Month: June 2019

There’s going to be a point in the not so distant future when the addition of new 5G cities won’t be news. After several years of hype, however, we’re still not quite there. The 5G picture is set to be quite different by year’s end, but for now, the big network war is one of inches.

Verizon (our boss’s boss’s boss) is flipping the switch in Denver today. The mile-high city is going ultra wideband this week, followed by Providence, Rhode Island on Monday July 1.

As for the devices that can actually access those speeds — that, too, is fairly limited. The list currently includes the LG V50, the Moto Z (plus 5G mod) and Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. That scant three puts the company in contention for most 5G handsets at the moment.

The addition of Providence and Denver brings the list up to four, along with Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon is promising a full 30 cities by year’s end. The carrier says subscribers can expect spreads to top out at around 1.5 Gbps, with average download speeds at around 450 Mbps.

Coverage will be consented in specific neighborhoods from the sound of it, meaning handsets will likely jump back and forth between 5G and LTE. Here are the specifics on that,

In Denver, Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in areas of Highlands, South of 37th between Tejon and Navajo Streets. Coverage can also be found throughout LoDo and around Coors Field. Businesses and consumers will also have 5G Ultra Wideband service in the Central Business District around popular landmarks like the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Sculpture Park, and outside Paramount Theatre. Areas of Capitol Hill and Northern Sections of The Denver Tech Center will also have Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service.
In Providence, Verizon business and consumer customers will initially see 5G Ultra Wideband service in parts of College Hill, Federal Hill, Mt. Hope, and around landmarks like Brown University (Erickson Athletic Complex, Wriston Quadrangle), Rhode Island School of Design and Providence College.

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) has certainly been getting a lot of attention in marketing software circles over the last year as big dawgs like Salesforce and Adobe enter the fray, but Amperity, a Seattle-based startup, has been building a CDP solution since it launched in 2016, and today it announced some updates to give customers more control over the platform.

Chris Jones, chief product officer at Amperity, says this is an important step for the startup. “If you think about the evolution of our company, we started with an idea that turned into a [Marketing Data Platform], which was the engine that powered all of that, but that engine was largely operated by our delivery team. We’re now putting the power of that engine into the customers’ hands and giving them the full access to that,” Jones explained.

That is giving customers — which include Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom and The Gap — the power to control how the software works in the context of their companies, rather than using a black box approach where you have to use the software as delivered. He says that customers want the ability to start using the system to gain insights on their own.

One of the primary pieces in the newest version of Amperity to allow them to do that is Stitch, a tool that lets users pull together all of the interactions from a customer in a single view —  ingesting the data, sorting, deduplicating it and delivering a list of all the interactions a brand has had with a given customer. From there, they can use the new Customer 360 visualization to get a more graphical view of the data.

Amperity Stitch Screenshot: Amperity.

Jones says companies can use this data to help different groups within a company, whether marketing, sales or service, understand the customer better before or during an interaction. For example, a marketer can segment the data in a very granular way to find all of the regular customers who aren’t part of the company loyalty program, and deliver them an email listing all of the benefits of joining.

Amperity launched in 2016, and has raised $37 million across two rounds. Its most recent funding came in 2017, a $28 million investment led by Tiger Global Management, according to Crunchbase data.

Making good on plans revealed last year to debut an EV-exclusive car sharing service, Volkswagen is actually launching its fleet for customers – debuting WeShare, a new shared service similar to Car2Go or GM’s Maven, but featuring only all-electric vehicles. Initially, WeShare will be available only in Berlin, where it’s launching today with 1,500 Volkswagen e-Golf cars making up the on-demand rental fleet.

The plan is to add 500 more cars to the available population by early next year, specifically the e-up! electric city company car, and then it’ll also play host to the brand new ID.3 fully electric car when that’s officially launched. VW is still targeting the middle of next year for a street date for that vehicle, which is part of its all-new ID line of vehicles designed from the ground-up based on its next-generation electric vehicle platform. In terms of new geographies, WeShare will look to launch In Prague (in partnership with VW Group sub-brand Skoda) and also in Hamburg, both some time in 2020.

WeShare has a coverage area that includes the Berlin city centre and a little bit beyond the Ringbahn train line that encircles it. The cars are available in a “free-floating” arrangement, meaning they’ll be free to pickup and park wherever public parking is available. This one-way model, which is the one used by competitor Car2go, is distinct from the round-trip style rentals preferred by Zipcar, for instance. It’s more convenient for customers, but more of a headache for operators, who have to worry about ensuring cars remain in the rental zone and are parked appropriately and legally.

WeShare will also take responsibility for recharging the vehicles as needed, and will do so using the public charging network that’s available in Berlin, but later on it will seek to incentive actual users of the system to charge up when vehicles need it.

Car sharing, especially one-way, has had a hit-and-miss track record to date. Car2go shuttered operations in Toronto and Chicago, for instance, due to incompatibility with city operations regarding parking in the case of Toronto, and rampant cases of fraud in Chicago that resulted in cars being used to commit crimes. VW notes in a release that in Berlin, however, the number of car sharing users has grown from 180,000 people in 2010 to 2.46 million in early 2019.

Volkswagen also owns and operates a fully-electric ridesharing service called MOIA, which has built its own fit-for-purpose vehicle and which currently operates in Hamburg and Hanover. Last year, VW said the two mobility service operations, which offer very different service models, will work together in future.

Venture capital investors Andreessen Horowitz, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and SGVC have valued TripActions, a travel booking service tailored for large enterprises, at $4 billion with a $250 million Series D.

The round, announced this morning, brings the business’s total raised to $480 million.

TripActions co-founder and chief executive officer Ariel Cohen tells TechCrunch the company’s revenue is growing 5x year-over-year but declined to disclose 2018 revenues. Currently, it has more than 2,000 customers, including WeWork, Zoom, Dropbox and Robinhood.

Founded in 2015, TripActions is out to replace antiquated travel booking systems with a platform that integrates company HR and expense systems. Using TripActions, business travelers can arrange flights, hotels and transportation, with 24/7 global support from the startup’s staff.

“We are going after a really big industry,” Cohen said. “We are replacing something people don’t like. They don’t like the tools corporates are giving them today to book business trips.”

TripActions plans to use the cash to accelerate its international expansion. Only 18 months ago, it operated just one office out of its headquarters in Palo Alto. Today, the company has 700 employees with offices in London, Sydney, Amsterdam and more.

Co-founder and chief technology officer Ilan Twig says once they brought on large enterprise customers like Box, for example, they had no choice but to better craft the service for markets located outside the U.S.

“In a year we went from a startup with an office in Palo Alto to having more than 100 employees in Europe,” Twig tells TechCrunch. “We need to meet users where they are … We need agents and operations in the various [geographies] that we are serving. And then of course sales and marketing in all of these [geographies].”

With the latest round, TripActions is sitting on a mountain of cash. The founders tell us they’ve yet to spend a dime of their $154 million Series C. Closed in November, the financing valued the company at $1 billion, cementing its position in the unicorn club.

“We want to make sure we are equipped to take the market,” Cohen said. “Do we need the entire amount of money we’ve raised to date? The answer is no. But do we want the means to seize the opportunity in the long term? The answer is hell yes.”

Before pivoting to smart glasses, Thalmic Labs (now North) tried its best to make its Myo gestural arm band controller the future of user input. Now, another startup is picking up the baton, acquiring patents related to the product and customer data.

The IP is being bought by CTRL-labs, a New York-based startup full of neuroscientists aiming to build a wrist-worn input device that translates electrical signals from your body into computer input. The startup closed a $28 million Series A last year with funding coming from Vulcan Capital, GV and others.

In December, CTRL-labs launched its own development kit for a device similar in scope to the Myo armband but more robust in its sensing capabilities.

While Thalmic Labs had its own ambitions for extracting input from the body’s electrical signals, CTRL-labs tells me that the patent purchase is largely focused on acquiring the tech behind the armbands gestural controls, which translated sweeping arm movements into input mechanisms. The startup hopes that by integrating the tech into future development kits, developers will have more options for functionality as the company strives to fine tune its more complex readings.

The purchase marks the close of an era for North, which has raised nearly $200 million according to CrunchBase and marked a major pivot last year away from its Myo armband towards its new Focals smart glasses. North has been full steam ahead on the smart glasses and seems to have dumped plans to pursue the Myo band further so offloading the patents seems like an easy choice as the team labors to scale sales of its smart glasses that starts at $599 ($799 with prescription lenses).

For its part, CTRL-labs exec Josh Duyan tells me that the connection between the two firms came about due to mutual investor Spark Capital making the connection. Duyan declined to disclose the price of the deal.

Amazon’s strategy to bring more brick-and-mortar options into its vast e-commerce empire, and its ambition to sell more pharmaceutical products, today may have found themselves a little more knitted together. The company announced a new service in the US called Counter, a free in-store pick-up service where Amazon shoppers can arrange to collect packages. And its first partner in the new effort? None other than one of the bigger names in drug stores: Rite Aid.

The two will kick off Counter with availability in “over 100” Rite Aid locations across the US. The longer-term plan for Amazon is to expand the pick-up option to 1,500 stores (including other retail partners) by the end of 2019 — a very quick ramp-up in the next six months.

In an interesting geographic reversal of how Amazon rolls out services, this one launched first in Europe, by way of a partnership with the clothes retailer Next in the UK, and Giunti Al Punto Librerie, Fermopoint and SisalPay in Italy. Amazon said the service has so far “been positively received, driving strong customer engagement and additional foot traffic for partners” in those markets.

The deal is a development on Amazon’s bigger strategy to take its business — born and raised online — into ever-more traditional retail settings, both to increase options for its online shoppers, as well as bring more customers into the fold who prefer to procure their goods in person rather than by post. Other very big moves on that front have included trying out its own cashier-less retail locations, setting up bookshops on university campuses, and of course buying Whole Foods.

This latest deal is one of its blended approaches, where online shoppers are given the option of getting in person.

“Amazon is always looking for innovative and convenient ways for customers to ship and receive their orders,” explains Patrick Supanc, Worldwide Director of Amazon Hub, which also includes its Locker, Locker+ and Apartment Locker pick-up services, in a statement. “With Counter, we’ve leveraged our growing logistics network and invested in new, easy to use technology to give customers yet another delivery option rooted in flexibility and control. We are excited to partner with national businesses like Rite Aid, and local businesses in the future, to create an outstanding experience for our shared customers.”

The expansion to more pick-up options as an alternative to home delivery is partly out of practicality.

First, people are still spending, overall, way more time and money in physical retail locations than they are in virtual ones, with the latest US census figures putting the figure at just 10 percent of retail sales being made through e-commerce.

Second, having packages delivered at home is not always convenient if you work in an office and do not have suitable back-up neighbors or a porter to sign for your packages, or you have had problems with package theft if parcels are left outside.

Other options Amazon has been adding on the brick-and-mortar retailer front have included Amazon Lockers locations in stores (most recently Stein Mart), as well as partnering with stores to take exchanges (such as its deal with Khol’s). In both cases, the incentive for the stores is to bring people into the stores who will do more than just deal with their Amazon business; they might shop, too.

That will also be a hook that Rite Aid will hope to use.

“Creating a seamless, convenient customer experience is a key element of our strategy and digital transformation,” said Jocelyn Konrad, Executive Vice President, Pharmacy and Retail Operations of Rite Aid, in a statement. “Being the first store partner for Counter in the U.S. is a differentiator for Rite Aid and we believe our partnership with Amazon, that includes Locker, creates a stronger in-store experience for existing customers and new customers that come in to pick up their packages.”

To be clear, Amazon doesn’t make any mention of Rite Aid’s core business as a pharmacy, but given what else we know about Amazon’s ambitions in that area it seems very notable.

Last year, Amazon acquired online pharmacy PillPack for just under $1 billion (a sum that includes earn-outs and the full value of the deal, sources tell us), prompting many people speculating about how it might use it to move into a deeper into the very lucrative world of pharmaceuticals.

That idea was buffered by the fact that it also launched a healthcare JV in partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan, and it has also been making other gradual moves into the medical sector with the sale of supplies.

While Amazon never got very far with its investment and partnership years ago with Drugstore.com (which was eventually acquired by Walgreens and shut down), it seems that a retail partnership with a drug store chain could be an obvious way of extending not just its pick-up parcel network, but also a way of bringing PillPack the physical delivery world.

Pavegen, a UK startup which harvests energy from people’s footsteps and also tracks that data, has raised £2.6m on its crowdfunding push having doubled its initial £950k target.

The campaign secured funds from over 1,400 investors, including partnership and anchor investment from major global engineering conglomerate Hinduja Group and family investment firm Tamar Capital.

The Hinduja Group, whose Co-Chairmen topped the UK 2019 Rich List, aims to use the technology to reduce the cost of manufacturing and provide access to fast-growing markets in India and South East Asia.

The funding round follows expansion into 36 countries worldwide, and £1.8m in revenues in 2018, with installations including smart city developments, retail destinations, transport hubs and education institutions in Hong Kong, India, Korea, Thailand, UAE, UK & USA.

In 2018, Pavegen also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with global engineering and technology giant, Siemens, to develop smart city projects together.

The key to Pavegen is not just power generation. Pavegen which converts the kinetic energy of footsteps into both electricity and data, and it is also developing an ecosystem allowing people to be rewarded for steps on Pavegen walkways.

The company says its first shopping center deployment at The Mercury mall in East London has raised engagement with the site by 15%.

Laurence Kemball-Cook, CEO of Pavegen, said: “We believe in placing people at the heart of the smart city. With the support of Hinduja Group, Siemens and Tamar Capital, our plan of making our technology ubiquitous for all cities becomes achievable.”

Hrag Sarkissian, Founding Partner, Tamar Capital, said: “Pavegen is very relevant when it comes to Smart cities, from a power and a data play. As cost comes down, large scale deployments could really change the game.”

Shom Hinduja, President of Alternative Energy and Sustainability Initiatives at Hinduja Group said: “It’s an exciting time for Pavegen with new projects in airports, retail sites and smart city developments in Asia, the Middle East and North America. We believe the Hinduja team will be able to play a key role in enabling the Pavegen team to rapidly bring their ambitious vision to life.”

Latin America-based Grow, which formed after micromobility companies Grin and Yellow merged earlier this year, has hit 10 million rides. Grin, which first started operating about one year ago in Mexico, has since expanded into 23 cities across Latin America. That is, of course, thanks in part to its mergers with Yellow and Ride.

This milestone is notable in part because it shows Grow is, err, growing at about the same rate as Bird and Lime did in each of those companies first years. In September, Bird hit the ten million scooter rides milestone after about one year of operations. That same month, Lime hit 11.5 million bike and scooter rides after about 14 months of being in business.

It’s also notable given Lime just expanded into Latin America yesterday with an electric scooter presence in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Chile. Lime currently counts 65 million rides.

Grow, with $150 million in funding, Grow counts five million users across its shared scooter, bike and e-moped services in Latin America. Collectively, riders have traveled more than nine million miles on Grow’s micromobility vehicles.

Bird’s somewhat weird but also very clever global expansion model is to let others handle it, and one of those others is bringing their service online this month. Bird Canada, which is a wholly Canadian-owned company entirely distinct from Bird, will begin offering on-demand electric scooter rental service in Alberta this month, with plans to offer its services across more Canadian communities on a gradual rollout schedule after that.

Bird Canada will be operating its service under the Platform plan that the original Bird announced earlier this year, which will see it acquire its scooters from the U.S. Bird at cost, and gain access to the Santa Monica-based startup’s tools, software and technology to operate the service, in exchange for a 20 percent cut of ride revenue.

The new Canadian e-scooter company is founded by Canadian serial entrepreneur and Toronto Raptors founder John Bitove (he led the bid that brought the NBA expansion team to Toronto in 1993), who will act as the company’s Chairman. Bird Canada’s day-to-day operations will be overseen by CEO Steward Lyons, who previously worked with Bitove on SiriusXM’s Canadian business and the startup national wireless provider Mobilicity which the two entrepreneurs founded together.

For its part, the Canadian entity will operate the fleet, including recharging the electric, battery-powered scooters and ensuring they’re in good working order. Local operators are also the ones who’ll need to work with city and any other relevant governing officials, which is a big reason why this probably seemed like the wisest or at least most expedient path to getting revenue from markets outside the U.S. for Bird.

Bird is also being selective about how it rolls out these franchise-like Platform partnerships, by picking only one partner per region and also by avoiding any such partnerships in markets where it does have an interest in eventually expanding itself.

Both Lyons and Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden provided quotes around this news that emphasize how scooter charing can offer sustainable, affordable transportation that helps alleviate traffic, and Lyons specifically said that Alberta is “leading the way in Canada.” The regulatory environment around scooters is at best murky in most Canadian cities, and local governing authorities are scrambling to figure out what the formal rules should be ahead of the scooter explosion traveling north of the U.S. border in a bigger way.

Bird Canada is likely hoping to set the tone for that conversation and be involved in encouraging more communities beyond those in Alberta to open its arms to on-demand rental businesses, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of reception these receive, and what approach Bird Canada takes to managing their fleet in the country’s harsher winter conditions.

Two of Europe’s biggest on-demand laundry startups are merging today. Laundrapp from London and Zipjet from Berlin are confirming the completion of a previously-rumored merger through which the combined business will become the largest on-demand laundry business in the UK.

Alongside this, the combined business has completed a funding round from existing investors including Toscafund, Hargreave Hale VCT, Henkel, Rocket Internet and further minority shareholders. The amount involved has not been disclosed. News of a planned merger was broken by Sky News back in April this year.

The European on-demand laundry and dry-cleaning market is estimated to be worth around €20bn per annum. Both Laundrapp and Zipjet have benefitted from this demand, with revenues, they say, rising more than 30% yoy. Together, the businesses currently process over 150,000 items of washing each month, with the ‘Wash & Fold’ service representing approximately 25% of volumes. The business says customers tend to start with the classic dry-cleaning offering, but later convert to the laundry and linen offering, driven by its convenience.

London is currently the main market for both Laundrapp and Zipjet, and this transaction gives the combined business-critical operational mass, whilst maintaining two separate brands in the short term.

Oliver Bedford at Hargreave Hale commented: “Bringing together two significant operators within the on-demand laundry industry will help lay the foundations for the next wave of investment into technology and infrastructure. Laundrapp aims to put convenience, choice and value at the centre of its customer proposition and we see this transaction as an important step towards building a sector leading capability.”

Lorenzo Franzi, CEO of Laundrapp, commented on the deal: “Bringing the two businesses together allows us to realise synergies, leveraging our technological advantage and critical mass to better serve customers and partners, and in the process cement our position as the #1 player.”