Month: August 2018

Gecko Robotics aims to save human lives at our nation’s power plants with its wall-climbing robots. To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.

We first reported on the Pittsburgh-based company when co-founder Jake Loosararian came to the TechCrunch TV studios to show off his device for the camera. Back then, Gecko was in the YC Spring 2016 cohort, working with several U.S. power plants and headed toward profitability, according to Loosararian. 

You can see the original interview below:

The type of robots Gecko makes are an important part of ensuring safety in industrial and power plant facilities as they are able to go ahead of humans to check for potential hazards. The robots can climb tanks, boilers, pipelines and other industrial equipment using proprietary magnetic adhesion, ultra-sonics, lasers and a variety of sensors to inspect structural integrity, according to a company release.

While not cheap — the robots run anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 — they are also obviously a minuscule cost compared to human life.

Gecko robot scaling the wall for a safety inspection at a power plant.

Loosararian also mentioned his technology was faster and more accurate than what is out there at the moment by using machine learning “to solve some of the most difficult problems,” he told TechCrunch.

It’s also a unique enough idea to get the attention from several seasoned investors.

Gecko Robotics aims to save human lives at our nation’s power plants with its wall-climbing robots. To continue doing so, the startup tells TechCrunch it has just secured $7 million from a cadre of high-profile sources, including Founders Fund, Mark Cuban, The Westly Group, Justin Kan and Y Combinator.

We first reported on the Pittsburgh-based company when co-founder Jake Loosararian came to the TechCrunch TV studios to show off his device for the camera. Back then, Gecko was in the YC Spring 2016 cohort, working with several U.S. power plants and headed toward profitability, according to Loosararian. 

You can see the original interview below:

The type of robots Gecko makes are an important part of ensuring safety in industrial and power plant facilities as they are able to go ahead of humans to check for potential hazards. The robots can climb tanks, boilers, pipelines and other industrial equipment using proprietary magnetic adhesion, ultra-sonics, lasers and a variety of sensors to inspect structural integrity, according to a company release.

While not cheap — the robots run anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 — they are also obviously a minuscule cost compared to human life.

Gecko robot scaling the wall for a safety inspection at a power plant.

Loosararian also mentioned his technology was faster and more accurate than what is out there at the moment by using machine learning “to solve some of the most difficult problems,” he told TechCrunch.

It’s also a unique enough idea to get the attention from several seasoned investors.

Nvidia is taking advantage of the Gamescom in Germany to hold a press conference about its future graphics processing units. The conference will start at 6 PM in Germany, 12 PM in New York, 9 AM in San Francisco.

Just a week after the company unveiled its new Turing architecture, Nvidia could share more details about the configurations and prices of its upcoming products — the RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti, etc.

The name of the conference #BeForeTheGame suggests that Nvidia is going to focus on consumer products and in particular GPUs for gamers. While the GeForce GTX 1080 is still doing fine when it comes to playing demanding games, the company is always working on new generations to push the graphical boundaries of your computer.

According to Next INpact, you can expect two different products this afternoon. The GeForce RTX 2080 is going to feature 2,944 CUDA cores with 8GB of GDDR6. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti could feature as many as 4,352 CUDA cores with 11GB of GDDR6.

Nvidia already unveiled Quadro RTX models for professional workstations last week. The company is expecting significant performance improvements with this new generation as those GPUs are optimized for ray tracing — the “RT” in RTX stands for ray tracing.

While ray tracing isn’t new, it’s hard to process images using this method with current hardware. The RTX GPUs will have dedicated hardware units for this task in particular.

And maybe it’s going to become easier to buy GPUs now that the cryptocurrency mining craze is slowly fading away.

You wouldn’t expect a medical app to get its start as a Snapchat competitor. Neither did video chat startup TapTalk’s founder Onno Faber. But four years ago he was diagnosed with a rare disease called Neurofibromatosis Type 2 that caused tumors leading Onno to lose hearing in one ear. He’s amongst the one in ten people with an uncommon health condition suffering from the lack of data designed to invent treatments for their ails. And he’s now the co-founder of RDMD.

Emerging from stealth today, RDMD aggregates and analyzes medical records and sells the de-identified data to pharmaceutical companies to help them develop medicines. In exchange for access to the data, patients gets their fragmented medical records organized into an app they can use to track their treatment and get second opinions. It’s like Flatiron Health, the Google-backed cancer data startup that just got bought for $2 billion, but for rare diseases.

Now RDMD is announcing it’s raised a $3 million seed round led by Lux Capital and joined by Village Global, Shasta, Garuda, First Round’s Healthcare Coop, and a ton of top healthtech angels including Flatiron investors and board members. The cash will help RDMD expand to build out its product and address more rare diseases.

RDMD founders (from left): Nancy Yu and Onno Faber

“We believe that the traditional way rare disease R&D is done needs to change” RDMD CEO Nancy Yu tells TechCrunch. The former head of corp dev at 23andme explains that, “There are over 7,000 rare diseases and growing, yet <5% of them have an FDA-approved therapy . . . it’s a massive problem.” 

While data infrastructure supports development of treatments for more common diseases like cancer and diabetes, rare diseases have been ignored because it’s wildly expensive and difficult to collect the high-quality data required to invent new medicines. But “RDMD generates research-grade, regulatory-grade data from patient medical records for use in rare disease drug R&D” says Yu. The more data it can collect, the more pharma companies can do to help patients.

Trading Utility For Patient Data

With RDMD’s app, a patient’s medical data that’s strewn across hospitals and health facilities can be compiled, organized and synthesized. Handwritten physicians’ notes and faxes are digitized with optical character recognition, structuring the data for scientific research. RDMD lays out a patients’ records in a disease-specific timeline that summarizes their data that can be kept updated, delivered to specialists for consultations, or shared with their family and caregivers.

If users opt in, that data can be anonymized and provided to research organizations, hospitals, and pharma companies that pay RDMD, though these patients can delete their accounts at any time. Since it’s straight from the medical records, the data is reliable enough to be regulation-compliant and research-ready. That allows it to accelerate the drug development process that’s both lucrative and life-saving. “It normally takes millions of dollars over several years to gather this type of data in rare diseases” Yu notes. “For the first time, we have a centralized and consented set of data for use in translational research, in a fraction of the time and cost.”

So far, RDMD has enrolled 150 patients with neurofibromatosis. But the potential to expand to other rare diseases attracted a previous pre-seed round from Village Global and new funding from angels like Clover Health CEO and Flatiron board member Vivek Garipalli, Flatiron investor and GV (Google Ventures) partner Vineeta Agarwala, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, former 23andme president Andy Page, and the husband and wife duo of former Instagram VP of product Kevin Weil and 137 Ventures managing director Elizabeth Weil.

“Onno and Nancy realized there’s an opportunity to do in rare diseases what Flatiron has done in oncology — to aggregate clinical data from patients, and to leverage that data in clinical trials and other use cases for biotech and pharma” says Shasta partner Nikhil Basu Trivedi. RDMD will be competing against pharma contract research organizations that incur high costs for collecting data the startup gets for free from patients in exchange for its product. Luckily, Flatiron’s exit paved the way for industry acceptance of RDMD’s model.

“The biggest risk for our company is if we lose our focus on providing real, immediate value to rare disease patients and families. Patients are the reason we are all here, and only with their trust can we fundamentally change how rare disease drug research is done” says Yu. RDMD will have to ensure it can protect the privacy of patients, the security of data, and the efficacy of its application to drug development.

Hindering this process is just one more consequence of our fractured medical records. Hopefully if startups like RDMD and Flatiron can demonstrate the massive value created by unifying medical data, it will pressure the healthcare power players to cooperate on a true industry standard.

Microsoft announced this morning it’s bringing Minecraft: Education Edition to the iPad for the first time. The game, which first launched to the public in late 2016, has been previously available in schools on Windows 10 devices and on macOS. The iPad software will roll out to schools starting in September, the company says.

If the school is licensed through Microsoft 365 for Education (A3 or A5), teachers will already have access to Minecraft: Education Edition and may be able to download it onto iPads when it launches. However, the school administrator will need to assign the available licenses to the teachers who want to use it, in that case.

For schools without a license, there are volume licensing agreements available through the Microsoft Store for Education and other resellers. Schools pay for the software on an annual subscription basis, but are able to try it out for free for up to 25 teacher logins, and 10 student logins.

Designed for use in the classroom, Minecraft: Education Edition offers teachers a number of resources that help them to incorporate the software into their curriculum. These include lesson plans and courses, plus access to an online community, mentorship, and technical support. The resources are available through the Minecraft: Education Edition website, as before.

The iPad version of the app will include the “Update Aquatic,” which allows school children to create stories, experiment with chemistry, and document their learning via the camera and portfolio features. Other lessons in Minecraft: Education Edition can teach subjects like STEM, history, language, art, and more.

When Microsoft bought the game company, it was already being used in over 7,000 classrooms across 40 countries worldwide, even without Minecraft’s official involvement. Today, Microsoft says the software has been licensed by 35 million teachers and students across 115 countries.

“Minecraft: Education Edition on iPad unlocks new and intuitive ways of collaborating and sharing and has revolutionized the way our students and teachers explore curriculum and projects,” explained Kyriakos Koursaris, Head of Education Technology for PaRK International School, in a statement about the launch. “The features allow for deep and meaningful learning, and the values it promotes, from inclusivity to 21 century skills, empower everyone to use technology with extraordinary results,” Koursaris said.

In addition to the iPad launch, Microsoft said it’s bringing one of Minecraft: Education Edition’s resource packs to the consumer version for Windows 10 and Xbox.

These players can now use the Chemistry Resource Pack that will introduce elements and items that are craftable using chemistry features. With this installed, players create elements and combine them into compounds, build a periodic table and combine materials using chemistry to create new items like helium balloons, sparklers, latex, and underwater torches, Microsoft says.

To use this, parents will need to go to the “Create New World” option in the game, and toggle on “Education” under the “Cheats” menu.

Fitbit’s ability to start righting the ship can largely be credited with its dive into the smartwatch category. Ionic was a bit of a mess, to be sure, but the Versa has proven a bona fide hit. But while smartwatches represent a rare bright spot in the stagnant wearable space, fitness bands have always — and will continue to be — Fitbit’s bread and butter.

The Charge is Fitbit’s workhorse. The unassuming tracker has sold well for the company, with the Charge 2 accounting for 15 million of the total 35 million the Charge line has sold.

Announced a full two years after its predecessor, the Charge 3 maintains the core competencies that helped make the line a success for the company, while baking in functionality that finds it further blurring the line between tracker and watch.

And why not? Fitbit is quick to cite its own survey of recent potential wearable buyers. Indeed, 42 percent told the company they wanted a tracker and 38 percent said they were edging toward a smartwatch. Size, price point and simplicity are among the primary drivers in that decision making — and the Charge 3 certainly has the Versa beat on those points.

In a meeting held prior to the official unveiling, a rep for the company said, “it truly is the Ferrari of trackers.” Not sure I can get on board with that one. Maybe it’s the Honda Civic. It’s reasonably priced at less than $200, dependable and built to last. Once again, the leaks were pretty much spot-on here. The top-level improvement here is the addition of a Gorilla Glass OLED touchscreen display that’s 40 percent larger than the Charge 2.

The design language hasn’t changed too much from its predecessor, though Fitbit’s made the band much easier to take off and put on, and added a whole bunch of different bands, including perforated sports models and woven straps, so there’s plenty of choice on that front. The battery has been improved. The claim has been bumped from a nebulous “several” days to seven.

GPS, as expected, is nowhere to be found, however. You’ll need to rely on your phone for that sort of tracking.

Fitbit’s added a bunch of what it calls “smart features” on the software side. The company introduced a bunch on the smartwatch side of things, so why the heck not, right? It might risk cannibalizing Versa sales slightly, but while the lines have been further blurred, the two still present fairly distinct categories, so far as most consumers are concerned.

The Charge 3 pops up notifications from popular apps like Facebook and Uber and lets users accept or reject calls. Those with Android will be able to choose canned message responses, as well. Fitbit’s ported a bunch of its own apps, including Alarms, Timer and Weather, with Leaderboard and Calendar coming in a future update. Third-party apps will be available, as well, though Fitbit hasn’t announced those yet.

Fitbit Pay, meanwhile, has finally made the leap onto the band, after it debuted on the smartwatch front, so you can theoretically leave the wallet at home while going for a run. That said, there’s no music control here yet, though the company says it’s working on it. Giving their buddy-buddy relationship with Deezer, I’d expect that to be arriving soon.

Fitness tracking has been improved throughout with more than 15 exercise modes. The physical button has been swapped out for an inductive one, helping make the device water-resistant up to 50 meters — and, yes, swim tracking is on board, as well. Female fitness tracking will get further updated in a future release to include ovulation. There’s also a beta version of Sleep Score, which is designed to give you more insight into your night-time habits and, I suppose, gamify sleep.

The company’s got a lot of lead time on all of this, as the device won’t be hitting store shelves until October. It will be priced at $150 for standard and $170 for a Special Edition with NFC and two bands.

iPrice, an e-commerce aggregation service in Southeast Asia, has landed a strategic investment from Naver, the Korean internet giant valued at over $21 billion, as part of a follow-on to the startup’s $4 million Series B from May.

There’s actually a strong connection around that recent round. It was led by Line Ventures, the investment arm of messaging app Line, which is owned by Naver . The size of the Naver investment hasn’t been disclosed, but iPrice has raised close to $10 million to date. Its investor base includes Asia Venture Group (AVG), Venturra Capital, Gobi Partners, Cento Ventures, Econa and Starstrike Ventures.

Naver is best known for its search engine, gaming business and content portals, but it also operates a shopping and price comparison engine in Korea. That’s something that iPrice can take valuable lessons from, according to a statement from the startup’s CEO David Chmelar.

iPrice is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and it operates an e-commerce aggregator service that pulls in prices from a range of services, including Alibaba-owned Lazada and Shopee, the online retail site from U.S.-listed Sea. Founded in 2015, it covers six countries in Southeast Asia — Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines — and also Hong Kong.

The idea is that a one-stop shop offers a better experience to Southeast Asia’s consumers, of which some 330 million are estimated to be online. That’s more than the entire population of the U.S..

While Southeast Asia often sits in the shadows of China and India, the region’s digital economy is tipped to grow five-fold over the next eight years to pass $200 billion by 2020, according to a report co-authored by Google. E-commerce is forecast to account for some 45 percent of that figure in 2020, and it reached an estimated $10.9 billion last year.

Naver is one of a number of Korean companies that are becoming more active within Southeast Asia, which is seen to have real growth potential. This investment in iPrice looks like it follows the firm’s blueprint of sourcing prospective investments via the Line fund. Line’s messenger app is popular in Thailand and Indonesia, which gives it additional roots.

iPrice last revealed that it had 50 million monthly visitors in December 2016, but it is aiming to reach 150 million by the end of this year. The company said it has seen 50 percent growth over the past three months on account of its development in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, but it did not supply raw figures nor financial information.

The company is more willing to provide data on the e-commerce industry. Last year it released a report on the state of e-commerce in Southeast Asia.

Farfetch, the UK-based marketplace for high-end fashion and other luxury goods, has confirmed its plans to go public. According to an F-1 form filed with the SEC, the company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FTCH.

An IPO for the company has been in the works for some time, and sources had been telling us to expect something this summer. Farfetch has not specified yet how much it plans to raise, but various reports have pegged the listing to come between $6 billion valuation (CNBC), or as high as $8.37 billion after it lists (Pitchbook).

Either number is a huge boost for the startup. For some context, the last publicly disclosed valuation for Farfetch was in 2016 when it raised at a $1.6 billion valuation.

The F-1 lays out some of the numbers behind the company.

As of December 31, 2017, the company said it had nearly 1 million (935,772) active consumers, with that figure growing 43.6 percent over the year. However, customer growth is somewhat slowing: In December 31, 2016, it had 651,674 active consumers, which was up 56.8 percent in the previous year. This makes it, the company says, is the world’s largest marketplace today for luxury goods.

“Farfetch is the leading technology platform for the global luxury fashion industry,” it notes in the prospectus. “We operate the only truly global luxury digital marketplace at scale, seamlessly connecting brands, retailers and consumers. We are redefining how fashion is bought and sold through technology, data and innovation. We were founded ten years ago, and through significant investments in technology, infrastructure, people and relationships, we have become a trusted partner to luxury brands and retailers alike.”

Revenues also are growing strong, albeit again slightly less stronger compared to the year before. In 2017 it was $386.0 million, up 59.4 percent versus 2016; and $242.1 million in 2016, up 70.1 percent versus 2015.

The company says that it made an operating profit of $136.9 million for the first six months of this year (vs $94.4 million the year before in the same period), but it is also making a net loss (after deducting tax etc.): $68.4 million for the first six months of this year, ballooning from $29.3 million in the same period a year before.

On the other hand, gross merchandise value is growing. GMV in 2017 was $909.8 million, 55.3 percent up on 2016. The previous year it grew 53.4 percent ($585.8 million in 2016).

Farfetch was a trailblazer in the area of building e-commerce marketplaces specifically catering to the luxury fashion and other luxury goods industries.

In many cases, it was working with boutiques and fashion houses that had yet to establish any kind of online commerce profile of their own. (“These sellers have been cautious in their adoption of emerging commerce technologies,” as Farfetch puts it.) So by pooling them together, it was able to create a high-end experience that was bolstered by its scale and reach.

It tapped into this market at a time that two new areas of demand were opening up. First, the e-commerce revolution was indeed starting to make its way into the higher end of the market, where even people who potentially had lots of leisure time and money to shop day in, day out, were happy to complement that with digital shopping.

Second, there have been a number of less mature economies on the rise, and that has led to a new wave of wealthy buyers, who may not always be based in the urban centres that many fashion houses and boutiques call their homes. Thus, the Farfetches of the world could come to their well-dressed rescue.

(It’s no surprise that Farfetch’s most recent acquisition and major investment were both out of China to target these specific shoppers.)

Farfetch is not the only one that has capitalised on these trends. Matches Fashion is another company that has built an online emporium for these brands and shoppers. And Threads has turned the website concept on its head by targeting the same people, but eschewing own-brand URLs and apps altogether.

Together, Farfetch and these others are hotly chasing a market that was estimated to be worth $307 billion in 2017 and projected to reach $446 billion by 2025.

We’ll update this post with more detail from the F-1 and any other numbers as we get them.

Update: Correction on number of active customers, to 1 million not 1 billion.

Apple is cracking down on illegal content in China after it removed potentially thousands of apps related to gambling.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. phone-maker purged as many as 25,000 apps — that’s a figure that was first cited by state-owned broadcaster CCTV [link in Chinese]. Apple didn’t comment on the number of apps removed, but it did confirm that it took action.

“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China. We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Apple offers over 1.5 million apps in China. Greater China — which includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — is Apple’s third largest region based on business, grossing $9.6 billion in the most recent quarter. That’s around 18 percent of its total revenue.

The removals come weeks after a number of state-media reported criticism of Apple for failing to prevent issues such a spam, gambling, pornography and more concerning its business in Asia.

That criticism has been linked to the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. — a spat that cost Qualcomm’s its $44 billion acquisition of NXP — but that may be wide of the mark. Apple is not alone in being rebuked by Beijing for content deemed unsuitable, a number of China’s up-and-coming startups have also had their wings clipped.

Earlier this year, ambitious new media firm ByteDance — which operates news and video apps and is currently talking to investors to raise $2.5-$3.5 billion — was ordered to shutter a parody app it operated in China. Additionally, four news and content apps were suspended from the App Store and Google Play for offending authorities. ByteDance responded by doubling its content moderation team and developing stronger systems for checking content.

“Content had appeared that did not accord with core socialist values and was not a good guide for public opinion. Over the past few years, we put more effort and resources toward expanding the business, and did not take enough measures to supervise our platform,” founder and CEO Zhang Yiming said in a statement that seemed designed to appease internet regulators.

Apple has, of course, taken criticism for kowtowing to Beijing by removing more than 50 VPN apps, which can be used to circumvent China’s internet censorship system, from the App Store. CEO Tim Cook has expressed his belief that the apps — and others removed by Apple in order to comply with Chinese law — will return, but it is difficult to envisage a scenario in which that happens.

Walmart announced over the weekend that it has completed a $16 billion investment in Flipkart that sees it become the majority owner of the Indian e-commerce company.

The deal was first revealed back in May and now it has closed after receiving the necessary approvals. It sees Walmart take a 77 percent share in the company, buying out a number of prior investors in the process and expanding its rivalry with Amazon to a new horizon. The investment capital also includes $2 billion in new equity funding which will be used for growth while the transaction was structured so that Flipkart itself can still go public. That latter point could mean that the Indian firm must go public within four years, as TechCrunch previously reported.

Flipkart will continue to be run by its leadership with Tencent and Tiger Global retaining board seats. Those two have remained investors in the business, alongside others that include Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and Microsoft. Walmart previously suggested that other allies would come aboard as investors. Google was strongly mooted, but so far there have been no strategic additions.

Walmart said that its plans for India will include investments that “support national initiatives and will bring sustainable benefits in jobs creation, supporting small businesses, supporting farmers and supply chain development and reducing food waste.”

As we previously reported, it also plans to use Flipkart as a “key center of learning” for the rest of its business across the world, and that includes its home market.

“Not only is [Flipkart] innovative [with the] problem-solving culture that they have, but they are doing some great work both in the AI space, how they are using data across their platforms but particularly in terms of the payment platform that they’ve created through PhonePe. All of those things we can learn from for the future and see how we can leverage those around the international markets and potentially into the US as well,” Walmart COO Judith McKenna said back in May when the deal was announced.

Flipkart’s business could also get a whole lot more transparent since its quarterly results will be reported as part of Walmart’s earnings. Although they will be part of its international business so that might provide some protection from direct scrutiny.