Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Following weeks of rumors surrounding a potential sale, Huawei has reportedly struck a deal to divest itself of its Honor brand. A new report out today from Reuters notes that the embattled hardware maker will sell the budget unit to a consortium of buyers that includes the government of the city of Shenzhen and Digital China, a phone distributor.

The report, which cites “people familiar with the matter,” puts the price tag for the Honor unit at $15.2 billion. Honor’s new owners will reportedly keep much of the brand’s 7,000 employees (management included) in tact, with plans to take the company public in around three years. The Honor brand has largely focused on low-cost devices, with sales in China, Europe and the U.S. This deal would likely find Huawei focusing more exclusively on high-end products under its own brand.

While the deal has been rumored for some time now, its seeming conclusion comes in the wake of Joe Biden’s presidential election win. It seems clear from Huawei’s decision to press on with the all-cash deal that the company doesn’t believe its international fortunes will change immediately under a new U.S. president.

The news comes in the wake of ongoing difficulties tied to U.S. sanctions. Huawei’s inability to access technologies from companies like Google have proven to be a major hit for the world’s second largest phone maker. While the company has managed to maintain solid sales in its native China, even those have taken a hit amid its struggles.

One of the problems with putting a satellite in orbit is that once you do, it’s pretty much out of your hands. If anything goes wrong, or it runs out of fuel, that’s all she wrote. Fortunately there are companies that aim to change this, and three leaders in the field — Orbit Fab, Astroscale, and Maxar — will be joining us at TC Sessions: Space in December.

You may remember Orbit Fab from Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield around this time last year. CEO and co-founder Daniel Faber debuted its refueling interface, RAFTI, and showed how that and a network of “tanker” satellites could save companies hundreds of millions by keeping their spacecraft in orbit rather than sending up replacements.

Astroscale is embarking on a similar effort for satellites in geosynchronous orbits, which are even more expensive to replace. But the Japan-based company is it’s also aiming at taking down the innumerable dead satellites and debris scattered throughout other orbits, and has raised huge sums to do so. US President Ron Lopez will join the panel to discuss the many potential approaches to improving sustainability in space.

Maxar is of course a well-known name in space operations, and we’ve had head of space robotics Lucy Condrakchian on stage at TC Sessions: Robotics. Her team is currently working on the ambitious Restore-L mission, which will demonstrate on-orbit refueling, manufacturing, and assembly. Why build it down here if you can do it up there?

These three panelists will discuss the possibilities of this emerging industry and what it could mean for startups and established enterprises here on the ground. With costs of launch dropping, the cost of building and maintaining a major satellite becomes a greater issue — but tiny, cheap satellites are also beginning to proliferate.

How will the market evolve? Can proprietary but practical tech like RAFTI make a difference? How close are we to the first satellite built entirely in space? All this and more will be on the table for our panel next month.

Get an early-bird ticket for just $125 until this Friday, November 13. And we have discounts available for groups, students, active military/government employees and for early-stage space startup founders who want to pitch and give their startup some extra visibility.

Isovalent, a startup that aims to bring networking into the cloud-native era, today announced that it has raised a $29 million Series A round led by Andreesen Horowitz and Google. In addition, the company today officially launched its Cilium platform (which was in stealth until now) to help enterprises connect, observe and secure their applications.

The open-source Cilium project is already seeing growing adoption, with Google choosing it for its new GKE dataplane, for example. Other users include Adobe, Capital One, Datadog and GitLab. Isovalent is following what is now the standard model for commercializing open-source projects by launching an enterprise version.

Image Credits: Cilium

The founding team of CEO Dan Wendlandt and CTO Thomas Graf has deep experience in working on the Linux kernel and building networking products. Graf spent 15 years working on the Linux kernel and created the Cilium open-source project, while Wendlandt worked on Open vSwitch at Nicira (and then VMware).

Image Credits: Isovalent

“We saw that first wave of network intelligence be moved into software, but I think we both shared the view that the first wave was about replicating the traditional network devices in software,” Wendlandt told me. “You had IPs, you still had ports, you created virtual routers, and this and that. We both had that shared vision that the next step was to go beyond what the hardware did in software — and now, in software, you can do so much more. Thomas, with his deep insight in the Linux kernel, really saw this eBPF technology as something that was just obviously going to be groundbreaking technology, in terms of where we could take Linux networking and security.”

As Graf told me, when Docker, Kubernetes and containers, in general, become popular, what he saw was that networking companies at first were simply trying to reapply what they had already done for virtualization. “Let’s just treat containers as many as miniature VMs. That was incredibly wrong,” he said. “So we looked around, and we saw eBPF and said: this is just out there and it is perfect, how can we shape it forward?”

And while Isovalent’s focus is on cloud-native networking, the added benefit of how it uses the eBPF Linux kernel technology is that it also gains deep insights into how data flows between services and hence allows it to add advanced security features as well.

As the team noted, though, users definitely don’t need to understand or program eBPF, which is essentially the next generation of Linux kernel modules, themselves.

Image Credits: Isovalent

“I have spent my entire career in this space, and the North Star has always been to go beyond IPs + ports and build networking visibility and security at a layer that is aligned with how developers, operations and security think about their applications and data,” said Martin Casado, partner at Andreesen Horowitz (and the founder of Nicira). “Until just recently, the technology did not exist. All of that changed with Kubernetes and eBPF.  Dan and Thomas have put together the best team in the industry and given the traction around Cilium, they are well on their way to upending the world of networking yet again.”

As more companies adopt Kubernetes, they are now reaching a stage where they have the basics down but are now facing the next set of problems that come with this transition. Those, almost by default, include figuring out how to isolate workloads and get visibility into their networks — all areas where Isovalent/Cilium can help.

The team tells me its focus, now that the product is out of stealth, is about building out its go-to-market efforts and, of course, continue to build out its platform.

Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who joined the company nearly 12 years ago and led it through its acquisition by Google to become a crowdsourced navigation app with millions of active users, is stepping down early next year.

Bardin had planned to announce his departure from Waze last spring, but changed his plans as the COVID-19 pandemic swept throughout the globe. The company is now launching a search for its next CEO. Bardin said he will stay on through January 2021 to help find the right person and aid with the transition.

“You know, after more than 11 years I think it’s time to do something else,” Bardin told TechCrunch in a phone interview Tuesday, adding he’s not thought about what that next pursuit might be. “And it’s also time to bring someone in who is better suited for the next stage of growth.”

Bardin didn’t found the company. That credit goes to Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar and Uri Levine who started Waze in Israel in 2008. But he’s been a part of and led the company through explosive growth and helped it become a community-based social network and navigation app that is used by millions of people globally.

When Bardin started at Waze, he said the company had maybe 14,000 users. Today, Waze has 140 million monthly active users who drive more than 24 million miles (40 billion kilometers) every month. He has overseen the launch of a number of programs and features, including the company’s Waze for Cities program, which share free, anonymized data with 1,600 cities globally as well as its ads offering and a carpool feature that helps connect riders and drivers. The carpool service is now available in four countries.

“I think one of the unique things about Waze’s mission is that everyone’s connected on this: nobody loves traffic,” Bardin said. “Many companies, when they disrupt an industry it means there is a loser and a winner. But that’s not the case with Waze.”

Perhaps his most critical role was steering Waze through Google’s acquisition of the company in 2013. Bardin noted that many expected Waze to fail under Google’s ownership within a year. It flourished instead because Google allowed Waze to remain independent and build its open community of users in spite of becoming an interwined product with Google Maps, he added.

“It’s a testament to Google that they gave us that flexibility and independence,” he said.

In a post on Waze’s community forum, Bardin emphasized that company has Google’s continued support and will continue to be an independent brand and service.

“Our 2021 plans and our vision remains the same. We are also investing significantly in our infrastructure and tools so that, with your continued support, we can continue to expand our service and “Outsmart traffic, Together”. And most importantly, you remain the very core and foundation of Waze–you make Waze what it is, and there are no plans to change that,” he wrote.

The next phase will be to continue that independence while growing it to 1 billion active users, Bardin said.

“We need someone with experience in managing a high-growth technology company in the consumer space, but it needs to be someone with experience in doing innovative approaches within a large company, which is a skill set that doesn’t really exist that much.”

Carbon Health has raised a $100 million Series C funding round, led by Dragoneer Investment Group and including participation from prior investors Brookfield Technology Partners, DCVC and Builders VC. This funding will be used to help the SF-based healthcare provider startup to continue to expand its nationwide footprint, including with the opening of 100 pop-up clinics planned for across 20 markets across the U.S.

This past year has seen Carbon Health expand from just seven clinics to 27, spread out across six different states. The company, which focuses on primary care, has also introduced virtual care options with an emphasis on what it calls “omnichannel” care, or offering services in whatever method is most convenient, effective and appropriate for its customers. The startup has always aimed at a hybrid care approach, but it’s emphasizing the flexibility of its model in response to COVID-19, and has in particular accelerated its plans around its pop-up clinics.

These are deployed in under-utilized spaces in regions where additional care options are needed, including parking lots and garages. Carbon Health partnered early with Reef Technology on opening these locations, using shipping-container style mobile trailers to provide on-site care. Carbon Health founder and CEO Eren Bali explained to me that while remote care can be very effective, in some instances, it requires some nurse practitioner support with virtual physician-guided services to provide a complete solution for customers.

The company is also looking to support greater testing capacity using this model, and eventually looking ahead to providing an infrastructure that can help with widespread COVID-19 vaccine distribution, once one is ready to go. While some scientific results this week have been very promising, including with Pfizer’s Phase 3 clinical trial, ultimately the effort of undertaking a national vaccine inoculation program will require cooperation among many stakeholders, including primary care providers.

Roblox this morning announced a partnership with Columbia Records that will allow it to bring a virtual concert experience featuring Lil Nas X to its gaming platform. Notably, this will be Roblox’s first-ever virtual concert, and follows similar events that have been held during the pandemic, like the “One World: Together At Home” concert to benefit WHO in April, and Fortnite’s Travis Scott concert hosted in-game, which attracted 12.3 million concurrent players at its peak.

The Lil Nas concert, meanwhile, will be hosted in an online event space custom-designed by Roblox to allow for an immersive experience. There will be several different stages, each inspired by Lil Nas X’s songs and music videos, that will use a variety of technologies including the latest in shadowing, lighting, and physically based rendering (PBR) facial recognition technologies, the company says.

During the concert, Lil Nas X will also perform his new single “Holiday” for the first time live, as well as other popular hiits.

The event itself will actually be run over three showings starting with the main event on Sat. Nov. 14th at 1 PM PST. The Asia showing will follow at 10 PM PST, then the European show will be on Sun. Nov. 15 at 9 AM PST.

In addition, Roblox and Columbia Records will host a Q&A with Lil Nas X that will be streamed in the concert venue with a preshow at 4 PM on Friday Nov. 13.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Columbia Records to bring Lil Nas X fans and the Roblox community together in an entirely new way,” said Jon Vlassopulos, Global Head of Music at Roblox, in a statement about the event. “This concert with Lil Nas X will transport players and their friends into the Metaverse, and bring to life the future of what immersive, social experiences can look like.”

Ahead of the event, the new concert venue will feature mini games and other activities for players to explore, as well as a virtual store offering exclusive merchandise, like accessories, emotes, and Lil Nas X avatar bundles.

“We’re throwing the biggest virtual concert of 2020, and I hope everybody in the world can come check it out,” said Lil Nas X, in a statement. “I feel very lucky to be the first artist to ever do this on Roblox. We had so much fun putting this together for my fans, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it,” he added.

Roblox has been signaling an interest in expanding its platform beyond gaming in recent months, as the pandemic fueled a jump in monthly users and player spending, as well as a desire for virtual activities in general. The company in July reported it had grown to more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it had in February, before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders had kicked in.

It also in July launched  “Party Place,” a virtual venue focused on hanging out for meetups or birthday parties.

The shift to virtual platforms for socializing has helped boost Roblox revenues, as well.

One third-party estimate, from Sensor Tower, pegged Roblox mobile spending at $94 million in September. It also suggested Roblox had passed $2 billion in spending to date. A more recent report from Safe Betting Sites, estimated Roblox players spent $820 million in total from Jan. through Sept. 2020.

The gaming company is poised to IPO, but a date has not been disclosed.

Explo, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 class, which is helping customers build customer-facing business intelligence dashboards, announced a $2.3 million seed round today. Investors included Amplo VC, Soma Capital and Y Combinator along with several individual investors.

The company originally was looking at a way to simplify getting data ready for models or other applications, but as the founders spoke to customers, they saw a big need for a simple way to build dashboards backed by that data and quickly pivoted.

Company CEO and co-founder Gary Lin says the company was able to leverage the core infrastructure, data engineering and production that it had built while at Y Combinator, but the new service they have created is much different from the original idea.

“In terms of the UI and the output, we had to build out the ability for our end users to create dashboards, for them to embed the dashboards and for them to customize the styles on these dashboards, so that it looks and feels as though it was part of their own product,” Lin explained.

While the founders had been working on the original idea since last year, they didn’t actually make the pivot until September. They made the change because they were hearing this was really what customers needed more than the tool they had been building while at Y Combinator. In fact, Chen says that their YC mentors and investors have been highly supportive of the switch.

The company is just getting started with the four original co-founders — Lin, COO Andrew Chen, CTO Rohan Varma and product designer Carly Stanisic — but the plan is to use this money to beef up the engineering team with three to five new hires.

With a diverse founding team, the company wants to continue looking at diversity as it builds the company. “One of the biggest reasons that we think diversity is important is that it allows us to have a bigger perspective and a grander perspective on things. And honestly, it’s in environments where I have personally […] been involved where we’ve actually been able to create the best ideas was by having a larger perspective. And so we definitely are going to be as inclusive as possible and are definitely thinking about that as we hire,” Lin said.

As the company has grown up during the pandemic, the founding core is used to working remotely and the goal moving forward is to be a distributed company. “We will be a remote distributed company so we’re hiring people no matter where they are, which actually makes it a lot easier from a hiring perspective because we’re able to reach a much more diverse and large pool of applicants,” Lin said.

They are in the process of thinking about how they can build a culture as they bring in distributed employees. “I think the way that we’ve started to see it is that working distributed is not a reduced experience, but just a different one and we are thinking about different things like how e organize new people when they on board, and maybe we can meet up as a team and have a retreat where we are located in the same place [when travel allows],” he said.

For now, they will remain remote as they take their first half dozen customers and begin to build the company with the new investment.

Today at 11:00 a.m. PT/2:00 p.m. ET, we’re bringing venture capitalist Soraya Darabi of TMV to the Extra Crunch Live stage to talk about how to get that first “yes” as an early-stage company and which founder mistakes often lead her to say “no.” You’ll need to be an Extra Crunch subscriber to attend, so grab your seat ASAP (we promise, it’s worth it).

Darabi co-founded TMV, formerly Trail Mix Ventures, in 2016, and has built a portfolio that is majority women and minority-owned, including employee wellness platform Bravely, holistic healthcare company Parsley Health and waste reduction upstart Ridwell. TMV is often the first institutional check that a company might raise.

Before TMV, Darabi spent time at The New York Times as the manager of digital partnerships and social media marketing. She also was the co-founder of two companies: Zady, which helps with sustainable fashion manufacturing, and Foodspotting, a visual guide that helps locals find dishes near them that was acquired by OpenTable.

We’ll walk through her theses, which range from future work and edtech, and double-click into what she needs to see in terms of metrics and product upon first pitch.

The growth of accelerators, rolling funds, community funds, hungry angels and institutional investors has given founders more options than ever before, but for women and people of color, access to funding continues to be a struggle. And when it comes to financing a startup, the most important — and hardest — check to land is the very first one. So, learn from her, bring your notebooks, a snack, and, as a way of me saying thank you for for subscribing to Extra Crunch, bring your questions for me to ask her live.

Details below the jump:

Spotify has come under fire of late over questions around musician compensation, but when it comes to podcasting, it has money to burn. This morning, the streaming service confirmed its acquisition of Megaphone for a reported $235 million.

Launched by The Slate Group in February 2015 as Panopoly, it rebranded as Megaphone in 2019. In its original form, the company produced a number of flagship podcasts for high profile media brands, including Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal and Vox. The rebranding, however, followed a shuttering of its editorial efforts to focus on back end concerns like hosting, ad tools and distribution.

Spotify already had an existing partnership with the company, including use of its hosting services. This deal, it seems, is largely focused on the service’s ad tools. “Together, Spotify and Megaphone will offer podcast publishers innovative tools that will help them earn more from their work,” Spotify said in a press release. “This includes the opportunity to opt in to have their content monetized, matching their loyal listeners with even greater demand from advertisers.”

Megaphone is the latest in a long line of recent podcast-centric acquisitions for Spotify, ranging from tens to hundreds of millions a pop. It should go a way toward cementing the company’s long-standing dream of become one of the medium’s biggest players.

The list of acquisitions also includes content producers like Gimlet, The Ringer and Parcast, along with technology companies like Anchor. This May, it also purchased exclusivity to the immensely popular Joe Rogan Experience for more than $100 million — an acquisition that has reportedly caused some unrest among employees who have taken issue with the show’s controversial subject matter.

Remote working has become the norm in many offices around the world this year, as organizations do what they can to help contain the rapid transmission of Covid-19 by reducing in-person interactions between workers. That’s also meant a renewed focus on how companies manage employees who have never worked in the office, and might even live outside the country. Today, one of the startups helping to manage those workers — appropriately, itself named Remote — is announcing a significant round of funding to expand its business to 30 countries, from 17 at the moment.

The startup has closed a round of $35 million, a Series A that is being led by Index Ventures, with participation also from Sequoia Capital and some pretty notable angel investors, including Aaron Levie, Zach Weinberg, and Kevin and Julia Hartz. It brings the total raised by Remote to $46 million to date after the company — founded in 2019 — raised $11 million in a seed round earlier this year.

The opportunity and challenge that Remote is tackling will be a familiar one to anyone who works in a company that has people spread across different countries.

You may have found the perfect person to fill a role, and if that person was in your city, he or she would be working in the office as a full-time employee. But because that person lives elsewhere, and it’s too complicated to sort out the employment terms, he or she instead gets paid essentially like a regular freelancer, with no benefits or other kinds of coverage you typically get in a full-time contract (which could include maternity leave, or redundancy terms, or shares in the company, and more). That poses tricky questions both for the employer and the employee: is the employer still legally bound to provide full-time benefits? Should the employee seek a job elsewhere to get a more complete package and more security?

Remote was built in essence all that and more: it acts as the middle man, working with the company and the employee in his/her home market to figure out how best to employ that person — whether as full-time or as a permanent contractor — and then handles payroll and more with a network of localised legal entities that it has built from the ground up to handle everything, from employer of record services, to payroll, benefits, taxes and visa and immigration services when they are needed, as well as a platform to cover payments when the employee in question is a contractor. Its customers range in size from 10 employees to a few thousand. “We are basically agnostic in that sense,” said Job van der Voort, the CEO, in an interview.

Remote was co-founded by two European transplants to San Francisco who have first-hand experience of the paradoxical pains and opportunities of being in an organization that uses remote workforces. Van der Voort had been the VP of product for GitLab, which he scaled from 5 to 450 employees working remotely (and it’s now a customer of Remote’s). CTO Marcelo Lebre most recently had been VP of engineering for Unbabel — another startup focused on reducing international barriers, this time between how companies and global customers communicate.

Remote is part of a veritable wave of startups that have emerged with significant funding this year to bring more services to businesses to better manage international workforces. They include Deel, Papaya Global, Lattice, Factorial and Turing, among others. There are also others like Gusto and Rippling who handle payroll domestically (taking on incumbents like ADP) but clearly will have their eye on international markets and global workforces to fuel their growth longer term.

Van der Voort says that the unique thing with Remote (apart from having the most obviously well-branded name) is that it has taken care to build each part of its business from the ground up.

“There are many companies that message the same thing: payroll for remote teams,” he said. “But they tend to rely on third parties which we don’t.”

That is partly what stood out for investors, too. Hannah Seal at Index said that her firm has been investing in Remote since the pre-seed round, and that relationship has helped her and the firm with other deals in recent times.

“When we first invested in Remote they were in Portugal, and we never met them in person,” she said of the San Francisco startup. “It wasn’t because of the pandemic that we did the pitch over Zoom, but because of how they were set up. That meant we had to build that relationship remotely. It has its challenges but we are working through that and making it work and we are increasingly open to investing in the best founders, regardless of where they live.”

“The future of work will involve many remote employees. Remote is addressing a key area of friction in the global economy by opening up the availability of talent to all businesses and the range of opportunities to individuals,” said Ravi Gupta, a partner at Sequoia Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to support Remote in its drive to reshape the global talent market.”