Author: azeeadmin

Almost two centuries ago, gold prospectors in California set off one of the greatest rushes for wealth in history. Proponents of socially conscious investing claim fund managers will start a similar stampede when they discover that environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights can yield treasure in the form of alternative data that promise big payoffs — if only they knew how to mine it.

There may be some truth to that line of thinking if you take some of the rhetoric and advertising out of the equation.

First, let’s be clear: ESG is not on the fringe. The European Union has implemented new financial regulations via the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). These improve ESG disclosures and considerations and help to direct capital toward products and companies that benefit people and the planet. As we write, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is also considering drafting and implementation of ESG-related regulations.

Whether enacted or currently under consideration, these rules encourage fund managers to integrate sustainability risks into their business processes, report on them publicly, stamp out greenwashing, and promote transparency and knowledge among investors. Accordingly, it will become easier to compare firms’ sustainability efforts, too, allowing stakeholders from all corners to make more informed decisions.

Incorporating ESG factors into investment strategies is not new, of course. The world’s largest asset managers have been practicing it for years. According to the Governance & Accountability Institute, 90% of companies listed on the S&P 500 now produce sustainability reports, an increase of 70 percentage points from more than a decade ago.

Yet some are still groaning about adopting an ESG investing mindset; they see ESG as a nuisance that detracts from their mission of earning high returns. But could this mindset mean they are missing important opportunities?

Don’t wait

Waiting for new mandatory ESG reporting and compliance framework standards in the U.S. puts Americas-focused managers at a significant disadvantage. Fund managers can start gaining insights today from alternative data originating in ESG-related data stemming from climate change, natural disasters, harassment and discrimination lawsuits, and other events and information that can be mined.

Dutch-German growth capital firm Endeit Capital has raised a 250 million euro fund to invest in B+ stage European startups. This is its third and largest investment fund, Endeit Capital III. The firm says it plans to support European scale-up companies that “lead to an accelerated digital transformation of the European society and economy and indeed the digital maturity of Europe.”

Endeit was a relatively early European investor, kicking off in 2006, and investing in 35 companies. It’s previously raised and invested 250 million euro through its first two funds, in the Benelux, DACH and Nordic regions.

The firm previously invested in companies such as 3D Hubs, Roamler, Albelli, MetrixLab, Unamic and Eyeworks, Gastrofix, Comtravo, Contorion, Chronext, Tourradar, Smartclip, Nordics Blis, Unruly and Leadfeeder. Many of its portfolio companies have exited to firms such as Time Warner, Xerox, Newscorp, Protolabs, Lightspeed, Macromill, TMG and Cimpress. Endeit Capital’s portfolio company Bux, a Europen neo-broker, recently raised $80 million.

It joins a spate of recent new VC and growth funds in Europe such as new funds from Cusp Capital and Highland Europe.

The news is good for European later-stage companies. While European early-stage capital has been on a tear for a few years, late-stage capital in Europe is typically lacking.

Founder and managing partner Hubert Deitmers said: “This financing round of Fund III has been a huge success, where we could establish the fund within a short time frame in its ‘First & Final close’, despite corona. It’s rewarding to see that ten entrepreneurs that Endeit had previously invested in are now investors themselves in this third fund.”

He says Endeit is explicitly aimed at boosting European companies against the superpowers of the US and China: “We support those internet entrepreneurs who can drive the change to make Europe more competitive and who have the ambition to become global market leaders… The next generation of European internet companies will be accelerated by core technologies, like machine learning, AI, and quantum computing. We are deeply convinced that we need to develop this knowledge within Europe and want to help ensure that European companies developing these technologies find the right environment in their home markets, rather than outside of Europe.”

Endeit emerged out of Endemol, the breakout media giant of the last 25 years. Deitmers and Endeit co-founder Martijn Hamann built Endemol out of the Netherlands into a publicly listed, global firm, acquiring 80+ businesses along the way. Endemol was later sold for many billions.

Hamann added: “Every single aspect of Endeit Capital is focused on helping entrepreneurs who shape the internet future to move forward quickly. We are looking for entrepreneurs with a strong product and unwavering drive to build market-leading positions with us.

Speaking to me via zoom, Deitmers said: “We have been a long-time cross border investor. There’s strong cross fertilization between the Netherlands and Germany. It’s different than London or Paris, which are like centralized magnets. What you see in Germany is an ecosystem that is very decentralized, you have the Munich hub, you have the hub in Cologne, you have Berlin, Hamburg. Then there is Zurich, Vienna. So there are multiple hubs in the region. And that is good, and I think it also across Europe. And you have now multiple hubs as you have shown in your TechCrunch city survey. You see there are more and more cities popping up with their own specialties like Rotterdam, or Hamburg in logistics tech.”

Does he see any Brexit effects going on?: “I think on the FinTech side you do see some changes to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris. I think specifically Amsterdam is benefiting a bit from a FinTech boost. We just closed a deal last week in a neobank there. The financial centers are shifting a little bit.”

Indian food delivery startup Zomato on Wednesday filed for an initial public offering, becoming the first tech unicorn startup from the world’s second largest internet market to do so in recent years.

The 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered Indian startup, which counts Info Edge and Ant Group among its investors, has set $1.1 billion as its IPO size and will look to raise about $1 billion by issuing shares, it said in the filing.

Some key insights shared by Zomato in the filling:

• Zomato has claimed market leading position in the food delivery market. The startup identified Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy, as well as restraunts such as Domino’s, McDonalds and Pizza hut as its competitor. (But not Amazon, which entered the food delivery market last year.)
• The startup clocked $183.6 million in revenue between April 1 and December 31. Its losses during this period were $91.8 million.
• Info Edge, one of the biggest investor of Zomato, plans to sell stake worth $100 million, the investment firm said in a filing.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Founders Circle Capital, a nine-year-old, San Francisco-based investment firm that strikes agreements with private, venture-backed companies to buy some of the vested stock options of their founders and employees — so they can buy a house or just breathe a bit more easily —  has closed its newest fund with $355 million in capital commitments, bringing the firm’s total assets under management to nearly $1 billion.

Not surprisingly, the outfit, which has more competition than ever — both by other secondary investment firms, aggressive outfits like Tiger Global that routinely acquire secondary stakes in companies,  as well as special purpose acquisition companies that are taking companies public a lot faster and alleviating the need of early shareholders to cash out via private sales — is also introducing a new twist to its business.

Specifically, according to both cofounder and CEO Ken Loveless and the outfit’s chief people officer, Mark Dempster, Founders Circle is now offering startups so-called flexible capital, too, including providing companies and executives with loans and other products in order to better compete in a fast-changing landscape. We talked with Loveless and Dempster via Zoom late last week about the new fund, the new products, and generally what they are seeing out there. Excerpts from that chat, edited for length and clarity, follow.

TC: This is your third fund. How does it compare with your earlier funds?

KL: We’ve raised three main funds. This is our third, but we’ve raised something like 17 entities [altogether], including some co-investment vehicles and special purpose vehicles to invest in some of our companies.

TC: And you’re now changing your approach a bit. How so?

MD: [We’re now offering] a mix of primary and secondary [investment dollars] and we can [offer these] are any time and in any combination. These [investments] don’t have to happen during a certain [distinct] round of financing; we might get involved in eight to 10 different investments [tied to the company].

TC: Do you have a debt partner so you have more capital at your disposal if you need it?

KL: We have a strategic partnership with Silicon Valley Bank, so they are typically the lender to these individuals as they solve their liquidity. In many cases, we provide an equity backstop to that.

TC: How has your world changed now that people perhaps see a light at the end of the tunnel, with companies becoming publicly traded entities in a variety of ways that we weren’t seeing in recent years? Are employees or founders any more or less reluctant to share their shares in secondary transactions?

KL: There hasn’t been any significant change. We had a portfolio company go public in UiPath that was 16 years old and if you think about how many things change in your life over that kind of time period, it would be quite a long list. We also had [stakes] in DoorDash and Poshmark, and if you look at the time between when they were founded and became publicly traded, it was close to a decade for both. So [while there is some market receptivity for companies] that really are two years old or three years old, the average [time from launch to publicly traded company] is still 10-plus years on average.

TC: A lot of outfits are competing for the same shares that you want to buy, including Tiger Global, which is paying very high prices in many cases. In addition to competing with these companies, I’m wondering if you ever sell your shares to them.

KL: We are typically a long-only investor. We have not sold any secondary shares. We typically hold through a public offering. We’re really trying to focus on those companies that can truly be in enduring, decades-old businesses. We obviously wouldn’t hold that long, but we’re holding into the public markets.

TC: How long do you hold your shares?

KL: We’re not bound [by anything] but what we tell our [investors] is that we typically hold for an average of one year post public offering [then distribute the shares to them].

TC: How, if at all, are you playing this SPAC phenomenon? Are you seeing opportunities to jump into these blank check companies before they merge with brands you’ve maybe been tracking?

KL: We have not directly participated in a SPAC, but we have had some of our portfolio companies merged with some SPACs to become what we hope will be enduring public businesses. So we’ve taken advantage of [those exits] as a financing tool.

TC: You’ve been at this for roughly a decade. How many companies have you backed and how many of these have exited?

MD: We’ve invested in 73 companies and 31 have exited.

TC: I know you tend to invest at a later stage — have there been any shutdowns owing to unforeseen circumstances?

MD: We’ve had zero company shutdowns.

TC: And what about what you’re having to pay? How has that changed over the last year or so?

KL: We just did an analysis of this and if you adjust for growth, we have not seen a substantial raise in valuations that we have paid compared to where prices were pre pandemic. We’re paying the same dollar for a point of growth as we were before [COVID-19 struck the U.S.].

TC: Why do you think that is?

KL: Companies that have solid unit economics have become better at both benchmarking their internal metrics, and investors have become better at understanding those and metrics. The consistency and underwriting by investors is becoming better and better.

Porsche has always gone its own way when it comes to creating new vehicles. It is, after all, the company that continues to stick to the wacky idea that putting the weight of an engine in the rear of a sports car is a great idea. (It is!)

So, bucking the crossover trend to create an all-electric, soft-roading wagon with just 20 more millimeters of clearance than their popular electric Taycan sedan isn’t out of character for the brand. Instead, it’s another example of how Porsche approaches electrification.”You don’t make an electric car. You make a Porsche with an electric powertrain,” Calvin Kim, product spokesperson for the Taycan line, said in a recent interview.

The 2021 Taycan Cross Turismo fits that bill. Powerful, quick, comfortable, luxurious and tech-laden, the Porsche Taycan 4 Cross Turismo (one of four variants of the wagon) offers a blend of practicality with a whole lot of power and speed for under $100,000.

Why Build an Electric Porsche Wagon?

Porsche upended the sports car enthusiast club when it launched the Cayenne nearly 20 years ago and is doing the same with the Taycan and the Taycan Cross Turismo. While the SUV and crossover business is still a tremendous cash cow for the company, nearly 4,500 Taycans were sold in 2020, according to a recent release from Porsche. That’s more than either the 718 or the Panamera line.  Porsche also says that from cradle to manufacturing, the new Cross Turismo is carbon neutral — the first vehicle they’ve made that has achieved that status.

“Porsche wanted to create the most sporty capability we can make,” Kim said, “and a wagon version of the Taycan embodies that ethos.”

The 2021 Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo is on sale today. Porsche says that it expects deliveries to start this summer.

Image Credits: Abigail Bassett

Taycan vs. Taycan Cross Turismo

Beyond the obvious form factor, prospective buyers or EV enthusiasts might wonder why someone might opt for a Cross Turismo over the original Taycan?

There are a few important differences between the two vehicles that might push some customers over to the wagon. First up, the Cross Turismo offers more passenger and cargo space. Passengers get an additional 0.35 inches of headroom up front and 3.69 inches in the back. The wagon is also equipped with more cargo space — 15.7 cubic feet behind the rear seats or 42.8 cubic feet with them folded forward. Like the Taycan, the Cross Turismo has an additional 2.9 cubic feet of area in the frunk.

The Cross Turismo also has a skosh 20 millimeters (just short of 1 inch) more ground clearance than the Taycan sedan and an additional driving mode called Gravel. Gravel mode is activated by a soft key on the center console rather than by the mode wheel on the steering wheel. It raises the car’s height and makes changes to the stability control and torque management system for better grip on gravel, snow or ice. Unfortunately, on our short test drive, we didn’t get a chance to put Gravel mode to the test.

Image Credits: Porsche

On top of these features, the Taycan Cross Turismo comes with all-wheel drive and standard air suspension (called Porsche Active Suspension Management or PASM), which, on the Taycan, is a $2,200 option. The Taycan Cross Turismo comes standard with the larger 93.4 kWh battery pack, which is a $5,780 option on the base Taycan sedan. The Cross Turismo is built on the same platform as the Taycan sedan, known as J1, internally.

There are four different variants of the Taycan Cross Turismo, including the one I drove. You can choose from the entry-level Taycan 4 Cross Turismo, the Taycan 4S Cross Turismo, the Taycan Turbo Cross Turismo, and the Taycan Turbo S Cross Turismo. At the highest trims, base prices start at $188,000. Pricing for the Taycan 4 Cross Turismo that I drove starts at $92,250 (including delivery).

Each flavor of Cross Turismo comes with an optional off-road package that adds lower body cladding to prevent rock chips on gravel roads and raises the vehicle by 10 millimeters. Porsche doesn’t state the ground clearance for the Taycan or the Taycan Cross Turismo, but approach and departure angles increase from 12.1 and 15.2 degrees to 12.2 and 16.2 degrees in the electric wagon.  In true Porsche fashion, the company says that there are more than 21,000 option combinations based solely on which Cross Turismo you choose, wheel choice, exterior color, and interior selection, not to mention details like badge deletion, stitching, technology options, and seat types.

Charging speeds are the same between the Cross Turismo and the Taycan. Porsche says that on DC fast chargers, the Taycan Cross Turismo can recharge from 5% to 80% in just 22.5-minutes.

First drive

The Taycan Cross Turismo 4, which I drove, represents the entry point to the new all-electric wagon. While neither Porsche nor the EPA has released range estimates, the European-spec, ruby red machine had just over 250 miles of range at 99% charge when I hopped into it for a Monday afternoon jaunt from Glendale, California to Big Bear and back. That nearly 200-mile trip left me with 68 miles of range in the proverbial tank. While it may seem like that math is off, it’s not, thanks to regenerative braking that helps generate electricity and push some of it back into the battery.

The drive consisted of about 140 miles along the highway and some 60 miles on mountain roads. Thanks to the dual-motor, all-wheel-drive setup that comes standard on all Cross Turismos, the electric wagon felt planted and secure on misty and slightly icy mountain roads and took corners without a modicum of body roll. With a 375 horsepower (469 with launch control)  and maximum available 368 lb-ft of torque, passing a sluggish motorist (or three at once) was handled with ease.

The Cross Turismo gets five different driving modes: Range, Normal, Sport, Sport Plus, and Individual. On the highway, I started in Normal mode and noticed how easy it was to push the vehicle beyond the stated speed limit. Using the toggle on the wheel, I switched to Range mode, which helps conserve battery by limiting speed to just 80 miles per hour. All of the modes except Range allow the driver to take the Cross Turismo to its full 136-mile-per-hour potential.

Image Credits: Porsche

My test vehicle was a European model. This meant that certain tech features that come with the Cross Turismo, including Porsche’s advanced driving assistance system InnoDrive and the navigation features, couldn’t be activated since my test drive was in the United States. However, the regular adaptive cruise control did work and I used it extensively on the highway run from Glendale to the base of the mountain.

The Taycan Cross Turismo’s adaptive cruise adapted quickly to the numerous drivers who cut into my lane. The feature handled these tricky moments the same way I would have, only with a bit more finesse. When a car swerved unexpectedly into my lane, the Cross Turismo slowed without slamming the brakes or stuttering and simply drew the 5,029-pound vehicle down to a slower speed and a comfortable following distance that was neither too short nor too long. As traffic sped up, the system would maintain the following distance without jostling or awkward pauses.

When I reached the base of the mountain, I had around 200 miles of range left. I toggled the Cross Turismo into Sport Plus mode and began the climb. In Sport and Sport Plus, the “engine noise” (for lack of a better term) inside the cabin becomes more audible. Porsche says that to create the sound, they recorded the motors’ audio, adjusted it and then piped the sound into the cabin. Outside the cabin in both modes, the vehicle becomes a bit louder but not nearly as raucous as a combustion Porsche.

The roads leading to Big Bear are more winter worn than those in the Los Angeles Basin and have plenty of cracks and potholes after a wet season. On the day I drove the route, it was misty and around 40 degrees, with frost licking the tips of the pines at higher elevations giving them a silver hue. The road was wet and wound through dense patches of cloud and fog, causing a few small icy spots on the roadway. The Cross Turismo took all of those challenges in stride.

If you’ve ever hustled a heavy and relatively large vehicle up a technical and twisting road, you know the body roll battle all too well. It’s a non-issue in the Cross Turismo. Because the body weight (battery and motors) are set low into the floor, the Cross Turismo feels as planted, comfortable and capable as a 911. The steering is direct and communicative without being twitchy. On the climb, I managed to trim off roughly 10 minutes on my estimated arrival without breaking a sweat or really pushing the car anywhere near the limit. At the predetermined coffee stop, I’d worn the battery down to 118 miles–plenty to get me back to Glendale with room to spare.

I ran the mountain road in Sport and cruised back to the valley. At the bottom of the mountain road, I noted that the vehicle had gained a few miles back thanks to regenerative braking and had 124 miles remaining. Throwing range anxiety to the wind and vowing to keep my eyes up for potential speed traps, I kept the Taycan Cross Turismo in Sport mode and zipped my way through 3 pm traffic, arriving back at the studio with plenty of power to spare.

Spotify launches paid podcast support, Amazon announces new tablets and we unveil the agenda for TC Sessions: Mobility. This is your Daily Crunch for April 27, 2021.

The big story: Spotify adds support for paid podcasts

As first announced in February, Spotify is now allowing podcasters to offer subscriber-only content, published through its Anchor podcasting software. Creators choose from three subscription tiers — $2.99, $4.99 or $7.99 per month.

This comes one week after Apple announced support for paid podcast subscriptions. But where Apple said it would take 30% of first-year subscriptions and 15% after that, Spotify says it will pass 100% of revenue on to podcasters for the first two years, only charging a 5% fee starting in 2023.

The tech giants

Amazon announces new Fire tablets and kids editions — The Fire HD 10 is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, with pricing starting at $150.

Tesla wants to make every home a distributed power plant — CEO Elon Musk said he wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company’s products.

Red Hat CEO looks to maintain double-digit growth in second year at helm — Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier runs the centerpiece of IBM’s transformation hopes.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Kids-focused fintech Greenlight raises $260M in a16z-led Series D, nearly doubles valuation to $2.3B — Since it launched its debit cards for kids in 2017, the company has set up accounts for more than 3 million parents and children.

Kry closes $312M Series D after use of its telehealth tools grows 100% yoy — During the pandemic, Kry quickly stepped in to offer a free service for doctors to conduct web-based consultations.

Banana Capital’s debut fund is for internet-first founders — You might know him for his viral tweets, but Turner Novak wasn’t always a master meme-maker.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Internal rates of return in emerging US tech hubs are starting to overtake Silicon Valley — AngelList analyzed IRR for almost 2,500 deals dating back to 2013.

Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace and Hippo’s Assaf Wand discuss proptech’s biggest opportunities — The pair joined us to discuss questions like: How should proptech founders think about competition, strategic investment versus top-tier VC firms and how to build their board?

SaaS subscriptions may be short-serving your customers — Adam Riggs argues that software as a service may have become a bit too interchangeable with subscription models.

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

Everything else

Announcing the Agenda for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 — Our guests will include Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson, Amy Jones Satrom of Nuro and famed investor Reid Hoffman.

Taking stock of the VC industry’s progress on diversity, equity and inclusion — A look at the VC Human Capital Survey from the National Venture Capital Association, Venture Forward and Deloitte.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Rather than a CEO-slamming sound bite free-for-all, Tuesday’s big tech hearing on algorithms aimed for more of a listening session vibe — and in that sense it mostly succeeded.

The hearing centered on testimony from the policy leads at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rather than the chief executives of those companies for a change. The resulting few hours didn’t offer any massive revelations but was still probably more productive than squeezing some of the world’s most powerful men for their commitments to “get back to you on that.”

In the hearing, lawmakers bemoaned social media echo chambers and the ways that the algorithms pumping content through platforms are capable of completely reshaping human behavior. .

“… This advanced technology is harnessed into algorithms designed to attract our time and attention on social media, and the results can be harmful to our kids’ attention spans, to the quality of our public discourse, to our public health, and even to our democracy itself,” said Chris Coons (D-DE), chair of the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on privacy and tech, which held the hearing.

Coons struck a cooperative note, observing that algorithms drive innovation but that their dark side comes with considerable costs

None of this is new, of course. But Congress is crawling closer to solutions, one repetitive tech hearing at a time. The Tuesday hearing highlighted some zones of bipartisan agreement that could determine the chances of a tech reform bill passing the Senate, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats. Coons expressed optimism that a “broadly bipartisan solution” could be reached.

What would that look like? Probably changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which we’ve written about extensively over the years. That law protects social media companies from liability for user-created content and it’s been a major nexus of tech regulation talk, both in the newly Democratic Senate under Biden and the previous Republican-led Senate that took its cues from Trump.

Lauren Culbertson, head of U.S. public policy at Twitter Inc., speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A broken business model

In the hearing, lawmakers pointed to flaws inherent to how major social media companies make money as the heart of the problem. Rather than criticizing companies for specific failings, they mostly focused on the core business model from which social media’s many ills spring forth.

“I think it’s very important for us to push back on the idea that really complicated, qualitative problems have easy quantitative solutions,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said. He argued that because social media companies make money by keeping users hooked to their products, any real solution would have to upend that business model altogether.

“The business model of these companies is addiction,” Josh Hawley (R-MO) echoed, calling social media an “attention treadmill” by design.

Ex-Googler and frequent tech critic Tristan Harris didn’t mince words about how tech companies talk around that central design tenet in his own testimony. “It’s almost like listening to a hostage in a hostage video,” Harris said, likening the engagement-seeking business model to a gun just offstage.

Spotlight on Section 230

One big way lawmakers propose to disrupt those deeply entrenched incentives? Adding algorithm-focused exceptions to the Section 230 protections that social media companies enjoy. A few bills floating around take that approach.

One bill from Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Reps. Paul Gosar (R-A) and Tulsi Gabbard (R-HI) would require platforms with 10 million or more users to obtain consent before serving users content based on their behavior or demographic data if they want to keep Section 230 protections. The idea is to revoke 230 immunity from platforms that boost engagement by “funneling information to users that polarizes their views” unless a user specifically opts in.

In another bill, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) propose suspending Section 230 protections and making companies liable “if their algorithms amplify misinformation that leads to offline violence.” That bill would amend Section 230 to reference existing civil rights laws.

Section 230’s defenders argue that any insufficiently targeted changes to the law could disrupt the modern internet as we know it, resulting in cascading negative impacts well beyond the intended scope of reform efforts. An outright repeal of the law is almost certainly off the table, but even small tweaks could completely realign internet businesses, for better or worse.

During the hearing, Hawley made a broader suggestion for companies that use algorithms to chase profits. “Why shouldn’t we just remove section 230 protection from any platform that engages in behavioral advertising or algorithmic amplification?” he asked, adding that he wasn’t opposed to an outright repeal of the law.

Sen. Klobuchar, who leads the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, connected the algorithmic concerns to anti-competitive behavior in the tech industry. “If you have a company that buys out everyone from under them… we’re never going to know if they could have developed the bells and whistles to help us with misinformation because there is no competition,” Klobuchar said.

Subcommittee members Klobuchar and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) have their own major Section 230 reform bill, the Safe Tech Act, but that legislation is less concerned with algorithms than ads and paid content.

At least one more major bill looking at Section 230 through the lens of algorithms is still on the way. Prominent big tech critic House Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) is due out soon with a Section 230 bill that could suspend liability protections for companies that rely on algorithms to boost engagement and line their pockets.

“That’s a very complicated algorithm that is designed to maximize engagement to drive up advertising prices to produce greater profits for the company,” Cicilline told Axios last month. “…That’s a set of business decisions for which, it might be quite easy to argue, that a company should be liable for.”

This afternoon Alphabet and Microsoft and Pinterest reported their quarterly earnings results for the first three months of 2021. Microsoft and Pinterest have rapidly lost value after reporting their results, while Alphabet appreciated after its own earnings download.

Sparing you a deluge of numbers, here’s what TechCrunch is pondering from each report in as few words as possible:

• Alphabet’s earnings were strong across a number of fronts; investors cheered. YouTube revenue grew nearly 50% to $6.0 billion, search ads performed well, and even the infamously unprofitable “Other Bets” ground managed to post nearly $200 million in revenue. But the most notable result from the technology conglomerate was its cloud results. Google Cloud grew from $2.777 billion in revenue and an operating loss of $1.73 billion in the year-ago quarter to revenues of $4.047 billion and an operating loss of just $974 million. The Mountain View-based agglomeration of tech services is building not only a material revenue stream out of a non ad-based product, but one that could generate material operating income in time. If trends hold.
• Microsoft’s earnings report was pretty good despite Wall Street disinterest. Microsoft grew 17% from its year-ago quarter while pushing its operating income up 31% to $17.0 billion; faster growing income compared to revenue is indicative of operating leverage. The company’s net income actually grew even more rapidly than its operating income, which is sharper than expected. Azure, the company’s Google Cloud and AWS competitor, grew 50% in the quarter which met expectations per CNBC. Microsoft remains incredibly rich, and its most future-looking products put up some pretty big numbers. Not bad!
• Pinterest posted a monster quarter. Wall Street was not impressed. Pinterest’s Q1 2021 revenue of $485.230 million was up 78% compared to the year-ago quarter, the company cut its net loss from $141.196 million to $21.674 at the same time, and its non-GAAP net income rose from -$59.916 million to $78.527 during the first three months of the year. The result of this wildly impressive quarter? Its shares are off more than 8%. One reason Pinterest may have dropped is that the company missed on monthly active users (478 million reported, 480.5 million expected), and warned that it would see “sequential operating expense growth […] accelerate in Q2.” But with the company anticipating 105% revenue growth in the current quarter and mid-teens MAU growth in the same period, it’s hard to be that mad at the company. Unless we’re missing something major here, Pinterest is being punished by investors who simply expected even more?

And there you have it, a very quick catch up. I am not supposed to cover earnings much anymore, but while you can take the pig from the shit, it’s hard to get the pig to not blog about earnings!

Exyn Technologies announced Tuesday that it has achieved what it considers the highest level of aerial autonomy reached within the industry. The key to the achievement is that Exyn drones are immune to GPS signal loss, meaning all spatial and mapping computations are done onboard, the company said.

Under Exyn’s definitions of autonomy, which are based on a similar standard applied to automotive, the company’s drones have achieved Level 4A autonomy. This means the drones are able to explore a designated 3D area without a remote operator in the backseat, according to Exyn.

Exyn’s achievement is a major step up from the previous level 3 of autonomy, in which a human is required to be present to potentially take over, something that has prevented drones from entering spaces without ranging signals.

The Level 3 aerial autonomy landscape is also defined by point-to-point navigation, in which an operator lays out a sequence of locations for a robot to visit, and the robot does its best to get there. Autonomous aviation startup Xwing’s self-flying utility aircraft will operate on this level by following specific flight paths. However, in real-life use cases, an operator might not have intimate knowledge of the operating environment, and the robot might not be able to access existing maps to learn from and inform its movements.

“We developed an autonomous system that can take you into dark, dirty, dangerous environments,” Exyn’s CTO Jason Derenick told TechCrunch. “Place it at the edge of danger and send it off to collect the information that you need. Oftentimes the information you need is beyond the line of sight, both in terms of communications as well as visual.”

Exyn’s drones are given a capability the company calls “scoutaunomy,” which involves defining a “bounding box volume” around which the drone can fly. Using lidar sensors, the drone can identify volume between explored and unexplored spaces in order to self-navigate and create an accurate, high-resolution map of the space. The drones, which are hardware-agnostic, can also carry additional sensors that collect further information to be integrated onto the maps. 

“Think of building a three-dimensional map and then draping on top of it RGB information from the camera, so now you’ve got a photorealistic 3D representation of the space,” Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies, told TechCrunch. “If we’re carrying heat and humidity sensors, getting radiological reading, getting gas readings, checking the ventilation, et cetera. That’s going to be a very rich dataset that currently underground mining doesn’t have.”

Most of Exyn Technologies’ use cases are in the mining industry, with clients like Rupert Resources and Dundee Precious Metals, where the ability to chart the unknown can keep miners safe and inform better business decisions. The company recently announced a partnership with Swedish mining and construction giant Sandvik that will involve integrating Exyn’s mapping software with Sandvik’s mapping analytics capabilities. 

Exyn is also working with government customers for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as well as in nuclear energy, construction and logistics, according to the company. 

Exyn Technologies announced Tuesday that it has achieved what it considers the highest level of aerial autonomy reached within the industry. The key to the achievement is that Exyn drones are immune to GPS signal loss, meaning all spatial and mapping computations are done onboard, the company said.

Under Exyn’s definitions of autonomy, which are based on a similar standard applied to automotive, the company’s drones have achieved Level 4A autonomy. This means the drones are able to explore a designated 3D area without a remote operator in the backseat, according to Exyn.

Exyn’s achievement is a major step up from the previous level 3 of autonomy, in which a human is required to be present to potentially take over, something that has prevented drones from entering spaces without ranging signals.

The Level 3 aerial autonomy landscape is also defined by point-to-point navigation, in which an operator lays out a sequence of locations for a robot to visit, and the robot does its best to get there. Autonomous aviation startup Xwing’s self-flying utility aircraft will operate on this level by following specific flight paths. However, in real-life use cases, an operator might not have intimate knowledge of the operating environment, and the robot might not be able to access existing maps to learn from and inform its movements.

“We developed an autonomous system that can take you into dark, dirty, dangerous environments,” Exyn’s CTO Jason Derenick told TechCrunch. “Place it at the edge of danger and send it off to collect the information that you need. Oftentimes the information you need is beyond the line of sight, both in terms of communications as well as visual.”

Exyn’s drones are given a capability the company calls “scoutaunomy,” which involves defining a “bounding box volume” around which the drone can fly. Using lidar sensors, the drone can identify volume between explored and unexplored spaces in order to self-navigate and create an accurate, high-resolution map of the space. The drones, which are hardware-agnostic, can also carry additional sensors that collect further information to be integrated onto the maps. 

“Think of building a three-dimensional map and then draping on top of it RGB information from the camera, so now you’ve got a photorealistic 3D representation of the space,” Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies, told TechCrunch. “If we’re carrying heat and humidity sensors, getting radiological reading, getting gas readings, checking the ventilation, et cetera. That’s going to be a very rich dataset that currently underground mining doesn’t have.”

Most of Exyn Technologies’ use cases are in the mining industry, with clients like Rupert Resources and Dundee Precious Metals, where the ability to chart the unknown can keep miners safe and inform better business decisions. The company recently announced a partnership with Swedish mining and construction giant Sandvik that will involve integrating Exyn’s mapping software with Sandvik’s mapping analytics capabilities. 

Exyn is also working with government customers for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, as well as in nuclear energy, construction and logistics, according to the company.