Category: UNCATEGORIZED

On the heels of a spate of reports over the weekend, today Intel confirmed its latest move to grow its automotive division: the chip giant is acquiring Moovit, an Israeli startup previously backed by Intel that analyses urban traffic patterns and provides transportation recommendations with a specific focus on public transit. The deal values Moovit at $900 million, although Intel says that the growth of its existing investment in the startup effectively works out to Intel paying $840 million.

Moovit provides traffic data to third parties (including Intel itself, and Uber), and it also has a popular app will 800 million users and some 7,500 transit authorities globally. Intel plans to use Moovit’s technology to expand the services it offers via Mobileye, the autonomous car company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017, which is the anchor of its efforts in the automotive sector.

Specifically, Moovit’s tech will be used to expand and enhance Mobileye’s “mobility as a service” offering, Intel said. Mobileye’s driver assistance technology is in some 60 million vehicles today, and while a lot of autonomous services like robot axis are still in their most nascent phase, the opportunities are big: Intel believes that robot axis alone will be a $160 billion market by
2030.

“Intel’s purpose is to create world-changing technology that enriches the lives of every person on Earth, and our Mobileye team delivers on that purpose every day,” said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. “Mobileye’s ADAS technology is already improving the safety of millions of cars on the road, and Moovit accelerates their ability to truly revolutionize transportation – reducing congestion and saving lives – as a full-stack mobility provider.”

Mobileye and Moovit had already been working together prior to the acquisition: Intel had been a strategic investor in the startup as as part of that deal, Professor Amnon Shashua, Senior Vice President of Intel and CEO / CTO of Mobileye, was on Moovit’s Board of Directors as an observer.

The deal is interesting not just because it underscores how Intel is doubling down on its autonomous car business, but that it’s doing so at a time when a number of other car companies and autonomous efforts are being paused or axed because of the global economic slowdown resulting from COVID-19.

“While others working on AV R&D may slow down or downsize their ambitions given the headwinds in our economy, we saw an opportunity to acquire a valuable asset that will help us realize our vision for driverless MaaS even faster,” Shashua noted in a blog post.

“We are excited to join forces with Mobileye and lead the future revolution of new mobility
services,” said Nir Erez, Moovit cofounder and CEO, in a statement. “Mobility is a basic human right, and as cities become more crowded, urban mobility becomes more difficult. Combining the daily mobility habits and needs of millions of Moovit users with the state-of-the-art, safe, affordable and eco-friendly transportation enabled by self-driving vehicles, we will be able to make cities better places to live in. We share this vision and look forward to making it a reality as part of Mobileye.”

More to come.

Backblaze today announced that its B2 Cloud Storage service is now API-compatible with Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Backblaze started out as an affordable cloud backup service but over the last few years, the company has also taken its storage expertise and launched the developer-centric B2 Cloud Storage service, which promises to be significantly cheaper than similar offerings from the large cloud vendors. Pricing for B2 starts at $0.005 per GB/month. AWS S3 starts at $0.023 per GB/month.

The storage price alone isn’t going to make developers switch providers, though. There are some costs involved in supporting multiple heterogeneous systems, too.

By making B2 compatible with the S3 API, developers can now simply redirect their storage to Backblaze without the need for any extensive rewrites.

“For years, businesses have loved our astonishingly easy-to-use cloud storage for supporting
them in achieving incredible outcomes,” said Gleb Budman, the co-founder and CEO of
Backblaze. “Today we’re excited to do all the more by enabling many more businesses to use
our storage with their existing tools and workflows.”

Current B2 customers include the likes of American Public Television, Patagonia and Verizon’s Complex Networks (with Verizon being the corporate overlords of Verizon Media Group, TechCrunch’s parent company). Backblaze says it has about 100,000 total customers for its B2 service. Among the launch partners for today’s launch are Cinafilm, IBM’s Aspera file transfer and streaming service, storage specialist Quantum and cloud data management service Veeam.

“Public cloud storage has become an integral part of the post-production process. This latest enhancement makes Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage more accessible—both for us as a vendor, and for customers,” said Eric Bassier, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Quantum. “We can now use the new S3 Compatible APIs to add BackBlaze B2 to the list of StorNext compatible public cloud storage targets, taking another step toward enabling hybrid and multi-cloud workflows.”

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

A few weeks back we dug into the boom that savings and investing apps and services were enjoying. Companies like Acorns, M1 Finance, Robinhood and others were seeing rapid growth in their assets under management (AUM) and downloads. New data out today underscores how well finance apps are faring in the new, chaotic COVID-19 era.

You can run a simple test on yourself in this case. Since, say, January of this year, have you paid more or less attention to your banking and investing related apps and, more broadly, your financial life? Perhaps you are trying to put a bit more away? Or make sure your 401k isn’t invested in something silly?

If so, you are far from alone. To detail just how much more activity this slice of the startup world is enjoying, this morning we’re taking another look at the growth that this slice of the fintech world is undergoing. We’ll lean on some new data from a mobile app analytics provider (AppAnnie) and a report from a brokerage-infra startup (DriveWealth) to get a clearer picture of where investing and savings apps are growing and just how well they are performing.

Investing in a downturn

Icebreaker claims to be Finland’s most active pre-seed VC. The firm, which also invests in Estonia and Sweden, has backed 38 companies in the last three years out of its first fund, with a 65% success rate so far for companies that have been able to raise follow-on funding.

Two weeks ago, Icebreaker announced the launch of Fund II, with an initial close of €50 million. That’s more than twice the size of its first fund, which topped out at €20 million.

Its remit remains largely the same, however. The company typically invests between €150k and €800k in teams that have “deep domain expertise” and are building globally competitive tech companies according to Icebreaker co-founder and partner Riku Seppälä.

Noteworthy, this goes right to the top of the funnel and includes backing and helping to connect “pre-founders,” defined as individuals with over 5 years of work experience in their domain who are aiming to start or join a tech company. As part of this effort, Icebreaker operates an online and offline community to act as a catalyst for new companies to be founded.

Meanwhile, I’m told that Fund II was signed just as the coronavirus crisis began to take hold and includes the majority of LPs from Fund I in addition to new investors. Lead LPs are Tesi, KRR III, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company and Elo Mutual Pension Insurance Company, together with 41 other entities consisting of institutional investors, family offices and founders.

To find out more about Fund II and what’s it’s like to launch a new pre-seed fund at a time of such uncertainty, and to understand how Icebreaker thinks about startup life during and after lockdown, I put questions to Icebreaker co-founder and Partner Riku Seppälä.

TechCrunch: What does it feel like to close a new fund right at the start of a pandemic?

Riku Seppälä: Of course, we have been distracted by the mounting health crisis and how the world economy will recover, so the feelings are mixed.

Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which provides data-driven insights about the app economy, has raised $45 million in new funding from Riverwood Capital. This is the first significant investment the now-profitable company has seen since its $1 million seed round in 2013.

The investment speaks to the growing demand for data on the app economy.

App intelligence firms like Sensor Tower and rivals — including App Annie, Apptopia and others — aim to become one-stop shops for data and insights. Sensor Tower’s current offerings include insights into user acquisition strategies, ASO (app store optimization), competitive analysis, and app-specific data, like daily ranks, installs, and review analysis, and more. Its customers can also get a view of the app economy globally, with top charts, publisher breakdowns, quarterly reports, ad intelligence and other data .

Among Sensor Tower’s client base are a number of enterprise-level customers, including Morgan Stanley, Zynga, and Tencent. In total, the company has over 350 enterprise users.

Sensor Tower has been profitable since launch and reports that 2019 saw record annual recurring revenue, and 65% growth year-over-year. Its employee head counts also increased 50% over the past year as Sensor Tower has expanded internationally, including with the opening of a new London office aimed at supporting the EMEA market. The company now has 75 employees globally.

App store intelligence firms serve to fill an existing need for businesses that generate their own revenue from mobile customers. Neither Apple or Google allow developers to view data or trends about the app store or the competitive landscape — only how their own app is performing. But businesses also need to know things like which keywords are successfully attracting users, how competitors are allocating their ad budget, how likely users are to pay or subscribe, how global trends can impact their own apps, and so much more.

These insights, however, often come with a cost. Sensor Tower and App Annie both have used or acquired mobile data companies to gather data. They’ve also run their own network of VPN apps and ad-blocker apps, which quietly collect data on how consumers are using their apps, sometimes without proper disclosure. Google and Facebook have done this too.

But there are no signs that the demand for app data is slowing.

In the U.S., for example, adults are now spending 3 hours, 43 minutes on their devices per day, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, app downloads and revenue are expected to hit record levels through 2024 across both emerging and mature markets alike, Sensor Tower says.

The firm references the new funding from Riverwood as more of strategic partnership focused on its further growth. It’s been in negotiations with the investors since 2019, it says.

“Coming from scrappy roots and minimal investment to be the company we are today, we’re excited to be partnering with Riverwood Capital,” said Alex Malafeev, co-founder and CEO of Sensor Tower, in a statement. “We believe this new chapter will allow us to accelerate our growth, innovate, and develop comprehensive solutions for an ever changing mobile ecosystem. Furthermore, we’re excited to partner with Jeff Parks, Ramesh Venugopal, and John Yang from Riverwood on the next phase of our growth.”

The company plans to use the new capital across all aspects of its business, including hiring, marketing, infrastructure and physical expansions. A newer product, the first Sensor Tower has launched in 2+ years, is App Teardown, which offers insights about what SDKs other apps are using.

“We’re looking at this as a way to really step on the gas after seven years of developing the product and business to the point where we’re confident it can support scaling at a more rapid pace,” noted Malafeev. “At the same time, this is a strategic investment from Riverwood, which is known for partnering with businesses such as ours that are primed for scale, and they will serve as close advisors on our growth. We’ll leverage their operational experience and apply the lessons they’ve learned working with other high-growth startups such as Nextdoor to ensure the decisions we make across the organization are aligned with maximizing this investment,” he added.

It was only the other week that Andreesen Horowitz announced their second blockchain-focused fund of $515m. In the announcement, they said: “We are still early in this Web 3 build-out. High-performance programmable blockchains will make decentralized network development much more accessible. After years of R&D, we are excited that a number of next-gen programmable blockchains will begin rolling out in the near future.”

The firm obviously had something in mind when that was published, it’s emerged that it’s leading a $21.6M funding round for the NEAR Protocol project (a round which just closed in the middle of US COVID-19 lockdowns). Other investors remain unnamed at this point. Not only that but NEAR launches its “MainNet” (as in, ‘production-ready’) network today. The move is a black-eye for the much-vaunted Ethereum 2.0 release, which has yet to appear.

What’s the TL;DR for blockchain to date? Well, we know Bitcoin (worth $143Bn) created a digital currency but without much programmability. Ethereum (now worth $22Bn) used the same concepts to build a decentralized application platform on top of a cryptocurrency (Ether) and now has over $1Bn stored in financial applications on top of it. However, the race to create a blockchain that can compete with the existing speed of the world’s financial system, and gain the same amount of user adoption has so far fallen short of expectations. The Ethereum project has proven quite slow, expensive and pretty difficult to use for anything but niche financial applications.

NEAR is the new kid on the block. After almost 2 years in development, it now claims that its platform is more performant, more usable and less expensive than Ethereum, allowing developers to realize many of the original use cases which got people so excited about blockchain in the first place.

In fact, Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum founder, has been known to make statements to the effect that NEAR may represent a significant challenge to Ethereum at some point.

Technically speaking, the NEAR Protocol is a brand new public, proof-of-stake blockchain which is built using a novel consensus mechanism called “Nightshade”. NEAR Protocol uses a technique called “sharding” that splits the network into multiple pieces so that the computation is done in parallel, meaning there isn’t a theoretical limit on the network’s capacity.

Near is also drawing on a Silicon Valley culture of “ship it, and ship it fast!” where Blockchain culture, in general, has suffered from a great deal of theory, philosophical navel-gazing, and not a lot of ‘get shit done’.

Cofounder Alex Skidanov started his professional career at Microsoft in 2009, then joined MemSQL in 2011 as Engineer #1, where he worked for 5 years as Architect and Director of Engineering. The other cofounder is Illia Polosukhin, who has over 10 years of experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major Tensor-Flow contributor and a manager of the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search.

Ransomware is getting sneakier and smarter.

The latest example comes from ExecuPharm, a little-known but major outsourced pharmaceutical company that confirmed it was hit by a new type of ransomware last month. The incursion not only encrypted the company’s network and files, hackers also exfiltrated vast amounts of data from the network. The company was handed a two-for-one threat: pay the ransom and get your files back or don’t pay and the hackers will post the files to the internet.

This new tactic is shifting how organizations think of ransomware attacks: it’s no longer just a data-recovery mission; it’s also now a data breach. Now companies are torn between taking the FBI’s advice of not paying the ransom or the fear their intellectual property (or other sensitive internal files) are published online.

Because millions are now working from home, the surface area for attackers to get in is far greater than it was, making the threat of ransomware higher than ever before.

That’s just one of the stories from the week. Here’s what else you need to know.

THE BIG PICTURE

Chegg hacked for the third time in three years

Education giant Chegg confirmed its third data breach in as many years. The latest break-in affected past and present staff after a hacker made off with 700 names and Social Security numbers. It’s a drop in the ocean when compared to the 40 million records stolen in 2018 and an undisclosed number of passwords taken in a breach at Thinkful, which Chegg had just acquired in 2019.

Those 700 names account for about half of its 1,400 full-time employees, per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Chegg’s refusal to disclose further details about the breach — beyond a state-mandated notice to the California attorney general’s office — makes it tough to know exactly went wrong this time.

It’s a tough media world out there, and few institutions have been spared the transformations underway thanks to the internet.

With Disney+ and Netflix posting records streaming numbers, and Quibi posting numbers that are perhaps a wee bit more bite-sized than some execs might have hoped, the competition has become fierce for audiences in our locked-down world.

Now, the Supreme Court is making a foray into the streaming wars, debuting its new streaming service this morning.

Dubbed SCOTUS+ (at least by me), the Supreme Court for the first time in its history will host a live broadcast of its oral arguments today. In fact, it’s going on right now if you happen to read this post just as I am publishing it.

Best of all, it’s free, although whether the Supreme Court will offer a paid tier for fervent fans of the Court remains to be seen.

The streaming service debuted 10am EDT this morning with a riveting pilot episode titled, “Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com B.V. Oral Argument.” In the episode, lawyers for two organizations you really didn’t know you wanted to know more about will be quizzed on the intricacies of … something. Trust me, the plot makes a lot more sense than Chrissy’s Court.

This initial foray is almost certainly just the first step as the Supreme Court expands its media presence. Expect additional ancillary content such as the latest Gins-burn and in-depth videos of Clarence Thomas not talking. And perhaps in competition with Quibi, the Court will introduce more “snackable arguments” that allows time-pressed millennials to enjoy their favorite oral arguments in bite-sized streams that fit into those careful windows for audio.

Later this year, the Supreme Court will introduce an Animal Crossing tie-in, with oral arguments replaced by ephemeral animated emotions of characters in a lawsuit over the cutting of interest rates by the Bank of Nook.

As many Amazon workers called out sick for a May Day Strike, Tim Bray was spending his final day at the company. The VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services announced today that May 1 was his final day with the retail giant, citing Amazon’s firings of vocally critical employees.

Likely most notable for being a coauthor of XML, Bray spent more than five years with the company, following stints with Google and Sun. In his post, he calls Amazon, “the best job I’ve ever had,” before noting a breaking point over the firings of organizers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa.

While Costa and Cunningham have stated that the firings were directly linked to their opening criticisms of Amazon’s environmental record and treatment of employees during the COVID-19 crisis, the company has, naturally, denied the connection, stating “We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”

For his part, Bray says he attempted to voice his concern through official channels before ultimately resigning.

“That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” Bray explains. “So I resigned. The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”

Bray’s post is an indictment of an unfair power structure in a company at which he served as an executive. The piece primarily focuses on treatment at Amazon warehouses across the world, both in terms of its COVID-19 response and broader complaints about the late stage capitalism for which the company has certainly played a role. He contrasts the treatment with his own former division, AWS, stating,

Amazon Web Services (the “Cloud Computing” arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.  Of course, its workers have power. The average pay is very high, and anyone who’s unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for additional comment.

Layoffs are having a big impact on industries across the board due to COVID-19. This week alone news came out of massive cuts for TripAdvisor, Lyft, and reportedly Juul and Uber.

But according to data tracker Layoffs.fyi, the cuts have affected certain job roles more than others.

Sales and customer success roles are the most affected by post-coronavirus startup layoffs, crowd-sourced data shows. Other top categories include engineering and operations roles. 

Earlier this month, restaurant tech startup Toast cut 50 percent of staff. About 70% of those laid off were in the sales or customer success roles. In restaurant review platform Yelp’s layoffs, 67% of cut positions were in the same bucket.

Equity management startup Carta laid off people, too, and about 47 percent of those cuts were in the sales or customer success roles.

It is not hard to make sense of why sales and marketing roles are the most impacted. The very function of these jobs is tied to a healthy market. 

Sales and new deals have slowed or halted altogether for many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because social distancing, and overall economic weariness, might not have people spending as much as they normally would have.

The cuts filter out disproportionately to other startup ecosystems, as sales and marketing roles are often based in satellite offices. 

But the cuts don’t just impact sales. In a number of cases, layoffs in one department adversely impact all departments of the company. For example, Carta’s CEO Henry Ward noted that reductions across sales, marketing, onboarding and support will likely seep into other roles as well.  

“As those departments become smaller, many of the teams that support those departments like recruiting, HR, operations, and parts of R&D, have to downsize with them,” Ward wrote in a Medium post. “Even though the analysis starts with customers, it quickly starts affecting all parts of the organization. This makes sense. We exist only because our customers exist and allow us to serve them. And when our customers suffer we suffer too.”

The graph below shows a makeup of roles impacted by COVID-19 related layoffs.

Engineers aren’t immune either. According to the report, engineers historically land high, competitive salaries versus sales roles, which largely are based on commission. In some cases, it means that a company trying to dial back costs needs to look at the highest-paid roles and slim accordingly. 

In Groupon and Eventbrite, engineering roles were the majority of positions that were cut, per Layoffs.fyi. Operations roles were also among the most cut for companies like Ritual and Turo. 

Check out the layoff tracker tool here. Tip us of any cuts you’re hearing or experiences at tips@techcrunch.com, or tweet me at @nmasc_.