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A year ago, Starship Technologies had a couple hundred autonomous bots delivering burritos and pizzas to  students on college campuses and residents in a few neighborhoods.

The company — with $17 million of new capital in its coffers — has expanded its fleet five-fold since COVID-19 swept through the European and North American markets that it operates in. While COVID-19 delivered pain and chaos, including to Starship Technologies, the company has also experienced an uptick in demand as restaurants switched to a takeout and delivery-only model. Starship now has 1,000 autonomous delivery bots in its fleet.

Starship Technologies said last year it planned to expand to 100 universities by late summer 2021. That’s a leap from the 15 campuses it operates at today. Still, the company is expanding in just about every measurable way, including locations, volume of trips, fleet size and workforce, which now number 400 people. The company said it is bringing new college campuses on every month and has a robust pipeline that will come online as classes resume.

The company’s recent $17 million raise, which was announced Tuesday, included investors TDK Ventures and Goodyear Ventures. The new investment brings Starship’s total funding to $102 million. Starship decline to share its valuation. The company also announced it has expanded to UCLA and Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.

Image Credits: Starship Technologies

Starship Technologies, which was launched in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has grown from an enterprise that completed 5,000 deliveries in 2017 to 1 million by January of this year. It’s also expanded beyond college campuses and communities like Milton Keyes, UK to more towns, including a 5,000-household area in Northhampton, UK and the California cities of Mountain View and Modesto.

Classiq, a Tel Aviv-based startup that aims to make it easier for computer scientists and developers to create quantum algorithms and applications, today announced that it has raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by Team8 Capital and Wing Capital. Entrée Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Sumitomo Corporation (through IN Venture) also participated in this round, which follows the company’s recent $4 million seed round led by Entrée Capital.

The idea behind Classiq, which currently has just under a dozen members on its team, is that developing quantum algorithms remains a major challenge.

“Today, quantum software development is almost an impossible task,” said Nir Minerbi, CEO and Co-founder of Classiq. “The programming is at the gate level, with almost no abstraction at all. And on the other hand, for many enterprises, that’s exactly what they want to do: come up with game-changing quantum algorithms. So we built the next layer of the quantum software stack, which is the layer of a computer-aided design, automation, synthesis. […] So you can design the quantum algorithm without being aware of the details and the gate level details are automated.”

Image Credits: Classiq

With Microsoft’s Q#, IBM’s Qiskit and their competitors, developers already have access to quantum-specific languages and frameworks. And as Amir Naveh, Classiq’s VP of R&D told me, just like with those tools, developers will define their algorithms as code — in Classiq’s case a variant of Python. With those other languages, though, you will write sequences of gates on the cubits to define your quantum circuit.

“What you’re writing down isn’t gates on cubits, its concepts, its constructs, its constraints — it’s always constraints on what you want the circuit to achieve,” Naveh explained. “And then the circuit is synthesized from the constraints. So in terms of the visual interface, it would look the same [as using other frameworks], but in terms of what’s going through your head, it’s a whole different level of abstraction, you’re describing the circuit at a much higher level.”

This, he said, gives Classiq’s users the ability to more easily describe what they are trying to do. For now, though, that also means that the platform’s users tend to be quantum teams and scientists and developers who are quantum experts and understand how to develop quantum circuits at a very deep level. The team argues, though, that as the technology gets better, developers will need to have less and less of an understanding of how the actual qubits behave.

As Minerbi stressed, the tool is agnostic to the hardware that will eventually run these algorithms. Classiq’s mission, after all, is to provide an additional abstraction layer on top of the hardware. At the same time, though, developers can optimize their algorithms for specific quantum computing hardware as well.

Classiq CTO Dr. Yehuda Naveh also noted that the company is already working with a number of larger companies. These include banks that have used its platform for portfolio optimization, for example, and a semiconductor firm that was looking into a material science problem related to chip manufacturing, an area that is a bit of a sweet spot for quantum computing — at least in its current state.

The team plans to use the new funding to expand its existing team, mostly on the engineering side. A lot of the work the company is doing, after all, is still in R&D. Finding the right software engineers with a background in physics — or quantum information experts who can program — will be of paramount importance for the company. Minerbi believes that is possible, though, and the plan is to soon expand the team to about 25 people.

“We are thrilled to be working with Classiq, assisting the team in achieving their goals of advancing the quantum computing industry,” said Sarit Firon, Managing Partner at Team8 Capital. “As the quantum era takes off, they have managed to solve the missing piece in the quantum computing puzzle, which will enable game-changing quantum algorithms. We look forward to seeing the industry grow, and witnessing how Classiq continues to mark its place as a leader in the industry.”

The pandemic has spelled economic setbacks for many people and industries, but the capital swirling about the technology world continues to roar along. In the latest development, TCV — the storied venture capital firm behind the likes of Airbnb, Spotify, Peloton and Facebook — has closed a record $4 billion for its latest fund.

This is not only the company’s biggest fund to date, but it also speaks to just how fast the tech industry is accelerating in terms of capital and how much of it tech is attracting. In 25 years of operations (a milestone it passed in 2020) TCV invested $14 billion across hundreds of startups. This latest $4 billion fund raised in a matter of months represents nearly 30% of that figure.

(It’s also more than the company originally targeted, which was $3.25 billion.)

Parter John Doran told TechCrunch the plan will be to use the money to continue backing existing portfolio companies, as well as make new bets, both in areas that have shown to be very strong winners in the last year — e-commerce, education, and tools to enable working in the cloud, for example — but also investments in areas that may not be doing as well right now, but TCV will believes will return, like travel.

“We have to take a long term view,” he said in an interview. “It’s about great founders and CEOs, and where those in areas like travel, you’ll still see the startups get funded at up rounds. Besides, who will be better positioned to grow and take advantage of a world that’s now more digital? That is a huge opportunity in the long term.”

As with other big capital events, the closing of a VC fund may not be intrinsically interesting news in itself, but it’s a significant bellwether that points to the level of confidence, interest and activity in the early stages of the funding process. That, in turn, has a direct knock-on effect for startups, and subsequently the technology industry at large.

In the case of TCV XI, as it is known, it’s a sign of strength in the market — it is $1 billion more than its previous fund, closed before the pandemic in 2019 — but also an endorsement of some of the less traditional processes and practices that have become the norm in many of our lives.

Notably, the raising (and closing) of the fund was done entirely virtually over the last year, Julia Roux, the company’s head of investor relations, told TechCrunch, from a mix of returning and new LPs. Going virtual is also, in many cases, the route that TCV (and other VCs) have taken in closing deals over the last year too, which looks like it may now be here to stay.

TCV has been very active in the past year, not just with private startup investments but seeing one of its most successful startups go public. Airbnb boldly went for an IPO in December, in the wake of a year that saw its business providing accommodation and other services to travellers come to a grinding halt.

The IPO was an example of the kind of more long-term investing that the firm is keen on doing (and very much has the funds to do now) despite current market conditions. Doran pointed out that TCV remains a “big believers in the Airbnb story,” investing in more shares in the company in the IPO.

Other big investments this year have included a lot of activity in commerce and fintech — including Mollie (raised $106 million), Spryker ($130 million), Revolut ($500 million), Klarna ($650 million), Nubank ($400 million) and Mambu ($135 million) — and Strava ($110 million). (Note how many of those rounds were outside the U.S.: almost all of them. The company says it has some $4 billion under management outside the U.S. now.)

Recent exits include AxiomSL, Genesys, Cradlepoint, and Silver Peak.

“We are humbled by the ongoing support of new and returning investors, which enabled us to raise a record sized fund,” said Jay Hoag, a founding general partner at TCV, in a statement. “Just as importantly, we are honored by all the great entrepreneurs we’ve worked with over the past 25 years, as their vision and relentless execution has been our foundation. We look forward to backing entrepreneurs with our new fund that we believe will become the next generation of iconic companies, in this incredibly fertile technology industry.”

It’s not every day you see a Latin American startup funded by a U.S. venture capital firm based in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian startup that wants to bring a positive twist to customer service monitoring announced a $25 million Series A from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO VC firm. It has now raised $34 million.

While it was at it, Playvox also announced something else unusual for an early stage company: an acquisition. The startup bought an Australian company called Agyle Time, a workforce monitoring SaaS tool. The acquisition brings together two companies with similar missions to provide a more complete customer service solution.

Playvox founder and CEO Oscar Giraldo founded the company in 2012 and has been quietly building it into an international business with brand name customers like Dropbox, Electronic Arts and Wish. The company’s Workforce Optimization platform works as a layer on top of customer service center management tools like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing management to monitor digital channels and give customer service agents feedback to help them do their jobs better.

“When you call a contact center or a company, you may hear that ‘this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes’. So Playvox is a technology that works on the backend of [the customer service system] to manage the workforce that is responsible for providing a great customer experience,” Giraldo explained. It does this, but instead of for calls, it focuses on chat and email interactions.

Giraldo got the idea for the business nine years ago when he was working as a software engineer in Argentina and toured some customer service centers, where he observed a lot of disgruntled and unhappy employees. He wanted to start a company that would help give feedback to these employees in a more constructive and positive way.

“Instead of the traditional approach of customer service QA that was punishing the agents [for mistakes], what we do is we use that data to train them with a learning management system that is integrated in the platform, and have coaching tools that allow our customers to provide timely feedback to the agent so they can change their behavior for the better,” he said.

The Agyle Time acquisition enables the company to expand beyond this feedback system into customer service workforce scheduling and position them to compete in the enterprise market with a more complete toolset. “What we see is that combining the quality management agent optimization tools that Playvox has built with Agyle Time’s workforce management will allow us to be a unique vendor in the marketplace,” Giraldo said.

As for Five Elms, it’s a firm that invests between $4 and $40 million in companies that have between $2 and $20 million in revenue. They like SaaS companies in atypical places with portfolio companies in Fayetteville, AK, Columbus, OH and Brisbane Australia. Playvox fits nicely in that group.

“Playvox continues to deliver extraordinary products, add renowned brands to its customer base, and attract exceptional executives because of its company values and culture,” Ryan Mandl, managing director at Five Elms Capital said in a statement.

Datastax, the company best known for commercializing the open-source Apache Cassandra database, is moving beyond databases. As the company announced today, it has acquired Kesque, a cloud messaging service.

The Kesque team built its service on top of the Apache Pulsar messaging and streaming project. Datastax has now taken that team’s knowledge in this area and, combined with its own expertise, is launching its own Pulsar-based streaming platform by the name of Datastax Luna Streaming, which is now generally available.

This move comes right as Datastax is also now, for the first time, announcing that it is cash-flow positive and profitable, as the company’s chief product officer, Ed Anuff, told me. “We are at over $150 million in [annual recurring revenue]. We are cash-flow positive and we are profitable,” he told me. This marks the first time the company is publically announcing this data. In addition, the company also today revealed that about 20 percent of its annual contract value is now for DataStax Astra, its managed multi-cloud Cassandra service and that the number of self-service Asta subscribers has more than doubled from Q3 to Q4.

The launch of Luna Streaming now gives the 10-year-old company a new area to expand into — and one that has some obvious adjacencies with its existing product portfolio.

“We looked at how a lot of developers are building on top of Cassandra,” Anuff, who joined Datastax after leaving Google Cloud last year, said. “What they’re doing is, they’re addressing what people call ‘data-in-motion’ use cases. They have huge amounts of data that are coming in, huge amounts of data that are going out — and they’re typically looking at doing something with streaming in conjunction with that. As we’ve gone in and asked, “What’s next for Datastax?,’ streaming is going to be a big part of that.”

Given Datastax’s open-source roots, it’s no surprise the team decided to build its service on another open-source project and acquire an open-source company to help it do so. Anuff noted that while there has been a lot of hype around streaming and Apache Kafka, a cloud-native solution like Pulsar seemed like the better solution for the company. Pulsar was originally developed at Yahoo! (which, full disclosure, belongs to the same Verizon Media Group family as TechCrunch) and even before acquiring Kesque, Datastax already used Pulsar to build its Astra platform. Other Pulsar users include Yahoo, Tencent, Nutanix and Splunk.

“What we saw was that when you go and look at doing streaming in a scale-out way, that Kafka isn’t the only approach. We looked at it, and we liked the Pulsar architecture, we like what’s going on, we like the community — and remember, we’re a company that grew up in the Apache open-source community — we said, ‘okay, we think that it’s got all the right underpinnings, let’s go and get involved in that,” Anuff said. And in the process of doing so, the team came across Kesque founder Chris Bartholomew and eventually decided to acquire his company.

The new Luna Streaming offering will be what Datastax calls a “subscription to success with Apache Pulsar.’ It will include a free, production-ready distribution of Pulsar and an optional, SLA-backed subscription tier with enterprise support.

Unsurprisingly, Datastax also plans to remain active in the Pulsar community. The team is already making code contributions, but Anuff also stressed that Datastax is helping out with scalability testing. “This is one of the things that we learned in our participation in the Apache Cassandra project,” Anuff said. “A lot of what these projects need is folks coming in doing testing, helping with deployments, supporting users. Our goal is to be a great participant in the community.”

After revealing its first fund just last year, a $100 million pool of investment capital dedicated to early stage startups focusing on sustainable food development, clean energy, health innovation and new space technologies, Prime Movers Lab is back with a second fund. Prime Movers Lab Fund II is larger, with $245 million committed, but it will pursue the same investment strategy, albeit with a plan to place more bets on more companies, with an expanded investment team to help manage the funds and portfolio.

“There are a lot of VCs out there,” explained founder and general partner Dakin Sloss about the concept behind the fund. “But there aren’t many VCs that are focused exclusively on breakthrough science, or deep tech. Even though there are a couple, when you look at the proportion of capital, I think it’s something like less than 10% of capital is going to these types of companies. But if you look at what’s meaningful to the life of the average person over the next 30 years, these are all the companies that are important, whether it’s coronavirus vaccine,s or solar energy production, or feeding the planet through aquaponics. These are the things that are really meaningful to to making a better quality of life for most people.”

Sloss told me that he sees part of the issue around why the proportion of capital dedicated to solving these significant problems is that it requires a lot of deep category knowledge to invest in correctly.

“There’s not enough technical expertise in VC firms to choose winners intelligently, rather than ending up with the next Theranos or clean tech bubble,” he said. “So that’s the first thing I wanted to solve. I have a physics background, and I was able to bring together a team of partners that have really deeply technical backgrounds.”

As referenced, Sloss himself has a degree from Stanford in Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy. He was a serial entrepreneur before starting the fund, having founded Tachyus, OpenGov and nonprofit California Common Sense. Other Partners on the team include systems engineer Dan Slomski, who previously worked on machine vision, electro-mechanical systems and developing a new multi-phase flow fluid analyzer; Amy Kruse, who holds a PhD in neuroscience and has served as an executive in defence technology and applied neuroscience companies; and Carly Anderson, a chemical engineer who has worked in biomedicine and oil & gas, and who has a PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering. In addition to core partners with that kind of expertise, Prime Movers Lab enlists the help of venture partners and specialist advisors like former astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Having individuals with deep field expertise on the core team, in addition to supplementing that with top-notch advisors, is definitely a competitive advantage, particularly when investing in the kinds of companies that Prime Movers Lab does early on in their development. There’s a perception that companies pursuing these kinds of hard tech problems aren’t necessarily as viable as a target for traditional venture funding, specifically because of the timelines for returns. Sloss says he believes that’s a misperception based on unfortunate past experience.

“I think there are three big myths about breakthrough science or hard tech or deep tech,” he said. “That it takes longer, that it’s more capital intensive, and that it’s higher risk. And I think the reason those myths are out there is people invested in things like Theranos, and the clean tech bubble. But I think that there were fundamental mistakes made in how they underwrote risk of doing that.”

Image Credits: Momentus

To avoid making those kinds of mistakes, Sloss says that Prime Movers Lab views prospective investments from the perspective of a “spectrum of risk,” which includes risk of the science itself (does the fundamental technology involve actually work), engineering risk (given the science works, can we make it something we can sell) and finally, commercialization or scaling risk (can we then make it and sell it at scale with economics that work). Sloss says that if you use this risk matrix to assess investments, and allocated funds to address primarily the engineering risk category, concerns around timeframes to return don’t really apply.

He cites Primer Movers Lab’s Fund I portfolio, which includes space propulsion company Momentus, heading for an exit to the public markets via SPAC (the company’s Russian CEO actually just resigned in order to smooth the path for that, in fact), and notes that of the 15 companies that Fund I invested in, four are totally on a path to going public. That would put them much faster to an exit than is typical for early stage investment targets, and Sloss credits the very different approach most hard science startups take to IP development and capital.

“The inflection points in these types of companies are actually I think faster to get to market, because they’ve spent years developing the IP, staying at relatively low or attractive valuations,” he said. “Then we can kind of come in, at that inflection point, and help them get ready to commercialize and scale up exponentially, to where other investors no longer have to underwrite the difference between science and engineering risk, they can just see it’s working and producing revenue.”

Companies that fit this mold often come directly from academia, and keep the team small and focused while they’re figuring out the core scientific discovery or innovation that enables the business. A prime example of this in recent memory is Wingcopter, a German drone startup that developed and patented a technology for a tilt-wing rotor that changes the economics of electric autonomous drone flight. The startup just took its first significant startup investment after bootstrapping for four years, and the funds will indeed be used to help it accelerate engineering on a path towards high-volume production.

While Wingcopter isn’t a Prime Movers Lab portfolio company, many of its investments fit the same mold. Boom Aerospace is currently working on building and flying its subscale demonstration aircraft to pave the way for a future supersonic airliner, while Axiom Space just announced the first crew of private tourists to the International Space Station who will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 for $50 million a piece. As long as you can prove the fundamentals are sound, allocating money turning it into something marketable seems like a logical strategy.

For Prime Movers Lab’s Fund II, the plan is to invest in around 30 or so companies, roughly doubling the number of investments from Fund I. In addition to its partners with scientific expertise, the firm also includes Partners with skill sets including creative direction, industrial design, executive coaching and business acumen, and provides those services to its portfolio companies as value-add to help them supplement their technical innovations. Its Fund I portfolio includes Momentus and Axiom, as mentioned, as well as vertical farming startup Upward Farms, coronavirus vaccine startup Covaxx, and more.

People and businesses are relying on the internet to get things done more than ever before, an opportunity but also an infrastructure headache for service providers that need to scale quickly and reliably to meet that demand.

Today, a startup that has built a clever, software-based way for them to expand their networks without buying costly equipment is announcing a major round of funding on the back of its business booming.

DriveNets — which provides software-based routing solutions to service providers that run them as virtualized services over “white box” generic architecture — has closed $208 million in funding, a Series B that values the company at over $1 billion post-money.

The plan will be to use the funding to continue building out the business internationally and to tailor it to more use cases beyond carriers, including the wave of bigger companies that stream large amounts of media and have some control over their networks as a result.

Future deals are still under NDA, CEO Ido Susan said but described the opportunity as a clear one: “If you want to serve bandwidth with low latency, if you want to offer strong 5g capability or cloud gaming, you need to be close to your end customer.”

The Series B is being D1 Capital Partners. Previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango (which co-led DriveNets’ previous, $110 million round when it emerged from stealth) also made a significant investment, and Atreides Management also participated. This latest round was made at more than double DriveNets’ valuation in 2019.

D1 has been an especially prolific investor in the last year, going big on businesses that are seeing a lot of attention as a result of pandemic conditions. They include e-commerce giants Warby Parker and Instacart, fintech TransferWise, gaming engine Unity, online car sales platform Cazoo, and transportation startup Bolt.

DriveNets’ big round is based both on bigger trends in the market, as well as its own strong record.

Before this round, DriveNets had already counted AT&T among its customers, a major vote of confidence for the company and its virtual network approach, but it seems that recent circumstances and the spike in internet activity have brought more providers to consider its approach.

“The internet was growing 30%-40% annually even before Covid-19,” said Susan. “But even five years ago, incumbent carriers were coming to us saying, said no one can build virtual networks. Now, it’s not a question of whether it works or not, but when you will adopt it.”

Recent momentum for the company’s sales, he said, is very good. “Everyone is working and studying from home so you need more capacity and bandwidth in the network,” he added. 

DriveNets’ core product is a more flexible and cost-effective replacement for the traditional network router that relies on virtualized architecture. Traditionally, routers have been sold as vertically-integrated hardware solutions, bringing together both software and hardware into one branded big box, with companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks dominating the space.

In their place, as Susan and co-founder Hillel Kobrinsky envisioned it, DriveNets provides a solution that is based around generic white boxes. It currently works with three providers for these boxes, Susan said.

These work in conjunction with a system it has developed called Network Cloud, which in turn runs a networking stack called the DriveNets Operating System. Service providers control their systems of white boxes and other servers through a virtualized service run over Docker containers, using open APIs to automate and configure various network services. This allows for more flexibility in capacity among the white box servers, but they can also be easily added and removed as needed. Essentially, it’s a system that disaggregates the software from the hardware, to make expanding the hardware much easier, and controlling the software significantly more flexible to boot.

It’s a disruptive concept that potentially steps on a lot of toes, but Adam Fisher, a partner with Bessemer, said that he’s confident it’s one that will continue to gain traction.

“We are extremely enthusiastic about the company,” he said. “Aside from Ido and Hillel as entrepreneurs, we really connected with their vision. Network routing is moving to software and cloud architecture. We’re talking not just about the small parts here but the hearts and lungs of the system. DriveNets is starting with the hardest parts. Once one customer becomes multiple customers, you just realise it’s the future.”

Beauty and wellness appointment booking apps have proliferated of the last few years, but it appears the race is still on as today one of the leaders, Booksy, raises $70 million in a Series C round led by Cat Rock Capital, with participation from Sprints Capital. 

The round was also joined by OpenOcean, Piton Capital, VNV Global, Enern, Kai Hansen, Zach Coelius and Manta Ray Ventures, and takes the total raised by the firm to $119 million. The funding will be used for expansion plans across North America, expanding to new verticals, and acquiring complementary businesses.

The Booksy app is used by customers to book and pay for beauty appointments with local businesses. Salons, nail bars and barbershops can manage the bookings, payments, and customer base via the accompanying Booksy Biz app. The platform also allows salons to sell other products via Booksy E-Commerce, which acts as a marketplace allowing customers to discover and book other local stylists, nail technicians etc.

Booksy was founded by Polish entrepreneurs Stefan Batory (CEO) and Konrad Howard. Allowing customers to schedule their best appointment time means that 38% of customers end up booking after-hours and increasing their appointment frequency by 20%, says the company. The startup launched in 2014 but is now in the US (its largest market), UK, Poland, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa. It claims to be the number-one beauty booking app in each country, with “13 million” consumers on the app.

Batory said in a statement: “Like with many sectors negatively hit by the pandemic, it’s been a turbulent time for the beauty and wellness industry but we’re confident in its ability to come back from this, so it’s fantastic to see our latest group of investors share our optimism and vision. This latest round of funding enables us to reach even more salons and service providers across the US, and in all the regions we operate, which in turn helps them reach more customers.” 

Alex Captain, founder and managing partner at Cat Rock Capital, said: “We are incredibly excited to invest in Booksy as it builds the leading global software platform for digitizing the beauty and wellness industry around the world.”

Booksy certainly seems to have cracked the international expansion game ahead of most competitors, which tend to stay more local to their countries of origin such as Treatwell, Styleseat, Vagaro and Mindbody. The opportunity for Booksy is to now use its war cast to roll-up other local players.

It has already acquired rival Lavito in 2018 and, more recently, merged with Versum in December 2020 allowing it to enter Mexico.

Lime is adding electric mopeds — painted in the company’s signature green — to its micromobility platform as the startup aims to own the spectrum of inner city travel from jaunts to the corner store to longer distance trips up to five miles.

Lime said Wednesday it plans to launch as many as 600 electric mopeds on its platform this spring in Washington D.C. The company is also working with officials to pilot the mopeds in Paris. Eventually, the mopeds will be offered in a “handful of cities” over the next several months.

The mopeds, supplied by manufacturer Niu, are designed for two people and outfitted with tech like infrared-cameras in the helmet compartment that can detect if they’re in use during a trip, an effort aimed at rooting out misuse and increasing safety. Repeat offenders of Lime’s policies, which includes wearing a helmet at all times, will be kicked off the platform. Customers will also be required to take a selfie wearing the helmet at the start of a ride.

The helmets will be supplied by Moon for U.S. customers and Nikko for the European deployments.

The mopeds will have a top speed of 28 miles an hour and be able to travel up to 87 miles on a single charge. Unlike Lime scooters, in which gig economy workers can earn money by collecting, charging and bringing back to city streets, the mopeds will have swappable batteries and be maintained by full-time employees.

While it’s unclear if mopeds have always been part of Lime’s long-term plans, the company’s head of new mobility  told TechCrunch that they’ve been thinking about what the future of electrified urban transportation might include.

“As we’ve grown as a company, we understood that we just needed to follow what our riders were demanding which is further distances,” said Sean Arroyo, head of new mobility at Lime. “The ability to meet any trip, at anytime, anywhere, is something that’s at the foundation for us and so our riders really are the ones that pointed us in this direction.”

Lime CEO Wayne Ting first hinted late last year that a “third mode” of transport beyond scooters and bikes was in the works for the first quarter of 2021 as well as the addition of third-party companies to its platform. Last year, Lime also started to include on its app Wheels-branded electric bikes in certain cities. Ting said, at the time, that users should expect more partnerships like these.

The expansion into mopeds is the latest sign that Lime has managed to put some of its darker Covid-19-tainted times behind it. Lime underwent a round of layoffs in April, taking on capital from Uber the next month in a down-round that brought its valuation under the $1 billion mark. Lime paused most of its operations for a month during the early COVID-19 days.

But it has since rebounded. Ting said in November that the company is both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter and was on pace to be full-year profitable, excluding certain costs (EBIT), in 2021. It also had enough cash — or access to it — to expand into mopeds.

The question is, ‘whether more modes are on the way?’

Arroyo didn’t give specifics, but it does appear more is coming.

“I think throughout this year you’re gonna see us really expand, not just with modes, but optionality,” Arroyo said. ” For us it’s really about having a platform that’s available for all these trips, and then we want to be able to provide optionality that makes sense for the riders. Shared is a huge component, but there’s a lot of different levels of what shared looks like; and throughout 2021, I think you’re gonna see us offer quite a few different options as our modes expand.”

Gardin, a ‘deep tech’ hardware and software startup developing optical phenotyping technology and analytics to optimise food production, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding.

Leading the round is LDV Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, and MMC Ventures. A number of angel investors are also investing, including Pratima Aiyagari, Gilad Engel, and Abdulaziz Alrashed.

Founded in late 2019, Gardin’s mission, in the U.K. company’s own words, is to help everyone access high quality, nutritious food that is “good for you and for our planet”.

Specifically, the startup is developing tech for farms based on its own “optical phenotyping” hardware and accompanying analytics software. The idea is to enable food producers to measure and monitor the nutritional value of food, from “seed to plate in a real world environment,” rather than a lab.

“With deployment of Gardin’s OS, insight from our analytics will be delivered to help food producers optimise production, grow nutritious food, lower carbon footprint and reduce waste,” says founder and CEO Sumanta Talukdar. “At Gardin, we want to empower food producers to feed the world consciously, sustainably and nutritionally, as it should be”.

Talukdar says he started the company after learning that the traditional food industry currently “does not, or cannot, quantifiably measure food nutrition and quality”. This has seen Gardin partner with some of the leading crop and plant physiologists, phenotyping experts and plant scientists to identify the key biochemical mechanisms in various crops related to plant physiology.

“By designing hardware to specifically measure the signatures of these mechanisms, Gardin is able to quantify plant physiology and key compounds density with high fidelity (i.e. signal/noise ratio) at a cost similar to consumer electronics goods,” he explained. To achieve this, Gardin is employing a multispectral data fusion approach, using a suite of remote sensing and computer vision techniques to capture very specific data which is then “fused” to drive the analytics.

To that end, Gardin has been designed to assist both traditional and CEA (controlled environment agriculture), with the ambitious aim to become the new “food production gold standard”.

“Our full stack product is designed to run and optimise the entire growing environment running silently in the background like an OS i.e we are solving their problems, helping food producers grow higher quality food and reducing their operating costs and carbon footprint,” adds Talukdar.

“We have also designed our platform so we can integrate with their existing architectures. To us, asking a producer in what is already an asset heavy industry to change or add to their system to make us fit, was folly”.

In terms of traction, Talukdar says Gardin has already secured pilot trials that are ready to go live early this year with “key go-to-market clients. They include supermarket chains, food producers and vertical farms.