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Supabase, a YC-incubated startup that offers developers an open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase and similar platforms, today announced that it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Coatue, with participation from YC, Mozilla and a group of about 20 angel investors.

Currently, Supabase includes support for PostgreSQL databases and authentication tools, with a storage and serverless solution coming soon. It currently provides all the usual tools for working with databases — and listening to database changes — as well as a web-based UI for managing them. The team is quick to note that while the comparison with Google’s Firebase is inevitable, it is not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for it. And unlike Firebase, which uses a NoSQL database, Supabase is using PostgreSQL.

Indeed, the team relies heavily on existing open-source projects and contributes to them where it can. One of Supabase’s full-time employees maintains the PostgREST tool for building APIs on top of the database, for example.

“We’re not trying to build another system,” Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone told me. “We just believe that already there are well-trusted, scalable enterprise open-source products out there and they just don’t have this usability component. So actually right now, Supabase is an amalgamation of six tools, soon to be seven. Some of them we built ourselves. If we go to market and can’t find anything that we think is going to be scalable — or really solve the problems — then we’ll build it and we’ll open-source it. But otherwise, we’ll use existing tools.”

Image Credits: Supabase

The traditional route to market for open-source tools is to create a tool and then launch a hosted version — maybe with some additional features — to monetize the work. Supabase took a slightly different route and launched a hosted version right away.

If somebody would want to host the service themselves, the code is available, but running your own PaaS is obviously a major challenge, but that’s also why the team went with this approach. What you get with Firebase, he noted, is that it’s a few clicks to set everything up. Supabase wanted to be able to offer the same kind of experience. “That’s one thing that self-hosting just cannot offer,” he said. “You can’t really get the same wow factor that you can if we offered a hosted platform where you literally [have] one click and then a couple of minutes later, you’ve got everything set up.”

In addition, he also noted that he wanted to make sure the company could support the growing stable of tools it was building and commercializing its tools based on its database services was the easiest way to do so.

Like other Y Combinator startups, Supabase closed its funding round after the accelerator’s demo day in August. The team had considered doing a SAFE round, but it found the right group of institutional investors that offered founder-friendly terms to go ahead with this institutional round instead.

“It’s going to cost us a lot to compete with the generous free tier that Firebase offers,” Copplestone said. “And it’s databases, right? So it’s not like you can just keep them stateless and shut them down if you’re not really using them. [This funding round] gives us a long, generous runway and more importantly, for the developers who come in and build on top of us, [they can] take as long as they want and then start monetizing later on themselves.“

The company plans to use the new funding to continue to invest in its various tools and hire to support its growth.

“Supabase’s value proposition of building in a weekend and scaling so quickly hit home immediately,” said Caryn Marooney, general partner at Coatue and Facebook’s former VP of Global Communications. “We are proud to work with this team, and we are excited by their laser focus on developers and their commitment to speed and reliability.”

Twitter has a lot going on, and it’s not always easy to manage that kind of scale on your own. Today, Amazon announced that Twitter has chosen AWS to run its real-time timelines. It’s a major win for Amazon’s cloud arm.

While the companies have worked together in some capacity for over a decade, this marks the first time that Twitter is tapping AWS to help run its core timelines.

“This expansion onto AWS marks the first time that Twitter is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service. Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage, and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter,” the company explained in the announcement.

Parag Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer at Twitter sees this as a way to expand and improve the company’s real-time offerings by taking advantage of AWS’s network of data centers to deliver content closer to the user. “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services,” Agrawal said in a statement.

It’s worth noting that Twitter also has a relationship with Google Cloud. In 2018, it announced it was moving its Hadoop clusters to GCP.

This announcement could be considered a case of the rich getting richer as AWS is the leader in the cloud infrastructure market by far with around 33% market share. Microsoft is in second with around 18% and Google is in third with 9%, according to Synergy Research. In its most recent earnings report, Amazon reported that $11.6 billion in AWS revenue putting it on a run rate of over $46 billion.

Twitter has a lot going on, and it’s not always easy to manage that kind of scale on your own. Today, Amazon announced that Twitter has chosen AWS to run its real-time timelines. It’s a major win for Amazon’s cloud arm.

While the companies have worked together in some capacity for over a decade, this marks the first time that Twitter is tapping AWS to help run its core timelines.

“This expansion onto AWS marks the first time that Twitter is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service. Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage, and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter,” the company explained in the announcement.

Parag Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer at Twitter sees this as a way to expand and improve the company’s real-time offerings by taking advantage of AWS’s network of data centers to deliver content closer to the user. “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services,” Agrawal said in a statement.

It’s worth noting that Twitter also has a relationship with Google Cloud. In 2018, it announced it was moving its Hadoop clusters to GCP.

This announcement could be considered a case of the rich getting richer as AWS is the leader in the cloud infrastructure market by far with around 33% market share. Microsoft is in second with around 18% and Google is in third with 9%, according to Synergy Research. In its most recent earnings report, Amazon reported that $11.6 billion in AWS revenue putting it on a run rate of over $46 billion.

Parsec, a startup that’s built streaming technology for both work and play, is announcing that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding.

This brings Parsec’s total funding to $33 million, according to Crunchbase. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casado joining the board. Previous investors HP Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Makers Fund, NextView Ventures and Notation Capital also participated.

CEO Benjy Boxer told me that since he and CTO Chris Dickson founded the company in 2016, the vision has always been “to make it easier for people to connect to their technology, software and content from anywhere, on any device.”

They started out by helping gamers access their gaming PCs from other devices (the Parsec app is currently available Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Raspberry Pi and the web).

“From the beginning, we thought that if we could build something that is great for gaming, it will be great for everything,” Boxer said.

But it was a natural transition to other use cases, since some of the people using Parsec to play games in their free time also turned out to work at TV production companies, video game companies or in other jobs where they need access to high-end workstations. That’s why the company launched Parsec for Teams this year, which offers the same low-latency remote experience, while also adding features like encryption, group permissions and collaboration on the same file.

Image Credits: Parsec

“The performance of Parsec is just way above everything else,” Boxer said. “People forget they’re using Parsec.”

Parsec works with major gaming clients like EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard Entertainment and Square Enix, and it’s also being used in industries like architecture, engineering and video broadcast/production/post-production.

And as you might imagine, the need for something like this has only increased during the pandemic. Boxer said customers have found that the platform is saving their employees more than an hour a day by eliminating the commute and giving them high-speed access to their workstations — rather than, say, having to wait an hour for a 100 gigabyte file to download.

And most those clients anticipate that after the pandemic, their employees will continue for work from home for part of the time.

“So in that scenario, people are brining their computers back to the office, and they can use Parsec to make sure it’s always accessible to them,” Boxer said.

On the consumer side, he said that where usage was previously heaviest during the weekends, during the pandemic “there’s no spike anymore on the weekends, people are playing all the time.”

Boxer added that the company will continue developing the core platform, leading to improvements for both gaming and enterprise users, while there’s a separate team focused on building administrative and collaborative features.

In its latest bid to outspend the competition on podcasting exclusives, Spotify this morning announced that it has signed a multi-year deal with Archewell Audio, a new production founded by Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markel, The Duchess of Sussex. Financial details haven’t been disclosed, but given the profile of the names and the cost of previous exclusives, it seems safe to suggest the company paid a pretty penny here.

The first full podcast series is expected to arrive at some point in 2021, and like all Spotify podcasts, will be free for subscribers. Before then, however, Archewell and Spotify-owned Gimlet will release a holiday special co-hosted by the Duke and Duchess. As you’d imagine, that’s set to be released at some point this month. They will continue to both produce and host shows for the duration of the deal.

Here’s what the pair had to say in a joint statement offered to Spotify,

What we love about podcasting is that it reminds all of us to take a moment and to really listen, to connect to one another without distraction. With the challenges of 2020, there has never been a more important time to do so, because when we hear each other, and hear each other’s stories, we are reminded of how interconnected we all are.

Spotify, of course, has been spending hundreds of millions over the past couple of years to build a library of exclusive podcasting content. Last month the music streaming service spent $235 million to buy ad company, Megaphone. Other high-profile acquisitions include Gimlet, The Ringer, Parcast and Anchor. The company also signed controversial host Joe Rogan to a multi-year deal in excess of $100 million.

Over the course of the last few years, Skylum made a name for itself with a set of photo-editing apps like Aurora HDR and Luminar. With Luminar AI, it is now launching a brand-new photo editor, starting at $79. The new application, available as a standalone product for Mac and Windows and as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photos for MacOS, was built from the ground up and offers many of the traditional photo-editing features you’re probably familiar with from the likes of Lightroom. The focus, though, is on its new AI-based tools, with a special focus on editing landscapes (and skies in general) and portrait shoots.

In total, Skylum added 13 AI features to the application. You can use those to improve your composition, replace the sky in your images (and relight the scene accordingly), add fog, mist and haze, and manipulate the faces and bodies of your portrait subjects by simply dragging a few sliders.

The idea here is to make it very easy for beginners to improve their photos while also giving pros the tools to quickly get the results they are looking for.

“Our approach to AI lines up with that of the best minds in the field. What differentiates it, however, is our human-centric application of this incredibly powerful technology. In my experience, only 30% of our time is actually spent being creative,” said Alex Tsepko, CEO of Skylum. “Luminar AI uses artificial intelligence to flip those metrics. We created Luminar AI so people can focus on the outcomes and photos, and not worry so much about the editing process.”

Image Credits: Skylum / Jeong Kyu Kim

Image Credits: Skylum / Iurie Belegurschi

For beginners, the place to start is Luminar AI’s templates, which you can think of as very advanced filters that go well beyond what Instagram is capable of. The application automatically classifies the image to get started (say landscape or portrait) and gives you a list of matching templates. That’s cool and often a good start, but chances are if you invest in a tool like this, you’ll want more granular control.

Luminar AI’s marquee feature is its Sky AI, which lets you replace the sky in your images with a few clicks. To do this, you choose from a set of pre-made skies, including sunsets, or create your own library. Either way, the application can then relight the whole scene based on what that sky looks like. It works surprisingly well. There’s also an Augmented Sky AI, which is a bit more gimmicky and lets you add birds, planes and balloons to the sky. It’s not for me, but expect to see a lot of balloons in your favorite influencers’ images in the near future. For more subtle changes, you can opt for the Sky Enhancer AI, which makes your sky pop a little bit more.

Image Credits: Skylum

For more general editing, the Accent AI tool is quite useful to adjust brightness, contrast and color, while Structure AI brings more clarity to an image.

Skylum promises that those adjustments won’t look unnatural, but your mileage may vary. Indeed — and this depends on your personal tastes — I found that for the best results, only moving the sliders 10 or 20 points was often enough. Anything more and you run the risk of creating some pretty garish images.

The portrait features include Body AI, Iris AI, Face AI and Skin AI. They make it exceedingly easy to perform the kind of retouching operations that would usually take a long time in Photoshop, be that bringing out a subject’s eyes, whitening teeth or removing blemishes from their skin.

Image Credits: Skylum

But while tools to change clouds in your landscapes and add bokeh to your shots are pretty uncontroversial for anybody but the most extreme of photography purists, having tools that can easily slim down anybody’s body or face with just a few clicks is something else.

This isn’t necessarily the place to litigate the ethics of portrait retouching and the toxicity of body shaming on social networks, but it’s something to be aware of, especially given how easy Luminar AI makes it to retouch bodies and faces and how effective the tool is. For what it’s worth, I tend to find myself feeling rather queazy using this side of Luminar AI’s tools.

Tive, a Boston-based startup, is building a hardware and software platform to help track the conditions of a shipment like say food or medicine to make sure it is stored under the proper conditions as it moves from farm or factory to market. Today, the company announced a $12 million Series A.

RRE Ventures led the round with help from new investor Two Sigma Ventures and existing investors NextView Ventures, Hyperplane Ventures, One Way Ventures, Fathom Ventures and other unnamed individuals. The company has now raised close to $17 million, according to Crunchbase data.

“Tive helps companies all over the world track their shipments in a very specific way,” company co-founder and CEO Krenar Komoni told me. Using a tracking device the company created, customers can press a button, place the tracker on a palette or in a container, and it begins transmitting shipment data like temperature, shock, light exposure, humidity and location data in real time to ensure that the shipment is moving safely to market under proper conditions.

He said that they are the first company to create single-use 5G trackers, meaning the shipping company doesn’t have to worry about managing, maintaining, recharging or returning them (although they encourage that by giving a discount for future orders on returned items).

Tive hardware tracker and data tracking software. Image Credit: Tive

The approach seems to be working. Komoni reports that revenue has grown 570% in 2020 as the product-market fit has become more acute with digitization hitting the supply chain in a big way. He says that in particular customers and investors like the company’s full-stack approach.

“What’s interesting […] and why we are resonating with customers and also why investors like it, is because we’re providing the full stack, meaning the hardware, the software, the platform and the APIs to major transportation management systems,” Komoni explained.

The company has 22 employees and expects to double that number in 2021. As he grows the company, Komoni says that as an immigrant founder, he’s particularly sensitive to diversity and inclusion.

“I’m an immigrant myself. I grew up in Kosovo, came to the US when I was 17 years old, went to high school here in Vermont. I’m a US citizen, but part of who I am is being open to different cultures and different nationalities. It’s just part of my nature,” he says.

The company was founded in 2015 and its facilities are in Boston. It has continued shipping devices throughout the pandemic, and that has meant figuring out how to operate in a safe way with some employees in the building. He expects the company will have more employees operating out of the office as we move past the pandemic. He also has an engineering operation in Kosovo.

Kryo, the company behind the ChiliSleep brand, is announcing that it has merged with another sleep technology company, Ebb Therapeutics, and also raised $37 million in new funding led by Ebb’s biggest investor KKR.

Founded in 2007, Kryo/ChiliSleep’s products include the chiliPAD, a device designed to improve sleep by adjusting the temperature of your bed. Co-founder and CEO Tara Youngblood told me that the company has always been focused on “changing sleep through temperature regulation” — but recently, the team has also become “hungry for this software piece” that will allow them to reach consumers without hardware.

Ebb, meanwhile, has created a cooling headband that’s also supposed to help customers sleep better. Youngblood said that the two companies have “a complementary approach,” and that the merger will create a strong portfolio of combined patents.

Youngblood also said that moving forward, the company will be led by Kryo management, but she declined to comment further on whether the Ebb team will be part of the merger.

The plan is to launch a new software platform called Sleep.me in May, which will combine sleep-related community, content and coaching (that last piece will draw on Ebb’s existing coaching service), with free and paid offerings. Youngblood said the company will continue to sell ChiliSleep products as well, while “the Ebb product line and Ebb brand will probably go away.”

Kryo CEO Tara Youngblood

Youngblood acknowledged that there’s been an explosion in sleep-related products in recent decades — something she attributed to growing research and awareness around the importance of sleep to our health.

“What’s going to be different, really, with the platform is that we’re going talk to that individual” and offer personalized advice, she said. “Thermal regulation may be a part of [your personalized approach], or it may not.”

Youngblood also noted that ChiliSleep has a medical advisory board that includes Dr. Michael Grandner of the University of Arizona, Dr. Chris Winter and Dr. Kelly Starrett.

“Insomnia and sleep-related issues are unfortunately on the rise, but fortunately so are effective treatments to address them,” said Ali Satvat, the global head of KKR Health Care Strategic Growth, in a statement. “We are thrilled to support the merger of ChiliSleep and Ebb to bring these innovations to the market and help solve an unmet need for those who need improved sleep.”

James Cox spent much of his professional career at Uber trying to crack the problem of how to reduce congestion through ride-sharing.

As one of the architects of the Uber Pool service and a longtime proponent of ride-sharing as a means to slash vehicle emissions, Cox leapt at the chance to harness technology developed at MIT that purported to perfect a dynamic routing and vehicle management system for transit authorities.

That technology is at the heart of The Routing Company, the startup that Cox now leads. It’s based on sofrware developed by Routing Company co-founder and chief technology officer, Alex Wallar, when he was a doctoral student at MIT focused on optimizing vehicle distributions. Working with collaborators including Daniela Rus, the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and post-doc researcher Javier Alonso Mora, Wallar developed a platform that could apply real-time optimization to public transit.

In April, Wallar took the research to Menno van der Zee, and the two men developed the underlying platform that would become The Routing Company.

Cox came on board as an advisor to the company initially, but decided to join the ride full-time after seeing the technology that Wallar and van der Zee had developed.

Now, with $5 million in new financing led by the MIT deeptech investment fund, The Engine, and $6.5 million in total financing, the company is taking its tech to transit authorities around the world.

“We are thrilled to support The Routing Company. They have cracked the code for dynamic shared rides at scale.” said Reed Sturtevant, general partner of The Engine. “Smart ride sharing solutions for cities will have a ripple effect. Innovation in transit could quickly reduce congestion, shorten commute times for those who can’t afford to live in the city where they work, and help the environment.”

The idea is to take the services that private companies had been trying to offer to consumers, and bring the benefits to everyone.

The startup landscape is littered with failed private commuter services, and The Routing Company hopes to circumvent the issues they faced by working with, instead of competing against, public urban transit.

In the US alone, public transportation is a $74 billion business… and during the COVID-19 pandemic it’s a business that’s suffering greatly.

“When we and all the other ridesharing companies were building shared rides algorithms in the past.. The complexity in solving the shared rides problem had not been solved in real time,” said Cox of his time at Uber. “My understanding was that it was not possible to solve it in real time. We are really making transit a customer. If you look at transit they are very good at working with high capacity routes and demand. Where they’re weaker is in low and medium density areas. This is where there’s really an opportunity to help them.”

Cox sees his new company as solving a problem that specifically impacts low-income, low density communities. These areas typically aren’t serviced as well or as frequently by traditional public transit, and the tools on offer from the Routing Company give transit authorities a way to spin up a new fleet to service those areas.

The Routing Company sells a package that includes an app for riders, an app for drivers, and a fleet management platform for the transit agency. While it experiments with different pricing options, Cox declined to disclose how much the company is charging its initial customers, but the revenue model is based on either a per vehicle, per-month fee or on a percentage of the revenue generated per vehicle, he said.

“Each driver receives a link to download an app. The riders are capable of accessing the app in a push a button shuttle way. We have built tools to allow people to make a phone call and make an appointment with an operator,” he said. 

The algorithms that had been developed for ride sharing in the past used an individual’s geolocation and destination to set the parameters of who would pick them up. The Routing Company flips that model by focusing on the position of an entire fleet of vehicles first and their already established routes to determine which vehicle is the best suited to pick up a passenger for a ride.

Wait times depend on the city and the number of vehicles deployed through The Routing Company, but Cox said the goal was to have passengers wait no more than 10 minutes for a pick up.  Already, one city in Scotland is using the service and The Routing Company has signed contracts with four undisclosed cities in the US an done in Australia.

“Plenty of people who have tried to make shuttle startups. The issue with a number of those is that the unit economics don’t work. Our approach definitely has the right technology and if we can augment public transit rather than compete with it,” Cox said. 

The foldable category got off to a famously rocky start. Fifteen months after the release of the first Galaxy Fold, Samsung has time to work out some of the issues with the original device in a fairly public fashion, given the world the better-received Galaxy Z Flip and Z Fold 2 this year.

Likely due to various stumbles from mobile manufacturers, the form factor has yet to redefine the industry in a meaningful way – but meaningful change takes time. And in case there was any doubt surrounding Samsung’s commitment to foldable displays, Mobile President TM Roh penned a letter on the company’s site, noting an expansion of the portfolio next year.

Whether that means an additional device or something more meaningful remains to be seen, though it does seem to suggest the arrival of at least one more affordable model. Price has certainly been a major hurdle for the adoption of these products. In the letter Roh notes that he/the company will be “sharing more in January” – perhaps an allusion to CES or a standalone Samsung event. Roh adds,

True to our heritage of staying ahead of the curve with trailblazing mobile tech, we’ll be expanding our portfolio of foldables, so this groundbreaking category is more accessible to everyone. And while we’re already known for our revolutionary cameras, we’ll never stop trying to outdo ourselves — so be on the lookout for super-intelligent, pro-grade camera and video capabilities in 2021. We’ve also been paying attention to people’s favorite aspects of the Galaxy Note experience and are excited to add some of its most well-loved features to other devices in our lineup.

Nothing particularly earth-shattering. With the race to 5G devices in the rear-view, the focus is seemingly back on cameras, in addition to folding screens. More after the holidays, no doubt.