Author: azeeadmin

Everli, the European marketplace for online grocery shopping that started in Italy but now also operates in Poland, Czech Republic and France, has raised a $100 million in Series C funding.

The round is led by Verlinvest, with participation from new investors Luxor, DN Capital, C4 Ventures, and Convivialité Ventures. FITEC (part of Fondo Italiano d’Investimento), 360 Capital, Innogest, and DIP also followed on.

Everli, formerly called Supermercato24, says it will use the injection of capital to accelerate growth and further expand its international footprint.

Founded in 2014, Everli lets customers order from local supermarkets for delivery. The company uses gig economy-styled personal shoppers who go into the store and ‘pick’ the products ordered and then deliver them same-day, or for an added cost within an hour. The company charges a delivery fee to consumers, but also generates revenue from fees charged to partnering merchants, and, notably, through advertising.

It has become the delivery partner of some of Europe’s largest grocery brands, offering access to over 300,000 products across the 70 cities it operates in. And, like other online grocery offerings, Everli has benefited from a boost in e-commerce and a reliance on delivery services prompted by the pandemic and country lockdowns.

“Everli is focused specifically on the grocery space,” says Federico Sargenti, CEO at Everli. “Rather than small baskets, or picking up just the basic essentials, Everli is focused on delivering whatever you need right up to your full weekly shop, with same-day delivery and a one-hour delivery window of your choice.”

He says that what further differentiates Everli is its strong relationships with retailers, and the use of their existing infrastructure. “Instead of being tethered and restricted to a radius around our own expensive central warehouses, we are able to operate across a much wider geographical footprint, entering small-to-medium density areas and offering many customers their first opportunity to receive same day groceries, [all] while retaining sustainable unit economics”.

Sargenti describes Everli as more similar to Instacart than many other European delivery firms, including the new crop of dark stores or those that offer groceries as a secondary service to takeouts. “[This is] why we’re leading the grocery space in Europe and securing brands like Lidl, Kaufland, and Carrefour,” adds Sargenti.

In 2020, Everli sales almost quadrupled to $130 million. That growth is happening more and more outside Italy, with its international expansion now responsible for over 20% of orders.

“We are proud to have played a role in helping many people during these difficult times, but we are only getting started, as this industry will never be the same again,” says Sargenti in a statement. “The shift to online delivery is not reversing, and expectations on all sides are only increasing. We have built a model which we believe offers unparalleled value to consumers, through wide access to the retailers and products they love, even in less urban areas, and to retailers, who are now able to affordably compete online and reach a whole new consumer base”.

Adds Simone Sallustio, Executive Director at Verlinvest: “Everli combines its tech & data excellence with the grocery retail experience of its partners and this combination provides it with the perfect position to cement itself as the European e-grocery market leader, delivering the best experience to consumers, value to retail partners, and digital activation to brands”.

If you develop software for a large enterprise company, chances are you’ve heard of Tricentis. If you don’t develop software for a large enterprise company, chances are you haven’t. The software testing company with a focus on modern cloud and enterprise applications was founded in Austria in 2007 and grew from a small consulting firm to a major player in this field, with customers like Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Toyota and UBS. In 2017, the company raised a $165 million Series B round led by Insight Venture Partners.

Today, Tricentis announced that it has acquired Neotys, a popular performance testing service with a focus on modern enterprise applications and a tests-as-code philosophy. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. France-based Neotys launched in 2005 and raised about €3 million before the acquisition. Today, it has about 600 customers for its NeoLoad platform. These include BNP Paribas, Dell, Lufthansa, McKesson and TechCrunch’s own corporate parent, Verizon.

As Tricentis CEO Sandeep Johri noted, testing tools were traditionally script-based, which also meant they were very fragile whenever an application changed. Early on, Tricentis introduced a low-code tool that made the automation process both easier and resilient. Now, as even traditional enterprises move to DevOps and release code at a faster speed than ever before, testing is becoming both more important and harder for these companies to implement.

“You have to have automation and you cannot have it be fragile, where it breaks, because then you spend as much time fixing the automation as you do testing the software,” Johri said. “Our core differentiator was the fact that we were a low-code, model-based automation engine. That’s what allowed us to go from $6 million in recurring revenue eight years ago to $200 million this year.”

Tricentis, he added, wants to be the testing platform of choice for large enterprises. “We want to make sure we do everything that a customer would need, from a testing perspective, end to end. Automation, test management, test data, test case design,” he said.

The acquisition of Neotys allows the company to expand this portfolio by adding load and performance testing as well. It’s one thing to do the standard kind of functional testing that Tricentis already did before launching an update, but once an application goes into production, load and performance testing becomes critical as well.

“Before you put it into production — or before you deploy it — you need to make sure that your application not only works as you expect it, you need to make sure that it can handle the workload and that it has acceptable performance,” Johri noted. “That’s where load and performance testing comes in and that’s why we acquired Neotys. We have some capability there, but that was primarily focused on the developers. But we needed something that would allow us to do end-to-end performance testing and load testing.”

The two companies already had an existing partnership and had integrated their tools before the acquisition — and many of its customers were already using both tools, too.

“We are looking forward to joining Tricentis, the industry leader in continuous testing,” said Thibaud Bussière, president and co-founder at Neotys. “Today’s Agile and DevOps teams are looking for ways to be more strategic and eliminate manual tasks and implement automated solutions to work more efficiently and effectively. As part of Tricentis, we’ll be able to eliminate laborious testing tasks to allow teams to focus on high-value analysis and performance engineering.”

NeoLoad will continue to exist as a stand-alone product, but users will likely see deeper integrations with Tricentis’ existing tools over time, include Tricentis Analytics, for example.

Johri tells me that he considers Tricentis one of the “best kept secrets in Silicon Valley” because the company not only started out in Europe (even though its headquarters is now in Silicon Valley) but also because it hasn’t raised a lot of venture rounds over the years. But that’s very much in line with Johri’s philosophy of building a company.

“A lot of Silicon Valley tends to pay attention only when you raise money,” he told me. “I actually think every time you raise money, you’re diluting yourself and everybody else. So if you can succeed without raising too much money, that’s the best thing. We feel pretty good that we have been very capital efficient and now we’re recognized as a leader in the category — which is a huge category with $30 billion spend in the category. So we’re feeling pretty good about it.”

During every economic boom, there are startup investors who appear on the scene from new corners. Some churn out; others earn the respect of the old guard over time.

Jake Paul would be happy to be in the latter camp. Then again, the 24-year-old didn’t become a YouTube star by being conventional. Little wonder that Paul is now jumping into venture capital with a venture outfit called the Anti-Fund. Newly formed with serial entrepreneur Geoffrey Woo, the endeavor is traditional in some ways but has a decidedly different point of view, say the two.

Some of the basics: Anti Fund is not a discrete pool of capital but is instead using AngelList’s Rolling Funds platform, which enables investors to raise money through a quarterly subscription from interested backers. Among its earliest backers are Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz.

Why choose a rolling fund instead of a traditional fund? For one thing, they were drawn to its Rule 506(c) structure, which enables issuers to broadly solicit and generally advertise an offering. Because Anti Fund plans to focus largely on consumer-focused brands and next-generation creator platforms in particular, “we want to be able to promote and advertise our fund,” says Woo, who most recently founded a nutrition-based food and beverage company and earlier in his career sold a company to Groupon.

Paul also wants to ensure his fans can get involved in they want. “I have followers are different reasons, and they want to be involved in what I’m doing. If they’re involved in our fund, then that’s more people rooting for us and our portfolio companies to win. We almost create this army that’s pushing all of these companies forward.”

Anti Fund plans to write checks of between $100,000 and $1 million to one to two startups every quarter. The goal, says Paul, is to be the “biggest rolling fund on AngelList” investing “around $10 million to $20 million a year.”

Anti Fund is just the newest effort to come from the world of social media influencers. As we reported earlier this month, the management company of another YouTube star, MrBeast, has dived into the world of venture capital with a $20 million fund it assembled with commitments from social media creators. Dispo, a photo-sharing app cofounded by YouTube star David Dobrik also attracted widespread attention and funding earlier this year.

“I think a lot of creators with newfound wealth — a lot of YouTubers or Instagram models — don’t necessarily know what to do with their money,” says Paul, who has already diversified into boxing, making his professional boxing debut last year. “I’m trying to lead the way.”

Neither Paul nor Woo is new to startup investing. Woo has been invested in roughy 20 startups on his own, including Paribus, an email widget that saved consumers money and that was acquired by Capital One. Paul, meanwhile, previously cofounded another small venture outfit called TGZ Capital that he says participated in the funding rounds of 15 startups.

One of these was Quip, a seven-year-old oral care company that has raised $62 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Another company backed by Paul is Triller, the social video app that briefly became the most-downloaded free app in Apple’s App Store last summer when its much bigger rival TikTok was facing an uncertain future in the U.S.

Triller has since lost enough of that momentum that talk of going public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle has yet to lead to a tie-up, six months after the company reportedly began exploring the possibility. Still, as a stakeholder, Paul is keeping it in the headlines, including by providing it with exclusive rights to stream (for $50 a pop) an upcoming boxing match with former MMA wrestler Ben Asken that Triller will air on April 17.

As luck would have it, it’s because Paul moved from L.A. to Miami to train for the fight that he met Woo, a Californian who visited Miami this past January for what was supposed to be a weekend trip and wound up staying. The two say they hit it off at a tech event and, after establishing they had mutual friends, connected over their interest in performance nutrition, with Paul investing in Woo’s newest company, HVMN. Last month, they decided to partner on Anti Fund, too.

Whether the two succeed as business partners will take time to learn. Certainly, they have a strong work ethic. Woo has started three companies since graduating from Stanford with a computer science degree. Though Paul makes what what seems an inordinate amount of money for creating YouTube videos, he has created thousands of them in order to amass his more than 20 million followers.

It’s also clear that, as with his social media career, Paul is taking boxing seriously. During his most recent fight, in November, he knocked out former NBA player Nate Robinson in the second round. His first boxing match, against fellow YouTuber AnEsonGib in January of last year, also ended in a knockout just 2 minutes and 18 seconds into the fight.

Many professional athletes see the fights as mere stunts, given Paul’s famous made-for-video antics, from a short-lived marriage, to disregarding the concerns of neighbors in West Hollywood, to being charged by police last June for criminal trespass and unlawful assembly connected with the looting of an Arizona mall.

An obvious risk is that the best deal-makers in the world will see Anti Fund as a stunt, too, or else that something that Paul says or does will ruffle feathers. As industry watchers know, investors’ excitement over Dobrik’s Dispo dissipated quickly after Business Insider first detailed various accusations of misconduct against members of the Dobrik’s online squad, including an accusation of rape against one of Dobrik’s friends that allegedly took place during a video shoot.

Paul, who dropped out of high school as a senior to pursue a career as an influencer, is well-aware of the Dobrik scandal. It’s because he has grown up online, in fact, that he’s not concerned about something from his past threatening his future.

“It’s definitely [risky to be in my position]. Your life is put on display when you choose to be a celebrity and specifically a vlogger. But because I’ve lived online, everyone’s seen everything already,” he says.

He also thinks that “VCs and people in the business world understand more and more how to work” with influencers and other celebrities who have enormous followings and are bringing them along as their careers evolve. “At the end of the day,” he says of business partners, “if someone is a good person and you have a relationship established with them, that’s what really matters.”

LIVEKINDLY Collective, the shouty parent company behind a family of plant-based food brands, has snagged cash from the global impact investing arm of $103 billion dollar investment firm TPG to close its latest round of funding at $335 million.

The company’s fundraising shows that investors still have high hopes for plant-based food brands and that despite the money that’s flowed to companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods — and the resurgence of older brands in the category like Quorn or Kelloggs’ Morningstar Farms —  there’s still a healthy appetite among investors for more brands.

LIVEKINDLY was founded by some heavy hitters from the food industry including Kees Kruythoff, the former president of Unilever North America; Roger Lienhard, the founder of Blue Horizon Corp; and Jodi Monelle, the chief executive and founder of LIVEKINDLY Media. Food industry veterans like Mick Van Ettinger, a former Unilever employee and Aldo Uva, a former Nestle employee round out the team.

Founded as a rollup for a number of different vegetarian and alternative protein food brands, the LIVEKINDLY collective is now one of the largest plant-based food companies, by funding.

The company said it would use the money to expand into the U.S. and China and to power additional acquisitions, partnerships and investments in plant-based foods.

The company raised money previously from S2G Ventures and Rabo Corporate Investments, the investment arm f the giant Dutch financial services firm, Rabobank.

Fundamentally, the founding investors behind LIVEKINDLY believe that the technology has a long way to go before it matures. And it’s likely that this latest round will be LIVEKINDLY’s last before an initial public offering of its own. 

“We are building a global pureplay in plant-based alternatives – which we believe is the future of food,” said Roger Lienhard, Founder and Executive Chairman of Blue Horizon Group and Founder of LIVEKINDLY Collective. “In just one year, we have raised a significant amount of capital, which testifies to the urgency of our mission and the enormous investment opportunity it represents. We believe the momentum behind plant-based living will continue to grow in both the private and public markets.”

As a result of its investment, Steve Ellis, Co-Managing Partner of The Rise Fund, has joined the LIVEKINDLY Collective Board of Directors, effective March 1, 2021.

“We are excited to work with LIVEKINDLY Collective and its ecosystem of innovative companies and world-class leaders to meet the growing global demand for healthy, plant-based, clean-label options,” said Ellis. “The company’s unique, mission-driven model operates across the entire value chain, from seed to fork, to drive worldwide adoption of plant-based alternatives and create a healthier planet for all.”

We’ve got the details on Boston Dynamics’ upcoming warehouse robot Stretch, Apple releases security patches and Cazoo is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for March 29, 2021.

The big story: Boston Dynamics shows off its next commercial robot

Boston Robotics continues its transformation from research organization to commercial robotics company: Stretch is the company’s commercial version of Handle, a wheeled robot that could navigate around objects and pick up a 100-pound crate. With Stretch, the wheels have become less prominent, while the team has added a “perception mast” that allows the robot to see while it moves around and picks objects in a warehouse environment.

Stretch is currently in prototype form. The company plans to build the first units this summer and actually make it available for sale next year.

The tech giants

Apple releases iPhone, iPad and Watch security patches for zero-day bug under active attack — Apple said the vulnerability, discovered by security researchers at Google’s Project Zero, may have been “actively exploited” by hackers.

IBM launches its first quantum developer certification — The “IBM Quantum Developer Certification” focuses on IBM’s own software tools.

Startups, funding and venture capital

DiDi Chuxing expands to South Africa, to take on Bolt and Uber — Founded in 2012, the Beijing-based company claims to serve over 550 million users in 16 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America and Australia.

Singular is a new Paris-based VC firm with $265M — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan want to build a leading European VC firm from Paris.

UK’s Cazoo will list on the NYSE by way of a SPAC, valuing it at $7B and raising $1.6B — The U.K. used-car sales portal has been on a major fundraising tear in the last year.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The NFT craze will be a boon for lawyers — Legal implications are the crux of the NFT trend.

Will the pandemic spur a smart rebirth for cities? — In this time of urban reset, which smart city technologies will transform how we live our lives?

CEO Manish Chandra and investor Navin Chaddha explain why Poshmark’s Series A deck sings — Beyond TAM, founders should explain how they’ll reach key metrics.

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

Everything else

Visa supports transaction settlement with USDC stablecoin — Visa has announced that transactions can be settled using USD Coin, a stablecoin powered by the Ethereum blockchain.

US cuts trade ties to Myanmar, leaving internet access uncertain — In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the trade suspension would be “effective immediately” and will remain in place “until the return of a democratically elected government.”

TC Early Stage will dive deep on how to fundraise for your startup — Take a look at the fundraising sessions going down at TC Early Stage, which takes place later this week on April 1 and 2.

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.

Earlier this year Divvy, a Utah-based software company that provides corporate spend management software, raised a $165 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. It followed its competitor Brex to unicorn-status as the market for financial services software and corporate payment solutions stayed red-hot in 2021 after a blockbuster 2020.

Now Ramp, a competitor to both Divvy and Brex, is looking to raise new capital from Stripe and D1 Capital Partners at a valuation that could top $1 billion. The Information first reported the news, which TechCrunch confirmed with a source familiar with the transactions.

Ramp also competes with startups like Airbase and Teampay, each providing software designed to help companies allow, administer and track corporate cash outflows. The startup category is perhaps best known for its concept of providing company cards to startups and other SMBs, though its market has since matured into financial software designed to provide a central node for internal expense controls.

The pace of investment into startup cohorts has been aggressive. Brex raised $150 million after the pandemic set in, while Ramp raised several times last year before adding a debt facility earlier this year to its financial backstop. Airbase also raised last year, sharing growth metrics as 2020 came to a close. Teampay added $5 million to its 2019-era Series A last year as well.

And in a sign that the model of fintech startups building corporate spend software could prove popular in other markets, a Latin American-focused startup in the space called Clara raised $3.5 million earlier this month.

Swiss automation and technology company ABB has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a cloud-based EV fleet management platform that it hopes will hasten the electrification of fleets. The platform, which the company says will help operators maintain business continuity as they switch to electric, will roll out in the second half of 2021.

This announcement comes after a wave of major delivery companies pledged to electrify their fleets. Amazon already has a number of Rivian-sourced electric delivery vans on the streets of California and plans to have 10,000 more operational by this year; UPS ordered 10,000 electric vans from Arrival for its fleet; 20% of DHL’s fleet is already electric; and FedEx plans to electrify its entire fleet by 2040. A 2020 McKinsey report predicted commercial and passenger fleets in the U.S. could include as many as eight million EVs by 2030, compared with fewer than 5,000 in 2018. That’s about 10 to 15% of all fleet vehicles.

“We want to make EV adoption easier and more scalable for fleets,” Frank Muehlon, president of ABB’s e-mobility division, told TechCrunch. “To power progress, the industry must bring together the best minds and adopt an entrepreneurial approach to product development.” 

ABB brings experience in e-mobility solutions, energy management and charging technology to the table, which will combine with AWS’s cloud and software to make a single-view platform that can be tailored to whichever company is using it. Companies will be able to monitor things like charge planning, EV maintenance status, and route optimization based on the time of day, weather and use patterns. Muehlon said they’ll work with customers to explore ways to use existing data from fleets for faster implementation.

The platform will be hosted on the AWS cloud, which means that it can scale anywhere AWS is available, which so far includes in 25 regions globally.

The platform will be hardware-agnostic, meaning any type of EV or charger can work with it. Integration of software into specific EV fleets will depend on the fleet’s level of access to third-party asset management systems and onboard EV telematics, but the platform will support a layered feature approach, wherein each layer provides more accurate vehicle data. Muehlon says this makes for a more seamless interface than existing third-party charging management software, which don’t have the technology or the flexibility to work with the total breadth of EV models and charging infrastructure. 

“Not only do fleet managers have to contend with the speed of development in charging technology, but they also need real-time vehicle and charging status information, access to charging infrastructures and information for hands-on maintenance,” said Muehlon. “This new real-time EV fleet management solution will set new standards in the world of electric mobility for global fleet operators and help them realize improved operations.”

This software is aimed at depot and commercial fleets, as well as public infrastructure fleets. Muehlon declined to specify any specific EV operators or customers lined up to use this new technology, but he did say there are “several pilots underway” which will “enable us to ensure that we are developing market-ready solutions for all kinds of fleets.” 

Swiss automation and technology company ABB has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a cloud-based EV fleet management platform that it hopes will hasten the electrification of fleets. The platform, which the company says will help operators maintain business continuity as they switch to electric, will roll out in the second half of 2021.

This announcement comes after a wave of major delivery companies pledged to electrify their fleets. Amazon already has a number of Rivian-sourced electric delivery vans on the streets of California and plans to have 10,000 more operational by this year; UPS ordered 10,000 electric vans from Arrival for its fleet; 20% of DHL’s fleet is already electric; and FedEx plans to electrify its entire fleet by 2040. A 2020 McKinsey report predicted commercial and passenger fleets in the U.S. could include as many as eight million EVs by 2030, compared with fewer than 5,000 in 2018. That’s about 10 to 15% of all fleet vehicles.

“We want to make EV adoption easier and more scalable for fleets,” Frank Muehlon, president of ABB’s e-mobility division, told TechCrunch. “To power progress, the industry must bring together the best minds and adopt an entrepreneurial approach to product development.” 

ABB brings experience in e-mobility solutions, energy management and charging technology to the table, which will combine with AWS’s cloud and software to make a single-view platform that can be tailored to whichever company is using it. Companies will be able to monitor things like charge planning, EV maintenance status, and route optimization based on the time of day, weather and use patterns. Muehlon said they’ll work with customers to explore ways to use existing data from fleets for faster implementation.

The platform will be hosted on the AWS cloud, which means that it can scale anywhere AWS is available, which so far includes in 25 regions globally.

The platform will be hardware-agnostic, meaning any type of EV or charger can work with it. Integration of software into specific EV fleets will depend on the fleet’s level of access to third-party asset management systems and onboard EV telematics, but the platform will support a layered feature approach, wherein each layer provides more accurate vehicle data. Muehlon says this makes for a more seamless interface than existing third-party charging management software, which don’t have the technology or the flexibility to work with the total breadth of EV models and charging infrastructure. 

“Not only do fleet managers have to contend with the speed of development in charging technology, but they also need real-time vehicle and charging status information, access to charging infrastructures and information for hands-on maintenance,” said Muehlon. “This new real-time EV fleet management solution will set new standards in the world of electric mobility for global fleet operators and help them realize improved operations.”

This software is aimed at depot and commercial fleets, as well as public infrastructure fleets. Muehlon declined to specify any specific EV operators or customers lined up to use this new technology, but he did say there are “several pilots underway” which will “enable us to ensure that we are developing market-ready solutions for all kinds of fleets.” 

Oh hello. What’s this then? A Niantic-branded AR headset? Perhaps? John Hanke, CEO of the Pokemon Go developer teased what could be a first-party head-mounted wearable, as the company makes a more aggressive push into augmented reality.

“Exciting to see the progress we’re making to enable new kinds of devices that leverage our platform,” the executive noted in the text accompanying an image of eyeglasses temples sporting the Niantic name in bright orange.

Niantic has been a fairly active investor in the Augmented reality hardware space, so there is also the possibility that they’ve done a branding partnership with a startup on a project, but this cryptic image crop is certainly making it look like they’re showcasing a device with first-party branding. There’s also the potential that this is a product in the “smart glasses” category that doesn’t include a display but focuses on building audio or camera functionality into a pair of glasses. Niantic has previously announced that they’ve been working with Qualcomm to help define their reference design for their XR hardware platform.

We’ve reached out to Niantic for additional comment.

Notably, the Twitter teaser also follows Niantic’s posting of a job listing for a Head of AR OS Engineering.

“We are on an ambitious mission to turn the world into an Augmented Reality canvas which games and other applications can paint on top of,” the listing states. “This future is fully realized on AR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). Niantic’s Engineering Team is seeking an inspirational leader to oversee the engineering direction to help build an AR operating system for HMDs and enable applications for millions of Niantic players.”

The image arrives amid a recent flurry of activity for the one-time Google spin out. Last week the company announced an AR title based on Pikmin, another Nintendo collaboration following its wildly successful Pokemon title. Earlier this month, it showed off a proof-of-concept version of Pokemon Go running on Microsoft’s HoloLens 2.

Niantic’s AR platform has stayed under wraps for the most part as the company seems to wait for a more active moment in augmented reality development to make a major push. Part of that activity may ultimately be defined by a broader AR hardware ecosystem, and as Apple and Facebook compete to release their own devices, I would imagine that there is some concern among players like Niantic that those early devices will focus on first-party software initially and leave fewer platform opportunities for third-parties.

Oh hello. What’s this then? A Niantic-branded AR headset? Perhaps? John Hanke, CEO of the Pokemon Go developer teased what could be a first-party head-mounted wearable, as the company makes a more aggressive push into augmented reality.

“Exciting to see the progress we’re making to enable new kinds of devices that leverage our platform,” the executive noted in the text accompanying an image of eyeglasses temples sporting the Niantic name in bright orange.

Niantic has been a fairly active investor in the Augmented reality hardware space, so there is also the possibility that they’ve done a branding partnership with a startup on a project, but this cryptic image crop is certainly making it look like they’re showcasing a device with first-party branding. There’s also the potential that this is a product in the “smart glasses” category that doesn’t include a display but focuses on building audio or camera functionality into a pair of glasses. Niantic has previously announced that they’ve been working with Qualcomm to help define their reference design for their XR hardware platform.

We’ve reached out to Niantic for additional comment.

Notably, the Twitter teaser also follows Niantic’s posting of a job listing for a Head of AR OS Engineering.

“We are on an ambitious mission to turn the world into an Augmented Reality canvas which games and other applications can paint on top of,” the listing states. “This future is fully realized on AR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). Niantic’s Engineering Team is seeking an inspirational leader to oversee the engineering direction to help build an AR operating system for HMDs and enable applications for millions of Niantic players.”

The image arrives amid a recent flurry of activity for the one-time Google spin out. Last week the company announced an AR title based on Pikmin, another Nintendo collaboration following its wildly successful Pokemon title. Earlier this month, it showed off a proof-of-concept version of Pokemon Go running on Microsoft’s HoloLens 2.

Niantic’s AR platform has stayed under wraps for the most part as the company seems to wait for a more active moment in augmented reality development to make a major push. Part of that activity may ultimately be defined by a broader AR hardware ecosystem, and as Apple and Facebook compete to release their own devices, I would imagine that there is some concern among players like Niantic that those early devices will focus on first-party software initially and leave fewer platform opportunities for third-parties.