Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The future of the connected home, connected car, and connected everything will have a lot of imaging technology at the center of it: sensors to track the movement of people and things will be a critical way for AI brains to figure out what to do next. Now, with a large swing towards more data protection — in part a reaction to the realization of just how much information about us is being picked up — we’re starting to see some interesting solutions emerge that can still provide that imaging piece, but with privacy in mind. Today one of the startups building such solutions is announcing a big round of funding.

Vayyar, an Israeli startup that builds radar-imaging chips and sensors as well as the software that reads and interprets the resulting images which is used in automotive and IoT applications (among others) — providing accurate information about what is going on a specific place, even if it’s behind a wall or another object, but without the kind of granular detail that would actually be able to personally identify someone — has picked up $109 million, money that it will use to expand the range of applications that it can cover and to double down on key markets like the US and China.

From what I understand from sources close to the deal, this round is being done at a valuation “north” of $600 million, which is a big step up on the company’s valuation in its C-round in 2017, which was at around $245 million post-money, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for the big multiple is because the company already has a number of big customers on its books, including the giant automotive supplier Valeo and what Raviv Melamed — Vayyar’s co-founder, CEO and chairman — described to me as a “major Silicon Valley company” working on using Vayyar’s technology in its smart home business.

I was going to write that the funding is notable for the large size, but it feels these days that $100 million is the new $50 million (which is to say, it’s becoming a lot more common to raise so much). What’s perhaps more notable is the source of the funding. The Series D is being led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with Regal Four and existing investors including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, ICV, ITI, WRVI Capital, Claltech all also participating. The total raised by the startup now stands at $188 million.

Koch Disruptive Technologies is the venture arm of Koch Industries, the multinational giant that works across a range of oil and gas, manufacturing, ranching and other industries. It’s founded by the Koch brothers, Charles and the late David, who are mostly known in popular culture for their strong support of right-wing politicians, businesses and causes. It’s an image that hasn’t really helped the VC arm and its partners seem to be trying to downplay it these days.

Putting that to one side, the Vayyar investment has a lot of potential applicability across the many industries where Koch has holdings.

“Advancements in imaging sensors are vital as technology continues to disrupt all aspects of society,” said Chase Koch, president of Koch Disruptive Technologies. “We see incredible potential in combining Vayyar’s innovative technology and principled leadership team with Koch’s global reach and capabilities to create breakthroughs in a wide range of industries.”

Over the last several years, the startup has indeed been working on a number of ways of applying its technology on behalf of clients, who in turn develop ways of productising it. There are a few exceptions where Vayyar itself has built ways of using its tech in direct consumer products: for example, the Walabot, a hand-held sensor that works in conjunction with a normal smartphone to give people the ability to, say, detect if a pipe is leaking behind a wall.

But for the most part, Melamed says that its focus has been on building technology for others to use. These have, for example, included in-car imaging sensors that can detect who is sitting where and what is going on inside the vehicle, useful for example for making sure that no one is dangerously blocking an airbag, or accidentally setting off a seatbelt alarm when not actually in a seat, or (in the case of a sleeping baby) being left behind on accident creating potentially dire outcomes.

Regulations will make having better safety detection a must over time, Melamed noted, and more immediately, “By 2022-2023 it will be a must for all new cars to be able to detect [the presence of babies getting left behind when you leave the car] if you want to have a five-star safety rating.”

The focus (no pun intended) on privacy is a somewhat secondary side-effect of what Vayyar has built to date, but that same swing of regulation is likely to continue to put it into the fore, and make it as much of a feature as the imaging detection itself.

Vayyar is not the only company using radar to build up better imaging intelligence: Entropix, Photonic Vision, Noitom Technology and Aquifi and ADI are among the many companies also building imaging solutions based on the same kind of technology. Melamed says that this is where the company’s software and algorithms help it to stand out.

“I think when you look at what we have developed for example for cars, these guys are far behind and it will take some time to close the gap,” he added.

 

Growing up, Selcuk Atli spent a good deal of his free time playing video games with his friends. And when I say with his friends, I mean actually with them. They’re called LAN parties, where everyone brings over their consoles and the group gets to play together virtually and in real life, all at the same time.

Atli, a grown man now, still loves games, but misses the memories made during LAN parties.

That’s how Bunch was born.

Bunch is a lot like Discord, but for mobile games. Users who download the game can connect with friends and join an audio or video chat with them. From there, users can choose a game to load and the whole party is instantly taken not just to the game, but into a multiplayer game session with their friends.

Today, Bunch has announced the close of a strategic investment round of $3.85 million from top game makers including Supercell, Tencent, Riot Games, Miniclip, and Colopl Next. Bunch’s previous investors include London Venture Partners, Founders Fund, Betaworks, Shrug Capital, North Zone, Streamlined Ventures, and 500 Startups.

Bunch has a handful of first-party games on its platform to ensure that new users have a starting off point. However, one of the biggest challenges of scaling is creating relationships with third-party game makers to eventually integrate that deep linking technology into the Bunch app.

With this new money, Bunch finds itself under the arm of a handful of some of the biggest mobile game publishers in the world. This new funding also brings Bunch’s total financing since launch to $8.5 million.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company try to bring the nostalgia of 90s gaming into the 21st Century. Discord has made quite a name for itself in the gaming world with a platform that allows gamers to communicate before, during and after a game.

However, Discord is more targeted at PC gamers, and is meant to give users the chance to meet and communicate with other gamers, rather than just hopping on a call with existing friends.

TeaTime Live, founded by QuizUp founder Thor Friedricksein, is another competitor focused squarely on mobile. However, TeaTime Live is going hard into Snapchat-like filters and avatars for video chat. And, like Discord, TTL wants users to meet other gamers, not connect with their IRL friends.

Bunch is primarily focused on connecting gamers with their actual friends. Once you’ve both loaded into a game, Bunch keeps running in the background to power voice chat. By focusing on real friends, Atli believes that the impact of Bunch can be much greater for both users and the games themselves.

In fact, Atli says that user retention on a specific game grows 1.3 times with every new friend added on the platform. Indeed, between Day 7 and Day 30, Bunch Cohorts’ retention rates are 2x the retention of normal players, according to the Bunch CEO.

For now, Bunch is focused entirely on user acquisition and scaling to more games, but could see an opportunity to generate revenue through a subscription or in-app purchase model around premium Bunch features.

Founders First Capital Partners, an accelerator and investment firm which provides revenue-based financing to businesses led by “underrepresented entrepreneurs” operating in underserved markets, has received a $100 million commitment to expand its operations.

The San Diego-based investor raised the debt financing from Community Investment Management, a large debt-focused impact investment fund.

The revenue-based financing model is a new one that several startups are beginning to explore as a way to take non-dilutive capital for early stage businesses that might not qualify for traditional bank loans.

Companies like the new media startup, The Prepared, which offers tips on disaster preparedness, used revenue financing as a way to get its own business off the ground. And other companies are turning to the financing method too, according to investors from Lighter Capital.

At Founders First Capital Partners, the new financing will expand its lending operations to companies that are already generating between $1 million and $5 million in annual revenue.

The new program is set to launch in January 2020, expanding the firm’s footprint as a financial services firm for minority and other underrepresented founders, the company said in a statement.

The firm focuses on businesses led by people of color, women, and military veterans and concentrates on entrepreneurs whose business operate in low and middle-income communities outside of the traditional funding networks of Silicon Valley and New York, the company said.

It also operates an accelerator program for entrepreneurs that meet the same criteria.

At its Cloud Next event in London, Google today announced a number of product updates around its managed Anthos platform, as well as Apigee and its Cloud Code tools for building modern applications that can then be deployed to Google Cloud or any Kubernetes cluster.

Anthos is one of the most important recent launches for Google, as it expands the company’s reach outside of Google Cloud and into its customers’ data centers and, increasingly, edge deployments. At today’s event, the company announced that it is taking Anthos Migrate out of beta and into general availability. The overall idea behind Migrate is that it allows enterprises to take their existing, VM-based workloads and convert them into containers. Those machines could come from on-prem environments, AWS, Azure or Google’s Compute Engine, and — once converted — can then run in Anthos GKE, the Kubernetes service that’s part of the platform.

“That really helps customers think about a leapfrog strategy, where they can maintain the existing VMs but benefit from the operational model of Kubernetes,” Google Engineering Director Jennifer Lin told me. “So even though you may not get all of the benefits of a cloud-native container day one, what you do get is consistency in the operational paradigm.”

As for Anthos itself, Lin tells me that Google is seeing some good momentum. The company is highlighting a number of customers at today’s event, including Germany’s Kaeser Kompressoren and Turkey’s Denizbank.

Lin noted that a lot of financial institutions are interested in Anthos. “A lot of the need to do data-driven applications, that’s where Kubernetes has really hit that sweet spot because now you have a number of distributed datasets and you need to put a web or mobile front end on [them],” she explained. “You can’t do it as a monolithic app, you really do need to tap into a number of datasets — you need to do real-time analytics and then present it through a web or mobile front end. This really is a sweet spot for us.”

Also new today is the general availability of Cloud Code, Google’s set of extensions for IDEs like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ that helps developers build, deploy and debug their cloud-native applications more quickly. The idea, here, of course, is to remove friction from building containers and deploying them to Kubernetes.

In addition, Apigee hybrid is now also generally available. This tool makes it easier for developers and operators to manage their APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, a challenge that is becoming increasingly common for enterprises. This makes it easier to deploy Apigee’s API runtimes in hybrid environments and still get the benefits of Apigees monitoring and analytics tools in the cloud. Apigee hybrid, of course, can also be deployed to Anthos.

Can cloud kitchens take off in India? Swiggy, one of the country’s largest food delivery startups, is betting on it. The Prosus Ventures-backed startup said on Wednesday it has established 1,000 cloud kitchens for its restaurant partners in the country.

The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has invested in over a million square feet of real estate space across 14 cities in the country over the last two years to help restaurant partners of all sizes expand to more locations both within their city and across new cities through cloud kitchens.

Swiggy said it has already invested about $24.5 million in its cloud kitchens business that it calls Swiggy Access, and plans to pump another $10.5 million into it by March next year.

Compared to developed nations like Japan and the U.S., India remains a very underpenetrated market for restaurants. “Even in dense areas, you know you need more restaurants,” said Larry Illg, chief executive of Prosus Ventures, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“That’s the value of creating kitchens for delivery platforms. We have the visibility of all the market dynamics. We can look at a location, comb through the data and know what kind of restaurants and food supplies would work there. Over time, you come to realize the neighborhood and their collective behaviour,” he said.

That’s where cloud kitchens could help. For restaurateurs, cloud kitchens reduce the risk when they look for expansion. “You have figured out the menu, and you know the operations. But you still have to take a big real estate risk when picking the location. Kitchens allow them to de-risk all these factors,” said Illg.

Early signs show that the concept of cloud kitchens is working for Swiggy Access partners. The company said one in three partners has been able to expand to a second kitchen within 90 days of signing up. Many restaurants from smaller cities have also expanded into big cities, the startup said.

Raymond Andrews, founder and chief executive of Biryani Blues, said in a statement that Swiggy Access has enabled the eatery to “expand quickly into newer territories not just in Delhi-NCR but also to Chandigarh. In the six years of our existence, I have found Access to be the easiest way to expand my brand. It’s a game-changer for the industry.”

Swiggy believes that India could emerge as the second-highest number of cloud kitchens after China in the coming years, said Vishal Bhatia, CEO of New Supply business at the firm. A year ago, the company had just 200 cloud kitchen partners.

“The milestone of Swiggy successfully creating over 1000 partner kitchens shows the faith the restaurant partners have in the concept and bolsters our pioneering efforts in enabling more success stories in the restaurant ecosystem,” he said.

Swiggy is also betting that cloud kitchens will help it speed up the delivery time. Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety said last month that the company is quickly scaling up “pods” that house cloud kitchens for restaurants in a way that they are “within a 10-minute reach of 99% of their consumers.”

Swiggy added that it is on track to create 15,000 new direct or indirect jobs in the restaurant industry through its Access program by next six months.

The announcement today comes weeks after news broke that Travis Kalanick, founder and former chief executive of Uber, is buying up cheap properties in India and some other markets to scale his cloud kitchens venture.

Indian newspaper Economic Times reported earlier this month that Ashish Saxena, former India head of TexMex Cuisine, franchisee for American casual dining restaurant chain Chili’s Grill & Bar in the country, is working with Kalanick on CloudKitchens, the new venture.

Food delivery firm FoodPanda, owned by ride-hailing giant Ola, earlier this year also pivoted to cloud kitchens.

Dream Games, a Turkish mobile gaming company founded by former Peak Games employees who worked together on hit puzzle games Toy Blast and Toon Blast, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Makers Fund, with co-investment from London’s Balderton Capital. The funding will be used to increase headcount within the Dream Games team, targeting 20 employees in year one.

The company — which is yet to launch a product — is co-founded by CEO Soner Aydemir, the former Product Director at Peak Games. The rest of the Dream Games team are Ikbal Namli and Hakan Saglam (former Peak Games engineering leads), Eren Sengul (former Peak Games product manger), and Serdar Yilmaz (former Peak Games 3D artist).

“Most of the [mobile games] companies believe that the market is saturated, but we believe there are still huge opportunities in the casual puzzle market,” Aydemir tells TechCrunch. “There are too many mediocre mobile games, but players deserve better. We see that there are still millions of players waiting for new, well-designed and enjoyable puzzle games, and we are committed to creating great games to meet players’ expectations”.

Aydemir says Dream Games doesn’t believe in a “hit-or-miss approach” to game development. Instead, he frames the studio’s strategy as “evolution over innovation” and “execution over ideas”. This will see it develop a first flagship title that can be iterated over the long term.

“We plan to fix the pain points for players in existing games,” he says. “Our experience makes us confident we can build something truly global by focusing on a single high-quality, long-standing game instead of multiple flash-in-the-pan titles. We’d rather people were loyally playing our one game for 10 years than losing interest every six months when something new comes along”.

With regards to audience, Aydemir says Dream Games is targeting players over the age of 25 in U.S., Canada and Europe. He pegs gender distribution at 65% female and 35% male. “Our players can be from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, but they are mainly average people who have routine lives,” he says.

Aydemir is also keen to flag up the burgeoning gaming sector in Turkey, which he claims is positioned to be one of the world’s leading ecosystems for mobile games.

In 2017, Peak Games, based in Istanbul, sold its card and board games studio to mobile gaming giant Zynga for $100 million. Zynga later opened a studio in the city and made further acquisitions, paying $250 million for Gram Games, the Turkish developers behind a number of popular puzzle titles. Other casual gaming studios with a presence in the region include Good Job Games, Ruby Games, Alictus, Rollic Games and Bigger Games.

It is approaching a year since TechCrunch broke news that Robinhood was stealthily recruiting for a London office ahead of plans to expand to the U.K. And in August the U.S.-based company, which pioneered “commission-free” stock-trading states-side, announced it had received regulatory approval to operate this side of the pond, signalling that a U.K. launch was indeed imminent. Well, now the wait is almost over, with the launch of the Robinhood U.K. waitlist.

In a classic bait and switch PR briefing on Tuesday — pitched as Robinhood introducing its investing platform to U.K. customers, which a number of local journalists, this one included, took to mean an actual launch — co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev and President of Robinhood UK Wander Rutgers revealed that Robinhood UK will be opening its doors early next year.

“We’re very excited to be announcing that our waitlist for Robinhood UK is going to be going live,” said Tenev. “Customers will be able to sign up for early access to our commission free investing platform in the U.K. and it’s very interesting for us because it will be our first live international market and a very important step for us to fulfil our mission to democratise access to the financial system”.

“We expect the product to be in the hands of customers in Q1 of next year,” clarified Rutgers.

When it does launch, Robinhood will initially offer what Rutgers described as “the best of Robinhood” to the U.K., including, of course, “commission-free” trading of stocks.

“It starts with our core platform: unlimited commission frees trades, no account minimums, and access to a huge range of equities from both the US and from across the world,” he told TechCrunch. “Secondly, we will enable instant deposit, instant trading, without any foreign exchange fees. Users can fund very easily from from any U.K. back using a phone or debit card and withdraw just as easily”.

In addition, the Robinhood UK app will include information to help with trading, including videos from the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Reuters, along with features to help users keep track of their investments, such as price movement alerts, analyst ratings, earnings, and being able to dial into earnings reports.

There will also be “snacks,” Robinhood’s daily podcast and newsletter, and “Robin Hood goals,” the fintech’s premium subscription service for qualifying professional investors.

What is particularly interesting about Robinhood’s pending U.K. launch is that it won’t be without direct competition. In the commission-free investing space, Freetrade was first out of the gate, and has since been joined by Revolut and Bux.

However, arguably, regardless of Robinhood’s deep pockets, a rising tide could lift all boats in the neo broker space since these upstarts are trying to grow the market by introducing new, younger people to investing, not just stealing customers from incumbents that are charging higher fees.

“We’ve been very successful [in the U.S.] at attracting multiple types of customers,” said Tenev. “You know of course there’s your first time investor that doesn’t have a brokerage account before and discovers investing through Robinhood’s product. And, you know, we think there’s a fair number of those types of folks in the U.K. as well. And then there’s also customers that invest a little bit more actively and are familiar [with] the fees… I think will will be able to attract customers from that group as well.”

Meanwhile, an intriguing element of any Robinhood-Revolut comparisons is that the two companies share a number of investors, namely Index and DST. Both companies also have incredibly high valuations, too.

“It’s not something that we spend a lot of time talking to our investors about,” said Tenev when asked if he was concerned that Revolut is now effectively a competitor, before delivering the standard startup narrative about focusing on customers not competitors.

“We’re certainly aware of competitors and, you know, believe that there’s things that we can learn from them but generally, you know, we found that if our focus is on the customer and listening really closely to them, we build products that customers love and.. that ends up working very well”.

But how did Tenev react when first hearing that Revolut was launching zero-commission trading?

“I don’t really remember the exact reaction that I had, but certainly, you know, having competitors and people entering our space is is nothing new for us,” answered the Robinhood co-CEO.

Volkswagen revealed Tuesday evening a new concept vehicle called the ID Space Vizzion, and despite the crazy Frank Zappaesque name, this one might actually make it into production in Europe and North America.

The ID Space Vizzion is the seventh concept that VW has introduced since 2016 that uses its MEB platform, a flexible modular system — really a matrix of common parts — for producing electric vehicles that VW says make it more efficient and cost-effective.

The first vehicles to use this MEB platform will be under the ID brand, although this platform can and will be used for electric vehicles under other VW Group brands such as Skoda and Seat. The ID.3, the first model in its new all-electric ID brand and the beginning of the automaker’s ambitious plan to sell 1 million EVs annually by 2025.

The ID Space Vizzion is equipped with a rear-mounted 275-horsepower motor and a 82 kilowatt-hour battery pack with a range of up to 300 miles under the EU’s WLTP cycle. A second motor can be added to give it all-wheel drive capability and a total output of 355 horsepower.

This concept will likely be described in a number of ways — and during the event at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles it was — but this is a wagon through and through.

Audi revealed Tuesday evening in Los Angeles the e-tron Sportback as the German automaker begins to chip away at its plan to launch more than 30 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025.

The e-tron Sportback reveal ahead of the LA Auto Show follows the launch earlier this year of Audi’s first all-electric vehicle, the 2019 e-tron.

Audi has delivered 18,500 of its all-electric e-tron SUVs globally since March 2019 when the vehicle first came to market. And the company is hoping to grab more, and different, customers with the Sportback.

Audi plans to offer two variants of the vehicle, a Sportback 50 and Sportback 55. The Sportback will come to Europe first in spring 2020. The Sportback 55 will come to the U.S. in fall 2020.

Audi calls this e-tron Sportback a SUV coupé, the latest evidence that automakers are comfortable pushing the boundaries of traditional automotive terminology. This is not a two-door car with a fixed roof and a sloping rear, although there are “coupé” elements in the design.

This is in fact a SUV with a roof that extend flat over the body and then drops steeply to the rear — that’s where the coupé name comes in — and into the D pillar of the vehicle. Then there’s the classic “Sportback” feature in the body where the lower edge of the side window rises toward the rear.

There are design details repeated throughout the exterior, specifically the four-bar pattern in the headlamps, front grille and wheels. And of course there are special interior and exterior finishes – 13 paint colors in all — and a first edition version customers can buy. The base price of the Sportback is 71,350 ($79,000).

But importantly, besides some styling and design changes, this vehicle boasts longer range and for everyone outside the U.S., futuristic looking side mirrors and new lighting tech.

The 2020 Audi e-tron Sportback has a 86.4 kilowatt-hour battery pack that has a range of up to 446 kilometers (277.1 miles) in the EU’s WLTP cycle. The EPA estimates aren’t out yet, but expect the range numbers to be slightly lower.

The company is targeting an EPA range of about 220 miles over the 204 miles of range that the regular e-tron gets.

Audi was able to improve the range by increasing the net battery capacity. It also decoupled the front motor and improved the thermal management.

Lighting and mirrors

Audi is known for its lighting and the company has made this a key feature in the Sportback. The vehicle has a new digital matrix headlights that breaks down light into tiny pixels. The result is precise lighting that has high resolution.

Inside the headlight is a digital micromirror device that acts like a video projector. Inside the DMD is a small chip from Texas Instruments that contains one million micromirrors. These micromirrors can be tilted up to 5,000 times per second.

The upshot: The headlights can project specific patterns on the road or illuminate certain areas more brightly. And for fun, animations like the e-tron or Audi logos can be projected on a wall when the vehicle is stopped.

Check out this video to see it in action.

The safety piece of this is the most interesting. For instance, on a freeway the light might creates a carpet of light that illuminates the driver’s own lane brightly and adjusts dynamically when he or she changes lane.

Then there are the virtual exterior mirrors. This wing-shaped side mirror doesn’t have an exterior mirror. Instead, it supports integrate small cameras. The captured images appear on high-contrast OLED displays inside the car between the instrument panel and the door.

If the driver moves their finger toward the surface of the touch display, symbols are activated with which the driver can reposition the image. The mirrors can be adjust automatically to three driving situations for highway driving, turning and parking.

Neither the mirrors of the digital matrix LED lighting is available in the U.S. and won’t be until the government changes its Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, or FMVSS, which are the regulations that dictate the design, construction, performance, and durability requirements for motor vehicles.

With Jinx, three former members of the Casper team are looking to bring what CEO Terri Rockovich called “the Casper playbook” to selling dog food.

The startup has raised $5.65 million from an all-star list of investors including Alexis Ohanian of Initialized Capital, Align Ventures, Brand Foundry, Wheelhouse Group, Will Smith and his family, the rapper Nas, singer Halsey, YouTube star/late night host Lilly Singh and TV personality/former NFL star Michael Strahan.

Rockovich previously served as vice president of acquisition and retention marketing at Casper, where she met her co-founders Sameer Mehta and Michael Kim. She said all three of them are “dog obsessives” who have experience trying to feed “picky eaters.” And they wer “hungry for a brand that is skinned in a way that is a lot more relatable to millennial consumer.”

It’s not just about taking regular dog food and selling it in a new way, either. Rockovich noted that an estimated 56% of dogs in the United States are overweight or obese. So Jinx’s staff nutritionist — working with a larger nutrition council — has developed a line of kibble and treats that she said is “packed with organic proteins, diversified proteins and easy-to-process carbohydrates for a moderately active animal.”

Jinx plans to start selling its first products in January. Rockovich said it will target pet owners with a certain set of “lifestyle attributes” — like living in an apartment, hiring dog walkers and owning dogs who sleep in their beds — and educate them so they actually examine the ingredients of their dog food, whether they buy it from Jinx or someone else.

“We understand the serious nature of creating something that goes into a body and kind of powers a lifestyle,” she said. “We’ve been so conscious of that. Frankly, it’s delayed our timeline — we know we have to get it right.”

As for how much this will cost, Rockovich said Jinx will “fall in the premium category.” (If you’re familiar with premium dog food brands, she said Jinx pricing be somewhere between Blue Buffalo and Orijen.) And while the company start off by selling directly to consumers through its website, Rockovich said her Casper experience has taught her the importance of having “some IRL presence, specifically in retail.”