Author: azeeadmin

The other week at TC Sessions: Mobility, I spoke to a trio of executives at top automotive companies about why they’re all so bullish about robotics. There are the obvious implications, of course. Automakers have long employed robotics for manufacturing – they were really ahead of the curve on those concerns about automating job loss. And then there’s the fact that self-driving cars are effectively robots.

Beyond that, however, it’s clear that car companies see robotics as a key investment in their future. What really struck me about the conversation, is how differently the three companies – Hyundai, Ford and Toyota – are approaching the space. If nothing else, it’s a sign that there’s plenty of opportunity here.

We wrote quite a bit about Ford’s ambitions in the category several roundups ago, including an interview with Mario Santillo, who joined us for the recent panel. As evidenced by the company’s recent investment in University of Michigan, Ford’s approach is largely research-based. The company wants to be in on the ground floor both in terms of technology and talent. Though when I pressed Santillo about acquisitions, however, (specifically as it pertains to Digit-maker, Agility), he told me, “that’s always something we’re looking at.” So don’t rule it of, especially as other car companies begin to lockdown big names in the category.

Hyundai, of course, made one of the biggest robotics acquisitions in recent memory, picking up Boston Dynamics after its short stint in the Softbank portfolio (the investment firm remains a shareholder). Of course, that post-Google time has been important for the company, seeing the commercialization of Spot and the upcoming sale of Stretch. Hyundai’s Ernestine Fu shed some more light for us on the deal, which officially closed this week,

With New Horizon Studios, the mandate is reimagining what you can do when you combine robotics with traditional wheeled locomotion, like walking robots and walking vehicles. Obviously the technology that [Boston Dynamics] has put together plays a key role in enabling those sorts of concepts to come to life.

As we discussed, the driving force in the Toyota Research Institute’s interest in the category Japan’s aging population. Eldercare forms the basis of much of what the company does in robotics, including some home robotics research that it showed off this week – specifically how its imaging can handle reflective and transparent surfaces. Both have traditionally been tricky for robotic systems.

As TRI’s Max Bajracharya told me,

[I]n Japan, in 20-30 years, the number of people who are over 65 will roughly be the same as the number of people who are under 65. That’s going to have a really interesting socioeconomic impact, in terms of the workforce. It’s probably going to be much older and we at Toyota are looking at how these people can keep doing their jobs, so they can get the fulfillment from doing their jobs or staying at home longer. We don’t want to just replace the people. We really think about how we stay human-centered and amplify people.

We’ve been following NVIDIA’s Isaac software for a while now, and the robotic simulation software is available as an open beta. Built on top of Omniverse, the software is designed to test a wide range of different camera and sensor capabilities for robotics. It’s a fascinate project and potentially a big deal for early-stage robotics startups.

Quick follow up to some funding last week from a robots landscaping company, I asked iRobot what’s going on with their Terra mower, which was delayed amid pandemic-related cuts. The company tells me there’s still no clear timeline for the indefinitely delayed robot.

Miso Robotics, meanwhile, continues to build out from Flippy, the hamburger-flipping robot with an automated beverage dispenser. The machine, created with beverage dispenser manufacturer Lancer, fully automates the process, right down to adding the cap on the cup. No clear timeline on the product yet, however, but it’s fun to see some of these companies branch out in a given sector.

A pair of warehouse automation stories worth highlighting here. Berkshire Grey has unveiled a bunch of new fulfillment robots. Per the company,

This new generation of mobile robots offers increased fulfillment throughput at a lower cost point to enable shorter delivery times and support a larger number of SKUs. Unlike fixed conveyor belts and early generation mobile robots, Berkshire Grey’s intelligent fleets harness the power of AI to orchestrate tens to thousands of mobile robots to pick, organize, and deliver items for a wide variety of customer and store orders.

The company will tell you the same thing as every robotics maker: it’s all about helping retailers compete with the behemoth that is Amazon. Fittingly, the ecommerce giant also showed off some new robots this week. Amazon says it’s utilized 350,000 mobile drive units since the company acquired Kiva Systems, which formed the foundation for its Amazon Robotics wing. The post has caused some to wonder whether, in spite of a head start and some massive funding, whether the company is beginning to fall behind a number of aggressive warehouse robotics startups.

Not a ton of funding news this week, but that should change soon. Hot bot summer is nearly upon us. I feel it in the air. Meantime,  please enjoy this submersible drone designed to track a wide range of creators in the mesopelagic “twilight” zone. Developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mesobot is designed to observe zooplankton, gelatinous animals and more, without disturbing their habitat. Here’s Senior Scientist Dana Yoerger,

We expect that Mesobot will emerge as a vital tool for observing midwater organisms for extended periods, as well as rapidly identifying species observed from vessel biosonars. Because Mesobot can survey, track, and record compelling imagery, we hope to reveal previously unknown behaviors, species interactions, morphological structures, and the use of bioluminescence.

Happy Windows 11 day. Microsoft is giving us our best look yet at its upcoming operating system, which is due out over the holidays. Following a year when the vast majority of our interpersonal communications arrived through computer and phone screens, the company is putting its communication software front and center.

Windows 11 will have Microsoft Teams built in, in a bid to compete more directly with communication platforms like Apple’s FaceTime. And like FaceTime, the key here is cross-device integration, making the service more hardware agnostic as people move from desktop to mobile and back again.

In an era when we’ve got more video chat platforms than we know what to do with, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we might be seeing the final nail in the coffin for the once-mighty Skype, which the company bought way back in 2011 for $8.5 billion. As it tried to do with Skype, Microsoft is looking to blur the line between consumers and professionals with the platform.

All versions of the new operating system will have Teams baked directly into the Start menu.

 

After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it clearly believes that the changes — and especially the redesigned user interface — in this update warrant a new version number.

If you followed along with the development and eventual demise of Windows 10X, Microsoft’s operating system with a simplified user interface for dual- and (eventually) single-screen laptops, a lot of what you’re seeing here will feel familiar, down to the redesigned Start menu. Indeed, if somebody showed you screenshots of Windows 11 and early previews of Windows 10X, you’d have a hard time telling them apart.

As Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay noted in today’s announcement, the overall idea behind the design is to make you feel “an incredible sense of calm,” but at the same time, the Windows team has also worked to make it a lot faster. Windows Updates, for example, are supposed to be 40 percent faster, but Panay also noted that starting up your machine and even browsing should feel much faster.

Besides the new user interface, which makes copious use of translucency and shadows, one of the core new UI features is what Microsoft calls Snap Layouts, which pops up a small widget when you hover over the icon that maximizes your window to allow you to move the window to any corner, something that previously involved dragging your window to the corner of your screen (which was often hard when you used multiple screens).

Developing…

Happs, an app that lets creators stream live video simultaneously across social platforms, has raised $4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally began as a platform for independent journalists, but expanded its mission last year to offer tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network.

The funding was led by Bullpen Capital and Crosslink, Goodwater, Corazon, Rob Hayes of First Round Capital and Bangaly Kaba, previously at Instagram and Sequoia, also participated.

What sets Happs apart from some established competitors in the space is the team’s desire to not only build tools that help video creators produce professional-looking online streams, but to cultivate a kind of meta-community that brings people together from across other social media sites.

“We kind of view this as the essence of what the creator economy is all about,” Happs CEO Mark Goldman told TechCrunch. “The idea of locking creators into an individual platform is a very traditional way of thinking about content creation.”

Like Goldman, the other co-founders, David Neuman and Drew Shepard, come from the media world. Goldman was the founding COO of Current TV, an experimental TV channel that dabbled in user-generated content and eventually sold to Al Jazeera in 2013.

“The whole idea was to democratize media and open it up,” Goldman said of his time working on Current TV, which he connects directly to his interest in building Happs. “[We] loved the creativity unleashed by that.”

Online creators tend to be siloed within the app where they’ve built the biggest community, but Happs wants to empower them to reach as many followers as possible in a platform-agnostic way. For creators, the appeal with multistreaming is maximizing reach while making content efficiently. There’s a risk of alienating YouTube followers at the expense of your Twitch community if you don’t play your cards right, but some savvy content creators have turned toward the model to grow their audiences.

Happs connects people across platforms in a few ways. For one, Happs users can broadcast live to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch simultaneously. The app also collects live comments from all supported social media sites and beams them into its own interface where they appear in a continuous cross-platform stream.

The integrated comment feature is nice built-in option for anyone who’s straddled comments across multiple devices simultaneously while livestreaming, which is no easy feat. When you’re streaming live you can feature a comment so that followers can see it on the screen no matter what platform they’re watching on.

Other companies in the space like OBS, Streamlabs and Restream are focused on the tools part of the equation, offering power users a useful backend for pushing out multi-streamed live video. Streamyard also offers multistreaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms through a simple browser interface.

Unlike those services, Happs feels more like a social network, with familiar features like user profile photos, follower counts and a feed next to a “go live” button. Anyone can use the multi-streaming platform through its iOS or Android apps or a web interface, whether they’re a creator signing up for the tools or a fan looking to support the content they love.

Happs lacks some of its competitors’ bells and whistles, stuff like fancy customized graphics and lower-thirds, but has a few interesting tricks of its own. While streaming live on Happs, you can invite someone else on the app to join your feed for a real-time collaboration. The social networking elements are meant to encourage cross-platform creativity, so a YouTuber and a Twitch personality could hang out together and boost both of their reaches, all while streaming to a bunch of other apps.

Happs also offers users monetization tools from the get-go, with no requirements before they can start making money. That speaks to the app’s appeal for creators who might be less established or just starting out. Happs could be a much harder sell for a popular creator deeply invested in a platform like Twitch, which has rules against multi-streaming for most accounts that are allowed to monetize.

There are a few different ways to monetize. One lets anyone on Happs sponsor a broadcaster through regular monthly payments. The other is a one-off option that lets you chip in an award for any livestream, or to the VOD (video on demand) after the fact. The in-app currency is a virtual coin that users can buy or earn through doing stuff on the app. There are no plans for ads (yet, anyway).

The company will take 30% cut of subscription earnings, though according to Goldman they’ll be waiving those fees for an unspecified period of time to attract people to the platform.

“We raised this round to really build up product and tech team [and] to make the platform much more stable and reliable,” Goldman said. The company is looking forward to leveraging the new resources to “really go out now and get in front of creators so they know Happs exists.”

Few spaces have grown hotter in the past year than the creator economy has, but for all of the new tools available to those starting a podcast, newsletter or storefront, most players have been more focused on building out their own platform opportunity rather than selling full independence to creators.

Spore wants to transform the creator web experience into a Shopify-like basket of tools that users tap into to connect with their audience across a variety of mediums. Spore CEO Austin Hallock is looking to compete with other creator giants for the “link in bio” real estate on social media sites with a white-label option that uses a creator’s own URL, selling an easy-to-build hub focused solely on connecting personalities with their fans.

With Spore, users can manage their audience, communicate with them and analyze what is and isn’t working.

The platform allows for blasting out newsletter updates, podcasts or texts while embedding functionality like storefronts or Discord-like chat feeds into their sites to keep the interactions going 24/7. Creators can also use the tool to convert free subscribers to paying ones, managing the payments flow while also building flows to allow creators to send certain content to their paying fans.

The small startup has raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by SignalFire with additional participation from Justin Kan & Robin Chan’s GOAT, Canaan, Lenny Rachitsky, Nathan Baschez, Justin Waldron and Dave Nemetz, among others.

It’s the first lead investment for former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine in his role at SignalFire (full disclosure: I used to work closely with Josh). Constine started using Spore to build out a site for his regular show on Clubhouse, fellow investor Justin Kan also grew familiar with the team by building out a website for his podcast and YouTube channel.

“I chose Spore as my first lead investment as a VC because it solves creators’ biggest problems by giving them their own white-labeled website they control, and combining all the best content, communication, analytics, and payment tools so creators can spend their time making art instead of being web developers,” Constine tells TechCrunch.

Spore is certainly a small-scale operation at the moment with 4 full-time employees, though they’re hoping to grow their team with this raise. All of these features are in their early MVP stages, but Hallock wants his company to continue building out its utility to creators so that they can build a direct connection with their fans, one that isn’t obfuscated by algorithms..

“We definitely want to give creators ownership,” Hallock tells TechCrunch. “Today, you’re promoting your Linktree page or Patreon rather than just promoting your own brand… We don’t want it to be about Spore.”

Content is king, as the saying goes. But in actual fact, a lot of what companies do today with content, and thus the power of that content, is relatively limited by the tools that exist to present it. That is slowly changing, and now a startup called Sanity, which has built a system to make it easier to repurpose and use content assets across a number of places, and to more easily use data as content, is announcing $39 million in funding on the back of strong demand for its tech.

This round, a Series B, is led by ICONIQ Growth (the growth round investment arm of the storied ICONIQ, backed by a number of high profile family offices including that of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg). Lead Edge Capital, Threshold Ventures, Heavybit, and Alliance Venture are also in this round, some of which also participated in Sanity’s previous $9.3 million fundraise in October 2020.

This latest investment brings the total raised by Sanity to $51.8 million. It is not disclosing its valuation, but Magnus Hillestad, Sanity’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was “very happy” with the number. In any case, it comes on the back of some very strong growth. Sanity is now being used by almost 100,000 developers, marketers, content creators and product professionals, the company said, with “active users” numbering at 30,000 (double the number of active users the company had in October, he said). Customers include the likes of National Geographic, Puma, InVision, Datastax and Brex — who are using it to manage their content repositories and letting them flexibly use information across a range of endpoints.

“Headless” has become a big theme in the world of technology, covering services as varied as content (by way of content management systems, commerce, banking and financial services. Organizations that want to buy systems to, say, build websites without putting a lot of investment into design can use platforms that both help them manage the content of the sites, as well as the look of them. But some might want a more customized experience, and they will opt for headless offerings, where there are systems still built to help automate and manage data at the backend, but giving them the ability to design front ends that are tailored to their specific needs.

In Hillestad’s view, the rise of headless services has been an important development, but what Sanity has conceived of is the next step in extensibility: a platform that lets you use content on the fly in a number of ways without people having to work on that in separate systems.

“We are taking a programmatic approach to content,” he said. “What businesses need now are not just marketing, or product, or e-commerce experiences.” These are all converging, he believes, “So you need to be able to build experiences to catch people wherever they are.

“Data is content, but content is also data. If you think about what we are doing, what we are giving companies is a content lake,” he continued. “Like data lakes, a content lake is structured, yet schema-less.”

This in turn gives companies the ability to use it across a number of use cases. This is notable because typically content is stored in silos created for specific purposes, part of the limitation of how CMS systems, even typical headless CMS systems, are conceived and built.

For now, there are however also limitations in Sanity: the company has yet to come up with interesting ways to enable translations between, say, audio and printed content, although that would appear to be a logical step for the company to take as it grows, given how many consumers already switch between different kinds of media formats.

“In an era of digital globalization, companies must rapidly deliver complex, multi-channel, and engaging digital experiences to reach customers wherever they are. This is forcing them to rethink the CMS. At the same time, developers are increasingly leading the adoption of new technologies and holding the keys to adapt effectively to this shift,” said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Growth, who is joining the board with this round. “Sanity has created the hero product for building innovative product experiences, with an impressive developer-oriented approach to content delivery and a personalized product experience that breaks down silos for content creators, marketing and developer teams. We’re excited to support the Sanity team as they enter this next phase of growth.”

The big news in tech this morning is a new a16z cryptocurrency-focused fund totaling some $2.2 billion. The new investment vehicle is worth around four times what the company’s preceding crypto fund — its second — was worth.

Andreessen’s wager on cryptocurrency is only accelerating over time as the investing house raises larger funds focused on the market with less time between them.

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It’s not hard to see why a16z is so enthused about the crypto market; its investments into trading house Coinbase paid off handsomely this year when the unicorn direct listed at a huge valuation premium to its previous worth. Why not put more capital into a startup cohort that was recently immensely lucrative?

But the venture capital group is up to a bit more than just writing new checks. We can tell that much from the firm’s short post announcing its new fund. Mix in a recent interview with a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen concerning the American regulatory environment, and we can understand that the firm is not simply planning a flurry of new deals.

Defending the future of crypto

The headline figure of $2.2 billion in capital available for crypto projects is driving headlines this morning, but the dollar figure should not be a surprise. There’s essentially infinite money in the market for name-brand venture capital firms today, it appears, and with a16z’s recent Coinbase win, I doubt it was monstrously difficult for the firm to compile a new, larger crypto-focused vehicle.

As companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today.

M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, led the round with participation from previous investors Boldstart Ventures, Grove Ventures and Crescendo Ventures. The company received a $3.3 million seed round, which we covered, last April and a previously unannounced $3.5 million add-on last summer. Today’s round brings the total raised to $23.8 million.

The company’s service helps companies control cloud costs, while giving developers the ability to deploy to the cloud with cost limits. It also provides a level of governance for code as it moves through the development cycle to deployment.

When we spoke to the company last April around its seed round, the company’s product was just entering beta. It has been generally available for about 4 months now and they’ve built out a lot of functionality since then, according to company co-founder and CEO Ohad Maislish.

“The last time we spoke we were just focussed on manual self service and empowering developers in non production environments. Now with infrastructure as code automation and teams and governance, we basically manage all of the cloud deployments for our customers,” Maislish explained.

Since going generally available with the product this year, he reports the company now has dozens of paying customers and is generating revenue. Customers includes JFrog, Varonis and BigID.

The startup has also grown from just 7 employees in April 2020 to 17 today with plans to reach 50 in the next 18 months it begins putting the new capital to work. He says that bringing in a diverse group of workers should help his company grow and bring different ways of solving problems. “I think that bringing people with different cultures, different backgrounds, is key in that they will bring [different ways of thinking].”

For now, the company is based in Israel with plans to open offices in the U.S.. Mailslish says that his plans to move to California were put on hold by the pandemic, but he hopes to open an office in Sunnyvale in the fall.

The Israeli office is a minimum of two days in the office, three days at home or whatever combination employees wish. He says that he plans to hire people in the U.S. office as he establishes himself there and some of those employees can be remote if it makes sense for the role.

Business operation automation startup Tonkean announced this morning that it closed a $50 million Series B round of capital. Accel led the round, which came just over a year after the startup raised a $24 million Series A. Lightspeed Ventures, which led the company’s preceding venture capital round, also participated in its new funding event.

Sagi Eliyahu, Tonkean’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview that his company’s valuation rose by around 4x in its latest funding round.

The startup was able to secure more capital at a higher price thanks in part to quick growth in 2020, which Eliyahu said was concentrated in the second half of 2020.

Tonkean is an interesting mix of business process automation, no-code and humans. In short, the startup allows a company’s ops groups — sales ops, marketing ops, etc. — to set up automated business logic across applications that can include human-in-the-loop elements. And Tonkean built its system to be IT-friendly, allowing it to support enterprise-scale customers.

The automation space has been broadly hot in recent quarters. Robotic process automation (RPA) is great for mechanizing repetitive tasks that waste human time. The method of using computers to do stuff that humans previously had to do by clicking far too much has proven to be big business.

 

Tonkean allows for something a bit different. An example may help: During our interview, Eliyahu mused about what might happen if a salesperson for a Tonkean client wanted to send a lead into a nurture campaign. Tonkean would let the sales ops team set up logic so that when the frontline salesperson selects the lead for a nurture effort inside their CRM, the lead would then automatically be added to a specific Marketo campaign. Furthermore, the click-to-nurture system would alert a human on the sales team, perhaps asking for approval of the decision.

Tonkean software employs no-code tools to let ops groups use off-the-shelf command modules to build business logic — or craft their own as needed. The use of the company’s software could allow for more empowered teams at companies that are less reliant on engineering groups for help in accelerating and automating their work.

That thematically fits inside the general narrative we’ve seen from no-code startups in general: They want to allow non-technical folks to have more control of their work through less reliance on technical teams at their place of employment.

Tonkean employs around 60 people today, up from around 15 folks at the time of its Series A. It plans to hire rapidly now that it has more capital. Eliyahu claims most of its Series A is still in the bank. So why did it raise?

Because Eliyahu considers his startup’s market to be so large that he wants to pull the company’s future closer to today; the new capital will give Tonkean the space it needs to hire more rapidly and build more quickly than it might have if it continued to operate from a smaller capital case.

Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. Let’s see how far it gets Tonkean. The next time we talk to the company, we’ll demand some harder growth metrics so we can see if the additional capital was the accelerant that the company hopes it will be.

Update: Google has now confirmed the delay, writing in a blog post that its engagement with UK regulators over the so-called “Privacy Sandbox” means support for tracking cookies won’t start being phased out in Chrome until the second half of 2023.

Our original report follows below… 

Adtech giant Google appears to be leaning toward postponing a long planned deprecation of third party tracking cookies.

The plan dates back to 2019 when it announced the long-term initiative that will make it harder for online marketers and advertisers to track web users, including by deprecating third party cookies in Chrome.

Then in January 2020 it said it would make the switch within two years. Which would mean by 2022.

Google confirmed to TechCrunch that it has a Privacy Sandbox announcement incoming today — set for 4pm BST/5pm CET — after we contacted it to ask for confirmation of information we’d heard, via our own sources.

We’ve been told Google’s new official timeline for implementation will be 2023.

However a spokesman for the tech giant danced around providing a direct confirmation — saying that “an update” is incoming shortly.

“We do have an announcement today that will shed some light on Privacy Sandbox updates,” the spokesman also told us.

He had responded to our initial email — which had asked Google to confirm that it will postpone the implementation of Privacy Sandbox to 2023; and for any statement on the delay — with an affirmation (“yep”) so, well, a delay looks likely. But we’ll see how exactly Google will spin that in a few minutes when it publishes the incoming Privacy Sandbox announcement.

Google has previously said it would depreciate support for third party cookies by 2022 — which naturally implies that the wider Privacy Sandbox stack of related adtech would also need to be in place by then.

Earlier this year it slightly hedged the 2022 timeline, saying in January that any changes would not be made before 2022.

The issue for Google is that regulatory scrutiny of its plan has stepped up — following antitrust complaints from the adtech industry which faces huge changes to how it can track and target Internet users.

In Europe, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been working with the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office to understand the competition and privacy implications of Google’s planned move. And, earlier this month, the CMA issued a notification of intention to accept proposed commitments from Google that would enable the regulator to block any depreciation of cookies if it’s not happy it can be done in a way that’s good for competition and privacy.

At the time we asked Google how the CMA’s involvement might impact the Privacy Sandbox timeline but the company declined to comment.

Increased regulatory oversight of Big Tech will have plenty of ramifications — most obviously it means the end of any chance for giants like Google to ‘move fast and break things’.