Year: 2021

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that’s designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real time parking and curb availability data.

Here’s how it works: small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a vehicle. Then solar-powered gateway hardware, which can be strapped easily to street poles, uses IoT to connect the sensor to the cloud through the cellular network. The data is then viewed and analyzed by real estate developers, parking operators or municipal agencies via a dashboard. 

Pebble doesn’t use cameras or collect identifying information about a person or vehicle, and is touting a “privacy preserving” approach. Sidewalk Labs has been relatively quiet since it shut down its $1.3 billion tech-enabled real estate project in Toronto amid privacy concerns a year ago. Rather than try to tackle large urban infrastructure projects, the company appears to be focusing its efforts on smaller scale solutions that can be used by private and public entities to improve cities. 

In October last year, Sidewalk Labs unveiled Delve, a design tool that uses machine learning to help developers, architects and planners to create optimal design plans for urban projects. Just a few weeks ago, Sidewalk Labs spinout Replica – an AI-powered data platform that uses machine learning to generate “synthetic” populations whose behaviors can be tracked in order to simulate plausible scenarios in the real world – secured $41 million in Series B funding. 

New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority relied on Replica during the pandemic to adapt its public transit schedule. Now, as the country begins to open up in earnest, those with a stake in parking and mobility, especially cities looking to unroll sustainable transport recovery plans, might consider using tools like Pebble’s to manage parking supplies effectively. 

Between 9% and 56% of traffic, and all the pollution that comes with it, is caused by people who are cruising for parking. Pebble says its real-time parking availability can be integrated into navigation apps, like Google Maps, through an API to help users spend less time circling the block.  

“Real-time parking information can also alert would-be drivers when spaces are limited before they even leave home, leading them to use alternative travel modes, such as park-and-ride transit or ferries,” wrote Sidewalk Labs’ senior creative technologist, Nick Jonas, in a blog post announcing the launch. “For example, a smart parking program at a BART park-and-ride station reduced driving by a monthly average of nearly 10 miles per person — and even shortened commutes.”

While cities could certainly benefit from a tool that could monitor curb and municipal parking, the effort involved could be enormous. Imagine a city like New York widely placing individual sensors to mark street parking spaces! It would be quite the job, not to mention difficult to define static parking spaces. Pebble says it is already working with pilot customers to manage tens of thousands of parking spaces, but it did not reply to a request for more information about whether or not any of those pilot customers are cities. 

In the blog post announcing the Pebble launch, Sidewalk Labs covers a range of potential use cases. City agencies that apply Pebble hardware to curbs can also gain insights on how to help businesses generate revenue by assigning relevant curb space for things like outdoor dining and applying flexible programs like dynamic pricing, which adjusts on-street parking rates based on supply and demand.

Pebble also says real estate developers can use its insights to create shared parking zones or build less parking if they can prove to cities that sufficient parking already exists to meet demand. 

While it seems more efficient parking would make for people relying further on cars, Sidewalk Labs says the opposite is true. Sidewalk Labs’ Senior Creative Technologist Nick Jonas says that Pebble can help “reduce driving and new parking in several ways,” including by helping real estate developers collect the data needed to provide compelling counterarguments for city ordinances requiring certain amounts of parking spots be built for new residential and office spaces.

“Pebble can help […] prove that parking demand can be met through existing spaces or shared parking zones, reducing the need to build new spaces,” Jonas said. And in terms of traffic generated by drivers searching for spots, Pebble can help by “facilitating direct navigation to a parking space,” which can make a dent in the “30 percent of traffic congestion that occurs from drivers for a parking space.”

On top of those infrastructure benefits, Jonas notes that Pebble can help with economic and convenience incentives that encourage commuters to opt for other methods of transit instead of driving.

“By facilitating dynamic pricing programs, Pebble can help cities “right-price” parking and encourage alternative travel modes,” he noted, adding that based on early data from pilots in the Bay Area, Pebble data including “direct navigation and real-time space availability data can also encourage people to use park-and-ride transit rather than driving all the way into an office.”

Much of the operating thesis upon which Sidewalks Labs is based is that cities would be able to run much more efficiently, effectively and safely if they can just address the existing data gaps and blindspots about how people actually live in, and navigate them. Pebble looks like it could be a key ingredient in help fill in the blanks for parking and garage usage.

Lamborghini will pay homage to combustion engines with the introduction of two new V12 luxury sports cars this year before it makes a push into electrification as the company tries to balance its storied gas-powered past with a hybrid, and eventually electric, future.

The company laid out Tuesday its electrification roadmap, a plan that will see its full lineup of vehicles become hybrids by the end of 2024 and the launch of an all-electric Lamborghini in the second half of the decade.

Lamborghini said it plans to invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.82 million) over four years to make the transition to hybrid vehicles, the largest allocation in its history. The Volkswagen-owned brand it will launch its first hybrid series production car in 2023 and then hybridize the rest of the lineup the following year. During this second phase of its roadmap, Lamborghini will focus on developing new technologies and the application of lightweight carbon fiber materials — both of which will be crucial in compensating for weight due to electrification, the company said.

The aim, during this phase, is to reduce the product emissions 50% by 2025, the company said.

“Lamborghini’s electrification plan is a newly-plotted course, necessary in the context of a radically-changing world, where we want to make our contribution by continuing to reduce environmental impact through concrete projects,” Lamborghini President and CEO Stephan Winkelmann said in a statement. He emphasized that this plan, which begins with a celebration of the combustion engine, will take the company towards a “more sustainable future while always remaining faithful to our DNA.”

The Italian brand has already moved towards hybrids with the Sián and its roofless cousin the Sián Roadster. These vehicles, which were unveiled in 2019 and 2020 respectively, are mid-engine sports cars that combine a naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 engine, a supercapcitor instead of a lithium-ion battery that operates its powertrain and a 48-volt electric motor.

Together, this system produces 819 horsepower that propels the vehicle from zero to 62 mph in 2.8 seconds and a top speed of 218 mph. Lamborghini is producing 63 Sián and 19 Sián Roadsters. All of these have been sold, which suggests there is demand for a hybridized version of the classic Lamborghini.

AI is driving the paradigm shift that is the software industry’s transition to data-centric programming from writing logical statements. Data is now oxygen. The more training data a company gathers, the brighter will its AI-powered products burn.

Why is Tesla so far ahead with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS)? Because no one else has collected as much information — it has data on more than ten billion driven miles, helping it pull ahead of competition like Waymo, which has only about 20 million miles. But any company that is considering using machine learning (ML) cannot overlook one technical choice: supervised or unsupervised learning.

There is a fundamental difference between the two. For unsupervised learning, the process is fairly straightforward: The acquired data is directly fed to the models, and if all goes well, it will identify patterns.

Elon Musk compares unsupervised learning to the human brain, which gets raw data from the six senses and makes sense of it. He recently shared that making unsupervised learning work for ADAS is a major challenge that hasn’t been solved yet.

Supervised learning is currently the most practical approach for most ML challenges. O’Reilly’s 2021 report on AI Adoption in the Enterprise found that 82% of surveyed companies use supervised learning, while only 58% use unsupervised learning. Gartner predicts that through 2022, supervised learning will remain favored by enterprises, arguing that “most of the current economic value gained from ML is based on supervised learning use cases”.

Vise today announced a $65 million Series C financing round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investors including Sequoia.

The startup launched on the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage in 2019 and has since raised upwards of $125 million.

Vise uses an AI-powered platform to give independent financial advisors the same level of data as advisories with their own analyst departments.

The goal, cofounder and CEO Samir Vasavada has told me in the past, is to give indie financial advisors the time and energy to cultivate their client relationships, rather than doing the hard math of building out portfolios. Vise does a lot of heavy lifting where the latter is concerned, freeing up advisors to focus on the former.

The premise behind Vise is to use tech to empower humans, ‘as opposed to replacing them’ by automating an industry that’s very old. The end goal is to ‘enable financial freedom for everyone.’

“We have to build a platform that will service hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars in assets in an automated way,” said Vasavada. “There is a lot of technical infrastructure that can be built, and systems around trading and around go-to-market so we can attack this industry.”

Since raising the company’s Series B, assets under management have ballooned 4x to $250 million and client accounts have more than doubled, says Vise.

Vise has been scaling its tech, team and the clientele for the past couple years, but that hit a new gear upon the appointment of Andrew Fong as CTO. Fong hails from Dropbox, where he served as VP of Infrastructure Engineering. He actually started out as a site reliability engineer at Dropbox back in 2012, climbing the ranks to engineering director, and then senior director of engineering with a focus on infrastructure before becoming a vice president.

Fong’s main goal is scaling up the engineering department, something that continues to be a focus for the company. Vasavada explained that expanding a product and a company is all about the foundation.

The company’s round fits inside the generally bullish market for fintech investments that TechCrunch has observed globally.

Of note: Vise’s Vasavada and Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire will join us tomorrow afternoon on Extra Crunch Live, where we’ll discuss how they came together for the financing, what made Vise stand out to Sequoia, and how they’re finding success in the world of fintech. Maguire and Vasavada will also hear live pitches from startups in the audience and give their feedback.

You can hang out with us tomorrow on Extra Crunch Live at 3pm ET/noon PT by registering here.

A company that has built a new approach to the business of extended warranties — providing a cost-effective and efficient way for retailers or brands to offer them; and an easy way for consumers to buy and file claims against them — is today announcing a huge round of funding as it looks to take its business to the next level.

Extend — which aims, in the words of co-founder and CEO Woody Levin, to become the “Apple Care” for everything that’s not an actual Apple product — has raised $260 million, a Series C that values the company at over $1.6 billion.

It plans to use the funding to continue expanding its business. That will include a gradual move into covering more than just extended warranties that kick in after manufacturer or retailer warranties run out; much wider geographical expansion; and more activity to prove out its place at the e-commerce table (if the leap to a $1.6 billion valuation in 27 months of operation isn’t testament enough…).

“Same day delivery, buy-now-pay-later, and other tools: we are now all part of that core e-commerce toolset,” Levin said in an interview. “We have been selling since 2019 but the market is just waking up to this. We’re focused on being transparent and fair with warranties. It’s something they haven’t seen before.”

The company says that in 2020, its first full year of business, it sold 300,000 protection plans, but it is now on track to sell more than 3 million protection plans this year. Customers include Peloton, iRobot, Harman/JBL, Backcountry, Balsam Hill, BlendJet, RealTruck, Traeger Grills and “hundreds” of others, along with a growing number of retailers, too. (Peloton likely makes for some interesting stories…)

The funding, a Series C, is coming from an interesting mix of financial and very strategic investors. It is being led by SoftBank, in the latest investment out of its Vision Fund 2. (Levin said he was pitched directly by Mashayoshi Son: “He immediately understood what we were doing.”)

Existing backers Meritech Capital Partners, PayPal Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures, and new investors insurance giant Nationwide, Tomales Bay Capital, Launchpad Capital, 10X Capital and 40North, also participated.

PayPal is a notable name here: warranties are often sold at the point of sale, and so it makes sense that a payment giant is interested in bringing more tools and conversion levers into the mix. (And given the connection between warranties and insurance, it’s also interesting to remember that Stripe, one of PayPal’s big competitors, in March received a huge funding round with insurance giants participating.)

Meanwhile, recall that SoftBank also is a part-owner of T-Mobile (which sells a lot of gadgets) and an investor in, well, a lot. This gives Extend a possible door into a huge range of places where it might integrate and offer extended warranties and other kinds of protection plans.

The round was oversubscribed and comes just eight months after Extend announced a Series B of $40 million. You could say that Extend very much extended its own conversations with VCs with this latest round.

Extended warranties and protection plans have long been a point of contention for consumers: they sound like peace of mind in theory, but they often feel like frustrating upsell, with the tacit message being that somehow the company accepts that its products won’t last. At the same time, they can be time-consuming, if not downright disappointing, to actually claim against.

Extend is all too aware of the pitfalls of the legacy model and has set out to combat it with more flexible offerings (providing tiers of warranty time with prices attached), clear policies that can be managed in one place for all of your Extend-provided coverage, and quick interactions — by way of a digital assistant called Kaley — to get claims against your policies if the need arises. In the background, it also leverages machine learning and risk analysis to make sure it’s not betting the house on its plans.

This has all played in its favor for now. Retailers are getting less interested in handling warranties in-house, and are turning to outside providers to do the work. Extend saw revenues rise 40x in its first full year of business (2020) — a time when many have been spending more hours at home and possibly more willing to follow through on customer support interactions when they do have problems. The startup says it expects revenues to go up by 400% this year.

Its customers continue to be primarily those who sell directly to consumers, although a few new deals with retailers speaks to some opportunities for a much wider opportunity for those who are looking for more services to offer shoppers around the basic proposition of buying goods, to better compete against the wider range of services that a marketplace like Amazon might offer for those who want them.

“As more consumers shop online, merchants are keen to provide customers with a greater peace of mind when making purchases. We believe Extend is reinventing the extended warranty industry through its leading platform, API solutions, and consumer-first approach,” said Nagraj Kashyap, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are pleased to work with Woody and the Extend team to support their ambition of providing a better way for consumers to protect the products they love.”

Without good data, it’s impossible to build an accurate predictive machine learning model. Explorium, a company that has been building a solution over the last several years to help data pros find the best data for a given model, announced a $75 million Series C today — just 10 months after announcing a $31 million Series B.

Insight Partners led today’s investment with participation from existing investors Zeev Ventures, Emerge, F2 Capital Ventures, 01 Advisors and Dynamic Loop Capital. The company reports it has now raised a total of $127 million. George Mathew, managing partner at Insight, and former president and COO at Alteryx, will be joining the board, giving the company someone with solid operator experience to help guide them into the next phase.

Company co-founder and CEO Maor Shlomo, says that in spite of how horrible COVID has been from a human perspective, it has been a business accelerator for his company and he saw revenue quadruple last year (although he didn’t share specific numbers beyond that). “It’s related to the nature of our business. We’re helping enterprises and data practitioners find new data sources that can help them solve business challenges,” Sholmo explained.

He says that during the pandemic, a lot of companies had to find new data sources because the old data wasn’t especially helpful for predictive models. That meant that customers required new sources to give them visibility into the shifts and movements in the market to help them adjust and make decisions during pandemic. “And given that’s basically what our platform does in its essence, we’ve seen a lot of growth [over the past year],” he says.

With the revenue growth the company has been experiencing, it has been adding employees at rapid clip. When we spoke to Explorium last July, the company had 87 people. Today that number has grown to 130 with plans to get to 200 perhaps by the end of 2021 or early 2022, depending on how the business continues to grow.

The company has offices in Tel Aviv and San Mateo, California with plans to open a new office in New York City whenever it’s possible to do so. While Shlomo wants a flexible workplace, he’s not going fully remote with plans to allow people to work two days from home and three in the office as local rules allow.

Email marketing is decades old, but it’s a category that has surprising life in it. Multiple generations of email marketing companies have come through and sustained success, from Constant Contact to Mailchimp. These brands often become household names — after all, you probably have hundreds of emails with their logos attached to the email footer.

Klaviyo is not as much of a household name right now, but it is absolutely on its way to the paramount of the next-generation of email marketing startups.

The company announced today that it has raised $320 million in new capital in a Series D round, led by Sands Capital, a private and public equity investor that has, among many areas of focus, a thesis in ecommerce. That brings the company’s total fundraising to $675 million, following a $200 million Series C round from just six months ago.

Klaviyo was the subject of one of our most recent EC-1 analyses, where we looked at the company’s history of growth, how it is rebuilding what’s been dubbed “owned marketing” (i.e. marketing channels that a business owns like email rather than channels owned by platforms like Facebook and Instagram), how marketers are using Klaviyo post-COVID, and some startup growth lessons from the business as well.

There is nearly 10,000 words of analysis packed into that whole story, so read that or save it for the weekend if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of Klaviyo’s story and how it is fitting in to the wider email marketing space. But suffice it to say that the company’s secret sauce is perhaps obvious: it’s a marketing company that’s pretty damn good at marketing. That’s allowed it to pull in gargantuan numbers of new customers as many retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses fled online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In its press statement, the company wrote that “Klaviyo’s customer base doubled over the past 12 months and the company now serves over 70,000 paying customers, a more than 110% increase from 2019 — ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, in more than 120 countries.” It also said that it plans to increase its head count from 800 to 1,300 people this year.

The company is headquartered in Boston, and Klaviyo’s all-but decacorn valuation is a major win for the Boston enterprise ecosystem, which continues to percolate on high.

In addition to Sands, Counterpoint Global, Whale Rock Capital Management, ClearBridge Investments, Lone Pine Capital, Owl Rock Capital, and Glynn Capital also joined the round as new investors. Previous investors Accel and Summit Partners also participated.

Email marketing is decades old, but it’s a category that has surprising life in it. Multiple generations of email marketing companies have come through and sustained success, from Constant Contact to Mailchimp. These brands often become household names — after all, you probably have hundreds of emails with their logos attached to the email footer.

Klaviyo is not as much of a household name right now, but it is absolutely on its way to the paramount of the next-generation of email marketing startups.

The company announced today that it has raised $320 million in new capital in a Series D round, led by Sands Capital, a private and public equity investor that has, among many areas of focus, a thesis in ecommerce. That brings the company’s total fundraising to $675 million, following a $200 million Series C round from just six months ago.

Klaviyo was the subject of one of our most recent EC-1 analyses, where we looked at the company’s history of growth, how it is rebuilding what’s been dubbed “owned marketing” (i.e. marketing channels that a business owns like email rather than channels owned by platforms like Facebook and Instagram), how marketers are using Klaviyo post-COVID, and some startup growth lessons from the business as well.

There is nearly 10,000 words of analysis packed into that whole story, so read that or save it for the weekend if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of Klaviyo’s story and how it is fitting in to the wider email marketing space. But suffice it to say that the company’s secret sauce is perhaps obvious: it’s a marketing company that’s pretty damn good at marketing. That’s allowed it to pull in gargantuan numbers of new customers as many retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses fled online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In its press statement, the company wrote that “Klaviyo’s customer base doubled over the past 12 months and the company now serves over 70,000 paying customers, a more than 110% increase from 2019 — ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, in more than 120 countries.” It also said that it plans to increase its head count from 800 to 1,300 people this year.

The company is headquartered in Boston, and Klaviyo’s all-but decacorn valuation is a major win for the Boston enterprise ecosystem, which continues to percolate on high.

In addition to Sands, Counterpoint Global, Whale Rock Capital Management, ClearBridge Investments, Lone Pine Capital, Owl Rock Capital, and Glynn Capital also joined the round as new investors. Previous investors Accel and Summit Partners also participated.

As cloud-native apps continue to become increasingly central to how organizations operate, a startup founded by the creators of a popular open-source tool to manage authorization for cloud-native application environments is announcing some funding to expand its efforts at commercializing the opportunity.

Styra, the startup behind Open Policy Agent, has picked up $40 million in a Series B round of funding led by Battery Ventures. Also participating are previous backers A. Capital, Unusual Ventures and Accel; and new backers CapitalOne Ventures, Citi Ventures and Cisco Investments. Styra has disclosed CapitalOne is also one of its customers, along with e-commerce site Zalando and the European Patent Office.

Styra is sitting on the classic opportunity of open source technology: scale and demand.

OPA — which can be used across Kubernetes, containerized and other environments — now has racked up some 75 million downloads and is adding some 1 million downloads weekly, with Netflix, Capital One, Atlassian and Pinterest among those that are using OPA for internal authorization purposes. The fact that OPA is open source is also important:

“Developers are at the top of the food chain right now,” CEO Bill Mann said in an interview, “They choose which technology on which to build the framework, and they want what satisfies their requirements, and that is open source. It’s a foundational change: if it isn’t open source it won’t pass the test.”

But while some of those adopting OPA have hefty engineering teams of their own to customize how OPA is used, the sheer number of downloads (and potential active users stemming from that) speak to the opportunity for a company to build tools to help manage that and customize it for specific use cases in cases where those wanting to use OPA may lack the resources (or appetite) to build and scale custom implementations themselves.

As with many of the enterprise startups getting funded at the moment, Styra has proven itself in particular over the last year, with the switch to remote work, workloads being managed across a number of environments, and the ever-persistent need for better security around what people can and should not be using. Authorization is a particularly acute issue when considering the many access points that need to be monitored: as networks continue to grow across multiple hubs and applications, having a single authorization tool for the whole stack becomes even more important.

Styra said that some of the funding will be used to continue evolving its product, specifically by creating better and more efficient ways to apply authorization policies by way of code; and by bringing in more partners to expand the scope of what can be covered by its technology.

“We are extremely impressed with the Styra team and the progress they’ve made in this dynamic market to date,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures. “Everyone who is moving to cloud, and adopting containerized applications, needs Styra for authorization—and in the light of today’s new, remote-first work environment, every enterprise is now moving to the cloud.” Thakker is joining the board with this round.

Email marketing has been with us for decades, but today it has been refined to a science and an art form.

If you’re an early-stage founder, it is one of the best ways to build and grow your direct relationship with your customer. You know how fickle the platforms can be. You can’t afford to mess this up.

So when and how should you think about doing email marketing, versus all of your other frantic priorities?

Here at Extra Crunch, we’re helping you find the answers. Today, we’re launching a survey of founders who want to recommend a great email marketer or agency they have worked with to the rest of the startup world.

Fill out the survey here.

If you have someone to recommend, make sure to let us know: We’ll use your answers to create a freely available public database of experts in this domain on TechCrunch. We’ll feature the most helpful responses (anonymously if requested) so other founders can find the right people for them to work with.

The next step might be even more useful: We’ll provide EC subscribers with our own coverage of email marketing how-to topics and issues in more detail, based on our ongoing conversations with these experts.

In the coming months, you’ll see us dig into topics from great content production to optimizing deliverability, flow, timing, and design. We’ll also examine how to use email together with other marketing funnels, to improve your ROI on paid advertising efforts.

We’ll cover ongoing changes to the technology that affect the space, including the state of the art in email tools, email service provider platform changes, privacy laws, and much more.

If you’re a founder and you respond to the survey, you’ll also receive a discount to a new Extra Crunch subscription.

We’re particularly interested in what the expert did in the early to middle stages of the startup’s journey. Usually before Series C, for venture-backed companies. Recommendations wanted for both individuals and agencies.

If you’re a growth marketing expert, you’re encouraged to share the survey with your founder clients.

Finally, for those who have been reading TechCrunch for at least a few years, you’ll remember a similar set of surveys we had begun around other categories of startup experts, including legal, brand and overall growth. After a hiatus to take care of a few other things, this survey marks the resumption of that initiative!