Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: Google expands languages push in India to serve non-English speakers

• December 17, 2020
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There are over 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this population is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English. This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second largest internet market

There are over 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this population is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English.

This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second largest internet market that has limited hundreds of millions of users’ rendition of the world wide web to a select few websites and services.

So it comes as no surprise that American tech giants, which are counting on emerging markets such as India to continue their growth. are increasingly attempting to make the web and their services accessible to more people.

Google, which has so far led this effort, on Thursday announced a range of changes it is rolling out across some of its services to make them speak more local languages and unveiled a whole new approach it’s taking to translate languages.

Additionally, Google said it plans to invest in machine learning and AI efforts at Google’s research center in India and make its AI models accessible to everyone across the ecosystem. The company — which counts India as its biggest market by users, and this year committed to invest more than $10 billion in the country over the coming years — also plans to partner with local startups that are serving users in local languages, and “drastically” improve the experience of Google products and services for Indian language users.

Product changes

Users will now be able to see search results to their queries in Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, and Marathi, in addition to English and Hindi that are currently available. The addition comes four years after Google added the Hindi tab to the search page in India. The company said the volume of search queries in Hindi grew more than 10 times after the introduction of this tab. If someone prefers to see their query in Tamil, for instance, now they will be able to set Tamil tab next to English and quickly toggle between the two.

Getting search results in a local language is helpful, but often people want to make their queries in those languages as well. Google says it has found that typing in non-English language is another challenge users face today. “As a result, many users search in English even if they really would prefer to see results in a local language they understand,” the company said.

To address this challenge, Search will start to show relevant content in supported Indian languages where appropriate even if the local language query is typed in English. The feature, which the company plans to roll out over the next month, supports five Indian languages: Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

Google is also making it easier for users to quickly change the preferred language in which they see results in an app without altering the device’s language settings. The feature, which is currently available in Discover and Google Assistant, will now roll out in Maps. Similarly, Google Lens’s Homework feature, which allows users to take a picture of a math or science problem and then delivers its answer, now supports Hindi language.

MuRIL

Google executives also detailed a new language AI model, which they are calling Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), that delivers more efficiency and accuracy in handling transliteration, spelling variations and mixed languages. MuRIL provides support for transliterated text such as when writing Hindi using Roman script, which was something missing from previous models of its kind, said Partha Talukdar, Research Scientist at Google Research India, at a virtual event Thursday.

The company said it trained the new model with articles on Wikipedia and texts from a dataset called Common Crawl. It also trained it on transliterated text from, among other sources, Wikipedia (fed through Google’s existing neural machine translation models). The result is that MuRIL handles Indian languages better than previous, more general language models and can contend with letters and words that have been transliterated — that is, Google is using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or script.

Additionally, the new model allows Google to “transfer knowledge and training from one language to another,” said Talukdar, who noted that the previous model Google relied on proved unscalable. MuRIL significantly outperforms the earlier model — by 10% on native text and 27% on transliterated text. MuRIL, which was developed by executives in India, is open source.

MuRIL supports 16 Indian languages and English.

One of the many tasks MuRIL is good at, is determining the sentiment of the sentence. For example, “Achha hua account bandh nahi hua” would previously be interpreted as having a negative meaning, but MuRIL correctly identifies this as a positive statement. Or take the ability to classify a person versus a place: ‘Shirdi ke sai baba’ would previously be interpreted as a place, which is wrong, but MuRIL correctly interprets it as a person.

More to follow…

News: Waresix acquires Trukita to connect more of Indonesia’s fragmented logistics chain

• December 17, 2020
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Waresix, one of Indonesia’s largest logistics startups, has acquired Trukita, a company that focuses on the “first mile.” The term refers to the part of the supply chain where goods are transported from ports to warehouses. While Waresix’s platform digitizes all parts of the supply and logistics chain, its current focus is on mid-mile logistics

Andree Susanto, CEO and co-founder of Waresix, left, with Ady Bangun, CEO and co-founder of Trukita

Waresix, one of Indonesia’s largest logistics startups, has acquired Trukita, a company that focuses on the “first mile.” The term refers to the part of the supply chain where goods are transported from ports to warehouses.

While Waresix’s platform digitizes all parts of the supply and logistics chain, its current focus is on mid-mile logistics services, or transportation from warehouses to distributors. Trukita has an extended network of over 10,000 trucks, and the combination of the two companies means it is “now one of the largest logistics technology providers in Indonesia,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Andree Susanto. Both Waresix and Trukita operate by connecting businesses to shipper and warehouses, and the acquisition will enable them to lower customer costs.

Waresix, which recently announced it raised $100 million in funding over the past year from investors like EV Growth, Jungle Ventures and SoftBank Ventures Asia, works with more than 375 warehouses and 40,000 trucks across Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country. It currently serves more than 100 cities.

Indonesia’s geography creates unique challenges for logistics companies, especially those operating outside of major cities, because it is an archipelago made up of more than 17,500 islands, of which 6,000 are inhabited. This means supply chains often span ships, trucks and several warehouses before goods make it to their final destination. The high costs of logistics has a sizable impact on Indonesia’s economy and the government is currently engaged in an initiative to develop more infrastructure, integrate databases and simplify export-import licensing.

Indonesia’s complicated logistics landscape has given rise to startups like Waresix, Kargo and Ritase, which focus on removing middlemen, managing shipments in real-time and using data analytics to uncover inefficienies in the supply chain.

Trukita was founded in 2017, and its investors include Astra International, EverHaüs and Plug and Play.

News: AutoLeap says it will repair your lousy relationship with car shops

• December 17, 2020
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No one likes having to go the automotive repair shop. There’s little transparency into what happens after a car is dropped off, invoices are often little more than a series of illegible bullet points, and the experience often feels chaotic. AutoLeap, a six-month-old, Toronto-based startup that quietly raised $5 million in seed funding in September,

No one likes having to go the automotive repair shop. There’s little transparency into what happens after a car is dropped off, invoices are often little more than a series of illegible bullet points, and the experience often feels chaotic.

AutoLeap, a six-month-old, Toronto-based startup that quietly raised $5 million in seed funding in September, thinks its team can figure out how to repair that broken experience by bringing car repair shops into the 21st century at long last. Its big idea is to help such shops organize their operations, schedule jobs, order parts, conduct digital inspections so that they can show clients what their cars require and why, and to be able to invoice customers in a transparent and seamless way.

It’s not the first to try to modernize the car repair process. A five-year-old, Seattle-based startup, Wrench, has already raised $40 million toward that end, while another entrant, RepairSmith, a two-year-old, L.A.-based car repair and maintenance service, is backed by Daimler.

Still, with a global automotive repair market that’s currently valued at $700 billion, there’s clearly room for more than one player and one approach, and AutoLeap has a few things working for it.

For starters, it has an investor base with some useful connections. Threshold Ventures, which led AutoLeap’s seed round, has ties to the automotive world, including through its bet on the car-selling platform Shift, which went public in October via a reverse merger.

AutoLeap — whose other venture investors include Maple VC, Liquid2 Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and Codename Ventures — is also backed by some notable individuals that hold sway in the world that AutoLeap is entering. Among them: Shift cofounder George Arison, former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, and former senior Bridgestone exec Ned Aguilar.

More importantly, AutoLeap’s founders worked together once before to reinvigorate a stodgy business. Before launching AutoLeap, co-CEOs Rameez Ansari and Steve Lau spent four years as the co-CEOs of FieldEdge, a SaaS company that helps contractors to run their small businesses.

They two — college friends who’d met at the University of Toronto — didn’t start the company. Rather, after Lau nabbed an MBA from Wharton for Ansari nabbed one from Stanford, they joined forces to acquire, manage and grow a neglected business after raising a a so-called search fund, a vehicle that’s backed by individual investors willing to bet that a team will find a company to buy, run it for some period of time, then sell it for far more money.

It was a productive experience for all involved. After spending $20 million to acquire FieldEdge, whose software had already been around for 30 years, Lau and Ansari so dramatically improved the company’s offerings that they were able to charge seven times what the company had previously charged for its products, says Lau. Then they sold it to the private equity firm Advent in 2018 for “north of $100 million,” says Lau.

It was a solid exit. Minus that $20 million investment, the team kept 30 percent of the remaining proceeds from FieldEdge’s sale, with the rest going to the search fund’s investors.

Even so, says Lau, he and Ansari might have kept going if not for rival ServiceTitan, which “went crazy on the fundraising front.” (The seven-year-old company has raised $400 million altogether from investors.) Between ServiceTitan’s daunting war chest and “given this was a first exit for us,” Lau says, “we transitioned out instead.”

Today, neither Lau nor Ansari wants to repeat the scenario with AutoLeap. Indeed, though Lau says the company is “heads down” and “not in any discussions” with investors now that it has secured seed funding, one imagines it won’t take long for AutoLeap to enter into discussions about that next round.

What investors would be funding essentially is a burgeoning software platform that aims to kill off paper flyers, crumbling fax machines, and sheaves of invoices — if only it can convince car repair shops to slow down long enough to try its software.

It isn’t a no-brainer that they will, admits Lau. “It’s a material onboarding effort, because you become the lifeblood of their business.” The sales process also requires convincing the shops to share their existing data and take the time required to be trained on how to use it.

Lau isn’t dissuaded, plainly. He says the time to onboard a new customer is one to two weeks and that “once they start seeing value, they get that ‘aha’ type of moment.” In fact, he says that AutoLeap is already working with a handful of shops, including several in Toronto, one in Las Vegas, and another in Boston.

As for its expansion plans, Lau says that some of the company’s seed funding will go toward digital marketing but that it’s also relying heavily on word of mouth. It helps, he says, that garages are often clustered in any one geographic area, which he believes will enable AutoLeap to spread quickly.

There isn’t “a lot of data” to support that assumption, offers Lau. But if AutoLeap has its way, there will be soon enough.

Above, left to right: AutoLeap co-CEOs Rameez Ansari and Steve Lau in a photo that Lau readily volunteers was Photoshopped owing to the pandemic.

News: China’s Luckin Coffee will pay $180 million to settle accounting fraud charges

• December 17, 2020
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China’s embattled coffee delivery startup Luckin has reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a $180 million penalty to settle charges that it overstated its revenues, expenses, and losses by the hundreds of millions of dollars. The announcement by the market regulator arrived Wednesday evening, months after short-seller Muddy

China’s embattled coffee delivery startup Luckin has reached a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a $180 million penalty to settle charges that it overstated its revenues, expenses, and losses by the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The announcement by the market regulator arrived Wednesday evening, months after short-seller Muddy Waters first reported the alleged fraud early this year. In response to the allegations, Luckin said in April it would launch an internal probe. In June, the SEC said it would delist Luckin, and in July, Luckin admitted it did cook its books.

The fiasco came only a year after Luckin raised $651 million through its first time sale on Nasdaq. The company was founded in October 2017, making it one of the fastest companies to go from a startup to a public company.

The startup, which aspired to take a piece of Starbucks’ sizable market share in China, allegedly fabricated more than $300 million in sales between at least April 2019 through January 2020, said the SEC announcement. Certain employees were found attempting to conceal the fraud by inflating the firm’s expenses by more than $190 million, “creating a fake operations database, and altering accounting and bank records to reflect the false sales.”

Luckin neither admitted or denied these claims, which were filed in a court in the Southern District of New York. The settlement is subject to court approval and the transfer of funds to security holders will need approval by Chinese authorities.

In September, China’s market regulator fined Luckin and 45 companies involved in Luckin’s frauds a total of $9 million after an investigation revealed the coffee company faked its numbers.

Despite the fraudulent scandal, Luckin claims business is still as usual. Operations of the firm and its stores are currently “stable and normal,” said the company in a notice on Wednesday.

“Luckin will continue to cooperate with regulators and prioritize compliance. In the meantime, our management and staff will continue to ensure the firm’s stable operation.”

Short-sellers have been going after U.S.-listed Chinese firms this year. A report from Wolfpack Research accused iQiyi, a major Chinese video streaming service backed by Baidu, of inflating its numbers, a claim that triggered an SEC probe. GSX Techedu, a Chinese after-school tutoring company, was under a similar SEC investigation after short-seller Citron Research said the company fabricated sales numbers.

“While there are challenges in our ability to effectively hold foreign issuers and their officers and directors accountable to the same extent as U.S. issuers and persons, we will continue to use all our available resources to protect investors when foreign issuers violate the federal securities laws,” said Stephanie Avakian, director of the SEC’s division of enforcement, in the regulator’s announcement on Luckin.

News: Lydia raises another $86 million to build European financial super app

• December 17, 2020
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French fintech startup Lydia has extended its Series B round. Accel is leading the extension with all major existing shareholders also participating. Lydia first raised $45 million in January 2020 — Tencent led that investment. The startup is now raising another $86 million, which means that Lydia has raised $131 million in total as part

French fintech startup Lydia has extended its Series B round. Accel is leading the extension with all major existing shareholders also participating. Lydia first raised $45 million in January 2020 — Tencent led that investment. The startup is now raising another $86 million, which means that Lydia has raised $131 million in total as part of its Series B round.

While Lydia wouldn’t discuss the valuation of the round, its co-founder and CEO gave me a hint. “The value of the company has really significantly increased between the two parts of the B round,” he told me.

Interestingly, Amit Jhawar is heading this investment for Accel . He joined Accel as a venture partner in July and he’s going to join Lydia’s board of directors.

Jhawar joined payments company Braintree in 2011 as COO and CFO. Shortly after, Braintree acquired peer-to-peer payment app Venmo. “When we acquired Venmo it was only 15 people. They had just released their mobile app in April of 2012,” Jhawar told me in a phone interview.

PayPal later acquired Braintree and Venmo — Jhawar stuck around until early 2020 to scale Venmo to the huge fintech consumer app that 52 million people use in the U.S. Jhawar believes that peer-to-peer payments represent the beginning of a long-term consumer relationship.

“You know that P2P is successful when they leave money in their account because they’re going to come back,” he said.

Back in 2014, when I first covered Lydia, I called it the Venmo for France — they had only raised €600,000 back then. It seems like Jhawar agrees with that take. Since then, Lydia has grown quite a lot and has expanded beyond peer-to-peer payments in various ways.

With Lydia, you can send money to another user in just a few seconds. You don’t have to enter an account number in your banking app — as long as you know their phone number, they’ll receive your payment.

If you have money in your account, you can choose to spend it directly using a Visa debit card. Lydia lets you generate a virtual card that works with Apple Pay and Google Pay — you can also order a plastic card.

Lydia also supports direct deposit as you get your own IBAN in the app. You can also create money pots and send a link to other users, view your bank accounts in Lydia, donate money to hospitals and charities, get a credit line, etc.

But there’s one killer feature that stands out over the rest. Bank accounts tend to be monolithic and don’t reflect how you use money. “If you look at banks today, they call the main account a checking account. It’s outdated by design,” CEO Cyril Chiche said.

Lydia has created flexible sub-accounts that you can use in many different ways. You can create a second sub-account and set some money aside for your bills. You can create a third one and share it with a few friends because you’re going on a vacation together.

You can move money from one account to another by swiping your finger across the account grid. As you can have multiple contributors and you can change the account associated with your debit card, it means that money flows more naturally. It feels like using a messaging app, not a financial app.

And it’s been working well in France. The company now has more than 4 million users. Transactions have doubled over the past year, which means that usage is accelerating.

“Lydia has the largest P2P network in Europe outside of PayPal and has the potential to grow all across Europe with a mobile-first, customer-focused solution. This will bring demand for incremental consumer financial products and high merchant interest to accept the payment,” Jhawar told me in an email.

And 2020 has been a busy year for Lydia. The company has just released a complete redesign to better position the app as a super app for financial services. All the interactions and all the main tabs have been changed.

Lydia also re-launched its premium offering with two new premium plans that offer you higher limits over the free plan and an insurance package for the most expensive offer. Those plans are more in line with what the app offers today and should contribute to the company’s bottom line. “The next step is bringing Lydia to profitability and it’s something that has always been important for us,” Chiche said in a recent interview.

Behind the scenes, Lydia has also upgraded many core features, such as migrating cards to a new infrastructure, adding alerts to account aggregation, supporting instant SEPA transfers to bank accounts, etc.

In 2021, the company plans to build on top of that new foundation with more financial products. “We’re going to try every single product — credit, savings, investment,” Chiche said.

The company is also slowly expanding to more countries. But it wants to offer a product that feels like a local product with a local card and a local IBAN to increase acceptance rates. Lydia is starting with Portugal.

News: Daily Crunch: Facebook escalates Apple criticism

• December 16, 2020
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Facebook takes aim at Apple, Texas sues Google and we interview the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This is your Daily Crunch for December 16, 2020. The big story: Facebook escalates Apple criticism Facebook took a big swing at Apple’s upcoming app tracking restrictions today with full-page ads in the print editions of The New York

Facebook takes aim at Apple, Texas sues Google and we interview the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This is your Daily Crunch for December 16, 2020.

The big story: Facebook escalates Apple criticism

Facebook took a big swing at Apple’s upcoming app tracking restrictions today with full-page ads in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post that argued the social networking giant is “standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.”

In other words, while Facebook will obviously be affected by Apple’s change (apps will have to ask users for permission before it can track their IDFA identifier, which will presumably lead to a steep drop in ad targeting), the company said that small businesses relying on targeted ad campaigns will be hurt even more.

And while the two campaigns are very different, it’s worth noting that another initiative against Apple is also gaining steam, with major U.S. news publishers joining the Coalition for App Fairness, a group fighting app store fees.

The tech giants

The latest multistate antitrust lawsuit targets Google’s ad business — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online advertising.

Following Hyundai acquisition, Boston Dynamics’ CEO discusses the robotics pioneer’s future — Rob Playter discusses the company’s new corporate parent, the future of Handle and Spot’s job at the NYPD.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper will seek multiple launch providers to carry its satellites to space — Amazon’s David Limp shared some new details about the company’s Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation.

Startups, funding and venture capital

StockX raises $275M Series E, valuing the retailer at $2.8B — Headquartered in downtown Detroit, Michigan, the raise marks the largest VC funding round in Michigan history.

BigID keeps rolling with $70M Series D on $1B valuation — Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global co-led the round.

New Wave is a new European seed fund headed up by ex-Accel VC Pia d’Iribarne — The firm’s debut fund of $56 million was raised in just three months.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to pick an investor in good or bad times — Quiq CEO Mike Myer says you should trust your instincts.

ClickUp CEO talks hiring, raising and scaling in the white-hot productivity space — The company, which makes business productivity tools for task management, goals and docs, has reached a valuation of $1 billion.

Dear Sophie: How did immigration change for startup founders in 2020? — Another edition of immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn’s advice column answering immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Bitcoin passes $20K and reaches all-time high — Bitcoin’s value has rapidly increased over the past two months.

Privacy is the new competitive battleground — New regulations give companies new opportunities to differentiate themselves.

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

News: HBO Max will finally land on Roku devices tomorrow

• December 16, 2020
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It took an unusually long time, but HBO Max is set to launch on Roku devices tomorrow. Roku users make up a massive chunk of the cord-cutting market, so the absence of an HBO Max app for Roku nearly seven months after the service launched was pretty glaring. We’d been wondering where the Max app was

It took an unusually long time, but HBO Max is set to launch on Roku devices tomorrow.

Roku users make up a massive chunk of the cord-cutting market, so the absence of an HBO Max app for Roku nearly seven months after the service launched was pretty glaring. We’d been wondering where the Max app was for months, its launch seemingly tied up over the matter of where and how customers could subscribe.

With Wonder Woman 1984 set to debut on Max in just a few weeks, one can assume there was tremendous pressure all around to get the deal done. As part of the deal, Roku users will be able to sign up for HBO Max using Roku’s built-in payment system, Roku Pay.

This news comes about a month after HBO Max filled a similar gap by finally launching on Amazon Fire devices, and days after the announcement of a mega deal that will see all 2021 Warner Bros. films launch on HBO Max on the same day they hit theaters.

With this launch, HBO Max will have most of the key bases covered, with support on iOS, Android, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon’s Fire devices, PC/Mac, and all of the modern gaming consoles minus the Switch.

News: The StockX megaround smells like pre-IPO money

• December 16, 2020
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An IPO? A shoe-reselling marketplace? Sure! At the numbers we know about it, why not?

Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that consumer reseller marketplace StockX raised $275 million at a valuation of approximately $2.8 billion.

Selling a tenth of your company for north of a quarter-billion may be somewhat common among late-stage software startups with tremendous growth, but one known for its market share in the sneaker resale niche? Don’t laugh, the round actually makes pretty OK sense. And given the growth that StockX has managed, it could have a path to the public markets in under a year.

In our piece covering the funding round, Matt Burns wrote that StockX saw its nondomestic sales rise 260% in Q3 compared to the year-ago period, recording half of its 13 million transactions in the last 12 months.

But that wasn’t really enough to get my head around the round, so I went hunting. Here’s a grip of other, dated growth metrics that help us put the new funding into proper context:

•  In mid-2019, when StockX became a unicorn after raising $110 million, it reported $100 million or more in monthly gross merchandise volume. It had around 800 employees at the time.
• As part of that deal, a former eBay exec and former NYSE executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange took over as CEO and took a board seat. The man in question, Scott Cutler, remains the company’s chief executive.
• StockX claimed more than $1 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2019 (the company supports streetwear and luxury resales as well as sneakers). The company closed out 2019 with around 1,000 employees.
• In mid-2020, StockX released a midyear report — née “corporate brag sheet” — saying that it had surpassed $2.5 billion in gross merchandise volume, and 10 million trades, half of which had been recorded in the last year.

To understand if those numbers are impressive or not, we’ll need to convert gross merchandise result into revenue. So, we’ll need to better understand StockX’s fee structure.

News: Following Hyundai acquisition, Boston Dynamics’ CEO discusses the robotics pioneer’s future

• December 16, 2020
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A lot can change in a year. Especially this year. For Boston Dynamics, the past 12 months have brought a number of radical changes traditionally not seen at 30-year-old businesses of its size. It’s a list that includes the first new CEO in the company’s history, wide availability of its first commercial product and, most

A lot can change in a year. Especially this year. For Boston Dynamics, the past 12 months have brought a number of radical changes traditionally not seen at 30-year-old businesses of its size. It’s a list that includes the first new CEO in the company’s history, wide availability of its first commercial product and, most recently, being acquired by its third owner in seven years.

Of course, no one has ever accused Boston Dynamics of being traditional.

Last week, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based robotics pioneer confirmed earlier rumors that it was being acquired by Hyundai. The South Korean tech giant will be taking an 80% stake in the company, leaving the other 20% or so to its former owner, Softbank Group. The deal, which values the 300-person company at $1.1 billion, is expected to close next June.

“We grew from 100 people to 300 people under SoftBank,” CEO Rob Playter tells TechCrunch. “That took investment. It took encouragement from them to launch a product, launch the products that we had in mind. It was critical. So our mission, which they started us down the path of, is to launch multiple robot products that include mobility, manipulation and vision. And they really gave us power and afterburners to pursue that mission.”

Playter, a longtime Boston Dynamics employee, waves away unfavorable optics around the company’s quick transitions between owners. Each owner served its function for the company’s bottom line — Google offered resources for exploration, SoftBank compelled it to productize and Hyundai will deliver the sort of engineering and manufacturing know-how required to scale up its products.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

“Ultimately [SoftBank is] an investment company, and we always expected there to be some kind of an exit,” says Playter. “The question was always when, and when is the right timing? So this isn’t really a surprise to us. And I think they saw and we saw that the time was right as our product launch grew to get a different kind of partner.”

The executive adds that the nature of the company’s interactions with SoftBank were ultimately limited under regulatory restrictions placed on the acquisition by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). “Getting through CFIUS will be a closing condition on the Hyundai deal,” he explains.

While SoftBank’s ownership of the company was seen as, at very least, aggressively nudging the company in the direction of commercialization after decades of operating as a research firm, the executive tells TechCrunch that Hyundai largely approved of the company’s existing roadmap. The past two years have certainly brought some profound changes for the company, but Boston Dynamics is still a fairly lean organization, and as such is designed to take a measured approach to the market.

Of the 300 or so employees, between 100 to 120 are currently focused on its first commercial product, Spot. Many of the company’s recent hires are focused on areas like sales, customer service and quality control — relatively unfamiliar terrain for an organization that went more than a quarter-century without releasing its first product. The team focused on its logistics robot, Handle, is significantly smaller, but growing, and will “match or exceed Spot over the course of the next year,” he adds. Handle is, after all, Boston Dynamics’ commercial launch. The company is set to unveil the commercialized version of the box-lifting machine in April. Pilot programs similar to those offered for Spot will follow and sales of the product will start at some point the following year.

The company has already begun to test “proof of concept” models with select partners in real-world warehouses. “These are systems for development that we’re taking onto customer sites to do proof of concept tests,” says Playter. “We’re taking learnings from that to improve the design. In parallel work, we’re designing the for-manufacture version of that robot right now. And first versions of that new generation will come online next summer.”

Fulfilment and logistics have already been a hot category for robotics for a number of years, but interest has only grown amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Handle represents a decidedly different to-market approach than Spot, in that respect. A large part of the quadrupedal robot’s pilot program was working with customers and partners to determine which categories had the highest demand for the advanced robotics technology. Demand for Spot hasn’t been huge, but it’s been steady, with the company selling more than 400 million units in the first 15 months.

In-demand applications include deployment in dangerous scenarios like a BP oil rig and a National Grid electric plant. Other more surprising use cases have arisen, as well. Late last year, the ACLU raised concern around video of a Spot robot featured in police training drills, which debuted at our Robotics event back in April. This October, a Spot was seen at a crime scene in Brooklyn. Playter confirmed that the NYPD is one of the company’s customers.

“They have a Spot and were using it, I think, to maintain a safe standoff distance when somebody (a potentially armed suspect) was barricading themselves,” he explains. “So I think getting a camera in and potentially communicating, de-escalating a potentially dangerous situation was the goal there.”

“One of the intended purposes of Spot is to enhance the safety of our customers by removing or providing the opportunity to remove a person from a dangerous environment,” Playter adds. “And that includes public safety officials like the police. And in particular, the Massachusetts State Police have been interested in using Spot in a classic mobile robot application, investigating suspicious packages or potential bombs. So I think these are great applications of robotics and something that we support.”

The next year will also see Boston Dynamics continuing to expand Spot’s available markets. Under the Hyundai banner, the company will likely continue the pace of releases set by Spot and Handle.

“I think something like a robot every couple of years is a pace that we could manage. From clean sheet, we can build a new robot in under a year,” says Playter. “And then you have to go through an iterative process of refining that concept and starting to understand market fit. And so I would look to, I want to stabilize the launch of Spot. There’s already improvements to Spot that we want to be thinking about. So I don’t know if we’re going to go build the next generation of Spot or maybe build the next robot for the next market. And that remains to be seen. We don’t quite have the team that’s big enough to do that just yet.”

The company’s research wing, which focuses on even more bleeding-edge robots like the humanoid Atlas, will also continue under Hyundai’s watch. The company stopped accepting new defense contracts in 2014, shortly after the Google acquisition, but research continues to be a key part of Boston Dynamics’ work.

“[W]e’re developing our own R&D work with Atlas internally,” Playter says. “And so we still use that as a platform to build both advanced hardware and software. We have some exciting things that I think will come out in the near future. We’re going to show you what we’ve been up to, probably in the classic Boston Dynamics home grown video way. I don’t think we have a deadline on when that’s going to come out, but there’s something in the oven.”

Integrating some of Boston Dynamics’ more advanced research into far out Hyundai concepts like the recently announced Ultimate Mobility Vehicle could also be a good fit. “We think the combination of wheels on legs is really interesting. If you recall, we built the first version of Handle with wheels and legs. And so there’s some real synergy there, I think. I think they’re really going to be able to build those vehicles.”

News: Amazon’s Project Kuiper will seek multiple launch providers to carry its satellites to space

• December 16, 2020
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Amazon SVP of Devices & Services David Limp joined us at TC Sessions: Space today, and he shared some new details about the company’s Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation. Limp shared more details on the technical design challenges that the Kuiper team solved with its revolutionary customer terminal, but he also shared more info on

Amazon SVP of Devices & Services David Limp joined us at TC Sessions: Space today, and he shared some new details about the company’s Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation. Limp shared more details on the technical design challenges that the Kuiper team solved with its revolutionary customer terminal, but he also shared more info on the company’s plans around launching its constellation, which will number 3,236 per the current plan approved by the FCC.

“We’re launch agnostic” Limp said. “If you know somebody who has a rocket out there, give us a call. “One of the reasons we thought the time was right to do a constellation now is because of some of the dynamics happening in the launch industry. Every day, we see a new demonstration of reusability every day, we see new demonstration of breakthroughs in better engines, whether that’s Raptor [SpaceX’s engine] or BE-4 [Blue Origin’s].”

Part of the FCC’s approval for Amazon’s constellation requires it to send up around half of its planned total constellation within the next six years, which is a significant volume and will require an aggressive launch pace to achieve. SpaceX’s Starlink, for context, has launched 16 batches of 60 satellites each for its network, with 14 of those happening in 2020 alone. In order to achieve that pace, Limp said that while he hopes Blue Origin (the Jeff Bezos-owned private rocket launch company) can provide some of its launch capacity, they will be looking elsewhere for rides to space as well.

“When you have to put 3,200-plus things into space, you will need will need launch a lot lots of launch capacity,” he said. “Our hope is that it’s not just one provider, that there will be multiple providers.”

Depending on the final Project Kuiper satellite spec, this could be a huge opportunity for new small satellite launchers coming on board, including companies like Astra, Kuiper and Virgin Orbit who spoke earlier today at the event on the progress their launch companies are making. It could also be a windfall for existing providers like Rocket Lab – and even potentially SpaceX. In response to a separate question, Limp noted that he doesn’t believe Project Kuiper is in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink, since there’s such a broad addressable market when it comes to connectivity for unserved and underserved customers globally.