Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The excitement around the ability to customize your iPhone homescreen following the release of iOS 14 has been paying off for Pinterest. According to new third-party estimates, Pinterest’s app has seen record global daily downloads and a swift climb up the App Store’s Top Charts as users sought out iPhone design inspiration — like photos to use for custom icons or wallpapers to match their new widgets, for example.

App store intelligence firm Apptopia was the first to note the impact of the iOS 14 customization trend on Pinterest’s downloads. According to its data, Pinterest saw a record high number of daily downloads on September 21 when it recorded approximately 616,000 new installs worldwide.

Another third-party estimate, however, found Pinterest’s daily download record was actually broken the day before.

Image Credits: screenshot via TechCrunch

App store market intelligence firm Sensor Tower nears Apptopia’s estimate for September 21, as it recorded approximately 680,000 global installs across both iOS and Android, instead of 616,000.

But Sensor Tower data shows that Pinterest actually broke the record for the most daily downloads ever on September 20. (Or, at least, this was the most since January 2014, which is when Sensor Tower began tracking app download data).

On September 20, the firm estimates that Pinterest’s app generated around 800,000 installs across iOS and Android on a global basis. That represents 32% week-over-week growth from the 607,000 installs it saw on September 13 — a few days before the worldwide release of Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 14.

In addition, Pinterest swiftly climbed up from No. 47 on the top free iPhone charts in the U.S. on Friday, September 18 to No. 7 on Sunday, September 20. It then climbed up even further to No. 6 on Monday, September 21 — a figure that agrees with Apptopia’s data. The app may have briefly hit the No. 1 position, as well, but not long enough to be recorded as the No. 1 app for the day.

Pinterest is also now No. 1 in the Lifestyle category on the iPhone, though it has regularly taken either a No. 1 or No. 2 position in this category as of February 4, 2020, Sensor Tower also noted.

The Pinterest homepage today showcases iPhone design trends as one of its “Daily Inspirations,” where the collection “Trending wallpapers and aesthetic home screen ideas” is currently sitting at the top of the page. Here, users are finding iPhone backgrounds and sharing other custom designs and icon sets for people to use in their own creations.

The iOS 14 update has had a large impact on the app ecosystem, as it finally delivered a feature Android users have had for years: homescreen widgets.

In combination with the new iOS App Library that lets you hide away less frequently-used apps, the iOS update has managed to tap into what was clearly pent-up consumer demand for being able to personalize the iPhone interface to their own tastes and interests. iPhone users are also now taking advantage of Apple’s Shortcuts app to create custom icons — although this is more of a hack, as the process isn’t really replacing the icon itself, but rather creating a shortcut to launch the app instead.

This redesign trend hasn’t only impacted Pinterest.

User demand for new widgets and creative tools is now playing out across the iPhone App Store and its Top Charts.

Currently, for example, the top three positions on the U.S. App Store’s Top Free Charts are held by widget-making applications: Widgetsmith, Color Widgets and Photo Widget, respectively. Pinterest has moved up to No. 5 as of the time of writing, and is followed by Motivation – Daily Quotes, another app gaining downloads for its widgets. Meanwhile, an app called Tune Track, an early adopter of widgets, has now found itself in the No. 8 position, as well. Even the Top Paid Charts are feeling the influence, as a Photo Widget is No. 1 and the creative design tool Procreate Pocket is No. 2.

Whether design tools will continue to reign remains to be seen. Some people are frustrated by the way Shortcuts are launched — it first redirects to the Shortcuts app, then launches the app in question. If Apple were to endorse the redesign trend, it would do away with this intermediary step to make custom shortcuts more useful.

Pinterest could not comment on the app download figures, but it confirmed the download spike isn’t attributable to a paid user acquisition campaign at this time. Intead, the company says it’s seeing organic increases in both downloads and iOS 14-related searches.

“There has been an increase in searches for iOS 14 wallpapers and homescreen design this week by Gen Z users, a demographic group that grew 50% year-over-year in June 2020,” a Pinterest spokesperson told TechCrunch. “These Pinners often use Pinterest as a resource for aesthetic inspiration and decorating offline spaces like bedrooms, so it’s interesting to see them seek inspiration for their online spaces, too,” they added.

While electric scooters first launched at scale in the U.S., they quickly made their way overseas. Now, there’s a bustling electric scooter market in Europe, China, Latin America and one that’s growing in parts of Africa.

At TC Sessions: Mobility on October 6 & 7, we’ll explore the journey of electric scooters and bikes from the U.S. to a number of countries across Europe all the way to Rwanda in Africa with Spin co-founder Euwyn Poon, Gura Ride founder Tony Adesina and Voi co-founder Fredrik Hjelm.

Euwyn Poon, Co-founder and President at Spin

Spin, which got its start as a bike-share operator in San Francisco, shifted entirely to electric scooters in 2018. Now, it’s owned by Ford and recently launched its electric scooter operations in Germany. The plan is to later expand beyond Germany and into France, as well as the U.K.

Spin President and Co-founder Euwyn Poon will talk about what it’s been like expanding abroad and its plans for further growth.

Tony Adesina, Founder and CEO at Gura Ride

While there is much adoption throughout other parts of the world, there are only a handful of operators in Africa, such as Medina Bike in Marrakech, Morocco, Awa Bike in Lagos, Nigeria and Gura Ride in Kigali, Rwanda. Many of the larger micromobility operators, like Bird, Lime, Yellow, VOI, Tier and others have yet to make their way into Africa.

Gura Ride, founded by Tony Adesina, is currently live in six cities throughout Rwanda, offering electric bikes and electric scooters to riders. We’ll chat with Adesina about the state of micromobility in Africa and why he thinks adoption has been slower on the continent.

Fredrik Hjelm, Co-founder and CEO at Voi

With $136 million in venture funding, Voi has become a behemoth that operates in 38 cities across 10 European countries. Voi, like other electric scooter companies, paused some operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But Hjelm ultimately saw the pandemic as an opportunity to change the way people travel around cities, he said in late May after bringing on board Bird’s former UK chief. Meanwhile, Voi partnered with BlaBlaCar that same month to offer shared electric scooter rides via BlaBlaCar’s apps. We’ll discuss with Hjelm Voi’s roadmap and how it’s navigated COVID-19.

Get your tickets for TC Sessions: Mobility to hear from these thought-leaders along with several other fantastic speakers from Waymo, Lyft, Nuro and more. Tickets are just $145 until September 12 at 11:59 p.m. PDT, with discounts for groups, students and exhibiting startups. And we’ve introduced a $25 Expo Ticket for those who want to peruse our early stage startups and check out the breakout sessions! We hope to see you there!

Millions of homes have voice-enabled devices, but when was the last time you heard a piece of synthesized speech longer than a handful of seconds? WellSaid Labs has pushed the field ahead with a voice engine that can easily and quickly generate hours of voice content that sounds just as good or better than the snippets we hear every day from Siri and Alexa.

The company has been working since its public debut last year to advance its tech from impressive demo to commercial product, and in the process found a lucrative niche that it can build from.

CTO Michael Petrochuk explained that early on, the company had essentially based its technology on prior research — Google’s Tacotron project, which established a new standard for realism in artificial speech.

“Despite being released two years ago, Tacotron 2 is still state of the art. But it has a couple issues,” explained Petrochuk. “One, it’s not fast — it takes 3 minutes to produce 1 second of audio. And it’s built to model 15 seconds of audio. Imagine that in a workflow where you’re generating 10 minutes of content — it’s orders of magnitude off where we want to be.”

WellSaid completely rebuilt their model with a focus on speed, quality, and length, which sounds like “focusing” on everything at once, but there are always plenty more parameters to optimize for. The result is a model that can generate extremely high quality speech with any of 15 voices (and several languages) at about half real time — so a minute-long clip would take about 36 seconds to generate instead of a couple hours.

This seemingly basic capability has plenty of benefits. Not only is it faster, but it makes working with the results simpler and easier. As a producer of audio content, you can just drop in a script hundreds of words long, listen to what it puts out, then tweak its pronunciation or cadence with a few keystrokes. Tacotron changed the synthetic speech space, but it has never really been a product. WellSaid builds on its advances with its own to create both a usable piece of software, and arguably a better speech system overall.

As evidence, clips generated by the model — 15-second ones, so they can compete with Tacotron and others — reached a milestone of being equally well rated as human voices in tests organized by WellSaid. There’s no objective measure for this kind of thing, but asking lots of humans to weigh in on how human something sounds is a good place to start.

As part of the team’s work to achieve “human parity” under these conditions, they also released a number of audio clips demonstrating how the model can produce much more demanding content.

It generated plausible-sounding speech in Spanish, French, and German (I’m not a native speaker of any of them, so can’t say more than that), showed off its facility with complex and linguistically difficult words (like stoichiometry and halogenation), words that differ depending on context (buffet, desert), and so on. The crowning achievement must be a continuous 8-hour reading of the entirety of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But audiobooks aren’t the industry that WellSaid is using as a stepladder to further advances. Instead, they’re making a bundle working in the tremendously boring but necessary field of corporate training. You know, the sorts of videos that explain policies, document the use of internal tools, and explain best practices for sales, management, development tools, and so on.

Corporate learning stuff is generally unique or at least tailored to each company, and can involve hours of audio — an alternative to saying “here, read this packet” or gathering everyone in a room to watch a decades-old DVD on office conduct. Not the most exciting place to put such a powerful technology to work, but the truth is with startups that no matter how transformative you think your tech is, if you don’t make any money, you’re sunk.

Image Credits: WellSaid Labs

“We found a sweet spot in the corporate training field, but for product development it has helped us build these foundational elements for a bigger and greater space,” explained head of growth Martin Ramirez. “Voice is everywhere, but we have to be pragmatic about who we build for today. Eventually we’ll deliver the infrastructure where any voice can be created and distributed.”

At first that may look like expanding the corporate offerings slowly, in directions like other languages — WellSaid’s system doesn’t have English “baked in,” and given training data in other languages should perform equally well in them. So that’s an easy way forward. But other industries could use improved voice capability as well: podcasting, games, radio shows, advertising, governance.

One significant limitation to the company’s approach is that the system is meant to be operated by a person and used for, essentially, recording a virtual voice actor. This means it’s not useful to the groups for whom an improved synthetic voice is desirable — many people with disabilities that affect their own voice, blind people who use voice-based interfaces all day long, or even people traveling in a foreign country and using real-time translation tools.

“I see WellSaid servicing that use case in the near future,” said Ramirez, though he and the others were careful not to make any promises. “But today, the way it’s built, we truly believe a human producer should be interacting with the engine, to render it at a natural, a human parity level. The dynamic rendering scenario is approaching quite fast, and we want to be prepared for it, but we’re not ready to do it today.”

The company has “plenty of runway and customers” and is growing fast — so no need for funding just now, thank you, venture capital firms.

Earlier this year, we launched The TechCrunch List, a carefully curated group of VCs who lead rounds recommended by thousands of founders for their acumen and friendliness, grouped by market focus, stage, and geography.

Since the launch of the List, we’ve seen great engagement: tens of thousands of founders have each come back multiple times to use the List to scout out their next fundraising moves and understand the ever changing landscape of venture investing.

We last revised The TechCrunch List on July 30th with 116 new VCs based on founder recommendations, but as with all things venture capital, the investing world moves quickly. That means it’s already time to begin another update.

To make sure we have the best information, we need founders — from new founders who might have just raised their VC rounds to experienced founders adding another round to their cap tables — to submit recommendations to us. Thankfully, our survey is pretty short (about 2 minutes), and the help you can give other founders fundraising is invaluable. Please submit your recommendation soon.

Since our last update in July, we have already had 840 founders submit new recommendations, and we are now sitting at about 3,500 recommendations in total now. Every recommendation helps us identify promising and thoughtful VCs, helping founders globally cut through the noise of the industry and find the leads for their next checks.

If you have questions about the List, our methodology, or about how to submit, we have a handy Frequently Asked Questions page. Otherwise, get those recommendations in. We’ll close this latest batch of recommendations off on Friday, and publish a newly updated List in the next two to three weeks.

Despite a surging stock market and many major tech players having record quarters, we’re still seeing layoffs throughout tech and the rest of corporate America. Salesforce recorded a huge quarter, passing $5 billion in revenue, only to lay off around 1000 people. LinkedIn is laying off 960 people one day after reporting a 10% increase in revenue.

These layoffs may seem like a contraction in size for these huge enterprises, but it’s actually the beginning of something I call The Great Unbundling of Corporate America. They still need to grow, they still need to innovate, they still need to get work done and they’re not simply canceling projects and giving up on contracts.

Just as COVID-19 has accelerated the move to remote work, our current crisis has accelerated the trend toward hiring independent contractors. Back in 2019 a New York Times report found that Google had a shadow workforce of 121,000 temporary workers and contractors, overshadowing their 102,000 full-timers. ZipRecruiter reported in 2018 that tech, along with its record employment growth, was showing an increasing share of listings for independent contractors.

A study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between 6.9% and 9.6% of all workers are now independent contractors, and according to Upwork, that may be as high as 35%. Mark my words — companies are using this time as an opportunity to swing the pendulum toward independent contractors and trimming the fat, justifying it with a vague gesture toward “an unprecedented time.”

That’s why, in my opinion, you’re seeing the NASDAQ hitting record highs despite everyone’s turmoil — depressingly, investors can see that large companies are tightening up and cleaning up waste, while finding an affordable workforce at will. As they have unbundled themselves from our physical offices, large enterprises are going to unbundle themselves from having to have a set number of employees.

When Square allowed its entire workforce to work remotely permanently. It wasn’t just because they wanted them to feel more creative and productive, but was likely a move away from having quite as much expensive, needless office space.

Similarly, if there is work that a full-time employee does that could be done by a flexible, independent contractor, why not make that change too? And it’ll be a lot easier to make without as many people at the office.

The argument I’m making is not anti-contractor, though.

I can’t think of any point in history where it’s been better to create a freelance business — the startup costs are significantly lower, and as companies move toward remote work, you can theoretically take business nationally (or internationally) like never before. Companies’ moves toward replacing W-2 workers with contractors is an opportunity for people to create their own miniature freelance empires, unbundling themselves from corporate America’s required hours, and potentially creating a way to weather future storms by taking away any single company’s leverage on their income.

The rush to remote work is also likely to push more workers into the freelance economy too. By having to create a remote office, with a remote presence in meetings and having to manage and organize our days, the average worker has all but adjusted to the life of a freelancer.

Where some might have gone to an office and had things simply happen to them, the remote world requires an attention to your calendar and active outreach to colleagues that, well, models how one might run a freelance business. Those with core skillsets that can be marketed and sold to multiple clients should be thinking about whether being a wage slave is necessary anymore, and with good reason.

That said — corporate America, and especially tech, has to treat this essential workforce with a great deal more empathy and respect than they have thus far.

Uber and Lyft were ordered to treat drivers as employees in part due to the fact that they never treated their contractors like parts of the company. Other than the obvious lack of benefits (paid time off, health insurance, etc.), Uber, like many large enterprises, treats contractors as disposable rather than flexible, despite them being the literal driving force of the company. When Uber went public, they gave a nominal bonus for drivers that had completed 2500 to 40,000 trips, with a chance to buy up to $10,000 of stock — at the IPO price. These drivers, that had been the very reason that many people became millionaires and billionaires when Uber went public, were given the chance to maybe make money, if they sold the stock quickly enough.

It’s an abject lesson on how to not build loyalty with independent contractors. It’s also a lesson on what the next big company that wants to build themselves off the back of the 1099’er should do.

What I’m suggesting is a radical rethinking of freelance contracting. I want you to see independent contractors as a different kind of worker, not as a way of skirting getting a full-time employee. A freelancer, by definition, is someone that you don’t monopolize, and someone that you should actively give agency and, indeed, part of the network you’re building. One of the issues of corporate America’s approach to freelance work is an us-versus-them approach to employment — you’re either part of us or you’re simply a thing we pick up and put down. What I’m suggesting is treating your freelancers as an essential part of your strategy, and compensating them as such. Freelancers should own equity and should have skin in the game — they may be working with you on a number of projects and take literal ownership of vast successes throughout your history.

Contracted work has only become mercenary through the treatment of the freelance worker. Where tech has succeeded in creating hundreds of thousands of independent contractor positions, it also has to lead the way in reimagining how we may treat them and reward them for their work. And corporate America needs to take a step beyond simply seeing them as a cheaper, easier way to do business. They’re so much more.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, TechCrunch media and advertising reporter Anthony Ha sat down with Blavity CEO Morgan DeBaun and The Shade Room CEO Angelica Nwandu to chat about their respective media companies, 2020 in the media world and how they view a recent conversation inside of media to hire and retain more diverse workforces.

Blavity is a network of online publications focused on Black audiences across verticals like politics, travel and technology. To date, the company has raised $9.4 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The Shade Room is an Instagram-focused media company that publishes hourly updates on national news, celebrity updates and fashion. Focused on the Black perspective, The Shade Room has attracted more than 20 million followers on Instagram and comments on issues of importance during key national moments.

During her conversation with Ha, Nwandu said that during the Black Lives Matters protests, The Shade Room was akin to a Black CNN.

With both companies founded in 2014, both CEOs have kept their media startups alive during a particularly difficult period. In the last six years, many media brands have shuttered, sold, slimmed or slunk away to the ash heap of history.

The question of how policymakers should respond to the power of big tech didn’t get a great deal of airtime at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, despite a number of investigations now underway in the United States (hi, Google).

It’s also clear that attention- and data-monopolizing platforms compel many startups to use their comparatively slender resources to find ways to compete with the giants — or hope to be acquired by them.

But there’s clearly a nervousness among even well-established tech firms to discuss this topic, given how much their profits rely on frictionless access to users of some of the gatekeepers in question.

Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston evinced this dilemma when TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino asked him if Apple’s control of the iOS App Store should be “reexamined” by regulators or whether it’s just legit competition.

“I think it’s an important conversation on a bunch of dimensions,” said Houston, before offering a circular and scrupulously balanced reply in which he mentioned the “ton of opportunity” app stores have unlocked for third-party developers, checking off some of Apple’s preferred talking points like “being able to trust your device” and the distribution the App Store affords startups.

“They also are a huge competitive advantage,” Houston added. “And so I think the question of … how do we make sure that there’s still a level playing field and so that owning an app store isn’t too much of an advantage? I don’t know where it’s all going to end up. I do think it’s an important conversation to be had.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said the question of whether large tech companies are too powerful needs to be reframed.

“Big per se is not bad,” she told TC’s Zack Whittaker. “We need to focus on whether competitors and consumers are being harmed. And, if that’s the case, what are the remedies?”

In recent years, U.S. lawmakers have advanced their understanding of digital business models — making great strides since Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg answered a question two years ago about how his platform makes money: “Senator, we sell ads.”

A House antitrust subcommittee hearing in July 2020 that saw the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple answer awkward questions and achieved a higher dimension of detail than the big tech hearings of 2018.

Nonetheless, there still seems to be a lack of consensus among lawmakers over how exactly to grapple with big tech, even though the issue elicits bipartisan support, as was in plain view during a Senate Judiciary Committee interrogation of Google’s ad business earlier this month.

On stage, Lofgren demonstrated some of this tension by discouraging what she called “bulky” and “lengthy” antitrust investigations, making a general statement in favor of “innovation” and suggesting a harder push for overarching privacy legislation. She also advocated at length for inalienable rights for U.S. citizens so platform manipulators can’t circumvent rules with their own big data holdings and some dark pattern design.

French startup Mirakl has raised a $300 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation — the company is now a unicorn. Mirakl helps you launch and manage a marketplace on your e-commerce website. Many customers also rely on Mirakl-powered marketplaces for B2B transactions.

Permira Advisers is leading the round, with existing investors 83North, Bain Capital Ventures, Elaia Partners and Felix Capital also participating.

“We’ve closed this round in 43 days,” co-founder and U.S. CEO Adrien Nussenbaum told me. But the due diligence process has been intense. “[Permira Advisers] made 250 calls to clients, leads, partners and former employees.”

Many e-commerce companies rely on third-party sellers to increase their offering. Instead of having one seller selling to many customers, marketplaces let you sell products from many sellers to many customers. Mirakl has built a solution to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce platform.

300 companies have been working with Mirakl for their marketplace, such as Best Buy Canada, Carrefour, Darty and Office Depot. More recently, Mirakl has been increasingly working with B2B clients as well.

These industry-specific marketplaces can be used for procurement or bulk selling of parts. In this category, clients include Airbus Helicopters, Toyota Material Handling and Accor’s Astore. 60% of Mirakl’s marketplace are still consumer-facing marketplaces, but the company is adding as many B2B and B2C marketplaces these days.

“We’ve developed a lot of features that enable platform business models that go further than simple marketplaces,” co-founder and CEO Philippe Corrot told me. “For instance, we’ve invested in services — it lets our clients develop service platforms.”

In France, Conforama can upsell customers with different services when they buy some furniture for instance. Mirakl has also launched its own catalog manager so that you can merge listings, add information, etc.

The company is using artificial intelligence to do the heavy-lifting on this front. There are other AI-enabled features, such as fraud detection.

Given that Mirakl is a marketplace expert, it’s not surprising that the company has also created a sort of marketplace of marketplaces with Mirakl Connect.

“Mirakl Connect is a platform that is going to be the single entry point for everybody in the marketplace ecosystem, from sellers to operators and partners,” Corrot said.

For sellers, it’s quite obvious. You can create a company profile and promote products on multiple marketplaces at once. But the company is also starting to work with payment service providers, fulfillment companies, feed aggregators and other partners. The company wants to become a one-stop shop on marketplaces with those partners.

Overall, Mirakl-powered marketplaces have generated $1.2 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) during the first half of 2020. It represents a 111% year-over-year increase, despite the economic crisis.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand across all areas — same features, same business model, but with more resources. It plans to hire 500 engineers and scale its sales and customer success teams.

More than seven years after Amazon began its e-commerce operations in India, and two years after its shopping service added support for Hindi, the most popular language in the country, the American giant is embracing more local languages to court hundreds of millions of new users.

Amazon announced on Tuesday its website and apps now support Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu in a move that it said would help it reach an additional 200-300 million users in the country.

Localization is one of the most crucial — and popular — steps for companies to expand their potential reach in India. Netflix added support for Hindi last month, and Amazon’s Alexa started conversing in the Indian language last year. (Amazon’s on-demand video streaming service, Prime Video, also supports Hindi, in addition to Tamil and Telugu.)

The company said the usage of Hindi, which it rolled out on its website and apps in India in 2018, has grown by three times in the past five months, and “hundreds of thousands” of Amazon customers have switched to Hindi shopping experience.

Amazon’s further language push comes months after its chief rival in India, Walmart -owned Flipkart, added support for Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, three languages that are spoken by roughly 200 million people in India.

Like Flipkart, Amazon worked with expert linguists to develop an accurate and comprehensible experience in each of the languages, the American e-commerce firm said.

But simple translation is not enough to make inroads with users in India. YouTube and YouTube Music, for instance, understand when Bollywood fans in India search for music by the name of the movie character or actor who played the part instead of the actual musician or song title — a phenomenon unique among Indian users.

Amazon appears to have incorporated similar learnings into its shopping experience. The company said for translations it preferred using commonly used terms from daily life over perfectly translated words.

Kishore Thota, Director of Customer Experience and Marketing at Amazon India, termed the availability of Amazon India shopping experience in four new languages a “major milestone.”

The move comes weeks ahead of Diwali, the biggest festival in India that sees hundreds of millions of Indians spend lavishly. “We are super excited to do this ahead of the upcoming festive season,” said Thota.

Don’t let budget woes keep you from participating in TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6-7. We’re dedicated to making this event accessible to as many members of the mobility community as possible. Case in point: today we’re announcing the new Expo Ticket for just $25.

Pro tip: Get your Expo ticket today. The price jumps to $50 once the conference begins on October 6.

What can you do with an Expo ticket? The short answer is plenty. You’ll have access to all the Mobility 2020 breakout sessions, which take a deeper dive into specific topics. We’ll be announcing those breakout sessions soon. Watch for our announcement, and be sure to check out the Mobility 2020 agenda.

“I learned a lot from the breakout sessions. An official from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation spoke about the city’s plan to build pathways for micro mobility vehicles. Access to experts sharing that kind of information is essential for anyone launching a micro mobility startup.” — Parug Demircioglu, CEO at Invemo and partner at Nito Bikes.

Plus, you can explore 40+ startups — both early stage and more established companies — exhibiting during the conference. Think of “Expo” as an alternative way to spell “opportunity.” Connect with the exhibiting founders, hear their product stories and watch their demos. You might find your next customer, partner, investment or employer.

We’ve got your back in the networking department with CrunchMatch. Our AI-powered platform helps you find and connect with the people who align with your business goals. Answer a few simple questions when you register and CrunchMatch will be ready to do the heavy lifting for you. Peruse the offerings and schedule 1:1 video calls with the folks who can help you take your startup dream to the next level. It’s the perfect tool to help organize and simplify your expo exploration.

“CrunchMatch, which is basically speed-dating for techies, was very helpful. I scheduled at least 10 short, precise meetings. I learned about startups in stealth mode, what big corporations were up to — things not yet picked up by the press. It was great, and I followed up on three or four of those connections.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.

Join mobility’s brightest minds, makers and investors at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6-7. Set aside your budget concerns and buy an opportunity-packed Expo Pass — before October 6 — for just $25. We can’t wait to “see” you there!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.