Month: September 2020

Lidar startup Ouster has spent the past several years expanding and improving its line of sensors as it jostles for a piece of the crowded and competitive market place. Now, Ouster says it has raised $42 million, fresh capital that will be used to fund product development and ramp up sales.

In short: Ouster is keeping the fight alive and there are signs that the San Francisco-based startup is making progress despite some headwinds. The $42 million Series B round didn’t feature any new investors — existing backers Cox Automotive, Fontinalis Partners and Tao Capital Partners all participated — and it was less than its previous raise of $60 million. Ouster, like many others, also reduced its workforce by 10% due to COVID-19, the company confirmed.

However, it’s worth noting that Ouster managed to close the round in the midst of COVID-19 and has continued to increase sales, even as its San Francisco-based manufacturing facility was shuttered temporarily due to a COVID-related government shutdown. The business grew enough to avoid further layoffs and to fully pay all employees and temp workers, according to the company. Ouster has raised $140 million to date.

Ouster wouldn’t share specific revenue numbers, but the company said its 12-month revenue has grown 62%, with third-quarter bookings up 209% year-over-year — a stat that makes sense, considering its business model and the expansion of its product line.

Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. Lidar is considered by most in the automated vehicle technology industry a key sensor required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles (with perhaps the exception of Elon Musk and a few others).

Ouster is taking a different technological and business approach than many of its competitors.

The company’s lasers and photodetectors are printed onto two chips using a standard process to produce integrated circuits (known as CMOS to those in the know). Ouster says this allows it to ditch the more common practice of stacking discrete components on top of each other to reach the desired resolution. Ouster argues that its approach results in a less complex sensor that is more reliable and cheaper.

“Ouster’s digital lidar architecture gives us fundamental advantages that are winning over customers in every market we serve. Digital CMOS technology is the future of lidar and Ouster was the first to invent, build, patent, and commercialize digital lidar. Once our customers experience the resolution and reliability of these sensors at an affordable price, there’s no turning back to legacy analog lidar,” Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said in a statement.

In January, Ouster launched its second-generation lidar product line, which includes three different 128-beam sensors to be used for different purposes, including one designed for navigating urban environments and warehouses. The other two sensors include a mid-range model with a 120-meter range and a 45-degree field of view, and a long-range lidar sensor with a more than 200-meter range for high-speed vehicle automation. All three products are currently shipping to customers and are available in 50 different configurations, according to Ouster.

The company’s business model is also slightly different than many others. Instead of targeting automakers or companies trying to commercialize robotaxis, Ouster has cast a wider net to diversify its business. The company is selling its lidar sensors to robotics, drones, mapping, defense, building security, mining and agriculture companies. The company launched in January its second-generation lidar sensors, which included three new 128-beam models that have different applications. The second-generation line is an improvement from its previous 64-beam models, with better resolution.

The strategy has appeared to pay off. Ouster has doubled its customer base since March 2019, according to the company. Today, Ouster says it has 800 customers across 15 markets, including Konecranes, Postmates, Ike, May Mobility, Kodiak Robotics, Coast Autonomous, the U.S. Army, NASA, Stanford University and MIT. Some of that growth has come from sales to Chinese automation companies such as idriverplus, WhaleAI, Hongjing Drive and qCraft.

Despite the growth, Ouster needs the capital to scale, as designing, manufacturing and selling lidar sensors is an expensive undertaking. Ouster has opened offices in Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Suzhou to expand global sales and customer service capabilities. It also has two manufacturing facilities. Its San Francisco facility, which opened in March 2019, is primarily used to introduce new products. Production volumes are lower at this facility. Once the product is validated, they’re transferred to Ouster’s contract manufacturer Benchmark in Southeast Asia.

Benchmark is now producing hundreds to thousands of second-generation sensors per month, according to Ouster.

On the heels of new filings from both Sumo Logic and JFrog, Snowflake, a venture-backed unicorn looking to go public on the strength of its data-focused cloud service, set an initial price range for its IPO.

The $75 to $85 per-share IPO price target values the firm at between $20.9 billion and $23.7 billion, huge sums for the private company. Its IPO could raise more than $2.7 billion for the startup.

Snowflake was last valued at around $12.5 billion when it raised a Series G worth $479 million earlier this year.

Built into those valuation projections are two private placements of stock in Snowflake, $250 million apiece from both Salesforce, the well-known CRM player, and Berkshire Hathaway, better known for its investment returns in the 80s and 90s, Cherry Coke, and Charlie Munger’s humor.

Jokes aside, the inclusion of Salesforce in the IPO is notable, but not a shock, but Berkshire taking part in the public market debut of Snowflake, a company with historic losses that are nigh-tyrannical, is.

Here’s the S-1/A text on the setup:

Immediately subsequent to the closing of this offering, and subject to certain conditions of closing as described in the section titled “Concurrent Private Placements,” each of Salesforce Ventures LLC and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will purchase $250 million of our Class A common stock from us in a private placement at a price per share equal to the initial public offering price. Based on an assumed initial public offering price of $80.00 per share, which is the midpoint of the price range set forth on the cover page of this prospectus, each of Salesforce Ventures LLC and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. would purchase 3,125,000 shares of our Class A common stock. […]

In addition, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has agreed to purchase 4,042,043 shares of our Class A common stock from one of our stockholders in a secondary transaction at a price per share equal to the initial public offering price that will close immediately subsequent to the closing of this offering.

That second paragraph makes it clear that Berkshire is actually looking to snooker even more shares into its corner, for a total purchase price that might scale to more than $500 million.

What is so attractive about Snowflake? TechCrunch wrote a bit about that when the company filed, but the short gist is that it has epic growth, improving gross margins, and dramatically curtailed losses. The package adds up to one valuable IPO, and something durable enough to tempt Buffett.

Regardless, what could be the most highly-valued IPO of the year — Airbnb depending — here in America just got a lot more exciting.

Apple has filed a countersuit against Epic over the latter’s attempt to circumvent App Store rules and avoid paying millions in fees. The lawsuit alleges that Epic is deliberately in breach of contract and asks the court to award damages and prohibit Epic from attempting anything like this again.

A brief refresher: Epic in mid August slipped a new way to buy in-game currency for Fortnite that skipped giving Apple its 30 percent cut, while simultaneously launching a PR campaign calling the company a monopoly and the App Store rules unjust. Apple responded by banning Epic’s accounts from the App Store, making it clear that this action could be avoided by Epic simply removing or adjusting the in-game store. Epic sought to have a court reverse its ban as an unfair business practice by a monopoly that would be proved as such, but only succeeded in having accounts unrelated to Fortnite unlocked.

Epic now seeks to show that Apple is a monopoly and its practices should be deemed unlawful, and Apple aims to show that’s untrue — but at the same time, has now filed this suit alleging wrongdoing by Epic.

“Although Epic portrays itself as a modern corporate Robin Hood, in reality it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing for the tremendous value it derives from the App Store,” writes Apple in its suit.

“While Epic and its CEO take issue with the terms on which Apple has since 2008 provided the App Store to all developers, this does not provide cover for Epic to breach binding contracts, dupe a long-time business partner, pocket commissions that rightfully belong to Apple, and then ask this Court to take a judicial sledgehammer to one of the 21st Century’s most innovative business platforms simply because it does not maximize Epic’s revenues.”

It would not be productive to go over the case in detail just yet, as we are still far from the point where all the companies various claims and counter-claims can be added up and compared. It will be weeks before even the preliminary injunction against Apple is decided, and much paper will be added to the pile before then.

The argument comes down to whether a company like Apple, which certainly exerts total control over its hardware-software ecosystem, qualifies as a monopoly. If it is, then the business practices Epic defied may be unlawful and therefore its flouting them will have been justified. If it isn’t, the countersuit may put Epic in rather a bad spot — not just owing Apple millions but unable to pull this trick again.

The burden of proof on Epic is quite serious here, and current antitrust doctrine doesn’t seem likely to define Apple’s App Store (and Google’s — which Apple is also suing along the same lines) as the act of a monopolist. But even if it fails to prove it and is handed a setback in court, Apple being publicly dragged as a potential monopoly, and having the claims evaluated by a judge — even skeptically — is not a good look.

Apple’s countersuit was inevitable given Epic’s high-profile and pretty much admitted breach of contract, but it raises the stakes nevertheless. The company has not specified the scale of the damages it seeks, but eight digits is probably a safe bet. You can read Apple’s suit below.

Apple Countersuit Against epic by TechCrunch on Scribd

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston will be joining us for a one on one interview at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt happening next week from September 14-18.

Houston has been there and done that as a startup founder. After attending Y Combinator in 2007 and launching at the TechCrunch 50 (the precursor to TechCrunch Disrupt) in 2008, he went on to raise $1.7 billion from firms like Blackrock, Sequoia and Index Ventures before taking his company public in 2018.

Houston and his co-founder Arash Ferdowsi had a simple idea to make it easier to access your stuff on the internet. Instead of carrying your files on a thumb drive or emailing them to yourself, as was the norm at that time, you could have a hard drive in the cloud. This meant that you could log on wherever you were, even when you were not on your own computer, and access your files.

Houston and Ferdowsi wanted to make it dead simple to do this, and in the days before smart phones and tablets,  they achieved that goal and grew a company that reported revenue of $467.4 million — or a run rate of over $1.8 billion — in its most recent earning’s report. Today, Dropbox has a market cap of over $8 billion.

And as we find ourselves in the midst of pandemic, businesses like Houston’s are suddenly hotter than ever, as companies are accelerating their move to the cloud with employees working from home needing access to work files and the ability to share them easily with colleagues in a secure way.

Dropbox has expanded beyond pure consumer file sharing in the years since the company launched with business tools for sharing files with teams, administering and securing them from a central console, and additional tools like a password manager, online vault for important files, full backup and electronic signature and workflow via the purchase of HelloSign last year.

Houston will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 to discuss all of this including how he helped build the company from that initial idea to where it is today, and he will talk about what it takes to achieve the kind of success that every startup founder dreams about. Get your Digital Pro Pass or your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or even a Digital Pass for $45 to hear this session on the Disrupt stage . We hope you’ll join us.

Nintendo has announced a surprise spin-off prequel to its modern classic Breath of the Wild, an action-focused game called Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. You’ll play the role of Link, as usual, but also the four champions and Princess Zelda herself, in attempting (unsuccessfully, as we know) to fight back the hordes of Ganon 100 years before the Switch launch title.

The game, clearly intended to tide over fans ravenous for the recently teased sequel, is developed by Koei Tecmo, which previously made the first Hyrule Warriors game as part of their long running Warriors series of large-scale battle-em-ups. That one, however, was more of a Zelda-themed action game, very much in the old realistic style that Nintendo ditched for a more painterly, stylized one.

Age of Calamity adopts not just the new look, but the characters and setting from Breath of the Wild, meaning it’s a canon entry in the franchise and a direct prequel.

One of the most interesting features of Breath of the Wild was the Princess, who bucked years of tradition by being not just a damsel in distress (though she is that too) but an interesting character unto herself, more so than Link and most of the champions. Her curiosity and scholarly ambition endeared players and made them see that the warrior they were playing was clever and strong, but little more than that — everyone wanted more Zelda.

The sequel may very well scratch that itch, but in the meantime we’ll get to tool around with the Princess in battle mode in this prequel. That’s a rare treat — she was playable in the previous Hyrule Warriors and in a spare handful of other games — and hopefully a taste of things to come.

Although I recently lamented Nintendo’s conservative and disappointing approach to bringing its classic 3D Mario games to modern audiences, Zelda has been successfully reinvented and updated more than once. The Warriors series isn’t known for breaking new ground — it’s really about killing monsters and enemy soldiers by the hundred — but this could prove a valuable addition to one of gaming’s most beloved franchises.

Apple is expanding its investment in podcasts. Today, Apple Books and Oprah announced the launch of “Oprah’s Book Club” podcast, an eight-episode series that will explore themes related to Oprah’s Book Club pick and bestseller, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson. The podcast is the first to cross over from Apple’s streaming TV service, Apple TV+.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg had reported Apple was looking to make original podcasts related to programs on Apple TV+. These podcasts would serve as companions to Apple TV+ content, helping to market the Apple’s growing slate of Apple TV+ originals.

Other podcasts were also in development, later reports had claimed. In an interview with Forbes, for instance, an executive producer of the Apple TV+ anthology series “Little America,” Lee Eisenberg, had said the show would have its own podcast as well. But that one hasn’t yet launched.

Apple declined to talk about any other podcasting efforts.

Oprah’s Book Club, however, would make for an obvious start for any expansions on this front.

Today, Apple already streams the “Oprah’s Book Club” series on Apple TV+. The company also has a number of ways to cross-market Book Club content. In addition to the new podcast series, for example, customers can also buy Oprah’s book selections on Apple Books, access a discussion guide for the book on Apple Books, and read and listen to an exclusive excerpt from “Caste” on Apple News, among other things. Apple Music Radio (formerly Beats 1) also features an author interview.

The premiere episode of the new podcast will focus on a conversation where Wilkerson talks about what inspired her to write “Caste” and how she believes society needs a new way to talk about racism, Apple says. Subsequent episodes will focus on specific pillars of caste, as described in her book. The new episodes will be released twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting today.

Apple so far has only made limited investments in podcasting, compared with the sizable efforts from rivals like Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon. Spotify has has hundreds of originals and exclusives available to its users. It also acquired several podcast networks and podcast startups, including Gimlet, Parcast, Anchor, and The Ringer.

Pandora, meanwhile, tapped into parent company SiriusXM’s assets to turn its talk shows into podcasts and developed a new podcast-and-music format, Pandora Stories. Amazon wraps in a premium collection of Audible podcasts with a Prime members.

Apple, on the other hand, releases more standard corporate fare as podcasts, like its Apple Keynotes and quarterly earnings call. Apple Retail had previously offered podcasts focused events at the Apple Store, but these are no longer updated. Apple News produces “Apple News Today,” and Apple Music produces “The Zane Lowe Interview Series” and “Songs for Life,” which also stream on Apple Music.

Apple Books, however, is the partner producer on the Oprah podcast, not Apple TV+, so it may not “officially” count as the first Apple TV+ companion series, we should note.

Unlike Spotify’s efforts, Apple’s podcasts are truly podcasts. That is, they’re made available for free on Apple Podcasts and can be added to any other podcast listening app via RSS, as the podcast format requires.

 

 

I cover a lot of data breaches. From inadvertent exposures to data-exfiltrating hacks, I’ve seen it all. But not every data breach is the same. How a company responds to a data breach — whether it was their fault — can make or break its reputation.

I’ve seen some of the worst responses: legal threats, denials and pretending there isn’t a problem at all. In fact, some companies claim they take security “seriously” when they clearly don’t, while other companies see it merely as an exercise in crisis communications.

But once in a while, a company’s response almost makes up for the daily deluge of hypocrisy, obfuscation and downright lies.

Last week, Assist Wireless, a U.S. cell carrier that provides free government-subsidized cell phones and plans to low-income households, had a security lapse that exposed tens of thousands of customer IDs — driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security cards — used to verify a person’s income and eligibility.

A misconfigured plugin for resizing images on the carrier’s website was blamed for the inadvertent data leak of customer IDs to the open web. Security researcher John Wethington found the exposed data through a simple Google search. He reported the bug to TechCrunch so we could alert the company.

Make no mistake, the bug was bad and the exposure of customer data was far from ideal. But the company’s response to the incident was one of the best I’ve seen in years.

Take notes, because this is how to handle a data breach.

Their response was quick. Assist immediately responded to acknowledge the receipt of my initial email. That’s already a positive sign, knowing that the company was looking into the issue.

When AngelList first launched rolling funds, an investment vehicle that raises money through a quarterly subscription from interested investors, the company looked at it as a bet. But early interest from emerging fund managers indicates that rolling funds might be more of the future of the company, according to AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli.

“Rolling funds are what venture fund structures would look like if they were built in the age of software,” Kohli told TechCrunch.

Since February, about 70 rolling funds have been created and managed using AngelList. The company estimates hundreds of new funds will be generated by the end of 2020. For comparison, one report says that 282 institutional funds were closed in 2019. AngelList’s data shows promising activity, although it remains unclear how much capital has been raised through the new investment vehicle.

What are rolling funds?

Before you understand rolling funds, you need a high-level understanding of traditional venture capital funds. Traditional funds are closed through a “months long process” fully behind closed doors. A fund manager will go to multiple LPs, such as family offices, high-net-worth individuals, colleges and universities, or other investment firms, to raise a minimum capital commitment.

Once the first tranche of the fund is raised, a fund manager can publicly announce it and start investing in startups. Because funds are usually invested with a 10-year return cycle, it keeps LPs and investors legally bound for a decade (and the money flowing until the capital commitment is closed).

Rolling funds were created as a potential path for emerging venture capitalists to start and close their first funds in a faster fashion. Fund managers raise new capital commitments on a quarterly basis and invest as they go, ergo “rolling” investment vehicles. Investors come on for a minimum one-year commitment, then invest at a quarterly cadence. The flexibility could allow LPs to bet on new fund managers, and new fund managers to bet on more diverse LPs.

All this flexibility could come with a cost. The rolling fund structure can be a bit volatile because limited partners have to “re-up” their investments on a quarterly basis. In a worst case scenario, an LP could drop out on a whim with no repercussions. With traditional funds, LPs are legally obliged to stay through the end of a fund or just write off their investment entirely.

Unlike traditional fund managers, rolling fund managers can be public about their fundraising activity due to an SEC regulation, 506(c). While legal, public solicitation by these new fund managers have rattled traditional VCs, who are used to a ban on marketing a new fund until after it is closed.

The way that AngelList is externally approaching rolling funds is similar to how it approaches angel investing and syndicates: it wraps things up in a pretty bow and gives people a place to talk about and access deals. The company recently created a page where it lists the names of all rolling funds on its platform to further transparency.

Because AngelList views transparency as a core tenet, it makes sense that the first rolling funds have been created by a generation of operators and founders who build in public. The cohort of rolling fund managers includes Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia, seed investor Cindy Bi, Andela and Flutterwave co-founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and creator of Mcjpod, Jason Jacobs.

The four mentioned above did a seminar in early September (linked here) to talk about why they created their own rolling funds. A general consensus emerged that for the next generation of founders, it pays in terms of reputation, deal flow and access of capital to build in public.

Rolling funds allow public builders to share their ups, downs and LP openings in a way that traditional funds wouldn’t legally allow.

But another detail, also addressed during the seminar, is that the rolling fund managers all had blaringly strong networks, the kind that could easily be used to close a traditional fund. Lavingia closed his $7 million fund in less than two months.

That dynamic throws into question if rolling funds are somewhat limited to only helping an emerging generation of fund managers who are already well-networked and well-resourced. After all, the very idea of a quarterly subscription means that a fund manager has enough charisma, resources and returns to convince LPs to invest consistently.

“We see rolling fund managers whether they have an audience or not,” Kohli said. “And they are successful whether or not they have a pre-existing audience or not.”

But how do you raise without an audience? Kohli noted that AngelList’s platform product connects rising investors to rolling funds. He estimates that 50% of capital raised by rolling funds has come through AngelList’s LP network, but did not share the total capital raised by rolling funds. The company also did not disclose the diversity breakdown of rolling fund managers.

AngelList’s stake

Kohli sees AngelList’s progress over a short time span as a powerful enough signal to prioritize the new product as a flagship offering. In fact, it sees itself becoming a SaaS company.

Here’s why that comparison actually makes sense: All of the rolling funds on AngelList are essentially the company’s customers. It charges a fee per customer to handle logistics.

However, unlike a traditional SaaS company, AngelList is an LP in a number of rolling funds and makes money the same way a traditional venture fund does. To limit unfair advantage, the AngelList team that invests in funds is separate from the team that helps manage and create funds.

AngelList declined to share the number of rolling funds it has anchored through a direct investment.

Despite rolling funds getting momentum, the structure isn’t competing with traditional Series A or Series B firms just yet.

“We view that rolling funds are going to be a very big part of the venture, and will be side by side with traditional funds,” Kohli said. “In the early stages, pre-seed and seed, you’re going to see a lot of rolling funds.”

In addition, AngelList.com is rebranding to include solely AngelList Venture and rolling funds. Talent and Product Hunt, two of AngelList’s other offerings, will move to separate websites and continue operating as independent entities.

In April, AngelList confirmed that it laid off a number of staff. TechCrunch learned that the layoffs largely impacted the company’s talent arm. Kohli emphasizes that the two products will continue to live on, and says the rebranding has been in motion since January.

NASA wants its private commercial space company partners to make more Moon deliveries on its behalf: The agency just issued another request for scientific and experimental payloads that need lunar delivery sometime in 2022, in part to help pave the way for NASA’s Artemis human lunar landing mission planned for 2024.

NASA previously established its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in order to build a stable of approved vendors for a special special type of service, namely providing lunar landers that would be able to handle last-mile delivery of special payloads to the Moon. It now counts 14 companies on this list of vendors, including Astrobotic, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Firefly to name a few, who are eligible to bid on contracts it creates to take specific cargo to the lunar surface.

Already, NASA has contracted two batches of payloads under the CLPS program, which will make up four planned total launches already under contract, including Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One set for June 2021; Intutive Machines IM-1 for October the same year; Masten’s Mission One for December 2022; and Astrobotic’s VIPER mission for sometime in 2023.

The list of new payloads for this round include a variety of scientific instruments, including a lunar regolith (that’s the Moon equivalent of soil) adhesion testing device; X-ray imagers; a dust shield created by the interaction of electric fields; and an advanced Moon vacuum for returning surface samples to Earth for more testing.

NASA’s private partners on the CLPS list will now be able to submit bids to cary the new list of 10 experiments and demonstrations, with the goal of delivering said equipment by 2022. The agency expects to pick a winner for this latest award by the end of this year.

The other day I took a moment to count the number of stories we’ve done on TechCrunch on the DoD’s $10 billion, decade-long, winner-take-all, JEDI cloud contract. This marks the 30th time we’ve written about this deal over the last two years, and it comes after a busy week last week in JEDI cloud contract news.

That we’re still writing about this is fairly odd if you consider the winner was announced last October when the DoD chose Microsoft, but there is no end in sight to the on-going drama that is this procurement process.

Government contracts don’t typically catch our attention at TechCrunch, but this one felt different early on. There was the size and scope of the deal of course. There was the cute play on the Star Wars theme. There was Oracle acting like a batter complaining to the umpire before the first pitch was thrown. There was the fact that everyone thought Amazon would win until it didn’t.

There was a lot going on. In fact, there’s still a lot going on with this story.

Oracle doth protest too much

Let’s start with Oracle, which dispatched CEO Safra Catz to the White House in April 2018 even before the RFP had been written. She was setting the stage to complain that the deal was going to be set up to favor Amazon, something that Oracle alleged until the day Microsoft was picked the winner.

Catz had been on the Trump transition team and so had the ear of the president. While the president certainly interjected himself in this process, it’s not known how much influence that particular meeting might have had. Suffice to say that it was only the first volley in Oracle’s long war against the JEDI contract procurement process.

It would include official complaints with the Government Accountability Office and a federal lawsuit worth not coincidentally $10 billion. It would claim the contract favored Amazon. It would argue that the one-vendor approach wasn’t proper. It would suggest that because the DoD had some former Amazon employees helping write the RFP, that it somehow favored Amazon. The GAO and two court cases found otherwise, ruling against Oracle every single time.

It’s worth noting that the Court of Appeals ruling last week indicated that Oracle didn’t even meet some of the basic contractual requirements, all the while complaining about the process itself from the start.

Amazon continues to press protests

Nobody was more surprised that Amazon lost the deal than Amazon itself. It still believes to this day that it is technically superior to Microsoft and that it can offer the DoD the best approach. The DoD doesn’t agree. On Friday, it reaffirmed its choice of Microsoft. But that is not the end of this, not by a long shot.

Amazon has maintained since the decision was made last October that the decision-making process had been tainted by presidential interference in the process. They believe that because of the president’s personal dislike of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, he inserted himself in the process to prevent Bezos’ company from winning that deal.

In January, Amazon filed a motion to stop work on the project until this could all be sorted out. In February, a judge halted work on the project until Amazon’s complaints could be heard by the court. It is September and that order is still in place.

In a blog post on Friday, Amazon reiterated its case, which is based on presidential interference and what it believes is technical superiority. “In February, the Court of Federal Claims stopped performance on JEDI. The Court determined AWS’s protest had merit, and that Microsoft’s proposal likely failed to meet a key solicitation requirement and was likely deficient and ineligible for award. Our protest detailed how pervasive these errors were (impacting all six technical evaluation factors), and the Judge stopped the DoD from moving forward because the very first issue she reviewed demonstrated serious flaws,” Amazon wrote in the post.

Microsoft for the win?

Microsoft on the other hand went quietly about its business throughout this process. It announced Azure Stack, a kind of portable cloud that would work well as a field operations computer system. It beefed up its government security credentials.

Even though Microsoft didn’t agree with the one-vendor approach indicating that the government would benefit more from the multi-vendor approach many of its customers were taking, it made clear if those were the rules, it was in it to win it — and win it did, much to the surprise of everyone, especially Amazon.

Yet here we are, almost a year later and in spite of the fact that the DoD found once again, after further review, that Microsoft is still the winner, the contract remains in limbo. Until that pending court case is resolved, we will continue to watch and wait and wonder if this will ever be truly over, and the JEDI cloud contract will actually be implemented.