Author: azeeadmin

Spotify today announced its plans to roll out a new high-end subscription service, called Spotify HiFi, along with other new features and updates, including a new podcast morning show, content deals, and features for creators. Spotify HiFi will launch later this year to Spotify Premium subscribers in select global markets, allowing them to listen to music in “CD-quality, lossless audio format.”

The news was first announced at Spotify’s online event, “Stream On.”

The company said high-quality music streaming has consistently been one of users’ most-requested features, and touted the power of high-quality audio — even by roping in Billie Eilish to make comments on Spotify’s behalf during the livestreamed event.

Spotify also said the HiFi service service will work across devices, including on Spotify Connect-enabled speakers. It also said it’s working with some of the world’s biggest speaker manufacturers to make Spotify HiFi accessible to more fans via Spotify Connect.

But Spotify’s news was light on the details users will really want to know — like pricing, launch date or even which markets will support the new subscription at launch. We understand the subscription will be priced higher than the Premium offering, obviously, by the exact price will vary by market. It will also be marketed as a Premium “add-on.”

The company today also offered an update on its existing artist programs, noting that it had added 76,000 artists to playlists for the first time and highlighted 175 up-and-coming artists through its Radar program, which offers editorial and marketing support. It highlighted, too, how artists were using newer tools like Enhanced Albums, and its Stories feature, Clips, which it says will soon roll out to more artists.

And it touted plans to significantly expand access to its service’s global footprint, saying that, over the next few days, it will expand to new markets that will allow it to reach more than a billion people worldwide, nearly half of whom are already using the internet.

On the podcasts side, Spotify announced a new morning show, “The Get Up,” and a new multi-year content deal with the Russo Brothers.

On its podcast creation app, Anchor, Spotify said it’s partnering with WordPress to turn text into audio, add video to their podcasts, and access new interactive features like polls and Q&As in order to add real-time communication with fans to their shows.

More to come…

TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Oslo and Norway will capture how the country is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic.

We’d like to know how Norway’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.

https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/

For example, here is the recent survey of London.

You are not in Norway, but would like to take part? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your country next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.

The survey is covering almost every country on in the Union for the Mediterranean, so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

(Please note: Filling out the survey is not a guarantee of inclusion in the final published piece).

I’ve piloted Spot a number of ways in a number of different settings. I had the chance to control the robot for the first time at one of our Robotics events a number of years back, and drove one around an obstacle course at Boston Dynamics’ headquarters. More recently, I navigated it via web browser as a test of the robot’s new remote interface.

But a recent test drive was different. For one thing, it wasn’t officially sanctioned by Boston Dynamics. Of course, the highly sophisticated quadrupedal robot has been out in the world for a while, and a few enterprising souls have begun to offer a remote Spot walking experience through the streets of San Francisco.

The latest project form MSCHF isn’t that. That should come as no surprise, of course. The Brooklyn-based company is never that straightforward. It’s the same organization that gave us the “pirate radio” streaming service All The Streams.FM and that wild Amazon Echo ultrasonic jammer. More than anything, their events are comments — on privacy, on consumerism or this case, a kind of dystopian foreshadowing of what robotics might become.

Like the rest of the world, the company was fascinated when Boston Dynamics put Spot up for sale — but unlike most of us, MSCHF actually managed to cobble together $75,000 to buy one.

And then it mounted a paintball gun to its back.

Image Credits: MSCHF

Starting Wednesday, users will be able to pilot a Spot unit through MSCHF’s site, and fire off a paintball gun in a closed setting. The company calls it “Spot’s Rampage.”

“The stream will start Wednesday at 1 PM EST,” MSCHF’s Daniel Greenberg told TechCrunch. “We will have a four-camera livestream going and as long as you’re on the site on your phone, you will have an equal chance of being able to control Spot, and every two minutes the driver will change. It should go for a few hours.”

Ahead of the launch of Spot’s web portal, the company built an API to remotely control both Spot’s SDK and the paintball gun mounted to the robot’s back. It’s a setup Boston Dynamics isn’t particularly thrilled with. Understandably so. For a company that has long been dealing with the blowback of cautionary science fiction like Black Mirror, the optics of a third-party mounting a gun — even one that shoots paint — are less than ideal.

Boston Dynamics tells TechCrunch that it was interested in working with the company early on.

“They came to us with the idea that they were going to do a creative project with Spot,” a rep told TechCrunch. “They’re a creative group of guys, who have done a bunch of creative things. In our conversations, we said that if you want to cooperate with us, we want to make it clear that the robots will not be used in any way that hurts people.”

Boston Dynamics balked when paintball gun entered the conversation. On Friday, it issued the following statement through Twitter:

Today we learned that an art group is planning a spectacle to draw attention to a provocative use of our industrial robot, Spot. To be clear, we condemn the portrayal of our technology in any way that promotes violence, harm, or intimidation. Our mission is to create and deliver surprisingly capable robots that inspire, delight & positively impact society. We take great care to make sure our customers intend to use our robots for legal uses. We cross-check every purchase request against the U.S. Government’s denied persons and entities lists, prior to authorizing a sale.

In addition, all buyers must agree to our Terms and Conditions of Sale, which state that our products must be used in compliance with the law, and cannot be used to harm or intimidate people or animals. Any violation of our Terms of Sale will automatically void the product’s warranty and prevent the robot from being updated, serviced, repaired or replaced. Provocative art can help push useful dialogue about the role of technology in our daily lives. This art, however, fundamentally misrepresents Spot and how it is being used to benefit our daily lives.

The statement is in line with the language in Spot’s contract, which prohibits using the robot to do anything illegal, or to intimidate or harm people. The company says it does additional “due diligence” with potential customers, including background checks.

Image Credits: MSCHF

The application is something of a gray area where Boston Dynamics is concerned. MSCHF approached the robotics company with its idea and Boston Dynamics balked, believing it wasn’t in-line with the stated mission for the quadrupedal robots. The official Spot’s Rampage site notes:

We talked with Boston Dynamics and they HATED [emphasis theirs] this idea. They said they would give us another TWO Spots for FREE if we took the gun off. That just made us want to do this even more and if our Spot stops working just know they have a backdoor override built into each and every one of these little robots.

Boston Dynamics says the company’s “understanding of the interaction” is “inaccurate.”

“We get approached by marketing opportunities all the time to create a really fantastic and compelling experience,” the company adds. “Selling one robot is not that interesting. Creating an amazing interactive experience is really compelling for us. One of the things they pitched to us was an interactive idea. It’s an expensive robot and they wanted to create an interactive experience where anybody can control the robot. We thought that was super cool and compelling.”

Boston Dynamics says it pitched the idea of using Spot’s robot arm to paint the physical space with a brush, rather than using the paintball gun. The company also offered to send technicians to the site to help maintain the robot during the stream, along with a few models as back up.

MSCHF’s inclusion of the paintball gun is, ultimately, about more than simply painting the canvas. The image of the robot with a gun — even one that only shoots paint — is menacing. And that’s kind of the point.

“It’s easy to look at these robots dance and cavort and see them as cute semi-sentient little friends,” says Greenberg. “They’re endearing when they mess up and fall over. We’ve adopted the trappings of that scenario by creating a ‘bull-in-a-china-shop’ scenario. Still, it’s worth remembering the big versions of Spot [Big Dog] were explicitly military mules, and that their public deployments tend to be by city agencies and law enforcement. At the end of the day, Spot is a terrestrial UAV – when you get to drive this robot and experience the thrill of pulling the trigger your adrenaline spikes — but, we hope, a few minutes later you feel a distinct chill. Anyone in their right mind knows these little cuties will kill people sooner or later.”

While early Boston Dynamics robots were, indeed, funded by DARPA for use as transport vehicles, the company is quick to distance itself from even the remotest hint of ominous imagery. Boston Dynamics came under fire from the ACLU after showcasing footage of a Spot being used in Massachusetts State police drills onstage at a TechCrunch robotics event.

Image Credits: MSCHF

The company told TechCrunch at the time:

Right now we’re at a scale where we can pick and choose the partners we engage with and make sure that they have a similar deployment and a vision for how robots are used. For example, not using robots in a way that would physically harm or intimidate people. But also have a realistic expectation for what a robot can and cannot do.

As MSCHF prepares to launch its event, the company is echoing those sentiments.

“I turned down a customer that wanted to use Spot for a haunted house,” Boston Dynamics tells TechCrunch. “Even putting it in that context of using our technology to scare people was not within our terms of use and not how we imagined the product being beneficial for people, and so we declined that initial sale. Had this concept been brought to us while we were in the initial sales discussions, we probably would have said, ‘there’s Arduino quadruped that you could easily put this activation together. Go do that. This isn’t representative of how we view our technology being used.’ ”

Image Credits: MSCHF

But the question of whether the company can put the toothpaste back in the tube remains. In cases of violations of the Terms of Service, the company can opt not to renew the license, which effectively deactivates it the next time a firmware update is due. Other cases could essentially void the warranty, meaning the company won’t service it.

A paintball gun being fired in a closed space likely doesn’t fall under harm, intimidation or illegal activity, however. So it’s not entirely clear whether Boston Dynamics has a direct course of action in this case.

“This is something we’re evaluating now, around this particular use case,” Boston Dynamics says. “We do have other terms of service in there, regarding modification of the robot in a way that makes it unsafe. We’re trying to understand what the implications are.”

Boston Dynamics (whose sale to Hyundai is expected to close in June) has devoted a good deal of time to showcasing the various tasks the robot can perform, from routine inspections at hazard sites to the complex dance moves it’s performed in a recent viral video. MSCHF’s primary — and, really, only — use is an interactive art piece.

“To be honest, we don’t have any further plans [for the robot],” says Greenberg. “I know we won’t do another drop with it as we do not do repeats so we will just have to get really creative. Maybe a waking cup holder.”

A new market forecast predicts app spending will reach $270 billion by the year 2025, including paid downloads, in-app purchases, and subscriptions. According to data from Sensor Tower, in-app spending will return to pre-pandemic levels of stable growth over the next few years, downloads will continue to grow, and, perhaps most notably, it’s predicting app store spending in non-game apps will overtake mobile game spending by 2024.

This is a big bet, given that, today, consumers spend twice as much on mobile games than on non-games. The firm, however, believes the subscription model now being adopted by a range of mobile apps will cause a shift in the market. By 2024, it expects non-game spending to reach $86 billion compared with $73 billion in game spending. And by 2025, that gap will widen, with non-games reaching $107 billion while mobile games reach $78 billion.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Last year, global consumer spending in the top 100 subscription apps was up by 34%, year-over-year, to give you an idea of the current state of the market. But there were already some indications that subscription growth was being impacted by larger apps, like Netflix and Tinder, which found workarounds to in-app purchases.

What Sensor Tower also can’t predict is how the regulatory environment of the next several years will play out across the app stores. Today, companies like Apple and Google require apps to charge customers for subscriptions via Google and Apple’s own payment mechanisms. But new anti-competition laws could be enacted that would allow publishers to market their own subscriptions inside their apps, which then redirect users to their own channels to make those purchases. Such a change would have an outsized impact on app store subscription growth trends, and, therefore, this forecast.

Though the pandemic pushed in-app spending up by 30% year-over-year to a record $111 billion in 2020, the new forecast predicts general in-app spending will return to pre-COVID levels over the next five years. It says gross revenue across both app stores will climb each year with a 19.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $270 billion by 2025. Of that figure, $185 billion will be App Store spending, versus $85 billion on Google Play.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

The U.S. will grow slightly slower than the rest of the global market, with a CAGR of 17.7% to reach $74 billion by 2025.

European markets will drive growth in app store spending from 2020 through 2025, led by the U.K. This not the equivalent to which markets see the most spending in total, but rather is about where growth is taking place — in other words, opportunity for app makers. By 2025, 11 European countries will pass the $1 billion in consumer spending milestone, to collectively reach $42 billion in consumer spend.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Downloads, meanwhile, will continue to grow over the next several years, to reach 230 billion by 2025, the forecast predicts, with Google Play accounting for a majority of that figure, with 187 billion global downloads. In the U.S., however, App Store downloads in 2025 (10.6B) will top those from Google Play (6.3B), the report concludes.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

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

Hi friends and new readers, welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

Before you get to reading The Station, a small update for you. As transportation editor — a new title I gained last month — I am focused on building a team and deepening our coverage. My first task was to bring on Mark Harris, who will be writing investigative pieces as well as articles for our subscription product Extra Crunch.

His first EC piece, which will publish this coming week, is a deep dive into solid-state batteries. This isn’t some one-off. Each month, EC will publish two “market map” articles, which focus on a particular slice of the transportation industry, along with other mobility-related analysis. I’m also bringing on more reporters to beef up coverage over at TechCrunch. A few of these folks have an expertise in automotive tech and are helping me revamp the traditional car review into something more TechCrunch-y.

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

Micromobbin’

Remember last week when I wondered out loud if a new diversification trend was afoot in the micromobility sector? A growing number of companies are either adding new products to their portfolios or technological upgrades. For instance, Lime has added mopeds to its portfolio and Spin is testing out new three-wheeled scooters that can be remotely operated, via software and people power from Tortoise.

Revel has taken this diversification to a new level. The shared electric moped startup said it will start offering monthly electric bike subscriptions in New York, making this is the second new business venture the company has announced in the past several weeks.

Until the end of January, Revel was just a shared electric moped startup. Then it added a DC fast-charging station for electric vehicles in New York City. This new “Superhub” will contain 30 chargers and be open to the public 24 hours a day. Revel said it will open other Superhubs across New York City.

A week or so later it announced it was expanding into monthly subscriptions for electric bikes. The pedal-assist bikes, which are manufactured by WING Bikes, come equipped with a 36-volt battery that can travel 45 miles on a single charge and can reach speeds of 20 miles per hour.

It doesn’t seem — based on comments I received from Revel CEO and co-founder Frank Reig — that the company is done adding business ventures or products. “Safe to say that this will not be our last big announcement in 2021,” Reig told me.

Stay tuned. 

Deal of the week

A few years ago, I thought that lidar — the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world — had reached its peak. More than 70 lidar startups existed at that time and the timelines around the deployment of autonomous vehicles, which would theoretically unleash massive demand for the sensors, was slipping.

Consolidation seemed inevitable. Then came the wave of pivots, when lidar companies employed various strategies. Some started to market their sensors to other industries and others touted the perception software that accompanied the lidar. Many targeted automakers with the pitch that their sensors could make the advanced driver assistance systems more robust, reliable and safe.

A new trend is afoot in lidar land. Merging with SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, have become a go-to path for companies wanting to access the level of capital that the public market can provide. Lidar companies have joined the party in recent months with Aeye becoming the latest guest to arrive.

Aeye announced it was going public through a merger with CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III that will value the company at $2 billion. Under this deal, AEye said it was able to raise $225 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from institutional and strategic investors that include GM Ventures, Subaru-SBI, Intel Capital, Hella Ventures and Taiwania Capital. Other undisclosed investors also participated. Through the transaction, AEye will have about $455 million in cash on its balance sheet, proceeds that include $230 million in trust from CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III, a SPAC sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald.

Aeye is the sixth lidar company to announce a SPAC since last summer. Velodyne Lidar kicked off the trend when it announced that it planned to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., with a market value of $1.8 billion. Others soon followed, including Luminar, Aeva, Ouster and Innoviz.

Which lidar company will be next?

Other deals that caught my eye this week …

Dingdong Maicai, the Chinese grocery app backed by Sequoia Capital China, is considering an initial public offering in the U.S. as soon as this year, Bloomberg reported.

Li-Cycle Corp, a lithium-ion battery recycler, is close to reaching an agreement to go public through a merger with Peridot Acquisition Corp., Reuters reported. The combined company would have a valuation of about $1.7 billion.

Metropolis, a new parking payment and management startup based in Los Angeles, has raised $41 million in financing from investors, including real estate managers Starwood and RXR Realty, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain’s 01 Advisors, Dragoneer, former Facebook employees Sam Lessin and Kevin Colleran’s Slow Ventures, Dan Doctoroff, the head of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs initiative; and NBA All Star and early-stage investor, Baron Davis. Global growth equity firm 3L led the round.

Fun fact: founder Alex Israel sold his last company, ParkMe, to Inrix back in 2015.

Recogni Inc., a startup that is developing an AI-powered vision recognition module for autonomous vehicles, raised $48.9 million in Series B funding round. Investors included BMW i Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, and existing investors, along with Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Continental.

Super73, the direct-to-consumer electric bike startup, raised $20 million Volition Capital. The Southern California-based company plans to use the capital to hire more staff, improve customer service operation and expand its product portfolio, The Verge reported.

Volkswagen is weighing the possibility of spinning out its Porsche unit, Bloomberg reported. The company is reportedly meeting with advisers to evaluate a potential initial public offering or spinoff of the sports car brand.

Volta Energy Technologies, the energy investment and advisory services firm, closed on nearly $90 million of a targeted $150 million investment fund, according to people familiar with the group’s plans. The venture investment vehicle complements a $180 million existing commitment from Volta’s four corporate backers, Equinor, Albermarle, Epsilon and Hanon Systems.

Investor survey 2021

Once a year, I like to reach out to investors and ask them a bunch of questions in an effort to understand where they’re putting their capital, identify emerging trends and get a general sense of where the industry, and its many sub sectors, are heading.

I surveyed 10 investors this time around and published the results in our subscription product Extra Crunch, where there will be a lot more transportation analysis in 2021. I encourage you to subscribe. In the meantime, here’s taste of what a handful (not all 10) had to say when I asked this:

What are the overlooked areas that you want to invest in, now that legacy automakers are shifting their portfolios to electric and new EV manufacturers are preparing to start production?

Clara Brenner, Urban Innovation Fund co-founder/managing partner : We are very interested in the emerging fleet management space — and this is reflected in a number of our recent investments, including Electriphi (software to help fleets transition to electric) and Kyte (activating underutilized fleets to deliver a magical car rental experience). There are so many efficiencies that come from the fleet model for transportation — we think this will be an increasingly important area in the coming years.

Dave Clark, partner at Expa: Don’t give the incumbents too much credit. As technology becomes commoditized we’ll see new competitors push their way into the market, especially around new designs more suitable to an autonomous and shared system.

A few specific examples for your readers: EVs are approaching price parity with gas-powered cars with the improvements to carbon-neutral/negative-emission tech, energy storage, microgrids and battery tech. We’re about to see drone infrastructure and service business models scale as we approach an inflection point in consumer adoption and industry regulation.

Finally, as autonomous vehicle tech approaches commoditization, there will be plenty of opportunities in the software layers that optimize routes and orchestrate resources across supply chains.

Abhijit Ganguly, senior manager at Goodyear Ventures: The secular trend toward electrification presents opportunities to OEMs, Tier 1 vendors and aftermarket participants alike. We continue to see opportunities in EV fleet management, aftermarket solutions for improving uptime, and reducing cost of operations and supportive infrastructure development (software and hardware) for easy deployment. Envoy, a Goodyear Ventures portfolio company, is capitalizing on these opportunities through its shared mobility EV platform.

Rachel Holt, co-founder/general partner at Construct Capital: We invested in a really interesting company building the software operating layer to help EV hardware manufacturers “connect;” the software layer of EV is going to be a very interesting space.

Sasha Ostojic, Playground Global operating partner: There seems to be an overlooked opportunity with consumer automotive apps. We have apps to manage our homes (cameras, speakers, sensors, etc.) so it’s only natural that our cars should join that ecosystem. At first it will be OEM-specific apps (like the Tesla app or the terrible GM app), but I expect an evolution of open APIs where you can add any car to your “garage” (like adding a device to Google Home).

Sebastian Peck, InMotion Ventures’s managing director: I think the market may not have fully appreciated the vast potential of connected vehicle data yet, in part because that data is currently still hard to access for developers. We see more OEMs making APIs available in 2021 and we expect this will become a very dynamic space with a lot of innovation benefitting consumers and commercial fleet managers.

Commission on Future Mobility Q&A

The Commission on the Future of Mobility is a new global coalition of business, industry, technology and policy leaders with a gigantic mission. The organization recently announced a slew of appointments to its board, notably Mary Nichols, the former chair of the California Air Resources Board and Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford Motor Co. Other commissioners include, Ola Cabs Chairman Bhavish Aggarwal, Valeo Chairman and CEO Jacques Aschenbroich and Avinash Rugoobur, who is president of Arrival.

I thought it was time to learn more and so I reached out and had a chat with Alisyn Malek, the organization’s executive director and the former COO and co-founder of May Mobility.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

ME: It says here that the ultimate objective of the commission is to recommend a framework for regulations in the American, European, and Asian markets that reflects and facilitates the technological transformation taking place. That’s a lot.

MALEK: It’s a big goal. (laughs)

ME: Why take a global approach to this?

MALEK: We think it’s really important to take a global approach because that allows you to be open to more options of what solutions could look like. If we were only looking at a specific region — yes, it’s a little bit easier in terms of what you need to focus on and the problems that you need to solve — but we also worried that it would limit us. By taking this global approach, we think it really creates the opportunity to take the best of what everybody is trying to do and put those out as options for people to really understand what the future could look like.

ME: Will this framework acknowledge that each region has its own demographics and nuances and cultural behaviors and infrastructure?

MALEK: We realize that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution, so our hope is to be able to put together a compelling vision and create options that different policymakers can select from and better understand the trade offs between them.

ME: The CFM emphasizes that its results are going to be based on data methodologies. Can you explain exactly the type of hard data that’s going to be used.

MALEK: We recognize that a lot of work has been done in these spaces before, so we will be looking at the current literature and working to add some new information and insight. We do think that there are areas where data needs to be collected.

For example, the changes in freight and the rise of e-commerce through the pandemic. That may be an area where we go in and try to understand a new data set. I don’t know that we would be outfitting vehicles to take that type of data — we’ll be looking for for existing data to feed our studies. That’s an area that is just so new that there really isn’t going to be a lot out there, so I think that’s a place where we may be substantially additive in the data perspective.

ME: Why does the transportation world need another commission?

MALEK: When we think about all of the commissions in mobility that exist today — and there are many — they are either focused on the advocacy of a specific topic or are interested in doing the research and adding to the knowledge base, but not necessarily carrying that through to advocacy to help drive change.

A big part of how the Commission on the Future of Mobility is different is the fact that is bringing together industry leaders across the movement of people and goods so we can hash out the hard questions internally as we work on our proposals and then bring those to an advocacy stage and help drive that change.

One AI thing

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Finally, I have to share my article about Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who avoided an 18-month prison sentence after receiving a presidential pardon last month.

I learned (and reported) that Levandowski has officially closed the church he created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence. The church, called Way of the Future, sparked interest and controversy — much like Levandowski himself — from the moment it became public in a November 2017 article in Wired.

But as I noted in my article, it wasn’t just the formation of the church or its purpose that caused a stir in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry. The church’s public reveal occurred as Levandowski was steeped in a legal dispute with his former employer Google. He had also become the central figure of a trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet, and Uber.

Levandowski dissolved the church at the end of the year. However, the process had started months before in June 2020, documents filed with the state of California show. The entirety of the church’s funds — exactly $175,172 — were donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

I did talk to Levandowski and while he didn’t get too deep into “why” he closed WOTF, he did say that he still believes in its premise. He believes that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change how people live and work and that it can be positive for society. He noted that is not guaranteed. Even without Way of the Future, Levandowski said he’s focused on making that happen.

I closed two major rounds of funding for my geothermal energy startup, Dandelion Energy, while pregnant. I did not disclose either pregnancy to my investors during the fundraising process either time. I felt fine doing this, and I believe other founders should feel free to keep their pregnancies private as well if they’d prefer to.

No one would think twice about a male founder who declined to share the details of his health or family status with investors during an initial fundraising meeting. On the contrary, it would be an unusual move for him to do so.

For some context, my co-founder and I spun our startup, Dandelion Energy, out of Alphabet’s X in April 2017 and raised our first small round of outside funding that summer. Our goal was to set up a commercial pilot and start selling and installing heat pumps to demonstrate that our product worked and show that there was demand for affordable geothermal before we raised a larger round. We had to prove that our business was viable.

That same summer, in 2017, I became pregnant.

Round one

As summer turned to fall, I had to figure out how to approach being pregnant while raising Dandelion’s second round of funding. I was lucky to be able to choose whether to tell people I was pregnant because it turned out I didn’t end up looking visibly pregnant until about seven months in, and even then I could dress to make it nonobvious. Without knowing anyone who’d gone through a similar experience, I had to decide how I would handle my status as a pregnant person when speaking with investors.

At first, it worried me that I would be hiding something if I didn’t disclose my pregnancy. But I really didn’t want to. I was a first-time entrepreneur with no real track record. Oh yeah, and I was a woman. And almost all of the investors were men who typically funded men.

Especially early on in a startup’s life, these investors are judging the founder as much as the business. Making an impression is key, and “pregnant” didn’t strike me as accretive in any way to my ability to deliver the type of impression that would lead to investment in my business (I hope this changes over time, but I am being honest about how things seemed to me).

And then there was this: Even if I had decided to tell investors I was expecting, how could I broach the topic in a way that wouldn’t threaten to derail the entire tenor of the meeting? I was meeting most of these people for the first time and had a limited amount of time to spend explaining payback periods and vapor compression refrigeration cycles. It seemed like the best-case scenario was if disclosing pregnancy made the meeting no worse than it would otherwise have been. In no world could I imagine it would be a net positive.

Given all of this, I made the decision to not talk about it. It worked out for me. As soon as I started showing, around seven months in, everyone left their offices for the holidays, and so I was never forced to address what was becoming visibly obvious.

But of course there was a downside to my approach. I would have to tell them eventually, and I’d pushed it off so long that by the time I finally got around to it we basically had to have a conversation like this:

Me: “Some happy news to share: I’m pregnant!”

Investors: “Congratulations! We are so thrilled for you! When’s the due date?”

Me: “Ahhh … Next month.”

Happily, all of them were extremely supportive and gracious when I told them. Their uncomplicated and positive acceptance of the news even made me wonder if all my internal wrangling about whether to tell investors had been unnecessary. I gave birth to my daughter literally one day after the money was wired.

Round two

Time passed and it became clear we were ready to raise our next round of funding. Also, I become pregnant again. This time, most of the fundraising happened in the early stages of my pregnancy. Early enough that I hadn’t even really told my friends, so it was obvious to me I wouldn’t be telling investors I was just meeting. After having gone through it once before, it was an easier decision the second time around.

Looking back

Reflecting on my experience, I do think it helped that I got to know my investors throughout the fundraising process, so by the time I told them I was pregnant, they already knew me and I had already established my credibility as an entrepreneur. Being pregnant was just something going on in my life; it didn’t define who I was to them. That is one advantage of introducing it later: It did not define me because they knew so much else about me by that point.

In many ways, I am a stereotypical founder: I have a CS degree from Stanford, I worked as a PM at Google, I have an engineering background. I have many advantages. Yet, more present in my mind during fundraising were the parts of my identity that seemed atypical, and the primary aspect here was my being a woman.

Because there is so much conversation about how women receive so much less investment, I was worried that being a woman would be a disadvantage, and there’s nothing like being pregnant to highlight in the strongest possible way that you’re a woman.

I now feel lucky to know other founders who have raised money while visibly pregnant, and so I’ve seen firsthand that it’s possible. But it is not something that a pregnant founder should feel obligated to disclose. I hope that it becomes common for women to start businesses and raise capital for those businesses in every stage of their lives, including when they’re pregnant.

Because as soon as the pregnant woman and the guy with the hoodie both seem equally probable as startup founders, it will suddenly matter much less whether to talk about your pregnancy.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out our last main ep, in which Natasha coins a slogan for a16z that I both hate, and became the headline of the show!

But enough of all of that, we have a lot to get through this morning. Here’s what we talked about:

• The Weekend: Coinbase at $100 billion? More on that to come. Toast is going public! Probably! Wait Toast the company that laid off staff last year? Yep that Toast! It’s not toast! And new rules on online lending in China.
• This Morning: Oscar Health put together an IPO price range that is interesting, and Apex Clearing is going public via a SPAC.
• Funding Rounds: Gophr raises money! Ageras Group raises money! Promise raises money! It was hard to pick just three, but each of those rounds has something notable about it. Enjoy!
• Deeper Dive/Riff: If the public markets will float even the most leaden of startup via a SPAC-balloon, any late-stage startup that doesn’t take the ride out of the private markets must either be perfect or too heavy to lift. And if it’s the second, we can write it off? Maybe?

And, finally, this is precisely what I feel like this Monday morning. Chat soon and stay safe!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

This morning Creatio, a Boston-based software company, announced that it has raised $68 million. Volition Capital, a growth-equity fund, led the round. The deal was a minority investment in the startup.

The deal is notable not merely thanks to its sheer size, but because up until today Creatio had bootstrapped. That’s according to founder and CEO Katherine Kostereva, with whom TechCrunch caught up with last week regarding the investment.

Per Kostereva, her company’s low-code platform helps other companies automate business processes. Creatio’s competitive edge, she said, comes in part from how quickly it can help companies automate; the faster that companies can get from a low-code platform to live apps matters.

Creatio also has a genre-focus, namely that it touts its platform’s ability to help automate work in the CRM space — think marketing and sales-related tasks. But its crowning “jewel,” Kostereva said, is Creatio’s underlying low-code automation platform.

The low-code world that Creatio competes in is a broad space that is seeing active investment from the very-early to the very-late stage. For example, last month TechCrunch covered no-code focused Stacker’s $1.7 million round. And earlier this month TechCrunch wrote about low-code focused OutSystems’ $150 million raise at a $9.5 billion valuation.

To see another low-code company raise a big check was therefore not too surprising.

TechCrunch was curious where the company and its founder came down on the concept of low-code versus no-code, a topic that is always good to ask players in either space. Kostereva highlighted the importance of citizen developers, folks who can use drag-and-drop interfaces to create apps but who are less adept with code. But she added that with today’s no-code tools one can only build simple things. Creatio, she continued, is more focused on the mid-market and enterprise. As such, it’s just not possible for Creatio to go no-code today. But, her view did appear to be that citizen devs should be able to do more and more in time without code.

It’s a fair perspective, and an encouraging one. The more that folks can do sans code, the more power that can shift into the hands of business orgs that traditionally had to depend on other departments for dev lift.

Back to the money side of things, Creatio has historically targeted breakeven financial results per its CEO. That means it reinvested in itself as it grew, an arrangement that made us was curious as to why the company would raise capital now; why change up a working formula?

In short the company was getting itself ready for to accelerate, according to its founder. Kostereva said that she wanted Creatio to have “world class” numbers for metrics like net retention, revenue growth, and net promoter score before it took on external funds.

Was the wait worth it? The company’s net retention was 122% last year, and its NPS score is 34, she disclosed. On the growth side of things, Kostereva said that her company started off doubling and tripling and is still close to doubling. Our read of her comments is that Creatio is probably growing its ARR in the high double-digits today.

The company wants to use its capital to invest in sales-and-marketing to help spread the the word about its business, invest in its partner program, a key growth mechanism, and R&D, it said. So, a little bit of everything.

TechCrunch has recently noticed just how big the software world really is, indexing off the fast that there is enough room for a host of OKR-focused startups to grow and raise external capital without weeding weaker players out. Given how many businesses processes there are in the world to automate, it may be that Creatio and other low-code platforms that want to help other companies accelerate will enjoy similar market dynamics. Investors, at least, are betting like that’s the case.

As live audio chat app Clubhouse ascends in popularity around the world, concerns about its data practices also grow.

The app is currently only available on iOS, so some developers set out in a race to create Android, Windows and Mac versions of the service. While these endeavors may not be ill-intentioned, the fact that it takes programmers little effort to reverse engineer and fork Clubhouse — that is, when developers create new software based on its original code — is sounding an alarm about the app’s security.

The common goal of these unofficial apps, as of now, is to broadcast Clubhouse audio feeds in real-time to users who cannot access the app otherwise because they don’t have an iPhone. One such effort is called Open Clubhouse, which describes itself as a “third-party web application based on flask to play Clubhouse audio.” The developer confirmed to TechCrunch that Clubhouse blocked its service five days after its launch without providing an explanation.

“[Clubhouse] asks a lot of information from users, analyzes those data and even abuses them. Meanwhile, it restricts how people use the app and fails to give them the rights they deserve. To me, this constitutes monopoly or exploitation,” said Open Clubhouse’s developer nicknamed AiX.

Clubhouse cannot be immediately reached for comment on this story.

AiX wrote the program “for fun” and wanted it to broaden Clubhouse’s access to more people. Another similar effort came from a developer named Zhuowei Zhang, who created Hipster House to let those without an invite browse rooms and users, and those with an invite to join rooms as a listener though they can’t speak — Clubhouse is invite-only at the moment. Zhang stopped developing the project, however, after noticing a better alternative.

These third-party services, despite their innocuous intentions, can be exploited for surveillance purposes, as Jane Manchun Wong, a researcher known for uncovering upcoming features in popular apps through reverse engineering, noted in a tweet.

“Even if the intent of that webpage is to bring Clubhouse to non-iOS users, without a safeguard, it could be abused,” said Wong, referring to a website rerouting audio data from Clubhouse’s public rooms.

Clubhouse lets people create public chat rooms, which are available to any user who joins before a room reaches its maximum capacity, and private rooms, which are only accessible to room hosts and users authorized by the hosts.

But not all users are aware of the open nature of Clubhouse’s public rooms. During its brief window of availability in China, the app was flooded with mainland Chinese debating politically sensitive issues from Taiwan to Xinjiang, which are heavily censored in the Chinese cybserspace. Some vigilant Chinese users speculated the possibility of being questioned by the police for delivering sensitive remarks. While no such event has been publicly reported, the Chinese authorities have banned the app since February 8.

Clubhouse’s design is by nature at odds with the state of communication it aims to achieve. The app encourages people to use their real identity — registration requires a phone number and an existing user’s invite. Inside a room, everyone can see who else is there. This setup instills trust and comfort in users when they speak as if speaking at a networking event.

But the third-party apps that are able to extract Clubhouse’s audio feeds show that the app isn’t even semi-public: It’s public.

More troublesome is that users can “ghost listen,” as developer Zerforschung found. That is, users can hear a room’s conversation without having their profile displayed to the room participants. Eavesdropping is made possible by establishing communication directly with Agora, a service provider employed by Clubhouse. As multiple security researchers found, Clubhouse relies on Agora’s real-time audio communication technology. Sources have also confirmed the partnership with TechCrunch.

Some technical explanation is needed here. When a user joins a chatroom on Clubhouse, it makes a request to Agora’s infrastructure, as the Stanford Internet Observatory discovered. To make the request, the user’s phone contacts Clubhouse’s application programming interface (API), which then creates “tokens”, the basic building block in programming that authenticates an action, to establish a communication pathway for the app’s audio traffic.

Now, the problem is there can be a disconnect between Clubhouse and Agora, allowing the Clubhouse end, which manages user profiles, to be inactive while the Agora end, which transmits audio data, remains active, as technology analyst Daniel Sinclair noted. That’s why users can continue to eavesdrop on a room without having their profile displayed to the room’s participants.

The Agora partnership has sparked other forms of worries. The company, which operates mainly from the U.S. and China, noted in its IPO prospectus that its data may be subject to China’s cybersecurity law, which requires network operators in China to assist police investigations. That possibility, as the Stanford Internet Observatory points out, is contingent on whether Clubhouse stores its data in China.

While the Clubhouse API is banned in China, the Agora API appears unblocked. Tests by TechCrunch find that users currently need a VPN to join a room, an action managed by Clubhouse, but can listen to the room conversation, which is facilitated by Agora, with the VPN off. What’s the safest way for China-based users to access the app, given the official attitude is that it should not exist? It’s also worth noting that the app was not available on the Chinese App Store even before its ban, and Chinese users had downloaded the app through workarounds.

The Clubhouse team may be overwhelmed by data questions in the past few days, but these early observations from researchers and hackers may urge it to fix its vulnerabilities sooner, paving its way to grow beyond its several million loyal users and $1 billion valuation mark.

After online dating’s tremendous 2020 growth that culminated in last week’s epic Bumble IPO, a new entrant has tossed its hat into the dating app ring.

Snack, founded by Kimberly Kaplan, looks to merge the popularity and format of TikTok with the dating world. Kaplan hails from Plenty of Fish, where she was one of the earliest employees at the dating site. She led product, marketing and revenue and was on the executive team that eventually sold PoF to Match Group for $575 million in 2015.

Kaplan said that she noticed a specific user behavior among folks using dating apps, particularly the coveted Gen Z demographic. Essentially, folks would match on Bumble or Tinder and immediately move the connection over to apps like Snap and Instagram, where they would watch each others’ stories and more casually flirt, rather than carrying on in a more high-pressure DM conversation on the dating apps.

Around the same time, TikTok surged in popularity, showing a shift in the average consumer’s attitude toward creating short-form video on the web.

Snack is a video-first dating app that asks users to create a video and post it to a feed. Other users can scroll through a feed (a la Instagram) rather than swipe right or left on individual profiles, and when someone likes a video, it opens up the ability to comment. Once two users have liked each others’ videos, DMs are open.

The app is still in its early days, so there is no location filtering yet to ensure that everyone who joins the app has a full feed of videos to browse through. Kaplan said that Snack is also working on video editing features similar to that of TikTok to let people get super creative with their profiles.

Thus far, Snack has received $3.5 million in funding, led by Kindred Ventures and Coelius Capital, with participation by Golden Ventures, Garage Capital, Panache Ventures and N49P.

Though we’re still a ways away from monetization, Kaplan says her experience in the dating space should be beneficial when looking to generate revenue at Snack, and that the startup will likely follow the same playbook as other dating apps, employing premium subscriptions and potentially ads.

There are 10 people on the Snack team, and Kaplan says that the team is 60 percent diverse with 40 percent of employees being visible minorities.

“The biggest challenge is going up against big players that have a lot of capital,” said Kaplan. “Starting out is hard and getting that initial foothold is hard. I fundamentally believe in our product and I see this open opportunity in the market. I very much believe someone will come in and usurp Tinder, and it’s going to be around video.”