Year: 2019

Ike, the autonomous trucking startup founded by veterans of Apple, Google, and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program, has raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Redpoint Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Basis Set Ventures, and Neo also participated in the round. Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal has joined Ike’s board. 

Ike’s funding round will help the company expand beyond its 30-person team as it drives forward with its mission to build a commercial product at scale. It’s a mission — expand and deploy — that sounds a lot like other autonomous vehicle startups. But that’s where the parallels end.

Ike’s three founders — Jur van den Berg, Nancy Sun, and Alden Woodrow — aren’t pushing to have the first self-driving trucks on the road. It’s a declaration, and one the company outlined Tuesday in a blog post on Medium, that lies in contrast with a budding and cutthroat industry often described as being in a frantic race.

But then again, these founders were in the thick of those buzzy, heady days of 2016 and 2017, when startups were being snapped up by automakers and big tech companies and term sheets were raining down.

Van den Berg and Sun were both working at Apple’s special projects group when they left to join Otto, an autonomous trucking startup that was acquired by Uber in 2016. Woodrow, who was product lead of Google X’s Makani project, would also end up at Uber ATG by February 2017 as group product manager of its self-driving truck program.

By 2018, the last of Otto’s founders had left Uber and the self-driving trucks program was in free fall. Sun, Woodrow, and van den Berg had left Uber by spring 2018 to launch Ike. A few months later, Uber announced it would shutter its self-driving trucks unit to focus on autonomous cars.

In short, Ike’s founders have seen a thing or two, including missteps and exciting breakthroughs, splashy reveals and a heaping spoonful of hubris.

“The temptation when you’re working on this technology — because there’s so much potential and because there’s so much excitement for it — especially for small companies in the early stages is to try and hack something together and try to get up and running really quickly,” Alden Woodrow, co-founder and CEO of Ike told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

That’s not what Ike is doing, Sun noted. Instead, the company is taking a systems engineering approach and sprinkling in a little Silicon Valley agility, Sun said.

What this means is Ike engineers aren’t focused just on quickly building out integrating self-driving software and sensors to get on the road. Instead, the company says it’s laser-focused on a systems-based philosophy. Ike is working on determining the design and architecture first before laying the foundation — to use a comparison to building a home.

It’s focused on an entire system that accounts for everything in the self-driving truck from its wire harnesses, alternator and steering column to durable sensors designed for the highway, computer vision and deep learning that allows it to see and understand its environment and make the proper decisions based on that information. That systems approach also includes proper validation before testing on public roads.

This will likely mean Ike’s self-driving trucks will launch after others. But its founders believe that when they do hit the road at scale, it will be a validated and valuable product that won’t need constant tweaks or even a pivot.

There are trade offs between all of these functional areas, Sun noted. “That’s why we need to get it right from a systems perspective and not over-rely on any one view,” Sun said.

The heads down, systems approach is a reflection of broader changes within the industry, which has since sobered up. Many companies, even those “ahead” in the race to deploy autonomous vehicles have discovered the problem is harder than expected. The days of time-lapsed self-driving videos, demos and bold claims have largely been replaced with a quieter lets-get-to-work now approach.

Ike’s plan for trucks

Ike, which is named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the U.S. interstate system he helped create when he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, is trying to build a system that allows trucks to drive safely and reliably on the highway without a human driver.

However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for human drivers under Ike’s model. The company intends for its trucks to only drive autonomously on highways. From there, human truck drivers would move the loads between the highways.

Ike stands apart from other self-driving truck startup in other ways too, namely its decision to license autonomous delivery company Nuro’s vehicle software stack. The copy of Nuro’s autonomous vehicle stack was a “hard fork,” Woodrow explained, meaning Ike doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with the company. Nuro does have a minority stake in Ike.

Instead, Ike gained a copy of relevant items (and the IP rights to it) that Nuro built, including some hardware designs, the autonomous software stack and the core infrastructure, which includes data logging, maps and simulation.

“We’re making a lot of progress today on hardware, software, systems engineering without driving trucks on the road,” Woodrow said. “That’s partly because of the team we’ve assembled, but it’s also due to the licensing agreement with Nuro that has given us a set of really robust tools.”

Ike won’t be staying off the roads for long. The company is planning to begin testing its self-driving trucks (with human safety drivers behind the wheel) on public roads this year.

Still, Ike’s founders aren’t set, or even focused yet, on where it will first deploy commercially.

“Because our roadmap is measured in years, we’ve got some time to get that right,” Woodrow said.

Connected car service provider Vinli today announced it closed a $13.5 million Series B financing round. The company says this infusion of capital allows it broaden its mobility services and integrations as it attempts to connect cars around the world.

The funding came from new and existing investors and brings the total amount the company raised to over $20 million.

Based in Dallas, TX, Vinli launched in 2014 in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield as a direct consumer company that allowed owners to add cloud services to automobiles. It was a clever concept, and when it launched four years ago, it was ahead of the curve. Now, in 2019, the focus of the business is different as the company seeks to provide deep data intelligence to auto makers and transportation providers.

“The investment validates our place in the industry. In the last five years, we have seen the industry unfold and evolve into an industry driven by digital services,” said Mark Haidar, CEO of Vinli, in a press release released to TechCrunch. “Companies today need viable data solutions — not only to support the growing number of data sources but to deliver on the multiple service offerings to their end customers. We’re focused on making it easier for large fleets and automakers to access smarter data intelligence. It’s in helping those partners scale and be successful is what we look forward to most at Vinli.”

Now, with the latest round of investment, Vinli is looking to integrate its platform with electric vehicles and turned to an energy company, E.ON, to examine the market. Vinli says it will expand its offerings for electric mobility and fleets of electric vehicles.

Vinli’s approaching a largely untapped market. As vehicles become more connected, there are countless data points that can be examined and expanded. With Vinli’s deep background in vehicle intelligence, it’s well suited to continue to grow and provide rich data sets of vehicle information.

Plaid, developers of financial services APIs, has been helping developers connect an app to a major US bank account for several years, but today they expanded that API to include all US banks, including smaller banks that might not have as advanced technology.

The product in question is called Auth. Prior to today’s announcement, this ability to easily connect to a bank account quickly was only available to roughly 3800 banks. The others required a more manual process or couldn’t participate. With this expansion, 11,500 US banks and credit unions can now connect using the Auth tool, meaning just about every bank or credit union, regardless of the backend technology.

The problem says, William Hockey, CTO and co-founder at Plaid, is that there are a variety of authentication options, depending on how sophisticated the bank’s technology might be. That meant leaving out banks or meticulously trying to code for every possibility. Plaid wanted to automate that for developers.

“Everybody in the US can actually use this product now. And some of those [connections] are super quick and instant, and some of those maybe take a day to verify, but what we’re doing is we’re wrapping all of that in the product. And so you as a developer, you don’t have to worry about all of the different authentication methods at some of these banks,” Hockey explained.

This is of course the major value proposition of any tool of this ilk, whether Stripe or Twilio or any similar product. It strips the complexity for developers, and allows them to add sophisticated functionality to an application with a couple of lines of code.

From a consumer perspective, you would select your bank from the list and the Plaid Auth tool would find the fastest connection method automatically, based on the bank’s technology.

Plaid was founded in 2013 and has raised over $300 million. The most recent round was $250 million on a $2.65 billion valuation.

UK home health analysis kit startup Thriva is adding three more products to its range later this month: A saliva-based cortisol stress test and two female hormone kits.

The Seedcamp-backed UK startup has been offering blood-prick-based health monitoring kits since 2016, and says it’s had more than 50,000 customers sign up to stab their own finger with its spring-loaded plastic lancet and massage a drop of blood into a tube to post away for lab-based analysis.

The new saliva kit lowers the barrier to entry for DIY ‘quantified selfers’ by only requiring the recipient chew on a piece of material, and remember to do so four times the same day, before sending it away for analysis of their cortisol levels — with a result promised within 48 hours.

Thriva says the idea is to offer a snapshot of a person’s stress levels across the day to “help users to understand if their cortisol level is outside the normal range, and at what points of the day this is occurring”.

Though clearly the test isn’t going to offer a comprehensive monitoring of cortisol levels, and Thriva only suggests the test “could help” identify parts of the day which are “causing a lot of stress, or explain why someone is finding it hard to get up in the morning or get to sleep at night”.

The price for its Stress Test — £79 — does therefore seem steep. Though users get four pieces of fabric so they can perform the ‘snapshot of a day’ stress test a full four times (at ~£20 a pop).

Thriva confirmed to us that subscription pricing is not being offered for this kit.

The Stress Test kit will be available on February 18.

Female hormone testing kits

Thriva also has two female hormone tests in the pipe (also available from February 18).

One is targeted at women of child-bearing age who want to monitor their fertility levels; and another for women approaching the menopause who wish to check whether their hormones are within the menopausal range.

Both are blood-prick based tests. Each test also requires the user to answer seven questions — on topics such as fertility, physical symptoms and type of contraception used — to provide additional context for the lab that analyzes their blood.

“The questionnaire allows the doctors to tailor the interpretation of your blood results (hormone levels) to your particular symptoms/needs. It also ensures that any other relevant symptoms (e.g. irregular periods) are considered in line with the results so that recommendations of when to seek further treatment from a health professional are correct (e.g. for PCOS),” a Thriva spokeswoman told us.

The Female Hormones baseline kit tests a range of female hormones to see if levels are “in normal range”.

Tracked hormones include:

• FSH and Luteinising hormone, which it says are essential to ovulation;

• Oestradiol, the primary female sex hormone;

• Testosterone, the primary male sex hormone;

• SHBG, which affects the availability of other hormones;

• plus hormones produced by the thyroid, which controls the body’s growth and metabolism;

Similarly, the menopause kit tests hormones including FSH and Luteinising hormone (high levels of which can be menopausal symptoms) and Oestradiol (which it says is indicative at low levels).

It also checks for thyroid problems, with Thriva saying symptoms can mimic those of menopause. And testers’ Vitamin D levels are also checked — with the company saying deficiency is common among women of this age.

As with all the kits Thriva offers, results are reviewed by “a UK-qualified GP” within 48 hours, and users are given recommendations for additional care to seek, where necessary.

Thriva suggests the home testing kits offer women a way to learn more about their bodies. Though the same hormone tests could always be requested via a GP — and would be free, under the UK’s National Health Service.

Whereas these kits are (also) priced at £79 apiece, with no subscription offers for the female hormone tests either.

The startup suggests women can benefit from obtaining hormone test results beforehand in order to have “informed discussions with healthcare professionals to improve their health and and quality of life”.

But as with many such products that pledge personal physical insight via lab-based analysis, core to the proposition is to sell the notion that the buyer gets to choose — and therefore control — the process of testing themselves. Though that ‘choice’ clearly comes with a price attached.

Apple has agreed to pay back a large sum in backdated taxes. The company has confirmed the information to the AFP and Reuters. According to L’Express, Apple could have paid as much as €500 million ($572 million) — the AFP also confirmed that sum.

“The French tax administration recently concluded a multi-year audit on the company’s French accounts, and those details will be published in our public accounts,” the company told Reuters. French authorities can’t confirm the transaction due to tax secrecy.

This isn’t the first time French tax authorities investigate on tech companies. Amazon also settled a dispute with French authorities back in February 2018.

In August 2016, the European Commission ruled that Apple had benefited from illegal tax benefits from 2003 to 2014. Like many global companies, Apple has been accused of optimizing its corporate structure to lower the effective corporate tax rate in Europe.

While Apple appealed the decision back in 2016 saying that everything was legal, the company finished paying back the fine in September 2018. There are now $16.4 billion (€14.3 billion) sitting in an escrow account, waiting for the appeal.

And it sounds like Apple should have paid more taxes in France in particular. French tax authorities focused on profits generated in France over the past ten years.

Last month, the French government announced that it would start taxing big tech companies in France even if they report profits in another country. This tax will be based on revenue generated in France. Other European countries could follow the same model.

127 member countries of the OECD are also discussing new taxation rules for big tech companies. This time, the OECD wants to force companies to report profits in all countries where they operate.

Tyra Banks, the supermodel-turned-entrepreneur, has unveiled her latest venture. Dubbed Modelland, the in-person theme park-like experience will bring technology to the forefront, Banks told TechCrunch over the phone last week.

“We’re very open to partnering with and having integrations with different brands that bring technology to the forefront and make sure what we’re providing in Modelland are things you cannot do on your phone,” she told me.

The attraction will combine fantasy with interactive entertainment (think some augmented reality and virtual reality), as well as what people have come to expect from theme parks: food, events and shopping. While it’s called Modelland, Banks said it’s geared toward the masses and aims to celebrate all expressions of beauty.

“I am being very deliberate to make sure this is something families can come to,” Banks said. “I’m not creating this to service people who want to become models or are models.”

Modelland’s ultimate purpose is to continue to help redefine standards of beauty — no matter what your age, race, body size and so forth.

“I’m happy to see the world is much more celebrating of different types of beauty,” she said. “I think Modelland can be the next iteration of that.”

Modelland is slated to open later this year in Santa Monica, Calif.

Facebook is taking action in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian country where the social network has been used to incite racial tension and violence, after it banned four armed groups from its service.

The U.S. company said in a blog post that it has booted the groups — the Arakan Army (AA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), Kachin Independence Army (KIO) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) — and that “all related praise, support and representation” will be removed.

The groups are among the many Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) that exist in Myanmar, which was under military rule until elections in 2015 partially opened the country.

Explaining that the groups have violated its terms of service, Facebook said:

There is clear evidence that these organizations have been responsible for attacks against civilians and have engaged in violence in Myanmar, and we want to prevent them from using our services to further inflame tensions on the ground.

…

We recognize that the sources of ethnic violence in Myanmar are incredibly complex and cannot be resolved by a social media company, but we also want to do the best we can to limit incitement and hate that furthers an already deadly conflict.

In recent times, the MNDAA was blamed for at least 30 deaths, including civilians, in 2017 during a skirmish with security forces on the northern border with China — the group responded at the time using a Facebook group — while, in January of this year, the AA was said to have killed 13 government troops as part of an attack on Independence Day. Last month, the government called for a cease-fire due to an apparent 13 incidents of fighting between EAOs.

The internet only became available and affordable to people in Myanmar after 2015, and already swathes of the country has flocked to Facebook, which is widely heralded as ‘the internet’ in the country. Facebook has some 20 million users in Myanmar, that’s nearly all of the country’s internet users and nearly 40 percent of the population.

That digital revolution has allowed anyone to sign up to reach audiences and spread messages. That’s true across the world, but particularly extreme in Myanmar, where the country’s religious conflict has expanded into the digital arena in a short space of time only to exacerbate the problems.

Since August 2017, an estimated 700,000 Rohingya Muslims are said to have fled Myanmar following the destruction of their homes and persecution in the northern Rakhine province. Much of the violence is reported to have been state-led. A UN fact-finding mission last year concluded that Facebook played a “determining role” in inciting the genocide.

In response, Facebook has introduced new security features and announced plans to increase its team of Burmese language content translators to 100 people. While it doesn’t intend to open an office in Myanmar due to security concerns, it has ramped up its efforts to expel bad actors. Beyond today’s removals, it has taken down scores of accounts and groups and, among others, removed the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and military-owned TV network Myawady from its platform.

But still, those on the ground are critical. Facebook, they said, still isn’t fully committed to Myanmar, it is moving too slow and it is asking too much of the volunteers and civic groups that have offered their assistance.

For one thing, the social network was rounded criticized after CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that it was using AI to remove hate speech in Myanmar. The company was, in fact, reliant on locals reporting the content before it took action, a process that took days.

To skeptics, the latest removals look like more ‘whack-a-mobile’ tactics to remove problems only once they have become problems. In banning (EAOs), Facebook has set a precedent that could sweep up other legitimate organizations based on the actions of minorities within their ranks, government claims or other situations. Some EAOs act as proxy governments in certain parts of the country.

Update 02/05 02:44 am PST: The headline of this story was updated for accuracy

Two dog walking and sitting startups are merging: HouseMyDog, the U.K.-headquartered online community that enables dog owners to find and book local trusted dog walkers and sitters, has agreed to join forces with Gudog, a similar offering based in Spain.

I understand that HouseMyDog and Gudog will continue to operate under their existing brands for now, but will consolidate into a single brand in “early 2019”. The combined companies also say the roll up creates what they claim is the largest platform of its kind in Europe.

Specifically, the merger seeds the combined platform with more than 25,000 approved dog sitters and walkers in over 70 cities across eight European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium.

Gudog is said to be the market leader in Spain and “growing rapidly” in France and Germany, adding to HouseMyDog’s strong foothold in other parts of Europe (HouseMyDog has offices in London, Dublin and Berlin). I’m also told that Gudog founder’s Loly Garrido and Javier Cuevas are staying on, taking up the company-wide roles of CPO and CTO respectively.

Meanwhile, the combined entity has a current headcount of 21, but expects to more than double revenue in 2019 and plans to grow the team to 35 to drive further European growth.

James McElroy, co-founder of HouseMyDog, comments: “We’ve had a close relationship with the Gudog team since we met in 2016. We admire what they have achieved and their passion for the community they have built. While today’s announcement makes strategic sense in combining our market share to accelerate our growth, we are also delighted to be working with a team that shares the same values and vision for the future of pet services in Europe”.

Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal’s next act is aimed at helping the next generation of startup founders in India.

Bansal has already etched his name into India’s startup history after U.S. retail giant Walmart paid $16 billion to take a majority stake in its e-commerce business to expand its rivalry with Amazon. Things turned sour, however, when he resigned months after the deal’s completion due to an investigation into “serious personal misconduct.”

In 2019, 37-year-old Bansal is focused on his newest endeavor, xto10x Technologies, a startup consultancy that he founded with former colleague Saikiran Krishnamurthy. The goal is to help startup founders on a larger scale than the executive could ever do on his own.

“Person to person, I can help 10 startups but the ambition is to help 10,000 early and mid-stage entrepreneurs, not 10,” Bansal told Bloomberg in an interview.

Bansal, who started Flipkart in 2007 with Sachin Bansal (no relation) and still retains a four percent share, told Bloomberg that India-based founders are bereft of quality consultancy and software services to handle growth and company building.

“Today, software is built for large enterprises and not small startups,” he told the publication. “Think of it as solving for startups what Amazon Web Services has done for computing, helping enterprises go from zero to a thousand servers overnight with no hassle.”

“Instead of making a thousand mistakes, if we can help other startups make a hundred or even few hundred, that would be worth it,” Bansal added.

Bansal served as Flipkart’s CEO from 2007 to 2016 before becoming CEO of the Flipkart Group. He declined to go into specifics of the complaint against him at Flipkart — which reports suggest came about from a consensual relationship with a female employee — and, of the breakdown of his relationship with Sachin Bansal, he said he’s moved on to new things.

It isn’t just xto10x Technologies that is keeping him busy. Bansal is involved in investment firm 021 Capital where he is the lead backer following a $50 million injection. Neither role at the two companies involves day-to-day operations, Bloomberg reported, but, still, Bansal is seeding his money and experience to shape the Indian startup ecosystem.

Databricks, the company behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Microsoft and NEA, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $498.5 million. Microsoft’s involvement here is probably a bit of a surprise, but it’s worth noting that it also worked with Databricks on the launch of Azure Databricks as a first-party service on the platform, something that’s still a rarity in the Azure cloud.

As Databricks also today announced, its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $100 million. The company didn’t share whether it’s cash flow-positive at this point, but Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi shared that the company’s valuation is now $2.75 billion.

Current customers, which the company says number around 2,000, include the likes of Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.

While Databricks is obviously known for its contributions to Apache Spark, the company itself monetizes that work by offering its Unified Analytics platform on top of it. This platform allows enterprises to build their data pipelines across data storage systems and prepare data sets for data scientists and engineers. To do this, Databricks offers shared notebooks and tools for building, managing and monitoring data pipelines, and then uses that data to build machine learning models, for example. Indeed, training and deploying these models is one of the company’s focus areas these days, which makes sense, given that this is one of the main use cases for big data, after all.

On top of that, Databricks also offers a fully managed service for hosting all of these tools.

“Databricks is the clear winner in the big data platform race,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in today’s announcement. “In addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.”

Ghodsi told me that Horowitz was also instrumental in getting the company to re-focus on growth. The company was already growing fast, of course, but Horowitz asked him why Databricks wasn’t growing faster. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s an enterprise company, that means aggressively hiring a larger sales force — and that’s costly. Hence the company’s need to raise at this point.

As Ghodsi told me, one of the areas the company wants to focus on is the Asia Pacific region, where overall cloud usage is growing fast. The other area the company is focusing on is support for more verticals like mass media and entertainment, federal agencies and fintech firms, which also comes with its own cost, given that the experts there don’t come cheap.

Ghodsi likes to call this “boring AI,” since it’s not as exciting as self-driving cars. In his view, though, the enterprise companies that don’t start using machine learning now will inevitably be left behind in the long run. “If you don’t get there, there’ll be no place for you in the next 20 years,” he said.

Engineering, of course, will also get a chunk of this new funding, with an emphasis on relatively new products like MLFlow and Delta, two tools Databricks recently developed and that make it easier to manage the life cycle of machine learning models and build the necessary data pipelines to feed them.