Author: azeeadmin

Before we get too far into this week’s roundup, I want to kick things off with an interview we haven’t published anywhere else. Earlier this week, we noted that Ford will be deploying some 100 researchers and engineers to the new $75 million facility at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The automaker told TechCrunch the set up is not an incubator, so much as “an extension of our global research and advanced engineering network.” Beyond the autonomous driving research, the company will be devoting a lot of research to how it can use third-party robots like Boston Dynamics’ Spot and Agility’s Digit, the latter of which was the centerpiece to a partnership Ford announced a couple of CESes ago.

Currently, the company currently has two Digit robots, purchasing the first two commercial units. Based on how the partnership pans out, Agility could, perhaps, be a prime acquisition target for a company more actively engaged with the robotics community.

Shortly after the event wrapped up, we hopped on the phone with Ford’s Technical Expert Mario Santillo, who will help head up the expanded robotics efforts. Some highlights below.

Ford is partnering with startup Agility Robotics to research and test the use of is bipedal Digit robot. Image Credits: Ford/Agility Robotics

What kind of work is Ford doing in robotics, beyond the autonomous driving space?

We’re really looking at all area of robotics. My team is focused anywhere from the manufacturing environment to more customer-facing applications, like Digit getting out of some delivery vehicle to deliver a package to your doorstop. Working with University of Michigan, they’re really looking for us to provide better use cases. We would like to — not necessarily develop the robots — but use robots like Digit or Spot to make them smarter and deliver things that Ford really cares about and to ultimately help humanity.

How close are you actually working with the team at Agility?

We’re working very closely. We’re in almost daily stand-ups in terms of getting everything up and running. We just got our Digit in Dearborn, just a couple of months ago. We have another Digit, which is sitting out in Palo Alto, so they’re a little ahead of us, in terms of actually getting real use cases. We work very well with Agility Robotics. There’s nothing hidden from either side. We just want to come together in a partnership and similar to the University of Michigan, we want to come together to make this thing better, useful and safe.

In terms of the actual research, what role does the university play?

The university is starting with the teaching of the next generation of roboticist, so that’s a huge role. The work they’re doing really spans all areas of robotics: air, land, sea, space, you name it. It’s amazing to see how interconnected things are. The walking lab, they’re specifically focusing on doing rehabilitation robotics, and that can directly lead into our Digit being more capable walking over rough terrain.

For the moment, Digit is a primary focus.

Digit is a clear, direct link, but Ford has a lot of wheeled robots, and a lot of work can feed into how we might better use these, based on research that’s going on at the University of Michigan.

Is Ford actively looking into acquiring startups or technologies in the robotics space?

I think Ford is always interested in evaluating new needs and companies as they come. I wouldn’t necessarily say, “no.”

Image Credits: University of Waterloo

Some cool research coming out of the University of Waterloo in Canada, where a team of researchers are exploring wearable cameras and machine learning to help robotic exoskeletons and prosthetics interact more naturally with their users. Per one of the researchers, “Our control approach wouldn’t necessarily require human thought. Similar to autonomous cars that drive themselves, we’re designing autonomous exoskeletons that walk for themselves.”

A number of companies are currently producing exoskeletons for mobility and rehabilitation purposes. Work like this could be a key step toward removing the need for a smartphone app or other external control.

Image Credits: HAI Robotics

In fundraising news, Hai Robotics completed a “nearly” $15 million Series B+ that adds to the Series B it announced late last year. The Shenzhen-based producers of the Haipick shelving system are one of a number of Chinese logistics robotics manufactures worth following. The system is tall and skinny, capable of moving up to eight boxes at once.

The company says it’s capable of improving warehouse operating efficiency by up to 4x. Like a number of entrants in the category, the pandemic has proven a big opportunity, as more people turn to e-commerce and companies look toward automation to avoid unnecessary shutdowns.

Image Credits: Surfacide

And just because I’m excited about baseball happening again, the Red Sox announced that they’ll be deploying UV disinfecting robots at Fenway this year. At the moment, the team appears to have only purchased three robots from Surfacide (also the legal name for the murder of a proprietary Microsoft tablet). So this will likely be a small part of a larger effort focused on, “disinfecting close quarters like team clubhouses, training rooms, as well as higher-traffic fan areas such as suites and restrooms.”

The robotic umpires, meanwhile, will have to wait a while longer for their MLB debut.

The running line from any acquired company CEO is that the company can do so much more with resources of the company that acquired it than it could on its own. Just seven months after being acquired, Drone, co-founder Brad Rydzewski says that his company really has benefited greatly from being part of Harness, and today the company announced a significant overhaul of the open source project.

The artist formerly known as Drone is now called ‘Harness CI Community Edition’ and Rydzewski says the Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal kept his word when he said he was 100% committed to continue developing the open source Drone product.

“Over the past seven months since the acquisition, a lot of community work has been around taking advantage of the resources that Harness has been able to afford us as a project — like having access to a designer, having access to professional writers — these are luxuries for most open source projects,” Rydzewski told me.

He says that having access to these additional resources has enabled him to bring a higher level of polish to the project that just wouldn’t have been possible without joining Harness. At the same time, he says the CI team, which has grown from the project’s two co-founders to 15 people, has also been able to build out the professional CI tool as it has become part of the Harness toolset.

Chief among the updates to the community edition is a new sleeker interface that has a much more professional look and feel, according to Rydzewski. In addition, developers can see how projects move along the pipeline in a visualization tool, while benefiting from real-time debugging tools and new governance and security features.

All of this is an embarrassment of riches for Rydzewski, who was used to working on a shoestring budget prior to joining Harness. “Drone came from very humble beginnings as an open source project, but now I think it can hold its own next to any product in the market today, even products that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Security compliance may not be the hottest conversation starter, but it’s a critical and often grueling process that companies have to endure every year to show that their security practices are up to par. It’s a burden that bogs down startups more than others, and so it’s fitting that startups are trying to find a better way.

Enter security compliance startup Secureframe, founded by Shrav Mehta and Natasja Nielsen, which thinks it has.

The company is announcing it has raised $18 million at Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins and with participation from Gradient Ventures and Base10 Partners, which led its $4.5 million seed round less than a year after it was founded in January 2020.

Secureframe helps businesses maintain two key cybersecurity certifications, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, which many companies require before they will do business. Secureframe’s compliance platform integrates with dozens of the most used cloud providers and apps to understand its customers’ security posture. The benefit, the company says, is that it can help companies get their certifications and become compliant in weeks, rather than months.

Shrav Mehta, the company’s founder and chief executive, told TechCrunch that it’s paying off, with a tenfold increase in revenue growth over the six months alone, and with over a hundred new customers, like software house Hasura and Omni, a Y Combinator graduate from the summer 2020 batch.

Mehta said the fresh funding round will help the company grow beyond the two certifications into an enterprise-grade risk and compliance management platform, such as the U.S. health privacy rules like HIPAA, and PCI compliance for secure card processing.

In the long term, Mehta said, he wants the company to design and offer its own compliance certifications.

In remarks, Kleiner Perkins’s Josh Coyne said Secureframe is leading the effort to modernize security compliance. “Secureframe is turning the industry on its head by automating compliance certifications end-to-end, serving as the single source of truth for commercial compliance,” he said.

Sentry, the company that helps developers catch bugs before they result in downtime, has added support for React Native, Android and Xamarin to its Performance Monitoring software. The company, which reached unicorn valuation in its last funding, also updated its Flutter SDK with support for new languages.

Sentry’s Performance Monitoring software is used by development teams to trace bugs and performance issues to poor-performing API calls, database queries and other potential causes. Sentry’s Flutter SDK, originally built in partnership with Google, now supports Kotlin, Java for Android, Swift, Objective-C for iOS and C/C++.

Other new features for its Flutter SDK include the ability to symbolicate, or transform into a human-readable format, Flutter-obfuscated Android builds; capture breadcrumbs, or a detailed record of events that happened before an issue, for user interface events and HTTP requests; and fatal crash support and offline caching, so app developers still get reports even if a user’s device goes offline.

In a statement, Sentry chief executive officer Milin Desai said, “These additions further expand our footprint, ensuring that all developers have visibility into the impact of their code—from frontend to backend—closing the observability gap and ensuring superior user experiences across all platforms and frameworks.”

Sentry is currently used by about 68,000 organizations around the world, who need to monitor the performance of their apps and fix bugs, like slow-loading pages, that frustrate users and result in lost revenue. Its customers include Atlassian, Cloudflare, Disney, GitHub and Microsoft.

The team at Google’s Area 120 in-house incubator says the idea for ThreadIt came well before COVID-19 made remote work a necessity for large swaths of the globe. Of course, the pandemic certainly accelerated interest in the product among the team behind it.

“It’s adjusted the lens through which everyone sees it,” Keller Smith, general manager and founder, Area 120, tells TechCrunch. “It was a trend that was growing even before COVID-19, but, of course, the whole world changed overnight.”

ThreadIt, which launches today as a browser-accessible service and Chrome plug-in, is an attempt to address a perceived hole in the market. The system, which allows users to record short video messages, is positioned to sit somewhere between long-form, live- video teleconferencing and short texts and emails.

The steps for getting started are pretty straightforward. You:

1. Record yourself speaking (you can rerecord if you mess up the first time)
2. Shoot the video off to selected colleagues.

The interface borrows some key features from other Google offerings, including a drop-down that lets you determine how recipients can interact with the video, be it just viewing or adding their own clip. The app threads together short videos, organizing things chronologically into a single video conversation. The team behind the app notes that it’s been dogfooding ThreadIt, having never actually met in person.

Certainly the zeitgeist is right. Remote work is going to continue to be a reality for many, even well after the pandemic has mercifully faded. And, of course, short-form video clips are once again having a moment. TikTok or Vine, for work, perhaps, only with more straightforward approach to making and watching short, informational video.

“We found that by adding a little bit of structure and allowing you to break it up and show little pieces of your work, that actually creates a much shorter message that’s much more on-point,” says Smith. “That was actually one gap we saw in what was out there today.”

The app, which is available to access starting today, is in kind of a public beta mode, as is Area 120’s custom. Essentially the team will gauge interest and collect feedback to see if the project is worth continuing to pursue. Services that have graduated include code education tool Grasshopper and travel app Touring Bird.

That means, among other things, that its still in early stage. As such, there are no doubt going to be a number of desired features that aren’t present. Having dealt with some health issues earlier this year that made speaking difficult, for instance, I would love to see a straight text-reply feature for those who can’t — or otherwise would prefer not to — appear on camera.

Deeper Google productivity app integration would make sense as well, though I suspect part of growing the app is deciding how much of a standalone to make it. Gmail integration would be good, for example, but you don’t want to have to rely on that platform if the new app is designed to augment it.

The service can be accessed on smartphones via the mobile Chrome browser, but a standalone app would probably make sense down the road, as well. “That’s something that we would look at going forward,” says Smith. “That’s a great example of looking for the interest and response and then being able to go deeper with that.”

Kosta Eleftheriou, a co-founder of the Fleksy keyboard app later sold to Pinterest in an acqui-hire deal, has been calling attention to Apple App Store issues like fake reviews, ratings and subscription scams, as well as malicious clone apps, after his own app, FlickType, was targeted by scammers. Now, the developer is taking the next step in his App Store crusade: he’s filing a lawsuit against Apple.

The suit, which the developer claims was filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara county, alleges that Apple enticed developers to build applications for its App Store — the only place iOS applications can be legally sold — by claiming its a safe and trustworthy place, but doesn’t protect legitimate app developers against scammers profiting from their hard work.

What’s more, the suit says, Apple is disincentivized to do so because scammers are generating revenue for Apple via their use of subscriptions, which involve a revenue share with Apple.

Eleftheriou has been personally impacted by App Store scammers. He left a well-paying job at Pinterest to develop his FlickType app, an alternative swipe keyboard for Apple Watch. After its launch, the app targeted by copycat app makers who claim their apps offer the same feature set as FlickType does, but instead lock users into high priced subscriptions for their poorly designed software. They also flood their apps with fake ratings and reviews to make them appear to be a much better option when users are looking for an app in this space.

Meanwhile, FlickType sports a 3.5-star rating, as it’s often dinged for Apple Watch platform issues that are outside the developer’s control or missing features users want to call attention to. Eleftheriou engages with his app’s users, however — responding to complaints and letting users know when features they’ve requested were added or bugs have been fixed. Scammers simply buy enough 5-star reviews to keep their apps’ overall ratings higher.

In other words, Eleftheriou is doing the hard work of being an App Store developer carving out a category for swipe keyboards for the Watch, but his potential income is being shifted over to scam apps who have a falsified App Store presence.

In years past, Apple took issues of app quality seriously. It worked to clean up shady subscription apps and remove clones and spam from the App Store through regular sweeps. It even once went so far as to ban apps built using templates in an effort to raise the bar on app quality, which angered small businesses who didn’t have the resources or funds to build more professional apps. (Apple later revised its policy to be more equitable.)

But the new lawsuit alleges that Apple is now doing little to police scammers’ apps because it profits from developer misconduct. Eleftheriou also notes he has raised these issues to Apple via his company KPAW, LLC, but Apple did “next to nothing” to resolve the problem.

Eleftheriou’s story is even more complicated, though, because his app was rejected from the App Store numerous times after meeting with Apple special projects manager Randy Marsden over a possible acquisition. He tells TechCrunch numbers were discussed with Apple and his meetings had included a Director and a VP, among others. Apple was considering turning FlickType into an Apple Watch feature, the lawsuit notes.

Shortly thereafter, FlickType was pulled from the App Store over App Store Review Guidelines violations, even as a competitor’s app was approved. Eleftheriou appealed for his app through Developer Relations but was given no guidance on how to prevent the same problem in the future, he said.

Over the months that followed, FlickType continued to face rejections from App Store Review. Apple’s App Store Review said that the app offered a “poor user experience,” even though tech journalists at numerous outlets had praised it, and Apple had once considering buying it. App Review also told the developer that “full keyboard apps are not appropriate for Apple Watch,” while it continued to allow competitors to publish their own keyboard apps.

Apple’s App Review team also allowed third-party apps that were running FlickType’s integratable version of the keyboard to be approved without issues. These included Watch apps like Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp, and Lens for Instagram.

After Apple approved FlickType in January 2020, the company claims it had already lost over a year of revenue to competitor keyboards that were not constantly being rejected. Nevertheless, FlickType reached the App Store’s Top 10 Paid app list and generated $130,000 in its first month. As a result of its success, it was quickly targeted by scammers who launched watered down, barely usable competitors to the app, cutting into FlickType’s revenue. FlickType’s revenue dropped to just $20,000 per month. The competitors were also using fake ratings to get their app boosted and installed by unsuspecting users.

Eleftheriou’s story was not unique, as it turned out. In recent months, he has been documenting the App Store’s multimillion-dollar scams, including those he was facing as well as others brought to his attention by developers with similar struggles. Apple, in some cases, would take action against the scammers he highlighted on social media. In other cases, it would not. And it would sometimes only take down one of the developer’s scam apps, but allow others under the same developer account to continue to operate.

The new lawsuit aims to hold Apple accountable for the issues Eleftheriou faced by asking Apple to restore his lost revenue and pay out any other damages awarded by the court.

Apple has not responded for a request for comment at this time.

A copy of the lawsuit is below. It is not yet appearing in public record searches for verification purposes. We’ll follow up to confirm when the case appears online and update accordingly.

Kpaw, LLC v. Apple, Inc by TechCrunch on Scribd

Five years ago, entrepreneur Dan Sommer bet big on the adult learning space when he was building out Trilogy Education, an online and in-person bootcamp in collaboration with universities to train workforces on the latest tech skills.

In 2019, Sommer sold that company for $750 million to 2U in one of the largest edtech exits to date. And today, Sommer is launching a new venture-backed startup in education that goes a few steps earlier in the learning journey: high school.

Edge Pathways is a for-credit, first-year program built in collaboration with universities to help aspiring engineers navigate entrance into the confusing, and often intimidating, field of science, technology and education. Along with launching to the public today, Edge Pathways announced it has raised $6 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital, Emerge Education and Rethink Education. First Round Capital’s Bill Trenchard will take a seat on Edge Pathway’s board of directors.

Instead of helping employed techies stay sharp, Sommer’s new startup is helping aspiring techies get a degree in the first place. When asked what changed between his two startups, he says it boils down to one single insight: the point in which a founder has to start helping support students to be ultimately successful.

“A lot of companies over the last two years are looking to group talent and looking at the old class of engineers,” Sommer said. “Starting earlier in this stage of the process is a way to help resolve the skills gap and help capture more students at a time when they’re impressionable, willing to learn and willing to support new kinds of pathways.”

Edge Pathways helps schools offer a program for credit that replaces the first year of college. Inspired by co-op programs at Drexel and Northeastern, Edge connects students to project-based learning and internship opportunities to replace a traditional lecture-style education. The startup is ultimately a services provider to colleges that want to open their doors to incoming engineering students.

Edge Pathways is more than a trial-run at college since it is for credit. To help colleges, the key stakeholder for Edge, stay happy, that means that the startup lets institutions make decisions on which students get admitted to the program, which faculty are involved and how the curriculum is created. Edge’s involvement is simply in the execution and daily support.

After the first year is completed, Edge stays with students to provide coaching and job opportunities throughout the college experience.

For the program, the startup charges students around $15,000, slightly lower than the price of in-state tuition. As numerous studies have shown, attrition rates in STEM fields are high due to changing majors or leaving the degree as a whole, which doesn’t help the some 3.5 million job openings out there for engineers, Sommer tells TechCrunch.

Edge’s largest challenge will likely be finding product-market fit with consumers. While it has created a curriculum in tandem with colleges, the startup needs to make sure the program fits a student’s wants and needs too — and those key decisions shouldn’t be without its end-customer in the room. Sommers, naturally, is optimistic that he’s on to something.

“So many students, particularly today, don’t see the relevance of what they’re learning in the classroom and don’t see how it ties into the world,” he said. “It’s hard to make that connection, so we designed a model to help universities support this gap.”

The other large challenge ahead for Edge is finding universities to work with. Sommer declined to share information about its inaugural partner, but said he will announce it “very soon.” Notably, the founder thinks early adopters will be transfer institutions because about 40% of students that get STEM degrees are transfer students.

“So many institutions today are really focused on the transient population of students,” he said. Edge hopes to “support more students through these hard disciplines, through hard subjects, and give them a reason to have inspiration.”

It’s an ambitious play, but by weeding out the weed-out classes themselves, Edge could make a big difference in the opportunity some students see for themselves in the world of STEM.

SecurityScorecard has been helping companies understand the security risk of its vendors since 2014 by providing each one with a letter grade based on a number of dimensions. Today, the company announced a $180 million Series E.

The round includes new investors Silver Lake Waterman, T. Rowe Price, Kayne Anderson Rudnick, and Fitch Venture along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Accomplice, Riverwood Capital, Intel Capital, NGP Capital, AXA Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $290 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy says the company’s mission has not changed since it launched. “The idea that we started the company was a realization that when I was CISO and CTO I had no metrics at my disposal. I invested in all kinds of solutions where I was completely in the dark about how I’m doing compared to the industry and how my vendors and suppliers were doing compared to me,” Yampolskiy told me.

He and his co-founder COO Sam Kassoumeh likened this to a banker looking at a mortgage application and having no credit score to check. The company changed that by starting a system of scoring the security posture of different companies and giving them a letter grade of A-F just like at school.

Today, it has ratings on more than 2 million companies worldwide, giving companies a way to understand how secure their vendors are. Yampolskiy says that his company’s solution can rate a new company not in the data set in just five minutes. Every company can see its own scorecard for free along with advice on how to improve that score.

He notes that in fact, the disastrous SolarWinds hack was entirely predictable based on SecurityScorecard’s rating system. “SolarWinds’ score has been lagging below the industry average for quite a long time, so we weren’t really particularly surprised about them,” he said.

The industry average is around 85 or a solid B in the letter grade system, whereas SolarWinds was sitting at 70 or a C for quite some time, indicating its security posture was suspect, he reports.

While Yampolskiy didn’t want to discuss valuation or revenue or even growth numbers, he did say the company has 17,000 customers worldwide including 7 of the 10 top pharmaceutical companies in the world.

The company has reached a point where this could be the last private fundraise it does before going public, but Yampolskiy kept his cards close on timing, saying it could happen some time in the next couple of years.

Barely more than seven months after its most recent funding announcement, Yotpo is revealing that it has raised another $230 million in a Series F round that values the company at $1.4 billion (post-money).

“Our round, in my eyes, it’s all about celebrating the future of e-commerce,” co-founder and CEO Tomer Tagrin told me. “Brands don’t need to worry about connecting the marketing stack anymore.”

Where success in traditional retail has been determined by “location, location, location,” Tagrin said e-commerce is “all about consumer attention.” To capture that attention, he estimated the average brand is using 10 to 14 different marketing applications, creating a “pretty horrible experience.” So Yotpo — founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York City — aims to provide all of a brand’s e-commerce marketing needs in a single, integrated platform.

To illustrate this, Tagrin described a marketer wanting to create a customized offer just for users who had both purchased a product in the past 90 days and left a five-star review. Yotpo allows them to do that with “just the click of a button,” whereas “that experience was just not feasible before Yotpo,” he said.

The platform currently consists of four main products — Yotpo SMS Marketing, Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals, Yotpo Reviews and Yotpo Visual UGC — which integrate with each other, as well as with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe-owned Magento and BigCommerce.

Yotpo CEO Tomer Tagrin

Tagrin said Yotpo still had money leftover from the last round but it decided to raise additional money to continue investing in product and marketing, as well for strategic acquisitions. (The company acquired SMSBump at the beginning of 2020 and Tagrin said it’s “70% of the way there” towards full integration.) Among other things, the company is planning to launch new products around customer communication and measuring a customer’s lifetime value.

Yotpo also says that it has now exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with the SMS marketing product growing revenue by 170% last year, while the loyalty product saw its revenue nearly double. Big brands like Patagonia and Steve Madden use the platform, but Tagrin pointed out that it’s also used by newer direct-to-consumer businesses like Princess Polly and has 30,000 paying customers over all.

“I like to say that Victoria’s Secret will die by a thousand cuts,” he said. “These are the mini-brands … the up-and-comer brands that are going to replace the incumbents.”

Yotpo has now raised more than $400 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase. The round was led by by Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global, with participation from Claltech Investment, Coin Ventures, Hanaco, Vertex Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Capital Group and others.

“Tiger Global has long been bullish on eCommerce as the future of retail, having invested in disruptor brands like Warby Parker and Peloton, giants like JD.com, and best-in-class SaaS companies like Stripe and Twilio,” said Tiger’s John Curtius in a statement. “We are excited by Yotpo’s approach to provide a unified marketing tech stack and the value it provides to brands and online shoppers in the process.”