Author: azeeadmin

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This weekend was all about memecoins. And I am sorry about that. But Equity doesn’t run the world, sadly, it merely notes what is going on:

• Dogecoin dropped during Elon Musk’s SNL appearance. Which was somewhat ironic. Also there’s another memecoin that is skyrocketing.
• Palantir, DoorDash, Airbnb, Alibaba will report earnings this week, amongst others.
• Clubhouse is finally coming to Android. In the United States. By invite. So, if that’s you, congrats, welcome to the app.
• A major cyberattack and ransom situation in the United States is a data point, yet again, that we’re woefully unprepared for cyber risk.
• StuDocu raised $50 million which was cool, while Gojek raised another $300 million, which was the very opposite of surprising.
• This week’s Extra Crunch Live is going to be really good. I will see you there!

It is going to be a busy week! Already since we recorded this show there’s more drama from Box, and more. Strap in!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

It is clear that Black, women, Latinx and LGBTQ+ startup founders face an uphill battle when it comes to getting a share of the VC investment pie in Silicon Valley. Perhaps that’s why Sixty8 Capital, a firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana, smack dab in the middle of the country, has chosen to launch a new $20 million fund aimed at providing early stage funding for underrepresented founders.

The fund’s investors include The Indiana Next Level Fund, 50 South Capital, Bank of America, Eli Lilly and Company, First Internet Bank and the Central Indiana Community Foundation. It’s working with another Indy based VC firm, Allos Ventures, and Paul Ehlinger from Allos will be a venture partner at Sixty8.

“With this fund, what we’ll get to do is really start to empower people of color, women and other diverse communities by putting capital directly into their hands. Being able to invest directly into companies that are building amazing solutions that just so happen to be founded by diverse people. So that is why we launched Sixty8. I think there’s a unique opportunity we can address, and I’m really excited to have an impact both in our community in Indiana, but also around the Midwest and parts of the South as well,” Kelli Jones, managing partner at the firm explained.

Jones told me that she grew up in Indianapolis, and after moving to New York and later LA to work at the intersection of music, tech and entertainment, she returned to Indy in 2016 to begin helping Black people in the community where she grew up get trained to get decent jobs both in and out of tech. That led to the development of a startup incubator focused on Black founders and later a pitch competition.

She said at that point, it was clear the founders she was working with needed access to capital to have a chance to grow the businesses they were starting as part of the incubator and pitch competition, and the idea of an early stage fund began to take shape. She said that Indiana is known for B2B SaaS and she wanted to tap into that energy.

“You know we’re known as B2B SaaS and we’ve had some amazing exits here with ExactTarget and Salesforce and Angie’s List and Interactive Intelligence and Genesys, and so we’ve had a lot of really amazing things happening in the tech realm locally, but there’s not a lot of conversations being had around diversity and seeing more people of color and women and LGBTQ founders,” Jones told me.

The plan is to provide seed, pre-seed and maybe piggyback on an occasional A round with investments that range between $250,000 and $500,000 per company. She says that there is a ready pipeline from her other ventures including the incubator and pitch competitions and she is also plugged into the community where there is lots of startup energy.

She says that they wanted to set up a fund not only to address issues of diversity and having diverse people making decisions on investments, but also based on a strategy where the firm was able to invest in companies that may not always be perceived as typical venture backed business targets.

The first investment is with a B2B SaaS company called Qualifi, which uses AI to help companies with high volume hiring loads get through the qualification round much faster, taking from 7-10 days down to 3 or less, Jones told me.

The name of the firm hails back to 1968, a time in history when there was a lot of protest bubbling up around the country and calls for more equality for people of color, women and Gay rights. Jones says they had a different name when the firm first launched in 2019, but this seemed so much more appropriate for a company focused on empowering diverse groups.

“It feels like we’re still marching and trying to survive the same way we were in 1968 during the Civil Rights [movement] where we lost big leaders, and where the fire in everyone was just so big. We were fighting for women’s rights and Latino rights and Black rights and there was just so much happening, and it seems like in 2021 like we really still are in that same space,” she said.

Let’s make it clear from the outset that this story is about an expense management SaaS business called Expensify. As you’d expect, yes, this is about the expense management market and how Expensify has grown, its technology and all of that. Normally, that would make us change the channel. But this is also a story about pirates; peer-to-peer hackers who asked, “Why not work from Thailand and dozens of countries across the globe?” and actually did it using P2P hacker culture as a model for consensus-driven decision-making — all with pre-Uber Travis Kalanick in a guest-starring role.

Most interestingly, this is a story about just not giving a damn about what anyone goddamn thinks, an approach to life and business that led to more than $100 million in annual revenue, and an IPO incoming on what looks to be a very quick timetable. Prodigious revenues, 10 million users and only 130 employees running the whole shebang — that’s a hell of an achievement in only 13 years.

If you’re going a bit “WTF,” well, we’d concur. Expensify is as contradictory as they come in the enterprise world. It’s managed to take what might well be the most boring part of the corporate business stack and turn it into something special. It doesn’t borrow its culture from other startups, it built its own tech stack from the ground up, and even hires in a completely radical way. Oh, and no one really has job titles either, because why the hell bother with hierarchy anyway? They’re pirates after all.

If expense management is about avoiding corporate plunder, then letting the pirates and hackers run the ship is probably the best approach. And now, Expensify is plundering the corporate spend world one travel ticket and business meal at a time just as the world is rebuilding in the wake of COVID-19.

TechCrunch’s writer and analyst for this EC-1 is Anna Heim. Heim is a tech journalist and former startup founder who has written for different tech publications since 2011. She recently joined Extra Crunch as a daily reporter, where she will be sharing insights on startups, particularly in SaaS. The lead editor of this package was Ram Iyer, the series editor was Danny Crichton, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, and original illustrations were created by Nigel Sussman with art direction from Bryce Durbin.

Expensify had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Heim has no financial ties to Expensify or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The Expensify EC-1 will be a serialized sequence of five articles published over the course of the coming weeks. We interviewed the company in February and March, well before the company announced a confidential filing of its S-1 to the SEC. Let’s take a look:

• Part 1: Origin story “How a band of P2P hackers planted the seeds of a unique expense management giant” (2,400 words/10 minutes) — Explores the colorful history of the Expensify founders’ days with Travis Kalanick’s venture before Uber, a P2P content distribution startup called Red Swoosh, and how that experience would eventually influence what would one day become an expense management giant.
• Parts 2-5: Upcoming shortly.

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

Individuality often has no place in the enterprise software space. In a market where a single contract can easily run into the millions, homogeneity is the herald of reliability and serves to reassure buyers of the worth of their potential purchase.

So it’s natural to think a company in the expense report management business would keep it simple and play it by the book. But one look at Expensify is enough to tell you that this is a company that never even looked for the book.

Right from its famous “workcations,” to its management structure and its decision-making policies, Expensify has it in its DNA to eschew so-called best practices for its own ideas — a philosophy rooted in its founder and early team’s P2P hacker background and do-it-yourself attitude. As a result, Expensify is atypical of startups in many ways, inside and out.

Founder and CEO David Barrett made it clear his company was different in our first call itself: “We hire in a super different way. We have a very unusual internal management structure. Our business model itself is very unusual. We don’t have any salespeople, for example. We’re an incredibly small company. We focus on the employees over the bosses. Our technology stack is completely different. Our approach toward product design is very different.”

That description would make some people call Expensify weird even by startup standards, but this essential difference has set it apart in a space dominated by giants such as SAP Concur and Coupa. And that’s ultimately been to its benefit: Expensify reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2020, with hefty 25% EBITDA margins to boot. There were also rumors of the company planning to go public during our interviews for this EC-1, but they stopped speaking to us in March, and now we know why: Expensify confidentially filed to go public on May 3.

Expensify’s origin story is one of a scrappy group of developers who turned travel into a catalyst for ideas and stuck together through highs and lows, ending up building one of the most unexpectedly original companies in enterprise software today.

When David met Travis …

To truly understand Expensify, you first need to take a close look at a unique, short-lived, P2P file-sharing company called Red Swoosh, which was Travis Kalanick’s startup before he founded Uber. Framed by Kalanick as his “revenge business” after his previous P2P startup Scour was sued into oblivion for copyright infringement, Red Swoosh would be the precursor for Expensify’s future culture and ethos. In fact, many of Expensify’s initial team actually met at Red Swoosh, which was eventually acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $18.7 million.

Barrett, a self-proclaimed alpha geek and lifelong software engineer, was actually Red Swoosh’s last engineering manager, hired after the failure of his first project, iGlance.com, a P2P push-to-talk program that couldn’t compete against Skype. “While I was licking my wounds from that experience, I was approached by Travis Kalanick who was running a startup called Red Swoosh,” he recalled in an interview.

Fair, a multilingual digital bank and financial services platform, is launching to the public after raising $20 million in 40 days earlier this year.

Founder Khalid Parekh raised the capital primarily from the very demographic that Houston-based Fair aims to serve: from a group consisting of a number of immigrants, many of whom were first-time investors.

“There was not a single check from a VC or bank or from a family office,” Parekh told TechCrunch. “Ninety percent of our investors are minorities or are immigrants like myself that believed in the concept of Fair.”

One could say that it’s also fitting that Fair’s headquarters are in Houston, which at the time of the last census was the most ethnically diverse city in the United States.

Parekh is not your traditional fintech founder. He doesn’t have banking or financial services experience, although he does have experience founding and running a successful company: AMSYS Group, which is valued at nearly $350 million. His mission with Fair is largely personal. Upon arriving in the U.S. from India with just $100 in his pocket 22 years ago, he struggled to not only get a loan but also to open a bank account. 

Image Credits: Founder and CEO Khalid Parekh / Fair

“I was an engineer by background, but was very confused with the American banking system. There is not a lot of help for immigrants who don’t understand it well,” Parekh recalls. “My biggest challenge was sending money back home. There was just a lack of welcome.”

In 2020, he used his own cash to build out the technology behind Fair, which is designed to be an option to those who are new to the country, have no credit or need access to interest-free loans. Fair operates with Coastal Community Bank as its sponsor bank. Parekh’s goal with Fair is to provide “ethical, transparent banking” – to anyone – via a membership model that eliminates all banking fees. Members can pay a one-time membership fee of $99 (paid in full or in installments) to have access to all of Fair’s online banking and financial services.

“Another challenge that I saw is that there were hardly any options for insurance and retirement services for immigrants and low-income people,” Parekh said. “All big institutions catered to people with a lot of money. But we want to create an institution where we are fair to everybody, regardless of religion, race, color, net worth or how much is in their bank account. We want everyone to be treated the same.”

Over the past year, the nation has seen a surge of neobanks emerge aimed at specific demographics, including Greenwood, First Boulevard and Cheese. Welcome Technologies is also aimed at serving the immigrant population. 

Fair aims to differentiate itself, according to Parekh, by offering interest-free lending, as well as the ability to invest, get insurance and plan for retirement in one platform that is available in English, Arabic and Spanish (with more languages to come). Ultimately, his goal in Fair is to help address the “longstanding racial income inequalities and widening wealth disparities in the U.S.” He won’t get a salary for his role as CEO.

Among Fair’s features are free international transfer, early access to paycheck funds, “instant, interest-free” microloans — essentially buy now, pay later at the register — an annual dividend account, debit card accounts for kids and interest-free loans for home, auto and business that are equity-based. Those equity-based loans are Sharia compliant, meaning that it’s not kosher to take interest. They also comply with Jewish law.

Instead, if a member wants to buy a home, they can put 20% down, and Fair will provide 80% via an LLC, of which the member and bank will be co-owners.

“The members will have the option of buying out our shares on whatever schedule they wish,” Parekh said.

In partnership with Avibra, Fair is offering free supplemental life, accident medical and AD&D insurance to all members as part of its banking services.

Fair aims to practice socially responsible investing (SRI), an approach to investing that reduces exposure to companies that are deemed to have a negative social impact. The fintech also practices ESG investing, which measures the sustainability of an investment and its overall impact in three specific categories: environmental, social and corporate governance. And, it’s also working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and World Relief, and will donate 2.5% of profits to refugee missions globally, as well as racial economic empowerment initiatives.

Among Fair’s advisors are Manolo Sánchez, a director at Fannie Mae and Stewart Information Systems and former chair & CEO of BBVA Compass, and Samuel Golden, managing director at management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal and founder of A&M’s Financial Industry practice.

Three years after its inception, crypto financial service provider Babel Finance is racking up fundings and partnerships from major institutional investors. The startup said Monday that it has closed a $40 million Series A round, with lead investors including Zoo Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Dragonfly Capital, Bertelsmann and its Asian fund BAI Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

For years, traditional investors were reluctant to join the cryptocurrency fray. But in 2020, Babel noticed that many institutions and high net worth individuals began to consider crypto assets as an investment class.

Babel, with offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Singapore, wanted to capture the window of opportunity and be one of the earliest to help allocate crypto assets in investors’ portfolios. But first, it needed to win investors’ trust. One solution is to have reputable private equity and venture capital firms on its cap table.

“It’s more of a brand boost so we can attract more institutions and build up credibility,” Babel’s spokesperson Yiwei Wang said of the firm’s latest financing, which is a strategic round as Babel had “reached profitability” and “wasn’t actively looking for funding.”

To vie for institutional customers and wealthy individuals, Babel plans to spend its fresh proceeds on product development, compliance and talent acquisition, seeking especially banking professionals and lawyers to work on regulatory requirements. It currently has a headcount of 55 employees.

Mainstream investors are jumping into the crypto scene partly because many see bitcoin as a way to hedge against “solvency and credibility risks” amid global economic uncertainties caused by Covid-19, said Wang. “Bitcoin is not something controlled by the government.”

The other trigger, Wang explained, was what shock the industry in February: Elon Musk bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin and declared Tesla would begin accepting the digital token as payments. That sparked a massive rally around bitcoin, sending its price to over $40,000.

Babel’s evolution has been in line with the trajectory of the industry. In its early days, the startup was a “crypto-native” company offering deposit and loan products to crypto miners and traders. These days, it also runs a suite of asset management products and services tailored to enterprise clients around the world. It’s applying for relevant financial licenses in North America and Asia.

As of February, Babel’s crypto lending business had reached an outstanding balance of $2 billion in equivalent cryptocurrency, the firm says. It has served more than 500 institutional clients and sees about $8 billion in direct trading volume each month. 80% of its revenues are currently derived from institutions. The goal is to manage one million bitcoins within four years.

For many founders, Y Combinator is a coveted milestone on the entrepreneurial road. As of January 2021, the accelerator has helped create 60,000 jobs, has 125 companies valued over $150 million, and has facilitated top exits totaling more than $300 billion. Past alumni include Airbnb, DoorDash and Coinbase — all of which are now publicly traded.

Unsurprisingly, the program has a strict selection process — with rumors claiming that less than 5% of startups are accepted, making Y Combinator one of the most prestigious accelerators out there. Competition may be fierce, but it’s not impossible, and jumping through some hoops is not only worth the potential payoff but is ultimately a valuable learning curve for any startup.

The entrepreneurs trying to get into Y Combinator are often at an early point in their journeys and haven’t yet built up the experience to know exactly what kind of business can hit the ground running. This is where a harsh journey of trial and error helps entrepreneurs face the reality of their business model. Going through the Y Combinator program’s rigorous vetting gives founders a sense-check of what they’re missing, and who they’re missing. Take it from someone who applied to the program 13 times before getting in.

Of course, 13 applications require a degree of time and money that startups don’t always have, so I’ve condensed my four biggest takeaways from the experience. Here’s how to work toward landing in the small percentage of startups successfully accepted to the Y Combinator program:

Put your business value before your personal vanity

In a sea of applications, it’s easy to feel like you have to distinguish yourself and your startup in a striking way. For me, I made my mark through an encounter with Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator — although not in the way I had hoped for.

Graham had written a lot of online essays and resources for startups. In 2012, I thought it would be great to download Graham’s essays, browse by most-used words and publish my findings on Hacker News. However, Hacker News is the social news website run by Y Combinator, and the morning after I shared my work I woke up to an email from Graham asking me to swiftly take it down.

Blind has carved out a unique niche in the social-networking world. It’s an app of verified, pseudonymous employees talking to each other about what’s going on at their employers, trading notes on everything from layoffs, to promotions, to policies. Part LinkedIn, part Reddit, part Slack — it’s become widely popular among tech workers at Silicon Valley companies and even outside the tech industry, with 5 million verified users.

Workplaces have changed dramatically post-COVID-19, with remote work becoming more of a norm, and that has made Blind indispensable for many workers who feel increasingly alienated from their companies and their colleagues.

The company announced this morning a $37 million Series C funding round led by South Korean venture firm Mainstreet Investment along with Cisco Investments and Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek. The company had filed a Form D in late March for roughly $20.5 million, and the $37 million represents the final total fundraised.

We last did a deep dive in the company back in 2018, so what’s changed? Well, first, there’s the pandemic. Co-founder and general manager Kyum Kim says that Blind’s users are now coming to the app all throughout the day. “Usage used to peak during the commute times,” he said. “8-10 AM before COVID and then after work, 7 PM-10 PM was another timeframe that people used to use Blind a lot. But now, it has kind of flattened out [throughout the day].” The new peak is 2 PM, and according to Kim, users are logging in 30 times per month over about 13-15 days.

This gets to the first of two areas where Blind is experimenting with revenue generation. As remote work has taken hold, particularly at tech companies, internal messaging channels have become less valuable as sources for clear information from executive leadership. Blind believes it has a better pulse on how employees are feeling about policies and their employers, and is building tools around, for example, pulse surveys to give HR teams better insight than they might get from other services.

“People are just more honest on our platform versus these company-sponsored channels,” Kim said. We’re “probably the only platform where people are coming voluntarily, have visibility into their intentions, how they feel about their company’s policies.” Blind wants to protect the identities of its users, while also offering aggregate insights to companies.

To that end, last week the company brought on Young Yuk as chief product officer. Yuk had been an advisor to Blind for the past four years, while daylighting in senior product roles at Intuit, Yelp, and Glassdoor. Kim believes that Yuk’s experience across consumer and enterprise will fit the unique needs of Blind’s business, which combines a consumer social network with B2B products.

For its own users though, the second area of attention is perhaps the most interesting: recruiting. Blind users are obsessed with career paths and compensation, and Kim said that “80% of our search keywords on Blind are company names or company names attached to levels, locations, or teams.” People want to know how to move their careers forward, an area companies are notoriously bad about explaining, and so “people come to Blind to find information from these verified employees.”

Blind is building what it calls “Talent by Blind,” a platform for capturing this hiring intentionality and selling it to recruiters. The goal is to transfer people whose intentions might be, say, L5 engineer at a big tech company in Seattle to a separate platform that can be used as a top-of-funnel for company recruitment efforts. Blind says a couple of companies are currently using this platform.

“Talent by Blind” is a platform to help transfer potential recruits into the top of the recruiting funnel at companies. Image Credits: Blind

Ultimately, Blind’s path has been one of slow and steady growth. The company claims to be deliberate in that approach, noting that pseudonymous communities often falter when they grow too fast and norms aren’t established early. Unlike more notorious anonymous communities from years past like Secret or YikYak, the company says that its network tends to be quite safe, since employees verify their identities and know that they are speaking directly to their colleagues.

Blind’s team has expanded in recent years. Image Credits: Blind.

Revenue approaches remain experimental, but ultimately, the key is that it has the users that companies want to hear from: their own employees and potential future employees. We want to “maintain that integrity with users,” Kim said. “‘Ally to employees and advisor to companies’ is the phrase we are trying to go for.”

“It’s been eight years we have been doing this business, [and] we have been focused on the longness,” he said. “There’s a lot of optimism in the company.” He would know — he probably checked Blind.

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.

Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to Point B.

What a week! It’s too much to cover everything that happened in world of transportation, so here are some of the highlights. Oh, and yes, I know that the big story this weekend was Elon Musk’s appearance on SNL. Since there’s no shortage of hot — and tepid — takes on Twitter and the rest of the interwebs, I think I’ll pass on any commentary.

Instead, it’s worth noting that what Musk says publicly about Tesla Autopilot and the company’s progress on a fully autonomous driving system directly contradicts with reality — and what his own employees are telling regulators.

A memo that summarizes a meeting between California regulators and employees at the automaker shows that Musk has inflated the capabilities of the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system in Tesla vehicles, as well the company’s ability to deliver fully autonomous features by the end of the year. The memo was released by transparency site Plainsite, which obtained it via a Freedom of Information Act request. You can read the whole story here.

My email inbox is always open. Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin’

News and announcements this week demonstrated how micromobility businesses are evolving and merging with other forms of mobility.

No company embodies this better than Revel, the company that began with shared electric mopeds and, since the start of 2021, has evolved into an e-bike subscription service, an EV charging hub and an all-Tesla, all-employee ride-hailing service.

What, one might ask, is founder and CEO Frank Reig up to? Well, we did ask it, and we published our interview so our readers could learn more about Revel’s journey and plans for the future.

“If we’re talking about electrifying mobility in major cities, it starts with infrastructure. And we’re the company rolling up our sleeves and doing it now by building that infrastructure and operating fleets. Because in a city like New York, the infrastructure does not exist for electric mobility.”

Another company that’s diving straight into the subscription model is the Australian startup Zoomo. The startup — which connects the gig economy, subscription services, electric mobility and big business — has a business model that wouldn’t have seemed possible more than a decade ago. Zoomo offers monthly e-bike subscriptions to gig economy bike delivery workers and corporate partners with bike delivery fleets. The startup announced it raised $12 million, only a few months after an $11 million Series A. Zoomo said it will use the fresh cash to expand its service into more of the U.S. and into continental Europe, as well as to further develop its consumer subscription offerings.

Betting on e-mopeds

Micromobility charging infrastructure company Swiftmile is partnering with European e-moped manufacturer GOVECS Group to deploy Mobility Hubs to charge and organize e-mopeds in shared and commercial fleets. With included parking stations, this model, which we’re starting to see with e-bikes and e-scooters, could be a great way to eliminate the use of vans to swap batteries. Germany is expected to see the first of these hubs in Q1 2022.

A small win for JOCO

Last week, I wrote about NYC Department of Transportation’s cease-and-desist order to the new e-bike-sharing platform JOCO. The company ignored the order, maintaining that since its bikes are stationed in private garages, the city doesn’t have the authority to control its operations. To that, the city replied with a lawsuit, demanding a halt in operations and penalties for violations.

On May 7, the court denied the city’s request for a temporary restriction on JOCO’s operations. The case is very much still open, but it’s a small win for JOCO and will allow the company to continue operating and expanding as scheduled. The hearing is scheduled for June 16, during which time the city is likely to drive home its exclusive partnership with Lyft-owned Citi Bike.

#BatteriesForBirds

As a recent transplant to New Zealand, I can tell you that this country really loves its native birds (and therefore, often hates cats, which are not native). Because of the isolation of New Zealand’s ecosystem, mammalian life never arrived or evolved, meaning the country has only native birds, insects and reptiles and amphibians — and not much in the way of predators, allowing the birdlife to flourish.

I say all of this so you understand the significance of Lime’s plan to give its old scooter and bike batteries a second life powering tools designed to save these precious birds. The project, done in partnership with The Cacophony Project and 2040 Limited, will use damaged Lime e-bike battery cells to power thermal cameras that are used to identify bird predators.

Bike launches

CERO, the LA-based ebike startup, has launched its CERO One electric cargo bike for preorders. The bike, with a small front tire, a big back tire and racks over each one, is designed to carry loads up to 77 pounds. Customers can choose between a Platform, Small Basket, and Big Basket variant. The starting price (including a front platform) is $3,799, and first deliveries can be expected around August or September.

Aventon has also announced the launch of the newest model of its Aventure e-bike, complete with fat tires and a color display screen that syncs with your smartphone to handle functions like turning the bike on, tracking mileage, powering on and off the lights and planning trips.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

It’s not all acquisitions and SPAC rumors in the world of autonomous vehicles. There are still traditional VC raises taking place, even in the midst of continued consolidation.

Einride, the Swedish startup known for its unusual-looking electric and autonomous pods that are designed to carry freight, raised $110 million to help fund its expansion in Europe and into the United States. The Series B round, which far exceeds its previous raises of $10 million in 2020 and $25 million in 2019, included new investors Temasek, Soros Fund Management LLC, Northzone and Maersk Growth. Existing investors EQT Ventures, Plum Alley, Norrsken VC, Ericsson and NordicNinja VC also participated in the round.

Einride has raised a total of $150 million to date. The company didn’t share its post-money valuation.

Einride is an interesting case study in the AV world. It has a present-day business of human-driven electric trucks, which carry freight for customers like Coca Cola and Oatly. It’s also developing, testing and eventually planning to deploy its Pod vehicles, which are designed without a cab. These Pods are meant to operate autonomously, although it should be noted that they are also supported with teleoperations, which means a human monitors and can control the vehicle remotely.

Einride had planned to expand into the U.S. but COVID-19 interrupted the move. Now, with fresh capital co-founder and CEO Robert Falck told me that the company is planning to have operations up and running in the U.S. before the end of the year. The plan is to set up headquarters in Austin, Texas, and open additional offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Global agreements are in place with brands such as Oatly, which includes U.S. operations, with more to be announced soon.

Einride’s presence in the United States, and specifically Texas, brings yet another AV company focused on freight into the region. Middle-mile delivery is getting more attention, interest and investment as 2021 unfolds. Another competitor in the region promises to spice things up, particularly on the hiring front.

Other deals that got my attention …

Firefly Aerospace raised $175 million, across a $75 million Series A round that valued the company north of $1 billion, and a $100 million secondary transaction which consisted of the sale of holdings held by primary Firefly investor Noosphere Ventures. The launch startup also announced that it intends to raise another $300 million later in 2021, after its forthcoming inaugural Alpha rocket launch, which is currently targeting a June take-off.

Kneron, a startup that develops semiconductors to give devices artificial intelligence capabilities by using edge computing, received a $7 million boost in capital from Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese supplier of power components for Apple and Tesla. The $7 million investment pushes Kneron’s total financing to more than $100 million to date. As part of the deal, Kneron also agreed to buy Vatics, a part of Delta Electronics’ subsidiary Vivotek, for $10 million in cash, TechCrunch’s Rita Liao reported.

Reinvent Technology Partners X, a new special purpose acquisition company created by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, filed for an IPO. The filing states that the SPAC is looking at merging with a late-stage company in a “technology sector or subsector, including consumer internet, online marketplaces, ecommerce, payments, gaming, artificial intelligence, SaaS, digital healthcare, autonomous vehicles, transportation, and others.” The duo’s previous SPAC announced earlier this year it agreed to merge with Joby Aviation.

Solid Power, Louisville, Colorado-based developer of solid-state batteries, raised $130 million in Series B funding round led by Ford and BMW, the latest signal that the two OEMs see SSBs powering the future of transportation. Under the investment, Ford and BMW are equal equity owners, and company representatives will join Solid Power’s board. Solid Power received additional investment in the round from Volta Energy Technologies, the venture capital firm spun out of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Youibot, a four-year-old startup that makes autonomous mobile robots for a range of scenarios, raised 100 million yuan ($15.47 million) in its latest funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, the Seoul-based early-stage arm of the global investment behemoth. Youibot’s previous investors BlueRun Ventures and SIG also participated in the round. Also, it’s worth noting that Softbank Ventures Asia led a financing round back in December for another Chinese robotics startup called KeenOn, which focuses on delivery and service robots.

Policy corner

President Joe Biden isn’t the only person in Washington with his eyes on electrifying transportation. Two separate pieces of legislation were introduced in Congress this week aimed at boosting zero-emission vehicle use in the country.

First, we have a $73 billion proposal introduced May 4 by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Their plan, “Clean Transit for America,” would replace more than 150,000 diesel buses, vans, ambulances and other publicly-owned vehicles with zero-emission models, as well as building out charging infrastructure to support the new fleet.

The following day, Reps. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) re-introduced a revised version of the “Electric Vehicles Freedom Act” to build out a network of EV charging stations across the country. Democrats supported a version of this bill last year. Although that bill failed, Biden’s outspoken support for EVs and his $2 trillion climate plan may give this new bill a more optimistic fate.

On the same day that Reps. Levin and Ocasio-Cortez announced their bill, a House subcommittee on Commerce and Energy held a hearing to discuss yet another bill that was introduced back in March. This bill, known as the CLEAN Futures Act, is the Democrats’ comprehensive climate legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions nationally by 50% by 2030. It would also earmark billions for EV infrastructure and to spurn domestic manufacturing of EV parts, like batteries. (Are you keeping all of this straight?)

Not every lawmaker at the hearing was so enthusiastic on the terms of the CLEAN Futures Act. There was particular pushback from Republicans. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich) said that the bill would “push” EVs on Americans “whether they are ready for them or not.”

“I have concerns that the CLEAN Future Act puts the cart before the horse by mandating electric vehicles, because there is no consideration for American workers or car buyers, our growing reliance on China for critical materials and minerals to make batteries, and certainly the strain that EVs will place on our grid,” he said.

Rep. Greg Pence (R-Indiana) added that the future of the transportation industry should not be a “one-size-fits-all made by Washington.” He said that hydrogen and renewable diesel should also be considered alongside battery electric.

During that same House subcommittee on Commerce and Energy meeting, most of which was spent on the CLEAN Future Act, several other proposed bills were mentioned, including the “NO EXHAUST Act,”  the “Electric Vehicles for Underserved Communities Act of 2021” and the “Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Future Act of 2021” or the “ATVM Future Act.”

The NO EXHAUST Act promotes the electrification of the transportation sector to improve air quality and electric vehicle infrastructure access — especially in rural, urban, low-income,and minority communities, according to Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who introduced the bill.

— Aria Alamalhodaei

A little bird

We hear things; and we’re here to share them with you.

Remember waaaaayyyyy back in April when a report from The Information said that Argo AI CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky told employees in an all-hands meeting that the autonomous vehicle startup was planning for a public listing later this year? At the time, and right here in The Station, I provided a bit more context, noting that while Salesky did indeed mention the prospect of an IPO during the company’s regular weekly all-hands meeting, there was more to the story.

The comments were made as the CEO discussed upcoming important milestones in 2021 that will lead to an IPO or a significant raise of some kind. The upshot: apparently all fundraising options are on the table, including a merger with a special acquisition company, or SPAC. (Argo has raised $2 billion to date.)

Now, it appears that Argo is leaning towards a more traditional investment path — at least, at first. In an interview with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow, Salesky said the company is going to be raising money this summer. His public comments support what I’ve heard from folks in the know.

“We’re really excited about doing that,” Salesky said in the interview. “We’ll be taking money from some of the capital markets and we’ll be looking at, you know, an IPO in the in the future as well. I think that it’s one of those things where you know we don’t know the exact source that we’re going to take the funding from next. We’re looking at a bunch of options, but we’re really excited about how that’s going to keep us going for the future to really be able to scale out autonomous vehicles.”

Speaking of Argo, the company revealed new details on a long-range lidar sensor that it claims has the ability to see 400 meters away with high-resolution photorealistic quality and the ability to detect dark and distant objects with low reflectivity. The technology, which is the product of Argo’s acquisition of lidar company Princeton Lightwave, is poised to help it deliver autonomous vehicles that can operate commercially on highways and in dense urban areas starting next year.

The company said  the first batch of these lidar sensors are already on some of Argo’s test vehicles, which today is comprised of Ford Fusion Hybrid sedans and Ford Escape Hybrid SUVs. By the end of the year, Argo’s test fleet will transition to about 150 Ford Escape Hybrid vehicles, all of which will be equipped with the in-house lidar sensor. Ford, an investor in and customer of Argo, plans to deploy autonomous vehicles for ride-hailing and delivery in 2022. Argo’s other investor and customer, Volkswagen, said it will launch commercial operations in 2025.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

The TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 event, which is scheduled for June 9, is approaching in about a month. We recently released a “mostly” final agenda.

Now two more announcements. Pam Fletcher, who is leading innovation efforts at GM, will be interviewed at the event. And, for all those AV fans out there … we’re putting Karl Iagnemma, an co-founder who now heads up Motional, and Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson on our “virtual” stage together. Have a question for either of these folks? Email me.

Other guests to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, includes Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt, investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, whose SPAC merged with Joby, investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital, as well as Starship Technologies co-founder and CEO/CTO Ahti Heinla. We also plan to bring together community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler, Remix co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu and Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig to talk about equity, accessibility and shared mobility in cities.

See y’all next week.