Year: 2020

Gaming platform Roblox, which has seen a surge of use due to the coronavirus pandemic, now has over 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it announced in February before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect. The company also said its developer community is on pace to earn over $250 million in 2020, up from the $110 million they earned last year.

These metrics and other company news were announced over the weekend at RDC, Roblox’s annual developer conference that was held virtually for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roblox, to be clear, doesn’t build the games that run on its platform. Instead, offers the platform for developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of the company’s larger individual games, before the pandemic, would average over 10 million monthly users. And over 10 games as of February claimed more than 1 billion total visits.

Image Credits: Roblox

Thanks to the pandemic, however, these gaming milestones have significantly increased in size.

During the first part of the year, the Roblox game Adopt Me! reached 1.615 million concurrent users and over 10 billion visits. A new game called Piggy, launched in January 2020, now has over 5 billion plays. Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event held in April 2020.

In total, there are now 345,000 developers on the Roblox platform who are monetizing their games, and over half of Robux being spent in catalog is now being spent on user-generated content (UGC) items, in less than 12 months after the UGC catalog program began.

The more than doubling of Roblox developers’ earnings year-over-year is related to a combination of factors, including the platform’s growing game catalog, new development tools, international expansions, and of course, a pandemic that has locked kids indoors away from their friends, forcing them to go online to connect.

On notable factor driving the increased developer earnings, however, was Roblox’s recent introduction of Premium Payouts, which pays developers based on the engagement time of Premium subscribers in their game. Through this system, launched earlier this spring, developers earned $2 million in June 2020 as part of this program alone.

Image Credits: Roblox

During the RDC event, Roblox also detailed its plans for expanded developer tools and platform updates. This includes new collaboration tools for larger development teams, which will allow developers to grant permissions to team members and contractors to work only on a certain part of their game. It will also launch a talent marketplace by the end of the year to help developers find people and resources to help with game development.

Roblox also said it will begin rolling out automatic machine translation for all supported languages, languages including Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish. This feature will help developers more easily reach international users with localized versions of their games.

Later this summer, Roblox said it will launch “Developer Events,” a new service that will help developers find one another in their local communities. Initially, these events will be held virtually, but will transition to in-person events when it’s safe to do so.

The company also signed its first music label partnership with Monstercat, an indie electronic music label known for its collaborations with gaming titles and artists, including Marshmello and Vicetone. The partnership has initially yielded 51 tracks for developers to use, free of charge, in their games. These include songs from a variety of EDM genres, such as Drum & Bass, Synthwave, Electro, Chillout, Electronic, Breaks, Future Bass, and more. More tracks will be added over time, Roblox says.

“The accomplishments of our developer community have eclipsed even our loftiest expectations; I am incredibly impressed by the unique and creative experiences being introduced on the Roblox platform,” said David Baszucki, founder and CEO, Roblox. “Our focus is to give developers the tools and resources they need to pursue their vision and create larger, more complex, more realistic experiences and collectively build the Metaverse.”

Roblox raised an additional $150 million in Series G funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s late-stage venture fund, just before the COVID-19 health crisis hit the U.S., valuing the business at $4 billion. Ahead of this, Roblox had been working to take its platform further outside the U.S. and into China, through a strategic partnership with Tencent focused on bringing its coding curriculum to the region and through added support for Chinese languages, among other things. Also with the additional funding, Roblox said it planned to help further its expansion effects, and build out more tools and its developer ecosystem.

Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform.

Investors include Y Combinator, Village Global, Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital and FundersClub.

“Paragon makes it easier for non-technical people to be able to build out integrations using our visual workflow editor. We essentially provide building blocks for things like API requests, interactions with third party APIs and conditional logic. And so users can drag and drop these building blocks to create workflows that describe business logic in their application,” says company co-founder Brandon Foo.

Foo acknowledges there are a lot of low-code workflow tools out there, but many like UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere concentrate on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate certain tasks. He says he and co-founder Ishmael Samuel wanted to focus on developers.

“We’re really focused on how can we improve developer efficiency, and how can we bring the benefits of low code to product and engineering teams and make it easier to build products without writing manual code for every single integration, and really be able to streamline the product development process,” Foo told TechCrunch.

The way it works is you can drag and drop one of 1200 predefined connectors for tools like Stripe, Slack and Google Drive into a workflow template, and build connectors very quickly to trigger some sort of action. The company is built on AWS serverless architecture, so you define the trigger action and subsequent actions, and Paragon handles all of the back-end infrastructure requirements for you.

It’s early days for the company. After launching in private beta in January, the company has 80 customers. It currently has 6 employees including Foo, who previously co-founded Polymail and Samuel, who was previously lead engineer at Uber. They plan to hire 4 more employees this year.

With both founders people of color, they definitely are looking to build a diverse team around them. “I think it’s already sort of built into our DNA. As a diverse founding team we have perhaps a broader viewpoint and perspective in terms of hiring the kind of people that we seek to work with. Of course, I think there’s always room for improvements, and so we’re always looking for new ways that we can be more inclusive in our hiring recruiting process [as we grow],” he said.

As far as raising during a pandemic, he says it’s been a crazy time, but he believes they are solving a real problem and that they can succeed in spite of the macro economic conditions of the moment.

CES 2020 got in just under the wire, ahead of COVID-19 reaching true international pandemic levels. And until today, the show’s governing body, the CTA, was planning to keep its record unbroken. Today, however, CEO Gary Shapiro announced via video that the Las Vegas event has been canceled. Instead, CES 2021 will follow the lead of the rest of the industry as an online-only event.

The news won’t come as a surprise to anyone following the industry. Even January 2021 seems like an extremely optimistic timeline, social distancing measures or no. While Berlin’s IFA still plans to go forward this year, all other big tech shows have been canceled or gone all digital for the foreseeable future.

“We concluded it is simply not possible to safely gather over 100,000 people indoors with a raging COVID-19 virus and no real hope for a tested and widely available vaccine by January,” Shapiro writes in a post on LinkedIn. “The world does not need more COVID-19 cases, and we decided we would do our part by ensuring we are not helping spread the disease.”

Developing…

NASA and SpaceX are looking to finish up the final demonstration mission of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronaut spacecraft at the end of this week, but it’s already looking ahead to Crew-2 – the second operational flight of Crew Dragon, currently set for sometime next spring. The agency revealed the four people that will fly aboard that launch, including two NASA astronauts, as well as one from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and one from the European Space Agency (ESA).

NASA astronauts Megan McCarthur and Shane Kimbrough will join JAXA’s Akihiko Hoshide and ESA’s Thomas Pesquet on that flight, which will follow Crew-1 currently scheduled for sometime in late September after Demo-2 concludes. This is a regular mission, meaning the crew will be staffing the International Space Station for an extended period – six months for this stretch, sharing the orbital research platform with three astronauts who will be using a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to make the trip.

That means there will be seven total crew members sharing the Station at once, which is an increase of its usual full complement of six. It sounds like that’s going to become the new normal according to NASA, with the extra person meaning that the crew can “effectively double the amount of science that can be conducted in space.”

If it doesn’t sound like the math works out on that, consider that ISS crew members spend a lot of their time on routine maintenance and operational tasks. A seventh person on board helping with those everyday activities should indeed free up a lot of additional time for people to conduct experiments and do research, since it means less time split for needed, but unscientific, activities involved in keeping the orbital platform operating well.

All members of this crew have previously spent time in space, but this will be McArthurs’ first trip to the International Space Station. Her last trip to space was aboard the Space Shuttle in 2009, when she participated in the final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. McArthur is also the wife of fellow astronaut Bob Behnken, who is currently at the ISS having launched on Crew Dragon for its first ever human spaceflight.

Startup stories are often too reductive — an entrepreneur dreams up an idea, snags some co-founders, raises a bit of money, and presto: success and riches.

It’s nearly never true. Even breakout successes like Slack that may feel straightforward have complicated stories. Amongst the most valuable startups there are hidden crises and disappointing quarters. Some famous startups even had to execute a hard pivot after their original idea flopped. Slack was originally a gaming company, Twitter was a podcasting platform and YouTube wanted to be a dating service.

But not all startups that struggle and eventually make it have to completely toss out their original idea. Some just need to shake up operations before seeing the sort of success they’d hoped for.

Social e-commerce and fulfillment platform Teespring is one such company.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

From a 2017-era round of layoffs and restructuring, the company is on an impressive, profitable growth curve today.

I was part of the reporting team that covered the company’s earlier struggles, which came after it raised more than $50 million in venture capital. So when Teespring wanted to discuss the numbers behind its recent growth, I was more than curious.

This morning, let’s look at how one startup found its groove a few years after we’d figured it was a done deal.

A comeback

Rewinding the clock, Teespring’s 2017 was a difficult period. The company had sharply cut staff as sales declined, cost reductions that helped push the startup from regular deficits into profitability.

At the time, reporting indicated that Teespring’s revenue fell off after it lost some power sellers and investments in goods other than T-shirts failed to materially improve its financial results. After the layoffs, Teespring raised $5 million at a diminished valuation to get back on its feet.

Playground Global has an eye on the future. A quick glance at the investment firm’s portfolio showcases a wide-ranging list of investments, covering robotics, autonomous driving, neural network, quantum computing, metallic 3D printing and gene therapy.

Playground GlobalCEO Barrett will join us on Extra Crunch Live to chat about these categories and more at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT/6 p.m. GMT. Login details are below the fold for EC members. He’ll join us to discuss these concepts and answer questions from the Extra Crunch audience. If you’d like to join in on the action, you can sign up here and check out best EC Live interviews, including Inspired Capital’s Alexa von Tobel and Emergence Capital’s Jason Green.

Prior to cofounding Playground, Barrett has had a long and distinguished career, dating back to an interest in security in his late teenage years. Beyond Playground, he’s probably best known as the founder of Rocket Science Games and his time serving as the CTO of Microsoft’s IPTV unit.

I’ve interviewed Barrett a number of times over the years, and he always brings thoughtful insight into future technologies. Barrett was one of our guests at last year’s event in Shenzhen, which seems like a lifetime ago now. Given how profoundly the state of the world has shifted in 2020, it’s certainly worth revisiting some of these ideas — in particular, automation and robotics, which have both been near and dear to Barrett’s heart and investment portfolio.

He’ll join us to discuss these concepts and answer questions from the Extra Crunch audience.

Side note: You can check out the full Extra Crunch Live agenda here.

Scheduling details

Date/Time: July 28, 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET

Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/99320626734

Add this call directly to your calendar. 

Lucid Motors is loading up its first electric vehicle with hardware — dozens of sensors, a driver monitoring system and an Ethernet-based architecture — for an advanced driver assistance system that aims to match and even surpass its rivals.

There will be 32 sensors in all, according to Lucid, which has branded its advanced driver assistance system DreamDrive. The total number isn’t what matters. The type and location — and of course, the software — does. For now, Lucid is just providing details on the hardware. 

The Air, which is set to debut September 9, will come with one lidar, radars, cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Lidar — the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car — is a noteworthy inclusion. The sensor is typically used on autonomous vehicles, not the production cars, trucks and SUVs that consumers will buy and drive. Lucid said its long-range lidar sensor will be placed in the front of the vehicle.

There is a small and growing list of automakers that have plans to include lidar in their production vehicles as well. Volvo revealed in May plans to start producing vehicles in 2022 that are equipped with lidar and a perception stack — technology developed by Silicon Valley startup Luminar that the automaker will use to deploy an automated driving system for highways. 

The number of radar sensors and their location is also a standout feature. Lucid will have five radars in all, one located in front to augment the capabilities of the lidar. The other four will be located on the four corners of the vehicle. This gives the Air 360 degrees of radar coverage. Tesla, which has an advanced driver assistance system that is widely considered to be the most or among the most capable on the market today, has eight cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and just one radar. Tesla vehicles do not have lidar. 

Image credits: Lucid

Inside the vehicle, will be a driver monitoring system with a dedicated camera. Lucid Motors didn’t reveal much about its DMS. However, it’s likely to operate similarly to GM’s hands-free system known as Super Cruise. Eugene Lee, the senior director of ADAS and autonomous driving at Lucid Motors, formerly worked on GM’s Super Cruise. 

Underlying all of this will be a high-speed Ethernet Ring, which Lucid describes as a unique cornerstone of advanced electric architecture. Automakers have been moving towards Ethernet technology for several years now in an effort to create a centralized network that simplifies the deployment of advanced features. Lucid said its ring, and not linear, design is what allows for a redundant platform for functions such as steering, brakes, sensors and even power sources. The system also allows for over-the-air software upgrades, an important feature (popularized by Tesla) that gives Lucid the ability to improve the ADAS over time. 

All this hardware will come standard on the first iteration of the Lucid Air, a pricier and more exclusive launch version called the Dream Edition. Lucid is sourcing its hardware system from several large suppliers, including Bosch, Continental and Here. The automaker said it integrates the hardware in house. 

The aim is for all of this hardware to support high functioning driver assistance features, eventually including hands-free automated highway driving. This ADAS package will not only offer Level 2 features, but is also Level 3 ready, according to Lee. There are five levels of automation under SAE’s definition. Level 2, is in which two primary functions are automated, and still have a human driver in the loop at all times. Level 3 takes that up a notch and is considered conditional automation in geofenced areas such as highways. Driver must still be prepared to intervene with Level 3.

Lucid said its DreamDrive tech will support 19 safety, driving and parking assist features that will be available as soon as the Air rolls off the assembly line. The automaker plans to add eight more features at a later date.

Lucid said the system will include safety features such as surround view monitoring, blind spot display, cross traffic protection that informs the driver of vehicles perpendicular to them, traffic sign recognition, automatic emergency braking and alerts for distracted or drowsy drivers. 

The driving assistant features will include adaptive cruise and lane centering for highway driving, headlight assist and an alert that tells the driver when standstill traffic has started to move again. It will also offer what Lucid describes as autonomous parking.

XPRIZE is turning its tried and tested model of offering cash prizes to spur innovation in critical areas to the challenge of COVID-19 testing. the nonprofit has created a $5 million prize pool for a Rapid COVID Testing competition, in partnership with an organization called OpenCovidScreen formed by scientists, researchers and industry leaders to drive open scientific collaboration on the topic.

The competition calls for participants to develop low-cost, rapid result testing solutions that can supplement those already in existence in order to massively scale testing capabilities and pave the way for safe reopening strategies. It’s open to potential solutions across a number of categories, including at-home tests, those conducted at point-of-care, distributed lab testing, and finally high-throughput lab solutions.

Judging for the ultimate prize awards will focus on their innovation, their performance, how quickly they can delver results (with the max allowable turnaround time capped at 12 hours), how scalable they are and how easy to use and cost-effective they can be (with a cost ceiling of $15 per test). The XPRIZE organization is also encouraging people to try a range of different technologies in their proposed solutions in order to diversify and ensure sustainability of the supply chain.

In order to take part, teams must joint the competition by August 31, 2020. The competition aims to announce grand prize winners by the end of January, and the plan is to award $1 million each to five teams.

Following the competition, participants can also benefit from a $50 million fund established by the ‘COVID Apollo Project’ to develop, deploy and scale their solution to actual production and distribution.

A lot of tech is built on the premise of services that can target the widest or most lucrative pools of users (and they’re a blockbuster when they can do both). But that leaves out a number of consumers, who fall into the margins for all kinds of reasons, be they physical, age, financial or other circumstances. Today, a startup building financial services specifically aimed at three typically marginalised markets — elderly or disabled people, and those who are recovering from addiction — is announcing some funding on the back of strong growth of its business and plans to do more.

True Link Financial, which provides financial services — specifically, today in the form of prepaid Visa cards and investment management — aimed at the tree demographics, is announcing that it has closed a Series B of $35 million, led by Khosla Ventures with strong participation also from Centana Growth Partners, an investor that specialises in financial services. We understand that the valuation is now around $115 million.

Kai Stinchcombe, the CEO who co-founded the company with Claire McDonnell (the COO), says that the plan will be to invest the money in adding more products to the mix, with insurance (life insurance) likely to come next, along with more credit-based services.

Interestingly, the company had raised a smaller Series B of $21 million from Khosla about 14 months ago — and started to pitch the news to TechCrunch back then.

“We’d mostly written the press release but then just didn’t get around to it,” Stinchcombe said with a little laugh. In the meantime, the company doubled in size in terms of revenues, and then Centana came along. Because of its financial services focus it was an investor True Link really wanted to get on board, so it reopened the round, closed the deal, and finally announced the news.

Indeed, Centana spotted the opportunity specifically around providing services for elderly people.

“True Link is fundamentally changing people’s financial lives at a time when they are the most vulnerable,” said Tom Davis, principal at Centana Growth Partners, in a statement. “The number of Americans ages 65 and older will likely double to over 80 million in the next 20 years, and this demographic is fortunately living longer and more independently than ever before. No one should be taken advantage of at a time when they need the most support, and customers and families consistently speak to the ways in which True Link has enabled them to retain financial freedom. We are thrilled to partner with True Link and invest in their mission to bring unique financial products to this market.” Davis is joining the board with this round, along with David Weiden from Khosla.

It’s ironic that the boost in personalisation that’s been afforded by the expansion and growing sophistication of technology hasn’t trickled down into more services built for the long-tail of would-be customers, so it’s always refreshing when you come across a startup that is tackling that very opportunity. In the case of True Link, the startup (founded in 2012) has taken the same products but tweaked them specifically with the particular user group in mind.

The True Link Card for Vulnerable Elders is based around the idea of giving an older person some autonomy with their money but with visibility for another person either to limit where and how that money is spent, or simply to be able to monitor where it is going. It also makes it easier elderly users  to pass on their cards to caregivers to make a purchase on their behalf without needing to track whether that’s been used exactly as requested (since there is a limit). It was, in fact, Stinchcombe’s own experience with a grandparent losing money in a case of fraud and financial abuse that led him to start this company.

The True Link Card for People in Recovery is based around the idea that people who are in that situation are usually engaged in a long-term struggle not to fall off the wagon. This can be tailored both to limit purchases at specific types of businesses (eg casinos, or bars), and also make it harder to take money out. “The thought here is that if you have a relapse along that journey, there is a transaction that could have been prevented,” he said. “Our goal is to raise the barrier, provide one more roadblock to relapsing.”

Services for those with disabilities are aimed at providing a link between a third-party administrator and the customer, so that the former has better tools for record keeping that can be necessary for benefits and also for local authorities to make sure that a person is being looked after well. Similarly those with cognitive or other behavioral issues can still maintain some financial independence and to learn more of it, but with better controls in place should something go awry.  Stinchcombe said that for many this represents the first time that they have been giving that kind of autonomy. The company is based and active for now only in the US, and True Link says it works with nearly half of participants in state-administered ABLE Act programs.

While some might say that “marginal” means “small”, there is still a big opportunity, both in the US and further afield (where True Link would likely work with a partner to roll out, said Stinchcombe).

“True Link has a great combination of a passionate team, a large and underserved market, and a proven product offering that is ready to scale,” said Weiden, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with them and improve financial flexibility and dignity for millions of people.”

In a world with growing amounts of data, finding the right set for a particular machine learning model can be a challenge. Explorium has created a platform to make that an easier task, and today the startup announced a $31 million Series B.

The round was led by Zeev Venture with help from Dynamic Loop, Emerge and F2 capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $50 million, according to the company.

CEO and co-founder, Maor Shlomo says the company’s platform is designed to help people find the right data for their model. “The next frontier in analytics will not be about how you fine tune or improve a certain algorithm, it will be how do you find the right data to fit into those algorithms to make them as useful and impactful as possible,” he said.

He says that companies need this more than ever during the pandemic because this can help customers find more relevant data at a time when their historical data might not be useful to help build predictive models. For instance, if you’re a retailer, your historical shopping data won’t be relevant if you are in an area where you can no longer open your store, he says.

“There are so many environmental factors that are now influencing every business problem that organizations are trying to solve that Explorium is becoming this […] layer where you search for data to solve your business problems to fuel your predictive models,” he said.

When the pandemic hit in March, he worried about how it would affect his company, and he put a hold on hiring, but as he saw business increasing in April and May, he decided to accelerate again. The company currently has 87 employees between offices in Israel and the United States and he plans to be at 100 in the next couple of months.

When it comes to hiring, he says he doesn’t try to have hard and fast hiring rules like you have a certain degree or have gone to a certain school. “The only thing that’s important is getting good people hungry to succeed. The more diverse the culture is, the more diverse the group is, we find the more fun it is for people to discover each other and to discover different cultures,” Shlomo explained.

In terms of fundraising, the while the company needs money to fuel its growth, at the same time it still had plenty of money in the bank from last year’s round. “We got into the pandemic and we didn’t know how long it’s going to last, and [early on] we didn’t yet know how it would impact the business. Existing investors were always bullish about the company. We decided to just go with that,” he said.

The company was founded in 2017 and previously raised a $19.1 million Series A round last year.