Author: azeeadmin

Ransomware attacks, fueled by COVID-19 pandemic turbulence, have become a major money earner for cybercriminals, with the number of attacks rising in 2020.

These file-encrypting attacks have continued largely unabated this year, too. In the last few months alone we’ve witnessed the attack on Colonial Pipeline that forced the company to shut down its systems — and the gasoline supply — to much of the eastern seaboard, the hack on meat supplier JBS that abruptly halted its slaughterhouse operations around the world, and just this month a supply chain attack on IT vendor Kaseya that saw hundreds of downstream victims locked out of their systems.

However, while ransomware attacks continue to make headlines, it’s near-impossible to understand their full impact, nor is it known whether taking certain decisions — such as paying the cybercriminals’ ransom demands — make a difference.

Jack Cable, a security architect at Krebs Stamos Group who previously worked for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), is looking to solve that problem with the launch of a crowdsourced ransom payments tracking website, Ransomwhere. 

“I was inspired to start Ransomwhere by Katie Nickels’s tweet that no one really knows the full impact of cybercrime, and especially ransomware,” Cable told TechCrunch. “After seeing that there’s currently no single place for public data on ransomware payments, and given that it’s not hard to track bitcoin transactions, I started hacking it together.”

The website keeps a running tally of ransoms paid out to cybercriminals in bitcoin, made possible thanks to the public record-keeping of transactions on the blockchain. As the site is crowdsourced, it incorporates data from self-reported incidents of ransomware attacks, which anyone can submit. However, in order to make sure all reports are legitimate, each submission is required to take a screenshot of the ransomware payment demand, and every case is reviewed manually by Cable himself before being made publicly available. If an approved report’s authenticity is later called into question, it will be removed from the database.

The already-burgeoning database, which doesn’t include any personal or victim-identifying information, is available as a free download for the cybersecurity community and law enforcement officials, which Cable hopes will help give some much-needed public transparency about the current state of the problem.

“As we consider policy proposals to change the state of ransomware economics, we will need data to assess whether these actions are successful,” Cable said. “For law enforcement, as we saw with the Colonial Pipeline hack, law enforcement does have the ability to recover some payments, so it would be great if this can further aid their efforts.”

At the time of writing, the site is tracking a total of more than $32 million in ransom payments for 2021. The bulk of these payments have been made to the REvil, the Russia-linked ransomware gang that took credit for the JBS and Kaseya hacks. The group has racked up more than $11 million in ransom payments this year, according to Ransomwhere, an amount that could increase dramatically if its recent demands for $70 million as part of the Kaseya attack are met. 

Netwalker, one of the most popular ransomware-as-a-service offerings on the dark web, comes in second with more than $6.3 million in payments for 2021, though Ransomwhere’s tally shows that the group has racked up the most ransom payments in total, with roughly $28 million to its name based on the site’s data.

RangarLocker, DarkSide, and Egregor round out Ransomwhere’s top five list — for now at least — having amassed sums of $4.6 million, $4.4 million, and $3.2 million, respectively. 

Cable says that going forward, he’s exploring ways of partnering with companies in the security and blockchain analysis spaces in order to integrate data that they already have on ransomware actions. He’s also looking at ways to support other traceable cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, as well as at the potential to track downstream bitcoin addresses. 

“It’ll never be possible to get the full picture — criminals who are using Monero will be near-impossible to track”, Cable says. “But I would like to get as complete of a picture as possible.”

Read more:

• As ransomware gets craftier, companies must start thinking creatively
• Are we overestimating the ransomware threat?
• Fujifilm becomes the latest victim of a network-crippling ransomware attack
• Kaseya hack floods hundreds of companies with ransomware
• Maze, a notorious ransomware group, says it’s shutting down
• CD Projekt hit by ransomware attack, refuses to pay ransom

The venture capital market is racing ahead, foot on the gas, middle finger out the window, hair on fire. That’s our read of the Q2 2021 data released thus far concerning how much money venture capitalists deployed around the world during the second three months of the year.

Startups have never had it this good when it comes to accessing private-market funds.

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The second quarter of 2021 was the biggest quarter for venture capital activity ever, measured by dollars invested. The wave of funding led to a quarterly record of new unicorns — startups that reach the $1 billion valuation threshold — born in the United States, Asia, Europe and Canada, according to CB Insights data reviewed by The Exchange.

Data from FactSet concerning the quarter agrees. The second quarter was a record-breaker in terms of dollars invested, even if total deal volume eased some from the first quarter’s tally.

The impact of the deluge of capital is what you’d expect: Round values are rising. Deals worth $100 million are setting records. And around the world, technology hubs are enjoying a flurry of high-priced deals that are enriching startups and providing them with capital at earlier stages that used to be reserved for IPOs and other seminal funding events.

So today we’re talking through the numbers. Next week, we’ll publish a host of geography-focused notes and reactions from investors and founders in the U.S. startup ecosystem, along with similar entries concerning the Asian and European startup markets.

Chatting with venture capitalists in recent months led us to expect strong second-quarter results; investors have spoken about ever-faster follow-on rounds and the explosion of high-priced, big-dollar deal-making from Tiger. SoftBank’s second vision fund is active. And there are myriad seed, early-stage, late-stage and crossover funds all competing with each other both inside and outside their normal investing stage bands in hopes of either accreting earlier, larger ownership than a bigger investing group might have in years past or working to defend early ownership past where earlier-stage firms used to exit stage left.

But enough words. Let’s get into the numbers. We’ll start with an overview of global results before diving into U.S. and Silicon Valley tallies, Europe and Asia’s performances, and new data concerning venture capital activity in Africa.

Buckle up.

A monster quarter

We’re pulling from a number of sources this morning, but for global data, we’re leaning on CB Insights, Crunchbase News and FactSet.

CB Insights has $156 billion on the books for global venture capital activity in the second quarter, up from $60.7 billion in Q2 2020. That’s a gain of 157% on a year-over-year basis. A FactSet chart indicates around $150 billion was raised in the second quarter, up a similar percentage from its year-ago result as what CB Insights counted.

For the first half of 2021, inclusive of the record second-quarter tally, the data is similarly shocking. Crunchbase News counts $288 billion invested during the first and second quarters of the year. CB Insights reckons the number of $292.4 billion. FactSet comes to a number that it describes as “over $280 billion.”

Those are all close enough for us, and they say the same thing: Global startups raised either as much, or very nearly as much, in the first two quarters of 2021 as they did in all of 2020.

As a reference point, Crunchbase News notes that the first half of 2021 crushed the second half of 2020 by $110 billion, in terms of global capital raised.

But what about round counts? Was all that capital concentrated in a few investments, or did the money flow freely to more startups than ever? Here, things get a little tricky. CB Insights data states that there were 7,751 startup deals in the second quarter, an all-time high. FactSet counts 5,400, far from its recorded record. At this juncture we’re seeing discrepancies in how different data-focused firms count; Alex was party to similar conversations during his time at Crunchbase and is sympathetic to the difficulty of deciding what to include and not in these types of surveys.

But even FactSet data indicates that the second quarter was the second-best three-month period for venture round counts since the start of 2019. No matter how you count, then, the data indicates lots of deals — and even more dollars.

A unicorn stampede

Flash, a startup that has developed a flexible benefits platform for Brazilian companies and employees, has raised $22 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

Monashees (which led Flash’s Series A), Global Founders Capital (who backed Flash’s seed round), Citius and Kauffman Fellows also participated in the financing.

Founded in 2019 by childhood friends Ricardo Salem, Guilherme Lane and Pedro Lane, Flash is out to revamp what it views as an antiquated way of offering benefits to employees in South America’s largest country.

The São Paulo-based company has built a flexible benefit management app provided with a Mastercard in an effort to replace what has historically been provided in the form of “outdated, commoditized and mandatory” meal/food and transportation “vouchers.”

“Our first product was a reinvention of the voucher that by Brazilian labor law, was something of a mandatory benefit for all companies to give as part of compensation,” Salem said. “There are four traditional incumbents, owned by the banks, that held 95% of the market with very outdated products and fat margins, and exploitation all over.”

Beyond that, Flash took its offering a step further by giving companies a way to configure their benefits offering so employees can “choose and manage their benefits as they want” via Flash’s app marketplace and card, noted Salem.

The company must be doing something right.

Since its inception, Flash has grown its customer base to 4,000 companies, ranging from startups and SMEs to enterprises.

Last year, Flash grew “10x” by all metrics. It went from 10,000 employees to 100,000 using its platform. So far, this year that number has already swelled to 250,000. While the company declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Lane said the growth in customers is reflected in the company’s GMV. Flash has also grown from about 50 to 200 employees over the past 8 months.

Image Credits: Flash

At the beginning of the pandemic when companies were sending employees home and wanting to help them pay bills for electricity and utilities, there wasn’t any instrument to help them do so, Salem said.

“So we built one in our app, which leverages our wallet and it was able to read the bar or QR code of the utility provider,” he added. “It became a very popular benefit.”

Within that same wallet, Flash has built another product — an incentive and rewards platform..

Even with all its early success, Flash has just a 1% market share so believes “there’s plenty of room to grow.” And, it views itself as “much more of a horizontal play than a geographical play.”

“We’re solving other pain points for companies in Brazil now, and that’s our plan for the short term,” Lane said.

“In the beginning, we saw this as a very cool thing very modern tech companies wanted,” Salem said. “But last year proved that this is not just a midsize tech company product. This is for every employee from tech employees to blue collar workers to CEOs Everyone has a flexible benefit need and different lifestyles and need a product adapted to all of those.”

Global Founders Capital’s Fabricio Pettena led Flash’s seed round back in 2019. He said he had been searching for disruption in the space for “a long time.”

“Since it is a big market in Brazil due to regulation, the incumbents really rip off restaurants and others,” Pettena told TechCrunch.

He said he knew immediately he wanted to invest in Flash.

“Flash’s team actually took an active role in the regulation change that allowed for flexible benefits, instead of just playing passive,” he said. “When we first met, within 15 minutes, it was clear that, apart from a couple of details, we already shared a common vision for how this disruption would take place.”

Frontier, which bills itself as a “new kind of vertically-integrated jobs marketplace” launches today with a $2.8M investment round led by NFX in the US, and backed by London’s firstminute Capital, FJ Labs, Cyan Banister, Ilkka Pannanen, Alex Bouaziz, Liquid 2 and several other funds and angels.

Frontier’s schtick is that it pre-tests applicants, weeds out the best candidates, and then allows them to directly book interviews with the employers, thus saving time and money in the hiring process.

But Frontier isn’t going after complex roles here. Its aimed at companies who need a high volume of low-skilled workers. Among its customers so far are Carrol’s (the largest franchisor of Burger King) and Concentrix. 

Elliot O’Connor, Founder and CEO of Frontier said: “We believe the hiring experience is a fragmented workflow for both employer and jobseeker, which dramatically slows down the time-to-fill for positions and leads to rigid labor markets  – something the world can’t afford right now. To fix hiring, a platform must own more of the hiring funnel than job platforms currently do, and use that position to redefine the experience.”

Elliot told me over a call that they are not using an algorithm in the AI sense of the word. It also removes unconscious bias by applying skill-based assessments: “We’re focused on high volume, low skilled workers, so for example, customer support or retail or warehouses. So we’re just assessing for things like typing speed etc. No one’s going to look at the resume. It’s a rule-based system so that the company does get to set the rules themselves. There’s no AI.”

He added: “We’ve gone and eaten up a lot of the different pieces of software that are out there and combined them into a single vertically integrated whole. So we’ve got a screening software that’s basically modular so every customer gets their own screening, according to their own criteria and the machine does it for them. So at the interviews they’re going to have qualified candidates.”

Pete Flint, NFX General Partner said: “Frontier is changing the entire talent sourcing process by providing an on-demand experience that’s already present in so many parts of life. Shortening the window of finding work and making hires is creating substantial benefits across large segments of the labor market. The network effects embedded in Frontier’s product and business model make it completely different to the traditional incumbents.”

Early-stage robotics fundraising is accelerating, with funding coming from boutiques to deep-pocketed venture capital firms. For founders, getting their idea from concept to company, or developing a minimum viable product, is daunting enough, but seeking an initial fundraising round brings a complexity that can be especially challenging to manage.

So how do robotics startups best approach fundraising and secure the financing to propel their company to the next level? There are five key areas to keep in mind about fundraising for robotics startups that founders must learn and practice.

Understand the proper fit between your company’s scale and the fund’s scale

Too often, founders court venture capitalists without understanding that the company they are founding might not be the right fit for VCs. Venture capital firms generally, and ones that invest in robotics specifically, look to invest in startups that have clearly identified potential to scale exponentially.

They are not geared toward backing entrepreneurs looking for an exit under $100 million that will only realize a handful of multiples for the investor. VCs are more likely looking to fund on a much larger scale — think a $1-billion-plus exit valuation — and back a company with the potential to deliver at least a 10x return.

Usually, robotics companies are capital-intensive and require a robust revenue model compared to pure software startups, and this is not for every VC. In fact, venture capital is likened to “rocket fuel” that is dangerous if put into a car but perfect for a rocket ready to shoot for escape velocity. Smaller-scale ventures often do not interest VCs but might be perfect for angel investors.

Bottom line: Do your homework, manage expectations, and seek funding from investors working at a scale commensurate with your idea and comfortable with the unique needs of robotics companies.

Consider capital sources that fit different companies and startups at different stages of its growth

Now is a great time for starting a company, in part because there have never been more sources of financing available. Angel investors and venture capitalists are just a portion of what is available.

There is growing opportunity, especially for robotics and AI startups, in nondilutive capital, including from U.S. government sources such as Department of Energy and Department of Defense grants. There are loaded/nondilutive funding streams, such as convertible debt, available from financial institutions and angels.

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, especially for hardware and robotics companies, have become popular in recent years. Some of these might be a better fit for your company at the current (or future) stage of your organizational growth cycle.

But some sophistication is warranted. Ask yourself what constraints or potential downsides come with the specific funding model you are considering/pursuing. Government grants, for instance, might drive the pace of development or push you toward certain customer-facing directions in ways that could be ill-suited to your company.

And just like that, it’s Day Two of TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising! Yesterday not only flew by in a blur — it was also certifiably off the hook. We hope you came away with new information, actionable advice that you can implement in your business right away and that you connected with your peers and other startup folks for support and opportunities along the way.

Pssst: Buy a ticket and tune in to today’s main event (see below).

We also hope you got a good night’s sleep because today is all about the pitch-off! Ten early-stage founders — hand-picked by the TechCrunch crew — will throw down in classic pitch-battle fashion in front these highly experienced and definitely discerning VC judges: Ben Sun of Primary Venture Partners, Leah Solivan of Fuel Capital and Index Ventures’ Shardul Shah.

Each startup team has only five minutes to pitch their company, business model and creative ideas — followed by a Q&A from our esteemed judges. When the pitch dust settles, one winner will get a feature article on TechCrunch.com, a one-year free subscription to Extra Crunch and a complimentary Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

Whether you’re at Disrupt, Early Stage or a TC Sessions, if you have a chance to see other founders pitch or watch VCs conduct a pitch deck teardown — take it. It’ll help you refine your own pitch.

I walked away with a bunch of notes to reorganize my pitch deck, and I’ve watched the pitch deck teardown videos multiple times, including side-by-side with my pitch deck. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very rewarding because now I have a clear path. Disrupt was like an authoritative instruction manual for how to finish my pitch deck. — Michael McCarthy, CEO, Repositax.

Get comfortable wherever you are, get ready to take copious notes and get ready to watch these 10 early-stage startups bring the heat on Day Two of TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising.

Session 1: 9:00 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PDT

Mi Terro (City of Industry, CA, USA) – The world’s first advanced material company that partners with food companies and farmers to create home compostable, single-use plastic-alternative packaging materials made from plant-based agricultural waste – this is a first-of-its-kind approach.

Press Sports App (Atlanta, GA, USA) – A lifelong sports social network for athletes from all levels and sports. Their deeply engaged community is creating system of record starting at the amateur level that has never been built before.

Snowball Wealth (San Francisco, CA, USA) – Provides personalized guidance to pay off debt and build wealth for the 30M women+ in America with student debt. Snowball provides users with a free student loan plan, which helps users save an average of $6K. They’re expanding to include a financial roadmap that’s community-driven and personalized so women+ can build wealth even as they pay down their debt.

My Expat Taxes (Vienna, Austria) – MyExpatTaxes is the leading U.S. expat tax software that guides users through the tax filing process faster and more affordable than any other competitor in the industry. It automates international tax treaties and expat tax benefits, helping U.S. expats stay compliant and claim thousands of dollars in refunds.

Speeko (Chicago, Illinois, USA) – AI-powered feedback on your voice in areas like pace, fillers, inclusivity, conciseness, and enunciation. Based on your speaking style, you’re matched with interactive exercises, courses, and vocal warm-ups. It’s like a gym membership for your voice, where you build muscle memory for speaking clearly and confidently.

Session 2: 10:10 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. PDT

Universal Prequal (Marlboro, NJ, USA) – Helps construction companies effectively manage risk by enabling them to find and vet qualified project teams capable of doing the work. Instead of the paper-intensive, time-consuming, expensive approach that exists throughout the industry today, our solution is online, easy-to-use, and cost-effective. Customers will know us as the national resource for managing risk based on comprehensive, reliable construction information.

T2D2.ai (New York City, NY, USA) – Provides continuous AI and computer vision-driven monitoring of buildings, bridges and other infrastructural assets. The T2D2 portal and dashboard gives asset owners and managers a detailed picture of all visible damage conditions – rank ordered by severity and geo-tagged for location information, so they can focus preventative maintenance efforts and avoid higher downstream repair costs as well as potential safety issues.

Boomerang (Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil) – A marketplace for consumer goods rental. We connect retailers, brands, and rental stores with customers that just want to use a product instead of owning it. For suppliers, Boomerang is a plug-and-play rental platform offering logistics, insurance, and online payments solution.

Stash Global (Wilmington, DE, USA) – Turned the most damaging cyber-attack of all, ransomware, into just another business problem that can be solved with the click of a button – without paying a cent (or cyber coin) of ransom. The No Ransom Ransomware Solution does it all: restores files; prevents access of frozen file content by attackers; eliminates ransom extortion.

Vyrill (San Francisco, CA, USA) – With the most powerful AI driven, in-video search, Vyrill is a fan video discovery, insights and content marketing platform enabling brand marketers to supercharge brand awareness and revenue with fan led content such as video reviews, unboxing, how-to videos and more. Vyrill is a Google for fan video and creators, capturing who, what, where and when –inside millions of videos.”

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Danny and Alex were on deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. Natasha will be back with us starting next week. So, it was old times on the show with just two of our team to vamp on the news. And oh boy was there a lot of news to get into. Like, loads.

• What’s going on with Didi? Didi’s woes have continued this week, with the company seeing its share price continue to fall. The Equity team’s view is that the era of Chinese companies listing in the United States is over.
• What’s going on with facial recognition tech? With AnyVision raising a $235 million round, Danny and Alex tangled over the future of privacy, and what counts as good enough when it comes to keeping ourselves to ourselves.
• Nextdoor is going public: Via a SPAC, mind, but the transaction had our tongues wagging about its history, growth, and how hard it can be to build a social network.
• Dataminr buys WatchKeeper: In its first-ever acquisition, Dataminr bought a smaller company to help it better visualize the data it collects. It’s a neat deal, and especially fun given taht Dataminr should go public sooner rather than later.
• Planet and Satellogic are going public: One week, two satellite SPACs. You can read more about Planet here, and Satellogic here.
• FabricNano and Cloverly raise capital: Satellites had us into the concept of climate change, so we also dug into recent funding rounds from FabricNano and Cloverly. It’s beyond neat to see for-profit companies tackle our warming planet.
• Two new venture capital funds: Acrylic has put together a $55 million fund for moonshot crypto work, while Renegade Partners has a $100 million fund for early-and-mid-stage generalist investments.
• Mmhmm is big time: And then there was mmhmm. Which now has $100 million more, and some big plans. Our question is what it will do with the money. We’ll have to wait and find out, we suppose.

Robots have a hard time improvising, and encountering an unusual surface or obstacle usually means an abrupt stop or hard fall. But researchers at Facebook AI have created a new model for robotic locomotion that adapts in real time to any terrain it encounters, changing its gait on the fly to keep trucking when it hits sand, rocks, stairs, and other sudden changes.

Although robotic movement can be versatile and exact, and robots can “learn” to climb steps, cross broken terrain and so on, these behaviors are more like individual trained skills that the robot switches between. And although robots like Spot famously can spring back from being pushed or kicked, the system is really just working to correct a physical anomaly while pursuing an unchanged policy of walking. There are some adaptive movement models, but some are very specific (for instance this one based on real insect movements) and others take long enough to work that the robot will certainly have fallen by the time they take effect.

Rapid Motor Adaptation, as the team calls it, came from the idea that humans and other animals are able to quickly, effectively, and unconsciously change the way they walk to fit different circumstances.

“Say you learn to walk and for the first time you go to the beach. Your foot sinks in, and to pull it out you have to apply more force. It feels weird, but in a few steps you’ll be walking naturally just as you do on hard ground. What’s the secret there?” asked senior researcher Jitendra Malik, who is affiliated with Facebook AI and UC Berkeley.

Certainly if you’ve never encountered a beach before, but even later in life when you have, you aren’t entering some special “sand mode” that lets you walk on soft surfaces. The way you change your movement happens automatically and without any real understanding of the external environment.

Visualization of the simulation environment. Of course the robot would not perceive any of this visually. Image credit: Berkeley AI Research, Facebook AI Research and CMU

“What’s happening is your body responds to the differing physical conditions by sensing the differing consequences of those conditions on the body itself,” Malik explained — and the RMA system works in similar fashion. “When we walk in new conditions, in a very short time, half a second or less, we have made enough measurements that we are estimating what these conditions are, and we modify the walking policy.”

The system was trained entirely in simulation, in a virtual version of the real world where the robot’s small brain (everything runs locally on the on-board limited compute unit) learned to maximize forward motion with minimum energy and avoid falling by immediately observing and responding to data coming in from its (virtual) joints, accelerometers, and other physical sensors.

To punctuate the total internality of the RMA approach, Malik notes that the robot uses no visual input whatsoever. But people and animals with no vision can walk just fine, so why shouldn’t a robot? But since it’s impossible to estimate the “externalities” such as the exact friction coefficient of the sand or rocks it’s walking on, it simply keeps a close eye on itself.

“We do not learn about sand, we learn about feet sinking,” said co-author Ashish Kumar, also from Berkeley.

Ultimately the system ends up having two parts: a main, always-running algorithm actually controlling the robot’s gait, and an adaptive algorithm running in parallel that monitors changes to the robot’s internal readings. When significant changes are detected, it analyzes them — the legs should be doing this, but they’re doing this, which means the situation is like this — and tells the main model how to adjust itself. From then on the robot only thinks in terms of how to move forward under these new conditions, effectively improvising a specialized gait.

Image Credits: Berkeley AI Research, Facebook AI Research and CMU

After training in simulation, it succeeded handsomely in the real world, as the news release describes it:

The robot was able to walk on sand, mud, hiking trails, tall grass and a dirt pile without a single failure in all our trials. The robot successfully walked down stairs along a hiking trail in 70% of the trials. It successfully navigated a cement pile and a pile of pebbles in 80% of the trials despite never seeing the unstable or sinking ground, obstructive vegetation or stairs during training. It also maintained its height with a high success rate when moving with a 12kg payload that amounted to 100% of its body weight.

You can see examples of many of these situations in videos here or (very briefly) in the gif above.

Malik gave a nod to the research of NYU professor Karen Adolph, whose work has shown how adaptable and freeform the human process of learning how to walk is. The team’s instinct was that if you want a robot that can handle any situation, it has to learn adaptation from scratch, not have a variety of modes to choose from.

Just as you can’t build a smarter computer vision system by exhaustively labeling and documenting every object and interaction (there will always be more), you can’t prepare a robot for a diverse and complex physical world with 10, 100, even thousands of special parameters for walking on gravel, mud, rubble, wet wood, etc. For that matter you may not even want to specify anything at all beyond the general idea of forward motion.

“We don’t pre-program the idea that it has for legs, or anything about the morphology of the robot,” said Kumar.

This means the basis of the system — not the fully trained one, which ultimately did mold itself to quadrupedal gaits — can potentially be applied not just to other legged robots, but entirely different domains of AI and robotics.

“The legs of a robot are similar to the fingers of a hand; the way that legs interact with environments, fingers interact with objects,” noted co-author Deepak Pathak, of Carnegie Mellon University. “The basic idea can be applied to any robot.”

Even further, Malik suggested, the pairing of basic and adaptive algorithms could work for other intelligent systems. Smart homes and municipal systems tend to rely on preexisting policies, but what if they adapted on the fly instead?

For now the team is simply presenting their initial findings in a paper at the Robotics: Science & Systems conference  and acknowledge that there is a great deal of follow-up research to do. For instance building an internal library of the improvised gaits as a sort of “medium term” memory, or using vision to predict the necessity of initiating a new style of locomotion. But the RMA approach seems to be a promising new approach for an enduring challenge in robotics.

A new biometrics privacy ordinance has taken effect across New York City, putting new limits on what businesses can do with the biometric data they collect on their customers.

From Friday, businesses that collect biometric information — most commonly in the form of facial recognition and fingerprints — are required to conspicuously post notices and signs to customers at their doors explaining how their data will be collected. The ordinance applies to a wide range of businesses — retailers, stores, restaurants, and theaters, to name a few — which are also barred from selling, sharing, or otherwise profiting from the biometric information that they collect.

The move will give New Yorkers — and its millions of visitors each year — greater protections over how their biometric data is collected and used, while also serving to dissuade businesses from using technology that critics say is discriminatory and often doesn’t work.

Businesses can face stiff penalties for violating the law, but can escape fines if they fix the violation quickly.

The law is by no means perfect, as none of these laws ever are. For one, it doesn’t apply to government agencies, including the police. Of the businesses that the ordinance does cover, it exempts employees of those businesses, such as those required to clock in and out of work with a fingerprint. And the definition of what counts as a biometric will likely face challenges that could expand or narrow what is covered.

New York is the latest U.S. city to enact a biometric privacy law, after Portland, Oregon passed a similar ordinance last year. But the law falls short of stronger biometric privacy laws in effect.

Illinois, which has the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law that grants residents the right to sue for any use of their biometric data without consent. Facebook this year settled for $650 million in a class-action suit that Illinois residents filed in 2015 after the social networking giant used facial recognition to tag users in photos without their permission.

Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said the law is an “important step” to learn how New Yorkers are tracked by local businesses.

“A false facial recognition match could mean having the NYPD called on you just for walking into a Rite Aid or Target,” he told TechCrunch. He also said that New York should go further by outlawing systems like facial recognition altogether, as some cities have done.

Read more:

• An internal code repo used by New York State’s IT office was exposed online
• Data breach at New York Sports Clubs owner exposed customer data
• Microsoft pitched its facial recognition tech to the DEA, new emails show
• US towns are buying Chinese surveillance tech tied to Uighur abuses

Online grocery startups around the world continue to pull in major investment, underscoring how much they have all grown especially in the last year of pandemic living. In the latest development, Kurly — a startup in South Korea that provides next-day grocery delivery services across the country — has closed $200 million in funding, a Series F valuing the company at $2.2 billion, the company confirmed.

This means the company’s valuation has more than doubled in the last year. Last April, Kurly closed a Series E of $150 million at a $780 million valuation.

This latest round is being co-led by Aspex Management, DST Global, Sequoia Capital China and Hillhouse Capital — all previous backers of the company — with new investors Millennium Management and CJ Logistics Corporation also participating. CJ Logistics is a strategic backer: it has a deal in place with Kurly to help expand its overnight delivery service to more regions across South Korea.

This latest funding comes right on the heels of a significant u-turn for the business in recent days.

Kurly had been planning an IPO in the U.S. later this year; instead it announced this week that it would instead seek to list in its home market instead.

“Kurly had explored both overseas and domestic IPO options. After reviewing detailed conditions such as its business model and stock market conditions both at home and abroad, Kurly has decided to go ahead with an initial public offering in the Korean stock market,” it said in a statement to Korea Economic Daily.

Some have reported that Chinese transport giant Didi’s rocky start as a public company on the NYSE this month gave Kurly pause on the performance of Asian companies on U.S. exchanges at the moment. Others have reported that the company was facing issues with some existing private backers wanting to cash out, concerned over the company’s growth potential — which might have hastened an IPO while also put more pressure on the company to produce better returns.

It’s worth noting too that Coupang, Kurly’s much bigger rival, is traded in the U.S. market, on the NYSE after going public earlier this year. Its market cap is currently just under $70 billion and so that might also invite unfavorable comparisons.

Whatever the reason for the shift, this latest round is an interesting signal to the market that investors are keen to continue supporting the company on the back of more market potential. Kurly said the funds will be used to build out its tech stack, talent recruitment, and to expand its coverage of its next-day services.

“This funding round is a testament to Kurly’s contributions in transforming customer’s everyday habit of conducting grocery shopping at physical stores into a more convenient way of shopping online by offering a superior selection of products through its innovative delivery service,” said Seul-A Kim, also known as Sophie Kim, the CEO and founder of Kurly, in a statement. “The Company has also been successful in bringing merchandises to the customers at a reasonable price through service technology empowered by the use of its proprietary data analytics. We are delighted to have new capital which would allow us to further invest in logistics infrastructure, people and technology to continue to innovate mobile grocery market and improve lives of consumers, producers and workers.”

The company has been growing at a strong pace, with $845 million in sales in 2020, up 124% over a year ago. It hasn’t disclosed whether it is profitable or what its operating margins are, but the theory is that — as with all e-commerce operations — as Kurly continues to scale its overnight delivery service, those margins will improve.

“We are excited to continue to support Market Kurly with our investment,” said Hermes Li, the founder and portfolio manager of Aspex Management, in a statement. “Korea is one of the fastest growing and largest e-commerce markets globally, and Kurly has been the leader in e-Commerce innovation. They have built a consumer centric brand focused on superior product quality and user experience. We believe there is significant potential ahead of Kurly from expansion into other consumer categories and new geographies. Aspex is looking forward to many years of growth with Kurly.”