Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Jeff Bezos -founded space company Blue Origin has a launch scheduled for today, with a liftoff window set for 8:30 AM CST (9:30 AM EST/6:30 AM PST). The launch livestream above will begin at around 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

The launch today will see a New Shepard rocket take off from the company’s West Texas launch facility. There’s a chance that weather won’t cooperate, and the team is monitoring conditions and will provide an update if they have to put off the launch to a. later date.

This launch is notable for a few different reasons, including that it includes a booster that has launched previously five times – making this a record sixth flight for one of the company’s re-usable booster stages. New Shepard is a suborbital launch vehicle, and will seek to deliver cargo including a number of scientific experiments as well as thousands of postcards from children who have submitted them through Blue Origin’s nonprofit Club for the Future organization, which aims to get kids in involved in space science and exploration.

In these waning days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, technologists and investors are beginning to lay the foundations for new, truly transformational technologies that have the potential to reshape entire industries and rewrite the rules of human understanding.

It may sound lofty, but new achievements from businesses and research institutions in areas like machine learning, quantum computing, and genetic engineering mean that the futures imagined in science fiction are  simply becoming science.

And among the technologies that could potentially have the biggest effect on the way we live, nothing looms larger than genetic engineering.

Investors and entrepreneurs are deploying hundreds of millions of dollars to create the tools that researchers, scientists and industry will use to re-engineer the building blocks of life to perform different functions in agriculture, manufacturing and medicine.

One of these companies, 10X Genomics, which gives users hardware and software to determine the functionality of different genetic code, has already proven how lucrative this early market can be. The company, which had its initial public offering earlier this year is now worth $6 billion.

Another, the still-private company is Inscripta, helmed by a former TenX Genomics executive, the Boulder, Colo.-based startup is commercializing a machine that can let researchers design and manufacture small quantities of new organisms. If TenX Genomics is giving scientists and businesses a better way to read and understand the genome, then Inscripta is giving those same users a new way to write their own genetic code and make their own organisms.

It’s a technology that investors are falling over themselves to finance. The company, which closed on $105 million in financing earlier in the year (through several tranches which began in late 2018), has just raised another $125 million on the heels of launching its first commercial product. Investors in the round include new and previous investors like: Paladin Capital Group, JS Capital Management, Oak HC/FT and Venrock.

“Biology has unlimited potential to positively change this world,” says Kevin Ness, the chief executive of Inscripta. “It’s one of the most important new technology forces that will be a major player in the global economy.”

Ness sees Inscripta as breaking down one of  the biggest barriers to the commercialization of genetic engineering, which is access to the technology.

While genome centers and biology foundries can manufacture massive quantities of new biological material  for industrial  uses, it’s too costly and centralized for most researchers. “We can put the biofoundry capabilities into a box that can be pushed to a global researcher,” says Ness.

Earlier this year the company announced that it was taking orders for its first bio-manufacturing product and the new capital is designed to pay for expanding its manufacturing capabilities.

That wasn’t the only barrier that Inscripta felt that it needed to breakdown. The company also developed a proprietary biochemistry for gene editing, hoping to avoid having to pay fees to one of the two laboratories that were engaged in a pitched legal battle over who owned the CRISPR technology (the Broad Institute and the University of California both had claims to the  technology).

Smart glasses maker North announced today that it will be ending production of its first-generation Focals glasses, which it brought to market for consumers last year. The company says it will instead shift its focus to Focals 2.0, a next-generation version of the product, which it says will ship starting in 2020.

Focals are North’s first product since rebranding the company from Thalmic Labs and pivoting from building smart gesture control hardware to glasses with a built-in heads-up display and smartphone connectivity. CEO and founder Stephen Lake told me in a prior interview that the company realized in developing its Myo gesture control armband that it was actually more pressing to develop the next major shift in computing platform before tackling interface devices for said platforms, hence the switch.

Focals 2.0 will be “at a completely different level” and “the most advanced smart glasses ever made,” Lake said in a press release announcing the new generation device. In terms of how exactly it’ll improve on the original, North isn’t sharing much but it has said that its made the 2.0 version both lighter and “sleeker,” and that it’ll offer a much sharper, “10x improved” built-in display.

North began selling its Focals smart glasses via physical showrooms that it opened first in Brooklyn and Toronto. These, in addition to a number of pop-up showroom locations that toured across North America, provided in-person try-ons and fittings for the smart glasses, which must be tailor-fit for individual users in order to properly display content from their supported applications. More recently, North also added a Showroom app for iOS devices, that included custom sizing powered by more recent iPhone front-facing depth sensing camera hardware.

North’s first-generation Focals smart glasses.

To date, North hasn’t revealed any sales figures for its initial Focals device, but the company did reduce the price of the glasses form $999 to just under $600 (without prescription) relatively soon after launch. Their cost, combined with the requirement for an in-person fitting prior to purchase (until the introduction of the Showroom app) and certain gaps in the product feature set like an inability to support iMessage on iOS natively, all point to initial sales being relatively low volume, however.

To North’s credit, Focals are the first smart glasses hardware that manage to have a relatively inconspicuous look. Despite somewhat thicker than average arms on either side where the battery, projection and computing components are housed, Focals resemble thick acrylic plastic frames of the kind popularized by Warby Parker and other standard glasses makers.

With version 2.0, it sounds like Focals will be making even more progress in developing a design that hews closely to standard glasses. One of the issues also cited by some users with the first-generation product was a relatively fuzzy image produced by the built-in projector, which required specific calibration to remain in focus, and it sounds like they’re addressing that, too.

The Focals successor will still have an uphill battle when it comes to achieving mass appeal, however. It’s unlikely that cost will be significantly reduced, though any progress it can make on that front will definitely help. And it still either requires non-glasses wearers to opt for regularly donning specs, or for standard glasses wearers to be within the acceptable prescription range supported by the hardware, and to be willing to spend a bit more for connected glasses features.

The company says the reason it’s ending Focals 1.0 production is to focus on the 2.0 rollout, but it’s not a great sign that there will be a pause in between the two generations in terms of availability. Through its two iterations as a company, Thalmic Labs and now North have not had the best track record in terms of developing hardware that has been a success with potential customers – Focals 2.0, whenever they do arrive, will have a lot to prove in terms of iterating enough to drive significant demand.

Babies have options these days when it comes to what goes in their mouth. No more is it just the standard mush in a jar. Now they’ve got everything from pouches to organic purees delivered right to their parents’ door — and Yumi is one of several startups cashing in.

The company has just announced the raise of another $8 million from several of Silicon Valley’s household names, including Allbirds, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Sweetgreen, SoulCycle, Uber, Casper and the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, James Freeman. That puts the total raised now to $12.1 million.

But it’s a tough and saturated market full of products all vying for mom and dad’s attention and that’s not a lot of cash to go on, compared to the billion dollar industry Yumi is up against. According to Zion Market Research, the global baby food market could reach as much as $76 billion by 2021. However, you wouldn’t know Yumi was up against such odds if you ask them and their financial supporters.

The advantage, according to the company, is in providing fresh food alternatives and that “shelf-stable” competitors like Gerber lack key nutrients parents want for their little ones.

“Our goal is to change the standards for childhood nutrition, and completely upend what it means to be a food brand in America,” Yumi co-founder and CEO Angela Sutherland said. “This group of visionary leaders have all redefined their categories and now we have the opportunity to work together to reimagine early-age nutrition for the next generation.”

Will that bet pay off and help this startup standout? Sales continue to rise and have risen by ten times in the last year, according to the company — we’ve asked but don’t know what those sales numbers are, unfortunately. However, Yumi’s bet on fresh and delivered could prove to be just what parents want as the company continues to grow.

“As a parent, Yumi’s mission immediately resonated,” said co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker Neil Blumenthal . “As we’ve seen at Warby Parker, and now at Yumi, there is a massive shift happening in the world of retail. There’s now a new generation of consumers who are actively seeking brands that reflect their values and lifestyle — the moat that big, legacy brands once enjoyed has evaporated.”

The big new round of funding for Passport’s ticketing and parking management tech proves that software can even disrupt something as mundane and seemingly low-tech as the parking lot.

The startup, which just raised $65 million in new financing from investors is a permitting, parking and ticketing management service for cities, office parks and campuses.

The capital commitment more than doubles the North Carolina-based startup’s funding to $125 million and is actually the second big investment round of the year for a parking tech company. SpotHero, the Chicago-based marketplace for parking raised $50 million earlier in the year and other services related to auto care and servicing in parking lots or on-demand have raised tens of millions of dollars as well.

“In the future, almost everyone in the world will live in a city, so there’s no more important challenge to work on than how people move throughout communities and transact with cities,” said Bob Youakim, Passport co-founder and chief executive in a statement. “We envision a world where mobility is seamless. To bring this vision to life, we are creating an open ecosystem where any entity — a connected or autonomous vehicle, a mapping app, or a parking app — can leverage our transactional infrastructure to facilitate digital parking payments.”

Passport’s application interfaces allow any government to set up electronic payments for parking tickets and with mobile readers can scan licenses to check for permits and approvals that car owners have through the companies management service.

With the close of the new round, Habib Kairouz from Rho Capital Partners and Scott Hilleboe from H.I.G. will . both take seats on the company’s board of directors.

The company processes more than 100 million transactions per-year and will see $1.5 billion pass through its system this year.

Some of the nation’s top healthcare-focused venture capital firms are banding together to form an advisory council with the technology security certification provider, Hitrust, to create best practices for data security for startups developing digital health technologies.

The conversations, spearheaded by the Nashville-based, healthcare-focused investment fund, Frist-Cressey, were designed to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies throughout the healthcare industry by creating best-practices around data security that large healthcare organizations demand before adopting a new service.

“Our service or our software want to be taken nationwide and everybody gets excited and thats’ when you get in front of the Chief security officer’s office and they ask if you’re HiTrust certified,” says Frist-Cressey partner Chris Booker. 

“It makes [startups] more marketable or more viable,” says Daniel Nutkis, the chief executive of Hitrust. “Organizations tend to be reluctant to work with startups… [Our certification] gave venture capital firms a level of comfort and we saw it as an opportunity.. Chris approached us to better develop a program more targeted at early stage companies… so that this becomes an easier program and can make it more wide-scale.”

So far investors including Ascension Ventures, Bain Capital . Ventures, Echo Health Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Blue Cross Blue Shield Ventures, Heritage Group, New Enterprise Associates and 7wire Ventures have all signed on to the venture capital advisory council.

For the firms, it’s simply a matter of protecting what is an increasing percentage of capital commitments. Investors have poured $50 billion into healthcare startups, according to data pulled from CB Insights, and nearly $16 billion of those investments were in digital health companies. Meanwhile, early stage startups are increasingly vulnerable to data breaches and lax security practices — failures of oversight that can mean the difference between life and death for early stage startups.

“Data breaches and privacy violations… these things can destroy a company,” says Booker.

According to CEO Afif Khoury, we’re in the middle of “the third wave of social” — a shift back to local interactions. And Khoury’s startup Soci (pronounced soh-shee) has raised $12 million in Series C funding to help companies navigate that shift.

Soci works with customers like Ace Hardware and Sport Clips to help them manage the online presence of hundreds or thousands of stores. It allows marketers to post content and share assets across all those pages, respond to reviews and comments, manage ad campaigns, and provide guidance around how to stay on-brand.

It sounds like most of these interactions are happening on Facebook. Khoury told me that Soci integrates with “40 different APIs where businesses are having conversations with their customers,” but he added, “Facebook was and continues to be the most prominent conversation center.”

Khoury and CTO Alo Sarv founded Soci back in 2012. Khoury said they spent the first two years building the product, and have subsequently raised around $30 million in total funding.

“What we weren’t building was a point solution,” he said. “What we were building was a massive platform … It took us 18 months to two years to really build it in the way we thought was going to be meaningful for the marketplace.”

Soci has also incorporated artificial intelligence to power chatbots that Khoury said “take that engagement happening on social and move it downstream to a call or a sale or something relevant to the local business.”

The new round was led by Vertical Venture Partners, with participation from Grayhawk Capital and Ankona Capital. Khoury said the money will allow Soci to continue developing its AI technology and to build out its sales and marketing team.

“Ours is a very consultative sale,” he said. “It’s a complicated world that you’re living in, and we really want to partner and have a local presence with our customers.”

India has proposed groundbreaking new rules that would require companies to garner consent from citizens in the country before collecting and processing their personal data. But at the same time, the new rules also state that companies will have to hand over “non-personal” data of their users to the government, and New Delhi will also hold the power to collect any data of its citizens without consent, thereby bypassing the laws applicable to everyone else, to serve sovereignty and larger public interest.

The new rules, proposed in “Personal Data Protection Bill 2019,” a copy of which leaked on Tuesday, will permit New Delhi to “exempt any agency of government from application of Act in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order.”

If the bill passes, and it is expected to be discussed in the parliament in the coming weeks, select laws drafted more than a decade ago would remain unchanged.

Another proposed rule would permit New Delhi the power to ask any “data fiduciary or data processor” to hand over “anonymized” non-personal data — or “other non-personal data” — for the purpose of better governance.

New Delhi’s new bill — which was passed by the Union Cabinet in India last week, but has yet to be formally shared with the public — could create new challenges for Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other companies that are already facing some regulatory heat in the nation.

India conceptualized this bill two years ago and in the years since, it has undergone significant changes. A draft of the bill, which was formally made public last year, had stated that the Indian government must not have the ability to collect or process personal data of its citizens, unless a lawful procedure was followed.

Ambiguity over who the Indian government considers an “intermediary” or a “social media” platform, or a “social media intermediaries” are yet to be fully resolved, however. In the latest version, the bill appears to not include payment services, internet service providers, search engines, online encyclopedias, email services and online storage services as “social media intermediaries.”

One of the proposed rules, that is directly aimed at Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media company that enables “interaction between two or more users” requires them to give their users an option to verify their identity and then publicly have such status displayed on their profile — similar to the blue tick that Facebook and Twitter reserve for celebrities and other accounts of public interest.

Last week news outlet Reuters reported portions of the bill, citing unnamed sources. The report claimed that India was proposing the voluntary identity-verification requirement to curb the spread of false information.

As social media companies grapple with the spread of false information, that have caused at least 30 deaths in India, the Narendra Modi -led government, a big consumer itself of social media platforms, has sought to take measures to address several issues.

Over the last two years, the Indian government has asked WhatsApp, which has amassed more than 400 million users in India, to “bring traceability” to its platform in a move that would allow the authority to identify the people who are spreading the information.

WhatsApp has insisted that such a move would require breaking encryption, which would compromise the privacy and security that more than a billion people globally enjoy on the platform.

The bill has not specifically cited government’s desires to contain false information for this proposal, however. Instead the bill insists that this would bring more “transparency and accountability.”

Some critics have expressed concerns over the proposed rules. Udbhav Tiwari, a public policy advisor at Mozilla, said New Delhi’s bill would “represent new, significant threats to Indians’ privacy. If Indians are to be truly protected, it is urgent that parliament reviews and addresses these dangerous provisions before they become law.”

The countdown status to Disrupt Berlin 2019 stands at T-minus 24 hours. Yep, the doors to prolific opportunity open tomorrow at Arena Berlin. It’s not too late to join thousands of your startup colleagues, but today’s the last day you can save money on the price of admission.

Our late registration for Disrupt Berlin closes tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t miss your last chance to save up to €200 over the onsite ticket price. Beat the clock and buy your pass right here, right now.

Let’s highlight just some of the events and happenings that await you at Disrupt Berlin.

Come ready to network and head straight to Startup Alley. The expo hall features hundreds of innovative early-stage companies eager to demo and discuss their products, platforms and services that span the tech spectrum.

It’s also where you’ll find a special cadre of companies — the TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors hand-picked up to five startups in each of the following categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, and CRM/Enterprise. See why they made the grade.

Want to make the most of your limited time at the show? Use CrunchMatch, our free business-matching platform that makes networking much more efficient. It’s curated and automated, and it connects you to people who align with your business goals.

Bear witness to the Startup Battlefield as founders of early-stage  startups launch on a world stage and vie for the Disrupt Cup, intense media and investor love and a $50,000 cash prize. Who knows? You might see the birth of a future unicorn.

Between all the networking and the Battlefield, be sure to take in the world-class speakers, panel discussions, Q&A Sessions and workshops. As usual, top players, technologists, researchers and investors will share insights on the current and future states of startups. Check out the full Disrupt Berlin agenda here and plan accordingly.

We’re only one day away from Disrupt Berlin, and we can’t wait to meet all of you creative founders, investors, makers and entrepreneurs. Prolific opportunity awaits you. Buy your pass to Disrupt Berlin and save up to €200 before late registration ends tonight at 10 December at 11:59 p.m. (CEST).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Earlier this year, Omers Ventures, the venture capital arm of Canadian pension fund Omers, outed a new €300 million fund aimed at European technology startups, having recruited local VCs Harry Briggs, Tara Reeves and Henry Gladwyn.

And now the firm is adding a fourth member in Europe: Jambu Palaniappan (pictured centre), the former head of Uber’s food delivery business in Europe, Middle East and Africa, has joined Omers Ventures as a Managing Partner.

Palaniappan joined Uber in 2012 when it was a 75-person startup focused primarily on the U.S. market. He led the ride sharing behemoth’s expansion throughout the EMEA region and India, before becoming Regional General Manager for Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Africa. He then went on launch Uber Eats in EMEA.

In other words, Palaniappan brings even more operational experience to Omers’ European VC team, although he isn’t new to the world of venture capital, either. His most recent gig was at London-based venture capital firm Atomico, where he spent 12 months as Executive-in-Residence (news that TechCrunch broke back in July 2018).

Unsurprisingly, Palaniappan has also been an angel investor, and is said to have backed a number of startups in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Meanwhile, the recruitment of Palaniappan marks a decent debut half year for Omers Ventures Europe, seeing the Canadian investor put together a team of faces well-known to the London and broader European tech and startup scene. Briggs’ resume includes stints at BGF Ventures and Balderton, as well as founding and exiting Tonics, a health drinks company. Reeves was at seed firm LocalGlobe and also co-founded Turo, the car-sharing marketplace. And Gladwyn previously managed seed investments for the founders of DeepMind.

The Omers Ventures Europe team have already invested more than €76 million into the European ecosystem. Investments to date include FirstVet, Resi and Quorso.