follows earlier reports. In an earnings call back in the fall of 2021, the company announced it was exploring strategic options for the cable network and streamer as it failed to provide a boost for Lionsgate. One solution was to sell all or a part of the asset. Michael Burns, Lionsgate's COO said, "While we continue to realize substantial synergies from bringing Lionsgate and Starz together, we also see the opportunity to potentially unlock significant shareholder value under a scenario where investors had the ability to value our studio assets and Starz separately.”
Feltheimer noted last week that the expectation right now is that Lionsgate will retain some ownership stake in Starz, but "anything can happen," he said. DirecTV is among many media companies looking to purchase a stake, along with Roku and Apollo Global Management, which have teamed up on a bid. Another potential suitor is Canal+, a division of French conglomerate Vivendi.
Lionsgate acquired Starz in 2016 for $4.4 billion, and over time, has steadily grown its customer base, which grew by 4.8 million for the quarter, reaching a total of 35.8 million. The CEO boasted during last week’s call that they predict Starz to hit 50 million to 60 million global subscribers (TV and streaming) by the end of fiscal 2025. The healthy numbers are another reason why Lionsgate is choosing this moment to send Starz out on its own.
Feltheimer emphasized that Starz is not aiming to compete with bigger streaming rivals, but is keeping it as a niche, ad-free service to be "layered" on top of them.
While Starz has strong content, the new company will certainly require support from other partners to succeed. We will have to wait to see which company believes that Starz has enough value to cough up the necessary costs.
The creator economy is “burning up,” and the Jonas Brothers are cashing in.
Launching today with the help of these former teen heartthrobs, Scriber is a creator subscription company geared toward more established figures in entertainment (… like the Jonas Brothers). Joe, Kevin and Nick aren’t just Scriber’s first creators — they also have equity in the company.
Besides catering to more established artists, Scriber differentiates itself from other creator subscription products by functioning solely via SMS. The creator will post a phone number on their social media platforms for fans to text, and after messaging that number, fans can pay a subscription fee via Apple Pay or Stripe to get exclusive content sent to their phone. For this launch with the JoBros, fans will pay $4.99 a month, but the service is only available in the U.S. right now.
Team Jonas is now on Scriber Text GO to 1-844-228-4544
Since Scriber is not an app on the App Store, the platform doesn’t have to pay fees to Apple or Google Play. Instead, creators pay Scriber $1 per month for each subscriber (so if they have 10,000 subscribers, they pay $10,000). The creator also covers Stripe’s 2.9% processing fee.
App Store fees have been a major pain point for creator-focused startups. Fanhouse, for example, instituted a coin system to circumvent Apple’s 30% cut — fans buy coins on the web, then use them in the app to subscribe to creators (they can also pay via the app, but they’ll be charged extra to cover the fees).
Scriber creators retain rights to the content that they upload, and the platform tries to protect the exclusive material from leaking by giving each subscriber a unique link to view uploads. So, if they share that link online, Scriber can easily figure out the source of the leak. This may not help in the case of screen recording and re-uploading videos, though.
Scriber comes courtesy of journalist-turned-entrepreneur Brian Goldsmith, who is serving as CEO and providing most of the startup capital. According to a report from Axios, Goldsmith says he hopes that the already wealthy celebrities he partners with will use the platform to raise money for philanthropy. The Jonas Brothers are planning to donate about half of their earnings to causes they care about.
This isn’t the Jonas Brothers’ first rodeo when it comes to startups and investments. The three musicians invested in Snackpass, a social food app, and OLIPOP, a celebrity-backed sparkling tonic company.
Kevin Jonas is a founder himself — he launched Yood, a now-defunct food app, and The Blu Market, an influencer marketing company.
I would love to see more companies like Artiphon in the world. Hardware startups with clever ideas and a knack for bringing them to market. Back in November 2020, I spent a good bit of time with the company's handheld synth/sampler/instrument. It didn't turn me into Wendy Carlos, but it helped pass a few dark pandemic hours by firing up some music-making neurons.
The device's strength lies in its extraordinarily low barrier of entry. No lessons or musical aptitude are required — just a free hand or two and the desire to noodle around with sound. Today the device is getting a sequel, in the form of the fittingly named Orba 2. The product looks identical to its predecessor, with a round base and eight touch-sensitive pads arranged in triangles like pizza slices.
Image Credits: Artiphon
The device largely functions the same as the Orba 1, as well, but features a revamped sound engine with new built-in audio samples. Those are augmented by built-in sensors, which let you modify the sound through talking, shaking and spinning the device. There are nine gestures in all. Users also can sample and loop directly on the device or with the connected Orba app.
"We want people to express themselves musically in their everyday lives," CEO Mike Butera says in a release. "We've dreamed of allowing anyone to play any sound they can imagine, anywhere they go, without worrying about historical instrument skills or abstract music theory. Orba 2 finally makes that possible."
All told, the sampler can record up to five minutes/128 bars on device, coupled with a new feature that helps snap playing to a beat. Clearly the end game is making the system as dummy proof as humanly possible. Though, for more advanced users, it also doubles as a MIDI controller (via USB-C or Bluetooth) for apps including GarageBand, Ableton Live, Logic Pro and Pro Tools.
The Orba 2 runs $150 — notably a $50 premium over its very accessible predecessor. Artiphon has also added a number of new features since the release of the first Orba, including the ability to utilize the device as a video editor.
DeLorean released fresh details and images of its Alpha 5 EV, a gull-winged electric vehicle that the company’s owners hope will resurrect the long defunct brand and possibly set the direction for more electric models.
The company’s — and the EV’s — big public moment won’t come until later this summer at the Monterey Car Week. But the brand’s owners, anxious to capitalize on interest in EVs and perhaps spur a little momentum ahead of the event, released images and specs that reveal the Alpha 5 retains the gull-winged, two-door frame featured in the “Back to the Future” trilogy, but features a curvier, sleeker silhouette and room for four passengers.
So far, the company’s intentions for reviving the DeLorean brand after a long hiatus — as well as how and where it will fund and built the Alpha 5 — are not clear. DeLorean CEO and former Karma Automotive executive Joost de Vries, who joined the company in December, is scheduled to speak Friday at the Electrify Expo EV festival in Long Beach, California. The expectation is that de Vries will share more information about the company’s wider ambitions for electrification.
DeLorean said Tuesday that the Alpha 5 sports car will post figures typical for a performance EV, zipping from 0 to 60 mph in just under three seconds on its way to a top speed of 155 mph. The company estimates that the car’s 100kWh battery will be able to travel more than 300 miles on a full charge.
The original DeLorean Motor Company, maker of the time-traveling DMC-12 that starred in the 1980s “Back to the Future” trilogy, was founded in Detroit in 1975 by John DeLorean, the Pontiac designer behind the GTO and Firebird. It went defunct seven years later.
The revived DeLorean Motor Company that designed the Alpha 5 is owned by a Texas-based DeLorean restorer that bought rights to the brand in 1995 and appears to be focused on electric models.
The EV was designed by Italdesign, which also helped shape the original DMC-12 four decades ago. Looking at the released images, the Alpha 5 retains the gull-winged, two-door frame from the movie but features a curvier, sleeker silhouette. It also gains two seats, a pair of infotainment screens and a frunk — but loses the flux capacitor.
The car will rely upon a mix of "artificial support" and human control, according to the company's website. This seems to suggest there will be some kind of advanced driver assistance system, but it’s unclear what the specific features will be.
DeLorean has not released details on its price, launch or production run. It will premiere at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, on August 18.
The company did not immediately respond for comment Tuesday.
Despite economic turmoil in the tech world, an Oakland-based startup shows that moonshots are still getting funded. Felt, co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk, wants to disrupt the role of maps in society, and rethink how we think about the medium. The startup allows users to build a map with datasets integrated into it, and work with each other to showcase impact in a less static way than your average Google maps query.
Despite a massive mission — proving that maps are a forgotten yet fundamental medium worth renovating — the co-founders cited proven business models from Figma and Notion, both valued in the billions, as reason to believe in their work. The aforementioned companies both succeeded in rolling out to users for personal use, then pivoting to the enterprise, a playbook that Felt wants to follow (and that VCs can certainly speak the language of).
“That kind of business model and go to market is — I don’t want to say immune, but is a little bit removed from the kind of market fluctuations we’re seeing,” Hashemi said. “It’s really not about consumer spending, it’s not about an advertising business, it’s just day in day out work that businesses are relying on.”
The argument worked. Today, the collaborative software startup tells TechCrunch that it recently closed a $15 million Series A led by Footwork, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Moxxie Ventures and Designer Fund.
Since its seed round, a $4.5 million investment announced in August 2021, Felt has grown its team from seven people to 15 people across Hawaii, California, Missouri, Vermont, Canada and Spain. One of Felt's team members — Mamata Akella — is even an in-house cartographer — a job title you don't too often see as part of the early-stage startup ranks.
The funding, and team growth, means that Felt thinks it is ready for the next phase of growth: feedback. The startup launched its platform publicly today after weeks of private beta testing with over 1,000 people. The public beta combined 50 layers of data, such as earthquake history or wildfire data, with a clean interface meant to empower people to draw their own maps. That in and of itself is a feat, the co-founders say, given that data is often fragmented, inaccurate or just straight-up badly formatted.
Image Credits: Felt
Felt is meant to be a continuation of the collaborative software movement underscored by everyday tools like Google Docs and top companies like Notion and Figma, as well as a sequel to Hashemi's previous company, Remix. Bought by Via for $100 million, Remix is a city transportation planning startup born out of Code for America Hackathon. Felt was the follow-up story, this time taking mapping beyond cities. From August to now, the co-founders say that Felt went from a tech demo to a product with more "commercial legs," including richer, fact-checked datasets, fewer bugs and, hopefully, a faster load time.
Felt launched with a climate-focused angle, yet that focus feels broader today. Hashemi said that the company is also investing in ways to serve other use cases, such as the sciences need to understand ocean landscape, or the national park's wanting a better way to track trails.
Image Credits: Felt
Duruk said they no longer view climate as a single industry, but instead as more of a horizontal idea. "Now, every single industry that has a physical presence on Earth has to have climate and weather and fires and floods in mind…it impacts everything." One example that Hashemi offered up was how maps can help people fleeing the war in Ukraine. How do people offer up houses, get matched or see what's available?
A lot of these collaboration use cases, he explained, "require a larger audience using the product and pushing the boundaries.”
The next chapter should help Felt with prioritizing which features to launch next or identifying surprising use cases, but it should also give it the pressure to answer some of its most looming challenges, such as how to moderate maps or build processes that limit bad actors. These are massive questions to answer before maps can become the next big medium. The startup is launching with a moderation-first approach in the beginning, banning any kind of criminal and illegal activity such as “the next insurrection map.” Duruk thinks that the public launch will show what gaps they have in their understanding.
"You need to moderate," said Duruk, who previously worked at Uber and data security company VGS. "I do not believe in opening something up to the world just filled with hopes and dreams, a small number of bad actors can make the experience awful for everyone and turn the platform into a bad place."
The startup has some well-powered competition. Other than Google Maps and Apple maps, social maps app Zenly, a company owned by Snap, recently announced that it is creating its own mapping data and engine. After three years of work, Zenly wants to integrate social data and mapping data into one frame; focusing less on being “pixel perfect” and more on rolling out a different type of map.
For Felt, this is both competition and an affirmation. While Zenly is going for consumers, Felt wants to be enterprise ready. The success of both efforts depends on the world’s appetite for a new way to map their thoughts. Even if it requires more than going from point A to point B.
It's been a bumpy ride for Netflix recently, and the announcement that it will be charging for password sharing hasn't gone as smoothly as it might have hoped, a new report claims. Subscribers in Peru who were opted in to new password-sharing restrictions have reported confusion over Netflix’s loose definition of "household” and noted the lack of clarity around the differing charges imposed on consumers.
Global tech news site Rest of World informally surveyed more than a dozen Netflix users in Peru, after Netflix’s March announcement that it would be asking customers in the country — as well as in Chile and Costa Rica — to pay extra when sharing their account passwords outside their homes. Central and South America represent Netflix's lowest revenue per user, which helps to explain the markets’ selection.
The majority of those surveyed by Rest of World in Peru said that they have still not received uniform messaging around the new charges, even though it's been over two months after the policy was first announced. Some subscribers experienced the price increase and then canceled their Netflix accounts as a result. But others who ignored the message about the new policy were able to share their accounts across households without an extra charge, they claimed.
An anonymous Netflix customer service representative reportedly told Rest of World that if a customer called in to argue that a member of their immediate household was using the account from a different location, the rep was instructed to tell them that person could continue to use the account via a verification code without experiencing an extra charge. This basically meant those who called in for support could ignore the new policy and continue to share the subscription without repercussions. The rep said members of their team were often confused about the policy as well.
In a statement to the outlet, the company said that the rollout has been “progressive” and that subscribers across the three test markets might be paying different charges.
A Netflix spokesperson told TechCrunch, “While we started working on paid sharing over 18 months ago, we have been clear for five years that ‘A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household‘. The millions of members who are actively sharing an account in these countries have been notified by email, but given the importance of this change, we are ramping up in-product notifications more slowly. We’re pleased with the response to date.”
According to Statista, in 2021, Netflix generated approximately US$3.58 billion in revenue with its operations across Latin America. The figure accounts for around 13.4% of Netflix’s global revenue that year, which in total amounted to approximately $30 billion.
In Peru, two additional people using a subscriber's account but living in another apartment, city or country are charged 7.9 soles (about $2.99) per month each. This option is cheaper than creating new Netflix accounts, as Peruvian subscribers pay 24.90 soles (around $6.80) for a basic plan.
However, after the particularly harsh Q1 2022 that saw Netflix's first drop in overall subscribers since 2011, the streaming giant has made it clear that it will charge extra for those that split a subscription across multiple addresses. Approximately 33% of Netflix subscriptions are shared in multiple households, per Leichtman Research Group. Netflix confirmed this in its recent earnings report by saying approximately 100 million households have freeloaders logged in to the streaming service account.
Analysts predict that Netflix subscriber growth has peaked, and the company seems to have hit a ceiling of 220 million subscribers. In addition, the streamer has laid off around 150 workers after losing 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter.
Given the confusion around early adopters’ firsthand experience with the new feature, Netflix will likely need to revise the password-sharing system before launching it worldwide. The company intends to extend the rollout at the end of 2022, in tandem with the launch of a cheaper ad-supported tier.
Updated May 31, 2022, 5:15 p.m. with a comment from Netflix spokesperson.
Back in 2018, a struggling Sphero needed a change. Post-Disney IP deal, life hadn't been easy for the Colorado robotic toy firm, so it looked to a potentially lucrative new sector: STEM education. History, as Mark Twain may or may not have ever said, rhymes. The source of the quote is uncertain, but the truth is extremely applicable in the world of startups, as Sphero spinout Misty Robotics is undergoing its own educational pivot.
Misty is one of those interesting ideas that was never able to fully find purchase. After a ouple of years looking to sell its adorable little robot platform to software and hardware developers, the company was ultimately acquired by the strangely named Swedish firm, Furhat. The two teams spoke of a "unified vision" when the news was announced in January, and this product relaunch is seemingly the first step toward achieving it.
"There was always great synergy between Furhat and Misty and with this launch you can see how that's playing out," Furhat co-founder and CEO Samer Al Moubayed says in a release."We've updated Misty's conversational capabilities with a focus on natural language understanding and conversational skills. We also believe that social robots need to reach a much wider sector of society, and be part of the educational system, to prepare the next generation of talent. Misty is designed especially to optimize learning and engagement, and has both an attractive and rich design, and very advanced sensors and hardware, making it unique in the market today."
Image Credits: Furhat Robotics
The move reconfirms something we've known for a long time: consumer robots are hard. Even as the technology is taking off across a wide range of sectors, from fulfillment to construction to healthcare, no one's been able to fully crack the code, outside of some robot vacuums. So Misty and Furhat are, understandably, going where the money is: specifically, education and research.
The teams cite more intuitive development tools that use Python, coupled with a drag and drop interface as a key toward opening accessibility to more educators and students. That's coupled with a new version of the robot's SDK. Furhat is looking to expand Misty's presence in the U.S. and its native Sweden, while targeting researchers in healthcare, who are looking toward social robotics as a method for working with patients with conditions like Alzheimer's and autism.
Just how hard will it be for some high-flying unicorns to go public? The question gets more serious and worrisome by the week.
To understand how much the late-stage market has changed in the last few months, we’re once again pulling public market data that we will contrast against mega-unicorn Databricks’ known results. Recall that we executed this experiment in February, when the data analytics company announced that it closed 2021 with $800 million in ARR, and in April, when we took a look at the company under the harsher lights of a declining market for software revenues.
That downward trend continued, meaning that it’s time to take another pass at the exercise.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
I promise that we’re not picking on Databricks for any reason other than that it committed the well-known sin of being more transparent than is traditional during its growth phase. By that I mean it shared a host of data points during its life as a private company. For that we are thankful. Sadly, because many of its peers preferred to hide their — let’s be clear: lesser — results, we are left using Databricks as our benchmark for how much things have changed in SaaS land.
It’s never great to punish the honest for their candor, but we also can’t avoid working to understand the current market — it’s our job. So, more with Databricks data today, even if we are reaching the point of cruelty.
So let’s chat results and valuations and see just how much work Databricks might have ahead of it to go public. Keep in mind that extension rounds at prior terms are coming back into vogue (Gusto is one example of this trend among the multi-unicorns), so we could see the company collect quiet capital without a public repricing before it does list. Our eyes, of course, are peeled.
Now, let’s have some fun.
A historical tour of Databricks’ valuation multiples
Pulling from our February and April coverage, a historical rundown of Databricks’ valuation and fundraising:
Q3 2019: $200 million run rate, $6.2 billion valuation — 31x run-rate multiple
End of 2020: $425 million ARR, $28 billion valuation — 66x ARR multiple
August 2021: $600 million ARR, $38 billion valuation — 63x ARR multiple
End of 2021: $800 million+ ARR, $38 billion valuation — 47.5x ARR multiple
Knowing what we did in April about the historical growth of Databricks’ revenue, we estimated that the company was at around $1 billion in ARR at that date, so we’ll go ahead and calculate the following ratios using both $1 billion and $1.1 billion ARR numbers for the company. You can decide which you think is a fairer estimate.
Now, at $1.0 billion in ARR, Databricks is worth 38x its annual recurring revenue. At $1.1 billion, 34.5x. That’s not a huge difference, mind, so no matter how you handicap the company’s recent growth, Databricks is worth around mid-to-high 30x its current top line. The question is how far from market reality that number is today.
Ahead of Apple’s big developer conference on June 6, WWDC, new information about what’s in store for iOS 16 has come to light. According to leaks reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, iOS users may expect to see new features like an upgraded lockscreen as well as updated first-party apps, including Messages and Health, updates to notifications, iPad multitasking features and more.
The report described the software as a “fairly significant” upgrade — which is notable given the last two updates included sizable changes, as well. With iOS 14, for example, iPhone users gained support for home screen widgets, leading to a homescreen customization craze that still sees widget and themes apps like Brass, Themify, ScreenKit and others topping the Graphics & Design charts. Last year’s iOS 15 upgrade, meanwhile, delivered Focus Modes — a new way to control what and who is allowed to interrupt you and when.
This time around, Bloomberg says Apple will give particular attention to its lockscreen, a bit of under-utilized real estate currently which offers only the date, time and buttons to launch the Flashlight or Camera apps.
In iOS 16, Apple aims to support wallpapers that have widget-like capabilities, the report claims. This could indicate that Apple is considering merging what’s today to the left of the homescreen — the “Today View” with its lineup of widgets — directly into the lockscreen itself. This would make sense as the Today View is meant to offer easy access to information you may need throughout the day, like upcoming calendar appointments, the weather or widgets that can be tapped to open favorite apps. But the Today View isn’t within easy reach because you still have to swipe right to see it, and many users don’t bother to do so.
This change could be beneficial to app developers who support widgets, as it gives them another shot at grabbing users’ attention in a high-profile area. Plus, it would give the homescreen customization app developers a way to extend their offerings. That is, users could now download full theme sets with sets of widgets designed both for the lockscreen and homescreen, along with matching wallpapers and icon themes.
In addition, the updated lockscreen could be preparing for a future where the lockscreen has an always-on display, similar to Apple Watch, though this would likely be tied to updated hardware, the report said. This mode may be exclusive to high-end iPhones at launch, including the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max — if given the green light.
Other expected features with iOS 16 include an updated Messages app with more “social networking-like functionality,” which may include some sort of update around audio messages. (Please, Apple, allow us to play audio messages at faster speeds like on WhatsApp!)
The Health app will also be updated, but the report didn’t have further details as to what would be changed. In addition, watchOS will gain changes to watch faces and a low-power mode, while iPadOS will gain changes to windowing and multitasking.
One feature that wasn’t touched on, but is in need of improvement, is iPhone’s Focus Mode. While a solid concept in theory, in practice many who have tried to set up Focus Mode have ended up missing important calls and texts, as well as critical notifications, that had come in via numbers or apps that hadn’t been allowed to punch through “Do Not Disturb” settings for the given mode. Setting up Focus Mode takes a lot of work, too — what could be better, perhaps, would be a Siri-powered Focus Mode that asks users to train the setting over a period of time, allowing it to learn what you consider important versus a distraction for particular times of “focus,” like your workday or personal time. Siri could also suggest Focus Modes based on how you already use apps on your phone or how often and when you “mute” notifications from specific apps.
The Bloomberg report didn’t note any planned changes for Focus Mode, but it would be a big oversight on Apple’s part to not roll out some tweaks to this system with the software update.
Apple’s WWDC 2022 keynote will livestream on June 6.
Erik Bradley brings more than two decades of experience in creating research platforms to his role as chief strategist at ETR, a market research firm specializing in enterprise technology data.
Over the past three years, the chaos of the pandemic has been felt everywhere.
IT managers suddenly found themselves supporting legions of work-from-home employees; planned system expansions and upgrades had to be put on hold; organizations needed new technologies to accommodate changing workforce requirements.
Now with people returning to offices, IT priorities are shifting rapidly, especially given the looming recession, high inflation, and stressed supply chains. Our latest research report offers some insight into where companies are allocating their IT spend in 2022.
For our latest survey, we polled 1,200 IT leaders, representing roughly $570 billion in annual IT spending.
Every year, we poll IT decision-makers worldwide about their plans for the coming year. For our latest survey, we polled 1,200 IT leaders, representing roughly $570 billion in annual IT spending. We asked them about their technology evaluations and their spending intentions to learn what they have planned for their enterprise networks.
Here are eight of the IT spending trends we deemed most significant:
IT spend projections soften
Overall, spending in the space has slowed from previous predictions. The 2022 survey projects IT spending to rise 6.7% year-over-year (YOY), down from December, when growth was expected to be 8.7% YOY.
Our research shows that organizational plans to begin new IT projects have stalled since the start of 2022. At the same time, the need for experienced IT personnel has accelerated, and hiring demand in the space has reached the highest level we have ever seen.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that more than 667,600 IT jobs will be added between 2020 and 2030, representing a 13% growth rate. The lack of experienced professionals is an issue that enterprises of all sizes in all markets will have to deal with for some time.
IT executives are advised to place a higher emphasis on employee retention as well as continuing to recruit new talent.
SMBs are growing faster
The SMB sector is showing slightly stronger growth than large enterprises. For vendors targeting the SMB market, now is an excellent time to increase marketing spend and fortify lead generation and content marketing. Smaller accounts may yield more sales in the near term.
Energy and utilities spend more on IT
Interestingly, the energy sector, which is usually conservative in its IT spending, is showing the highest budget increase. Education shows the lowest projected IT spending. Vendors should consider shifting marketing budgets to target verticals that project higher expenditures.
Mental health issues have come into a clearer focus amid the pandemic. Depression became endemic, but it still too often goes undetected. Even when it does, healthcare providers struggle to meet demand. Two women engineers — both of whom experienced depression and had trouble finding therapy — thought the answer might be helping medical pros detect depression.
Kintsugi is a startup that wants to put technology to work on the problem. Co-founder and CEO Grace Chang saw this as an access issue: Both founders experienced bouts of depression and found it difficult to get clinicians to help, leading them to think about it from their perspective as engineers.
They figured that if it was possible to identify the people who need therapy the most, it would be easier to achieve the goal of directing those people to suitable treatment. So Chang and co-founder Rima Seiilova-Olson built an API to detect depression through voice.
"We saw this as an infrastructure problem where you have so many people trying to jam through that front door, but not a lot of visibility as to who is severely depressed and who is in this low to moderate phase. And if we can provide this information to those practitioners, we can really deeply affect the specific problem," she said.
Why voice?
People who are feeling blue tend to have a flat voice, something that clinicians have observed for decades. This is true regardless of language or culture and appears to be a universal human reaction to depression, according to Seiilova-Olson.
"Psychomotor retardation is the process of slowing down of thought and muscle movements. And it’s universal no matter where you’re born or what language you speak," she said.
Psychiatrists who observe severely depressed patients notice this symptom, Seiilova-Olson noted. Kintsugi is attempting to use technology to build a machine learning model with many more samples than any individual clinician could see in a lifetime. The solution measures the likelihood of depression on the GAD-7 (0-21) scale, with zero being fine and 21 being severely depressed. After a patient grants permission, the clinician can get immediate feedback based on the score. The score, which becomes part of the patient notes, is protected under doctor-patient privilege, according to the company.
"Our neural network model has been trained on tens of thousands of depressed voices. So it can be like a set of psychiatrists, but it’s much more sensitive. It can pick it up even when the depression is at mild or moderate levels," she said.
Even before the pandemic, depression was rampant. The World Health Organization reports that 5% of adults worldwide suffer from clinical depression. That adds up to 280 million people. It is the leading cause of disability in the world, and it doesn't have to be that way.
The WHO reports that all forms of depression — whether mild, moderate or severe — are treatable if detected. But too often those with depression suffer in silence and don't seek help for their condition. A 2017 article published in the SSM Population Health Journal cites a 1999 study that found two-thirds of depression cases in the U.S. go undiagnosed.
This is even more tragic when you consider that 700,000 people take their own lives each year as a result of depression, according to the WHO. Among the problems with getting people into treatment is a lack of trained professionals to help diagnose it, and the fact that medical professionals tend to tackle this problem only when patients report symptoms, which can be unreliable.
Finding a data source
Before Chang and Seiilova-Olson could build a model to detect depression through voice, they needed data. The first step involved interviewing around 200 psychologists, psychiatrists and clinicians. They learned through their research that journaling was a good way for people to sort out their feelings.
So the first thing they did was build a free voice journaling app, also called Kintsugi. With that, they were able to access thousands of voice samples that they used to train the model on what a depressed voice sounds like.
If you're worried about privacy here, the terms of service indicated that the data could be used for research purposes. In terms of security, entries are encrypted in transit and at rest, but they are also shareable publicly if people are inclined to do that. Further, Chang said they deliberately made the choice upfront not to use natural language processing, which keeps the content of the journals out of the equation. Their goal was simply to understand how people were speaking, rather than what they were saying, which was really not relevant to the issue they were trying to solve.
Chang said this solved three problems. For starters, they didn't have to worry about protecting the privacy of their individual users because the content was not the target of their research. It also simplified the underlying technology and enabled them to focus on building a scoring system based on the pattern in the voice. Finally, using pattern recognition allowed them to be language-agnostic — it didn't matter what people were saying or what language they were speaking.
Building the solution
The founders thought long and hard about how to incorporate this solution into a clinical setting, and they decided to build an API that connects into the clinical notes section of the patient's electronic health record.
Patients are sometimes asked to assess their own mental health state as part of the patient intake process, but they often don't accurately assess their condition. That's where the Kintsugi solution comes into play.
"We have an API, which is just a software layer that is integrated into clinical call centers and telehealth applications … and it is for nurses and care managers when they do their outbound calls to patients to understand in that short window of time if that patient is struggling with a behavioral health issue, and if the patient is struggling to provide information to that patient with what different types of care are available to him or her," Chang explained.
The company points out that while it is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for what is called De Novo approval, the solution is identified as a Clinical Decision Support tool under the 21st Century Cures Act. Such support tools do not require explicit FDA approval, the founders told me.
Kintsugi also conducted a clinical study and is in the process of publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), but it didn't want to share details until the official announcement.
The two founders met at a hackathon in 2019 and were excited just to encounter another woman at such an event, which tend to be attended mostly by men. They bonded over a mutual love of coding and their similar immigrant experiences: Chang grew up in Taiwan, while Seiilova-Olson grew up in Kazakhstan.
As they got to know each other, they realized that each had struggled to find mental health care when they needed it and began exploring the idea of building a solution to help. They raised an initial $8 million seed round to build the product last year and another $20 million Series A earlier this year.
Fundraising as two immigrant women founders presented its own unique challenges, Chang said. "The barrier for women is that you can’t paint a story of all these things that you're going to do. You already must have these things done for people to invest in you, and so I think that is quite a challenge, probably not just for women, but for minorities more broadly I would imagine," she said.
They are not alone in this space. Ellipsis Health, Sonde Health, Vocalis Health and Winterlight Labs are working on similar voice-based solutions for identifying mental health conditions. Some of these companies have identified problems providing consistent results across different dialects and demographics, but Kintsugi's founders believe their approach overcomes these issues.
Kintsugi already has contracts with a couple of large healthcare companies and is working to build on that.
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