Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Sutro’s device has changed a lot since the company appeared as a contestant in our Hardware Battlefield way back in 2015. But who hasn’t, really? The startup happened to be in town as TechCrunch paid a visit to SSV’s Shenzhen headquarters. Turns out it’s a good place to be six weeks ahead of your product’s commercial launch. There are always plenty of kinks to be ironed out ahead of product, after all.

The heart of the product is the same, of course: a floating connected device that can continually measure the chlorine, pH and other levels of a pool’s content. The final version of the device, however, is cylindrical, with, thankfully, fewer wires hanging out than the previous version. Honestly, it looks a bit like a floating travel mug.

With a new production partner announced way back at CES in January, the company says it’s now six weeks away from shipping the product for those who purchase it directly through the startup’s site. Some point soon, it will also make the device available through pool stores and other online channels. For now, however, it’s direct purchase only.

At $699, the device isn’t cheap. Though the Bay Area-based startup believes that the nuisance of regularly monitoring pools will be enough to convince those with deep pockets to take the plunge, sop to speak. And the company’s already seen a fair amount of interest from potential customers since it started talking up the product nearly half a decade back.

A planned second version of the device will make things even more convenient, with plans to add a system for releasing chemicals into the water in order to automatically regulate the water’s make up. That bit certainly sounds appealing if a ways off.

Hardware is just the first step for the company, though. Sutro believes that with enough devices out in the real world, it can create useful datasets for water quality. While plenty of monitoring systems exist for reservoirs and aqueducts, a lot can happen on the way to the hose or faucet. Flint is, sadly, a recent example of this, as river water corroded aging pipes, causing lead to enter the water supply.

The company plans to use data from this and future products to build what it deems a “water genome,” offering rich information on water quality across the world.

Cambridge, UK based graphene startup, Paragraf, has closed a £12.8 million (~$16M) Series A round of funding led by early stage VC  Parkwalk. Also investing this round: IQ Capital Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners and Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge, plus several unnamed angel investors. 

The funding will be used to bring the 2015-founded Cambridge University spin out’s first graphene-based electronics products to market — transitioning the startup into a commercial, revenue-generating phase.

When we covered Paragraf’s $3.9M seed raise just over a year ago CEO and co-founder Dr Simon Thomas told us it was looking to raise a Series A ahead of Q3 2019 so the business looks to be right on track at this stage.

During the seed phase Paragraf says it was able to deliver a manufacturing facility, graphene layer production and first device prototypes “significantly” ahead of plan.

It’s now switching focus to products — with strategic volume device production partners, and commercialisation of its first device: A super-high sensitivity magnetic field detector which it says operates over temperature, field and power ranges “that no other device can currently achieve”.

Commenting in a statement, Thomas added: “I am extremely proud of the young team at Paragraf who have collectively delivered the early strategy milestones with great skill. This next phase will allow Paragraf to make these truly game-changing technologies a reality. Paragraf is continually seeking like-minded collaborative development, production and commercial partners to accelerate the delivery of the many exciting electronics technology opportunities graphene has to offer.”

In terms of the touted benefits of graphene, the atom-layer-thick 2D material has long been exciting scientists as a potential replacement for silicon in computer chips — thanks to a raft of key properties including high conductivity, strength and flexibility and thermal integrity. Researchers suggest it could deliver a performance speed increase of up to 1000x, while reducing energy use by up to 50x.

But while excitement about how graphene could transform electronics has been plentiful in the more than a decade since it was discovered, those seeking to commercialize the wonder material have found it challenging to manufacture at commercial grade and scale.

This is where Paragraf aims to come in — claiming to be the first company to deliver IP-protected graphene technology using what it bills as “standard, mass production scale manufacturing approaches”.

It also says its first sensor products have demonstrated “order of magnitude operational improvements over today’s incumbents”.

Such claims of course remain to be tested in the wild but Paragraf isn’t dialling down the hype vis-a-vis the transformative potential of baking graphene into next-gen electronics.

“Achieving large-scale, graphene-based production technology will enable next generation electronics, including vastly increased computing speeds, significantly improved medical diagnostics and higher efficiency renewable energy generation as well as currently unachievable products such as instant charging batteries and very low power, flexible electronics,” it writes.

A year ago Thomas told us Paragraf expected high-tech applications of graphene in consumer technologies to appear in the general market within the next 2-3 years — a timeline that should now have shrunk to just a year or two out.

On-demand transportation giant Uber made its name in part by aggressively entering new markets on a path of organic growth, but in recent times, it has shown itself more amenable to the concept of expansion through acquisition. Today, MLU, Uber’s ride-sharing and food delivery JV with Yandex (by way of Yandex .taxi) covering cities in Russia and surrounding regions, announced that it has acquired Vezet, a smaller rival that operates in 123 markets in the same region, for a price that’s estimated to be in the region of $204 million.

Alongside that MLU said that it would be investing an further 8 billion rubles ($127 million) in the Russian regions over the next three years, with half towards safety and security — including driver training — and half for “supporting regional drivers and taxi fleet companies.” (The latter could be in the form of special incentives to continue encouraging them to drive with MLU over others, and other loyalty programs.)

Current shareholders of Vezet “will receive new shares in MLU, representing up to 3.6% of the issued share capital of the company at closing, together with up to $71.5 million in cash,” based on Vezet meeting certain performance and integration targets, the companies said. Part of that integration will involve moving all of Vezet onto a single platform with MLU.

To be clear, the companies did not disclose the approximate valuation of the deal based on these percentages, but as a marker, when Uber last valued MLU ahead of its public listing, it put the figure at $3.68 billion. That would put shares of 3.6% at just under $132.5 million, valuing the Vezet transaction in total at around $204 million. (This is assuming that the valuation of MLU, prior to this acquisition, has not changed in the last three months.)

The deal will also slightly reduce Uber’s stake in the JV: MLU notes that following the completion of the acquisition, Yandex NV will own 56.2% of MLU, and Uber will own 35.0%, with 5.3% held by employees (part of the equity incentive plan).

The move speaks to the inevitable consolidation that has happened, and will continue to happen, in the ridesharing market. Vezet (which has a nice double-meaning in Russian: driving, and lucky — or maybe more accurately, things are going your way) itself is a combination of some smaller businesses, and today operates services under four brands: Vezet, Taxi Saturn, Fasten and Red Taxi.

It will also help MLU potentially remain in markets where it has had faced some potential issues in the past. In Kazan, for example, some had called on the government to ban MLU (specifically Yandex.taxi). That hadn’t come to pass, although the prospect of such legal actions might be diffused if it’s acquires a local operator that’s had a more harmonious rise in the market.

Vezet’s business model is built around providing a platform for individuals and existing fleets, which can use it to get routed to passengers looking for a ride from A to B. Like Uber and the many others in this business area, Vezet uses an app-based interface, but given its footprint and how it covers markets where smartphone penetration and usage are not as extensive as in mature markets, it also allows people to order rides through call centers. This deal will include all of Vezet’s assets.

While Uber originally forged an empire by entering markets on its own steam and building businesses from scratch (using tens of billions of dollars in VC funds to do it), in more recent years it’s formed regional joint ventures, including merging its operations in China with Didi and Southeast Asia with Grab alongside its Russia move with Yandex. It’s also started to acquire businesses to move into new markets, such as its recent deal to buy Careem for more than $3 billion to make a big splash in the Middle East.

The acquisition is expected to close at the end of the year, the companies said.

Hero Labs, a London-based startup that is developing “smart” technology to help prevent water leaks in U.K. properties, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding. The round is led by Earthworm Group, an environmental fund manager, with further support via a £300,000 EU innovation grant and a number of unnamed private investors.

The new capital will be used by Hero Labs to accelerate development of its first product: a smart device dubbed “Sonic” that uses ultrasonic technology to monitor water use within a property, including the early detection of water leaks.

Founded in 2018 by Krystian Zajac after he exited Neos, a smart home insurer that was acquired by Aviva, Hero Labs was born out of the realisation that a lot of smart home technology either wasn’t very smart or didn’t solve mass problems (Zajac had also previously ran a smart home company focusing on ultra high net-worth individuals that delivered bespoke designs for things like motorised swimming pool floors or home cinemas doubling up as panic rooms).

Coupled with this, the Hero Labs founder learned that water wastage was a very costly problem, both financially and environmentally, with water leaks being the number one culprit for property damage in the U.K. ahead of fires, gas explosions or break-ins combined. This sees water leaks cost the U.K. insurance industry £1 billion per year, apparently.

“My vision for the company is to solve real-life problems with truly smart technology,” Zajac tells me. “From working at Neos and alongside some of the world’s largest home insurers I understood the problems that impacted ordinary homeowners and their families on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps most surprisingly, I learnt that water leaks are far and way the biggest cause of damage to homes… I also wanted to do more for the environment in my next venture after learning that water leaks waste 3 billion litres of water a day in the U.K. alone”.

To that end, the Sonic device and service is described as a smart leak defence system. Aimed at anyone who wants to prevent water leaks in their property — including homeowners, landlords, facilities management, property developers and businesses — the ultrasonic device typically attaches to the piping below your sink and “listens” to the vibrations coming off the interconnected pipes.

Sonic then monitors the water flow using machine learning and its algorithms to identify usage and detect anomalies. This requires the technology to understand the difference between appliances, running taps and even flushing toilets so that it can build up a picture of normal water usage in the home and in turn identify if that pattern is broken. Crucially, if needed, Sonic can automatically shut off the water supply to prevent a water leak damaging the property or its possessions.

Will a full launch planned for later this year, Sonic is targeting consumers as well as small businesses initially. “We are [also] in discussions with insurers who might subsidise the product or give it away completely for free to certain more affluent customers to minimise the risk of water escape,” adds Zajac.

Just two years ago, investors were heavily pouring money into China’s dockless bike-sharing startups. Now that boom has busted with derelict bikes littering the streets of cities.

Meanwhile, a new race has started for two-wheelers with motors — and one of the main players is a survivor from the bike-sharing craze. Blessed with fundings from the world’s most valuable fintech company Ant Financial through its Series D to F funding rounds, Hellobike provides a range of mobility services such as shared e-bikes and rented electric scooters to its 230 million registered users.

Electric push

Hellobike first launched in 2016 by deploying shared bikes in smaller cities and towns — where Ofo and Mobike were largely absent early on — rather than large urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai. This allowed Hellobike to largely avoid the cash splurging competition against Ofo and Mobike.

Ofo is now battling a major financial crisis as it struggles to repay user deposits. Its archrival Mobike has slowed down expansion since it was sold to Hong Kong-listed local services giant Meituan. And Hellobike, which boasts about its operational efficiency, has begun an electric push.

“When the two major powers were at war, neither of them went after electric bikes. They were fighting over bicycles,” Hellobike’s chief financial officer Fischer Chen (pictured above) recently told TechCrunch at Rise conference in Hong Kong, referring to the feud between Mobike and Ofo. “As such, there was no price war for e-bikes from the outset. The competition is rational.”

Electric two-wheeled vehicles are in high demand in the country where nearly 1.4 billion people live. According to data collected by Hellobike, nearly 300 million rides are completed on analog bikes every day in China. What many don’t realize is that pedal-assist electric bikes and pedal-free scooters together more than double that number, generating 700 million rides per day.

As with bicycles, there are benefits to rent rather than buy an electric bike in China. For one, users don’t need to worry about getting their assets stolen. Second — and, this is specific to electric vehicles — finding a safe, convenient charging spot can be a challenge in China.

That’s why Hellobike put up charging stations as it went about offering shared ebikes in 2017. At these kiosks, riders swap their battery out for a new one without having to plug in and wait. They then have the option to pay with Alipay, Ant’s mobile wallet with a one-billion user base.

Of all the monthly two-wheeler electric bikes activity in China, Hellobike has captured 80% of the market share, Chen claims. For bike-sharing, it accounts for 60-70%. It’s hard to verify the share by looking at data compiled by third-party app trackers, for they don’t usually break out the user number for individual features. The Hellobike app is a one-stop-shop for bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters as well as carpooling, a service complementary to its main two-wheeler business intended to “capture price-sensitive small-town consumers” according to Chen.

Similarly, Mobike has been folded into Meituan’s all-in-one service app. What further complicates the inquiry is some of Hellobike’s rides are accessed directly on Alipay rather than its own app.

When it comes to competition in electric two-wheelers, Chen maintained that other challengers are “relatively small” and that acquiring online users has become “very difficult.” For Hellobike, getting existing customers to try out new features takes as much effort as “adding a new tab to its app,” Chen suggested.

But other internet giants have also set their sight on plugged-in micromobility. Both Mobike and ride-sharing leader Didi Chuxing have their own e-bike sharing programs. It won’t be an easy game, as all contenders need to cope with China’s increasingly strict rules for electric bicycles.

Scooter rental is next

What’s for certain is that Hellobike has big ambitions for electric micromobility. While shared bikes and e-bikes are meant for one-off uses, Hellobike plans to rent out e-scooters for longer swathes of time as many people might want the powered-up vehicles for their daily commute.

Hellobike founded a new joint venture last month to fulfill that demand. Joining forces with Ant — which is controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma — and China’s top battery manufacturer CATL, Hellobike is launching a rental marketplace for its 25 km/h e-scooters targeted at millions of migrant workers in Chinese cities.

“People might be able to afford an e-scooter that costs several thousand yuan [$1 = 6.88yuan], but they might be leaving the city after a year, so why would they buy it? So we come in as a third-party partner with a new rental model through which people pay about 200 yuan a month to use the scooter,” explained Chen. “By doing so, we convert people from buying vehicles to paying for services, renting the vehicles.”

The three shareholders will also work to install more battery-swapping stations nationwide that not only recharge Hellobike’s shared e-bikes but also its e-scooters, that will be made by manufacturing partners.

“We function as a platform and won’t compete with traditional scooter manufacturers,” suggested Chen. “They still get to use their own designs and SKUs [stock keeping units], but we will put smart hardware into their models… so users know where their vehicles are… and they can unlock the scooters with a QR code just like they do with a shared bike or e-bike.”

Hellboke has raised at least $1.8 billion to date, according to public data compiled by Crunchbase. Bloomberg reported in April that it was seeking to raise at least $500 million in a new funding round. The company declined to comment on its fundraising progress.

When it comes to financial metrics, Chen, a veteran investment banker, declined to disclose whether Hellobike overall is profitable but said the company “performs much better than its competitors” financially. The most profitable segment, according to the executive, is the electric bike business.

As for bicycles, Chen noted that China’s main bike-sharing companies are “no longer burning money” since they’ve raised prices in recent times. Hellobike’s bike unit has achieved cash-flow positive during the warmer, peak seasons, Chen added.

“Point Blank,” a new Netflix original film, stars Frank Grillo and Anthony Mackie as a criminal and a nurse thrown together by circumstances — Abe (played by Grillo) is struck by a car while fleeing a murder scene, and he’s brought to the hospital where Paul (Mackie) works. Soon, Paul finds himself coerced into to breaking Abe out of the hospital.

Despite the presence of two Marvel stars (Grillo had a brief-but-memorable run in the Captain America movies as Brock Rumlow, while Mackie’s Falcon is about to become the new Captain America), “Point Blank” is a decidedly modest affair, focusing on these two men as they drive through the streets of Cincinnati, on the run from both the police and criminals.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to deliver a straightforward crime movie, but as we discuss in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we found ourselves underwhelmed by the results, largely because the film was so by-the-numbers.

Yes, there are moments when “Point Blank” tries to surprise the audience, but most viewers will see the twists coming a mile away. And while the movie (based on a French film of the same name) seems to owe a debt to buddy cop movies like “48 Hours” and “Lethal Weapon,” it lacks the finesse needed to balance its jokes with high-stakes violence.

We also discuss AT&T/WarnerMedia’s announcement that it’s taking “Friends” off Netflix, so that it can bring the show to its upcoming streaming service, now called HBO Max.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

f you want to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Introduction
0:39 HBO Max
13:27 Point Blank review
26:24 Point Blank spoiler discussion

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is set to run a historic launch later today, with the Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission, which will aim to put a rover on the Moon’s south pole to help study the celestial body’s origin. The launch is target for 2:51 AM India Standard Time (IST), which is 5:21 PM EST. The live stream above should begin around 2:30 AM IST, or 5:00 PM EST.

Chandrayaan-2 will carry lunar lander Vikram, which will deliver ISRO rover Pragyan to the surface at the pole, with a target landing zone of a plain that covers the ground between two of the Moon’s craters, Simpelius N and Manzinus C. The rocket used for the launch is the GSLV Mk-III, India’s most powerful launch vehicle ever, and the orbiter used for this mission will relay back information from the lander and rover to Earth via the Indian Deep Space Network, as well as make its own observations during its planned one-year mission lifespan.

The mission will seek to take a number of measurements of the lunar surface, including topographic, mineral makeup, seismographic, chemical analytics and more, with an eye to shedding more light on the Moon’s origins. If all goes to plan, the lunar orbiter will make its way to to Moon over the next couple of months and aim to soft land the Vikram at the South Pole target site on September 6, 2019.

This is a historic mission for a few reasons, including being the first ever soft-landing attempt at the Moon’s South Pole region, as well as being the first Indian mission to attempt a soft landing using all home-grown lander and rover technology. If successful, India will be only the fourth country ever to have soft-landed a vehicle on the lunar surface.

Chandraayan-1 was the first ever Indian lunar probe mission, and was launched by ISRO in 2008, with the mission coming to a successful end in August 2009. Chandrayaan-1 employed a controlled crash landing to deliver the probe, unlike the soft landing descent planned for Chandrayaan-2.

In a pitch during a recent meeting at Brinc’s Hong Kong headquarters, the Barcelona-based team behind Kibus Petcare was quick to point out that most millennials consider pets “a member of the family.” That sort of statement manifests itself in various ways, of course, but for many, that means preparing home cooked meals for their dogs and cats.

As a rabbit owner myself, that fortunately mostly just means rinsing off some arugula in the sink once a day. For those other pet owners, however, the prospect is a fair bit more complex, putting the same or even more work into prepping meals for their furry companions.

The pitch behind Kibus is an attempt to split the difference. The company’s appliance is designed to offer something like a home cooked meal for a dog or cat with a fraction of the required effort. The system accepts plastic cartons filled with freeze dried pet food. Pour in some water and the system will heat it up, cooking the foodstuffs in the process.

The company is going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign to sell the product, which is currently in prototype form. At launch, it will run around €199. That initial version will include user refillable pods, but in the future, they company plans to limit these to the pre-made variety, clearly going after a kind of ink cartridge approach to monetizing the system.

The pods will work out to around €1 a day, with the machine rationing out food to pets one to five times a day. Each should last about a week for an average pet, or somewhere in the neighborhood of three days for the largest dog. To start, the company is offering up five different food options (two for cats, three for dogs), with more coming down the road.

Users can monitor the system remotely and program in the sound of their own voice to call the pet over when it’s feeding time. The second version of the device will also include a camera for monitoring pets from afar.