Author: azeeadmin

To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of virtual, interactive digital twins of real spaces available for researchers and their voracious young AIs.

On Facebook’s side the big advance is in two parts: the new Habitat 2.0 training environment and the dataset they created to enable it. You may remember Habitat from a couple years back; in the pursuit of what it calls “embodied AI,” which is to say AI models that interact with the real world, Facebook assembled a number of passably photorealistic virtual environments for them to navigate.

Many robots and AIs have learned things like movement and object recognition in idealized, unrealistic spaces that resemble games more than reality. A real-world living room is a very different thing from a reconstructed one. By learning to move about in something that looks like reality, an AI’s knowledge will transfer more readily to real-world applications like home robotics.

But ultimately these environments were only polygon-deep, with minimal interaction and no real physical simulation — if a robot bumps into a table, it doesn’t fall over and spill items everywhere. The robot could go to the kitchen, but it couldn’t open the fridge or pull something out of the sink. Habitat 2.0 and the new ReplicaCAD dataset change that with increased interactivity and 3D objects instead of simply interpreted 3D surfaces.

Simulated robots in these new apartment-scale environments can roll around like before, but when they arrive at an object, they can actually do something with it. For instance if a robot’s task is to pick up a fork from the dining room table and go place it in the sink, a couple years ago picking up and putting down the fork would just be assumed, since you couldn’t actually simulate it effectively. In the new Habitat system the fork is physically simulated, as is the table it’s on, the sink it’s going to, and so on. That makes it more computationally intense, but also way more useful.

They’re not the first to get to this stage by a long shot, but the whole field is moving along at a rapid clip and each time a new system comes out it leapfrogs the others in some ways and points at the next big bottleneck or opportunity. In this case Habitat 2.0’s nearest competition is probably AI2’s ManipulaTHOR, which combines room-scale environments with physical object simulation.

Where Habitat has it beat is in speed: according to the paper describing it, the simulator can run roughly 50-100 times faster, which means a robot can get that much more training done per second of computation. (The comparisons aren’t exact by any means and the systems are distinct in other ways.)

The dataset used for it is called ReplicaCAD, and it’s essentially the original room-level scans recreated with custom 3D models. This is a painstaking manual process, Facebook admitted, and they’re looking into ways of scaling it, but it provides a very useful end product.

The original scanned room, above, and ReplicaCAD 3D recreation, below.

More detail and more types of physical simulation are on the roadmap — basic objects, movements, and robotic presences are supported, but fidelity had to give way for speed at this stage.

Matterport is also making some big moves in partnership with Facebook. After making a huge platform expansion over the last couple years, the company has assembled an enormous collection of 3D-scanned buildings. Though it has worked with researchers before, the company decided it was time to make a larger part of its trove available to the community.

“We’ve Matterported every type of physical structure in existence, or close to it. Homes, high-rises, hospitals, office spaces, cruise ships, jets, Taco Bells, McDonalds… and all the info that is contained in a digital twin is very important to research,” CEO RJ Pittman told me. “We thought for sure this would have implications for everything from doing computer vision to robotics to identifying household objects. Facebook didn’t need any convincing… for Habitat and embodied AI it is right down the center of the fairway.”

To that end it created a dataset, HM3D, of a thousand meticulously 3D-captured interiors, from the home scans that real estate browsers may recognize to businesses and public spaces. It’s the largest such collection that has been made widely available.

Image Credits: Matterport

The environments, which are scanned an interpreted by an AI trained on precise digital twins, are dimensionally accurate to the point where, for example, exact numbers for window surface area or total closet volume can be calculated. It’s a helpfully realistic playground for AI models, and while the resulting dataset isn’t interactive (yet) it is very reflective of the real world in all its variance. (It’s distinct from the Facebook interactive dataset but could form the basis for an expansion.)

“It is specifically a diversified dataset,” said Pittman. “We wanted to be sure we had a rich grouping of different real world environments — you need that diversity of data if you want to get the most mileage out of it training an AI or robot.”

All the data was volunteered by the owners of the spaces, so don’t worry that it’s been sucked up unethically by some small print. Ultimately, Pittman explained, the company wants to create a larger, more parameterized dataset that can be accessed by API — realistic virtual spaces as a service, basically.

“Maybe you’re building a hospitality robot, for bed and breakfasts of a certain style in the U.S — wouldn’t it be great to be able to get a thousand of those?” he mused. “We want to see how far we can push advancements with this first dataset, get those learnings, then continue to work with the research community and our own developers and go from there. This is an important launching point for us.”

Both datasets will be open and available for researchers everywhere to use.

Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee directory, which you can access from inside Slack. All of these appear to have been designed with the changing nature of work in mind.

Let’s start with Slack Huddles, the audio tool that lets you have a real-time conversation with someone in Slack instead of typing out all of your thoughts. This will be much easier for people who find typing challenging, but the company also believes it will allow more spontaneous discussion, which mimics being in the office, at least to some degree.

“Huddles is a light-weight, audio-first way of communicating right in Slack. [It] recreates the spontaneous and serendipitous interactions that happen outside of scheduled meetings,” Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack explained in a press briefing yesterday.

As companies continue to introduce more flexible working models, they will have to adjust how they work. Huddles is one way of thinking about that, says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

“Some things can be synchronous, but only take three minutes. Instead of [scheduling a meeting for] next Tuesdays from 11:30 to 12 and [using] the whole half hour because that’s what we scheduled, it’s two or three minutes, right now, And if the conversation fizzles out in the Huddle you leave it open, maybe someone joins later and says something, which you wouldn’t do on a call,” Butterfield said.

And recognizing that not everyone will be able to hear, the new tool includes real-time transcription.

The company has also been talking about providing some kind of video message capability since last year. The idea is almost like a video voicemail or an Instagram Story where you shoot a short video and post it in Slack. “We’ve been thinking about it and we believe that by giving people a way to expressively and asynchronously share and consume information we can enable people to be more flexible in how they work, and reduce the need for video meetings,” Yehoshua said.

The new feature will enable Slack users to play back video, voice and screen recordings natively in Slack. People can record and upload short clips into a channel or DM, “enabling others to watch and respond on their own schedule,” she explained.  While this feature isn’t ready to release yet, Yehoshua reported it is being piloted and will be available to paid teams some time in the coming months.

The last piece is based on the Rimeto acquisition, which Slack bought last year with an eye toward upping their corporate directory piece. The Rimeto product has in fact been repurposed as Slack Atlas, a corporate directory that users can access right in Slack, rather than moving to another program to find that information. It’s another way Slack can keep users in Slack to find the information that they need, while avoiding context switching. This is currently in limited customer testing, but should be available some time later this year, according to the company.

Slack first announced these tools last year, initially saying they were experimental, but quickly shifting them to the product road map. Butterfield appeared in a Clubhouse interview in March with former TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine, who is now a SignalFire investor ostensibly to talk about the future of work, but he also went into more detail about these tools for the first time.

It’s hard not to wrap this discussion into the future of work, and indeed Slack’s future as part of Salesforce, which bought the communications tool for $27 billion last year. Work is changing and Slack is looking to be a broader part of that solution, whatever the future holds.

Drone delivery startup Zipline, a company that got its start delivering medical supplies across Africa, has raised $250 million in new funding. This latest round has vaulted the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion and will fuel further expansion of its logistics networks in Africa and the United States.

Zipline made a name for itself first in Rwanda and then in Ghana, where it delivered blood, vaccines, life-saving medications and other essential supplies using autonomous electric drones. The company, which started work on drone delivery in 2013, is vertically integrated – meaning it designs and manufactures the unmanned drones, the logistics software, and the accompanying launch and landing system. Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch that this was more by necessity than design, noting that when the company first started developing its drone tech, it quickly realized that off-the-shelf components weren’t reliable or didn’t integrate well.

“Over time Zipline has had to basically rip every single thing out of the system, whether it was the flight computer [. . .] or the battery pack, or the aircraft itself. And we’ve had to build every single one of those things completely from scratch.”

Rinaudo stressed that Zipline doesn’t think of itself as a drone company, but rather an instant logistics provider. And while the company iteratively improves its autonomous drone model, much of its successes over the past five years have been related to building out its logistics network. After what Rinaudo described as a challenging first year of operations in Rwanda in 2016, the company has since partnered with logistics company UPS in that East African country, the Toyota Group in Japan, and it’s started working with Nigeria’s Kaduna and Cross River States. Here in the United States, the company has partnered with Novant Health to deliver medical equipment and personal protective gear in North Carolina and, notably, with retail giant Walmart delivering health and wellness products.

Unlike many companies that suffered during the pandemic, for Zipline there was an obvious opportunity to further accelerate its operations – not only delivering personal protective equipment but also COVID-19 vaccines. The company said it is planning to deliver 2.4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.

Zipline sees an additional opportunity in delivering healthcare items, such as pharmaceutical prescriptions, directly to people’s homes. “[Hospitals] really see instant logistics as the other half of telepresence,” Rinaudo said. “If you can have someone quickly pull out their phone and talk to a doctor, then the other half of the equation is, can we get you what you need?”

Image Credits: Zipline

The company’s currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration to move from operating under an emergency waiver – granted by regulators during the pandemic – to a full commercial operating certification. One advantage Zipline may have over competitors in the FAA’s certification process is that it has many thousands of hours of safe flight data to show that it’s system is sound. It would be the first drone delivery company to receive such a certification.

In the long run, Zipline may start to focus on other industries, but for now it’s laser focused on healthcare, Rinaudo said. He noted that in the last few months alone the company has signed service contracts for five new distribution centers in Nigeria and four in Ghana, as well as “multiple new service contracts” with hospital systems in the United States. This latest funding round, led by Baillie Gifford and with support from returning investors Temasek and Katalyst Ventures, and new investors Fidelity, Intercorp, Emerging Capital Partners and Reinvest Capital, will be used to build out the infrastructure for these new contracts.

Rinaudo said the aim is for Zipline to serve the majority of single-family detached homes across the United States over the coming three years or so.

“The fact that so many big companies like Toyota and Walmart are starting to make big bets in this instant logistics space, I think is a pretty clear sign that people realize this is coming,” Rinaudo said. “There’s a tidal wave of transformation coming. The exciting thing about it is that it’s going to totally transform the way that healthcare systems work, it’s going to totally transform the way that economic systems work, and it’s going to make it possible for logistics to serve people equally.”

This morning Gusto, a unicorn that sells payroll and benefits management software, announced that it will now offer part of its service via an API to external platforms. The new product, dubbed Gusto Embedded Payroll, will allow vertical SaaS companies to provide payroll support to their own customers.

The move to provide elements of its service through other firms’ offerings could bolster Gusto’s growth rate; for partner platforms the ability to provide payroll services may make their overall offering more attractive to small businesses.

According to Gusto co-founder and chief product officer Tomer London, vertical SaaS companies are offering effectively a “business in a box” service today, making the addition of payroll to their own services a somewhat obvious move, as paying workers is a key element of running a company. Indeed, for many companies payroll is their largest expense.

In the same interview, Gusto co-founder and CEO Josh Reeves indicated that more of Gusto’s services could become accessible via externally facing APIs over time. Gusto was built using internal APIs to connect abstracted front and backends, London told TechCrunch, so much of Gusto could eventually become accessible by third-party developers without infinite lift by the company.

That Gusto, formerly ZenPayroll, is starting with payroll services is not a huge surprise given its history. What it adds next is a more interesting question. The company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars while private, including $200 million in 2019. Gusto was last valued at $3.8 billion in 2019, according to PitchBook data.

The move to offer elements of the unicorn’s core service package to other companies via a programming hook was not a snap decision, the co-founders told TechCrunch. Instead, it was something that was discussed over a multi-year period while Gusto waited for the right market timing. The rise of vertical SaaS provided the correct moment in the company’s view. Which seems reasonable, frankly. An example will help explain why.

One early Gusto partner for its embedded payroll offering is Squire, a startup that TechCrunch has covered extensively. Squire is a vertical SaaS shop that makes software for barber shops. It raised $8 million in 2019, $27 million in early 2020 and another $45 million later in the year.

The company is a good example of the build targeted software for a particular industry model (here’s a recent startup example, and another). By implementing Gusto’s new embedded payroll service, Squire can offer its current and future customers a more complete digital application to help them run their IRL businesses. And Gusto will be able to drive more revenue from the same code it already uses to power its original offering.

The move by Gusto to open more of its service to other companies while also offering its traditional product fits neatly into a rising trend that TechCrunch has observed regarding more and more startups offering their service not via a managed service, but instead through an API. Gusto is not a young company in startup terms, but the adaptation of its service tracks with what we’re seeing from other technology upstarts.

According to the co-founders, its embedded payroll service will sport similar economics to its main offering. Gusto proper, Reeves told TechCrunch, grew 50% last year.

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

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon who now makes her living as comedian and podcast host, to talk about the creator economy — including our disdain for that horrid phrasing. You may know her from her cheeky, on point shorts about tech culture (and tech Twitter).

Gay gave us an honest look into the life of creator helper turned creator actual, admitting that her current job path wasn’t possible in 2018. Somewhere, somehow, a VC in the distance heard that admittance as an opportunity to back a creator economy startup.

Here’s what we got into:

• Gay’s experience at Patreon, and why she left. Alex had some thoughts on the theme. It appears that growing list of creator-focused tools could increase the vapor pressure of folks who write, talk, art, and otherwise create, regarding their present-day employment.
• Why one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to the diverse world of folks engaged in creative work. We also dipped our toes into the issue of indie creators needing to be CEOs as well as artists.
• We chatted on Vibely, a startup that wants to make interactions with creators ~ multi-directional~ and what it says about scaling time.
• We also got into what an average day looks like for a full-time creator-comedian-podcaster, why she’s annoyed with how creators are discussed by founders and investors, and the tooling she hopes to see in the future.
• And, well, we had to ask her if she’s starting a rolling fund too.

All told, if you care about the economics of the creative world and want to add some nuance to your theories about it, it’s a fun episode.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger.

The company — which also works with contractors that work on business properties — is acquiring Aspire Software, a software provider specifically for commercial landscapers. Along with that, ServiceTitan is announcing another $200 million in funding, a Series G that values that company at $9.5 billion.

The funding is being led by a new backer, Thoma Bravo, with other unnamed existing investors participating. (That list includes Sequoia, Tiger Global, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital.)

Los Angeles-based ServiceTitan is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but it comes on the heels of the company raising $500 million only in March (when it was valued at $8.3 billion) — money that it earmarked at the time for acquisitions.

ServiceTitan also confirmed that this is its biggest acquisition yet, which roughly puts this deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Aspire will stay based in Missouri to build out the company further from there.

Aspire itself has some 50,000 customers and sees $4 billion in annualized transactions on its platform across areas like landscaping, snow and ice management, and construction. It has never disclosed a valuation, nor how much money it has raised. The St Louis, MO company was previously backed by growth equity firm Mainsail Partners.

The deal underscores not just how much scale and opportunity remains in building technology to serve the home services space, but also what might be a consolidating trend within that, where a smaller number of companies are building technology for contractors and others in the space working across a number of adjacent and related verticals.

ServiceTitan is already bringing in annual recurring revenues of $250 million — a figure it shared in March and hasn’t updated — and as of that month, it had grown 50% over the preceding year. Part of that growth is based on simply more usage of and demand for its software, but part of it also has to do with the company expanding what it covers.

ServiceTitan got its start in residential plumbing, HVAC and electrical — the areas where the the two founders Ara Mahdessian (CEO) and Vahe Kuzoyan (president) went first because they knew them best from their own family businesses — but expanded into areas like garage door, chimney and other areas, as well as commercial property, on its own steam.

In other markets like landscaping or pest control, the expertise is more specialized, however, so it makes sense to make acquisitions in those areas to bring in that software, and teams to manage and build it, to further diversify the company. (ServicePro, a pest control company, was acquired in February.)

ServiceTitan said that its contractor customers have made more than $20 billion in transactions in the last year, but with the wider industry of contracting repair and maintenance services estimated to be worth $1 trillion, there is obviously a lot more potential. Hence expanding the range of areas covered in the industry.

“Both Aspire and ServiceTitan were born out of a desire to improve the lives of contractors who work tirelessly to serve their communities, but who have historically been underserved by technology,” said Mahdessian in a statement. “Mark and his team at Aspire have more than 500 years of combined experience in the commercial landscaping industry. Just like we built ServiceTitan to solve the problems our fathers faced, it’s that first-hand industry knowledge that has enabled Aspire to build the most powerful software in the industry with the highest customer satisfaction.”

Thoma Bravo has been making some prolific moves to take majority positions in a number of older tech companies in recent weeks (see QAD, Proofpoint and Talend for three examples among others). This, however, is a growth investment that is coming as many wonder when and if ServiceTitan might go public.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to ask Mahdessian about that later but in March he hinted that an IPO might come later this year or latest by the end of 2022, depending on market conditions. This Series G round implies perhaps stretching to the later part of that timeframe.

“As the fastest-growing software solution for the trades with an unrelenting focus on customer success, ServiceTitan is poised to extend its leadership and capture increased market share as the industry exceeds $1 trillion globally,” said Robert (Tre) Sayle, a partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “ServiceTitan’s expansion into landscaping, a more than $100 billion market in the US alone, is an important step on its path to provide all home and commercial tradesmen with the tools they need to grow and manage a successful business. We are excited to partner with ServiceTitan and to leverage our software and operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth and build upon its strong momentum.”

There are a number of companies playing in the wider home services market that speak to the opportunity ahead. Companies like Thumbtack are digging deeper into home management, providing a bridge to contractors to fill out the work needed (and also providing them with the software to do so), while companies like Jobber and BigChange, which have also raised recently, are also looking to build better software to manage individual and fleets of contractors and their fleets.

ServiceTitan, the biggest of the software players now, is likely going to continue making more deals to grow its own empire, but it added that it will also be using the funding to expand more organically, with investments into customer service, R&D, and to hire more people across the board.

The Pittsburgh Strip District, once home to Industrial Age giants Alcoa, Heinz, U.S. Steel and Westinghouse, has evolved over the past decade into a technology and robotics hub, and notably, a testbed of autonomous vehicles.  That activity has more recently spilled out beyond Smallman Street, so-called Robotics Row, past the confines of the Strip District and Lower Lawrenceville and into adjoining neighborhoods to the north and south.

And while, Argo AI, Aurora Innovation (as well as its newly acquired addition Uber ATG) and Motional are the most visible examples of autonomous vehicle testing and development in the city, numerous other AV startups have popped up in the past six years — each one betting that its application will provide the quickest path to commercialization.

Locomation, a startup founded in 2018 that is working on autonomous trucks, is one of them. The co-founders, who met at the National Robotics Engineering Center, an operating unit within Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, believe the smoothest, fastest route to autonomous trucks is to use a human-guided convoy system first. 

Locomation contends that autonomous trucks that can operate without a human safety driver behind the wheel will happen eventually and after considerable validation. But until then, the company is pitching a convoy system, in which a lead driver pilots a truck and another truck follows it autonomously. The autonomous one will also have a driver, but that individual will be resting and is considered a passenger.

“We decided that we needed to expose the (autonomous) system to the real world in a safe and profitable way,” co-founder and CEO Çetin Meriçli told TechCrunch in a recent interview, adding that is how the idea of human-guided autonomous driving came about. “We are still building a Level 4 system with an extremely narrow operational design domain that can drive itself and it doesn’t require a driver in the seat as long as there is a human driven lead track right in front of it.”

Locomation’s starting point is a two-driver, two-truck system for long haul routes. When the lead driver is in place, the following driver is resting in the other vehicle. Both trucks are equipped with a self-driving system so they can periodically swap positions.  However, Meriçli noted that while the lead driver is operating the vehicle, the autonomous system is only assisting the person.

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“There is some automation there, but we don’t think it is a good idea to automate the lead truck so much that the lead driver can actually become complacent,” he said. “Keeping the driver engaged enough and at the same time trying to reduce the cognitive load as much as possible is a very delicate balance to hit there.”

The drivers then take over manual driving once they leave the interstate.

The next phase is what Locomation calls the drone follower system designed for shorter haul routes of 250 miles or less. This system involves one driver and two trucks, one lead and one following behind autonomously.

These two human guided convoy concepts will help the company progress to an autonomous system in which trucks operate without humans between hubs on an interstate and then eventually to dock to dock, which would include non-interstate roads.

Locomation has a contract to equip 1,120 Wilson Logistics trucks with its autonomous relay convoy technology over the next five years. The first trucks are expected to be delivered in 2022. The company recently signed an eight-year agreement to supply PGT Trucking with the systems for 1,000 trucks.

Today, Locomation is in test mode, although it has hauled some freight. That means safety drivers are always behind the wheel. Eventually, it will transition to a commercial operation, which Meriçli said the company is aiming to launch in the second half of 2022.

To reach that goal, Locomation is doing what some many others are aiming for: raising money, recruiting talent and expanding. Locomation, which currently operates across the Alleghany River from Pittsburgh’s Strip District, will soon move to larger facility in the Tech Forge section.

Mericli said there are at least two dozen startups working on autonomous vehicle technology in Pittsburgh.

“Most of them are really little hole in the wall operations, maybe a couple of folks,” Mericli said. ” Many of them are actually the second generation or third generation; they started their careers in one of these larger companies, worked there for a number of years, identified a few pain points and either got frustrated with the slow progress or got bit by the entrepreneurship bug.”

“It’s not quite like Silicon Valley, just yet,” Mericli said, adding that it is getting closer to that West Coast hub of tech. “What I see here, which was not the case a couple of years ago, is that now there are some role models, some success stories, some big achievers, like the Argos and Auroras of the world. Hopefully, Locomation is climbing those ladders too. Now young people and new entrepreneurs coming out of the CMU ecosystem, the way they are thinking about their business and their aspirations, it’s getting closer to the Silicon Valley mindset.”

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

My husband and I are both U.S. permanent residents.

Given what we’ve gone through this past year being isolated from loved ones during the pandemic, we’d like to bring my parents and my sister to the U.S. to be close to our family and help out with our children.

Is that possible?

— Symbiotic in Sunnyvale

Dear Symbiotic,

Thanks for your question! Yes, it’s possible to bring your parents and sister to the United States! We have a lot of clients like you who are looking to reunite with their families. My law partner, Anita Koumriqian, and I discussed in a podcast episode what U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents should know about bringing family members to the United States. In that episode, we also discuss certificates of citizenship for individuals who are U.S. citizens born abroad.

As always, I suggest you consult with an experienced immigration attorney in petitioning for green cards for your parents and sister. An immigration attorney can also discuss alternative immigration options for your sister.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Who can I sponsor as a permanent resident? As a U.S. citizen?

U.S. permanent residents — or green card holders — can only sponsor a spouse or unmarried children for a green card. But if you have lived in the U.S. for at least five years as a green card holder, you are eligible to become a U.S. citizen. U.S. citizens who are at least 21 years old can sponsor a broader list of family members for green cards: parents, spouses, children and stepchildren, brothers and sisters.

Online electric micromobility dealership Ridepanda has announced a raise of $3.75 million that the startup will use to build out its engineering, product and design teams to boost its e-commerce and B2B solutions. The company also wants to double down on strategic partnerships with delivery fleets and businesses offering employees commuter benefits if they purchase an electric vehicle. 

Last year, e-bike and e-scooter sales skyrocketed. A Bicycle Association report detailing the impact of COVID-19 on the U.K. cycling economy from January to October 2020 revealed sales of e-bikes more than doubled. Between April and September, they saw a 92% YoY rise in sales. Deloitte has predicted that in 2023, e-bike sales will top 40 million units worldwide, generating over $22 billion. In a market increasingly favorable to electric micromobility options, Ridepanda’s business could lead sales of electric bikes, scooters and mopeds for both consumers and fleets.

“60% of in-car trips take place within zero to five miles, and we think there is a better way to go,” CEO and co-founder of Ridepanda, Chinmay Malaviya, told TechCrunch. “Electric cars is one solution, but we think that our vehicles are cheaper, a lot more accessible, more affordable, more practical, better for traffic congestion, easy to store, easy to park, easy to charge, environmentally friendly and a lot more fun because of the added health benefits.”

Ridepanda, which is based in San Francisco but ships to 48 U.S. states, offers a suite of light electric vehicles, from Segway-Ninebot e-scooters to Aventon e-bikes to Niu e-mopeds. The company would not reveal how many vehicles it’s sold since its founding in 2019, but Malaviya told TechCrunch it’s a four-digit number.

Co-founder and CTO Charlie Depman says e-bikes are the most popular, directly followed by scooters. Mopeds still have some room for growth, but Depman suspects part of the reason for the lower sales in that category are ongoing pandemic-related, supply-chain issues. 

Ridepanda vets each vehicle on its site upfront, ensuring all parts are high quality and easy to repair and replace, something that’s very useful if you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of taking your malfunctioning e-scooter to a traditional bike shop. 

When a user comes to Ridepanda’s site, they can use the refined recommendation engine which helps customers choose the right vehicle for their particular use case, whether that’s commuting in the city or leisure rides in the suburbs and everything in between. 

“A fifth of our customers don’t know what type of vehicle they want when they come to our site,” Depman told TechCrunch. “We give you a ranked set of recommendations for your use case and feature preferences, and you’ll be taken to the vehicle page where we show you more about our dealership and offer maintenance plans, roadside assistance, et cetera to make ownership easy. Basically it’s as easy as it is to own a car, but a lot of this infrastructure isn’t in place for light electric vehicle ownership.”

Vehicles are mailed directly to the customer, who can choose to assemble it or have a trained technician come to the house for home assembly.

It’s this hands-on approach that the company wants to improve with the fresh funding, specifically automating the post-purchase fulfillment process and building out after sales service in the form of its PandaCare app.

“PandaCare has been our flagship dealership offering that has all of the maintenance and roadside assistance and extended warranty,” said Depman. “So ideally this app would entail having access to all those services and being able to call a mechanic to come work on your vehicle. It could also notify you about doing preventative maintenance, or notify us about doing preventative maintenance, so we can help extend the vehicle’s lifetime.” 

Ridepanda is also working on creating a more personalized geographic approach on the product side. Laws and regulations around these vehicles differ from state to state, as do potential rebates and purchase incentives. 

In February, Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon introduced the Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (E-BIKE) Act, which would give a 30% refundable tax credit on the purchase of a new e-bike. The bill hasn’t yet made its way through Congress, but if it passes, and there’s good reason to think it might, Ridepanda hopes to be able to help facilitate the corresponding rise in sales. 

Malaviya said Ridepanda is also partnering with the county of San Mateo’s utility provider Peninsula Clean Energy to roll out local e-bike rebates, helping low income communities access them at the point of purchase. 

“We are very excited to see how we can play a role as a tech partner, as well as a choice platform for consumers in terms of integrating and making it very seamless and easy for folks to take advantage of these rebates and subsidies out there,” said Malaviya.

The $3.75 million round, which is an extension of the company’s seed funding last year, is led by Porsche Ventures, Yamaha and Proeza Ventures, with participation from angel investor Toby Sun, co-founder of Lime, and Silicon Valley VC General Catalyst, according to Malaviya. 

“There’s a lot we can gain from these partnerships,” said Malaviya. “From Yamaha, how do you manage dealerships to supply chains to even actually getting access to the bikes and mopeds? Same with Porsche. They also released a high-end e-bike and we’re excited to also work with them in accessing dealerships and the product, and also the branding piece. And Proeza, we’re pretty excited for all the supply chain expertise we can gain. What is also key about these folks is Porshe’s HQ is in Germany, Yamaha in Japan and Proeza in Latin America. As we look to go outside of the U.S., this could be very helpful.”

Ro, a direct-to-consumer virtual care company, has scooped up Kit, an at-home diagnostics company with an array of customizable products, from finger prick blood tests to weight measurement tools. The price was undisclosed.

Ro co-founder Zachariah Reitano said that he first approached Kit as a potential customer, hoping to integrate its quality testing into its platform. Him and Kit’s co-founders, Philip Fung and Erik Salazar, bonded over shared missions to become a vertically-integrated primary care platform, as well as the current issues that stop consumers from accessing care. The synergy eventually drove Ro to scoop up the 17-month old business.

Kit partners with health insurers, clinical trials, self-insured employers and telehealth platforms to create customizable at-home diagnostic tests. It essentially serves as a white-label solution for physicians, giving them an ordering portal for them to request and tweak the tests that can eventually be delivered to consumers. The company’s in-network approach comes as a contrast to Ro’s vision of direct-to-consumer healthcare, so it will be key to see how Kit customers are impacted by the transaction and if You can bring down prices to hit consumer-friendly benchmarks.

Reitano stressed Kit’s consumer-friendly UX. Consumers will receive a Kit box on their doorstep, with steps to download the Kit app so they can get step-by-step guidance on how to self-administer their test. There’s other bits within the box, such as a hand warmer to increase blood flow or a piece of foam to practice on (instead of skin).

Image Credits: Ro/Kit

“When I first used Kit, I genuinely felt like I was living in the future,” Reitano said. “And that doesn’t happen very frequently.” He declined to name specific competitors, but said that other at-home diagnostic companies have “processes that feel very antiquated” with pamphlets and confusing instructions. Two of the leading players in the at-home testing space are Everlywell and LetsGetChecked, which both have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital. Kit raised only a $3.3 million seed round before getting acquired, with investments from Sherpalo Ventures, South Park Commons, Slow Ventures and Village Global, per Crunchbase. 

“There’s a fragmentation of care, fragmentation of data and providers aren’t kept in the loop,” Reitano said. “And we have so much work to do, but Kit is such an important and essential piece in that infrastructure to again bring more and more of a patient’s care under the same roof.”

As part of the acquisition, Ro has added its first lab to its brand. It will now have access to Kit’s CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited lab, which it owns and operates in San Francisco, CA.

Ro’s acquisition of Kit is its third acquisition in the past 12 months. In December 2020, it acquired Workpath, an in-home care API that allows it to send professionals to a patient’s home or conduct diagnostic tests – which will eventually be broadened by Kit’s product. In May 2021, Ro bought Modern Fertility for north of $225 million, which will help it add fertility testing and proactive, reproductive health services to its women’s health offerings. Modern Fertility offers a $129 hormone test for consumers to take at home, a product that will jive with Kit’s host of services.

Becoming a mass consolidator in the digital health space was a hope, not an expectation, says Reitano. From a technical perspective, Ro is now juggling the integration of three startups into its service -with perhaps even more acquisitions on the way. Naturally, the company could face friction when trying to integrate new and existing customers without breaking service – and it could similarly find that lowering costs of high quality, high touch products like diagnostics may not be as possible as generic drugs.

Still, Reitano thinks that the big opportunity for any company that joins his company is that Ro has scale, with millions of patients across 50 states. Scale can reduce costs, and in this case, supercharge an 16-month old company into a brand that is most recently valued at $5 billion.