Year: 2019

Uber is launching a new feature aimed at skiers and snowboarders.

The ride-hailing company said Wednesday that beginning December 17 an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app that will let customers order a ride with confirmed extra vehicle space or a ski/snowboarding rack.

Uber is launching the feature in 23 U.S. cities located areas near mountain resorts such as Anchorage, Boise, Boston, Eastern Washington, Flagstaff, Arizona and Grand Rapids, Michigan, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Lehigh Valley, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Hampshire, Portland, Oregon, Portland,Maine,  Salt Lake City, Seattle, Upstate New York, Vermont, Wilkes-Barre Scranton and Worcester, Wyoming. Riders living in Colorado cities such as Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins and the front range of the Rockies where numerous resorts are located will also have the feature.

Uber hasn’t said if it will offer the ski feature outside of the United States.

Uber Ski is the latest of additional features aimed at attracting new users or retaining existing ones. Uber wouldn’t say if a bike option might be next. However, Nundu Janakiram, head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this one.

“No one customer is the same, which is why part of our platform strategy is unlocking capabilities for unique needs, at the right times,” Janakiram said. “Uber Ski is the latest step toward that goal, and we’ll have more to share in the future as we continue to identify ways we can do more in the vein of Uber Ski, Uber Pet, and more for riders that love Uber’s convenience.”

The feature comes with a cost. Riders pay an additional surcharge for the selection, on top of their standard trip fare. Riders will be able to view the Uber Ski surcharge on their receipt, and the surcharge will be added to their upfront price when that option is selected in-app, the company said.

Drivers don’t have to participate in Uber Ski. They can opt-out of Uber Ski trips in the driver preferences menu in the app, while still receiving other eligible trip opportunities, according to the company. If they choose to accept Uber Ski trips, drivers will also receive a significant portion of that surcharge, on top of their standard trip earnings.

Drivers who want to participate will first need to snap and upload a photo of their vehicle to the app’s documents section to confirm eligibility.

Another startup hoping to capitalize on the fintech opportunity in Mexico has closed on a new sum of funding. Mexican challenger bank Albo has secured a $19 million extension to its Series A financing, led by U.S.-based Valar Ventures. The neobank previously raised $7.4 million at the beginning of 2019, bringing the company’s total Series A funding amount to $26.4 million.

This marks one of the larger early rounds for a Mexican startup. Albo joins the ranks of other Mexican startups that have raised larger-than-average Series A rounds like Y-Combinator backed scooter company Grin that scored a $45.7 million Series A and Klar, the Chime clone that raised $57.5 million in debt and equity seed funding.

Albo is Valar Ventures’ first foray into Mexico, though it has a penchant for neobanks broadly. The fund, which was founded by Peter Thiel, notably invested in N26 and TransferWise.

Mountain Nazca and Flourish Ventures also joined Albo’s Series A.. 

In its current form, Albo is a Mastercard debit card and a personal finance app that allows customers to open a bank account in 5 minutes through a branchless experience. 

The challenger bank tech startup concept is one of the most lucrative opportunities in Mexico – which is the second largest economy in Latin America second to Brazil. Out of the 130 million population of Mexico, 45% are underbanked. While underbanked users have access to bank accounts, deep financial products designed to help them compound wealth through lending and savings features do not exist in the Mexican market through traditional banks. This leaves what founder 31-year-old Angel Sahagun describes as a total addressable market of 59 million people in Mexico alone.

Traditional banks don’t serve the Mexican population. Existing incumbents shy away from lending, lack transparency, have high fees and are known for bad customer service. 

Albo says it owns the market share in Mexico with 200,000 monthly active customers who are spending and making transactions in its platform. But it is far from the only consumer neobank option in the country. Brazil’s Nubank, one of the most high-funded startups in all of Latin America, expanded into Mexico in May of this year. Nubank says it has 8.5 million clients in Brazil, and the startup is reportedly fundraising at its $10 billion valuation. Not to mention the threat posed by European startups like N26 and Revolut that have reportedly had their eye on the Mexican market. 

The Albo team has raised $26.4 million to scale its leading neobank.

Sahagun says that while there may be some overlap in Nubank and Albo customers, the offerings are different. Nubank issues credit cards for people with existing credit history – not the same target customer as Albo. 

Either way, with a new Mexican fintech product launching or getting funded seemingly every day, the market is growing saturated. That’s great for the ecosystem and for customers to have so much competition. But this will raise challenges around acquiring customers and hiring, and fundraising will undoubtedly get harder for those who want a piece of the Mexico fintech pie. 

In the meantime, founders are taking more of a collaborative rather than competitive stance. “This isn’t a winner takes all market,” says Sahagun, arguing that the financial market in Mexico is diverse enough to thrive with numerous financial products. 

Sahagun says the capital will be used to expand leadership roles and speed up customer acquisition. Albo will use the capital to build out new features: a savings product that lets users improve spending and saving habits, and what it says will be a transparent and easy-to-use lending option for customers who want access to loans. 

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, they face a huge challenge just getting started. Hyperproof, a Bellevue, Washington startup, is launching a new product to help companies build a workflow to get them in compliance in a more organized way.

Company co-founder and CEO Craig Unger says most companies struggle with the complexity of compliance. It involves a lot of different activities and often requires the cooperation of employees, who typically aren’t involved in compliance.

Hyperproof wants to provide a single place where companies can undertake their compliance activities. “In reality, there’s no single place where if you’re a compliance officer, you can say, ‘here is where I do my work’. Here is the equivalent of my SAP system for a CFO or my CRM system for a head of sales or head of marketing — and Hyperproof is just that,” Unger explained.

He says most companies do compliance today in a fairly ad hoc way, relying on technology like spreadsheets to track tasks, and email to make requests for needed information. What Hyperproof does is package all of that into a single program. You indicate what compliance regimen you want to work with, and Hyperproof builds a workspace for you with all of the requirements you need for that compliance framework.

Unger says at this point, the company is simply putting all of the tasks in a single workflow to simplify and organize your activities around this compliance framework.You can also import a spreadsheet to get that information inside Hyperproof, or outline the requirements in your own language in the program.

“Once you have a defined program in place, you can start working with the rest of the organization in a collaborative way by sending emails. The evidence that comes back gets put inside Hyperproof as an immutable record with an audit trail around this data collection,” Unger explained. Should you get audited, you have a central place to show the auditor your work.

The company has concentrated on building the workflow part of this, but in the future wants to add automation and APIs to connect directly to other systems to automate many of the activities. The goal with the initial release was to get companies a compliance framework workflow, and then build on that in the future.

The company was founded last year and has raised $3 million from 23 angel investors in the Seattle area where they are based. In fact, Unger is a former Microsoft employee and also helped found Azuqua, a workflow startup he sold to Okta this year for $52.5 million.

Blue Origin will be looking to launch one of its New Shepard sub-orbital spacecraft today – a second attempt after weather didn’t cooperate yesterday. Conditions are looking much better at the company’s West Texas launch site, so the Jeff Bezos-founded space venture is much more optimistic that today’s launch will go off as planned.

This mission, codenamed NS-12 because it’s the 12th flight of the New Shepard vehicle, will be the sixth re-use of the NS3 booster stage which provides the spacecraft’s initial thrust to get it off the ground. That will be a record for commercial reusable spaceflight, and it’s a key mission parameter, though the primary focus is still on delivering payloads for customers.

Those payloads include a range of different science experiments, as well as postcards submitted by kids around the world via the Blue Origin ‘Club for the Future’ non-profit. Bezos announced this new organization at the big Blue Origin lunar lander unveiling in May, and it’s designed to provide educational materials around space exploration to schools, and the postcards project is its first big endeavor.

Currently, Blue Origin is waiting to update their specific launch time due to heavy fog in the vicinity of its launch pad, but we’ll update this post with the exact time once it’s available.

I’ve been following Estonia-headquartered Jobbatical and its founder, Karoli Hindriks, for years. Part of the vanguard of startups working on infrastructure for digital nomads, the startup has been building the base platform to help global job seekers hire and fire their governments.

As Jobbatical has worked with more and more companies and governments though, it has learned that the friction here is not just finding employment globally for talented individuals, but rather the actual process of applying for immigration and work permits, ranging from forms that must be filed in person to the hours of labor it can take to fill out an application.

“What started to happen was that the relocation part… became something that the clients came back to us and said, ‘Can you do relocation for everyone and not just those coming through Jobbatical?’” Hindriks explained.

Last year, Jobbatical began to refocus its platform on powering relocation for workers at companies, and now its new strategy is coming into focus with the launch of the company’s new offices in Spain and Germany, announced on stage earlier today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

In the process, the company hopes to not just make the immigration process easier — but also much faster.

“How much time are government officials doing dummy work?” Hindriks asked. “30-40% of the consulate’s time is spent on answering the question of ‘what is the status of my visa?’”

The problem is that feedback in the immigration system is not available to all the players involved. Immigration process agents at companies who handle their workers’ visas have to constantly search around to make sure they are moving each of their cases forward. Managers have no idea when their workers may move, while employees are kept in the dark about their current status, inducing anxiety.

Hindriks’ vision is to help each of these three sides use a “TurboTax for immigration” to streamline the process. Jobbatical now can handle immigration applications in Estonia, Germany, and Spain and hopes to add Finland early next year.

But the more ambitious vision is ultimately to help governments drive their processes faster. Similar to how, say, the U.S. tax agency the Internal Revenue Service offers eFiling, Hindriks sees a future where Jobbatical can help facilitate immigration filings and massively speed up the efficiency of governments around these processes by allowing workers to directly submit applications to the government. She is working with two countries today to create exactly these sorts of digital submission systems.

It’s a space that has heated up in recent years as immigration continues to flow across the world. Boundless, for instance, helps individuals apply for U.S. green cards. Jobbatical is focused on the B2B market, focused on companies with global workforces.

Despite the deep debate in many countries over immigration, the reality is that every country has skills deficits that can be helped with smart and efficient immigration. Jobbatical is one company that may make the system more fair and relaxing for stressed workers looking to build their international careers.

China launched the Gaofen-7 imaging satellite in November, and the country has just shared the first of its high-resolution, 3D shots. The satellite is sensitive enough to height that it should be able to spot a single person from 500 kilometers up.

Gaofen-7 is the latest in a planned series of 14 satellites intended to overhaul China’s orbital imaging capabilities. Companies like Planet are lofting hundreds of satellites to provide terrestrial businesses with up-to-date imagery, so it’s natural that China, among other countries, would want to have their own.

Already the Gaofen project has led to a huge reduction in reliance on foreign sources for this critical data, which as frictions in other areas of technology have shown, may not always be possible to rely on.

Each new satellite has added unique or improved capabilities to the constellation, using different orbits and equipment to provide different data to the surface. Gaofen-7 combines multispectral cameras with highly precise laser altimetry to provide extremely detailed 3D images of structures and land forms.

Obviously this isn’t full resolution, but you get a sense of the level of detail provided.

Under ideal conditions, the satellite can produce color imagery at a sub-meter resolution, meaning objects less than a meter across can be detected, and with about 1.5 meter resolution for depth. So if a person is lying down, it’ll see them — and if they stand up, they’ll see them too.

Of course it’s nowhere near the sensitivity of a scientific instrument like NASA’s ICESat-2, which can detect height down to an inch or so. But Gaofen-7 is a more general-purpose satellite, intended for things like surveying and construction.

“It’s like a precise ruler for measuring the land,” the satellite’s lead designer, Cao Haiyi, told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. “In the past, surveying and mapping work was labor-intensive and lasted for months or even years. With the new satellite, these tasks can be completed in minutes. Before the launch of Gaofen-7, we could only precisely locate super-highways, but now Gaofen-7 can help us accurately locate rural roads.”

Gaofen-7 has already taken thousands of images and is intended to last at least eight years in orbit. Some of the imagery from the project will be made globally available, but Gaofen-7’s will probably be proprietary for some time to come.

Buildings under construction are a maze of half-completed structures, gantries, stacked materials, and busy workers — tracking what’s going on can be a nightmare. Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can navigate this chaos and produce 3D progress maps in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two off.

Bottlenecks in construction aren’t limited to manpower and materials. Understanding exactly what’s been done and what needs doing is a critical part of completing a project in good time, but it’s the kind of painstaking work that requires special training and equipment. Or, as Scaled Robotics showed today at TC Disrupt Berlin 2019, specially trained equipment.

The team has created a robot that trundles autonomously around construction sites, using a 360-degree camera and custom lidar system to systematically document its surroundings. An object recognition system allows it to tell the difference between a constructed wall and a piece of sheet rock leaned against it, between a staircase and temporary stairs for electric work, and so on.

By comparing this to a source CAD model of the building, it can paint a very precise picture of the progress being made. They’ve built a special computer vision model that’s suited to the task of sorting obstructions from the constructions and identifying everything in between.

All this information goes into a software backend where the supervisors can check things like which pieces are in place on which floor, whether they have been placed within the required tolerances, or if there are safety issues like too much detritus on the ground in work areas. But it’s not all about making the suits happy.

“It’s not just about getting management to buy in, you need the guy who’s going to use it every day to buy in. So we’ve made a conscious effort to fit seamlessly into what they do, and they love that aspect of it,” explained co-founder Bharath Sankaran. “You don’t need a computer scientist in the room. Issues get flagged in the morning, and that’s a coffee conversation – here’s the problem, bam, let’s go take a look at it.”

The robot can make its rounds faster than a couple humans with measuring tapes and clipboards, certainly, but also someone equipped with a stationary laser ranging device that they carry from room to room. An advantage of simultaneous location and ranging (SLAM) tech is that it measures from multiple points of view over time, building a highly accurate and rich model of the environment.

The data is assembled automatically but the robot can be either autonomous or manually controlled — in developing it, they’ve brought the weight down from about 70 kilograms to 20, meaning it can be carried easily from floor to floor if necessary (or take the elevator); and simple joystick controls mean anyone can drive it.

A trio of pilot projects concluded this year and have resulted in paid pilots next year, which is of course a promising development.

Interestingly, the team found that construction companies were using outdated information and often more or less assumed they had done everything in the meantime correctly.

“Right now decisions are being made on data that’s maybe a month old,” said co-founder Stuart Maggs. “We can probably cover 2000 square meters in 40 minutes. One of the first times we took data on a site, they were completely convinced everything they’d done was perfect. We put the data in front of them and they found out there was a structural wall just missing, and it had been missing for 4 weeks.”

The company uses a service-based business model, providing the robot and software on a monthly basis, with prices rising with square footage. That saves the construction company the trouble of actually buying, certifying, and maintaining an unfamiliar new robotic system.

But the founders emphasized that tracking progress is only the first hint of what can be done with this kind of accurate, timely data.

“The big picture version of where this is going is that this is the visual wiki for everything related to your construction site. You just click and you see everything that’s relevant,” said Sankaran. “Then you can provide other ancillary products, like health and safety stuff, where is storage space on site, predicting whether the project is on schedule.”

“At the moment, what you’re seeing is about looking at one moment in time and diagnosing it as quickly as possible,” said Maggs. “But it will also be about tracking that over time: We can find patterns within that construction process. That data feeds that back into their processes, so it goes from a reactive workflow to a proactive one.”

“As the product evolves you start unwrapping, like an onion, the different layers of functionality,” said Sankaran.

The company has come this far on $1 million of seed funding, but is hot on the track of more. Perhaps more importantly, its partnerships with construction giant PERI and Autodesk, which has helped push digital construction tools, may make it a familiar presence at building sites around the world soon.

Nathan Damtew, the founder of new Ethiopian education technology and gaming company BeBlocky, has always been interested in games.

An avid Call of Duty player, the young entrepreneur, who founded BeBlocky in his senior year of college, was always struck by the disconnection between how adept his generation was at playing games and how little they knew about how those games were built.

The problem, Damtew thought, was especially acute across Africa, where most students are introduced to programming in high school — if they’re able to get those classes at all.

BeBlocky is his attempt to change that.

The company’s initial product is a programming learning platform for kids. It uses animated programming lessons as a traditional app and through augmented reality to teach children the basics of computer programming using a modified curriculum based off of lessons from Code.org.

BeBlocky launched a mere five months ago and already has 6,000 users on its app. In Ethiopia, it has grown through its partnership with the local Addis Ababa-based organization Yenetta Code, which teaches Ethiopian students in the nation’s capital coding skills.

The company has also scored early partnerships with national celebrities to attract kids to the platform. BeBlocky uses avatars from pop culture icons like Rophnan, a popular Ethiopian musician, and Jember and Hawi, two characters from a popular Ethiopian comic book.

It’s an indicator of how BeBlocky expects to make money. Damtew says that sponsorship opportunities will exist for companies that want to advertise in the app. And, there’s an opportunity for in-app purchases, he says.

“These characters… kids love them… we want to have the characters as toys that can have a bar code so kids can take a picture and then engage with the game characters in the app,” says Damtew.

The merchandising component also informs the company’s move to develop an augmented reality application as well, which the company developed after seeing the success of Pokemon Go. 

“We thought it would be a very cool thing to integrate the education system with the Augmented Reality,” says Damtew.

Gameplay in the app is designed to encourage users to roam free in the environment once they complete lessons peppered through five different levels of the game, so they can build out their own worlds.

Going forward, Damtew envisions a fully realized merchandising and storytelling platform that includes tech-enabled toys and games and user generated content built with BeBlocky’s assets.

“One of the things that makes us different is that education and coding in Africa has been overlooked and we’re making characters that are relevant to African people around the world,” says Damtew.

To date, the company has raised a small, pre-seed investment from the Baobab Network, after participating in the impact investor’s two-year technology accelerator program and is currently in the process of raising its seed round, with an eye toward expanding the marketing and development of the app across theAfrican continent.

From a Southwest England farmer’s son comes a risk management platform, Stable, a solution as simple as car insurance designed to protect farmers around the world from pricing volatility.

Using Stable, food buyers ranging from owners of a small smoothie shop to Coca-Cola employees can insure thousands of agricultural commodities, packaging and energy products. Led by founder and CEO Richard Counsell, London-based Stable has raised a $6 million seed round from Anthemis Group, agricultural company Sygenta and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

“I knew instinctively what a huge problem and how much damage volatile pricing does,” Counsell, who comes from a long line of farmers in Somerset, England, tells TechCrunch. “You could say it was in my blood. It’s not often you get the chance to bring two sides of your world together.”

After four years of research and development, Stable is launching on stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. For the former currency trader and farmer-turned-CEO, building the data-rich risk management platform was no easy task. To adequately protect farmers, Stable’s team of data scientists, analysts and developers collected 3,000 niche and un-traded indexes from 40 countries, allowing customers to match their risk to a local index.

“We make it simple and precise for businesses of every size and every sector to protect their business from volatile prices,” Counsell said. “Everything from fish to timber to food and then the packaging as well energy, whether that be fuel or electricity.”

Counsell said the business plans to set up shop in Chicago, the global epicenter for commodities risk management, and Sydney, a massive commodity producer, as soon as next year. For the foreseeable future, Stable will focus solely on the agri-food industry, worth more than $4 trillion, according to Stable’s statistics. Eventually, Counsell says Stable will expand to include other sectors like metals or construction.

“Almost every business on the planet is exposed to one commodity,” Counsell said, alluding to the company’s grand ambitions.

Clideo says it can help marketers reach consumers in a smarter way, by making videos shoppable via an “interactive overlay.”

CEO Michele Mazzaro (who previously worked as an executive at Ki Group and in mergers and acquisitions at KPMG Italy) said these videos are meant to address a larger issue: “Businesses are failing in communicating on digital media. I don’t remember the last time I clicked on a banner, pre-roll or mid-roll ad. I hate it as a consumer.”

To address this, Mazzaro and his co-founders Nitzan Mayer-Wolf and Andrea Iriondo have created what Mazzaro described as a way to “turn any video into a discovery experience.” They’re presenting the product today at Disrupt Berlin as part of our Startup Battlefield.

Although the videos are described as interactive, the Clideo team isn’t trying to power the kind of branching narratives popularized by startups like Eko (not to mention Netflix’s “Black Mirror” special “Bandersnatch”), but rather taking a standard video and adding new capabilities around the products featured — the ability to buy something, save it to a wishlist or share it on social media.

Mazzaro argued that these features give marketers crucial data about which audiences are engaging with which products.

“Stop throwing your video budgets into the garbage and undersatnad why your consumers are engaging with you,” he said.

Clideo videos require their own video player, so they can’t be played directly on YouTube or social media. However, Mazzaro noted that they can be promoted on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere via links.

And despite this limitation, Madrid-based Clideo has already been tested by e-commerce websites, including Spain’s Modalia.com, with conversion rates as high as 33%.

Interactive and/or shoppable video isn’t a new idea, but Mazzaro said most existing solutions either come from creative agencies working with a limited number of luxury brands, or video marketing platforms that include very limited interactive capabilities.

Mazzaro contrasted this with Clideo, which he said is creating “the do-it-yourself solution without compromising creativity.” In fact, he said an interactive video can be created in as little as five minutes.

He also argued that Clideo is differentiated by its business model — where, in addition to a monthly subscription, customers pay an additional fee tied directly to Clideo’s results driving viewers to checkout pages.

“We’re the only ones to align our goals to our customers,” Mazzaro said.

Clideo has been bootstrapped thus far. Mazzaro said that the product is available globally, though early customers are likely to be based in Spain, Italy and Israel.