Year: 2020

Theta Lake, a provider of compliance and security tools for conferencing software like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, Zoom and others, said it has raised $12.7 million in a new round of funding.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with commitments from Cisco Investments, angel investors from the collaboration and security space, and previous investors, Neotribe Ventures, Firebolt Ventures and WestWave Capital, the company said.

The company’s financing comes as the COVID-19 pandemic has created a surge of demand for remote work conferencing technologies — and services that can ensure the security of those communications.

Citing a Research and Markets report, the company estimates that the market will grow from $8.9 billion in 2019 to $23 billion by the end of this year.

Theta Lake said that the funding would be used to increase its sales and marketing capabilities and for research and development on new product features, according to a statement. 

The company’s tech already uses machine learning to detect security risks in video, visual, voice, chat and document content shared over video and collaboration tools.

As a result of its investment, Arif Janmohamed, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, will join the Theta Lake Board of Directors, the company said. 

“The need for security and compliance solutions that fully cover modern collaboration tools should be obvious to everyone,” said Devin Redmond, Theta Lake’s co-founder and chief executive, in a statement. “That need pre-existed the pandemic, but now is more pressing than ever. The shift from physical work sites and employer-owned networks with tightly managed devices and applications, to a distributed workplace that lives inside your collaboration tools means organizations need new security and compliance coverage that lives inside that new workplace.” 

The chip industry consolidation dance continued this morning as AMD has entered into an agreement to buy Xilinx for $35 billion, giving the company access to customers requiring chips with high performance workloads like artificial intelligence.

AMD sees this deal as combining two companies that complement each other’s strengths without cannibalizing its own markets. CEO Lisa Su believes the acquisition will help make her company the high performance chip leader.

“By combining our world-class engineering teams and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing,” Su said in a statement.

In an article earlier this year, TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington described Xilinx new satellite focused chips as offering a couple of industry firsts:

It’s the first 20nm process that’s rated for use in space, offering power and efficiency benefits, and it’s the first to offer specific support for high performance machine learning through neural network-based inference acceleration.

What’s more, the chips are designed to handle radiation and the rigors of launch, using a thick ceramic packaging. These kinds of applications should open up new markets for AMD as the two companies combine.

In a nod to shareholders of both companies, she said that this deal should benefit each one. “This is truly a compelling combination that will create significant value for all stakeholders, including AMD and Xilinx shareholders who will benefit from the future growth and upside potential of the combined company.

So far stockholders aren’t impressed with AMD stock down over 4% in pre-trading, while Xilinx stock is up over 11% in pre-trading.  Xilinx has a market cap of over $28 billion compared with AMD’s $96.5 billion.

This deal comes on the heels of last month’s ARM acquisition by Nvidia for $40 billion. With two deals in less than two months totaling $75 million, the industry is looking at the bigger is better theory. Meanwhile Intel took a hit earlier this month after its earnings report showed weakness in its data center business.

While the deal has been approved by both company’s boards of directors, it still has to pass muster with shareholders and regulators, and is not expected to close until the end of next year.

When that happens Su will be chairman of the combined company, while Xilinx CEO President and CEO, Victor Peng, will join AMD as president, where he will be in charge of the Xilinx business and strategic growth initiatives.

Uber is facing another legal challenge in Europe related to algorithmic decision making.

The App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) filed a case, yesterday, with a court in the Netherlands seeking to challenge the ride hailing company’s practice of ‘robo-firing’ — aka the use of automated systems to identify fraudulent activity and terminate drivers based on that analysis.

Under EU law individuals subject to solely automated decisions have a right to request a human review. Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives data subjects the right not to be subject to a solely automated decision where there’s a significant legal or similar effect.

The ADCU case contends that Uber drivers in the UK and Portugal have been “wrongly accused of ‘fraudulent activity‘ as detected by Uber systems before being fired without right of appeal”.

“In each of the cases the drivers were dismissed after Uber said its systems had detected fraudulent activity on the part of the individuals concerned. The drivers absolutely deny that they were in any way engaged in fraud and Uber has never made any such complaint to the police. Uber has never given the drivers access to any of the purported evidence against them nor allowed them the opportunity to challenge or appeal the decision to terminate,” it writes in a press release about the action.

A spokeswoman for Uber said the cases of the drivers in question had been manually reviewed by specialist staff prior to the terminations.

However the ADCU’s contention is that Uber is using an overly broad definition of ‘fraud’ to undercut its obligations to workers’ rights by concealing performance-related dismals — noting that the company’s ‘Community Guidelines’ define ‘fraud’ to include declining work offered and strategically logging out to await higher surge pricing.

A segment of Uber’s guidelines on fraud states that it is “constantly on the lookout for fraud by riders and drivers who are gaming our systems”. The text goes on to specify that some of the behaviours which may cause an Uber driver to have their account deactivated include: “deliberately increasing the time or distance of a trip; accepting trips without the intention to complete, including provoking riders to cancel; creating dummy rider or driver accounts for fraudulent purposes; claiming fraudulent fees or charges, like false cleaning fees; and intentionally accepting or completing fraudulent or falsified trips”.

The union says driver 1, who was based in London, was summarily dismissed after Uber said their systems had detected “irregular trips associated with fraudulent activities” — and was never given an explanation nor a right of appeal.

Driver 2, also based in London, was summarily dismissed after Uber claimed its systems detected ‘the installation of and use of software which has the intention and effect of manipulating the Driver App’. Again it says the driver was given no further explanation of the allegations and was denied the right of appeal.

Driver 3, based in Birmingham, was similarly terminated without right of appeal after Uber said their systems had detected “a continued pattern of improper use of the Uber application…..& this created a poor experience for all parties.”

A fourth driver, based in Lisbon, Portugal, had their account deactivated after Uber claimed its systems detected “the recurrent practice of irregular activities during use of the Uber App.“

Uber declined to go into specific detail on the cases of the individual drivers involved in the ADCU challenge but said it does not see any new allegations based on the press release — adding that it’s awaiting any new information from the courts.

“Uber provides requested personal data and information that individuals are entitled to. We will give explanations when we cannot provide certain data, such as when it doesn’t exist or disclosing it would infringe on the rights of another person under GDPR. As part of our regular processes, the drivers in this case were only deactivated after manual reviews by our specialist team,” the company said in a statement.

We also asked the company if it manually reviews all the cases of drivers whom its algorithm has identified as engaged in fraudulent activity — but at the time of writing it had not responded to the question.

The ADCU is inviting other former Uber drivers from the UK and throughout the European Economic Area who have been similarly dismissed over alleged ‘fraudulent activity’ to register on its website to join the collective action which they’re hoping to part-fund via a crowdjustice campaign.

In July the union backed another challenge to Uber’s algorithms — in that case focused on the use of profiling and data-fueled algorithms to manage drivers, looping in the GDPR’s data access rights.

Last month the union also lodged a similar challenge to India-based ride-hailing platform Ola.

Deci, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a new platform that uses AI to optimized AI models and get them ready for production, today announced that it has raised a $9.1 million seed round led by Emerge and Square Peg.

The general idea here is to make it easier and faster for businesses to take AI workloads into production — and to optimize those production models for improved accuracy and performance. To enable this, the company built an end-to-end solution that allows engineers to bring in their pre-trained models and then have Deci manage, benchmark and optimize them before they package them up for deployment. Using its runtime container or Edge SDK, Deci users can also then serve those models on virtually any modern platform and cloud.

Deci’s insights screen combines all indicators of a deep learning model’s expected behavior in production, resulting in the Deci Score – a single metric summarizing the overall performance of the model.

The company was co-founded by co-founded by deep learning scientist Yonatan Geifman, technology entrepreneur Jonathan Elial, and professor Ran El-Yaniv, a computer scientist and machine learning expert at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

“Deci is leading a paradigm shift in AI to empower data scientists and deep learning engineers with the tools needed to create and deploy effective and powerful solutions,” says Yonatan Geifman, CEO and co-founder of Deci. “The rapidly increasing complexity and diversity of neural network models make it hard for companies to achieve top performance. We realized that the optimal strategy is to harness the AI itself to tackle this challenge. Using AI, Deci’s goal is to help every AI practitioner to solve the world’s most complex problems.”

Deci’s lab screen enables users to manage their deep learning models’ lifecycles, optimize inference performance, and prepare models for deployment. Image Credits: Deci

The company promises is that, on the same hardware and with comparable accuracy, Deci-optimized models will run between five and ten times faster than before. It can make use of CPUs and GPUs for running its inference workloads and the company says that it is already working with customers in autonomous driving, manufacturing, communication and healthcare, among others.

“Deci‘s ability to automatically craft top-performing deep learning solutions is a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence and unlocks new opportunities for many businesses across different industries,” said Liad Rubin, Partner at Emerge. “We are proud to have partnered with such incredible founders and be part of Deci’s journey from day one.”

Only a few weeks after the successful public offering of Array Technologies proved that there’s a market for technologies aimed at improving efficiencies across the solar manufacturing and installation chain, Leading Edge Equipment has raised capital for its novel silicon wafer manufacturing equipment. 

The $7.6 million financing came from Prime Impact Fund, Clean Energy Ventures and DSM Venturing and the company said it would use the technology to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts. 

For the last few years researchers have been talking up the potential of so-called kerfless, single-crystal silicon wafers. For industry watchers, the single-crystal versus poly-crystalline wafers may sound familiar, but as with many things with the resurgence of climate technology investment maybe this time will be different.

Silicon wafer production today is a seven-step process in which large silicon ingots created in heavily energy-intensive furnaces are sawed into wafers by wires. The process wastes large amounts of silicon, requires an incredible amount of energy and produces low-quality wafers that reduce the efficiency of solar panels.

Using ribbons to produce its wafers, Leading Edge’s manufacturing equipment uses the floating silicon method to reduce production to a single step, consuming less energy and producing almost no waste, according to the company.

Founded by longtime experts in the silicon foundry industry — Alison Greenlee, a quadruple-degreed graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on floating silicon method that reduces waste in the manufacturing of silicon for solar cells; and Peter Kellerman, the progenitor of floating silicon method technologies.

The two founded Leading Edge Equipment to rejuvenate a project that had been mothballed by Applied Materials after years of research.

The two won $5 million in federal grants and raised an initial $6 million from venture capital firms in 2018 to kick off the technology.

Leading Edge expects that its equipment could become the standard for silicon substrate manufacturing.

Kellerman, now the emeritus chief technology officer, was replaced by Nathan Stoddard, a seasoned silicon manufacturing technology expert who has worked on teams that have brought three different solar wafer technologies from concept to pilot production. Stoddard, a former colleague of Greenlee’s at 1366 — one of the early companies devoted to new silicon production technologies — was won over by Greenlee and Kellerman’s belief in the old Applied Materials technology. 

The company claims that its technology can reduce wafer costs by 50 percent, increases commercial solar panel power by up to seven percent, and reduces manufacturing emissions by over 50 percent.

To commercialize the project, earlier this year the team brought in Rick Schwerdtfeger, a longtime innovator in solar technology who began working with CIGS crystals back in 1995. In the 2000s Schwerdtfeger spent his time in building out ARC Energy to scale next-generation furnace technologies. 

“After critical technology demonstrations and the development of a new commercial tool, we are now ready to launch this technology into market in 2021,” said Schwerdtfeger in a statement. “Having recently secured a 31,000 square foot facility and doubled the size of our team, we will use this new funding to prepare for our 2021 commercial pilots.”

With a new $4 million round, the Bogota-based supply chain logistics technology developer Tül is prepping to expand across the Latin American region.

Founded by Enrique Villamarin Lafaurie and Juan Carlos Narváez, Tül’s technology connects construction manufacturers to the small businesses across Latin America that are responsible for handling half of the inventory for construction jobs in the region, Lafaurie said.

Lafaurie previously spent ten years working in the construction industry for Cementos Argos, the Colombian company responsible for a huge chunk of cement sales in North and South America.

“We’re connecting big construction companies in the back to hardware companies at the front end. It’s a way where producers can connect to those stores and can talk to those stores and do promotions straight to those stores,” said Lafaurie. 

By digitizing what had been a primarily analog industry, the company has managed to hit a $10 million run revenue run rate and sign up 3,000 stores since its launch 8 months ago.

And that’s just in Colombia alone, said Lafaurie. The company will soon open up operations in Ecuador, which Lafaurie said was the second largest hardware market (per capita) in Latin America.

The company now counts nine employees on staff and expects to ramp up hiring significantly with the new capital.

“Colombia, was the most locked down country in the whole world. People were not allowed to leave their houses, but construction was deemed an essential business,” said Eric Reiner, an investor with Vine Capital Management, which led the company’s seed round. “Tül allowed hardware stores to ship products directly to the construction workers. With their logistics network they started a separate brand delivering sanitation equipment so that schools and laundromats could become sanitation stations.”

As Lafaurie describes it, Tül’s online service became a lifeline for the industry.

“The whole industry just shut down and we managed to keep those business open by not only helping them deliver straight to the jobsite, but by becoming the sanitation stations in the neighborhood. The outcome of that is very loyal customers to us that we helped,” he said. “We have huge retention of customers just from that.”

NeoLight, a startup company that’s working to bring hospital-grade neonatal care technologies to the home, has raised $7 million more in financing.

Dignity Health and Honor Health Systems came in to support the company along with previous investors like the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and his wife Ashley and other, undisclosed investors. 

Initially intended for hospital use, the company pivoted to pitch its hardware to new parents since they’re now being encouraged to take newborns home as soon as possible so that they can be quarantined.

The company’s light therapies are designed to treat conditions like jaundice, which occurs in roughly 60% of newborns and can lead to brain damage if left untreated, according to a statement from the company.

“The challenge is that the doctor may not know if treatment is necessary until the  newborn is three or four days old, often after the baby has gone home from the  hospital,” company founder Vivek Kopparthi said in a statement.

FreshToHome, an Indian e-commerce startup that sells fresh vegetables, fish, chicken and other kinds of meat, has raised $121 million in a new financing round as the Bangalore-headquartered firm reports accelerated growth spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

The startup, which offers its service in several major Indian cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, and Hyderabad, is processing about 1.5 million orders a month, up from 420,000 monthly orders last year, said Shan Kadavil, co-founder and chief executive of FreshToHome, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The growing popularity of FreshToHome, which aims to “Uber-ize farmers and fishermen” for commodity exchange, comes as people become cautious about stepping outside of the homes and standing in queues in front of vegetable shops to reduce their exposure to the virus. FreshToHome provides contactless delivery of “100% fresh and 0% chemicals” vegetables and meats directly to consumers’ homes.

On the platform, farmers and fishermen bid for their latest yields (as mandated by local laws) electronically. This allow them to cut the middlemen, which helps them and FreshToHome assume better control over quality of the items and reduce the prices. The startup has also established its own supply chain network and transports items through trains and planes.

The new financing round for the startup — a Series C — was led by Investment Corporation of Dubai, the principal investment arm of the Government of Dubai, Investcorp, Ascent Capital, U.S. Government’s development finance institution (DFC), and the Allana Group. As far as Series C financing round for consumer-focused startups goes, FreshToHome’s $121 million round is the largest to date for an Indian startup.

This is also the first time DFC has bought an equity stake in an Indian startup. It has previously lent capital to Odisha-headquartered MilkMantra. Iron Pillar, which led FreshToHome’s Series B round, invested $19 million in the new financing round. FreshToHome has raised $154 million to date.

Kadavil, who previously headed India operations of gaming firm Zynga and is an advisor to several startups, said raising a new round at the height of a pandemic was not necessarily difficult for FreshToHome as there is a pent up demand from investors for this category and the startup has demonstrated impressive growth in recent quarters.

“FreshToHome is a leader in leveraging AI-based technology and business innovation to bring a superior value proposition to customers and suppliers in a large and important market,” said Khalifa Al Daboos, Deputy CEO of Investment Corporation of Dubai, in a statement.

The startup, which currently clocks an annual recurring revenue of $80 million, aims to hit $200 million next year. Kadavil said FreshToHome has become EBIDTA profitable (it is generating a profit if you exclude interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization costs) in several mature cities and will now expand to more geographies. It already operates in the UAE, and plans to expand to Saudi Arabia. It also plans to expand within India and become operational in Kolkata.

FreshToHome competes with a handful of startups, including Licious, which has raised more than $94.5 million to date, and to an extent with BigBasket.

Tinder, currently the world’s biggest biggest dating app for people to find matches and connect with them, is expanding another feature today to extend the time people spend in the app, and the communications they can have within it.

Face to Face, an opt-in-only feature that Tinder launched earlier this year that lets users video chat with each other without exchanging personal information and only when they’re facing the cam, is now expanding globally, perhaps a timely move in a moment when many people are not meeting in person.

Tinder is well aware of the creepy aspects of dating services, and so tellingly it has touted how it’s not the company’s video team but its Trust and Safety team that built this one.

“We’re excited to share that our Face to Face feature is rolling out to our global community after receiving positive feedback from our members who have had early access to it,” said Rory Kozoll, Head of Trust and Safety Product at Tinder. “This adds to our growing list of features built focused on member safety throughout their dating journey, like Photo Verification, Safety Center and our offensive message detection technology. ”

Dating apps might seem like a strange category to thrive in a period where many are focusing — either because of government rules or on recommendation from health experts, or both — on social distancing and congregating in small, known, regular bubbles. But in fact there seems to be an opportunity here: they become a way for people to connect and get to meet each other, at a time when many bars are closed down or finding their normal operations very limited.

As a case in point, Tinder, according to stats from AppAnnie, has continued to linger in the top rankings of downloads of lifestyle apps this year (it’s currently at number three on iOS in the US).

And the video chat feature only accentuates the idea of using the app not just to see who is out there and who you might match with, but to communicate with those people.

This is not a complete free-for-all spamfest of unwanted people approaching you, as they might in a bar, however. Tinder noes that both parties need to be opted into the feature, and you have to have matched already in the regular part of the app before a chat can be initiated.

And even then you can choose to ignore video chats when they come in, as you might a regular phone call.

And, if you are getting creepy people saying inappropriate things to you and calling you too much, and you don’t want to turn the feature of altogether, you can report people by scrolling to their profile and following the “report” instructions.

Tinder has been playing with video features for years to extend the ways that people interact on the app, video being one of the most popular and engaging mediums in apps currently. It’s been a mixed bag. Tinder Loops, another way of showing yourself off, has been around since 2018 and is still going strong. Other efforts like its Swipe Night apocalyptic interactive video in-app show have been shelved in recent months due to Covid-19.

More robots are coming to White Castle.

Expanding a partnership with Miso Robotics, around 10 new White Castle locations will be rolling out the Pasadena, Calif.-based company’s robotic fry cook.

The move accelerates the adoption of Miso Robotics’ newly designed Flippy robot into kitchens to speed up production and allow more staff to work in the front of the house to service customers, the companies said in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

White Castle first announced its pilot with Flippy in July as COVID-19 was beginning to spread around the country and presenting risks for kitchen staff and customers alike.

The need to limit staff while keeping up cooking speeds presented a challenge for the restaurant chain and it turned to Miso Robotics’ fry cook in a box to find a solution.

“Artificial intelligence and automation have been an area White Castle has wanted to experiment with to optimize our operations and provide a better work environment for our team members,” said Lisa Ingram, the chief executive officer of White Castle in a statement. “This pilot is putting us on that path – and we couldn’t be more pleased to continue our work with Miso Robotics and pave the way for greater adoption of cutting-edge technology in the fast-food industry.”

The robots have been particularly useful during late night shifts, when employees don’t want to work but many of White Castle’s target customers are eager to grab some eats, according to a statement from the company. Flippy’s robots can now prepare up to 360 baskets of fried foods a day.

In total, the company’s robot handled approximately 14,580 lbs. of food and over 9,720 baskets since the pilot was instituted in late September 2020, according to a statement.