Year: 2021

Blue Origin is set to launch one of its New Shepard rockets as early as tomorrow, January 14 at 9:45 AM CST (10:45 AM EST) for its first mission of 2021. This is a big one for the Jeff Bezos-founded space company, too – it includes upgrades to the crew capsule atop the rocket that are designed to improve the astronaut experience, a key preparatory step as the company approaches its first actual human spaceflight missions.

New Shepard has flown 13 times previously, and carried a number of different payloads to suborbital space before returning to Earth. The reusable launch vehicle aims to ultimately provide rides to space for people, too – and while there’s no stated timeline for this actually happening, tomorrow’s mission is a strong sign that it could be taking place sometime relatively soon.

Crew-focused upgrades flying on this New Shepard launch for the first time include acoustic and temperature regulation equipment, display panels that provide information to anyone who would be on board, and push-to-talk communications systems installed in each of the crew capsule’s six seats. One of those seats will have a life-size test article on board, a humanoid flight dummy named Mannequin Skywalker that Blue Origin uses to measure various aspects of the vehicle’s performance.

It’ll test astronaut safety alert systems that Blue Origin intends to include on the final flight system, and it’ll also carry a payload with a very different purpose – 50,000 postcards provided by school kids around the world to the Blue Origin non-profit Club for the Future.

The mission will be broadcast live by Blue Origin via its website and YouTube channel (embedded below) and you can expect the stream to begin around 30 minutes prior to launch time, so at around 10:15 AM EST (7:15 AM PST).

Blue Origin is set to launch one of its New Shepard rockets as early as tomorrow, January 14 at 9:45 AM CST (10:45 AM EST) for its first mission of 2021. This is a big one for the Jeff Bezos-founded space company, too – it includes upgrades to the crew capsule atop the rocket that are designed to improve the astronaut experience, a key preparatory step as the company approaches its first actual human spaceflight missions.

New Shepard has flown 13 times previously, and carried a number of different payloads to suborbital space before returning to Earth. The reusable launch vehicle aims to ultimately provide rides to space for people, too – and while there’s no stated timeline for this actually happening, tomorrow’s mission is a strong sign that it could be taking place sometime relatively soon.

Crew-focused upgrades flying on this New Shepard launch for the first time include acoustic and temperature regulation equipment, display panels that provide information to anyone who would be on board, and push-to-talk communications systems installed in each of the crew capsule’s six seats. One of those seats will have a life-size test article on board, a humanoid flight dummy named Mannequin Skywalker that Blue Origin uses to measure various aspects of the vehicle’s performance.

It’ll test astronaut safety alert systems that Blue Origin intends to include on the final flight system, and it’ll also carry a payload with a very different purpose – 50,000 postcards provided by school kids around the world to the Blue Origin non-profit Club for the Future.

The mission will be broadcast live by Blue Origin via its website and YouTube channel (embedded below) and you can expect the stream to begin around 30 minutes prior to launch time, so at around 10:15 AM EST (7:15 AM PST).

And we’re off to the races!

Last night, Affirm priced its IPO above its raised range at $49 per share, a sign that the public markets remain hungry for new listings. Provided that Affirm today trades similarly to how it priced, we could be looking at a 2021 IPO market that resembles last year’s heated results.

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

That’s good news for a host of companies looking to follow in the financial technology unicorn’s footsteps.

Poshmark prices tonight and trades tomorrow. And with Qualtrics in the wings along with Coinbase, Roblox set to direct list, and Bumble said to file as well, we’re heading into another busy IPO quarter. Affirm’s first-day trading results will therefore hold extra importance, even if its pricing augurs well for IPOs more generally.

Affirm first targeted $33 to $38 per share before raising its range to $41 to $44 per share. Pricing at $49 is a victory. Briefly, why, and then a thought about what’s next for the IPO market.

Affirm

What does Affirm sell? First, per its S-1 filings, it charges merchants a fee to “convert a sale and power a payment.” That sounds like software revenues, albeit not in the recurring manner of a SaaS company.

Second, Affirm earns from “interest income [from] the simple interest loans that we purchase from our originating bank partners.” And, it offers virtual cards to consumers via its app, allowing it to generate interchange revenues.

We care about all of that as it’s important to realize that Affirm is not a software company in the context that we usually think about them, namely software as a service, or SaaS.

This matters when we consider how the market values Affirm; the more richly Affirm is valued in revenue-multiple terms by its new, $39 per-share IPO price, the more bullish we can presume the IPO market is.

What are Affirm’s gross margins? A great question, and one that is surprisingly hard to answer. If you read its final S-1 filing, you’ll find that all its chatter concerning “contribution profit” has been removed. This is a shame to some degree as contribution profit — and margin — were Affirm’s closest shared cognate to gross margin.

And we’re off to the races!

Last night, Affirm priced its IPO above its raised range at $49 per share, a sign that the public markets remain hungry for new listings. Provided that Affirm today trades similarly to how it priced, we could be looking at a 2021 IPO market that resembles last year’s heated results.

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

That’s good news for a host of companies looking to follow in the financial technology unicorn’s footsteps.

Poshmark prices tonight and trades tomorrow. And with Qualtrics in the wings along with Coinbase, Roblox set to direct list, and Bumble said to file as well, we’re heading into another busy IPO quarter. Affirm’s first-day trading results will therefore hold extra importance, even if its pricing augurs well for IPOs more generally.

Affirm first targeted $33 to $38 per share before raising its range to $41 to $44 per share. Pricing at $49 is a victory. Briefly, why, and then a thought about what’s next for the IPO market.

Affirm

What does Affirm sell? First, per its S-1 filings, it charges merchants a fee to “convert a sale and power a payment.” That sounds like software revenues, albeit not in the recurring manner of a SaaS company.

Second, Affirm earns from “interest income [from] the simple interest loans that we purchase from our originating bank partners.” And, it offers virtual cards to consumers via its app, allowing it to generate interchange revenues.

We care about all of that as it’s important to realize that Affirm is not a software company in the context that we usually think about them, namely software as a service, or SaaS.

This matters when we consider how the market values Affirm; the more richly Affirm is valued in revenue-multiple terms by its new, $39 per-share IPO price, the more bullish we can presume the IPO market is.

What are Affirm’s gross margins? A great question, and one that is surprisingly hard to answer. If you read its final S-1 filing, you’ll find that all its chatter concerning “contribution profit” has been removed. This is a shame to some degree as contribution profit — and margin — were Affirm’s closest shared cognate to gross margin.

It’s estimated that there were some 50 billion connected devices globally in 2020, and while that really says a lot about how far we’ve come in tech, for many it also speaks to a big issue: security vulnerabilities, with the devices themselves, plus all the components and services running on them, all potential targets for anything from malicious hackers to not-so-intentional data leaks.

Today, an Israeli startup Vdoo — which has been developing AI-based services to detect and fix those kinds of vulnerabilities in IoT devices — is announcing $25 million in funding, money that it plans to use to help it better address the wider issue as it applies to all connected objects. With its initial focus on large industrial deployments, medical systems, communications infrastructure and automotive, Vdoo also looking more deeply now at the wider network of devices that use communications chips, providing quick (as in minutes) assessments to identify and remediate or directly fix various issues: it cites zero-day vulnerabilities, CVEs, configuration and hardening issues, and standard incompliances among them.

The funding — an extension to the $32 million round that Vdoo announced in April 2019 — is coming from two investors, Israel’s Qumra Capital and Verizon Ventures (the investing arm of Verizon, which — by way of its acquisition of Aol many years ago — also owns TechCrunch).

Verizon’s interest in Vdoo is strategic and speaks to the opportunity in the market. As CEO Netanel Davidi (who co-founded the company with Uri Alter and Asaf Karas) describes it, operators like Verizon are interested because of their role as a distributer and reseller of hardware as part of their wider services play, be it for broadband access, or a telematics service, or something for the connected home or connected office.

“They sell connected devices to enterprises and home users that are not made by them, yet the carriers are responsible for the security,” he said, “so the solution is to bake that into devices” to make it work more seamlessly, he said.

Verizon is not the startup’s only strategic backer. Others in the first tranche of this round included another carrier, Japan’s NTT Docomo, MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of the global cyber insurance firm) and Dell Technology Capital, the VC arm of Dell.

The company has now raised around $70 million, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Davidi confirmed that it has more than doubled this year.

(In April 2019, PitchBook estimated that it was just under $100 million, which would make it now at over $200 million if that figure is accurate.)

Davidi said that the decision to raise this money as an extension to the previous round rather than a new round was strategic: it gave the company the chance to raise funding more quickly, and to take more time to prepare for a bigger funding round in the near future.

And the reason for raising quickly was to address what was a quickly moving target: one of the by-products of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a dramatic shift to people working from home, buying new devices to enable that and in general using their communications networks much more heavily than before.

Connected device security typically focuses on monitoring activity on the hardware, how data is moving in and out of them. Vdoo’s approach has been to build a platform that monitors the behavior of the devices themselves, using AI to compare that behavior to identify when something is not working as it should. 

“For any kind of vulnerability, using deep binary analysis capabilities, we try to understand the broader idea, to figure out how a similar vulnerability can emerge,” is how Davidi described the process when we talked about the first part of this round back in 2019.

Vdoo generates specific “tailor-made on-device micro-agents” to continue the detection and repair process, which Davidi likens to a modern approach to some cancer care: preventive measures such as periodic monitoring checks, followed by a “tailored immunotherapy” based on prior analysis of DNA.

Vdoo is a play on the Hebrew word that sounds like “vee-doo” and means “making sure”, and points to the basic idea of how it approaches the verification around its device monitoring. It also feels somewhat like the next step in endpoint security, which was the focus of Davidi and Alter’s previous startup, Cyvera, which was eventually acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

The focus on devices, in some ways, is a significantly more complex approach given that it’s not just about the device, but the many components that go into them. As we have seen with Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities might exist at the processor level.

And as Davidi pointed out to me this week, at times those issues aren’t even intentional but still mean data can leak out, and at worst that can be exploitable by bad actors.

“Backdoors are being built into many devices, and some are not even intentional,” he said. “It may be that the developer wanted to create a shortcut to make something else easier in the future. Some will see that as a back door, and some will not.”

The fractal-like nature of the issue what Vdoo is digging into with its widening approach.

“Initially we wanted to serve the ecosystem of manufacturers, since they are the cause of the problem and the origin of the security issues,” he said. “We started there with Fortune 500 customers in areas like automotive and industrial and medical and telco and aviation. The idea was to make a platform that could serve and product security stakeholders. But then we saw that this was a big unserved market.”

Indeed, Vdoo quotes figures from research firm Markets and Markets that forecast that the global device security market will grow to $36.6 billion by 2025 from $12.5 billion in 2020.

“The number of connected IoT devices is rapidly growing, creating greater opportunities for security breaches,” said Boaz Dinte, Managing Partner of Qumra Capital, in a statement. “Vdoo’s unique device-centric, deep technology automated approach has already brought immediate value to vendors in a very short period of time. We believe the market opportunity is huge, and with newly infused growth capital, Vdoo is well-positioned to become the leading global player for securing connected devices.”

“With the expansion of 5G networks and mobile edge compute, there’s a need for an end-to-end, device-centric security approach to IoT,” added Verizon Ventures MD Tammy Mahn in a statement. “As the venture arm of a leading telco, Verizon Ventures is proud to invest in  Vdoo and its world-class team on their journey to solve this global need, while ushering in a new era of security by design in our increasingly connected world.”

It’s estimated that there were some 50 billion connected devices globally in 2020, and while that really says a lot about how far we’ve come in tech, for many it also speaks to a big issue: security vulnerabilities, with the devices themselves, plus all the components and services running on them, all potential targets for anything from malicious hackers to not-so-intentional data leaks.

Today, an Israeli startup Vdoo — which has been developing AI-based services to detect and fix those kinds of vulnerabilities in IoT devices — is announcing $25 million in funding, money that it plans to use to help it better address the wider issue as it applies to all connected objects. With its initial focus on large industrial deployments, medical systems, communications infrastructure and automotive, Vdoo also looking more deeply now at the wider network of devices that use communications chips, providing quick (as in minutes) assessments to identify and remediate or directly fix various issues: it cites zero-day vulnerabilities, CVEs, configuration and hardening issues, and standard incompliances among them.

The funding — an extension to the $32 million round that Vdoo announced in April 2019 — is coming from two investors, Israel’s Qumra Capital and Verizon Ventures (the investing arm of Verizon, which — by way of its acquisition of Aol many years ago — also owns TechCrunch).

Verizon’s interest in Vdoo is strategic and speaks to the opportunity in the market. As CEO Netanel Davidi (who co-founded the company with Uri Alter and Asaf Karas) describes it, operators like Verizon are interested because of their role as a distributer and reseller of hardware as part of their wider services play, be it for broadband access, or a telematics service, or something for the connected home or connected office.

“They sell connected devices to enterprises and home users that are not made by them, yet the carriers are responsible for the security,” he said, “so the solution is to bake that into devices” to make it work more seamlessly, he said.

Verizon is not the startup’s only strategic backer. Others in the first tranche of this round included another carrier, Japan’s NTT Docomo, MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of the global cyber insurance firm) and Dell Technology Capital, the VC arm of Dell.

The company has now raised around $70 million, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Davidi confirmed that it has more than doubled this year.

(In April 2019, PitchBook estimated that it was just under $100 million, which would make it now at over $200 million if that figure is accurate.)

Davidi said that the decision to raise this money as an extension to the previous round rather than a new round was strategic: it gave the company the chance to raise funding more quickly, and to take more time to prepare for a bigger funding round in the near future.

And the reason for raising quickly was to address what was a quickly moving target: one of the by-products of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a dramatic shift to people working from home, buying new devices to enable that and in general using their communications networks much more heavily than before.

Connected device security typically focuses on monitoring activity on the hardware, how data is moving in and out of them. Vdoo’s approach has been to build a platform that monitors the behavior of the devices themselves, using AI to compare that behavior to identify when something is not working as it should. 

“For any kind of vulnerability, using deep binary analysis capabilities, we try to understand the broader idea, to figure out how a similar vulnerability can emerge,” is how Davidi described the process when we talked about the first part of this round back in 2019.

Vdoo generates specific “tailor-made on-device micro-agents” to continue the detection and repair process, which Davidi likens to a modern approach to some cancer care: preventive measures such as periodic monitoring checks, followed by a “tailored immunotherapy” based on prior analysis of DNA.

Vdoo is a play on the Hebrew word that sounds like “vee-doo” and means “making sure”, and points to the basic idea of how it approaches the verification around its device monitoring. It also feels somewhat like the next step in endpoint security, which was the focus of Davidi and Alter’s previous startup, Cyvera, which was eventually acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

The focus on devices, in some ways, is a significantly more complex approach given that it’s not just about the device, but the many components that go into them. As we have seen with Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities might exist at the processor level.

And as Davidi pointed out to me this week, at times those issues aren’t even intentional but still mean data can leak out, and at worst that can be exploitable by bad actors.

“Backdoors are being built into many devices, and some are not even intentional,” he said. “It may be that the developer wanted to create a shortcut to make something else easier in the future. Some will see that as a back door, and some will not.”

The fractal-like nature of the issue what Vdoo is digging into with its widening approach.

“Initially we wanted to serve the ecosystem of manufacturers, since they are the cause of the problem and the origin of the security issues,” he said. “We started there with Fortune 500 customers in areas like automotive and industrial and medical and telco and aviation. The idea was to make a platform that could serve and product security stakeholders. But then we saw that this was a big unserved market.”

Indeed, Vdoo quotes figures from research firm Markets and Markets that forecast that the global device security market will grow to $36.6 billion by 2025 from $12.5 billion in 2020.

“The number of connected IoT devices is rapidly growing, creating greater opportunities for security breaches,” said Boaz Dinte, Managing Partner of Qumra Capital, in a statement. “Vdoo’s unique device-centric, deep technology automated approach has already brought immediate value to vendors in a very short period of time. We believe the market opportunity is huge, and with newly infused growth capital, Vdoo is well-positioned to become the leading global player for securing connected devices.”

“With the expansion of 5G networks and mobile edge compute, there’s a need for an end-to-end, device-centric security approach to IoT,” added Verizon Ventures MD Tammy Mahn in a statement. “As the venture arm of a leading telco, Verizon Ventures is proud to invest in  Vdoo and its world-class team on their journey to solve this global need, while ushering in a new era of security by design in our increasingly connected world.”

The first commercial lunar landers are set to start making their trips to the Moon as early as this year, and now another one has a confirmed ride booked: Intuitive Machines is sending its second lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, with a projected launch timeframe happening sometime around 2022 at the earliest. Intuitive Machines has already booked a first lander mission via SpaceX, which is also hosting payloads for other private companies seeking to make lunar landfall under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander can carry up to 100 kg (around 222 lbs) of cargo to the Moon’s surface, and can communicate back to Earth for transmitting the results of its missions. It has both internal and surface mounting capacity, and will carry science experiments for a variety of customers to the lunar surface through NASA’s commercial partnership program, partly to support future NASA missions including its planned Artemis human Moon landings.

The first Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission, which will also use a Nova-C lander, is set to take place sometime in the fourth quarter of 2021 based on current timelines. It’ll include a lunar imaging suite, which will seek to “capture some of the first images of the Milky Way Galaxy Center from the surface of the Moon,” and the second mission will include delivering a polar resource mining drill and a mass spectrometer to the Moon’s South Pole on behalf of NASA, in addition to other payloads.

The first commercial lunar landers are set to start making their trips to the Moon as early as this year, and now another one has a confirmed ride booked: Intuitive Machines is sending its second lander aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, with a projected launch timeframe happening sometime around 2022 at the earliest. Intuitive Machines has already booked a first lander mission via SpaceX, which is also hosting payloads for other private companies seeking to make lunar landfall under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander can carry up to 100 kg (around 222 lbs) of cargo to the Moon’s surface, and can communicate back to Earth for transmitting the results of its missions. It has both internal and surface mounting capacity, and will carry science experiments for a variety of customers to the lunar surface through NASA’s commercial partnership program, partly to support future NASA missions including its planned Artemis human Moon landings.

The first Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission, which will also use a Nova-C lander, is set to take place sometime in the fourth quarter of 2021 based on current timelines. It’ll include a lunar imaging suite, which will seek to “capture some of the first images of the Milky Way Galaxy Center from the surface of the Moon,” and the second mission will include delivering a polar resource mining drill and a mass spectrometer to the Moon’s South Pole on behalf of NASA, in addition to other payloads.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m a grad student currently working on F-1 STEM OPT. The company I work for has indicated it will sponsor me for an H-1B visa this year.

I hear the random H-1B lottery will be replaced with a new system that selects H-1B candidates based on their salaries. How will this new process work?

— Positive in Palo Alto

Dear Positive:

Thanks for your timely question! The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), finalized a new rule last week (Jan. 8), that replaces the random H-1B lottery with a pay-to-play system. There may be litigation that could change things before this year’s selection process, but interestingly, removing the randomness from the H-1B lottery is one point on which both Biden and Trump agree.

To find out more about all the changes that will impact this year’s H-1B process and how to prepare, register for our upcoming webinar on Jan. 20, on how to Get Ready for the H-1B FY2022 Lottery. In the meantime, listen to my recent H-1B podcast in which I discuss what the 2021 lottery will look like, and download our free H-1B guide. Also, check out the podcast episode on What Makes a Strong H-1B Petition.

Under this new wage-based H-1B allocation system, which is slated to go into effect on March 9, USCIS will select H-1B registrants based on the highest relative wages paid, taking into account the job, where it will be done and the job level (think of it like a career stage). This change is aimed at encouraging employers to offer higher salaries and higher-skilled positions to H-1B candidates to better protect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers and increase the likelihood that H-1B visas will be awarded to the best and the brightest individuals. In a nutshell, this is great news for Silicon Valley companies that have cash and need to remove risk.

While the new rule substantially increases predictability in the “lottery” process, it may make it more difficult for companies that are unfunded, pre-revenue early-stage startups to get H-1B visas for founders or employees, particularly since other forms of compensation, such as equity or stock options, are not considered wages. So the lesson here is to get some predictable revenue or runway prior to Q2 when you need to submit the I-129 petition so you can demonstrate the “ability to pay” at a higher wage level.

You know what’s great? Becoming a unicorn in two years. You know what’s even better? Exiting at unicorn status in two years.

This morning, Qualcomm announced that it was buying high-performance computing startup NUVIA for $1.4 billion, minus some coverage of working capital and debt.

The startup, which we extensively profiled on its launch after raising $53 million in a Series A in late 2019 and again a few months ago when it raised $240 million in its Series B from Mithril, was the brainchild of a number of star Apple chip engineers who had worked on the computing giant’s A series of chips that powered the company’s iPhones and iPads.

Much like how Apple’s new M series of chips for its laptop computers (so far) have dazzled with an almost revolutionary mix of energy efficiency and performance, NUVIA’s founders were hoping to use their experience in managing the power envelope while eking out high performance and bring that to the data center. Given the sheer scale of power required by data centers to function, which is only going up with the demand for AI applications in the cloud, the hope was that NUVIA could have its cake and eat it too: offering high performance while cutting power and saving costs for cloud computing.

According to Qualcomm’s press release, NUVIA’s technology will be incorporated across the company’s line of chips, with its leadership centered around its 5G-focused Snapdragon chip. The company’s founders and employees are expected to join, and the deal must be approved by U.S. regulators.

NUVIA was one of the most compelling companies of the new crop of next-generation silicon startups, but it was also mired in a legal battle between one of its founders and famed former Apple engineer Gerald Williams III and his former employer. Apple filed a civil lawsuit against Williams in 2019 (California Superior Court of Santa Clara, 19-cv-352866), arguing that he attempted to recruit his former colleagues to join NUVIA in breach of his contractual obligations with Apple. Williams fought back through his own motions, and the two have been legal discovery ever since, with the latest updates happening just last month with Apple and Williams demanding each other hand over certain documents as the case has proceeded.

We don’t know how the timing of that lawsuit played into the company’s quick exit, or whether Qualcomm’s significantly deeper relationship with Apple as a supplier might help the parties reach a quicker settlement. We’ve reached out to a NUVIA spokesperson for comment.

While that lawsuit was a cloud over the company, the end result is a unicorn exit at $1.4 billion on just shy of $300 million of venture capital fundraised in roughly two years. Mithril is probably not terribly thrilled given the quick turnaround, but earlier investors like Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), Mayfield, and WRVI Capital are probably doing a bit better on the multiples on invested capital front. And of course, the founders likely came out well ahead as well.