Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Rocket Lab’s merch store has pretty much what you’d expect from a space-themed gift shop – baby onesies, t-shirts, caps and mission patches. But the commercial rocket launch company just added its latest product, and it’s a bit different from their standard fare: For just $7.5 million, you can own a “Gold Mission Success coin” for a “dedicated mission,” in either LC-1 (Rocket Lab’s New Zealand launch facility) or LC-2 (the company’s new Virginia-based US launch site) flavors.

The coin is “triple plated gold,” but its material composition isn’t the reason for the high price. And in fact, there is a way to get one absolutely free – all you have to do is purchase a dedicated launch aboard one of Rocket Labs’ Electron launch vehicles. That makes sense because the cost for Rocket Lab’s dedicated launch services (when you’re not splitting the cost across a long list of small payloads from multiple customers) appears to be right in that range.

If you just want the coin and not the 56-foot, 27,000+ lb rocket, however, Rocket Lab’s latest product is for you. The detailing on the coin’s face and back looks pretty nice, and it’s a relatively large coin as far as coins goes, since it looks like its probably around double the diameter of a quarter, at least.

If anyone’s feeling generous, this is now at the top of my holiday wish list – but I want both obviously so I can have a full set.

 

 

Licious, a Bangalore-based startup that sells fresh meat and seafood online, has secured $30 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.

The new financing round, dubbed Series E, for the four-year-old startup was led by Singapore-based Vertex Growth Fund, it said Monday. Existing investors 3one4 Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, and Sistema Asia Fund also participated in the round.

The Series E pushes Licious’ to-date raise to $94.5 million.

Licious operates an eponymous e-commerce platform to sell meat and seafood in seven cities in India (Bengaluru, NCR, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Panchkula, Mohali, Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai). The startup does not stock any inventory, so any raw material it procures, it processes and ships that on the same day or next. It processes more than 17,000 orders everyday.

The startup, which employs more than 2,000 people, has built its own supply chain network to control sourcing and production of food, it said. Licious executives said the startup is growing at a healthy rate of 300% year-over-year and aims to generate $140 million in annual revenue by 2023.

Licious will use the fresh capital to expand to more cities in India, and launch new products, said Vivek Gupta, co-founder of the startup.

The startup competes with Bangalore-based FreshToHome, which has amassed more than 650,000 customers in 10 cities in India. As of August, when FreshToHome raised $20 million in a new funding round, the startup was handling 14,000 orders a day.

Gupta said the vast majority of the Indian meat and seafood industry remains unorganized, which has created an immense opportunity for startups to address the sector. The cold-chain market of India is estimated to grow to $37 billion in the next five years, according to industry estimates.

“The traditional meat and seafood industry are in dire need of tech intervention, quality standardisation and a skilled talent pool. Licious is working towards creating these differentiators and will stay committed towards elevating India’s meat and seafood experience,” he said.

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, we are looking at how WeWork’s largest rival in China — UCommune — is pulling ahead with its initial public offering and GitHub’s potential big move in China.

GitHub turns to China

The world’s largest source code repository host GitHub is mulling to open a Chinese subsidiary, the company’s CEO told the Financial Times recently. The plan comes at a time when the technological rift between China and the U.S. is deepening. The U.S.’s trade sanctions on Huawei, which includes limiting the company’s access to certain Android services, has stirred concerns of further “decoupling” between the two countries. Since then Huawei has stepped up efforts to cut its reliance on American suppliers and develop its own core chips and software operating system.

American tech companies are feeling a similar chill from the trade war. Opening a China office could potentially help GitHub hedge against trade war bans and alleviate the company’s risks in its second-largest market. The demand for a China backup plan appears to have grown after GitHub restricted accounts of users in Cuba, Iran and a few other countries to comply with U.S. sanctions, a decision that sparked an outcry from open-source developer communities around the world and worried Chinese users that the same could befall them.

On the other hand, developers in China and overseas worry that maintaining a China-based operation might subject GitHub’s local projects to Beijing censorship as the country requires foreign companies operating in China to store users’ data locally. Though GitHub has previously been blocked in China seemingly for sharing anti-censorship tools, the restriction was usually temporary. As of now, the site remains largely accessible in China, according to Greatfire.org, a website that monitors China’s online censorship. But the concerns are justified. LinkedIn and Bing, sharing the same parent company — Microsoft — with GitHub, have been roundly criticized for practicing censorship in China.

Big hopes and losses

China’s shared space provider UCommune is moving ahead of its rival WeWork as it filed with the U.S. securities exchange for an IPO this week. Like its American counterpart, UCommune — which rebranded from UrWork after a name dispute with WeWork — hasn’t yet found its way to profitability. The Beijing-based company posted a net loss of 573 million yuan ($80.13 million) for the first three quarters ended September 30, 2019, up from 271 million yuan a year earlier, shows its F1 filing.

UCommune founder Mao Daqing, a real estate veteran, has previously forecasted that China’s co-working industry would be valued close to 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) by 2030. The reality is a bit more dismal. WeWork is reportedly coping with high vacancy rates across major Chinese cities, although sources told TechCrunch that spaces could be easily filled up with one or two large corporate contracts per location.

Perhaps more notably, half of UCommune’s revenue is derived from so-called “marketing and branding services,” which include content design as well as online and offline advertising services it sells to customers. The marketing segment, curiously, is attributed to one single subsidiary, a digital marketing services provider it acquired in late 2018. UCommune warns in its prospectus that “the historical financial results of our marketing and branding services may not serve as an adequate basis for evaluating the future financial results of this segment” because revenue from the unit relies overwhelmingly on a small number of major enterprise clients.

Also worth your attention…

Despite Huawei’s push to build its own alternative operating system — HarmonyOS — the Chinese giant is sticking with Android for the foreseeable future. At a company event this week in Shenzhen, its home city, consumer software executive Wang Chenglu announced (in Chinese) that all of Huawei’s handsets, tablets and laptops will continue to carry Android-based OS in 2020. Meanwhile, Huawei’s other products, including a broad range of Internet of Things that make up a smaller chunk of its consumer revenue, will ship with HarmonyOS.

Kuaishou, the largest rival to TikTok in China has reached 100 million daily active users, the company announced (in Chinese) this week. Tencent-backed Kuaishou was one of China’s first short-video apps to have attracted a meaningful following, but it was quickly leapfrogged by a latecomer, ByteDance’s Douyin, which is TikTok’s brand in China.

Though similarly focused on bite-sized videos, the two apps differ fundamentally in the way they distribute content. Trending videos on Douyin tend to come from pedigreed influencers and professional creators; users are fed what Douyin’s complex algorithms determine as “quality” content. Kuaishou, in comparison, works to cultivate a sense of community as its users get exposed to a broader range of long-tail content — often from creators with insignificant followings.

That places Douyin closer to a form of “media” and Kuaishou closer to a “social network,” suggested (in Chinese) Liu Jianing, managing director of China’s top boutique investment bank China Renaissance, at a recent industry conference. For that reason, the two apps also monetize differently — while Douyin generates revenue mainly from ads, Kuaishou harnesses its social graphs to enable social commerce wherein shoppers leverage other users’ recommendations to make purchases.

Neo-Pentecostal gangs in Brazil, driving out other faiths at gunpoint. A mob of 100 lawyers attacking a hospital in Pakistan to revenge themselves on violent doctors there. Anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, and red-pillers. Sometimes it seems like the world has fragmented into a jagged kaleidoscope of countless mobs and subcultures, each more disconcerting than the last.

Much of this is selection bias: if it bleeds, it leads, in both mass media and social-media algorithms. But it does seem plausible that the Internet is contributing to this kaleidoscope, to this growth in worrisome fringe subcultures, in three separate ways: complexity, information, and connectivity.

Connectivity is the most obvious avenue. The Internet empowers everyone to find their like-minded people, and this is as true of the hateful and vengeful as it is of the dispossessed and downtrodden. Furthermore, the power of a group increases nonlinearly with its size. The hateful views of one man in a community of 100 people are unlikely to make a huge collective difference; worst case, they become a fabled missing stair. But 1% of a nation of 100 million? That’s a million people. That’s a movement ready to join, to march, to pay tithes, to reinforce one another.

Information is more subtle. There’s a fascinating quote from the recent New Yorker profile of William Gibson: “Gibson noticed that people with access to unlimited information could develop illusions of omniscience.” You can get any kind of information you want on the Internet. You can find what appear at first glance to be closely argued and well-supported claims that global warming will kill off all but half a billion people by the end of this century, and also, if you prefer, that global warming is an authoritarian hoax.

No wonder people increasingly act as if the truth is something you choose from a buffet rather than a fact that will eventually bite you, hard, if you refuse to believe in it. As Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” But if all your information comes from the Internet, and is never testable, you never have to stop believing in it … until it’s far too late.

Complexity is, I think, the saddest. It has nothing to do with being led astray by evil companions or disinformation. It’s just that our modern world has become so complicated, such an endless buzz of noise and events and obligations, that lashing back against it, fixating on a simple solution to all the world’s problems, makes people feel strong. This delightful article about schisms among believers in a flat Earth includes the telling quote: “When you find out the Earth is flat … then you become empowered.”

Is the world going to get weirder yet, with new and more bizarre and inexplicable subcultures erupting from the Internet with every passing year? Have we hit the plateau of an S-curve? Or are we in a local minimum, and as we get better at dealing with connectivity and complexity, will we look back on these as the crazy years? My money’s on door number two … but I’ve been outweirded before.

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space from TechCrunch. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox.

This is it – the very first edition of Max Q: TechCrunch’s space newsletter. Despite approaching the end of the year, it’s been a really busy week in the space industry, too. Between launches real and metaphorical, there’s plenty of activity to catch up on. And if you’ve got any space stuff you want to share for future newsletters, feel free to email me at darrell@techcrunch.com or let me know on Twitter @etherington.

Space enters a bit of a frenzy time at year’s end as a lot of other areas in tech are slowing down – especially over the past few years, as a number of companies push to re-ignite crewed spaceflight in the U.S. It’s common for many of these companies, and NASA itself, to set ambitious, optimistic timelines, and that often also means trying to fit in as much as possible before the year is out to make good on at least some of those promises.

Blue Origin launches and lands 12th New Shepard

Blue Origin launched its 12th New Shepard sub-orbital spacecraft this week, on its second try after bad weather scrubbed the first attempt. The launch was the sixth for the booster stage rocket used on the mission, and it landed perfectly meaning it could potentially serve even more launches in future.

Onboard were experimental and research payloads from Columbia University and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, as well as student postcards and art projects from a collaborative contest launched with the band OK Go. This mission is also noteworthy because it’s yet another step in Blue Origin’s progress towards qualifying New Shepard for human flight, after which it’ll start to shuttle tourists to space for a quick, but unbeatable, view.

Rocket Lab’s U.S. launch site is officially open

Rocket Lab, one of few launch startups that’s actually flying payloads to space, has officially opened its second launch pad – this one in the U.S. The company’s original launch site, which will continue to fly missions, is in New Zealand, but its new launch facility on Wallops Island in Virginia will open the doors for a key new customers, the U.S. Air Force. The first launch from this site, designed LC-2, should happen sometime in the first half of next year.

Kepler Communications books SpaceX rideshare missions

Small satellite startup Kepler Communications has booked two batches of nanosatellite launches on board SpaceX’s new rideshare missions. SpaceX announced earlier this year that it would be doing this as a new offering, allowing companies with smaller payloads to book space on a ride that will take up a bunch at once. It’s perfect for startups like Kepler, who wouldn’t be the primary customer on any SpaceX mission, and who might not be able to find a large lead partner to foot the majority of the bill for a mission that works on their schedule.

Near Space Labs uses stratospheric satellites to do what orbital ones can’t

A new startup is looking to produce high-resolution, on-demand and timely imaging for various customers and applications, and it’s using its own custom satellites hat are carried by weather balloons to make it happen. Advantages of taking this approach include cost, as well as access and the ability to capture very detailed pictures without having to use massively expensive and bulky optics, as you would from space.

Northrop Grumman booked a customer for its first OmegA rocket flight

Northrop Grumman’s in-development OmegA launch craft will be able to carry large payloads, and it’ll be doing that mostly on behalf of the U.S. Air Force and other U.S. defence agencies. But the rocket will first need to qualify to get USAF clearance to operate, and it’s going to be using its first ever launch in pursuit of said qualification to also ferry payloads for paying customers. Two birds, one stone, as they say.

What starfighters would look like if Porsche was in the Star Wars universe

There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out this week, and it’ll definitely feature new ships and other fancy sci-fi gadgets, if previous films are any indication. One you won’t see in the movie is this starfighter, which was designed in collaboration with both Porsche and Lucasfilm . The ship has a distinctive Star Wars vibe, to be sure – but Porsche says it’s also got elements inspired by the 911 and Taycan. Still definitely wouldn’t look out of place berthed next to the Millennium Falcon.

What to watch out for this week

SpaceX has a launch coming up on Monday, and the crucial Boeing/NASA commercial crew capsule test launch is set for Friday, December 20. That launch will be the uncrewed version of the first-ever commercial crew launch for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, and if all goes well, that will mean we’re closer than ever for U.S. astronauts launching once again from U.S. soil aboard an American launch vehicle.

Uber is in advanced stages of talks to close a deal to sell its food delivery service UberEats’ India business to local rival Zomato, as the American ride-hailing giant looks to cut its spending, three people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The deal values UberEats’ India business at around $400 million, one of the sources said. As part of the deal, UberEats would get a sizable stake in Zomato, and Uber would further invest $150 to $200 million in the 11-year-old Indian firm, people said.

A spokesperson for Uber declined to comment. A text to Zomato founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal, who met Uber executives last week, remained unanswered.

The deal comes at a time when Zomato is in final stages to close a new financing round of $600 million, Goyal told news agency PTI earlier this month. TechCrunch reported earlier that China’s Ant Financial was close to leading a financing round of up to $600 million in the 11-year-old firm.

More to follow…

Here’s a nice little surprise for Android users this weekend. It seems that Google’s pans to roll out Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging is slightly ahead of schedule. The company announced in November that it would be making the feature available for all Android users in the country by year-end.

A tweet from Android Messages product manager Sanaz Ahari confirms that the SMS-successor has been made available to users in the States as of this week. The new protocol brings with it some key advances over messaging stalwart, SMS.

The update brings a lot of features that many have been compared to iMessage, Apple’s standard protocol that’s done a good keeping many users onboard with iOS, for fear of becoming a green bubble. Key features include read receipts, the ability to see another user typing in real-time, larger file transfers and improved group messaging (though, as noted, some features like end to end encryption are still lacking).

Notably back in October, the U.S.’s four primary carriers formed a rare joint effort to accelerate the adoption of RCS. Both the Messages app and carrier services have to be updated to get access. Users in the U.K. and France also have access to the feature as of this summer, with more countries coming soon.

Listen. Spotify’s tired of screwing around here. The company spent a lot of money on podcasts. Like, a lot, a lot. And it really needs you to start listening to things, because it’s almost certainly going to spend even more in the coming years.

I mean, music is good, too, don’t get it wrong, but with between $400 and $500 million spent on the format in 2019 alone, the service is really going to need you to hold up your end of the deal here and just, pretty please start streaming the things. This week, Spotify is introducing a new button to help kickstart the habit.

First noted by The Verge, the feature is coming to users in a number of markets, including the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, limited to those users who have yet to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I’d imagine that still applies to a broad swath of users. Spotify is still a relatively new entrant in the field, and while podcasting is growing at a rapid rate, many listeners have already settled on a player.

The service has a big lift here, attempting to distinguish itself with premium offerings in a flood of free content. Spotify certainly pushed podcasts big time in its viral year-end wrap ups, prominently featuring them among artists, even if you only listened to an episode or two.

Discovery could be a big part. That’s a puzzle many platforms are still working to crack beyond simply recommendations. The company notes that it will recommend both its own and non-Spotify podcasts with the feature. It will be interesting to see how much it pushes its own offerings, however, given the massive size of its investment.

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into your inboxes yet again.

I’m in Berlin where TechCrunch just pulled off another great Disrupt event, we’ve got a lot of great Europe-focused startup content on the site so get to scrolling if your interest is piqued.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

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The big story

Just as Pets.com symbolized the ridiculousness that came to frame the tech industry preceding the Dotcom bubble burst at the start of the century, dog-walking startup Wag might symbolize that SoftBank’s earthquaking investment overexposure may extend far beyond a one-time WeWork mistake.

This week, the WSJ reported that SoftBank had tossed in the towel on Wag, selling off its massive “nearly 50% stake” in the startup. The report states that SoftBank sold its stake back to the startup at a valuation far below its previous $650 million value. SoftBank is walking away from its two board seats in the process.

Wag will be laying off “a significant amount of the remainder of its workforce,” according to the report.

High-ambition startups stumble all of the time, but SoftBank’s money bag-swinging swagger has left a handful of startups with dollar signs in their eyes and the desire to grow at a pace that they never dreamed of. When LA-based Wag closed its $300 million raise from SoftBank at the beginning of 2018, plenty of people wondered why on earth a dog-walking startup needed that kind of money.

Shift forward to the end of 2019, and startups that have relied on connecting contractor labor with phone-wielding consumers haven’t proven to be as capable in shifting into profitability with Wag seeming to be yet another example.

Needless to say Pets.com and Wag really don’t hold much comparison when it comes to the broader impact. Pets.com was well-known largely because of its hilarious marketing overextension, Wag’s stumblings are far more impactful, especially as they relate to the reputation of its Japanese benefactor which has significantly reshaped the venture capital market in Silicon Valley and around the world.

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on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com

On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Apple revamps parental controls on iOS
  Apple is giving its parental control tools for iOS new functionality. The new update in iOS 13.3 lets parents set limits over who their kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day.
• Away CEO steps down
  One of the weirder sagas of the week was Away CEO Steph Korey’s stepping down from her role at the D2C luggage company. The step-down followed a long investigation in the Verge which basically chronicled how awful life was on Away’s customer service team which painted a pretty ugly portrait of Korey’s leadership style. It was a rough article, but after Korey’s apology acknowledged that she had made some mistakes and would be trying to fix her management style, most people assumed the saga had wrapped. She stepped down this week following what was reported to be board pressure to do so, turns out they had been wanting to replace Korey and the negative press was the excuse they needed.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

• An iOS bug is locking up iPhones:
  [An iOS bug in AirDrop lets anyone temporarily lockup nearby iPhones]

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription business had another great week of content. Our good friend Alex Wilhelm (who hired me as an intern four years ago!) is back at TechCrunch and has fired up a new series on Extra Crunch. Here’s his first post on the new hot club to join.

The $100M ARR Club

“…Firms with valuations that their revenues can’t back are in similar straits. In the post-WeWork era, some unicorns are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. I suspect that the companies in most danger are those with slim revenues (compared to their valuations), poor revenue quality (compared to software startups) or both.

That said, there is a club of private companies that are really something, namely private ones that have managed to reach the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold. It’s not a large group, as startups that tend to cross the $100 million ARR mark are well on the path to going public…”

Sign up for more newsletters including my colleague Darrell Etherington’s new space-focused newsletter Max Q here.

Seoul and South Korea may well be the secret startup hub that (still) no one talks about.

While often dwarfed by the scale and scope of the Chinese startup market next door, South Korea has proven over the last few years that it can — and will — enter the top-tier of startup hubs.

Case in point: Baedal Minjok (typically shortened to Baemin), one of the country’s leading food delivery apps, announced an acquisition offer by Berlin-based Delivery Hero in a blockbuster $4 billion transaction late this week, representing potentially one of the largest exits yet for the Korean startup world.

The transaction faces antitrust review before closing, since Delivery Hero owns Baemin’s largest competitor Yogiyo, and therefore is conditional on regulatory approval. Delivery Hero bought a majority stake in Yogiyo way back in 2014.

What’s been dazzling though is to have witnessed the growth of this hub over the past decade. As TechCrunch’s former foreign correspondent in Seoul five years ago and a university researcher locally at KAIST eight years ago, I’ve been watching the growth of this hub locally and from afar for years now.

While the country remains dominated by its chaebol tech conglomerates — none more important than Samsung — it’s the country’s startup and culture industries that are driving dynamism in this economy. And with money flooding out of the country’s pension funds into the startup world (both locally and internationally), even more opportunities await entrepreneurs willing to slough off traditional big corporate career paths and take the startup route.

Five years ago, Baemin was just an app for chicken delivery with a cutesy and creative interface facing criticism from restaurant franchise owners over fees. Now, its motorbikes are seen all over Seoul, and the company has installed speakers in many restaurants where a catchy whistle and the company’s name are announced every time there is an online delivery order.

(Last week when I was in Seoul, one restaurant seemingly received an order every 1-3 minutes with a “Baedal Minjok Order!” announcement that made eating a quite distracted experience. Amazing product marketing tactic though that I am surprised more U.S.-based food delivery startups haven’t copied yet).

The strengths of the ecosystem remain the same as they have always been. A huge workforce of smart graduates (Korea has one of the highest education rates in the world), plus a high youth unemployment and underemployment rate have driven more and more potential founders down the startup path rather than holding out for professional positions that may never materialize.

What has changed is venture capital funding. It wasn’t so long ago that Korea struggled to get any funding for its startups. Years ago, the government initiated a program to underwrite the creation of venture capital firms focused on the country’s entrepreneurs, simply because there was just no capital to get a startup underway (it was not uncommon among some deals I heard of at the time for a $100k seed check to buy almost a majority of a startup’s equity).

Now, Korea has become a startup target for many international funds, including Goldman Sachs and Sequoia. It has also been at the center of many of the developments of blockchain in recent years, with the massive funding boom and crash that market sustained. Altogether, the increased funding has led to a number of unicorn startups — a total of seven according to the The Crunchbase Unicorn Leaderboard.

And the country is just getting started – with a bunch of new startups looking poised to driven toward huge outcomes in the coming years.

Thus, there continues to be a unique opportunity for venture investors who are willing to cross the barriers here and engage. That said, there are challenges to overcome to make the most of the country’s past and future success.

Perhaps the hardest problem is simply getting insight on what is happening locally. While China attracts large contingents of foreign correspondents who cover everything from national security to the country’s startups and economy, Korea’s foreign media coverage basically entails coverage of the funny guy to the North and the occasional odd cultural note. Dedicated startup journalists do exist, but they are unfortunately few and far between and vastly under-resourced compared to the scale of the ecosystem.

Plus, similar to New York City, there are also just a number of different ecosystems that broadly don’t interact with each other. For Korea, it has startups that target the domestic market (which makes up the bulk of its existing unicorns), plus leading companies in industries as diverse as semiconductors, gaming, and music/entertainment. My experience is that these different verticals exist separately from each other not just socially, but also geographically as well, making it hard to combine talent and insights across different industries.

Yet ultimately, as valuations soar in the Valley and other prominent tech hubs, it is the next tier of startup cities that might well offer the best return profiles. For the early investors in Baemin, this was a week to celebrate, perhaps with some fried chicken delivery.