Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX announced the public launch of of its self-driving taxi service in Shanghai today. Called simply RoboTaxi, AutoX’s offering already faces competition from Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing platform, which launched its own robo-taxi pilot program in Shanghai at the end of June.

AutoX’s RoboTaxis will first be available in Jiading District, starting with a fleet of 100 vehicles. Rides can be booked through AutoNavi, the mapping and transportation-booking app owned by Alibaba, one of the startup’s investors. AutoX, which is headquartered in Shenzhen, raised a $100 million Series A last year from backers including Dongfeng Motor, one of China’s largest vehicle manufacturers, Alibaba, and Plug and Play’s China fund.

AutoX’s service will compete against Didi’s self-driving taxi pilot, which also operates in Jiading District, a large suburban district that is fairly close to Shanghai’s center, but less congested. Didi’s service launched a few weeks after the company announced it had raised $500 million from investors including SoftBank for its new autonomous driving subsidiary. Didi’s ambitious goal is to deploy more than one million autonomous vehicles by 2030.

AutoX and Didi are both competing against a list of autonomous taxi services from Chinese rivals like Pony.ai, Baidu and WeRide. All have already deployed robotaxi programs in different cities. Other companies, like Momenta, are focused on building and selling software for self-driving taxis to partners, which may enable even more robotaxi fleets to launch. Momenta’s progress is due in part to state support, because the Chinese government has created several large funds for industries including autonomous driving, 5G and artificial intelligence, as it tries to offset the economic impact of COVID-19.

When asked about the competitive landscape, Jewel Li, the chief operating officer of AutoX, told TechCrunch that one of its advantages is investor list, which includes original equipment manufacturers and Alibaba. This means AutoX’s backers not only provide funds, abut also “the use cases in both mobility and logistics for autonomous driving. This investor portfolio is one of a kind, not only in the China market, but also globally.”

The company also has a robotaxi fleet in Shenzhen’s Nanshan District, she added, which gave the company experience operating autonomous rides in a densely-populated urban area.

AutoX is currently the third, and only China-focused company, to hold a permit for driverless robotaxis in California, which Li said is the “highest standard permit in the autonomous driving industry.” (The other two holders are Waymo and Nuro).

AutoX’s RoboTaxis will also be available for bookings through Shanghai-based taxi fleet Letzgo’s app. The two companies announced a strategic partnership today that will have Letzgo staff running RoboTaxis at AutoX’s Shanghai operations center, which opened in April.

AutoX also has plans to build out its robotaxi service in Europe.

Derek Norton and Jeremy Milken have known each other for twenty years. Over their longtime personal and professional relationship, the two Los Angeles-based serial entrepreneurs have invested in each other’s companies and investment firms, but never worked together until now.

Milken is taking the plunge into institutional investing, joining Norton as a partner in Watertower Ventures just as the firm prepares to close on a $50 million new fund.

It’s an auspicious time for both Los Angeles-based businessmen, as the LA venture community sees a wave of technology talent relocating from New York and San Francisco in the newly remote work culture created by the COVID-19 epidemic.

“I see two things happen. One people look at the effects of where the market’s going. We’re seeing a lot more companies that are starting up now as a result of a [the pandemic],” said Norton. “New company formation is happening faster than before covid. [And] a lot of venture capitalists that have relocated to LA. They’ve moved down to LA for lifestyle reasons and they’re saying that they don’t need to go back to San Francisco.”

For Milken, the opportunity to get into venture now is a function of the company creation and acceleration of digital adoption that Norton referenced. “The pandemic is accelerating change in the marketplace. Things that might have taken a decade are taking two years now,” Milken said.

These opportunities are creating an opening for Watertower Ventures in markets far beyond the Hollywood hills. The firm, whose original thesis focused on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, is now cutting checks on investments in Texas and Utah, and spending much less time looking for companies in the Bay Area.

Norton’s latest fund is the only the most recent act in a career that has seen the investor traverse the financial services digital media and the early days of the internet. Norton built Digital Boardwalk, a pioneering internet service provider and the second commercial partner for the trailblazing browser service, Netscape.

Later, at Jeffries Technologies, and the $120 million Entertainment Media Ventures seed and early stage venture capital fund, Norton was intimately involved in bringing tech to market and focusing on early stage investments. With that in mind, the Watertower Ventures group, which launched in 2017 with a small, $5 million fund, is a return to those roots.

The plan, even at the time, was always to raise a larger fund. After founding and running the boutique investment banking business at Watertower Group, Norton knew he had to raise a starter fund to prove the thesis he was working on.

That thesis was to provide a bridge between early stage companies and large technology companies using the network that Norton has built in the Southern California tech and entertainment community over decades.

“We want to take our contacts at Google, Apple, Facebook, Disney, Microsoft, Cisco, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and other companies we believe should have a relationship with our portfolio companies, and help the CEOs and management teams more effectively do business development,” Norton told SoCal Tech when he closed his first fund in 2017. “We want to connect them to the right person at those companies to create a commercial relationship. That has a really large impact on early stage companies, who typically don’t have a deep network of relationships, and the ability to get to those type of people. It’s because of our advisory business that we have those relationships, and that’s also why those relationships stay fresh and active, versus people who aren’t in those businesses. It’s almost a full time job to maintain that, and that’s where our value-add is.”

Milken, who has spent his professional career in entrepreneurship, was ready to try investing, and was intimately familiar with Watertower and its portfolio, as an investor in the firm’s first $5 million fund.

“Two years ago we started having those conversations,” said Norton in an interview. “As Jeremy exited his business in September it created the opportunity to go out and raise together as the evolution of our partnership.”

With the new capital coming in, Norton expects to back some 30 to 35 companies, he said. And, in a testament to the first fund’s performance, which has it in the top decile of venture funds for its vintage, Norton said he was able to raise the capital amidst the economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 70 percent of the existing portfolio has been marked up, according to Norton.

Even though limited partners, the investors who back venture funds, were reluctant to commit capital to new firms in March and April, fundraising returned with a vengeance in June and July, according to Norton. The paper performance likely was enough to woo additional limited partners and individual investors including TikTok chief executive Kevin Mayer, the former head of streaming at Disney.

Mayer’s presence in the firm’s investor base is a testament to the firm’s pitch to founders. “We view fundraising as a massive distraction for these early stage companies from their business. We try to deliver that network that’s ours to those founders,” said Norton.

“I think we’re in a unique position starting with a fresh fund here,” says Norton. “Uncertainty creates opportunity and people are bringing solutions. We haven’t noticed any slowdown whatsoever, we’re working with twenty five companies per week. Since the inception of the fund, we haven’t seen deal flow at this level.”

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend enjoyment.

Ready? Let’s talk money, upstart companies and spicy IPO rumors.

Sadly the best news of the week isn’t a fit here

So far this little newsletter has bested performance expectations, and has quickly become my favorite thing to write each week. Sadly, however, it has a theme and a genre and a remit. Which means that I will not be writing its opening column on the Epic-Apple payment brouhaha. Alas.

But don’t worry. In our world of markets and startups there was a lot to get through.

Namely that a number of unicorns that you know by name appear to be edging closer and closer to going public. There are some big names that are either about to file, or are trending in the direction of public debuts, and we’re getting more and better information than before.

I tried to summarize a bit of this on Thursday, but let’s narrow and just talk IPO mechanics:

• Palantir may direct list in September. Is it a consultancy? Is it a software company? Is it a mix of both? Don’t know? Don’t want to price it? Just direct list it! Jokes aside that we are this close to a Palantir IPO is a combination of this and exciting. (More on its growth history here.)
• Airbnb’s IPO is not only back on, it could file this month and go public before the end of the year. And its second-quarter financials leaked. The damage in perspective: After $842 million in Q1 2020 revenue, the firm had a reported $341 million Q2. And in the year-ago Q2 it did north of a flat billy in top line.
• A coda on Airbnb. Lyft and Uber have not seen their value drop as far as their revenue has in 2020. So, there is a comeback story to be made that investors are willing to buy. That Uber and Lyft are still talking about adjusted profitability, of course, has helped their case. Still, if Airbnb can chart a path back to its former financial position, investors might be willing to overlook its summer results.
• Stripe hired a CFO. That’s a game-on, though we’re not really expecting a release inside of 2020.

Adding a little more, Coinbase is still expected to debut in perhaps early 2021, and DoorDash is somewhere in the wings.

And then there are the companies that are IPO-scale and just… not going public because they are enjoying extended grand tours of the late-stage startup market funded by the largesse of wealthy relatives. Or late-stage venture funds. Whatever. You get what I mean. Snowflake has annual recurring revenue of $400 million, and it is private. Wild.

We, the S-1-reading public, are hungry for the f****** numbers. Give them to us!

Market Notes

This week’s Market Notes is a bit different than usual as we have two longer topics, instead of a number of little notable entries.

The Exchange caught up with the CEOs of Wix and Cloudinary recently, to chat about their companies (the former is public, the latter is private) and how they are faring during COVID-19.

I know we’re all a bit tired of talking about the pandemic, but how it has changed the business landscape is probably the single biggest story of the year inside of our world. So, let’s see what we learned talking to the execs.

Cloudinary

• TechCrunch spoke with media-management service Cloudinary in January of 2020 because it was a company that had reached $60 million ARR without external capital. It has sold secondary shares here and there to external parties (Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures), but has paid for its own growth. In January, CEO Itai Lahan said that his company had never lacked what it needed to keep growing and “get to the next level.”
• So, what’s happening over at Cloudinary now that we are deep in the pandemic business cycle? Likening his company to a bulldozer when discussing how Cloudinary operates compared to some startups, Lahan said that his market was varied: E-commerce as a segment is not growing as fast as the company had expected, but social customers had grown quickly in April, and so forth.
• Cloudinary itself is still growing, and its CEO stressed that it has not had to lay off staff during the pandemic. Cloudinary did burn a little cash for a few months earlier in the year, but remains self-powered with sufficient resources in the CEO’s view.
• Cloudinary’s marketing VP Sanjay Sarathy was on the call as well, so I asked him if he agreed with Lahan about having all the resources he needs. He predictably agreed, but stressed something that stayed in my head. According to Sarathy, having both self-serve and enterprise sales has been useful; with two paths to market Cloudinary can balance one with the other, making me wonder why more companies don’t do the same.
• Finally the three of us riffed on the impact that high valuations have on some startup choices. If ARR is highly valued by investors, then startups might pursue less-efficient growth than they otherwise might because they are in some way incentivized to do so. Cloudinary isn’t chasing VC markups in the same way, so it’s world is a bit different. The company remains hugely interesting, and we’ll check back in with them in a few months.

Wix

• Wix recently reported earnings, and I got on the phone with its CEO Avishai Abrahami to chat about its results, and most notably its pandemic-era marketing spend. When some companies are cutting costs and lowering spend, Wix put $119.3 million into sales and marketing in Q2, up from $95.2 million in Q1 2020 and $71.3 million in Q2 2019.
• What up with that? In short Wix caught the digital transformation acceleration tailwinds and decided instead of just enjoying a boost to invest lots in growing even faster. That cost money, but the firm is pretty stoked about how short its payback cycle is for those expenses. The company said that more than half of its Q2 marketing spend (60%) has been returned to the company in cash terms (some of the revenue is unearned, of course, and will be prorated over time).
• “We are responding to this continued heightened demand by increasing our investment in marketing, which based on our historical data, will drive continued collections and revenue growth in the near future,” the company said during its earnings cycle.
• During our conversation Abrahami said that even in places where the pandemic has settled down a bit, the world has not gone back to what it was pre-pandemic. The acceleration of the digital transformation then, is perhaps not a short-term bump, but a whole-cloth reordering of how business happens.
• Wix also launched a number of products include some ecommerce tooling towards the end of 2019, which Abrahami described as well-timed. He also stressed that COVID-19 is awful and that good business results don’t mean that he’s happy with the state of the world.

So, Cloudinary is chugging along with a slightly uneven growth profile depending on the niche in question. Wix is seeing a perhaps broader acceleration. But both companies are going to come out on the other side of COVID-19 in fine shape. We just hope that Cloudinary still goes public in due time. We want that S-1!

Various and Sundry

• On Equity this week we dug into how Gen Z is changing fundraising by making it fun and good and bringing attention into the matrix of things that prove market-fit.
• I covered Cube’s $5 million seed round, which stood out for the part of the market they are tackling, and Mux’s $37 million Series C. Mux does video APIs so that any company can bring video into their service natively. As you can imagine, it’s been busy.
• Duck Creek priced its IPO at $27 per share after raising its range earlier this week to $23  to $25 per share. The company’s stock opened at $42 per share, up 56%.
• This week The Exchange was super happy to welcome another author for the first time: Natasha Mascarenhas whom you might know from the Equity podcasting crew. You can read her first entry here, as she was kind enough to fill in for me on my day off.
• The fintech software-and-card world took a neat turn this week when Ramp added more code to its corp card business. It’s a startup we’ve kept tabs on since its launch earlier this year, and it has managed to grow during the spend-reducing pandemic, which is neat.
• The Gong round was cool, with the company valued at $2.2 billion after a fresh $200 million in capital. Oh, and it has grown 2.5x this year.

And we have to cut it there as we’re out of room. Thanks for hanging out with us today!

Hugs, fistbumps, and good vibes,

Alex

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.

There are few things that US political leaders can agree on these days, but one of them thankfully appears to be 5G. Manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, health care and many other industries are beginning to incorporate the fast, device-to-device connectivity provided by the fifth-generation wireless standard. But the key 3.5 GHz band of spectrum had been reserved for military and government use. Following years of congressional and most recently executive-branch action, it will now be auctioned off in early 2021. The marketing fluff will finally make way for the technology’s promise(s). More analysis from Danny Crichton:

There has been growing pressure on U.S. government leaders in recent years over the plodding 5G transition, which has fallen behind peer countries like China and South Korea. Korea in particular has been a world leader, with more than two million 5G subscribers already in the country thanks to an aggressive industrial policy by Seoul to invest in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure and take a lead in this new wireless transition.

The U.S. has been faster at moving ahead in millimeter (high frequency) spectrum for 5G that will have the greatest bandwidth, but it has lagged in midband spectrum allocation. While the announcements today is notable, there will also be concerns whether 100 Mhz of spectrum is sufficient to support the widest variety of 5G devices, and thus, this allocation may well be just the first in a series.

Nonetheless, additional midband spectrum for 5G will help move the transition forward, and will also help device and chip manufacturers begin to focus their efforts on the specific bands they need to support in their products. While it may be a couple of more years until 5G devices are widely available (and useful) in the United States, spectrum has been a key gating factor to reaching the next-generation of wireless, and a gate that is finally opening up.

All sorts of IPOs

“Today, it’s nearly hard to recall the fear that took over startup-land,” Alex Wilhelm writes in a review of recent unicorn news for Extra Crunch. “Sure, there are warning signs about cloud growth rates, but for many unicorns, we still live in boom times.” Indeed, two of the biggest names in pre-public startups appear once again track for IPOs. Airbnb could file to go public this month, despite pandemic losses to its business. Payments provider Stripe seems to be headed that way, too. The Valley’s oldest unicorn, Palantir, may finally do that direct filing. In the meantime, Accenture spinout Duck Creek Technologies had its big liquidity event for its private equity owners yesterday, with a 50% pop — Alex did a closer look at the insurtech company’s financials on Monday for Extra Crunch, and predicted events basically:

[T]o understand its revenue base, we’ll need to annualize the nine-month period that ended May 31, 2020 (ew), and use that to extrapolate a (kinda) revenue multiple using a set of metrics that we don’t tend to use for such things (yuck).

• Duck Creek nine-months’ revenue for period ending May 31, 2020: $153.35 million.
• That figure, annualized: $204.5 million.
• Implies revenue multiple at its two IPO valuations: 11.9x, and 13.2x.

Those seem somewhat reasonable? Maybe a little expensive given the company’s slow aggregate revenue growth and lower-than-average SaaS gross margins?

By that logic, the company will raise its IPO range, price above the boosted interval, and quintuple on its first day’s trading…

Want more zingers like this? He’s busy covering the 2020 unicorn-to-IPO path through all its twists and turns over on The Exchange, which subscribers can get as a daily post and as a weekly newsletter coming out every Saturday.

Don’t let a TechCrunch reporter accidentally crash your company meeting

Our security editor Zack Whittaker had a first-person situation this week with poor security practices at a startup. And not just any kind of startup:

I got a tip about a new security startup, with fresh funding and an idea that caught my interest. I didn’t have much to go on, so I did what any curious reporter would do and started digging around. The startup’s website was splashy but largely word salad. I couldn’t find basic answers to my simple questions. But the company’s idea still seemed smart. I just wanted to know how the company actually worked.

So I poked the website a little harder.

Reporters use a ton of tools to collect information, monitor changes in websites, check if someone opened their email for comment, and navigate vast pools of public data. These tools aren’t special, reserved only for card-carrying members of the press, but rather are open to anyone who wants to find and report information. One tool I use frequently on the security beat lists all the subdomains on a company’s website. These subdomains are public but deliberately hidden from view, yet you can often find things that you wouldn’t from the website itself.

Bingo! I immediately found the company’s pitch deck. Another subdomain had a ton of documentation on how its product works. A bunch of subdomains didn’t load, and a couple were blocked off for employees only. (It’s also a line in the legal sand. If it’s not public and you’re not allowed in, you’re not allowed to knock down the door.) I clicked on another subdomain. A page flashed open, an icon in my Mac dock briefly bounced, and the camera light flashed on. Before I could register what was happening, I had joined what appeared to be the company’s morning meeting….

Founders, lock up those docs!

Studying up on diversity

Megan Rose Dickey, who has started writing weekly column about tech labor called Human Capital, put together a quick set of resources for companies including a glossary of terms and key organizations, as well as key issues and data points for context. Here’s more:

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd and the subsequent racial justice uprising, many people in tech shouted from the rooftops that “Black Lives Matter,” despite having subpar representation of Black and Latinx folks at their companies. In some cases, these companies’ proclamations of ‘Black Lives Matter’ felt especially performative in contrast to their respective stances on Trump and selling their technology to law enforcement agencies.

Still, this has led to an increased focus on diversity, inclusion and equity in the tech industry. If you’re wondering things like, “Where do I find Black and brown talent?” or saying, “I’d invest in Black and Latinx people if I could find them!,” then this is for you.

Below, you’ll learn about some of the issues at play, some of the key organizations doing work in this space and access a glossary of frequently used terms in the realm of diversity, equity and inclusion in tech.

Minimum viable email and other growth marketing tips

Lucas Matney took a look through three growth marketing talks at early stage to glean key tactics for those who didn’t attend. Along discussions around SEO and landing pages, here’s a big presentation from Sound Venture’s Susan Su about growing a business through email marketing in 2020. Here’s an excerpt:

“The first role email plays in growth is as a tool to help you accelerate your reinforcing feedback loops. For example, email growth can help you expand LTV if you’re building a consumer e-comm or it can help you shorten your sales cycle if you’re a B2B, or enterprise SaaS business. It’s also really powerful for reducing attrition or churn, which is key, obviously, and sometimes it’s an overlooked way of actually increasing growth.”

The second role that [email] plays in growth is as a two-way channel connecting your product and your user, and that channel can carry information either about your product value from your brand out to your user, or it can carry information about your users needs and preferences from them to you.”

Check out her full talk, which was moderated by your faithful correspondent, for advanced topics like how to improve the credibility of your domain with spam filters.

Around TechCrunch

Save with group discounts to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Ready, set, network: CrunchMatch is open for Disrupt 2020

We’re exploring the future of SaaS at Disrupt this year

Waymo COO Tekedra Mawakana is coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Rep. Zoe Lofgren to talk privacy and policy at Disrupt 2020

Across the week

TechCrunch

Facebook launches support for paid online events

Digitizing Burning Man

The robots occupying our sidewalks

Beware bankers talking TikTok

Kamala Harris brings a view from tech’s epicenter to the presidential race

Extra Crunch

Building a fintech giant is very expensive

Minted.com CEO Mariam Naficy shares ‘the biggest surprise about entrepreneurship’

IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era

What’s different about hiring data scientists in 2020?

No pen required: The digital future of real estate closings

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the full crew around once again — Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton, Chris Gates and myself. And as always, it was key to have the full crew as there was an ocean of news to get through. Before we get into the show, make sure you’ve checked out Danny’s latest work on the TechCrunch List… now, let’s get to it:

• The TikTok saga continues: This week we spent a few minutes discussing why bankers are incentivized to make the proposed TikTok-Microsoft deal as competitive as possible. Or at least make it look as competitive as possible. And, there’s some data from inside Microsoft about how the deal is being viewed.
• Airbnb could file to go public this month! It might go public before the year is out! That’s way better than we expected. (Bloomberg got its Q2 finances.)
• Palantir could file for a direct listing next month! That’s great. We wanted to know what Palantir really is, namely a consultancy or a tech company. And then we played valuation bingo so we can look back later and mock ourselves.
• I was very excited about the Duck Creek IPO. Few of my friends joined me in being excited.
• The three of us also took a minute to riff on the latest Pinterest news, namely that it’s poorly run and is sexist per its now-former COO. We’d love to stop covering these stories, but they keep happening so, on we go.
• Danny had some neat SPAC data to share, helping illustrate that SPACs are not merely a meme, they are a real, driving force of public company action this year. As was Tesla’s announced stock split, which led us to ask why a few times.
• Next up, Natasha walked us through her latest work digging into how Gen Z is shaking up the funding world. We framed the changes in some historical context, and decided that really in the end the kids are alright.
• Danny brought us to a close, with a note on Conduit (connecting founders and early-stage investors) and Circle (creator software). Both are worth your time.

And that was our show! We are back Monday morning. Stay cool!

Every year hackers descend on Las Vegas in the sweltering August heat to break ground on security research and the most innovative hacks. This year was no different, even if it was virtual.

To name a few: Hackers tricked an ATM to spit out cash. A duo of security researchers figured out a way to detect the latest cell site simulators. Car researchers successfully hacked into a Mercedes-Benz. A Windows bug some two decades old can be used to plant malware. Cryptocurrency exchanges were extremely vulnerable to hackers for a time. Internet satellites are more insecure than we thought and their data streams can contain sensitive, unencrypted data. Two security researchers lived to tell the tale after they were arrested for an entirely legal physical penetration test. And, a former NSA hacker revealed how to plant malware on a Mac using a booby-trapped Word document.

But with less than three months until millions of Americans go to the polls, Black Hat sharpened its focus on election security and integrity more so than any previous year.

Here’s more from the week.

---

THE BIG PICTURE

A major voting machine maker is finally opening up to hackers

The relationship between hackers and election machine manufacturers has been nothing short of fraught. No company wants to see their products torn apart for weaknesses that could be exploited by foreign spies. But one company, once resistant to the security community, has started to show signs of compromise.

Election equipment maker ES&S is opening up its voting machines to hackers — willingly — under a new vulnerability disclosure program. That will see the company embrace hackers for the first time, recognizing that hackers have knowledge, insight and experience — rather than pushing them away and ignoring the problems altogether. Or, as the company’s security chief told Wired: “Hackers gonna hack, researchers gonna research.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Friday that the company was ‘embarrassingly late’ rolling out a security layer known as two-factor authentication for its mobile app.

“Sorry, this is embarrassingly late. Two factor authentication via sms or authenticator app is going through final validation right now,” Musk wrote Friday in response to a question from a Twitter follower.

Musk said in April that the additional security layer was “coming soon.” He first mentioned that the company would add two-factor authentication back in May 2019. Tesla owners have stepped up their calls for two-factor authentication as the rest of the tech community has adopted the security feature.

Two-factor authentication — also known as two-step verification — combines something you know, like a password, with something you have, like your phone. This is a way to verify that the real account holder — or car owner — is logging in and not a hacker.

Some websites do this by sending you a code by text message. But hackers can intercept these. A more secure way of doing it is by sending a code through a phone app, often called an authenticator, which security experts prefer.

Beefing up the security on the Tesla mobile app is particularly pressing. The Tesla app is a critical tool for owners, giving them control over numerous functions on their vehicles.

When Bluetooth is enabled, the Tesla app allows drivers to use their phone as a key to Tesla’s newer vehicle models. The app also lets the user remotely lock and unlock the doors, trunk and frunk, turn on the HVAC system, monitor and control charging, locate the vehicle and schedule service — to name a few of the main capabilities.

These days, two-factor authentication is common and widely employed to stop hackers from using stolen passwords to break into users’ accounts. What’s unclear with Tesla is whether the two-factor tool will rely on SMS or a phone app. Musk said the final validation was for SMS “or” authenticator app, a statement that leaves that critical question unanswered.

The controversial facial recognition software maker Clearview AI has a new contract with ICE, the most controversial U.S. government agency. Clearview was already known to work with the branch of Homeland Security fiercely criticized for implementing the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies. The new contract makes it clear that relationship is ongoing — and that Clearview isn’t just playing a bit part in tech’s lucrative scrum for federal contracts.

First spotted by tech watchdog Tech Inquiry, the new contract is worth $224,000 and will provide the agency with what is only described as “Clearview licenses,” likely just access to the company’s software services. According to the award notice, the funding office for the contract is Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division within ICE that focuses on “cross-border criminal activity” including drug and human trafficking. Four companies competed for the contract.

Clearview is no stranger to controversy. Its somewhat mysterious facial recognition software allows clients to upload a photo of anyone to cross-reference it against a massive database full of photos scraped from online sources, including social networks. Civil liberties groups see Clearview’s tech as a privacy nightmare, but for any law enforcement agency tasked with tracking people down, it’s a dream come true.

Clearview has faced near-constant scrutiny from privacy advocates and even large tech companies since the quiet company was exposed in a report this January. Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube have all denounced Clearview’s use of data scraped from their platforms, with some of those companies even authoring cease-and-desist letters for violating their terms of service.

In May, the ACLU announced that it was suing Clearview over privacy violations. That suit wields the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) against the company, the same law that previously extracted a $550 million settlement from Facebook on behalf of Illinois residents.

“Companies like Clearview will end privacy as we know it, and must be stopped,” ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Nathan Freed Wessler said of the lawsuit.

In the four years since Help Lightning first began pitching its services out of its Birmingham, Ala. headquarters, the company has managed to sign up 100 customers including some large Fortune 500 companies like Cox Communications, Siemens, and Boston Scientific.

Now, with an additional $8 million in financing from Resolve Growth Partners, the company is hoping to expand its sales and marketing efforts and continue to refine its product.

The technology was initially invented by Bart Guthrie, a neurosurgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wanted a way to improve telepresence technologies so he could assist with remote surgeries.

What Guthrie developed was a technology that could merge video streams to that experts could remotely monitor, manage, and assist in everything from service repairs to surgery.

“Think of it as a video call on steroids,” says Gary York, the company’s chief executive officer. A serial entrepreneur, York was brought on board by Guthrie to help commercialize the technology four years ago.

The technology works on any android or iOS device and is accessed through a mobile browser. The company now boasts over 100 customers including Cox, Canon, Unisys, and Boston Scientific. And its usage has soared since the advent of the pandemic, according to York.

“We saw call volume quadruple,” he said.

For instance, Cox Communications uses the technology to provide virtual trouble shooting to replace in-home service visits for customers. At Siemens, service technicians who fix medical imaging and lab diagnostic equipment can use the Help Lightning to link up with experts to troubleshoot fixes in real time. York would not comment on pricing, but said that the company provides custom quotes based on usage.

“After evaluating the virtual expertise software market for over a year, our diligence is clear that Help Lightning has built a highly differentiated solution that is valued by its customers” said Jit Sinha, co-founder and Managing Director from Resolve, in a statement earlier this week. “Help Lightning has a tremendous opportunity to power the success of this rapidly emerging market. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Gary York and his talented team.”

 

Rent the Runway and Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies.

Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing.

Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur launched her first fund to invest in female-led startups. It took her 700 meetings over two years to make that first close, she said. Years later, venture capital has slightly taken note. But the Female Founders Fund, or “F Cubed,” has tracked female-led wins and bet big on the underestimated asset class.

Her early focus on female founders hasn’t evolved, but the landscape has. And in an unprecedented world of remote deals and democratization of venture capital, we’re even more excited to have Duggal join us on Extra Crunch Live this upcoming Thursday at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. EST/6 p.m. GMT

Those tuning in and taking notes are encouraged to ask questions, but you have to be an Extra Crunch member to access the chat. If you still haven’t signed up, now’s your chance! With the subscription, you’ll also be able to check out all of our stellar previous guests on-demand (watch those episodes here).

Female Founders Fund has provided seed institutional capital to entrepreneurs with over $3 billion in enterprise value. The firm has cut checks into women-led companies such as Rent the Runway, Billie, Tala, Peanut, Thrive Global and Zola. The fund has also attracted limited partners like Melinda Gates and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.

Duggal herself has a fascinating trajectory into technology investing. At 25, she started a wine bar in Bombay called The Tasting Room. She went on to get an MBA from London Business School, and co-founded Exclusively.in, an e-commerce company that got acquired by Indian fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2011.

Hear from Duggal on August 20 about how the investment landscape has changed for female founders, what she thinks of as a success story and if 2020 feels different than 2014. And Extra Crunch fam, make sure to bring your thoughtful questions for me to ask her live on air.

You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.