Month: June 2019

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a new method for delivering key nutrients to plant roots – without having to ensure they’re present in the soil where the plants are growing.

The landmark study greatly increases the efficiency of surface delivery of nutrients and pesticides to plants. Currently, when crops are sprayed with stuff that’s supposed to help them grow faster or better, the vast majority of that (up to 95 percent, according to CMU’s engineering blog) will just end up either as concentrated deposits in the surrounding soil, or dissolving into ground water. In both cases, accumulation over time can have negative knock-on effects, in addition to being terribly inefficient at their primary task.

This method, described by researchers in detail in a new academic paper, would manage to improve efficiency to nearly 100% absorption of nutrients and pesticides delivered as nanoparticles (particles smaller than 50 nanometers across – a human hair is about 75,000 nanometers wide, for context) sprayed onto the leaves of plants, which then make their way through the plant’s internal vascular system all the way down into the root system.

Using this method, agricultural professionals could also greatly improve delivery of plant antibiotics, making it easier and more cost-effective to treat plant diseases affecting crop yields. It would be cheaper to delivery all nutrients and pesticides, too, because the big bump in efficiency of uptake by the plants means you can use much less of anything you want to deliver to achieve your desired effect.

This research could have huge impact in terms of addressing growing global food supply needs while making the most existing agricultural land footprint and decreasing the need for potentially damaging expansion of the same.

SpaceX is going to launch a Falcon Heavy rocket for only the third time ever tonight, should all go according to the current mission plan. The launch, set to take place during a four-hour launch window that opens at 11:30 PM EDT (8:30 PM PDT) [UPDATE: The launch is now targeting 2:30 AM EDT (11:30 PM PDT), which still falls within the four-hour launch window] tonight, will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

On its first-ever nighttime launch, Falcon Heavy’s STP-2 mission will carry a cargo made up of a number of payloads from commercial customers, as well as from the U.S. Department of Defence, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. The mission involves putting 24 different spacecraft into orbit, along three separate orbital paths. One of the is an experimental research satellite for the Air Force Research Laboratory, and NASA’s payload includes four different experimental craft, which the agency detailed this month.

It’ll also carry LightSail 2, a crowdfunded spacecraft spearheaded by Bill Nye’s Planetary Society, which will make its way through space using the literal solar wind beneath its massive sail. SpaceX is also re-using Falcon Heavy boosters for the first time, with side boosters used on the Arabsat-6A mission flown in April, and it’ll attempt to recover all three first-stage rockets via landings at Cape Canaveral and aboard its drone landing pad barge.

The launch will be streamed live above, with the feed getting started around 15 minutes prior to scheduled launch window opening.

Comscore’s name is usually in the news because of its widely-cited research and stats around media traffic and other analysis charting digital consumer behavior. More recently, it’s been coming up for another reason: ongoing corporate upheaval and its tumbling stock price. Today comes the latest development in that story: the company announced that it has raised $20 million, with the option of increasing the sum to $50 million, from a firm called CVI Investments.

“This transaction strengthens our balance sheet and positions us to pursue our refocused growth strategy while providing the flexibility to better apply resources to meet our business objectives, and ultimately drive long-term value for our stockholders,” Dale Fuller, Interim Chief Executive Officer of Comscore, said in a statement.

As explained in the 8-K, the money is coming in the form of a share purchase that is expected to close around June 26.

Comscore did not give more specifics about how it plans to use the funding, but it comes at a tricky time, with the stock today at one point dipping to a 52-week low at $7.39/share. Earlier this year, it lost both its CEO and its president, and then this month its COO departed after less than a month with the company. Counting its current interim CEO, it has been through five CEOs in the last five years. In May, the loss-making company also announced that it would be reducing headcount by 10%, or 180 people, as part of a restructuring and effort to move into profitability.

Comscore competes with the likes of Nielsen in measuring media consumption and patterns of digital consumers, but that is not its only challenge.

The company, and others like it, have traditionally been a key component in the world of advertising, as they provide an inportant, third-party assessment of audience data, necessary for helping to plan media spend and campaigns. But the rise of adtech and marketing tech, and a new array of places where ad inventory is placed beyond websites, has created a new level of more granular measurements and customer demands, so part of the challenge for Comscore has been to build new products to meet those new scenarios.

Its most recent series of executive departures and workforce reductions have not been the first faced by the company: it has also been the subject of an SEC investigation into its accounting practices, having admitted in 2018 that it overstated revenues by some $127 million resulting from a long-term WPP partnership. Prior to that, longtime CEO Gian Fulgoni left the company over the same problem.

Last year, it was reported that Comscore had engaged Goldman Sachs to reach out to parties potentially interested in acquiring it, including strategic acquirers operating in a similar space and buyout firms. The talks were never confirmed and nothing ever materialised at the time.

The company’s market cap is now at around $460 million, having seen its share price decline drastically since 2015.

 

With increased pressure on Chinese manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, Shenzhen-based drone giant DJI has no doubt had cause for concern of late. In late-2017, the U.S. government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office raised concern that the company’s camera-equipped flying machines could be sending data back to China.

A few weeks back, the Department of Homeland Security similarly raised warning over commercial drones from China. In a hearing entitled “Drone Security: Enhancing Innovation and Mitigating Supply Chain Risks” last week, meanwhile, the National Defense University’s Harry Wingo told the Senate Transportation Subcommittee, “American geospatial information is flown to Chinese data centers at an unprecedented level. This literally gives a Chinese company a view from above of our nation.”

DJI fired back in a letter provided to TechCrunch, noting,

Because the drone industry is becoming an increasingly critical engine for small American businesses as well as the entire U.S. economy, it is essential that decisions affecting key components of the industry are based on fact. We are deeply concerned that, left unchecked, the unsubstantiated speculation and inaccurate information presented during your Subcommittee hearing will put the entire U.S. drone industry at risk, causing a ripple effect that will stunt economic growth and handcuff public servants who use DJI drones to protect the public and save lives.

The letter also breaks down some of the finer points of the discussion as follows,

• DJI drones do not share flight logs, photos or videos unless the drone pilot deliberately chooses to do so. They do not automatically send flight data to China or anywhere else. They do not automatically transmit photos or videos over the internet. This data stays solely on the drone and on the pilot’s mobile device. DJI cannot share customer data it never receives.

• DJI’s professional pilot app has a built-in setting to disconnect all internet connection, as an extra precaution for pilots performing sensitive flights. Unlike some technology companies, DJI does not sell or monetize customer data.

• DJI embeds password and data encryption features in the design of our products. This provides customers with secure access to the drone and its onboard data. In cases when U.S. drone users do choose to share their data, it is only uploaded to U.S. cloud servers.

• DJI operates a global Bug Bounty Program so the world’s security researchers can identify unforeseen security issues, and we hire independent security experts to test our products. These are just some of the steps we take to assure high-security users they can use our products with confidence.

With increased speculation, the company is looking to assemble some of its products stateside. A warehouse in Cerritos, California is set to be repurposed to build those drone models sold in the U.S., in order to better comply with government regulation. 

The company tells TechCrunch,

DJI is committed to investing in America and providing U.S. government workers, first responders, and public servants with customized solutions that meet their unique security, safety, and procurement needs. As part of our long-term commitment to America that began in 2015 with our research and development facility located in Palo Alto, we are opening a new production facility in California and filing for compliance under the U.S. Trade Agreements Act. This new investment will expand DJI’s footprint in the U.S. so we can better serve our customers, create U.S. jobs, and strengthen the U.S. drone economy. We look forward to working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in its review of our application.

DJI hopes that assembling products in California will help the company better comply with the Trade Agreements Act, a move that comes as preps the release of the DJI Government Edition, a repurposed Mavic Pro drone designed for use by government agencies.

Life can be tough for a small satellite operator – it may be relatively cheap and easy to build small sats (or CubeSats, as they’re sometimes called), but arranging transportation for those satellites to get to orbit is still a big challenge. That’s why SpaceRyde is pursuing a novel way of launching light payloads, that could help small sat companies skip the line, and save some cash in the process.

SpaceRyde’s co-founders, wife and husband team Saharnaz Safari and Sohrab Haghighat, saw the opportunity to address this growing customer base by making launches easier by reducing the impact of one of the biggest complicating factors of getting stuff into space: Earth’s atmosphere.

In an interview, Safari explained that SpaceRyde’s technology works by making it possible to use a relatively tiny rocket rather than a huge one by attaching it to a stratospheric balloon and launching from much closer to orbit. Because of the size of the rocket and the lift limitations of the balloons, SpaceRyde ends up carrying much smaller payloads than say, SpaceX or Rocket Lab, but on the upside, clients don’t have to share rides like they do with the big rocket providers.

“Just getting a ride to orbit for these small satellite, even if they have the money, or they want to pay as much as they’re getting charged right now, on big rockets, is a big problem,” Safari said. “Because they have to wait until a mission with their parameters, to the orbit they want, the inclination they want, all that becomes available and then if there’s space, they can, you know, hitch a ride. So it’s more or less like a bus system.”

No one loves waiting for the bus, least of all the emerging crop of space startups hoping to build sustainable businesses. Many of these young companies, like fellow Canadian startup Wyvern, are looking to launch and operate small sats as the backbone of their go-to-market plan. Trouble is, they’re at the whim of whatever primary client current launch providers are serving, with launch condition requirements for the largest, most expensive satellites on board dictating when, where and if launches will happen for the tag-along smaller customers.

“What we’re building is, instead of this bus system, where it’s a set schedule, and it can get delayed,” Safari explained. “We want to give them the taxi or Uber service to space, where they buy an entire rocket and we provide the payload capacity that smaller satellite companies typically use in one launch, and so they can basically buy the entire rocket, and they can put a bunch of their satellites, depending on how big their satellites are, and then they just tell us where they want us to drop it for them.”

SpaceRyde is early in its own journey, having been founded less than a year ago. But Haghighat, the company’s CEO in addition to being Safari’s husband and co-founder, has a PhD in Aerospace, Aeronatical and Astronautical Engineering from the University of Toronto and was an early employee of success story Cruise Automation. Safari brings business and sales expertise, as well as a Master’s degree in Bioanalytical Chemistry from the University of Waterloo . But more important than either of their credentials, they’ve already demonstrated a sub-scale prototype of their system in action.

Earlier this year, SpaceRyde launched a stratospheric balloon carrying a scaled down version of their launch platform and rocket in Northern Ontario, Canada. The test wasn’t a complete success – a modification to the off-the-shelf rocket engine they used didn’t work exactly as expected – but it did demonstrate that their in-flight launch platform orientation tech worked as intended, and Safari says the malfunction that did occur is relatively easy to fix.

Next up for SpaceRyde is to work towards a full-scale demonstration of their platform, which Safari says should happen sometime next year. The company is hiring to grow its small team and accelerate its pace of development, and Safari says they’re excited specifically about the potential SpaceRyde has to bring back domestic launch capabilities to Canada – the country hasn’t had a rocket launch in 21 years.

For the private space economy, the startup can’t commercialize its product fast enough: Safari says they’ll be able to offer their launches at “around half” of what their customers would be charged currently (thanks to using mostly off-the-self rocket parts and balloons), but again she stressed that it’s actually not cost, but availability that is the biggest challenge for most.

Walmart -owned Sam’s Club is expanding into same-day alcohol delivery, the retailer announced this morning. The delivery service is being powered by Sam’s Club partner Instacart and is currently live in 215 stores across 12 U.S. states, with plans to reach other cities and markets in the months ahead.

At launch, the list of states supporting alcohol delivery includes Florida, California, Missouri, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Ohio, Wyoming, Connecticut, Texas, Kentucky, and Minnesota. Not all clubs in those states will offer the service — only select markets.

Where available, Sam’s Club members will be able to order both from the in-house “Member’s Mark” brand — like Member’s Mark Sangria, Member’s Mark Prosecco and Member’s Mark Moscato D’Asti, for example — as well as from other popular brands, like Kendall Jackson Chardonnay, Modelo Especial, and Tito’s Handmade Vodka, among others. The deliveries can arrive as fast as one hour.

The move pits Sam’s Club as a rival to other same-day alcohol delivery services, including Target’s Shipt, which delivers alcohol in a number of cities from various retailers (including Target), Amazon’s Prime Now, Drizly, Postmates, plus other Instacart partner retailers which vary by market and regional chains.

Sam’s Club parent Walmart also delivers alcohol in select markets through Walmart Grocery.

To order alcohol, Sam’s Club members will need to order through the Instacart app or website. They’ll also obviously need to be 21 years of age and will need to present their government ID at the time of delivery.

“Sam’s Club is focused on offering quality products, unexpected finds and better customer experiences,” said Racquel Harris, Vice President, Adult Beverage, in a statement. “Now you can select the perfect bottle of wine to complement your dinner or stock up on your favorite beer or spirits for the big game with the convenience of delivery.”

“Instacart is proud to collaborate with Sam’s Club to provide wine, beer, and spirits delivery for their valued members. By extending our marketplace categories, we’re making it even easier for customers to shop from Sam’s Club for all their needs – from groceries and household essentials to alcohol,” said Andrew Nodes, Vice President of Retail at Instacart. “We’re proud to have grown our relationship with Sam’s Club to include its clubs across the U.S., helping members across the country get the groceries they need in as fast as an hour.”

 

“I just want to be proud of the company that I work for,” Maren Costa told me recently.

Costa is a Principal UX Design Lead at Amazon, for which she has worked since 2002. I was referred to her because of her leadership in the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group I covered earlier this week for my series on the ethics of technology.

Like many of her peers at Amazon, Costa has been experiencing a tension between work she loves and a company culture and community she in many ways admires deeply, and what she sees as the company’s dangerous failings, or “blind spots,” regarding critical ethical issues such as climate change and AI.

Indeed, her concerns are increasingly typical of employees not only at Amazon, but throughout big tech and beyond, which seems worth noting particularly because hers is not the typical image many call to mind when thinking of giant tech companies.

A Gen-X poet and former Women’s Studies major, Costa drops casual references to neoliberal capitalism running amok into discussions of multiple topics. She has a self-deprecating sense of humor and worries about the impact of her work on women, people of color, and the Earth.

If such sentiments strike you as too idealistic to take seriously, it seems Glass Lewis and ISS, two of the world’s largest and most influential firms advising investors in such companies, would disagree. Both firms recently advised Amazon shareholders to vote in support of a resolution put forward by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and its supporters, calling on Amazon to dramatically change its approach to climate issues.

Glass Lewis’s statement urged Amazon to “provide reassurance” about its climate policies to employees like Ms. Costa, as “the Company’s apparent inaction on issues of climate change can present human capital risks, which have the potential to lead to the Company having problems attracting and retaining talented employees.” And in its similar report, ISS highlighted research reporting that 64 percent of millennials would be reluctant to work for a company “whose corporate social responsibility record does not align with their values.”

Amazon’s top leadership and shareholders ultimately voted down the measure, but the work of the Climate Justice Employees group continues unabated. And if you read the interview below, you might well join me in believing we’ll see many similar groups crop up at peer companies in the coming years, on a variety of issues. All of those groups will require many leaders — perhaps including you. After all, as Costa said, “leadership comes from everywhere.”

Maren Costa: (Apologizes for coughing as interview was about to start)

Greg Epstein: … Well, you could say the Earth is choking too.

Costa: Segue.

Epstein: Exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time, Maren. You are something of an insider at your company.

Costa: Yeah, I took two years off, so I’ve actually worked here for 15 years but started 17 years ago. I actually came back to Amazon, which is surprising to me.

Epstein: You’ve really seen the company evolve.

Costa: Yes.

Epstein: And, in fact, you’ve helped it to evolve — I wouldn’t call myself a big Amazon customer, but based on your online portfolio, you’ve even worked on projects I personally have used. Though find it hard to believe anyone can find jeans that actually fit them on Amazon, I must say.

Costa: [My work is actually] on every page. You can’t use Amazon without using the global navigation, and that was my main project for years, in addition to a lot of the apparel and sort of the softer side of Amazon. Because when I started, it was very super male-dominated.

I mean, still is, but much more so. Jeff literally thought by putting a search box that you could type in Boolean queries was a great homepage, you know? He didn’t have any need for sort of pictures and colors.

Epstein: My previous interview [for this TechCrunch series on tech ethics] was with Jessica Powell, who used to be PR director of Google and has written a satirical novel about Google . One of the huge themes in her work is the culture at these companies that are heavily male-dominated and engineer-dominated, where maybe there are blind spots or things that the-

Costa: Totally.

Epstein: … kinds of people who’ve been good at founding these companies don’t tend to see. It sounds like that’s something you’ve been aware of and you’ve worked on over the years.

Costa: Absolutely, yes. It was actually a great opportunity, because it made my job pretty easy.

Google announced this morning it’s expanding its two-year-old digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, “Be Internet Awesome,” to now include media literacy — specifically, the ability to identify so-called “fake news” and other false content. The company is launching six new media literacy activities for the curriculum that will help teach kids things like how to avoid a phishing attack, what bots are, how to verify that information is credible, how to evaluate sources, how to identify disinformation online, spot fake URLs, and more.

The new media literacy classes — which frankly, some adults should read through as well — were developed in collaboration with Anne Collier, executive director of The Net Safety Collaborative, and Faith Rogow, Ph.D., co-author of The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy and a co-founder of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

“We need the right tools and resources to help kids make the most of technology, and while good digital safety and citizenship resources exist for families, more can be done for media literacy,” writes educator and teachmama.com founder Amy Mascott, in an announcement on Google’s blog today. “I’ve worked alongside dozens of educators who believe that media literacy is essential to safety and citizenship in the digital age, but agree that it’s a topic that can be tough to cover.”

The courses offer kids not only instruction, but also a combination of activities and discussion starters aimed at helping them develop critical thinking skills when it comes to pursuing online resources.

Its overall theme, the course material explains, is to help kids understand that the content they find online isn’t necessarily true or reliable  — and it could even involve malicious efforts to steal their information or identity.

The kids learn how phishing works, why it’s a threat, and how to avoid it. They then practice their anti-phishing skills by acting out and discussing reactions to suspicious online texts, posts, friend requests, pictures, and emails.

In the bots section, they learn about how A.I. works and compare and contrast talking to a bot versus talking to a human being.

In the following media literacy sections, kids learn what a credible source is, how to figure out what a source’s motives are, and learn that “just because a person is an expert on one thing doesn’t make them an expert on everything.”

In a related classroom activity, the kids pick a question related to something they’ve seen online or are learning in class and try to get the answers online, while figuring out if the sources are credible.

They also learn to fact check credible sources with other credible sources as a way to look for a variety of sources.

“If you can’t find a variety of credible sources that agree with the source you are checking, you shouldn’t believe that source,” the curriculum explains.

Kids are additionally taught how to spot fake information using clues like deceptive URLs as well as checking the sources for credibility. They’re told that some people don’t know how to do this, and share fake information online — which is how it spreads.

“There are a lot of people and groups who are so passionate about what they believe that they twist the truth to get us to agree with them. When the twisted information is disguised as a news story, that’s disinformation,” the curriculum says.

Kids are also informed that some of the fake news organizations are hard to spot because they use names that sound like they’re real.

And the course delves into various tricks some websites use — like using photos that don’t relate to the story, using clickbait words like “shocking” or “outrageous” which they know make people curious,” using bold, underline, exclamation points or ALL CAPS, to convince you to agree with them.

This section concludes with an online game, Reality River, that asks kids to use their best judgment in order to cross the river rapids. This takes place in Interland, the game developed as a companion to Google’s digital safety and citizenship curriculum.

The overall goal of the media literacy course is to encourage the kids to make checking all news and information a habit — not just those they think seem suspicious.

Google says the new curriculum is available online for both teachers and families alike to use, and are offered in English, Spanish and eight other languages.

Google is partnering with the YMCA and National PTA across multiple cities to host online safety workshops, as well.

 

 

 

A legal challenge to a data transfer mechanism that’s used by thousands of companies to authorize taking European citizens’ personal data to the US for processing has been delayed.

As we reported last month, the General Court of the EU had set a date of July 1 and 2 to hear the complaint brought by French digital rights group, La Quadrature du Net, against the European Commission’s renegotiated data transfer agreement, the EU-US Privacy Shield.

That hearing has now been canceled — as the court intends to await the decision on another separate but related hearing, on July 9.

La Quadrature du Net has argued for years that Privacy Shield is incompatible with EU law as a result of US government mass surveillance practices — filing its first complaint back in October 2016.

Nor is it alone in its concerns, with the European parliament, European data protection agencies, and privacy and data protection experts all raising questions about the legality of the arrangement which went into operation in August 2016.

But in a series of tweets posted to Twitter today the digital rights group says it has been informed by the court that the hearing has been cancelled — in favor of waiting for the upshot of July 9 hearing.

The latter pertains both to the EU-US Privacy Shield and another data transfer mechanism, called standard contractual clauses (SCCs).

Following an updated complaint against Facebook’s use of SCCs, filed with the Irish Data Protection Commission by lawyer and privacy campaigner Max Schrems back in 2016, the watchdog referred its concerns to the courts.

Irish judges went on to ask Europe’s top court to weigh in on a number of legal questions — including whether Privacy Shield ensures an adequate level of protection for EU citizens’ personal data, as EU law requires that it must. So European judges will be considering how US government mass surveillance programs of the digital sphere — as revealed back in 2013 by NSA whistleblower, Esward Snowden — impact European’s fundamental privacy rights.

At this point you’d be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja-vu because it was via an earlier legal challenge, also brought by Schrems, that led Europe’s top court to strike down the prior data arrangement, Safe Harbor, back in 2015.

Critics of Privacy Shield are hoping the successor arrangement’s days are similarly numbered.

“All that remains is to wait for the Court’s decision, which is not expected to arrive for several months,” writes La Quadrature du Net in a final tweet [translated from French using Microsoft technology]. “We wish a lot of courage and a lot #datalove @MaxSchrems for his business! Hearing on July 9th!”

Facebook tried and failed to block the Irish court’s referral of legal questions about Privacy Shield to the CJEU.

Following the July 9 hearing, a decision from the CJEU is possible later this year — perhaps as soon as October. Although a deliberation timeframe of up to six months is not unusual European judges have shown themselves willing to move remarkably quickly in issuing decisions if they believe EU citizens’ fundamental rights are being undermined.

Since getting up and running less than three years’ ago, Privacy Shield has also suffered from the Trump effect — with key elements of the arrangement, which had been agreed in writing between the European Commission and the Obama administration, being neglected by the incoming US president.

Late last year Europe’s executive body expressed its impatience by issuing the US with a deadline to fulfil outstanding Privacy Shield requirements — including nominating a permanent ombudsperson to handle EU citizens’ complaints.

In January the US duly nominated DocuSign chairman and former CEO, Keith Krach, to be the undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment — and also the Privacy Shield ombudsperson.

All of that will, however, be meaningless fiddling if Europe’s top court decides the mechanism is fundamentally incompatible with EU law on account of US national security priorities that allow the government to help itself to everyone’s data. So, er, watch this space.

If you asked the average person on the street what Robotic Process Automation is, most probably wouldn’t have a clue. Yet new data from Gartner finds the RPA market grew over 63% last year, making it the fastest growing enterprise software category. It is worth noting, however, that the overall market value of $846.2 million remains rather modest compared to other multi-billion dollar enterprise software categories.

RPA helps companies automate a set of highly manual processes.The beauty of RPA, and why companies like it so much, is that it enables customers to bring a level of automation to legacy processes without having to rip and replace the legacy systems.

As Gartner points out, this plays well in companies with large amounts of legacy infrastructure like banks, insurance companies, telcos and utilities.”The ability to integrate legacy systems is the key driver for RPA projects. By using this technology, organizations can quickly accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, while unlocking the value associated with past technology investments,” Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner said in a statement.

The biggest winner in this rapidly growing market is UIPath, the startup that raised $225 million on a fat $3 billion valuation last year. One reason it’s attracted so much attention is its incredible growth trajectory. Consider that UIPath brought in $15.7 million in revenue in 2017 and increased that by a whopping 629.5% to $114.8 million last year. That kind of growth tends to get you noticed. It was good for 13.6% marketshare and first place, all the way up from fifth place in 2017, according to Gartner.

Another startup nearly as hot as UIPath is Automation Anywhere, which grabbed $300M from SoftBank at a $2.6B valuation last year. The two companies have raised a gaudy $1.5 billion between them with UIPath bringing in an even $1 billion and Automation Anywhere getting $550 million, according to Crunchbase.

Automation Anywhere revenue grew from $74 million to $108.4 million, a growth clip of 46.5%, good for second place and 12.8 percent marketshare. Automation Anywhere was supplanted in first place by UIPath last year.

Blue Prism, which went public in 2016, issued $130 million in stock last year to raise some more funds, probably to help keep up with UIPath and Automation Anywhere. Whatever the reason, it more than doubled its revenue from $34.6 million to $71 million, a healthy growth rate of 105 percent, good for third place with 8.4 percent marketshare.

For now, everyone it seems is winning as the market grows in leaps and bounds. In fact, the growth numbers down the line are impressive with NTT-ATT growing 456% and Kofax growing 256% year over year as two prime examples, but even with those growth numbers, the marketshare begins to fragment into much smaller bites.

While the market is still very much in a development phase, which could account for this level of growth and jockeying for market position, at some point that fragmentation at the bottom of the market might lead to consolidation as companies try to buy additional marketshare.