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TiVo today is launching a new device, its would-be Fire TV Stick competitor known as the TiVo Stream 4K. First announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, this $50 Android TV-powered HDMI dongle is TiVo’s attempt to insert itself into the streaming media device market.

The new dongle arrives at a time when TiVo has largely lost its customer base to rivals like Roku, Amazon, Apple, and others who have better catered to the demands of cord cutters. Meanwhile, TiVo’s own DVR for pay TV customers has slowly gone out of fashion as the cord cutting trend accelerated.

As the name implies, the new device supports 4K UHD, along with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos. Chromecast is built in, too.

Thanks to its use of the Android TV platform, the TiVo Stream 4K also has access to thousands of Play Store apps for streaming including Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, and others.

But one thing it doesn’t have is a way to record live TV. Instead, TiVo has left that up to its partner Sling TV and that service’s Cloud DVR. The deal with Sling TV also offers integration that includes surfacing Sling’s content in universal search and through voice commands via the included Voice Remote.

The decision to prominently feature Sling TV could make a transition to a streaming device less awkward for first-time cord cutters, who may miss the always-on nature of live TV and its linear programming guide.

The voice button on the remote can also call up Google Assistant, as on other Android TV devices, which means you can do more than search for content. The assistant can answer questions, too —  like giving you the daily weather forecast, for example.

The TiVo Stream 4K also includes access to TiVo’s newer ad-supported streaming service, TiVo+ — its own version of Roku’s free movies and TV hub, The Roku Channel. TiVo+ includes access to thousands of hours of free movie and TV shows and 49 streaming channels across news, sports, kids, food, music, and comedy.

Unlike TiVo devices that preceded it, the TiVo Stream 4K doesn’t require a subscription to continue to use its service. It’s just the one-time purchase of $49.99, which includes a 7-day free trial of Sling TV.

“At a time when viewers are streaming more than ever across a sea of platforms, TiVo Stream 4K integrates that content with recommendation and search features to make it easier to find, watch and enjoy the best news, entertainment and sports from today’s most popular services,” said Dave Shull, TiVo president and CEO, in a statement. “After an incredibly positive reception from media and the wider industry at CES, we are delivering on our promise to launch TiVo Stream 4K, which is symbolic of our company’s transformation from a well-loved DVR provider to a pioneer in the streaming market,” he said.

TiVo, of course, can hardly call itself a pioneer in a market where a number of streaming dongle devices already exist and have for years — including the Fire TV Stock, Roku Streaming Stick, and Chromecast. Leading device maker Roku has also plugged nearly every hole in the market with a variety of form factors and feature sets from its low-end boxes and sticks to its high-end 4K player.

Meanwhile, TiVo has stuck around trying to reinvent its DVR for the era of cord cutting with middling results. Its oddly-designed BOLT-era box for cord cutters was eventually replaced with TiVo Edge, which comes in two packages — one for antenna users, then other for cable TV subscribers. But the demand for watching and recording TV has dwindled, outside of the specific needs of live sports viewers.

With declining hardware sales and subscriber numbers, TiVo has turned its business to advertising, including its TiVo+ streaming service and with skippable pre-roll ads on DVR recordings. More recently, it has announced plans to merge with technology licensor Xperi in a $3 billion deal.

The TiVo Stream 4K will give it another way to put its ad business in front of more customers.

The device is available now via www.tivo.com/streamNOW.

 

Autotech Ventures popped on the scene three years ago with a $120 million debut fund and a plan to invest in early-stage ground transportation startups. Now, with investments in 26 startups and a handful of exits, including Xnor.ai, DeepScale and Frontier Car Group, the venture firm is back with a new, bigger fund and the same strategy.

Autotech Ventures has raised more than $150 million in its second fund with capital commitments from both financial and corporate investors, including Volvo Group Venture Capital AB, Lear, Bridgestone and Stoneridge, as well as other vehicle manufacturers, parts suppliers, repair shop chains, leasing corporations, dealership groups and trucking firms.

The new fund brings the firm to more than $270 million under management to date.

While Autotech’s funds include institutional financial investors, it has largely focused on corporation.

“The corporate LP base is a key part of our strategy as a firm and a key differentiator for us,” Daniel Hoffer, managing director at Autotech, said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “At a high level we provide capital, transportation market intelligence and access to large corporations in the industry, including our LPs. Startups really value those connections because we can accelerate their go-to market and their distribution channels in addition to providing greater access to other forms of business development and even M&A opportunities.”

The firm typically aims for the seed and Series A sweet spot. But it occasionally will participate in Series B and later-stage funding rounds, Hoffer said. Its new $150 million-plus fund will target early-stage startups in several sectors that fall under the “ground transportation and mobility” umbrella, including connectivity, autonomy, shared-use mobility, electrification and digital enterprise applications.

Autotech Ventures does invest globally, although the majority of its investments are in the U.S. Outside of North America, the firm has a proportionate interest in Europe and Israel, according to Hoffer.

Some of its notable investments include computer vision startup DeepScale (which was snapped up by Tesla last year), Lyft, used vehicle marketplace operator Frontier Car Group, Outdoorsy, Swvl, parking app SpotHero, Volta Charging and Xnor.ai, which Apple acquired in January.

Hoffer said the firm is sensitive to the well-hyped trends, such as autonomous vehicle technology, that everybody is chasing, but it also is interested in the more niche opportunities that people might be less aware of.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has upended the shared mobility sector, ride-hailing and public transportation, has Hoffer and his fellow Autotech venture capitalists focused on logistics and supply chain visibility — two areas that have promise in this “COVID-oriented world.”

Autotech is also interested in overlooked opportunities, such as software that enables the industry to execute recalls, and even visibility into junkyard inventory, Hoffer added. The company also sees investment opportunities in “off highway” autonomous vehicle technology ventures, such as in mining and construction.

A new data set from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) details how startups are reacting to the post-unicorn era as COVID-19-related disruptions upset the global economy and remake the risk tolerance of private investors.

What SVB’s new report shows is unsurprising: venture capital deal volumes are falling, startups are tapping existing debt capacities to add cash to balances while they still can and some upstart firms are curtailing spend to reduce unprofitability. The last data point comes via the lens of startups that recently raised, making the data more a snapshot of what companies that are successfully attracting capital may have accomplished with regard to improving profitability — the directional shifts are material regardless of that particular nuance.

Let’s briefly examine what the data says and what it tells us about the state of the startup market.

Spending less, borrowing more

Venture capitalists are pulling back, SVB data indicates. A chart from its Q2 markets report notes that the “SVB Deal Activity Index” had fallen from a rating of 160 in early March to just over 70 by mid-to-late-April. That staggering decline means fewer rounds are getting done and that there is less capital going into startups of all sizes.

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale on demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service that will scale up and down as needed automatically.

Confluent CEO Jay Kreps says that elasticity is arguably one of the most important features of cloud computing, and this ability to scale up and down is one of the primary factors that has attracted organizations to the cloud. By automating that capability, they giving DevOps one less major thing to worry about.

“This new functionality allows users to dynamically scale Kafka and the other key ecosystem components like KSQL and Kafka Connect. This is a key missing capability that no other service provides,” Kreps explained.

He points out that this particularly relevant right now with people working at home. Systems are being taxed more than perhaps ever before, and this automated elasticity is going to come in handy, making it more cost-effective and efficient than was previously possible.

“These capabilities let customers add capacity as they need it, or scale down to save money, all without having to pre-plan in advance, ” he said.

The new elasticity feature in Confluent is part of a series of updates to the platform, known as Project Metamorphosis, that Confluent is planning to roll out throughout this year on a regular basis.

“Through the rest of the year we’ll be doing a sequence of releases that bring the capabilities of modern cloud data systems to the Kafka ecosystem in Confluent Cloud. We’ll be announcing one major capability each month, starting with elasticity,” he said.

Kreps first announced Metamorphosis last month when the company also announced a massive $250 million funding round on a $4.5 billion valuation. In spite of the current economic situation, driven by the ongoing pandemic, Confluent plans to continue to build out the product, as today’s announcement attests.

In spite of their protected status under international laws, pangolins remain one of the most trafficked animals in the world—and at least some of that trade is taking place right out in the open on Facebook .

A new report from tech watchdog group the Tech Transparency Project details how Facebook users are engaged in the sale of illegally-trafficked pangolin parts, even though the practice is illegal and prohibited by Facebook itself.

In one example, a public page of Facebook called “Pangolin Scales for Sale in Vietnam” advertised the sale of the forbidden animal products, asking potential buyers to send a message to the seller over WhatsApp or email.

Another public Facebook page, “Rhino Horns And Pangolin scales For sale In China,” was created in March and directed customers to “embrace our businesses like never before” in the wake of the coronavirus. Other pages offered the sale of pangolin oils. Most of these sites were hiding in plain sight, easily found by using basic search terms like the Vietnamese word for “pangolin” or even the phrase “pangolins for sale” in English.

Facebook’s own platform rules prohibit the sale of live animals as well as anything that “promotes, encourages, or coordinates the poaching of endangered species and their parts.” The company joined an anti-wildlife trafficking coalition in March of 2018, but since that date reports have detailed the ongoing sales of everything from hornbill parts to tiger teeth through ads and direct sales facilitated by the platform.

Pangolins are again are in the spotlight right now as the global scientific community searches for answers about the pandemic’s origins. Wild animals carry coronaviruses and can transfer those potentially devastating diseases to humans, as is believed to be the case with a Chinese bat population and the 2002 SARS outbreak.

According to new research, some pangolins carry coronaviruses related to the one that causes COVID-19. Most scientists believe the novel coronavirus likely originated in bats, but how the virus spread from bats to humans is a mystery researchers are still seeking to understand.

ReadySet, a diversity, equity and inclusion startup led by Project Include Founding Member Y-Vonne Hutchinson, has raised its first, and perhaps last round of funding from Indie.vc.

“We were lucky enough to close our round right as the coronavirus was hitting and then shifted our business to doing remote stuff that offered connection,” Hutchinson told TechCrunch.

For the last five years, ReadySet has been sustaining itself off of revenue and in the last year saw about $1 million in annual revenue. ReadySet makes money by offering consulting services to companies looking to create more inclusive workplaces and cultures. ReadySet has worked with companies like Salesforce, Airbnb, Amazon, GitHub, UCSF Health, Mailchimp, Medium and many others.

“We’ve been profitable the entire time we’ve been in business,” Hutchinson said. “But we wanted to be able to maximize our impact beyond in-person training services and doing stuff that felt a little more like product development that didn’t necessitate immediate revenue.”

ReadySet decided to take funding from Indie.vc because of the firm’s focus on startups that are profit-driven, she said. She also “didn’t want to give up a huge chunk of ownership in a firm I built from scratch.”

Indie.vc doesn’t take any equity upfront. If a startup in its portfolio raises additional money or sells, Indie.vc converts its investment to equity at a percentage decided on by the company. If the company never sells or never raises another round, Indie.vc gets a share of the company’s revenue until the firm makes 5x its investment.

“They weren’t interested in taking a big chunk of the business but were instead interested in helping us get more profitable,” she said. “For me, as a founder that has not been in the VC space, it’s been hard to be seen as a real entrepreneur.”

Indie.vc aims to be the last outside financing founders ever need to take. For Hutchinson, she said that could be the case.

“I don’t want to be the kind of founder that chases the next round,” she said. “I want to smartly leverage the funding and continue our profitability and do it at scale. I think some founders get stuck doing that and then don’t focus on the product.”

In light of these trying times amid the COVID-19 pandemic, ReadySet investing more heavily in remote training offerings.

“We’re really sort of looking for ways we can resource companies trying to rethink digital interaction,” she said. “I also think a lot of people or some people think this is a blip on the radar and we’ll go back to normal. We don’t think that I necessarily going to happen.”

Despite these rocky times where many tech companies are laying off staff members and putting some on furlough, Hutchinson said some companies have doubled down on what they’re doing in terms of workplace culture.

In past recessions, where diversity, equity and inclusion has been seen as a “‘nice to have,’ there is an existential threat that has changed the way we live and the way we have to show up at work,” Hutchinson said.

People are now isolated or needing to take care of family, she says. Perhaps they’re drinking more and/or working through grief, loss and death — all of which are traumatic, she said.

“All of those issues actually implicate DE&I,” Hutchinson said. “We’re used to siloing it, but in reality, DE&I speaks to how people show up, how they feel included, how we support people and now, more than ever, that’s really important.”

Hutchinson says her clients are asking her more about mental health, belonging, childcare and bringing compassion into these trying times.

“A lot of tech companies don’t necessarily have strong management cultures,” she said. “Those gaps are now becoming really obvious to people. I think we’re all in a place where we’re trying to figure out how we adjust to what’s going on now. It’s about so much more than work right now. I would encourage companies, even if they don’t consider that to be DE&I, how they’re treating their employees.”

“Assembly” may sound like one of the simpler tests in the manufacturing process, but as anyone who’s ever put together a piece of flat-pack furniture knows, it can be surprisingly (and frustratingly) complex. Invisible AI is a startup that aims to monitor people doing assembly tasks using computer vision, helping maintain safety and efficiency — without succumbing to the obvious all-seeing-eye pitfalls. A $3.6 million seed round ought to help get them going.

The company makes self-contained camera-computer units that run highly optimized computer vision algorithms to track the movements of the people they see. By comparing those movements with a set of canonical ones (someone performing the task correctly), the system can watch for mistakes or identify other problems in the workflow — missing parts, injuries, and so on.

Obviously, right at the outset, this sounds the kind of thing that results in a pitiless computer overseer that punishes workers every time they fall below an artificial and constantly rising standard — and Amazon has probably already patented that. But co-founder and CEO Eric Danziger was eager to explain that this isn’t the idea at all.

“The most important parts of this product are for the operators themselves. This is skilled labor, and they have a lot of pride in their work,” he said. “They’re the ones in the trenches doing the work, and catching and correcting mistakes is a big part of it.”

“These assembly jobs are pretty athletic and fast paced. You have to remember the 15 steps you have to do, then move on to the next one, and that might be a totally different variation. The challenge is keeping all that in your head,” he continued. “The goal is to be a part of that loop in real time. When they’re about to move on to the next piece we can provide a double check and say, ‘Hey, we think you missed step 8.’ That can save a huge amount of pain. It might be as simple as plugging in a cable, but catching it there is huge — if it’s after the vehicle has been assembled, you’d have to tear it down again.”

This kind of body tracking exists in various forms and for various reasons; Veo Robotics, for instance, uses depth sensors to track an operator and robot’s exact positions to dynamically prevent collisions.

But the challenge at the industrial scale is less “how do we track a person’s movements in the first place” than “how can we easily deploy and apply the results of tracking a person’s movements.” After all, it does no good if the system takes a month to install and days to reprogram. So Invisible AI focused on simplicity of installation and administration, with no code needed and entirely edge-based computer vision.

“The goal was to make it as easy to deploy as possible. You buy a camera from us, with compute and everything built in. You install it in your facility, you show it a few examples of the assembly process, then you annotate them. And that’s less complicated than it sounds,” Danziger explained. “Within something like an hour they can be up and running.”

Once the camera and machine learning system is set up, it’s really not such a difficult problem for it to be working on. Tracking human movements is a fairly straightforward task for a smart camera these days, and comparing those movements to an example set is comparatively easy as well. There’s no “creativity” involved, like trying to guess what a person is doing or match it to some huge library of gestures, as you might find in an AI dedicated to captioning video or interpreting sign language (both still very much works in progress elsewhere in the research community).

As for privacy and the possibility of being unnerved by being on camera constantly, that’s something that has to be addressed by the companies using this technology. There’s a distinct possibility for good, but also for evil, like pretty much any new tech.

One of Invisible’s early partners is Toyota, which has been both an early adopter and skeptic when it comes to AI and automation. Their philosophy, one that has been arrived at after some experimentation, is one of empowering expert workers. A tool like this is an opportunity to provide systematic improvement that’s based on what those workers already do.

It’s easy to imagine a version of this system where, like in Amazon’s warehouses, workers are pushed to meet nearly inhuman quotas through ruthless optimization. But Danziger said that a more likely outcome, based on anecdotes from companies he’s worked with already, is more about sourcing improvements from the workers themselves.

Having built a product day in and day out year after year, these are employees with deep and highly specific knowledge on how to do it right, and that knowledge can be difficult to pass on formally. “Hold the piece like this when you bolt it or your elbow will get in the way” is easy to say in training but not so easy to make standard practice. Invisible AI’s posture and position detection could help with that.

“We see less of a focus on cycle time for an individual, and more like, streamlining steps, avoiding repetitive stress, etc.,” Danziger said.

Importantly, this kind of capability can be offered with a code-free, compact device that requires no connection except to an intranet of some kind to send its results to. There’s no need to stream the video to the cloud for analysis; footage and metadata are both kept totally on-premise if desired.

Like any compelling new tech, the possibilities for abuse are there, but they are not — unlike an endeavor like Clearview AI — built for abuse.

“It’s a fine line. It definitely reflects the companies it’s deployed in,” Danziger said. “The companies we interact with really value their employees and want them to be respected and engaged in the process as possible. This helps them with that.”

The $3.6 million seed round was led by 8VC, with participating investors including iRobot Corporation, K9 Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Slow Ventures.

VC fund Runa Capital was launched with $135M in 2010 and is perhaps best known for its investment into NGINX which powers many web sites today. In more recent years it’s participated or led investments into startups such as Zipdrug ($10.8M); Rollbar this year ($11M); and Monedo (for €20M).

HQ’d in San Francisco, it’s now completed the final closing on its $157 million Runa Capital Fund III, which, they say, exceeded its original target of $135 million.

The firm typically invests between $1 million and $10 million in early-stage companies, predominantly Series A rounds and has a strong interest in cloud infrastructure, open-source software, AI and machine intelligence and B2B SaaS, in markets such as finance, education, and healthcare.

Dmitry Chikhachev, co-founder and managing partner of Runa Capital, said in a statement: “We are excited to see many of our portfolio companies’ founders investing in Runa Capital III, along with tech-savvy LPs from all parts of the world, who supported us in all of our funds from day one… We invested in deep tech long before it became the mainstream for venture capital, betting on Nginx in 2011, Wallarm and ID Quantique in 2013, and MariaDB in 2014.”

Going forward the firm says it aims to concentrate much of its firepower in the realm of machine learning, and quantum computing.

In addition, Jinal Jhaveri, ex-CEO & Founder of Schoolmint, a former portfolio company of Runa Capital which was acquired by Hero K12, has joined the firm as a Venture Partner.

Runa operates out its HQ in Palo Alto to its offices throughout Europe. Its newest office opened in Berlin in early 2020, given Runa Capital’s growing German portfolio. German investments have included Berlin-based Smava and Mambu, as well as the recently added Monedo (formerly Kreditech), Vehiculum, and N8N (a co-investment with Sequoia Capital). Other investments made from the third fund include Rollbar, Reelgood, Forest Admin, Uploadcare, and Oxygen.

N8N and three other startups were funded through Runa Capital’s recently established seed program that focuses on smaller investments up to $100k.

Google today announced that it is extending the preview period of Android 11 by about a month. So instead of launching a beta this month, as it had previously planned, it’ll release a fourth developer preview today instead. The first beta will officially launch on June 3, during an Android-centric online event it’ll hold in lieu of its I/O developer conference.

“When we started planning Android 11, we didn’t expect the kinds of changes that would find their way to all of us, across nearly every region in the world,” Google’s Android team writes today. “These have challenged us to stay flexible and find new ways to work together, especially with our developer community. To help us meet those challenges we’re announcing an update to our release timeline.”

Google notes that it wants to meet the needs of the Android ecosystem, which has obviously started work on early app testing for Android 11 based on the company’s guidance, with the current environment during the coronavirus pandemic and the other priorities that come with that. Delaying the release by a month seems like a reasonable approach in this context.

Google says developers should target the Beta 1 release date of June 3 for releasing a compatible app to gather feedback from the larger group of Android Beta users. And that group will be larger because, like with previous releases, Google will make over-the-air updates available to users who opt in to the beta and have a compatible device. The list of compatible devices for the beta remains to be seen, but it’ll likely include all recent Pixel phones, starting with the Pixel 2.

Ever since the Tesla Model 3 came to market in 2017 there’s been widespread speculation about an interior camera that’s hidden in the rearview mirror and faces into the car’s cabin.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the camera is there to support the company’s eventual robotaxi plans or even record sing-along sessions with the vehicle’s Caroake feature. But there have also been hints that the camera would be used to recognize people in the vehicle and automatically deliver personalized features.

But wait. Now, it appears the cabin-facing camera could also be used for video conferencing. Sure, why not?

Video conferencing within a Tesla will be “definitely a future feature,” Musk wrote on Twitter in response to a question from the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley group.

How or when this feature might appear isn’t important. Details like whether it will be active even while someone is driving are boring.

Today, Tesla’s entertainment features like its video games or streaming Netflix can only be used when the vehicle is in park. The Caroake feature can be deployed while driving, although a message pops up saying that the lyrics, which are displayed on the central screen, are only for passengers. A confirmation button that reads “I am a passenger” is also displayed before launching.

But that doesn’t mean the video conferencing feature will have the same constraints. Just a few days ago, Musk talked about creating a game like a complex version of Pac-Man or Mario Kart that interacts virtually with reality. In other words, could be played while driving on roads.