Author: azeeadmin

The team at TechCrunch is preparing for another epic Startup Battlefield competition this year at Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23 and we’re assembling a superstar team of judges that will choose the winner who gets to take home $100K and the Disrupt Cup. We’re thrilled to have Venrock’s Camille Samuels join us as one of our esteemed Battlefield judges at our second virtual Startup Battlefield.

Samuels is a partner at Venrock, building out the team’s investments in the healthcare world, focusing specifically on plays in biotech, medical devices and consumer health. Some recent bets include Unity Biotechnology, Iris Medicine and Biolux. Samuels joined Venrock in 2014 after 12 years at healthcare-centric firm Versant Ventures. Before the start of her 20+ year career in venture, Samuels worked in business development at drug discovery company Tularik and had stints in corporate development at Genzyme and Millennium Predictive Medicine.

When we spoke with Samuels early last year she talked about her interests in technology that could keep people healthier for longer. “In general, the big idea of improving health span is what really interests me. I want us to extend out the years that we can be healthy and happy versus on medication and decrepit,” she told us.

It’s been a big year for Venrock, which recently closed its ninth fund with $450 million; the firm’s latest exits include last year’s IPOs of Cloudflare and 10x Genomics.

Disrupt 2021 runs September 21-23 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your pass to attend with the rest of the TechCrunch community for less than $100 if you secure your seat before next month.

Polish computational chemistry outfit Molecule.one has raised $4.6M to expand its quest to bring theoretical drug molecules to reality. Its machine learning systems predict the best ways to synthesize potentially valuable molecules, a crucial part of creating new drugs and treatments.

Molecule.one went on stage at Disrupt SF 2019’s Startup Battlefield, where they explained the difficulty faced by the drug discovery industry, basically that they come up with lots of theoretical treatments but can’t actually make the molecules.

The company’s system enters play when you have some exotic new compound you want to make in order to test it in real life, but don’t know how to make it. After all, these molecules are brand new to science — no one has created them before, so why should anyone know? Molecule.one creates a workflow starting with ordinary off-the-shelf chemicals and provides step by step instructions using known methods of how to go from A to B… and to C, D, and so on (it’s rarely simple).

The company leverages machine learning and a large body of knowledge about chemical reactions to create these processes, though as CSO Stanisław Jastrzębski explained, they do it backwards.

“Synthesis planning can be characterized as a game,” he said. “In each move of this game, instead of moving a piece on a board, we break a chemical bond between a pair of atoms. The goal of the game is to break down a target molecule to molecules that can then be bought on the market and used to synthesize the target. We use algorithms similar to the ones used by DeepMind to master Go or chess to find the synthesis pathway.”

Co-founders Piotr Byrski and Paweł Włodarczyk-Pruszyński note that predicting organic reactions is no cakewalk, and that they have dedicated a great deal of resources towards making their system efficient and verifiable. The theoretical pathways they produce seem plausible but still need to be tested, something they do regularly internally so companies see that Molecule.one just selling good ideas but workable ones.

Since their debut at Disrupt, the company has acquired a number of customers with annual contracts, Byrski said, and rolled out lots of features on the platform. Włodarczyk-Pruszyński said that their efficiency has increased as well.

Image Credits: Molecule.one

“Our system has matured and we have extended our platform to support planning synthesis for thousands of molecules per hour,” he said. “This feature is incredibly useful when combined with AI systems for drug discovery that generate huge numbers of candidate drug molecules. All these improvements helped us gain trust in the industry and initiate collaborations with relevant parties.”

Certainly the problem becomes one of scaling as your customers start asking about pathways for hundreds of thousands of possible therapeutic molecules rather than a handful. For them, if they are to bear the manufacturing cost, it’s worth the outlay at the start to see if one of the compounds they’re looking at is considerably easier to make than another with a similar effect. Without simulating the entire process that’s difficult to say for sure, so they can just send the list to Molecule.one and get the report back a few days later.

Image Credits: Molecule.one

The team can’t share any of their customers’ successes (though presumably there have been some) because of course all this work is highly confidential. But they did say that like many companies in biotech they are doing what they can to support COVID-related therapies.

“We made part of our platform free to eligible researchers working on COVID drug discovery. This has resulted in a lasting collaboration with the LambdaZero project at MILA, which is advised by Prof. Yoshua Bengio,” said Byrski.

This also offered the opportunity to test their new scaling methods, since for such a project many candidate molecules must be evaluated, not just for efficacy but the capability of being manufactured easily.

“We are incredibly excited about this area in general because it enables traversing novel regions of the chemical space, which offers enormous promise in terms of looking for drugs that have not yet been synthesized,” Byrski said.

The funding round was led by Atmos Ventures, with a long list of participating investors: AME Cloud Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Firlej Kastory, Inventures, Luminous Ventures, Sunfish Partners, and individuals including Bayer executive Sebastian Guth.

The company plans to use the money to expand the team and continue expanding generally; it also has a plan to open new offices in the U.S. and Western Europe (they’re based in Poland).

Autonomous robotics company Starship Technologies has a new CEO. The company on Tuesday said Alastair Westgarth, the former CEO of Alphabet’s Loon, would be leading the company as it looks to expand its robotics delivery service.

Westgarth previously headed Loon, Alphabet’s experiment to deliver broadband via high-altitude balloons, from 2017. The project shut down for good at the beginning of this year. The company said in a farewell blog post that “the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.” Prior to working at Loon, Westgarth headed the wireless antennae company Quintel Solutions, was a vice president at telecommunications company Nortel and director of engineering at Bell Mobility.

He will be joining Starship Technologies at a time of rapid expansion. At the beginning of 2020, Starship only had a couple hundred autonomous bots operating in a few neighborhoods and college campuses. Last month the company said the number of deliveries since the start of the pandemic quadrupled, hitting a milestone 1.5 million commercial deliveries globally.

“Autonomous delivery is changing logistics as we know it, impacting billions of people around the world,” Westgarth said in a statement Tuesday. “The team at Starship has been developing and perfecting the technology and its operations for years, since creating the robot delivery category in 2014 […] I’m excited about this opportunity and looking forward to helping the company scale both on campuses and in neighborhoods, giving millions more people access to this market-leading, convenient, safe and environmentally friendly delivery service.”

Starship’s previous CEO Lex Bayer quietly departed in December 2020, after nearly three years at the helm. Its co-founder Ahti Heinla, who acted as interim CEO, will now become Starship’s CTO.

Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw — it’s extremely valuable when used skillfully but can cause a lot of pain when mismanaged. Fortunately, this is a story about how it can go right.

At the beginning of 2020, my company, Quantum Metric, was on a tremendous growth curve. We couldn’t have been more excited — and then COVID hit. Suddenly, everything was up in the air. Customer behavior quickly began to reflect the uncertainty we all felt, and my team wasn’t immune to it, either. Like most, we sweated through the first few months of the pandemic.

On the one hand, we felt it might be our time to shine, as digital solutions rose to the surface even in industries that were previously slow to adopt them (think banking and airlines). On the other, companies were trying to lock up as much cash as they could, as fast as they could. What if our customers weren’t able to pay us?

One thing became crystal clear: We needed cash, too. First and foremost, we needed it to protect the company against the income loss we anticipated from customers who were having an especially tough time — namely, those who relied on in-person business as a major revenue source.

Second, we needed cash in order to scale. As the weeks following the initial shelter-in-place orders ticked by, the rush toward digital grew exponentially, and opportunities to secure new customers started piling up. A solution to our money problems, perhaps? Not so fast — it was a classic case of needing to spend in order to make.

Most startups face this dilemma at some point. Some face it continuously. We needed a way to funnel capital into growth and manage to stay cash strong, which was important for another reason: As we headed downstream toward a Series B funding round, we were hesitant to devalue the company (and employee shares) any more than was absolutely necessary.

“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” Thomas Sowell wrote about politics. It’s no different in business. We knew that for Quantum Metric to succeed, we had to give up something in the future in order to get what we needed in the short term. Choosing a debt round as a younger company ran the risk of cash-flow misalignment down the road, but in the same vein, an equity round might have made subsequent funding rounds more challenging.

Whatever we did, we had to do fast, and we had to do it in a chaotic venture capital environment (that may be an understatement). In some meetings, it felt as if VC money had dried up completely. In others, record deals were being made. Startups were bypassing IPOs and going public via SPACs and direct listings. Factoring in the amount of hype that was permeating the market (something I’ve never been a fan of), the “wise” decision felt elusive. As you know from the headline of this piece, though, we chose debt, and it paid off.

The benefits of choosing debt over equity

There ended up being two “layers” of benefits to our debt round. The benefits of the first layer correspond directly with the goals I mentioned above; we got the cash we needed in order to expand — which meant investing in our team, product, marketing and infrastructure — and avoided diluting the company’s value for existing shareholders in the process.

Ads are coming to Twitter’s version of Stories, known as Fleets. The company announced today it will began pilot testing Fleet ads in the U.S., which will bring full-screen, vertical format ads to Twitter for the first time, allowing it to better compete with the vertical ads offered across social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, among others.

The new Fleet ads will appear in between Fleets from people you follow and will support both images and video in 9:16 format. The video ads support up to 30-seconds of content, and brands can also include a “swipe up” call-to-action within their ads.

For video, this is shorter than what Instagram offers (up to 120 seconds) or TikTok (up to 60 seconds), but is in line with best practices which stress that shorter ads can be better.

Twitter didn’t say how often you’ll see a Fleet ad as you swipe, saying only that it will “innovate, test and continue to adapt” in this area, as it learns how people engage.

Advertisers, meanwhile, will receive standard Twitter ad metrics for their Fleet ads, including impressions, profile visits, clicks, website visits, and more. And for video ads, Twitter will report video views, 6s video views, starts, completes, quartile reporting and other metrics.

Image Credits: Twitter

The company is launching the pilot program in the U.S. with just 10 advertisers, including those in tech, retail, dining and CPG verticals.

Twitter says the pilot will help the company to understand how well these types of ads perform on Twitter, which will inform the company not only how to better optimize Fleet ads going forward, but also other areas where it may launch full-screen ads further down the road. In addition, it wants to learn how people feel about and engage with full-screen ads, as the test continues.

Twitter had first begun experimenting with Fleets in spring 2020 as a way to offer a Stories-like product experience where users could post ephemeral content. At the time, the company hoped Fleets would encourage more hesitant users to share content to the platform, as Fleets disappeared after 24 hours, reducing the pressure to perform that comes with posting directly. They also don’t circulate Twitter like retweets and quote tweets do, nor do they show up in Search or Moments.

Image Credits: Twitter

The feature rolled out to global users in November 2020. They were initially criticized by some who felt that Fleets were yet another example of how all social apps were starting to look the same. Nevertheless, Fleets have now become a core part of the Twitter experience.

Today, people use Fleets to point to other tweets they’ve posted, or to share personal updates, photos, and commentary. However, unlike Stories on other platforms, like Snapchat or Instagram, Fleets still offer a fairly bare bones experience in terms of creator tools. You can change the background color, add stickers and text, but that’s about it.

Twitter declined to say how many or what percentage of Twitter’s active user base has now adopted Fleets, noting instead that 73% of those who post Fleets say they also browse what others are sharing. The company says it plans to roll out new updates and features to Fleets in the future, as it continues to invest in the product.

Fleet ads will launch today in the U.S. across both iOS and Android.

Convenience stores are ubiquitous – and they sell the vast majority of gas purchased by consumers in the United States. But as more Americans transition to electric vehicles, a major reason people visit convenience stores will disappear.

Industry giant 7-Eleven is looking to capture this growing market of EV drivers. The company said Tuesday it will install 500 direct-current fast charging ports at 250 locations across North America by the end of 2022. These charging stations will be owned and operated by 7-Eleven, as opposed to fuel at its filling stations, which must be purchased from suppliers.

Many charging stations from some of the country’s largest providers, like EVgo, ChargePoint or Tesla’s Supercharger network, are located in a patchwork of parking lots adjacent to shopping malls or retailers like Target. But a major draw of convenience stores like 7-Eleven is that they’re already located in areas adjacent to highways or major roads – so they may have a leg up in attracting drivers.

7-Eleven may have another advantage in choosing to install DC fast chargers as opposed to slower level 2 chargers: The majority of convenience retailers are designed for quick, in-and-out service – around the time it takes to fill a tank of gas. Many don’t offer temperature-controlled places to sit, so a longer charging time would likely pose a problem for drivers. While older EV models are limited by the amount of kilowatt charges they can accept (so the output rate of the charger is inconsequential to how long it takes to charge the battery), newer vehicles can accept a wider range of charging rates.

As charging infrastructure – or lack thereof – remains one of the largest barriers to EV adoption, planned build-outs from mainstream retailers like the one announced by 7-Eleven could help reduce some consumer hesitancy over EVs.

The 500 charging stations will join 7-Eleven’s existing network of 22 charging stations, which are located in 14 stores across four states.

Another week, another unicorn IPO. This time, Sprinklr is taking on the public markets.

The New York-based software company works in what it describes as the customer experience market. And after attracting over $400 million in capital while private, its impending debut will not only provide key returns to a host of venture capitalists but also more evidence that New York’s startup scene has reached maturity. (More evidence here.)

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Sprinklr last raised a $200 million round at a $2.7 billion valuation in September 2020. That round, as TechCrunch reported, also included a host of secondary shares and $150 million in convertible notes. Inclusive of the latter instrument, Sprinklr’s total capital raised to date soars above the $500 million mark.

Temasek Holdings, Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Intel Capital and others have plugged funds into Sprinklr during its startup days.

Sure, Robinhood didn’t file last week as many folks hoped, but the Sprinklr IPO ensures that we’ll have more than just SPACs to chat about in the coming days. But one thing at a time. Let’s discuss what Sprinklr does for a living.

Sprinklr’s business

Sprinklr’s IPO filing and corporate website suffer from a slight case of corporate speak, so we have some work to do this morning to determine what the company does. Here’s what the company says about itself in its filing:

Sprinklr empowers the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier.

We do this with a new category of enterprise software – Unified Customer Experience Management, or Unified-CXM – that enables every customer-facing function across the front office, from Customer Care to Marketing, to collaborate across internal silos, communicate across digital channels, and leverage a complete suite of modern capabilities to deliver better, more human customer experiences at scale – all on one unified, AI-powered platform.

Not very clear, yeah? Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Here’s what the company actually does:

The grassroots Democratic organization Indivisible is launching its own team of stealth fact-checkers to push back against misinformation — an experiment in what it might look like to train up a political messaging infantry and send them out into the information trenches.

Called the “Truth Brigade,” the corps of volunteers will learn best practices for countering popular misleading narratives on the right. They’ll coordinate with the organization on a biweekly basis to unleash a wave of progressive messaging that aims to drown out political misinformation and boost Biden’s legislative agenda in the process.

Considering the scope of the misinformation that remains even after social media’s big January 6 cleanup, the project will certainly have its work cut out for it.

“This is an effort to empower volunteers to step into a gap that is being created by very irresponsible behavior by the social media platforms,” Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director Leah Greenberg told TechCrunch. “It is absolutely frustrating that we’re in this position of trying to combat something that they ultimately have a responsibility to address.”

Greenberg co-founded Indivisible with her husband following the 2016 election. The organization grew out of the viral success the pair had when they and two other former House staffers published a handbook to Congressional activism. The guide took off in the flurry of “resist”-era activism on the left calling on Americans to push back on Trump and his agenda.

Indivisible’s Truth Brigade project blossomed out of a pilot program in Colorado spearheaded by Jody Rein, a senior organizer concerned about what she was seeing in her state. Since that pilot began last fall, the program has grown into 2,500 volunteers across 45 states.

The messaging will largely center around Biden’s ambitious legislative packages: the American Rescue plan, the voting rights bill HR1 and the forthcoming infrastructure package. Rather than debunking political misinformation about those bills directly, the volunteer team will push back with personalized messages promoting the legislation and dispelling false claims within their existing social spheres on Facebook and Twitter.

The coordinated networks at Indivisible will cross-promote those pieces of semi-organic content using tactics parallel to what a lot of disinformation campaigns do to send their own content soaring (In the case of groups that make overt efforts to conceal their origins, Facebook calls this “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”) Since the posts are part of a volunteer push and not targeted advertising, they won’t be labeled, though some might contain hashtags that connect them back to the Truth Brigade campaign.

Volunteers are trained to serve up progressive narratives in a “truth sandwich” that’s careful to not amplify the misinformation it’s meant to push back against. For Indivisible, training volunteers to avoid giving political misinformation even more oxygen is a big part of the effort.

“What we know is that actually spreads disinformation and does the work of some of these bad actors for them,” Greenberg said. “We are trying to get folks to respond not by engaging in that fight — that’s really doing their work for them — but by trying to advance the kind of narrative that we actually want people to buy into.”

She cites the social media outrage cycle perpetuated by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a harbinger of what Democrats will again be up against in 2022. Taylor Greene is best known for endorsing QAnon, getting yanked off of her Congressional committee assignments and comparing mask requirements to the Holocaust — comments that inspired some Republicans to call for her ouster from the party.

Political figures like Greene regularly rile up the left with outlandish claims and easily debunked conspiracies. Greenberg believes that political figures like Greene who regularly rile up the online left suck up a lot of energy that could be better spent resisting the urge to rage-retweet and spreading progressive political messages.

“It’s not enough to just fact check [and] it’s not enough to just respond, because then fundamentally we’re operating from a defensive place,” Greenberg said.

“We want to be proactively spreading positive messages that people can really believe in and grab onto and that will inoculate them from some of this.”

For Indivisible, the project is a long-term experiment that could pave the way for a new kind of online grassroots political campaign beyond targeted advertising — one that hopes to boost the signal in a sea of noise.

If you’ve experienced parenthood, you’re well versed in the surprisingly small world of disposable diapers. Help may be on the way.

Kudos, a startup that is looking to reinvent the disposable diaper with sustainability in mind, announced the close of a $2.4 million seed round of financing today. Investors include Foundation Capital, XFund, PJC, Precursor Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures,  SV Angel, Underscore VC, Alpha Bridge Ventures, April Underwood and more.

Cofounder and CEO Amrita Saigal says that Kudos is the first and only disposable baby diaper to earn the cotton natural seal from Cotton Inc. for having 100 percent cotton touching the baby’s skin instead of plastic. They’re also made with four times more plant-based materials than the top disposable diaper out there.

Disposable diapers are made up of many layers. Your average disposable diaper from brands like Huggies, Pampers, etc. employ petrochemicals, fabrics like polyester, and a whole lot of plastic. In fact, despite how soft it feels, most disposable diapers’ top sheet (the part that touches your baby’s skin) are made of plastic.

Kudos uses organic cotton in place of that, and focuses on using green materials, with the absorbent core of the diaper made of wood fluff pulp that is totally chlorine free and harvested through the Forest Stewardship Council.

All that said, Saigal explained that performance is just as important as the composition of the diaper, saying that most parents feel that going to a more eco-friendly product sometimes means trading on performance. She explained how parents often have a much higher standard for products for their babies than they do for their own products.

“When I’m thinking about feminine care products, I might go to an eco-friendly product and it’ll be a pain if it has a little bit less performance but I can handle that for myself,” said Saigal. “But with parents, if their kid gets a rash it affects their life and their sleep. When it comes to diapers, parents aren’t willing to give that same leeway for a sustainable product.”

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a lot in the world, and supply chains are no exception. 

A number of applications that aim to solve workflow challenges across the supply chain exist. But getting real-time access to information from transportation providers has remained somewhat elusive for shippers and logistics companies alike. 

Enter Project44. The 7-year-old Chicago-based company has built an API-based platform that it  says acts as “the connective tissue” between transportation providers, third-party logistics companies, shippers and the systems. Using predictive analytics, the platform provides crucial real-time information such as estimated time of arrivals (ETAs).

“Supply chains have undergone an incredible amount of change – there has never been a greater need for agility, resiliency, and the ability to rapidly respond to changes across the supply chain,” said Jason Duboe, the company’s Chief Growth Officer.

And now, project44 announced it has raised $202 million in a Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Emergence Capital. Girteka and Lineage Logistics also participated in the financing, which gives project44 a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. That doubles the company’s valuation at the time of its Insight Partners-led $100 million Series D in December.

The raise is quite possibly the largest investment in the supply chain visibility space to date.

Project44 is one of those refreshingly transparent private companies that gives insight into its financials. This month, the company says it crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is up 100% year over year. It has more than 600 customers including some of the world’s largest brands such as Amazon, Walmart, Nestle, Starbucks, Unilever, Lenovo and P&G. Customers hail from a variety of industries including CPG, retail, e-commerce, manufacturing, pharma, and chemical.

Over the last year, the pandemic created a number of supply chain disruptions, underscoring the importance of technologies that help provide visibility into supply chain operations. Project44 said it worked hard to help customers to mitigate “relentless volatility, bottlenecks, and logistics breakdowns,” including during the Suez Canal incident where a cargo ship got stuck for days.

Looking ahead, Project44 plans to use its new capital in part to continue its global expansion. Project44 recently announced its expansion into China and has plans to grow in the Asia-Pacific, Australia/New Zealand and Latin American markets, according to Duboe.

“We are also going to continue to invest heavily in our carrier products to enable more participation and engagement from the transportation community that desires a stronger digital experience to improve efficiency and experience for their customers,” he told TechCrunch. The company also aims to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) and data science capabilities and broaden sales and marketing reach globally.

Last week, project44 announced its acquisition of ClearMetal, a San Francisco-based supply chain planning software company that focuses on international freight visibility, predictive planning and overall customer experience. WIth the buy, Duboe said  project44 will now have two contracts with Amazon: road and ocean. 

“Project44 will power what they are chasing,” he added.

And in March, the company also acquired Ocean Insights to expand its ocean offerings.

Will Chen, a managing director of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, believes that project44 is unique in its scope of network coverage across geographies and modes of transport.  

“Most competitors predominantly focus on over-the-road visibility and primarily serve one region, whereas project44 is a truly global business that provides end-to-end visibility across their customers’ entire supply chain,” he said.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management, noted project44 CEO and founder Jett McCandless, will help the company grow not only by providing capital but through its network and resources.