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Walmart today announced of a new delivery service business called Walmart GoLocal, which allows other merchants, both large and small, to tap into Walmart’s own delivery platform to get orders to their customers. Merchants can choose to the use the service for a variety of delivery types, including scheduled and unscheduled deliveries, including same-day delivery, and they can expand their delivery capacity and coverage as their own customer demand requires.

GoLocal is powered by services Walmart first developed for its own delivery needs. Over the past three years, Walmart has been working to scale its in-house Express Delivery service, which promises delivery in two hours or less. This service now offers 160,000+ products at some 3,000 stores, reaching nearly 70% of the U.S. population, the company says. Now it believes it’s ready to make these same capabilities available to other merchants across the U.S. with GoLocal.

While the new B2B service allows merchants to leverage Walmart’s last-mile network and logistics, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Walmart employees will be delivering the packages — at least at first.

Instead, GoLocal’s last-mile capabilities will be handled by gig workers from Walmart’s Spark Driver program. These same drivers also support Walmart’s same-day grocery delivery. But while the same-day service additionally relies on third-party delivery services — like Roadie, DoorDash and Uber’s Postmates — Walmart tells us that third-party delivery services won’t be involved in GoLocal.

Instead, Walmart plans to expand GoLocal over time to include more associate-powered delivery. Already, Walmart is testing associate delivery in electric vans in Northwest Arkansas, for example. These vans would allow Walmart to power delivery for a wider variety of merchants — like those with larger products that wouldn’t fit into Spark drivers’ personal cars and trucks. Walmart also plans to evolve GoLocal delivery via newer innovations like drones and autonomous vehicles, which Walmart has been testing through its Express Delivery service.

“We’ve worked hard to develop a reliable last mile delivery program for our customers,” said Tom Ward, senior vice president, Last Mile, Walmart U.S., in a statement. “Now, we’re pleased to be able to use these capabilities to serve another set of customers – local merchants. Be it delivering goods from a local bakery to auto supplies from a national retailer, we’ve designed Walmart GoLocal to be customizable for merchants of all sizes and categories so they can focus on doing what they do best, leaving delivery speed and efficiency to us,” he added.

Participating GoLocal merchants don’t have to be of a certain size. Anyone from a mom-and-pop to a national retailer can opt to use the service. They also don’t have to sell on Walmart.com’s marketplace, as this isn’t a fulfillment service where Walmart both houses and delivers third-party inventory — it’s just the last-mile delivery portion. The merchant inventory remains at their own local stores.

While any retailer could use GoLocal, getting started requires technical integrations on the retailers’ part. Walmart provides an API that plugs into their existing commerce platform which will ping GoLocal when customers place orders. This alerts GoLocal to dispatch the driver while Walmart captures delivery experience feedback, it says. If widely adopted, this could also give Walmart access to local delivery data to analyze that could aid in improving its own delivery business or inform decisions about fulfillment center placement — a potential competitive advantage.

Walmart says it already has some merchant partners signed up for GoLocal, including contracts with some national enterprise retailers, but is not yet permitted to disclose those names. It won’t detail the pricing for the service, explaining that as a white-label option with a variety of features, the prices are customized to each retailer’s individual needs.

The service is one of several initiatives Walmart now has underway to generate revenue by serving the needs of other retailers. Recently, Walmart announced it would sell access to its own e-commerce technologies to retail businesses, for example. This is a part of Walmart’s broader strategy that will see it looking to turn a profit based on providing access to technologies and services it once used only for its own operations.

Square. Uber. Zillow. Airbnb. Besides being some of the biggest technology companies, what else do these titans have in common? They all operate in entrenched, highly fragmented, geographically localized and regulated industries. That means they required a lot of upfront venture capital investment to disrupt their respective markets. And the investment has paid off — these are now some of the most valuable companies in the world.

Venture capital alone hasn’t funded some of the largest companies. One of today’s most successful tech entrepreneurs was funded by massive infusions of investment from the federal government — Elon Musk received $4.9 billion in public subsidies for his companies, including SpaceX and Tesla. Moreover, government investment, via tax credits for electric vehicle purchases, made it more affordable for consumers to buy the green transportation they needed.

But one massive industry has not yet benefited from the large amounts of money that both venture capital and government can provide: Childcare. Families in the United States spend $136 billion on infant and child care every year, and the market is only growing. If you include school-age care and education for all children under 18, that number grows to $212 billion. In investor terms, the TAM (total addressable market) is huge.

So where is the investment? Biden’s current compromise on an infrastructure plan does not include many provisions for childcare. Venture investment in this space is nascent and insufficient. In 2020, only $171 million was invested in care and early childhood education. The funding situation has improved in 2021, with $516 million invested in childcare, but it’s still just a tiny fraction of the $288 billion of venture capital invested so far this year.

To put that in perspective, a single new company has raised more funding in 2021 than the entire childcare industry.

Funding emerging childcare technology may require a lot of upfront capital. For starters, the industry is regulated and safety is and should remain a priority. Caring for and educating young children takes training, skill and love — it cannot be done by a computer.

But there are so many facets of the industry that are ripe for innovation. Parents sometimes take weeks to find a childcare provider that meets their needs. In some markets, there is not nearly enough supply (three children for every licensed slot) to meet the demand. Assessing quality, pricing and availability is challenging, and payments and business operations tools for the nation’s 300,000+ daycares are still often pen, paper and Excel spreadsheet affairs.

This industry just needs patient investors with long-term perspectives.

This is a great time to diversify investment portfolios and support relatively recession-proof companies meaningfully expanding access to childcare. COVID has finally started to bring this largely offline industry online. Parents are now willing to go digital for childcare decisions and providers are adopting new online technologies at a record pace. These tailwinds provide the perfect conditions for startups.

Solving this problem is a huge business opportunity that affects so much else. When the millions of parents with young children can’t find care, they can’t work. We saw this over and over again since the start of the pandemic. The average American family can spend up to 25% of their income on early childhood care, while the average care worker makes approximately $12 an hour.

Unlocking innovation here at scale will require public and private investment. Government shapes and enables markets, from the explosion of technology that followed from Kennedy’s investment in the space race to more recent fundamental investments in wind, solar and electric vehicles. NASA catalyzed dozens of new technologies in the 1960s because it had both a generous budget and the flexibility to work with the best private-sector contractors available to solve specific problems.

The revitalization of the childcare sector would benefit from an ambitious and galvanizing “moonshot” goal, like providing universal, free childcare for all Americans.

By collaborating with flexibility and creativity across the public and private sectors, we can achieve a basic shared goal that other democracies have already fulfilled — the accessible provision of high-quality childcare for all members of society.

Subscription newsletter platform kingpin Substack shared today that they’ve acqui-hired the team behind Cocoon, a subscription social media app built for close friends.

We covered the Y Combinator-backed startup’s initial $3 million seed raise led by Lerer Hippeau back in November 2019, shortly before the pandemic dramatically reconfigured how people used social media to communicate with the people nearest and dearest to them. Cocoon’s initial pitch was for a social network for your closest friends, something that could level-up the text group chat you may have been stuck using before, though over time Cocoon evolved its platform’s dynamics to allow for more open social circles that users could fine tune at will. With the app, users could share text and photo updates while also using passive data from sources like mobile location data or fitness stats to deliver automatic updates to Slack channel-like feeds for specific groups of their friends.

The app was co-founded by Sachin Monga and Alex Cornell, who met in product roles at Facebook.

Unlike plenty of other networking apps, Cocoon didn’t rely on advertising or user data to monetize, instead pushing users to pay for a $4 monthly subscription. Despite the app’s slick design, it didn’t seem to make much of a lasting splash or find its market fit and Substack says they won’t be continuing support for the app, instead choosing to bring the small team aboard. Given some of Substack’s recent initiatives around community building for their network of newsletter writers, it isn’t surprising that they’re seeking out more talent in the space to help evolve the functionality of their platform.

Back in March, the startup detailed it had closed a $65 million Series B at a $650 million valuation, bolstering up on cash as they look to define a space that has gotten more eyeballs on it as of late, with both Twitter and Facebook releasing newsletter products this year.  They’ve been snapping up a few smaller startups over the past few months. Earlier this month, they disclosed that they had bought the debate platform Letter for an undisclosed sum. In Maym, they acqui-hired the team from a community-building consultancy startup called People & Company.

Last year, Instagram unveiled Shops as part of Facebook’s larger pivot toward e-commerce. Shops is front-and-almost-center on the app’s bottom navigation bar, even more readily accessible than the button to upload a new photo. Now, after testing in the U.S. earlier this month, Instagram will introduce ads on the Instagram Shop tab globally, rolling them out in all countries where the Instagram Shop tab is available.

This marks Instagram’s latest update in evolving its e-commerce platform. It’s previously implemented shopping in Reels to compete with TikTok, organized exclusive product Drops into their own Shop category and added affiliate features for creators to earn a commission on sales of sponsored products.

Currently, items on Shops appear in a two-column grid of square tiles. Ads will appear as a tile within this structure, but they’ll be marked “Sponsored” in the bottom left corner of the image. When the ad is clicked, it will open the Product Details page, which shows more information about the item, additional images, and other products from the brand. Users can save a product from an ad to their wishlist or send it to a friend — if the ad is inappropriate, they can press and hold its tile to see options to hide or report the ad.

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram tested Shops ads with U.S. advertisers like Away, Donny Davy, Boo Oh, Clare paint, JNJ Gifts, DEUX and Fenty Beauty. As TechCrunch previously reported, these ads will launch with an auction-based model and only appear on mobile, since Shops isn’t available on desktop. A user’s experience with these ads will depend on how they use Instagram and how many people are shopping in the Instagram tab.