Author: azeeadmin

The IPO rush of 2021 continued this week with a fresh filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase. The company raised hundreds of millions while private, making its impending debut an important moment for a number of private investors, including venture capitalists.

According to PitchBook data, Couchbase was last valued at a post-money valuation of $580 million when it raised $105 million in May 2020. The company — despite its expansive fundraising history — is not a unicorn heading into its debut to the best of our knowledge.

We’d like to uncover whether it will be one when it prices and starts to trade, so we dug into Couchbase’s business model and its financial performance, hoping to better understand the company and its market comps.

The Couchbase S-1

The Couchbase S-1 filing details a company that sells database tech. More specifically, Couchbase offers customers database technology that includes what NoSQL can offer (“schema flexibility,” in the company’s phrasing), as well as the ability to ask questions of their data with SQL queries.

Couchbase’s software can be deployed on clouds, including public clouds, in hybrid environments, and even on-prem setups. The company sells to large companies, attracting 541 customers by the end of its fiscal 2021 that generated $107.8 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, by the close of last year.

Couchbase breaks its revenue into two main buckets. The first, subscription, includes software license income and what the company calls “support and other” revenues, which it defines as “post-contract support,” or PCS, which is a package of offerings, including “support, bug fixes and the right to receive unspecified software updates and upgrades” for the length of the contract.

The company’s second revenue bucket is services, which is self-explanatory and lower-margin than its subscription products.

Popular Twitch streamers Amouranth and Indiefoxx are the two latest casualties of Twitch’s ongoing battle to enforce its own confusing rules around sexually suggestive content.

Both creators were suspended following ASMR streams that pushed the bounds of Twitch’s community guidelines forbidding content that isn’t quite sexual in nature but is still too risqué for a platform deeply self-conscious about its advertising business. The Amazon-owned company declined to comment on the length of the bans or what provoked them, but pointed TechCrunch toward its rules on sexual content.

It’s possible that both Amouranth (Kaitlyn Siragusa) and Indiefoxx (Jenelle Dagres) will be reinstated Monday, 72 hours after their Friday ban, but both channels remained unavailable at the time of writing. Siragusa confirmed to Polygon that she was suspended after a stream in which she did yoga poses while making ear-licking sounds into a microphone.

The so-called “ASMR-meta” on Twitch, where streamers boost their views by whispering into their microphones or producing licking sounds, sometimes while holding yoga poses, follows the controversy around hot tubs on Twitch that exploded last month. In both instances, some Twitch creators believe that the platform’s rules are selectively enforced.

“With ASMR meta and crazy yoga poses, believe it or not I watched two other girls doing it to the tune of 2-5k views without any bans for months before I folded the activity into ASMR creating the infamous ‘ASMR’ meta,” Siragusa wrote on Twitter. “Those other streamers are still unbanned and continue to do it. My sin was taking inaction as a sign of tacit acceptance, and then blowing the top off the secret and hitting 30k viewers.”

Because both the ASMR meta and the hot tub meta were dominated by female streamers, the whole situation has attracted even more misogyny within the Twitch community, where female streamers are still regularly harassed off the platform.

In a blog addressing the proliferation of women streaming from pools and hot tubs at the time, Twitch wrote that “being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules, and Twitch will not take enforcement action against women, or anyone on our service, for their perceived attractiveness.” The company clarified that while a bathing suit in a bedroom might break the rules, “contextually appropriate” swimwear is allowed.

Twitch also acknowledged the complexity of its own difficult to parse rules:

“Our intention with the Sexually Suggestive policy was to draw a line on content that is overtly or explicitly sexually suggestive, not to ban all content that could be viewed as sexually suggestive – but we acknowledge that our rules are not as clear as they could be.

Prohibiting every form of content that could be interpreted as suggestive would also result in far more restrictions on the video games and premium content that we currently allow, especially considering the ways that female characters are sometimes objectified or presented in a sexualized manner.”

Its solution at the time was to create a “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” category where that content could live. Most of Twitch’s categories are dedicated to specific games, with most of the platform’s non-gaming streams listed in the popular catch-all category “Just Chatting.”

ASMR has its own category with 2.4 million followers, encompassing ear-tingling ASMR streams that don’t push the boundaries of Twitch’s rules with the more recent crop of those that do. So far, instead of building out a more thoughtful way to corral sexually suggestive content, the company is opting to punish anybody who it decides crosses the line. But it’s possible that could all change: Last month, Twitch said it was working on new policies to further clarify the rules on sexually suggestive content.

Unfortunately for Twitch — and for the female creators disproportionately affected by its uneven policies — the abundance of ear-licking streams suggests that until then, the company will be making these same determinations over and over as it tries to draw a line within a gray area of its own making.

Ubco, the New Zealand-based electric utility bike startup, has raised $10 million to fund a global expansion focused on the U.S. market and scale up its commercial subscription service business. 

Ubco’s hero product, the Ubco 2X2, is an all-wheel drive electric motorbike that looks like a dirt bike but rides like a moped. What began as a solution for farmers to get around pastures and farms easily, safely and quickly has expanded to include an urban version of the bike that caters to fleet enterprise customers, gig economy workers and city riders. 

Since its founding in 2015, the company has produced two versions of its 145-pound utility bike: The Work Bike, the original off-road vehicle, and the Adventure Bike, the newer version that’s made for city riding but can handle itself off-road. 

Now that Ubco’s got a fresh cash infusion from the round led by Seven Peak Ventures, Nuance Capital and TPK Holdings, it hopes to continue expanding into existing verticals, like food delivery, postal service and last-mile logistics. The company already works with Domino’s in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, as well as a range of other national clients, like the New Zealand Post, the Defense Force, the Department of Conservation and Pāmu, or Landcorp Farming Limited and other local restaurants and stores.

“We have a strong enterprise market in New Zealand and have developed a strong pipeline of sales internationally,” Timothy Allan, CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. 

While direct consumer sales make up for most of Ubco’s revenue at present, the company is pushing aggressively into enterprise, and more specifically, subscription services. The 2X2 is built on an intelligent platform that includes vehicle and power systems, cloud connectivity and data analysis, which enables the subscription model to work alongside fleet management systems. 

Ubco expects revenue to climb from $2.1 million in 2020 to $8.4 million by the end of 2021 as it pushes to increase its annual recurring revenue through subscriptions. Ubco’s subscription model, which costs about $50 to $60 per week ($75 to $85 NZD) for fleet enterprise customers, is being rolled out in New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., Europe and the U.S. this year and into 202. Consumers will get access to the subscriptions as well within the next couple of months, according to a spokesperson for the company. 

Allan sees subscriptions as the future of the EV industry, not just because it allows for a high chance of profitability, but also because it’s far more environmentally sustainable. As the company expands this part of its business model, it hopes to lead the circular economy space.

The company predicts that vehicles run through the subscription model will have four times the life expectancy as those sold outright and produce 80% less carbon overall compared to a combustion vehicle. 

“Subscription means we own the vehicle, so we manage the lifecycle,” said Allan. “So the first life starts at high intensity, and that might be 60,000 kilometers delivering pizza, or it might be 30,000 kilometers on a farm, which are equally hard for different reasons. Then after, that vehicle will go down to a lower intensity application. After that the battery can then be pulled out, and that might go into passive solar storage or something like that.”

Allan sees solving the end-of-life issue as a personal and professional challenge, one with room for creativity since no one has fully figured out the correct way of doing it. He says he takes a bottom up approach when it comes to the engineering of the vehicle in a way that allows for easier recycling.

“Like when you design a battery, fuck putting fire retardant foam into it because you can’t get it back at the end of life,” he said. “So it starts with correctly labeling, engineering with intent so that you’re designing for this type of assembly, and then your business or commercial system needs to support the concept. Now, we’ve got the advantage because the economics and incentives are aligned, and that all aligns with New Zealand’s product stewardship legislation.”

Trying to perfect the circular economy through utility vehicles isn’t just about doing what’s right for the environment. Allan thinks it’ll be a smart business decision in the end, one that will draw in customers and give the company a competitive edge with enterprise clients. 

“This is a part of your journey with us as a customer,” said Allan. “If we can design subscriptions and the life of the vehicle in such a way that you feel good about it, that’s where we’re driving from. Most people want to do the right thing, and we can provide something that logically fits the economics, can be done at scale and can be managed holistically.”

In something of an about-face, Amblin Partners, Steven Spielberg’s long-running film production company, will produce several films per year for Netflix. The deal reflects Netflix’s rising star and arguably acceptance by the legendary director of a new order to the cinematic world where home viewing is a first class citizen.

The deal, announced in a press release with few details except glowing quotes from Amblin and Netflix executives. All that is certain is that Amblin will produce “multiple new feature films per year” for Netflix.

“From the minute Ted [Sarandos, Netflix Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer] and I started discussing a partnership, it was abundantly clear that we had an amazing opportunity to tell new stories together and reach audiences in new ways,” said Spielberg in the release.

Those new ways didn’t sound so amazing to Spielberg a couple years ago when he was reportedly pushing to exclude Netflix films from the Academy Awards.

“Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” Spielberg told ITV in March of 2019. “I don’t believe films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination.”

Ultimately no real push was made, though. Whether Spielberg was misrepresented, changed his mind, or just read the room, he has since tempered his position. He has said rather that he simply wants to cherish and protect “the theatrical experience” — understandable from one of the pioneers of the modern blockbuster.

Naturally it’s a huge get for Netflix, which will get a steady stream of Amblin features, though there’s no guarantee of a Spielberg picture. Meanwhile Amblin will continue its longtime partnership with Universal, which fills the more traditional moviemaking and distribution side of things. The company has already broken bread with streaming companies, with shows and films made for and distributed by Netflix and others, but this is most significant partnership so far.

Perhaps it was COVID that suggested to Spielberg and Amblin that streaming platforms are, far from going away, simply the future of the industry in many ways. In a world where the “theatrical experience” is a potential superspreader event and people are perfectly happy to watch (and pay for) a “premiere” at home, it may be better to roll with the punches and hope that things bounce back.

Collectibles boomed during the pandemic and while NFT outfits like NBA Top Shot exploded as consumers flirted with newer efforts, the sneaker world grew even more mature with enthusiasts digging deeper into communities dedicated to the hobby/passion/obsession/alternative asset class.

Vancouver’s SoleSavy, a sneaker community dedicated to giving fans a curated place to navigate the world of shoes, with all of its drops, news and rumors, has raised a $12.5 million Series A just months after wrapping a $2 million seed round, showcasing investor enthusiasm behind vertical-specific premium social experiences. The round was led by Bedrock Capital with participation from Dapper Labs’ CEO Roham Gharegozlou, Diplo, Bessemer Ventures and Turner Novak’s Banana Capital, among others.

CEO Dejan Pralica says the company has tripled its user base since its seed raise late last year, while growing its team from 10 to 37 employees in the same period.

Today, SoleSavy’s community is based largely around a network of Slack groups where users can discuss just about everything. Though the platform’s chat communities are organized in Slack now, Pralica sees a future where the company could build its own chat hub for members, something to further tie-in the startup’s app, website and online conversations. The more near-term goal is to grow this community into a hub of trusted buyers and sellers where a peer-to-peer member marketplace can thrive. SoleSavy is at the forefront of a new generation of more social internet marketplaces where vertical-specific communities can gather and grow inside an all-encompassing platform.

“I do envision on end-to-end platform that’s very integrated,” Pralica tells TechCrunch.”I want to make sneakers fun again and enjoyable for the people that are passionate about them.”

Part of that fun has been diminished by free-for-all chat groups that can quickly grow toxic or grow exploitative as moderators look to cash in on their networks, something SoleSavy hopes a more curated approach can bring back.

As my boss (and TC’s resident sneaker head) Matthew said in his write-up of SoleSavy’s seed raise earlier this year:

That positive community vibe is what Pralica says is SoleSavy’s long-term focus and differentiating factor that keeps the 4,000 members across the U.S. and Canada interacting with the group on a nearly daily basis… I’ve been in a dozen or so different groups focused on buying large quantities of each release to re-sell over the years and many of them are, at best, rowdy and at worst toxic. That’s an environment that SoleSavy wanted to stay away from, says Pralica. Instead, SoleSavy tries to court those who want to buy and wear the shoes, trade them and yes, maybe even resell personal pairs eventually to obtain and wear another grail.

The company’s sizable Series A raise just months after a seed showcases that plenty of investors are intrigued by the idea of verticalized marketplaces built up around social communities, Pralica sees the funding as a chance to ignore fundraising for a while and focus on “building for the future” while identifying new opportunities in the sneakersphere.

SoleSavy has been pretty focused on North American sneaker heads so far, but Pralica see that hefty Series A check taking the platform into new markets, including Australia and New Zealand, United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan and broader Europe. The company also plans to use the new funding to build out its editorial network with podcasts, editorial features, original video and member events.

Search is changing. Most search engines now don’t just bring up a page of 10 search results and two ads at the top when you type in a query. Instead, Google search queries can bring up a whole range of results, and sometimes answer your questions without you ever having to click through to a page.

Take, for example, a search like this: “how many days until halloween.”

A featured snippet counting down the days to Halloween. Image Credits: Ryan Sammy

You can see that instead of displaying the top result right away, Google answers the question for you in a rich snippet. It also gives you related search queries featuring countdowns for other holidays. On the right is a knowledge panel from Wikipedia about Halloween, and below that, you’ll see the featured snippets section. These snippets will expand when clicked with answers for related questions.

Finally, after these answers to your queries and any related questions, you get to the first result. At this point, do you even need to visit the website?

Google search is not what it used to be. We all want to be No. 1 on the search results page, but these days, getting to that position isn’t enough. It might be worth your while to instead go after the top featured snippet position.

What’s a featured snippet?

Featured snippets are collections of sentences or words that Google pulls directly from a webpage relevant to the search query. These snippets are displayed right below the search box and are meant to answer search queries quickly. The snippets can appear in the form of lists, how-to steps, tables, short paragraph boxes and other formats.

TikTok announced today the launch of its Jump program, which expands the app’s potential for third-party integrations. TikTok began beta-testing this feature in February with Whisk, a recipe-sharing app, though only select creators could use the feature. Now, Jump will start rolling out to all users with an expanded slate of partners.

Jumps can only be built by third-party providers after being approved through an application process. Platforms like Breathwrk, Wikipedia, Quizlet, StatMuse, and Tabelog participated in the beta test, and now, TikTok says providers like BuzzFeed, Jumprope, IRL, and WATCHA will begin implementing their own Jumps in the coming weeks. So, an educational creator could link to Quizlet flashcards to review a concept they explained in a TikTok, or a yoga instructor could share breathing exercises on Breathwrk. For a platform that doesn’t even let all users include a link in their bio yet, this expands the existing tools creators have to engage their audience.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok is positioning Jump as a feature that propels discovery. Sean Kim, Head of Product, TikTok US writes, “TikTok has become a destination both to be entertained and to learn; through TikTok Jump, we’re creating that ‘last mile’ of our community’s discovery journey and helping to spark action and deeper interaction both on and off the platform.”

But on other apps like Snapchat and WeChat, these lightweight third-party integrations drive e-commerce. Jump is similar to competitor Snapchat’s Minis feature, which lets you buy movie tickets via Atom, for example. Both Minis and Jump integrations can be built using HTML5. Meanwhile, WeChat facilitates over $250 billion dollars in annual transactions through its own mini apps – there were over a million mini apps on WeChat as of 2018.

While Instagram has been ramping up its e-commerce features on Reels, its TikTok competitor, it’s possible that Jump could later be used to sell items featured in a video. In December, Walmart piloted video shopping on TikTok, which performed well enough that they did it again in March. But for now, it seems like Jump is being used to improve user experience and deepen the platform’s relationships with third-party partners.

India proposed on Monday banning flash sales on e-commerce platforms and preventing their affiliate entities from being listed as sellers on the platform as the South Asian market looks to further tighten rules that could hurt the future prospects of Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart in the world’s second largest market.

The proposal, unveiled by India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs on Monday evening, comes at a time when brick-and-mortar retailers in India have ramped up their complaints to raise concerns about the way Amazon and Flipkart are expanding their operations in the country.

In its proposal, India’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs said that e-commerce firms should not be allowed to hold flash sales that are very popular during festive season in the country. During flash sales, which are akin to Amazon’s Prime Day, e-commerce firms see some of their biggest spikes in customer orders as brands offer heavy discounts on their products.

“Certain e-commerce entities are engaging in limiting consumer choice by indulging in ‘back to back’ or ‘flash’ sales wherein one seller selling on platform does not carry any inventory or order fulfilment capability but merely places a ‘flash or back to back’ order with another seller controlled by platform. This prevents a level playing field and ultimately limits customer choice and increases prices,” the ministry said in a statement.

As it has done so with its IT rules, India is also proposing that e-commerce firms appoint Chief Compliance Officer, a nodal contact person for 24×7 coordination with law enforcement agencies, officers to ensure compliance to their orders and Resident Grievance Officer for redressing of the grievances of the consumers on the e-commerce platform.

“This would ensure effective compliance with the provisions of the Act and Rules and also strengthen the grievance redressal mechanism on e-commerce entities,” the ministry said.

Amazon said it was reviewing the proposed policies while Flipkart had no immediate comment.

The ministry said it is making the proposal, for which it plans to seek industry feedback over the next 15 days, after receiving “several complaints against widespread cheating and unfair trade practices being observed in e-commerce ecosystem.”

Additionally, the new proposal asks e-commerce firms to introduce a mechanism to identify goods on their platforms based on country of origin and suggest alternatives to “ensure fair opportunity to domestic goods.”

The announcement comes at a time when Flipkart is in talks to raise as much as $3 billion and explore the public markets. Both Amazon and Flipkart are also the subject of an ongoing antitrust probe in India.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Following this morning’s announcement that Hyundai has closed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics, another automotive company has posted some robotics news. The Toyota Research Institute announcement is decidedly less earthshaking than that big deal — if anything, it’s more of a progress check on what the division has been working on.

Of course, incremental updates tend to be the name of the game when it comes to robotics of all sorts. This does, however, shed some interesting light on the work TRI has been doing in the home. Today the company announced some key advances to robotics it has designed to perform domestic tasks.

“TRI roboticists were able to train robots to understand and operate in complicated situations that confuse most other robots, including recognizing and responding to transparent and reflective surfaces in a variety of circumstances,” the Institute writes in a blog post.

Image Credits: Toyota Research Institute

With settings like kitchens, the robots come in contact with a variety of transparent and reflective surfaces — a hurdle for traditional vision systems. Specifically in the kitchen, things like a transparent glass or reflective appliance can create an issue.

“To overcome this, TRI roboticists developed a novel training method to perceive the 3D geometry of the scene while also detecting objects and surfaces,” TRI Robotics VP Max Bajracharya said in a post describing the research. “This combination enables researchers to use large amounts of synthetic data to train the system.” Using synthetic data also alleviates the need for time-consuming, expensive or impractical data collection and labeling.

With an aging population in its native Japan, Toyota has made eldercare a key focus in its ongoing robotics research. So it makes a lot of sense that sort of robotics tasks form a core of much of its research in the category, as well as those elements that bleed into the work it’s doing on Woven City. And certainly the company gets credit for putting in some work here, before the orchestrated appearances we’ve seen of robotics offerings from companies like Samsung.

Image Credits: Toyota Research Institute

“It’s not only about keeping people in their homes longer and living independently,” Bajracharya  recently told me in an interview. “That’s one aspect of it — but in 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.”

Uber has reached a deal to become the sole owner of Latin American delivery startup Cornershop, just one year after acquiring a majority stake in the company. The ride-hailing giant said in a regulatory filing Monday that it will purchase the remaining 47% interest in Cornershop in exchange for 29 million shares. The transaction is expected to close in July.

Uber announced in 2019 plans to take a majority ownership in Cornershop. That transaction wasn’t completed until the third quarter of 2020 other than in Mexico, which closed in January 2021. This latest agreement, which was reached June 18 and reported Monday, will make Cornershop a wholly owned subsidiary of Uber.

The deal suggests Uber’s bullishness in delivery hasn’t waned. With Cornershop as wholly owned subsidiary, Uber can beef up its grocery delivery options, a service made popular during the pandemic. Uber started offering grocery delivery in select cities across Latin America, Canada and the U.S. last summer after it acquired Postmates in a deal valued at $2.65 billion. Uber faces stiff competition from grocery retailers themselves, many of whom offer delivery through partnering with startups like DoorDash or Favor Fleet.

Cornershop, which is headquartered in Chile, was founded in 2015 by Oskar Hjertonsson, Daniel Undurraga and Juan Pablo Cuevas. The company expanded its operations to eight countries up and down the Americas, including Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, the U.S. and Canada. The company raised $31.7 million over four rounds of funding from investors that include Accel and Jackson Square Ventures.

Uber wasn’t the only grocery service with its eyes on Cornershop; the startup was supposed to be acquired by Walmart in a $225 million deal, but it ultimately fell through after Mexican anti-trust regulators blocked the deal from moving forward. It is unclear whether this deal will be subject to the same risks.

TechCrunch has reached out to Cornershop and Uber for comment. We will update the story if they respond.