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Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:46:09 +0000
Ford started production yesterday on its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, a do-or-die vehicle that takes the automakerâs â and the United States’ â best-selling vehicle and swaps its gas-guzzling engines for powerful electric motors juiced by more than 1,800 pounds of batteries.
The mattress-sized pack can deliver over 300 miles of range, but if Ford wants to win over weekend warriors who tow 28-foot motor boats, itâs going to need better batteries.
While todayâs batteries can store more energy than ever â theyâve improved in energy density by 5% per year for the last several years â those steady, incremental increases probably wonât be enough to make EVs a no-brainer for many consumers. Todayâs cells are better in every respect than those made five years ago, but they still leave much to be desired. Whatâs needed are some breakthroughs.
EVs are a relatively small part of the overall market for cars and trucks, but they make up nearly 80% of the demand for lithium-ion batteries, far outpacing devices like laptops and phones. And demand is only going to increase. The world is expected to need 5,500 GWh of batteries by 2030, according to Wood Mackenzie, a 5x increase over today, thanks to changing consumer tastes and looming phase-outs of fossil-fuel vehicles.
Over the next five years, the battery world is poised to undergo a significant transformation. Iâve sifted through a long list of startups to find the nine most interesting ones that are developing technologies to make batteries weigh less, charge faster, and last longer. In the last year and a half, theyâve collectively raised $4.1 billion â some of that through special purpose acquisition companies, but the vast majority from late-stage venture and corporate rounds.
Solid-state
The battery tech thatâs been getting the most attention recently is solid-state, and for good reason. Automakers are salivating at the idea of EVs with a range of over 400 miles that can be recharged in 15 minutes, which solid-state batteries have the potential to deliver.
Solid-state batteries earn their name by replacing the liquid electrolytes that shuttle ions from one side of the battery to another with solid versions. Solid electrolytes offer a few advantages. For one, they can prevent the growth of dendrites, stalactite-like spikes of lithium that can form on a batteryâs electrodes. Dendrites can grow relatively easily in the liquid, so battery makers add an ion-permeable separator to prevent dendrites from bridging the gap between positive and negative electrodes.
If the separator is damaged, as happened in defective Chevy Bolt battery packs, then dendrites can cause a short circuit that can start a fire.
The other thing that solid electrolytes can enable is whatâs known as a lithium-metal battery. In a typical lithium-ion battery, when lithium ions are on the anode side, theyâre stored in graphite. Graphite anodes are inexpensive and stable, but they add weight to a battery. Eliminating them would help lighter batteries store more energy, but lithium-metal anodes are prone to forming dendrites. To prevent dendrites from growing long enough to short-circuit the battery, researchers are working on solid electrolytes that not only block the stalactites, but also wonât create problems with the anodeâs highly reactive lithium.
Three companies in particular show promise in solid-state. One is Factorial, which has raised $253 million, including a $200 million Series D that closed in January and was led by Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis, the automaker created by the merger of the Italian-American Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Franceâs PSA Group. Factorial, based in the Boston suburb of Woburn, Massachusetts, had operated in stealth mode until last April.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:44:55 +0000
When the CEO of FedEx, the global leader in logistics, promises âan enormous effort towards autonomous trucksâ this summer, wisdom â conventional or otherwise â says listen up, things are about to get interesting.Â
Last year, FedEx joined forces with Aurora Innovation â the AV startup that acquired Uberâs self-driving unit in 2020 â and began a pilot program using self-driving trucks to haul goods between Dallas and Houston (with a safety driver on board). That partnership moved Aurora closer to its ambitious goal of launching an autonomous trucking business, without safety drivers, by the end of 2023.
FedExâs summer teaser and Auroraâs progress toward its goal are just two reasons why weâre thrilled that Sterling Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer at Aurora and Rebecca Yeung, corporate VP of operations science and advanced technology at FedEx will join us onstage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 on May 18 and May 19 in San Mateo, California.
FedEx has been working internally on its own smaller-scale AV technology for several years. One project, a sidewalk delivery bot named Roxo, was a collaborative effort with DEKA Development & Research Corp. and its founder Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway and iBot wheelchair. Roxo made its debut in 2019.
As for its larger-scale autonomous projects, FedEx seems to be focused on partnerships â with Aurora for long-haul trucking, Nuro for deploying its autonomous bots for last-mile delivery at large scale and with China-based Neolix, where FedEx is testing on-road AV delivery.
Meanwhile, Aurora sped from buzzy startup to publicly traded company-via-SPAC in a span of four years (the deal closed in March, 2021). The company was founded in 2017 by Anderson, Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson, all of whom have a history with automated vehicle technology.
In this conversation with Anderson and Yeung, weâll check in on the status of the Dallas-Houston pilot and ask if there might be more collaboration ahead. Weâll try to get a sense of how long it will take driverless long-haul trucks to become a reality, what challenges remain to be solved and whether public confidence is one of those challenges.
Of course we don’t know whether Yeung will reveal FedEx’s big summer plan for autonomous trucking, but you can bet weâll ask about it.
Donât miss this in-depth conversation about the current and future state of autonomous trucking with Auroraâs Sterling Anderson and FedExâs Rebecca Yeung.TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them. Register today before prices increase May15!
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Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:13:54 +0000
Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And itâs an opinionated take on mobile payments â not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the companyâs founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia.
In many ways, Lydia isnât standing still and keeps reinventing itself. The company originally started as a peer-to-peer payment app for the French market. For the first time, people could send and receive money instantly from their smartphones.
The app has evolved drastically over the past few years. The company recently reached unicorn status and the team has been iterating with more services and features.
In particular, you can now use your Lydia account as an alternative to a regular bank account. Users can order a debit card, send and receive money through a unique IBAN. Users can also trade cryptocurrencies, stocks, precious metals and ETFs.
With this new design, the company is streamlining its app with a clear separation between your activity, your accounts, your cards and your trading activity. More importantly, the company is positioning its mobile app as a social product â not a fintech product.
Image Credits: Lydia
Building the foundation for the next 10 years
When I met with Lydiaâs co-founders Cyril Chiche and Antoine Porte, they both had read my recent article on Zenly, another popular social app designed in Paris. And they found some similarities between the new Lydia and the new Zenly.
âWe just sent a newsletter to our user base that unveils a new chapter for Lydia, laying down the plan for the next 10 years â just like Zenly,â co-founder and Chief Product Officer Antoine Porte told me.
It works but it has never been designed for humans. Cyril Chiche
This isnât a random milestone. Lydia launched the first version of its app nine years ago. âIf you count the gestation period, itâs been 10 years,â Porte said.
The company has managed to attract 5.5 million users. And a fraction of them have now decided to use Lydia as their primary account.
âThe more we progress in financial and banking services, the more we try to intellectualize the reason why people dislike their bank,â co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me.
âWhen digging further, you realize how banks have been using technology. They built a beautiful system for interbank activities. You can move money from one end of the globe to the other. It works but it has never been designed for humans,â he added.
This sums up Lydiaâs design language pretty well. The team wants to build an app that is âdesigned for humansâ. For instance, someone who has never used a bank app before shouldnât have to learn about SEPA transfers and IBANs before sending money to a family member.
When you open the updated version of Lydia, the main tab has been drastically cleaned up. It is now an activity feed with your latest transactions. There are two buttons at the top of the screen â receive and pay.
At the bottom of the screen, thereâs a new tab bar with buttons that are clearly labeled. You no longer have to guess which button does what.
The second tab shows your accounts â your main Lydia account, your sub-accounts and your bank accounts that you have aggregated in the app. Personal accounts and shared accounts are now separated into two sections.
The third tab lets you access your cards and control them from there. Trading now gets its own tab, separated from the rest of the app. If you rarely open Lydia, it is now much easier to understand where you should tap to access what you want to access.
What is money?
As French entrepreneurs who overthink everything a bit too much, Lydiaâs founders keep going back to the definition of the terms they use. âWe have forgotten the very reason why money exists because we view money as an accounting tool,â Porte said.
âMoney has a meaning. It is either a project or a memory,â Chiche added later in the conversation.
And yet, when people open their bank app, it feels like opening up an Excel spreadsheet. Worse, it often fosters a lot of negative thoughts.
âYour account has only been credited once and everything else is negative operations. When you look at your account statement, you feel like you messed up,â Chiche said.
Money is what you do with it. Antoine Porte
According to the founders, thereâs too much guilt involved with banking. Thatâs why you no longer see your account balance when you open Lydia. You have to tap on the second tab to view it. Thatâs also why you donât see the ââŹâ sign next to every transaction. The company doesn’t want to emphasize the accounting aspect of your transactions.
âThe worst thing is neobanks that show you a chart of your balance over time,â Chiche said.
âWe need a new definition for money. Money is no longer coins, bills or physical things. That could be the opportunity to go back to the origin â money is what you do with it,â Porte said.
A fintech app or a social app
Each transaction in Lydia could be considered as an event. You can open the transaction card, change the name and add emojis so that it means something to you. For instance, you may want to put your babyâs name on the nursery bill.
Today, the company is going one step further. Users can add a photo to each transaction. That seems a bit odd at first, but Lydia truly believes it has a shot at building the best social journaling app.
Image Credits: Lydia
You may think that journaling is a thing of the past. But a generation of smartphone users have been journaling every day without even realizing it.
The journal itself has evolved. Instead of buying a fancy notebook and spending 15 minutes every day writing about the current day, people take photos with their phones. The camera roll has become a sort of ubiquitous, effortless journal.
Lydia is so simple and fast that it has always been considered as a utility app. But it has always been a social app. Antoine Porte
Lydia plans to take advantage of that by augmenting the camera roll. First, your past financial transactions represent a structure. Second, adding a photo makes a transaction much more personal. âIf you donât know what photo you should use, it probably means that it was an unnecessary expense,â Porte said.
Third, it turns each transaction into a potential social post. You can swipe through your transactions just like you would swipe through photos in a photo album. If itâs a shared expense, other users will see the photo. It also creates a virality factor as people could start asking why youâre taking a photo. You could imagine a feature that lets you share a transaction in other apps as well.
More importantly, it opens up a lot of possibilities. A card transaction also happens at a specific place and at a specific time. Lydia could populate the transaction screen with more data about the place you visited. As soon as Foursquare invented checkins, people started talking about checkin fatigue. Maybe the most powerful checkins are your card payments.
It brings us to the main question. Is Lydia a fintech app or a social app?
âLydia is so simple and fast that it has always been considered as a utility app. But it has always been a social app,â Porte told me.
I donât think itâs as simple as that. Some users will still use Lydia a few times a month to send and receive money. But a small, highly engaged portion of the user base might see the social potential of Lydia.
We donât need to come up with a definitive answer right now as the redesign is a clear improvement over the previous version of the app. âPeople tell us our competitors are Revolut, but they are bankers,â Porte said.
âWe want to create the WhatsApp of money instead,â he added.
How Zenly made social maps cool again â and whatâs next
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:00:47 +0000
Recycling is an essential â if not particularly glamorous â part of fighting climate change. Itâs no secret that the world has a serious trash problem. The U.S. alone generates 292.4 million tons of trash a year, or 4.9 pounds per person per day. Globally, we produce 380 million tons of plastic annually, half of which goes to single-use products.
Every year, the world dumps between 20-50 million metric tons of electronic waste and only 12.5% of it gets recycled. Tech gadgets and the clean energy technologies we need to fight climate change rely on critically finite minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.
Mountains of trash, un-recycled plastics and a shortage of minerals necessary for clean energy transition threaten our ability to achieve a more sustainable world. Thatâs why weâre thrilled that the CEOs of AMP Robotics, Novoloop and Nth Cycle will join us on stage at TC Sessions: Climate and The Extreme Tech Challenge 2022 Global Finals on June 14 in Berkeley, California.
AMPâs recycling technology â a combination of computer vision, machine learning and robotic automation â can sort waste streams in ways that traditional systems canât, and at a cost far lower than most waste-handling facilities. The robots can tell the difference between high and low-density plastics, sort for color, clarity, opacity and shapes like lids, tubs, clamshells and cups. In 2021, AMP doubled the number of robotic installations across 25 states, growing its U.S. fleet to nearly 200.
Founder and CEO Matanya Horowitz earned four bachelorâs degrees, in electrical engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, and economics, along with a masterâs degree in electrical engineering, from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He holds a doctorate in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology.Â
Novoloop, a new U.S.-based startup that just raised $11 million in Series A financing led by Envisioning Partners, transforms plastic waste through its proprietary technology, ATOD (Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition). The company claims this process breaks down polyethylene (the most widely used plastic today) into chemical building blocks that can be synthesized into high-value products.
Co-founder and CEO Miranda Wang, a venture-backed climate tech entrepreneur is a Forbes 30 Under 30, UN Young Champion of the Earth and a Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius prize winner. She received her bachelorâs degree (Engineering Entrepreneurship, Philosophy, Molecular Biology) from UPenn and a bachelorâs of science from McGill University.
Nth Cycle, meanwhile, has developed a unique technology called electro-extraction. It lets recyclers and miners recover critical minerals from discarded batteries, low-grade ores and mine site waste using only electricity and carbon filters. Itâs an environmentally-friendly, lower-cost alternative to current pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy processes.
Megan OâConnor is an environmental engineer and chemist. She founded Nth Cycle one day after defending her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Duke University and graduated from the second cohort of Innovation Crossroads at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Weâre looking forward to this conversation about the ways in which technology is transforming recycling into a powerful, efficient and cost-effective tool for fighting climate change. We also want to get a sense of each companyâs roadmap and how effectively they can scale for even more growth.
TC Sessions: Climate 2022 is all about the growing wave of startups, technologies, scientists and engineers dedicated to saving our planet and, of course, the investors who finance them. Join us in-person on June 14 at UC Berkley’s Zellerbach Auditorium. Register now and save $200.
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Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:44:27 +0000
Roku’s first quarter of 2022 shows signs of slowdown, particular with a slowing of total net revenue and subscriber growth, which was below what analysts estimated. There was a significant decrease in streaming unit player sales as well due to numerous challenges.
With only 1.1 million incremental active accounts added, Roku’s subscriber total was 61.3 million in Q1. This was slightly under analysts expectations of 61.8 million. For context, at the end of 2021, Roku surpassed 60 million accounts, an increase of 3.7 million for Q4.
Roku reported significantly decelerated total net revenue growth of 28% in Q1 to $737.7 million. In the first quarter of 2021, the company reported a revenue growth of 79%.
In addition, Roku reported a 12% year-over-year decrease in streaming unit player sales. The company explained this was because COVID-19 distorted business patterns as well as the ongoing supply chain crisis and inflation.
âWe have delivered solid performance in a challenging operating environment and expect that we will continue to navigate through macro headwinds, including inflationary pressures, geopolitical conflict, and supply chain disruptions,â CEO Anthony Wood and Chief Financial Officer Steve Louden wrote in a letter to shareholders.
The muted outlook, based on continuing macro headwinds, may lead to volatility like its rivals in the coming months. For the second quarter, the company projects total net revenues to grow 25% year-over-year to $805 million, lower than the consensus estimate of $815.7 million.
Plus, even though the company has been the top streaming platform in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, its stock has dropped 6% in the last week, 20% in the last month, and over 70% in a year.
There’s a lot standing in Roku’s way, and the new Charter-Comcast venture may pose some heavy competition as a new media aggregator. Charter will contribute $900 million over several years to the effort.
Comcast and Charter team up to launch a new streaming platform for US consumers
However, Roku isn’t scared off by the competition. During yesterday’s call, Anthony pointed out that the expenses associated with streaming tech will create an obstacle. He said,
âIt’s very hard for — certainly for a new player. Like it’s hard for you to imagine how they’re going to be successful given the long number of years that we’ve invested in our platform and our competitors have as well. But also, just you have to amortize that cost across a larger and larger installed base to be competitive. Scale is super important.â
The company believes that it will continue to be the number one selling TV OS system in the country, no matter how many competitors it faces. Anthony added that Roku has competed against strong companies for years like Google and Amazon, yet the reason Roku continues to win is that it remains successful in both streaming players and smart TVs as opposed to only one or the other.
In March, the latest version of its streaming TV software, Roku OS 11, launched. This focused on adding more personalization to the Roku platform, including the new feature Roku Photo Streams, among others.
Roku’s latest software offers collaborative photo screen savers, recommendations, and more
The Roku Channel had a successful quarter, for the most part. Streaming hours went up this quarter, with a total of 20.9 billion hours in the quarter, an increase of 1.4 billion from last quarter, up 14%. Last year, the companyâs users consumed 73.2 billion hours of content through Rokuâs services.
Earlier this week, Lionsgate and the Roku Channel announced a multi-year deal in which the free platform will receive two separate windows in which they will be the exclusive home for upcoming theatrical titles through 2024.
The Roku Channel signs multiyear deal with Lionsgate Films to stream free movies
This marks a significant win for FASTs (free ad-supported streaming TV), advertisers, and consumers as well who have access to more and more free content.
Wood said,
“The secular shift to TV streaming continues, and we are investing in the significant opportunity ahead of us. Our unique assets, including the Roku OS, Roku TV, The Roku Channel, and our sophisticated ad platform continue to position us to extend our leadership in the years ahead. We remain excited about executing against this opportunity as more content, viewers, and advertisers move to TV streaming.”
The company continues to expand The Roku Channel’s content library. Roku wrote in its shareholder letter that it previously reached a licensing agreement with A+E Networks as well as launched Discovery+ via premium subscriptions on The Roku Channel, bringing more than 70,000 episodes to viewers.
The letter added that on May 3, Roku will present new content coming to the service along with ad product offerings to advertisers at Rokuâs first in-person Upfront event. The new and upcoming titles include âHonest Renovations,â a home renovation series hosted by Jessica Alba and Lizzy Mathis; âTo Paris for Love: A Rom-Com,â and âWEIRD: The âWeird Alâ Yankovic Story,â starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:36:22 +0000
Elon Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter and told banks that agreed to help fund his $44 billion acquisition offer about his plans to monetize tweets, according to a new report from Reuters. A source told Reuters that Musk has decided on who he plans to appoint as the new chief executive of Twitter, but the source didn’t name the person. Twitter’s current CEO Parag Agrawal, who took the role after Jack Dorsey stepped down in November, is expected to remain as CEO until the deal is completed.
Reuters reports that Musk told Twitter chairman Bret Taylor that he does not have confidence in the company’s management, which is a sentiment that he also stated in SEC filings. Agrawal would be set for a significant compensation package if the deal closes and Musk brings in new management, as he would receive $38.7 million due to a clause in his contract, according to the companyâs latest proxy filing.
Reuters reports that Musk told banks that he plans to develop more ways to make money from tweets. For example, he said that he plans to create a way to monetize tweets that go viral or include important information. He also suggested the idea of charging a fee when third-party websites quote or embed tweets from verified accounts.
The Washington Post reports that Musk also brought up the idea of paying influencers to create content for the platform, which is a business model that has proven to be successful for TikTok. Musk is also said to be interested in the idea of subscription services that the company could offer.
In deleted tweets from earlier this month, Musk suggested significant changes to Twitter Blue, which is the social media giant’s subscription service that is currently priced at $2.99 per month. Musk suggested cutting the price, adding a way to pay in dogecoin, and banning advertising. In another now-deleted tweet, Musk said he wants to move Twitter away from its dependence on advertising for much of its revenue.
Musk had also told the banks he could crack down on executive and board pay at Twitter to slash costs. Reuters also reports that in his pitch to the banks, Musk said Twitter’s gross margin is much lower than other social media services, such as Facebook and Pinterest, and argued that there are ways to run the company in a more cost-effective way.
Bloomberg News reported this week that Musk spoke to bankers about job cuts as part of his pitch to the lenders. Musk reportedly won’t make decisions on job cuts until he receives ownership of the company.
Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and âthe satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.â Musk will have to pay Twitter a $1 billion termination fee if he doesnât go through with his acquisition of the social network, per a recent SEC filing. The filing, which details the terms of the agreement, indicates Twitter would have to pay the same fee under specific circumstances.
A complete timeline of the Elon Musk-Twitter saga
Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44B acquisition offer
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:02:18 +0000
It’s not exactly shocking news at this point that the cloud infrastructure market had another standout quarter. After the big 3 vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — reported earnings this week, we were once again provided a big result with Synergy Research estimating that the market reached $53 billion for the quarter, up 34% from the prior year.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about these numbers is that Microsoft is creeping ever closer to Amazon, the long-time market leader.
Amazon has steadily controlled a third of this market for years. Of course, it’s important to understand that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant has maintained a steady percentage of a pie that is dramatically expanding. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been growing slowly but surely over time. This quarter the company accounted for 22% of public cloud revenue, according to Synergy, up from around 20% in the year ago period.
Amazon pioneered the public cloud market in 2006 and was out there all alone for years before Microsoft began competing in earnest, especially after Satya Nadella came on board in 2014, and has pushed closer to Amazon in recent years.
The last of the big 3, Google is working hard as well and has now cornered around 10% of the market. In fact, the research firm reports that the three companies account for 65% of the entire cloud market.
Image Credits: Synergy Research
Yet even with Microsoft’s hard push into the market and impressive growth, when you add up Microsoft and Google’s growing market share percentages, Amazon still controls a tick more than the other two combined. It shows the amazing staying power of first-to-market advantage, even when you have well capitalized giants competing with one another. And also speaks to Amazon’s ability to fend off the growing competition to this point.
Numbers from Canalys were right in line with Synergy’s with the total coming in a tad higher at just under $56 billion. The differences are due to the models and formulas each firm uses, but are close enough that the divergence barely matters.
As for market share percentages, Canalys had Amazon at 33%, Microsoft at 21% and Google at 8%, again with very slight differences from Synergy.
These companies are looking at revenue from infrastructure, platform and hosted private cloud services. Neither is counting Software as a Service (SaaS) in these numbers, which could account for differences in reported numbers.
In terms of the numbers, for Synergy, it breaks down this way: $17.67 billion for Amazon, $11.66 billion for Microsoft and $5.3 billion for Google.
For Canalys, it’s Amazon with $18.45 billion, Microsoft with $11.74 billion and Google with $4.47 billion.
The numbers here are so large that it’s easy to forget just how big the public cloud market really is. The category is on an astonishing $212 billion run rate (using Synergy’s number) and continues to grow at a surprisingly rapid rate as more companies push more workloads to the cloud. Consider that total revenue last year was $178 billion.
Growth has accelerated since the pandemic hit in March 2020, and if you believe the numbers out there, cloud adoption still has a long way to go, especially when you consider many companies are adopting a multi-cloud strategy. The growth can’t go on forever, but considering that the need for cloud services isn’t a finite amount, it’s likely it will continue to experience substantial growth for quite some time.
With a $22B run rate, does it matter if Google Cloud still loses money?
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:00:54 +0000
One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that â people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibitively expensive.
Neobanks, fintech APIs, new savings programs, infinite cards for different payment methods, stablecoins for cross-border payments, cheaper fiat transfers, and, of course, zero-cost trading have improved how the average person can use, store, and interact with money. It pretty much rules.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
The tech has proved darn neat, but there are some issues on the business model side of things. As it turns out, not charging for what was once a paid service is a great way to accrete customers, but it’s also an at-times tricky way of making money. This is a lesson that Robinhood is in the process of learning â and as a public company, sharing with the rest of the world.
This week, Robinhood reported Q1 earnings that were far under street expectations. CNBC notes that the company’s per share loss of $0.45 was $0.09 worse than analysts’ expectations, and that the company’s revenue result of $299 million was off by around $57 million. Shares of Robinhood are trading sharply lower this morning.
Parsing the Robinhood earnings presentation this morning, it’s clear that the equities trading boom that powered its hyper-growth has passed. And, of all the company’s products, the most durable remains its most controversial â yes, Robinhood’s options trading revenues once again accounts for the majority of its transaction income, following declines in the value of stock trades and crypto trading activity.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 14:00:15 +0000
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic with Alex Wilhelm, and Grace Mendenhall, our ever-trusty producer, helped us power through. A big shoutout to Dennis, Julio, and Yashad for getting all the tech working well.
Right, what did we dive into during our live taping? A lot!
The latest from the Elon Musk-Twitter saga, including the social media company’s earnings and how it is somewhat sensitive to market sentiment; Musk won’t have infinite room with which to maneuver once he owns Twitter.
For rounds of the week, Mary Ann chatted through the recent Umaro raise — who doesn’t love talking about bacon? — and Alex picked the latest from the self-driving front.
From there it was time to talk layoffs at Robinhood and other companies, focused around how some companies that did well in the pandemic are now suffering from what could be described as at least a hangover.
And we closed with notes on Copper and Step and the ethics of teens investing in crypto. Which led us to question putting crypto in your 401k. Views vary!
Equity is back Monday! Chat then!
Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 13:55:32 +0000
When I first saw Center Cam, I was not exactly impressed. I mean, look at it — it’s a webcam on a stick. Against high-end competitors from very well-established brands, with eons of experience and near-infinite marketing budgets, it takes a particularly bold entrepreneur to launch something new in a heavily commoditized market. When it comes to photography in particular, I’m no stranger to calling out dumb ideas, and I was half expecting that Center Cam would fall in that category. I was wrong; the camera is very simple, yes, but it solves a huge and fantastically overlooked problem with video conferencing: It’s almost impossible to feel a deep connection with the person you’re talking to.
One of the things that helps people feel connected in conversation in eye contact, and if you think about how most webcams are mounted on your computer, it’s not hard to imagine how that doesn’t work — the camera is either on top of or (shudder ⊠) at the bottom of the screen.
Either way, you’re probably going to be looking at the people you talk to, which means you’re not going to meet their eyes — most people are looking far too low to experience eye contact. In business meetings, maybe that’s fine — but there is a class of video conferencing folks who really struggle with this, and that’s therapists, trainers and coaches. Speaking from experience, feeling connection with a therapist via Zoom is excruciatingly hard. The typical approach is to place the speaker’s window as close to the camera as you can get them, and then make the window pretty small, but even then, you don’t get the right connection.
FaceTime has long had a feature that adjusts your eyes slightly so it looks at you are looking at the camera, even though you’re not, and Windows 11 recently announced it’s launching a similar feature. Frederic hates it and I get why – it doesn’t look great. While it’s possible to fix this issue in software, I was pretty curious to see whether a hardware solution would be better.
Between my main Spekular video light and about $300 worth of colored LED lights for my background, it’s no wonder the camera got a little confused about its white balance. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch
In short: Yes. It is. A lot better. The camera itself is a relatively high-quality USB camera on a metal flexible hose, and it comes with a clip to keep it secure on your screen. Yes, it does obscure part of your screen when you are using it, but it didn’t feel nearly as distracting as I thought it would. The cam has a USB-A connector and comes with a USB-C adapter in the box, so most computer users should be able to use it. There’s no software included, but both my Mac laptop and my Windows computer found the camera and were able to use it without any kerfuffle.
The white balance on the camera was tricked by the colored lights I use for my background, but that was pretty easily resolved by running the camera through OBS and adjusting the exposure and white balance manually. Most users don’t have $900 worth of lights to run their web cams, so perhaps this is a problem that’s unique to me — when testing in more normal lighting situations, the camera worked as you’d expect, with image quality on par with or slightly better than the camera that’s built into my M1-processor MacBook Air.
Place the camera more or less between the eyes of the person you are talking to, then look them in the eyes. It creates a perfect illusion of eye contact, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in video conferencing. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch, who is in desperate need of a haircut.
“I’ve always wanted to be a counselor; that goes back to the real origin story, back when I was coming apart as a teenager. I had some people who helped me, and I always wanted to circle back to that,” explains Ian Foster, CEO and founder of Center Cam. “I finally was finishing my degree when 2020 hit. It was my last semester, and I was working with kids just like I had been back as a teenager. I was a substitute counselor, and when the pandemic hit it meant that I couldn’t meet with these kids in person anymore. I immediately switched to remote. I’d been in lots of Zoom calls, but I hadn’t actually been in any that I cared about this deeply. All of a sudden, I realized the tech was coming between me and the kids, and I started looking at ways to make the tech suck less.”
In the process, Foster found the smallest USB-enabled security camera he could find and made prototypes by duct-taping the camera to the screen. The prototypes themselves didn’t work all that well, but he did discover that the connection with his clients deepened, and he was encouraged to continue the experimentation.
“I spent a whole year developing the clip, the flex tubing and making incremental improvements,” laughs Foster, thinking of the early days.
A commodity webcam and some flex tubing don’t exactly make a defendable product, but the company has found a deep connection with its audience nonetheless. The team claims it has shipped more than 16,000 units to date, and it is currently on its third internal revision of the camera. This version has passive heat fins on the outside of the camera to keep the imaging chip cool — cooler chip means less noise means better image quality — and the company suggests it is working on a complete revamp of the product that’ll look function even better.
“It’s more than just a camera. We’re trying to improve the tech as fast as we can, but I think more so than the tech. People really want to feel connected to people. I was working on a master’s project: a documentary on substance lifestyle in Alaska. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but the big takeaways for me were connectedness to land resources and to each other. That’s where my heart was at the time, and then all sudden, I had relationships with these kids that I was working with, and it all just fell apart,” remembers Foster. “It all t became part of what we’re trying to do: a better connection. It’s not just a tagline. We’re really trying to increase the quality of connections online. It is no accident that 15%-20% of our customers are coaches or therapists.”
I was so ready to turn the snark to 11 on this product review, but in trying it out, the little block of metal won me over. I legit think it’s the best webcam I’ve ever used. Not because the cam itself is incredible — it is not. You don’t have to look far for better features, better image quality and a higher degree of user friendliness. Besides, there’s a downside to being able to have great eye contact: If you are the kind of person who likes to take notes or sneak in a tweet or two during meetings, it becomes very obvious that you’re not paying attention to the person you are talking to.
This product has one major thing going for it, though: It does do a better job at what webcams should do than most. Helping humans connect from a distance.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 13:30:54 +0000
Much of the grocery focus over the past three years has been around online adoption, but as long as 90% of U.S. grocery sales still happen in stores, companies like Clerk want to bring some digitization to the brick-and-mortar grocery experience.
CEO Marlow Nickell co-founded Austin-based Clerk with Don Oelke and Edward Cates in 2016, and while Nickell saw Amazon and Walmart plowing ahead in the marketing and product merchandising spaces, he saw a need from the rest of the space that didnât have the capacity to innovate there.
The company created a digital advertising network called Grocery TV and provides screens, initially in the checkout aisle, for brands and retailers to leverage with the aim of improving the shopping experience.
Clerk took in $5 million in Series A funding two years ago, led by Silverton Partners, and since that time, grew its network size by 350%, going from 750 stores to now 2,700 stores. Next month, the company is planning for its largest install to date that will push it to over 3,000, Nickell told TechCrunch.
The company is now in all 50 states and has over 14,000 displays in retailers like ShopRite, Bashasâ and Cub Foods. It has partnerships with programmatic networks, including The Trade Desk and Yahoo DSP, to make it easier for agencies and brands like Chase and Anheuser-Busch to reach an audience of over 30 million grocery shoppers.
Cooler Screens raises $80M to bring interactive screens into cooler aisles
In addition, the company launched a SaaS merchandising product that uses machine learning to make sure products are in-stock and shelved correctly. One of its partnerships there is with Dotdash Meredith, announced in 2021, which uses Clerkâs technology to manage its publications in over 15,000 stores per quarter.
Clerkâs digital screens are not a new concept, in fact there have been a handful of companies over the past decade or so bringing digital signage into grocery aisles, mainly for in-store advertising. Those include NoviSign, ScreenCloud, Cooler Screens, EasyScreen and In-Store Broadcasting Network. You also might remember Premier Retail Networks as one of the pioneers in this space with its Checkout TV product that was in U.S. Walmart stores.
Nickell noted that technology costs and an engineering focus â which is his background â was needed to keep technology costs down.
âWe saw companies raise more, but struggle to get hardware out there,â he added. âHardware is hard and if you donât do it right, it can be expensive.â
Clerk’s team. Image Credits: Clerk
Where he believes Clerk is getting it right is by having a âFirst Principles approach,â which enables the company to offer a cheaper cost structure. The rise of social media is also making in-store retail advertising easier because more people are used to absorbing a lot of content.
However, there remains a delicate balance between throwing up screens and interfering with the customer experience. âYou have to be thoughtful there because things will struggle to take off if it does, and grocery stores donât want to mess with what they already have,â Nickell added.
Meanwhile, in addition to growth of stores and screens, Clerk also tripled its revenue in the past two years and became profitable last year. With an efficient business going, the company decided to invest in growth, raising $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Sageview Capital.
As part of the investment, Sageview partner Dean Nelson will join Clerkâs board of directors, while Sageview principal Roberto Avila will join as a board observer.
Whereas the Series A was scaling the market and team, the Series B is a pure growth round. Clerk has 30 employees and will be growing both the team, partnerships and store count over the next two to three years. In addition, the funding will go toward technology and product development, including new merchandising analytics.
âWhen we have the opportunity for growth, we want to take it,â Nickell said. âWe will use this round to catapult us into the market. Something that is unique about this space is that grocery stores want to know you are going to stick around, so to be a successful technology company in the space, you have to be building a lasting company and one that will be a tech partner for the future.â
11 ways to make personalized shopping more effective and profitable
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 12:45:06 +0000
Are you slouching at your desk again? There’s an app for that… Zen uses posture mirroring software to help information workers stop hunching over their desks — sending alerts when it detects you’re not sitting up straight so you can correct your posture and, hopefully, avoid a lifetime of back problems.
The catch? It uses your webcam to check on your posture. So, er, you have to be comfortable with Zen’s software ‘watching’ through the lens as you work.
Given how many people routinely tape over their webcam just to be sure — y’know, that the NSA isn’t watching — that’s quite the ask. So we asked Zen’s co-founder and CEO, Daniel James, how the San Francisco-based startup works around that privacy concern.
As well as offering the tool direct to consumers (it currently has 1,000+ users of its subscription service), the startup sells a version of Zen to employers and has signed up around 30 companies (including over a dozen enterprises) since it launched the offering back in October 2020. And given rocketing growth in worker surveillance tools since the pandemic-triggered boom in remote working there’s plenty of reason for privacy concerns.
For example, could an employer that’s signed up to Zen use the tool, if not literally to spy on staff sitting at their desks (which would probably be pretty boring tbh), then to log how many hours they are physically sat in front of the screen, say — and use those data-points to pressure employees to shorten any desk breaks they might wish to take?
Dystopian uses of webcam-based tools aren’t hard to imagine because such stuff, sadly, isn’t science fiction. Take Amazon’s launch in the US last year of AI-powered cameras in its Prime delivery vans, which it said would be used to assess driver “safety” — but which critics instantly dubbed Orwellian surveillance…
In short, ‘AIs with eyes’ can just feel, er, function creepy.
Zen says it’s taken a “privacy centric” approach to building this webcam-based posture correcting tech — meaning its taken some specific steps to try to reassure users they’re not being watched by it or anyone else as the AI watches them.
Firstly, its posture correction software is open source (the code is here on Github). “We use open source software for the entire app, except our exercise and educational content, which we custom make,” notes James when as asked about that.
The AI also processes data locally, on device — which means it does not require an internet connection to function — so he says users can verify for themselves that it’s not uploading/streaming any data to the cloud by testing it with their wi-fi/internet connection disabled.
“The posture correction software feature runs offline, without internet, without recording or storing visuals,” he emphasizes. “Since data, like photos or videos, can’t be passed to the cloud without internet connection, which is the only way that employers could spy on employees, it’s technically impossible for us (Zen) or employers to record or store any visuals and ultimately spy on people.”
He also confirms that employers who use Zen’s software only receive “aggregated” (entire company) and “anonymous” (no individual names) information on how many employees sign up to the app and how many use it on a weekly basis.
“With these two data points they can see if employees are engaged with Zen or not, which is usually the determining factor for them when deciding to extend their contract with us,” he adds.
So — to be clear — Zen’s claim is that neither employers who pay it for the software (or Zen itself) can access the camera feed of users to record or store any visuals.
“The posture correction feature of the app, which is the only feature that accesses individuals’ cameras doesn’t run on the cloud, which technically means that no one can tap into the app and access data, including visuals,” says James, adding: “Surprisingly, no employer has ever asked for ‘spy’ type data. They really just want to know if employees are using the solution that they are paying for.”
Even so, privacy conscious desk workers may still not like the idea of sitting in front of a naked camera lens all day.
After all, there is little in tech so blissfully out-of-sight-out-of-mind as a webcam with a sticker stuck firmly over it.
Posture check-ins
On this, James suggests Zen users have come up with their own way to feel comfortable with the tool as he says they tend to use the app to do short posture checks in — say of 30 minutes or an hour with the feature enabled, a couple of times a day — rather than keeping it on all the time.
The developers have smartly leaned into that — recommending users do just a short daily check in to stay posture aware.
“We noticed that the majority of our users don’t leave Zen on all day. Instead they do a short 30-60 minute posture session during their first work session in the morning and another one around Noon or 4 PM. This correlates to how most people meditate,” James tells TechCrunch. “They spend a short time actively being aware of their thoughts which strengthens their passive awareness throughout the day. This works for posture as well.
“Doing short small sessions daily ultimately increases your posture awareness and behavior change. Furthermore, in user interviews people often tell us that ‘Zen seems to be in the back of my head even when I’m not at my desktop. I find myself slouching at the dinner table, and I’m starting to naturally notice it and move back into an upright position.’ From this anecdotal and analytical data, we decided to recommend people to start using the app for just thirty minutes a day during what we call the ‘7-Day Posture Challenge’ and people are seeing amazing results both in increased posture awareness and decreased back and joint pain.”
“We’ve found that people aren’t as concerned about any privacy invasions when they realize that Zen doesn’t have to be on all day. You can turn it on and off as you wish,” he adds.
James also says users often combine use of the posture monitoring feature with use of other apps which require the webcam to be on, such as when they’re making a videoconferencing call.
“They can show posture awareness and confidence during their video calls and they have their camera on for Zoom and G Meets regardless so they aren’t as concerned about any privacy invasions,” he notes.
Zen integrates with the user’s general computer workflow — running in the background and mirroring the user’s posture via a stick-man icon displayed in the menu bar which lets users keep discreet tabs without being interrupted with alert messages. Blue and upright is good; bent and red is bad. (James says it never sends distracting/pop-up message alerts; but users can choose from a few options how they want to be alerted.)
How Zen alerts users to poor posture: A larger graphic can be pinned to the screen (with an optional alarm feature) or users can rely on watching a discreet stick-man in the menu bar can (Credit: Zen)
The posture correcting AI works off a user-defined baseline — meaning the user needs to demonstrate their upright posture on set up. The app then uses that to build a user-specific model made of vectors that record key posture points/indictors (joints, nose, ears etc) so the AI can detect posture changes in real-time (i.e. when the camera monitoring is enabled) and determine whether or not the person is slouching.
“These posture points are fed to a mathematical model that constantly compares your current posture position to the original baseline posture position that you set as your ‘upright’ position,” he explains. “In addition, the app applies geometrical formulas to vectors formed by your current posture position and your original baseline upright posture position to determine if you’re slouching.”
James has a personal reason to be keen on keeping good posture, having been a “very active” NCAA Division-One college football player at Yale University who then went on to working at Adobe in San Francisco — and “living the typical sedentary corporate lifestyle of sitting in front of a computer for over eight hours a day” — which eventually led to him developing serious low back pain and carpal tunnel.
“Adobe offered great ergonomic resources like a free ergonomic consultation and a stand-up desk and purchased different devices that claimed to help with posture but my pain just continued to increase,” he says, fleshing out the reasons that led to founding Zen.
There was a lucky strike too: His co-founder, Alex Secara — who was his housemate at the time and is now Zen’s CTO — had already developed a posture correction software for himself in college to help with a spine-related condition he has (kyphosis) which had also been exacerbated after long hours of coding during tech internships.
“We ultimately decided to join forces to build Zen alongside top ergonomists and physical therapists,” adds James.
Zen is disclosing $3.5M in pre-seed funding raised from investors including Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, Goodwater Capital, Samsung Next, Softbank and others which it says it will be using to invest in expanding its team for growth and product dev — with plans in the works for key workday integrations (Slack, G Cal, Microsoft Teams), and for versions of the software for different devices/platforms (mobile, tablet, etc.).
The startup also tells us says it’s exploring partnerships with larger companies and “further proving out the efficacy of our solutions through clinical studies”. (Current enterprise customers include Brex, Alation and Cedar.)
Zen also plans to switch the consumer product to a freemium version — saying it’s aiming for a model akin to the meditation app Calm with premium paid features.
Expanding into selling physical products (more ergonomic chairs, mice, keyboards etc) is also on its roadmap, per James, who says it’s also looking to explore whether it can make use of existing movement sensor hardware in devices like more high end headphones, wearables and mobiles to see if it could repurpose those signals for determining if a person is slouching or not.
If it can devise AI models to figure that out, it might end up being possible for users to get real-time, back-saving posture-mirroring tips without ever needing to switch the camera on. Bliss!
Calm acquires healthcare technology company Ripple Health Group
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 12:00:16 +0000
Industrial robotics has in recent years become one of the hottest tech sectors in China as the country encourages the use of advanced technology to enhance efficiency on the production floor.
VisionNav Robotics, which specializes in autonomous forklifts, stacking vehicles and other logistics robots, is the latest industrial robot maker from China to get funded. The Shenzhen-based automated guided vehicle (AGV) startup has snagged 500 million yuan (around $76 million) from a Series C extension round led by Meituan, China’s food delivery giant, and 5Y Capital, a prominent venture capital firm in the country. Its existing investors IDG, TikTok’s parent firm ByteDance, and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital also joined in the round.
Founded in 2016 by a group of PhDs from the University of Tokyo and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, VisionNav’s valuation was boosted to over $500 million in this round, up from $393 million just six months ago when it picked up 300 million yuan ($47 million) in a Series C financing, it told TechCrunch.
The new funding will allow VisionNav to invest in R&D and broaden its use cases, expanding from a focus on horizontal and vertical moving to other functions like stacking and loading.
The key piece in adding new categories is to train and improve the startup’s software algorithms, less so developing new hardware, said the firm’s vice president of global sales, Don Dong. “From controlling, dispatching, to sensing, we will have to improve our software capabilities as a whole.”
A major challenge for robots, said Dong, is to effectively perceive and navigate the world around them. The problem with a camera-powered autonomous driving solution, like that of Tesla, is it can be easily affected by bright light. Lidar, a sensing technology heralded for its more accurate distance detection, was still too expensive for mass adoption a few years ago, but it has seen its price slashed substantially by Chinese players like DJI-affiliated Livox and Robosense.
“Before, we were mostly providing indoor solutions. Now that we are expanding to unmanned truck loading, which is often semi-outdoors, it’s inevitable we will be operating in strong light. That’s why we are adapting a combination of vision and radar technologies to navigate our robots,” said Dong.
VisionNav sees Pittsburg-based Seegrid and France-based Balyo as its international rivals but believed it has a “price advantage” for being in China, which houses its manufacturing and R&D activities. The startup is already dispatching robots to clients in Southeast Asia, East Asia, as well as the Netherlands, the UK, and Hungary. It’s in the process of setting up subsidiaries in Europe and the US.
The startup works with system integrators to sell its robots, meaning it doesn’t collect detailed customer information, making data compliance in foreign markets simpler. It’s expected to derive 50-60% of its revenues abroad in the next few years, compared with the current share of 30-40%. The US is one of its main target markets, said Dong, as the forklift industry there generates “greater gross revenues than that of China despite having a smaller number of forklift vehicles.”
Last year, VisionNav pulled in total sales revenues between 200 million ($31 million) and 250 million yuan ($39 million). It currently operates a team of around 400 people across China and it’s expected to reach 1,000 staff this year by hiring aggressively overseas.
China roundup: Keep down internet upstarts, cultivate hard tech
SoftBank leads $15M round for China’s industrial robot maker Youibot
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 08:00:38 +0000
It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the âprivacy decentralizedâ startup. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if âDeFiâ is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions – which are normally private in the traditional finance world – will struggle to take off.
Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent âfront-runningâ, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee – just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.
Sienna Network has now launched its private crypto lending platform, dubbed SiennaLend. The company claims that crypto users can use the platform to earn interest on their crypto and also borrow crypto from the platform – all privately. The platform will compete in this space with Uniswap and PancakeSwap, but claims to have more features than both.
SiennaLend is (obviously) built on top of the Secret Network, which affords – claims the company – greater security and safety compared to open and non-private blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and others.
SiennaLendâs pitch to the market is that its lower gas prices will make it more attractive to small investors.
âPaying a transaction fee of $150 to make a loan of $200 makes little sense and this is another major benefit for SiennaLend. Gas fees are counted in cents rather than dollars as the scalability of the blockchains are much higher. We have spent 15 months in stealth, fine-tuning this absolute game-changer for crypto and its ascendance to the next level of mainstream finance,â Monty Munford, Chief Evangelist, Sienna Network, said in a statement.
Sienna Network says âPersonal Identifiable Information (PII)â means users can “backtrack” and see their wallet possessions and trading history via their wallet address. It will also offer loans against collateral, as would happen with traditional lending, by allowing users to deposit into a pool and choose to earn interest or borrow based on that deposit. The idea is that traders can defend against the current market volatility more easily.
Lending protocols like this in DeFI are widely observed to be taking off, despite market volatility, because they offer more reassurances to crypto holders. Cryptocurrency-based loans have become a highly utilized aspect of DeFi.
By being built on Secret Network, Sienna Network/SiennaLand is also part of the Cosmos ecosystem, recently upgraded to be a part of IBC. Cosmos competes – after a fashion with Polkadot, also an âinternet of blockchainsâ.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 02:14:48 +0000
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold around 4.4 million shares of the company on Tuesday, according to regulatory filings published on Thursday.
Musk, via Aaron Beckman, his power of attorney, filed a total of five Form 4s with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to cover all 138 individual transactions.
The value of the sales in the filings disclosed is so far is around $4 billion, per TechCrunch calculations.
The executive said in a tweet on Thursday: “No further TSLA sales planned after today”.
The filings don’t reveal why Musk sold his shares, something he’s been wont to do. The money could possibly go towards his recent controversial plans to purchase social media platform Twitter, however, $4 billion seems to hardly make a dent in the $44 billion the acquisition will cost.
However, if Musk backs out of the deal, he’s on the hook for $1 billion, per the termination fee of the deal with Twitter, so at least that amount would be covered by these sales.
No further TSLA sales planned after today
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2022
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 01:13:22 +0000
Airbnb is going all in on the “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy that much of the business world has been forced to adopt, committing to full-time remote work for most employees and a handful of perks like 90 days of international work/travel. It’s a strong, simple policy that so few large companies have had the guts to match.
In an email to employees posted to the company blog (or was it a blog post emailed to employees?), and in a Twitter thread for those who can’t be bothered, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky outlined the new policy, summing it up in five points:
You can work from home or the office
You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation wonât change
You have the flexibility to travel and work around the world
Weâll meet up regularly for gatherings
Weâll continue to work in a highly coordinated way
They’re pretty self-explanatory, obviously, but just to be clear let’s run them down.
Apart from “a small number of roles” for whom presence in an office or location is required (and who probably already know this), all employees can work from wherever they want.
If you want to move, as long as you stay within the country, your pay won’t change. Wherever you go in the U.S., for instance, you’ll get the same pay, and one hopes it’ll be enough whether you live in a small town in Colorado or midtown Manhattan. Sadly if you decide you want to move permanently to London or Seoul, this is “much more complex, so we won’t be able to support those this year.”
Though workers will need a permanent address, they’ll have dozens of companies and locations to work from for up to 90 days a year â so stay over in Lisbon for a bit and work from that villa for a week or two after your vacation. Why not? Well, possibly because remote work visas may not be available for those areas, but that’s all a work in progress. (They’re adding partners to a big list over here.)
Chesky says they’ll all “meet up regularly,” even though Airbnb probably has about 15,000 employees at this point. That’s even more than TechCrunch! They’ll have “limited off-sites” in 2022, which is probably smart, but next year you can “expect to gather in person every quarter for about a week at a time.” I really don’t understand how they can possibly get any work done over there.
The last point seems kind of superfluous and self-congratulatory, but it is probably good to officially note that the general shape of working at the company, or how people are managed and so on, won’t change due to this new policy.
Tech companies are looking at more flexible work models when offices reopen
Many companies have announced tentative policies with the understanding that they would be revisited in a few months. There’s a lot of talk about the “hybrid” or “flex” model where employees work from the office a few days, then from home the rest of the time. Depending on where and how you work, this could be the best or worst of both worlds. But it does suggest a certain lack of decisiveness in leadership. (Among the early adopters of full time remote work was Twitter, which may soon be under new leadership.)
And then there’s the safety and liability question. Activision Blizzard, already kind of fubar, mandated a return to the office, then lifted their vaccine mandate. As someone noted at the time, “do not die for this company,” or any company for that matter.
Perhaps Airbnb will be the guinea pig for this particular type of “fully remote workplace” and all the other companies will be watching and waiting for the company to stub its toe on some huge new tax burden or productivity issue. But the simplicity and flexibility of the policy, international legal restrictions notwithstanding, may outweigh any new troubles it creates.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:56:08 +0000
A popular criticism of NFTs is that they are just static JPEG files. Technically, they are not, of course. They are pieces of code on a blockchain, which means that they can be programmed to have various qualities. The NFTs that go on sale on marketplaces such as OpenSea are already programmed with instructions on the royalties to be provided to the owner, for instance.
But what if they could be programmed to do much more?
Thatâs a trend we have seen in recent quarters. Pearpop introduced dynamic NFTs earlier this year that gain value as a social media post goes viral. The NFTs on Axie Infinity change their properties as a user makes inroads in the game.
A new startup, called Revise, is attempting to productize this ability.
It offers developers the ability to make their own NFTs interact with data feeds of their choice, which could be a web3 platform such as Chainlink or a web2 outlet like Weather.com.
The goal, as the startup explains it, is to make the NFTs change their properties based on events. For instance, a soccer NFT could hypothetically interact with data from FIFA and change its property or media content based on the real-world performance on the field.
âWhat programmable NFT allows you to do is also leverage the userâs interaction or skill to make the properties rarer,â said Raunaq Vaisoha, co-founder and chief executive of Revise, in an interview with TechCrunch.
By programming NFTs based on usersâ interactions, developers can incentivize them to participate more in their projects, said Vaisoha, who co-founded Revise with Anil Dukkipatty.
Revise is also adding a layer of governance for the storage through its data structure to help developers handle disputes in a trustable manner.
âCurrently, an issue with dynamic NFTs is that your data has to be off-chain. Imagine youâre playing a game and you have to wait for the block time for your gaming character to update. Most people end up storing the NFT on an AWS S3 or a different web2 layer,â he said. âThatâs what our data structure is built to solve.â
Revise is initially launching with the Polygon blockchain, but plans to expand to other blockchains in the future. Its SDK is live in private beta on NPM, and the startup has amassed some customers already, including Ludo Labs.
The startup said on Friday it has raised $3.5 million in its seed round. Alpha Wave Global and 8i co-led the round. Bharat Founders Fund and a number of entrepreneurs including Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, DeFi Pulse founder Scott Lewis, AngelList India head Utsav Somani, The Graph’s Pranav Maheshwari, and Treebo founder Rahul Chaudhary also participated in the round.
“The entire NFT space has seen a massive narrative shift as people have discovered that NFTs can be more than just digital collectables or static assets. We see this shift happen in Gaming most prominently, but the abstract concept is broadly applicable to any real-world asset that can be tokenized. Further, as more complex utilities are built on NFTs, the aspect of traceability and transparency in governance will become front and centre,â said Tushar Behl of Alpha Wave Global, in a statement.
âWe loved Revise and the founders for their deep product insight and a forward-looking vision of the space. What the team at Revise is building can become the most fundamental layer for NFT provenance and programming, much like Chainlink did for Defi!â
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:01:20 +0000
Glorang, a Seoul-based edtech startup that offers after-school classes and extracurricular activities via online for students between the ages of 3 and 18, said Friday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding co-led by Korea Investment Partners and Murex Partners, along with Japan’s Pksha Capital.Â
The new funding, which brings its total raised to $18 million, values Glorang at around $40 million, Glorang CEO and founder Taeil Hwang told TechCrunch. Â
The startup has aspirations to become Outschool of Asia. Hwang said that its business model is similar to Outschool, the San Francisco-based after-school marketplace for children. Glorang will use the Series A to expand its service to Japan and Malaysia by the fourth quarter of this year and Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam in the following years, Hwang said. It also plans to increase its headcount.Â
“The education market in the English-speaking and North American regions is undoubtedly large, but we [at Glorang] understand that each country’s local D2C education market in Asia can be just as substantial,” Hwang said.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced students in many parts of the globe to become online learners; the education technology industry has experienced a sudden surge and demand globally due to the pandemic. The Asia Pacific is one of the fastest-growing regions in the adoption of Edtech, increasing to $64.5 billion in 2027, from $17.6 billion in 2019.
Glorang was founded in 2017 by Hwang, who started off this company with an AI-powered platform helping students match with study abroad programs. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Glorang pivoted its main business, the online class platform, and launched Gguge in 2020, Hwang said. The company claims Gguge has more than 100,000 users in South Korea.Â
What sets Gguge apart from its peers is providing education services in local languages, Hwang said adding that it currently offers Korean but will add the Japanese language soon.Â
Gguge offers a selection of more than 5,000 online classes via Zoom. Instructors help students engage with active learning methods, ranging from reading newspapers through solving puzzles to incorporating Minecraft and Pokemon games into the classes.Â
“As a team that understands both the local culture and strategies in Asia, we are confident that our platform will have a strong standing in Asia’s ever-growing D2C education market,” Hwang said.Â
Students can take a one-day class or subscription-based semester classes via Gguge. The company has a team of 35 in Korea.Â
Outschool, newly profitable, raises a $45M Series B for virtual small group classes
Vietnam after-school learning startup Marathon raises $1.5M pre-seed round
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 22:40:24 +0000
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Itâs Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Hajeâs blood pressure is slowly returning to what passes for normal after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, itâs hard to get used to the quirks and foibles of a new country, OK? Nobody tell him about how healthcare works in this country, please; weâd never hear the end of it.
In other news, TechCrunch has a shiny new fintech newsletter launching on Sunday. Sign up today so you donât miss it this weekend! The third ep of our crypto and blockchain podcast, âChain Reaction,â is out today, so fill your ears with the dulcet tones of Lucas and Anitaâs calming voices.
Friday tomorrow, woohoo! â Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
Twitter admits it overcounted accounts: Hey guess what? Twitter announced its first-quarter earnings today. And it didnât count right, revealing that it was reporting more users than it really had â by nearly 2 million â something Sarah points out is âa predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Muskâs proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal.â Meanwhile, Alex looked into what the acquisition could mean for Twitter’s advertising revenue.
Death and taxes are indeed certain: Itâs not every day that we get to quote Ben Franklin in a story, but in this case, itâs tied to technology making it easier for us to do things like pay our taxes. To that point, mobile tax-filing app Taxfix brought in a $220 million round to become a unicorn. Taxes are not always easy, so itâs good to have someone who knows what to do. We like how CEO Martin Ott put it, âWeâve hacked the brain of a tax accountant into codes.â
Thereâs a Google of Russia: Its name is Yandex, and itâs selling its media division to, get this, a company called VKontakte, which is considered âthe local Facebook equivalent.â Not sure it gets better than that. This is news Natasha was following for a month now, and she reports the sale was fallout from Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in many companies reassessing their media assets.
Startups and VC
One of our favorite things about putting the Daily Crunch together is that we get to cheer on our colleagues and read their fantastic work. Today, itâs a Kyle-o-rama. He wrote about how Synthesis AI raised $17 million to create synthetic data to improve computer vision and how payroll provider Symmetrical.ai raised $18.5 million to make employee payouts smoother. CommandBar landed $19 million to continue creating a search-and-browse plugin for web apps, and Deepset raised $14 million to help companies build natural-language processing apps. Kyle, your fingers must be exhausted — go treat yourself to a cup of coffee and a round of baseball or something.
We love Christineâs story of Lemon Perfectâs investor journey with the queen bee: Two years after Lemon Perfect was spotted in BeyoncĂ©’s limo, the superstar is now a backer.
Also! We kicked off a series of pitch deck teardowns, and we are looking for startups that want to have their pitch decks reviewed. Get involved!
More news than you can shake a cap table at:
Shuffle off your mortal oil: BlocPower wants to evict fossil fuels one building at a time, replacing them with greener alternatives.
Wuthering Writes: Just when you thought you had learned to ignore marketing copy, Movable Ink comes along with customized marketing content and a $55 million sack of cash to build a content-generating AI.
If you want it done properly, you gotta do it your shelf: Oware is streamlining Pakistan’s supply chain, powered by a $3.3 million seed round.
Without a car in the world: Post-pandemic, used car platforms are booming, and Spotawheel just raised âŹ100 million. It is active in Poland and Greece and about to launch in Romania.
More vrooms, less fumes: Dat Bike is the creator of Vietnam’s first domestic electric motorbike, and we are a little bit in love with the cafe-racer styling.
GVâs Frederique Dame on product-market fit: âYou have one chance at a good experienceâ
Image Credits: John Lamb (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In a fireside chat at TechCrunch Early Stage, Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV who previously led product and engineering teams at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, shared her thoughts about product-market fit.
Dame addressed several issues, including the need to collect customer data as early as possible, strategies for iterating and testing without tapping engineering resources, and, notably, why founders should make themselves vulnerable when pitching investors:
“Trust me with what you donât know or whatâs not working” she said, “because once we invest, weâre going to have to work on this stuff anyway.”
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
GVâs Frederique Dame on product-market fit: âYou have one chance at a good experienceâ
Big Tech Inc.
Get your popcorn ready: We already talked about Google and Facebook in the Top 3, so letâs start off this section with a little bit of Amazon. The company launched its movie rental service in India, with over 40 original and co-produced shows and movies that will enable customers to get early access to both Indian and foreign movies.
Rounding up some earnings: Todayâs earnings are brought to you by the letter âT,â which rhymes with âP,â and that spells Peacock, which added 4 million paid subscribers. Meta’s metaverse is not doing so hot, but Facebook gained users.
Ac(quisi)tion news: It looks like Microsoft will be adding another company to its family. Activision Blizzard shareholders voted to approve the sale. Meanwhile, Hackerone acquired PullRequest, a YC-backed company that will give the bug bounty company some code-review skills.
Judge sides with Elon Musk: He is probably going to win with the Twitter deal, but he can definitely put a checkmark in the âwinâ category here. A Delaware judge ruled in his favor following a lawsuit brought by Tesla shareholders that accused Musk of coercing Teslaâs board into buying SolarCity back in 2016.
Oh Snap!: Our reporters were busy covering Snap today in assorted stories we will bullet below. We would like to highlight that it created a new gadget that will have you forgetting what a selfie stick is. Pixy, Snapâs mini drone, is your camera when you donât have anyone else to hold your phone. Also:
Snap offers Lens Cloud for developers
New in-app AR shopping tools for retailers
Snapchat adds new assistive devices for bitmoji avatars
Snap and Live Nation come together on AR experiences at concerts, festivals
Snapchatâs new âDirector Modeâ will have you becoming a video creator in no time
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:58:58 +0000
Amid a record-breaking fiscal second quarter, Apple also delivered record-breaking services revenue up 17% year over year to reach $19.8 billion. The category — which includes businesses like the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, cloud services and others — also grew to reach 825 million paid subscriptions on Apple’s platform.
This figure is up more than 165 million in the last 12 months alone, Apple said.
The company highlighted a few of its recent achievements in the services category, including Apple TV+ becoming the first streaming service to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, for its movie “Coda.” Apple also noted its Apple TV+ shows had earned over 240 awards and more than 960 nominations to date.
The streaming service recently added live sports content with the addition of Friday Night Baseball, which launched earlier this month, along with other new titles.
In addition to setting an all-time revenue record in the services category, Apple set all-time records for the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Care and cloud services, it said. Meanwhile, its video advertising and payment services set March quarter records.
During the last 12 months, Apple said it had generated $75 billion in services revenue.
“These impressive results reflect the impact of our continued investment in improving and expanding our services portfolio and the positive momentum that we’re seeing on many fronts,” noted Luca Maestri, Appleâs CFO.
He attributed the growth to other factors as well, including Apple’s growing device install base, which also reached an all-time high across each geographic segment and major product category. Plus, Apple customers are increasingly engaging with the services Apple offers.
“We have more transacting accounts, more paying accounts, more accounts with subscriptions — the absolute amount of paid subscriptions on our platform is pretty impressive: 825 million. It’s an increase of 165 million in the last 12 months alone. So you can even tell that this is great growth,” said Maestri.
The company has also been adding new services over the last few years and plans to “add new services and new features,” he hinted.
While the majority of today’s Apple services are aimed at consumers, Apple said that it sees enterprise as a great opportunity going forward, following its recent launch of Apple Business Essentials, which was aimed more at the SMB market.
“But we know that enterprise, in general, as a market is a very interesting market for us, and we’re putting a lot of effort and focus on it. And we believe we have really good opportunities to grow,” said Maestri.
However, Apple did warn that while it expects services to continue to grow in double digits in the coming year, it does anticipate services growth to decelerate from its March quarter’s performance due to various factors including the supply chain constraints impacting Apple’s ability to ship enough products to meet customer demand, foreign exchange rates and the pausing of all sales in Russia, which took place in March.
The company said the growth rate for the June quarter is expected to be less than the 17% that it reported in In March, as a result.