Author: azeeadmin

Spain’s government has reached an agreement with trade unions and business associations over labor reforms that will see delivery platform couriers recognized as employees, it said today.

Once such a law is passed, the development could have major ramifications for platforms operating in the market — which include the likes of Deliveroo, Glovo and UberEats, to name a few.

“The Ministry of Labor and Social Economy, the trade union organizations CCOO and UGT and the business organizations CEOE and CEPYME have reached an agreement to establish the employment status of workers dedicated to the delivery or distribution of any consumer product or merchandise through platforms digital,” the ministry said in a statement (which we’ve translated from Spanish)

“The agreement recognizes the presumption of employment of workers who provide services through digital delivery platforms, in line with the Supreme Court ruling,” it added.

“The presumption of employment is recognized for workers who provide paid distribution services through companies that manage this work through algorithmic management of the service or working conditions, through a digital platform.”

 

Agreement on the reform means the government can now start to move forward with the legislative process after many months negotiating on exactly how to change labor laws.

The timing looks especially interesting as the European Union is also considering how to improve conditions for gig workers more broadly — so Spain’s plan to legislate, ahead of other EU countries, to recognize a subset of gig workers as employees could be influential in shaping wider regional policy.

Wider reforms in Spain aimed at supporting growth of digital business also come with a strong social inclusion component, with the government saying no one should be left behind in a drive to modernize.

The labor reform agreement follows a number of legal challenges in Spain in recent years over the classification of delivery riders. There have been varying outcomes in the courts but last year Spain’s Supreme Court ruled against homegrown delivery platform, Glovo, in a case relating to the employment classification of a courier — putting a stamp of finality on the matter as it also declined to refer questions to Europe’s top court.

Delivery platforms in the market have suggested the impact of the planned reform could result in thousands of couriers losing their source of income.

Up to 30,000 couriers are reported to provide services on delivery platforms in Spain.

There have also been accusations that platforms are being unfairly singled out as a politically easier target vs other more established industries which also rely on labor provided by ‘autónomos‘ (self-employed) workers.

However delivery startups have been less vocal about what a legal requirement to put couriers on the payroll would mean for their business model — or, indeed, their (ongoing) quest for profitability.

Responding to news of Spain’s labor reform agreement, Mark Tluszcz, CEO at Mangrove Capital Partners — who has been a long time critic of the gig platform business model — told TechCrunch: “We have long taken the view that gig platforms would have to go through significant structural changes driven by individual countries’ laws. Unless gig workers are recognized as employees, we risk creating a subclass of workers that don’t have adequate rights or social coverage. The pandemic has clearly illustrated the need to ensure all workers have protections and it is increasingly difficult for gig platforms to argue otherwise.”

Workers must see algorithmic workings

In an interesting additional component to the reform agreement announced today, the government said the incoming legislation will require that workers’ legal representatives are informed of the criteria powering any algorithms or AI systems that are used to manage them and which may affect their working conditions.

Its statement specifies that this includes algorithmic systems that are related to access to employment and for any rating systems that monitor performance or profile workers.

This component looks like it’s taking inspiration from a number of recent legal challenges in Europe which have focused on ride-hailing platforms’ algorithmic management and drives’ access to data the platforms hold on them.

James Farrer, a former Uber driver who successfully challenged the company’s employment classification in the UK — where the Supreme Court recently held that the challenging drivers are workers — and who is also involved in the more recent algorithm and data access challenges, has set up a not-for-profit with the aim of establishing a data trust for drivers for the purpose of collective bargaining.

Spain’s unions appear to be taking a similar tack by pushing for access to the algorithmic rules that are used to manage couriers as a tool to tackle the power asymmetry between platforms and workers.

A spokesperson for Uber sent us this statement in response to the Spanish government’s announcement:

“Over the past few weeks, thousands of couriers across the country have come together to stand against this proposed regulation that would deprive them from the independence they value most. At Uber, we are fully committed to raising the standard of work and giving independent workers more benefits while preserving flexibility and control. We want to work with all relevant parties across Spain to improve independent work, instead of eliminating it.”

Deliveroo also sent us this statement:

“This proposal goes against the interests of riders who value flexible work, restaurants who benefit from delivery services and customers who value on-demand delivery. Thousands of riders who took to the streets to protest their desire to remain self-employed have had their voices ignored.

“Delivery platforms have put forward constructive proposals to enable riders to work flexibly with additional security and have warned that forced reclassification will lead to less work for riders, will hurt the restaurant sector and will restrict the areas where platforms can operate. Unfortunately these messages have also been overlooked.

“Nothing has been finalised and we will continue to argue that the Government should provide riders with flexibility and security, which is what they want. We will continue to engage with the Spanish Government to seek alternative ways forward. We urge the Government to listen to riders and urgently think again.”

Glovo declined to make a statement at this time.

In recent weeks, Uber has been lobbying for deregulation for platform workers in Europe ahead of the EU’s consultation process on improving gig work — seeing the possibility of a pan-EU framework as an opportunity to reshape regional employment rules to better mesh with modern working patterns. However the move has led to criticism that it’s trying to lower EU standards.

 

In just a few hours, we’re going to (virtually) meet up in the Magic City, Miami. Since we first let you know about our new Spotlight series, we’ve gotten a ton of registrations and some amazing submissions for our pitch-off.

The small event features three segments: networking, a pitch-off, and a fireside chat with Rebecca Danta, Managing Director of Miami Angels, and Brian Brackeen, General Partner of Lightship Capital. Everyone is welcome to attend today’s event, but it’s specifically programmed to help and highlight those in the Miami region.

Register here. It’s free.

Meet Our TechCrunch City Spotlight: Miami Pitch-Off Companies and Judges

We had to go through some fantastic submissions to get the five that will pitch their companies to our judges today. We think you’ll agree that Miami’s best have come out in full force.

First, let’s meet the companies:

• Evan Leaphart will be presenting his unique approach to helping kids learn how real-life actions lead to financial consequences with Kiddie Kredit
• Lacey Kaelani has been a casting pro for years. How are things still done through Craigslist ads and hacked together databases? No idea. Casting Depot aims to solve that problem.
• Samella Watson, founder of Sebiya, will remind us that when travelling where you stay is more than just a place to sleep.
• Dan Saltman has seen people from all walks of life try to handle the footprint that social media leaves in their wake. Sometimes, you want to start over. Redact is the tool to do it with.
• D Marie Thompson has a very personal story when it comes to nursing and she founded MyRa to solve a problem that affected her and her colleagues.

The three judges that have the difficult task of picking a winner and runner-up are:

• Alexis Alston, Senior Associate at Lightship Capital
• Patty Wexler, Managing Director at Starlight Ventures,
• Laura González-Estéfani, Founder and CEO of TheVentureCity

Each company will get four minutes to present and then the judges will have a few minutes to ask questions. After all of the companies have pitched, the judges will get five minutes to decide who takes the crown of first-ever TechCrunch City Spotlight Pitch-Off champion.

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Not in Miami? Don’t worry. TechCrunch is bringing this series of free events to other cities across the United States and abroad. In the coming weeks, we’ll have similar events in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and others as TechCrunch digs deep into growing tech scenes outside of Silicon Valley.

Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new support option for its Premium Support customers that run mission-critical services on its platform. The new service, imaginatively dubbed Mission Critical Services (MCS), brings Google’s own experience with Site Reliability Engineering to its customers. This is not Google completely taking over the management of these services, though. Instead, the company describes it as a “consultative offering in which we partner with you on a journey toward readiness.”

Initially, Google will work with its customers to improve — or develop — the architecture of their apps and help them instrument the right monitoring systems and controls, as well as help them set and raise their service-level objectives (a key feature in the Site Reliability Engineering philosophy).

Later, Google will also provide ongoing check-ins with its engineers and walk customers through tune-ups architecture reviews. “Our highest tier of engineers will have deep familiarity with your workloads, allowing us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, delivering the fastest response in the industry. For example, if you have any issues–24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week–we’ll spin up a live war room with our experts within five minutes,” Google Cloud’s VP for Customer Experience, John Jester, explains in today’s announcement.

This new offering is another example of how Google Cloud is trying to differentiate itself from the rest of the large cloud providers. Its emphasis today is on providing the high-touch service experiences that were long missing from its platform, with a clear emphasis on the needs of large enterprise customers. That’s what Thomas Kurian promised to do when he became the organization’s CEO and he’s clearly following through.

 

Facebook is expanding its monetization options for video creators. For anyone watching videos posted by those creators, that probably means you’ll see more ads.

Facebook App Monetization Director Yoav Arnstein wrote in a blog post that creators will now be able to include in-stream ads in videos that are as short as one minute — previously, the minimum was three minutes. Those ads will usually play after 30 seconds of a shorter video.

“Looking ahead, we’re exploring in-stream ad formats that increase engagement through rewards or product interaction — intending to help content creator payouts grow while providing a good viewing experience for people and a way for advertisers to reach relevant audiences,” Arnstein wrote, adding that the company is “especially focused on short-form video monetization” and will be testing a way to include ads that look like stickers to Facebook Stories.

Facebook splits the revenue from these ads with the video creators, and it says it’s also updating the program criteria. To participate, Facebook Pages must  nowhave 600,000 minutes of viewing time across all videos (previously only videos of three minutes or longer had counted) for the last 60 days and five or more active or Live videos.

On the Live side, Arnstein wrote that Facebook is moving its in-stream advertising program out of invite-only mode, allowing creators with 60,000 minutes of Live viewing in the last 60 days to participate. And it will be investing $7 million to encourage the adoption of Stars (a virtual currency that fans can use to support creators) by offering free Stars.

Non-advertising products are also continuing their international rollout. Arnstein wrote that paid online events (launched last summer) are available in 20 countries, with plans to expand to 24 more (including Argentina, Hong Kong and Ireland) in the coming weeks, while fan subscriptions are available in more than 25 countries and will be introduced in another 10 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey).

“It seems quite odd that no one has built the SpaceX equivalent for the ocean,” Anthony DiMare tells TechCrunch. “There’s no big, modern technology company that fits the space yet.”

DiMare cofounded Bedrock Ocean Exploration last year, with Charles Chiau. The latter brought a depth of robotics expertise to the space, while DiMare has experience with the oceans. His previous company, Nautilus Labs, which specialized in ocean fleet logistical planning, raised an $11 million Series A back 2019.

After leave the startup, DiMare says he met up with Chiau at San Francisco diner, where the pair discussed the challenges and opportunities in mapping the ocean floor. Today Bedrock is announcing that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Quiet Capital, and R7.

The company notes that more than 80% of the ocean remains unmapped. And those parts that have been are often at fairly low resolution. As the CEO puts it in a press release tied this morning’s news, “A far greater percentage of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been mapped and studied than our own ocean floor has.”

The funding will go toward developing partnerships and building out the company’s robotics and cloud platforms. The team, which currently includes some participants from the recent Shel-sponsored X Prize ocean floor competition should be expanding, as well.

Among the chief uses for the technology is lying undersea cable. “As of now, it’s done in basically a one-off basis,” says DiMare. “I know that if I need to lay a cable between the United States and China, I’m going to guestimate the most efficient route and do a survey over that area and hope that it generally returns information that I need to lay a cable. But if I find something, I need to reroute it.”

Off-shore wind farms are major potential growth category for the company as well. “Right now we’re not working any oil companies,” says DiMare. “We didn’t know if we were going to have to go down that route. Thankfully, offshore wind has just absolutely exploded. There’s just so much work to be done in the offshore wind space that we can literally just focus on that.”

If there were any doubt about a cryptocurrency boom, we need look no further than at the explosion of growth of certain companies in the space.

One such company is BlockFi, which today announced it has closed on a massive $350 million Series D funding that values it at $3 billion. While this news in and of itself is certainly attention-getting, it’s even more impressive when you consider the startup just raised a $50 million Series C last August at a $450 million valuation. The latest financing brings its total equity raised since inception to about $450 million, with the company raising $100 million across its seed and Series C rounds.

Zac Prince — who comes from a background in consumer lending —  founded BlockFi with Flori Marquez in 2017. The Jersey City, New Jersey-based startup raised $1.6 million in a seed round of funding that closed in 2018 and was led by ConsenSys Ventures and included participation from SoFi.  

Prince describes BlockFi as a financial services company for crypto market investors that offers a retail and institutional-facing suite of products. On the retail side of its platform, people can use its mobile app to earn a yield on their crypto holdings (6% on Bitcoin, 8.6% on stablecoins), buy and sell crypto and get low-cost loans secured by the value of their crypto portfolio “so they can get liquidity without selling,” he said. Specifically, clients can buy and sell digital assets (from Bitcoin, Ethereum and Link to Litecoin, PaxG and multiple stablecoins) directly on BlockFi.

The startup is also a lender and provider of trade execution services to institutions participating in digital asset markets. 

It’s a model that seems to be working in a big way. Since the end of 2019, BlockFi has seen its client base grow from 10,000 to more than 225,000. Today, BlockFi has 265,000 funded retail clients and over 200 institutional clients.

And it’s lent over $10 billion to its retail, corporate and institutional clients.

Over the past year, BlockFi has also accomplished the following:

• Increased the number of assets on its platform to $15 billion, compared to $1 billion last March — with a 0% loss rate across its lending portfolio since inception.
• Bumped its monthly revenue to over $50 million, up from $1.5 million a year prior.
• Boosted its headcount to about 530 people, compared to 100 last March.

“In less than six months since we completed our Series C, Bitcoin and other digital assets have assumed a central role in many investors’ portfolios and in broader financial markets,” Prince said. “Our conviction that digital assets are the future of finance has been vindicated by our client base, which grew 10 times year over year in 2020 and has more than doubled since the end of 2020.”

New investor Bain Capital Ventures, partners of DST Global, Pomp Investments and Tiger Global co-led the Series D, which included participation from a slew of other firms including existing backer Valar Ventures, Breyer Capital, Susquehanna Government Products, Jump Capital and Paradigm, among many others. BlockFi employees who have been employed for more than one year have the opportunity to receive liquidity on a portion of their equity via a secondary tender offer as part of the financing round.  

BlockFi believes that investor enthusiasm for the Series D round reflects both the company’s strong business growth, as well as “broader conviction in cryptocurrencies as an asset class.” 

“Individual investors, institutional asset managers and corporate treasury departments are all exploring avenues to invest in cryptocurrencies,” the company said.

“Our goal for BlockFi has always been for it to facilitate cryptocurrencies going mainstream – and each day provides more evidence that is exactly what is occurring,” said Marquez, who serves as the company’s SVP of operations.

Bain Capital Ventures Partner Stefan Cohen agrees. He believes there are currently limited banking services available for crypto holders, which puts BlockFi in an opportune position.

“Bitcoin has already eclipsed $1 trillion in market cap and is likely headed higher to fulfill its store of value promise. As wealth accumulates to BTC holders, most will look for ways to earn yield or borrow against their holdings for more traditional asset purchases such as homes, cars and education,” he wrote via email. “BlockFi stands alone as the leader in bringing simple, secure, everyday financial services to cryptocurrency holders.”

The startup’s exponential growth over the past year proves “there was clearly a huge need for BlockFi’s services,” Cohen said.

“Their vision was to build an easy-to-use, trusted platform to bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream, and they’ve truly succeeded,” he added.

Meanwhile, Cohen said Bain Capital has had a long-term thesis on Bitcoin becoming a store of value and has actively invested in “picks-and-shovels businesses” that enable what is now a $1 trillion-plus market. 

“Trusted financial services are a critical pillar of the space, and we view it as a highly strategic component of the market,” he added.

Looking ahead, the startup has plans to launch in the second quarter a Bitcoin Rewards Credit Card, which will give BlockFi clients the ability to earn Bitcoin cash back on every transaction. It plans to use the new capital to continue growing its product suite, expand into new global markets and for strategic acquisitions. The company also plans to double its headcount by year’s end, according to Prince.

BlockFi already has a global presence and retail clients in over 100 countries. Last year, it opened institutional client service offices in London and Singapore.  This year, the startup is looking to add regional support in Europe, APAC and LatAm for its retail clients. 

Over the past week, BlockFi was making headlines for other reasons. The company was the victim of an “unusual assault” on March 7 when an attacker spammed the platform with fake sign-ups and abusive language.

To that end, the company acknowledges that it became aware that an unauthorized third party began attempting bulk sign-ups on its platform on March 7.

“We do not know the origin of the email addresses used for these ‘sign-ups’  but they did not come from us and they were not the emails of BlockFi clients,” the company told TechCrunch. “In general, we would characterize the event as vulgar spam’ and the total number of valid emails affected was less than 1,000.”

The company maintains that no data from BlockFi was accessed and its data was not compromised.  

“Our clients’ funds and data were safeguarded throughout the incident,” the company added. “Since then, our engineering and security teams have taken steps to prevent events like this from happening in the future. In addition, we reached out directly to all of the valid email recipients to apologize for the incident.”

Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A. Led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures and featuring Accel and Reinvent Capital, the round will go toward helping the company essentially double its headcount this year.

Founded by former Stanford PhD student Simon Kalouche, the system utilizes deep imitation learning – a popular concept in robotics research that helps systems map and improve through imitation.

“Instead of letting it sit in a lab for five years and creating this robotic application before it’s finally ready to deploy to the real world, we deployed it today,” says Kalouche. “It’s not fully autonomous – it’s autonomous maybe 90, 95% of the time. The other 5-10% is assisted by remote human operators, but it’s reliable on day one, and it’s reliable on day 10,000.”

Nimble is one in a long list of robotics companies to get a boast from Covid-19. The pandemic has driven both explosive growth in ecommerce and interest in automation, contributing to a significant excitement around the warehouse fulfillment tech. Nimble has also benefited from the rapid deployment of its systems.

“We’re not the first robotic pick, place and pack company that’s out there. We’ve grown really fast and have a lot of robots deployed in production,” Kalouche tells TechCrunch. “A lot of people have robots in the corner of a warehouse. Right now, we have heaps of robots deployed, and we’re growing really quickly. These are robots that are in production and picking tens of thousands of real orders every single day for each of our customers.”

In addition to the large funding round, the company is also adding two impressive names to its Board of Directors: Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Fei-Fei Li and Kitty Hawk/Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun.

“Nimble addresses both reliability and integration concerns,” Li, who’s also a seed investor, said in a release tied to the news. “Their robots have been picking reliably in production, at scale for over a year for some of the world’s largest retailers. They’ve developed an AI-powered product that makes integration fast and frictionless for their retail customers.”

Scott Galloway, the New York University professor, author, and tech entrepreneur, is taking the wraps off a $30 million Series A round for his newest company, Section4, a platform for business “upskilling” that has now raised $37 million altogether.

The company is premised on the belief that millions of workers need help to stay competitive and employable, yet not all have access to, or interest in, costly graduate school programs. In fact, Section4 thinks more affordable “sprints” — or two- to three-long week courses taught by prominent professors from top schools that can also be mind expanding — is the way to go.

Whether that thesis proves out remains to be seen, but Section4 — whose new round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Learn Capital and GSV Ventures — says early indications are good and that it already has 10,000 alums from dozens of countries.

We talked with Galloway yesterday about who, specifically, Section4 aims to serve, what percentage of its students is outside the U.S., and how universities feel about their professors participating in a startup that could eat into their own revenue. Excerpts from that chat follow, edited lightly for length.

TC: Why start this company?

SG: Graduate education was transformative in my life, and I enjoy teaching, and we thought there was an opportunity — because of the pandemic and changing behaviors — to start an online ed concept that tried to deliver 50% to 70% of the value of an elite MBA elective at 10% of the cost and 1% of the friction.

TC: Is this competition then for shorter executive MBA programs?

SG: I would say not even exec MBAs, because part-time MBAs  get a certification that is still incredibly valuable in the marketplace. And we don’t offer that. It’s somewhat competitive [instead] with executive education, the bring-50-people-from-Pfizer-in-for-two-days-and-charge-a-bunch-of-money-and- have-them-eat-lunch-together-on-campus-in-Palo Alto-and-throw-some-professors-at-them-for-some learning. I would argue that we’re competitive with that. It’s incredibly expensive, both financially but just trying to gather 40 or 50 executives.

Also, quite frankly, it’s a little bit exclusionary because a company like Verizon can only send 100 people to Wharton’s exec ed, and we’re hoping that we can run thousands of people from these companies through our programs.

TC: So these are companies that are your customers, not individuals seeking betterment for themselves.

SG: It’s both. The funnel is: organically people sign up. And the idea is that the course costs $700, $800 versus $7,000, which is what it costs to take an elective at an elite business school right now. So for example, 120 people have organically, individually signed up on their own who work at Google. Then our expectation is that over time, these companies will approach us and say, ‘We would like to buy a certain number of seats or a membership that covers 100 or 1,000 of our employees.’

TC: You say Section4 has already taught 10,000 students; when did you start offering your programming?

SG: In March of last year. Our first course had 300 people; the course I just wrapped up had 1,500, so it scales pretty well.

What’s different about it is our completion rates, which are 70%-plus. The curse of online ed is that completion rates are really low because video doesn’t capture people or create an intensity, and we try to be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous, so [there is] project work and teams, live streams with the professor, and live one-on-one sessions with a TA. It’s meant to hold people accountable and engage them.

TC: You’re promising students access to top professors like yourself. How do the schools for which they teach feel about this? They’re perhaps helping build the brand of the school, but are there also competitive concerns?

SG: For some yes, for some no. Some universities have asked their faculty to take a pause and not engage in any type of relationship like this, but some universities embrace it. Several students who have taken our course have sent us messages saying they are now going to apply to a full-time MBA program because they see the value and they want the certification. So I’m not sure it’s purely complimentary, but it’s also not purely competitive.

TC: What is your economic relationship with these professors?

SG: I’m not going to disclose the exact economic agreement. What I will say is that we see attracting these superstars and retaining them as key to our value proposition. And so our aim is that this is the greatest compensation per podium hour that they’re going to receive. If you have a course with 800 people, and they’re each paying $800, that’s $640,000. As you can imagine, there is a lot of gross margin capital that can be deployed or can be paid to the professor.

TC: Are most of the students gravitating to this platform coming from inside or outside of the tech industry?

SG: Fifty of the Fortune 100 [companies] have people who’ve taken our class so far, and it’s all walks. It’s pharma, it’s big AG, it’s big tech, it’s big oil. I would say we probably overindex in tech because these organizations are generous in terms of giving employees tuition remission, and I think, to a certain extent, my brand is bigger in the tech community and initially, that was kind of the awareness we had.

The other big cohort is middle-market companies, 10- to 500-people companies where a director there either didn’t have the opportunity or the inclination to go back to business school, but still would like a taste of supply chain from an MIT professor.

TC: What percentage of your students are outside the U.S.?

SG: I think it’s about 30% international. We have every continent covered.

We also try to reserve at least 10% of our class for scholarships. We have a rigorous scholarship process, where you send us an email saying you can’t afford it, and you get a scholarship. And a lot of our scholarships go to people internationally, because $800 in Rwanda is real money.

With prices ranging from $15 to $50, the strawberries grown by the vertical farming startup Oishii aren’t going to be found in just any grocery store.

Instead, the nearly five year-old startup is taking what its co-founder Hiroki Koga called the Tesla approach and targeting the highest end of the market in a New York City — a place where culinary decadence is de rigueur. 

“First of all our product. It’s almost a completely different cultivar. It has higher levels of sweetness and aroma — about two to three more times sweetness in our strawberries. People are paying for that extra experience,” Koga said. 

The approach is working, with the company sold out of all of its crop for the foreseeable future, Koga said. Oishii (which means “delicious” in Japanese) has also managed to convince investors, raising $50 million in financing so that it can expand its take on the vertical farming business.

The market is already fairly crowded with bigger, better financed startups including Bowery Farms (whose facility is steps away from Oishii’s growing space in Kearny, NJ) and Plenty, so what brought an investment firm backed by some of Japan’s biggest businesses (Toyota Motor Corporation and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation) from Oishii’s farm to the negotiating table?

To hear Koga tell it, it was the strawberries.

“Strawberries have been said to be the holy grail of vertical farming. It takes five to ten times longer to do a complete R&D cycle for a strawberry. You need to nail every single growing step,” Koga said. “I’ve been in this industry for a long time since it emerged in Japan. Cracking the code for strawberries has been my personal dream.”

So SPARX’s Mirai fund, which includes investments from Toyota, Sumitomo and the asset management firm SPARX, joined investors like the Sony Innovation Fund, PKSHA Technology, Social Starts, and several prominent angel investors to pour $50 million into the company. 

“Oishii is the farm of the future,” said SPARX Group Co. President and Group CEO Shuhei Abe. “The cultivation and pollination techniques the company has developed set them well apart from the industry, positioning Oishii to quickly revolutionize agriculture as we know it.”

Koga has been thinking about vertical farming for nearly his entire professional career. First exposed to the industry as a young consultant with Deloitte back in the early part of the new millennia, Koga moved to the U.S. to pursue an MBA at Berkeley in 2015. It was just as the vertical farming industry was beginning to take off in the U.S. and Koga found investment firms tapping him to do due diligence on the emerging businesses coming into the market.

From that work, Koga knew the time was ripe to bring a new model to market, so he set about to launch Oishii. A mutual friend introduced him to his co-founder and Oishii’s chief operating officer, Brendan Sommerville, who was pursuing an MBA at UCLA at the time, and Oishii was born.

The thesis was to bring Japanese quality produce to the U.S. and starting with bespoke strawberries would offer the company a path to profitability on a potentially more accelerated timeframe than its competitors, Koga said.

“The problem the industry is facing is the commercial viability of the business model,” Koga said. “We have to start with a crop that is profitable and when i thought about what could that be, I thought Japanese strawberries are a truly unique product that people will pay a premium for.”

The two moved East to prove out their thesis because New York represented a branding and culinary capital for the two West Coasters.

“We wanted to launch a very strong brand and a very differentiated product we wanted to launch in a place with a very strong culinary culture,” Koga said. “When it comes to strawberry literally everything is shipped from California and a little bit from Florida we wanted to prove that we could do this locally and have strong demand in New York.”

The city’s top chefs have been eating up the company’s “omakase” berry since it first cropped up back in 2018.  Dominique Ansel, the Instagram-famous pastry chef who invented the cronut, love them. So do the folks behind the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare (now in Manhattan) where a full meal with wine will run a couple roughly $1300.

With its new $50 million harvest, Oishii’s going to expand production to reach more domestic and international markets, Koga said. And the company plans to expand into other cultivars.

“The omakase berries are the ‘Roadsters’, but we actually have the model s and the model three in the pipeline already,” Koga said. “We want to make this accessible to everybody.” 

That means expanding from the company’s current facility, which is roughly the size of a few tennis courts, to another location (also in Kearny), which Koga said will be roughly the size of a football field.

Vertical farms pose an interesting opportunity for all sorts of investors, and Koga theorized that there could be alternative financing models for Oishii as the company proves out its technology at scale.

Technologically, Oishii centers its vertical farms around the pollinators that strawberries need to fertilize their plants. That means it’s basically built around a massive beehive.

“The entire hive lives inside our farm. We’ve optimized the whole environment not just for strawberries but for the bees,” Koga said. That means the company could potentially expand its indoor cultivation to other pollinated fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, melons, and grapes, etc. [and] most of the vegetables.. If we apply the bee pollination technology to any of these crops, then it’s a matter can we conquer each of those [other cultivation] steps.”

Beyond the bees, Oishii is doubling down on automation through the development of proprietary berry picking technologies.

“What we realized quickly is that it’s probably faster if we develop it ourselves,” Koga said of the company’s robots. “We got our prototype of a harvesting robot in a matter of two months. The visual recognition went very quickly [because it was indoors].”

The company also operates as a carbon neutral business, according to Koga. The company offsets its energy consumption and plans to be going all renewable at its next growing location. “It is our intent to keep on growing like that so there’s nothing we’re doing [in farming] that’s worse,” he said.

SpaceX now has 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit – it launched its latest full complement of the internet broadband spacecraft early this morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Just last Thursday, SpaceX launched its last batch of 60, and this past week it also confirmed that it’s expanding its beta of the Starlink internet service to additional markets around the world, including Germany and New Zealand.

This is the 21st Starlink launch overall, and the sixth this year, with as many as three more launches tentatively planned for later this month, weather and schedule permitting. The simple reason it’s pursuing such an aggressive launch pace is that the more satellites it adds to its constellation in low-Earth orbit, the more customers it can sign up and serve. Starlink is currently in beta, but it’s now open to anyone to sign up depending on geography, with SpaceX taking a deposit and offering a rough timeline on projected availability.

So far, Starlink service is open to people in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Germany and New Zealand, but the plan is to achieve “near global coverage of the populated world” by the end of this year. Adding satellites to the constellation not only helps expand geographic reach, but also improves network performance. SpaceX says that currently, the beta should provide speeds ranging from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s, with latency falling between 20ms to 40ms, but that both of those metrics should improve over the coming months as more spacecraft join the network, and as SpaceX rolls out additional ground stations.

Already, there are anecdotal reports that Starlink’s service bests the competition in rural and hard-to-reach areas where ground infrastructure for alternative services like cellular internet, or legacy satellite from geosynchronous spacecraft-based networks have been disappointing.

This launch also included a successful controlled landing of the booster used to propel the Falcon 9 rocket that carried the Starlink satellites to orbit. SpaceX landed the first stage, which flew previously on five missions, including SpaceX’s first human spaceflight mission, back at its autonomous drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean.