TechCrunch |
- Facebook parent Meta eyes investment in Indian betting app Better Opinions
- Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet outlines the accelerator’s newest program in Africa
- Fairbanc provides BNPL for micro-merchants in Indonesia
- Mexican region gives Tesla and its suppliers a dedicated border crossing lane
- Google’s Pixel 6a is a budget device with the heart of a flagship
- The SEC takes a long-feared position in Coinbase insider trading suit
- The Amazon effect is fueling a wave of robotics investments, acquisitions and maybe an IPO
- Slowdown? What slowdown? Menlo Ventures bags $761M for its largest-ever opportunities fund
- Daily Crunch: Amazon wades deeper into healthcare with its $3.9B purchase of One Medical
- Taking robots from the lab to the real world
- Harmonizing human-robot interactions for a ‘new and weird’ world of work
- Snap misses on Q2 revenue, declines to forecast its future financial performance
- Robotics and AI are going from cage to stage
- Dean Kamen on the power of celebrating your own obsoletion
- Get ready for a lot of dead DAOs
- UC Berkeley shows off accelerated learning that puts robots on their feet in minutes
- Amazon defined warehouse robotics — so, what’s next?
- Andreessen Horowitz ditches physical HQ in return for global outposts
- Pitch Deck Teardown: Arkive’s $9.7M seed deck
- Twitch builds toward a ‘layered’ safety approach with new moderator tools
| Facebook parent Meta eyes investment in Indian betting app Better Opinions Posted: 22 Jul 2022 03:31 AM PDT Facebook-parent Meta, which counts India as its largest market by users, is gearing up to make its third startup investment in the South Asian market. The American social media group, which invested in social commerce Meesho in 2019 and online learning platform Unacademy in 2020, is in talks to back the early-stage startup Better Opinions, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The deliberations are ongoing and the deal is yet to close, sources cautioned, requesting anonymity as the details are private. Meta did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening. Meta is proposing to invest in Better Opinions' seed financing round of up to $3 million, valuing the startup at under $25 million, two sources said. If the talks materialize into a deal, it will be the first time Meta takes stake in a seed-stage Indian startup. Samay Jain, co-founder of Better Opinions, told TechCrunch in an emailed response that the startup has raised $2.5 million seed funding from a number of investors including Metaplanet VC, YCombinator, Taurus VC, Original Capital, Tremis Capital, Goodwater Capital and Super Capital. He declined to comment on the startup’s deliberations with Meta. Founded last year by GoJek alums Jain and Soumyajit Das, Better Opinions is building what it has described to investors as "the prediction market" for India. The eponymous app allows individuals to trade their opinions on everyday topics and win real cash based on how good those predictions turned out. These everyday topics include predicting the price of a cryptocurrency token at a specific future time, box office collection of new titles and views a YouTube will be able to garner during a specific period. On the app, users can also make predictions on results of cricket matches as well as specific outcomes of certain events in the game such as runs in an over, according to an analysis of the app. “You can set your price, hedge and trade using Better Opinions. With our insights and your skills, you can trade and profit. We want to make trading an exciting exercise,” the startup says on its website. In response to figures obtained from an investor deck, Jain said the startup has amassed 600,000 users who have traded over $1.25 million on the platform. The startup plans to make revenue by charging brokerage fee, sell subscription, and market making, it disclosed in the investor deck. Better Opinions is attempting to open the world of investments to people who have understanding of specific subjects but are unable to make use of it in the stock markets, one of its investors described in a memo. The prediction market is beginning to make inroads in several markets. Startups such as Kalshi and Dream11 also operate in the space and have amassed millions of users. Meta’s peers Google and Amazon have also made several investments in India in recent years, chasing opportunities that often compliment and broaden their approaches to serve the world’s second largest internet market. |
| Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet outlines the accelerator’s newest program in Africa Posted: 22 Jul 2022 02:07 AM PDT In April, startup accelerator Techstars, in partnership with ARM Labs, a Lagos-based innovation program focusing on fintech startups, announced the launch of ARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator Program. As Techstars' newest accelerator program in Africa, the announcement re-emphasized the expansion plans Techstars touted when it hired Maëlle Gavet as CEO last January. The Lagos accelerator adds to the long list of dedicated generalist and specialist programs the firm has managed to create globally over the past couple of years. Companies that get accepted into any of these three-month programs receive $20,000 plus a $100,000 convertible note in exchange for 6% common stock, access to the Techstars network and other resources. In 2021, the Colorado-based accelerator ran up to 50 accelerator programs across 18 countries, most of which were based in North America and Europe. In Africa, the accelerator test-ran an accelerator program in Cape Town between 2016 and 2017. Techstars has invested in more than a dozen African-based startups through other programs. Thus, it was only a matter of time before one of them hit Africa — and where better to start than in Nigeria. Most of the startups backed by the accelerator on the continent are based in the country, including Farmcrowdy, Healthtracka, TalentQL, Quidax, OurPass, Rentsmallsmall and Treepz. The Nigerian tech ecosystem has grown tremendously in the past five years, with the influx of venture capital reaching over $1.8 billion in 2021. Lagos is at the epicenter of this growth. According to this data, the city is one of the fastest growing ecosystems worldwide and the number one African startup city as of last year. By partnering with ARM Labs, Techstars hopes to capitalize on the immense opportunity created by the city's startups. The program's inaugural class starts in December and culminates in a Demo Day next March. TechCrunch caught up with Gavet on her trip to Lagos and spoke at length on how the program would work, opportunities for founders and why the accelerator is bullish on Africa. TC: There are many Techstars programs, from London to Seattle to Riyadh to Oak Ridge-Knoxville, and sometimes it's hard to keep count. But before launching in Lagos, it seemed only the Toronto program took actual notice of Africa, as evident in the 15 startups represented from the region in its program. Why is this the case? MG: Techstars has been active in Africa since 2011. We have run 350 local ecosystem-building events, primarily in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. We also had a Barclays Accelerator program in South Africa for two years, and we have made close to 100 investments in African founders. But you're right. The most recent Toronto cohort was heavily focused on Africa, honestly, more because I think Canada has a very welcoming visa system for African founders. So it just makes it much easier for them to go to the Toronto program than it would be to many other Western programs. But Techstars has been actively looking at Africa in general. The discussion last year was that we should, given how vibrant the tech ecosystem here is, have accelerators here in Africa. I am in Nigeria this week — I'm also going to Kenya — because I'm here to figure out the right way to do it, where we will open them and so on. We decided last year to open one in Lagos and we are very much hoping to be able to double down and explore other options in terms of different hubs across Africa. Why partner with ARM for this program in Lagos, and can you describe the structure? We have pretty high standards regarding the type of company we partner with and the three-month program we put in place. Any founder going to apply to these and then be accepted into this program here in Lagos will benefit from the experience we have accumulated over the last few years, from the playbook that we have to run this program, from the international network that we have. That model has worked out for the last 15 years, so I'm pretty confident. Soon, we're going to announce the new managing director for Lagos, some with local experience as an entrepreneur and experience working with the regulators as well. Now, we decided to partner with ARM because we wanted someone who was embedded into Nigeria and understood the country better than us from a business perspective.  Image Credits: lARM Labs Lagos Techstars Accelerator Program. We wanted a business partner who understands Africa and what it means to do business across Africa. And I think we're realistic enough to realize that we don't know everything and can provide much better service to founders when we combine each other's strengths — the global network of experts, or playbook, all the infrastructure we have, and the knowledge and experience and local network of a partner like ARM. Can international founders apply for this program and would they need to come to Lagos to participate? All of our programs are international, we usually have between 20%-40% of local founders, and the rest are international founders. With the Lagos program, we expect this ratio to be about the same. While there is so much knowledge and energy from founders in Nigeria, we also expect that there will be many African founders. For them, it would be easier and more appropriate because they're mainly focused on the African market and so it will be better for them actually to come to the Lagos accelerator. That's part of why I'm going to Kenya next because I think that there are quite a few Kenyan founders who would prefer coming to Lagos than going to Europe or North America. And then, quite a few founders in Europe and the U.S. are looking at Africa as a tremendous market for their businesses. And so I expect we will have applications from them and those who get in will have to come down. At the end of the day, we'll select twelve of the best. As an African founder, why would I apply to Techstars Lagos rather than Toronto, New York, or other Western programs? We have 60 programs and accept founders from around the world. So if you're a Nigerian founder and want to apply to any Techstars accelerator, you can do that anywhere in the world you want. Now, the way we recommend people to do it is to think about first, is there a sector that you're interested in and follow through with that. So, for instance, if you're in the music industry, we have a music accelerator in LA where you may want to apply. If you are much more on the agriculture and food tech side, we have an accelerator in Minnesota for that. You can also decide that, for whatever reason, you want to experience North America and have a different experience of how business is being done elsewhere, so you may want to apply to Toronto or New York; these are generalists program. You may also decide to go to a market close to Africa with a local connection, for example, the U.K. and European markets. And so you can apply to the London one or the Paris one. When you look at the 20+ investments we've made in African founders, they came from all around. You're very well aware of Toronto, but again, we have Nigerian founders who went through New York, London and Bangalore, so that's not going to change. Now, you may also decide that you want to stay in Africa. And for you like being either for a personal reason or business reason, like actually, Lagos is the place where you want to be because you can't leave your family for three months, or because again, like you want to really focus on the Nigerian market, and then you should apply to the Lagos accelerator. Is the Lagos accelerator sector agnostic? The one we're doing with ARM is focused on fintech and prop tech. There's a robust industry growing up in Nigeria around these two topics. So we expect that there's going to be a lot of founders. Also, if you look at ARM, they're great partners for founders. And so, I would recommend those founders who apply to this accelerator to look at how ARM can help them. And as a result of that, if you're not sure they can help you, then maybe you should look at another accelerator program. But if you think that they can, you absolutely should apply. If you don't know, you should contact us and talk to us. Will the startups in the Lagos accelerator be able to assess follow-on capital? After they go through the accelerator, we'll support some to raise money from other investors depending on where they are in their development, their fundraising stage, etc. We have a fund called Techstars Ventures, which is the fund that we use to do follow-on checks in seed, Series A and sometimes Series B. With what's happening with venture capital slowdown and economic downturn, is this the best time to launch a program in a new region? Also, how do you advise founders to deal with this current situation? I think the program is even more relevant now that there's a downturn and the economy is slowing down than ever before. So what we do at Techstars is help founders build real, healthy, sustainable businesses. This is even more important during a downturn because you need support, network and capital more than ever in this period. So from that perspective, no concern whatsoever. I think that when it comes to the advice I give founders in general, don't forget that nobody succeeds alone. It even holds more true during a crisis. And that may be an additional reason to apply to Techstars because you will need more than ever to support the capital program and the mentorship to succeed during the economic downturn. One of the seeming objectives behind Techstars starting a Lagos accelerator is to create unicorns from the continent. Lagos is also home to some of Africa's unicorns like Flutterwave and Interswitch, but how do you hope to achieve that, seeing that the accelerator is yet to mint one after years of investing? We are what we call universal investors. We try to have a portfolio representing all industries and all types of people in the world. The reason why I'm convinced that there are going to be a lot of unicorns in the future is that just look at the African market. You can even take Nigeria as an example: huge population, growing consumption and various problems and challenges entrepreneurs are tackling. This is like a recipe for creating the next generation of very wealthy entrepreneurs and legacy companies. Now, will it be a bunch of unicorns, or will it be a bunch of $100 million companies? We'll see. But I can see so much potential both in terms of the quality of entrepreneurs and the size of the problem they're trying to solve that I can't imagine anything but a lot of very wealthy entrepreneurs and important companies in the future for Nigeria and Africa in general. |
| Fairbanc provides BNPL for micro-merchants in Indonesia Posted: 21 Jul 2022 06:37 PM PDT "Buy now, pay later" (BNPL) startups have gained traction by targeting consumers, but BNPLs for businesses are also starting to take off. One example is Fairbanc, which is based in Singapore but focused on Indonesia. It allows small businesses to take out short-term credit to purchase fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) inventory. Fairbanc announced today it has raised $4.8 million in pre-Series A funding led by Vertex Ventures. Other participants in the round included Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group, Asian Development Bank and Accion Venture Lab. Fairbanc also received previous investment from East Ventures, 500 Global and Michael Smapoerna. Fairbanc will use its new funding on expanding in Indonesia, and exploring new markets like Vietnam and the Philippines in partnership with Unilever. It also plans to expand into verticals beyond fast-moving consumer goods, including within the B2B supply chain. Fairbanc has partnerships with 13 consumer brands, including Unilever, Nestle, Coca Cola and Danone. It says it has already onboarded over 350,000 merchants in less than 12 months. Of that number, 75,000 are purchasing inventory with its BNPL feature, which have terms of one to two weeks for fast moving products. Its users are typically last-mile micro-merchants that purchase $50 to $300 of each brand's products every week. Fairbanc also finances small retailers that sell smartphones. According to a survey done by Unilever and Fairbanc, 80% of Fairbanc's users are unbanked, meaning they don't have bank accounts, and about 70% are women. The startup claims merchants increased their sales by an average of 35%. Fairbanc was founded in 2019 by Wharton-graduate Mir Haque, who first piloted the startup in Bangladesh before choosing Indonesia as its main market. Haque was born in Bangladesh and described it to TechCrunch as "the birthplace of micro-finance." After living and working in the United States for almost 25 years, he moved back to Bangladesh in 2018 to digitize micro-credit, with the goal of creating a digital credit platform for micro-merchants that did not require a smartphone or digital literacy. "After some market research, I saw an opportunity for large-scale ecosystems lending in offline market with Unilever by integrating our API with their own app used by their offline sales agents to take orders from the merchants," he said. "But it didn't work out in Bangladesh because the market was oversaturated with micro-finance, with many merchants having overlapping and overdue loans." As a result, Fairbanc decided to pilot with Unilever in Indonesia instead. Haque says that resulted in 35% sales growth for almost 500 small merchants with zero defaults over one year. "Because merchants must pay last week's BNPL to place orders for the current week, this model of 'stop supply until repayment' results in very low defaults," he said. Indonesia was chosen as Fairbanc's first market after its pilot in Bangladesh because it is "not only a much larger market in terms of population and GDP compared to Bangladesh, but it also doesn't have the problem of too many microfinance chasing the same merchants," Haque said. "I guess because of this same reason of banks in Bangladesh weren't all that excited the way Indonesian banks are." Before founding Fairbanc, Haque worked at companies including Google, Adobe, McKinsey and Deutsche Bank. The company's founding team also includes Kevin O'Brien, former chief technology officer of non-profit lending platform Kiva, and Thomas Schumacher, who co-founded emerging market microloan platform Tala. |
| Mexican region gives Tesla and its suppliers a dedicated border crossing lane Posted: 21 Jul 2022 04:37 PM PDT Tesla suppliers traveling from Nuevo León, Mexico, to Texas now have their very own dedicated border patrol lane. Elon Musk’s electric car company, which recently relocated its headquarters from Fremont, California, to Austin, has struck a deal with the “pro-business” Mexican state to allow express access for Tesla and its suppliers at the Colombia Solidarity checkpoint, reports Bloomberg. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection, however, has given Tesla no such exemption, according to a spokesperson from the agency, so it looks like the ease of access is only one way for now. “For northbound commercial trucks at the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge, currently there are only the regular cargo lanes and the Free and Secure Trade (FAST) lane, which is for the exclusive use of companies that are enrolled in the CBP-Trade Partnership against Terrorism (C-TPAT) program,” Rick Pauza, public affairs officer for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told TechCrunch. “There is no separate, dedicated lane for Tesla or any specific company.” Nuevo León is home to at least six Tesla suppliers, including APG Mexico and Taiwanese-based companies EnFlex Corp. and Quanta Computer. Ivan Rivas, the region’s economy minister, told Bloomberg that Nuevo León is becoming an “electro-mobility hub,” and that he expects the EV industry to contribute to between 5% and 7% of investment in the state this year. Rivas, who didn’t negotiate the deal, also expressed to Bloomberg that the region had an economic incentive for playing ball with Tesla, and hopes to potentially do similar deals in the future with other companies, likely those that will also position suppliers in Nuevo León. The Colombia-Solidarity crossing site isn’t one of Mexico’s most popular border crossings, where the highest average wait time is 26 minutes. Nuevo León’s border authority is expanding the Colombia crossing from six lanes to eight. The dedicated lane — which is only for the company and suppliers, not Tesla owners — can be found at a remote border crossing a few miles north of Laredo, Texas. A green highway sign that says “TESLA” and is written in the company’s iconic font is nestled between one lane for cars and another for empty trucks or buses. TechCrunch spoke to four different border patrol and customs agents along the Texas-Mexico border and two from the California-Mexico border — all of whom say it is unusual to see one company have dedicated access to a lane. Tesla could not be reached since it has disbanded its press office, so it’s unclear whether the automaker gave anything to Nuevo León in exchange for the dedicated lane, but it’s possible the region just wanted to accommodate Musk’s company for bringing industry and potentially jobs. |
| Google’s Pixel 6a is a budget device with the heart of a flagship Posted: 21 Jul 2022 04:28 PM PDT It's probably hyperbole to credit Google's Pixel A devices for single-handedly keeping the broader line alive during some admittedly lean times. Let's be honest, much of that goes to Google's very deep pockets — when you're one of the world's largest companies, what's a little sunk-cost fallacy between friends? The budget devices have, however, been a lifesaver, buoying the line when the Pixel division was still desperately attempting to find its footing. It's safe to say that — after several false starts — Google finally found success with the Pixel 6. It was the first time in the line's history the company could credibly claim that it had released a flagship.  Image Credits: Brian Heater A new hardware design, coupled with the company's first in-house Tensor chip and some solid new camera hardware, combined well with several generations of software improvement. The Pixel 6a, happily, shares more DNA with the Pixel 6 than with the Pixel 5a. The biggest connective tissue between the products is Google's broader overall strategy of a roughly six-month release cadence. First you drop the flagship; then half a year later, you arrive with its budget equivalent. It’s an approach that seems to be working well. You appease the early adopters with the initial product and eventually a number of the new features trickle down into its namesake. By the time that arrives, you're already ready to start hearing about its successor. It's no coincidence, of course, that the company teased the Pixel 7 alongside the 6a announcement. It's a tacit reminder that, while the 6a actually looks pretty good, something even better is on the way. It's the tyranny of choice effectively monetized.  Image Credits: Brian Heater It’s an important part of Google's approach, because the 6a is a largely effective exercise in cutting the correct costs. It's still a midtier/budget handset, don't get me wrong — but it's a budget/midtier device with the heart of a flagship. The build materials are the most immediately apparent. The 6a is more plasticky than its immediately successor. That's mostly a big issue if you're someone who carries your device around without a case. Those people exist. I'll never understand them, but they exist. You do lose a bit of durability on the front of the device, with a downgrade from Gorilla Glass Victus to Gorilla Glass 3. The screen size has been scaled down as well, from 6.4 inches to 6.1 inches (still a 1080p OLED, though at a sightly higher pixel density), with a 60Hz refresh rate vs. the 6's 90Hz (neither goes up to 120, mind). Honestly, for many, the smaller screen is probably something of an improvement. The 6 is a big phone. This is much more reasonable for a wider spectrum of hands.  Image Credits: Brian Heater There's no wireless charging on board, and predictably, the camera gets a notable hardware downgrade, knocking the 50-megapixel wide and 12-megapixel ultrawide dual sensors down to a pair of 12-megapixel wide/ultrawide. Google has insisted for several generations that hardware doesn't matter nearly as much as software when it comes to smartphone imaging. The last few Pixel devices were a repudiation of that theory, however. One might argue that it's truer today than it was a few generations ago, but great smartphone shots still require the right marriage of the two. That said, you can still capture quality shots on the 6a — a fact that is helped along by some impressive software advances made over the years, including features like Magic Eraser. Also key is the inclusion of the same Tensor chip found in the Pixel 6, which delivers many of those key additions.  Image Credits: Brian Heater The new (well, newish) chip delivers impressive power gains, when stacked up against the 5a. The 6a sings by midtier device standards. The on-board 6GB of RAM is a downgrade from the 6's 8GB, but it should get the job done. Storage is the same at 128GB, though there's no 256GB upgrade option. The battery, meanwhile, gets a slight decrease in mAh, from 4,614 to 4,410, but that's going to get you through more than a day, no problem. The most impressive thing about the Pixel 6a, however, is the price. The 6 was an extremely reasonable $599, and the company has managed to shave another $150 off. Good luck finding more bang for your buck. |
| The SEC takes a long-feared position in Coinbase insider trading suit Posted: 21 Jul 2022 03:26 PM PDT A former product manager at Coinbase has been arrested, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday, after being charged in a cryptocurrency insider trading scheme related to the listing of new crypto tokens on the Coinbase exchange. A separate filing on the case by the SEC signals the beginning of a major battle with crypto firms on what should be designated as a security. A press release detailed that the former Coinbase employee Ishan Wahi and his brother Nikhil Wahi had both been arrested while their friend Sameer Ramani had been charged but had not been located. Ishan Wahi has been charged with two counts of wire fraud conspiracy and two counts of wire fraud, while Nikhil Wahi and Sameer Ramani were both charged with one count of wire fraud conspiracy and one count of wire fraud. While the DOJ’s charges do not include any counts of securities fraud, interestingly, in separate charges filed by the SEC, a number of the assets traded by the group are designated as being crypto asset securities, a classification that is surely going to have far-reaching implications for the crypto industry if it sticks. Specifically, the SEC framed the following assets as securities: Power Ledger’s POWR token, Flexa’s AMP token, Rally’s RLY token, DerivaDEX’s DDX token, XY Labs’ XYO token, Rari Capital’s RGT token, Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange’s LCX token, DFX Finance’s DFX token and Kromatika Finance’s KROM token. In a 62-page filing, the SEC takes particular aim at the firms and tokens listed, saying that “Nikhil and Ramani traded in securities subject to the federal securities laws because these crypto assets were investment contracts; they were offered and sold to investors who made an investment of money in a common enterprise, with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The SEC more widely classifying crypto assets as securities could be a major threat to the crypto industry, which has gained come of its momentum due to relaxed regulatory guidelines surrounding commodities, which many insiders have argued tokens should be classified as. In response to the SEC’s suit, Coinbase announced that they had filed a petition to develop new frameworks for crypto security rules. The arrests follow a saga that played out largely on Twitter, where a crypto personality that goes by Cobie discovered a wallet that had been used to buy up a number of cryptocurrencies ahead of the announcement of a Coinbase listing of those assets on its exchange. An investigation from the Justice Department uncovered that Wahi and his associates had traded in advance of at least 14 asset listings at Coinbase, realizing gains of around $1.5 million. The group had purchased cryptocurrencies using accounts registered to other people and had transferred funds “through multiple anonymous Ethereum blockchain wallets,” according to the press release. Apparently, after an investigation into the trades, Coinbase reached out to Ishan Wahi about scheduling a meeting regarding the asset listing process and Wahi attempted to leave the country, but was stopped by law enforcement before boarding. This arrest follows the June arrest of OpenSea executive Nate Chastain, who was also charged with insider trading related to NFTs. Subscribe to TechCrunch's crypto newsletter “Chain Reaction” for news, funding updates and hot takes on the wild world of web3 — and take a listen to our companion podcast! |
| The Amazon effect is fueling a wave of robotics investments, acquisitions and maybe an IPO Posted: 21 Jul 2022 03:24 PM PDT Amazon’s drive to get as many products to customers as quickly as possible combined with a decade of technological breakthroughs, a labor shortage and skyrocketing e-commerce growth have aligned to create ideal conditions for warehouse robotics startups. This fruitful convergence has led to acquisitions, large funding rounds and at least one robotics IPO next year. And growth appears to be limitless, according to TC Sessions: Robotics panelists Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk, Berkshire Grey SVP Jessica Moran and Melonee Wise, who founded Fetch and is now VP of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies. “Amazon really started rocking the boat, right?” said Moran during the panel on warehouse robotics. “The Amazon effect of get as many SKUs as possible to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, really put everybody in a position — even pre-COVID to say — ‘Hey, I gotta figure out how to automate how to do things faster.'”  Image Credits: Locus Robotics “We look at Amazon, probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today, Faulk said. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.” Faulk doesn’t see a ceiling to the growth. “If you look at the level of warehouse penetration right now by robots and automation, at most it’s 5%. There are about 150,000 buildings out there around the globe, billions of square feet of space, so there’ll be another 6 or 7 billion square feet of warehouse space built over the next over the next four or five years, that’s all going to be automated.” Warehouse construction coupled with labor, rising demand for e-commerce and the challenges around seasonal peaks, will help drive growth, he said. That bullish view is driving Locus toward an IPO in the next year to 18 months, Faulk said. Wise predicts that this will also lead to a wave of consolidation, in which a logistics company may seek to add automation to its product offerings. It’s exactly what happened when Wise’s startup Fetch was acquired by Zebra Technologies in 2021, a company already deeply embedded in the logistics segment, by providing printers, barcode scanners and mobile computers. “I think that you’re going to see that over the next couple of years more, and more of what you might call consolidation of alignment of products and product families and portfolios that help tell a larger story around end-to-end ecosystem for fulfillment or manufacturing solution,” Wise said. “Robotic automation is an extension of kind of that logistics portfolio.” |
| Slowdown? What slowdown? Menlo Ventures bags $761M for its largest-ever opportunities fund Posted: 21 Jul 2022 03:21 PM PDT Startup founders and laid-off tech workers know all too well about the funding slowdown of 2022, but the boom times aren’t over for everyone. U.S. venture firms in particular are amassing more cash than ever, and Menlo Ventures is perpetuating the trend. The 46-year-old Bay Area firm, known for its early bets on companies like Uber and Warby Parker, told regulators this week that it has secured $761.4 million for its third “special opportunities” fund. It appears to be Menlo’s largest such fund to date. Menlo did not respond to requests for comment on its plan for the money, but an earlier statement offers a hint. When Menlo closed its initial special opportunities fund in 2016, the firm said it would use the cash to back the “most promising entrepreneurs and companies at the Series B and C stages.” Opportunity funds and similarly named vehicles can mean different things to different firms, which makes it tricky to know exactly what Menlo plans to do. SoftBank, for example, launched a $100 million opportunity growth fund in 2020 to exclusively “invest in companies led by founders and entrepreneurs of color,” but that doesn’t seem to be what Menlo is up to. Of course, the firm could simply respond to my emails, but never mind that! A January filing indicates that Menlo once sought to raise $750 million for its third special opportunities fund; it wound up raising about $11 million more, from 29 undisclosed investors, per the firm’s latest filing. The fund marks a 53% jump from Menlo’s previous special opportunities vehicle, which closed at $496.7 million in 2019 and was also oversubscribed. Menlo’s funds often tap out at around $500 million, per PitchBook data and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2020, the firm revealed its fifteenth early-stage fund, a vehicle it closed with $500 million in capital commitments. To date, the venture firm has backed hundreds of companies across numerous sectors and stages. Recent Menlo-led deals include a $37 million round for Polly, a SaaS startup focused on the mortgage industry, as well as a $19.5 million raise for Eppo, maker of software testing tools. According to its website, Menlo has backed more than 75 public companies and has a portfolio that includes over 160 M&A deals and more than $5 billion under management. |
| Daily Crunch: Amazon wades deeper into healthcare with its $3.9B purchase of One Medical Posted: 21 Jul 2022 03:05 PM PDT To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Well hello again! It's Thursday — heat waves are heat wavin', and all of TechCrunch is psyched about a fun and engaging Robotics event today. That's not all that's happening, though. We’ve had 70 new stories on the site since our last newsletter, which means that we got to learn about all sorts of wild and wonderful happenings in our world of startups and company building. It was extra-double-plus hard to select the best of the best for the newsletter, but we tried our best. Enjoy! — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups and VCToday has been a cavalcade of robotics. The articles that caught our eye in particular were Brian‘s story, asking whether universities are doing enough to foster robotics startups, and Kirsten's piece on Agility's next Digit robot, which will have a face and hands. Also, don't miss Brian's Actuator newsletter, which covers what's happening in Robotics world. The most recent issue came out yesterday. We were delighted to see TextExpander — who've been around for a hot minute but have been bootstrapping to date — raise a $41 million round of financing, as Ingrid reports. The company makes business communications faster by creating modular extendable text macros. The other not-to-be-missed story today is Anita and Natasha M's WTF is a 409A — a crucial piece you need to understand if you want any hope of understanding startup valuations in the U.S.!
Growth cheat code: Use fractional hiring to stay on plan when cutting costs Image Credits: Henrik Sorensen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images As winter winds begin to blow, major tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Lyft have each instituted hiring freezes. Likewise, early-stage startups are under pressure to reduce burn while preserving forward momentum, but “fractional hiring is a growth cheat code” when used strategically, says Teja Yenamandra, co-founder and CEO of Gun.io. “There is now way less competition for the talent you're hiring, and you may be able to lock in a hire who was unaffordable a few months ago.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.If you've come here for Tesla news, you're in luck. The mobility, climate and even crypto crews were in full-coverage mode of the electric automaker, giving you lots of news to rev your engines. Harri and Kirsten dove into the company's quarterly earnings, writing, respectively, about Tesla's success in the solar game and its quarterly decline in profits. Over to crypto, Lucas reports on how Elon Musk not only discloses that Tesla owns Dogecoin, but also that the company dumped 75% of its Bitcoin holdings. And finally, Rebecca writes that Tesla is increasing the cost of its self-driving software, while at the same time Jaclyn writes the company is on track to launch its battery-electric truck in 2023. Now for some non-Tesla news. First up, Jagmeet reports that Amazon is looking at India as the next place to bring its Project Kuiper satellite internet business. Meanwhile, so many companies are hitting the pause button on a number of different things. One of the top stories sticking around from yesterday was Andrew's piece on Google taking a two-week hiatus from hiring and then slowing down for the rest of the year. And it is not alone: Kyle covers GitHub's hiring pullback, while Paul writes about Just Eat Takeaway scaling back in France. Rebecca covers both Lyft's layoffs amid a closure of its in-house car rentals program and the U.K.'s App Drivers and Couriers Union putting their vehicles in park to strike in response to files that were leaked about Uber. Finally, Catherine reports on Zipmex pausing withdrawals from its digital assets exchange.
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| Taking robots from the lab to the real world Posted: 21 Jul 2022 02:46 PM PDT Engineers and robotics fans can nerd out about robots in the lab and the workshop all day long. It’s a very long road from a ridiculously cool, glorified science experiment to robots that can be put to work in production settings. These robots often have to work in some of the harshest conditions imaginable: defusing bombs, wandering the halls of nuclear power plants or working high up in the air to ensure our power lines stay in good shape. As part of today’s TC Sessions: Robotics event, I spoke with Robert Playter, the CEO at Boston Dynamics, and Kiva Allgood, the CEO at Sarcos Technology and Robotics, to figure out how they are evolving and growing their organizations to help their robotics out into the real world.  The Sarcos Guardian XT can sit on any platform and can do things that are too dangerous for humans to do. Image Credits: Sarcos (opens in a new window) Sarcos Technology and Robotics has been in the news a bunch, as it has been scaling up its product lineup. The company has three flagship products. The first is an exoskeleton that partners with a human to allow it to do things that humans can’t do normally. Next is the Guardian XT, which is a teleoperated, highly dexterous product that works particularly well for tasks at height. There’s also the Guardian S, which is a remote inspection robot.  Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robot. Image Credits: Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics has three robots that it is building and selling right now — two of the three are available for purchase. Spot is the one you’re probably most familiar with; it’s the one that looks like a dog, which you may have seen on the TechCrunch stage in the past. Stretch is a mobile pick-and-pack robot the company is building specifically for the logistics industry — its first use case will be unloading trucks and containers full of boxes. The third robot is a research platform that the company calls Atlas, a humanoid robot that you may have seen trying (and, occasionally, spectacularly failing) its limbs at parkour. The below interview has been edited for length and clarity. TC: What does it take to ship robots to customers? Robert Playter (Boston Dynamics): One of the biggest shifts is we’ve gone from a 100-person company, which was the R&D company proving the technology. We’re currently 500 people. We had to build out all this additional functionality — services, supply chain, manufacturing, enlarging our finance teams. There’s so much more to actually building and delivering a product than getting the first prototype to work. Kiva Allgood (Sarcos Robotics): It’s a different mindset. You have to shift the engineering team. R&D engineers who love to prove out and continue to iterate don’t love putting their pencils down. So as you expand the organization to be able to support going to market with sales and finance, you also have to ensure that you have the right mindset in the engineering side of the house. And that’s a big transition. It’s really hard. If you’ve spent 20 years building a robot, it’s your baby, and you want to keep making it better. Not necessarily, you know, saying it’s as good as it’s gonna get. So I’d say that’s probably one of the biggest mind shifts we’ve had to deal with. TC: Shifting from in-house to customer-operated — is that hard? Kiva Allgood (Sarcos Robotics): Clearly, you can’t send an engineer out there with every product, so you have to have a diagnostic setting, and the tools to go with it. That needs to be part of the mindset of the engineer to who’s releasing the product. That’s very different from the R&D phase, where folks go and fix the robot, saying “It’s fixed,” but they don’t document it. They didn’t say, “Here’s the five diagnostic things that you need to do.” Robots are complex things. We’re really trying to do design for manufacturing and scaling, and that includes design for servicing, which is a different thing from demonstrating that the technology can work. Robert Playter (Boston Dynamics): The customer needs to be successful with the product. When you have engineers, you can make a robot do almost anything, but for the customers to be able to do things, you have it all working together in a way that makes it really easy. The out-of-the-box experience needs to just work. That means you need to understand the actual applications the robots will be used for, and build the connecting infrastructure to make the robot actually deliver value. TC: What are the kinds of tasks that are too dangerous for humans? Kiva Allgood (Sarcos Robotics): One example of those tasks is anything at height. For example, tree trimming. You have to clear around electrical lines, because that is one of the number one causes for fires. A human in a bucket truck with a power saw cutting near a live power line, it is very, very dangerous, and that’s one place where robots can be helpful. Or anything that includes scaling tall structures, anything that has a repetitive motion that has a strong impact on shoulders and arms. That’s where if you have a robot doing those tasks and a human who’s now a robot operator. It means they are no longer a technician; they are a fleet operator of robots, but they don’t have to get in harm’s way. Another use case for us is aviation. During a lightning storm, you can’t place a human on the tarmac — but you can use a robot. Robert Playter (Boston Dynamics): Some of the best applications are ones where there’s a safety issue. For example, measuring radiation inside a nuclear power plant is a common application. Some utility companies and power companies are using Spot when there’s a dangerous event, and they need to disconnect high-voltage equipment. Those can generate an arc flash, and it kills hundreds of people a year. Ontario Power Generation just used Spot for that, and proved that they can do that power disconnect with our robot. We also have police and safety customers who are using Spot to explore CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) environments. They also use it for environments, where there may be dangerous drugs present, like fentanyl. I just saw a report from a customer where they’re using Spot to explore a drug den and find out if there are drugs inside a building. TC: How have the businesses had to evolve? Robert Playter (Boston Dynamics): It started with service. We were building Spots in the lab, but we needed to service them, and that was a whole new function. Marketing is another example — we never really did a whole lot of outbound marketing. We posted some videos on YouTube, but now we’re trying to systematically go and target the right customers. We actually stood up our own manufacturing facility here in Waltham so now we’re going to be able to produce thousands of robots per year in this facility. That’s a whole new skill set. Kiva Allgood (Sarcos Robotics): There has definitely been a transformation of the leadership team, and that also comes with its own challenges. People taking on slightly different roles, specializing more, whereas they used to wear five or six different hats. These days, supply chain and manufacturing are critical parts of the leadership team. As you mature a product, the questions you ask evolve. How you hold the team accountable, what are the key results? You have to be mindful of that. I have empathy for the people who’ve been on the journey with us the whole time. Some of them can go through that transition, and some of them can’t. There are some folks who just love doing R&D, and that’s all they ever want to do, and you’ll want to embrace that. You can see the full video of the Robotics session below! |
| Harmonizing human-robot interactions for a ‘new and weird’ world of work Posted: 21 Jul 2022 02:40 PM PDT Robots have always found it a challenge to work with people and vice versa. Two people on the cutting edge of improving that relationship joined us for TC Sessions: Robotics to talk about the present and future of human-robot interaction: Veo Robotics co-founder Clara Vu and Robust.ai founder Rod Brooks (formerly of iRobot and Rethink Robotics). Part of the HRI challenge is that although we already have robotic systems that are highly capable, the worlds they operate in are still very narrowly defined. Clara said that as we move from “automation to autonomy” (a phrase she stressed she didn’t invent) we’re adding both capabilities and new levels of complexity. “We’re moving … from robotic systems that do exactly what they were told to do or can perceive a very specific very low-level thing, to systems that have a little bit more autonomy and understanding,” she said. “The system that my company builds would not have been possible five years ago, because the sensors that we’re using and the processors that we’re using to crunch that data just didn’t exist. So as we do have better sensors and more processing capabilities, we’re able to, as you said, understand a little bit more about the world that we’re in and sort of move the level of robotic performance up a notch.” Brooks emphasized the under-the-hood complexity in the “no-code” tools his new company is putting in warehouses. “We have lots of code; the customers don’t have to code — that’s the difference,” he said. “You know, 80% of all warehouses in the U.S. have zero automation, when a conveyor belt would count as automation. 80% don’t even have that. We’re trying to put robots, intelligent robots in there, we don’t want to ask them to understand intelligent robots and programming and stuff when they’ve had zero automation. So we’ve got to make it easy for them.”  Illustration showing a Robust.ai robot navigating a warehouse. Image Credits: Robust.ai It’s part of a change to the overall ecosystem that Brooks sees happening, having to do with the steady march of computational improvement giving way to a more creative era. “I’ve been saying that we’re in a golden age of computer architecture. Because since 1965, everyone had to hold to Moore’s Law. They knew they had to make double the speed, double the memory, double this on this day, or otherwise, their competitors would get them. So they couldn’t do anything new and weird,” he explained. “With the end of Moore’s law, they’re now having to do new and weird stuff. These are things we couldn’t do two years ago. And it’s because there’s change in computer architecture.” That may be good, because the things robots are expected to do are getting weirder as well, relying more and more on an AI that isn’t quite up to the task. “I think that in robotics in general, the robotics problems get exponentially more difficult the more uncontrolled the environment is, and the more various the task is,” said Vu. “So something that would be very simple in a single task and a fixed environment becomes AI complete, we’ll call it, in an outdoor environment that’s unstructured. And it’s not just a little bit harder. It’s not just, well you have this today and, in a couple of years, you’ll have that. It could be decades harder.”  A Veo Robotics setup in a human-robot coworking environment. Image Credits: Veo As for the domain of collaborative robots, or cobots, Brooks recalled his time at Rethink Robotics as valuable and even successful despite the company eventually folding. (An aside before his answer proper: “First, I have to say Clara is smarter than me, because I tried to get her to work, she was a consultant at Rethink, but she wouldn’t join. So she’s smarter than me. Where were we?”) “I refer to Rethink as a complete artistic success,” he said. “It changed what people thought was possible and other people are doing. We were too early in some sense, and we made a fatal error in not sticking with the original conception, which was to not put robots in places where robots already were, but to put them in other places. Because as soon as we went where they already were, there were expectations of what they should do. And that pulled us away from what our primary mission was.” Vu agreed, saying Rethink had shaken the industry even if it wasn’t a commercial success, noting that the idea for Veo and her co-founder both essentially rose out of Brooks’s company: “The idea of collaborative robotics, as far as I know, it came out of Rethink. How could robots be different than they are? What could they do that they can’t do today? And in particular, how could robots work with people? And how could that actually make the robots more valuable?” It’s the goal of Veo to take the cobot idea to the next level: “Cobots have totally transformed the industry. There’s I think 200,000 of them out there, it’s growing at 30% a year — all the major robot manufacturers now make cobots as well,” she said. “And we’re trying to really take the next step and say, you know, what the ideas behind Rethink have done for smaller, lighter weight robots … We want to do that for the big powerful robots as well, and the way to do that is through computer vision, that’s now it wasn’t possible 10 years ago.” We covered many more topics in our discussion, so be sure to check out the full interview below. |
| Snap misses on Q2 revenue, declines to forecast its future financial performance Posted: 21 Jul 2022 02:07 PM PDT Snap released its second-quarter earnings on Thursday and missed analyst’s expectations. Revenue was $1.11 billion for the quarter, up 13% from the same period a year earlier but coming in below its previous guidance of 20% to 25%. Snap also declined to predict its future financial performance due to “uncertainties related to the operating environment.” The company also reported that its daily active users increased 18% year over year to reach 347 million. “While the continued growth of our community increases the long-term opportunity for our business, our financial results for Q2 do not reflect the scale of our ambition,” the company said in a letter to investors. “We are not satisfied with the results we are delivering, regardless of the current headwinds.” Snap noted that the second quarter of the year ended up being more challenging than expected and that it now plans to "substantially slow our rate of hiring, as well as the rate of operating expense growth." During Snap’s call with investors, executives said the company will continue to cultivate new sources of revenue across its business, including Snapchat’s camera, its Spotlight feature, map, Augmented Reality (AR) and more. The results come as Snap said in May that it wouldn’t meet the second-quarter guidance it set the prior month. At the time, Snap also indicated that last year's iOS privacy change continues to affect the company. Once iOS users were presented with a choice to opt-out of off-app tracking, most users chose not to hand over more personal data to the apps they use, which impacted the ad business of social apps like Snapchat and Facebook. Although Snap continues to grow year over year, the company is growing more slowly than expected due to the overall economic environment. In a bid to raise revenue, Snap officially launched its paid subscription plan two weeks ago to offer users exclusive features, such as the ability to change the app's icon and see who has rewatched your Stories. Snapchat+ costs $3.99 per month and unlocks a special badge, the option to pin a friend as your No. 1 friend and the ability to see "the general direction of travel for where friends have moved recently." The company says that the last feature is only available if your friends have already consented to share their location. The company also announced this month that it’s introducing Snapchat for Web to let users send snaps and chat with friends via video calls, all from their desktops. Despite still seeing itself as a mobile-first platform, Snap says it decided that it was time to bring Snapchat's core features to the web after listening to feedback from users. |
| Robotics and AI are going from cage to stage Posted: 21 Jul 2022 02:05 PM PDT A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways to get through it successfully. Milo Werner is a new general partner at MIT’s The Engine, an accelerator and fund focused on “tough tech.” Joyce Sidopoulos is a co-founder of MassRobotics, a community and advocacy group for the sector’s startup ecosystem. And Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Covariant, which is designing a new generation of warehouse robots (he also just won the ACM Prize — belated congratulations, Pieter). Our panel started out with some of the most obvious technical considerations founders need to keep in mind when shifting from a research to a mass production process. (Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and continuity.) “When the technologists are designing the product itself, they just want it to work, right? But when you actually go to manufacturing, the manufacturer will say, we can’t put that board on top of that, we can’t assemble it that way. So you really, from the beginning, should be thinking about manufacturing, and design for manufacturing,” said Sidopoulos. Werner pointed out that the tolerances, precision and monitoring will never be as good as your own lab, so be ready to accept that — as well as compromises for cost. “The reality is you go through a series of iterations once you enter manufacturing, for cost down, and managing the ramp up,” she said. “In a research lab, you’re just trying to get a prototype working. And often you can write a paper that gets a lot of visibility and excitement for showing something for the first time — it can work!” said Abbeel. “Then you go to something in production… and all of a sudden, it’s not the fact that you can make it work once that matters — it’s the consistency, having it essentially always work. So, chasing the kind of high nines of performance and reliability, I think is probably the biggest difference.” As demands on the company change, the company itself must change to accommodate them. Werner pointed out that many founders, having come off four to eight years of work in the area, have a passion and familiarity with the material that’s difficult to match — but that can be a barrier to building a team. “The part that they often face is that they need to build a big team, and that team needs to be just as strong or stronger than them,” she said. “Coming from the academic, institutional space, it can be a very individual contributor ideology. And moving to the business space, it’s completely team oriented. And you are only as strong as your team.” “I would totally agree with that,” Sidopoulos said. “We find that a lot of time, the co-founders are passionate about what they’re doing. But then they have to bring in, you really have to bring in a strong business-focused person, because how do you sell this thing? How do you put it into a pitch deck? That’s not what you’re taught when you’re in engineering school. Finding the right people and the right combination. It’s like getting married, right? You’re marrying someone who you’re going to be spending a lot of time with. And so you have to make sure that you have the same goals, you have the same mission, you have the same work ethic.” Werner pointed out it’s always wise to hire ahead of the need — and joining a community of like-minded people can help a founder build their network and get a sense of where others are in the process. Abbeel told a story about a serendipitous relationship that Covariant built: Our first lead investor, Amplify, had a partner who they made available five hours a week, who had a ton of operational experience in sales, on the business development side, many previous startups, where he had worked full time, and now he was a venture capitalist,” he said. “And he brought all that operational experience into what we were doing. And we quickly found that five hours wasn’t [enough]… we wanted more! Over time, we got him so excited to join us as our COO! It’s a great example of somebody who most likely would not have been in our natural network, but came our way in a way that actually it was possible to get to know each other very well, for several months before we really started working full time together. With a completely different set of experiences and skill set — so valuable.” If only all founders were so lucky! It’s not exactly advice, but it does show that it pays to strike while the iron is hot. Finding a product market fit was another topic we touched on, and each panelist had variations on the idea of focusing fast. “We get a lot of startups that have an awesome technology that can really solve a lot of problems… if you’re not focused on one solution, for one industry, you’re spreading yourself too thin,” Sidopoulos said. “You have to really know your customer, what their challenge is, what they want solved, and what they’re willing to pay for. Get that focus on one, get it accomplished — then you have a story, then you have someone who’s using your technology. Then pivot to another case. It really, really helps with investment as well.” Abbeel pointed out that this can be extended to the timeline as well. Sure, you might be able to solve problem Y in six months and problem Z in 18 months — but what’s problem X you can solve tomorrow? Someone out there wants to pay you for that, even if you plan on having something way better later. “To us, that was very eye opening,” he said. “Because many others were also very excited about robots, but it was excitement for, in some sense, of the future of the company. It wasn’t excitement for the today of the company. To us, that was really the big factor in our decision making, who’s excited for robots today?” Werner actually recommended partnering with a large strategic in the sector, as their deep knowledge (and pockets) can help you build that first use case. Even companies like Tesla (where she worked before The Engine) started out partnering with bigger ones to test and prove out their product. “You’re kind of using your partner to de-risk your technology,” she said. “Once you’ve de-risked that technology, build on that and go farther.” But, she warned, be careful not to fall into the trap of over-specialization or over-reliance on the partner’s resources, or you’ll find yourself dependent and tied to their roadmap instead of your own. That’s just a handful of the topics we covered today — you can watch the rest of the panel for free right here. |
| Dean Kamen on the power of celebrating your own obsoletion Posted: 21 Jul 2022 01:30 PM PDT More than 40 years and 1,000 or so patents after selling his first company, AutoSyringe, to healthcare giant Baxter, Dean Kamen still gets a charge describing breakthrough innovation. It’s been five years since his organ fabricating project ARMI (Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute) divided critics. The project made more waves early last month, at the CNN-hosted conference Life Itself. Kamen paints the picture appearing on a panel at TC Sessions: Robotics today:
 Inventor Dean Kamen looks on as over 110,000 pounds of personal protective equipment (PPE), shipped from Shanghai, China, is unloaded from a cargo plane at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire, Thursday, April 30, 2020. The equipment will be used for medical workers and first responders in their fight against the virus outbreak. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) Kamen is first to admit, however, that the path to all success is paved with failure. The trick is learning the right lesson. "What I’ve learned from failure is go back and decide was the fundamental goal wrong — that’s why it failed, you succeeded, but nobody needs this — or did the available technology and your systems integration and application have it wrong, in which case, you’ve now learned enough, go try again, go use a different approach," Kamen explains. "Pick yourself up, try again, using a different approach. And it really doesn’t matter how many times you fall down. If you fall down five times, but you stand up six, it’s okay. And in the end, you only need a win every once in a while to keep your confidence up. And hopefully, to give you the resources to keep going even though inevitably you’ll have failures, let the projects fail, don’t let the people fail." These are among the fundamentals Kamen has attempted to infuse into FIRST, the education program he co-founded in 1989, with MIT professor Woodie Flowers. It is best known for its robotics competitions, which center around competitive builds of robots and other projects, bringing the teamwork and enthusiasm of sports to STEM education — subjects that might otherwise turn off students who traditionally encounter them in more formal and staid settings. "Kids won't go to class, or they'll take math for 45 minutes between phonics and spelling, one day a week. But they'll go after school for three hourse, every single day to get better at football or get better at basketball. So I said, 'look, we're not competing for the hearts and minds of kids with the science fair and the spelling bee, we're competing with the things that they invest all of their time, energy and passion in. So let's use that model — make it aspirational, make it after school. Don't give them quizzes and tests, give them letters and trophies. Bring the school band and the mascots."  U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), right, looks toward inventor Dean Kamen as over 110,000 pounds of personal protective equipment (PPE) from Shanghai, China, delivered to protect medical workers and first responders fighting the COVID-19 virus outbreak, is unloaded from a cargo plane at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire, Thursday, April 30, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) Perhaps the hardest-fought lesson of all, however, is understanding, accepting and even welcoming the fact that progress in technology and sciences means that one day your best work will be eclipsed. "You have to be more than prepared for it. You have to be confident it will happen, and you have to celebrate it. I celebrate it more when it's me that obsoleted the last thing I did, but if somebody else can obsolete it and if I get to a point where I need a better clinical solution than a dialysis machine or an insulin pump, if I can get to a place with somebody else’s technology to gave me a new organ or a prosthetic limb or something, I need to have a better quality of life, I will thank that person. And I hope I will return that favor by giving them something of value that we invented." |
| Get ready for a lot of dead DAOs Posted: 21 Jul 2022 01:25 PM PDT  Image Credits: TechCrunch After a lengthy crypto bull run, the startups and projects in the space are reining in expectations and settling in for a long-haul crypto winter. It’s been a particularly tough time for DAOs, which are seeing their treasuries and native tokens decline, forcing them to cut back on expenses while trying to drum up enthusiasm within their communities. The crypto governance organizations certainly have made a big splash in the past year but can the bulk of them survive a downturn? That was our hot topic of discussion this week. Hello and welcome back to the Chain Reaction podcast, where we unpack and explain the latest crypto news, drama and trends, breaking it down block by block for the crypto curious. This week, Lucas and Anita dove into OpenSea layoffs, the threat of Binance taking on Coinbase in the U.S. market and how the Bored Apes creators are trying to build their own metaverse to take on Roblox and Meta. We also chatted about this week’s rising crypto prices and why traders are feeling bullish all of a sudden. Our guest: Upstream CEO Alexander TaubDAO has been a very hot acronym among crypto acolytes over the past year, from online investors using them to crowdfund money to buy a copy of the constitution, to major DeFi protocols pushing their governance to these decentralized autonomous organizations. This week, Anita and Lucas chatted with Alexander Taub, the CEO of DAO tooling startup Upstream, pushing him on what DAOs are doing right and wrong and what they’ll look like after this crypto winter. |
| UC Berkeley shows off accelerated learning that puts robots on their feet in minutes Posted: 21 Jul 2022 12:18 PM PDT Robots relying on AI to learn a new task generally require a laborious and repetitious training process. University of California, Berkeley researchers are attempting to simplify and shorten that with an innovative learning technique that has the robot filling in the gaps rather than starting from scratch. The team shared several lines of work with TechCrunch to show at TC Sessions: Robotics today and in the video below you can hear about them — first from UC Berkeley researcher Stephen James. “The technique we’re employing is a kind of contrastive learning setup, where it takes in the YouTube video and it kind of patches out a bunch of areas, and the idea is that the robot is then trying to reconstruct that image,” James explained. “It has to understand what could be in those patches in order to then generate the idea of what could be behind there; it has to get a really good understand of what’s going on in the world.” Of course it doesn’t learn just from watching YouTube, as common as that is in the human world. The operators have to move the robot itself, either physically or via a VR controller, to give it a general idea of what it’s trying to do. It combines this info with its wider understanding of the world gleaned from filling in the video images, and eventually may integrate many other sources as well. The approach is already yielding results, James said: “Normally, it can sometimes take hundreds of demos to perform a new task, whereas now we can give a handful of demos, maybe 10, and it can perform the task.”  Image Credits: TechCrunch Alejandro Escontrela specializes in designing models that extract relevant data from YouTube videos, such as movements by animals, people or other robots. The robot uses these models to inform its own behavior, judging whether a given movement seems like something it should be trying out. Ultimately it attempts to replicate movements from the videos such that another model watching them can’t tell whether it’s a robot or a real German shepherd chasing that ball. Interestingly, many robots like this learn first in a simulation environment, testing out movements essentially in VR. But as Danijar Hafner explains, the processes have gotten efficient enough that they can skip that test, letting the robot romp in the real world and learn live from interactions like walking, tripping and of course being pushed. The advantage here is that it can learn while working rather than having to go back to the simulator to integrate new information, further simplifying the task. “I think the holy grail of robot learning is to learn as much as you can in the real world, and as quickly as you can,” Hafner said. They certainly seem to be moving toward that goal. Check out the full video of the team’s work here. |
| Amazon defined warehouse robotics — so, what’s next? Posted: 21 Jul 2022 11:57 AM PDT It took exactly two minutes for today's TC Sessions: Robotics fulfillment panel to make its first Amazon mention. The retail giant looms over the category like no other. It played a foundational role with the 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems that birthed Amazon Robotics, and remains the 800-pound gorilla looming in the background of any conversation about warehouse automation. For the past decade, the company has demonstrated an impressive dominance. It's helped the company set a once-impossible standard of next-day — and even same-day — delivery for many orders. Retailers large and small have sought ways to remain competitive, fostering the growth of an entire industry of warehouse robotics firms like Locus, Fetch and Berkshire Gray. The 10-year-old Kiva acquisition remains the foundation piece of Amazon's play. The wheeled systems are effectively the ground floor for a modular ecosystem. "When we're looking at our technology and architecture, we're looking at every sub-component and what capability that provides us," Amazon Global Robotics VP Joseph Quinlivan told me on a panel at the event today. "And how can we commoditize that and — in much like the software space — build a clean API and form factor around that, that gets to be reused across many different robotics solutions and architectures. One of the reasons we've been able to go pretty fast and build a wide array of products beyond the initial Kiva product, is we were able to use this architecture and these technologies that were thought of more than just a problem that we were immediately solving." At Re:Mars a few weeks back, the company unveiled a number of new robotics systems designed to fit into that growing warehouse ecosystem. The headliner of the bunch was Proteus, a new system that introduces full autonomy while maintaining Kiva's rough form factor. The company noted at the time:
We suggested, at the time, that the system might be the product of Amazon's 2019 acquisition of Boulder-based autonomous cart maker, Canvas. Quinlivan, however, says the robot was developed independently of the acquisition.  An employee scans an item at work stations part of mobile robotic fulfilment systems also known as ‘Amazon Robotics’ during the inauguration of a new Amazon warehouse in Bretigny-sur-Orge, some 30 kms south of Paris, on October 22, 2019. Image Credits: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP via Getty Images "That was internally developed by the Amazon Robotics team that came out of the Kiva acquisition," the executive says. "A lot times at Amazon, we have concurrent development efforts. We're excited about what the Canvas team is going to deliver, and they're going to focus on a different application we haven't announced yet." He also pushes back on the notion that Amazon's recently announced $1 billion fund, which backed a number of robotics firms, including Agility, is a pipeline toward future acquisitions. "I don't think we invest — especially in early stage-companies — because we want to acquire it. We almost never have that discussion. We invest because we believe that the people have a passion for what they're solving, it's an interesting problem. We almost have the mentality that we want to invest in things we don't believe could be achieved, because we could be wrong." |
| Andreessen Horowitz ditches physical HQ in return for global outposts Posted: 21 Jul 2022 11:05 AM PDT For a long time, distributed work for VCs looked like a split-HQ between two cities in different parts of the world. Now, it may look like “the cloud.” Andreessen Horowitz, a venture firm turned registered investment adviser, says that its "headquarters will be in the cloud" going forward, according to a blog post written by founding partner Ben Horowitz. Alongside ditching a centralized HQ, a16z announced new offices in Miami Beach, New York and Santa Monica in addition to its existing Menlo Park and San Francisco posts. A16z declined to comment beyond the blog post. The firm is prioritizing physical offices around the world instead of one centralized HQ doesn't entirely come as a surprise, if you consider the pandemic. Coronavirus kept offices closed, forcing venture capitalists to learn how to do their jobs remotely and all around the world. Now, VCs staying in Silicon Valley feels quite 2019, as investors migrate to other hot spots, including Austin, Miami and Salt Lake City. "In our firm's new operating model, we work primarily virtually, but will use our physical presence to develop our culture, help entrepreneurs and build relationships," Horowitz wrote in the blog post. Despite the fact that "materialize physically on command" sounds like a phrase straight out of a Marvel movie, it's an example of how investors are reacting to remote-first but not remote-only work culture. Distributed VCs are reacting differently to this new normal, with many of the newer investors having been always remote. For example, Eric Tarczynski of Contrary Capital says his firm has been remote since inception but recently launched an in-person community space in NYC for portfolio companies and founders within the firm’s network. “Having a space where people can host small dinners, events and work out of when they’re ideating has been powerful,” he tells TechCrunch. Ankur Nagpal, of Vibe Capital, launched his fund with plans to spend one month at a time in geographies he plans to invest in. Brianne Kimmel of Worklife Ventures is creating an invite-only community space in Los Angeles. Most recently, Index Ventures opened its fourth office in New York — its first new office in more than a decade. |
| Pitch Deck Teardown: Arkive’s $9.7M seed deck Posted: 21 Jul 2022 11:00 AM PDT On Tuesday, I covered Arkive’s $9.7 million funding round, a startup that is trying to answer the question: “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?” The company’s founder and CEO Tom McLeod was gracious enough to let me take a closer look at the pitch deck he used to raise their seed round for our pitch deck teardown series here on TechCrunch+. Let’s get to it! We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. Slides in this deckArkive’s deck is a hard-hitting, to-the-point deck that crams a lot of details into just 12 slides:
The deck has a small number of redactions; the team reports it removed the following information:
Three things to loveRight off the bat, this slide deck shouts both “good storytelling” and “experienced entrepreneur.” The former because the narrative flows effortlessly and clearly from one slide to the next. Very few of the slides are, as many founders choose to do for clarity, labeled as “product” or “roadmap.” Both the content and design make sure you know exactly which part of the story you’re looking at. Here’s a few things I think Arkive did particularly well: Planting the seed of a dream [Slide 2] Barreling hard out of the gates. Image Credits: Arkive (opens in a new window) So what’s left? You sell the dream — and my goodness, did Arkive knock that particular ball out of the park. Love or loathe the idea, “What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?” is a hell of a conversation starter. It also serves a more subtle purpose — for some subset of potential investors, this slide will make them nope the hell out of the deal right away. That can be an advantage, as it’s nearly impossible to convince people who’ve made up their minds about crypto, blockchain, museum curation or fractal ownership to get excited about Arkive. The corollary is that investors who are excited about this space are invited to elevate their excitement with a very simple slide. The slide hints at the market, it suggests the solution Arkive is building, and it communicates the company’s goals and missions. It’s simple, effective and demonstrates a clarity of vision that I rarely see in founders in this context. There’s one lesson you can take away from this: If you’re struggling to come up with a vision that’s as clear as this, ask yourself if you fully understand your market, the problem you are solving and the solutions you are proposing. It was that, now it is this [Slide 4] “We create a unique opportunity by shifting from the consolidation of curatorial power with elites to weaponizing the power of crowd-sourced intelligence.” Image Credits: Arkive. Few founders pause for long enough to consider that investors are pretty similar in their motivations. Yes, they’re trying to create an outsized return for their LPs, but to many VCs, that’s the “what” and maybe the “how,” but not the “why.” I love this slide because it plants a bold stake in the ground, striking a stark contrast between the old (traditional musea) and the new (Arkive). It uses the buzzwords of crowd-sourcing, equality and speaking democratic truth to a traditionally elitist group of curators. For investors who care about diversity, inclusion and social justice, the message is spot on — will this be the first time there will be true representation in art and artifact curation? And on the other end, for investors who couldn’t wring out a singular copulation about making the world a better place, the slide does something else: It highlights a market that is staggeringly low on innovation and may turn out to be ripe for financial disruption. I wish the slide had fewer words in it (perhaps Arkive could have made a deck with fewer words for presentation purposes), but that tiny niggle aside, I think it is very close to being perfect. It draws out the contrasts and sets out the playing field effectively while leaving enough space to have fruitful and interesting discussions about Arkive’s visions for the future. Let’s talk business model [Slide 5] Business model, meet acquisition model. Image Credits: Arkive This slide outlines two important parts of that business model. For one, it outlines the user acquisition path and explains how the company is planning to take care of part of its marketing. It also explains the “How will this thing make money?” question without going into too much irrelevant detail. This slide, in particular, helped me realize that the founding team is particularly experienced. Instead of only looking at one part of the puzzle in isolation, they have instead identified and articulated how all of the pieces come together while focusing on the user acquisition aspect of the business model. The effect is simple but powerful. Just with the slide, I can deduce what I would have said to pitch it, but I’ve interviewed McLeod, the company’s co-founder, so I know he is a good presenter and can speak about his vision with great passion. Each of the four boxes on this slide is a slightly ajar door inviting you to have a conversation. In the rest of this teardown, we'll take a look at three things Arkive could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck! |
| Twitch builds toward a ‘layered’ safety approach with new moderator tools Posted: 21 Jul 2022 10:53 AM PDT Moderating an online community is hard, often thankless work — and it’s even harder when it happens in a silo. On Twitch, interconnected channels already informally share information on users they prefer to keep out. The company is now formalizing that ad hoc practice with a new tool that lets channels swap ban lists, inviting communities to collaborate on locking serial harassers and otherwise disruptive users out before they can cause problems. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Twitch Product VP Alison Huffman explained that the company ultimately wants to empower community moderators by giving them as much information as possible. Huffman says that Twitch has conducted "extensive" interviews with mods to figure out what they need to feel more effective and to make their communities safer. Moderators need to make a ton of small decisions on the fly and the biggest one is generally figuring out which users are acting in good faith — not intentionally causing problems — and which ones aren't. "If it’s somebody that you see, and you say 'Oh, this is a slightly off-color message, I wonder if they’re just new here or if they are bad faith’ — if they’ve been banned in one of your friend's channels, it is easier for you to go, 'yeah, no, this is probably not the right person for this community,' and you can make that decision easier," Huffman said. "That reduces the mental overhead for moderators, as well as more efficiently gets someone who’s not right for the community out of your community." Within the creator dashboard, creators and channel mods can prompt other channels they’d like to trade lists of banned users with. The tool is bi-directional, so any channel that requests another streamer’s list will be sharing theirs in return. A channel can accept all requests to share ban lists or only allow requests from Twitch Affiliates, Partners and mutually followed channels. All channels will be able to swap ban lists with up to 30 other channels, making it possible to build a pretty robust list of users they’d prefer to keep out, and channels can stop sharing their lists at any time.  Image Credits: Twitch Channels can choose to either automatically monitor or restrict any account that they learn about through these shared lists, and they’ll be restricted by default. Users who are “monitored” can still chat, but they’ll be flagged so their behavior can be watched closely and their first message will be highlighted with a red box that also displays where else they’ve been banned. From there a channel can opt to ban them outright or give them the all-clear and switch them to “trusted” status. Twitch’s newest moderation tools are an interesting way for channels to enforce their rules against users who might prove disruptive but potentially stop short of breaking the company’s broader guidelines prohibiting overt bad behavior. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario, particularly for marginalized communities, where someone with bad intentions could intentionally harass a channel without explicitly running afoul of Twitch’s rules against hate and harassment.  Image Credits: Twitch Twitch acknowledges that harassment has “many manifestations,” but for the purposes of getting suspended from Twitch that behavior is defined as “stalking, personal attacks, promotion of physical harm, hostile raids and malicious false report brigading.” There’s a gray zone of behavior outside of that definition that’s more difficult to capture, but the shared ban tool is a step in that direction. Still, if a user is breaking Twitch’s platform rules — and not just a channel’s local rules — Twitch encourages a channel to report them. "We think that this will help with things that violate our community guidelines as well," Huffman said. "Hopefully, those are also being reported to Twitch so we can take action. But we do think that it will help with the targeted harassment that we see impacting, in particular, marginalized communities." Last November, Twitch added a new way for moderators to detect users trying to skirt channel bans. That tool, which the company calls “Ban Evasion Detection,” uses machine learning to automatically flag anyone in a channel who is likely to be evading a ban, allowing moderators to monitor that user and intercept their chat messages. The new features fit into Twitch’s vision for “layered” safety on its platform, where creators stream live, sometimes to hundreds of thousands of users, and moderation decisions must be made in real-time at every level. "We think that this is a powerful combination of tools to help deter chat-based harassment proactively [and] one of the things that I love about this is that it’s another combination of humans and technology,” Huffman said. “With ban evasion detection, we are using machine learning to help find users that we think are suspicious. With this, we are leaning on the human relationships and the trusted creators and communities that they have already established to help provide that signal.” Twitch’s content moderation challenge is a crucible of sorts, where dangerous streams can reach an audience and cause harm as they unfold in real time. Most other platforms focus on after-the-fact content detection — something is posted, scanned by automated systems or reported, and that content either stays up, comes down or gets tagged with a user or platform-facing warning of some kind. The company is evolving its approach to safety and listening to its community, meditating on the needs of marginalized communities like the Black and LGBTQ streamers that have long struggled to carve out a safe space or a visible presence on the platform. In March, Color of Change called on the company to step up its efforts to protect Black creators with a campaign called #TwitchDoBetter. The trans and broader LGBTQ community have also pressured the company to do more to end hate raids — where malicious users flood a streamer’s channel with targeted harassment. Twitch sued two users late last year for coordinating automated hate campaigns to deter future bad actors. Ultimately, smart policies that are evenly enforced and improvements to the toolkit that moderators have at their disposal are likely to have more of a day-to-day impact than lawsuits, but more layers of defense can’t hurt. “For a problem like targeted harassment, that is not solved anywhere on the internet,” Huffman said. “And, like it is in the non-internet world, it is a forever problem — and it’s not one that has a singular solution. “What we’re trying to do here is just build out a really robust set of tools that are highly customizable, and then put them in the hands of the people who know their needs best, which are the creators and their moderators, and just allow them to tailor that suite of tools to meet their particular needs.” |
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