Author: azeeadmin

The UK’s chief data protection regulator has warned over reckless and inappropriate use of live facial recognition (LFR) in public places.

Publishing an opinion today on the use of this biometric surveillance in public — to set out what is dubbed as the “rules of engagement” — the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, also noted that a number of investigations already undertaken by her office into planned applications of the tech have found problems in all cases.

“I am deeply concerned about the potential for live facial recognition (LFR) technology to be used inappropriately, excessively or even recklessly. When sensitive personal data is collected on a mass scale without people’s knowledge, choice or control, the impacts could be significant,” she warned in a blog post.

“Uses we’ve seen included addressing public safety concerns and creating biometric profiles to target people with personalised advertising.

“It is telling that none of the organisations involved in our completed investigations were able to fully justify the processing and, of those systems that went live, none were fully compliant with the requirements of data protection law. All of the organisations chose to stop, or not proceed with, the use of LFR.”

“Unlike CCTV, LFR and its algorithms can automatically identify who you are and infer sensitive details about you. It can be used to instantly profile you to serve up personalised adverts or match your image against known shoplifters as you do your weekly grocery shop,” Denham added.

“In future, there’s the potential to overlay CCTV cameras with LFR, and even to combine it with social media data or other ‘big data’ systems — LFR is supercharged CCTV.”

The use of biometric technologies to identify individuals remotely sparks major human rights concerns, including around privacy and the risk of discrimination.

Across Europe there are campaigns — such as Reclaim your Face — calling for a ban on biometric mass surveillance.

In another targeted action, back in May, Privacy International and others filed legal challenges at the controversial US facial recognition company, Clearview AI, seeking to stop it from operating in Europe altogether. (Some regional police forces have been tapping in — including in Sweden where the force was fined by the national DPA earlier this year for unlawful use of the tech.)

But while there’s major public opposition to biometric surveillance in Europe, the region’s lawmakers have so far — at best — been fiddling around the edges of the controversial issue.

A pan-EU regulation the European Commission presented in April, which proposes a risk-based framework for applications of artificial intelligence, included only a partial prohibition on law enforcement’s use of biometric surveillance in public places — with wide ranging exemptions that have drawn plenty of criticism.

There have also been calls for a total ban on the use of technologies like live facial recognition in public from MEPs across the political spectrum. The EU’s chief data protection supervisor has also urged lawmakers to at least temporarily ban the use of biometric surveillance in public.

The EU’s planned AI Regulation won’t apply in the UK, in any case, as the country is now outside the bloc. And it remains to be seen whether the UK government will seek to weaken the national data protection regime.

A recent report it commissioned to examine how the UK could revise its regulatory regime, post-Brexit, has — for example — suggested replacing the UK GDPR with a new “UK framework” — proposing changes to “free up data for innovation and in the public interest”, as it puts it, and advocating for revisions for AI and “growth sectors”. So whether the UK’s data protection regime will be put to the torch in a post-Brexit bonfire of ‘red tape’ is a key concern for rights watchers.

(The Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform report advocates, for example, for the complete removal of Article 22 of the GDPR — which gives people rights not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing — suggesting it be replaced with “a focus” on “whether automated profiling meets a legitimate or public interest test”, with guidance on that envisaged as coming from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). But it should also be noted that the government is in the process of hiring Denham’s successor; and the digital minister has said he wants her replacement to take “a bold new approach” that “no longer sees data as a threat, but as the great opportunity of our time”. So, er, bye-bye fairness, accountability and transparency then?)

For now, those seeking to implement LFR in the UK must comply with provisions in the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (aka, its implementation of the EU GDPR which was transposed into national law before Brexit), per the ICO opinion, including data protection principles set out in UK GDPR Article 5, including lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limitation, security and accountability.

Controllers must also enable individuals to exercise their rights, it said.

“Organisations will need to demonstrate high standards of governance and accountability from the outset, including being able to justify that the use of LFR is fair, necessary and proportionate in each specific context in which it is deployed. They need to demonstrate that less intrusive techniques won’t work,” wrote Denham. “These are important standards that require robust assessment.

“Organisations will also need to understand and assess the risks of using a potentially intrusive technology and its impact on people’s privacy and their lives. For example, how issues around accuracy and bias could lead to misidentification and the damage or detriment that comes with that.”

The timing of the publication of the ICO’s opinion on LFR is interesting in light of wider concerns about the direction of UK travel on data protection and privacy.

If, for example, the government intends to recruit a new, ‘more pliant’ ICO — who will happily rip up the rulebook on data protection and AI, including in areas like biometric surveillance — it will at least be rather awkward for them to do so with an opinion from the prior commissioner on the public record that details the dangers of reckless and inappropriate use of LFR.

Certainly, the next information commissioner won’t be able to say they weren’t given clear warning that biometric data is particularly sensitive — and can be used to estimate or infer other characteristics, such as their age, sex, gender or ethnicity.

Or that ‘Great British’ courts have previously concluded that “like fingerprints and DNA [a facial biometric template] is information of an ‘intrinsically private’ character”, as the ICO opinion notes, while underlining that LFR can cause this super sensitive data to be harvested without the person in question even being aware it’s happening. 

Denham’s opinion also hammers hard on the point about the need for public trust and confidence for any technology to succeed, warning that: “The public must have confidence that its use is lawful, fair, transparent and meets the other standards set out in data protection legislation.”

The ICO has previously published an Opinion into the use of LFR by police forces — which she said also sets “a high threshold for its use”. (And a few UK police forces — including the Met in London — have been among the early adopters of facial recognition technology, which has in turn led some into legal hot water on issues like bias.)

Disappointingly, though, for human rights advocates, the ICO opinion shies away from recommending a total ban on the use of biometric surveillance in public by private companies or public organizations — with the commissioner arguing that while there are risks with use of the technology there could also be instances where it has high utility (such as in the search for a missing child).

“It is not my role to endorse or ban a technology but, while this technology is developing and not widely deployed, we have an opportunity to ensure it does not expand without due regard for data protection,” she wrote, saying instead that in her view “data protection and people’s privacy must be at the heart of any decisions to deploy LFR”.

Denham added that (current) UK law “sets a high bar to justify the use of LFR and its algorithms in places where we shop, socialise or gather”.

“With any new technology, building public trust and confidence in the way people’s information is used is crucial so the benefits derived from the technology can be fully realised,” she reiterated, noting how a lack of trust in the US has led to some cities banning the use of LFR in certain contexts and led to some companies pausing services until rules are clearer,” she also warned. “Without trust, the benefits the technology may offer are lost.”

There is one red line that the UK government may be forgetting in its unseemly haste to (potentially) gut the UK’s data protection regime in the name of specious ‘innovation’. Because if it tries to, er, ‘liberate’ national data protection rules from core EU principles (of lawfulness, fairness, proportionality, transparency, accountability and so on) — it risks falling out of regulatory alignment with the EU, which would then force the European Commission to tear up a EU-UK data adequacy arrangement (on which the ink is still drying).

The UK having a data adequacy agreement from the EU is dependent on the UK having essentially equivalent protections for people’s data. Without this coveted data adequacy status UK companies will immediately face far greater legal hurdles to processing the data of EU citizens (as the US now does, in the wake of the demise of Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield). There could even be situations where EU data protection agencies order EU-UK data flows to be suspended altogether…

Obviously such a scenario would be terrible for UK business and ‘innovation’ — even before you consider the wider issue of public trust in technologies and whether the Great British public itself wants to have its privacy rights torched.

Given all this, you really have to wonder whether anyone inside the UK government has thought this ‘regulatory reform’ stuff through. For now, the ICO is at least still capable of thinking for them.

 

Ford has two electric vehicles in the pipeline —  the E-Transit cargo van and F-150 Lighting Pro —aimed at commercial customers. Now, the automaker is rounding out its future EV commercial business with the acquisition of battery management and fleet monitoring software startup Electriphi.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Ford is betting that the software developed by the three-year-old San Francisco startup will help it capture more than $1 billion in revenue just from charging by 2030. Ford Pro has financial ambitions beyond charging. The business unit said it expects to generate $45 billion in revenue from hardware and adjacent and new services by 2025 — up from $27 billion in 2019.

Electriphi, along with its 30-person team, will be folded into the newly minted Ford Pro business unit, which is focused on providing services to commercial customers of its electric Transit van and F-150 Lightning Pro pickup truck. Ford will start shipping E-Transit to customers later this year. The F-150 Lightning Pro, a commercial variant of the all-electric Lightning pickup truck, is expected to come to market in spring 2022.

“As commercial customers add electric vehicles to their fleets, they want depot charging options to make sure they’re powered up and ready to go to work every day,” said Ford Pro CEO Ted Cannis. “With Electriphi’s existing advanced technology IP in the Ford Pro electric vehicles and services portfolio, we will enhance the experience for commercial customers and be a single-source solution for fleet-depot charging.”

Electriphi launched in 2018 when it became obvious that upcoming state and federal mandates would drive heavy duty vehicles and mid-sized commercial fleets towards electrification, co-founder and CEO Muffi Ghadiali told TechCrunch in a recent interview. The company has focused on segments deploying commercial electric vehicles in the U.S. and internationally, a list that includes school buses and transit buses.

“If you just think about what’s going to happen in the next 10 years — it’s a massive transformation in mobility for energy and software,”  Ghadiali said. “The stakes are incredibly high and time is running out.” He noted fleet operators are nervous about that upcoming mandates that will require moving to zero-emissions vehicles by the end of the decade. “To turn over your entire fleet in 10 years, you have to start now; they’re going, ‘I have to make sure that my fleet operations don’t skip a heartbeat, while this transition is happening.'”

Ford first approached Electriphi in early 2021. The startup had raised just $4.2 million at a valuation of about $11 million prior to the deal with autoomaker.

While Ford’s focus is building out the software for its E-Transit and Lightning Pro, it is possible that it will also continue to serve Electriphi’s customer base.

“Interestingly, as it turns out, the underlying Ford platform is used across many different vehicle types as well as school buses,” Ghadiali said. “So it’s hard to say which segments we won’t still be in because they are you know they are very relevant to what we do. Of course, our focus will be the large volume that the Ford is going to ship in the next year.”

On-demand goods, food and alcohol delivery service Gopuff has acquired fleet management platform rideOS for $115 million to $125 million, sources familiar with the deal say.

This acquisition comes just a few months after the Philadelphia-based startup announced a $1.15 billion funding round at a $8.9 billion valuation, up from $3.9 billion in October. Last fall, the company also raised $380 million and bought BevMo, a beverage retailer. Gopuff did not share its updated valuation with this new acquisition.

Gopuff provides delivery of everything from cleaning and pet products to over-the-counter medication and food in more than 650 U.S. cities, charging $1.95 for delivery that happens in 30 minutes or less and is available either very late or even 24/7.

This will be incredibly important as the company looks to expand into New York this year, a place where residents expect high rent prices to come with the opportunity to have anything from hummus to diapers delivered at 4 a.m. Speaking of diapers, Gopuff told TechCrunch it has just doubled its baby category and added hundreds of new local products, and that it has expanded to delivering beauty products and “better-for-you” products, which seem to be a mix of organic stuff and healthier snacks.

Gopuff also acquired U.K.-based Fancy Delivery in May, marking its first entrance into international markets. As the company prepares to expand in more complex and high-density cities and enter into new verticals, Gopuff says rideOS’s tech geared toward advanced routing, complex dispatch and fleet optimization will be essential. The company aims to use its new IP to better power multimodal deliveries and reduce delivery times.

By acquiring rideOS, Gopuff also hopes to improve its unit economics and develop new tools to help both its delivery managers and partners be more organized and efficient on the ground, the company says. RideOS, a platform created and led by former Uber, Google and Apple employees in the mapping and ride-hailing space, sees this acquisition as a chance to scale and stay at the forefront of defining the Instant Needs economy.

“Gopuff’s mission and global ambition to be the world’s go-to solution for immediate everyday needs is a natural extension of rideOS’ vision to build software that efficiently moves people and things throughout the world,” said Justin Ho, co-founder and CEO of rideOS, in a statement. “Given Gopuff’s exponential growth, we expect to significantly increase our headcount by the end of this year, expanding our presence in Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, and Berlin.”

Podcasts are all the rage, but podcast discovery is a challenge. Today, Spotify announced its acquisition of Podz, a startup that’s trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery.

“At Spotify, we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience,” the company said. “We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.”

Since podcasts are usually upwards of 30 minutes long, it’s hard for listeners to browse new shows – listening to an episode of a podcast isn’t as easy as trying out a song by a new artist. So, Podz developed what it called “the first audio newsfeed,” presenting users with 60-second clips from various shows. Podcasters often use apps like Headliner to create clips to promote on their social media accounts, and Podz follows the same idea. But instead of podcasters manually choosing how to promote their show, Podz chooses a clip using its machine learning model, which was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio in consultation with journalists and audio editors.

Before its acquisition by Spotify, Podz raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding from M13, Canaan Partners, Charge Ventures, and Humbition. Celebrities like Katie Couric and Paris Hilton also invested.

“Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told TechCrunch via email in February. “Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”

This acquisition marks yet another sign of Spotify’s ambition to corner the podcasting market, and audio entertainment in general – just yesterday, Spotify debuted Greenroom, its live audio Clubhouse rival. And when it comes to driving revenue from podcast subscriptions, Spotify and Apple are neck and neck. In April, Apple announced its expansion into podcast subscriptions, and the following week, Spotify began rolling out its subscription platform after teasing it in February. Apple said it will take 30% of podcast revenue in the first year, which will drop to 15% in the second. On the other hand, Spotify’s program won’t take any cut from creators until 2023, when it will take 5%.

Though podcast creators can quickly determine that it might prove more beneficial to surrender 5% of their subscription earnings than 30%, listeners will likely just flock to whatever app provides the best user experience – and if Spotify’s investment in discovery pays off, it could pose trouble for Apple’s longstanding dominance in the podcasting medium.

KeepTruckin, a hardware and software developer that helps trucking fleets manage vehicle, cargo and driver safety, has just raised $190 million in a Series E funding round, which puts the company’s valuation at $2 billion, according to CEO Shoaib Makani. 

G2 Venture Partners, which just raised a $500 million fund to help modernize existing industries, participated in the round, alongside existing backers like Greenoaks Capital, Index Ventures, IVP and Scale Venture Partners, which is managed by BlackRock. 

KeepTruckin intends to invest its new capital back into its AI-powered products like its GPS tracking, ELD compliance and dispatch and workflow, but it’s specifically interested in improving its smart dashcam, which instantly detects unsafe driving behaviors like cell phone distraction and close following and alerts the drivers in real time, according to Makani. 

The company says Usher Transport, one of its clients, says it has seen a 32% annual reduction in accidents after implementing the Smart Dashcam, DRIVE risk score and Safety Hub, products that the company offers to increase safety.

“KeepTruckin’s special sauce is that we can build complex models (that other edge cameras can’t yet run) and make it run on the edge with low-power, low-memory and low-bandwidth constraints,” Makani told TechCrunch. “We have developed in-house IPs to solve this problem at different environmental conditions such as low-light, extreme weather, occluded subject and distortions.”

This kind of accuracy requires billions of ground truth data points that are trained and tested on KeepTruckin’s in-house machine learning platform, a process that is very resource-intensive. The platform includes smart annotation capabilities to automatically label the different data points so the neural network can play with millions of potential situations, achieving similar performance to the edge device that’s in the field with real-world environmental conditions, according to Makani.

A 2020 McKinsey study predicted the freight industry is not likely to see the kind of YOY growth it saw last year, which was 30% up from 2019, but noted that some industries would increase at higher rates than others. For example, commodities related to e-commerce and agricultural and food products will be the first to return to growth, whereas electronics and automotive might increase at a slower rate due to declining consumer demand for nonessentials. 

Since the pandemic, the company said it experienced 70% annualized growth, in large part due to expansion into new markets like construction, oil and gas, food and beverage, field services, moving and storage and agriculture. KeepTruckin expects this demand to increase and intends to use the fresh funds to scale rapidly and recruit more talent that will help progress its AI systems, doubling its R&D team to 700 people globally with a focus on engineering, machine vision, data science and other AI areas, says Makani. 

“We think packaging these products into operator-friendly user interfaces for people who are not deeply technical is critical, so front-end and full-stack engineers with experience building incredibly intuitive mobile and web applications are also high priority,” said Makani. 

Much of KeepTruckin’s tech will eventually power autonomous vehicles to make roads safer, says Makani, something that’s also becoming increasingly relevant as the demand for trucking continues to outpace supply of drivers.

“Level 4 and eventually level 5 autonomy will come to the trucking industry, but we are still many years away from broad deployment,” he said. “Our AI-powered dashcam is making drivers safer and helping prevent accidents today. While the promise of autonomy is real, we are working hard to help companies realize the value of this technology now.”

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Welcome back to the Daily Crunch for Thursday, June 17. Thank you to Walter Thompson and the Extra Crunch staff for taking the reins I took from Alex. I was released from jury duty, so I’ll be seeing you through the remainder of the week, and we’ll be back to regularly scheduled Alex in no time.

But before we get on with the show, I want to let you know that Duolingo’s director of engineering will join us at our City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event in just two weeks. Karin Tsai joined the company in 2012 as one of its first engineers, and saw the company grow from a scrappy startup into a 400-person global business.

— Henry

The TechCrunch Top 3

Google recently discovered a bug in its Android app that could have allowed an attacker to quietly steal personal data from a device. The company caught it, plugged it and confirmed that it had no evidence that anyone’s data was compromised.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has revived a bill that would establish a new U.S. federal agency to shield Americans from the invasive practices of tech companies operating in their own backyard.

The AI-powered defense company founded by Oculus founder and seller-to-Facebook Palmer Luckey has landed a $450 million round of investment that values the startup at $4.6 billion just four years in.

Startups and VC

Unit has raised $51 million in a Series B round to further its goal of making it possible for non-fintech and fintech companies alike to build banking products “in minutes.”

Disrupting job recruitment disruption: Beamery raised $138 million to continue building out more technology and shake up online job recruitment as we know it. Ingrid reports today that the company calls itself a “talent operating system,” describing that thusly: “A way to manage sourcing, hiring and retaining of people, plus analyzing the bigger talent picture for an organization.”

Nylas, which created an effective way to integrate email, calendars and other tools into other apps using APIs, is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business — $120 million big. 

Data analytics for HR is what eqtble is offering, and it just raised a $2.7 million seed round to do it. There is a lot of data to capture when it comes to a company’s staff, and eqtble wants to help you snag it.

The industrial side of cybersecurity: Claroty, a late-stage company that protects big companies, including Pfizer (which it helped to secure its COVID-19 vaccine supply chain — raised $140 million.

5 tips for brands that want to succeed in the new era of influencer marketing

A small startup with the right message can connect with established and emerging stars on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube who will promote your company’s products and services — as long as they understand the influencer marketplace.

Creators have plenty of brands and revenue channels to choose from, but growth marketers who understand how to court influencers will make inroads no matter how small their budget. Although brand partnerships are still the top source of revenue for creators, many of them are starting to diversify.

If you’re in charge of marketing at an early-stage startup, this post explains how to connect with an influencer who authentically resonates with your brand and covers the basics of setting up a revenue-share structure that works for everyone.

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

Big Tech Inc.

If you live in New York, you can now make your way to Google’s new store, which opened today in Chelsea. The giant’s new brick-and-mortar presence joins the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Amazon so people can peruse its hardware offerings, as well as those of selected not-Google offerings.

It’s an advertising world, and we’re just living in it: Instagram today announced the global launch of ads in Reels, its TikTok rival. Sarah Perez says in her reporting that the ads will be up to 30 seconds in length and vertical in format. Like Reels, the new ads will loop, and people will be able to like, comment on and save them, the same as other Reels videos.

Google this morning announced a line of new virtual machines built on AMD’s third-gen EPYC processor. The new line, called Tau, is x86-compatible and offers a 42% price-performance boost over standard VMs. Google, of course, claims the Tau family “leapfrogs” existing cloud VMs.

Amazon this week announced its Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, which will reduce the commissions Amazon takes on app developer revenues for qualifying smaller businesses. Previously, Amazon’s Appstore took a 30% cut of revenue, including that from in-app purchases. Now, it will take only 20% from developers who earned up to $1 million in the prior calendar year. The program will additionally offer AWS credits.

E3 2021, virtual style, wrapped this week, and, according to Brian Heater, Microsoft won the week with the announcement of 30 games. Nintendo followed with added Switch software.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch is building a shortlist of the top growth marketers in tech. If you’re a founder, we’d love to hear who you’ve worked with.

Fill out the survey here.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon did with Susan Su, head of Portfolio at Sound Ventures, about growth marketing in 2021.

Electric vehicle startup Canoo detailed some of the features that may be on its app on Thursday, foremost of which is a one-stop shop functionality that customers could use for their Canoo vehicles – and all their other cars, as well.

This unusual approach to its branded vehicle app could potentially pay off big-time for Canoo in terms of user data and revenue via sales on services like tire replacements and insurance. If the average Canoo driver owns two other vehicles, that could mean that 50,000 sold Canoos could yield data on up to 150,000 vehicles total, Canoo’s senior VP of global customer journey and aftersales Christian Treiber said.

“Let’s think about the opportunity overall,” he said. “The Canoo ecosystem, but for the entire customer garage.”

For all vehicles – Canoo or not – that are hooked into the app, the driver will be able to see details on range and battery life for their EVs, as well as the odometer, miles per gallon, and total range for their internal combustion engine vehicles. Treiber said this could be accomplished simply using an ODB connector.

“We know how to translate data in cars, we know how to take that metadata and put in service maintenance, repair and asset information, because that’s what we’ve done, we’ve built a multi billion dollar business doing this,” Canoo CEO Tony Aquila told TechCrunch. “So we can take that data and do that for you. It’s nothing for us on our platform. It’s just an OBD dongle. OEMs spend money on stupid stuff, we’d rather give you a dongle for your second car. If you want to connect it, you can run it all off the same app.”

Aquila took the helm at Canoo in April, after co-founders Stefan Krause and Ulrich Kranz departed in June 2020 and April, respectively. (Kranz was hired by Apple to help with the development of its first car.) Aquila founded Solera Holdings in 2005, a risk management and asset protection software company.

Canoo’s hoping to use its app to drive revenue in other ways as well. For Canoo cars, drivers can access the Maintenance and Upgrades section to instantly upgrade the horsepower of their vehicle, schedule a service appointment or check for software updates. Up to 94% of the electronic control units will have wireless updating capability. The app will also make predictive wear and tear reminders for when you’ll likely need new tires – and it will push special offers for these services in advance.

Drivers will also be able to order other vehicle upgrades for the Canoo, like a roof rack or floor or seat protection.

Much of these features – especially the services for non-Canoo vehicles – will likely come together through partnerships with service providers, insurance companies and vehicle detailers. Trieber hinted at other potential partnerships as well, such as using the Canoo app as a digital wallet to pay for a meal at a restaurant, for example

“The single greatest opportunity for the automotive industry is monetizing data, and we want to be part of it, and we will be part of it,” he said.

The news was announced during the company’s investor day presentation Thursday, where Aquila also revealed Oklahoma as the site for its first factory. That location is expected to open in 2023. Canoo’s debut lifestyle vehicle, which is expected to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2022, will being manufactured by Netherlands-based contract manufacturer VDL Nedcar while the factory is being built.

This past year, three sheep in Canada have been wearing their kidneys on their sleeves. Or more aptly, in jackets on their fluffy backs. 

These three sheep are part of an ongoing animal study run by the Buffalo, New York-based startup Qidni Labs, a company pursuing waterless and mobile blood purification systems. Qidni Labs was founded in 2014, has raised $1.5 million and is currently in the due diligence process leading up to another round of funding. Qidni Labs was also an award winner at the 2019 KidneyX Summit for developing an air removal system for a wearable renal therapy device. 

The jackets are a prototype of Qidni’s mobile hemodialysis machine called Qidni/D. The idea behind Qidni/D is that it will be significantly smaller than a traditional hemodialysis setup and use fewer fluids, allowing patients to be more mobile. 

“We see this device, and this technology, to be a bridge to a blood purification technology that allows the patients to be mobile, although we do not anticipate that to be the first product,” says Morteza Ahmadi, the founder and CEO of Qidni Labs. 

Per the CDC, about one in seven people in the US have some type of chronic kidney disease. Over time, that could progress kidney failure, at which point it’s recommended that patients start dialysis or receive a transplant. That threshold is typically symptom based; people might experience weight loss, shortness of breath or an irregular pulse to name a few symptoms.

There are two major types of dialysis: hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis. Hemodialysis passes blood through a filter and a liquid called dialysate, whereas peritoneal dialysis inserts fluid into the body, which absorbs toxins, then drains it out. Qidni/D is a hemodialysis machine that can fit into a sheep sized jacket, and uses its own cartridges and gel-based system to cut down on the amount of liquid needed to perform dialysis. (TechCrunch reviewed images of the device). 

In an early animal trial – the results of which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal – the device was able to reduce levels of urea in sheep’s blood at the threshold of an adequate dose of traditional dialysis. TechCrunch reviewed data from the study over Zoom. 

These sheep had no functioning kidneys, and were hooked up to the machine for between four and eight and a half hours. Morteza adds that the data so far suggests that four hours of treatment should be sufficient to cleanse the sheep’s blood. 

This is just one small animal study, so it’s hard to draw massive conclusions from it. It didn’t include an active control arm, for instance, and instead compared the amount of urea and electrolytes removed from the sheep’s blood to published standards from other studies on dialysis. 

The study alone is far from enough to suggest that the technology is ready for market, but those within the company are taking it as a good sign that the design of Qidni’s mobile dialysis machine bears further testing. 

“We can say that in this study, we could replace daily dialysis based on the data,” he says. 

The team will continue to tweak the technology in more sheep-based studies this year, and is aiming to begin human trials in 2022. The overall goal is to file for FDA approval, provided that clinical studies can demonstrate safety and efficacy, by the second half of 2023. 

The kidney treatment landscape is dominated by dialysis, which is an onerous treatment – despite the fact that a kidney transplant, in many cases, could relieve that burden.  

At the moment, far more people with end stage renal disease are on dialysis than receive kidney transplants. The CDC estimates that 786,000 people in the US live with end stage renal failure, of which 71 percent are on dialysis and 29 percent have received transplants. 

The dialysis industry, and in particular Fresenius and DaVita, the two giants that control about 70 percent of the industry, also has a controversial and complicated history of poor performance.

The kidney treatment landscape is also notable because it’s covered by Medicare, however, it remains expensive. Dialysis and transplants make up about seven percent of Medicare’s budget. Because of this complex landscape, startups have been pursuing alternatives like implantable kidneys. 

Qidni’s current product is not an artificial kidney in that it could live forever in the body of a participant and replace a non-functional organ. Rather, it’s a more mobile take on dialysis. Qidni/D, the blood purification device, is the company’s main focus for the time being. 

That said, Qidni/D  does have some unique elements that may make it as “disruptive” as Morteza hopes it will be. Namely, its small size, and low water requirements. 

During an average week of dialysis treatment, the average person is exposed to about 300 to 600 liters of water, per the CDC. Some of that water is used in the dialysate solution that helps to leach toxins out of the blood. Per Morteza, Qidni/D uses just one cup of water per treatment session, most of which is contained with the dialysate solution. 

“In our understanding, this is probably one of the first times in the world that waterless technology is useful for blood purification over a long period of time in a large animal model,” he says.

Removing the liquid components of dialysis may streamline an already onerous process. Morteza, for one, hopes that this would make at-home dialysis more attainable (fewer stringent water safety requirements) and limit risks of infection (water-related infections sometimes occur during dialysis).

It’s also a small step towards creating an implantable kidney, which would, ideally, not require massive amounts of external fluid – though mobile dialysis remains Qidni’s current focus. The company’s upcoming round will be focused on testing their cartridge technology in small human trials. 

“In this round of funding we would be raising $2.5 million, and that should take us to a point that we can test this technology in a small group of patients, connected to an existing dialysis machine using our own cartridges instead of existing dialysate,” he says. 

It’s ultimately a step towards a machine that functions more like the organ it’s supposed to mimic, though the holy grail for patients is a solution that ends the need for dialysis in the first place. 

This past year, three sheep in Canada have been wearing their kidneys on their sleeves. Or more aptly, in jackets on their fluffy backs. 

These three sheep are part of an ongoing animal study run by the Buffalo, New York-based startup Qidni Labs, a company pursuing waterless and mobile blood purification systems. Qidni Labs was founded in 2014, has raised $1.5 million and is currently in the due diligence process leading up to another round of funding. Qidni Labs was also an award winner at the 2019 KidneyX Summit for developing an air removal system for a wearable renal therapy device. 

The jackets are a prototype of Qidni’s mobile hemodialysis machine called Qidni/D. The idea behind Qidni/D is that it will be significantly smaller than a traditional hemodialysis setup and use fewer fluids, allowing patients to be more mobile. 

“We see this device, and this technology, to be a bridge to a blood purification technology that allows the patients to be mobile, although we do not anticipate that to be the first product,” says Morteza Ahmadi, the founder and CEO of Qidni Labs. 

Per the CDC, about one in seven people in the US have some type of chronic kidney disease. Over time, that could progress kidney failure, at which point it’s recommended that patients start dialysis or receive a transplant. That threshold is typically symptom based; people might experience weight loss, shortness of breath or an irregular pulse to name a few symptoms.

There are two major types of dialysis: hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis. Hemodialysis passes blood through a filter and a liquid called dialysate, whereas peritoneal dialysis inserts fluid into the body, which absorbs toxins, then drains it out. Qidni/D is a hemodialysis machine that can fit into a sheep sized jacket, and uses its own cartridges and gel-based system to cut down on the amount of liquid needed to perform dialysis. (TechCrunch reviewed images of the device). 

In an early animal trial – the results of which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal – the device was able to reduce levels of urea in sheep’s blood at the threshold of an adequate dose of traditional dialysis. TechCrunch reviewed data from the study over Zoom. 

These sheep had no functioning kidneys, and were hooked up to the machine for between four and eight and a half hours. Morteza adds that the data so far suggests that four hours of treatment should be sufficient to cleanse the sheep’s blood. 

This is just one small animal study, so it’s hard to draw massive conclusions from it. It didn’t include an active control arm, for instance, and instead compared the amount of urea and electrolytes removed from the sheep’s blood to published standards from other studies on dialysis. 

The study alone is far from enough to suggest that the technology is ready for market, but those within the company are taking it as a good sign that the design of Qidni’s mobile dialysis machine bears further testing. 

“We can say that in this study, we could replace daily dialysis based on the data,” he says. 

The team will continue to tweak the technology in more sheep-based studies this year, and is aiming to begin human trials in 2022. The overall goal is to file for FDA approval, provided that clinical studies can demonstrate safety and efficacy, by the second half of 2023. 

The kidney treatment landscape is dominated by dialysis, which is an onerous treatment – despite the fact that a kidney transplant, in many cases, could relieve that burden.  

At the moment, far more people with end stage renal disease are on dialysis than receive kidney transplants. The CDC estimates that 786,000 people in the US live with end stage renal failure, of which 71 percent are on dialysis and 29 percent have received transplants. 

The dialysis industry, and in particular Fresenius and DaVita, the two giants that control about 70 percent of the industry, also has a controversial and complicated history of poor performance.

The kidney treatment landscape is also notable because it’s covered by Medicare, however, it remains expensive. Dialysis and transplants make up about seven percent of Medicare’s budget. Because of this complex landscape, startups have been pursuing alternatives like implantable kidneys. 

Qidni’s current product is not an artificial kidney in that it could live forever in the body of a participant and replace a non-functional organ. Rather, it’s a more mobile take on dialysis. Qidni/D, the blood purification device, is the company’s main focus for the time being. 

That said, Qidni/D  does have some unique elements that may make it as “disruptive” as Morteza hopes it will be. Namely, its small size, and low water requirements. 

During an average week of dialysis treatment, the average person is exposed to about 300 to 600 liters of water, per the CDC. Some of that water is used in the dialysate solution that helps to leach toxins out of the blood. Per Morteza, Qidni/D uses just one cup of water per treatment session, most of which is contained with the dialysate solution. 

“In our understanding, this is probably one of the first times in the world that waterless technology is useful for blood purification over a long period of time in a large animal model,” he says.

Removing the liquid components of dialysis may streamline an already onerous process. Morteza, for one, hopes that this would make at-home dialysis more attainable (fewer stringent water safety requirements) and limit risks of infection (water-related infections sometimes occur during dialysis).

It’s also a small step towards creating an implantable kidney, which would, ideally, not require massive amounts of external fluid – though mobile dialysis remains Qidni’s current focus. The company’s upcoming round will be focused on testing their cartridge technology in small human trials. 

“In this round of funding we would be raising $2.5 million, and that should take us to a point that we can test this technology in a small group of patients, connected to an existing dialysis machine using our own cartridges instead of existing dialysate,” he says. 

It’s ultimately a step towards a machine that functions more like the organ it’s supposed to mimic, though the holy grail for patients is a solution that ends the need for dialysis in the first place. 

Coda entered the market with an ambitious, but simple, mission. Since launching in 2014, it has seemingly forged a path to realizing its vision with $140 million in funding and 25,000 teams across the globe using the platform.

Coda is simple in that its focus is on the document, one of the oldest content formats/tools on the internet, and indeed in the history of software. Its ambition lies in the fact that there are massive incumbents in this space, like Google and Microsoft.

Co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra told TechCrunch that that level of competition wasn’t a hindrance, mainly because the company was very good at communicating its value and building highly effective flywheels for growth.

Mehrotra was generous enough to let us take a look through his pitch doc (not deck!) on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, diving not only into the factors that have made Coda successful, but how he communicated those factors to investors.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where founders in the audience come “onstage” to pitch their products to our guests. Mehrotra and his investor, Madrona partner S. Somasegar, gave their live feedback on pitches from the audience, which you can check out in the video (full conversation and pitch-off) below.

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live takes place every Wednesday at 3 p.m. EDT/noon PDT. Anyone can hang out during the episode (which includes networking with other attendees), but access to past episodes is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. Join here.

The soft circle

Like many investors and founders, Mehrotra and Somasegar met well before Mehrotra was working on his own project. They met when both of them worked at Microsoft and maintained a relationship while Mehrotra was at Google.

In their earliest time together, the conversations centered around advice on the Seattle tech ecosystem or on working with a particular team at Microsoft.

“Many people will tell you building relationships with investors … you want to do it outside of a fundraise as much as possible,” said Mehrotra.

Eventually, Mehrotra got to work on Coda and kept in touch with Somasegar. He even pitched him for Series B fundraising — and ultimately got a no. But the relationship persisted.