Year: 2021

Zero Motorcycles has been around for over a decade and in that time it’s consistently improved its fleet of electric bikes. With the new FXE, the northern California company has taken the thoroughly enjoyable FXS supermoto and transformed it into something a bit more futuristic looking with a new easier-to-parse display.

The FXE likely isn’t a great pick for two-wheeled beginners or for folks that want a weekend cruiser, but for the experienced rider who needs a daily commuter that packs agility and power into a fun package, the 100-mile range FXE might be the best way to get to and from work. Watch our first ride video for the full story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. Roberto Baldwin is an Engadget contributor. 

In the past year, many of the conversations around autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been dominated by the same question: When will self-driving cars be the norm on public roads?

While industry leaders talked a big game on AVs monopolizing our roads back in 2016, today some experts have put widespread Level 4 adoption over a decade away. However, even that timeline only works if automakers overcome significant barriers — both technical and behavioral. The challenge of bringing AVs to consumers will be tougher than anticipated, with a central part of the effort being focused on earning the public’s trust.

Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To meet the projected timelines and start building this critical trust today, automakers should accelerate the adoption of autonomous capabilities into advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

The challenges facing current ADAS technologies

The truth is that consumers do not yet trust the ADAS capabilities in their vehicles. A 2021 AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey found that 80% of drivers wanted current vehicle safety systems, like automatic emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance, to work better, noting the lack of confidence consumers feel around current offerings.

Despite significant recent advancements in the industry, including announcements from Cruise gaining permission to give rides in driverless test vehicles to passengers in California, AAA studies indicate that still only one in 10 drivers would be comfortable riding in a self-driving car. While consumers seem to be aware that AV technologies are advancing quickly, this lack of trust from users will be a major barrier to full adoption and can pose a threat to the industry — no matter how far along the technology develops.

To aid in building the public’s confidence, the industry must focus today on more advanced and reliable ADAS to meet consumer demands. However, current offerings face major challenges that must be resolved before the majority of consumers will get on board:

1. Lack of reliability in common adverse conditions: Technologies including lidar and camera are limited to what they can “see” around them. These systems can be easily obstructed by snow, dirt and debris covering the vehicle’s sensors. Additionally, without clear, crisp lane markings — in the event of snow, heavy rainfall or off-road conditions — or strong GPS signals, the typical sensors tracking vehicle location will not function properly.
2. Poor detection: There have been several cases where ADAS technologies have been unable to detect degraded lane markings, pedestrians, other vehicles or common on-road objects, resulting in injury and even death for drivers and pedestrians.
3. Low understanding by the general public: While some ADAS features are designed to operate independently, there is still a consistent lack of public knowledge when it comes to understanding how to best utilize the systems’ abilities to maximize safety. This lack of awareness poses an unnecessary threat to drivers who inadvertently misuse the technology as well as to those with whom they share the roads.

Addressing these challenges and creating better automated driving experiences for consumers is a critical step to mass adoption of future AV technology. The most immediate opportunity to move the needle with consumer acceptance in this area is to target improving reliability and user experience — especially with dynamic vehicle safety systems. To do so, automated and autonomous vehicles need improved sensors and software that enhance today’s systems and, as a result, boost consumer confidence in the safety of automated capabilities.

A fresh perspective on vehicle positioning

In the last decade, the industry has made various advancements in positioning systems, which locate a vehicle to the centimeter on roadways and are critical additions to traditional hardware stacks. As a result, experts have been placing bets on technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and novel mapping techniques as the final missing piece to robust vehicle positioning due to their ability to operate in adverse driving conditions and navigate highly dynamic environments.

While it is clear there are different avenues AVs can take to increase their reliability on the road, automakers are still trying to determine which approach can unlock the change in performance required for broad adoption.

When taking a closer look at the differentiators that make these technologies stand out, a common thread is how they address three critical issues: the absence of roadside features such as on open highways, within parking lots or when a car is boxed in by trucks and vision is limited; the reliance of camera-based systems on clear, consistent lane markings; and quickly changing environments in which the scene on the surface looks different from one moment to the next and HD maps quickly become unusable. These common challenges have left consumers frustrated with inconsistent and unreliable ADAS features.

One way to overcome these critical gaps is to explore other avenues for reliable vehicle positioning such as ground-penetrating radar — which allows vehicles to determine their precise location in adverse weather or in rough terrain, amid poor GPS availability and other common barriers faced by automated systems today — to show improved autonomy is possible. By adding these novel approaches into vehicles, automakers can create more reliable and accurate ADAS features — safeguarding the automated driving experience.

Leaning on ADAS as a vehicle for consumer confidence and mass AV adoption

A recent study from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) found that consumers familiar with ADAS technology were more likely to feel positive about autonomous cars and that 75% who currently own a vehicle with ADAS features say they are excited about future safety technology. This shows consumer engagement in today’s ADAS features can lead to more positive attitudes on tomorrow’s AV adoption.

As an industry, where do we go from here? Many are finding that there is a unique opportunity to resolve the future issues of autonomous vehicle operations by attacking them head-on in present-day ADAS systems — where they will otherwise be a future problem that will block mass adoption.

We need to address these critical issues with ADAS technologies and create better driving experiences to earn the public’s trust. By using higher-performing ADAS as a pathway to mass AV adoption, we can arrive at the destination safely.

The industry, along with consumers, can build a safe autonomous future.

Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, said it will double the number of its electric vehicle fast charging stations in the United States and Canada by the end of 2025.

The commitment, if successful, means 1,800 fast charging stations — or 10,000 individual chargers — will be installed and operational by that time. The vast majority (some 1,700 stations) will be installed in the United States with the remainder in Canada. This will build off of EA’s plans to have about 800 charging stations and about 3,500 individual chargers in the U.S. by the end of 2021.  As of today, Electrify America has installed 635 charging stations in the United States.

The plan is part of parent company VW Group’s announcement Monday to increase public charging infrastructure in North America, Asia and Europe. The expansion aims to increase the number of 150 and 350 kilowatt chargers, or fast chargers. VW nor EA disclosed how much money would be spent to meet this new plan. However, an EA spokesperson did confirm that the company would be spending more than the $2 billion it previously committed to invest into clean energy infrastructure over a 10-year period that kicked off in 2017.

The decision to double its charging infrastructure in North America was prompted by the rapid growth expected of electric vehicles by virtually all the auto manufacturers, according to a statement by Electrify America president and CEO Giovanni Palazzo.

The EV market was once the primary domain of Tesla, the Nissan Leaf and GM’s Chevrolet Bolt EV. And while the majority of vehicles on the road today are gas and diesel-powered, an increasing number of other EV models have, or are about, to come to market, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Porsche Taycan and the Cross Turismo variant, Hyundai Kona Electric, Jaguar I-Pace, Rivian R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV and the VW ID. 4.

Electrify America’s initial plan was to invest more than $2 billion over a 10-year period into clean energy infrastructure and education. Of that funding, some $800 million was earmarked for California, the largest EV market in North America. This latest boost will be used to increase chargers in established EV regions in the U.S. such as California as well as push into new states, including Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming and Vermont.

The company is also adding chargers to a stretch of highway in the upper Midwest, following similar efforts to promote cross-country travel. The subsidiary Electrify Canada will expand its network to nine provinces, including Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Electrify Canada will also add more stations to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, the four provinces where it already has a presence.

The addition of MagSafe to the iPhone 12 line introduced all manner of fun avenues for accessory makers, but there’s a strong case (so to speak) to be made that a snap on battery pack might be the most useful of all. A number of third-parties (notably Anker and Mophie) have introduced their own versions, and now Apple’s getting in on the action.

[gallery ids="2176873,2176872,2176871,2176870"]

The simply-named MagSafe Battery Pack went up for pre-order on Apple’s site today for $99, with an estimated arrival of July 19. The new pack comes in white (with a subtly gray Apple logo on the back to let people know you went first-party) and provides up to 15W of wireless charging, per the company.

Other details are scarce at the moment, including  precisely how many phone charges you’ll get out of the pack. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed on the rear of the device, fine-print noting the 1,460 mAh size. The pack itself charges via Lightning port, and users can plug it in with the phone attached to get a quicker charge to both the pack and battery at once.

The price is a premium, compared to Anker and Mophie’s products, which run around the $45-50 range for a 5,000 mAh battery.

There’s a reason startup compensation packages usually include equity, or stock options. For one, it’s a way for startups to remain competitive in the job market and attract top talent. But it’s also a way to reward those employees who join early and give them a tangible reason to stay incentivized to grow the company.

The problem is that while many employees do understand that their equity compensation could mean a big payday in the future — and, in 2021, that’s more likely than ever — they don’t often understand the inevitable complexities of their stock options. That puts employees at risk of not getting the most value after an IPO or, worse, losing them.

If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone. That’s why I’m going to share three things all employees joining a startup should do with their equity:

Understand how to value your equity — and when it can change

While many startups are getting better at proactively communicating the value of your equity package upfront, some are still figuring out the best way to do it. That’s because, unlike the more straightforward number of a salary, stock options are more nuanced — they’re a living, breathing type of compensation.

The most important pieces of information to pay attention to are your 409A valuation, your strike price, the type of options you were granted and the preferred share price.

The 409A valuation is based on your company’s valuation. This is also referred to as the fair market value (FMV). The 409A valuation can, and does, often change — they have to be updated at least once a year by a third-party valuator in order to meet tax rules. The 409A also changes during a fundraising event. Investors involved in the funding round determine how they value the company and are given options, at that valuation, in exchange for cash.

Since the company has now been valued higher, the 409A changes for everyone. It’s also possible for the 409A to go down if, for any reason, the company is now valued at a lower amount. This is known as a “down round.” Airbnb had a notable down round during the pandemic, though it eventually recovered and went public.

Your strike price is the price at which you can buy your stock options (also known as exercising). Yes, buy. You are given the option to buy them, which is why they are called stock options. But know that your strike price will likely never change. However, if you’re ever given more stock options (perhaps as a future bonus), this would be a separate grant and the strike price could be different. Companies are legally required to issue stock options at the most recent 409A price (or higher).

Despite studies, statistics and oh-so-many pledges, a vast number of companies continue to struggle with recruiting diverse talent. Some say that it’s not the pipeline problem, it’s an issue with how recruitment rounds and technical interviews are conducted. Others point to success with hiring entry-level diverse talent, but then companies fail to retain and reinvest in those individuals as they progress through their career.

While entrepreneurs continue to poke at the gap between talented, diverse individuals and scaled recruiting, a new merger today between two venture-backed companies paints an ambitious picture of what a promising solution could look like.

Today, WayUp, a sourcing platform for diverse candidates, announced that it is merging with Yello, a recruitment software company. The two HR tech companies will operate under Yello as a legal entity but continue to keep their independent branding with a now combined 200 employees.

“We can send all the diverse applicants into applicant tracking systems or CRMs, but if companies don’t have the automation workflow, and the tools and analytics that they need to make sure that those candidates are truly making their way through, then these candidates are sitting in a black hole,” Liz Wessel, co-founder and CEO of WayUp, said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Wessel’s realization of the “black hole” that candidates fell into soon turned into conversations with Yello, which she describes as the “most robust [candidate relationship management solution] in the market for early career.”

Now, by combining forces, the startups will be able to create an end-to-end recruitment tool that helps aggregate a group of diverse candidates who have varied backgrounds from across core and non-core schools, ethnicity, majors, location, gender and ethnicity, and then place them with recruiters into a software-powered job funnel.

Data-driven diversity

Wessel has spent the past seven years building up WayUp around the concept of “data-driven diversity.” The platform differentiates from other sourcing and job platforms by asking candidates to self-report race, ethnicity, gender and veteran status. As a result, employers, which are WayUp’s clients, can prioritize diversity when hiring, while early-career professionals can explore curated opportunities based on their profiles.

More recently, WayUp launched a dashboard to help employers see where their recruiting process loses diverse candidates. While that dashboard was WayUp’s first foray into the world of candidate recruitment management, today’s merger with Yello suggests it was just foreshadowing the partnership to come.

Yello handles recruitment processes for companies, from top of funnel events such as career fairs through virtual candidate engagement and interview scheduling. The company has landed clients like Johnson & Johnson, Tableau, eBay and Adobe for its sourcing, engaging, and placing software.

“They provide a ton of automation workflow to make it so that companies can significantly, quickly, efficiently and easily get applicants through in a fair and equitable way,” Wessel said. “Companies often don’t struggle with, ‘how do I get more applicants’ at the early career stage, it’s really, ‘how do I get the most qualified, diverse talented candidates hired’.”

Yello’s been working on a sourcing arm for years in its campus recruiting solution. Now, with WayUp, the database will grow to over 6 million candidates, across 7,000 campuses. Candidates, while self-reported, are 71% Black, Hispanic or female, along with “tens of thousands” of veterans, a statement about the merger disclosed.

“In addition to offering a powerhouse of data, recruiters will benefit from the automation opportunities of two solutions from a single company,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO, Yello, in a statement announcing the merger,

Yello, which didn’t previously have an explicit diversity angle in its software product, is now adding WayUp’s database of talent to its suite of services. And WayUp, which didn’t previously have a candidate relationship management tool, now can offer one to its talent.

Handshakes

Even with 6 million early market professionals in its sphere, the companies have a billion-dollar competitor worth paying attention to. Handshake, which last raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation, is a networking and recruitment platform for college students. The job recruiting tool recently passed 18 million users across thousands of universities, including some 120 minority-serving institutions, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions in the U.S., as well as community colleges. Handshake’s focus on diversity isn’t as marketed as WayUp’s, but its footprint, as well as a curated network that brings HBCUVcs into conversations with its 550,000 employer clients, shows its commitment to underrepresented groups. Canvas, another venture-backed startup in the HR tech world, similarly offers  recruiting platform that is based on self-reported data, aimed at helping diverse candidates land jobs.

With WayUp joining Yello’s brand, it is strengthening its competitive advantage over Handshake, Canvas and other competitors by adding software services to its recruiting tool. It’s been almost four years since both Yello and WayUp last raised venture capital money, but the move to merge doesn’t appear to be a lifeboat, as Wessel pointed out that her company beat sales expectations four quarters in a row.

“Yello isn’t competitive to Handshake at all,” Wessel said over e-mail. “I’ve never heard of one of them winning a deal over the other and we only compete with Handshake if a company isn’t prioritizing D&I as their main goal. [For what it’s worth], we’ve yet to lose an RFP for D&I sourcing.”

Long-term, it’s unclear what’s stopping more companies from combining CRM tools with talent tools, Handshake included.

“It’s really hard,” Wessel said. “We have both an Enterprise-grade software that took a decade to build to get it where it is today.”

AttackIQ, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations with breach and attack simulation solutions, has raised $44 million in Series C funding as it looks to ramp up its international expansion.

The funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), and Gaingels, with existing vendors — including Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Telstra Ventures — also participating. The round brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $79 million. 

AttackIQ was founded in 2013 and is based out of San Diego, California. It provides an automated validation platform that runs scenarios to detect any gaps in a company’s defenses, enabling organizations to test and measure the effectiveness of their security posture and receive guidance on how to fix what’s broken. Broadly, AttackIQ’s platform helps an organization’s security teams to anticipate, prepare, and hunt for threats that may impact their business, before hackers get there first.

Its Security Optimization Platform platform, which supports Windows, Linux, and macOS across public, private, and on-premises cloud environments, is based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a curated knowledge base of known adversary threats, tactics, and techniques. This is used by a number of cybersecurity companies also building continuous validation services including FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, and Cymulate.

AttackIQ says this latest round of funding, which comes more than two years after its last, arrives at a “dynamic time” for the company. Not only has cybersecurity become more of a priority for organizations as a result of a major uptick in both ransomware and supply-chain attacks, the company also recently accelerated its international expansion efforts through a partnership with technology distributor Westcon.

The startup says it’s planning to use these new funds to further expand internationally through its newfound partnership with Atlantic Bridge, which will also see Kevin Dillon, the company’s co-founder and managing director, join the AttackIQ board of directors. 

“AttackIQ has established itself as a category leader with a formidable enterprise customer base that includes four of the Fortune 20,” said Dillon. “We believe deeply in the company’s vision and potential to become the next billion-dollar cybersecurity software company and look forward to helping the company turn early traction in Europe and the Middle East into robust, long-term expansion.”

Brett Galloway, CEO of AttackIQ, said the round “reaffirms the strength” of its platform.

As well as enabling organizations to review the robustness of their security defenses, the startup also runs the AttackIQ Academy, which provides free entry-level and advanced cybersecurity training. It has accumulated 17,200 registered students to date across 176 countries.

When it comes to big SaaS products, few are bigger than Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite). So it’s maybe no surprise that one of the first people we contacted to speak at our SaaS conference on October 27 was Google’s Javier Soltero.

Today, Puerto Rico-born Soltero is Google’s VP and GM in charge of Workspace, which has well over 2 billion users. Today, it consists of products like Gmail and Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slide Meet, Chat and Drive. Currently, Workspace is going through what may be one of its most important periods of change, too, with extensive new collaboration features and, for the first time, a paid individual plan. All of this, of course, is happening against the backdrop of the pandemic, which made remote collaboration tools and video chat services like Meet more important than ever.

All of that would be enough to make Soltera a good conversation partner for a SaaS event, but his background goes much further than that. He actually started his career as a software engineer at Netscape in the late 90s and after a few other engineering positions, co-founded launched his first startup, the monitoring service Hyperic, in 2004. Hyperic then merged with SpringSource, which was acquired by VMware, landing Soletro in the position as VMware’s CTO for its SaaS and Application Services.

It’s likely his next startup, the mobile-centric email startup Acompli, though, that you remember. Founded in mid-2013, Microsoft quickly acquired Acompli in late 2014 and then essentially turned into Outlook Mobile. At Microsoft, Soltero rose through the ranks to become a corporate VP for its Office group and Cortana, before decamping to Google in 2019. Since then, he’s become the public face of GSuite/Workspace and we’ll use our time with him to talk about the joys and challenges of managing a massive SaaS product, but also about what he learned from building products from the ground up.

Register today with a $75 early bird ticket and save $100 before tickets go up. TC Sessions: SaaS takes place on October 27 and will feature the chats with the leading minds in SaaS, networking, and startup demos.

Instagram is tinkering around with a new test feature that changes the way users reshare content they like to their Stories.

The test, which will only appear for a subset of users, lets users see a collection of content they’ve viewed recently when they’re in the Stories section of the app. That content will be collected under a new reshare sticker, which can be found in the sticker tray when creating a Story. Posts and Reels viewed in the last hour will appear here along with recently created posts.

“We know that people sometimes find reshared content less engaging, personal, and fun,” an Instagram spokesperson said of the test. “We hope that with this new test experience, people are encouraged to be more intentional and deliberate when sharing things that matter to them.”

Content reshared through the sticker will appear against the backdrop of an existing Story, which could encourage more personalization. As it stands now, when users add a post of Reel to their Story, that content generally stands alone against a plain background. The new reshare Sticker adds a new way for people to contextualize content they’re resharing and makes those posts feel a bit less static (think retweets with comment rather than straight up retweeting a stranger into your feed).

The test isn’t guaranteed to make it into the full app, but Instagram will use feedback from the new reshare feature to see if it ups the quality of reshared posts. By letting people review what the’ve seen after the fact rather than just sharing on the fly, the feature could also encourage users to reshare more through their Stories — or at least reshare more thoughtfully.

Instagram tests new features all the time. And while test features don’t always make it into the final product, they do give an indication of what the company is thinking about when it comes to reshaping the app — and the behavior of the more than one billion people who use it on a regular basis.

Other recent Instagram tests have toyed with the idea of hiding Like counts and experimented with mixing algorithmic recommendations into the app’s main feed.

Sourcegraph, a late stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Insight Partners, Geodesic Capital and other existing investors. The company has now raised almost $225 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Company CEO and co-founder Quinn Slack says that we know by now that every company is building software, and as they do, they are generating tons of code. “They’re all drowning in code, and we help solve that. Our product is universal code search, which helps developers search, understand and automate code,” Slack explained.

He says that companies use Sourcegraph to find problems and vulnerabilities they might not otherwise see. Developers and site reliability engineers may see that there’s a problem, but getting to the specific part of the code where it’s happening requires a specialized tool, he says. Some of the large companies might build their own tools for this purpose, but most companies don’t have the resources and this puts code search within reach of many more developers.

“Universal code search that we built — and we spent a lot of time building it — is the first kind of code search that actually understands code as code and all the connections, that graph of code. And that means that if you’re a developer, you can get to that answer of how do I do this thing or how do I fix this or if I change this what’s going to break, in way less time and that’s why you need a purpose-built code search tool,” he said.

He says that the company was founded in 2013, but it took almost five years to build a product of this sophistication. The startup was able to get funding initially based on the potential of a tool like this. Now investors are seeing the traction they envisioned early on.

Today they have 800,000 developers using the product over the last 12 months and Slack says that they have indexed over 54 billion lines of code. Paying customers include Plaid, Uber, GE and Atlassian. The company has around 160 employees and expects to increase that to 250 by the end of the year with all of this new capital.

The company made the fortunate decision to go fully remote in January of 2020 just a couple of months before offices shut down in the U.S., and his plan is to continue to be remote even after offices fully reopen.

Slack doesn’t shy away from the IPO question, saying it’s definitely something they think about. “We want to be a public company eventually, so that we can show that we’re going to be around forever. This funding certainly shows that we are growing, and that we are going to stick around and we’re going to be vendor independent, so you know that’s that’s definitely an important part of our strategy.”