Author: azeeadmin

In the first quarter of 2021, American consumer cryptocurrency trading giant Coinbase grew sharply, generating strong profits at the same time.

For Coinbase, the disclosure of its preliminary Q1 2021 results comes a week ahead of its direct listing, an event that will see the company begin to trade publicly. As it is both cash-rich and well-known, Coinbase is foregoing a traditional IPO in favor of the more exotic method of going public.

In its release, Coinbase disclosed the following metrics, which TechCrunch has compared to metrics from its S-1 filing:

• Monthly transacting users (MTUs) of 6.1 million, up from 2.8 million at the end of 2020
• Platform assets of $223 billion, up from $90.3 billion at the end of 2020
• Trading volume of $335 billion, up from $193.1 billion at the end of 2020
• Revenue of $1.8 billion, up from $585.1 million in Q4 2020
• Net income of “approximately $730 million to $800 million,” up from $178.8 million in Q4 2020
• Adjusted EBITDA of “approximately $1.1 billion,” up from $287.7 million in Q4 2020

The growth of Coinbase from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021 is so extreme that the company’s year-over-year comparisons are farcical. For example, in Q1 2020 Coinbase’s revenues were $190.6 million, or just under 11% of its Q1 2021 top line. The company’s adjusted profits alone in Q1 2021 were more than five times its year-ago revenues.

The new numbers may help solidify some valuation marks that the company has been discussed as approaching, like the $100 billion threshold, or even boost them.

The company did present some warnings in its public release, noting that cryptocurrency price “cycles can be highly volatile, and as a result, [Coinbase] measure[s] [its] performance over price cycles in lieu of quarterly results.” The company also stated that future declines in crypto trading activity will not slow its investment:

MTUs, Trading Volume, and therefore transaction revenue currently fluctuate, potentially materially, with Bitcoin price and crypto asset volatility. This revenue unpredictability, in turn, impacts our profitability on a quarter-to-quarter basis. In terms of expenses, we intend to prioritize investment, including in periods where we may see a decrease in Bitcoin price. This is because we believe that scale is central to achieving our mission and it is still early in the development of this industry. [Emphasis: TechCrunch]

Or more simply, it is willing to sacrifice future profitability if its revenues decline, as it is building for the future instead of hewing to more near-term investor expectations. At least Coinbase is being clear in its messaging to investors; don’t buy Coinbase stock expecting the company to tune its results to quarterly expectations.

Looking ahead, Coinbase did provide some guidance for its full year results. For 2021, the company provided three scenarios. The first “assumes an increase in crypto market capitalization and moderate-to-high crypto asset price volatility,” leading to 7.0 million MTUs. The second “assumes flat crypto market capitalization and low-to-moderate crypto asset price volatility” and 5.5 million MTUs. The third “assumes a significant decrease in crypto market capitalization, similar to the decrease observed in 2018, and low levels of crypto asset price volatility thereafter” and 4.0 million MTUs for the year.

But don’t think that Coinbase is anticipation stagnant growth, simply because its best scenario anticipates mere growth from 6.1 million MTUs to 7.0 million MTUs. The company wrote in its release under the headline “institutional revenue” that it expects “meaningful growth in 2021 driven by transaction and custody revenue given the increased institutional interest in the crypto asset class.”

Coinbase’s quarter was bonkers good. But so was the performance of cryptocurrencies themselves. A bet on the company’s shares, then, could easily be seen as a bet on the value of bitcoin and its ilk. April 14th is going to be a fun day to watch.

Bay Area-based Rapid Robotics today announced a $12 million Series A. The new round, led by NEA, brings the company’s total funding up to $17.5 million. It joins a recently closed seed round, announced way back in November of last year. Existing investors Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital also took part in the round.

We noted at that stage that COVID-19 had a sizable impact on robotics investment. At the very least, the pandemic has served to accelerate interest in automation, as many “non-essential” workers have been unable to travel to their jobs. At present, manufacturing jobs often lack the ability to perform remotely.

Rapid notes that the company’s tech has been involved with the production of some 50 million parts over the past year, over a wide variety of different manufacturing verticals. And, like his predecessor, President Biden has already begun talking up strategies to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S. Of course, ambitious as it might be, any plan is going to have to be a balancing act between human jobs and automation.

The company notes the longstanding issue with human operators in these roles. “If we don’t solve this problem, U.S. manufacturers will never be able to compete in a global market,” CEO Jordan Kretchmer said in a release. “It’s really that simple.”

Rapid’s main value add here is ease of use. The company creates systems designed to get up and running quickly.

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.

Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.

This is your chance to put Belfast on the Techcrunch Map!

If you are a tech startup founder or investor in the city please fill out the survey form here.

This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors (see also below) we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.

These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for ExtraCrunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.

In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.

This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and generally how your city will evolve.

We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.

So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.

Apple has launched a new app, Find My Certification Asst., designed for use by MFi (Made for iPhone) Licensees, who need to test their accessories’ interoperability with Apple’s Find My network. The network helps users find lost Apple devices — like iPhones, AirPods, and Mac computers, among other things — but is poised to add support for finding other compatible accessories manufactured by third parties.

The launch of the testing app signals that Apple may be ready to announce the launch of the third-party device program in the near future.

According to the app’s description, MFi Licensees can use Find My Certification Asst. to test the “discovery, connection, and other key requirements” for their accessories that will incorporate Apple’s Find My network technology. It also points to information about the Find My network certification program on Apple’s MFi Portal at mfi.apple.com, which currently references Find My network as a MFi program technology that’s “launching soon.”

The new app’s screenshots indicate it allows device makers to run a wide variety of tests in areas like connectivity, sound (for example, if the item can make a noise when misplaced), firmware, key management, NFC, power, and more.

Image Credits: App Store screenshot

The app became publicly available on Sunday, April 4th on the iOS App Store, according to Sensor Tower data. It’s brand-new so is not yet ranking in any App Store categories, including its own, “Developer Tools,” or others. It also has no ratings and reviews at this time.

The app’s launch is step towards the larger goal of opening up the Apple Find My network to third-parties and Apple’s planned launch of its own new accessory, AirTags.

Apple at last year’s Worldwide Developer Conference had first announced it would open up Find My to third-party devices after facing pressure from regulators in the U.S. and Europe who had been looking into, among other things, whether Apple had been planning to give itself an advantage with its forthcoming launch of AirTags, a competitor to Tile’s lost-item finder.

A prominent Apple critic, Tile had complained that AirTags would be able to connect with Apple’s U1 chips, which use UWB (ultra-wideband) technology for more precise finding capabilities, and at a Congressional hearing noted that AirTags would work with Apple’s own Find My app, which ships by default on Apple devices. This, Tile believed, would give Apple a first-party advantage in the lost-item finder market that Tile had successfully established and dominated for years.

Apple, in response, opened up third-party developer access to its U1 chip via its “NearbyInteraction” framework last year. As a result, Tile in Jan. 2021 announced its plan to launch a new tracker powered by UWB.

More recently, Apple updated its Find My app to include a new tab called “Items” in preparation for the app’s expanded support for AirTags and other third-party accessories, like those from Tile and others. This “Items” tab is enabled in latest Apple’s iOS 14.5 beta release, where the app explains how the Find My app will now be able to help users keep track of their everyday items — including accessories and other items that are compatible with Find My.

However, Tile (and likely others) feel that Apple’s concessions still disadvantage their businesses because participation in Apple’s FindMy program means that the third-party device maker would have to abandon its existing app and instead require its customers to use Apple’s FindMy app — effectively turning over its customers and their data to Apple.

Apple has not yet responded to request for comment about the new app’s launch.

Electric cars and trucks seem to have everything going for them: They don’t produce tailpipe emissions, they’re quieter than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts and the underlying architecture allows for roomier and often sleeker designs. But the humble lithium-ion battery powering these cars and trucks leads a difficult life. Irregular charging and discharge rates, intense temperatures and many partial charge cycles cause these batteries to degrade in the first five to eight years of use, and eventually, they end up in a recycling facility.

Instead of sending batteries straight to recycling for raw material recovery — and leaving unrealized value on the table — startups and automakers are finding ways to reuse batteries as part of a small and growing market.

That’s because the average electric vehicle lithium-ion battery can retain up to 70% of their charging capacity after being removed. The business proposition for second-life batteries is therefore intuitive: before sending the battery to a recycler, automakers can potentially generate additional revenue by putting it to use in another application or selling it to a third-party.

Low consumer uptake and the relatively recent introduction of EVs to the market has kept the supply of used batteries low, but automakers are already pursuing a number of second-life projects.

To name only a few such projects that have popped up in recent years, Nissan is using old batteries to power small robots; French carmaker Groupe Renault, with partners, is launching stationary energy storage systems made with old EV batteries; and Audi Environmental Foundation, the daughter organization of Audi AG, worked with Indian startup Nunam to build solar nanogrids out of used e-tron battery modules.

Other OEMs, like Lucid Motors, BMW and Proterra, are incorporating reuse principles into their battery design. In fact, Lucid has built its batteries to work across its electric vehicle and energy storage products, including in second-life uses, Chief Engineer Eric Bach told TechCrunch. And BMW has used a ‘plug-and-play’ concept with the batteries in its i3 model so that they can be easily removed and inserted into second-life applications, BMW spokesperson Weiland Bruch said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We believe that battery second-life will become its own self-standing business field,” he added.

A new lease on battery life

Automakers are increasingly bullish on second-life uses, though the size of their role in this budding market is still unclear. Matthew Lumsden, CEO of UK-based Connected Energy, told TechCrunch that he has noticed a shift in the past two years where some OEMs have begun viewing batteries as an asset rather than a liability.

Today, in a twist, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has announced a proposal for a $10 million allocation in the state budget to create a seed fund for Black and Latinx startups, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The Black and Latinx Seed Fund will be administered by the New Economic Development Authority (NJEDA).

NJEDA CEO Tim Sullivan said based on research conducted by the state, that New Jersey is the first state in the nation to develop this type of fund.

He said the move is a “direct response to the systemic racial inequities in access to capital for Black and Brown entrepreneurs” and aimed at addressing “the racial wealth gap.”

“I think two of the centerpieces of Gov. Murphy’s strategy overall for the economy is to build a stronger and fairer New Jersey and a stronger and fairer economy,” Sullivan said, adding that the state is also focused on “reclaiming New Jersey’s heritage of leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship.”

It’s a known fact that the number of venture dollars flowing to Black and Latinx founders is dismally low.

As one evidence of that, last year Crunchbase found that as of Aug. 31, Black and Latinx founders had raised $2.3 billion in funding, representing just 2.6% of the total $87.3 billion in funding that had gone to all founders up until that point in 2020. 

Also, Digitalundivided’s ProjectDiane 2020 report found that Black and Latinx women founders received just $1.7 billion of the total $276.7 billion venture dollars invested between 2018 and 2019.

Over the past several months — in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement — we’ve seen an increasing number of venture funds announce initiatives toward funding a broader group of founders.

“Before there was a Silicon Valley, whether you’re talking about folks like Thomas Edison, Bell Labs or Sarnoff Labs, we were the place that perhaps more than any other place that fueled 20th century American entrepreneurial-led growth,” Sullivan told TechCrunch. “And the reality is that we lost a little bit of that. We’re still one of the top places for innovation and entrepreneurship, but other places –whether it’s out west or in places like Austin and Boston — have really upped their game and we want to recapture that unquestioned leadership position in innovation, entrepreneurship.”

Beyond that – under Gov. Murphy’s leadership – the state wants “to build the most diverse and inclusive innovation ecosystem in America.”

“That is a lot easier said than done, particularly because of not only centuries worth of systemic discrimination and racism, but some very specific manifestations of that systemic disenfranchisement and discrimination, particularly around venture capital funding and early stage seed funding,” added Sullivan, who once worked at Barclays Capital as chief of staff to the head of Global Investment Banking.

Zakiya Smith-Ellis, chief policy advisor to Gov. Murphy, said the initiative came after conversations with Black and Latinx business investors.

“This was developed with the input of folks who might be direct beneficiaries of this program and that community was directly impactful in designing and developing this proposal,” Smith-Ellis told TechCrunch. “We hear from them ‘we don’t have the family members, we don’t have the friends who are just going to write me a check at the very beginning, I think this is really instructive.’ ”

The legislature is set to vote on the proposal by July 1.

While it was difficult to find examples of governments doing similar things, there are a number of organizations out there that are committed to funding diverse founders.

In February, several national and Chicago-based organizations banded together to support early-stage Black and Latinx tech entrepreneurs through a new program dubbed TechRise. The nonprofit P33 launched the program in partnership with Verizon and 1871, a private business incubator and technology hub, among others, with the goals “of narrowing the wealth gap in Chicago, generating thousands of tech-related jobs and giving $5 million in grant funding to Black and Latino entrepreneurs,” according to the Chicago Sun Times. (Disclosure: Verizon is TechCrunch’s parent company).

And, Detroit-based ID Ventures says it invests in minority and women-led companies “at 4x the national average.”

“By providing opportunities to underrepresented entrepreneurs, we can ensure representation, respect our state’s diversity, and create a start-up community unlike any other,” the organization’s website says.

Also in Austin, DivInc is a nonprofit pre-accelerator that holds 12-week programs for underrepresented tech founders. Founded in 2016 by former Dell executive Preston James, the organization aims to “empower people of color and women entrepreneurs and help them build successful high growth businesses by providing them with access to education, mentorship, and vital networks.”

The competition for note-taking is as fierce as it has ever been with plenty of highly-valued productivity startups fighting for an audience it can potentially serve endless productivity offshoots. In the past year, Notion raised at a $2 billion valuation, Coda raised at $636 million, and Roam raised at $200 million.

A new competitor in the space is emerging out of stealth with fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The free app, called Mem, is an early access platform dedicated to pushing users to quickly jot down their thoughts without focusing too heavily on the underlying organization of them. The startup’s founders have vast ambitions for what their platform could become down the road, tapping into further advances in machine learning and even AR.

“Really the differentiation is [information] that is summonable ubiquitously wherever you are,” Mem co-founder Kevin Moody tells TechCrunch. “So, in the near term, through your desktop app with Mem Spotlight as a heads-up display for wherever you are, in the medium term through an assistive mobile application, and then in the long term, imagine contact lenses that are overlaying useful content to you in the world.”

Moody and his co-founder Dennis Xu tell TechCrunch they’ve raised $5.6 million led by a16z with additional participation from their Cultural Leadership Fund, Will Smith’s dreamers.vc, Floodgate and Unusual Ventures. The round also was host to a handful of angel investors including Harry Stebbings, Julia Lipton, Niv Dror, Tony Liu, Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, among others.

In its current iteration, Mem push users towards “lightweight organization” rather than clicking through folders and links to find the perfect place to nestle their thoughts. Users can quickly tag users or dedicated topics in their notes. The user workflow relies pretty heavily on search and chronological organization, presenting users with their most recently accessed notes. Users can also set reminders for certain notes, bringing a popular email framework to note-taking.

For users of stock apps like Apple Notes, these interface quirks may not sound very jarring, though the design is still a departure from apps like Notion and Airtable which have heavily focused on structure over immediacy.

Mem Spotlight

Perhaps Mem’s biggest shift is how users access the information they’ve dumped into the platform. The founders say they want to avoid their app being seen as a “destination,” instead hoping users rely heavily on a keyboard-shortcut-prompted overlay called Mem Spotlight that allows them to search out information that they may need for an email, presentation or text message. The broader hope of the founders and investors behind Mem is that the team can leverage the platform’s intelligence over time to better understand the data dump from your brain — and likely other information sources across your digital footprint — to know you better than any ad network or social media graph does.

“What would it mean to just capture passively your digital footprint and then make use of that as though it were structured,” Moody posits. “If we can actually have our own Mem modeling of all of these entities, whether it’s text, or maybe it’s contacts, the people that you know, or it’s the events that you’re going to and these different sources feed into Mem, what would it mean for Mem to be able to have a product that is the ‘you’ API?”

For now, the startup’s app isn’t quite as grandiose in scale as what the founders may see in its future, but as Mem continues to onboard early users from its waitlist and add to its desktop functionality, the company is driving towards a platform they hope feels more instrumental to how its users “remember” information.

Wisk Aero, the air mobility company borne out of a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Archer Aviation alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation.

Wisk claims in the lawsuit that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The lawsuit points to the design of Archer’s first electric aircraft that was released in February, which Wisk says is a copy of one of its potential designs. That design was submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 2020, and Wisk alleges the similarities are too numerous to have been a coincidence.

Wisk further claims that during a forensic investigation it opened after Archer hired 10 former Wisk engineers, one of those hires secretly downloaded thousands of files before his departure. Another engineer also downloaded files, the suit alleges.

The information contained in the stolen files includes systems designs, test data, and aircraft designs, Wisk said in a blog posted Tuesday.

“As our Complaint explains, the design Archer disclosed above reflects its insider knowledge of Wisk’s extensive aerodynamic test and evaluation data based on years of experimentation and modeling,” the company said in the blog post. “The similarity in overall aircraft design further indicates Archer’s use of more detailed design features, including features related to aircraft propulsion, power management, avionics, flight control, and manufacturing methodology.”

Archer has snagged some major wins in 2021, including an announcement in February that it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Atlas Crest Investment Corp. for an equity valuation of $3.8 billion. Also in February, the Palo Alto, California-based startup landed a $1 billion order with United Airlines as a customer and investor.

“It’s regrettable that Wisk would engage in litigation in an attempt to deflect from the business issues that have caused several of its employees to depart,” an Archer spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. The plaintiff raised these matters over a year ago, and after looking into them thoroughly, we have no reason to believe any proprietary Wisk technology ever made its way to Archer.  We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.”

The Archer spokesperson added that the company has “placed an employee on paid administrative leave in connection with a government investigation and a search warrant issued to the employee, which we believe are focused on conduct prior to the employee joining the company. Archer and three other Archer employees with whom the individual worked also have received subpoenas relating to this investigation, and all are fully cooperating with the authorities.”

The suit was filed with the California Northern District Court under case no. 5:21-cv-02450.

GM is adding an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck to its lineup, as the automaker pushes to deliver more than 1 million electric vehicles globally by 2025.

GM President Mark Reuss said Tuesday that the Chevrolet Silverado electric full-size pickup will be based on the automaker’s Ultium battery platform and will have an estimated range of more than 400 miles on a full charge. It should be noted this is GM’s forecast not an official EPA figure.

GM is positioning the full-sized pickup for both consumer and commercial markets. Reuss said that retail and fleet versions of the Silverado electric pickup will be offered with a variety of options and configurations.

“I’m particularly excited about its potential in the fleet and commercial space, a crucial part of the EV market, especially initially,” Reuss said during a presentation at the company’s Factory ZERO assembly plant in Detroit and Hamtramck.

The electric Silverado will go head to head with Ford’s upcoming electric F-150. And while new EV entrant Rivian is not going after the commercial market, its electric RT1 pickup will also provide competition in the space. Rivian is expected to begin deliveries of its electric RT1 pickup truck this summer.

The news also follows a string of announcements over the past 18 months, including the GM’s Ultium battery platform and the launch of BrightDrop, an a new business unit to offer commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products. BrightDrop will begin with two main products: an electric van called the EV600 with an estimate range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1.

Last year, GM committed more than $27 billion to EV and AV product development, including $7 billion in 2021 and plans to launch 30 EVs globally by the end of 2025, with more than two-thirds available in North America.

Reuss said that the company will build the Silverado electric pickup truck at the company’s Factory ZERO assembly plant in Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan. He confirmed that the GMC Hummer EV SUV, which was unveiled over the weekend, will also be built at the factory. GM renamed its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant “Factory ZERO” in October 2020 and later said it would invest $2.2 billion in the factory to produce a variety of all-electric trucks and SUVs.

The facility, which is is undergoing a complete renovation and retooling and has expanded to more than 4.5 million square feet, will also produce the GMC Hummer EV pickup and the Cruise Origin, a purpose-built, all-electric and shared self-driving vehicle. Production of the GMC Hummer EV pickup will begin later this year.

Esri, the geographic information system (GIS), mapping and spatial analytics company, is hosting its (virtual) developer summit today. Unsurprisingly, it is making a couple of major announcements at the event that range from a new design system and improved JavaScript APIs to support for running ArcGIS Enterprise in containers on Kubernetes.

The Kubernetes project was a major undertaking for the company, Esri Product Managers Trevor Seaton and Philip Heede told me. Traditionally, like so many similar products, ArcGIS was architected to be installed on physical boxes, virtual machines or cloud-hosted VMs. And while it doesn’t really matter to end-users where the software runs, containerizing the application means that it is far easier for businesses to scale their systems up or down as needed.

Esri ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes deployment

“We have a lot of customers — especially some of the larger customers — that run very complex questions,” Seaton explained. “And sometimes it’s unpredictable. They might be responding to seasonal events or business events or economic events, and they need to understand not only what’s going on in the world, but also respond to their many users from outside the organization coming in and asking questions of the systems that they put in place using ArcGIS. And that unpredictable demand is one of the key benefits of Kubernetes.”

Deploying Esri ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes

The team could have chosen to go the easy route and put a wrapper around its existing tools to containerize them and call it a day, but as Seaton noted, Esri used this opportunity to re-architect its tools and break it down into microservices.

“It’s taken us a while because we took three or four big applications that together make up [ArcGIS] Enterprise,” he said. “And we broke those apart into a much larger set of microservices. That allows us to containerize specific services and add a lot of high availability and resilience to the system without adding a lot of complexity for the administrators — in fact, we’re reducing the complexity as we do that and all of that gets installed in one single deployment script.”

While Kubernetes simplifies a lot of the management experience, a lot of companies that use ArcGIS aren’t yet familiar with it. And as Seaton and Heede noted, the company isn’t forcing anyone onto this platform. It will continue to support Windows and Linux just like before. Heede also stressed that it’s still unusual — especially in this industry — to see a complex, fully integrated system like ArcGIS being delivered in the form of microservices and multiple containers that its customers then run on their own infrastructure.

Image Credits: Esri

In addition to the Kubernetes announcement, Esri also today announced new JavaScript APIs that make it easier for developers to create applications that bring together Esri’s server-side technology and the scalability of doing much of the analysis on the client-side. Back in the day, Esri would support tools like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe/Apache Flex for building rich web-based applications. “Now, we’re really focusing on a single web development technology and the toolset around that,” Esri product manager Julie Powell told me.

A bit later this month, Esri also plans to launch its new design system to make it easier and faster for developers to create clean and consistent user interfaces. This design system will launch April 22, but the company already provided a bit of a teaser today. As Powell noted, the challenge for Esri is that its design system has to help the company’s partners to put their own style and branding on top of the maps and data they get from the ArcGIS ecosystem.