Author: azeeadmin

Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups that’s hoping to disrupt the disruptor is announcing a big round of funding to expand its own business.

Firebolt, which has built a new kind of cloud data warehouse that promises much more efficient, and cheaper, analytics around whatever is stored within it, is announcing a major Series B of $127 million on the heels of huge demand for its services.

The company, which only came out of stealth mode in December, is not disclosing its valuation with this round, which brings the total raised by the Israeli company to $164 million. New backers Dawn Capital and K5 Global are in this round, alongside previous backers Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Angular Ventures.

Nor is it disclosing many details about its customers at the moment. CEO and co-founder Eldad Farkash told me in an interview that most of them are US-based, and that the numbers have grown from the dozen or so that were using Firebolt when it was still in stealth mode (it worked quietly for a couple of years building its product and onboarding customers before finally launching six months ago). They are all migrating from existing data warehousing solutions like Snowflake or BigQuery. In other words, its customers are already cloud-native, big-data companies: it’s not trying to proselytize on the basic concept but work with those who are already in a specific place as a business.

“If you’re not using Snowflake or BigQuery already, we prefer you come back to us later,” he said. Judging by the size and quick succession of the round, that focus is paying off.

The challenge that Firebolt set out to tackle is that while data warehousing has become a key way for enterprises to analyze, update and manage their big data stores — after all, your data is only as good as the tools you have to parse it and keep it secure — typically data warehousing solutions are not efficient, and they can cost a lot of money to maintain.

The challenge was seen first-hand by the three founders of Firebolt, Farkash (CEO), Saar Bitner (COO) and Ariel Yaroshevich (CTO) when they were at a previous company, the business intelligence powerhouse Sisense, where respectively they were one of its co-founders and two members of its founding team. At Sisense, the company continually came up against an issue: When you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power its analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity. And that started to become very expensive.

Firebolt set out to fix that by taking a different approach, re-architecting the concept. As Farkash sees it, while data warehousing has indeed been a big breakthrough in big data, it has started to feel like a dated solution as data troves have grown.

“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’ ” he told me back in December. Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue, believes, but “we see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”

The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses with a SQL-based system that works on academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity. And lower costs.

Fast forward to today, and the company says the concept is gaining a lot of traction with engineers and developers in industries like business intelligence, customer-facing services that need to parse a lot of information to serve information to users in real-time, and back-end data applications. That is proving out what investors suspected would be a shift before the startup even launched, stealthily or otherwise.

“I’ve been an investor at Firebolt since their Series A round and before they had any paying customers,” said Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. “What had me invest in Firebolt is mostly the team. A group of highly experienced executives mostly from the big data space who understand the market very well, and the pain organizations are experiencing. In addition, after speaking to a few of my portfolio companies and Firebolt’s initial design partners, it was clear that Firebolt is solving a major pain, so all in all, it was a fairly easy decision. The market in which Firebolt operates is huge if you consider the valuations of Snowflake and Databricks. Even more importantly, it is growing rapidly as the migration from on-premise data warehouse platforms to the cloud is gaining momentum, and as more and more companies rely on data for their operations and are building data applications.”

Illumio, a self-styled zero trust unicorn, has closed a $225 million Series F funding round at a $2.75 billion valuation. 

The round was led by Thoma Bravo, which recently bought cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint by $12.3 billion, and supported by Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, and Blue Owl Capital. 

The round lands more than two years after Illumio’s Series E funding round in which it raised $65 million, and fueled speculation of an impending IPO. The company’s founder, Andrew Rubin, still isn’t ready to be pressed on whether the company plans to go public, though he told TechCrunch: “If we do our job right, and if we make our customers successful, I’d like to think that would be part of our journey.”

Illumio’s latest funding round is well-timed. Not only does it come amid a huge rise in successful cyberattacks which show that some of the more traditional cybersecurity measures are no longer working, from the SolarWinds hack in early 2020 to the more recent attack on Colonial Pipeline, but it also comes just weeks after President Joe Biden issued an executive order pushing federal agencies to implement significant cybersecurity initiatives, including a zero trust architecture. 

“And just a couple of weeks ago, Anne Neuberger [deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity] put out a memo on White House stationary to all of corporate America saying we’re living through a ransomware pandemic, and here’s six things that we’re imploring you to do,” Rubin says. “One of them was to segment your network.”

Illumio focuses on protecting data centers and cloud networks through something it calls micro-segmentation, which it claims makes it easier to manage and guard against potential breaches, as well as to contain a breach if one occurs. This zero trust approach to security — a concept centered on the belief that businesses should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters — has never been more important for organizations, according to Illumio. 

“Cyber events are no longer constrained to cyber space,” says Rubin. “That’s why people are finally saying that, after 30 years of relying solely on detection to keep us safe, we cannot rely on it 100% of the time. Zero trust is now becoming the mantra.”

Illumio tells TechCrunch it will use the newly raised funds to make a “huge” investment in its field operations and channel partner network, and to invest in innovation, engineering and its product. 

The late-stage startup, which was founded in 2013 and is based in California, says more than 10% of Fortune 100 companies — including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas SA and Salesforce — now use its technology to protect their data centers, networks and other applications. It saw 100% international growth during the pandemic, and says it’s also broadening its customer base across more industries. 

The company has raised more now raised more $550 million from investors include Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Formation 8.

Jio Platforms, run by India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani), and Google on Thursday unveiled JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone as the top Indian telecom operator makes further push to make it more affordable for people to sign up to its network.

The Indian firm, which secured $4.5 billion investment from Google (and another $15.5 billion from Facebook and others) last year and shared plans to work on low-cost smartphones, said the JioPhone Next will help roughly 300 million users in India who are still on 2G network upgrade.

The phone, which is “powered by extremely optimized Android” operating system, will first launch in India this September and eventually be made available outside of the country.

Jio Platforms, which serves 425 million subscribers, is positioned to add another 200 million in the next few years, said Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, at its annual general meeting Thursday.

The JioPhone Next will be the “most affordable smartphone” globally, said Ambani.

Even as most smartphones that ship in India, the second largest market, are priced at $150 or less, customers looking for a smartphone priced under $100 are left with little choice. And that choice has further shrunk in recent years.

Research firm Counterpoint told TechCrunch that the sub-$100 smartphones accounted for just 12% of the Indian smartphone market, down from 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2018. Sub-$50 smartphones represented just 0.3% of the entire market in 2020, down from 4.3% in 2018.

Smartphone makers are aware of this whitespace in the market, but have found it incredibly challenging to meet this demand. Some, including Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 425 million subscribers, earlier explored a range of feature phones to reach small cities and towns of India. Jio Platforms’ KaiOS-powered feature phone, called JioPhone, had amassed 100 million customers as of late February this year.

In a recent report to clients, analysts at UBS said that after accounting the recent price surge of memory component, any smartphone priced at or under $50 is likely selling at cost.

“While this move by Jio will accelerate 2G to 4G migration, we evaluated how interesting this space would be for other smartphone manufacturers, especially key players like Xiaomi. Xiaomi, the unit market leader in smartphones in India, is unlikely to follow up with a $50 smartphone, in our view,” they wrote in the report, obtained by TechCrunch.

Google, too, has previously made several efforts — $100 Android One smartphones program in 2014 and low-resource intensive Android Go operating system in 2017 — to expand the reach of its handsets. The company has also backed KaiOS, which powers popular feature phones.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

US/Israeli startup, Sorbet – which helps companies de-risk themselves against accrued paid time off (PTO) by employees — has raised another $15M, in a round led By Dovi Frances’ Group 11, not long after a $6 million seed round only last April.

Sorbet says it removes the burden of PTO from employers, allowing employees to ‘spend’ it in offers and other types of deals, giving employers far more control over the whole process and the ability to forecast ahead. It does this by buying out PTO liabilities from employees and loading the cash value of the PTO on prepaid Credit Cards. It then refinances these liabilities for employers, hence the forecasting advantage.

Veetahl Eilat-Raichel, founder and CEO, said: “It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a tectonic shift in employer-employee dynamics and with inbound global interest exceeding our wildest expectations, I had the great privilege of picking and choosing the best investors to help us expand and accelerate. I can think of no better partner than Dovi and the entire Group 11 team to join us, and am thrilled and humbled to have them alongside our already stellar group of investors.”

Dovi Frances, Founding Partner, Group 11 said: “At Group 11 we pride ourselves in our unique ability to uncover the unicorns of tomorrow. Veetahl and the team did something exceedingly difficult which is to uncover a massive market inefficiency hiding in plain sight. With a $270B market opportunity, it was crystal clear to me this was the time to push forward and not look back.”

Following Wise’s announcement earlier this month that it planned to go public by way of a direct listing on the LSE, today the company made the news formal with a regulatory filing. The London-based company — formerly known as TransferWise and primarily in the business of transferring money across different currencies — with 10 million users said it plans to list in “early July 2021” but did not provide further details on pricing of its class A shares, in keeping with how direct listings work. It’s been reported, however, that the plan is for the valuation to be in the range of $6 billion to $7 billion with the listing.

(Overall, Wise has put in place a dual-class share structure in place with two classes of shares in issue, class A shares and class B shares, in order to support Wise’s focus on its mission as it transitions into the public markets, it noted. Class B shares are not tradeable.)

“The Company will not set a price in respect of the class A shares or offer any class A shares in connection with the direct listing,” it noted in the statement. “The opening price of the class A shares will be determined in the opening auction on the date of Admission.” While direct listings have somewhat taken off as a route for tech companies to go public in the U.S. — a trend spearheaded by another European juggernaut, Spotify — this is a new turn for the LSE, which published its own new rules on the process the same day that Wise announced its plans.

In the meantime, we can watch for more details around the public offering, and updates about the company’s business, will be coming out in a prospectus and other related statements in the coming days and weeks.

Bypassing the big investment banks and the related roadshow of a more conventional listing can be a bold move, one that companies who want to avoid the volatility and commitment of that process might opt to take if they feel they have enough momentum to hit the market directly. Wise in its statement today hinted that there has been some early interest, based on its share offering to Wise customers.

“I am pleased to confirm our plans for a direct listing in London. This process will broaden the ownership of Wise, in support of our mission to move money around the world faster, cheaper and more conveniently,” said Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder of Wise, in a note in the statement. “Since announcing our expected intention to float last week, we’ve had over 60,000 expressions of interest in our customer shareholder programme, OwnWise, which is designed to reward customers who buy Wise shares and stick with us for the longer-term. This direct listing is about further aligning our mission and our shareholder base and I’m enormously proud that customers want to be a part of that.”

Wise has been one of the huge success stories for fintech coming out of Europe, and London — founded by Estonians Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, the company’s been based out of London and has stuck with that even through all the financial turmoil of Brexit. Its 10 million customers currently process around $7 billion (£5 billion) in cross-border transactions every month, which remains its primary business even as it diversifies into newer, related areas of financial services. In its most recent financial year, Wise’s revenue grew to $586 million, up from $422 million. That represents $57 million (£41 million) in profit before tax, and the company says it has been profitable since 2017.

Class B shares will hold 9 votes per share, are strictly non-transferable and, amongst other voting right cancellation events, expire on the fifth anniversary of any listing, the company confirmed. Wise’s shareholders and holders of vested options as at 23 May 2021 are entitled to elect to receive 50% of their class A share holding in the Company with additional corresponding class B shares on a 1:1 basis (save for Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder of Wise, who is entitled to elect to receive 100% of his class A share holding in the Company with additional corresponding class B shares on a 1:1 basis), it added.

“The voting rights attaching to the class B shares are, subject to certain regulatory approvals, capped so that no shareholder can, by virtue of the class B shares they hold, cast more than one vote less than 35% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision (save for Kristo Käärmann who, for so long as he is CEO of the Company, will be capped in respect of his class B shares at one vote less than 50% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision and if, at any time, he is not CEO of the Company he will be capped at one below 35% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision). The class B shares are non-tradeable and will not be listed.”

After launching five years ago in the United States, Apple’s search advertising service finally arrived in mainland China this week.

The feature, called Apple Search Ads, lets developers bid on an advertising slot based on users’ keyword search in the App Store, similar to how Google search ads work. JPMorgan previously estimated the giant’s annual ad revenue could top $11 billion by 2025, though the forecast didn’t have a breakdown for the search ad business.

Apple has itself been reining in on personalized advertising, letting users turn off data tracking by apps, a move that will inevitably roil the business models of Facebook and others dependent on third-party data to target ads.

China has historically been a strong market for Apple, but iPhones are increasingly losing their luster as a status symbol in the country with the rise of local offerings like Huawei. In the first quarter, however, Apple’s smartphone shipment saw a rebound thanks to Huawei’s slipping sales and the launch of the iPhone 12 family. The Chinese App Store is another important source of income for Apple.

In a five-page guideline, Apple outlines the qualifications for developers targeting ads at mainland Chinese users. There is a stack of industry-specific licenses that advertisers must obtain, which practically excludes most foreign entities from directly advertising in mainland China, as noted in a blog post by AppInChina, an agency that helps international apps launch in China. To bid for search ads in China, apps would have to find local partners with all the government approvals in place.

The requirements for apps importing goods into China, for example, include not just a general license to run value-added internet businesses but also registrations with the relevant trade and customs authorities. Apple may even start asking for these permits from apps that simply want to publish in China, wrote AppInChina, as Apple continues to enforce rules set by the Chinese government as evident from its crackdown on gaming apps.

Industries like real estate, automotive, and financial services have long and offline sales cycles and digital advertising tends not to perform well in these areas. The conversion rates are low and because the real-world assets are offline the temptation of advertisers is to buy leads and clicks, which can inflate customer acquisition costs. People are browsing but they end up buying offline, basically.

A new startup, Tomi plans to address this issue by processing a user’s behavior on a company’s website (using a tracking pixel, combined with ad APIs and CRMs) to help companies reach customers more in the way an ecommerce business would.

It’s now raised a $1M seed round from investors including Begin Capital and Phystech Leadership Fund.

Founded by Konstantin Bayandin — a former senior director of digital marketing and technology at Compass and chief marketing officer at Ozon, ‘Russia’s Amazon’ — Tomi competes against similar AdTech companies such as Anytrack, Sociaro, Meetotis, Alytics and Postclick.

However, the difference, Bayandin says, is that Tomi “focuses on offline conversions and works with multiple ad channels, such as Facebook, Instagram and Google.”

Bayandin says: “Real-estate companies would love to leverage online ads in order to sell their inventory but it turns out to be too expensive and difficult. People like to browse but rarely convert and most of these transactions happen offline. So real-estate clients don’t know how to optimize for their real buyers. Tomi uses machine learning to analyze the way real buyers browse the website and optimize ad campaigns towards conversions.”

The background to all this is that with Apple closing down IDFA, Google planning to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, and the latest iOS 14.5 update allowing users opt out of “personalized ads”, the entire ad business is in flux, so new tools are going to be required. Bayandin says Tomi is part of this new wave of AdTech.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 23, 2021. The value of leading cryptocurrencies has rebounded some in the last day or so. Congrats to the hodlrs out there. If you are a nocoiner, don’t worry; stocks are also up. If you want more on the topic, the TechCrunch crew held a Twitter Space recently on the current state of crypto. Now, the news. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Robotaxis are coming (slowly): Alphabet’s self-driving unit, Waymo, has been busy lately, but it’s not the only company in its market generating headlines. Chinese robotaxi player WeRide bagged $600 million in less than half a year, TechCrunch reports. The company is now worth $3.3 billion. Let’s hope that all the capital and activity in this particular market works out when the rubber hits the road.
• Soon, even regular folks can get in on the autonomous action: Love the idea of self-driving cars, but don’t have $100 million or more to pour into one of the industry’s leading private players? Good news! You can put your $100 into Embark soon, as the self-driving truck company is going public via a SPAC. You are welcome for this PSA.
• Tech’s cultural discussion continues: If you follow the tech industry, you’ve seen news about its evolving cultural discussion. From banning “politics” to public culture memos to private missives that became public, there’s a lot going on at both startups and public companies alike. A new document from the edtech sector takes a rather pointed stand in the larger conversation in favor of not backing down from controversial topics, Natasha wrote for the site. It won’t be the last memo we see on the matter.

Startups

• The exit market for growth-focused startups is still hot: That’s the lesson from recent IPO filings in the tech space. If you are an investor or startup employee, it’s good news. If you are a wealthy tech company looking to buy smaller firms, the news is less good because you will probably have to pay a large premium to snag startups.
• Snackpass scoops up $70M: You may have seen Snackpass signs at food spots in your city. The startup focuses on pickup orders inside of restaurants rather than delivery, and, per our reporting, has seen its growth explode in recent months as people have gone back outside. It’s now worth more than $400 million.
• PairTree raises $2.25M to make adoption easier: There are lots of tech deals with business problems. Sometimes startups build businesses to solve human problems. PairTree is one such company. Per Devin, it wants to make part of the adoption process easier with an “online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or other organization.” I love it.
• Drata raises $25M to make security compliance easier: If you run a company, you have to deal with security compliance. Drata wants to make securing SOC 2 compliance easier. That way, your startup won’t lose a deal over lack of compliance certification, a situation that might lead to you exclaiming “drata!” while smacking your own forehead.
• Vercel raises $102M for its next.js service: You’ve probably heard of next.js, a React framework for front-end development work. Vercel built it with Facebook and Google. Now the company has $102 million more in the bank thanks to a Series C that valued the company at more than $1 billion. Per TechCrunch, traffic to apps and websites on Vercel’s network doubled since October of last year. That’s the sort of usage growth that investors love to see.

Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein

In the last year, online apparel shopping app Shein grew active daily users by 130%, reports Apptopia.

Each day, thousands of new products arrive on the app’s virtual shelves. Items are rapidly designed and prototyped before Shein’s contractors put them into production in Guangzhou factories — two weeks later, those SKUs arrive in fulfillment centers around the globe.

TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao examined how the company’s agile supply chain has become hot talk among e-commerce experts, but beyond a strong logistics game and data-driven product development, Shein’s close relationships with suppliers are integral to its success.

She also tried to answer a question many are asking: Is Shein a Chinese company?

“It’s hard to pin down where Shein is from,” answered Richard Xu from Grand View Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm.

“It’s a company with operations and supply chains in China targeting the global market, with nearly no business in China.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We’re taking a break from politics today, so if you wanted even more updates about how India is taking on one American tech company or another, we are sorry. A lot of other stuff happened, however, that is pretty neat:

• Ford is keeping scooter dreams alive: Remember when Ford bought Spin? It was a great moment for the micromobility space. Today, Spin launched its first in-house scooter. So, if you need two small wheels and a battery pack, Ford has you covered. Recall that Ford is investing heavily in electric cars and trucks as well.
• Amazon and Salesforce buddy up even more: The growing partnership between Amazon and Salesforce took a new step today, with the two major American tech companies announcing “a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications that cross the two platforms.” Amazon competes with Microsoft in the public cloud world, and Salesforce competes with Microsoft in the CRM space. So to see the pair of them hold hands is not a huge surprise.
• TikTok has real competition: TikTok’s chief rival in China just hit the 1 billion monthly active user (MAU) mark. That’s a real accomplishment, given that the world only has 8 billion or so folks in it. Kuaishou, the app in question, has only 150 million non-Chinese MAUs, for what it’s worth, making it more of a giant domestic player in China than an international heavyweight. That may change, of course, if it keeps growing as it has been.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices.

Fill out the survey here.

Here’s one of the recommendations we received:

Name of marketer: Karl Hughes, draft.dev.

Name of recommender: Joshua Shulman, Bitmovin.com.

Recommendation: “Karl is incredibly knowledgeable in the field of content and growth marketing to a large (and equally niche) target audience of developers. He and his team at Draft.dev are some of the best at ‘developer marketing,’ which is a greatly underrated target audience.”

Community

Yo dawg, we heard you liked audio … so we put audio in your audio!

Yesterday, we had a super fun Twitter Spaces chat (with a few hundred of our closest friends) about Bitcoin and crypto in general. It was led by the Equity Podcast crew, but a few of our other writers joined in on the fun. Some of it even made its way into the latest episode of Equity, so have a listen (and keep an eye out for our next live chats).

TC Eventful

It’s pretty simple — In a few short weeks, startup founders from around the world will join our bootcamp series TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, happening on July 8 and 9. You’ll choose from a wide range of presentations that span the fundamentals of launching and growing your business, whether you are bootstrapping or have just secured your first investment funds. Register before this Friday and get 50% off with promo code DAILYCRUNCH50.

It’s a little thing, but one worth savoring.

If you’re tired of your Instagram feed mostly being a chaotic mashup of screencapped tweets and reshared TikToks, well, those things probably aren’t going away but one is about to look a lot better.

Twitter just added the capability to share a tweet directly to Instagram Stories, letting you port your clever cross-platform moments over properly. You can’t tap the tweets to hop back to Twitter, but they look nice now. Unfortunately for Android users, it’s iOS-only for now.

 

The new cross-platform feature is just a tiny sample of Twitter’s refreshing recent flurry of product activity — a result of mounting pressure from investors who accused the company of stagnating and planned to oust its CEO, Jack Dorsey. The company also just added two more major features to empower users to monetize their tweets: paid subscriptions known as “Super Follows” and ticketed events.

Twitter users have long waited for a laundry list of small quality of life tweaks to manifest, a phenomenon that often materializes as an entire cohort of journalists complaining about how you still can’t edit tweets. But if it can keep the pace, Twitter might finally be ready to deliver.

See, doesn’t that look nice?

Bird has announced the launch of shared e-bikes to its fleet of e-scooters, which it says can be found in over 250 cities around the world. The shared micromobility provider is also launching a so-called ‘Smart Bikeshare’ platform that allows local shared bike and e-moped providers and transit apps to integrate with Bird’s app. 

“Shared e-scooters catapulted shared micromobility to the center stage of eco-friendly transportation in cities by providing more than 150 million zero-emission trips globally,” said Travis VanderZanden, founder and CEO of Bird, in a statement. “We are launching our shared Bird Bike and Smart Bikeshare platform to meet fast-growing demand from cities and riders for more sustainable transportation options while expanding our serviceable addressable market by 5 billion trips per year.” 

This announcement comes just a month after Bird dropped its new Bird Three scooter with better battery life. The micromobility giant’s shared e-bike will roll out later this year, with Cleveland, Ohio, being one of the first markets, according to a spokesperson for the company. In a statement, Bird said the bike will be available in select cities throughout North America, Italy, Spain, Germany, Ireland and France this year. Bird did not say how many e-bikes it would be launching or give a more specific launch date.

Bird also did not respond to whether or not the e-bike is designed or manufactured by the company, and if not, which manufacturer the company is working with.

The Bird Bike is built on a 75-pound frame with a step-through design that can drive riders up hills with as much as a 20% grade, according to the company. It’ll have a front basket, large pneumatic tires and all the on-board geofencing and diagnostics that you’d expect from a Bird vehicle. 

The Bird Bike is not Bird’s first bike. In the summer of 2019, the company unveiled its Bird Cruiser, an electric cross between a bike and a moped that could seat up to two people. But they decided to pause the pilot last year at the onset of the pandemic, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Bird’s bikeshare platform has already kicked off in Italy with local e-moped company Zig Zag, displaying the Italian company’s vehicles alongside its own in the Bird app. Bird says it wants to collaborate with other micromobility companies around the world and is in talks with groups like the North American Bikeshare Association to do so in the U.S. 

Bird did not answer questions about whether it would receive a cut of local operators’ profits if booked through the Bird app.

In a statement from the company, Bird’s bikeshare platform makes the company “the first scooter operator to integrate with local shared bike and e-moped providers.” Bird does not currently have plans to integrate third party, e-scooter providers into their app, according to the company.

If Bird isn’t collaborating with local e-scooter providers, sharing its platform with e-bike and e-moped providers allows it the chance to have more of a multi-modal presence without doing the heavy lifting of actually launching multi-modal fleets. At the very least, these collaborations will also give Bird a better idea of where and how riders are using different vehicles, which could help the company decide on new mobility modes to invest in, while also informing its own expansion plans, especially in Europe.

Bird did not confirm whether this is a part of its bikeshare platform strategy.