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SpaceX is racking up wins this week, after a successful second launch attempt for its CRS-18 mission earlier this evening, and now with a first short-hop free flight for its StarHopper prototype spacecraft on Thursday night, again on its second try after a scrub earlier this week.

This test involved flying StarHopper to the relatively modest height of just 20 meters (around 65 feet, which is roughly how tall it is to begin with), where it moved around only very slightly, guiding itself under its own navigation. The StarHopper then returned to Earth as planned, so all indications are that this was a good test that went exactly as intended by the SpaceX crew.

StarHopper is a scaled down test vehicle designed to help SpaceX run crucial preparation trials for the new Raptor engine ahead of building its full-scale Starship reusable spacecraft. Starship is the next launch vehicle SpaceX is developing, which is intended to be fully reusable (its current rockets are only partially able to be refurbished and reflow) and which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk envisions eventually being able to take over all mission activity for the company, including transfer of crew and cargo to Mars. Once ready, it’ll be paired with SpaceX’s future ‘Super Heavy’ launch rocket for extra-orbital launch capabilities.

An untethered hop is a key milestone in SpaceX’s planned development, and it’s been trying to get this done for a couple of weeks now. Musk has already said that he anticipates flying the full-scale Starship prototype. Mark 1 and Mark II of which are both in simultaneous development at both Boca Chica in Texas, and at SpaceX’s Florida facility.

Two days after Facebook reporting growing numbers (even amid its regulatory turmoil), its social media counterpart Twitter today announced its Q2 results. The company made $841 million in overall revenues, up 18% on a year ago; with EPS and net income respectively at $1.43 and $1.1 billion, a huge bump due to a “significant income tax benefit” related to the establishment of a deferred tax asset for corporate structuring for certain geographies, Twitter said. Without that tax benefit, net income was a more modest $37 million and EPS was $0.05.

Monetizable Daily Active Users — Twitter’s new, preferred audience metric — is now at 139 million, which Twitter says is up 14% on a year ago.

The figures beat on revenues, but missed by quite a bit on EPS (if you remove the one-off tax benefit): Analysts were expecting earnings per share of around $0.19 on revenues of just over $829 million for the quarter. A year ago, Twitter posted an EPS of $0.17 on sales of $710.5 million, and last quarter, the company handily beat analyst expectations on sales of $787 million and diluted EPS of $0.25.

The US continues to be Twitter’s revenue engine, the company said. It accounted for $455 million of its sales, up 24%, while international revenue was $386 million, up just 12%. Japan continues to be Twitter’s number-two market, up 9% and accounting for $133 million of its overall sales.

One of the more notable figures in this latest report is a new metric called “monetizable daily active users”, which Twitter has introduced to replace monthly and daily active users. mDAUs is based on Twitter users who logged in or were “otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads,” according to the company.

The advertising aspect is the key part: Twitter’s previous metrics, the more established MAU and DAU figures that other companies typically provide, did not distinguish which users were served ads, and which were not.

Twitter’s argument has been that MAUs and DAUs are not a great picture of the company’s business prospects because of that fact, and so it announced some time ago that it would stop reporting these figures, moving instead to mDAUs.

Be that as it may, it’s notable that the MAU figure had been a problematic one for Twitter: in the last quarter, the company’s MAUs were 330 million, a drop of 6 million users compared to a year ago, and people had been using the generally sluggish growth (and sometimes decline) of those numbers to underscore the contention that Twitter had a growth problem.

Moving to mDAUs is a way for Twitter to de-emphasize that view and to put a spotlight on more encouraging numbers: those that show Twitter is increasing its advertising base. Nevertheless, Twitter acknowledges that it’s not standard, and so harder to use as a comparable against anything other than Twitter itself. “Our calculation of mDAU is not based on any standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies,” it noted in a recent letter to shareholders.

The company is still relatively young, and continues to tinker and make changes — some big, some small — to both its backend and user interface. Some have been made to address some of the larger issues that people have been (often critically) vocal about, such as coping with harassment or making the site more user-friendly for power-Tweeters, new adopters, and everyone in between. Others are to continue building Twitter as a business, which means making it more advertising and media-partner friendly.

Not all the changes are always positive. There’s been a fair amount of backlash over the company’s new destop design, which it introduced this month. It will be interesting to see how and if it proves to be a headwind in future quarters.

More to come.

SoftBank Group announced today that it will launch its second Vision Fund with participation from Apple, Foxconn, Microsoft and other tech companies and investors. Called the Vision Fund 2, the fund will focus on AI-based technology. SoftBank said the fund’s capital has reached about $108 billion, based on memoranda of understandings. SoftBank Group’s own investment in the fund will be $38 billion.

It is worth noting that the second Vision Fund’s list of expected limited partners does not currently include any participants from the Saudi Arabia government (the first Vision Fund’s close ties to people, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who have been implicated in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has understandably been a major source of concern for investors, companies and human rights observers).

But SoftBank Group also said is still in discussions with other participants and that the total amount of the fund is expected to increase. The full list of participants who have signed MOUs so far are: “Apple, Foxconn Technology Group, Microsoft Corporation, Mizuho Bank, Ltd., Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, MUFG Bank, Ltd., The Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, Limited, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Limited, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., Daiwa Securities Group Inc., National Investment Corporation of National Bank of Kazakhstan, Standard Chartered Bank, and major participants from Taiwan.”

SoftBank’s intention to launch Vision Fund 2 was first reported earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal. The new fund is expected to decrease SoftBank’s reliance on Saudi Arabian investment and also potentially change the relationship between startups, corporate giants like Microsoft and investors.

Unity’s private valuation is climbing but it’s growing unclear whether the company’s leadership is planning to take the 15-year-old gaming powerhouse public anytime soon.

The company announced today that is has received signed agreements from D1 Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Light Street Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Silver Lake Partners to fund a $525 million tender offer that will allow Unity’s common shareholders — the majority of which are early or current employees — to sell their shares in the company.

The tender offer gives employees “the opportunity for some liquidity,” Unity CFO Kim Jabal says. The total amount raised will depend on the enthusiasm of common shareholders to sell their stakes in Unity.

This event could potentially signify that the company is pushing back its timeline for an IPO, keeping employees that have been sitting on equity for several years happy as Unity labors on in private markets. It’s worth noting that the company has raised hundreds of million previously with the same intent of buying back employee shares.

It was reported earlier this year that Unity was targeting an IPO in the first half of 2020.

The company also confirmed that it wrapped up a $150M Series E funding round in May that doubled the company’s valuation to $6 billion. The announcement confirms the valuation we reported on in May though at a higher amount of capital raised.

SF-based Unity has more than 2,000 employees. The company builds developer tools which are used game studios to create video games across a number of platforms. The company claims that half of all games are created using the company’s game engine.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today released the first volume of its bipartisan investigation into Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections.

Helmed by Select Committee Chairman Richard Burr, the Republican from North Carolina, and Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who serves as Vice Chairman, the committee’s report “Russian Efforts Against Election Infrastructure,” details the unclassified summary findings on election security. 

Through two and a half years the committee has held 15 open hearings, interviewed over 200 witnesses, and reviewed nearly 400,000 documents, according to a statement and will be publishing other volumes from its investigation over the next year. 

“In 2016, the U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure. Since then, we have learned much more about the nature of Russia’s cyber activities and better understand the real and urgent threat they pose,” Committee Chairman Burr said in a statement. “The Department of Homeland Security and state and local elections officials have dramatically changed how they approach election security, working together to bridge gaps in information sharing and shore up vulnerabilities.”

Both Sen. Burr and Sen. Warner said that additional steps still needed to be taken.

“[There’s] still much more we can and must do to protect our elections. I hope the bipartisan findings and recommendations outlined in this report will underscore to the White House and all of our colleagues, regardless of political party, that this threat remains urgent, and we have a responsibility to defend our democracy against it.”

Among the Committee’s findings were that Russian hackers exploited the seams between federal and state authorities. State election officials, the report found were not sufficiently warned or prepared to handle an attack from a state actor.

The warnings that were provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security weren’t detailed enough nor did they contain enough relevant information that would have encouraged the states to take threats more seriously, the report indicated.

 More work still needs to be done, according to the Committee. DHS needs to coordinate its efforts with state officials much more closely. But states need to do more as well to ensure that new voting machines have a voter-verified paper trail. 

So does Congress. The committee report underscores that Congress need to evaluate the results of the $380 million in state security grants which were issued under the Help America Vote Act and ensure that additional funding is available to address any security gaps in voting systems and technologies around the U.S.

Finally, the U.S. needs to create more appropriate deterrence mechanisms to enable the country to respond effectively to cyber attacks on elections.

The Committee’s support for greater spending on election security and refining electoral policy to ensure safe and secure access to the ballot, comes as Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has blocked two election security measures that were attempting to come before the Senate floor for a vote.

New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, tried to get consent to pass a House bill that requires the use of paper ballots and included new funding for the Election Assistance Commission.

In a statement explaining his rejection of the Bill, McConnell told The Hill, “Clearly this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent.”

McConnell also rejected a consent motion to pass legislation that would require that candidates, campaign officials, and family members to reach out to the FBI if they received offers of assistance from foreign governments.

SpaceX has launched CRS-18, the 18th commercial resupply mission its flown for NASA to deliver experiment, research and supply materials to the International Space Station. This mission’s cargo included IDA-3, the second automated docking ring set to be installed on the ISS, which will enable autonomous docking capabilities for future commercial spacecraft visiting the station with both crew and cargo on board. CRS-18 took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 6:01 PM ET (3:01 PM PT) on Thursday, after an attempt Wednesday was scrubbed due to weather.

There are around 5,000 lbs of cargo on board the Dragon launched for this mission. CRS-18 also carried an research mission into engineering organic tissue for use in 3D bioprinting from a company called Techshot, as well as experiments in tire material manufacturing from Goodyear. There’s even Nickelodeon’s signature green slime (yes, the slime you’re thinking of) which is being sent up care of the ISS U.S. National Laboratory to help astronauts educate students on how fluid operates in microgravity environments.

SpaceX previously flew the Falcon 9 first stage rocket booster used on this mission just two months ago for the last ISS resupply mission, CRS-17. That’s a quick turnaround for one of its refurbished rockets, and another sign that it’s making good progress in its goal of achieving fully reusable launch capabilities. The Dragon cargo capsule used for this mission also flew before – twice, including for CRS-6 in April, 2015 and once again in December 2017 for CRS-13.

The landing of the Falcon 9 from CRS-18, sped up 2X.

This launch included a recovery attempt for the Falcon 9, too, and it returned and landed as planned at the company’s LZ-1 landing zone at Cape Canaveral Air Force base. The first-stage booster separated from the second stage and Dragon craft as planned, and then returned to Earth, landing successfully after a controlled descent. This was SpaceX’s 44th successful recovery of a Falcon 9 first-stage after launch.

Next up for the Dragon capsule is for it to dock with the ISS, which is set to happen on Saturday. It’ll then have its cargo unloaded by the astronauts on board the station, and receive 3,300 lbs of return cargo which it’ll bring back to Earth with a return trip that’ll conclude with a splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

Like Azure last week, AWS reported some slippage in its cloud earnings growth numbers today, dropping from 49 percent growth last year at this time to 37 percent this year. Total revenue increased from Q2 last year from $6.105 billion to $8.381 billion this year. Today’s report puts the company on an astonishing run rate of over $33 billion — just for AWS. That’s a successful company, nevermind one that’s a division of a larger organization.

And Amazon has to be thrilled that it is, as AWS accounted for 13 percent of the company’s total income this quarter, as it continues to help lead the way for the online retailer. All of that is mostly good news by most measures, but the slowing growth in a market that is continuing to accelerate is curious for both Microsoft and Amazon, as both companies continue to dominate the cloud infrastructure market.

Amazon controls approximately 33 percent of the market, while Microsoft accounts for around 16 percent. Regardless of whose numbers you look at, AWS has approximately double the marketshare of Microsoft, but Microsoft remains the only company with double digit marketshare up until this point.

The drop by both companies could simply be attributed to the law of large numbers, which says as big as these two companies are, sustaining the kind of growth rates they were on becomes increasingly difficult over time, even in an accelerating market.

“What we are seeing is the law of large numbers where the revenue gets so high, the growth percent gain gets harder. AWS’s dollar gain is still larger than the number 2-5 [rivals] combined,” Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy told TechCrunch.

As markets mature, growth just naturally slows down, and Amazon couldn’t maintain growth in the 40s forever no matter how hot the market is. Regardless, the revenue remains impressive and AWS continues to help drive Amazon’s success.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX managed to pull off something very few people thought it could — by disrupting one of the most fixed markets in the world with some of the most entrenched and protected players ever to benefit from government contract arrangements: rocket launches. The success of SpaceX, and promising progress from other new launch providers including Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, have encouraged interest in space-based innovation among entrepreneurs and investors alike. But is this a true boom, or just a blip?

There’s an argument for both at once, with one type of space startup rapidly descending to Earth in terms of commercialization timelines and potential upside, and the other remaining a difficult bet to make unless you’re comfortable with long timelines before any liquidity event and a lot of upfront investment.

Cheaper, faster, lighter, better

Image via Getty Images / Andrey Suslov

There’s no question that one broad category of technology at least is a lot more addressable by early-stage companies (and by extension, traditional VC investment). The word ‘satellite’ once described almost exclusively gigantic, extremely expensive hunks of sophisticated hardware, wherein each component would eat up the monthly burn rate of your average early-stage consumer tech venture.

Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup The Boring Company has raised its first outside investment through the sale of $120 million in stock, according to a securities filing.

The details of authorized sale of stock were first reported by Bloomberg News, which reviewed the filing obtained by Prime Unicorn Index.

Steve Jurvetson, a longtime friend, adviser and early backer of Musk’s other companies SpaceX and Tesla, has invested in The Boring Company (TBC).

The investment comes just a two months since the The Boring Company landed a $48.7 million commercial contract to build and operate an underground “people mover” in Las Vegas. After receiving approval from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, TBC secured the contract in May to build an underground loop system that shuttles people.

The initial design for the project, dubbed Campus Wide People Mover, or CWPM, will focus on the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is currently in the midst of an expansion that is expected to be completed in time for CES 2021. The newly expanded Las Vegas Convention Center will span about 200 acres once completed. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA)estimates that people walking the facility would travel two miles from one end to the other, a distance that prompted officials to find a transportation solution.

Since landing the contract in Las Vegas, TBC has ramped up its hiring as it starts to scale up and move beyond the status of Musk pet project. (TBC hasn’t publicized how many people it employs; estimates from various sources put it at more than 80 people, although there’s evidence of overlap between SpaceX and TBC.)

TBC previously raised nearly $113 million last year.

It’s been a while since Google last shared any fundamental financial data about its cloud business. In today’s earnings call, though, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who recently installed former SAP exec Thomas Kurian as the new head of Google Cloud, announced that this business unit now has an $8 billion annual revenue run rate. That’s up from the $4 billion the company reported in early 2018.

While Google often felt like an also-ran in the cloud wars, it’s clearly starting to make up some ground. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” Kurian told me when I talked to him earlier this year. Now he can put some numbers behind this claim.

To put that into perspective, AWSs run rate topped $30 billion last quarter while Microsoft Azure is somewhere around $11 billion, though concrete numbers are hard to come by.

“Q2 was another strong quarter for Google Cloud, which reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion and continues to grow at a significant pace,” Pichai said. “Customers are choosing Google Cloud for a variety of reasons: reliability and uptime are critical. Retailers like Lowes are leveraging the cloud as one of the important tools to transform their customer experience and supply chain.”

Pichai also noted that customers want the flexibility to move to the cloud in their own way, something that some of Google’s competitors — and especially Microsoft — focused on before Google got to this point. With Anthos and other initiatives, the company is now catching up, though.

Unsurprisingly, Pichai also stressed Google’s role in pushing AI forward at a time when enterprises are starting to look at how they can make use of this technology.