Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Qatalog, a London-based startup that has developed a “virtual workspace” that brings together disparate SaaS tools to help teams function better, is disclosing $15 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is European venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors Jacob de Geer (CEO/co-founder of iZettle), Chris Hitchen (partner at Inventures, founder Getprice), and Thijn Lamers (former EVP at Adyen). As part of the investment, Atomico partner Irina Haivas will join the board.

Existing investors, including London’s Mosaic Ventures, which led Qatalog’s $3.5 million seed round in late 2019 while the company was still in stealth, also followed on. Other backers are Taavet Hinrikus (Transferwise co-founder), Paul Forster (founder, Indeed), Ott Kaukver (former CTO, Twilio), Renaud Visage (co-founder, Eventbrite), Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung (Tiny Supercomputer), Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital) and various unnamed angels from Transferwise, Deepmind and Monzo. It brings total funding raised to $18.5 million.

Founded in 2019 by Tariq Rauf, a former global product lead at Amazon, and prior to that, a head of growth at TransferWise, Qatalog aims to bring together all of the SaaS building blocks used in the modern workplace, including Teams/Slack, Microsoft/Google Suite, Zoom, Confluence, Jira, Notion, Asana and others.

The virtual workspace plugs into these various SaaS tools and organises the content and its relationships around “people, teams and projects” presented and accessible through a single interface. By building what Rauf calls the “work graph,” Qatalog wants to unify workplace information to make it much more accessible and transparent, and with the ability to automate routine work and enable SaaS tools to talk to one another. In doing so, the idea is that teams can work smarter and collaborate better throughout the organisation.

“Organizations have an endless supply of tools, methods, and data to make people more productive and happy at work,” he tells me. “But these tools create a lot of chaos, wasted time, and frustration. These pain points are exacerbated by silos of tools and processes, and an increase in remote work”.

To solve this, Rauf says Qatalog has built a “source of truth” for the teams, projects and people within a company and all the “ancillary information” about them. This includes connecting various tools, locations and systems, and providing additional “capabilities and features that make accessing, retrieving, sharing and coordinating work very seamless”.

In some ways, Qatalog is perhaps akin to a modern workplace intranet, if one were to take a SaaS-first and ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ approach. Or perhaps another way to think about Qatalog is that SaaS tools are especially good at solving one problem or a subset of related problems, but don’t scale particularly well when operating in a vacuum or if they (or users) try to bolt on additional functionality outside of their core offering. What’s needed is a way to re-bundle this disparate functionality and the information and workflows it spawns, therefore negating the need for companies to hack together spreadsheets or “super Google docs” to try to consolidate processes and a company’s knowledge-base.

“We connect to [a company’s] various tools, pull as much information about them as possible together, and ask for additional information as needed,” Rauf explains. “Users can then search across their workspace and tools from one place; create teams and projects and wire up all the different silos into them; set trackable goals and connect them to various tools, people, teams and projects; and build workflows that can be assigned and tracked across the team”.

The “workflows” can be something as mundane as the steps required and people involved when booking leave, or something more involved such as a complex work task. The clever part is not just the way a workflow is created and presented, but how workflows are powered under the hood by Qatalog’s “work graph”. This reduces form filling when linking people, teams and SaaS tools to different steps in a workflow and also means that information is two-way. Complete a task within Qatalog and information can be automatically pushed to Slack, Google Calendar etc., and vice versa. It is also not hard to see how a work graph of this kind could enable more automation and/or work macros to be employed in future.

With regards to Qatalog’s typical customer, Rauf says that so far the startup has found that companies with 50 plus people and distributed teams have been good candidates as that’s when internal systems and ad-hoc knowledge management processes start to fail. “At that point, most companies have also likely picked up 10+ tools and are finding information requires manual switchboarding by people,” he tells me.

After announcing a modest $28 million raise earlier this year, the user-generated gamified e-learning platform Kahoot today announced a much bigger round to double down on the current surge in demand for remote education.

The Norwegian startup — which has clocked 1.3 billion “participating players” since launching in 2013 — has picked up $215 million from SoftBank, specifically by way of a “private placement to a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp., through issuance of 43,000,000 new shares.” The placement was made at 46 Norwegian Krone per share, working out to NOK1,978 million (or $215 million), and the funding will be used for acquisitions and also to continue its expansion.

Kahoot is traded on the Merkur Market in Oslo — a stepping stone between being a fully private startup and a publicly-listed company — and today the company is trading more than 15% up on the news. At market open today, it was valued at NOK22.2 billion, or about $2.4 billion — so by the end of the day that market cap is likely to have gone up as a result of today’s investment.

“Kahoot! is experiencing strong momentum and accelerated adoption as enterprises increasingly seek engaging, trustworthy and user-friendly ways to build corporate culture, educate and interact,” the company noted in a statement. “|At the same time, schools and educators are looking to enhance the learning experience, whether virtually or in the classroom. The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the Private Placement to finance accelerated growth through value-creating non-organic opportunities and continue to build a unique platform company.”

We are reaching out to SoftBank for a direct comment on the news — which was announced by Kahoot in the briefest of terms necessary for disclosure as a publicly-traded company — and will update as we learn more.

The startup has been building a two-pronged business: first, a platform aimed at school children to build and use, and browse and use other’s online learning content; and second, a platform where corporates can build, use, and use other’s corporate training materials. The former puts an emphasis on free usage, while the latter is a paid product.

In both cases, Kahoot’s content is built around the idea of gamification — learning designed as games — to make the process more fun and engaging. It has described itself as the “Netflix of Education” — but I think of it a little more like YouTube, because of the user-generated element of a lot of the material.

The company has been hugely successful in its model so far. It says that it has had 1.3 billion participating players, and 200 million games played with 100 million user-generated Kahoots in the last 12 months.

As a point of comparison, last month, when it announced an acquisition to boost its corporate learning business — it bought an enterprise engagement platform called Actimo for about $33 million — it said that it had counted some 1 billion “participating players,” on top of some 4.4 billion users since first launching the platform in 2013.

SoftBank is not the company’s first high-profile investor. Other backers in the company include Microsoft and Disney, as well as the well-known regional VCs Northzone and Creandum.

You’ve probably heard of Glassdoor, which exists to allow employees to rate companies anonymously. Now a UK entrepreneur has decided to address the thorny issue of rating venture capitalists.

Landscape, a new review platform for tech startup founders to discover and find investment opportunities, officially launches today. Started by CompSci graduate Joe Perkins, the site purports to provide transparent feedback from entrepreneurs on their experiences with European VCs and accelerators. During its recent beta phase, Landscape clocked-up 700 over reviews and has garnered 83 ‘Verified Partners’ on the platform. The intention is to start with the UK and Europe and later expand to the US market.

But Perkins has not started the site without industry involvement. Landscape has built an advisory group which includes Alex Depledge MBE (founder and CEO of Resi), Eammon Carey (MD of Techstars London and partner at The Fund), Emma Sinclair MBE (co-Founder of Enterprise Alumni), Hussein Kanji (partner at Hoxton Ventures), and Jon Bradford (partner at Dynamo Ventures). 

Another institutional VC giving its backing to the platform is Ada Ventures. Partner ‘Check’ Warner said in a statement: “The VC and accelerator landscape is regularly called out due to bad actors or for not doing enough to be more inclusive. There are some great organizations already working with firms to make things better, but data is incredibly important and founders often feel powerless when raising money in the beginning. Landscape’s platform not only provides much-needed transparency for everyone, levels the field, and means investors will have to take consistent and sustained action rather than provide lip service, or a one-off.  Even better – investors will have more insight into how founders perceive them and have the insights they need to improve.”

Perkins came up with the idea this year, during the last peak of Covid19 in the UK, after his own experiences raising capital for his educational technology company Coursematch in 2019. “We had been pitching a bunch of investors and I’d been really interested to see how the quality of interaction varied so greatly from each fund. We had one interaction in particular with a London-based fund that ended up being a real time-waster, and I remember thinking “I wish I had a mechanism to warn future founders!”, he commented. Coursematch ended up raising funds from the Ignite Accelerator and the Development Bank of Wales.

The platform reviews are provided by anonymous founders, who score VCs and accelerators they have interacted with on 12 different factors such as Approachability, Diversity, and Response Time. Founders have to provide more information about themselves, the business, and whether the firm they are reviewing invested in their startup, in order to provide context. Landscape is free for founders to use, but offers a paid subscription for VCs enabling them to unlock premium services allowing them a right of reply. Obviously, some might consider that a form of blackmail, but given they can reply to reviews, and see the reasons they might be losing marks, it might concentrate a few minds on how they can improve their offering to founders.

The launch of the site possibly also reflects the fact that UK VC has reached the point where there is now more competition for deals.

The idea itself is not new. Started in 2007, Glassdoor set out to do this for any company. It was acquired by the Japanese firm, Recruit Holdings, for US$1.2 billion in 2018. Better known as a platform for employees to air their grievances about larger corporates, you will of course sometimes see tech startups appear on the platform, in a positive or negative light.

In the VC space, Adeo Ressi, founder of The Founder Institute, launched TheFunded in 2007. The website is designed to allow entrepreneurs to write anonymous reviews about venture capital groups and their processes. It was largely met with derision from VCs and Ressi intended to keep the site anonymous but was eventually outed. TheFunded never really took off (as the dated design and old updates attest), as the VC world is notoriously gossipy and it would not usually be that hard to figure out who was doing the dissing.

This is the challenge faced by Landscape. TheFunded started in a very large VC sector, the US. By contrast, Landscape is launching into the UK initially, which is many times smaller.

Perkins told TechCrunch it’s been many years since TheFunded launched and “the ecosystem has matured to a point where something like Landscape can exist”. He also said Landscape will go global very soon: “Success for Landscape is creating a platform that not only allows founders to complete due diligence on investors before taking their capital, but also provides investors with the insights they need to iterate and improve on their own product, something more and more VCs are becoming open to. While a specific VC may be able to infer who they think has left a review, Landscape will never explicitly reveal this.”

“Most of the responses that the founders leave in their review are included on the platform, but some are left out to protect the founders’ anonymity. Of the 600 founders that have left a review thus far, none have raised issues with this – with that being said, Landscape will always allow for a founder to remove or edit their review at a later date. A lot of reviews are being generated from founders within a portfolio, which may be more complementary to the fund. With more reviews from anyone who has been in discussion with the firm, we’ll be able to give founders more information for their due diligence,” he added.

According to Landscape, the 10 Best Performing European VC Firms rated by its community (these are un-ranked listings), with over five reviews are:

7percent Ventures
Ada Ventures
Ascension Ventures
BACKED VC
Connect Ventures
Dynamo Ventures
Episode 1 Ventures
Kindred Capital
Seedcamp
Talis Capital 
 
Additional insights based on almost 700 reviews so far include:

• VCs score worst on “Diversity”, and “Beyond Money”.
• Accelerators score worst for Post Programme Support.
• Female founders typically feel less supported by their investors than male founders.
• Founders who didn’t successfully raise capital rate VC “Response Time” lower than those who did.

Apple is set to announce new iPhone models today. The company is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live.

Rumor has it that there will be four versions of the iPhone 12, including a “mini” phone with a 5.4-inch display, an iPhone 12, 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max. The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro could share the same 6.1-inch display, while the iPhone 12 Pro Max could feature a 6.7-inch display.

You can expect some models with 5G networking capabilities. While the company will likely spend time explaining why 5G is faster than 4G, remember that many carriers have yet to roll out their 5G networks beyond some testing cities.

But that’s not all. Apple could also unveil a wireless charging pad. This time, it’s not going to be named AirPower. The company could bring back the name MagSafe for the accessory.

On the audio front, many people believe that Apple has been working on over-ear headphones. It would fit well in the AirPods lineup. Apple could also use this opportunity to launch a smaller, cheaper HomePod.

You can watch the live stream directly on this page, as Apple is streaming its conference on YouTube.

If you have an Apple TV, you can download the Apple Events app in the App Store. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old ones. The app icon was updated a few days ago for the event.

And if you don’t have an Apple TV and don’t want to use YouTube, the company also lets you live stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed now works in all major browsers — Safari, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

We’ll be covering the event and you can follow our liveblog for live commentary.

Easyship, a logistics startup that allows e-commerce sellers to add multiple carriers to their stores, announced it has joined the Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program. Easyship is headquartered in Hong Kong and New York. Co-founder Tommaso Tamburnotti told TechCrunch it is the only shipping app in Asia for Shopify Plus, the e-commerce platform’s solution for large companies and high-volume shippers.

Founded in 2015 by Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac, both veterans of Southeast Asia e-commerce giant Lazada, and former banker Paul Lugagne Delpon, Easyship’s platform is includes more than 250 shipping options from carriers including UPS, FedEx and DHL, pre-negotiated discounted rates and the automation of tasks like taxes and duty charges. So far, Easyship says it has served more than 100,000 clients.

According to a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), volumes of international postal packages dispatched have grown during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for things like electrical machinery, pharmaceutical products, mechanical appliances and accessories. At the same time, customs and movement restrictions, as well as a drop in air traffic, have created new challenges for cross-border sellers.

Tamburnotti told TechCrunch that COVID “has been a big shock to the logistics industry,” starting with manufacturers shutting down in China, which resulted in delays for many e-commerce consumer brands.

After factories in China reopened, however, Tamburnotti said there was a surge in production, and about an 80% increase in e-commerce orders worldwide. But the drop in the number of commercial passenger flights, which typically also carry small parcels, resulted longer delivery wait times, and additional courier fees.

In addition to its headquarters in Hong Kong and New York, Easyship also has offices in Singapore, London and Australia, and Tamburnotti said “being a truly global company helps us provide shipping solutions to our clients that need to reach their clients worldwide.”

 

It’s happening slowly but surely. With every passing week, more venture firms are beginning to announce SPACs. The veritable blitz of SPACs formed by investor Chamath Palihapitiya notwithstanding, we’ve now seen a SPAC (or plans for a SPAC) revealed by Ribbit Capital, Lux Capital, the travel-focused venture firm Thayer Ventures, Tusk Ventures’s founder Bradley Tusk, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and FirstMark Capital, among others. Indeed, while many firms say they’re still in the information-gathering phase of what could become a sweeping new trend, others are diving in headfirst.

To better understand what’s happening out there, we talked on Friday with Amish Jani, the cofounder of FirstMark Capital in New York and the president of a new $360 million tech-focused blank-check company organized by Jani and his partner, Rick Heitzmann. We wanted to know why a venture firm that has historically focused on early-stage, privately held companies would be interested in public market investing, how Jani and Heitzmann will manage the regulatory requirements, and whether the firm may encounter conflicts of interest, among other things.

If you’re curious about starting a SPAC or investing in one or just want to understand how they relate to venture firms, we hope it’s useful reading. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: Why SPACs right now? Is it fair to say it’s a shortcut to a hot public market, in a time when no one quite knows when the markets could shift?

AJ: There are a couple of different threads that are coming together. I think the first one is the the possibility that [SPACs] works and really well. [Our portfolio company] DraftKings [reverse-merged into a SPAC] and did a [private investment in public equity deal]; it was a fairly complicated transaction and they used this to go public and the stock has done incredibly well.

In parallel, [privately held companies] over the last five or six years could raise large sums of capital, and that was pushing out the the timeline [to going public] fairly substantially. [Now there are] tens of billions of dollars in value sitting in the private markets and [at the same time] an opportunity to go public and build trust with public shareholders and leverage the early tailwinds of growth.

TC: DraftKings was valued at $3 billion when it came out and it’s now valued at $17 billion, so it has performed really, really well. What makes an ideal target for a SPAC versus a traditional IPO? Does having a consumer-facing business help get public market investors excited? That seems the case.

AJ: It comes down to the nature and the growth characteristics and the sustainability of the business. The early businesses that are going out, as you point out, tend to be consumer based, but I think there’s as good an opportunity for enterprise software companies to use the SPAC to go public.

SPAC [targets] are very similar to what you would want in a traditional IPO: companies with large markets, extremely strong management teams, operating profiles that are attractive, and long term margin profiles that are sustainable, and to be able to articulate [all of that] and have the governance and infrastructure to operate in a public context. You need to be able to do that across any of these products that you use to get public.

TC: DraftKings CEO Jason Robins is an advisor on your SPAC. Why jump into sponsoring one of these yourselves?

AJ: When he was initially approached, we were, like most folks, pretty skeptical. But as the conversations evolved, and we began to understand the amount of customization and flexibility [a SPAC can offer], it felt very familiar. [Also] the whole point of backing entrepreneurs is they do things differently. They’re disruptive, they like to try different formats, and really innovate, and when we saw through the SPAC and the [actual merger] this complex transaction where you’re going through an M&A and raising capital alongside that and it’s all happening between an entrepreneur and a trusted partner, and they’ve coming to terms before even having to talk about all of these things very publicly, that felt like a really interesting avenue to create innovation.

For us, we’re lead partners and directors in the companies that we’re involved with; we start at the early stages at the seed [round] and Series A and work with these entrepreneurs for over a decade, and if we can step in with this product and innovate on behalf of our entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in tech more broadly, we think there’s a really great opportunity to push forward the process for how companies get public.

TC: You raised $360 million for your SPAC. Who are its investors? Are the same institutional investors who invest in your venture fund? Are these hedge funds that are looking to deploy money and also potentially get their money out faster?

AJ: I think a bit of a misconception is this idea that most investors in the public markets want to be hot money or fast money. You know, there are a lot of investors that are interested in being part of a company’s journey and who’ve been frustrated because they’ve been frozen out of being able to access these companies as they’ve stayed private longe. So our investors are some are our [limited partners], but the vast majority are long-only funds, alternative investment managers, and people who are really excited about technology asa long term disrupter and want to be aligned with this next generation of iconic companies.

TC: How big a transaction are you looking to make with what you’ve raised?

AJ: The targets that we’re looking for are going to look very similar to the kind of dilution that a great company would take going public —  think of that 15%, plus or minus, around that envelope. As you do the math on that, you’re looking at a company that’s somewhere around $3 billion in value.  We’re going to have conversations with a lot of different folks who we know well, but that’s that’s generally what we’re looking for.

TC: Can you talk about your “promote,” meaning how the economics are going to work for your team?

AJ: Ours [terms] are very standard to the typical SPAC. We have 20% of the original founders shares. And that’s a very traditional structure as you think about venture funds and private equity firms and hedge funds: 20% is is very typical.

TC: It sounds like your SPAC might be one in a series.

AJ: Well, one step at a time. The job is to do this really well and focus on this task. And then we’ll see based on the reaction that we’re getting as we talk to targets and how the world evolves whether we do a second or third one.

TC: How involved would you be with the management of the merged company and if the answer is very, does that limit the number of companies that might want to reverse-merge into your SPAC?

AJ: The management teams of the companies that we will target will continue to run their businesses. When we talk about active involvement, it’s very much consistent with how we operate as a venture firm, [meaning] we’re a strong partner to the entrepreneur, we are a sounding board, we help them accelerate their businesses, we give them access to resources, and we leverage the FirstMark platform. When you go through the [merger], you look at what the existing board looks like, you look at our board and what we bring to bear there, and then you decide what makes the most sense going forward. And I think that’s going to be the approach that we take.

TC: Chamath Palihapitiya tweeted yesterday about a day when there could be so many VCs with SPACs that two board members from the same portfolio company might approach it to take it public. Does that sound like a plausible scenario and if so, what would you do?

AJ: That’s a really provocative and interesting idea and you could take that further and say, maybe they’ll form a syndicate of SPACs. The way I think about it is that competition is a good thing. It’s a great thing for entrepreneurship, it’s a good thing overall.

The market is actually really broad. I think there’s something like 700-plus private unicorns that are out there. And while there are a lot of headlines around the SPAC, if you think about technology-focused people with deep tech backgrounds, that pool gets very, very limited, very quickly. So we’re pretty excited about the ability to go have these conversations.

You can listen in on more of this conversation, including around liquidation issues and whether FirstMark will target its own portfolio companies or a broader group or targets, here.

GoGet, a Malaysian on-demand work platform, announced today that it has raised a $2 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The platform currently has 20,000 gig workers, who are called “GoGetters,” and has onboarded 5,000 businesses, including Lazada Malaysia, IKEA Malaysia, Foodpanda and flower delivery service BloomThis.

While Malaysia has other on-demand work platforms, including Supahands and Kaodim, each has its own niche. SupaHands focuses on online tasks, while Kaodim offers professional services like home repairs, catering and fitness training. GoGet is more similar to TaskRabbit, with GoGetters performing errands or temp work like deliveries, moving large items, catering at events, data entry and office administration.

Chief executive officer and co-founder Francesca Chia founded GoGet in 2014. The startup decided to focus on gig workers because there is a labor gap in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, she told TechCrunch.

“Today, the majority of ASEAN’s labor market are low- to middle-skilled, and the majority are not protected with job security, future career paths and financial services such as insurance and savings,” she said. “At the other end of the spectrum, over 70% of employment in ASEAN are from SMEs, who seek to scale without scaling full-time costs, and find it difficult to train and maintain a reliable pool of staff.”

[gallery columns="5" ids="2059174,2059175,2059176,2059177,2059178"]

GoGet wants to bridge the gap by connecting businesses with verified flexible workers, she added. GoGetters are able to switch between different categories of work, which Chia said gives the ability to learn new skills. Companies are provided with management features that include the ability to create a list of GoGetters they want to work with again and tools for recruiting, training and payment.

The Series A will be used to expand GoGet in Malaysia. One of the things many companies whose business models revolve around the gig economy need to grapple with as they scale include workers who are frustrated by uneven work, low pay and the lack of benefits they would receive as full-time employees. In California, for example, this has resulted in a political battle as companies like Uber, DoorDash and Lyft try to roll back legislation that would force them to classify more gig workers are full-time employees.

Chia said GoGet’s “vision is to bring flexible work to the world in a sustainable manner.” Part of this entails giving GoGet’s gig workers access to benefits like on-demand savings and insurance plans that are similar to what full-time employees receive. GoGet’s platform also has career-building features, including online trainings and networking tools, so workers can prepare for jobs that require different skill sets.

While GoGet’s short-term plan is to focus on growth in Malaysia, it eventually plans to enter other ASEAN countries, too.

In a press statement about the investment, Monk’s Hill Ventures co-founder and managing partner Kuo-Yi Lim said, “The nature of work is being redefined as companies and workers seek both flexibility and fit. This trend has been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses are transforming in response and require more elastic workforce. GoGet provides a community of motivated and well-trained workers, but more importantly, its platform extends the corporate people management systems to ensure quality, compliance and seamless workflow.”

Carl Pei, who co-founded the smartphone giant OnePlus in his 20s, is leaving the company, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Pei played an instrumental role in designing the OnePlus smartphone lineup over the years, including the recently launched OnePlus Nord, which has been the company’s biggest hit to date. Outside Shenzhen, China, where OnePlus is headquartered, Pei has also been the face of the Chinese firm, appearing at trade conferences, interacting with loyal customers, and giving interviews to the media.

In the early years of OnePlus, Pei devised various marketing strategies for best positioning the company’s products and create a hype about them. In 2014 and 2015, when OnePlus struggled with scaling its inventories, the company sold its phones through invites and several other clever marketing techniques including one in which people were required to destroy their current phones to buy a new OnePlus smartphone.

In the early days of OnePlus, Pei lived almost exclusively in low-cost hotels in China and India to better understand the market and easily travel to new cities. OnePlus is now one of the most successful premium smartphone makers in India and several other markets.

“We did’t have proper product management. What we lacked in experience, we made up in hours,” he said in an earlier interview. He talked more about the company’s early days and the state of the smartphone market at Disrupt 2019.

Once he publicly asked Samsung to hire him so that he could learn more about overseeing operations and logistics. “So, Samsung, today I have a proposal for you: let me be your intern. Seriously. I would be honored to learn from your team about how you’ve been able to scale, run, and manage your business so successfully,” he wrote on his personal blog.

Pei reached out to Pete Lau in 2012 through social media. The two started OnePlus a year later. “He said, ‘I want to change the world.’ I thought this kid has ambitious thoughts and dreams. I think it comes from the heart and it’s very important. I think he has tenacity,” Lau recalled in an interview in 2015.

Years before they started OnePlus, Pei collaborated with a friend and sold whitelabeled MP3 players in China.

Pei, 31, is not joining Samsung, but has clarity on what he wishes to do next. He is starting his own venture and is in talks with investors to raise capital, according to one of the sources who requested anonymity as they are not authorized to speak to the media. Carl did not respond to a request for comment early Monday.

Alphabet (you know… Google) has taken the wraps off the latest “moonshot” from its X labs: A robotic buggy that cruises over crops, inspecting each plant individually and, perhaps, generating the kind of “big data” that agriculture needs to keep up with the demands of a hungry world.

Mineral is the name of the project, and there’s no hidden meaning there. The team just thinks minerals are really important to agriculture.

Announced with little fanfare in a blog post and site, Mineral is still very much in the experimental phase. It was born when the team saw that efforts to digitize agriculture had not found as much success as expected at a time when sustainable food production is growing in importance every year.

“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. What’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.

Much as Google originally began with the idea of indexing the entire web and organizing that information, Grant and the team imagined what might be possible if every plant in a field were to be measured and adjusted for individually.

The way to do this, they decided, was the “Plant buggy,” a machine that can intelligently and indefatigably navigate fields and do those tedious and repetitive inspections without pause. With reliable data at a plant-to-plant scale, growers can initiate solutions at that scale as well — a dollop of fertilizer here, a spritz of a very specific insecticide there.

They’re not to first to think so. FarmWise raised quite a bit of money last year to expand from autonomous weed-pulling to a full-featured plant intelligence platform.

As with previous X projects at the outset, there’s a lot of talk about what could happen in the future, and how they got where they are, but rather little when it comes to “our robo-buggy lowered waste on a hundred acres of soy by 10 percent” and such like concrete information. No doubt we’ll hear more as the project digs in.

Alphabet (you know… Google) has taken the wraps off the latest “moonshot” from its X labs: A robotic buggy that cruises over crops, inspecting each plant individually and, perhaps, generating the kind of “big data” that agriculture needs to keep up with the demands of a hungry world.

Mineral is the name of the project, and there’s no hidden meaning there. The team just thinks minerals are really important to agriculture.

Announced with little fanfare in a blog post and site, Mineral is still very much in the experimental phase. It was born when the team saw that efforts to digitize agriculture had not found as much success as expected at a time when sustainable food production is growing in importance every year.

“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. What’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.

Much as Google originally began with the idea of indexing the entire web and organizing that information, Grant and the team imagined what might be possible if every plant in a field were to be measured and adjusted for individually.

The way to do this, they decided, was the “Plant buggy,” a machine that can intelligently and indefatigably navigate fields and do those tedious and repetitive inspections without pause. With reliable data at a plant-to-plant scale, growers can initiate solutions at that scale as well — a dollop of fertilizer here, a spritz of a very specific insecticide there.

They’re not to first to think so. FarmWise raised quite a bit of money last year to expand from autonomous weed-pulling to a full-featured plant intelligence platform.

As with previous X projects at the outset, there’s a lot of talk about what could happen in the future, and how they got where they are, but rather little when it comes to “our robo-buggy lowered waste on a hundred acres of soy by 10 percent” and such like concrete information. No doubt we’ll hear more as the project digs in.