Author: azeeadmin

It was easy to wonder what would become of Docker after it sold its enterprise business in 2019, but it regrouped last year as a cloud native container company focused on developers, and the new approach appears to be bearing fruit. Today, the company announced a $23 million Series B investment.

Tribe Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Benchmark and Insight Partners. Docker has now raised a total of $58 million including the $35 million investment it landed the same day it announced the deal with Mirantis .

To be sure, the company had a tempestuous 2019 when they changed CEOs twice, sold the enterprise division and looked to reestablish itself with a new strategy. While the pandemic made 2020 a trying time for everyone, Docker CEO Scott Johnston says that in spite of that, the strategy has begun to take shape.

“The results we think speak volumes. Not only was the strategy strong, but the execution of that strategy was strong as well,” Johnston told me. He indicated that the company added 1.7 million new developer registrations for the free version of the product for a total of more 7.3 million registered users on the community edition.

As with any open source project, the goal is to popularize the community project and turn a small percentage of those users into paying customers, but Docker’s problem prior to 2019 had been finding ways to do that. While he didn’t share specific numbers, Johnston indicated that annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 170% last year, suggesting that they are beginning to convert more successfully.

Johnston says that’s because they have found a way to turn a certain class of developer in spite of a free version being available. “Yes, there’s a lot of upstream open source technologies, and there are users that want to hammer together their own solutions. But we are also seeing these eight-to-ten person ‘two pizza teams’ who want to focus on building applications, and so they’re willing to pay for a service,” he said.

That open source model tends to get the attention of investors because it comes with that built-in action at the top of the sales funnel. Tribe’s Arjun Sethi, whose firm led the investment, says his company actually was a Docker customer before investing in the company and sees a lot more growth potential.

“Tribe focuses on identifying N-of-1 companies — top-decile private tech firms that are exhibiting inflection points in their growth, with the potential to scale towards outsized outcomes with long-term venture capital. Docker fits squarely into this investment thesis[…],” Sethi said in a statement.

Johnston says as they look ahead to post-pandemic, he’s learned a lot since his team move out of the office last year. After surveying employees, they were surprised to learn that most have been happier working at home, having more time to spend with family, while taking away a grueling commute. As a result, he sees going virtual first, even after it’s safe to reopen offices.

That said, he is planning to offer a way to get teams together for in-person gatherings and a full company get-together once a year.

“We’ll be virtual first, but then with the savings of the real estate that we’re no longer paying for, we’re going to bring people together and make sure we have that social glue,” he said.

Ford Motor Company will be embedding 100 of its researchers and engineers in a new $75 million robotics and mobility facility on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.

This is not the first collaboration between the automaker and the university. Ford is UM’s single largest corporate donor and the two entities have previously teamed up to open the UM Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles. But this is the first time Ford is co-locating part of its team on a university campus.

Ford clarified to TechCrunch that the arrangement is not an incubator, but “an extension of our global research and advanced engineering network.”

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. Ford will also have access to the research labs located throughout the rest of the building, including four high-bay garage space to test autonomous vehicles and a walking robots laboratory.

Nearby, Ford will be able to drive its cars at the Mcity Test Facility, a simulated Main Street for testing the cars in real-world environments. Ford was the first automaker to test an autonomous vehicle at Mcity in 2015.

The automaker’s research areas will not be limited to autonomous driving tech.

“The whole field of robotics has applications beyond the vehicle, that’s very clear to us,” Ford CTO Ken Washington said Tuesday. “We made the decision quite some time ago that we wanted to create a capability in robotics to apply to our vehicles, but also to have a broader potential application base, including manufacturing, including rethinking how we’re showing up in the market with our commercial vehicles, and possibly other solutions, like aerial robotics.”

In January of 2020, Agility Robotics’ first order came from Ford, for the Digit – a humanoid robot equipped with sensors to work in human spaces. Ford will be experimenting with the Digit in the new building as well as Boston Dynamics’ infamous Spot, the four-legged robot that can navigate unpredictable terrain. Ford will be conducting experiments with both these robot models at the new UM facility.

Ford and UM as part of the arrangement will be developing an inclusive curriculum “to open more opportunities for underserved students,” according to a statement. Alec Gallimore, the Dean of Engineering at UM, said the new Robotics Institute aims to push the field to be more equity-centered. To that end, students from historically black schools in Atlanta, Georgia will be able to enroll remotely in a Robotics 101 course, which doesn’t require calculus, to “level the playing field” for students from high schools that did not offer advanced courses.

As NASA is quick to remind people, the investments it funnels towards space exploration often winds up improving life on Earth – and it’s now in the business of speeding up some of that work through startups. SMART, a startup founded in 2020, 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. The young company today revealed its first product: An airless bicycle tire based on technology NASA engineers created to make future lunar and Martian rovers even more resilient.

SMART’s METL tire is the the first fruit of the startup’s 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.

Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center assemble the new shape memory alloy rover tire prior to testing in the Simulated Lunar Operations Laboratory.

Dr. Padula and Creager’s key development was creating an alloy that can return to their shape at the molecular level, meaning they can deform to adapt to uneven terrain, including obstacles like gravel and potholes, and return to their shape without losing structural integrity over time.

SMART, which is co-founded by Survivor Fiji champion Earl Cole and engineer Brian Yennie, worked with Padula and Creager, along with former NASA intern Calvin Young, to apply the benefits of SMA to the consumer market. They’re targeting the cycling market first with their METL tire, which is set to become available to the general public by early next year. Following that, SMART intends to also pursue bring SMA tires to the automotive and commercial vehicle industries, too.

Image Credits: SMART Tire Company

Already, SMART has a partnership in place with Ford-owned Spin, the bike and scooter-sharing company focused on novel micro-mobility models. SMART’s technology has the potential not only to make flat tires or under inflation a thing of the past, but could reduce cost and waste long-term by supplementing the need for rubber tires, which need frequent replacement and can be a danger to riders or drivers when used without proper pressure.

SMART is also using WeFunder to seek crowdsourced equity investment, with SAFEs currently available at an $8 million valuation cap.

The global venture capital ecosystem is inequitable. In the United States’ mature venture capital market, an entrepreneur’s race, gender and age help determine who has access to capital.

But there are other limiting factors: geography, for example. While it has been encouraging in recent years to cover what has felt like a boom in Latin American and European fintechs, or a general rise in VC activity in a host of Asian countries, the landscape remains imbalanced.

The pragmatist in you is already forming complaints. Yes, the world is not uniformly developed. Yes, venture capital-startup hubs can take decades to reach maturity. And, yes, progress is being made in some regions.

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

But as the world grows more connected, the tech gap between nations isn’t narrowing fast enough. And yet, given rising populations of people ready to jump into a more digital future, investment in some less-mature startup markets is lower than you’d think. (Less investment into less-mature startup markets is not a tautology; you can get to ecosystem maturity faster with easier capital access because it allows for quicker startup formation cycles.)

The wild imbalance of the world’s venture capital came up yesterday over on the public forum. Dauda Barry, CEO of U.K.-based startup Adaplay Esports, tweeted that African startups had “already raised $500 [million] in 2021,” which he contrasted positively to what he described as a full-year 2020 result of $1.4 billion.

Using his figures, African startups are on pace to raise $2.5 billion in 2021 if current trends hold, a healthy increase from the 2020 figure. Clayton Collins, a media exec, pointed out an interesting contrast: Stripe raised more yesterday than Barry had reported for the entire African continent this year.

Put another way: A single U.S.-Irish company outraised an entire continent’s year-to-date venture capital sum in one day.

Taking numbers from Twitter is never the best way to be informed, however. So this morning, let’s do a little digging. I’ve pulled Crunchbase and PitchBook data to peek at what they say about African startup investment thus far in 2021. And we also have our prior look into the 2020 African startup ecosystem to point to. (For more on African startups in general, we also chatted with the CEO of public African e-commerce player Jumia here.)

Ready to get into some startup numbers after weeks of nonstop IPO coverage? I am. Let’s go!

The African startup market

Barry’s number of $500 million felt directional when we were discussing it, as all round numbers are. So let’s poke at it a bit.

PitchBook data of African investments thus far in 2021 includes 72 deals worth $750.6 million, though if we drill down to just companies with African headquarters, the number dips. Crunchbase lists $746.1 million in total equity funding for African companies so far in 2021, but if we filter out private equity along with all non-equity investments, the number falls to around $136.2 million.

Roblox, the gaming company that went public this month with a strong debut, changed the game (so to speak) for the role that creative input can play in making a game more loved, more engaging, and even more enterprising. Today, a startup that is taking a version of that model — focused on in-game apps and modifications — is announcing some funding and the launch of a new toolkit to double down on that opportunity.

Today, a startup called Overwolf, which has built a popular platform for gaming fans to build modifications (mods) and additional tools for all kinds of PC games, is announcing $52.5 million in growth funding and the launch of a new content creation SDK — underscoring its growth and more specifically the demand in the market to bring more user-generated content variations into the gaming universe.

The company’s platform has some 30,000 creators, 90,000 mods and add-ons, and 18 million monthly users across thousands of games, including Fortnite, World of Warcraft and Minecraft. In the last year, which has seen a surge of gaming activity as more people stay home throughout the pandemic, Overwolf’s revenue has grown by 300%, it said.

“We want to be what YouTube is for YouTubers,” said Uri Marchand, the CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based Overwolf, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Just as YouTube is a one-stop shop for video, we want to be a one-stop shop for creating apps and mods.”

The Series C is being co-led by Insight Partners and Griffin Gaming Partners, a VC that specialists in gaming content. Other investors in the round include Ubisoft, Warner Music Group, Meg Whitman, and Gen.G Co-Founder, Kevin Chou. Valuation is not being disclosed.

Importantly, alongside the funding, Overwolf is introducing a new service called CurseForge Core, an SDK that can be integrated directly into a game itself to make it easier for gaming enthusiasts and developers to build user-generated content for it. CurseForge Core is essentially the next iteration of CurseForge, the mods platform that Overwolf acquired from Amazon’s Twitch last year for an undisclosed sum.

The buyer and acquirer here continue to have a close relationship, even as Overwolf also looks to work more closely with others like Discord, which says something about what makes up the bigger ecosystem of communication and activity among gamers outside of the core experience of a game itself.

Prior to launching this SDK, Overwolf already had built out a large community of users — both on its own steam and by way of its acquisition of CurseForge. While that is entirely focused on PC games at the moment, the plan will be to expand its reach to other platforms, including Macs, console games and mobile gaming, in the next year.

The gap in the market that Overwolf has identified and built for is the demand from avid gamers for more tools to improve their experience of the game, sometimes very specific ones that might not be core to everyone’s experience but definitely wanted by enough people to merit their creation.

These can be, for example, maps to navigate your way around a game, or dashboards or leaderboards to keep better track of various statistics of characters and other players, tools to modify characters, or apps to communicate with other players when you’re inside a game. Marchand points out that he first got into this world as a mod maker himself, years ago creating a Skype app for World of Warcraft years ago.

“We pivoted from making mods to making a platform for others to make mods and additions,” he said. “When you think about all the aspects that need to be addressed — they include telemetry, the interactive UI, analytics, installers — they can be very complicated. So we provided platform essentials to help developers figure it all out.”

While games developers might have a very specific vision of how they would like their games to look at play, as Marchand described it to me, it’s also a big part of PC gaming culture to be able to play around with those experiences to make them unique to each player. But handling the work of third-party ecosystems is not typically in their core competencies.

“The scale and diversity of that content makes it impossible for a game maker to capture and do it all,” said Marchand. “History has proven that while game makers would like to encourage UGC they can’t and that is why we exist.”

Even if building an SDK that sits inside games themselves is a logical next step, it also represents a kind of increased trust between Overwolf and games publishers.

“Overwolf is developing the holy grail of frameworks for UGC for both publishers and in-game creators. Enabling all major publishers like us, to allow the creation of mods in a safe, secure, authorized, and profitable manner; is a game changer for all creators and IP holders,” said Oscar Navarro, Head of Corporate Development for Ubisoft, in a statement.

Indeed, the tradeoff for games publishers are more tools that will potentially keep users further engaged. The SDK will cover tools such as cross-platform modding, to let players discover and install mods in-game, across all platforms and storefronts; an analytics dashboard to have better visibility on how well various mods are performing; moderation tools to better vet what third-party content gets submitted; and monetization tools to bring in more creators. As with other platforms that incentivize creators, these include an Author Rewards Program, fund investments, developer contests, and hackathons.

“We’ve been following UGC in gaming for many years and believe Overwolf has established itself as a leader in this category,” said Teddie Wardi, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “AAA game studios will want to allow creators to build and express themselves, and Overwolf is positioned as the platform to make this possible by ensuring that creators are recognized for their contributions, and easily integrating creations into games. Overwolf has proved themselves to be strong champions of the creator community and we look forward to helping them scale up in 2021.”

Financial incentives will continue to stand out for these creators, who today make most of their money not from paid mods and apps, but from in-mod or in-app advertising, a network that is run by Overwolf itself. Marchand said that the most successful developers can bring in revenues of $100,000 each month.

While Marchand likens Overwolf aims to YouTube, investors see a parallel in Unity, another key toolkit for the games developer community.

“Similar to how developers use Unity to build a game, we see Overwolf as the framework for everything UGC related to games. Overwolf allows for one of the only means of monetization for the thousands of creators, in turn, this translates to increased engagement for the publishers and more content for gamers.  Services like Overwolf set the stage for the industry to see a new generation of user-generated content and we are excited to invest in the leading company moving this space forward,” commented Nick Tuosto, Co-Founder of Griffin Gaming Partners and Managing Director at LionTree, in a statement.

Google is making changes to its parental control system, Family Link, that aims to better reflect parents’ changing views on children’s screen time. In the pre-pandemic world, parents were more likely to see screen time as something in need of restriction — they’d rather their kids get offline or go outside to play with friends, perhaps. But the challenges of a locked-down world and the push towards virtual learning have impacted parents’ views. Google says today’s parents are more concerned about how kids are spending time on their devices, not how much time is being spent.

It’s a concession to a world where devices have become a savior of sorts to families who’ve stayed at home to avoid Covid — where they’ve been restricted from seeing extended family and friends, and where schools are closed and playdates and parties were cancelled. Parents came to realize that screen time in and of itself isn’t necessarily something to be avoided; they just wanted more control over how it’s used.

With the Family Link update, parents can now choose to make remote learning apps “always allowed,” so they don’t count toward overall screen time daily limits. This could include not only those apps that are used to attend school or communicate with teachers, but others that have popped up to help kids learn and be entertained, like the supplemental resources the school suggests — or the apps parents allow during break times from virtual class.

Parents will also now have access to more detailed daily, weekly and monthly activity reports that provide both an overview of how the child is spending their time in apps, as well as how screen time usage has changed over a week or month, and what portion of time was spent in the “always allowed” apps. This gives parents a better idea of what screen time was used for education versus play.

On Android, Family Link users will also be able to browse through a selection of teacher-recommended apps from the Google Play catalog for kids under 13 in the U.S. And parents can also now set screen time limits directly from the child’s device on Android.

Image Credits: Google

Though these updates will remain useful in a post-pandemic world where parents hold a more nuanced view of screen time, it’s unfortunate that Google waited until so late in the pandemic to roll these changes out. As more people in the U.S. are being vaccinated, restrictions are lifting — including the re-opening of schools in many places. That means parents’ stress over kids’ increased screen time usage will soon become a moot point. The devices will be replaced with in-person learning, and screen time may become villainized yet again.

Related to today’s news, Google has launched a new website for families whose kids are beginning to use technology at families.google. The company also launched a new content series with meditation app Headspace that will help families with kids practice mindfulness together. Again, that’s a resource that was desperately needed in 2020 during the pandemic’s heights, more so than it is today as the world begins reopening.

Still, the pandemic has forced families to think more about screen time and what sort of on-device experiences they want their children to have. As a result of this increased scrutiny, social apps like TikTok and Instagram — the latter just today, in fact — have rolled out more family-friendly safety features, aimed at encouraging parents to see their apps in a better light, rather than being the first to go when screen time gets locked down. It has also encouraged new hybrid learning and education startups to launch, hoping to build out a new category of edutainment apps that can avoid screen time lockdowns.

A security breach at cryptocurrency platform Roll allowed a hacker to obtain the private key to its hot wallet and steal its contents — worth about $5.7 million.

In a statement, the company said it was investigating the breach, which happened early Sunday.

“As of this writing, it seems like a compromise of the private keys [sic] of our hot wallet and not a bug in the Roll smart contracts or any token contracts,” the statement said. Roll said the attacker had already sold the tokens for Ethereum.

“There is no further user action suggested at this stage. We are temporarily disabling withdraw from the Roll wallet of all social money until we have migrated our hot wallet,” the statement added.

It’s not clear how the attacker broke in and obtained the private key — akin to the password for Roll’s hot wallet. Hot wallets are designed to be connected to the internet to send and receive cryptocurrency, but typically only store a fraction of a cryptocurrency owner’s total reserves, given the inherent security risk of an internet-connected wallet. A cold wallet, or storage device that isn’t connected to the internet, is typically used for holding the bulk of an owner’s cryptocurrency for longer-term periods.

Roll allows creators to mint and distribute their own Ethereum-based cryptocurrency, known as social tokens, under which the creators can decide how the currency is spent. There are hundreds of different kinds of social currency on the platform, including $WHALE, $RARE, and $PICA tokens — which plummeted in value in the aftermath of the breach.

The creator of the $WHALE token said in a tweet more than 2% of its tokens were stolen in the Roll breach, but that the hack was “minimally detrimental” to the project.

Others weren’t so lucky. One person said they had “lost everything,” while others criticized Roll’s new $500,000 fund to help affected creators for not going far enough.

Roll said it will hire a third-party to audit its security infrastructure to prevent another breach. “We will also run a forensic analysis to figure out how the key was compromised,” the statement said.

Jennifer Dulski has held her fair share of leadership positions, from being president and COO of Change.org to serving as head of product for Google’s shopping and product ads to leading the team responsible for Facebook Groups.

But she’s identified a problem that most people managers will all too clearly understand: training and tools to be a great manager are at a shortage.

That’s why she founded Rising Team, which is today announcing the raise of a $3 million seed round led by Female Founders Fund, with participation from Peterson Ventures, Burst Capital, Xoogler Ventures, 500 Startups, Roble Ventures, Supernode Ventures and several angels.

Dulski explained that there are some tools for managers, like surveys from Gallup and Glint, and there are training options, like executive coaches. But there aren’t many options out there that combine the two.

“I was lucky enough to have the benefit of getting executive coaches or being sent to training, and those felt like being taught how to fish,” said Dulski. “But then it was like being dropped off at the lake with no fishing pole or bait, because I had learned all these things about how to be a good leader but I had no tools to implement what I had learned.”

Rising Team is a platform that combines tools and training to help managers motivate, organize and ultimately effectively lead their team.

The first layer of the platform is the tools suite, which includes proprietary assessments and 1:1 templates. Most employee surveys focus so heavily on the actual job, with questions like “I’m able to do my best work.” With Rising Team, the assessments are geared toward who team members are personally, with a look at how they want to be appreciated or what they believe their talents and skills are.

This helps managers understand how to pair team members together, what tasks they should be assigned to, and truly grasp what motivates each individual that works for them. Alongside these assessment tools, Rising Team also offers training in the form of videos, articles, and audio resources. In the future, the company plans to build out AI-based custom training tips that are powered by data from the assessments.

Rising Team is also building out a community that lets managers communicate with one another.

Interestingly, the startup is taking a bottom-up approach when it comes to revenue, pricing the product in a way that will allow individual managers to personally purchase the software, and hopefully spread the word to the rest of their team. But the door is open for organizations to get the full employee base on the product as well.

For now, Rising Team is in a free beta, so pricing has not yet been announced.

The team is currently made up of 8 people, 60 percent of whom are female and 50 percent of whom are BIPOC.

“It’s really, really important to me and to our team as a whole that we build a diverse team from the start,” said Dulski. “I believe in that so firmly and all the data is really clear that more diverse teams are more successful.”

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Jim Jackson developed timber and farmland in Eastern Washington, protected from coastal rains by the peaks of the Cascade mountains, building out a clutch of apple farms and other properties on the state’s sunny side for 40 years.

Traditionally, he raised money to expand operations for his farms through his existing network, which meant asking previous investors to pool together and come up with the cash.

But more recently, Jackson turned to a fundraising platform that operates entirely online. Like hundreds of other farmers, he’s using a service called AcreTrader to raise money for agricultural development projects. AcreTrader is one of a growing number of companies revolutionizing the way farm and forestland are acquired, developed and commercialized across the United States.

There’s lots of farmland in the U.S. Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and the world’s third-richest man, is the nation’s largest owner of farmland, holding roughly 242,000 acres. That number seems high until you compare it with the 897.4 million acres of land that are currently arable and used for farming in the U.S.

Another 823 million acres of forests dot the United States, the majority of which are privately owned.

Taken together, that’s a massive amount of real estate with economic potential that’s traditionally been accessible only to the ultra-wealthy to acquire and finance for development. Now, startups like AcreTrader and others including Tillable, ($8.3 million) FarmTogether ($3.7 million), and Harvest Returns are bringing marketplace models to the farming world — potentially bringing hundreds of thousands of investable acres to financiers looking to diversify.

Earlier this year, TikTok made an update to its privacy settings and defaults to further lock down the app for its teenage users. This morning, Instagram followed suit with teen-focused privacy updates of its own. But the Facebook-owned social app didn’t choose to add more privacy to teen accounts by default, as TikTok did — it largely made it more difficult for adults to interact with the app’s teen users.

The company said it’s rolling out new safety features that would restrict adult users from being able to contact teens who didn’t already follow them. The exception to this rule would still allow the teen to interact with adult family members and other trusted adults on the platform, like family friends. In the case that an adult tried to DM a teen who didn’t follow them, they’d receive a notification informing them this wasn’t possible.

And if the teen has already connected with an adult and is DM’ing with them, they’ll be notified if that adult is exhibiting suspicious behavior — like sending a large amount of friend requests or messages to users under 18. This tool will also then allow the teen to end the conversation, block, report or restrict the adult from further contact.

Image Credits: Instagram

In addition, Instagram said it will make it more difficult for adults to find and follow teens in other places within the Instagram app, including Explore, Reels, and more. This will include restricting adults from seeing teen accounts in the “Suggested Users” section of the app, as well as hiding their comments on public posts.

The company also noted it’s developing new A.I. and machine learning-based technology that would make it possible to find teens lying about their age on the app. This could result in these features being applied, even if the teen in question had lied about their birth date when signing up for the app, but the technology isn’t fully live yet.

Other additions rolling out as part of today’s updates include new safety resources for parents in the app’s Parents Guide and educational material for teens that will better explain what it means to have a public account on the app, and encourage them to choose private options.

Image Credits: Instagram

The launch timing here is notable, as TikTok has recently focused on making its platform safer for teens — not only with the changes to its default settings, but also with the addition of parental controls last year. The company last year took the unusual step of bundling a parental control mechanism directly into its app that lets a parent link to a child’s TikTok account to control their profile’s privacy, what they’re allowed to do on the app, and even which feed they can view. The company has continued to expand these controls following their launch, indicating that it considers these core features. By making privacy and parental controls a key part of the experience, the app is more likely to be blessed by parents who would otherwise restrict their teens’ social media access — and that helps TikTok grow its user base and teens’ time spent in the app, sometimes at Instagram’s expense.