Year: 2021

The incredible success of the cloud business applications space in recent years has driven up valuations and fundraising across all stages of venture investment. That has in turn increased VC fund sizes, led to massive cloud IPOs and brought a new cadre of investors to further fuel the fire.

The median Series A raised by cloud companies these days is about $8 million and can often go well above $10 million, according to PitchBook data from the first quarter of 2021. Series Cs now routinely include secondary capital for founders, and many Series Ds are above $100 million with valuations in the billions.

Such an influx of capital and interest has upended many structures and long-held norms about how startups are funded. Venture funds continue to grow and must write larger checks, but ever-higher valuations force many firms to hunt for opportunities earlier. The VC alphabet soup has been spilled, making A rounds look like Bs used to, and the Bs seem like the Cs of old.

Which begs an interesting question: Is the seed round the new Series A?

We don’t think so.

Seed rounds have certainly grown — averaging about $3 million nowadays from around $1 million to $2 million previously — but otherwise, seed investments are the same as before and remain very different from Series As.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

Our live show is this week! And we’re very excited about it! Details here, and you can register here. It’s free, of course, so swing by and hang with us.

Back on theme, we had a lot to get through this morning, so inside the show you can find the following and more:

• The Chinese cryptocurrency clampdown is a big damn deal: With lots of the nation’s mining capacity heading offline, there’s a scramble to relocate rigs and generally figure out what a crypto market sans China might look like.
• In the wake of the news, the value of cryptocurrencies fell. As did shares of Coinbase this morning in pre-market trading.
• Facebook’s Clubhouse rival is out. The American social giant follows Spotify into the live-audio market. You have to give it to modern software companies, who thought that they could be both leading tech shops and Kinko’s clones at the same time?
• Revolut is unprofitable as hell but increasingly less so. That could be good news for fintech as a whole.
• Amber Group raised $100 million; Forto raised $240 million.

See you this Thursday at the live show!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

Our live show is this week! And we’re very excited about it! Details here, and you can register here. It’s free, of course, so swing by and hang with us.

Back on theme, we had a lot to get through this morning, so inside the show you can find the following and more:

• The Chinese cryptocurrency clampdown is a big damn deal: With lots of the nation’s mining capacity heading offline, there’s a scramble to relocate rigs and generally figure out what a crypto market sans China might look like.
• In the wake of the news, the value of cryptocurrencies fell. As did shares of Coinbase this morning in pre-market trading.
• Facebook’s Clubhouse rival is out. The American social giant follows Spotify into the live-audio market. You have to give it to modern software companies, who thought that they could be both leading tech shops and Kinko’s clones at the same time?
• Revolut is unprofitable as hell but increasingly less so. That could be good news for fintech as a whole.
• Amber Group raised $100 million; Forto raised $240 million.

See you this Thursday at the live show!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Hyundai this morning announced that it has completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics. The deal, which values the innovative robotics company at $1.1 billion, was announced in late-2020. The companies have not disclosed any future financial details.

The South Korean automotive giant now owns a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics, previously belonging to SoftBank. The Japanese investment company was effectively a transitional owner, purchasing Boston Dynamics from Google, which owned the company for just over three years.

While its time with Softbank wasn’t much longer than its stint under Google/Alphabet X, Boston Dynamics saw the commercialization of its first two products since launching nearly 30 years ago. The company brought its quadrupedal robot Spot to market and this year announced the (still upcoming) launch of Stretch, an updated version of its warehouse robot, Handle.

In a recent appearance at TechCrunch’s Mobility event, Hyundai’s Ernestine Fu discussed the planned acquisition of an 80% controlling interest in the company. Fu noted that Hyundai’s New Horizon Studios, which has previewed multiple “walking” car concepts that look poised to build on decades of Boston Dynamics research.

“With New Horizon Studios, the mandate is reimagining what you can do when you combine robotics with traditional wheeled locomotion, like walking robots and walking vehicles,” Fu told TechCrunch. “Obviously the technology that [Boston Dynamics] has put together plays a key role in enabling those sorts of concepts to come to life.”

As it has changed hands over the years, Boston Dynamics has long insisted on maintaining its own research wing, which has given us less commercial technology, like the humanoid robot, Atlas. How this will function under the umbrella of Hyundai remains to be seen, though the company does seem to have a vested interest in maintaining a forward-looking approach.

“We and Hyundai share a view of the transformational power of mobility and look forward to working together to accelerate our plans to enable the world with cutting edge automation, and to continue to solve the world’s hardest robotics challenges for our customers,” Boston Dynamics CEO Rob Playter said when the deal was announced.

Music licensing marketplace Songtradr this morning announced a $50 million Series D. The oversubscribed round – which features Regal, Aware Super, Perennial, Argo and Greencape – follows a $30 million raise last August, bringing the Los Angeles company’s total funding to north of $100 million.

The platform licenses music to high profile names for advertising, films, TV, gaming and the like, including Disney, Netflix, Apple, Coca-Cola, Amazon and Google. It hosts songs from some 600,000 musicians/songwriters/rights holders.

The service hasn’t had any issue spending its funding to date. Earlier this month, it announced the acquisition of creative agency MassiveMusic. Other acquisitions made in the past year include Cuesongs, Song Zu, Pretzel and Tunefind.

The company says the new funding will go toward even more M&As, new products and an increase in global headcount. The company is headquartered in L.A., but also has offices in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Image Credits: Songtradr

“Songtradr is rapidly accelerating as we continue to develop our tech-enabled B2B music ecosystem and integrate our new acquisitions,” CEO Paul Wiltshire said in a press release. “Attracting such a blue-chip investor base into this round further endorses our vision of the future music industry in this rapidly evolving digital world, providing a strong foundation for the future.”

Wiltshire adds that the company saw a 100% y-o-y revenue growth for 2020.

Kredivo announced today it has secured another $100 million debt facility from Victory Park Capital (VPC). This doubles the Indonesian digital lending and credit platform’s total warehouse financing facility from VPC to $200 million. The first round was closed in July 2020.

Kredivo is operated by Singapore-based fintech FinAccel. This is the largest loan facility it has raised so far, and is VPC’s biggeast debt commitment to a fintech company outside of the United States and Europe, as well as its only investment in Southeast Asia. Kredivo will use the debt facility to help achieve its goal of serving 10 million customers in Indonesia.

Other notable startups that have received debt financing from VPC include Razor Group, factory 14, Konfio and Elevate.

Kredivo has more than three million customers and offers two main types of lending products: zero interest 30-day ‘buy now, pay later’ financing for e-commerce and offline purchases, and three-, six- and 12-month installment loans with an interest rate of 2.6% a month, or a maximum annual rate of 53.36%. Kredivo chief executive officer Akshay Garg told TechCrunch that its ‘buy now, pay later’ services are typically used for small-value online purchases, while installment loans are used to finance bigger transactions, like laptops, home renovation or medical care.

While ‘buy now, pay later’ services like Klarna, Afterpay or Affirm offer convenience to customers in the United States or Europe, in emerging markets it also serves as a tool to build credit, especially in countries that have low credit card penetration, Garg said.

“Credit is one of the largest and most complex areas of the financial services ecosystem and the fact is that Indonesia is deeply underserved on that equation,” he said. Most banks only provide secured lending, like home or car loans, and unsecured lending is rare. Garg said there are only eight million credit card holders in Indonesia, which has a population of 270.6 million, and that number has not changed in 13 years.

One of the reasons for Indonesia’s very low credit card penetration rate is because banks are reluctant to give unsecured loans, especially to younger customers.

“What we’re solving is less a convenience problem and more an access problem. We’re putting unsecured credit, or the ability to buy on credit, in the hands of urban millennials for the first time, simply because banks are just not providing them access to credit cards,” said Garg.

He added that Kredivo’s effective risk-scoring model allows to charge low interest rates, and its non-performing loan ratio is in the low single-digits, despite the economic impact of COVID-19, which Garg described as a “trial by fire.”

Like credit cards from banks, Kredivo also reports customers’ loan histories to Indonesia’s credit bureaus, so they can build credit scores. “What we’re doing is a building Indonesia’s first real digital credit bureau from the ground up, and I think our risk metrics show that this is not just for the sake of some funky innovation, but something that is delivering real performance,” Garg said.

In a statement, VPC partner Gordon Watson said, “We have been impressed with the resilience and growth of the business and look forward to deepening our partnership with Kredivo. The company presents a unique combination of growth, scale, risk management and financial inclusion in one of the most exciting emerging markets in the world.”

As podcasting continues to gain ground among mainstream consumers as a digital media platform alongside music, video, and the printed word, a startup that made a name for itself through building content for the medium has closed a round of funding to help it explore what comes next.

WaitWhat, co-founded by two of the people who helped conceive of and build the TED digital media empire, has closed a round of $12 million, in a round led by Raga Partners, with Laurene Powell Jobs’ firm Emerson Collective, Lupa Systems, Capital One Ventures, Maywic Select Investments, GingerBread Capital, Burda Principal Investments, Cue Ball Capital, and Reid Hoffman also participating.

WaitWhat says it plans to use the money to continue producing content in formats that have already proven very successful for it so far — to date, it has seen 70 million downloads of its work, which includes the podcasts Masters of Scale from Reid Hoffman, Meditative Story, Spark & Fire, and Should this Exist? — as well as invest in its tech and R&D and efforts to break new ground for new kinds of formats.

The company may be best known for its podcast production, but it describes itself as a “media invention company” and June Cohen, who co-founded the company with Deron Triff, want to double down on the invention part of that description, going past podcasting to explore other ways of interacting with users.

“We’re working on an innovative content format for physical well-being that lives inside of workouts, but will come at the experience through storytelling,” the pair said in an email (which we had to move to after our phone conversation, while they were on the road in a car, broke up. Maybe in-car calls need to be disrupted soon, too). “After physical well-being, we see intergenerational experiences (parent/child) as another interesting white space that plays into habit and human potential, and are in the early stages of developing a television series to explore this arena.”

An existing iteration on the podcast theme — a entrepreneur training course that it has developed in connection with its Masters of Scale podcast, has been downloaded 10,000 times in its first 8 weeks on the market. And Meditative Story, which focuses on mindfulness, is being downloaded 750,000 times each month. In this they have focused on an important aspect of any digital service: “As with the podcast format, it’s all about habit,” they said.

But it is more than that: at a time when podcasting may still be somewhat nascent as a business model, while at the same time at the risk of starting to be too formulaic, the company’s catching attention for exploring ways to address both of those issues.

Its solution, in part, may be based on creative ways of presenting content to users, but also keeping a focus on strong material to use in those channels.

“Our aim is to build the most valuable independent portfolio of premium IP — one that’s designed around essential human needs and built with a contrarian strategy to scale,” the pair said in the email. “We see an outsized opportunity for alternative content that lives at the intersection of daily habit and fulfilling human potential. Our success is linked to how we build content ecosystems where habit and human potential come together.”

There is potentially a lot of money in making compelling podcasting content, of course, but for now a good chunk of that is coming in the form of M&A, specifically from companies like Spotify looking to buy much bigger audiences that it can coalesce around its own advertising and paid subscription efforts, or by buying into new tech for creating and organizing this kind of content.

WaitWhat presents an interesting variation on that theme, by building a startup around the idea of innovating within and beyond the podcast medium, which could catch the eye again of the same players who are watching and snapping up content companies today.

Something interesting in how Cohen and Triff have approached fundraising is that they say that they have done it in part to “secure diversity” at the startup. In part this is about hiring people from a mix of backgrounds but also about how it approaches management and how it endorses those with whom it works.

“We see our fundraising rounds as a tool for securing diversity,” they noted. “We know that’s not a typical viewpoint. But we have found ways to use our fund-raising rounds to leap us forward on diversity — in a few different ways.”

They note that in the seed round, they raised half of the funds from investors who identify as women. “We did this by raising from women first. Most people thought we were crazy. (“Just take the money there you find it!” was the advice we got) But it’s what we believed in, and it’s what we did,” they said.

Then in the Series A (we covered it here), “our lead investors had diverse funds, but they weren’t women-led. So we created a carve-out to create balance. And raised additional funds from women-led funds to balance us out.”

In this latest Series B, “we shifted our focus from total dollars to representation on the Board,” they said. “We actually wrote into our term sheet that WaitWhat will always maintain gender balance on the board. In this round, we shifted to a 5-person board, so what that means is that we won’t have less than 2 people who identify as women — or less than 2 people who identify as men. Our investors haven’t seen a company request this before — but they welcomed it, and shared that they wished more companies would ask.”

Far from annoying the men in the room, it seems to have gotten them even more on board with the idea of purpose existing alongside business interestes.

“Drawing on our background of investing in companies that have demonstrated the ability to build loyalty and community around high-quality content and experiences, we are big believers in WaitWhat’s approach to deliver durable and adaptive content, helping people become the best versions of themselves,” said Atul Joshi, founder and managing partner of Raga Partners, who led the investment for the firm. 

There have been further calls from EU institutions to outlaw biometric surveillance in public.

In a joint opinion published today, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), Wojciech Wiewiórowski, have called for draft EU regulations on the use of artificial intelligence technologies to go further than the Commission’s proposal in April — urging that the planned legislation should be beefed up to include a “general ban on any use of AI for automated recognition of human features in publicly accessible spaces, such as recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals, in any context”.

Such technologies are simply too harmful to EU citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms — like privacy and equal treatment under the law — to permit their use, is the argument.

The EDPB is responsible for ensuring a harmonization application of the EU’s privacy rules, while the EDPS oversees EU institutions’ own compliance with data protection law and also provides legislative guidance to the Commission.

EU lawmakers’ draft proposal on regulating applications of AI contained restrictions on law enforcement’s use of biometric surveillance in public places — but with very wide-ranging exemptions which quickly attracted major criticism from digital rights and civil society groups, as well as a number of MEPs.

The EDPS himself also quickly urged a rethink. Now he’s gone further, with the EDPB joining in with the criticism.

The EDPB and the EDPS have jointly fleshed out a number of concerns with the EU’s AI proposal — while welcoming the overall “risk-based approach” taken by EU lawmakers — saying, for example, that legislators must be careful to ensure alignment with the bloc’s existing data protection framework to avoid rights risks.

“The EDPB and the EDPS strongly welcome the aim of addressing the use of AI systems within the European Union, including the use of AI systems by EU institutions, bodies or agencies. At the same time, the EDPB and EDPS are concerned by the exclusion of international law enforcement cooperation from the scope of the Proposal,” they write.

“The EDPB and EDPS also stress the need to explicitly clarify that existing EU data protection legislation (GDPR, the EUDPR and the LED) applies to any processing of personal data falling under the scope of the draft AI Regulation.”

As well as calling for the use of biometric surveillance to be banned in public, the pair have urged a total ban on AI systems using biometrics to categorize individuals into “clusters based on ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation, or other grounds on which discrimination is prohibited under Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights”.

That’s an interesting concern in light of Google’s push, in the adtech realm, to replace behavioral micromarketing of individuals with ads that address cohorts (or groups) of users, based on their interests — with such clusters of web users set to be defined by Google’s AI algorithms.

(It’s interesting to speculate, therefore, whether FLoCs risks creating a legal discrimination risk — based on how individual mobile users are grouped together for ad targeting purposes. Certainly, concerns have been raised over the potential for FLoCs to scale bias and predatory advertising. And it’s also interesting that Google avoided running early tests in Europe, likely owning to the EU’s data protection regime.)

In another recommendation today, the EDPB and the EDPS also express a view that the use of AI to infer emotions of a natural person is “highly undesirable and should be prohibited” —  except for what they describe as “very specified cases, such as some health purposes, where the patient emotion recognition is important”.

“The use of AI for any type of social scoring should be prohibited,” they go on — touching on one use-case that the Commission’s draft proposal does suggest should be entirely prohibited, with EU lawmakers evidently keen to avoid any China-style social credit system taking hold in the region.

However by failing to include a prohibition on biometric surveillance in public in the proposed regulation the Commission is arguably risking just such a system being developed on the sly — i.e. by not banning private actors from deploying technology that could be used to track and profile people’s behavior remotely and en masse.

Commenting in a statement, the EDPB’s chair Andrea Jelinek and the EDPS Wiewiórowski argue as much, writing [emphasis ours]:

“Deploying remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces means the end of anonymity in those places. Applications such as live facial recognition interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms. This calls for an immediate application of the precautionary approach. A general ban on the use of facial recognition in publicly accessible areas is the necessary starting point if we want to preserve our freedoms and create a human-centric legal framework for AI. The proposed regulation should also prohibit any type of use of AI for social scoring, as it is against the EU fundamental values and can lead to discrimination.”

In their joint opinion they also express concerns about the Commission’s proposed enforcement structure for the AI regulation, arguing that data protection authorities (within Member States) should be designated as national supervisory authorities (“pursuant to Article 59 of the [AI] Proposal”) — pointing out the EU DPAs are already enforcing the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the LED (Law Enforcement Directive) on AI systems involving personal data; and arguing it would therefore be “a more harmonized regulatory approach, and contribute to the consistent interpretation of data processing provisions across the EU” if they were given competence for supervising the AI Regulation too.

They are also not happy with the Commission’s plan to give itself a predominant role in the planned European Artificial Intelligence Board (EAIB) — arguing that this “would conflict with the need for an AI European body independent from any political influence”. To ensure the Board’s independence the proposal should give it more autonomy and “ensure it can act on its own initiative”, they add.

The Commission has been contacted for comment.

The AI Regulation is one of a number of digital proposals unveiled by EU lawmakers in recent months. Negotiations between the different EU institutions — and lobbying from industry and civil society — continues as the bloc works toward adopting new digital rules.

In another recent and related development, the UK’s information commissioner warned last week over the threat posed by big data surveillance systems that are able to make use of technologies like live facial recognition — although she claimed it’s not her place to endorse or ban a technology.

But her opinion makes it clear that many applications of biometric surveillance may be incompatible with the UK’s privacy and data protection framework.

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

Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to Point B.

A few Extra Crunch items highlight before we jump into things. This week, we published an interview with Refraction AI co-founder and CTO Matthew Johnson-Roberson as part of an ongoing series focused on transportation founders. TechCrunch has been following autonomous delivery startup since it came out of stealth on our stage in 2019. Refraction, which built its vehicle to travel in bike lanes up to 15 miles per hour, has been testing in AnnArbor, Michigan. Now, it’s expanding to Austin. Our interview with Johnson-Roberson reveals the premise behind the company, what prompted him to step down as CEO and some of the challenges in the industry. The twist with this series? We plan to check in on every founder we interview a year after their Q&A is published.

Later this month, we’ll feature an interview with Candice Xie, the CEO and co-founder of Veo.

Finally, we have a fresh round of recaps from the TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 event held June 9. Each recap provides a rundown of the conversation as well as some key quotes from our panelists. The recaps also include the video of the session.

• How autonomous delivery startups are navigating policy, partnerships, and post-pandemic operations
• Experts from Ford, Toyota and Hyundai outline why automakers are pouring money into robotics
• Investors Clara Brenner, Quin Garcia and Rachel Holt on SPACs, micromobility and how COVID-19 shaped VC
• Founders Ben Schippers and Evette Ellis are riding the EV sales wave
• Mobility startups can be equitable, accessible and profitable

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

Deal of the week

Taking autonomous vehicle technology from the “lab,” — ok, from the closed track — to commercial scale is a pricey endeavor. Not every AV developer has success raising money or access to debt. Waymo does.

The company has raised another $2.5 billion in external funding about 15 months after its first external round brought in $2.25 billion. (That round was later expanded by $700 million a few months later.) The round appears to be mostly existing investors including parent company Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Magna International, Mubadala Investment Company, Perry Creek Capital, Silver Lake, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Temasek. Tiger Global was the investor newcomer.

The funding announcement comes a few months after CEO John Krafcik left the company after five years in the position. The CEO position is now being held jointly by Tekedra Mawakana, former COO, and Dmitri Dolgov, who joined the original self-driving project at Google and was CTO.

More than $2 billion is a hefty haul. Although numerous folks,  some of whom are in the financial sector, reached out to me to share reactions of surprise that it wasn’t larger. I’m more interested in how that money is being put to work. Waymo has now brought in nearly $6 billion in outside investment since March 2020.

Other deals that my attention …

Bringg, a software developer focused on helping retailers with last-mile logistics, raised $100 million in a Series E round of funding led by Insight Partners. Salesforce Ventures, Viola Growth, Next 47, Pereg Ventures, Harlap, GLP and Cambridge Capital — all previous backers — also invested. Bringg CEO Guy Bloch told TechCrunch that the funding will be used both to continue growing Bringg’s customer base, but also the company’s ca

CAI International, the tansportation finance and logistics company,  agreed to a $1.1 billion takeover by Mitsubishi HC Capital. This is an all-stock deal that is comprised of $104 million worth of preferred stock and $986 million of common stock equity value, Reuters reported.

Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a mobile telematics and analytics, has acquired TrueMotion. The company didn’t disclose the terms. CMT will now provide telematics services to 21 out of the 25 largest auto insurers in the United States, and across more than 20 countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Africa, Japan and Australia.

Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of GM, secured a $5 billion line of credit from the automaker’s financial arm to pay for hundreds of purpose-built electric and autonomous Origin vehicles as they start to roll off the assembly line. The access to the credit provided by GM Financial will push Cruise’s “total war chest” to more than $10 billion as it prepares for commercialization, CEO Dan Ammann wrote in a blog post. In short: the credit will be used to buy these Cruise Origins from GM, which is assembling the autonomous vehicles at its renamed and renovated Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. The factory is now called Factory ZERO.

Electriphi, a battery management and fleet monitoring software startup based in San Francisco, was acquired by Ford. The acquisition, the terms of which neither party would disclose, aims to round out Ford’s future EV commercial business. The automaker already has two electric commercial vehicles in pipeline, the  E-transit cargo and F-150 Lighting Pro pickup truck. Ford is betting that the software developed by the three-year-old San Francisco startup will help it capture more than $1 billion in revenue just from charging by 2030.

Gopuff, the on-demand goods, food and alcohol delivery service, acquired fleet management platform rideOS for $115 million, sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. This acquisition comes just a few months after the Philadelphia-based startup announced a $1.15 billion funding round at a $8.9 billion valuation, up from $3.9 billion in October. Last fall, the company also raised $380 million and bought BevMo, a beverage retailer. Gopuff did not share its updated valuation with this new acquisition.

KeepTruckin, a hardware and software developer that helps trucking fleets manage vehicle, cargo and driver safety, raised $190 million in a Series E funding round, which puts the company’s valuation at over $2 billion, according to CEO Shoaib Makani. G2 Venture Partners, which just raised a $500 million fund to help modernize existing industries, participated in the round, alongside existing backers Greenoaks Capital, Index Ventures, IVP and Scale Venture Partners and funds managed by BlackRock.

Kodiak Robotics, the Silicon Valley-based startup developing autonomous trucks, has a new investor. Tire-making giant Bridgestone has taken a minority stake in the AV startup as part of a broader partnership to test and develop smart tire technology. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Kodiak Robotics co-founder and CEO Don Burnette told TechCrunch that this is a direct financial investment. Bridgestone CTO Nizar Trigui has also joined the Kodiak board as an observer. The two companies also formed a strategic partnership focused on advancing Bridgestone’s tire tech and fleet management system.

MachineMetrics, a data startup focused on manufacturing, raised $20 million in Series B round led by industrial automation and robotics Teradyne. Ridgeline Ventures also participated along with existing investors Tola Capital and Hyperplane.

Mister Car Wash, a car wash company owned by Leonard Green & Partners and based in my hometown, has set the terms for its initial public offering. The company said in a regulatory filing that it will issue 37.5 million with the expectation of a per share price between $15 and $17.

Motorway, a U.K. startup that allows professional car dealers to bid in an auction for privately owned cars for sale, raised £48 million ($67.7 million) in a Series B round led by Index Ventures, along with new investors BMW iVentures and Unbound. Existing investors Latitude and Marchmont Ventures also participated. The funding will be used to extend its platform and grow the current 160-strong team.

PayCargo, the Freight payment platform company, raised $125 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners.

Solid Power, a solid-state battery developer backed by Ford and BMW, locked in a deal to merge with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp III, at a post-deal implied market valuation of $1.2 billion. The transaction is expected to generate around $600 million in cash, including a $165 million private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction from investors Koch Strategic Platforms, Riverstone Energy Limited, Neuberger Berman and Van Eck Associates Corporation.

Vertical Aerospace is yet another electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft startup to take the SPAC path to the public markets. The UK-based eVTOL developer, which is backed by American Airlines, Avolon, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce and Microsoft’s M12, has agreed to merge with special purposed acquisition company Broadstone Acquisition Corp., at an implied $2.2 billion valuation.

Woven Capital made an undisclosed investment in Ridecell, a platform powering digital transformations and IoT automation for fleet-driven businesses. Woven Capital is an $800 million global investment fund that supports innovative, growth-stage companies in mobility, automation, artificial intelligence, data and analytics, connectivity, and smart cities. It is the investment arm of the Woven Planet Group, a Toyota subsidiary which is dedicated to building the safest mobility in the world. Along with the investment, Ridecell and the Woven Planet Group will explore collaborative opportunities in mobility service operations.

Hints at Argo’s future

You might have noticed under “deal of the week” that Ford acquired a fleet management and charging monitor software company called Electriphi. When the deal was announced, I found myself wondering aloud if the software would be used by the company for its eventual commercial fleet of robotaxis? And that got me thinking about Argo AI, the startup developing the self-driving system for backers Ford and VW.

I was pointed to some comments made Ford CEO Jim Farley, which suggests that maybe Argo will play a larger role in commercial operations than expected. Farley was asked during the Deutsche Bank’s Global Auto Industry Conference what he thought about the convergence between what Argo will be offering and I guess Ford in terms of business model?

Farley’s response: “Well, that’s a good question. I think Argo has proven to be very adaptive business, not just the technology. My personal opinion is that I think they deserve the opportunity to be a one-stop shop company and that they will take on more of the go-to-market responsibilities for our AV effort.”

Policy corner

Welcome to Policy Corner. It’s a (relatively) short one this week folks. As a reminder, if there’s any policy or regulatory news (or tips!) that you think merits inclusion in the Corner, send me an email at aria.techcrunch@gmail.com.

Autonomous vehicle developers Nuro and Cruise, along with three other entities, have formed a new coalition to support a California bill that would require AVs to be zero emission by 2030. TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan was the first to cover the bill back in March. Notably absent from this coalition are Argo AI, which has Ford and VW has backers and customers, as well several other legacy automakers. John Davis, chief engineer at Ford Autonomous Vehicles, told Bellan back in March that the computing demands of an AV platform means that it may make more sense to transition first to a hybrid model before going full EV.

For Cruise’s part, it makes sense that they’d want to ratchet up their support of the bill, especially after news broke that earlier this week they’d taken out a $5 billion line of credit to ramp up production of their electric Cruise Origin AV.

EV proponents are fired up about the possibility of taxing EVs as one way to fund the massive infrastructure investments that are currently being debated in Washington. The proposal is being mulled by legislators as they continue to negotiate the infrastructure package. Joe Britton, the Executive Director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, called the tax proposal “the brainchild of those who want to unfairly punish EV drivers and hinder clean vehicle deployment.”

It seems that an EV tax could be the sacrificial lamb that some legislators are looking for, but it is important to note — as ZETA does — that battery electric vehicles are still only around 1% of the cars on the road.

— Aria Alamalhodaei

Notable reads and other tidbits

Here are a few more final items to wrap up The Station.

Autonomous vehicles

Pony.ai, the robotaxi startup that operates in China and the United States, has started testing driverless vehicles on public roads in California ahead of plans to launch a commercial service there in 2022. The company said the driverless vehicle testing, which means the autonomous vehicles operate without human safety drivers behind the wheel, is happening daily on public roads in Fremont and Milpitas, California. Pony.ai is also testing its driverless vehicles in Guangzhou, China. Pony.ai said it also plans to resume a rideshare service to the public in Irvine this summer using AVs with a human safety driver. Its goal is to roll out the fully driverless service to the public in 2022.

EVs and hydrogen

Canoo, the electric vehicle startup that recently became a publicly traded company through a merger with a SPAC, made a number of announcements during its investor day event. First on the list was news that the company plans to build a factory in Oklahoma that will employ up to 2,000 workers. The factory will be located on a 400-acre site in the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, Oklahoma about 45 minutes from Tulsa. The facility, which the company describes as a “mega microfactory” will include a paint shop, body shop and general assembly plant and is expected to open in 2023.

Canoo also laid out its plans for automated driving, which I haven’t heard much about until now. The details were thin, but Canoo is planning to have its vehicles equipped with “Level 2” advanced driver assistance system, which means two primary functions — like adaptive cruise and lane keeping — are automated and still have a human driver in the loop at all times. From there, it seems the company is taking the Tesla approach and believes it can reach Level 4 autonomy through software improvements. To be clearm, Tesla is nowhere near Level 4 autonomy, which means the vehicle ccan handle all driving without the driver in the loop in certain geographic areas or conditiions. Here is the Canoo CTO’s comments about this.

We’ve got an ADAS system ready for launch at Level 2, with all of the basic features, but we’ve got an OTA system — over the air upgradability — so as we continue to refine and mature and validate additional features in ADAS, we’re going to be able to upgrade over time and with our ADAS compute platform, along with the sensor suite we believe will ultimately get us to around Level 4.

Finally, the company also detailed some of the features that may be on its app, including a one-stop shop functionality that customers could use for their Canoo vehicles — and all their other cars, as well. This unusual approach to its branded vehicle app could potentially pay off big-time for Canoo in terms of user data and revenue via sales on services like tire replacements and insurance.

Lordstown Motors is digging itself deeper into a hole it seems. The company’s CEO and CFO resigned following a less than stellar first quarter results in May, including news that production volumes would likely be half — from around 2,200 vehicles to just 1,000 — should the company not identify more funding. But wait. What is this?

The following day, hope was restored when interim CEO Angela Strand and President Rich Schmidt made a series of statements  at an Automotive Press Association event that drove up shares in the company, including that it has enough “binding orders” from customers to fund limited production of its electric pickup truck through May 2022. Ah but hold tight because the next day Lordstown issued a regulatory filing that reversed those claims.

It appears those “binding orders” were more like agreements to maybe lease or buy.

Jaguar Land Rover is developing a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle based on the new Defender SUV, and plans to begin testing the prototype next year. The prototype program, known as Project Zeus, is part of JLR’s larger aim to only produce zero-tailpipe emissions vehicles by 2036. JLR has also made a commitment to have zero carbon emissions across its supply chain, products and operations by 2039. The automaker has also tapped AVL, Delta Motorsport, Marelli Automotive Systems and the U.K. Battery Industrialization Center to help develop the prototype.

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, is expanding into parcel logistics through a partnership with FedEx. The multiyear, multiphased strategic partnership aims to test and ultimately deploy Nuro’s next-generation autonomous delivery vehicle within FedEx operations. This bot will follow Nuro’s more recent R2 bot. The deal with FedEx marks its first foray into parcels logistics. The pilot program has already started in Houston. This multiyear commitment will allow Nuro to bring its technology to more people in new ways, and eventually reach large-scale deployment, according to Cosimo Leipold, Nuro’s head of partnerships.

Polestar, Volvo Car Group’s standalone electric performance brand, will manufacture its first all-electric SUV in the United States. The automaker said the Polestar 3 will be assembled at a plant shared with Volvo Cars at a factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina. The Polestar 3 follows the all-electric Polestar 2 sedan and the hybrid grand tourer Polestar 1. Production of Polestar 3 is expected to begin globally in 2022.

In-car tech

Amazon Web Services entered into an agreement with Ferrari to become their official cloud provider, a deal that aims to help the luxury automaker’s Scuderia Ferrari Formula One racing team launch a digital fan engagement platform via its mobile app.

Android Auto has some new updates including personalizing the launcher screen directly from a user’s smartphone and manually setting dark mode. Browsing content is also supposed to be easier with new tabs in media apps, a “back to top” option and an A to Z button in the scroll bar.  New app experiences have also been added to help with EV charging, parking and navigation apps are now available to use in Android Auto. Users will also be able to read and send new messages directly from apps like WhatsApp or Messages — now available globally. These Android Auto features are available on phones running Android 6.0 or above, and when connected to your compatible car.

Other transportation stuff

Financial Times digs into the sticky issue of Chinese surveillance technology that is used in ‘smart cities’ all over the world.

GM upped the amount it says it will spend on electric and autonomous vehicle investments to $35 billion through 2025 — an $8 billion increase from its previous plan announced in November 2020.

Lux Research released a study showing that in 2020 electric vehicles sales, meaning battery and plug-ins, increased 37% compared to 2019. The sales growth was led by 140% growth in Europe as the BEV market took off in several countries. The report noted that while Tesla remains the most popular BEV maker, but its choice of cells from LG Energy Solution in China means Panasonic lost the market share crown it had held since 2013.

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, has purchased 100 acres of land near the Gigafactory that Panasonic operates with Tesla in Sparks, Nevada as part of an expansion plan that aligns with the Biden Administration’s drive to increase adoption of electric vehicles and boost domestic battery recycling and supply chain efforts. The company said its existing 150,000-square-foot facility in Carson City, Nevada will also nearly triple in size. Redwood is adding another 400,000 square feet onto the Carson City recycling facility, which is expected to be operational by the end of the year.

As enterprise startups continue to target interesting gaps in the market, we’re seeing increasingly sophisticated tools getting built for small and medium businesses — traditionally a tricky segment to sell to, too small for large enterprise tools, and too advanced in their needs for consumer products. In the latest development of that trend, an Israeli startup called DataRails has raised $25 million to continue building out a platform that lets SMBs using Excel to run financial planning and analytics like their larger counterparts.

The funding closes out the company’s Series A at $43.5 million, after the company initially raised $18.5 million in April (some at the time reported this as its Series A, but it seems the round had yet to be completed). The full round includes Zeev Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Innovation Endeavors, with Vintage Investment Partners added in this most recent tranche. DataRails is not disclosing its valuation, except to note that it has doubled in the last four months, with hundreds of customers and on target to cross 1,000 this year, with a focus on the North American market. It has raised $55 million in total. 

The challenge that DataRails has identified is that on one hand, SMBs have started to adopt a lot more apps, including software delivered as a service, to help them manage their businesses — a trend that has been accelerated in the last year with the pandemic and the knock-on effect that has had for remote working and bringing more virtual elements to replace face-to-face interactions. Those apps can include Salesforce, NetSuite, Sage, SAP, QuickBooks, Zuora, Xero, ADP and more.

But on the other hand, those in the business who manage its finances and financial reporting are lacking the tools to look at the data from these different apps in a holistic way. While Excel is a default application for many of them, they are simply reading lots of individual spreadsheets rather than integrated data analytics based on the numbers.

DataRails has built a platform that can read the reported information, which typically already lives in Excel spreadsheets, and automatically translate it into a bigger picture view of the company.

For SMEs, Excel is such a central piece of software, yet such a pain point for its lack of extensibility and function, that this predicament was actually the germination of starting DataRails in the first place,

Didi Gurfinkel, the CEO who co-founded the company with Eyal Cohen (the CPO) said that DataRails’ initially set out to create a more general purpose product that could help analyze and visualize anything from Excel.

“We started the company with a vision to save the world from Excel spreadsheets,” he said, by taking them and helping to connect the data contained within them to a structured database. “The core of our technology knows how to take unstructured data and map that to a central database.” Before 2020, DataRails (which was founded in 2015) applied this to a variety of areas with a focus on banks, insurance companies, compliance and data integrity.

Over time, it could see a very specific application emerging, specifically for SMEs: providing a platform for FP&A (financial planning and analytics), which didn’t really have a solution to address it at the time. “So we enabled that to beat the market.”

“They’re already investing so much time and money in their software, but they still don’t have analytics and insight,” said Gurfinkel.

That turned out to be fortunate timing, since “digital transformation” and getting more out of one’s data was really starting to get traction in the world of business, specifically in the world of SMEs, and CFOs and other people who oversaw finances were already looking for something like this.

The typical DataRails customer might be as small as a business of 50 people, or as big as 1,000 employees, a size of business that is too small for enterprise solutions, “which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to implement and use,” added Cohen, among other challenges. But as with so many of the apps that are being built today to address those using Excel, the idea with DataRails is low-code or even more specifically no-code, which means “no IT in the loop,” he said.

“That’s why we are so successful,” he said. “We are crossing the barrier and making our solution easy to use.”

The company doesn’t have a huge number of competitors today, either, although companies like Cube (which also recently raised some money) are among them. And others like Stripe, while currently not focussing on FP&A, have most definitely been expanding the tools that it is providing to businesses as part of their bigger play to manage payments and subsequently other processes related to financial activity, so perhaps it, or others like it, might at some point become competitors in this space as well.

In the meantime, Gurfinkel said that other areas that DataRails is likely to expand to cover alongside FP&A are likely to include HR, inventory, and “planning for anything,” any process that you have running in Excel. Another interesting turn would be how and if DataRails decides to look beyond Excel at other spreadsheets, or bypass spreadsheets altogether.

The scope of the opportunity — in the U.S. alone there are more than 30 million small businesses — is what’s attracting the investment here.

“We’re thrilled to reinvest in DataRails and continue working with the team to help them navigate their recent explosive and rapid growth,” said Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, in a statement. “With innovative yet accessible technology and a tremendous untapped market opportunity, DataRails is primed to scale and become the leading FP&A solution for SMEs everywhere.”

“Businesses are constantly about to start, in the midst of, or have just finished a round of financial reporting—it’s a never-ending cycle,” added Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures. “But with DataRails, FP&A can be simple, streamlined, and effective, and that’s a vision we’ll back again and again.”