Author: azeeadmin

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. I also tweet.

It’s a surreal day to talk about technology, but here we are. If you can pull your eyes away from the greater geopolitical tragedy that is our world today, here’s what we talked about:

• T Mobile may have suffered a material breach. If this bears out, it could be a leading tech story for the week. Vice has confirmed that at least some of the data in the leak appears genuine.
• Indian travel service ixigo is going public. The company’s IPO follows Zomato’s own domestic debut.
• And speaking of IPOs, the Tencent Music offering in Hong Kong could be on hold until next year.
• And a trio of American tech companies raised a raft of capital as last week concluded. Carta put together $500 million in a huge deal, as Chime raised $750 million. And as the week closed, Discord was reported to be hunting up a new round at a $15 billion price tag.

And stocks are set to open lower this morning. That’s the morning report. Equity is back on Wednesday.

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. I also tweet.

It’s a surreal day to talk about technology, but here we are. If you can pull your eyes away from the greater geopolitical tragedy that is our world today, here’s what we talked about:

• T Mobile may have suffered a material breach. If this bears out, it could be a leading tech story for the week. Vice has confirmed that at least some of the data in the leak appears genuine.
• Indian travel service ixigo is going public. The company’s IPO follows Zomato’s own domestic debut.
• And speaking of IPOs, the Tencent Music offering in Hong Kong could be on hold until next year.
• And a trio of American tech companies raised a raft of capital as last week concluded. Carta put together $500 million in a huge deal, as Chime raised $750 million. And as the week closed, Discord was reported to be hunting up a new round at a $15 billion price tag.

And stocks are set to open lower this morning. That’s the morning report. Equity is back on Wednesday.

U.S. auto regulators have opened a preliminary investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot advanced driver assistance system, citing 11 incidents in which vehicles crashed into parked first responder vehicles while the system was engaged.

The Tesla vehicles involved in the collisions were confirmed to have either have had Autopilot or a feature called Traffic Aware Cruise Control engaged, according to investigation documents posted on the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s website. Most of the incidents took place after dark and occurred despite “scene control measures” such as emergency vehicle lights, road cones, and an illuminated arrow board signaling drivers to change lanes.

“The investigation will assess the technologies and methods used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement with the dynamic driving task during Autopilot operation,” the document says.

The investigation covers around 765,000 Tesla vehicles that span all currently available models: Tesla Model Y, Model X, Model S, and Model 3. The eleven incidents or fires resulted in 17 injuries and one fatality. They occurred between January 2018 and July 2021.

This is not the first time Tesla’s Autopilot has fallen under the scrutiny of NHTSA, the country’s top vehicle safety regulator. In 2017, the agency investigated an incident that resulted in a fatal crash in 2016, though the EV maker was found to be at no-fault in the accident. NHSTA has investigated a further 25 crashes involving Tesla’s ADAS since, the Associated Press reported when it broke the story Monday.

In June, NHTSA issued an order requiring automakers to report crashes involving vehicles equipped with ADAS or Levels 3-5 of automated driving systems.

“NHTSA reminds the public that no commercially available motor vehicles today are capable of driving themselves,” an agency spokesperson told TechCrunch on Monday.

TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla, which has dissolved its media relations division, for comment and will update the story if the company responds.

We’re quick to celebrate the extraordinary victories of Israel’s multiplying cybersecurity unicorns, but every success story must start somewhere. The early days of any young startup decide how successful it can be, which is why we’ve developed a focused, value-add program to support cybersecurity founders during this most critical stage and maximize their potential in building market-leading companies.

However, the early stages of cybersecurity company-building are often shrouded in mystery, only coming into the light for fundraising and feature announcements. This leaves many entrepreneurs we speak with asking what exactly cybersecurity companies are achieving behind the curtain to earn these huge victories.

Though every company’s journey is unique, we can tease out trends and patterns to establish performance benchmarks for the cybersecurity ecosystem as a whole. To most entrepreneurs, however, the sensitive data required to understand the early success of a company is often unavailable or obscured. Moreover, the industry has yet to formally define proxies for growth and momentum beyond fundraising — leaving cybersecurity founders aiming for landmarks without guideposts.

Entrepreneurs require guideposts to aspire to when building large companies, and critical customer and revenue expectations can be best established by looking at what already successful cybersecurity companies have accomplished. Such metrics have been previously established for wider areas of technology, such as SaaS.

Leveraging our experience and resources, we collect this knowledge to keep our founders informed with the most up-to-date cybersecurity-specific metrics for long-term and large-scale growth. We hope that sharing these unique insights into early-stage cybersecurity companies — based on our own portfolio companies’ average performance — will help entrepreneurs in the wider Israeli ecosystem more confidently build their budgets and roadmaps with industry evidence.

Image Credits: YL Ventures

What should revenue look like over the first few years?

Though today’s investors are growing more aggressive, $500,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) is a traditional baseline requirement for a successful Series A from strong investors, and hitting that mark quickly should remain every entrepreneur’s goal. Hitting this target indicates product-market fit and customer willingness to commit to your solution.

Discounting variances in pricing, the best companies we’ve seen are able to reach the $500,000 benchmark in less than 18 months. From there, top-performing companies can expect to gain momentum and reach $1 million in ARR in 18 to 24 months. Such momentum is contingent on a number of factors for Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs, but growth is mainly reliant on how well founders connect with relevant customers outside the Israeli market.

Canada-based Shopistry wants to turn the concept of headless commerce, well, on its head. On Monday, the e-commerce startup announced $2 million in seed funding to continue developing its toolkit of products, integrations, services and managed infrastructure for brands to scale online.

Jaafer Haidar and Tariq Zabian started Shopistry in 2019. Haidar’s background is as a serial technology founder with exits and ventures in e-commerce and cloud software. He was working as a venture capitalist when he got the idea for Shopistry. Zabian is a former general manager at OLX, an online classified marketplace.

Shopistry enables customers to create personalized commerce experiences accessible to all. Haidar expects headless will become the dominant architecture over the next five years, though he isn’t too keen on calling it “headless.” He much prefers the term “modular.”

“It’s a modular system, we call it ‘headless without the headaches,’ where you grab the framework to manage APIs,” Haidar told TechCrunch. “After a company goes live, they can spend 50% of their budget just to keep the lights on. They use marketplaces like Shopify to do the tech, and we are doing the same thing, but providing way more optionality. We are not a monolithic system.”

Currently, the company offers five products:

• Shopistry Console: Brands turn on their optimal stack and change anytime without re-platforming. There is support for multiple e-commerce administrative tools like Shopify or Square, payment providers, analytics and marketing capabilities.
• Shopistry Cloud is a managed infrastructure spearheading performance, data management and orchestration across services.
• Shopistry Storefront and Mobile to manage web storefronts and mobile apps.
• Shopistry CMS, a data-driven, headless customer management system to create once and publish across channels.
• Shopistry Services, an offering to brands that need design and engineering help.

Investors in the seed round include Shoptalk founder Jonathan Weiner, Hatch Labs’ Amar Varma, Garage Capital, Mantella Venture Partners and Raiven Capital.

“At MVP we love companies that can simplify complexity to bring the proven innovations of large, technically sophisticated retailers to the masses of small to midsize retailers trying to compete with them,” said Duncan Hill, co-founder and general partner at Mantella Venture Partners, in a written statement. “Shopistry has the team and tech to be a major player in this next phase of the e-commerce evolution. This was easy to get excited about.”

Shopistry is already working with retailers like Honed and Oura Ring to manage their e-commerce presences without the cost, complexity or need for a big technology team.

Prior to going after the seed funding, Haidar and Zabian spent two years working with high growth brands to build out its infrastructure. Haidar intends to use the new capital to future that development as well as bring on sales and marketing staff.

Haidar was not able to provide growth metrics just yet. He did say the company was growing its customer base and expects to be able to share that growth next year. He is planning to add more flexibility and integrations to the back end of Shopistry’s platform and add support for other platforms.

“We are focusing next on the go-to-market perspective while we gear up for our big launch coming in the fourth quarter,” he added. “There is also a big component to ‘after the sale,’ and we want to create some amazing experiences and focus on back office operations. We want to be the easiest way to control and manage data while maintaining a storefront.”

Swiftarc Ventures announced its $10 million Swiftarc Beauty Fund to support female founders leading the next wave of beauty and wellness brands.

Swiftarc started in 2019 and this is its fourth fund, Sid Jawahar, founder and managing partner told TechCrunch.

“We are being socially conscious and deliberate in solving the funding issue for female founders and diverse founders,” he said. “We took a hard look around Black Lives Matter and other awakenings and made the decision to be deliberate in trying to right an industry wrong.”

At the same time, Swiftarc itself is matching this by aiming for its firm’s employee base to be 50% diverse by 2022, Jawahar added.

He feels the beauty industry is stuck in time, where 75% to 80% of sales are still made from wholesale. E-commerce and digitally native brands are just the tip of the iceberg, he said. What has changed is the emphasis on inclusive beauty, with buyers of diverse backgrounds becoming majority purchasers. In addition, it is now not just about the brand, but building a community in order to be successful, Jawahar said.

That’s why Swiftarc brought in Fabian Urquijo, president, whose background is in P&G and Revlon, to lead the firm’s beauty efforts.

“While at Revlon, we saw that independent brands that were digitally native could address unmet needs with personalization that the legacy brands can’t address,” Urquijo said. “Most of their growth is driven by that, and they end up being acquired by the big brands and continue to lead that growth.”

The fund will target categories including clean and sustainable beauty, science-backed beauty products, technology-enabled and community-driven beauty and gender-neutral and inclusive brands.

Jawahar anticipates funding five to seven companies so that Swiftarc can provide the right kind of expertise to the companies, but could increase that to 10. The firm already invested in Alleyoop, a makeup and skincare line for busy women.

The fund combines financing with mentorship, peer-to-peer networking opportunities and targeted training facilitated by an all-female Beauty Council that includes industry, investment and beauty startup executives providing unique and relevant perspectives to the women-led startups. The council committed to helping 100 to 200 female founders in their journey from key introductions to foundational expertise.

Swiftarc’s engagement director Leslie Wolfson is building the Beauty Council and said she “wanted to curate a group of strong women with diverse backgrounds, career experiences and willingness to mentor and share their experiences and knowledge with founders.”

California-based Baffle, a startup that aims to prevent data breaches by keeping data encrypted from production through processing, has raised $20 million in Series B funding.

Baffle was founded in 2015 to help thwart the increasing threats to enterprise assets in public and private clouds. Unlike many solutions that only encrypt data in-transit and at-rest, Baffle’s solution keeps data encrypted while it’s being processed by databases and applications through a “security mesh” that de-identifies sensitive data that it claims offers no performance impact to customers.

The startup says its goal is to make data breaches “irrelevant” by efficiently encrypting data wherever it may be, so that even if there is a security breach, the data will be unavailable and unusable by hackers.

“Most encryption is misapplied, and quite frankly, doesn’t do anything to protect your data,” the startup claims. “The protection measures that are most commonly used do nothing to protect you against modern hacks and breaches.”

Baffle supports all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and it’s currently used to protect more than 100 billion records in financial services, healthcare, retail, industrial IoT, and government, according to the startup. The company claims it stores records belonging to the top 5 global financial services companies and five of the top 25 global companies.

“Securing IT infrastructure—networks, devices, databases, lakes and warehouses—is never complete. Constant change makes it impossible to adopt a zero trust security posture without protecting the data itself,” said Ameesh Divatia, co-founder and CEO of Baffle.

The startup’s Series B funding round, which comes more than three years after it secured closed $6M in Series A financing, was led by new investor Celesta Capital with contributions from National Grid Partners, Lytical Ventures and Nepenthe Capital, and brings the startup’s total funding to date to $36.5 million.

Baffle, which says it has seen threefold revenue growth over the past year, tells TechCrunch that the funds will be used to help it grow to meet market demand and to invest further in product development. It also plans to double its headcount from 25 to 50 employees over the next 12 months.

“With this investment, we can meet market demand for data-centric cloud data protection that enables responsible digital information sharing and breaks the cycle of continuous data and privacy breaches,” Divatia added.

Read more:

• Opaque raises $9.5M seed to secure sensitive data in the cloud
• Google will let enterprises store their Google Workspace encryption keys
• AWS has acquired encrypted messaging service Wickr

If you injure your elbow, surgery can help. If you lose a leg, prostheses are available. But problems within the brain are more difficult to treat, and for stroke victims rehabilitation is largely left to the body’s own repair mechanisms. BrainQ aims to change that with a device that stimulates the damaged part of the brain and promotes self-repair, showing enough improvement in studies to warrant a Breakthrough Device certification from the FDA — and the company has just raised $40M to take it to market.

It should be said at the outset that doubting the efficacy of some brainwave-emitting miracle device is natural. And in fact when I spoke with BrainQ’s founder Yotam Drechsler, he reminded me of the last time we’d talked — back in 2017, at which time I “expressed strong skepticism.”

No hard feelings — the tech was largely notional then, he admitted — but since that time the team has continued its work, raised some money, and what was a promising if not well supported thesis then has turned into one backed by firsthand data and clinical outcomes. The resulting system could be the biggest improvement to stroke therapy in decades or more.

Strokes can result in various obvious impairments, such as grip strength or coordination, but of course the injury is not to the hand or leg itself, it is to the networks in the brain that govern those parts. But medical science has no method for directly rebuilding those networks — the brain must do so on its own, in its own time.

To aid this, regular physical therapy and brain health checkups, sometimes for years on end, are used to in essence make sure the brain is still working on it and that the parts of the body don’t themselves fall into disrepair.

The most interesting improvements to this process in recent years have added tech into the loop to provide immediate feedback, such as that one’s balance is skewed to one side, and providing stimuli that aim to counteract that. But ultimately it’s still targeted physical therapy.

Drechsler and BrainQ see the problem a little differently. It’s not simply an injury but a disturbance to the brain’s carefully cultivated homeostasis, one which it has no means to counteract. He compared a stroke not to an analogous injury but to a baby born prematurely and whose body is not up to the task of heating itself. What do you do in such a case? You don’t attempt to “fix” the body so it can operate at lower temperatures, or supercharge the heat output — you just put the kid in an incubator, and everything proceeds as it should.

BrainQ’s device does something similar, making the brain operate better by changing its local environment.

“We map the channels of healthy brains and non-healthy brains and compare them. Once we find these, we use a low-intensity magnetic field therapy to resonate in the brain and facilitate its endogenous recovery mechanisms,” explained Drechsler.

It’s been shown in other contexts that this type of stimulation can produce improved neuroplasticity — the capability of the central nervous system to reprogram itself. By narrowly targeting stroke-affected areas, BrainQ’s device promotes neuroplasticity in them, leading to expedited recovery.

But it’s not simply a matter of saying “the stroke affected the ventral half of the right occipital lobe, aim the magnets there.” The brain is a complicated system, and strokes affect networks, not just a given cubic centimeter. BrainQ has deployed machine learning and a large collection of data to better understand how to target those networks.

Without diving too deeply into how the brain operates, let it suffice to say that certain networks operate locally at very specific spectral signatures or frequencies as detected by EEG readings. The left hand and left foot may occupy the same region of the motor cortex, but the hand might operate at 22 Hz, while the foot operates at 24 Hz, for example.

“The question is, how do you find these signatures?” asked Drechsler. As it’s somewhat difficult to explain, I asked him to put it in his own words after we spoke:

The novelty of BrainQ’s investigational treatment lies in the data-driven method we have deployed in order to inform the ELF-EMF frequency parameters. In choosing these parameters, our aim is to select frequencies that characterize motor-related neural networks in the CNS, and are related to the disability a person experiences following a stroke or other neurological trauma. To achieve this, we have analyzed a large-scale amount of healthy and non-healthy individuals’ brainwaves (electrophysiology data). Our technology uses explanatory machine learning algorithms to observe the natural spectral characteristics and derive unique therapeutic insights. These are used by BrainQ’s technology to target the recovery of impaired networks.

The device they’ve created to administer the treatment is unusual. Because it’s a whole-brain magnetic field generator, it has a rather bulky cylindrical headpiece , but the rest of it fits into a sort of back brace and hip pack. That’s because, unlike the more common magnetic brain imaging tech, MRI, the fields and currents involved are extremely small.

Image Credits: BrainQ

“We use very, very low intensity, about the same level as normal brain activity,” said Drechsler. “It’s not about creating an action potential or a jump in activity, it’s about creating the right conditions for the recovery mechanisms.”

The results of this stimulation were borne out in a small (25 patients) but decisive study due to be reviewed and published soon (preprint abstract here). Patients given the BrainQ treatment in addition to normal therapy saw hugely improved recovery evaluations, which look at metrics like improvements to balance and strength. 92 percent saw major improvements over just therapy and 80 percent achieved what could be called recovery (though this term is inexact).

Generally speaking the therapy would last for about an hour at a time, during which the patient would do various physical exercises while wearing the device, and they would need to be repeated five days a week for two months or so. The headset feeds the patient’s own patterns into BrainQ’s cloud-based service, which does the crunching and matching necessary to produce a tailored treatment pattern. It’s all run via tablet app, which can be operated by a caregiver (such as an outpatient nurse) or by using a built-in telemedicine platform.

Drechsler said that this approach was poorly received early on, and not just by this reporter.

“In 2017, we started to set the ground for a cloud-connected therapeutic device that can treat the patient wherever she or he is,” he said. “Back then no one was willing to even talk about treating patients outside the controlled environment of the hospital. Then in 2020 COVID came and everything changed.”

He noted that during the pandemic, many of those recovering from a stroke who would normally visit the hospital for regular care were (and some remain) unable to do so. A home-based therapy with low risk and potentially great outcomes would be of enormous benefit for thousands and thousands of people currently recovering from a stroke. And importantly, he notes, it doesn’t shift resources away from existing treatment plans, just improves their outcomes. (“We don’t move anybody’s cheese.”)

Here is where you would normally read something along the lines of “but it maybe five years before the FDA approves it for insurance and use.” But BrainQ recently received Breakthrough Device certification, an expedited approval process that, since just the beginning of this year, also confers qualification for coverage under Medicare. This means that conceivably, BrainQ could be shipping devices very soon — though still a year or two out.

Its next step, very prudently, is a larger scale study, towards which the company intends to devote a large portion of its recent fundraise, $40M led by Hanaco Ventures, with Dexcel Pharma and Peregrine Ventures participating.”

“The reason why we raised all this money is we are on the verge of a unique study with 12 sites,” Drechsler said. While he could not yet name the hospitals or research organizations they partnered with, he said they were basically the cream of the stroke rehabilitation crop and “really we couldn’t aspire for better than getting all these top sites in the same study. There’s this excitement that maybe something new is coming — in stroke recovery there has been almost no progress in the last two or three decades, and physical therapy has been the standard for two hundred years.”

Without making any promises, he suggested that this line of inquiry could move medicine towards not just mitigating but reversing some disabilities, a feat the value of which can hardly be enumerated.

“I was looking over my pitch decks from 2016,” Drechsler mused. “Early on as a CEO, you have big dreams. We heard a lot of skepticism early on in the process, but I was proud to see that many of those dreams have materialized.”

Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Two housekeeping slash teasers …

Stay tuned this week for a series of articles on Nuro reported by investigative science and tech reporter Mark Harris with assistance from myself and our copy editorial team. This deep dive into Nuro is part of Extra Crunch’s flagship editorial offerings.

This so-called EC-1 series is designed to provide authoritative, deep analysis into a growth-stage company that not only offers a panoramic view of a specific business, but also teaches lessons learned from the veterans of these organizations, whether they be founders, sales leaders, product managers, software engineers, marketers or anyone else who contributed to the growth of a startup.

The goal, as EC-1 series editor Danny Crichton has written before, is to help TechCrunch readers understand the intricacies of building a company from as many angles as possible, while also getting situational intelligence on the best tech companies scaling up in the market today. The EC-1 takes its name from the Form S-1 filing that late-stage startups submit to the SEC as part of the IPO process.

Finally, I wasn’t able to attend Monterey Car Week this year (that’s me sighing deeply). Luckily, Tamara Warren was. Look out for her roundup of vehicles that stood out at this year’s event.

As always, you can 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.

Micromobbin’

The North American Rideshare and Scooter Association released its 2020 State of the Industry report, so I thought I’d share some of the findings that jumped out at me. Seeing as how 2020 will forever be known as the year of Covid, the report also quantifies the impact of the pandemic on shared micromobility and demonstrates the industry’s response.

An overview

In 2020, around 224 cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico had at least one bikeshare or e-scooter system and 72 had both. This is 22% fewer than in 2019. All 129 e-scooter systems are dockless and electric, while the 167 city bikeshare systems have a mix of docked, dockless, and hybrid systems.

Other stats:

• 44% of cities with bikeshare systems have fleets that include e-bikes.
• Larger cities tend to have more vehicles per system and more per capita.
• Vehicle densities and utilization rates were higher in larger cities.

Stickin’ it to the car

• 36% of shared micromobility trips replace a car trip
• North Americans gained almost 12.2 million hours of additional physical activity through shared micromobility, by creating new trips and replacing motorized trips.
• Shared micromobility trips offset approximately 29 million pounds of CO2 emissions by replacing auto trips.

Money, money, moneyyyy

A recent study conducted by Emory University found that e-scooter programs increased unplanned spending at quick service restaurants and food and beverage stores. The study found:
• $921 per scooter of additional spending during the 6-month study period, and a 0.6% increase in total sales
• Scooter systems employ about 5,000 people. That’s 1 person for every 30 scooters.

Operators top program costs were: Rebalancing and recharging; Vehicle maintenance and repair; Overhead costs (e.g. insurance, fees, etc.). Their revenues came mostly from: Sponsorships (28%); Per ride fees (26%); Fixed fees (18%); Subsidies (10%)

Representation skews towards $$$

Rider representation improved in 2020, however it still skews towards white men and women in higher economic brackets. People with HHI of $50,000 and up were over-represented. The most over-represented group made between $50,000 and $75,000.

People aged 25 to 44 were massively overrepresented, as were white people and men. Black, Latinos and women to be underrepresented but again, apparently it was worse in 2019.

On the workforce end of things, it looks like there’s at least some conversations about diversity happening.
• 71% of operators stated that diversity is part of every hiring conversation.
• 69% reported that women and people of color are represented at all levels of their organization.
• 57% reported that staff is representative of the populations being served.
• 55% reported that their staff have completed cultural competency or diversity training

Becoming a part of the public transit ecosystem

• 50% of riders reported that they use shared micromobility to connect to transit.
• 16% of all shared micromobility trips were for the purpose of connecting to transit.
• 71% of all docked bikeshare stations are within one block of another public transportation mode.

Back to our scheduled programming

Indian ridehailing service Ola invested a ton of money last year into an e-scooter factory, and now those labors are coming to fruition. Ola is set to launch its electric scooter on August 15th. It comes with some fancy features like reverse mode, 10 new colors (many of which are pastels) and smarter charging that is fully automated to charge without the need for card or cash.

While we’re in India, the moped-sharing giant Bounce also has some news. The company said it has begun replacing its fleet of 30,000 petrol scooters with electric scooters. It’s partnering with startup Chara, which makes ‘switched-reluctance motors,’ so that it can make its own scooters in-house.

Finally, micromobility company Skip filed a petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last week, so it’s time to sell off its assets and pay its debts. Skip’s creditors are scheduled to meet on September 8 to go through the $10 to $50 million worth of liabilities and $50 to $100 million worth of assets. Helbiz, which is going public via SPAC this year, acquired Skip late last year as part of its own global expansion strategy. This is the first time (but maybe not the last) that we see a major scooter company file for bankruptcy.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

The public filings they just keep on comin’ in 2021. The latest is Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing company.

The company initiated the confidential process of filing for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. That means we don’t have that data dump that the S-1 provides. We will have to wait.

The number of shares to be offered in the IPO and the price range have not yet been determined, the company said in a statement.

Turo is 11 years old now; it’s not really a startup any more. Its marketplace, which lets car owners post an ad to rent out their vehicle on its app and website, is available in more than 5,500 cities across three countries. Turo was in Germany after taking over Daimler AG’s car-sharing subsidiary Croove alongside an investment deal. Notably, we learned that the company is no longer in Germany.

Turo’s last big funding round was in July 2019 when investors put $250 million into the company. That Series E round pushed the company into unicorn status and “past the billion-dollar valuation mark.” CEO Andre Haddad said in a blog post. Turo followed that up with a $30 million extension round the following February, bringing its total funding to date to over $500 million.

Speaking of publicly traded companies …. Joby Aviation made its public debut, 12 years after JoeBen Bevirt founded the company at his ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains. The air taxi developer began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the ticker symbol “JOBY,” after completing a merger with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners. Aria Alamalhodaei interviewed Bevirt and Joby Executive Chairman Paul Sciarra about this moment and what’s coming next.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Ambri, a battery tech startup based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, raised $144 million in funding led by strategic investors Reliance New Energy Solar, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, Paulson & Co. Inc. Ambri’s largest shareholder, Bill Gates as well as new investors, Fortistar, Goehring & Rozencwajg Associates, Japan Energy Fund and others participated. The company said the money will be used to commercialize its technology and to build a domestic manufacturing facility.

Anchor Yacht Rentals, a Tampa, Florida startup that developed a platform to connect private yacht owners and licensed captains to riders, raised $2.5 million in seed financing led by Austin-based Silverton Partners. The company, founded in 2016, raised the capital to extend its presence across major U.S. and international travel markets.

ChargePoint made its second acquisition since going public in March, purchasing European electric fleet management company ViriCiti for €75 million ($88 million) in cash. The news comes just a few weeks after the EV charging network operator announced the purchase of European charging software company has·to·be.

Gopuff, the U.S. delivery app, acquired London-based on-demand grocery startup Dija, Sifted reported. The terms were not disclosed. Gopuff has made a couple of acquisitions over the past several months, including $115 million for fleet management startup rideOs and UK-based Fancy Delivery.

HopSkipRide raised $25 million in a Series C to help fund its growth and expand into 30 new markets over the next year and a half. The funding came from Energy Impact Partners, Keyframe Capital, FirstMark Capital and 1776 Ventures.

Jerry, the car ownership app, raised $75 million in a Series C round that values the company at $450 million. Te funding announcement comes just months after raising $28 million. Existing backer Goodwater Capital doubled down on its investment in Jerry, leading the “oversubscribed” round. Bow Capital, Kamerra, Highland Capital Partners and Park West Asset Management also participated in the financing, which brings Jerry’s total raised to $132 million since its 2017 inception.

Policy corner

Welcome back to policy corner.

I’m going to start this week’s column off with a little wet blanket reminder. The obvious news is that the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — the one that’s been in negotiations for months — passed. But, let’s not forget that it has passed the Senate and more work is required in the House before it can make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

That’s not to take away from the historic passage, which was, as the New York Times notes, “uncommonly bipartisan.” But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and progressive Democrats have said that they will not take up the bill unless and until both parts of Congress complete a budget reconciliation process that could earmark up to $3.5 trillion on a slew of domestic programs aimed at expanding the federal safety net, that would be funded in part by tax hikes on high-earners and corporations.

And the budget proposal? It has zero support from Republicans, suggesting a long and arduous road ahead for both the infrastructure bill and the national budget.

“What we’re doing here isn’t easy,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Wednesday. “We’ve labored for months and months to reach this point, and we have no illusions: maybe the hardest work is yet to come, but we are united in our desire to get it done.”

While the infrastructure bill did pass the Senate, it is very much a compromise, especially on the provisions related to transportation electrification. That’s why some House Democrats are eyeing the budget proposal as an alternative way to slip in some provisions that didn’t make it into the infrastructure bill. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), along with 27 other Democrats, sent a letter to Pelosi urging that the budget proposal include $85 billion for building out a national EV charging network. (The infrastructure bill earmarks $7.5 billion for EV charging.)

In other news, it looks like President Biden is contemplating setting a 2050 target for airlines to switch 100% to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), hand-in-hand with possible incentives to help the industry make the transition. Commercial aviation is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize because, with today’s battery technology and energy density limits, the amount of batteries needed to get a Boeing 737 off the ground and across the Atlantic would far exceed the weight limits of the aircraft.

That leaves zero-emissions jet fuels. Some current aircraft models can accept a 50/50 blend of SAF and conventional fuel, but new aircrafts will need to be developed that can accept 100% SAF. Given that fuel is one of the highest costs for airlines, industry will likely lobby for substantial government support before endorsing a zero-emission mandate, even one that is non-binding.

— Aria Alamalhodaei

Notable news and other tidbits

Welp, earnings dominated this week, but there was other news too. Let’s dive in.

Autonomous vehicles

Einride and Bridgestone partnered partnership that should be viewed as a data collaboration. Einride will collect new layers of safety and efficiency-related data from Bridgestone’s smart-sensing tires. Meanwhile, Bridgestone will use that data from Einride’s testing and operations to integrate its advanced mobility technologies into Einride’s onboard vehicle platforms.

Kiwibot, the robotic sidewalk delivery startup, partnered with food services and facilities management giant Sodexo to bring its robots to U.S. college campuses. Starting this month, students and faculty at New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University and Gonzaga University are expected to have the option to order meals via robots from Sodexo-serviced locations on campuses.

Motional, the autonomous vehicle company born out of a $4 billion joint venture with Aptiv and Hyundai, said it is expanding its presence in California by opening a new operations facility in Los Angeles to support testing on public roads, hiring more engineers and adding an office in Silicon Valley.

The investment into the area follows a hiring spree that has pushed Motional’s total headcount to more than 1,000 people, an expansion into Seoul and its announcement last December to launch fully driverless robotaxi services in major U.S. cities in 2023 using the Lyft ride-hailing network.

Starship Technologies, an autonomous delivery services company that, like Kiwibot, uses sidewalk robots, announced it will begin delivery service on four additional college campuses this fall, adding to the 20 campuses on which it already operates.

Earnings time!

Arrival, the UK-based electric vehicle company, still has no revenue yet to speak of and its earnings report reflects the expenses associated with bringing a new vehicle to market. Arrival reported an EBITDA loss of €29 million ($34 million). Its adjusted EBITDA loss was €35 million ($41 million) which widened from the first quarter’s loss of €27 million ($31 million).

Capex came to €65 million ($76 million), primarily due to the costs of staff working on product development and other costs related to factory equipment. The company anticipates spending between €175 million to €225 million ($205 million to $264 million) on capex in the remainder of the year, an increase caused by expenses from the Bicester, U.K. microfactory and planned openings of other factories in South Carolina and one-off tooling costs.

Notably, the company said it was on track to meet planned product launch dates, but much will depend on whether or not the company can fulfill orders and turn letters of intent into sales — especially a crucial van order with UPS, which could bring in upwards of $1 billion in revenue.

Hyzon Motors, the hydrogen-powered heavy-duty truck company, is another pre-revenue company that went public via a SPAC. The company reported a net loss for the second quarter of $9.4 million, including $3.5 million in R&D expenses. It had a negative adjusted EBITDA of $9.1 million. The company has $517 million in cash on hand, enough to reach free cash flow by 2024 without having to sell additional equity.

The company, which is banking on the $500 million injection of capital from the transaction and growing customer orders to take it to positive cash flow, said it is preparing to start its first customer trials in the United States.

Lordstown Motors reported a net loss of $108 million, a 13.7% improvement from the first quarter loss of $125 million. Its net losses are more than tenfold higher than the -$7.9 million it reported in the same period last year.

The company cut research and development spending by 17% from the previous quarter to $76.5 million and increased its capital expenditures to $121 million from $53 million in the first quarter. Lordstown also increased its capital expenditure guidance for the year, from $250 million to $275 million to a $375 million to $400 million range, a spike related to its need to prepay for equipment.

Executives at the beleaguered EV startup said they’re on track to begin production of its flagship electric truck Endurance, but only select customers will begin to receive vehicles early next year.

Luminar, the lidar company, reported $6.3 million in revenue, a 19% increase compared to the prior quarter. The company reported a net loss of $36.8 million up from the $25.4 million in same period last year.  The newly public company did raise its full-year 2021 revenue guidance to $30 million to $33 million versus prior guidance of $25 to $30 million. a quick scan of their second-quarter earnings shows a company trying to grow — as its expanding operating losses illustrate.

Vroom, the online car marketplace, reported a net loss of $65.8 million, which included $22.6 million in one-time, IPO-related costs, Automotive News reported. Vroom went public in June 2020. Vroom did report higher revenue and vehicles sales.

Electric vehicles

Elon Musk publicly complained via tweet that Renesas and Bosch, two of the world’s biggest auto-chip suppliers, are hurting the Tesla’s production, Bloomberg reported.

Polestar released pricing and other details on two new versions of its Polestar 2 electric vehicle, Car and Driver reported. A single-motor version will start at $47,200, and a dual-motor version will have a base price of $51,200, which is cheaper than  last year’s Launch Edition model. (I’m looking forward to trying these new variants out.)

Flight

Amazon’s $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Northern Kentucky opened this past week, marking the latest effort by the e-commerce giant to connect a network of 40 sites and control all aspects of delivery as demand for speed and convenience accelerates.

The Amazon Air Hub operations, located at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, will be the center of its U.S. cargo network. Amazon said the U.S. hub will eventually operate a dozen flights per day and process millions of packages every week.

Archer Aviation is seeking $1 billion in damages from Wisk Aero, according to court filings, escalating the ongoing legal battle between the two air taxi rivals.

Wisk “deployed a knowingly false extra-judicial smear campaign that projected stand-alone defamatory statements about Archer to the world,” the filing says. On this basis, Archer claims that this “smear campaign” has negatively impacted its ability to access capital and has impaired business relationships, resulting in damages “likely to exceed $1 billion.”

Misc. mobility

BlackBerry has partnered with Car IQ to bring a secure vehicle-based payment platform to the BlackBerry/AWS IVY ecosystem. The system helps create a “digital fingerprint” for the vehicle, according to the company and will connect to a bank’s payment network, validate, and pay for services such as fuel, tolls, parking, maintenance, along with other “wallet” capabilities.

Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and the Michigan Department of Transportation have partnered to provide grants to companies focused on mobility and electrification that are looking to deploy their technology in the state.

Grants are focused on “sustainable futures” aka electric vehicle adoption and charging infrastructure, “equitable futures,” which means affordable and reliable transportation options, and multimodal transportation. Check out the process here.

Rapido, a bike taxi aggregator in India, said on Monday it has raised $52 million in a new financing round as the six-year-old startup looks to find space in a category dominated by Ola and Uber in the South Asian market.

The six-year-old startup’s new funding — Series C — was financed by Shell Ventures, Yamaha, Kunal Shah of CRED, Amarjit Singh Batra of Spotify India, and Positive Moves Consulting. Existing investors Pawan Munjal of Hero Group, Westbridge, Nexus Venture Partners and Everblue Management also participated in the round, which brings its to-date raise to over $130 million.

Rapido offers its two-wheeler service in about 100 Indian cities. The startup says it has amassed over 15 million customers and 1.5 million driver-partners who it calls captains. In recent years, the startup has also expanded in three-wheeler space, which it says recorded a growth of 4X since last year in 26 cities where it is operational, and hyperlocal delivery.

In a statement, the startup said its platform, which was hit by the coronavirus pandemic that prompted India to enforce lockdown in several states, has already seen an 85% recovery. The startup attributed growth in part to the growing e-commerce and hyperlocal delivery opportunities in India.

“Even though our product and business model are lucrative and have the potential to churn out an exceptional revenue, this fundraising indicates more of the investors’ confidence in us than the need for capital,” said Aravind Sanka, co-founder of Rapido, in a statement.

He said the startup hopes to expand to serve 50 million customers in the next 18 months. The startup plans to also deploy capital to broaden its technology stack — it’s looking to make strategic investments — and hire more people

The growth of Rapido follows a shift in India’s mobility market, where Uber and Ola flooded more than a million cabs in the past decade. In urban cities, two-wheelers and three-wheelers have proven more effective because they can zip through much faster in traffic and are more affordable.

Both Ola and Uber have also expanded to two-wheeler and three-wheeler categories in recent years, inking partnerships with firms such as Vogo and Yulu. Ola has additionally expanded into manufacturing of electric vehicles. On Sunday, it launched its first electric scooter, called Ola S1, that is priced at 99,999 Indian rupees, or $1,350. The electric scooter offers a range of 121 kilometers (75 miles) on a complete charge.