Month: September 2020

A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found.

The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone’s contact lists to see if their friends and family members are registered to vote. The app uploads and matches the user’s contacts with voter data supplied from TargetSmart, a political marketing firm that claims to have files on over 191 million Americans.

When a match is found, the app displays the voter’s name, age and birthday, and which recent election they voted in. This, the app says, helps users “find people you know and encourage them to get involved.”

But The App Analyst, a mobile expert who detailed his findings on his eponymous blog, found that he could trick the app into pulling in any voter’s information simply by creating a contact on his phone with the voter’s name.

Worse, he told TechCrunch, the app pulls in a lot more data than it actually displays. By intercepting the data that flows in and out of the device, he saw far more detailed — and sensitive — voter information, including the voter’s home address, date of birth, gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation, such as Republican or Democrat.

The Biden campaign fixed the bug and pushed out an app update on Friday.

“We were made aware about how our third party app developer was providing additional fields of information from commercially available data that was not needed,” Matt Hill, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, told TechCrunch. “We worked with our vendor quickly to fix the issue and remove the information. We are committed to protecting the privacy of our staff, volunteers and supporters and will always work with our vendors to do so.”

A spokesperson for TargetSmart said a “limited amount of publicly or commercially available data” was accessible to other users.

It’s not uncommon for political campaigns to trade and share large amounts of voter information, called voter files, which includes basic information like a voter’s name and which political parties they are registered with. Though a lot of this data is public, political firms try to enrich their databases with additional data from other sources to help political campaigns identify and target key swing voters.

But several security lapses involving these vast banks of data have questioned whether political firms can keep this data safe.

It’s not the first time TargetSmart has been embroiled in a data leak. In 2017, a voter file compiled by TargetSmart on close to 600,000 voters in Alaska was left on an exposed server without a password. And in 2018, TechCrunch reported that close to 15 million records on Texas voters were found on an exposed and unsecured server, just months ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Last week Microsoft warned that hackers backed by Russia, China and Iran are targeting both the 2020 presidential campaigns but also their political advisors. Reuters reported that one of those firms, Washington DC-based SKDKnickerbocker, a political consultant to the Biden campaign, was targeted by Russian intelligence but that there was “no breach.”

For founders who have a startup idea — but few engineering skills to make it a reality — making the team’s first technical hire can be a daunting task.

Nontechnical founders will face greater challenges when it comes to sourcing and recruiting engineering talent, but another factor that raises the stakes: They must often act quickly to find someone who could very well end up with co-founder status.

We interviewed a handful of startup founders and technical leaders to get their thoughts about how nontechnical founders should approach the hiring process for engineer no. 1.

Their advice spanned how to handle technical interviews, sourcing technical talent, how to decide whether your first engineering hire should become CTO — and how to best kick the can down the road if you’re not ready to start worrying about bringing on an engineer quite yet. Everyone I spoke to was quick to caution that their tips weren’t one-size-fits-all and that overcoming limited knowledge often comes down to tapping the right people to help you out and lend a greater understanding of your options.

I’ve broken down these tips into a digestible guide that’s focused on four areas:

• Sourcing technical candidates.
• How to conduct interviews.
• Making an offer.
• Taking a nontraditional route.

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Sourcing technical candidates

Knowing what you’re looking for obviously depends a good deal on what you need. Founders have more flexibility if they’re just aiming to get engineers on board so they can get an MVP out the door, but technical expertise is only part of the equation if you’re aiming to hire for someone that may end up being a co-founder or CTO.

The robotics industry is having a major moment amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s true that category has been an exciting target for investments for a number of years now, but labor issues and concerns over transmission have led many sectors to take a good, long look at automation.

Meal preparation is a prime target. It’s an essential service and one that finds human hands coming into direct content with food. Leipzig, Germany-based DaVinci Kitchen is looking to tackle issues around food preparation with the launch of a modular robotic kiosk that cooks Italian-themed pasta dishes.

In 2018, German incubator 2b AHEAD Ventures assembled the team that would become DaVinci to address concerns around labor shortages in the food preparation industry.

“The catering industry is gigantic,” CTO Ibrahim Elfaramawy told TechCrunch on a call ahead of the startup’s participation in Disrupt Battlefield. “Everyone has to eat. We see our clients struggling to find qualified personnel. The jobs are getting tougher, the pay is not increasing, unfortunately. A lot of restaurant owners are looking for solutions to increase their capabilities and quality. Robots can work 24/7. This is the opportunity that we see and many of our clients are excited about it.”

The first batch of robots will focus on pasta — a relatively easily prepared dish with universal appeal. The machine creates the pasta, cooks and serves it all in around six minutes, according to Elfaramawy. It can prepare two dishes simultaneously and cleans the dishes in around 20-30 seconds.

The system is modular, so the machine can potentially be outfitted to prepare other foodstuff, including salads or prepare different takes on the pasta theme, swapping Italian style for an Asian dish, for example.

Thus far, the small company has raised around $780,000 in a seed round, courtesy of 2b AHEAD and Rheine-based frozen food company, Apetito, which is also one of DaVinci’s first clients. The startup is also in the process of raising a Series A with a target of $1.7 million. Its first kiosks are on track to be delivered in late-2020 or early 2021, depending on COVID-19’s impact on the company’s supply chains. The first batch will include 10 machines.

The company is targeting restaurants and food courts, which can buy or lease the robots.

GoodRx is a rare breed of modern tech IPO: a startup that is actually profitable and heading to the public markets. The consumer service offers coupons on prescriptions redeemable at pharmacies that can save customers significant money on their monthly drug prices.

The company filed an amended S-1 with the SEC this morning, and that included three pieces of news that hadn’t previously been reported.

First and most significantly, the company notes in its filing that it is offering its two co-founders, Douglas Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, approximately 25 million in stock, at what the company placed as a fair-market value of $533.3 million. That stock has both a time-based component and a performance-based component, and is designed to incentivize the duo to commit to the company for the long-term.

Unlike most startups exiting these days, the two founders hold very little ownership of their company, with both Hirsch and Bezdek owning just a 1.3% stake in GoodRx prior to the IPO. The equity award — if fully realized — would roughly quadruple their individual stakes in the company.

This so-called “Founders Award” wasn’t included in the company’s initial prospectus. While companies typically offer stock grants, and sometimes bountiful stock grants, to key managers and employees, the scale of the offer here is quite high compared to the norm. That might reflect feedback from equity investors who were concerned that the founders had such diminutive stake in their own company compared to other recent technology IPO issues.

In addition to the equity award, the second bit of news is that growth equity investor Silver Lake is going to buy a $100 million stake in GoodRx through a private placement that will be set to the IPO price. Silver Lake currently owns 35.3% of GoodRx through its previous private equity investment into the company in 2018. The additional $100 million in capital will help the fund build up its position as GoodRx enters the public markets. The agreement was signed yesterday according to the company’s filing.

These “beat-the-IPO-buzzer” private placements have been a common pattern in recent weeks. Similar to Silver Lake here, Salesforce Ventures and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway each invested $250 million into cloud data platform Snowflake in a private placement. For Berkshire, that was a first foray into an unprofitable technology company.

Third and finally, the company has noted that it quietly bought Scriptcycle, a prescription management service for retail chains, for $60.1 million back on August 31. The Asheville, North Carolina-based startup has just a handful of employees according to LinkedIn. As part of the terms of the acquisition, employees and managers are expected to receive $3 million of new stock in GoodRx, vesting over two years.

Altogether then, GoodRx’s filing indicated that it is targeting a share price of $28 for a maximum offering size of about $1.1 billion.

GoodRx is a rare breed of modern tech IPO: a startup that is actually profitable and heading to the public markets. The consumer service offers coupons on prescriptions redeemable at pharmacies that can save customers significant money on their monthly drug prices.

The company filed an amended S-1 with the SEC this morning, and that included three pieces of news that hadn’t previously been reported.

First and most significantly, the company notes in its filing that it is offering its two co-founders, Douglas Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek, approximately 25 million in stock, at what the company placed as a fair-market value of $533.3 million. That stock has both a time-based component and a performance-based component, and is designed to incentivize the duo to commit to the company for the long-term.

Unlike most startups exiting these days, the two founders hold very little ownership of their company, with both Hirsch and Bezdek owning just a 1.3% stake in GoodRx prior to the IPO. The equity award — if fully realized — would roughly quadruple their individual stakes in the company.

This so-called “Founders Award” wasn’t included in the company’s initial prospectus. While companies typically offer stock grants, and sometimes bountiful stock grants, to key managers and employees, the scale of the offer here is quite high compared to the norm. That might reflect feedback from equity investors who were concerned that the founders had such diminutive stake in their own company compared to other recent technology IPO issues.

In addition to the equity award, the second bit of news is that growth equity investor Silver Lake is going to buy a $100 million stake in GoodRx through a private placement that will be set to the IPO price. Silver Lake currently owns 35.3% of GoodRx through its previous private equity investment into the company in 2018. The additional $100 million in capital will help the fund build up its position as GoodRx enters the public markets. The agreement was signed yesterday according to the company’s filing.

These “beat-the-IPO-buzzer” private placements have been a common pattern in recent weeks. Similar to Silver Lake here, Salesforce Ventures and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway each invested $250 million into cloud data platform Snowflake in a private placement. For Berkshire, that was a first foray into an unprofitable technology company.

Third and finally, the company has noted that it quietly bought Scriptcycle, a prescription management service for retail chains, for $60.1 million back on August 31. The Asheville, North Carolina-based startup has just a handful of employees according to LinkedIn. As part of the terms of the acquisition, employees and managers are expected to receive $3 million of new stock in GoodRx, vesting over two years.

Altogether then, GoodRx’s filing indicated that it is targeting a share price of $28 for a maximum offering size of about $1.1 billion.

Earth observation has grown from government-run missions to a crucial everyday business tool, but it still has room to grow. Specifically, into the thermal infrared spectrum, if startup Satellite Vu gets itself into orbit. The company plans to be able to monitor the heat signatures of most of the planet’s buildings with a satellite constellation built for the purpose.

Presenting today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, Satellite Vu co-founder and CEO Anthony Baker explained the huge market for anyone who can tell with precision how much heat is being emitted by buildings, fields and other features.

Heat could indicate poor insulation, for one thing, and a waste of energy on HVAC. It could show the true (not reported) hours of operation at a factory or mine. It could track burning natural gas or waste emissions from refineries. With a resolution of 3 to 4 meters — an order of magnitude or more better than what’s out there — it might even be able to estimate the attendance of outdoor events or, for that matter, troop concentration in warfare. And of course it can do all this in the dark of night.

Baker told TechCrunch that he felt the Earth observation business, despite producing successful endeavors like Planet, still had lots of room to grow.

“Planet and Google Maps, they can show you what’s going on on the outside of a building. We can show you what’s going on inside,” he explained.

The tech behind it is both new and old. Infrared detection goes back decades, but doing so from orbit to within a fraction of a degree, and at this level of detail, is a very different proposition. The tech Satellite Vu is based on began as an Oxford-developed sensor for the Lunar Trailblazer orbiter that would look for water on the Moon’s surface; the company has an exclusive license to it.

“We took the sensor and space-hardened it, and did all the ‘new space’ stuff,” i.e. things like miniaturization and power optimization, Baker said. The problem with making the device smaller and more efficient, though, is “it affects the image — distorts it and blurs it. So we found a way to deal with that.”

 

Satellite Vu follows in the footsteps of Apple, Google and others, which in attempts to improve their smartphone cameras have found that there’s precious little improvement to be gotten out of the hardware, and instead focused on the software.

Like those of tech companies, Satellite Vu’s system collects information from dozens of sequential images and interprets that into an improved single one.

“We stack the images, and we can get a higher resolution, get rid of aberrations in it, do lots of other things. And it’s all patentable,” Baker added.

The result is a remarkably cheap satellite: maybe $15 million, and the company only needs 7 to get the worldwide coverage it plans to offer. For comparison, Baker said, the European Space Agency just greenlit a €500M project that would collect thermal imagery at a 30-meter resolution (smaller is better).

Competition in Earth observation is strong, but in this particular niche it’s practically non-existent in the commercial space. Planet’s satellites can see near-infrared spectra, but that’s not enough to get detailed heat data. There are military satellites and some from NASA or ESA, but they tend to be old, special-purpose, classified, or all three. Getting regular thermal imagery from orbit from a commercial provider isn’t really a possibility. Drones and high altitude flights are an option but not quite the same thing. And while there are a couple startups looking to get into the same domain, there’s probably room for everyone.

“It appeals to a lot of people, and government agencies around the world want a commercial source for this data,” Baker said. “The easiest market is probably ESG [environmental, social and governance] and green financing. Everyone is investing in green materials and stocks, but how do you know they’re green? No one’s counting. But we can measure it.”

Compliance with environmental law is difficult to monitor, and as new rules are established, new methods for making sure people abide by them are much in demand. It’s also helpful for companies that, for instance, are making voluntary efforts to go green and need an objective record that shows, for example, that their buildings are heated or cooled at certain efficiencies or that their datacenters operate at certain capacities and hours.

The clear demand for this service makes the daunting “We’re building a satellite” business model a little less daunting for investors. “They want to know where you’re going to make your first dollar. So if customers are willing to put money on the table, VCs will too,” Baker said. Right now the company is operating on grant money, but will soon need the kind of cash those programs don’t tend to part with all at once.

The immediate plan is to demonstrate the sensor in a series of flights using traditional aircraft, after which customers will, Baker hopes at least, start throwing money at them. Letters of intent (of which Satellite Vu has eight figures worth) are all well and good, but nothing beats a good old fashioned contract.

The best news is that launch costs, which might have grounded a company like this a few years ago, are now down to record lows.

“Elon’s deal for small satellites is just amazing. 200 kilos for a million dollars? That’s $5,000 a kilo — I’ve bought rockets in my career for $50,000 a kilo,” Baker said.

By going to a standard orbit on a ride share with SpaceX’s own Starlink launches, Satellite Vu keeps costs low and can break even with just one or two of its birds in the air. As with visible-spectrum orbital imagery, applications tend to emerge once the data starts coming out, so the company hopes diversify its offerings once it shows the capabilities of its constellation.

Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd wants to build a truly timeless company.

“You can never disrupt the need for humans to connect. And the other thing that you can never disrupt is the need for women to feel respected and to feel equal and to feel safe and empowered in those connections. And those are truly the two things that we as a group seek to do,” Wolfe Herd said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020. “We truly believe that as long as there are women on planet Earth — which there would be no planet Earth without them — we believe we will be in business.”

The statement from the executive highlighted a broader point she was making about Bumble’s untapped market opportunities and how she stacks the company up against its competitors.

“We aren’t sitting comparing ourselves to anybody else in the space, and candidly, we don’t really see just the dating space as our competition,” Wolfe Herd told TechCrunch. “We truly believe that our [lifetime value] opportunity is so exponential and that we can serve our audience in so many deep rooted ways beyond dating.”

Wolfe Herd has had a busy year. In late 2019 the Bumble founder took control of a broader suite of dating apps from her founding partner Andrey Andreev. Wolfe Herd now leads not only the Bumble app, but is also in charge of the Badoo, Lumen and Chappy dating apps. The dating app empire was last valued at $3 billion following Andreev’s stock sale to Blackstone.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the company was aiming for a 2021 debut on the public markets, targeting a valuation north of $6 billion. In July, Fast Company reported that Bumble now has 100 million users.

Wolfe Herd has had to deal with leading a larger team through 2020 and a pandemic that has greatly complicated the logistics of dating, complicating user habits and leading the team to make new updates to meet shifting consumer demands.

Even with all of the changes, Wolfe Herd says the app has found new opportunities.

“With the increased demand for connectivity and for people to have an outlet to meet new people paired with this almost secondary pandemic, which is loneliness, we are very well positioned to be an incredibly durable business during this time,” Wolfe Herd says.

While SpaceX and its ilk in the commercial rocket launch market have changed the economics of space and ushered in an era of small satellite entrepreneurship, the actual rocket engine technology they use isn’t that different from what was in use 50 years ago when NASA was making its first forays into outer space.

Firehawk Aerospace, a new startup founded by CEO Will Edwards and Chairman and Chief Scientists Ron Jones, wants to change that with a stable, cost-effective hybrid rocket fuel that employs additive manufacturing (industrial-scale 3D printing) to overcome the hurdles and limitations of previous hybrid fuel engine designs.

Hybrid rockets themselves – ones that use a combination of solid fuel and liquid oxidizer – aren’t new, but they have always faced significant limitations in terms of their performance metrics and maximum thrust power. Jones, a longtime rocket propulsion researcher and aerospace structures and advanced composite engineer, has been fascinated with engine technology and how to overcome the limits of past hybrid engine designs, while also retaining the benefits – including safety and cost.

Jones had been very interested in physics and engineering through high school and college, but ultimately joined the Navy and became an aviator before later coming back around to working in the aerospace industry. Meanwhile, he took advantage of the advent of the internet in its early days to begin diving deeper into his early love of rocketry, specifically researching hybrid engine technology and trading notes with experts all around the world.

“Ultimately, I came up with two concepts together,” Jones told me in an interview. “One is that they were using the wrong fuel – the fuel they were using was too elastic. Once you put it under pressure, it’s going to reverberate, and it’s not very strong so as it gets thinner, it will essentially break off chunks, and you lose a lot of fuel. So I switched that to a structurally very hard polymer. And second, I could see that they’re molding in casting just wasn’t a good idea. I switched that out to additive manufacturing.”

With additive manufacturing, which builds up a structure over time by extruding material, instead of pouring a liquid into a form and allowing it to harden, you can do things that are impossible with molding, including building up intentional, very structured internals. If you’ve ever seen at-home consumer 3D printing, it’s like the criss-cross patter you see in larger solids to provide rigidity or support to the external surfaces. That turned out to unlock a lot of potential for solid rocket fuel pellets.

“With additive manufacturing, I was able to do something no one else had done before. And that is to create a highly engineered internal structure that you can’t do with molding,” he said. “With those internal structures, we’ve been able to greatly improve the performance of the rocket engine, making it very reliable and also very safe, and these were the primary attributes that I was going after.”

Firehawk now holds five patents related to its 3D printing of rocket fuel, and it has already conducted 32 engine hot fire tests at both 200 lbs and 500 lbs of thrust to verify that its design actually works. The startup is also working on an engine capable of 5,000 lbs of thrust (roughly equivalent to Rocket Lab Electron’s second stage), which it plans to begin testing later this year at a new facility it’s building for the purpose.

As mentioned, current launch companies are already operating using much older, but still effective, rocket technology. So why bother with a new type of hybrid engine design? For a number of reasons, but efficiency and safety are chief among them.

Firehawk’s fuel can be stored, transported and handled much more safely, since it’s not susceptible to accidental detonation when the fuel and oxidizer are separate. It’s also non-toxic, and only produces exhaust that Firehawk says is “environmentally benign.” Safe handling of existing rocket fuel options for large launch vehicles requires a lot of special care and safety, as well as training, all of which adds up to time and expense.

Firehawk can also provide custom engine designs in between 4 to 6 months, it says, whereas typical new rocket engine development based on existing technology usually takes between 5 to 7 years. That time savings also adds up to significant budget savings – on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars – meaning new and better rockets can be iterated more quickly, without long useful lifetimes required between generations to recoup initial R&D costs.

The fuel can also be stored and transported over long durations, and even potentially stopped and restarted mid-flight, all of which means that longer and more complex missions can be accomplished at far lower costs than ever before. Obviously, the potential has sparked a lot of interest from both potential commercial and government customers, according to CEO Edwards.

Earlier this year, Firehawk Aerospace closed a $2 million seed round, from investors including Victorum Capital, Achieve Capital, and Harlow Capital Management, and they’re currently looking to grow the team, particular with driven engineers looking to work on the future of rocket propulsion. It’s also in process with a number of potential partners and letters of intent for commercialization of its technology.

Congratulations, you landed your Series A round. What’s next? Your Series B, and a lot of twists and turns. Yasmin Razavi of Spark Capital and Elliott Robinson of Bessemer are joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 (happening right now!) to talk about how early stage founders should think about landing growth stage venture capital money.

Elliott Robinson is a partner in the San Francisco office where he focuses primarily on growth investments in SaaS and cloud companies. He co-authors Bessemer’s iconic 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and the annual State of the Cloud Report. He looks to partner with companies and management teams that are defining their market category while also maintaining a set of core values that will allow them to grow their leadership position. Elliott is currently a board member for Hyperscience and a board observer for Hinge Health.

Razavi is a general Partner at Spark Capital, who’s logged time at Snapchat, Index Ventures and McKinsey.

Growth stage investing, as both investors agree, has evolved massively over the past 20 years, in terms of definition and dollar size. To make sense of it, we’re going to discuss tips and tactics on how to bridge the gap between seed and institutional investors. What metrics should you be thinking about? How should you view your Series B investor versus your seed investor?

If a pre-seed investment is like a marriage, what’s an equally intense metaphor for Series D investments? In a post SoftBank world, late stage investment is forever changed in a way that could be confusing to understand. Razavi and Robinson combine to bring a fascinating perspective to an evolving area of venture capital investment.

And yes, we’ll talk about COVID, too.

Grab your pass today to attend Disrupt to check out this session and so much more. You will also get access to the CrunchMatch platform after registering so you can start networking right away with the TechCrunch community. Get your pass here.

 

GM will reveal its GMC -branded electric Hummer on October 20, the same day that the company will also begin taking customer reservations for the new vehicle that it describes as a “super truck.”

The Hummer EV debut, which was originally scheduled to occur May 20 and delayed due to COVID-19, is one of 20 electric vehicles GM intends to deliver by 2023.

Not much is known about the Hummer EV, although the automaker has released a few specs, including that it will produce the equivalent of 1,000 horsepower, have a 0 to 60 mph acceleration of 3 seconds and 11,500 feet of torque. A GM spokesperson confirmed that the company plans to begin producing the GMC Hummer in late 2021.

A video released Monday promoting the upcoming unveiling also reveals that the Hummer will have a so-called “crab mode,” a feature that will allow the vehicle to move diagonally. Crab mode is the kind of gee whiz feature aimed directly at off-roading customers and another way to differentiate it from other rough-and-tumble future EVs such as Rivian’s electric pickup and SUV and Tesla’s Cybertruck.

The Hummer EV will be produced at its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant in Michigan. GM previously announced plans to invest $2.2 billion into its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant to produce all-electric trucks and SUVs, as well as a self-driving vehicle unveiled by its subsidiary Cruise.

Here’s the video: