Month: June 2019

French startup Ornikar is raising a $40 million Series B round (€35 million) from Idinvest and Bpifrance. The company competes with traditional driving schools in Europe with an online marketplace of students and teachers.

And Ornikar has been a massive success in France. Overall, 35 percent of driving school registrations in 2019 are handled by Ornikar.

There are many advantages in choosing Ornikar. For driver students, Ornikar is much more flexible than a traditional driving school. Driving schools in France are usually pretty small with only a handful of employees. It’s sometimes hard to book lessons, especially if you have a full-time work.

When you sign up to Ornikar, you can connect to your Ornikar account and book an hour or two from there. Ornikar works with a pool of 650 instructors so that you get to study at your own pace.

Ornikar is also cheaper than a traditional driving school. By automating the administration work as much as possible, the startup says that it is 35 percent cheaper than a traditional driving school. It currently costs €750 for 20 hours of lessons.

“We’ve been profitable in 2018 and very profitable in 2019 for the French market,” Ornikar co-founder and CEO Benjamin Gaignault told me.

Here are some numbers. Every month, 30,000 people sign up to Ornikar in France. The startup manages 70,000 hours of lessons per month on its marketplace.

Ornikar works with qualified instructors who got a license to work in a driving school. They get paid €15 per hour, which is theoretically more than in a normal driving school.

With today’s funding round, the startup wants to expand to more countries. Ornikar is already live in Germany and Spain, but the company wants to grow the product there. Eventually, the company will also expand to Italy and the U.K.

In addition to new countries, Ornikar wants to sell other car-related products. The company is partnering with third-party companies for car insurance products, and there will be more products down the road.

Ornikar had previously raised an $11.3 million Series A (€10 million) and a $1.3 million seed round (€1 million). Existing investors include Brighteye, Partech, Elaia, Xavier Niel, Jacques-Antoine Granjon and Marc Simoncini.

Did you miss the deadline to compete in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on Oct. 2-4? Cheer up buckaroo. You may be down, but you’re not out. You have one last chance for Startup Battlefield glory.

“Tell me more,” we hear you cry. Buy a demo table and exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF for a chance to win a Wild Card entry to Startup Battlefield. Out of all the startups exhibiting in the Alley, our team of TechCrunch editors will select two standouts as Wild Card teams. Those teams will compete head-to-head in Startup Battlefield for $100,000 equity-free cash, the Disrupt Cup and plenty of investor and media attention.

Yes, it’s a longshot, but sometimes longshots pay off. Just ask the folks at RecordGram. Not only did the company reap the many benefits of exhibiting in Startup Alley, but it also earned a Wild Card slot and won the Startup Battlefield championship.

Whether or not you earn a Wild Card or compete in Startup Battlefield, exhibiting in Startup Alley offers almost infinite opportunity. More than 10,000 attendees will be on hand, and they’ll be hungry to explore everything Startup Alley has to offer. It’s a networking paradise where you just might connect with future customers, investors, partners, advisors, employees and marketers. Plus, with 400 media outlets attending, plenty of journalists will be trolling for great stories.

Caleb John, founder and CEO of Cedar Robotics, met hundreds of people demonstrating his company’s tech in Startup Alley. He calls the experience “one of the coolest things we’ve ever done.”

Of course, you get all the other benefits associated with your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Three full days of programming across all four Disrupt stages including the Main stage where you’ll hear a lineup of amazing speakers. You also receive access to interactive workshops, the complete attendee list via Disrupt Mobile App, CrunchMatch, our attendee-networking platform, networking parties, the TechCrunch After Party and exclusive video content access once the conference ends.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on Oct. 2-4. Come exhibit in Startup Alley for your chance to win one of two Wild Card spots and your last opportunity to compete in Startup Battlefield. Go for it!

Not quite ready for prime time on the Disrupt Main stage? No worries. Why not apply for our TC Top Picks program? Our TC Top Picks receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and plenty of media and investor exposure.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

It’s NEWSLETTER TIME get pumped! I know I am – it’s my first Daily Crunch in over a year. That’s right, your friendly neighborhood Anthony Ha is otherwise occupied today so I’m back to deliver this baby to you, devoted readers. And there’s news: Plenty o’ News.

1. Reddit puts r/The_Donald in a corner

Reddit has long had an uncomfortable relationship with one of its communities, a subreddit called r/The_Donald which focuses on all things related to the current U.S. President (still seems like a totally crazy thing to say).

The so-called ‘front page of the Internet’ has finally had enough – or at least, the stage before truly ‘enough.’ It’s quarantined r/The_Donald, meaning that its content won’t ooze beyond the community into the rest of Reddit’s multi-community surfaces. So you have to choose to wallow in that filth, going in eyes wide open.

2. Apple makes a key chip talent hire

Apple loves using its own chips in its products, and keeps adding more chips all the time to handle things like on-device security and wireless connections with accessories. Now it’s brought on a leading ARM chip designer, which is obviously fuelling speculation that Apple could replace Intel with its own ARM-based processors to power next-generation Macs.

3. Live stream selling app expands to in-person sales

NTWRK is a weird hybrid of QVC and HQ Trivia, with people selling you stuff via live stream. The app is now expanding into physical events, which I guess will resemble flash sales mixed crossed with concerts?

4. Station F is launching a co-living space for startups

Station F is a gigantic co-working space in Paris that seemed like an unlikely proposition when it was first revealed. It got made and has been operating for years now, however. So maybe there’s a chance that its new ‘Flatmates’ co-living space, which can house up to 600 people in shared apartment arrangements, can do the same.

5. Amazon debuts counter pick-up at Rite Aid

Amazon is introducing a new counter pick-up service for packages at stores in the U.S, starting with 100 Rite Aid locations. Amazon has hollowed out the bodies of its retail hosts and is now parasitically using their corpses to propagate.

6. TripActions raises $250M and is now valued at $4B

That’s four unicorns stacked atop one another, if you’re counting. TripActions is an enterprise booking platform, which is big business, and if it’s at all an improvement over the various legacy ones I’ve used over the years, then it’s probably worth that high value assessment.

7. Volkswagen launches all-electric car sharing

A car sharing network made up of only electric vehicles?! Now there’s one from Volkswagen, called WeShare. It’s only live in Berlin as of today, and it probably isn’t destined for U.S. shores anytime soon, but it’s definitely a sign of the times.

Google Cloud today announced that Chronicle, the enterprise security company Google’s parent company Alphabet incubated under its X “moonshot factory,” is moving to Google Cloud and becoming part of Google’s security portfolio.

Chronicle officially launched out of X in January 2018, when it became an independent company under the Alphabet umbrella. Stephen Gillett, who was previously the COO of security company Symantec, became its CEO.

Spinning out Chronicle instead of bringing it to Google Cloud always seemed like an odd move. It was likely meant to see if its products, including malware and virus scanning service VirusTotal and its enterprise security intelligence and analytics platform, could stand on their own. It’s unclear how well Chronicle did in the market, but given Google’s focus on growing its cloud business, it seems like a logical move to now integrate Chronicle into Google Cloud.

“Chronicle’s products and engineering team complement what Google Cloud offers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian writes today, “Chronicle’s VirusTotal malware intelligence services will be a powerful addition to the pool of threat data informing Google Cloud offerings, and will continue to support applications running on our platforms.”

He also notes that the team saw that both Chronicle and Google Cloud were already on a trajectory that saw them converge on the same kind of solutions.

He expects to see a full integration of Chronicle’s security tools into Google Cloud by this fall.

SpaceX is looking to raise a bunch of new cash – $314.2 million at a per share price of $214, according to a new CNBC report. The raise would be the third total this year, which together added up to over $1 billion in new capital.

Both those filings were revealed in May, so it’s a lot of money to be generating not even halfway through 2019. But SpaceX is also spending a lot, and expanding beyond its existing rocket launch business with new projects that have high costs, including building an all-new reusable spacecraft called the “Starship” and launching a constellation of satellites called “Starlink” to serve high-speed internet to traditionally underserved customers globally.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is still making money on launches, and CEO Elon Musk estimated last year that it’s probably on track for around $3 billion in revenue for this year. That’s a good chunk of change, but Musk has a lot of pots in the fire, including presumably a plan to still make its way to Mars and set up permanent operations on the red planet, as detailed in a couple consecutive talks at the annual International Astronautical Congress.

We’ve reached out to SpaceX for comment and will update if they respond.

Many, many startups have tried to work their way into the U.S.’s $76 billion wedding market. But Zola is one of the few that’s truly carved a path in this massive industry.

That’s why we’re so thrilled to have Shan-Lyn Ma, CEO of Zola, join us at Disrupt SF in October.

After graduating with an MBA from Stanford, Ma climbed the ranks at Yahoo, going from a marketing intern to Senior Product Marketing manager in three years. She moved on to Gilt Groupe as a Senior Director of Product before creating and launching Gilt’s Food and Wine business, Gilt Taste.

She then spent a year as Chief Product Officer for chloe + isabel inc. before leaving to start a little wedding ecommerce website called Zola in 2013.

Today, Zola has raised more than $140 million from big name investors such as Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Canvas Ventures, and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. According to Pitchbook, Zola’s valuation was $650 million as of its latest funding round in 2018.

Part of Zola’s success comes from the fact that it started in a single vertical and continuously added features and products that consolidate the wedding planning process under one roof.

The company launched as a simple wedding registry platform, letting couples choose their future gifts and then letting guests log in and buy those gifts through the platform. Over time, however, Zola continued to build upon that momentum to create a one-stop shop for weddings.

Today, Zola users have access to all kinds of resources, including invitations, menus, programs, thank you notes, etc., as well as matching you with wedding planners and other wedding vendors. Oh, and of course there’s a shopping platform for wedding gowns, jewelry, etc.

In just over five years, it has become the de facto platform for couples to plan and execute their wedding. More than half a million couples have used Zola to manage their registry or guest list, and common problems in ecommerce, like holding inventory or dealing with returns, is significantly minimized due to Zola’s model.

In short, there is plenty to learn from Ma at TechCrunch Disrupt, and we can’t wait!

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available at an early bird rate here.

Google Maps just got a lot more useful for commuters. The company today announced a pair of updates for its mapping application — one that will offer live traffic delays for buses in the cities where it didn’t already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your bus, train, or subway car will be.

The latter is perhaps the more interesting of the two, as it represents a new prediction technique Google has been perfecting for over half a year. Starting in October, the company began to ask Google Maps users to rate their journey if they had traveled during peak commuting hours of 6 am to 10 am. Google asked about how many seats were available or if it was standing room only, in order to identify which lines had the highest number of crowdedness reports.

Over time, it was able to model this data into a new prediction capability designed to tell transit riders how packed their bus or train would be.

It also used this data to create rankings of the most crowded routes and stops around the world.

Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo dominated the rankings for the most-crowded transit lines, as each city had 3 lines in the top 10. Meanwhile, New York’s L train is the only one in the U.S. to rank in the top 10.

This isn’t the first time Google has used its massive Maps footprint to make predictions about crowds. The company had already introduced similar features for predicting the size of the crowd at restaurants and other retail locations.

In addition, Google today expanded its ability to alert bus riders to delays.

In December 2017, the company began offering real-time information provided by local transit agencies to transit riders. But this data wasn’t available in all cities. To address the problem, Google is launching live traffic delays in those markets where the information has been lacking — like Atlanta, GA.

To make its predictions, Google is combining the bus route details with the data it’s collecting from users who have consented to anonymized data sharing. This is the same data collection mechanism it uses to predict the crowds at local businesses today. Essentially, the company is turning Google Maps into a powerful tool to understand the movement of people in the world. But many users may not know they’ve been opted into this data-sharing by default. In fact, they probably will think the transit data is coming from the city — not from the app installed on their phone and millions of others.

In any event, users will now be able to see the bus delays, how long the delay will be, and adjusted travel times based on these live conditions.

Google says the new features are rolling out on Google Maps in nearly 200 cities worldwide on both Android and iOS today.

Soon, you might not need anything more specialized than a readily accessible touchscreen device and any existing data sets you have access to in order to build powerful prediction tools. A new experiment from MIT and Brown University researchers have added a capability to their ‘Northstar’ interactive data system that can “instantly generate machine-learning models” to use with their exiting data sets in order to generate useful predictions.

One example the researchers provide is that doctors could make use of the system to make predictions about the likelihood their patients have of contracting specific diseases based on their medial history. Or, they suggest, a business owner could use their historical sales data to develop more accurate forecasts, quickly and without a ton of manual analytics work.

Researchers are calling this feature the Northstar system’s “virtual data scientist,” (or VDS) and it sounds like it could actually replace the human equivalent, especially in settings where one would never actually be readily available or resourced anyway. Your average doctor’s office doesn’t have a dedicated data scientist headcount, for instance, and nor do most small- to medium-sized businesses for that matter. Independently owned and operated coffee shops and retailers definitely wouldn’t otherwise have access to this kind of insight.

This new tool is built on automated machine-learning techniques that are becoming much more ‘au courant,’ since it helps expand the number of people for whom AI technology is accessible.

Northstar itself is the product of more than four years of work, and presents a blank canvas that’s compatible across multiple platforms, and then users can upload their own data sets, which show up as boxes on the interface. They can then drag and drop those into the centre area of the canvas and then draw connecting lines to indicate to that they should be processed with an algorithm of their choosing in combination with one another.

So basically, they could theoretically grab a dataset detailing metabolic rates of patients, and another one detailing their age, and then derive from that how often a specific disease occurs across those two factors. Now, with the new virtual data scientist feature, they’ll be able to combine inputs to generate predictive, AI-based analysis across these combined factors as well.

Researchers have also designed this VDS system so that it’s actually the fastest application of automated machine learning to date. That’s another key piece for making it usable by everyone, since it’s not really feasible to imagine people working with this digital whitetable and then waiting ours for results to come out. Next up, it’s going to improve error reporting to help ensure that non-specialist users not only find it easy to use, but also get clear indicators when they do something wrong so they can fix it next time.

More than a dozen engineers, who lost their jobs after consumer robotics startup Anki shut down in April, have found a new home.

The 13 robotics experts, a group that includes Anki’s co-founder and former CEO Boris Sofman, are heading over to self-driving vehicle company Waymo, to lead engineering in the autonomous trucking division, according to a LinkedIn post. Sofman will report to CTO Dmitri Dolgov.

The group of engineers comprises nearly the entire technical team at Anki, many of whom have roots at Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics program, and includes its former behavior lead Brad Neuman and perception lead Andrew Stein. Anki’s head of hardware Nathan Monson and its former program manager Charlie Hite have also joined Waymo.

Axios was the first to report the move.

Anki built several popular products, starting with Anki Drive in 2013 and later the popular Cozmo robot. The Bay Area-startup had shipped more than 3.5 million devices with annual revenues approaching $100 million, Sofman wrote Thursday in a LinkedIn post.

Anki had raised more than $180 million, according to Crunchbase. The company was apparently prepared to take its robots business beyond entertainment, but it ran out of runway before it was able to activate that plan. “In the end we couldn’t overcome recent hurdles and the complexities of consumer hardware,” Sofman wrote.

Anki was a consumer robots company, which would seem like a bit of a leap over to Waymo. However, Sofman noted that it was autonomous driving that “first sparked” his attraction to the field and was the focus of his thesis at Carnegie Mellon.

“Throughout the last decade, I would look over at what was happening at Waymo and be inspired by the progress they were making, and the inevitable impact their technology would have on everyone’s lives in the years to come,” Sofman wrote.

The trucking team will work out of Waymo’s San Francisco office, a newer development within the company’s structure.

Much of the attention on Waymo has been on its robotaxi ambitions and its Waymo One ride-hailing service in the Phoenix area. However, the company has intentions to apply its full self-driving stack to other commercial applications, including trucks and deliveries.

“The nice thing about all those properties is that while the specialization layer are very different, the core technology, and the hardest problems that you’re trying to solve on research and engineering are exactly the same,” Dolgov said during an interview in March at MIT Tech Review’s EmTech Digital conference.

Over the past five years, Kubernetes has grown from a project inside of Google to an open source powerhouse with an ecosystem of products and services, attracting billions of dollars in venture investment. In fact, we’ve already seen some successful exits, including one from one of our panelists.

On September 5th at TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’re going to be discussing the rise of Kubernetes with two industry veterans. For starters we have Aparna Sinha, director of product management for Kubernetes and the newly announced Anthos product. Sinha was in charge of several early Kubernetes releases and has worked on the Kubernetes team at Google since 2016. Prior to joining Google, she had 15 years experience in enterprise software settings.

Craig McLuckie will also be joining the conversation. He’s one of the original developers of Kubernetes at Google. He went on to found his own Kubernetes startup, Heptio, with Joe Beda, another Google Kubernetes alum. They sold the company to VMware last year for $505 million after raising $33.5 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The two bring a vast reservoir of knowledge and will be discussing the history of Kubernetes, why Google decided to open source it and how it came to grow so quickly. Two other Kubernetes luminaries will be joining them. We’ll have more about them in another post soon.

Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine. Instead of developing large monolithic applications that sit on virtual machines, containers run a small part of the application. As the components get smaller, it requires an orchestration layer to deliver the containers when needed and make them go away when they are not longer required. Kubernetes acts as the orchestra leader.

As Kubernetes, containerization and the cloud-native ethos it encompasses has grown, it has helped drive the enterprise shift to the cloud in general. If you can write your code once, and use it in the cloud or on prem, it means you don’t have to manage applications using different tool sets and that has had broad appeal for enterprises making the shift to the cloud.

TC Sessions: Enterprise (September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center) will take on the big challenges and promise facing enterprise companies today. TechCrunch’s editors will bring to the stage founders and leaders from established and emerging companies to address rising questions, like the promised revolution from machine learning and AI, intelligent marketing automation and the inevitability of the cloud, as well as the outer reaches of technology, like quantum computing and blockchain.

Tickets are now available for purchase on our website at the early-bird rate of $395; student tickets are just $245.

Student tickets are just $245 – grab them here.

We have a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.

For each ticket purchased for TC Sessions: Enterprise, you will also be registered for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.