Author: azeeadmin

In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users’ data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws.

The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans’ private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL (to later become Verizon Media, which owns TechCrunch — for now) were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members.

But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What’s even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote.

“We hadn’t realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website,” said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. “We are still members.”

Evernote joined the coalition in October 2014, a year and a half after PRISM first came to public light, even though the company was never named in the leaked Snowden documents. Still, Evernote was a powerful ally to have onboard, and showed RGS that its support for reforming government surveillance laws was gaining traction outside of the companies named in the leaked NSA files. Evernote cites its membership of RGS in its most recent transparency report and that it supports efforts to “reform practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information” — which makes its disappearance from the RGS website all the more bizarre.

TechCrunch also asked the other companies in the RGS coalition if they knew why Evernote was removed and all either didn’t respond, wouldn’t comment or had no idea. A spokesperson for one of the RGS companies said they weren’t all that surprised since companies “drop in and out of trade associations.”

The website of the Reform Government Surveillance coalition, which features Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter, Verizon Media and Zoom, but not Evernote, which is also a member. (Image: TechCrunch)

While that may be true — companies often sign on to lobbying efforts that ultimately help their businesses; government surveillance is one of those rare thorny issues that got some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley rallying behind the cause. After all, few tech companies have openly and actively advocated for an increase in government surveillance of their users, since it’s the users themselves who are asking for more privacy baked into the services they use.

In the end, the reason for Evernote’s removal seems remarkably benign.

“Evernote has been a longtime member — but they were less active over the last couple of years, so we removed them from the website,” said an email from Monument Advocacy, a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that represents RGS. “Your inquiry has helped to prompt new conversations between our organizations and we’re looking forward to working together more in the future.”

Monument has been involved with RGS since near the beginning after it was hired by the RGS coalition of companies to lobby for changes to surveillance laws in Congress. Monument has spent $2.2 million in lobbying to date since it began work with RGS in 2014, according to OpenSecrets, specifically on lobbying lawmakers to push for changes to bills under congressional consideration, such as changes to the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, albeit with mixed success. RGS supported the USA Freedom Act, a bill designed to curtail some of the NSA’s collection under the Patriot Act, but was unsuccessful in its opposition to the reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA, the powers that allow the NSA to collect intelligence on foreigners living outside the United States, which was reauthorized for six years in 2018.

RGS has been largely quiet for the past year — issuing just one statement on the importance of transatlantic data flows, the most recent hot-button issue to concern tech companies, fearing that anything other than the legal status quo could see vast swaths of their users in Europe cut off from their services.

“RGS companies are committed to protecting the privacy of those who use our services, and to safeguard personal data,” said the statement, which included the logos of Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter, Verizon Media and Zoom, but not Evernote.

In a coalition that’s only as strong as its members, the decision to remove Evernote from the website while it’s still a member hardly sends a resounding message of collective corporate unity — which these days isn’t something Big Tech can find much of.

Peter Boyce II has left General Catalyst to start his own firm, a little over a year after the venture capital firm promoted him to partner. His new firm is called Stellation Capital, and filings indicate that he is looking to raise up to $40 million for the debut investment vehicle. Sources say that most, if perhaps not all, of that total has been closed since the initial SEC filing in April.

Boyce declined to comment for this story. It’s been a quiet transition for the investor; his LinkedIn and Twitter have not been updated to indicate his new job title, but his personal website indicates the new gig. For an investor to leave a prominent venture capital firm after an eight-year tenure to raise dozens of millions of his own — and somehow do so quietly and with minimal coverage — might be a result of the funding frenzy and consequential numbness to yet another filing.

Boyce joined GC in 2013 and led investments in Ro, Macro, towerIQ and Atom. He’s also supported portfolio companies such as Giphy, Jet.com and Circle. Beyond GC, Boyce has experience co-founding and running Rough Draft Ventures, a program that helps incubate startups founded by students, recent graduates as well as promote entrepreneurship on campuses.

Stellation Capital will leverage his work and name into early-stage investments. The name of the firm, per its website, is derived from the Latin root of stella, which means star. The name also describes “the process of extending a polygon in new dimensions to form a new shape…just like we’re extending the potential of a founder into new possibilities.”

It’s unclear what the firm’s check size and cadence will be, but it did say it wants to back successful companies at “their earliest stages” on the website.

Instacart has appointed Facebook executive Fidji Simo as its new CEO, just seven months after she joined the grocery delivery company’s board of directors. Simo, formerly the vice president and head of the Facebook app, will replace Instacart founder and current CEO Apoorva Mehta on August 2. Mehta will transition to executive chairman of the board, per a statement from Instacart.

Instacart declined on behalf of Simo for request to provide further comment.

Women of color chief executives at the forefront of billion-dollar businesses are still an unfortunately rare occurrence. Simo is the co-founder of Women in Product, a nonprofit organization that works to empower women in product management, as well as advance and advocate for women’s careers in tech. The transition marks that Facebook has lost one of its few female leaders, and Instacart has a new energy as it itself plans to increase its head count by 50% in 2021.

The departure of Mehta from his role so close to an expected IPO is as notable as it is rare. Mehta founded Instacart 10 years ago, incubating it through Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch to its most recent valuation of $39 billion.

The pandemic spotlighted Instacart’s purpose, as millions of people around the world faced quarantines and limited in-person interactions, including trips to the grocery store. The increased consumer spending on for-delivery services led Instacart to hire hundreds of thousands of workers, as well as launch same-day delivery on a variety of products beyond avocados – including electronics, sports equipment and prescription medicine

The growth hasn’t come without controversy. Instacart, joined Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates as major backers for Proposition 22, a measure that would classify gig workers as independent contractors, limiting the types of benefits that they could receive. Prop 22 eventually passed, which could be seen as beneficial to Instacart executives and detrimental to the shoppers who make the deliveries. The event happened after years of protests, class-action lawsuits over wages and tipping debacles in which Instacart is scrutinized for unfair policies toward its shoppers.

Simo obviously has experience working at controversial companies, thanks to her decade at Facebook. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg replied to Simo’s announcement in a comment on the platform.

“Fidji – I’m immensely grateful for the impact you’ve had on Facebook over the last 10 years,” Sandberg wrote. “You’ve worn so many hats leading the Facebook App – all while advocating for gender equality in the tech community. I’m so proud to see where you’re headed. Cheering you on!”

Instacart describes Simo as a “core driver of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy” and the leader behind the architecture of Facebook’s advertising business. The executive helped scale Facebook as it grew from 1,000 to 100,000 employees, and through its transition to the public markets – experience that may mesh well with Instacart’s ambitions to eventually go public.

Her rise to chief executive comes as the pandemic winds down and parts of the world begin to reopen, which will likely signal a new chapter about how Instacart conducts business and faces new challenges on how the business stays relevant.

Understanding what you will change is most important to achieve a long-lasting and successful robotic process automation transformation. There are three pillars that will be most impacted by the change: people, process and digital workers (also referred to as robots). The interaction of these three pillars executes workflows and tasks, and if integrated cohesively, determines the success of an enterprisewide digital transformation.

Robots are not coming to replace us, they are coming to take over the repetitive, mundane and monotonous tasks that we’ve never been fond of. They are here to transform the work we do by allowing us to focus on innovation and impactful work. RPA ties decisions and actions together. It is the skeletal structure of a digital process that carries information from point A to point B. However, the decision-making capability to understand and decide what comes next will be fueled by RPA’s integration with AI.

We are seeing software vendors adopt vertical technology capabilities and offer a wide range of capabilities to address the three pillars mentioned above. These include powerhouses like UiPath, which recently went public, Microsoft’s Softomotive acquisition, and Celonis, which recently became a unicorn with a $1 billion Series D round. RPA firms call it “intelligent automation,” whereas Celonis targets the execution management system. Both are aiming to be a one-stop shop for all things related to process.

We have seen investments in various product categories for each stage in the intelligent automation journey. Process and task mining for process discovery, centralized business process repositories for CoEs, executives to manage the pipeline and measure cost versus benefit, and artificial intelligence solutions for intelligent document processing.

For your transformation journey to be successful, you need to develop a deep understanding of your goals, people and the process.

Define goals and measurements of success

From a strategic standpoint, success measures for automating, optimizing and redesigning work should not be solely centered around metrics like decreasing fully loaded costs or FTE reduction, but should put the people at the center. To measure improved customer and employee experiences, give special attention to metrics like decreases in throughput time or rework rate, identify vendors that deliver late, and find missed invoice payments or determine loan requests from individuals that are more likely to be paid back late. These provide more targeted success measures for specific business units.

The returns realized with an automation program are not limited to metrics like time or cost savings. The overall performance of an automation program can be more thoroughly measured with the sum of successes of the improved CX/EX metrics in different business units. For each business process you will be redesigning, optimizing or automating, set a definitive problem statement and try to find the right solution to solve it. Do not try to fit predetermined solutions into the problems. Start with the problem and goal first.

Understand the people first

To accomplish enterprise digital transformation via RPA, executives should put people at the heart of their program. Understanding the skill sets and talents of the workforce within the company can yield better knowledge of how well each employee can contribute to the automation economy within the organization. A workforce that is continuously retrained and upskilled learns how to automate and flexibly complete tasks together with robots and is better equipped to achieve transformation at scale.

The term muscle car has always been a euphemism for concessions. Want the most power for the money? Forget about a sports car from Porsche or Lotus. Buy a muscle car and just take corners a bit slower. Today Dodge announced it’s making an electric muscle car and it will be available in 2024. The first question that comes to mind: well, if it’s a muscle car, what’s missing?

There’s a difference between a muscle car and a sports car, and Dodge is uniquely suited to know the differences. The brand has long been associated with horsepower and going fast in a straight line. The Dodge Viper. The Dodge Challenger. Even the Dodge Durango, a lumbering SUV, is available with a tricked-out V8 capable of putting out 710 hp — more power than most Porches, though no one is about to pit a Durango against a 911 on the track.

Part of the draw of electric vehicles revolves around their mechanical simplicity. That was the original sales pitch for the muscle car, too. But, instead of offering a sports car with a tuned chassis and remarkable aerodynamics, which adds significant development cost, American car companies just stuffed larger engines in everyday family cars. Bam. Muscle cars, baby.

Let’s assume Dodge uses the muscle car mold and makes a low-cost, high-power, straight-line electric racer — think Dodge Challenger rather than Toyota Supra. This mold has several distinct characteristics.

One, burnouts. Muscle cars are known for their burnouts, which themselves are a byproduct of an overabundance of power, lack of chassis refinement and utter disregard for your tires’ tread. Dodge teased this capability in its announcement tweet, showing a vehicle smoking all four tires. Dodge knows its audience.

Muscle car owners expect to be able to tune, tweak and modify their vehicles at home. That’s one of the main appeals to this type of vehicle. Straight from the factory, muscle cars are capable, but the buyer understands the automaker omitted certain parts to keep the sticker price as low as possible. Want better traction? Swap out the tires. Want better cornering? Add stiffer sway bars. An electric muscle car must be modifiable — something that’s increasingly rare as performance is more often optimized through software tweaks than mechanical upgrades.

Tesla has long been criticized for its aversion to vehicle modifications and at-home repairs. This is an opportunity for Dodge and others. A large swath of car buyers expect to be able to wrench on their vehicles, and I’ll wager this demographic is critical to Dodge’s future growth.

These unique characteristics of muscle cars are what make the segment so appealing for Dodge. The auto brand struggles to keep up with the market with a stable of stale vehicles, and the muscle car’s low-cost formula could allow for cheaper development costs.

And keeping development costs low is what Dodge needs right now.

Dodge is owned by Stellantis, a new automobile conglomerate formed when FCA, Dodge’s old owner, merged with the Dutch automaker PSA Group. It gets more confusing when Dodge’s previous owner is mentioned. Once always mentioned along with the giants of GM and Ford, Chrysler previously owned Dodge but is now just another brand in the Stellantis family. Together, Dodge and Chrysler offer only six vehicles, and none have seen significant updates in years.

An electric muscle car could revitalize the brand in the same way the Bronco is revitalizing Ford.

Look at Ford. The 2021 Bronco is a hit because it lines up nicely with consumer’s expectations of a Bronco. People hardly remember the engine and chassis issues that were long associated with the Bronco. Instead, people remember a durable off-roader (and slow car chases), so Ford made a durable off-roader loaded with modern conveniences.

Dodge should do the same with its upcoming electric muscle car. But, of course, calling a vehicle a muscle car sets certain expectations that Dodge would be wise to deliver.

Likewise, Ford is also selling a four-door electric Mustang, and its heavily rumored Chevrolet is preparing a similar electric SUV Corvette. While most people love the electric Mustang (I don’t), they also concede the Mustang naming muddles the branding.

What is it going to be called? Automakers are increasingly turning to their back catalog for new branding. GM revived the Hummer for its first electric truck, and Ford brought back the Bronco and F-150 Lightning. Dodge has a lot of history with muscle cars. There’s the legendary Charger Daytona (perfect if the upcoming car is built on the current Charger or Challenger), the low cost Coronet and its upgraded sibling Coronet Super Bee, the Dodge Stealth, or Dodge Polara — though maybe Polara is too close to the EV maker, Polestar. Or Dodge could turn to names used by Plymouth, another brand previously owned by Chrysler. So there’s the Plymouth Roadrunner, Duster, Fury, and Barracuda, too.

Last question: How will Dodge make the car sound like a muscle car? Hopefully, they won’t. I’m here for feeling performance rather than hearing it — and I drive a big F-150 with a custom exhaust.

Stellantis, the global automaker born out of a merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker Groupe PSA, will invest €30 billion ($35.5 billion) in electric vehicles and new software over the next four years as part of a major push to transition away from internal combustion engines.

The world’s fourth-largest automaker joins rivals such as General Motors and Volkswagen in earmarking billions toward EV investments through the first part of the decade. Among the company’s plans are manufacturing an electric Dodge muscle car and an electric Ram pickup truck, both by 2024. Stellantis also said it would offer an electric or plug-in model in every vehicle segment under its Jeep brand by 2025.

The ultimate aim, CEO Carlos Tavares said during the company’s inaugural EV Day event on Thursday, is to hit sales targets for low-emission vehicles (including plug-ins) of 70% in Europe and 40% in the U.S. by 2030.

Stellantis has been slower to electrify than some of its rivals, perhaps due in part to its lineup’s best-sellers skewing toward performance and heavy-duty models. The company designs and manufactures cars across over a dozen brands, including Jeep, Chrysler, Ram Trucks and Dodge. Its major brands in Europe include Peugeot, Vauxhall, Citroen and Fiat.

In order to deliver on its electrification strategy, Stellantis executives said that the company will also manufacture 130 gigawatt hours of battery capacity by 2025 and around 260 gigawatt hours across five factories in North America and Europe by 2030. The company will use two battery chemistries by 2024, with the goal of developing solid-state battery technology by 2026.

Image Credits: Stellantis (opens in a new window)

The car giant is also developing a portfolio of four dedicated electric vehicle platforms: Small, for city driving; Medium, for premium vehicles; Large, for performance and muscle models; and Frame, for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles. The platforms will have a range of up to 300 miles for Small and 500 miles for Large and Frame. The aim is to decrease battery costs by 40% by 2024, Stellantis CFO Richard Palmer said.

Morgan Stanley has joined the growing list of Accellion hack victims — more than six months after attackers first breached the vendor’s 20-year-old file-sharing product. 

The investment banking firm — which is no stranger to data breaches — confirmed in a letter this week that attackers stole personal information belonging to its customers by hacking into the Accellion FTA server of its third-party vendor, Guidehouse. In a letter sent to those affected, first reported by Bleeping Computer, Morgan Stanley admitted that threat actors stole an unknown number of documents containing customers’ addresses and Social Security numbers.

The documents were encrypted, but the letter said that the hackers also obtained the decryption key, though Morgan Stanley said the files did not contain passwords that could be used to access customers’ financial accounts.

“The protection of client data is of the utmost importance and is something we take very seriously,” a Morgan Stanley spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are in close contact with Guidehouse and are taking steps to mitigate potential risks to clients.”

Just days before news of the Morgan Stanley data breach came to light, an Arkansas-based healthcare provider confirmed it had also suffered a data breach as a result of the Accellion attack. Just weeks before that, so did UC Berkely. While data breaches tend to grow past initially reported figures, the fact that organizations are still coming out as Accellion victims more than six months later shows that the business software provider still hasn’t managed to get a handle on it. 

The cyberattack was first uncovered on December 23, and Accellion initially claimed the FTA vulnerability was patched within 72 hours before it was later forced to explain that new vulnerabilities were discovered. Accellion’s next (and final) update came in March, when the company claimed that all known FTA vulnerabilities — which authorities say were exploited by the FIN11 and the Clop ransomware gang — have been remediated.

But incident responders said Accellion’s response to the incident wasn’t as smooth as the company let on, claiming the company was slow to raise the alarm in regards to the potential danger to FTA customers.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, for example, raised concerns about the timeliness of alerts it received from Accellion. In a statement, the bank said it was reliant on Accellion to alert it to any vulnerabilities in the system — but never received any warnings in December or January.

“In this instance, their notifications to us did not leave their system and hence did not reach the Reserve Bank in advance of the breach. We received no advance warning,” said RBNZ governor Adrian Orr.

This, according to a discovery made by KPMG International, was due to the fact that the email tool used by Accellion failed to work: “Software updates to address the issue were released by the vendor in December 2020 soon after it discovered the vulnerability. The email tool used by the vendor, however, failed to send the email notifications and consequently the Bank was not notified until 6 January 2021,” the KPMG’s assessment said. 

“We have not sighted evidence that the vendor informed the Bank that the System vulnerability was being actively exploited at other customers. This information, if provided in a timely manner is highly likely to have significantly influenced key decisions that were being made by the Bank at the time.”

In March, back when it was releasing updates about the ongoing breach, Accellion was keen to emphasize that it was planning to retire the 20-year-old FTA product in April and that it had been working for three years to transition clients onto its new platform, Kiteworks. A press release from the company in May says 75% of Accellion customers have already migrated to Kiteworks, a figure that also highlights the fact that 25% are still clinging to its now-retired FTA product. 

This, along with Accellion now taking a more hands-off approach to the incident, means that the list of victims could keep growing. It’s currently unclear how many the attack has claimed so far, though recent tallies put the list at around 300. This list includes Qualys, Bombardier, Shell, Singtel, the University of Colorado, the University of California, Transport for New South Wales, Office of the Washington State Auditor, grocery giant Kroger and law firm Jones Day.

“When a patch is issued for software that has been actively exploited, simply patching the software and moving on isn’t the best path,” Tim Mackey, principal security strategist at the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center, told TechCrunch. “Since the goal of patch management is protecting systems from compromise, patch management strategies should include reviews for indications of previous compromise.”

Accellion declined to comment.

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as engaging as Minecraft or Fortnite, but with a focus on education.

In February, PowerZ launched the first version of its game on computers. It doesn’t have a lot of content, but the company wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible. Aimed at kids who are 6 years old and over, PowerZ teleports the player into a fantasy world with cute dragons and magic spells.

“The idea is really to build a sort of Harry Potter,” co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me. “You have this world that is super nice and very interesting. Like with Hogwarts, you want to come back regularly. And the story will progress over a very long time.”

15,000 children tried out the first chapter. On average, they have spent 4 hours in the game. I asked whether Freund was satisfied with those metrics. He told me he thought his company’s vision was “completely validated.”

Bpifrance Digital Venture, RAISE Ventures and Bayard are investing in today’s round. Existing investors Educapital, Hachette Livres, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Michaël Benabou are also investing once again.

Now, it’s time to add content, expand to other platforms and launch new languages. When it comes to content, the company wants to partner with other game studios. They’re going to create new islands and design games that make you learn new stuff. Zero Games, Opal Games and ArkRep will contribute to PowerZ.

When those new chapters are available, kids will be able to practice mental calculation, geometry, vocabulary, foreign languages, sign language, but also astronomy, photography, architecture, sculpture, cooking, wildlife, yoga, etc.

“Basically we want to position ourselves as a publisher,” Freund said. “The only thing we want to keep in-house is the main storyline.”

As for new platforms, PowerZ is launching its game on the iPad this week. The company realized that launching on computers wasn’t the right move. Adults are already using computers or you don’t want to leave your kid on the computer. That’s why PowerZ is starting with the iPad. The iPhone will follow suite. In 2022, the company expects to release its game on the Nintendo Switch and potentially other game consoles.

While the game is only available in French for now, the startup is also thinking about launching an English version soon.

“The game is completely free right now. The idea that we have to monetize it is to copy every other games with in-app purchases for visual items,” Freund said.

When you look further down the roadmap, PowerZ has some radically ambitious goals. Freund believes that educational games will become mainstream really quickly. Many companies don’t want to develop this kind of stuff because screens are bad for kids.

“If we just say that screens are bad, we’ll end up with an Amazon product to learn math. I feel a sense of urgency to develop an educational platform for screens that can scale,” Freund told me.

PowerZ wants to reach hundreds of thousands of children as quickly as possible. And just like Fortnite or Minecraft, the company believes its game can act as a platform for other stuff that can evolve over time.

As I mentioned at the close of last week’s roundup, the biggest issue in writing this roundup on Wednesday is that sometimes news breaks on Thursday morning. Again, I’m asking the robotics community to try not make any big headlines on Thursdays. That would really help a guy out.

Last week, news broke that Zebra Technologies had purchased Fetch. I’ve written about the latter several times over the past couple years, and spoken to founder Melonee Wise a number of times, as well. Ultimately, it’s not much of a surprise Fetch went the acquisition route. If I were a better man, however, I would have leaned heavily toward an acquisition by some mega-retailer like Walmart or Target.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Everyone is looking for a competitive advantage against Amazon, including those big names. And, of course, they’ve got the deep pockets to purchase a head start. Ultimately, I think a deal like this is better for the industry, at large, given how Amazon’s acquisitions tend to go. The company loves to buy up startups and keep all of that cool technology to itself. I spoke to Wise about the deal, late last week. Some excerpts:

As we were fundraising for our Series D, this opportunity came out of that. I think when you look at it, over the last couple of years, we’ve had a good relationship with them. With the pandemic, there’s been a huge draw for more and more automation technology. Before the pandemic, there were already labor shortages for warehouse and logistics, and the pandemic only exacerbated it. One of the other great things about us joining Zebra is they have a strong go-to-market engine, and they can amplify our sales capability. They’re already in all of the customers we want to be working with. It helps us reach a much broader, wider and deeper audience.

I think it’s complicated. When I started the company, I never really planned on anything. I just wanted to go build something. I mean that in the most sincere way. I wanted to go build something and not fail. And the question is, what does not failing look like? I think the facts are that in the last 20-something years, almost no robotics company has IPO’ed. Now we’re starting to see SPACS, but there hasn’t been a robotics company that’s IPO’ed through the traditional route.

In terms of vision of how we’re thinking about it, Zebra is very excited to kind of make Fetch the centerpiece of this whole new offering that they’re building out. It’s a high strategic priority for them.

Image Credits: Abundant

On the whole, this week marked a pretty substantial slow down in terms of funding announcements. We did get one big bummer news item, as Abundant Robotics is shutting down. Good Fruit Grower got the following statement from CEO Dan Steere,

After a series of promising commercial trials with prototype apple harvesters, the company was unable to raise enough investment funding to continue development and launch a production system.

We’ve reached out for further comment, but the company’s understandably not champing at the bit to discuss where things went wrong. It’s easier, of course, to celebrate the successes than it is to dissect the failures, the latter happens much more often than we can to admit in this field. Often they arrive early in the process and don’t really warrant a lot of ink.

Abundant’s different. From the outside, the Bay Area company appeared to be on the right track toward becoming a dominant name in robotic fruit harvesting. The company had raised a total of $12 million, including Series A in 2017. Granted, that’s not an insignificant amount of time to go between raises and bringing robotics to production is extraordinarily difficult.

What’s more surprising is that the company couldn’t drum up enough interest to get it across the finish line during the pandemic, when, anecdotally, interest in robotics and automation seems to be heating up. Certainly that applies to farming, which has experienced series labor shortages over the past year. More insight into that soon, I hope.

Sarcos, meanwhile, keeps finding its way into the news cycle. This week, it’s the launch of the teleoperated Guardian XT. The company’s exoskeletons get all the love (thanks in no small part to some high profile partnerships), but company also produces non-body mounted robotics. Per the company,

The SenSuit controller enables the Guardian XT robot to mimic the operator’s movements in real-time. It is an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based motion tracker that communicates with the robot and leverages Sarcos’ proprietary force feedback technologies. The company also plans to integrate a VR- or AR-based HMD to provide remote visual and situational awareness to the operator. The Guardian XT robot is equipped with 3-degrees of freedom end effectors that enable dexterous control of trade tools and materials, including hand-held power tools, welding and cutting equipment, inspection and test equipment, parts and components, hazardous materials, and retail inventory goods, amongst others.

The system is capable of lifting and moving up to 200 pounds and will hit the market by the end of next year.

Image Credits: Fusion

Meanwhile, robotic surgery company Fusion Robotics announced this week announced plans to merge with Adaptive Geometry, another tech company specializing in spinal surgery technology. The two companies will combine to create the perfectly nondescript Accelus (frankly, Fusion is a pretty good name for two combined companies, but maybe that’s just me).

“Accelus will create opportunities for wide-scale adoption of robotics in spine surgery—both in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs)—by addressing previous constraints related to cost and efficiency,” Accelus Chris Walsh said in a release. “Both Fusion Robotics and Integrity Implants have built enabling technology platforms that create a force multiplier for spinal care. Our products and culture create accessibility to fit each patient’s anatomy, each surgeon’s preferred approach, and each healthcare facility’s space and budget limitations, embodying our core principle of access without compromise.”

That’s a lot of business talk this week, so here’s a fun video of Boston Dynamics doing fun Boston Dynamics stuff, presumably to welcome their new Hyundai overlords:

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin.

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Circle will not direct list or pursue a traditional IPO. Instead, the company is combining with Concord Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, or blank-check company. The transaction values the crypto shop at an enterprise value of $4.5 billion and an equity value of around $5.4 billion.

The offering marks an interesting moment for the crypto market. Unlike Coinbase, which operates a trading platform and generates fees in a manner that is widely understood by public-market investors, Circle’s offerings are a bit more exotic.

Circle’s SPAC presentation details a company whose core business deals with a stablecoin — a crypto asset pegged to an external currency, in this case, the U.S. dollar — and a set of APIs that provide crypto-powered financial services to other companies. It also owns SeedInvest, an equity crowdfunding platform, though Circle appears to generate the bulk of its anticipated revenues from its other businesses.

For more on the deal itself, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet has a piece focused on the transaction. Here, we’ll dig into the company’s investor presentation, talk about its business model, and riff on its historical and anticipated results and valuation multiples.

In short, we get to have a little fun. Let’s begin.

How Circle’s business works

As noted above, Circle has three main business operations. Here’s how it describes them in its deck:

Image Credits: Circle investor presentation

Let’s consider each one, starting with USDC.

Stablecoins have become popular in recent quarters. Because they are pegged to an external currency, they operate as an interesting form of cash inside the crypto world. If you want to have on-chain buying power, but don’t want to have all your value stored in more volatile, and tax-inducing, cryptos that you might have to sell to buy anything else, stablecoins can operate as a more stable sort of liquid currency. They can combine the stability of the U.S. dollar, say, and the crypto world’s interesting financial web.