Author: azeeadmin

Blue Origin successfully completed its first crewed launch Tuesday, sending four human passengers to space – including the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. The result of billions of dollars of investment, dozens of test launches and some petty squabbling amongst ultra-rich founders, the triumph of the New Shepard, along with that of Virgin Galactic earlier this month, undoubtably heralds the dawn of a new age of space tourism.

It was quite the media spectacle. The mission took place at Launch Site One, Blue Origin’s sprawling and secretive facility that sits around thirty miles north of the small town of Van Horn, Texas. Every hotel in Van Horn and nearby towns were sold out of rooms in the days leading to launch as spectators traveled in for the event; meanwhile, a huge gaggle of local, national and online outlets (including yours truly) swarmed the Press Site as early as 2:30 AM CST. Despite some premature calls for rain in the early hours of the morning, the skies stayed clear and things mostly kept to schedule.

The four-person crew – including Bezos, his brother, Mark, 18-year old student Oliver Daemon, and aviation pioneer and Mercury 13 veteran Wally Funk – emerged from the training center and caught a Rivian R1S electric SUV to the launch pad around 45 minutes prior to launch. (Bezos drove a Rivian R1T pickup to the landing site of the rocket after its last test, a nod to Amazon’s sizeable investment in the EV startup). The crew climbed the launch tower and took a brief respite in an adjacent shelter, before climbing into the capsule, dubbed RSS First Step.

There was a brief hold at T-15 minutes, leading to the launch running slightly behind schedule. New Shepard took at 8:11 CST. They passed the Kármán line (more on that later) at 8:15 AM; capsule separation followed, and the booster returned to the launch site autonomously and with a loud boom at 8:19 AM. The crewed capsule floated slowly to Earth via parachute, touching land at 8:22 AM for an eleven-minutes total flight time.

The flight was the result of fifteen tests of the reusable suborbital New Shepard rocket, including a rehearsal launch in April that included a dry run of flight preparations and a mock crew embarked (then disembarked before take-off) into the capsule. Blue Origin now joins rival Virgin Galactic in a very, very small group of commercial space companies to send private citizens to orbit.

Daemon was added to the crew after the anonymous auction winner, who bid $28 million for the seat, had to bow out due to a scheduling conflict. CNBC reported that Daemon’s father, CEO of the Dutch private equity firm Somerset Capital Partners, placed the second-highest bid.

The route to space

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, six years after he started ecommerce behemoth Amazon. The company has zeroed in on space tourism, and it sees this flight as the requisite proof of concept it needs to start flying customers. To that end, the New Shepard capsule has large, tourism-friendly windows – the largest in spaceflight history, according to the company. “These windows make up a third of the capsule, immersing you in the vastness of space and life-changing views of our blue planet,” it says on the Blue Origin website.

The launch is also the culmination of weeks of squabbling between Bezos and his billionaire spacefaring rival, Richard Branson, who was aboard his own flight to space 10 days earlier. But despite ostensibly beating Bezos to the punch, much of the fighting was over what actually counts as space – and whether VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered spaceplane, actually went there.

The kerfuffle is over what’s known as the Kármán line, an internationally recognized imaginary boundary of space that’s around 60 miles above Earth. VSS Unity flew to around 51.4 miles – above the boundary recognized by NASA. “From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin tweeted two days before the Virgin launch. The tweet also included a little infographic throwing further shade at on Virgin flights.

From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name. For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line. pic.twitter.com/QRoufBIrUJ

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 9, 2021

This is just the beginning for Blue Origin. Director of astronaut sales Ariane Cornell said at a pre-mission briefing on July 18 that she’s been “chatting with many of [Blue Origin’s] future customers who have signed for the subsequent flights.” She added that the company intends on launching two more flights this year, with CEO Bob Smith estimating that a second crewed New Shepard flight could take place in September or October.

What does this mean for the rest of us (as in, those that don’t have a couple extra million floating around in our bank accounts)? While the so-called billionaire space race is a petty squabble, both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic’s respective launches are the likely heralds of a new age of space travel for consumers and scientists alike. It will be limited to the wealthy at first, but as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm argues, costs will go down and more humans will go to space – including scientists and researchers, maybe even me or you.

In case you missed it, you can catch the entire launch on Blue Origin’s archived livestream here:

As its name suggests, venture firm Pillar VC is focused on building “pillar” companies in Boston and across the Northeast.

The Boston-based seed-stage firm closed a raise of $192 million of capital that was split into two funds, $169 million for Pillar III and $23 million for Pillar Select. More than 25 investors are backing the new fund, including portfolio founders.

Jamie Goldstein, Sarah Hodges and Russ Wilcox are Pillar VC’s three partners, and all three lead investments for Pillar. The trio all have backgrounds as entrepreneurs: Goldstein, who has spent the past two decades in VC, co-founded speech recognition company PureSpeech, which was acquired by Voice Control Systems; Hodges was at online learning company Pluralsight; and Wilcox was CEO of electronic paper company E Ink, which he sold in 2009.

Pillar typically invests in a range of enterprise and consumer startups and aims to target Pillar III at startups focused on biology, enterprise SaaS, AI/ML, crypto, fintech, hardware, manufacturing and logistics. The firm will make pre-seed investments of $50,000 to $500,000 and seed-round investments of $2 million to $6 million.

One of the unique aspects of the firm is that it will buy common stock so that it will be aligned with founders and take on the same risks, Goldstein told TechCrunch.

The firm, founded in 2016, already has 50 portfolio companies from its first two funds — Pillar I, which raised $57 million, and Pillar $100 million. These include cryptocurrency company Circle, which announced a SPAC earlier this month, 3D printing company Desktop Metal that went public, also via SPAC, last year, and PillPack, which was bought by Amazon in 2018.

“Pillar is an experiment, answering the question of ‘what would happen if unicorn CEOs came in and helped bootstrap the next generation’,” Wilcox said. “The experience is working, and Pillar does what VCs ought to do, which is back first-of-its-kind ideas.”

In addition to leading investments, Hodges leads the Pillar VC platform for the firm’s portfolio companies. Many of the portfolio companies are spinouts from universities, and need help turning that technology into a company. Pillar provides guidance to recruit a CEO or partner on the business side, leadership development, recruit talent and makes introductions to potential customers.

Pillar also intends to invest a third of the new fund into that biology category, specifically looking at the convergence of life science and technology, Wilcox said.

In its second fund, the firm started Petri, a pre-seed bio accelerator focused on biotech, and brought in founders using computation and engineering to develop technologies around the areas of agriculture, genetics, cell and gene therapies, medical data and drug discovery. The third fund will continue to support the accelerator through both pre-seed and seed investments.

The first investments from Pillar III are being finalized, but Hodges expects to infuse capital into another 50 companies.

“We are super bullish on Boston,” she added. “So many companies here are growing to be household names, and an exciting energy is coming out.”

 

Fabric8Labs this morning announced that it has raised $19.3 million. The Series A was led by Intel Capital and features Lam Capital, TDK Ventures, SE Ventures, imec.xpand, Stanley Ventures and Mark Cuban. It follows $4 million in seed funding raised in mid-2018.

The San Diego-based startup specializes in metal 3D printing. It’s a hot category, of late, as evidenced by Desktop Metal and Markforged’s decisions to go public via SPAC over the past two years. Fabric8Labs says lower cost and less energy consumption are among the benefits to its process.

“Our process is inherently different and does not utilize powder nor thermal processes. Instead, it is based on electrochemical deposition, which operates at room temperature, has a significantly lower power demand, and utilizes an aqueous (water-based) solution made from low-cost metal salts,” CEO Jeff Herman tells TechCrunch. “In combination, the commodity priced raw materials and power-efficient process enable a step change in reducing the total cost of ownership and cost per-part.”

The company says the funding will go toward doubling its headcount before the end of the year, increase development of its existing technology and showcase its ability to print high-resolution copper pieces. The company plans to bring the technology to market, but notes that goals of hitting a general market will be a multiyear process.

Scalability is always one of the biggest question marks around any kind of additive manufacturing. Herman says 3D printing for manufacturing is firmly in Fabric8Labs’ sights.

“Our technology is extremely scalable,” the executive says. “The vision we share with our partners is to deploy our technology at a massive scale in the factories of the future, with process capabilities and economics uniquely positioned to tackle high-volume manufacturing. A Fabric8Labs-enabled factory could easily consist of 50+ automated systems sharing large feedstock reservoirs, similar to other large-scale electrochemical processes in operation today.”

Commercial real estate has been slow to embrace technology; though it has an addressable financing market of more than $40 billion, putting together a deal is still mostly manual, paper-heavy and complicated.

New York-based Lev is taking on this problem by automating workflows online and gathering hundreds of millions of data points into machine learning software to ensure financing accuracy. To do this, the commercial real estate financing transaction platform raised $30 million to give it a $130 million valuation just two years into its inception.

The latest financing comes four months after the company raised $10 million in seed funding led by NFX. Greenspring led the latest round, with participation from First American Title. Existing investors NFX, Canaan Partners, JLL Spark, Animo Ventures and Ludlow Ventures also joined in to give Lev total investments of more than $34 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Lev founder and CEO Yaakov Zar previously co-founded Boston-based Dispatch, which built tools for home services businesses. It was when he and his wife went through the homebuying process — and their mortgage fell through — that Zar decided to look at real estate financing.

He channeled his frustration into becoming a licensed mortgage loan originator. After relocating to New York, Zar was helping a friend at a nonprofit organization refinance their building and got a firsthand look at what he said was a fragmented commercial real estate mortgage industry.

Companies like Blend are addressing the problem of real estate lending, Zar told TechCrunch, but very few are focusing on commercial real estate, where lending is sensitive to interest rates and total amortization. In addition, property owners have a burden of refinancing every five to 10 years.

“Legacy businesses like JLL, which is an investor, Cushman Wakefield and CBRE work on lending, but they are much more ‘relationship focused’ than tech focused,” Zar said. “We think that it is a necessary part because the deals are so large and complex that you need a relationship for them, but transactions less than $1 billion are pretty straightforward. On experience and product, no one is close to us.”

Initially, Zar and his team wanted to build the “Rocket Mortgage of commercial real estate lending,” but found that to be difficult because real estate brokers are putting together their own pitch books for lenders. Instead, Lev is building a technology platform of more than 5,000 lenders with information on what projects they like to finance. It then analyzes a customer’s portfolio and connects them in minutes with the right lender, taking 1% of the loan amount for each transaction as payment. Lev is also working to be able to close deals online.

Zar wasn’t looking for funding when he was approached by investors, but said he was introduced to some people who liked the company’s growth and trajectory and decided to accept the funding offer.

He intends to use the new funding on product development, with the aim of giving a term sheet in seconds and closing a loan in seven days. Right now it can take a week or two to get the term sheet and 45 to 90 days to close a loan.

The company has about 40 employees currently in its New York headquarters, Miami R&D center, Los Angeles outpost and remotely. Continued investments will be made to expand the team.

Lev grew 10 times in volume in the past year, closing approximately $100 million of loans in 2020. Zar expects to close over $1 billion in 2021.

“Customers come back to us repeatedly, and there are a ton of referrals,” Zar said. “We want to be the platform on which capital market transactions are processed. You need an advantage to network and find great deals. I don’t want to mess with that, but when you find it, bring it to us, we will close it and provide the asset management with the best option to close online and manage the deal from a single platform.”

Meanwhile, Pete Flint, general partner at NFX, told TechCrunch that he got to know the Lev team over the last 18 months, checking in on the company during various stages of the global pandemic, and was impressed at how the company navigated it.

As co-founder of Trulia, he saw firsthand the problems in the real estate industry over search and discovery, but as that problem was being solved, the focus shifted to financing. NFX is also an investor in Tomo and Ribbon, which both focus on residential financing.

Wanting to see what opportunities were on the commercial real estate side, Flint heard Lev’s name come up more and more among brokers and industry insiders.

“As we got to know the Lev team, we recognized that they were the best team out there to solve this problem,” Flint said. “We are also among an amazing group of people complementing the round. The folks that are deep industry insiders will put a helpful lens on strategy and business development opportunities.”

 

In May, Path Robotics announced a $56 million Series B. It was a sizable raise, as far as robotics rounds go. But the Columbus, Ohio-based startup is already back for more, raising a “pre-emptive” Series C a mere two and a half months later.

And it’s a biggie. The firm has raised $100 million, led by Tiger Global and featuring participation from Silicon Valley Bank, an existing investor. The deal brings the robotic welding firm’s total funding to $171 million.

Path cites a longstanding shortage of skilled welders as a primary driver in interest around its tech. The problem dates back before the global pandemic (though that’s likely only exacerbated the issue, as it has with so many other labor issues). Once again, it notes a study by the American Welding Society that says the U.S. alone will experience a shortage in the welding workface of around 400,000 by 2024.

From the sound of it, the company is already looking beyond welding. After all, construction is a huge business, with massive opportunities for the right robotics organization. And, of course, having an infusion of $100 million certainly doesn’t hurt your growth plans.

“Most robots merely repeat what they are told, with no ability to improve themselves. The future of manufacturing hinges on highly capable, flexible robotics,” CEO Andrew Lonsberry said in a statement. “Robots that can truly see and learn.”

What, precisely, those future plans are, the company doesn’t say, but it plans to build them atop of its imaging and AI, presumably to build a sort of modular ecosystem for the construction robotics category.

Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder hints at those plans in a statement. “Path’s innovative approach to computer vision and proprietary AI software allows robots to sense, understand and adapt to the challenges of each unique welding project. We believe this breakthrough technology can be adopted for many other applications and products beyond just welding, to serve their customers holistically.”

Electric fat tire bike manufacturer Rad Power Bikes has unveiled the latest model of its flagship RadRover, and at $1,999, it appears to be cheaper than its predecessor, which goes for $1,699. The updates on the RadRover 6 Plus are emblematic of the company’s mission to enhance rider experience, especially for those who don’t identify as bike riders but are looking for a more eco-friendly way to travel.

“We develop powerful, reliable bikes, bikes that are confidence-inspiring and easy to use,” Redwood Stephens, chief product officer of Rad Power Bikes, told TechCrunch. “We’ve completely redesigned the system to have a new user interface, big buttons, big text illuminated. The power button is in Rad orange, so when you walk up to the bike it says, ‘I’m the power button!’ to you. You don’t even have to tell somebody how to turn on the bike. The same with the power assist levels. You’ve got big up and down arrows which are super easy to use.”

Stephens said the company’s goal is to get people out of cars. Rad Power’s main customers aren’t urban bikers, and at 73 pounds a bike, it’s not hard to see why – Try lugging that up your third floor walkup. Rather, they’re people over 50 in suburban or rural areas who want another travel option besides their four-wheeled vehicle and would definitely benefit from letters symbols on their e-bike that are as large as those on their cell phones, according to data collected by the company.

In February, Rad Power Bikes raised $150 million from investors like Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global Fund and Fidelity Management & Research Company. It used the funds, one of the largest of a U.S. electric bike startup, to scale globally, expanding beyond the $100 million in sales it generated in 2019.

Now, with over 350,000 bikes on the roads, Rad Power Bikes is settling into its direct-to-consumer approach with a thoughtful strategy, one that integrates everything from the design and robustness of the vehicle to the price point to the delivery and packaging.

“So in a nutshell it’s about reducing friction of the user experience throughout the whole lifetime of the product,” said Stephens. “It starts with the information that we have on our website to the box arriving with your bike in it and a QR code on a box that says, ‘Here’s the link to the unpackaging video,’ and then thinking about how to make that as smooth as possible for the end user.”

Stephens says the company is so concerned with a smooth customer experience, right down to how you take the bike out of its box, that Rad Power’s packaging and designing engineers work right alongside the bike designers so that the direct-to-consumer experience is considered throughout the design process. In other words, nothing is an afterthought.

In North America, customers who don’t want to unbox the bike themselves can opt for a white glove delivery service, complete with bike assembly.

What’s new with the RadRover 6 Plus?

Rad Power’s newest model is the first of its kind to feature hydraulic brakes and ceramic brakepads, which means riders will need to apply less pressure to slow down or stop, and they can expect brakepads to have a longer lifespan and require less maintenance. There’s also been some updates to the battery, which was designed in-house and lives directly in the frame of the bike, which not only looks kind of cool but it’s also easy to remove for indoor charging.

The frame itself has been re-engineered to accommodate shorter people, and the center of gravity has been lowered, which the company says should improve handling. The geared hub motor has 750 wattage of power, which is the same as the RadRover 5, but the company says the 6 Plus can handle hills 25% faster.

The suspension has also changed, but perhaps not for the better. The last model had 80 mm of travel, and the 6 Plus has 60 mm, which might mean there’s less space for the wheel to move before bottoming out, but according to the vehicle specs, the spring preload can be adjusted to suit various rider weights and terrain.

Finally, like the last model, this one comes with front, rear and brake lights, but it has the added benefit of activating the lights when the bike turns on and a new fender-mounted tail light.

Sounds great. Why is it so cheap?

Honestly, this seems like a steal. Where some e-bikes go for a cool $9,000, this one is surprisingly affordable at $1,999. Stephens says he doesn’t always know why other manufacturers are as expensive as they are.

“Our batteries use state-of-the-art Panasonic or Samsung cells, which are the same providers for the electric car industry, and so our packs are bigger,” he said. “Our motors and speed controllers are top notch, and our bikes are very reliable in the industry. Our motors last a long time. We see many of our riders with over 10,000 miles on their bike and still going.”

Stephens speculates that the biggest differentiator between Rad Power and many other e-bike providers is the supply chain. Rad Power designs its bikes from the ground up, so it doesn’t buy off-the-shelf products, like motors, displays and batteries, from a company like Bosch.

“There are less middlemen, less people in the manufacturing supply chain for us marking up systems,” he said. “And because we’re direct-to-consumer, there’s no markup from the retail shop to the consumer.”

Rad Power has manufacturing locations in China, Taiwan and Thailand that make the components the company designs and sends them at a very large scale, which also helps to keep the price down.

The company has four retail stores in Seattle, San Diego, Vancouver and Europe where it also sells its bikes, and it has also set up a partner network with local bike shops that are certified to work on its bikes and even assemble them from the box at customers’ homes. Stephens said the company is on track to have 75% of its U.S. customers have rad service available to them this year.

Founded in 2014 as an in-person rowing studio, CityRow was relatively early to adopt the at-home connected model. The New York-based company launched a digital platform in 2018, two years before the pandemic completely transformed the way many of us work out. Of course, things have been trending that way a while, but 2020 accelerated home fitness in ways few thought possible.

CityRow says it experienced a 375% revenue growth last year, largely on the strength of rowing machine sales and platform subscriptions. Today, it’s announcing that it has raised a $12 million Series A, led by JW Asset Management, with help from Sol Global and K2. The company says it has a number of plans for the money, but first and foremost is the addition of livestreaming classes to its current on-demand content selection.

“All of this capital is really about us hyper growing the company in the ways we know our consumers want us to grow,” founder and CEO Helaine Knapp tells TechCrunch. “First up is launching live classes, and we just signed a lease. We’re moving into a space in Midtown (Manhattan), to be able to launch these live classes, as soon as this fall. That’s a massive undertaking that we’ve been excited about launching for some time.”

The studio is an upgrade for CityRow, which has thus far recorded its content at one of its corporate locations. Knapp says the company doubled its headcount in the past year (currently at 14 full-time corporate employees) and is on track to double that in the next year.

CityRow offers a pair of connected Rowers, the Go Classic and the recently launched Go Max, which retail for $1,295 and $2195, respectively. They work with the company’s mobile app, which also offers off-rower exercise courses. It currently operates 11 locations — two corporate-owned and nine franchises. The company says it has sold 64 franchises in all, with plans to launch 12 in the next year.

Obviously some of those plans were paused during the pandemic.

“It’s still early days, in terms of comeback,” says Knapp. “But I’m very proud of how our franchisees weathered the storm, with a lot of them being very new studios. And I think that’s a testament to the power of the brand and the community with the franchises.”

Knapp points out that everyone who belongs to one of the locations also gets free access to CityRow’s app, which may have incentivized customers to maintain their membership during closures.

“Digital fitness was already growing like crazy before the pandemic,” explains Knapp. “And it just accelerated us, if I had to guess, a couple of years faster. Digital fitness is still only a fraction of the market, but in-person is still the majority by a landslide”

Ensuring food safety compliance can be challenging at one restaurant, let alone across thousands of restaurants. Zenput has developed technology aimed at making sure operating procedures are quickly adapted so that businesses maintain quality.

The San Francisco-based operations execution company raised $27 million in Series C financing, led by Golub Capital, to continue developing its application to automate operation procedures like tracking food safety, public health protocols and changing market conditions.

Restaurants, convenience stores and grocery chain customers can use Zenput to update all of their locations — at the same time — with new processes, promotional campaigns and key initiatives while also gathering data and insights from those locations to find opportunities for improvement.

Joining Golub in the round were existing investors, including Jackson Square Ventures, MHS Capital and Goldcrest Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to more than $47 million, co-founder and CEO Vladik Rikhter told TechCrunch.

Greg Gretsch, founding partner and managing director at Jackson Square Ventures, led Zenput’s Series A round in 2016 and had met Rikhter a year prior. At the time, Rikhter was in the early stages of developing what Gretsch called an organization task manager. While he didn’t invest then, he kept in touch with Rikhter and saw “how much of a grinder he was” in expanding the platform.

“When he sees a problem, he works and works to solve it,” Gretsch said. “Whenever you have a multilocation business, you have a remote management problem. You’re trying to manage everything so your weakest link can perform as best as the best link, but you need a platform to manage that so that you can hold stores accountable to improve the end product.”

Front-line workers use Zenput’s mobile app for onboarding at the beginning of the day and to track safety compliance and fresh food checks, something Rikhter said was historically challenging once a business had thousands of locations. The app can also alert when food has been left out too long to assist in lowering food waste rates.

Since its founding in 2012, Zenput is currently used by customers like Chipotle, Domino’s, P.F. Chang’s, Five Guys, Smart & Final and 7-Eleven in over 60,000 locations across more than 100 countries.

The Series C round comes as the company saw 100% revenue growth over the past year. At the same time, product usage more than doubled at stores, and to date, 1.5 billion questions were answered through Zenput, a figure Rikhter expects to double over the next 12 months as locations aim to find ways to do more things remotely.

“The pandemic inadvertently helped us,” he added. “Initially, it was rough, but then a lot of the brands we dealt with needed to expedite technology and saw an opportunity to invest in our technology. We have more products coming because there is more that can be done to make sure every meal is a safe meal.”

Much of the new funding will go toward building those new products and capabilities and into marketing to expand the customer base. The company recently launched an expansion of its Zenput for Franchisors tool and updates to its food prep labeling and temperature monitoring functions.

Rikhter also plans to double Zenput’s employees over the 16 to 18 months, especially in the product engineering and marketing areas.

All of that is to be ready for customer demand as restaurants, convenience stores and grocery chains do more to change up the way they do business in the future.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to show up at a restaurant and see changes made daily on protocols, which will drive a lot more of the journey than before,” Rikhter said. “We see more operators flexing muscles they didn’t know they had, as it relates to promotions and products, so they can grow faster and run totally different operational features and offer more options for customers.”

 

MIT CSAIL spinout Inkbit this week announced that it has raised $30 million. The Series B, led by Phoenix Venture Partners LLC, brings the firm’s total funding up to $45 million. PVP joins existing partners like industrial 3D printing giant Stratasys, DSM Venturing, Ocado, 3M, IMA and Saint-Gobain.

Inkbit was founded in 2017, building on technology developed with a financial assist from DARPA. The company currently holds the exclusive licensing rights to that technology. Its primary differentiator from the slew of existing 3D printers is a vision and AI system designed to identify and correct mistakes during the printing process.

Mistakes can be quite frequent — and costly — in additive manufacturing. Inkbit’s technology uses imaging to scan each printed layer, compare it against the original plan and then adjust accordingly to correct errors on the fly. The latest round of funding follows the February release of the company’s Vista printer, which builds on Inkbit’s Vision-Controlled Jetting (VCJ) closed-loop feedback technology.

“Inkbit is currently experiencing significant growth and we are excited to have the opportunity to continue to build our talented team and scale the company to meet customer demand,” co-founder and CEO Davide Marini said in a statement. “The opportunities for additive manufacturing are growing as adoption of 3D printing for full-scale production increases. We look forward to using our raised capital to continue evolving and innovating within this dynamic industry.”

The round will be used to expand the sales reach of its new printer, both in the U.S. and into additional markets, including Asia and Europe/Middle East/Africa.

Electric scooter operator Superpedestrian has announced its acquisition of Navmatic, a startup that helps micromobility operators locate vehicles and correct their movements in real time.

The companies did not reveal the details of the buy, which was finalized last month, but those close to the deal say the number is not far off from Navmatic’s last funding round, which was $4 million raised in seed funding last June. 

The Navmatic purchase means Superpedestrian can apply the startup’s Super Fusion technology to enhance its vehicle safety systems. Pedestrian Defense, as the new system is called, can detect unsafe riding behaviors – like riding the wrong way down a one-way, aggressively swerving, sidewalk riding or repeated hard braking – and either notify the rider or correct the rider’s behavior in real time by slowing or stopping the scooter. Riders receive a safety rating at the end of the ride that is used to deliver customized safety training, to incentivize good behavior via discounts or to blacklist chronically unsafe riders.

As more stories surface about scooter-related accidents, picking on the shiny, new tech amid the commonplace majority of car-related road collisions, Spin and Voi have also tacked on additional tech meant to keep riders in line and protect pedestrians. Rather than focus on positioning software like Navmatic’s, they’ve turned to computer vision startups Drover AI and Luna. Given an unobstructed camera, Spin and Voi vehicles can, unlike Superpedestrian’s, actually detect pedestrians with some degree of accuracy. But where they fall short is actually stopping the rider or correcting behavior in the moment.

“The current challenge is how to protect the more vulnerable people around a scooter, meaning pedestrians, people with disabilities, a man or a woman with a stroller,” Assaf Biderman, CEO of Superpedestrian, told TechCrunch. “For that you need a very precise location, you need characterization of the rider’s behaviour and you need context awareness, like is the rider blocking the right of way? You don’t need a camera if you train your data right.”

Biderman says Superpedestrian runs a microprocessor with Navmatic’s software on its LINK scooters’ operating systems, which is where all of Superpedestrian’s maps live. That software is trained on a variety of sensors, including vision for ground truth and high definition maps. During a ride, real time computations analyzing data picked up from the scooter are done on the edge of the microprocessor, combining raw GPS data, multiple dimensions of inertial sensing and vehicle dynamics to calculate very precise location and movements of the vehicle. 

“With Navmatic’s software, location detection significantly improved, and all of a sudden you can really do this kind of analysis of the minute motions of someone on a scooter or small vehicle,” said Biderman. “Our response time is now about 0.7 seconds.”

According to Paul White, director of development and public affairs at Superpedestrian, the vehicle’s location accuracy improvement ranges from 70% to 90% depending on local conditions. 

Both companies say such precise location data, coupled with the ability to control the vehicle’s movements, is a superior solution to vision, one that is potentially cheaper but definitely more scalable. 

“You’re not gonna put a $1,000 or $2,000 lidar on a scooter, right?” said Biderman. “What you’re able to do through sensor fusion helps you to overcome the limitations of vision alone, which is bad at night, can get dirty and can fail a lot, or GPS alone, which can suffer from reflection and shadows. When you combine as many sensors as you can, you benefit from the best of all worlds, and it just keeps learning and improving.”

Superpedestrian has boasted its ability to better control its vehicles by owning the full stack, from operating system to hardware, compared to other operators that buy off-the-shelf operating systems.

“We had a lot of challenges trying to integrate our tech with other companies because every time they needed to change a line of code, they had to contact the manufacturer which could take a week to make any changes,” Boaz Mamo, CEO and founder of Navmatic, told TechCrunch.

Superpedestrian’s software-first approach to this acquisition was also attractive to one of the company’s current investors, Dan Herscovici, partner at Edison Partners.

“Most other acquisitions by scooter companies are usually a play for market share,” he said. “It’s not as typical to see micromobility companies really leaning on IP and tech to really enhance the vehicle.”

Herscovici said Superpedestrian looked at many solutions in the marketplace to solve for the problem of pedestrian safety and city compliance, and even considered developing its own tech. Balancing time-to-market and the need to move quickly, the ever-present threat of losing city permits looming over their head, acquiring Navmatic seemed like the right decision.

“The way I generally like to think about the micromobility space is that there are three major constituencies,” said Herscovici. “The first is the rider, and that’s what most micromobility companies think about. How do you attract them and keep them riding? The next is the city or municipality, and the next and most forgotten about is the non-rider, the ones sharing the road. I think the industry has been searching for a way to modify rider behavior based on safety regulations and this acquisition unlocks that capability.”

Mamo also pointed out that Pedestrian Defense unlocks the capability for cities to get some insights into how riders are traveling and how they might be able to make better infrastructure decisions.

Biderman said Superpedestrian is building around 50,000 scooters this year, with every new vehicle the company builds containing this new technology starting December. Next year, the company will begin deploying the upgraded vehicles in the new cities it’s moving to, as well as switching out older models in cities Superpedestrian has an existing presence.