Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The Boeing-built X-37B space plane commissioned and operated by the U.S. Air Force has now broken its own record for time spent in space. Its latest mission has lasted 719 days as of today, which is one day longer than its last mission which ended in 2017, as noted by Space.com. It’s not an overall record, since geocommunications satellites typically have life spans of five years or more, but it’s nonetheless an impressive milestone for this secretive Air Force vehicle, which is all about testing and developing U.S. technologies related to reusable spaceflight and more.

The X-37B began its current mission in September 2018, when it launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The specific details of the spacecraft’s missions are classified, but in addition to apparently spending ever increasing amounts of time up in space (each successive mission of the space plane has lasted longer), it’s also “operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.” These tests involve tech related to guidance, navigation, thermal protection, high-temperature materials and durability, flight and propulsion systems and more, which is basically not saying much since that’s just everything involved in space flight.

There’s no crew on board operating X-37-B, but the vehicle can autonomously descend back through Earth’s atmosphere and land horizontally on a runway, just like the NASA Space Shuttle used to do when it was in operation.

The X-37 program got kicked off in 1997, originally began by NASA, and it was then transferred to DARPA and the U.S. Air Force after that. The X-37B has flown four times, and in total, the first four missions added up to 2,085 days spent in space.

Presight Capital, the international venture arm of Aperion Investment Group, is announcing that it’s closed its first fund of $80 million.

Aperion is the family office of German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer (pictured above), who previously co-founded pharmaceutical company  Ribopharma. Angermayer told me he sees his investments through Aperion are a way for him to continue building new startups.

“In my heart, I’m still an entrepreneur,” he said. “I have some character traits that are really good for an entrepreneur, but I’m not a good operator. I know that I’m not the guy who should run a company.”

Angermayer (who lives in London) said that with Presight, he’s taking on outside capital for the first time: $20 million of the Presight fund comes from Aperion, $60 million from other investors.

This will also allow him to start investing outside Germany and Europe — he started Presight with partner Fabian Hansen, who’s based in San Francisco, and the firm will back U.S. startups (with selective investments in Asia and Europe).

Fabian Hansen

Angermayer and Hansen said that Presight generally invests in early-stage startups, alongside U.S. venture firms. In addition to the money, they can offer startups the connections and knowledge they need to expand into Europe, particularly when it comes to understanding the regulatory landscape.

They also said they have expertise in sectors like biotech, and can connect startups to Wall Street when it’s time to raise larger rounds.

In fact, according to a source with knowledge of the firm, investors in the fund include Wall Street figures like Galaxy Digital founder Mike Novogratz, Falcon Management President James Leitner and Moore Strategic Ventures. Other investors include Austrian entrepreneur Alexander Schuetz, international entrepreneur and investor Nicole Junkermann, the Schadeberg family office (that’s the family that owns Krombacher beer), Albright Stonebridge Group executive Michael Shtender-Auerbach, Stern Stewart Managing Partner Markus Pertl and actress Uma Thurman.

Presight has already made nine investments, five of them disclosed publicly:

• Terran Biosciences (focused on neurological and mental illness)
• Peptilogics (developing treatments to address drug-resistant bacterial infections)
• Enclear Therapies (focused on neurodegenerative disease)
• SmithRX (which aims to replace pharmacy benefit managers)
• cannabis company Left Coast Ventures

While there’s a clear focus on biotech, Angermayer said he’s deliberately trying to invest across different industries, allowing him to “take a lot of learnings in one sector and apply it to new ones.”

He added, “That’s one of my deep beliefs: You can either be vertical or horizontal. For problem-solving, especially if things are new, you want to have a very holistic view of things.”

Boll & Branch, which sells sustainably-sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels, is announcing that it has raised $100 million in a strategic investment from L Catterton’s Flagship Buyout Fund.

This looks like a big change from the company’s previous approach to  funding. It was self-funded for its first two years (resulting CEO Scott Tannen described as “a lot of maxed out credit cards and five mortgages on my house”), and even when it started looking at venture capital, it only raised a total of $12 million from a single institutional backer, Silas Capital.

In fact, when Recode wrote about Boll & Branch’s Series B last year, it described the startup as one “that wants to raise as little venture capital as possible.”

Tannen said that when he founded the company with his wife Missy, they wanted to “build a sustainable business from the ground up,” and that wasn’t just about the products — they didn’t want to build a company that was “ultimately designed from day one to be sold.”

As a result, he said, Boll & Branch has been profitable for the past four years and is now bringing in “nine-figure revenue.” He compared it to other L Catterton investments like The Honest Company and Peloton, companies that “have become the winner in the startup competition” and are ready to “really become household names.”

In a statement, L Catterton’s Nik Thukral described Boll & Branch as “one of the most beloved bedding brands” and said it “capitalizes on several compelling trends including the emergence of authentic, pure, and chemical free products that can be traced back to their origin, as well as consumers’ heightened focus on healthy living.”

The company’s next steps include expanding internationally — Tannen said that while the company doesn’t currently sell outside the United States, “It’s hard to imagine a country or market in the world that doesn’t make sense for Boll & Branch.”

It will also continue expanding the product lineup. Tannen hinted at “really interesting product introductions” coming in the next few months. They might not be the most obvious additions to the lineup, but he said these decisions come from asking, “What does the home goods brand of the future look like?”

He added, “That’s what we’re trying to be, versus trying to look in the shopping mall and just creating a new version of something [that already exists].”

Disney showed off some exciting new footage from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final instalment of the newest Star Wars movie trilogy at its D23 expo this past weekend. Now, that footage is available online for everyone else to see.

The clip includes a swelling montage of clips from the previous two trilogies, and the last two movies of this series, which really adds a sense of the history and weight of the legacies involved here. Despite myself, I even found myself a tad nostalgic for the prequel movies, even though I despise them and would like them erased from existence and collective human memory.

The actual new footage comes towards the end, and is quite limited in terms of time and amount of content. But it does include some potentially spoiler-ish stuff, including a scene where Rey wields a dual-bladed red dark side lightsaber and there’s voiceover from someone who sounds a lot like Emperor Palpatine (who also showed up on the new poster revealed for the movie).

Anyways it looks amazing, and it’s coming out on December 20.

At VMworld today in San Francisco, VMware introduced a new set of services for managing virtual machines and containers in a single view called Tanzu. The product takes advantage of the knowledge the company gained when it acquired Heptio last year.

As companies face an increasingly fragmented landscape of maintaining traditional virtual machines, alongside a more modern containerized Kubernetes environment, managing the two together has created its own set of management challenges for IT. This is further complicated by trying to manage resources across multiple clouds, as well as the in-house data centers. Finally, companies need to manage legacy applications, while looking to build newer containerized applications.

VMware’s Craig McLuckie and fellow Heptio co-founder, Joe Beda, were part of the original Kubernetes development team They came to VMware via last year’s acquisition. McLuckie believes that Tanzu can help with all of this by applying the power of Kubernetes across this complex management landscape.

“The intent is to construct a portfolio that has a set of assets that cover every one of these areas, a robust set of capabilities that bring the Kubernetes substrate everywhere — a control plane that enables organizations to start to think about [and view] these highly fragmented deployments with Kubernetes [as the] common lens, and then the technologies you need to be able to bring existing applications forward and to build new application and to support third party vendors bringing their applications into [this],” McLuckie explained.

It’s an ambitious vision that involves bringing together not only VMware’s traditional VM management tooling and Kubernetes, but also open source pieces and other recent acquisitions including Bitnami and Cloud Health along with Wavefront, which it acquired in 2017. Although the vision was defined long before the acquisition of Pivotal last week, it will also play a role in this. Originally that was as a partner, but now it will be as part of VMware.

The idea is to eventually cover the entire gamut of building, running and managing applications in the enterprise. Among the key pieces introduced today as technology previews are the Tanzu Mission Control, a tool for managing Kubernetes clusters wherever the live and Project Pacific, which embeds Kubernetes natively into VSphere, the company’s virtualization platform, bringing together virtual machines and containers.

VMware Tanzu. Slide: VMware

McLuckie sees bringing virtual machine and Kubernetes together in this fashion provides a couple of key advantages. “One is being able to bring a robust, modern API-driven way of thinking about accessing resources. And it turns out that there is this really good technology for that. It’s called Kubernetes. So being able to bring a Kubernetes control plane to Vsphere is creating a new set of experiences for traditional VMware customers that is moving much closer to a kind of cloud-like agile infrastructure type of experience. At the same time, Vsphere is bringing a whole bunch of capabilities to Kubernetes that’s creating more efficient isolation capabilities,” he said.

When you think about the cloud native vision, it has always been about enabling companies to manage resources wherever they live through a single lens, and this is what this set of capabilities that VMware has brought together under Tanzu, is intended to do. “Kubernetes is a way of bringing a control metaphor to modern IT processes. You provide an expression of what you want to have happen, and then Kubernetes takes that and interprets it and drives the world into that desired state,” McLuckie explained.

If VMware can take all of the pieces in the Tanzu vision and make this happen, it will be as powerful as McLuckie believes it to be. It’s certainly an interesting attempt to bring all of a company’s application and infrastructure creation and management under one roof using Kubernetes as the glue, and with Heptio co-founders McLuckie and Beda involved, it certainly has the expertise in place to drive the vision.

Stylitics, a startup powering outfit-based shopping recommendations for online retailers, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The company was initially known for ClosetSpace, a mobile app that provided consumers with outfit recommendations and inspiration.

While the app is still live, Stylitics’ focus has shifted to its retailer tools — for example, when you look at this blouse on the LOFT website or this shirt on the Banana Republic site, Stylitics is powering the “Ways to Wear It” and “Wear It With” widgets recommending other products that you could purchase to complete the outfit.

The company said it’s drawing on brand merchandising guidelines, engagement and purchase data from the retailer, broader trend data and stylists’ expertise to create these recommendations, which are updated as products sell out.

In an email, founder and CEO Reuben Deuskar (pictured above) added that Stylistics is able to provide useful recommendations from the start, without requiring time to train with a retailer’s data.

“We have billions of data points from powering outfitting on dozens of sites for more than four years, so we have a very good idea on Day One what an excellent and high performing outfit should look like for each product for a new customer,” Deuskar said.

Stylitics says it has driven $300 million for its retail partners — a group grown in the past year to include Ann Taylor, Calvin Klein, Chico’s, Gap, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Under Armour and White House Black Market.

The startup has now raised a total of $21 million. The new round was led by PeakSpan Capital, with participation from Trestle LP. PeakSpan co-founder Phil Dur is joining the Stylitics board.

“With the rapid growth of digital commerce, retailers are scrambling to keep pace with the consumer demand for more visually exciting and compelling shopping experiences,” Dur said in a statement.

The startup said it will use the money to grow its sales and marketing team while new developing new types of shoppable content and in-store experiences

Nvidia today announced that it has been working with VMware to bring its virtual GPU technology (vGPU) to VMware’s vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS. The company’s core vGPU technology isn’t new, but it now supports server virtualization to enable enterprises to run their hardware-accelerated AI and data science workloads in environments like VMware’s vSphere, using its new vComputeServer technology.

Traditionally (as far as that’s a thing in AI training), GPU-accelerated workloads tend to run on bare metal servers, which were typically managed separately from the rest of a company’s servers.

“With vComputeServer, IT admins can better streamline management of GPU accelerated
virtualized servers while retaining existing workflows and lowering overall operational costs,” Nvidia explains in today’s announcement. This also means that businesses will reap the cost benefits of GPU sharing and aggregation, thanks to the improved utilization this technology promises.

vComputeServer works with VMware Sphere, vCenter and vMotion, as well as VMware Cloud. Indeed, the two companies are using the same vComputeServer technology to also bring accelerated GPU services to VMware Cloud on AWS. This allows enterprises to take their containerized applications and from their own data center to the cloud as needed — and then hook into AWS’s other cloud-based technologies.

“From operational intelligence to artificial intelligence, businesses rely on GPU-accelerated computing to make fast, accurate predictions that directly impact their bottom line,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang . “Together with VMware, we’re designing the most advanced and highest performing GPU- accelerated hybrid cloud infrastructure to foster innovation across the enterprise.”

FreshToHome, a Bangalore-based e-commerce startup that sells fresh fish, chicken, and other kinds of meat, has raised $20 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.

The Series B round for the startup was led by Iron Pillar, with Joe Hirao, the founder of Japan’s ZIGExn also participating in the round. The startup, which closed its $11 million Series A financing round three months ago, has raised $33 million to date.

FreshToHome sells “100 percent” pure and fresh — it adds no preservative or any other chemicals —  vegetables and meat in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune — the latter two of which it recently entered. Unlike most other marketplaces, FreshToHome has built its own supply chain network, giving it better control over delivery.

As a result of this, FreshToHome is able to deliver the perishables on the same day and as soon as up to two hours, Shan Kadavil, CEO of FreshToHome, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The startup has amassed 650,000 customers and recently started to sell milk in Bangalore, another market segment that remains largely unstructured in the nation.

And that growth has helped the startup attract some attention. Several major players in the nation, including Amazon India and Walmart that have recently expanded to include perishable category, has held talks with FreshToHome to acquire a stake in the startup, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The cold-chain market of India is estimated to grow to $37 billion in next five years.

More to follow…

BharatPe, a New Delhi-based firm that is enabling hundreds of thousands of merchants to start accepting digital payments for the first time each month and also giving them access to working capital, has raised $50 million as it looks to scale its business in the nation.

The Series B round for the one-year old startup was led by San Francisco-headquartered VC firm Ribbit Capital and London-based Steadview Capital, both of which have previously invested in a number of financial services in India.

Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Beenext Capital, and Insight Partners also participated in the round, pushing BharatPe’s all-time raise to $65 million. The new round valued the startup at $225 million, Ashneer Grover, cofounder and CEO of BharatPe, told TechCrunch in an interview.

BharatPe operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments. Even as India has already emerged as the second largest internet market with over 500 million users, much of country remains offline. Among those outside of the reach of the internet are merchants running small businesses such as roadside tea stalls.

BharatPe team with actor Salman Khan, who is the firm’s brand ambassador.

To make these merchants comfortable in accepting digital payments, BharatPe relies on QR codes built as part of government-backed UPI payments infrastructure. “We get them to put up a QR code in their shops, and any customer that uses a UPI-powered payments app — which is now supported by nearly every payments app in India — can pay these shop owners digitally,” said Grover.

Through BharatPe, these merchants also get access to a simplified dashboard on their phones to track the customers who owe them money and get periodic reminders.

BharatPe has amassed more than 1.5 million merchants on its platform. It processes over 21 million transactions a month worth more than $83 million, Grover said.

BharatPe also allows merchants to secure short-term loans. New merchants can secure about $500 for a period of three months from BharatPe. As merchants spend more time on BharatPe, the firm expands the amount to about $2000.

The lending business is crucial to BharatPe. Payments app make little to no money through making transactions on their platforms. Those processing UPI payments can not even charge a small commission to merchants. “There is no money to be made in doing payments in India,” Grover said. But payment services can charge small interest on loans.

Access to working capital is a major challenge in developed markets such as India. According to a World Bank report, more than 2 billion people globally do not have access to working capital.

Grover said BharatPe aims to use the fund to add about 3.5 million merchants in the next 12 months. The firm has more than 2000 sales people who are adding 400,000 new merchants to BharatPe each month, he said.

Rest of the money will go into financing the loans on the platform and building new solutions. Later today, BharatPe will launch a new service to connect suppliers and merchants through BharatPe so that their accounts are in sync.

Megvii Technology, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup known in particular for its facial recognition brand Face++, has filed for a public listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Its prospectus did not disclose share pricing or when the IPO will take place, but Reuters reports that the company plans to raise between $500 million and $1 billion and list in the fourth quarter of this year. Megvii’s investors include Alibaba, Ant Financial and the Bank of China. Its last funding round was a Series D of $750 million announced in May that reportedly brought its valuation to more than $4 billion.

Founded by three Tsinghua University graduates in 2011, Megvii is among China’s leading AI startups, with its peers (and rivals) including SenseTime and Yitu. Its clients include Alibaba, Ant Financial, Lenovo, China Mobile and Chinese government entities.

The company’s decision to list in Hong Kong comes against the backdrop of an economic recession and political unrest, including pro-democracy demonstrations, factors that have contributed to a slump in the value of the benchmark Hang Seng index. Last month, Alibaba reportedly decided to postpone its Hong Kong listing until the political and economic environment becomes more favorable.

Megvii’s prospectus discloses both rapid growth in revenue and widening losses, which the company attributes to changes in the fair value of its preferred shares and investment in research and development. Its revenue grew from 67.8 million RMB in 2016 to 1.42 billion RMB in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate of about 359%. In the first six months of 2019, it made 948.9 million RMB. Between 2016 and 2018, however, its losses increased from 342.8 million RMB to 3.35 billion RMB, and in the first half of this year, Megvii has already lost 5.2 billion RMB.

Investment risks listed by Megvii include high R&D costs, the U.S.-China trade war and negative publicity over facial recognition technology. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch published a report that linked Face++ to a mobile app used by Chinese police and officials for mass surveillance of Uighurs in Xinjiang, but it later added a correction that said Megvii’s technology had not been used in the app. Megvii’s prospectus alluded to the report, saying that in spite of the correction, the report “still caused significant damages to our reputation which are difficult to completely mitigate.”

The company also said that despite internal measures to prevent misuse of Megvii’s tech, it cannot assure investors that those measures “will always be effective,” and that AI technology’s risks and challenges include “misuse by third parties for inappropriate purposes, for purposes breaching public confidence or even violate applicable laws and regulations in China and other jurisdictions, bias applications or mass surveillance, that could affect user perception, public opinions and their adoption.”

From a macroeconomic perspective, Megvii’s investment risks include the restrictions and tariffs placed on Chinese exports to the U.S. as part of the ongoing trade war. It also cited reports that Megvii is among the Chinese tech companies the U.S. government may add to trade blacklists. “Although we are not aware of, nor have we received any notification, that we have been added as a target of any such restrictions as of the date this Document, the existence of such media reports itself has already damaged our reputation and diverted our management’s attention,” the prospectus said. “Whether or not we will be included as a target for economic and trade restrictions is beyond our control.”