Author: azeeadmin

When it comes to health issues like menopause, fertility, pregnancy, and even early parenthood, the data tells us that people typically turn to search engines and social media for advice to ask about symptoms or concerns they have. They tend not to go to a medical practitioner, in the first instance. The suggestion, therefore, is that there is plenty of room for startups to fill that gap This is effectively the verticalisation of the model first pioneered by startups like KRY, Babylon Health, and Ada Health.

Peppy, a B2B digital health platform addressing just these concerns, has now raised a £6.6M/$10M Series A funding round led by Felix Capital, with previous investors including Outward VC, Seedcamp, and Hambro Perks, also participating.

Peppy is a little like a ‘Babylon Health before you need Babylon Health’. The company says it provides expert-led support to individuals before they need to see a doctor.

Founded in London in 2018 by co-founders Evan Harris, Max Landry, and Mridula Pore, the startup address major life and family moments: menopause, fertility, pregnancy, and early parenthood. 

It offers its services to a corporate customer base, which then incorporates Peppy into its employee health programs, enabling it to acquire some large employers in the UK and grow – it says – by 20 percent month-on-month for the past 12-months. Customers include BNP Paribas, Santander, DFS, Wickes, NHS trusts, the University of Sheffield.

The startup is pushing at an open door: Women of menopausal age are the fastest-growing demographic in the UK, and most say their work is negatively impacted, but – and here’s the crucial bit, they’d rather not talk about it to their line manager. Peppy says this is one of their biggest selling points into companies, which can now address the problem and help employees back to work more easily.

Just as with other telemedicine products, there are features such as access experts via a secure mobile app, with instant messaging, group chat, video consultations, live events, evidence-based articles, videos and programs. Furthermore, users can join a community of people who are experiencing similar challenges.

Mridula Pore, Co-Founder of Peppy, said: “The pandemic has shown us that employers can’t just talk about supporting their employees’ health and wellbeing anymore, they have to take action. More and more leading businesses are turning to us to provide the support their people really need – not a one-size-fits all solution, but support that is trustworthy, personalized, and delivered by experts. We’re still at the surface of what is possible for Peppy.”

Susan Lin, Investor at Felix Capital, said: “Since Felix started, ‘aspiration for a better life’ has been a core theme and we believe in the strong opportunity for digital health and wellness solutions to improve this. Peppy is at the forefront of three huge market trends and we believe is positioned to become a category-defining brand. First, massive growth in targeted employee benefits, driven by increasing awareness of the importance these have in boosting morale, productivity, and retention. Second, demand for much more convenient ways to access healthcare, which has been further accelerated by COVID-19. And finally, a need for much more personalized solutions, especially in critical life stages such as menopause and early parenthood.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Pore expanded on the problem: “Today, people’s alternative is to go to their GP/MP. They may be lucky, have a GP who knows a lot about the issues to offer the support the patient needs. We know that a lot of women aren’t getting the support they need, they suffer, they struggle, they’re embarrassed to talk to their manager about what’s going on. They muddle through and they’re worried about being fired because for ‘women’s problems’. Some women quit. All the surveys suggest that people either switch their working arrangements, make different decisions or quit. It’s a big headache for employers, and we know the same thing happens for new parents.”

She added: “We’ve seen a real tidal change, especially in the last two years and I think COVID has massively accelerated companies putting menopause policy into line manager training. But none of those really address what the individual needs are because ultimately they still go to their GP and they’re back at square one. And so what we’re doing with Pepe is giving them access to our nurses and counselors on our programs, so they can get informed, educated on what their options are, medical and nonmedical, have the information they need to be able to go and seek out the right options for them, try them and they get that support over months, because we know that it will go up and down over time and you know everyone’s health journey evolves.”

She told me that the tech solution means Peppy allows people to connect to human experts “through the way that suits them in a personalized way and convenience so they can get child support, they can get video consultations, they’ll get content that’s tailored for them, they can join in live sessions on topics that are relevant for them. That can be anything from the basics of menopause, to your sex life. You can do it on your own time, in short bursts, or if you need it, for a 45-minute phone consultation.”

Online abuse, disinformation, fraud and other malicious content is growing and getting more complex to track. Today, a startup called ActiveFence, which has quietly built a tech platform to suss out threats as they are being formed and planned, to make it easier for trust and safety teams to combat them on platforms, is coming out of the shadows to announce significant funding on the back of a surge of large organizations using its services.

The startup, co-headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, has raised $100 million, funding that it will use to continue developing its tools and to continue expanding its customer base. To date, ActiveFence says that its customers include companies in social media, audio and video streaming, file sharing, gaming, marketplaces and other technologies — it has yet to disclose any specific names but says that its tools collectively cover “billions” of users. Governments and brands are two other categories that it is targeting as it continues to expand. It has been around since 2018 and is growing at around 100% annually.

The $100 million being announced today actually covers two rounds: its most recent Series B led by CRV and Highland Europe, as well as a Series A it never announced led by Grove Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Vintage Investment Partners, Resolute Ventures and other unnamed backers also participated. It’s not disclosing valuation but I understand it’s between $300 million and $400 million. (I’ll update this if we learn more.)

The increase presence of social media and online chatter on other platforms has put a strong spotlight on how those forums are used by bad actors to spread malicious content. ActiveFence’s particular approach is a set of algorithms that tap into innovations in AI (natural language processing) and to map relationships between conversations. It crawls all of the obvious, and less obvious and harder-to-reach parts of the internet to pick up on chatter that is typically where a lot of the malicious content and campaigns are born — some 3 million sources in all — before they become higher-profile issues.  It’s built both on the concept of big data analytics as well as understanding that the long tail of content online has a value if it can be tapped effectively.

“We take a fundamentally different approach to trust, safety and content moderation,” Noam Schwartz, the co-founder and CEO, said in an interview. “We are proactively searching the darkest corners of the web and looking for bad actors in order to understand the sources of malicious content. Our customers then know what’s coming. They don’t need to wait for the damage, or for internal research teams to identify the next scam or disinformation campaign. We work with some of the most important companies in the world, but even tiny, super niche platforms have risks.”

The insights that ActiveFence gathers are then packaged up in an API that its customers can then feed into whatever other systems they use to track or mitigate traffic on their own platforms.

ActiveFence is not the only company building technology to help platform operators, governments and brands to have a better picture of what is going on in the wider online world. Factmata has built algorithms to better understand and track sentiments online; Primer (which also recently raised a big round) also uses NLP to help its customers track online information, with its customers including government organizations that used its technology to track misinformation during election campaigns; Bolster (formerly called RedMarlin) is another. Some of the bigger platforms have also gotten more proactive in bringing tracking technology and talent in-house: Facebook acquired Bloomsbury AI several years ago for this purpose; Twitter has acquired Fabula (and is working on a bigger efforts like Birdwatch to build better tools), and earlier this year Discord picked up Sentropy, another online abuse tracker.

It may well be that ultimately there will exist multiple companies doing good work in this area, not unlike other corners of the world of security, which ideally need multiple efforts thrown at problems to crack them. In this particular case, the growth of the startup to date, and its effectiveness in identifying early warning signs, is one reason why investors have been interested in ActiveFence.

“We are pleased to support ActiveFence in this important mission” commented Izhar Armony, the lead investor from CRV, in a statement. “We believe they are ready for the next phase of growth and that they can maintain leadership in the dynamic and fast growing trust and safety market.”

“ActiveFence has emerged as a clear leader in the developing online trust and safety category. This round will help the company to accelerate the growth momentum we witnessed in the past few years,” said Dror Nahumi, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners, in a statement.

Online abuse, disinformation, fraud and other malicious content is growing and getting more complex to track. Today, a startup called ActiveFence, which has quietly built a tech platform to suss out threats as they are being formed and planned, to make it easier for trust and safety teams to combat them on platforms, is coming out of the shadows to announce significant funding on the back of a surge of large organizations using its services.

The startup, co-headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, has raised $100 million, funding that it will use to continue developing its tools and to continue expanding its customer base. To date, ActiveFence says that its customers include companies in social media, audio and video streaming, file sharing, gaming, marketplaces and other technologies — it has yet to disclose any specific names but says that its tools collectively cover “billions” of users. Governments and brands are two other categories that it is targeting as it continues to expand. It has been around since 2018 and is growing at around 100% annually.

The $100 million being announced today actually covers two rounds: its most recent Series B led by CRV and Highland Europe, as well as a Series A it never announced led by Grove Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Vintage Investment Partners, Resolute Ventures and other unnamed backers also participated. It’s not disclosing valuation but I understand it’s between $300 million and $400 million. (I’ll update this if we learn more.)

The increase presence of social media and online chatter on other platforms has put a strong spotlight on how those forums are used by bad actors to spread malicious content. ActiveFence’s particular approach is a set of algorithms that tap into innovations in AI (natural language processing) and to map relationships between conversations. It crawls all of the obvious, and less obvious and harder-to-reach parts of the internet to pick up on chatter that is typically where a lot of the malicious content and campaigns are born — some 3 million sources in all — before they become higher-profile issues.  It’s built both on the concept of big data analytics as well as understanding that the long tail of content online has a value if it can be tapped effectively.

“We take a fundamentally different approach to trust, safety and content moderation,” Noam Schwartz, the co-founder and CEO, said in an interview. “We are proactively searching the darkest corners of the web and looking for bad actors in order to understand the sources of malicious content. Our customers then know what’s coming. They don’t need to wait for the damage, or for internal research teams to identify the next scam or disinformation campaign. We work with some of the most important companies in the world, but even tiny, super niche platforms have risks.”

The insights that ActiveFence gathers are then packaged up in an API that its customers can then feed into whatever other systems they use to track or mitigate traffic on their own platforms.

ActiveFence is not the only company building technology to help platform operators, governments and brands to have a better picture of what is going on in the wider online world. Factmata has built algorithms to better understand and track sentiments online; Primer (which also recently raised a big round) also uses NLP to help its customers track online information, with its customers including government organizations that used its technology to track misinformation during election campaigns; Bolster (formerly called RedMarlin) is another. Some of the bigger platforms have also gotten more proactive in bringing tracking technology and talent in-house: Facebook acquired Bloomsbury AI several years ago for this purpose; Twitter has acquired Fabula (and is working on a bigger efforts like Birdwatch to build better tools), and earlier this year Discord picked up Sentropy, another online abuse tracker.

It may well be that ultimately there will exist multiple companies doing good work in this area, not unlike other corners of the world of security, which ideally need multiple efforts thrown at problems to crack them. In this particular case, the growth of the startup to date, and its effectiveness in identifying early warning signs, is one reason why investors have been interested in ActiveFence.

“We are pleased to support ActiveFence in this important mission” commented Izhar Armony, the lead investor from CRV, in a statement. “We believe they are ready for the next phase of growth and that they can maintain leadership in the dynamic and fast growing trust and safety market.”

“ActiveFence has emerged as a clear leader in the developing online trust and safety category. This round will help the company to accelerate the growth momentum we witnessed in the past few years,” said Dror Nahumi, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners, in a statement.

Shared electric micromobility company Lime announced a partnership to integrate its electric scooters, bikes and mopeds into the Moovit trip planning app. As of next week, Lime’s vehicles will be included as a travel option in tandem with public transit for either all or part of a multimodal journey on the Israeli app.

Nearby Lime vehicles will show up in Moovit in 117 cities across 20 countries, including the United States, South Africa, Australia and throughout Europe. Lime says this partnership is the largest micromobility integration within an app fully dedicated to mobility as a service (MaaS) to date based on the number of cities involved. It plans to add 40 other cities in the following months.

The partnership between Lime and Moovit, which is a subsidiary of Intel’s Mobileye, follows a trend in the transportation world that integrates public transit, ridesharing and micromobility into one optimized system. Uber, one of Lime’s lead investors, delivered a whitepaper this year laying out its plans to facilitate such a centralization of mobility modes. Some public transit agencies, like St. Louis Metro Transit, that have experienced a decline in ridership hope directing users to third-party apps that lay out different forms of mobility would eventually bring it back. Others might just see joining forces as a way to get commuters out of cars, giving them seamless options for traveling that last mile from home to the train station without contributing to carbon emissions.

“This partnership signifies that mobility companies recognize the need to collaborate together to offer riders more convenient modes of public and shared transportation as they return,” Nir Erez, Moovit co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Offering more alternative options that can easily get people to their destinations is a critical component of a MaaS platform, especially in some of the most congested cities in the world.”

Lime is touching on a moment with cities, no doubt in a way that will lead to more permit awards for the micromobility giant. The pandemic has caused many cities to embrace micromobility and draft recovery plans that highlight sustainable mobility.

“Moovit captures a market specifically focused on planning commutes and local travel, and helping users access micromobility as part of those journeys will hopefully reduce car travel and further encourage people to take public transit again,” Tiffani Gibson, senior manager of Lime’s corporate communications, told TechCrunch. “We want cities to view us as a sustainable partner that works in tandem with the broader transit ecosystem. We provide an additive service that eases and encourages connections to transit, especially in traditionally underserved areas. We want riders to return to transit in conjunction with our service and are looking to replace car trips, not transit trips.”

According to Moovit’s COVID-19 mobility report, public transit is back on the rise in big cities like New York, Paris and London, which is probably why Lime wants to tap into the market now. Last month, 41% of Lime’s scooter rides were taken during peak commuting hours, according to data from the company, which also says historical data has shown a significant amount of Lime rides connecting riders with public transit.

Lime is also integrated with Google Maps, one of the most downloaded MaaS apps in the world, but it wouldn’t say in how many cities Lime’s vehicles are integrated with the app. On Google Maps, users can choose to route their destination via car, public transit, walking or bike. Bikers are offered Lime’s vehicles as a transport option for the whole journey, whereas with Moovit, the point is to feature Lime vehicles for first- or last-mile solutions to mass transit.

With both Google Maps and Moovit, users can see in real-time where a Lime vehicle is nearby, how long it’ll take to walk there, an estimated trip cost and remaining battery percentage. To unlock the journey, users will be redirected to the Lime app after clicking on the logo.

Indian social media platform ShareChat said on Tuesday it has raised an additional $145 million and is now valued at nearly $3 billion, months after it secured $502 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion.

Temasek and Moore Strategic Ventures led the new tranche of investment while Mirae-Naver Asia Growth fund participated in the new financing round (Series F), the Bangalore-based startup said. TechCrunch reported earlier this month that six-year-old ShareChat was in talks to raise at around $2.8 billion valuation.

“This additional investment for Series F is a validation of our market leadership and a reflection of investor trust in our execution capabilities. We are immensely proud of what we have been able to achieve with Moj and ShareChat in the last 12 months,” said Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of video app Moj and ShareChat.

“We have been very fortunate to attract a bunch of very high quality names in our series F and the list just got longer with Temasek, MSV and Mirae-Naver joining hands with us.”

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Sachdeva said the short video app Moj, which the startup launched last year immediately after New Delhi banned TikTok, is the fastest growing product within the company and he expects it to be bigger that ShareChat one day.

ShareChat, which claims to have more than 160 million users, offers its social network app in 15 Indian languages and has a large following in small Indian cities and towns, or what venture capitalist Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures refers to as “India 2.”

Very few players in the Indian startup ecosystem have a reach to this segment of this population, which thanks to users from even smaller towns and villages — called “India 3” — getting online has expanded in recent years.

Moj, on the other hand, competes with a handful of players, including Times Internet’s MX TakaTak, as well as Glance’s Roposo and DailyHunt’s Josh — both of which received funding from Google late last year. The search giant was also in talks to invest in ShareChat late last year, TechCrunch reported earlier.

TechCrunch also reported earlier that Twitter had held talks to acquire majority stakes in ShareChat and expand the Moj app globally.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Freight forwarders often keep track of rates on spreadsheets they email to customers, but the pandemic has made that difficult because prices are constantly fluctuating. Freightify, a startup that refers to itself as the “Shopify for maritime freight,” provides white-label rate management and e-booking tools that freight forwarders can use to set up online stores, reducing the time they need to spend on administrative work.

The startup announced today it has raised $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding led by Nordic Eye Venture Capital, with participation from Tradeworks VC, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns and Blume Funders Fund. The round also included returning investor Vinod Kumar Talreja.

Freightify currently serves customers in 10 countries and plans to use part of its funding to expand into the United States and Europe. Its customers are freight forwarders who range in size from handling 250 shipments a year to more than 100,000.

The company was founded in 2016 by Raghavendran Viswanathan, its chief executive officer. Freightify started out as FreightBro, a freight marketplace, before its technology evolved into Freightify’s automated rate management system.

Freightify says the platform has handled more than $400 million in freight revenue for customers and corresponding gross merchandise volume of $2 billion.

Freightify can be integrated with freight forwarders’ existing transport management systems, which track the movement of cargo. Once freight forwarders set up an online store with Freightify, their customers use it to compare rates, ask for quotes, book online and track shipments. Freightify draws pricing data from the APIs of ocean carriers like Maersk, CMA-CGM and Evergreen or automates the entry of offline contract rates from carriers without APIs.

Viswanathan told TechCrunch that before the COVID-19 pandemic, freight rates were relatively static, so freight forwarders were able to share them with customers through spreadsheets. But the pandemic created a host of new challenges.

“The ocean freight transportation industry is going through a flux right now,” Viswanathan said. “The industry went into a downward spiral since the start of the pandemic. Freight rates have been hitting record numbers for four straight quarters,” with rates up 500% since the beginning of 2020.

Furthermore, other factors, like the Suez Canal blockage by the Ever Given and pandemic-related port delays, have made supply chains even less predictable.

Freightify solves some of these challenges by giving freight forwarders and their customers a live pricing platform like the ones used by travelers to compare airfares, showing real-time rates on a single screen.

“Freight forwarders are like the travel agents for the global trade,” Viswanathan said. “However, air travel is not as complicated as global trade. Supply chains require experts to manage cargo throughout the entire lifecycle and freight forwarders play a vital role in greasing the wheels.”

Freightify is working on a new product where its customers can share data with one another, making it easier to communicate across timezones while reducing the amount of emails they need to send. A closed group product pilot is expected to happen at the end of this year.

In a statement about the funding, Nordic Eye investment manager Ib Drachmann said it’s “exciting to follow a dynamic and ambitious organization that has great chances of making a huge digital impact in international freight forwarding.”

Business-to-business payments platform Nium announced Monday that it raised more than $200 million in Series D funding and saw its valuation rise above $1 billion.

The company, now Singapore-based but shifting to the Bay Area, touted the investment as making it “the first B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia.”

Riverwood Capital led the round, in which Temasek, Visa, Vertex Ventures, Atinum Capital, Beacon Venture Capital and Rocket Capital Investment participated, along with a group of angel investors like DoorDash’s Gokul Rajaram, FIS’ Vicky Bindra and Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi. Including the new funding, Nium has raised $300 million to date, Prajit Nanu, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

The B2B payments sector is already hot, yet underpenetrated, according to some experts. To give an idea just how hot, Nium was seeking $150 million for its Series D round, received commitments of $300 million from eager investors and settled on $200 million, Nanu said.

“This is our fourth or fifth fundraise, but we have never had this kind of interest before — we even had our term sheets in five days,” he added. “I believe this interest is because we’ve successfully managed to create a global platform that is heavily regulated, which gives us access to a lot of networks. This is an environment where payment is visible, and our core is powering frictionless commerce and enabling anyone to use our platform.”

Nium’s new round adds fuel to a fire shared by a number of companies all going after a global B2B payments market valued at $120 trillion annually: last week, Paystand raised $50 million in Series C funding to make B2B payments cashless, while Dwolla raised $21 million for its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments. In March, Higo brought in $3.3 million to do the same in Latin America, while Balance, developing a B2B payments platform that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods. raised $5.5 million in February.

Nium’s approach is to provide access to a global payment infrastructure, including card issuance, accounts receivable and payable, and banking-as-a-service through a single API. The company’s network enables customers to then send funds to more than 100 countries, pay out in more than 60 currencies, accept funds in seven currencies and issue cards in more than 40 countries, Nanu said. The company also boasts money transfer, card issuances and banking licenses in 11 jurisdictions.

Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founding partner and managing partner at Riverwood, said in an email that the combination of software — plus regulatory licenses — and operating a fintech infrastructure platform on behalf of neobanks and corporates is a global trend experiencing hyper-growth.

Riverwood followed Nium for many years, and its future vision was what got the firm interested in being a part of this round. Alvarez-Demalde said that “Nium has the incredible combination of a great market opportunity, a talented founder and team, and we believe the company is poised for global growth based on underlying secular technology trends like increasing real-time payment capabilities and the proliferation of cross border commerce.

“As a central payment infrastructure in one API, Nium is a catalyst that unlocks cross-border payments, local accounts and card issuance with a network of local market licenses, partners and banking relationships to facilitate moving money across the world,” he added. “Enterprises of all types are embedding financial services as part of their consumer experience, and Nium is a key global enabler of this trend.”

Nanu said the new funding enables the company to move to the United States, which represents 3% of Nium’s revenue. He wants to increase that to 20% over the next 18 months, as well as expand in Latin America. The investment also gives the company a 12- to 18-month runway for further M&A activity.  In June, Nium acquired virtual card issuance company Ixaris, and in July acquired Wirecard Forex India to expose it to India’s market. He also plans to expand the company’s payments network infrastructure, invest in product development and add to Nium’s 700-person headcount.

Nium already counts hundreds of enterprise companies as clients and plans to onboard thousands more in the next year. The company processes $8 billion in payments annually and has issued more than 30 million virtual cards since 2015. Meanwhile, revenue grew by over 280% year over year.

All of this growth puts the company on a trajectory for an initial public offering, Nanu said. He has already spoken to people who will help the company formally kick off that journey in the first quarter of 2022.

“Unlike other companies that raise money for new products, we aim to expand in the existing sets of what we do,” Nanu said. “The U.S. is a new market, but we have a good brand and will use the new round to provide a better experience to the customer.”

Tesla is pushing the launch of its electric Semi truck program to 2022 due to supply chain challenges and the limited availability of battery cells, the company said in its second-quarter earnings report Monday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned about battery supply constraints before and the effect it might have on the Tesla Semi, which was first unveiled as a prototype in November 2017. Back in January, Musk said the engineering work on the Tesla Semi had been completed and deliveries were expected to begin this year. He did add the caveat, at the time, that the availability of battery cells could limit the company’s ability to produce the Semi.

That warning was apparently warranted. From the shareholders’ letter posted today after the market closed:

We believe we remain on track to build our first Model Y vehicles in Berlin and Austin in 2021. The pace of the respective production ramps will be influenced by the successful introduction of many new product and manufacturing technologies, ongoing supply-chain-related challenges and regional permitting.

To better focus on these factories, and due to the limited availability of battery cells and global supply chain challenges, we have shifted the launch of the Semi truck program to 2022. We are also making progress on the industrialization of Cybertruck, which is currently planned for Austin production subsequent to Model Y.

While not mentioned on the call or in its earnings report, the delay follows the departure of Jerome Guillen, a critical executive at Tesla who was working on the development and eventual production of the Tesla Semi. Guillen’s resignation in June came just three months after he was moved from the president of automotive position, which included oversight of the Tesla Semi, to a role with less responsibility as head of heavy-duty trucking. Guillen had led Tesla’s entire automotive business from September 2018 until March 2021.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Cybertruck, which is supposed to go into production in late 2021, looks like it might be pushed into next year as well. Musk didn’t answer questions, but comments from Musk as well as Tesla VP of engineering Lars Moravy during the earnings call suggest that it could shift to 2022.

Cybertruck is currently in its alpha stages of prototyping, with the basic engineering and architecture of the vehicle completed. While the Model Y takes priority, the company is moving into a beta phase of the Cybertruck later this year, Moravy said.

“We’ll be looking to ramp that in production in Texas after Model Y is up and going,” he added.

Musk leaned in on how difficult the Cybertruck would be, perhaps as a way to cushion expectations for its arrival in 2021.

“Cybertruck ramp will be difficult because it is such a new architecture,” Musk said. “It’s going to be a great product; it might be our best product ever, but it does have a lot of fundamentally new design ideas.”

He went on to make the point that he has used as other vehicles have gone from prototype to volume production: Manufacturing is hard.

“At the risk of being repetitive, it’s actually easy to make prototypes or a handful of small-volume production, but anything produced at a high volume, which is really what’s relevant here, is it’s going to move as fast as the slowest of the rough order of magnitude of 10,000 unique parts and processes.”

Tesla’s primary source of revenue comes from the sale of its electric vehicles, but its latest quarterly earnings report showed growth in its energy storage and solar business.

The demand picture will get even sunnier for the division if the company can access enough chips for its energy storage products, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla on Monday reported $801 million in revenue from its energy generation and storage business — which includes three main products: solar, its Powerwall storage device for homes and businesses, and its utility storage unit Megapack — but that’s just a sliver of the nearly $12 billion in total revenue. Small as it is, the division is selling more energy storage and solar. Revenue from this division grew 62% from the previous quarter and more than 116% from the same quarter in 2020. Tesla doesn’t separate solar and energy storage revenue.

More importantly, the cost of revenue for its solar and energy storage business was $781 million, meaning that for the first time the total cost of producing and distributing these energy storage products was lower than the revenue it generated. That’s good news.

As one might expect, total deployments also rose. Tesla installed 1,274 megawatt-hours of energy storage in the second quarter of 2021, a 205% increase from the same period last year. Similarly, the amount of solar energy deployed in the second quarter of this year was 85 MWh, up 214% from Q2 2020. As a side note: Tesla’s total solar and energy storage deployments were essentially flat when comparing Q2 2019 and Q2 2020 numbers, likely due to the pandemic’s general halting of business.

The important nugget is revenue growth. In 2019, Tesla reported $369 million in revenue from solar and storage. Revenue was stagnant in Q2 2020, with $370 million from that business. This quarter was more than double what Tesla brought in during the same quarters of 2019 and 2020.

What changed? Besides COVID-19, Tesla points to several Megapack projects coming online and growing popularity in its combined solar and Powerwall product. (Tesla no longer allows customers to order Powerwall without a solar installation.) According to a configurator on Tesla’s website, one Megapack is about $1.2 million before taxes. In some states, Tesla says the earliest deliveries will be in 2023.

Tesla’s energy storage business is facing headwinds, however. Musk said demand for both the Megapack and the Powerwall both exceed supply, and a backlog is growing. The company is unable to meet that demand because of the global chip shortage, he said.

Tesla uses the same chips in its Powerwall as it does in its vehicles, and Musk said vehicles are the priority while supply is low.

Musk said in the long term, Tesla and other suppliers would need to produce a combined 1,000 to 2,000 gigawatt-hours per year in order to keep up with energy storage demands. Musk said the company has asked its cell suppliers to double their supply in 2022, a goal that Musk caveated would be dependent on supply chain issues. The company’s current strategy is to overshoot cell supply and route it outward to its energy storage products, but as in the case of chip shortages, vehicle production would be prioritized, according to Musk.

Battery cell plans

While much of the battery cell discussion focused on its 4680 cell that is in development, Musk also touched on Tesla’s intentions to power some of its products with cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Specifically, he said there’s a good chance that all stationary storage could move to iron-based batteries and away from nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) and nickel-cobalt-aluminum batteries.

“I think probably will see a shift, my guess is probably to two-thirds iron, one-third nickel,” Musk said of Tesla’s plans. “And this is actually good because there’s quite a bit of iron in the world, an insane amount of iron. But there’s much less nickel and there’s way less cobalt.”

The one-third of batteries that will remain nickel-based will be used for its longer-range electric vehicles. All of its other EVs would also move to LFP batteries, which is already the case in its vehicles assembled in China.

Tesla’s primary source of revenue comes from the sale of its electric vehicles, but its latest quarterly earnings report showed growth in its energy storage and solar business.

The demand picture will get even sunnier for the division if the company can access enough chips for its energy storage products, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla on Monday reported $801 million in revenue from its energy generation and storage business — which includes three main products: solar, its Powerwall storage device for homes and businesses, and its utility storage unit Megapack — but that’s just a sliver of the nearly $12 billion in total revenue. Small as it is, the division is selling more energy storage and solar. Revenue from this division grew 62% from the previous quarter and more than 116% from the same quarter in 2020. Tesla doesn’t separate solar and energy storage revenue.

More importantly, the cost of revenue for its solar and energy storage business was $781 million, meaning that for the first time the total cost of producing and distributing these energy storage products was lower than the revenue it generated. That’s good news.

As one might expect, total deployments also rose. Tesla installed 1,274 megawatt-hours of energy storage in the second quarter of 2021, a 205% increase from the same period last year. Similarly, the amount of solar energy deployed in the second quarter of this year was 85 MWh, up 214% from Q2 2020. As a side note: Tesla’s total solar and energy storage deployments were essentially flat when comparing Q2 2019 and Q2 2020 numbers, likely due to the pandemic’s general halting of business.

The important nugget is revenue growth. In 2019, Tesla reported $369 million in revenue from solar and storage. Revenue was stagnant in Q2 2020, with $370 million from that business. This quarter was more than double what Tesla brought in during the same quarters of 2019 and 2020.

What changed? Besides COVID-19, Tesla points to several Megapack projects coming online and growing popularity in its combined solar and Powerwall product. (Tesla no longer allows customers to order Powerwall without a solar installation.) According to a configurator on Tesla’s website, one Megapack is about $1.2 million before taxes. In some states, Tesla says the earliest deliveries will be in 2023.

Tesla’s energy storage business is facing headwinds, however. Musk said demand for both the Megapack and the Powerwall both exceed supply, and a backlog is growing. The company is unable to meet that demand because of the global chip shortage, he said.

Tesla uses the same chips in its Powerwall as it does in its vehicles, and Musk said vehicles are the priority while supply is low.

Musk said in the long term, Tesla and other suppliers would need to produce a combined 1,000 to 2,000 gigawatt-hours per year in order to keep up with energy storage demands. Musk said the company has asked its cell suppliers to double their supply in 2022, a goal that Musk caveated would be dependent on supply chain issues. The company’s current strategy is to overshoot cell supply and route it outward to its energy storage products, but as in the case of chip shortages, vehicle production would be prioritized, according to Musk.

Battery cell plans

While much of the battery cell discussion focused on its 4680 cell that is in development, Musk also touched on Tesla’s intentions to power some of its products with cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Specifically, he said there’s a good chance that all stationary storage could move to iron-based batteries and away from nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) and nickel-cobalt-aluminum batteries.

“I think probably will see a shift, my guess is probably to two-thirds iron, one-third nickel,” Musk said of Tesla’s plans. “And this is actually good because there’s quite a bit of iron in the world, an insane amount of iron. But there’s much less nickel and there’s way less cobalt.”

The one-third of batteries that will remain nickel-based will be used for its longer-range electric vehicles. All of its other EVs would also move to LFP batteries, which is already the case in its vehicles assembled in China.