Author: azeeadmin

Software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, but it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud. We’ve all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with deal sizes and valuations steadily climbing. But as tech industry watchers know only too well, large funding rounds and valuations are not foolproof indicators of sustainable growth and longevity.

To scale sustainably, grow its customer base and mature to the point of an exit, a SaaS startup needs to stand apart from the herd at every phase of development. Failure to do so means a poor outcome for founders and investors.

As a founder who pivoted from on-premise to SaaS back in 2016, I have focused on scaling my company (most recently crossing 145,000 customers) and in the process, learned quite a bit about making a mark. Here is some advice on differentiation at the various stages in the life of a SaaS startup.

Launch and early years

Differentiation is crucial early on, because it’s one of the only ways to attract customers. Customers can help lay the groundwork for everything from your product roadmap to pricing.

The more you know about your target customers’ pain points with current solutions, the easier it will be to stand out. Take every opportunity to learn about the people you are aiming to serve, and which problems they want to solve the most. Analyst reports about specific sectors may be useful, but there is no better source of information than the people who, hopefully, will pay to use your solution.

The key to success in the SaaS space is solving real problems. Take DocuSign, for example — the company found a way to simply and elegantly solve a niche problem for users with its software. This is something that sounds easy, but in reality, it means spending hours listening to the customer and tailoring your product accordingly.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 3, 2021. If you are a startup founder or early employee or investor, there’s good news on the TechCrunch front today: The start of the Disrupt agenda is live! It’s going to be one hell of a show for anyone interested in startups and how they grow. See you there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• United goes Boom: News broke today that United Airlines has agreed to purchase 15 supersonic jets from Boom, a startup focused on building them. For Boom, the deal is a big happening, evidence of material market demand for its products. And, given how much planes cost in general, a huge set of bookings for the company to show to its investors that have plowed nearly a quarter billion dollars into the company, according to Crunchbase.
• Twitter is Blue: No, the social media company isn’t sad. Quite the opposite. Instead, Twitter’s subscription service Blue is going live in two markets for a few dollars per month. It’s something of a very public test of what Twitter hopes — we presume — will be a globally available subscription option for those of us who can’t stop tweeting.
• Women’s health remains an underinvested startup niche: TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas dug into the world of hormonal health for the blog today, asking why there aren’t unicorns in the huge market. It’s a great read.

Startups and VC

We’re dividing up today’s startup and venture capital news into two buckets. The first comprises early-stage rounds, and the latter investments in upstarts that are a bit more mature.

• India’s early-stage market accelerates: Manish Singh reports for TechCrunch that a host of Indian startups are in the process of raising money. He broke an ocean of news in his piece on the matter, not only underscoring how active the global venture market is, but just how hard it can be to keep track of all the activity.
• Simplified raises $2.2M to support marketing creative: Marketers are expected to generate lots of content. Simplified is taking on Canva and that huge market need in a single go. And now it’s backed by Craft Ventures.
• Ganaz raises $7M to help agricultural workers get paid: Not every tech company has to cater to the tech elite or the wealthy. Ganaz is betting that its business — focused on what we described as changing “how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack” — is going to be a hit. Given how huge the agricultural sector is, its wager makes some sense.

And then, on the late-stage front:

• Gong raises $250M for sales automation: Gong’s rapid growth and latest funding was part of my column this morning because of how interesting they proved to be. In short, the sales automation company has roughly tripled its valuation to more than $7 billion since last August. How? By growing by more than 2x in the last year.
• Realtime Robotics raises $31M for real-time robotics: Boston’s startup scene is more than biotech, it should be clear by now. Realtime Robotics is one such Beantown startup that isn’t building new drugs. Instead, Brian Heater reports, it’s building robot software to “help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once.”
• LeoLabs raises $65M to keep satellites from hitting each other: As SpaceX sends bushels of internet satellites into space, the issue of crowding in near-Earth orbit will only get stickier. LeoLabs is betting that keeping expensive space tech from hitting other space tech, or even space trash, is going to be a growth industry.

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

Two years ago, founders of calendar-assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.

Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.

So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we’d been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy.

In a guest post for Extra Crunch, Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Big Tech was busy yet again today, with news from Waymo, Twitter and Blackstone. We also have to talk about the law.

• You can now hail Waymo taxis in Google Maps: Vertical integration, baby! It’s a jam if you are a platform company that makes self-driving cars, operates a taxi service, and also publishes what I presume is the most popular mapping software in the world.
• In related news: Waymo, bring self-driving taxis to Providence, Rhode Island, you cowards!
• In related apologies: Waymo is not made up of cowards, but merely businesspeople who should invest more of their testing budget in Providence, Rhode Island.
• Twitter wants to hear you talk: Twitter is bringing its Spaces product more front-and-center in its mobile experience. Sure, all you use Twitter for today is tweets, but Big Tweet will soon want to send your newsletters, host your chats, and, well, distribute your Fleets as well.
• A court case draws limits around a controversial American hacking law: Per TechCrunch, the U.S. Supreme Court “ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws” in a “landmark ruling [that] concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.”
• In terms of legal news and tech, it’s nice to have some good news.
• And, finally, Blackstone is buying IDG: While your humble TechCrunchers are somewhat sensitive to the idea of private equity buying media properties, the Blackstone-IDG deal is yet another example of the trend.
• The deal means that titles like “CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, and Tech Hive” are changing hands, along with IDC itself.

In April, Medium CEO Ev Williams wrote a memo to his staff about the company’s shifting culture in the wake of a challenging year.

“A healthy culture brings out the best in people,” he wrote. “They feel psychologically safe voicing their ideas and engaging in debate to find the best answer to any question — knowing that their coworkers are assuming good intent and giving them the benefit of the doubt because they give that in return.”

A few paragraphs later, Williams wrote that while counterperspectives and unpopular opinions are “always encouraged” to help make decisions, “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”

He added: “These behaviors are not tolerated.”

The internal memo, obtained and verified by TechCrunch, was published nearly one month after Medium staff’s unionization attempt failed to pass, and roughly one week after Williams announced a pivot of the company’s editorial ambitions to focus less on in-house content and more on user-generated work.

Medium’s editorial team got voluntary payouts as part of the shift, with VP of Editorial Siobhan O’Connor and the entire staff of GEN Magazine stepping away.

However, several current and former employees told TechCrunch that they believe Medium’s mass exodus is tied more to Williams’ manifesto, dubbed “the culture memo,” than a pivot in editorial focus. Since the memo was published, many non-editorial staffers — who would presumably not be impacted by a shift in content priorities — have left the company, including product managers, several designers and dozens of engineers.

Those departing allege that Williams is trying to perform yet another reset of company strategy, at the cost of its most diverse talent. One pull of internal data that includes engineers, editorial staff, the product team, and a portion of its HR and finance team, suggests that, of the 241 people who started the year at Medium, some 50% of that pool are now gone. Medium, which has hired employees to fill some vacancies, denied these metrics, stating that it currently has 179 employees.

Medium said that 52% of departures were white, and that one third of the company is non-white and non-Asian. The first engineer that TechCrunch spoke to said that minorities are overrepresented in the departures at the company. They also added that, when they joined Medium, there were three transgender engineers. All have since left.

“A beloved dictator vibe”

In February, a number of Medium employees — led by the editorial staff — announced plans to organize into a union. The unionization effort was eventually defeated after falling short by one vote, a shortfall that some employees think was due to Medium executives pressuring staff to vote against the union.

The month after the unionization effort failed, Medium announced an editorial pivot. The company offered new positions or voluntary payouts for editorial staff. A number of employees left, which is not uncommon in the aftermath of a tense time period such as a failed unionization and the offer of a clear, financially safe route out.

In April, Williams posted the culture memo outlining his view on the company’s purpose and operating principles. In the memo, he writes that “there is no growth without risk-taking and no risk-taking without occasional failure” and that “feedback is a gift, and even tough feedback can and should be delivered with empathy and grace.” The CEO also noted the company’s commitment to diversity, and how adapting to “opportunities or threats is a prerequisite for winning.”

Notably, Medium has gone through a number of editorial strategy changes, dipping in and out of subscriptions, in-house content, and now, leaning on user-generated content and paid commissions.

“Team changes, strategy changes and reorganizations are inevitable. Each person’s adaptivity is a core strength of the company,” the memo reads.

The memo doesn’t explicitly address the unionization attempt, but does talk about how Medium will not tolerate “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment [but] have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”

Employees that we spoke to think that Williams’ memo, while internal rather than publicly posted, is reminiscent of statements put out by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, which both banned political discussion at work due to its incendiary or “distracting” nature. While the Medium memo doesn’t wholly ban politics, the first engineer said that the “undertone” of the statement creates a “not safe work environment.” Frustrated employees created a side-Slack to talk about issues at Medium.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Medium said that “many employees said they appreciated the clarity and there were directors and managers involved in shaping it.”

The month of the memo, churn tripled at the company compared to the month prior and was 30 times higher than the January metric, using an internal data set obtained by TechCrunch.

The second engineer that spoke to TechCrunch left the company last month and said that the memo didn’t have anything “egregious” at first glance.

“It was more of a beloved dictator vibe, of like, your words are vague enough that they’re not enforceable on anything else, and it looks good on paper,” they said. “If you just saw that memo and nothing else, it’s not a Coinbase memo, it’s not a Basecamp memo.”

But, given the timing of the memo, the engineer said their interpretation of Williams’ message was clear.

“[Medium wants] to enforce good vibes and shut down anything that is questioning ‘the mission,’” they said.

Medium’s extreme 

The same engineer thinks that “very few people left because of the editorial pivot.” Instead, the engineer explained a history of problematic issues at Medium, with a wave of departures that seem to be clearly triggered by the memo.

In July 2019, for example, Medium chose to publish a series that included a profile of Trump supporter Joy Villa with the headline “I have never been as prosecuted for being Black or Latina as I have been for supporting Trump.”

When the Latinx community at Medium spoke to leadership about discomfort in the headline, they claimed that executives from editorial didn’t do anything about the headline until it was mentioned in a public Slack channel. One editor asked anyone who had gone through the immigration process or was a part of the Latinx community to get in a room and explain their side, a moment that felt diminishing to this employee. The headline only changed when employees posted in a public Slack channel about their qualms.

“They think caring is enough,” the employee said. “And that listening is merciful and really caring, and therefore they’re really shocked when that is not enough.”

The third engineer who spoke to TechCrunch joined the company in 2019 because they were looking for a mission-driven company impacting more than just tech. They realized Medium had “deeper issues” during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer.

“There were deeper issues that I just hadn’t heard about because I wasn’t part of them. That just kind of got slid under the rug,” they said, such as the Trump supporter profile. The former employee explained how they learned that HR had ignored a report of an employee saying the N-word during that time, too. Medium said this is false.

“I don’t feel like I needed the memo to really understand their true colors,” they said.

After The Verge and Platformer published a report on Medium’s messy culture and chaotic editorial strategy, the second engineer said that multiple employees who were assumed to be tied to the story were pressured to resign.

“The way I see it, they fought dirty to defeat the union,” the first engineer said. “But it wasn’t a total success because all of these people have decided to leave in the wake of the decision, and that’s the cost. The people who are left basically feel like they have to nod and smile because Medium has made it clear that they don’t want you to bring your full self to work.”

The engineer said that Medium’s culture of reckoning is different from Coinbase because of the mission-oriented promise of the former.

“Some companies, like Coinbase, have said that ‘we want people who are not going to bring politics and social issues to work,’ so if you join Coinbase, that’s what you are expecting, and that’s fine,” they said. “But Medium specifically recruited people who care about the world, and justice, and believe in the freedom of speech and transparency.”

The engineer plans to officially resign soon and already has interviews lined up.

“It’s a good job market out there for software engineers, so why would I work for a company that is treating their own people unfairly?”

If you didn’t want to shell out $9.99 per month to watch the meme-worthy iCarly reboot, now you won’t have to. On Monday, Paramount+ will launch its ad-supported Essential Plan, priced at $4.99 per month.

This less-expensive plan will replace the CBS All Access plan, which included commercials, but also granted access to local CBS stations. If you’re currently subscribed to that $5.99 per month plan, you can keep it. But starting Monday, it won’t be around anymore for new subscribers. 

What makes the Essential Plan different from CBS All Access? Subscribers on the new tier will get access to Marquee Sports (including games in the NFL, UEFA Champions, and Europa Leagues), breaking news on CBSN, and all of Paramount’s on-demand shows and movies. This includes offerings from ViacomCBS-owned channels like BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, the Smithsonian Channel, and more. But, local live CBS station programming will no longer be included. So, if that’s a deal-breaker, you might want to subscribe to CBS All Access this weekend. 

The existing Premium Plan ($9.99 per month) removes commercials and adds support for 4K, HDR, and Dolby Vision. Like other streaming services, only Premium subscribers will have access to mobile downloads. 

Both plans include access to parental controls and up to six individual profiles. The service doesn’t have a watch list at this time. But that has become a baseline feature for being competitive in this space, so it’s not a matter of if, but when. 

For comparison, the basic Netflix plan costs $8.99 per month, but only lets you watch on one screen at a time. That makes it harder to share an account with family or friends. Their standard tier is $13.99, making it a bit pricier than Paramount+.

Earlier this week, HBO Max unveiled their own lower-cost, ad-supported subscription tier, priced at $9.99 per month. The WarnerMedia-Discovery merger could also have major implications for the popular streaming service, though how that shakes out in terms of content libraries, or even possibly a combined streaming app, remains to be seen. 

Ultimately, consumers will make their decisions about which services to pay for based on a variety of key factors including content, pricing, and user experience. On the content front, Paramount+ plans to announce a slate of big-name titles when the new plan goes live on Monday, in hopes of wooing new subscribers. But the low-cost plan may also appeal to those who don’t necessarily care about top movies – they just want an affordable add-on to their current streaming lineup that provides them with access to some of the programs Netflix lacks. 

Paramount+ owner ViacomCBS said it added 6 million global streaming subscribers across their Paramount+, Showtime OTT, and BET+ services in Q1, to end the quarter with 36 million global users. Most of those come from Paramount+.

The fundraising continues apace in the go-go world of venture capital. Today, it’s Lux Capital — known for its frontier investing — that has closed a $675 million early-stage venture fund and an $800 million growth-stage fund from its existing LPs, including many of the foundations, endowments, and family offices that have backed the firm from its start in 2000.

It’s easy to appreciate why they would re-up. Over the last 12 months alone, a dozen of Lux’s portfolio companies have either been acquired, gone public, or announced plans to go public, either via a SPAC of the good-old-fashioned way. Among them is Zoox, bought by Amazon last year; Desktop Metal, which went public by merging with a blank-check company last December; and Shapeways, which agreed in April to merge with a blank-check company.

The most recent of Lux’s portfolio companies to announce a SPAC deal is Bright Machines, a manufacturing software company that two weeks ago announced a merger with a publicly traded shell company. (Lux also raised its own $345 million blank-check company last fall, one that has yet to identify a target.)

Still, even a firm with Lux’s track record isn’t immune to competition in a crowded market. That’s partly why Lux — whose last two funds closed with a collective $1 billion in August 2019 —  has incubated more than a dozen companies of its own, says the firm’s cofounder, Peter Hebert, who talked with us yesterday from Menlo Park about that approach, along with whether and when he sees a correction coming. Some of that conversation is excerpted below, edited lightly for length.

TC: What size checks will you be writing from these new funds?

PH: The median investment in this current early-stage fund will be about $25 million over the life of [each] investment, and that could range from $100,000 to something like $50 million. With our opportunity vehicle, that can be up to a $100 million check and also larger, but I would expect there to be at least one investment in that range.

TC: And the opportunity fund can back companies inside of the portfolio or outside it?

PH: That’s right. I would expect that the majority will be companies where we were an early-stage lead investor, but that there’s no requirement that it’s exclusively Lux-seeded or Series-A-backed companies that receive investment. There’ve been a handful of companies we’ve backed in the past [that weren’t earlier bets] including the liquid biopsy company Thrive Earlier Detection [which was acquired soon after], contract management software maker IronClad [backed earlier this year], and the at-home health testing company Everly Health [which Lux first funded in December].

TC: What startup in your portfolio right now has received the most funding from Lux?

PH: I guess that would be Applied Intuition (which makes  simulation software and infrastructure tools to test and validate autonomous vehicles at scale).

TC: How much do you look to own?

PH: Generally, where we are coming in as the lead institutional investor in a Series A, it’s 20% to 25%, and that can be higher or lower. In many cases, we will create companies from scratch and more often those can be as high as 50%.

TC: I didn’t realize that incubating companies was a big part of Lux’s business.

PH: Yeah, for us, one of the most successful of our investments was a company called Kurion that was a pioneer in nuclear waste remediation that we created based largely on the vision of my cofounder, Josh Wolfe, and his view on the future of alternative energy. We recruited all these great folks out of MIT’s material science department and built that and owned north of 30% when it was acquired by a French waste water company, Veolia, for $400 million in 2016 — and that [was part of a] $100 million fund.

TC: How active are you on this front right now? Given how heated pricing is out there, I’d think it’s a good time to be starting companies in-house.

PH: In the last two to three years, we’ve been most active in new [company] formation for exactly [those] reasons. It’s not like we’re just a factory [looking to] churn things out. Inspiration is the starting point. But whether it’s a market opportunity that we assess,  or whether it’s interesting science and tech that needs a catalyst to get things off the ground, we’re happy to play that role.

TC: What do you think of what’s happening in terms of the feverish pace of fundings and how quickly companies’ valuations are soaring? It seems nuts, but it’s also hard to imagine it ending anytime soon.

PH: I think we’re uncomfortably optimistic. Structurally, [I’m optimistic] because the way that science and technology are funded today is so changed. When I got into business in the late ’90s, the venture industry was small, it was provincial, it was people on Sand Hill Road who wouldn’t talk with anyone who was beyond 10 miles of their office. People were proud to know nothing about the financial markets because there was little connectivity in terms of their impact on [what VCs were doing].

Now it’s global and while some might say the market is frothy, [all that capital is] allowing companies that are really ambitious and that require capital that otherwise might not have [materialized] to [gain momentum], and from the perspective of scientific advancement and technological progress, this is good.

There will certainly be experimentation, people will lose money, there will be hundreds of companies funded and most of them wash out. But there’s going to be a lot of lasting transformative change that comes out of all of this.

It was August 2019, and the fundraising process was not going well.

My co-founder and I had left our product management jobs at New Relic several months prior, deciding to finally plunge into building Reclaim after nearly a year of late nights and weekends spent prototyping and iterating on ideas. We had bits and pieces of a product, but the majority of it was what we might call “slideware.”

When we spoke to many other founders, they all told us the same thing: Go raise, raise big, and raise now. So we did that, even though we were puzzled as to why anyone would give us money with little more than a slide deck to our names. We spent nearly three months pitching dozens of VCs, hoping to raise $3 million to $4 million in a seed round to hire our founding team and build the product out.

Initially, we were excited. There was lots of inbound interest, and we were starting to hear a lot of crazy numbers getting thrown around by a lot of Important People. We thought for sure we were maybe a week away from term sheets. We celebrated preemptively. How could it possibly be this easy?

Then in July, almost in an instant, everything started to dry up. The verbal offers for term sheets didn’t materialize into real offers. We had term sheets, but they were from investors that didn’t seem to care much about what we were building or what problems we wanted to solve. We quickly realized that we hadn’t really built momentum around the product or the vision, but were instead caught up in what we later learned to be “deal flow.”

Basically, investors were interested because other investors were interested. And once enough of them weren’t, nobody was.

Fortunately, as I write this today, Reclaim has raised a total of $6.3 million on great terms across a group of incredible investors and partners. But it wasn’t easy, and it required us to embrace our failure and learn three important lessons that I believe every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.

Lesson 1: Build big before you raise big

In 2019, we were hunting for what some referred to as a “mango seed” — that is, a seed round that was large enough that it was perceptibly closer to a light Series A financing. Being pre-product at the time, we had to lean on our experience and our vision to drive conviction and urgency among investors. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t enough. Investors either felt that our experience was a bad fit for the space we were entering (productivity/scheduling) or that our vision wasn’t compelling enough to merit investment on the terms we wanted.

When we did get offers, they involved swallowing some pretty bitter pills: We would be forced to take bad terms that were overly dilutive (at least from our perspective), work with an investor who we didn’t think had high conviction in our product strategy, or relinquish control in the company from an extremely early stage. None of these seemed like good options.

Spin, the Ford-owned micromobility operator, has added a new CEO, launched a new strategy to capture market share and announced a plan to get back into bike share, although this time with an electric twist. 

The flurry of moves suggest that Spin is still trying to figure out the best path forward to push past its rivals and become profitable. Under the changes announced Thursday, co-founder and CEO Derrick Ko is moving to a strategic advisory role, along with the other two co-founders Zaizhuang Cheng and Euwyn Poon. In Ko’s place is Ben Bear, who previously served as CBO of Spin.

Alongside the change in leadership, Spin is deploying e-bikes for the first time, expanding to multiple cities in the U.S. and Europe, implementing new technologies and coming for Bird as the Number Two e-scooter company in the country (behind Lime, of course). 

Pressure among micromobility operators to actually turn a profit is increasing, so Spin is flexing its compliance record in order to secure those limited vendor permits. The end game is to angle for more exclusive, and perhaps more lucrative, partnerships with cities. Amid all this activity are reports that Ford might be divesting Spin into a separate company, including a sale or spinoff of the subsidiary. Which leads us to wonder in which direction the new CEO will be steering this ship. 

“We’re full speed ahead on the hiring front, and we’ve got ambitious growth plans for this year, heading into 2022 and beyond,” Bear told TechCrunch. “We really think the market is reaching a tipping point where cities are more and more moving towards limited vendor permits, which is right where we’re focused and have been focused throughout our history.”

(Spin would not comment on the reports of Ford divesting the e-scooter company.) 

Most cities have evolved from an unregulated market to an open one, and many, like Atlanta and Washington, D.C., are operating limited vendor permits. Spin is counting on this trend continuing to exclusive vendor permits, similar to the deal Lyft-owned Citi Bike has made with New York City. This might mean going after mid-tier cities that charge Spin less in fees, or even pay them to operate.

“In Bakersfield, we recently received a $1.1 million state grant to install infrastructure and conduct the program, and then $257,000 from the city as well to make sure that the project was supported, and that we’re able to offer low-cost rides to residents who need that,” said Bear. 

In Grand Rapids, Spin is working with nonprofits to deliver scooters as an addition to public transportation, and in Pittsburgh, the company has integrated with the public transit app to make different types of mobility as frictionless as possible. 

“We definitely see ourselves as part of that broader ecosystem, which includes public transit,” said Bear. 

Spin claims that its win rate on new markets in the U.S. is 85% and its renewal rate is 93%. However, the company has lost a few big permit awards, including New York City and Paris. Of its nearly 100 markets in the U.S., a large majority are made up of mid-tier cities and college campuses. Spin says it will be in up to 25 additional U.S. markets through the rest of the year, with plans to expand to Portugal and Ireland, as well. 

Of Spin’s nearly 100 markets in the U.S. and Europe, over 70% are limited vendor exclusive, according to Bear. He says Spin’s reputation of ensuring safety, compliance and equitable service for residents makes it a trusted city partner. But if it wants to monopolize the micromobility of cities, it has to provide a multi-modal fleet. Enter electric bikes. 

Spin also announced plans to roll out up to 5,000 e-bikes on the streets this year, starting with Providence, Rhode Island on June 14. It will also bring e-bikes, as well as e-scooters, to recently won markets like Fort Collins, Colorado; Bakersfield, California; and Penn State University — all of which are exclusive partnerships. 

Spin was founded as a pedal bike share in 2017, but pivoted to e-scooters the following year. Of the major micromobility companies, Spin is a bit late to the e-bike party. Bear says the company wanted to delay bringing e-bikes to market until the form factor had developed enough to be as compelling as its scooters. This prudence could just as well hurt the success of its e-bike program if Spin isn’t bringing something as good as an e-bike that’s already been through multiple iterations of deployed field use. First-generation hardware is rarely, if ever, perfect out the gate. And since Spin hasn’t run a fleet of e-bikes yet, it might not be the smoothest management transition. 

Either way, e-bikes aren’t the only iron in Spin’s fire. True to its promise of being what cities want a micromobility operator to be, Spin is thinking strategically about technological add-ons. For example, Spin has partnered with computer vision startup Drover AI to launch its Spin Insight Level 2, or a bundle of sensors, cameras and on-board computing power to detect sidewalk and bike lane riding and validate parking. Spin launched this new capability for the first time on Wednesday, deploying 100 Drover-tech equipped e-scooters in Milwaukee with plans to launch in Miami, Seattle and Santa Monica, as well. Last month, Bird was booted by the Santa Monica City Council in favor of Spin, Veo and Lyft and will have to remove all of its scooters from its own hometown by July. 

Seattle and Santa Monica, along with Boise, Idaho, will also be seeing some of Spin’s new tech in the form of the S-200, a three-wheeled adaptive sit-down scooter. The vehicle is built in tandem with mobility startup Tortoise, whose repositioning software allows remote operators to move vehicles off sidewalks and into proper parking spots, as well as rebalance them. 

Google has selected 30 startups to receive a share of its $2M Black Founders Fund in Europe, providing these companies with a spot of cash, some valuable cloud services, and a bit of good old-fashioned networking among the Google crew.

The fund was announced last fall as part of a company-wide effort towards “building a more equitable future for everyone,” alongside grants and new sponsorships. Over 800 companies applied and Google interviewed 100 of them, ultimately winnowing that down to the 30 announced today.

Each company will receive “up to” $100K in non-dilutive funding, and up to $120K in Ads grants and $100K in Cloud credits. (I’ve asked Google for more details on how the fund was divided, and if any company received this full amount. I’ll update if I hear back.)

They’ll also get access to Google’s entrepreneurial network, tech support, and some other assets that don’t have hard numbers associated with them.

All the startups are led by black founders, and 40 percent by women of color. One of the latter is Nancy de Fays, co-founder of LINE, which makes these cool battery-hub combos for the MacBook “Pro” that add a ton of ports and battery life and look sweet to boot. I’ve learned a lot chatting with her at trade shows, and regret that I do most of my work at a desktop so I don’t have an excuse to use one of the company’s gadgets.

In response to being selected for Google funding, de Fays penned a blog post exhorting corporations to throw their weight around in favor of social change, and for startups to lead the way in diversity and equity.

We buy values and standards more than we buy the product itself. We buy ideals of life more than the actual features. Putting the these two parameters in the equation – the capability of big corps to shout loud, and consumers’ receptiveness to brands values and messages – it does make sense to me that to drive such a society change, big companies should voice and convey strong messages.

Founders need to build diverse teams without falling into compassion fatigue. They must show empathy and respect and bring onboard the best talents. Period. They need to be outspoken about their values, convey a strong, global mindset and build their organisation around them. And if they find themselves scoring low on diversity along the way, they should question themselves on the why and act on it without doing charity.

It’s something of a counterpoint to the idea, also commonly expressed these days, that companies should be mission-focused and objective.

Here are the other 29 companies that Google will be giving a boost to (descriptions taken from the blog post):

• Afrocenchix – Afrocenchix formulate, manufacture, and sell safe, effective products for afro and curly hair.
• AudioMob – AudioMob provides non-intrusive audio ads within mobile games.
• Augmize – Augmize builds risk models for property and casualty insurers using interpretable machine learning.
• Axela Innovation – Axela Innovations created a smart platform that joins up care services and puts the person receiving care at the center of the process.
• Bosque – Bosque is the first tech-enabled, direct-to-consumer plant brand in Europe with digitized inventory, AR tech, and on-demand access to vetted plant experts.
• Circuit Mind Limited – Circuit Mind is building intelligent software that fully automates the design of electronic circuit systems.
• Clustdoc – Clustdoc is client onboarding automation software used by organizations and teams around the world.
• Contingent – Contingent is an AI platform that proactively predicts, monitors, and manages supplier risk.
• Define – Define is a legal technology company that optimizes the contract drafting and reviewing process for lawyers, serving the world’s largest banks and consulting companies.
• Freyda – Freyda is digitizing the asset management industry by helping funds and service providers to become hyper-efficient in how they approach their data capture from documents.
• Heex Technologies – Heex Technologies provides AI-powered software and web services to development teams in data-intensive fields such as autonomous driving.
• HomeHero – HomeHero is an operating system for the house, making running a home simple and easy.
• Hutch Logistics – Hutch Logistics is a fulfilment and operating system for e-commerce brands.
• iknowa – iknowa is an end-to-end building and renovation platform for property owners and tradespeople.
• Kami – Kami empowers parents during family planning, pregnancy and childhood, allowing them to adapt and thrive through even the most difficult transitions.
• Kwara – Kwara makes building wealth together frictionless, by turning analog credit unions in emerging markets into modern digital banks.
• Lalaland – Lalaland uses AI to create synthetic humans for fashion eCommerce brands to increase diversity in retail.
• Modularity Grid – Modularity Grid is an AI platform that makes energy systems more efficient and resilient.
• Movemeback – Movemeback (often referred to as “the Linkedin of Africa”) is a global social professional platform, connecting people to opportunities, insights, and people they don’t have access to.
• Playbrush – Playbrush is the innovation leader in oral care, growing smart toothbrush subscriptions to foster better mouth and body health.
• Remote Coach – Remote Coach is a platform providing technology for personal trainers and fitness influencers to digitize and grow their businesses.
• Robin AI – Robin AI uses a combination of human and artificial intelligence to read and edit contracts.
• Scoodle – Scoodle is a platform for education influencers. Everyone has something they want to learn and something they can teach—we bring both sides together.
• Suvera – Suvera delivers a virtual care clinic for patients with long-term conditions in the UK.
• Syrona Health – Syrona is a digital health Company providing tracking, treatment, and management solutions for people with chronic gynecological conditions.
• Tradein – Tradein is a real-time scoring and prediction of business payment behavior and solvency.
• Vanilla Steel – Vanilla Steel offers a digital auctions platform for excess steel that provides sellers a simple inventory management process for excess material.
• Wild Radish – Wild Radish enables people who love food and cooking to engage in Michelin-quality, unique, cooking and dining experiences at home.
• Xtramile – Xtramile is a data-driven platform that delivers the right job to the right candidate anywhere online.

Feels like we’ll be hearing from most of these folks again. You can find out more about Google’s startup programs here.

Waymo One, the ride-hailing service that uses driverless vehicles in the suburbs of Phoenix, can now be accessed and booked through Google Maps.

This will be the first fully autonomous ride-hailing option available in the app, which will roll out first to Android users, Waymo said Thursday. The team up not only brings together two Alphabet companies, it signals Waymo’s push to become more visible and accessible to the public.

Waymo has abut 600 vehicles in its U.S. fleet. About 300 to 400 of those are in the Phoenix area, but not all of those are used in the driverless Waymo One fleet. The Waymo One service only uses driverless vehicles, which means that a safety operator is not physically behind the wheel. It also means that if it pops up on Google Maps, users can be assured that it will indeed be driverless. Some vehicles in the Phoenix area are used for testing while others operate in an expanded geographic area and still have a trained operator behind the wheel. Waymo wouldn’t share exact numbers of how many of these vehicles would be dedicated to driverless rides.

Users first have to input directions to or from a location in Waymo’s Metro Phoenix territory, which includes parts of Chandler, Mesa, and Tempe, from an Android device. Once the user taps on the ridesharing or transit tab, they will see the estimated price and ETA of their trip with Waymo.

Existing Waymo One riders will be directed to the Waymo app to book the ride, while newcomers will be taken to the PlayStore to download it.

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is once again heading to the International Space Station.

The company launched its 22nd Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) mission for NASA on Thursday. This is the fifth capsule SpaceX has sent to ISS in the last twelve months, SpaceX director of Dragon mission management Sarah Walker noted in a media briefing Tuesday. It’s also the first launch of the year on a new Falcon 9 rocket booster.

The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 1:29 PM eastern time, right on schedule despite the threat of storm clouds from the south and east. The first stage separated as planned and touched down on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship in the Atlantic Ocean eight minutes after launch. The second stage, which takes the capsule to orbit, separated 12 minutes after launch, also right on schedule.

Image Credits: SpaceX

The Falcon 9 Rocket launch vehicle is sending more than 7,300 pounds of research materials, supplies, and hardware, including new solar arrays, to the ISS crew. It’s the second mission under SpaceX’s new CRS contract with NASA; the first took place last December.

Dragon is carrying a number of research experiments to be conducted on the ISS, including oral bacteria to test germ growth with Colgate toothpaste; a number of tardigrades (also affectionately called water bears), primordial organisms that will attempt to fare and reproduce in space environments; and an investigation that will study the effects of microgravity on the formation of kidney stones – an ailment that many crew members display an increased susceptibility to during spaceflight.

The capsule is also delivering fresh food, including apples, navel oranges, lemons, and avocados.

Of the over 7,300 pounds of cargo, around 3,000 pounds will be taken up by a new roll-out, “flex blanket” solar array developed by space infrastructure company Redwire. As opposed to more traditional rigid paneled solar arrays, flex blanket technology provides more mass and performance benefits, Redwire technical director Matt LaPointe told TechCrunch.

The arrays were placed in the Dragon’s unpressurized trunk. It’s the first of three missions to send iROSA solar arrays to the station, with each mission carrying two arrays, LaPointe said. Once installed, the six iROSA arrays will collectively produce over 120KW of power. Redwire, which announced in March that it would go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, says the new iROSA arrays will improve the ISS’s power generation by 20-30%.

The Dragon capsule is set to arrive at the space station at around 5 AM on June 5, where it will autonomously dock on a port of the Harmony module of the ISS. It will spend more than a month with the station before splashing down in the Atlantic with research and return cargo.