Year: 2020

WeRide, one of China’s most-funded startups developing autonomous driving capabilities, said on Wednesday that it has raised a $200 million strategic round from Chinese bus maker Yutong.

Mega investments aren’t uncommon at companies like WeRide developing the next-generation level 4 driving standard, which denotes that the car can handle the majority of driving situations independently without human intervention.

WeRide did not disclose its valuation for this round, which is the first tranche of its Series B round, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The new funding will see WeRide joining hands with Yutong, a 57-year-old company, to make autonomous driving minibusses and city buses as well as work on R&D, vehicle platforms and mobility services together. The partners have already jointly developed a front-loaded driverless minibus for mass-production. The model, which comes without a steering wheel, accelerator or brakes, is designed for operating in urban open roads, said WeRide

Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, became WeRide’s strategic investor in 2018 following the completion of the startup’s Series A round, which was partially funded by the Chinese facial recognition giant SenseTime.

Autonomous driving startups in China are racing to showcase their progress, in part to attract funding for their cash-bleeding businesses. Alibaba-backed AutoX, for instance, began deploying driverless cars on the roads in Shenzhen in a bold move. WeRide and its rivals are testing various levels of autonomous driving vehicles in both the United States and major Chinese cities where local policies are supporting the futurist transportation tech.

“Capital’s attitude is shifting and increasingly bullish about autonomous driving and its commercial future following the COVID-19 pandemic [in China]. Many investments are happening in this space because investors don’t want to miss out on any potential leaders in autonomous driving,” the WeRide spokesperson said. “Our Series B round has attracted a lot of interest.”

WeRide’s competitors include Pony.ai in its backyard Guangzhou, AutoX and Deeproute.ai in Shenzhen, Momenta in Suzhou, Baidu in Beijing, to name a few.

TaskRabbit has reset an unknown number of customer passwords after confirming it detected “suspicious activity” on its network.

The IKEA -owned online marketplace for on-demand labor said it reset user passwords out of an abundance of caution and that it “took steps to prevent access to any user accounts,” a TaskRabbit spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“As always, the safety and security of the TaskRabbit community is our priority, and we will continue to be vigilant about protecting our users’ personal information,” said the spokesperson.

But TaskRabbit did not immediately elaborate or provide answers to our questions, including if it planned to inform customers of the breach, what data — if any — was taken or if the breach had been remediated.

TaskRabbit customers were alerted to the incident in a vague email that only noted their password had been recently changed “as a security precaution,” without saying what specifically prompted the account change. TechCrunch confirmed that the email was legitimate.

It’s not uncommon for companies to reset passwords after a security incident where customer or account information is accessed or stolen in a breach. But it’s rare for companies to reset user passwords unrelated to a security incident.

Last year, online apparel marketplace StockX reset customer passwords after initially citing “system updates,” but later admitted it took action after it found suspicious activity on its network. Days later, a hacker provided TechCrunch with 6.8 million StockX account records stolen from the company’s servers.

TaskRabbit’s freelance labor marketplace was founded in 2008, and grew over time from an auction-style platform for negotiating tasks and errands to a more mature and tailored marketplace to match customers with contractors. That eventually attracted the attention of furniture retailer IKEA, which bought the startup in September 2017 after TaskRabbit put itself on the market for a strategic buyer.

The year after the acquisition, however, TaskRabbit had to take its website and app down due to a “cybersecurity incident.” The company later revealed an attacker had gained unauthorized access to its systems. Then-TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot said the company had contracted with an outside forensics team to identify what customer information had been compromised by the attack, and urged both users and providers to stay vigilant in monitoring their own accounts for suspicious activity.

Following the attack, the company said it was implementing several new security measures and would work on making the log-in process more secure. It also said it would reduce the amount of data retained about taskers and customers as well as “enhance overall network cyber threat detection technology.”

Brown-Philpot left TaskRabbit earlier this year, and the CEO role has since been filled by former Airbnb and Uber Eats leader, Ania Smith.

The stimulus bill includes significant changes to copyright law and enforcement, the Biden administration may have to build a presidential Twitter following from scratch and we round up the startups that shut down this year. This is your Daily Crunch for December 22, 2020.

The big story: Stimulus bill increases penalties for illegal streaming services

While we wrote several stories yesterday about the tech implications of the new stimulus bill (and highlighted it in yesterday’s Daily Crunch), more details are emerging — like the fact that it will make illegal streaming for profit a felony, punishable by fines or up to 10 years of imprisonment.

The language of the bill seems to focus on commercial piracy services, rather than individuals or Twitch streamers — a point that one of its sponsors, Senator Thom Tillis, emphasized in a statement, claiming that “no individual streamer has to worry about the fear of prosecution.”

On the copyright front, the bill also creates a new Copyright Claims Board to handle copyright infringement claims of up to $30,000.

The tech giants

Google, Cisco and VMware join Microsoft to oppose NSO Group in WhatsApp spyware case — A coalition of companies have filed an amicus brief in support of a legal case brought by WhatsApp accusing NSO Group of using an undisclosed vulnerability to hack into at least 1,400 devices.

Twitter’s POTUS account will reportedly be reset to zero followers when Biden takes over — Twitter, meanwhile, says it has “been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.”

Startups, funding and venture capital

Remembering the startups we lost in 2020 — A look back at startups large and small that didn’t make it through hell year.

Horizon Robotics, a Chinese rival to Nvidia, seeks to raise over $700M — Horizon Robotics is a five-year-old unicorn specializing in AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles.

Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25M for its employee health management tools — Management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

To win post-pandemic, edtech needs to start thinking big — After a noisy 2020, can the sector maintain momentum?

One final $100M ARR company and the startups we want to meet in 2021 — Let’s talk about Nexthink.

With a $50B run rate in reach, can anyone stop AWS? — AWS has taken advantage of first-to-market status to become the most successful player in the space.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Gift Guide: TechCrunch’s Favorite Things of 2020 — Many of the podcasts, songs, movies, people and more that got us through this year.

NASA opens new launchpad at Kennedy Space Center meant to serve multiple commercial launch customers — The purpose of LC-48 is very explicitly to fill “a need for new, low-cost launch systems with very fast turnaround cycles.”

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Content moderation has been a thorny topic in 2020. And when I say “thorny,” I mean in the sense of having multiple congressional hearings on the subject. Twitter and Facebook in particular have been mired in concerns around the subject, fielding complaints that they both haven’t done enough to weed out problematic content and suggestions that they’re a censorship-happy, shadow-banning enemy of the First Amendment.

The latter appears to be the sole reason for the existence of the right wing-focused Twitter competitor, Parler.

As Substack grows in popularity, the newsletter platform is going to face some tremendously difficult questions around content moderation. Today it published a lengthy blog post hoping to nip some of those concerns in the bud. The write-up offers some caveats, but largely espouses the platform’s commitment to free speech, noting:

In most cases, we don’t think that censoring content is helpful, and in fact it often backfires. Heavy-handed censorship can draw more attention to content than it otherwise would have enjoyed, and at the same time it can give the content creators a martyr complex that they can trade off for future gain. We prefer a contest of ideas. We believe dissent and debate is important. We celebrate nonconformity.

The stance reflects Substack’s commitment to a subscription-based model, rather than the ads that currently keep the lights on for services like Twitter and Facebook. Instead, it takes a 10% cut of writers’ subscription revenue. Certainly that frees it up from sponsorship boycotts to some degree. The subscription model also means that users have to opt into specific content more so than on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where content boundaries are far more fluid.

“We are happy to compete with ‘Substack but with more controls on speech’ just as we are happy to compete with ‘Substack but with advertising,’ ” the company writes.

Of course, there are financial considerations — there always are. Substack has a vested interest in supporting right-wing and conservative voices who have decried Facebook and Twitter’s practices. Notably, The Dispatch is at the top of the service’s politics leaderboard. In an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year, editor Stephen Hayes called the service, “unapologetically center-right,” while its current blurb refers to it as “conservative.”

“None of these views are neutral,” Substack writes. “Many Silicon Valley technology companies strive to make their platforms apolitical, but we think such a goal is impossible to achieve.” There’s no doubt some truth in that. Any position on content moderation can be viewed as a political one to some degree. And equally, none will make everyone — or even most people — completely happy.

But it’s also easy to see the service facing some major tests of its current hands-off approach as the service continues to grow in popularity. The service’s approach has involved putting its name out there in front of consumers, meaning it won’t be viewed as a kind of invisible publishing platform.

Substack is quick to add that there is, naturally, content that crosses the line in spite of this. “Of course, there are limits,” it writes. “We do not allow porn on Substack, for example, or spam. We do not allow doxxing or harassment.”

Tesla stock’s miraculously bizarre 2020 might have a gone different way had Apple’s Tim Cook agreed to a meeting in recent years, or so says Elon Musk.

Reacting to Reuters’ recent news that Apple has not abandoned its electric car program and is still pursuing plans to build a physical vehicle, Musk tweeted that in “the darkest days” of scaling Model 3 production, he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook and raised the possibility of the Cupertino company acquiring Tesla. Musk says that Cook refused to take the meeting.

TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for comment.

Musk’s short tweet did not clarify exactly when this timeline was, though given public information about Tesla’s Model 3 production, it was likely between 2017 and 2019. In regards to Musk’s proposed sales price, 1/10th of Tesla’s current market capitalization is about $60 billion, which isn’t too far from the stock’s public value last year before it reached stratospheric heights in recent months.

Though Tesla is now worth more than $600 billion on the public markets after joining the S&P 500 this week, most Wall Street analysts seem perplexed by the stock’s recent growth which has been owed to young and first-time investors rallying behind Tesla’s products and its CEO.

Bandit ML aims to optimize and automate the process of presenting the right offer to the right customer.

The startup was part of the summer 2020 class at accelerator Y Combinator . It also raised a $1.32 million seed round in September from YC, Haystack Fund, Webb Investment Network, Liquid 2 Ventures, Jigsaw Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Pathbreaker Ventures and various angels — including what CEO Edoardo Conti said are 10 current and former Uber employees.

Conti (who founded the company with Lionel Vital and Joseph Gilley) is a former Uber software engineer and researcher himself.

The idea, as he explained via email, is that one customer might be more excited about a $5 discount, while another might be more effectively enticed by free shipping, and a third might be completely uninterested because they just made a large purpose. Using a merchant’s order history and website activity data, Bandit ML is supposed to help them which offer will be most effective with which shopper.

Conti acknowledged that there’s other discount-optimizing software out there, but he suggested none of them offers what Bandit ML does: “off the shelf tools that use machine learning the way giants like Uber, Amazon, and Walmart do.”

He added that Bandit ML’s technology is unique in its support for full automation (“some stores sent their first batch of offers within 10 minutes of signing up”) and its ability to optimize for longer term metrics, like purchases over a 120-day period, rather focusing on one-off redemptions. In fact, Conti said the technology the startup uses to make these decisions is similar to the ReAgent project that he worked on at Facebook.

Bandit ML is currently focused on merchants with Spotify stores, though it also supports other e-commerce platforms like Calii. Conti said the platform has been used to send millions of dollars worth of promotions since July, with one clothing company seeing a 20% increase in net revenue.

“Starting with an always-on incentive engine for every online business, we aim to build functioning out-of-the-box machine learning tools that a small online business needs to compete with the Walmarts and Amazons of the world,” he said.

 

NASA has finished work on a new launchpad at its Kennedy Space Center in Florida – Launch Complex 48 (LC-48), a pad that will be able to support smaller launch vehicles than either LC-39A or B, or SLC-41, which currently host SpaceX, SLS and ULA launches respectively. It’s designed to be able to be used by multiple providers, with an absence of permanent structures that allows for flexible configuration depending on who’s using it.

The purpose of LC-48 is very explicitly to fill “a need for new, low-cost launch systems with very fast turnaround cycles,” according to KSC senior project manager Keith Britton speaking to NASASpaceflight.com. That sounds an awful lot like some of the forthcoming launch models being developed and tested by companies including Astra, a small launcher that designed its business around the now-ended DARPA competition for a responsive launch demonstration.

While companies like Virgin Orbit are aiming to create responsive, mobile launch capabilities by obviating the need for a specialized pad altogether, they are in the minority when it comes to small launch startups in terms of skipping the need for vertical take-off altogether. Many more companies, including Astra, as well as Firefly, Orbex, and the newly-revived Vector Launch are focusing on small rockets that can be launched with scaled down requirements in terms of both people and infrastructure required on site to add flexibility and mobility into their models.

LC-48 doens’t yet have any actual customers booked – NASA says it’s in discussions with a number of companies, but none are yet officially signed customers. The agency does, however, anticipate some launches potentially taking place from the new pad as early as next year.

AWS, Amazon’s flourishing cloud arm, has been growing at a rapid clip for more than a decade. An early public cloud infrastructure vendor, it has taken advantage of first-to-market status to become the most successful player in the space. In fact, one could argue that many of today’s startups wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the formation of cloud companies like AWS giving them easy access to infrastructure without having to build it themselves.

In Amazon’s most-recent earnings report, AWS generated revenues of $11.6 billion, good for a run rate of more than $46 billion. That makes the next AWS milestone a run rate of $50 billion, something that could be in reach in less than two quarters if it continues its pace of revenue growth.

While the cloud division’s growth is slowing in percentage terms as it comes firmly up against the law of large numbers in which AWS has to grow every quarter compared to an ever-larger revenue base. The result of this dynamic is that while AWS’ year-over-year growth rate is slowing over time — from 35% in Q3 2019 to 29% in Q3 2020 — the pace at which it is adding $10 billion chunks of annual revenue run rate is accelerating.

At the AWS re:Invent customer conference this year, AWS CEO Andy Jassy talked about the pace of change over the years, saying that it took the following number of months to grow its run rate by $10 billion increments:

Extrapolating from the above trend, it should take AWS fewer than 12 months to scale from a run rate of $40 billion to $50 billion. Stating the obvious, Jassy said “the rate of growth in AWS continues to accelerate.” He also took the time to point out that AWS is now the fifth-largest enterprise IT company in the world, ahead of enterprise stalwarts like SAP and Oracle.

What’s amazing is that AWS achieved its scale so fast, not even existing until 2006. That growth rate makes us ask a question: Can anyone hope to stop AWS’ momentum?

The short answer is that it doesn’t appear likely.

Cloud market landscape

A good place to start is surveying the cloud infrastructure competitive landscape to see if there are any cloud companies that could catch the market leader. According to Synergy Research, AWS remains firmly in front, and it doesn’t look like any competitor could catch AWS anytime soon unless some market dynamic caused a drastic change.

With around a third of the market, AWS is the clear front-runner. Its closest and fiercest rival Microsoft has around 20%. To put that into perspective a bit, last quarter AWS had $11.6 billion in revenue compared to Microsoft’s $5.2 billion Azure result. While Microsoft’s equivalent cloud number is growing faster at 47%, like AWS, that number has begun to drop steadily while it gains market share and higher revenue and it falls victim to that same law of large numbers.

The edtech market raked in more than $10 billion in venture capital investment globally in 2020, but for students, parents and teachers, the year was defined more by its scramble than its surge.

Nandini Talwar, a student and teacher’s assistant at Columbia University, wants to hold more efficient office hours so students don’t have to wait on a Zoom call. TraLiza King, a director at PWC and single mother, needs a Zoom alternative for her 4-year-old, who is too young to understand how to mute and unmute. Brian Kinglsey, chief academic officer at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, is looking for ways to reengage remote students that don’t require socially distant home visits.

Naturally, any company that shifts overnight from being a tool to a necessity will have growing pains, and edtech as a sector is no exception. Startups with the long-term ambitions of solving education’s inequities had to come up with quick fixes that would serve millions of learners. A sector that was notoriously undercapitalized had to reach venture scale while adapting to the realities of a remote work landscape like never before. As schools seesawed between hybrid and remote, education technology companies had to be nimble as well. The ubiquity of remote learning surely brought a boom to new users, but may have in fact limited the sector’s ability to innovate in lieu of fast, easy scale.

For edtech in 2020, flexible and scrappy was a survival tactic that led to profits, growth and most of all, aha moments that technology was needed in the way we learn. Now, as we enter the rest of the decade, the sector will have to shake off its short-term-fix mentality to evolve from tunnel vision to wide-pan ambition.

The innovation that must grow

If nothing else is clear after a tumultuous remote learning experience, it’s that the world needs effective and accessible technology that allows education to scale with learning for all in mind. In fact, the comeback story and surges of massive open online course providers (MOOCS) shows how in-demand digital curricula truly are.

However, usage is not a replacement for effectiveness. In reality, most people don’t have the drive, motivation or comprehension capabilities to learn from a one-hour lecture — even if they technically show up.

The mad rush to track engagement is underway. In the past few months, Zovio launched Signalz, a tool that helps universities track student engagement and see who is most at risk for dropping out of courses. Piazza also launched a tool focused on college and high school student participation that allows instructors to send personalized messages and measure activity on their assignments. There’s also Rhithm, an app that allows educators to check in daily with students for emotional-learning insights, and Edsights, a chatbot for undergraduate students. 

Still, instead of bringing the classroom experience online and trying to track the heck out of it, what if you completely upend it? The answer might begin with flashcards.

Quizlet, which started off as a flashcard app, has spent the past three years building out its artificial-intelligence-powered tutoring arm. CEO Matthew Glotzbach says the feature is now the most-used Quizlet offering, signaling how students want a more in-depth solution than flashcards.

The most recent example I saw of innovation was Sketchy, a startup that teaches medical concepts through illustrations. It allows students to skip notecards and textbooks and comprehend through animated videos; think of a countryside kingdom scene about coronavirus or a salmon dinner about salmonella.

While the technology itself isn’t from Mars, Sketchy’s strategy does what many edtech solutions don’t: learning theory. The company uses the memory-palace technique to help students replace textbooks with videos and actually retain information. Plus, after seven years as a bootstrapped company, Sketchy just raised $30 million dollars in venture capital. The round was led by TCG with involvement from Reach Capital.

Zach Sims, the founder of Codecademy, told me that the startups that will “win” the next wave are the ones that are “using interactivity and technology to create an educational experience you just couldn’t have in the classroom.”

To retain recent gains, edtech companies need to replicate Sketchy’s strategy: Replace outdated systems and methods with new, tech-powered solutions. No more of the endless bundling and unbundling of the school experience. As we evolve into a world of life-long learning and cohort-based learning platforms, founders will need to be especially innovative with the way they deliver content. Don’t simply put engaging content on a screen, but innovate on what that screen looks like, tracks and offers. Is it rooted in true learning principles, or is it just a repacked lecture?

In other words, if 2020 showed us how hard “Zoom school” really is, then 2021 should not be about creating more versions of Zoom schools. It should be about playing an entirely different universe.

The hurdle that remains

The biggest elephant in the room for edtech is the one that every human in the world can’t wait for: the end of the coronavirus pandemic. And with promising vaccine news, the light at the end of the tunnel certainly feels within reach for those who dare to dream.

When the world recovers, startups that have based their entire business around remote learning and remote work will likely see a drop in usage. The surge will slow, and everyone in edtech is wondering how to extract post-pandemic value.

This in mind, Ashley Bittner, co-founding partner of Firework Ventures, a new future of work fund, thinks that the next generation of edtech founders should continue to make moonshot bets, but be realistic about what will work for the decades ahead.

“Anyone can pitch an idea about how we should do math curriculum,” she said. “But there’s a reason behind why we teach kids to do it this way. I don’t think there’s enough respect for the experience learning science behind products.”

In this country, we have a longstanding peaceful transfer of power for the executive office, even in the wake of the hardest-fought elections. Certain circumstances have led many to question whether the tradition will continue come January 20. Despite his very vocal protestations, however, the current president has agreed to step aside, should all of his legal maneuvers fall short (something that seems all but a certainty at this point).

There is, of course, nothing in the Constitution that offers guidance the peaceful transition of passwords — strangely, the forefathers of this country didn’t possess the foresight to predict Twitter . The service has already outlined what happens to Trump’s account when he leaves office. Namely, he loses the protections that come with being a political figure.

CEO Jack Dorsey noted this at last month’s congressional hearings, stating, “If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away.” But what of the incoming president? What will the transition look like for Biden? And what happens if Trump doesn’t willingly give up the official @Potus account as has also been suggested?

He hasn’t exactly been eager to accept the results of this election and he’s not the sort to willingly give up a platform — particularly one with 33 million followers (admittedly a fraction of Trump’s main account).

Nick Pacilio, of Twitter’s Communications, Government & News team, offered TechCrunch the following statement, on the matter: “Twitter has been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.”

The company, perhaps understandably, didn’t answer the question directly, but working with the incoming team is a simple enough way to circumvent any issues transferring more than one dozen accounts, as The Wall Street Journal notes. As has been reported, existing tweets will be deleted and the incoming administration will start from scratch — a net positive for the Biden team, given the…polarizing nature of the previous president’s feed.

According to Biden’s digital director, the POTUS and White House accounts will also reset to zero followers, marking a change over the Obama to Trump transition. Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account has already lost one prominent follower. Earlier this week, CEO Jack Dorsey unfollowed the president, along with other prominent politicians, including Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.