Year: 2019

Christopher Gavigan, sitting in a crisp white shirt inside a small TechCrunch conference room, radiates energy, even in a late-day interview just hours before he’s scheduled to fly home from San Francisco to L.A.

We’re meeting to talk about Prima, a new startup that Gavigan began developing seven months ago with two cofounders. One of them is a former beauty and marketing executive, Jessica Assaf, who was until recently running a company called Cannabis Feminist to sell marijuana wellness products at her L.A. home. The other is Laurel Angelica Myers, who’d spent six years working alongside Gavigan at his last startup, The Honest Company, the now eight-year-old brand that sells nontoxic personal care and household products at Target, Whole Foods, Nordstrom and many other places.

Gavigan is still Honest’s “chief purpose officer” and its most effective evangelist, one quickly gathers. But he’s gotten excited in recent months about a new opportunity that many others are beginning to chase, too: the market for products made with cannabinoids of CBD, a compound that can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants and which has taken off since industrial hemp cultivation was made legal in the United States last year.

Prima, based in Southern California, is creating a spate of products around hemp cannabinoids that Gavigan manages to make sound magical. He talks of taking the “best organically grown hemp out of Oregon” and using a “very gentle, slow extraction process” to get it into an oil and distillate form that it will then use to create consumer products, starting with “emerging beauty and pain management” for the skin and a “luxurious facial oil,” noting that a “lot of these cannabinoids do a great job with moisture retention and irritation and redness reduction.”

Prima also plans to introduce ingestible products, including a soft gel and mix-in powdered blends that can be used to pour into coffee or tea or water. One will be focused on immunity, another on sleep, another on energy.

None of these products is available for sale today, it’s worth noting. Prima isn’t even sure yet of its packaging, though it sounds like a thicker card stock will be involved.

Still, Gavigan paints a sufficiently compelling picture that the company – – which plans to sell directly to consumers via a content-rich site designed to educate while it persuades —  has already raised roughly $3.3 million in seed funding. Lerer Hippeau led the round, with participation from Greycroft and other (undisclosed) private and institutional investors.

It’s easy to understand why they are already buying in. Broadly speaking, Prima has a good story as a science-driven plant wellness company that’s championing the strong therapeutic potential of hemp CBD, even if the jury is still out on whether that potential is real or imagined. Given that there is no go-to brand quite yet, it’s timing actually looks impeccable on this front.

Prima is also registered as a public benefit corporation, which means in addition to its corporate goal of maximizing profit for shareholders, its charter commits the company to spending some of its profits or resources (or both) in support of a specific public benefit. In Prima’s case, that will be invested in cannabis-related research initiatives. Consumers might like this, too.

Yet Gavigan himself may be the company’s best weapon. Having spent much of his career selling natural and “green” products, he understands toxic and questionable ingredients. He also says he loves “very nascent, stigmatized markets” and is well aware of the standards that users expect of them, particularly when the end product is more costly. The Honest Company has fought numerous battles over the years, owing to its marketing, getting sued over its sunscreen (which it later reformulated), its baby formula (the company fought back and a court ruled in its favor), and its laundry detergent and dish soap (it settled a class action lawsuit that claimed it misled buyers about their ingredients) .

He also knows how to talk to consumers looking to make better choices on behalf of themselves.

The bigger challenge right now for Prima, along with other CBD brands, might simply be convincing regulators that their products are, at a minimum, safe to use. Right now, that’s no small feat.

In New York City, health departments are stopping restaurants from serving CBD-laced foods to their customers. The L.A. County Department of Health similarly said it would ding restaurants for using CBD in their food and drink offerings. As a new story in The Atlantic notes, while CBD can be derived from both cannabis and hemp plants, the FDA has said it will treat CBD the same no matter which plant it comes from, which is to say, it considers both illegal as additives in consumer food products.

Gavigan knows well of this uphill battle, though is he also convinced of the promise of CBD, spending 20 minutes with this reporter, outlining the research he has pored over and that suggests promise in numerous areas, including in treating epilepsy. (Last year, the FDA approved an oral CBD drug called Epidiolex for the treatment of seizures associated with two rare and severe forms of epilepsy.)

He points to researchers at Mount Sinai and UCLA and UC Irvine among other places who are currently studying cannabinoids for pain, inflammation, stress, anxiety, and insomnia.

Without standards, it could be difficult for any brand to move forward in a meaningful way. In fact, a California-based attorney with whom The Atlantic spoke, tells the outlet that the current lack of standardization is what’s making regulatory agencies so nervous about CBD. “If you go buy a CBD beverage and it’s not specially packaged—it just looks like another coffee or whatever—someone might take a sip who doesn’t intend to,” he says.

Still, creams and oils are still on the table while they figure it out. And with the CBD market expected to grow to $22 billion by 2022 — outpacing marijuana — it’s looking smart for Prima and other brands that are barreling forward, hoping theirs is the name that will stick.

Pictured above, left to right: Laurel Myers, Christopher Gavigan, and Jessica Assaf

Substack started out by providing individual writers and publishers with a set of tools enabling them to charge a subscription fee for their newsletters. Now it’s giving them the ability to do the same thing with podcasts.

In fact, Morgan Creek Digital Assets founder Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is already using the platform to introduce a daily podcast to complement his existing, crypto-focused Off the Chain newsletter.

“We’ve always thought the magic of what Substack is doing is the fact that we’re disintermediating the people creating stuff and the people who are consuming it — you are the brand they’re paying for,” Substack CEO Chris Best told me. “That whole model works incredibly well for newsletters, and to us, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be a great model for podcast content.”

Substack’s podcasting capabilities will allow publishers to either offer a podcast-specific subscription — or, like Pompliano, to include it as part of a broader package with their newsletter subscription. The podcast itself will be distributed through an audio player that can be embedded in both newsletters and on the web.

A web-based audio player might seem like a clunky way to listen to podcasts, but Substack’s player (which you can try out here) works pretty smoothly and includes features like the ability to jump backward and forward 30 seconds, and to play podcasts at various speeds.

Best added that he’s also open to the idea of creating a private, subscriber-only feed that can be accessed by podcast apps.

“We’re going to put it out there and see what people want,” he said. But he argued that the “existing feed-based podcast system” is “not living up to its potential” when it comes to enabling podcasters to make money from subscriptions.

We spoke shortly after Spotify announced that it was acquiring podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor, which Best said illustrates the importance of a tool like Substack, because it’s focused on “empowering individuals”: “We let people get paid directly by people, rather than aggregated into a wider system.”

I also brought up the patronage model for supporting content creators enabled by Patreon (which is currently how I support one of my favorite podcasts).

“We definitely think the world is big enough for both of those things,” Best replied. While he expressed admiration for the Patreon model, he argued, “There’s also room for another kind of thing, where you say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this professionally, it’s my job, I do a good job with it and you should pay for it.'”

And Best doesn’t intend to stop with newsletters and podcasts. There are plans to support other media formats, although the exact timing will depend on Substack’s customers.

“We are hyper-focused on serving the authors that we’re working with,” he said. “The timing tends to depend on when we find people that want to do it. Why we did the podcast thing now [comes from] Pomp wanting to do it now.”

The tech industry has been called on to share data with public sector researchers so the mental health and psychosocial impacts of their service on vulnerable users can be better understood, and also to contribute to funding the necessary independent research over the next ten years.

The UK’s chief medical officers have made the call in a document setting out advice and guidance for the government about children’s and young people’s screen use. They have also called for the industry to agree a code of conduct around the issue.

Concerns have been growing in the UK about the mental health impacts of digital technologies on minors and vulnerable young people.

Last year the government committed to legislate on social media and safety. It’s due to publish a white paper setting out the detail of its plans before the end of the winter, and there have been calls for platforms to be regulated as publishers by placing a legal duty of care on them to protect non-adult users from harm. Though it’s not yet clear whether the government intends to go that far.

“The technology industry must share data they hold in an anonymised form with recognised and registered public sector researchers for ethically agreed research, in order to improve our scientific evidence base and understanding,” the chief medical officers write now.

After reviewing the existing evidence the CMOs say they were unable to establish a clear link between screen-based activities and mental health problems.

“Scientific research is currently insufficiently conclusive to support UK CMO evidence-based guidelines on optimal amounts of screen use or online activities (such as social media use),” they note, hence calling for platforms to support further academic research into public health issues.

Last week the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee made a similar call for high quality anonymized data to be provided to further public interest research into the impacts of social media technologies.

We asked Facebook-owned Instagram whether it will agree to provide data to public sector mental health and wellbeing researchers earlier this week. But at the time of writing we’re still waiting for a response. We’ve also reached out to Facebook for a reaction to the CMOs’ recommendations.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson said:

We want the time young people spend online to be meaningful and, above all, safe. We welcome this valuable piece of work and agree wholeheartedly with the Chief Medical Officers on the need for industry to work closely together with government and wider society to ensure young people are given the right guidance to help them make the most of the internet while staying safe.

Instagram’s boss, Adam Mosseri, is meeting with the UK health secretary today to discuss concerns about underage users being exposed to disturbing content on the social media platform.

The meeting follows public outrage over the suicide of a schoolgirl whose family said she had been exposed to Instagram accounts that shared self-harm imagery, including some accounts they said actively encouraged suicide. Ahead of the meeting Instagram announced some policy tweaks — saying it would no longer recommend self-harm content to users, and would start to screen sensitive imagery, requiring users click to view it.

In the guidance document the CMOs write that they support the government’s move to legislate “to set clear expectations of the technology industry”. They also urge the technology industry to establish a voluntary code of conduct to address how they safeguard children and young people using their platforms, in consultation with civil society and independent experts.

Areas that the CMOs flag for possible inclusion in such a code include “clear terms of use that children can understand”, as well as active enforcement of their own T&Cs — and “effective age verification” (they suggest working with the government on that).

They also suggest platforms include commitments to “remove addictive capabilities” from the UX design of their services, criticism so-called “persuasive” design.

They also suggest platforms commit to ensure “appropriate age specific adverts only”.

The code should ensure that “no normalisation of harmful behaviour (such as bullying and selfharming) occurs”, they suggest, as well as incorporate ongoing work on safety issues such as bullying and grooming, in their view.

In advice to parents and carers also included in the document, the CMOs encourage the setting of usage boundaries around devices — saying children should not be allowed to take devices into their bedrooms at bedtime to prevent disruption to sleep.

Parents also encourage screen-free meal time to allow families to “enjoy face-to-face conversation”.

The CMOs also suggest parents and guardians talk to children about device use to encourage sensible social sharing — also pointing out adults should never assume children are happy for their photo to be shared. “When in doubt, don’t upload,” they add.

By now, most of us should be familiar with the concept of the tailored news feed. Right now my Facebook feed (yes, I’m still there, alas) has been messed up because I’ve clicked on too many posts about Brexit, but I digress. My point is that content has long since fallen to the tyranny of tailoring and personalization, and content marketing (that stuff that marketers like pass-off as editorial) is a big business. Making that content so enthralling as to be practically addictive is the aim of this industry, but right now all those poor copywriters have to do a lot of manual heavy lifting, such is their burden.
This is the problem DataSine is trying to address by tailoring content to the reader’s personality. It does this by applying machine learning to behavioral data they hold about that person, whether it be customer profiles or whatever.
The idea is that marketers then make more informed decisions about what content they push out, and thus more time being creative, rather than spending time on writing, tweaking and A/B testing.
DataSine has now raised $5.2 million in a Series A round led by UK-based VC Pentech Ventures and Propel Venture Partners. Other investors include C.Entrepreneurs/Cathay Innovation, Twin Ventures and Sistema_VC. Customers include BNP Paribas and the Tinkoff bank. DataSine claims it has helped achieve uplifts of up to 80% in engagement and 71% in sales.
DataSine’s content personalization platform is called Pomegranate. The company says it provides an AI-powered content editing platform to guide marketers in tailoring a range of content elements, including words and images. The idea is that it will personalize everything from emails and landing pages to call center scripts Pomegranate will launch in March, and it integrates with CRMs like HubSpot and email platforms like MailChimp .
Founder and CEO Igor Volzhanin says he launched DataSine after moving to London to do a PhD in Psychology because he believed “that personality can help companies understand their customers as a whole… and move beyond the traditional focus of click optimization.”
According to Boston Consulting Group, personalization is worth an extra $800 billion in business to the 15% of companies that manage to get it right.
Marc Moens, a partner at Pentech, commented that “DataSine is particularly well-positioned to bring psychology and AI to address contemporary marketing challenges. The idea that digital communications can be tailored for an individual in the age of Big Data is very appealing and addresses the needs of the market.”
The company’s competitors include Meniga, The Signal Open Data Platform, Adapti, Textio, Crobox VisualDNA and Hello Soda). But Volzhanin says their approach differs from most of these in using a single customer profile, collaborative AI and a psychological approach. “We bring together AI and psychology to provide our recommendations. We do a lot of proprietary, cutting edge research to understand what kind of content different people like and use AI to power Pomegranate to provide these recommendations to marketers,” he told me.

It isn’t super common to find two entrepreneurs in one marriage, especially two entrepreneurs that want to work together. But married couple Rob and Monica Royer are making it happen with a new collaboration between Interior Define and Monica + Andy.

Interior Define, founded by Rob Royer, looks to offer super customizable, high-quality furniture at an affordable price point. Users can pick the style of their furniture, the materials used, and even specify dimensions to ensure that their stuff fits perfectly in their space.

Monica + Andy, on the other hand, was founded by Monica Royer and Brian Bloom, launched in 2014 to provide high-quality baby and children’s apparel, all of which is made with Global Organic Textile Standard certified cotton. Both Interior Define and Monica + Andy are digitally native brands, but both have various physical guide shops across the country.

One of Monica + Andy’s claims to fame is the brand’s limited edition prints. With that in mind, Monica and Rob Royer hatched a plan to collaborate on child-sized furniture using fun Monica + Andy prints. The children’s furniture is real furniture, shrunken down, according to Rob Royer. However, the slip covers are 100 percent washable to ensure that kids can still play happily without completely destroying the furniture in the play room.

“To be brutally honest, working together as married, founding CEOs is probably a really bad idea and I do not recommend trying this yourself,” said Monica Royer with a laugh. “But we stumbled into it with this idea, and we’re incredibly passionate about the brands we’ve created. And we have a unique understanding of each other, both as partners, but also as fellow founding CEOs.”

Rob and Monica said that part of the reason the collaboration made sense is because of the faith they have in their teams to execute.

“We both have fantastic teams,” said Rob Royer. “Teams are the ones that do all of the great work. We came to the table with an idea and our teams were the ones who really executed on the vision.”

The children’s furniture, which includes chairs, loveseats, couches and even sectionals, will be sold through the Interior Define website, but Monica + Andy will be selling extra throw pillows through the M+A website.

“We cut our teeth on children’s apparel,” said Monica Royer. “To expand into additional product categories is a unique opportunity for us in general, but it’s made better by working with a brand that aligns from a customer experience, aesthetic, and team perspective.”

Aurora, the buzzy startup founded by early pioneers of self-driving car technology who led programs at Google, Tesla, and Uber, has raised more than $530 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia and includes “significant investment” from Amazon and T. Rowe Price Associates.

The monster round pushes Aurora’s valuation near $2.5 billion. Aurora announced a $90 million Series A round last February from Greylock Partners  and Index Ventures, bringing its total raised to date to more than $620 million.

Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach is joining Aurora’s board, which already includes external directors Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capital investor Reid Hoffman, and Ian Smith.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, Geodesic, Shell Ventures and Reinvent Capital are also participating in the round, as well as previous investors Greylock and Index Ventures.

The size of the raise — and the company’s new valuation — are certainly notable. But it’s the collection of new investors that provide the best view into Aurora’s ambitions.

The company has already ramped up in its considerably short life. Since Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson founded the company in early 2017, they have set up offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco and Pittsburgh and announced partnerships with Volkswagen Group, Hyundai and Chinese electric vehicle startup Byton. The company has also made some key hires, including SpaceX’s former head of software engineering, Jinnah Hosein, who is leading a software engineering team.

Sequoia’s “stamp of approval,” (as Urmson calls it) at such an early stage is significant. The inclusion of Amazon and T. Rowe Price are the two investors that show a long-term strategy has been put into play.

Aurora will likely need more capital as it develops a “full-stack solution” for self-driving vehicles. So, it’s choice of investors are critical.

“We’re trying to be strategic about it and have people around the table who share the vision of where we want to go as a company and who understand how hard the problem is — this is not a short-term play —and knowing that ultimately we will need more capital.” Urmson told TechCrunch.

T. Rowe Price, which Urmson notes is savvy about macro trends, can provide the kind of long-term thinking Aurora will need if it hopes to survive in this ever-changing, and still nascent autonomous vehicle industry.

Amazon, meanwhile, has the kind of logistical prowess and sheer amount of capital that could prove to be particularly beneficial to Aurora.

Aurora engineers are focusing on Level 4 autonomy, a designation by SAE International that means the car takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. Level 4 autonomy can be applied in different ways. And while, most might assume it translates into moving people around in robotaxis, autonomy can also be applied to the movement of goods. Enter Amazon.

“We are always looking to invest in innovative, customer-obsessed companies, and Aurora is just that,” Amazon said in an emailed statement. “Autonomous technology has the potential to help make the jobs of our employees and partners safer and more productive, whether it’s in a fulfillment center or on the road, and we’re excited about the possibilities.”

Enterprises now amass huge amounts of data, both from their own tools and applications, as well as from the SaaS applications they use. For a long time, that data was basically exhaust. Maybe it was stored for a while to fulfill some legal requirements, but then it was discarded. Now, data is what drives machine learning models, and the more data you have, the better. It’s maybe no surprise, then, that the big cloud vendors started investing in data warehouses and lakes early on. But that’s just a first step. After that, you also need the analytics tools to make all of this data useful.

Today, it’s Microsoft turn to shine the spotlight on its data analytics services. The actual news here is pretty straightforward. Two of these are services that are moving into general availability: the second generation of Azure Data Lake Storage for big data analytics workloads and Azure Data Explorer, a managed service that makes easier ad-hoc analysis of massive data volumes. Microsoft is also previewing a new feature in Azure Data Factory, its graphical no-code service for building data transformation. Data Factory now features the ability to map data flows.

Those individual news pieces are interesting if you are a user or are considering Azure for your big data workloads, but what’s maybe more important here is that Microsoft is trying to offer a comprehensive set of tools for managing and storing this data — and then using it for building analytics and AI services.

(Photo credit:Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

“AI is a top priority for every company around the globe,” Julia White, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure, told me. “And as we are working with our customers on AI, it becomes clear that their analytics often aren’t good enough for building an AI platform.” These companies are generating plenty of data, which then has to be pulled into analytics systems. She stressed that she couldn’t remember a customer conversation in recent months that didn’t focus on AI. “There is urgency to get to the AI dream,” White said, but the growth and variety of data presents a major challenge for many enterprises. “They thought this was a technology that was separate from their core systems. Now it’s expected for both customer-facing and line-of-business applications.”

Data Lake Storage helps with managing this variety of data since it can handle both structured and unstructured data (and is optimized for the Spark and Hadoop analytics engines). The service can ingest any kind of data — yet Microsoft still promises that it will be very fast. “The world of analytics tended to be defined by having to decide upfront and then building rigid structures around it to get the performance you wanted,” explained White. Data Lake Storage, on the other hand, wants to offer the best of both worlds.

Likewise, White argued that while many enterprises used to keep these services on their on-premises servers, many of them are still appliance-based. But she believes the cloud has now reached the point where the price/performance calculations are in its favor. It took a while to get to this point, though, and to convince enterprises. White noted that for the longest time, enterprises that looked at their analytics projects thought $300 million projects took forever, tied up lots of people and were frankly a bit scary. “But also, what we had to offer in the cloud hasn’t been amazing until some of the recent work,” she said. “We’ve been on a journey — as well as the other cloud vendors — and the price performance is now compelling.” And it sure helps that if enterprises want to meet their AI goals, they’ll now have to tackle these workloads, too.

Last year, Match Group acquired a 51 percent stake in the relationship-focused dating app Hinge, in order to diversify its portfolio of dating apps led by Tinder. The company has now confirmed that it fully bought out Hinge in the past quarter, and today owns 100 percent of the app which has been gaining momentum both inside and outside of the U.S. following last year’s deal.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Match believes Hinge can offer an alternative to those who aren’t interested in using casual apps, like Tinder. As the company noted on its earnings call with investors this morning, half of all singles in the U.S. and Europe have never tried dating products. And of the 600 million internet-connected singles in the world, 400 million have never used dating apps.

That leaves room for an app like Hinge to grow, as it can attract a different type of user than Tinder and other Match-owned apps – like OKCupid or Plenty of Fish, for example – are able to reach.

As Match explained in November, it plans to double-down on marketing that focuses on Tinder’s more casual nature and use by young singles, while positioning Hinge as the alternative for those looking for serious relationships. The company said it would also increase its investment in Hinge going forward, in order to grow its user base.

Those moves appear to be working. According to Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg, Hinge downloads grew 4 times on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter of 2018, and grew by 10 times in the U.K. The app is particularly popular in New York and London, which are now its top two markets, the exec noted.

Match may also see Hinge as a means of better competing with dating app rival Bumble, which it has been unable to acquire and continues to battle in court over various disputes.

Bumble’s brand is focused on female empowerment with its “women go first” product feature, and takes a more heavy-handed approach to banning, ranging from its prohibition on photos with weapons to its stance on kicking out users who are disrespectful to others.

Match, in its earnings announcement, made a point of comparing Hinge to other dating apps, including Bumble.

“Hinge downloads are now two-and-a-half times more than the next largest app, and 40 percent of Bumble downloads,” said Ginsberg, referring to a chart (below) which positions Hinge next to competitors like Happn, The League, Coffee Meets Bagel and Bumble.

“We expect Hinge to continue to strengthen its position in this relationship-minded market,” she added. “We believe that Hinge can be a meaningful revenue contributor to match group beyond 2019, and we have confidence that can carve out a solid position in the dating app landscape amongst relationship-minded millennials, and serve as a complimentary role in our portfolio next to Tinder,” Ginsberg said. 

Match has big plans for Hinge in 2019, saying that it will expand Hinge to international markets, double the size of its team, and build new products featured focused on helping people get off the app and go on dates.

Hinge today claims to be the fastest-growing dating app in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, and is setting up a date every four seconds. 3 out of 4 first dates on Hinge also lead to second dates, it says.

Hinge is now one of several dating apps own by Match Group, which is best known for Tinder and its namesake, Match.com. But the company has been diversifying as of late, not only with Hinge, but also its newest addition, Ship, which was developed in partnership with media brand Betches. But Ship could be a miss if it doesn’t even out its demographics – currently, the subscriber base is 80 percent female, Match says.

Tinder, meanwhile, still drives Match Group’s revenue, which rose to $457 million from $379 million a year ago, and exceeded analysts’ expectations for $448 million, per MarketWatch. In the quarter, Tinder added 233,000 net new subscribers, bringing its total subscriber count to 4.3 million. Combined with Match’s other apps, overall subscribers totalled 8.2 million.

Optimus Ride, an MIT spinoff, is gearing up to deploy its self-driving vehicles within a mixed-use development located in Reston, Virginia. Thanks to a partnership with Brookfield Properties, Optimus Ride will deploy an autonomous vehicle service throughout Halley Rise, a development that features housing, retail, offices and public spaces in June.

“We are pleased to announce our partnership with Brookfield, the world’s leading real estate developer,” Optimus Ride CEO Dr. Ryan Chin said in a press release. “We will deploy our self-driving system at Brookfield’s Halley Rise location this summer to provide users with autonomous mobility access between office buildings as we continue to scale our business. In the future, we will advance our partnership by deploying our self-driving systems at additional Brookfield sites around the world.”

During phase one of the deployment, just three Optimus Ride autonomous vehicles will in service to transport people within the development. In the greater D.C. area alone, Brookfield owns 40 properties.

Given that Brookfield has properties throughout the world, Optimus Ride plans to deploy its autonomous services in additional Brookfield developments. Optimus Ride has previously deployed autonomous driving services near Boston, in an urban development called Union Point.

When Amazon unveiled a six-wheeled urban delivery robot called Scout a couple of weeks ago, its website was pretty definitive about who was behind it.

“These devices were created by Amazon,” the page reads. “We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle.”

But that is only part of the story, TechCrunch has discovered. Some of the intellectual property and technology behind Scout likely came from farther afield – a small San Francisco startup called Dispatch that Amazon stealthily acquired in 2017.

Although the Dispatch.AI website is still active, and press reports have even called its robot a rival to Scout, the talent behind Dispatch has actually been working for Amazon for well over a year.

Back in 2014, Estonian start-up Starship Technologies revealed a prototype urban delivery robot.  It caught the attention of three young engineers who were working together at a New York real estate visualization company. Stav Braun was a computer vision expert, Uriah Baalke an alumnus of legendary robotics lab Willow Garage, and Sonia Jin a computer scientist from MIT.

The trio realized that they had all the necessary skills to build a U.S. rival to Starship. In the spring of 2015, they incorporated Dispatch Inc., in the Californian seaside town of Marina.

Within six months, they had moved the company to South San Francisco and, with the help of mechatronics engineer Buddy Gardineer, built an electric semi-autonomous robot called Carry that could transport up to 100 pounds. Dispatch launched pilot programs on two college campuses in California — ideal environments to perfect their robot without having to navigate public rules and regulations.

Steven Weiner, president of Menlo College, told TechCrunch its pilot was “both utilitarian as well as engaging. The devices had something of a following on our campus — literally and otherwise.”

With successful tests behind it, the company secured a $2 million seed round in early 2016 from VCs at Andreessen Horowitz and Precursor Ventures. Dispatch grew to around 10 employees, and late that year, filed its first patent application. The company appeared to be on the verge of becoming a major player in robotic delivery.

Then in 2017 everything suddenly went quiet. Baalke made his last tweet in June, and the official Dispatch Twitter account fell silent at the start of August 2017. The Menlo College pilot finished, and the university has not had contact with Dispatch since.

The Dispatch website is still live, however, and none of the founders have updated their LinkedIn profiles.

Public records suggest that Amazon acquired the company around the same time. Dispatch’s sole patent was transferred to Amazon Technologies, Amazon’s R&D subsidiary, on November 22, 2017. Six days later, Braun surrendered Dispatch’s business registration in California. Amazon confirmed to TechCrunch that it did buy Dispatch, although it would not provide further details.

Dispatch’s founders and employees have kept a very low profile since then, although the available evidence points to them having moved with the company.

Braun registered to vote in Seattle last fall. Xiaodong Lan, a robotics engineer whose LinkedIn profile says he is still at Dispatch, is mentioned in the resume of his PhD mentor as now working as a research engineer at Amazon.

Amazon’s robot has superficial physical differences from Dispatch’s. Scout has six wheels to Carry’s four, and opens at the top instead of the side. But the vision, obstacle avoidance and navigation algorithms it requires for urban and suburban deployments will need to solve the very same problems such as uneven paving, curbs, street furniture, pedestrians and animals.

Amazon likely had many more people than just the Dispatch team working on Scout. The LinkedIn profile of one of Amazon’s scientists says the company has been working on relevant robotic perception, planning and localization (mapping) technologies since 2015. But two other profiles suggest that the Scout project only became a serious business, including buy-in from Jeff Bezos, around the time that Dispatch was acquired in 2017.

Amazon never announced the acquisition of Dispatch. The company’s big news that year was buying Whole Foods for $13.2 billion.

In its latest 10-K filing with the SEC, Amazon noted, “During 2017, we also acquired certain other companies for an aggregate purchase price of $204 million. The primary reason for our other 2017 acquisitions was to acquire technologies and know-how to enable Amazon to serve customers more effectively.” Among these were home automation, e-commerce and AI businesses.

Amazon continued its buying spree in 2018, spending nearly $2.2 billion on smart security camera firm Ring, online pharmacy PillPack, and $57 million on “certain other companies.” Whether these turn out to be robotics or transportation startups like Dispatch is something we might only learn when someone notices their founders have suddenly gone quiet, too.