Year: 2020

Napster, the pioneering digital music brand from way back when, is changing hands once more. Today, a UK startup called MelodyVR, which creates immersive live music experiences that you watch either through VR headsets or phones, announced that it has acquired Rhapsody International — the company that owns Napster — for $70 million.

MelodyVR is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, and its market cap is currently around £74 million (about $97 million).

MelodyVR said that Rhapsody, which offers music directly to consumers as well as via B2B deals with companies like BMW, has 3 million users across four continents, with some 90 million licensed tracks in its catalogue. In 2019 it clocked 10.8 billion streams with revenues of $113 million on the back of an ad-free model that charges users $9.99/month for its service.

MelodyVR, meanwhile, has worked with artists such as Post Malone, Cypress Hill (pictured from a recent LA performance in a studio above), KISS, Lewis Capaldi, Kesha, Khalid, Luke Combs, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson, Panic! At the Disco and Tori Kelly, and has collaborated with a number of venue owners and event planners like Live Nation and O2 Telefonica. Notably, in more recent times, it has been one of the VR companies building and running “COVID-19-safe” studios in London and Los Angeles for artists to use and continue performing.

MelodyVR said that initially the two will continue to operate as separate businesses, but longer term the plans is to build out a wider platform that incorporates both immersive, virtual live music as well as music streaming services.

At a time when live music is under a lot of threat because of the coronavirus health pandemic and the restrictions on gatherings of large groups, it could turn out to be a very timely deal, even as it puts MelodyVR in more direct competition with other large streaming services such as Spotify, Amazon Music, and offerings from platform giants Google and Apple.

“MelodyVR’s acquisition of Napster will result in the development of the first ever music entertainment platform which combines immersive visual content and music streaming,” said MelodyVR CEO Anthony Matchett in a statement. “For music fans today, live and recorded music are intrinsically linked. We are as keen to see our favourite artists perform live as we are to listen to their albums. Our purchase of Napster, one of the music industry’s original disruptors, is born out of our wish to deliver the world’s foremost music experience, available seamlessly across audio and visual media and in turn presenting a truly next generation music service.”

MelodyVR becomes the third owner of Napster, after Rhapsody acquired the company in 2011 from Best Buy (which bought it in 2008 for $121 million). Rhapsody itself was spun out of RealNetworks in 2010, but over the years, amid investments by others like Telefonica, RealNetworks gradually built up its stake in the company once more.

Napster began its life as a renegade in the very nascent world of digital music, before the days of streaming, giving consumers an easy way to share music files (typically MP3s), helping them bypass purchasing physical or digital tracks and albums.

Ultimately, it was too good to be true: the company faced huge lawsuits and legal challenges that ultimately crippled the business and shut it down. The brand and logos still had a lot of currency, and they were purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Roxio, which then rebranded its own digital music service (FKA Pressplay) as Napster, which is the company that was then picked up by Best Buy, and then Rhapsody, and ultimately RealNetworks.

Through all that, Napster undeniably paved the way for a number of other technological approaches — such as the P2P architecture that Spotify used in its earliest days of building its streaming service — which now dominate how music is consumed.

Ultimately, all that business sounded the death knell for physical music sales, and the industry has subsequently turned to a variety of other avenues to diversify its business model. One of key the routes has been in live performance. So as live performing is now under threat, having a new home that is building a virtual alternative to physical venues could mean a potentially interesting combination.

“This is a tremendous outcome for two organizations with complementary platforms and loyal audiences, and we could not be more excited to be moving forward as one company,” said Napster CEO Bill Patrizio, in a statement. “The product, technology and cultural synergies of Napster and MelodyVR will bring tremendous innovation for music lovers, artists and the entire music industry. Good things come from being together, and we look forward to creating a powerful platform that combines our strengths and offers an even wider range of content to consumers, creators and advertisers.”

Eduardo Saverin will forever be known for cofounding Facebook 16 years ago with four other Harvard classmates (one of whom is still running the company).

But even before splitting in 2009 for Singapore with his shares of the company, Saverin’s attention was on startup investing, and since 2015, he has been laser focused on B Capital, the five-year-old venture firm that he set up with another friend, Raj Ganguly, a former consultant and vice president at Bain Capital.

There’s a bit to manage. The two — along with three other general partners — are now overseeing more than $1 billion across four offices and two funds, both of which are anchored by the management consulting giant Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In fact, unlike most five-year-old firms, B Capital has from the outset — partly because of its close ties to BCG — been on a mission to identify interesting startups and trends across the world. A quick look at its portfolio underscores just how wide a net it is casting, with bets that range from Ninja Van, the last-mile logistics provider for delivery services in Southeast Asia, to the L.A. scooter company Bird, to Icertis, a Bellevue, Wa.-based contract management software maker.

We talked back in February with Ganguly about B Capital’s approach. Last week, as B Capital was closing its first bet on a startup headquartered in Latin America (Yalochat), we had the opportunity to talk with Saverin, too, about how he sees the firm growing from here. Our chat has been edited lightly for the length.

TC: You were born in Brazil.

ES: I was born and raised in Brazil, São Paulo, then I moved to the West [to Florida, then to Boston for school] and I ended up out here in Asia more than 10 years ago.

TC: I’m surprised you haven’t invested in the region sooner.  I’m assuming — maybe wrongly — that you spend time there and have relationships there?

ES: Good things take time. For me, it’s a question of getting to know an ecosystem and getting ready to invest in it. We really do think about investing longer term in a truly global fashion, and we look at entrepreneurs who think of themselves also in a borderless world where they can start in a particular country region, then leverage what they’ve learned to expand across the world. In the case of Yalochat, [a conversational commerce startup that’s headquartered in Mexico City], it’s a Latin American business that is already today in Asia, but could they be the rest of the world? Absolutely. There are these more fabled stories of U.S. companies expanding elsewhere in the world, and even Chinese companies. But why couldn’t a Latin American company do that, or an African company? Our view is that they can.

My background, coming from Latin America, having lived in the U.S. and now living in Asia, [I’m] humbled by the fact that the world isn’t the same. So while we as a firm think about ‘global first,’ it doesn’t mean every part of the world is the same. You need to learn, adapt, get better, and get smarter about how each region works and how to do business there. So for us, we didn’t start on day one investing absolutely everywhere, but that is the mission.

TC: I talked with Raj not so long ago and he mentioned that one of B Capital’s startups has a business development person and a sprinkling of other employees in in Silicon Valley even though the company isn’t selling into U.S. markets. He said it “helps them get a better valuation.” Are others of your founders doing this, too? Should they?

ES: We talk a lot about the world of innovation past Silicon Valley. But that’s not because you should ignore Silicon Valley. It’s simply because I think there’s been over the years an overemphasis that it’s the be-all center of the innovation. You can’t go to the point of ignoring it — it’s actually critically important, and it will continue to be a big part of entrepreneurship. So we don’t ignore it. But I think it’s important to understand that its dominance won’t remain — not because it won’t do as well but because other parts of the world will do well.

As for whether companies think about creating offices in Silicon Valley, absolutely if it fits the requirements of that particular business. The Valley is a tremendous enabler, but it’s also challenging because for talent, for example, you’re in competition with a wide array of heavily funded companies, For instance, we have an autonomous driving technology company we have backed out of Europe, and if you think about the talent that they can acquire there versus the Valley and some of the price points, and you go down to the bottom-line enablement of that business, they certainly should maintain a large part of their engineering staff in their initial [European] headquarters. But they do have an office in Silicon Valley because I think there are very unique angles that they can bring to bear in terms of talent and skill set in Silicon Valley.

TC: How do you get comfortable with founders all over the world when your firm is sizable but not enormous? You don’t have an office in Europe. You don’t have an office in Latin America. Will that change?

ES: We don’t have what I would say is a dedicated staff [in either region] but because of our approach is a partnership-enabled approach — as an example, one of our big partners in our firm is the Boston Consulting Group and they have offices across Latin America and a deep on-the-ground presence —  a lot of the time we get introduced that way.

More broadly, our investments come from a variety of means that includes both relationships with founders who we’ve gotten to know time and who may have relationships with other upcoming founders and investors, so we also get introduced that way.

TC: What piqued your interest about Yalochat specifically? 

ES: It’s a company that’s looking to enable large enterprises on top of the messaging world, which is something we’ve looked at very deeply. There’s a lot of examples in Asia of how messaging applications and conversational commerce has been incredibly effective at enabling a reconstruction of how enterprises engage with their end consumers. So [using] that pattern recognition, we started looking at the space in other parts of the world and at winners in an economy like Latin America, where messaging is just huge.

Facebook use in Brazil, for example, is number three in the world after India and the U.S., so it’s a huge market for social. It’s a massive market for messaging.

TC: Have you invested in conversational commerce apps elsewhere in the world?

ES: No, as we take a bet on each of these categories, we like to back one entrepreneur and go with him across the world.

TC: But you have two scooter type companies in different parts of the world — Bird in the U.S. and Bounce in India — because the markets are so different. Is that an exception to the rule? Do you think in some cases it makes more sense to bet on local players?

ES:  I think in this particular case, when we’re talking about the enablement of new mobility mobility solutions, we viewed the India spoke solution and problem as massively different than what Bird was solving in more developed economies. I think Bird can be pan-global and that it has shown the capability to grow globally. But the India equation was a very different one for Bounce, where you’re seeing a company that looked at [executing on] public transportation enablement at incredibly low cost and doing it with a proven, tested, multi-decade medium, meaning traditional Vespas and motorcycle-style scooters in the region. So these were very different companies at incredibly different price points that I would say are more complementary than anything.

TC: You’ve also made numerous fintech bets in India and Indonesia, I know, and you’re looking to do more of the same in Latin America, where there is similarly a massive number of people who are underbanked or unbanked. How important would you say your relationship with Boston Consulting Group in seizing on this opportunity? 

ES: The idea is to build a big team [at B Capital], but to be enabled truly by partnerships, like with BCG, which help us bring to bear corporate relationships to our startups. If you think about it, the past few decades have been about the rise of the consumer internet. The next few decades will be about how you’re going to bring digital transformation to large traditional industries. These are industries that much larger than the industries that Facebook or Google tackled in the beginning. The advertising industry is a minuscule part of the GDP. We look at it in comparison to health care, financial services, or logistics, and technology innovation is going to start touching these massive industries.

As an entrepreneur, should you consider doing it without partnering and leveraging the distribution, regulatory know-how, and capital of the largest companies in that space? I know the startup timeline is very different than the corporate timeline in terms of how quickly the clock ticks. But our goal is to be a translation engine and a partnership engine between those industries, which creates a win-win.

It’s less about entrepreneurs in a dorm room trying to “out innovate” and take out the largest businesses in the world. In a lot of cases, it’s thinking about, ‘Can I do it faster if I leverage an asset or a distribution network or the regulatory reality of a large business, and can I create a win in doing that?’ We’re trying to make innovation not just about disruption but about positive and neutral transformation. I think that it will become part of the story. It’s not always going to be the story. But it will become a more important part of the story as you start seeing innovation begin transforming large, traditional industries versus [what we’ve seen with] the consumer internet.

A district court denied Epic Games’ motion to temporarily restore Fortnite game to the iOS App Store, but also ordered Apple to not block the gaming giant’s ability to provide and distribute Unreal Engine on the iPhone-maker’s ecosystem in a mixed-ruling Monday evening.

More to follow…

Supermetrics, the data management and analysis tool for marketers, has raised €40 million in new funding.

Leading the round is Highland Europe, with participation from IVP, while the injection of capital will be used by the profitable Finland-based company for further expansion, including bringing data warehousing to the marketing sector.

Founded in in 2013 by Mikael Thuneberg, Supermetrics is a SaaS that helps marketers compile data in a “ready-to-use format” that is compatible with their data crunching and reporting tool(s) of choice. The idea is to provide a unified view of various disparate marketing data so that marketing teams and other stakeholders can see what is and isn’t performing — and more easily course correct or double down.

Supermetrics is also designed to be used by non-engineers, and without the need to add another codebase to a company’s IT stack.

“The problem is the growing amount of data that marketing teams have to work with and the fact that data is increasingly scattered across a growing number of platforms, channels and tools,” Thuneberg tells me. “It is hard to get a comprehensive view of the overall marketing performance, managing all that data becomes hard work. Many marketers still rely on manual processes like copy-pasting to collect their data together and to update reports. It is time-consuming, error-prone and boring”.

To remedy this, Supermetrics automates data transfers from more than 70 marketing data sources to tools like Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Excel, data warehouses and various business intelligence tools.

“We build tools that take away that pain with automated data transfers and help marketers extract valuable insights from unified data,” says Thuneberg. “Using Supermetrics is very simple and you can get started with just a few clicks, not needing a lengthy setup process. We believe everyone should be able to get their hands on relevant data and use it to do their jobs better”.

In addition, about a year ago, Supermetrics expanded to data warehouses by launching its “Supermetrics for BigQuery” product. “Many of our customers are struggling with the volume of data they need to manage, and setting up a data warehouse can really help them solve many issues. We wanted to make that better available and more accessible to all marketing teams. Although setting up a marketing data warehouse with Supermetrics requires a little more technical know-how, we have stayed true to our philosophy and made it as simple and effortless as possible”.

Meanwhile, Supermetrics is disclosing that the company now has over 14,000 clients, from Fortune 500 companies to marketing agencies. It claims to be “highly profitable” and says it has consistently achieved profit margins of over 30%. Customers include Nestle, Warner Brothers, L’Oreal, Hubspot, and iProspect.

Thuneberg cites Supermetrics’ main competitors as Funnel.io, Adverity, Fivetran and Stitch (part of Talend). “There are also lots of smaller companies addressing the same general problem of marketing data fragmentation,” he adds.

After restricting access to a popular group with posts critical of Thailand’s monarchy, Facebook is planning legal action against the Thai government, which the social media giant says forced it to restrict content deemed to be illegal.

On Monday, Reuters reported access to Royalist Marketplace had been blocked within Thailand. Users there who try to visit the group, which has over a million members, now see a message that says access to it has “been restricted within Thailand pursuant to a legal request from the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.”

In a media statement emailed to TechCrunch, a Facebook spokesperson said, “After careful review, Facebook has determined that we are compelled to restrict access to content which the Thai government has deemed to be illegal. Requests like this are severe, contravene international human rights law, and have a chilling effect on people’s ability to express themselves. We work to protect and defend the rights of all internet users and are preparing to legally challenge this request.”

The spokesperson added, “excessive government actions like this also undermine our ability to reliably invest in Thailand, including maintaining an office, safeguarding our employees, and directly supporting businesses that rely on Facebook.”

The group was started in April by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a dissident living in self-exile in Japan, where he is an associate professor of political science at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

Pavin told Reuters that Royalist Marketplace “is part of the democratization process, it is a space for freedom of expression. By doing this, Facebook is cooperating with the authoritarian regime to obstruct democracy and cultivating authoritarianism in Thailand.”

The geo-restriction of Royalist Marketplace comes as thousands of pro-democracy protestors in Bangkok demand reform of the monarchy, including abolition of a strict lese-majeste law that mandates prison sentences of up to 15 years for people who defame members of the monarchy.

Pavin has been openly critical of Thailand’s monarchy. In a piece published on the Council of Foreign Relation’s website earlier this month, Pavin wrote that “for several decades now, the supposedly constitutional monarchy of Thailand has often proven to extend its powers beyond constitutional norms and rules,” intervening in politics as the current king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, established closer ties with the military.

In a 2014 New York Times opinion piece, Pavin described having a warrant issued for his arrest by the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. He was also attacked by a intruder in his Kyoto apparent, which Pavin believes “was a warning for my continuing to hold, and express, my positions.”

The restriction of Thai users’ access to Royalist Marketplace took place three weeks after Thailand’s Minister of Digital Economy and Society, Puttipong Punnakanta, threatened to take action against Facebook because he said it did not comply quickly enough with the government’s requests to restrict content.

In 2016, Thailand enacted the Computer-Related Crime Act, which the Human Rights Watch warned “gives overly broad powers to the government to restrict free speech, enforce surveillance and censorship, and retaliate against activists.”

Facebook is also under scrutiny in India, its biggest market by number of users, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Ankhi Das, the company’s top public policy executive in India, had opposed applying the platform’s hate-speech rules to a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party.

For iRobot, much of the last several years has been devoted to making its line of home-cleaning robots smarter. There hasn’t been much in the way of new hardware in a while, as the company focuses on things like connectivity, smart home integration and smarter cleaning. This latest update touches on all three, but primarily focuses on the latter.

Intelligence has long been a bit of a sticking point for the Roomba skeptics. The robotic vacuums have traditionally relied on patterns and physical barriers to offer the best clean. This week’s addition of the Genius Home Intelligence feature, on the other hand, brings a number features aimed at optimizing the cleaning efficiency of existing robots.

The feature is accessible through an update of the company’s Home app and will work with all of iRobot’s connected devices, including the Roomba i7 and i9 vacuums, along with the Braava Jet M6 mop. There’s a laundry list of different updates here, including personalized cleaning schedules developed around the user’s habits and/or preferences. The robots can also specifically target areas where messes tend to accrue, including tables and kitchen counters, setting it in motion with a voice command like, “Roomba, clean around the couch.”

Schedules can be set, including prompts like After Dinner and Bedtime, and the robots can be set to start cleaning when you leave the house and return to their charging bases when you get back. Other options include seasonal cleaning protocols and the ability to set “keep out zones” for the robots.

The news comes during what’s been a bit of a rough year for the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company. Back in April, the company announced it would not be releasing its Terra lawn mowing robot in 2020, as it cut around 5% of its global headcount amid a “repriortization.” The company laid the blame at the feet of COVID-19, as industrial automation companies have seen an increase in interest amid the pandemic.

The Genius feature begins rolling out this week.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a way for a fully wireless system to monitor not only movement and vital signs contact-free, but also to track activities – in a more privacy-preserving way without using video. The system has the potential to be used at long-term care and assisted living facilities to provide a higher standard of support, while also ensuring that the privacy of the residents of those facilities is respected.

The system, which is dubbed “RF-Diary” by the research team that created it, can identify whether a person is sleeping, reading, cooking, watching TV or more, by combining a map of a person’s living space with the types of activities that happen in different activities. The research team behind it trained the system on wireless signals generated by people performing known activities in these spaces, and was subsequently able to categorize activities from new people, in entirely new locations using the knowledge it gained through training.

Not only does the system preserve privacy more effectively than video-based monitoring, but researchers found that RF-Diary was actually more accurate, too. That means that it could accurately identify activity captions for individuals even when they were in dark settings, or blocked by other objects that would’ve thwarted visual checks. Overall, researchers found that their system was able to identify activities accurately over 90 percent of the time, across a range of 30 household activities.

This technology could not only help with communal care facilities, but also with aging-in-place, since the researchers note that families looking to support older relatives who are living alone could also use it as a way to keep up-to-date on their loved ones.

Since it can also monitor vital signs and general movement, the system created by this MIT CSAIL team could be a comprehensive solution that will not only help with resource-strained care facilities, but also with assisted care and remote monitoring in the COVID-19 era, when distance is often a prerequisite for safe and responsible best practice. Now the team hopes to get the system ready for real-world use, as a step towards commercializing it for general sale.

Palantir’s mysterious work and its founding origins with Trump ally and anti-press crusader Peter Thiel have inspired a number of controversies in recent years, none as divisive as its ongoing business with ICE. But with a direct listing around the corner, the famously secretive company is in for a lot more scrutiny.

In Palantir’s forthcoming S-1 filing, obtained by TechCrunch, the soon-to-be-public company addresses concerns about managing its brand reputation as some of its contracts attract unwanted attention. Palantir makes the fairly combative claim in the risks portion of the unpublished financial filing that its business could be harmed by “coverage that presents, or relies on, inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or otherwise damaging information” about the company:

“As our business has grown and as interest in Palantir and the technology industry overall has increased, we have attracted, and may continue to attract, significant attention from news and social media outlets, including unfavorable coverage and coverage that is not directly attributable to statements authorized by our leadership, that incorrectly reports on statements made by our leadership or employees and the nature of our work, perpetuates unfounded speculation about company involvements, or that is otherwise misleading.”

The filing also states that the company has its hands tied in responding to these hypothetical misleading reports due to the “sensitive nature” of its contracts and confidentiality requirements.

Incomplete reporting is inevitable for a company that’s largely shrouded the nature of its business from the public eye. Historically, any information that trickles out about Palantir’s work with U.S. defense and law enforcement agencies comes from FOIAs, like one that recently produced a user manual for Palantir Gotham, the company’s signature software platform developed for defense and intelligence agencies.

Palantir acknowledges that activists and the press have taken a special interest in the company due to its work with “organizations whose products or activities are or are perceived to be harmful.” The S-1 of course doesn’t name Palantir’s work with ICE specifically, but that contract has attracted a swarm of scrutiny, both from outsider observers and employees within the company. The filing notes that unspecified relationships have resulted in public criticism and “unfavorable coverage” of the company.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that Palantir employees were reckoning with the company’s work for the aggressive U.S. immigration agency, “[debating] the ICE contracts in town hall meetings, office hallways, Slack channels and email threads.”

While other tech companies have yielded to critics of defense and law enforcement work, Palantir instead has grown its most controversial contracts over time. The company’s S-1 discusses that decision making process:

“Activists have also engaged in public protests at our properties. Activist criticism of our relationships with customers could potentially engender dissatisfaction among potential and existing customers, investors, and employees with how we address political and social concerns in our business activities.

Conversely, being perceived as yielding to activism targeted at certain customers could damage our relationships with certain customers, including governments and government agencies with which we do business, whose views may or may not be aligned with those of political and social activists.”

In 2018, as the tech industry grappled with the ethical implications of lucrative federal defense work, more than 200 employees wrote a letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp expressing their concerns over its ICE contracts. Palantir has two current contracts with ICE, one for the agency’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) internal database and another for software known as FALCON. Combined, those contracts are worth as much as $92 million.

Palantir makes a sizable chunk of its revenue by selling U.S. agencies software that weaves together data streams to monitor individuals, but the company draws a thick line at helping China do the same.

“We do not work with the Chinese communist party and have chosen not to host our platforms in China, which may limit our growth prospects,” the S-1 states, calling work with China “inconsistent” with the company’s aims and culture.

“We do not consider any sales opportunities with the Chinese communist party, do not host our platforms in China, and impose limitations on access to our platforms in China in order to protect our intellectual property, to promote respect for and defend privacy and civil liberties protections, and to promote data security.”

Palantir’s anti-China stance isn’t necessarily surprising given Thiel’s penchant for ominous warnings about Chinese tech dominance — a position that also happens to bolster his relationship with a White House that’s since kicked off an unusual crusade against Chinese social media giant TikTok. Still, it’s strange, noteworthy and a sign of the times to see a refusal to do business with China articulated explicitly in a tech company’s S-1.

Asana, the project management software developer, dropped its filing for a direct listing on one of the busiest days of a surprisingly busy late summer.

The task management toolkit provider started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early FB employee Justin Rosenstein, isn’t as well known or as well financed as today’s other big public offerings — the game engine developer, Unity, and the $14 billion valued enterprise cloud storage provider Snowflake — but its modest $1.5 billion valuation may in some way make it a better bellwether for investor appetite in new tech offerings.

That’s because Asana is losing money … and losing money big. Its losses are expanding even as its growth increases. The company lost $118.6 million in fiscal 2020 even as it expanded its revenue to $142.6 million for the same period. In 2019 it saw revenues of $76.8 million and a net loss of $50.9 million. 

If the idea is that you have to spend money to make money, then Asana is doing exactly as it should, because the company has been growing. Revenue increased $19.7 million, or 71 percent, during the three months ending April 30, 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The company attributed that growth to a shift in its sales strategy toward higher-priced subscription plans and revenue from existing customers.

Cost of revenues for the company grew by 51 percent as gross margins slightly rose over the same period, according to the company.

One bright spot for Asana is the potential converts it still has yet to win over as paying customers. Asana boasts 3.2 million free accounts and has managed to make its bones off of only over 75,000 paying customers. Given the rapid transition to remote work for many knowledge workers, project management tools only become more important.

The path to the public markets has been a long one for Asana, which first appeared on the scene in 2008. The company’s last capital infusion came in 2018 with $125 million raised across two quick investment rounds led by Generation Investment Management, the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore’s firm may have ponied up a lot of cash, the biggest winner in Asana’s public listing is likely to be Facebook co-founder Moskovitz. He owns a huge percentage of the company — roughly 35 percent. That’s a whole lot more than Rosenstein’s 16.2 percent haul.

Asana had telegraphed its intentions to access public markets via a direct listing earlier this year — even before the pandemic had made the market more receptive to collaboration software tools like the ones it offers.

The path to deploying commercial aircraft that can handle all aspects of flight without a pilot is long, winding, expensive and riddled with regulatory and technical hurdles. Marc Piette, the founder of autonomous aviation startup Xwing, aims to make that path to pilotless flight shorter and more cost effective.

Instead of building autonomous helicopters and planes from the ground up, Xwing is focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of existing aircraft. Now, the company is sharing details of its go-to-market strategy several months after raising $10 million in new funding and following successful autonomous test flights in a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan. Xwing said it has completed since July more than 70 hours of engine time for ground and flight tests, and more than 40 hours of automated flight time.

The Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, a utility aircraft that has historically been used for cargo, flight training and humanitarian missions, will be the initial centerpiece of its plan to operate commercial cargo flights. The plan is to have a regional focus and operate within a 500-mile range with flight paths over unpopulated areas.

Xwing will operate the fleet. However, Piette said the company is also open to partnerships and licensing the technology to other operators.

Xwing’s so-called Autoflight System is designed to be aircraft agnostic. And it still is, Piette said in a recent phone interview. The Cessna 208B Grand Caravan is just the beginning.

“It’s still in production, it’s a safe aircraft and it’s a good platform for us to convert to an unmanned aircraft here,” Piette said.

Piette believes that retrofitting existing aircraft with its Autoflight System will speed up deployment, while maintaining safety and keeping costs in check. The Autoflight System is integrated with onboard flight control systems that allow the plane to navigate, take off and land autonomously. The system is designed to be supervised by remote operators who work with air traffic controllers, according to Xwing.

Before commercial operations can start, Xwing will need regulatory approval.

Xwing has the necessary Part 135 Air Carrier certificate required to launch its commercial business, which was obtained when it acquired a company running commuter operations. Xwing is now updating the certificate for cargo operations and 208B Cessna Caravans. Xwing still needs the FAA to provide flight certification for unmanned Cessna 208B Grand Caravan aircraft with cargo capacity of over 4,000 pounds. Xwing has been working with the FAA and has also been involved for more than a year with NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS in the NAS) program, an initiative meant to mature the key remaining technologies that are needed to integrate unmanned aircraft in U.S. airspace.

“I’m not going to minimize the challenge here because this is quite novel for the regulator and it’s also complex in nature from a safety perspective,” Piette said. “I’d love to be able to start these commercial cargo operations unmanned in the U.S, in the very early 2022 timeframe. We’ll have to see if we can make that happen.”