Month: August 2018

Lead Edge Capital, a New York-based venture firm, has been around since 2009, and it has been quietly growing like kudzu since. After closing its very first fund with $52 million back in 2011, it has been roughly doubling the size of its funds ever since, closing on $138 million in 2013 and $290 million in 2016 and today, announcing a fourth, $520 million fund. Altogether, including some special purpose vehicles it has assembled, the firm is now managing roughly $1.5 billion in assets.

How did the team, led by founder Mitchell Green, pull it off? Green’s background may have helped. The Williams College grad says he went to work for UBS as a banking analyst in its M&A group out of college, then it was on to Bessemer Venture Partners as an analyst, then Wharton, where he not only earned his MBA but began working at a Tiger-cub-seeded hedge fund by Julian Robertson. All along the way, Green was apparently making friends in high places. And given the success of Lead Edge to date, they are happy enough to have him manage some of their money through Lead Edge.

We talked with Green about some of those connections, and Lead Edge’s new fund, via an email exchange late yesterday. Our chat has been edited for length.

TC: Your investor base consists of more than 250 executives and investors. In fact, you say that 70 percent of your new fund comes from individual LPs, while only 30 percent of the capital came from institutional investors. Who are these people?

MG: They come from Charles Schwab, Capital One, NetSuite, eBay, Neiman Marcus, Xerox, Unilever, Cisco, Saks, Microsoft and many more. Among them is Anne Mulcahy, the former chairman and CEO of Xerox; Alison Rosenthal, the former head of mobile at Facebook; Nigal Morris, the cofounder of Capital One; GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; and David Pottruck, the former CEO of Charles Schwab.

We pride ourselves on leveraging our LPs to make connections on behalf of portfolio companies. Instead of simply deploying capital, our LPs and operating partners are dedicated to mentoring and leading portfolio businesses through their extended network and deep knowledge across different industries.

TC: Any examples?

Our first discussion with [cybersecurity firm] Duo Security resulted in an introduction between Duo’s CEO, Dug Song, and the former CIO of General Motors. While Duo wasn’t raising money, they assured us that if they did, they would let us know, as they saw how helpful our network could be. Eventually, we invested over $90 million into Duo [which is now being acquired by Cisco for $2.35 billion].

TC: What kinds of company does Lead Edge target, and has that changed over time?

MG: We’ve always been focused on companies in the software, internet, business services and consumer sectors. They types of companies we’ve invested in haven’t changed over time. Some current and former portfolio companies include Alibaba Group, Arrive Logistics, Bazaarvoice, Delivery Hero, Duo Security, Mindbody, Marketo,Refinery29, Spotify, Toast, Uber and Xamarin.

TC: What’s the strategy exactly?

MG: Most of our capital is geared towards companies in the $10 million to $100 million annual revenue range, where our LP base can help our portfolio companies in a multitude of ways — from customer relationships to advisory to recruiting. The balance of our capital is invested into what we call “platform” companies like Alibaba, Uber and Spotify, as well as public market investments, where we’re long only.

TC: Which company has raised the biggest check from Lead Edge?

MG: We’re able to scale our investments though dedicated co-investment vehicles we’ve raised. We invested more than $300 million into Alibaba in the years leading up to its IPO; more than $150 million into Spotify in the years leading up to its IPO; and most recently, invested more than $90 million into Duo Security prior to the announced of its acquisition by Cisco.

TC: Which has produced the biggest return? 

MG: We’ve had several excellent exits, but our largest returns by dollars returned to LPs were via Alibaba’s IPO, Spotify’s  IPO, and now the impending sale of  Duo Security. We’ve also had a number of other strong exits, including Xamarin, which was acquired by Microsoft; Bazaarvoice, which went public; Clearscore, which is being acquired by Experian); Marketo, which went public and was then acquired; Driling Info, which was acquired by Genstar; and Delivery Hero, which went public.

TC: That’s quite a run. How do decisions get made? Majority rules?

MG: We have a streamlined decision-making process that due to the small size of the investment committee consists of the firm’s three partners, including myself; Brian Neider, who I’d met at Bessemer; and Nimay Mehta. All three of us have been working together and served on the investment committee since Fund I. Brian and I shared an office together at Bessemer Venture Partners. Nimay was the first hire at here and has been with the firm since 2011.

TC: How much of your deal flow is inbound versus outbound?

MG: We all come from outbound backgrounds, so most of our sourcing is done outbound. Nimay was formerly with Insight Venture Partners, where he was an associate and worked on much of their outbound efforts. Brian and l worked together for nearly three years at Bessemer Venture Partners, and were the first two analysts that Bessemer ever hired to do outbound sourcing in 2005.

TC: What’s the strangest deal you’ve ever invested in?

MG: We knew the founder of this company that had an exciting but off-the-wall idea to create a scooter sharing application. It seemed crazy at the time, but we did participate in the initial funding rounds at Bird.

TC: Any deals you won’t do based on experience with last funds?

MG: We have certainly learned lessons in specific sectors and have a higher bar for companies in emerging economies as currency fluctuations could materially impact returns.

TC: Your biggest challenge right now as an investor in the current market?

MG: The largest challenge is seeing companies that are overcapitalized. Years ago, fundraising would take place in stages. Now, once a company reaches $5 million in revenue off a proof of concept, investors want to give them $50 million to capitalize on the idea. We think this can cause bad behavior in companies, so we’re cognizant of trying to find businesses that can be capital efficient or are burning capital in a way that’s commensurate with strong unit economics.

TC: SoftBank. How is its strategy impacting what you do?

MG: We don’t see them in most of our deals.

Encrypted collaboration app Wickr has added a feather to its cap with a partnership with Psiphon, provider of smart VPN tools. Wickr will use Psiphon’s tech to guarantee your packets get where they need to go regardless of whether you’re at home, at a cafe with bad wi-fi, or at a cafe with bad wi-fi in China.

The idea is that the user shouldn’t have to be auditing their own connection to be sure their apps will work properly. That can be a matter of safety, such as a poorly secured access point; connectivity, such as one where certain ports or apps are inoperable; or censorship, like requesting data from a service banned in the country you’re visiting.

Wickr already encrypts all your traffic, so there are no worries on that account, but if the connection you’re using were to block video calls or certain traffic patterns, there’s not much the company can do about that.

Psiphon, however, is in the business of circumventing deliberate or accidental blockages with a suite of tools that analyze the network and attempt to find a way to patch you through. Whether that’s anonymizing your traffic, bouncing it off non-blocked servers, doing automatic port forwarding, or some other method, the idea is the packets get through one way or another.

There’s a cost in latency and throughput, of course, but while that may matter for online gaming or video streaming, it’s far less important for something like uploading an image, chatting with colleagues, and the other functions that Wickr provides. At all events you can turn the feature on or off at will.

There will be a monetary cost too, of course, in the form of premiums added to paid plans. Enterprise customers will be the first to receive the Psiphon-powered traffic handling, today in fact, and the feature will then trickle its way down to other paid users and free users over the next few weeks.

Hackers that targeted a Democratic senator up for reelection this year may have left behind clues in their attack that further suggest Russian involvement.

The office of Claire McCaskill, a Missouri senator, was targeted in an apparent targeted phishing attack from a fake Microsoft domain that the software giant later seized pursuant to a court order. The Daily Beast reported that a then-McCaskill staffer was the target of the attack, which was attributed to hackers linked to Russian intelligence — largely because the effort was similar to the phishing attack on Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, whose account was successfully breached and emails were shared with WikiLeaks.

Now, new research suggests that the phishing page used in the McCaskill attack contains language-specific code references that lends further credence that Russian hackers were involved.

When the hackers built the phishing page used to trick the McCaskill staffer, they scraped the code from a legitimate Microsoft login page that staff would use to log into their network. That code included a browser-generated link of the original web page that was scraped, the research said. That link appended a language marker at the end which varies depending on which country the user is located in the world — such as “gb” for the UK, or “fr” for France.

Because the language tag was “ru”, which researchers say shows that the code was likely scraped from a user in Russia.

Yonathan Klijsnma, threat researcher at RiskIQ, said that in many cases hackers won’t build a phishing page from scratch but will simply copy and save the page it’s trying to imitate. In doing so, any saved language tags embedded in the code “can be a crucial clue in connecting operators with their malicious campaigns.”

Klijsnma said these tags are often overlooked by the hackers. That which resulted in a sloppy phishing page that was saved by RiskIQ’s vast internet crawling operation.

Although McCaskill, a vocal Russia critic, confirmed the “unsuccessful” attempted hack in a press release in July that she attributed to Russia, a spokesperson for McCaskill declined to comment further when reached Wednesday prior to publication.

In an additional twist, Klijsnma also found that the same Russian hackers also targeted reporter Serhiy Drachuk, whose work has long criticized of the Russian regime. Code from the page that was used in the McCaskill phishing attempt contained leftover references to the journalist’s work email address, which was previously accessed by the hackers.

We reached out to Serhiy Drachuk for comment, but did not hear back by the time of writing.

It’s the latest in a long string of cyberattacks and phishing efforts to target US political institutions before and during the 2016 presidential election and later. Just this week, Democratic National Committee officials said they thwarted an attempt to access their voter database. It comes hot on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement that it prevented a Russian-backed advanced persistent threat group known as Fancy Bear (or APT28) to steal data from political organizations.

Upgrade, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based consumer lending venture founded by Renaud Laplanche, has raised $62 million in Series C funding led by CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund. The company’s earlier investors also joined the round, including Apoletto, FirstMark Capital, NOAH, Ribbit, Sands Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Union Square Ventures and Vy Capital. The money brings the total capital that Upgrade has raised to date to $142 million.

It’s easy to appreciate investors’ interest in the company, which already employs 300 people. Since its founding, it says, it has amassed more than 100,000 customers and issued more than $1 billion loans. The average loan size is roughly $10,000.

The company is gaining traction without giving away the store, too. Though the interest rate that it charges compares favorably to average credit card rates of about 18 percent for consumers with good credit, Upgrade still gets away with an APR in the low to mid-teens, charging some customers up to 30 percent interest per year — which is similar to the highest rates on credit cards. Indeed, the minimum credit score that a consumer need have to secure a loan from Upgrade, its minimum is 620, which the credit reporting bureau Experien says falls into the range of subprime borrowers who may be offered less-than-ideal loan terms because of their perceived ability to repay a loan on time.

Yet Upgrade isn’t just making money of potentially risky — and, presumably, many more solid — borrowers. The company also recently introduced a personal credit line that’s a kind of mash-up of an unsecured personal loan and credit card. Borrowers can tap up to $50,000 if, say, they know they’ll need to make a costly home improvement, or (worse) need to pay off other loans. That balance is then converted into an installment loan with a fixed interest rate and a term of up to five years if it isn’t paid off immediately. Those APRs range from 6.46 percent to a whopping 35.9 percent, which might concern someone with a severe aversion to debt, like this editor, but as a business is hard to beat.

Put another way, while the first online lending venture of Laplanche, Lending Club, caters to people who are just beginning to borrow money, Upgrade appears to be focused on a slightly older demographic with more serious lending needs. Asked about this, Laplanche, who was somewhat famously ousted from Lending Club over a governance scandal roughly 18 months after taking the public — he launched Upgrade soon after — says simply that Upgrade building a “mainstream consumer credit brand.”

Its products, he adds, are designed to cater to “broad swaths of the population.”

Korean automaker Hyundai is jumping into India’s on-demand mobility space after it led a $14.3 million investment in car-rental startup Revv.

Hyundai, which is the second largest seller of cars in India, initially announced an undisclosed investment in Revv this week, but now the startup has confirmed that the capital is part of a larger 100 Crore INR (~$14.3 million) Series B round.

Other investors in the round include Japan’s Dream Incubator, Telama Investment and Sunjay Kapoor of auto component firm Sona BLW. Existing investors Edelweiss and Beenext also took part in the deal, which takes Revv to $23 million raised from investors, according to data from Crunchbase.

Revv was founded in 2015 and it offers on-demand car rentals using a model similar to Zipcar in the U.S. The startup is currently active in 11 cities in India with a fleet of around 1,000 vehicles. It claims to have served 300,000 users to date. One of its hallmarks is doorstep delivery and collection from customers, which eschews the usual process of designated collection and return locations.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Revv co-founders Anupam Agarwal (CEO) and Karan Jain (COO) said the plan is to expand to 30 cities over the next 12-18 months while growing the fleet size to 10,000-12,000. The duo said that the investment from Hyundai didn’t include any specific clause to provide vehicles, but that it is possible that an agreement may be reached in the future.

Beyond potential support on growing the fleet, Agarwal and Jain said that Revv plans to tap Hyundai for its knowledge in vehicles, including performance upkeep, maintenance of cars and more, and other tech areas as it builds out its platform and new products.

That’s because the startup’s expansion plan goes beyond new geographies to include different types of services, too.

Right now, Revv offers on-demand car rentals and a subscription-based product — Switch — that is designed for power-users, but Agarwal and Jain want to introduce more modular and flexible products. Already Shift users account for around one-third of rentals, but Revv wants to go further.

Agarwal and Jain hinted that could range from shorter time “on-demand” rentals, such as within 15 minutes, to longer-term alternatives to car ownership that remain financial commitments of loans and repayments.

“We are looking at innovative business models that we can take to the consumer,” the Revv co-founders said. “We understand that the traditional model of car ownership will be diluted and alternative options of accessible mobility will be the norm.

“Cabs solve point A to B in 40 minutes, but every other need is still a largely unsolved problem in this country. India is unique [and the need for] mobility solutions is far higher because 98 percent of people don’t own cars,” they added.

While taxi on-demand apps like Ola and Uber are making the cab experience better in India, Revv believes it can’t address other needs like out of town trips, long-distance commuting and other requirements that it believes are common among Indian consumers. Longer term, the startup’s aim is to grow the ‘automobile access’ rate to 50 percent across India to help cover these gaps.

With this new funding in the bag, Revv aims to amp up its business with a “slew” of new products. Agarwal and Jain said the target is to increase revenue 10X, going from $10 million ARR right now to $100 million within 18 months.

They believe that these new services are essential and that they could account for half of that revenue target. They also plan to increase marketing spend to grow the brand, having previously focused on user retention, according to Agarwal and Jain.

When asked about the potential to add two-wheeled transportation — given the growth of startups in that space, such as Sequoia-backed Bounce — the duo, who both spent time with McKinsey, said they would remain focused on cars for at least the next year.

“We feel there’s a huge opportunity that hasn’t been tapped into,” they said.

Revv’s chief domestic rival is Zoomcar, which raised $40 million earlier this year and is backed by the likes of Ford and Mahindra & Mahindra. Zoomcar has already moved into two-wheelers, and its big differentiator is a program that allows existing car owners to lease out their vehicles by adding them to the Zoomcar fleet. The five-year-old startup is also considering overseas expansion.

Elsewhere, other competitors include Voler, Drivezy and Carzonrent.

Australia has blocked Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment for its 5G network, which is set to launch commercially next year. In a tweet, Huawei stated that the Australian government told the company that both it and ZTE are banned from supplying 5G technology to the country, despite Huawei’s assurances that it does not pose a threat to national security.

We have been informed by the Govt that Huawei & ZTE have been banned from providing 5G technology to Australia. This is a extremely disappointing result for consumers. Huawei is a world leader in 5G. Has safely & securely delivered wireless technology in Aust for close to 15 yrs

— Huawei Australia (@HuaweiOZ) August 22, 2018

Earlier today, the Australian government issued new security guidelines for 5G carriers. Although it did not mention Huawei, ZTE or China specifically, it did strongly hint at them by stating “the Government considers that the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorized access or interference.”

Concerns that Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese tech companies will be forced to comply with a new law, passed last year, that obligates all Chinese organizations and citizens to provide information to national intelligence agencies when asked have made several countries wary of using their technology. Earlier this month, the United States banned the use of most Huawei and ZTE technology by government agencies and contractors, six years after a Congressional report first cited the two companies as security threats.

In its new security guidelines, the Australian government stated that differences in the way 5G operates compared to previous network generations introduces new risks to national security. In particular, it noted the diminishing distinctions between the core network, where more sensitive functions like access control and data routing occur, and the edge, or radios that connect customer equipment, like laptops and mobile phones, to the core.

“This new architecture provides a way to circumvent traditional security controls by exploiting equipment in the edge of the network – exploitation which may affect overall network integrity and availability, as well as the confidentiality of customer data. A long history of cyber incidents shows cyber actors target Australia and Australians,” the guidelines stated. “Government has found no combination of technical security controls that sufficiently mitigate the risks.”

Last year, Australia introduced the Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms (TSSR), which takes effect next month and directs carriers and telecommunication service providers to protect their networks and infrastructure from national security threats and also notify the government of any proposed changes that may compromise the security of their network. It also gives the government the power to “intervene and issue directions in cases where there are significant national security concerns that cannot be addressed through other means.”

Huawei’s Australian chairman John Lord said in June that the company had received legal advice that its Australian operations are not bound to Chinese laws and he would refuse to hand over any data to the Chinese government in breach of Australian law. Lord also argued that banning Huawei could hurt local businesses and customers by raising prices and limiting access to technology.

TechCrunch has contacted ZTE and Huawei for comment.

Tim Kentley-Klay, the co-founder and CEO of secretive self-driving vehicle company Zoox, was fired suddenly Wednesday by the company’s board.

Kentley-Klay’s departure was first reported by The Information, which cited an unnamed source. Kentley-Klay later tweeted a statement confirming that he had been fired by the board.

Kentley-Klay and Zoox could not be reached for comment. TechCrunch will update the story as it develops.

In the tweet, Kentley-Klay wrote:

I came to this town as a founder only to build the future of mobility, and by the metrics shared here was crushing it against the biggest. But the shocking reality is that this—without a warning, cause or right of reply—the board fired me. Today was Silicon Valley up to its worst tricks. This town sells the story that it backs founders to create real change. Rather than working through the issues in an epic startup for the win, the board chose a path of fear, optimizing for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the Universe. Cheers to the true believers that have built Zoox from scratch these last four years. Don’t let anyone stand between you and what you know is right. TKK.

He also posted a graphic comparing the capital efficiency of top autonomous vehicle programs like Waymo, Uber, and Cruise with Zoox.

Kentley-Klay has since posted more than a dozen tweets, quoting others who have contacted him to express support and disappointment. He doesn’t name anyone, but the presumption is that these are Zoox employees.

The firing comes just a month after Zoox closed a massive $500 million funding round at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation. The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings its total amount of funding to $800 million.

Kentley-Klay founded Zoox with Jesse Levinson about four years ago. The company is infamous for its secrecy. The first real inside look into the company, and Kentley-Klay, came just a month ago in a feature by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance.

The company, which employs about 500 people, wants to deploy autonomous vehicles on public streets and launch a ride-hailing service with its fleet by 2020.

Facebook announced today that it had banned the app myPersonality for improper data controls and suspended hundreds more. So far this is only the second app to be banned as a result of the company’s large-scale audit begun in March; but as myPersonality hasn’t been active since 2012, and was to all appearances a legitimate academic operation, it’s a bit of a mystery why they bothered.

The total number of app suspensions has reached 400, twice the number we last heard Facebook announce publicly. Suspensions aren’t listed publicly, however, and apps may be suspended and reinstated without any user notification. The only other app to be banned via this process is Cambridge Analytica.

myPersonality was created by researchers at the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre (no relation to Cambridge Analytica — this is an actual academic institution) to source data from Facebook users via personality quizzes. It operated from 2007 to 2012, and was quite successful, gathering data on some four million users (directly, not via friends) when it was operational.

The dataset was used for the Centre’s own studies and other academics could request access to it via an online form; applications were vetted by CPC staff and had to be approved by the petitioner’s university’s ethics committee.

It transpired in May that a more or less complete set of the project’s data was available for anyone to download from GitHub, put there by some misguided scholar who had received access and decided to post it where their students could access it more easily.

Facebook suspended the app around then, saying “we believe that it may have violated Facebook’s policies.” That suspension has graduated into a ban, because the creators “fail[ed] to agree to our request to audit and because it’s clear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place.”

This is, of course, a pot-meet-kettle situation, as well as something of a self-indictment. I contacted David Stillwell, one of the app’s creators and currently deputy director of the CPC, having previously heard from him and collaborator Michel Kosinski about the dataset and Facebook’s sudden animosity.

“Facebook has long been aware of the application’s use of data for research,” Stillwell said in a statement. “In 2009 Facebook certified the app as compliant with their terms by making it one of their first ‘verified applications.’ In 2011 Facebook invited me to a meeting in Silicon Valley (and paid my travel expenses) for a workshop organised by Facebook precisely because it wanted more academics to use its data, and in 2015 Facebook invited Dr Kosinski to present our research at their headquarters.”

During that time, Kosinski and Stillwell both told me, dozens of universities had published in total more than a hundred social science research papers using the data. No one at Facebook or elsewhere seems to have raised any issues with how the data was stored or distributed during all that time.

“It is therefore odd that Facebook should suddenly now profess itself to have been unaware of the myPersonality research and to believe that the data may have been misused,” Stillwell said.

A Facebook representative told me they were concerned that the vetting process for getting access to the dataset was too loose, and furthermore that the data was not adequately anonymized.

But Facebook would, ostensibly, have approved these processes during the repeated verifications of myPersonality’s data. Why would it suddenly decide in 2018, when the app had been inactive for years, that it had been in violation all that time? The most obvious answer would be that its auditors never looked very closely in the first place, despite a cozy relationship with the researchers.

“When the app was suspended three months ago I asked Facebook to explain which of their terms was broken but so far they have been unable to cite any instances,” said Stillwell.

Ironically, Facebook’s accusation that myPersonality failed to secure user data correctly is exactly what the company itself appears to be guilty of, and at a far greater scale. Just as CPC could not control what a researcher did with the data (for example, mistakenly post it publicly) once they had been approved by multiple other academics, Facebook could not control what companies like Cambridge Analytica did with data once it had been siphoned out under the respectable guise of research purposes. (Notably, it is projects like myPersonality that seem to have made that guise respectable to begin with.)

Perhaps Facebook’s standards have changed and what was okay by them in 2012 — and, apparently, in 2015 — is not acceptable now. Good — users want stronger protections. But this banning of an app inactive for years and used successfully by real academics for actual research purposes has an air of theatricality. It helps no one and will change nothing about myPersonality itself, which Stillwell and others stopped maintaining years ago, or the dataset it created, which may very well still be analyzed for new insights by some enterprising social science grad student.

Facebook has mobilized a full-time barn door closing operation years after the horses bolted, as evident by today’s ban. So when you and the other four million people get a notification that Facebook is protecting your privacy by banning an app you used a decade ago, take it with a grain of salt.

The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why? Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree it’s also pretty good for your health. But when most of us have been brought up with animal protein in the middle of our plates, it often feels pretty hard to achieve. At the same time, fast food delivery has been taking off, but we’re still eating the same thing: meat.

So a Danish startup has come along to try to solve this. Simple Feast delivers sustainable food to people’s homes in biodegradable boxes, and it’s now raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital in London, with participation from 14W in New York. Existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders are also re-investing the round.

Simple Feast offers what it describes as ready-to-eat plant-based food that is “sustainably produced, organic, and delivered straight to the doorstep” in biodegradable boxes every week. The meal solution delivers weekly boxes with three prepared plant-based and 100 percent organic meals ready to serve in 10 minutes.

In this respect it’s not unlike other startups, such as HelloFresh, with the main difference being that all the food is plant-based.

Jakob Jønck, CEO and co-founder of Simple Feast, says: “Climate change is real. There is no Planet B and we are facing what is arguably the biggest challenge in human history. This is a big investment for a small company, but it’s a drop in the ocean considering the challenge at hand, the politicians and industries we are up against.”

He and Thomas Ambus, co-founder/CTO, started thinking more deeply about Simple Feast when Under Armour acquired Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, their previous startups, in the spring of 2015 and got serious about it in 2016. “Ever since founding Endomondo and heading up International Operations for MyFitnessPal, I always felt a missing link when trying to move towards a healthy, sustainable diet — an actual product that didn’t compromise on taste, nor convenience, but solved the huge challenges involved with embarking on this journey towards eating plants first and foremost,” says Jønck.

Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital, says: “With a global transition towards plant-based food, we believe Simple Feast is uniquely positioned to change the way we eat and create awareness about the impact of our food choices.”

The main target is families, with the parents in their 30s and 40s. “We find that women are still predominantly the decision maker when it comes to food for the family. Our most typical customers are women in a relationship in their 30s with one or two kids. Our customers are also politically interested, above the average,” says Jønck.

They are competing with restaurants, meal kits and take-away. “We are disrupting both the restaurant and the meal kit industry. Nobody has ever taken the challenge of creating climate-friendly, plant-based food seriously while serving it directly to consumers. We don´t make compromises on taste, nor convenience, and we don´t believe that we have seen that before,” he told me.

What good is 3D? Does depth and definition give you anything worthwhile in an interface that’s most likely flat anyway? Is “immersion” as a metric really worth that much?

Even as a ton of startups and big companies have invested in 3D-centric hardware and software, there has undoubtedly been some pushback on whether it’s all that necessary. I grappled with some of these questions when I played with the latest project from Looking Glass, a desktop volumetric display that they see as so central to the company’s goals that they’ve just named it the Looking Glass.

My experience with it left me a bit perplexed with where the tech would end up, but god dammit was it cool anyway.

The startup is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign to gauge interest in such a product, they’ve raised about $775k with north of 1,200 backers. I had a chance to try out both of the versions of what they’re shipping, a $450 8.9 inch version and a $2,500 15.6 inch type.

The display is beaming 45 views of an object, each at 60 frames per second delivering images that you can peer around and see multiple angles of. How it works is that the display is basically sending out a fan of perspectives which can be observed by multiple people from multiple perspectives. No matter what you initially hear about the technical details of how it all works, there is a certain degree of disbelief baked into seeing a volumetric display like this for the first time. It’s like… looking into a fishbowl of pixels.

Looking Glass has been around since 2015 and has already shipped quite a few products that broadly fit into the world of holograms, this one comes at a time where it has the chance to be a little bit more than a toy for designers and creative types. Rather than putting on a headset, Looking Glass argues, this product offers these people the chance to easily see what they’re working on and show it to other without tossing a headset around.

The display is a fascinating pairing for the recent buildup in platforms and stores for 3D digital assets. It’s easier than its ever been to build a 3D scan of something now that there are sophisticated camera arrays on devices like the iPhone X, similarly large tech cos are looking to buy into the AR/VR development process with 3D digital asset libraries that can be easily accessed.

I’m a bit torn on how far out I see the use cases for a volumetric display type like this actually extending, but this does specifically seem like a very intriguing tool for a 3D creator who’s building their own models and wants to see them visualized in a more immersive way. Is it solving an essential problem for them? I wouldn’t say so, but it’s such a weirdly interesting technology that I don’t doubt they’ll be able to move some units to an early adopter crowd that’s generally aching for this type of stuff. Most of these Kickstarter upstarts are peddling pipe dreams, but Looking Glass has been working on this stuff for awhile and whether or not you actually do need it, they’ve got it.