Author: azeeadmin

After Spark Capital announced it would ‘sever all ties’ with Dispo following allegations around co-creator and famous YouTuber David Dobrik, two of the app’s earliest investors have similarly backed away from the company. Seven Seven Six and Unshackled followed suit this morning, releasing subsequent statements that they plan to donate any profits from investments to organizations working with survivors of sexual assault.

Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, released a statement on Monday morning saying that the allegations against Dobrik are “extremely troubling” and are “directly at odds” with the firm’s core values.

“We have made the decision to donate any profits from our investment in Dispo to an organization working with survivors of sexual assault. We have believed in Dispo’s mission since the beginning and will continue to support the hardworking team bringing it to life,” according to the firm’s statement. Ohanian has retweeted the statement from his personal account but has offered no separate statement.

Unshackled Ventures similarly tells TechCrunch that the firm will donate any profits from the investment in Dispo to organizations focused on survivors of sexual assault.

The firm pointed to Maitri, an organization that supports women survivors, as one place it plans to donate to.

“We are a female majority team that does not take this lightly. We are in full support of their decision to part ways with David,” per the statement. It is unclear how Spark Capital, which similarly is in the process of making sure it doesn’t profit from Dispo, will be handling its financial stake as well. Spark was unable to be reached for clarification.

The company was last valued at $200 million with Spark Capital-led $20 million Series A financing just weeks ago. Dispo released a statement last night stating that Dobrik has stepped down from the board of Dispo and leave the company. It is unclear if Dobrik still has a financial stake in the company through ownership and if he plans to divest.

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, announced Monday that it has raised $150 million in Series D funding.

Coatue Management led the round, which brings San Francisco-based Side’s valuation to $1 billion and total funding raised to over $200 million since its 2017 inception. Existing backers Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures and Sapphire Ventures also participated in the new financing.

The round is notable in that the amount raised is significantly higher than the $35 million Side raised in a Series C round in November 2019. Valuation too increased nearly 7x compared to the $150 million valuation at the time of its Series C. Sapphire Ventures led that investment and managing director Paul Levine, who was previously president and COO of Trulia (through its IPO and multibillion-dollar acquisition by Zillow), joined the company’s board of directors at that time.

The startup pulled in between $30 million and $50 million in revenue in 2020, and expects to double revenue this year. In 2019, Side represented over $5 billion in annual home sales across all of its partners. Today, the company’s community of agent partners represents over $15 billion in annual production volume.

Side was founded by Guy Gal, Edward Wu and Hilary Saunders on the premise that most real estate agents are “underserved and underappreciated” by traditional brokerage models.

CEO Gal said existing brokerages are designed to support “average” agents and as such, the top-producing agents end up having to do “all of the heavy lifting.”

Side’s white label model works with agents and teams by exclusively marketing their boutique brand, while also providing the required technology and support needed on the back end. The goal is to help partner agents “predictably grow” their businesses and improve their productivity.

“The way to think about Side is the way you think about what Shopify does for e-commerce…When partnering with Side, top-producing agents, teams and independent brokerages, for the first time in history, gain full ownership of their own brand and business without having to operate a brokerage,” Gal said. “When you spend years solving the problems of this very specific community of agents, you are able to use software to drive enormous efficiency for them in a way that has never been done before.”

Existing brokerages, he argues, actively discourage agents from becoming top producers and teams, because agents who serve fewer clients can be forced into paying much higher commission fees on every transaction, which means the incentives between brokerages and top agents and teams are misaligned.

“Top producers want to grow and differentiate, and brokerages want them to do less business at higher fees and be one more of the same under the same brand,” Gal said. “Side, rather than discouraging and competing with top producing agents and teams, enables them to grow and scale their own business and brand.”

Today, Side supports more than 1,500 partner agents across California, Texas and Florida.

The startup plans to spend its new capital on “significant hiring” and toward an expansion outside of California, Texas and Florida — the three markets in which it currently operates. It also plans to boost its 300-plus headcount by another 200 employees. 

Israel’s ironSource, an app-monetization startup, is going public via a SPAC.

But before you tune out to avoid reading about yet another blank-check company taking a private company public, you’ll want to pay attention to this one.

For starters, this is the second SPAC-led debut from an Israeli company in recent weeks worth more than $10 billion. And secondly, ironSource is actually a pretty darn interesting company from a financial perspective.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The company follows eToro in announcing its combination with a public entity designed to help startups get over the private-public divide. And valued at just over $11 billion by the deal, it will best eToro’s valuation by several hundred million. Combined, both companies will bring more than $20 billion in liquidity to their founders, backers, ecosystems, employees and SPAC teams associated with their impending debuts.

This morning, let’s rewind through TechCrunch’s ironSource coverage during its life as a private company and then examine its financial results. At the end, we’ll ask ourselves whether its new valuation makes any damn sense.

It’s Monday, and that means it’s time to strap in and get to work. Let’s get to it!

ironSource’s past, performance and future

TechCrunch has covered ironSource for years, including a piece on its 2014-era $85 million investment. At the time, we noted that the company “support[s] about 5 million installs per day and [has] more than 50,000 applications using [its] SDK.”

In 2019, ironSource raised more than $400 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion, though details were fuzzy at the time. TechCrunch wrote about the company last month when it announced its second acquisition of the year; ironSource bought Soomla —  app monetization tracking — and Luna Labs — video ad tooling — toward the end of its path to a public debut.

PitchBook data indicates that the company was worth an estimated $1.56 billion when it closed its 2019-era round. That ironSource intends to go public with a valuation of $11.1 billion means that it is shooting for a commanding increase in value in just a few short years.

Is the company worth the new number? Let’s find out, starting with a look at its revenue growth over time:

First, observe the company’s historical performance in 2020 compared to 2019; posting 83% revenue growth from a nine-figure base is impressive. ironSource only expects to grow a hair over 37% in 2021, however, though it doesn’t anticipate further revenue growth deceleration in percentage terms the following year.

The chart on the right is useful as well. Note how the company’s 2019 saw strong growth from its Q1 to its Q4. But also note its flat summer, in which sequential growth came to a near-halt. Comparing that lackluster middle period with the rapid growth ironSource posted in every quarter of 2020 is stark. Sure, the pandemic boosted screen time for all of us, but my gosh, did ironSource have a great year on the back of the pandemic.

Ahead of another big tech vs Congress ‘grab your popcorn’ grilling session, scheduled for March 25 — when US lawmakers will once again question the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter on the unlovely topic of misinformation — a coalition of organizations across the privacy, antitrust, consumer protection and civil rights spaces has called for a ban on “surveillance advertising”, further amplifying the argument that “big tech’s toxic business model is undermining democracy”.

The close to 40-strong coalition behind this latest call to ban ‘creepy ads’ which rely on the mass tracking and profiling of web users in order to target them with behavioral ads includes the American Economic Liberties Project, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Center for Humane Technology, Epic.org, Fair Vote, Media Matters for America, the Tech Transparency Project and The Real Facebook Oversight Board, to name a few.

“As leaders across a broad range of issues and industries, we are united in our concern for the safety of our communities and the health of democracy,” they write in the open letter. “Social media giants are eroding our consensus reality and threatening public safety in service of a toxic, extractive business model. That’s why we’re joining forces in an effort to ban surveillance advertising.”

The coalition is keen to point out that less toxic non-tracking alternatives (like contextual ads) exist, while arguing that greater transparency and oversight of adtech infrastructure could help clean up a range of linked problems, from junk content and rising conspiracism to ad fraud and denuded digital innovation.

“There is no silver bullet to remedy this crisis – and the members of this coalition will continue to pursue a range of different policy approaches, from comprehensive privacy legislation to reforming our antitrust laws and liability standards,” they write. “But here’s one thing we all agree on: It’s time to ban surveillance advertising.”

We’re just days away from kicking off TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising on April 1-2. Join us for two program-packed days dedicated to founders in the earliest stages of startup life (pre-seed through Series A). The event agenda features interactive presentations that cover a range of essential topics like fundraising, operations, growth, product-market fit, product management and more.

No pass? No problem. Click here and buy your pass today.

Everyone’s busy. We get it. But this virtual conference (VOD means you won’t miss a session) gives you schedule flexibility to take a condensed dive with experts wearing their been-there-done-that-kicked-butt t-shirts. No need to reinvent the wheel. Learn from the best.

Here — for your edification — are just five of the many reasons you should attend TC Early Stage on April 1-2.

1. Bootcamp your way to success

Building a successful startup involves a learning curve like no other. Mastering the many the core skills required to build strong and build smart takes dedication and perseverance.

Early Stage 2021 is an intensive, one-stop entrepreneurial shop where you learn from seasoned experts, founders and investors. You’ll learn from subject-matter experts, across the startup ecosystem, ready to help you avoid costly missteps.

Attendees say: “Early Stage 2020 provided a rich, bootcamp experience with premier founders, VCs and startup community experts. If you’re beginning to build a startup, it’s an efficient way to advance your knowledge across key startup topics.” — Katia Paramonova, founder and CEO of Centrly.

2. Build community and expand your network

Ever feel like you’re going it alone? At Early Stage 2021, you’ll tap into a global community of folks just like you — startup founders in the early, and often confusing, innings. Connect and join forces, share pain points, discover opportunities and celebrate successes. The virtual platform’s chat feature rocks for ad hoc meetups and CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, helps you find and schedule meetings with the people who can move your dream closer to reality.

Attendees say: “TechCrunch does this thing — and they did it amazingly well in a virtual event — of connecting total strangers to create a genuinely supportive community. — Jessica McLean, Director of Marketing and Communications, Infinite-Compute.

3. Special Breakout Sessions

Don’t miss our partner series of interactive breakouts and get answers to your burning questions. You’ll receive expert advice on topics ranging from the benefits of adopting OKRs and protecting your company’s intellectual property to achieving operational excellence from day one, everything you ever needed to know about mergers and acquisitions and accelerating the dev process through fast feedback.

4. Do you science?

Does using biology as technology to tackle the daunting challenges of human and planetary health give you a huge case of business goosebumps? Don’t miss Scientist Entrepreneurs — Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies. This special presentation, brought to you by Mayfield, looks at scaling startups and touches on three areas that influence trajectory: fundraising, hiring and product design.

5. The TC Early Stage Pitch-Off

Day two features a thrilling pitch off. Tune in to watch as 10 global early-stage companies — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — pitch to our panel of top VCs. All 10 competitors receive invaluable exposure, and the ultimate victor wins a feature story on TechCrunch.com, an annual Extra Crunch subscription and admission to TC Disrupt this September. Pro tip: Take notes — watching a pitch off is a great way to improve your own presentation skills.

So much to learn and so many reasons to go. Buy your pass and join your community at TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising on April 1-2.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Operations & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Amazon’s Prime Wardrobe has been a key way for the e-commerce giant to expand its reach selling clothing and other apparel: giving shoppers an easy way to try on several items, return what they don’t want, and pay for what they keep has helped it cross the virtual chasm by bringing the online experience a little closer to what it’s like to shop for fashion in physical stores. Now, a startup that’s built “Prime Wardrobe as a service” to help smaller competitors offer its shoppers the same experience is announcing some funding to expand its business.

TryNow — which provides technology to online retailers that use Shopify Plus to let their customers receive and try out apparel, return what they don’t want and pay only for what they keep — has raised $12 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its business.

The startup, based out of San Francisco, already works with around 50 up-and-coming online retailers doing between $10 million and $100 million in revenues, with Universal Standard, Roolee, Western Rise, and Solid & Striped among its customers. Founder and CEO Benjamin Davis said in an interview that it has seen business grow six-fold in the last year as more shopping has shifted online from brick-and-mortar due to the pandemic. TryNow claims that using its service can help brands grow average order value by 63%, conversion rates by 22% and return on ad spend by 76%.

Fashion has been a primary focus for “try before you buy” services online, but the the model is not limited to it.

“Apparel is a core category for us,” said Davis, but he also said he believes that the model can be applied to improve the unit economics of selling online to other categories, like cookware. “Prime Wardrobe has solidified the power of that model for fashion, but we believe it’s much larger. We think that any purchase that is discretionary should be tried before it is bought.”

The funding, a Series A, is coming from a very notable list of backers that speaks to the opportunity in this space. Investors in the round include Shine Capital, Craft Ventures, SciFi VC (the venture firm co-founded by Max Levchin, founder and CEO of buy-now-pay-later firm Affirm), Third Kind, and Plaid co-founders Zachary Perret and William Hockey.

As-a-service, at your service

TryNow sits as part of a bigger wave of commerce and finance services that have emerged over the years to provide technology to entrepreneurs where the commerce technology they are using is not the core of the business they are building.

The thinking goes: building payments or related features is complex and not something that a company not focused on payments would build itself (much like most businesses would not build their own accounting software, or the computers that they use). And as the biggest competitors — eg, Amazon — continue to grow and build their own technology in-house to keep their competitive edge, a demand for more tech-enabled tools only grows and becomes more sophisticated with the competitive threat. These in turn get delivered as a service, since smaller competitors will lack the funds and human capital to build these themselves.

Davis said that TryNow chose to work solely with Shopify (and specifically Shopify Plus, the version of the service with more features, designed for retailers with more than $1 million in revenues) and its platform for letting retailers build and operate e-commerce storefronts, because of how it has become such an integral player in that ecosystem.

He said that there has been demand from retailers using other platforms such as Big Commerce and Adobe’s Magento — as well as the platforms themselves. And it will look to expand to these over time, but for now, “we think Shopify is the most powerful, and growing the fastest, with the biggest opportunity at checkout,” said Davis. “It’s a multibillion opportunity.”

TryNow has whittled down its core functionality in the e-commerce space to a very specific role.

It doesn’t handle checkout — that’s Shopify; nor transactions — that’s payment companies, or indeed by-now-pay-later companies (like TryNow, another kind of tech helping people defray the payment part of procurement); nor returns — it integrates with Happy Returns, Loop Returns and Returnly; nor email-based communications and marketing with customers — that’s Klaviyo.

What TryNow provides are analytics to manage the risk around any deal, and technology to integrate and manage the payments and returns experience, so that procuring doesn’t trigger a payment, returning triggers a payment for what is kept, and I suppose not returning triggers a different kind of payment (plus flagging the customer for future try-now-pay-later attempts).

Within the wider space of e-commerce, apparel has had a particularly tricky ride among those trying to bring the experience into the online world.

It’s no surprise when you think about it: shopping for apparel is an inherently physical activity, involving trying things on, browsing around big stores with wide selections, and only paying for what you actually take away with you.

That has given rise to a lot of different startups, leaning on new innovations in computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence, better cameras on phones, new manufacturing techniques and more to try to sew up the gap between what you do online and how you would shop in the brick-and-mortar world.

(And these startups are seeing their own opportunities and demand in the market: just last week, Snap Inc acquired Fit Analytics, one of the tech companies building better tools to improve how online shoppers can estimate what size they might need to buy of an item: the social media company’s interest is to use the technology to expand how it works with its advertisers and to build out a bigger shopping experience on Snapchat and beyond.)

Before try-now-pay-later, the basic idea of selling fashion online has been to assume it’s okay to skip all the physical aspects of buying apparel before paying.

“Give me a credit card, and I’ll charge you for what you are getting, and if you don’t like it, you can get a refund? We would never operate a brick-and-mortar store that way, charging people before going into fitting rooms,” said Davis. “It’s unnatural and restricts growth.” And high-ticket items can be even harder to sell in that environment, he added.

While companies like Le Tote, Stitch Fix, and Wantable have built out fashion businesses on the premise of try first, and then pay only for what you keep, there are fewer companies out there that have distilled this idea into a standalone, B2B service. (And indeed, the try-before-you-buy service can be a tricky one to manage as a viable business, with Le Tote, now in Chapter 11, and now-defund Lumoid pointing to some of the challenges.)

“Ben and the TryNow team are taking what they’ve learned from Affirm and Stitch Fix and launching the ultimate checkout option: try now, buy later. This translates into more order volume and more profit. We all want to try before we buy: it’s only a matter of time before TryNow’s checkout solution becomes the standard,” said Brian Murray, managing director at Craft Ventures, in a statement.

Still, there are others that compete more directly. BlackCart out of Canada, which raised funding earlier this year, also provides try-now-pay-later as a service for apparel and other goods, and it integrates with other storefront platforms beyond Shopify. (It seems to take a different approach to offsetting the risk for retailers, essentially making up-front payments for goods itself and then reconciling directly with the retails around returns.) And it seems like a no brainer that Amazon might try to offer Wardrobe as a service to more retailers, as it does with so many of its other features.

Along with the funding, TryNow is also announcing a couple of new executive appointments that speak to where it sees itself competing and sitting longer term. Jessica Baier, formerly of Stitch Fix, is now VP of growth strategy; and Jonathan Kayne, a former head of product partnerships for Affirm, is now TryNow’s VP of platform.

The investors in this round are a pretty interesting set of backers that also point to possible directions for the company.

Shine is a relatively new firm co-founded by Mo Koyfman and Josh Mohrer to focus on early stage investments, with Koyfman previously backing a lot of interesting e-commerce companies at Spark; Craft is another early stage firm co-founded by David Sacks and Bill Lee; SciFi VC is Max and Nellie Levchin’s venture fund (and Max has a long and impressive track record in e-commerce, most recently as the founder and CEO of another startup in the flexible payment space, buy-now-pay-later business Affirm).

Third Kind, meanwhile, has been a prolific backer of e-commerce tech as part of its bigger investment thesis. And while Plaid’s founders are investing here as financial backers, it’s notable that they are both providing financial features as a service to third party businesses: diversification for Plaid might one day come in the form of providing tools for specific verticals, which would likely take them into the realm of more flexible payment and procurement options.

“At Shine, we are attracted to businesses with simple yet powerful insights that can ultimately lead to massively scalable new platforms,” said Koyfman in a statement. “TryNow’s understanding that a lack of tactility restricts e-commerce growth has opened the opportunity to create and scale the Try Now Buy Later category. It is rare to find such a strong team attacking such a simple but big idea. We are delighted to partner with Benjamin and the entire TryNow team as they scale their elegant platform and help e-commerce brands close the conversion gap with brick and mortar retail.”

Nigerian startup Xend Finance uses decentralized finance (DeFi) to address currency devaluation. DeFi aims to bridge the gap between decentralized blockchains and financial services. Aronu Ugochukwu and Abafor Chima founded the startup in 2019, and Ugochukwu is quite familiar with currency devaluation. 

Currency devaluation is a common economic nightmare faced in most African countries and other developing countries worldwide. It has become imperative for organisations like credit unions to hedge their collective funds against their local currency’s devaluation.

“We’ve experienced three massive currency devaluations in the last three years in Nigeria, and this is similar to different economies in the world with unstable economies,” Ugochukwu said to TechCrunch. “My mother and I belong to different cooperatives where we save and make monthly contributions to help one another in the cooperative. Realizing that despite saving regularly, we were losing more value for our money. This gave birth to Xend Finance.”

Today, the company announced its mainnet launch, opening up the ability for credit unions to access DeFi for their members by using decentralized stablecoins such as DAI and BUSD.

Not only is Xend Finance trying to protect credit unions from fluctuation, but it is also changing how they operate. In these unions, groups of individuals contribute to informal savings for their different mutual benefits.

However, they are often limited by three factors. One is in its size — only a small knit of people in a particular locale can access the service. The second is lack of insurance which means people don’t have the confidence to join saving cycles. The third has to do with how credit union members default in payments, affecting how much is paid down the line.

Image Credits: Xend Finance

Xend Finance is plugging these gaps using blockchain technology. The platform allows credit unions to have over 1,000 members who don’t stay in the same geographical location. It also employs smart contracts to lock each member’s contribution and enable flexible payouts when a payment cycle is due, which reduces default payment rates. The company also says it offers decentralized insurance to protect members against any form of asset loss that results from contract failures. However, this isn’t a traditional insurance contract from an insurance company. 

Besides, the company says credit union members can earn interests in their savings by exchanging their crypto or fiat currency for stable cryptocurrencies and locking crypto assets on lending platforms. According to the company, there’s a possible 15% available annual percentage yield on the platform.

The company claims to be the world’s first decentralized finance (DeFi) credit union platform and the first DeFi company to launch out of Africa. Its technology is built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a blockchain for developing high-performance decentralized applications.

In 2019, the startup based in Enugu, Nigeria, took part in the Google Launchpad Africa accelerator and the Binance Incubation Programme. It has since secured $2.2 million from Binance, Google Launchpad, NGC Ventures, Hashkey, and AU21 Capital, amongst others.

From December 2020 to January 2021, Xend Finance executed a testnet with over 1,500 participants in 75 countries. This helped them find product-market fit, and last week, the company did a beta launch of its mainnet where it received over $500,000 in deposits. They also signed a credit union partnership with a software service provider, TechFusion Africa and its 5,000 members. 

Image Credits: Xend Finance

The company intends to onboard a lot of customers now and focus on revenue later, Ugochukwu says. And when it does, the play will be to charge a commission (not more than 5%) on the return on investment when members of cooperatives or regular individuals save or perform contributions on the platform.

Having run some tests and passed several iterations, Xend Finance is fully going public today, and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of Binance, expects the platform to show what can be built on BSC.

“Africa is one of the most important continents, representing the future and emergence of DeFi and blockchain capabilities,” said Zhao. “We are very excited about the mainnet launch of Xend Finance, with a team we backed early on that has a strong foothold in Africa and have been strong advocates for what Binance Smart Chain can accomplish. With their platform, they can bring stable currency and DeFi investment opportunities to those who normally wouldn’t have them.”

Along with the mainnet launch, Xend Finance will introduce the $XEND token through a Token Generation Event (TGE) on Balancer. The company says the token will reward users for performing different operations in “the protocol, as well as allows a decentralized governance of the Xend Finance ecosystem.”

For Ugochukwu, Xend Finance presents people with the opportunity to channel their savings into stablecoins without worry that their money will devalue overnight and earn higher interest rates through DeFi. “We are very excited that blockchain will have a positive impact on the people of Africa,” he said. 

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

Hi friends and new readers, welcome to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. Before I forget, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the newsletter, if you’re interested in attending our upcoming early-stage conference. I have a gift for you.

Um, there is a #$@% ton of mobility news to get to, including a few scoops, some investment news, and a new “market map” that takes a deep look into the business of Mobility-as-a-service apps. Buckle up.

First up, here’s the market maps story (I just mentioned) from writer Jason Plautz. The upshot: As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships. Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility. Third-party platforms have become more appealing to transit agencies as they scramble to keep buses, trains and rail full of customers.

And yep, this is an Extra Crunch story, which requires a subscription. As I’ve shared in here before, we’re bringing more transportation analysis to Extra Crunch. Last month, we had Mark Harris’ market analysis on solid state batteries. Next week, Extra Crunch will feature stories on the state of holographic tech in vehicles, the second-life battery marketplace and software plays in the micromobility industry.

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

Micromobbin’

Bird peeped up this week (they’ve been sorta quiet lately) and announced it is investing $150 million into a European expansion plan that will include launching in more than 50 cities this year, a move that it says will double its footprint in the region.

According to Bird, this growth plan is already underway, with the shared micromobility company recently bringing its scooters to Bergen, Norway; Tarragona, Spain; and Palermo, Italy.

Bird emphasized that its European expansion will be more than just a geographic one. The company said it is adding more scooters to its existing fleets and made several other promises as part of its announcement, including plans to launch new mobility products and safety initiatives, “the next generation of recycling and second-life applications for vehicles,” investing in equity programs and “securing partnerships across the region.”

I might have raised an eyebrow or two when I first read this announcement. Why? Welp, for one it isn’t clear what these new mobility products or initiatives around safety or recycling will be. A Bird spokesperson told me these will be new vehicles and “transport modes” in the region. Bird didn’t provide details about what it means by “securing partnerships,” a phrase that could mean an extension of its franchise program called the Bird Platform or some other kind of arrangement with local governments or operators.

And then there’s the bit about that $150 million. A Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch it’s using “existing resources” to fund these various initiatives. However, the pandemic, its acquisition of Circ and its effort to launch operations in new cities while maintaining existing fleets have depleted its funds. (Last June, Bird shut down scooter sharing in several cities in the Middle East, an operation that was managed by Circ.) The company’s last public fundraising announcements were more than a year ago. The company raised $275 million in a Series D round back in September 2019. That round was later extended to $350 million.

Now, this could be the $100 million in convertible debt that Bird reportedly was close to finalizing (per The Information’s reporting back in January). But something tells me there is more to this. Stay tuned.

A few other interesting micromobbin’ nugs for you … 

Lime and Lyft appear to have secured a license that will allow the companies to exclusively operate scooter and bike share services in Denver. The city’s Department of Transportation & Infrastructure said it is moving two licensing agreements through the Denver City Council approval process. On March 23, he DOTI will present the licensing agreements to Denver City Council’s Land Use, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee  for approval before heading to full council for consideration.

The “license” term is important here and marks a shift in how Denver is thinking about dockless shared scooters and bikes. A license would replace how dockless electric scooter and bike companies currently operate in Denver, which is through a permit. If the licenses are approved by Council, Lyft and Lime would be the only two companies operating vehicles in Denver under the new bike and scooter share program. The license would be valid for 5 years.

Superpedestrian, the startup that makes e-scooters equipped with self-diagnostic software, is upgrading its product as it prepares for a major expansion into 10 new cities within the next two weeks, TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan reported. Superpedestrian might not be a household name, but it is an up-and-coming player in the micromobility world. The company has developed AI — which is integrated into the vehicle — that monitors and corrects scooter safety issues in real time.

The next-generation operating system that will provide those upgrades, codenamed “Briggs,” will be uploaded to its global fleet of LINK e-scooters. It includes improvements to geofencing capabilities and battery life, making Superpedestrian more attractive to cities looking for partners who can provide assurances around safety and reliability.

SMART, a startup founded in 2020, revealed its first product: An airless bicycle tire based on technology NASA engineers created to make future lunar and Martian rovers even more resilient. This nifty tech that shows how NASA investments towards space exploration can end up improving life on Earth. SMART has a partnership with NASA through the Space Act Agreement and is part of the agency’s formal Startup Program that aims to commercialize some of its innovations.

Image Credits: SMART Tire Company

The company’s “METL tire” came out of its work with NASA’s Glenn Research Center, where NASA engineers Dr. Santo Padula and Colin Creager first developed their so-called “shape memory alloy” (SMA) technology. SMA allows for a tire constructed entirely of interconnected springs, which requires no inflation and is therefore immune to punctures, but which can still provide equivalent or better traction when compared to inflatable rubber tires, and even some built-in shock-absorbing capabilities, TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington reports.

SMART’s  co-founders, Survivor: Fiji” champion Earl Cole and engineer Brian Yennie, are targeting the cycling market first with their METL tire, which is set to become available to the general public by early next year. SMART intends to bring SMA tires to the automotive and commercial vehicle industries.

Deal of the week

Typically, my “deal of the week” has a financial figure tied to it. This time, I don’t have those terms. (Feel free to share,  if you do.) This deal made it to the top of the list because of its importance in the autonomous vehicle industry.

I am, of course, talking about Cruise acquiring Voyage, a four-year-old autonomous vehicle startup that is well-known in the industry despite its size relative to other major players. Voyage had 60 employees and raised about $52 million compared to giants like Cruise that has a nearly 2,000-person workforce and is valued at $30 billion. But Voyage made an indelible mark on the industry, in large part because of its co-founder and CEO Oliver Cameron. The company, which spun out of Udacity in 2017, is best known for its operations in two senior living communities. Voyage tested and gave rides to people within a 4,000-resident retirement community in San Jose, California, as well as The Villages, a 40-square-mile, 125,000-resident retirement city in Florida.

I’ve been told the majority of Voyage’s team will move over to Cruise and Cameron will take on a new role as vice president of product. Basically, Cameron will be in charge of anything that touches the customer.

Importantly, Voyage’s ride-hailing service (which always included a human safety driver behind the wheel) at the two senior communities, one in California and the other in Florida, will be ending before summer. The Villages community in Florida is massive and its where Voyage scaled up and at one point had “hundreds” of riders. The shuttering of this service would seem to open up the opportunity to other AV companies; my guess is that Cameron has already fielded a few inquiries.

Voyage’s partnership with FCA, now called Stellantis, will also end once the acquisition with Cruise closes.

Other deals that stood out …

Aerovel, the manufacturer of uncrewed vertical take-off and landing aircraft designed for surveillance, has raised $2.5 million in Series B capital. The investment is from undisclosed leaders in aviation, according to the company.

Arbe Robotics, a company that sells long-range 4D imaging radar, has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition company Industrial Tech Acquisitions Inc. The transaction is expect4ed to deliver about $177 million in gross cash  proceeds that includes Industrial Tech’s $77 million cash-in-trust as well as $100 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, M&G Investment Management, Varana Capital, Texas Ventures and Eyal Waldman, the founder and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. You can check out their investor presentation here.

For a little insight into Arbe, check out this Autonocast podcast episode from 2018, when I — along with my co-hosts Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer — interviewed Arbe CEO Kobi Marenko about his company’s high-resolution radar technology.

Charge Amps, the Swedish maker of smart charging stations, cables, and cloud software, raised 130 million crowns ($15.3 million) in a funding round led by Swedbank Robur. The company raised the funds ahead of a planned IPO next year, Reuters reported.

Fort Robotics raised $13 million in a round led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who previous headed up Humanistic Robotics. That fellow Pennsylvania startup is focused on landmine and IED-clearing remote operating robotic systems.

Momenta, the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, closed another massive round of nearly $500 million. The funding lifts its total funding to more than $700 million and in its short life has attracted a dazzling list of investors, including Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, the government of Suzhou and Daimler.

Momenta’s chief of business development Sun Huan told TechCrunch’s Rita Liao that the investment marks an important step toward the firm’s international expansion. In a few months’ time, Sun will head to Stuttgart, the German hometown of Mercedes-Benz, and open Momenta’s first European office.

Unagi, the startup behind the portable, design-centric electric scooters, raised $10.5 million in a Series A round led by led by the Ecosystem Integrity Fund with participation from Menlo Ventures, Broadway Angels and Gaingels, among others. Unagi, which was launched in late 2018 by former Beats Music CEO and MOG co-founder David Hyman, plans to use the money to fund its expansion and bring  its subscription service to six more U.S. cities, including Austin, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle. Unagi will also be expanding its existing service in the New York and LA metropolitan regions, including all five NYC boroughs, Long Island, Westchester and Northern New Jersey, as well as the Westside and Southeast LA, the San Fernando Valley and Orange County.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Lots. of. news. Let’s get to it.

Autonomous vehicles and robotics

Ford Motor announced plans to embed 100 of its researchers and engineers in a new $75 million robotics and mobility facility on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. The arrangement will give Ford space to conduct robotics research and access to students — and vice versa — from the top floor of the four-floor, 134,000 square-foot building. In addition to its fourth-floor lab, Ford will have access to a high-bay garage space to test autonomous vehicles.

Shortly after the event wrapped up, TechCrunch hardware editor Brian Heater hopped on the phone with Ford’s Technical Expert Mario Santillo, who will help head up the expanded robotics efforts. Here’s what Santillo had to say.

Electric

Amazon is expanding customer deliveries via electric cargo vehicle to San Francisco, making the Bay Area the second of 16 total cities the company expects to bring its Rivian-sourced EVs to in 2021. San Francisco’s unique terrain and climate were a couple of the reasons Amazon said it chose the city for its second round of testing. Its EVs, which were designed and built in partnership with Rivian, can last up to 150 miles on a single charge.

BMW takes the wraps off of the all-electric i4 sedan. The German automaker also announced version 8 of its iDrive operating system, which will feature a new dashboard layout and visual design, with two curved screens. It will make its debut in the i4 and iX.

Chanje, EV startup that emerged from stealth in 2017 and is owned by Chanje is owned by Chinese automotive company  FDG, is being sued by truck rental company Ryder for alleged failing to deliver 100 of the 125 vans it was promised, The Verge reported. Ryder says it’s owed nearly $4 million. Chanje was on The Autonocast waayyyyy back in 2018. At the time, I was impressed by the idea and the van, which I drove with co-host Alex Roy around downtown Los Angeles. But it seems that Chanje is riddled with problems — and lawsuits. The Verge reported that Chanje has been sued more than once in Los Angeles Superior Court by former employees who say they’re owed tens of thousands in back pay and bonuses. The company has also been hit with liens from the California Secretary of State for not paying taxes.

Lucid Motors, which is already experimenting with energy storage systems for commercial and residential customers, is also eyeing ways to repurpose batteries from its electric vehicles, according to this scoop by TechCrunch’s Aria Alamalhodaei. While Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson has previously discussed plans to eventually build energy storage systems like Tesla that uses new batteries, this is the first time the company has talked about second-life applications for the product.

This is interesting because Lucid is still years from having to contend with a large number of used batteries. After all, its first EV, the luxury Lucid Air sedan, isn’t coming to market until the second half of 2021.

Hyundai is offering owners of the 2021 Kona Electric and Ioniq Electric access to 250 kWh of complimentary charging (approximately 1,000 miles of EPA estimated driving range) on the  Electrify America fast-charging network.

Rivian plans to install more than 10,000 chargers by the end of 2023. The network will have a dual purpose: quickly power its electric vehicle models with fast chargers installed along highways and provide Level 2 chargers at further afield locations next to parks, trailheads and other adventurous destinations. The company said that its so-called Rivian Adventure Network will include more than 3,500 DC fast chargers at over 600 sites, which will only be accessible to owners of its electric vehicles. Each site will have multiple chargers and located on highways and main roads, often by cafes and shops.

Rivian is also installing thousands of “waypoint” Level 2 AC chargers throughout the United States and Canada. These waypoint chargers will have a 11.5 kW charging speed, which should be able add up to 25 miles of range every hour for its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV. The waypoint chargers will be strategically located along and near routes that Rivian customers are likely to take. They will be found at shopping centers restaurants, hotels, campsites and parks.

Volkswagen AG revealed how it aims to seize the top spot as the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, outlining plans to have six 40 gigawatt hour (GWh) battery cell production plants in operation in Europe by 2030. To get there, the automaker put in a 10-year, $14 billion order with Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt — and that’s only one of the six planned factories. A second plant in Germany will commence production in 2025.

Thomas Schmall, VW Group board member and CEO of Volkswagen Group Components. Image credits: Volkswagen

Ride-hailing

Uber says that drivers in the U.K. who use its ride-hailing app will be treated as workers, a designation that will give them some benefits such as holiday pay. However, even as Uber seemingly concedes to a Supreme Court ruling last month, a new fight could already be brewing over the company’s decision to calculate working time from the point a trip commences — rather than when drivers log on to the app.

All drivers in the U.K. will be paid holiday time based on 12.07% of their earnings, which will be paid out every two weeks. Drivers will also be paid at least the minimum wage after accepting a trip request and after expenses. Eligible drivers in the U.K. will automatically be enrolled into a pension plan with contributions from Uber. These contributions will represent approximately 3% of a driver’s earnings.

However … Uber will only guarantee that drivers’ working time and other benefits will accrue once they accept a trip and not based on when they have signed into the app to begin working. That already has labor activists fuming.

Meanwhile, Uber’s use of facial recognition technology for a driver identity system is being challenged in the U.K., where the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) and Worker Info Exchange (WIE) have called for Microsoft to suspend the ride-hailing giant’s use of B2B facial recognition after finding multiple cases where drivers were mis-identified and went on to have their licence to operate revoked by Transport for London (TfL).

The union said it has identified seven cases of “failed facial recognition and other identity checks” leading to drivers losing their jobs and licence revocation action by TfL, TechCrunch reporter Natasha Lomas writes.

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Space startup Astroscale has launched ELSA-d, the demonstration mission for its End-of-Life Services by Astroscale (ELSA) technology, which aims to dock with, and then safely remove, orbital debris. Astroscale’s demonstrator package includes two separate payloads, a servicer that represents its future production spacecraft, and a ‘client’ satellite that’s meant to represent the debris satellites it’ll be de-orbiting on behalf of customers in future.

The Astrocale payload was launched via a Soyuz rocket that took off early this morning from Kazakhstan carrying 38 commercial satellites from 18 countries. It’s the first Astroscale spacecraft to reach orbit, since the startup’s founding in 2013 by Japanese entrepreneur Nobu Okada. Astroscale had launched a micro satellite designed to measure small-scale debris in 2017, but all 18 of the satellites on that particular mission failed to reach orbit, due to human error in the launch vehicle’s programming.

This ELSA-d mission is a much more ambitious effort, and involves what amounts to an active on-orbit demonstration of the technology that Astroscale ultimately hopes to commercialize. The mission profile includes repeat docking and release maneuvers between the servicer satellite and the simulated client satellite, which is equipped with a ferromagnetic plate to assist the servicer with its magnetic docking procedure.

Astroscale hopes to prove out a range of its advertised capabilities with this demonstration, including the servicer’s ability to search out and located the client satellite, inspect it for damage, and then dock with it as mentioned, in both non-tumbling and tumbling scenarios (ie., a payload that’s maintaining a stable orbit, and one that’s spinning end-over-end in space with no ability to control its own attitude).

There’s a lot riding on this mission, which will be controlled from a ground center established by Astroscale in the UK. Aside from its long-term commercial ambitions, the startup is also contracted to partner with JAXA on the Japanese space agency’s first orbital debris removal mission, which aims to be the first in the world to remove a large object from orbit, representing the spent upper stage of a launch rocket.

Recent testimony before Congress on the massive SolarWinds attacks served as a wake-up call for many. What I saw emerge from the testimony was a debate on whether the public cloud is a more secure option than a hybrid cloud approach.

The debate shouldn’t surround which cloud approach is more secure, but rather which one we need to design security for. We — enterprise technology providers — should be designing security around the way our modern systems work, rather than pigeonholing our customers into securing one computing model over the other.

The SolarWinds attack was successful because it took advantage of a vast, intermixed supply chain of technology vendors. While there are fundamental lessons to be learned on how to protect the code supply chain, I think the bigger lesson is that complexity is the enemy of security.

The “Frankencloud” model

We’ve seen our information technology environments evolve into what I call a “Frankenstein” approach. Firms scrambled to take advantage of the cloud while maintaining their systems of record. Similar to how Frankenstein was assembled, this led to systems riddled with complexity and disconnected parts put together.

Security teams cite this complexity as one of their largest challenges. Forced to rely on dozens of vendors and disconnected security products, the average security team is using 25 to 49 tools from up to 10 different vendors. This disconnect is creating blind spots we can no longer afford to avoid. Security systems shouldn’t be piecemealed together; an organization’s security needs to be designed with one single point of control that provides a holistic view of threats and mitigates complexity.

Hybrid cloud innovations

We’re seeing hybrid cloud environments emerging as the dominant technology design point for governments, as well as public and private enterprises. In fact, a recent study from Forrester Research found that 85% of technology decision-makers agree that on-premise infrastructure is critical to their hybrid cloud strategies.

A hybrid cloud model combines part of a company’s existing on-premise systems with a mix of public cloud resources and as-a-service resources and treats them as one.

How does this benefit your security? In a disconnected environment, the most common path for cybercriminals to compromise cloud environments is via cloud-based applications, representing 45% of cloud-related incidents analyzed by our IBM X-Force team.

Take, for instance, your cloud-based systems that authenticate that someone is authorized to access systems. A login from an employee’s device is detected in the middle of the night. At the same time, there may be an attempt from that same device, seemingly in a different time zone, to access sensitive data from your on-premise data centers. A unified security system knows the risky behavior patterns to watch for and automatically hinders both actions. If these incidents were detected in two separate systems, that action never takes place and data is lost.

Many of these issues arise due to the mishandling of data through cloud data storage. The fastest-growing innovations to address this gap are called Confidential Computing. Right now, most cloud providers promise that they won’t access your data. (They could, of course, be compelled to break that promise by a court order or other means.) Conversely, it also means malicious actors could use that same access for their own nefarious purposes. Confidential Computing ensures that the cloud technology provider is technically incapable of accessing data, making it equally difficult for cybercriminals to gain access to it.

Creating a more secure future

Cloud computing has brought critical innovations to the world, from the distribution of workloads to moving with speed. At the same time, it also brought to light the essentials of delivering IT with integrity.

Cloud’s need for speed has pushed aside the compliance and controls that technology companies historically ensured for their clients. Now, those requirements are often put back on the customer to manage. I’d urge you to think of security first and foremost in your cloud strategy and choose a partner you can trust to securely advance your organization forward.

We need to stop bolting security and privacy onto the “Frankencloud” environment that operates so many businesses and governments. SolarWinds taught us that our dependence on a diverse set of technologies can be a point of weakness.

Fortunately, it can also become our greatest strength, as long as we embrace a future where security and privacy are designed in the very fabric of that diversity.