Year: 2020

Waymo has added an additional $800 million to the $2.25 billion funding round that it first announced in March, bringing the total size of the financing (its first from investors outside of Alphabet) to $3 billion. The extension comes from new investors including those managed by T. Rowe Price, Perry Creek Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company and others.

The extension, like the original round itself, will be used by Waymo to invest in its workforce, product development and operating its Waymo One ride-hailing service, as well as its Waymo Via cargo and goods transportation service.

Waymo’s move to bring in external funding is seen as a way for the autonomous driving company to inject fresh capital into its program, as well as bring on new strategic partners, like Magna and AutoNation, which participated in the previously announced tranche. While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a temporary setback when it comes to its testing and service deployment programs, Waymo notes in a new blog post from CEO John Krafcik that the crisis actually underscores the need for its technology.

“COVID-19 has underscored how fully self-driving technology can provide safe and hygienic personal mobility and delivery services,” Kracik notes in the post. “We’re grateful these partners share our mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going.”

LinkedIn adds new features to support virtual events, Elon Musk escalates his battle with Alameda County and Banjo’s CEO resigns after some disturbing revelations.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 12, 2020.

1. LinkedIn adds polls and live video-based events in a focus on more virtual engagement

Microsoft -owned LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it’s trying to play a part in virtual workplaces: It’s launching a Polls feature for users to canvas opinions and get feedback, as well as a tool called LinkedIn Virtual Events that lets people create and broadcast video events via its platform.

The Virtual Events products is a merger of two existing tools — LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events.

2. Elon Musk restarts Tesla factory in defiance of county orders

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday that the company’s factory in Fremont, California is open and has restarted production despite a stay-at-home order issued by Alameda County. Musk said in a tweet Monday afternoon that he will “be on the line,” a reference to the assembly line at the factory where Tesla makes the Model X, Model S, Model 3 and Model Y. He added “if anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

3. Banjo’s CEO resigns after report details KKK ties in his past

After investigative reporting at OneZero revealed his undisclosed involvement in a shooting at a synagogue with KKK members at age 17, the CEO of surveillance startup Banjo will leave the company he founded. In a short blog post, the company announced a “change in leadership” and the resignation of its founder and CEO Damien Patton.

4. 4 edtech CEOs peer into the industry’s future

As millions adopt remote learning overnight, edtech’s reputation is changing — and investors are scrambling accordingly. We asked four entrepreneurs who have been working in this space to share what they think the next billion-dollar business will look like. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. Instagram Lite shuts down in advance of a relaunch

Instagram — which has always characterized the app as a “test” — is planning to take what it has learned over these past years to develop a new version of Instagram Lite. It’s unclear how far out that launch may be, but the new version is currently being built.

6. Former Tesla president and Lyft COO Jon McNeill on what both companies have gotten right and wrong

Jon McNeill spent two-and-a-half years as Tesla’s president, heading up global sales, marketing, delivery and government relations before heading to Lyft in early 2018. We talked to him about his experience at both companies and how he’s applying those learnings to his new startup studio. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. DispatchTrack, a last-mile logistics platform, raises $144M in its first-ever funding

DispatchTrack, which provides a platform for last-mile deliveries, has closed its first-ever funding. As a bootstrapped startup, it’s already grown to support more than 60 million deliveries per year.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

LaunchNotes, a startup founded by three ex-Atlassian employees, makes it easier for businesses to communicate the changes in their software products to both their internal teams and external customers. In practice, you can think of it as a product similar to Statuspage, which made it easier for companies to communicate the status of their systems. And that’s maybe no surprise, given that two of the three co-founders, Tyler Davis and Tony Ramirez, previously worked on that service, which was then sold to Atlassian .

LaunchNotes is now generally available.

As Jake Brereton, the third co-founder and former head of marketing for Jira at Atlassian, told me, before founding LaunchNotes, the team had already realized how difficult it had become for many software businesses to keep their release notes updates. It’s not unusual for many companies to ship updates multiple times a day, after all, which only makes writing comprehensive release notes harder. It doesn’t help that the Agile Manifesto doesn’t exactly highlight the value of documentation when it advocates for ‘working software over comprehensive documentation.’

Project trackers, the team argues, are great for keeping specific teams in the loop, but it takes a communication layer on top of that to consolidate those updates and distribute it across an organization and to outside stakeholders.

What LaunchNotes aims to achieve is a sort of middle ground, where PMs can update their constituents about changes that apply to their work and businesses as a whole can then communicate relevant changes to their customers, all from one platform. The LauchNotes team specifically notes how useful a service like this is for non-technical teams that need to communicate changes to customers but are currently often left in the dark, especially as the DevOps movement is pushing for even faster updates.

Writing updates in LaunchNotes is pretty straightforward, as you would expect, and updates can easily be directed to internal or external sites. There’s a neat tagging feature that makes it easier for stakeholders to focus on the topics that most matter to them (think mobile apps, APIs, integrations, etc.), but for the most part, the team focused on keeping things simple. The system also allows users to subscribe to updates that are relevant to them and get alerts when there are any changes.

While LaunchNotes is still in its early days — and remains self-funded — it already counts Atlassian, Twilio and Loom among its customers (here is Loom’s LaunchNotes page).

The team is still thinking about how it can automate more of the update process through integrations with existing project management tools, but Brereton stressed that this is less about automation than making it easy for development teams to communicate with their non-technical stakeholders.

Pricing for LaunchNotes starts a $29, but there is also a free plan that allows for two project users and up to 50 public subscribers who can sign up for alerts. The free plan is also limited to public updates and doesn’t allow for any major design changes.

Sleeper is widening its ambitions to esports as the arena sports world goes into hibernation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

While CEO Nan Wang has high hopes that the upcoming NFL season can proceed amid the pandemic, he’s hoping to expand the app’s appeal to gamers by launching support for the intensely popular title League of Legends. Wang says that esports support was always in the cards, but that its rollout was never supposed to come this early.

“Originally, the goal was to do arena sports and then strategically select esports that we thought would be big market opportunities,” Wang says. “In the absence of sports, it becomes easier for us to push something that was further out on the roadmap.”

As Sleeper looks to push beyond its 1 million active users, the company is bulking up on funding reserves. The fantasy sports app has closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Kevin Durant, Baron Davis, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Twitch CEO Kevin Lin also joined the round. In August, the company shared it had raised a $5.3 million Series A led by General Catalyst.

For now, all of Sleeper’s services are free and there aren’t immediate plans to change that. Wang says that delayed and canceled seasons of arena sports is likely going to push out the company’s timelines for beginning to generate revenues.

Sleeper’s investors have hailed the startup as leading the way among a new class of vertical-focused social networks.

“The next social platforms are going to be vertical and look a lot more like games, offering deeper engagement than broad social networking platforms. Sleeper’s leagues provide shared activities between friends, and has some of the best stickiness metrics we’ve seen,” Andreessen Horowitz GP Andrew Chen said in a statement.

With its League of Legends launch, Sleeper is in the position of helping define a fantasy league experience for a popular franchise. The league’s organization isn’t fundamentally different from other fantasy sports. Users recruit a fantasy crew and draft professional esports athletes to their teams. From there, users in a league participate in weekly head-to-head matches with each other, making predictions and leveraging gameplay-specific mechanics.

League of Legends support is a big deal to Sleeper because it also represents the company’s first international foray. Users in the U.S., Europe, Vietnam, Korea and Brazil can participate in this upcoming fantasy season.

On the product side, the startup recently launched voice chat to capitalize on users stuck at home amid the pandemic, Wang tells TechCrunch the team is also hoping to add video chat to the app soon. Wang also notes that Sleeper is on track to launch three new sports this year.

As Sleeper aims to grow around the roadblocks of pandemic lockdowns, Wang and his team hope that their continued focus on social features can ensure the startup’s shared success in the worlds of online gaming and arena gaming.

“The roadmap for us has always been to win both sports and exports because they both have the same underlying motivation,” Wang says. “The most important thing for any sports fan is being able to enjoy it with their friends and family members.”

Google is making it easier for Google Play Music users to make the switch to the company’s now preferred music app, YouTube Music, ahead of its plans to shut down Google Play Music later this year. Starting today, Google Play Music users will be able to move their libraries, personal taste preferences and playlists to the newer YouTube Music service by way of a new “transfer” option available in the app.

The company has been steadily working to make YouTube Music its default music service, in order to eventually replace Google Play Music. Last year, for example, Google shut down the Google Play Artist Hub and began preinstalling YouTube Music on Android smartphones. It said at the time those moves were part of its broader strategy to merge the two services.

Now we have a deadline of sorts for Google Play Music’s end-of-life — sometime later this year, according to Google’s announcement.

One challenge in this transition was the ability for Google Play users to retain their personalization preferences, library and playlists from Google Play Music, when moving to the new service. Most users did not relish the idea of starting from scratch after building up years of history on Google Play Music.

That’s where today’s new “transfer” option comes in.

On YouTube Music, users will be able to now click on a “transfer” button on iOS and Android to start the transfer of their uploads, purchases, added songs and albums, personal and subscribed playlists, likes and dislikes, curated stations, and personal taste preferences.

Following the transfer, users will immediately see an updated YouTube Music home screen reflecting the impact of this new data on their personalized recommendations. YouTube Music will also email users when the transfer is complete and their music has been fully added to the in-app “Library” tab.

Current customers will be alerted to the transfer option via an email that includes more detailed instructions.

Google also addressed Google Play Music user feedback by rolling out new features to YouTube Music aimed at making its newer service more compatible in terms of feature set with the older one.

It recently added increased playlist length (from 1K to 5K songs), support for uploads (up to 100K tracks — which is 50K more compared with Google Play Music), offline listening, lyrics, and an Explore tab for discovering new music, playlists, and genres.

In addition, podcast listeners are able to visit a webpage (http://podcasts.google.com/transfer) to transfer their subscriptions and episode progress to Google Podcasts with a single click. The Google Podcasts app, like YouTube Music, will serve as Google’s default podcast listening experience, similar to how Apple’s Podcasts is its own dedicated app for audio programs.

YouTube Music has yet to rival Spotify or Apple in terms of paying music subscribers. Earlier this year, the company said YouTube Music and YouTube Premium combined have over 20M paid subscribers, but it didn’t break out how many users converted to paid customers to access the music subscription offering. Meanwhile, Apple announced last year its Apple Music service topped 60M subscribers; Spotify as of Q1 2020 now has 130 million paid subscribers.

In part, YouTube Music’s struggles are due to the fact that Google is operating two separate music services, splitting its customer base. When Google Play Music fully shuts down, that could change.

YouTube Music is being offered at the same $9.99 per month subscription price as Google Play Music, which includes on-demand streaming, background listening, offline access, and an ad-free experience. For $11.99 per month, users can extend that experience to YouTube by way of YouTube Premium.

Google didn’t provide an exact date for the shutdown of Google Play Music.

“For now, users will continue to have access to both services,” the company said. “We want to ensure everyone has time to transfer their content and get used to YouTube Music, so we’ll provide plenty of notice ahead of users no longer having access to Google Play Music later this year.”

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is admitting that the short-form video service’s launch hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped — and he knows what to blame for its issues.

“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said in an interview with The New York Times. “Everything. But we own it.”

Back in April, I actually asked Quibi executives about how they thought the worldwide pandemic and widespread social distancing measures might affect their launch. After all, an app designed to deliver videos under 10 minutes when you’re on-the-go seems less appealing when no one can leave their house (where you can just sit on your couch and watch Netflix).

“I’m looking to take small breaks more than ever before to stand up, walk around, go outside,” CTO Rob Post said at the time. “Our use cases are these in-between moments. Now more than ever, that use case is still present.”

Similarly, Katzenberg told The Times he’d hoped “there would still be many in-between moments while sheltering in place.” Instead, he argued that those moments are still happening, “but it’s not the same. It’s out of sync.”

How badly has the launch gone? Quibi says it has been downloaded around 3.5 million times, and that it currently has 1.3 million active users. That’s a significant audience, especially for a service that was only released a little over a month ago.

Still, Katzenberg admitted it’s “not close to what we wanted.” And the company is apparently adjusting its projections, which had called for the service to reach 7 million users and $250 million in subscriber in its first year.

At least it sounds like Quibi is trying to learn and adapt. For one thing, the marketing has started to shift to promoting specific shows like “Reno 911” reboot, rather than advertising the idea of Quibi itself. For another, the company said it will be adding support TV viewing support for iOS users this week.

Smartphone shipments are reportedly beginning to see signs of line China, after a sizable dip from the COVID-19 pandemic. New numbers from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (a government connected agency) point to a 17% rise in shipments for April, pointing to some recovery for the market.

The figure, from the China state supported group, is virtually a mirror reflection of the 18% dip Canalys reported for Q1. COVID-19 was the primary culprit for those figures, through a combination of decreased spending among China’s phone buying public and sizable supply chain constraints as many Asian nations were on lockdown to slow the spread.

Both Huawei and Apple benefitted from the rebound, though Reuters notes that the firm opted not to include an OS breakdown for the first time in a while, making it more difficult to parse marketshare here.

Smartphone shipments have suffered across the board, along with countless other industries. A rebound for China’s market could be a bellwether for positive numbers for the industry moving forward — especially given the country’s close ties to the global supply chain. In spite of being the first country hit, China’s official figures for COVID-19 deaths have remained low, compared to countries in Europe and North America.

That’s likely due in part to some draconian measures used to stop the spread. Other countries (the U.S. in particular) may not be so likely to rebound from the pandemic, leading to a more protracted impact on the global market. 

Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub in an all-stock deal, The Wall Street Journal reports. This comes a few months after reports emerged that GrubHub was looking to sell Uber, DoorDash and others.

According to the report, Uber approached GrubHub earlier this year with an offer, but the two companies are still in talks. Another report says the deal could be finalized sometime this month.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, food delivery has been hot. In Q1, Uber Eats experienced major growth with gross bookings of $4.68 billion, up 52% from that same quarter one year ago.

TechCrunch is awaiting comment from Uber and GrubHub. Developing…

As parents across the country are tasked with managing their children’s schooling amid a pandemic, investors are betting on a homeschooling startup that’s aiming to provide parents with services that can simplify the process of giving their kids a tailored education at home.

Founder Ryan Delk says his startup Primer, is building the “full-stack infrastructure” that parents need to homeschool their kids, an interactive suite of products that he hopes can “make homeschooling a mainstream option for families.”

His company shared funding details with TechCrunch, disclosing that his startup had closed a $3.7 million seed round led by Founders Fund. Other investors in the round include Naval Ravikant, Cyan Banister and Village Global.

Delk was homeschooled by his parents from kindergarten to eighth grade, an experience he looks back on fondly, he says. Delk says that he was “stunned by the lack of infrastructure” available today for parents interested in homeschooling their kids.

As of 2016, about 2.4 million kids in the United States are homeschooled.

Primer isn’t offering a dedicated curriculum. So far, they’ve been building tools to help parents acquaint themselves with what’s out there. Primer has already rolled out a pair of free homeschooling resources for parents, including Navigator, a tool to help parents stay compliant with state regulations for homeschooling their kids, as well as Primer Library, a collection of free digital instruction materials.

Since launching its compliance and library tools late last year, the team has been prepping for their next launch, a series of interest-based communities that homeschoolers can join and participate in online. The communities will begin rolling out this August in time for a new school year. Delk says the team is hoping to launch about 5-7 different classes, spanning topics like “rockets, chess and baking” with instruction from experts and interactions with other students. Primer hasn’t finalized pricing, but the team plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for membership to the communities.

Today, the startup is launching a waitlist for this feature. In a blog post, Delk notes that next year he hopes to launch “several more products that deliver everything parents need to give their children an exceptional homeschooling experience.”

Delk believes that there’s going to be a “huge influx” of new homeschoolers as shelter-in-place winds down and some parents find that homeschooling is something they’d like to pursue long-term. He notes that the products that his team is creating are still pretty high-touch for parents and that it isn’t the right fit for everyone, much like homeschooling.

“It’s going to be very hands-on and we’re going to be upfront about that,” Delk says. “We are not building a plant-your-kid-in-front-of-an-iPad-for-six-hours product.”

When it comes to corporate venture capital, semiconductor giant Intel has shaped up to be one of the most prolific and prescient investors in the tech world, with investments in 1,582 companies worldwide, and a tally of some 692 portfolio companies going public or otherwise exiting in the wake of Intel’s backing.

Today, the company announced its latest tranche of deals: $132 million invested in 11 startups. The deals speak to some of the company’s most strategic priorities currently and in the future, covering artificial intelligence, autonomous computing, and chip design.

Many corporate VCs have been clear in drawing a separation between their activities and that of their parents, and the same has held for Intel, but at the same time, the company has made a number of key moves that point to how it uses its VC muscle to expand its strategic relationships and also ultimately expand through M&A. Just earlier this month, it acquired Moovit, an Intel Capital portfolio company, for $900 million (a deal that was knocked down to $840 million when accounting for its previous investment).

“Intel Capital identifies and invests in disruptive startups that are working to improve the way we work and live. Each of our recent investments is pushing the boundaries in areas such as AI, data analytics, autonomous systems and semiconductor innovation. Intel Capital is excited to work with these companies as we jointly navigate the current world challenges and as we together drive sustainable, long-term growth,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement.

The tranche of deals come at a critical time in the worlds of startups and venture investing. Many are worried that the slowdown in the economy, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will mean a subsequent slowdown in tech finance. Intel says that it plans to invest between $300 million and $500 million in total this year, so this would go some way to refuting that idea, along with some of the other monster deals and big funds that we’ve written out in the last couple of months.

The list announced today doesn’t include specific investment numbers, but in some cases the startups have also announced the fundings themselves and given more detail on round sizes. These still, however, do not reveal Intel’s specific financial stakes.

Here’s the full list:

• Anodot uses machine learning for to monitor business operations autonomously, covering areas like app performance, customer incidents, and more. The idea is that using the platform to monitor for these incidents means detection and response time can be faster. The full $35 million round was announced back in April.

• Astera Labs is a fabless semiconductor startup focused on connectivity solutions for data-centric systems to remove performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads in areas like AI. It announced its Series B of an undisclosed amount two weeks ago, and prior to this it had raised just over $6 million according to PitchBook.

• Axonne develops next generation high-speed automotive Ethernet network connectivity solutions for connected cars: addressing the issue of merging legacy or proprietary systems with the demands of advanced next-generation applications. Intel invested as part of a $9 million round that actually closed in March.

• Hypersonix uses big-data analytics to determine and predict customer demand for e-commerce, retail and hospitality customers. One of its customers is Amazon — which uses Hypersonix’s platform in its supply chain division. That may come as a surprise, but according to Hypersonix’s CEO the e-commerce giant does not have dedicated analytics teams to serve every division in the company, so sometimes they do buy from third parties. The round was actually announced at the beginning of this month: an $11.5 million deal.

• KFBIO out of China is one of Intel’s biotechnology bets. The company has designed and built a digital pathology scanner, which aims to replace microscopes with its big data, cloud-based, and AI-powered insights. The obvious connection and interest here for Intel is on the processor side, but potentially brings Intel into a sphere where it can flex its muscle around a range of AI and cloud computing applications as well. The deal was closed at the beginning of April and totals around $14.2 million.

• Lilt has built an AI-powered language translation platform, not to compete with the likes of Google Translate for consumers, but to help those with international-facing websites and apps localise their services more efficiently. The company actually announced its round today: a $25 million Series B led by Intel.

• MemVerge focuses on “in-memory” computing, an architecture that makes it easier to deploy heavy, data-centric applications. It closed its round of $24.5 million at the beginning of April, and while it’s always worked with Intel processors, Intel’s investment was not public until today.

• ProPlus Electronics, also out of China, is an electronic design automation (“EDA”) startup that speeds up chip design and fabrication for semiconductor companies manufacturing a variety of chips at scale. It closed its round also at the beginning of April. The exact amount was undisclosed except to note that it was in the “hundreds of millions of Chinese Yuan” (or tens of millions of US dollars).

• Retrace is an under-the-radar dental data startup that uses AI to improve “dental decision making,” but according to its site seems also to focus on other healthcare areas. It’s not clear how big the round is or when it closed.

• Spectrum Materials out of China is another stealthy company that supplies gas and other materials to semiconductor makers.

• Xsight Labs based in Israel is building chipset designs to accelerate data-intensive workloads that you typically get with AI and analytical applications. Israel has a huge R&D centre in Israel focused on autonomous driving, one of the applications that’s going to demand a lot in processing power, so this looks like a clearly strategic bet. The company raised $25 million in February, but Intel was not disclosed in that round previously.