Month: September 2020

As part of the continuing global rollout of LanzaTech’s technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions and turn those emissions into fuel and chemicals, the company is rolling out a new small-scale waste biomass gasifier in India.

The new gasifier, which was announced Tuesday on TechCrunch Disrupt’s virtual stage, will be hosted at Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemical, one of India’s largest refiners. The LanzaTech gasifier, which will be built in partnership with Indian project development firm Ankur Scientific, will use waste to make ethanol and chemicals rather than power.

While most of the industry uses large-scale, expensive oxygen-blown gasifiers to make liquids, the LanzaTech air blown technology is much cheaper and easier to operate and can still produce bacteria at a scale that produces a meaningful amount of ethanol.

Contamination also isn’t an issue with the gas feedstock for LanzaTech’s bacteria, according to Holmgren. The new process can produce biochar that ends up replacing fertilizer in soil and thereby reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, which are another greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

If the pilot project is successful and the gasifiers are rolled out at scale across India, it could mean an ability for the country to produce roughly 25 billion liters of ethanol per year and result in removing 60 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to LanzaTech’s estimates.

“Overall something that people said makes no sense, may well make sense and may well result in benefits beyond just the immediate reuse of waste agri carbon and production of a fuel that results in keeping some petroleum in the ground,” according to a statement from Holmgren. “Holistic systems thinking is the way.”

For Holmgren, the small pilot project in India is an example of how small-scale, low-cost distributed systems can compete with the big oil industry.

“There are two paths to scale, bigger which is cheaper per unit produced, or massively replicating a small scale unit (numbering up vs. scaling up),” Holmgren said. “Most people have always believed that numbering up is for toys and food, but I think it will also fit process technology. Certainly, larger fits petroleum, but it can’t fit biotechnology or biomass or waste gases which are distributed and difficult to move.”

Decarbonization, Holmgren believes, will require a reimagining of traditional systems if humanity is to break the carbon cycle that’s now causing global climate catastrophes that can be observed in the Western United States right now.

“We must not benchmark today’s innovation against the past; we must, instead, imagine and create a very different future, one where the production of energy, fuels and chemicals is based on distributed, rather than centralized principles,” said Holmgren. “Recent breakthroughs in miniaturization, automation, AI and 3D printing enable distributed production beyond anything that could have been previously imagined and of course, a simple gasifier will help that along.”

Google-owned navigation app Waze is gaining a number of new product features as well as a partnership with Amazon Music, the company announced at its first major virtual event, Waze On. Among the changes, Waze is gaining personalized recommendations based on a user’s trip history, as well as traffic notifications, ETA improvements, lane suggestions, expanded Google Assistant integration, and more.

Waze’s trip suggestions are one of the more notable new features, as they tap into the Waze user’s historical driving patterns to make inferences about where the user may be headed to next. The feature, which will roll out next month, will be based on trips the user took in the past as well as the locations they’ve recently driven to, Waze says. The suggestions will offer the driver a visual overview of their trip, including details like the time the trip will take and the expected traffic.

Another new feature, traffic notifications, will alert users when traffic begins to build up or the driver risks being late on both favorite and frequent destinations, as well as one-time planned drives. These will also arrive next month, Waze noted.

Among the smarter improvements, is a new addition called Lane Guidance. As the name suggests, Waze will now be able to tell drivers what lane to be in when they’re merging or exiting a stretch of highway. This feature is rolling out now.

Waze also updated its ETA calculations in areas where there are fewer drivers — a reflection of the impact the pandemic has had on historical driving patterns. With some areas seeing fewer cars on the road due to companies’ embrace of remote work, Waze says it’s been harder to predict the changing flow of traffic. The update should help it take into account the reduction in traffic when making calculations in some areas.

In a much-needed update, users will now be able to save their itinerary for a planned drive directly to the Waze app from the Live Map feature on the web.

Waze has also expanded Google Assistant integration to French, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Waze users.

The Waze Carpool service received a few updates, too. It now offers instant booking and auto approve features for drivers and riders. Drivers can also get real-time ride requests as they begin a drive, allowing them to pick up more riders along the way.

Amazon Music, meanwhile, joined the Waze Audio Player partner program, which allows Waze users to listen to third-party services from Waze’s audio player. Amazon Music users will be able to access the Waze app from the music app, as well. The audio program itself is not new. Waze already works with other music and audio partners, including Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, YouTube Music, Deezer, TIDAL, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Scribd, and others.

Waze at the event said it now sees over 140 million users worldwide per month contributing to the community by driving over 36 billion kilometers and reporting over 70 million incidents in 185 countries.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is doing its part to help protect the Earth from any errant asteroids that may threaten terrestrial life, awarding a €129.4 million ($153 million) contract to an industry consortium led by German space company OHB. The contract covers the “detailed design, manufacturing and testing” of a mission codenamed ‘Hera,’ after the Greek goddess of marriage and the hearth, which will support NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test mission and help provide a path towards future planetary defense operations in space.

ESA’s Hera mission will launch a desk-sized satellite, which itself will contain small CubeSats, to perform a post-impact assessment of the effect NASA’s DART spacecraft has on as asteroid that it’s designed to essentially smash into at high velocity. Hera is intended to navigate around the asteroid autonomously while collecting data to help scientists back here on Earth understand whether their ambitious plan has been successful, in terms of using a human-made spacecraft to intentionally impact with an asteroid and change its trajectory through space.

The CubeSats will inspect the asteroid close-up once deployed from Hera – including a potential interior probe with a radar array, the first of its kind for an asteroid body. All told, Hera and its CubeSate companions will be spending six months studying the asteroids following their encounter with DART.

NASA’s mission is set to launch sometime in July, 2021, and will arrive at the pair of asteroids – called the ‘Didymos’ pair – in September the following year. The ESA’s Hera mission is set to launch in October 2024, and then rendezvous with the asteroids in 2026, so there will be a considerable gap between the impact and Hera’s close-up study – time during which its effects should hopefully be apparent.

The tech industry has become known as a place that is predominantly white and male. Contrary to the misguided popular belief, it’s not a pipeline problem as much as it’s a retention problem.

Black Tech Pipeline, aims to debunk that myth and help support Black technologists along their respective journeys. Black Tech Pipeline, founded by Pariss Athena, has three key offerings: a job board where anyone can pay to be featured, a recruitment and consulting service and connections to potential speakers for events.

“The goal of Black Tech Pipeline is to bring exposure to the existing community of Black technologists,” Athena said. “We are focused on those who are here because we want to shine a light on the whole ‘pipeline problem’ not being real. We’ve been in the industry. We exist in it. We’ve been here for years. We’re seniors, we’re mid-level, we’re a range. But we also want to create this ripple effect for those who are outside of the industry to show them you have a community of people who look like you and are here to support you through your journey.”

Currently, there are nearly 700 Black technologists in the database. As of July, 8.66% of candidates had zero years of experience, 37.33% had one to two years’ worth of experience, 27.33% had two to three years of experience, 22% had five to 10 years of experience and 10.5% had 10-plus years of experience.

Companies featured on the job board are paying customers of Black Tech Pipeline. That means they get a customized landing page where they can describe the roles they have available, as well as detail their values, how the company thinks about diversity and inclusion, and more. These companies will also be featured in Black Tech Pipeline’s newsletter and social media platforms, which has a combined following of more than 40,000 people.

“We want to give a very transparent view of what it means to work there as someone who is most likely going to be the minority in the workplace,” Athena said.

Athena landed on the idea to create a database of Black technologists after she was laid off from her first job as a software engineer and became more active on Twitter.

“When I got on, I noticed there was a really tiny community of Black technologists, which was interesting, because, at least out here in Boston — and I’m sure this is everywhere — but not only have I always been the only software engineer on the development team, but literally the only Black person in the entire company ever since I entered this industry,” Athena said.

“So because I rarely saw people who look like me, I just figured we weren’t really in this industry, so when I saw that we were a few of us, I was like, ‘Oh, cool, I wonder how many more of us are out there?’ And I had put out a tweet asking what does Black Twitter in tech look like? And that tweet, unexpectedly, went semi-viral and lots of Black technologists from all over the world posted themselves into the tweet, and it created this super long thread of their pictures and captioning what they do in the industry. And overnight, it really formed this movement and community of Black tech Twitter.”

That same week, employers began reaching out to Athena, asking her to help them recruit Black people, she said. Despite not having any recruiting experience, Athena agreed to help. She developed a talent database in order to connect candidates with employers, as well as an accompanying application that automatically filters into the database.

In its earlier days, Athena said she noticed that while many of the candidates were being hired, a lot of them weren’t being retained.

“So there was just this retention problem,” she said. “And as someone who has always been the only Black person in predominantly white spaces, I knew what was going on.”

That’s what led Athena to create a consultant package and start charging companies. Anytime a candidate would get hired through her efforts, she would conduct biweekly check-ins during the first 90 days to see how they’re doing.

“That was my way of ensuring that I didn’t send them somewhere harmful,” Athena said. “And with their consent and safety in mind, I would relay the feedback that they gave me to the employer.”

The goal with that is to help employers improve their work culture, as well as the systems and processes that have bias baked into them. Initially, Athena was doing this for free and operating simply out of her Twitter direct messages. Athena has since started charging companies for these services as part of her company, Black Tech Pipeline.

Despite all the effort Athena has put into Black Tech Pipeline, this is not yet her full-time job, but she wants it to be. Ideally, she would be focused more on the consultation piece.

“I really love the fact that I get to be this almost external HR, but for the candidate and not for the company,” she said. “So, I’m not here to protest the company and make sure it looks good no matter how much harm they’re doing. I’m here to make sure this person is having a good experience, and if not, I’m going to hold you accountable and we’re going to work on it. So that’s really what I want to do — make change and hold people to their word. I don’t want to work with anyone that’s going to be performative.”

Of the 12 companies she’s worked with so far, there have been nine hires. Technically, there have been more, but Athena said she doesn’t count the ones where people have been hired but haven’t stayed for very long. Part of that retention problem, she said, reflects a couple of issues she’s had with larger companies.

One of those issues is there being a disconnect between the folks at the company who really do want to implement change and the higher-ups who feel less inclined to do so, Athena said. Another one is that some folks who have been hired have experienced microaggressions that made them want to leave.

“And so when those things happen, I’m reporting it to the manager but they don’t know how to move forward with it,” Athena said. “They’ll say it’s not substantial enough or say it was coincidental. When I cannot get through to employers like that, I finish out my contract with them by doing the check-ins and reporting feedback, but I don’t dive in to look at their current processes and see where they can improve. I don’t do that anymore for those types of employers. So I just finish out the contract and move on.”

ZenHub, the popular project management solution for GitHub users, today announced the launch of its new features for automating hand-offs between teams. The idea behind Automated Workflows, as it is called, is to remove some of the manual busywork of updating multiple boards across teams when a new patch is ready to go to testing, for example (or when it fails those tests and the development team has to fix it).

As ZenHub founder and CEO Aaron Upright told me, Automated Workflows are only the first step in the company’s journey from not just being the most integrated service on GitHub but also the most automated.

Teams still struggle with the mechanics of agile project management, he noted. “Things like what frameworks to choose. How to organize their projects. You talk to small companies and teams, you talk to large companies — it’s a problem for everyone, where people don’t know if they should be Scrum, or Kanban or how to organize Sprint planning meetings.” What ZenHub wants to do is remove as many of these friction points as possible and automate them for teams.

It’s starting with the hand-off between teams because that’s one of the pain points its customers are struggling with all the time. And since teams tend to have their own projects and workspaces, the ZenHub team had to build a solution that worked across a company’s various boards.

The result is a new tool that is pretty much a drag-and-drop service that automatically creates notifications and moves items between workplaces as they move from QA to production, for example.

“It’s a way to automate work between different workspaces,” explained Upright. “And we’re really excited about this being kind of the first step in our automation journey.”

Over time, Upright expects, the team will be able to use machine learning to understand more about the connections that its users are making between teams. Using that data, its systems may be able to also recommend workflows as well.

The next part of ZenHub’s focus on automation will be a tool for managing the Sprint planning process.

“Already today’s, ZenHub is capturing things like velocity. We’re measuring that on a team by team basis. We understand the priority of issues in our workflow. What we want to be able to do is allow teams to automatically set a Sprint schedule, say, for example, every two weeks. Then, based on the velocity that we know about your team, maybe your team can accomplish 50 story points every two weeks — we want to auto-build that Sprint for you.”

Desktop Metal is one of the most interesting startups to come out of Boston in some time, with a technology designed to “print metal.” That’s a potentially huge expansion for the 3D printing market, where flexible polymers are the norm, a material that limits the kinds of products that these machines can produce. Little surprise then that the company caught the eye of a SPAC a few weeks ago and if all goes well, will begin publicly trading later this year.

This morning, the SPAC (called Trine) and startup have filed their latest financial and shareholders report with the SEC, giving us some sense of who the big VC winners are here.

First, let’s take a look at Desktop Metal’s preferred share price since its Series A back in 2015. The company has seen its price soar over the past five years, from $0.53 for its Series A to just slightly more than $10 for its Series E shares it sold last year.

According to its filing, Desktop Metal’s largest VC investors are NEA with 17.66% ownership, Lux with 11.59%, Kleiner with 11.10%, GV (formerly Google Ventures) at 8.89%, Northern Trust with 6.96% and KDT, a Koch Industries subsidiary, with 5.89%.

Desktop Metal is valued at $1.83 billion of the total $2.5 billion SPAC price. The difference in those two figures comes from the $305 million of capital held by the SPAC and $275 million in a private investment into the company that will be conducted as part of the acquisition, along with fees and some other ancillary financials.

What does that look like from a returns perspective? Desktop Metal raised six rounds of capital (Series A through Series E & E-1), raising a total of $438 million according to the company’s filings. Using the numbers from these filings, we can do some back-of-the-envelope math to make some rough guesses at how the individual funds returned on their investment.

The biggest overall winner in terms of multiples on investment is Kleiner Perkins, which sits at a roughly 10x return on its full investment into the company. Kleiner took a fifth of the Series A, putting in roughly $3 million. It then proceeded to double down in the Series B, where it invested approximately $13 million, before tapering off its pro rata in later rounds. Given that its $20.4 million in invested capital is skewed toward the earliest rounds, that drove up its return multiple.

NEA, perhaps owing to its larger fund scale, constantly invested in the company across all of its rounds, ultimately investing about $57 million. It invested in Desktop Metal through its seed program, and also did about 43% of the Series A. It continued to invest heavily across all the company’s growth rounds as well. Ultimately, NEA had a computed multiple on investment of roughly 5.67x.

Finally among early-stage investors, Lux managed to secure a 5.31x return, and it similarly plowed money into the company across all of its rounds, albeit slightly less aggressively than NEA, ultimately investing about $40 million into Desktop Metal.

Heading over to the growth investors, GV started investing in the Series C round and invested a total of about $65 million across the later stage, securing a return of 2.5x. Northern Trust came in on the Series D and netted 1.6x, and KDT of Koch Industries ended up with about 1.44x through its mezzanine capital infusion.

This includes all investors with more than 5% ownership in the company, per SEC regulations. Approximately $100 million of the company’s $438 million in fundraising is not disclosed on its cap table, so there might be other VCs with swell returns that weren’t obligated to disclose their shares. In addition, I am not including some minor common share stakes held by these venture firms, which are small enough to not radically change their return profile.

Desktop Metal’s quick appreciation in value over just five years will also give these firms very strong IRRs for their investments.

Given that Desktop Metal is heading to the public markets through a SPAC, all of these investors have an option to sell their stakes or hold on to them going forward. If they hold and Desktop Metal performs well, their stakes could increase dramatically in value, driving much higher returns. The reverse is naturally also true. Once public, the firms have flexibility on if and when to exit, and that decision will ultimately determine their final realized returns to LPs.

For now though, this is a great checkpoint to see just how successful some of these venture firms were on this deal. Maybe firms can print gold with those 3D printers after all.

Disney has released the first trailer for the second season of The Mandalorian, and it actually provides a lot of plot detail via voice over of a conversation behind main character Mando and someone directing him as to what he should do with The Child (aka Baby Yoda). It sounds like the main action will focus on Mando trying to reunite Baby Yoda with the rest of his species – not without difficulty, of course.

The trailer features a lot of brief glimpses of action, at least one funny child moment, and quick looks at side characters from the first season who are also returning, including Gina Carano’s Cara Dune and Carl Weathers’ Greef Karga. It also brings up some deep Star Wars universe lore, including the longstanding rivalry between Mandalorians and self-style galactic protectors the Jedi.

It looks plenty entertaining, and there are X-Wings. I can’t wait for this to arrive starting October 30 on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+.

Robotics generally have seen an increase in interest during the pandemic, so it makes perfect sense that investors are taking a closer look at autonomous drone delivery. That’s good news for Volansi, which just announced a $50 million Series B.

The round, led by Icon Ventures, brings the Bay Area-based startup’s total funding up to around $75 million. Also involved are existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and YCombinator, as well as new names, Harpoon Ventures and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund.

Volansi (nee Volans-i) has been demonstrating its drones’ long-range capabilities for some time now. We wrote about them back in 2017, when they showed off a 100-mile flight — an impressive feat given the restrictions of most traditional drones. These days the company’s primary drones are the Voly C10, which can move 10 pounds up to 50 miles and the M20, which the company claims has a 350 mile range, hitting speeds of up to 75 MPH.

A key application here is the delivery of medical supplies. The drones middle-mile drones are capable of traversing terrain that might be difficult or impossible to travel through more traditional ground methods. Current clients include both enterprise and government departments. This new round of funding will go toward increasing headcount, launching new projects and advancing existing initiatives in the U.S. and emerging markets.

Viacom-owned streaming service CBS All Access is becoming Paramount+, the company announced this morning. The name change, which will take place next year, aims to better reflect the expanded content lineup that has joined the service following the Viacom-CBS merger in 2019, including content from brands like BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Smithsonian Channel, TV Land, VH1, Paramount Pictures, and other sports programming. In addition, Paramount+ will expand internationally in 2021, initially to markets like Australia, Latin America and the Nordics.

ViacomCBS’ plans to rebrand the service were previously known. The company earlier this year had told investors a rebranded and expanded service would arrive sometime the summer. It later pushed that timeframe back to 2021, but continued to roll out new content.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish had earlier described the company’s plans for the expanded service as one which would allow it to showcase the company’s biggest franchises and deep library, but also one that would leverage the company’s IP for original content, as it has already done now with its multiple “Star Trek” series and “The Good Wife” spin-off “The Good Fight,” for example. The rebranded service would also continue to promote the company’s sports offerings, including its continual airing of NFL games as well as those from other leagues, like the NCAA and PGA.

All this would run on CBS All Access’ existing tech platform, not a new service built from scratch.

Today, ViacomCBS notes that the new service Paramount+ will also feature an expanded array of originals. This includes “The Offer,” a scripted limited series about the making of “The Godfather;” CIA spy drama “Lioness” created by Taylor Sheridan; a reimagined version of MTV’s “Behind the Music,” that will focus on the past 40 years; a true crime docuseries “The Real Criminal Minds,” based on the fictional TV hit; and a revival of BET’s “The Game.”

These shows will join previously announced plans for new kids original series “Kamp Koral,” from Nickelodeon’s “Spongebob Squarepants,” and the service’s plan to be the SVOD home for “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run.”

Paramount+ will also continue to feature existing originals, like “The Good Fight,” “The Twilight Zone,” Tooning Out the News,” “No Activity,” Why Women Kill,” “Interrogation,” “The Thomas John Experience,” “Tell Me a Story,” “Star Trek: Discovery,” “Star Trek: Picard,” “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” as well as upcoming series “The Stand,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “The Harper House,” “Guilty Party,” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”

The company says the broader lineup from this summer has already impacted the service’s viewership and demographics. Following the addition of the new content, including over 3,500 episodes of TV from across ViacomCBS’ brands, CBS All Access broke its records for total monthly streams in August and saw one of its best-ever months for new subscribers. These users were also measurably younger than the service’s overall average subscriber age, thanks in part to the addition of UEFA and other content.

As CBS All Access nears its 2021 rebrand to Paramount+, it will further expand its content lineup to reach more than 30,000 episodes and movies and continue to develop new originals from brands including BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and others.

“Paramount is an iconic and storied brand beloved by consumers all over the world, and it is synonymous with quality, integrity and world-class storytelling,” said Bob Bakish, President and CEO, ViacomCBS, in a statement about the changes. “With Paramount+, we’re excited to establish one global streaming brand in the broad-pay segment that will draw on the sheer breadth and depth of the ViacomCBS portfolio to offer an extraordinary collection of content for everyone to enjoy.”

Paramount+, notably, is also the latest to embrace the plus sign (+) suffix as part of its branding, following the launch of newer streaming services like Disney+, Apple TV+, ESPN+, TiVo+, and just yesterday, the kids-focused media catalog, Amazon Kids+. It’s unclear, however, if the name “Paramount” will resonate with prized younger viewers as much as the company hopes, or if this general trend toward adding a “plus” sign is helping these services truly carve out their own space.

ViacomCBS didn’t announce any plans to change pricing when the new service goes live.

In Q2 2020, ViacomCBS said its domestic paid streaming services, including CBS All Access and Showtime, had reached 16.2 million subscribers, up 74% year-over-year. CBS All Access had also broke its own records for paid subscribers, streams and minutes watched in the quarter.