Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Food has been an ever-present touchpoint in the world of startups, and I don’t mean the free catered lunches, or expansive canteens that you get in bigger places, to keep startup workers sustained but also focused on building, without leaving the building.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of enterprises spun out of the idea of making it easier and faster (but maybe not cheaper) for you to get the food you want to eat or cook; and there are also hundreds of business ideas hatched out of the idea of using tech to create new kinds of foods ways to eat it, ways to prepare it.

Too Good To Go is a different kind of bird. It’s a food startup that’s actually about trying to find a landing place for food that no one seemingly wanted in the first instance, and the lower toll it takes on your conscience is matched by prices that put less pressure on your wallet.

Mette Lykke, the CEO of the startup, sat down with us at Disrupt this year to talk about the company’s mission, the state of play today, and also about the wider opportunities of building startups around big ideas and social good.

Her track record gives her a great perspective. Before taking the helm at Too Good To Go, she was one of the co-founders of Endomondo, the fitness tracking app, which was eventually acquired by Under Armour, part of a bigger move from the fitness apparel company to fill out a bigger strategy around quantified self, and what you do once you put on your fitness gear.

Exercise, staying healthy, saving money, and eating better are all things that have been on a lot of people’s minds of late. We’re living through a global health pandemic that’s impacted us in a lot of different ways, but for many of us, one of the good things that has come out of it has been a set of  salient takeaways about staying in shape, how best to use the time that we have, eating better and generally looking after ourselves and our planet in a more conscientious way.

One-third of food produced today is either lost or wasted, Mette tells us, providing a ripe opportunity to create a way to tap into some of that waste to reduce its financial and environmental impact, and that is what Too Good To Go has set out to do.

Its business is set up as a two-sided marketplace where food “providers” (eg restaurants and producers) contribute surplus food items that “buyers” (eg, consumers) can then browse, purchase and then pick up at cut-down prices — a service that’s now live in 10 countries, she said.

Yet as you might expect, TGTG has definitely seen a major impact from the pandemic, when the basic business model took a huge hit as people were ordered to stay at home, and many restaurants and others simply shut down because staying open to service just a few customers who were venturing out for take-out food simply didn’t make sense. The company saw a 62% drop in revenue as a result.

Over time, though, it started to come up with ways of working with the suppliers, even providing a way for some of them to connect with customers in cases where they had no other means to do so.

That has included working with more suppliers, whose customers (often restaurants) were disappearing; and providing temporary takeaway services for restaurants that didn’t have these in place already, to help get food to people. It also worked “pro bono”, foregoing its commission, for customers just to help keep them afloat and working with TGTG.

It’s not completely back to business as usual now — it is probably still too early to tell how many enterprises will come out of Covid-19 intact, and in the meantime they may get a lot more nervous about the idea of cannibalising their businesses with cut-price goods.

Still, there is hope. Too Good To Go is finding that there is still definitely an appetite (no pun intended) for buying food at lower prices that serves a good purpose: fighting food waste at a time when many are more concerned about how their basic consumer choices can make a difference for the better, or worse.

While fighting food waste and staying in shape (and getting fighting fit) do not seem to have a huge amount in common — besides, of course, pivoting on the role of eating as something that impacts both — there is actually an interesting thread that connects them: they are both focused on activities that consumers can do to improve and feel better about themselves.

There was a time when these kinds of premises might not have held much sway with financiers as solid business ideas: idealism (if it was ever there to begin with) quickly gives way to the bottom line a lot of the time.  But Mette’s success, as a female entrepreneur in Europe no less, is a sign of how things are evolving.

“There are a lot of things starting to happen,” she said both of social goodstartups and their prospects with VCs, an interesting insight also considering that she herself is an occasional investor as well. “I’d love to see more social good businesses getting to scale [even if] we’re still probably in the early days.”

Listen below to hear more of her insights.

If we have learned anything from the mass production of cheap internet-connected devices is that security was an afterthought. Default passwords are the norm and security flaws aren’t patched, leaving entire fleets of smart devices vulnerable to attack.

But one Israeli security startup is taking a different approach to protect vulnerable Internet of Things devices.

Sternum, headquartered in Tel Aviv, provides an embedded integrity verification technology, known as EIV, which verifies that the app hasn’t been maliciously altered in some way. Its technology detects code vulnerabilities to prevent attacks before they are exploited. Its advanced detection system, or ADS, brings real-time threat detection, allowing companies to respond to attacks in real-time.

It’s a novel idea for when there is no other way to secure a vulnerable device.

Earlier this year, Sternum was first with a fix for a new wave of vulnerabilities that hit millions of Internet of Things devices. Dubbed Ripple20, the vulnerabilities allow hackers to hijack potentially hundreds of millions of affected devices.

“Patching vulnerabilities is an endless game,” Sternum’s founder and chief executive Natali Tshuva told TechCrunch.

“Unlike many other solutions, we are not focused on patching every vulnerability on a device. We are solely focused on the exploitation stage, or the point at which the hacker takes advantage of a vulnerability to execute an attack,” she said.

Tshuva’s roots are as a security researcher, where she found several previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in Linux, Android and other embedded systems.

“I realized that there are real technological and market challenges to securing these devices properly,” she told TechCrunch. “I wanted to apply my know-how in cybersecurity, research, product and managing talented R&D teams to create innovative solutions that will truly solve the problem, end-to-end.”

It’s a bet that’s paying off.

The company revealed its $6.5 million Series A round, the company announced Tuesday. The round was led by Square Peg with participation from Merle Hinrich and European venture firm BTOV.

Philippe Schwartz, a partner at Square Peg, which led the round, said he was “impressed with Sternum’s innovative products and diverse team, whose technologies will power our connected future with uncompromising security protection and rich, data-driven insights.”

The New York-based startup HowGood, which provides a sustainability database for consumer product ingredients, is publicly launching its product Latis and has already signed an initial customer with Danone North America, the company said.

The company said that its Latis tool can be used to determine the impact of any ingredient or product against environmental and social metrics like biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, labor risk, and animal welfare.

“Consumers no longer just want the best product at the best price,” said Alexander Gillett, CEO and founder of HowGood, in a statement. “Today’s shoppers place value on protecting the environment and ensuring that the brands they support align with their personal values.”

Aggregating information from academic papers, industry findings, research from non-governmental organizations, and other sources, Latis can be used by product development groups inside corporations to assess the implications of using certain ingredients.

Since the information is only used by the company to inform product development, there are no guarantees that product developers won’t use toxic or environmentally damaging products — they’ll just have the opportunity to be aware of how those products effect biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, labor risk, and animal welfare.

The company currently has data on over 33,000 ingredients, chemicals and materials, according to a statement. HowGood is backed by investors including FirstMark, Great Oaks Venture Capital, High Line Venture Partners, Joanne Wilson and Contour Venture Partners.

“Having an impact assessment tool for our product portfolio is raising the sustainability awareness of our product developers and brand teams,” said Takoua Debeche, SVP of Research and Innovation at Danone, in a statement. “This holistic tool is critical to improving the sustainability impact of our brands.”

 

Airmeet, a startup that offers a platform to host virtual events, said on Tuesday it has raised $12 million in a new financing round as the Bangalore-headquartered firm demonstrates accelerating growth in its user base.

Sequoia Capital India led the $12 million Series A financing round in one-year-old Airmeet. Redpoint Ventures and existing investors Accel India, Venture Highway, Global Founders Capital (GFC), and Gokul Rajaram (Caviar Lead at Doordash) also participated in the round.

Airmeet allows users and businesses to host interactive virtual events. Its platform intuitively replicates aspects of a physical event, offering a backstage, clubbing people to a table, allowing participants to network with each other, and even enable event organizers to work with sponsors.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Lalit Mangal, co-founder of Airmeet, said the startup’s today hosts more than 1,000 events a day. The platform’s usage has grown 2,000% over the last quarter without any investment in advertisement, he said.

In recent months, Airmeet has worked to expand the use cases of the platform. In addition to hosting large conferences, Airmeet is now also being used for professional meetups at large film festivals, he said. Recently it held university resource fairs and technical industry summits.

“Covid-19 has accelerated a permanent behavioral shift across many industries. With digitization of largely traditional spaces leapfrogging by years, the $800+ billion global offline events space is up for grabs. There is massive potential for players who drive the industry’s transition towards online-events,” said Abhishek Mohan, VP at Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.

Airmeet is built on top of WebRTC, a standard that most modern browsers follow. This has enabled Airmeet to be fully accessible through Chrome and Firefox. All the sessions are also end-to-end encrypted, said Mangal. It does not have a mobile app. Mangal said people tend to use their laptop or desktop or their iPads for professional events. (Users can consume a session through their mobile browser, however.)

The startup, which is in the same space as Hopin and Andreessen Horowitz-backed Run the World, will use the fresh capital to add new features to Airmeet and also scale globally, said Mangal.

“Airmeet’s mission is to create a global platform to enable millions of community managers and event organizers across the world to engage with and expand their audience. And with Lalit and team’s focus, execution and innovative thinking, they are strongly placed to achieve their goal,” said Mohan.

By the time Felix Ortiz III left the Army in 2006, the Brooklyn, NY native had spent time taking classes at the City University of New York and St. John’s. Those experiences led him to found ViridisLearning, which aimed to give universities a better way to track student development to help graduates land jobs.

Now he’s taken the learnings of that attempt to reshape education into the corporate world and raised over $1 million in financing from investors including B Capital, the investment firm launched jointly by the Boston Consulting Group and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and Subversive Capital.

The goal of Ortiz’s newest startup, EmPath, is to provide corporate employees with a clear picture of their current skills based on the work they’re already doing at a company and give them a roadmap to up-skilling and educational opportunities that could land them a better, higher paying job.

The company has an initial customer in AT&T, which has rolled out its services across its entire organization, according to Ortiz.

From starting out in a shared apartment in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, Ortiz’s family history took a turn as his father became assistant speaker of the house in New York’s legislature and his mother operated a mental health clinic in the city.

When Ortiz enlisted in the Army at 17, he continued to pursue his education, and served as a Judge Advocate General for the Army at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. From there, Ortiz launched his first education venture, a failed startup that attempted to teach skills for renewable energy jobs online. The Green University may no longer exist, but it was the young entrepreneur’s first foray into education.

A road that would continue with ViridisLearning and lead to the launch of EmPath.

Along the way, Ortiz enlisted the help of an experienced developer in the online education space — Adam Blum.

The creator of OpenEd, the largest educational open resource catalog online, which used machine learning to infer skills from the online activity of children, and the founder of Auger.ai, a toolkit to bring machine learning and predictive modeling to skill development, Blum immediately saw the opportunity EmPath presented.

“Inferring skills for employees using their corporate digital footprint and inferring those skills for potential jobs… where you identified skill gaps using inferred skills for courses to suggest remedial resources to plug education gaps,” just makes sense, Blum said. “It was a much more powerful vision.”

Blum still holds an equity stake in Auger.ai, but considers the work he’s doing with EmPath as the company’s chief technology officer to be his full time job now. “Building this out with felix was more exciting in terms of the impact it would have,” Blum said. 

EmPath already is fully deployed with AT&T and will be adding three Fortune 1,000 companies as customers by the end of the month, according to Ortiz.

The young startup also has a powerful and well-connected supporter in Carlos Gutierrez, the former chief executive officer of Kellogg, and the Secretary of Commerce in the George W. Bush White House.

“Lacking a college degree throughout my career, I had to develop my own skills to enable my climb up the corporate ladder. The technology didn’t exist to help guide me, but in today’s world, professionals should not have to upskill blindly,” said former Commerce Secretary and EmPath co-founder Carlos Gutierrez, in a statement. “We created a technology platform that can help transform an organization’s culture by empowering employees and strengthening talent development. This technology was a game changer even before the Covid-19 pandemic, and now that corporate budgets are tighter, it is even more important for companies to accelerate skills development and talent growth.” 

With the 2020 general election coming up in November, Uber has partnered with TurboVote to launch an in-app feature designed to help riders, eaters, drivers and delivery workers register to vote. This comes after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in August said the company would help every driver register to vote.

Uber will feature in-app banners and send emails giving people information about how to vote. They’ll then be directed to TurboVote to register to vote in their state.

Uber, as usual, also has initiatives to help voters find their polling place and will offer discounted rides to and from the polls. Uber is also asking folks to consider volunteering to be a poll worker, given the shortage this year as a result of COVID-19.

Uber has offered discounted rides to polling places for the last few years but this is the first time Uber has tried to help people register to vote through its app. Earlier this year, Lyft announced it would offer discounted as well as free rides to the polls throughout the general election.

This year, the fate of Uber and Lyft in California is up to voters. Prop 22, which Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart have collectively poured $180 million into, seeks to keep their workers classified as independent contractors.

More than a third of small and medium-sized businesses on Facebook in India expect cash flow to be a challenge for them as they navigate through the coronavirus pandemic in the next few months, according to a report by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank.

Facebook, which reaches nearly every internet users in India and which collaborated with OECD and World Bank for the report, wants to help. The social giant today announced a grant of $4.3 million for more than 3,000 small businesses across Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore (Indian cities where the company has its offices).

In an interview with TechCrunch, Ajit Mohan, head of Facebook India, said the grant includes both cash and ad credits, with cash constituting the larger share. These businesses don’t have to advertise on Facebook to be eligible for the grant, he said.

The India grant is part of the company’s $100 million global grant for small businesses that it announced in March.

Additionally, Facebook and Instagram have also launched capabilities for businesses in India to sell gift cards. “During the pandemic, it’s been inspiring to see how people and businesses have come together on the Facebook family of apps to support their local communities,” said Mohan. (Mohan will be appearing at Disrupt 2020 conference Wednesday.)

These gift cards, which will be issued by startups Quiksilver and PayU, are designed to help businesses get the immediate cash flow to stay afloat. Users can redeem these gift cards at these businesses later on.

The announcement today comes as Facebook begins to engage deeply with small businesses in the country. The company invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms earlier this year and said it would work with the Indian giant to explore ways to serve the nation’s 60 million businesses.

“The recovery of small businesses from the pandemic will be critical to the recovery of Indian economy, and we want to do everything we can to help. Today we’re building on our commitment by announcing the small business grant for India,” said Mohan.

Businesses can apply for the grant starting today.

More to follow…

The European Union’s top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc’s net neutrality rules — interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial ‘zero rating’ by Internet services providers.

‘Zero rating’ refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services ‘tariff free’ by excluding their data consumption. It’s controversial because it can have the effect of penalizing and/or blocking the use of non-zero-rated apps/services, which may be inaccessible while the zero rated apps/services are not — which in turn undermines the principal of net neutrality with its promise of fair competition via an equal and level playing field for all things digital.

The pan-EU net neutrality regulation came into force in 2016 amid much controversy over concerns it would undermine rather than bolster a level playing field online. So the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)’s first ruling interpreting the regulation is an important moment for regional digital rights watchers.

Despite the existence of a net neutrality regulation, European carriers have continued offering packages that ‘zero rate’ certain apps, such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp, for example — raising questions over whether such offers comply with the rules. Today’s ruling suggests they do not.

In another example from Hungary, one of carrier Telenor’s 1GB data tariffs (screengrabbed below) touts unlimited domestic data consumption for a number of social apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Twitter — meaning all other apps/services are at a disadvantage as usage is throttled by the user’s 1GB allowance.

A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its ‘zero rating’ packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation — which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights — and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of “equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic”.

The court found that ‘zero rating’ agreements that combine a ‘zero tariff’ with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of ‘non-zero tariff’ services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users’ rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market.

“Such packages are liable to increase the use of the favoured applications and services and, accordingly, to reduce the use of the other applications and services available, having regard to the measures by which the provider of the internet access services makes that use technically more difficult, if not impossible. Furthermore, the greater the number of customers concluding such agreements, the more likely it is that, given its scale, the cumulative effect of those agreements will result in a significant limitation of the exercise of end users’ rights, or even undermine the very essence of those rights,” the court writes in a press release.

It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users’ rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible.

The full CJEU judgement is available here in French and Hungarian.

IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.

Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.

IBM’s Dario Gil tells me that the company made a deliberate choice in announcing this road map and he likened it to the birth of the semiconductor industry.

“If you look at the difference of what it takes to build an industry as opposed to doing a project or doing scientific experiments and moving a field forward, we have had a philosophy that what we needed to do is to build a team that did three things well, in terms of cultures that have to come together. And that was a culture of science, a culture of the road map, and a culture of agile,” Gil said.

He argues that to reach the ultimate goal of the quantum industry, that is, to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, the company could’ve taken two different paths. The first would be more like the Apollo program, where everybody comes together, works on a problem for a decade and then all the different pieces come together for this one breakthrough moment.

“A different philosophy is to say, ‘what can you do today’ and put the capability out,” he said. “And then have user-driven feedback, which is a culture of agile, as a mechanism to continue to deliver to a community and build a community that way, and you got to lay out a road map of progress. We are firm believers in this latter model. And that in parallel, you got to do the science, the road map and the feedback and putting things out.”

But he also argues that we’ve now reached a new moment in the quantum industry. “We’ve gotten to the point where there is enough aggregate investment going on, that is really important to start having coordination mechanisms and signaling mechanisms so that we’re not grossly misallocating resources and we allow everybody to do their piece.”

He likens it to the early days of the semiconductor industry, where everybody was doing everything, but over time, an ecosystem of third-party vendors sprung up. Today, when companies introduce new technologies like UV lithography, the kind of road maps that IBM believes it is laying out for the quantum industry today help every coordinate their efforts.

He also argues that the industry has gotten to the point where the degree of complexity has increased so much that individual players can’t do everything themselves anymore. In turn, that means various players in the ecosystem can now focus on specializing and figuring out what they are best at.

“You’re gonna do that, you need materials? The position technology? Then in that, you need the device expertise. How do you do the coupling? How do you do the packaging? How do you do the wiring? How do you do the amplifiers, the cryogenics, room temperature electronics, then the entire software stack from bottom to top? And on and on and on. So you can take the approach of saying, ‘well, you know, we’re going to do it all.’ Okay, fine, at the beginning, you need to do all to integrate, but over time, it’s like, should we be in the business of doing coaxial cabling?”

We’re already seeing some of that today, with the recent collaboration between Q-CTRL and Quantum Machines, for example.

Gil believes that 2023 will be an inflection point in the industry, with the road to the 1,121-qubit machine driving improvements across the stack. The most important — and ambitious — of these performance improvements that IBM is trying to execute on is bringing down the error rate from about 1% today to something closer to 0.0001%. But looking at the trajectory of where its machines were just a few years ago, that’s the number the line is pointing toward.

But that’s only part of the problem. As Gil noted, “as you get richer and more sophisticated with this technology, every layer of the stack of innovation ends up becoming almost like an infinite field.” That’s true for the semiconductor industry and maybe even more so for quantum. And as these chips become more sophisticated, they also become larger — and that means that even the 10-foot fridge IBM is building right now won’t be able to hold more than maybe a million qubits. At that point, you have to build the interconnects between these chambers (because when cooling one chamber alone takes almost 14 days, you can’t really experiment and iterate at any appreciable speed). Building that kind of “quantum intranet,” as Gil calls it, is anything but trivial, but will be key to building larger, interconnected machines. And that’s just one of the many areas where inventions are still required — and it may still take a decade before these systems are working as expected.

“We are pursuing all of these fronts in parallel,” Gil said. “We’re doing investments with horizons where the device and the capability is going to come a decade from now […], because when you have this problem and you only start then, you’ll never get there.”

While the company — and its competitors — work to build the hardware, there are also plenty of efforts in building the software stack for quantum computing. One thing Gil stressed here is that now is the time to start thinking about quantum algorithms and quantum circuits, even if today, they still perform worse on quantum computers than classical machines. Indeed, Gil wants developers to think less about qubits than circuits.

“When [developers] call a function and now it goes to the cloud, what is going to happen behind the scenes? There are going to be libraries of quantum circuits and there’s going to be a tremendous amount of innovation and creativity and intellectual property on these circuits,” explained Gil. And then, those circuits have to be mapped to the right quantum hardware and indeed, it looks like IBM’s vision here isn’t for a single kind of quantum processor but ones that have different layouts and topologies.

“We are already, ourselves, running over a billion quantum circuits a day from the external world — over a billion a day,” Gil said. “The future is going to be where trillions of quantum circuits are being executed every day on quantum hardware behind the scenes through these cloud-enabled services embedded in software applications. ”

Spotawheel, the “end-to-end” digital platform for buying a used car in Poland and Greece, has raised €10 million in debt and equity funding, as it sees a bounce-back from the slowdown witnessed as the coronavirus crisis took hold.

Once again the new investment was led by VentureFriends, with participation from existing investor Velocity Partners, along with U.S.-based FJ Labs and unnamed strategic investors. It adds to €8 million previously raised by the Athens-headquartered startup.

Spotawheel says funds will be used to expand across multiple locations in Europe. The company will also invest in growing its used car sourcing infrastructure. Headcount will be added to commercial, tech and ops related positions across Europe.

Launched in 2016, Spotawheel operates a B2C platform for used cars that moves the buying and selling process online, and by doing so, removes a lot of friction while also claiming to bring greater transparency. The idea is to provide e-commerce levels of convenience and protection when purchasing a used car.

“Customers can opt in for a test drive or have the car delivered countrywide under a 7-day return policy, while enjoying up to 5 years of limited warranty, the largest in Europe,” Charis Arvanitis, Spotawheel co-founder and CEO, told me last year.

To help make this possible, the startup employs “predictive analytics” of the condition and expected failures on a per car basis. “Sourcing decisions are made at a fraction of the time and cost required by traditional dealers, while allowing for inventory turnover of up to 3x faster than the market average,” claims Spotawheel.

Arvanitis tells me Spotawheel has returned to “triple digit” growth as of this month, recovering from a lull since June. “[The] current sales run rate is already at several thousands cars sold per year, just from two EU countries where our combined market share is slightly above 0.1%,” he says.

On the roadmap is increasing Spotawheel’s sourcing footprint to 25 European cities, including in Germany in Q4 2020. The startup is also setting up its first European vehicle reconditioning centre, although, with papers yet to be signed, Arvanitis isn’t revealing the location for now.