Author: azeeadmin

 

Y Combinator-backed Kapacity.io is on a mission to accelerate the decarbonization of buildings by using AI-generated efficiency savings to encourage electrification of commercial real estate — wooing buildings away from reliance on fossil fuels to power their heating and cooling needs.

It does this by providing incentives to buildings owners/occupiers to shift to clean energy usage through a machine learning-powered software automation layer.

The startup’s cloud software integrates with buildings’ HVAC systems and electricity meters — drawing on local energy consumption data to calculate and deploy real-time adjustments to heating/cooling systems which not only yield energy and (CO2) emissions savings but generate actual revenue for building owners/tenants — paying them to reduce consumption such as at times of peak energy demand on the grid.

“We are controlling electricity consumption in buildings, focusing on heating and cooling devices — using AI machine learning to optimize and find the best ways to consume electricity,” explains CEO and co-founder Jaakko Rauhala, a former consultant in energy technology. “The actual method is known as ‘demand response’. Basically that is a way for electricity consumer to get paid for adjusting their energy consumption, based on a utility company’s demand.

“For example if there is a lot of wind power production and suddenly the wind drops or the weather changes and the utility company is running power grids they need to balance that reduction — and the way to do that is either you can fire up natural gas turbine or you can reduce power consumption… Our product estimates how much can we reduce electricity consumption at any given minute. We are [targeting] heating and cooling devices because they consume a lot of electricity.”

“The way we see this is this is a way we can help our customers electrify their building stocks faster because it makes their investments more lucrative and in addition we can then help them use more renewable electricity because we can shift the use from fossil fuels to other areas. And in that we hope to help push for a more greener power grid,” he adds.

Kapcity’s approach is applicable in deregulated energy markets where third parties are able to play a role offering energy saving services and fluctuations in energy demand are managed by an auction process involving the trading of surplus energy — typically overseen by a transmission system operator — to ensure energy producers have the right power balance to meet customer needs.

Demand for energy can fluctuate regardless of the type of energy production feeding the grid but renewable energy sources tend to increase the volatility of energy markets as production can be less predictable vs legacy energy generation (like nuclear or burning fossil fuels) — wind power, for example, depends on when and how strongly the wind is blowing (which both varies and isn’t perfectly predictable). So as economies around the world dial up efforts to tackle climate change and hit critical carbon emissions reduction targets there’s growing pressure to shift away from from fossil fuels-based power generation toward cleaner, renewable alternatives. And the real estate sector specifically remains a major generator of CO2 so is squarely in the frame for ‘greening’.

Simultaneously, decarbonization and the green shift looks likely to drive demand for smart solutions to help energy grids manage increasing complexity and volatility in the energy supply mix.

“Basically more wind power — and solar, to some extent — correlates with demand for balancing power grids and this is why there is a lot of talk usually about electricity storage when it comes to renewables,” says Rauhala. “Demand response, in the way that we do it, is an alternative for electricity storage units. Basically we’re saying that we already have a lot of electricity consuming devices — and we will have more and more with electrification. We need to adjust their consumption before we invest billions of dollars into other systems.”

“We will need a lot of electricity storage units — but we try to push the overall system efficiency to the maximum by utilising what we already have in the grid,” he adds.

There are of course limits to how much ‘adjustment’ (read: switching off) can be done to a heating or cooling system by even the cleverest AI without building occupants becoming uncomfortable.

But Kapacity’s premise is that small adjustments — say turning off the boilers/coolers for five, 15 or 30 minutes — can go essentially unnoticed by building occupants if done right, allowing the startup to tout a range of efficiency services for its customers; such as a peak-shaving offering which automatically reduces energy usage to avoid peaks in consumption and generate significant energy cost savings.

“Our goal — which is a very ambitious goal — is that the customers and occupants in the buildings wouldn’t notice the adjustments. And that they would fall into the normal range of temperature fluctuations in a building,” says Rauhala.

Kapacity’s algorithms are designed to understand how to make dynamic adjustments to buildings’ heating/cooling without compromising “thermal comfort”, as Rauhala puts it — noting that co-founder (and COO) Sonja Salo, has both a Phd in demand response and researched thermal comfort during a stint as a visiting researcher at UC Berkley — making the area a specialist focus for the engineer-led founding team.

At the same time, the carrots it’s dangling at the commercial real estate to sign up for a little algorithmic HVAC tweaking look substantial: Kapacity says its system has been able to achieve a 25% reduction in electricity costs and a 10% reduction in CO2-emissions in early pilots. Although early tests have been limited to its home market for now.

Its other co-founder, Rami El Geneidy, researched smart algorithms for demand response involving heat pumps for his PhD dissertation — and heat pumps are another key focus for the team’s tech, per Rauhala.

Heat pumps are a low carbon technology that’s fairly commonly used in the Nordics for heating buildings but whose use is starting to spread as countries around the world look for greener alternatives to heat buildings.

In the UK, for example, the government announced a plan last year to install hundreds of thousands of heat pumps per year by 2028 as it seeks to move the country away from widespread use of gas boilers to heat homes. And Rauhala names the UK as one of the startup’s early target markets — along with the European Union and the US where they also envisage plenty of demand for their services.

While the initial focus is the commercial real estate sector, he says they are also interested in residential buildings — noting that from a “tech core point of view we can do any type of building”.

“We have been focusing on larger buildings — multi-family buildings, larger office buildings, certain type of industrial or commercial buildings so we don’t do single family detached homes at the moment,” he goes on, adding: “We have been looking at that and it’s an interesting avenue but our current pilots are in larger buildings.”

The Finnish startup was only founded last year — taking in a pre-seed round of funding from Nordic Makers prior to getting backing from YC — where it will be presenting at the accelerator’s demo day next week. (But Rauhala won’t comment on any additional fund raising plans at this stage.)

He says it’s spun up five pilot projects over the last seven months involving commercial landlords, utilities, real estate developers and engineering companies (all in Finland for now), although — again — full customer details are not yet being disclosed. But Rauhala tells us they expect to move to their first full commercial deals with pilot customers this year.

“The reason why our customers are interested in using our products is that this is a way to make electrification cheaper because they are being paid for adjusting their consumption and that makes their operating cost lower and it makes investments more lucrative if — for example — you need to switch from natural gas boilers to heat pumps so that you can decarbonize your building,” he also tells us. “If you connect the new heat pump running on electricity — if you connect that to our service we can reduce the operating cost and that will make it more lucrative for everybody to electrify their buildings and run their systems.

“We can also then make their electricity consumed more sustainable because we are shifting consumption away from hours with most CO2 emissions on the grid. So we try to avoid the hours when there’s a lot of fossil fuel-based production in the grid and try to divert that into times when we have more renewable electricity.

“So basically the big question we are asking is how do we increase the use of renewables and the way to achieve that is asking when should we consume? Well we should consume electricity when we have more renewable in the grid. And that is the emission reduction method that we are applying here.”

In terms of limitations, Kapacity’s software-focused approach can’t work in every type of building — requiring that real estate customers have some ability to gather energy consumption (and potentially temperature) data from their buildings remotely, such as via IoT devices.

“The typical data that we need is basic information on the heating system — is it running at 100% or 50% or what’s the situation? That gets us pretty far,” says Rauhala. “Then we would like to know indoor temperatures. But that is not mandatory in the sense that we can still do some basic adjustments without that.”

It also of course can’t offer much in the way of savings to buildings that are running 100% on natural gas (or oil) — i.e. with electricity only used for lighting (turning lights off when people are inside buildings obviously wouldn’t fly); there must be some kind of air conditioning, cooling or heat pump systems already installed (or the use of electric hot water boilers).

“An old building that runs on oil or natural gas — that’s a target for decarbonization,” he continues. “That’s a target where you could consider installing heat pumps and that is where we could help some of our customers or potential customers to say ok we need to estimate how much would it cost to install a heat pump system here and that’s where our product can come in and we can say you can reduce the operating cost with demand response. So maybe we should do something together here.”

Rauhala also confirms that Kapacity’s approach does not require invasive levels of building occupant surveillance, telling TechCrunch: “We don’t collect information that is under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], I’ll put it that way. We don’t take personal data for this demand response.”

So any guestimates its algorithms are making about building occupants’ tolerance for temperature changes are, therefore, not going to be based on specific individuals — but may, presumably, factor in aggregated information related to specific industry/commercial profiles.

The Helsinki-based startup is not the only one looking at applying AI to drive energy cost and emissions savings in the commercial buildings sector — another we spoke to recently is Düsseldorf-based Dabbel, for example. And plenty more are likely to take an interest in the space as governments start to pump more money into accelerating decarbonization.

Asked about competitive differentiation, Rauhala points to a focus on real-time adjustments and heat pump technologies.

“One of our key things is we’re developing a system so that we can do close to real time control — very very short term control. That is a valuable service to the power grid so we can then quickly adjust,” he says. “And the other one is we are focusing on heat pump technologies to get started — heat pumps here in the Nordics are a very common and extremely good way to decarbonize and understanding how we can combine these to demand response with new heat pumps that is where we see a lot of advantages to our approach.”

“Heat pumps are a bit more technically complex than your basic natural gas boiler so there are certain things that have to be taken it account and that is where we have been focusing our efforts,” he goes on, adding: “We see heat pumps as an excellent way to decarbonize the global building stock and we want to be there and help make that happen.”

Per capita, the Nordics has the most heat pump installations, according to Rauhala — including a lot of ground source heat pump installations which can replace fossil fuel consumption entirely.

“You can run your building with a ground source heat pump system entirely — you don’t need any supporting systems for it. And that is the area where we here in Europe are more far ahead than in the US,” he says on that.

“The UK government is pushing for a lot of heat pump installations and there are incentives in place for people to replace their existing natural gas systems or whatever they have. So that is very interesting from our point of view. The UK also there is a lot of wind power coming online and there have been days when the UK has bee running 100% with renewable electricity which is great. So that actually is a really good thing for us. But then in the longer term in the US — Seattle, for example, has banned the use of fossil fuels in new buildings so I’m very confident that the market in the US will open up more and quickly. There’s a lot of opportunities in that space as well.

“And of course from a cooling perspective air conditioning in general in the US is very wide spread — especially in commercial buildings so that is already an existing opportunity for us.”

“My estimate on how valuable electricity use for heating and cooling is it’s tens of billions of dollars annually in the US and EU,” he adds. “There’s a lot of electricity being used already for this and we expect the market to grow significantly.”

On the business model front, the startup’s cloud software looks set to follow a SaaS model but the plan is also to take a commission of the savings and/or generated income from customers. “We also have the option to provide the service with a fixed fee, which might be easier for some customers, but we expect the majority to be under a commission,” adds Rauhala.

Looking ahead, were the sought for global shift away from fossil fuels to be wildly successful — and all commercial buildings’ gas/oil boilers got replaced with 100% renewable power systems in short order — there would still be a role for Kapacity’s control software to play, generating energy cost savings for its customers, even though our (current) parallel pressing need to shrink carbon emissions would evaporate in this theoretical future.

“We’d be very happy,” says Rauhala. “The way we see emission reductions with demand response now is it’s based on the fact that we do still have fossil fuels power system — so if we were to have a 100% renewable power system then the electricity does nothing to reduce emissions from the electricity consumption because it’s all renewable. So, ironically, in the future we see this as a way to push for a renewable energy system and makes that transition happen even faster. But if we have a 100% renewable system then there’s nothing [in terms of CO2 emissions] we can reduce but that is a great goal to achieve.”

Inflation may or may not prove transitory when it comes to consumer prices, but startup valuations are definitely rising — and noticeably so — in recent quarters.

That’s the obvious takeaway from a recent PitchBook report digging into valuation data from a host of startup funding events in the United States. While the data covers the U.S. startup market, the general trends included are likely global, given that the same venture rush that has pushed record capital into startups in the U.S. is also occurring in markets like India, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

The rapidly appreciating startup price chart is interesting, and we’ll unpack it. But the data also implies a high bar for future IPOs to not only preserve startup equity valuations at their point of exit, but exceed their private-market prices. A changing regulatory environment regarding antitrust could limit large future deals, leaving a host of startups with rich price tags and only one real path to liquidity.

That situation should be familiar: It’s the unicorn traffic jam that we’ve covered for years, in which the global startup markets create far more startups worth $1 billion and up than the public markets have historically accepted across the transom.

Let’s talk about some big numbers.

Startup valuations: Up, and going upper

To summarize what PitchBook published: Round sizes are going up as valuations go up, and with the latter rising faster than the former, we’re not seeing investors get more ownership despite them having to spend more for deal access.

In the early-stage market, deal sizes are rising as follows:

Prices are going up as well, as the following chart shows:

Which leads to the following decline in equity take rates:

Those charts belie somewhat how quickly venture capital is changing. For example, in 2020, the median early-stage value created between rounds was $16 million (or a relative velocity 54%, if you prefer). In 2021 thus far, it’s $39.4 million (120% relative velocity). And that 2020 figure was a prior record. It just got smashed.

The PitchBook dataset has other superlatives worth noting. Enterprise-focused seed pre-money valuations hit an average of $11 million in the first half of 2021, an all-time high. Early-stage valuations for enterprise-focused startups also hit fresh records — $92.7 million on average, $43.0 million median — this year after rising consistently since 2011.

And late-stage valuations for enterprise tech startups have gone vertical (chart on the right):

Both Facebook and Snap offer tools that allow developers to build out augmented reality (AR) experiences and features for their own respective family of apps. Now, TikTok is looking to do the same. The company recently launched a new creative toolset called TikTok Effect Studio, currently in private beta testing, which will allow its own developer community to build AR effects for TikTok’s short-form video app.

On a new website titled “Effect House,” TikTok asks interested developers to sign up for early access to Effect Studio.

On the form provided, developers fill out their name, email, TikTok account info, company, and level of experience with building for AR, as well as examples of their work. The website also asks if they’re using a Mac or PC (presumably to gauge which desktop platform to prioritize), and whether they would test Effect House for work or for personal use.

The project was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, via a tip from Sam Schmir.

TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch the website launched earlier in August, but the project itself is still in the early stages of testing in only a few select markets, one of which is the U.S.

The company couldn’t offer a timeframe as to when these tools would become more broadly available. Instead, TikTok characterized Effect Studio as an early “experiment,” adding that some of its experiments don’t always make it to launch. Plus, other experiments may undergo significant changes between their early beta phases and what later becomes a public product.

That said, the launch of an AR toolset would make TikTok more competitive with industry rivals, who today rely on creative communities to expand their apps’ features sets with new features and experiences. Snap, for example, launched a $3.5 million fund last year directed toward Snapchat AR Lens creation. Meanwhile, at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in June, the company announced it had grown its Spark AR platform to over 600,000 creators across 190 countries, making it the largest mobile AR platform worldwide.

TikTok, too, has been increasing its investment in developer tools over the past couple of years. However, its focus as of late has been on toolkits aimed at third-party developers who want to integrate more closely with TikTok in their own apps. Today, TikTok’s developer website provides access to tools that allow app makers to add TikTok features to their apps like user authentication flows, sound sharing, and others that allow users to publish videos from a third-party editing app out to TikTok.

The new TikTok Effect Studio isn’t meant to be used with third-party apps, however.

Instead, it’s about building AR experiences (and possibly, other creative effects), that would be provided to TikTok users directly in the consumer-facing video app.

Though willing to confirm its broader goals for TikTok Effect Studio, the company declined to share specific details about the exact tools may be included, citing the project’s early days.

“We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Currently, we’re experimenting with ways to give creators additional tools to bring their creative ideas to life for the TikTok community,” they added.

Pry Financials wants to make startup finances approachable for its entire team, not just the people in charge of its accounting spreadsheets. The Y Combinator alum announced today it has raised $4.2 million from Global Founders Capital, Pioneer Fund, NOMO VC, Liquid2 and Hyphen Capital. 

Launched in March, Pry now has more than 200 customers and claims it has grown 35% month-over-month since YC’s Demo Day. It was founded by Alex Sailer, Tiffany Wong, Hayden Jensen and Andy Su. 

Before starting Pry, Su was co-founder of InDinero, another YC alum that started as a “Mint for small businesses” before pivoting to a full-service accounting company. InDinero launched while he was still a student at U.C. Berkeley and Su eventually became responsible for its financial planning.

He told TechCrunch that most startups can’t afford accounting software like Workday Adaptive Planning. Instead, they sometimes work with outsourced CFO services, but mostly rely on spreadsheets for everything: three-way forecasts, predicting runway, hiring and contractor budgets and investor updates. 

“I was the chief technical officer and over the years, I also took on the finance function, so it was kind of a dual CTO/CFO role. This was 2010 through 2020 and as technology grew, the engineering and product teams got all sorts of new tools every six months or so, whereas the finance team was just stuck in Excel,” he said. 

Started as a side project was Su was still at InDinero, Pry starts at just $50 a month and replaces those spreadsheets with easy-to-understand dashboards for accounting, financial planning and scenario modeling. The dashboards connect to Quickbook, Xero or bank accounts, so numbers are continuously updated.

Pry’s clients typically start using it after they raise seed funding, because “for most first-time founders, that’s the most amount of money you have ever received, so you need to spend more time managing it and reviewing it every month. And you’re spending a lot of time on payroll each month,” Su said. Second-time founders, meanwhile, sign up for Pry because they are sick of Excel spreadsheets. 

“Reviewing a spreadsheet is mind-numbingly hard,” said Su. “If you see a number that’s off, you get this weird formula if you didn’t do it yourself. Then you basically have to write a long email to the financial analyst who wrote it and hope that they get back to you before closing time.” For founders who need to update lenders or investors every month, this means a lot of work. 

Pry makes the process more efficient by turning three-way reports—combinations of balance sheets, profit and loss statements and cashflow—into Financial Report dashboards, and then adding features like hiring plans, financial modeling and scenario planning. 

The scenario planning feature serves as a sandbox, giving startup teams and their investors a way to predict how different situations will impact finances: for example, how much runway they have if they raise a certain amount of funding or adjust product pricing.

“We’re improving upon and trying to make decisions about the company in a collaborative way. The analogy we have is git branching, where you have your main plan, and want to try something like a new revenue model or acquiring a business, but don’t want to mess with your current strategy,” said Su. “What you can do is create a completely new branch with, say, a new pricing strategy. You can make all the changes you want and then switch back to your old branch without worrying about overriding or conflicting with it.” 

Those speculative branches are also continuously updated with the company’s most recent bank account and payroll information, so founders don’t need to recreate them from scratch if they want to revisit a potential scenario later. 

Pry plans to build more complex predictive tools and also integrate industry standards, like statistic and benchmarks, into templates to help founders understand what targets they should set. 

Since Pry is easier to manage than a set of Excel spreadsheets, Su said it’s helped startups spot important things. For example, one founder was able to find a way to save $15,000 by catching a tax issue. Pry also helps everyone at a startup understand its finances’ even if they haven’t worked with accounting spreadsheets before. The platform will add roles and permissions soon, so founders can give or restrict access to different people, like leaders of specific departments. 

Su said Pry does not compete with the accounting services many startups rely on until they can hire a head of finance, but makes it easier for startups to collaborate with them since they can share their dashboards. 

“Usually early on, you can outsource to a CFO firm. That’s the norm in the business and it works pretty well for most companies. You get a part-time CFO to work really hard for a month and get your fundraising structure done,” said Su, adding “we fit into that ecosystem well.” 

When Clarisse Beurrier was getting her education in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, she already knew she wanted to make a difference; hence her participation in Effective Altruism Cambridge, an organization dedicated to helping smart and capable people target their philanthropic urges at the problems that will have the biggest actual impact on the world. She’s now a co-founder at Animal Alternative Technologies, a startup aiming to expedite the commercialization of cultured — aka ‘lab-grown’ — meat.

Clarisse joined us for this week’s episode of Found, our interview podcast where we speak to a different founder every week. We talk about what Clarisse learned about the cultured meat and animal protein alternative industry from her work experience at a couple of startups, including HigherSteaks, and how that dovetailed with the work she was doing at school to help her identify a crucial gap between science and industry. We get into everything from convincing big, entrenched industry heavyweights to embrace change, and the challenges of being a firs-time founder right out of school.

We loved our time chatting with Clarisse, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com, or leave us a voicemail at (510) 936-1618. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

Australian regulators have given Taiwan Innovative Space, a five-year-old launch company that goes by Tispace, the green light to conduct a commercial launch at a newly licensed facility in southern Australia later this year.

Tispace will conduct a test flight of its two-stage, suborbital rocket Hapith I from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex in Southern Australia. The flight will be used to validate the vehicle’s propulsion, guidance, telemetry, and structure systems, Tispace said in a news release.The launch facility, operated by space infrastructure company Southern Launch, received its license from the country’s industry ministry in March.

The news is potentially significant for both Australia and Taiwan’s burgeoning space industries, which have lagged behind other nations’. Australia only established a domestic space agency in 2018, and interest in how the country can get in on the new space economy has only grown since. The newly licensed launch facility will initially support a test launch campaign for up to three suborbital rockets, in order to collect data on the possible environmental impacts of the site.

“This [launch permit approval] is an important outcome in establishing Australia’s commercial launch capability and demonstrating what our country can offer to the international space sector,” Australia’s Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Christian Porter, said in a statement. “Space is a significant global growth market that will support Australia’s economic future through big investment, new technologies and job growth across multiple industries.”

Taiwan has also been slow to develop a home-grown space industry, though the country took a major step forward when Taiwanese legislators passed the Space Development Law in May to spur the development of a domestic space program. But while the country has a handful of satellites in orbit – most recently the YUSAT and IDEASSat CubeSats, which were transported into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in January – it has yet to launch a rocket or spacecraft from its soil.

Hapith I is Taiwan’s first domestically manufactured rocket, and Tispace its first commercial space launch company. The company had planned to test the Hapith vehicle from a launch site in Taiwan, but the site was scrapped over legal issues concerning the location. In addition to launch, Tispace may start conducting even more of its operations abroad: according to an Australian press release, it’s also considering “bringing manufacturing of complete rocket systems” to the land down under.

Netflix’s live-action adaptation of classic anime Cowboy Bebop has been a long time coming, and the show finally has a release date. The 10-episode first season will start streaming on November 19th.

Although Netflix hasn’t posted a trailer just yet, it provided a first proper look at Cowboy Bebop in a bunch of photos. The images show John Cho (Spike Spiegel), Mustafa Shakir (Jet Black) and Daniella Pineda (Faye Valentine) in character, as well as an adorable corgi.

Live-action adaptations of anime haven’t typically been well-received (here’s looking at you, Ghost in the Shell). There’s pressure on Netflix to get this take on Cowboy Bebop right, but things are looking promising. The core cast looks great in the first batch of images, while some key creatives from the 1998 anime are involved. Legendary composer Yoko Kanno returns, while original director Shinichirō Watanabe consulted on the Netflix show.

Production started in 2019 but it was paused for eight months after Cho sustained a knee injury on the set. Filming eventually wrapped in March.

Netflix

Getting children to school safely and reliably is a challenge as old as public education itself. But rarely have any entrepreneurs tackled the problem of updating and optimizing one of the nation’s largest legacy transit systems, now nearly a century old. It’s still common to find people at U.S. student transportation hubs speaking into walkie-talkies and wrangling clipboards as they sort passengers into gas-guzzling yellow buses.

Ritu Narayan was working as a product executive at eBay when her two children began attending school. Finding safe and reliable options for getting them to campus was sometimes so difficult that anytime those options would fall out, she would be on the verge of leaving her job.

Bearing in mind that her mother in India had set aside a career to raise Narayan and her three siblings, she founded Zūm in 2016 with brothers Abhishek and Vivek Garg to optimize routes, create transparency and make school commutes greener; since then, Zūm has operated in several California districts (including San Francisco), as well as in Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. In Oakland, Zūm has optimized routes to reduce the previous bus requirement by 29 percent, with the balance being serviced by midsized vehicles.

Zūm also plans to have a fleet of 10,000 electric school buses by 2025 and is partnering with AutoGrid to transform that fleet into a virtual power plant with the potential capacity to route 1 GW of energy back to the grid.

To get a deeper look into the startup’s plans and hear what Narayan has learned from its journey so far, we discussed the pandemic’s impacts on Zūm’s development, where she thinks the company will be a year from now, and how she convinced investors to back a business model that embraces accessibility and equity.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

How did COVID-19 affect your business? What percentage of your business is back now?

It’s funny, because we used to say that student transportation is a recession-proof business, and no matter what, kids are still going to go to school, but the pandemic was the first time in probably the last 100 years when kids across the globe did not go to school. It was an interesting time for us, because overnight, all the rides were closed and we had to focus on what was needed immediately to support our districts and students.

We realized that the school is such an important physical infrastructure that’s not just for education, but students get meals there as well as physical and emotional help. So we helped the school districts with reverse logistics, taking the meals or laptops from the school districts and delivering them to homes, because our software could handle that kind of thing. That was just an interim to make sure the communities settled. Starting last year, rides started coming back around 30%, and this year starting in April, it has been 100% back in the business.

Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, the region has been known far less for silicon and defense than for the consumer internet products of Google, Facebook and Netflix.

A small number of startups though are attempting to revitalize that important government-industry nexus as the rise of China pushes more defense planners in Washington to double down on America’s technical edge. Vannevar Labs is one of this new crop, and it has hit some new milestones in its quest to displace traditional defense contractors with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial acumen.

I last chatted with the company just as it was debuting in late 2019, having raised a $4.5 million seed. The company has been quiet and heads down the past two years as it developed a product and traction within the defense establishment. Now it’s ready to reveal a bit more of what all that work has culminated in.

First, the company officially launched its Vannevar Decrypt product in January of this year. It’s focused on foreign language natural language processing, organizing overseas data and resources that are collected by the intelligence community and then immediately translating and interpreting those documents for foreign policy decision-makers. CEO and co-founder Brett Granberg said that the product “went from one deployment to a dozen adoptions.”

Second, the company raised a $12 million Series A investment in May from Costanoa Ventures and Point72 with General Catalyst participating. Costanoa and GC co-led the startup’s seed round.

Finally, the company has been on a hiring spree. The team has grown into a crew of 20 employees, and the firm last week brought on Scott Sanders to lead business development. Sanders was one of the earliest employees at Anduril, and had spent several years at the company. Vannevar also added John Doyle, a long-time Palantir employee who was head of its national security business, onto its board according to Granberg. Today, the team is equally split between national security folks and technologists, and he says that the team is set to double this year.

With a few years of hindsight, Granberg says that he has refined what he considers the best model for defense tech startups to break into the hardscrabble market at the Pentagon and across Northern Virginia.

First, there needs to be incredible focus on getting access to actual end users and learning their work. The functions that defense and intelligence personnel perform are completely different from operations in the commercial economy, and trying to translate what works at a large corporation into defense is a fool’s errand. “You need to have both the DNA of understanding new technology and the DNA of deeply understanding a lot of different use cases within DoD,” Granberg said, referencing the Department of Defense.

That’s directly informed how Decrypt has developed over time. “We started focusing on the counter-terrorism space, and as the government moved away from counter-terrorism, we started moving to the foreign actors that were important,” he said. “Once we have our first couple of deployments, we are able to iterate very, very quickly.”

He also strongly eschews a popular view in defense procurement circles that there are “dual-use” technologies that can be used equally well in commercial and defense applications. “Some of the most important mission problems where the government spends the most money and has the most interest,” he explained, are also contexts where commercial off-the-shelf products (dubbed COTS in the industry parlance) are least useful. He says startups targeting defense simply cannot split their bandwidth by also trying to learn commercial use cases.

In fact, he went so far to predict that “you are going to see a lot of companies that have raised a lot of money that will fizzle out in the coming years” because they just can’t nail the dual-use model well.

Second, he argues that defense tech startups need to move beyond the model that each company should work on one platform, and instead move to an organizational model where a company offers multiple products to reach scale. Each product has the potential to reach “a couple of hundred million in revenue” according to Granberg, but it is hard to expand a company’s size if it doesn’t parallelize product development.

To that end, Granberg said that he pushes Vannevar Labs to always be exploring new product lines for growth. “Decrypt is our first product [but]10% of our energy is in new product efforts,” he said. “I can imagine when we are three to four years down the line… it might be 9-10 products.” He said that the one platform approach might have worked for Palantir, which ironically, is the major winner in the defense tech space the last few years. But newer companies like Anduril and Shield AI have been designed around product line expansion.

Finally, noting those other companies, Granberg believes there is something of a collective benefit as each startup makes headway in the defense sector. “There is this theory in our space that we don’t view ourselves as competitors — if one of us does well, we all do well,” he said. Given the varied mission requirements of different agencies and the absolute massive scale of budgets in this field, startups actually have a lot of independent terrain to explore, even if they come up against the big legacy defense contractors on a regular basis.

As for Vannevar Labs, its next goal is to turn its Decrypt product into a program of record, which would guarantee it a certain level of sales and revenue for potentially years into the future. That’s a huge bar to leap, but would be a turning point in the company’s long-term trajectory.

TechCrunch Sessions is back!

On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the industry. And you’re in luck, because $75 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer and save $100 bucks before prices go up!

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from industry experts, and take part in discussions about the potential of new advances in data, open source, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Javier Soltero at Google, Kathy Baxter at Salesforce, Jared Spataro at Microsoft, Jay Kreps at Confluent, Sarah Guo at Greylock and Daniel Dines at UiPath.

You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on our virtual platform — all for $75 and under for a limited time with even deeper discounts for nonprofits and government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month, so keep your eyes open.

In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

Survival of the Fittest: Investing in Today’s SaaS Market
with Casey Aylward (Costanoa Ventures), Kobie Fuller (Upfront) and Sarah Guo (Greylock)

• The venture capital world is faster, and more competitive than ever. For investors hoping to get into the hottest SaaS deal, things are even crazier. With more non-traditional money pouring into the sector, remote dealmaking now the norm, and an increasingly global market for software startups, venture capitalists are being forced to shake up their own operations, and expectations. TechCrunch sits down with three leading investors to discuss how they are fighting for allocation in hot deals, what they’ve changed in their own processes, and what today’s best founders are demanding.

Data, Data Everywhere
with Ali Ghodsi (Databricks)

• As companies struggle to manage and share increasingly large amounts of data, it’s no wonder that Databricks, whose primary product is a data lake, was valued at a whopping $28 billion for its most recent funding round. We’re going to talk to CEO Ali Ghodsi about why his startup is so hot and what comes next.

Keeping Your SaaS Secure
with Edna Conway (Microsoft), Olivia Rose (Amplitude)

• Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, startups and major corporations have it tough. How can you secure your company without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern Chief Security Officer and how to move fast… without breaking things.

Automation’s Moment Is Now
with Daniel Dines (UiPath), Laela Sturdy (CapitalG), and Dave Wright (ServiceNow)

• One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll be talking to UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.

Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity’s Spark
with Javier Soltero (Google)

• One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.

The Future is Wide Open
with Abby Kearns (Puppet), Aghi Marietti (Kong), and Jason Warner (Redpoint)

• Many startups today have an open source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner an investor at Redpoint about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.

How Microsoft Shifted from on Prem to the Cloud
with Jared Spataro (Microsoft)

• Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for over 15 years and he was a part of the shift from strictly on prem software to one that is dominated by the cloud. Today he runs one of the most successful SaaS products out there, and we’ll talk to him about how Microsoft made that shift and what it’s meant to the company.

How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold
with Jenn Knight (Agentsync), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), and Dan Wright (DataRobot)

• The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data, instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. We’ve collected three leaders from three data-focused startups that are forging new markets to get their insight on how today’s SaaS companies are leveraging data to build new companies, attack new problems, and, of course, scale like mad.

What Happens After Your Startup is Acquired
with Jyoti Bansal (Harness), Nick Mehta (GainSight)

• We’ll speak to three founders about the emotional upheaval of being acquired and what happens after the check clears and the sale closes. Our panel includes Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics, Jewel Burkes Solomon, who founded Partpic and Nick Mehta from GainSight.

How Confluent Rode the Open Source Wave to IPO
with Jay Kreps (Confluent)

• Confluent, the streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka, was born out of a project at LinkedIn and rode that from startup to IPO. We’ll speak to co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps to learn about what that journey was like.

We’ll have more sessions and names shortly, so stay tuned. But get excited in the meantime, we certainly are.

Pro tip: Keep your finger on the pulse of TC Sessions: SaaS. Get updates when we announce new speakers, add events and offer ticket discounts.

Why should you carve a day out of your hectic schedule to attend TC Sessions: SaaS? This may be the first year we’ve focused on SaaS, but this ain’t our first rodeo. Here’s what other attendees have to say about their TC Sessions experience.

“TC Sessions: Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mhttps://techcrunch.com/2021/06/24/databricks-co-founder-and-ceo-ali-ghodsi-is-coming-to-tc-sessions-saas/obility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford were there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Grab your team, join your community and create opportunity. Don’t wait — jump on the early bird ticket sale right now.