Month: June 2019

Just a few months ago, Innoviz became one of the better capitalized lidar startups when it announced it had raised $132 million in a Series C funding round. But that wouldn’t be the end of it.

The company kept the funding doors propped open and ultimately captured another $38 million from investors. The round has closed at $170 million, Innoviz said Monday.

Initial investors in the Series C round included China Merchants Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, New Alliance Capital, Israeli institutional investors Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services and Phoenix Insurance Company. The newest investors, and those responsible for the fresh injection of $38 million, were not named.

The close of the Series C round brings Innoviz’s total funding to $252 million.

The lidar industry is brimming with startups — about 70 according to industry experts — that see an opportunity to sell their tech to companies developing autonomous vehicles. Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles.

Innoviz is aiming for this very space with its solid-state lidar sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles. The company contends that solid-state lidar technology is more reliable over time because of the lack of moving parts.

Innoviz says that its perception software is what helps it stand out in a sea of lidar startups. The perception software identifies, classifies, segments and tracks objects to give autonomous vehicles a better understanding of the 3D driving scene.

The company plans to use the funding, in part, to further develop the perception software piece. That includes bringing on two computer vision experts Dr. Raja Giryes and Or Shimshi as “strategic collaborators.”

The funding will also be used to help Innoviz scale up and eventually mass produce its products. Its automotive-grade lidar product called InnovizOne is entering series production in 2021 for global automakers. The company has an existing solid-state lidar (InnovizPro) that is available now.

Innoviz’s strategy has been to partner with a number of OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers such as Magna, HARMAN, HiRain Technologies and Aptiv and to package perception software with its lidar sensors and offer it as a complete unit for companies developing autonomous vehicle technology.

Innoviz has locked in several key customers, notably BMW. The automaker picked Innoviz’s tech for series production of autonomous vehicles starting in 2021.

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1. Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal

This is a huge deal for Salesforce as the company continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics.

Salesforce reportedly worked hard to buy LinkedIn (which Microsoft ultimately picked up instead). And while there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal should help the company extend its engagement with existing customers.

2. Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff

Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations.

3. Google Assistant comes to Waze navigation app

Google Assistant in Waze will provide access to your usual Assistant features, like playback of music and podcasts, but it’ll also offer access to many Waze-specific abilities, including letting you ask it to report traffic conditions, or specifying that you want to avoid tolls when routing to your destination.

4. Microsoft acquires Psychonauts-maker Double Fine Productions

In addition to making Psychonauts, Double Fine notably raised around $3 million in a Kickstarter campaign to create the adventure game it eventually titled Broken Age. As is the case with past Microsoft studio acquisitions, it sounds like Double Fine will continue to operate externally, underneath the Xbox Game Studios umbrella.

5. Former Unity Technology VP files lawsuit alleging CEO sexually harassed her

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Unity spokesperson said the allegations are not true and that it intends to “vigorously defend against the false allegations.”

6. Economic development organizations: good or bad for entrepreneurial activity?

In developing VC markets such as the Midwest, some may think that funding from the government or economic development organizations are a godsend — but entrepreneurs need to ensure that this money isn’t a double-edged sword. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The Equity team has some thoughts on SoftBank’s Vision Fund, and what its difficulties raising more money mean for the late-stage investment landscape. Meanwhile, Original Content reviews Netflix’s “Always Be My Maybe,” and we also have a bonus interview with the director of “I Am Mother.”

May has come and gone, and we’re nearly halfway done with June. All we seem to really know about the Galaxy Fold, on the other hand is that it’s still coming…at some point. In a comment earlier today, Samsung promised a launch date for the delayed foldable “in the coming weeks.” It’s a familiar refrain at this point, of course.

Initially planned for an April 26 launch, the hardware giant hit pause on the device after multiple problems were reported among a small batch of review units. Samsung initially placed the blame for display problems on reviews, but ultimately announced it was going back to the drawing board.

A month and half after the promised launched, we’ll still no closer to knowing the new date. It’s not a great look for Samsung, but it’s a hell of a lot better than subjecting the product to a pair of recalls a la the Galaxy Note. It’s a new category based around a new technology, so one ultimately can’t blame Samsung for being cautious here. Of course, the case could certainly be made that these sort of precautions would have been better to take prior to putting these out in the wild, but here we are.

Reviewers aren’t supposed to serve as beta testers, but the company is probably better off getting these issues out of the way before wider release.

Holberton School, which sees itself as a college alternative for budding software engineers, today announced that it has opened a campus in Medellin, Colombia. With this, it now operates to schools in the country after opening its Bogota campus earlier this year.

The idea behind Holberton School, which doesn’t charge any upfront tuition and uses a blind, automated admissions process, is to provide project-based software engineering training that will allow students to get industry jobs. Unsurprisingly, the school’s origins are in Silicon Valley, where it has been operating for a few years now. In addition to Silicon Valley and Colombia, it also recently opened a campus in Connecticut. Its students from these programs have landed jobs at a number of high-profile companies, ranging from Apple to Google, Amazon and Tesla.

Holberton’s Bogota campus

For its Bogota campus, Holberton partnered with delivery service Rappi, Colombia’s first unicorn. To open the campus in Medellin, Holberton partnered with the Colombian government, as well as a number of local businesses and entrepreneur groups like Ruta N and Socialatom Ventures.

“Our administration is on a deliberate path of a digital transformation of the economy, from manufacturing to ‘mindfacturing’ through the production and export of intellectual property,” said Colombian president Ivan Duque in a prepared statment. “We are keenly aware that there is a deficit in software engineers and programmers, in Colombia and globally. Our priority is to reform education towards a digital economy, at all stages of education […] supporting efforts of the software industry training software engineers around their needs with disruptive initiatives.”

Depending on how much you’ve followed the transformation of Medellin in recent years, opening a coding school there may still seem like an odd choice. these days, however, Medellin is a bit of a hub for digital innovation.

“Colombia’s digital growth is so impressive that they cannot currently train the required pool of software engineering talent fast enough,” said Holberton co-founder Sylvain Kalache. “These new schools will enable Colombia to take a quantum leap into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and give so many of its citizens lasting skills and high-quality jobs.”

Just ahead of the 2016 presidential election, HBO announced its plans to carry a nightly news show courtesy of Vice News, called “Vice News Tonight.” That show is now being canceled, which puts an end to HBO’s seven-year-long relationship with the new media brand Vice Media, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter out on Monday.

HBO and Vice had expanded their relationship over the years, with a 2013 deal for a weekly news magazine, “Vice;” plus multiple documentary specials and, later, the launch of the nightly news program.

The goal with “Vice News Tonight” was to reach a younger audience who had grown “increasingly skeptical of daily broadcast news,” Vice had explained in its announcement at the time of launch.

The media company argued that the nightly news format hadn’t changed in roughly 60 years, but the way younger viewers consumed information has. They no longer watch nightly news out of obligation, but because the show has earned their time and attention, the company said.

The program grew to reach an audience of over 500,000 viewers per episode and won five Emmys, but still faced a ton of competition in the broader news market.

The show also meant to appeal to younger viewers who have cut ties with traditional pay TV. But today, these viewers have a number of ways to stream the news — including through live TV internet services like YouTube TV, Sling TV, or Hulu with Live TV, for example, as well as via the streaming platforms themselves, like within Roku’s The Roku Channel or dedicated apps for media players like Apple TV. They can also now get the news through other dedicated news streaming services, like CBSN, CBS All Access, NBC News Now, Cheddar, or even on social networks like Snapchat.

Today, news streamer NewsON announced it was coming to Amazon Fire TV, as another example.

In addition, THR points out that “Vice News Tonight” was more of a passion project of former HBO CEO Richard Plepler, who left earlier this year following AT&T’s acquisition of WarnerMedia.

Along with the cancellation of “Vice News Tonight,” Vice Media news chief Josh Tryrangiel will depart at the end of the month, a report from The Wrap notes. Meanwhile, former New York Post CEO and publisher Jesse Angelo will come on board as president of global news and entertainment.

“Jesse is a news pioneer and has built an incredible career by successfully expanding the world of publishing into wider forms of distribution through a multitude of platforms, including digital, social, audio and television,” Vice Media CEO Nancy Dubuc, in a statement. “With him joining our executive team, Vice’s strategic growth plan for news will begin and complement wider partnership opportunities already underway. We’ve had a great run with our friends at HBO and now we’re excited to launch our news products on new platforms, solidifying our place as one of the most trusted brands out there, drawing the youngest audience of anyone in hard news.”

The cancellation follows layoffs of 10% of Vice staff in February and the hiring of Katie Drummond, previously deputy editor at Medium, as SVP of Vice Digital in March.

Though “Vice News Tonight” may be over, it’s not the end of Vice’s streaming platform presence. The company is reportedly working on a new show for Hulu, a report a few months ago said. That deal hasn’t yet been announced. And Vice is shopping a daily news show to other networks and platforms, THR says.

“Vice News Tonight” will end in September when the contract is up.

A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in women’s sexual health for decades.

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is now a 40-year-old invention and even the top pharmaceutical companies have spent a pittance on research and development. Subjects like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and menopause have taken a backseat to other, more fatal concerns. Fertility is itself oftentimes a mysterious black box as well, though a full 10% of the female population in the United States has difficulty getting or staying pregnant.

That’s all starting to change as startups are now bringing in millions in venture capital to gather and treat women’s health. While it’s early days (no unicorns just yet) interest in the subject has been jumping steadily higher each year.

To shine a better light on the importance of tech’s role in spurring more innovation for women’s fertility, we asked five VCs passionate about the space for their investment strategies, including Sarah Cone (Social Impact Capital), Vanessa Larco (NEA), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund), Jess Lee (Sequoia) and Nancy Brown (Oak HC/FT).

Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital

Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital

We’re interested in companies that create large data sets in women’s health and fertility, enabling personalized medicine, clinical trial virtualization, better patient outcomes, and the application of modern AI/ML techniques to generate hypotheses that discover new targets and molecules.

Qubole, the data platform founded by Apache Hive creator and former head of Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team Ashish Thusoo, today announced the launch of Quantum, its first serverless offering.

Qubole may not necessarily be a household name, but its customers include the likes of Autodesk, Comcast, Lyft, Nextdoor and Zillow . For these users, Qubole has long offered a self-service platform that allowed their data scientists and engineers to build their AI, machine learning and analytics workflows on the public cloud of their choice. The platform sits on top of open-source technologies like Apache Spark, Presto and Kafka, for example.

Typically, enterprises have to provision a considerable amount of resources to give these platforms the resources they need. These resources often go unused and the infrastructure can quickly become complex.

Qubole already abstracts most of this away and offering what is essentially a serverless platform. With Quantum, however, it is going a step further by launching a high-performance serverless SQP engine that allows users to query petabytes of data with nothing else by ANSI-SQL, given them the choice between using a Presto cluster or a serverless SQL engine to run their queries, for example.

The data can be stored on AWS, Azure, Google cloud or Oracle Cloud and users won’t have to set up a second data lake or move their data to another platform to use the SQL engine. Quantum automatically scales up or down as needed, of course, and users can still work with the same metastore for their data, no matter whether they choose the clustered or serverless option. Indeed, Quantum is essentially just another SQL engine without Qubole’s overall suite of engines.

Typically, Qubole charges enterprises by compute minutes. When using Quantum, the company uses the same metric, but enterprises pay for the execution time of the query. “So instead of the Qubole compute units being associated with the number of minutes the cluster was up and running, it is associated with the Qubole compute units consumed by that particular query or that particular workload, which is even more fine-grained ” Thusoo explained. “This works really well when you have to do interactive workloads.”

Thusoo notes that Quantum is targeted at analysts who often need to perform interactive queries on data stored in object stores. Qubole integrates with services like Tableau and Looker (which Google is now in the process of acquiring). “They suddenly get access to very elastic compute capacity, but they are able to come through a very familiar user interface,” Thusoo noted.

Back in the 2010 timeframe, it was common to say that content was king, but after watching Google buy Looker for $2.6 billion last week and Salesforce nab Tableau for $15.7 billion this morning, it’s clear that data has ascended to the throne in a business context.

We have been hearing about Big Data for years, but we’ve probably reached a point in 2019 where the data onslaught is really having an impact on business. If you can find the key data nuggets in the big data pile, it can clearly be a competitive advantage, and companies like Google and Salesforce are pulling out their checkbooks to make sure they are in a position to help you out.

While Google, as a cloud infrastructure vendor, is trying to help companies on its platform and across the cloud understand and visualize all that data, Salesforce as a SaaS vendor might have a different reason — one that might surprise you — given that Salesforce was born in the cloud. But perhaps it recognizes something fundamental. If it truly wants to own the enterprise, it has to have a hybrid story, and with Mulesoft and Tableau, that’s precisely what it has — and why it was willing to spend around $23 billion to get it.

Making connections

Certainly, Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff has no trouble seeing the connections between his two big purchases over the last year. He sees the combination of Mulesoft connecting to the data sources and Tableau providing a way to visualize as a “beautiful thing.”

On July 10, just one short month from now, more than 1,000 of the best and brightest minds in mobility will converge in San Jose, Calif. for TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. This day-long conference is dedicated to exploring the current state of mobile technology and building the future of moving people and things from point A to point B.

But you have only four days left to save $100 on the price of admission. Our early-bird pricing comes to a full stop on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Keep that Benjamin in your pocket where it belongs — buy your ticket right now.

We’ve got a packed agenda of interviews, demos and workshops featuring the likes of Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, who leads product development and program management for Aurora, the autonomous vehicle company.

Taking a page right out of the Jetsons, Uber wants to launch flying taxis within a few years. We’ll hear from Mark Moore, Uber’s engineering director for Elevate, and one of the people determined to make that happen.

Nils Wollny, of Holoride, wants an interactive VR experience in the backseat of every car. His demo will show what an automotive VR future might look like.

A workshop with Arrive’s CEO, Yona Shtern takes a thought-provoking look at the future of seamless, urban mobility. He’ll discuss what the foundation of a connected city includes and outline the steps needed to get there.

There are plenty more presentations — a veritable embarrassment of mobility riches. Check out the event agenda for more information, because we still have a few surprises coming your way.

Let’s talk networking. TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 draws some of the industry’s most influential founders, investors, technologists and media. Talk about a targeted audience — these are the people you want to notice you and your genius early-stage startup. Buy a demo table and show them what you’ve got. Bring your team too, because your demo package includes three attendee tickets (only two demo tables are left for purchase).

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Don’t miss this chance to save an easy $100. The saving ends on Friday, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your ticket today, and we’ll see you in San Jose.

Amazon this morning announced the launch of Amazon Credit Builder, a new secured credit card offered in partnership with Synchrony Bank. As the name implies, the card is aimed at those who are looking to build their credit history — either to recover from bad credit or to establish new credit. Like other credit products Amazon has launched, the card’s big perk is cash back on Amazon.com purchases — in this case, 5% back on purchases if the cardholder is a Prime member.

The Credit Builder card also has no annual fee, offers special financing on purchases, and includes protection from unauthorized charges. As a secured card, Amazon Credit Builder requires that cardholders submit a refundable security deposit in order to get a line of credit from the bank. This funding isn’t available for purchases made with the card, but rather serves as a way to establish a credit limit.

The deposit can range from $100 to $1,000, says Amazon, and is submitted either by electronic transfer (ACH transfer on Amazon) or via mail.

To pay off purchases, the card is unique in that it allows customers to either choose to make 12 months of equal payments or 6/12/24-month 0% periods for select purchases.

Also a part of the product is the ability for cardholders to track their credit improvement over time as they use the card to make purchases on Amazon.com.

The cardholders receive access to their own personal TransUnion CreditView Dashboard, where they can view their VantageScore credit score for free, use a simulator to understand how different activities will impact that score, get fraud alerts, and access credit education to help them further improve their credit score.

Other financial education provided by Synchrony is also available.

Amazon says that Credit Builder customers may become eligible for an upgrade to the Amazon Store Card after as little as seven months after opening the Credit Builder account, at which time their initial security deposit would be refunded.

Typically, secured credit cards are offered to people looking to improve their credit — but it’s unusual for a retailer to provide their own secured card. For Amazon, however, offering credit to the under-banked or unbanked is another way of expanding its business to a broader market.

Like many online retailers today, Amazon believes that shopping online shouldn’t be a privilege only for the middle class and up. After all, e-commerce sites may often have better deals than brick-and-mortar stores, and the convenience of shopping online can help customers save both gas money and time — the latter a particular issue for those working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

To cater to the under-banked and low credit customers, Amazon already offers a low-cost version of Amazon Prime for those on government assistance programs in the U.S., including including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC) and, as of last year, Medicaid.

More recently, it and other retailers like Walmart began participation in a USDA trial focused on allowing SNAP recipients to shop for groceries online.

While Amazon’s new card may make sense for those on a path to building better credit, it may be better for those who are looking to upgrade to the Amazon Store Card in the future, rather than simply repair their poor credit history.

The card, consumers should note, carries a high APR of 28.24% — higher than the average median APR for retail cards (25.64%).

“This is a solid option for people who are new to credit or rebuilding their credit after prior missteps, but there are some risks to be aware of,” notes Ted Rossman, Industry Analyst for CreditCards.com.

“It’s always important to pay your credit card bills in full, and that’s especially true with this card. The interest rate is very high – 28.24% – and if you fail to pay a 0% promotional offer in full by the time the term expires, you’ll be charged retroactive interest on the average daily balance going back all the way to the original purchase date,” he says.

However, Rossman concludes that when the card is used properly, the card could be useful in improving credit while receiving the cash back perk.

Customers can visit the Amazon Credit Builder page to sign up for the card.