Author: azeeadmin

SaaS-maker Birdie has closed an $11.5 million Series A round of funding led by Index Ventures. Existing investor Kamet Ventures also participated.

The UK-based caretech startup has raised a total of $22.9M since being founded back in 2017 (a 2018 raise that was called a Series A at the time is now being classed as a seed expansion). It’s focused on building tools for social care providers to drive efficiencies in a chronically under resourced sector.

Birdie isn’t a care provider itself (so it’s not a direct competitor to a startup like Lifted); rather it aims to support care providers with a suite of digital tools intended to reduce admin costs and makes it easier to manage the care being provided to individuals — doing away with the need for paper-based records, and enabling real-time visibility such as via carer check-ins and medication-related notifications.

The wider mission is for the platform to support care providers to offer more co-ordinated, personalized and — the hope is — preventative care so that older adults can be supported to live for longer in their own homes.

“Technology can completely transform the way we look after the elderly and help them to age at home much longer, healthier and happier,” says CEO and co-founder Max Parmentier, explaining the founding premise. “We position ourselves as a solution to uniquely offer a full support for the elderly to age at home… So we started off with the people closest to the elderly and caring for the elderly which are the care providers. And when we look at how these providers are operating they are extraordinary committed, and very much involved in their work, but the care delivered is very uncoordinated, reactive and sometimes very generic.

“We felt that we could go way beyond — in terms of technology — becoming the operating system to be much more efficient in the way they deliver care but also to significantly increase the quality of the care delivered.”

What’s the draw for VCs to invest in such an under-resourced market? “There’s macro trends which are unavoidable. I agree with you that it’s vastly underfunded but it’s just unsustainable,” he argues. “There is clearly an argument to say that whether VCs or investors are interested in this industry or not it’s going to get bigger. And one way or another we’ll have to find some funding mechanism to pay for it.”

“Today already we hear horrible stories about older people not being taken care of properly. I think what got particular Index excited is really the opportunity to [tell a positive story],” he goes on. “I’m quite an optimistic person. I do believe that actually you could very much craft a much happier path in terms of ageing which is actually more affordable — because it doesn’t cost as much because you really lower the healthcare costs if you really tailor these packages better and tailor the care much better. And you can also use technology to make it more personalized, more preventative.”

By simplifying and streamlining data capture around elderly care via a digital platform, information about the care being delivered can be structured in a way that helps reduce errors (such as from handwritten notes leading to administering the wrong medication) and allows for problems to be spotted early when an intervention may be highly beneficial, is the contention.

Parmentier gives the example of early signs of a urinary tract infection which, if picked up on — by spotting telltale signs in the data — can be treated simply at home with antibiotics. But if not an elderly person may end up in hospital, with all the associated risks of a far worse outcome.

Birdie can also supply connected hardware like motion sensors to its care provider customers so that its platform can monitor frail elderly adults who may be at risk of falling. Although Parmentier emphasizes that such hardware is an optional component of the platform — and is only installed with the full knowledge and consent of the care recipient.

The business is focused on “serving the interests and the rights of these older adults and no one else”, he says, confirming that care recipients’ data is not shared with any third parties unless it’s directly related to the delivery of their care.

Birdie’s team (Image credits: Birdie)

Having a digital platform-level view into an individual’s care obviously offers increased visibility vs paper-based records. It also means real-time data can be shared — such as with close family members who may want the reassurance of knowing when their loved one has received a visit or taken their medication, and so on. (Again, though, only with the proper consents.)

“There is a positive narrative which is that ageing is actually great,” Parmentier suggests. “If you’re in good health this part of your life is probably one of the most exciting. And this is really the spin we should give in terms of story but also we should empower these older adults with the right support to take that happy path.”

To date, Birdie has partnered with almost 500 providers across the U.K. — and currently its platform is being used to support the care of more than 20,000 older people every week.

Growth has been 8x over the past 12 months, per Parmentier, as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated demand for in-home elderly care. The new funding will go on accelerating growth in the U.K., though he also says it has its eye on other geographies and sees potential to expand internationally.

“Phase one [of the business] is how can we empower these care providers to be better at what they do?” he says. “Because I really believe that there’s am army of care givers who are so committed and if we can help them be better at what they do that’s beautiful.”

Having structured data on elderly care provides a foundation for conducting research that could further the ‘preventative’ care component of the mission — and Birdie is taking some tentative steps in that direction via some project partnerships.

Such as one into polypharmacy (i.e. concurrent use of medications which can have negative clinical consequences) with U.K.-based AI company Faculty.

“There’s very little known as to what impact medication has on older adults health. If you think about it we just have pharma companies doing trials and then flagging secondary symptoms up when they arise and then doctors prescribe that. The reality is for elderly people — because usually they combine different medications — the symptoms and the damage to health can be greater,” he explains.

“What we’ve done with Faculty is to look at what is the medication treatment of an older adult and what is the clinical observations from carers following these medication treatments. So do we see that typically there’s less appetite to eat or drink, or complaints about pains and so on. And do we see correlations with the actual medication treatment prescribed?”

The polypharmacy research is at an early stage but he says the hope is they will be able to build an AI model that can generate warnings for a prescribing clinician if a particular medication regime has been linked to outcomes that may damage health or otherwise hamper healthy caring for an individual.

On the research side, Birdie’s website notes that it’s using “anonymized” data in these exploratory efforts — which is a claim that merits scrutiny given that medical data is both very sensitive and notoriously difficult to robustly (irreversibly) anonymize.

Asked about this, Parmentier says that for the moment its research efforts entail correlating data on different older adults from different care providers, and that the data being pooled is limited to specifically relevant info (i.e. depending on the research project) — removing “all the un-needed data”, as he puts it. 

He says it is not, for example, currently combining any of the data it holds with National Health Service (NHS) patient data — which he acknowledges could pose a major risk of re-identification. But he also says Birdie does want to go there because it believes that combining more data-sets could help it further preventative care research.

“The risk is when you pool your data with any third party data-set such as the NHS for instance. That is really risky… because there’s always a way to tie it back. So we’ve been keeping away from that for the moment,” he tells TechCrunch.

“I think it can really improve our preventative models but we need to do that only under very strict conditions that the anonymization is bullet-proof,” he adds. “We haven’t done that yet and we’re exploring ways to do it. But we’re going to very cautious about it. So for the moment there’s no risk really because we’re not mixing data-sets of the same patient. But if we were to integrate with third parties’ systems the risk will rise — and we’ll need to address it very clearly.”

Parmentier also offers a glimpse of an ambitious potential second phase of the business — where Birdie believes it will be able to coach older adults themselves (and/or their family members who are acting as care givers), i.e. enabled by its platform-level view of best practice (and by being able to fold in data-fuelled research into preventative care AI models).

To get there will require not, just a lot of data, but a sectoral shift toward a model of care delivery focused on “value-based healthcare”; where the provider is billed not for hours of care given but on health/quality of life outcomes. So the transformative vision of highly scalable, data-enabled elderly home care is certainly not going to arrive overnight.

In the meanwhile Birdie’s business remains firmly in phase one: Building support tools to drive efficiency and quality for an under-resourced sector.

“We see the same problem everywhere,” adds Parmentier. “Today already we don’t look after our elderly properly… Today they cost us about 60% of our healthcare costs. Tomorrow is going to be much worse. We need to channel more investment into this industry — in terms of new ways of operating, technology, and really innovation is key to move towards better models where it’s more preventative, more personalized, more outcome based — because that’s the solution. It’s going to lower the cost base, it’s going to improve the health outcomes.”

Commenting in a statement, Stephane Kurgan, venture partner at Index Ventures, added: “Our ageing society and increasing healthcare costs require us to rethink the way we care for frailer populations like the elderly. Technology gives us the tools, as the care sector has remained widely paper-based and is ripe for disruption.

“By investing in caretech with Birdie, we are investing in solving the daily challenges of the care community. We firmly believe in Birdie’s vision to make care more personalised and more preventative so that older people can age at home longer, healthier and happier. We’ve been impressed by Birdie’s traction and the calibre of its team, and are very excited to embark on this journey with them.”

Panaseer, which takes a data science approach to cybersecurity, has raised $26.5 million in a Series B funding led by AllegisCyber Capital. Existing investors, including Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, AlbionVC, Cisco Investments and Paladin Capital Group, as well as new investor, National Grid Partners also participated. Panaseer has now raised $43m to date.

Panaseer’s special sauce and sales pitch amount to what it calls ‘Continuous Controls Monitoring’ (CCM). In plainer English that means correlating a great deal of data from all available security tools to check assets, control gaps, you name it.

As a result, the company says it can identify zero-day and other exposures faster, or exposure to, say, FireEye or SolarWinds vulnerabilities.

Jonathan Gill, CEO, Panaseer said: “Most enterprises have the tools and capability to theoretically prevent a breach from occurring. However, one of the key reasons that breaches occur is that there is no technology to monitor and react to failed controls. CCM continuously validates and measures levels of protection and provides notifications of failures. Ultimately, CCM enables these failures to be fixed before they become security incidents.”

Speaking to me on a call he added: “The investment, allows us to scale our organization to meet those demands of customers with a team of people to implement the platform and help them get tremendous value and to evolve the product. To add more and more capability to that technology to support more and more use cases. So they’re the two main directions, and there’s a market we think of 10s of 1000s of organizations of a certain size, who are regulated or they have assets worth protecting and a level of complexity that makes it difficult to solve the problem themselves. And our Advisory Board and the customers I’ve spoken with think maybe there are barely 20 companies in the world who can solve this problem. And everybody else gets stuck on the fact that it’s a really difficult data science problem to solve. So we want to scale that and take that to more organizations.”

And why did they pick these investors: “I think we picked them and they picked us, we’ve been on that journey together. It takes months to find the best combination. The dollars are all the same when it comes to investors, but I think they can help improve as an organization and grow just like the existing investors do. They give us access and reach into parts of the market and help make us better as organizations as well.”

Bob Ackerman, founder and managing director of AllegisCyber Capital, and co-founder of DataTribe said: ‘The emergence of Continuous Controls Monitoring as a new cybersecurity category demonstrates a ‘coming of age’ for cybersecurity. Cyber is the existential threat to the global digital economy. All levels of the enterprise, from the CISO, to Chief Risk Officer, to the Board of Directors are demanding comprehensive visibility, transparency and hard metrics to assess cyber situational awareness.”

After months of deliberations, the FCC is ready to start helping people cover the cost of broadband and connected devices through two emergency funds amounting to more than $10 billion. If your household has trouble paying for internet access or shares a single computer, or your wallet has just had a rough year, you probably qualify for help.

The two distinct programs are the Emergency Connectivity Fund Program and the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program. They sound similar, and in a general sense they do similar things, but they’re distinct programs intended to help close the connectivity gap in America, especially for those most adversely affected by the pandemic.

The first, which we’ll just call the Connectivity Fund, is not something you as an ordinary consumer necessarily need to worry about, but your household may still benefit from it. It’s intended, as FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has explained, to close the “homework gap” specifically, meaning kids who lack the ability to take part in online schoolwork because they lack a suitable device or connection.

The fund will work with schools and libraries to cover the cost of things like portable wi-fi hot spots, tablets, laptops, or other connectivity-related items. Basically, those institutions will do their own work to identify the kids and families that need help, provide what they think is needed, and then send the bill to the FCC.

As a parent, you may have to respond to a survey or talk to your kid’s teacher about what would help most, but you probably won’t have to do much in the way of paperwork. That said, you might ask an administrator whether they’re aware of and participating in the program — it goes through the FCC’s E-rate program, which might be a more familiar term to them.

The Emergency Broadband Benefit is the one that ordinary users will need to do a little legwork to take advantage of. This $3B fund is a one-time thing, available only while the money lasts, and the FCC in a call with media wasn’t really able to estimate exactly how long that is likely to be, since it depends on how many people sign up in the first place.

The program subsidizes $50 (or $75 in tribal lands) in broadband costs and provides a one-time $100 discount for hardware, provided you meet the eligibility requirements. The short version is if you qualify for any other federal assistance, like Pell grants, free and reduced-price lunch, Medicaid, etc, you almost certainly qualify here. And if you earn less than $99K and “experienced a substantial loss of income” in the last year, you also qualify — which covers a whole lot more people.

You can apply online or via mail starting tomorrow, May 12, but the easiest thing to do might be to check if your current broadband provider is participating and just ask them to enroll you in the program. They may have their own form you have to fill out, but the result is $50 off your internet for as long as there’s money in the FCC’s $3B bag.

When I asked an FCC representative whether the two programs could complement or interfere with one another in a single household, they said there will probably be some limitations but that specifics will come later. Basically there are provisions to prevent a single internet connection or device from receiving discounts from both programs, but because they’re administered differently you shouldn’t have to worry about that. Just ask the school what they’ve got for you and sign up for the broadband benefit, and you should be good. (Likewise for Lifeline and other benefits — should be fine.)

Incidentally, the two measures were both passed unanimously by the FCC, and the comments of the individual commissioners show that they are pleased to get this out the door — this really is a $10B giveaway to those who need it most, and though it took some time to achieve, it should be helpful to quite a lot of people.

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Welcome back to Daily Crunch. You look great today!

From our perch, it’s fascinating to watch the exit market for startups wax and wane this year. And change it has. After kicking off with a blistering pace in early 2021 before succumbing to what felt like a sudden cold snap, it appears that the public markets are once again welcoming startups to their rosters.

At least that’s what venture-backed digital mortgage unicorn Better.com hopes. And media companies BuzzFeed, Vice, and the artist formerly known as Bustle. Tech stocks might be losing ground, but the demand for unicorn liquidity appears to be winning out over caution. — Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

• $112M for last-mile fulfillment: Munich-based parcelLab just closed a mega-round to make delivery and returns better for e-commerce companies.
• $160M to buy third-party retailers on Amazon: Yet another startup has raised a huge amount of money to buy up retailers that sell on other sites. Acquco joins Thrasio and Perch in the game with oodles of capital.
• The American scooter wars have died down to a murmur, but that doesn’t mean that shared-transit startups around the world aren’t still competing for market share. Tage Kene-Okafor reports for TechCrunch on “the motorcycle ride-hailing wars in Nigeria and Uganda.”

Startups and VC

The world of startups has become so very broad that it’s a bit bonkers to try and cut down on the total news volume each day for this newsletter. So what follows is a sampling of what we published today concerning the upstart economy:

• Why TransUnion led blockchain fintech Spring Labs’ $30M Series B: Credit ratings as they exist today are garbage. Perhaps the blockchain will be better? TransUnion also would like to avoid being replaced, so it has its checkbook out for Spring Labs.
• Sequoia Games looks to capitalize on NBA Top Shot fever with an AR tabletop game: Concerned that NFTs were too cool? This is “a game that seems to be trading cards meets Catan meets NFTs meets augmented reality,” we wrote. I mean, sure?
• The Last Gameboard raises $4M to ship its digital tabletop gaming platform: Sticking to the gaming theme, how about a 16-inch square screen that sits flat on your table for all your IRL gaming needs? Let’s just hope it works. Our hopes are up.
• SightCall raises $42M for its AR-based visual assistance platform: Go to a site to make a repair. Hold up a tablet in front of the broken thing. AR-powered interface shows you notes and details about what needs fixing. That’s cool as hell, provided that SightCall can get it all to work.
• Lili, a neobank aimed at freelancers, raises $55M as it passes 200K users: No matter how much money global neobanks raise as a startup cohort, they will need several hundred million more. Here’s Lili contributing to the cause.

Blockchain credit ratings and NFTs and consumer gaming hardware and AR-tech for techs and fintech? It’s a busy startup market out there.

SaaS companies can grow to $20M+ ARR by selling exclusively to developers

Before Twilio had a market cap approaching $56 billion and more than 200,000 customers, the cloud-communications platform developed a secret sauce to fuel its growth: a developer-focused model that dispensed with traditional marketing rules.

Software companies that sell directly to end users share a simple framework for managing growth that leverages discoverability, desirability and do-ability (the “aha!” moment).

Data show that traditional marketing doesn’t work on developers; to create and sell software to developers at scale, you’ll need to toss that B2B playbook and meet customers where they are.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Turning at last to the largest companies in the world of tech, the public-market giants, here’s the latest:

• Samsung is out of MWC in-person events: If you really wanted to see new Samsung hardware at MWC this year, tough, though I am not sure how many of you that impacts. Virtual events, everyone, are here to stay. Who has time to fly to a different country to sit in a chair and type?
• Jumia’s long-bet on African e-commerce continues to post modest improvement: E-commerce and shipping company Jumia is still figuring out its model as its market evolves. It had a tough COVID, but there are some signs of life from the public concern.
• Uber and Lyft want to help you get a vaccine: American ride-hailing companies are stepping up to get folks to a vaccine site. Which is good. Let’s hope that every ride-hailing company does this as, you know, vaccines work and COVID-19 is bad.
• YouTube tries to buy TikTok love: Do you know what is almost as good as having huge viral traction and a huge hook into popular culture like TikTok? Dropping $100 million to pay people to populate your platform with original content. Yeesh.
• Google gets into remittances: Google wants you to send money to other countries using its GPay. Two things: One, it’s called GPay? How have I never heard of it? And, second, it didn’t already do this? Big Search is teaming up with the ever-loved Western Union on the project. Wise is also helping out.

Community

The topic of workplaces “opening up” is a hot one. Come take our Twitter poll and share your thoughts (and chat about it with us on Discord).

Jamf, the enterprise Apple device management company, announced that it was acquiring Wandera, a zero trust security startup, for $400 million at the market close today. Today’s purchase is the largest in the company’s history.

Jamf provides IT at large organizations with a set of management services for Apple devices. It is the leader in the market, and snagging Wandera provides a missing modern security layer for the platform.

Jamf CEO Dean Hager says that Wandera’s zero trust approach fills in an important piece in the Jamf platform tool set. “The combination of Wandera and Jamf will provide our customers a single source platform that handles deployment, application lifecycle management, policies, filtering and security capabilities across all Apple devices while delivering zero trust network access for all mobile workers,” Hager said in a statement.

Zero trust, as the name implies, is an approach to security where you don’t trust anybody regardless of whether they are inside or outside your network. It requires that you force everyone to provide multiple forms of authentication to prove their identity before they can access company resources.

The need for a zero trust approach became even more acute during the pandemic when employees  have often been working from home and have needed access to applications and other company resources from wherever they happened to be, a trend that was happening even prior to COVID, and is likely to continue after it ends.

Wandera, which is based in London, was founded in 2012 by brothers Roy and Eldar Tuvey, who had previously co-founded another security startup called ScanSafe. Cisco acquired that company, which helped protect web gateways as a service for $183 million back in 2009. The brothers raised over $53 million along the way for Wandera. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, 83North and Sapphire Ventures.

Writing in 2017 in a blog post announcing the firm’s investment in Wandera, Sapphire co-founder and managing director Andreas Weiskam had this to say about the startup:

The emerging category of mobile threat defense and mobile security more broadly present a large market opportunity. Wandera’s combination of a secure mobile gateway with an enduser application is well positioned to to capture this large market. It’s complementary set of functionalities which span several use cases can help make the mobile world more secure for enterprises without compromising usability or employee privacy.

Jamf now has access to all of that technology and everything else the company has developed since. Under the terms of the deal, Jamf is paying Wandera $350 million in cash, then paying them two $25 million payments on October 1, 2021 and December 15, 2021. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter assuming it passes regulatory scrutiny.

Shortly after Samsung announced that it won’t be attending the upcoming MWC Barcelona, Chinese hardware giant (and Motorola parent) Lenovo has confirmed with TechCrunch that it has also decided to forgo the in-person event. The event is scheduled for June 28 to July 1.

“Lenovo is not attending in person but will participate in the virtual partner program,” the company said in a brief statement. The decision reflects that of Samsung’s – opting to skip a booth in favor of going all-virtual.

The move is not particularly surprising – and, as noted earlier, it’s hard to shake the feeling we had early last year, as the dominos started falling ahead of the event’s cancelation (though by all accounts this year’s MWC will have a physical presence regardless). Google, IBM, Nokia, Sony, Oracle and Ericsson have all already confirmed they will not be in attendance.

Some key hardware names are still up on the official MWC exhibitor list, including ZTE, Xiaomi and LG – though things are further complicated by the fact that the latter recent announced its exit from the smartphone business.

Following Samsung’s announcement, the show’s governing board, the GSMA, told TechCrunch, “Of course we respect that planning in a pandemic is complicated. Samsung will adapt their presence to virtual for MWC21 and we look forward to seeing them in person 2022.” It’s safe to assume the response is similar for the moment, though we’ll update if we receive additional comment.

These announcements are, no doubt, a massive blow for MWC’s ambitions for a small return to normalcy this year. But given travel restrictions in many places as the pandemic continues to rage on in various parts of the world, it’s hard to fault any of the companies for their abundance of caution.

eBay is joining the NFT frenzy, telling Reuters today that going forward it will allow the sales of NFTs on its platform, a mainstream embrace that follows billions of dollars in NFT purchases over the past few months. The e-commerce company seems poised to slowly build up sales of digital collectibles on the platform, starting with a smaller group of verified sellers on the platform.

“In the coming months, eBay will add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to our platform,” eBay exec Jordan Sweetnam told them.

eBay has invested heavily in infrastructure for physical collectibles like trading cards, as well as items like sneakers and watches which they help verify for buyers.

eBay is a major presence in online shopping, but the platform will have its work cut out for it competing with dozens of crypto native NFT marketplaces already out there. While NFT interest has been high as of late, the infrastructure for buying collectibles with cryptocurrencies still isn’t the most user-friendly. Earlier this week, executives at eBay said they were open to accepting cryptocurrencies in the future.

This news comes as the Ethereum cryptocurrency, which is the primary method of purchase for most NFTs, reaches past all-time-highs, currently trading over $4,100.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck shared more details on the company’s next launch, which is set to take off from its New Zealand facility on May 15. The Electron vehicle will be carrying satellites from BlackSky, but delivering that payload is only half of the mission: the other half will be recovering the booster stage after an ocean splashdown.

This is the second of three planned booster recovery missions, part of Rocket Lab’s long-term plan to reach reusability for its launch vehicle, an achievement most famously held by its competitor SpaceX. The first recovery mission, dubbed “Return to Sender,” successfully splashed down in the Atlantic in November. While Beck told reporters Tuesday the condition of that booster “was remarkable,” this upcoming mission nevertheless features a number of component and system upgrades aimed at further fortifying the booster.

Most notably, the booster will be equipped with a redesigned heat shield made out of stainless steel, rather than aluminum, “designed to carry the reentry loads as well as the ascent loads,” Beck said. Electron must endure temperatures as high as 2400ºC during reentry, conditions the original equipment wasn’t intended to handle.

The company is also introducing what it’s calling the Ocean Recovery and Capture Apparatus, or ORCA, a dedicated system to help lift the rocket stage out of the water and onto the deck of a ship. Rough seas in November presented a challenge to the recovery effort, though ultimately the booster was not damaged.

The mission will also reuse components from the recovered booster, which (although the booster itself was dismantled) were subsequently inspected and requalified for flight. “From here on in, we should be able to reuse this system on every single launch vehicle that we’ve been bringing back,” Beck said.

Rocket Lab is pursuing a unique route to reusability. As opposed to the approach from SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets use powered decelerations and landings, Rocket Lab’s approach with Electron is to decelerate the vehicle passively using the atmosphere and a parachute.

The reentry method is constrained by the size of the launch vehicle, Beck explained. “You don’t really have that ability to carry extra fuel to do maneuvers or deceleration burns or anything like that,” he said. Instead, the vehicle enters engines-first and propagates a massive shockwave on its journey back to Earth, carefully managed to reduce peak heat on its vulnerable parts. This results in a nearly negligible payload reduction: about 10%, as opposed to the 30-40% required for a propulsive landing. These are very tight margins, Beck acknowledged:

“This is not a simple thing to do. It sounds pretty basic – let’s just bring the stage back and put it under a parachute and splash down – but actually, doing it with no significant reentry elements and just using the atmosphere to do all the work is really challenging.”

The final splashdown recovery mission will take place before the end of 2021, Beck said, and will include improvements to the decelerator and a more general block upgrade. Once these missions are complete, Rocket Lab will turn to its ultimate goal: to do away with splashdown recovery altogether and to retrieve the booster mid-descent under its parachute using a helicopter.

Looking ahead, the company’s next rocket will be the Neutron, “a vehicle designed for reusability from day one,” Beck said. The Neutron will be much larger than its predecessor and capable of lifting heavier payloads to orbit. He estimated that Rocket Lab will construct one Neutron rocket per year and aim to operate a fleet of four to begin with.

For Subaru diehards holding out for an electric vehicle, the wait is almost over. The Japanese automaker just announced new details about its first ever EV, which is set to hit the streets in 2022.

Subaru will call its first EV the Solterra, a fitting name for a brand synonymous with outdoor adventures and you know, the sun and the Earth. Also fittingly, Subaru’s first full-fledged EV will be an SUV thats ships with the manufacturer’s well-regarded all-wheel drive capabilities.

The Solterra is built on a new platform the company is developing in partnership with Toyota, which the latter company will use for its impossibly named BZ4X crossover (BZ stands for “beyond zero,” apparently).

Subaru has only released two teaser images so far, but given that the new SUV will share DNA with the Toyota BZ4X, Subaru’s offering will likely look like a toned-down, less aggressively styled version of Toyota’s forthcoming futuristic electric crossover.

Other than that, we don’t know a whole lot. If the Solterra winds up looking a lot like the BZ4X, you can expect a sort of squashed RAV4, maybe somewhere between a Crosstrek and a Forester in size.

Subaru’s first proper EV will join the plug-in hybrid Crosstrek, which the company began selling in 2014 — currently its only option for climate-conscious drivers. The Solterra will go on sale next year in the U.S., Canada, China, Europe, and Japan.

As vice president of Innovation at National Grid Partners, I’m responsible for developing initiatives that not only benefit National Grid’s current business but also have the potential to become stand-alone businesses. So I obviously have strong views about the future of the energy industry.

But I don’t have a crystal ball; no one does. To be a good steward of our innovation portfolio, my job isn’t to guess what the right “basket” is for our “eggs.” It’s to optimally allocate our finite eggs across multiple baskets with the greatest collective upside.

Put another way, global and regional trends make it clear that the Next Big Thing isn’t any single thing at all. Instead, the future is about open innovation and integration of elements across the entire energy supply chain. Only with such an open energy ecosystem can we adapt to the highly volatile — some might even say unpredictable — market conditions we face in the energy industry.

I like to think of this open, innovation-enabling approach as the “energy internet,” and I believe it represents the most important opportunity in the energy sector today.

The internet analogy

Here’s why I find the concept of the energy internet helpful. Before the digital internet (a term I’m using here to encompass all the hardware, software and standards that comprise it), we had multiple silos of technology such as mainframes, PCs, databases, desktop applications and private networks.

As the digital internet evolved, however, the walls between these silos disappeared. You can now utilize any platform on the back end of your digital services, including mainframes, commodity server hardware and virtual machines in the cloud.

You can transport digital payloads across networks that connect to any customer, supplier or partner on the planet with whatever combination of speed, security, capacity and cost you deem most appropriate. That payload can be data, sound or video, and your endpoint can be a desktop browser, smartphone, IoT sensor, security camera or retail kiosk.

This mix-and-match internet created an open digital supply chain that has driven an epochal boom in online innovation. Entrepreneurs and inventors can focus on specific value propositions anywhere across that supply chain rather than having to continually reinvent the supply chain itself.

The energy sector must move in the same direction. We need to be able to treat our various generation modalities like server platforms. We need our transmission grids to be as accessible as our data networks, and we need to be able to deliver energy to any consumption endpoint just as flexibly. We need to encourage innovation at those endpoints, too — just as the tech sector did.

Just as the digital internet rewards innovation wherever it serves the market — whether you build a better app or design a cooler smartphone — so too will the energy internet offer greater opportunities across the energy supply chain.

The 5D future

So what is the energy internet? As a foundation, let’s start with a model that takes the existing industry talk of digitalization, decentralization and decarbonization a few steps further:

Digitalization: Innovation depends on information about demand, supply, efficiency, trends and events. That data must be accurate, complete, timely and sharable. Digitalization efforts such as IoE, open energy, and what many refer to as the “smart grid” are instrumental because they ensure innovators have the insights they need to continuously improve the physics, logistics and economics of energy delivery.

Decentralization: The internet changed the world in part because it took the power of computing out of a few centralized data centers and distributed it wherever it made sense. The energy internet will do likewise. Digitalization supports decentralization by letting assets be integrated into an open energy supply chain. But decentralization is much more than just the integration of existing assets — it’s the proliferation of new assets wherever they’re needed.

Decarbonization: Decarbonization is, of course, the whole point of the exercise. We must move to greener supply chains built on decentralized infrastructure that leverage energy supply everywhere to meet energy demand anywhere. The market is demanding it and regulators are requiring it. The energy internet is therefore more than just an investment opportunity — it’s an existential imperative.

Democratization: Much of the innovation associated with the internet arose from the fact that, in addition to decentralizing technology physically, it also democratized technology demographically. Democratization is about putting power (literally, in this case) into the hands of the people. Vastly increasing the number of minds and hands tackling the energy industry’s challenges will also accelerate innovation and enhance our ability to respond to market dynamics.

Diversity: As I asserted above, no one has a crystal ball. So anyone investing in innovation at scale should diversify — not just to mitigate risk and optimize returns, but as an enablement strategy. After all, if we truly believe the energy internet (or Grid 2.0, if you prefer that term) will require that all the elements of the energy supply chain work together, we must diversify our innovation initiatives across those elements to promote interoperability and integration.

That’s how the digital internet was built. Standards bodies played an important role, but those standards and their implementations were driven by industry players like Microsoft and Cisco — as well as top VCs — who ensured the ecosystem’s success by driving integration across the supply chain.

We must take the same approach with the energy internet. Those with the power and influence to do so must help ensure we aggressively advance integration across the energy supply chain as a whole, even as we improve the individual elements. To this end, National Grid last year kicked off a new industry group called the NextGrid Alliance, which includes senior executives from more than 60 utilities across the world.

Finally, we believe it’s essential to diversify thinking within the energy ecosystem as well. National Grid has sounded alarms about the serious underrepresentation of women in the energy industry and of female undergraduates in STEM programs. On the flip side, research by Deloitte has found diverse teams are 20% more innovative. More than 60% of my own team at NGP are women, and that breadth of perspective has helped National Grid capture powerful insights into companywide innovation efforts.

More winning, less predicting

The concept of the energy internet isn’t some abstract future ideal. We’re already seeing specific examples of how it will transform the market:

Green transnationalism: The energy internet is on its way to becoming as global as the digital internet. The U.K., for instance, is now receiving wind-generated power from Norway and Denmark. This ability to leverage decentralized energy supply across borders will have significant benefits for national economies and create new opportunities for energy arbitrage.

EV charging models: Pumping electricity isn’t like pumping gas, nor should it be. With the right combination of innovation in smart metering and fast-charging end-point design, the energy internet will create new opportunities at office buildings, residential complexes and other places where cars plus convenience can equal cash.

Disaster mitigation: Recent events in Texas have highlighted the negative consequences of not having an energy internet. Responsible utilities and government agencies must embrace digitization and interoperability to more effectively troubleshoot infrastructure and better safeguard communities.

These are just a few of the myriad ways in which an open, any-to-any energy internet will promote innovation, stimulate competition and generate big wins. No one can predict exactly what those big wins will be, but there will surely be many, and they will accrue to the benefit of all.

That’s why even without a crystal ball, we should all commit ourselves to digitalization, decentralization, decarbonization, democratization and diversity. In so doing, we’ll build the energy internet together, and enable a fair, affordable and clean energy future.