Author: azeeadmin

NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace with a $93.3 million contract to take a lunar lander module loaded with experiments to the surface of the Moon. While the company will not be performing the launch itself, it will be providing the spacecraft and “Blue Ghost” lander for the 2023 mission.

The space agency made the award as part of its ongoing Commercial Lunar Payload Services, under which several other non-prime space companies have been selected for similar work: Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Masten, and so on.

This particular contract was first publicized to its CLPS partners back in September, which would have submitted bids for the project; Firefly clearly carried the day.

“We’re excited another CLPS provider has won its first task order award,” said NASA associate administrator for science Thomas Zurbuchen in a release announcing the contract. The last few years have seen many such firsts as NASA has increasingly embraced the commercial sector in providing everything from launch services to satellite and spacecraft manufacturing.

It’s not exactly Firefly’s first order from NASA, though: its national security subsidiary Firefly Black (ominous) will be launching two cubesats for the Venture Class Launch Service Demo-2 mission. But this is larger and more complex by a huge margin (not to mention more expensive).

This will be the maiden lunar voyage for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which it’s been working on for the last few years in anticipation of renewed interest in the Moon. It will hold the 10 scientific payloads, which NASA describes here, including a new laser reflector array and an experimental radiation-tolerant computer. There’s a lot to be loaded up, but Blue Ghost should have 50kg of space left over for anyone else who wants a ride to the Moon.

Everything is going to Mare Crisium, a basin on the “light” or near side of the moon, where hopefully they will contribute valuable observations and experiments to inform future visits to and habitation on the Moon.

Firefly will also be providing the spacecraft that will take the lander into lunar space, and will be responsible for getting it off the Earth in the first place — the company told me they’re evaluating options for that. By the time 2023 rolls around there should be plenty of rides to choose from, and indeed Firefly’s own Alpha launch vehicle may be flying by then, though it’s not ready to commit to a lunar insertion orbit mission today. The company plans to have its first Alpha flight in March.

TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups‘ 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator’s latest companies.

Demo days are regular affairs, but they always feature a crop of startups that could build the next tech giant, so we pay attention. Especially in the COVID-19 era, when demo days have gone virtual. Now it’s easier than ever for investors, and journalists, to tune in.

TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator’s virtual demo days, as well as regular batches from the various Techstars accelerators around the world.

But, today we’re talking favorites from 500 Startups’ latest cohort. Jonathan Shieber will take the baton first, followed by Alex Wilhelm.

Demo day standouts

Stack

• What: A new way to browse online.
• Why we like it: The browser and tab model hasn’t changed much since the days of Netscape and organizing online information is increasingly a complicated mess of a hundred tabs (at least on my browser). Stack is pitching a new way to organize information that’s more interactive, more organized and easier to visualize.

Adapty

• What: Low-code A/B testing of monetization mechanics and subscriber services for apps.
• Why we like it: Helping to give app developers tools to better understand where, how and why monetization breaks down and offer tools to fix it makes Adapty a standout among this YC cohort. The app economy is still a multibillion dollar business and getting customers to stick around remains a huge problem. Anything that can help is a boon for company builders.
  
  

Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021.

The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet

Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large companies use to share content with their employees.

What makes this new platform, called Viva, any different? Well, it integrates with Microsoft’s other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Yammer, along with LinkedIn Learning and other training services, and it also includes team analytics.

In a pre-recorded video, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft is launching this because, “We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”

The tech giants

Venmo to gain crypto, budgeting, savings and Honey integrations this year — The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory.

Google to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera — Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone.

HubSpot acquires media startup The Hustle — HubSpot says content is an increasingly important part of its business, with customers finding its products through things like YouTube videos and HubSpot Academy.

Startups, funding and venture capital

23andMe set to go public via a Virgin Group SPAC merger — The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close.

Accel backs Mexican startup Flink’s effort to bring consumer investing to Latin America — Since launching its first brokerage product in July of 2020, Flink has surpassed 1 million users and 800,000 active brokerage accounts.

Tovala, the smart oven and meal kit service, heats up with $30M more in funding — This is the second round of funding for the startup in the space of six months.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Four strategies for deep tech founders who are fundraising — Step one: Use storytelling to highlight your big vision.

Why one Databricks investor thinks the company may be undervalued — The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far.

Extra Crunch is now hiring for reporter, editor and project manager positions — Extra Crunch is about to turn two years old and we now have a lot of demanding subscribers. (We love them, of course.)

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

A growing number of startups are creating APIs to assess and offset corporate carbon emissions — It was only a matter of time before application programming interfaces came for the carbon credit offsets.

The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020 — That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019, according to data from Synergy Research Group.

China’s national blockchain network embraces global developers — Last year, an ambitious, government-backed blockchain infrastructure network launched in China.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!

So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:

• Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company’s Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.
• RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That’s a lot of cash for very little dilution.
• Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company’s growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.
• Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the dating market may be in the future.
• In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion.
• Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat.
• Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times.
• And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for ecommerce automation, and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser.
• Make sure to read Natasha’s profile of the new Expectul CEO here.
• And, we closed on some Miami news.

And somehow we still have another entire day before the weeks is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020’s storms.

Huawei’s status in the U.S. has been one of many question marks hovering over the newly minted Biden administration. The smartphone maker was one of a number of Chinese companies added to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” during Trump’s four years in office.

Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has offered what is potentially one of the clearest looks so far at how Huawei’s status might (or might not) evolve under a new administration. Responding to questions from Senate Republicans, former Rhode Island Governor Raimondo indicated that the Biden administration likely would not be in any hurry to remove Huawei from the blacklist.

Republican House members had previously raised concerns over Raimondo’s position on companies like Huawei, a stance she had yet to clarify. “We urge those Senators who have a history of calling for Huawei to remain on the Entity List to stick to their principles and place a hold on Ms. Raimondo’s confirmation until the Biden Administration clarifies their intentions for Huawei and on export control policies for a country that is carrying out genocide and threatening our national security,” they wrote.

Raimondo has since responded.

“I understand that parties are placed on the Entity List and the Military End User List generally because they pose a risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests,” the politician said, in a note reported by Bloomberg. “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”

The statement isn’t definitive in either direction (as is perhaps to be expected for a Cabinet nominee), but it certainly doesn’t point to a radical change from Trump’s position on the issue. The smartphone marker was added to the list in 2019, following longtime accusations over security and spying concerns. The company has also variously been tied to the Chinese government.

The DoC noted at the time:

Huawei was added to the Entity List after the Department concluded that the company is engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, including alleged violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), conspiracy to violate IEEPA by providing prohibited financial services to Iran, and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation of those alleged violations of U.S. sanctions, among other illicit activities.

The Trump administration proved especially aggressive in regards to blacklisting Chinese tech companies, a fact that has already had a profound impact on Huawei’s bottom line. Drone giant DJI and AI company SenseTime have been added to the DoC list, while Xiaomi made a separate military blacklist in the waning days of the administration.

As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big mergers and beef up federal resources for antitrust enforcement. Klobuchar’s bill, the Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, seeks to address consolidation across industries, calling out “dominant digital platforms” specifically.

“While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem,” Klobuchar said. “We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate.”

Klobuchar now leads the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, a corner of Congress already signaling its interest on reform that would impact big tech.

The new bill would bolster the Clayton Antitrust Act, a 1914 bill that created a framework for the rules around competition that are still applied today. Specifically, it would amend that bill to reinterpret its standard for evaluating anti-competitive mergers, changing the language to prevent any deal that “create[s] an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition” rather than the current wording.

The aim is to catch potentially anti-competitive behavior earlier in the game — an outcome that would address the government’s current conundrum, in which federal regulators are now awkwardly reevaluating mergers that evolved into monopolistic behavior years after the fact.

The bill would also put the onus on merging companies to prove that they don’t pose a risk of reducing competition, taking that burden off of the government in specific cases. Those rules would apply to “mega-mergers” worth $5 billion or more and in which a company with 50 percent market share seeks to buy a current or potential competitor.

Klobuchar’s proposal also seeks to add a provision to the Clayton Act against conduct that puts competitors at a disadvantage — a rule that would address some of the murkier areas of anti-competitive behavior that stretch beyond outright mergers and acquisitions.

Citing lacking enforcement budgets, the bill also sets out a $300 million infusion for the Justice Department’s antitrust division and the FTC. At the FTC, that money would help create a new division within the agency for research on markets and mergers.

The bill will be co-sponsored by Senators Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey, all Democrats on the antitrust subcommittee. And while it’s a single party endeavor for now, the antitrust reform could attract support from Republicans in Congress like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who signaled his interest in antitrust changes that target large tech companies as recently as this week. Hawley also sits on the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee.

Klobuchar stops short of calling for large tech companies like Facebook and Google to be broken into their component parts, a move that has attracted some support from lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in recent years. In the midst of emerging multi-state lawsuits targeting big tech companies, the FTC announced its own antitrust case against Facebook late last year, pushing for the company to be broken up.

 

Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks, to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the world of healthcare — specifically, to speed up the process of voice communication between entities in the fragmented U.S. healthcare industry.

Infinitus uses “voice RPA” to become the machine-generated voice that makes calls from, say, healthcare providers or pharmacies to insurance companies to go through a series of questions (directed at humans at the other end) that typically need to be answered before payments are authorized and other procedures can take place.

The startup is coming out of “stealth mode” today but it has been around for a couple of years already and has signed on a number of large healthcare companies as customers — for example, the wholesale drug giant AmerisourceBergen — and is in some cases contributing its technology to public health efforts around the current coronavirus pandemic, with one organization currently using it to automate a mass calling system across several states to get a better idea of vaccine availability to help connect the earliest doses with the most vulnerable groups that need them the fastest.

It made 75,000 calls on behalf of 12,000 providers in January alone.

Infinitus’ public launch is also coming with a funding kicker: it has picked up $21.4 million in Series A funding from a group of big-name investors to build the business.

The round is being co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, with Gradient Ventures (Google’s early stage AI fund), Quiet Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Tau Ventures also participating, along with individual investments from a selection of executives across the worlds of AI and big tech: Ian Goodfellow, Gokul Rajaram, Aparna Chennapragada and Qasar Younis.

Coatue is shaping up to be a huge investor in the opportunity in RPA. Earlier this week, it emerged that it co-led the latest investment in UiPath, one of the leaders in the space, having been a part of previous rounds as well.

“Coatue is proud to have led the Series A in Infinitus,” says Yanda Erlich, a general partner at Coatue. “We are big believers in the transformative power of RPA and Enterprise Automation. We believe Infinitus’ VoiceRPA solution enables healthcare organizations to automate previously costly and manual calls and faxes and empowers these organizations to see benefits from end-to-end process automation.”

The problem that Infinitus is addressing is the fact that healthcare, in particular in the privatized U.S. market, has a lot of time-consuming and often confusing red tape when it comes to getting things done. And a lot of the most immediate pain points of that process can be found in voice calls, which are the primary basis of critical communications between different entities in the ecosystem.

Voice calls are used to initiate most processes, whether it’s to obtain critical information, follow up on a form or previous communication, or pass on some data, or of course provide clearance for a payment.

There are 900 million calls of these kinds made in the U.S., with the average length of each call 35 minutes, and with the average healthcare professional who works in an administrative role to make those calls dedicating some 4.5 hours each day to being on the phone.

All of this ultimately adds to the exorbitant costs of healthcare services in the U.S. (and likely some of those inscrutable lines of fees that you might see on bills), not to mention delays in giving care. (And those volumes underscore just what a small piece Infinitus touches today.)

Founder and CEO Ankit Jain — a repeat entrepreneur and ex-Googler who held senior roles in engineering and was a founding partner at Gradient at the search giant — told TechCrunch in an interview that the idea for Infinitus first occured to him a couple of years ago, when he was still at Gradient.

“We were starting to see a lot of improvements in voice communications technology, turning text into speech and speech into text. I realised that it would soon be possible to automate phone calls where a machine could carry out a full conversation with someone.”

Indeed, around that time, Google itself had launched Duplex, a service built around the same principle, but aimed at consumers, for people to book appointments, restaurant tables and other services.

He determined that just being able to talk like a human and understand natural language wasn’t the only issue, and not even the main one, in enterprises applications like healthcare environments, which rely on specific jargon and particular scenarios that are probably less rather than more like actual human interactions.

“I thought, if someone wanted to build this for healthcare it would change it,” he said. And so he decided to do just that.

The specialization of the content and interactions potentially is also one reason why Infinitus might not worry so soon about cannibalization from bigger RPA players, at least for now.

The fact that these services can sound “lifelike” — like actual humans — has been something that consumer services have aspired to, although that hasn’t always worked out for the best. Duplex, for example, in its early days came under criticism for how it might be deceptive, because it wasn’t clear to users they were speaking to a machine logging their responses in a data harnessing exercise. Jain notes that Infinitus is actually intentionally choosing voices that sound like bots to help make that clear to those taking the calls.

He said that this also “helps reduce the level of chatter” on the conversation and keep the person speaking focused on business.

On that front, it seems that while Infinitus works like other voice RPA services, connected up with live, human agents who can take over calls if they get tricky, that hasn’t really needed to be used.

“Today we don’t need to triage with humans because we see high enough success rates with our system,” he said.

You might wonder, why hasn’t the healthcare industry just moved past voice altogether? Surely there are ways of exchanging data between entities so that calls could become obsolete? Turns out that at least for now that isn’t something that will change quickly, Jain said.

Part of it is because the fragmentation in the market means it’s hard to implement new standards across the board, covering hundreds of insurance payers, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical groups, billing and collections organisations and more. And when it comes down to it, a phone call ends up being the easiest route for many admins who might have to typically deal with 100 different payment companies and other entities, each with a different logging mechanism. “It’s a lot of cognitive load, so it’s often easier to just pick up the phone,” Jain said.

Bringing in voiceRPA like Infinitus’s is part of that long haul to update the bigger system.

“By automating one side we are showing the other side that it can be done,” Jain said. “Right now, there are just too many players and getting them agree on one standard is a gargantuan task, so trying to winning one small piece after another is how it’s done. It should not be voice, but by the time standards bodies agree on something else, the world has moved on.”

As startups have stayed private longer and liquidity has become harder to secure for early employees and investors, more and more shareholders have looked for ways to unload their shares to others. All the way back in 2011, companies like SecondMarket were seeing nine-figures worth of shares being traded on their secondary share platforms.

That wave of liquidity startups ran into two problems: one was regulatory, and the other was a lack of company information about cap tables and that company’s current financial picture. Stock buyers were essentially flying blind while buying into companies, which some investors were more than willing to do, but that blindness limited the market demand for secondary shares significantly.

Carta is hoping that its base as the cap table management solution of choice for many startups will allow it to parlay that position into a new service it has called CartaX. We’ve heard rumblings about the service for more than a year now, but according to a new blog post by founder Henry Ward, it looks like the product is exiting beta and starting to operate in the real world with real money.

Yesterday, Carta sold just shy of $100 million of its shares across 1,484 market orders to 414 participants through its own CartaX product at a price of $6.9 billion. Ward says that is up from the $3.1 billion valuation of the company’s Series F round from last year.

As a comparison, secondary transactions typically involve secondary buyers who negotiate these deals manually one-on-one with individual sellers. What makes CartaX interesting is that it could allow for much faster and more frequent secondary sales at companies based on the same sort of computerized trading models that currently power the stock market.

Liquidity is a huge issue for startups, and while CartaX is just getting going, it fulfills a key need for many participants in the startup ecosystem, and it’s a key financial product to watch as it expands in 2021.

Meanwhile, revenues are looking good at Carta these days. According to an article earlier today by Zoë Bernard and Cory Weinberg at The Information, Carta has an ARR of $150 million. That’s a 46x revenue multiple if all the numbers are correct, which these days is good if not great for SaaS companies approaching the public markets.

Twitter is upping its data analytics game in the form of an expanded, multiyear partnership with Google Cloud.

The social media giant first began working with Google in 2018 to move Hadoop clusters to the Google Cloud platform as a part of its Partly Cloudy strategy.

With the expanded agreement, Twitter will move its offline analytics, data processing and machine learning workloads to Google’s Data Cloud. 

I talked with Sudhir Hasbe, Google Cloud’s director of product management and data analytics, to better understand just what this means. He said the move will give Twitter the ability to analyze data faster as part of its goal to provide a better user experience.

You see, behind every tweet, like and retweet, there is a series of data points that helps Twitter understand things like just how people are using the service, and what type of content they might want to see.

Twitter’s data platform ingests trillions of events, processes hundreds of petabytes of data and runs tens of thousands of jobs on over a dozen clusters daily. 

But by expanding its partnership with Google, Twitter is essentially adopting the company’s Data Cloud, including BigQuery, Dataflow, BigTable and machine learning (ML) tools to make more sense of, and improve, how Twitter features are used.

Twitter declined request for comment but CTO Parag Agrawal said in a written statement that the company’s initial partnership was successful and led to enhanced productivity on the part of its engineering teams.  

“Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day,” he said.

Google Cloud’s Hasbe believes that organizations like Twitter need a highly scalable analytics platform so they can derive value from all their data collecting. By expanding its partnership with Google, Twitter is able to add significantly more use cases out of its cloud platform.

“Our platform is serverless and we can help organizations, like Twitter, automatically scale up and down,” Hasbe told TechCrunch.

“Twitter can bring massive amounts of data, analyze and get insights without the burden of having to worry about infrastructure or capacity management or how many machines or servers they might need,” he added. “None of that is their problem.” 

The shift will also make it easier for Twitter’s data scientists and other similar personnel to build machine learning models and do predictive analytics, according to Hasbe.

Other organizations that have recently turned to Google Cloud to help navigate the pandemic include Bed, Bath and Beyond, Wayfair, Etsy and The Home Depot.

On February 2, TC’s Frederic Lardinois reported that while Google Cloud is seeing accelerated revenue growth, its losses are also increasing. This week, Google disclosed operating income/loss for its Google Cloud business unit in its quarterly earnings. Google Cloud lost $5.6 billion in Google’s fiscal year 2020, which ended December 31. That’s on $13 billion of revenue.

Virtual health and wellness platforms have grown increasingly popular throughout the pandemic, but a new startup wants to focus that effort exclusively on senior citizens. Bold, a digital health and wellness service, plans to prevent chronic health problems in older adults through free and personalized exercise programs. Co-founded by Amanda Rees and her partner Hari Arul, Bold picked up $7 million this week in seed funding led by Julie Yoo of Silicon Valley-based Andreessen Horowitz.

Rees said in an interview that the idea for Bold came from time she spent caring for her grandmother, helping her through health challenges like falls. “I kept thinking about solutions we could build to keep someone healthier longer, rather than waiting for until they have a fall or something else goes off the rails to intervene,” she said. Rees started Bold to use what she’d learned from her own experience in dance and yoga to help her grandmother practice maintaining balance to prevent future falls. “My passion really was around ways to sort of widen the aperture, and make these solutions more accessible and built for older people.”

The member experience is pretty straightforward. Users fill out some brief fitness information on the web-based platform, outlining their goals and current baseline. From that information, Bold creates a personalized program that ranges from a short, seated Tai Chi class once a week, to cardio and strength classes meeting multiple times each week. “The idea is to really meet a member where they are, and then through our programming, help them along their journey of doing the types of exercises that are going to have the most immediate benefit for them,” said Rees.

Bold’s funding round comes at a time of concern around ballooning healthcare expenses for older populations, and a focus on how to reduce these costs for both current and future generations. While falls alone aren’t necessarily complex medical incidents, they have the potential to lead to fractures and other serious injuries. Bold’s preventative approach to falls is a more active solution than necklace or bracelet monitors that send a signal to emergency services when they detect a fall. And by offering virtual programs, they can help at-risk older populations engage in exercise while avoiding potential COVID-19 exposure at gyms.

Research shows that this works. Even simple, low-intensity exercise can improve balance and strength enough to reduce the incidence of falls, which is currently the leading cause of injury and injury death among older adults.

Fewer injuries would mean less need for medical care, which would lead to money saved for hospitals and health insurers alike. That’s why in addition to their seed funding, Bold has plans to start rolling out partnerships with Medicare Advantage organizations and risk-bearing providers, which will help make their exercise programs available to users for free.