Month: September 2020

Disney+ is the latest streaming service to introduce a way for friends and family to watch movies and TV together while in different locations.

With the pandemic closing movie theaters and making any kind of indoor socializing pretty risky, the Netflix Party Chrome extension has become the main way I watch TV with friends. Netflix Party doesn’t have any official connection to Netflix, but other streaming services, like Amazon Prime Video and Disney-owned Hulu, have been adding similar features of their own.

Disney has already been testing the new GroupWatch feature in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and today it’s launching for viewers in the United States.

Jerrell Jimerson, the chief product officer for Disney’s streaming services, told me that GroupWatch was already in development before the pandemic, but that the company “worked to accelerate it given the realities of COVID.”

The Disney+ experience has some key advantages over most other co-watching technology, because it doesn’t require users to install a browser extension and it will work on any device, not just laptop and desktop computers. Jimerson explained that the goal was to create something that was “super easy for consumers to use” and that “didn’t take away from the content and didn’t take away from the viewing experience.”

Image Credits: Disney

Once you’ve selected GroupWatch from the Details menu of a movie or TV show, you can invite up to six other people to participate — of course, they’ll need a Disney+ subscription of their own. And while the invitation has to be created via the Disney+ website or mobile app, people can also participate in a GroupWatch from their internet-connected TVs.

Besides synchronizing video playback (which any participant can control), GroupWatch allows viewers to respond to what’s happening on-screen by sharing emojis. But it lacks one of the hallmarks of co-watching, namely a chat that runs alongside the video.

Granted, a chat window could have been a bit distracting when blown up onto a big TV, but it’s arguably the centerpiece of social viewing. Jimerson said that if viewers want to chat, they can continue talking on whatever channel they used to send the invite (presumably a chat app on their phones).

“There are other opportunities to integrate communication capabilities, but we haven’t shared any timing on those things,” he added.

Foldable phones have had…quite the journey over the last few years. The second time appears to have been the charm for the Galaxy Fold, with a far more robust design than the first generation. And now Motorola’s hoping for similar luck with a revamped version of the Razr.

The Lenovo -owned brand announced this morning that the latest addition of the phone will officially launch in North America on October 2. And for a limited time, it will be available from select retailers — including Amazon, Best Buy, B&H and its own site — for $1,200. That’s a $200 initial discount for early adopters with faith that Motorola nailed it this time out.

The original version of the handset, launched last year, had everything working in its favor, from an iconic name to the latest in smartphone devices. Ultimately, however, it ran into poor reviews, keeping with a theme of the initial wave of foldables. It was a big letdown for a legitimately exciting device. Here’s what a spokesperson told TechCrunch about this latest model:

We’re confident in our foldable system, which is why we retained much of the same technology from the first iteration of Razr. While evolving Razr’s design to include 5G, we focused on areas to make mechanical refinements, based on direct consumer feedback.

Announced three weeks back, the new device will arrive in the States in a matter of days, sporting 5G connectivity and a lower price than the original (on top of the aforementioned limited time discount). AT&T and T-Mobile will also be carrying the new model.

Cube.js, an open-source company that is building a data platform to help developers by analytical application for both internal and external users, today announced that it has raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Previous investors Eniac Ventures, Betaworks, Innovation Endeavors and Slack Fund also participated, in addition to new investors Uncorrelated Ventures and Overtime.vc.

The two co-founders, Artyom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov, actually built the core of what is now the successful Cube.js project for another company they founded in 2016: Statsbot. Statsbot is a business intelligence platform that helps enterprises create reports and dashboards — and there’s a Slack bot, too.

“While working on Statsbot we build what is Cube.js right now to power the Statsbot application,” Keydunov said. “But over time, as users were using Statsbot, we started to see that they were asking us about how they could use this technology to power internal application or customer-facing applications for analytics. […] We worked with several companies to have some proof of concept of using Cube.js as a standalone technology and we got really positive feedback about that.”

The general idea behind Cube.js is to replace a lot of the busywork of building the backend infrastructure for connecting data sources and building visualizations. The open-source tool is essentially a middleware layer that sites between the databases and the frontend and that handles the SQL generation, caching, security and orchestration so that developers can focus on writing their applications. Thanks to its caching technology, it also solves a lot of performance issues for developers.

Image Credits: Cube.js

As Keydunov argued, if you are a data analyst or data engineer, there are already plenty of tools on the market today that will provide you most of what you need. Developers, though, who typically need to build custom applications, have to rely on a variety of disconnected libraries. “They don’t have any solutions they can use specifically for building analytics applications,” he noted.

“We invest very often in open source companies. And one of the areas of pain points that we’re very well aware of this challenge of building applications that connect to lots of different data sources,” Bain Capital Ventures partner Stefan Cohen told me. “The advent of the public cloud and the heterogeneity of the data sources that are out there and being consumed at such a rapid pace by developers and engineers just makes it really hard to pull all this stuff together in a way that can present visually appealing and useful applications for the enterprise.”

Yet enterprises want these applications because they can help them unlock new revenue and streamline their workflows. That puts Cube.js right in the middle of this trend.

Like most open-source companies, the Cube.js team is looking at offering a commercial cloud and SaaS service for enterprises, with all of the usual enterprise accouterments like additional security and sign-in features.

As Keydunov told me, the team expected to spend 2020 on building out the open-source community around Cube.js through events and meetups. And while that has obviously gotten a bit harder, the team still focused on talking to potential customers and community members as much as possible.

“I think the big challenge — and the opportunity for us — is to make this leap from open source to a commercial product,” Cohen noted. “And it’s great to see so many developers and organizations using the Cube.js open source. But what we really need to do is get that fully featured cloud product available and then start to drive use of it. And not even necessarily monetizing it but just making sure that our enterprise features are the right ones for the market and that we’re solving a meaningful pain point. And I think if we could get that right, the world’s our oyster — but we have to get that product out and then start driving some initial usage.”

Unsurprisingly, that’s also what the team plans to focus on with this new round of funding it now has in the bank.

Chip designer Arm today announced the launch of a new set of solutions for autonomous systems for both automotive and industrial use cases. These include the Arm Cortex-A78AE high-performance CPU,
the Mali-G78AE GPU and Arm Mali-C71AE image signal processor.

What makes all three of these chips stand out is that they have built-in safety features. ‘Safety,’ in this context, means that the chips feature additional capabilities that ensure that every calculation is essentially double-checked.

Traditionally, Arm has offered two modes for its CPU. In ‘split mode,’ all cores work independently and only go offline every now and then for quick sanity checks. This works well for applications with low or no safety requirements since the cores can run at close to their maximum performance.

Image Credits: Arm

In ‘locked mode,’ cores run in pairs and their operations are cross-checked against each other. This helps these chips satisfy various automotive safety requirements, but comes with an obvious performance penalty as you can only use half the cores.

Today, the company introduced its new hybrid mode for its CPUs, which combines the best of both worlds for high-performance use cases where only medium failure detection is needed. It allows the cores to still run in split mode, but the shared cluster logic, which integrates the cores, now runs in lock mode. That provides the safety mechanisms of lock mode — just at a different layer — with the performance of split mode.

For the new AE-version of the Mali GPU, Arm is introducing what it calls ‘flexible partitioning,’ which makes it easier to split the various GPU cores between workloads as needed. That means features like maps can run in one partition, separate from safety features like driver monitoring or running the instrument cluster.

Traditionally, Arm targeted these AE-branded designs at the automotive industry. ‘AE’ actually used to stand for ‘automative enhanced.’ Now, however, it is targeting the broader market for autonomous systems.

“We introduced this AE [intellectual property]. It was referring to ‘automotive enhanced,’ originally, and so it has specific features, performance, safety, for the automotive market,” Arm’s VP of its automotive business, Chet Babla, told me. “But fast forward to today and what we’ve realized that in talking to industrial OEMs and the compute requirements, the safety requirements they have, they’ve said, ‘actually, what you’re doing in the automotive space is very applicable to the compute and safety challenges that we face.'”

While Arm is remaining relatively quiet about its $40 billion acquisition by Nvidia, which is still going the regulatory process, it’s worth noting that both companies have set their eyes on this market for autonomous systems, with Nvidia offering its own platform for autonomous robots, using its Jetson AGX, for example, which use ARM CPUs in addition to Nvidia’s own GPUs. It looks like that won’t change anytime soon.

“Powerful new processing capabilities are needed to enable future autonomous vehicles and machines. As a lead partner for the new Arm Cortex-A78AE, NVIDIA delivers the advanced performance and safety
these edge AI systems require with our next-generation NVIDIA Orin SoC,” said Gary Hicok, senior vice president of hardware development at NVIDIA.

Grammarly, the popular spelling and grammar checker, is launching a few new features for its paying users today that go beyond some of its traditional tools to help its users make their overall writing not just technically correct but also more legible. That means the service can now help you restructure sentences for clarity, help you improve your formatting to make your sentences more readable (mostly through suggesting bulleted lists) and suggest changes to your tone.

In addition, Grammarly is also getting a UI update with a new floating sidebar that lets you see all of the service’s suggestions in an easier to read format.

Grammarly’s Nicholas Stanford recently walked me through some of the new features. The main idea here, he noted, is to help writers put the reader at the center. That’s not something that comes naturally to a lot of writers, but that’s essential if you want to get your point across.

Image Credits: Grammarly

“For most people in the world, most of the writing they do — and certainly most of the important writing they do — is actually at work,” he noted. “And these aren’t necessarily people that are professional writers but more regular office workers writing emails, writing marketing pitches and reports. And it turns out that a lot of people feel uncomfortable with writing. It’s difficult. It’s difficult to be understood. It’s difficult to get your message across. How many times have you received a quick little email and thought: is this person upset at me?”

Based on Grammarly’s own research, 75% of its users are afraid of being misunderstood. Yet, after the pandemic started and people began working from home, writing only became a more important part of their jobs.

Today’s updates to Grammarly’s writing assistant are largely based on the company’s AI smarts, though some remain mostly rule-based, too. On the AI side, the service’s new tools for rewriting systems may be the most interesting ones. Typically, tools like Grammarly have focused on the word level — and maybe a bit beyond that for stock phrases. Now, this tool can look at a convoluted sentence and suggest rewrites to make the sentence more readable, for example. Over time, Stanford said, the plan is to make this tool even smarter so that it can understand context across paragraphs, too.

Image Credits: Grammarly

“It’s currently just at the sentence level. We’re trying to start expanding it beyond that, because you’re very limited if you don’t see beyond that what the larger context is,” he explained. The challenge here for a system like this, after all, is not just to suggest a basic rewrite or to break a long sentence into two, but to ensure that the sentence still has the same meaning in the larger context. To enable that, the team built a second system that runs in the background to ensure that the new sentence doesn’t suddenly have a completely different meaning.

As for improved readability, the focus here is mostly on making documents more skimmable by suggesting bullet points instead of long lists in a sentence. The tool can also detect dates and deadlines and bold them to make sure they stand out.

Tone detection is something Grammarly has done for a while. Now, however, the system will not just point out what a document sounds like but provide suggestions for improving it.

Boston-based robotic gardening startup Tertill this morning announced that it has appointed Helen Greiner as CEO and Chairman. The executive is best known for cofounding iRobot in 1990 along with fellow MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab members Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle (the company’s longtime CEO).

At first glance, Tertill is a pretty natural fit for Greiner. The startup, which appeared onstage shortly after launch at our first robotics event back in 2017, drew immediate comparisons to the Roomba. The device sports a similar form factor to iRobot’s immensely popular robotic vacuum. It also serves a similar maintenance function — albeit with garden weeds, rather than carpet spills.

There’s also the fact that Tertill/Franklin Robotics’ cofounders is an early iRobot employee credited as one of Roomba’s inventors. Launched as a 2017 Kickstarter, the product is essentially a solar-powered robotic weed whacker designed to live in the user’s garden and do routine maintenance.

Greiner, who more recently served as the founder and CEO of drone company CyPhy Works and an advisor to the U.S. Army, tells TechCrunch that the new position is a natural fit.

Image Credits: Tertill

“I’m a customer,” she explains, “I have one of the first ones from the Kickstarter. I have it in my garden running, so I know it does a great job that I don’t like to do. I was looking for an opportunity that really gets to push more robots into people’s hands. Starting with a robot like Tertill that is out there and has a passionate user base already, that does a unique job. It seemed like a wonderful, synergistic thing of what I’ve done in the past and what they needed.”

The company has raised $1 million thus far, in addition to around $300,000 raised by that initial Kickstarter. Greiner is not ready to discuss further plans for funding, but explained that the company is looking at Tertill as a stepping stone to further outdoor robotics solutions. It’s a plan not entirely dissimilar to the home ecosystem iRobot has discussed, with the Roomba serving as the centerpiece.

“Roomba’s now 20% of the North American vacuuming market,” Greiner says. “That would have been mind-blowing when we first started. But a rising tide raises all boats, and I think a lot of folks are seeing that, hey, maybe we should have a robot doing these other tasks. In the longer term, there are a lot of jobs and chores outside that we can take on with these thought leaders and technologists. We’re not limiting it to Tertill. We’re pushing the whole space.”

Commercial cannabis operations often rely on software platforms to track and forecast crops from seed to sale. Trym today is announcing a large $3.1M seed round that will help the company expand its software offering.

Trym’s solution offers commercial growers a robust set of features, including integration with the regulatory platform Metrc and environmental sensors. Using the system, growers gain a powerful tool to grow their plants and business thanks to comprehensive analytics capabilities and operations management.

Trym’s seed round came from friends and family, along with notable investors. Out of the $3.1M round, $1M came from friends and family. At the same time, 7thirty Capital and Delta Emerald Ventures co-led the preferred round of $2.1M with participation from Welcan Capital, Arcview Collective Fund, and others. Trym says the round was oversubscribed.

“Our investors are a perfect match with Trym’s DNA,” said Matt Mayberry, CEO, and co-founder, Trym in a released statement. “They understand that connectivity is the future of cannabis agriculture and that to stay in the game, commercial cultivators have to closely track and manage all aspects of their business. A disruption is happening in the market, and we are helping to drive it.”

The cannabis software market is quickly gaining new entrants as more developers discover the exploding marketing. Gone are the days of growers scribbling notes on pads of paper. The legal cannabis industry in the United States is quickly adapting to the latest platforms to increase yield and decrease the amount of bookkeeping needed to stay up with ever-changing regulations.

“The growth opportunity in the cannabis cultivation software market is very exciting for us,” said Micah Tapman, Managing Partner at 7thirty Capital, said in a released statement. “Trym is disrupting cannabis cultivation with a comprehensive software platform that streamlines business and connects the whole team for more efficient farm management. We have watched Trym grow since 2019, and their progress has been exceptional. We are delighted to participate in this round.”

Two weeks, at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, a similar company could Canix, won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition. Like Trym, Canix gives growers a platform to track growth and stay current on regulations.

After launching its first bottle in 2018, LARQ has drummed up a good deal of interest among consumers looking for ways to wean themselves off of plastic bottles. Last year alone, the Bay Area-based startup managed to sell 75,000 bottles, with help from retail partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. The feat is made more impressive by the fact that — at $99 — the company’s offerings are pretty steep as far as refillable water bottles go.

LARQ’s value proposition is in its UV cap. As someone who’s carried around a lot of reusable water bottles since those heady Nalgene days in college, I’ve got some pretty good horror stories about the veritable forest of fungus that’s grown inside. Diligent washing can be particularly difficult with such a narrow receptacle.

The company’s products have also garnered investment interest. Today the company announced a $10 million Series A lead by Seventure, with participation from DCM. The round follows an initial seed fund raised back in June of last year. LARQ’s also got a number of key shareholders, including Capricorn Investment Group, Heuristic Capital, IdeaFarm Ventures, Augment Ventures and Warriors power forward Draymond Green. The Series A bring the company’s funding to date up to $15.7 million. 

“At LARQ, we are ushering in a new era of hydration that is better for you and better for the planet,” CEO Justin Wang said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “We use consumer-centric product design combined with cutting edge technology to make it easier to opt for the healthier and more sustainable choice anywhere and anytime. To realize this vision, LARQ needs to meet the consumer at every opportunity for hydration, from a bottle on-the-go, to the home tap, and everything in between.”

The LARQ bottle in currently being stocked by 88 retailers in 16 countries, though this round is set to help it take that global expansion even further. Early this month, it  aimed at bringing its water purifying technology to a Brita-style filter. As of this writing, the campaign has raised more than 13x its $50,000 goal. It was certainly the right product for the company at the moment, as the home market has become increasingly important with fewer people leaving the house.

Image Credits: LARQ

LARQ says its technology was in development for 10 years prior to launch. It will be interesting to see how the company continues to evolve as lower-cost takes on the format continue to enter the market.

Shipping has long been one of the more antiquated, and least technological, segments in the world of commerce, with its physical aspects — rooted in massive cargo tankers, giant fleets of aircraft and trucks, and trains of linked-up containers — underscoring some of the more obvious analogue attributes of the business.

That has also made it a ripe opportunity for startups, and today, one called PayCargo, which has built a suite of cloud-based payment and financing services for the cargo industry, is announcing $35 million in funding to expand its business in the wake of Covid-19.

The investment is coming from a single, high-profile investor, Insight Partners, which back in April announced a monster $9.5 billon fund that it planned to use not just to support portfolio companies through the global health pandemic, but to seek out new opportunities emerging in the wake of it.

PayCargo appears to be one of the latter. Eduardo del Riego, the CEO (PayCargo was co-founded by COO Juan Carlos Dieppa and chairman Sergio Lemme), said that while the cargo industry has faced a lot of turmoil with the pandemic — production in some places grinded to a halt, social distancing rules created new challenges for how shippers could work and move physical goods — it also highlighted how solutions like PayCargo’s were essential in getting things working properly again.

“With COVID, there was tremendous uncertainty about the impact of the global supply chain,” he said in an interview, “and like many other industries, the pandemic accelerated the need and demand for a paperless and contactless solution, which in turn accelerated PayCargo’s business.”

And while many of us brace ourselves for more fallout about how the world economy is contracting, PayCargo is profitable and has been from its start, the company said, and it has been growing — which in itself could be a positive signal about how production is indeed picking up again.

PayCargo provides a platform that offers tools for payers to send payments, vendors to receive them, APIs to integrate the tools into an existing IT, and financing services for those who do not want to pay for the shipments up front. All of these, for the majority of those working in this area, still are fixed in paperwork and can take weeks to resolve, making it a prime area to tackle with electronic services.

These days, PayCargo is processing some $4 billion in payments annually from some 12,000 shippers and carriers and a network of 4,000 vendors — customers span land, sea and air and include Kuehne + Nagel, DHL, DB Schenker, BDP, Seko Logistics, UPS, YUSEN Logistics and vendors like Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, Ocean Network Express, Alliance Ground, Swissport, and AirFrance — with transaction volume up 80% over last year. By way of its APIs, PayCargo also works with a number of partners to serve customers, including the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Cargo Network Services (CNS), CHAMP Cargosystems, IBS, Accelya, Unisys and Kale Logistics.

We have written before about the very fragmented and analogue freight industry, which still bases a lot of transactions around faxes, actual paperwork physically exchanged between parties, people transferring not just goods but documents hand to hand. The same goes for the payments infrastructure that underpins it all.

That has spawned a number of other startups looking to tackle the market with tech. Emerge has been building a digital marketplace specifically for the trucking industry, while Cargo.com is targeting air freight; Europe’s Zencargo, FreightHub and Sennder are focusing on bringing cloud-based infrastructure into freight-forwarding (and Sennder is positioning itself as a consolidator in this market, recently acquiring Uber’s European business in this area); and Flexport has positioned itself has one to watch in its own take on shipping SaaS.

PayCargo itself also has a number of competitors, which might include those building bigger suites of services, of which payments is just one. In addition to all of the ones we’ve covered, there is GlobalTranz, CloudTrade and others. (Del Riego refused to name any competitors directly. “PayCargo is the premier and most robust solution in the marketplace,” he said flatly.)

Overall CrunchBase estimates that some $5.5 billion has been invested in shipping-related tech companies looking to bring more updated processes to what is, at the end of the day, ultimately a very physical business.

But with the industry significantly bigger than that — one estimate forecasts that the shipping logistics market in the US alone will be worth $1.3 trillion by 2023 — you can see how building and addressing that would be a lucrative opportunity.

“As the cargo industry rapidly shifts to electronic payments, PayCargo has established itself as the market leading platform for doing business by successfully automating the payments process and ensuring efficiency for both payers and vendors,” said Ryan Hinkle, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “We are excited to work with PayCargo to continue to scale its global payments network and through our Insight Onsite team of ScaleUp and operational experts, help bring additional resources to its impressive list of customers.” Hinkle is joining the board with this round.

Bitpanda, a crypto assets platform, has closed a $52 million Series A funding round form Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel. Vienna-based VC Speedinvest also participated, alongside other unnamed investors. Claiming 1.3 million users, Bitpanda has previously been trading digital assets and tokenizing precious metals.

The Vienna-based company will use the cash to expand internationally. It expanded to France, Spain and Turkey in 2020 and plans to enter additional European markets this year and next. It has 300 employees.

Essentially, Bitpanda is a crypto exchange which can support other kinds of assets in a tokenized form. To date, it’s not very well known or used in the Crypto world.

What this represents is an interesting move by a crypto exchange, effectively expanding into real-world assets. At the other end of the spectrum, platforms like eToro, Robinhood and Revolut, which came from traditional assets world, and are now adding Crypto world assets. Eventually, the two will meet, in some shape or form.

Bitpanda is a centralized exchange with its own infrastructure, and is not running on a public blockchain. Other centralized exchanges include Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Kucoin and Huobi.

As part of the investment, Valar Ventures founding partner, Andrew McCormack, will also join Bitpanda’s board. McCormack was previously with PayPal in its early years and supported Peter Thiel during its IPO and eventual sale to eBay in 2002. Valar has previously invested in European fintechs including Transferwise and the Germany-based digital bank, N26.