Year: 2020

The Nest Hub Max is getting Zoom . Google outlined the arrival of the popular teleconferencing platform in a blog post today, noting that it has started to roll out for users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.

The much-requested feature is arriving as an “early preview,” essentially meaning that users will have to opt-in to receive the firmware prior to wide release — though the company insists that it’s not a software beta, offering essentially the same experience as the wide release version.

To use it, Nest Hub Max owners need a free or paid Zoom account. Users need to link their account to the device and add the invite to Google Calendar to host a meeting. The feature will also take advantage (where applicable) of a new feature for Google and Nest Wifi that prioritizes teleconferencing for wireless bandwidth.

Zoom is one of many video conferencing services already available on Facebook’s Portal line. Amazon announced in August that the software would be arriving on its Echo Show devices before the end of the year, but has yet to give a firm date. As for the standard Nest Hub, that Google display doesn’t have a camera for privacy reasons.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, the company announced it would soon require developers to disclose their app’s privacy practices to customers via new, glanceable summaries that appear on their apps’ product pages on the App Store. Today, these new app privacy labels are going live across all of Apple’s App Stores, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

On the developers’ side, Apple began requiring developers to submit their privacy practices with the submission of new apps and app updates. However, it hadn’t begun to publish this information on the App Stores until today.

The new labels aim to give Apple customers an easier way to understand what sort of information an app collects across three categories: data used to track you, data linked to you and data not linked to you. Tracking, Apple explains, refers to the act of linking either user or device data collected from an app with user or device data collected from other apps, websites or even offline properties (like data aggregated from retail receipts) that’s used for targeted advertising or advertisement measurement. It can also include sharing user or device data with data brokers.

This aspect alone will expose the industry of third-party adtech and analytics SDKs (software development kits) — basically code from external vendors that developers add to their apps to boost their revenues.

Meanwhile, “data linked to you” is the personal information tied to your identity, through your user account on the app, your device or other details.

Broken down, there are a number of data types apps may collect on their users, including things like personal contact information (e.g. address, email, phone, etc.); health and fitness information (eg. from the Clinical Health Records API, HealthKit API, MovementDisorderAPIs or health-related human subject research); financial information (e.g. payment and credit info); location (either precise or coarse); contacts; user content (e.g. emails, audio, texts, gameplay, customer support, etc.); browsing and search histories; purchases; identifiers like user or device IDs; usage and diagnostic info; and more.

Developers are expected to understand not only what data their app may collect, but also how it’s ultimately used.

For example, if an app shares user data with a third-party partner, the developer will need to know what data that partner uses and for what purposes — like displaying targeted ads in the app, sharing location data or email lists with a data broker, using data for retargeting users in other apps or measuring ad efficiencies. And while the developer will need to disclose when they’re collecting data from Apple frameworks or services, they aren’t responsible for disclosing data collected by Apple itself.

There are a few exceptions to the new disclosure requirements, including data collected in optional feedback forms or customer service requests. But, in general, almost any data an app collects has to be disclosed. Even Apple’s own apps that aren’t offered on the App Store will have their privacy labels published on the web.

Apps will also be required to include a link to their publicly accessible privacy policy and can optionally now include a link to a page explaining their privacy choices in more detail. For example, they could link to a page where users can manage their data for the app or request deletion.

The privacy information itself is presented on a screen in the app’s product listing page in easy-to-read tabs that explain what data is collected across the different categories, starting with “data used to track you.”

Apple says it will not remove apps from the App Store if they don’t include this privacy information, but it’s no longer allowing apps to update until their privacy information is listed. That means, eventually, all apps that haven’t been abandoned will include these details.

Apple’s decision to implement privacy labels is a big win for consumer privacy and could establish a new baseline for how app stores disclose data.

However, they also arrive at a time when Apple is pushing its own adtech agenda under the banner of being a privacy-forward company. The company is forcing the adtech industry to shift from the identifier IDFA to its own SKAdNetwork — a shakeup that’s been controversial enough for Apple to delay the transition from 2020 to 2021. The decision to delay may have been, as Apple stated, to give marketers panicked about the sizable revenue hit, time to adapt. But Apple is, of course, keenly aware that regulators were weighing whether the App Store was behaving in anticompetitive ways toward third-parties.

Facebook, for example, had warned businesses they would see a 50% drop in Audience Network revenue on iOS as a result of the changes that would remove personalization from mobile app ad install campaigns.

Apple, in the meantime, took some of the regulatory heat off itself by reducing its App Store commissions to 15% for developers making less than $1 million.

As all these consumer privacy changes are underway, Apple itself continues to use its customer data to personalize ads in its own apps, including the App Store and Apple News. These settings, which are enabled by default, can be toggled off in the iPhone’s Settings. App publishers, on the other hand, will soon have to ask permission from users to track them. And Apple now runs plenty of other services it could expand ads to in the future, if it chose.

It will be interesting to see how consumers react to these new privacy labels as they go live. Apps that collect too much data may find their downloads are impacted, as wary users pass them over. Or, consumers may end up ignoring the labels — much as they do the other policies and terms they “agree” to when installing new software.

Details about Apple’s privacy practices were also published today on a new website, Apple.com/privacy, which includes not only the changes to the App Store, but lists all other areas where Apple protects consumer privacy.

Amazon today announced a new Alexa feature, Live Translation, that will translate conversations between people who speak two different languages. The feature uses Amazon’s speech recognition technology and neural machine translation technology to work, and supports translating between English and French, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese (Brazilian), German, or Italian.

To use Live Translation, an Echo device owner can issue a voice command like “Alexa, translate French,” to get started with translating between English and French. When you hear the beep, you can speak in either language, even taking natural pauses between your sentences, Amazon claims. Alexa will then automatically detect the language being spoken and translate each side of the conversation. On Echo Show devices, you can also see the translations in addition to hearing it.

To end a translation session, you say “Alexa, stop.”

The company had been revealed to be working on a universal language translation feature according a 2018  report from Yahoo Finance.

The new addition may now make Alexa more competitive with Google devices, which can leverage Google’s existing Translate service via Google Assistant. Google Home devices had introduced the ability to translate conversations on the fly in early 2019 across a wide range of languages through a feature called Interpreter Mode. Today, Interpreter Mode works across many Google devices, including smart speakers, smart displays, smart clocks and even Google Assistant on phones and tablets. However, when Google added live translation to its Pixel Buds, the feature initially flopped.

How well Alexa’s translation feature will work requires further testing after today’s launch.

Live translation is the latest in a series of language-focused updates for Echo devices.

The feature follows on last year’s introduction of multilingual mode for U.S. speakers, that allows Alexa users to speak a combination of English and Spanish, French and English, and Hindi and English, for example. Alexa can also translate a single word or phrase into over 50 supported languages.

In addition to helping users better communicate, Amazon says the feature can be used for language learning and for communication between hotel guests and staff through Alexa for Hospitality, its platform designed for the hotel industry.

A spurt of delays could derail the end-of-year IPO cavalcade, pushing some major flotations into 2021 and possibly complicating next year’s public-liquidity run.

On Saturday, the NYT reported that gaming development platform Roblox would delay its IPO into the new year. Its CEO informed employees that the hiatus would allow Roblox to “improve [its] specific process” for shareholders of all types.

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What the hell does that mean?

That after watching shares of DoorDash, Airbnb, and C3.ai soar last week, Roblox doesn’t want to allow current shareholders to sell in the IPO, only to see the value of their now-sold shares open sharply higher. (The Roblox IPO has a line in its offering explanation that reserves the ability for existing shareholders to sell, implying liquidity for employees and investors; this makes the pricing issue more personal than academic.)

One delayed IPO isn’t such a bad thing: Roblox will still go out, we will still watch, it will still be interesting. But now fintech startup Affirm will likely delay its IPO as well, Axios and the WSJ report. That’s two.

And if Affirm and Roblox delay, others may too. This morning we asked on the Equity podcast if there could be too much of a good thing. The answer appears to be yes, at least as far as IPO pops go. Investor enthusiasm was so high for last week’s mostly brand-name debuts that the whole well could be poisoned for a while.

Great.

This is particularly grating as the 2021 IPO cohort could be massive. If you thought 2020 had a lot of deals, next year could really impress you. But only if the prevailing climate is right, it appears. Because if there is one thing we’ve learned about unicorns, it’s that they are spotlight-shy. Say “GAAP” too loudly and they tend to scatter.

But at some point unicorns have to exit. This is especially true today, as the birth rate of unicorns in the United States — the pace at which net-new startups reached a $1 billion valuation — rebounded in the third quarter. From a local minima of just 11 new unicorns in Q2 2020, 17 made the cut in the third quarter. That brought the number of un-exited unicorns in the United States to 216 in the U.S. alone, according to CB Insights.

There are more than 500 unicorns in the world, all of which will want to exit while stocks are at, or near all-time highs.

If the liquidity train is derailed because some IPO did too well, I will lose my gosh-darn mind.

What more do you want?

It’s somewhat amazing that we’re in this situation. The IPOs in question that present a problem did, in fact, incredibly well.

Andreas Pursian, Markus Gilles, and Jonas Brandau, the three co-founders of Klima, an app focused on helping consumers understand and offset their carbon emissions, first found entrepreneurial success at Hyper.

The mobile magazine publishing toolkit they developed was sold to Mic in 2017, but it was only the most recent success in a string of collaborations dating back nearly a decade.

“We had a fascination for technology and all the great things you could do to improve society,” said Gilles, Klima’s chief executive, in an interview earlier this year.

Klima, which launched this month, is in some way the culmination of those efforts.

Gilles and Pursian first met in university and later with Brandau they launched their first app, Pino, a mobile-based video op-ed page that had German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an early contributor on the platform.

The connection to politics and media continued with Hyper, their publishing platform that sold to Mic and continues with Klima. With the app, the three co-founders have taken their media savvy and applied it to getting consumers to reduce and neutralize their carbon emissions through offsets and behavioral changes.

“Offsets can remedy and buy us a lot of time while we’re rebuilding our society,” said Gilles. “We need to get to 50% emissions reductions in the next ten years which is a herculean task. We can’t afford to leave any climate solution on the table right now.”

Like other apps, Klima has identified diet as one of the major personal steps a person can take to reduce their emissions footprint. Substituting cars with biking, or electric vehicles, and buying less fast-fashion and more used clothing also has an impact.  

Klima’s app includes a carbon calculator, which measures a carbon footprint and allows users to offset that with a personalized monthly subscription. The company’s app also provides lifestyle tips to reduce emissions. Finally it offers a social sharing feature so that other would-be climate warriors can join the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

“We have a special situation right now,” said Gilles. “What we are doing as founders. We know that the climate crisis is not taking a pause because of the pandemic. We have raised enough funding right now to still be there when the pandemic is over.”

The company is backed by Jens Begemenn, the founder of Wooga; Niklas Jansen, co-founder of Blinkist; Christian Reber, the founder of Pitch; and institutional investors including e.ventures, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and 468 Capital.

To date, Klima has raised $5.8 million in financing. The company offers three types of offsets for its users. The first is natural solutions, like tree-planting projects; the second is tech-based solutions like solar power installations; and the third is social solutions, like replacing wood-burning cookstoves with electric or gas stoves for homes. 

“We’ve seen great traction with the app so far,” said Gilles. The company’s app is now live in 18 countries including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and has the largest user base of any climate offset app currently on the market, the company said.

 

Sanchali Pal first woke up to the world’s climate crisis after watching the 2008 documentary Food Inc.

The Princeton undergraduate saw the film in 2011, and it started her on the journey that would lead her to launch Joro, the Sequoia-backed startup that monitors consumer spending to offer tips on how to offset and reduce a user’s carbon footprint.

After scoring a job at the development firm, Dalberg, then working in India and Ethiopia, Pal returned to the US to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. She initially thought she’d focus on transportation, but her mind kept returning to consumer consumption habits and the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by targeting consumer behavior.

“I started thinking about it in the fall of my first year at business school, and I kind of put it on the back burner because I didn’t know how to do it from a practical stand. I wasn’t a technology person. I didn’t build software myself,” Pal told Jason Jacobs, the host of the My Climate Journey podcast. “I didn’t know how we would capture the data to show someone their carbon footprint and help them reduce it until I met my co-founder [J. Cressica Brazier], and I met her at an MIT event in the spring of that year two years ago, and the wheels started turning, maybe there’s a tool here that we could build together.”

The Joro app uses consumer spending data culled from integrations with Plaid to identify changes in users’ personal habits that can make an impact on their overall carbon footprint — based on their personal spending.

The app also has a community component, connecting users with sustainability challenges, classes, and other educational tools, along with a social network to communicate with peers and track relative progress.

Consider it a version of keeping up with the Joneses, but for planetary health and eco-consciousness.

To date, the app’s community of users have reduced nearly 6 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020. Which sounds impressive, but given reductions in travel due to COVID-19 mitigation restrictions, the largest contribution that a consumer can make is reducing their meat consumption. While that only leads to roughly 4% reductions in global carbon emissions, it reduces about 1,200 pounds of carbon emissions. Over the 6 million kilograms that would mean a little bit over 10,000 people may be using the app.

Pal would not comment on the number of users her company’s app has managed to attract.

What the company does have now is $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, which doubled down on its $1 million pre-seed commitment made when Joro was part of the firm’s early stage founder program.

Other investors and advisors include the venture firms Expa and Amasia, and angel investors and advisors like James Park, the co-founder of Fitbit; Rich Pierson, the co-founder of Headspace; Sebastian Knutsson, the chief creative head and co-founder of King; the actress Maisie Williams; Philian, the private investment company of Karl-Johan Persson, chairman of H&M; Tom Baruch; and Anjula Acharia, a partner at Trinity Ventures.

“At Expa we are focused on backing remarkable founders that are passionate about the product they are building,” said Expa founder Garrett Camp in a statement. “We saw that in Sanchali – she had a big vision and conveyed it very strongly to us. We have conviction that Joro can build a great product and a great business. The world will be a better place because of what Joro will bring to market.”

Pal estimates that behavioral changes and better consumer choices can reduce and individual’s carbon footprint by up to 30 percent.

It’s a bet that other companies are making too. For instance, the Los Angeles challenger bank, Aspiration, founded by Andrei Cherny, has a tool that can measure the “social impact” of a consumer’s monthly spending — that includes the climate impact of daily consumption.

Pal hopes that through the education and community components of the app, consumers can put pressure on the systems and industries that are the primary producers of greenhouse gas emissions to change their ways.

“Systems are made of people. Like us,” Pal wrote in a blog post. “Companies and governments change when enough people demand it through their actions and behaviors. No, we’re not a silver bullet — we need policymakers and businesses to take sweeping action. But we’re not powerless either. Together we can accelerate the pace of change by demonstrating our demand for a cleaner society.”

If your event budget is more like dental floss than a shoestring, this is your lucky day. Our $25 Expo Only ticket offers affordable access to an impressive array of presentations — and opportunity — at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17.

Full disclosure: The Expo Only ticket does not include networking with CrunchMatch, the free Extra Crunch membership or access to the main stage programming. You’ll need a late registration pass to tap into those opportunities.

So, what exactly do you get with the Expo Only pass? You can explore the expo area to meet and connect with early-stage startups showcasing their innovative tech and talent. You also get access to all the breakout sessions (11 of them at last count) over the course of two days — including the Fast Money series. You need money to build your startup, and this series teaches you where and how to access grants and other funding opportunities.

Don’t miss the two University Research Showcase sessions, where you’ll hear about the latest space research and emerging space technologies. You’ll gain valuable insight on the current and future state of the space industry. Plus, you’ll have two opportunities to watch live pitch sessions and learn what VCs look for in a pitch deck. Get ready to take copious notes.

Schedule conflict? Don’t stress about missing any of the breakouts — they’ll be available as video on demand after the event. Go ahead, meet with a customer, flesh out your pitch deck — and catch up on anything you missed at your convenience.

Now that you know what’s included, here are four stellar breakout examples. You’ll find complete descriptions of all the breakout sessions in the event agenda.

Fast Money: Learn how SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators work together to connect startups to government organizations and resources in the space industry.

University Showcase — Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part One): will feature scientists and academics from USC, MIT, UCLA, ASU and Caltech, Aerospace Corporation’s partners, sharing insights on their space research and highlighting a range of emerging space technologies.

Pitch Feedback Session: Join us for a pitch feedback session open to all startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2020 moderated by TechCrunch staff.

Starburst x TechCrunch Pitch Me to the Moon: Ten promising early-stage space startups will present their innovations live to a panel of high-profile judges from across the industry.

Don’t let a dental floss budget keep you from attending TC Sessions: Space 2020. Buy your Expo Only ticket now and get ready to discover up-and-coming startups, find funding resources and learn more about the latest space research and technology.

Adult video giant Pornhub this week announced that it has taken the unprecedented step of removing millions of user-uploaded videos. The move, which the Canadian-born site calls “the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” arrives in the wake of a New York Times opinion piece that stated the “site is infested with rape videos.”

Pornhub announced last week that it would be limiting uploads to only verified users. Now, as noted by Motherboard, the service has suspended all videos for the site not uploaded by existing partners or members of its Model program. Suspended content will be subject to review by Pornhub early next year.

The service noted in a statement that the new model is arguably the strictest instituted by a content platform. “This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders,” it writes, “a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute.”

The Times offered reports — some first-hand — of graphic exploitation. “I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women,” Nicholas Kristof wrote. “If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.”

Major credit card companies ultimately followed suit. Last week Discover announced that it would cut ties with the service, following similar moves by Mastercard and Visa. That added incentive no doubt further pressured Pornhub to take even more aggressive action than already announced.

In a statement, the site noted that watchdog group Internet Watch Foundation discovered 118 instances of child sexual abuse on the platform. The service calls the number “118 too many.” The service was defensive in its report, believing it has been singled out due to its focus on adult content.

“It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform,” the service writes. “These are the same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and even the American Library Association. Today, it happens to be Pornhub.”

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.

Hi friends and new readers, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

This year has delivered turmoil, volatility and pain along with some unexpected bright spots, a flood of M&A deals, venture raises and of course, SPACs. In the next few editions of The Station, I plan to focus on some of the biggest stories of the year along with a deeper dive into those that were overlooked and deserve a bit of attention.

Dear readers, here’s where you come in. I want to hear from you. What were the biggest stories of the year? Which stories should have gotten more coverage and attention, but didn’t? Please share your thoughts.

Email me anytime at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Deal of the week

In the nascent autonomous vehicle technology industry, this might be the biggest story of the year. Uber announced that it reached an agreement to sell its self-driving unit Uber Advanced Technologies Group to Aurora Innovation.

The deal requires some unpacking. Here are the tl;dr highlights:

1. Aurora didn’t pay cash for Uber ATG, which was last valued at $7.25 billion
2. Uber is over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora
3. Uber gets a 26% stake in the newly combined company Aurora (Pre-deal: Uber held an 86.2% stake on a fully diluted basis in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8%.)
4. The combined company has a valuation of $10 billion
5. Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.
6. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.
7. Uber ATG CEO Eric Meyhofer is out.

As you might recall, I had the story three weeks before the official announcement. Back then, I didn’t have all the details, nor had I spoken to some of the key players like Aurora CEO Chris Urmson, who once headed up the former Google self-driving project.

The big takeaway right now: the next 60 days will be critical for Aurora and its hope of integrating two companies. The company plans to spend this time “dispassionately” looking at everything, including talent, tech and operations, Urmson told me.

Aurora has 600 employees and Uber ATG has about 1,200. The companies also have different cultures. It’s a monumental task that if not executed correctly could lead to the demise of Aurora.

A few other deals that got my attention …

Boston Dynamics confirmed that Hyundai has acquired a controlling interest in the company. The deal, which values Boston Dynamics at $1.1 billion, gives Hyundai Motor Group an 80% stake, with SoftBank controlling the remaining 20%. The transaction marks the Spot-maker’s third change of hands in a mere seven years.

In&motion, a French startup that developed wearable airbag systems for motorbikes, raised a $12 million (€10 million) funding round led by Upfront Ventures, with 360 Capital also participating.

Motiv Power Systems, the electric vehicle chassis maker, looking to merge with a special purpose acquisition company as a path to become a publicly traded company, reported FreightWaves.

Parallel Domain, which developed a synthetic data generation platform to train autonomous systems,  raised an $11 million in a Series A round led by Foundry Group. Calibrate Ventures and return investors Costanoa Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, and Toyota AI Ventures also participated.

Volkswagen Group invested 1 billion euros ($1.21 billion), increasing its stake in Volkswagen Anhui Automotive Company in China, formerly known as JAC Volkswagen. The company said it will build cars based on its MEB electric platform in Hefei in east China’s Anhui province with production beginning in 2023.

Uber’s 2020 evolution

Uber has spent 2020 ridding itself of any business that could derail or even delay its mission to becoming a profitable company.

One year ago, Uber’s business model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery as well as futuristic long-term bets on autonomous vehicles and flying cars.

The COVID-19 pandemic and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s focus on profitability prompted the company to dump its moonshots and double down on delivery with its acquisition of Postmates.

Uber Elevate, the company’s air taxi moonshot, was the last to fall. Uber announced this week that it will offload Elevate to Joby Aviation. This is yet another complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an expanded partnership between the two companies. The $75 million investment comes in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made as part of Joby’s Series C financing round in January 2020, Uber said. To date, Joby Aviation has raised $820 million. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup.

Last year, Uber and Joby, which is developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, signed on as a vehicle partner for Uber’s Elevate initiative. Joby was the first partner to commit to deploying air taxi services by 2023.

The upshot: Uber is keeping its hand in all of the units it has sold off — Jump, Elevate, Uber ATG — through agreements that typically have involved investing in the acquiring company in exchange for an equity stake and partnerships.

Inside Rivian’s adventure network

I recently had a wide-ranging interview with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe that covered charging, batteries and automated driving. (stay tuned for more on the batteries and automated driving bits). This week, I will focus a bit on Rivian’s charging strategy.

Most automakers rolling out new electric vehicle models have partnered with third-party EV charging companies. Then there is Tesla, which poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building a proprietary “Supercharger” network.

Rivian is going for a goldilocks “just right” strategy, albeit an expensive one, according to new details shared by Scaringe. The electric automaker has designed and is now starting to build out a network of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the United States as it prepares for the first deliveries of its R1T pickup truck and R1S sport utility vehicle.

The network will include fast-chargers located along interstates, which is common approach that Tesla and others like Electrify America have implemented. Rivian is also planning to install dozens of EV chargers designed to power up its electric vehicles while parked at adventurous destinations, from mountain bike and hiking trails to kayaking spots and maybe even near popular climbing crags.

It’s a direct appeal to Rivian’s customer base and one required to build confidence in the brand and electric vehicles, in general, Scaringe told me.

Two important points:

1. Building the Rivian network has been more than a test of consumer brand awareness and real estate wits. The electric automaker, which has raised about $6 billion, developed the tech in-house, including the high-speed DC charger.
2. The platform and the hardware around it also will be used for a fleet-based product. (Yup, and not just for its partner Amazon.)

“If you think of commercial vans, the charger and the dispenser may look a little different, but the guts of these power modules that are used to build up the charging capability are identically applied in these very different applications,” Scaringe said. “It’s one of the reasons we built all that core competency, so we can build both fleet-based B2B charging solutions and the consumer-facing adventure network for Rivian customers.

QuantumScape’s big breakthrough

Folks who follow hot stocks might have noticed the eye-popping jump in QuantumScape’s share price. That bump is the result of a decade of work.

QuantumScape is the solid-state battery company that spun out of Stanford, got backing from Volkswagen Group and then became a publicly traded company through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp.

This week, QuantumScape released performance data of its solid-state battery technology. The upshot: a solid-state battery that can charge from zero to 80% capacity in 15 minutes, has 80% longer range than today’s lithium-ion batteries, capable of running over 800 cycles at 80% capacity and contains a solid-state separator that functions at -30 degrees Celsius.

Why does this even matter? If QuantumScape has cracked the case of commercially viable solid-state lithium-metal batteries as it suggests, this would mean a huge leap in energy density conventional lithium-ion batteries, which would in turn, give electric vehicles a driving range comparable to combustion engine-based vehicles.

It’s important to note that QuantumScape says it has been able to achieve 80% longer range WITHOUT giving up or compromising other parts of the cell such as cycle life, operating temperature, safety, cathode loading, or excess lithium in the anode.

QuantumScape proved out the most difficult part. But there’s still a ways to go. The results are based on testing of single layer battery cells. The next step is to test multi-layer battery cells and then get to work on building out manufacturing to be able to produce these at scale.

QuantumScape founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh described to me in a recent interview how they got to this breakthrough. Hint: it wasn’t one revelation.

We knew we wanted to build a 1000-watt hour per year battery with solid state technologies, but we did not know the specific material system that would work, so there was a lot of pathfinding and exploration that was done in different materials systems that turned out to be dead ends.

Luckily, nature did provide one such system that meets all the requirements and our team was able to both discover it, in terms of its chemical composition, and also figure out how to manufacture it with high levels of quality and high rates speed to get to low cost. It took us about five years to find the material and then another five years to figure out to make it high volume with high quality.

It was not by any means, a straight shot. There were a lot of false starts.”

Notable reads and other tidbits

American Airlines said it will start offering at-home COVID-19 tests to domestic fliers, the Verge reported. The airline is partnering with direct-to-consumer home testing company LetsGetChecked, which will sell the tests for $129 on top of the cost of travel.

Arrival, the U.K. electric vehicle startup that plans to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special purpose acquisition company CIIG Merger Corp., has picked Charlotte for its North American headquarters.

California State Senator Ben Allen, Democrat,  introduced a bill calling for the State Secretary of Transportation to create an advisory committee focused on autonomous vehicle policy.

Cruise Automation started testing what it describes as “fully driverless vehicles” on public roads in San Francisco. There are important caveats to this including a small geofenced test area and that a safety operator was in the passenger seat. But it’s notable because this is the first milestone required to secure a permit to launch a shared, commercial service that can charge for rides.

Elon Musk has moved to Texas, the latest and not last tech executive to flee California. The two companies he leads, SpaceX and Tesla, still have major operations in California. Speaking of Tesla, the company took advantage of its absolutely massive market cap ($608B at the time) and filed to to sell $5 billion in shares after investors bid its equity to record levels.

EnergyHub partnered with Enel Group’s advanced energy services business line Enel X and to expand the availability of electric vehicle charging stations as a flexible distributed energy resource (DER) for utilities.

Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC, Argo AI and Ford Motor Company Fund partnered with Miami -based nonprofit The Education Fund to  make contactless deliveries to students and families in need in Ford’s Fusion Hybrid self-driving test vehicles. Ford said it is building a self-driving service in Miami-Dade for ride-hailing and goods delivery and offered to help make deliveries to students’ homes through its pilot program.

Sensible 4, Finland-based self-driving technology company, is sending a team to the Finnish arctic, to perform a two-week-long autonomous winter driving test in dark and snowy conditions. The goal of the test is to collect winter data and test how new features in the software perform in harsh winter conditions, the company said in an email.

The company ultimately wants to be used in self-driving last-mile shuttle buses. The software, that the test vehicle will run on is the base for the first commercial release of its autonomous driving kit solution, Dawn, which will be released in 2022.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent a letter to all 50 governors asking them to prioritize giving drivers and delivery workers the COVID-19 vaccine as essential workers.

Big data is a sham. For years now, we have been told that every company should save every last morsel of digital exhaust in some sort of database, lest management lose some competitive intelligence against … a competitor, or something.

There is just one problem with big data though: it’s honking huge.

Processing petabytes of data to generate business insights is expensive and time consuming. Worse, all that data hanging around paints a big, bright red target on the back of the company for every hacker group in the world. Big data is expensive to maintain, expensive to protect, and expensive to keep private. And the upshot might not be all that much in the end after all — oftentimes, well-curated and chosen datasets can provide faster and better insight than endless quantities of raw data.

What should a company do? Well, they need a Tonic to ameliorate their big data sins.

Tonic is a “synthetic data” platform that transforms raw data into more manageable and private datasets usable by software engineers and business analysts. Along the way, Tonic’s algorithms de-identifies the original data and creates statistically identical but synthetic datasets, which means that personal information isn’t shared insecurely.

For instance, an online shopping platform will have transaction history on its customers and what they purchased. Sharing that data with every engineer and analyst in the company is dangerous, since that purchase history could have personally identifying details that no one without a need-to-know should have access to. Tonic could take that original payments data and transform it into a new, smaller dataset with exactly the same statistical properties, but not tied to original customers. That way, an engineer could test their app or an analyst could test their marketing campaign, all without triggering concerns about privacy.

Synthetic data and other ways to handle the privacy of large datasets has garnered massive attention from investors in recent months. We reported last week on Skyflow, which raised a round to use polymorphic encryption to ensure that employees only have access to the data they need and are blocked from accessing the rest. BigID takes a more overarching view of just tracking what data is where and who should have access to it (i.e. data governance) based on local privacy laws.

Tonic’s approach has the benefit of helping solve not just privacy issues, but also scalability challenges as datasets get larger and larger in size. That combination has attracted the attention of investors: this morning, the company announced that it has raised $8 million in a Series A led by Glenn Solomon and Oren Yunger of GGV, the latter of whom will join the company’s board.

The company was founded in 2018 by a quad of founders: CEO Ian Coe worked with COO Karl Hanson (they first met in middle school as well) and CTO Andrew Colombi while they were all working at Palantir, and Coe also formerly worked with the company’s head of engineering Adam Kamor while at Tableau. That training at some of the largest and most successful data infrastructure companies from the Valley forms part of the product DNA for Tonic.

Coe explained that Tonic is designed to prevent some of the most obvious security flaws that arise in modern software engineering. In addition to saving data pipelining time for engineering teams, Tonic “also means that they’re not worried about sensitive data going from production environments to lower environments that are always less secure than your production systems.”

He said that the idea for what would become Tonic originated while troubleshooting problems at a Palantir banking client. They needed data to solve a problem, but that data was super sensitive, and so the team ended up using synthetic data to bridge the difference. Coe wants to expand the utility of synthetic data to more people in a more rigorous way, particularly given the legal changes these days. “I think regulatory pressure is really pushing teams to change their practices” around data, he noted.

The key to Tonic’s technology is its subsetter, which evaluates raw data and starts to statistically define the relationships between all the records. Some of that analysis is automated depending on the data sources, and when it can’t be automated, Tonic’s UI can help a data scientist onboard datasets and define those relationships manually. In the end, Tonic generates these synthetic datasets usable by all the customers of that data inside a company.

With the new round of funding, Coe wants to continue doubling down on ease-of-use and onboarding and proselytizing the benefit of this model for his clients. “In a lot of ways, we’re creating a category, and that means that people have to understand and also get the value [and have] the early-adopter mindset,” he said.

In addition to lead investor GGV, Bloomberg Beta, Xfund, Heavybit and Silicon Valley CISO Investments participated in the round as well as angels Assaf Wand and Anthony Goldbloom.