Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Segway-Ninebot introduced Tuesday an electric dirt bike that marks the company’s expansion into the powersports market.

The Chinese scooter company launched two versions of its new “Dirt eBike” at the automotive specialty products show SEMA in Las Vegas.

Segwey’s first foray into powersports products combines aspects of a mountain bike with the get-up-and-go of a dirt bike. And it’s all electric.

These days, Segwey is known for its micromobility products, namely scooters. For instance, Segwey unveiled in January the Model Max scooter, a more robust product designed to help shared scooter services like Bird and Lime reduce operating and maintenance costs.

But Segwey is aiming to do more than supply scooters. The company wants to offer a range of mobility devices that combine software, robotics, and its patent-protected Segway self-balancing technology. The debut of the Dirt eBike follows the introduction of three other hybrid off-road products, including an ATV all in an effort to build out its new SegwayPowersports business unit.

The Dirt eBike falls under Segway’s line of personal products, including other micromobility solutions such as the Ninebot Kickscooter and Ninebot GoKart Kit, according to the company.

“Our core focus is to create innovative transportation solutions that will help people move around their
communities — including solutions for the urban dweller and outdoor adventurer,” said Julie Tang,
marketing director at Segway. “The popularity of electric vehicles has made its way to the biking
segment and we are proud to meet the growing eco-conscious consumer demands by introducing Segway Dirt eBike, our first product focused solely on the outdoor consumer who wants a rugged and
high performance dirt biking experience.”

The Dirt eBike will come in two versions, the X160 and X260. The X260 will be, as you might assume, is the beefier, heavier, longer range and more capable bike. It will also be more expensive, coming in at about $4,500.

The X260 weighs 121 pounds with the battery. While the X160, which costs $3,000, is about 105 pounds.

The X260 comes with a headlight, can hit a top speed of 46.6 miles per hour and handle steeper slopes of up to 45 degrees.

Both versions have swappable batteries. The X260 has an estimated battery range of 74.6 miles on a single charge, while the X160 has 40.4-mile range.

The product will be available for consumers will be in the first quarter of 2020, the company said.

Segway-Ninebot introduced Tuesday an electric dirt bike that marks the company’s expansion into the powersports market.

The Chinese scooter company launched two versions of its new “Dirt eBike” at the automotive specialty products show SEMA in Las Vegas.

Segwey’s first foray into powersports products combines aspects of a mountain bike with the get-up-and-go of a dirt bike. And it’s all electric.

These days, Segwey is known for its micromobility products, namely scooters. For instance, Segwey unveiled in January the Model Max scooter, a more robust product designed to help shared scooter services like Bird and Lime reduce operating and maintenance costs.

But Segwey is aiming to do more than supply scooters. The company wants to offer a range of mobility devices that combine software, robotics, and its patent-protected Segway self-balancing technology. The debut of the Dirt eBike follows the introduction of three other hybrid off-road products, including an ATV all in an effort to build out its new SegwayPowersports business unit.

The Dirt eBike falls under Segway’s line of personal products, including other micromobility solutions such as the Ninebot Kickscooter and Ninebot GoKart Kit, according to the company.

“Our core focus is to create innovative transportation solutions that will help people move around their
communities — including solutions for the urban dweller and outdoor adventurer,” said Julie Tang,
marketing director at Segway. “The popularity of electric vehicles has made its way to the biking
segment and we are proud to meet the growing eco-conscious consumer demands by introducing Segway Dirt eBike, our first product focused solely on the outdoor consumer who wants a rugged and
high performance dirt biking experience.”

The Dirt eBike will come in two versions, the X160 and X260. The X260 will be, as you might assume, is the beefier, heavier, longer range and more capable bike. It will also be more expensive, coming in at about $4,500.

The X260 weighs 121 pounds with the battery. While the X160, which costs $3,000, is about 105 pounds.

The X260 comes with a headlight, can hit a top speed of 46.6 miles per hour and handle steeper slopes of up to 45 degrees.

Both versions have swappable batteries. The X260 has an estimated battery range of 74.6 miles on a single charge, while the X160 has 40.4-mile range.

The product will be available for consumers will be in the first quarter of 2020, the company said.

There are more seed funds than ever helping business get off the ground but the Series A financing continues to be one of the toughest deals to close.

Not only will we welcome early-stage investors to teach entrepreneurs how to raise their first round of venture capital, we will have a group of investors intimately familiar with the Series A on deck at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December to offer their best tips and tricks.

Joining us on stage is Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet and Penta founder Jessica Holzbach.

Samet, for her part, joined Blossom Capital, a new European venture capital fund focused on leading Series A investments, earlier this year. Based in Stockholm, Samet’s career includes years of angel investig with standout bets including LendingHome, Bloomcredit and Stravito. Blossom portfolio companies include Duffel, Frontify, Fat Llama, Sqreen and Checkout.com. Before Blossom, Samet was the director of technical sales at Klarna, a high profile European fintech startup.

Finally, Holzbach, who leads the digital only banking platform for SMEs, Penta, has spent her career founding startups and working as a management consultant, supervising various CRM projects for financial institutions and insurance companies. Penta, where she is currently CCO, has raised millions in venture capital funding, including a €7 million Series A last year. She can speak to the process of securing funding and the challenges she faced as a founder.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin, running December 11 and December 12, to hear more from these experts on how to secure one of the most influential funding rounds in a company’s lifespan. Tickets to the show are available here!

There are more seed funds than ever helping business get off the ground but the Series A financing continues to be one of the toughest deals to close.

Not only will we welcome early-stage investors to teach entrepreneurs how to raise their first round of venture capital, we will have a group of investors intimately familiar with the Series A on deck at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December to offer their best tips and tricks.

Joining us on stage is Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet and Penta founder Jessica Holzbach.

Samet, for her part, joined Blossom Capital, a new European venture capital fund focused on leading Series A investments, earlier this year. Based in Stockholm, Samet’s career includes years of angel investig with standout bets including LendingHome, Bloomcredit and Stravito. Blossom portfolio companies include Duffel, Frontify, Fat Llama, Sqreen and Checkout.com. Before Blossom, Samet was the director of technical sales at Klarna, a high profile European fintech startup.

Finally, Holzbach, who leads the digital only banking platform for SMEs, Penta, has spent her career founding startups and working as a management consultant, supervising various CRM projects for financial institutions and insurance companies. Penta, where she is currently CCO, has raised millions in venture capital funding, including a €7 million Series A last year. She can speak to the process of securing funding and the challenges she faced as a founder.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin, running December 11 and December 12, to hear more from these experts on how to secure one of the most influential funding rounds in a company’s lifespan. Tickets to the show are available here!

There are more seed funds than ever helping business get off the ground but the Series A financing continues to be one of the toughest deals to close.

Not only will we welcome early-stage investors to teach entrepreneurs how to raise their first round of venture capital, we will have a group of investors intimately familiar with the Series A on deck at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December to offer their best tips and tricks.

Joining us on stage is Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet and Penta founder Jessica Holzbach.

Samet, for her part, joined Blossom Capital, a new European venture capital fund focused on leading Series A investments, earlier this year. Based in Stockholm, Samet’s career includes years of angel investig with standout bets including LendingHome, Bloomcredit and Stravito. Blossom portfolio companies include Duffel, Frontify, Fat Llama, Sqreen and Checkout.com. Before Blossom, Samet was the director of technical sales at Klarna, a high profile European fintech startup.

Finally, Holzbach, who leads the digital only banking platform for SMEs, Penta, has spent her career founding startups and working as a management consultant, supervising various CRM projects for financial institutions and insurance companies. Penta, where she is currently CCO, has raised millions in venture capital funding, including a €7 million Series A last year. She can speak to the process of securing funding and the challenges she faced as a founder.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin, running December 11 and December 12, to hear more from these experts on how to secure one of the most influential funding rounds in a company’s lifespan. Tickets to the show are available here!

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are over 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past twenty years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and CODA Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will . be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are over 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past twenty years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and CODA Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will . be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are over 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past twenty years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and CODA Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will . be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

Google has partnered with several tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a new, collaborative open-source secure chip design project.

The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in datacenters, storage, and computer peripherals, which are both open and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors.

It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

OpenTitan builds off the success of Google’s own custom-built chip, Titan, which it uses in its multi-factor security keys and its own-brand Android phones. Critical to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which cryptographically ensures that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Root-of-trust provides a solid foundation for the operating system and applications running on the chip.

Google said OpenTitan will be run by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital to support the project.

OpenTitan will also be platform agnostic and can be adapted to almost any device or software, Google said.

It’s not the first project dedicated to building secure chip designs. The Open Compute Project, supported by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open-source designs for its core infrastructure servers as part of an effort to gain better efficiencies from datacenter operations.

Apple also has its own secure — albeit proprietary — custom silicon, the Apple T2, found in its latest MacBooks, which it uses to control a device’s security functions and store the user’s passwords and encryption keys.

Google has partnered with several tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a new, collaborative open-source secure chip design project.

The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in datacenters, storage, and computer peripherals, which are both open and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors.

It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

OpenTitan builds off the success of Google’s own custom-built chip, Titan, which it uses in its multi-factor security keys and its own-brand Android phones. Critical to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which cryptographically ensures that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Root-of-trust provides a solid foundation for the operating system and applications running on the chip.

Google said OpenTitan will be run by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital to support the project.

OpenTitan will also be platform agnostic and can be adapted to almost any device or software, Google said.

It’s not the first project dedicated to building secure chip designs. The Open Compute Project, supported by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open-source designs for its core infrastructure servers as part of an effort to gain better efficiencies from datacenter operations.

Apple also has its own secure — albeit proprietary — custom silicon, the Apple T2, found in its latest MacBooks, which it uses to control a device’s security functions and store the user’s passwords and encryption keys.