Author: azeeadmin

Congruent Ventures, the early stage investment firm focused on technologies and services designed to avert the current climate emergency, has raised $175 million in financing for its latest fund.

The firm, which now has $300 million in assets under management, is focused on investing in pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds and was founded by Abe Yokell and Joshua Posamentier, two longtime investors in the climate space with over twenty years of experience investing in the sector.

“With the dawn of a new administration dedicated to infrastructure [and] climate and a long-overdue influx of capital towards pressing global issues surrounding climate change, we cover the gamut with a portfolio of over three dozen companies working in transportation, energy transition, food and agriculture to sustainable production and consumption,” Yokell wrote in an email.

Companies in the portfolio include the mycelium meat producer Meati; Milk Run, a farm to table food marketplace; PicoMES, which develops software for efficient manufacturing; Parallel Systems, a developer of electrified, autonomous rail cars; Alloy Enterprises, which is an additive manufacturer for aluminum; Hippo Harvest, which provides autonomous greenhouse growing systems; and Amp Robotics, a provider of recycling robots to improve efficiencies among hard-pressed waste recycling organizations.

The firm counts some high profile limited partners like Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, affiliates of Prelude Ventures; the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Turst and Surdna Foundation, along with UC Investments.

“Until very recently, there was a total dearth of early-stage capital focused on climate and sustainability,” said Joshua Posamentier, managing partner and co-founder, Congruent Ventures. “We invest at the earliest stages where we can help entrepreneurs avoid a myriad of pitfalls, help them build strong companies, raise additional capital, and as a result, tackle the world’s most pressing environmental problems in some of the world’s largest sectors.”

One third of Congruent’s companies are working directly with energy or civil infrastructure and could stand to gain tremendously from any infrastructure spending bill that could come from Washington. Beyond that, the firm’s limited partners include infrastructure investors with over $700 billion of assets under management that are all potential customers for the technologies developed by the firm’s portfolio companies, the firm said in a statement.

While most startups today are creating software, not every upstart enterprise is taking a code-only approach to building a business. Some of today’s most ambitious startups are aiming quite a bit higher.

Albedo is one such company. The recent Y Combinator graduate wants to build a constellation of low-orbit satellites that can provide higher-resolution Earth imaging than what is generally available today. And it just closed a $10 million seed round.

Initialized Capital led the investment, which also saw participation from Jetstream, Liquid2 Ventures and Soma Capital

TechCrunch has had its eye on Albedo since its Y Combinator run, discussing the firm’s approach to providing what it describes as “aerial-quality” images — though they are taken from space instead of a drone or aircraft. In more technical parlance, Albedo wants to provide 10-centimeter visual imagery and 2-meter thermal imagery.

According to Topher Haddad, Albedo’s co-founder and CEO, the company aims to launch its first satellite in 2024 and bring its full constellation in orbit by 2027. With eight satellites, the company can provide daily image revisits; with 24, it can do that three times each day, though the eight-satellite fleet will be an early milestone for the startup, according to its CEO.

Why hasn’t someone already tried to build what Albedo is working on? The company, Haddad explained, has been made possible in part due to advances in the larger space economy, and the fact that major cloud providers AWS and Azure have both built out services to handle satellite data — “AWS Ground Station” in the case of the former and “Azure Orbital” in the latter. Mix in cheaper launches and more modular satellite construction, and what Albedo wants to do is becoming possible.

Albedo CEO and co-founder Topher Haddad, via the company.

There’s some tech risk to what Albedo aims to do, however. Haddad explained to TechCrunch how his company hopes to employ in-orbit refueling for its satellites’ electric propulsion so that they can stay afloat longer; if that effort fails, or drag winds up being worse than anticipated, Albedo’s satellites might have to opt for slightly higher orbits and lower-res photos in the 12- to 15-centimeter range.

For fun, what does that resolution mean in more practical terms? A 10-centimeter-resolution image from a satellite is one in which each pixel is 10 centimeters on each side. So, a 15-centimeter-resolution image would have pixels that were more than twice the surface area of a 10-centimeter shot.

Resolution matters, as does the regularity of new pictures being taken. On the latter front, the company’s eventual fleet of satellites should keep its photos fresh.

Albedo intends to target companies of all sizes as customers. The imaging world is a big market, with Haddad expecting to find customers among property insurance companies, mapping concerns, utility firms and other large companies. And now it has more capital than ever to pursue its goals.

The round

It takes more money to get a space startup off the ground than it takes to iterate on an early software product. So, what does the $10 million it just raised get Albedo? The first thing is staff. When TechCrunch last spoke with Haddad, the company was still a team of three. That’s about to change, however; a number of new hires recently accepted offers, and the company expects to add another four or five people to its staff in addition to those already planning to join.

Albedo said it anticipates a staff of 10 to 12 by the end of the year.

The $10 million will also allow the company to fund a down payment on rocket space and payments to suppliers that should allow Albedo to wrap up its satellite design. Per its CEO, the startup expects to raise a larger Series A in around a year to help finance getting its first satellite into orbit. That moment will allow the startup to better prove its technology, and, if all goes well, help it to raise even more capital to keep its launch schedule packed.

Let’s see how far the company can get with its new capital, and if it finds sufficient, ahem, lift to reach the next funding milestone. If it does, we could wind up covering the launch of its first satellite. That would be fun.

Bosch executives on Thursday criticized proposed EU regulations that would ban the internal combustion engine by 2025, saying that lawmakers “shy away” from discussing the consequences of such a ban on employment.

Although the company reported it is creating jobs through its new businesses, particularly its fuel cell business, and said it was filling more than 90% of these positions internally, it also said an all- or mostly-electric transportation revolution would likely affect jobs. As a case in point, the company told reporters that ten Bosch employees are needed to build a diesel powertrain system, three for a gasoline system — but only one for an electrical powertrain.

Instead, Bosch sees a place for renewable synthetic fuels and hydrogen fuel cells alongside electrification. Renewable synthetic fuels made from hydrogen are a different technology from hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity, while hydrogen-derived fuels can be combusted in a modified internal combustion engine (ICE).

“An opportunity is being missed if renewable synthetic fuel derived from hydrogen and CO2 remains off-limits in road transport,” Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner said.

“Climate action is not about the end of the internal-combustion engine,” he continued. “It’s about the end of fossil fuels. And while electromobility and green charging power make road transport carbon neutral, so do renewable fuels.”

Electric solutions have limits, Denner said, particularly in powering heavy-duty vehicles. The company earlier this month established a joint venture with Chinese automaker Qingling Motors to build fuel cell powertrains in a test fleet of 70 trucks.

Bosch’s confidence in hydrogen fuel cells and synthetic fuels isn’t to the exclusion of battery-electric mobility. The company, which is one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive and industrial components, said its electromobility business is growing by almost 40 percent, and the company projects annual sales of electrical powertrain components to increase to around €5 billion ($6 billion) by 2025, a fivefold increase.

However, the German company said it was “keeping its options open” by also investing €600 million ($721.7 million) in fuel cell powertrains in the next three years.

“Ultimately Europe won’t be able to achieve climate neutrality without a hydrogen economy,” Denner said.

Bosch has not been immune from the effects of the global semiconductor shortage, which continues to drag into 2021. Board member Stefan Asenkerschbaumer warned that there is a risk the shortage “will stifle the recovery that was forecast” for this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company executives told investors earlier this month that the situation may persist into 2022.

Facebook may be reconfiguring its News Feed algorithms. After being grilled by lawmakers about the role that Facebook played in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the company announced this morning it will be rolling out a series of News Feed ranking tests that will ask users to provide feedback about the posts they’re seeing, which will later be incorporated into Facebook’s News Feed ranking process. Specifically, Facebook will be looking to learn which content people find inspirational, what content they want to see less of (like politics), and what other topics they’re generally interested in, among other things.

This will be done through a series of global tests, one of which will involve a survey directly beneath the post itself which asks, “how much were you inspired by this post?,” with the goal of helping to show more people posts of an inspirational nature closer at the top of the News Feed.

Image Credits: Facebook

Another test will work to the Facebook News Feed experience to reflect what people want to see. Today, Facebook prioritizes showing you content from friends, Groups and Pages you’ve chosen to follow, but it has algorithmically crafted an experience of whose posts to show you and when based on a variety of signals. This includes both implicit and explicit signals — like how much you engage with that person’s content (or Page or Group) on a regular basis, as well as whether you’ve added them as a “Close Friend” or “Favorite” indicating you want to see more of their content than others, for example.

However, just because you’re close to someone in real life, that doesn’t mean that you like what they post to Facebook. This has driven families and friends apart in recent years, as people discovered by way of social media how people they thought they knew really viewed the world. It’s been a painful reckoning for some. Facebook hasn’t managed to fix the problem, either. Today, users still scroll News Feeds that reinforce their views, no matter how problematic. And with the growing tide of misinformation, the News Feed has gone from just placing users into a filter bubble to presenting a full alternate reality for some, often populated by conspiracies theories.

Facebook’s third test doesn’t necessarily tackle this problem head-on, but instead looks to gain feedback about what users want to see, as a whole. Facebook says that it will begin asking people whether they want to see more or fewer posts on certain topics, like Cooking, Sports, or Politics, and more. Based on users’ collective feedback, Facebook will adjust its algorithms to show more content people say they’re interested in, and fewer posts about topics they don’t want to see.

The area of politics, specifically, has been an issue for Facebook. The social network for years has been charged with helping to fan the flames of political discourse, polarizing and radicalizing users through its algorithms, distributing misinformation at scale, and encouraging an ecosystem of divisive clickbait, as publishers sought engagement instead of fairness and balance when reporting the news. There are now entirely biased and subjective outlets posing as news sources who benefit from algorithms like Facebook’s, in fact.

Shortly after the Capitol attack, Facebook announced it would try clamping down on political content in the News Feed for a small percentage of people in the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Indonesia, for period of time during tests.

Now, the company says it will work to better understand what content is being linked negative News Feed experiences, including political content. In this case, Facebook may ask users on posts with a lot of negative reactions what sort of content they want to see less of.

It will also more prominently feature the option to hide posts you find “irrelevant, problematic or irritating.” Although this feature existed before, you’ll now be able to tap an X in the upper-right corner of a post to hide it from the News Feed, if in the test group, and see fewer like in the future, for a more personalized experience.

It’s not clear that allowing users to pick and choose their topics is the best way to solve the larger problems with negative posts, divisive content or misinformation, though this test is less about the latter and more about making the News Feed “feel” more positive.

As the data is collected from the tests, Facebook will incorporate the learnings into its News Feed ranking algorithms. But it’s not clear to what extent it will be adjusting the algorithm on a global basis versus simply customizing the experience for end users on a more individual basis over time.

The company says the tests will run over the next few months.

That thing I said the other week about robotics SPACs being relatively few and far between is becoming less and less true. It’s like someone walked down to the local robotics club, explained the admittedly somewhat convoluted methods around robotics mergers and the rest of the industry decided that they, too, wanted to get in on this action.

Joining the list that already includes warehouse automation firm Berkshire-Gray and exoskeleton company Sarcos is Vicarious Surgical. The surgical category is definitely one to keep an eye on going forward for these deals. Not only is it a massive industry with intricate and expensive procedures, it’s one that’s been proven out for several decades now, thanks in no small part to players like Intuitive, which received FDA approval more than 20 years ago for its da Vinci system.

Vicarious has been kicking around since 2015 and has raised $43.2 million to date. The company’s got some big names in its corner, including Bill Gates via the Gates Frontier Fund, as well as backing from the likes of Marc Benioff. The company utilizes virtual reality so surgical operations can be performed remotely. The SPAC deal values the firm at $1.1 billion and will net Vicarious up to $425 million.

Sizable round from Canvas last week, as well. No, not the autonomous cart company acquired by Amazon Robotics a couple of years back. The San Francisco-based robotic drywall startup raised a $24 million Series B. One of the most interesting things we’re seeing out of the robotics construction space isn’t just the potential size of the industry, but the breadth of applications. There are just so many different places where robotics and automation could play a key role in the future.

Image Credits: ANYbotics

One of the bigger surprises of the week is the commercial arrival of ANYbotics’ ANYmal robot. We’ve seen the quadrupedal robot in a number of different iterations over the years. The comparisons to Boston Dynamics’ Spot system is, of course, unavoidable, though the Swiss company has been working on their proprietary tech for several years now.

With that in mind, it’s probably not surprising that the first commercial application for the robot is similar to that of Spot. Specifically, it’s designed to patrol potentially unsafe working spaces, including electrical and industrial plants. ANYmal has a customizable array of sensors up top for visual and audio inspections, among others.

Image Credits: University of Tubingen

Here’s a neat project out of Germany’s University of Tubingen. Researchers designed a robot to mimic the movements of an elephant trunk. This early version is comprised of low-cost (and colorful) 3D-printed components that are capable of grasping a range of different objects. The group hopes to one day adapt the technology for industrial grasping applications.

The past year has changed the way we work, on so many levels — a fact from which podcasters certainly weren’t immune. I can say, anecdotally, that as a long-time podcaster, I had thrown in the towel on my long-standing insistence that I do all of my interviews in-person — for what should probably be obvious reasons.

2020 saw many shows shifting to a remote format and experimenting with different remote recording tools, from broad teleconferencing software like Zoom to more bespoke solutions like Zencastr. Tel Aviv-based Riverside.fm (originally from Amsterdam) launched right on time to ride the remote podcasting wave, and today the service is announcing a $9.5 million Series A.

The round is led by Seven Seven Six and features Zeev-ventures.com, Casey Neistat, Marques Brownlee, Guy Raz,  Elad Gil and Alexander Klöpping. The company says it plans to use the money to increase headcount and build out more features for the service.

“As many were forced to adapt to remote work and production teams struggled to deliver the same in person quality, from a distance—Gideon and Nadav saw an opportunity to not only solve a great need for creators, but to build an extraordinary product,” Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian said in a release. “As a creator myself, I can say from experience that Riverside’s quality is unmatched and the new editing capabilities are peerless.”

Riverside.fm is a remote video and audio platform that records lossless audio and 4K video tracks remotely to each user’s system, saving the end result from the kind of technical hiccups that come with spotty internet connections.

Along with the funding round, the company is also rolling out a number of software updates to its platform. At the top of the list is brand new version of its iPhone app, which instantly records and uploads video, a nice extension as more users are looking to record their end on mobile devices.

On the desktop front, “Magic Editor” streamlines the multi-step process of recording, editing and uploading. There’s also a new “Smart Speakerview” feature that automatically switches between speakers for video editing, while not switching for accidental noises like sneezing and coughing.

It’s a hot space that’s only heating up. Given how quickly the company was able to piece their original offering together, it will be interesting to see what they’re able to do with an additional $9.5 million in their coffers.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have a natural fit with sports memorabilia, another category of speculative asset whose value is primarily dependent on the prices its adherents are willing to pay. A new startup called SportsIcon aims to deliver even more value via sports-focused NFTs, with direct collaboration with athletes and lessons from the pros to accompany the one-off digital collectibles.

SportsIcon has backing from Roham Gharegozlou, the CEO of Dapper Labs, which was at the very forefront of the NFT craze and which powers NBA Top Shot. It’s also funded by rapper Nas, whose portfolio includes a number of prescient early bets, former NBA player Andrew Bogut, Eniac Ventures’ Partner Nihal Mehta and more. The company announced its initial round of funding along with its public launch, but declined to disclose the total amount, noting only that it was “in the seven figures.”

Initially, SportsIcon will be debuting between 15 and 20 NFTs, created in collaboration with athletes, that commemorate specific, historic moments from their sporting careers. Accompanying these NFTs will be “two-hour masterclasses,” which the company said in a press release will give “fans access to their mental and physical training methods, techniques and best practices.”

That masterclass approach is due in part to the background of co-founder Chris Worsey, who previously built a number of edtech startups including Coursematch. Worsey told TechCrunch that the key to its approach lies in the exclusive content that will be packaged along with the NFTs it’s bringing to market. SportsIcon is differentiated because it’s creating unique content, shooting for two days with the athlete — the first day will be “interviews about their journey and their past,” the second day will be shooting them on the training field, he said.

“This is the key: The beauty is the built-in scarcity of this content,” Worsey added. “We won’t be releasing it elsewhere.”

The hope is to build a “long-term relationship with the icons,” he explained, while the exact financial details/split will differ from deal to deal. In some cases, the athlete is donating their proceeds to the charity of their choice. Each unique art piece will be auctioned off, and the packs will sell for anywhere from $10 to $999. The more expensive packs will be “the really rare, scarce moments where the icon’s talking about their greatest moments,” according to Worsey. Packs can also include real-world prizes like signed memorabilia or box seats at a game.

The real differentiator for SportsIcon, he says, is down to the focus on content, and creating something that’s not only unique, but also high-quality.

“SportsIcon is different because we invest in the content,” Worsey told TechCrunch. “We hire world-class directors and we make world-class content.”

While the startup isn’t yet revealing any of the athletes its working with on its debut NFTs, it says the first sports stars that will appear on the platform will come from soccer, tennis, MMA, basketball and baseball, with agreements with stars in each of those areas currently in progress.

Holoride, the company that’s building an immersive XR in-vehicle media platform, today announced it raised €10 million (approximately $12 million) in its Series A investing round, earning the company a €30 million ($36 million) valuation. 

The Swedish ADAS software development company Terranet led the round with €3.2 million (~$3.9 million), followed by a group of Chinese financial and automotive technology investors, organized by investment professional Jingjing Xu, and educational and entertainment game development company Schell Games, which has partnered with holoride in the past to create content. 

Holoride will use the fresh funds to search for new developers and other talent both as it prepares to expand into global markets like Europe, the United States and Asia, and in advance of its summer 2022 launch for private passenger cars. 

“This goes hand-in-hand with putting more emphasis on the content creator community, and as of summer this year, releasing a lot of tools to help them build content for cars on our platform,” Nils Wollny, holoride’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch. 

The Munich-based company launched at CES in 2019. TechCrunch got to test out its in-car virtual reality system. Our team was surprised, and delighted, to find that holoride had figured out how to quell the motion sickness caused both by being a passenger in a vehicle, and by using a VR headset. The key? Matching the experience users have within the headset to the movement of the vehicle. Once holoride launches, users will be able to download the holoride app to their phones or other personal devices like VR headsets, which will connect wirelessly to the car itself, and extend their reality.  

“Our technology has two sides,” said Wollny. “One is the localization, or positioning software, that takes data points from the car and performs real time synchronization. The other part is what we call our Elastic Software Development Kit. Content creators can build elastic content, which adapts to your travel time and routes. The collaboration with Terranet means their sensors and software stack that allow for a more precise capture and interpretation of the environment at an even faster speed with higher accuracy will enable us in the future for even more possibilities.”

Terranet’s VoxelFlow software, which was originally designed for ADAS applications, will help holoride advance its real time, in-vehicle XR entertainment. Terranet’s CEO Par-olof Johannesson, describes VoxelFlow as a new paradigm within computer vision and object identification, wherein a combination of sensors, event cameras and a laser scanner are integrated into a car’s windshield and headlamps in order to calculate the distance, direction and speed of an object.

Terranet’s VoxelFlow uses computer vision and object identification via a combination of sensors, event cameras and a laser scanner, which are integrated into a car’s windshield and headlamps, in order to calculate the distance, direction and speed of an object.

Holoride, which is manufacturer-agnostic, will be able to use the data points calculated by VoxelFlow in real time if holoride were being used in a vehicle that was built integrated with Terranet’s software. But more important is the ability for holoride to reuse 3D event data for XR applications, giving it to creators so they can create the most interactive experience. Terranet is also looking forward to opening up a new vertical for VoxelFlow. 

“We are of course very eager to access holoride’s wide pipeline, as well,” said Johannesson. “This deal is very much about expanding the addressable market and tapping into the heart of the automotive industry, where lead times and turnaround times are usually pretty long.”

Holoride is on a mission to revolutionize the passenger experience by turning dead car time into interactive experiences that can run the gamut of gaming, education, productivity, mindfulness and more. For example, around Halloween 2019, holoride teamed up with Ford and Universal Pictures to immerse riders into the frightening world of the Bride of Frankenstein, replete with monsters jumping out and tasks for riders to perform. 

Wollny said holoride always has an eye towards the next step, even though its first product hasn’t gone to market yet. He understands that the future is in autonomous vehicles, and wants to build an essential element of the future tech stack of future cars, cars in which everyone is a passenger. 

“Car manufacturers always focus on the buyer of the car or the driver, but not so much on the passenger,” said Wollny. “The passenger is who holoride really focuses on. We want to turn every vehicle into a moving theme park.”

AppliedXL, a startup creating machine learning tools with what it describes as a journalistic lens, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Emerging from the Newlab Venture Studio last year, the company is led by CEO Francesco Marconi (previously R&D chief at The Wall Street Journal) and CTO Erin Riglin (former WSJ automation editor). Marconi told me that AppliedXL started out by working on a number of different data and machine learning projects as it looked for product-market fit — but it’s now ready to focus on its first major industry, life sciences, with a product launching broadly this summer.

He said that AppliedXL’s technology consists of “essentially a swarm of editorial algorithms developed by computational journalists.” These algorithms benefit from “the point of view and expertise of journalists, as well as taking into account things like transparency and bias and other issues that derive from straightforward machine learning development.”

Marconi compared the startup to Bloomberg and Dow Jones, suggesting that just as those companies were able to collect and standardize financial data, AppliedXL will do the same in a variety of other industries.

He suggested that it makes sense to start with life sciences because there’s both a clear need and high demand. Customers might include competitive intelligence teams as pharmaceutical companies and life sciences funds, which might normally try to track this data by searching large databases and receiving “data vomit” in response.

“Our solution for scaling [the ability to spot] newsworthy events is to design the algorithms with the same principles that a journalist would approach a story or an investigation,” Marconi said. “It might be related to the size of the study and the number of patients, it might be related to a drug that is receiving a lot of attention in terms of R&D investment. All of these criteria that science journalist would bring to clinical trials, we’re encoding that into algorithms.”

Eventually, Marconi said the startup could expand into other categories, building industry-“micro models.” Broadly speaking, he suggested that the company’s mission is “measuring the health of people, places and the planet.”

The seed funding was led by Tuesday Capital, with participation from Frog Ventures, Team Europe and Correlation Ventures.

“With industry leading real-time data pipelining, Applied XL is building the tools and platform for the next generation of data-based decision making that business leaders will rely on for decades,” said Tuesday Capital Partner Prashant Fonseka in a statement. “Data is the new oil and the team at Applied XL have figured out how to identify, extract and leverage one of the most valuable commodities in the world.”

During the pandemic, having an automated solution for onboarding and updating Apple devices remotely has been essential, and today Kandji, a startup that helps IT do just that, announced a hefty $60 million Series B investment.

Felicis Ventures led the round with participation from SVB Capital, Greycroft, Okta Ventures and The Spruce House Partnership. Today’s round comes just 7 months after a $21 million Series A, bringing the total raised across three rounds to $88.5 million, according to the company.

CEO Adam Pettit says that the company has been growing in leaps in bounds since the funding round last October.

“We’ve seen a lot more traction than even originally anticipated. I think every time we’ve put targets up onto the board of how quickly we would grow, we’ve accelerated past them,” he said. He said that one of the primary reasons for this growth has been the rapid move to work from home during the pandemic.

“We’re working with customers across 40+ industries now, and we’re even seeing international customers come in and purchase so everyone now is just looking to support remote workforces and we provide a really elegant way for them to do that,” he said.

While Pettit didn’t want to discuss exact revenue numbers, he did say that it has tripled since the Series A announcement. That is being fueled in part he says by attracting larger companies, and he says they have been seeing more and more of them become customers this year.

As they’ve grown revenue and added customers, they’ve also brought on new employees, growing from 40 to 100 since October. Pettit says that the startup is committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture at the company and a big part of that is making sure you have a diverse pool of candidates to choose from.

“It comes down to at the onset just making the decision that it’s important to you and it’s important to the company, which we’ve done. Then you take it step by step all the way through, and we start at the back into the funnel where are candidates are coming from.”

That means clearly telling their recruiting partners that they want a diverse candidate pool. One way to do that is being remote and having a broader talent pool to work with. “We realized that in order to hold true to [our commitment], it was going to be really hard to do that just sticking to the core market of San Diego or San Francisco, and so now we’ve expand expanded nationally and this has opened up a lot of [new] pools of top tech talent,” he said.

Pettit is thinking hard right now about how the startup will run its offices whenever they allowed back, especially with some employees living outside major tech hubs. Clearly it will have some remote component, but he says that the tricky part of that will be making sure that the folks who aren’t coming into the office still feel fully engaged and part of the team.