Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Udacity and Mercedes-Benz’s North American R&D lab have developed curriculum for a sensor fusion nanodegree, the latest effort by the online education startup to meet high demand for skills related to autonomous vehicles and to duplicate the success it has had with its self-driving car engineer program.

Enrollment for the sensor fusion degree opened up Tuesday.

Udacity specializes in “nanodegrees” on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision.

The new sensor fusion nanodegree is one of the recent additions and changes enacted by Udacity’s co-founder Sebastian Thrun as part of a larger turnaround plan aimed at bring costs in line with revenue without hurting growth.

The sensor fusion program is made up of four courses and is intended to take about four months to complete. Students will learn about lidar obstacle detection, radar obstacle detection, camera and lidar data fusion, and Kalman Filters. Those who finish the degree should be able to work with lidar, radar, and cameras — sensors that are used on the vast majority of autonomous vehicles.

A group of MBRDNA employees are enrolled in the sensor fusion program as part of an Enterprise training pilot.

“There’s no such thing as self-driving car generalists,” Thrun told TechCrunch. “Companies are looking for something specific. And the hottest thing around right now is sensor fusion.”

And despite the AV industry dipping into the “trough of disillusionment” Thrun said there is still a lot of demand for skilled workers.

“It’s easier to get a job right now than raise money from investors,” Thrun said. “All of these companies like Zoox and Aurora, Waymo, Cruise and Tesla are hiring like crazy.”

For instance, GM’s self-driving car unit Cruise announced in March plans to hire hundreds of employees through the end of the year, doubling its engineering staff.

Udacity and Sunnyvale,Calif.,-based Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America (MBRDNA) have partnered on nanodegree programs before. In 2016, the two companies collaborated on a self-driving car engineer nanodegree — a program that attracted thousands of students and would lead to the spinout of AV startup Voyage. More than 21,000 students from 120 countries have enrolled in that program.

Udacity doesn’t break out graduation rates for individual programs, making it difficult to assess how many people have completed the self-driving car engineer degree or have gone on to jobs in the field.

Udacity has reported that a 34 percent graduation rate over its more than 30 nanodegree programs. The company also notes that nanodegree program graduates have landed new jobs with Audi, BMW, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Lyft, NVIDIA, and Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes employs more than 40 nanodegree program graduates globally, according to Udacity.

Udacity also other nanodegree related to the industry, including an introduction to self-driving cars and flying cars.

In April, Udacity laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations. Udacity now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors. The company has also added new services aimed at retaining students, including a technical mentorship program. Since May 1, every Udacity student has access to technical mentors, expert reviewers, career coaches, and personalized learning plans.

The company experienced growth in 2017 and revenue that increased 100 percent year-over-year thanks to some popular programs like its self-driving car and deep learning nanodegrees. And while new programming was added in 2018, the volume slowed and failed to attract the same attention and enrollment as its predecessors. Meanwhile, costs ballooned. After CEO Vishal Makhijani left in October and Thrun stepped in. Thrun, who founded Google’s moonshot factory X, is also CEO of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk Corp.

Udacity and Mercedes-Benz’s North American R&D lab have developed curriculum for a sensor fusion nanodegree, the latest effort by the online education startup to meet high demand for skills related to autonomous vehicles and to duplicate the success it has had with its self-driving car engineer program.

Enrollment for the sensor fusion degree opened up Tuesday.

Udacity specializes in “nanodegrees” on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision.

The new sensor fusion nanodegree is one of the recent additions and changes enacted by Udacity’s co-founder Sebastian Thrun as part of a larger turnaround plan aimed at bring costs in line with revenue without hurting growth.

The sensor fusion program is made up of four courses and is intended to take about four months to complete. Students will learn about lidar obstacle detection, radar obstacle detection, camera and lidar data fusion, and Kalman Filters. Those who finish the degree should be able to work with lidar, radar, and cameras — sensors that are used on the vast majority of autonomous vehicles.

A group of MBRDNA employees are enrolled in the sensor fusion program as part of an Enterprise training pilot.

“There’s no such thing as self-driving car generalists,” Thrun told TechCrunch. “Companies are looking for something specific. And the hottest thing around right now is sensor fusion.”

And despite the AV industry dipping into the “trough of disillusionment” Thrun said there is still a lot of demand for skilled workers.

“It’s easier to get a job right now than raise money from investors,” Thrun said. “All of these companies like Zoox and Aurora, Waymo, Cruise and Tesla are hiring like crazy.”

For instance, GM’s self-driving car unit Cruise announced in March plans to hire hundreds of employees through the end of the year, doubling its engineering staff.

Udacity and Sunnyvale,Calif.,-based Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America (MBRDNA) have partnered on nanodegree programs before. In 2016, the two companies collaborated on a self-driving car engineer nanodegree — a program that attracted thousands of students and would lead to the spinout of AV startup Voyage. More than 21,000 students from 120 countries have enrolled in that program.

Udacity doesn’t break out graduation rates for individual programs, making it difficult to assess how many people have completed the self-driving car engineer degree or have gone on to jobs in the field.

Udacity has reported that a 34 percent graduation rate over its more than 30 nanodegree programs. The company also notes that nanodegree program graduates have landed new jobs with Audi, BMW, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Lyft, NVIDIA, and Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes employs more than 40 nanodegree program graduates globally, according to Udacity.

Udacity also other nanodegree related to the industry, including an introduction to self-driving cars and flying cars.

In April, Udacity laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations. Udacity now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors. The company has also added new services aimed at retaining students, including a technical mentorship program. Since May 1, every Udacity student has access to technical mentors, expert reviewers, career coaches, and personalized learning plans.

The company experienced growth in 2017 and revenue that increased 100 percent year-over-year thanks to some popular programs like its self-driving car and deep learning nanodegrees. And while new programming was added in 2018, the volume slowed and failed to attract the same attention and enrollment as its predecessors. Meanwhile, costs ballooned. After CEO Vishal Makhijani left in October and Thrun stepped in. Thrun, who founded Google’s moonshot factory X, is also CEO of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk Corp.

DefinedCrowd, the Startup Battlefield alumnus that produces and refines data for AI-training purposes, has just debuted iOS and Android apps for its army of human annotators. It should help speed up a process that the company already touts as one of the fastest in the industry.

It’s no secret that AI relies almost totally on data that has been hand-annotated by humans, pointing out objects in photos, analyzing the meaning of sentences or expressions, and so on. Doing this work has become a sort of cottage industry, with many annotators doing it part time or between other jobs.

There’s a limit, however, to what you can do if the interface you must use to do it is only available on certain platforms. Just as others occasionally answer an email or look over a presentation while riding the bus or getting lunch, it’s nice to be able to do work on mobile — essential, really, at this point.

To that end DefinedCrowd has made its own app, which shares the Neevo branding of the company’s annotation community, that lets its annotators work whenever they want, tackling image or speech annotation tasks on the go. It’s available on iOS and Android starting today.

It’s a natural evolution of the market, CEO Daniela Braga told me. There’s a huge demand for this kind of annotation work, and it makes no sense to restrict the schedules or platforms of the people doing it. She suggested everyone in the annotation space would have apps soon, just as every productivity or messaging service does. And why not?

The company is growing quickly, going from a handful of employees to over a hundred, spread over its offices in Lisbon, Porto, Seattle, and Tokyo. The market, likewise, is exploding as more and more companies find that AI is not just applicable to what they do, but not out of their reach.

Biofourmis, a Singapore-based startup pioneering a distinctly tech-based approach to the treatment of chronic conditions, has raised a $35 million Series B round for expansion.

The round was led by Sequoia India and MassMutual Ventures, the VC fund from Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. Other investors who put in include EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, China-based healthcare platform Jianke and existing investors Openspace Ventures, Aviva Ventures and SGInnovate, a Singapore government initiative for deep tech startups. The round takes Biofourmis to $41.6 million raised to date, according to Crunchbase.

This isn’t your typical TechCrunch funding story.

Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput moved to Singapore to start a PhD, but he dropped out to start the business with co-founder Wendou Niu in 2015 because he saw the potential to “predict disease before it happens,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

AI-powered specialist post-discharge care

There are a number of layers to Biofourmis’ work, but essentially it uses a combination of data collected from patients and an AI-based system to customize treatments for post-discharge patients. The company is focused on a range of therapeutics, but its most advanced is cardiac, so patients who have been discharged after heart failure or other heart-related conditions.

With that segment of patients, the Biofourmis platform uses a combination of data from sensors — medical sensors rather than consumer wearables, which are worn 24/7 — and its tech to monitor patient health, detect problems ahead of time and prescribe an optimum treatment course. That information is disseminated through companion mobile apps for patients and caregivers.

That’s to say that medicine works differently on different people, so by collecting and monitoring data and crunching numbers, Biofourmis can provide the best drug to help optimize a patient’s health through what it calls a ‘digital pill.’ That’s not Matrix-style futurology, it’s more like a digital prescription that evolves based on the needs of a patient in real-time. It plans to use a network of medical delivery platforms, including Amazon-owned PillPack, to get the drugs to patients within hours.

Yes, that’s future tense because Biofourmis is waiting on FDA approval to commercialize its service. That’s expected to come by the end of this year, Singh Rajput told TechCrunch. But he’s optimistic given clinical trials, which have covered some 5,000 patients across 20 different sites.

On the tech side, Singh Rajput said Biofourmis has seen impressive results with its predictions. He cited tests in the U.S. which enabled the company to “predict heart failure 14 days in advance” with around 90 percent sensitivity. That was achieved using standard medical wearables at the cost of hundreds of dollars, rather than thousands with advanced kit such as Heartlogic from Boston Scientific — although the latter has a longer window for predictions.

The type of disruption that Biofourmis might appear to upset the applecart for pharma companies, but Singh Rajput maintains that the industry is moving towards a more qualitative approach to healthcare because it has been hard to evaluate the performance of drugs and price them accordingly.

“Today, insurance companies are blinded not having transparency on how to price drugs,” he said. “But there are already 50 drugs in the market paying based on outcomes so the market is moving in that direction.”

Outcome-based payments mean insurance firms reimburse all outcomes based on the performance of the drugs, in other words how well patients recover. The rates vary, but a lack of reduction in remission rates can see insurers lower their payouts because drugs aren’t working as well as expected.

Singh Rajput believes Biofourmis can level the playing field and added more granular transparency in terms of drug performance. He believes pharma companies are keen to show their products perform better than others, so over the long-term that’s the model Biofourmis wants to encourage.

Indeed, the confidence is such that Biofourmis intends to initially go to market via pharma companies, who will sell the package into clinics bundled with their drugs, before moving to work with insurance firms once traction is gained. While the Biofourmis is likely to be bundled with initial medication, the company will take a commission of 5-10 percent on the recommended drugs sold through its digital pill.

Doubling down on the US

With its new money, Biofourmis is doubling down on that imminent commercialization by relocating its headquarters to Boston. It will retain its presence in Singapore, where it has 45 people who handle software and product development, but the new U.S. office is slated to grow from 14 staff right now to up to 120 by the end of the year.

“The U.S. has been a major market focus since day one,” Singh Rajput said. “Being closer to customers and attracting the clinical data science pool is critical.”

While he praised Singapore and said the company remains committed to the country — adding EDBI to its investors is certainly a sign — he admitted that Boston, where he once studied, is a key market for finding “data scientists with core clinical capabilities.”

That expansion is not only to bring the cardio product to market, but also to prepare products to cover other therapeutics. Right now, it has six trials in place that cover pain, orthopedics and oncology. There are also plans to expand in other markets outside of the U.S, and in particular Singapore and China, where Biofourmis plans to lead on Jianke.

Not lacking in confidence, Singh Rajput told TechCrunch that the company is on course to reach a $1 billion valuation when it next raises funding, that’s estimated as 18 months away and the company isn’t saying how much it is worth today.

Singh Rajput did confirm, however, that the round was heavily oversubscribed, and that the startup rebuffed investment offers from pharma companies in order to “avoid a conflict of interest and stay neutral.”

He is also eying a future IPO, which is tentatively set for 2023 — although by then, Singh Rajput said, Biofourmis would need at least two products in the market.

There’s a long way to go before then, but this round has certainly put Biofourmis and its digital pill approach on the map within the tech industry.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Millions of Instagram influencers had their private contact data scraped and exposed

A massive database containing contact information for millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts was found online by a security researcher.

We traced the database back to Mumbai-based social media marketing firm Chtrbox. Shortly after we reached out, Chtrbox pulled the database offline.

2. US mitigates Huawei ban by offering temporary reprieve

Last week, the Trump administration effectively banned Huawei from importing U.S. technology, a decision that forced several American companies, including Google, to take steps to sever their relationships. Now, the Department of Commerce has announced that Huawei will receive a “90-day temporary general license” to continue to use U.S. technology to which it already has a license.

3. GM’s car-sharing service Maven to exit eight cities

GM is scaling back its Maven car-sharing company and will stop service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities in which it operates.

4. Maisie Williams’ talent discovery startup Daisie raises $2.5M, hits 100K members

The actress who became famous playing Arya Stark on “Game of Thrones” has fresh funding for her startup.

5. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, plans to launch a free music streaming app

The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions with music labels to launch the app as soon as the end of this quarter.

6. Future Family launches a $200 membership for fertility coaching

In its recent user research, Future Family found that around 70% of new customers had yet to see a fertility doctor. So today, the startup is rolling out a new membership plan that offers customers a dedicated fertility coach, and helps them find a doctor in their area.

7. When will customers start buying all those AI chips?

Danny Crichton says it’s the best and worst time to be in semiconductors right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Another brick-and-mortar retailer is turning to Amazon to help save its struggling business. Today, discount chain operator Stein Mart announced it will install Amazon Hub lockers in nearly 200 stores as soon as next month. The lockers are self-serve kiosks that allow Amazon shoppers to take advantage of in-store pickup and returns.

The deal will bring increased foot traffic to Stein Mart stores, potentially increasing its sales.

Meanwhile, Amazon gains the advantage of a brick-and-mortar presence for delivery and returns without having to invest in more real estate or making an acquisition, as it did with Whole Foods. The move also benefits Amazon’s battle with Walmart — the latter which has been quick to leverage its brick-and-mortar locations to aid its online shoppers.

Walmart stores, for example, offer self-serve pickup towers for online orders, curbside pickup for groceries and other household needs, and other in-store pickup options. Last fall, it also began offering in-store returns for items from third-party marketplace sellers.

Stein Mart’s deal follows a larger industry trend of retailers and brands collaborating with, instead of fighting with, Amazon.

For example, department store chain Kohl’s recently expanded its own Amazon partnership.

Over the past couple of years, Kohl’s had been working with the e-commerce giant by allowing Amazon shoppers to bring their returns to one hundred Kohl’s stores across the U.S. The deal resulted in increased foot traffic and revenues — and some would say it even saved Kohl’s.

In April, Kohl’s said the Amazon returns program would expand to all 1,150 of its U.S. locations.

Stein Mart, which last year made Retail Dive’s list of 12 retailers at risk of bankruptcy, has been fighting across multiple fronts to survive. It has improved its merchandise, cleaned out inventory, cut costs, and tested services like ship-to-store. More recently, it began testing “endless aisles” (kiosks to connect store shoppers to broader online inventory), added mobile checkout and introduced a smarter fulfillment logic system to help fill web orders.

The company had also hinted last year it was open to almost anything, saying it planned to  “explore strategic alternatives” to help improve its declining sales.

Despite its improvements, the chain still ended up with a disappointing 2018 holiday sales season, and remains in need a bigger boost to its bottom line. That’s where the Amazon Hub lockers come in.

The program allows Amazon shoppers to choose a Locker location at their nearest Stein Mart as their shipping address for their online orders at checkout. When their item arrives, they’ll receive an email along with a barcode that’s used to pick up their package during store hours.

This immediately should increase foot traffic to Stein Mart stores, as it has at Kohl’s, Whole Foods, and other Amazon Locker locations. Over time, the hope is that Stein Mart sales will improve as well, if it’s able to successfully market its own in-store merchandise to the Amazon shoppers who drop by.

“We are thrilled to offer this innovative delivery experience to Amazon customers while introducing new shoppers to Stein Mart,” said Hunt Hawkins, Stein Mart’s CEO, in a statement. “Customer service and convenience are top priorities at Stein Mart, and the ability to give both to Amazon customers was a big factor in our decision to introduce this program.”

Stein Mart says the lockers will be available by early June.

Investors responded favorably to the news — as shares jumped 45 percent after the Amazon deal was announced.

In August of last year, Getaround scored $300 million from Softbank. Eight months later they handed that same amount to Drivy, a Parisian peer-to-peer car rental service that was Getaround’s ticket to tapping into European markets.

Both companies shared similar visions for the future of car ownership, they were about the same size, both were flirting with expanding beyond their home market, but only one had the power of the Vision Fund behind it.

The Exit is a new series at TechCrunch. It’s an exit interview of sorts with a VC who was in the right place at the right time but made the right call on an investment that paid off. [Have feedback? Shoot me an email at lucas@techcrunch.com] 

Alven Capital partner Jeremy Uzan first invested in Drivy’s seed round in 2013. Uzan joined Index Ventures co-leading a $2 million round that valued the company at less than $10 million. The firms would later join forces again for the company’s $8.3 million Series A.

I chatted at length with Uzan about what lies ahead for the Drive team, what Paris’s startup scene is still in desperate need of, and how Softbank’s power is becoming even more impossible to ignore.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

---

Getting the checkbook

Lucas Matney: So before we dive into this acquisition, tell me a little bit about how you got to the point where you were writing these checks in the first place.

Jeremy Uzan: So, I studied computer science and business and then spent three years as a tech banker. I was actually in a very small investment banking boutique in Paris helping young startups to raise their Series A rounds. They were all French companies, my first deal was with the YouTube competitor DailyMotion.

Roughly $165 billion worth of wholesale produce is bought and sold every year in the U.S. And while that number is expected to go up to $1 trillion by 2025, the business of agribusiness remains unaffected by technology advancements that have reshaped almost every other industry. ‘

Now Silo, a company which has recently raised $3 million from investors led by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital and including Semil Shah from Haystack Ventures; angel investors Kevin Mahaffey and Matt Brezina; and The Penny Newman Grain Company, an international grain and feed marketplace, is looking to change that. 

Silo’s chief executive, Ashton Braun, spent years working in commodities marketplaces as a coffee trader in Singapore and moved to California after business school. As part of the founding team at Kite with Adam Smith, Braun worked on getting Kite’s software to automate computer programming off the ground, but he’d never let go of creating a tool that could help farmers and buyers better communicate and respond to demand signals, Braun says.

“I was a super young, green, bright-eyed potential entrepreneur,” says Braun. Eventually, when Kite sold to Microsoft, Braun took the opportunity to develop the software that had been on his mind for four-and-a-half years.

He’d seen the technology work in another industry closer to home. Growing up in Boston, Braun had seen how technology was used to update the fishing industry, giving ships a knowledge of potential buyers of their catch while they were still out in ocean waters.

“When you’re moving a product that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars and has a shelf life of a few days there’s literally no room for error and there’s a lot you need to do,” says Braun. It’s a principle that applies not only to seafood but to the hundreds of millions of dollars of produce and meat that comes from farms in places like California. “What we want to do is we want communication and data to live int he right places at the right time.”

Braun says there’s limited data coming in to farmers to let them know what demand for certain produce looks like, so they’re making guesses that have real financial outcomes with very little data.

Silo’s software vets and supports buyers and suppliers to give farmers a window into demand and potential buyers a view into available supply and quality.

“What Silo is building has the potential to make marketing and distribution of agriculture incredibly more efficient, which is a win both for the suppliers and buyers. We’re excited to support and assist this team as they work to move agriculture forward,” said Eric Woersching, General Partner at Initialized Capital, in a statement.

Silo is using the new financing to make a hiring push and develop new products and services to support liquidity in its perishable goods marketplace.

While an earlier generation of agribusiness software focused on increasing productivity on farms, a new crop of companies is targeting the business of farming itself. Companies like AgriChain and GrainChain, also offer supply chain management software for farming, and WorldCover is creating insurance products for small farmowners in emerging markets.

The penetration of technology through near ubiquitous mobile devices, coupled with sensing technologies and machine learning enhanced predictive software is transforming one of the world’s oldest industries.

“I’ve come across quite a few marketplace platforms attempting to serve different segments of the agriculture supply chain, and none of which have come close to impressing me to the degree Silo has in their tech-forward approach to reducing the friction that comes with managing all aspects of the supply chain on their platform. Silo’s deployment of machine learning streamlines the process, requiring little to no change in their users’ workflow, and removes many barriers of their platform reaching critical mass,” said Matthew Nicoletti, commodity trader at The Penny Newman Grain Company.  

A week after Sonos added long-promised Google Assistant integration to a pair of speakers, Bose is following suit. The company’s bringing the popular smart home AI to a trio of existing models, the Home Speaker 500 and Soundbar 500 and 700. The forthcoming, pint-sized Home Speaker 300 will be hitting the market with the feature built in.

Like Sonos, you’ll get your standard array of Assistant queries, including music playback, Chromecast TV control and the ability to control connected home features like smart lighting. All of that will be accessible through the built-in speaker array. Like Sonos, the aforementioned speakers are also compatible with Alexa.

It’s clearly in the best interest of these third party manufacturers not to have to play sides. For Google and Amazon, it means bringing their respective smart home ecosystems to a pair of well-regarded brands. Also like Sonos, setup happens in the company’s music app, which means, unfortunately, that you won’t have the full suite of setup options you get with Google’s own Home speakers.

The upgrade is available starting today. Additional features, including news and podcasts are coming this summer. Ditto for the Home Speaker 300, which is arriving this summer.

Sun Basket, a provider of a healthy meal delivery service, has raised another $30 million in venture capital funding. The round, led by PivotNorth Capital, brings the company’s total raised to $125 million.

The Series E funding delays Sun Basket’s expected initial public offering once again. There’s been unsubstantiated talk of a Sun Basket float for quite some time; in fact, before Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, a pair of fellow meal kit delivery businesses, completed IPOs, Sun Basket was the subject of exit rumors. Alas, we will have to wait a while longer before the company makes the big leap.

After all, Blue Apron has performed very poorly since going public on the New York Stock Exchange two years ago. Sun Basket chief executive has been honest about the difficulties of being a meal kit startup in a post-Blue Apron IPO universe, telling PitchBook his company’s Series D round “was by far the most challenging fundraise” in his company’s history.

Sun Basket, headquartered in San Francisco, was founded in 2014 by award-winning chefs Adam Zbar and Justine Kelly. The company delivers fresh, organic and sustainable ingredients to customers, setting itself apart from the large number of meal-kit providers active in the U.S. Its latest infusion of capital will be used to expand their offerings to include breakfast, lunch and dinner, “personalized for any lifestyle.”

“We’re thrilled to have the strong support of our investors who share our vision for building the leading personalized healthy eating platform,” CEO Zbar said in a statement. “Food is a $1T market ripe for online disruption, and Sun Basket will continue to innovate, focusing on our customers’ top three needs: health, ease, and personalization.”

Sun Basket says its growing fast. In its funding announcement, the business cited a compound annual growth rate of 80 percent over the last three years with “the best unit economics in the space.” Sapphire Ventures, August Capital, Founders Circle, Unilever Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Relevance Capital, Accolade Partners, and Correlation Ventures have also particiated in the round.

Despite known issues in the space, a tough path to profitabliity and high-profile failures (see ‘After Raising $125M, Munchery Fails To Deliver’), venture capital investors continue to make deals in the meal kit/ food delivery space. From large financings like DoorDash’s $400 million Series F to GrubMarket’s recent $25 million deal, food startups continue to attract investment.