Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Harry Destecroix co-founded Ziylo while studying for his PhD at the University of Bristol. Ziylo, a university spin-out company, developed a synthetic molecule allowing glucose to bind with the bloodstream more effectively. Four years later, and by then a Phd, Destecroix sold the company to Danish firm Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest manufacturers of diabetes medicines, which had realized it could use Ziylo’s molecule to develop a new type of insulin to help diabetics. He walked away with an estimated $800m.

Destecroix is now embarking on a project, “Science Creates”, to repeat the exercise of creating deep-tech, science-based startups, and it will once more be based out of Bristol.

To foster this deep tech ecosystem it will offer a specialized incubator space able to house Wet Labs, a £15 million investment fund and a network of strategic partners to nurture science and engineering start-ups and spin-outs.

The Science Creates hub, in partnership with the University of Bristol and located in the heart of the city, is aspiring to become a sort of ‘West Coast’ for England, and the similarities, at least with an earlier version of Silicon Valley, are striking.

The Bay Area of old was cheaper than the East Coast of the US, had a cornerstone university, access to capital, and plenty of talent. Bristol has all that and for capital, it can access London, less than 90 minutes by train. But what it’s lacked until now is a greater level of “clustering” and startup-focused organization, which is clearly what Destecroix is planning to fix.

In a statement for the launch, he explained: “Where a discovery is made has a huge bearing on whether it’s successfully commercialized. While founding my own start-up, Ziylo, I became aware of just how many discoveries failed to emerge from the lab in Bristol alone. No matter the quality of the research and discovery, the right ecosystem is fundamental if we are going to challenge the global 90% failure rate of science start-ups, and create many more successful ventures.”

Science Creates is be grown out of the original incubator, Unit DX, that Destecroix set up in collaboration with the University of Bristol in 2017 to commercialize companies like his own.

The ‘Science Creates ecosystem’ will comprise of:

Science Creates Incubators: Unit DX houses 37 scientific and engineering companies working on healthtech, the environment and quality of life. The opening of a second incubator, Unit DY, close to Bristol Temple Meads train station, will mean it can support 100 companies and an estimated 450 jobs. The Science Creates’ physical footprint across the two units will reach 45,000 sq ft.

Science Creates Ventures: This £15 million EIS venture capital fund is backed by the Bristol-based entrepreneurs behind some of the South-West’s biggest deep tech exits.

Science Creates Network: This will be a portfolio of strategic partners, mentors and advisors tailored to the needs of science and engineering start-ups.

Destecroix is keen that the startups nurtured there will have more than “Wi-Fi and strong coffee” but also well-equipped lab space as well as sector-specific business support.

He’s betting that Bristol, with its long history of academic and industrial research, world-class research base around the University of Bristol, will be able to overcome the traditional challenges towards the commercialization of deep tech and science-based startups.

Professor Hugh Brady, Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of Bristol, commented: “We are delighted to support the vision and help Science Creates to build a thriving deep tech ecosystem in our home city. Great scientists don’t always know how to be great entrepreneurs, but we’ve seen the impact specialist support can have in helping them access the finance, networks, skills, and investment opportunities they need. Working with Science Creates, we aim to support even more ground-breaking discoveries to progress outside the university walls, and thrive as successful commercial ventures that change our world for the better.”

Ventures in Unit DX so far include:
– Imophoron (a vaccine tech start-up that is reinventing how vaccines are made and work – currently working on a COVID vaccine)
– Cytoseek (a discovery-stage biotech working on cell therapy cancer treatment)
– Anaphite (graphine-based science for next gen battery technology).

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Destecroix went on to say: “After my startup exited I just got really interested in this idea that, where discovery is actually founded has a huge bearing on whether something is actually commercialized or not. The pandemic has really taught us there is a hell of a lot more – especially in the life sciences, and environmental sciences – that has still yet to be discovered. Vaccines are based on very old technology and take a while to develop.”

“Through this whole journey, I started trying to understand it from an economic perspective. How do we get more startups to emerge? To lower those barriers? I think first of all there’s a cultural problem, especially with academically-focused universities whereby entrepreneurship a dirty word. I had to go against many of my colleagues in the early days to spin out, then obviously universities own all the IP. And so you’ve got to go through the tech transfer office etc and depending on what university you are at, whether it’s Imperial, Cambridge or Oxford, they’re all different. So, and I put the reason why there were no deep terch startups in Bristol down to the fact that there was no incubator space, and not enough investment.”

“I’ve now made about 14 angel investments. Bristol has now catapulted from 20th in the league tables for life sciences to six in the country in the last three years and this is largely due to the activities that we’ve been helping to encourage. So we’ve helped streamline licensing processes for the university, and I’ve helped cornerstone a lot of these deals which has resulted in a wave of these technology startups coming in.”

“I thought, now’s the time to professionalize this and launch a respectable Bristol-based venture capital firm that specializes in deep technologies.”

Sometimes it’s just not worth it to try to top Mother Nature. Such seems to have been the judgment by engineers at the University of Washington, who, deploring the absence of chemical sensors as fine as a moth’s antennas, opted to repurpose moth biology rather than invent new human technology. Behold the “Smellicopter.”

Mounted on a tiny drone platform with collision avoidance and other logic built in, the device is a prototype of what could be a very promising fusion of artificial and natural ingenuity.

“Nature really blows our human-made odor sensors out of the water,” admits UW grad student Melanie Anderson, lead author of the paper describing the Smellicopter, in a university news release. And in many industrial applications, sensitivity is of paramount importance.

If, for instance, you had one sensor that could detect toxic particles at a fraction of the concentration of that detectable by another, it would be a no-brainer to use the more sensitive of the two.

On the other hand, it’s no cake walk training moths to fly towards toxic plumes of gas and report back their findings. So the team (carefully) removed a common hawk moth’s antenna and mounted it on board. By passing a light current through it the platform can monitor the antenna’s general status, which changes when it is exposed to certain chemicals — such as those a moth might want to follow, a flower’s scent perhaps.

See it in action below:

In tests, the cybernetic moth-machine construct performed better than a traditional sensor of comparable size and power. The cells of the antenna, excited by the particles wafting over them, created a fast, reliable, and accurate signal for those chemicals they are built to detect. “Reprogramming” those sensitivities would be non-trivial, but far from impossible.

The little drone itself has a clever bit of engineering to keep the antenna pointed upwind. While perhaps pressure sensors and gyros might have worked to keep the craft pointing in the right direction, the team used the simple approach of a pair of large, light fins mounted on the back that have the effect of automatically turning the drone upwind, like a weather vane. If something smells good that way, off it goes.

It’s very much a prototype, but this sort of simplicity and sensitivity are no doubt attractive enough to potential customers like heavy industry and the military that the team will have offers coming in soon. You can read the paper describing the design of the Smellicopter in the journal IOP Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

You can listen to Apple Music on your Google Nest device, Apple is working to top Intel with its next set of chips and Cisco acquires Slido. This is your Daily Crunch for December 7, 2020.

The big story: Google smart speakers add Apple Music support

Google announced this morning that devices including the Nest Audio, Nest Hub Max and Nest Mini will now be able to play Apple Music via voice commands.

Google’s speaker ecosystem already supports a range of streaming audio services, including Spotify and Pandora, but Apple Music was a big exception until now. (Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini already supported the service, of course, as did Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart speakers.)

To set this up, Google device owners will need to link their Apple Music accounts in their Google Home app and set it as their default music service. Then they can start using commands like, “Hey Google, play New Music Daily playlist” or “Hey Google, play Rap Life playlist.”

The tech giants

Apple reportedly testing Intel-beating high core count Apple Silicon chips for high-end Macs — According to Bloomberg, the new chips include designs that have 16 power cores and four high-efficiency cores.

Cisco is buying Slido to improve Q&A, polls and engagement in WebEx videoconferencing — Slido lets people moderate questions and interactions from a larger group, whether at virtual conferences or in-person events.

Tinder makes it easier to report bad actors using ‘unmatch’ to hide from victims — Tinder notes that users have always been able to report anyone on the app at any time, even if the person used the unmatch feature, but most users probably didn’t know how.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SpaceX snags $885M from FCC to serve rural areas with Starlink — This funding is part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase I auction, which is distributing billions to broadband providers so they can bring internet to under-served rural areas.

Tech growth fund Highland Europe raises €700M to ‘double-down’, strengthens team — The new fund means Highland Europe’s assets under management have risen to €1.8 billion.

Luko raises $60M for its home insurance products — Luko is selling home insurance products for both homeowners and renters.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The IPO market looks hot as Airbnb and C3.ai raise price targets — So much for a December slowdown.

Three questions to ask before adopting microservice architecture — Madison Friedman of Vertex Ventures examines “the multiheaded hydra that is microservice overhead.”

Why does TechCrunch cover so many early-stage funding rounds? — TechCrunch writers and editors discuss why funding-round stories are our bread and butter.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

California’s CA Notify app to offer statewide exposure notification using Apple and Google’s framework — The state of California has now expanded access of its CA Notify app to everyone in the state.

Original Content podcast: Hulu’s ‘Happiest Season’ casts fresh characters in a familiar story — I’m an easy movie crier, but man, this one made me cry.

Mixtape podcast: Making technology accessible for everyone — Featuring a panel on how advances in AI and related technologies will alter the landscape of assistive technology.

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.

Like a lot of startups, Aarmy faced some big challenges when the pandemic forced widespread shutdowns in March.

Up until then, Aarmy was offering in-person fitness classes from its locations in New York and Los Angeles. Trey Laird, who founded the startup with trainers Akin Akman (chief fitness officer) and Angela Manuel-Davis (chief motivation officer), told me that within 48 hours, the strategy shifted online, starting with fitness classes via Instagram Live — something it continues to offer, while also launching a digital subscription program over the summer.

The startup is backed by celebrity investors including Jay-Z, Chris Paul and Karlie Kloss, as well as firms like Mousse Partners, Valia Ventures, Pendulum and Wilshire Lane Partners. Laird said that the team always planned to launch an online business, with a few physical locations serving as “content engines.” The pandemic just accelerated those plans.

“What changed is, we thought we had time to perfect everything,” Akman said. “[Once the pandemic hit,] we didn’t have time to have all these in-depth conversations, we didn’t have time to wait. We wanted to get out there.”

An Aarmy subscription costs $35 a month or $350 a year, offering access to a full digital library, including live sessions with Aarmy trainers, with 20 new practice sessions uploaded every week. The company says it already has “thousands” of paying subscribers, with a conversion rate of more than 70% from its free trial, and an 88% retention rate overall.

Davis acknowledged that Aarmy’s coaches have had rethink their approach, particularly since they can’t shoot themselves “in a room with 60 people” as originally planned. Now they have to provide all of the energy themselves, and they need to be “super intentional” about planning their sessions, rather than simply responding to the activity of the athletes in the room.

Beyond the classes, Aarmy has also launched an apparel business, selling a variety of fitness gear on its own website and via Net a Porter. In fact, the company says this side of the business has already brought in $450,000 in sales.

Akin described the overall Aarmy strategy as one that’s as much about mental conditioning as it is about physical fitness — which he argued has been well-suited to the pandemic era, when so many people are struggling with feelings of depression, isolation and the sense that they’re “victims of circumstance.”

Laird added, “For a brand where the inspiration and the mental strength and finding that inspiration is as important as the actual movement or actual workout, it’s been the perfect time. It’s presented a great opportunity to connect with people around the world and show what differentiates us.”

Practically speaking, it’s nearly impossible to offer a real review of Cyberpunk 2077, the long-awaited follow-up to The Witcher 3 from developer CD Projekt Red. In the first place, it’s so big that the few days I’ve had with it aren’t enough to realistically evaluate the game; second, it’s so buggy and janky now that it feels wrong to review it before it becomes the game I know it will be; and finally, everyone’s going to buy it anyway.

The Witcher 3 is among the most universally lauded games of the last decade, up there with Breath of the Wild, The Last of Us, and Dark Souls. Though it had its flaws — lackluster combat, a limited scope — it did the open world thing better than anyone before or since, largely through improved writing, interesting characters, and consequences to player choices.

It was during what you might call that game’s honeymoon period that Cyberpunk 2077 was announced, and in the years since then the game has approached untenable levels of hype: It could never live up to what people expected, but it could very feasibly be a good game in its own right.

Recent controversies, however, have cast a pall over the launch: A seemingly hypocritical condemnation of pre-release crunch from the developer, some indefensible choices regarding diversity in the game (racialized gangs and a questionable approach to gender and trans representation), and delays suggested this may not be the magnum opus people hoped for.

In the first place I can confirm that the game probably should have been given a few more months of polish, at least on PC, the platform I played it on. From the very start I encountered obvious bugs like characters failing to animate, objects floating in mid-air, and the admittedly expected physics silliness one finds in every open-world game with simulated objects interacting. A day-one patch may fix some of them, but it’s clear that a game this big is nearly impossible to smooth out entirely. (I should say that I’m only partway through the 40-odd-hour campaign, though like its predecessor that will be padded out considerably with side quests.)

That’s a shame, because the world CD Projekt Red has created — or rather adapted from the tabletop RPG on which it is based — is undeniably rich and lovingly fashioned. The easiest way to describe it is simply to say that it’s exactly what you imagine when you think of “cyberpunk,” no more but surely no less.

The look of overcrowded streets filled with weirdo future people, shuffling between food carts offering vat-grown meat, beneath floating neon advertisements for cybernetic limbs and hacking tools, all watched over by enormous corporations of dubious intention… it’s right out of Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days, Ghost in the Shell, Neuromancer, and dozens of other genre pieces that informed both the original RPG and the general ideas that constitute “cyberpunk” in the zeitgeist.

It’s a familiar world you’ll be entering in some ways, with few real surprises if you’re at all conversant in the genre. That is a good thing in many ways, as it feels like a lived-in place: a crystallization and expansion of ideas that, while you have seen them elsewhere, have never been at your fingertips so readily, save perhaps in the original Deus Ex, which had its own limitations.

Yet at the same time there is very much the feel of a lack of imagination and willingness to update those ideas in ways that seem obvious. The gangs based on racial identities seem like such a poor fit for both this era and for a future in which such distinctions have no doubt declined in relevance, especially in a vast melting pot like Night City. The stereotypical “Mexican tough guy” dialogue of your otherwise likeable companion Jackie grates, for instance, as do for example the stilted, supposedly Japanese mannerisms of staff at an Arasaka corporate hotel.

Gender is also a mixed bag. Reviews by queer-identifying reviewers at Polygon and Kotaku have much more relevance here than anything I can say, but I can only concur that the freedom the player has in selecting their presentation is an important step towards better representation of queerness in games — but also has a “do as I say, not as I do” feeling. Elsewhere in the game sex and gender are handled regressively or inconsistently with the clear implication that, with body modification something anyone one can do on a street corner for a few eurobucks, race and gender are fluid and unimportant in this world.

This future feels like it was extrapolated exclusively from the forward thinking but still limited minds of a bunch of smart white guys from the ’90s. Perhaps that’s why I feel so comfortable in it. But as Ready Player One demonstrated, there’s a limit to how much can be accomplished by those methods.

At the same time I want to call out the care that was obviously taken in some ways to have a future filled with people of different shapes, sizes, colors, inclinations, and everything else — it’s clear there is genuine good intention here, even if it stumbles with unfortunate regularity.

“What about the game itself, you babbler,” you ask, after 800 words, “is it any good?”

Yes, it’s good, but difficult to categorize. On one hand, you have a paralysis-inducing freedom in shaping the capabilities with which your character approaches the various situations he or she will encounter. Brute force, stealth, hacking, gunplay — all are quite viable, but don’t expect to get far relying on only one. A “pure hacking” approach, for instance, will be far more tedious than it’s worth, while a “pure gunplay” one will likewise miss the point.

In navigating an enemy base, taking down some rando street gang, or getting through one of the game’s highly involved criminal operations, there are many options for any given situation, but none is reliable enough (certainly not early on, anyway) to get you through without resorting to the others.

One inconveniently placed guard may be susceptible to having his eyes hacked, while another may be easily distracted by one of the numerous items you can make fizzle out and attract their attention. But when you eventually slip up and the bullets start to fly, you’re not going to hack your way out of it. That’s okay, though: You’re not a scalpel, you’re a Swiss Army knife. Act like it!

The open world in which you’ll be undertaking all these missions is a rich one… perhaps too rich. Open the map and you’re presented with a sea of icons, though they’re not quite the Ubisoft-style to-do list so much as letting you know that this is a big, dense city where you’ll never lack for gun shops, criminal activities to engage in or disrupt, and interesting locations to explore. If you think of the map as more “where’s a ripper around here? Let me check my phone” than generic “video game map” it makes more sense, though it’s obviously the latter as well.

You’ll be driving around a lot as well, a process that is about as smooth as it was in Grand Theft Auto 3. Using the totally inadequate keyboard controls for my car, I’ve caused panics and accidents, mowed people down, and obstructed traffic constantly, while attempting to follow every law and attract as little attention as possible. This part of the game feels hilariously last generation, like how in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, your all-terrain horse vehicle was an object of terror and lethality to any peasant stupid enough to walk on one of that game’s many mountain trails.

The helpful GPS directions once took me through a pedestrian occupied area with a gate that was just narrow enough to completely trap the car, though it extricated itself offscreen when I called it. Another time I summoned the car to my location and instantly heard a distant explosion and screams. The car arrived 30 seconds later completely trashed, missing the doors on one side. Fortunately it seems to repair itself by mysterious means when you’re not looking.

But when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing — you know, cyberpunk stuff — things are smoother, if not what I’d call completely modern. I had this feeling the whole time like I was playing a game whose bones were built 8 years ago and then wrapped in layer after layer of stuff, creating systems and environments that feel incredibly cool in some ways and, like the car, huge throwbacks in others. The gunplay isn’t as good as any shooter today, the melee is about at Skyrim quality, the hacking is perhaps Deus Ex levels, and stealth is nowhere near Metal Gear — but none of those games actually offered the breadth or richness of systems and environments as Cyberpunk 2077.

In the final — for the purpose of this article, which is to say incredibly limited and initial — analysis, it’s both accurate to say that this game is GTA: Night City 2077 and totally inadequate. It’s both unique and totally derivative, futuristic and regressive, wide-open and painfully restrictive. Like many AAA games these days, Cyberpunk 2077 contains multitudes, and short of being a total faceplant, which it undeniably isn’t, it has a huge draw and value for the millions of players who want to hoon around a cyberpunk dystopia, hacking and shooting and scheming and getting better armblades, eyeball replacements, and future-guns.

I suppose the simplest summary of my review would be that I look forward to playing Cyberpunk when it’s finished. The Witcher 3 came out to acclaim but also criticism of many of its systems, and over time it has evolved into the genre-leading game it is. Cyberpunk has that potential, but it undeniably also has real issues that I would like to let them address before I play it. If you have any patience, I’d give it a few months at least so you don’t have the best of the game spoiled by the worst. At some point in the future I think Cyberpunk will be a pivotal title in gaming, but not yet — let’s just hope it gets there before 2077.

Aurora Innovation, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Sequoia Capital and Amazon, has reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that will value the combined company at $10 billion.

Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.

Aurora, which was founded in 2017, is focused on building the full self-driving stack, the underlying technology that will allow vehicles to navigate highways and city streets without a human driver behind the wheel. Aurora has attracted attention and investment from high-profile venture firms, management firms and corporations such as Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital,  Amazon and T. Rowe Price, in part because of its founders Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson, all of whom are veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry.

Urmson led the former Google self-driving project before it spun out to become the Alphabet business Waymo. Anderson is best known for leading the development and launch of the Tesla Model X and the automaker’s Autopilot program. Bagnell, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, helped launch Uber’s efforts in autonomy, ultimately heading the autonomy and perception team at the Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh.

Aurora plans to bring autonomous trucks to market first. However, Urmson has maintained that the company is still pursuing other applications of its self-driving stack such as robotaxis. The deal with Uber ATG provides Aurora with talent and operational facilities. But it delivers on two other important areas: relationships with Uber ATG investors, specifically Toyota, as well as a partnership with Uber that will give it access to its vast ride-hailing platform.

“The way we want to build this company has been with this mindset of let’s build it to scale — let’s create an environment where people can do their best work,” Urmson said in an interview Monday. “And then let’s go look for great teams and bring them in. It’s one way to get a combination of talent and technology, and in this case, also relationships.”

The announcement, which confirms TechCrunch’s reporting in November, marks the beginning of what promises to be a huge undertaking to merge Uber ATG, a 1,200-person business unit with operations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto with its smaller competitor.

It’s not clear if all Uber ATG employees will be folded into Aurora, which has 600-person workforce and operations in San Francisco Bay Area, Pittsburgh, Texas and Bozeman, Montana. At least one executive — Uber ATG CEO Eric Meyhofer — will not be joining the company.

This is not Aurora’s first acquisition, although it is certainly its largest and most complex. In 2019, Aurora acquired Blackmore, a Bozeman, Montana-based lidar company, and simulation startup 7D Labs.

Odysee is a new video site that CEO Jeremy Kauffman said was created to recapture some of the freedom and independence of the internet he grew up with — an internet where “anyone could speak and anyone could have a voice.”

Kauffman argued that since then, the internet has become “very corporate,” with a small number of companies controlling the flow of information. Odysee was created to provide an alternative — and eventually, more than that.

“Some would call it an alternative to YouTube,” he said. “We like to think it’s the successor.”

The site was created by the team behind the Lbry (pronounced “library”) blockchain protocol. Kauffman emphasized that neither Odysee creators nor their viewers need to know anything about the technology (“blockchain is a how, it’s not a why”), but he said this approach gives those creators more direct control of their content and their audience. As Kauffman put it, “Your channel exists, effectively, in a cryptocurrency wallet that you can download.”

The Lbry website offers a few more details: “For the same reasons that nobody can prevent a Bitcoin transaction from taking place, nobody can prevent a transaction (like a publication or a tip) from appearing on the LBRY blockchain.”

The Odysee website sits on top of this protocol. While anyone could, in theory, publish anything to the Lbry blockchain, Odysee restricts content based on a handful of community guidelines that prohibit things like pornography and content that promotes violence or terrorism.

Still, Kauffman said, “We do think that YouTube is far too strict.” As an example, he pointed to the Google-owned platform’s decision to remove an interview with the Trump Administration’s pandemic advisor Scott Atlas in which he questioned social distancing and stay-at-home orders. (Dr. Atlas resigned from his position in the administration last week.)

“Strict” is not exactly the word I’d use to describe YouTube’s moderation policies, and I’d also argue that it’s a good thing that the big digital are being (somewhat) more proactive in blocking or at least labeling misinformation around high-stakes topics like the COVID-19 pandemic, or President Trump’s efforts to de-legitimize his defeat in the November election.

Kauffman countered that in the Atlas example, “You don’t delete the video. That’s not how science progresses.”

And while loudly declaring your dedication to “free speech” has increasingly served as a euphemism for attracting right-wing content and users, Kauffman said that’s not his aim.

“We want to be a space where all voices can be heard,” he said.

There’s also a compelling argument that the big platforms simply have too much power, so regardless of your opinion on any particular platform or decision, you could see Odysee as an attempt to return that power to individual creators.

Plus, politics only represents one slice of what’s being published on the site.

“If you want to go watch ‘The Daily Show’ or Gordon Ramsey clips, go to YouTube,” Kauffman said. “If you want to watch this crazy, trippy video that a 19 year old made in their house but it’s super interesting, that’s the kind of stuff that you can find on Odysee.”

Not that Odysee necessarily expects creators to post exclusively to the site, as Upper Echelon Gamers acknowledged in a statement:

The greatest draw for me to Odysee was an automated second library of content that can build on its own without increasing my workload. Combine that with a much clearer monetization formula, and far more responsive communication with the administration and you have a platform that is very exciting to work with.

Odysee officially launched this month, but it says that since the beta version went live in February, more than 400,000 people have posted a total of 5 million videos to the site, which is already attracting 8.7 million monthly active users.

The plan is to eventually make money from advertising, with creators given full control over how they monetize. Individual viewers, meanwhile, will also be able to pay to skip ads, even if it’s just for one video.

 

Do people want their at-home fitness to come in video game form? The incredible popularity of games like Ring Fit Adventure suggests yes.

London-based startup Quell thinks it’s just the beginning for this genre, and they’ve raised a $3M seed round to help prove it.

At the core of Quell’s gameplay is the “Gauntlet” — a harness, of sorts, that the player slips on to control Quell’s games. As players punch and dodge their way through the world, Gauntlet’s built-in sensors measure things like punch speed and accuracy, while customizable resistance bands keep things challenging.

We initially wrote about Quell back in August here, and named it as one of our top startups from the Y Combinator S20 Demo Day.

Investors in this round include Twitch co-founders Kevin Lin and Emmett Shear, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, WikiHow founder Josh Hannah, TenCent, Khosla Ventures, Heartcore, Social Impact Capital, and JamJar Investments. Quell co-founder Doug Stidolph tells me that they were initially raising at a valuation of $10M; by the time they’d closed the final investors in this round, the valuation had increased to $15M. The company also recently closed a Kickstarter campaign, where it raised £501,341 (around $670k USD) from nearly 3,000 backers. With the ongoing pandemic making it scarier and riskier to hit the gym (if your state/county even allows it), interest and demand for home fitness options will just keep going up.

Quell’s hardware and games are initially being built to work with PC, Mac, and mobile devices. That means no console support at first — a bummer, as a big ol’ TV seems like the ideal display for games like this, and consoles are probably the most user-friendly way of getting it there. It’s something the company says it has on its roadmap to hopefully tackle in the future, but the added cost/complexity of the console hardware approval process was a bit too much to take on at launch.

Meanwhile, Quell is building out its own in-house game studio, hiring folks like Peter Cornelius (formerly Lead Producer at the developer-centric gaming tech company Improbable) as Game Production Director. One of the main goals, Quell co-founder Cameron Brookhouse tells me, is to build games that get the player exercising while still being deeply immersive; they want the gameplay to encourage movement intuitively, rather than tossing up prompts that say something like, “OK! Time for jumping jacks!”

The Quell team tells me they expect their first hardware to ship by the end of 2021. They’re currently working on transitioning their prototypes into production, figuring out how to do things like make it easier to adjust resistance or swap the Gauntlet from user to user, and to increase the number of different exercises its sensors can detect and gamify.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, the investment firm which spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs to fund and develop the next generation of infrastructure, has unveiled its latest project — Reslia, which focuses on upgrading the efficiency and reliability of power grids.

Through a $20 million equity investment in the startup OhmConnect, and an $80 million commitment to develop a demand response program leveraging OhmConnect’s technology and services across the state of California, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners intends to plant a flag for demand-response technologies as a key pathway to ensuring stable energy grids across the country.

‘We’re creating a virtual power plant,” said Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners co-CEO, Jonathan Winer. “With a typical power plant … it’s project finance, but for a virtual power plant… We’re basically going to subsidize the rollout of smart devices.”

The idea that people will respond to signals from the grid isn’t a new one, as Winer himself acknowledged in an interview. But the approach that Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners is taking, alongside OhmConnect, to roll out the incentives to residential customers through a combination of push notifications and payouts, is novel. “The first place people focused is on commercial and industrial buildings,” he said. 

What drew Sidewalk to the OhmConnect approach was the knowledge of the end consumer that OhmConnect’s management team brought to the table The company’s chief technology officer was the former chief technology officer of Zynga, Winer noted.

“What’s cool about the OhmConnect platform is that it empowers participation,” Winer said. “Anyone can enroll in these programs. If you’re an OhmConnect user and there’s a blackout coming, we’ll give you five bucks if you turn down your thermostat for the next two hours.”

The San Francisco-based demand-response company already has 150,000 users on its platform, and has paid out something like $1 million to its customers during the brownouts and blackouts that have roiled California’s electricity grid over the past year.

The first collaboration between OhmConnect and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners under the Resilia banner will be what the companies are calling a “Resi-Station” — a 550 megawatt capacity demand response program that will use smart devices to power targeted energy reductions.

At full scale, the companies said that the project will be the largest residential virtual power plant in the world. 

“OhmConnect has shown that by linking together the savings of many individual consumers, we can reduce stress on the grid and help prevent blackouts,” said OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries. “This investment by SIP will allow us to bring the rewards of energy savings to hundreds of thousands of additional Californians – and at the same time build the smart energy platform of the future.” 

California’s utilities need all the help they can get. Heat waves and rolling blackouts spread across the state as it confronted some of its hottest temperatures over the summer. California residents already pay among the highest residential power prices in the counry at 21 cents per kilowatt hour, versus a national average of 13 cents.

During times of peak stress earlier in the year, OhmConnect engaged its customers to reduce almost one gigawatt hour of total energy usage. That’s the equivalent of taking 600,000 homes off the grid for one hour.

If the Resilia project was rolled out at scale, the companies estimate they could provide 5 gigawatt hours of energy conservation — that’s the full amount of the energy shortfall from the year’s blackouts and the equivalent of not burning 3.8 million pounds of coal.

Going forward, the Resilia energy efficiency and demand response platform will scale up other infrastructure innovations as energy grids shift from centralized power to distributed, decentralized generation sources, the company said. OhmConnect looks to be an integral part of that platform.

“The energy grid used to be uni-directional.. .we believe that in the near future the grid is going to be become bi-directional and responsive,” said Winer. “With our approach, this won’t be one investment. We’ll likely make multiple investments. [Vehicle-to-grid], micro-grid platforms, and generative design are going to be important.” 

finn.auto — which allows people to subscribe to their car instead of owning it, and offsetting their CO2 emissions — has raised a $24.2M / €20M Series A funding round. White Star Capital (which has also invested in Tier Mobility), and the Zalando co-CEOs Rubin Ritter, David Schneider and Robert Gentz are new investors in this round. All previous investors participated.

The funding comes just under a year since the company launched, after selling just 1,000 car subscriptions. It’s also partnered with Deutsche Post AG and Deutsche Telekom AG.

A number of car manufacturers have launched similar subscription services powered by various providers, such as Drover, Leaseplan and Wagonex.

UK-based startup Drover has raised a total of $40M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest Series B funding round was with Shell Ventures and Cherry Ventures . Plus, there are branded services which include Audi on Demand, BMW, Citroën, DS, Jaguar Carpe, Land Rover Carpe, Mini, Volkswagen and Care by Volvo.

Digitally-led subscription services have the potential to disrupt the traditional car sales model, and new startups are entering the market all the time.

The fin.auto model is proving to appeal to environment-conscious millennials. For each car subscription, the company is offsetting the CO₂ emissions of its vehicles, meaning subscribers can drive their cars in a climate-neutral manner. Its now expanding its range of fully electric vehicles and, in cooperation with ClimatePartner, is supporting selected regional climate protection and development projects.

Key to the Munich-based startups’ play is the automation of fleet management processes and customer interactions, meaning it’s much easier and cheaper to run this kind of subscription operation.

Max-Josef Meier, CEO and founder of finn.auto said: “We are delighted to have been able to bring such high-caliber investors on board and that our existing investors are cementing their confidence with the current round. Mobility with your own car becomes as easy as buying shoes on the Internet. We already offer a large selection of different car brands, whose cars can be ordered online on our platform in just five minutes and at flexible runtimes. The delivery is then conveniently made to the front door.”

Nicholas Stocks, General Partner at White Star Capital added: “There is a huge opportunity globally to streamline outdated customer experiences in the automotive retail space and become the Amazon of the automotive industry. This is something finn.auto is excellently placed to capitalize on with its offering of convenience, flexibility, value and sustainability.”